We are not stupid geode00 but we are alienated, we are complete zombies, completely manipulated. Some of us start to realize, but then we become so depressed, so overwhelmed we almost regret having dig-out to reality.
The "One-Eyed Babysitter":
Television was beginning to make its entrance as the next mass media technology at the time the Radio Research Project's findings were published in 1939. First experimented with on a large scale in Nazi Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, TV made its splashy public appearance at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where it attracted large crowds. Adorno and others immediately recognized its potential as a mass-brainwashing tool. In 1944, he wrote,
``Television aims at the synthesis of radio and film ... but its consequences are enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter, so drastically that by tomorrow, the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out in the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of Gesamtkunstwerk--the fusion of all arts in one work.'
As was obvious from even the earliest clinical studies of television (some of which were conducted in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Tavistock operatives), viewers, over a relatively short period of time, entered into a trance-like state of semi-awareness, characterized by a fixed stare. The longer one watched, the more pronounced the stare. In such a condition of twilight-like semi-awareness, they were susceptible to messages both contained in the programs themselves, and through transference, in the advertising. They were being brainwashed. [10]
Television moved from being a neighborhood oddity, to mass penetration of especially urban areas, during approximately 1947-52. As Lyndon LaRouche has observed, this coincided with a critical period in the nation's psychological life. The dreams of millions of World War II veterans, and their high hopes of building a better world, crashed to earth in the morally corrupt leadership of the Truman administration and ensuing economic depression. These veterans retreated into family life, their jobs, their homes, their living rooms. And, in the center of those living rooms was their new television set, whose banal images provided assurance that the corrupt moral choices they had made were correct.
The earliest programming fell back on the tested models of radio, as described in the Radio Research Project: the situation comedy, or ``sitcom,' the game shows, the variety shows, sports, and the ``soaps.' Many were in serial form, with interlocking characters, if not stories. All were banal, deliberately designed so.
The children of these unhappy veterans, the so-called baby boomers, became the first generation to be weaned on what LaRouche calls ``the one-eyed babysitter.' Television viewing was encouraged by parents, often as a means of controlling the children, who would stare at whatever was on the screen for hours on end. The content of the first children's programs was banal (but no more so than the television programming in general), and mentally destructive; even more destructive was the replacement of real family interaction by television viewing, as the dinner table was replaced by the ``TV dinner' in front of the tube. Not surprisingly, the children fixated obsessively on the items advertised by the media, demanding that they be given such items, lest they not be like their friends. [11]
In the mid-1970s, Eric Trist, who, until his death in 1993, headed Tavistock's operations in the United States, and Tavistock's main media ``expert,' Fred Emery, reported on their findings of the impact of 20 years of television on American society. In Emery's 1975 work, Futures We Are In, they reported that the content of programming was no longer as important as the sheer amount of television viewing. Average daily viewing time had risen steadily over the two decades since the introduction of the medium, such that by the mid-1970s, it ranked as a daily activity only behind sleep and work, at almost six hours a day (since then, it has risen still further, to more than seven hours, with the addition of video games, home videos, and so on); among school-age children, the time spent viewing television ranked just behind school attendance. These findings, Tavistock indicated, strongly suggested that television was like an addictive drug. Similarly, Emery reported on neurological studies which, he claimed, showed that repeated television viewing ``shuts down the central nervous system of man.'
Whether this claim holds up under scientific scrutiny, Emery and Trist present persuasive argument that general, extensive television viewing lowers the capacity for conceptual thinking about what is being presented on the screen. The studies show that the mere presence of images on television, especially within appropriate news or documentary format, but also within general viewing, tends to ``validate' those images, and imbue them with a sense of ``reality.'
Trist and Emery find nothing wrong with such developments, which indicate that television is producing a brain-dead generation. Rather, they show how this development fits into a larger global plan for social control, implemented by Tavistock and its allied networks on behalf of its sponsors. Society, they state in A Choice of Futures, a book published in the same time period, has been plunging through progressively lowered states of mental awareness, to a point where even the Orwellian fascist state is not attainable. At this point, thanks to television and other mass media, mankind is in a state of dissociation, whose political outcome will be manifested in a ``Clockwork Orange' society, named for the book by the late Anthony Burgess, in which roving youth gangs habitually commit acts of random violence, and then return home to watch the news about what they have done on the ``tube.'
The brainwashers point out that this development, for which they say the violence of Northern Ireland is a model, was not induced by the effects of television alone. Society has been put through ``social turbulence' in a series of economic and political shocks, which included the war in Vietnam, the oil price shocks, and the assassination of political leaders. The psychological impact of those events, for whose responsibility they neglect to properly ascribe to the Anglo-American establishment, were magnified by their being brought into homes, in gory and terrifying detail, by television news broadcasts. Under the Trist-Emery scenario, one can imagine hearing the tag line for a future late news program: ``The end of the world. Details at 11.'
Consolidating the Paradigm
In a 1991 anthology of the work's of Tavistock which he edited, Trist wrote that all of the international ``nodes' or centers of the institute's brainwashing apparatus were deployed for the central purpose of consolidating the paradigm-shift to a ``post-industrial world order.' Their goal, he stated, was to make the shift irreversible. In this work, and in other locations, Trist, like Alexander King, urges a mass ``reeducational' campaign to break the last vestiges of national resistance, especially within the United States, to this new, one-world order.
Approximately ten1 years earlier, another of Tavistock's minions, Bertram Gross, in a paper delivered to a 1981 World Future Society conference attended by Al Gore, provided a glimpse of what this ``new world order' might look like. Gross argued that in the period ahead, the world would be offered what Tavistock likes to call a ``critical choice'--a set of options, all of which appear to be bad, but, because of applied terror and pressure of events, a choice is nonetheless forced and the ``less bad' option taken. Western industrial society will break down into chaos; this chaos can, he said, either lead to a fascism of the authoritarian type that the British helped install in Nazi Germany, or to a more humane and benevolent form of fascism, which Gross called a ``friendly fascism.' The choice, Gross proclaimed, is to attempt to go back to the old industrial paradigm, under which there will be Nazi fascism; or, to embrace post-industrialism, where there will be a ``friendly fascism.' The latter, he said, is clearly preferable, since it is merely a transition to a new ``global information world order,' which will involve more personal choice and freedom, a true open and participatory mass democracy.
For Gross, the choice is clear: In any case, there will be pain and suffering; but only the ``friendly fascism' of the global information order, of a society wired together by cable television, satellites, and computer lines, offers hope for a better ``future.'
Who shall administer this ``friendly fascist' world order? Gross explained that there now truly exists a ``Golden International,' a term that he credited to the late Communist International (Comintern) leader Nikolai Bukharin. It is an enlightened international elite, based within the powerful European-centered oligarchy that controls the global multinational communications industry, as well as other critical resources and global finance. This elite must be instructed and informed by the intelligence of the Tavistock networks; they must be shown that the great masses of television-fixated mental zombies can be won easily to this brave new world, through inducements of entertainments and the endless supply of ``information.' Once the masses are won over, through ``education,' then the resistance within national sectors will collapse.
In 1989, under the initiative of Trist, Tavistock convened a seminar at Case Western Reserve University to discuss the means to bring about a ``stateless' international fascism--a new global information world order. In 1991, Tavistock devoted its journal, Human Relations, to the publication of the papers from that conference. In several of the papers, the call went out for the deployment of the mass media on behalf of this project.
In addition, since 1981, there was now a new technology at the disposal of the brainwashers--the Internet. According to Harold Perlmutter, one of the participants at the Case Western seminar, the Internet represented a subversive means to penetrate national borders with ``information' about this new world order; it also serves as a glue for a network of non-governmental organizations, all circulating propaganda for the new world order. These NGOs are to be the superstructure upon which the new world order is to be built. Perlmutter, and other conference participants, argued that their movement cannot be beaten, because it doesn't exist, in a formal sense. It resides in the minds of its conspirators, minds informed by Tavistock's mass-media brainwashing machine. As television was the information drug during the last half of this millennium, so the Internet, with its glut of mostly useless chatter and ``information,' with its subversive, programmed messages, is to be the new ``drug' of the next millennium, Tavistock boasts. [12]
``Americans don't really think--they have opinions, feelings,' said the Futures Group's Hal Becker in a 1981 interview. ``Television creates opinion, then validates it. Are they brainwashed by the tube? It is really more than that. I think that people have lost their ability to relate the images of their own lives without television intervening. This really is what we mean when we say we have a wired society. We are headed for an Orwellian society, but Orwell made a mistake in 1984. Big Brother doesn't need to watch you, as long as you watch it. And who can say that this is really so bad?'
From american_almanac.tripod.com
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