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How Americans came to be so brainwashed -- Edward Bernays, Propaganda

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Johnny Asia

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Apr 24, 2009, 10:03:02 AM4/24/09

"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."-Edward Bernays, Propaganda

http://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598

A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought
and public relations, Edward Bernays (18911995), pioneered the
scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which
he famously dubbed "engineering of consent." During World War I, he
was an integral part of the U.S. Committee on Public Information
(CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package,
advertise and sell the war to the American people as one that would
"Make the World Safe for Democracy." The CPI would become the
blueprint in which marketing strategies for future wars would be based
upon.

Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and,
incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken
proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate
manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell Propaganda lays out
his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the
collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics,
art, science and education. To read this book today is to frightfully
comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and
business have become in regards to organized manipulation of the
masses.

----------------------

http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1999Q2/bernays.html

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & The Birth of PR

by Larry Tye

book review by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton

Today, few people outside the public relations profession recognize
the name of Edward L. Bernays. As the year 2000 approaches, however,
his name deserves to figure on historians' lists of the most
influential figures of the 20th century.

It is impossible to fundamentally grasp the social, political,
economic and cultural developments of the past 100 years without some
understanding of Bernays and his professional heirs in the public
relations industry. PR is a 20th century phenomenon, and
Bernays--widely eulogized as the "father of public relations" at the
time of his death in 1995--played a major role in defining the
industry's philosophy and methods.

Eddie Bernays himself desperately craved fame and a place in history.
During his lifetime he worked and schemed to be remembered as the
founder of his profession and sometimes drew ridicule from his
industry colleagues for his incessant self-promotions. These schemes
notwithstanding, Bernays richly deserves the title that Boston Globe
reporter Larry Tye has given him in his engagingly written new book,
The Father of Spin.

In keeping with his obsessive desire for recognition, Bernays was the
author of a massive memoir, titled Biography of an Idea, and he
fretted about who would author his biography. He would probably be
happy with Tye's book, the first written since his passing.

The Father of Spin is a bit too fawning and uncritical of Bernays and
his profession. We recommend it, however, for its new insights into
Bernays, many of which are based on a first-time-ever examination of
the 80 boxes of papers and documents that Bernays left to the Library
of Congress. The portrait that emerges is of a brilliant,
contradictory man.

Tye writes that "Bernays' papers . . . provide illuminating and
sometimes disturbing background on some of the most interesting
episodes of twentieth-century history, from the way American tobacco
tycoons made it socially acceptable for women to smoke to the way
other titans of industry persuaded us to pave over our landscape and
switch to beer as the 'beverage of moderation.' The companies involved
aren't likely to release their records of those campaigns, assuming
they still exist. But Bernays saved every scrap of paper he sent out
or took in. . . . In so doing, he let us see just how policies were
made and how, in many cases, they were founded on deception."

In an industry that is notable for its mastery of evasions and
euphemisms, Bernays stood out for his remarkable frankness. He was a
propagandist and proud of it. (In an interview with Bill Moyers,
Bernays said that what he did was propaganda, and that he just "hoped
it was 'proper-ganda' and not 'improper-ganda.'")

Bernays' life was amazing in many ways. He had a role in many of the
seminal intellectual and commercial events of this century. "The
techniques he developed fast became staples of political campaigns and
of image-making in general," Tye notes. "That is why it is essential
to understand Edward L. Bernays if we are to understand what Hill and
Knowlton did in Iraq--not to mention how Richard Nixon was able to dig
his way out of his post-Watergate depths and remake himself into an
elder statesman worthy of a lavish state funeral, how Richard Morris
repositioned President Bill Clinton as an ideological centrist in
order to get him reelected, and how most other modern-day miracles of
public relations are conceived and carried out."

Many of the new insights that Tye offers have to do with Bernays's
relationship with his family and his uncle Sigmund Freud, whose
reputation as "the father of psychoanalysis" owes something to
Bernays' publicity efforts. Bernays regarded Uncle Sigmund as a
mentor, and used Freud's insights into the human psyche and motivation
to design his PR campaigns, while also trading on his famous uncle's
name to inflate his own stature.

There is, however, a striking paradox in the relationship between the
two. Uncle Sigmund's "talking cure" was designed to unearth his
patients' unconscious drives and hidden motives, in the belief that
bringing them into conscious discourse would help people lead
healthier lives. Bernays, by contrast, used psychological techniques
to mask the motives of his clients, as part of a deliberate strategy
aimed at keeping the public unconscious of the forces that were
working to mold their minds.

Characteristically (and again paradoxically), Bernays was remarkably
candid about his manipulative intent. "If we understand the mechanisms
and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and
regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it,"
he argued in Propaganda, one of his first books. In a later book, he
coined the term "engineering of consent" to describe his technique for
controlling the masses.

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits
and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society," Bernays argued. "Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism
of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling
power of our country. . . . 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 . . . who understand the mental processes and social
patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control
the public mind."

This definition of "democratic society" is itself a contradiction in
terms--a theoretical attempt to reconcile rule by the few with the
democratic system which threatened (and still threatens) the
privileges and powers of the governing elite. On occasion, Bernays
himself recoiled from the anti-democratic implications of his theory.

During Bernays' lifetime and since, propaganda has usually had dirty
connotations, loaded and identified with the evils of Nazi PR genius
Joseph Goebbels, or the oafish efforts of the Soviet Communists. In
his memoirs, Bernays wrote that he was "shocked" to discover that
Goebbels kept copies of Bernays' writings in his own personal library,
and that his theories were therefore helping to "engineer" the rise of
the Third Reich.

Bernays liked to cultivate an image as a supporter of feminism and
other liberating ideas, but his work on behalf of the United Fruit
Company had consequences just as evil and terrifying as if he'd worked
directly for the Nazis. The Father of Spin sheds new and important
light on the extent to which the Bernays' propaganda campaign for the
United Fruit Company (today's United Brands) led directly to the CIA's
overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala.

The term "banana republic" actually originated in reference to United
Fruit's domination of corrupt governments in Guatemala and other
Central American countries. The company brutally exploited virtual
slave labor in order to produce cheap bananas for the lucrative U.S.
market. When a mildly reformist Guatemala government attempted to
reign in the company's power, Bernays whipped up media and political
sentiment against it in the commie-crazed 1950s.

"Articles began appearing in the New York Times, the New York Herald
Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, the New Leader, and
other publications all discussing the growing influence of Guatemala's
Communists," Tye writes. "The fact that liberal journals like the
Nation were also coming around was especially satisfying to Bernays,
who believed that winning the liberals over was essential. . . . At
the same time, plans were under way to mail to American Legion posts
and auxiliaries 300,000 copies of a brochure entitled 'Communism in
Guatemala--22 Facts.'"

His efforts led directly to a brutal military coup. Tye writes that
Bernays "remained a key source of information for the press,
especially the liberal press, right through the takeover. In fact, as
the invasion was commencing on June 18, his personal papers indicate
he was giving the 'first news anyone received on the situation' to the
Associate Press, United Press, the International News Service, and the
New York Times, with contacts intensifying over the next several
days."

The result, tragically, has meant decades of tyranny under a
Guatemalan government whose brutality rivaled the Nazis as it
condemned hundreds of thousands of people (mostly members of the
country's impoverished Maya Indian majority) to dislocation, torture
and death.

Bernays relished and apparently never regretted his work for United
Fruit, for which he was reportedly paid $100,000 a year, a huge fee in
the early 1950s. Tye writes that Bernays' papers "make clear how the
United States viewed its Latin neighbors as ripe for economic
exploitation and political manipulation--and how the propaganda war
Bernays waged in Guatemala set the pattern for future U.S.-led
campaigns in Cuba and, much later, Vietnam."

As these examples show, Tye's biography of Bernays is important. It
casts a spotlight on the anti-democratic and dangerous corporate
worldview of the public relations industry. The significance of these
dangers is often overlooked, in large part because of the PR
industry's deliberate efforts to operate behind the scenes as it
manages and manipulates opinions and public policies. This strategy of
invisibility is the reason that PR academic Scott Cutlip refers to
public relations as "the unseen power."

Bernays pioneered many of the industry's techniques for achieving
invisibility, yet his self-aggrandizing personality drove him to leave
behind a record of how and for whom he worked. By compiling this
information and presenting it to the public in a readable form, Tye
has accomplished something similar to the therapeutic mission that
Freud attempted with his patients--a recovery of historical memories
that a psychoanalyst might term a "return of the repressed."
Published in PR Watch, Second Quarter 1999, Volume 6, No. 2

Pucker your lips for the Apocalypse!

Johnny Asia, Guitarist from the Future

http://johnnyasia.com