Interesting you find Dem baby boomers to have a different view of Vietnam these days. I honestly do not know of one person, from either party, who thinks Vietnam was justified or was a legitimate war. Everyone I know, from either persuasion is pissed about it to this day. In fact, more than they ever were as more info comes out over the decades.
I'll second the motion! The "different view" I'm aware of is that many of us that were there now view it as a mistake. But hey, Agent Orange won't hurt you it's just to kill vegetation. If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we'll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week we'll have to fight in San Francisco.
And same is true now for Ukraine.... the narrative never ends to support the MIC.
Yes, I was alive but young during the Vietnam war and remember watching it every night on the news. It felt wrong then and it is enraging later in life when one learns all the facts ... starting with the Gulf of Tonkin. At a young age I distrusted Johnson. I guess my instincts were good.
You have sound instincts. War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I am a Baby Boomer who went the other direction to become very Conservative in my old age, and yet I haven't changed my view that Vietnam was an unnecessary disaster. It may have helped the MI Complex and maintained Corporate America's access and control of oil and other raw materials, but it did nothing for the average American who had to fight and die there or since from service-acquired injuries and exposures. If JFK had lived the war would never have happened, which is one of the reasons he was killed.
Ah there are plenty. Some leaders of the Vietnam antiwar movement are in fact high up in the WEF currently. Some in the defense industry and others openly support throwing money into the Ukraine bubble of death and destruction.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
"The most obvious of these powerful interests in that of what President Eisenhower called the Military-Industrial Complex—an interest group that seeks to prepare for war and to get the American people on board for doing so."
Check out this new post on what Australian Senator, Malcolm Roberts, calls "a Military- Pharmaceutical Apparatus" (US-UK-Can-Aus) with an updated overview of the Medical Countermeasures Consortium: “Did the Medical Countermeasures Consortium Run Covid?”
Like everyone else on the left, Hollywood has gone way too far! The primary reason people watch movies, or TV shows, is to be entertained, by good characters telling a good story. Instead, Hollywood has moved into cheap remakes with mediocre actors, and hyperpolitically correct themes, destroying many of the remakes, or settling for special effects in the place of any story at all, and actors who do not"fit" the supposed characters at all, just to check their boxes....
Wouldn't it be great to see it all go away?! I'd love to see them all go away. Even tv, it's 10 min worth of crap with 15 minutes of rx advertisements. If people turned off the boob tube they wouldn't get covid, or bird flu, and the average IQ would increase.
Been decades since anything creative came out of Hollywood.
If you haven’t watched Oliver Stone’s JFK recently, recommend making time for it. One of the final acts of the movie, the trial of Clay Shaw by NOLA’s DA Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) is especially insightful if you compare his closing argument to the last four years. Just another CIA & MIC operation.
Follywood has trended towards the left for the last 50 years. The government has been catching up to that trend. Now, they are both merging into the malaise of leftist tyranny and globalist terrorism.
How many baby boomers have you talked with lately? I'm one, and I protested the Vietnam war and landed in jail for it, and have protested and marched for each disgusting war since, including the current Genocide of the Palestinian people. So please, don't lump us all into one category. I'm sick of it.
Not only does the Pentagon control Hollywood, so does the CIA. 2 examples of pure deep state propaganda are the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" & the TV series "Homeland." John - & anyone else who's interested - perhaps the definitive source on this is the book "National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood" by Matthew Alford & Tom Secker. Highly recommended.
I'm going to venture into a very taboo place. To illustrate where the power of war as sophisticated and elaborate propaganda, aka showbiz came into its modern form. Lessons about war and the power of propaganda in those efforts learned by a young Adolf Hitler. Who studied his adversaries (UK, US) to learn what they did better than Germans in World War I. Determined to not make the same mistakes.
Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud), considered "the father of public relations" and practiced his skills at manipulating minds first in theater (including a movie about Eugenics wrapped into a story about promiscuous sex between the elite and lower classes):
Harold Lasswell also produced works on war propaganda, studied its application during WWI in London, Paris and Berlin during the 1920's as Hitler and Goebbels were also studying it there. He was particularly fond of using "atrocity propaganda" (still employed for Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Gaza):
In Germany's defeat Hitler learned how poor his nation had been at propaganda and how much better the US and UK were at it. He wrote of this in Mein Kampf. The lessons he described paved the way for Joseph Goebbels and their long, trusted partnership, eventually becoming the Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment. Inspiring films like Triumph of the Will:
Edward Bernays, "the father of public relations" was the single most important historical figure in the field of applied psychology using modern media, film. To sell war, cigarettes, cosmetics, cars, sugar, shortening, fluoride, pharmaceutical drugs, pandemics, masks, vaccines, climate change, gender-affirming care, cricket burgers. And the actors who profit from setting public policies that enrich the manufacturers of all of the above. Both Hollywood actors and Political actors. And, as Schumer and Graham have recently reminded us, "war is good for business."
Hitler had some frighteningly familiar insights a century ago. Instead of treating his words like a taboo maybe we try learning from them, to protect ourselves from the weaponized psychology he describes. Ignoring his hatred of Jews, as I had to, in order to get to the main points about war propaganda. Excerpts from Mein Kampf in comment below.
"EVER since I have been scrutinizing political events, I have taken a tremendous interest in propagandist activity. I saw that the Socialist-Marxist organizations mastered and applied this instrument with astounding skill. And I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-Social movement, especially in Lueger's time, achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its successes.
But it was not until the War that it became evident what immense results could be obtained by a correct application of propaganda. Here again, unfortunately, all our studying had to be done on the enemy side, for the activity on our side was modest, to say the least. The total miscarriage of the German 'enlightenment ' service stared every soldier in the face, and this spurred me to take up the question of propaganda even more deeply than before.
There was often more than enough time for thinking, and the enemy offered practical instruction which, to our sorrow, was only too good.
For what we failed to do, the enemy did, with amazing skill and really brilliant calculation. I, myself, learned enormously from this enemy war propaganda. But time passed and left no trace in the minds of all those who should have benefited; partly because they considered themselves too clever to from the enemy, partly owing to lack of good will.
Did we have anything you could call propaganda?
I regret that I must answer in the negative. Everything that actually was done in this field was so inadequate and wrong from the very start that it certainly did no good and sometimes did actual harm."
...
"The second really decisive question was this: To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses?
It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.
What the intelligentsia - or those who today unfortunately often go by that name - what they need is not propaganda but scientific instruction. The content of propaganda is not science any more than the object represented in a poster is art. The art of the poster lies in the designer's ability to attract the attention of the crowd by form and color. A poster advertising an art exhibit must direct the attention of the public to the art being exhibited; the better it succeeds in this, the greater is the art of the poster itself. The poster should give the masses an idea of the significance of the exhibition, it should not be a substitute for the art on display. Anyone who wants to concern himself with the art itself must do more than study the poster; and it will not be enough for him just to saunter through the exhibition. We may expect him to examine and immerse himself in the individual works, and thus little by little form a fair opinion.
A similar situation prevails with what we today call propaganda.
The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.
The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function, like the poster, consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be exerted in this direction.
The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success in pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.
Once we understand how necessary it is for propaganda to be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.
Thus we see that propaganda must follow a simple line and correspondingly the basic tactics must be psychologically sound."
...
"There was no end to what could be learned from the enemy by a man who kept his eyes open, refused to let his perceptions be ossified, and for four and a half years privately turned the storm flood of enemy propaganda over in his brain."
...
"The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing.
English propagandists understood all this most brilliantly-and acted accordingly. They made no half statements that might have given rise to doubts."
...
"But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success."
...
"The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blase young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I mean is to convince the masses. But the masses are slowmoving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them."
...
"And in England they understood one more thing: that this spiritual weapon can succeed only if it is applied on a tremendous scale, but that success amply covers all costs.
There, propaganda was regarded as a weapon of the first order, while in our country it was the last resort of unemployed politicians and a comfortable haven for slackers."
One of the main truths to understand about war is that it is a racket. Smedley Butler wrote a book on the subject and I recommend it. I was a marine corps grunt in the vietnam war for nineteen months and I realized this the hard way. It's no understatement to say that war is a racket. It's all about the money.
The oligarchies of military-production, oil and finance run the "American" empire, but the form of extraction is the "printing" of $US, which currency is accepted for real products, like oil, steel and wheat by the rest of the world.
When reserve-currency-status ends, this "free-ride" will end.
We must individually prepare for a loss of personal financial capability, by getting out of debt and all unequal relationships with financial institutions.
Holding a few months of cash "under the mattress" is prudent, and water, beans, rice, salt, oil & propane.
Wow, with the buildup in your piece today, which veered from the title to the insidiousness of the military/industrial complex, I hundred percent expected you to land on a plug for RFK Jr because of his top two priorities - reducing the military budget by half and his first four years!!!! and taking on the pharma-agra-techno-congresso- etc, etc complex. I always promised I would quit my job and back the candidate who cross-haired the military budget. (I did work on the Dennis Kucinich campaign because he was strongly orienting himself in this way, but) RFK has the Kennedy guts and determination and savvy to really do this. (It is as likely as any other theory that his uncle was assassinated because of his lean toward significantly taking on the military industrial complex.) This country can only further decline under the weight of the military budget and debt, and most of debt from military/would not be any debt with a leaner military budget. Anyone voting for corporate controlled dems and repubs get a clue, only with RFK Jr. does this country have a path forward. You may disagree with him over small fry but on every major issue he is the most thoughtful, intelligent and sane. Please read his positions on the issues, watch to the "Real Debate" where he eviscerates Biden and Trump, and listen to what he says - not the infantile press slanders. No chance for him? That was what they said about his Dad, and the last few months before the election he was on a miraculous road to winning.
It's not the military budget killing us, but the socialist policies and programs, especially since the Obama yrs of admitting larger numbers of unsupportable illegals, murdering our natural replacement population, poisoning our food, air, and water to reduce fertility, and longer life spans, and a medical system designed to keep us sick, not cure our ills, as used to be its aim!
Socialism, the new "communism", is more repressed here in the US than almost any country in the world, nowhere else is it demonized. In many dozens of countries, basically every rich country in the world besides the US, capitalism and socialism work together just fine and it is just about tinkering to get the balance right. The most abusive use of US socialism is by the corporate entities, who pillage our food, air, and water, and have bought out our medical system. The corporate capitalists on the one hand seek to reduce socialistic constraints on themselves but abuse it to the max for their own benefit. The textbooks used by every medical student for example, are underwritten by pharmaceutical, instrument and other profit making corporations. So, for example, the US has among the highest caesarean rates in the world as textbooks teach that hi tech births should be the norm! for the most natural human process on the planet!! And those "socialist" universities? subsidizing the corporate world - skilled labor pool, laboratories, etc etc. 90% of the "food products” in supermarkets is not really food - so highly processed, artificial ingredients, etc.- and should not be consumed. Every body of water and every inch of soil would be polluted if it was not for socialist environmental policies. Nixon's bi-partisan commission with majority Repubs, passed the EPA into law but now it is conservatives and corporations who want no restrictions on death producing industries - immigrants have inconsequential impact on the big picture of our ills.
Every country in the world wants to emulate the way more amazingly successful socialist/capitalist economies of Western and Northern Europe (and they do it without the bounty of resources that we have and waste so blatantly and without the worldwide military presence that unblinkingly is there not for peace but to maintain our “strategic interests”). The northern European countries lead the world in almost every category of quality of life - healthcare, education, environment, transportation, status of women, etc. etc. The 30 year old argument that our more capitalist health care system (Obamacare a joke compared to real socialist healthcare - that's why it cannot succeed) would blow away Europe's way more socialist health care has officially been declared dead, and the US retreats every year in health care indicators, now behind Third World countries in many categories. Tiny communist (oooh so scary) Cuba, despite the loss of the Soviet Union and all our senseless embargoes, blows us away in almost every health category (and so many other fronts like organic agriculture, education, etc).
Illegals as the root of all our problems - give me a break. Republicans and Democrats still turn a blind eye, especially in the southern states, to illegal immigration because they know that provides cheap farm, restaurant, landscaping, construction, childcare, etc. etc. It is well known that legislators who vote for tough immigration laws actually have illegal immigrants working for them. It has been a sham for decades - we do not have the want to take care of the border problem. It could be done in a year's time if we had the political will to accomplish it, but it would ruin our economy - shucks Americans do not want to work most jobs needing doing, if they want to work at all, and are much more obsessed with basically white collar crime/internet scheming. And we want our cheap food and service prices. Recently Republicans have refused to vote for bi-partisan bills for border control…. Please read the history of our immigration "problem". And please please get your head out of the US conservative anti-socialism sand!
Um, for starters, Communism,ala Marx, is the NEW socialism which dates back at least to Rome! Remember "bread and circuses"? That was but 1 socialist program.
Don't even get me started on the EPA; just ask the folks in SW CO about the orang river that still has not been cleaned up after their major faux pas, among others, and the over reaches!
As for the high rate of C-sections, that's more about money than most anything else, for the docs and hospitals alike.
Capitalism and socialism are about as unequally you ked as possible; they never work "peacefully" together! That's like saying Yhwh God and Satan work together; NO WAY! They are always in conflict!
Constitutionally, there is no provision for a standing Army, Air Force, or Space Force; only Navy, Marines as part of their structure, and Coast Guard. A well regulated militia of reserves is the only "army" we are entitled to, and essentially what we had 'til WW II!
What you're not taking into account is the socialist change executed under Wilson, which moved our corporate gov't into FOREIGN control via our money. We haven't been a sovereign nation since1913!
Neither have you recognized the spiritual aspects of the events taking place, in the world today! The global situation as an whole, is rapidly moving toward a climax, to be followed by a total reorganization, "under new management"; it's following 2 divergent, but long- standing, agendas, and the outcomes already determined. It will be a time of peace and prosperity for those who live long enough to enjoy it, but the next years will be " thinning the herd" in a number of unpleasant ways.
And yes, the military budget is killing us. Just 1/4 reduction of the military spending, re-directed, would "solve" all our problems. The Chinese are not marching into Iowa any time soon.....
While perhaps not "sensitive information", fascinating Iron Man disclosed titanium gold, which was a military secret in 2008. I've heard other movies, such as The Hunt for Red October, disclosed more sensitive military secrets.
They evidently had permission, or would've been shut down fast. Tom Clancy has contact with the "intelligence community" and walks a fine line in writing his books, so as to not reveal any still classified information.
Serious subject here, but some humor From the NY Post article: "While Hollywood and Washington had been strange bedfellows at times, Kennedy’s victory made their integration complete . . . "
But the article ended there without the obvious climax of Marilyn Monroe's affair with Kennedy and her sultry rendition of Happy Birthday, Mister President in 1962.
Interesting you find Dem baby boomers to have a different view of Vietnam these days. I honestly do not know of one person, from either party, who thinks Vietnam was justified or was a legitimate war. Everyone I know, from either persuasion is pissed about it to this day. In fact, more than they ever were as more info comes out over the decades.
I'll second the motion! The "different view" I'm aware of is that many of us that were there now view it as a mistake. But hey, Agent Orange won't hurt you it's just to kill vegetation. If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we'll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week we'll have to fight in San Francisco.
Lyndon B. Johnson
And same is true now for Ukraine.... the narrative never ends to support the MIC.
Yes, I was alive but young during the Vietnam war and remember watching it every night on the news. It felt wrong then and it is enraging later in life when one learns all the facts ... starting with the Gulf of Tonkin. At a young age I distrusted Johnson. I guess my instincts were good.
You have sound instincts. War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
Smedley Butler
Most of what went wrong in that war WAS LBJ and his political appointees, and the lying media!
Vietnam was bad for Dad, who was a Major, USMC there in 1967.
We all knew we were getting lied to all the time.
I am a Baby Boomer who went the other direction to become very Conservative in my old age, and yet I haven't changed my view that Vietnam was an unnecessary disaster. It may have helped the MI Complex and maintained Corporate America's access and control of oil and other raw materials, but it did nothing for the average American who had to fight and die there or since from service-acquired injuries and exposures. If JFK had lived the war would never have happened, which is one of the reasons he was killed.
Ah there are plenty. Some leaders of the Vietnam antiwar movement are in fact high up in the WEF currently. Some in the defense industry and others openly support throwing money into the Ukraine bubble of death and destruction.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Ah, yes. I agree, those that are in the power structure and/or benefitting from it. But I wouldn't generalize across "many democrats".
Well, this is pretty consistent in all polls.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/05/08/growing-partisan-divisions-over-nato-and-ukraine/
I agree w you 100%!!! I don’t know anyone who has “reversed” their view on the Vietnam war!
I know two. My uncle, infantry, and a friend, medic. They are wrecked in many different ways.
Yes, there are many that came home but brought Vietnam with them.
"The most obvious of these powerful interests in that of what President Eisenhower called the Military-Industrial Complex—an interest group that seeks to prepare for war and to get the American people on board for doing so."
Check out this new post on what Australian Senator, Malcolm Roberts, calls "a Military- Pharmaceutical Apparatus" (US-UK-Can-Aus) with an updated overview of the Medical Countermeasures Consortium: “Did the Medical Countermeasures Consortium Run Covid?”
https://democracymanifest.substack.com/p/there-was-no-pandemic-only-a-pandemic
Like everyone else on the left, Hollywood has gone way too far! The primary reason people watch movies, or TV shows, is to be entertained, by good characters telling a good story. Instead, Hollywood has moved into cheap remakes with mediocre actors, and hyperpolitically correct themes, destroying many of the remakes, or settling for special effects in the place of any story at all, and actors who do not"fit" the supposed characters at all, just to check their boxes....
Wouldn't it be great to see it all go away?! I'd love to see them all go away. Even tv, it's 10 min worth of crap with 15 minutes of rx advertisements. If people turned off the boob tube they wouldn't get covid, or bird flu, and the average IQ would increase.
Been decades since anything creative came out of Hollywood.
If you haven’t watched Oliver Stone’s JFK recently, recommend making time for it. One of the final acts of the movie, the trial of Clay Shaw by NOLA’s DA Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) is especially insightful if you compare his closing argument to the last four years. Just another CIA & MIC operation.
check out this factual analysis of the real story:
https://www.amazon.com/Assassination-President-John-Kennedy-Headshots/dp/B0CXLN1PX1
Yes, it was that, because JFK was talking about shutting down the VERY unconstitutional CIA, and Federal Reserve!
The CIA is a rogue agency and, the way it is now, is a threat to our Republic.
It WAS before JFK even ran for office; that was why he wanted to shut them down!
Follywood has trended towards the left for the last 50 years. The government has been catching up to that trend. Now, they are both merging into the malaise of leftist tyranny and globalist terrorism.
How many baby boomers have you talked with lately? I'm one, and I protested the Vietnam war and landed in jail for it, and have protested and marched for each disgusting war since, including the current Genocide of the Palestinian people. So please, don't lump us all into one category. I'm sick of it.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/corruption/the-ethics-act-end-insider-trading-in-congress/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=RSS
Not only does the Pentagon control Hollywood, so does the CIA. 2 examples of pure deep state propaganda are the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" & the TV series "Homeland." John - & anyone else who's interested - perhaps the definitive source on this is the book "National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood" by Matthew Alford & Tom Secker. Highly recommended.
https://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Cinema-Government-Hollywood/dp/1548084980/ref=pd_sim_hxwPM2_sspa_dk_detail_p0_og_d0?pd_rd_w=0biTk&content-id=amzn1.sym.d375dc79-47c3-4f16-a3e4-573ef5bb5da1&pf_rd_p=d375dc79-47c3-4f16-a3e4-573ef5bb5da1&pf_rd_r=B68DG127NJNEWY5T2HJE&pd_rd_wg=Kse1r&pd_rd_r=34f7120b-97b6-4e0c-938a-566196f8c26b&pd_rd_i=1548084980&psc=1
I'm going to venture into a very taboo place. To illustrate where the power of war as sophisticated and elaborate propaganda, aka showbiz came into its modern form. Lessons about war and the power of propaganda in those efforts learned by a young Adolf Hitler. Who studied his adversaries (UK, US) to learn what they did better than Germans in World War I. Determined to not make the same mistakes.
Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud), considered "the father of public relations" and practiced his skills at manipulating minds first in theater (including a movie about Eugenics wrapped into a story about promiscuous sex between the elite and lower classes):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-new-york-times-edward-l-bernays-m/31090629/
Harold Lasswell also produced works on war propaganda, studied its application during WWI in London, Paris and Berlin during the 1920's as Hitler and Goebbels were also studying it there. He was particularly fond of using "atrocity propaganda" (still employed for Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Gaza):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lasswell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda
Then during WWI for the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel which produced the earliest war films:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information
In Germany's defeat Hitler learned how poor his nation had been at propaganda and how much better the US and UK were at it. He wrote of this in Mein Kampf. The lessons he described paved the way for Joseph Goebbels and their long, trusted partnership, eventually becoming the Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment. Inspiring films like Triumph of the Will:
http://www.jewishmag.com/158mag/goebbels/goebbels.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Will
Edward Bernays, "the father of public relations" was the single most important historical figure in the field of applied psychology using modern media, film. To sell war, cigarettes, cosmetics, cars, sugar, shortening, fluoride, pharmaceutical drugs, pandemics, masks, vaccines, climate change, gender-affirming care, cricket burgers. And the actors who profit from setting public policies that enrich the manufacturers of all of the above. Both Hollywood actors and Political actors. And, as Schumer and Graham have recently reminded us, "war is good for business."
Hitler had some frighteningly familiar insights a century ago. Instead of treating his words like a taboo maybe we try learning from them, to protect ourselves from the weaponized psychology he describes. Ignoring his hatred of Jews, as I had to, in order to get to the main points about war propaganda. Excerpts from Mein Kampf in comment below.
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Volume One - A Reckoning
Chapter VI: War Propaganda
https://web.archive.org/web/20230307140929/https://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch06.html
"EVER since I have been scrutinizing political events, I have taken a tremendous interest in propagandist activity. I saw that the Socialist-Marxist organizations mastered and applied this instrument with astounding skill. And I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-Social movement, especially in Lueger's time, achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its successes.
But it was not until the War that it became evident what immense results could be obtained by a correct application of propaganda. Here again, unfortunately, all our studying had to be done on the enemy side, for the activity on our side was modest, to say the least. The total miscarriage of the German 'enlightenment ' service stared every soldier in the face, and this spurred me to take up the question of propaganda even more deeply than before.
There was often more than enough time for thinking, and the enemy offered practical instruction which, to our sorrow, was only too good.
For what we failed to do, the enemy did, with amazing skill and really brilliant calculation. I, myself, learned enormously from this enemy war propaganda. But time passed and left no trace in the minds of all those who should have benefited; partly because they considered themselves too clever to from the enemy, partly owing to lack of good will.
Did we have anything you could call propaganda?
I regret that I must answer in the negative. Everything that actually was done in this field was so inadequate and wrong from the very start that it certainly did no good and sometimes did actual harm."
...
"The second really decisive question was this: To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses?
It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.
What the intelligentsia - or those who today unfortunately often go by that name - what they need is not propaganda but scientific instruction. The content of propaganda is not science any more than the object represented in a poster is art. The art of the poster lies in the designer's ability to attract the attention of the crowd by form and color. A poster advertising an art exhibit must direct the attention of the public to the art being exhibited; the better it succeeds in this, the greater is the art of the poster itself. The poster should give the masses an idea of the significance of the exhibition, it should not be a substitute for the art on display. Anyone who wants to concern himself with the art itself must do more than study the poster; and it will not be enough for him just to saunter through the exhibition. We may expect him to examine and immerse himself in the individual works, and thus little by little form a fair opinion.
A similar situation prevails with what we today call propaganda.
The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.
The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function, like the poster, consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be exerted in this direction.
The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success in pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.
Once we understand how necessary it is for propaganda to be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:
It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.
Thus we see that propaganda must follow a simple line and correspondingly the basic tactics must be psychologically sound."
...
"There was no end to what could be learned from the enemy by a man who kept his eyes open, refused to let his perceptions be ossified, and for four and a half years privately turned the storm flood of enemy propaganda over in his brain."
...
"The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing.
English propagandists understood all this most brilliantly-and acted accordingly. They made no half statements that might have given rise to doubts."
...
"But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success."
...
"The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blase young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I mean is to convince the masses. But the masses are slowmoving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them."
...
"And in England they understood one more thing: that this spiritual weapon can succeed only if it is applied on a tremendous scale, but that success amply covers all costs.
There, propaganda was regarded as a weapon of the first order, while in our country it was the last resort of unemployed politicians and a comfortable haven for slackers."
People interested in the nexus between MIC/Hollywood, might like to check out Oliver Stone's documentary on the subject, "Theaters of War" (2022)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11841496/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_theaters%2520of%2520war
check this out:
https://www.amazon.com/Assassination-President-John-Kennedy-Headshots/dp/B0CXLN1PX1
One of the main truths to understand about war is that it is a racket. Smedley Butler wrote a book on the subject and I recommend it. I was a marine corps grunt in the vietnam war for nineteen months and I realized this the hard way. It's no understatement to say that war is a racket. It's all about the money.
The oligarchies of military-production, oil and finance run the "American" empire, but the form of extraction is the "printing" of $US, which currency is accepted for real products, like oil, steel and wheat by the rest of the world.
When reserve-currency-status ends, this "free-ride" will end.
We must individually prepare for a loss of personal financial capability, by getting out of debt and all unequal relationships with financial institutions.
Holding a few months of cash "under the mattress" is prudent, and water, beans, rice, salt, oil & propane.
for those discussing JFK and Oliver Stone ...Here is a better source of info. Fascinating presentation of the FACTS:
https://www.amazon.com/Assassination-President-John-Kennedy-Headshots/dp/B0CXLN1PX1
Wow, with the buildup in your piece today, which veered from the title to the insidiousness of the military/industrial complex, I hundred percent expected you to land on a plug for RFK Jr because of his top two priorities - reducing the military budget by half and his first four years!!!! and taking on the pharma-agra-techno-congresso- etc, etc complex. I always promised I would quit my job and back the candidate who cross-haired the military budget. (I did work on the Dennis Kucinich campaign because he was strongly orienting himself in this way, but) RFK has the Kennedy guts and determination and savvy to really do this. (It is as likely as any other theory that his uncle was assassinated because of his lean toward significantly taking on the military industrial complex.) This country can only further decline under the weight of the military budget and debt, and most of debt from military/would not be any debt with a leaner military budget. Anyone voting for corporate controlled dems and repubs get a clue, only with RFK Jr. does this country have a path forward. You may disagree with him over small fry but on every major issue he is the most thoughtful, intelligent and sane. Please read his positions on the issues, watch to the "Real Debate" where he eviscerates Biden and Trump, and listen to what he says - not the infantile press slanders. No chance for him? That was what they said about his Dad, and the last few months before the election he was on a miraculous road to winning.
It's not the military budget killing us, but the socialist policies and programs, especially since the Obama yrs of admitting larger numbers of unsupportable illegals, murdering our natural replacement population, poisoning our food, air, and water to reduce fertility, and longer life spans, and a medical system designed to keep us sick, not cure our ills, as used to be its aim!
It’s all of those things
That, the "dumbing down" of the voters, and the turn away from Yhwh God, actually, are all parts of our destruction.
Socialism, the new "communism", is more repressed here in the US than almost any country in the world, nowhere else is it demonized. In many dozens of countries, basically every rich country in the world besides the US, capitalism and socialism work together just fine and it is just about tinkering to get the balance right. The most abusive use of US socialism is by the corporate entities, who pillage our food, air, and water, and have bought out our medical system. The corporate capitalists on the one hand seek to reduce socialistic constraints on themselves but abuse it to the max for their own benefit. The textbooks used by every medical student for example, are underwritten by pharmaceutical, instrument and other profit making corporations. So, for example, the US has among the highest caesarean rates in the world as textbooks teach that hi tech births should be the norm! for the most natural human process on the planet!! And those "socialist" universities? subsidizing the corporate world - skilled labor pool, laboratories, etc etc. 90% of the "food products” in supermarkets is not really food - so highly processed, artificial ingredients, etc.- and should not be consumed. Every body of water and every inch of soil would be polluted if it was not for socialist environmental policies. Nixon's bi-partisan commission with majority Repubs, passed the EPA into law but now it is conservatives and corporations who want no restrictions on death producing industries - immigrants have inconsequential impact on the big picture of our ills.
Every country in the world wants to emulate the way more amazingly successful socialist/capitalist economies of Western and Northern Europe (and they do it without the bounty of resources that we have and waste so blatantly and without the worldwide military presence that unblinkingly is there not for peace but to maintain our “strategic interests”). The northern European countries lead the world in almost every category of quality of life - healthcare, education, environment, transportation, status of women, etc. etc. The 30 year old argument that our more capitalist health care system (Obamacare a joke compared to real socialist healthcare - that's why it cannot succeed) would blow away Europe's way more socialist health care has officially been declared dead, and the US retreats every year in health care indicators, now behind Third World countries in many categories. Tiny communist (oooh so scary) Cuba, despite the loss of the Soviet Union and all our senseless embargoes, blows us away in almost every health category (and so many other fronts like organic agriculture, education, etc).
Illegals as the root of all our problems - give me a break. Republicans and Democrats still turn a blind eye, especially in the southern states, to illegal immigration because they know that provides cheap farm, restaurant, landscaping, construction, childcare, etc. etc. It is well known that legislators who vote for tough immigration laws actually have illegal immigrants working for them. It has been a sham for decades - we do not have the want to take care of the border problem. It could be done in a year's time if we had the political will to accomplish it, but it would ruin our economy - shucks Americans do not want to work most jobs needing doing, if they want to work at all, and are much more obsessed with basically white collar crime/internet scheming. And we want our cheap food and service prices. Recently Republicans have refused to vote for bi-partisan bills for border control…. Please read the history of our immigration "problem". And please please get your head out of the US conservative anti-socialism sand!
Um, for starters, Communism,ala Marx, is the NEW socialism which dates back at least to Rome! Remember "bread and circuses"? That was but 1 socialist program.
Don't even get me started on the EPA; just ask the folks in SW CO about the orang river that still has not been cleaned up after their major faux pas, among others, and the over reaches!
As for the high rate of C-sections, that's more about money than most anything else, for the docs and hospitals alike.
Capitalism and socialism are about as unequally you ked as possible; they never work "peacefully" together! That's like saying Yhwh God and Satan work together; NO WAY! They are always in conflict!
Constitutionally, there is no provision for a standing Army, Air Force, or Space Force; only Navy, Marines as part of their structure, and Coast Guard. A well regulated militia of reserves is the only "army" we are entitled to, and essentially what we had 'til WW II!
What you're not taking into account is the socialist change executed under Wilson, which moved our corporate gov't into FOREIGN control via our money. We haven't been a sovereign nation since1913!
Neither have you recognized the spiritual aspects of the events taking place, in the world today! The global situation as an whole, is rapidly moving toward a climax, to be followed by a total reorganization, "under new management"; it's following 2 divergent, but long- standing, agendas, and the outcomes already determined. It will be a time of peace and prosperity for those who live long enough to enjoy it, but the next years will be " thinning the herd" in a number of unpleasant ways.
And yes, the military budget is killing us. Just 1/4 reduction of the military spending, re-directed, would "solve" all our problems. The Chinese are not marching into Iowa any time soon.....
The Chinese have already done that; you just weren't watching!
While perhaps not "sensitive information", fascinating Iron Man disclosed titanium gold, which was a military secret in 2008. I've heard other movies, such as The Hunt for Red October, disclosed more sensitive military secrets.
They evidently had permission, or would've been shut down fast. Tom Clancy has contact with the "intelligence community" and walks a fine line in writing his books, so as to not reveal any still classified information.
Serious subject here, but some humor From the NY Post article: "While Hollywood and Washington had been strange bedfellows at times, Kennedy’s victory made their integration complete . . . "
But the article ended there without the obvious climax of Marilyn Monroe's affair with Kennedy and her sultry rendition of Happy Birthday, Mister President in 1962.