Democracy, The Most Dangerous
Religion
Part 13 - Bernays and Democracy
Control
By Larry Romanoff, December 21, 2022
Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion e-book
From their
experiences in the formulation, manipulation and control of public perception
and opinion with the CPI, both Lippman and Bernays later wrote of their open
contempt for a “malleable and hopelessly ill-informed public” in
America.[1] Lippmann had already written that the people in
a democracy were simply “a bewildered herd” of “ignorant and
meddlesome outsiders”[2] who should be maintained only as “interested
spectators”, to be controlled by the elite “secret government”. They concluded
that in a multi-party electoral system (a democracy), public opinion had to be “created
by an organized intelligence” and “engineered by an invisible
government”, with the people relegated to the status of uninformed
observers, a situation that has existed without interruption in the US for the
past 95 years. Bernays believed that only a few possessed the necessary insight
into the Big Picture to be entrusted with this sacred task, and considered
himself as one member of this select few.
“Throughout his
career, Bernays was utterly cynical in his manipulation of the masses. In
complete disregard of the personal importance of their sincerely held values,
aspirations, emotions, and beliefs, he saw them as having no significance
beyond their use as tools in the furtherance of whatever were the commercial and
political ends of his hirers.”
In his book ‘Propaganda’,[3][3a][4] Bernays wrote, “It was, of course, the astounding success of
propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all
departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. It was
only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask
themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the
problems of peace. 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.”
Bernays’ original
project was to ensure US entry into the European war, but later he primarily
concerned himself with the entrenchment of the twin systems of electoral
democracy and unrestricted capitalism the elites had created for their benefit,
and with their defense in the face of increased unrest, resistance, and
ideological opposition. Discovering that the bewildered herd was not so
compliant as he wished, Bernays claimed a necessity to apply “the discipline
of science”, i.e., the psychology of propaganda, to the workings of
democracy, where his social engineers “would provide the modern state with a
foundation upon which a new stability might be realized”. This was what
Lippmann termed the necessity of “intelligence and information control” in a
democracy, stating that propaganda “has a legitimate and desirable part to
play in our democratic system”. Both men pictured modern American society
as being dominated by “a relatively small number of persons who understand
the mental processes and social patterns of the masses”. To Bernays, this
was the “logical result of the way in which our democratic society is
organized”, failing to note that it was his European handlers who organised
it this way in the first place.
Lippman and Bernays
were not independent in their perverted view of propaganda as a “necessity”
of democracy, any more than they were in war marketing, drawing their theories
and instruction from their Jewish masters in London. The multi-party electoral
system was not designed and implemented because it was the most advanced form
of government but rather because it alone offered the greatest opportunities to
corrupt politicians through control of money and to manipulate public opinion
through control of the press. In his book The Engineering of Consent,[5] [5a] Bernays baldly stated that “The engineering
of consent is the very essence of the democratic process”. In other words,
the essence of a democracy is that a few “invisible people” manipulate
the bewildered herd into believing they are in control of a transparent system
of government, by choosing one of two pre-selected candidates who are already
bought and paid for by the same invisible people.
Even before the
war, the ‘secret government’, i.e., the European Jewish handlers of
Lippman and Bernays, had fully recognised the possibilities for large-scale
population control and had developed far-reaching ambitions of their own in
terms of “Democracy Control”, and using the US government once again as
a tool. Their interest was not limited to merely the American population, but
quickly included much of the Western world. With Lippman and Bernays as their
agents, these invisible people had the US government applying Bernays’
principles in nations all over the world, adding the CIA Project Mockingbird[6][7][8][9][10], the VOA[11][12], Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, Radio
Liberty, and much more to their tools of manipulation of the perceptions and
beliefs of peoples of dozens of nations. The US State Department, by now
totally onside, claimed that “propaganda abroad is indispensable” for what it
termed “public information management”. It also recognised the need for
absolute secrecy, stating that “if the American people ever get the idea that
the high-powered propaganda machine was working on them, the result would be
disaster”. But the high-powered machine was indeed working on them, and
continued to an extent that might have impressed even Bernays.
The history of
propaganda and its use in manipulating and controlling public opinion in the
US, and in Western democracies generally, is a long story involving many
apparently disparate and unrelated events. A major crisis point for elite
control of American democracy was the Vietnam War, the one period in history
when the American people were treated to accurate media coverage of what their
government was actually doing in another country. Due to the horrific
revelations of American torture and brutality, public protests were so widespread
that the US was on the verge of anarchy and became almost ungovernable.
Americans were tearing up their military draft notices and fleeing to Canada to
escape military service. Streets and university campuses were overwhelmed with
protests and riots, at least until Nixon ordered an armed response.[13][14][15] That was in 1970, but in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg
stole “The Pentagon Papers” from the RAND corporation where he worked,
and leaked them to the media, and that was the beginning of the end. After the
political fallout and Nixon’s resignation, Bernays’ secret government went into
overdrive and the American political landscape changed forever.
A major part of
this ‘democratic overdrive’ was the almost immediate creation in July of
1973 by David Rockefeller, Rothschild, and other “private citizens”, of
a US-based think tank called ‘the Trilateral Commission’.[16] At the time, Rockefeller was Chairman of
Rothschild’s Council on Foreign Relations as well as Chairman of the
Rothschild-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was
Obama’s Foreign Policy Advisor, was a ‘co-founder’. The necessity for the
formation of this group was officially attributed to the Middle-East oil
crisis, but they focused on a much more important crisis – that of democracy,
which was exhibiting clear signs of going where no man should go. At the time,
with a modicum of free press remaining, the Washington Post published an
article titled “Beware of the Trilateral commission” (17). They would not do so again. Any criticism of
the Commission is today officially listed by the US government as a ‘conspiracy
theory’.[18]
I could find no
record of any report by the Trilateral Commission on the Mid-East oil crisis,
and it appears their first major report, published by New York University in
1975 only two years after their formation, was titled, “The Crisis of
Democracy”[19][20], a lead writer of which was a Harvard professor
named Samuel Huntington.
In the paper,
Huntington stated that “The 1960’s witnessed an upsurge of democratic fervor
in America”, with an alarming increase of citizens participating in
marches, protests and demonstrations, all evidence of “a reassertion of
equality as a goal in social, economic and political life”, equality being
something no democracy can afford. He claimed, “The essence of the democratic surge of the
1960’s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and
private. In one form or another, it manifested itself in the family, the
university, business, public and private associations, politics, the
governmental bureaucracy, and the military services.”
Huntington, who had
been a propaganda consultant to the US government during its war on Vietnam,
further lamented that the common people no longer considered the elites and
bankers to be superior and felt little obligation or duty to obey. We needn’t
do much reading between the lines to see that Huntington’s real complaint was
that the wealthy elites, those of the secret government, were coming under
increasing public attack due to revelations of grand abuses of their wealth and
power. They were no longer admired and respected, nor even particularly feared,
but instead were increasingly despised. The people also abandoned trust in
their government due to the realisation of the extensive infiltration of the
White House and Congress by Bernays’ “shrewd operators”, leading to, in
Huntington’s words, “a decline in the authority, status, influence, and
effectiveness of the presidency”.
Huntington
concluded that the US was suffering from “an excess of democracy”,
writing that “the effective operation of a democratic political system
usually requires apathy and noninvolvement”, stating this was crucial
because it was precisely these qualities of the public that “enabled
democracy to function effectively”. True to his racist roots, he identified
“the blacks” as one such group that was becoming “too democratic”
and posing a danger to the political system. He ended his report by stating
that “the vulnerability of democracy, essentially the ‘crisis of democracy’”,
stemmed from a society that was becoming educated and was participating, and
that the nation needed “a more balanced existence” with what he called “desirable
limits to the extension of political democracy”. In other words, the real
crisis in democracy was that the people were beginning to believe in the “government
by the people, for the people” part, and not only actually becoming
involved but beginning to despise and disobey those who had been running the
country solely for their own financial and political advantage. And of course,
the solution was to engineer a social situation with less education and democracy
and more authority from the secret government of the elites.
Democracy,
according to Huntington, consisted of the appearance but not the substance, a
construct whereby the shrewd elites selected candidates for whom the people
could pretend to vote, but who would be controlled by, and obey their masters.
Having thus participated in ‘democracy’, the people would be expected to return
to their normal state of apathy and noninvolvement.
However, there was
an undertone in this paper, specifically in Huntington's comments, that I found
unsettling, almost as a harbinger for things to come. Some of his
"evaluation" seemed almost heretical for the time, stating that
the existing basic framework of (democratic) government requires "reconsideration",
and asking, "Is political democracy, as it exists today, a viable form
of government"? He wrote that "acute observers on all three
continents have seen a bleak future for democratic government". He
noted one senior British official stating, "parliamentary democracy [in
the UK] would ultimately be replaced by a dictatorship", and former
Japanese Prime Minister Takeo Miki warning that "Japanese democracy
will collapse". He asked, "Can these countries continue to
function during the final quarter of the twentieth century with the forms of
political democracy which they evolved during the third quarter of that
century?" As I've already noted elsewhere, he stated clearly that
"democracy" has failed completely in every area of human society
where it has been tried (save that of government), but then laments that
democracy appears to be failing in the government arena as well.
Reading that paper
in the light of political developments since, left me with a feeling that
Huntington could have been hired by Klaus Schwab to present his "Great
Reset". It was disturbing that when we connect the dots of
political developments in the past 50 or so years, it appears the Western world
has been getting itself primed for a transition from "democracies" to
fascist governments. This is especially true since there has so
clearly been a co-ordination between all of those dots, and that planning could
have come only from the Jewish Khazar mafia in the City of London. There is no
other central source possible for this.
Noam Chomsky noted
in an article that in the student activism of the 1960s and early 1970s, the
nation apparently risked becoming too well educated, creating the Trilateral
Commission’s ‘crisis of democracy’. In other words, the ignorance
necessary for the maintenance of a multi-party government system was at risk of
being eroded by students who were actually learning things that Bernays’ secret
government didn’t want them to learn. “The Commission in a report decried the focus on what
it called “special-interest groups” like women, workers and students, trying to
gain rights within the political arena that were clearly “against the national
interest” [of the top 1%]”. The Commission stated it was especially concerned
with schools and universities that were not doing their job of “properly
indoctrinating the young” and that “we have to have more moderation in
democracy”. From there, the path forward was clear: young people in America
would now be “properly indoctrinated” by both the public school system
and the universities, so as to become “more moderate”, more ignorant,
and above all to avoid demanding things like social equality and workers’
rights that were so clearly against the ‘national interest’ of the
elites and their ‘secret government’.
Before Huntington
and the student activism of the 1960s, we had another renowned expert on
propaganda, politics and fascism, in the person of another American Jew, Harold
Lasswell, who has been admiringly described as “a leading American political
scientist and communications theorist, specializing in the analysis of
propaganda”, with claims Lasswell was “ranked among the half dozen
creative innovators in the social sciences in the twentieth century”. His
biographer, Almond, stated firmly that “few would question that [Lasswell]
was the most original and productive political scientist of his time”.[21] High praise indeed, reminiscent of that ladled
onto Lippman and Bernays – and for the same reasons.
Even earlier, in
the late 1930s and early 1940s, the University of Chicago held a series of
secret seminars on “communication”, funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation, that included some of the most prominent researchers in the fields
of ‘communications and sociology’, one of whom was Lasswell. Like Lippman and
Bernays before him, and Huntington et al after him, Lasswell was of the opinion
that democracy could not sustain itself without a credentialed elite shaping,
molding and controlling public opinion through propaganda. He stated that if
the elites lacked the necessary force to compel obedience from the masses, then
‘social managers’ must turn to “a whole new technique of control,
largely through propaganda”, because of the “ignorance and superstition
of the masses”. He claimed that society should not succumb to “democratic
dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests”, because
they were not. Further, “the best judges are the elites, who must,
therefore, be ensured of the means to impose their will, for the common good”.
The Rockefeller and other Foundations and think-tanks have been slowly
executing this advice now for almost 100 years.
Among the many
results of the work of Lippman and Bernays was the subsumption, of initially
the Executive Branch and eventually the Legislative Branch as well, of the US
government, into a global plan of the European and American bankers and their
US corporate and political interests. We speak openly today of the White House
and US Congress being overwhelmingly controlled by the Jewish lobby and their
multinational corporations, but this forest was planted 100 years ago. By the
early 1900s we already had an American government firmly under the powerful
influence of, and effectively controlled by, what Bernays termed the “secret
government”, and which was controlled in virtually the same manner as the
bewildered public herd. During his presidential election campaign in 1912,
Theodore Roosevelt said, “Behind the visible government there is an
invisible government upon the throne that owes the people no loyalty and
recognizes no responsibility”,[22] and claimed it was necessary to destroy this
invisible government and undo the corrupt union of business and politics.
Roosevelt again:
“It was natural and
perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties,
thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They
created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. A small
group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over
other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor and other people’s
lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men
could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. These economic royalists
complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they
really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
Arthur Miller wrote
that “Those who formally rule, take their signals and commands not from the
electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. It exists even though its
existence is denied, and this is one of the secrets of the American social
order, but one that is not to be discussed.” And, as Baudelaire told us, “The
devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist”. The truth of
this is everywhere to be seen, but few want to look.
Returning to Bernays
and his propaganda to save democracy, and the versions promulgated by his
heirs, there were two intermixed currents in that river. The most important was
for the (largely foreign) bankers and industrialists to regain full
control of the US government, especially the economic sectors, the first step
being to repair the loosened control of the political parties themselves and
the politicians inhabiting them. There is an interesting Chinese document that
accurately addresses the deep Jewish influence on the US government at the
time, stating: “The
Democratic Party belongs to the Morgan family, and the Republican Party belongs
to the Rockefeller family. Rockefeller and Morgan, however, belonged to
Rothschild.”[23] Then, new and extensive efforts were required
to regain social and political control of the population. What they needed was
a vaccine, not to protect the American people, but to infect them with an
incurable disease pleasantly named ‘democratisation’, but which would be
more readily recognisable as zombification. They succeeded.
Democracy had
always been hyped in the West as the most perfect form of government, but under
the influence of an enormous propaganda campaign it soon morphed into the
pinnacle of enlightened human evolution, certainly in the minds of Americans,
but in the West generally. Since a multi-party electoral system formed the
underpinnings of external (foreign) control of the US government, it was
imperative to inject this fiction directly into the American psyche. They did
so, to the extent that “democracy”, with its thousands of meanings, is
today equivalent to a bible passage – a message from God that by its nature
cannot be questioned. Bernays and his people were the source of the deep,
abiding – and patently false – conviction in every American heart that
democracy is a “universal value”. One of the most foolish and persistent myths
these people created was the fairytale that as every people evolved toward perfection
and enlightenment, their DNA would mutate and they would develop a God-given,
perhaps genetic, craving for a multi-party political system. This conviction is
entirely nonsense, without a shred of historical or other evidence to support
it, a foolish myth created to further delude the bewildered herd.
But there was much
more necessary in terms of social control. By the time Regan replaced Carter in
1980, all the wheels were in motion to permanently disenfranchise American
citizens from everything but their by now beloved “democracy”. Regan’s
assault on the American public was entirely frontal, with Volcker of the FED
plunging the US into one of the most brutal recessions in history, driving down
wages and home ownership, destroying a lifetime’s accumulation of personal
assets, dramatically increasing unemployment, eliminating labor unions almost
entirely, and making the entire nation politically submissive from fear.
Interestingly, the more that their precious democracy was impoverishing and
emasculating them, the more strongly the American public clung to it, no longer
retaining any desire for equality but merely hoping for survival. The eight
years of Regan’s presidency were some of the most brutal in US history, but
with the power of the propaganda and the willing compliance of the mass media,
the American people had no understanding of what was happening to them. The
lessons of the 1970s and the Vietnam War were learned well, and Bernays’ “invisible
people” reclaimed the US as a colony, both the government and the people,
the reclamation cleverly “engineered by an invisible government”.
The full
Machiavellian nature of this propaganda, its true intent and results, will not
be immediately apparent to readers from this brief series of essays. Reading
the entire series of Bernays and Propaganda will fill in many of the gaps and
permit readers to connect more dots and obtain a clearer picture of the entire
landscape.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles
posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more
than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry
Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior
executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an
international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at
Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to
senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a
series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the
contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive
can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/
+ https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted
at:
2186604556@qq.com
*
Notes
(1) https://alethonews.com/2012/07/31/progressive-journalisms-legacy-of-deceit/
(2) http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/MediaControl_excerpts.html
(3) https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598
(3a) https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_english_.pdf
(4) https://archive.org/details/BernaysPropaganda
(5) https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Consent-Edward-L-Bernays/dp/B0007DOM5E
(5a) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/The_Engineering_of_Consent_%28essay%29.pdf
(6) https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-cia-paid-and-threatened-journalists-to-do-its-work
(7) https://thenewamerican.com/cia-s-mockingbirds-and-ruling-class-journalists/
(8) https://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/local/cia-report-on-project-mockingbird/295/
(9) https://allthatsinteresting.com/operation-mockingbird
(10) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_mediacontrol03.htm
(12) The VOA
surrounded China from all neighboring countries, and including a massive
presence in Hong Kong, broadcasting American seditionist propaganda into China
(according to Bernays’ template) 24 hours a day for generations. It failed, and
was finally shut down in 2019. Also, when the Taiwanese scientist identified
the 5 original haplotypes of the COVID-19 virus and proved they had originated
in the US, it was the VOA that harassed the man so badly online that he closed
all his social media accounts and went dark. Democracy being a coin with only
one side, the US greatly resented China Radio International broadcasting
“Beijing-friendly programs on over 30 US outlets, many in major American
cities.” http://chinaplus.cri.cn/opinion/opedblog/23/20181006/192270.html
(15) http://news.cnr.cn/native/gd/20200606/t20200606_525118936.shtml
(16) http://www.antiwar.com/berkman/trilat.html
(18) http://mail.conspiracy-gov.com/the-new-world-order/trilateral-commission/
(19) https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/The-Crisis-of-Democracy.pdf
(21) https://www.nap.edu/read/1000/chapter/10
(23) The Age of
Innovation 2013 Issue 6 95-97 pp. 3 of 1003, The database of scientific and
technological journals of Chinese science and technology; http://www.cqvip.com/QK/70988X/201306/46341293.html
Copyright
© Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2022
