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Keepers at the Gate
He Who Controls Television Controls the Masses
By Manuel Valenzuela
12/07/05 "ICH" -- -- In this age of modernity and technology, where
the television monitor has become the center of the average American
household, from cradle to grave acting as surrogate parent, teacher,
role model and as influencer of human thought, it should come as no
surprise that entire populations can be controlled with such
facility and efficiency, turning once thinking humans into grazing sheeple. For in today’s day and age, he who controls television
controls the masses, and he who controls the masses controls the
nation.
Television has become, quite simply, the greatest tool of mass
manipulation and thought control civilization has ever seen, an
incarnation of the myriad of myths, fables, fictions, story telling,
theologies and all other forms of ‘bread and circus’ history’s elite
have concocted from which to retain power and control the lower
echelons of man’s corrosive pyramid of hierarchy. In the television
the elite have found the greatest weapon of mass control, seemingly
able to dictate culture, politics, events, thought and destiny from
the moment of birth to the time of death. It can even be said that
it is they who can determine reality in twenty-first century
America, magically making history disappear, altering the past,
changing the present and molding the future. Reality is what they
want it to be, shifting culture to their dictates, conditioning
minds to fit their goals, pushing society in the direction that most
benefits them and erasing from memory any manifestation that does
not correspond to the reality they wish to create.
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, that
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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