"Love Taps and Reckless Attacks"
by Joel Bowman
"Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses." ~ Juvenal, "Satires X"
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "First up, the same olds...From Reuters: "Trump says ceasefire still holds after fighting between the US and Iran flares." From the New York Times: "Tehran Accuses U.S. of “Reckless Attack” in Strait as Trump Insists Ceasefire Holds." And from Fox News: "Trump calls US strikes on Iran a ‘love tap’ after destroyers targeted in Strait of Hormuz." And there you have it, dear reader. Clean as an oil spill. Now, is the situation improving… or deteriorating? Are attacks flaring… or the ceasefire holding? Are we talking reckless attacks… or love taps? Hmm...
Death by Democracy: As we’ve seen in these Notes many times before, modern man can be made to go along with just about anything. Given the right circumstances… some narrative framing… and enough time for it all to marinate in his soft, mammalian brain… there is almost nothing Homo Credulus will not learn to embrace.
Just take a look at the historical record; you’ll soon wonder how we even got this far. Sure, you’ll discover gizmos and flying contraptions… art and agriculture… music and mathematics. You’ll witness spectacular scientific breakthroughs, the number “0” and a man’s footprint on the moon. But you’ll also scratch your head. Perhaps you’ll even weep. And if you reckon hard enough, you’ll put a few assumptions in the firing line…
The Divine Right of Kings? Strongman rule? Modern democracy? How has mankind survived such crude contrivances? Self inflicted, no less! And why, moreover, does he rush so earnestly to repeat and replay his own worst mistakes? Ah, let us not be too hard on our fellow creatures. After all, repetition is nothing new…
You’ll recall that it was the Greeks who first gave the world democracy – from the Greek, dēmokratía, literally “Rule by ‘People’”. (And yes, as an astute reader reminded us recently, it was those very same Greeks who put their own beloved Socrates to death… by a majority vote of 361-140.)
Today, democracy is a cherished tenet of “the West.” It is woven into the civic religion, sewn into the social fabric, and inked on our hallowed mastheads. Men march off eagerly to fight for it, to proselytize it… and to die in forgotten ditches defending it. At least, that’s what they believe they’re doing. As usual, the devil is in the details. Herewith, a little historical context…
The Father of Propaganda: The phrase “Making the world safe for democracy” was actually a marketing slogan, coined back in the 1910s, as a way to sell “The Great War” to America. Weary from their own grueling Civil War just a few decades earlier, in which hundreds of thousands of young men gave up the ghost, Americans were mostly inward looking at the time. That is to say, they wanted little to do with what they largely saw as a “European affair.”
Polls might have indicated no appetite for battle, but the nation’s politicians were nonetheless starved for military misadventure. They sensed big profits abroad, both in manufacturing armaments and making onerous loans to foreign powers. Sure, “the nation” would have to fill “tank and trench” with warm young bodies, but very few soldiers would carry senatorial surnames along with their rifles. And so, after a public relations campaign of truly epic proportions, America’s sons marched off to war… wrapped in the delusion they had freshly been sold.
Eddie Bernays, the man who coined the phrase and, thus, peddled the war to his nation, made a personal fortune for his efforts. He was even invited by Woodrow Wilson to attend the ill-fated Paris Peace Conference, in 1919, as a show of gratitude for his services. There, Bernays learned the full impact of his “democracy” slogan. An obviously bright fellow, the surreal experience caused him to think… If people would be willing to kill one another under the influence of a mere marketing campaign, surely they could be convinced to do, say and buy just about anything!
Bernays was right. In fact, he wrote a series of books, detailing his insights. They included "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923), "A Public Relations Counsel" (1927) and a neat little number titled "Propaganda" (1928), in which the author laid out the blueprint for mass social and psychological manipulation. The collected works went on to become a huge success and a favorite of none other than Joseph Goebbles, Reich Minister for Propaganda in Nazi Germany between 1933-45.
Bernays himself, writing in his 1965 autobiography, recalls a dinner at home in 1933 where…Karl von Wiegand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Wiegand his propaganda library, the best Wiegand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Wiegand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. [...] Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign. It is indeed chilling to think of such a heinous undertaking as being engineered, blueprinted, premeditated and carried out according to some kind of script. And yet, there it is… in Bernays’ own words, the “Father of Propaganda.”
The Show Must Go On: Having acquired somewhat of a tainted reputation-by-association, propaganda, itself, underwent a “strategic rebranding” after WWII. Needless to say, the very same métier thrives to this day, under the more socially palatable designation, “Public Relations.” Still, a ruse by any other name…
“Could we be so stupid again?” wonders the gentle reader. “Might the mob still be swayed by what Charles Mackay termed ‘extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds?’” Why, of course! Such is the nature of the mob! Whether in love, literature, politics or any other matter, man is wont to be convinced, assured, persuaded, often against his own best interests. Few are the absurdities in which he will not take refuge, invest his finite time or squander his morality. All he needs is a good story, something to arrest his imagination and cauterize his capacity for reason. A distraction from his lonely, quotidian existence, and a few crumbs to pass his lips.
The Roman poet, Juvenal, recognized as much when he mocked the panem et circenses (bread and circuses) stratagem almost two millennia ago. In his "Satire X", he referred to the annona (a kind of grain dole) and the famous circus games, held in the Colosseum and elsewhere, as designed to keep the unthinking population fed and happy. And lo!
So many moons later, a quarter century into the new millennium, we’ve got trending headlines and streaming infotainment, the pretense of safety and a surrender of liberty, soaring national debt at home foreign entanglements abroad, mindless TV debates and partisan hack electioneering. Now, as then, the show goes on!"
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