Brainwashing in the U.S.A.

"The propagandist in the United States starts with advantages deriving from independent features of American society which predispose its members to adopt - or accept - a dualistic, Manichean world-view. This is a world-view dominated by the powerful symbols of the Satanic and the Sacred (darkness and light). A society or culture which is disposed to view the world in Manichean terms will be more vulnerable to control by propaganda. Conversely, a society where propaganda is extensively employed as a means of social control will tend to retain a Manichean world-view, a world-view dominated by symbols and visions of the Sacred and the Satanic.

"In addition, U.S. society has a pragmatic orientation. This is a preference for action over reflection. If the truth of a belief is to be sought in the consequences of acting on the belief, rather than through a preliminary examination of the grounds for holding it, there will be a tendency to act first and question later (if at all - for once a belief is acted upon the actor becomes involved in responsibility for the consequences and will be disposed to interpret the consequences so that they justify his belief and hence his action). If it is that American culture, compared with most others, values action above reflection, one may expect that situation to favour a Manichean world-view. For acknowledgement of ambiguity, that is, a non-Manichean world where agencies or events may comprise or express any complex amalgam of Good and Evil - demands continual reflection, continual questioning of premises. Reflection inhibits action, while a Manichean world-view facilitates action. On that account action and a Manichean world-view are likely to be more congenial to and to resonate with the cultural preference found in the United States. . .

"The Manichean dichotomy that has been most powerful - as a means of social control - in respect of both domestic issues and foreign policy issues is not God/Heaven versus Devil/Hell but the secular equivalent of these. Thus on the one hand an extravagant idealization of the Spirit of America, the Purpose of America, the Meaning of America, the American Way of Life - the transcendent values by which America is represented to the world as the Manifest Destiny of the world in Piety and Virtue . . . On the other hand the extravagant negative idealization of Evil secularized in communism/socialism as sui generis, in all places and at all times, malevolent, evil, oppressive, deceitful and destructive of all civilized and humane values.

"The most cursory acquaintance with American political propaganda will suggest that the psychological power of almost all such propaganda derives from a calculated exacerbation of American national sentiments. Notions like the American Way of Life, the Meaning of America, the Spirit of America, become symbols with the irrational power of the Sacred, and from an equally calculated exacerbation of American apprehension about the 'alien ideology' of communism and all its allegedly un-American characteristics, communism/socialism etc., become symbols of the Satanic. So long as these symbol-identifications can be maintained in popular sentiment it is a simple matter to curb popular demand and support for significant reform of the institutions and conditions of American society. By associating welfare provisions and other (selected) government interventions with Socialism/Communism and conversely the Free Enterprise system with Loyalty, Patriotism, Freedom, the American Dream, the American Way of Life, propagandists are doing no more than manipulating appropriate Satanic and Sacred symbols.

"The manipulation of patriotic and nationalist sentiments has, above all else, given American anti-communism its remarkable psychological force as a means of social control. Peacetime 'patriotic' hysteria such as characterized the McCarthy period is a phenomenon largely peculiar to the United States among Western countries which have any extended experience with democratic forms of government. Fear of communism as Satanic is largely derived from hypersensitive nationalism. In popular consciousness it comes largely from the representation of communism as threatening the cherished, the secular-sacred idealized 'American Way': threatening, in a word, 'national security' - a term conceived of as broadly as the Middle Ages conceived of defence of the faith against threats and seductions from heretical ideas and agencies.

"It is no new notion, of course, that American anti-communism during the postwar decade (WWII - ed.) took on a medieval temper. Nonetheless some illustration in passing may be useful to remind us just how regression toward a superstitious, magical world-view may be induced under the influence of aggravated nationalist faith. In the nineteenth century those who refused to accept the diabolism of old women were pilloried as 'patrons of witches'. In the decades after 1946 anyone who argued against the diabolical view of communism was likely to be pilloried as 'soft on communism' or as a 'communist fellow-traveller'. (Today, sustained by an avalanche of Wall Street cash, Obama is denounced as the reincarnation of Karl Marx - ed.)

"In the sixteenth century witches were regarded as possessed by (that is, as obedient to remote and magical control by) the Devil. In 1955 a reputable American journal that catered to intellectuals editorialized: 'that [Ho Chi Minh] is our enemy is obvious. He belongs to that particularly dangerous species of men whose nervous system has been rewired to make it obedient to remote control from Moscow' ('Who-What-Why' 1955:8).

"During the past sixty years this form of crass stereotyping was made tolerable because of the defeat of a culture of critical consciousness."

------Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy - Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty

The Occupation Of Our Minds

The control of consciousness by agents of the 1% assumes greater moves toward mental fascism as the system experiences breakdowns in several places at once. Previous problems were in local or national political economies but globalization  - what Karl Marx analyzed as capitalism a century before it became the present acknowledged monster - has seen its domination encountered with democracy seeking people and an equilibrium seeking nature, simultaneously. The national recessions bordering on global depression bring with them a reaction from rulers threatening political repression causing further social depression. Domination through warfare gets worse, as does the contamination of the public mental state through controlled information flow.

While Americans have their heads twisted with a pointless debate over a program to give more billions of tax payer dollars to private health insurance blood suckers – what is called “obamacare” by marketeers – the nation moves closer to another open war in Syria, with Iran to follow if the fanatic Usrael caucus has its way. As the public is thrown into further division over the murder of a Florida youth by an armed vigilante and a weapons crazed sector is posed against gun controllers, a multi billion dollar military force wreaks havoc all over the globe and the occupation of public minds with the subjects of private division becomes more deadly.

 As growing forces of democracy strive for unity and take steps towards creating the real thing to counter the wealth controlled farce going under its name, the American presidential comedy-horror show blends reality TV with hilarious farce. It occupies the psychological time of many while most Americans are physically occupied with trying to find work, get an education or extend their lines of credit to go more deeply into patriotic debt. The clash between material reality and the surreal messages that crowd into public consciousness is almost as deadly as that between the crippling poverty and cruel hardship lived by billions of people while a relative handful of billionaires live in a luxury unknown to past messianic despots worshiped as gods by people who were said to be primitive. We are civilized?

Political Absurdity in Review

by Michael K. Smith

The recent flap over Rush Limbaugh's "slut" remarks once again featured a boycott movement designed to remove an ignorant blowhard from the public air waves, as though punishment of objectionable speech were the proper response to grotesque (election year) propaganda. But if objectionable speech is to be banned rather than debated, why all the liberal fuss when Phil Donahue was removed from the air for opposing the 2003 Iraq invasion? Aren't advertisers entitled to be offended at comments that aid and abet a brutal dictator's continued reign (Saddam Hussein)? Or do liberals have a monopoly on speech codes?

The alleged necessity for Limbaugh's removal is all the damage to "women and girls" from his obnoxious sexist slander. Aside from the principled issue of freedom for the speech that we hate, without which free speech is a fraud and a sham, there is the obvious fact that taking a misogynist off the air has never been demonstrated to do anything to eliminate the relentless sexist imagery and commentary constantly spilling forth from the corporate mass media. Anyone who doubts this need only count the number of female crotch shots we are regularly subjected to in the visual media, not to mention the standard media assumption that women's value resides exclusively in their sexual attractiveness and willingness to go to bed with men. Limbaugh called someone a slut? Big deal. The corporate mass media constantly characterizes all women as secretly desiring to be sluts.

Furthermore, in terms of sheer destruction, "free trade" enthusiasts do far more damage to women and girls than all of Limbaugh's broadcasts put together. These champions of private profiteering at public expense classify the immense labor of mothering children as nothing more than a private hobby, by definition entitled to no public support, while the male-dominated war industry is rewarded with gargantuan public subsidies on the ridiculous pretext that making war enhances the general welfare. Concerned about damage to women and girls? Then ban capitalism.

But we can't even ban capitalism in medicine, which is a pre-requisite to public health, and which every other industrialized country besides the United States realized decades ago. Debate over Obama care (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) centers on the governmental tyranny involved in forcing Americans to purchase medical insurance. Meanwhile, of the private tyranny of Health Mafia Organizations that price-gouge the middle class and leave the diseases and injuries associated with poverty largely undiagnosed and untreated, not much is said, and even less done. The message is clear: Profit is sacred, and American lives, expendable. Oh happy day, change is here at last.

The whole Obama care discussion now before the Supreme Court strikes one as a pilot project to develop a Comedy Central show, perhaps to be called, "Three Stooges Squared" (Three squared equals nine; there are nine justices on the Supreme Court - ed.) Allegedly the seat of nearly divine wisdom, the Court long upheld the view that blacks were only three-fifths human, as stated in the U.S. Constitution, and more recently has insisted that the private corporation, a legal abstraction, is more human than biological men and women when it comes to human rights. So incorporate yourself and drive in the carpool lane, since a driver and his founding corporate documents constitute two people under the law.

The "conservatives" on the Court (reactionary jingoists - ed.) are concerned that if Obama care can mandate that Americans purchase medical insurance it may lead to unlimited federal authority and the extinction of personal liberty. During oral arguments Justice Antonin Scalia asked in apparent seriousness what would prevent the federal government from requiring all Americans to buy broccoli.

Naturally, there is no discussion of Constitutional over-reach when it comes to Obama's presumed authority to assassinate Americans with no recourse to due process of law, which Attorney General Eric Holder insists is a presidential prerogative, as long as the president designates his targets as "terrorists" before he kills them, an infinitely elastic category if there ever was one.

In fact, personal liberty is held hostage to corporate power and Israel fanatics in every dimension of contemporary American life, and the problem is not government over-reach, but government abdication of its Constitutional responsibility to promote the general welfare, which only once in a blue moon can be expected to coincide with the profit needs of the planet-spanning conglomerates that virtually own the government, and never with Jewish supremacist politics.

Instead of pointlessly debating a mandate to make Americans buy crappy insurance, the government should simply extend the socialized medicine it gives to every member of Congress to all American citizens. Note that the government doesn't badger Congress members to spend their food money purchasing second rate medical insurance, but rather, extends them high quality socialist care as a permanent entitlement, alongside a more than adequate salary. If this is right for government officials, why isn't it right for the American people?

Social or Anti-Social Media?

"If we want to save life and humanity, we are obliged to end the capitalist system."   Bolivian President Evo Morales

We hear and read that the economy is rebounding – again – and this during a multi billion dollar presidential campaign. Gee. Threats of more foreign wars are also unrelated to politics , nor are the signs of mental and physical breakdowns in our military which shouldn’t worry anyone now that the economy is rebounding. Again. Unfortunately, the corporate perspective from which everything is looking so good still rules our consciousness but among many subjects of the system, critical thinking is advancing. Though sometimes very slowly, as when decent people are swept up in emotional tsunamis by a manipulation device called social media.

An online phenomena about Invisible Children recently caused an offline tragedy among Invisible Adult Mentalities. The same social media that help provoke changes among people seeking democracy also offer opportunities for an opposition to maintain an anti-social minority’s control. By using new manipulation devices they can confuse massive populations in seemingly individual ways that feed into self obsessed, ego centered consumers of culture. Personal messages for individuals who are urged to share them almost without limits can be even more persuasive than older one-way mass broadcasting media. But even as they help bring people together texting, tweeting or twiddling in ways  still not understood by most users of electronic devices, they offer advantages to controllers of this system taking an increasing toll on the planet and all it’s inhabitants. The time to heed the words of Morales has never been more urgent.

Present campaigns to militarily intervene in Syria and attack Iran are stress signs in a global economy wildly enriching fewer people while reducing greater majorities to indebtedness, warfare and poverty. Popular confusion is not only due to major corporate media but also to weapons of mass disinformation that can be sent directly into our heads by the new social media. And  whether in the Middle East or the Middle West, suffering increases for many so that a few can live in luxury.

Palestinians continue to endure an apartheid settler state financed with massive tax payer aid from the American public, but no tweeted online miracle seems to bring that information into the personal lives of celebrities and millions of other people with no lives of their own but to follow celebrities.

Meanwhile, the supposed rebirth of the auto industry in the USA is entirely due to a tax payer financed public bailout of a private industry which has hired many new workers, but at half the wages of its old work force. In Tel Aviv , Detroit or Wall Street this is great for minority investors but it’s bad for a global majority. And that is how all alleged foreign threats and supposed recoveries in stock markets should be seen: they profit very few at enormous loss to the great majority and in doing so they increase danger to everyone’s future.

The American election will offer voters their usual choice of lesser evil and thereby guarantee continued evil, but needed social policies to transform reality will not be on the ballot. Calls for public banks, a maximum wage, a tax on wealth, health insurance for all, much more social spending and much less warfare waste, will continue to come from outside what is called mainstream politics but is really two wings of one corporate party representing minority capital. The  understandably angry majority divided into a tea party , an occupy movement and mistaken identity groups needs to ultimately find common ground in shaping a democracy that meets the needs of an entire population and not just a cabal of billionaires. That may seem impossible to people schooled in double standards , elitist division and contempt for others but most of them are neither believers in nor can they ever be practitioners of democracy. They support the minority rule of master race/chosen people doctrines with cosmetic language to cover that reality under a cloak of perverted democratic politics and the patriarchal religion of capitalist free markets.

Domination over public thinking is fading, even if not at a fast enough speed to assure a positive outcome. But once people gain control of their lives, their communities and their  environment, progress can be achieved far more quickly than the regressive destruction that has taken so long to reveal its cause. What is most important is that democracy seekers not succumb to the terrible negativity of social doctrines that thrive on division, opposition, combat and profit for national minorities only at tremendous loss to the global majority.

This capitalist political economic disease has brought humanity to a point of no return, but one that also offers a road to a better world for all and not just some. That will take real democracy which isn’t something we murder foreigners to achieve but  have to create in our own homelands by organizing and uniting with fellow citizens. This calls for more respect than we have been anti-socialized to give one another but once we realize individual freedom is not possible in isolation but only in community it may not be so difficult to achieve.

First, the talk of war must be stopped before it leads to actual war, and the power of minority money over the global system must be countered by the power of majority people. That will not happen as the result of a November election and certainly not by allowing social media to be used for anti-social purposes,  but it needs to happen soon.

Let God's Justice Reign?

"The god of the Holy Bible - so much adored in the United States and elsewhere - is ferociously vindictive, neurotically jealous, intolerant, vainglorious, punitive, wrathful, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sadistic, and homicidal. . . .were we to live literally by God's eternal and unchanging word as recorded in the Bible, we would have to execute homosexuals, adulterers, fornicators, and masturbators. We would have to stone to death those offspring who are given to drink or gluttony, or who disrespect their parents. We would have to kill rape victims who fail to cry out loud enough and exterminate people who violate the Sabbath. We would be obliged to execute those who take the Lord's name in vain or who proselytize for other deities or who have been labeled a witch. We would need to slice and tear the foreskins off all male infants; assassinate family members if they take up with false gods; suppress all other religions because they are ipso facto erroneous; instruct the millions held in involuntary servitude around the world to serve their enslavers faithfully because all authority stems from God; and launch genocidal military attacks against heathen nations that do not honor the one true deity of the West.

"We also can feel free to sell our daughters into domestic servitude and treat family members like mortal enemies should they encumber our own religious development in any way. We may own slaves captured from nearby nations (not just Mexico but even Canada). But we dare not taste shellfish or pork, and we must avoid all contact with women on the days they are menstruating . . . "

-----Michael Parenti, God and His Demons

Obama Apologizes For Murders, Commends Killer For Not Urinating On Victims

President Obama phoned his condolences to Afghanistan but pointed out that the murderer of sixteen innocent victims had not urinated on any of them. "Plainly, civilized treatment of the dead should not blind us to the fact that a horrible crime was committed, but how many other nations would breed homicidal soldiers who could exercise such self control?" he asked the shocked Afghani president who was heard to mutter " death to the dumb half white cracker" under his breath.

Invisible Children Online Phenomena:Thinking Adults Offline Tragedy

New Twitbook film viewed by twelve billion people in fifteen minutes reveals heart rending story of African - black  booga booga - evil monster and his mob of several hundred - black booga booga - monsters who kill children and must be stopped by U.S. military aid to an African regime also black - not quite as booga booga -  with aid supervised and under the control of civilized, white, missionary position assuming people who will  once again and as always straighten things out for poor, uncivilized and needy black  Africans who will all mostly die, starve, get AIDS or worse if the west doesn’t intervene.

Film makers will conduct an online sale at Gee-Bay in which bridges, highways and downtown buildings in the USA will go to Americans who donate the most money to the fund for gullible well meaning folks with so much idle time they can watch half hour films about Africans while showing complete disregard for their suffering pets.