The fiery letters of an unprecedented human catastrophe already stand flickering on the wall, and it will be fatal for the world as a whole, if we do not succeed immediately, in the coming days and weeks, to declare globalization a failure, and to set everything into motion to double agricultural production capacity in the shortest possible time!
This is of the utmost urgency: Since October 2007, there have been food riots in over 40 nations. According to Rajat Nag, managing director general of the Asian Development Bank, 1 billion Asians (!) are already at serious risk from the hunger crisis, and in Africa, Ibero-America, and among the poor on the other continents, an additional 1 billion face the same fate. But according to Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), since December his organization has been unable to raise 10.9 million euros (!) in order to purchase seed for poor farmers in developing countries. The rich states are simply not willing to support the developing countries with money, seed, and investment in infrastructure, Diouf told an FAO conference on Latin America in Brasilia in mid-April.
Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, pointed to an additional aspect of the crisis; namely, that the use of food for biofuels is a ``crime against humanity.'' In order that we might fill our gas tanks with ethanol with clear ecological conscience, people in the Third World must starve (and also die). Speaking of the resulting food riots, Ziegler said, ``These are riots of utter despair by people who fear for their lives, and who, nagged by deathly fear, take to the streets.''
And that's only the beginning. Because, as long as the current policy of the ``rich'' nations--i.e., the free-trade doctrine of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the European Union Commission, and so one--continues, the food cartels and speculators will take advantage of the conditions created by the escalating systemic crisis of the world financial system, to maximize their profits and to feed price inflation, without the farmers reaping any benefit therefrom. And if the world's central banks continue their practice of using tax revenues in an attempt to make up for the speculative losses of private banks, then we are going to see hyperinflation like Weimar Germany spread around the globe.
Under these circumstances, the entire planet will be swept by the storm winds of food riots, until humanity descends into a new dark age of chaos, gang warfare, and climbing death rates--or, until justice and life with human dignity is established for all human beings on this planet.
- The Oligarchy's Malthusian Axioms -
For the year 2050, the UN forecasts a population growth of 33%, that is, from the current 6.7 billion to approximately 9 billion human beings. The demand for food will rise correspondingly, and if we add the approximately 2 billion who are currently undernourished, then a doubling of food production is a good rough measure on which we can orient our planning efforts.
One would be hard put to find another issue which more effectively unmasks the oligarchical axiomatic state of mind, as this one. The U.S.-Eurocentric outlook regards the prospective population growth as a threat, bringing with it the challenge of mass immigration of poor people into the developed countries, and the struggle to secure raw materials (most of which are located in the poor countries). This viewpoint was most recently expressed by Michael V. Hayden, U.S. Director of Central Intelligence, at a speech at the University of Kansas. He asserted that this growth will occur chiefly in the nations of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, places where this population growth cannot be sustained economically, thus leading to a heightened danger of violence, rebellion, and extremism. This same oligarchical axiomatic outlook underlies the unspeakable strategy paper issued by five retired generals, who count as the first among the six primary challenges to the world community, population growth and the unequal distribution of the demographic curve in the various continents. This poses the greatest threat to prosperity, responsible government, and energy security, these generals say. The model for this neo-Malthusian, imperial world-view is the infamous National Strategic Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), drafted by Henry Kissinger in 1974, which declares all raw materials around the world to be a U.S. strategic security interest.
The truth is, that the oligarchical model which Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz set into motion on Aug. 15, 1971, with the end of Roosevelt's Bretton Woods system and of fixed currency exchange rates, thereby systematically guiding the economy into the direction of unregulated free trade, has now completely failed. This 1971 paradigm-shift away from production and into speculation--unregulated credit generation in the so-called offshore markets such as the Cayman Islands, where 80% of all hedge funds are headquartered--ushered in the emergence of today's casino economy.
Since that time, step by step, each new precedent has gone in the direction of the neo-liberal model: the creation of the eurodollar market; the 1974 oil price swindle; the 1975 hardening of ``IMF conditionalities''; the assaults by the Carter Administration, beginning in 1976, against ``mercantilist tendencies in the developing countries''; Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's 1979 high interest rate policy; the policies of ``Reaganomics'' and ``Thatcher economics'' in the 1980s, including the mergers and hostile takeovers typifying a process of ever greater cartellization; Alan Greenspan's invention of miraculous ``creative credit instruments'' following the Crash of 1987; and the unfettered globalization following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the transfer of industrial production into ``cheap production countries''--all these were further mileposts in the same direction.
- Behind Today's Hunger Catastrophe -
It is in this context that we must consider today's exploding hunger catastrophe. Formerly, since 1957, the European Economic Community's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) had been designed to supply the population with sufficient foodstuffs at reasonable prices, so that farmers had an appropriate income and agricultural production could be increased. But with the introduction of unfettered globalization, other, entirely different criteria took precedence. With the 1992 agricultural reform, consumer price reductions were instituted, for example: beef farms 20%, grain farms 30%, and milk farms 15%. But there were no provisions for corresponding compensation to the farmers. Instead, they were offered financial assistance tied to compliance with ``ecological criteria.''
The farmers had been talked into this deal with the argument that they ``must hold their own on the world market,'' i.e., they must be able to compete with cheapened production abroad. In practice, however, it meant that many farmers had to shut down completely, while others could run their farms only as a part-time occupation, such that a career in farming became unattractive for the young generation, resulting in the loss of many family farms.
This trend in the direction of free trade was escalated by the so-called Uruguay Round, the final negotiation session of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which ended their former practice of considering the rules of agricultural production from the standpoint of food security, and instead bound themselves to the strict rule of free trade, and thus to the food cartels' demand for maximization of profit. Since that time, millions of farms have gone bankrupt, and the process of cartellization has taken hold to such an extent, that in five months, the FAO has been unable to pull together a pitiful 10 million euros so that, in the midst of this hunger catastrophe, the poor countries might be able to sow seed--seed which is controlled by only three companies!
The replacement of GATT--which still had the form of a multilateral agreement among states--by the World Trade Organization, a supranational bureaucracy with far-reaching independent powers, portended a further round of deregulation, abolishment of all trade barriers not bound by collective bargaining agreements, and ``harmonization'' of member-states' standards. The chief beneficiaries of these measures in the direction of free trade, were, once again, the food cartels. Since then, completely anonymous WTO boards of experts have enjoyed the right to impose penalties on violators against free trade, without these ``experts'' being obliged in any way to account to voters for their actions.
For the European Union, the Agenda 2000 and the agricultural reform of 2005 further stepped up the tempo in the direction of reduction of surpluses (and thus the destruction of foodstuff reserves and exports). Instead of setting fair producer prices which could cover production costs, compensatory payments were made for leaving land fallow--``set-aside'' policy--and for completely arbitrary environmental protection measures. And so, the trend toward sell-offs of independent family farms proceeded apace.
Former German Economics Minister (and later Consumer Protection Minister) Renate Künast, and Agriculture Minister Franz Fischler, were correct when they spoke of a systemic change being introduced with this agricultural reform. Fischler cynically observed at the time, that the compulsory price reductions would also bring about a reduction in the intensity of cultivation, because the farmers would not have any money left for fertilizer or pesticides.
A bit later, some farmers fared better financially for a while, because of the EU subsidies for cultivation of plants for biofuels--but with the above-mentioned catastrophic consequences.
And it should be pointed out that the pioneer in the use of foodstuffs for the production of ethanol, was Benito Mussolini. Under the WTO and EU Commission regime, production capacity was reduced in the industrial nations, while at the time, the developing countries were forced to export cheap foodstuff in order to earn cash to repay foreign debt--and this, frequently, even though their own population was not adequately supplied with food. And so, today, the economic and moral bankruptcy of this system of British free trade and Manchester capitalism is plain for all to see.
Fortunately, there is also resistance against the genocidal policies of WTO and EU free trade. In recent weeks, French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier and German Consumer Protection Minister Horst Seehofer have begun a campaign aimed directly against the EU policies. Barnier started a European-wide campaign in defense of the CAP, a policy which some free-trade fanatics (such as David Spector, an Associate Professor at the Paris School of Economics, and the Financial Times) are demanding be completely abolished, despite the hunger crisis. Barnier attacks the idea that the poorest countries should export food to the rich countries, as a total departure from reality, since it is precisely such a policy which has ruined subsistence agriculture and local production in the poorest countries. Instead of this, Barnier demands that Africa, Latin America, and Asia likewise institute their own CAPs--i.e., a protectionist parity system.
- Emergency Measures Needed Now -
There can be only one answer to the obvious bankruptcy of murderous free trade: We need a worldwide mobilization for the most rapid possible doubling of agricultural production. The WTO itself must be dissolved, immediately.
Leading up to the FAO conference in Rome on June 3-5, all means, including unconventional ones, must be made available for enabling the FAO to set a program into motion to increase agricultural production worldwide. This must include a new ``Green Revolution,'' as well as medium-term measures for the expansion of infrastructure, the building up of food-processing industries in developing countries which do not have them, and for water management.
The topic of a new and just world economic order must be put onto the agenda. In view of the existential significance of this issue for the future of all humankind, a special session of the UN General Assembly must be convened on this theme. The New Bretton Woods system, and a New Deal for the entire world, in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt--measures which many heads of state and economists have been calling for--must immediately become the subject of an emergency conference of heads of state, who must decide upon a new world financial system which would permit all nations to develop. The building of the Eurasian Land-Bridge must be agreed upon as the keystone for reconstructing the world economy.
In the U.S. Declaration of Independence--which the Schiller Institute's founding conference in 1984 adopted as its charter by making it applicable for all nations of this world, by just a few wording changes--it says:
``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.''
This Declaration of Human Rights must hold true still today--for all human beings on this planet. What we need today, is men and women who fight with passion and love for the idea of a just world order, one in which the community of nations can live together in peace and human dignity. Life, Liberty, and Happiness mean, above all, that all people have enough to eat and that poverty is abolished--something which we have all the technological means to bring about. Whether we can make this vision into reality, or whether we instead speed humanity into collapse, is how each one of us will be measured by history.
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Retitled, copied from
http://www.larouchepac.com
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
We need a Good-Neighbor policy!
The flow of tens of billions of dollars in remittances sent home to Mexico and other Ibero-American countries by migrant workers in the United States, is drying up, according to official statistics provided by Mexico's Central Bank and a recent study issued by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). After rising at the rate of nearly 20% per year between 1994 and 2006, remittances stalled out in 2007, and in the first quarter of 2008 fell by 3%, compared to the same period in 2007.
Total remittances to Ibero-America were about $46 billion in 2007, with a little over half of that amount ($24 billion) going to Mexico. Entire communities, states, and even nations have become dependent on the flow of remittances, as genocidal British free trade and globalization policies forced huge chunks of the populations of these nations (30% in the case of El Salvador; 10% in the case of Mexico) to flee to the United States in desperate search of survival for themselves, and their families back home.
Now, the collapse of the U.S. "importer of last resort" means that starvation and chaos will be visited on the nations of Ibero-America--exactly as Lyndon LaRouche warned would occur, if the insane British economic policies were not changed. A recent Bank of Mexico study reported that 86% of all remittances are used by the families back in Mexico for basic "sustenance," i.e. survival.
The recent quarterly trend in remittances sent to Mexico tells part of the story:
2Q '06 = 21%
3Q '06 = 13%
4Q '06 = 8%
1Q '07 = 3%
2Q '07 = -1%
3Q '07 = 3%
4Q '07 = 0%
1Q '08 = -3%
But the reality is actually much worse than these average figures suggest. According to the IADB, although the total dollar amount of remittances to Ibero-America has stagnated or fallen somewhat, the number of workers who send money back home "regularly" fell dramatically from 12.6 million in 2006, to 9.4 million in the first quarter of 2008--i.e., 3.2 million workers stopped sending money regularly. In percentage terms, 73% of all Ibero-American born adults in the U.S. were sending money home regularly in 2006, whereas in 2008 that had fallen to only 50%. This is a tectonic shift in economic activity of nearly 25% of the Hispanic migrants in the U.S.
According to the IADB, 3.2 million fewer remitters translates into some 10 million people back home no longer receive support for their most essential "sustenance." The agency estimates that some 2 million families will, as a result fall below the poverty line, mainly in Mexico.
Ironically, this will lead to more people trying to flee their countries to come to the United States in search of survival--at exactly the point that the economic collapse and viciously anti-immigrant policies in the U.S. are expected to lead to the expulsion from the U.S. of up to 2 million people in the near term.
The shock front has hit.
copied from
http://www.larouchepac.com
Total remittances to Ibero-America were about $46 billion in 2007, with a little over half of that amount ($24 billion) going to Mexico. Entire communities, states, and even nations have become dependent on the flow of remittances, as genocidal British free trade and globalization policies forced huge chunks of the populations of these nations (30% in the case of El Salvador; 10% in the case of Mexico) to flee to the United States in desperate search of survival for themselves, and their families back home.
Now, the collapse of the U.S. "importer of last resort" means that starvation and chaos will be visited on the nations of Ibero-America--exactly as Lyndon LaRouche warned would occur, if the insane British economic policies were not changed. A recent Bank of Mexico study reported that 86% of all remittances are used by the families back in Mexico for basic "sustenance," i.e. survival.
The recent quarterly trend in remittances sent to Mexico tells part of the story:
2Q '06 = 21%
3Q '06 = 13%
4Q '06 = 8%
1Q '07 = 3%
2Q '07 = -1%
3Q '07 = 3%
4Q '07 = 0%
1Q '08 = -3%
But the reality is actually much worse than these average figures suggest. According to the IADB, although the total dollar amount of remittances to Ibero-America has stagnated or fallen somewhat, the number of workers who send money back home "regularly" fell dramatically from 12.6 million in 2006, to 9.4 million in the first quarter of 2008--i.e., 3.2 million workers stopped sending money regularly. In percentage terms, 73% of all Ibero-American born adults in the U.S. were sending money home regularly in 2006, whereas in 2008 that had fallen to only 50%. This is a tectonic shift in economic activity of nearly 25% of the Hispanic migrants in the U.S.
According to the IADB, 3.2 million fewer remitters translates into some 10 million people back home no longer receive support for their most essential "sustenance." The agency estimates that some 2 million families will, as a result fall below the poverty line, mainly in Mexico.
Ironically, this will lead to more people trying to flee their countries to come to the United States in search of survival--at exactly the point that the economic collapse and viciously anti-immigrant policies in the U.S. are expected to lead to the expulsion from the U.S. of up to 2 million people in the near term.
The shock front has hit.
copied from
http://www.larouchepac.com
Sunday, April 27, 2008
The Shaping of Public Opinion
This web site is still very much "under construction," but I want to take a minute to post this. The body is apparently the beginning of a book you can find at Amazon.com, Pr!: A Social History of Spinby by Stuart Ewen. It's bracketed by poster "lapis" comments made some five years ago.
Here Goes:
Lapis 7/15/2003
Shaping public opinion is a Science that is utilized by the globalists. The media is the message in this case and the carving tool of the collective mind. The world has fallen under a hypnotic spell with a very carefully scripted message. It takes reading between the lines to decipher this message..a message of tyranny and control.
One of the recent pioneers of this reality shaping was Freud's nephew, a man by the name of Edward Bernays. Here is some insight into his ways of deception, and just who utilizes these tools masterfully.
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Visiting Edward Bernays
When I began the research for this book-attempting to discover the social and historical roots that would explain the limitless role of public relations in our world-one of my first stops along the way was a sojourn with Edward L. Bernays, a man who, beginning during the 1910s, became one of the most influential pioneers of American public relations; a person whose biography, though not widely known, left a deep mark on the configuration of our world.
Born in Vienna in 1891, Bernays was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud. (His mother was Freud's sister, his father was Freud's wife's brother.) His family background impressed him with the enormous power of ideas, and accustomed him to the privileges and creature comforts of bourgeois existence.
Bernays was also a far-sighted architect of modern propaganda techniques who, dramatically, from the early 1920s onward, helped to consolidate a fateful marriage between theories of mass psychology and schemes of corporate and political persuasion.
During the First World War, Bernays served as a foot soldier for the U. S. Committee on Public Information (CPI)-the vast American propaganda apparatus mobilized in 1917 to package, advertise and sell the war as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy." The CPI would become the mold in which marketing strategies for subsequent wars, on to the present, would be shaped.
In the twenties, Bernays fathered the link between corporate sales campaigns and popular social causes, when-while working for the American Tobacco Company-he persuaded women's rights marchers in New York City to hold up Lucky Strike cigarettes as symbolic "Torches of Freedom." In October of 1929, Bernays also originated the now familiar "global media event," when he dreamed up "Light's Golden Jubilee," a worldwide celebratory spectacle commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the electric light bulb, sponsored-behind-the-scenes-by the General Electric Corporation.
While by birth an Austrian Jew, Bernays' work and vivid writings served as an inspiration for Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Nazi propaganda minister-or so public relations folklore records.
Bernays influence would continue to hold sway well into the post-World War II era. To put it simply, Edward Bernays' career-more than that of any other individual-roughed out what have become the strategies and practices of public relations in the United States.
I had encountered Bernays before. In the early 1970s, while writing a book on the social history of advertising-Captains of Consciousness-I had happened upon some of his writings-mostly from the 1920s. In the pages of Captains he fittingly looms as an eloquent and influential ideologue of an American consumer culture in formation.
Then, in the mid-1980s, while working on another book (All Consuming Images), I again ran into Mr. Bernays. This time it was primarily through his writings from the forties and fifties, when-as an enduring student of mass persuasion-he helped to educate political leaders on the uses of the mass media, and to the particular advantages of visual symbols as instruments for what he christened the "engineering of consent." Once more, through the agency of his fertile and suggestive writings, Bernays had emerged as a leading character in one of my manuscripts.
Both times my encounters with Bernays were like those that usually take place between historians and the "historical figures" that they write about. They were exchanges between old documents and the inquiring mind of their reader and interpreter. As I commenced work on my social history of public relations early in 1990, I assumed, reasonably, that Bernays, himself, was long gone. Once more, the picturesque record that he had left behind was as close as I was likely to get to him.
Soon, however, I stumbled onto the fact that my reasonable assumption was incorrect. In a conversation with a neighbor of mine named Richard Weiner-who is, himself, a prominent member of the public relations fraternity-I learned that Bernays was, in fact, still alive, residing in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Weiner instructed me: "If you're going to do this book, you've got to talk to Eddie Bernays." I was astonished and delighted to hear Bernays referred to in the present tense; I was also amused to hear him referred to as "Eddie." Behind the aura of historical figure, stood a guy called Eddie. I obtained Bernays' telephone number and set out to arrange an interview. He was then on the brink of his ninety-ninth birthday, and I didn't know what to expect. Would he see me? Would he be enfeebled? He was very old.
An exploratory call to Bernays reached an answering machine. A woman's voice, official in tone, informed me that I had reached the offices of "Dr. Edward L. Bernays," and that "Dr. Bernays" was currently unavailable. I was instructed to leave a message. For a man of almost 100, Bernays was still communicating an air of business-as-usual. I told the machine:
My name is Stuart Ewen. I am an historian, a writer. I'm currently working on a book on the social history of public relations. I would very much like to come to Cambridge, to visit with 'Dr. Bernays' in order to conduct an oral history interview. I left my phone number, and indicated that, should I not hear back from him shortly, I would call again. Two days later, I received a phone call at home from Edward Bernays.
It felt weird, like a dream. Given my experience tracking his historical footprints, it was like talking-via dixie cups and a string-with a piece of history. His voice was soft, a bit hoarse, the voice of an elderly man, to be sure, but he also sounded deft and businesslike.
He asked me about myself, my background, where I taught, the book I was writing. I told him that I was a cultural historian, with a particular interest in the ways that the mass media have crisscrossed with the experiences of twentieth century American life. I told him that I knew a great deal about him, his life and contributions, and added that I had recently published a book exploring the influence of commercial imagery on the contours of American society. Without missing a beat Edward Bernays retorted, scrappily, "Of course, you know, we don't deal in images....We deal in reality."
My fascinating encounter with Edward L. Bernays had begun. I had already been offered a lesson from the master. Ideally, the job of public relations is not simply one of disseminating favorable images and impressions for a client. For Bernays and, as I would learn, for many others in the field, the goal was far more ambitious than that. Public relations was about fashioning and projecting credible renditions of reality itself.
Rather than pursue the interview by telephone-I wanted to meet him, face-to-face-I arranged to visit Edward Bernays at his home, on Columbus Day of 1990. In the weeks preceding our scheduled meeting, I refamiliarized myself with some of his writings: Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923); Propaganda (1928); "The Engineering of Consent" (1947); and his autobiography, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays (1965). I also looked at a few writings I'd never read before: books, some short pamphlets and speeches. Bernays, meanwhile, sought to put his own spin on the forthcoming interview. He sent me a photocopy of a biographical piece about him that had appeared recently in a special issue of Life magazine, listing the 100 most influential Americans of the twentieth century.
+ + +
On the chill, gray morning of October 12, 1990, I took the shuttle from LaGuardia to Logan Airport in Boston, leaving myself enough time to arrive at Bernays' home for our scheduled one o'clock interview. Crossing the Charles River into Cambridge, the cab took me toward a maze of old, tree-lined streets bordering Harvard Square, stopping by the large red number "7" that Bernays had informed me marked his house. The house itself was stately, a large white wood-frame, surrounded by some hedges, unpretentious. Walking up the path to the door, I did not know what to expect.
I rang the doorbell and waited for an answer. A minute or two passed, and there was none. Not a sound. Had he forgotten? Was the apparent wit with which he had spoken to me on the phone only illusory? I rang again, and waited. Then, after another minute or so had passed and I had begun to grow disconsolate, I heard soft footsteps moving slowly toward the door. "Bernays?" I thought. Instead, a Chinese woman, of middle age, opened the door a crack and said, "Yes?" I told her who I was; that I had, a couple of weeks before, scheduled an interview for this afternoon with Mr. Bernays.
She looked at me quizzically, then muttered something about his having been ill yesterday. Inviting me into the house, and directing me to wait in the first floor library, she disappeared to inquire whether he was up to seeing me.
As I waited, I inspected the shelves of the spacious, high-ceilinged room in which I stood. It was a remarkable collection of books, thousands of them: about public opinion, individual and social psychology, survey research, propaganda, psychological warfare, and so forth; a comprehensive library spanning matters of human motivation and strategies of influence, scanning a period of more than one hundred years. These were not the bookshelves of some shallow huckster, but the arsenal of an intellectual. The cross-hairs of nearly every volume were trained on the target of forging public attitudes. Here -in a large white room in Cambridge, Massachusetts-was the constellation of ideas that had inspired and informed a twentieth century preoccupation: the systematic molding of public opinion.
Captured in thought, I suddenly heard steps moving swiftly toward the library door. Assuming it was the Chinese woman again, to report on Bernays' condition, I braced myself for bad news. But as the door swung open, there-standing before me in a comfy-looking brown, three-piece suit and tie, and transmitting a sparkle through his wizened eyes-was a puckish little man with thin, shaggy white hair. The swift steps I'd heard were those of Edward L. Bernays, moving toward the threshold of his one-hundredth year. Despite years of pondering him as a shrewd and cynical manipulator of public consciousness, I was immediately entranced. His physical countenance reminded me of pictures I had seen of an aged Albert Einstein. He moved toward me and, with smiles, we exchanged formal introductions. "I want you to have this," I said, and handed him an inscribed copy of my last book, All Consuming Images, which he accepted with a nod. He then instructed me that we should go upstairs, to his office, for the interview.
He led me to the bottom of a tall staircase. On the left side there was a chair-elevator, the kind one associates with wealthy invalids in the movies. "You ever ride on one of these things?" he asked me.
"No, I've only seen them in pictures," I responded frankly.
"Get on!" he commanded me, like an elfin carny beside an amusement park ride.
I turned around and sat down, my feet resting on a metal platform at the base of the chair. "Move your feet." he ordered.
"What?"
"Move your feet back."
Without understanding I drew my feet to the back of the platform, leaving a narrow ledge in front of them. Suddenly, he stepped onto the ledge, his small pear-shaped body hovering over mine. "Should I hold you?" I asked, concerned for his frail bones.
"No," he responded dismissively, as he pushed a button on the side of the chair, and we glided up together and, turning a slight corner toward the end of the voyage, arrived on the second story. At the summit of the climb, Bernays hopped off onto the landing, and I-somewhat shakily-proceeded off behind him. "We don't deal with images," I thought, "we deal in reality."
He led me through a dark room off the landing. Its walls were covered with scores of framed black and white photographs, many of them inscribed. Wordlessly, yet eloquently, the pictures placed my ancient host close to the heartbeat of a century. Bernays on his way to the Paris Peace Conference, 1918. Bernays standing with Enrico Caruso. Bernays and Henry Ford. Bernays and Thomas Edison. Bernays and Dwight David Eisenhower. A photo portrait of his uncle, Freud, was also conspicuous. Bernays with the "great men," at the "great events" of the twentieth century. I looked ...awestruck. He said nothing. In silence, I was fascinated, entranced by it all.
From the photo gallery, we stepped into his small office, a solarium, and took seats by a cluttered desk. We began to talk. He began by asking me questions: about myself, my background, what had attracted me to his work in particular, and-more generally-to the broader study of communications in twentieth century America.
I opened with a rhetorical response."How can you deal with 20th century culture without dealing with...?"
"...the basis of the exchange of ideas that makes the culture," he completed my thought.
Coming from very different vantage points, from different epochs, we understood each other. He knew what I was looking for. Within my historical study of public relations, I sought to make sense of the the peculiar processes of representation and perception-the "exchange of ideas," as he put it-that have come to distinguish cultural life in the era of mass communication.
+ + +
The next four hours were vintage Edward Bernays. Again and again I heard word-for-word reiterations of themes, stories, even specific catch phrases that I had encountered many times before in his writings.
None the less, beyond the actual experience of meeting with Bernays, some parts of the interview were new to me, contributing to the scope and texture of the history that follows. I was particularly intrigued, for example, by Bernays' reflections on the connection between his own thinking and that of Walter Lippmann, who published a book entitled Public Opinion in 1922, just one year before Bernays' first public relations manifesto, Crystallizing Public Opinion, appeared. (Bernays' book, Propaganda [1928], would later follow Lippmann's sequel to Public Opinion, The Phantom Public, by one year.) There are, however, some aspects of the interview that are worth mentioning here, aspects which reflect on the history and meaning of public relations itself.
+ + +
First. Throughout the interview Bernays expressed an unabashedly hierarchical view of society. Repeatedly, he maintained that, while most people respond to their world instinctively, without thought, there exist an "intelligent few" who have been charged with the responsibility of contemplating and influencing the tide of history. Perceived by Bernays as one of these "few," he was willing to share his outlook with me in straightforward terms.
Although he had written extensively, over a lifetime, about democracy and on the important role that public relations plays in a democratic society, Bernays, himself, was clearly no democrat. He expressed little respect for the average person's ability to think out, understand, or act upon the world in which they live.
"There are strange things about the culture," he intoned. "The average IQ is 100 of the American public, did you know that?" Assuming I grasped what for him was obvious, Bernays then sketched a picture of the public relations expert as a member of the "intelligent few" who advises clients on how to "deal with the masses...just by applying psychology."
As a member of that intellectual elite which guides the destiny of society, the PR "professional," Bernays explained, aims his craft at a general public which is essentially, and unreflectively, reactive. Working behind the scenes, out of public view, the public relations expert is "an applied social scientist," one educated to employ an understanding of "sociology, psychology, social psychology and economics" in order to influence and direct public attitudes. Throughout our conversation, Bernays conveyed his hallucination of democracy: a highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians are continuously at work, analyzing the social terrain and adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.
Undoubtedly, this point of view offers a glimpse into Edward L. Bernays. More importantly, it reflects a foundational conceit governing the field of public relations more broadly. While some have argued that public relations represents a "two-way street" through which institutions and the public carry on a democratic dialog, the public's role within that alleged dialog is, most often, one of having its blood pressure monitored, its temperature taken.
+ + +
It should be noted that Bernays, at the time of our conversation, felt that the field of "public relations" had failed to live up to his "professional" expectations. "Today," he related to me with some dismay, "any nitwit or dope or anybody can call himself or herself a public relations counsel. I had a young woman call up two months ago and she said I hear you're nice to young people. Can I come in and see you? And I said, what do you do? She said, ' I'm in public relations.' So I made a date with her and when she came in-she was about 27 years old, young woman, apparently intelligent...
I said, 'What do you do?'
She said, 'I'm in public relations.'
I said, 'I didn't ask you that. I asked you what you did.'
She said, 'I give out circulars in Harvard Square.'
She was in public relations! [The term public relations] hasn't only been misused. But people have used the name for press agents, flacks, publicity men or women, individuals who simply try to get pieces into the paper that are favorable to a client. Whereas, by my definition, a public relations person, who calls themselves [sic] that, is an applied social scientist who advises a client or employer on the social attitudes and actions to take to win the support of the publics upon whom his, or her, or its viability depends."
+ + +
Another phase of the interview deserves special mention. I came to visit Bernays because he was both a participant in, and a witness to, the rise of public relations over a period of nearly three-quarters of a century. Anticipating the interview, I hoped that his recollections would provide me with some new and clear sense of the particular historical soil out of which public relations, as a phenomenon, grew. In this regard I was, for the most part, frustrated.
Bernays' take on public relations was remarkable in that it tended to ignore the particular processes, or details, of the periods which had given rise to it. Throughout the interview he described public relations as a response to a trans-historic concern: the requirement, for those people in power, to shape the attitudes of the general population.
For Bernays, public relations reflected the refinement of techniques developed to serve ancient purposes. He appeared to have thought little about his life, or his field, as bearing the imprint of a specific historical era. As I prepared to depart from him, I felt a bit disappointed in this regard.
Then, as we began discussing the means by which I would get from his house back to the airport, a curious conversation unfolded. Amid a general complaint about the cost of taxicabs, and after counselling me to save my money and hop a trolley, Edward Bernays indicated that he, himself, had never learned how to drive an automobile. I expressed surprise. He explained that he had simply never had to learn to drive; among his family's train of up to thirteen servants, there was always a chauffeur. Bernays then proceeded to tell me the story of one chauffeur in particular, a man he called "Dumb Jack."
Each day, he related to me, Dumb Jack would awaken at 5 o'clock in the morning, and prepare to drive Bernays and his wife (and partner in public relations), Doris Fleishman, to the office. The trusty chauffeur would then return to the family home to carry their two daughters to school. From there, he would return to the office in order to chauffeur Bernays and his wife to business meetings throughout the day, taking time out to retrieve the daughters from their school. At the end of the day, according to Bernays, a subdued Dumb Jack would step into the kitchen and, as the cook prepared the evening meal, he would sit at a kitchen table, lay his head in his hands, and take a nap. He would go to bed at nine, only to begin his routine again the next morning at five. Comparing this situation favorably to the cost of one cab ride to the airport today, Bernays ended his story by saying that for all of this work, Dumb Jack received a salary of twenty-five dollars per week, and got a half a thursday off every two weeks.
"Not a bad deal," Bernays confided, characterizing the benefits that his family had derived from Dumb Jack's years of compliant service. Then, with a lilt of nostalgia in his voice, he concluded his story: "But that's before people got a social conscience."
At that moment, in that nostalgic reverie over a bygone era, my quest for historical explanation-or at least a piece of it-was satisfied. In an incidental reference to "social conscience," Bernays had illuminated an historic shift in the social history of property, shedding inadvertent light on the conditions which gave birth to the birth of the practice of public relations. As the twentieth century progressed, people were no longer willing to accomodate themselves to outmoded standards of deference which history, for millenia, had demanded of them.
Bernays was the child of a bourgeois world that was, in many ways, still captivated by aristocratic styles of wealth, where relations between the classes were marked, to a large extent, by deep-seated patterns of allegiance-of obedience and obligation-between masters and servants. Like Mr. Stevens (the Anthony Hopkins character) in Remains of the Day, Dumb Jack was also a child of these circumstances.
The "social conscience," to which Bernays had referred, arrived at that moment when aristocratic paradigms of deference could no longer hold up in the face of modern, democratic, public ideals that were boiling up among the "lower strata" of society. At that juncture, strategies of social rule began to change, and the life and career of Edward Bernays, I should add, serves as a testament to that change.
The explosive ideals of democracy challenged ancient customs that had long upheld social inequality. A public claiming the birthright of democratic citizenship and social justice increasingly called upon institutions and people of power to justify themselves and their privileges. In the crucible of these changes, aristocracy began to give way to technocracy as a strategy of rule. Bernays came to maturity in a society where the exigencies of power were-by necessity-increasingly exercised from behind the pretext of the "common good." Bernays, the child of aristocratic pretense who fashioned himself into a technician of mass persuasion, was the product of a "social conscience" that had grasped the fact that a once submissive Dumb Jack, in the contemporary world, would no longer be willing to quietly place his tired head in his folded hands at the end of each day, only to awaken and serve again the next morning. Born into privilege, developing into a technocrat, Bernays' biography illustrates the onus that the twentieth century has placed on social and economic elites; they have had to justify themselves continually to a public whose hearts and minds now bear the ideals of democracy.
As I pursued my research following my encounter with Bernays, and repeatedly ran into the fear of an empowered public that ignited the thinking of early practitioners of public relations, the story of "Dumb Jack"-the man who was no more-came to mind again and again, reminding me of the human flesh that encircles the bones of broad institutional developments.
+ + +
Another story bears repeating here. Towards the middle of our interview, hoping that I could gain insight into the way Bernays approached his practical work, I asked him to describe how he would plan and attend to a specific public relations assignment. First of all, Bernays instructed, one must rid one's mind of the conventional "press agent" image. "We've [speaking of himself] had no direct contact with the mass media for about fifty years." Rather, he continued, the job of a public relations counsel is to instruct a client on how to take actions which "just interrupt...the continuity of life in some way to bring about the [media] response."
"How would you do that?" I asked.
Bernays thought for a moment, and then turned toward his desk, where he had earlier placed the copy of my book. He picked it up and began to fondle its cover between his small, pinkish-gray fingers; glancing down at the front of the book, reading, to himself, the descriptive material and blurbs that appeared on its back. Then, with a tone of momentousness in his voice, he turned to me:
If you said to me, 'I would like more readers of this book' [tapping the cover] ...I would immediately get in touch with the largest American consumer association. And I would say to the head of the consumers association, 'There are undoubtedly...I can't tell you the exact percentage, but X percentage of your members who are very definitely interested in the images that come from a finance capitalist society, and who I think would enjoy hearing about that. Why don't you devote one of your twelve meetings a year to consumer images, the name of a new book, and I think it may be possible for me to get the author to talk to the New York meeting and you then make an arrangement with American Tel and Tel and have a video tape made of him beforehand and in thirty of the largest cities of the United States that have the American Consumer League, you listen to an in-depth concept of consumers and images....'
Then Bernays turned to me and, with an abracadabra tone in his voice, he summarized the imaginable result of his hypothetical phone-call to the head of the country's largest consumer association:
Every one of the consumer groups has contacts with the local paper, and in some cases the AP may pick it up, or Reuters, and you become an international star!
I must acknowledge that I was thoroughly charmed. Here I was, sitting with Edward Bernays-innovator and artiste of modern public relations-listening to him apply his costly wizardry to me and my book. I couldn't get over it, and thought to myself, "What a flatterer. This guy really knows how to polish up the old apple." For weeks after the interview, I was tickled by the incident, retelling it to friends, students, whoever had the patience to listen. For me the story captured Bernays' engaging personality, his ingenious thought process, his ability to garner a response.
Then, about three months after the interview-the above incident having faded from my immediate memory-I received a most surprising telephone call. It was from Steven Brobeck, president of the Consumer Federation of America, one of the nation's largest and most influential consumer organizations. Mr. Brobeck wanted to know if I would be willing to serve as a keynote speaker at the upcoming Consumer Congress in Washington, DC, a convention that would bring together more than a thousand members of consumer organizations from around the country. He wanted me to speak about American consumer culture and the ways that seductive commercial images are routinely employed to promote waste and disposability. C-Span, I was informed, would be taping my keynote, and would then cablecast it across the country.
I still do not know whether Bernays' hand was behind this invitation, or whether the phone call was merely a result of sly coincidence. When I inquired as to the origin of the invitation, nowhere was there any clear-cut, or even circumstantial, evidence of Bernays' intervention.
But then I recalled another point in our lengthy conversation, when Bernays sermonized on the invisibility with which public relations experts must, ideally, perform their handiwork.
When I noted that, even though Life magazine had included him in the list of the one hundred most influential Americans in the twentieth century, most Americans would probably no know who he was, he responded: I'm sure of it....To the average American your name has to be Walter Cronkite, or...[you have to be] the most beautiful girl... some movie actress they know.... In public relations, just as in law, you don't-nobody knows who the lawyer of most people is, and that lawyer may do more than the brain of the man who is theoretically doing it....And I think it should be that way because nobody knows who my doctor is. I mean, except friends. And he may be the basis of my living.
And there I was; the mystery still unsolved. Yet the question remained, and remains, open. Things had uncannily come to pass much as Bernays had described in his hypothetical disquisition on the work of a PR practitioner, and one was left to ponder whether there is any reality anymore, save the reality of public relations? Magnified by my seductive encounter with Edward Bernays, it is this question, and its implications for contemporary life, which stands at the heart of this book.
+ + +
One last point. I had gone to Cambridge to interview Edward Bernays and gather hidden details about the history of the hidden-yet omnipresent-activity of public relations. In retrospect, I had greatly underestimated the individual with whom I would be talking. I had presupposed that this keenly aware shaper of public perception, this trader in realities, was at the same time open to being candidly cross-examined. Yet in the days following our meeting, it became clear to me that my entire visit had been orchestrated by a virtuoso.
He had even offered me the key by which the pageantry of our encounter might have been unlocked. During the extensive taped interview that I assumed I was conducting, Bernays had at one point turned to me, and announced:
News is any overt act which juts out of the routine of circumstance. ...A good public relations man advises his client...to carry out an overt act... interrupting the continuity of life in some way to bring about a response.
From the time I had approached the door of his house, waiting impatiently for an answer; to my ride on the staircase elevator; to my walk through the gallery of historical photographs, on to the time, five hours later, when we parted company, Edward Bernays-who still claimed to charge $1,000 per hour consulting fees-was giving me, free of charge, an empirical object lesson in public relations. Above all else that I gathered from my journey to Cambridge, this was the prime benefit of my brush with Edward Bernays; experiencing the man himself-still spry at one hundred-in action.
© 1996, Stuart Ewen
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Keep in mind much has been learned since the father of modern deception has passed away. These principals have grown in sophistication but the globalists still hold their power by the very use of these tools. Politicians and the media carry out the plans of this deception with growning expertise. Opinion polls are the measure of their success.
Please...snap out of the trance before its too late.
Here Goes:
Lapis 7/15/2003
Shaping public opinion is a Science that is utilized by the globalists. The media is the message in this case and the carving tool of the collective mind. The world has fallen under a hypnotic spell with a very carefully scripted message. It takes reading between the lines to decipher this message..a message of tyranny and control.
One of the recent pioneers of this reality shaping was Freud's nephew, a man by the name of Edward Bernays. Here is some insight into his ways of deception, and just who utilizes these tools masterfully.
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Visiting Edward Bernays
When I began the research for this book-attempting to discover the social and historical roots that would explain the limitless role of public relations in our world-one of my first stops along the way was a sojourn with Edward L. Bernays, a man who, beginning during the 1910s, became one of the most influential pioneers of American public relations; a person whose biography, though not widely known, left a deep mark on the configuration of our world.
Born in Vienna in 1891, Bernays was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud. (His mother was Freud's sister, his father was Freud's wife's brother.) His family background impressed him with the enormous power of ideas, and accustomed him to the privileges and creature comforts of bourgeois existence.
Bernays was also a far-sighted architect of modern propaganda techniques who, dramatically, from the early 1920s onward, helped to consolidate a fateful marriage between theories of mass psychology and schemes of corporate and political persuasion.
During the First World War, Bernays served as a foot soldier for the U. S. Committee on Public Information (CPI)-the vast American propaganda apparatus mobilized in 1917 to package, advertise and sell the war as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy." The CPI would become the mold in which marketing strategies for subsequent wars, on to the present, would be shaped.
In the twenties, Bernays fathered the link between corporate sales campaigns and popular social causes, when-while working for the American Tobacco Company-he persuaded women's rights marchers in New York City to hold up Lucky Strike cigarettes as symbolic "Torches of Freedom." In October of 1929, Bernays also originated the now familiar "global media event," when he dreamed up "Light's Golden Jubilee," a worldwide celebratory spectacle commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the electric light bulb, sponsored-behind-the-scenes-by the General Electric Corporation.
While by birth an Austrian Jew, Bernays' work and vivid writings served as an inspiration for Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Nazi propaganda minister-or so public relations folklore records.
Bernays influence would continue to hold sway well into the post-World War II era. To put it simply, Edward Bernays' career-more than that of any other individual-roughed out what have become the strategies and practices of public relations in the United States.
I had encountered Bernays before. In the early 1970s, while writing a book on the social history of advertising-Captains of Consciousness-I had happened upon some of his writings-mostly from the 1920s. In the pages of Captains he fittingly looms as an eloquent and influential ideologue of an American consumer culture in formation.
Then, in the mid-1980s, while working on another book (All Consuming Images), I again ran into Mr. Bernays. This time it was primarily through his writings from the forties and fifties, when-as an enduring student of mass persuasion-he helped to educate political leaders on the uses of the mass media, and to the particular advantages of visual symbols as instruments for what he christened the "engineering of consent." Once more, through the agency of his fertile and suggestive writings, Bernays had emerged as a leading character in one of my manuscripts.
Both times my encounters with Bernays were like those that usually take place between historians and the "historical figures" that they write about. They were exchanges between old documents and the inquiring mind of their reader and interpreter. As I commenced work on my social history of public relations early in 1990, I assumed, reasonably, that Bernays, himself, was long gone. Once more, the picturesque record that he had left behind was as close as I was likely to get to him.
Soon, however, I stumbled onto the fact that my reasonable assumption was incorrect. In a conversation with a neighbor of mine named Richard Weiner-who is, himself, a prominent member of the public relations fraternity-I learned that Bernays was, in fact, still alive, residing in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Weiner instructed me: "If you're going to do this book, you've got to talk to Eddie Bernays." I was astonished and delighted to hear Bernays referred to in the present tense; I was also amused to hear him referred to as "Eddie." Behind the aura of historical figure, stood a guy called Eddie. I obtained Bernays' telephone number and set out to arrange an interview. He was then on the brink of his ninety-ninth birthday, and I didn't know what to expect. Would he see me? Would he be enfeebled? He was very old.
An exploratory call to Bernays reached an answering machine. A woman's voice, official in tone, informed me that I had reached the offices of "Dr. Edward L. Bernays," and that "Dr. Bernays" was currently unavailable. I was instructed to leave a message. For a man of almost 100, Bernays was still communicating an air of business-as-usual. I told the machine:
My name is Stuart Ewen. I am an historian, a writer. I'm currently working on a book on the social history of public relations. I would very much like to come to Cambridge, to visit with 'Dr. Bernays' in order to conduct an oral history interview. I left my phone number, and indicated that, should I not hear back from him shortly, I would call again. Two days later, I received a phone call at home from Edward Bernays.
It felt weird, like a dream. Given my experience tracking his historical footprints, it was like talking-via dixie cups and a string-with a piece of history. His voice was soft, a bit hoarse, the voice of an elderly man, to be sure, but he also sounded deft and businesslike.
He asked me about myself, my background, where I taught, the book I was writing. I told him that I was a cultural historian, with a particular interest in the ways that the mass media have crisscrossed with the experiences of twentieth century American life. I told him that I knew a great deal about him, his life and contributions, and added that I had recently published a book exploring the influence of commercial imagery on the contours of American society. Without missing a beat Edward Bernays retorted, scrappily, "Of course, you know, we don't deal in images....We deal in reality."
My fascinating encounter with Edward L. Bernays had begun. I had already been offered a lesson from the master. Ideally, the job of public relations is not simply one of disseminating favorable images and impressions for a client. For Bernays and, as I would learn, for many others in the field, the goal was far more ambitious than that. Public relations was about fashioning and projecting credible renditions of reality itself.
Rather than pursue the interview by telephone-I wanted to meet him, face-to-face-I arranged to visit Edward Bernays at his home, on Columbus Day of 1990. In the weeks preceding our scheduled meeting, I refamiliarized myself with some of his writings: Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923); Propaganda (1928); "The Engineering of Consent" (1947); and his autobiography, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays (1965). I also looked at a few writings I'd never read before: books, some short pamphlets and speeches. Bernays, meanwhile, sought to put his own spin on the forthcoming interview. He sent me a photocopy of a biographical piece about him that had appeared recently in a special issue of Life magazine, listing the 100 most influential Americans of the twentieth century.
+ + +
On the chill, gray morning of October 12, 1990, I took the shuttle from LaGuardia to Logan Airport in Boston, leaving myself enough time to arrive at Bernays' home for our scheduled one o'clock interview. Crossing the Charles River into Cambridge, the cab took me toward a maze of old, tree-lined streets bordering Harvard Square, stopping by the large red number "7" that Bernays had informed me marked his house. The house itself was stately, a large white wood-frame, surrounded by some hedges, unpretentious. Walking up the path to the door, I did not know what to expect.
I rang the doorbell and waited for an answer. A minute or two passed, and there was none. Not a sound. Had he forgotten? Was the apparent wit with which he had spoken to me on the phone only illusory? I rang again, and waited. Then, after another minute or so had passed and I had begun to grow disconsolate, I heard soft footsteps moving slowly toward the door. "Bernays?" I thought. Instead, a Chinese woman, of middle age, opened the door a crack and said, "Yes?" I told her who I was; that I had, a couple of weeks before, scheduled an interview for this afternoon with Mr. Bernays.
She looked at me quizzically, then muttered something about his having been ill yesterday. Inviting me into the house, and directing me to wait in the first floor library, she disappeared to inquire whether he was up to seeing me.
As I waited, I inspected the shelves of the spacious, high-ceilinged room in which I stood. It was a remarkable collection of books, thousands of them: about public opinion, individual and social psychology, survey research, propaganda, psychological warfare, and so forth; a comprehensive library spanning matters of human motivation and strategies of influence, scanning a period of more than one hundred years. These were not the bookshelves of some shallow huckster, but the arsenal of an intellectual. The cross-hairs of nearly every volume were trained on the target of forging public attitudes. Here -in a large white room in Cambridge, Massachusetts-was the constellation of ideas that had inspired and informed a twentieth century preoccupation: the systematic molding of public opinion.
Captured in thought, I suddenly heard steps moving swiftly toward the library door. Assuming it was the Chinese woman again, to report on Bernays' condition, I braced myself for bad news. But as the door swung open, there-standing before me in a comfy-looking brown, three-piece suit and tie, and transmitting a sparkle through his wizened eyes-was a puckish little man with thin, shaggy white hair. The swift steps I'd heard were those of Edward L. Bernays, moving toward the threshold of his one-hundredth year. Despite years of pondering him as a shrewd and cynical manipulator of public consciousness, I was immediately entranced. His physical countenance reminded me of pictures I had seen of an aged Albert Einstein. He moved toward me and, with smiles, we exchanged formal introductions. "I want you to have this," I said, and handed him an inscribed copy of my last book, All Consuming Images, which he accepted with a nod. He then instructed me that we should go upstairs, to his office, for the interview.
He led me to the bottom of a tall staircase. On the left side there was a chair-elevator, the kind one associates with wealthy invalids in the movies. "You ever ride on one of these things?" he asked me.
"No, I've only seen them in pictures," I responded frankly.
"Get on!" he commanded me, like an elfin carny beside an amusement park ride.
I turned around and sat down, my feet resting on a metal platform at the base of the chair. "Move your feet." he ordered.
"What?"
"Move your feet back."
Without understanding I drew my feet to the back of the platform, leaving a narrow ledge in front of them. Suddenly, he stepped onto the ledge, his small pear-shaped body hovering over mine. "Should I hold you?" I asked, concerned for his frail bones.
"No," he responded dismissively, as he pushed a button on the side of the chair, and we glided up together and, turning a slight corner toward the end of the voyage, arrived on the second story. At the summit of the climb, Bernays hopped off onto the landing, and I-somewhat shakily-proceeded off behind him. "We don't deal with images," I thought, "we deal in reality."
He led me through a dark room off the landing. Its walls were covered with scores of framed black and white photographs, many of them inscribed. Wordlessly, yet eloquently, the pictures placed my ancient host close to the heartbeat of a century. Bernays on his way to the Paris Peace Conference, 1918. Bernays standing with Enrico Caruso. Bernays and Henry Ford. Bernays and Thomas Edison. Bernays and Dwight David Eisenhower. A photo portrait of his uncle, Freud, was also conspicuous. Bernays with the "great men," at the "great events" of the twentieth century. I looked ...awestruck. He said nothing. In silence, I was fascinated, entranced by it all.
From the photo gallery, we stepped into his small office, a solarium, and took seats by a cluttered desk. We began to talk. He began by asking me questions: about myself, my background, what had attracted me to his work in particular, and-more generally-to the broader study of communications in twentieth century America.
I opened with a rhetorical response."How can you deal with 20th century culture without dealing with...?"
"...the basis of the exchange of ideas that makes the culture," he completed my thought.
Coming from very different vantage points, from different epochs, we understood each other. He knew what I was looking for. Within my historical study of public relations, I sought to make sense of the the peculiar processes of representation and perception-the "exchange of ideas," as he put it-that have come to distinguish cultural life in the era of mass communication.
+ + +
The next four hours were vintage Edward Bernays. Again and again I heard word-for-word reiterations of themes, stories, even specific catch phrases that I had encountered many times before in his writings.
None the less, beyond the actual experience of meeting with Bernays, some parts of the interview were new to me, contributing to the scope and texture of the history that follows. I was particularly intrigued, for example, by Bernays' reflections on the connection between his own thinking and that of Walter Lippmann, who published a book entitled Public Opinion in 1922, just one year before Bernays' first public relations manifesto, Crystallizing Public Opinion, appeared. (Bernays' book, Propaganda [1928], would later follow Lippmann's sequel to Public Opinion, The Phantom Public, by one year.) There are, however, some aspects of the interview that are worth mentioning here, aspects which reflect on the history and meaning of public relations itself.
+ + +
First. Throughout the interview Bernays expressed an unabashedly hierarchical view of society. Repeatedly, he maintained that, while most people respond to their world instinctively, without thought, there exist an "intelligent few" who have been charged with the responsibility of contemplating and influencing the tide of history. Perceived by Bernays as one of these "few," he was willing to share his outlook with me in straightforward terms.
Although he had written extensively, over a lifetime, about democracy and on the important role that public relations plays in a democratic society, Bernays, himself, was clearly no democrat. He expressed little respect for the average person's ability to think out, understand, or act upon the world in which they live.
"There are strange things about the culture," he intoned. "The average IQ is 100 of the American public, did you know that?" Assuming I grasped what for him was obvious, Bernays then sketched a picture of the public relations expert as a member of the "intelligent few" who advises clients on how to "deal with the masses...just by applying psychology."
As a member of that intellectual elite which guides the destiny of society, the PR "professional," Bernays explained, aims his craft at a general public which is essentially, and unreflectively, reactive. Working behind the scenes, out of public view, the public relations expert is "an applied social scientist," one educated to employ an understanding of "sociology, psychology, social psychology and economics" in order to influence and direct public attitudes. Throughout our conversation, Bernays conveyed his hallucination of democracy: a highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians are continuously at work, analyzing the social terrain and adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.
Undoubtedly, this point of view offers a glimpse into Edward L. Bernays. More importantly, it reflects a foundational conceit governing the field of public relations more broadly. While some have argued that public relations represents a "two-way street" through which institutions and the public carry on a democratic dialog, the public's role within that alleged dialog is, most often, one of having its blood pressure monitored, its temperature taken.
+ + +
It should be noted that Bernays, at the time of our conversation, felt that the field of "public relations" had failed to live up to his "professional" expectations. "Today," he related to me with some dismay, "any nitwit or dope or anybody can call himself or herself a public relations counsel. I had a young woman call up two months ago and she said I hear you're nice to young people. Can I come in and see you? And I said, what do you do? She said, ' I'm in public relations.' So I made a date with her and when she came in-she was about 27 years old, young woman, apparently intelligent...
I said, 'What do you do?'
She said, 'I'm in public relations.'
I said, 'I didn't ask you that. I asked you what you did.'
She said, 'I give out circulars in Harvard Square.'
She was in public relations! [The term public relations] hasn't only been misused. But people have used the name for press agents, flacks, publicity men or women, individuals who simply try to get pieces into the paper that are favorable to a client. Whereas, by my definition, a public relations person, who calls themselves [sic] that, is an applied social scientist who advises a client or employer on the social attitudes and actions to take to win the support of the publics upon whom his, or her, or its viability depends."
+ + +
Another phase of the interview deserves special mention. I came to visit Bernays because he was both a participant in, and a witness to, the rise of public relations over a period of nearly three-quarters of a century. Anticipating the interview, I hoped that his recollections would provide me with some new and clear sense of the particular historical soil out of which public relations, as a phenomenon, grew. In this regard I was, for the most part, frustrated.
Bernays' take on public relations was remarkable in that it tended to ignore the particular processes, or details, of the periods which had given rise to it. Throughout the interview he described public relations as a response to a trans-historic concern: the requirement, for those people in power, to shape the attitudes of the general population.
For Bernays, public relations reflected the refinement of techniques developed to serve ancient purposes. He appeared to have thought little about his life, or his field, as bearing the imprint of a specific historical era. As I prepared to depart from him, I felt a bit disappointed in this regard.
Then, as we began discussing the means by which I would get from his house back to the airport, a curious conversation unfolded. Amid a general complaint about the cost of taxicabs, and after counselling me to save my money and hop a trolley, Edward Bernays indicated that he, himself, had never learned how to drive an automobile. I expressed surprise. He explained that he had simply never had to learn to drive; among his family's train of up to thirteen servants, there was always a chauffeur. Bernays then proceeded to tell me the story of one chauffeur in particular, a man he called "Dumb Jack."
Each day, he related to me, Dumb Jack would awaken at 5 o'clock in the morning, and prepare to drive Bernays and his wife (and partner in public relations), Doris Fleishman, to the office. The trusty chauffeur would then return to the family home to carry their two daughters to school. From there, he would return to the office in order to chauffeur Bernays and his wife to business meetings throughout the day, taking time out to retrieve the daughters from their school. At the end of the day, according to Bernays, a subdued Dumb Jack would step into the kitchen and, as the cook prepared the evening meal, he would sit at a kitchen table, lay his head in his hands, and take a nap. He would go to bed at nine, only to begin his routine again the next morning at five. Comparing this situation favorably to the cost of one cab ride to the airport today, Bernays ended his story by saying that for all of this work, Dumb Jack received a salary of twenty-five dollars per week, and got a half a thursday off every two weeks.
"Not a bad deal," Bernays confided, characterizing the benefits that his family had derived from Dumb Jack's years of compliant service. Then, with a lilt of nostalgia in his voice, he concluded his story: "But that's before people got a social conscience."
At that moment, in that nostalgic reverie over a bygone era, my quest for historical explanation-or at least a piece of it-was satisfied. In an incidental reference to "social conscience," Bernays had illuminated an historic shift in the social history of property, shedding inadvertent light on the conditions which gave birth to the birth of the practice of public relations. As the twentieth century progressed, people were no longer willing to accomodate themselves to outmoded standards of deference which history, for millenia, had demanded of them.
Bernays was the child of a bourgeois world that was, in many ways, still captivated by aristocratic styles of wealth, where relations between the classes were marked, to a large extent, by deep-seated patterns of allegiance-of obedience and obligation-between masters and servants. Like Mr. Stevens (the Anthony Hopkins character) in Remains of the Day, Dumb Jack was also a child of these circumstances.
The "social conscience," to which Bernays had referred, arrived at that moment when aristocratic paradigms of deference could no longer hold up in the face of modern, democratic, public ideals that were boiling up among the "lower strata" of society. At that juncture, strategies of social rule began to change, and the life and career of Edward Bernays, I should add, serves as a testament to that change.
The explosive ideals of democracy challenged ancient customs that had long upheld social inequality. A public claiming the birthright of democratic citizenship and social justice increasingly called upon institutions and people of power to justify themselves and their privileges. In the crucible of these changes, aristocracy began to give way to technocracy as a strategy of rule. Bernays came to maturity in a society where the exigencies of power were-by necessity-increasingly exercised from behind the pretext of the "common good." Bernays, the child of aristocratic pretense who fashioned himself into a technician of mass persuasion, was the product of a "social conscience" that had grasped the fact that a once submissive Dumb Jack, in the contemporary world, would no longer be willing to quietly place his tired head in his folded hands at the end of each day, only to awaken and serve again the next morning. Born into privilege, developing into a technocrat, Bernays' biography illustrates the onus that the twentieth century has placed on social and economic elites; they have had to justify themselves continually to a public whose hearts and minds now bear the ideals of democracy.
As I pursued my research following my encounter with Bernays, and repeatedly ran into the fear of an empowered public that ignited the thinking of early practitioners of public relations, the story of "Dumb Jack"-the man who was no more-came to mind again and again, reminding me of the human flesh that encircles the bones of broad institutional developments.
+ + +
Another story bears repeating here. Towards the middle of our interview, hoping that I could gain insight into the way Bernays approached his practical work, I asked him to describe how he would plan and attend to a specific public relations assignment. First of all, Bernays instructed, one must rid one's mind of the conventional "press agent" image. "We've [speaking of himself] had no direct contact with the mass media for about fifty years." Rather, he continued, the job of a public relations counsel is to instruct a client on how to take actions which "just interrupt...the continuity of life in some way to bring about the [media] response."
"How would you do that?" I asked.
Bernays thought for a moment, and then turned toward his desk, where he had earlier placed the copy of my book. He picked it up and began to fondle its cover between his small, pinkish-gray fingers; glancing down at the front of the book, reading, to himself, the descriptive material and blurbs that appeared on its back. Then, with a tone of momentousness in his voice, he turned to me:
If you said to me, 'I would like more readers of this book' [tapping the cover] ...I would immediately get in touch with the largest American consumer association. And I would say to the head of the consumers association, 'There are undoubtedly...I can't tell you the exact percentage, but X percentage of your members who are very definitely interested in the images that come from a finance capitalist society, and who I think would enjoy hearing about that. Why don't you devote one of your twelve meetings a year to consumer images, the name of a new book, and I think it may be possible for me to get the author to talk to the New York meeting and you then make an arrangement with American Tel and Tel and have a video tape made of him beforehand and in thirty of the largest cities of the United States that have the American Consumer League, you listen to an in-depth concept of consumers and images....'
Then Bernays turned to me and, with an abracadabra tone in his voice, he summarized the imaginable result of his hypothetical phone-call to the head of the country's largest consumer association:
Every one of the consumer groups has contacts with the local paper, and in some cases the AP may pick it up, or Reuters, and you become an international star!
I must acknowledge that I was thoroughly charmed. Here I was, sitting with Edward Bernays-innovator and artiste of modern public relations-listening to him apply his costly wizardry to me and my book. I couldn't get over it, and thought to myself, "What a flatterer. This guy really knows how to polish up the old apple." For weeks after the interview, I was tickled by the incident, retelling it to friends, students, whoever had the patience to listen. For me the story captured Bernays' engaging personality, his ingenious thought process, his ability to garner a response.
Then, about three months after the interview-the above incident having faded from my immediate memory-I received a most surprising telephone call. It was from Steven Brobeck, president of the Consumer Federation of America, one of the nation's largest and most influential consumer organizations. Mr. Brobeck wanted to know if I would be willing to serve as a keynote speaker at the upcoming Consumer Congress in Washington, DC, a convention that would bring together more than a thousand members of consumer organizations from around the country. He wanted me to speak about American consumer culture and the ways that seductive commercial images are routinely employed to promote waste and disposability. C-Span, I was informed, would be taping my keynote, and would then cablecast it across the country.
I still do not know whether Bernays' hand was behind this invitation, or whether the phone call was merely a result of sly coincidence. When I inquired as to the origin of the invitation, nowhere was there any clear-cut, or even circumstantial, evidence of Bernays' intervention.
But then I recalled another point in our lengthy conversation, when Bernays sermonized on the invisibility with which public relations experts must, ideally, perform their handiwork.
When I noted that, even though Life magazine had included him in the list of the one hundred most influential Americans in the twentieth century, most Americans would probably no know who he was, he responded: I'm sure of it....To the average American your name has to be Walter Cronkite, or...[you have to be] the most beautiful girl... some movie actress they know.... In public relations, just as in law, you don't-nobody knows who the lawyer of most people is, and that lawyer may do more than the brain of the man who is theoretically doing it....And I think it should be that way because nobody knows who my doctor is. I mean, except friends. And he may be the basis of my living.
And there I was; the mystery still unsolved. Yet the question remained, and remains, open. Things had uncannily come to pass much as Bernays had described in his hypothetical disquisition on the work of a PR practitioner, and one was left to ponder whether there is any reality anymore, save the reality of public relations? Magnified by my seductive encounter with Edward Bernays, it is this question, and its implications for contemporary life, which stands at the heart of this book.
+ + +
One last point. I had gone to Cambridge to interview Edward Bernays and gather hidden details about the history of the hidden-yet omnipresent-activity of public relations. In retrospect, I had greatly underestimated the individual with whom I would be talking. I had presupposed that this keenly aware shaper of public perception, this trader in realities, was at the same time open to being candidly cross-examined. Yet in the days following our meeting, it became clear to me that my entire visit had been orchestrated by a virtuoso.
He had even offered me the key by which the pageantry of our encounter might have been unlocked. During the extensive taped interview that I assumed I was conducting, Bernays had at one point turned to me, and announced:
News is any overt act which juts out of the routine of circumstance. ...A good public relations man advises his client...to carry out an overt act... interrupting the continuity of life in some way to bring about a response.
From the time I had approached the door of his house, waiting impatiently for an answer; to my ride on the staircase elevator; to my walk through the gallery of historical photographs, on to the time, five hours later, when we parted company, Edward Bernays-who still claimed to charge $1,000 per hour consulting fees-was giving me, free of charge, an empirical object lesson in public relations. Above all else that I gathered from my journey to Cambridge, this was the prime benefit of my brush with Edward Bernays; experiencing the man himself-still spry at one hundred-in action.
© 1996, Stuart Ewen
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Keep in mind much has been learned since the father of modern deception has passed away. These principals have grown in sophistication but the globalists still hold their power by the very use of these tools. Politicians and the media carry out the plans of this deception with growning expertise. Opinion polls are the measure of their success.
Please...snap out of the trance before its too late.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Five Years Ago Today
I don't want to put up an "under construction" sign here, so I employed the tools of the Internet to see what I was saying some years ago on this date. This was after I had committed to the name for this blog. I had no idea I'd find this.
Since It was me that wrote this, I have taken the liberty of replacing "nonsense (my polite word)" with the word I had intended, "bullshit." Otherwise it is what it was. I don't know if the site I was writing about is still there or not.
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Rumor Mill News Reading Room Archive
LOOKING THE BEAST IN THE EYE AGAIN
Posted By: somtum
Date: Sunday, 20 April 2003, 2:35 p.m.
Date: Sunday, 20 April 2003, 2:35 p.m.
Reading through this and adding my sarcastic comments in curly quotes was perhaps not the best way to deal with it. Well, so be it. I didn’t know it was going to be what it was when I started. Whether it is carefully contrived disinformation and mind pollution or whether these people actually think this way, is, I confess, not clear to me. I think the former. I kind of liked this web site. They have intriguing paintings and music. (Who supports this complex effort? Has the Rockefeller Foundation gone new age? Why don’t I believe these people and facilities are working for free out of the goodness of their hearts?) New Age collectivist empiricist bullshit – at best. Thirty pages and it is only a speck of the web site. ------------------ - What follows is a session I recorded of Dr. Neruda on December 31, 1997. {I do not believe that date. This “interview” is linked from the “what’s new” section of the web site. Wait for it – the interview has predictions and good foresight.} He gave permission for me to record his answers to my questions. This is the transcript of that session. This was one of five times I was able to tape-record our conversations. I have preserved these transcripts precisely as they occurred. No editing was performed, and I've tried my best to include the exact words, phrasing, and grammar used by Dr. Neruda. (It's recommended that you read the previous three interviews before reading this one.) {I confess that I did not.} - some snippets – Sarah: “I’m not clear about the different objectives of these three forces.” +++ Dr. Neruda: “At the highest levels of the Incunabula, the planning horizons are typically twenty to one hundred years, depending on the issue. They are well aware that as the oil supplies diminish, oil will become increasingly more difficult to extract from the planet’s reservoirs, and consequently, require at minimum, a thirty percent delta in refining costs. This will have a profound effect on price, which can have the effect of producing a persistent recession in the world’s economy.” {really showing his ignorance for such a connected fella. Where is mention of the Constitution? Banking? } +++ Sarah: Okay, stop a moment because I did some research since our interview Saturday, and learned a little bit about the organization called the Illuminati. Is this the same organization you’re now referring to as the Incunabula?” Dr. Neruda: “No. The Illuminati is part of the secret network, but it’s not the alpha organization. The Illuminati is affiliated with other blueblood organizations, mostly originating from European roots, but its goals and objectives are not aligned to the Incunabula.” Sarah: “In what way, because from my reading it seemed like it was the secret network you were referring to.” Dr. Neruda: “First, you need to understand that the secret network, as I was referring to, is loosely assembled and not well aligned because of competing agendas. Nonetheless, there is a sense of camaraderie between some of the more powerful groups mostly because they share an elite status in business, academia, or government. +++ Dr. Neruda: “The Incunabula doesn’t dictate to the other two forces. It strategically releases information that lures the two forces in the direction it wants them to go. Sarah: “I’m not clear about the different objectives of these three forces.” Dr. Neruda: “The Incunabula is concerned with the globalization of monetary channels and vital supplies like petroleum and natural gas; the Military Force is concerned with spreading and preserving democratization throughout the globe, and in so doing, protecting the self-interests of the dominant superpowers of America and Western Europe; and the Isolationist Force is focused on industry and wealth building for its citizens at the state level.” Sarah: “But how does the Incunabula lure these other two forces to do its bidding? Can you give me an example?” Dr. Neruda: “Why do you think Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait?” + + + Dr. Neruda: “Yes. As I said earlier, they believe the global regulation of energy resources and the ability to manage population growth are the convergent issues of our time that – if managed properly – can avert Armageddon.” Sarah: “You’ve said that word twice tonight – Armageddon. What do you mean by that? Are you talking about World War III?” Dr. Neruda: “Armageddon is defined by the ACIO as the chaos of humanity. It is the time when humanity plunges into chaos and the interfaces of global commerce, communication, and diplomacy are destroyed in favor of national self-preservation. If this were to happen, weapons of unusual power could be used to destroy thirty percent or more of the human population. This is the definition that we don’t like to talk about, but it’s well known within the ACIO as a possibility in the 21st century.” Sarah: “So I assume you have your probability forecasts for this as well. Right?” Dr. Neruda: “Yes.” + + + There’re several alternative energy sources that are under consideration – some are not even released to the public at this time because they stem from technologies that also carry great potential as weapons. “As far as the ACIO is concerned, it has thoroughly analyzed the various scenarios presented by U.S. global domination and find that there are only two scenarios in which the United States can achieve its ambitious aims without catalyzing a world war and plunging the global economy into a severe depression.” Sarah: “Can you disclose these?” Dr. Neruda: “No.” + + + Dr. Neruda: “No. It’s because the U.S. has a global military presence and economic lever that it wields with relative virtuosity. It is skillful at aggression without appearing aggressive. It protects and defends, and sometimes it will do this in a pre-emptive strike and sometimes in a reactive countermeasure that is usually at a force response that is several fold the original intensity. America’s self interests have become the standard of the free world, and there are those who fear it will dominate to the point of imperialism.” Sarah: “How does all of this fit into the work of the Incunabula or the ACIO for that matter?” Dr. Neruda: “The Incunabula uses the U.S. as a force for globalization. It is the lead horse pulling the nation states of the globe into a common economic and political platform. Sarah: “Can you disclose these?” Dr. Neruda: “No.” Sarah: “Why?” Dr. Neruda: “They are based on a mixture of remote viewing, advanced computer modeling, and preliminary BST tests. I am not willing to disclose this information at this time. Perhaps at a later date.” + + + Sarah: “Remind me again, why is this consolidation, as you put it, so critical to our survival?” Dr. Neruda” “Because the threats that will confront the human population in the 21st century will be global issues – whether they are intractable recessions, dwindling oil supplies, food distribution, overpopulation, pollution, nuclear fallout, or extraterrestrial visitations, they will require a global, coordinated response. Unless the nations of the world are united, they will respond too slowly to the threats, and the decay forces will have such traction that they may be impossible to reverse.” + + + Dr. Neruda: “Only partially. The electromagnetic fields were not fully replicated in terms of their sustained intensity levels in metals because of electron drift, which, and I’m struggling to keep this in layperson’s terms, were the primary reason it failed. Nonetheless, there were prototypes built that replicated aspects of the alien craft’s propulsion system, and these were sufficient to galvanize funding and support for the ACIO.” + + + Sarah: “So it’s possible that Fifteen made all of this up?” Dr. Neruda: “You mean about the planners?” Sarah: “Isn’t it possible?” Dr. Neruda: “No. But it’s possible that his perception is not completely accurate, though I doubt it. Fifteen’s ability to grasp the character of someone is uncanny. He understands human psychology better than those writing the textbooks. {Quite an accolade. Gee. Wow.} I think it would be impossible for the planners to pull the wool over his eyes without him being aware of it.” Sarah: “But you said you never met these planners – only Fifteen has…” Dr. Neruda: “I understand your concern about the validity of this. If I could give you names to check out, or some other form of proof, I would. These organizations exist right up to the Incunabula, and they can be traced and researched. Certainly many journalists and researchers have done so regarding Freemasonry or Skull and Bones, and some with good success. But they never look at the broader order and what organization manages these larger, more abstract forces that make up the Triad of Power.” {Turtles under turtles under turtles . . .} + + + “Well, as much as I’m tempted to dive into more information about this Grand Portal, I think my mind has reached its full ration for the night. Let’s plan to talk more about the Grand Portal in our next interview. Okay?” Dr. Neruda: “That’s fine with me.” Sarah: “Anything you want to say before we sign off?” {Who is this, Larry King?} Dr. Neruda: “Yes. “If you, the reader, {So is this calculating, or what?} wonder how the information I’ve presented about the Incunabula relates to all of the various conspiracy theories about the New World Order, intelligence community, Illuminati, Freemasonry, and all the other supposed clandestine organizations of the world, I would respectfully ask you to suspend your prior notions about the motivations of these various groups. “These are not evil-minded organizations regardless of how some portray them. Their members have children and families just like you, and they take pleasure and disgust in the very same things as you do. {Well, the problem here is that WE don’t take pleasure and disgust in the same things. WE ARE DIFFERENT AND WE RESPECT THOSE DIFFERENCES! HELLO. Hello. Anybody home?} They are humans with all the same weaknesses for vice and greed, but they also have a strong energy to improve the world {that’s catchy}, it is simply that their definition of what a better world is may differ from yours. “If your interest is to conjure an antagonist for your amusement, that’s your prerogative. {Gee, this guy is so superior, so intelligent.} But the issues I’ve related tonight are too serious to be amusing. They are deserving of your attention and discernment. {You betcha.} Do your own investigation into the energy supplies of our world. You may come up with different numbers than what I mentioned, but only because the technology of the ACIO is more advanced than the petroleum industry. Nonetheless, you’ll see confirmation of this general condition. {Yes, We read Mike Ruppert’s web site too.} “Look at the current events of your time whenever you read this interview. You’ll see how this plan is progressing. ;-)It may seem to take detours, but the general course is what I’ve described. It is moving in this direction not out of accident or because of the whims of the world’s leaders, you can be sure. It is all part of the orchestration of events that are played out according to the well-designed blueprints of the Incunabula planners. “You may feel a certain anguish that you’re being led to a future not of your choosing, but if you want to have influence, then you need to be educated and aware of the real forces that are defining your future. This is a free-will universe. {So let me direct your thinking.} There is no hierarchy of angelic beings guiding the destiny of earth. There is no ascended master who dictates the pathway to enlightenment for humanity or the individual. {Well-read too.} “If you truly want to express and apply your freewill, make it a personal religion to know the facts. Learn how to look behind the stories that are being sold by the media and politicians, and form your own conclusions. {Why do I get the feeling I’m not in his target audience?} Keep your doubt intact about everything you’re told from the political stage, especially when you’re induced to be patriotic. It is one of the clearest signals to be suspicious of what you’re being told. “When enemies are created – especially new ones, be wary of the motivations of those who claim them to be enemies. Investigate the facts. Look under all the rocks and verify your evidence. Each of you must become investigators and learn the art of research and analytical study if you want to feel more a part of the movement to globalization. {AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGH!} “Your insights and understandings may not change humanity’s course one millimeter, but it will change your ability to feel a part of this migration and have a sense of where humanity is moving and why. “And to those who prefer to strike out on their own path and believe that globalism is pure folly, I can only explain to you that it must happen. It is the outward expression of who we are and it is the natural progression of our species to unify around the inner essence of our identity, instead of the outer façade of our particular nation or religious belief. {OK MR Scientist, where did you DEFINE “globalism?” } “I believe everyone understands this to varying degrees, but it is the methods of this unification that concern people. And I share this concern. {sympathetic - sounds like an interrogator} If we’re collectively informed about the plan and understand the end-goal is something that holds a great promise for humanity, we can pursue this goal with greater velocity and with added confidence that the methods will be in everyone’s best interest. This must be our goal. “And finally, many of you may feel that globalization is a concept of the New World Order and therefore dismiss it as a movement borne out of greed and the lust for power. Yes, there are always those who will take advantage of this movement to achieve personal gain, but the reason to become a unified people on this earth is far greater than the personal gains of a few. Remember this as you read your conspiracy stories. {And be grateful for the managers.} “I’m finished, Sarah. Thank you for your indulgence.” Sarah: “Thank you for your comments.” End of Session http://www.wingmakers.com/neruda4ex.html -------------------- - The thing is, 100,000 people are going to read this and most of them are going to taken in. It is a very slick web site. Yesserrie, turn to the internet for the truth. They’ve got this stuff on Bucky Fuller websites too. I posted something almost exactly a year ago about one. Sounds like the same crew, actually. A person could go nuts tracking these vermin down. Better just to learn to recognize the expression of the current of thought they represent. A great read if you have the stomach for it. Wear your rubber boots. These people are smoothe.
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