The Creation of an Inauthentic American Culture

 

 

 

 

 

 

Culture War Part Two, Matrix Aroused, the Sixties: How We Became a Nation of Puppets, and the Hidden Puppeteers 

 

Matrix Aroused – Topics

Whatever Happened to the Sixties Generation?

The Fear they Engendered in the Privileged

The All Out Campaign to Slander Them, Distort their Actions, Activities, History, and to Scapegoat the Sixties Generation, their Values and Ideals

The “Big Lie” of the “Conservative Backlash” That Never Was

The Total Remaking of Education, Publishing, Media, Middle Class Prosperity, and Other Institutions so Such a Generation Would Never Rise Again

The Beginnings of the Comprehensive Blanket of Untruth–Put Out by a No Longer Free Media, a Media Bought and Owned…

Which Is Increasingly Being Termed “The Matrix”

The ‘Why’ of “Obvious Truths”
an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema

The Why of Obvious Truths,  Culture War and Matrix Beginnings:
Pt. 1,  “Whatever Happened to the Sixties Generation?”
The Fear they Engendered in the Privileged,
the All Out Campaign to Slander, Distort, and Scapegoat a Generation

For the author’s reading, with elaboration, of this part, “Culture War, Part Two: Matrix Aroused,” click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here.

http://lj-toys.com/?auth_token=sessionless%3A1308963600%3Aembedcontent%3A18828749%2621%26%3Abf3102db69a92716e49de78eff1f7a6ae460f7be&moduleid=21&preview=&journalid=18828749 (Link) View more American Politics Sound Clips and American History Sound Clips

 

America’s Lying Times, Beginnings

Talkin’ Bout My Generation

Whatever Happened?  Whatever happened to Sixties youth? What has become of the values, aspirations, ideals, and energy that manifested in those turbulent but exciting, angry but supremely hopeful years?

There was a time, after all, when the influence of the “baby-boomer” youth generation was everywhere to be found. Their activities were broadcast daily on the TV news; they were making political events; they were setting trends in fashion and style which business did its worst to copy, package, and sell–attempting thereby to cash in on such powerful enthusiasms.

Suddenly, faster than their appearance, this generation of youth faded from significance in the early Seventies. At the time, commentators were falling over each other attempting to fit a rationale to the relative disappearance of youth influence and the comparative placidity of events. 

A common explanation that surfaced in those days was that many youth leaders, particularly activists, had begun being disillusioned about the effectiveness and results of confrontational politics.

Some argued that activists were beginning to “look inward” for the roots of problems, or of reevaluating and seeking to come up with better ways of eliciting change. As for the less activist sectors of the youth culture–those referred to by the originally pejorative terms “flower children” or “hippies”–many had moved out of the cities, often in disgust and equal disillusionment, to the countryside.

There they were reputed to be actively carrying out their “back to nature” values singly, in couples, and in communal groups. As far as the larger culture was concerned, they were invisible.

 

 

 

What happens to a revolution not televised:  Others have asserted that the media played a large and active part in the “disappearance” of this generation. It has been noted, for example, as simply one indicator, that 90% of youth protests were reported by the media in 1969, but only 20 to 25% were covered in 1970-71, and only 1% of such dissident activities could be found in the media coverage of 1972.

One could argue in response to this that demonstrations were becoming commonplace, so they qualified less as news as time went by. But this reasoning does not fully explain the precipitous nature of this decline, nor the resulting virtual elimination of coverage. In respect to comparable events of recent times, such a pattern has elicited the label “media cover-up.”

Killing “The Sixties”

It is therefore much more likely–and there has been evidence and published commentary to this effect–that this decline was part of a concerted effort by the media, in collusion with the threatened established sectors of society, to actively put a lid on student and youthful dissent and unrest.

Keeping the People Down

I myself have knowledge and personal experience of how a similar suppression at exactly this time was perpetrated on university campuses.

Enlightenment lobotomies…again.  Specifically, at the college I was attending–Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania–and other colleges and universities around the country, wealthy alumni threatened to withdraw funding unless (1) certain faculty members, considered “threatening” to established interests, were fired, (2) certain programs–considered too innovative, “disruptive,” or “instigative”–were cut back or eliminated, and (3) certain “unorthodox,” “undisciplined,” or “publicly disrespectful” student behaviors were discouraged, suppressed, and/or harshly responded to and clamped down on.

The total remaking of society, so such a generation would never arise again.  Indeed, such active “blacklisting” of counterculture figures, behavior, and values on university campuses seemed to be part of a general dictum across institutions–including publishing, films, TV, education at all levels, medicine and science, and the work place–to actively fight back at what was seen as dire threats to traditional mainstream values–values, incidentally, that were calculated to placate the masses and keep them, as for hundreds of years, feeling nervous, unworthy, inferior, and slavish in relation to the wealthy and powerful.

Matrix Aroused

The Fear they Engendered in the Privileged

Some commentators speculated that established societal powers had been caught off guard by the initial fervor and tenacity of counterculture energy and demonstrations, but that toward the end of the Sixties and early Seventies there had been time to regroup.

Declaration of Culture War

A massively funded attack by “the establishment.”  These established forces and economic interests began to implement a well-conceived, hugely funded, well-orchestrated, and highly cooperative counteroffensive against the new cultural values, which in their minds represented a dagger poised at the heart of their very existence.

From this perspective, then, the media’s active refusal to cover events could be seen as a small, albeit influential, aspect of a much larger effort–however unconsciously carried out–at suppression of the new values and reinforcement of traditional ones by the powerful interests that those values, if successful, either directly or indirectly put in jeopardy.

Creating a “conservative backlash.”  With these considerations, it is understandable that in 1971 and 1972–despite increasing unrest and demonstrations on college campuses, increasing liberalization of values among all age groups and growing liberal and counterculture political power–there would be a number of books published and widely reviewed which, closing their eyes on all this, instead presented dubious evidence and selectively chosen incidents to make a case for a so-called “conservative backlash,” which there is no doubt the authors earnestly hoped for and fervently sought to bring about in their proclamation of it. The same tactics are being used today to create a conservative Tea Party “movement.”

This may be seen as the beginnings of the use of “The Big Lie” as a major, sometimes the only strategy, in conservatives attempts to fight back against this outpouring of sensitivity to injustice at all levels.

Strong man truth–Big lies!!…big ones.  As background: The Big Lie basically amounts to the idea that you can say the most outlandish thing long enough, loud enough, and from the highest pulpit, and eventually it becomes accepted fact. No doubt, its use can be traced to the earliest times of civilized history and is certainly evident in this century in the tactics of Hitler and Mussolini, where it played crucial and primary roles.

 

However, its more recent re-emergence in contemporary America and its rise to the heights of skillful political brandishment came in the hands, first, of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr.

Then later it had its most pervasive use, however awkward and skill-less, during the eight years of George W. Bush, where Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, and others took it to such moronic lengths they eventually were seen to be what they were–big lies, with no attempt to educate the public at all; but simply to cover up and to manipulate, like common criminals would.  [Footnote 1]

Nevertheless, these later major uses, in fact the evolution of The Big Lie into the ONLY strategy of Republican politics may find its beginnings in such publications as these books from the early 70s, as well as to its highly skilled, and much documented, use by Richard Nixon throughout his political career.

Creating Their Own Reality –
It’s Their World, We Only Just Live In It

The success of The Big Lie, and its eventual morphing into the The Big Web of Deceit, more easily termed The Matrix

The hidden puppeteers.  Whereas Sixties youth had only their enthusiasm and their heartfelt passion to allow a world of freedom, and all the other values espoused in our Constitution, they were up against huge entrenched, and filthy with wealth, nameless puppeteers. The wealth of these puppet masters got them any support they wanted for anything. These wealthy manipulators sensed a threat to the status quo, hearing about idealistic notions of equality, freedom, and such. But they also knew that their positions depended not on the actual enjoyment of the masses of their supposed “freedoms” but only of ordinary folks being convinced they had them.

 

Culture War, Beginnings: Trauma at the Top: “Our Youth Have Gone Crazy! They Actually Believe That Claptrap About Freedom That We Put in Schoolbooks To Keep the Masses Complacent! They’re Daring to Use Them!”  So it was a huge threat to see masses of people proclaiming their rights and actually daring to use them. They could be slowed down in using their rights by having them violently bludgeoned by police and riled up construction workers in Chicago; they could be taken off track perhaps, by having several of them killed at Kent State; and they could be continually arranged to be misreported in the media and maligned as well. But this seemed to make them only more determined.

Paying the piper, calling the tune.  Still, these puppeteers owned the media and therefore controlled what the public would be told; they were the main sources of income for universities across the country, so they controlled what would be rolled out as truth and knowledge. Ultimately they could fund politicians and speakers…and radio and TV show hosts who would speak their Big Lies. They really had all the weapons to roundly put down this band of idealists whose only weapons were truth, and righteous feeling, and passion of youth, and clarity of youthful mind.

No contest.  It was no contest, especially as only one side was fully aware that they were at war; indeed the other side–most of them–had no inkling of the powers behind the scenes. That reality would of course be left out of the history and sociology books they had read–funded by the puppeteers of course.

Many 60s youth even began to believe that they had lost, and that most Americans were lashing back at them. This would be disheartening to many; especially to those who had seen the coming together of middle class, upper middle class, and working class to join in mass movements like the one million who showed up from all over the country to be at Moratorium Day on November 15, 1969. In this way the media had a big influence on taking the wind out of the sails of many of the youth.

Living Under the Big (Conservative) Lie

Others felt they must have been wrong because they had now, according to the media, become the enemy of those they hoped would see the wisdom of these values that basically came from them! That is to say that young radicals in general had come from middle class liberal family backgrounds. They always felt they were carrying out the values that their parents had taught them. 

“First, We’ll Instill Doubt in the Masses, Thereby Creating Division”

These youth saw the country come awake to their values through massive movements like the antiwar movement and the cultural flowering, which older and middle class folks were increasingly taking on themselves. It was therefore disconcerting and confusing to be told they were actually at odds with a conservative majority, a “silent majority.” This wasn’t true, but that would not be obvious to them at the time. So thinking the country was at odds with the actual following through on the values of  their parents and the liberal worlds they grew up in, doubt was palpable.

“Next, We’ll Push Them Into Poverty, Thereby Eliminating Alternatives.”   

For these youth, their response, unfortunately, was to try to reintegrate with the society they had thrown behind them, but now saw as the only one possible.

“Last, We’ll Compel Obedience”

Still, this cadre of youth retained their values into later life. It became common to hear that these motivated youth decided on a strategy of playing the game to gain entrance to the positions of power and to change the structures of violence and hatred from within. To some extent they succeeded, as we see from the careers of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Continue on this site with
“Culture War, Part Three: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures”

 

 Footnote

1.  The results of this are discussed, with a fair amount of humor, in my article/audiocast “Naked Republicans.”

Naked Republicans – Blue Meanies Fleeing or Looking Foolish

For the author’s reading of “Naked Republicans,” click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here (36 minutes):

http://lj-toys.com/?auth_token=sessionless%3A1308963600%3Aembedcontent%3A18828749%2622%26%3A657cb1f16332bf3ac1bff62eaa087468a2ec43b6&moduleid=22&preview=&journalid=18828749 (Link) View more American Politics Sound Clips and American History Sound Clips

You might also be interested in the 4-minute clip taken from “Naked Republicans.” Click on the link to the audio site below or click the audio player below that:

“You’re Turning Down my Money for ME!…To Stare Down…Who?!!”: Likely Constituent’s Response to Republican Governors
Who Turned Down Unemployment Money from Stimulus
to “Score Points” Against Obama

http://lj-toys.com/?auth_token=sessionless%3A1308963600%3Aembedcontent%3A18828749%2623%26%3Ab3bcba05200f1f75684fa1ef9db68f11191f783e&moduleid=23&preview=&journalid=18828749 (Link) View more Silly Mickel’s Calling The Noble In Spirit: Wake Up Sound Clips and Michael Jackson And The Authentic Life Sound Clips

 Copyright © 2009, 2011 by Michael Derzak Adzema

Noteworthy Comments

1.  Mona Kranke  An interesting sight. A good article! And some facts, I have to think about.

But I don’t understand, why you decide, that the lying and dividing started in the early 70s.

But – excuse my poor English – possibly I didn’t understand all completely …?

Or do you mean this worldwide movement – you can watch between 1965 and 70 in the whole world – a movement of “Unity, Equality, Love and Peace”, in all the different societies? This you cannot explain with the development in the USA or the Western World (that is – over this very different!).

With the beginning of 1971 it was changing totally – during half an year the movement fell into pieces. Best friends become strangers to each other and even enemies. The left wing youth, the same people, that 1970 went together against war, for human rights and equality on demonstrations and wanted to change the world, were struggling between Maoist, Leninist, Trotsky-ist, Anarchist and other ~ists.

In China turned the cultural revolution – that begun as a progressive movement – into terror and the opposite of progress.

Nixon won presidential elections and bombed Laos and Cambodja – nobody asked why!

I was in an East-German jail from Xmas 1970 until Nov. 1971. I came free and wanted to visit my old friends – I was stunned! It was so crazy! The world around me had changed! The half of them didn’t speak with the other half and didn’t visit the same bars and events anymore! Only a few was not gone insane!

And I know, that the same phenomena occurred in the West-European countries – possibly besides Spain, that was under dictatorship of Franco and not in the same strength affected by this movement. I discussed many hours about this development with friends.

All the scientific explanations seem to be artificial constructions, if you look at the very different societies, that produced similar changes.

And the lying in the USA – sorry, look backwards to the consolidation of the states in the middle-west, the annexion of Texas and California, the deals during and after the Mexican war, always were the poor used and thrown away. And the left wing was much stronger before the 1960s. The McCarthy-Era left deep traces behind.

I remember big worker’s movement in the 50s and 60s, miner’s strike, transportation and docker’s strikes. I really don’t know, but for me it seems, as had this movement decreased, when the racial unrest in the mid of the 60s came up. Another reason could be, that the production was done more and more by machines. If at a workplace of 200m² is working one lonely worker, it is not easy, to organize a strong union. But it’s fact, that the strong workers movement went down, and some students, who claimed to know the world and the life, because they had read some books, came to the top of progressive movement. This will always be a dead end street! Students finish their studies and get children, leave the universities and change their residence and soon their mind.

You know the wonderful movie “Flashback”?
:-)
The media will have a big influence on all societies. And a crowd of students will never be able to build up a national movement for the future. I believe, that the leaders of the movement made the same mistake in the USA as in Middle-Europe. They discussed with their compadres and sent them out to agitate the working class.

Imagine this! You are the worker or 3 workers in a bar, the student tells you about the life … if this guy is a funny boy, you will buy him a beer and laugh with your mates the whole evening, if not, you won’t give him any chance. Those workers in the 70s weren’t the same like today! They thought a lot more than they believed and watched lesser TV. And the media was not so perfectly organized to make mindless idiots.

If Watergate occured today – what would happen? An article with headline in the NYT and other big papers. 3 days later a revision on page 3? At next month TIME would have an investigating story. No retirement, no penalty, no prosecution. In the name of security and the war against terror, wire tapping is come the normality!

Cheney did some things, that were much more serious and dangerous for the USA and the whole world. He doesn’t look afraid in any way …

2. Mickel Adzema  Thanks for your incredible, thought-provoking response. You know that of which you speak and open my mind to more of what went on. You have a story to tell that we all need to hear more of. And you add so much to what I have said, which admittedly, is more concerned with the events in the USA. But the “overseers” are a worldwide clique. And the movement, I know well, was, as you say, a worldwide phenomenon. There are many points that I would like to respond and share with you on that you bring up, too. But don’t have the time to right now. I certainly ponder your additions, and have some responses to share to some of my points that you ask about. Have you had the time to listen to any of the audio clips? I have elaborated much more on the text in them. But again, it has always been my intention to look more deeply into the worldwide movement and to do inquiry into the worldwide response by the powers elsewhere than in the U.S….though my initial inquiry has shown up that there is more connection between the elite of the many nations than among the elite with those of their own countries…just as in the 100 years war between England and France in which entire villages were given to be plundered, the men killed, the women raped and killed, in exchange for the release of a captured noble from the other side. And there is so much more of that ilk in history indicating that class warfare is not a national phenomenon but an international one, especially in this age, but also throughout history.

3.  Mona Kranke  PS: I read your article twice – it’s really very good written and thought – besides the “Beginning” in the headline – and – you can call me unscientifical – there are more influences than can be scientifical explained today!

And this is very good! – If “they” would know about the powers of mass behaviour, they would immediately pay as much as is needed to manipulate this powers … and let us pay for this manipulation, as they do with TV and religion today!

If you find this hidden energy – please, don’t tell us! We’re safe! OMNIBRAIN is watching us..

:-))

4.  Mickel Adzema  LOL. As well I know about OMNIBRAIN. I find a post of mine getting 1500 “views” in one day, and none the next, double digits in the 9 months of it having been posted, and the related posts getting no increases. I figure I let out (in the audio clip, which they didn’t pick up on initially) some of those “key words” they search for on computers to keep watch on us “troublemakers”! And I don’t write what I write without some amount of trepidation, as I said in my post on “1984 being spiffy these days.” But as Ghandi said, “truth is God.” And with so much on the line, including the continuation of life on this planet, I can’t think of how I can live my life without taking these chances. I know what has happened to those who have spoken out previously. I know I don’t need to elaborate on this with you. Anyway, thanks again for the cogent and humorous response. The only power and strength, outside of the Divine, that we have is to connect with each other and share our common experiences, insights, and SOLIDARITY. I feel unity with you, and that feeling fuels my sometimes wavering courage.

5.  Mickel Adzema  The link to the “1984 being spiffy” on Amplify is http://bit.ly/1984-Am

6.  Mona Kranke  @sillymickel – Very good article! I’ll share and store!

The most people unfortunately try to ignore this isues or they’re panicking and get paranoid – followed by insane tendencies and ignorance of reality finally too! ;-(

Continue on this site with
“Culture War, Part Three:
Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures”

 


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About sillymickel

Activist, psychotherapist, pre- and perinatal psychologist, author, and environmentalist. I seek to inspire others to our deeper, more natural consciousness, to a primal, more delightful spirituality, and to taking up the cause of saving life on this planet, as motivated by love.
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