The Corporatocracy has a fetish for fascism– here’s why…
It was #WhistleblowerWednesday yesterday here on your Daily WakeUp Call. And yesterday’s spotlight was on General Smedley Butler. General Butler was the lone whistleblower who exposed a Wall Street coup to overthrow President Roosevelt, back in 1933.
At the time, General Butler was the most decorated Marine in history. After he retired from the military, General Butler traveled across the country giving talks about how “War is [just] a Racket” that profits the corporate elites.
One of his core critiques of the corporate elites is their intentional support of fascism. As indie researcher, Barbara LaMonica explained in her excellent article Kennedys and Kings, Corporate America financed violent hate groups back then to carry out anti-union and anti-communist campaigns. The corporate elites effectively fused virulent racism and white nationalism with anti-socialism and anti-labor. So, for the Whites who were easily infected with racial hatred, they dependably extended their hate to pro-socialists and pro-labor as well.
It’s useful to look back on such history. It gives us some cognitive distance– some objectivty– where we can more easily understand such social contagions as racism, fascism and hate. We can better see how such movements are made to serve power; how our minds are manipulated so that we turn on each other.
It reminds us– that so long as we’re divided, we’re more easily controlled. And It begs a most critical question: how is it that our thoughts and thinking are so easily manipulated…?
Sorta related… New Scientist magazine published an interesting article last week about how hypnosis workson the mind. The author presented an intriguing definition of hypnotism, as “a discipline that influences the brain’s ability to adapt and learn…a skill we can use to help us change our mind. This adaptability lets the brain modify its neural connections and rewire itself.”
The “neural connections” that the article refers to are basically the patterned thinking that we develop through repetition. It’s how our belief systems are made and sustained.
The author explains how you can practice self-hypnosis on yourself to create new patterns of thinking. OR how a competent hypnotist can impose new thinking patterns on you through suggestion and repetition.
It reminds us of the famous marketing guru, Edward Bernays. He was the nephew of legendary psychiatrist Sigmnd Freud. Bernays lived back in General Butler’s day- they were about the same age.
Bernays wrote a now-infamous book, titled “Propaganda”. It generated huge interest among corporate elites. In his book, Bernays asserted that:
“[The massses] are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions… Those who manipulate the..habits and opinions of the masses constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind…”
Can you believe he admitted that shit?! Remember, Bernays was a guy who advised multiple US Presidents. He was the darling of the corporate warmongers back then, and eventually worked with the CIA. He gained wide acclaim for coining such slogans as “The War to End All Wars” and “Making the World Safe for Democracy.” (And you can bet that Bernays advised his corporate pals on how to turn hate groups against labor and socialism as well.)
Bernays was sorta like a competent hypnotist– a competentmass hypnotist. He knew how to use sloganeering in mass media, through suggestion and repetition, to impose new thinking patterns on the general public. Indeed, all of us are victims of mass media propaganda. But we can also reinforce the effects of mass propaganda ourselves…
If we fail to investigate our own patterned thinking, then the patterns of thinking imposed upon us can ultimately blind and bind us. For example, it can blind us to the fact that our patterns of activism might just be perpetuating the very fuckery we seek to defeat… And the very fear of that possibility– that ‘I’ve got it all wrong’ — that great fear can bind us from doing the self-work that we must in order to transcend our pattered thinking. To awaken and inoculate ourselves, not just from the mass propaganda machine, but our own self-perpetuating patterns of thinking and doing…
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges wrote about this very phenomenon just recently. He was writing about mass protests against the ruling elites and how “protests can be the beginning of political consciousness…But protests can also be empty political theater,” he said. We can use them to make us feel good about ourselves; to advertise our moral correctness; to make us feel like we’re advancing the process of change. But are we?
“As long as we play by their rules,” Hedges says, “voting, lobbying, petitioning and protesting..it’s a game that the state has learned to play to its advantage.” –We can march and protest, and vote in their rigged elections “as long as we do not disrupt the [profit] machine.”
We no longer live in a representative democracy– America has been transformed into a corporate plutocracy. Money is the only real power in this Corporatocracy. And the only real leverage we have against such power is mass economic activism. Indeed, mass organized boycott is the only political will that ever effectively challenged such entrenched and monied power.
It was the Salt and Textile boycotts that Gandhi organized to help win India’s independence from Britain in the 1900s. It was the mass strikes and picket lines that helped US workers in the 1930s win a 40-hour work week, overtime pay and collective bargaining for labor unions. It was the bus boycotts and restaurant sit-ins in the 1960s that helped Black Americans win Civil Rights reforms. It was the Salad Boycotts and Grape Boycotts in the 1960s and 70s that helped win Economic Justice for Migrant workers. And it was the divestment boycotts in the 1980s that finally forced an end to Apartheid in South Africa.
If you want to learn how all of us in the work of Global Justice can join together in strategic boycott and force this corporatocracy to the people’s bargaining table, to end all this injustice, warmongering and corruption, and to help save our planet– please check out our ABOUT Page and listen to our first podcast. And if you want to get involved, please fill out the “contact” form at the top/right of the Home page– or you can email us at info@wakingjustice.org –We’d love to hear from you.
