Valentine Bonnaire

Yesterday we looked at how politicians might use symbols and one line statements or “glittering generalities” to drum up support for themselves.  Today, we’ll talk about using fear as a method of controlling the proletariat because we are seeing it happen in this election.  Fear can be engineered on very subtle levels or used to create an impact in order to sway public opinion in a very sophisticated way.  Let’s look at the Obama campagain’s use of this emotion as contrasted with the “glittering generalities” and white propaganda being used at first as advertising motifs.  Has David Axelrod created a monster?  That is our question of the day.

So, how might a candidate manipulate a populace by using fear?  Let’s use the Jeremiah Wright incident.  Here is a short film by Flineo which looks at how “doublespeak” is being used by Barack Obama.

Flineo’s film “The Game of Expedience” looks at Obama’s history with Wright in fresh ways…

White America did not expect the vitriol it saw coming from Reverend Wright at the pulpit.  We saw HATE.  This is not an emotion the American people have felt towards each other in our generation.  Since the Civil Rights era Americans have been working to stamp out racism.  All of a sudden, we are seeing it coming from the Black Church.  This is a politics of division.  And a politics of fear.

What we didn’t know, if we hadn’t read Obama’s book was that he had already written about how he has felt about “white folks” for years.  This is a must read, and it’s been unpacked over at Savage politics.com by J. Cifre.  He is calling Obama out on his lies.  I’ll cite from some examples in the piece, but it’s important to read the whole thing to grasp it in light of the veiled threats coming from the campaign in terms of trying to force his opponent Hillary Clinton out of the race prematurely.  Why?  Because this is the sort of “fear” event that can be manufactured by a group using propaganda as a control mechanism.

Wright, Lies, and Videotapes

“…In a clearly opportunist and political move, Barack Hussein Obama finally decided to “divorce” himself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright, after finding out that all the polls were showing his numbers sliding in a dramatic downward spiral, all thanks to the ego of his 20 year spiritual guide and mentor. Obama’s political posturing is exemplified by the fact that he decided to blatantly lie about his affinity to Wright’s message and mission. In said conference, Obama stated that NONE of Wright’s recent comments reflected his own views and that they “CONTRADICTED” his philosophical perspectives, all of which have nonetheless been expressed in his own books and other political works.

All of Obama’s books are filled with passages that express an identical political and racial perspective about the United States, and ventilates an almost cryptic hatred of it’s majority population: White Americans. Let’s first look at a few quotes from Obama’s best selling book ‘Dreams From My Father‘, to have a valid point of comparison:…”

You will be surprised at the levels of Black Nationalism apparent after following this read.  Now, why would striking fear into a portion of the populace work as a propaganda technique?  It’s classic when you are trying to divide and conquer a people.  One critique I have of the entire Obama camp is its efforts to divide and conquer the Democratic Party via target marketing to specific segments of it.

It’s extremely easy to sit in a church pew and listen to years worth of sermons and gain black votes isn’t it?  Flineo’s film documents how to build a following above.  To discount Jeremiah Wright now though?

How we see this is a classic fear mongering tactic used in propaganda…(to be continued!)

And here is SourceWatch.com on that…stay tuned…(more on this will come this afternoon)…

Motivated by fear, fear as propaganda

Fear is one of the most primordial human emotions and therefore lends itself to effective use by propagandists. Human beings can do great and terrible things when motivated by fear. Fear is essentially the survival instinct kicking in: “I’d better watch out because you can harm me.” Fear being fundamentally irrational, it is one of the techniques most widely used by propagandists.

“When a propagandist warns members of [his/her] audience that disaster will result if [it does] not follow a particular course of action, [he/she] is using the fear appeal,” observes the Propaganda Critic. “By playing on the audience’s deep-seated fears, practitioners of this technique hope to redirect attention away from the merits of a particular proposal and toward steps that can be taken to reduce the fear.”

Specific types of fears include xenophobia (fear of foreigners), fear of terrorism, crime, economic hardship, ecological disaster, disease, overpopulation, invasion of privacy, or discrimination. With such a broad spectrum of fear, the propagandizer can pick relevant phobias and incorporate them into his/her messages. The power of this propaganda technique can be multiplied when it is exploited in conjunction with uncertainty and doubt, that is, when information at hand is not sufficient enough to completely rule out the cause of the fear. In order to instill fear, uncertainty and doubt, propagandists exploit general ignorance.

Fear is a form of agitprop…(agitation propaganda) it’s a way to divide groups but also gain momentum and support at the same time.  Here is a piece of agitprop art.  What do you see happening in the art?  What are these two doing, what is the movement of their bodies and what are they carrying.  There is the “flag” motif again we saw the last few days.  Can you notice other symbol systems at work scattered around this propaganda poster?