Understanding Propaganda Part 2
Junious Ricardo Stanton
Last week I wrote about propaganda and how it is the way an international cabal of professional manipulators influence individuals, groups and large swaths of the global populous to accept, believe, consume and act in certain ways beneficial to the content creators and their clients. Propaganda is a tool that can be used for good or evil. It is a tool of image and idea dissemination, calculated social manipulation and premeditated social engineering.
Every day we are targeted by psychologically formatted images, content and promptings to get us to believe buy and internalize crafted messages about ourselves, others and the world. The real impetus behind propaganda is power. The “father of modern Public Relations and Propaganda is Edward Bernays. Bernays was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud who used his uncles’ ideas on the human psyche and the theories of several other psychotherapists to develop ways to manipulate the human unconscious to get a predetermined desired result whether it was buy selected products, believing certain facts or behaving in subscribed ways.
At the root of all modern propaganda are Edward Bernays ideas on social control by a few elites. “The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. To advertise on a scale which will reach fifty million persons is expensive. To reach and persuade the group leaders who dictate the public's thoughts and actions is likewise expensive. For this reason there is an increasing tendency to concentrate the functions of propaganda in the hands of the propaganda specialist. This specialist is more and more assuming a distinct place and function in our national life. New activities call for new nomenclature. The propagandist who specializes in interpreting enterprises and ideas to the public, and in interpreting the public to promulgators of new enterprises and ideas, has come to be known by the name of ‘public relations counsel.’ …The public relations counsel, then, is the agent who, working with modern media of communication and the group formations of society, brings an idea to the consciousness of the public. But he is a great deal more than that. He is concerned with courses of action, doctrines, systems and opinions, and the securing of public support for them. He is also concerned with tangible things such as manufactured and raw products. He is concerned with public utilities, with large trade groups and associations representing entire industries. He functions primarily as an adviser to his client, very much as a lawyer does.” Propaganda by Edward Bernays pages 37 and 38
Technology has advanced fat beyond Bernays’ time which was not that long ago considering Bernays made transition in 1995. Now the ruling oligarchs has access to a vast array of gizmos, gadgets, tools and weaponry they can use to influence, manipulate and control us by exploiting our fears, insecurities, desires and fantasies.
“The internet and other technologies have made it easier to weaponize and exploit these flaws, beguiling more people faster and more compellingly than ever before. It is likely artificial intelligence will be used to exploit the weaknesses inherent in human nature at a scale, speed, and level of effectiveness previously unseen. Adversaries like Russia could pursue goals for using these manipulations to subtly reshape how targets view the world around them, effectively manufacturing their reality. If even some of our predictions are accurate, all governance reliant on public opinion, mass perception, or citizen participation is at risk. One characteristic human foible is how easily we can falsely redefine what we experience. This flaw, called the Thomas Theorem, suggests, ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Put another way, humans not only respond to the objective features of their situations but also to their own subjective interpretations of those situations, even when these beliefs are factually wrong. Other shortcomings include our willingness to believe information that is not true and a propensity to be as easily influenced by emotional appeals as reason, as demonstrated by the ‘North Dakota Crash’ falsehood.” Artificial Intelligence and the Manufacturing of Reality by Christopher Paul and Marek N. Posard (underlined emphasis is mine)
https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/01/artifici... This is what we are experiencing now, social media and other technological vehicles are being weaponized and employed to dupe, gaslight and bamboozle us to believe a fake reality these technologies are being used to create. When Bernays was working for the Creel Committee in the early 1900’s newspapers radio, films and graphic art advertisements were the vehicles used to convince the American people entering WWI was the good and noble thing to do.
Today we are being duped to support Ukraine a failed state, a corrupt banana republic the US created when it paid $5.5 billion dollars to sponsor a coup d’état in 2014 to toppled the duly elected government of that country!
https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-u... Bernays techniques along with massive suppression and censorship are being used to gaslight and beguile us into thinking COVID and Monkeypox are Biblical proportion plagues when they are not.
We need to understand the power of propaganda and psychological warfare and how they are being used against us.
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Posted By: Junious Stanton
Monday, July 11th 2022 at 10:27PM
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