The media war to capture the human psyche

Renowned Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud considered the human psyche to be at the centre of an individual’s emotions, thoughts and behaviour, controlling everything from a person’s interaction with family, friends and colleagues to beliefs about religion, education, death and all else in between.

He characterised the psyche as consisting of three conflicting parameters… the id, ego and superego, with these basic traits determining a person’s perception of reality.

Freud defined the id as being the fundamental cravings of a person stemming from their most primitive animal emotions; he saw the ego as the aspects of character that allow a person to evaluate and react to situations; while the superego was the ethical component of a personality, providing the moral standards that dictate the environment within which the other traits function.

But one of the most fundamental flaws of the human psyche is the notion that the majority of people on the planet share similar values and expectations of life itself.

We all seem to recognise that in terms of id and ego people differ greatly but there is a misguided belief we share a common perception of the superego, which shapes our respect and tolerance of the rest of mankind.

My perception is that most people would choose to avoid conflict in life, to live without stress and pain to enjoy the simple pleasures afforded by our existence on this planet, but there is no doubt others are not wired like this and go out of their way to cause chaos around them, often driven by a lust for control and power.

But how people choose to satisfy their cravings for control can be very different… one individual may be hell-bent on spreading fear and loathing to achieve their goals, while another is motivated by the respect and adulation of others.

There are introverts and extroverts, those who live for risk and those totally averse to it, people who wear their hearts on their sleeves and those who hold their cards tightly to their chests. But no matter what country we are born in and the religion in ascendance there, we generally make the mistake of thinking we all share similar values about right and wrong, about parenthood, love and respect for others.

In truth this is far from being the case, with people driven by many conflicting emotions that grant each of us very little real insight into how another individual will react to any given situation.

And different aspects of life stimulate people in very different ways. Take politics for example… we all know how important it is and the level of control it holds over us but most see it as a tiresome source of disharmony in the world that we would rather avoid for the simple escapism afforded by the entertainment industry, which today shapes our perceptions more deeply than reality itself.

Those who seek power enter politics or fight their way up the corporate ladder, those who don’t can immerse themselves in the land of make believe that exists on the screen on their living room wall, the tablet they hold in their hand or the computer perched on their desk… this provides an easier ride through life than the reality outside our windows.

World events during the past three years provide a clear image of this, but it is a phenomenon that has been around for far longer and shapes our lives imperceptibly with those in power generally having to stuff things up pretty seriously before the majority stand up and take notice.

Create the appearance that everything in the world is hunky-dory and resistance becomes futile, circuits on the wheel of fortune roll around without anyone being bothered about getting off.

So what’s the point I’m making here? Well, it’s that the ability of those in power to stay there is enhanced by the illusion the tiresome disharmony of the real world can be experienced from a sofa in the living room and made just as entertaining as the other forms of escapism we find there.

For the first two years of the “Plandemic” conjured up about Covid I endeavoured to wake people up with little success to the lunacy all around them but by the start of this year I’d virtually given up… resistance had become futile and my desire to expose the reality of the situation had almost seeped away. Over that period I’d researched a lot, written extensively but just like everyone else had also sought solace through the technology in my living room.

And by the third year of the farce it was easier just to accept the situation and let others deal with the stress and pain... Netflix offerings became my chosen way of escape from the madness. But the escape was far from satisfactory… for everything I watched reminded me of the pantomime I was living through.

Before Joe Biden took office in the United States the person he appointed to lead his Domestic Policy Council, Susan Rice, had been the 24th US National Security Advisor during Barack Obama’s second term in office and American ambassador to the United Nations during his first, but immediately before joining the new president’s administration she’d curiously been a member of the Netflix board… a position she had held since March 2018.

Why was this curious? Well it implied to me that her Netflix role was seen by those manipulating world events as being on a par with the parts she had played in Obama’s administration and the one she was about to take on under Biden… in short it was to placate the masses during a period of extreme upheaval when thoughts and minds needed to be diverted away from reality and the dissemination of propaganda was paramount.

In short Netflix was part of the distraction, running hand in hand with the propaganda and brainwashing people were being bombarded with on social media and through news broadcasts… it was a sign to me that reality had gone out the window and the world was now being programmed to react in specific ways by a manipulative and malevolent media… just as it had been 80 years earlier in Nazi Germany.

Even a cursory glance through the archives leading up to the start of World War II is enough to raise eyebrows and drop jaws, for it becomes immediately clear that the pictures painted by the history books hide a multitude of sins.

I’m guessing that the vast majority of people outside Germany are not familiar with the name Bertelsmann and are blissfully unaware it is synonymous with Europe’s largest media group and one of the biggest and most influential publishers on the planet.

Most people would also be blissfully unaware that it ranks as one of the biggest Nazi organisations to survive World War II, along with brands such as Allianz, Hugo Boss, Siemens, IBM, Volkswagen, Dr Oetker, Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Krispy Kreme, Pret A Manger, Kodak, Agfa, Audi, Porsche, BMW, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank that owe much of their status today to business conducted with the Third Reich before and during the war years.

Other international giants that also collaborated with Germany during this period include the Chase National Bank, Citigroup, Standard Oil, ITT, Ford, General Motors and even Coca-Cola.

This period of history witnessed possibly the largest theft of wealth and assets the world has ever seen, with the majority of that loot never being returned to its original owners. What happened to it after the war? Well perhaps the answer lies in the archives of many of these organisations, with Nazi plunder distributed throughout the world through a series of front companies and wartime collaborators to form seed money for the rise of the fascist industrial-military complex which now engulfs our world and pollutes our grasp of reality.

In the west we believe our lives are controlled by democratic governments that we elect into power but nothing could be further from the truth. Democracy is a myth, it is this industrial-military complex that rules our lives with political parties the means to divide and rule the population to advance the stranglehold held by the corporate dynasties that dictate what happens on this planet.

Most people consider governments are in place to serve the needs of the people who elect them, but again it’s a myth. Governments do not serve the people... they serve the corporate machine, under the pretext that what fuels the economy is by definition good for society.

But anyone who has studied economics will be aware of the so-called factors of production, land, labour, capital and the final piece in the jigsaw… the entrepreneur. These are the means seen as being fundamental to building the wealth of a society but the entrepreneurs of this world are ultimately those who control access to capital, which they use to appropriate land and exploit labour that in turn creates even more wealth to sustain their status at the top of the pyramid.

To these capitalists the population of a country is viewed as nothing more than the labour through which they build their wealth and the more these people can be exploited the greater the assets accrued.

During World War II many of the companies listed above took advantage of slave labour to produce their wealth, a practice used centuries earlier to build plantations and businesses around the world that created the platform for many of these dynasties to develop their empires.

In order for the average person to make a living within the modern framework they require employment with unscrupulous companies like these and are therefore dependent on such organisations for their daily bread. For a brief period around the start of the 20th century moves towards socialism saw the introduction of workers’ rights to protect people’s incomes and limit exploitation but in the post-war years the rise of corporate fascism has seen those hard-earned rights gradually eroded with labour once again simply a factor of production to serve corporate goals.

Through zero-hours contracts, non-disclosure agreements and other methods of manipulating staff, organisations insure their workforces do their bidding, for failure to do so can lead to dismissal or limited opportunities to climb the corporate ladder. Serve the company well and you get your daily bread, point out the exploitation and end up on the streets… that’s the way it works.

So, back to Bertelsmann, one of Europe’s largest media groups. It is headquartered in the small provincial town of Gutersloh in north-west Germany and has gone on record as admitting its rise to prominence was founded on close contacts with the Nazi regime during World War II.

These contacts enabled the founding Mohn family to transform the company from an obscure publisher of religious tracts to the largest supplier of literature for Adolf Hitler’s wartime military machine… a commanding position from which it expanded post-war to become the world’s largest book publisher, whose worldwide tentacles extend into the TV, magazine and press sectors.

But until an Independent Historical Commission revealed its findings about Bertelsmann in a 794-page report on 10 September 2002 the company had hitherto wiped its Nazi routes from its historical accounts and even claimed to have opposed Hitler’s regime, forcing Gunter Theilen, its chief operating officer at the time, to come out with an apology for the deception.

“Bertelsmann AG unreservedly accepts the Independent Historical Commission’s report as the official record of the company’s history during the Third Reich,” Theilen said. “I would like to express our sincere regret for the inaccuracies the commission has uncovered in our previous corporate history of the World War II era, as well as for the wartime activities that have been brought to light.”

While the company’s own whitewash of history claims the Mohn family’s opposition to Hitler led the Nazis to close the company down in 1944, the 2002 revelations showed that, far from opposing the fuhrer, company chief Heinrich Mohn supported a number of Nazi causes with donations and was even a member of a group called the SS Sponsors Circle, providing financial backing to Hitler’s elite military corps. He also published a number of anti-Semitic works after the existence of concentration camps became widely known.

And although it is true the company was banned from publishing new books toward the end of the war, this was not due to its heroic opposition to Nazism but more to do with paper shortages making the operation unsustainable. Bertelsmann’s lucrative printing business remained in operation and brought the company an explosion in profits.

“Bertelsmann published a variety of papers and books that clearly had anti-Jewish bias,” Independent Historical Commission chairman Saul Friedlaender, an Israeli historian, claimed. The commission also found that Bertelsmann made “indirect” use of Jewish slave labour in Latvia and Lithuania, although not at its German headquarters.

In fact the company had close ties to Hitler’s regime, especially the Propaganda Ministry, and printed 19 million books during World War II, making it the largest publisher for the German army.

But until the commission began investigating the company’s history in the late 1990s, Bertelsmann had always maintained its historically active role in the Nazi resistance.

And from 1945 on, the “Christian-based” company claimed it had been shut down by the Nazis for anti-government tendencies, which the commission’s report indicates was a “legend” invented by the company in order to receive a publishing licence from the occupying forces as quickly as possible. In reality, Bertelsmann was closed in 1944 because it was hoarding paper and could no longer turn a good profit.

“In 1945, the legend that C Bertelsmann was closed down because of resistance to the Nazis smoothed the way for the occupation authorities promptly granting the firm a new licence to publish,” the report said.

So, where does this leave us 80 years on from the “alleged” demise of the Third Reich? Well, Bertelsmann, the primary Nazi propaganda tool, is now the leading media company in Europe controlling organisations such as the RTL Group, Penguin Random House, BMG, Arvato, Bertelsmann Printing Group, Bertelsmann Education Group and Bertelsmann Investments.

Through these subsidiaries Bertelsmann has a vast portfolio of investments in a large number of media outlets across Europe, including Atresmedia in Spain, involved in a large number of joint projects with smaller media operations to produce programming for Netflix, which is a subsidiary of Comcast… one of just six organisations that control virtually all existing US media outlets. Along with Comcast, the other organisations that make up that list are Walt Disney, Viacom CBS, Sony, Fox and AT&T, which owns Warner Media.

Obviously takeovers and start-ups are constantly changing the picture, but the control of the media industry worldwide lies within a small basket of organisations who ultimately create the news, movies and television series designed to distract us from their distorted versions of reality.

In the battle for hearts and minds and ultimate control of the human psyche, these organisations, which also include the BBC in the UK, tell us what to believe through their versions of the news, which the Bertelsmann story illustrates can be very wide of the truth.

They along with think-tanks such as the World Economic Forum, Bilderberg Group, Tavistock Institute, Trilateral Commission, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Prayer Breakfast, the Asian Leadership Conference, the Boao Forum for Asia, the International Labour Organisation, the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Bohemian Club, Le Cercle and the Valdai Discussion Club create our perception of world events that are designed to serve the goals of corporate fascism championed by the industrial-military complex, which I would argue could be described as the Fourth Reich.

Built on looted Nazi plunder aided by a compliant occupying force in post-war Germany and the financial support of pre-war US financial institutions, 1945 didn’t bring an end to German national socialism it opened it up to the world.

Between November 1945 and October 1946 an International Military Tribunal tried 21 of the most important surviving leaders of Nazi Germany as well as six German organisations, but these so-called Nuremberg trials were little more than show cases… in truth Nazi ideology following World War II spread internationally as former SS scientists and servicemen were secreted around the globe, aiding regimes in South America and providing the knowledge for the NASA rocket programme and post-war CIA projects.

Just as in the Ukraine today, World War II was a construct of corporate fascism created to build the wealth of global dynasties that install governments sympathetic to their lust for wealth and power… and the collateral damage, well that’s just the factor of production called labour, there to be exploited and kept subservient by the brainwashing that infests the airwaves and pollutes our psyche... what a way to start 2023!