OpEdNews - Page 3 of Article: Unmasking of the Authoritarians

In fact, the conditioning and manipulation of the American mind that began with 9/11 and has yet to cease, and which was designed to condition us into accepting the fast approaching authoritarianism, has hit us like a blitzkrieg, a constant and perpetual barrage of opinion, sound bites, images and carefully orchestrated propaganda disseminated through the greatest tool of brainwashing ever invented, namely, the television.

Today the corporatist media is saturated with the talking heads and stenographers of the neocons, corporatists and authoritarians, all paid to embed into our minds the propaganda and manipulations of the cabal of criminality. Using our sophisticated and fancy flat screens and HD televisions against us, the corporatist/neocon media is thus using every tool at its disposal to dumb down opinion, alter the meaning of words and precepts, and condition us into accepting growing limitations to our freedoms and rights we enjoy as Americans.

Most egregious of all is FOX News, a fascist propaganda machination masquerading as a news and media channel. Owing its success to the incessant jingoism, patriotism, war cheerleading and fear mongering in the days and years after 9/11, FOX News has only served to brainwash, condition and make ignorant millions of authoritarian personalities. This network has accumulated a collection of the most vile, despicable and nefarious authoritarian personalities in the country, a group of little Goebbels’ who are proud to serve as propaganda loudspeakers and stenographers of the emerging American corporatist state. This collection of immoral midgets and schizophrenic sycophants has made the Nazi propaganda machine look like the Brady Bunch.

These charlatans have regressed debate so much in America, they have devolved political opinion so enormously, they have dumbed down the population to such a high degree, yet have become successful because they satiate the very craving and appetite of the authoritarian personality that longs to hear the talking points of tyranny rising and fascism spreading. Indeed, the authoritarian personality seeks comfort and security in the demented and delusional opinions of FOX News personalities, needing the validation of beliefs to assuage his insecure and feeble mind.

The success of FOX News, with its group think mentality, its obvious distortions, manipulations and lies, its smearing of opposition, its virulent hate mongering and dissemination of extreme right-wing corporatist venom, has had the effect of spreading its corrosive propaganda to other networks as these seek to replicate Rupert Murdoch’s formula for success and profit. Consequently, these networks, in imitating the formula for success used by FOX, became conduits of propaganda and stenographers of the state, thereby exacerbating ignorance, compounding hatred and destroying free thought.

Acting as the Ministry of Truth, at a time of perceived and manufactured fear and terror, FOX News offered stability in an unstable world, drawing in millions of authoritarian personalities that needed to hear and see that the world, although inherently evil, was being protected by the state. Thus, FOX News became the main stenographer and defender of the party in power.

With millions of viewers tuning in, needing a fix of bravado and schoolyard bully newspeak and behavior, corporations wanting to cash in joined the FOX News orgy of hatred, fear mongering and xenophobia, spending millions of dollars so the army of authoritarian personality would watch their advertisements and invariably, purchase their products.

By appealing to the authoritarian personality at a time when to do so is appealing and expected, especially with the fortuitous luck of 9/11 having molded, created and awakened so many authoritarians in hibernation, FOX has helped push the nation down the precipice of authoritarianism, steering the nation’s mood to the hard, authoritarian right, and in the process shifting ideology towards the parameters of accepted despotism. For while the good Germans of yesteryear allowed the Nazi regime to flourish and commit monstrous atrocities, they did not have the power or scope or reach of a FOX News, corporatist media type propaganda machine from which to gather and be brainwashed. Indeed, their army of authoritarian personality, much smaller than ours, was conditioned on much less, without the use of television and its many powers of persuasion, yet it is America’s army of authoritarian personality that has been molded via the airwaves to become a dangerous and growing entity. The television has thus proven a most useful tool to the neocons, just as it is to any fascist regime.

But for the army of authoritarianism tuning in religiously on a daily basis, however, FOX would have never survived, thrived and grown to become the greatest tool of propaganda the nation, and the world, has ever seen. Like two organisms in a symbiotic relation, therefore, one entity fed the other, growing together in power and scope, sustaining each other through one entity’s addiction to insecurity and the other’s immediate and hypnotic fix.

So successful has the conditioning of FOX and its imitators been, so dangerous has the end result turned into, that today over 100 million individuals have been transformed into an army of authoritarians, their personality being such that easy followers of criminality do they become. At the drop of a hat, these individuals would chose slavery over freedom, security over rights, ignorance over knowledge, war over peace and tyranny over liberty. In a world of unintended consequences, the army of authoritarian personality can help turn freedom’s bells into fascism’s sirens.

Army of Authoritarian Personalities

To the authoritarian personality, those millions living among us as neighbors, friends, co-workers and family, the arrival of authoritarianism into our lives will be welcomed without even a hint of dissent. For these individuals believe everything emanating from their television monitors, treating those words spoken by stenographers and propagandists as sacrosanct and truth. To these millions, blind faith in government and in criminal leaders is a way of life, for the myths of the American state caring for its people, being an altruistic entity, is a certainty rooted in life-long brainwashing. To these millions, the myths of and faith in American exceptionalism are just as strong as those myths, faiths and beliefs in a primitive and unseen deity. To the authoritarian personality, the fables of American history, and of the American government, are deeply embedded in the mind, never able to be exorcised from within.

To this individual, the state is the ultimate arbiter of human interaction, and its leaders, the personification of religious deities themselves. Indeed, traumatic events such as 9/11 systematically alter the behavior and psychology of an authoritarian personality. This individual could mutate from moral and honorable man to warmongering and xenophobic psychotic. He could go from once being a thinking and knowledgeable person to easily brainwashed and manipulated, made to believe a vast array of lies and deceptions, creating a barricade within that prevents all truth and reason from entering. It is calamities such as 9/11 that like a snap of a finger transform normalcy and decency into hate and fear, causing the carrier of the authoritarian personality to alter his or her psyche. As if hypnotized by unrecognizable powers, this individual does not even become aware of his sinister and oftentimes self-destructive metamorphosis.

To the authoritarian personality, fear of Arab bogeymen, that dreaded evildoer known as al-Qaeda, marketed as seeking the complete destruction of America, controls all aspects of emotion and psychology, resulting in the complete submission of his mind to authority. Thus, if the state requests that a microchip be implanted into his head, he will immediately comply. If the state decides to suspend the Constitution, he will provide a flame. If Muslims, Arabs, dissidents and other undesirables are forced into ghettos or are rounded up, he will gladly volunteer. If curfews or checkpoints or martial law is declared, he will finally feel protection from fear. If his rights and freedoms are taken away, he will live life content. If the state desires to attack a foreign land, he will ask for the use of nuclear weapons. If the dear leader asks for volunteers to defend the homeland, he will immediately purchase a brown shirt. If he is told to be vigilant in his neighborhood, he will take that as instruction to spy on neighbors. If he is told his wife or mother are enemies of the state, he asks where to turn them in.

Such is the corrosive interaction between the authoritarian personality and the manipulative powers of the state. Such is the danger of authoritarian personalities intertwining their numbers with engineered, catalyzing events. Such is the potential damage of authoritarian personalities to tomorrow’s freedom that the sacrifice of their progeny’s long-term rights and liberties is a small price to pay for the short-term comfort of their own manufactured fears.

Authoritarian personalities are the submissive peons of power, the cowards of corporatism, and the blood-thirsty barbarians of warmongers. They are, quite simply, one of the greatest threats to the republic, a collection of intellectually hollow, willfully ignorant followers of criminality. Born natural followers, selfish and greedy, uncurious and apathetic, devoid of reason and logic, lacking courage and free-thought, unwilling to ever question authority, eager to place blind faith in both the unseen and the unproven, in adulthood becoming the ignorant sheeple easily obeying the dictates of leaders, with authoritarian tendencies running through their veins, these individuals have come out into the open, like cockroaches rising from the sewers, the propaganda and conditioning by the corporatist media becoming the hypnotic flute beckoning them forward.

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