Books That Counter Our "Training" To Make War by John Pilger

Prior to the 1920s there were dozens of newspapers in a city catering to the needs and prejudices of various groups of people. But the wealthy and powerful class did not want newspapers exposing what they actually did to exploit other Americans. So they decided to start "professional" Journalism Schools so that only people with these degrees can practice journalism.

Similar to all schools of higher learning, those individuals with untrainable non-conventional thinking or independence can be weeded out during the secretive qualifying exams for the higher degrees. Most learn what not to talk or write about so they do these things automatically today.

In the 1920s and 1930s brute force was used to control labor and other malcontents, but corporations and governments found that at some point they became difficult to control. So a plan called Operation Phoenix (?) was initiated in 1937 to control the thinking of the American people, but was not started until 1945.

They decided to make use of powerful propaganda techniques developed by the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays of Cambridge, "The Father of Public Relations" who already had success in getting Americans to start eating hearty breakfasts in 1907, propagandizing our elites to believe that World War I was necessary to help Britain, getting woman to smoke in the 1930s to "gain their independence" from men and perversely Jewish Bernays also ironically helped Hitler who read his 1928 book "Propaganda" in prison to help him convert Germans into raving war-minded and anti-Semitic maniacs.

Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf in an obscure book published in 1994, "Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism--1945-60--" wrote a factual, non-ideological, description of actually what happened. Big Business spent an enormous amount of money to squeeze out any independent thinking and becoming obedient to authority during business hours, at elementary high schools, and colleges with appropriately placed money and teaching plans, TV and radio ads and in program propaganda pieces to make unions into a pariah organization successfully.

Wendell Potter who is now speaking out against Corporate Healthcare Policies use to be the top Public Relations person to CIGNA Healthcare, is a good example of obedience to power. He designed the propaganda campaign to stop the spread of their act of denying a dying liver transplant teenager calling it experimental which is ridiculous and led to her early death two days after they were forced to rescind their death order because of a huge public outcry.

But he retired early because his individual morality came back a year before when he visited a Virginia health fair where White southerners were lining up by the thousands from nearby and distant states to get free healthcare in horse stalls and gurneys with no privacy. Now he is speaking out. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07312009/profile.html

To get another slant on what is happening in this world, go to http://www.zcommunications.org/znet, and select one article you might be interested in reading. Normally they are longer than Krugman's Op-Ed column which is limited to about 700 words, but just like him, the articles in Z-Net informs you about facts and mainstream journalist's slant on the facts. Even if you disagree with what they write which I do from time to time, you will gain facts that may help your thinking about what matters to you.

Jim Kawakami

August 7, 2009

http://jimboguy.blogspot.com Health, Finance, and other topics of interest and analysis

Aug 06, 2009 by John Pilger "Books that Counter Our "Training" to Make War""

http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3945 (Pilger is banned from any USA media outlet now because he so effectively films and writes about what the Establishment is actually doing. www.johnpilger.com

1.0 Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky describe how war propaganda in free societies is "filtered" by media organisations, not as conscious "crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalisation of [elite] priorities and definitions of newsworthiness".

2.0 A Century of Spin by David Miller and William Dinan, who describe the rise of an "invisible government" invented by Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays. "Propaganda," said Bernays, "got to be a bad word because of the Germans, so what I did was to try and find some other words." The other words were "public relations", which now consumes much of journalism.

3.0 The latest achievement of PR is the "Obama phenomenon". In Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (published in the US by Paradigm), Paul Street peels away the mask in perhaps the only book that tells the truth about the 44th president of the United States.

4.0 My contribution. Jim General Smedley D. Butler wrote a book "War is a Racket," 1935, where he writes "I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism." Note that the Standing armies, CIA and NSA spy agencies were also established by Wall Street and Bankers. The framers of the Constitution and others know about the dangers of a Standing Army. Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and Eisenhower spoke often about these dangers.