Televising the revolutionary case against capitalism and promoting the socialist case for the establishment of a global social system in which the earth's natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled, and in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation
Journalist Chris Hedges discusses his recent book Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. In it, he charts the dramatic rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy, and illusion. Hedges argues we now live in two societies: one, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world and can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth; the other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic where serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins.
Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He writes for many publications, including Foreign Affairs, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, Granta, and Mother Jones. He is also a columnist for Truthdig.com.
Co-sponsored by the Writing Program, Department of Media Studies and Film, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
Location: Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall. 12/08/2009 7:00 p.m.
Released in December 2009, the Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the "devils in the details" in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from whats really required to tackle the climate crisis. If you've heard about Cap & Trade, but arent sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you.
Boiling Frogs Post presents an exclusive interview with Colonel Larry Wilkerson on a tyrannical US presidency and politics of fear, Israel’s interests versus US interests and the question of loyalties, and more:
As a 'card carrying' member of the Likud Party, whose interest did Douglas Feith really serve?
Is the current situation in the US due to incompetent leadership or venal leadership exploiting politics of fear?
The Story of Bottled Water, released on March 22, 2010 (World Water Day) employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the story of manufactured demand—how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. Over five minutes, the film explores the bottled water industrys attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces. The film concludes with a call to take back the tap, not only by making a personal commitment to avoid bottled water, but by supporting investments in clean, available tap water for all.
Our real enemies are not those living in a distant land whose names or policies we don't understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it's profitable, the banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us - Mike Prysner
5th April 2010 -- WikiLeakshas released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
If the cold blooded murder of a dozen innocents is not enough for these blood-crazed psychopaths, they then open their 30mm helicopter canon on people who come to tend to a survivor. And make no mistake - this is no isolated incident.
It's so simple. Don't eat anything that comes from a factory - and that includes meat. The food industry is bigger than the oil industry and every bit as corrupt and manipulative. If they had their way, all food would come in a box, filled with low-cost garbage ingredients, and marked up to the moon. Thanks to their bribery and bullying that already describes the federal school lunch program. They stand ready to legally attack anyone who speaks the truth, even deep pockets celebrities like Oprah Winfrey who declared on her show she would never eat another hamburger and was sued by the cattle ranching industry for defamation. It's remarkably easy to avoid the personal health catastrophe that factory foods lead to: don't eat them! It's that simple.
Television is the most powerful weapon of psychological warfare in history and yet it is a member of the family in most households. The programming that we are constantly assaulted with conditions us to a particular worldview. This fake reality changes our behavior making us less active and more compliant with society's shortcomings.
Since television is controlled by a small handful of powerful corporations, viewers will never witness informing, truthful news and entertainment. As political and corporate power unite at an ever increasing rate, being informed is more important than ever.
People need to seek out independent and alternative unbiased sources on the internet for their information or we will continue to be manipulated by the corporate controlled media.
Transcript
Most of humanity is in an absolute hypnotic trance that they're put in from cradle to grave by constant repetition of a fake reality and when we wake up from this we will not be subservient.
Jordan Maxwell: The bottom line is that the government is getting what they ordered. They do not want your children to be educated. They do not want you to think too much. That is why our country and our world has become so proliferated with entertainments, mass media, television shows, amusement parks, drugs, alcohol, and every kind of entertainment to keep the human mind entertained so that you don't get in the way of important people by doing too much thinking. You better wake up and understand that there are people who are guiding your life and you don't even know it.
Steven Jacobson: Television is the most powerful weapon of psychological warfare in history. The programming that we are constantly assaulted by throughout our lives conditions us. It programs us to a particular worldview. Now, we may consider it normal because we were born into this system of lies and deception. And because we were born into this situation and our parents were born into it and have suffered from it, we don't know any better.
Aldous Huxley: What I may call the messages of Brave New World, but it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.
George Carlin: But there's a reason, there's a reason. There's a reason for this. There's a reason education sucks and its the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. Its never gonna get any better, don't look for it. Be happy with what you got, because the owners of this country don't want that. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that.
Howard Beale: We know things are bad, worse than bad. They're crazy. Its like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world were living in is getting smaller and all we say is please at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel belted radios and I wont say anything, just leave us alone. Well I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore! You've got to say, Im a human being God damn it, my life has value!
A UN nuclear watchdog report suggests Iran could be developing a nuclear bomb, apparently confirming long-held suspicions in the West. But Tehran denies the claims, again insisting that its atomic intentions are peaceful. Michel Chossudovsky, who's from an independent Canadian policy research group, believes that what Iran says hardly matters, because the U.S. is planning for war.
After assessing today's dwindling oil reserves and skyrocketing use of oil for fuels, plastics and chemicals, "The Oil Factor" questions the motives for the U.S. wars in the Middle-East and Central Asia where 3/4 of the world's oil and natural gas is located.
With exclusive footage shot on location in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the film documents the spiraling violence now engulfing both Iraq and Afghanistan, a country conspicuously absent from the commercial media's news segments.
Interviews gathered throughout the Middle-East, Europe and the United States, including a Bechtel executive in Baghdad, also expose who is cashing in on the tens of billions of dollars requested from congress by the current administration of G. W. Bush.
With detailed maps and graphics, The Oil Factor features many experts and personalities such as former Defense Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky, the Project for the New American Century Executive Director Gary Schmitt, Coalition Provisional Authority Chairman Paul Bremer, former Pentagon analyst Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, current Iraqi government official Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim and authors Ahmed Rashid and Michael C. Ruppert.
Contributing organizations include the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, the Pentagon, Washington's Institute for Policy Studies, New York's World Policy Institute, London's Jane's Intelligence and Petroleum Economist, Paris' Agence France Press and Center for Energy Strategy Studies (C.E.P.S.E.) or the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (O.E.C.D.)
Though a bit dated, this video is worth watching. Michel Chossudovsky, (who has some good articles on the Global Research site) a professor at the University of Ottawa, demonstrates how the US attack on Yugoslavia in the 1990s were the prelude to and part of a larger plan to destabilize and invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to the plan, Iran is next.
Some of Chossudovsky's observations:
* The CIA and US military worked closely with al Queda as recently as 2001 to destabilize the Balkans. Their last overt co-venture was in the Yugoslavian province of Macedonia. Al Queda was created by and remains under the control of the CIA as is the Taliban and Pakistan's ISI.
* The US and UK are engaged in a global competition against France, Germany and other euro countries for oil, African resources, the global weapons trade and financial dominance (US dollar vs. Euro)
* In 2002, the US adopted a policy of pre-emptive nuclear attack listing Russia and China as countries subject to attack. "Nuclear war is now part of the military assumption."
* It's not just Bush and the Neo-cons. Yes, Bush is a puppet. Thoroughly corrupt, callous, venal, but essentially a moron. The country is actually being run by what in effect is a military dictatorship and will continue to be one regardless of who is in the Whit House.
* The so-called "War on Terror" is a complete fabrication designed to justify the US drive for world economic dominance and a "Homeland Security State" at home.
United States-China relations are on the rocks recently, China says that they have been seriously disrupted. Essentially, China feels that it is being threatened by the United States - not least because of its relations with Iran - and this has been mounting since 1999. The threats are coming in the form of diplomacy, however Michel Chossudovsky says that the United States also has missiles pointed at Chinese cities.
Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, here (audio file only) discusses influence, controlling the public mind and government.
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” Aldous Huxley
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Transcript – The Ultimate Revolution
March 20, 1962 Berkeley Language Center – Speech Archive SA 0269
Moderator:
{garbled}Aldous Huxley, a renowned Essayist and Novelist who during the spring semester is residing at the university in his capacity of a Ford research professor. Mr Huxley has recently returned from a conference at the Institute for the study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara where the discussion focused on the development of new techniques by which to control and direct human behavior. Traditionally it has been possible to suppress individual freedom through the application of physical coercion through the appeal of ideologies through the manipulation of man’s physical and social environment and more recently through the techniques, the cruder techniques of psychological conditioning. The Ultimate Revolution, about which Mr. Huxley will speak today, concerns itself with the development of new behavioral controls, which operate directly on the psycho-physiological organisms of man. That is the capacity to replace external constraint by internal compulsions. As those of us who are familiar with Mr. Huxley’s works will know, this is a subject of which he has been concerned for quite a period of time. Mr. Huxley will make a presentation of approximately half an hour followed by some brief discussions and questions by the two panelists sitting to my left, Mrs. Lillian {garbled} and Mr. John Post. Now Mr. Huxley
Huxley:
Thank You.
{Applause}
Uh, First of all, the, I’d like to say, that the conference at Santa Barbara was not directly concerned with the control of the mind. That was a conference, there have been two of them now, at the University of California Medical center in San Francisco, one this year which I didn’t attend, and one two years ago where there was a considerable discussion on this subject. At Santa Barbara we were talking about technology in general and the effects it’s likely to have on society and the problems related to technological transplanting of technology into underdeveloped countries.
Well now in regard to this problem of the ultimate revolution, this has been very well summed up by the moderator. In the past we can say that all revolutions have essentially aimed at changing the environment in order to change the individual. I mean there’s been the political revolution, the economic revolution, in the time of the reformation, the religious revolution. All these aimed, not directly at the human being, but at his surroundings. So that by modifying the surroundings you did achieve, did one remove the effect of the human being.
Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. Well needless to say some kind of direct action on human mind-bodies has been going on since the beginning of time. But this has generally been of a violent nature. The Techniques of terrorism have been known from time immemorial and people have employed them with more or less ingenuity sometimes with the utmost cruelty, sometimes with a good deal of skill acquired by a process of trial and error finding out what the best ways of using torture, imprisonment, constraints of various kinds.
But, as, I think it was (sounds like Mettenicht) said many years ago, you can do everything with {garbled} except sit on them. If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent, it’s exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.
It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions shall we say, and this is a problem which has interested me many years and about which I wrote thirty years ago, a fable, Brave New World, which is an account of society making use of all the devices available and some of the devices which I imagined to be possible making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population, to iron out inconvenient human differences, to create, to say, mass produced models of human beings arranged in some sort of scientific caste system. Since then, I have continued to be extremely interested in this problem and I have noticed with increasing dismay a number of the predictions which were purely fantastic when I made them thirty years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true.
A number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already. And there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution, a method of control by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of servitude, Well this process is, as I say, has gone on for over the years, and I have become more and more interested in what is happening.
And here I would like briefly to compare the parable of Brave New World with another parable which was put forth more recently in George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty- Four. Orwell wrote his book between, I think between 45 and 48 at the time when the Stalinist terror regime was still in Full swing and just after the collapse of the Hitlerian terror regime. And his book which I admire greatly, it’s a book of very great talent and extraordinary ingenuity, shows, so to say, a projection into the future of the immediate past, of what for him was the immediate past, and the immediate present, it was a projection into the future of a society where control was exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals.
Whereas my own book which was written in 1932 when there was only a mild dictatorship in the form of Mussolini in existence, was not overshadowed by the idea of terrorism, and I was therefore free in a way in which Orwell was not free, to think about these other methods of control, these non-violent methods and my, I’m inclined to think that the scientific dictatorships of the future, and I think there are going to be scientific dictatorships in many parts of the world, will be probably a good deal nearer to the brave new world pattern than to the 1984 pattern, they will a good deal nearer not because of any humanitarian qualms of the scientific dictators but simply because the BNW pattern is probably a good deal more efficient than the other.
That if you can get people to consent to the state of affairs in which they’re living. The state of servitude the state of being, having their differences ironed out, and being made amenable to mass production methods on the social level, if you can do this, then you have, you are likely, to have a much more stable and lasting society. Much more easily controllable society than you would if you were relying wholly on clubs and firing squads and concentration camps. So that my own feeling is that the 1984 picture was tinged of course by the immediate past and present in which Orwell was living, but the past and present of those years does not reflect, I feel, the likely trend of what is going to happen, needless to say we shall never get rid of terrorism, it will always find its way to the surface.
But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale.
And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.
And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People did make use of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and miss craftsman’s point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I think there is a real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century. We know much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because of our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area with a greater assurance of being producing something that really works.
In this context I would like to mention the extremely interesting chapters in Dr. William (sounds like Seargent’s) Battle for the Mind where he points out how intuitively some of the great religious teachers/leaders of the past hit on the Pavlovian method, he speaks specifically of Wesley’s method of producing conversions which were essentially based on the technique of heightening psychological stress to the limit by talking about hellfire and so making people extremely vulnerable to suggestion and then suddenly releasing this stress by offering hopes of heaven and this is a very interesting chapter of showing how completely on purely intuitive and empirical grounds a skilled natural psychologist, as Wesley was, could discover these Pavlovian methods.
Well, as I say, we now know the reason why these techniques worked and there’s no doubt at all that we can if we wanted to, carry them much further than was possible in the past. And of course in the history of, recent history of brainwashing, both as applied to prisoners of war and to the lower personnel within the communist party in China, we see that the pavlovian methods have been applied systematically and with evidently with extraordinary efficacy. I think there can be no doubt that by the application of these methods a very large army of totally devoted people has been created. The conditioning has been driven in, so to say, by a kind of psychological iontophoresis into the very depths of the people’s being, and has got so deep that it’s very difficult to ever be rooted out, and these methods, I think, are a real refinement on the older methods of terror because they combine methods of terror with methods of acceptance that the person who is subjected to a form of terroristic stress but for the purpose of inducing a kind of voluntary quotes acceptance of the state the psychological state in which he has been driven and the state of affairs in which he finds himself.
So there is, as I say, there has been a definite improvement in the, even in the techniques of terrorism. But then we come to the consideration of other techniques, non-terroristic techniques, for inducing consent and inducing people to love their servitude. Here, I don’t think I can possibly go into all of them, because I don’t know all of them, but I mean I can mention the more obvious methods, which can now be used and are based on recent scientific findings. First of all there are the methods connected with straight suggestion and hypnosis.
I think we know much more about this subject than was known in the past. People of course, always have known about suggestion, and although they didn’t know the word ‘hypnosis’ they certainly practiced it in various ways. But we have, I think, a much greater knowledge of the subject than in the past, and we can make use of our knowledge in ways, which I think the past was never able to make use of it. For example, one of the things we now know for certain, that there is of course an enormous, I mean this has always been known a very great difference between individuals in regard to their suggestibility. But we now know pretty clearly the sort of statistical structure of a population in regard to its suggestibility. Its very interesting when you look at the findings of different fields, I mean the field of hypnosis, the field of administering placebos, for example, in the field of general suggestion in states of drowsiness or light sleep you will find the same sorts of orders of magnitude continually cropping up.
You’ll find for example that the experienced hypnotist will tell one that the number of people, the percentage of people who can be hypnotized with the utmost facility (snaps), just like that. is about 20%, and about a corresponding number at the other end of the scale are very, very difficult or almost impossible to hypnotize. But in between lies a large mass of people who can with more or less difficulty be hypnotized, that they can gradually be if you work hard enough at it be got into the hypnotic state, and in the same way the same sort of figures crop up again, for example in relation to the administration of placebos.
A big experiment was carried out three of four years ago in the general hospital in Boston on post-operative cases where several hundred men and woman suffering comparable kinds of pain after serious operations were allowed to, were given injections whenever they asked for them whenever the pain got bad, and the injections were 50% of the time were of morphine, and 50% of water. And about twenty percent of those who went through the experiment, about 20% of them got just as much relief from the distilled waters as from the morphea. About 20% got no relief from the distilled water, and in- between were those who got some relief or got relief occasionally.
So yet again, we see the same sort of distribution, and similarly in regard to what in BNW I called Hypnopedia, the sleep teaching, I was talking not long ago to a man who manufactures records which people can listen to in the, during the light part of sleep, I mean these are records for getting rich, for sexual satisfaction (crowd laughs), for confidence in salesmanship and so on, and he said that its very interesting that these are records sold on a money-back basis, and he says there is regularly between 15% and 20% of people who write indignantly saying the records don’t work at all, and he sends the money back at once. There are on the other hand, there are over 20% who write enthusiastically saying they are much richer, their sexual life is much better (laughter) etc, etc. And these of course are the dream clients and they buy more of these records. And in between there are those who don’t get much results and they have to have letters written to them saying “Go persist my dear, go on” (laughter) and you will get there, and they generally do get results in the long run.
Well, as I say, on the basis of this, I think we see quite clearly that the human populations can be categorized according to their suggestibility fairly clearly,. I suspect very strongly that this twenty percent is the same in all these cases, and I suspect also that it would not be at all difficult to recognize and {garbled} out who are those who are extremely suggestible and who are those extremely unsuggestible and who are those who occupy the intermediate space. Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible organized society would be quite impossible, and if everybody were extremely suggestible then a dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable. I mean it’s very fortunate that we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority and who therefore preserve us from dictatorship but do permit organized society to be formed. But, once given the fact that there are these 20% of highly suggestible people, it becomes quite clear that this is a matter of enormous political importance, for example, any demagogue who is able to get hold of a large number of these 20% of suggestible people and to organize them is really in a position to overthrow any government in any country.
And I mean, I think this after all, we had the most incredible example in recent years by what can be done by efficient methods of suggestion and persuasion in the form of Hitler. Anyone who has read, for example, (Sounds like Bulloch’s) Life of Hitler, comes forth with this horrified admiration for this infernal genius, who really understood human weaknesses I think almost better than anybody and who exploited them with all the resources then available. I mean he knew everything, for example, he knew intuitively this pavlovian truth that condition installed in a state of stress or fatigue goes much deeper than conditioning installed at other times. This of course is why all his big speeches were organized at night. He speaks quite frankly, of course, in Mein Kampf, this is done solely because people are tired at night and therefore much less capable of resisting persuasion than they would be during the day. And in all his techniques he was using, he had discovered intuitively and by trial and error a great many of the weaknesses, which we now know about on a sort of scientific way I think much more clearly than he did.
But the fact remains that this differential of suggestibility this susceptibility to hypnosis I do think is something which has to be considered very carefully in relation to any kind of thought about democratic government . If there are 20% of the people who really can be suggested into believing almost anything, then we have to take extremely careful steps into prevent the rise of demagogues who will drive them on into extreme positions then organize them into very, very dangerous armies, private armies which may overthrow the government.
This is, I say, in this field of pure persuasion, I think we do know much more than we did in the past, and obviously we now have mechanisms for multiplying the demagogues voice and image in a quite hallucinatory way, I mean, the TV and radio, Hitler was making enormous use of the radio, he could speak to millions of people simultaneously. This alone creates an enormous gulf between the modern and the ancient demagogue. The ancient demagogue could only appeal to as many people as his voice could reach by yelling at his utmost, but the modern demagogue could touch literally millions at a time, and of course by the multiplication of his image he can produce this kind of hallucinatory effect which is of enormous hypnotic and suggestive importance.
But then there are the various other methods one can think of which, thank heaven, as yet have not be used, but which obviously could be used. There is for example, the pharmacological method, this is one of the things I talked about in BNW. I invented a hypothetical drug called SOMA, which of course could not exist as it stood there because it was simultaneously a stimulant, a narcotic, and a hallucinogen, which seems unlikely in one substance. But the point is, if you applied several different substances you could get almost all these results even now, and the really interesting things about the new chemical substances, the new mind-changing drugs is this, if you looking back into history its clear that man has always had a hankering after mind changing chemicals, he has always desired to take holidays from himself, but the, and, this is the most extraordinary effect of all that every natural occurring narcotic stimulant, sedative, or hallucinogen, was discovered before the dawn of history, I don’t think there is one single one of these naturally occurring ones which modern science has discovered.
Modern science has of course better ways of extracting the active principals of these drugs and of course has discovered numerous ways of synthesizing new substances of extreme power, but the actual discovery of these naturally occurring things was made by primitive man goodness knows how many centuries ago. There is for example, in the underneath the, lake dwellings of the early Neolithic that have been dug up in Switzerland we have found poppy-heads, which looks as though people were already using this most ancient and powerful and dangerous of narcotics, even before the days of the rise of agriculture. So that man was apparently a dope-bag addict before he was a farmer, which is a very curious comment on human nature.
But, the difference, as I say, between the ancient mind-changers, the traditional mind- changers, and the new substances is that they were extremely harmful and the new ones are not. I mean even the permissible mind-changer alcohol is not entirely harmless, as people may have noticed, and I mean the other ones, the non-permissible ones, such as opium and cocaine, opium and its derivatives, are very harmful indeed. They rapidly produce addiction, and in some cases lead at an extraordinary rate to physical degeneration and death.
Whereas these new substances, this is really very extraordinary, that a number of these new mind-changing substances can produce enormous revolutions within the mental side of our being, and yet do almost nothing to the physiological side. You can have an enormous revolution, for example, with LSD-25 or with the newly synthesized drug psilocybin, which is the active principal of the Mexican sacred mushroom. You can have this enormous mental revolution with no more physiological revolution than you would get from drinking two cocktails. And this is a really most extraordinary effect.
And it is of course true that pharmacologists are producing a great many new wonder drugs where the cure is almost worse than the disease. Every year the new edition of medical textbooks contains a longer and longer chapter of what are Iatrogenic diseases, that is to say diseases caused by doctors (laughter} And this is quite true, many of the wonder drugs are extremely dangerous. I mean they can produce extraordinary effects, and in critical conditions they should certainly be used, but they should be used with the utmost caution. But there is evidently a whole class of drugs effecting the CNS which can produce enormous changes in sedation in euphoria in energizing the whole mental process without doing any perceptible harm to the human body, and this presents to me the most extraordinary revolution. In the hands of a dictator these substances in one kind or the other could be used with, first of all, complete harmlessness, and the result would be, you can imagine a euphoric that would make people thoroughly happy even in the most abominable circumstances.
I mean these things are possible. This is the extraordinary thing, I mean after all this is even true with the crude old drugs. I mean, a housemate years ago remarked after reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, He Says “And beer does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man” (laughter). And beer is of course, an extremely crude drug compared to these ones. And you can certainly say that some of the psychic energizers and the new hallucinants could do incomparably more than Milton and all the Theologicians combined could possibly do to make the terrifying mystery of our existence seem more tolerable than it does. And here I think one has an enormous area in which the ultimate revolution could function very well indeed, an area in which a great deal of control could be used by not through terror, but by making life seem much more enjoyable than it normally does. Enjoyable to the point, where as I said before, Human beings come to love a state of things by which any reasonable and decent human standard they ought not to love and this I think is perfectly possible.
But then, very briefly, let me speak about one of the more recent developments in the sphere of neurology, about the implantation of electrodes in the brain. This of course has been done in the large scale in animals and in a few cases its been done in the cases of the hopelessly insane. And anybody who has watched the behavior of rats with electrodes placed in different centers must come away from this experience with the most extraordinary doubts about what on Earth is in store for us if this is got a hold of by a dictator. I saw not long ago some rats in the {garbled} laboratory at UCLA there were two sets of them, one with electrodes planted in the pleasure center, and the technique was they had a bar which they pressed which turned on a very small current for a short space of time which we had a wire connected with that electrode and which stimulated the pleasure center and was evidently absolutely ecstatic was these rats were pressing the bar 18,000 times a day (laughter). Apparently if you kept them from pressing the bar for a day, they’d press it 36,000 times on the following day and would until they fell down in complete exhaustion (laughter) And they would neither eat, nor be interested in the opposite sex but would just go on pressing this bar {pounds on podium}
Then the most extraordinary rats were those were the electrode was planted halfway between the pleasure and the pain center. The result was a kind of mixture of the most wonderful ecstasy and like being on the rack at the same time. And you would see the rats sort of looking at is bar and sort of saying “To be or not to be that is the question”. (Laughter) Finally it would approach {Pounds on podium} and go back with this awful I mean, the (sounds like franken huminizer anthropomorphizer), and he would wait some time before pressing the bar again, yet he would always press it again. This was the extraordinary thing.
I noticed in the most recent issue of Scientific American there’s a very interesting article on electrodes in the brains of chickens, where the technique is very ingenious, where you sink into their brains a little socket with a screw on it and the electrode can then be screwed deeper and deeper into the brainstem and you can test at any moment according to the depth, which goes at fractions of the mm, what you’re stimulating and these creatures are not merely stimulated by wire, they’re fitted with a miniature radio receiver which weighs less than an ounce which is attached to them so that they can be communicated with at a distance, I mean they can run about in the barnyard and you could press a button and this particular area of the brain to which the electrode has been screwed down to would be stimulated. You would get this fantastic phenomena, where a sleeping chicken would jump up and run about, or an active chicken would suddenly sit down and go to sleep, or a hen would sit down and act like she’s hatching out an egg, or a fighting rooster would go into depression.
The whole picture of the absolute control of the drives is terrifying, and in the few cases in which this has been done with very sick human beings, The effects are evidently very remarkable too, I was talking last summer in England to Grey Walter, who is the most eminent exponent of the EEG technique in England, and he was telling me that he’s seen hopeless inmates at asylums with these things in their heads, and these people were suffering from uncontrollable depression, and they had these electrodes inserted into the pleasure center in their brain, however when they felt too bad, they just pressed a button on the battery in their pocket and he said the results were fantastic, the mouth pointing down would suddenly turn up and they’d feel very cheerful and happy. So there again one sees the most extraordinary revolutionary techniques, which are now available to us.
Now, I think what is obviously perfectly clear is that for the present these techniques are not being used except in an experimental way, but I think it is important for us to realize what is happening to make ourselves acquainted with what has already happened, and then use a certain amount of imagination to extrapolate into the future the sort of things that might happen. What might happen if these fantastically powerful techniques were used by unscrupulous people in authority, what on Earth would happen, what sort of society would we get?
And I think it is peculiarly important because as one sees when looking back over history we have allowed in the past all those advances in technology which has profoundly changed our social and individual life to take us by surprise, I mean it seems to me that it was during the late 18 century early 19th century when the new machines were making possible the factory situation. It was not beyond the wit of man to see what was happening and project into the future and maybe forestall the really dreadful consequences which plagued England and most of western Europe and this country for sixty or seventy years, and the horrible abuses of the factory system and if a certain amount of forethought had been devoted to the problem at that time and if people had first of all found out what was happening and then used their imagination to see what might happen, and then had gone on to work out the means by which the worst applications of the techniques would not take place, well then I think western humanity might have been spared about three generations of utter misery which had been imposed on the poor at that time.
And the same way with various technological advances now, I mean we need to think about the problems with automation and more profoundly the problems, which may arise with these new techniques, which may contribute to this ultimate revolution. Our business is to be aware of what is happening, and then to use our imagination to see what might happen, how this might be abused, and then if possible to see that the enormous powers which we now possess thanks to these scientific and technological advances to be used for the benefit of human beings and not for their degradation.
This film goes in detail through the untold history of The Project for the New American Century with tons of archival footage and connects it right into the present. This film exposes how every major war in US history was based on a complete fraud with video of insiders themselves admitting it. This film shows how the first film theatres in the US were used over a hundred years ago to broadcast propaganda to rile the American people into the Spanish-American War. This film shows the white papers of the oil company Unocal which called for the creation of a pipeline through Afghanistan and how their exact needs were fulfilled through the US invasion of Afghanistan. This film shows how Halliburton under their "cost plus" exclusive contract with the US Government went on a mad dash spending spree akin to something out of the movie Brewster's Millions, yet instead of blowing $30 million they blew through BILLIONS by literally burning millions of dollars worth of hundred thousand dollar cars and trucks if they had so much as a flat tire. "A stunning film. It should be seen as widely as possible, in cinemas, bars, clubs, at meetings and, of course, through the internet. I'm sure the film will continue to be a source of debate and political education for many years. Maybe until the war criminals have been brought to trial." - Ken Loach While Massimo Mazzucco’s first political documentary, GLOBAL DECEIT (2006), focused on the long list of inconsistencies in the official version of the 9/11 attacks, THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY explores the historical, philosophical and economic background that suggests a matrix for such events that is much closer to home than the so-called "Islamic terrorism". The film provides solid evidence for the true reasons behind the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, whose unfolding is described in chilling detail in a document called "Project for the New American Century", published in the year 2,000, that seems to have served as the actual blueprint for such dramatic events.
The terrorists aren’t who you think they are. Throughout history, criminal elements inside governments have carried out terror attacks against their own populations as a pretext to enslave them. TerrorStorm reveals how, in the last hundred years, Western leaders have repeatedly murdered their own citizens while posing as their saviors.
TerrorStorm asserts that that September 11th, the attacks of 7/7 in London, and many other terrorist events were self-inflicted wounds. You will witness British Special Forces troops caught in the act of staging terror attacks in Iraq and see official US government documents laying out plans to hijack passenger planes by remote control. You will learn how the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the US-backed Iranian coup of 1953 are all interconnected false-flag terror events. This powerful documentary explores the mindset of the average brainwashed Westerner. It delves deeply in to the systems of control which have been scientifically-crafted to imprison their minds and keep their eyes closed to the realities of the world around them. Special Features - Over an hour of the most powerful moments from the historic 9/11 & The Neo-Con Agenda Symposium in Los Angeles, California featuring speeches and commentary by world-renowned experts who expose 9/11 as an inside job including: * BYU Physics Professor Steven E. Jones * Actor and Activist Charlie Sheen * StarWars Program progenitor Lt. Col. Bob Bowman * Filmmaker Alex Jones * 9/11 Scholars for Truth Founder James Fetzer * Terrorism Expert and Historian Webster G. Tarpley - Trailers from other Alex Jones documentary films - Music by A Scanner Darkly's Graham Reynolds.
Howard Zinn, who has died of a heart attack aged 87, was a much-loved and much-vituperated icon of the American left. He was an activist and historian, and later a dramatist, but always a courageous and articulate campaigner for his vision of a just and peaceful America.
As a white teacher at the black SpelmanCollege for women in Atlanta, Georgia, he was a mentor to and later the historian of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC), the radical student wing of the civil rights movement. In 1963 he was dismissed from Spelman for advocating a less "ladylike" concept of women's education, and moved to BostonUniversity, where he taught political science for 24 years.
In 1980 he published A People's History of the United States, an account that stressed injustices and oppression and resurrected forgotten voices, which has sold more than 1m copies.
Zinn always said he was not a pacifist, because he thought it was too absolute a position. But he was a passionate and highly articulate critic of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. As a bombardier during the second world war, he was involved in the first use of napalm as a weapon, and could never quite forgive himself for what he regarded as a crime against German soldiers, as well as French civilians.
Zinn's parents were Jewish immigrants to the US, with very limited education, who settled in Brooklyn, New York, and worked in factories. His father came from Austria-Hungary and his mother from Irkutsk in Siberia. There were no books in the house when he was growing up, until his father bought him a 25-cent edition of the works of Dickens, an offer from an evening newspaper.
Zinn worked in a shipyard after high school and was involved in demonstrations against fascism in the 1930s. He joined the US Army Air Force and during the war, flew from bases in England over France, Germany and his father's native Hungary. The napalm incident, involving petroleum jelly that causes terrible burns, was over Royan in western France.
After the war, he went back to interview victims of the bombing, and later wrote about it in two books. His own experience and his subsequent interviews led him to conclude that the bombing had been ordered more to enhance the careers of senior officers than for any military imperative, and he later wrote about the ethics of bombing in the context of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tokyo and Dresden, as well as Iraq.
Under the GI Bill, Zinn studied history at New YorkUniversity. He then went to Columbia, where he earned an MA in 1952 with a thesis about a famous coalminers' strike in Colorado, then obtained his PhD with a dissertation about the career in Congress of Fiorello LaGuardia, the reforming mayor of New York. He studied at Columbia under Henry Steele Commager and Richard Hofstadter. From Hofstadter he learned, as he said later, that American liberals were not as liberal as the word implied, and that the two threads that ran through all American history were nationalism and capitalism.
Zinn went to Spelman in 1956. Among his students were Maria Wright Edelman, the campaigner for children's rights, and the future novelist Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple.
He soon became involved with the SNCC and Martin Luther King's civil rights campaign. In 1964 he published SNCC: The New Abolitionists. The book ends with a statement of his creed. What made SNCC a threat to the establishment, he wrote, was "its rejection of authority; its fearlessness in the face of overwhelming power; its indifference to respectability". Its radicalism, he went on, "is not an ideology but a mood. Moods are harder to define. They are also harder to imprison."
Zinn became involved in a conflict with the authorities at Spelman over his insistence that its students should not be trained to be ladies, but should be actively involved in politics. Although he theoretically had tenure, he was fired. At BostonUniversity his course on civil liberties was immensely popular.
He was soon involved in the campaign against the Vietnam war. When Daniel Ellsberg, a previously gung-ho John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson administration official, came out against the war, he gave one copy of the Pentagon Papers (officially titled United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, the government's secret history of the war) to Zinn and his wife, Roslyn. Zinn and Noam Chomsky edited what became known as the Mike Gravel edition, published in Boston in 1971-72 by the Beacon Press.
While the war was still raging, Zinn travelled to Hanoi with the Rev Daniel Berrigan – one of the two Berrigan brothers, priests jailed for their anti-war activities – and successfully negotiated the release of three captured US airmen.
For decades, he poured out articles attacking war and government secrecy. His energy and generosity extended to writing introductions to more than 30 books by other writers.
When President Ronald Reagan bombed Tripoli in 1986, Zinn wrote: "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable." He denounced the invasion of Iraq and also criticised President Barack Obama's intensification of the war in Afghanistan. He was sharply attacked in Israel and by many of his fellow American Jews for saying that war was morally the equivalent of terrorism.
Not surprisingly, he drew fierce criticism from conservatives. And although his People's History was hugely popular among students, as well as the general public, even liberal historians were critical of its relentless castigation of the darker side of American history. In the New York Times, for example, Eric Foner called it "a deeply pessimistic vision of the American experience" and pointed out that "blacks, Indians, women and labourers appear either as rebels or as victims. Less dramatic but more typical lives – people struggling to survive with dignity in difficult circumstances – receive little attention." Michael Kammen, himself a historian of American radicalism, said the book was not a success.
What few could deny was the tenacity of Zinn's commitment to his core belief – that people should stand up for their rights and their vision of the good society. "Where progress has been made," he wrote near the end of his life, "wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it's been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn't just moan. They worked, they acted, they organised, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that's what we have to do today."
Roslyn died in 2008. Zinn is survived by a daughter and a son.
George Binette writes: By the time I reached BostonUniversity in September 1978 as an undergraduate, Howard Zinn had already lectured there for 14 years and become a local legend. The mere mention of his name polarised opinion among students and staff alike.
At first I found his lectures disorganised, bordering on the chaotic. But I soon came to appreciate that through subtly weaving considerable erudition with personal reminiscence, he was challenging the received and often cherished assumptions about US history among young people.
In person Zinn frequently projected a Zen-like calm. He seemed to possess exceptional patience, both for naive admirers and stridently reactionary critics, though he never concealed a zealous passion against injustice. And in contrast to many left-leaning academics, he combined his classroom stance with practical action.
As an officer of the Boston lecturers' union, Zinn was one of the leaders of a spring 1979 strike against the college administration. After the lecturers had suspended their action, low-paid administrative and clerical workers mounted their own strike. Along with four other lecturers, Zinn refused to cross their picket lines, thus risking suspension. But he continued to teach, inviting students to join him on a college lawn. He struggled to be heard over the traffic din on Commonwealth Avenue, but ultimately delivered an inspiring talk that placed the administrative workers' fight in the context of the American labour movement's often bloody history.
• Howard Zinn, historian and activist, born 24 August 1922; died 27 January 2010
SANTA'S WORKSHOP takes you to the real world of China's toy factories. Workers tell us about long working hours, low wages, and dangerous work places. Those who protest or try to organize trade unions risk imprisonment. Low labour costs attract more and more companies to China. Today more than 75% of our toys are made in China. But this industry takes its toll on the workers and on the environment. The European (and American) buyers blame bad conditions on the Chinese suppliers. But they say that increasingly hard competition gives them no option. Who should we believe? And what can you do to bring about a fairer and more humane toy trade? [PLEASE WATCH THIS INCREDIBLY INFORMATIVE DOCUMENTARY REGARDING SLAVERY OVERSEAS]
ONLY A SHORT SEGMENT IN THE BEGINNING HAS ENGLISH SUBTITLES, THE REST IS SPOKEN ENGLISH*
Winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross? "The Road to Guantanamo" is the terrifying first-hand account of three British citizens who were held for two years without charges in the U.S: military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Known as the ?Tipton Three,? in reference to their home town in Britain, the three were eventually returned to Britain and released, still no formal charges were made against them at any time during their ordeal.
The film has already engendered significant controversy due to its critical stance towards the American and British governments. Part documentary, part dramatization, the film chronicles the sequence of events that led from the trio setting out from Tipton in the British Midlands for a wedding in Pakistan, to their crossing the Afghanistan border just as the U.S. began its bombing campaign, to their eventual capture by the Northern Alliance and their imprisonment in Camp X-Ray and later at Camp Delta in Guantanamo.
Starring: Farhad Harun, Arfan Usman, Rizwan Ahmed, Waqar Siddiqi, Shahid Iqbal Directed by: Michael Winterbottom, Mat Whitecross 95 minutes, UK (2006), In this compelling docudrama by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, the 'Tipton Three' narrate their own experiences in America's controversial offshore detention camp The Road To Guantánamo opens with archive footage of George W Bush, flanked by a stern-faced Tony Blair, declaring his certain knowledge that all the detainees held in Guantánamo are "bad people". Everything that follows is designed to turn these words inside out, as three young British Muslims tell the story of how they came to be in US custody at Guantánamo for over two years, and discuss the Kafkaesque horrors that awaited them there, until finally they were released without charge or apology. The title may evoke the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope 'Road' movies of the 1940s, travel-themed musical comedies with a vaguely racist depiction of non-Americans, but the exotic journey embarked upon by the so-called 'Tipton Three' was to take them into areas that were politically incorrect in an altogether different way.
It would be easy to criticise The Road to Guantánamo for being one-sided (it is), and for failing to contextualise the conduct of the US (there is not even a passing mention of 9/11), but such objections miss the point. Many times Bush, Blair and other politicians have used their considerable public platforms to present a similarly partisan, at times even subsequently discredited justification for different aspects of their 'War on Terror', including the unlimited detention without trial of men like the Tipton Three. The trio, and the more than 800 prisoners who remain at America's Cuban base, were not able to communicate their version of events to a lawyer or judge, let alone to the outside world. The Road To Guantánamo gives them their day in court, and the story these "bad people" tell is one that well deserves a hearing.
