Maybe, like me, you are wondering somewhat about recent events, which are being reported in much the same way by newspapers with supposedly differing political views.
But in any case, I invite you to watch this old 8-minute video (transcript below):
Or even just the first 70 seconds of it (highlighted in bold in the first few paragraphs of the transcript).
Don’t be put off by the word Hegelian, which is not even mentioned! Or by the fact that the presentation is to an American audience decades ago.
The (timeless) concepts are not difficult to grasp. As the summary puts it:
The first step (thesis) is to create a problem.
The second step (antithesis) is to generate opposition to the problem (fear, panic and hysteria).
The third step (synthesis) is to offer the solution to the problem created by step one: a change which would have been impossible to impose upon the people without the proper psychological conditioning achieved in stages one and two.
Here is the transcript:
But what is the best way to sell big government and then world government to a people like ours [in America], historically devoted to an independent republic of limited powers?
The answer is simple. In revolutionary literature the tactic is known as “pressure from above and below”.
Deliberately create problems, and then offer only those solutions that result in the expansion of government.
Create conditions so frightful at home and abroad that the abandonment of personal liberties and national sovereignty will appear as a reasonable price for a return to domestic tranquility and world peace.
If those who seek world dominion can stimulate leftist mobs into violent confrontation with local law enforcement and also provide exhaustive news coverage so that the entire nation can see and tremble then the peaceful and freedom-loving majority can be programmed to accept a vast expansion of government powers and even a national police force offered supposedly to end the violence.
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If those who seek world dominion can raise the spectre of an enemy armed to the teeth with superior atomic weapons on the verge of launching a nuclear holocaust and also offer world government as the prevention then millions of Americans can be programmed to accept the loss of national sovereignty as our last best hope for peace.
This is the meaning of pressure from above and below.
To put over police state measures at home, they need chaos crime and anarchy in the streets. To sell the idea of world government they need the constant threat of nuclear war. Or, as they say in revolutionary circles, the real action is in the reaction.
Kunen carries the usual “new left” credentials and is a classic example of the extent to which a highly intelligent mind can be programmed by the establishment into thinking that it is acting against the establishment.
Kunen was one of the leading participants in the first student seizure of an American University which occurred at Columbia in April of 1968. Initially the movement was not large and easily could have been stopped by a simple police action. But as usual the anti-establishment forces received their greatest help from the establishment itself. For several days police were told not to interfere. Meanwhile, university officials grovelled in the face of outrageous propaganda charges, and the media made national heroes of the rebelling students. MGM even made a movie out of Kunen’s book.
On page 130 Kunen wrote:
“In the evening I went… to check out a strategy meeting. A kid was giving a report on the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] convention. He said that, at the convention, men from business international roundtables — the meetings sponsored by business international for their client groups and heads of government — tried to buy up a few radicals. They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago. We were also offered Esso or Rockefeller money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the centre as they move to the left.”
Jerry Kirk, while a student at the University of Chicago, was active in the SDS, the Du Bois club, the Black Panthers and the Communist Party. In 1969, Mr Kirk broke from the party, and the following year testified before the House and Senate Internal Security Committees. Here is what Mr Kirk has told us:
“Young people have no conception of the conspiracy strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below. They have no idea that they’re playing into the hands of the establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they’re fighting the forces of the super-rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and don’t realize that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it and using it for their own purposes.”
When Stokely Carmichael [a US civil rights activist] was head of the militant revolutionary group known as SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], he was invited to speak at the University of Chicago. Jerry Kirk, then still a Black Panther, was among those who attended, and here is how he described Carmichael’s appearance:
“Mr Carmichael was obviously in the middle of something rather important, which made him more nervous and more tense than in the past. He started speaking of things which he said he could not have said before, because his research was not finished. He spoke of the false consciousness of many blacks who believed the Jews were the instrument of oppression of Blacks. And he made note of the fact that even though many Jewish people, for example in New York, own quite a bit of land, one must understand that the overwhelming percentages of mortgages in Harlem was owned not by Jewish people, but by Morgan Guarantee Trust — the Morgan family — and Chase Manhattan bank — the Rockefellers. He repeated the line from the [Bob Dylan] song he liked so well: ‘Something is happening here, but you don’t know quite what it is. Do you, Mr Jones?’”
What he was getting at was that the Jews were simply one strata of society who are themselves being oppressed by people who were much richer and much more powerful. In the agencies of this power he cited banks, the chief among which were Morgan Guarantee Trust and Chase Manhattan and the foundations connected with these monoliths.
It was not long after this that Stokely Carmichael mysteriously was ousted from both SNCC and the Black Panthers. Apparently he had learned too much.
More and more, young radicals are beginning to wake up to the fact that their entire lives have been carefully programmed by the very people who are their hate symbols. They’re beginning to realize that their so-called “anti-establishment” outlook actually is the calculated product of the establishment press, the establishment communications media, the establishment entertainment industry, the establishment schools.
Rich men’s corporations publish and popularize revolutionary books and songs. Through advertising, rich men’s businesses subsidize revolutionary magazines. Rich men’s tax-exempt foundations pour millions of dollars into left-wing organizations. The federal establishment in Washington, through agencies like the OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity], provide weekly paychecks to thousands of hardcore revolutionaries.
And so we return again to the basic question: Why? Why does the establishment publicly condemn but privately support the anti-establishment movements?
Former Communist Jerry Kirk answers:
“The idea is to create a situation where the people are so frightened of the violence all around them that they will throw their hands up in the air and demand: federal Government, do something. And the only choice open will be martial law. The Communists, black militants and revolutionaries will never succeed in overthrowing the government of the United States. But unless they are stopped they will scare the American people into accepting socialism from Washington and statist rule by the insiders of the establishment. This is what it is really all about.”
