Brainwashing in America

[Mike Sullivan]

Brainwashing in America
by Dr. William L. Pierce
Free Speech - April 1995 - Volume I, Number 4


WE'VE TALKED HERE about a number of very important things in recent months: about the damage done to the American standard of living and to American sovereignty by the New World Order planners and their various free trade schemes; about the efforts of the government and the controlled media to disarm American citizens, so that they cannot rebel; about attempts to scuttle the First Amendment and outlaw Politically Incorrect speech.

Most recently we've talked about the ways in which the controlled media use the average American's desire to be fashionable, to be trendy, as a means to manipulate his attitudes and opinions -- in other words, to brainwash him. Today we'll focus on this last topic, because it's really the key to everything else.

How much more pleasant and progressive a world this would be if all of us were rational creatures -- and honest too! Honesty is important. But the fact is that most of us think with our emotions instead of with our reasoning faculty. We will believe the most absurd things, if we have some emotional compulsion to do so. And even when our emotions don't have us entirely convinced, we'll pretend that they do, if there is a compelling reason. We'll be dishonest in telling other people what we believe.

For example, the opinions of many of us on the subject of race are determined not by observation and reason, but by fear of being unfashionable -- and by other emotions besides fear in many cases. And even those of us who do not have fashionable ideas on race -- even those of us whose ideas have been shaped by observation and reason -- often are not honest in expressing our ideas to others. We still fear being thought unfashionable by others, and so we lie about what we believe.

I spoke a few weeks ago about the ways in which the controlled media have used our lack of reason and our lack of honesty -- or lack of courage -- to manipulate our attitudes on racial matters and to manipulate governmental policies on race as well. By presenting us with certain images which have an emotional impact and repeatedly associating those images with certain ideas, the men who control the news and entertainment media establish conditioned reflexes in the public. In other words, they brainwash us. They make us think the way they want us to think, not by showing us evidence and reasoning with us, but by understanding how to push the right emotional buttons on us.

In my last talk with you I gave the example of the way in which the controlled media manipulated public opinion during the time of all the civil disorders connected with the effort to force racial mixing between Whites and Blacks -- the so-called civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s. Our television screens showed us scenes calculated by the media controllers to make us sympathize with Black civil rights demonstrators and to make us embarrassed by the Whites who opposed them. They showed us White Klansmen pulling Blacks off buses and beating them with baseball bats. They showed us White policemen siccing their dogs on Black marchers in Alabama. Not typical scenes, certainly, but scenes carefully selected for their emotional impact. Of course, they could have chosen images which would have had exactly the opposite effect. Instead of showing us Black demonstrators being beaten by angry Whites, they could have shown us interviews with the White victims of Black crime -- or with the relatives of White victims. They could have shown us residential neighborhoods which used to be White and decent before the government brought Blacks in, and which then became filthy and crime-ridden afterward. They could have interviewed some of the elderly White people trapped in these neighborhoods because they couldn't afford to move, and let these people tell us on the air how their lives had been turned into a living hell. Instead of showing us polite, neatly dressed Black children being escorted into a newly integrated White school by Federal marshals while White students jeered and cursed them, they could have shown us examples of the decay and degradation which inevitably followed the racial integration of the schools: the graffiti on the walls, the gang fights, the disorder in the classrooms. They could have hardened our will to oppose the destruction of our schools and neighborhoods, made us feel that it was our duty, instead of making us feel guilty for opposing racial mixing.

But the controlled media have their agenda, their goal, and that goal is always to break down the structure of our society, to lower our standards, to destroy our morale, to undermine our solidarity, to corrupt and confuse us. We always can predict the side the controlled media will be on in any social or economic or cultural or racial dispute. It always will be the side which weakens us as a people.

Another example of this process of brainwashing by the media has been their treatment of the campaign to make homosexuality acceptable to the average person. I don't know whether or not you've ever actually been physically present at a public demonstration by homosexuals, but let me tell you, they're pretty disgusting. Among homosexuals there seems to be an unusually high percentage of exhibitionists, of in-your-face types who like to show their contempt for normal people by shocking them. But when these homosexual demonstrations are televised, the viewers don't see the worst of this disgusting behavior. It's covered up by the media, who try to make these sick creatures seem almost normal to us.

I was living in the Washington, DC, area during the latter part of the Vietnam war. I went downtown to observe several of the big demonstrations first hand. The media always called them peace demonstrations. I was more naive at that time than I am now, and I was absolutely flabbergasted when I compared the news coverage of a demonstration with what I had actually seen with my own eyes just a few hours earlier.

These demonstrations always had a big contingent of communists in the lead, with other communist groups scattered among the rest of the marchers. The Communist Party USA was there with its big red banners and its pictures of Marx and Lenin. The Trotskyites were there with their banners. The Young People's Socialist League, the Progressive Labor Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and all the rest. They all carried Viet Cong flags as well as their own banners. Most of them were bussed in from New York, and there was a high percentage of really greasy-looking Jews among them, Marx- and Trotsky-type Jews.

The great majority of the demonstrators weren't card-carrying members of any of these communist groups. They were just liberals and leftists of various stripes, many of them students like Bill Clinton at the time, who were there because it was the fashionable thing to do. But these Bill Clinton types were marching arm in arm with genuine Reds who were carrying Viet Cong flags. This was at a time when the Viet Cong were killing an average of 100 American soldiers every day.

Anyway, when I saw the television news coverage of the demonstration that evening and saw the pictures in the Washington Post the next morning, I looked in vain for any of the communist banners which had been so evident when I was there. The people in the controlled media had deliberately sanitized their coverage of the demonstration. They had cropped their pictures so that the communist banners and placards didn't show. They had turned their cameras on the normal-looking demonstrators and on the less- inflammatory placards: the ones that merely called for an end to the war instead of the ones which called for a Viet Cong victory.

The cameras sought out young women marchers carrying children in their arms and focused on them. Or if someone was pushing a baby carriage, she was sure to be seen in the television coverage. When the demonstrators began to chant, Ho, ho, ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong's gonna win, the audio background would be blanked so television viewers wouldn't hear it, and the commentator would begin speaking.

The controlled media had made these demonstrations look respectable. They had made it look like the people opposed to an American victory were normal, decent folks like you and me, who merely wanted peace, just as they had made it look like the people opposed to forced racial mixing were hooligans.

You see, the people who control television are able to control our society, because they understand how to use this powerful weapon effectively. They understand how to manipulate the attitudes and opinions of the public with it. They don't try to tell us, of course, exactly how we must vote in each election. They just determine which ideas and policies to make fashionable, and which ideas and policies to make unfashionable. Once the media have done that, the politicians -- both Democrats and Republicans -- pretty well fall into line. The media masters are willing to let us decide whether we want Bill Clinton or George Bush in the White House, because they know that neither one of these politicians will dare to be unfashionable on the really important issues.

This ability to dictate what will be fashionable and what will be unfashionable by playing on the emotions of the public is the greatest power wielded in the world today. It is an absolute disaster for us that this power is in the hands of Jews rather than our own people. But that's the way things are at the moment. We have to understand that. And we have to fight it. We have to try to take that power away from those who wield it now and return it to our own people. There are several ways in which we can fight, and we'll talk about them.

I'll tell you one way, though, that we can't fight. We can't fight by trying to make the great majority of our people think with their heads instead of their emotions. We can't fight by trying to get people to substitute reason for fear and guilt and the other emotions on which the media masters play so skillfully. People are constituted the way they are, and we have to accept it. We can't change that. Most people always will be subject to manipulation by whoever has the power to set fashions. What we have to do is take that power away from those who have it now. One thing that we can do, even though it's very difficult, is try to give more people the courage to be honest. I was a physics professor at a university back during the 1960s, when the so-called civil rights turmoil was very much in the news. Blacks were demanding this and demanding that, and they were rioting and marching and burning things and generally raising hell. Well, I observed all of these things, and I thought about them, and I talked with my colleagues at the university about them.

My colleagues could be divided into three groups, based on their responses to my expression of concern about what was happening.

First, there were the trendies, the liberals, the ones who held a moistened forefinger up to the breeze of propaganda coming from their television receivers and adjusted their opinions accordingly. One could argue with them, but there really was no point in it. They were absolutely determined to believe whatever was fashionable, and they weren't going to let facts or reason get in their way.

Second, there were the Jews, who are a lot more numerous on university campuses than they are in the general population. One didn't need to argue with them either. They were all up to their necks in various civil rights activities: organizing committees to hire more non-White faculty members or recruit more non-White students, demanding that the university's trustees get rid of all their investments in South Africa, and so on.

Finally, there were colleagues who were open-minded enough so that I could talk with them about what was going on. They weren't taken in by the TV propaganda, and they formed their own opinions about things. With very few exceptions, however, they were not willing to express their views publicly. They let themselves be intimidated by the Jews and the trendies. Many of them behaved in a dishonest way, telling me one thing in private and behaving in public as if they agreed with the current TV fashion. They were, I believe, unduly timid, unduly afraid of the consequences of opposing the Jews and the trendies.

It is true, of course, that there was a certain amount of physical intimidation: tire slashing, disruptions in class, the threat of violence, which the advocates of Political Correctness have never hesitated to use. But I believe that if those who opposed the politicizing and corruption of our universities had been bolder and had stood together, the way their opponents did, they could have prevailed in many cases. In many of our universities they could have preserved the atmosphere of academic freedom and the academic standards which used to prevail.

Actually the situation was a bit more complex than I have indicated. The government and the media both were leaning on the universities to lower their standards. It would have been necessary to defy the government as well as the Jews and the trendies. Eventually it would have been necessary to weed out the Jews and reestablish the bans on hiring Jewish faculty members which our universities used to have in order to protect themselves from subversion. This would have entailed a real fight, a major disruption at every university: the sort of disruptions which actually occurred on many campuses during the 1960s and 70s, when Blacks and Jews really turned things upside down and established the tyranny of Political Correctness which still rules. Even then the professors who disagreed with what was happening failed to speak out effectively against it or to display any sort of solidarity. The consequence of this failure . . . well, we all know what the consequence was. It was the destruction of our universities. Worse, it was their conversion to enemy assets. We can still go to an American university for a technical education -- to learn engineering or chemistry or mathematics -- but we certainly can no longer acquire there what used to be called a liberal education. We certainly can no longer acquire there the knowledge and feeling for our civilization which in the past prepared us to be defenders and builders of that civilization.

What remains of our universities is really pitiful to behold, really disgusting. The people in charge present the worst possible example to the young people there. They are lickspittles and hypocrites, liars and wimps, without the slightest trace of manliness, honor, or self-respect. They teach doctrines which are fashionable, but which they know are false. They grovel at the feet of the Jews and other minorities in order to keep their jobs.

Just last month the president of Rutgers University, which used to be a fine institution, was desperately trying to hold his job after he made a slip and actually said something which everyone knows is true, but which it is Politically Incorrect to mention. In an address to faculty members he pointed out that Blacks simply don't have the genetic quality to meet the standards set for White students. Well, of course, one of the monitors of Political Correctness recorded his comments and gave the recording to the controlled media, which immediately began howling for his blood.

Instead of defending what he had said and backing it up with evidence, the president began groveling and apologizing. He whined and begged. He said he really hadn't meant what he said -- that it had just slipped out, and it was exactly the opposite of what he really believed. Probably many of you saw the news stories. Truly pathetic!

To have saved our universities from what they have become today would have been worth any sort of disruption, any sort of temporary unpleasantness.

The point is that just a little honesty, a little courage, at the right time could have prevented a great tragedy.

Do you think that I'm being naive in asking for honesty, when so little is evident in our national life?

You should understand that I'm not asking for courage from people who have none in them. But there still are a few individuals who are capable of being honest, even in our universities, even in our government, a few who have the courage to be honest -- if they're given a little encouragement, if someone else will set an example for them.

We're trying to set an example with our radio broadcasts. But many of you who are listening also can set examples.

We should never think: Well, I'm only one person. What I do or don't do isn't important. I can't make a difference by myself.

That kind of thinking is wrong. We can make a difference, because courage is contagious. It spreads from person to person.

And it's powerful. One courageous truthteller can back down a thousand cowards and liars and hypocrites. He can send a whole regiment of Jewish media bosses scurrying for cover, like vampires fleeing the light of the rising sun.

There has never been a time in the long history of our race when we were more in need of a few honest men and women, a few people of courage and integrity. There has never been another time when a few good men and women had the opportunity to make such a big difference as they can make now.

Let's do it!

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