The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.
Edward Bernays, 1955
In his 1928 book Propaganda, Edward Bernays, the architect of modern day public relations and marketing, argues that manipulation of public opinion is necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society. It’s a strategy that his been implemented for centuries, but most notably during the last hundred years. Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Hussein found propaganda to be an extremely effective mechanism of control over their populations, as have modern-day governments of the Western world where “freedom of the press” and government transparency are supposed to be a key tenet of an open society.
It’s often a soft-sell strategy, repeating a message hundreds, even thousands of times, so that the consciousness of an entire people can be shifted to accommodate the plans of those in positions of power.
Sometimes, however, the propaganda is so over the top that it leaves you wondering if it’s even real. The following video from notorious ‘Axis of Evil’ member North Korea leaves no doubt that propaganda is alive and well in our modern world.
According to the following documentary, reportedly disseminated to millions of North Koreans, conditions in the United States are so deplorable that Americans are being forced to eat wild birds and drink snow coffee just to survive.
This ridiculously blatant example of government manipulation is a must-see, not necessarily because of the irony of it being from North Korea, where Western journalists have reported that hundreds of thousands of people themselves are starving to death, but because it demonstrates how far leaders are willing to go to ensure their narrative is the only one that’s accepted by the masses, rendering all alternative opinions moot or conspiratorial.
Before we start pointing the finger at North Korea’s propaganda machine, however, we must look at our own government, and the manipulations regularly proclaimed as truth to the American people.
One of the most infamous and well known lies perpetrated by our own government has led to a decade’s long war, taken the lives of thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of civilians and left our country trillions of dollars in debt.
Watch, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell provides justification for why we must take our country to war, a move he later acknowledged was “one of my most momentous failures, the one with the widest-ranging impact.”
As Colin Powell later realized, the propaganda was so widespread that not even he was aware of it, having been manipulated by his superiors just like the American people.
Lies and half-truths abound, even in a society where the information is purportedly free-flowing.
Make no mistake – if you see it on TV, and the same information is being repeated over and over, you are being fed a line of complete bull.
It’s all theater:
Pushing the envelope:
It should make every one of us question the legitimacy of what we’re being told.
Is our economy really on its way to recovering like our best and brightest say it is? Is the war in the middle east really coming to a close and will our soldiers really be coming home soon? Is the agenda to remove Americans’ access to semi-automatic rifles really because it will reduce gun violence?
Don’t believe any of it for a second. In today’s day and age we must be our own investigators if we want to know the real truth, because our government and their propaganda alphabet news agencies are doing everything they can to hide what’s really going on.
It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions but impossible to change the attitude of one man.
Edward Bernays