The enduring beauty of fascism is that it requires so little from us... so little independent thought; just our basic belief and adherence to a limited set of popularly-shared directives and narratives that once fully accepted, relieve us of the need to address stubborn questions or to fret over subtle differences of opinion and feeling.
Propaganda reassures us that we are complete, that we know all there is to know, that we are rational, pragmatic and pure, that the science has been settled and that we are a part of something special.
Such a surrender to reductionist narratives cuts across all classes and income brackets. Neither the most educated nor the least uneducated retain any special advantage in the face of powerful consensus-shaping propaganda.
PROPAGANDA is, of course, the life-blood of fascist control. Maintaining the economic, governmental and scientific frameworks of a technocratic-fascist “operating system” is unthinkable without propaganda and disinformation. When truth is seen as a liability to power, it must always be disallowed, and all instances of it effectively penalized.
Radio and television and their constant enabler, popular “science” – operate today as their own religions, reliant for their success upon the devotion of the masses. As McLuhan told us, the experience of electronic media is always more powerful than the specific messaging it contains.
The currency that we use to pay for the electronic spectacle is our attention, and in such hyper-mediated times as these, the charges mount up exponentially, until we find ourselves saddled with soul-crushing denial and disconnection.
Three defining historical moments (among many) have defined the confluence of fascism, propaganda and technology.
- The fundamental principles of propaganda were first defined 100 years ago by Edward Bernays, often referred to as the father of public relations.
- Joseph Goebbels served as Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. The stunning successful lessons of his Nazi propaganda programs were not lost on the world’s political and economic leaders in the post-war era, and in the time since then.
- The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was founded in 1947, for the expressed purpose of conducting secret intelligence operations that could serve political aims at the same time they generated huge and untraceable profits. The extent of the CIA’s illegal enterprises necessitated the creation and maintenance of a permanent ministry of disinformation, managed by our own taxpayer-funded “Shadow Government” and “Deep State.”
In retrospect then, it is clear that these propaganda campaigns have proven SO successful, that even today, few of us ever realize how ongoing, vast and wide-spread they are.
Propaganda’s efficacy is so indisputable, that it is commonly the case that those who are the most certain that they are NOT among the propagandized, are in fact its most overt victims.
A key part of the propagandist’s handbook is to simply leave unexplored stories that they are NOT given approval to manage and control; stories which, we might assume, do not generate sufficient advantage for the owners. Such calculated sins of omission are essential to keeping the mass of believers unperturbed by the vagaries of complexity in the delivery of their daily dogmas.
If an individual were to insist upon learning more about any of these less-discussed stories, they would soon arrive at the realization that while an abundance of relevant facts can easily be found, and often hidden in plain sight, the truth is that most people simply do not WANT to know, think or talk about any such truths that differ from those accepted by their peers, for whom cognitive dissonance causes such literal pain and disorientation, as to keep them docile and compliant to the dictates of the media.
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