mirror of
https://github.com/nhammer514/textfiles-politics.git
synced 2024-10-01 01:15:38 -04:00
324 lines
21 KiB
HTML
324 lines
21 KiB
HTML
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
|
|
<head>
|
|
<title>tv-stuff</title>
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../CSSstyle.css"/>
|
|
<!--Fill in your link line for CSS and JS in the XSLT here! -->
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
<h1 id="title-index">tv-stuff</h1>
|
|
<div id="conspiracy">
|
|
<p>Turn Off Your Television!!</p>
|
|
<p>by L. Wolfe </p>
|
|
<p>Hey buddy, I'm talking to you. Yes, you, the guy sitting in front of
|
|
the television. Turn down the sound a bit, so that you can hear what
|
|
I am saying.
|
|
|
|
Now, try to concentrate on what I am going to say. I want to talk to you
|
|
about your favorite pastime. No, it's not baseball or football, although it
|
|
does have something to do with your interest in spectator sports. I'm
|
|
talking about what you were just doing: watching television. </p>
|
|
<p> Do you have any idea about how much time you spend in front of the
|
|
television set? According to the latest studies, the average American now
|
|
spends between five and six hours a day watching television. Let's put that in
|
|
perspective: that is more time than you spend doing anything else but sleeping
|
|
or working, if you are lucky enough to still have a job. That's more time than
|
|
you spend eating, more time than you spend with your wife alone, more time
|
|
than with the kids. </p>
|
|
<p> It's even worse with your children. According to these same
|
|
studies, young children below school age watch more than eight hours each
|
|
day. School age children watch a little under eight hours a day. In 1980, the
|
|
average 20-year-old had watched the equivalent of 14 months of television
|
|
in his or her brief lifetime. {That's 14 months, 24 hours a day.} More
|
|
recent figures show that the numbers have climbed: the 20-year-old has
|
|
spent closer to two full years of his or her life in front of the
|
|
television set. </p>
|
|
<p> At the same time, the researchers have noted a disturbing phenomena. It
|
|
seems that we Americans are getting progressively more {stupid}.
|
|
They note a decline in reading and comprehension levels in all age groups
|
|
tested. Americans read less and understand what they read less than
|
|
they did 10 years ago, less than they have at any time since research
|
|
began to study such things. As for writing skills, Americans are, in general,
|
|
unable to write more than a few simple sentences. We are among the least
|
|
literate people on this planet, and we're getting worse. </p>
|
|
<p> It's the change--the constant trendline downward--that interests
|
|
these researchers. More than one study has correlated this increasing
|
|
stupidity of our population to the amount of television they watch.
|
|
Interestingly, the studies found that it doesn't matter what people watch,
|
|
whether it's "The Simpsons'' or "McNeil/Lehrer,'' or "Murphy Brown''
|
|
or "Nightline':' the more television you watch, the {less literate, the
|
|
more stupid} you are. </p>
|
|
<p> The growth in television watching had surprised some of the researchers.
|
|
Back a decade ago, they were predicting that television watching would level
|
|
off and might actually decline. It had reached an absolute saturation point.
|
|
They were right for so-called network television; figures show a steady
|
|
dropoff of viewership. But that drop is more than made up for by the growth of
|
|
cable television, with its smorgasbord of channels, one for almost every
|
|
perversion. Especially in urban and suburban areas, Americans are hard-wired
|
|
to more than 100 different channels that provide them with all
|
|
news, like CNN, all movies, all comedy, all sports, all weather, all financial
|
|
news and a liberal dose of straight pornography. </p>
|
|
<p> The researchers had also failed to predict the market penetration of first
|
|
beta and then VHS video recorders; they made it possible to watch one thing and
|
|
record another for later viewing. They also offered access to movies not
|
|
available on networks or even cable channels as well as home videos,
|
|
recorded on your own little camcorder. The proliferation of home video
|
|
equipment has involved families in video-related activities which are not
|
|
even considered in the cumulative totals for time Americans spend
|
|
watching television. </p>
|
|
<p> You might not actually realize how much you are watching television. But
|
|
think for a moment. When you come home, you turn the television on, if it isn't
|
|
on already. You read the paper with it on, half glancing at what is on the
|
|
screen, catching a bit of the news, or the plot of a show. You eat with it on,
|
|
maybe in the background, listening for a score or something that happens to a
|
|
character in a show you follow. When something you are interested in, a show
|
|
or basketball game, is on, the set becomes the center of attention. So
|
|
your attention to what is on may vary in intensity, but there is almost no
|
|
point when you are home, and inside, and have the set completely off. Isn't
|
|
that right? </p>
|
|
<p> The studies did not break down the periods of time people watched
|
|
television, according to the intensity of their viewing. But the point is
|
|
still made: you compulsively turn the television on and spend a good portion
|
|
of your waking hours glued to the tube. And the studies also showed that many
|
|
people can't sleep without the television turned on! </p>
|
|
<p> Brainwashing
|
|
|
|
Now, I'm sure you have heard that watching too much television is bad for
|
|
your health. They put stories like that on the evening news. Bad for your eyes
|
|
to stare at the screen, they say. Especially bad if you sit too close.
|
|
Well, I want to make another point. We've already shown that you are
|
|
addicted to the tube, watching it between six and eight hour a day. But
|
|
it is an addiction that {brainwashes} you.
|
|
|
|
There are two kinds of brainwashing. The one that's called {hard}
|
|
brainwashing is the type you're most familiar with. You've got a pretty good
|
|
image of it from some of those old Korean war movies. They take some guy,
|
|
an American patriot, drag him into a room, torture him, pump him full of
|
|
drugs, and after a struggle, get him to renounce his country and his beliefs.
|
|
He usually undergoes a personality change, signified by an ever-present
|
|
smile and blank stare. </p>
|
|
<p> This brainwashing is called {hard} because its methods are
|
|
overt. The controlled environment is obvious to the victim; so is the
|
|
terror. The victim is overwhelmed by a seemingly omnipotent external force,
|
|
and a feeling of intense isolation is induced. The victim's moral strength is
|
|
sapped, and slowly he embraces his torturers. It is man's moral strength
|
|
that informs and orders his power of reason; without it, the mind becomes
|
|
little more than a recording machine waiting for imprints.
|
|
|
|
No one is saying that you have been a victim of {hard}
|
|
brainwashing. But you have been brainwashed, just as effectively as
|
|
those people in the movies. The blank stare? Did you ever look at what you
|
|
look like while watching television? If the angle is right, you might catch
|
|
your own reflection in the screen. Jaw slightly open, lips relaxed into a
|
|
smile. The blank stare of a television zombie.
|
|
|
|
This is {soft} brainwashing, even more effective because its victims
|
|
go about their lives unaware of what is being done to them. </p>
|
|
<p> Television, with its reach into nearly every American home, creates the
|
|
basis for the mass brainwashing of citizens, like you. It works on a
|
|
principle of {tension and release}. Create tension, in a controlled
|
|
environment, increasing the level of stress. Then provide a series
|
|
of choices that provide release from the tension. As long as the victim
|
|
believes that the choices presented are the {only} choices available,
|
|
even if they are at first glance unacceptable, he will nevertheless,
|
|
ultimately seek release by choosing one of these unacceptable choices. </p>
|
|
<p> Under these circumstances, in a brainwashing, controlled environment,
|
|
such choice-making is not a "rational'' experience. It does not
|
|
involve the use of man's creative mental powers; instead man is
|
|
conditioned, like an animal, to respond to the tension, by seeking release. </p>
|
|
<p> The key to the success of this brainwashing process is the regulation
|
|
of both the tension and the perceived choices. As long as both are
|
|
controlled, then the range of outcomes is also controlled. The victim is
|
|
induced to walk down one of several pathways acceptable for his
|
|
controllers. </p>
|
|
<p> The brainwashers call the tension-filled environment {social
|
|
turbulence}. The last decades have been full of such {social
|
|
turbulence}--economic collapse, regional wars, population disasters,
|
|
ecological and biological catastrophes. {Social turbulence} creates
|
|
crises in perceptions, causing people to lose their bearings. Adrift and
|
|
confused, people seek release from the tension, following paths that appear to
|
|
lead to a simpler, less tension-filled life. There is no time in such a
|
|
process for rational consideration of complicated problems. </p>
|
|
<p> Television is the key vehicle for presenting both the tension and the
|
|
choices. It brings you the images of the tension, and serves up simple
|
|
answers. Television, in its world of semi-reality, of illusion, of escape
|
|
from reality, {is itself the single most important release from our
|
|
tension-wracked existence.} Eight hours a day, every day, through its
|
|
programming, you are being programmed. </p>
|
|
<p> If you doubt me, think about one important choice that you have made
|
|
recently that was not in some way influenced by something that you have
|
|
seen on television. I bet you can't think of one. That's how controlled you
|
|
are. </p>
|
|
<p> Who's Doing It
|
|
|
|
But don't take my word for it. Ten years ago we spoke to a man from a think
|
|
tank called the Futures Group in Connecticut. Hal Becker had spent more
|
|
than 20 years of his life manipulating the minds of the leaders of our
|
|
society. Listen to what he said: </p>
|
|
<p> {"I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I
|
|
want him to. Just let me control television. Americans are wired into
|
|
their television sets. Over the last 30 years, they have come to look at their
|
|
television sets and the images on the screen as reality. You put something on
|
|
television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the television set
|
|
contradicts the images, people start changing the world to make it more like
|
|
the images and sounds of their television. Because its influence is so
|
|
great, so pervasive, it has become part of our lives. You lose your sense of
|
|
what is being done to you, but your mind is being shaped and
|
|
moulded.''} </p>
|
|
<p> "Your mind is being shaped and moulded.'' If that doesn't sound like
|
|
brainwashing, I don't know what is. Becker speaks with the elan of a
|
|
network of brainwashers who have been programming your lives, especially
|
|
since the advent of television as a "mass medium'' in the late 1940s and
|
|
early 1950s. This network numbers several tens of thousands worldwide.
|
|
Occasionally one appears on the nightly news to tell you what {you} are
|
|
thinking, by reporting the latest "opinion polls.'' But for the most
|
|
part, they work behind the scenes, speaking to themselves and writing
|
|
papers for their own internal distribution. </p>
|
|
<p> And though they work for many diverse groups, these brainwashers are
|
|
united by a common world view and common method. It is the world view of
|
|
a small elite, whose financial and political power rests in institutions
|
|
that pass this power on from generation to generation. They view the common
|
|
folk like yourself as little better than beasts of burden to be controlled
|
|
and manipulated by a semi-feudal international oligarchy, whose wealth,
|
|
power and bloodlines entitle them to rule. </p>
|
|
<p> One of the oligarchy's institutions for manipulation of
|
|
populations is located in a suburb of London called Tavistock. The Tavistock
|
|
Institute for Human Relations, which also has a branch in Sussex, England, is
|
|
the "mother'' for much of this extended network, of which Becker is a
|
|
member. They are the specialists in {both} hard and soft brainwashing. </p>
|
|
<p> The Tavistock Institute is the psychological warfare arm of the
|
|
British Royal household. The oligarchs behind Tavistock, and similar outfits
|
|
in the United States and elsewhere, are determined that you should be a
|
|
television addict, sucking up a daily dose of brainwashing from the "tube;''
|
|
that is how they control you. </p>
|
|
<p> Like his fellow brainwashers, Becker prides himself in knowing the
|
|
minds of his victims. He calls them "saps.'' Man, he told an interviewer,
|
|
should be called "homo the sap.'' </p>
|
|
<p> "Soft'' brainwashing by television works through power of
|
|
suggestion. Television watching creates a state of drugged-like oblivion to
|
|
outside reality. The mind, its perceptions dulled by habituated
|
|
viewing, is ready to accept any new illusion of reality as presented on the
|
|
tube. The mind, in its drugged-like stupor of television watching, is
|
|
prepared to accept that the images that television {suggests} as
|
|
reality {are} reality. It will then struggle to form fit a
|
|
contradictory reality into television image, just as Becker claims. </p>
|
|
<p> Another Tavistock brainwasher, Fred Emery, who studied television for
|
|
25 years, confirms this. The television signal itself, he found, puts the
|
|
viewer in this state of drugged-like oblivion. Emery writes: "Television as
|
|
a media consists of a constant visual signal of 50 half-frames per second.
|
|
Our hypotheses regarding this essential nature of the medium itself are: </p>
|
|
<p> "1) The constant visual stimulus fixates the viewer and causes the
|
|
habituation of response. The prefrontal and association areas of the cortex are
|
|
effectively dominated by the signal, the screen. </p>
|
|
<p> "2) The left cortical hemisphere--the center of visual and
|
|
analytical calculating processes--is effectively reduced in its functioning
|
|
to tracking changing images on the screen. </p>
|
|
<p> "3) Therefore, provided, the viewer keeps looking, he is unlikely to
|
|
reflect on what he is doing and what he is viewing. That is, he will be aware,
|
|
but unaware of his awareness.... </p>
|
|
<p> "In other words, television can be seen partly as the technological
|
|
analogue of the hypnotist.'' </p>
|
|
<p> The key to making the brainwashing work is the {repetition of
|
|
suggestion} over time. With people watching the tube for 6 to 8 hours a
|
|
day, there is plenty of time for such repeated suggestion. </p>
|
|
<p> Some Examples
|
|
|
|
Let's look at an example to make things a bit clearer. Think back about
|
|
20 years ago. Think about what you thought about certain issues of the
|
|
day. Think about those same issues today; notice how you seemed to change
|
|
{your} mind about them, to become more tolerant of things you
|
|
opposed vehemently before. It's your television watching that changed your
|
|
mind, or to use Becker's terms, "shaped your perceptions.'' </p>
|
|
<p> Twenty years ago, most people thought that the lunacy that is now
|
|
called environmentalism, the idea that animals and plants should be protected
|
|
on an equal basis with human life, was screwy. It went against the basic
|
|
concept of Christian civilization that man is a higher species than and
|
|
distinct from the animals, and that it is man, by virtue of his being made in
|
|
the image of the living God, whose life is sacred. That was 20 years ago. But
|
|
now, many people, maybe even you, seem to think otherwise; there are even laws
|
|
that say so. </p>
|
|
<p> This contrary, anti-human view of man being no more than equal to animals
|
|
and plants was inserted into our consciousness by the suggestion of
|
|
television. Environmental lunacy was scripted into network television shows,
|
|
into televised movies, and into the news. It started slowly, but picked up
|
|
steam. Environmental spokesmen were increasingly seen in the favorable glow
|
|
of television. Those who opposed this view were shown in an unfavorable way.
|
|
It was done over time, with repetition. If you weren't completely won over, you
|
|
were made tolerant of the views of environmental lunatics whose statements
|
|
were morally and scientifically unsound.
|
|
|
|
Let's take a more recent example: the war against Iraq. That was a war
|
|
made for television. In fact, it was a war {organized} through
|
|
television. Think back a year: How were Americans prepared for the eventual
|
|
slaughter of Iraqi women and children? Images on the screen: Saddam Hussein,
|
|
on one side, Hitler on the other. The images repeated in newscasts, backed up
|
|
by scenes of alleged atrocities in Kuwait. Then the war itself: the
|
|
video-game like images of "smart'' weapons killing Iraqi targets. </p>
|
|
<p> Finally, the American military commander-in-chief Gen. Norman
|
|
Schwartzkopf, conducting a final press briefing that was consciously
|
|
orchestrated to resemble the winning Superbowl coach describing his victory. </p>
|
|
<p> Those were the images that overwhelmed our population. Only now,
|
|
months later, do we find out that the images had nothing to do with reality.
|
|
The Iraqi "atrocities'' in Kuwait and elsewhere were exaggerated. Our
|
|
"smart'' weapons like the famous <span class="NORP" title="NORP">Patriot</span> anti-missile system didn't
|
|
really work. Oh, and the casualty figures: it seems that we murdered far
|
|
more women and children than we did soldiers. Hardly a "glorious
|
|
victory.'' But while it might have made a difference if people knew this while
|
|
the war was being planned or in progress, polls show that Americans no
|
|
longer find the war or any stories about it "interesting.'' </p>
|
|
<p> Looking at the question more broadly, where did your children get
|
|
most of their values, if not from what they saw on television? Parents might
|
|
counteract the influence of the infernal box, but they could not
|
|
overcome it. How could they, if they themselves have been brainwashed by the
|
|
same box and if their children spend more time with it than them? Studies
|
|
show that most of television programming is geared to a less than
|
|
5th grade comprehension level; parents, like you, are themselves being
|
|
remade in the infantile images of the television screen. All of society
|
|
becomes more infantile, more easily controllable. </p>
|
|
<p> As Emery explains: {"We are proposing that television as a simple
|
|
constant and repetitive and ambiguous visual stimulus, gradually closes down
|
|
the central nervous system of man.''} </p>
|
|
<p> Becker holds a similar view of the effect of television on American's
|
|
ability to think: {"Americans don't really think--they have opinions
|
|
and feelings. Television creates the opinion and then validates it.''} </p>
|
|
<p> Nowhere is this clearer than with politics. Television tells Americans
|
|
what to think about politicians, restricting choices to those acceptable
|
|
to the oligarchs whose financial power controls networks and major cable
|
|
channels. It tells people what has been said and what is "important.''
|
|
Everything else is filtered out. You are told who can win and who can't. And
|
|
few people have the urge to look behind the images in the screen, to seek
|
|
content and truth in ideas and look for a high quality of leadership. </p>
|
|
<p> Such an important matter as choosing a president becomes the same as
|
|
choosing a box of laundry detergent: a set of possibilities, whose limits are
|
|
determined, by the images on the screen. You are given the appearance of
|
|
freedom of choice, but that you have neither freedom nor real choice. That
|
|
is how the brainwashing works. </p>
|
|
<p> "Are they brainwashed by the tube,'' said Becker to the interviewer.
|
|
"It is really more than that. I think that people have lost the ability to
|
|
relate the images of their own lives without television intervening to tell
|
|
them what it means. That is what we really mean when we say that we have a
|
|
wired society.'' </p>
|
|
<p> Turn It Off!
|
|
|
|
That was ten years ago. It has gotten far worse since then. In coming
|
|
issues, we will show you the brainwashers' vision of a hell on earth
|
|
and how television is being used to get us there; we will discuss television
|
|
programming, revealing how it has helped produce what is called a
|
|
"paradigm'' shift in values, creating an immoral society; we will explain how
|
|
the news is presented and how its presentation has been used to destroy
|
|
the English language; we will discuss the mass entertainment media, showing
|
|
who controls it and how; we will deal with America's addiction to
|
|
spectator sports and show how that too has helped make you passive and stupid;
|
|
and finally, we will show where we are headed, if we can't break our addiction
|
|
to the tube. </p>
|
|
<p> So, after what I just told you, what do say, buddy? Do you want to
|
|
stay stupid and let your country go to hell in a basket? Why don't you just
|
|
walk over to the set and turn it off. That's right, completely off. Go on,
|
|
you can do it. Now isn't that better? Don't you feel a little better already?
|
|
You've just taken the first step in deprogramming yourself. It wasn't that
|
|
hard, was it? Until we speak again, try to keep it off. Now that will be a bit
|
|
harder. </p>
|
|
<p>From New Federalist V6, #29. </p>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|