Supposing Truth out of Hysteria

To: Truthout

Re: John Pilger's Article on Propaganda

I'm not sure Bernays was the first to invent propaganda ... after all, Manifest Destiny was a propaganda as much as Cromwell's 'liberation' of Jamaica from the oh so dastardly Spanish.

Behind every 'liberation' there is a bete noire and what is really interesting is to hypothesize that perhaps the bete was blanc.

So returning to Bernay's 'magnum opus' ... suppose the 'dastardly' Germans never sank the Lusitania; suppose the Kaiser was right that it was the French and the Russians who started the Great War; suppose it was the dastardly English who inhumanely sought to starve the German civilian population in submission.

Suppose, Hitler was right that the Allies sought to impoverish Germany with chains of debt and to encircle her with meancing armies while she was prohibited from self defense. Suppose Canada and Mexico lopped off chunks of land from the United States and Canada held a 'corridor' from Montreal to New York City. Suppose as Chamberlain said and John Foster Dulles implied, a 'war party' in the U.S. and Britain in fact were the guilty parties who precipitated the World War.

Most people -- in fact 99 percent of them -- are almost congenitally incapable of asking liberating questions. Most of what people are taught as history is really hysteria -- that is, propaganda and myth which it is taboo to so much as question.

However, once you do start to question, you will never see the world in the same light again.

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