HOW TO SELL NAZIS, INSURRECTIONISTS & A MURDEROUS COUP TO THE WORLD

HOW TO SELL NAZIS, INSURRECTIONISTS & A MURDEROUS COUP TO THE WORLD

At first sight you might think this was a difficult task. Perhaps even impossible. Yet it was done. It was accomplished because every tool necessary to do it was available in our modern world to do so.

The advent of public relations, using the tools provided by an approach incorporating human psychology, began the process that would lead to the selling of almost anything.

It is Edward Louis Bernays who is credited with being the father of modern public relations. Using what he knew of his uncle Sigmund Freud’s studies he crafted a very successful business model helping U.S. companies to sell more of their products.

‘ Edward Louis Bernays was an American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations.’ (Wikipedia)

The period when this newly acquired art of public relations arrived most significantly in the political world was in the early Eighties in both the UK and USA. Margaret Thatcher was newly elected and installed as prime minister in Britain. Ronald Reagan became U.S. president in 1981. The election of these two brought an entirely new approach to the selling of politicians to the general public into being. Prior to Thatcher and Reagan substance counted. It was vital to deliver a good speech that communicated your future plans and such speeches were normally delivered live. Television played a much lesser role and in general people read their news rather than watched it. Television was a relatively simple point and shoot medium with a minimum of commentary.

All this was to change radically through the Eighties. Production values rose and the presentation of politicians grew slicker. Attention to appearance became a high priority. A groomed appearance and especially, a well-tended/coiffured hair was essential. Steadily, appearance began to far outweigh substance. Politicians were cosmetically tended to in similar style to film stars, every aspect of their look was honed to appeal to whatever sector of the population garnered most votes. Focus groups began to be run to see what people most wanted to hear. The most pressing concerns, prejudices, areas of interest and desires were then fed back to the populace at large. Public relations began to take over from anything approaching in-depth political issues. Facts began to become malleable, adjusted to whatever reality was convenient and/or helpful for the occasion and desired narrative.

As Thatcher approached the end of her first term in office she was languishing badly in the polls. It appeared certain that she would fail in the upcoming general election. However, the day was saved for Margaret Thatcher by a certain General Leopoldo Galtieri, then acting president of Argentina. He had decided that the British had occupied the Falkland Islands (The Malvinas) off the Argentine coast long enough and decided to take them back for Argentina by force. The subsequent short war by Britain against the Argentine forces which Britain won boosted Thatcher’s ratings and easily won an election she was otherwise looking likely to have lost.

While Thatcher was raising the patriotic blood of the British, Reagan was using death squads by the name of the Contra Guerrillas in Nicaragua to spread a campaign of fear and intimidation to oust the Sandinista government there. A scheme was devised to secretly fund the Contras through the then prohibited selling of arms to Iran. Concurrently Reagan was assisting the government in El Salvador in its fight with rebel groups in the country.

‘Between 1981 and 1986, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the illegal sale of arms to Iran, who was subjected to an arms embargo at the time. The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, an anti-Sandinista rebel group in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by legislative appropriations was prohibited by Congress, but the Reagan administration figured out a loophole by secretly using non-appropriated funds instead.’ (Wikipedia)

‘Reagan's policy has been criticised due to the human rights abuses proven repeatedly to be perpetrated by El Salvadoran security force with Amnesty International reporting that it had received: "regular, often daily, reports identifying El Salvador's regular security and military units as responsible for the torture, "disappearance" and killing of civilians. Types of torture reported by those who have survived arrest and interrogation included beatings, sexual abuse, use of chemicals to disorient, mock executions, and the burning of flesh with sulphuric acid."’

The point about the three instances of war at a distance above is the degree to which home audiences were mostly kept quite ignorant, undisturbed and unconcerned concerning the abuses that were taking place in these wars assisted and often financed by the U.S. taxpayer. Thatcher and Reagan of course went on to ever greater electoral success in subsequent years totally unblemished by the death and destruction they had wrought overseas.

The next steps in making war acceptable came after 9/11. The regime change wars that followed would be said to be about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. This gave sanction to the death and displacement of millions. Unlike in earlier wars engaged in by the United States journalists would no longer be permitted free reign to investigate and report as they had done during the Vietnam War. Now they would be embedded with the coalition troops and be given nightly briefings, the material from which could be passed on to “inform” the waiting public back home. Another layer in the santizing of war had been laid down.

Now we arrive at the main topic of this commentary, the events which have taken place in Ukraine between the years 2013 and the present day.

In the last few months of 2013 protestors arrived on Maidan Square in the centre of Kiev. These protestors engaged in largely peaceful demonstrations to signal their wish to draw closer to the European Union, a process being pursued by the then president and government who sought to obtain much needed funds. For the protestors this movement toward the EU was moving too slowly and they had doubts that it would result in the outcome they hoped would transform their lives.

At some point in late November/December 2013 an influx of radical elements joined the protest and began using violence both against those protestors they regarded as unable to effect the kind of change they sought. Many had been receiving military training in Poland. Others had received training in subversion techniques in the U.S. embassy in Kiev. Together they began accumulating a wide array of weapons from hand guns to hunting rifles to medieval-type clubs to Molotov Cocktails and the use of heavy cobbles and bricks from surrounding streets. These radical elements, many of whom bore swastika tattoos and emblazoned police shields they had taken from the security forces with Nazi symbology, began attacking the lightly-armed police and torching government buildings. Barack Obama, U.S. president at the time, called them “peaceful protestors” and warned the then Ukrainian authorities to leave them alone.

Maidan Square became a scene from hell as the early months of 2014 wore on. Some seventeen young policemen lost their lives at the hands of the “peaceful protestors”. The square was a war zone day after day. All manner of attacks were made on the security forces armed with only a baton and shield. Heavy chains, toxic sprays and even a fork-lift truck was used against their static line of shields. Kiev’s chief of police requested that his men be given fire arms but the Ukrainian president of the time, Yanukovych turned down the request stating that he wished to maintain “a dialogue” with those on the square.

In the western world there was a little disquiet regarding what was going on in the square however, the primary emphasis was on sympathy for those protesting. This was seen by the appearance of U.S. senators such as John McCain next to Ukrainian members of parliament who cheered on the crowd. The then Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland along with the then U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt also arrived on the square to lend their encouragement. You will perhaps be able to imagine the response to these events if they were to occur in the USA, UK or Europe in a situation where those you are cheering on have murdered seventeen police officers.

Yet despite the daily increase in violence, despite the obvious Nazi cult elements, despite the arson and general disruption to normal life that was occurring, as far as western political and media elites were concerned the president and his government were the ‘bad guys’.That western interests were invested in the potential result of the mayhem, murder and mass destruction involved and that this skewed the coverage, narratives and support is quite obvious. The entire weight of western mainstream media eventually got behind their political elites in lending their ever increasing support for the insurrection that was taking place. An insurrection that was taking place mind you against a democratically-elected president and government where the elections had been supervised by large teams of electoral observers.

The combined effect of political talking heads of every mainstream political party in the West plus their compliant media elites provided a wall-to-wall veil of decency to these entire murderous and quite clearly criminal events. That the president had to flee for his life, the government fall and U.S. approved quislings take over raised hardly an eyebrow. Even when the two characters mentioned above, Nuland and Pyatt could be heard in a leaked phone call discussing who should take over.

From the fall of the Yanukovych presidency and the then Ukrainian government until today a similar veil of decency has been drawn over events in Ukraine, once again for the benefit of western self-interest. Some 15,000 died in the years after the coup in 2014, the vast majority at the hands of the Ukrainian military and the Nazi-mentality radicals and ultranationalists who were taken into the Ukrainian National Guard. By indiscriminate mortar shelling of villages, towns and cities in the Russian-speaking east the death count inexorably rose over the years. These deaths appear to have counted as little to western news editors and politicians as they did for the ethnic Ukrainians who perpetrated them. Both appear to have regarded those who died, men, women and children of all ages, as sub-human. Western audiences were kept in the dark with only vague inferences that pointed to “The Russians” being at fault.

The facade of western decency and eastern dirtiness continues unabated to this day. Edward Bernays who used the word ‘propaganda’ proudly as a positive thing and a beneficial tool, would surely stand in awe of the emotional and news blackout perpetrated by western political and media elites regarding the killing zone of eastern Ukraine which they assisted in holding in a vacuum. The dying screams would not be heard. The funerals for young boys who had been playing soccer in a school yard or that of a young teacher who lay decapitated by the school house door, or the lady out shopping in her village centre… all as nothing. Not newsworthy at all to western “journalists”, editors of politicians. Because their deaths were not useful and indeed, were counter-productive to the ‘Evil Russia - Innocent Ukraine’ narrative they so fervently and consistently wished to promote.

It continues to this very day. In every speech or statement by a western political figure or official. In every article approved by western editors across the western world. It’s by now a deeply embedded and ingrained policy, with memes that reinforce themselves constantly with no one within the mainstream brave enough or interested enough to contradict them. And a public who, in the main, continue to believe what they are told by their politicians and mainstream news outlets. Too busy or too little interested to look any deeper they meekly accept as true what those who hid so much and lied about so much in the past, tell them. A blanket of lies using all the psychological tricks Bernays used plus so much more learnt from the West’s wars over the years.

HOW TO SELL NAZIS, INSURRECTIONISTS & A MURDEROUS COUP TO THE WORLD