Since the international insanity began three years ago in the Spring of 2020, several compelling theories have emerged regarding those who have used this time to suppress freedoms and control the population.
For example, Debbie Lerman has effectively argued that lockdowns in the US were not about health, but about counter-terrorism. The state response is to control the population, and not let go of those controls once they are in place.
Aaron Kheriaty has effectively argued that we have entered a new realm of the Security State, all our actions monitored, tracked, and controlled.
Most disturbing of all, Jeffrey Tucker has effectively argued that scientific consensus has overwritten individual choice, giving us a vaccine which we all would be required to take, and which naturally leads to eugenics.
In reading these kinds of well-positioned articles, and the reactions to them on social media, it’s easy to get the impression that we have entered a truly Brave New World, one which did not formerly exist, and is an entirely new phenomenon.
The simple fact is that they are not new ideas. Man desires power over man. But even the parts of the recent attacks on humanity that may seem new are not entirely new. As outlined in the articles above, one such idea is that the government and companies have been performing psyops against us, to control our emotions and dictate our actions.
But how do you convince the population that this mode of existence is desirable? You have to change the way they think. Is that new?
In his brilliant documentary, The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis describes how companies and governments used the psychological ideas of Sigmund Freud to manipulate people’s emotions for their own purposes and ends throughout the 1900s.
Edward Bernays, the nephew of Freud, was chiefly responsible for bringing these ideas of mass manipulation to large corporations and the US government. In one example explored in Curtis’ documentary, the taboo against women smoking in public was preventing the large tobacco companies from selling to half of their potential market.
Bernays hired a group of debutantes to appear in the Easter Sunday parade of 1929 in New York, under the guise that they represented the women’s suffrage movement. During the parade all the women smoked cigarettes, referencing the phrase “Torches of Freedom.” Cigarette sales to women began to take off.
What’s key here is that Bernays did not just get the women in the parade, he also alerted the press that it was happening. The press happily took photos and repeated “Torches of Freedom” in articles written for papers around the country. So the press unwittingly (or complicitly) aided Bernays in his campaign to encourage more women to smoke. Sound familiar?
Even as doctors became increasingly aware that cigarettes not only did not promote freedom, but could easily kill you, the song and dance continued. Cigarette campaigns used the medical establishment to give consumers the idea that cigarettes are safe. Again, sound familiar?
Bernays’ work with the US government included what now would be called a color revolution in Guatemala. Guatemala had a dictator who worked well with the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita), procuring bananas for sale in the US. The problem was that the workers were essentially slaves, and they revolted, electing a new leader, Dr. Juan Jose Arévalo, who installed a constitution modeling the US.
He was followed by Jacobo Arbenz, who took the lands away from the banana company. They didn’t like that and went crying to Uncle Sam. Bernays came to the rescue, and staged anti-American pro-Communist rallies, including of course, a healthy dose of violence. No matter that Arbenz did not call himself a Communist or had any ties to Moscow. It didn’t take long for the American people to be frightened of a new Communist threat to the south, and get behind the idea that this new leader was a threat and must go.
Bernays even came up with a new phrase for how he had manipulated the minds of Americans; he called it the Engineering of Consent. And this wasn’t the first time Bernays added a phrase to the lexicon. When he started with big business in the 1920s he thought the word propaganda was so negative, so he came up with a new one: public relations.
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