by Russell M. Drake
With Comment by Prof. James Craven, Blackfoot
18 January 2005
"All
effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and
these must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped
formulae. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the
very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put
forward... Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively
and, in so far as it is favorable to the other side, present it
according to the theoretical rules of justice: the very first
condition which has to be fulfilled is a systematically one-sided
attitude towards every problem. It must present only that aspect
of the truth, which is favorable to its own side... the receptive
powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding
is feeble... The art of propaganda consists precisely in being
able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to
their feelings. It consists in putting a matter so clearly and
forcibly before their minds as to create general conviction
regarding the reality of a certain fact, the necessity for certain
things. It must be limited to a few simple themes and these must
be repeated again and again". (Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf)
See the
article: "Bush-Hitler: Hypnotizing the Masses," by
Russell M. Drake, courtesy of Information Clearing House (which
along with Truthout I hope all will support and read): available
at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6528.htm
Prof.
James Craven
THE FULL ARTICLE:
Bush-Hitler:
Hypnotizing The Masses
by Russell
M. Drake
Originally published 21 July 2004
Said by
some to be more dangerous than Osama bin-Laden, he has been
condemned as a "war maniac," called a "moron"
by the Canadian prime minister’s chief spokeswoman, ridiculed as
"The English Patient" for his struggles with language,
and likened to Adolf Hitler.
Of all
the labels hung on George W. Bush, the hardest to shake may be the
comparison with Hitler.
Perhaps
the clearest likeness between the two men lies in their use of
emotionally induced hypnosis to plant in the mass consciousness an
image of themselves as protectors of their subjects from threats
to national survival both inside and outside the fatherland.
In a
June, 2003 article written for The Nation about Bush’s
"mastery of emotional language, especially negatively charged
emotional language," clinical psychologist Reanna Brooks
observed that "Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks
in his listeners’ minds with a number of linguistic techniques
borrowed from hypnosis and advertising to instill the image of a
dark and evil world around us."
His
subliminal messages to justify religious war against
"evildoers" are right out of Madison Avenue. Writing in The
New Yorker of July 12 & 19, David Greenberg tells how Bush
speechwriter Michael Gerson, "himself an evangelical, laces
the President’s addresses with seemingly innocuous terms that
the devout recognize as laden with meaning: ‘whirlwind,’ ‘work
of mercy,’ ‘safely home,’ ‘wonderworking power.’"
Aspiring
political hypnotists would do well to study Hitler as an
introduction to Bush.
"Without
in any way straining language we can truthfully say that he
(Hitler) was one of the great hypnotists of all time," says
George H. Estabrooks in Hypnotism, the ne plus ultra of
Hitler hypnosis books. Dr. Estabrooks was chairman of Colgate
University’s psychology department, and taught at the school
from 1927 to 1964.
Demonizing Saddam
"The
efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in
preventing the division of the attention of the people, and always
in concentrating it on a single enemy." Hitler said that, in Mein
Kampf.
Bush
could just as easily have said it. Having lost public focus on
Osama bin Laden by his inability to capture the wily 9/11 bomber,
he found it not just convenient, but necessary, to replace bin
Laden with Saddam Hussein as the new "single enemy," a
stratagem inherited from the first President Bush who damned
Hussein as "worse than Hitler" in the run-up to Desert
Storm, the first Iraq war. On the eve of war in early October,
1990, ex-president Ronald Reagan picked up the beat before a crowd
of Houston Republicans, denouncing his former Iraqi ally as
"the reincarnation of Hitler."
"Depicting
Saddam Hussein as an evil man made it easier to justify U. S.
involvement in the Persian Gulf War. Psychology is an important
part of any war strategy." from Introduction to Psychology,
a textbook by Mark Garrison, Kentucky State University. If
demonizing Saddam was effective strategy in the first Gulf war,
the current administration worked wonders with it, with a little
help from people like 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney and Bill
Clinton who, on the David Letterman show, September 11, 2002,
called Saddam "a threat, a murderer and thug..." while
endorsing his removal.
Fear Hypnosis
In search
of support for shaky WMD charges against Saddam, Bush found the
torture issue and put it on the front burner in his January 2003
State of the Union address: "This dictator who is assembling
the world’s most dangerous weapons has already used them on
whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind
or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are
obtained by torturing children while their parents are made to
watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other
methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock,
burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with
electric drills, cutting out tongues and rape."
Bush went
on to urge Americans to come together in an orgy of fear induced
self hypnosis by mentally imaging the dreadful prospect of Iraqi
sponsored terrorists attacking the U. S., and tried again to link
the Iraqi leader to the 9/11 attack on the twin towers:
"Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other
plans - this time armed by Saddam....We will do everything in our
power to make sure that that day never comes." If Saddam had
not existed, Bush would have invented him.
Press Supports War on
Iraq
With
skillful use of fear hypnosis, Bush not only gulled the public,
but played a credulous press like a Steinway baby grand.
The
establishment press fell in behind Bush almost to a man in
endorsing his war aims against Iraq. This blind procession is
amply documented by reporter Chris Mooney in the March/April 2004
issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. The L. A. Times and the
N. Y. Times weakly dissented from war without UN approval but
rolled over when Bush went ahead anyway. Even the usually
skeptical The New Yorker saw merit in Bush’s war plans, warning
that absent "Saddam’s abdication, or a military coup...a
return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most
dangerous option of all."
Hypnosis Contagion
The
demonization of Saddam spread like germs.
"The
mob leader will count on emotional contagion....Emotions are far
more contagious than the measles. This fact of emotional contagion
was very important to Hitler," says Estabrooks. Emotional
statements by a hypnotic leader, he avers, are "burned"
into receptive subconscious minds with the permanence of an image
engraved on a photographic negative.
To be
hypnotized by one such as Bush is to be branded with his ideology
and to bend to his will as he so directs. This is true of anyone
drawn uncritically to any leader or dominant figure. Be it Bush or
Clinton, Hitler or Churchill, Reagan or FDR, the difference in the
degree of hypnotically induced allegiance depends on the skill of
the hypnotist and the suggestibility of the subject.
In The
Group Mind, first published in 1920 by Putnam, author William
McDougall says, "It is well recognized that almost any
emotional excitement increases the suggestibility of the
individual, though the explanation of the fact remains
obscure."
By
putting the horror mask on Saddam, by petrifying U. S. citizens
with tales of Saddam’s gases and torture chambers and terrorist
connections, Bush dusted off and refined an old Hitler trick.
"The
one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and
force." Hitler, Mein Kampf.
Putting
his own spin on Hitler’s formula, Bush induced fear-of-Saddam
hypnosis in Americans to set them up for repetition hypnosis, to
deepen and fix the fear. "Axis of evil" - "weapons
of mass destruction" - "torture chambers" -
"Iraqi terrorists" - "grave and gathering
danger," all gained dominance in the thought patterns of
Americans to lure them to Bush’s side against the evil Saddam.
"The
influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power
is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This
power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded
in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious
selves in which the motives of our actions are forged." So
said Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd, his seminal study of political
hypnosis, published in 1897.
Bush Power Hypnosis
Why did
Bush thus goad Americans to war by hypnotizing them? The answer
seems to be that from day one, he intended the chaos of crisis and
war to put in place a domestic agenda that he knew stood little
chance of succeeding in peace.
He
gambled that the electorate would be reluctant to change leaders
in the crisis of war just as crewmen would hesitate to pull the
captain from the bridge of their ship even as he sailed into a
field of icebergs.
Bush’s
incendiary bluster on taking office would seem to support this
scenario. In turn, he dissed North Korean and Iranian leaders, sat
by while the intafada exploded into the bloodiest, most enduring
sequel of suicide bombings and Israeli retaliation in the history
of the war, trashed the Kyoto treaty to reduce global air
pollution, unilaterally revoked the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty
with Russia, and vetoed U. S. support of a world court to try war
crimes.
The Republican ‘Pearl
Harbor’
His
actions appeared designed to escalate seething world resentment of
America’s imperial transgressions to flash point, provoking an
outbreak of hostilities that would draw the nation into armed
conflict.
While
Bush and his handlers may not have expected a reaction to their
warmongering so costly as 9/11, when it came may well have
regarded it as God-sent. The twin towers disaster has been called
"the Republicans’ Pearl Harbor," because of the
opportunity it presented to rally the electorate around Bush and
continue him in power, as Pearl Harbor did for FDR.
In Bush’s
Brain, by James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush advisor Karl Rove is
seen as agitating for the Iraq invasion to keep war fever alive
when the hunt for bin Laden faltered and as 9/11 receded in the
public consciousness. Other administration figures stepped forward
to beat the war drums.
A March
5, 2004 article in the New York Times said, "Mr. Bush and his
aides have planned for more than a year to make the president’s
response to terrorist attacks the centerpiece of his re-election
effort."
"We
are fighting a global war on terrorism," said National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, on "Meet the Press,"
Sunday, March 14, 2004.
In early
February on "Meet the Press," Bush referred to himself
as a "war president" and said he had "war on my
mind" when he made decisions in the Oval Office.
Verbal Confusion
Hypnosis
While
Bush may have led the nation into war with Hitler hypnosis he has
kept it there with hypnosis of his own making, a technological
tour de force of classical, textbook hypnosis that eclipses
anything Hitler used and sets Bush apart as a political hypnosis
stylist in his own right.
When it
became apparent as time passed that Weapons of Mass Destruction in
Iraq was an illusion, Bush segued smoothly into verbal confusion
hypnosis, which is discussed at some length in Handbook of
Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, by Jesse E. Gordon:
"The
verbal confusion technique, which is quite difficult to
administer, involves an approximation of double-talk in which
instructions of a somewhat contradictory kind are given in rapid
succession making it impossible for the attentive subject either
to quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them. Finally, he
simply gives up all attempts and more or less collapses into a
hypnotic state."
Exactly.
A review of the Bush hocus-pocus in his 2004 State of the Union
address, for example, shows how nimbly he skipped through a maze
of issues such as WMD - deftly changed to "weapons of mass
destruction-related program activities" - no child left
behind, "the sanctity of marriage," senior drug discount
cards, invading Iraq in the interests of national survival and
world peace, "foreign terrorists," permanent tax relief,
jobs, and much, much more. Holding up one theme card after another
for public review, before they could "quite comprehend or
quite acquiesce to any of them," Bush fanned the deck and
flashed yet another card at his bewildered audience.
A
"GOP strategist" complained to the Los Angeles Times,
"He’s all over the map now, sending a lot of confused
messages to the voters." Of course.
Many now
openly wonder how so obvious a lie as WMD could have passed muster
with such a large majority of Americans.
One
answer is provided by Hitler in Mein Kampf: "In the size of
the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility,
since the great masses of the people....will more easily fall
victim to a great lie than to a small one." Thus was born the
concept of the "Big Lie," yet another Hitler crowd
manipulation tool co-opted by Bush.
Even the
most skeptical may succumb to hypnotic contagion but later find
the resources to cast off the devil spell, says William McDougall.
Among the most fervent Bush supporters have been people now coming
forward to say that they are "uncomfortable" with
reports that the reasons given for going to war may have been
nothing more than a pack of Bush lies. Call them recovering Bush
dupes.
War is Peace
Perhaps
the biggest challenge he has given the public is asking them to
think of his war making as, actually, peace making. Think of the
Pentagon as the "Ministry of Peace," charged with making
perpetual war in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Bush has
been almost studious in application of the hypnotic word
"peace" to sugarcoat his designs for war.
"Peace"
has become his slogan.
"Slogans
are both exciting and comforting, but they are also powerful
opiates for the conscience....Some of mankind’s most terrible
misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic
words or phrases," said Harvard University president James
Bryant Conant in the Baccalaureate Address to Harvard College,
June 17, 1934.
"How
many people in the confusion of a defeat or crisis have been
reassured by one word? Peace. Independence. Reconstruction.
Without taking a closer look, they adopt the leader in whose name
this ideal has been proposed. It is the ideal that unites them and
leads them into the venture. If necessary, technicians will be
responsible for conducting it from the inside so long as the
figurehead maintains his prestige." Jean Dauven, The
Powers of Hypnosis.
Nixon
national security advisor Henry Kissinger intoned "Peace is
at hand" as voters prepared to go to the polls in November,
1972 to choose between George McGovern and Richard Nixon as the
candidate most likely to end the Vietnam War. In one of the most
cynical betrayals of public trust on record, Kissinger the
technician lied to a desperate nation about the prospects of peace
in order to get the figurehead reelected.
After
Nixon was safely reinstalled in the White House, saturation
bombing to coerce North Vietnam to U. S. peace terms started
again, with the unspeakable Christmas bombing of Hanoi as the main
attraction.
Author,
foreign correspondent and broadcaster William L. Shirer, who
witnessed Hitler’s rise to power, commented in The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich on Hitler’s masterful use of the
peace card.
"On
the evening of May 21 (1935), he delivered another ‘peace’
speech....one of the cleverest and most misleading of his
Reichstag orations.....He rejected the very idea of war, it was
senseless, it was useless, as well as a horror."
But while
the world was lulled by his peace offensive, the master of the
Thousand Year Reich plotted the war he said he abhorred.
George W.
Bush misses no chance to reaffirm his dedication to peace and to
denounce those who he says threaten peace.
He
mounted the pulpit of the United Nations, September 17, 2002 to
bully the international body with his peace message: "The
United Nations must act. It’s time to determine whether or not
they’ll be a force for good and peace or an ineffective debating
society."
He stood
before Congress and the press, sent an emissary to the Orwellian
sounding United States Institute of Peace, went on the radio,
appeared at factories and military bases, hawking his peace
message while putting U. S. forces in place to invade Iraq.
Sometimes,
to justify keeping the country in a state of war, he combines
"peace" with "freedom" and
"security" as in his commencement address to the
students of Concordia University, May 14 this year when he said,
"America works for peace and freedom....For the sake of
peace, for the sake of security, we stand for freedom."
Administration spokespersons, notably Condoleezza Rice, repeat
these buzz words in their own speeches.
Bush Radio Hypnosis
With his
regular Saturday radio addresses, Bush works heroically on turning
Americans into automatons of subservience to his goals. John
Kerry, refusing to concede the airwaves to Bush, is using the
medium to respond to Bush attack ads and launch attacks of his
own, giving every indication that he will continue the tradition
of Saturday presidential radio if elected.
Radio is
the most hypnotic of the media as, in the words of Jean Dauven,
"It is through the spoken word that the hypnotist exercises
his power." The audio nature of broadcast fosters an illusion
of privacy that allows the hypnotist to flatter the listener that
he/she is being addressed exclusively, enhancing the listener’s
suggestibility.
Hate-Talk Radio
Hypnosis
Estabrooks
witnessed the birth of political radio hypnosis and the advent of
the craft’s earliest stars, FDR, Churchill, and Hitler. He
predated Rush Limbaugh’s lobotomized rabble by decades, but was
in on the beginnings of hate-talk radio when Father Charles
Coughlin and the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith poisoned the airwaves in
the 1930s.
Estabrooks
would have been fascinated with the emergence of Ronald Reagan,
radio hypnotism’s modern master. With his banal Gipperisms,
deeply imbedded fear of communism and Soviet nuclear threat
obsessive-compulsive anxiety disorder, all delivered in the
polished tones of a professional broadcaster, Reagan robbed a
generation of Americans of their capacity to think critically, a
condition perpetuated by his disciples as witnessed in the
transcontinental state funeral of early June, 2004, a seven-day
binge of national hypnosis. Brain dead from Alzheimer’s for 10
years, Reagan was resurrected from the public media files to
extend his hypnotic hold on Americans, all part of the Republican
power keeping machinery which includes putting Reagan’s picture
on money and carving his likeness either on Mt. Rushmore, or
"our own mountain," as one of his adherents puts it.
Men of Action Don’t
Apologize
The
president, by the very nature of his position at the pinnacle of
power, is hypnotic. Probably no president, with the possible
exceptions of Nixon and Reagan, has marshaled so powerful an
arsenal of hypnosis, or exercised it so energetically and
effectively as George W. Bush.
Successful
hypnosis of the electorate satisfies a demagogue’s dream -
uncritical acceptance of the man and his policies by a majority.
Bush has been good enough at it to acquire an aura of
invincibility that predictably has led to an excess of hubris in
his conduct.
As Reagan
and the elder Bush did not apologize for Iran-Contra, do not
expect George W. Bush to ever forswear his actions in Iraq. It is
not in his nature to admit mistakes or reflect on his misdeeds,
nor apparently is it in the nature of his closest aides and
subordinates to do so either. Gustave Le Bon described the type in
The Crowd.
"The
leaders we speak of are more frequently men of action than
thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they
be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity.
They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly
nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on
madness...their convictions are so strong that all reasoning is
lost on them. Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or only
serve to excite them more."
George
Estabrooks spoke of such men possessing ".....an uncanny
drive, a restless energy, as they push forward toward their own
self-centered ideal, and they will be utterly ruthless in
attaining their ends. The rights of others, even the lives of
others, are simply of no consequence if they stand between the
dictator and his determined goal....
The
dictator really believes that he is God’s chosen instrument - or
society’s chosen instrument if he does not believe in God - to
lead his group, or possibly the entire world, into the promised
land."
Bush
apparently has long held the notion that God wants him to be
president. On the occasion of his second inauguration as Texas
governor, he "gathered a few trusted colleagues in his office
to announce, ‘God wants me to be president,’" according
to Southern Baptist leader Richard Land as quoted in online Slate
magazine, April 29, 2004.
Bush’s Hypnotized
Supporters
Bush
spinmeisters will continue to place their candidate in front of
unsuspecting NASCAR dads, right wing religious fundamentalists,
teenage soldiers, home owners, sports fans, snow mobilers and dirt
bikers, loggers and roughnecks, teamsters and hard-hats, 2nd
Amendment zealots, high school dropouts, Orange County developers,
and field hands, where the president can work his inspirational
way into their hearts and minds. This has been called targeting
"the lowest common denominator," but Nazi propaganda
chief Paul Joseph Goebbels had a better description, revealed in
his diaries discovered in the rubble of the Propaganda Ministry at
the end of World War II:
".....the
rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine.
Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and
repetitious. In the long run only he will achieve basic results
influencing public opinion who is able to reduce problems to the
simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating
them in this simplified form despite the objections of the
intellectuals."
Bush, the Elected
Dictator
Will all
of this lead to a New Thousand Year Reich in America?
George
Estabrooks warned that such an outcome, while not inevitable, is
not impossible.
"How
can we guarantee that our choice at the polls will be a wise
one?......on this matter of electing a potential dictator, you
will make that mistake once only. From then on, he will take care
that your mistakes are always in his favor......
"Sit
down and think over that last spellbinder you heard on the
platform, over the radio or on television.....Were you listening
to a man of reason or to a hypnotist who aimed to limit your field
of consciousness? You say you cannot be hypnotized against your
will. Perhaps you were hypnotized last night as you listened to
that political address over your TV.....The most dangerous
hypnotist may be the man you listened to last week over the radio.
You were his subject....As a matter of fact, you were a very
excellent subject. Think it over....."
Hitler
aide Albert Speer and newscaster William L. Shirer commented on a
recent moment in history when a great people became the eager
followers of a hypnotic leader who led them to ruin.
".....as
I see it today, these politicians in particular were in fact
molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and
daydreams...Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler’s
and Goebbel’s baton, yet they were not the true conductors. The
mob determined the theme." - Albert Speer, Inside the Third
Reich.
"The
Germans imposed the Nazi tyranny on themselves." William L.
Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Russell
M. Drake is a freelance writer and photographer in Yucca Valley,
California. He is a journalism graduate of the University of
Texas, and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and The
West Texas Livestock Weekly. He co-founded and later sold a Los
Angeles company that produced self hypnosis-aided educational
courses on audio cassette. He has contributed articles and
pictures to newspapers in Southern California. Contact: russ33@msn.com
Copyright 2004 Russell M.
Drake, P. O. Box 1213, Yucca Valley CA 92286
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