Language, objectivity, and political power

August 29, 2022

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by Francis Lee

Contemporary politics consists of the usual timeless formula of Machiavelli – namely: rule by force and fraud – but now with the current emphasis being on fraud, writes Francis Lee.

‘’Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, their inhabitants driven out into the countryside, their cattle machine gunned, their huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.’’ (Politics and the English Language – 1946)

‘’There is a high probability that Russia will intervene in the Baltics to test NATO’s Article 5 … ‘’ (Anders Fogh Rasmussen, ex head of NATO, February 2015).

It would be true to say that the language of politics and power – machtpolitik or realpolitik – is patently neither objective, nor particularly interested in the pursuit of truth. Quite the contrary in fact. If we take the above examples, the first is simply an attempt to mask what is an international war crime into a reasonable policy of ‘humanitarian’ intervention. All rather reminiscent of the language which evolved during the Indo-China wars, e.g. ‘we destroyed the village in order to save it.’ The purpose of the second assertion was simply designed to ramp up the current war psychosis in order to justify the eastern expansion and build-up of NATO on Russia’s western frontiers. Please note that Mr Rasmussen isn’t saying that a Russian intervention is possible, or even probable, but highly probable. This seems somewhat strange as Russia couldn’t wait to get rid of the Baltic states when it declared its independence in 1991, and now we are expected to believe that Russia wants to invade those same states!

It is said that knowledge is power, in fact the reverse seems more accurate. Those who control the means of communication are now able to create a virtual reality. This is nothing new. The father of modern Public Relations, Edward Bernays, postulated that ‘invisible’ people create knowledge and propaganda and rule over the masses, with a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and citizen response. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” (Propaganda).

One of Bernays’ great admirers was Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels who was to apply his theories with alacrity during the Nazi ascendency 1934-1945. JG was able to convince enough of Germany’s population that ‘total war’ was really quite good fun. He and they were apparently not aware that this would ultimately involve the fire-bombing of German cities like Hamburg and Dresden. This amply demonstrates that skilful techniques of mass indoctrination are able to get people to imagine and support policies which are not necessarily in their own best interests.

In our own time this mass manipulation was identified by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky in their seminal work The Manufacture of Consent first published in 1988. The mass communication media of the U.S. “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion.” This seems to be the most salient political phenomenon of our times.

Returning to Orwell, it was during his period in Spain during the war against Franco (1936-39) that he first became aware of the political potentialities of modern mass communications systems. Orwell was a passionate believer in truth, and that objective facts existed and could be identified. However, as a result of his experiences in Spain he discovered that mere facts were of secondary or even no importance. What counted was a propaganda narrative which was a function of political expediency. At the time he was serving in the military wing of POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity) sister party of the British ILP (Independent Labour Party) which he later joined – 1938. This was in 1937 after the Comintern’s right turn, away from the ultra-leftism of the Third Period, towards the Popular Front phase, a move from a policy of international revolution (identified as Trotskyism) to the defence of democracy through alliances with bourgeois political groups. Unfortunately for Orwell he was in the wrong place at the wrong time – this was the time of the big Stalinist push against Trotskyism, and in Spain this meant the POUM. He wrote:

‘’I must say something about the general charge that the POUM was a secret fascist organization in the pay of Franco and Hitler. This charge was repeated over and over in the Communist press … according to the Frenti Rojo (the Valencia Communist Newspaper) ‘’Trotskyism, is not a political doctrine; it is a capitalist organization in league with the Fascists, a Fascist terrorist band, and part of Franco’s 5^th column.’’

What was noticeable from the start was that there was no evidence to support this accusation; the thing was simply asserted with an air of authority.’’ (My emphaisis – FL)

Yep, sounds familiar.

Orwell’s pessimism in this respect reached its terminal stage in his disturbing dystopian novel, 1984

This manufacture of a virtual reality is now common currency in the mass media. The press in particular – including the putatively left-wing publications, (more catholic than the Pope) the Guardian and the Independent – pretty much operate as an appendage to the ‘invisible’ people or are the ‘invisible people’ identified by Bernays. A case in point being a recent snippet in the Independent newspaper which read:

‘’60,000 tortured to death in (Syrian) government jails.’’

‘’At least 60,000 people have died in Syrian government jails during the 5-year conflict, according to a report by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) which said they died ‘’either as a result of direct bodily torture or denial of food and medicine.’’ The Observatory’s director, Abdulrahman said more than 20,000 had died in Sednaya prison near Damascus. The Observatory claimed it had been able to verify the deaths of 14,456.00 (sic) under the age of 18, since the start of the Syrian uprising since 2011.

The Independent 23-05-2106 By Tom Perry – Beirut.

Closer examination reveals that Mr Abdulrahman has lived in Coventry – a small provincial town in middle-England – since 2006 and owns a shop which he runs with his wife; nonetheless he asserts that his sources were serving officials seeking to expose what is going on.

So, we get one guy in Beirut publishing a report based upon another guy who has lived in Coventry since 2006 and who claims to have contacts at high levels in the Syrian government. Yeah, right!

Yet the Independent, which is said to be a ‘left leaning’ newspaper owned by the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev who purchased it in 2010, will it seems publish extremely dubious stories without checking the sources but simply takes what they say at face value. No doubt this dishonesty serves a greater cause.

The post-modernist denial of the possibility of objective reality is now firmly entrenched in reactionary elite circles. It involves, 1. ‘Groupthink’ defined as a process where a group with similar backgrounds and largely insulated from outside opinion makes decisions without critically testing, analysing and evaluating ideas and outcomes. 2. ‘Doublethink’ where two incompatible thoughts can be carried on at the same time. It of course follows that if everyone is thinking the same then no-one is thinking at all. Finally, 3. Double standards. Describing the behaviour of your opponents as despicable, inhuman and a violation of human rights, when ‘our’ side is doing exactly the same. Of necessity this involves all of the above mechanisms. Orwell explained:

‘’Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and of course there is no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.’’ (Notes on Nationalism – 1945).

The Goebbels propaganda template was/is disarmingly simple: tell a lie, preferably a big one and then repeat it endlessly until it seeps into the popular consciousness. Taking their cue from this policy the mainstream media messages are relentless, ubiquitous, and obedient to their political masters. This was apparent during the EU referendum campaign and the geopolitical tensions in eastern Europe and the South China Sea. This information war is now the primary political phenomenon of our times, and the mass media speaks with one voice.

As Orwell opined: ‘To begin with, the era of free speech is closing down, the freedom of the press in Britain has always been something of a fake, because in the last resort, money controls opinion.’ That’s the bad news. ‘… still as long as the legal right to say what you like exists, there are always loopholes for the unorthodox writer.’ (Why I joined the Independent Labour Party – 1938). With due deference to Orwell, however, those loopholes are disappearing fast.

Sad to say, however, Orwell actually ended up spying for the British Foreign Office. At the time, 1946, the USSR and Stalin were both very popular amongst the working people of the UK. The Soviet football (‘soccer’ for all our American friends) team, Moscow Dynamo, did a tour of the UK and played Chelsea at Stamford Bridge (London); it was a mass sell-out where upwards of 100,000 fans spilled over onto the pitch. Chelsea won by the way, 4-1. (See below).

Members of my own family were actively involved in the war both in the army, Royal navy and merchant navy. One such, Uncle Tom, took part in convoys carrying armaments to the USSR – a rather dangerous undertaking from Scotland to Murmansk all the time being bombed and torpedoed by German aircraft and U-Boats based in occupied Norway. He was lucky to survive.

But that was then, and this is now.

———————————————————————————————————

Unfortunately, however, and according to Ben Norton of The Greyzone 2016 , the popularity of the USSR was not to the liking of the British political class and intelligentsia. Indeed!

Norton noted the following:

‘’It is fascinating seeing people in the 21st century, especially self-declared leftists, still lionizing George Orwell, the worst kind of reactionary turncoat.

For years, the cat has been out of the bag: George Orwell secretly worked for the UK’s Foreign Office. At the end of his life, he was an outright counter-revolutionary snitch, spying on leftists on behalf of the imperialist British government.

The US government also found Orwell’s work quite useful. The coup-plotting, death squad-training assassins and torturers at the Central Intelligence Agency turned Orwell’s books into a propaganda weapon. The CIA even funded the Animal Farm movie, which is now mandatory viewing in many high schools.

But that happened after Orwell’s death in 1950. What is more scandalous is that he knowingly collaborated with the UK government when he was still alive.

“Orwell’s List” is a term that should be known by anyone who claims to be a person of the left. It was a blacklist Orwell compiled for the British government’s Information Research Department; an anti-communist propaganda unit set up for the Cold War.

The list includes dozens of suspected communists, “crypto-communists,” socialists, “fellow travellers,” and even LGBT people and Jews — their names scribbled alongside the sacrosanct 1984 author’s disparaging comments about the personal predilections of those blacklisted.

The document was declassified by the British government in 2003. The leading neoliberal newspaper The Guardian reported at the time that the blacklist “contains the names of 38 public figures, from the actors Charlie Chaplin and Michael Redgrave to the author JB Priestley, whom Orwell suggested should not be trusted by the IRD as anti-communist propagandists.”

Timothy Garton Ash, the historian who obtained the document, revealed that Orwell gave the blacklist to his close friend Celia Kirwan, who worked for the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, from his sickbed in May 1949.

Orwell had told Kirwan in April that the list included journalists and writers who “in my opinion are crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as propagandists.”

“There seems to be general agreement by Orwell’s fans, left and right, to skate gently over Orwell’s suspicions of Jews, homosexuals and blacks, also over the extreme ignorance of his assessments,” wrote legendary radical journalist Alexander Cockburn, sardonically referring to the anti-communist blacklist as “St. George’s List.”

“If any other postwar left intellectual was suddenly found to have written mini-diatribes about blacks, homosexuals and Jews, we can safely assume that subsequent commentary would not have been forgiving,” he added. “Here there’s barely a word.”

Cockburn’s The Nation article on the subject, “St. George’s List,” is difficult to find today. I have republished it in full below. The article was also expanded into “The Fable of the Weasel,” Cockburn’s foreword for John Reed’s Animal Farm parody Snowball’s Chance.

Apologists insist Orwell simply “sold out” later in life and became a cranky conservative, yet the story is more complex. Orwell had a consistent political thread throughout his life. This explains how he could go from fighting alongside a Spanish Trostkyite militia in a multi-tendency war against fascism to demonizing the Soviet Union as The Real Enemy — before returning home to imperial Britain, where he became a social democratic traitor who castigated capitalism while collaborating with the capitalist state against revolutionaries trying to create socialism.

Sure, the USSR did some objectionable things, but it was also the only large country in the entire world that supported the Spanish Republicans in their fight against fascism (excluding a bit of extra support from Mexico). The Soviet Union understood that one cannot have a revolution if one cannot even defeat the fascist counterrevolution first — a lesson many on the left still have not learned today.

Yet leftists like Orwell and his devoted followers continue to lament Kronstadt and revel in their ideological purity — while conveniently living relatively comfortable lives in Western imperialist country.’’

So, if it is the case that Orwell fell foul of some reactionary impulses in later life, then none of us is apparently immune to this type of propaganda. I think Orwell’s conversion dates back to his political period working for the British Colonial Office in India. His novels – Burmese Days, for example – as well as articles such as (Shooting and Elephant) and (A Hanging) seem to have insinuated themselves into his belief system. This was not at all unusual among intellectuals from the 1950’s onwards – with the honourable exception of C Wright Mills perhaps – who became fervent supporters of imperialism and is still the case today. The blue pill is apparently still all the rage among the decadent and fashionable elite! This much is manifest. Like the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, who in 1918 said of the political/moral degeneration of the West:

‘’The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity…

‘’And what rough beast its hour come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.’’

(The Second Coming)

But like the carthorse, Boxer, in Animal Farm, we, the western ‘intelligentsia’ (sic! or what passes for it) must try harder.

Say No To Censorship: Here’s How We’re Rebuilding Alternative Media

A CALL TO ACTION

May 09th, 2022

Source

With the war in Ukraine raging on and corporate media outlets pushing a pro-NATO agenda – we’ve entered war time and having access to alternative information is crucial to preventing escalation.

By Mnar Adley

I’m Mnar Adley, founder, and editor-in-chief of MintPress News and director of our new video project “Behind the Headlines.”

I have an urgent appeal to make to everyone who cares not only for our first amendment but for the future of our planet. Independent, watchdog journalism that holds the military class accountable is under threat.

With the war in Ukraine raging on and corporate media outlets pushing a pro-NATO agenda – we’ve entered war time and having access to alternative information to the war machine is crucial to preventing escalation. We are now facing the very real threat of nuclear war.

We’re experiencing censorship unlike anything we’ve faced before, and MintPress and other antiwar media have been facing 5 years of algorithmic shadowbanning by Big Tech.

In the last month alone, independent antiwar journalists have been targeted in organized smear campaigns, de-platformed, given “state affiliated” labels on their accounts, and even outright purged off of social media platforms. Youtube has deleted hundreds of thousands of historical videos from prominent antiwar journalists and activists including Abby Martin, Chris Hedges, and Lee Camp, and is demonetizing political content everywhere in an effort to defund antiwar efforts. Our very own Gofundme fundraisers were taken down without reason or an opportunity to appeal.

What this amounts to is little more than a modern-day book burning. The work of the most important dissenting voices of our time is being discredited. Division is being sowed and any information that challenges the corporate and military establishment’s agenda is censored. Meanwhile, the bank accounts of executives at Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are being filled at a record pace.

For the last several years, MintPress has been at the forefront of sounding the alarm about the deep state working with silicon valley tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to control your news feed and ensure that any alternative narrative is algorithmically disappeared. But we’re not backing down because the future of our planet and the prosperity of peace and justice depends on our reporting.

This is why I consulted with anti-censorship, pro-free press, and human rights experts on our nonprofit board– including Mickey Huff, president of the Media Freedom Foundation and the director of Project Censored; FBI whistleblower, Coleen Rowley; and international human rights attorney, Todd Pierce– to create a new video reporting project called Behind The Headlines. To help us build this project we will need your support.

We need to raise $400,000 in the next year, so we’re creating our first phase fundraiser to be stated for $200,000.

Join us here: We’re LIVE on Indiegogo! 

Our goal is to create a video platform that is a 100% people-funded non-profit with the most important dissenting names in independent media that have felt the brunt of this censorship campaign.

We’re working with Political Comedian Lee Camp and filmmaker and investigative journalist Dan Cohen.

In addition to the Behind the Headlines board, we also have an esteemed board of advisors, including John Pilger, Abby Martin, Miko Peled, Ollie Vargas, and Dr. Ramzy Baroud.

Lee Camp follows a long line of political comedians from George Carlin to Bill Hicks ……. We’re giving him a platform with full editorial freedom to write and produce his own political comedy show.

Lee Camp’s shows are like a form of investigative comedy. They give the audience something to think about regarding key issues of the day that are often either distorted in the establishment press or ignored altogether. Given the many challenges we face from the climate crisis to war and the global pandemic, it’s important to laugh when and how we can, otherwise, we’d just have to wail and cry. Lee blends wit and dark humor with quality reporting that is truly a call to action.

Dan Cohen is a jack of all trades. He’s an investigative journalist based in Washington DC reporting from the belly of the beast. He’s currently working on several guerilla-style documentaries where he traveled to the heart of conflicts targeted by U.S. imperialism and corporate pillaging– the first is a three-part series about a revolution in formation in Haiti. Another is about the failures of the peace accord in Colombia.

Another covers the resistance movement in Gaza and Israel’s temple movement and plans to destroy al-Aqsa Mosque as part of an end of times prophecy. All of these issues can be traced in some manner back to U.S. empire and efforts to create and maintain instability around the world. In addition to documentaries and written investigations, Dan is also leading our video investigative series called Behind The Headlines. He has already exposed the murky connections between corporate media, the Pentagon, the Biden administration, and much more.

For far too long, some of America’s most talented journalists have been forced to turn to foreign state media to produce watchdog journalism after being ousted and ostracized from U.S. mainstream media outlets. Those outlets have utterly failed the public and specialize in producing fast food news that is sensationalized, divisive, and wor as a mouthpiece for the two-party duopoly, weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and hawkish think NATO-funded think tanks.

We don’t have watchdog media anymore, we have extremist corporate media lapdogs beating the drums of war and acting as stenographers for the government.

We can’t rely on the legacy media in our own countries to tell us what’s really happening at home and around the world, and we shouldn’t have to rely on foreign state media outlets to fill in those holes. Instead, we must create our own.

The truth is we can’t continue to wait for the oligarchy to give us a media that represents “we the people.” It’s time that we unite on a broader front of non-partisanship that holds the elite accountable – in the spirit that journalism was intended by our First Amendment – to revive the fourth estate and create our very own media that goes Behind The Headlines.

It’s time that we put our money where our mouth is because our First Amendment and its free press, and free speech principles are on life support.

But to help us build this project we will need your support. We need to raise $400,000 in the next year, so we’re creating our first phase fundraiser to be stated for $200,000. This two-month campaign will support:

• Lee Camp’s new weekly political comedy show ‘The Most Censored News with Lee Camp’
• Production of four documentaries by Dan Cohen:
  • Endgame Apocalypse: Inside Israel’s Temple Mount movement and its plans to destroy al-Aqsa Mosque [Trailer coming soon]
  • Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza and the armed resistance that won the war [Trailer coming soon]
  • Inside Colombia’s narco-state and plot between the DEA and the Colombian government to plunge the country into a state of civil war
  • A three-part series on Haiti’s rising resistance movement against neoliberalism and occupation and how the U.S. is trying to quash it

• A monthly Behind The Headlines Report, an investigative video project with Dan Cohen covering the military-industrial complex, how propaganda works and much more.
• Weekly Video Podcast interview series with Mnar Adley

The funds for this campaign will help us cover all the production and editing costs, social media, and travel costs associated with creating high-quality video content and documentaries. In addition to this, the funds will help us cover the costs of launching our website. I hope you’ll join us today on Indiegogo! 

Mnar Adley

Director of Behind The Headlines and MintPress News 

Andrei Martyanov – World and Ukraine on March 5, 2022

March 06, 2022

Andrei Martyanov’s site is 

http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/

It’s Different, They’re White: Media Ignore Conflicts Around the World to Focus on Ukraine

March 02nd, 2022

By Alan Macleod

Source

A MintPress News analysis found that in a single week Fox News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC ran almost 1,300 separate stories on the Ukraine invasion, two stories on the Syria attack, one on Somalia, and none at all on the Saudi-led war on Yemen.

KIEV, UKRAINE — We are living in dangerous times. All around the world, intense military actions are taking place. Last week alone, Russia launched a huge military invasion of Ukraine; Saudi Arabia carried out dozens of strikes on Yemen; Israel launched a wave of deadly missile attacks against Syria; and the United States restarted its bombing campaign in Somalia.

These four deadly incidents happened concurrently. Yet judging by media coverage, it is highly unlikely that many will even be aware of the final three. A MintPress News study of five leading Western media outlets found that overwhelming attention was paid to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while the others were barely mentioned, if at all.

In total, in the week between Monday, February 21 and Sunday, February 27, Fox News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC ran almost 1,300 separate stories on the Ukraine invasion, two stories on the Syria attack, one on Somalia, and none at all on the Saudi-led war on Yemen.

The data for the study was collected using the Factiva news database, which was then cross referenced with searches on the websites of the respective news outlets’ websites, and also checked against precise Google searches to generate a final total. A chart visualizing the disparity in coverage over those seven days can be seen below.

Credit | Alan Macleod

Collectively, the five outlets published 1298 stories about Ukraine, meaning each one printed at around one per hour on average over the week studied. FoxNews.com ran the most — 308 — roughly one every 30 minutes. However, there was little significant numerical difference between the outlets, whose front pages and editorial sections were all dominated by headlines about Ukraine. In contrast, only The New York Times mentioned the Somali strike at all, while The Washington Post was the only outlet to cover the attacks on Syria. Fox News, CNN and MSNBC did not cover any of the other nation-on-nation attacks at all.

The media gets around to opposing war

Despite repeated warnings, the attack on Ukraine still came as a shock to most in the region. On the eve of the conflict, only 42% of Ukrainians believed any attack was likely, with President Volodymyr Zelensky himself criticizing what he called a destabilizing Western “panic” over the possibility.

The Russian military has occupied significant portions of the country, capturing key targets. Yet it has also united the West against the action, drawing a sharp and apparently determined response. In addition to ejecting Russia from the SWIFT system of international payments, a number of NATO countries, including the previously more neutral France and Germany, have sent arms to Ukraine. Zelensky has also signed an application to join the European Union. Inside Russia, the government’s actions sparked protests nationwide, many of which were suppressed by the police.

A sign of how seriously the media took the story is the number of editorials both The New York Times and The Washington Post ran. Editorials are articles collectively written by the senior staff on issues deemed so important that the outlet must make its readers aware of their collective position — a position that guides future coverage. Three of the four editorials the Times ran that week were on Ukraine. They denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin for his “bewildering aggression” and his “xenophobic, imperial and misguided notion that Ukraine was inherently an appendage of Russia.” Meanwhile, the Post published six separate editorials on the subject, each condemning Putin and praising President Joe Biden for his leadership.

The total rejection of violence was refreshing to many. “So this is what it looks like when the corporate media opposes war,” wrote Jeff Cohen, founder of media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, going on to make the point that the press has stood firmly behind virtually all of the United States’ recent conflicts.

Invisible Yemen

In contrast, there was almost no coverage of the latest attacks by Saudi-led forces against Yemen — a campaign that has already created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. The years-long war has intensified of late, with January 2022 the worst month for civilian casualties since fighting began in 2014.

On February 21, Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) reported that the Saudi Coalition bombed targets in Hajjah province in north-western Yemen, killing a number of civilians and injuring far more. Meanwhile, jets pummeled the coastal city of Hodeida. The next day, airstrikes and missiles hit residential areas in the provinces of al-Jawf, Marib, Taizz and Saada provinces.

On February 24, the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Yemen was hit by 37 separate airstrikes across the country, primarily in Hajjah and al-Bayda. The next day, the Saudi Coalition also shelled Saada using heavy artillery, killing at least six civilians. Saada has been a center of the bloodshed for some time now. In January, the Saudis dropped a Raytheon laser-guided bomb on a detention center there, killing 91 people and wounding hundreds more.

This is just a taste of the violence, information about which is not easy to come by in the West. In a 24-hour period between Thursday and Friday, the Coalition is accused of violating the ceasefire agreement on 147 different occasions and locations.

These latest attacks were not covered at all by Fox News, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post or MSNBC. Yemen has never been a war that has interested American media. Indeed, on MSNBC, there has been more in-depth coverage of Ukraine in one week than of the Yemen conflict since it began in 2014.

This is despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have died, the UN estimating that the death toll reached at least 377,000 by the end of 2021. Furthermore, the United States is a direct participant in the violence. A recent MintPress study revealed that the U.S. has sold at least $28 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia alone, and provides training and support for Riyadh, both militarily and diplomatically, helping the Coalition to continue the bloodshed.

There was some coverage of Yemen in The Washington Post. However, it all centered around Yemeni aggression towards Saudi Arabia and its allies, who were presented as the victims. This included an article on how the U.S. is imposing new sanctions on the so-called “Houthi rebels” and a story about a low-tech drone attack on a Saudi airport, in which it also noted that “Fighting in the strategic city of Marib in past months has led to increased Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.” What the Post failed to tell readers is that Marib is not in Saudi Arabia or the UAE, but in Yemen – a fact that undermines the narrative about who is the aggressor. (Inside Yemen, many consider referring to the de facto government as “Houthis” as derogatory and delegitimizing what they see as a coalition of many different groups into the political party Ansar Allah, rather than a Houthi insurgency.)

https://twitter.com/queeralamode/status/1498338405477847042?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1498338405477847042%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mintpressnews.com%2Fukraine-russia-war-media-bias-study%2F279847%2F

Somalia yawn, Syria shrug

Last week, the U.S. resumed its bombing campaign against Somalia, Africa’s second poorest

nation. Using a reaper drone, the military carried out an airstrike near the country’s capital, Mogadishu. The Tuesday strike also failed to make media waves, despite the military issuing a press release about it. The only outlet of the five studied to cover it was The New York Times, which released a story headlined, “U.S. Carries Out First Airstrike in Somalia Since August.” Far from condemning the act as bewildering aggression, as it had done with Putin, the subheadline immediately justified it, claiming that, “the strike targeted Al Shabab militants who had attacked allied Somali security forces.” Thus, a drone strike on a country on the other side of the world was framed as a necessary, defensive move. Indeed, the Times even included the phrase “collective self-defense” in reference to the strike. Two other news round-up articles in the Times mentioned the strike in a single sentence, linking to the story. That was the extent of the coverage.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to escalate its attacks on Syria. At around 1 a.m. on February 23, it fired missiles from the Golan Heights into Quneitra province in south-western Syria (Israel has occupied Syria’s Golan Heights since 1967). The next day, it launched a missile attack on Damascus, killing at least three soldiers who were stationed on the capital’s outskirts. As a way of justification, Israel claimed that the Syrian army had been working with Hezbollah, carrying out a leaflet drop across southwestern Syria publicizing the assertion. In recent weeks, the Israeli military has hit Damascus a number of times, its jets reportedly breaching both Syrian and Lebanese airspace to do so.

In these efforts, illegal under international law, Israel is helped by the United States, which supplies it with nearly $4 billion in military aid yearly. U.S. forces currently occupy significant areas of Syria, including the oil-producing regions in the northeast, and constantly coordinate actions with their Israeli ally.

The only outlet to cover these actions was The Washington Post. But even then, it merely republished two dry articles from the newswire service the Associated Press, adding no commentary or background. Thus, the attacks were treated as business as usual and worthy of almost no attention.

“First major war between civilized nations”

Although the disparity in quantity of coverage is stark, it is also important to note the huge differences in tone and outlook. Media is festooned with pictures of the targets of Russian aggression. For the first time, we are being invited to view the war from the side of the victim. Furthermore, the coverage is not dry and matter-of-fact, but emotive and full of outrage. This is virtually unheard of when reporting on Western wars, and is a conscious decision taken by those at the top.

Weeks after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, for example, the chairman of CNN sent a memo to all staff advising them in no uncertain terms to downplay the suffering of Afghans, stating that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange went to prison for releasing images of victims of U.S. wars. Yet Russia’s victims are front and center, with media even going so far as to approvingly report on Ukrainian civilians making and using Molotov cocktails on Russian forces.

This, for Palestinian journalist Mohammed El-Kurd, was a revelation. “It is insanely surreal to realize that mainstream news outlets — and settler politicians alike — possess the linguistic capacity to call occupation by its name. A capacity that is made staggeringly absent in the context of occupied Palestine, often under the guise of objectivity,” he said, adding:

‘Hypocrisy’ doesn’t describe this adequately. The appropriate word is psychosis. They live in a parallel universe where Europeans, who take up arms to defend their lands and families, are called resistance fighters but Palestinians doing the same damn thing are ‘terrorists.’ There is a separate set of rules for different people.”

War is terrible anywhere and everywhere but it is not more terrible just because it is in Europe.

— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) February 24, 2022

For many, this disparity is simply about racism. “Ukraine is not the worst act of war since World War II. It’s not even the worst war going on right now,” wrote Sri Lanka-based journalist Indi Samarajiva, referring to Syria and Yemen; “It’s just the worst to happen to white people.”

Certainly, there has been a shocking amount of casually racist commentary on corporate media. “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen,” said CBS News foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata from Kiev.

Al-Jazeera English presenter Peter Dobbie made similarly Orientalist remarks, expressing his concern for wealthy Ukrainian refugees fleeing, while also demonstrating his contempt for poor non-white people in the same circumstances, stating:

What is compelling is that just looking at them, the way they’re dressed. These are prosperous, middle-class people, these are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war. These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa; they look like any European family that you would live next door to.”

Others made similar remarks. “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed,” said Ukraine’s former Deputy Chief Prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, while talking to the BBC, which did not challenge him on the statement. “The unthinkable has happened…This is not a developing, third-world nation; this is Europe!” exclaimed ITV News reporter Lucy Watson in a tearful explanation as to why we need to help the refugees. “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking,” wrote former Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan in The Daily Telegraph. “War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone,” he added.

Summing up the orgy of casual prejudice was Daily Wire journalist Michael Knowles, who tweeted, “It just occurred to me that this is the first major war between civilized nations in my lifetime.”

English-language media’s racist double standards are on full display. #Ukraine #Russia #NATO pic.twitter.com/2RFxLEqAbI

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) March 1, 2022

The sheer number of media personalities expressing their shock at seeing “civilized” people in this predicament led a number of press associations from the Global South to release statements of protest.

“This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. It dehumanizes and renders their experience with war as somehow normal and expected,” wrote The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association.

“The idea that war is a thing that happens in lands outside of the West is beyond myopic. It is a gross misrepresentation of the entirety of human history. People who are not white are not more innately prone and habituated to violence and suffering,” added the Foreign Press Association, Africa.

All comes down to whose ox is getting gored

While racism is clearly a factor in the coverage, it should be remembered that the bombing of Yugoslavia — a white nation comparable to Ukraine — was celebrated, not rejected. This was in large part because it was NATO itself that was the aggressor.

Media theory scholars have long argued that victims of Western aggression are largely ignored but those of the West’s enemies will be given center stage. In 1988, academics Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky developed their theory of worthy vs. unworthy victims in their book “Manufacturing Consent.” Together, they compared the coverage of two concurrent genocides, one in Cambodia (an enemy state) and one carried out by the Indonesian military (funded and armed by the U.S. government) in East Timor. While the savagery of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge became worldwide news, as the genocide in East Timor reached its peak, coverage fell to literally zero in major media outlets. This and other examples led them to conclude that both the quantity and quality of the coverage of atrocities is dependent almost entirely on two factors:

1. Who is the perpetrator
2. Who is the victim

If the perpetrator is our enemy, and there is political capital to be made from highlighting their crime, then the media will deem the victim “worthy”  — especially if the victim is a pro-U.S. figure. If, however, you die at the hands of the U.S. or its allies, you can expect little sympathy or coverage from the media, especially if you are a Communist, Muslim, or any other designation that renders you unworthy of media attention.

In the Ukraine case, the perpetrator is an enemy state (Russia) and the victim is a pro-Western government seeking to join both the European Union and NATO. However, in the other three cases detailed here (Israeli strikes on Syria, Saudi attacks on Yemen, and U.S. attacks on Somalia), the aggressor is either the U.S. itself or its close allies, while the victim is an enemy actor. Hence the complete lack of coverage. Therefore, there will be few — if any — think pieces denouncing the U.S. for its barbarity, nor any calls to create a military alliance to counter Israel, or to take in hundreds of thousands of Yemeni refugees.

A NYT headlines circa 2003, left, and a NYT editorial from 2022

Turning the outrage tap on and off is a key way in which media manufacturers consent for U.S. foreign policy, hiding certain atrocities from our gaze and placing others on our screens. To be clear, Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine should, of course, be making headlines around the world, and victims should be mourned and perpetrators condemned. However, the vast qualitative and quantitative disparity between coverage of the attacks on Yemen, Somalia and Syria and the attack on Ukraine, which received almost 400 times the attention of the other three combined, is another stark example of how the media is outraged at war only when it wants to be.

While the Israeli attack on Syria and the U.S. strike on Somalia were relatively minor occurrences in comparison to Russia’s invasion, and could therefore be said to deserve less coverage, the continuing Saudi war on Yemen is not. And while the Ukraine attack is new, the beginning of the Yemen conflict received scant attention at the time. Furthermore, all three are a direct result of American policy and could be stopped immediately if the public were sufficiently aware and engaged, thus rendering coverage of particular importance to U.S. audiences.

Americans are united in rejecting Russia’s attack on Ukraine. A recent poll found that only 6% of the public consider its invasion justified, as opposed to 74% against. This suggests that if the media covered U.S. imperialism in the same way it covers its Russian equivalent, then those wars would end immediately. But they do not. And the Ukraine coverage underlines that this is a choice they are making every day.

The “Corona Crisis” and the War of “The Super-Rich” against the Earth’s Citizens

“The Super-Rich” against the Earth’s Citizens

By Emanuel Pastreich

Global Research, March 26, 2021

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Corporations, multinational investment banks, and the super-rich that hide behind them have launched the final stage this year of a ruthless war of a tiny few against the great majority of humanity.

Although they pay off their puppets in the media to float happy tales of some happy resolution to the dire situation of the moment, they already know that the die is cast, that they are committed to a strategy of distracting, seeding division, undermining rational thinking and using a combination of blatant intimidation with open bribery to slowly, systematically, overpower and reduce to slavery 99.98% of the Earth’s population.

They know already, according to the calculations of their supercomputers, what will happen if they are not successful in this plan. They also know that catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss will make it impossible for them to monopolize the wealth and the resources for long.

There is literally no limit to how far they will go.

The tools they use to pursue this war against the citizens of the Earth are technology, propaganda and disinformation campaigns, threats against individuals who display leadership skills and massive bribes for the leaders who are allowed to be covered in the media to represent the conservative and the progressive causes.

They also employ as part of this strategy an intimate knowledge of certain key weaknesses in the brain, and the potential for exploiting the human inclination to determine truth based on a vague sense of the mood of the herd, rather than logic. That is to say they are investing billions in hidden money to systematically create social pressure that makes citizens conform with pointless mandates for masks or vaccines that are launched from diverse platforms as a means of inducing the population to police itself.

Without such a strategy, the super-rich could not possibly seize control of the entire Earth.

There has been extensive research by corporations, and by the CIA and Department of Defense (government organizations exploited to hide the true entities demanding such research) into how humans can be manipulated without their knowledge, and compelled through imperceptible persuasion to permit, or even aid, their own disenfranchisement without us even being aware of this silent and invisible takeover.

Such operations have been undertaken before, but never on this global scale. New developments in super-computing and the global integration of, and deregulation of, finance, has made such a master plan possible for the first time.

Recent developments are best viewed as the final acceleration of a process by which corporations bribed and lobbied all authority figures in government and academics to go along with a process of privatization, commercialization, and automation that now means that a tiny handful of people can control every aspect of human experience in an absolute sense while the vast majority of citizens cannot even conceive of what is taking place. We have not reached that state yet, but Elon Musk, Bill Gates and others believe, based on the calculations of supercomputers, that it is now possible.

The super-rich has also invested wisely in the establishment of a panoply of sham activists, or toothless, “feel good, do nothing” NGOs.

These “movements” are allowed to appear in the corporate-controlled media, and they pretend to respond to corporate power, but they purposely discourage citizens from organizing themselves (they ask only for donations, or attendance at protests, but they pointedly do not empower people to form their own groups or achieve financial and ideological independence).

Such NGOs are silent about the mass manipulation of the media and of politics by global finance—even though that is the primary cause of the political problems we face.

If we follow the current trajectory, there will not be a single part of our lives that is completely controlled by a multinational corporation in the next few years.

We do not have that long to act.

Image on the right is from Natural News

The push for mandatory COVID-19 “vaccines” in the face of the overwhelming scientific evidence against them is not a matter of mistaken science or bad policy. It is rather a process of preparing government officials, doctors, reporters, and other media figures to follow orders from above that have no rational basis.

After this “softening-up process,” which is carefully calibrated on the basis of secret CIA torture programs designed to test the weaknesses of the human psyche, a rougher and more brutal form of the rule can be implemented.

The mask mandate was the first step in the implementation of this form of massive psychological warfare. It is, to use the technical term, a slow “rape of the mind.”

The enormous restructuring of governance and the economy described by the World Economic Forum as the “Great Reset” is not a secret and anyone who takes the time to read that book, and related documents, can figure out about 70% of what is their agenda is.

The citizen will be convinced that he or she operates within a functional country and that there is some process by which the politicians at the top take actions on their behalf. But the super-rich cares nothing for nation-states and their populations and they use politicians to deflect attention away from themselves. Every time a politician takes a fall, it is to distract you from the predations of the rich. Every attack on minorities is a trick to get you hooked on race and diversity and distracted from the concentration of wealth.

We are increasingly subject to the whims of unaccountable global powers, and the intentionally render us passive, open to persuasion, and therefore incapable of resistance, by the media that is controlled by those powers.

The super-rich relies on two approaches to psychological manipulation that go back to the 1930s and before but have been perfected by recent research.

The first technique is the use of traumatic events that are reported on in a sensationalist and unscientific manner in the media so as to induce a deep sense of shock, disorientation and confusion in the population as a whole. The mental trauma of such events, whether the 9.11 incident, or the hyped-up COVID-19 crisis, or the “armed insurrection” at the Capitol, is used to induce passivity and receptivity to profound institutional shifts that would otherwise be impossible.

Naomi Klein describes this approach as the “shock doctrine” and although she hesitates to delve too deeply into the degree to which it has become national policy, she accurately traces the approach back to the torture programs designed to test the limits of the human psyche.

Such trauma affects the reactive and emotional part of the human brain known as the amygdala, bringing on a “fight or flight” response in the psyche that overrides the rational, integrative, response to external events that would be carried out by the prefrontal cortex in normal conditions.

Because we as individuals, and as populations, are unaware of how the amygdala has taken over decision making from the prefrontal cortex because of these engineered shocks, we are unable to organize, or even conceive of, a response to the real threat. Instead, we focus on the cooked-up threats offered to us by the commercial media like Islamic terrorism in the case of 9.11 or the spread of a dangerous virus in the case of the COVID-19 operation.

The second strategy is to induce a hypnotic state in the brain of the individual, and the population as a whole, through the constant repetition of certain themes and images through advertisements, commercials, images, and themes articulated in movies, TV shows, reporting, and even the packaging of products.

The stimulation alternates between the intentionally boring and distracting images and direct appeals to the pleasure centers of the brain such as the desire for food, for sexual arousal, or for pleasant experiences.

The advertisements promoting the enjoyment of food and encouraging low-level sexual arousal are not only, or even primarily, aimed at selling products. They are intended to induce a state of passivity in the population.

The CIA explains the process,

“Hypnosis is basically a technique which permits acquisition of direct access to the sensory motor cortex and pleasure centers, and lower cerebral (emotional) portions of the right side of the brain following successful disengagement of the stimulus screening function of the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere which functions as the noncritical, holistic, nonverbal and pattern-oriented component of the brain, appears to accept what the left hemisphere passes to it without question. Consequently, if the left hemisphere can be distracted either through boredom or through reduction to a soporific, semi-sleep state, external stimuli to include hypnotic suggestions are allowed to pass unchallenged into the right hemisphere where they are accepted and acted on directly.”

(FOIA document “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process” June 9, 1983 (US Army Intelligence and Security Command)

CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5

The scale of this experiment in mass hypnosis to render the citizens of all the world passive, and unable to resist persuasion from authority figures is unprecedented. This process is being undertaken slowly, over months and years, following complex algorithms that are kept secret.

It is critical in this process that individuals be isolated from each other, unable to communicate except through mediums controlled by multinational corporations, and that they be offered only ineffective and superficial organizations to join organizations in which they will be incapable of participating in the decision-making process, or of effecting change. Quarantine, lockdowns, social distancing, and the promotion of a narcissistic consumption culture are critical to that process.

The result is that the citizens of the United States, and around the world, are being reduced to consumers of products supplied by multinational corporations who cannot even conceive of how the world has been radically transformed in this great reset.

They are being rendered passive and unresponsive so that the super-rich can quickly seize complete control of the systems by which countries are governed, by which money and finance are determined, the media by which information is distributed, the universities and research institutes by which authoritative perspectives backed by science are presented, the farms and distribution systems by which food is provided, the aquafers and irritation systems by which water is provided, and every other aspect of human experience.

When we awake from this slumber, if we ever do, we will discover that every aspect of our lives is controlled by unaccountable powers which we cannot understand, which we have no way to challenge and which will increase slowly and systematically the means by which we are made slaves, and, if necessary, destroyed.

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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020

Captain America – The Man with Two Brains

March 21, 2021

By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog

An earlier essay titled, “If America Dissolves . . .” formed an introduction to the series on Bernays and Propaganda. This essay functions as the epilogue.

I will briefly repeat here several observations I made earlier, in order to develop a point that requires some elaboration.

In the essay titled The Utopia Syndrome, I mentioned Elizabeth Anderson’s theory of what I call ‘The Propaganda Mask’, which states that when political ideals or the ‘official story’ diverge too widely from reality, the ideals or the official narrative themselves become a kind of mask that prevents us from perceiving the gap. When the tenets of the propaganda are too far removed from factual truth, the victims lose their ability to separate fact from fiction and become unable to recognise the discrepancy between their ideals and their actions, or between their convictions and the truth. In the same essay I outlined that Americans are guilty of what I call ‘the Utopia Syndrome’, comparing themselves not with the real world of their actions but with some utopian standard of ideals that exists only in their own imaginations, a world of fancy and illusion divorced from reality. Next, I noted the black and white mentality that pervades America, the result of their Christianity and the work of Bernays, whose methods of manipulation of the public mind created a kind of binary mentality. Bernays claimed the excessive emotional loading in his propaganda could produce only a limited range of powerful emotional responses in his victims, forcing one’s emotional switch into a binary ‘on or off’ mode, with no other choices.

Within this binary framework, it is interesting that Americans are of two minds with respect to their treasured democracy. On the one hand, they preach glassy-eyed and fervently that their multi-party political system is the pinnacle of human evolutionary development, a universal value gifted to them by their god and representing the yearnings of all mankind, while on the other hand vehemently condemning that same democracy as hopelessly corrupt and its politicians less trustworthy than snakes and used-car salesmen. Thus, Americans seem to have two brains which are apparently unconnected and unable to communicate with each other. We have one brain stridently preaching the utopian fiction of a beautiful mansion on a hill, while the other dismisses with contempt the reality of a cracked foundation and leaking roof, sagging floors and faulty wiring, and all the rest. Yet the brain’s owner is seemingly unaware of these two successive and starkly contradictory realities.

These behavior patterns are not difficult to understand if we assume that Americans really do have two unconnected brains, not physically but mentally. Like all schizophrenics, most Americans exhibit what researchers call a ‘splitting of mental functions’, a mental disorder characterised by a failure to recognize what is real, the most common symptom being false beliefs. This derived schizophrenia appears to share the stage with a variation of what is called a ‘multiple personality disorder’, “a mental defect characterised by two distinct but dissociated personality states that alternately control a person’s behavior, accompanied by memory impairment not explained by ordinary forgetfulness.” This combination summarises to a people (a) holding totally false beliefs, unable to distinguish fiction from reality, (b) displaying two distinct but dissociated and opposite mental states, and (c) exhibiting little if any memory overlap between these two states. Odd as all this may seem, this describes Americans too perfectly to be an irrelevant coincidence. I should note here that both these mental disorders are diagnosed more frequently in the US than in any other nation.

Americans have been overwhelmed with utopian propaganda from infancy, an insidious New Testament heavily loaded with religion and emotion, indoctrinating them with a belief in their own moral superiority endowed upon them by their god, resulting in the Propaganda Mask where they can no longer recognise the vast discrepancy between their ideals and their actions (or the actions of their government). Their evangelical brand of Christianity endows them with the conviction that they are “good” and that all their actions, however evil, are also “good”. It then follows that they compare themselves not to the real world of their actions but only to their programmed utopian ideals. It is logical that Americans appear blind to this stark discrepancy due to the memory impairment when shifting personality states, the explanation lying with Bernays and the ‘on and off’ switch that controls the two brains. The issue is simply that both brains (or personality states) cannot be “ON” at the same time.

The condition and its states are easy to observe. In moments of unthreatening discourse, most any American brain can switch to its reality state and recognise democracy and capitalism for what they are, with all the open sores and unlanced boils readily apparent and heartily condemned. In these unguarded moments, many Americans will release a tide of criticism and moral condemnation of their capitalist system, with at least intuitive if not factual understanding of the criminal character of their corporations and banks, and the fundamentally unjust nature of their legal and judicial systems, as well as the failings of their vaunted multi-party democratic system. They know full well their Wall Street bankers are predatory vampires, that their courts are neither of law nor justice, that their democracy is corrupted beyond redemption, and that most of their politicians and corporate executives belong in prison. They are mostly quite aware of the devastating injustices of their capitalist system, and surprisingly aware of the futility of their great ‘democracy’. It can be startling to see their clarity of vision and harsh judgments of these failings.

But on occasions when these fundamentals are threatened, or when exposed to an emotionally-nourishing propaganda stimulus containing an opportunity to ‘feel good to be an American’, the reality brain switches off, the utopian brain switches on, and we are subjected to a sometimes frighteningly religious flood of nationalistic nonsense. I wrote earlier that much of what we attribute to American hypocrisy may in reality be due to a peculiarly American kind of mass insanity, which would appear to be precisely the case.

No other nation in the world has been exposed to political-religious brainwashing propaganda on such a massive scale. Patriotism in America is neither natural nor spontaneous; it has been planned, programmed and instilled in all Americans from birth, at least all white Americans. It is often so foolish as to be comical and open to ridicule, but simultaneously rather frightening. Consider this example:

The media topic is that fewer Americans are buying live Christmas trees in favor of artificial ones that are less bother and are re-usable. The live tree industry feels a long-term threat to its survival. No politics here, no religion. But then this is America and things are different here. The problem, according to the US media, is not the change in consumer tastes but rather is China, specifically “China’s cheap, fake Christmas trees”. China is “threatening our authentic American trees” and, even more importantly, China is also threatening “the patriotic Americans” who supply the authentic American trees. The media article therefore advised these threatened Americans to evidence their patriotism by going out into the forest to find “a God-grown tree”. When you read this, do you laugh or cry?

This tragic combination of serious mental imbalance and distressing emotional immaturity creates an existential problem for these hysterical pre-pubescent Americans. On the one hand, they desperately must feel good to be an American because it is their only source of emotional sustenance. But on the other hand, the fact of being American contains nothing in itself to make anybody feel good about anything. Even worse, it isn’t sufficient for them to merely feel good about themselves; it is crucially necessary to feel they are better than others, which is why they need an external comparison to illuminate their superiority. In spite of their imaginary exceptionalism and professed overwhelming moral superiority, there is also an inner recognition that these claims are false, evidenced by their constant attempts to prove a superiority which, if real, should be so obvious as to require no proof.

But Americans have nothing valuable of their own, not in themselves, nor in their national identity, history or culture, so they compensate by denigrating those who do have. This is why they so vigorously blind themselves to their own faults, crimes and atrocities, and focus only on the sins of others – even if they have to create imaginary ones. This is in part why hypocrisy has become a defining adjective of Americans: they cannot permit their national identity to collapse from a revelation of their current faults and historical crimes. When overlaid with their malignant Christianity, this combines to produce their imaginary and marvelously-warped self-image of moral superiority. The end result is a nation with little intrinsic self-worth and few genuine human values, unable to see itself as it really is: empty, superficial, vacuous, ignorant, mean-spirited, hysterical, envious, aggressive, self-obsessed, and hypocritical.

This is what Lippman and Bernays (and their European masters) did to the American people – reprogrammed an entire nation in equally as brutal a fashion as did the US with the Philippines, and the UK with Hong Kong, in this case creating an entire society of deluded, hysterical, and profoundly sick killer-consumers with a totally fictional history. It is probably fair to say that these men had good and fertile material to work with, a composition of the worst features of Christianity, native ignorance, and insatiable greed, but still we need to give credit where credit is due. Americans have always been racist and violent, but it was Lippman and Bernays who turned them into serial killers celebrating their Afghan “bug splats” (1) in the national media. And it was in this fertile and evil soil that American Presidents, Secretaries of State and Defense Secretaries so lushly sprouted into the longest string of sociopathic genocidal killers in history. Democracy never had a chance.

*

Notes

(1) For those who don’t know, a ‘bug splat’ is both the sound and the result of a large insect like a grasshopper impacting the windshield of a car at high speed. Americans were renowned for shooting children in Afghanistan (usually in the head) with high-powered weapons, and referring to the resulting explosion as a ‘bug splat’.

*

Introduction – If America Dissolves…  https://thesaker.is/if-america-dissolves/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 1 of 5 — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 2 of 5 — The Marketing of War — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-marketing-of-war/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 3 of 5 –– Democracy Control – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-democracy-control/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 4 of 5 –The Transition to Education and Commerce – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-transition-to-education-and-commerce-part-4/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 5 of 5 — Propaganda Continues Unabated — http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-propaganda-continues-unabated-part-5/

Epilogue – Captain America –The Man with Two Brains

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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.

His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

Bernays and Propaganda – The Transition to Education and Commerce – Part 4

March 02, 2021

By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog

The success of Lippman and Bernays did not go unnoticed in many segments of American society. Universities in particular realised the potential of these new propaganda techniques to form, manipulate and control social perceptions and behavior. Schools and Universities in the US had never been viewed as an educational system but more as tools of a public disciplinary system, a method both of social control and a means to inculcate attitudes and beliefs most useful to the industrialists and bankers. This began before the time of Lippman and Bernays, with the great “Robber Barons”, the criminally rich families like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Astor, DuPont, Guggenheim, Morgan, Vanderbilt. Andrew Carnegie first promoted the notion that the nation’s very rich should found universities in order to remake education to serve their needs. Many American industrialists joined this crusade, resulting in Stanford, Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Chicago and many more. Their efforts were widely publicised as a kind of benevolent charity to the nation, but their purpose was not to educate but to indoctrinate, using the educational system to create citizens obedient to their capitalist ideology and maintain their financial power.

They meant these institutions to preach the standard religious mythologies of patriotism and democracy, but also the values of child labor, slave wages, anathema toward labor unions and opposition to minimum wages, as a scheme to maintain their income disparity, basically to inculcate public attitudes that would serve to prevent any transference of wealth to the masses. These industrial and financial elites played a heavy role in the transformation of America’s educational system, first from their financial control and second from their power to design and control the ideologies that would emerge in the curricula, setting the stage for the methods of American education today, in particular the US business schools. Perhaps the most important consideration about American education that is so poorly-appreciated is that the American elite did not want (and still do not want) to improve the nation’s education level because both the multi-party political system and the US brand of capitalism require ignorance for survival, both relying heavily for their success on a thoughtless, uninformed, and uneducated population. (1)

Of course in all nations, the educational system is one of the primary institutions of social control, but with the aid of Lippman and Bernays the US went far beyond civilised norms. For both primary and secondary school, the intent was to establish social control by first producing a strong sense of national identity and cohesion, which led to, among other things, the mass hysteria of US patriotism so much in evidence today. It isn’t widely recognised that the ever-present and pervasive pathological American brand of patriotism is an extremely powerful mechanism of social control, to the extent that few Americans would be prepared to have themselves classified as ‘unpatriotic’. But to be patriotic in the American mold means one must firmly align one’s interests with the ruling elite. In America, you cannot be patriotic while condemning free-market capitalism or the frequent wars for its benefit, and it is distinctly unpatriotic to express a wish for a government-paid healthcare system or to protest against the banks that caused much of the population to lose their homes in 2008. As reporter George Seldes pointed out, (2) (3) this patriotism, the American way of taking pride in one’s country, forces the masses to ally themselves with the ruling powers, and this produces a kind of perpetual control. He said this deceptive propaganda has existed for so long that few are aware of how it came about or even that it exists. He ended his comment with the observation that if the media informed the people of this insidious control, it would lose its power. But the media, themselves aligned with the ruling powers, refuse to address it.

The purpose of the universities, in the view of these industrialists and bankers, was to develop by indoctrination a kind of management elite capable of controlling society in a way most useful to the top 1%. By the end of the First World War, the world was in the throes of a massive industrialisation as well as urbanisation, creating social stresses from problems of inequality and civil rights, with social unrest already a growing problem. To deal with this, American universities developed (under the tutelage of Lippman and Bernays) what they called the “social sciences” like sociology and psychology with the objective of producing a cadre of “social engineers and technicians” to address these issues and control American society. The ‘secret government’ believed that psychology, with the techniques so skillfully applied by Bernays, could “be instrumental for attaining democratic social order and control”. The theory was that individuals in society were not “well adjusted” and that propaganda could be used to appropriately “adjust” them. From this point, with the educational system as a major instrument, the US transitioned into a society of social engineering and control, using Bernays’ methods directly upon primary, high school and university students to form and manipulate public perceptions and beliefs in a manner most useful to the secret government and the multi-nationals they controlled. Neither the good of the nation nor the welfare of its citizens were listed as priorities. Of course, education itself became diseased and corrupted by these measures.

Socialism was perhaps the greatest enemy to the entrenched ability of the bankers and industrialists to loot the nation, with items like minimum wages, free education or medical care severely restraining the greed of the elites, and thus socialism quickly became public enemy no. 1 in the American educational system. For generations, Bernays and his heirs filled the minds and hearts of American children with a fear of socialism, equating it to godless nations ruled by brutal dictators where citizens had no freedom. The propaganda was extremely powerful and the brainwashing began very early in life – as it still does today. Consider this example from a current American elementary school book: The question posed is “Which of the following goes with socialism?”, with the student offered three possible answer choices:

• A Political system in which a dictator rules, and there are no freedoms.
• An Economic system in which the government owns the big businesses.
• An Economic system in which businesses are privately owned.

Of course, the correct answer is “none of the above”, but in American schools the first two evil choices are the only correct answers, small children learning very early on that private-enterprise capitalism is the only way to fly, socialism not only to be avoided but to even explore that system is equated to seeking information on Satan worship. The doors to these little American minds are firmly slammed shut very early in life, never to be opened again, an integral part of their political-religious indoctrination. The false tenets of American capitalism are given vast prime-time exposure, again closing the little minds forever to any understanding of what they are for or why they are for it. (4)

Yale University, working with huge grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, created a propaganda institute to perform practical research on issues “directly concerned with the problems of man’s individual and group conduct” and “to correlate knowledge and coordinate technique in related fields”. The stated purpose was to better “understand human life”, but the intent was to utilise that understanding for the control of the population. There was a Princeton University Radio Project to discover the most effective way to use broadcasting for population indoctrination and control, the techniques being adopted by the VOA, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia. The internet and Princeton archives appear to have been scrubbed clean of information on this.

And indeed Princeton was so heavily involved in propaganda, subterfuge and spy-craft, that it provided the bulk of the staff for the OSS and CIA during their formative years. (5) As with most everything else regarding the US, the American universities were even much worse than imagined, being deeply into the CIA’s murderous MK-ULTRA program of mind control that stretched for decades (6), as part of the Bernays-inspired search for population control mechanisms. In testimony to the US Senate, Senator Ted Kennedy stated that more than thirty US universities and institutions were involved in what he termed an “extensive testing and experimentation” program which included covert drug tests on citizens at all social levels, all without their knowledge or consent. (7)

The elite 1% founded not only universities but the Foundations that exist to this day, and for the same purposes of social control. Institutions like the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, were primarily created “to perpetuate predatory wealth through the control of information and the sources of information”, and quickly assumed missions of direct influence and control of the mindsets of many of the world’s leaders, or at least influential individuals. The Rockefeller Foundation has been pre-eminent in an astonishing array of social control initiatives that included population control in the real sense through sterilisation and war. And both the Rockefeller and Carnegie institutes funded and promoted the practice of eugenics, Carnegie recommending a national chain of gas chambers to eliminate the socially (and ideologically) unfit. (8) All of this twisted ideology stemmed from the same source.

The Rockefeller Foundation in one advertised instance held a major conference with “representatives of some of the largest financial interests” in the US, i.e. the Jewish European bankers who controlled the US FED, to promote a propaganda program to “educate the citizenry in pro-capitalistic ideology and thus relieve unrest”. In other words, employ the Freud/Bernays propaganda methods to teach the working class to stay poor for the benefit of the corporate elites and the bankers. This group believed it needed a “publicity bureau” that could “correct popular misinformation” by providing “a constant stream of correct information” delivered to the lower and middle classes on their proper place in society. They then set about creating a powerful research organisation to study “social problems” and “the causes of social and economic evils”, portraying themselves as disinterested scientists searching for the public good while actually focused on propaganda, public indoctrination and secret social control.

All the so-called Foundations and Think Tanks established during the past century shared the purpose of steering society and social thought into desirable channels, and executing massive schemes of social engineering, eventually corrupting the educational system and co-opting all emerging social movements for the benefit of Bernays’ ‘secret government. American society, primarily through the educational system and the use of the new social sciences was being almost totally re-created to serve its ultimate masters.

A memo from the Rockefeller historical archives revealed a concern that their purposes might become public knowledge and be “misinterpreted” since public opinion would naturally be violently opposed to such secret programming. Senators and Congressmen rightly feared these Foundations were dangerous to their society and form of government, and recommended their abolition, but the elected portions of the government have never had the power to control the secret government. The US Congress stated that these foundations, with their wealth and influence, were “a grave menace to the welfare of society” and would be used not only to affect and control the government but to change its form. And try to change its form they would.

This is one reason most university business schools are funded by (and named after) their monied benefactors: money guides and even determines the curriculum. Many American universities today are merely servants of major industrial firms, virtually their entire research capabilities harnessed in pursuit of either commercial patents or discoveries of military value, the education of students becoming increasingly remote and inferior. In the end, the practices of Bernays’ propaganda and the private funding of education to serve private hidden interests became one and the same, the propaganda machine absorbing education itself, for the purpose of ‘adjusting’ the population to eliminate ‘misinformation’ and replace it with the ‘constant stream of correct information’ while firmly repressing all contradictory thought.

Interestingly, debt bondage is one of the main forms of social control and for this reason has always been heavily promoted in the US, its financial benefit to the private bankers being an added plus. New university graduates who are $200,000 in debt, homeowners with a huge mortgage, wage slaves with high credit card balances, are unlikely to risk their careers and livelihood by openly challenging the system. When an entire nation is heavily in debt, the people cannot afford to revolt. Meekness and silence are prerequisites for survival, especially in the almost total absence of labor unions. Thus, the American propaganda machine discouraged savings and encouraged consumption on credit. This was so true that as early as the 1920s as much as 90% of all major items like homes, cars, furniture and appliances purchased in the US, were bought on credit. (9)

• Turning to Commerce

Lippman and Bernays also turned their attention to the manipulation and control of public attitudes toward advertising and commerce, which is why and how the vast propaganda machine transformed American culture into a materialistic consumer society. The consumption orientation was created solely to transfer wealth to the top 1% who owned most of the means of production and who would primarily benefit, mostly the same people constituting Bernays’ “invisible government”. The ease and potential of public manipulation fired the imagination of those who controlled the banks and multinational corporations, their minds opened to the vast potential to increase sales by turning Americans into appropriately conditioned consumers. They realised that if they could condition emotional responses into the subconscious of the American population without the awareness of the people, they could firmly control the purchasing attitudes and habits of an entire nation. And of course this was precisely the result, with the US economy today dependent for 75% of its life on consumer spending, Americans proclaiming this bizarre condition as a universal value and the will of God.

Following his political successes, Bernays set up shop on Madison Avenue and by the early 1920s was already doing for American products and branding what he had done for war marketing, that is to say, using propaganda to manipulate and control public perception and behavior, in this case to create not only mindless consumers but to fabricate and permanently instill in the American mind the myth of brands. Bernays quickly attracted more corporate clients than he could handle, with most large firms tripping over themselves to take advantage of the power of propaganda and mind control to loot the nation’s bank accounts.

Advertising and Agencies

In 1957 Vance Packard published a best-selling book titled “The Hidden Persuaders”, that revealed in detail how advertisers were using psychologists and psychiatrists following Bernays’ manipulative methods to tap into our unconscious desires in order to “persuade” us to buy the products they were selling. (10) (11) The entire advertising industry succumbed to this siren call and today is a rat’s nest of (often) reprehensible manipulation of the public. Ad agencies would hold “focus groups” where they would surreptitiously record housewives and others discussing their inmost feelings, thoughts, desires on many matters, then use that information to subvert those and manipulate people into buying whatever they wanted to sell.

One instance that crossed my path was exposure to the story boards of a foreign advertising agency in Shanghai tasked with helping an American bank market credit cards to young Chinese. I was appalled at what I saw. The manipulation was to me not only disgusting but obscene. Someone had spent real money to ferret out the hidden desires, fears and aspirations of young Chinese, and turned that knowledge to looting their bank accounts. The conclusions were that these young people, university graduates, were now in an era of rising affluence and desired to be recognised as more than citizens of a third-world country, in a sense to be seen as worthy equals to young people of other nations. They had purchasing power, generally good taste, and wanted to be appreciated as valuable consumers. The recommendations were startling. “Tell him he’s a king. Use the tag line “The world is waiting for you”, and “With our credit card, you can have it all now”. Make him feel he is important and recognised, that he is valued because he is Chinese.” And, since this young person likely came from a one-child family where his wishes were important, “Do everything possible to push the “me, me, me, more, more, more” attitude.”

I encountered this by accident, and had an email exchange with a young Chinese on this topic. I cannot locate my original email but, from memory, this is what I wrote to him:

“A credit card is not magic, and it is not free. It is borrowed money that you will have to repay at a high rate of interest. No matter what they tell you, you cannot have it all, not now, and not without working and saving for it. Moreover, you are not a king. You are a nobody. You are just another dumb kid with a credit card, one of 300 million others like you. I am sorry to tell you the world is not waiting for you. The world doesn’t even know you exist and, if it did know, it wouldn’t care. That is the truth. I suggest you accept it and act accordingly.”

The American Auto Industry

The conduct of these propagandists, beginning with Lippmann and Bernays marketing war for Rothschild and their other masters in London, was clearly criminally insane. There is no way to place a positive spin on people who provoke a world war for their private benefit, but it is more difficult to grasp that their conduct in the commercial realm was (and still is) no less criminally insane. One example is the American auto industry and the American love affair with the automobile.

This is a long and interesting story which I have covered in detail here (12). Briefly, in the 1920s the world was turning to electric automobiles en masse and the advent of inexpensive electric public transport was sounding the death knell for gasoline-powered cars. General Motors and the major oil companies were facing a multiple crisis, and embarked on one of the greatest criminal frauds in history, killing off the electric car and mass transit in the US. But they didn’t stop there. Life in many of the world’s major cities is convenient and enjoyable without a car, partially due to excellent mass transit and partially to urban areas designed for human living rather than automobiles. But not in the US. GM and its friends infiltrated the civic planning faculties of major US universities and propagandised the construction of suburbs – which exist only in North America, physically segregating living, working and shopping spaces to make auto ownership mandatory. They also bribed and extorted the US government to abandon rail transport and invest solely in highways, again to make private auto ownership mandatory. The long term negative effects of this ruthless corporate conspiracy are literally beyond calculation. Then the public propaganda kicked in:

“America’s Love Affair with the Automobile” is presented as an expression of independent and freedom-loving America, where inexpensive mass transportation failed to evolve due to Americans’ individuality and desire for freedom, but that is a propaganda myth, a lie of enormous proportion. Today’s US car culture was the result of a massive conspiracy, like the consumer society, imposed on an unsuspecting nation through deceit and propaganda. After execution of the massive fraud, the American people were for generations complimented on their individualism, adventuresome spirit and their love of freedom and independence, and for the choices they believed they made but that had been made for them by others. Here as in no other market is it so true that Bernays’ capitalists were selling “not so much products as emotion itself, psychologically linking the act of purchasing an automobile to falsely-manufactured feelings of confidence, freedom, happiness, empowerment and independence, tying the very self-identity of Americans to the purchase of an automobile.” (13)

CONSUMER GOODS

Nestlé and the Baby Milk Companies

Mothers’ breast milk is universally acknowledged as far superior to artificial powdered milk for babies, being naturally sterile and containing all the necessary nutrition while, and very importantly, supplying the baby with multiple antibodies that provide immunity against many childhood illnesses and diseases. Almost all mothers are able to breastfeed their babies, who then become ill much less often than babies fed with artificial milk powder. Bottle-feeding with artificial milk has been long proven to present increasing dangers where mothers have poor or no access to necessary sterile facilities.

UNICEF and many other health groups have stated that about 1.5 million babies die each year from simple ailments like diarrhea, common in babies drinking artificial powdered milk, but that almost never occur with breast-fed babies. The WHO and a number of other international organisations claim that “Over 4,000 babies die every day in poor countries because they’re not breastfed. That’s not conjecture, it’s fact.” Since the end of World War II, approximately 50 million infants have died from this one cause, but Nestlé, Danone, Wyeth, Mead Johnson and Abbott are hugely profitable.

In one of the most criminal and anti-human campaigns ever produced by Bernays and his heirs, a few industrialists conspired to create a reprehensible propaganda offensive to convince the world’s mothers, most especially those in undeveloped countries, to avoid breast-feeding their babies. It was a direct and deliberate attack on one of the most basic of human functions while ignoring the enormous human cost in infant fatalities and illnesses for which they are in most cases directly (or at least indirectly) responsible.

They utilised the services of thousands of physicians, psychologists and psychiatrists, and marketing personnel, to learn how to penetrate the psyche of a new mother to discourage her from breastfeeding her own child. I can recall seeing in several poor countries billboards for baby milk that contained photos of ‘yellow-haired goddesses’, the essential sentiment being communicated was: “Beautiful white women don’t breastfeed their babies. It’s only you backward, uneducated and ignorant brown peasants who do that.” And this from a radio advertisement by US-based Borden milk in the 1950s that played this little song: “The child is going to die because the mother’s breast has given out. Mama o Mama the child cries. If you want your child to get well, give it KLIM milk.” (14) The executives and staff of baby milk companies like Nestlé are even more morally deformed than are those of Big Pharma (who are often owned and controlled by the same people), and have proven they will do whatever is necessary, use any tactics that produce sales, totally heedless to law, ethics or morality.

Bernays’ first corporate client was Proctor and Gamble (P&G), a client that wholeheartedly subscribed to his methods, their relationship lasting more than 30 years, with P&G adopting a marketing model driven by propaganda built on psychological manipulation. (15) Chinese mothers preferred washable cloth diapers, strongly resisting P&G’s marketing efforts for plastic Pampers, so P&G spent millions on psychologists and psychiatrists in attempts to identify the hidden fears and weaknesses in Chinese mothers so as to prey on those. And they found what they needed: the mothers’ concern for their baby’s health and his longer-term development and success in life. P&G then created a scenario based on claims that increased sleep would not only improve a baby’s health but would result in “improved cognitive development and academic achievement”, thereby presumably guaranteeing wealth and a successful career. They produced “studies” with “scientific results” that appeared palpably fraudulent, claiming that Chinese babies wearing Pampers fell asleep 30% faster than babies wearing cloth diapers, and further that their sleep while wearing Pampers would experience “50% Less Disruption”. (16) In an internal P&G staff promotional video, one Pampers brand manager boasted about his psychological fraud, saying, “We really had to change the mindset and educate [Chinese mothers] that using a diaper is not about convenience for you – it’s about your baby’s development. I’m talking about taking a product and literally changing consumer behavior to create a market for it.” Through this reprehensibly false propaganda, P&G were “educating” mothers to believe that wearing disposable diapers would dramatically enhance their child’s mental development. And boasting about their cleverness in doing so. (17)

The Barbie doll is a similar story, a product never intended for children. Barbie was a sex toy named Lili, created in Switzerland in the 1950s and popular primarily with perverted single men in Europe. A Jewish-American woman named Ruth Handler who, with her husband, owned the then-small company named Mattel toys, was on holiday in Germany and apparently fell in love with this doll, brought it to the US and began marketing it as a “more mature” companion for little girls “exploring womanhood”. Mothers were either disturbed or horrified, especially since Barbie’s “mature” body was “borderline pornographic” and seen as a serious danger “potentially damaging to young girls’ psyches”. That view is still held very strongly by millions of mothers all over the world who have banned this doll from their homes. But Handler, adopting Bernays’ propaganda methods, employed psychiatrists to learn how to change the values of American mothers in order to market this doll. The advice was to instruct mothers to consider Barbie as “a tool for teaching their daughters about the importance of appearance and femininity.” Just what every 3 year-old girl needed to help her grow up into a wholesome young woman – a plastic doll with big breasts and a sports car. I have always hated that doll.

It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that Starbucks offers some of the worst coffee on the planet, which is natural since it was designed to suit American tastes. But you may be surprised to learn that Starbucks is no longer selling coffee; they are now selling “experiences”. The marketers and advertisers, aided and abetted by the propagandists and their Freudian background, have concluded that there is an even better way to loot bank accounts than offering fake goods on credit. In their view, shops once sold commodities (coffee beans), then became ‘service firms’ (coffee shops) where the commodity was standardised and the distinguishing consumer attraction was the quality of service. Inherent in that shift was the degrading of the commodity – which was expensive – and replacing it with ‘service’ which cost nothing but an artificial smile. They have now moved to a new level where we sacrifice both the commodity and the service, and replace both with “an experience”.

Now, the offspring of Lippman and Bernays are spending huge money on psychologists and psychiatrists to fathom precisely what it is about going to a Starbucks or a Wal-Mart that can create a “positive emotional response”. Yes, I know. I almost choked writing that sentence, but these people are serious. They want to identify the underlying stimuli and then fabricate the circumstances in an attempt to provoke that response. If successful, the fake commodity and fake service can disappear to be replaced by a fake emotional experience that you will treasure and one day excitedly relate to your grandchildren. It is all a false reality created with contrived experiences that are not real, but Americans are already on international speaking tours proselytising the new marketing approach. And it’s all fake, in the same way that most of America is fake. Americans promoting this new view seem unable to recognise that any part of their new bible contrasts with reality, and react with offense when Europeans tell them “You Americans are all about image instead of reality. Everything about you is fake and superficial. You people are living in a cliché.”

It is true that sitting in a coffee shop in Vienna or at a sidewalk cafe in Rome can be a treasured experience, generated by dozens or perhaps even hundreds of charming small details that combine to create a genuine appreciation of one of life’s little pleasures. But these wonderful small experiences cannot be fabricated and still generate a pleasure of life, except perhaps for Americans who appear to have lost entirely the ability to distinguish the sizzle from the steak and to whom the only genuine reality is superficial. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting one’s customers to have a good experience, but the American attitude toward creating these is not genuine or sincere; it is cheap, fake, and artificial, a psycho-induced emotional response to a fake reality. Instead of trying to understand how to give customers a real, genuine, pleasant experience as they would receive in Vienna or Rome, the Americans are spending millions trying to understand how to fabricate in their customers the artificial “feelings” of an experience without actually giving them anything. One needs to wonder what the hell Americans think about, what goes on in those minds. And, if anybody needs an “experience” so badly they have to go to a Starbucks or a Wal-Mart to find it, what they really need is a life.

I could go on, but these cases illustrate the point I want to make. There was a time when manufacturers focused on making products that people wanted to buy but, with the success of Bernays’ twisted and manipulative “propaganda”, they now employ psychologists and psychiatrists to probe the human psyche and find a way to permanently alter (and corrupt) the human mind to buy whatever these people want to sell. There is much more to this, including the concept of branding, that I will cover in a later essay.

Let’s review. By the early 1900s, Lippman and Bernays had learned from experience the methods of creating an extensive, false, and emotionally-provocative imagery and to use this fabricated mythology to control the perceptions and manipulate the opinions and behavior of the population of an entire nation. It had first been done for political purposes during wartime, to create immense racial hatred and push a nation into war, but was clearly just as applicable to political and commercial ambitions. At the same time, the wealthy elite of the nation created the higher echelons of an American educational system that would use essentially the same principles to entrench themselves in perpetuity by maintaining the bewildered herd as a kind of feudal colony of impoverished consumers. Those controlling the banks and large corporations were not content to stop with the educational system when they realised the broader possibilities of influencing the population through a nationwide scale of propaganda disguised as advertising, which led in turn to the creation and rapid development of the American advertising industry based almost entirely on the principles Lippman and Bernays identified. We then had the media, beginning with print and radio but rapidly including the movies and then television, being the vehicles through which this grand plan of population control would be executed.

In summation, we have a grand conspiracy by a relative handful of people to manipulate and control the perceptions and beliefs of an entire nation of people, entirely for perverted purposes. Perhaps the word ‘conspiracy’ is inaccurate, since these categories of players were in some sense acting independently or at least in different spheres such as advertising and media control or education and politics, but the net result is not different from what would have occurred had there been a tightly-organised conspiracy. Certainly, each knew what the other was doing, and would have been fully aware of the effects of their combined efforts. If we connect these dots, we have the European Jewish bankers and their many huge corporations, and the wealthy US elites exercising enormous control over the US government and effectively taking full charge of American education, of banking and the economy, of industrial production and, most important of all, of the mental and emotional content of the American people.

In every case, there was no concern for the good of the people or of a nation, no value placed on human lives, the human experience, or the human environment. It was only about the money to be derived from social control. Lippman and Bernays are gone, but their mainstay of immoral, manipulative and deceptive practices is as virulent as ever. As Shakespeare told us in Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”.

Introduction – If America Dissolves – https://thesaker.is/if-america-dissolves/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 1 of 5 — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 2 of 5 — The Marketing of War — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-marketing-of-war/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 3 of 5 – Democracy Control – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-democracy-control/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 4 of 5 –The Transition to Education and Commerce

*

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.

His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

Notes

(1) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/04/substandard-education-in-america.html

(2) https://www.libertarianism.org/people/george-seldes

(3) https://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-That-Attempting-Patriotism/dp/1332838243

(4) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/04/what-is-difference-between-capitalism.html

(5) https://paw.princeton.edu/article/p-source

(6) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/07/cia-project-mk-ultra-july-2-2020.html

(7) https://ascensionglossary.com/index.php/Project_MKUltra

(8) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/07/the-pleasures-of-depopulating-earth.html

(9) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/04/lets-have-financial-crisis-first-we.html

(10) https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Persuaders-Vance-Packard/dp/097884310X

(11) https://www.nurturedevelopment.org/blog/the-7-tactics-of-hidden-persuaders/

(12) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/04/the-american-love-affair-with.html

(13) This quote is not original, but I have lost the source.

(14) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/10/en-larry-romanoff-nestle-murdering-with.html

(15) http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/en-larry-romanoff-criminal-corporations-proctor-gamble-clean-face-dirty-heart/

(16) http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-pg-brought-the-diaper-revolution-to-china/

(17) http://www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/04/27/how-procter-and-gamble-cultivates-customers-in-china/

Bernays and Propaganda – Democracy Control

February 21, 2021

By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog

From their experiences in the formulation, manipulation and control of public perception and opinion with the CPI, both Lippman and Bernays later wrote of their open contempt for a “malleable and hopelessly ill-informed public” in America. (1) Lippmann had already written that the people in a democracy were simply “a bewildered herd” of “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” (2) who should be maintained only as “interested spectators”, to be controlled by the elite “secret government”. They concluded that in a multi-party electoral system (a democracy), public opinion had to be “created by an organized intelligence” and “engineered by an invisible government”, with the people relegated to the status of uninformed observers, a situation that has existed without interruption in the US for the past 95 years. Bernays believed that only a few possessed the necessary insight into the Big Picture to be entrusted with this sacred task, and considered himself as one member of this select few.

“Throughout his career, Bernays was utterly cynical in his manipulation of the masses. In complete disregard of the personal importance of their sincerely held values, aspirations, emotions, and beliefs, he saw them as having no significance beyond their use as tools in the furtherance of whatever were the commercial and political ends of his hirers.”

In his book ‘Propaganda’, (3) (3a)(4) Bernays wrote, “It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Bernays’ original project was to ensure US entry into the European war, but later he primarily concerned himself with the entrenchment of the twin systems of electoral democracy and unrestricted capitalism the elites had created for their benefit, and with their defense in the face of increased unrest, resistance, and ideological opposition. Discovering that the bewildered herd was not so compliant as he wished, Bernays claimed a necessity to apply “the discipline of science”, i.e., the psychology of propaganda, to the workings of democracy, where his social engineers “would provide the modern state with a foundation upon which a new stability might be realized”. This was what Lippmann termed the necessity of “intelligence and information control” in a democracy, stating that propaganda “has a legitimate and desirable part to play in our democratic system”. Both men pictured modern American society as being dominated by “a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses”. To Bernays, this was the “logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized”, failing to note that it was his European handlers who organised it this way in the first place.

Lippman and Bernays were not independent in their perverted view of propaganda as a “necessity” of democracy, any more than they were in war marketing, drawing their theories and instruction from their Zionist masters in London. The multi-party electoral system was not designed and implemented because it was the most advanced form of government but rather because it alone offered the greatest opportunities to corrupt politicians through control of money and to manipulate public opinion through control of the press. In his book The Engineering of Consent, (5) (5a) Bernays baldly stated that “The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process”. In other words, the essence of a democracy is that a few “invisible people” manipulate the bewildered herd into believing they are in control of a transparent system of government, by choosing one of two pre-selected candidates who are already bought and paid for by the same invisible people.

Even before the war, the ‘secret government’, i.e., the European handlers of Lippman and Bernays, had fully recognised the possibilities for large-scale population control and had developed far-reaching ambitions of their own in terms of “Democracy Control”, and using the US government once again as a tool. Their interest was not limited to merely the American population, but quickly included much of the Western world. With Lippman and Bernays as their agents, these invisible people had the US government applying Bernays’ principles in nations all over the world, adding the CIA Project Mockingbird (6) (7) (8) (9) (10), the VOA (11) (12), Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, Radio Liberty, and much more to their tools of manipulation of the perceptions and beliefs of peoples of dozens of nations. The US State Department, by now totally onside, claimed that “propaganda abroad is indispensable” for what it termed “public information management”. It also recognised the need for absolute secrecy, stating that “if the American people ever get the idea that the high-powered propaganda machine was working on them, the result would be disaster”. But the high-powered machine was indeed working on them, and continued to an extent that might have impressed even Bernays.

The history of propaganda and its use in manipulating and controlling public opinion in the US, and in Western democracies generally, is a long story involving many apparently disparate and unrelated events. A major crisis point for elite control of American democracy was the Vietnam War, the one period in history when the American people were treated to accurate media coverage of what their government was actually doing in another country. Due to the horrific revelations of American torture and brutality, public protests were so widespread that the US was on the verge of anarchy and became almost ungovernable. Americans were tearing up their military draft notices and fleeing to Canada to escape military service. Streets and university campuses were overwhelmed with protests and riots, at least until Nixon ordered the students shot in the back. (13) (14) (15) That was in 1970, but in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg stole “The Pentagon Papers” from the RAND corporation where he worked, and leaked them to the media, and that was the beginning of the end. After the political fallout and Nixon’s resignation, Bernays’ secret government went into overdrive and the American political landscape changed forever.

A major part of this ‘democratic overdrive’ was the almost immediate creation in July of 1973 by David Rockefeller, Rothschild, and some “private citizens”, of a US-based think tank called ‘the Trilateral Commission’. (16) At the time, Rockefeller was Chairman of Rothschild’s Council on Foreign Relations as well as Chairman of the Rothschild-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Obama’s Foreign Policy Advisor, was a ‘co-founder’. The necessity for the formation of this group was officially attributed to the Middle-East oil crisis, but they focused on a much more important crisis – that of democracy, which was exhibiting clear signs of going where no man should go. At the time, with a modicum of free press remaining, the Washington Post published an article titled “Beware of the Trilateral commission” (17). They would not do so again. Any criticism of the Commission is today officially listed by the US government as a ‘conspiracy theory’. (18)

I could find no record of any report by the Trilateral Commission on the Mid-East oil crisis, and it appears their first major report, published by New York University in 1975 only two years after their formation, was titled, “The Crisis of Democracy” (19) (20), a lead writer of which was a Harvard professor named Samuel Huntington.

In the paper, Huntington stated that “The 1960’s witnessed an upsurge of democratic fervor in America”, with an alarming increase of citizens participating in marches, protests and demonstrations, all evidence of “a reassertion of equality as a goal in social, economic and political life”, equality being something no democracy can afford. He claimed, “The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960’s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. In one form or another, it manifested itself in the family, the university, business, public and private associations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services.”

Huntington, who had been a propaganda consultant to the US government during its war on Vietnam, further lamented that the common people no longer considered the elites and bankers to be superior and felt little obligation or duty to obey. We needn’t do much reading between the lines to see that Huntington’s real complaint was that the wealthy elites, those of the secret government, were coming under increasing public attack due to revelations of grand abuses of their wealth and power. They were no longer admired and respected, nor even particularly feared, but instead were increasingly despised. The people also abandoned trust in their government due to the realisation of the extensive infiltration of the White House and Congress by Bernays’ “shrewd operators”, leading to, in Huntington’s words, “a decline in the authority, status, influence, and effectiveness of the presidency”.

Huntington concluded that the US was suffering from “an excess of democracy”, writing that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires apathy and noninvolvement”, stating this was crucial because it was precisely these qualities of the public that “enabled democracy to function effectively”. True to his racist roots, he identified “the blacks” as one such group that was becoming “too democratic” and posing a danger to the political system. He ended his report by stating that “the vulnerability of democracy, essentially the ‘crisis of democracy’”, stemmed from a society that was becoming educated and was participating, and that the nation needed “a more balanced existence” with what he called “desirable limits to the extension of political democracy”. In other words, the real crisis in democracy was that the people were beginning to believe in the “government by the people, for the people” part, and not only actually becoming involved but beginning to despise and disobey those who had been running the country solely for their own financial and political advantage. And of course, the solution was to engineer a social situation with less education and democracy and more authority from the secret government of the elites.

Democracy, according to Huntington, consisted of the appearance but not the substance, a construct whereby the shrewd elites selected candidates for whom the people could pretend to vote, but who would be controlled by, and obey their masters. Having thus participated in ‘democracy’, the people would be expected to return to their normal state of apathy and noninvolvement.

Noam Chomsky also noted in an article that in the student activism of the 1960s and early 1970s, the nation apparently risked becoming too well educated, creating the Trilateral Commission’s ‘crisis of democracy’. In other words, the ignorance necessary for the maintenance of a multi-party government system was at risk of being eroded by students who were actually learning things that Bernays’ secret government didn’t want them to learn. “The Commission in a report decried the focus on what it called “special-interest groups” like women, workers and students, trying to gain rights within the political arena that were clearly “against the national interest” [of the top 1%]”. The Commission stated it was especially concerned with schools and universities that were not doing their job of “properly indoctrinating the young” and that “we have to have more moderation in democracy”. From there, the path forward was clear: young people in America would now be “properly indoctrinated” by both the public school system and the universities, so as to become “more moderate”, more ignorant, and above all to avoid demanding things like social equality and workers’ rights that were so clearly against the ‘national interest’ of the elites and their ‘secret government’.

Before Huntington and the student activism of the 1960s, we had another renowned expert on propaganda, politics and fascism, in the person of another American Jew, Harold Lasswell, who has been admiringly described as “a leading American political scientist and communications theorist, specializing in the analysis of propaganda”, with claims Lasswell was “ranked among the half dozen creative innovators in the social sciences in the twentieth century”. His biographer, Almond, stated firmly that “few would question that [Lasswell] was the most original and productive political scientist of his time”. (21) High praise indeed, reminiscent of that ladled onto Lippman and Bernays – and for the same reasons.

Even earlier, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the University of Chicago held a series of secret seminars on “communication”, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, that included some of the most prominent researchers in the fields of ‘communications and sociology’, one of whom was Lasswell. Like Lippman and Bernays before him, and Huntington et al after him, Lasswell was of the opinion that democracy could not sustain itself without a credentialed elite shaping, molding and controlling public opinion through propaganda. He stated that if the elites lacked the necessary force to compel obedience from the masses, then ‘social managers’ must turn to “a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda”, because of the “ignorance and superstition of the masses”. He claimed that society should not succumb to “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests”, because they were not. Further, “the best judges are the elites, who must, therefore, be ensured of the means to impose their will, for the common good”. The Rockefeller and other Foundations and think-tanks have been slowly executing this advice now for almost 100 years.

Among the many results of the work of Lippman and Bernays was the subsumption, of initially the Executive Branch and eventually the Legislative Branch as well, of the US government, into a global plan of the European and American bankers and their US corporate and political interests. We speak openly today of the White House and US Congress being overwhelmingly controlled by the Jewish lobby and their multinational corporations, but this forest was planted 100 years ago. By the early 1900s we already had an American government firmly under the powerful influence of, and effectively controlled by, what Bernays termed the “secret government”, and which was controlled in virtually the same manner as the bewildered public herd. During his presidential election campaign in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt said, “Behind the visible government there is an invisible government upon the throne that owes the people no loyalty and recognizes no responsibility”, (22) and claimed it was necessary to destroy this invisible government and undo the corrupt union of business and politics. Roosevelt again:

“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor and other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

Arthur Miller wrote that “Those who formally rule, take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. It exists even though its existence is denied, and this is one of the secrets of the American social order, but one that is not to be discussed.” And, as Baudelaire told us, “The devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist”. The truth of this is everywhere to be seen, but few want to look.

Returning to Bernays and his propaganda to save democracy, and the versions promulgated by his heirs, there were two intermixed currents in that river. The most important was for the (largely foreign) bankers and industrialists to regain full control of the US government, especially the economic sectors, the first step being to repair the loosened control of the political parties themselves and the politicians inhabiting them. There is an interesting Chinese document that accurately addresses the deep Jewish influence on the US government at the time, stating: “The Democratic Party belongs to the Morgan family, and the Republican Party belongs to the Rockefeller family. Rockefeller and Morgan, however, belonged to Rothschild.” (23) Then, new and extensive efforts were required to regain social and political control of the population. What they needed was a vaccine, not to protect the American people, but to infect them with an incurable disease pleasantly named ‘democratisation’, but which would be more readily recognisable as zombification. They succeeded.

Democracy had always been hyped in the West as the most perfect form of government, but under the influence of an enormous propaganda campaign it soon morphed into the pinnacle of enlightened human evolution, certainly in the minds of Americans, but in the West generally. Since a multi-party electoral system formed the underpinnings of external (foreign) control of the US government, it was imperative to inject this fiction directly into the American psyche. They did so, to the extent that “democracy”, with its thousands of meanings, is today equivalent to a bible passage – a message from God that by its nature cannot be questioned. Bernays and his people were the source of the deep, abiding – and patently false – conviction in every American heart that democracy is a “universal value”. One of the most foolish and persistent myths these people created was the fairytale that as every people evolved toward perfection and enlightenment, their DNA would mutate and they would develop a God-given, perhaps genetic, craving for a multi-party political system. This conviction is entirely nonsense, without a shred of historical or other evidence to support it, a foolish myth created to further delude the bewildered herd.

But there was much more necessary in terms of social control. By the time Regan replaced Carter in 1980, all the wheels were in motion to permanently disenfranchise American citizens from everything but their by now beloved “democracy”. Regan’s assault on the American public was entirely frontal, with Volcker of the FED plunging the US into one of the most brutal recessions in history, driving down wages and home ownership, destroying a lifetime’s accumulation of personal assets, dramatically increasing unemployment, eliminating labor unions almost entirely, and making the entire nation politically submissive from fear. Interestingly, the more that their precious democracy was impoverishing and emasculating them, the more strongly the American public clung to it, no longer retaining any desire for equality but merely hoping for survival. The eight years of Regan’s presidency were some of the most brutal in US history, but with the power of the propaganda and the willing compliance of the mass media, the American people had no understanding of what was happening to them. The lessons of the 1970s and the Vietnam War were learned well, and Bernays’ “invisible people” reclaimed the US as a colony, both the government and the people, the reclamation cleverly “engineered by an invisible government”.

The full Machiavellian nature of this propaganda, its true intent and results, will not be immediately apparent to readers from this brief essay. The next essay in this short series, a description of the further transition of Bernays’ propaganda methods to education and commerce, will fill in many of the gaps and permit readers to connect more dots and obtain a clearer picture of the entire landscape.

*

Introduction – If America Dissolves…  https://thesaker.is/if-america-dissolves/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 1 of 5 — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 2 of 5 — The Marketing of War — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-marketing-of-war/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 3 of 5 –– Democracy Control

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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

Notes

(1) https://alethonews.com/2012/07/31/progressive-journalisms-legacy-of-deceit/

(2) http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/MediaControl_excerpts.html

(3) https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598

(3a) https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_english_.pdf

(4) https://archive.org/details/BernaysPropaganda

(5) https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Consent-Edward-L-Bernays/dp/B0007DOM5E

(5a) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/The_Engineering_of_Consent_%28essay%29.pdf

(6) https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-cia-paid-and-threatened-journalists-to-do-its-work

(7) https://thenewamerican.com/cia-s-mockingbirds-and-ruling-class-journalists/

(8) https://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/local/cia-report-on-project-mockingbird/295/

(9) https://allthatsinteresting.com/operation-mockingbird

(10) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol03.htm

(11) https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/radio-liberty-and-voa-are-a-part-of-american-propaganda-machine-and-are-banned-in-the-usa/

(12) The VOA surrounded China from all neighboring countries, and including a massive presence in Hong Kong, broadcasting American seditionist propaganda into China (according to Bernays’ template) 24 hours a day for generations. It failed, and was finally shut down in 2019. Also, when the Taiwanese scientist identified the 5 original haplotypes of the COVID-19 virus and proved they had originated in the US, it was the VOA that harrassed the man so badly online that he closed all his social media accounts and went dark. Democracy being a coin with only one side, the US greatly resented China Radio International broadcasting “Beijing-friendly programs on over 30 US outlets, many in major American cities.” http://chinaplus.cri.cn/opinion/opedblog/23/20181006/192270.html

(13) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kent-state-massacre-vietnam-war-national-guard-50-year-anniversary-a9497501.html

(14) https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/reference/united-states-history/ohio-kent-state-university-shooting/

(15) http://news.cnr.cn/native/gd/20200606/t20200606_525118936.shtml

(16) http://www.antiwar.com/berkman/trilat.html

(17) https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1992/04/25/beware-the-trilateral-commission/59c48198-9479-4c80-a70a-a1518b5bcfff/

(18) http://mail.conspiracy-gov.com/the-new-world-order/trilateral-commission/

(19) https://www.trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

(20) https://ia800305.us.archive.org/29/items/TheCrisisOfDemocracy-TrilateralCommission-1975/crisis_of_democracy_text.pdf

(21) https://www.nap.edu/read/1000/chapter/10

(22) https://www.sgtreport.com/2020/11/former-presidents-warn-about-the-invisible-government-running-the-united-states/

(23) The Age of Innovation 2013 Issue 6 95-97 pp. 3 of 1003, The database of scientific and technological journals of Chinese science and technology; http://www.cqvip.com/QK/70988X/201306/46341293.html

Mass Manipulation – How it Works

February 07, 2021

by Robert Cialdini and Peter Koenig for the Saker Blog

Have you ever wondered how a herd of sheep is driven to their slaughterhouse? Manipulation of minds is a well-studied science, has been applied already for centuries, but is getting ever more sophisticated. For example, the many poignant assertions, Joseph Goebbels, Hitlers Minister of Propaganda (1933 to 1945), included, “if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth”; or “if you make people believe in the threat of an enemy, they’ll do your bidding”– and “divide and polarize them, destroy their solidarity, and they follow your command”.

Today we have become more sophisticated. While fear is still the weapon of choice – imagine an invisible enemy that everybody is scared of – we have digitally observant media, algorithms and robots that focus on your thinking, how you react and deal with social media, or what websites you consult, and where and what you shop. This is just to mention a few points of information. Today there are on average about 200 such data to be electronically computed, so as to sway your opinion and to make you believe the most flagrant lies.

You may recognize what covid is doing to you and at what state of manipulation we are – how close to the slaughterhouse are we? The seven stages below synthesize the book ‘Influence, The Power of Persuasion’, by Robert Cialdini.

Hypnotherapists have been noticing blatant hypnosis and Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques being used by the government and state-controlled media. NPL is a psychological approach that involves analyzing strategies used by successful individuals and applying them to reach a personal goal. It relates thoughts, language, and patterns of behavior learned through experience to specific outcomes.

More Here

Why Propaganda is Vital In Upholding The Illusion of a Democracy

The Saker

October 29, 2020

By Cynthia Chung for the Saker Blog

“Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion. This is the weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and the trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, the wrong the right. In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest, and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion’s getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves.”

-James Fenimore Cooper

Democracy is something that has been completely taken for granted here in the West. There is an ongoing triumph over past laurels, without paying heed to the road we have strayed from. We criticize others for failing to uphold a standard we consider ourselves the leaders of, but democracy is not something simply “acquired” and subsequently “retained,” it is not a “possession.” This is because a system of democracy is at every moment of its existence defined by the character of its citizenry. Democracy only exists if it is upheld, and if a citizenry fails to do so, it renders itself defenseless to an ever-creeping tyranny.

For such a “creeping tyranny,” control is conditional to whether the citizenry is satisfied with an ever-growing “illusion of democracy.” Such a construct needs to give its subjects the impression that they have “free choice” in what shapes their future and their way of life, including: who will be their “friends” and who will be their “foes.”

And thus, War has always depended on a reliable system to spread its propaganda.

The Arthashastra written by Chankya (350-283 BCE) who was chief advisor to the Emperor Chandragupta (the first ruler of the Mauryan Empire) discusses propaganda and how to disperse and apply it in warfare. It is one of the oldest accounts of the essentialism of propaganda in warfare.

Propaganda is vital in times of war because it is absolutely imperative that the people, who often need to make the greatest sacrifices and suffer the most, believe that such a war is justified and that such a war will provide them security. To the degree that they believe this to be true, the greater the degree of sacrifice and suffering they are willing to submit themselves for said “promised security”.

It is crucial that when the people look at the “enemy” they see something sub-human, for if they recognise that said “enemy” has in fact humanity, the jig is up so to speak.

And thus we are bombarded day after day, hour after hour of reminders as to why the “enemy” is not human like us, not compassionate like us, not patient, just and wise like us.

No doubt, war has been a necessary response when tyranny has formed an army to fight for its cause, but I would put forth that most wars have been rather unnecessary and downright manipulated for the design of a small group of people.

During WWI, on Dec 25th 1914, something rather unexpected occurred and a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front took place between the French/British soldiers and the German soldiers. Some even ventured into “no man’s land”, given its name since none left it alive, to mingle with the “enemy” and exchange food and souvenirs. There were joint burial ceremonies and prisoner swaps. A game of football took place as well. It is said that these truces were not unique to the Christmas period but that they were much more widespread during the holiday season.

These fraternisations would understandably make it quite difficult to return to combat against one another…for no apparently good reason. Some units needed to be relocated since they had developed friendships with the opposing side and now refused to fight them.

The lesson was quickly learned and propaganda was heavily pumped down the throats of the Allied countries, and by the course of just a few years, they no longer viewed the Germans as human.

The Battle For Your Mind

“Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief…The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.”

– William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”

Mass propaganda is the very reason why in this so-called “age of information”, we are more confused and divided from each other than ever…

It had been commonly thought in the past, and not without basis, that tyranny could only exist on the condition that the people were kept illiterate and ignorant of their oppression. To recognise that one was “oppressed” meant they must first have an idea of what was “freedom”, and if one were allowed the “privilege” to learn how to read, this discovery was inevitable.

If education of the masses could turn the majority of a population literate, it was thought that the higher ideas, the sort of “dangerous ideas” that Mustapha Mond for instance expresses in “The Brave New World”, would quickly organise the masses and revolution against their “controllers” would be inevitable. In other words, knowledge is freedom, and you cannot enslave those who learn how to “think”.

However, it hasn’t exactly played out that way has it?

The greater majority of us are free to read whatever we wish to, in terms of the once “forbidden books”, such as those listed by The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1). We can read any of the writings that were banned in “The Brave New World”, notably the works of Shakespeare which were named as absolutely dangerous forms of “knowledge”.

We are now very much free to “educate” ourselves on the very “ideas” that were recognised by tyrants of the past as the “antidote” to a life of slavery. And yet, today, there is a fear of that very thing, that to “know” will label you an outcast from a “healthy” society. That the simple desire to know is the beginning of rebellion.

It is recognised, albeit superficially, that who controls the past, controls the present and thereby the future. George Orwell’s book “1984”, hammers this as the essential feature that allows the Big Brother apparatus to maintain absolute control over fear, perception and loyalty to the Party cause, and yet despite its popularity, there still remains today a lack of interest in actually informing oneself about the past.

What does it matter anyway, if the past is controlled and rewritten to suit the present? As the Big Brother interrogator O’Brien states to Winston, “We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not? [And thus, are free to rewrite it as we choose…]”

Of course, we are not in the same situation as Winston…we are much better off. We can study and learn about the “past” if we so desire, unfortunately, it is a choice that many take for granted. And thus, by our failure to ask the right questions and seek the appropriate answers, we find ourselves increasingly in the unsettling position of a Winston…we are enslaved by the very lack of our own will.

In Orwell’s “1984”, there are three main super states in the world: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia that are in one combination or another constantly at war with each other and have been so for the last 25 years.

In the case of Winston, he has only known Oceania (the British commonwealths and U.S.), he knows essentially nothing of either Eurasia or Eastasia, except that sometimes Oceania is at war with Eurasia and sometimes it is at war with Eastasia. In fact, even this memory, that the enemy is not constant, is not something Winston is supposed to recollect or acknowledge. Just by doing this very thing, he is committing a “thoughtcrime”.

Winston’s experience begs the questions, if one were born into a fascist, totalitarian state would they know it? Of course, the state itself would not describe itself as such. How would you be able to compare your “freedom” with the “oppression” of the enemy, when all you were given was what the state chose to give to you?

How do you know that what has come to shape your convictions, your beliefs, your fears really belong to you, and were not placed there by another?

We are all very sensitive to this unsettling question because ironically, that has also been placed in us. It was what started this whole business of “mind control”, you see, it had to be done…for our “protection”.

Warfare in the 21st Century

For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the pinnacle of skill.

– Sun Tzu

There a many different forms of warfare, but namely there is warfare that exists in the physical domain of aggression vs defense and warfare that exists in the mental domain of ideas.

The majority of tyrants from the ancient times to present day, have always had a network of powerful people behind them (whether they were aware of it or not) that opened up a path for them to sit on the throne so to speak. For example, we now know that there was a very direct support of Hitler coming from the Bank of England amongst other very influential institutions. That is, Hitler did not arise to power ‘naturally’ or by his mere merit.

The desperation of that economic environment in Germany was predictably formulated as a direct consequence of the Treaty of Versailles which was essentially a death sentence to the German people. And Hitler who had started to make a small name for himself was selected and endorsed as the ‘face’ of what had already been decided would be the fate of Germany.

Wars have almost always been the result of funding and organising from powerful groups with geopolitical interests, often of empire, who create an environment of disinformation and desperation amongst the people through economic and military warfare along with color revolutions.

However, once there was the creation of nuclear bombs, geopolitical warfare was changed forever.

Though we still use much of the same old strategies today, war is ever more located on the plane of ideas, and along with this the ever increasing focus on the manipulation of information and the populace’s perspective of who is good and who is bad.

The war that needs to be fought against the present tyranny is thus increasingly a mental war. In the case of the populace, all together they hold more power than they realise. The real crisis of today’s western thinking is that the people have forgotten how to think. Attention spans have gone down drastically along with a functional vocabulary. People are becoming more and more dominated by image based messages rather than content that requires more than a 10 minute attention span. Articles in the news keep getting shorter and shorter because people seemingly cannot be bothered with too much reading. Along with the serious decline in reading in replacement for quick entertainment (more successful than any book burning in history), people no longer bother to work for a comprehensive viewpoint. Information becomes an annoying barrage of ad campaigns, each yelling louder and more frequently than the other.

The solutions to our problems such as the oncoming economic collapse (in case you haven’t noticed we are doing everything the same as pre-2008), have their solutions in what Russia and China are presenting.

The initiation of war has almost always been presented as a false ‘necessity’, that is in response to the dominating geopolitical ‘balance’, which is basically meant to service the present system of empire, and the erroneous belief in zero sum game.

However, the idea that humans exist in a zero sum game, doomed to battle forever over a diminishing return of resources, was disproven time and again in modern history through the application of successful principles of national political economy. Notable examples of which include Colbert’s dirigisme of France’s 17th century (later revived during the presidency of Charles De Gaulle), the Hamiltonian system of America as exemplified by Abraham Lincoln’s Greenbacks, FDR’s New Deal, and JFK’s space program as well as its most recent expression of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

This system understands that fast money is parasitical and acts in direct opposition to the long-term investments required for projects that will revolutionise a nation’s infrastructure, including science-driver programs.

That debt for such long-term projects is not qualitatively the same as the present debt we see accruing today, and that debt towards investing for the future will always yield a higher return than the cost over time. This is why debt towards long-term investment on infrastructure and science driver projects, such as space exploration, will always be sustainable with a massive return quantitatively and qualitatively. Whereas, the gambling of fast money will very predictably lead to a collapse as was clearly indicated by the 2008 financial crisis, and which insanely has yet to be addressed with a serious bank reform.

The higher battle ground is being fought on the plane of ideas and which proposed ‘new system’ will replace the current collapsing one we are presently in. On the one side the hegemonic rule of a one world government who thinks that they can use force and oppression to rule and on the other side a multi-polar system of cooperating nation states committed to progress that will offer a real qualitative return for the future.

The Art of Doublethink

“WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”

George Orwell’s “1984” (Big Brother Mantra)

A truly immersive system of propaganda, which necessarily will be full of contradictions to the truth, absolutely requires that its subjects are compliant with “doublethink,” that is, the ability to accept two contradictory thoughts in your mind without acknowledging that they are in fact opposites.

Orwell identifies this under two forms of “doublethink”, which are “crimestop” and “blackwhite”. “Crimestop” meaning the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of a dangerous thought.

Orwell further states “It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments…and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short, means protective stupidity.”

“Blackwhite”, is the act of contradiction of plain facts, applied to an opponent. And when applied to the Party, it is the willingness to say black is white when the Party discipline demands it so.

As Orwell describes it “it means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past…The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons…The subsidiary reason is that…he must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off… [the precautionary reason] by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party.”

Orwell continues “The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest.”

That is, it is the Inner Party members who are the most indoctrinated, the best at inducing “mind control” or “doublethink” on themselves, and at the same time believe that it is the best and right thing to do.

Orwell describes “doublethink” thus: “The process has to be conscious , or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence guilt…To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink.”

What many fail to grasp when reading “1984” is that Orwell is not only the character Winston, he is also the character O’Brien. He is the Outer Party member-turned-revolutionary, and he is the Inner Party disciplinarian.

He is simultaneously the tormentor-programmer as well as the tormented-programmed.

Winston eventually breaks and releases the one thing that kept him human, his love and loyalty to Julia. In the end, an announcement is made that Oceania is ever nearer to winning the war and Winston looks up at a large poster of Big Brother and cries gin-filled tears of joy and relief, for he had finally come to love Big Brother.

He had become O’Brien.

So Who is the Said “Enemy”?

The enemy is our lesser selves.

Our most base fears, desires and obsessions. The voice that whispers in our ears telling us not to believe in anything genuine or honest, that the world we live in will ultimately destroy itself and thus it is all about looking out for number one. That it is our fate to be the playthings of higher powers.

This is the voice of a prisoner of Plato’s cave, neck shackled and looking at only shadows on a wall. This is not reality. This is the voice of someone who has been enslaved for most of their life. The voice of someone who has become so disempowered that they wholly accept whatever ugly condition is imposed upon them and will even work to defend it as necessary.

There is a way out of all of this, but you will have to become an optimist in order to see the solution.

“We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

– Abraham Lincoln

Footnote:

1. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of forbidden books, which were judged to be dangerous to the faith and morals of Roman Catholics, and had a suspicious gravitation towards works by platonic humanists. Among the banned works would include those of Dante, Erasmus and all of Machiavelli’s books. For more refer to my paper on this subject.

The author can be reached at cynthiachung@tutanota.com