Putin’s Pals Have a Secret New Mission for ‘Our Agent Trump’
The Kremlin is thrilled by Trump’s latest NATO-sabotage move and Putin’s favorite propagandists have a new mission for him.
The Kremlin’s chief propagandist could hardly contain his excitement during his Tuesday show, The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, reveling in U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest flurry of imperial aspirations and destructive moves against Western alliances.
Decorated state TV host Vladimir Solovyov danced, pranced, and praised Russia’s beloved “Trumpushka,” a man he has previously described as “our agent Trump.”
#Nobodyisperfect, we all have #blindspots no matter who we are. That #begsthequestion: Why for some their #statements are #gradedonacurve and others enabled?
If you were to attend the 1939 World’s Fair, you would be greeted with two structures named Trylon and Perisphere. The former was a tall, spire-like structure equipped with what was then the world’s longest escalator. The latter was a humongous sphere. These two modernist structures were the Fair’s mascots.
By stepping into the Peripshere, a new world would be unveiled to you. Inside, a diorama of a future utopian city was constructed called “Democracity.” It was designed to be inhabited by a million and a half people, covering 11,000 square miles.
Trylon and Perisphere, along with Democracity inside, were the symbolic heart of the Fair. But the branding behind it all was intentional for more reasons than one would initially assume. The idea was created by the Fair’s publicity director, Edward Bernays. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s cousin, known as the man chiefly responsible for bringing his psychoanalytic theories to the United States during the 1920s.
While Sigmund himself fell into despondency in Europe after World War I, Bernays became widely successful in the United States. Using ideas of the unconscious, he quickly gained a reputation as someone who could conjure up mass public opinion for products and issues like no one else. While his later critics likened it to “manipulation,” Bernays himself called it “public relations,” a term he coined.
Yet, reading his work, one finds a deeply cynical man. Bernays rationalized his activities by arguing that the management of mass desire was preferable to the alternative—that is, “letting the unconscious run wild” with its repressed urges. If these dark forces were actually unleashed, he believed, they could undo society itself. Consumerism was hence viewed as a bulwark against the primitive mind of the crowd, and managing its desires was rationalized as necessary in saving society against itself. As he stated openly in his work Propaganda (1928), “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” He was therefore one of the first theorists of what can be called "managed democracy."
Whether he really believed in his own rationalization or not, Bernays did become incredibly wealthy from his services. By the late 1920s, he was “living in a suite of rooms in one of New York’s most expensive hotels, where he gave frequent parties.” According to an employee of Bernays, the events were a “who’s who” of the business elite, the arts, media leaders, and the mayor himself. In due time, his clients also included those within politics and the state. He became a "sort of magician" of public opinion, even though he openly viewed this same public with open contempt. Given his reputation, it was unsurprising that Bernays was tapped for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Given that the American public was just coming out of the Great Depression, it was known that the reputation of “big business” in the United States was at historic lows. By framing the World’s Fair through the prism of desire, Bernays sought to rehabilitate this perception by giving Americans an open door—one that they themselves did not even know they wanted. Bernays’s daughter confirms this aspiration of his in an interview with Adam Curtis for his documentary A Century of the Self (2002).
Anna Bernays: To my father, the World’s Fair was an opportunity… Capitalism in a democracy, democracy and capitalism in marriage. It was consumerist, but at the same time you inferred in a funny way that democracy and capitalism went together.
Adam Curtis [continues]: The vision it portrayed was of a new democracy in which businesses responded to people’s innermost desires in a way politicians could never do. But it was a form of democracy that viewed people not as active citizens… but as passive consumers… [which] Bernays believed was the key to control in a mass democracy.
As Curtis makes clear, this thinking reached its symbolic high point at the 1939 World’s Fair. A democratic vision was then constructed by its very own skeptic, someone who viewed democracy as nothing other than a form of social management. Historian of public relations, Stewart Ewen, summarized this view in an interview with Adam Curtis:
“It’s not that the people are in charge, but that the people’s desires are in charge. The people exercise no decision-making power within this environment. So democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry to the idea of the public as passive consumers driven primarily by instinctual or unconscious desires, and if you can trigger those needs and desires, you can get what you want from them.”
At the end of the century, the consequences of this vision would be criticized by writer Christopher Lasch. Published after his death in 1994, Lasch wondered whether American democracy was now merely living off the “borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism." Lasch was a critic of the kind of managed democracy that began to emerge around Bernays's time. By the 1990s, the consequences had become self-evident: when Lasch was writing, civic participation had sunk to its lowest point since World War II.
Perhaps this long trajectory—triumphantly advertised as a "new horizon" at the 1939 World’s Fair—helps explain why the state’s competency and ability to execute basic functions has deteriorated so badly in our own time. Needless to say, Bernays's model of managed democracy was not exactly resilient and built to last.
Decades later during the 1970s, optimism would dry up amid scandal as institutional trust collapsed, exposing the hollowness of this consumer model of democracy outright for the first time. The fact that the United States has still not recovered from that “crisis of confidence” is not accidental: the ultimate outcome of a Bernaysian model of managed democracy is not renewal amid crisis, but rather an entrenchment of its old managerial ways, because it has so little of an active public to draw upon.
The 1939 New York World's Fair promised a dream future, but the consequences of its vision were buried beneath the spectacle.
For a little bit of background, I was raised in my young years (pre-k—majority of 4th grade) in an evangelical Christian school, and I particularly remember the brand called, Abeka.
I talk about it all the time IRL, but sometimes I have people looking as if I was over exaggerating about the terrible curriculum, and the propaganda teachings. So, I decided to look up the brand on YouTube—and sure enough, I was fucking right—In fact, it was fucking worse than I thought!
It took me an hour to vent to my husband and I have been traumatized by my past education and struggling because I never learned problem solving skills, nor basic science until fourth grade and I was even held back in 2nd grade because of my ‘poor reading skills’ (I was fucking dyslexic) and was older than everyone else and made fun of for it. And I know, I know, people have had it much much worse than me, I am completely aware—but being a kid with ADD (inattentive ADHD) and dyslexia, I struggled sooo much until I was in late high school and college. I thought I was just stupid, I had such a hard time with school and not realizing I was neuro divergent.
Sometimes I think I am over with all of this, but then I watch something like a video about Abeka, or anything about Christian cults, and I’m back in elementary school thinking I was I had MR (I not saying that to be offensive, I actually thought I had MR).
Being gaslit and told that you’d do better if you just “worked harder” or “just focus a little more” or “just take your medication” is so fucking hurtful. And I really have a hard time moving on.
I’m 29 now and I hate that I still cry about things that happened when I was a child. But it’s unfortunately a part of me, and sometimes I really wish it wasn’t. I wish I was just emotionally stable and had a normal fucking childhood.
Anyways, TL;DR version:
Evangelical Christianity schools are fucking bullshit and harmful to children, full of gaslighting and propaganda, and can make people permanently scarred. Fuck that bullshit. Fuck Abeka, ACE, or any other pseudoscience or cults. FUCK THEM.
NEXTA, an independent news organization which primarily covers Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine reports on Twitter that state-approved Russian media is getting increasingly shambolic and surreal in its explanations for apparent anti-government incidents.
Lenta (Лента.ру) blames the arson of the car of a senior Russian general on a perpetrator who had been kidnapped and hypnotized by Ukraine. 😵💫
The Kremlin leadership doesn’t want people to consider that it’s actually Russians who may be engaging in resistance.
The Kremlin claims that the car bomb which killed ultra-nationalist propagandist Darya Dugina was the work of Ukraine. But the FSB’s story claiming it was carried out by a Ukrainian woman in a neon pink hoodie who escaped to Estonia is as laughable as Putin’s pretext for invading Ukraine.
And more recently, Dmitry Litovkin, another pro-Putin propagandist, mysteriously fell ill and died after being placed in an induced coma. He was 51 – not terribly old.
It is not Ukraine but Vladimir Putin who has a long history of killing Russians for his own purposes.
'Putin Has Been Killing His Opponents For Years' Says Wife of Russian Opposition Leader
We can’t say for sure who is responsible for these recent incidents. But there are reports of an anti-Putin National Republican Army active in Russia.
Did Russian resistance kill daughter of Alexander Dugin?
It’s less risky for the Kremlin to make up bizarre excuses than to admit that there may be an active anti-Putin resistance inside Russia.
Spin Really Fast is a work from Holy Nonsense, a Creative Commons project. View Holy Nonsense 2020 here. Thank you to @voxlunch for the contribution! Original post here.
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The Right Tool For The Job -voxlunch-
This morning I was working on something and made an interesting metaphorical observation. The cutting discs used on this rotary tool are very brittle. You can break them with your fingers. However, mounted on a spindle and spun at thousands of RPM, those same fragile discs can cut through steel. So the next time you're feeling weak or useless, consider that you may simply not be getting utilized properly, and that your true potential awaits.
Now go out there and spin really fast.
Marginalia: A girl in a dress with a basket is spreading something on the ground, possibly food or seeds. Beneath her hand, a tree made of circuits is sprouting from the untamed grass and flowers. She says: I always read "plant your seeds" as being more metaphorical, but I suppose that's the propagandist in me talking.
