217. Propaganda: The Underground History of American Education by John
Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Propaganda
To
get where we got, public imagination had to be manufactured from command
centers, but how was this managed? In
1914 Andrew Carnegie, spiritual leader of the original band of hard-nosed dreamers, gained influence
over the Federal Council of Churches by
extending heavy subsidies to its operations. And in 1918 Carnegie
endowed a meeting in London of the
American Historical Association where an agreement was made to rewrite American history in the
interests of social efficiency. Not all leaders were of a single mind, of course. History
isn't that simple. Beatrice Webb, for instance, declined to accept financial aid from Carnegie on her visit, calling him "a reptile" behind his back; the high- born Mrs. Webb saw through Carnegie's pretensions, right into the merchant-ledger of his tradesman soul. But enough were of a single mind it made no practical difference.
isn't that simple. Beatrice Webb, for instance, declined to accept financial aid from Carnegie on her visit, calling him "a reptile" behind his back; the high- born Mrs. Webb saw through Carnegie's pretensions, right into the merchant-ledger of his tradesman soul. But enough were of a single mind it made no practical difference.
On July 4, 1919, the London Times carried
a long account reporting favorably on the
propaganda hydra growing in the United States, without identifying the
hand of Carnegie in its fashioning.
According to the paper, men "trained in the arts of creating public
good will and of swaying public
opinion" were broadcasting an agenda which aimed first at mobilizing world public opinion and then
controlling it. The end of all this effort was
already determined, said the Times — world government. As the newspaper
set down the specifics in 1919,
propaganda was the fuel to drive societies away from their past:
Efficiently organized propaganda should
mobilize the Press, the Church, the stage, and
the cinema. Press into active service the whole educational systems of
both countries. ..the homes, the
universities, public and high schools, and primary schools. ..histories.
..should be revised. New books should be
added, particularly to the primary schools.
The same issue of the London Times carried
a signed article by Owen Wister, famous
author of the best-selling novel The Virginian. Wister was then on the
Carnegie payroll. He pulled no punches,
informing the upscale British readership, "A movement to correct the schoolbooks of the United States has been
started, and it will go on."
In March 1925, the Saturday Evening Post
featured an article by a prominent Carnegie
official who stated that to bring about the world Carnegie envisioned,
"American labor will have to be
reduced to the status of European labor." 7 Ten years later, on
December 19, 1935, the New York American
carried a long article about what it referred to as "a secret Carnegie Endowment conference" at
the Westchester Country Club in Harrison,
New York. Twenty-nine organizations attending each agreed to authorize a
nationwide radio campaign managed and
coordinated from behind the scenes, a campaign to commit the United States to a policy of
internationalism. The group also agreed to present "vigorous counter-action" against
those who opposed this country's entrance into the League of Nations. Pearl Harbor was only six
years away, an international showcase for
globalism without peer. 8
Soon after this conference, almost every
school in the United States was provided with full-size color maps of the world and with
League of Nations literature extolling the
virtues of globalism. That's how it was done. That's how it still is
done. Universal schooling is a permeable
medium. There need not be conspiracy among its internal personnel to achieve astonishingly uniform
results; multiply this tactical victory
thousands of times and you get where we are. Today we call the
continuation of this particular strand
of leveling "multiculturalism" — even though every particular culture
it touches is degraded and insulted by
the shallow veneer of universalism which hides the politics of the thing.
If the article were written today, the
magnitude of reduction would be to an Asian or "global" standard, I
would imagine. Just how wide a gulf
there is between propaganda and reality where economic globalism is the issue
can be gathered from a front-page
article in the World Business section of March 7, 2003 New York Tines detailing
Australia's "12th consecutive year
of economic expansion" in the face of the dismal performance of other
industrialized economies. Australia's secret, according to the text of "Australia keeps Bypassing Pitfalls
of Global Economy," is that Australia's economy is not export-dependent,
"domestic consumers are the main
pillar of the economy."
Freud's Nephew
No comments:
Post a Comment