There’s a method to the Right’s apparent madness. I remain convinced that the powerful lessons of Joseph Campbell’s decades of lectures at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute are being used to power weapons-grade domestic propaganda.

The key to understanding his bloviating is in that last sentence, to wit: “subordinating America’s greatness, America’s exceptionalism.” That’s the myth that powers our foreign policy.

This is just an excerpt from John Pilger’s July article in the New Statesman. Read the whole thing for its emphasis on the deliberate crafting of myths to jack us around like so many beasts of burden.

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Mourn on the Fourth of July
John Pilger
New Statesman
09 July 2009

http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2009/07/pilger-obama-america-world

It was a lesson in what historians call “exceptionalism”, the notion that the United States has the divine right to bring what it describes as liberty and democracy to the rest of humanity. That this merely disguised a system of domination, which Martin Luther King described, shortly before his assassination, as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”, was unspeakable. As the great people’s historian Howard Zinn has pointed out, Winthrop’s much-quoted description of the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city upon a hill”, a place of unlimited goodness and nobility, was rarely set against the violence of the first settlers, for whom burning alive some 400 Pequot Indians was a “triumphant joy”. The countless massacres that followed, wrote Zinn, were justified by “the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained”.

[...]

What the American elite demanded, wrote Frederic F Clairmont in The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism, “was not allies but unctuous client states. What Bretton Woods bequeathed to the world was a lethal totalitarian blueprint for the carve-up of world markets.” The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank were established in effect as arms of the US Treasury and would design and police the new order. The US military and its clients would guard the doors of these “international” institutions, and an “invisible government” of media would secure the myths, said Edward Bernays.

Bernays, described as the father of the media age, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. “Propaganda,” he wrote, “got to be a bad word because of the Germans . . . so what I did was to try and find other words [such as] Public Relations.” Bernays used Freud’s theories about control of the subconscious to promote a “mass culture” designed to promote fear of official enemies and servility to consumerism. It was Bernays who, on behalf of the tobacco industry, campaigned for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation, calling cigarettes “torches of freedom”; and it was his notion of disinformation that was deployed in overthrowing governments, such as Guatemala’s democracy in 1954.

Above all, the goal was to distract and deter the social democratic impulses of working people. Big business was elevated from its public reputation as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic force. “Free enterprise” became a divinity.

http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2009/07/pilger-obama-america-world

IOW, we have buttons, and Limbaugh and other propagandists excel at pushing them to goad us to our own fleecing and slaughter, demonstrating the power of abusing mythology and psychology to power weapons-grade domestic propaganda.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWMwN2UyNzYwN2M1Y2JkNTdiODk1OWMyYmVmYTA2YmU=&w=MA==

So the “right” controls the judicial system? Is that why Karl Rove has yet to be dragged back to D.C. for Conyers questioning? Or maybe it is because they’ve already been convicted in a military tribunal(just speculation).

Or is it that, in a worse case scenario, C.A.I.R. will take up the call to protect their fellow Islamists:

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/11/who-is-protecting-cair.html
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=116380

All in all, I believe there is more to be delved into.