The origins of Americanism

The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. (Alex Carey)

I stumbled upon the above words years ago, and only now have followed up on Carey’s (1922-1987) work. He was a misplaced sheep rancher in Australia who had strong academic leanings. (Raising “sheep” would later seem apropos.) He studied propaganda, but most of his work was unpublished due to an early death. He noticed that around 1970 American propaganda was creeping into Australian society. In academic fashion, he did research into the origins.

So I spent my down time in Yellowstone reading “Taking the Risk out of Democracy,” a collection of his essays. Most of our current attitudes are a manifestation of earlier work by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). That robust group ran education campaigns from the early twentieth century forward. The only two serious threats to corporate power in our society are government and unions. NAM demonized both, convincing even those who benefited from unions that they were a force for evil. Those attitudes are omnipresent now in our culture.

NAM was behind a Red Scare in the post World War I era, which repeated itself after World War II. The Rosetta Stone for anyone serious about avoiding propaganda is the “Manichean world-view.” This includes use of powerful symbols of Satanic and Sacred, good and evil, darkness and light. This is the seed of Americanism that germinated in the The Committee on Public Information, or CPI, sometimes called the Creel Committee. It was the group that explored propaganda techniques to rally the public behind American entry in to the First World War. So successful was CPI that its techniques were used by the Germans leading up to World War II, and Americans are now are the master practitioners. Note how all about us are forces of Satanic evil as we fight for Sacred good, and how evil communism was in short order replaced by terrorism (by non-Americans) as the symbol of evil.

Americans are drenched from birth now in propaganda, so much so that only by accident, as with me, do any of us escape it. I can easily see, as it is painfully obvious, that 9/11 and Boston were false flag events. But for most of us, there is no access to anything but reinforcement of the official story of Satanic evil attacking our sacred good. False flag events are agitprop techniques, but the guts of American propaganda is birth-to-death immersion in wide cultural assimilation of lies. By the time we graduate from high school, the “state” owns our minds. In reality, the state is the corporation.*

9/11 was twelve years ago, Boston just this year, and already they are shrouded in the cloak of official truth. Imagine that all of American history is thus.

The CIA [Committee for Immigrants in America, not the current spook agency] … produced a brilliant propaganda strategy to involve every American in an annual ritual of national identification. This ritual would embed the cultural intolerance of the Americanization movement with an identification that was formally and officially sanctified. The CIA thereby launched its campaign for the fourth of July 1915 to be made a national Americanization Day, a day for a ‘great nationalistic expression of unity and faith in America’. (Carey, The First Americanization Movement)

I have long suspected that most of our history is bogus, and that the few Enlightenment principles that the writers of the Declaration wrote about were expounded in brief window that had closed by the end of Jefferson’s term of office. Look about us now, see what we have left of speech, religion, privacy, habeas … all gone. Free speech, never really practiced until the 1950’s in the Civil Rights movement, has again gone underground, and any who practice it are likely on a list of subversives somewhere in the bowels of NSA.

So now I learn that the 4th of July was merely another propaganda device. “Americanization” became “Independence,” but it’s still going on. Why am I not surprised?
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*Edward Snowden, the supposed whistle-blower, worked for Booz Allen, a private contractor. I have read (and who can know?) that 70-80% of NSA’s work has been outsourced to by private contractors. Taxpayers finance all of it, but might it be better said that corporate America has “insourced” 20-30% of its surveillance work to NSA?