This topic questions the dismissing of ideas as "conspiracy theories" so as to deny factual support for unpopular thoughts. Many examples are provided that were once tagged as wild-eyed theories, which have since been shown to be quite real.

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(Article changed on May 11, 2013 at 07:49)

(Article changed on May 10, 2013 at 21:38)

(Article changed on May 10, 2013 at 21:34)

"Reality." The word has a comfortable, solid sound to it, doesn't it? Good old reality. Dependable, like the North Star... like sunrise. But, is it actually like that? Are you sure that it isn't just a bunch of ideas planted in your head. Really?

On the other hand, "brainwashing" has such a sinister sound to it. Evil. Malevolent. Sneaky. Who would do such a thing? And just how does brainwashing differ from, say, education? Maybe it's all in the point of view of the recipient of the process.

While we are considering the semantic content of words, how about "conspiracy?" Now there is a loaded word. In just ten letters it manages to completely dismiss any possibility of truth when applied to an idea or theory. Yes! There is the combination marked for potency... "conspiracy theory."

Let me introduce you to a man. Edward Bernays was his name. He is known as the father of modern public relations, a.k.a. brainwashing.

A really interesting character was Mr. Bernays. He was a double nephew of psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud. His mother was Sigmund's sister Anna, and his father was Ely Bernays, brother of Freud's wife, Martha Bernays. Did you get that? Freud's sister married his wife's brother. That union produced the son, Edward. Image Deleted Because Wiki Page Empty or Removed Image
Edward Bernays circa 1920s by Wikemedia Commons

Born in 1891, when he was just a year old he was brought by his parents from his native Austria to America. It is hard to overestimate his mark on the American social consciousness. Bernays worked for the administration of Woodrow Wilson during World War I. As part of the Committee on Public Information, he was influential in promoting the idea that America's war efforts were primarily aimed at "bringing democracy to all of Europe." That's right. It was the idea of Bernays to sell warfare as the spreading of democracy, an idea that rules the American thought process to this very day.

Stunned by the degree to which the democracy slogan had swayed the public both at home and abroad, he wondered whether this propaganda model could be employed during peacetime. Due to negative implications surrounding the word propaganda because of its use by the Germans in World War 1, he promoted the term "Public Relations." According to the BBC interview with Bernays' daughter Anne, he felt that the public's democratic judgment was "not to be relied upon" and he feared that "they [the American public] could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above." This "guidance" was interpreted by Anne to mean that her father believed in a sort of "enlightened despotism" ideology.

Here is that thought in Bernays' own words: "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?"

Indeed, it is. It has always been possible, although it was much easier when the sources of people's information were severely limited. Let's look at some well-documented cases of fooling the public into believing what some large, all-powerful entity wanted us to believe. Naturally, the merging of big government and big money is the primary source of such nonsense.

During his 104-year lifetime, Bernays was influential in many efforts that could be described as brainwashing. At the behest of the American Tobacco Company he kicked off the effort to popularize the public smoking of cigarettes by women. He engaged a contingent of young models who lit up Lucky Strike cigarettes in front of press photographers during the 1929 Easter Parade in New York city. By dubbing the cigarettes as "torches of freedom" he turned the event into a women's rights issue. [A side note. That is when my grandmother, Ruth Meyer, began to smoke. She died of emphysema in 1972.]

While Bernays traded on Freud's reputation to promote his methods, there was actually a fundamental conflict between his motives and his uncle's. Freud's psychoanalytic "talking method" was aimed at bringing a patient's subconscious motivations to the forefront of consciousness, with the aim being to improve the patient's mental health. Bernays' methods were aimed at concealing the manipulation of the subconscious, which was done to influence people's behavior for the benefit of business and government.

This leads me to the following premise: modern America has never entered into a war or other armed conflict without the citizenry first being prepared for it by some fabricated incident. Bernays' involvement in the overthrow of the democratic government of Guatemala is a case in point.

In this well-documented incident, the USA overthrew the government of Guatemala. In 1950, President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was elected president of Guatemala on a platform of land reform. Bernays' propaganda (documented in the BBC documentary, The Century of the Self), branding Guzman as communist, was published in major U.S. media. The United Fruit Company or UFC (now Chiquita Brands), a US corporation that owned the majority of land in Guatemala, knew that Guzman's plan was to nationalize UFC's banana plantations, thereby ending the feudal system that kept the country's people in poverty. In 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower, at the behest of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, had the CIA carry out a paramilitary invasion by an anti-Communist "army of liberation." This was one of many such actions in South America conducted by the USA. http://tinyurl.com/3vy6fg.

This premise is supported by a short list of a few of the most well-known setups.

• The Gulf of Tonkin Incident -- The supposed attacks on a US Navy destroyer that got us into the Vietnam war never took place. http://tinyurl.com/c3tkztx

• Iraq's attack on Kuwait in 1990 that lead up to the First Gulf War was approved in advance by American Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, 1990.

• Iraq's alleged possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) was a complete fabrication. There was never a reason to engage in the Second Gulf War.

• The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked by the United States, and it was known when the attack was underway. Old battleships were sent from San Diego to port in Hawaii, while all the aircraft carriers put out to the safety of the high sea. Newly developed radar provided an actual warning that the Japanese planes were on their way. http://tinyurl.com/ctdtkae. Roosevelt and his cronies needed this to get America into WWII when nobody wanted to do that following the massive cost and troop deaths during WWI. http://tinyurl.com/a8f2gjn

Indeed, it is easy to prove the existence of widely recognized conspiracies carried out by the American government and the corporate media. There are abundant examples showing how America's supposed love affair with democracy is really a sham. We have overthrown democracies all over the world and installed dictators who were compliant with our financial interests. These are a few of the most notorious examples.

• The 2002 overthrow of the Chavez presidency in Venezuela was directly coordinated by the Bush Administration. http://tinyurl.com/337jo3

• In 1953 the USA overthrew the democratically elected president of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddeq, and put the brutal Shah Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi into power, where he remained until 1979. http://tinyurl.com/augerb

• The US role in the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, is a glaring example of our disdain for democracy. In the first 911 conspiracy, America backed a coup by General Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973. Due to the repressive character of General Pinochet's rule, the coup became the most notorious military takeover in the annals of Latin American history. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm

• Other countries around the world where America deposed elected heads of state and inserted dictators include Angola, Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, Congo, Dominican Republic, East Timor, El Salvador, Greece, Grenada, Haiti, Indonesia, Laos, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Zaire. This doesn't even include the many assassination plots America was and is complicit in. http://tinyurl.com/jt475

  Up is down, black is white, and doublespeak prevails in the world of conspiracies

  The above-mentioned, well-documented acts of evil carried out around the world in our name by the United States government and its corporate bosses are matched by their secret plots and plans within our country.

  For starters, how about the above-ground nuclear tests carried out within the continental boundaries of the lower 48 states, which spewed a witches' brew of radioactive elements far and wide downwind of these activities. It is impossible to tell how many thousands of cancer deaths accrued from these activities, but studies done on the baby teeth of children raised during this era can be extrapolated to show that millions of Americans were exposed to deadly fallout, and a significant percentage of them developed cancer. http://tinyurl.com/49kv3qf. Conservative estimates put the number of deaths from these cancers at over 15,000 Americans. http://tinyurl.com/cv28epj. Similar information is available from Utah http://tinyurl.com/33xaj6 and Nevada http://tinyurl.com/cnecadr.

  Between 1930 and 1960, manufacturers did all they could to prevent the link between asbestos and respiratory diseases, including cancer, from becoming known, so they could avoid prosecution. American workers had in fact sued the Johns Manville company as far back as 1932, but it was not until 1962 that epidemiologists finally established beyond any doubt what company bosses had known for a long time: asbestos causes cancer. http://tinyurl.com/cvku3wf

  Aluminum is a common element that is a known cause of Alzheimer's disease. http://tinyurl.com/cyazc46. Commonly found in antiperspirant deodorants, aluminum chlorohydrate is linked to breast cancer. http://tinyurl.com/dxonwzh.

  America's use of so-called "depleted uranium" munitions is actually a crime. We are guilty of what we accuse others of, the use of weapons of mass destruction. We have used nuclear warfare in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The epicenter of this is Falujah, where we have monstrously caused thousands of birth defects and cancers. http://gulfwarvets.com/du.htm

  Here is one I can speak to first hand. In 1971 I was nearly killed in a head-on collision. My injuries, although life threatening, were not complicated for any hospital emergency room to handle. In spite of this, the hospital itself caused complications that nearly killed me. A hospital-induced infection ravaged my body, and it took two months of hospitalization to rectify. This is called an iatrogenic illness.

  Iatrogenic illness -- disease produced as a result of medical treatment -- is now recognized as a health hazard of global proportions. MEDLINE (the computerized medical research database of the United States National Library of Medicine) includes over 7,000 articles, reports, and scientific research papers published since 1966 that show a substantial number of patients suffer treatment-caused disorders and adverse drug reactions. These harmful effects, which can be serious and even lethal, are associated with every facet of modern medicine including drugs, other medical therapies, diagnostic procedures, and surgery.

  There is absolutely a massive conspiracy to brainwash the American people into believing that global warming climate change is not the fault of human activities. Organizations like the Global Warming Policy Institute masquerade as impartial organizations to spread misinformation. This is the ultimate crisis ever to face humanity, and our political leadership is bought and sold by the fossil-fuel industry into taking no meaningful action on this matter. Our grandchildren will hate us for not preventing this. It is already too late. http://tinyurl.com/6u5jbqd.

  Our relationship with government has been stood on its head. It used to be that our personal business was private, and government's affairs were supposed to be public. Now the opposite is true. Everything about our personal lives is known to government, and everything it does is hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Whistle-blowers go to jail.
  

  Now we have a state of affairs in which it is the ultimate crime for a person who reveal the actual truth to the masses about what government does. Bradley Manning, in disclosing thousands of classified e-mails to the general public via WikiLeaks, has now been imprisoned for three years without being convicted of, or even tried for, any crime. Here is the most famous of his leaks of government activities, the well-known "Collateral Murder" video. http://www.bradleymanning.org/learn-more/collateral-murder-video

  I apologize for being so heavy handed in this post. It is just that I am appalled at the "America is such an exceptional country" mind set. We are not a great country. We are a gangster nation. The utter mass insanity that prevails is maddening to me.

  All of the major institutions of our society that are accepted as determiners of reality have been co-opted by powerful interests who seek to mislead us so as to profit themselves. First and foremost, our government has been totally taken over and made to come to heel before the dictators of finance. Our major media are all owned and operated by those same dictators of finance. Religion, something that could be a messenger of peace, love and understanding, has been perverted by fundamentalists who couple their messages of fear and anger with politics.

  The Tea Party, which began as a reaction to the banking crash of 2007, has been taken over by the ultra-wealthy. It is focused solely upon world-wide privatization of all that is public. In my next post in this series I will delve into the history of disaster capitalism.

  
  
  
  Authors Website: http://www.daveworld.biz
  
  Authors Bio:
  
  

  James R. Bailey is a 30 year veteran reporter, political activist, environmentalist, and homesteader in northern Wisconsin's Chequamegon National Forest in the Town of Grand View. His political activism began in the late 1960s, when he opposed the Vietnam War and the creating of a nuclear submarine communications base near Clam Lake, Wisconsin commonly known as Project ELF. He was also an early supporter of LGBT rights, and has been in a long term committed relationship for 41 years. Bailey earned a BA in Mass Communications from the University of Wisconsin - Parkside in 1977; he is a collaborating author of a book, "Spirit of the Ojibwe: Images of Lac Courte Oreilles Elders" and writes a blog "Namekagon Notebook"; website www.daveworld.biz