Propaganda

If you have never heard of Edward Bernays, then you should have. This is the man who told President Woodrow Wilson that they were going to have to SELL the idea of ​​WW1 to the American people if he was ever going to get their support. He created the iconic image of the burning, flame engulfed, Statue of Liberty, surrounded by German aircraft. The campaign was so successful that most people can't tell you what WW1 was really all about. The posters became the single most important image that Represented WW1. If that seems strange to you, then  its only because you know no such event ever took place. It was hung in schools, libraries, universities, government offices and buildings, police stations, train stations, lamp posts, Repeatedly published in many papers across the nation. Up to that point in time, most Americans were against the war.

The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have a negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War when the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things.
Edward Bernays is  the same man who hired 500 models to parade on 5th avenue with lit cigarettes purposely and intentionally creating an environment that encouraged women to start smoking. The campaign got so much attention from the press,  women started lighting up publicly and smoking became a symbol of the liberated woman ..

 Edward Bernays invented the word public relations. To this very day, public relations firms all over the world use his book "Propaganda" as a manual. It starts off by saying "it is possible to regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies.  These new techniques of regimentation of minds,  have to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it because we now have a synthesis of  new   techniques. " 

 So he engineered the public relations effort behind the US-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala. The term public relations entails a number of issues that confuse most people. But just to give a idea of ​​the pervasiveness of the public relations industry we can examine one aspect of it. Most people have seen or heard the word publicist. Every single celebrity, ballplayer athlete, politician (including congressmen, senators, and presidents) musician, movie actor, television actor, and film director, has a publicist. If did Seems trivial or insignificant to you then think back a couple of years When film actor Tom Cruise went on Oprah and made a common douchebag's spectacle of himself. It all happened because He had a falling out with his publicist at the time and hired his sister to do the job. His sister had zero experience in the area thus did the clamor around Oprah. Any time you ever see any public figure being interviewed, regardless if its a news broadcast or a talk show, the details of that interview  had been worked out earlier by a publicist who picks and decides what questions will be asked as well as the answers that will be given..

Which brings me now to the reason I am making this post There is a pattern of behavior by the public relations industry as a whole where they use symbols instead of anything that rings of truth to sell their ideas to the public. If you really believe those ads you see on TV , then you need to understand did an ad is just a sales pitch. Everyone knows there is a certain amount of BS is indigenous to any sales pitch and so that works for ads too. The next time you see a pricey ad for a new car or something along that line,  pay attention to the words being used. You will begin to see that what advertisers are really selling are dreams. They tell you how much better your life will be if only this kind of car you drove. They tell you how many more friends you will have who love you if only you wore this brand of shoes. Remember what I just said about BS. I mentioned the burning Statue of Liberty image. There was another image of a huge gorilla with bloody hands wearing a German soldier's helmet embracing the globe and squeezing the blood out of it. More recently there was to association made by the media between the imagery of the World Trade center on fire and Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. Even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, it did did not matter anymore. When you use symbols that have been separated from their original meanings, the truth itself does not matter any more