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“To make the organization of propaganda possible, the media must be concentrated, the number of news agencies reduced, the press brought under single control, and radio and film monopolies established. The effect will be still greater if the various media are concentrated in the same hands. When a newspaper trust (ie, monopoly) also extends its control over films and radio, propaganda can be directed at the masses and the individual can be caught in the wide net of media.” – Jacques Ellul (1965)
When Edward Bernays (the nephew of Sigmund Freud) wrote his famous 1928 book, Propaganda, he titled the first chapter of the book “Organizing Chaos”. The quotes below are taken directly from that chapter.
What was strikingly obvious to me in reading the book is that Bernays – in the year before the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 - wasn’t making any effort to sugar-coat the fact that he actually believes that propaganda is an essential and desirable fact of modern life.
Mystic Pizza is a thoroughly enjoyable, consummately unoriginal musical play, from top to bottom. This retread of the 1988 movie is essentially a coming of age story about three young women in the eponymous Mystic, a seaside town in Connecticut. The trio – Daisy Arujo (Krystina Alabado), her sister Kat (Kyra Kennedy) and their friend Jojo Barboza (Gianna Yanelli) – are searching for romance and their pathways in life, yearning for a more fulfilling life than mere housewifery and drudgery in proletarian Mystic. This timeworn plot is, however, set in a fairly novel social milieu, namely a community with many residents of Portuguese descent, a minority group that doesn’t get much attention in U.S. pop culture.
“Joseph McCarthy is the only major politician in the country who can be labeled “liar” without fear of libel.”– Joseph Alsop
“The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205 names that were made known to the Secretary of State (Dean Acheson)as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” – Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, February 9, 1950, at a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia
“If somebody would only smuggle me aboard the Democratic campaign special with a baseball bat in my hand, I’d teach patriotism to ‘Little Adlai’.” – Joe McCarthy, mocking 1952 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson)
"I call Marco Rubio, 'Little Marco’. That frightened little puppy couldn't be elected dog-catcher in Florida." – Donald Trump (mocking Republican rival Sen Marco Rubio during 2016 campaign)
Recording of a webinar hosted by War Industry Resisters and MA Peace action
among others on 18 January 2024 (257 attendees). Prof Mazin Qumsiyeh
addressed the subject of this era: The Israeli genocide continues and so
does Palestinian resistance in all its forms. Huge demonstrations around
the world that call for Palestinian freedom while Western corporate media
conveys an Israeli narrative that portrays the mass murder and injury of
tens of thousands of Palestinians as justified rather than as criminal.
https://www.youtube.com/live/UHUgFIEWr1g
Qumsiyeh and Haidee Clauer. 2023 Weaponizing Israeli National Parks to
ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Palestine Israel Journal. Vol 3/4
LA Phil and its Music & Art Director, Gustavo Dudamel, are taking Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold out of the opera house and into the concert hall to present Das Rheingold, the first of the ambitious librettist/composer’s mammoth, marathon 17-hour, musical/ theatrical, four-opera extravaganza known as The Ring Cycle or Der Ring des Nibelungen. Das Rheingold – which refers to the gold of the Rhine River, not to the official beer of the N.Y. Mets – is set in primeval Germany, its characters and story derived from Northern European mythology.
Wagner’s magisterial, majestic, moody music is perfect for evoking these mythic gods, giants, dwarves, trolls, nymphs, Valkyries and other figures, plus tales, from lore that existed centuries before Christianity spread to Europe and Wagner wrought his “Bühnenfestspiel” (stage festival play) about the epic quest and struggle for a magical golden ring that endows its bearer with omnipotent powers.