If there's one thing that can be said about the American people, it's the level of ignorance we possess over our own empire. Most of us aren't even aware the Empire exists. America has a presence in Afghanistan, and that's it! Once one mentions the drone wars Obama started throughout Africa and Southeast Asia, you're suddenly talking to a deer in headlights. 9/11 happened because terrorists just hate our freedom, not because we have military bases on holy lands.
The American people are so fucking ignorant about the world they live in because the mass media has hammered down propaganda to a science. In 1928, a man named Edward Bernays published Propaganda -- it's a practical guide on how to manipulate the masses. Really. See, the word "propaganda" at one time didn't carry all the negative connotations. It was once a very respected practice. The way Bernays himself describes it, its purpose is to convey an opinion, and it only becomes immoral once you blatantly lie. Once the war euphoria died down after World War I ended, people began to realize that they had all been duped, and they fought a war for nothing (sound familiar?). This is when people began to see propaganda for what it really was -- manipulation. Edward Bernays wrote this manual to "take back" the word, to show that it really wasn't as evil as everyone thought. He obviously wasn't successful, and the phrase "propaganda" soon had to be switched with "public relations." Bernays was kind of a propaganda guru in his day. He was responsible for the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala. He got women to smoke. The fucker knew what he was doing.
This is an extremely important book. It is the blueprint. Its techniques are still being used today. Reading how casually Bernays describes these methods, and how convinced he is that they're necessary, is chilling. It's a rare glimpse into what the 1% really thinks of us.
"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.
We are governed, our minds 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.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time....
...It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda."
To see some of these methods in practice, we can just turn to Wikileaks. In 2010, Wikileaks leaked a CIA document describing how to keep up support for unpopular wars -- 1) instill mass apathy, just get people to stop talking about the wars, and 2) manipulate people into thinking the wars are being fought for humanitarian purposes.
Here's a link to the document, but there's no telling how long it might be up. Wikileaks has been sustaining a massive DDoS attack throughout the last week or so, and they may go down again (I'll get into this in a little bit).
Wikileaks' introduction:
This classified CIA analysis from March, outlines possible PR-strategies to shore up public support in Germany and France for a continued war in Afghanistan. After the Dutch government fell on the issue of dutch troops in Afghanistan last month, the CIA became worried that similar events could happen in the countries that post the third and fourth largest troop contingents to the ISAF-mission. The proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it is the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as for Germany’s standing in the NATO. The memo is an recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA. It is classified as Confidential / No Foreign Nationals.
Snippets from the doc:
Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission—Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough (C//NF)
The fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan demonstrates the fragility of European support for the NATO-led ISAF mission. Some NATO states, notably France and Germany, have counted on public apathy about Afghanistan to increase their contributions to the mission, but indifference might turn into active hostility if spring and summer fighting results in an upsurge in military or Afghan civilian casualties and if a Dutch style debate spills over into other states contributing troops. The Red Cell invited a CIA expert on strategic communication and analysts following public opinion at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to consider information approaches that might better link the Afghan mission to the priorities of French, German, and other Western European publics. (C//NF)
Public Apathy Enables Leaders To Ignore Voters. . . (C//NF)
The Afghanistan mission’s low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Berlin and Paris currently maintain the third and fourth highest ISAF troop levels, despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments, according to INR polling in fall 2009.
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French and German commitments to NATO are a safeguard against a precipitous departure, but leaders fearing a backlash ahead of spring regional elections might become unwilling to pay a political price for increasing troop levels or extending deployments. If domestic politics forces the Dutch to depart, politicians elsewhere might cite a precedent for “listening to the voters.” French and German leaders have over the past two years taken steps to preempt an upsurge of opposition but their vulnerability may be higher now:
- To strengthen support, President Sarkozy called on the National Assembly—whose approval is not required for ISAF—to affirm the French mission after the combat deaths of 10 soldiers in August 2008. The government won the vote handily, defusing a potential crisis and giving Sarkozy cover to deploy approximately 3,000 additional troops. Sarkozy, however, may now be more vulnerable to an upsurge in casualties because his party faces key regional elections this March and the already low support for ISAF has fallen by one-third since March 2009, according to INR polling in the fall of 2009.
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So if you think it's a little odd that America has completely forgotten that it's fighting a fucking war, this may offer of a little insight. The media has gotten us to stop talking about it. These people know what they're doing. They've been perfecting it for a century.
And now we reach the purpose of this post, I'd like to bring a couple things to your attention. Barack Obama is trying to acquire the power to lock up American citizens without a trial. Nobody knows this is happening. Why? Remember back in 2002, when George Bush passed the Patriot Act? And how liberals were calling him a Nazi? Remember when Barack Obama renewed the Patriot Act with hardly a whimper? Extremism has been normalized. Obama, with a lot of help from the media, has moved the center line to George W. Bush. Once the Patriot Act became okay, things like NDAA became the next step. It's always little by little, bit by bit.
Leaked Stratfor emails just revealed that law enforcement agencies have been hiring out private companies, filled with ex-CIA, to put facial recognition technology into street cams all across the country. And when they think they're talking among themselves, they're quite casual about the actual purpose:
"they [San Francisco] need something like TrapWire more for threats from activists than from terror threats. Both are useful, but activists are ever-present around here."
Activism is terrorism. You got that? Free speech is no longer protected. That is the country we live in.
Almost immediately after Wikileaks revealed this, their website began sustain a massive DDoS attack - 10 gigabytes every second. Everyone knows who's doing it. And no one's saying a thing.
When the New York Times finally got around to covering this threat to free society, the propaganda couldn't be more apparent. They defined TrapWire as "antiterrorist software," when that's obviously not even close to what it is, it's meant to crush activism.
Right now, the NSA is quietly building the largest spy center in the country. It's going to house private emails, cellphone calls, Google searches, and after TrapWire was revealed, I'm sure human faces and information on where people have been. The NSA whistleblower who revealed all ths, William Binney, worked there for three decades. The FBI raided his home soon after he went public with this.
This government has always looked for more efficient methods to crush dissent. COINTELPRO was not a long time ago. The Bush Administration were all Nixon men, they're the same damn people. And this is their fucking golden age, because they don't have to hide in the shadows anymore. Everything they did then is now legal, and the public is too stupid to care. They can do whatever the fuck they want, and no one's going to raise a finger.
I don't know how the fuck we're supposed fight this. Whenever I try mentioning it to anyone, I'm always met with "HURF DURF BUT THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE AMERICA'S FREE STOP BEING A CONSPIRACY THEORIST THAT'S STUPID" and they go back to circlejerking around the left/right red/blue game. Say what you want about the immorality of propaganda, but you can't say it doesn't work. As long as the media guides public opinion, the American people will always be trapped focusing on bullshit issues like some rich fuck's taxes, or gossip around some extremist VP pick. They're nothing but distractions, and they fucking work. I'd guess at least 80% of the public doesn't have damn clue about anything I just said. And with the propaganda system as powerful as it, there is no possible way to inform them. I have absolutely zero hope for this country's future.
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