The Power to engender mass Delusion

I am going to do something I promised myself I'll never do, but now realize I must change my mind because much is at stake.

I am going to tell what I wrote more than four decades ago when there was no internet, and all that I was permitted to do was to send my missives to a publication that wasn't on the blacklist, and let it circulate my thoughts among its members and beyond.

The year was the early to the mid-1970s, a time when the media were whipping up hysteria about President Richard Nixon being the harbinger of an apocalypse that was sure to hit America if that man remained in office. The trick the media used to justify what they were doing was to take frequent polls they said showed the public to be in agreement with them. Well, I felt it was a cheap shot for the media to cause the hysteria and then justify it by the fact that the public believed everything they said about Nixon who may not have been a saint but was not the demon they portrayed either. I became so angry, I suggested something.

I wrote an open letter to the media telling them they were on a power trip and were winning. But that was not enough, I said, considering that they can double their winnings. The way to do it was this: Now that they have shown they can sway public opinion in one direction, they should reverse their stand to show that they can sway public opinion in the other direction too. This will prove they are twice as powerful.

They did not listen to me, of course, but retained the old habit; one that got worse as they learned to let out a louder and sharper shrill. You can see how far they have come when you go over an article whose title is: “Obama misses the mark,” and whose subtitle is: “The president and Hillary make the case that Obamaworld is a secure place to live.” It was written by David A. Keene, a former honcho at the NRA, and now opinion editor at The Washington Times where the article was published.

Keene writes the following about an existential threat he says is posed by potential terrorists: “it does worry Americans who realize that there are people out there who want to destroy our country and would use a weapon of mass destruction to do so if they ever get their hands on one.” He chose to mention weapon of mass destruction because the point was made that Americans kill each other, year after year, at a rate that no group of terrorists can match – not even once – before being wiped out. And so he, who is of the gun lobby, is trying to draw a sharp contrast between the foreign terrorists and the local mass killers who may cause as much carnage using all sorts of guns, but would have no access to weapons of mass destruction.

That argument is not working for him, however, because he does not say how the public came to fear a foreign threat to the very existence of America if not for the media that has been whipping up hysteria to that effect. Furthermore, he does not say what the chances are that the terrorists will obtain the dreaded weapon. Or why they would be more dangerous than the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans and the Pakistanis who already possess – not one weapon of mass destruction but – an arsenal of them, and do not always agree with America's foreign policy?

Also, when Keene talks about people “who want to destroy our country,” he means to say the military obliteration of America, something that even the Russians could not do with the thousands of nuclear weapons, the massive missile arsenal, the air force, the surface navy and the submarine fleet they possess – all of which match those of America or surpass them in some places. And yet, our author asserts that the American people have come to “realize” that the terrorists can do what no one else can ... a fantastic delusion that can only be asserted by a deluded man writing for a deluded publication.

So the question to ask is this: How can some people in America be gripped by a fantasy of this magnitude if not for the system of mass deception that the media have become … operating as they do in a system of liberal democracy that has itself been corrupted – not by foreign kids who happen to be Muslim – but a Jewish Establishment that created the movement to which they flock, and continues to motivate America into destroying the very Arab regimes who fight the newly acquired ideology of those kids?