From The Ramparts

Understanding Propaganda Part 1

Understanding Propaganda Part 1

Junious Ricardo Stanton

“The white man is a great propagandist. He realizes fully and completely the value of propaganda. You must therefore organize our propaganda to undo the propaganda of other people, if their propaganda affects your interest. The Bible is religious propaganda, the school book is literary propaganda, the novels and books you read are also literary propaganda, all calculated to bring about certain results beneficial to the propagandists.  Never forget then that you are surrounded in a world of propaganda all dressed up or cooped up to suit a doubtful public who is not careful with what it digests as coming from without.” Marcus Garvey Life and Lessons, Lesson Sixteen Propaganda page 890.

             Following WWI the ruling classes and their sycophants increased their study and focus on propaganda as a means not only to promote consumerism but also as a means of mass social manipulation. The man whose propaganda techniques make him the most acclaimed man in the field, the father of Pubic Relations and Propaganda, is Edward Bernays (1891-1995).

Bernays was of Jewish heritage and he was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays and his family migrated to the US, he attended New York public schools and went to college to study agriculture. After graduation Bernay’s decided to enter the field of writing and journalism.

Bernays came to prominence when he worked for the Creel Committee aka The Committee on Public Information. This was a group of graphic artists, writers, journalists and media persons who helped establish and shape an all pervasive multi-media quasi-government propaganda campaign whose goal was to convince and manipulate a reluctant US public to enter the ongoing European War referred to as World War I.  Needless to say the Creel Committee was hugely successful in their endeavors and many of its members like artist Charles Gibson, writer Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays who all enjoyed successful careers after the war.

Bernays is credited with developing techniques and strategies for manipulating the public by using some of his uncles’ theories as well as other psychotherapists and psychologists’ ideas and techniques. See the program I did with Catherine Austin Fitts  on Edwward Bernays at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BTgzHmDowQ&t=16s

 In 1928 Bernays published a book entitled Propaganda it became his best known book. Bernays theories, ideas and techniques were used by the Nazis to socially reengineer Germany into a fascist state.  Not only did the Nazis use it, almost all US advertising, public relations firms and propaganda programs utilize Bernays work on one level or another!

For Edward Bernays and men like him propaganda is a tool for control, manipulation and power. Bernays believed the key to mass manipulations was in the ability to influence the conscious and subconscious minds of the subject. Many of his ideas he got from his famous uncle Sigmund Freud. In his book Propaganda he laid out how propaganda took on a new roll during and after WWI. “It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. The American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a technique which, to most per[1]sons accustomed to bidding for public acceptance, was new. They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach—visual, graphic, and auditory—to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group —persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe. At the same time the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental cliches and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror and the tyranny of the enemy. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace. As a matter of fact, the practice of propaganda since the war has assumed very different forms from those prevalent twenty years ago. This new technique may fairly be called the new propaganda. It takes account not merely of the individual, nor even of the mass mind alone, but also and especially of the anatomy of society, with its interlocking group formations and loyalties. It sees the individual not only as a cell in the social organism but as a cell organized into the social unit. Touch a nerve at a sensitive spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism.” Edward Bernays, Propaganda pages 27-28.

We’re all targets of propaganda, manipulation and social engineering in ways Edward Bernays never envisioned. Corporations, communications sector and social media giants https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/070815/what-telecommunications-sector.asp and others as well as governments are all heavily engaged in massive propaganda and mind control campaigns designed to create a reality and world view that benefits them, not us. We’ll discuss more about their tactics and techniques in future articles.

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posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 12:45 PM