The Inner Cabinet and the Outer Media, By Edward Curtin
“One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it — it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Anyone who is not sick at heart and raging over the slaughter of over 165 young Iranian girls at a school by the American-Israeli monsters waging war on Iran is depraved and evil. It sickens me to state something so obvious, but I am afraid it is true that many are not distraught by the news. A nod to “how terrible” and on with the war is a common response for those who even know about it, not just because of moral indifference but because of the acceleration of digital news reporting that disappears today before it has become tomorrow. The young girls are forgotten with each passing day in the U.S. and Israel – but not in Iran. For war criminals Trump and Netanyahu, the death of those children is a joy on the way to further slaughter of the innocent.
On the other hand, there are many in this functionally illiterate U.S.A. with its functionally illiterate president who have probably never heard of this war crime. And U.S.-Israeli war crimes are so common that they come and go like ripples on a stream, like a scroll through a “smart phone.” Little penetrates the propaganda bubble, and when it does, it is quickly replaced by the illusion that once these bad guys are swept out of office these wars will end because our good guys will return in the game of musical chairs to make all copacetic. Peace will reign, as in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, etc.
I repeat a question that I have asked before, but to what avail I know not: Why do Americans think the United States has 750 + military bases in over 80 countries, supported by a bi-partisan consensus? The answer is blatant except for idiots and those willfully blind, and there are plenty of both.
The United States is an imperial warfare state and these bases exist to wage wars around the world, as the U.S. has done. End of story.
The Jeffrey Epstein Files release, aside from diverting the public’s attention from Iran, Ukraine, etc., has caused many people to contemplate how certain rich and connected people conspire behind the scenes for nefarious sexual purposes but also to manipulate financial and political matters. To the most naïve, the naming of so many prominent people – university presidents, politicians, bankers, et al. – in this criminal club is very surprising.
Yet, more perversely, the Epstein long-running serial (not the reality for the victims of the sexual abuse) is entertainment in Neil Postman’s sense of Amusing Ourselves to Death, the title of his prescient 1985 book wherein he argued television had redefined the modern sense of reality, truth, and intelligence; had achieved the status of myth, “a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible”; that had turned everything into entertainment. Narcoticized by their technological obsession, he argued, people were losing themselves in a fantasy world of unending diversions, as television news was becoming entertainment and all a show, the business of show business. In Postman’s words: “Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western World.” Facts, data, and the delusive “news of the day” were abundant, but all in the fragmented and pseudo context of televised amusement.
One can only scream in accord when contemplating today’s digital internet Screen Society in which mini-televisions accompany people everywhere in the form of cell phones, keeping them constantly entertained with pointillistic nanosecond “news” catered to their personal tastes and devoid of any context.
While the inner workings of the imperial ruling class might not usually involve as much sexual abuse as the Epstein Serial, or what the journalist Pepe Escobar calls “the Epstein Syndicate,” its members have long conspired to control their wealth, power, and political domination of the masses. Waging wars, globalizing their control (started greatly circa 1985), filling the coffers of the military industrial complex that they own, are prime goals. Many of these vile creatures, of course, in their hubris, thinking they are in full control, have entered a trap of international espionage and sexual blackmail, as is evident in the Epstein case, where the presumed controllers are the controlled.
Despite their wealth and power, their little boy minds and sexual avidities have drawn them to “pleasure islands” where they have been exposed as jackasses braying their little boy innocence. They thought Epstein and his intelligence handlers in Israel, Britain, and the U.S were offering them deeper access to the Syndicate’s Inner Cabinet, but they failed to see the trap doors. Yet now that the Epstein “scandal” has received partial exposure, aside from the few that must be sacrificed to appease the public, most skate and profit mightily. It’s an old game of propaganda as palimpsest.
Just the other day, I had coffee with a friend whose family ties to these imperial ruling class criminals go back more than a century. We discussed his life as a dissident within his wealthy family’s connections to the CIA, the Rockefellers, Morgans, Harvard, the Kennedy assassinations, the industrial corporations essential to the warfare state and massive profits (G.E., General Dynamics, Lockheed, etc.), Wall Street, the banks, corporate media, Big Tech, and on ad infinitum. Many details of a gross world of privilege, betrayal, and endless lies where all the insiders know and associate with each other despite different political parties; what, if you were a sensitive child with a conscience, would repulse you, as it did my friend.
We could call it the Old School Wasp Ruling Class except that old is new and White Anglo Saxon was never just that but connected early on to Zionism and its wealthy supporters in and out of government, here and in Israel. Endless connections that most people alive today know nothing about. The hypocrisy involved is appalling and staggering.
The moneyed elite’s hatred for ordinary people is extreme, and their use of the word “democracy” to cover their crimes is routine. Their proclivities have been inculcated in them within the unreal bubble of filthy lucre and its cultural trappings by their parents and reinforced by those toadies who kiss their asses for access to their worlds of ease and glitz. The same is true for the new billionaires who have recently joined the club and are surrounded by sycophants and tongue hangers.
One of the saddest realities of political life is the way people are fooled again and again by the propaganda these people and their media at the entertainment circuses that they own and that pass lies for news feed them. That it is the same slop dished out endlessly from different media cooks means nothing. The conservative media simply shout for war and more war, while the liberal play both sides (anti-war and pro-war) against the middle in a hypocritical manner to support the wars that the U.S. wages endlessly. The most insidious garbage is swallowed by those who consider themselves “intellectuals” and highly educated.
When my friend mentioned one of his parents’ famous associates, Walter Lippmann, who would stay at their home when he was young, I was reminded of Edward Bernays and others who laid the foundations for today’s mind control. Lippmann, a prominent journalist termed the “Father of Modern Journalism,” and Bernays, the so-called “Father of Public Relations,” were two heavyweight insiders who, beginning in the 1920s laid the groundwork for U.S. government and corporate propaganda today. Their work extended into the 1970s. Bernays, the paradigm for the propagandist on the inside, and Lippmann, the model for the slick journalist on the outside, each worked his side of the invisible fence.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . .
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. (my emphasis)
Edward Bernays penned those words in 1928 to open his book, Propaganda. They perfectly summarize the truth of how the U.S. is ruled.
Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s double nephew (his mother was Freud’s sister and his father was Freud’s wife’s brother). He was born in Vienna, Austria, but his family moved to New York when he was very young. He worked as a propagandist for the U.S. government during WW I. He coined the term “the engineering of consent,” and for many decades worked behind the scenes for the major corporations (General Electric, the American Tobacco Company, United Fruit, etc.), politicians, and the U.S. government to manipulate the public’s mind – e.g. convincing women to smoke by calling cigarettes “torches of [women’s] freedom” and helping the CIA in its 1954 coup in Guatemala against the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, and so much more. He was a master shadowy manipulator and anti-democrat who served the interests of the imperial ruling class and was highly respected by it for his techniques of propaganda and mind control that rendered reality “virtual” in the service of power.
Lippmann, while considered a journalist and public intellectual, and who, unlike Bernays who worked almost exclusively behind the scenes as a member of the “inner cabinet,” labored for “the inner cabinet” mostly from the outside-in through his newspaper columns. In books, which the average newspaper reader didn’t read, he advocated a similar elitist credo as Bernays, advocating that the government use symbols and movies to prevent the public from independent thought and to control them emotionally. In an early book, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (1914), whose words could have been written today by snide elitists, the CIA and its assets (and have in similar words), he wrote:
The sense of conspiracy and secret scheming [among the public] which transpires is almost uncanny. ‘Big Business,’ and its ruthless tentacles, have become the material for the feverish fantasy of illiterate thousands thrown out of kilter by the rack and strain of modern life. It is possible to work yourself into a state where the world seems a conspiracy and your daily going is beset with an alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil. Everything askew – all the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a deliberate evil intelligence, and men like Morgan and Rockefeller take on attributes of omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity would reduce to barbarous myth.
Both Lippmann and Bernays thought of ordinary people as nasty creatures that had to be controlled through lies and deception. They were pioneers in the inside-outside technique of propaganda that has been used for a long time by the government and their media allies to confound ordinary people. By inside-outside I mean that for propaganda to be effective, those using it need to have many working secretly to develop and exercise techniques of deception like Bernays and the CIA, and public media figures like Lippmann who reinforce the lies but in a seemingly “reasonable” way from the outside. The latter group is employed at the large media companies that are owned by the very rich outright or by massive international media monopolies. The CIA and other American intelligence agencies secretly develop propaganda techniques and have their people placed within all departments of the government (see Understanding Special Operations: 123 ff.) and throughout the mass media to work the public from the outside. Of course, as is evident from the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its joint evil war with the U.S. against Iran, Israel and its Mossad play a large part in this as well, not only influencing Trump and the U.S. Congress, but much of the U.S. government and media, where they have placed many assets.
A homely basketball analogy is apt in describing how the propaganda game is played: One successful basketball strategy known as “Inside-Out” is to have players drive to the basket to begin the game, which forces the defense to contract near the basket, which in turn opens up scoring opportunities from the outside. It is simple but effective, depending, of course, that the players can shoot and make some baskets.
Enter Trump, who seems to be and may be clinically insane or just plain evil like his Israeli counterpart Netanyahu, and who on the face of it seems to contradict much of this inside-out approach to controlling the masses. Like a bull escaped from a pen, he just bellows threats and wages wars at home and abroad, seemingly not caring whether or not he convinces the population that his actions are just and in their interest. It’s as if he is announcing to all who voted for him, that they were fools to believe for a moment that he wouldn’t start any new wars and would end America’s “endless wars,” and to those who didn’t vote for him, “Fuck you, too.”
In the past, presidents felt compelled to try to justify through propaganda the wars and coups they waged, from Vietnam to Iraq to Libya, etc. No matter how obvious their lies, like Colin Powell holding up a little vial to show how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (which he later said was a mistake and not a lie to cover his complicity), they told them and used all the propaganda at their disposal to make them sound true, having “journalist” friends and assets provide justifications. Trump seemingly doesn’t care.
Some say that is because he is a complete anomaly and was able to twice become president by some strange twist of fate. If that is so, it would be the first and second time in modern history that it happened. A man with no political experience, a comical reality-tv joke, a bombastic fat party boy with weird dyed hair who talks like a version of an East Coast Valley Girl, a womanizer, a very wealthy New York real estate wheeler and dealer, etc. gets the votes of middle Americans who are losing their farms and factory jobs and are angry at the government. All sorts of explanations have been given for this “anomaly,” except that it was not one, except in appearance.
Before Trump was first elected in 2016, it was accepted that one could never be elected president of the U.S. unless one checked off a list of boxes approved by the inner controllers of the Democratic and Republican parties. Independent or small party candidates like Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson were never given a real chance but were viewed as spoilers.
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