October 20, 2022
Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion
Chapter 3 – Multi-Party Democracy
Chapter 4 –The Right-Wing Brain
Chapter 5 – Choosing Government Leaders
Chapter 6 – The Theology of Politics
Chapter 7 – The Theology of Elections
Chapter 8 — Rubber-Stamp Parliaments
Chapter 9 – Democracy and Universal Values
Chapter 10 – Myths of Democracy
Chapter 11 – The Chimera of Democracy
Chapter 12 – Bernays and Democracy Control
Chapter 13 – Democracy to Fascism
Chapter 14- The Non-Imperial Empire
Chapter 15 – China’s Democracy Experiments
Chapter 16 – China is Not the West
Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion
1. Chapter 1 – Introduction
BULGARIAN CHINESE ENGLISH ESTONIAN POLSKI ROMANIAN
Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion e-book
Having been raised in a Western democratic political environment, Americans (and yes, others as well, but most especially Americans) have been by design infused from birth with a conviction that some form of a multi-party electoral system – which we can loosely term “democracy” – is, even with the occasional flaw, the right way, the only way, the way God intended when He designed the Universe. It is not unfair to state that Americans generally believe – because this is what they have been taught since birth – that all nations aspire to their superior and enlightened form of government and that, as these nations develop, they will naturally gravitate toward that which Americans hold to be true – that “democracy“, however defined, is a “universal value” because it represents the pinnacle of civilisation. Indeed, “democracy” is very often presented as a reflection of “the yearnings of all mankind“.
But these opinions and convictions appear for the most part to be unexamined positions, seemingly never having been openly challenged or even discussed, positions which, through generations of intense and incessant propaganda reinforcement have obtained the status of revealed religious truths which cannot be questioned because they are by nature not questionable. I have covered in detail the propaganda myths and tactics leading to this situation, in a series of articles in an E-book titled Bernays and Propaganda. It contains all the necessary references and would be worth your time to read and understand how deeply this has permeated into American society.[1]
The false propaganda campaign to insinuate the theology of democracy into the American psyche began in the early 1900s with Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann, two Jews taking instruction from a Rothschild and the City of London. Lippman and Bernays wrote of their open contempt for a “malleable and hopelessly ill-informed public” in America. Lippmann had already written that the people in a democracy were simply “a bewildered herd” of “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” who should be maintained only as “interested spectators”, to be controlled by the (Jewish) “secret government”. They concluded that in a multi-party electoral system (a democracy), public opinion had to be “created by an organized intelligence” and “engineered by an invisible government”, with the people relegated to the status of uninformed observers, a situation that has existed without interruption in the US for the past 95 years. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”[2]
Bernays claimed a necessity to apply “the discipline of science”, i.e., the psychology of propaganda, to the workings of democracy, where his social engineers “would provide the modern state with a foundation upon which a new stability might be realized”. This was what Lippmann termed the necessity of “intelligence and information control” in a democracy, stating that propaganda “has a legitimate and desirable part to play in our democratic system”. Both men pictured modern American society as being dominated by “a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses”. To Bernays, this was the “logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized”, failing to note that it was his Jewish European masters who organised it this way in the first place.
Lippman and Bernays were not independent in their perverted view of propaganda as a “necessity” of democracy, any more than they were in war marketing, drawing their theories and instruction from their Zionist masters in the City of London, and in fact testing it in the UK before bringing it to the US. The multi-party electoral system was not designed and implemented because it was the most advanced form of government but rather because it alone offered the greatest opportunities to corrupt politicians through control of money and to manipulate public opinion through control of the press. In his book ‘The Engineering of Consent‘, Bernays baldly stated that “The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process”. In other words, the essence of a democracy is that a few “invisible people” manipulate the bewildered herd into believing they are in control of a transparent system of government, by choosing one of two pre-selected candidates who are already bought and paid for by the same invisible people.
After the political fallout of the Vietnam war and Nixon’s resignation, Bernays’ secret government went into overdrive and the American political landscape changed forever. A major part of this ‘democratic overdrive’ was the almost immediate creation in 1973 of a US-based think tank called ‘the Trilateral Commission’, which focused on “the crisis of democracy“, which was exhibiting clear signs of going where no man should go. Their first major report, published by New York University in 1975, was titled, “The Crisis of Democracy”,[3][4] a lead writer of which was a Harvard professor named Samuel Huntington. In the paper, Huntington stated that “The 1960’s witnessed an upsurge of democratic fervor in America”, with an alarming increase of citizens participating in marches, protests and demonstrations, all evidence of “a reassertion of equality as a goal in social, economic and political life”, equality being something no democracy can afford. He claimed, “The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960’s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. In one form or another, it manifested itself in the family, the university, business, public and private associations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services.”
Huntington, who had been a propaganda consultant to the US government during its war on Vietnam, further lamented that the common people no longer considered the elites and bankers to be superior and felt little obligation or duty to obey. Huntington concluded that the US was suffering from “an excess of democracy”, writing that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires apathy and noninvolvement”, stating this was crucial because it was precisely these qualities of the public that “enabled democracy to function effectively”.
He ended his report by stating that “the vulnerability of democracy, essentially the ‘crisis of democracy’”, stemmed from a society that was becoming educated and was participating, and that the nation needed “a more balanced existence” with what he called “desirable limits to the extension of political democracy”. In other words, the real crisis in democracy was that the people were beginning to believe in the “government by the people, for the people” part, and not only actually becoming involved but beginning to despise and disobey those who had been running the country solely for their own financial and political advantage. And of course, the solution was to engineer a social situation with less education and democracy and more authority from the secret (Jewish) government. Democracy, according to Huntington, consisted of the appearance but not the substance, a construct whereby the shrewd elites selected candidates for whom the people could pretend to vote, but who would be controlled by, and obey their masters. Having thus participated in ‘democracy’, the people would be expected to return to their normal state of apathy and noninvolvement.
In other words, the ignorance necessary for the maintenance of a multi-party government system was at risk of being eroded by students who were actually learning things that Bernays’ secret government didn’t want them to learn. The Commission stated it was especially concerned with schools and universities that were not doing their job of “properly indoctrinating the young” and that “we have to have more moderation in democracy”. From there, the path forward was clear: young people in America would now be “properly indoctrinated” by both the public school system and the universities, so as to become “more moderate”. And more ignorant.
Before Huntington and the student activism of the 1960s, we had another renowned expert on propaganda, politics and fascism, in the person of another American Jew, Harold Lasswell, who has been admiringly described as “a leading American political scientist and communications theorist, specializing in the analysis of propaganda”, with claims Lasswell was “ranked among the half dozen creative innovators in the social sciences in the twentieth century”. Like Lippman and Bernays before him, and Huntington et al after him, Lasswell was of the opinion that democracy could not sustain itself without a credentialed elite shaping, molding and controlling public opinion through propaganda. He stated that if the elites lacked the necessary force to compel obedience from the masses, then ‘social managers’ must turn to “a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda”, because of the “ignorance and superstition of the masses”. He claimed that society should not succumb to “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests”, because they were not. Further, “the best judges are the elites, who must, therefore, be ensured of the means to impose their will, for the common good”. The Rockefeller and other Foundations and think-tanks have been slowly executing this advice now for almost 100 years.
Democracy had always been hyped in the West as the most perfect form of government, but under the influence of an enormous propaganda campaign it soon morphed into the pinnacle of enlightened human evolution, and to a religion in its own right, certainly in the minds of Americans, but in the West generally. Since a multi-party electoral system formed the underpinnings of external (foreign and parasitic) control of the US government, it was imperative to inject this fiction directly into the American psyche. They did so, to the extent that “democracy”, with its thousands of meanings, is today equivalent to a bible passage – a message from God that by its nature cannot be questioned. Bernays and his people were the source of the deep, abiding – and patently false – conviction in every American heart that democracy is a “universal value”. One of the most foolish and persistent myths these people created was the fairytale that as every people evolved toward perfection and enlightenment, their DNA would mutate and they would develop a God-given, perhaps genetic, craving for a multi-party political system. This conviction is entirely nonsense, without a shred of historical or other evidence to support it, a foolish myth created to further delude the bewildered herd.
In an article in the NYT,[1] Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver noted “The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argued that when political ideals diverge very widely from reality, the ideals themselves may prevent us from seeing the gap. When the official story differs greatly from the reality of practice, the official story becomes a kind of mask that prevents us from perceiving it.”[5] This means that if propaganda is not only incessant and pervasive but if its tenets are too far removed from factual truth, the victims of this propaganda lose their ability to separate fact from fiction and become unable to recognise the discrepancy between their beliefs and their real world, believing their world corresponds with the religiously-inspired tenets of their propaganda even when it patently and most obviously does not correspond. The theory is not intuitively obvious, but it is heavily supported by facts. The flaws inherent in a multi-party electoral system are so overwhelming, so blindingly obvious, and so serious, yet so apparently perfectly transparent.
The subsequent articles in this series will explore these flaws, one by one. I would make one final comment here: In The Crisis of Democracy, Huntington openly admitted that “the democratic process“, i.e., subordinates selecting their leaders and/or deciding the overall trajectory of any institution, would almost inevitably lead to failure. Huntington: “A university where teaching appointments are subject to approval by students may be a more democratic university but it is not likely to be a better university. In similar fashion, armies in which the commands of officers have been subject to veto by the collective wisdom of their subordinates have almost invariably come to disaster on the battlefield. The arenas where democratic procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited.“ If this isn’t clear, the man is saying that “democracy” fails everywhere it has been tried, but maintains that it is nevertheless “appropriate” for national and other governments. This is one of the schizophrenic flaws we will explore.
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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at:
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
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Notes
[1] BERNAYS AND PROPAGANDA
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/BERNAYS-AND-PROPAGANDA.pdf
[2] Bernays and Propaganda – Democracy Control Series — 7 articles
[3] https://www.trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf
[5] American Dystopia – the Propaganda Mask and the Utopia Syndrome
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/1514/
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2024