From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Turn Off Your TV: Part 2
Date: 28 Aug 92 7:56:5 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems

This is the second in a series on the nature of TV and mass media.  
For those who missed the earlier posting, contact me by e-mail and I
will send it to you.

Turn Off Your TV--Part II 

The Making of a Fascist Society 

by L. Wolfe 


So, how are you doing? I
hope you still have that television set
turned off. If you don't, you'd better
get up and turn it off now, before we
go any further: You'll need to be able
to concentrate on what I am telling
you. 
   Most Americans think they have a
pretty good idea of what fascism is all
about. They've seen the pictures, in
the movies and on television, of Nazi
Germany in the 1930s. The marching
jackbooted troops. The huge rallies,
with all the flags. The speeches by
Hitler, to the cheering approval of
enormous crowds of people, who raise
their arms in salute at the beckoning
of their Fu@auhrer. Also the pictures
of the Nazi thugs breaking windows, the
Gestapo and SS troops beating someone,
maybe a Jew. Then there are the other
images: the scenes after the death
camps were opened to Allied troops, the
piles of bodies, the bones, the hair,
the huge mounds of eyeglasses--and the
ovens. 
   A generation of Americans went to
war to defeat that horror; many gave
their lives so that such inhumanity
might never walk this Earth again. We
Americans would never tolerate what
happened in Nazi Germany, you say; we'd
never let Hitler get that far, and we'd
never look the other way in
indifference while millions of our
fellow men were slaughtered. No sir,
not us. 
   Not us? Think back to a little
more than a year ago. Think back to
those great parades of troops and
equipment celebrating the ``glorious''
victory of our troops in Operation
Desert Storm. There were millions of
people, throughout the nation, cheering
raising their arms and voices in
salute. And there were a hundred
million more people watching the
celebration on television sets
throughout the land. In fact, if you
think back, these celebrations,
especially the huge ones in New York
and Washington, were
{organized} by television, with
local and national newscasts providing
``advance'' advertising for the
``largest patriotic celebrations in
history,'' as they were called. 
   And it was the television set that
told you {what} you were
celebrating, or why Gen. Norman
Schwarzkopf was as great a hero as
George Washington or Ulysses S. Grant.
This had been preceded by similar
``patriotic'' coverage on the war
itself, before, during, and after the
hostilities. You never questioned any
of it, and you chose to participate in
the celebration, either directly or
indirectly. 
   Only now do you find that you were
celebrating the {slaughter} of
more than 100,000 innocent
civilians--women and children, in large
part, and the maiming of tens of
thousands more innocents. The
approximate one month of hostilities
was one of the most savage and intense
slaughters of innocents in the history
of warfare. And for whom did we fight?
Our ``victory'' placed a despotic
ruler, a brutal and fabulously rich
ruling family, back on their feudal
throne. This is what you celebrated. 
   There were no Nazi thugs to
terrorize you into going along with it
all. You became part of a mob, a
fascist mob organized by television.
{You and your fellow citizens,
brainwashed by television, already live
in and tolerate a fascist society.} 
   Let's state our point another way:
{The advent and mass dissemination
of television technology has rendered
the Nazi model for a fascist society
obsolete; it has provided a better,
more subtle, and more powerful means of
social control than the organized
terror of the Nazi state.} 
   To understand why this is so, we
must take a look at that Nazi state,
and the fascist society it organized. 
   The Fascist Concept of
Man
 
   The Nazi state was created by the
same oligarchical financial and
political interests who today control
what we call the mass media and
television. Forget about whatever
stories you've seen on television about
how Hitler came to power: his path to
power was cleared by the same oligarchs
who employ the the brainwashers that
program you through television. Over a
period of years, following the First
World War, Germany was brutalized by
the economic policy of this
international elite. Hitler's Nazis
were funded and promoted as a political
option, and then steered into power in
1932-33. 
   Once in power, the Nazis
maintained their hold through the use
of terror as part of mass brainwashing.
In many ways it were proper to view the
Nazi period as an {experiment}
in methods of mass brainwashing and
social control. At the root of this
experiment was the desire to create a
New World Order based on reversing a
fundamental premise of Judeo-Christian
civilization: that man is created as a
higher and distinct species from
animals, created in the image of the
living God and by divine grace,
imparted the divine spark of reason.
This is what makes man human--his
divinely given power of reason. This
view of man, the view of the
Renaissance, holds that all men are
created {equal} in the eyes of
the Creator. Society, organized
according to such principles, must
enable man to seek the Truth as his
highest goal, and thereby
{perfect} his existence and
that of future generations, in
accordance with Natural Law. 
   Such a worldview cannot allow for
the existence of an oligarchy who views
itself, by birthright and worldly
power, as more equal than other men.
Such oligarchs, and creatures like
their coterie of brainwashers, hold a
contrary worldview: Man is an animal, a
degraded beast, whose worst impulses must
be repressed by the state. Laws are
created to {control} these
human animals and to allow for the
continued existence of the social
order. Men, in turn, make a {social
contract} to allow themselves to be
governed by such laws, which are
mutable, since they are government by
neither Natural Law nor truth. This is
the view of the so-called
Enlightenment, and in its extreme form,
the fascist state. 
   The question of the concept of
man--as a creative, reasoning human
being made in the image of the living
God, or as a degraded beast, an
animal--defines all other cultural
questions. It is the moral--or
immoral--underpinning of all societies.
For mass brainwashing to work, it must
attack the Renaissance view of man, for
no person with such a self-conception
can be brainwashed. Large numbers of
people must be induced to give up
beliefs that are the heritage of
Judeo-Christian civilization; to do
that, religious institutions, such as
the Christian Churches, which defend
the sanctity of human life, must be
undermined and ultimately destroyed.
This explains the peculiar fascination
of all brainwashers with Gnostic
heresy, Satanism, or what they call
``the varieties of religious
experience.'' 
   Such concepts as the sanctity and
dignity of human life and the
perfectability of man, and the
principle of progress of human
knowledge, the ideas of the
Renaissance, have been transmitted from
generation to generation. They are
deeply imbedded in the human
personality, and are the invariant
axioms of our culture. To remove them,
requires the equivalent of
psychological shock therapy. When they
are removed, we remove what makes man
human, what separates him from the
beast: {We have made man
bestial.} 
   Freudian Mass
Brainwashing
 
   The Nazi experiment was aimed at
doing that. How did it work? Well now
we'll say something that might shock
some people: Nazi Germany was an
experiment in {Freudian mass
psychology.} 
   That is not to say that Sigmund
Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis,
was himself a Nazi; he wasn't a
practicing one. But he {shared}
the belief of the Nazis and their
sponsors that man was an animal, first
and foremost. In several locations,
Freud makes the case that it is the
primitve, animal characteristics of man
that are at the center of his emotional
life. His life is a conflict between an
animal seeking {pleasure} and
gratification, and a reality that says
that this cannot always be so; thought
emerges as the individual tries to
balance between the pleasure and
reality principles. 
   Freud saw his work as continuation
of that of Charles Darwin, who had
``removed man from his throne at the
center of the universe,'' and placed
him squarely in the animal kingdom.
Darwin saw nothing unique in man,
nothing that gave him right to dominion
over the Earth, other than sheer power
to dominate other species. All that
made man what he truly was, was not the
work of a God, but of profane,
clashing, and blind forces, claimed
Darwin; Freud emphatically agreed with
the work of ``the great Darwin.'' 
   This belief that man is nothing
more than a degraded beast is at the core
of the Freudian system. It is
fundamental to Freud's ordering of
mental states that he must deny the
perfectability of man, that there can
be no absolute truths: man can never
overcome his flaws. Psychoanalysis
doesn't cure so much as it
``enlightens,'' makes an individual
aware of his flaws and neuroses, to
learn to live with them, and therefore
cope with their debilitating
symptomatic effects. 
   For Freud, man is in a constant
state of war with himself, with an
infantile ``it'' (the id) at war with
``a little me'' or ``I'' (the ego);
this ``I'' is only slightly less
animalistic than the total animal, the
``it.'' Society exerts control over
this degraded beast, this animal, through
the ``over I,'' misreferred to in
English as the ``superego.'' The ``over
I,'' which Freud identifies as moral
conscience, bids only that the ``it''
and the ``I'' control themselves in the
form of a social contract with the rest
of society. 
   Freud states that the ``over I''
often gets in the way of the legitimate
needs of the ``I'' and the ``it.'' It
therefore becomes the source of
neurosis, through repression of
especially the sexual needs of the
``id'' and the ``I.'' What Freud calls
the moral conscience of society is a
source of pain, not pleasure, for the
individual. 
   The sources of human creativity,
what distiguishes man from the animal,
for Freud comes from
{sublimated} sexual drives of
the ``it'' and the ``I'': The most
creative people are either practicing
or latent homosexuals. This absurd
theory Freud attempted to ``prove'' in
his famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci,
generalizing later to say that all
people who follow what they perceive to
be moral conscience, are driven toward
neurosis. There is no paradise beyond
an earthly paradise, Freud says, and
all who believe otherwise suffer from a
delusional fantasy. 
   Freud's hatred of all religion, in
particular the Roman Catholic Church,
is central to his system. Religion is
the great illusion that his psychology
must strive to remove from man, since
religion tells man that he is more than
a beast and that he lives for higher
purpose than the socially regulated
seeking of pleasure. 
   Man is not made in the image of
the living God, says Freud; man has
made God in {his} image, for
the purpose of easing the pain of his
existence. Deriding the great thinkers
of the past, he says their defense of
religious doctrine is infantile folly: 
   ``We shall tell ourselves that it
were very nice if there were a God who
created the world and was a benevolent
Providence, and if there were a moral
order to the universe and an afterlife;
but it is a striking fact that this is
exactly as we are bound to wish it to
be. And it were more remarkable still
if our wretched, ignorant and
downtrodden ancestors had succeeded in
solving these difficult riddles of the
universe.... 
   ``...|[Yet] you defend the
religious illusion with all your might.
If it becomes discredited--and indeed
the threat to it is great enough--then
your world collapses. There is nothing
left for you but despair of everything,
of civilization, of the future of
mankind. From that bondage, I am, we
are free. Since we are prepared to
renounce a good part of our infantile
wishes, we can bear it if a few of our
expectations turn out to be illusions''
{(The Future of an Illusion).} 
   The Freudian system is thus a
perfect tool for brainwashing, since it
negates the moral underpinnings of our
civilization, telling us that they are
infantile illusion. Without that moral
underpinning, man has no moorings and
is susceptible to the brainwashers'
``suggestion.'' All Freudian psychology
is a form of brainwashing to one extent
or another, because to agree with its
premises, one must agree that man is a
beast who must deny the existence of
universal law and God, the Creator. 
   Freudian psychology, as preached
by either Freud and his followers, or
by neo-Freudians like Carl Jung, became
the rage in the 1920s. It was promoted
in the popular culture through the mass
media of its day, newspaper and
magazine articles. Its morally insane
system of ``id,'' ``ego,'' and
``superego'' became part of the popular
culture, as did its belief that
creativity stems from sexual drives. 
   Mass Psychology
 
   In 1921, before the Nazis had
themselves been promoted into a mass
phenomenon, Freud published one of the
seminal works in his system, {Mass
Psychology and the Analysis of the
I.} Like the works of Fred Emery
quoted earlier, and other brainwashers,
this work is at once an analysis of a
social phenomenon, and at the same time
a ``cookbook'' on how, through mass
psychology, to create such a
phenomenon--in this case a mass fascist
movement. 
   Freud uses as a starting point the
work of the French psychologist Gustav
LeBon, his infamous {The Psychology
of the Crowd.} It is LeBon's main
thesis that as part of a mass or crowd,
man regresses to a {primitive}
mental state. A person who may be
otherwise highly cultured and moral is
capable of acting like a barbarian, is
prone to acts of unspeakable violence
and inhumanity, and loses his critical
faculties in a large mass of people. 
   People in a crowd lose their
inhibitions and moral standards, and
become highly emotional, says LeBon.
This emotionalism, this irrationality,
lends itself to the power of
{suggestion,} through which the
behavior of an individual can be
determined by his perceptions and the
actions of others around him. 
   LeBon describes this as a return
to man's primitive nature. Like Freud,
at the center of his belief is the
assertion that man is merely a higher
animal, whose animal traits are
controlled by social norms and the
structure of society. Place this animal
in a mass of similar animals, and his
human identity is crushed: He ceases to
think as a human and becomes caught up
in instinctive animal-like activity.
Man, says LeBon, has returned to his
animal roots. 
   But while he has become at once
more primitive, more animal-like and
infantile, mass man, the man in the
crowd, also has a heightened sense of
power, while his individual
responsibility for action--a key factor
in all moral judgment--diminishes. 
   Sound familiar? LeBon is
describing the behavior of all masses
of people organized around emotionalism
and infantile activities, such as the
crowds at large spectator sporting
events, at large rock concerts, at mass
demonstrations. It is the psychology of
the unthinking {mob.} The
masters of people like LeBon, the
people who control the brainwashers
that program television, have for
centuries known that masses in mobs are
easily manipulated. From the days of
ancient Rome, to the mobs of the French
Revolution and the Terror, the
oligarchs have used {agents
provocateurs} and money to have
such mobs do their bidding. 
   LeBon says that individuals in a
mass seem to behave as if they are in a
state of hypnosis. But that is where
his observations stop. Freud takes it a
step further: The most effectively
controlled masses are those which are
led, by a leader. It is the leader who
places the mass under an effective
hypnotic spell. 
   Masses of people, Freud says, can
be deliberately induced to give up
their moral conscience--the values that
underpin all moral judgment. Deep
within man's unconscious, is his animal
nature. Those urges are repressed by
his conscience, which is in turn molded
by society. Freud calls this the ``I
ideal'' (the ego ideal), which he later
develops into the concept of the ``over
I'' (the superego). The mass itself
creates the preconditions for the
silencing of the voice of individual
conscience; that voice silenced, all
that violates the standards of
conscience, all the evil in man, can
appear, without restraint. 
   Freud is wrong that man is first
and foremost an animal and that all
that society does is to repress his
instinctual animal behavior. He has
laid the basis for a regressive, evil
psychology, that can make man
{more} of an animal--and hence
more easily manipulated by a small
ruling elite of oligarchs. 
   ``In my innnermost depth, I am
really convinced that my dear fellow
human beings--with few exceptions--are
rabble,'' Freud wrote to a colleague in
1929. 
   If you deny, as Freud does, that
man's true identity lies not in his
individual mortal self, but in the
moral acts of that individual, through
his powers of creative reason, that
live beyond his life on Earth, then you
take away man's soul; then man is
{reduced} to the animal-like,
to be controlled by the power and
repressive actions of an
oligarchical-controlled state. 
   ``It is just as impossible to do
without control of the masses by a
minority as it is to dispense with
coercion in the work of civilization,''
Freud writes in his 1927 attack on
religion, {The Future of an
Illusion.} ``For the masses are
lazy and unintelligent.'' 
   Freud, before Hitler and his
sponsors published {Mein
Kampf,} described the concept of
the ``Fu@auhrerprinzip,'' the
leadership principle around which the
Nazi state was organized. In his
{Mass Psychology,} Freud argues
that any mass, be it a nation, or a
randomly created group, must have a
leader, someone who gives it its {I
ideal} or values. The leader
{becomes} the individual
member's common {I ideal} and
takes over all his critical faculties,
just as the hypnotized individual
surrenders his self-determination to
the hypnotizer. It is the leader, says
Freud, who provides the common bond for
a mass of people; their common
attachment to the leader enables each
member to identify with the other,
giving form and direction to the mass. 
   Freud says that the leader holds
an attachment to his followers through
what he calls the {aim inhibited
libido}--a sexual attraction that
is repressed or desexualized. For this
to function, however, the leader must
remain aloof, with no emotional
attachments to anybody, so as create an
almost god-like or mystical quality.
The leader must appear to be above the
mass, yet part of it; ``he loves no one
but himself or other people in so far
as they can serve his needs,'' writes
Freud. In that way, the leader ``loves
everyone.'' 
   Man is most like an animal when he
is young. The infantile mind, while
still different from the animal in its
creative capacities, thinks more
instinctively, is more reactive, is
more prone to suggestion. Freud's
``Fu@auhrer'' becomes a vehicle to make
the masses more infantile; they are
thus more easily controlled and
manipulated. {They are rendered
defenseless against mass
brainwashing.} 
   Think about what we have described
about the leader. Now think about what
you know about the Nazi state and its
Fu@auhrer. Even the movie images have
told you that Hitler organized his
followers and the mass of Germans
{almost exactly as Freud had
described,} with results Freud
``predicted.'' 
   Was the Fu@auhrer a Freudian? It
is known that Hitler read LeBon; it
cannot be established that he read
Freud, especially {Mass
Psychology.} But it is clear that
those who put Hitler in power and those
who steered his movement read Freud, as
did most of the ruling elite of the
day: It was they who were promoting the
Freudian craze and its propagation
throughout the world. 
   {To be continued.} 

From New Federalist V6, #32.


----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com

Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.politics.misc,soc.culture.latin-america