If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves. Howard Zinn
Today Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by their world government. Henry Kissinger
There is no civil right. Not even the precious right of citizenship that this administration will not abuse to secure ever greater control over American life. Professor Jack Balkin
The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. H L Mencken
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens. H L Mencken
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H L Mencken
The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell’s 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface.
Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars. Paul Joseph Watson
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain. Marquis de Sade
I have resigned. I will not be pushed. Filed. Stamped. Indexed. Briefed. Debriefed. Or numbered. My life is my own. My life is my own. I am not a number. I am a free man. The Prisoner, ITV 1967-68
Societies differ but in ours the major decisions over what happens in the society – decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on – are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms and so on – they are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government and they are the ones who own the media and they are the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens. Professor Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
It’s basically an institutional analysis of the major media – what we call a Propaganda Model. We’re talking primarily about the national media, those media that set a general agenda that others adhere to ... The elite media are the agenda-setting media ... And they do this in all sorts of ways: by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis, by framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits, they determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict in order to serve the interests of dominant elite groups in society. ibid.
The US media are alone in that you must meet the condition of concision. You’ve got to say things between two commercials. Or in six hundred words. And that’s a very important fact. Because the beauty of concision – saying a couple of sentences between two commercials – the beauty of that is that you only repeat conventional thoughts. ibid.
Well the title [Manufacturing Consent] is actually borrowed from a book by Walter Lippmann, written back around 1921, in which he described what he called ‘The Manufacturing of Consent’ as a revolution in the practice of democracy. What it amounts to is a technique of control, and he said this was useful and necessary because the common interests – the general concerns of all people – elude the public; the public just isn’t up to dealing with them, and they have to be the domain of what he called a specialised class ...
There’s a version of this expressed by the highly respected moralist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr [see Moral Man and Immoral Society], who was very influential on contemporary policy makers. His view was that rationality belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason but faith. And this naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent over simplification which are provided by the myth-maker to keep a person on course. ibid.
By selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis, and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, Youtube 1992
You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption. Noam Chomsky
The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people. Noam Chomsky
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
The ten principles of the concentration of wealth and power: Concentration of wealth yields concentration of power … (1) Reduce Democracy; (2) Shape Ideology; (3) Redesign the Economy; (4) Shift the Burden; (5) Attack Solidarity; (6) Run the Regulators; (7) Engineer Elections; (8) Keep the Rabble in Line; (9) Manufacture Consent; (10) Marginalize the Population. Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream, F-Movies 2017
Samuel Huntingdon: You may have to sell intervention or other military action as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you’re fighting. That’s what the United States has been doing ever since. Noam Chomsky, lecture March 1989, ‘Definition of the Alternatives is the Supreme Instrument of Power or The Lying Elite’s Game’
The media do indeed fulfil a societal … to inculcate and defend the economic and social and political agenda of the privileged groups. ibid.
In the 1960s large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands, and that’s a crisis which has to be overcome. ibid.
The public has to be reduced to their proper state of apathy and obedience and driven from the public arena if democracy is to survive. ibid.
The propaganda model is never taken seriously … The truth is no defence. ibid.
‘Why aren’t you in school? I see you every day wandering around.’
‘Oh, they don’t miss me,’ she said. ‘I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this.’ She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. ‘Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around ... I guess I’m everything they say I am, all right. I haven’t any friends. That’s supposed to prove I’m abnormal.’ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here’s American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you! Bill Hicks
The problem isn't a lack of money food water or land. The problem is that you've given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their own power than helping mankind. Bill Hicks
The whole system that we live in drills into us that we’re powerless, that we’re weak, that our society is evil, that it is crowded etc. and so forth. It’s all a big fat lie. We are powerful, beautiful, extraordinary. There is no reason why we cannot understand who we truly are, where we are going. There is no reason why the average human being cannot be fully empowered. We are incredibly powerful beings. Professor Carl Sagan