The ruling elite can, through clandestine programming and seemingly innocuous entertainment, influence the way millions of minds think, invariably transforming free thought into shackled reasoning. Over decades of methodical molding and development, beginning at the earliest possible age of a human being, those who control television oftentimes succeed in altering and indeed controlling the opinions, beliefs and thoughts of a person. Thus, the goals and views of the elite are transmuted onto those who stand not to benefit by the beliefs they now possess and the thoughts they have been brainwashed to accept.
This silent conditioning, achieved willingly by society, allowed inside the home by millions of families, absorbed into the mainstream and transported over the airwaves to all corners of the nation, creates entire armies of sentient beings conditioned never to question authority or the actions of governance. Over decades of assimilation and dumbed-down programming, the population comes to accept that fate has accorded them the role of sheeple in the games of social Darwinism and human caste systems. Thus, the interests of the elite and the control of the powerful are allowed to continue uninterrupted, without protest, dissent or challenge, assured of dominance, slavery and enduring reign over the sheeple of America.
In today’s day and age, those who control television are corporations and the fledgling corporatists now in possession of government. The rise of fascism in America has also given rise to the mutually beneficial interests of both government and corporations, making the use and control of television of utmost importance to the ruling elite. With government and business fusing together, the resources of both entities can join forces to achieve the desired regimen of thought control, thereby having a greater impact in controlling more of the population, for longer periods of time, and in greater capacity, both by mass manipulation and by offering exactly what the human/animal brain wants most, distraction. Thus, mass media serves a paramount importance in the rise of corporatism, using all tools at its disposal to condition, manipulate, indoctrinate, distract and transform the masses, steering the population in the direction both government and business wants us to head in, creating massive armies of drones marching lock step in service of, and controlled by, the corporatist few.
With Americans watching so much television on a weekly basis, discarding books of enlightenment for monitors of idiocy, preferring the drug of fantasy over the sobering realm of reality, no longer capable of analytical, logical thought, choosing to incorporate as their own the views, beliefs and opinions of corporate media, the keepers at the gate are free to do as they please, disseminating lies, distortions, manipulations, propaganda and fictions into our homes and the minds of our family, young and old, never discriminating and always flowing in the interest of the Establishment.
From birth they have us hooked with their highly addicting programming, from cartoons to sitcoms to movies to sports to newscasts to niche channels, using our animal emotions and passions to intravenously feed us their vast array of products and opinions and services and trends and beliefs. From birth the manipulation of brainwaves begins, altering development, robbing innocence, supplanting free thought with manipulated ideas tested in marketing laboratories, making consumers and producers of us and enslaving our biological and psychological needs to those outcomes that offer them the greatest revenue, profit and rise to power.
In time we are conditioned to become slaves to the system, their system, becoming unquestioning automatons never wondering why it is that the same system we are a part of is intent on keeping us subjugated and exploited, why we work the hours we work, why we work five days instead of four, why we devote more time to work than to our children, why we put up with office politics, why we put up with long and stressful commutes, why our pay is what it is, why we continue watching television, why we place blind faith in immoral politicians, why we ever supported an ill begotten war, why we vote against our own interests, why we continue shopping for goods we don’t need, why we purchase the products we buy, why we never question authority or speak truth to power.
As the brainwashing continues, and as the last remaining vestiges of free thought are chained to the gallows of corporate control, we fail to see that we have become a mere pawn to the system, an army of worker bees and soldier ants, one cog in a giant engine, exploited for our energy and our existence, a part easily replaceable, easily discarded, easily abandoned. Through the devastating dumbing-down mechanisms of television, along with the abandonment of education and the comfort of American middle class life, the Establishment is assured of a population acquiescent and pacified, remaining silent in times of disquieting conundrums, made merry by the plethora of bread and circus emanating throughout the land.
The genius of the American Establishment, learned after World War II, was in sacrificing a minute piece of the American pie to the growing middle class – that would have previously been greedily kept – in order to maintain the masses in an utter state of comfort, thus creating an environment of silent passivity, complacency and calm, where the masses would have nothing to protest or dissent over. The Establishment learned that a citizenry made comfortable in life would not protest the inevitable enslavement of their lives, or of their children. It learned that slavery could be maintained, and even sought by the slaves themselves, by offering a few more morsels, crumbs and bones than before, enough to live in comfort and thus never being given the opportunity to seek revolution, challenge authority or protest the status quo. By perpetually satisfying our mammalian passions, needs and emotions with a larger sliver of the prosperity pie, the Establishment saw that production increased, consumption rose exponentially, a calmer society permeated, citizens actually further enslaved themselves and, in the end, the same products produced by the middle class invariably were consumed by them as well, thus returning the allocation of resources back to the Establishment.
The television would only serve the interests of the Establishment even further by distracting the enslaved masses in search of escapism with fantasy-filled media, by programming young minds to the dictates of the system and by saturating the airwaves with the products and services produced by the masses, for the consumption of the masses, and the growing power of the Establishment. For years this worked marvelously, in the process helping to make American citizens the most comfortable people on Earth, given an overabundance of products by which to enjoy life, a growing standard of living and materialistic wealth beyond anything seen in human history. Yet the added morsels and crumbs and bones and fictions given us could not hide the control over our daily lives, our indebtedness to the system, our impotence versus power and our continued subservience to the Establishment.
The Soviet Communist Paradigm
The full introduction of the television would also be used for more sinister methods, arriving just in time to see the emergence of the elite’s control of the masses through fear and xenophobia, using the manufacture and marketing of enemies, such as the dreaded Soviet Communist, to better control the direction of the nation and the population. The Establishment became fully aware of a grave and growing danger to its power and control that if allowed to foment in the minds of the masses could spell a deep threat to the system. This fear by the elite was not of Soviet communism, which was a product of human greed, corruption and debauchery by the Russian government, but of the principles of socialism, which were gathering steam throughout the world in the years after World War II. The Establishment, both government and corporate, would use the television, and the newspapers and magazines it controlled, to preempt the principles of socialism, many of which espouse the teachings of Christ, conditioning in the population fears, lies, manipulations and hatreds regarding human socialism, thus assuring itself that such a threat to its existence would be squashed in America.
Through television and mass media Soviet Communism and socialism were fused together, fear of “Red Soviets” was made all-encompassing and the introduction of the Cold War, thanks to an easily-manipulated and fear-gripped populace, became a prosperous era for war profiteers, defense contractors and corrupt politicians. The Cold War established with the population the idea of America as benevolent and inherently good, always right and never wrong, fighting for the freedom of the free world, doing battle against the dreaded “Evil Empire.” Americans with social democrat tendencies were persecuted, anything anti-corporation was chastised, those pointing out the debased faults of the American system were ostracized and an entire nation was brought under the noose of fear.
An enemy had been created, and hundreds of millions of Russians were made subhuman monsters, all innocent and as decent as you and me, all fighting to survive a totalitarian regime. The brainwashing of Americans was so overwhelming, so successful, that for decades the Cold War raged on, living off the fumes of illusion and charades, creating bogey men lurking behind dark corners and making the principles of socialism a taboo subject to those whose unenlightenment is a cornerstone of the keepers of the gate.
Television and mass media were used to conjure up an enemy that was designed and marketed to last into perpetuity, granting perpetual war for perpetual profit, giving sustenance to the military-industrial complex. Fear oozed out the pores of average Americans as we were made to believe in mushroom clouds, told to build concrete bunkers, ‘educated’ in the inherent evil of communists, of evildoers hating us for our freedoms. We were spoon-fed the lies and manipulations and charades through sitcoms, movies, advertisements, newscasts and even cartoons. The conditioning was as pervasive as it was successful. It was corporate mass media, from newspapers to magazines to television, which transformed an entire nation into enemies, allies into rivals, millions of humans into communist monsters and a Cold War into tense periods of mutually assured destruction.
So invasive was the idea of Soviets and of communism as enemies, in fact, that to this day those brainwashed decades ago still see an enemy behind every progressive and left leaning American, still calling us “communists” when the new, hip, in vogue term is “terrorist.” Only with the fall of the Berlin Wall were we allowed to see the fallacy behind our lunacy, the façade finally evaporating, finally opening our eyes to a cold war that was designed for the salvation of the elite, not that of the masses, so that a perceived threat to the Establishment’s crony capitalism, profit, greed, wealth and power could be retained, so that the American people would be taught and conditioned to despise the principles of socialism, for the elite saw in it, and still do, a severe threat to their way of life.
For the salvation of the elite Americans were conditioned into hysteria; for our continued ignorance the Cold War subsisted, empowering itself and living off our programmed fears and hatreds, calculated to keep us on the path to crony capitalism and debauched democracy and away from other, possibly better mechanisms of human society. Our fears and hatreds made it easier for the elite to control us; our blind faith in the propaganda they spewed further degraded our lives. We were negated from seeing the beauty of Russia and Eastern Europe; their cultures and peoples were marginalized and denied us. A threat was over hyped on purpose, creating an enemy for geopolitical and power hungry goals.
Along with a cursory semblance of greater freedom, as well as the illusions of democracy, Americans were made to believe in the sanctity of the nation. America could do no wrong; jingoism and nationalism flourished, we were conditioned to believe in an America the righteous, defender of human rights, protector of democracy, cherished beholder of justice and equality, an upholder of all things good. All the while America’s government was unleashing hell on Earth upon the peoples of the south, creating wars, supporting dictators and despots, arming militaries, training soldiers of death, promoting murder, assassinations, torture, coup d’etats, death squads, creating slave labor, impoverishing millions, exploiting billions and condemning to limbo countless human beings whose only crime was being born in lands coveted by American corporate interests.
It was the mass media, using all tools at its disposal, that created good versus evil, cowboy versus Indian, American versus Soviet, masquerading the interests of the few for those of the many, spawning fear and hatreds, altering culture and opinion to the tunes of the Establishment, controlling the fate of an entire nation. The same exact thing has occurred in this fictional war on terror, simply the latest resurrected marketing ploy from the dusty bins of history.
What the Cold War shows us is that the population of a wealthy nation can be, through the corporate media, easily cajoled into doing the bidding of the elite, standing proudly by, and in furtherance of, the beliefs and goals created by the system. A nation can in the span of a few years or months be made to hate, fear and seek war, its collective emotions and psychology and passions exploited and manipulated by mass media, particularly television.
Reality is anything the corporate mass media wants it to be and, with a nation addicted to television, subservient to its hypnotizing glare, ready to absorb its opinions and visions, unquestioning and sedentary, kneeling in reverential attention at the images it generates and the sounds it emanates, the real danger becomes when the concocted reality of corporatists becomes the reality of the masses, when fiction and lies and deceptions become forgotten or ignored, and when fear, hatred, jingoism and xenophobia are birthed through the careful manipulation of our animal emotions and passions.
As has been seen during the Cold War, and now the fictional war on terror, it seems entire populations, no matter how civilized or comfortable their lives are, no matter how advanced or sophisticated they might claim to be, are impotent to the captivating powers of television and mass media, the weapons of choice for corporatists, creating citizens ready to do the bidding and dying for the interests of the elite, ready to sacrifice their freedoms, human rights, democracy and nation’s Constitution in furtherance of the growing plague of fascism.
Keepers at the Gate
Corporate mass media, today more than ever, has the ability to push exactly the right buttons, using the powerful images and sounds of television, by which to steer an entire population in the direction it wants it to head. Images from video can be manipulated, altered, omitted, repeated, inserted and given the aura of reality, while sounds can be used to further the interests of the mass media. Opinion can be and is oftentimes skewered in favor of the Establishment’s goals, as reporters, journalists and anchors assist in furthering the propaganda of their corporate owners, in the process censoring the debate and dissent necessary for the healthy function of democracy.
The Keepers at the Gate are the creators of reality, of news and opinion, those that filter and whitewash and erase from memory, those whose job it is to distract and sensationalize and manage culture. It is they who possess the responsibility of altering mass thought and opinion in favor of the Establishment, pushing the goals of the few into the homes of the many. A nation that has been weaned away from the liberating mechanisms of knowledge and reason and free thinking must depend on the opinions it hears and the images it sees to create its own reality. Pushed away from and trained to detest reading, getting news only by watching television, trained to absorb the views of pundits and talking heads whose opinion always favors the interests of the elite, America’s population is robbed of divergent and diverse views, failing to grasp the dissenting opinions and debate needed for brains to analytically synthesize all angles of a story.
Instead, a population conditioned to have the attention span of ten second sound bites has been manipulated to hear the repetitive slogans and cheers and talking points emanated by the talking heads seen on television. Through repetition of catchphrases and words the opinion of the masses is generated, creating a consensus of mass appeal the easier to dictate the direction of the nation. In such a way, since 9/11, the corporate media, in partnership with the Bush administration, has methodically managed the “war on terror” through censorship of diverging opinion, by the repetitive use of slogans and catchphrases, by creating alternate realities and by controlling the views, images and sound bites allowed to fester on the airwaves.
For they are the Keepers at the Gate, the entities that decide what constitutes the programming and news and reality the masses should be made to watch. They are the puppeteers and we the marionettes, our actions and opinions controlled with the invisible strings of manipulation. We are mere pawns in their games of chess and monopoly, impotent to challenge their omnipresence. Our reality is their fiction, whatever they decide to filter into our lives.
They can manipulate us into an immoral and illegal war using the tools learned from Madison Avenue marketers, exploiting our mammalian passions, wants and emotions, tinkering with the buttons of human psychology. They can condition us to hate and fear and seek vengeance, using enemies, both real and imagined, to force us to give up freedoms and rights and democracy, in the process transforming once decent people into cheerleaders and supporters of torture, mass murder, illegal occupation, war crimes and the evisceration of both due process and habeas corpus. They can devise a fictional war on terror, using modern day bogey men to manipulate our fear-induced emotions, thereby enriching and empowering themselves, all the while we willingly concede our remaining freedoms and rights to the corporatists in power.
The Keepers at the Gate determine the morsels and crumbs and bones of information we are allowed to see and hear. It is they who have made the Bush/Iraq war a war invisible and unseen, hidden from our conscious, its ramifications on our soldiers and on Iraqis made to disappear. It is they who brazenly darken the arrival of dead and injured soldiers, they who censor the horrors of war and the war crimes committed in our name. Thanks to the Keepers at the Gate, the Iraq war exists in the clouds, as if taking place in another planet, inside a vortex of unknowns, away from our gluttonous reality, our comfort level retained and secure from the ghastly realities of a war of choice upon millions of innocent Iraqis.
Hidden wars that do not litter the landscape of American consciousness have a purpose, however. For a losing war that cannot be seen by the masses cannot create dissent, protest and shock. A quagmire that is unseen retains the aura of victory, refusing to give rise to revulsion and disgust in the minds of millions who, if allowed to see the true nature of man fighting man, might become a threat the Establishment does not wish to foment. For the Keepers at the Gate have decided that imperial wars for resources, wealth, power and geopolitical advantage must continue; the Iraq war must not be relinquished. And so, in the time honored tradition of controlling the masses, television has risen to hide what is not to be seen and disseminate only what is needed, feeding us morsels of news so that we do not become a threat.
It is corporate media that has been created to maintain the balance of news, used to expose the enemies of power and the pawns of the elite whose usefulness has served its purpose. The corporate media and its journalist hacks that masquerade as propagators of news manipulate us, deceive us and confuse us, using the power endowed to them to cover up the mistakes of the Establishment. They have become the loudspeakers and sycophants of power, employed to propagandize corporatists and their goals while suppressing and maligning those who question and those who speak truth to power.
News anchors have become corporate shills, pushing the products and services sold by the mother company, offering sensationalized news that serves only to distract, dumb down and make forget. Reporters propagate the government’s lies and deceptions, rarely, if ever, seeking truth and all its angles. The bottom line has replaced truth, propaganda has replaced reality and lackeys have replaced honorable journalists. The interests of those who control television and news bureaus are given precedence over informing the public, objectivity and truth becoming victims of religious, political and philosophical inclinations. Suppression of truth has given way to the pursuit of ideology and zealotry, with the beliefs and goals of reporters, producers and editors allowed to dictate what is and what is not considered valid news.
The Keepers at the Gate are the stimulators of our reality, suppressing what is not expedient to the Establishment, disseminating that which is, systematically concocting and perfecting the formulas to better control and manipulate the American public and knowing what buttons to push so that, in the end, we invariably take the road they have designed for us. The Keepers at the Gate dictate what is, what was and what will become, hiding behind cameras to push society in that certain direction that will be of most convenience to them. They are embedded throughout corporate mass media, becoming the gods of destiny for hundreds of millions of citizens, creating the invisible hand and the omnipotent consciousness of American culture, politics and society.
They can conjure up bogey men out of thin air, creating enemies and wars out of lies and embedded manipulations. They can ruin the lives and careers of honorable men and women; they can birth division and animosity between citizens. Presidents and politicians are born and made through the fictions and whitewashes at the disposal of the Keepers at the Gate, their careers eviscerated when falling out of favor with the Establishment. Populations are brainwashed through propaganda; dumbed down through the idiocy of circus-like programming; manipulated by subjective and skewered newscasts; distracted and made to forget by sensationalist bull manure; emotions and passions easily controlled by fear, hatred and warmongering.
For years the corporate mass media has been marinating our existence, taking our youngest, inculcating them to produce, consume, obey and be a good slave, reprogramming their innocent minds with the incantations of corporatist goals, taught never to question and always to follow, told to place blind faith in corporations and so-called leaders. The Keepers at the Gate are the arbiters of reality, determining our fates through the monitors we eagerly cherish like idols perched in the middle of our homes. Daily we sit and pray to the new religion of man, told to produce and consume and obey and follow, our thoughts calibrated to the tunes of power. The news chosen for our consumption is tainted with the ulterior motives of control; the shows and sitcoms we watch contain the poisoning allure of fiction and perfection that in the human condition is constantly sought yet can never be achieved; advertisements, the real purpose behind programming, saturate our minds, manipulating our emotions, needs and wants, compelling us towards purchase.
From our earliest days the Keepers at the Gate bombard us with their propaganda, using the seduction of television, with its vast array of brain altering mechanisms, its fantasy-laden programming, its opinion-transforming sound bites and its captivating role as parent, teacher and role model for millions of children no longer reared, taught or disciplined by overstressed, overworked and greed addicted parents. The Keepers at the Gate are the sentinels watching over our lives; the overlords of America’s destiny. They are allowed inside our homes, their technologies adapting and learning ever more each year how to control and manipulate us further. They are the Keepers at the Gate, the gods of information and the purveyors of the Establishment’s interests. Truth is their enemy; knowledge their poison; free thought the antidote to their dreadful virus; our incessant watching of television sustains and feeds them, granting them energy. Our ignorance is their strength; our acquiescence their ability to continue emaciating our lives.
The greatest weapon of mass control to ever arise sits proudly in our home, welcomed by us into the safe confines of where our children reside. The tool used by corporatists to gain dominion over our nation and lives has become our most cherished possession. We place full trust in its capacity and technology, in the escapism it can offer and the news it can provide. It is the only way the Keepers at the Gate can enter our homes, thereby penetrating our minds and that of our children. Yet we control the remote and the ability to leave the monitor off. It is up to us to kill our television before it kills us. Only then will the Keepers at the Gate dissipate from our minds, and our consciousness. For they can enter our home only if we allow them and today, more than ever, they need to be shown the door, with darkness enveloping their attempted passage into our lives.
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Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet columnist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com as well as at other alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela is also author of Echoes in the Wind, a fiction novel. 
