As written in my introduction, the focus of this blog is data and data alone. As such, I try to avoid controversial subjects and stick to offering a different approach to or highlight different aspects of current subjects. That was until Covid-19 and its unbelievable in-your-face lies and manipulations showed up in early 2020.
Suddenly, just straying off the main narrative became a sin, almost a crime, punished with excommunication by Google and Facebook (or rather erasing and banishment, the modern equivalent, according to the scale of the crime), harsh criticism from friends for daring to think different and listening to "discredited" scientists and doctors. (All of them apostates!)
The choice between orthodoxy and conspiracy theory is now stark and without nuance. As George Bush made it plain during the Gulf War, "You are either with us or against us!" It was most certainly very hard then to have much sympathy for a thug like Saddam Hussein. But bombing a relatively modern country back to the stone age should have scared the "with us" crowd back into reason. It did not.
Likewise today, the enemy is invisible but so much more formidable that we should give up all freedoms and most of the conveniences of the modern world to defeat and push it back to the very edge of our world... An unwinnable war in which any educated person 50 years ago would have recognized the shadow of George Orwell.
But here we are, facing a second wave as I write, with a third predicted for the coming Winter...
The article below contains many assertions I agree with. Others I do not. I have edited some of the conspiracy theories which I think are over the top to keep the essence of the essay about propaganda, manipulation and polarization. (You can find the full unedited text by following the link below.)
Authored by Mark Petrakis via Off-Guardian.org,
The enduring beauty of fascism is that it requires so little from us… so little independent thought; just our basic belief and adherence to a limited set of popularly-shared directives and narratives that once fully accepted, relieve us of the need to address stubborn questions or to fret over subtle differences of opinion and feeling.
Propaganda reassures us that we are complete, that we know all there is to know, that we are rational, pragmatic and pure, that the science has been settled and that we are a part of something special.
Such a surrender to reductionist narratives cuts across all classes and income brackets. Neither the most educated nor the least uneducated retain any special advantage in the face of powerful consensus-shaping propaganda.
PROPAGANDA is, of course, the life-blood of fascist control. Maintaining the economic, governmental and scientific frameworks of a technocratic-fascist “operating system” is unthinkable without propaganda and disinformation. When truth is seen as a liability to power, it must always be disallowed, and all instances of it effectively penalized.
Radio and television and their constant enabler, popular “science” – operate today as their own religions, reliant for their success upon the devotion of the masses. As McLuhan told us, the experience of electronic media is always more powerful than the specific messaging it contains.
The currency that we use to pay for the electronic spectacle is our attention, and in such hyper-mediated times as these, the charges mount up exponentially, until we find ourselves saddled with soul-crushing denial and disconnection.
Three defining historical moments (among many) have defined the confluence of fascism, propaganda and technology.
- The fundamental principles of propaganda were first defined 100 years ago by Edward Bernays, often referred to as the father of public relations.
- Joseph Goebbels served as Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. The stunning successful lessons of his Nazi propaganda programs were not lost on the world’s political and economic leaders in the post-war era, and in the time since then.
- The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was founded in 1947, for the expressed purpose of conducting secret intelligence operations that could serve political aims at the same time they generated huge and untraceable profits. The extent of the CIA’s illegal enterprises necessitated the creation and maintenance of a permanent ministry of disinformation, managed by our own taxpayer-funded “Shadow Government” and “Deep State.”
In retrospect then, it is clear that these propaganda campaigns have proven SO successful, that even today, few of us ever realize how ongoing, vast and wide-spread they are.
Propaganda’s efficacy is so indisputable, that it is commonly the case that those who are the most certain that they are NOT among the propagandized, are in fact its most overt victims.
Corporate media focuses on those stories they are paid to propagate, i.e., those which support the financial and ideological
agendas of their owners, who themselves are all, without exception, central parts of the larger global ruling oligarchy.
A key part of the propagandist’s handbook is to simply leave unexplored stories that they are NOT given approval to manage and control; stories which, we might assume, do not generate sufficient advantage for the owners. Such calculated sins of omission are essential to keeping the mass of believers unperturbed by the vagaries of complexity in the delivery of their daily dogmas.
If an individual were to insist upon learning more about any of these less-discussed stories, they would soon arrive at the realization that while an abundance of relevant facts can easily be found, and often hidden in plain sight, the truth is that most people simply do not WANT to know, think or talk about any such truths that differ from those accepted by their peers, for whom cognitive dissonance causes such literal pain and disorientation, as to keep them docile and compliant to the dictates of the media.
As McLuhan said:
Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”
Perhaps, the grandest illusion of all, and which must be maintained at all costs, is that both the world and the stories we tell of it, must be made to appear as though they are generated randomly. It must always appear that the media’s coverage and the comments of experts are entirely free from any preconceived manipulation.
In the terminology of the media, news must always be “Breaking!” – even though in reality, we know the news more closely resembles a cooking show, where ingredients are chopped and sliced before-hand, after which they are mixed and served up live on camera in ways that keep the public hooked on happy hash-slinging and enticingly-scripted recipes.
Technocratic-Fascism, the advanced fusion of the multinational technology-dominated corporatocracy with the authoritarian global and surveillance state, allows its initiates to believe they are a part of something bigger than themselves. Witness the magical left’s lockstep belief in the pure villainy of Donald Trump, or the magical right’s equally lockstep belief in Trump as a self-sacrificing national hero.
Clearly both parties to the constant heist of human freedom need each other to better manage their greed for consumer profit and civilian control. Such mental assaults secondarily require that all truthful motives remain hidden and obfuscated in a fog of weaponized storytelling.
This accounts of course for the abiding value of bullshit, does it not? Bullshit effectively misleads without upsetting the natural order of things, without irreversibly tearing apart the fabric of credibility. Nothing can stand in the way of the constant flow of messaging, profit and growth, which are after all, the primary justifications for all this deceptive disorder.
This is another aspect of what makes technocratic-fascism so irresistible; in realizing how effective it is at knowing us better than we know ourselves. The assumption is that if we were to know ourselves better than the stories we are told, we would not be seduced by such obvious lies. Since we don’t, our “betters” are left with no choice but to keep up the constant barrage of lies, at least until our thinking eventually locks up and we capitulate and collapse, like a stack of wooden blocks.
If for example, we did not always obey or give our attention to propaganda, we would soon grow alarmed by the many contradictions that we are told exist, say between the Covid monster and the daily vaporous disease statistics, or between maskers and non-maskers, between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, between crushing economic destruction and the mewling need for safety, between the lunatic left and the lunatic right, between black and whites, between males and females… between one piece of orthogonal bullshit and another equally opposing piece of bullshit.
ALL of these dichotomies, of course, are at some fundamental level FALSE… every last one of them, each constructed by skilled media professionals and put in place to overwhelm our critical thinking and that of millions of others from seeing what’s really going on in the limitless background.
In this remarkably cost-efficient way, human energy and intelligence are siphoned off, and directed towards the task of turning us into helplessly confused and easily-controllable “lab rats,” forcibly cut off from each other, lest we experience ourselves as intelligent and sovereign beings. If something like that were to happen, the driving agendas of big business and global governance to keep us marching in lockstep towards a more divided and disempowered fate, would soon disintegrate.
It is in such a state of debilitating surrender that we are divided one subset “targeted” demographic against another; all herded into a wicked mental trap with one side thinking one thing, while the other side thinks something else – such that half of us hate the other and the other half hate the other right back.
At this point, and after so many years of unqualified victories for the industries supported by the propaganda industry, the pathetic truth is that propaganda doesn’t even NEED to be that entertaining anymore. Knowing they have the situation in tow, the purveyors of propaganda can save a ton of money by just being sensational, confrontational and redundant in their narratives.
Recall this quote from the singular Frank Zappa:
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Once we have learned to carry on absent the need for verifiable truth, or without the need to discern authentic and honest voices from deceitful and manipulative ones, we gradually lose our interest in so-called “truth,” preferring instead to keep splashing about in unsubstantiated speculation, pompous judgments and opinionated fluff.
Let’s be honest…the only people who might actually CARE what any of us think about the blaring big topics of the day (masks or vaccines or climate change or Black Lives Matter, etc.) are other equally thin-skinned victims of propaganda, who much like the majority of us, still believe that the government cares about them and that the mainstream media is telling them the truth.
That is why a growing number of people have given up on the media’s crudely fictional depiction of reality, and are instead trying to figure out how to thrive and to reconnect energetically with others – and with truths that can only exist OUTSIDE the reach of the propaganda ‘spectacle.”
The media, of course, with their sophisticated surveillance tracking tools knows full well when there is an uptick in negative reactions to their toxic narratives, but since it is also aware that it is after all pushing nothing but sugar water bullshit, it is left with little choice but to double-down and turn the levels up even higher… thus ramming even more bullshit at us.
Whacky Joe Biden, Greedy Green Greta, Covid, Aunt Jemima Race Wars and endless offenses… all come at us so fast and so hard as to leave us bent and broke under the weight of it all, as we stumble around like headless chickens desperately trying to win the approval of our friends by looking like we are at least doing the only “acceptable” thing.
Arriving at his frenzied point of screwball hyper-polarization, is the essential endgame of Propaganda… locking us into its agenda, at the same time it demands that we think we are making these choices of our own FREE WILL!
To get us to that point though, they must keep us constantly preoccupied; agitated, offended, attacking each other and defending ourselves against all threats, both real and imagined. The more they can get us ensnared in mind-numbing opinions and outrages, the less energy and attention will be left to notice the deeper more manipulative agendas of techno-fascism.
Mid 20th Century fascism was woefully limited in its capacities and in what it could extract from its victims… and yet still it worked! The new technocratic-fascism is here to mine the population for all the bio-capital commodification it can. Those who can invent the most efficient and ingenious means of converting human confusion, poverty, crime and illness into impact markets will quickly take their place among the prior generations’ titans of technology.
Once you step back far enough though to experience the sheer SCALE of this ongoing and unlimited propaganda WAR on us, it grows a bit easier to see why so few are able to escape the media’s influence. Oh, for a while perhaps, you can rise above it… but eventually, you will get pulled back down into the muck. Even if you kill your TV, unplug yourself from your media feeds, and turn off the Wi-Fi, each of us, at some point, will relapse and fall off the wagon.
This is because propaganda is not just about what’s in the news or in the media. It’s even more importantly about the broadly consensual layers of social hallucination that are created and shared across all of society, which make it difficult for any of us to function socially, absent those commonly shared reference points and signals that we have convinced ourselves are required in order to allay our anxiety, confusion and isolation… all of which are primary raisons d’etres for propaganda in the first place.
I wish there was one simple way to break propaganda’s voodoo spell. There isn’t. I’m not even sure how to do that for myself, or how I can avoid falling prey to it again, just as I and most of us have done for the great majority of our lives.
What seems obvious to me now is that propaganda in the service of a transhumanist-centered technology has become so pervasive and insidiously forceful, that in many ways, our thinking has ceased to be entirely our own, and that the portion of our soul that remains recognizable as uniquely us, is shrinking fast.
The effect of all this leaves our spirits infected, and easily convertible into compliant puppets under the top-down control of truly diabolically puppet masters, who in order to keep us subservient to their untruths, and to doing whatever we are told, have become masterful at pretending to be something they are not.
[ . . ]
NOT seeing just how obvious and laughable propaganda campaigns have become in this one-size fits all era, leaves us painfully vulnerable and ready to be further subsumed by more of the same.
The complexity of today’s master plans for disinformation are unparalleled compared to the past. Looking back to the 1950’s and 60’s, when all the above long-term plans for centralized and technocratic control were slowly being tested, being part of America’s growing middle-class was actually a pretty sweet deal. It is in a return to more bucolic and “normal” times as these that we pin our nostalgic hopes, by the media but especially by politicians.
Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in, can hope to escape.”
William S. Burroughs
*
Looking at our world, we can see that the reach and authority of the transnational global capitalists who run the world’s nation-sized casinos has been cemented. All systems are now in place, up and running LIVE on that criminal syndicate’s vast web of networks. Each one of us has by now been targeted by them for some form of surveillance and financialization – just as “nature” has, just as “disease” has, just as “social justice” has, just as everything will eventually.
[ . . ]
Sadly, this is where decades of constant acquiescence to propaganda and institutional hypnosis has brought us…bent over, staring at our shoes and bracing for the “BIG ONE.”
I remember in my own youth, being convinced that the evil genius of Hitler and Nazism had somehow transformed the mass of decent German people into BEASTS, possessed by demons, as if in a dark fairy tale… into something less than human.
We know that once we begin to regard others as LESS than us…as something OTHER than us, it is only a short step to unleashing our hate upon them, even to the point of becoming violent and criminal.
Needless to say, these very same psychological imperatives are everywhere apparent today; in how we are instructed by propaganda to regard the Chinese, Russians, Muslims, white supremacist Trumpers, deluded depraved liberals, defective racists, misogynist sexists and quivering face-ists (with their acute disdain for anyone who questions the dogma of e-mask-ulation.)
Same as it ever was, you might say, but as we approach the much-touted singularity with its accompanying convergence of man and machine, how will the media respond in the face of that Huxleyan “solution?” In that light, how might propaganda shift its focus?
I expect it will change-up the pitch and tell us that THIS time, things will be different. This time won’t be like last time. No, this time, things will have changed, so that we will no longer be “brainwashed” by the media as we were before. No, when the coming big change happens to us, it will not be like that. We will rather be transformed into advanced independent humans augmented by perfectly blended combinations of technology, science and engineering.
Our DNA will be carefully crafted by brilliant doctors and scientists to enhance only the “preferred” qualities in their human subjects, and under their wise direction, we will gladly do as we are told. For so great a future, we will willingly offer our support and so grow accustomed to our new life, lest we become like those poor unfortunate souls, so lost in their unreason, that they cannot fully appreciate the wisdom that derives from enthusiastically embracing PROGRESS.
In our leaders inspired and time-tested plans, we will of course have every convenience at our fingertips, such that doors will magically open when we approach. We will be able to download all manner of rich media and data with the blink of an eye. We will be as supermen.
Our definitions of what is valuable and what is not, will fluidly shift to suit changing circumstances. We will see ourselves as the very picture of modernity, and the envy of the world…just as we have always been. We will be as American as our multi-racial forefathers, even though they lived in unenlightened times…long before today’s great social justice transformation allowed us, their proud descendants, to wake each day into this glistening new world.
In such a world, when we ask ourselves what we might be grateful for, we will no longer need to struggle for an answer. We will know exactly what is good, true and beautiful and we will commit ourselves to those lofty ideals each and every day.
Therein too, and most mercilessly, resides the fatal beauty of technocratic-fascism.
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