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by Mark Petrakis
August
26, 2020
from
Off-Guardian Website
Art work source:
audioxide.com
"Those
who are serious in ridiculous matters
will be
ridiculous in serious matters."
Cato the
Elder
The enduring beauty of fascism is that it requires so
little from us… so little independent thought:
just our basic belief
and adherence to a limited set of popularly-shared directives
and narratives that once fully accepted, relieve us of the need
to address stubborn questions or to fret over subtle differences
of opinion and feeling.
Propaganda reassures us,
that we are complete,
that we know all there is to know, that we are rational,
pragmatic and pure, that the science has been settled and that
we are a part of something special...
Such a surrender to
reductionist narratives cuts across all classes and income brackets.
Neither the most educated
nor the least uneducated retain any special advantage in the face of
powerful consensus-shaping propaganda.
PROPAGANDA is, of course, the
life-blood of fascist control.
Maintaining the
economic, governmental and scientific frameworks of a
technocratic-fascist "operating system" is unthinkable without
propaganda and disinformation.
When truth is seen as a
liability to power, it must always be disallowed, and all instances
of it effectively penalized.
Radio and television and their constant enabler, popular "science" -
operate today as their own religions, reliant for their success upon
the devotion of the masses.
As
Marshall
McLuhan told us,
the experience of
electronic media is always more powerful than the specific
messaging it contains...
The currency that we use
to pay for the electronic spectacle is our attention, and in such
hyper-mediated times as these, the charges mount up exponentially,
until we find ourselves saddled with soul-crushing denial and
disconnection.
Three defining historical moments (among many) have defined the
confluence of fascism, propaganda and technology.
-
The fundamental
principles of propaganda were first defined 100 years ago by
Edward Bernays, often
referred to as the father of public relations.
-
Joseph
Goebbels served as Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi
Germany from 1933 to 1945.
The stunning
successful lessons of his Nazi propaganda programs were not
lost on the world's political and economic leaders in the
post-war era, and in the time since then.
-
The Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA)
was founded in 1947, for the expressed purpose of conducting
secret intelligence operations that could serve political
aims at the same time they generated huge and untraceable
profits.
The extent of the
CIA's illegal enterprises necessitated the creation and
maintenance of a permanent ministry of disinformation,
managed by our own taxpayer-funded "Shadow Government" and
"Deep State."
In retrospect then, it is
clear that these propaganda campaigns have proven SO successful,
that even today, few of us ever realize how ongoing, vast and
wide-spread they are.
Propaganda's efficacy is so indisputable, that it is commonly the
case that those who are the most certain that they are NOT among the
propagandized, are in fact its most overt victims.
Corporate media focuses on those
stories they are paid to propagate, i.e., those which support the
financial and ideological
agendas of their owners, who themselves are all, without exception,
central parts of the larger global ruling oligarchy.
A key part of the propagandist's handbook is to simply leave
unexplored stories that they are NOT given approval to manage and
control; stories which, we might assume, do not generate sufficient
advantage for the owners.
Such calculated sins of
omission are essential to keeping the mass of believers unperturbed
by the vagaries of complexity in the delivery of their daily dogmas.
If an individual were to insist upon learning more about any of
these less-discussed stories, they would soon arrive at the
realization that,
while an abundance of
relevant facts can easily be found, and often hidden in plain
sight, the truth is that most people simply do not WANT to know,
think or talk about any such truths that differ from those
accepted by their peers, for whom cognitive dissonance causes
such literal pain and disorientation, as to keep them docile and
compliant to the dictates of the media...
As McLuhan said:
"Only the small
secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by
public incredulity."
Perhaps, the grandest
illusion of all, and which must be maintained at all costs, is that
both the world and the stories we tell of it, must be made to appear
as though they are generated randomly.
It must always appear
that the media's coverage and the comments of experts are entirely
free from any preconceived manipulation.
In the terminology of the media,
news must always be
"Breaking!",
...even though in
reality, we know the news more closely resembles a cooking show,
where ingredients are chopped and sliced before-hand, after which
they are mixed and served up live on camera in ways that keep the
public hooked on happy hash-slinging and enticingly-scripted
recipes.
Technocratic-Fascism, the
advanced fusion of the multinational technology-dominated
corporatocracy with the
authoritarian global and surveillance state, allows its initiates to
believe they are a part of something bigger than themselves.
Witness the magical
left's lockstep belief,
in the pure villainy
of
Donald Trump, or the
magical right's equally lockstep belief in Trump as a
self-sacrificing national hero...
Clearly both parties to
the constant heist of human freedom need each other to better manage
their greed for consumer profit and civilian control.
Such mental assaults
secondarily require that all truthful motives remain hidden and
obfuscated in a fog of weaponized storytelling.
This accounts of course for the abiding value of bullshit, does it
not?
Bullshit effectively
misleads without upsetting the natural order of things, without
irreversibly tearing apart the fabric of credibility. Nothing can
stand in the way of the constant flow of messaging, profit and
growth, which are after all, the primary justifications for all this
deceptive disorder.
This is another aspect of what makes technocratic-fascism so
irresistible:
in realizing how
effective it is at knowing us better than we know ourselves...
The assumption is that if
we were to know ourselves better than the stories we are told, we
would not be seduced by such obvious lies.
Since we don't, our
"betters" are left with no choice but to keep up the constant
barrage of lies, at least until our thinking eventually locks up and
we capitulate and collapse, like a stack of wooden blocks.
If for example,
we did not always
obey or give our attention to propaganda, we would soon grow
alarmed by the many contradictions that we are told exist, say,
-
between the
Covid monster and the daily vaporous disease statistics
-
between
maskers and non-maskers
-
between
vaxxers and anti-vaxxers
-
between
crushing economic destruction and the mewling need for
safety
-
between the
lunatic left and the lunatic right
-
between black
and whites
-
between males
and females
-
between one
piece of orthogonal bullshit and another equally
opposing piece of bullshit...
ALL of these dichotomies,
of course, are at some fundamental level FALSE… every last one of
them, each constructed by skilled media professionals and put in
place to overwhelm our critical thinking and that of millions of
others from seeing what's really going on in the limitless
background.
In this remarkably cost-efficient way, human energy and intelligence
are siphoned off, and directed towards the task of turning us into
helplessly confused and easily-controllable "lab rats," forcibly cut
off from each other, lest we experience ourselves as intelligent and
sovereign beings.
If something like that
were to happen, the driving agendas of big business and global
governance to keep us marching in lockstep towards a more divided
and disempowered fate, would soon disintegrate.
It is in such a state of debilitating surrender that we are divided
one subset "targeted" demographic against another; all herded into a
wicked mental trap with one side thinking one thing, while the other
side thinks something else - such that half of us hate the other and
the other half hate the other right back.
At this point, and after so many years of unqualified victories for
the industries supported by the propaganda industry, the pathetic
truth is that propaganda doesn't even NEED to be that entertaining
anymore.
Knowing they have the
situation in tow, the purveyors of propaganda can save a ton of
money by just being sensational, confrontational and redundant in
their narratives.
Recall this quote from the singular Frank Zappa:
"The illusion of
freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the
illusion.
At the point where
the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just
take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they
will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see
the brick wall at the back of the theater."
Once we have learned to
carry on absent the need for verifiable truth, or without the
need to discern authentic and honest voices from deceitful and
manipulative ones, we gradually lose our interest in so-called
"truth," preferring instead to keep splashing about in
unsubstantiated speculation, pompous judgments and opinionated
fluff.
Let's be honest… the only people who might actually CARE what any of
us think about the blaring big topics of the day (masks or vaccines
or climate change or Black Lives Matter, etc.) are other equally
thin-skinned victims of propaganda, who much like the majority of
us, still believe that the government 'cares' about them and
that the
mainstream media is telling them
the truth...
That is why a growing number of people have given up on the media's
crudely fictional depiction of reality, and are instead trying to
figure out how to thrive and to reconnect energetically with
others - and with truths that can only exist OUTSIDE
the reach of the propaganda 'spectacle.'
The media, of course, with their sophisticated surveillance tracking
tools knows full well when there is an uptick in negative reactions
to their toxic narratives, but since it is also aware that it is
after all pushing nothing but sugar water bullshit, it is left with
little choice but to double-down and turn the levels up even higher…
thus ramming even more bullshit at us.
Whacky Joe Biden,
Greedy Green Greta, Covid, Aunt Jemima Race Wars and endless
offenses… all come at us so fast and so hard as to leave us bent
and broke under the weight of it all, as we stumble around like
headless chickens desperately trying to win the approval of our
friends by looking like we are at least doing the only
"acceptable" thing.
Arriving at his frenzied
point of screwball hyper-polarization, is the essential endgame of
Propaganda… locking us into its agenda, at the same time it demands
that we think we are making these choices of our own 'FREE WILL'...!
To get us to that point though, they must keep us constantly
preoccupied:
agitated, offended,
attacking each other and defending ourselves against all
threats, both real and imagined...
The more they can get
us ensnared in mind-numbing opinions and outrages, the less
energy and attention will be left to notice the deeper more
manipulative agendas of techno-fascism...
Mid 20th
Century fascism was woefully limited in its capacities and in what
it could extract from its victims… and yet still it worked!
The new
technocratic-fascism is here to mine the population for all the
bio-capital commodification it can.
Those who can invent
the most efficient and ingenious means of converting human
confusion, poverty, crime and illness into impact markets will
quickly take their place among the prior generations' titans of
technology.
Once you step back far
enough though to experience the sheer SCALE of this ongoing and
unlimited propaganda WAR on us, it grows a bit easier to see why so
few are able to escape the media's influence.
Oh, for a while perhaps,
you can rise above it… but eventually, you will get pulled back down
into the muck.
Even if you kill your TV,
unplug yourself from your media feeds, and turn off the Wi-Fi, each
of us, at some point, will relapse and fall off the wagon.
This is because propaganda is not just about what's in the news or
in the media.
It's even more
importantly about the broadly consensual layers of social
hallucination that are created and shared across all of society,
which make it difficult for any of us to function socially,
absent those commonly shared reference points and signals that
we have convinced ourselves are required in order to allay our
anxiety, confusion and isolation… all of which are primary
raisons d'êtres for propaganda in the first place.
I wish there was one
simple way to break propaganda's voodoo spell.
There isn't...
I'm not even sure how to
do that for myself, or how I can avoid falling prey to it again,
just as I and most of us have done for the great majority of our
lives.
What seems obvious to me now is that propaganda in the service of a
transhumanist-centered technology
has become so pervasive and insidiously forceful, that in many ways,
our thinking has ceased to be entirely our own, and that the portion
of our soul that remains recognizable as uniquely us, is shrinking
fast.
The effect of all this leaves our spirits infected, and easily
convertible into compliant puppets under the top-down control of
truly diabolically puppet masters, who in order to keep us
subservient to their untruths, and to doing whatever we are told,
have become masterful at pretending to be something they are
not...
This is perfectly exemplified in the character of
Bill Gates,
who working with his
Bain and Co. handlers and account managers, (who
previously managed the Iraq War for
Dick Cheney) have
constructed these elaborate biopharma/biocapital/vaccine public
health/fear narratives and investment pyramids,
...that are then fed to
the media and Wall Street, who reheat and serve them to the public,
generating criminal profits while making such that Gates is always
portrayed as an 'altruistic philanthropist' and protector of
the public… when any fool can see he is nothing of the sort.
NOT seeing just how obvious and laughable propaganda campaigns have
become in this one-size fits all era, leaves us painfully vulnerable
and ready to be further subsumed by more of the same.
The complexity of today's master plans for disinformation
are unparalleled compared to the past.
Looking back to the
1950's and 60's, when all the above long-term plans for centralized
and technocratic control were slowly being tested, being part of
America's growing middle-class was actually a pretty sweet deal.
It is in a return to more
bucolic and "normal" times as these that we pin our nostalgic hopes,
by the media but especially by politicians.
"Desperation is the
raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave
behind everything they have ever believed in, can
hope to escape."
William S.
Burroughs
Looking at our world, we can see that the reach and authority of the
transnational global capitalists who run the world's nation-sized
casinos has been cemented.
All systems are now in
place, up and running LIVE on that criminal syndicate's vast web of
networks.
Each one of us has by now
been targeted by them for some form of surveillance and
financialization - just as "nature" has, just as "disease" has, just
as "social justice" has, just as everything will eventually...
The "A.I. control grids" are all active and expanding.
The technocratic
agendas are now fully ready for prime-time...
We have been gradually
"shepherded" by propaganda and psychological torture techniques,
just as we have also been physically compromised,
...which are then
governed by oxygen-absorbing
5G which at the higher millimeter
wave frequency, will bring remote alteration of our very DNA under
the "persistent" control of A.I., which will guide the process of
transmuting us into commodities, into plunderable assets, into
digitally-regulated and genetically modified "livestock."
Sadly, this is where decades of constant acquiescence to propaganda
and institutional hypnosis has brought us… bent over, staring at our
shoes and bracing for the "BIG ONE."
I remember in my own youth, being convinced that the evil genius
of Hitler and Nazism had somehow transformed the mass of decent
German people into BEASTS, possessed by demons, as if in a dark
fairy tale… into something less than human.
We know that once we begin to regard others as LESS than us…
as something OTHER than us, it is only a short step to
unleashing our hate upon them, even to the point of becoming violent
and criminal.
Needless to say, these very same psychological imperatives are
everywhere apparent today:
in how we are
instructed by propaganda to regard the Chinese, Russians,
Muslims, white supremacist Trumpers, deluded depraved liberals,
defective racists, misogynist sexists and quivering face-ists
(with their acute disdain for anyone who questions the dogma of
e-mask-ulation)...
Same as it ever was, you
might say, but as we approach the much-touted singularity with its
accompanying convergence of man and machine,
How will the media
respond in the face of that Huxleyan "solution?"
In that light, how
might propaganda shift its focus?
I expect it will
change-up the pitch and tell us that THIS time, things will be
different.
This time won't be
like last time. No, this time, things will have changed, so that
we will no longer be "brainwashed" by the media as we were
before. No, when the coming big change happens to us, it will
not be like that.
We will rather be
transformed into advanced independent humans augmented by
perfectly blended combinations of technology, science and
engineering.
Our DNA will be carefully crafted by brilliant doctors and
scientists to enhance only the "preferred" qualities in their
human subjects, and under their wise direction, we will gladly
do as we are told.
For so great a
future, we will willingly offer our support and so grow
accustomed to our new life, lest we become like those poor
unfortunate souls, so lost in their unreason, that they cannot
fully appreciate the wisdom that derives from enthusiastically
embracing PROGRESS...
In our leaders inspired and time-tested plans, we will of course
have every convenience at our fingertips, such that doors will
magically open when we approach. We will be able to download all
manner of rich media and data with the blink of an eye.
We will be as
supermen...
Our definitions of what
is valuable and what is not,
will fluidly shift to
suit changing circumstances.
We will see ourselves
as the very picture of modernity, and the envy of the world…
just as we have always been.
We will be as
American as our multi-racial forefathers, even though they lived
in unenlightened times… long before today's great social justice
transformation allowed us, their proud descendants, to wake each
day into this glistening new world.
In such a world, when
we ask ourselves what we might be grateful for, we will no
longer need to struggle for an answer.
We will know exactly
what is good, true and beautiful and we
will commit ourselves to those lofty ideals each and every day.
Therein too, and most
mercilessly, resides the fatal beauty of technocratic-fascism.
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