Musings on Propaganda...

Propaganda has long been used by states and nation-states to anesthetise and rev up the population. It has, not surprisingly, been used to do both in times of crises and war. I give you the bullshit about the Maine and Spain abusing Cuban women on the plains and the bullshit about evil Huns (Hitler before Hitler) bayoneting Belgian babies, claims that appeared in the mass media before the Spanish American War and during World War I. Both of these forms of propaganda, by the way, were used to manipulate the US into both of those wars.

 

Everyone, of course, uses propaganda from Innocent, the Blessed Virgin Mother America to the Ukraine. In fact, I recently read a report  about Ukraine's hiring of a PR firm, no doubt with American aid, to spin the war for that country in the mass commercial media so to rev up the West in its favour, something made easier by the almost total absence of spin for Russia on the Western corporate media and the almost total absence of those who rightly note the role the US and the Ukraine have played in the advent of the war on the dominant corporate mass media in the US.

 

Given this, one must be skeptical of claims of atrocities in war UNTIL they have been independently verified. One MUST also be cognisant of the fact that in the era of total war EVERYONE commits what are regarded as atrocities including Innocent, the Blessed Mother America. That is the nature of total war. so if past is prologue.
 

For those who prefer to have their emotional chains pulled by propagandistic bullshite, ignore this post. Bliss, after all, is one of the things that comes from a belief in a manichean faith, nationalist or otherwise, where you can spin or parrot notions that you are good and they are evil.

Welcome to the Kingdom of Glupov...

The Dixiefornication of the Republican Party has given us not only an incompetent narcissistic moron as president, a theocratic idiot grandpa as vice-president, and Republican lawmakers who have turned stupidity into a not so fine art. It has also given us [pun intended] ever increasing levels of anti-intellectual moronicity in a nation that has become a textbook example of an Idiocracy and a casebook example of a country in which moronicity is running ever more amok.

These red, white, and blue faced idiots screaming and yelling about big government taking away their right to be a moron, don't even have the brains to realise that they are not anywhere close to being the hard volcanic island of right wing myth. Given this empirical reality these empirically challenged morons are not free to inflict their moronicity--their failure to wear a mask and distance during a pandemic that is killing thousands, for instance--on me or anyone else.

These meatheaded members of the cult of moronicity do not seem to realise the obvious, that we live in a world and in a country of networks and that we live in a world and a country in which what one person does or doesn't do, can and does impact others. As most writers on liberty from an Enlightenment perspective realised long ago, but apparently not these goobers, when you have a multitude of individuals you have a multitude of potential liberties which are sometimes in conflict. Hence someone or something, the imperfect government, for example, is necessary in order to adjudicate between liberties. Nor do they appear to comprehend that liberties are, like speech, limited. One does not have the liberty to commit murder, at least officially, nor does one have the liberty to falsely yell fire in a theatre. One can only assume that this nuanced exploration of liberty is irrelevant to these morons since for them the only liberty is, in a kind of bully boy meets dictatorial "approach", their liberty. For them, in other words, it is their liberty their way or you can hit the highway.

I wouldn't give a fuck about all this if these morons were snuffing themselves in a kind of death cult in love with dying and doing it in Texas fashion. When they threaten me and others, however, I do give a fuck. These morons have no right to threaten my health or my life or the lives and health of others.

You've Been Clintoned

If you believe that Donald Trump is the 1764th avatar of Adolf Hitler since the 1930s then you've been Clintoned. At best or at worst, depending on your point of view, Trump is kind of a comic or Chaplinesque version of Italy's Benito Mussolini. If you believe that Vladimir Putin is the 7914th avatar of Josef Stalin since the 1950s then you've been Clintoned. Putin is more akin to the 19th and 20th century Tsars.

This discourse, this absurd genealogy which links people like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to evil comic book versions of "evil" historical characters of the past, has been created and disseminated by the heirs of those who manufactured a fear based World War I mass propaganda and the heirs of Madison Avenue, who were themselves the heirs of WWI propagandists, who manipulated mass consumer habits by manufacturing "needs, many" of them sexual. What I find so fascinating is that many American and Western academic social scientists and historians appear to believe and parrot this same propaganda or spinning coming from the propagandists of the political party cartel and their wooden dummies in the media as though it were fact. They should know better. That they don't just proves Barnum's point, a sucker is born every minute.

Our Masters Voices...Musings on Doublespeak in Corporate America

Living in Corporate America, which, George Calin once said, "was bought and sold and paid for years ago", is a trip. Here in the land of doublespeak some people can be beaten and pepper sprayed simply for "camping" in parks while those who camp and wait for Black Friday deals, entertainment tickets, or sports tickets, often on public sidewalks, are a media item as Naomi Wolf says in her recent article. And most citizens, or should I say most consumers since that is what corporate America sees us as, don't even see or hear the corporate lies right in front of them.

Naomi Wolf in her Guardian piece lists several things Occupy has called for. "...No 1: get the money out of politics". Occupy protestors urge this reform as a response to the Citizens United court ruling "which allowed boundless sums of [corporate] monies to enter the campaign process". Number 2 "reform...the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation." In particular Occupy calls for the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, "the Depression-era law, eliminated during the Clinton administration, "that separates investment banks from commercial banks". "This law", claims Occupy, "would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create...derivatives out of thin air and wipe out the commercial and savings bank" sector. Number 3 Occupy pass "laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors”. Number 4, one Wolf doesn't discuss, to move your monies from too big to fail banks like CitiBank and Bank of America, banks involved in creating derivative and real estate bubbles out of thin air and banks which continue to pay their investment labour force millions in bonuses, to local credit unions and community banks. Clearly, as Wolf notes and as anyone with eyes can see, Occupy has a political programme.

So why is it that the talking heads on TV, on the radio, and in the blogosphere keep claiming that Occupy has no "plan" when Occupy, as Wolf notes again and again, clearly has several plans to reform Washington? So why this charade? Could it be that corporate America and its political minions, particularly on the right, and its demagogues are sticking to a message and keep promoting it even in the face of empirical data to the contrary? Could it be that the fiction that Occupy has no plan is exactly what America's elites want to manipulate the "silent majority" into believing? Is this fiction becoming reality just another example of postmodernist manipulation in the service of corporate control and power? And why are the media not challenging the falsehoods being peddled and parroted by the the handmaidens of Corporate America? Is it because media news readers and news men and women simply aren't aware of this data? If so why not? Or is it because the media are simply parroting the corporate party line manufactured by the public relations courtiers of the corporate class in a regimented way that was not even possible in the Stalin era USSR? After all Big Media are controlled by and large by corporations and America's public broadcaster, PBS, has to be careful that it doesn't bite the hand that feeds it too hard because the hand that feeds sometimes bites back as PBS occasionally finds out? Is this the way the corporate media world goes round? And about that additional significant question: why are the masses swallowing this elite generated crap as though it was a chocolate truffle? Because postmodernist demagoguery in the service of economic and political elites creates reality even if that reality is patently false?

I am sure that Lee Atwater, the Republican strategist who once claimed that reality doesn't matter, that what really matters is what you can convince people is true, is enjoying all this doublespeak from the corporate class and its media acolytes about the Occupy movement and the fact that so many Americans seem to be eating it up wherever he is. After all before he died he trained a number of Corporate American technocratic spin doctors in the fine arts of demagoguery and reality manipulation including George W. Bush and Karl Rove.

Postscript
One blogger questioned Wolf's speculation that the Department of Homeland Security may have helped coordinate the military operations against Occupy movements in several American cities (http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/shocking-truth-about-factless-assertions). However I find it hard to escape the thesis that there was coordination between the police departments who ran Occupy out of Seattle, Portland, Oakland, the City. If not, why did they occur at around same time? Winter coming? They all realised that tents and tenters were hazardous to human health simultaneously? Jean Quan, the "activist" mayor of Oakland has, in fact, admitted that the offensive against Occupy was coordinated by "proper" authorities in eighteen cities (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpElRNEJPXshttp://www.mediaite.com/online/did-oakland-mayor-jean-quan-admit-cities-coordinated-to-bust-occupy-protests/, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I87roZGeGhw, ).

This raises the question of why did the militarised "forces of order" brutally push Occupy out of public and private spaces in similar ways? Coincidence? Accident? While Wolf's thesis is tentative and based on "coincidences" like those above it is an interesting thesis particularly given what we know about how the government worked in the past. Remember the centralised campaigns against dissidents in the 60s and 70s? Recall that the CIA and FBI helped quash dissidents? during the 60's and 70's?

Bibliography
Naomi Wolf, The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy, 25 November 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy?fb=optOut