Propaganda, Terror, and Mass Communication Part 3

Written by Ray Peach

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The psychological nature of a totalitarian dictatorship is created by two closely related phenomena: namely propaganda and terror. Because terror reinforces the monopoly of mass communication, socialist propaganda can only be fully understood within this context. Conversely, terror assumes its all-pervading quality because it is spread about through continuous repetition of the official political narrative. This linkage of propaganda and terror distinguishes them from all comparable phenomena in non-socialist systems of government; and is why today’s newscasts describe so many events in terms of terrorism.

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Propaganda_and_TerrorIn The Pathology of Politics, Carl Friedrich defines terror as “symbolic acts designed to influence political behavior by extra-normal means, entailing the use or threat of violence.” Terror, Friedrich says, “may be employed for maintaining a political system or for destroying it.” In 1908, the French philosopher George Sorel published Reflections on Violence where he said that social morality must be expressed in anti-democratic terms owing to “the impossibility of political democracy.”  He concluded that existing social systems based on natural law, even though they were “considered to be perfectly just,” needed to be destroyed and replaced by a system of social justice. The only way to do this, he said, was through the use of force and deception, because the public is so accustomed to the belief in natural rights “they cannot make up their mind to abandon them.” This is a direct assault on the Christian faith and the United States, which were built on the concept of natural law.  Influenced largely by Marx, Sorel’s work became the template for Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Ho, Chi, Castro, and others.

The First Hydrogen Bomb

The results of the War of the Worlds experiment showed that fiction could be used to instill terror in the population through psychological violence, creating a whole new role for mass media. After the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb on November 1st, 1952, the news media began to hype the dangers of nuclear war. The reality was that the first hydrogen bomb was larger than a ten-story office building,  and the first Soviet H-Bomb (1961) weighed in at 27 tons, making it so large it was an impossibly useless weapon.  Even Uranium and Plutonium bombs like those used on Japan during WWII were incredibly large, and contrary to popular belief, were not all that powerful or effective. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed to be effective because most Japanese buildings are constructed of paper. We saw this in the fire bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, which resulted in more deaths than either of the two “A bombs.” Even now, a fire in a Japanese residential district is disastrous. The day after the bombing the railroads were running, and today Hiroshima’s city hall, which was used as the aiming point, is still standing – in fact, I’ve been in it.

Eisenhower wanted to belay public concerns over nuclear war, hiring Edward Barnays to come up with a public relations campaign to help alleviate public concern. Using Eisenhower’s goal as a ruse, Bernays and the Frankfurt School began to go the other direction, creating a propaganda campaign design to terrorize the American People into accepting a one-world government controlled by the United Nations.  One of Bernays accomplishments was the Duck and Cover campaign that had school children diving under their desks from 1951 into the 1980s. Not only would diving under a desk be of little use, the warning system that it was based on was prohibitively slow. Beside, in 1951 the Russians had no effective way of delivering atomic bombs to American cities, and Sputnik wouldn’t be launched until October 1957. The real purpose of Duck and Cover was to terrorize children and their parents by constantly reminding them that they are not safe in their own schools.

Hollywood Terror

This psychological attack was coordinated with Hollywood who produced The Day the Earth Stood Still, in 1951. In the movie, the supposed need for a one-world government is summed up in the final scene when the space alien, Klaatu, tells a group of scientists that by surrendering their security to a robot, his people “live in peace, without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war…” Klaatu then issues an ultimatum telling the scientists, “Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace. Or pursue your present course -- and face obliteration.”

In 1957, Nevil Norway wrote a post apocalyptic novel about the last survivors of a world wide nuclear war called On The Beach.  The novel was made into a movie in 1959, which like all such movies blamed war on the stupidity of Western culture, not on the evil of the Soviet Empire. In 1974, the rock star Neil Young (b. 1945) would use the movie as inspiration for his album On The Beach.  The album was recorded with the help of his friend and mass murderer Charles Manson, who inspired Neil to write the song Revolution Blues where he championed Manson’s views about fostering a massive racial war.

From Dr. Strangelove (1964) to The Sum of All Fears (2002) Hollywood has inculcated us with nuclear terror; but when Ronald Reagan defied this official wisdom and stood up to the Soviet Union, we discovered that their equipment didn’t work, or in many cases didn’t even exist, having spoofed American reconnaissance with cheap replicas.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

Perhaps the biggest act of terrorism perpetrated on the American people came from the Kennedy administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October of 1962, the world supposedly came close to nuclear annihilation, after the Soviets placed nuclear missiles in Cuba; but the incident had more to do with theater than with an actual threat. Today sources like Wikipedia state that the world’s first ICBM was the Russian R-7, which was used to launch Sputnik in 1957. However, this misrepresents the situation, as operational versions of the missile with a workable warhead did not see service until January 20th, 1960. Even then they were so inaccurate and unreliable that half of them could not even be counted on to launch. In October of 1962, these missiles were limited to six soft sites in the USSR and their reaction time was approximately ten hours, making them easy targets.  By comparison, by June of 1959, the United States had 123 ICBMs consisting of nine Atlas squadrons and four Titan squadrons.  By 1962 these had been supplemented by nearly a thousand solid fueled Minuteman missiles that could be fired at a moments notice.

When Kennedy ran for office he attacked Eisenhower for being soft on communism by allowing a missile gap  and for doing nothing about Fidel Castro in Cuba. But as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee he knew that the United States had an overwhelming advantage in every area of nuclear deterrence. Kennedy also knew that Eisenhower was planning to invade Cuba; but during the 1960 Presidential campaign Nixon couldn’t say anything and Kennedy knew it.  In fact, Kennedy leaked so much information that Eisenhower was forced to cancel the invasion, and his assertion that the Soviets were ahead in the arms race gave aid and comfort to the enemy. This allowed Kennedy to hide his socialist agenda by presenting himself as anti-communist while scaring the American public half to death.

Totalitarianism_by_A_R_PeachDuring the Cuban Missile “crisis,” Nikita Khrushchev supposedly shipped SA-4 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles to Cuba; but based on Soviet doctrine and the ease with which the missiles were detected, it is more likely that these were replicas.  This should come as no surprise since the Allies did the same thing to the Germans during WWII.  Additionally the CIA had been tracking Soviet warheads and knew Khrushchev never deployed any warheads with the missiles.  Perhaps more revealing however, is a memo found in Kennedy’s own handwriting at the Kennedy Library in Waltham, Massachusetts, that read, “Is there a plan to brief and brainwash the key press within twelve hours or so?” The memo specifically mentions Walter Lippmann, The New York Times, other “key bureau chiefs,” and it was standard procedure for Kennedy to use FCC Chairman Newton Minow to get what he wanted from the press.

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The standard story says that Khrushchev backed down in a secret deal where the United States agreed to remove our Jupiter missiles from Turkey, making it appear that these were antiquated missiles that needed to be decommissioned anyway. In reality, these were brand new state of the art missiles with hydrogen warheads, which had just been developed and deployed. Not only did Kennedy remove the missiles in Turkey, he removed them from England and the rest of Western Europe.

In a theatrical production, President Kennedy revealed the presence of the S-4s in a nationwide television speech and had UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, display the enlarged photographs at the UN General Assembly. These actions placed Khrushchev in an almost impossible situation in terms of his international prestige. He was able, however, to use the universal fear of nuclear war to put pressure on Kennedy, thus making him appear responsible for resolving the crisis and reaching a peaceful settlement. So instead of dealing with Khrushchev from the position of immense nuclear superiority, which we still held in 1962, Kennedy ended up by agreeing to refrain from any anti-Castro activities in return for Khrushchev's removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba; but these supposed removals were never verified.

The Cuban missile crisis and a willing press created a cult of personality that treats the Kennedy family as royalty to this day; and they did it by terrorizing an entire country, causing people to spend a fortune on family bomb shelters. In contrast President Nixon discovered in 1970 that the Soviets were building a submarine base in Cuba in violation of their agreements with Kennedy. This base and its submarines would be capable of launching missiles against the East Coast of the United States with little or no warning. U2 reconnaissance flights over Cuba in August showed nothing unusual, but in September, photographs revealed construction had begun on the shores of Alcatraz Island, a tiny dot of land off Cuba's southern coast. Instead of making a public spectacle out the problem, or pursuing Russia from a public position of weakness, Nixon decided to handle the problem in secret from a position of strength.

This angered Clintons’ mentor, Senator Fulbright, who publicly charged Nixon with “hoodwinking the American people.” He went on to say that stories of nuclear submarine bases in Cuba were aimed at getting Congress to approve more defense spending. Due to his position in Congress, Fulbright knew the truth, but this put Nixon in the position of either having to go public with the problem, or grin and bear it – he did the latter.  By secretly applying pressure for the Soviets to back down in private, the Russians were able to extract themselves from the situation while saving face, and the American people were not traumatized.

Today the same terrorist techniques are being applied, only on a more intense scale. Since 9/11 Americans have been told that we are incapable of defeating an enemy who attacked us with box cutters without surrendering our liberty and our national identity. There isn’t a newscast in the country that doesn’t display in horrific detail violence in the Middle East, characterizing it as democracy in action.

In 2008, Hollywood did a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, except that this version says mankind is nothing more than a Virus infesting the earth and needs to be eradicated. We see the same theme in James Carmon’s movie Avatar where the Human race is the worst thing that ever happened to the Universe. Finally, every network on television sells Obama’s cult of personality in what has become a massive all Obama all the time channel.

Robert Owen (1771 – 1858), the founder of utopian socialism, said that the clergy for the socialist religion would be journalists and teachers, which they are; but he hadn’t heard of radio or television.  In America, the person in front of the camera or microphone at every major news outlet, reads from the teleprompter or script placed in front of them, where even the “off hand” remarks and jokes are generally scripted. Journalists attend the same schools and are selected for their belief in party ideology, believing their job is to make a difference, not to simply report the truth. Eventually, even this ideology is abandoned as individuals recognize that their job is to grind out the political message like sausage through a meat grinder. Purported conservative news channels like Fox News exists to support the illusion of choice, while continuing to dispense the political narrative.·


– Edwards Bernays·

If you like this series on Mass Communication you would probably like the book it came from: Totalitarianism: How the Socialist Faith is Destroying America.  Learn More

Ray_PeachMr. Peach (visit his website) ·is a retired engineer who spent a great deal of his life traveling the world to solve problems for fortune 500 companies and the U.S. Government.·After serving 8 years in U.S. Naval Air he went to work for Litton Guidance Systems as a field engineer, working in the Middle East and Asia. For the next 12 years he worked as a systems engineer for Hughes Aircraft where he was involved with the F-14D, F-15E, and the F/A-18 tactical aircraft...........read more

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