Western Propaganda

1. Introduction • Propaganda is meant to manipulate people into adopting ideas and behaviors, it presents one side as absolute truth, it convinces people that they came to the belief all by themselves. Propaganda tells you what to think, education is supposed to tell you how to think. But education systems have so often been vehicles for propaganda the distinction is blurry. • Propaganda gives people comfort from anxiety and fear. It offers a clear and simple explanation of the world. • Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew and Netflix’s CEO “we are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” This guy wrote Propaganda. • Elites and educated people disproportionately influence. Names get passed down the social hierarchy until it becomes passe. • Andrey Miroshnichenko “The media proclaim themselves a supplier, but it really serves as a valve, which opens for money or when given permission to by the authorities.” • Richard Weaver found it ironic that we freed ourselves from the earth-centric view of the cosmos and enslaved ourselves to an illusory view of the world created by the mainstream media. • In 1950 when the U.S sent over troops to help South Korea, and the troops were released from POW camps, they were espousing communism! They sent CIA operative Edward Hunter to investigate. He coined the word brainwashing. He wrote a book called Brainwashing. • Kathleen Taylor The Science of Thought Control. One marker is the complete polarity in the new found belief. They now believe something that is so different or contrary to what they use to believe. William Sargant thought these ‘sudden conversions’ could be explained as they are seen in political victims, therapy patients and religious converts. 2. Real News? • While it seems like we have unlimited options for viewing news and entertainment, in reality almost all of them are owned by what’s known as ‘The Big 6’. National Amusements, Disney, AT & T, Comcast, Newscorp, Sony. Isn’t monopoly a crime? • In 1947, A Free and Responsible Press by The Commission on Freedom of the Press, “The modern press itself is a new phenomenon. Its typical unit is the great agency of mass communication. Those agencies facilitate thought and discussion. They can stifle it. They can advance the progress of civilization or they can thwart it. They can debase and vulgarize mankind. They can endanger the peace of the world…They can play up or down the news and its significance, foster and feed emotions, create complacent fictions and blind spots, misuse the great words, and uphold empty slogans.” • Michael Parenti “If the press cannot mold our every opinion, it can frame the perceptual reality around which our opinions take shape. Here may lie the most important effect of the news media: they set the issue agenda for the rest of us, choosing what to emphasize and what to ignore or suppress, in effect, organizing much of our political world for us. The media may not be able to tell us what to think, but they are strikingly successful in telling us what to think about.” • So, we know there is conflicted interests and the media owners could take advantage of their power. Is there any evidence they have? Well, yes, they have been caught lying countless times and pushing certain narratives, best seen in their “journalists” or panel hosts interviewing people such as Jordan Peterson, they are not there to understand a point of view they are there to trap opposing guests and act as talking heads, ideological zombies. Nietzsche “sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.” • Noam Chomsky suggests the reason the media defies truth is because like politicians, the media is dominated by individuals who adhere to an elitist ideology. The ideologues think “that the mass of the public is just too stupid to be able to understand things. If they try to participate in managing their own affairs, they’re just going to cause trouble. Therefore, it would be immoral and improper to permit them to do this. We have to tame the bewildered herd, not allow it to rage and trample and destroy things.” • Thomas Jefferson “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier” • One tactic is presenting real facts but just using a false interpretation. 3. Psychological Manipulation • Bertrand Russell “it is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they have even in totalitarian countries.” • Carl Rogers also warned of the refined science of the human mind will only lead to mass control. In On Becoming a Person. “I believe that too few people are aware of the extent, the breadth and the depth of the advances which have been made in recent decades in the behavioral sciences…the increasing power for control which it gives will be held by someone or some group; such an individual or group will surely choose the purposes or goals to be achieved; and most of us will then be increasingly controlled by means so subtle we will not even be aware of them as controls…it appears that some form of completely controlled society…is coming.” • With democracy, Ellul proposed that democratic govts can and do decide on policies independent of voters through the use of propaganda, policies are created, propaganda shapes public opinion, then they vote on exactly what the government already decided to do. • In a report released in 2021, scientists on a subcommittee of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the UK admitted to using totalitarian mind-control tactics to obtain mass-compliance. One scientist said he was “stunned by the weaponization of behavioral psychology over the last 5 years.” These are quoted in A State of Fear by Laura Dodsworth. • Pavlov’s experiment showed that if you imposed extreme stress on the dog, it will break down in hysteria. To the point that any previous behavior he conditioned into the dog, disappeared. And even more, if he attempted to condition a new behavior shortly after, it becomes deeply embedded in the dog’s nervous system and very difficult to remove. This clearly explained it for Sargant in Battle for the Mind. Sargant also believed that emotional breakdown also had therapeutic potential. Inducing a breakdown and wiping out the previous neurotic thoughts and behaviors. The covid pandemic? H.L Mencken “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Sargant’s advice was to respond to all the fear mongering with indifference mixed with laughter. “Whoever can be roused either to fear or anger by politician, priest or policeman, is more easily led to accept the desired pattern of “co-operation”, even though this may violate his normal judgement. The safety of the free world seems therefore to lie in the cultivation not only of courage, moral virtue and logic, but of humor: humor which produces the well-balanced state in which emotional excess is laughed at as ugly and wasteful.” • Operant conditioning. B F Skinner did some famous experiments in which he tested different methods of introducing new behaviors to rats. He cultivated new behaviors through positive reinforcement in one investigation. In another set, he eliminated behaviors via punishment. This temporarily put an end to the behavior. But didn’t remove the motivation. Positive reinforcement more enduring. Skinner “Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled…nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement-there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave-the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.” • Frederick Douglas “I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one…He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.” 4. Entertainment • “non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature.” This entertainment ensured they paid no attention to political and social realities and also to promote docility and stupidity. Making them care little for freedom. • Scientists have known for decades that tv activates alpha waves placing the individual in a hypnotic like state, primed for suggestions and ready to be programmed. Neurosurgeon Adam Lipson “there have been EEG studies demonstrating that tv watching converts the brain from beta-wave activity to alpha waves, which are associated with day dreaming, and a reduced use of critical thinking skills.” This trance state is perfect for all the media’s cliches and slogans and moral values and ideological principles to be constantly repeated. Nearly 70 years ago, Joost Meerloo warned of the hypnotizing dangers of tv. Dangers which now apply to computers and smartphones, in The Rape of the Mind. • Aldous Huxley said he wrote Brave New World as a warning, and in a 1962 interview he said “we are in the process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and will always exist to get people to love their servitude.” He depicts the distant future, scientifically managed dystopian society where authorities rule not through force but by supplying endless streams of distracting entertainment and manipulating them with drugs and other tech methods. “In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness… these were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren…27 years later I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming much sooner than I thought they would…The nightmare of total organization…has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.” • Meerloo “any man who escapes from reality through the use of alcohol and drugs is no longer a free agent; he is no longer able to exert any voluntary control over his mind and his actions…Alcoholism and drug addiction prepare the pattern of mental submission so beloved by the totalitarian brainwasher…Drugs…can be used to make man a submissive and conforming being.” “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” • Huxley “in 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in brave new world, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.” Huxley was aware of those studies and in his book the drug soma was the metaphor. Huxley “The world government encouraged the systematic drugging of their own citizens for the benefit of the state” a “holiday from reality”. • A trove of official documents gained under the U.S freedom of information laws were released detailing the dealings between filmmakers and intelligence officials at the CIA headquarters. They have involvement in movies depicting the CIA, making sure they are painted as a governmental hero protecting America. This is not reality. In reality they inject the black populations with syphilis and do mind control experiments (MK Ultra) and many other atrocities, like brainwash the masses through movies. They do various things from clarifying points to actually writing parts of scripts, they have done this on more than 1800 movies and tv shows. The U.S department of defense is more often involved however because filmmakers will approach them to use their equipment and in return, they check the script. The CIA placed undercover agents in major studios, this was at the height of cold war paranoia, when the cold war was over, there was no enemy so they had to convince the public they were still needed. This is all from Al Jazeera. You want to act like it’s not a big deal? Maybe we should have at the beginning of each movie “made with the support of the CIA” how do you think the public would respond? They would instantly recognize it as propaganda. William J Casey 1981 CIA director “we will know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” • Walt Disney used to be a secret informer to FBI. He was the only filmmaker allowed to use technicolor till 1935. He gave a Nazi propagandist a tour of his studio and it’s his brand that is one of the ‘big 6’. Disney owns a lot of big brands • Steven Crowder “…all the late-night shows had 2 trillion dollars from the government.” • The author of Peter Pan very messed up dude https://youtu.be/tJ3NYGDRGqo • “Fan-baiting” is a form of marketing used by producers, film studios and actors, with the intent of exciting artificial controversy, garnering publicity and explaining away negative reviews of often highly anticipated productions (Ghostbusters 2016, Terminator, Captain Marvel, Netflix’s Resident Evil, The Rings of Power, they destroyed my favorite show Supernatural). They write the script poorly and then accuse the fans of being racist, sexist, bigots etc. • The elite disparage marriage and Christianity and traditional values that built the west. Stranger things rant by the ugly but hot chick, The Simpsons, 5. We Should Really Know Better by Now • Historian Howard Zinn “If those in charge of our society-politicians, corporate execs, owners of press and television can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.” • Adolf Hitler “The bigger the lie the more likely it will be believed. • Lies have always been used for political purposes, covering up mistakes and/or hidden motives. They are an essential ingredient in political campaigning. They take on quite a sinister form when they become all-encompassing and infect every facet of life. It is a sign totalitarianism may be rising. • All the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century rose to power amidst thunderous applause. • Political philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that totalitarianism at its essence is an attempt at “transforming reality into fiction.” In Nazi Germany it was the idea of a superior race, in the Soviet Union it was that all could be made equal. Referring to communist Russia Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote “in our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the state.” “And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: let their rule hold not through me!” “Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.” • Very reminiscent of the climate change lie. Or the acceptance of people identifying as things they are biologically not. Complete denial of reality and if you don’t take part you are evil. • Vaclav Havel describing Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule “life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics.” • Havel “there is obviously something in human beings which responds to this system…They are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore, not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people’s own failure as individuals.” “The best resistance to totalitarianism is simply to drive it out of our own souls, our own circumstances, our own land, to drive it out of contemporary humankind.” Jordan Peterson warning people to first deal with their own inadequacies and grow as a person before they set out to change the world. Havel “if the main pillar of the totalitarian system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why the truth must be suppressed more severely than anything ese.” 6. The History of Education • The advent of public schooling in the west is viewed as progress, but many who have studied the history of public education have concluded that its primary role from the beginning was not to enlighten but act as a form of social control. • The roots of compulsory education go back to ancient Greece. Spartan children were taken from their parents and housed in military schools with the aim of cultivating total obedience to the state. The more modern version of public schooling originated in the 16th century Europe. In 1524 Martin Luther wrote a letter to the German leaders, urging them to mandate schooling. His goal was to use state power to indoctrinate kids into the Lutheran church. • Frederick William I of Prussia, in 1717 factory model of schooling. Rena Upitis. This model promotes standardizing of teaching, testing and learning rates. Promotes respect for authority over exploration of truth, uniformity and orthodoxy over innovation and progress. This model was so effective and beneficial for the state, in the 19th century the U.S caught wind and adopted it as well. • H.L Mencken “The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence…Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is the aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians…and that is its aim everywhere else.” • Ellwood Cubberley, Head of Stanford’s School of Education and influential reformer wrote in his 1916 book Public School Administration “Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of 20th century civilization and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.” • William Torrey Harris U.S commissioner of Education in late 19th century, steadfast believer that the child was the absolute property of the govt, wrote in his book The Philosophy of Education “99 students out of 100 are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths careful to follow the prescribed custom.” This is not an accident but the result of substantial education which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.” • Frederick Taylor Gate, business adviser to John D Rockefeller, founded the General Education Board in 1903, which provided major funding for schools, and was a big supporter of state-controlled schools. He wrote in his book The Country School of Tomorrow “In our dream…the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand…We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply. For the task that we set before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one; to train these people as we find them for a perfectly ideal life just where they are…an idyllic life under the skies and within the horizon, however narrow, where they first open their eyes.” • Prominent philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce “The Fixation of Belief” he explains how it was possible to fix belief not in the individual but the community via the method of authority. “Let the will of the state act, then, instead of that of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young; having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated or expressed. Let all possible causes of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehensions. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted so that they may regard private and unusual opinions with hatred and horror”. • As Ivan Illich wrote in Deschooling Society “School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.” • Ignorance, which comes with the education systems being taken over, we can’t sufficiently learn from history when its being taught through filtered lenses. Institutions are supposed to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next. • In a study of 400 eminent men and women of the 20th century, detailed in Cradles of Eminence, 3 out of 5 of these had “serious school problems.” Of course, if you are an individual who yearns to push boundaries, explore ideas and create ideas, invent and innovate, Albert Einstein found school so suffocating requiring in his words “the obedience of a corpse”, upon passing a test he previously failed, he had no desire to think of scientific problems for an entire year. He didn’t credit school but said he managed in spite of it. “it is in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry…It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.” • John Taylor Gatto former NYC teacher of the year who upon resigning over frustration over the faults he believed to be embedded in the very essence of modern schooling wrote a series of books on the history and nature of compulsory schooling. “Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing…it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die.” “Schools are intended to produce…formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled. To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this, but…in a national order in which the only “successful” people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic…the products of schooling are…irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.” “…what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens-all in order to render the populace “manageable.” • Noam Chomsky echoed this in ‘Understanding Power’ “…given the external power structure of the society in which they function, the institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity, and to make them controllable and indoctrinated.” • After 13 years of indoctrination few emerge with a great thirst for knowledge and a curiosity toward the many mysteries of the world. Instead, Bruce Levine in ‘Resisting Illegitimate Authority’ says by the time they graduate they been trained “to be passive; to be directed by others; to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authority; to pretend to care about things that they do not care about; and that one is impotent to change one’s dissatisfying situation.” • Our schooling cannot be relied upon to generate critical and curious minds needed to protect society, but maybe the media? • On the 31/3/22, the Washington Examiner published leaked documents from the California Teachers Association that indicate schools are systematically encouraging homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism. These documents are from a package that sets guidelines for LGBT clubs in schools. High school, middle school, and elementary. Clearly targeted to very young kids. ‘The Gender Unicorn’ Pictograph. Christopher Tremogli broke the story. A teacher from Blackshear Elementary in Austin Texas claimed that 20 out of her 32 4th grade students have come out as gay.

7. Sources • Max igan • Ray dalio • The 6 Companies That Own (Almost) All Media [INFOGRAPHIC] - WebFX • https://youtu.be/-fq75Ax_kL0 • Academy of Ideas

• https://youtu.be/bJ4gZD2A8Tk