PROPAGANDA!!!

Meet Edward Bernays, esteemed nephew of Sigmund Freud. Known from his obituary as the "Father of Public Relations," he was the all-American foundational spin-doctor/witch doctor. He described a system of dictatorship not by arms or force, but of mass-mediatized mind-control.

R.I.P.

EDWARD LOUIS BERNAYS

1891-1995

PRIMORDIAL INFLUENCER

Whose Legacy is Rich Beyond Measure

By all-American we mean to say that he was Austrian, but America is a diverse nation who takes all the help it can get: never averse to extra-national businessmen mountebanks with the gift of gab and skills at puppeteering.

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of...Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members of the inner cabinet."

*Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

Propaganda is, quite literally, a propaganda spin for the concept of propaganda. It's a grand tease, billed as a how-to manual on soft dictatorship, but leaving out the actual how-to's. A tautology? No, an advertisement for himself and his services.

The intention is not to supply to a demand, but to take control and create demand for the almighty product; to construct and contract figureheads, or frame celebrities in caricatures which effectively absorb and obsess mass consciousness towards a given goal [$$$]; these, he says, are more effective means to "organize the chaos" of society into something profitable malleable, than by directly commanding.

Bernays learned much from the Phallic Psychoanalytic theory and practice of his uncle, and yet more from the emergent science of Rat and Pigeon Training Behaviorism.

The Consumerist Regime should aim at visceral urges, induce a sensory bombardment aimed to exacerbate appetite, desire, fear, and hence ease of control; then to starve or scare the population over the course of an ever-evolving series of crises. We are plopped and sucked into an economic amoeba, ravenous for catastrophe and its management. Mass-projected, this phenomenon is paralleled in the world of ideals and politics, where sections of the populace are set against each other in separated echo chambers, always blaming the Other. Deliberately, there is a different Truth broadcast into each of the poly-chambered separation cells.

We are guided, for our own good, raised by the boot-straps of benevolent leaders and captains of industry.

There are tropes.

Such as the all-American eggs and bacon breakfast. Perfectly natural and spontaneous stars-and-stripes-forever predilection, right? Not really; a light breakfast of something like a roll and some orange juice was the American norm at the turn of the 20th century. However, in the 1920's, a company called Beech Nut Packing Co. wanted to sell more bacon. So with the hired help of Edward Bernays, who procured a signed statement from his PR company's private doctor, who in turn reached out to thousands of physicians, sounding the conch shell:

4500 PHYSICIANS URGE AMERICANS TO EAT HEAVY BREAKFASTS TO IMPROVE THEIR HEALTH

Improve their health indeed. Which brings us to the subject of big tobacco and Mr. Bernays. When he was enlisted as secret propaganda guru by the head of the American Tobacco Corporation, a George Washington Hill, his prime objective was to increase the sales of Lucky Strike cigarettes to women. Untapped market, especially in an era when it was taboo for women to smoke in public.

Bernays psychoanalyzed the situation and figured he could speak to female aspirations in the new climate of universal suffrage if he represented cigarettes as TORCHES OF FREEDOM. Those jutting, smoldering little rods could symbolize the casting down of millennia of oppression! He made it "a thing" as they say, and hired some prominent feminist figures and suffragettes to be seen puffing away after a big Easter Parade.

He was also told by American Tobacco Corp. to associate their product with thinness and the movie star look (cigarette replacement for sweets makes you trim, guess it counteracts the bacon?), 'cause the film industry was in on this funding thing, among others. Seduction in control. Smokin' hot.

As for our plucky hero Eddie, I've been more or less presenting him as an ad-man. He would resent that. He insisted on a fundamental difference between his work and that of a [mere] advertiser. And rightly so, credit where due.

Of course Eddie was cozy with Presidents, he worked for two of them, Coolidge and Eisenhower.

(Ah, Presidents Presidents, the corpses of geriatrics, beginning to ooze, paraded about in succession, whose rotting limbs don't even feel the support of the puppet strings burning in the spotlights that cult their personality! Overripe, brown-spotted. Their images screened, portraited, mass-presented.) But I digress.

I was supposed to talk about bananas. You see, botanically, bananas are berries, bunched on a flowering plant (not a tree) in the genus Musa. Once native to tropical parts of Africa and Asia, bananas came to be planted extensively in Latin America. Cheap source of nutrition for slaves and field workers. Until United Fruit took over.

Let's forget Baron Bernays for a moment and look at the big picture over at United Fruit (R.I.P. 1899-1970). Suffice it to say, he was earning $100,000 annually on the payroll of United Fruit in the early 1950's. For his famous services.

I guess that was the cue to switch to the next book.

We highlighted the need to spin a new product, something the Americans have never seen before, tasted before. Part of breakfast, maybe. What is the price of a cheap banana?

The rise and long reign in Central America of the United Fruit Company reads today like a fable of American capitalism. From the dawn of the twentieth century, the company played the major role in the Guatemalan economy. For even longer, it had sought, through close ties with successive dictators, to control nearly a dozen nations scattered around the Isthmus and the Caribbean.

* Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, 1982

Once upon a time, there was an enchanted land called Guatemala, might better have been called Bananolandia by those times. And Costa Rica, Honduras, etc. United Fruit was a state unto itself within Central America, owning 3.5 million acres of land, dedicated almost exclusively to cultivating bananas. In Guatemala the company owned all the railroads, the only port town, and all the politicians. Only policy favorable to The Company would be policed.

Meanwhile conditions for workers were those of medieval serfdom, replete with all the attendant child labor necessary to get the job done, to say nothing of the effect of monopoly mono-crop culture on the environmental floral and faunals, and the over-dependence of the economy on a single export that favored a single private company in lands far away. But hey, that's life in a banana republic. Don't fuck with the UFC. Those who do find out.

Little Eddie a la Sauce Bearnaise worked wonders for the company with his grand mustachio, laboring ceaselessly to justify the plantation-style cheap cost of banana feedback loop, and present a squeaky clean image to the public. At first he engaged in the phallic shameless promotion of the banana itself and its infinite nutritive value and amazing health benefits. To say nothing of its taste and sweet mushy texture.

Perfect first solid food for baby, yum yum.

Then, there was the issue of cleaning up the company's image. I mean, after that plaza-full of banana workers on strike and their families were gunned down in Columbia in 1928 at the behest of the UFC, there was a lot of interference to run.

Which soon became a crusade.

Enter Jacobo Árbenz, whose presidency and that of his predecessor mark the only period of functional representative democracy in Guatemala's history. A great spirit of hope had seized the country after the brutal dictatorship of Jorge Ubico was over, which crystallized into the implementation of serious reformation policy.

Árbenz looked to reinstate democratic representation, free speech, a livable minimum wage, and also the right the strike and unionize for all Guatemalan workers. He used to cite Franklin D. Roosevelt frequently in his speeches. So far so good, any democratic big brother super-nation could be proud and give 'em a pat on the back, right?

Come 1952, and Árbenz's pet project, the Agrarian Reform, comes into effect. Decree 900 was aimed to expropriate millions of acres of fallow land in order to redistribute it to landless peasants. What does that sound like?

COMMUNISM!!!

As sleuths come to find, not only did Árbenz openly allow the Marxist labor party in Guatemala to exist, but his own wife Maria Villanova, though born to a conservative socialite family, was a highly educated die-hard radical, and was said to be extremely influential on the president.

United Fruit was outraged. They were offered the measly $600,000 for fallow land they had undervalued for tax evasion purposes. Oh yeah, and now they were kindly asked to start paying taxes, and actually contribute to the Guatemalan economy.

UFC didn't stew in their fury; they went straight to the top.

Eisenhower? Yes, he's a tough-liner anticommunist of course, but also a cautious and judicious procrastinator if he needed to be. A wily old fox, with true military strength, but his strings could be pulled.

Oh, but dear Eddie Bernays, you and the Dulles brothers need to talk; you've got to to work your art of spin on those old crusaders. Why, you have already?

See, I told you he wasn't just an ad-man, he has friends in high places. Allen Welsh Dulles (left) was director of the CIA and John Foster Dulles (right) was Secretary of State during the Eisenhower administration. With no nepotism involved, nor conflict of interest. Both men were on the United Fruit Company's payroll for hefty sums, and both had represented the company through the legal firm Sullivan & Cromwell. Juicy!

COMMIE! RED!! COMMUNIST INFILTRATION ON UNCLE SAM'S DOORSTEP!! EXTRA EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT. GUATEMALA BECOMES A SOVIET SATELLITE!!!

[DISCLAIMER: Before we step any farther to observe the effects of causes, a word about the ethical doctrine that Edward Bernays set for himself. He prided himself with a smug grin on having refused his services to Goebbels and the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, who requested them. His book, nonetheless, was read by them. Bernays operated through third parties and attached his name officially to nothing he did. A summary of his ethics is the declaration that the ethical blame falls on his client, and he can pretty well wipe his hands of it.]

Oh, and here comes

our next book, Tiempos Recios (Harsh Times), by Mario Vargas Llosa

And tells the story of The Liberator, Carlos Castillo Armas, a product the Dulles Brothers created from the raw material of a nobody in exile. This, is his transformation into the heroic freedom fighter destined to topple that despicable Soviet tool, Árbenz.

Armas plotted foment on the Honduras/Guatemala border with only a bunch of rag-tag followers; yet, the massive propaganda campaign launched in Guatemala and the U.S.A. made them seem innumerable, and ever advancing. A few planes strafed and fired strategically on Guatemalan cities to create a sense of terror and a false sense of the rebel power.

This was all part of C.I.A Covert Operation named PBSUCCESS

Well, good ol' Árbenz and his pretty wife Maria tried and all, but they were just too honest for this game. After a desperate attempt to arm the citizen body against impending invasion (only about 100 showed up), he resigned, taking asylum in the Mexican Embassy with his family.

After some very complicated finagling, Castillo Armas was "elected" president by a landslide 99% vote.

And thus, my friends, is a democratically elected government toppled at the behest of a fruit company!

Árbenz would then float around in exile, a pariah practically everywhere, taboo in the Western and Eastern Blocs, finding consolation in a perpetual bottle of his old friend, whiskey. His daughter committed suicide in Columbia over a jilted lover. He was never the same, embittered and broken, he waited for the end. Árbenz died in 1971, either drunk in his bathtub, or by suicide, or else just of illness in bed. The accounts differ.

And what of Guatemala, land of the liberated? Surely they prospered under Castillo Armas? Well, he undid Decree 900, and the rest of Árbenz's reforms, followed by a reign of terror, assassinations, and detentions. But he didn't last long. On July 26th, 1957, he was shot to death by one of his own presidential guards.

From then, nearly forty straight years of brutal, unrelenting civil war ensued. Clashes between the right-wing military regime and leftist insurgent movements crescendo into a maelstrom of cruelty and violence against civilians that would paralyze the country for many decades.

Increasingly intensive efforts of the right-wing military juntas and death-squads to wipe out the guerrilla insurgency in the countryside, led to what is known as the Mayan Genocide, or the Silent Genocide, involving the mass killing of indigenous groups in the Guatemalan county-side, especially those of Mayan descent. Look it up, because I don't want to talk about the subject any longer.

What I do wish to put out a final word on, a final meditation on blood, found in the Quiche Maya creation story, the Popol Vul, or, Counsel Book.

Popol Vuh tells an ancient tale of creation, migration, and the defeat of death by descent into the underworld. It tells of the foundational four Kings, and their bloody sacrifices, and the population that rose against them. Originally preserved in oral tradition by the Quiche Maya peoples of Guatemala, it was recorded in writing in the mid sixteenth century.

A passage:

AND THEN COMES THE KILLING OF THE TRIBES.

This is how they died: when there was just one person out walking, or just two were out walking, it wasn't obvious when then took them away.

After that they went to cut them open before Tohil and Auilix.

After that, when they had offered the blood, the skull would be placed in the road. They would roll it onto the road.

So the tribes were talking:

"A jaguar has been eating," was all that was said, because their tracks were like a jaguar's tracks when they did their deed. They did not reveal themselves. Many people were abducted.

*Popol Vuh, translated by Dennis Tedlock, 1985

It does not reveal itself, or the blood it is gorged on, yet it hides in plain sight.

FIN.

--Rob Angeli

P.S.

United Fruit and Produce Co., re-branded and repackaged like magic!