Dear Friends, TNNWC Members and Internationalist Colleagues:
For many years, the means to establishing and keeping power (in addition to the customary demonstrations of military might and unbridled aggressiveness) have been simple, and easy to utilize:
1. Acquire and keep secrets from your subjects (I use this latter term distastefully, but for the purposes of making myself understood through brutal simplicity). Hide your agenda, your plans, your activities, your knowledge...your treasure map to the trappings of power. Secrets are powerful weapons in the war to acquire minds; the mere "legend" of a secret, existing or not, is even quite a powerful tool;
2. Divide your subjects against each other by leading them into disputes, squabbles, ethnic issues, racial tensions, false enemies, false prophets and with grand lies. If you continually divide and conquer your vanquished subjects, they will never achieve the critical mass of concensus or of minds to overthrow you -- they will be distracted with either hurting each other, defending against each other, or suspecting each other. Historical examples abound, from the Mayans to Nazi Germany to Angola to China and Rwanda. The opposite side of this silver coin (one out of a colletction of thirty or so) is to "unite these terribly victimized folks against a common enemy" -- "Either you're with me, or your with the terrorists!"
3. Control the media - print, television and radio. Squelch stories that obstruct your objectives and fill the media (a bit of encouragement at the point of a sword helps to get cooperation) with propaganda that serves to either speak supportively of your nefarious agenda, or speaks in the most negative terms about your designated enemies or opponents. Silence the naysayers and those who serve as your detractors. This has gooten increasingly difficult to since the inception of the Internet and proliferation of its children; the Social Media
4. Use symbols, pomp and circumstance, banners, flags, battle hymns, special celebretory honors, rituals, and and other sensory stimuli (as well as subliminal stimuli) to stir up atavistic emotion, and to de-intellectualize issues that might otherwise receive too much questioning or thought from your subjects -- you want to enslave them, so you require them to be completely emotional, highly conformist, and comfortable playing the smallest role possible within the bounds of your kingdom.
5. Be certain that the masses (or is it, as Dick Cheney once said, laughingly, "Them asses"?) believe that there is indeed an afterlife in a kinder, gentler, happier place than that which exists in the miserable present, and that if they follow your rules, which you may invent as you go along, they will be rewarded posthumously. Who uses this strategy? I will not name names, or cite any specific parties like the Vatican or the madrassas in makeshift mosques throughout the poorest parts of the Arab World. Note: This is not to disparage or insult those who do believe in a Divine Being, organized religion, religious scriptures or an afterlife, either north or south - it is to focus your attention on the persons, those Human Beings, who utilize these belief systems to enslave us, or to have us kill for them...either by going to war, or by committing suicide in such a manner that the maximum Human collateral damage is done.
Social Media is changing everything. Citizen journalists with their own ideas, thoughts and disclosures are reaching out to others all over the planet. Secrets are hard to keep. Dissidents are difficult to suppress. Lies are harder to promulgate, with propaganda and dogma being challenged more vociferously every single day.
It is now 3rd February, 2011... What started as an uprising in Tunisia has spread and sown the seeds of revolution and discontent to Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria (pre-emptively). This type of "What in the hell is going on?" question, the question that so often ignites and inspires rebellion and regime change might even spread to the United States.
Social media has become a weed in the garden of the status quo. True free speech (as opposed the "legally permitted" variety), combined with the ability to broadcast throughout the world simultaneously is fomenting great unrest. Old leaders have to adapt new strategies or they will find themselves usurped by a generation of more technologically-oriented leaders-in-training who are genuinely chosen by the people whom they will have to serve, and to whom they will be accountable.
New leaders will have to seize and hold power by far more sophisticated methods than those used by their soon-to-be-uprooted predecessors.
The International Dialogue has given birth to International Action. I, for one, am ready for a change of pace. I feel a renewed sense of adventure and excitement.
Faithfully, and in the Spirit of International Friendship and Commerce,
Douglas Castle
http://AboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com
http://www.DouglasCastleBlogosphere.com
http://twitter.com/douglascastle
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THE INTERNATIONALIST PAGE - "A shrinking world, with expanding opportunities."
http://theinternationalistpage.blogspot.com/
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