In 1928 Edward Bernays wrote a book called simply “Propaganda.” It speaks of how public opinion in Democracy is controlled by “invisible governors” through propaganda and public relations rather than the political leaders that catch our eye. It is essential that we understand that Bernays coined the term “Public Relations Officer” to replace the word “Propagandist” because propagandist had become a “dirty” word. He wrote this book in 1928 but only now (almost 100 years later,) has it become apparent to even half of the population that what he said 100 years ago may, in fact, be true.

Bernays has been referred to as the “father of propaganda” and the “father of advertising” by various modern sources. It was even said that he was largely responsible for the form of Allied propaganda in World War II. This caught my attention when I realized that some of the “facts” we accept from the World War are actually Allied propaganda. When I realized that some of what I “knew” (as I found out by reading original sources,) was untrue I wanted to find out “Who is this man that is so skilled in Propaganda that he can warp history?” I strongly recommend this small 168 page book with an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller to all my readers.

“Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons – a trifling fraction – who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”

Edward Bernays – Propaganda, p. 37-38.

Previously, from studying 1^st person accounts of the War Between the States and World War II I discovered information that was so far beyond and contradictory to what I had been taught to accept as fact that ANY experiences of the type i was reading in these accounts seemed to me impossible. The account that Churchill and the British give of Hitler and the Anschluss of Austria is markedly different from the eyewitness account of General Guderian, who was there, and recounted in his book Panzer Leader. Written after the war, he recounts the history as it is accepted but says it is completely at odds with his experience and he went into Austria with the “fist wave” so to speak. Particularly, he contradicts the idea that people had gone ahead to forcefully arrange a “warm welcome” for Hitler because Hitler, against all advice, refused to wait until the police could ensure his safety and pushed ahead at the front of the effort. General Guderian is not the only one who contradicts Allied history of those years. I have always said, history is written by the victors but too often I had thought that American scholars were objective. In retrospect that whole idea is ludicrous.

This problem became more acute in my mind when I would present facts and historical observations and it caused such cognitive dissonance that people become angry and would turn away. I had one person say, “I need to take a break, you’re blowing my mind.” I even had one woman, that I had mistakenly considered intelligent, that said “I don’t accept these facts.” Caught off guard I laughed at her and said you are welcome to discount opinions and observations but you can’t ignore facts just because you don’t like them. We must, IF we are honest, integrate those facts into a new understanding of the topic. THIS is the key to science, history, and intelligence analysis. The angry and intransigent responses regarding the history of World War II, the War Between the States, Slavery, and even discoveries and medical reports I have studied regarding the Pandemic have been met by the same anger that is noted by specialists who have dealt with deprogramming cultists after they have been separated from the cult. This cultic mindset seems to have been produced by modern media.

All of this has combined to bring me to an interest in brainwashing and propaganda. Information has lead me to believe that there are several paths of brainwashing that affect our lives and understanding today…or our misunderstanding of information today. Social groups guard their membership and beliefs and will angrily minimize any who disagree with them (like numerous black conservatives being called “white”). Today there has been much talk of people who refuse to listen to facts (even regarding science and medicine,) in favor of propaganda and misinformation that is prevalent and already accepted by them. But what are the facts? IF you don’t have someone you trust finding them for you then you are in for an uphill struggle to determine them. My regular readers have heard repeatedly about Google’s refusal to monetize my account because I do not present “accepted consensus” as gatekeepers continue to control the information we see. Further, my experience and research into how hard it is to deprogram people who have been brainwashed by a cult make me cautious for our future. When I found a quote of Walther Darre’ (look it up, its the only quote given and was still there when last I looked,) on his Wikipedia page that had been revealed to have been allied propaganda being used as if it were “history” I became concerned for our knowledge in general.

So, after running across his name in history and realizing that Edward Bernays had written a book on Propaganda I obtained it and read it. I wanted to read what this master of propaganda and advertising had to say. I now realize this is an essential book to understand how Propaganda developed and how media, government, and business sources combine to manipulate and form our lives and opinions today through public relations – if you consider it was written a hundred years ago and psychology and technology have combined to make it much more powerful than it was in his day. When you combine the fact that industry and tech have a major influence on our government and that 85% of our media is manipulated by the majority ownership of only 5 corporations there is good reason to be cautious of what we read and hear.

It is essential that the common person come to realize that when we see Public Relations Specialist we are actually seeing a Propagandist. Bernays knew that after the World Wars (he wrote this book after World War I after a Member of Parliament had published a book that explained all of the propaganda used against the populations of England and the United States in forming their opinions about Germans and the war – the people were furious that they had been so blatantly lied to in order to make them hate the enemy. In the introduction it explains:

“The Anglo-American campaign to demonize the “Hun,” and to cast the war as a transcendent clash between Atlantic “civilization” and Prussian “barbarism,” made so powerful an impression on so many that the world’s of government and business were forever changed.”

“In World War One it was the propaganda of “our side” that first made “propaganda” so opprobrious a term…when the Allied propaganda used to tar the “Hun” had been belatedly exposed to the American and British people. Indeed, as they learned more and more about the outright lies, exaggerations and half-truths used on them by their own governments both populations came, understandably, to see “propaganda” as a weapon even more perfidious than they had thought when they had not perceived themselves as its real targets. Thus did the word’s demonic implications only harden…”

Mark Crispin Miller, p. 14-15 in his Introduction to Propaganda by Edward Bernays

To protect their propaganda myths they even confiscated and classified Hitler’s home movies because they didn’t think it would be good for Allies to see their “personification of evil” laughing and playing with children and puppies, I don’t know how many biographies of Hitler I read before I realized that he had stopped in the middle of an artillery barrage to pick up and save a small dog during World War One while everyone else was running for cover. Even later attempts to publish them have such a propaganda filled commentary that fewer than 5% of the books I have read on World War II have any trace of (what I would consider,) the Historian’s objectivity in the writing. Even now, I have to say that I am not trying to excuse Hitler for what he did by reporting these facts. However, take a moment to ask yourself why you have such an emotional, knee-jerk reaction to someone who probably died before you were born? Do you respond the same to Ghenghis Khan? Stalin? Pol Pot or Mao? They all killed more people than Hitler did in concentration camps…only they were not the subjects of propaganda as our enemy.

Even today, as I mentioned, the only quote listed on Walter Darre’s page is actually Allied propaganda that was published in Life Magazine with the statement that they “couldn’t reveal” how the piece came to them. (I guess that is because if they actually said “the government made this up and asked us to print it” that would have made it less effective.) But anyone who has read Darre’s books on rebuilding an Agrarian community will see nothing of him in that supposed “quote”. It is amazing, with all the writing that Professor Darre had done that the one quote they have attributed to him is fake propaganda. The same problem exists with many of the “sources” about Nazi Germany. It is as if every author feels the need to declare “I am good because I hate Nazis” in their writings. My Dad always said that if someone is truly good they don’t have to prove it and to beware of people who loudly proclaimed their own virtues or abilities because they were untrustworthy. There are some fine books about World War II written by scholars from former Allied countries but there is a lot of propaganda too. I remember reading a book on Rommel the Desert Fox. My Dad saw me reading it and said “the Jews in my unit thought the sun rose and set in Rommels b*tt.” I asked why. He said he had Jews in his unit (mind you this was in the 1940s when my Dad was in World War II,) who had posters of the Desert Fox on their wall. None of the books I read on World War II told me that Rommel had taken Jewish prisoners, gave them back their rifle, and sent them to Palestine to fight the British for their own homeland rather than send them to Germany for the Final Solution. I have since confirmed it but I would not even have known to look for that comment if my Dad had not been a World War II Veteran to tell me that. I certainly wasn’t told that in school.

Bernay’s in his book was trying to redeem “propaganda” for us as a positive thing after World War I because, apparently, people did not like finding out that their government had lied to them. Fortunately, the government learned its lesson after World War One. It no longer admits it lies to its people (that was sarcasm – if you couldn’t figure that out.) Even as Bernays wrote he doubted if he could redeem the job of “propagandist” as the honorable and noble profession he considered it to be and suggested it be called “public relations.” The Introduction puts a lot of this in perspective and also reveals that all of the “positive” examples of propaganda in the book were actually Bernays’ own propaganda triumphs – although he does not assume credit for them in the book. Bernays feels this is all a good thing:

“In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and demarcation of issues bearing upon a public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of conduct to which we conform most of the time.”

Edward Bernays, Propaganda p. 38-39

This explains so much of what we see today. Although I don’t remember “voluntarily agreeing” to letting these invisible governors rule us – agreement as Bernays would say, is implied by us not resisting it. These “elite” invisible governors (mostly educated in the megalopolis’ dominated Northeastern United States,) have decided that they need to change the opinions of the entire country to conform to them. This is why the ivy league educated VP of Bud Light can look down on the “fratty” manly past advertising of Bud Light and dismiss it as “plebian.” Bernays had warned that the Propagandist, to be effective, must know both the ideas of the leaders and the position of the masses in order to be an effective mediator between the two. However, todays companies constantly take their lead from woke cultists who live in a bubble of their own and if the know what the common people think they look down on them as ignorant and people who need to be remade in their own ivy league image. Like Bernays she feels she has a right to “evolve and elevate” (her words not mine,) society up to a more “enlightened” understanding and she believes she will provide it she like Bernays, would insist that we don’t really know what we want or need and she will give it to us. (You can see her interview here in the first few minutes of this editorial commentary about Bud Light’s miscalculation of their audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPv-QnWZzPk&t=188s ]

Unfortunately, when Bernays wrote there were many sources of media all competing with their own message and that competition prevented out and out lying (as in the toothpaste story below,) the free interplay of ideas provided by many sources and inputs is no longer available in society when government meets weekly with social media and 85% of media is dominated by only 5 companies we too often are fed one line of propaganda and are no longer given a choice. I have heard people in their 20s and 30s say “its always been like this there used to be only 3 networks.” But that is false. Those three networks provided more diversity of idea than we get from each of the mainline news channels today. My favorite shows growing up were shows like “crossfire” where they had two people of opposing views debate their positions (back when leftists were liberals and had ideas rather than dogma.) I learned more from those shows about the various views and why their were no “simple” answers than I ever see today in mainline media. In fact, mainstream and social media exert a great deal of effort to crush dissenting views and manipulating language to warp and twist meanings to reshape our thinking. That is why I have repeatedly suggested buying a dictionary from the 1960s and using that to get definitions rather than looking them up online where they can be changed at a whim. [See also: https://sabersedge.online/died-suddenly-the-facts-science-and-guilt ]

However, to Bernays credit, he repeatedly insists, as the Nazi propagandist Goebbels also repeatedly insisted, that the propagandist must first and foremost be truthful in what he says (apparently Goebbels deviated from this later in the war when things were going bad.) However, as Goebbles said, it is no use to tell people that no Allied bombers can penetrate our Anti-aircraft barrier when they can go out in the streets and see buildings burning. Perhaps, if more propagandists and “public relations” officers had followed this our society would be better off. However, there no longer seems to be any ethics at all in propaganda, advertising, or public relations anymore.

It was the same with Bud Light and today’s propagandists – they have so far deviated from the truth, by clinging to neo-Marxist doctrine, that they are completely out of touch with the common person.

Not that they were pure in his day.

The Toothpaste Controversy

Bernays includes an example of a toothpaste company that was making claims for its toothpaste that no toothpaste was able to perform. He was hired by their competitor. What was he to do lie and make even bigger claims? Be silent and let the lying advertisers grab the greater market share claiming their product could do what no product could possibly do? Bernays propaganda was more subtle. He created a public information campaign using doctors and dentists to provide the truth to the people. That no toothpaste could do what they claimed. The science wasn’t there. By exposing the company as liars no one wanted to trust them anymore for any of their health needs. It surprises me that such contemporary exposure of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and the lies and half-truths that were used in those campaigns don’t come back to haunt those companies. For myself, I now see a Pfizer ad and think “I don’t believe anything you say anymore. I will get my healthcare from another company, after all, for you it may be profit but for me its my life. Thank you very much.” I even had a surgeon tell me in the hospital in 2021 that the Pfizer vaccine had been approved by the FDA. A claim that my wife found was a lie by checking her phone. It was still simply “authorized” for “emergency use” which is very different from something going through the approval process. I chose not to have that particular surgeon on my team. If he was 1) a liar, or 2) not up on current medical procedures and treatments and ignorant of the difference between “authorized for emergency use” and “approved”; either way I did not want him working on me.

As Bernays says:

“Some of this phenomena of this process are criticized – the manipulation of news, the inflation of personality, and the general ballyhoo by which politicians and commercial products and social ideas are brought to the consciousness of the masses. The instruments by which public opinion is organized and focused my be misused. But such organizations and focusing are necessary to orderly life.”

Edward Bernays, Propaganda p. 39

Ironically, the more “Democratic” we become the more power we give to these invisible governors who can so easily manipulate the opinions of large numbers of people through media. The more we extend the vote the more power we give to those who can sway large swaths of society through their control of media and the less free we actually become. The founders knew democracies tear themselves apart and set up systems to prevent us from doing so. Safeguards that we have largely dismantled over the last 150 years. More and more I am wondering if we should go back to property holders as people who have a stake in the future. But more than that, perhaps we should restrict the vote to those who are stable members of society. Those who are married with children (who thus have a stake in the future,) and who stay married – therefore contributing to the stability of society – and those who serve in the military as those who have shown a willingness to defend the society and uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.

I have become convinced that, besides the control of propaganda, one of our biggest mistakes was allowing for no fault divorce and our current divorce courts and laws. Tomorrow we will look at some of the facts about stable families including the fact that black families in America (far from being destroyed by slavery,) where the strongest and most stable families in America up until the 1960s. We will find out why tomorrow and how family stability is key to societies well being.