by FRANK SCOTT • Dateline: Tuesday, April 16, 2019
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society..we are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men..who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses..it is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."
—from "Propaganda" 1928 by Edward Bernays
Ruling class personages attending the funeral of John McCain, one of their own, and a notorious henchman and salesman for the same class.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]gnorant but often understandable fearful reactions by individuals to retail murders committed by driven lunatics and manic revenge seekers that have taken the lives of many innocent souls is conveniently labeled “islamophobic”, while the systemic mass murdering destruction of major parts of the middle east and wholesale inhumanity that slaughters hundreds of thousands, reduces millions to refugees while destroying nations and governments and is the root of retaliatory terrorism is, um, enlightened globalized love of Islam?
Poverty and injustice in some foreign countries is seen as dreadful behavior demanding our humanitarian attention while poverty and injustice at home calls for more domestic spending on war, junk food, pets and gossip.
A rich, arrogant, asshole, thus over-qualified for the job of American president, is so hated by the establishment and its class of professional minions that much of public consciousness is focused exclusively on him while a system sinks lower in wealth and morality each day and situations more threatening than modern humanity has ever consciously faced get worse with each moment focused on his alleged fascism while its more destructive than ever qualities remain in what amounts to an unconscious state that the psych business loves as long as it can be individually monetized.
Proposals that are part of the Green New Deal encounter criticism from the ruling powers and their servant class in media and politics with the plaintive wail “where will we get the money” coming from sources deaf, dumb and blind to the trillions spent on warfare <>>> millions living in poverty and hundreds of thousands living under bridges, highways, in tent cities, their autos or on the street. A four-year-old child idiot savant might advise that the wailers consider budgeting less for war, poverty, exploitation, profits <>>> and more for food, clothing, shelter and health care for the entire population. If such a gender free disabled child of color existed it might be urged to enter the democratic sweepstakes for president but hopefully refuse to sink to their level, from which warfare, poverty and waste result.
Gossip mongers posing as political commentators insist Trump reveal his tax figures so that they might learn the shocking news that he is an extremely wealthy capitalist, thus given, like all members of his class, to hire lawyers and accountants and regularly cheat on his taxes the way they all do, and to an overwhelmingly greater extent than the common people formerly called the middle but more honestly the working class. In fact, a study revealed that .5% of the richest people in America claim 20% of the untaxable wealth in existence, which amounts to some 50 billon dollars a year of what should be our cash that they stash. Trump represents chump change to that mob, which is why they pay to have him play the role of individual rich pig and drum that idea into the heads of people so starved for information they can believe Trump is having a homosexual affair with Putin while missing the fact that he has almost buried his face in Netanyahu’s crotch with hardly a word of criticism about Israel from the same information pimps screeching about Russia and everything but the system that he, they, and we are a part of and which must be radically transformed if we are to have real democracy, peace, social justice and an environment treated as foundation for such a system.
Gossip mongers posing as political commentators insist Trump reveal his tax figures so that they might learn the shocking news that he is an extremely wealthy capitalist, thus given, like all members of his class, to hire lawyers and accountants and regularly cheat on his taxes the way they all do, and to an overwhelmingly greater extent than the common people formerly called the middle but more honestly the working class. Now, for a comparison of the shameful behavior of alleged representatives of the people and their co-conspirators in corporate media, let’s watch what the great heroes of our “free” press do with the arrest of Assange, an international figure of courageous public service who makes most of what passes for a journalist class seem a system worshipping stenography religion by comparison. It is significant that he and Manning, two heroic figures, are imprisoned while an entire population of corporate and media hustlers make a living blaming the empty headed egotist in the white house for everything that is, was, and continues to be appallingly wrong with a system while they all make good livings obliterating any mention of that while jumping on a bandwagon of “resistance” to Trump. And Trump will of course cooperate, calling for their heads and despite his initially expressed feelings about wasteful wars becoming a barking dog in response to his master’s orders to get more belligerent about Venezuela, Cuba, and intellectual concepts beyond his – and far too many Americans’ - frame of reference or understanding, like socialism and communism.
A leadership class whose morality and intellect could give pond scum a bad name will continue searching for evidence to impeach the captain of a ship that is not only in danger of sinking but threatening the entire ocean in which it may be swallowed, while the crew follows orders and the passengers are distracted, confused and not yet angry enough to really mutiny. Let’s not wait until the water is up to our ankles.
This is an excerpted version of Frank's essay. You can read the whole editorial at his chief site, legalienate.blogspot.com
Editor's Comment: The image below, one of thousands perhaps in circulation castigating the Republicans and Trump, in particular, as the direct causes of the national debacle, encapsulates what Frank Scott so brilliantly denounces in this essay. But the image is misleading; not untruthful, just badly misleading.
The ideological disease afflicting the United States —induced confusion is probably a more apt term— which has divided the nation into two irreconcilable camps, has old and complex origins, and one of the chief problems in explaining it away is that reality is defined for the believers only in half-truths, many of these half-truths long the stock in trade of the professional apologists for US imperialism and its hypocritical foundation, exceptionalism.
The half-truth is perfect as a lure for the mentally incautious or plain ignorant—the vast majority of the American public. In the current case, if you look at this image (appearing in a Democrat/Never trumper venue) how can anyone inject some mature reasoning and vision into a Democrat/Russiagater's partisan mind when practically ALL the bad and even horrid things that are being said about Trump and his gang are true? Indeed, the man is such an abject representative of this country's malignant ruling class that his loud and often infantile persona has made it easy for the revoltingly cynical Democrats, and their allies in the intel and military agencies and whorish punditocacy, to sell everyone the line that all evil flows from Trump, that the problem is not systemic, and that once HE is eliminated, things will go back to some hunky dory democracy, the rule of law, blah, blah.
There's just one problem with that interpretation: it's certifiably and intentionally delusional. For by the time Trump arrived on the scene, American democracy was already dead. Long dead--its place occupied by a deceiving hulk, an empty, formal democracy, a zombie democracy, if you like, masking the rule of the global plutocracy, which, incidentally, is not even patriotically invested in the US, per se, but simply uses America as a main base of operations and shield for its incessant crimes, like a giant parasite, a la Alien, which is exactly what it is. So yea, Trump is bad, he's crazy, he's stunningly ignorant, he's an obnoxious narcissist, he's unreliable, and he's infantile, and he likes to pinch women's asses and grab their privates with impunity. But he did not create the current mess, and he did not conspire with the Russkies to meddle in, or take over a non-existent democracy. The truth comes from the opposite direction: it is the decomposing capitalist system and its utterly corrupt culture that spawned Trump, and his political parents are all the media pundits, presstitutes, and politicians in the rotten money-controlled duopoly who preceded him and still surround him, including the most vociferous poseurs in the Democrat party gallery of hypocrites, from Pelosi and Obama on down to the long list of celebrities who proudly militate in an equally ridiculoous and delusional "#resistance".
The image below, therefore, could easily be grafted on Democrat operatives, for they, too, are very much guilty of the crimes imputed to Trump and then some, and we are talking real crimes here, including brutal, long-lasting unwarranted wars, which the empire, in rapid decline, needs to constantly pursue or threaten in order to remain viable as the main bully on the block.
Trump obviously does not have any solutions to the American disease; only pathetic fools can believe such a notion. If anything, he's a flame accelerant in the conflagration consuming the nation. But his supposed opponents—the Democrat mafia—have no solutions either, although their legion of idiotised, smug followers seem to think so, or are good at pretending they do. In fact, they are more dangerous, because they wear carefully cultivated masks guaranteeing a more undetectable type of deceit, whereas Republicans, by temperament more impudent and brutish about their political malfeasance, are also far more transparent in their prostitution to the rich and powerful. That being the case, with the Democrat choir singing the loudest, a selective vision seconded by a selective priggish indignation have become the coin of the realm, and that is what makes this historical moment so repugnant. For horrid criminality is bad enough, but when wrapped in thick layers of almost impregnable hypocrisy, a hundred times worse. CJ Hopkins summed up the nature of our predicament rather well. His diagnosis, along with Frank Scott's lacerating words, should be circulated widely. Who knows, their truths might liberate enough minds in time to start a real cure. —PG
Americans elected Donald Trump, a preposterous, self-aggrandizing ass clown, not because they were latent Nazis, or because they were brainwashed by Russian hackers, but, primarily, because they wanted to believe that he sincerely cared about America...Unfortunately, there is no America. There is nothing to make great again. “America” is a fiction, a fantasy, a nostalgia that hucksters like Donald Trump (and other, marginally less buffoonish hucksters) use to sell whatever they are selling … themselves, wars, cars, whatever. What there is, in reality, instead of America, is a supranational global capitalist empire, a decentralized, interdependent network of global corporations, financial institutions, national governments, intelligence agencies, supranational governmental entities, military forces, media, and so on.—CJ Hopkins
