From No More Fake News
If you want to track a civilization as it collapses, watch what happens to the concept of the rebel.
From the 1960s onward -- starting with Lee Oswald and the assassination of JFK -- the whole idea of "the rebel" with power has been sequentially updated and repackaged. This is intentional.
The objective is to equate "rebel" with a whole host of qualities -- e.g., runaway self-serving paranoia; random destruction; out-of-control drug use; generalized hatred; the commission of crimes...
On a lesser, "commercialized" level, the new rebel can define himself by merely showing up at a concert to scream and drink heavily and break something, having already dressed to make a dissident fashion statement. He can take an afternoon off from college classes and have his arms tattooed. All the while, of course, he functions as an avid consumer of mainstream corporate products.
You even have people who, considering themselves rebels of the first order, support a government that spies on its people 24/7, launches military attacks all over the world, and now funds a Manhattan Project to map every move of the 100 billion neurons of the brain, for the ultimate purpose of controlling it.
Even going back as far as the 1950s, the so-called decade of conformity, psyops professionals sculpted notions of The Rebel: He was the person who didn't want to take part in the emerging bland corporate culture.
He was imagined and presented as troubled, morose; a wobbly unfocused JD Salinger Holden Caulfield, or a beatnik, a Madison Avenue caricature of somebody who opposed Madison Avenue.
In other words, the people who were shaping the consumer culture were creating the image of the rebel as a cartoon figure who just didn't want to buy into "the good life."
Time Magazine ran a cover story on the beatniks, and characterized them as a disaffected trend. Marlon Brando, heading up a bunch of moronic motorcycle riders, invaded a town of pleasant clueless citizens and took it over, wreaking destruction. The 1953 movie was The Wild One. James Dean, who had the same trouble Brando did in articulating a complete sentence, was "the rebel without a cause" in the "iconic film" of the same name. He raced cars toward cliffs because his father couldn't understand him.
These were all puff pieces designed to make rebels look ridiculous, and they worked. They also functioned to transmit the idea to young people that being a rebel should be a showbiz affectation. That worked, too.
Then the late 1960s arrived. Flower children rebels, in part invented by the major media, would surely take over the world and dethrone fascist authority with rainbows. San Francisco was the epicenter. But Haight-Ashbury, where the flowers and the weed were magically growing out of the sidewalks, turned into a speed, acid, and heroin nightmare, a playground for psychopaths to cash in and steal and destroy lives. The CIA, of course, gave the LSD culture a major push.
For all that the anti-war movement eventually accomplished in ending the Vietnam war-crime, in the aftermath many of those college students who had been in the streets -- once the fear of being drafted was gone -- scurried into counselors' offices to see where they might fit into the job market after graduation. The military industrial complex took its profits and moved on, undeterred.
The idea of the rebel was gone. It later resurfaced as The Cocaine Dealer, the archangel of the 1980s.
And so forth and so on. All these incarnations of The Rebel were artificially created and sustained as psyops. At bottom, the idea was to discredit the Individual, in favor of The Group.
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