Thank you, Solenn Madevon, precocious young person. Your letter was well worth reading. You are correct when you say propaganda is used by the wicked to control society. Folks don’t seem to mind.
Cynics — usually old as I — say people are sheep-like, easily herded, dumb animals. Would you deny that many of your butt-head classmates are smoking cigarettes because they still think it makes them look cool? PR and Madison Avenue use the same subtle tools as the propagandists. And social-engineering, by any other name, is as old as bread and circuses, which are still what everybody cares about most.
Edward Bernays has been called “The Father of Propaganda,” and he was much admired by Joseph Goebbels, top-dog in Hitler’s ministry of propaganda. With these techniques, they turned a highly cultured German people into genocidal maniacs in no time. How? Tell everybody that bad people are coming to take all their stuff, to rape their wives and kids, and it’s easy. Adding, of course, that friends and neighbours will say you’re a yellow-bellied coward and unpatriotic if you don’t “cowboy up.”
A paraphrase, but Goebbels said this deception works everywhere, all the time. And that was years ago. Do high school kids recall 9-11? It is a classic example of “disaster capitalism” and the best thing that could have happened to a floundering G.W. Bush since election fraud. With an American election this year, watch carefully, kids, for a notorious “October surprise,” which will surely guarantee Obama’s re-election.
It is heartening to see young people take an interest in these things. And it would make a big difference if more people asked themselves who’s controlling the multi-media messages they’re regurgitating. Due-diligence? Your grad class is probably going to be called upon to soldier for the Third World War, just because your parents and grandparents voted like sheep. Iran? China? Russia? All the above? The warlike Harper will sign Canada up in a flash.
Extreme cynics call us “sheeple,” ovine and wooly-minded, crowded like lambs to the slaughter, funnelled between what we don’t want to know and what we really, really need to know. Ninety-nine per cent of us have been so co-opted, fleeced and brainwashed by the one per cent, we flock as directed by the dogs of propaganda and/or high-school teachers.
Hope? St. Augustine said she has two beautiful daughters: anger and courage. Get mad, neighbours, young and old; speak out. Occupy something, anything, before the bankers occupy everything. Fascism totally sucks.
Geoff Burton
Penticton