Propaganda: Mind Manipulation & Manufacturing Consent

Propaganda, known today euphemistically as ‘public relations’, is the manufacturing of consent.  It’s the distortion of information to suit a particular agenda.  Along with it’s ‘proper’ use comes the ability to control the masses, to mold the collective mind.

Propaganda is all pervasive in our society and culture.  We have trouble discerning what information is real and what is not.  It’s become increasingly difficult to tell the truth from the lies, even with the power of the internet.

Time has given these mind manipulators lots of practice to hone their skills.  It’s important to realize the magnitude of manipulation that is being perpetrated against mankind.  Things are not what they seem.

The facts have been twisted and used against us and for private interests.  What we think we know is engineered by these shadow figures, this invisible government that hovers over us, controlling our every seemingly independent decision.

A man named Edward Bernays was one of the most prominent mind manipulators.  Considered the “Father of Propaganda” he was hired by corporations and governments and used our human emotions against us, often for nefarious purposes that serve the elite and compromised the integrity of the common folk.  He is the reason we put so much attachment on materialistic things. We don’t want a new car. We need that new car!  His uncle just so happened to be the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, so he used his uncle’s psychological know-how to penetrate the collective mind.  He shaped public opinion to suit the interests of whomever had the most money and power at the time.

We can thank this guy for the public’s acquiescence to war, water fluoridation, bacon for breakfast, and the reason women started smoking in the 1920’s.  He was hired by governments and corporations to sway public opinion on the side of the investors.  This alludes to an inherent problem in our society. The corrupt system in place today that passes for capitalism and democracy always puts monetary incentives above the interests of the common man and health.

“Torches of Freedom“ was a phrase used to encourage women’s smoking by exploiting women’s aspirations for a better life during the women’s liberation movement in the United States. Cigarettes were described as symbols of emancipation and equality with men. The term was first used by psychoanalyst A. A. Brill when describing the natural desire for women to smoke and was used by Edward Bernays to encourage women to smoke in public despite social taboos. Bernays hired women to march while smoking their “torches of freedom” in the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929 which was a significant moment for fighting social barriers for women smokers. -wikipedia

One of the best forms of propaganda, if not the best, is the motion picture.  Hollywood, movies, and cinema are powerful opinion shapers that prey on the subconscious mind.

“The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment.” -Edward Bernays – The Father of Propaganda

Consent is manufactured, our choices are made for us.  Misinformation and disinformation are tools used by the orchestrators of the mind manipulation.  When oppressive action is desired, acquiescence is created.  It’s a lot like September 11th. Problem-Reaction-Solution. The Hegelian Dialectic.  If these dark entities seek to gobble up the freedom of mankind an event must transpire to allow the citizens to beg for war and their liberties taken away.

The first step (thesis) is to create a problem. The second step (antithesis) is to generate opposition to the problem (fear, panic and hysteria). The third step (synthesis) is to offer the solution to the problem created by step one: A change which would have been impossible to impose upon the people without the proper psychological conditioning achieved in stages one and two.

One of Bernays favorite techniques for garnering public opinion was appealing to the authority figure.  If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. In order to promote sales of bacon, for example, he conducted a survey of physicians and reported their recommendation that people eat heavy breakfasts. He sent the results of the survey to 5,000 physicians, along with publicity touting bacon and eggs as a heavy breakfast.  Sales went through the roof.  To Bernays it didn’t matter what was right, what mattered was the price of the job and the satisfaction of being able to brainwash the masses.  He brags about this ability in his book Propaganda written in 1928.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it. -Edward Bernays (Propaganda 1928, p.71)

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, (Propaganda 1928, p.37) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AIpqGhKFxQ

Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses. (tag words propaganda, bernays )
– Aldous Huxley, Preface to A Brave New World

“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”  -Walter Lippmann

“Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.”  -Walter Lippmann

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. – Edward Bernays
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
– Edward Bernays, Propaganda

“The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest. In practice, the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly — freedoms that make engineering consent possible — have tacitly expanded our Bill of Rights to include the right of persuasion,” Edward Bernays — The “Father of Propaganda”

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. – Carl Sagan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCqiYu9IcaI&feature=share

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda. -Upton Sinclair

Most propaganda goes unnoticed as propaganda.  For many people who still believe in vaccination, this is just another billboard^.  Most people don’t see it for what it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpH5ji6SDRE&list=PLnFHbmPeGjTB11LSI4-40-1MjUay70KKA&index=3

Walter Lippman, another purveyor of propaganda, stated in his book, ‘Public Opinion’, “The manufacture of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique.” And that, “Under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer possible … to believe in the original dogma of democracy.”

Propaganda is the act of deliberately spreading false or deceptive information, ideas, rumors, doctrines or principles propagated by an organization or movement to help or harm a target person, group of people, movement, institution, nation, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdar_PxApd8

Ivy Lee was another prominent mind manipulator; In 1914 he was to enter public relations on a much larger scale when he was retained by John D. Rockefeller Jr to represent his family and Standard Oil (“to burnish the family image”), after the coal mining rebellion in Colorado known as the “Ludlow Massacre.” Upton Sinclair dubbed him “Poison Ivy” after Lee tried to send bulletins saying those that died were victims of an overturned stove, when in fact they were shot by the Colorado National Guard. -wikipedia

Psywar explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the “elitist theory of democracy” and the relationship between war, propaganda and class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or4eVXSMzH4

Propaganda of World War

In 1917, at a time where the president was elected under the slogan”He Kept Us Out of War”, President Woodrow Wilson came out with what they called “Four Minute Men“. These were short films presented during the four minutes between reels changing in movie theaters across the country.  These short mini presentations brainwashed the masses into thinking we should go to war with Germany.  There were a large number of German Americans living in the states at the time so support for war with Germany was grim.  George Creel, another influential propagandist who worked with Bernays, came out with these short wartime propaganda stunts to garner support for the war, and it worked like a charm.

We all know plenty about the atrocities committed by the “bad guys” in WWII.(well after 1917 I might add).  What we aren’t told however, is the horrible torture and deaths of millions of innocent German civilians.  After WWII, when we defeated the “Axis of Evil”, President Eisenhower decided to deliberately starve over a million German men, women and children.  Instead of quickly killing the people he put them in a field without shelter, food or water.  That’s the cheapest and most effective way to execute a mass murder and that is exactly what he did.  Of course we never learned about this in the U.S. school systems because we were the “good guys”.  It really is amazing how much history or ‘his-story’ can be altered to suit a particular agenda.  The saying “History is written by the victors” has never rung so true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnZ4sQbKuCU

Sometimes it isn’t the information that we’re told that sways our epistemological worldview, it is the information that’s suppressed and kept hidden deep beneath the collective consciousness.

‘Other Losses’ is a 1989 book by Canadian writer James Bacque, in which Bacque provides massive evidence that U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower intentionally caused the deaths by starvation or exposure of around a million German prisoners of war held in Western internment camps briefly after the Second World War. Other Losses charges that hundreds of thousands of German prisoners that had fled the Eastern front were designated as “Disarmed Enemy Forces” in order to avoid recognition under the third Geneva Convention, for the purpose of carrying out their deaths through disease or slow starvation. Other Losses cites documents in the U.S. National Archives and interviews with people who stated they witnessed the events.

Besides Eisenhower’s death camps there were countless other atrocities committed by the ‘good guys’ in WWII, including the bombing of Dresden.  These war crimes, where literally millions of German women and children were raped and murdered, are never portrayed in Hollywood blockbusters or BBC documentaries.  These war crimes are in fine print or missing all together in the history books which were of course written by the victors of the war.  We never hear about the plight of the German in WWII, only the suffering endured by the “good guys”.

Have you seen any WWII movies lately?  There are about 1,488 trillion of them and they all concentrate on the evil of the NAZI’s while ignoring the evil they themselves perpetrated.  Over 10 million German civilians died in WWII, but their deaths were somehow justified because of the actions of one man.

They called World War II the ‘Good War’, because we had to defeat the ‘Axis of Evil‘.  As it turns out, the Allies might have been the most evil of them all.  The war crimes committed by the Rothschild backed countries of this so called ‘Good War’ remain today as some of the most heinous crimes ever to be recorded in human history.

German cities were decimated and millions died.  It has been determined that the bombing of Dresden, a 100% civilian city with no armaments, was destroyed in such a fashion, that men, women, and children were burned alive, and it has been officially labeled a “holocaust” or “whole-burning”.

War is profitable, very profitable.  The evil forces that pull the wires of our society,  this ‘shadow government’ as Bernays put it, control every facet of our lives, but only if we let them.  If we educate ourselves of the inner workings of our society, and as C.G. Jung put it “make the darkness conscious”, we can rise above the restraints of mis and disinformation, lies, deceit, and propaganda.

We’ve really only seen propaganda that furthers nefarious and sinister agendas, however it can be used to promote well being and altruism too.

Cannabis Propaganda

Pejoratively known as ‘marijuana’, this innocent “drug” has never claimed one life due to its direct use.  Aspirin and Ibuprofen claim thousands of lives annually and you can get these at any convenience store.  Cannabis is a schedule 1 drug meaning it isn’t supposed to have any medicinal benefits. Meanwhile half of the states in the US have passed medical allowances for this altruistic herb.  The hypocrisy of united states government can be found at their patent office, where they hold multiple patents for its use medicinally.

A massive propaganda campaign against hemp and cannabis began in the 1930’s with films like ” Reefer Madness”

Cannabis was a threat to many industries, due to its practical use to make just about anything.  Jack Herer, in his book ‘The Emperor Wears No Clothes” covers the vast uses of cannabis.

In Conclusion

Propaganda is everywhere and it’s filled with logical fallacies which run amuck in our society.  These flaws in reasoning go unnoticed and sway the public’s opinion.   The Trivium is an excellent technique to sift through the BS, and form a solid understanding of what is true and what is not.

It’s vital that we learn these methods of manipulation that are being used against us.  When highly manipulated and biased information passes as sacrosanct fact, all kinds of nefarious agendas can be carried out.  Money talks, and often in a way where it’s trying to get you to do something your don’t want to do. Humans are just that, human. We are mortal.  We make mistakes.  But it’s important to recognize these mistakes as to not repeat them.  Otherwise we remain cogs in the machine; victims to the mind molders, and contributors of our own demise.