RUTHFULLY YOURS

In July of 2011, when North Korea’s butcher-dictator Dear Leader Kim Jung-Il died, all the NK Communist Party members in the land were ordered to cry hysterically, to ululate in grief at the death of Dear Leader, in public, altogether, on command. You can see it in this video, the Party cadres lined up on the hard snow in military platoon formation, men and women, bursting into tears when the command was given.

The BBC wondered at the time whether all that public crying was real or not, since Dear Leader controlled every human being in that country, by sending any wrong ‘uns to his vast concentration camps to be starved and worked to death. Every tear-stained face in those black-clad platoons knew with absolutely certainty that they would be arrested and sent to death if they failed to show enough dramatic grief. Some unconvincing mourners were undoubtedly grabbed and taken away to the camps.

North Korea’s national cry-in for the loss of Dear Leader is an important lesson about human politics: the power of closed cult indoctrination. Turns out you don’t even need death camps. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment showed how it could be done with legally free Stanford students in the prime of life, able to walk away from the experiment any time they liked, without murderous guards armed with guns. All you needed was a Stanford grad student wearing a white lab coat. A whole series of experiments showed the same kind of thing.

The iron key to mind control is having one source of “real” information, and shutting off any competing ones. It’s all Scientology has to deliver for its faithful followers to stay in that imaginary world. Most of the more fanciful religious and non-religious cults on the web have followers who indoctrinate themselves. The Five Star Movement in Italy started as an internet cult in the ‘90s telling teenage kids about airplanes spreading out chemtrails to control the minds of Italians; today the Five Star Cults controls a plurality of votes in the Parliament in Rome. Today “brain hackers” are no doubt using the same dark arts on the more gullible of their webizens. It’s one reason why teenage kids a decade ago started to put metal objects through their ears, lips and noses. To them those were magical symbols as surely as a reversed swastika was an object of power to the Hitlerjugend.

Cults are human universals. A lot of tribal groups are nothing but cults: The key is always restricting information, and crushing dissent. That’s why U.S. cults often block communication between members and their families.

Now that Donald Trump has reopened the subject of term limits for Congress in his Gettysburg speech, it’s time to turn to the subject of term limits for a group that may need them even more — the media.

The moment couldn’t be more auspicious since WikiLeaks has just exposed 65 “journalists”–coming from such august names in the field as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC– who were at some level in cahoots with the Hilary Clinton presidential campaign.

Does anyone doubt this number will grow? Of course not, although it already encompasses almost all the prominent brands in the mainstream media.

But, you might ask, just because many of the reporters, broadcasters and pundits involved have worked, in many instances, for the same organizations for decades, far longer than most politicians have been in office and certainly longer than even two-term presidents, how can we “term limit” them? They are not, after all, government workers employed by the taxpayer and this is a capitalist country, at least for the moment.

Well, it’s quite simple, really. We simply call them what they are. They are not journalists in any real sense. They are public relations people — sometimes known, pejoratively, as flacks.

Now having spent a fair number of years writing books and movies, I am quite familiar with how PR people work, having had more than a few of them, some quite good and some not.

Thus reading through the WikiLeaks emails, the behavior of these PR folks (formerly known as journalists) was quite familiar to me. For example, when Glenn Thrush of Politico sent his article about Clinton to her campaign manager John Podesta in advance of publication, he was acting in the grand tradition of the public relations man, submitting his copy to his client for approval. In one of his emails to Podesta, Thrush goes so far as to call himself “a hack.” But he is not. He is a flack.