PROPAGANDA NATION- You Are Living In A Dream World

T.Ruth2power

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Thu Nov-01-07 01:41 PM
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PROPAGANDA NATION- You Are Living In A Dream World

"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."
Edward Bernays, Nephew of Sigmund Freud, Propaganda (1928)

"Those unaware are unaware of being unaware"

- Merrill Jenkins, Monetary Realist

The corporate mass-media serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc.

“The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It’s unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable — if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.”

— Noam Chomsky
M.I.T. professor of linguistics
prolific author & U.S. foreign policy critic
What Uncle Sam Really Wants

“The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.” — Michael Parenti
Political scientist and author of
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media

The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. . . . In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
—George Orwell, 1984

Researchers have discovered that approximately 13% of the population understand the process of 'reasoning' an problem solving through observation. The other 87% simply want to give their "opinion" on the matter, however ill-informed they may be. This was first observed during WWI when it was realized that by keeping the masses distracted while disseminating their own propaganda, the vast majority believed what they were hearing was fact. In 1917 just prior to the United States entering the war, 94% of the British working class had no idea what they were fighting for. Not ironically, when President Bush went to war with Iraq, violating the constitution, 87% of Americans were for the war.

This power of manipulation is called the 'power of public Opinion.' An excerpt form Walter Lippman, a father of propaganda, in his book "Public Opinion", states,

"Public opinion deals with indirect, unseen and puzzling facts, and there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which public opinion refers are known only as opinions, pictures inside heads of human beings, pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes and relationships, are their public opinions. These pictures which are acted up upon by groups are PUBLIC OPINION with capital letters. The picture inside the head often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside their heads."

Lippman work closely in this research with Edward Bernays who wrote two influential books in the field called, "Crystallizing Public Opinion" and "Propaganda". In the latter we read this telling passage,

"we are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. What ever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons, a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million, who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, and who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world."

“When I was Times bureau chief in Washington, I was a member of the League of Gentlemen ; otherwise I never would have been bureau chief. Time after time, good reporters...complained about not being able to get stories in the paper. And time after time I said to them, ‘You’re just not going to get that in the New York Times... it’s too reliant on your judgement rather than on official judgement, it’s too complex, it contradicts the official record more flagrantly than the conventions of daily journalism allow.’”

— Tom Wicker
New York Times columnist
Guardian (London), February 13, 1985
quoted in Democracy for the Few, by Michael Parenti
and “‘League of Gentlemen’ Rates Media,” by Kevin Kelly

“Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. “The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become,
for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.”

— David McGowan
from the introduction to Derailing Democracy

"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous - he simply cannot believe it exists"

- J. Edgar Hoover