Anarcho-Historian Lesson #12: Legitimacy, the evil art of statecraft

Human civilization has formed evil monsters beyond the control of our imaginations.

The first atrocity on the contorted path of civilization represented the division of small societies into the common folk and the ‘better folk.’ Those divisions created social class differences. These high partitions within human society fell into socio-economic estates, and there emerged the first class conflicts.

With class conflicts, another historical villain then tainted human civilization: the State. The State appeared as the false arbiter or umpire between the warring classes. The State’s infernal job was to create a phony solidarity through both’ the people’ and ‘the cause,’ or really, language and religion, where there was no ‘unity’ before. The State had to mix the arts of the wizard with the arts of the warrior.

The State merged the priest experts with the war experts, all of which created an administrative class always aligned with the better folk, while secretly united against the common folk. The grand strategy was how to rule over the regular folk who often greatly outnumbered the ruling classes. The burning question for those elites concerned: how to avoid the commoners from discovering the scam, then banding together and just exterminating the usurpers? The ingenious answer shortly arrived through legitimacy, or the evil art of statecraft.

Our eternal enemies, have forever personified the elites, the ruling classes, the State, the authorities, the controllers, and all of our so-called ‘leaders.’ They have mastered legitimacy’s techniques, from around six thousand years ago, during the first reigns of urban civilization, to our actual imperial systems. Some of these systems were absolutely brilliant, and those shrewd state masters designed political systems that have lasted hundreds, if not thousands of years, throughout human history.

The Chinese emperors developed the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ intellectual concept, later mixed with a mutated imperial Confucianism. The Persian emperors developed the first universal, monotheist ideology loyal to the grand emperors: Zoroastrianism. The Mexica-Aztec ‘tlatloani’ perfected the Destructive Ages of the Suns and a ritual calendar that supported such a Mesoamerican hierarchy.

The Hindu Brahmins decreed the ultimate system of purification rites versus impurities, and with all of this craziness, their multiple caste and ‘jati’ declinations. The Greek rulers established the universality of the Greek ‘Hellenic’ language and its ‘cosmopolitan’ writing culture, which eventually signified urban sophistication in the Mediterranean region. The Roman emperors produced the political ideology of ‘civitas’ through the interlocking privileges and duties of ‘a constitution, citizenship, and a refined public life.’ There were also those infamous Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt.

Egyptian Pharaohs, in the land of the Black Nile, founded on the northeast corner of the African continent, utilized three ingenious techniques within the devious arts of state legitimacy. And it was the Pharaohs of the New Kingdom that had successfully used the three most important methods from the occult books of state power, or the deceptive arts of legitimacy, or cultural power.

The first method of legitimacy embodied the recourse to continual warfare, or endless enemies waiting for their own destruction. The second method of legitimacy represented the state mandated choreography of myths, heroic legends, rituals, symbols, iconography, festivals, funerals, public works of grandiosity, such as temples and large monuments, and like always, military displays of might and power. The third method of state legitimacy was elite control of the Egyptian language, mostly illustrated in religious-medical-legal-statecraft codes, and their corresponding sacred meanings behind the sacred symbols.

1540 BCE was the magical and masterful decade when the Pharaohs of the Old and Middle Kingdoms transformed themselves into Emperors of both Lower and Upper Egypt. The rulers would soon recast themselves as the divine spirits or geniuses between the material and the spiritual. The ancient kings remade their rule into the New Kingdom.

The Dynasty of Amenhotep-Thutmose transfigured its power into a political-military-religious-cultural glory for both the rulers and the ruled. Even the defeated and their haters admired the New Kingdom’s military prowess and artistic magnificence. Only some hundred years earlier, the Egyptian rulers had to pay extortion tributes, or taxes, to the Hyksos barbarians that had successfully invaded their lands.

The past was over, and this new dynasty transformed into a resurrected myth of greatness, like the Great Pyramids that still stood majestically at Giza. They had realized that States do have such powers.

The Amenhotep-Thutmose Dynasty found continual enemies to exploit and then defeat, and often brutally. They attacked the southern front of Nubia, demanded regular tribute-taxes, and later attacked the farthest regions of Cush, or northern Ethiopia, and even found the source of the White Nile.

The Egyptian forces next invaded the Barbarians of the West, or the Libyans. Succeeding this attack, they defeated the Hyksos and their other nemeses, such as the Hittites, found in the lands of central Anatolia, or modern Turkey. The Egyptian Empire soon extended its tribute and military domains to the southeast. They attacked the great coastal cities of Beirut, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Joppa, Accho, Megiddo, and Askalon, and moved deeper into the East.

The imperial reach continued victorious over the great empires of the Levant, such as the Mitannis, the Hittites and yes, even the Assyrians! Aleppo, Kadesh, Ugarit, Homs and Babylon – all fell to the grand army of the Pharaonic invaders.

This grand-majestic army, shadowing the mastery of Alexander some one thousand and one hundred years later, crossed the Tigris and Euphrates and marched into the lands of Medes-Persia. Did they even cross over to the great rivers of the Indus and Ganges? Only the soldiers of those powerful armies knew for certain.

Once conquered, the defeated had to pay protection monies, or tribute taxes, to the Grand Pharaohs in Heliopolis. They also had to supply allied warriors or mercenaries for continual war, and most importantly, import slaves. All of the conquered cities also had to allow a small Egyptian garrison to reside in their territories.

Even with all of this militaristic conquest; the wars, invasions, enemies, threats, monsters, nemeses, barbarians, savages, menaces, dangers, ultimatums and adversaries – the conflict never seemed to end. There was another war of conquest just over the setting of the sun. The Egyptian Gods of War transfigured into sadistic vampires demanding ever greater sacrifices.

With their greater extortion rackets and taxation schemes, the Egyptian elites under the Pharaonic rule amassed bloated treasuries gushing with the lure of finely made, crafted objects, inclusive of human slaves, all of which transformed into movable capital. The New Dynasty of military conquerors transferred this new wealth into the royal coffers for the lavish display of public theater, grand monuments and choreographed state rituals.

Like New Money or the ‘Nouveau Riche,’ everywhere, and around the world, the state never shirks from showing off its bad taste. Yet, the rulers had learned another valuable lesson: the common folks do enjoy watching from a distance the over the top consumption and grossness of material possessions – all in the pursuit of pride, power and vulgarity. A subject and powerless people love to see power egregiously displayed through their human gods.

The New Dynasty junta of Pharaohs immediately set about its massive public works programs: greater, and even more lavish than before. The Pharaohs had the workers construct monolithic, mini-city temples in their cities of Heliopolis, Thebes, and they even gave patronage to the great architectural wonders of Luxor, Karnak and Amarna.

The Egyptian religious-political calendar filled itself with glorious festivals for the numerous gods of the outer and inner worlds. The calendar also coincided with the astronomical wonders found in the Cosmos in order to convince the people that The New Dynasty was firmly within the route of the Heavens, the Spirits and all of the departed, Noble Souls.

Egyptian priests and scribes clearly understood that Death was the most emotional event in most people’s lives, so the death of the Pharaoh became the über-event, spectacular show for the kingdom. The processions carrying the different tombs and coffins winded around like well-oiled serpents, and even the holy animals inside of the holy temples, which included hawks, jackals, lions and crocodiles participated, all of the holy of the holies had their places in the parades of destiny. Lavishly costumed priests, warriors, administrators, royal slaves and other hundreds of attendants winded their way into the sacrosanct burial chambers.

Priests conducted massive, deep religious rituals, using every form of magic, holy images, music, song, sacred dance, poetry and sacrifice, including incense, flowers, oils, scents, foods, libations, spices and herbs to create a truly hallucinating effect.  This state theater inflamed the five human senses. The watchers understood that the era of one Pharaoh was over. A new era would resurrect and begin again, like great Horus, Holy Mother Isis, and the Holy One Osiris – through their eternal defeat of Seth’s treason.

As the final days of ritual burial finished within the temple, the scribes fashioned steles around all the images of the late Pharaoh-emperor. The steles possessed the sacred language, or hieroglyphics, of ancient Egypt. The priests, administrators and royal families understood the holy code, and they controlled the delivery of the message.

To this day, historians know a good deal about certain Pharaonic rulers, such as their wars, conquests, victories, family dynasties, noble retainers, public works and genius. Yet, we still know very little about every day life for Egyptian farmers.

By controlling the complete language, the meanings and the message, the Pharaoh system of rule would continue for another thousand years, always secure in its ability to dominate, maintain peace, and administer, ‘ma’at, or justice.

Certain bad historians cite those ancient times as particularly unique historical eras, where imperial theater transformed into one of humanity’s most fascinating epochs. Yet, we still live with the historical ghosts and traditions from those ancient days.

Actually, there is another, extremely antagonistic world empire on the contemporary human stage, and this empire is far more dangerous and potent than the ancient Egyptian variety. This empire has the name of the United States of America, and it has been in continual war, both in domestic and foreign conflicts, since its most recent commencement in 1790 AD.

Most Americans cannot go to Washington D.C., the empire’s capital, in order to attend inaugurations and other state sponsored theater. But what about those boxes sitting in our private spaces, which transmit the deep propaganda and addictive spectacle coming from the Empire’s main centers: New York City, Washington D.C., and Hollywood, Los Angeles, California?

The corporate media has a great amount of social control within the Empire’s borders, and it commands the common use of the English language – inclusive of the Empire’s enemies. How many of us use their vocabulary, such terms as ‘Middle East,’ Surgical Strikes,’ ‘Terrorism,’ ‘Peace Dividends,’ ‘Humanitarian Interventions,’ ‘Rogue States,’ and other outrageous concoctions developed from the dark offices of the US Intelligence-Spy-Military-Industrial Complex?

Like the Pharaonic New Kingdom, they all represent the furtive arts of legitimacy, the real cultural power of the State or governments. There is a saying that war is the health of the State, and this is true. But there also exists the spectacle of uniforms and other costumes, and with all of their ritual foolishness, such as flag waving, State of the Unions, annual voting, annual bank holidays, annual tax days and pubic songs in honor of the government at major sporting events, or ‘national anthems.’

Ultimately, the Mainstream News and corporate information sources, and especially on the television, take their complete message, or language, from the same ‘leaders, rulers and autocrats.’ Our media intellectuals have included  government officials, generals, spymasters, politicians, university professors, police chiefs – and other rancid experts found in our societies.

How can we destroy the legitimacy of the State, or the actual empire that currently threatens the Earth and our very lives? We must ignore and turn off their messages, never attend their staged events, verbally reject their ongoing wars of mass murder, never sign our lives away in support of their military or police invasions.

We have to intelligently and publicly discredit, ridicule their actions when necessary. Eventually, the fetid actuality of slavery within such an Empire will invalidate their sociopathic behavior and lies. No legitimacy tactics will work after such a public exposure, since a good minority of the population will reject them completely. Nothing can save them then. But this nefarious empire will not die without the most brutal recourse to violence – unto a most horrifying extermination.

Remember, state legitimacy is more difficult to end than to begin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Amerikan Empire VII: Bad Education through Dirty Social Control

After twelve years of living overseas in Europe, vagabonding and traveling around the world, I decided to return to the Amerikan school system. I wanted to get the top degree as a historian, a PhD. Yet, I always hated the Amerikan system of ‘education.’ Like most people in the country, most of my Amerikan schooling experiences were quite negative.

I had thought that studying for a PhD, or a useless doctorate degree, would signify a totally different experience. I would be able to read what I wanted, and study various themes and topics that interested me. I could write passionately about what truly fascinated me related to historical stuff. I could then become a professor too.

I finally did receive my longed for PhD six years later – but I was terribly wrong. I was good at history, but common sense kicked me in the butt. The rot of the education system had even infected the deadbeat world of Amerikan university graduate school.

From daycare-head start, nursery ‘schools’ to the doctoral program schools in Amerikan universities, bad education reigns through dirty social control. The main culprit represents the mandatory and compulsory state ‘public’ school. The Amerikan forced and coerced schooling system exists solely for training obedient, institutionalized slaves. The elites wanted, and have continued to want, mental cowards that follow orders throughout their bad employment careers. The Amerikan school system currently runs like a minimum security jail system confined within the bureaucratic iron cage.

I’ll never forget my first few weeks on the Amerikan university campus after being out of the ‘school system’ for over ten years. The university charged and extorted students for almost everything that they needed on campus. There were counseling fees, student bookstore fees, student union fess, building fees, computer resource fees, etcetera, and even teaching grad students had to pay for tuition.

In the Amerikan Empire, the state, inclusive of federal, state and city governments, normally tax the citizens incessantly. However, the Amerikan university had perfected this art of taxation, charges and fines, which possessed even greater reach than the state – since tuition costs rose by the rate of inflation times twenty each year.

The university also had a long list of fees and sanctions that required continual outlays of payments, such as parking fees, for both cars and bicycles, late registration fines, drinking alcohol on campus fines, skateboarding fines, and the poor undergrads that lived in the dorms had it worse. Their lives were exactly like prisoners in minimum security jails. They had to inform the security staff when both leaving and arriving in the buildings. Any minor room infraction could land them serious fines, ending up homeless – or even arrested by the campus donut brigade.

I was really shocked when I saw one peculiar ‘innovation.’ The university had a full-fledged and legal, autonomous police force, with its very own detective and jail, cops openly carried semi-automatic guns, high-powered shotguns, and the unit had an armored vehicle with drug sniffing dogs. These cops were often young and hard-core. They regularly rode and walked around the campus looking to harass and bust both unwary students and strangers that ventured on the campus spaces.

While the cops kept the campus on lockdown, surveillance cameras were prevalent everywhere. It wasn’t as bad as a casino or a prison, but it came close. The vigilance cameras were in the hallways, library bookcase areas, and they even faced the front doors of restrooms.

A terrible ambience of fear and distrust pervaded the entire university campus community. The university bosses or administrators managed the whole operation from the top down. The Regents or Trustees possessed the legal management of the university, so they appointed the president. The president next appointed his or her own assistants, and in turn, they appointed the provosts, vice provosts and the other campus directorships. Meanwhile, the provosts appointed the deans and the assistant deans, and the deans appointed their assistants. Almost none of these six figure salaried administrators, and in the case of the president, millionaires, taught classes. They generally attended meetings and passed e-mails to each other.

The administrative chiefs often delegated the heavy university workload, innocuously called service requirements, onto the tenured professor managers. These administrators could dismiss any worker or terminate any job position at will – even if the victim had tenure.

This American university system resembled the old Communist Central Committees of Eastern Europe, or the old Corporations run by the family juntas of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts at the turn of the century. The top directors also referred to ‘their university’ as a not-for-profit corporations. The irony apparently escaped them.

The tenured professor managers were quite disappointing as both workers and people. They often acted in a cowardly manner. They never argued with the administrators, and never fought back against most university injustices. The few who did fight back, ended up fired. Most tenured university professors transformed themselves into institutional drones.

Most of them had already transformed themselves into servile workers through faithfully attending the Amerikan Empire school system.

The worst of the bunch were the other graduate students. I had thought that my fellow students would emerge as intellectual colleagues where deep discussions on history, culture and politics were commonplace. The opposite was true. With so little money at the bottom of the pyramid and with most of us gaining horrible salaries at the poverty level, every other graduate student was a competitor for the meager amounts of available money. Hatred ruled inside of those tiny and claustrophobic grad student offices.

The hatred and anger seethed at all levels on the campus. Administrators often blew their tops against recalcitrant professors. Some professors went ballistic against grad students. The grad students showed their rage through harshly grading the papers of the undergraduates – who represented the ‘lazy’ students. Yet it was the laziest of the bunch, the administrators, who received the greatest payouts. And from there, the pyramid of tension, hate and control regularly flushed down into the university cesspool.

I began to hear other horrible stories and legends. A tenured, professor-pervert got away with his sexual indiscretions due to his ability to garner outside grant money for the university, i.e., the administration. The uni donut cops managed a corrupt practice of busting drivers around the campus at night for Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol, (DUI) money; meanwhile, some of those same cops would get drunk and then receive free rides home. University administrators would physically threaten attorneys, coaches and professors that refused to bend to their wills.

I also heard about some departments where cowardly professor bullies formed mob actions against their non-conformist colleagues. The university environment functioned under some of the worst institutionalized behavior in the education industry. Only the Amerikan prison gulag or the US Post Office seemed worse off – and yet, I had voluntarily entered this sick world.

I stayed on for six years longer until I received my PhD. I had no where else to go. I was good at history, reading and writing. But I paid a serious price for my desperate and stubborn will to continue and finish graduate school. I too fell victim to the pettiness, the competitive meanness, the nasty envy, and worst of all, the frustrated anger. Yet, I prided myself in resisting such institutional vices. It took me four years after receiving my PhD to fully heal my mind from such a harsh ‘educational’ experience.

After reaching the long sought doctoral degree, I then realized something even more sinister – the Amerikan university had become a rotten extension of the Amerikan high school, which in turn, birthed itself out of the infernal concoction of Amerikan forced schooling, or ‘the public school system.’

The mandatory public school system was actually a recent historical phenomenon. About a hundred years ago in the USA, few people attended the local public schools. Kids might attend a local school-house, but the school was completely autonomous, under a schoolmaster or even a local teacher. Most children attended for a few years, but it often ended when they had to work at their parent’s businesses, farms or small ranches. Children mainly learned their life and work skills from their parents.

At about the same time, Amerika’s elite business capos, such as the Rockefellers, began to lobby the state governments for forced, mandatory schooling. They wanted a more ‘disciplined’ workforce, and so they united with German Empire trained, public intellectuals, such as John Dewey, to set up ‘school boards,’ ‘child labor laws,’ and ‘teacher colleges.’ The Amerikan federal and state apparatuses supported this school system because they watched the spectacular military power of the German Empire, or the Second Reich, which had compulsory state schooling. Other world empires, had also utilized this successful school model, such as the French Empire and the British Empire.

By the 1920s, most US states had some form of mandatory public school law, which gave states the legal right to take away parents’ kids, and hold them against their wills for a good party of the day. The elites however, such as the Rockefellers, never sent their kids to those obligatory public schools; instead, their sons, and eventually, daughters too, attended elite college preparatory private schools, and afterwards, attended the ivy league, elite universities.

The requisite state, Amerikan public schools had more administrators than teachers. They often sat in offices, never taught, and received great salaries, benefits and severance pay packages. Under them were the ‘education leaders,’ or principals, who also made very good money.

In order to earn a little money, I did some substitute teaching at some local public schools. During my period breaks, I overheard teachers recounting some outrageous stories of corrupt Board of Education bosses, often coming into the main office for a few hours and then leaving for the rest of the day. And these bosses made six figure salaries! At the same time, most of the teachers that I saw in the teacher’s lounge seemed tired, worn out, weird and their pay was average. The teachers did most of the work, since the principals never really taught any classes.

Working as a substitute also pained me to view the poor children harassed, categorized and ordered around by the school authorities. Bullying was rampant and the violence between students often exploded into nasty fights. The corporate media liars always blamed school violence on bad kids, bad parents and bad teachers. But I saw first hand that it was the institutional violence of enforced schooling, which had started this nefarious cycle.

The school system of the Amerikan Empire did teach a few reading and math skills. Most importantly however, those schools also taught more deceitful lessons.

The compulsory schooling scam has taught children about their low place in the social hierarchy, and how in order to ‘stay afloat in the world,’ the good student must lie, tolerate boredom, elicit favors, and maintain a false, hypocritical public persona.

The Amerikan state school has represented the most impressive institution for maintaining social control. As long as the Amerikan Empire continually murders and vomits out its casualties across this planet, this disguised jail system for children, adolescents and young adults, will rip apart and destroy its own sad victims.

History shall condemn such a monstruous institution clothed in the black robes of ideological deceit, or ‘educational policy.’ Compulsory State Education has forced millions of parents, under the terrible threats of the State, to hand over their own children for mind and personality mutilation.

The Amerikan Empire V: The Greatest Brainwashing Show in History

Living and surviving in the United States of America is like no other experience. Propaganda overload and brainwashing overdose entail part of the process. For those of us unfortunately born here, the corporate media have inundated, attacked and cudgelled us into accepting certain ways of thinking since we were children sitting in front of the TV ‘boob tube.’ This image-emotional thinking spawns from a nefarious concoction that has mixed the fine arts of media spectacle, hip TV advertising, and a hard dose of sociopathic mythology.

We Americans can never fully extirpate those monstrosities out of our mental systems – unless we become full on ex-pats and embrace completely the new culture that we happen to live in. And this does not just mean becoming an advanced level speaker in the new language. It also means redirecting the mind into a completely distinct mindset.

I actually performed this mental release program through living in Europe for about five years, and I was able to change my thinking completely. But, when I returned to the States after my living overseas adventure, I was surprised with the change of cultural scenery. The United States did not change that much really. I had changed.

I first remember seeing flags flying everywhere representing the United States government. In no other country in the world does one see so many government flags crowding into the frontal sight view. In the rest of the world, the state apparatuses put out the flags for visits of foreign dignitaries or for special occasions, such as Independence Days or Revolution Days. But in the USA, regular citizens and many businesses hang out the flags on their automobile antennas, on auto bumper stickers, front license plates, on their shirts, pants, shoes, asses, jackets, on the doors of their private homes, and grandly displayed on brick walls, vacant windows, high ceilings and even floors.

I realized that some Americans actually believed that the Flag, which was really one of the symbols of the US government in Washington D.C., also represented them as a people. The Flag was for them too – and they could do what they liked with it. The US government had successfully transformed one of their symbols into a popular culture hip item. In no other country in the world has this seductive method worked so splendidly. The Amerikan Flag has transformed itself into an idol fetish symbol.

The other symbols of the US government are the Statue of Liberty, the Bald Eagle clutching arrows and branches over the Seal of Stars and Bars, the US Dollar, the White House, the US Congress Capitol building, Mt. Rushmore, and the Uncle Sam character. Yet, how many Americans put up the other symbols around their homes, businesses and cars – or even on their clothes?

I also noticed the terribly repressive nature of the laws compared to many of the foreign countries where I had traveled and lived. The nasty cop presence was everywhere looking for victims to harass, detain, arrest, and even imprison. The repressive nature of the laws and police state terror also showed their scars on the everyday American people. In big city Amerika, it was terrible. Paranoia and suspicion truly ran deep. I felt the violence in the eyes, while spotting the fear on the faces.

Actions that in other countries that had no legal consequences, possessed the potential for serious crime infractions in the USA, like drinking alcohol in public, physically fighting back against a person that had insulted you publicly or physically threatened you, or looking at a pretty woman or man in a public library. I was frightened myself, but I embraced Anarchism while living in Europe, so I was going to do something inside this Evil Empire. And if there was so much tension, hatred and fear on the streets, then why did a good part of the American public still embrace the symbols of the US government as part of their own identities?

The most dangerous and most sophisticated power of the Amerikan Empire is its corporate media propaganda and brainwashing control. This indoctrination power is even more powerful and dangerous than its military power because this system slowly rots out the insides of people’s brains. This media propaganda, emotional manipulation and brainwashing system have been, and always will be, the greatest indoctrination program in human history. No other empire, class based society or political culture has been able to compete with having such a high percentage of its own citizens visibly identify with the state’s ideological political goals. Many citizens of different countries around the world would say that they are proud to live in their respective countries, but Amerikan patriotism and exceptionalism are quite different breeds of activities.

Most US citizens revert to a type of immediate defense of government policy regardless of the facts or the truth. The Fascist governments of Europe and Latin American tried to create a similar world through murdering many of their own citizens that did not accept the new order. They failed at their goals because the tactics were too brutal for human consumption. The Communist governments of eastern Europe tried to create a particular mind control system among its worker-citizens, yet they failed too. Only ancient monotheistic religious ideologies, such as Christianity and Islam, can actually compete with, and resist, the ideology of American patriotism and exceptionalism.

The American propaganda ‘greatest show on earth’ uses some very important methods in maintaining its hold on many American’s minds. The first method guarantees a compliant corporate press media group that keeps up the public lies of ‘independent’ and ‘objective.’ The second method makes sure that alternative viewpoints and the actual history of the situation, versus the official government lies, are kept marginalized, isolated, and outside of the corporate media. The American public has become the most ignorant and ill-informed populace in world history.

The third method operates on the corporate media and government intellectuals who regularly destroy the English language with contradictory phraseology, such as ‘surgical strikes,’ ‘medical experts,’ scientific studies,’ ‘tax rebates,’ ‘affordable care acts,’ ‘public education,’ ‘department of defense,’ ‘institutions of justice,’ ‘freedom fighter,’ ‘assault weapon bans,’ ‘human rights sanctions,’ and ‘humanitarian interventions.’ The fourth method runs on the corporate media system regularly using old theatrical stunts in order to hammer its viewpoints across the public spectrum: constant repetition of key ideas, emotional image manipulations, plot breakup and suspense building through continual advertising cuts, and destruction-war-technology-violence-special effects mega shows. Some good examples of the US government’s brainwashing methods were the gradual re-education methods and repression used during the 1970s-1990s, when the political-economic-military elites had decided to destroy the cultural legacy of the ‘Sixties.’

The changes from the Sixties blew up in the 1970s. The elites in power were in shock – and they were scared. Many Americans lost respect for most government and corporate entities. The corporatist elites knew that a revolution was not on the near horizon – but they weren’t exactly sure. They had to do something. And so they did.

If a foreign person were to judge those times, 70s-90s, just through watching American television, her or she would think that the United States was the embodiment of the Fourth Reich. In many ways, it was, and especially for those unfortunates stuck in the American prison gulag, or for those unfortunates that were victims of American state terrorism overseas, like in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Libya, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Iran and Iraq.

It was during this tumultuous period that American television erupted into a terrible outbreak of cop shows. The other popular sitcoms were family shows, which was normal in a society where divorce and alternative family arrangements were changing the greater society. But the cop shows came and they stayed.

The television ‘hey day’ of cop shows actually began in the late sixties and early seventies. This was not a coincidence. If the adept cultural historian looked into that period in American history, he/she would find a culture of widespread distrust, and even outright rebellion, against police forces and government agents. In fact, cop and spy shows increased substantially during the seventies TV period.

Every type of cop imaginable came into being on TV. Such colorful examples have included the cool and hip, undercover agent snitch-cops, such as ‘Mod Squad,’ the good-looking, suave cop of ‘Rockford Files,’ and the weathered, tough talking, urban cops such as ‘Kojak’ and ‘Baretta.’ There were other cop genres, such as ‘Hawaii 5-O,’ ‘SWAT,’ ‘Barney Miller,’ ‘Starsky and Hutch,’ ‘Ba Ba Black sheep,’ ‘Chips,’ etc. The major TV networks saturated the next decade, the eighties, with an even more diverse variety of cop shows, from realistic and serious, urban precinct stories of ‘Hill Street Blues,’ to the young and hip, good looking narcs of ’21 Jump Street.’ By the end of the eighties, cops even had their very own, a real life docudrama where they arrested and destroyed the lives of real citizens, called ‘COPS.’

Meanwhile, Hollywood began to premier particular movies that displayed the US military in a more jovial fashion, such as ‘Private Benjamin,’ ‘An Officer and a Gentleman,’ ‘Top Gun,’ and ‘Stripes.’ The Eighties was also the period when movies finally dealt with the ‘Vietnam Syndrome,’ such as ‘Deer Hunter,’ ‘Rambo’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’. The corporate media did not show the true story about what happened to the five million murdered Indochinese victims, but instead, focused on the mentally disturbed US servicemen who came back to a country that ignored them, and so they became worse off when they returned. Those veterans were the true sufferers due to an ungrateful public and a neglectful VA administration. Not one movie plot mentioned the real culprit: an US government lie to begin a war, (The Gulf of Tonkin Incident), and a forced draft on working class youth, which used them as live bait and as paid assassins for the upper ranks of the officer class and political elites. Even the German governments after WW II did not conduct a media campaign of their Wehrmacht veterans as ‘victims’ of Allied hypocrisy.

In the middle of the 1980s, the US government committed a despicable act of tyranny against the state governments and young Americans. It willfully, and without any citizen or state consent whatsoever, rose the drinking age from 18 to 21, and gave the US government a cultural mandate to control a good amount of the personal behavior of its young people. This underhanded policy also gave enormous powers to one non-government and non-elected moral crusading agency, which soon had power over the lives of millions of young citizens. The group called itself Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Prohibition was back.

After the raise in the drinking age, police forces then set up roadblocks on the nation’s roads where they forced drivers to stop, and conducted illegal searches of ‘drivers under the influence of alcohol.’ The federal and state governments enabled another domestic war against the citizenry: the imprisonment of intoxicated drivers. These actions outrageously violated the fourth amendment to the Constitution, yet there was very little public outrage. Driving under the influence ‘crimes’ are actually the only crimes on the books that do not secure the constitutional right to have a trial by jury in the United States. Some dangerous legal precedents were set.

In the mid to late 1980s, the corporate media began to inflame the hysterics in the US government’s phony ‘war against drugs.’ Local police forces under the paramilitary SWAT acronym commenced the now common practice of breaking down private doors in working class neighborhoods, and willfully murdering suspected ‘drug dealers’ or ‘uncontrollable addicts’ without any sufficient notification. Most of the victims of these institutional murders were simply American citizens who were minding their own business and unlucky enough to experience such acts of state terrorism.

Another good example of such US government, corporate media mythology event during the 80s was the sudden death of an African-American college basketball player, named Len Bias, after a night of partying. The liars in the media blamed his death on the use of ‘crack’ cocaine, but the basketball player actually used a whole lot of drugs, both legal and illegal, such as alcohol and energy drinks during his partying escapade. The corporate media played up the hype, and then saturated the public news broadcasts with cities under siege from drug peddlers, gang bangers, gangsta rap thugs and ‘crack babies.’ Why was there no media debate about infants born with mutations and severe illnesses due to all of the legal drugs forced on women during pregnancy by respectable doctors?

Millions of unfortunate young people caught up in the easy money sham entered the American prison-concentration camp system for longer years of penal servitude than most murderers and rapists, and most of them were African-Americans and Latinos. The Meth corporate media hysteria next opened up and the police moved slowly into ‘trailer trash’ residential areas, mostly filled with lower class young people of white skin privilege. The prison population jumped substantially once again, but the police forces continued to focus on the young African-American population in regards to drug crimes. Crack cocaine prison sentencing was almost a hundred times greater than regular Cocaine sentencing.

This 1980s-90s media exaggerated, drug and crime hysteria actually copied the earlier Satanic, child abuse hysteria in the middle part of that decade. The corporate media once again inflamed Americans about child day care centers abusing children and the growing threat of Satanism in American communities. All of sudden, fanatical Evangelical Christian cops and previously unknown ‘social workers’ popped on the TV talk shows warning Americans about the coming Satanic sacrifice danger. Accusations flew across the US like in the old witch hunting eras of Early Modern Europe. A shameless media huckster Geraldo Rivera did a one-hour national TV special on ‘Satanism.’ Still today, innocent US citizens have been putrefying in prison and have completely lost their lives from that terrible period of legal witch-hunting.

Amazingly, by the late eighties, one of the most hated institutions in American society, the US military had become the most respected institution in the United States. After the debacles of Korea and Vietnam, the American alternative media exposed the US military’s corruption in favor of high-ranking officers and its continuous lies to the public. Other media outlets exposed the US government’s genocidal horrors, mass murders, and judicial oppression against soldiers of conscience, A little over ten years ago, most American university ROTC officer programs had to close down their doors due to the successive fire bombings and destructive attacks against their offices.

As the reader can see, most of those seventies and eighties TV cop shows and Hollywood ‘Vietnam’ movies most definitely had their desired effect. They kept the young people in a type of infantile state of watching the local paramilitaries arrest, beat up and imprison the unfortunates in police traps. Kids could laugh at the antics of the poor, working class and minorities caught up in the dragnet. But their laughs were soon to end because then the cops moved into greater terrains that were more fertile, like robbing people’s personal property through ‘civil forfeiture.’ Now the police have been targeting everybody. Meanwhile, the US Military is on the warpath across the Earth. The Vietnam Debacle is over.

These days, DUIs are even more costly and sanctioned, while the cops don’t care who they grab driving around late at night. The corporate media also wanted to get rid of the ‘Vietnam syndrome,’ which meant a hesitance of using American troops in combat. The beginning of the Invasion against Iraq in 1990 successfully finished off that concern. The US Military is currently in overdrive with over a thousand bases around the world, and many of us don’t even know how many countries the US is currently in war against.

The media drug and crime hysteria, with the Satanic abuse hysteria also functioned magnificently. Most Americans believed the corporate media then, and they still do. The US government would exterminate a religious group using various federal agencies who burned alive most of the children inside that building. The US govt. exterminated them over buying some ‘guns from out of state.’ This was the Waco extermination campaign against the Branch Davidian religious group in the 90s.

The corporate media used the same exact lies about ritual abuse against the children in Waco, as they had previously done in 80s with the Satanic abuse scares. And of course, the US government mythologized the attack on the World Trade Center Towers in NYC as the 9/11 Event. Again, the corporate-government media used the same exact lies from the Drug War hysteria: a secret cabal of evildoers led by a sinister evil man overseas pulled off the nefarious deeds. In the 80s, it was the evil Latino, narco-terrorist drug lord, Pablo Escobar, but after the 9/11 Event, it was the evil Muslim, Arab terrorist of Osama Ben Laden.

Unfortunately, we are dealing with the greatest brainwashing show in world history. We cannot counter it, nor can we construct a rival to such unbelievable media propaganda power. Even the corporatist elites know this. We have the Internet, but they still hold the real power of the TV screen and the cinema. Most Americans still get a good amount of their information from those two sources.

But pathological liars, and especially the sociopaths in power who believe their own lies, eventually catch themselves in their own snares. Lying uncontrollably leads to greater secrecy, greater cover-ups, and greater outrages. When around 20% of the population can finally see the true visage of the Monster, then the propaganda show will burn in its own foils. And this will happen eventually. At the same time, the Anarchist waits patiently.

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #5: Seven Classical Methods in Maintaining Social Control over Subject Populations

A violent year was ending; this ‘august’ day was also in the middle of a hard winter – and it was even rougher inside the moderate climes of Rome. This particular year was 27 BCE. It was the month of January, and the  new emperor of the great Roman Empire claimed the day of the 16th as an imperial holiday. The emperor’s name for historical posterity was Octavian Augustus.

During the subsequent years of his reign, he would use all of the ancient classical methods in maintaining social control over Rome’s subject populations. The Roman Empire would never experience its previous civil wars again, yet he snuffed out the Roman Republic from its existence. He replaced the Republic with an Empire and the rest was history.

The first method in social control was Octavian Augustus successfully claiming the rituals, images and titles of legitimate authority. His second method ingeniously utilized slow and repressive tyranny with token reforms. The third method represented the mastery of the bread and circuses spectacle. The fourth used the infamous, and always-triumphant, political technique of divide and you shall conquer. The fifth aspect of control made use of naming enemies and aggravating the public fear of such enemies. The sixth system of statecraft employed selective justice and pardons for some, while making brutal examples against a few easier targets, or called ‘the carrot and the stick’ approach. The final one, and most important method tied with the first one, availed in him creating state mythologies out of selected events.

And many patrician elites, the senate, the army, common plebes, farmers, artisans, foreign citizens, resident merchants and even slaves would commend the name of August for historical posterity. In fact, this dictator’s name now has the English synonym of prestigious. A month in our Gregorian calendar also has the name August. This short story is how it got that way.

On this day, the 16th of January, 27 BCE, called ‘the first settlement,’ his friend and associate, Lepidus, received the spiritual title of the top priest in the Roman religion, ‘the Pontifex Maximus.’ Lepidus and Augustus acted through a complete religious ceremony that included animal sacrifices and sacred rituals. Lepidus dressed accordingly in the beautiful robes and hat of a Pontifex Maximus. Octavian was not finished however, for he soon dashed into the public state theater in his imperial purple and crimson toga over his old military outfit, when he was previously a military commander of a victorious Roman legion. In one full super event, he claimed all three state powers and legitimized his rule: spiritual, political and military. Octavian Augustus would eventually take the imperial spiritual title of Pontifex Maximus from his old client Lepidus.

While Octavian claimed the semi-divine powers over life and death within the entire empire, he also instituted some important reforms on this sacred holy day. He symbolically handed over his legislative power to the Senate, where a faction of that body had warred against his late, assassinated protégé, Julius Caesar. Augustus made sure that the name and title of Caesar also possessed a semi-divine stature, and Octavian took the name of Caesar as the eternal symbol for the Roman emperor – and which would signify emperor even until modern history, with such bogus titles as Kaiser and Czar.

The entire ritual set up featured senators, military commanders with their officers in full military campaign dress, and a flourish of Romans, equestrians, gentleman farmers and distinguished citizens standing in awe inside of the imperial city, surrounded by grandiose, cleaned white temples and Roman imperial majesty. With all of the state pomp and ritual, which utilized all of the five senses and displayed the flourish of power and greatness, the emotional crowd screamed the new titles and powers of Octavian: ‘Princep,’ or First Citizen, ‘Consul,’ or legislative-military adviser, and ‘Imperator.’ or military commander.

This public ritual super event solidified both his power and legitimacy to rule, while he simultaneously showed his historic preservation of the old Roman values of ‘Dignitas,’ or public honor, ‘Gravitas,’ or public temperance, and ‘Auctoritas,’ or valued wisdom. In an ancient historical age without the Internet, video, television, film, radio and photo-print media, Octavian the Great had prepared a true masterpiece of state theater.

Octavian the Augustus claimed even greater honors, all for his ‘duty’ to Rome. He set up another date of glory called the ‘second settlement,’ where he claimed the powers of the ‘Tribune,’ or the sacred interests of the people, called the ‘Popolus.’ Augustus even claimed that the massive conglomerations of Rome actually represented one great family on the Earth, and so his ultimate title was ‘Pater Patriae,’ Father of the sacred country. In an Empire that swarmed on three different continents while possessing many different languages and cultures, this new truth was certainly something else to believe.

But sacred state rituals and costumes in the service of legitimacy needed some more backing for wider public support. Augustus became the Roman game and circus leader extraordinaire. Normally, such games and circuses happened only during Roman holy days, or holidays. But Augustus kept the party spirit burning with lots of back to back contests of chariot races, gladiator fights, mock battles, and even naval ones, and public contests of lyrical-musical, religious, poetic and physical glories. During these festivals and spectacles, Augustus distributed rations of bread, killed bull meat, and watered down wine to the anxious urban crowds in Rome. The theatrical comedies were in full operation, and the emperor even rebuilt the great Theater of Apollo.

Octavian had also made sure that his rival enemies ended up fully destroyed and discredited. Octavian’s greatest concern was Caesar’s cousin and Roman hero, Mark Antony and his relationship to Cleopatra in Egypt. Octavian managed to pull the Roman Senate against the Mark Antony, and he had even read the supposed will of Mark Antony to the Roman people in the Forum market. Like a skilled manipulator, Octavian moved the public sentiment against the ‘dictatorial degenerate’ lying in waste at Cleopatra’s palace in Egypt. Eventually, Octavian managed to seize a Roman legion that exterminated his followers, and he even ordered their son, Caesarion, killed. Any Roman associated with such a rabble became a public enemy of the Roman people.

While the circuses and bread distribution progressed, Octavian warned the Roman people of the coming sacrifices ahead in order to maintain their wonderful empire. Continual war was the other standard in Octavian’s rule. The Celtic nations in Gaul, or France, and in Hispania, or Spain, still needed the iron discipline of Roman blood and fire. Augustus also had to exterminate the pirate danger in the Mar Nostrum, or the Mediterranean Sea.

Earlier, Octavian had finished off one of the sons of Pompey; Pompey the Great was an old Roman General and ally, later enemy, of Caesar. His sons still had a base of operations in the wilds of Sicily. Augustus’ latter warfare eventual paid off with full victories in Spain and in France. His Germania, or German campaigns, did not gain much territory. In fact, his war campaign against the German nations ended in defeat, but the Roman blood would demand future sacrifice in subduing them. His descendent Claudius would do the faithful job.

In the east, he took Egypt, grabbed more territory from Dacia, or Rumania, and Rome successfully battled the Parthians, or Persians-Iranians, whereby the Roman imperial standards moved from Mesopotamia, or Iraq, into Northern Africa, and on the northern periphery, from the Danube to the Rhine river. Octavian Augustus had many spectacular public triumphs in his city of Rome. His unforgettable triumphant returns featured marching Roman legions in sync, loud war drums, megalith flower displays, stolen religious objects on pedestals, massive stone gods brought back on ships, and thousands of unfortunate captured slaves in chains.

Octavian always maintained the astute politician role. He knew when to offer pardons and patronage, and with other unfortunates, exterminate them mercilessly. He had all of the Senatorial conspirators associated with the assassination of Caesar exterminated – including the noble Cicero, yet he lavished power and patronage on the rest of the Roman Senate to help ‘govern’ the Empire. He exterminated the last heir of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, yet he pardoned Mark Antony’s brother that warred against him in the Perusine War. He ultimately exterminated the sons of Pompey, or the Pirates of Sicily, and yet, he redistributed lands in Italy to his Roman soldiers that faithfully fought with him and even with those that fought for Mark Antony – and he pardoned his old ally Lepidus when his old and disgruntled client decided to battle against him.

Finally, Augustus was the master in creating a renewed imperial and cultural mythology. His death culminated in Roman holiday celebrations that included a monolithic funeral cortège of flower wreaths featuring his noble family and the successor emperor, Tiberius, the Roman Senate, the Roman Praetorian Guard, or elite soldiers, equestrian Roman cavalry, Roman legions stationed near the city of Rome, and throng of innumerable Roman nobles, plebes and citizens in mourning. Augustus financed many public work projects, and his most famous was the construction of the Pantheon, which still stands in the actual Rome of today. His burial took place in the sacred corner of the temple, and his ‘Genius,’ or essence received deification. His eulogies also spread to other writers, intellectuals and historians that Augustus patronized. The greatest work was the epic tale of the Romans, called the ‘Aeneid,’ which traced the early history of Rome back to the honorable and courageous, Trojans – and finishing with Augustus, of course.

And so, the mythology of Octavian Caesar Augustus still lives in historical grandeur, or historical infamy, if you are an Anarchist. His statecraft also continues to breed its monsters. Since those ancient times, uncountable emperors, dictators, thugs on thrones, tyrants, princes, kings, queens, dukes, state criminals, sociopaths, prime ministers, presidents and self-proclaimed leaders have utilized the same methods and have unfortunately made them work.

Now the readers know the truth of such tactics and we can counter them. Anarchists can tell this story and other such examples to the angry and the ignorant. The astute reader can also see how the current monstrosity of empire, the United States of America Empire, has also used, and continues to use, such sinister practices of public manipulation.

But the current evil Amerikan empire has even greater power at its disposal in statecraft and social control. This criminal regime in Washington D.C. has been, and always will be, the greatest at utilizing particular modus operandi: media advertising through image-phrase repetitions, emotional manipulations, and blatant news speak propaganda.