Karl Rove & the Spectre of Freud's Nephew
by Stephen Bender
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=1783156
In the early 20th Century, the public came to associate the words "propaganda" and "war" with one another. This was no accident. Bernays wrote in Propaganda: "It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the [First World] war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind."
Bernays is here referring to the "idealistic" Wilson administration’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), a massive propaganda ministry set up shortly after America’s entry into the First World War in April of 1917. The CPI was headed up by George Creel, a progressive journalist, who once remarked that "people do not live by bread alone; they also live by catch-phrases." Bernays was an advisor to the CPI. So was Walter Lippmann, a former socialist turned liberal who would become the dean of mid-20th Century American journalism.
These revolutionary psychological insights had actually been percolating in France and Great Britain since the first years of the 20th Century.
They were duly appropriated by Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf (1925): "But it was not until the [First World] War that it became evident what immense results could be obtained by a correct application of propaganda. Here again, unfortunately, all our studying had to be done on the enemy side…"
In Bernays’s 1965 memoir Biography of an Idea, he acknowledged that Crystallizing Public Opinion significantly influenced Josef Goebbels.
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