Musings, articles and sundry postings of a Geordie class warrior, adhering to the Orwellian maxim: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
Wikipedia informs us that the custom of putting up a Christmas tree can be traced to 16th century Germany, though neither an inventor nor a single town can be identified as the sole origin for the tradition, which was a popular merging of older traditions; in the Cathedral of Strasbourg in 1539, the church record mentions the erection of a Christmas tree.
Back then the guilds started putting up Christmas trees in front of their guildhalls: a Bremen guild chronicle of 1570 reports how a small fir was decorated with apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers, and erected in the guild-house, for the benefit of the guild members' children, who collected the dainties on Christmas day.
But, nuff of that bollocks…after all the Xmas tree is used to help the workers decorate their homes during the festival of the birth of the Christ-child, to help them numb the pain of their oppression. Whilst many will defend the growing of conifers for use during Xmas festivities, there is another “green tree” of sorts, which has had a bad press and which needs far more promotion by workers – a wee tree that has countless uses and benefits; one that could feed and clothe and help house millions of the world's poor and increase the standard of living for everyone., and which this blog has covered in the past. Just one snag, for various reasons, our masters oppose its mass cultivation. The following film explains…
Why is the massively valuable and versatile hemp plant illegal in the United States and indeed elsewhere? Three reasons. Making hemp illegal:
1. Provides make-work for a vast army of "law enforcers" who then are available to be used for other social control work 2. Protects the market share of numerous well organized lobbies: alcohol makers, plastics and chemical manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and cotton growers (still a powerful economic force in America 200 + years after the Civil War.) 3. Gives fascist minded politicians yet another way to control the population
Two themes I often return to on this site are mind control and food adulteration. This video focuses on both. It commences with a Dr Russell Blaylock talking about the “chemical dumming down of society” to make people generally gullible, unable to think for themselves and dependent on governments and moves onto mass neuro-toxity via mercury poisoning and water fluoridation (a theme covered elsewhere on this site). The film also refers briefly to the work of Edward Bernays (again covered elsewhere on this site), a champion of water fluoridation.
Bernays helped the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) and other special interest groups to convince the American public that water fluoridation was safe and beneficial to human health. This was achieved by using the American Dental Association in a highly successful media campaign.
Call it conspiracy theory if you want, but if our leaders thought there were chemicals they could get us to ingest on a daily basis, chemicals that could indeed “dumb is down”, make us more manageable, do you think they would hesitate in using them?
The film cites a source I’m yet to confirm, although there are many references to it in cyber space. It suggests that the fluoridation of water was first introduced in nazi concentration camps and quotes a Charles Perkins, a chemist, who wrote the following to the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 2nd 1954: 'in the 1930s, Hitler and the German Nazis envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by a Nazi philosophy of pan-Germanism. The German chemists worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass control, which was submitted to, and adopted by, the German General Staff. This plan was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water supplies. By this method they could control the population in whole areas, reduce population by water medication that would induce sterility in women and so on. In this scheme of mass control sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place.'Still with Bernays, these quotes from his 1928 book Propaganda show why he was so useful to the ruling elite of his day, and indeed right now.
Still with Bernays, these quotes from his 1928 book Propaganda show why he was so useful to the ruling elite of his day, and indeed right now.
p37 The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons-a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million-who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.
It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda.
p59 Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities .. about immigration who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve at our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?
p60 A presidential candidate may be "drafted" in response to "around popular demand," but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men sitting L.. around a table in a hotel room.
p61 A man buying a suit of clothe imagines that he is choosing, according to his taste and his personality, the kind of garment which he prefers. In reality, he may be obeying the orders of an anonymous gentleman tailor in London. This personage is the silent partner in a modest tailoring establishment, which is patronized by gentlemen of fashion and princes of blood. He suggest to British noblemen and others a blue cloth instead of gray, two buttons instead of three, or sleeves a quarter of an inch narrower than last season. The distinguished customer approves of the idea.
But how does this fact affect John Smith of Topeka?
The gentleman tailor is under contract with a certain large American firm, which manufactures men's suits, to send them instantly the designs of the suits chosen by the leaders of LondonBoston, and Philadelphia wear them. And the Topeka fashion. Upon receiving the designs, with specifications as to color, weight, and texture, the firm immediately places an order with the cloth makers for several hundred thousand dollars' worth of cloth. The suits made up according to the specifications are then advertised as the latest fashion. The fashionable men in New York Chicago, man, recognizing this leadership, does the same.
Women are just as subject to the commands of invisible government as men. A silk manufacturer, seeking a new market for its product, suggested to a large manufacturer of shoes that women's shoes should be covered with silk to match their dresses. The idea was adopted and systematically propagandized. A popular actress was persuaded to wear the shoes. The fashion spread. The shoe firm was ready with the supply to meet thee created demand. And the silk company was ready with the silk for more shoes.
p63 The new profession of public relations has grown up because of the increasing complexity of modern life and the consequent necessity for making the actions of one part of the public understandable to other sectors of the public. It is due, too, to the increasing dependence of organized power of all sorts upon public opinion. Governments, whether they are monarchical, constitutional, democratic or communist, depend upon acquiescent public opinion for the success of their efforts and, in fact, government is government only by virtue of public acquiescence. Industries, public utilities, educational movements, indeed all groups representing any concept or product, whether they are majority or minority ideas, succeed only because of approving public opinion. Public opinion is the unacknowledged partner in all broad efforts.
The public relations counsel, then, is the agent who, working with modern media of communications and the group formations of society, brings an idea to the consciousness of the public.
p71 The systematic study of mass psychology revealed t7 students the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group. Trotter and Le Bon, who approached the subject in a scientific manner, and Graham Wallas, Walter Lippmann, and others who continued with searching studies of the group mind, established that the group has mental characteristics distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by impulses and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual psychology. So the question naturally arose. If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?
p73 If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences.
p.74
But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences. Not many years ago, it was only necessary to tag a political candidate with the word interests to stampede millions of people into voting against him, because anything associated with "the interests" seemed necessary corrupt. Recently the word Bolshevik has performed a similar service for persons who wished to frighten the public away from a line of action.
By playing upon a old cliché, or manipulating a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass group emotions.
p75 It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud( who have pointed out that many of man's thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion, whereas the fact may be that he would really prefer not to be burdened with it, and would rather walk for the sake of his health. He may really want it because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a means of pleasing his wife.
This general principle, that men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology. It is evident that the successful propagandist must understand the true motives and not be content to accept the reasons which men give for what they do.
p75 Human desires are the steam which makes the social machine work. Only by understanding them can the propagandist control that vast, loose-jointed mechanism which is modern society.
p84
... while, under the handicraft of small-unit system of production was that typical a century ago, demand created the supply, today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand. A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular product, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable. This entails a vastly more complex system of distribution than formerly.
p109 No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of 3 the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.
Fortunately, the sincere and gifted politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold and form the will of the people.
p110 The political apathy of the average voter, of which we hear so much, is undoubtedly due to the fact that the politician does not know how to meet the conditions of the public mind. He cannot dramatize himself and his platform in terms which have real meaning to the public. Acting on the fallacy that the leader must slavishly follow, he deprives his campaign of all dramatic interest. An automaton cannot arouse the public interest. A leader, a fighter, a dictator, can. But, given our present political conditions under which every office seeker must cater to the vote of the masses, the only means by which the born leader can lead is the expert use of propaganda.
Whether in the problem of getting elected to office or in the problem of interpreting and popularizing new issues, or in the problem of making the day-to-day administration of public affairs a vital part of the community life, the use of propaganda, carefully adjusted to the mentality of the masses, is an essential adjunct of political life.
p119 It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave to the public's group prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters in conformity with his own ideas of public welfare and public service. The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but know how to sway the public.
p120 Good government can be sold to a community just as any other commodity can be sold.
p120 One reason, perhaps, why the politician today is slow to take up methods which are a commonplace in business life is that he has such ready entry to the media of communication on which his power depends.
The newspaperman looks to him for news. And by his power of giving or withholding information the politician can often effectively censor political news. But being dependent, every day of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources.
p123 Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.
p123 The criticism is often made that propaganda tends make the President of the United States so important that he becomes not the President but the embodiment of the idea of hero worship, not to say deity worship. I quite agree that this is so, but how are you going to stop a condition which accurately reflects the desires of a certain part of the public? The American people rightly sense the enormous importance of the executive's office. If the public tends to make of the President a heroic symbol of that power, that is not the fault of propaganda but lies in the very nature of the office and its relation to the people.
MadRedMeech, a close comrade of Class Warfare, sends a story doing the rounds of the US radical sites and pertaining to the practice of putting fluoride into the water supply.
Apparently, back in October, voters in Juneau, Alaska were asked to consider using fluoride to medicate the town’s water supply. The issue required a simple up or down vote, one that local water users were eminently qualified to make. The Chicago - based American Dental Association, an advocacy organization, didn’t see it that way. The ADA shipped in consultants, hired gofers, and purchased ad space in all the media outlets.
Despite spending $167,000, the pro-fluoride forces collected a feeble 38 percent. The clean water supporters, polling 62 percent, spent only $7,000 in media, relying on word of mouth and the Internet to spread the word.
Juneau’s vote demonstrates that fluoride has overstayed its welcome in many American municipalities. As a mandatory drug, fluoride is facing buyer’s remorse and outright refusal in a growing number of US cities
For sixty years this reactive chemical and highly poisonous substance has been touted to communities, the publicity cloaked in supposed good intentions. The message has been: “Poor folks’ teeth need a quick fix to assure they enjoy the benefits of healthy teeth, just like rich folks. Fluoride is the ticket.”
The fluoride campaign began in the late 1930s and continues to this day. It was hatched at the highest levels of Alcoa, the aluminium mining and smelting corporation. Fluoride is a waste product produced during aluminium processing and requires special handling and disposal. Treating it as a hazardous material is expensive and eroded Aloca’s bottom line.
Today, Alcoa has been joined by US Steel, DuPont, Alcan, Reynolds Metals, Kaiser Aluminum, Allied Chemical, and the Florida phosphate fertilizer industry. Each contributes a share of the 155,000 tons of fluoride waste sold to municipal water systems across the US. The operation is so sophisticated that its influence extends to academia, media, and government.
The net result is that three generations of Americans have been used as industrial waste filters. The vast majority of fluoride is then dumped into the environment, usually rivers, via water treatment outfalls.
Fluoride’s political history is recounted in a recent book, The Fluoride Deception, by Christopher Bryson (published 2004). A former BBC reporter, Bryson investigated the origins of fluoride’s use in water systems and documents how an obscure finding purporting dental benefit was hijacked by major corporations to avoid the cost of doing business.
As reported by Bryson and others, the revolving door between industry and government, a research project faking fluoride’s effectiveness, and the perception-management wizardry of Edward Bernays allowed Alcoa and other fluoride-producing industries to begin shunting the waste into water systems.
Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and familiar with Freud’s psychological research. Historians believe this understanding was a critical element in selling fluoride to the American people. With its reputation as a commercial rat poison and use in Nazi and Soviet prison camps (it makes inmates docile), Bernays had an uphill climb. However, using psychological hot buttons (fear, greed, envy, guilt), and a compliant media, Bernays engineered fluoride’s social acceptance.
It’s not known what Bernays thought of using fluoride for prison control. However, it’s clear from the following passage that he counted himself among the invisible elite:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." [Propaganda, reissued in 2004 by Ig Publishing]
For his success with fluoride, and earlier work for pork producers (“bacon and eggs for breakfast”) and cigarettes ("torches of liberty"), Bernays is considered the father of the public relations industry.
In many parts of the world, Bernays’ fluoride spin has been rejected. New science about how it alters body chemistry as well as a growing number of studies that show dental health in communities with fluoride fares no better than those without it, have cancelled earlier support. Such was the justification offered by Zurich, Switzerland officials when fluoride was discontinued several years ago. Similar data has caused fluoride to be banned in Japan, China, India, and most of Europe. Fluoride’s strongholds are the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
While fluoride proponents still have affiliates in national health organizations, many have withdrawn support. Among the health advocates opposing fluoride are: the AmericanAcademy of Allergy and Immunology, the AmericanAcademy of Diabetes, the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, the American Nurses Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the National Kidney Foundation, and the Society of Toxicology.
Some of the most effective anti-fluoride campaigners are former supporters. Consider Hardy Limeback, BSc, PhD, DDS, head of the Department of Preventive Dentistry for the University of Toronto and president of the Canadian Association for Dental Research. In an April 1999 interview, Limeback, once a vocal advocate of the drug, stated, “Children under three should never use fluoridated toothpaste or drink fluoridated water. And baby formula must never be made up using Toronto tap water. Never.”
Seven years later, in 2006, the ADA, followed by the CDC, issued advisories calling on mothers to stop using tap water to mix baby formula. The ADA has also recently acknowledged that fluoride has no value when used systemically, that its only effectiveness comes from topical applications. Nevertheless, the federal health bureaucracy calls fluoride a major advancement, apparently in denial about the schizophrenic nature of its policies.
Adding further momentum to calls to end fluoridation, a study released last year by the National Academies' National Research Council (NRC), sponsored by the US Environmental Protection Agency, found that the current maximum levels of fluoride allowed by the EPA in drinking water should be lowered due to concerns over adverse health effects. The current maximum contaminant level of fluoride is 4 mg/L. The NRC found that these levels are too high and "not protective" of the population.
Numerous studies reviewed by the NRC report that fluoride is linked to subclinical or malfunctioning thyroid glands. This is "associated with increased cholesterol concentrations, increased incidence of depression, diminished response to standard psychiatric treatment, cognitive dysfunction, and in pregnant women, decreased IQ of their offspring."
The NRC study says that sources for internal fluoride exposure include inhalation and dermal absorption. This means that when you bathe or shower fluoride is entering your body via breathing and contact. The NRC panel then examined numerous reports showing an association between fluoride ingestion and a range of physical complaints that included thyroid disorder, brittle bones, kidney failure, arthritis, and cancer.
Some of the most telling science of fluoride’s effects comes from the work of Roger Masters, an emeritus researcher at DartmouthCollege. Masters directed research that found an insidious connection between fluoride and lead. The study compared children’s blood in communities using fluoride-treated water with communities using nonfluoridated water. Drawing from samples of more than 400,000 children, increased blood lead levels were always associated with fluoride-treated water. According to Masters, fluoride leaches lead from the water system’s pipes and fixtures.
In light of this work and other new data, the justification for using fluoride in water systems evaporates. No one can rationally contend that its benefit exceeds its cost. Who disputes the fact that chronic lead poisoning lowers IQ and promotes criminal behaviour? Yet in the presence of fluoridated water, small amounts of lead are disabling generations of Americans.
The evidence continues to mount against fluoride. This month Scientific American magazine carries a major article that assembles much of the data in one place. “Scientific attitudes toward fluoridation may be starting to shift,” writes author Dan Fagin.
Fagin, the Director of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, says, “There is no universally accepted optimal level for daily intake of fluoride.” Fagin reports that some researchers wonder whether the 1 mg/L (250 times more fluoride than breast milk) added to drinking water is too much.
Fagin’s Scientific American article highlights total consumption because fluoride is also found in foods, beverages, medicines, and dental products. With fluoride coming from a variety of sources, experts fear we are overdosing ourselves. Fluoride ove-consumption is visible first in children as dental fluorosis—white-spotted, yellow, brown and/or pitted teeth. This is a sign of too much fluoride. Depending on location, estimates of childhood fluorosis in the US range between 30 to 80 percent.
Before class-action lawsuits are filed, before the weight of science crushes the bureaucracy, let’s take heed of the accumulated facts and make the necessary adjustments. Even if it’s sixty years late, the precautionary principle remains a valid guide. Further damage will end with a moratorium on fluoride.
Further to the posting yesterday, and the need for the master class - via the media - to continually control our thoughts, here’s a snippet that takes the topic a step further.
Back in 2002, Adam Curtis and the BBC released a four-part series called "The Century of the Self." The series tracked how American elites have aggressively used the modern behavioural sciences to persuade, coerce and manipulate the American public into accepting the corporate-government world's version of events as their own.
This seven-minute snippet, "The Assassin of Democracy", focuses on one of the most skillful and amoral all the experts in mass manipulation, Edward Bernays. Bernays got his first taste of the power of propaganda during World War I. He advised US presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Einsehower and served numerous corporations and business associations. One of his biggest fans was Hitler's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, a fact about which Bernays bragged proudly.
In this clip, we see a pattern that Bernays used over and over again: namely, turn a harmless entity into a fearsome enemy through lies and manufactured news items. Then use the "threat" to justify attack. The subject of this video is Bernays’ campaign against the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1953, but you'll have no trouble seeing that this very same method is being used today.
In his best remembered work, Propaganda (1928), Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
Frightening stuff! And this 80 years ago! Makes you ponder just how much the master class has perfected its act since then.
