<strong>Written By:</strong> Diogenes
<strong>Date:</strong> 2005-04-28 10:10:00
<a href="/article/31007692-corporate-propaganda-versus-freedom-and-liberty">Article Link</a>

This book, and others like it, tells us that we the American people have been the subject of a 75-year-long multi-billion dollar intentional assault on our freedom to think and to choose. \"...propaganda techniques have been developed and deployed (in the United States)...to control and deflect the purposes of the domestic electorate in a democratic country in the interests of the privileged segments of that society.\"

Management of collective attitudes by manipulating significant symbols
What is propaganda? \"Propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols...Collective attitudes are amenable to many modes of alteration...intimidation...economic coercion...drill. But their arrangement and rearrangement occurs principally under the impetus of significant symbols; and the technique of using significant symbols for this purpose is propaganda.\" (Laswell, Bradson, and Janowitz 1953:776-80).
By significant symbols Mr. Carey is talking about the catch phrases by which human beings can be aroused to anger, to go to war, or merely to consume---phrases like \"the American Way,\" \"the Free Enterprise System,\" \"the American Dream,\" and \"the global economy,\" as opposed to \"creeping socialism,\" \"the red menace,\" and \"a national threat.\" Do you remember when it was patriotic to \"buy American\" or we would lose the economic war with Japan? How did we come to believe that our individual identity would be enhanced and glorified by wearing the names of the people who designed our clothes on our hand-bags and pant seats? Isn\'t this a little like living in a corporate feudal state?

Symbols of the Sacred and the Satanic
Significant symbols are \"symbols with real power over emotional reactions---ideally, symbols of the Sacred and the Satanic.\" Sounds like something Marduk would cook up! And Mr. Carey suggests that, \"The United States has for a long time, provided all of these conditions in greater abundance than any other country.\"
People who are polarized and see life in terms of good and bad, black and white, are more easily manipulated. The \"enemy\" may indeed seem evil; but in the solitude of our own homes, we all know that we are a mix of both. None of us is so clearly saint or sinner. Instead of polarizing we could be have a dialogue, a discussion; and yet, seemingly we can be manipulated by propaganda into thinking almost anything.

We might be the most brain washed country on the planet! One professor in Alex Carey\'s book, Professor Harwood Childs, states, \"Americans are the most propagandized people of any nation.\" Is this possible? Aren\'t we the good guys?

I know, you are thinking, \"Hey! Only the bad guys use propaganda. Only our enemies use propaganda.\" And you are right; but sometimes the bad guys are right in our own back yard and we don\'t even see them. Who are these \'geniuses\' who believe they have the right to manipulate our thinking?

Bernays sauce
In the early days of World War I, we the America people---like any intelligent group of human beings---didn\'t want to go to war. So we had to be convinced, or coerced, and this was done very effectively by a campaign launched by President Woodrow Wilson, Walter Lippman (an eminent journalist), and Edward Bernays (who just happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud). I can always remember Bernays\' name because it sounds like that really fattening sauce I occasionally spread all over anything before I hit middle age.
Anyway these two guys, Lippman and Bernays, were apparently brilliant at brainwashing. Bernays is famous for saying, \"If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.\" (from Toxic Sludge is Good for You! Common Courage Press). Bernays called this \"engineering consent.\"

We seem clueless!
I don\'t know about you, but I sure like to spend my week-ends thinking about controlling the group mind. What are they thinking? The reason none of us know that these things are going on is because none of us is capable of thinking like this!
The war propaganda campaign of Mr. Lippman and Mr. Bernays \"produced within six months so intense an anti-German hysteria as to permanently impress American business (and Adolph Hitler, among others) with the potential of large scale propaganda to control public opinion.\" Bernays found a very practical use for his Uncle Sigmund\'s science of psychology. \"When the war ended, Bernays later wrote, business realized that the general public could now be harnessed to their cause as it had been harnessed to the war to the national cause.\" (Alex Carey).

This has been going on since before most of us were born and, according to Inanna, propaganda has been used since the beginning of our written history. Today we have far more efficient means of distributing propaganda than ever before. The television, the radio, and the media in general have made it easy for the spin-meisters and the public relations firms with their armies of lawyers, lobbyists, and paid-for-scientists to tell us what to think so that we will all be good little consumers. The true religion of the West is consumerism, and we are working night and day to spread that religion to our brothers and sisters in the East.

Was that in the Bill of Rights?
Why, every man, woman and child has a right to shop at a mall and eat burgers & fries whether they want to or not. Was that in the Bill of Rights? Oh, yes, of course \"the pursuit of happiness\" is---having more things! How could I forget? Gotta have it!
In 1927, Harold Lasswell wrote \"Propaganda Techniques in World War I\" and suggested that, \"familiarity with the behavior of the ruling public (meaning those who had so easily succumbed to the propaganda) has bred contempt...as a consequence, despondent democrats turned elitist, no longer trusting intelligent public opinion, and therefore should themselves determine how to make up the public mind, how to bamboozle and seduce in the name of the public good...\"

Does that include destroying the public educational system and poisoning our food and water?

They didn\'t even have television then!
Imagine, they didn\'t have television yet. Laswell believed that propaganda had a legitimate roll in a democracy---a sad \"faith\" on his part. And as Alex Carey points out, \"propaganda has become a profession. The modern world is busy developing a corps of men who do nothing but study the ways and means of changing minds or binding minds to their convictions.\"
There is nothing in our culture that encourages a person to think independently. Tell your family and friends that you are going off to think---and they will think you are crazy. We in the West have had to access Eastern religions to realize that pursuits like meditation and contemplation are actually fertile uses of our time. We are encouraged to keep busy from the time we can walk until the day we die. Are people still sending their babies to schools?

What would happen if the human species were free?
What would happen if the human species were not coerced, herded, and manipulated? What if each of us wanted to and had time to think, to become who were are, to cultivate our uniqueness and commune with our Source, the God that lives with-in each and every one of us? What might we become? Is that what \"they\" are afraid of? They must be afraid of something to have expended so much energy, money, and time all these years to keep us in such a narrow frame of expression.
These men and women who specialize in controlling and brain-washing us can only despise themselves more than they so obviously despise and distrust us. Next time you spend a few hours absorbing mindless entertainment-and-advertising (they are never separate) designed to make you go out and consume more, more, more----stop! for just a minute and think who you might be.

I don\'t like the way this corporatist elite think they can continue to get away with the lies and the contempt. According to historians, Thomas Jefferson never lost his faith in the individual human being. Isn\'t that awesome? He would not have much time or respect for the elitist spin-meisters, propagandists, lawyers, and lobbyists who compete with each other to control our world.

Isn\'t it time that we the American people grew out of our adolescent denial and faced our own demons? If we confronted our responsibility for freedom we might not lose what Washington and Jefferson left us. I love my country. Where else can a gal say what\'s on her mind?
V.S. Ferguson


Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty
by Alex Carey, 1997; University of Illinois Press

   

Excellent post! Sad but true.

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If I stand for my country today...will my country be here to stand for me tomorrow?

   

It is and has been my rarely to be humble and informed opinion that to be freedom and liberty one must have a firm grasp on exactly what those concepts are and what they are not.<br />
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Firstly, in order to have either freedom and liberty one must somehow acquire the skill of a critical thinker- and that also means breaking to bonds of the now well established political party systems, the doctrines of organised religion and mostly escaping the constraints of has come to be known as law.<br />
<br />
In my personal search for understanding I have not been hampered by a cookie cuter education system (read John Taylor Gatto’s “American History Tour”<br />
<a href="http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history1.htm">http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history1.htm</a> ) and this has left me with a love/hate relationship with schooling and academia. <br />
One of the saddest things I’ve been told is that the majority of school texts are from American publishing houses.<br />
<br />
Vive le Canada has become one of my sites of choice, mainly due to the writings ot the featured contributors, BUT (full stop) as I read the offerings of a lot of the posts here I am stuck with much despair – very few are thinking out of the box1 It is as though their investment in their education prevents moving beyond party politics and strict adherence to dogma.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/">http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/</a> offers some excellent research into how the establishment is organised and taken control of what passes for though, not only on this continent but in the world view as well<br />
<br />
I first became aware of after reading Gary Allan’s 1971 underground hit “None Dare call it Conspiracy.” <a href="http://kamron.com/none_dare_call_it_conspiracy.htm">http://kamron.com/none_dare_call_it_conspiracy.htm</a> )<br />
<br />
Unless we the common people take heed of the works of George Lakoff and his Rockridge Institute we WILL be at effect of the unscrupulous.<br />
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I wish I knew who penned this. I found it in my 1958 Oxford unabridged.<br />
<br />
The Bar, the Pulpit and the Press Nefariously combine To Cry up an usurpt Pow'r And stamp it Right Devine. -1695<br />

   

what if...we all had a doobie and a fig leaf? We'd be in the freakin' garden of eden (eatin'?). And vive would not exist. Neither would Canada. Neither would America. Neither would Emperor Penguin Sandwhiches with mayonnaise, peanut butter, and little chocolate sprinkles. Don't knock it. I am making every bit as much sense, am I not? New World philosopher right here, in the making, before our very eyes. We have a chance to get to know the next great one personally. Seize the opportunity! Are we real? Or are we imagining ourselves?

   

Blessed are the users of the ad hominem. May they ever be examples of the weak-minded

10,000 comedians outta work and yer tryin to ta be funny

   

Einstein said," Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one."

---
Dave Ruston

   

<p>Hmmm… it sounds a bit Alexander Pope-ish, but 1695 would be at least twenty years too early.</p>

   

<p>Our National Public Radio had a piece on Bernays just last week, though their presentation was a fair bit tamer. The lead-in dealt with some of Bernays’ work for his commercial clients, e.g. his work for a pork producer to change the general perception of a typical American breakfast from toast and coffee to bacon and eggs (presumably also with coffee).</p>

   

Persistent... And very hard to ignore.

   

From Brainwashing America by Dr. Norman Livergood, former department head at the US Army War College:<br />
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<br />
The puppet Bush regime is using new, aggressive forms of brainwashing to change the very way Americans think and feel.<br />
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This is the psychological dimension of the "High Cabal's" general onslaught against American workers, just as the "war on terrorism" is the military dimension and corporate crime and tax cuts for the rich comprise the economic dimension.<br />
<br />
We are living under the beginning stages of a military dictatorship in precisely the same way that 1930s Germans suffered under the Nazi regime.<br />
<br />
As in the case of Nazi Germany, state-sponsored propaganda (brainwashing) is a vital part of the Bush regime's strategy.<br />
<br />
{SNIP}<br />
<br />
In an earlier article, I reviewed the varied aspects of personality profiling and simulation. While serving as Head of the Artificial Intelligence Department at the U.S. Army War College, 1993-1995, I conducted studies on profiling, psychological programming, and brainwashing. I explored and developed personality simulation systems, an advanced technology used in military war games, FBI profiling, political campaigning, and advertising. Part of my discovery was that:<br />
<br />
* unenlightened human minds are combinations of infantile beliefs and emotional patterns<br />
<br />
* these patterns can be simulated in profiling systems<br />
<br />
* these profiling systems can be used to program and control people<br />
<br />
Personality simulation systems are being used to create political campaigns that apply voter profiles to control their voting behavior. TV commercials and programs use personality simulation to profile viewers to control their purchasing and viewing behaviors. And sophisticated propaganda and brainwashing techniques are being used by the Bush junta to keep American citizens under control.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.new-enlightenment.com/brainwash1.htm">http://www.new-enlightenment.com/brainwash1.htm</a>

   

Another fine piece by Normie can be found at <a href="http://www.hermes-press.com/Perennial_Tradition/ignorance.htm">http://www.hermes-press.com/Perennial_Tradition/ignorance.htm</a><br />
<br />
plus there is a book, The Perennial Tradition that some time one can d/l<br />
great stuff!

   

I agree with most of the comments posted on this subject. Really there is little new here, we have been railing against this phenomena and preaching to ourselves for some time now without results. Indeed, it seems that those who support real freedoms have been steadily losing ground instead of rallying the public and making any kind of credible stand.

I noted just today in the mainstream media that the national New Democratic Party (the only faintly progressive political option realistically available to Canadians) has made no gains at all in the polls this summer, despite widespread disgust with Liberal corruption and duplicity, and general rejection of the dinosaur-like Conservative Party. Indeed, respondents to the polls showed a strong desire for a return to "majority government", which effectively means a five-year elected corporate dictatorship at the hands of those oh so arrogant Liberals.

Still, those few of us who care chatter away to each other, sometimes blaze away at any one of us who suggests we are not doing enough or not doing the right things, and struggle desperately to keep a dry patch of ground under our own feet. Abject failure, irrelevance and even the extinction of decency and freedom as viable societal concepts are almost at hand if we cannot turn the tide.

How come we can send tens of thousands into the streets to protest a visit by President Bush, but can't send enough to the polls to unseat the most greedy, regressive and unsavoury Liberals or Conservatives at election time? How can organized Labour collect dues from countless thousands of Canadians, but not be supported by enough of them to deliver more than a tiny handful of progressive votes when it counts. We hardly hear even a weak sqeak from them any more on social issues. We never see even a single solitary hopeless protester out there speaking out about the one-sided media. If nobody cares, then we are wasting our time trying to help.

Bashing Bush or blaming the US for everything bad is a waste of time and energy, and will never solve any of our problems. He doesn't care, and in any event the solutions, if there are any, are here in Canada. I am grateful every day for Vive le Canada which provides an opportunity for us to exchange ideas, but posting our feelings here will never by itself affect meaningful change. We MUST find some way to start a national debate in this country about these important issues and have them heard by as many people and as often as the average car commercial. Only then will eyes start to open and will there be any chance of a better future.