consentfactory | There comes a point in the introduction of every new official
narrative when people no longer remember how it started. Or, rather,
they remember how it started, but not the propaganda that started it.
Or, rather, they remember all that (or are able to, if you press them on
it), but it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because the official
narrative has supplanted reality.
You’ll remember this point from the War on Terror, and specifically
the occupation of Iraq. By the latter half of 2004, most Westerners had
completely forgotten the propaganda that launched the invasion, and thus
regarded the Iraqi resistance as “terrorists,” despite the fact that
the United States had invaded and was occupying their country for no
legitimate reason whatsoever. By that time, it was abundantly clear that
there were no “weapons of mass destruction,” and that the U.S.A. had
invaded a nation that had not attacked it, and posed no threat to it,
and so was perpetrating a textbook war of aggression.
These facts did not matter, not in the slightest. By that time,
Westerners were totally immersed in the official War on Terror
narrative, which had superseded objective reality. Herd mentality had
taken over. It’s difficult to describe how this works; it’s a state of
functional dissociation. It wasn’t that people didn’t know the facts, or
that they didn’t understand the facts. They knew the Iraqis weren’t
“terrorists.” At the same time, they knew they were definitely
“terrorists,” despite the fact that they knew that they weren’t. They
knew there were no WMDs, that there had never been any WMDs, and still
they were certain there were WMDs, which would be found, although they
clearly did not exist.
The same thing happened in Nazi Germany. The majority of the German
people were never fanatical anti-Semites like the hardcore N.S.D.A.P.
members. If they had been, there would have been no need for Goebbels
and his monstrous propaganda machine. No, the Germans during the Nazi
period, like the Americans during the War on Terror, knew that their
victims posed no threat to them, and at the same time they believed
exactly the opposite, and thus did not protest as their neighbors were
hauled out of their homes and sent off to death camps, camps which, in
their dissociative state, simultaneously did and did not exist.
What I’m describing probably sounds like psychosis, but, technically
speaking, it isn’t … not quite. It is not an absolute break from
reality. People functioning in this state know that what they believe is
not real. Nonetheless, they are forced to believe it (and do, actually,
literally, believe it, as impossible as I know that sounds), because
the consequences of not believing it are even more frightening than the
cognitive dissonance of believing a narrative they know is a fiction.
Disbelieving the official narrative means excommunication from
“normality,” the loss of friends, income, status, and in many cases far
worse punishments. Herd animals, in a state of panic, instinctively run
towards the center of the herd. Separation from the herd makes them easy
prey for pursuing predators. It is the same primal instinct operating
here.
0 comments:
Post a Comment