Propagandizing The Masses
September 24, 2012 by Bob Livingston
Propaganda is the use of words and messages to mold the public mind to accept falsehoods as truths and divert the attention of the masses away from important subjects and toward those with little or no significance. The basis of mind control, propaganda leads to the acceptance of subtle or overt force and collectivism and directs the public to act against its self-interest.
The whole political realm is propaganda. The “truth” is what the handlers and spinmeisters and message crafters and their presstitute media mouthpieces say it is. The recent dustup involving the secret Mitt Romney video is case in point.
The media and President Barack Obama’s campaign message handlers made hay with Romney’s words about “not working for” 47 percent of the electorate. Never mind that Romney was speaking a truth. Almost half of Americans are on some kind of government program. Half of Americans don’t pay income taxes. Romney’s message — whether true or not — of smaller, limited government will not resonate with most of them. If he expends resources on attempts to woo them, he is wasting his time and money.
As usual, rather than focusing on the important takeaway of the story, the mainstream media blew the ancillary issues out of proportion in another feat of linguistic legerdemain. Lost in the hue and cry and Obama’s appearance on “The David Letterman Show,” as well as the subsequent faux outrage of the right’s media mouthpieces when it was revealed that a couple of minutes of tape was missing, was the information Romney revealed about the spinmeisters and message crafters behind the campaign.
They are professional propagandists. They travel the world working for campaigns. Their core value, if they have any, is only to get the candidate elected who bid the highest for their services. As Romney said in a rare moment of political candor that you only get if you’re part of the 1 percent:
I have a very good team of extraordinarily experienced, highly successful consultants, a couple of people in particular who have done races around the world. I didn’t realize it. These guys in the U.S.—the Karl Rove equivalents—they do races all over the world: in Armenia, in Africa, in Israel. I mean, they work for Bibi Netanyahu in his race. So they do these races and they see which ads work, and which processes work best, and we have ideas about what we do over the course of the campaign. I’d tell them to you, but I’d have to shoot you.
How do they determine which processes work best? Romney told the audience:
We speak with voters across the country about their perceptions. Those people I told you—the 5 to 6 or 7 percent that we have to bring onto our side—they all voted for Barack Obama four years ago. So, and by the way, when you say to them, “Do you think Barack Obama is a failure?” they overwhelmingly say no. They like him. But when you say, “Are you disappointed that his policies haven’t worked?” they say yes. And because they voted for him, they don’t want to be told that they were wrong, that he’s a bad guy, that he did bad things, that he’s corrupt. Those people that we have to get, they want to believe they did the right thing, but he just wasn’t up to the task. They love the phrase that he’s “over his head.”
Hence, Romney’s message is that Obama is “over his head.” Giving the 5 percent to 7 percent of the Nation’s undecided and disengaged simpletons the truth — that Obama is a collectivist who believes in redistribution and is intentionally trying to crash the Nation’s economy in order to “fundamentally transform” the country — is unacceptable because they don’t want to hear it. They probably wouldn’t understand it anyway.
It is impossible to know what the candidates will do based on their campaign speeches and slogans and advertisements (see George W. Bush 2000 and Obama 2008). The words they use and messages they convey are selected based on focus groups made up of those who claim to be independents or moderates who are malleable, indecisive and disconnected from important issues. Every political utterance is closely scripted and, as even the media now admits, censored by the campaigns, thanks to a complicit presstitute media.
Both Democrats and Republicans use propaganda for their benefit. Their aim is to draft a message based not on what they believe or what is Constitutional or what is good for the country, but to make the targeted audience take the desired action. One dare not speak the truth.
But the propaganda that gets the parties’ rank and file agitated continues unabated. The spinmeisters and propaganda mouthpieces seize on “hot button” issues in order to create division among the populace and to keep the public’s focus away from the Federal Reserve’s money printing and assault on the wealth of Americans, American imperialism and the resulting slaughter of innocents abroad, the exploding Federal regulatory bureaucracy, and the crony capitalism that benefits large multinational corporations that, in turn, benefits the political elites.
The propaganda hides the similarities in the candidates and the parties’ elite: that both are slaves to the military-industrial complex and will continue to wage perpetual war around the globe at the behest of their globalist masters, both are owned by the banksters and will do their bidding, both believe in the imperial Presidency and the ability to govern by fiat executive order, both believe it’s the proper role of the President to incarcerate Americans without due process and hold them indefinitely without trial, both approve of the fear-based burgeoning homeland-security apparatus that violates Americans’ rights with unlawful searches and seizures and is stockpiling weaponry and ammunition as if building up for war, and both are approved by the world’s elites — Obama in 2007 and Romney in 2012 (which may indicate that elites have kicked Obama to the curb).
The propaganda works well.
Party rank and file (that is, the workers in the trenches and party-specific voters) buy the lie that their candidates are going to abide by the party platform — which the elites ignore — and keep the promises their messagers told them to make to whatever audience they happen to be standing before at the time.
When it comes time to govern, those promises are shoved down the memory hole, and the political elites do the will of their corporate and globalist masters. Government grows, liberty is lost and tyranny prevails — regardless of which political party holds power.
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