Propaganda and Modern Mass Communication

Americans have been so intrinsically deceived from the cradle to the grave, that they must undergo a literal revolution in thinking to overcome the misinformation they have been burdened with by a so-called "education." All the popular images of American political leaders are based on inaccurate renderings of history, which are deliberately employed to misrepresent the purposes and functions of the government. These images function as icons, which the society will play upon the remainder of the individual's life. Where the school system drums the system of social controls into the heads of the American people in their most formative stage, the media operates based on the assumptions the schools have created in the world-view they impart to students. America lives in denial of the monster in its midst, the public education monolith, that has a bureaucracy in every nook and crany of the country.

The iconic images of men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are far removed from the reality of these two presidents as men. This is rarely touched upon, however, because no independent thought is allowed that might undermine the institutional infrastructure that has built its power on the public's support of icons. This is the underlying imperative that dominates the news industry in the United States, and it guarantees that the institutions of the republic will remain unchallenged, no matter how corrupt they may become. The fundamental dynamic of the republic is the tension between the image of the purposes of the republic, and the reality of it as an institution. The reality of the republic is that it is faceless, like a corporation. It is cold, sterile and mechanical, devoid of any of the human qualities mankind has come to rely on for mercy or compassion. The republic is a ceremonial facade that is more concerned with distracting attention away from those interests that actually own everything of value. The masses are basically mortgaged to these interests, who are able thereby to curtail the independence of the people while claiming to make them "free."

America at the time of the revolution was a fairly rough country, but it was far from the image of struggling Europeans carving a civilization out of the wilderness. By the time of the revolution the colonies had become stable slave-owning societies, that were profitably exporting cash-crops. Slave- owning societies, however, are by definition police states, because the main tension in the state is the aspiration of the slaves for freedom, and the financial incentive of their "owners" to retain their capital assets. This issue is brushed aside by the modern pundits, but colonial America was not known for its art or culture. A society cannot flourish culturally in the arts when so much of its resources are consumed with the basic demands of law enforcement; a society in which human beings seeking freedom is a felony. Attitudes outlive institutions, and the republic that came to support the slaveowners against the slaves outlived the institution of slavery, to become the anchor for the Master and Servant laws which were re- named the Labor Codes in the 20th century.

Colonial America was dominated by a pseudo-scientific obsession with conquest of the landscape, which they carried out with the precision of the new school of thought of science. Consequently communications in colonial America had a functionality to it which could be thought of as pragmatic. Almanacs were popular, with their weather predictions and their tips on farming. There were newspapers, but there was little patience with the humanities, theatre, arts, or entertainment. Those painters who were American, lived and worked in London. As the conflict between the elite of the colonies and the legal Government in London heated up, the modern age of mass communications was born with the evolution of the pamphlet. Pamphleteering was an important form of communications for a people who were divided in time and space, who were literate. Most Americans, however, at about the time of 1776, were not literate. This is the part of history no one wants to remember, because it involved the suppression of the slave caste through policies of deliberately keeping the slaves ignorant, generation after generation. It was a serious crime to teach a slave to read or write, in a society that was anxiety-ridden over the possibility of slave revolts. Ironically, this same suspicion of intelligence is evident in the institutions of the republic, with particular importance to the mass media, which evolved in a symbiotic relationship with the Government set up by the Founding Fathers.

American independence was achieved by essentially inciting the masses to fratricide, that is, civil war. A majority of the colonials, however, did not support the cause of independence. The majority was either ambivalent (slaves and servants), or outright supported what was the legal government. In order to accomplish independence, its supporters had to suppress any popular loyalty that existed to the legal government. This is rarely given much attention, but the way Loyalists were driven out of America was through soapbox orators enraging mobs, who would descend upon an unfortunate's home and desecrate it. Inciting people to violence should not be considered noble or patriotic at any time, and it certainly should be re-evaluated in terms of the history taught to millions of schoolchildren, who are being sent the message, through the example of the revolution, that it is okay to shoot at law enforcement ("George Washington did it...").

The republic set up under the Constitution of 1787 was designed as a way to engineer public opinion to fit the needs of the dominant class, what came to be known as the upper class. Elections and political campaigning were essential components of a process which enabled the powerful to shape the opinions held by average people, who in the early days of the republic lacked the right to vote. By limiting the right to vote to property-holders -- property like slaves -- it guaranteed a certain mind-set would be dominant in the Government that would be voted into power. The idea that the early plantation aristocracy would create a system whereby the slaves could vote themselves into freedom is absurd. There was a determined effort to create institutions that had no other purpose than to limit the options for ordinary people, because the owners of vast estates were not about to put their own interests under the power of a fickle public. As the plantation aristocracy died out, its successors intermarried into the great (political) families of the republic, as well as the families of the nouveau riche industrialists, who looked to such marriages with old money as a way into high society. This hard core of power now constitutes a kind of mega-class of billionaires, many of them the descendants of those first Europeans who arrived in the New World, who swindled the Natives out of land the Natives didn't think anyone had the right to own, let alone sell.

Widening the franchise didn't have any effect on the underlying society, because voting for officers with ceremonial power, in a three branch system that effectively divided the Government against itself, enabled the plantation aristocrats and their successors near absolute power over their holdings, which was the majority of all property being protected by the police of the republic. Widening the franchise did, however, have a palliative effect, because it made ordinary people FEEL involved in the process of government. Few people, even among intellectuals, understand how so much of public administration was privatized through the creation of the republic. Most of the decisions that will effect Americans are decided in corporate board rooms, not Congressional offices, or the White House. Of course, even the notion of "private" versus "public" property has a legalistic ring to it, as a device to create an artificial class that has no real purpose other than to divide and confuse ordinary people.

The legalistic nature of Anglo-American culture has always generated an ample amount of public controversy, and as the art of pamphleteering evolved, so too the republic evolved as a fine-tuned process for manipulating and controlling public debates. The very idea that the American revolution was a war fought between the English and the Americans underscores the effectiveness of the republic as a means for controlling public opinion, because in 1776 there was no such thing as an "American." America was nothing other than a geographical expression, the great majority of the people who lived in America considering themselves to be loyal Englishmen, seeking nothing other than their ancestral rights as Englishmen. The revolution was an internal rupture in which a mass of people were driven from their homes because their opinions supported the British. Their property was then stolen, under the banner of the protection of property! We can hear the faint traces of Orwellian newspeak, as the totalitarian republic came into being through the invention of modern crowd control, which its supporters represented as a means to expand the freedom of the common man. It was only through violence, intimidation and fear that the Founding Fathers were able to devise a consensus in favor of independence, which launched a reign of terror the exploitation of which is still the main characteristic of the Federal Government. If the Sons of Liberty existed today, it would be called a terrorist organization. It is important to understand that Arafat and the PLO, as well as the Zionists, all followed the well-worn path trailblazed by the American insurrectionists. Ironically, it is this same example that inspired the founders of the KKK.

The early years of the republic witnessed some clumsy experiments in manipulating the masses. The first real show of strength of the republic took place to suppress the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. After fighting a war over the obscure issue of "taxation without representation" -- which comes off like the right to have an attorney -- one of the first acts of the Washington Administration, under the influence of Alexander Hamilton, was to impose a tax on whiskey. Of course the people who'd lost sons and fathers in a war over taxes felt deeply betrayed, and the rebellion that took place invoked one of the earliest police actions of the Federal state. Other police actions, such as the return of fugitive slaves to their bondage, is lost in the minutiae of the bureaucracy as routine business.

Through the efforts of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, and a cadre of lawyer-politicians, a bi-partisan system evolved regularizing an even more powerful grasp over the affairs of the republic by the entrenched interests. Political parties provided the merchant class, and the rising industrialists, direct access to the legislative and executive apparatus of the Government, on the state and Federal level, through their ability to donate money to political campaigns of candidates for public office; and where there is influence over the legislative and executive branches of government, there is influence over the judicial branch. The rivalry between Hamilton and Jefferson is defined by the polite agreement to disagree that is the hallmark of the modern Middle Class democratic process. The political parties are not governed by any burning moral issues, they are fossilized staid coalition institutions that are designed to limit outside interference. The parties crank out slogans and symbols designed to move masses and to shape the dialogue, and it is in their interests never to challenge the Federal republic, because their power is defined by the institutions of the republic. The political parties exist comfortably within a spectrum in which there are only two viable parties, mainly because of the obstacles they can throw out to obstruct new parties from forming. This conveys a sense of pragmatism to the two-party-system, because only a nominee of one of the two major parties has a genuine chance of victory. The reality, however, that the party machinery has been captured by the commercial interests of the country, and that the mass campaigns of the parties are designed more to generate popular support for the state in general, rather than any candidate for public office in particular, goes right over the heads of average Americans. This is why the numbers of voters who vote declines in each succeeding election, the man on the street has come to realize that regardless if a Democrat or a Republican wins the general election, the police state of the Founding Fathers will remain with us, with its garrison sensibilities and creedal intolerance. The majority of contemporary journalists and reporters are members of one of the two major parties, and this influence runs through every report they make on the condition of the country. Party loyalty, of course, ranks right up there with high school spirit, because the ultimate loyalty of human beings universally is not to some corporate institution that has no objective reality. Human beings everywhere, for as long as there have been human beings, remain loyal to their families, which is why the republic had to invent the so-called Nuclear Family, to break up the traditional tribal family arrangement that prevailed universally of three or more generations under a single roof. This is because in every country where tradition required placing loyalty to the family above loyalty to the state, the state was challenged for power by the fathers and mothers of the nation.

One of the earliest direct attempts to control public opinion took place in the late 1700's, as laws of Congress called the Alien and Sedition acts. This was the first attempt by a generation of political leaders who were largely born overseas, to define who would be excluded from citizenship. Xenophobia, or fear of foreigners, has been one of the most powerful catalysts of the republic from its origins. The republic as a device of control involved manipulating perceptions, which the various bureaus of the state and Federal Government raised up to an art form. The proto-type for the modern republican state is the emergency state of France during the Reign of Terror. Fearful people are motivated people, and control amounted to selection of those things or conditions to be feared. In France it was the safety of the "Fatherland," as a foreign army approached; in America, the people are conditioned to be afraid of "crime." At the time the Alien and Sedition acts were the law of the land, it was a crime to criticize the President of the United States. Newspaper editors spent time in jail for violating the Alien and Sedition acts.

The American civil war is one of the most misunderstood episodes in American history. The real tension driving the conflict was not slavery, it was authority. What precipitated the civil war was the adoption of nullification legislation by those southern states that later became the Confederacy, which was intended to nullify the effectiveness of Federal law within the boundaries of a state with such legislation. Ironically the very idea of a state adopting nullification legislation derived of Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Resolution, and another Jeffersonian's Kentucky Resolution, which sought to nullify the Alien and Seditions acts in those states; laws their authors later regretted when they each, in turn, later became president.

There is the lawyer's precision in all of Lincoln's declarations about preserving the Union, which was legalese for securing the supremacy of the Federal Government. Lincoln had been a railroad attorney before he commenced his career as the politician who engineered a war in which ONE MILLION AMERICANS would be killed. Lincoln was, in fact, reluctant to employ the slavery issue, until it appeared as if the Federal Government might lose the war unless it found some moral note that might legitimize the unprecedented violence. There were Draft Riots in New York, and commanders of the armies were incredibly inept. Anyone with a legal background who reads the Emancipation Proclamation would recognize immediately that it had no impact whatsoever, other than as a press release, because it basically emancipated those slaves who were held in bondage in states that were in rebellion at the time. In other words, good old Honest Abe was freeing slaves in places he had no actual control over.

The American civil war was the first real modern war, in the sense that warfare had become the beneficiary of modern technology. The railways to transport men and arms, the Gattling guns, the telegraph, TNT, all changed forever the way men would fight. And the victory of the Federal Government guaranteed the absolute supremacy of the Federal Government over the state governments. As a result the only attributes of statehood left to the defeated states was the title State in the name, other than that, American states were in practice semi-autonomous provinces, and nothing more. This clarified the power structure for everyone, including a newly emerging popular press, which was marked by a bent towards the sensational. The development of a compliant Middle Class as a labor force to replace the freed slaves, fueled the evolution of a public educational institution to meet the needs of the labor market by teaching minimal literacy skills. This, in turn, fueled the market for newspapers and magazines, as the number of people equipped with the skills to read them increased. It was from these primitive and crude circumstances that the first mass media tycoon would emerge, whose long shadow dominated the scene to such an extent that the people he black-balled were shunned decades after the tycoon's own death.

William Randolph Hearst was the first man to own a chain of newspapers. There is a famous quote from the man that was made legendary in the film Citizen Kane, wherein he tells a reporter that if the reporter will get the story on the Spanish American War, Hearst would deliver the war. The Hearst family fortune was made in silver mines in Nevada. The power of silver mining interests was felt when the Federal Government started minting silver coins, buying all of its silver from families like the Hearsts. Thus these families were well connected, and knew the ins and outs of political deal brokering. Yet it speaks more to the core of power, the indecent collusion between those who govern and those who inform us. To please his concubine, Hearst bought a movie studio and promoted her as a star. While in the end Hearst's form of yellow journalism declined, the newspaper as a medium of mass communication was born, and the Hearst example was followed elsewhere.

The Hearst example, mind you, involved stunts wherein someone would jump into the San Francisco Bay to see how long it took rescuers from government agencies to respond, which was then reported in Hearst papers as a bona fide news event. The Hearst standard can be seen in the modern obsession with celebrities, value free icons who are compromised by the rewards of fame into collaboration with the republic. This all became the engine of growth for a new medium that, when it was launched, changed forever the very idea of influence peddling. THE MOTION PICTURE...

The hey-day of Hollywood was a spectacle of staged dramatics, engineered to closely guard the legacy of the Studio system of hegemony. Now a new job title emerged which has become indispensable to the rising star: The publicist. Public relations as a field saw one of its best moments when PR specialists instructed John D. Rockefeller to give away silver dimes in front of reporters. It instantly caught the imagination of anyone who saw the image in the mass media, turning an alien faceless money-monger into a friendly old man giving a child a dime. Image is everything. Public relations is a division of advertising, which infers that the PR people are not interested in hearing any input. PR specialists want to get their message across. What average people don't understand, however, is the role of publicists in the evolution of public policies and public debates. Publicists are often former reporters, or drop-outs from journalism class who have lots of reporter friends, so that they can offer their clients CONTACTS within the press. Of all the institutions of the republic, the press is probably more corrupt than any of them, as journalists literally peddle contacts like illegal contraband.

The most significant act of authority of a modern nation-state is war, at which time the government has more effective control over the resources of the nation than at any other time. This is why modern popular culture has such a strong nostalgic attitude towards the official wars the politicians of the republic committed us to. Re-creations of the American Revolution almost caste it as if the Founding Fathers threw a party, and everyone lived happily ever after. The important thing to remember, however, is that the human mind can relate to something it has seen or heard far more easily than to something it has read. Reading involves a process of ascertainment of the meaning and context of what is meant by the words on the page; events one witnesses, whether first hand or as re-enactments, are visual experiences that can carry a visceral impact of certainty, so that even if the genuine facts are different, the fact that one experienced another set of facts can be sufficient to convince one that false information is true. This is vital, because the advent of motion pictures introduced a form of manipulation of the masses at an unprecedented skill level. How could anyone describe George Washington as aloof, regal, pretentious or vain, when the man on the silver-screen depicting Washington is mild-mannered, smiling, kind, and welcoming? Even the most powerful intellect can be sucked into doubting the facts of history he knows are true, when put under the influence of audio-visual media.

This was demonstrated very powerfully by the German Nazis, who developed the Ministry of Information. By using rallies, radio, newspapers, and police action, the Nazis made use of the Weimar constitution, which was the republican successor of the Imperial monarchy. When the death camps were built, contracts were let to the biggest industrial firms in Germany, all of which are still in business today. Mass markets are like herds of cattle, and the fear raised in consumers is how they are herded towards the interests of those raising the fears. There is little or no thought about the impact of fear on individuals, because individuals are marginalized where only mass counts. When the Germans over-ran Poland and France, the world was annoyed, but there was no will to go to war; it was when Hitler made it clear that he would not stop until he had conquored England, and then Russia, that the world community became alarmed enough to take up the gauntlet. This is important, because Hitler was a respected world leader before he became public enemy number one, the man it was politically correct to hate. In fact, the reluctance of world leaders to interfere in the domestic policies of one of their own group, derived from the threat that any such interference might be seen as a precedent that could be used against them at some later date. What modern nation-state does not have an oppressed minority? What modern state has no political prisoners? Needless to say, the United States has both an oppressed minority AND political prisoners, in a system that basically keeps their voices out of the mainstream press. Had Hitler been content with Paris, the Third Reich would probably exist today, and the Final Solution would have been carried out. There was no diplomatic furor over the genocide of the Jews or the Gypsies. Both were deemed expendable to the diplomatic corps; not worth fighting a war over, much like the slaves of the Civil War. (The Allies in World War II had plenty of opportunities to bomb the ovens of the death camps, or the railroads entering and leaving them, but they never did.)

Hitler's thirst for conquest and his failure to see that England represented a line he should not cross, tripped the world into World War II. Where World War I profited from airplanes, telephones, and mechanized transport, World War II profited from radar, radio, and mass production. The American war effort was a masterpiece of mass manipulation, highlighted by such contradictions as the fact that the Ford Motor Company continued to manufacture cars in war-time Germany. Most significantly, however, was the new technology of the radio. Radio was the first real revolution of modern communications since the invention of the newspaper. Through FDR's regular "fireside chats" it galvanized Americans into feeling that they were an actual single community. This helped to solidify the totalitarian system of information control, with doctrines of "voluntary compliance" and "self-regulation." Radio, coupled with motion pictures that appeared to address current events, had a powerful impact on the impressionable minds of simple people, and at the time World War II began, the majority of Americans still lived on farms.

The movie industry is one of the least understood because it has had the ability to construct its own image. "More Stars Than In The Sky" was MGM's slogan. A Hollywood Premiere at the Chinese Theatre was a spectacle fit for a king, which was handy because the absence of a legitimate system of government, namely a monarchy, meant that the society thirsted for substitutes, which Hollywood sold them: the tinsel icon. The Stars of golden era Hollywood were the stuff of legends, largely devised by Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, lap-dogs of such tycoons as Hearst. The promotions that went into selling movies are the stuff of REAL legends, a catalog of stunts and staged news events that the mass media bought into hook, line and sinker. As the cultural decline in American society began, "entertainment news" evolved as an independent "branch" of journalism, highlighting the urgent need of the powerful to distract average people from their personal sufferings with the escapades of their favorite stars. It's easy to dismiss the money spent to advertise products as having no influence on the masses, but this fails to take into account the fact that if the resources had to be used that way, what lost opportunities and potentials had to be forsaken? Political groups spend money advertising all the time, knowing that it won't change anyone's opinion, but at the same time the space that advertising is taking up won't be used by some "radical" group with bona fide grievances.

What is rarely ever given any real attention is the suggestability of the average American, after a public school education and a career as a corporate employee. The end product is a deeply dysfunctional human being, illustrated by the recent suicide of the Chief of Naval Operations, who appeared to have achieved everything the republic has to offer in the way of status. People who succumb to suicide or drug-addiction are human beings who lost all hope that their lives could be better, and so they chose self-destruction. The notion that this kind of pathology can be addressed through imprisonment is the height of idiocy; it blames the victim for the problem. It also sets the society on the course to inevitable SELF-DESTRUCTION.

In the 1930s the first television broadcast was transmitted from the World's Fair. It was a novelty device, which few saw as anything other than as a technological fad. Television disappeared until after the end of World War II, when it came out in black and white for the masses. The era of live TV was born. If Orson Welles' use of radio to perform the War of the Worlds had an unnerving impact on a newly emerging mass society -- which panicked when it thought it was under a genuine attack from aliens from another planet -- the promise of television to enhance the mind control of the governing class had true potential. What all the loud, opinionated pundits seem to miss when they criticize foreign countries for failing to uphold the idea of a free press, is the fact that all television and radio broadcasters in America are licensed by the United States Government, which has yanked licenses when stations have gotten too controversial. (After compliance with the Census was made mandatory and punishable by imprisonment, about 1980, a radio station in Hawaii took the position that a mandatory Census was un-American, and urged non-cooperation; the FCC lost no time in revoking the station's license).

Early television had the feeling of honesty to it because of that old wive's-tale "the camera never lies." The reality -- THAT THE CAMERA ALWAYS LIES -- is not understood by the layman. Real first-hand experience is a three-dimensional phenomena, which includes sights, sounds, smells and touch; it also includes the intellectual process of knowing, which amounts to an almost sacred union between that which experiences and that which is being experienced. A camera can only take a moment in time and capture that moment, at a single frozen angle, in a particular light, none of which may reflect what is depicted as it is in nature.

At first television was seen as an outsider by the so-called hardcore journalists, and by the movie studios. A handful of studios controlled Hollywood under a mogul system that made it ripe for socialist organizing. The ironic message of Marxism all along was that where capitalists expand their control, the conditions ripen for the mass of workers to wake up to their central role in enriching the capitalists. But where in European countries the slavemasters recognized the signs of a decaying social contract, and loosened the reins on the slaves, the American reaction was to tighten the reins, and punish dissent. The Un-American Activities "investigations" of McCarthy are a powerful reminder of the collusion between the three branches of the republican government, and the mass media. How many innocent Americans did Walter Winchell destroy, before he descended into his much-deserved obscurity? Dick Nixon's rise to power was punctuated by his finger-pointing and witch-hunting tactics. The sorry truth, however, is that witch-hunts date back to Salem, Massachusetts, and we still haven't learned that these mob-inciting tactics are attempts to short-circuit the legitimate recourse to the legal system, where some kinds of standards of proof and evidence still apply, at least technically. (One of the greatest propagandists for the republic, and possibly one of the greatest propagandists of all time -- even outclassing Goebbels and Hitler, himself -- was J. Edgar Hoover, who rose to prominence as a result of the hysteria-inducing Palmer Raids. By his clever manipulation of ideas through the use of television, such as his closely controlled television series The FBI, and through such gimmicks as the slogan, "The FBI Always Gets Its Man," and the Ten Most Wanted List, the American people were easily tricked into ignoring the environment of terror and suspicion he masterminded, which even intimidated U.S. Presidents).

While the police were hunting down "anarchists" -- which was anyone who believed that the Federal Government was an illegal institution -- and breaking strikes of over-worked women and children demanding decent wages, the Motion Picture Industry was developing a positive ideal of glamour to attract and lure the Middle Class into collaboration with the republic. The republic had been set up by commercial interests for commercial purposes, and it was consistent with the modus operandi of industry in general to be supportive of the legal system of the republic, which made it possible for ancient laws protecting human beings to be superceded, to enable industrial development that demanded that common law protections against poisoning land, air and water be waived. When the same basic principles came to be applied to banking and insurance interests, and the fairly new field of speculative stock investment, unprecedented fortunes were made. The stock market made Las Vegas appear like a sure deal, because it was always dominated by a handful of insiders, who employed tactics like regular market "shake-outs" of small-investors to proclaim the highest returns of all time the same year the market collapsed in 1929.

The so-called Star System was haunted by the reality that the Stars felt like glamourous slaves. Captive beneficiaries who came from very ordinary beginnings, but who were catapulted into uncharted terrain, the lonely terrain of the Super-Star: the object of worship, the icon. The studio picked dates for their leading men and women, and arranged marriages. The "sighting" of a movie star accompanied by a producer or director at a Hollywood "Hot Spot," became the subject of pseudo-intellectual speculation on par with the Kremlinologists attempting to read the intentions of the Soviet Union by the make-up of the Soviet officials on Lenin's Tomb at official events. The sheer ludicrous fact that so much attention was focused on events set up by the studio, from the creation of "hot spots" to the placement of paid reporters at the site, who had advance knowledge of the "spontaneous event," was not appreciated by a society that was being worked into premature graves. America enjoyed being entertained and felt entitled to indulge itself. It had won the war, and American politicians were pushing their weight around, making the world safe for General Motors and United Fruit.

What evolved was a multi-media information sphere bombarding innocent people with messages from all the angles available to modern man: sight, sound and dimension. Monied interests found that they could employ college-educated PR specialists from Madison Avenue -- the birthplace of modern advertising as an influence peddler -- to create campaigns that had mass penetration and appeal. Sloganeering was raised to an art form, as the attention span of the average American was reduced to about 20 seconds. Every new innovation in mass persuasion had the effect of making the average American more unprepared to defend himself from fraudulent representations.

At about the time the mass media was thoroughly convinced that it had complete control over the way Americans think about issues -- because there was no independent media able to challenge the handful of corporations that owned the media as private property -- along came one of the most arrogant and misguided police actions of the republic's history. The United States Government proceeded to violate its own Constitution, by sending troops to war without declaring war. Of course, only a lawyer could think up such a condition. After John Kennedy sent military personnel into south Vietnam, he, himself, was assassinated two weeks after the CIA-engineered assassination of the President of South Vietnam.

The mass media would never recover from the loss of its credibility due to its wholehearted embrace of the Warren Commission, and the famed Magic Bullet, which supposedly wounded Governor Connelly and killed the president -- while changing direction a number of times -- and which now appears in photographs as a virtually unblemished discharged bullet. The real test of the ability of the media to close ranks can be witnessed in the merciless and scathing criticism Oliver Stone received for his version of the assassination, called JFK. There was a visceral feel among the ruling class that this person had abused his privileges, by giving the grievances of the marginalized enough credence to air their views. One columnist scoffed at the idea of a conspiracy, declaring that he remembered the day when he and 50,000 other co-conspirators met at the Madison Square Gardens to plot the assassination and cover-up. Yet a Congressional committee did find evidence of a conspiracy, and hard evidence all seems to point in the direction of the "off-the-shelf, stand alone" rogue intelligence agents of the kind that became famous for the Watergate break-in, and the Iran-Contra embezzlement scandal. However, lest anyone become too excited because they sense in this an attack on either the left or the right, it should be understood that the governing interests of the country disregard the divisions between the Democrats and the Republicans, making sure to donate heavily to both, since a fickle public is capable of returning either party to power with the changes of passing fancy.

During the Vietnam "War" the Pentagon continuously generated statistics that supported the plans of the bureaucracy to prosecute the war. Because the Federal Government had very successfully suppressed its own slave castes, and forced them to become useful when they were finally freed, or confined to penitentiaries, the Establishment of the republic was over-confident that it could overcome the native resistance of the Vietnamese to foreign occupation. Americans had re-written history so many times, we didn't know, ourselves, what was true. When American troops were increased to a half a million men, the media reported what they were told to report by a Pentagon that had a history of controlling how its victories and defeats would be portrayed in the press. This was what is called "Military History", and it is not written by general historians, but by military men with oaths of allegiance to the very command structures about whose defeats they must describe. It is said that every military fights its last battle when it goes to war, which speaks to the institutional memory of armies. Most interestingly, the root institution of the Federal Government is in fact the United States Army, which is chronologically older than the republic. This relationship has basically made the U.S. Government the dog dragged about by its tail, because the military reviles the politicians, believing that it alone is the true repository of American nationalism.

Mass armies are the core institutions of mass states, and the Armed Forces are the largest employer in the United States. In order to move a mass that mass had to be influenced by ideas, and the original mass army, the levee en masse of France (which introduced conscription and the draft to the modern state), was inspired by the French Enlightenment ideals of Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood. Coupled with hatred of everything old, this powered the French conquest of Europe with the largest armies of all time. Napoleon was not so much a military genius as he was a tactical genius. He devised ways to employ large bodies of men on the battlefield that are still relevant today. However, the raising of the army by the state required the use of the media to capture the imagination of the masses, and for this nothing worked better than a national emergency. It was these national emergencies that were created all the time, as staged events, such as when Hitler sent thugs over across into territory he intended to annex, whose crimes against Germans became the pretext of an invasion to protect Germans. It is a basic tactic of fascism.

The media in Germany dutifully reported the advances of Chancellor Hitler, in the same way that the American media dutifully suppressed photographs of FDR in a wheel chair. The Hollywood movie stars went on road-tours promoting War Bonds and "rationing." Rationing generated a pop-culture version of "fairness," which openly suggested that anyone who "cheated" a government agency actually cheated the whole American people. These superficial values became the basis of the post-war civic culture, which was an ethic of mind-numbing uniformity and polarization. The Nazi practice of turning in one's neighbors or parents for crimes against the state -- really only a revival of the Puritan practices in the Plymouth Colony -- became standard operating procedure of the very states that defeated the Nazis in War. The Federal Government even opened concentration camps for Americans of Japanese descent, which the media gave its full support to as its patriotic duty. (Americans offended by the suggestion that their own leaders actually confined human beings to concentration camps, have suggested that the term confined makes it sound that the Japanese were there involuntarily; but survivors remember the machine guns that guarded the camps).

Of course, the media applauds when Americans are carted off to camps, and it applauds when forty years later the camps are declared violations of human rights, entitling the victims to renumeration. The smile on the news anchorman or woman's face is everpresent, whether the news is bad or good. There is a nervous agitation behind the dignified calmness that comes to the surface when civil disorders take place, like riots or tornados, FORCES OF NATURE. Yet the newsmen are no one to focus attention upon, they insist, they are not the story, it is the news that is the focus of their jobs. And they repeat this to every tabloid reporter doing a piece on the newsman, because reporters are now celebrities too; cultural icons of truth, justice and the American Way. What is rarely mentioned is the genuine force driving the news, which is not the truth, but ratings. As the incidence of casual murder escalates, in which increasing numbers of Americans actually take pleasure torturing and murdering their fellow Americans as a form of entertainment, the entertainment industry is hard-pressed to reflect these trends to remain realistic; to enable the movies to fulfill their function of "suspending the ability to disbelieve." Yet the media never assumes any responsibility for the "fevers" it invokes in an unwitting populace.

The inside of a television show is a trade secret, because the gears and levers involved in making news are not as objective as the producers of news shows would like a gullible public to believe. While the news is generally driven by tragedies and Acts of God (because of its focus on the police blotter), there is another aspect to television production that involves generating the interest of the public in issues that are not newsworthy. A good example is the reactionary tendency of the American press to predict the fall of the English monarchy, which seems stubbornly resistant to every prediction of its imminent demise. These predictions have taken place for 200 years, ever since the revolution, and yet those Brits persist in their support of the ancient constitution, the same constitution that still underlies the entire American legal system. In fact, the Americans seem equally enthralled with the latest gossip on the royal family because until an American royal family is installed, culturally the English Queen remains the tribal icon of leadership to Americans, as a transcendant figure. This goes over the head of the jingoistic American press, which has memorized the litany of the American civic creed, central to which was the suppression of all ancestral loyalty to Britain.

Typical of the showman-style of news that prevails throughout the republic was the location of an escaped war criminal in South America, who was extradited to Italy largely through the efforts of ABC News. Another example of stage-managed news was the discovery that NBC News actually planted small explosives in a truck they had covered as unsafe. It revealed a side of the news business that was nothing short of unsavory and dishonest; it appeared that the integrity of the news was selective, so that efforts to slander were deemed justifiable because of some higher interest which remained obscured. It is actually common-place for ambitious reporters to dig up dirt on someone in a public position because high profile personalities have long coat tails; and reporters, like junior District Attorneys, all look for that golden opportunity to acquire fame, that rare and delicate commodity that can be cashed-in through lucrative book-writting contracts or a political career. There is no more sure way to fame than to investigate some big shot in the political party of the other side (it's always the reporters' own party that benefits from his or her investigations), which leads to an official investigation by the District Attorney, or even better, the State Attorney General. This has been raised to an art form on the national level with the Special Prosecutors legislation that came in the aftermath of Watergate, which was actually a concession to the fact that the Government could not be trusted to investigate itself.

In the rat-race rush to coerce the majority to comply with the ordinances adopted by the politicians in their assemblies, the media joyously overlooks the fundamental reality that the masses depend upon the media and the government for reliable information, and that they are easily duped. The logic of the mass media is painfully and excrutiatingly short-circuited, as human beings are sacrificed in cold blood for the sake of saving a bloated and out-of-control institutional order. The only difference between the old Soviet Union and the current Federal Government of the United States, is that the Soviets gave up and stopped torturing the truth. The Federal Government, on the other hand, has spent two centuries avoiding the truth, and doesn't intend to become the victim of that falsity this late in the game. But of course, so did the Czar and Czarina of All the Russias.

Lies generate their own counter-force, which is the curiosity that develops when they are exposed, as to what constitutes truth. Lies in fact only have relevance in relation to truth, which is why liars are so vociferous in their defense of the theory that there is no truth. When a crime against humanity is committed it crosses partisan boundaries, to speak to the humanity of anyone who becomes a witness in terms so dynamic it overwhelms all transient loyalties. This took place when, in the 1970s, the bodies of the Imperial Russian family were found, and those who discovered them took a virtual blood oath that the site would remain secret until the Communists, who murdered the royal family, had fallen from power. At the time such a plan could have been viewed as optimistic at best, yet the people who discovered what they knew was a crime scene felt so moved that they swore a pact to pass on the location of the bodies to succeeding generations if necessary!

There is something of this sentiment among Americans, as regards the murder of John F. Kennedy. While he was not actually an exceptional president, and he was moved by partisan intrigue to support his own side at the expense of the country (like all partisans), his brutal murder made him into a figure of Shakespearean dimensions. It created a gaping wound in the body politic that won't be healed until his murderers are identified, and some closure attained. This is the personal characteristic of the nation and its relationship with its leaders, so that even though the ancient royal system of legitimate government has been overthrown, the pundits insist on the terminology of the lost Camelot. The archtype of the king and the kingdom are so ancient and venerable that they haunted the Founders of the republic. That is why the anti-monarchist extremism of the republic is so pronounced...

The final culmination of the collusion between the state and the mass communication interests -- the media and the motion picture industry -- came with the election of a former Screen Actor's Guild president to the Presidency of the United States. Like John Wayne in True Grit, Ronald Reagan gave the best performance of his career, doing the role of president. It became clear once he was out of office that he was generally briefed about his own positions right before "going on." At one time he openly referred to his speech as a script, which was broadcast into the homes of America. In the end he was the "Teflon President" because no matter what his administration did, none of the consequences seemed to stick to him. He was popular because he fulfilled the majesty of the office with the dignity of a performer, because the highest office of the land is a symbolic office. The presidency is a mock monarchy, built to rotate so that no one man might attain an actual interest in the long-term interests of the American people, because the Founders realized that only by rotating the office of the highest magistrate could their individual holdings be protected (many of them owning estates with title that, at best, was clouded by the legally dubious methods that were employed to oust the original "owners," the American Indians).

The culture of the media is fundamentally enmeshed with the political society spawned by the republic, which bears the veneer of equality over a divided society. Racially divided, economically divided, and geographically divided. The ruse of "freedom" is a distraction away from the reality that the republic has been a device for reducing the ancestral freedom of the American people. The best evidence of this can be found in the sycophantic adoration by the media of the republic. The republic is always right, in a new twist of the old saying, "Mussolini is always right." It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that opinions critical of the government never seem to make their way into the mass media. When by some fluke a criticism does find its way into print, or goes on the air, it is either because some major disaster has occured which the Government's flaws caused and which were too glaring to hide; or it is because the poor fool who dared to speak up is about to be made an example of the power of ridicule to stigmatize politically incorrect opinions in America.

When a politically incorrect opinion is voiced, especially by an accredited "mouth-piece" such as a tenured professor, or a popular-celebrity pundit, the method for marginalizing this kind of dissent is the equivalent of a bum-rush. The target is overwhelmed by politically correct criticism of him, which can include a tremendous amount of viscious slander (i.e., lies). This is where the hate comes in, because the media feels free to target people and institutions for the public to hold in contempt, which it then justifies destroying even if the way this is done is to lie. This is best exemplified by the coverage of court cases by the media, which is pre-disposed by its historical connections with the Government to give the state the benefit of all doubt when it charges citizens with having committed crimes. The media is the first to act as judge and jury by convicting defendants based only on the legal theories put forward by the District Attorneys, and thereby feeling justified to lead a gullible public to the same conclusions, neglecting the fact that the world of the media is a world of perceptions. Perceptions that are often manipulated by the actual power and influence of the parties. Not surprisingly, one of the parties to all criminal actions is the police; but it is completely beyond the ability of the every-day run-of-the-mill reporter to accept that it is within the realm of possibility that a bureaucracy like the police department might fabricate evidence, or attempt to create a case against an innocent person. Thus the ground is laid for explosions of public sentiment, when someone the media has convinced millions of spectators is guilty, is set free by a jury that actually had to witness every pertinent detail of the case firsthand. This reveals the ugly underside of the culture of the media, the culture of power. Reporters, editors and news programmers are intensely aware of their power over the public mind, the seriousness of which can be heard in apologetics about the duties of journalists to be impartial. This impartiality, however, is only a cover to disguise the actual inner affiliations that exist between the blue-blood "old money families" of the social register, and the media, who fawn on the upper class, and actively assist in disguising the way they control the society from the man on the street.

An interesting anecdote came out about this in Orange County, California, when the Los Angeles Times, the lap-dog of the Chandler family, did a story on Donald Bren, the billionaire developer of the Irvine Ranchero. Mr. Bren and the Irvine Co. were instrumental in developing Newport Beach -- one of the most successful areas of what is now euphemistically called the Gold Coast -- and the City of Irvine, California, the epitome of modern urban planning. Irvine has neighborhoods that are reminiscent of the old B-movie "The Stepford Wives," in which the housewives of a squeaky clean suburb are all turned into the drugged slaves of their husbands. (Sort of like a Democrat's worst nightmare of life in a world run by the Republicans). Irvine is carefully segregated into physically separated neighborhoods that were built to accomodate the reality of social classes, the price structure being designed to exclude buyers of the wrong class. While the class structure is not as severe as a hereditary system, it is perhaps more cruel, being marked by the insensitivity of nouveau riche tendencies.

Donald Bren, however, is not just another resident of Orange County. He is the principal rival of the Segerstrom family, whose development, the South Coast Plaza, is in direct competition with Bren's Fashion Island mall. He is a man to be reckoned with, whose mere disapproval cancelled plans for a new Newport Beach Art Museum designed by the world-renown I.M. Pei because Donald Bren didn't like the design. Bren is the archtypal billionaire the entire system of government of the republic was designed to recognize and bow to, and which the media knows to give sufficient cover that he can appear just like every other Private Citizen, while slightly above the rest, like a First Among Equals. The reality, however, that Bren has MORE AT STAKE -- that he has more property to lose than anyone else in Orange County -- only became readily apparent when, during the events that led up to the filing of the unprecedented bankruptcy by Orange County in 1994, county officials were on the phone to the Lord of the Manor, discussing how the bankruptcy might impact HIM.

It certainly gives one reason to pause...