Robert Chandler in his 2008 book SHADOW WORLD tells how Plato explained the differences between images and reality in their simplest and perhaps purest form some 2,400 years ago. He selected the shadows made by a fire in a cave to explain the difference between what we see and the reality surrounding us in the sunlight outside the cave. Shadows are only imitations of really living things, the Greek philosopher observed. The shadows on the wall of the cave present the appearance of material things, not their true nature.
From the beginning premise, doubtlessly drawn from his own observations, Plato takes a second step, which helps us to understand deception in the modern world. If one held people as prisoners in a cave, Plato surmised, with chains preventing them from turning their bodies and heads, the fires behind and above them at some distance would cast shadows on the wall. Since restraints would hold the prisoners in place, the shadows could be used to manipulate and shape their perceptions, which would naturally lead to a phenomenon in which the images cast on the cave wall would become truth in the eye of the beholder. “To them,” Plato concluded, “the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.” As a result, the prisoners, once in the world of sunlight outside the cave, would find that they believe the “shadows of the images” more than the living creatures and actual things in the world around them.
Plato’s discussion in THE REPUBLIC about the problems of distinguishing between image and reality provide a backdrop for the narrative in the analysis. For Plato, the puppets on the wall of a cave, shown as shadows from flickering fires behind the captive audience, served to mislead and manipulate the perceptions of objects and events. Today, we call such activities propaganda and disinformation, whose purpose is to deny and deceive. And now you can better understand what has been happening with the shadow government we’ve been hearing so much about only since Donald Trump got elected.
Robert Chandler said in his book SHADOW WORLD, Resurgent Russia, the Global New Left and radical Islam says the American people, held like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, are being fed a constant psychological diet of images designed by Russia’s clandestine specialists doing all they can do to constraint the growth of America’s power and influence. At the same time, America’s home-grown and international cultural Marxists or progressives-socialists-marxists- in ideological solidarity with Russia – are centered on tearing down what they call “corporate America,” and Islamic militants are poised to crush what they see as the depravity of U.S. culture and enforce a status of dhimmitude before America’s toxic perversion can infect Muslim societies. (dhimmitude is the Muslim system of controlling non-Muslim populations conquered through Jihad.) The arsenal of political weapons chosen in the assault on America by one or more of the three antagonists include subversion, propaganda (open and covert), disinformation, direct action (agitation) and active measures, terrorism, agents of influence, immigration and a particular emphasis by all three groups on the life-blood of political warfare: denial and deception.
Since few in the United States are countering the images cast by these three hostile centers, Americans, when they are released from the dictatorship of the images cast inside Plato’s modern cave and having reached the sunlight of reality, do not perceive the dangers swirling around them. Therefore, it will be difficult to correct the pictures that deceive Americans. These perceptions have been keenly shaped by the propaganda and disinformation spewed from the Russians, cultural Marxists, and Salafists, Americans can be expected to resort to the human psychological process of cognitive dissonance, which will screen-out factors in the real world that do not fit the images so carefully fed to them.
The open question is whether these images are so strongly inculcated that they are resilient to correction that expose their baseline of denial and deceit. If the propaganda and disinformation programs against the United States by Russians, home-grown and international progressives-socialists-marxists, and radical Islamists are so strong that Americans will resist seeing the threatening realities operating deeply inside the world’s shadows, their response options will be severely constrained.
A case in point here could be the Americans who still believe planes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11/2001.
On September 16th, CNN ran a declassified story about President Ronald Reagan and the Russians and the Russian ruling elites and the people at-large have been rankled about their loss of Russian power and influence in the world after the December 31, 1991, the Kremlin foreign policies have been pursued on a dual track, one open rail and another underground wrote Chandler. The Russian Federation’s intelligence service remained extremely active inside the United States right from the beginning. Midway through its first decade, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSS), copycat successor to the KGB, had intensified its espionage activities in the United States, Russia maintained several of the Soviet Union’s international fronts, such as the World Peace Council, World Federation of Trade Unions, and International Association of Democratic Lawyers to advance Russian national interests. Moreover, members of the American progressive-socialist-marxist movement have maintained their connections with the surviving Soviet-Russian fronts.
THE PARTY’S NOT OVER
“The Party’s not over” proclaimed a tongue-in-cheek unifying theme of “Marxism 2000,” an international conference of progressives-socialists-marxists held at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Sponsored by the Association for Economic and Social Analysis that operated out of the Department of Economics, the September 2000 forum promoted:
…Marxian approaches to social theory and radical social change. We especially seek to stimulate and facilitate open discussions, rethinking, and extensions of Marxism. In our view, they can and should form an important part of developing effective movement in the twenty-first century for an end to class exploitation and the current forms of political, cultural, and psychological oppressions (including those based on race, gender, and sexual orientation)
COMMUNIST DEMOCRATS HAVE NO SHAME
Former President Barack Obama’s Community Organizing filled this need. Most presidents move quietly into the background but not Obama. He opened up his office a short distance from the White House and is now being offered $400,000 by Wall Street to hear him speak. It is also likely to be a source of criticism as many will remember this hyprocrit’s record attacks against Wall Street bankers for making huge salaries while average Americans were suffering from the ravages of the 2008 financial crisis.
GUILTY AS SIN, FREE AS A BIRD
Hundreds of participants sampled the radical agenda, which was rich in a range of topics suitable for America’s social and cultural transformation to “move Marxism’s future forward.” Most of the conference participants were university professors, including both presenters and attendees. They were an affable crowd and spoke big words about serious matters. Among them were several hard-nosed radicals, some could be heard arranging private evening discussions about revolutionary agendas. Chandler inadvertently crossed-paths in the university parking garage with Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the indigenous revolt in Chiapas, Mexico.
AMERICA’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Having said all of the above by Chandler brings us to the recent article in the 9/18/2017 NEW AMERICAN entitled: America’s Cultural Revolution. While the Trump election may be the focus of the frightful explosion of vicious verbal violence and actual physical violence that have beset America, the real forces of play have been building for many years, carefully nurtured by a new class of professional revolutionaries: tenured radicals, community organizers, politicians and their elite promoters in the “mainstream” media, major corporations, and tax-exempt foundations.
Those with memories long enough and those who have studied 20th-century political history may recognize in the current tumult many familiar contours that are strikingly similar to the horrendous communist convulsion in China known as Mao Tse-tung’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” This is not mere coincidence; there are direct, as well as ideological, ties connecting Red China’s Cultural Revolution and Mao’s murderous, fanatical Red Guards to the unfolding chaos that is enveloping our nation. The frenzied Antifa/BLM/LGBTQ/enviro-climate zealots are the vanguards of a Maoist culture that has taken root in academia, Hollywood, Big Labor, and Big Business, and if allowed to thrive unchallenged will undoubtedly result in now-unimaginable death and destruction, as did Mao’s “glorious experiment” in Orwellian social transformation. Don’t miss this 14 minutes YouTube! It’s happening today
During the terrifying decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Chairman Mao sent millions of youth into the schools, streets, and countryside to terrorize the Chinese people into total submission. These Red Guards – mostly high-school and college students, but – also including elementary-school pupils – accused and denounced their own parents, grandparents, and siblings, as well as their neighbors, teachers, and professors, of such “crimes” as being “capitalist roaders,” or “rightists,” or of showing “bourgeois tendencies,” or expressing “politically incorrect thought.”
TEARING DOWN STATUES AND MONUMENTS
Many of these young communist accusers actually played lead roles in physically attacking, humiliating, torturing, even killing the accused “enemies of the people.” Even many leading Communist Party officials were arrested, tried, imprisoned, and then “re-educated” and “rehabilitated”- or killed. Tearing down and destroying tens of thousands of churches, shrines, temples, statues, and monuments was also a key part of the Cultural Revolution, to cleanse the nation of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. Does this sound familiar, William Jasper author of the article asks?
In the years before 1966, the Chinese Communist Party had prepared the way for this enormous, violent convulsion with intensive ideological indoctrination similar to what we are witnessing here today. In China, as in Russia and other developing countries, the Marxist-Leninist revolution emphasized “class warfare,” pitting poor against rich, peasant against landlord. However in the United States and other wealthy developed countries with a large middle class, other differences and hot-button issues must be exploited to divide and conquer: race, immigration, amnesty, etc. So in the interest of examining the ties and parallels of America’s current trends to the ongoing revolution of “Mao Tse-tung thought,” Jasper then sets forth a few examples of recent manifestations that illustrate the depth and breadth of the crisis we have:
All White People are Racists, According to Critical Race Theory, as taught in many of our high schools and colleges, America is systemically, irredeemably racist especially since the acceptance of multiculturalism. All Men are rapists. That sweeping charge, made by a character in Marilyn French’s bestselling novel The Women’s Room (1977), has become feminist dogma, as taught in Women’s Studies and Gender Theory classes in high schools, colleges, and universities. “All men are rapists and that’s all they are, “charged self-described “radical feminist” French. “They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes.”
Bias Response Teams. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has brought to national attention a burgeoning threat that has been proliferating below the radar on campuses: These teams monitor and investigate student and faculty speech, directing the attention of law enforcement and student conduct administrators toward the expression of students and faculty members. Many of these teams tend to cast a wide net when defining “bias.”
Prison (or Death) for Climate “Deniers” – “The police would start to identify the most influential Global Warming Deniers,” under Professor Richard Parncutt’s proposal, and “These individuals would then be charged and brought to justice.” Because global-warming (GW) “deniers” will be responsible for the death of millions of people, says Parncutt, they must be imprisoned until they confess their errors and prove their contrition.
Conservatives Out, Communist In- Over the past year, left-wing students and faculty members have prevented a number of well-known conservative authors, pundits and scholars from speaking at colleges and universities, or have raucously (sometimes violently) disrupted their talks. No further explanation here. We’ve seen it on the T.V. News
The Revolution Eats Its Own – Some of the Democrat “progressives” responsible for the cultural revolution in America are already beginning to get a taste of this experience. Pelosi was shouted down during a DREAM ACT gathering and this is only the first of such assaults that Democrats can expect because the chickens are coming home to roost…
In the interest of space and your time, copies of this article are available in the Sept. 18, 2017 magazine NEW AMERICAN for $3.95 plus S & H. To place your order, visit www.shopjbs.org or call (800) 727 TRUE. This magazine also gives Constitutional grades to our elected officials which helps us know how to vote- 24 issues for $49
I’m sure readers are asking, “Well, Betty, what’s your answer to our dilemma.” Essentially “our perception of reality” has been changed so we mistake evil for good and embrace our own destruction so allow me to be so bold as to suggest A.G. Jeff Sessions begin prosecuting usurpers and insurgents or resign. So far, he’s totally incompetent. Let’s remember Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. And last but not least 1/3 of our government is involved in Satanic pedophilia.
We also need to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education, return education to the states and save government money spent on reeducating students, commodities for the New World Order by these “teachers of destruction” in these worthless colleges and universities.
Education can return to on- the- job training by mentors which long ago proved successful. What is really distressing is that many “adults” today aren’t half the boys our ancestors were. In reality, it was common years ago for young children to assume adult responsibilities. Today we have snowflakes! Apprenticeships at age eight weren’t unusual. What Satan meant for evil can be turned around for good if our country simply repents and turns again to Creator God.
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E-Mail Betty Freauf: bettyfreauf@gmail.com
