pravda article
The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.
Disraeli
By Nicolas Bonnal
The more Western democracy wants to
establish democracy in the world, the more it works undemocratically,
whether in Tripoli, Brussels or in Washington. Yet it is very hard
nowadays to resist its impeccable and humanitarian propaganda. This is
why we must seize the origins of this dark strength.
Let's go back to the twenties of last
century: we are facing the fascinating confrontation of western
propaganda, bolshevist propaganda, fascist, Ku Klux Klan or Nazi
propaganda; and everywhere capitalism trying to sell its products and
stuff.
In 1928, Edward Bernays, a parent of
Sigmund Freud, publishes a famous book about modern propaganda and
advertising, which synthesises the advancements of modern mind control,
after a terrible World War and a decennial of technical improvement and
modern art of conditioning the masses through radio, movies and press.
Basically Bernays states that days of
democracy are over, if they have happened once. Everything is linked to
science, manipulation, mind control and invisible wire-pullers when it
comes to politics. This is also what had predicted Moses Ostrogorski, a
Russian researcher and shrewd observer of American political parties at
the end of the nineteenth century. This expression of wire-puller has
been popularized later, in front of incomprehensive masses, by famous
movie (and book) the Godfather. The masses of consumers, voters or
travellers never do what they want; they just do what they are told to
do. Read this sentence for instance:
There are invisible rulers who
control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what
extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are
dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.
Reading again this book has amazed me
since it is a work written in a rather cynical, provocative and
controversial tone. Bernays could not write such stuff nowadays, for we
are maybe in more totalitarian times, which mean more sophisticated,
satisfied and blinded times. He could be labelled conspiracy theorist!
Those who are behind the scenes have
been dubbed here the manipulators of symbols, the deciders, the
technocrats sometimes. Bernays writes in his clerical style: As
civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible
government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have
been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.
The citizen of tomorrow needs to be
standardized as most as possible. This system was established first in
America, then in Western Europe then, with the fall of the wall,
everywhere else. The last resistant countries, some Moslem nations, have
been recently destroyed, pulverized indeed. This is because we must
conform:
From some ethical teacher, be it a
minister, a favourite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a
standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the
time.
This is basically what utters with some
imprudence and arrogance Bernays in his book: a good reader of Babbitt,
the masterwork of Upton Sinclair denouncing the standardized bourgeois
citizen of America, Bernays sees in America the laboratory of the future
to create the mixed-up, robotic and standardized citizen of the one
world republic!
The extraordinary, growing, and sane
standardization of stores, offices, streets, hotels, clothes, and
newspapers throughout the United States...
All this stuff basically serves one
purpose like in the Bible, when the psalmist and Job are comparing
themselves to the bird captured by the fowler: the ensnarement of the
mind.
There is consequently a vast and
continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some
policy or commodity or idea.
Politicians are mere products like soap
and pasta. Even war is a product you can sell with some propaganda
salsa. To create a war against Syria is not more complicated than to
create a war against Germany a century ago! Writes Bernays:
The manipulators of patriotic
opinion made use of the mental clichés and the emotional habits of the
public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the
terror and the tyranny of the enemy.
And Bernays does not believe that
universal literacy can create a freer man; on the contrary the
well-informed citizen is the more manipulated:
But instead of a mind, universal
literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with
advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data,
with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but
quite innocent of original thought.
We should now promote a non-reader
citizen! Yet he would be a victim of manipulators of images and symbols
carried on his cellular phone, that omnipresent companion and
transmitter of alienation.
In politics too Bernays sees no reasons to be more romantic:
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.
The modern world is such divided between
hidden elite of manipulators and a big mass of manipulated (and happy
to be so) people, a herd victim of the global mind control:
But clearly it is the intelligent
minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and
systematically. In the active proselytizing minorities in whom selfish
interests and public interests coincide lie the progress and development
of America.
We do know how cruel and irresponsible
these 'active proselytizing elites' can be nowadays. In order to be
realistic and not only pessimistic, Bernays adds that humanity is a
gregarious species and that modern science, this great liberator of our
superstitions, has thus described our brain (this was prior to
psychoanalysis founded by his uncle):
This assumed that the human mind was
merely an individual machine, a system of nerves and nerve centres,
reacting with mechanical regularity to stimuli, like a helpless,
will-less automaton. It was the special pleader's function to provide
the stimulus which would cause the desired reaction in the individual
purchaser.
Thanks to God, to save us from modern science and propaganda, we have the psalms:
Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.
Nicolas Bonnal
