Sunday, December 1, 2019

Why is US Propaganda More Effective

1) The US government spends more money on political influence than anyone else by orders of magnitude.

Essentially the entire US "intelligence" and foreign service is a giant Influence operation, not limited to the explicit propaganda funded through NED, USAID, and VOA--which are themselves huge also.  The total funding for these agencies and operations is divided up in various ways to hide it, but $62.8 Billion is visibly allocated for the "National Intelligence Program," and $21.5 Billion is allocated for the Military Intelligence Program, for  a total of $81.5 Billion spent on explicit and openly funded "Intelligence" operations.  Meanwhile, the State Department and USAID receive a total of $31.3 Billion.

This influence is not spread worldwide evenly, though there is wide coverage, it's focussed on some spots with laser intensity.  Whole areas of the world we know we might as well write off, but we keep trying everywhere.


2) The US private sphere spends more on influence than anyone else also.

The mainstream media itself is owned by the richest plutocrats, and serves their interests first.  Add all the lobbyists, PR agencies, think tanks, NGO's, etc, all a giant influence operation.  There's influence in the ads and influence in the content and the ads also affect the content.  Add to this all the levels of education where there are rich donors--they don't do that for nothing, but sway the direction of teaching and research.

Bottom line: we have more richer people, and they spend more money on influence of endless kinds.

The money available to US media and influence operations means it can be slicker than anything else, and, at least to the US trained audience, this makes it more real.  And what really makes it stick is having a wide range of apparent differences in outlook, such as both Neocon and Progressive NGO's, which are nevertheless contained to the sphere of acceptable opinion with regards to the continuing expansion of US influence.


3) History.  While other countries have been utterly changed in the last 200 years, the US has remained a functional republic, or so it seems, for over 200 years, with only a short disruption 160 years ago.  Success and stability have bred and entrenched the mind control aristocracy (the OhSoSocial Class, which includes secretive tribes such as Skull and Bones and the like at every elite university).  Germany and Russia have been turned upside down several times in the past 200 years, so the mind control aristocracy is less pervasive and facile.  Also, an emphasis on speculative finance has led to greater entrenchment of the mind control aristocracy, in the hands of finance spooks like Allen Dulles who had an immense impact on US history but were rarely known in their day.  A long uninterrupted history means that our most powerful totalitarian and epitome of the Deep State, J Edgar Hoover--whose career started with breaking up leftist groups and kept that theme throughout--remained in power longer than Joseph Stalin and had immense permanent influence that continues to this day, in the prohibition of Marijuana, the weak and small (if finally growing) US Left, and the near elimination (and now slow recovery) of the US Labor Movement, as well as the continuing influence of organized crime (which he nutured and protected) and far right (which he was part of).


4) Foreign Allies don't question US propaganda not necessarily because they believe it, but because they depend on it also.  Every US client state wants US to be their investor and customer, we have more money to spend, and we are the savior of oppressive client regimes especially by supporting them in various ways.  Nobody in the loop wants to halt the gravy train, even though they may secretly distrust or despise us, but talking the talk and walking the walk long enough, it ultimately sinks in there also, and in the case of UK we're the continuation of their former empire of misinformation and war and their current partner in the new one.


5) The US population has long been bred and trained to be as stupid as rocks.

We've had it easy--relatively free of danger of military attack or political upheaval--and lived in an extensive, diverse, and uninterrupted system of highly funded full spectrum mind control all our lives.  The whole training is not to think much about anything political, but to have endless diversions instead, diverting time and money to still more commercial influence seeking interests, which fund the aforementioned media establishment, to keep things that way.  Development and promotion of bourgeois diversions has been a US speciality, though often now partly outsourced where actual manufacturing is involved.  Meanwhile, within the US, a person is made to feel endless dangers of all kinds, not the kinds that make a person fear the US military and police state but instead the kinds that make them want to bring that military and/or police state ON even more.  The diversions created are the only way to cope with the highly programmed fears, keeping people from thinking beyond the acceptable sphere,while they hope and pray for ever greater military and police state protection from foreign and ungodly influences.

If you fit right in with the doctrinal systems, particularly in their most extreme Religious Conservative form, you are likely to have lots of kids, like the Quiverfull, and be filling them with the same mindset.  US is one of the most religious contries in the world.  If you are an ideological "outlier" (not so outlying perhaps)  like an atheist, leftist, or pacifist who questions military or police state authority, you are more likely to live and die alone in your home staring at your computer.  Especially if you are non-white, your home might well be a prison cell or street corner compared with your peers who accepted authority. And so, passive acceptance of authority is bred, as it always has been, but rarely with such efficiency.

People in other coutries have seen huge regime changes in recent history.  The cover on the war consent manufacturing system has long been blown for many if not most people.  They don't trust the media.  They don't trust the deep state.  They don't have as much money to spend on the latest coolest diversions, which cost more to them too.  They live in much greater danger of war and/or political upheaval, and so they pay attention to politics as if their lives depends on it.  Far fewer people are in prison, and population growth hasn't favored the extremely religious quite as much.

Here in USA, it seems 40% hope the Deep State will save them from Trump (as-if-they-would), and many notables have said so explicity.  Many take umbrage at Trump for suggesting the US Media is Fake News (which of course it is, as described above).


6) US has to do propaganda better than anyone else.  We spend more on the military, more on wars, and have killed more people by far than any other country since 1945.  We need to keep the US population protected from thinking off script with a theatric politics that appears full spectrum, but isn't in certain critical ways, most notably the ways that protect the ongoing war machine.

Part of this need is fufilled endlessly projecting our mind control prowess onto other countries.  I recall as a toddler fearing that the Soviets were the brilliant chessmasters of evil misinformation, and that was why the whole world didn't settle down and accept US vision and benevolence.  It wasn't until my teens I realized that people in the rest of the world didn't live in caves and wear grass skirts.

(Beaney and Cecil cartoons featured a vaguely Soviet looking and sounding evil character named Honest John, one of about a million examples of such.  These have never been censored, though other stereotyped ethnicities have been.)

No existing "competitor" such as Russia, China, or Germany has such far flung military, imperial, and commercial intersts.  Throughout the previous century, Russia has been had a far more defensive posture than us.  Not long ago, their previous "country" split apart partly from our long time engineering for that to happen.  Pulling back a few lost regions that were part of Russia for over 100 years like Crimea with a referendum is nothing like our endless uninvited aggression in foreign countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

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