by
Colin Todhunter
The
father of modern public relations and spin, Edward Bernays was a
cold, cynical manipulator of mass perception. He knew that by shaping
people’s desires in a certain way, governments and corporations
could sell just about any notion to the masses and manipulate them at
will. Whether it was whipping up fear about the bogeyman of communism
or selling the ‘American Dream’ of happiness through consuming
goods, Bernays and the public relations/advertising industry, which
took its cue from him, did exactly that.
Bernays
was an expert in stage managing events to capture the popular
imagination. Among his various accomplishments was to get women
hooked on cigarettes by associating feminism and fashion with
smoking. Calling cigarettes ‘torches of freedom’, he was
instrumental in convincing women that cigarettes were trendy and that
smoking symbolised emancipation. From getting people to change their
diets to putting fluoride in drinking water, corporations knew who to
turn to when they wanted to sell their dubious products.
Thanks
in large part to Bernays, politicians, the corporate media and the
system’s opinion leaders learned to appeal to primitive impulses,
such as fear, sex and narcissism, that have little bearing on issues
beyond the narrow self-interests of a consumer society. The whole
point of such a society is to distract people from the reality of the
wider world and train them to desire and want new things that they
don’t really need – or for that matter even want – while
stripping them of their ability to be self-reliant and independent.
The US
government quickly learned that angels and demons could be
manufactured from thin air and, from Guatemala and Congo to Vietnam,
that wars and destabilisations could be built on packs of lies –
lies about evil-doers about to kick down the door, lies about the
impending misery they would inflict and lies about the government
delivering the world from impending doom.
The 2002
BBC documentary series ‘The Century of the Self’ describes how
Bernays’s propagandised on behalf of the United Fruit Company (now
Chiquita Brands International) and the US government to help
overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo
Arbenz Guzman. Arbenz wanted to nationalise the company’s lands but
Bernays successfully helped brand Arbenz as a communist with links to
the USSR, which had no basis in reality. This set the stage for
public support for a US-backed violent overthrow of Arbenz.
Whether
it has involved Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine or Libya, Bernay’s
tactics of deception have been further developed to keep the masses
docile in order to sell imperialism under the lie of a war on terror,
humanitarian intervention or exporting freedom, while enriching
corporate interests in the process.
Consumer
capitalism and imperialism
Millions
are now locked into the pursuit of the Bernay’s model of
consumerism. They are locked into addiction. Addicted to the pursuit
of acquisition, of hedonism, of self-gratification. Addicted to the
belief that there is an actual point to it all.
In the
US Declaration of Independence, there is the phrase “Life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness”. Freedom and happiness (or the
pursuit of it) is central but was subverted by the likes of Bernays.
With his knowledge of psycho-analysis (Sigmund Freud was his uncle),
Bernays knew it was relatively easy to manipulate desires and get
people hooked on consuming.
This
great ‘American Dream’ of consumerism was built on craving and
propaganda. And it is maintained by stripping the environment bare,
by the unsustainable raping of nature to fuel profits, and is
underpinned by perpetual war to grab resources.
As a
result of such war, the US military-industrial complex is now
responsible for a body count of 20 million dead and counting since
1945, people killed by US-backed wars and death squads, covert ops
and destabilisations. All glossed over by countless Hollywood icons,
commentators and politicians under the banner of championing freedom
and democracy.
Today’s
globalised system of capitalism exists to facilitate the desires of
around just 6,000 to 7,000 people: the extremely wealthy of the world
who are setting the globalisation and war agendas at the G8, G20,
NATO, the World Bank and the WTO. They are from the highest levels of
finance capital and transnational corporations.
These
billionaires (a transnational capitalist class) dictate global
economic policies through their high-level think tank and lobbying
networks and decide on who lives and who dies and which wars are
fought and inflicted on which people.
They are
called ‘wealth creators’. ‘High flyers’ who have stolen
ordinary people’s wealth, who have stashed it away in tax havens,
who have bankrupted economies because of their reckless gambling and
greed and who have imposed a form of globalisation that results in
devastating destruction and war for those who attempt to remain
independent from them or structurally adjusted violence via
privatisation and economic neo-liberalism for millions in countries
that have acquiesced.
Little
wonder then that attempts to redress the balance have been brutally
suppressed over the decades. From democratic leftist organisations or
governments pursuing a socialist alternative or just displaying
independent tendencies, this class has used intelligence agencies,
front groups, threats, co-opted leaders or military might to attempt
to subvert or annihilate any threat to its global hegemony.
From El
Salvador and Chile to Egypt and India’s tribal belt, ordinary folk
across the world have been subjected to policies that have resulted
in oppression, poverty and conflict. But this is all passed off by
politicians and the corrupt mainstream media as the way things must
be. And anyone who stands up to this lie is ridiculed or much worse
to prevent the truth from emerging. And that truth is that many of us
know what ‘happiness’ really is and the type of society necessary
to achieve it – based on common ownership of natural assets (the
commons), self-reliance, localisation, economic democracy and
equality – and that the immensely wealthy people who stand in its
way do all things necessary to prevent us from having it.
Yet it
is ordinary men (and women) who sign up to join the military and
support this system on behalf of these immensely wealthy people. In
part thanks to Bernays, such people have however been adept in
manipulating the masses to rally around flag and nation, evoking an
emotive misplaced sense of patriotism to pursue their militarism or
justify their exploitation.
In his
book ‘A People’s History of England’, AL Morton documented how
ordinary people, over many hundreds of years, set out to challenge
these rulers and often paid with their lives. Nothing ever came for
free and ordinary working people fought tooth and nail for any rights
that they managed to obtain.
Such a
travesty then that today ordinary people in the richer countries are
denied decent livelihoods because jobs have been sold to the lowest
bidder in places such as China, a de facto colonial outpost for the
US empire with its ready supply of cheap labour.
With
workers’ wages having been depressed, consumer demand thus propped
up by debt, how convenient that the lie of ‘austerity’ is being
used as a battering ram to finish off what the likes of Reagan and
Thatcher did in the 80s with their pro-big business,
pro-privatisation, anti-union, anti-welfare policies.
And we
are supposed to thank ‘them’ for this and vote for ‘their’
politicians and support their wars. Ordinary young men (and women)
are encouraged to sign up – the grandchildren of the cannon-fodder
‘heroes’ sacrificed en masse on the blood-soaked battlefields of
countless other wars that have gone before can now join up to fight
again. For what, a land fit for heroes? Or austerity, food banks,
child poverty, powerlessness, more imperialism and propping up the US
dollar. For whom? Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum, BP, JP Morgan,
Boeing and the rest.
The US
economy has been hollowed out. Much of manufacturing has been shipped
abroad. For those who benefited, US workers can go to hell in a
handbasket as long as profits keep rolling in. It’s the ability to
maximise profit by shifting capital around the world that matters to
them, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements which
open the gates for plunder or through coercion and militarism which
merely tear them down.
Bernay’s
was a sophisticated operator in his time. But in terms of being able
to manipulate the public and keep them onside, docile, hooked and
oblivious to what is really happening, things have certainly moved
on.
Today,
there are no doubt hundreds of firms like Strategic Communications
Laboratories (SCL), which has conducted ‘behavioural change’
programmes in over 60 countries with clients having included the
British Military of Defence, the US State Department and NATO. The
use of the media to fool the public appears to be one of SCL’s key
selling points.
And then
there is APCO Worldwide, also politically well-connected and, as
Shelley Kasli puts it, well-versed in “beating the war drum” and
other fine pursuits such as facilitating the plunder of Iraqi wealth.
Whether
it concerns the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings or the rest
of the high-level think tanks – which determine policies for their
politicians to sell to the public – or the various powerful
corporate lobby groups, what they all have in common is that they are
all involved in orchestrating our future for their benefit.
But none
of this must be exposed. If the propaganda is to remain effective,
the public must remain comatose, emotionally malleable, strung out on
consumerism and endlessly subjected to an echo chamber of empty
slogans about patriotism, the bogeyman at the door and freedom and
democracy.
The
system must promote a mass mindset that is immune to the lies because
the alternative is rational analysis and emancipatory change.
Source:
Comments
Post a Comment