The United States Domestic Propaganda

by

       M. Richard Maxson

      Congress was quietly planning to officially lift a 64-year old

law preventing the US government from using propaganda on its own citizenry. Before the House passed its defense budget a bipartisan group of congressmen tacked on an amendment that would "essentially neutralize" a set of time-tested guidelines "that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government's misinformation campaigns." President Barack Obama endorsed this at Georgetown University that "we're going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we're going to have to change how the media reports on ... issues." This should be enough to send a shudder down the spine.  Politicians always have lied but the media was there to, if not serve as an impartial referee, at least hold the players to some sort of standard. No more. Big Brother is not only watching, he's now legally manipulating their environment and blurring the line between fiction and reality.  

"There are very sophisticated efforts to manipulate the images and the information that you see every day, in ways that you won’t recognize.” - Sharyl Attkisson -CBS

      Upton Sinclair, said it best when he defined journalism in the United States as “the day-to-day, between elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence." Journalism, as it is taught in schools, is about discovering, or at least suggesting, through a series of well-defined techniques what is actually happening in events of interest and reporting the findings in a non-biased, almost scientific, way, but, remarkably, this is something which virtually never happens in American journalism. Truthfulness and journalistic principles simply have no place in the intensely  politically-charged atmosphere of America where no event and no utterance is without political dimensions. Actually, this has been the case for a very long time, but it just hasn’t always been so starkly clear as it is now. 

      We sat down in a discussion group of residents who had state run medias in their countries in eastern Europe, Soviet Union, China, etc. When we discussed how the state managed to control public opinion these people would usually produce a weary, knowledgeable, cynical smile and point out that propaganda in those countries was really done quite incompetently. If you really want to know propaganda, they said, you need to study American propaganda techniques. According to them, it is, undeniably, the best in the world. The consensus was that propaganda in those countries was too obvious "As soon as you read the first sentence you knew it was a bunch of propaganda, so you didn’t even bother to read it. If you heard a speech, you knew in the first few words that it was propaganda, and you tuned it out," stated one. Even though communists had total control of the press, the people just tuned it out.

       American propaganda, however, is much cleverer. American propaganda, they patiently explained, relies

entirely on emotional appeals. It doesn’t depend on a rational theory that can be disproved: it appeals to things no one can object to. American propaganda had its birth in the advertising industry. The pioneers of advertising learned early on that people would respond to purely emotional appeals. Appeals to sexiness, to pride of ownership, to fear of falling behind the neighbors are the stock American advertising and propaganda has been refined over the years into a malevolent science, based on the assumption that most people react, not to ideas, but to naked emotion.  Fear, envy, greed, hatred, and lust: these are the basic tools for good propaganda and effective advertising. By far, the most powerful motivating emotion—the top, most-sought-after copy writers will tell you, in an unguarded moment—is fear, followed closely by greed.

      This is not the whole picture, thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have solid proof that paid government agents are using “psychology based influence techniques” on social media websites such as YouTube,

Facebook and Twitter. Documents leaked by Snowden also reveal that government agents have been conducting denial-of-service attacks, flooding social media websites with thinly veiled propaganda and have been purposely attempting to warp public discourse misinformation. The U.S. government has actually been caught manipulating discourse on Reddit and editing Wikipedia. In addition, the State Department has confirmed that it has been working to convince major media and entertainment companies, including Sony Pictures, to help with the American propaganda machine to counter other non-aligned views here and around the world.

"Propaganda does exist on all sides of us, and it does change our mental pictures of the world". -  Edward Bernays

      The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

      We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.  In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. The terrible truth in all of this is that the average American doesn't even know it is happening to them. Can we truly be a free people when our minds are so tightly controlled by unknown entities or is our national consiousness an illusion?