At the same time, the researchers have noted a disturbing phenomena. It seems that we Americans are getting progressively more stupid. They note a decline in reading and comprehension levels in all age groups tested. Americans read less and understand what they read less than they did 10 years ago, less than they have at any time since research began to study such things. As for writing skills, Americans are, in general, unable to write more than a few simple sentences. We are among the least literate people on this planet, and we're getting worse.

It's the change ─ the constant trendline downward ─ that interests these researchers. More than one study has correlated this increasing stupidity of our population to the amount of television they watch. Interestingly, the studies found that it doesn't matter what people watch, whether it's "The Simpsons" or "McNeil/Lehrer," or "Murphy Brown" or "Nightline" ─ the more television you watch, the less literate, the more stupid you are.

The growth in television watching had surprised some of the researchers. a decade ago, they were predicting that television watching would level off and might actually decline. It had reached an absolute saturation point. They were right for so-called network television; figures show a steady drop-off of viewers. But that drop is more than made up for by the growth of cable television, with its smorgasbord of channels, one for almost every perversion. Especially in urban and suburban areas, Americans are hard-wired to more than 100 different channels that provide them with all news, like CNN, all movies, all comedy, all sports, all weather, all financial news and a liberal dose of straight pornography.

The researchers had also failed to predict the market penetration of first beta and then VHS video recorders; they made it possible to watch one thing and record another for later viewing. They also offered access to movies not available on networks or even cable channels as well as home videos, recorded on your own little camcorder. The proliferation of home video equipment has involved families in video-related activities which are not even considered in the cumulative totals for time Americans spend watching television.

You might not actually realize how much you are watching television. But think for a moment. When you come home, you turn the television on, if it isn't on already. You read the paper with it on, half glancing at what is on the screen, catching a bit of the news, or the plot of a show. You eat with it on, maybe in the background, listening for a score or something that happens to a character in a show you follow. When something you are interested in, a show or basketball game, is on, the set becomes the center of attention. So your attention to what is on may vary in intensity, but there is almost no point when you are home, and inside, and have the set completely off. Isn't that right?

The studies did not break down the periods of time people watched television, according to the intensity of their viewing. But the point is still made: you compulsively turn the television on and spend a good portion of your waking hours glued to the tube. And the studies also showed that many people can't sleep without the television turned on!

Brainwashing

Now, I'm sure you have heard that watching too much television is bad for your health. They put stories like that on the evening news. Bad for your eyes to stare at the screen, they say. Especially bad if you sit too close. Well, I want to make another point. We've already shown that you are addicted to the tube, watching it between six and eight hour a day. But it is an addiction that brainwashes you.

There are two kinds of brainwashing. The one that's called 'hard' brainwashing is the type you're most familiar with. You've got a pretty good image of it from some of those old Korean war movies. They take some guy, an American patriot, drag him into a room, torture him, pump him full of drugs, and after a struggle, get him to renounce his country and his beliefs. He usually undergoes a personality change, signified by an ever-present smile and blank stare.

This brainwashing is called 'hard' because its methods are overt. The controlled environment is obvious to the victim; so is the terror. The victim is overwhelmed by a seemingly omnipotent external force, and a feeling of intense isolation is induced. The victim's moral strength is sapped, and slowly he embraces his torturers. It is Man's moral strength that informs and orders His power of reason; without it, the mind becomes little more than a recording machine waiting for imprints.

No one is saying that you have been a victim of 'hard' brainwashing. But you have been brainwashed, just as effectively as those people in the movies. The blank stare? Did you ever look at what you look like while watching television? If the angle is right, you might catch your own reflection in the screen. Jaw slightly open, lips relaxed into a smile. The blank stare of a television zombie.

This is 'soft ' brainwashing, even more effective because its victims go about their lives unaware of what is being done to them.

Television, with its reach into nearly every American home, creates the basis for the mass brainwashing of citizens, like you. It works on a principle of 'tension and release'. Create tension, in a controlled environment, increasing the level of stress. Then provide a series of choices that provide release from the tension. As long as the victim believes that the choices presented are the 'only' choices available, even if they are at first glance unacceptable, he will nevertheless, ultimately seek release by choosing one of these unacceptable choices.

Under these circumstances, in a brainwashing, controlled environment, such choice-making is not a "rational" experience. It does not involve the use of Man's creative mental powers; instead Man is conditioned, like an animal, to respond to the tension, by seeking release.

The key to the success of this brainwashing process is the regulation of both the tension and the perceived choices. As long as both are controlled, then the range of outcomes is also controlled. The victim is induced to walk down one of several pathways acceptable for his controllers.

The brainwashers call the tension-filled environment 'social turbulence'. The last decades have been full of such social turbulence ─ economic collapse, regional wars, population disasters, and ecological and biological catastrophes. Social turbulence creates crises in perceptions, causing people to lose their bearings. Adrift and confused, people seek release from the tension, following paths that appear to lead to a simpler, less tension-filled life. There is no time in such a process for rational consideration of complicated problems.

Television is the key vehicle for presenting both the tension and the choices. It brings you the images of the tension, and serves up simple answers. Television, in its world of semi-reality, of illusion, of escape from reality, is itself the single most important release from our tension-wracked existence. Eight hours a day, every day, through its programming, you are being programmed.

If you doubt me, think about one important choice that you have made recently that was not in some way influenced by something that you have seen on television. I bet you can't think of one. That's how controlled you are.

Who's Doing It

But don't take my word for it. Ten years ago we spoke to a man from a think tank called the Futures Group in Connecticut. Hal Becker had spent more than 20 years of his life manipulating the minds of the leaders of our society. Listen to what he said:

"I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television. Americans are wired into their television sets. Over the last 30 years, they have come to look at their television sets and the images on the screen as reality. You put something on television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the television set contradicts the images, people start changing the world to make it more like the images and sounds of their television. Because its influence is so great, so pervasive, it has become part of our lives. You lose your sense of what is being done to you, but your mind is being shaped and molded."

"Your mind is being shaped and molded." If that doesn't sound like brainwashing, I don't know what is. Becker speaks with the elan of a network of brainwashers who have been programming your lives, especially since the advent of television as a "mass medium" in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This network numbers several tens of thousands worldwide. Occasionally, one appears on the nightly news to tell you what 'you' are thinking, by reporting the latest "opinion polls." But for the most part, they work behind the scenes, speaking to themselves and writing papers for their own internal distribution.

And though they work for many diverse groups, these brainwashers are united by a common world view and common method. It is the world view of a small elite, whose financial and political power rests in institutions that pass this power on from generation to generation. They view the common folk like yourself as little better than beasts of burden to be controlled and manipulated by a semi-feudal international oligarchy, whose wealth, power and bloodlines entitle them to rule.

One of the oligarchy's institutions for manipulation of populations is located in a suburb of London called Tavistock. The Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, which also has a branch in Sussex, England, is the "mother" for much of this extended network, of which Becker is a member. They are the specialists in 'both' hard and soft brainwashing.

The Tavistock Institute is the psychological warfare arm of the British Royal household. The oligarchs behind Tavistock, and similar outfits in the United States and elsewhere, are determined that you should be a television addict, sucking up a daily dose of brainwashing from the "tube". That is how they control you.

Like his fellow brainwashers, Becker prides himself in knowing the minds of his victims. He calls them "saps." Man, he told an interviewer, should be called "homo the sap."

"Soft" brainwashing by television works through the power of suggestion. Television watching creates a state of drugged-like oblivion to outside reality. The mind, its perceptions dulled by habituated viewing, is ready to accept any new illusion of reality as presented on the tube. The mind, in its drugged-like stupor of television watching, is prepared to accept that the images that television 'suggests' as reality 'are', in fact, reality. It will then struggle to form-fit a contradictory reality into television image, just as Becker claims.

Another Tavistock brainwasher, Fred Emery, who studied television for 25 years, confirms this. The television signal itself, he found, puts the viewer in this state of drugged-like oblivion. Emery writes: "Television as a media consists of a constant visual signal of 50 half-frames per second. Our hypotheses regarding this essential nature of the medium itself are:

1. The constant visual stimulus fixates the viewer and causes the habituation of response. The prefrontal and association areas of the cortex are effectively dominated by the signal, the screen.

2. The left cortical hemisphere ─ the center of visual and analytical calculating processes ─ is effectively reduced in its functioning to tracking changing images on the screen.

3. Therefore, provided the viewer keeps looking, he is unlikely to reflect on what he is doing and what he is viewing. That is, he will be aware, but unaware of his awareness... "In other words, television can be seen partly as the technological analogue of the hypnotist."

The key to making the brainwashing work is the 'repetition of suggestion' over time. With people watching the tube for 6 to 8 hours a day, there is plenty of time for such repeated suggestion.

Some Examples

Let's look at an example to make things a bit clearer. Think back about 20 years ago. Think about what you thought about certain issues of the day. Think about those same issues today. notice how you seemed to change 'your' mind about them, to become more tolerant of things you opposed vehemently before. It's your television watching that changed your mind, or to use Becker's terms, "shaped your perceptions."

Twenty years ago, most people thought that the lunacy that is now called environmentalism, the idea that animals and plants should be protected on an equal basis with human life, was screwy. It went against the basic concept of Christian civilization that Man is a higher species than, and distinct from, the animals, and that it is Man, by virtue of his being made in the image of the living God, whose life is sacred. That was 20 years ago. But now, many people, maybe even you, seem to think otherwise. There are even laws that say so.

This contrary, anti-human view of Man being no more than equal to animals and plants was inserted into our consciousness by the suggestion of television. Environmental lunacy was scripted into network television shows, into televised movies, and into the news. It started slowly, but picked up steam. Environmental spokesmen were increasingly seen in the favorable glow of television. Those who opposed this view were shown in an unfavorable way. It was done over time, with repetition. If you weren't completely won over, you were made tolerant of the views of environmental lunatics whose statements were morally and scientifically unsound.

Let's take a more recent example ─ the war against Iraq. That was a war made for television. In fact, it was a war 'organized' through television. Think back a year. How were Americans prepared for the eventual slaughter of Iraqi women and children? Images on the screen: Saddam Hussein, on one side, Hitler on the other. The images repeated in newscasts, backed up by scenes of alleged atrocities in Kuwait. Then the war itself ─ the video-game like images of "smart" weapons killing Iraqi targets.

Finally, the American military commander-in-chief Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, conducting a final press briefing that was consciously orchestrated to resemble the winning Superbowl coach describing his victory.

Those were the images that overwhelmed our population. Only now, months later, do we find out that the images had nothing to do with reality. The Iraqi "atrocities" in Kuwait and elsewhere were exaggerated. Our "smart" weapons, like the famous Patriot anti-missile system, didn't really work. Oh, and the casualty figures ─ it seems that we murdered far more women and children than we did soldiers. Hardly a "glorious victory." But while it might have made a difference if people knew this while the war was being planned or in progress, polls show that Americans no longer find the war or any stories about it "interesting."

Looking at the question more broadly, where did your children get most of their values, if not from what they saw on television? Parents might counteract the influence of the infernal box, but they could not overcome it. How could they, if they themselves have been brainwashed by the same box and if their children spend more time with it than them? Studies show that most of television programming is geared to a less than 5th grade comprehension level. parents, like you, are themselves being remade in the infantile images of the television screen. All of society becomes more infantile, more easily controllable.

As Emery explains:

"We are proposing that television as a simple constant and repetitive and ambiguous visual stimulus, gradually closes down the central nervous system of Man."

Becker holds a similar view of the effect of television on American's ability to think:

"Americans don't really think ─ they have opinions and feelings. Television creates the opinion and then validates it."

Nowhere is this clearer than with politics. Television tells Americans what to think about politicians, restricting choices to those acceptable to the oligarchs whose financial power controls networks and major cable channels. It tells people what has been said and what is "important." Everything else is filtered out. You are told who can win and who can't. And few people have the urge to look behind the images in the screen, to seek content and truth in ideas and look for a high quality of leadership.

Such an important matter as choosing a president becomes the same as choosing a box of laundry detergent ─ a set of possibilities, whose limits are determined, by the images on the screen. You are given the appearance of freedom of choice, but you have neither freedom nor real choice. That is how the brainwashing works.

"Are they brainwashed by the tube," said Becker to the interviewer. "It is really more than that. I think that people have lost the ability to relate the images of their own lives without television intervening to tell them what it means. That is what we really mean when we say that we have a wired society."

Turn It Off!

That was ten years ago. It has gotten far worse since then. In this article, we will show you the brainwashers' vision of a hell on Earth and how television is being used to get us there; we will discuss television programming, revealing how it has helped produce what is called a "paradigm" shift in values, creating an immoral society; we will explain how the news is presented and how its presentation has been used to destroy the English language; we will discuss the mass entertainment media, showing who controls it and how; we will also deal with America's addiction to spectator sports and show how that too has helped make you passive and stupid; and finally, we will show where we are headed, if we can't break our addiction to the tube.

Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has said that America needs a year of "cold turkey" from television if we are to survive as a nation. so, after what I just told you, what do you say, my friend? Do you want to stay stupid and let your country go to hell in a handbasket? Why don't you just walk over to the set and turn it off. That's right, completely off. Go on, you can do it. Now isn't that better? Don't you feel a little better already? You've just taken the first step in deprogramming yourself. It wasn't that hard, was it? Try to keep it off. Now that will be a bit harder.

The Fascist Consent of Man

The Nazi state was created by the same oligarchical financial and political interests who today control what we call the mass media and television. Forget about whatever stories you've seen on television about how Hitler came to power ─ his path to power was cleared by the same oligarchs who employ the brainwashers that program you through television. Over a period of years, following the First World War, Germany was brutalized by the economic policy of this international elite. Hitler's Nazis were funded and promoted as a political option, and then steered into power in 1932-33.

Once in power, the Nazis maintained their hold through the use of terror as part of mass brainwashing. In many ways, it were proper to view the Nazi period as an 'experiment ' in methods of mass brainwashing and social control. At the root of this experiment was the desire to create a New World Order based on reversing a fundamental premise of Judeo-Christian civilization - that Man is created as a higher and distinct species from animals, created in the image of the living God and by divine grace, and imparted the divine spark of reason. This is what makes Man human -- His divinely given power of reason. This view of Man, the view of the Renaissance, holds that all men are created 'equal' in the eyes of the Creator. Society, organized according to such principles, must enable Man to seek the Truth as His highest goal, and thereby 'perfect ' His existence and that of future generations, in accordance with Natural Law.

Such a worldview cannot allow for the existence of an oligarchy who views itself, by birthright and worldly power, as more equal than other men. Such oligarchs, and creatures like their coterie of brainwashers, hold a contrary worldview: Man is an animal, a degraded beast, whose worst impulses must be repressed by the state. Laws are created to 'control' these human animals and to allow for the continued existence of the social order. Men, in turn, make a 'social contract' to allow themselves to be governed by such laws, which are mutable, since they are government by neither Natural Law nor truth. This is the view of the so-called Enlightenment, and in its extreme form, the fascist state.

The question of the concept of Man ─ as a creative, reasoning human being made in the image of the living God, or as a degraded beast, an animal - defines all other cultural questions. It is the moral ─ or immoral - underpinning of all societies. For mass brainwashing to work, it must attack the Renaissance view of Man, for no person with such a self-conception can be brainwashed. Large numbers of people must be induced to give up beliefs that are the heritage of Judeo-Christian civilization. To do that, religious institutions, such as the Christian Churches, which defend the sanctity of human life, must be undermined and ultimately destroyed. This explains the peculiar fascination of all brainwashers with Gnostic heresy, Satanism, or what they call "the varieties of religious experience."

Such concepts as the sanctity and dignity of human life and the perfectibility of Man, and the principle of the progress of human knowledge, the ideas of the Renaissance, have been transmitted from generation to generation. They are deeply imbedded in the human personality, and are the invariant axioms of our culture. To remove them requires the equivalent of psychological shock therapy. When they are removed, we remove what makes Man human, what separates him from the beast ─ 'We have made Man bestial'.

Freudian Mass Brainwashing

The Nazi experiment was aimed at doing just that. How did it work? Well now we'll say something that might shock some people ─ Nazi Germany was an experiment in 'Freudian mass psychology'.

That is not to say that Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, was himself a Nazi; he wasn't a practicing one. But he 'shared' the belief of the Nazis and their sponsors that Man was an animal, first and foremost. In several locations, Freud makes the case that it is the primitive animal characteristics of Man that are at the center of His emotional life. His life is a conflict between an animal seeking 'pleasure' and gratification, and a reality that says that this cannot always be so; thought emerges as the individual tries to balance between the pleasure and reality principles.

Freud saw his work as a continuation of that of Charles Darwin, who had "removed Man from his throne at the center of the universe," and placed him squarely in the animal kingdom. Darwin saw nothing unique in Man, nothing that gave him the right to dominion over the Earth, other than sheer power to dominate other species. All that made Man what He truly was, was not the work of a God, but of profane, clashing and blind forces, claimed Darwin. Freud emphatically agreed with the work of "the great Darwin."

This belief that Man is nothing more than a degraded beast is at the core of the Freudian system. It is fundamental to Freud's ordering of mental states that he must deny the perfectibility of Man, that there can be no absolute truths; that Man can never overcome His flaws. Psychoanalysis doesn't cure so much as it "enlightens," as it makes an individual aware of his flaws and neuroses, to learn to live with them, and therefore cope with their debilitating symptomatic effects.

For Freud, Man is in a constant state of war with Himself, with an infantile "it" (the id), at war with "a little me" or "I" (the ego); this "I" is only slightly less animalistic than the total animal, the "it." Society exerts control over this degraded beast, this animal, through the "over I," erroneously referred to in English as the "superego." The "over I," which Freud identifies as moral conscience, bids only that the "it" and the "I" control themselves in the form of a social contract with the rest of society.

Freud states that the "over I" often gets in the way of the legitimate needs of the "I" and the "it." It therefore becomes the source of neurosis, through repression of especially the sexual needs of the "id" and the "I." What Freud calls the moral conscience of society is a source of pain, not pleasure, for the individual.

The sources of human creativity, what distinguishes Man from the animal, for Freud comes from 'sublimated' sexual drives of the "it" and the "I" ─ The most creative people are either practicing or latent homosexuals. This absurd theory Freud attempted to "prove" in his famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci, generalizing later to say that all people who follow what they perceive to be moral conscience, are driven toward neurosis. There is no paradise beyond an earthly paradise, Freud says, and all who believe otherwise suffer from a delusional fantasy.

Freud's hatred of all religion, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, is central to his system. Religion is the great illusion that his psychology must strive to remove from Man, since religion tells Man that He is more than a beast, and that He lives for a higher purpose than the socially regulated seeking of pleasure.

Man is not made in the image of the living God, says Freud; Man has made God in 'His' image, for the purpose of easing the pain of His existence. Deriding the great thinkers of the past, he says their defense of religious doctrine is infantile folly:

"We shall tell ourselves that it were very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order to the universe and an afterlife; but it is a striking fact that this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. And it were more remarkable still if our wretched, ignorant and downtrodden ancestors had succeeded in solving these difficult riddles of the universe ....

"...Yet you defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited -- and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but despair of everything, of civilization, of the future of Mankind. From that bondage, I am, we are free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions".

The Freudian system is thus a perfect tool for brainwashing, since it negates the moral underpinnings of our civilization, telling us that they are an infantile illusion. Without that moral underpinning, Man has no moorings and is susceptible to the brainwashers' "suggestion." All Freudian psychology is a form of brainwashing to one extent or another, because to agree with its premises, one must agree that Man is a beast who must deny the existence of universal law and God, the Creator.

Freudian psychology, as preached by either Freud and his followers, or by neo-Freudians like Carl Jung, became the rage in the 1920s. It was promoted in the popular culture through the mass media of its day, in both newspaper and magazine articles. Its morally insane system of "id," "ego," and "superego" became part of the popular culture, as did its belief that creativity stems from sexual drives.

Mass Psychology

In 1921, before the Nazis had themselves been promoted into a mass phenomenon, Freud published one of the seminal works in his system, "Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the I". Like the works of Fred Emery quoted earlier, and other brainwashers, this work is at once an analysis of a social phenomenon, and at the same time a "cookbook" on how, through mass psychology, to create such a phenomenon ─ in this case, a mass fascist movement.

Freud uses as a starting point the work of the French psychologist Gustav LeBon, his infamous "The Psychology of the Crowd". It is LeBon's main thesis that as part of a mass or crowd, Man regresses to a 'primitive' mental state. A person who may be otherwise highly cultured and moral is capable of acting like a barbarian, is prone to acts of unspeakable violence and inhumanity, and loses his critical faculties in a large mass of people.

People in a crowd lose their inhibitions and moral standards, and become highly emotional, says LeBon. This emotionalism, this irrationality, lends itself to the power of 'suggestion', through which the behavior of an individual can be determined by his perceptions and the actions of others around him.

LeBon describes this as a return to Man's primitive nature. Like Freud, at the center of his belief is the assertion that Man is merely a higher animal, whose animal traits are controlled by social norms and the structure of society. Place this animal in a mass of similar animals, and his human identity is crushed -- He ceases to think as a human and becomes caught up in instinctive animal-like activity. Man, says LeBon, has returned to his animal roots.

But while He has become at once more primitive, more animal-like and infantile, mass Man, the man in the crowd, also has a heightened sense of power, while his individual responsibility for action ─ a key factor in all moral judgment -- diminishes.

Sound familiar? LeBon is describing the behavior of all masses of people organized around emotionalism and infantile activities, such as the crowds at large spectator sporting events, at large rock concerts, and at mass demonstrations. It is the psychology of the unthinking 'mob'. The masters of people like LeBon, the people who control the brainwashers that program television, have for centuries known that masses in mobs are easily manipulated. From the days of ancient Rome, to the mobs of the French Revolution and the Terror, the oligarchs have used 'agents provocateurs' and money to have such mobs do their bidding.

LeBon says that individuals in a mass seem to behave as if they are in a state of hypnosis. But that is where his observations stop. Freud takes it a step further. The most effectively controlled masses are those which are led, by a leader. It is the leader who places the mass under an effective hypnotic spell.

Masses of people, Freud says, can be deliberately induced to give up their moral conscience ─ the values that underpin all moral judgment. Deep within Man's unconscious, is His animal nature. Those urges are repressed by His conscience, which is in turn molded by society. Freud calls this the "I ideal" (the ego ideal), which he later develops into the concept of the "over I" (the superego). The mass itself creates the preconditions for the silencing of the voice of individual conscience; that voice silenced, all that violates the standards of conscience, all the evil in Man, can appear, without restraint.

Freud is wrong that Man is first and foremost an animal and that all that society does is to repress His instinctual animal behavior. He has laid the basis for a regressive, evil psychology, that can make Man 'more' of an animal -- and hence more easily manipulated by a small ruling elite of oligarchs.

"In my innnermost depth, I am really convinced that my dear fellow human beings ─ with few exceptions ─ are rabble," Freud wrote to a colleague in 1929.

If you deny, as Freud does, that Man's true identity lies not in his individual mortal self, but in the moral acts of that individual, through his powers of creative reason, that live beyond his life on Earth, then you take away Man's soul; then Man is 'reduced' to the animal-like, to be controlled by the power and repressive actions of an oligarchical-controlled state.

"It is just as impossible to do without control of the masses by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization," Freud writes in his 1927 attack on religion, "The Future of an Illusion". "For the masses are lazy and unintelligent."

Freud, before Hitler and his sponsors published 'Mein Kampf', described the concept of the "Fuauhrerprinzip", the leadership principle around which the Nazi state was organized. In his "Mass Psychology", Freud argues that any mass, be it a nation, or a randomly created group, must have a leader, someone who gives it its 'I ideal' or values. The leader 'becomes' the individual member's common 'I ideal' and takes over all his critical faculties, just as the hypnotized individual surrenders his self-determination to the hypnotizer. It is the leader, says Freud, who provides the common bond for a mass of people; their common attachment to the leader enables each member to identify with the other, giving form and direction to the mass.

Freud says that the leader holds an attachment to his followers through what he calls the 'aim inhibited libido' -- a sexual attraction that is repressed or desexualized. In order for this to function, however, the leader must remain aloof, with no emotional attachments to anybody, so as create an almost god-like or mystical quality. The leader must appear to be above the mass, yet part of it; "he loves no one but himself or other people in so far as they can serve his needs," writes Freud. In that way, the leader "loves everyone."

Man is most like an animal when He is young. The infantile mind, while still different from the animal in its creative capacities, thinks more instinctively, is more reactive, and is more prone to suggestion. Freud's "Fuauhrer" becomes a vehicle to make the masses more infantile; they are thus more easily controlled and manipulated. "They are rendered defenseless against mass brainwashing."

Think about what we have described about the leader. Now think about what you know about the Nazi state and its Fuauhrer. Even the movie images have told you that Hitler organized his followers and the mass of Germans 'almost exactly as Freud had described', with results Freud "predicted."

Was the Fuauhrer a Freudian? It is known that Hitler read LeBon; it cannot be established that he read Freud, especially "Mass Psychology". But it is clear that those who put Hitler in power and those who steered his movement read Freud, as did most of the ruling elite of the day. It was they who were promoting the Freudian craze and its propagation throughout the world.

Some neo-Freudians did become overt supporters of the Nazis. Of them all, the most important was the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who had broken with Freud over the latter's refusal to see value in gnostic mysticism and what he called Freud's fixation on the sexual drive, the libido, as the root of all neuroses. Ultimately, Jung came to see in Hitler and the Hitlerian state the proof of his theories.

And, more, Jung saw in Hitler the apotheosis of Jung's own search for a kind of pagan "communion" with the Beyond, a search that began in 1915, with Jung's colossal nervous breakdown.

There is a strong connection between Jung's psychoanalytic theories, which form one of the conceptual bases of "New Age" ideology today, and his Nazism -- or, more precisely, his fascination with Hitler. For Jung was obsessed by the notion that the deepest reality, the greatest truth, lay buried in the unconscious, mystical, psychotic aspects of Man's mind, as opposed to the outward, rational, scientific (Judeo-Christian) view of the world. That was the basis for Jung's decades-long pilgrimage through himself, beginning with his nervous collapse, to find stranger and more distant "truths."

And that was the basis for his attitude toward Hitler. Hitler was the prototype of Jungian Man, who surrendered His reason to His unconscious, who welcomed divine madness as Jung himself advised.

Thus, in 1934, Jung was writing of the "formidable phenomenon of National Socialism," which the world beheld "wide-eyed with astonishment." Hitler, he wrote, had "literally set all Germany on its feet." He saw this as the rebirth of the ancient Germanic god Wotan, celebrating his resurrection in an age when the Christian God had proved too weak to save Christendom from fratricidal slaughter.

"As an autonomous archetype, Wotan produces effects in the collective life of a people and thereby reveals his own nature," Jung raved in trying to explain the "formidable phenomenon" of Hitlerism. This god of wind and rain had transformed Germany, this wind that "bestoweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth... [it] seizes everything in its path and overthrows all that is not firmly rooted. When the wind blows, it shakes everything without or within."

Earlier, in an essay written in 1932 (but only printed in 1934), Jung had celebrated the "leader [Fuehrer] personality" as against the "ever-secondary, lazy masses, who cannot take the least move in the absence of a demagogue." When he printed the essay in 1934, he specified in a footnote: "Since this sentence was first written, Germany, too, has found its Fuehrer."

In 1933, about three months after Hitler came to power, Jung, a Swiss national, became a minor official of the Nazi state. Shortly after Hitler was named chancellor of Germany, Ernst Kretschmer had resigned as president of the German General Society for Psychotherapy. His successor was Jung, and Jung's second in command at the society was Dr. M. H. Goering, cousin to Hermann Goering.

Was Jung simply taking the post (as he later claimed) in order to save the delicate plant of psychotherapy from utter extinction by the Nazis? Hardly. His first editorial in "Zentralblatt", the journal of the society, declared, "In the interest of science, we can no longer ignore the palpable differences, long known to persons of insight, between the Germanic and Jewish psychologies. Psychology, more than any other science, contains a personal factor, ignorance of which falsifies the results of theory and practice."

The next year, in 1934 in "Zentralblatt", he published a programmatic denunciation of 'subversive' Semitism. To the Aryan unconscious (the collective, or racial, unconscious of the German people, as he phrased it), Jung attributed "the potential energy and creative seeds of a future still awaiting fulfillment, ... [of] the still youthful Germanic peoples."

All this was written in the first two years of the Nazi regime. Perhaps Jung had not yet understood the nature of the beast, of the regime he served?

Not true. In 1938, fully five years after Hitler's accession to power, Jung was able to write with wild enthusiasm of Hitler as a "visionary," an historical phenomenon belonging to the type of the "truly inspired shaman or medicine man," the loudspeaker of the German soul, whose power was "magical rather than political," a "spiritual vessel."

In his interview with American newspaperman H. R. Knickerbocker in October 1938, a month after Hitler had extorted from the West the Munich Pact, Jung said that "Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man.... The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer.... He is the loudspeaker which magnifies the inaudible whispers of the German soul until they can be heard by the German's conscious ear. He is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the World War, and the one characteristic which colors every German soul is the typically German inferiority complex, the complex of the younger brother, of the one who is always a bit late to the feast. Hitler's power is not political, it is magic."

Hitler's secret was that he allowed himself to be moved by his own unconscious, said Jung. He was like a man who listens intently to whispered suggestions from a mysterious voice and "then acts upon them. In our case, even if occasionally our unconscious does reach us through dreams, we have too much rationality, too much cerebrum, to obey it -- but Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always led." This, of course, is the significance of Hitler's own, oft-quoted remark, "I go the way Providence dictates with the confidence of a sleepwalker."

Jung predicted to Knickerbocker that England and France would not honor their Munich guarantees to the Czechs, since no nation keeps its word. Then why, Knickerbocker asked, expect Hitler to keep his word? Hitler was different, Jung insisted. "Because Hitler is the nation." This was exactly what Nazi Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess used to scream at the Nazi Nuremberg rallies.

And still, after the war began, Jung remained an enthusiast. As France surrendered to Germany in June 1940 -- the date, the summer solstice, did not pass unnoticed by Jung and other Nazi mystics -- Jung cried ecstatically, "It is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius!"

Even much later in the war, when Jung had come to realize that his future required him to dissociate himself from Hitler's particular brand of magic, Jung was still certain that Hitler represented Germany in the profoundest possible, mythic and mystical way. In answer to queries from American agents as to whether Hitler could be overthrown internal to Germany, Jung shook his head impatiently. Never could Hitler be overthrown by other Germans; he was Germany. He was the "collective [racial] unconscious of the German people."

Mass Media

The Nazis and their organized supporters represented only a 'minority' of the German population, even when in power. What about the rest of the people, whom our television documentaries called the "good Germans," who acquiesced to the Hitler state? How were they made to go along?

That was accomplished through mass terrorization, through both the actual use of jackboot terror and the 'implied threat' to use it. It is very possible that the same powers which placed Hitler in power could have done so, by a 'putsch', without a popular election victory. I say that they 'chose' not to do it that way, because the psychological considerations that were required in order for the Hitler state to take hold, demanded that the initial choice of the Nazis appear to be a free one. This heightened the anxiety of the "good Germans," since they appeared to have brought the terrible state of affairs on themselves. As many Freudians and neo-Freudians who have analyzed the Nazi experiment have remarked, this led the majority of Germans to doubt their own judgment, making them more susceptible to brainwashing.

The structure of the Nazi Party and the Fuehrer state provided organized vehicles for Freudian mass brainwashing. But the principle vehicle was 'mass media'. In fact, the Nazis more or less invented 'mass media' -- the means for the universal or near universal dissemination of "information" simultaneously, in this case controlled through the state.

There were three basic institutions of mass media.

The 'print media', which featured the coordinated control of information disseminated through the press. All information was created and passed through the Information Ministry, under Josef Goebbels. The coverage was orchestrated so as not to appear to be identical, with various papers given particular aspects of a story. But the point is that all the news was managed from the top, including even foreign coverage of German events. Nearly every German could be reached with the message desired in this fashion.

'Film' became a universal mass medium as well, with cinemas established in every town, with feature films that carried brainwashing images of Nazi culture. Such films were often carefully crafted to have the greatest psychological effect, with the Leni Riefenstahl epics such as "Triumph of Will" being the most notorious. Those films and newsreels were carefully produced, and allowed audiences to become participants in the mass experience of rallies and other events. They provided a bond, as we have described, between the leader and masses and the individual in the mass and his neighbor in other parts of Germany. They provided a universal brainwashing experience, and were consciously produced to create such a desired effect. Audiences in cinemas routinely joined in Nazi anthems and salutes, at the instigation of the images on the screen. In addition, the films provided the 'feinbild' or the pictures of the enemies against which the Nazis were to deploy their mobs. As more than one brainwasher has commented, the Germans were the first to be subjected to the overt use of film for propaganda and the experiment was an enormous "success."

But the most universal of the mass media was 'radio'. As soon as they came to power, the Nazis ordered the production and mass dissemination of cheap radio receivers. By the end of their first year in power, nearly every German household had one. In addition, loudspeakers, hooked to radio receivers and amplifiers, were installed in town squares and other locations throughout Germany.

For the first time in history, an event could be heard by nearly every person in a single country, as it was happening. This is the mass audience that foreshadows our television experience. The concept behind it was the same as we have described in discussing Freud's "Mass Psychology" -- individuals participating in the mass phenomena are susceptible to suggestion, to losing their moral conscience -- they become overwhelmed by the mass experience.

Coming across the radio, into millions of homes and thousands of plazas, is the voice of one man, the Fuehrer. That fact -- that all or nearly all Germans were hearing his voice at the same moment -- gave an enhanced power to the message; it created an air of "all powerfulness." Many commentators have remarked about the hypnotic quality of Hitler's voice, how it seemed to mesmerize his audience, whether live or on radio or seen in the film. The neo-Freudians would remark that it was not only the quality of the voice, but the sense on the part of the listener of being part of a mass experience, that contributed to this effect.

Careful Orchestration

Hitler's speeches were some of the first mass media events in history. They were as carefully prepared and orchestrated as any modern television event. They are comparable to the kind of preparation and buildup, given a media extravaganza such as the Superbowl. In fact, one might say that such people who prepared such mass media events learned their lessons from the Nazis, as we shall later explain.

The speeches were preceded by widespread advertising in the print media and radio, with a buildup of anticipation and excitement. As the moment of the speech approached, the announcers described the frenzy and excitement of the crowd. Hitler's entrance into the hall was carefully described, also to build tension and excitement. When the speech began, Hitler usually spoke in low and mellow tones, easing his audience into his message. His sentences were simple and usually short. Words were carefully chosen, so as not to be beyond the simplest of listeners. His tone and excitement in voice rose as the speech progressed, eventually shouting his message to his audience. It ended with the crowd roaring its approval, all of which was broadcast without comment. As the Fuehrer left the hall, the commentator would carefully describe the scene, with the emphasis on what the crowd was doing.

But it did not come naturally for Hitler. He carefully rehearsed everything, down to the most minute gestures and eye movements, using photographs to modify his style for maximum effect. Like a television star, he went over details of the staging of his entrances, the location of the podium, the lighting, etc. with his "stage managers" such as Goebbels.

When brainwashers spoke to Germans after the war, as part of efforts to "psychoanalyze" the Nazi experience, they found few remembered any specific content in Hitler's speeches. Almost all could remember being part of the experience, if they were in attendance, and most remembered the "excitement" in listening to them on the radio. The words "hypnotic" and "mesmerizing" were the most used to describe the Fuehrer's voice. Even some people who professed to have disagreed with the Nazis grudgingly claimed that Hitler was a "a spellbinding speaker."

The brainwashers concluded from all this that 'mass media' events had caused people to "suspend their belief in reality", that they had in fact been willing to accept uncritically things being said, which they might have rejected, if they had heard them in another context.

Ironically, the Nazis were working on the next level of mass media technology ─ television ─ when the war broke out. Had the war and its production demands not intervened, it is fairly certain that by no later than the mid-1940s every German would have had a television set!

The 'mass media' hold of Hitler on the population continued through the end of the war; other Nazi leaders, Goebbels in particular, were said to have had a similar effect. But no one could overwhelm reality like the Fuehrer, or, rather, 'the Fuehrer's mass media events'. Only as the Nazi state collapsed in military defeat and chaos, did this process break down.

A Society Driven Insane

This is a picture of a society, driven 'deliberately insane'. It is all the more cruel for this was done to a great people, chosen as victims because they were great and the carriers of the traditions of the Renaissance through such giants as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schiller, List, and von Humboldt. An evil science, Freudian social psychology, was deployed against them, by a sick oligarchy.

During the war, Bruno Bettelheim, a neo-Freudian, published a psychological analysis of the Nazi period at the behest of the network of brainwashers associated with the Tavistock Institute. Himself a concentration camp inmate in 1938-39, Bettelheim describes how under extreme doubt and terror, the individual will regress to an increasingly more infantile state. In that condition, the inmates of the camps started to mirror the personalities and mannerisms of their oppressors, the SS guards. In a widely circulated version of that work, "The Informed Heart", he indicates that life outside the concentration camps mirrored the psychological disintegration taking place inside -- All German citizens were becoming more infantile, less able to act as reasoning adults.

"While the good child may be seen and not heard," writes Bettelheim, "the 'good German' had to be unseen and also dumb... It is one thing to behave like a child because one is a child: dependent, lacking in foresight and understanding, taken care of by bigger, older, and wiser adults, forced by them to behave, but occasionally able to defy them and get away with it. Most important of all, feeling certain that in time, as one would reach adulthood oneself, all this would be righted. It is quite another thing to be an adult and have to force oneself to assume childish behavior, and for all time to come...

"It was not just coercion by others into helpless dependency," continues Bettelheim. "It was also the clean splitting of the personality. Man's anxiety, His wish to protect life, forced Him to relinquish what was ultimately His best chance of survival -- His ability to react and make appropriate decisions. But giving this up, He was no longer a man, but a child. Knowing that for survival, He should decide and act, and trying to survive by not reacting -- these in their combination overpowered the individual to such a degree that he was eventually shorn of all self-respect and all feelings of independence."

In this way, the multi-level experiment in Freudian mass brainwashing worked its evil on the German population. In the end, the Nazis, themselves a group of gnostic psychotics, went predictably out of control and the experiment had to be destroyed. In the interim, the Freudian mobs unleashed by the process had destroyed much of Europe. And when it was over, those who had imposed this horror in the world, attempted through mass media to blame their 'victims' for the crimes committed. The Germans, whom the oligarchy, through their Nazi tools, had tortured in mass brainwashing, were told that they were 'collectively guilty' for all that had happened. The oligarchy tried a handful of the psychotic Nazis, and in so doing, put the whole German nation, one of the greatest peoples on the earth, wrongly in dock at Nuremberg. And while they intoned that it must "never happen again," they and their brainwashers were already studying where the experiment had gone wrong. They were preparing to do far worse, using a newly developed tool ─ television ─ as their more advanced mass brainwashing mechanism to organize a new form of fascist state without the Nazi superstructure.

We'll pick up this thread of a fascist state without the Nazi superstructure in the next part of this article, and show you the kind of society that your brainwashers plan for you. But for the moment, I want you to think back to the two images with which we started this section -- the Nazi state, and in particular, the Nazi rallies, with the frenzied crowds, cheering their Fuehrer, and the millions more listening, glued to their radios. Now reflect on what we have told you about this, how they were really carefully stage-managed "mass media events".

Now think about the "Desert Storm" rallies, and the similarities between the two events -- at their roots both are "organized, mass media brainwashing events".

Do you realize that you have been manipulated? You don't, do you? That is how well the more than 40-year brainwashing of the American population by television has worked.

I am indebted to Molly Hammett Kronberg for the section on Jungian psychology and Hitler, and for discussion on the Nazi movement overall.

The Clockwork Orange Society

I'm back again. I won't even ask you this time whether the television set is turned off. By now, I hope, you realize that it is impossible to think about any important subject as long as it is on. But in case 'someone else' has turned the set on, I'll give you a chance to either turn it off or to go to another room before we begin.

The people who had put the Nazis in power never gave up on the idea of mass psychological brainwashing as a means to maintain the power of the oligarchical elite. They only grudgingly acknowledged that the Nazi model of social control, with its requirement for total regimentation, could not have universal application. The question confronting the brainwashers at such places as the Tavistock Institute outside London was how to create a Nazi state in the United States without its now socially unacceptable state terror apparatus.

Americans returned home from fighting a war in which they had defeated a monstrous evil at great human sacrifice. Those involved in the war effort were thus focused on the 'higher purpose' in life, the kind of moral outlook that leads an individual to be willing to sacrifice his life, if necessary, to make the world a better place to live in for someone who might come after him, while giving renewed meaning to the achievements of past generations. The war effort led to a burst of 'cultural optimism' in the population, that made it seem that we could do great things for all Mankind.

Now, look around at this miserable nation of ours. It is hard to believe that it is the same place as 40 or 50 years ago. For most people, there is little or no purpose to life, except to survive to the next day. Our people have a deep-seated 'cultural pessimism', and are cynical about nearly everything.

Now, think hard -- over the last 40 years, while our moral outlook has collapsed, what became a constant, ever-present part of your life. That's right, 'television', that box in your living room. That realization is necessary to understand what I am about to tell you.

The New 'Leader'

The evil Sigmund Freud, in his work "Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the I", said that an individual's moral inhibitions and outlook can be broken down as part of a mass or crowd. According to Freud, people in crowds or masses behave as if they are hypnotized ─ A person becomes more infantile, and hence more like an animal under such circumstances, and loses the power to reason critically. By using the power of mass suggestion, a new outlook, based on different ideals, can then be substituted for values a person had previously held.

Freud says that each mass has a leader, who serves the function of hypnotist. It is to the leader that the individuals in the crowd surrender their ideals, and it is from the leader that they receive their new values. It is at the will and word of the leader, that the mass or mob can be deployed.

Freud claimed that the leader principle worked as a brainwashing tool because of some innate need of Man to be led; this merely betrayed his own oligarchical outlook. He believed that Man was merely a two-legged animal, whose basic animalism could be induced to come to the fore in mass situations.

Freud is wrong -- Man is not an animal. However, he can, under conditions of mass psychosis, through brainwashing techniques of the type described, be made to 'act as if he were an animal'. The key to mass brainwashing is to create the kinds of "organized, controlled environments" in which "tension" and "stress" can be applied to break down morally informed judgment, thereby making an individual more susceptible to "suggestion". Such 'controlled environments' are organized so as to appeal to base emotionalism, sensuality, and even eroticism ─ "feelings" that make Man "one with animals" ─ and not to Man's higher reasoning capabilities, which truly distinguished him from the beast. It is this fact, and not merely the size of an event, that makes the brainwashing possible.

For the brainwashers, what was required for a new system of mass social control was a means to organize a "mass appeal to emotionalism". The more overpowering and all encompassing that appeal, the better. The more infantile the population could be made, the less would be their resistance to suggestion and manipulation.

In television, they found the tool to make that constant appeal to infantilism, organized on a mass basis. It had the potential to reach into 'every' home, to reach 'every' citizen with a set of messages and suggestions. It also had the ability, through the control and dissemination of information, to create large "controlled environments" by creating your perceptions of events. Television is the new "leader," the technological equivalent of Hitler.

Writing in 1972 with Eric Trist, formerly of the Wharton School and now of the University of Toronto and the leading Tavistock brainwasher in the United States, Fred Emery says:

"We are suggesting that television evokes a basic assumption of 'dependency'. It must evoke (this) because it is essentially an emotional and irrational activity.... Television is the non-stop leader who provides nourishment and protection."

Emery and Trist report that the population has never been told this about television, and writing for a handful of fellow brainwashers, they are now about to let this secret out: "... that the questioning and confrontation of television has been put aside in order to maintain its role as the 'leader' in the dependent mode."

They note that 'all' television has a dissociative effect on mental capabilities, making people less able to think rationally. Harkening back to the studies of the Hitler experiment, they find that this confirms the thesis that "the leader should be 'mad' or a 'genius,' yet all the same people feel compelled to believe that he is a dependable leader."

Emery and Trist, after looking at over 20 years of television brainwashing, comment; "In other words, television can be partly seen as a technological analyst of the hypnotist."

The more you watch, the more susceptible you become to suggestions from your 'leader', the television. "... It turns you off to reality and time," Emery and Trist write, commenting that comprehension of time relationships and reality are required for an individual to take reasoned and purposeful action.

In looking at the effects of habituated television watching, Emery and Trist cite studies proving that it does neurological damage:

"Our thesis is that television produces a quality and quantity of habituation that approximates the destruction of critical anatomical structures."

They report, however, that the damage is not irreversible. The neurological problems can be cleared up within a few days of halting the six to eight hours of daily viewing. The effects on the ability to reason and on moral value structures are far more difficult to "clear up":

"Man can (therefore) be seduced from purposeful functioning in such a way that he is unable to become aware of his deficit."

Social Turbulence

Now, we are ready to look at what the brainwashers and the oligarchs who have deployed them have in store for you.

Many neo-Freudians have criticized Freud for presenting too biologically oriented a system. They say that Freud failed to understand how much of a role the 'social environment' plays in shaping the personality of the individual. A new social psychology must place an emphasis on the role of tension-filled environments in shaping the personality or the "ego," producing regression to more infantile, or "id-like" personalities.

According to the view of personality held by Tavistock's Emery and Trist, the 'social environment' is either 'stable', at which point, people are more or less able to "cope" with what is happening to them, or it is 'turbulent', at which point people either take actions to relieve the tension, or they adapt to accept the tension-filled environment. If the 'turbulence' does not cease, or if it intensifies, then, at a certain point, people cease being able to adapt in a positive way. At that point, Emery and Trist say, people become 'maladaptive' -- they choose a response to tension that degrades their lives. They start to "repress reality", denying its existence, and constructing increasingly more infantile fantasies that enable them to cope. All the while, their lives are becoming increasingly worse, when measured by value structures of a short time before. To avoid this contradiction, people, under conditions of "increasing social turbulence", change their values, yielding to new 'degraded' values, values that are less human and more animal-like.

Sound like a bunch of gobbledegook? Well, in a certain sense it is ─ Morally reasoning individuals, cultured by 2,000 years of Christian civilization, do not think in such ways. They would reject barbaric choices, the so-called critical choices, where none are good. They would seek Truth, and by seeking Truth, find ways out of the brainwashers' mind trap.

Forty years ago, our responses to problems, and our moral outlook were different. You would have probably rejected the kinds of critical choices you are offered today. But that was 'before television'. Forty years of television have eroded your ability to make moral choices, and have steered you into critical choices. You have followed your 'leader', television, down a path to Hell.

Looking into Hell

Twenty years ago, the brainwashers, Emery and Trist, laid out some scenarios for the future based on a "permanent condition of social turbulence". There might be brief periods of respite, but, according to them, the world would become increasingly more chaotic and violent.

In the hands of those with the power to make policy -- to create the 'social turbulence' -- what they have written is a cookbook recipe for a desired "future." It is proper to look at what they produced, back in 1972, as the psychological warfare underpinning, the mass brainwashing concept, behind the political doctrines of such institutions as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. It is for such people that they were written.

Their forecast ─ a period of continuous turbulence, especially economic turbulence leading to economic decline -- had its political corollary in the CFR's "Project 1980s" reports drafted in the mid-1970s. There, we find reference to plans for the "controlled disintegration" of the American economy.

In 1972, twenty years of television-watching in the United States and most of the West had left populations with three basic 'maladaptive' scenarios for dealing with the tension.

one scenario is called 'superficiality'. It is a form of psychological retreat, an attempt to simplify choices. Tension, say Emery and Trist, makes Man desire to break free of the emotional values formerly placed on choices. A person reduces the "value of his intentions, lowering the emotional investment in the ends being pursued, whether they be personally or socially shared ends... This strategy can only be pursued by denying the deeper roots of Humanity that bind...people together on a personal level by denying their individual psyche."

Emery and Trist, writing in the Vietnam era, point to the drug-soaked rebellion of the "flower children" against society as an example of how this scenario functions. Fighting an increasingly senseless and brutal war, the older generation begins to ultimately accept the moral decadence of the drug culture of its children, rather than seek conflict. Society as a whole accepts a "lower moral standard", posited as a higher value.

Citing the Frankfurt School philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, popularized by the 1960s counterculture, Emery and Trist say that under such conditions choice becomes meaningless. What is important is "the moment," and "the momentary experience becomes all," they state.

Quoting from Marcuse in his "One Dimensional Man", Emery and Trist say that modern society is thus confronted with "the rational character of its irrationality."

The organized societal response to this process is best identified by Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", the drug-controlled society, in which there are 'no' individual moral choices. They identify the 1960s counterculture as "pioneers" for this scenario.

The second scenario involves the 'segmentation' of society into smaller parts, of a size that one might be more easily able to cope. "There is an enhancement of in-group and out-group prejudices as people seek to simplify their choices," say Emery and Trist. "The natural line of social divisions have emerged to become barricades."

In this scenario, it is every group ─ ethnic, racial, sexual ─ against the other. Nations break apart into regional groups, and those smaller areas in turn fissure into even smaller areas, along ethnic or other lines. It is an incredibly violent scenario, but a violence associated with a purposefulness of sorts, in individual defense of each ethnic or other group.

The organized social response to such a psychological and political disintegration is the Orwellian fascist state, modeled on George Orwell's book "1984". In the book, individuals turn to "Big Brother" to regulate their lives and conflicts among various castes within society. A continuous conflict among three superpowers, writes Orwell, is "waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact..."

While noting that the Orwellian scenario is not acceptable in its fully regimented form, any more than Nazism could now be replicated in its exact form, Emery and Trist state that there are nonetheless obvious parallels in the "Cold War" to the Orwellian "war of each against all". They comment elsewhere that, should the Cold War collapse, the ability to control a segmentation scenario on a societal scale would also collapse.

The third scenario is the most intense, involving a withdrawal and retreat into a "private world and a withdrawal from social bonds that might entail being drawn into the affairs of others." Emery and Trist caution that 'dissociation' is not the more assertive statement of "me first," of personal selfishness that became the hallmark of the 1970s and 1980s. Fearing the terror that surrounds him, the individual seeks to avoid all forms of danger entirely. Individuals seek 'invisibility', in order to fade into their environments; they see nothing and no one, so that no one might see them.

The brainwashers remark that 'dissociation' has always been a response of sorts to living in a city. People tend to "look the other way," at some of what is going on, just as the person who rides the subway tries to "remain invisible" although in a crowd.

Here we can see how Freud and others' predictions about the behavior of crowds or masses of people is specific to only certain types of specially organized experiences -- ones in which the mass is organized around appeals to emotionalism, that lead to the regression of the individual to an infantile state of mind, to an animal-like "freedom" of hedonistic expression. Emery and Trist describe a level of 'dissociation' so great that the individual is reduced to an animal. He withdraws from the terror around him, and like an animal "playing possum," tries to hide.

With individuals withdrawn into their fantasies, their minds numbed and brainwashed by their televisions, the brainwashers "predict" that men will be willing to accept "the perverse inhumanity of man to man that characterized Nazism" -- not 'the structure' of the Nazi state, but the 'moral outlook of Nazi society'.

Ultimately, the majority of people withdraw so far that they don't even bother to go to their sporting events or rock concerts -- "they have such experiences mediated through television". It is the television that "gives them solace," write the brainwashers.

To survive, such individuals require the comfort of a 'new' religion. The old religious forms, especially Western Christianity, demand that Man be responsible for his fellow humans. The new religious forms will be a form a 'mystical anarchism', a religious experience much likened to satanic practice of the Nazis and the views of Carl Jung. Again, it is to be television that provides the "social glue" that binds the minds of the population to their new religious forms. It is television as the leader, in this case, the "anti-Christ".

A Clockwork Orange

The organized social response to 'dissociation', say Emery and Trist, is a society described in the pages of Anthony Burgess's novel "A Clockwork Orange".

In the book, Burgess depicts a society gone controllably mad. A majority of people are engaged in useless "schooling," a few engaged in mind-destroying trivial labors, and somewhere, there are people running all this as if it were an insane zoo.

Senseless violence is everywhere in the streets, committed by gangs of youth who lust for blood. In a typical 'Clockwork Orange' street scene, a gang of drugged, outlandishly dressed teenagers viciously beats an old man. He had it coming, said one of the gang members; everyone knows that if you go into certain parts of town, you will be beaten and raped.

There is no politics to any of it ─ Burgess made sure that his "hero," Alex, repeatedly makes clear that he is 'apolitical'. Alex speaks a language invented by the linguist Burgess, appropriate to his infantilism; It is never translated ─ the reader is forced to "learn" what it means by description or "word pictures."

Burgess provides no explanation about how society got this way; there is no war or other social calamity referred to. "That's just the way things are," one character says.

"A Clockwork Orange" portrays a society dominated by infantile animal-like rage. The 'dissociated' adults cannot exert moral authority over their children, because they are too involved with their own infantile fantasies, brought to them through their television sets. Even as they watch the reports of the daily mayhem, they convince themselves that it isn't "their kids" who are doing this.

For Emery and Trist, Burgess's 'Clockwork Orange' vision "is" the Nazi state without the superstructure. It is organized disorder, without moral control.

It is the force of the mass communications media, the 'power of television', however, that is driving us toward the 'Clockwork Orange society'. As we have explained in previous sections, television, when watched in habituated, long viewing induces 'dissociation'. It also provides the tension and images of violence required in order to create the form of social organization in "A Clockwork Orange". Under its ever-present eye, the "leader", television, transforms children into beasts like Alex and parents into impotent caretakers of beasts.

Over time, one state of mental and social disintegration can transform itself into another. Given the power of television over society, all states will tend to become more 'dissociative', more like "A Clockwork Orange". As the Futures Group brainwasher Hal Becker put it back in 1981, "Orwell made a big mistake in his "1984". Big Brother doesn't need to watch you, as long as you watch it."

Next, I will explain how the programs you watch on television have been crafted to brainwash you.

The Programming of America by Television

Reflect on the following for a moment -- Suppose someone told you that they wanted you to take a large dose of a mind-deadening drug, and that after you took the drug, they were then going to suggest that you do things that without taking the drug you would probably never conceive of doing. And, they also told you that "you would not be held accountable for what you did, that you would have no conscious memory of what took place". Would you take it?

Definitely not, you say, no way.

Yet, for more than 40 years, the majority of Americans, like yourself, have been taking a daily dose of a mind-deadening drug, one of the most powerful ever invented -- "television". With your mind in a deadened state, things have been suggested to you that, were you alert and reasoning, you would have rejected. And, 'over time', under the continual dosage of this drug, you have followed the suggestions, changing the way you think about yourself and the world around you. And, you never knew that this was happening and you may even yet, despite ail the things we have already shown you, have trouble believing it. That is how complete this brainwashing process is, how strong is its power over you.

People like Sigmund Freud, his direct followers in the psychoanalytic movement, and the neo-Freudians that split from him, as well as all 'social psychologists', deny the existence of the universal truth that Man is made in the living image of God, and is therefore distinct from the animal. They deny that Man has been endowed by his Creator with the Divine Spark of reason, and that by the gift of reason, Man can 'consciously' perfect his knowledge. For them, creativity is fundamentally an unknowable mystical concept, an act linked to repression of both carnal and sexual desires.

By denying these most fundamental of truths, they deny the existence of any truth. They seek to impose on Mankind a "paradigm shift that will wipe out 2,000 years of Christian civilization", thereby returning Man to a bestial and primitive social order.

Using television as their weapon, the brainwashers have launched a 40-year assault on the universal truths of Western Christian civilization and on the concept of universal truth itself. In place of morally informed reason, in the absence of universal truth, they have raised the false god of 'popular opinion'. As we shall show, they have consciously targeted "the higher moral values" of society, and even the idea that there could be a set of true moral values, seeking to substitute 'amorality' as the axiomatic assumption.

Reality as Opinion

Once the concept of universal truth is obliterated, reality can be redefined by internal "perceptions" or "images" of that reality. Those perceptions and images are then validated by 'popular opinion'. Reality becomes a set of conflicting opinions validated by a mass consensus.

Freud, in discussing this transformation in his 1921 "Mass Psychology", identifies the process in masses of people as a loosening of the hold of what he calls moral or social conscience (the "Over I" or "superego," as it is mistranslated in English) over a person's more infantile and hence, more animal-like nature (the I and It, or the "ego" and "id"). To use a term developed by the neo-Freudians, the individual becomes more "other-directed," governed by the perceived opinions of others, and thus, more easily manipulated.

Television brainwashing works through the manipulation of images and perceptions to cause a 'paradigm shift' in the "public mind." It does this through what the television people appropriately call 'programming', the content of which is shaped and fine-tuned by "social analysts."

Let's see how Walter Lippmann, one of the earliest practitioners and theorists of the mass manipulation of opinion, describes the process. Lippmann, trained by the British psychological warfare unit at Wellington House during World War I and a follower of Freud, was to become regarded as the most influential American social and political commentator of the first half of the twentieth century.

In 1922, following the publication of Freud's "Mass Psychology", Lippmann authored a handbook on the manipulation of the public mind, titled "Public Opinion". In its introductory chapter, titled "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads," he describes the concept of public opinion:

"Public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts and there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which public opinion refers are known only as opinions... The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes and relationship, are their opinions. Those pictures which are acted on by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters... The picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside."

While television might shift some opinions relatively quickly, a 'paradigm shift' involving the 'axiomatic' assumptions that govern all individuals thinking in a society does not occur overnight; it occurs over a long period of time, in stages.

Think about a profile of the American population, correlating it to the cumulative amount of television viewing.

First, you have a generation which was born before the advent of television, the generation who fought in World War II. They had the strongest set of moral values, since they were influenced by the war experience and their parents' strong moral values. They were the most resistant to brainwashing.

Their children, the "baby boomers" of the 1947-55 period, were the special targets of the brainwash programming, as we shall show. They have been subjected to television brainwashing all their lives. All succeeding generations have been totally immersed in the television brainwashing experience.

Thus, you have an older generation which has been watching television since approximately 1950, and successive generations who have been watching for their entire lifetimes.

Now, you have parents who were themselves reared by television, raising children, who were reared by television, who are now starting to have children themselves -- three successive generations subjected to television brainwashing, without any conscious memory of anything different.

With this profile in mind, focus on the following: The goal of television programming is to make each succeeding generation more infantile, more animal-like, more amoral, thereby 'shifting' the value structure of the whole society. By the end of the process, the parents of the "baby boomers" have adopted all the fundamental, infantile assumptions of their children.

The Lost Generational War

The Tavistock brainwashers Fred Emery and Eric Trist, writing nearly 20 years ago, identify the crucial period in this brainwashing process -- the point at which the pre-television generation tried to raise their "baby boom" kids, approximately 1949-69. They note the following scenario. Throughout the period, children's television watching increased, especially as the number of shows oriented to them increased. At the same time, adult watching increased. Children, they say, learned from what they saw their parents doing -- It became socially approved behavior to watch television.

But then something interesting happened -- The television, itself, took over as a surrogate parent. Children watched to amuse themselves, and were encouraged by parents to do so. They became habituated to watching.

The images presented on the screen were more real, more powerful than the outside world. The messages presented in the shows became more important to the children than what they were told by their live parents.

Children watched the same shows, often with their friends, and talked about the shows, socializing the experience. Emery and Trist, citing the work of others, report that television became the "Pied Piper" for the children, the 'leader' that they followed.

The whole process created an estrangement between child and parent, although not necessarily apparent at first, creating a crisis in the fundamental unit of social reproduction, the family. It was only as these baby boomer children grew into adolescence in the 1960s that the conflict broke into the open. Write Emery and Trist:

"a generation of children grow up on a TV diet, and as the more affluent get sets, then multiple sets, the more likely they are to use it as a substitute for a presence with their children. The children grow into adolescence, spend less time viewing, but have a different world view. They challenge the world view of the parents, face to face..."

In previous generational challenges, Emery and Trist write, the disciplinary authority of the adult society ultimately won over its young-adult values. But this time, adult society had lost its ability to discipline; the adults had been infantilized by their own television watching. The generational war is lost, Emery and Trist write, as all society plunges to a new, 'lower' infantile level. The behavior of the children -- the drugs, the sex, the anti-social behavior -- is excused or, to use a brainwasher's word, "rationalized", with the help of the messages contained in television programming.

Emery and Trist reach a startling conclusion -- The generational war between the so-called counterculture and the generation that fought World War II will be the last such sharp confrontation of values. Under the influence of television, each succeeding generational transfer of power will be smoother. When the adults are infantile already, it is more easy to accept the infantilism of their youth. The children, they state, may be violent, insane and anti-social, but no one will assert that it isn't their right to be so!

To understand better how we got into this mess, we are going to have to go back to the early period of television in the 1950s, and show how what you watched as a child helped determine your values as an adult.

As we said, the "baby boom" generation was the first to be reared by the television set. By 1952, there were already 30 million TV sets in America; by the end of the decade, the penetration in American homes was near universal. This provided the basis for mass brainwashing, targeting especially the children born since 1949.

It is important to understand that the brainwashers think in 'long time spans'. They know that it is impossible to effect any significant change in social values over anything but time-frames measured in several generations. Hence, the messages presented in mass television programming in the 1950s, which were planned to "play back" one and two decades hence. In the same way, what you and your children are watching today, will shape the first part of the next millennium.

While your brainwashers think in "long periods of time", you are being induced to think in shorter and shorter time-frames. Your attention span is shrinking almost daily. For example, the average half-hour television show is broken into at least four segments, with usually the longest running no more than five to six minutes, with the remaining portions occupied by commercials, theme and credits. Television news presents items in 30 second bites, with slightly longer feature pieces. The very nature of the majority of your television viewing makes it impossible to consider difficult concepts, especially developments over long periods of time.

Cultural Warfare

Your brainwashers themselves actually fall into two major categories. They both have the same world view -- the concept of Man as a beast, to be controlled and manipulated like an animal -- but there is a division of responsibility between them. There are the people like Emery and Trist and others at places like Tavistock, who create and analyze mechanisms for brainwashing, who study the effects of this brainwashing with what are called 'profiles', and who make recommendations on how to do it better. They work as social psychologists, and in similar professions.

Then, there are the people who create the "idea content" of the brainwashing. They operate on the culture or 'paradigm', as we have explained -- the sets of axioms that govern the way we think. These are the "cultural warfare" experts, who create the value systems which are, in turn, imposed on the society by the brainwashing mechanisms, such as television.

In the late 1930s and during the war, operatives of the Frankfurt School were involved in major studies of mass radio programming, and their ultimate effects upon the population. Their work, with Tavistock-linked personnel, in what was known as the Princeton "Radio Project", provided important conceptual material for later, mass television brainwashing.

One of the key early pioneers in television brainwashing techniques was Theodor Adorno, a Frankfurt School operative and a former member of the "Radio Project." Adorno shared the bestial outlook of the neo-Freudians, developing, along with others associated with the Frankfurt School network, a perverse theory on the use of mass communications technology for mass brainwashing. Given the appropriate message content, said Adorno, media such as television and radio, could be used to make people "forcibly retarded." An adult personality could be reduced, through interaction with mass media, to a more primitive, childish or infantile state.

In a 1938 report, Adorno compares the retardation capability of existing media. Radio has one level of effect, but sound film is an even more powerful "retardant," Adorno indicates. Television is yet another level more powerful, said Adorno in 1944:

"Television aims at the synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the overall impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically...."

In the minds of Adorno and his "fellow travelers," the power to control the new medium meant the power to determine and control the values of society:

"Television is a medium of undreamed of psychological control," Adorno wrote in 1956.

That same year, Adorno wrote an essay entitled "Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture" that elaborated on the brainwashing techniques that could be employed with television. It was intended as a cookbook and discussion guide for people involved with the programming. For people like ourselves, intended television brainwash victims, it provides insight into how the messages in the programming can be "decoded."

Outlining his study, Adorno writes, "We will investigate systematically socio-psychological stimuli typical of televised material on both the descriptive and psychodynamic levels, in order to analyze their presuppositions, as well as their total pattern, and to evaluate the effect they are likely to produce. This procedure may ultimately bring forth a number of recommendations on how to deal with these stimuli in order to produce the most desirable effect..."

Adorno states that all television programming contains an 'overt' message as defined by plot, characters, etc. in the images presented and a 'hidden' message that is less obvious, and is defined by the larger intent of those presenting the images. These "hidden messages" are the brainwashing content, while the "overt" message -- the plot, etc. -- is the "carrier" of that brainwash content.

The "hidden message" operates on the mind so as to cause "value conflict" over a period of time. As we have stated before, the conflict will not surface immediately, but occurs over generational time spans. The "hidden message" in a show may not surface for 10-20 years as a change in attitudes of the majority of the population, but Adorno asserts that "it will ultimately surface". This is the concept of 'playback' to which we have referred in other sections of this report.

Those 'Wholesome' Shows

To make his point, Adorno unmasks the "hidden message" of a number of popular shows of the early television period.

"Our Miss Brooks", a popular situation comedy (sitcom), pitted a trained professional, a school teacher, against her boss, the principal. Most of the humor, according to Adorno, was derived from situations in which the underpaid teacher tried to hustle a meal from her friends.

Adorno "decodes" the "hidden message" as follows:

"If you are humorous, good-natured, quick-witted, and charming as she [Miss Brooks] is, do not worry about being paid a starvation wage. You can cope with your frustration in a humorous way and your superior wit and cleverness put you not only above material privations, but also above the rest of Mankind."

This 'message' will be called forth years hence, as the economy collapses in the form of a "cynical anti-materialism." It came forth with a vengeance among the 1960s "lost generation," and the first wave of the "counterculture."

Generalizing from this, Adorno points out that it is "social tension and stress" that call forth the television images of "pyschodynamic stereotypes", the role models and images from the early television viewing. The more confusing life becomes, the "more people cling desperately to clichés in order to bring order to the otherwise un-understandable," Adorno says.

Another "decoding" by Adorno emphasizes this point. Remember the show, "My Little Margie"? The heroine of this sitcom was a pretty girl who played "merry pranks" on her father, who is portrayed as well-meaning but stupid.

Adorno says that the "hidden message" is the image of an aggressive female successfully dominating and manipulating the male father-figure. He "predicts" that years later, that young girls will increasingly mirror this image of the "bitch-heroine." Little Margie is the role model image for the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s that took off as the "My Little Margie" viewers grew up.

The messages need not be contained within a single show; they could be transmitted through a series of images contained as primary or secondary features within "several shows". For example, Adorno indicates that several shows featured characters who were artistic, sensitive, and effeminate males. Such images cohered with Freudian notions that artistic creativity stemmed from either a repressed or actual homosexual passion. These effeminate, sensitive males usually come up against the other more aggressive male "macho" images, such as cowboys, who are uncreative.

Recognizing the psychological power in the "hidden image", Adorno predicts that the "creative sissy" will find an "important" place in society. Such images are "playing back" today in the spread of homosexuality throughout society, and in all creative arts.

Television's Killing of God

One of the fundamental relationships that defines our civilization is that of Man to God. That relationship is mediated through organized religion. It is religion that teaches the values and 'axioms' of western Christian civilization, which creates in the individual the capacity for moral judgment that must inform our reasoning processes.

As we have explained in another section of this report, the evil Sigmund Freud, whose mass psychology became the basis for theories of mass brainwashing, hated all religious belief, precisely because it told Man that He was endowed with divine powers to perfect His existence. According to Freud, this belief, the root of our moral conscience, brought Man into conflict with his more infantile desires, thus causing neuroses.

Freud's system and its variants in social psychology must deny the perfectibility of the soul, as described by Dante as the passage of Man from the Inferno, through Purgatory, to Paradise. Man, the two-legged animal, must not aspire to be any more than He is, a beast, at war with Himself, whose base emotions must be repressed and controlled.

In the early 1950s, the majority of Americans still actively worshiped God in churches and synagogues. The practice of religious belief was an "axiomatic assumption" of American life, even if Americans did not always act according to those beliefs. Television could not "actively and openly" attack this; to do that would bring down the wrath of an angry nation on the new medium, and lose its potential hold over the population.

So the programmers took another tact -- "Television shows made organized religious belief invisible; made it disappear from the screen". Studies of the content of television shows in the 1950s show almost no references to church-going or religious activities.

Think about such shows as "Leave It to Beaver" or "Father Knows Best". Do you ever remember those families going to church or discussing religious beliefs? Do you even know what faith those families were? You don't because they never told you ─ They never discussed such matters.

Most importantly, when these families had problems, did they ever turn to their church or their religious leaders as resources to help solve them? Never. They were all worked out within the family -- in the absence of organized religion or religious beliefs. The family and its values were thus 'secularized', and what were once called moral and religious values became known as "family values" -- a secular belief structure that has nothing to do with fundamental values of western Christian civilization.

This was the "hidden message" of those so-called wholesome family shows of the 1950s, the ones that some Moral Majority-types and people like Tipper Gore now hold up as examples of a golden era of television!

The 'playback' came in the late 1960s, with the nation convulsed in generational battles over values, triggered by the Vietnam conflict. Tavistock brainwasher Fred Emery noted at the time that, unlike previous periods of social chaos, in the late 1960s no one was turning to organized religion to help find a way out, to seek more fundamental values that could bind together society and troubled families alike. Instead, he describes the rise, especially among the television-weaned baby boomers, of a "mystical anarchism" that rejected all organized religion as false and "sought a new definition for God." This is the "New Age," or the "Age of Aquarius," preached by Frankfurt School gurus like Herbert Marcuse.

More recent surveys taken by Tavistock's population profilers show that fewer people than ever before say that they hold "strong religious beliefs" of any kind. A standard answer has a person saying that he was brought up religiously, "but no longer practices any organized religion."

We're All Animals

Now, let us turn our attention to how the programmers created an identity between Man and the animal.

One of the earliest forms of children's programming was cartoon shows. Often those shows had human hosts, such as 'Bozo', or 'Terrytoon Circus's' Claude Kirshner. But the majority of the content of the half-hour shows was the five to six minute cartoons. Much was made in those early days about how silly and innocuous the cartoons were, with some parents' groups complaining that there should be more "content" in children's programming.

But they weren't innocuous. Almost every cartoon portrayed 'animals' acting as if they were human beings. Studies of children who had a daily, steady diet of television cartoons show that the kids lost their ability to see the difference between most animals and human life ─ instead the animal kingdom appeared to mirror human society. The children identified with certain animals as "heroes" and feared others as dangerous "bad guys".

The same kind of cartoon fare had been available to Saturday matinee and other movie audiences. But children went to the movies at most once or twice a week, for an hour or two. During the first 10 years of television, children aged 2 to 10 watched more hours of cartoons than they spent doing any other activity. They received more than an hour and a half a day worth of cartoon brainwashing.

Toward the end of THE decade, the cartoon shows started to mirror adult television ─ "Yogi Bear" and other Hanna-Barbera features were put in the weekly series format, to create a regular, habituated audience. As some of the programmers predicted, this format also drew adult audiences to the cartoon series.

That Lousy Mouse

The most powerful of the children's shows were produced by Walt Disney Studios, which had years of experience in producing a mass brainwashing product directed at children. Walt Disney and his brother Roy were both involved in the production of propaganda films during World War II, overseen by the Tavistock-dominated Committee for Morale. His studio was the first to produce feature-length cartoons that incorporated human and animal characters. Disney recognized that the cartoon, with its color and larger-than-life imagery, was the perfect vehicle for carrying "messages" to children. His films, such as "Sleeping Beauty" and "Snow White", were all aimed at becoming universal experiences for generations of children and their parents, containing 'moral messages' that would stay with a child through most of his or her life.

Thus, it was not surprising that the most popular children's show of the first television decade was the "Mickey Mouse Club", which mixed cartoon, movie and live interaction between human and animal characters.

The "Mickey Mouse Club" was "an experiment in mass brainwashing of children through television". Around the show was built an actual club organization, which by the end of the decade had more members than the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts combined. Along with membership came a club magazine and other items which, in turn, suggested other group activities, which usually meant the purchase of some Disney-licensed toys and paraphernalia.

Each child at home was "indoctrinated" in a membership ritual, with prompting from the television, and was urged to sing-along with songs, with words flashed on the screen, and chant things as instructed by their television group leader. They did so while wearing their "mouse ears," which were designed to make them identify with an animal figure, Mickey Mouse.

At the end of each show, there was a sermon by the "group leader," a young adult male, whose preaching was reinforced by statements from the "live" Mouseketeers in the studio, each of whom was known only by his or her first name. The sermon usually spoke of the need to honor parents and other family members, and to do "good" things for little creatures and other little children. All of this was done while children at home and on the stage wore their ears and gave their "club salute."

There had been other children's clubs before, around radio shows such as "Captain Midnight," and around television figures like Roy Rogers or "Howdy Doody," but nothing on the scale of Disney's Mickey Mouse Club, and nothing organized around identification with an animal. American children had been given a new pagan-like religion, and its god was a mouse!

The parents saw nothing wrong in this. The mouse, through his surrogate, his human spokesman on the show, Jimmy, supported "American values." Children were being "taught" to respect their parents, to be "patriotic" and to act well-behaved. The parents were happy to let a mouse, or rather television, through a mouse, give those values to a generation of children.

Reflect for a moment on a different time and a different place. There was another generation of children whose values were given to them in an organized form from someone other than their parents. The "Hitler Youth" of Nazi Germany. They too had their rituals, their uniforms and symbols, and their songs. They too had their leaders, who preached sermons. And they too were "taught" to be "patriotic" and respect their parents, and to always be polite and well-behaved. Remember what we said ─ the Nazi state and values without the Nazi baggage. Mickey Mouse, the Fuhrer? Makes you think for a moment, doesn't it?

Those Murderous Animals

One of the "values" that was inserted into the various serial adventures within the "Mickey Mouse Club's" format was the need to protect "little creatures" and "Nature" against greedy man, who would destroy them to make money. Similar themes were contained in the prime time "Walt Disney Presents" series.

Meanwhile, other more "standard" format shows, such as "Lassie" and "Rin Tin Tin" created further identification between children and the animals. In these shows, the animal was the "hero," who often defeated bad people, sometimes without the help of any human intervention. In each case, the shows featured a young boy or girl, who was protected by the animal (in the two cases cited, dogs). As later brainwashers' studies found, this made the images on the screen easier for the children viewers to identify with.

All of this identification with the animal, and the blurring of the distinction between what is human and what is animal, "played back" a generation later in the lunacy of the environmental movement.

Now, it's 1990. Those nice stories about "cute little animals" have turned a bit gruesome. The average nature show, whether it be on cable, on the networks, or on public television, shows animals killing each other and copulating. Some of the Moral Majority-types are a little squeamish about the copulation, but they apparently find little wrong with the violence.

The new shows have the blessing and the guidance of various psychologists, who have profiled children's responses to the animal gore and sex. They openly state that the shows provide lessons for children about "human behavior", since the animals merely reflect the darker side of Man's own nature. Eli Rubinstein, a psychologist working on the American Psychological Association's task force on television and society, claims the violent nature documentaries "puts human behavior in context". He says that parents should watch such shows with kids so that they can use them constructively to "reinforce positive human behavior".

Such shows are especially good at explaining to children why it is bad to create large populations. The children can see that unregulated population growth leads to death and suffering, these brainwashers say.

Thus, the next generation of children are to be told that they are to mimic "good" animal behavior and avoid the more nasty stuff. We don't want too many children, now, do we? And you tolerate this brainwashing and may even participate in it, as the psychologists "recommend". This is where those cartoons and Mickey Mouse have led us.

Next time you're around an environmentalist over 35 years of age, ask him if he still has his "mouse ears."

And Justice For All

Now, let's take a look at another brainwashing message, "justice, as carried out by law enforcement officers", and see how television handled it. Here we will see how the hidden message shifts to an increasingly more fascist outlook.

In the first decade of television, the image of law enforcement was conveyed in both the westerns and the so-called "cops and robbers" shows. Children watched both, since they were on during prime time and were among the most popular viewing for families.

Usually, the law enforcement officers were either the heroes, or major secondary characters, who worked with the heroes in order to solve problems. The sheriff or the detective or police officer was the "good" guy, who risked his life to protect citizens from "bad" criminals.

The simple message delivered was "crime doesn't pay." What was crime or criminal activity? Anything that violated the law. And what determined the law? On what principles was a society governed by law founded? Certainly not on the concepts of charity and justice contained in the Bible or on the concepts of Natural Law embodied in our Constitution. At best, what was shown was that the law was based on a "social contract" in order to control the worst elements in society. At worst, it was shown to be based only on retributive justice ─ "an eye for an eye". As studies of the program content of such shows as "Gunsmoke", "The Untouchables", or "Dragnet", show often that such "justice" was swift and final ─ More often than not the "bad guy" wound up dead, without any trial.

As television entered its second decade, the brainwashers altered the programming content. With the baby boomers approaching adolescence, new shows started portraying the "corruption" in society and the legal system. The series "The Fugitive," for example, featured as a hero a man wrongly convicted of murder, running from the law while trying to find the person who framed him. Each episode showed the corruption in the society around him, including corrupt lawyers and police officers. Other shows had plot lines with the message that crime was a "sociological problem", and that "justice could not be found inside the "system".

Such images, imprinted on the minds of impressionable adolescents and children growing up, 'played back' during the "revolution" against the social order in the late 1960s. (In this case they turned out to be all to true though)

More recently, television provided new messages telling viewers that the "system" had become so corrupt, and that the corruption was everywhere ─ Judges were crooked, law enforcement officials were crooked, etc. The heroes of shows are now people who operate outside any law, who bring people to justice one way or another, Rambo-style. A new fascist vigilantism is being organized by such shows as "Dark Justice" about a judge, who seeks to destroy people whom he cannot convict in his courtroom. The brainwashing message is that Constitutional law is itself a means to protect only the criminals and must be side-stepped in order to achieve "justice".

This message finds no contradiction in the images from 35 years ago that lie in the recesses of the minds of the baby boomers. The westerns and "cops and robbers" shows told you that justice is defined by the "eye for an eye" dictum, and that most often it was found at the barrel of a gun.

The Sexual Revolution

Finally, let's turn our attention to one of the most discussed questions about television programming -- the widespread sexual content of shows. A flip through the dial makes it obvious that there is plenty of every kind of sex one could imagine on the tube, and what isn't shown explicitly in network prime time, is implied in dialogue. But it wasn't always that way. Again, we will see how the images have shifted, to that of an increasingly debased level.

Let's go back to the 1950s again, when the brainwashing of the baby boomers started. In the early television shows, there was no depiction of any sexual activity and almost no discussion of the matter. Those early shows supposedly featured "wholesome" family situations, at least if you believe what some of today's television's critics now tell us. But the brainwashing message was more subtle. It didn't rely on visual image or dialogue.

It is important that we make some distinctions about "love" and "sex." The very fact that people focus on "sex" or "sexual activity" already reflects a debasement of fundamental human emotions into their most carnal. We must draw a distinction between what is commonly called "sex" or "love," and the concept of Christian love, known as 'Agape'. Man, as distinct from the beast, can experience love, in its most profound sense, as separated from the instinctual cravings of animals, and to experience such love is joyful.

There is no separation of the mind from such emotion, no split between emotion and reason, in this most fundamental sense of the concept of love or 'Agape'. It is this concept of love, as in Man's love of God, that is the fundamental emotion, that truly makes Man human. To say that all human society is fundamentally based on Man's love of God and his fellow man is not incorrect.

To reduce love to simple emotion, and to further reduce it to a sexual attraction, is a degradation of Man. The Freudian paradigm and all its derivatives deny the existence of a love that is anything different than carnal or romantic. Any other kind of love is defined as "neurotic", the product of a denial of man's basic 'animal' instincts. In the Freudian system, 'Agape' has been replaced by 'eros', whose carnal cravings must determine all human relationships.

There is no better example of 'Agape' than the love and joy that a parent feels in seeing his or her child develop into a reasoning human being. The tears of joy that come to parents' eyes when they see a child understand something for the first time are indicative of a profound emotional experience. This 'fundamental' emotional experience puts Man in touch with His human identity.

The goal of the brainwashers was to destroy 'Agape', using television as their weapon. Over a period of several generations, television would steer Man away from 'Agape', and place Him under the thrall of 'eros'.

As we have stated, the earliest television was in no way sexually explicit or even implicit. The prevailing morality within the society, although weakened by hedonistic pursuits, would still not tolerate that. Instead, what was presented were simple 'romantic' notions or no notions of love at all. Furthermore, studies done during this early period revealed that early television reinforced infantile concepts about "boy meets girl" and "infatuation" which, in turn, reinforced "common knowledge" among children and adolescents about human relationships. The Frankfurt School crowd realized that by presenting no 'positive' concept of loving, they were helping to "wipe the slate clean", leaving the door open for more debased images at a later point.

But there was another flank to the attack on 'Agape', one with a more "hidden" message. Emery and others studying early television found that such shows as "Father Knows Best", "Ozzie and Harriet", and "Leave It to Beaver", had a secondary effect on the children viewing them. The fictional parents were portrayed as "perfect," without flaws.

No real world situations were actually solved so perfectly. Tension was thus created between the 'image' of the "perfect parents" that appeared on the screen and the 'real' parents who lived in the children's homes -- The latter could never measure up to the former.

Meanwhile, the parents, who watched these shows with their children, were being shown television images of kids who were nothing like the real thing - They were too "good", too well-behaved, too respectful. When they tried to measure their own kids against the tube's images of children, they found their own wanting.

The brainwashers noted that this was the first generation whose images of parents and children were coming into conflict with reality. An obvious conclusion can be drawn -- the early television programming message 'played back' in the generational war of the late 1960s, when the tension exploded into anger and rage.

As the baby boomers reached adolescence, they were bombarded with new, more degraded images of "love", and "love-making", which were to prepare the way for the next phases of the "sexual revolution". Only ten years earlier, the images and situations of "Love, American Style" or "MASH" would have been unthinkable to put on television.

A new image started to enter the scene ─ the shattering of the nuclear family, the fundamental unit by which society is reproduced. In the early 1970s, shows featuring unwed mothers, extramarital affairs, adultery, and people "living together" out of wedlock were widespread. Sex and sexual references were everywhere on prime time.

A study was done comparing a week of prime time shows during 1975, 1977 and 1978, which shows how fast this "carnalization of America" was spreading:

"Contextually implied intercourse increased from no weekly occurrences in 1975 to 15 in 1977 and 24 in 1978; sexual innuendoes increased in frequency from about one reference per hour in 1975 to 7 in 1977 to 11 in 1978. Most dramatically, verbal references to intercourse increased from 2 occurrences in 1975 to 6 references in 1977 to 53[!] in 1978..."

It isn't just the amount of sex being shown and referred to on television, but the 'messages' that accompany it. For example, in the early period of television, which we will define for our purposes as prior to the 1969 season, a study done by a research team and published in the excellent source book "Watching America", showed that 38 percent of shows "presented extramarital affairs as wrong. The proportion dropped to 7 percent after 1970. Before 1970, none of the shows ever portrayed recreational sex as acceptable without qualification. In prime time's passionate world of the 1970s and 1980s, 41 percent of the shows viewed portrayed recreational sex as acceptable without qualification, and 33 percent made no moral judgment."

The same book notes:

"On the TV screen, sex is usually without consequence, without worry and with rarely a bad experience."

The images of the 1970s are 'playing back' with a vengeance in the 1980s and 1990s. There is an important point to be made here. While changes in values do not occur overnight, they are occurring at an increasingly rapid pace. This has to do with the cumulative effect of television brainwashing on an increasingly amoral and immoral population. "As morality collapses and breaks down, there is less resistance to suggestion in the individual."

The authors of "Watching America" sum up television's view of 'eros', and what the message is that television delivers to its brainwash victims:

"Today television is both willing to talk about sex and tell the truth about it as the Hollywood community sees the truth. That truth is roughly, that sex is important, it needs to be dealt with, in all its diverse expressions, and those who would suppress it from popular entertainment are doing the mass audience a disservice. Indeed, the real villains on programs that deal with sexual issues are...the Moral Majoritarians who would deny romance its natural physical expression, restrict free expression and much-needed information, or condemn 'deviant' social victims like gays and prostitutes who are no different than the rest of us, except in one minor regard ─ their sex lives. As for extramarital sex, it's a fact of life, which popular entertainment would be foolish to ignore or treat moralistically according to outmoded standards."

They note that television, with its power, need not be direct in its advocacy:

"As a leading form of mass entertainment, television rarely mounts the barricades. Instead, it breaks down barriers one by one, gradually extending the limits of social acceptability."

How well this brainwashing has worked is reflected in some new reports from the Census Bureau, based on 1990 data.

Some 61 percent of all adults are wed, compared with 72 percent in 1970.

In 1970, 85 percent of all children under the age of 18 lived with two parents; now only 72 percent do. Divorce caused 37 percent of the single-parent homes. In 33 percent of the single-parent homes, the parent has 'never' married.

In a reflection of the infantilism that now grips society, these reports also show that a larger number of youth, aged 20-30, continue to live at home with their parents than at any time in recent history, be they single or married and "regardless of economic circumstances".

Brainwashing by Remote Control

In the early days of television, the Hollywood-based programmers were 'directly' influenced by Frankfurt School operatives. Now, most of the people in charge of programming, both in writing and producing shows and determining which of those produced make it on the air, are in the approximate 35- to 45-year-old age range. In other words, the programmers themselves have been brainwashed by 40 years of television programming! To use a television metaphor, "the brainwashing is now taking place on remote control".

This is confirmed by a profile made by the authors of "Watching America". Their survey of a random sampling of the top 350 people involved in television programming reveals the debased moral value structure that now determines what you watch:

* some 73 percent of this crowd comes from either the Boston-Washington corridor or California.

* Although 93 percent had a religious upbringing (59 percent were Jewish), 45 percent claimed no religious affiliation or belief in God; those who said that they had retained some religious faith, said that their religious affiliations were nominal; 93 percent said they seldom or never attended religious services.

* some 75 percent described themselves as "left of center" politically and "liberal". These "liberals", however, are strong believers in "free enterprise", and almost all support the "free market system of economics".

* some 43 percent think that the American system of government and the Constitution need a "complete restructuring".

* some 91 percent are in favor of unrestricted rights to abortion; 80 percent believe that there is nothing wrong or abnormal about homosexuality, with 86 percent supporting the rights of homosexuals to teach in public schools. More than 83 percent think that extramarital affairs are okay, while 51 percent do not think that there is anything wrong with adultery.

In addition, nearly all support a radical environmentalist agenda to one degree or another. No question was asked about whether they believed that Man was a beast, but their other answers reveal that their answer would have been a resounding "yes".

Finally, when asked which groups should influence American society the most, they listed consumer groups and intellectuals at the top and religion at the bottom. Two-thirds believed that it was their role to program television entertainment to promote "their" social agenda.

Think back a moment to those figures from the Census Bureau on the American family, which showed in statistical form the collapse of the nuclear family. Can't you see the correlation between those figures and the degenerate values of the television programmers?

You are being brainwashed

“Camera’s got them images, camera’s got them all…Nothing’s Shocking”.

“I have a vision…television!”

“Honey, where’s the remote?”

A funny thing happened to me about six months ago. See, being that I’m pursuing a career in the entertainment/music/radio industry, I’ve been pretty broke. An offset of my being broke is that I had to decide which expenses and bills to keep and pay, and which ones I could do without or get away with not paying for. I’ve eliminated such luxuries like buying new sneakers, switched from drinking Guinness to drinking PBR, and, my hardest transition was going from smoking kind nugs to cheap schwag. All of this took some adjustment but I began to fare well with my new financial state.

One of the bills that I decided to blow off for “just a couple more weeks” was my cable bill. The notices started coming more frequently and the phone calls began, but I felt that I didn’t really need cable so it wasn’t on the top of my priority list. Eventually, the digital part of my service was shut off and I was left with just the basic channels. That lasted about two weeks until, finally, the axe fell and I was left with a pair of rabbit ears that could pick up three channels on a clear day.

My first few days without television were like the first few days a junkie tries to kick heroin. I needed those Seinfeld reruns. My day wasn’t complete without at least an hour of “I love the 80’s” on VH1. I didn’t know how I’d survive without my ritualistic Sunday night Simpsons. How would I talk about Friends with my friends?

It felt very similar to getting out of a relationship that both parties involved knew was no good for the other, something I have also become something of an expert on. Yes, breaking the habit of not watching television was the same as breaking up with a bad girlfriend, but the true test was to see how long I could go without that comfortable booty call.

After the first week or so, I started to feel less of a need to lay motionless on the couch, scratching my nuts and farting into the same couch cushion every night for upwards of three hours on end. I found myself writing and reading more. I went to HACC and registered for some courses. I got my own business going again and started working part time with a radio station. I go out and see original music at least 5 nights a week. I genuinely feel as if I’ve just now started to truly realize the world around me for what it is.

As the weeks went on and the momentum built from my new found energy, I began to think more about why I hadn’t started doing all of the things I’m doing now sooner. Was it the divorce? Was it the psychological toll that a custody battle took on my mental constitution? Or, just maybe, could have it of been the fact that I, just like every other American, was spending an average of 7.2 hours in front of the television every single day?

That’s right! 7.2 hours of each day (on average) is spent staring at a flickering screen filled with images that do nothing but distract, coerce, and waste valuable time of the viewer. 49 hours of every week is what it adds up to. Sure, right about now you may be saying, “Well I don’t watch TV for 7 hours every day”. Sure you don’t. Not every day. But think about this: Have you ever spent an entire weekend clutching the remote control as if it were a morphine drip button after painful surgery? How many days off from work have you woke up with Katie Couric, had lunch with Bob Barker, and went to bed with Raymond?

It all adds up to an average of 7.2 hours every day that we spend watching the television, and in my experience, I can tell anyone reading this that your life will become dramatically better if you just turn it off. Period.

In my 27 years, according to the institute that figured out that Americans watch 7.2 hours of television every day, 65,318 hours of my life has been spent in front of the television. Holy shit. That’s a lot of hours. And what have I gained by watching that much television in my life? Nothing.

Television is not real.

Nothing we see on the television is based on or presented to us in a realistic setting. Sure, they try really hard to convince us that it’s real, but what is reality? Reality is what we make of it. Reality is the color of the walls in your bedroom; reality is the itch on your back that you just can’t reach; reality, to me, is the notion that marriage is over rated; reality is the fact that I’m not worried about my daughter getting stung by a bee or falling down the stairs, because those things are going to happen; Reality is the fact that I’m actually afraid of when she goes to kindergarten and has to pass her Hello Kitty backpack through a fucking metal detector.

With the exception of The Simpsons, The Sopranos, and good old porn and movies, the main purpose of the television and networks, it seems to have become, is to force us into being bigger, more gluttonous, greedy consumers than we already are. Sure, America is based on capitalism, but when did it become a requirement for me to sit in front of an electrical box and be forced into a decadent mental deterioration that is being brought on by massive psycho-seductive efforts enlisted by multi-national corporations all fighting for dibs on my hard earned money? Every image we see on the television is shown to us in order to convince us that what we see is how it is, and I just am not buying what they’re selling anymore. From what I’ve seen, what they’re telling us just doesn’t add up.

Question Authority.

Personally, I don’t like being told what to do. I’ve always had a problem with authority and to me, the television seems like it has become the most respected, and feared, authority that we know. Where do you go to get the scoop on what semi-developed country Baby Bush has decided to go into and fuck with? Where do you go to find out what all the cool kids are wearing to school this year? Where do you go to sneak a glance into the life of some homogenized, dramatized, idealized life of a family that you wish you were a part of?

Right after they tell you what to be afraid of (Sars, Y2K, Aids, child pornographers, a suspect described as a black male in his 20’s, virtually anyone of Middle Eastern descent, road-rage, air-rage, airbags, con-men, a suspect described as a black male in his 20’s, killer bees, brain cancer from cell phones, cell phones causing explosions at gas pumps, the imminent threat of a terrorist attack at any given moment, Anthrax, West Nile, a suspect described as a…get the picture?) they tell you what to buy. Go lower your cholesterol with Cheerios and then brush your teeth with Colgate, pick your kids up from soccer practice in the all new, gas guzzling SUV, make Kraft macaroni and cheese with your Swanson fish sticks (and remember, Kraft is made by the good people that bring us Marlboro cigarettes, Philip Morris), get that purple pill to keep it up for the wife, and don’t forget the duct tape and plastic sheets, and then, if you’re unemployed because of an accident, call Angino and Rovner and get the compensation that you deserve. Sue somebody.

Know who I think I’m going to sue? ABCNBCCBSFOX. Yes, I’m going to sue them for wasting 65, 318 hours of my time. I wonder how much I can get? The television has given me plenty of skewed, spun, and unreliable information that I had to un-learn in order to function properly again.

“But how do you get the news?”

The news. Ah, good ol’ Tom Brokaw. How about this theory: Ever stop and think that “The News” is just another program that is “brought to you by our sponsors”? That’s all it is. Your nightly news broadcast is no different than an episode of Roseanne. How can I say that? Well, I’ll tell you. The news programs that we watch are scripted, choreographed bits of fluffed up crap that are sponsored by a variety of corporations. Yes, all of the things that they show us on the news do actually happen, but it’s nothing news worthy and most times all of the good news (good, in this case, meaning positive or heart-warming) hits the cutting room floor because it’s not as interesting as someone getting shot or a fire burning down three houses on 6th street. Notice this next time you see a segment on 20/20 about how unsafe your car is: immediately following the broadcast about car safety or dangers, I guarantee you that you will see a commercial for Volvo, or Volkswagen, or Subaru telling you how safe this new $32,000 MSRP piece of machinery is. Brainwashing.

TV-A

I’ve spoke with a lot of people about kicking the habit and I get almost the same response every time: “I don’t watch that much TV.” Know what that sounds like to me? An alcoholic saying “I don’t drink that much” or a smoker saying “I really need to quit”. Television can be considered an addiction. That’s a good way to look at it if you truly want to eliminate it from your life. You need to tell yourself that you’ll be all right without CSI or RAW! on a Monday night. Trust me, you will be able to get to sleep without the 11:00 news flickering in the background with the sleep timer set on “90”.

Know what else is interesting to me? Now, being an ex-watcher, I notice how many times during a typical day that people reference or mention TV in conversation. It’s crazy! It’s almost as if the television is the most interesting thing in peoples lives. When in reality, it’s a box of transistors and wires blaring enticing images with the sole purpose of selling you something. And I’m not just talking about the commercials either. The following is taken directly from author Ron Kaufman who published this on the Website http://www.turnoffyourtv.com (go ahead, click the link…just make sure you come back and finish reading my article).

The Beautiful People Syndrome is what happens when you watch too much TV. You begin to believe, or expect, regular people to act, behave, and look like television stars. Does TV imitate life, or does life imitate TV, or does both happen? Television images portray people as beautiful, smart, wealthy, quick-witted, creative, instantly compelling, and exciting. Television wouldn't be worth watching, for those who watch, if it wasn't unbelievably interesting.

In the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, New York University Professor Neil Postman explains how television has changed modern imagery: "It is implausible to imagine that anyone like our 27th President, the multi-chinned, three-hundred pound William Howard Taft, could be put forward as a presidential candidate in today's world. The shape of a man's body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing a public in writing or on the radio . . . but it is quite relevant on television. The grossness of a three-hundred-pound image, even a talking one, would easily overwhelm any logical or spiritual subtleties conveyed by speech."

Postman goes on to explain that "on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words . . . You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content."

After watching hours and hours and hours of television imagery, those "Beautiful People" will become burned into your mind. The handsome, pretty, skinny and witty characters on the show "Friends" are more famous than writers, poets, politicians and more important than teachers, policemen, or firemen. The characters on "Friends" or "Ally McBeal" live the lives we all should live -- and they don't even have to work that hard.

The Beautiful People Syndrome is attacking the psyche of television-addicted America. For a man, if you are not 6'1'', handsome and wealthy you are not ideal. Any woman who isn't bone-thin with a large chest certainly is below the standard. Television is warping the American mind. Unfortunately, the Americanization of the rest of the world may contribute to mind-warping worldwide. Everyone wants to be one of the beautiful television people.

And now, a word from our sponsors:

So what should we do about this television thing? Most likely, a lot of you will just keep watching. Some of you will actually close your web browser, disconnect from the internet, go lay down on the couch, and turn on your TV. And that’s okay; just do me a favor? Next time you’re watching some kid in the mall in Camp Hill strut around like a street thug from The Bronx, or your kid tells you that she absolutely has “to have the new DVD from Jessica Simpson” that she saw on MTV, or your annoying co-worker feels obliged to engage you in a conversation about which American Idol character he thinks Simon should take it easy on, just remember this: it’s not too late to turn it off.

Have a comment about this piece or want additional information? Let me know jersey@roundtablepresents.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it