Reply #19: What is the "squid-ink" in the water is the semantic cookie-cutter template the Bushies [View All]

have inoculated their "activists" with? It was designed in the bowels of hell, as it were, the billion-dollar apparatus of Bushie "think-tanks" (Bageant touches on this several times throughout the book).

It spreads like a virus, because it was designed and marketed that way. It is easy to replicate, fiendishly clever in that with short declarative Orwellian statements it creates rhetorical Gordian knots which take so long to properly untangle that in our ADD society, people's eyes glaze over like those characters in "Scrubs" before one can unpack and debunk these misleading falsehoods.

It works because it touches a chord we all have in our reptile brains "fear of the other". It works because it was designed to be easily mimickable, and gives the wielder a potent club that at the very least, squirts squid-ink into the discussion and at worst, shuts down any reasoned discussion.

You can find it in use on any message board anywhere. Hell, because it is now such a part of our surroundings, you can see it is use in the Clinton/Obama flamefests and elsewhere on DU.

As I said, it is easily mimickable and wields like a potent club. It was marketed to us on a subconscious level (as all good marketing is) so that even if we defend against it consciously, it still seeps in.

For such a potent weapon, who could resist the temptation to pull it off the shelf and beat one's opponents over the head with it? Not me. I have unwittingly done so and will probably do so again, even though I recognize it for what it is and consciously try to defend against it whenever possible.

And because our clueless Democratic Leadership did nothing while it was morphing all around, threw no "sand in the gears" and offered no real resistance for 25 years and even now mostly fails to do so, this THING, whatever you want to call it, has cemented into stone.

So much of what 97.5-99% of the Imperial Subjects of Amerika believe as Convention Wisdom is misinformation, disinformation and Bushie Lies, hammered home, as Goebbels foresaw when he was using a primitive form of this Bushie Thing, this absolutist, demonizing, and dehumanizing rhetoric, by sheer repetition and the audacity to tell such Big Lies and keep on telling them, no matter what.

Goebbels spoke of this Bushie Strategy quite eloquently seventy years ago when he said:

"Propaganda…must always be essentially simple and repetitious. In the long run, only he will achieve basic results in influencing public opinion who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form despite the objections of the intellectuals."
- Joseph Goebbels’ diary, 1/29/42

There is a quote I have seen in various siglines around DU, "There is one thing they had over their enemies, and that was the capacity to astonish."

Well that quote is correct, too, and our Democratic Leadership has been paralyzed by the snake's eyes for so long they know no other way of being. That, too, is what Bageant's book is about.

The difficulty and hard uphill road anyone who wishes to go out and follow through on Bageant's advice should understand what they/we face, the better to combat it. I have to varying degrees been doing this "Paul Revere-ing" for seven plus years and have met repeatedly with our National Madness that has been as brilliantly marketed and integrated into the National Consciousness as the original Goebbels' did, maybe better.

I don't know what the answer is, but maybe we can put our heads together and figure it out, now that we know what the question is. The answer to this question is notably missing from Bageant's book, he just says to get out there and mix it up, so to speak.

But what to do against Goebbels v2.0 that is ingrained in the National Mind so deeply, now? How to combat this thing that was designed by hundreds of very smart, if evil, people at the cost of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours?

It is an answer, at this late date, we desperately need if we are to restore the old American Republic to some semblance of it's former post-WWII self