As a rape survivor I'd like to point out calling #Assange supporters rape apologists is offensive. This is about US detention w/out trial.
— Ethical Girl (@ethicalgirl) August 16, 2012
Some of the most appalling people on the internet at the moment are ignoring that Julian Assange has been framed by the military industrial complex on spurious charges of a sexual nature relating to deception of non use of a prophylactic. This misdemeanour is masquerading in Sweden as a crime so far distant from my use of the language I will neither repeat it or give it any credit.
The perniciousness of distorting language so far from its meaning is that it imposes violent sexual assault on women in the future as the patriarchal elements (like the aforementioned military industrial complex) of society take their hatred out on women. By insisting that Julian be prosecuted I claim you encourage violent sexual crime on women. You're a disgrace and exceedingly selfish. In this respect I applaud the honesty and courage of the tweet I've published. This comes from compassion and truth; not bitterness and short term point-scoring at the expense of long term safety of women.
There are of course counterarguments and I'm familiar with all of them, not least their propensity to ignore the persecution by the military industrial complex so in the end it is my word against yours. So be it. I'm OK with that. Julian is innocent and decent people know that.
The recent FBI disclosure of UFO evidence is another drip in the emerging stream of the most important cover up in history. Caught between a rock and a hard place of institutional concealment and public programming the idea is drip feed the information out so that public acceptance comes without the rage of discovering how duped they were in the first place. The new FBI vaults released information is particularly important because the military industrial elites have always portrayed the Roswell Incident as a weather balloon. Indeed a gullible public has always sucked on the nipple of warmed info with a zest for scepticism that always ignored being sceptical of their masters.
To begin with the media reported this news completely uncensored.
This story was then changed into yet another famous weather balloon.
They went one step further though and staged a press conference to show the weather balloon.
But were unaware that decades later with digital enhancement tools an investigator would be able to read the memo in General Ramey's left hand above. It read as follows:
Here's the FBI vault disclosure with additional damning evidence. The FBI information says the air force took that weather balloon from Roswell, and flew it for immediate inspection to Fort Worth. The question the sceptards out there need to ask themselves is why fly a standard weather balloon to have the top scientists investigate it?
But I don't want to leave you with an impression that it's all over because if a UFO with occupants was taken for examination the really explosive thinking starts when a man considers what that means for the back engineered technology that has been around since at least the 40's and that if super-luminal travel is possible then there are dangerous questions to ask of the military industrial complex as to who has that technology and where in the universe are they using it? Maybe that breakaway civilisation that Richard Dolan talks about is more real than conjecture because that is how the 'genius' of capitalism rolls.
There's no mention of government in "military industrial complex". Which might explain the quality of our politicians who are simply bought to rubber-stamp where our taxes go. Best thing about these revelations is watching the debunkers deny until they choke on the full weight of the evidence revealing their willing complicity to do and think exactly as they are told. There's so much more than this. Only open minds dare tread.
Are for that special someone in your life that you want to bomb the living shit out of and spread their entrails all over the fucking bleeding Christmas tree while watching the blood ooze down off the pine needles onto the neatly wrapped presents below. Sound a bit much? Well unfortunately we don't have any Youtube videos, or Tweets from the Pakistani and Afghan weddings that were hit by Raytheon's Remotely Operated Drone technology though I do know that the guys who operate the Predator technology are having psychological problems because taking out innocent people a couple of continents away with a joystick and a couple of beers on the side (no spliffs) before heading home to tuck the kids into bed and kiss their foreheads is not working out.
The good news is you can now follow the latest military industrial complex social meeja superstars Raytheon on twitter or follow on Facebook. I thought I was missing the obvious or something when I stumbled across their website and noted that they actively encourage sharing of their media releases including updates on the latest iphone app that can be used in modern warfare situations.
This company were creating killing machines long before the CIA's recruiting and funding of the mujahedin in Afghanstan came back to haunt the United States of America (thumps clenched right fist to flag loving heart) on 9/11 as home command fighter jets had their lines of communication scrambled long enough to see the twin towers implode vertically (Queue The Beatles: I get by with a little help from my friends), a full hour and a twenty minutes before the next attack on the nervous system of the worlds most sopisticated military headquarters the Pentagon.
If you didn't know by now that military intelligence (and all the other spooks and peddlers of fear) is an insult to the intelligence then it's down to shitty ol' moi with freedom fries in hand to share that Raytheon are the people who now make dollars out of misery with their latest sexy iphone app while the enemy they continually build up before trying to hack down (it's just business) are currently hacking into the video feeds of the war drones flying long distant remote over the hills of Afghanistan (and Pakistan) and are now only a tweet away: Pimping their latest software.
I welcome the military industrial complex' coming out party into social media. Transparency can only be a good thing. Which allows me to say this. Get a fucking grip America. They don't hate your freedoms. They despise the fork tongued, rattle tail, snakeskin salesmen and their utter, utter contempt for anyone elses freedom to have a life. They bury their infant corpses the day after a wedding (time and again) while the US goverment deliberates over whether to pay the Taliban off, now that woman's rights have slipped down the priority list, while bribing the current corrupt and unloved but installed dictator who has an opium druglord brother on the CIA payroll.
In the mid 90's, Department of Defence Geologist Phil Schneider started doing presentations at UFO conferences about his role in the construction of underground bases that the military industrial complex has been building since the second world war to keep the Very Very VIPs nice and comfy in the event of extinction level events such as thermo-nuclear war.
Phil's story was unusual and UFO related as he stumbled across that US military/non human intelligence working agreement/connection which is quite well documented and authenticated by the grand daughter of Eisenhower. Coincidentally the same person that came up with the term military industrial complex.
Shortly after gaining notoriety in UFO circles at these talks and not before accusations of disinformation started to surface (his story is extraordinary to the max) Phil was suicided and is thus for me one of the more reliable witness testimonies on the internet. Suicided people are as good as it gets for authentication in my book and the nature of Phil's murder including torture is a little unusual.
Christopher Knowles echoes a sentiment I wrote about last year (and have pasted below) that the Vatican, the U.N. and The Royal Society have quietly rearranged the tables with respect to the 'multi-dimensional other'. The servant classes in the media haven't picked up on it yet but as long as the top tier is covered that's all that matters. It should be an interesting year.
There is a considerable section of the population who believe that anything really momentous and important is going to be announced in the Rose Garden of the Whitehouse to the Whitehouse Press Corp. That isn't actually the way it works if anybody has been paying attention to Wikileaks. We're no more treated like adults capable of handling the truth than the children we rear on a diet of small to disgraceful lies on every subject from sex education to the nature of Father Christmas ( a story worth exploring given its Shamanistic roots). If the news is really momentous it is leaked first unless its the build up to war in which case the enemy is dehumanised to a steady beat of propaganda. Government never really govern if indeed they ever really have since the end of the Second Sorld War. (See military industrial complex for more on that subject).
The Vatican made a curious announcement during the Pope's visit to the UK regarding their their recognition of the right of aliens to be baptised. This is a matter not without importance given that it's only the sons of Adam who can enter the Kingdom of God. It's also worth noting that the institutions most at risk of losing authority are the top down hierarchical religions who seemingly are the least spiritual guardians on the planet.
Then it's always worth mentioning that the most respected and oldest science institution on the planet have begun to discuss what to do if extra terrestrial life is an impending realisation on our species. Regrettably the Royal Society still assumes people use internet explorer which might explain why they are on the same page as the corporate owned media when it comes to stunning scientific revelations of this nature.
Also we have Dr Stephen Hawking, the most famous and respected space cowboy on the planet who recently warned us that we should hide from aliens as they may not be friendly. This is preposterous given the striking blue visibility of our planet and our current inability to manoeuvre it out of sigh. It fully matches the heights of his recent quantum and relativity work which finally concludes that God could exist, but scientifically doesn't need to.
The latest addition to institutional approval of contemplative mystery (a mode of thinking strictly disapproved of until it's approved) is the emergence of a United Nations ambassador for Space in the shape of astrophysicist Mazlan Othlan of Malaysia. The selection of a national from a country that few people can pin point on a map to greet any alien life in an official capacity on behalf of planet Earth says bundles about the trust that currently exists with the most powerful people on Earth. Don't they usually get first dibs at moments of history? It may well be the case that any future visitors have already shown their contempt for our leadership hierarchy. Maybe that's what crop circles are telling us.
But the real clincher that encouraged me to come off the fence and suggest that we are about to be in for some hard core unlearning (i.e taken off the teat of government information) is that BUSINESS is being briefed at $4000 a ticket about alien business potential. In a recent summit of the Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyadh where former British and Canadian Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien; Jim Albaugh, President and CEO of Boeing; Andy Bird, chairman of Walt Disney International; Jared Cohen, Director of Google ideas, and many others were told about evidence of UFOs and ET life. In short, world business leaders were told that flying saucers were real and that the advanced technology of extraterrestrial civilizations made possible a special kind of UFO for astute entrepreneurs – Unprecedented Financial Opportunities. A mystery participant to the GCF was former U.S. President Bill Clinton who spoke about advanced energy systems that await international development. A point not lost on the Saudi Arabian Government no doubt and possibly the reason for such an odd place to discuss the matter.
It's worth reviewing the videos I posted a short while back on unidentified activity over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Again, I only know they are lights but they act like nothing I've seen before and if the rumours of reverse engineered technology tucked away in the military industrial complex are true or even if we admit the record of false flag operations by Goverment is's hard to know what it is. I'm happy to call that instance a mystery but for the bulk of this post? You heard it here first but could have heard it earlier from Freeman.
The late Chalmers Johnson points out that Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex speech was meant to be Military Industrial Congressional Complex but he was advised it would be too incendiary. I love the smell of broken republic in the morning. Then we can move on.
Eisenhower wanted to call the military industrial complex the military industrial congressional complex but was advised not to and given that's the definition of Fascism I'd say that's how fast the US screwed up freedom after WWII. I don't believe in party politics any more but I find it weird no American even thinks that political advertising should be removed from Television. It's so toxic.
My Great Grandmother's name was Lucy Myers. She was a lovely old soul and I enjoyed visiting her on my own as a young lad to listen to her stories about life in the later Victorian/early Edwardian period of England. I'd heard she had a tough streak as a mother though I never saw anything but sweetness. A tired soul who wanted nothing more than to 'finish up her time here'.
She had started life as a maid and after two world wars and retirment enjoyed a bit of gardening in her 90's but once she was too infirm for that, was more than eager to move on to the next stage of her existence. Whatever that may be as we never discussed it. We did however discuss that the sort of entertainment provided at visiting fairs during her childhood, were lead balls filled with water which could be purchased squeezed for fun before returning. I've never forgotten that something so simple could be the source of amusement in a our age of high velocity, uber-violent, real time and networked electronic gaming.
The reason I speak about Great Grandma is that when she died in my home town of Southampton, I made the mistake of carelessly speaking on the phone to my Sister in London where we both lived. Being a bit pragmatic about these things even though I had been very fond of Great Grandma I simply shared the news in about three words and my sister promptly broke down and cried. Later on my mother pointed out to me that I'd been insensitive and that there was a need to soften things up a bit and prepare someone for unexpected news. In my psychology this is not a good thing as by the time people get to spitting something I've parsed through a hundred times more permutations of possible surprising or shocking news than it appears other people are capable of and so I just prefer it straight up. No matter how surprising, upsetting, crazy or odd it really is.
There is a considerable section of the population who believe that anything really momentous and important is going to be announced in the Rose Garden of the Whitehouse to the Whitehouse Press Corp. That isn't actually the way it works if anybody has been paying attention to Wikileaks. We're no more treated like adults capable of handling the truth than the children we rear on a diet of small to disgraceful lies on every subject from sex education to the nature of Father Christmas ( a story worth exploring given its Shamanistic roots). If the news is really momentous it is leaked first hand. Whether willingly or unwillingly. Government never really govern if indeed they ever really have since the end of the Second Sorld War. (See military industrial complex for more on that subject).
The Vatican made a curious announcement during the Pope's visit to the UK regarding their their recognition of the right of aliens to be baptised. A matter not without importance given that it's only the sons of Adam who can enter the Kingdom of God. It's also worth noting that the institutions most at risk of losing authority are the top down hierarchical religions who seemingly are the least spiritual institutions on the planet.
Then it's always worth noting that the most respected and oldest science institution on the planet have begun to discuss what to do if extra terrestrial life is an impending realisation on our species. Regrettably the Royal Society still assumes people use internet explorer which might explain why they are on the same page as corporate owned media when it comes to stunning scientific revelations of this nature.
Then there's Dr Stephen Hawking the most famous and respected space cowboy on the planet recently warning us that we should hide from aliens as they may not be friendly. An idea so preposterous given the striking blue visibility of our planet and our current inability to manoeuvre it out of sight, that it fully matches the heights of his recent quantum and relativity work which finally concludes that God could exist, but scientifically doesn't need to. Silly billy.
The latest addition to institutional approval of contemplative mystery (a mode of thinking strictly disapproved of till it's approved) is the emergence of a United Nations ambassador for Space in the shape of astrophysicist Mazlan Othlan of Malaysia. The selection of a national from a country that few people can pin point on a map to greet any alien life in an official capacity on behalf of planet Earth says bundles about the trust that currently exists with the most powerful people on Earth who usually get first dibbs at moments of history. It may well be the case that any future visitors have already shown their contempt for our traditional leaders.
But the real clincher that encouraged me to come off the fence and suggest that we are about to be in for some hard core unlearning (i.e taken off the teat of government information) is that BUSINESS is being briefed at $4000 a ticket about alien business potential. In a recent summit of the Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyadh where former British and Canadian Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien; Jim Albaugh, President and CEO of Boeing; Andy Bird, chairman of Walt Disney International; Jared Cohen, Director of Google ideas, and many others were told about evidence of UFOs and ET life. In short, world business leaders were told that flying saucers were real and that the advanced technology of extraterrestrial civilizations made possible a special kind of UFO for astute entrepreneurs – Unprecedented Financial Opportunities. A mystery participant to the GCF was former U.S. President Bill Clinton who spoke about advanced energy systems that await international development. A point not lost on the Saudi Arabian Government no doubt and possibly the reason for such an odd place to discuss the matter.
It's worth reviewing the videos I posted a short while back on unidentified activity over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Again, I only know they are lights but they act like nothing I've seen before and if the rumours of reverse engineered technology tucked away in the military industrial complex are true or even if we admit the record of false flag operations by Goverment is's hard to know what it is. I'm happy to call that instance an mystery but for the bulk of this post? You heard it here first but could have heard it earlier from Freeman.
Joe Rogan is the latest incarnation in a notable line up of American comedians including George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks who are to my mind Americans of the noblest pedigree. I've never heard his comedy work which is odd, because his opinions on topics as diverse as flotation tanks, Hegelian Dialectic (the Messiah complex), the military industrial complex and DMT are cogent, thoughtful and sensitive to the plight of humans. Too quote Timothy Leary on Terence McKenna "it takes fucking guts" to stand up and criticize the machine and if there's one hallmark of the educated and aware 21st century American it's his or her silent compliance.
The Messiah complex is partly explained by the pain of living in the duality of an illusory 3 dimensions plus a fourth of time. It's about the dual nature of maintaining balance between polarities of left versus right, man versus woman, hot against cold, love or loneliness and so on and so forth. We chose to incarnate in this time and yet it hurts enough to numb ourselves off from the plight of others even though naturally enough on a groaning planet we yearn as a species for honourable and enlightened leadership.
Well the United States hasn't had that since Eisenhower who warned ya'll that it's just business and that the government is no more difficult to control than the workers it hires. It's just nonsense to think you have to choose a side when both sides are rigged. The only side to choose is yours and to abstain from the game in future. They shot the next president (Kennedy) who came in and was the last to try and change the system. The rest have been shoe ins since then with possible exceptions that we're gamed to fail to provoke a lurch towards a greedy trickle down society when any thinker knows it's trickle up economics. We create the wealth not mercantilist families jerking the strings of power and thriving profitably from war.
There may well be a slim chance that Obama is playing the longest hand of poker in history but until we have the evidence for that, we should reserve our judgement until the final results are in and never again put more trust in others than we would place in ourselves. In any case, Joe Rogan. One of a handful of people who aims straight.
A long long time ago in a distant galaxy of Nordrheinwestphalen and Hessen I worked with the American military selling Harley Davidsons and American Cars. A likeable African American Sargent bought a Camaro through us and began planning a trip to 'London in Britain' as they often called it. As if to distinguish from London in Texas. He asked the route to take, and as the English Channel tunnel was in construction I pointed him towards Calais for the ferry. His faced looked non plussed about the car ferry. He slowly asked a question I've never forgotten 'You mean there's water between France and England?'
I learned from this experience that a person who might be responsible for my life in a conflict zone could well be more dangerous than bullets. Some time later I was sitting at my desk and the light visibly dimmed. I looked up at the giant frame of South Carolina African American who was blocking the sunlight to the doorway of my office. He slowly drawled some car questions for me in the deepest voice I'd heard a human make.
We got to know each other a bit. He was a First Sargent, rank E8, and one day he shared his American invasion of Grenada story. They called it a liberation of course though it was a British colony at that time. Thatcher had to shut her warmongering mouth because Reagan had secretly stitched up the Argentinians by helping us in the Falklands war. The usual reptilian code of conduct for the political classes. Fuck each other over till they need each other etc etc.
I never met an E8 (the highest ranked enlisted soldier) that I didn't like. Some were psychopaths but in a conflict zone a seasoned, intelligent psychopath is useful. E8s have an air of authority that experienced command of soldiers (and killing) gives a man. You feel their presence behind your back. Lower ranks don't fuck around with them, and officers are secretly intimidated by them. They're the pinnacle of earned stripes. They are smart, tough and intimidating. They don't command the army. They run it.
At some point after one of the wars that First Sargent (E8) Bob Dean served in, he was transferred to NORAD in Paris. There he was exposed to information about UFO encounters that most Five Star Generals know nothing of. If information really is power then it's a logical proposition that information isn't shared. The full extent of contact isn't general knowledge even for presidents. Eisenhower however saw what was going on and observed that clusterfuck demonic groups in the Pentagon and Industrial elites were leveraging this information to form what he called in his farewell speech, The military industrial complex.
Most people in that complex are unaware of this and just get on with drawing a salary facilitating the killing machine's unsurpassed ability to transfer wealth from us to a group of people who make the Wall Street masters of the Universe look like overworked wage slaves. It's the slickest and most powerful model of global wealth transfer to date. Take some time out to watch the video above and establish for yourself what it takes to move from being on the inside to telling a story that is at odds with everything that the accumulation machine stands for. A story that could only ever earn a man ridicule from those that most fear what his words have to say. Could it be that Bob Dean is more an enlightened individual than the enlisted soldier he once was? Update: I have caught Bob Dean telling a pork pie (I believe) but as he's old and UFO disease is a known condition I'm going to assume his earlier whistle blowing is still truthful.
I'm confident that if I had come to the subject of alien abduction more than five years ago I'd have rejected it totally, burned out like many finer minds than I, or even more damaging, reached a premature conclusion and developed one of those fixed minds that is too certain for it's own good. Instead I came to the subject with lots of good information and video testimonies on the internet and an awful lot of context, swilling around the planetary hive mind.
I love Terence McKenna's work but it's likely he never took enough DMT to step into the Bardot and his analysis of alien proctologists from Zeta Reticuli prevented me from taking the subject seriously till I'd worked my way through all the safe stuff. So even heroes make mistakes but we can forgive him for not being perfect.
I don't know what the statistics are like now (I hope it's diminished massively) but there's a reason that alien abduction went through the roof after the second world war. The military industrial complex cut a deal in exchange for new alien technology (largely kept away from us) that humans could be experimented on (as long as they were returned with their memories wiped of the ordeal). That may sound fantastic, but just hold that thought in suspension as it's only a matter of time till sunlight is disinfecting the underground bases of the US, UK and Australian cigar chomping military types in the future. There's some very ugly stuff that gets done out of sight.
For now you can listen to Budd Hopkins above who has investigated over 700 cases of alien abduction by 2004 and then you might want to reconsider having some sympathy for people who were not only abducted and experimented on but were largely ridiculed by a society conditioned to react that way by the same media owners who are but an extension of the military complex I mentioned earlier. Are you getting the picture yet?
Richard Sauder PhD is one of those valiant people who has lived a life of service to others, including spells incarcerated for protesting nuclear weapons on US military bases. He took the decision to protest against the military industrial complex even though the odds were stacked against him and despite having a PhD and the choice between an easy life and one of service to others, Dr Sauder took the path his conscience obliged him to pursue. He's on our side.
Why Should We Care?
The reason why we should consider how we can assist Dr Richard Sauder is that his work has been of vital contribution to the parapolitical research community. Richard is the author of the ground breaking scholarly work Underground Bases and Tunnels: What Is The Government Trying To Hide? It is a solid academic work of painstaking research and sacrifice to us. It slowly pieces together the technology used in the manufacturing of underground and undersea bases and the bureaucratic paper trail that is left by the military leviathan. These underground bases conceal the most evil and unconscionable acts, far from the eyes of all but the most vetted and financially rewarded servants of the so called breakaway civilisation. They devote their lives to acts of pain and suffering to humanity, and their own survival in the event of cataclysmic events, including the very wars their masters plot.
What Has He Done Since?
I've written about Dr. Richard Sauder from time to time on this blog but not so much on his relocation to the arboreal landscape of Quito, Ecuador in South America. Richard has been pursuing a life of conciousness studies through the use of sacred medicines such as Ayahuasca and Malicagua. Through these metaphysical journeys he has been able to feed back to us a clearer picture of who we are and what the challenges we face on this planet. This includes the mechanized technological efforts to control our species through every spectrum of the mind-control, conciousness-control-levers that the anti-human elements try to throw at us. It was Richard who alerted us to the nature of The Machine long before the NSA whistle-blower scandal confirmed our worst suspicions that everything and anything we say or do is being scooped up, and put in storage for later retrieval to be used against us. It is Richard who also outlined to us through his Shamanistic journeys the nature of remote control of the human population from satellite technologies and what he identified as artificial intelligence resources that is the iniquitous privilege of those who use our wealth creation efforts to exploit us. With this technology they also keep it from us as it could play a vital contribution towards solving the problems and challenges that our species face after decades, centuries and millennia of exploitation through older models of mind control such as religion and synthetic divide and rule.
Richard's current situation is perilous. His conciousness-exploration research and studies, left him in the hands of a service to self Shaman in Ecuador. This resulted in an experience which he describes as torture and which for legal reasons we are unable to go into. He is trying to resist the drift towards Ayahuasca exploitation in South America by making a stand against the Shaman who took advantage of his trusted position and left Richard in much pain, requiring a period of recuperation in hospital which has allowed him to function as close to normal again. He is now broke.
What can we do to help?
Richard needs money. Lots of it and as quickly as possible. I ask you to consider his work and service to humanity and find a way to reach into your pockets and send him the cash he needs to keep his head above water, pay the medical bills paid and pursue justice for the increasing number of travellers in the South American jungles seeking enlightenment and self growth. Please email Richard on dr.samizdat1618@gmail.com to get some money to him during this difficult and trying period. Thank you very much and if donations are not possible, please consider buying his books including the one linked in the second paragraph and here again, or his other book: Hidden in Plain Sight
I've no problem in admitting mistakes because I don't have the military industrial complex or government handcuffs to sit Dick Cheney in a room and pull his pacemaker our with pliers till he speaks.
I have to rely on the best information I can get my hands on at the time.
I've no real interest in the World Trade Centre towers military grade demolition on 9/11, because it's the million or so Iraqis and Afghanis that are the victims, not the Israelis, British, French or Americans who actually orchestrated most of it. You know. The perpetrators.
However, I hope you were watching your freedoms get pick-pocketed by the war entertainment complex since then.
Here's Butler Shaffer's views on the matter. It's erudite thinking and you really must read it to appreciate a mind ahead of its time.
If I were to offer a seminar on the nature of war, I believe that the first class session would include a showing of the film Wag the Dog. Those who wish to justify the obliteration of hundreds of thousands of total strangers in the name of "good" versus "evil," or "national honour," will likely find the movie discomforting. As the governments of India and Pakistan self-righteously, and in the name of "God," threaten one another with a nuclear war that could instantly kill anywhere from ten to twenty million people, it is time for decent, intelligent people to put down their flags and begin to see war for what the late General Smedley Butler rightly termed it: "a racket." This film offers a quick reality fix.
Randolph Bourne's observation "war is the health of the state" is familiar to most critics of militarism, but few have delved into why this is so. Statism is dependent upon mass thinking which, in turn, is essential to the creation of a collective, herd-oriented society. Such pack-like behaviour is reflected in the intellectual and spiritual passivity of people whose mindsets are wrapped up more in images and appearances than in concrete reality.
Such a collapse of the mind produces a society dominated by entertainment — which places little burden on thinking — rather than critical inquiry, which helps to explain why there has long been a symbiotic relationship between the entertainment industry and political systems. Entertainment fosters a passive consciousness, a willingness to "suspend our disbelief." Its purpose is to generate amusement, a word that is synonymous with "diversion," meaning "to distract the attention of." The common reference to movies as a form of "escape" from reality, reflects this function. Government officials know what every magician knows, namely, that to carry out their illusions, they must divert the audience's attention from their hidden purposes.
Michel Foucault has shown how the state's efforts to regulate sexual behaviour — whether through repressive or "liberating" legislation — serves as such a distraction, making it easier for the state to extend its control over our lives. It is instructive that, in the months preceding the World Trade Centre attacks which, in turn, ushered in the greatest expansion of police powers in America since the Civil War, the news stories that dominated the media had to do with allegations of adulterous affairs by a sitting president and a congressman. It is not coincidence that both the entertainment industry and the government school systems have helped to foster preoccupations with sex.
The authority of the state is grounded in consensus-based definitions of reality, whose content the state insists on controlling. This is why so-called "public opinion polls," rather than factual analysis and reason, have become the modern epistemological standard, and why imagery — which the entertainment industry helps to foster — now takes priority over the substance of things.
Politics and entertainment each feed upon — and help to foster — public appetites for illusions and fantastic thinking. The success of such undertakings, in turn, depends upon unfocused and enervated minds, which helps to explain why motion picture and television performers, popular musicians, and athletes — whose efforts require little participation on the part of the viewer — have become the dominant voices in our politicized culture. It also helps to account for the attraction of so many entertainers throughout the world to visionary schemes such as state socialism, as well as the increasing significance of entertainment industry gossip and box-office revenues as major news stories.
The entertainment industry helps shape the content of our consciousness by generating institutionally desired moods, fears, and reactions, a role played throughout human history. Ancient Greek history is tied up in myths, fables, and other fictions, passed on by the entertainers of their day, the minstrels. We need to ask ourselves about the extent to which our understanding of American history and other human behaviour has been fashioned by motion pictures, novels, and television drama. Through carefully scripted fictions and fantasies, others direct our experiences, channel our emotions, and shape our views of reality. The fantasies depicted are more often of conflict, not cooperation; of violence, not peace; of death, not the importance of life.
Nowhere is the interdependency of the political and entertainment worlds better demonstrated than in the war system, which speaks of "theatres" of operation, "acts" of war with battle "scenes," "staging" areas, and "dress rehearsals" for invasions. The pomp and circumstance of war is reflected in military uniforms that mimic stage costumes, all to the accompaniment of martial music that rivals grand opera. A Broadway play can become either a "bomb" or a "hit;" troops are "billeted" (a word derived from the French meaning of a "ticket"); while the premier of a movie is often accompanied, like a World War II bombing raid, by searchlights that scan the skies. Even the Cold War was framed by an "iron curtain." Is it only coincidence, devoid of any symbolic meaning, that at the end of the American Civil War - one of the bloodiest wars in human history - its chief protagonist was shot while attending the theatre, and that his killer was an actor who, upon completing his deed, descended to the stage and exited?
Adolf Hitler understood, quite well, the interplay between political power and theatre, a truth that continues to reveal itself in entertainers involving themselves so heavily in political campaigns, some even managing to get themselves elected to Congress or the presidency! Nor was it surprising that one of the first acts of the Bush Administration, following the announced "War on Terrorism," was to send a group of presidential advisers to Hollywood to enlist the entertainment industry's efforts to portray the war as desired by Washington! As with earlier wars, the "military/entertainment complex" will continue to write the scripts and define the characters that are required to assure the support of passive minds in the conduct of war.
Furthermore, because entertainment is often conducted in crowded settings (e.g., theatres, stadiums, auditoriums) there is a dynamic conducive to the generation of mass-mindedness. One need only recall the powerful harangues of Adolf Hitler that coalesced tens of thousands of individuals into a controllable mob, to understand the symbiotic relationship between entertainment and politics.
Entertainment is a part of what we call "recreation," which means to "re-create," in this case to give interpretations to events that are most favorable to one's national identity and critical of an opponent. In this connection, entertainers help to manipulate the "dark side" of our being which, once mobilized, can help to generate the most destructive and inhumane consequences. World War II movies portrayed Japanese kamikaze pilots who crashed their planes into Navy ships as "crazed zealots," while American pilots who did the same thing to Japanese ships or trains were represented as "heroes" willing to die to save their comrades. German and Japanese soldiers were presented as sneering sadists who delighted in the torture of the innocents, while the American soldiers only wanted to get the war over with so they could get back home to mom and her apple pie! How many of us, today, think of 19th century U.S. cavalrymen — as portrayed by the likes of John Wayne and Randolph Scott — as brave soldiers, while Indian warriors were "savages" for having forcibly resisted their own annihilation?
All of this leads me to ask whether the entertainment industry is an extension of the war system, or whether war is simply an extension of our need for entertainment? What should be clear to us is that entertainment is one of the principal means by which our thinking can be taken over and directed by others once we have chosen to make our minds passive, which we do when we are asked — whether by actors or politicians — to suspend our judgement about the reality of events we are witnessing. When we are content to be amused (i.e. to have our attention diverted from reality to fantasy), and to have our emotions exploited by those skilled in triggering unconscious forces, we set ourselves up to be manipulated by those producing the show.
Politics differs from traditional theatre in one important respect, however: in the political arena, we do not call for the "author" at the end of a war! Most of us prefernotto know, for to discover the identities of those who have scripted such events might call into question our own gullibility
