Dear Friend,
Do you find it astounding that someone as unfit for public office as Donald Trump is leading in the polls and threatening to reprise his presidency?
If you’re like me, you find it incredible that our next president might be Donald Trump. And this time around he not only tells us his intentions; he has a team of sycophants ready to implement them.
One can dismiss the enthusiasm for Trump of the cognitively impaired. They simply lack the tools to make intelligent judgments about the necessary qualities of a leader.
But you and I must face the fact that there are also intelligent people who have somehow fallen under Trump’s thrall.
How on Earth did that happen?
In this document I will answer that question, and will offer a solution to the problem.
The answer to the question is quite simple. While we have treated the Trump campaign as though it has something to do with party politics and government, it fact it has nothing to do with those. We are dealing with a mafia.
I use the term “mafiocracy” for its system of governance.
We’ve all seen portrayals of mafias in movies of course. We have an impression of how a mafia works, and that impression has a lot of truth in it. But because not all of the internal workings of a mafia lend themselves to dramatic movie scenes, important things we should be aware of are just not so visible in our entertainment-dominated ways of learning.
And as with all sorts of other processes, mafiocracy has become more sophisticated and powerful in recent decades, benefiting from developments in digital technology.
While it’s common for political power struggles to exhibit some mafiocratic methods, the legitimate ones take seriously things like constitutions, due process, parliamentary procedure, the rule of law, and some measure of civil behavior and integrity.
Mafias Do Not Care
Mafias care only about their own internal rules, as exemplified by La Cosa Nostra’s requirements for becoming a “made man.” For the rest of us, murder is not only illegal but way over the edge morally. For them, it’s simply a procedural necessity and has nothing to do with rules from outside the organization.
Ideology is another point of distinction. Legitimate politicians tend to have sets of beliefs, particularly when it comes to economics. While the words “conservative” and “liberal” are tossed around without a lot of definition, legitimate politicians tend to believe those words represent ends of a meaningful spectrum of beliefs, and they see themselves as advocates of policies based somewhere on that spectrum.
Mafias will pretend to observe ideologies in their efforts to recruit chumps, but under the surface it is pure brutal power struggle. A mafia does not care about ideology.
Isn’t it amusing that Hitler’s Nazi party and Stalin’s Communist party are purported to represent opposite ends of an ideological spectrum. In fact their “ideologies” were identical. They had only to do with the aggregation of power, the same “set of beliefs,” which is “I believe I should have what you have.”
Says your local crime boss: “My belief is that I should be in control of everything, capiche?” You won’t find him (never her) discussing the merits of parliamentary versus limited-term governance.
In fighting this mafia, it’s important that we all understand mafiocracy. I have described mafiocracy’s eight components, eight sets of techniques used to aggregate power to a hierarchy headed by a single individual.
If I can contribute in some small way by promoting an understanding what’s going on under a mafia’s veneer of normality, that will help toward blunting its force.
More importantly, after I explain the eight components of mafiocracy, I will offer a strategy for dealing with the one component that you and I can most immediately do something about.
The Eight Components of Mafiocracy
Modern Mafiocracy consists of the application of the following methods in the aggregation of power:
Recruitment of Stooges
Recruitment of Kompromats
Insertion of Discreditors
Insertion of Allies
Deployment of Goebbelsology
Trolling of Social Networks
False Flag Operations
Signaling The Consequences Of Opposition
Let’s explore each of those components of mafiocracy.
Mafiocracy Component 1: Recruitment of Stooges
The stooge strategy is a powerful method for permeating society with a mafia’s agenda, imparting to the mafia operation a veneer of respectability and acceptability.
A stooge is a stupid but well known businessperson whose failures have left them with an unworkable load of debt. It’s often used in “bustout” schemes, such as when a mafia wants to acquire an industrial property for the purpose of destroying it with arson (after stealthily removing valuable contents) in order to collect insurance payouts. To maintain the insurance policy through the purchase transaction, a well-regarded businessperson’s name needs to be associated with it, because no sane and non-corrupt underwriter will continue a policy that’s associated with the name of a known mafioso.
The mafia bails out the stooge with the understanding that he is now the property of the capo de tutti capi, that is, the big boss.
Trump As Stooge
Mafias seldom have as big a fish as Donald Trump to work with. The Russian mafia has other stooges in its stable, but MAGA Man is probably the biggest catch in the history of mafia stoogeology.
The outrageously incompetent businessman Donald Trump (for a partial list of his failures see https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-05-18/trump-business-partners-outline-his-failed-deals ) was bailed out of billions of dollars of debt by the Russian mafia around 2003. While they did launder much of the payments through Deutsche Bank to give it a veneer of legitimacy, mafias try to avoid such auditable paperwork. The proposition is simple enough to obviate the need for documentation: “I bail you out, I own you. And I am known to resort to extreme measures with disobedient stooges in order to set an example for others.”
As a businessman, Trump was a loser – over and over again. His net worth is likely less than yours or mine or that of anyone else reading this - it’s likely negative. The billions of dollars of debt he racked up before 2000 qualified him for the stooge role so familiar to mafiosos throughout history.
MAGA is a mafiaist organization, and it is the creation of Russia.
Arron Banks As Semi-Stooge
Arron Banks is perhaps not a classic stooge, as it appears that his obedience to the Russian mafia has as much to do with his other ties. Nevertheless, he contributed more money to the Brexit campaign than any accounting of his net worth would indicate was available to him.
Why would Russia care about Brexit? Why would Vladimir Putin care about Brexit?
The answer is that both the Russian leadership, and particularly Putin, are extraordinarily jealous of “the West,” where “the West” includes Japan and India and all nations where individual freedom is respected and protected (though not always to the extent we would like.)
This is not a new thing. Today’s Russian leadership continues a tradition that goes at least back to the reign of Peter The Great, whose slavish envy of European culture had him compel members of his court and of the St. Petersburg elite to speak French instead of Russian.
According to Robert D. Kaplan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2023, “Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, pressed by an oligarch to explain how Mr. Putin could have planned such an invasion without his inner circle knowing, reportedly replied: ‘He has three advisers. Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.’”
Russia has worked hard over at least a century to drive competence out of its system, through gulags, extermination, or de facto exile. The result is an incredibly incompetent culture, saved from economic ruin only by abundant natural resources, the extraction of which was engineered by Western contractors. However, somehow in the midst of that Russia has developed one extraordinary competence: they are far and away the top theorists and practitioners of mafiology. The Sicilian mafia are amateurs by comparison.
Years after Brexit, the UK’s Channel 4 reported1 that “Mr Banks is currently under investigation by the National Crime Agency over the source of money used to fund his Leave.EU referendum campaign… His [Arron Banks’s] companies are also subject to an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office. Leave.EU has been found to have breached electoral rules and was fined by the Electoral Commission.
Mr [Nigel] Farage has repeatedly denied Mr Banks has made any donations to the Brexit Party, or has any involvement with it.
He has previously refused to name a donor to the party claiming he would be “hounded” if his identity was revealed.
Another donor, Jeremy Hosking, has revealed he donated £200,000 to the group.
Farage has consistently defended Mr Banks, claiming that the allegations surrounding his business deals, his campaign and his relationship with Russia are ‘unfounded’.”
If it’s not purely as a stooge, where does Banks’s loyalty to Russia come from?
New Statesman reported2 that “In 2001 he [Banks] married again, this time to Ekaterina Paderina, known as Katya, a Russian from Yekaterinburg ... Katya came to Britain in the 1990s to study marketing at Portsmouth University. She overstayed her visa but married Eric Butler, a merchant seaman who, at 54, was more than twice her age. The marriage ended within months, prompting officials to investigate whether it was a sham.
Years later the tabloids discovered that Michael Hancock, a disgraced former SDP/Liberal Democrat MP for Portsmouth with a history of assisting dubious young women from eastern Europe, had intervened to help Katya stay in the UK. That, plus her fluency in six languages and the fact that Yekaterinburg was once a closed city, led to suggestions that she was a spy. Banks responded by buying a personalised number plate for her Range Rover: X MI5 SPY.”
Mafiocracy Component 2: Recruitment of Kompromats
It’s well known that FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover held onto his power for decades in spite of his obvious deficiencies because he knew about all the skeletons in the closets of Washington legislators and bureaucrats.
Dirt on your opponent, or for that matter your ally, can provide a lot of power. All that’s necessary to exercise that power is to make it clear what you want from them, and that if you don’t get it their misdeeds will be disclosed to the public.
Is this a mafiaist technique? Well, there’s a lot of this kind of thing wherever political power aggregates, so perhaps the point is that there’s always a bit of mafia in politics.
Once again, however, the Russians show that they’re the real pros in yet another mafia technique:
GOP Lawmaker Says His Colleagues Are Compromised
https://politicalwire.com/2023/12/21/gop-lawmaker-says-his-colleagues-are-compromised/
By Taegan Goddard December 21, 2023
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) said on a podcast that some of his colleagues have been compromised by the Russians using drugs and prostitutes.
Said Burchett: “You know the old honeypot. The Russians do that and I’m sure Members of Congress have been caught up. Why in the world would good conservatives vote for crazy stuff like what we’ve been seeing? Here’s how it works. You’re visiting, you’re out of the country or out of town or you’re in a motel or at a bar in DC and, whatever you’re into – women, men, whatever – comes up and they’re very attractive and they’re laughing at your jokes, and you’re buying them a drink.”
He added: “Next thing you know you’re in the motel room with them naked, and next thing you know you’re about to make a key vote, and what happens? Some well-dressed person comes up, whispers in your ear, ‘Hey man, there’s tapes out on you. Were you in a motel room on whatever with whoever? And you’re like, ‘Uh, oh.’ And they say, ‘You really ought not to be voting for this thing. And what do they do? It’s human nature.”
And more: “No man or no woman is an island, and they know what to get at. If it’s women, drugs, booze, it will find you in DC and in most elected offices. And that’s what people in power and influence do.”
From Reddit - Posted by u/MMccLLoovviinn
Alabama Mayor Kills Self After Right-Wing Blog Outs His Cross-Dressing
I'm starting to believe that the right wing politicians are all being selected based on backgrounds that can be blackmailed.
When Russia hacked the DNC during the 2016 elections. It wasn't only the DNC that got hacked, the RNC was hacked as well. From what I know, only the DNC's information was revealed by the hackers. Seems the RNC information was better kept a secret and used as leverage. So your point seems to have merit.
Lindsey Graham's actions over the last 5 to 7 years only make sense if you look at it through the lens of blackmail. The man literally bent over backwards to do things that made no sense at all and benefited no one but our enemies.
Mafiocracy Component 3: Recruitment of Discreditors
When it comes to the study of the manipulation of perceptions, Americans are in pre-K while Russians are post-docs. While in just about everything else they are astoundingly incompetent, the leaders of Russian government and media are the undisputed champions of the game of getting others to believe what they want them to believe.
One of the most effective ways to discredit an organization that represents an obstacle to the implementation of one’s plan is to influence appointments to that organization’s leadership positions.
How did a drunken incompetent, Joseph McCarthy, get elected Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations by his fellow Senate Republicans? As it turned out, his inept hearings succeeded in tarring all the people fighting Russian subversion with the brush of his own paranoid ineptitude. Let us imagine a conversation about that...
Comrade, surely you learned answer to question back in Perception 101. Is very simple.
Step one: Survey all who have figured out what we are doing.
Step two: Find the stupidest big a__hole among them.
Step three: Let Commisar of Adversary Appointments know your selection.
Oh, you already did that?
Senator McCarthy? Da, is good one. McCarthy is perfect stupid a__hole. Is a drunk for good measure. Good catch, Comrade. Sorry I misjudged you. Commisar will ensure that idiot McCarthy leads opposition.
Step four: Enjoy as stupid a__hole McCarthy discredits own movement, our opposition. Have another vodka.”
Good job, Russia! You got America to bifurcate into two echo chambers, those who imagined communist subversives everywhere, and those who felt victimized by the first group. Each was unwilling to listen to anything the other had to say. Peter the Great would be proud!
Consider that the “Russian threat” used to be the threat of communism. Then Russian communism failed so they became a capitalist state. Today the “Russian threat” perseveres, showing that ideology is just a smokescreen.
The Russian ideology is the same as the ideology of the Third Reich.
Russia has lulled the masses of America and Europe into believing that politics is driven by the tension between two ideologies. Call it right vs left, conservative vs liberal, Tory vs Labor, Republican vs Democrat, etc. etc. In fact the intellectual foundation of that belief are as significant as the intellectual foundation of Red Sox vs Yankees. In other words, there is no intellectual foundation.
Hitler’s party was called “Socialist,” and Stalin’s party was also characterized with the same word. Their “ideologies” were in fact the same. They were neither “left” nor “right,” conservative nor liberal.
They were mafiaist.
Mafiocracy Component 4: Insertion of Allies
The tactic of getting people who are friendly to one’s own agenda appointed to influential positions is certainly not unique to mafias. It’s used across the integrity spectrum, from the lying, cheating mafioso to the honest citizen trying to get some productive changes approved.
Plenty of other organizations besides mafias try to move things to their own benefit by influencing the appointments of management and boards of committees, regulators, etc.
While this may appear to be like the insertion of discreditors tactic, there is an important distinction. With the insertion of discreditors, the incompetent appointee need only continue their incompetence and is otherwise not depended upon for anything. By contrast, the inserted ally must be depended upon to toe the party line after their appointment, and they must be continually updated on changes to that party line.
A significant part of the Republican Party of the United States of America has been taken over by people who show a startling level of loyalty to Russia. How did that happen?
Insertion of Allies is at work here of course. But look to Items 1, 2 and 8 for an explanation of how this tactic has been implemented by the Russian mafia.
Mafiocracy Component 5: Deployment of Goebbelsology
If something you read online makes you really angry, stop for a moment and ask yourself: Am I being played by a goebbelsian troll factory?
The despots who control everything in the un-free nations of this world are very jealous of the West. In fact, their fondest wish is to watch the West collapse into a thousand raging civil wars.
Social media is more than eager to help them because, you know, outrage creates page views and clicks. That in turn builds their database about you and me – and of course that database not only sells ads but generates revenue from access to the database itself.
The skilled goebbelsian trolls work all sides and the middle. Anywhere there’s a half-truth they can parlay into anger on the left or right, MAGA or Woke, they’ll do so skillfully in a way that generates peak outrage.
So before you play the sucker by engaging in that outrage, think: Who is it that would like me to react this way? And also think: Are those people skilled in the art of what I will call goebbelsology?
OK, I slipped this neologism in for a reason. Josef Goebbels was of course the propaganda minister of Hitler’s Third Reich. But Goebbels himself learned the art of manipulation of the masses by studying the work of someone else, a pioneer in the art of manipulation.
That someone else was Edward Bernays.
I call it goebbelsology rather than bernaysology because, first, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, is a recognizable brand for the art of manipulating perceptions; and second, we’re talking about the dark side of this set of tools. Edward Bernays naively believed, as did the pioneers of nuclear fission and fusion, that his discovery would be used for the good of mankind.
In his essay “The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations”, Richard Gunderman tells about the source of this incredible set of power tools.
Gunderman notes: “Often referred to as ‘the father of public relations,’ Bernays in 1928 published his seminal work, Propaganda, in which he argued that public relations is not a gimmick but a necessity:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”
Gunderman continues, “Bernays came by his beliefs honestly. Born in Austria in 1891, the year Sigmund Freud published one of his earliest papers, Bernays was also Freud’s nephew twice over. His mother was Freud’s sister Anna, and his father, Ely Bernays, was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha… he chose a career in journalism, eventually helping the Woodrow Wilson Administration promote the idea that US efforts in World War I were intended to bring democracy to Europe.
Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime.
“Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term ‘public relations.’
“Drawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund – a relationship Bernays was always quick to mention – he developed an approach he dubbed ‘the engineering of consent.’ He provided leaders the means to ‘control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.’ To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious...”
“Bernays’ publicity campaigns were the stuff of legend. To overcome ‘sales resistance’ to cigarette smoking among women, Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade, having fashionable young women flaunt their ‘torches of freedom.’
“He promoted Lucky Strikes by convincing women that the forest green hue of the cigarette pack was among the most fashionable of colors. The success of this effort was manifested in innumerable window displays and fashion shows… But at home, Bernays was attempting to persuade his wife to kick the habit… While promoting cigarettes as soothing and slimming, Bernays, it seems, was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer.”
“Bernays also used fear to sell products. For Dixie cups, Bernays launched a campaign to scare people into thinking that only disposable cups were sanitary. As part of this campaign, he founded the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink.”
“In the 1920s, Joseph Goebbels became an avid admirer of Bernays and his writings – despite the fact that Bernays was a Jew. When Goebbels became the minister of propaganda for the Third Reich, he sought to exploit Bernays’s ideas to the fullest extent possible. For example, he created a ‘Fuhrer cult’ around Adolph Hitler.
“Bernays learned that the Nazis were using his work in 1933, from a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers. He later recounted in his 1965 autobiography:
They were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.
“Today we might call what Bernays pioneered a form of branding, but at its core it represents little more than a particularly brazen set of techniques to manipulate people to get them to do your bidding.
“Its underlying purpose, in large part, is to make money. By convincing people that they want something they do not need, Bernays sought to turn citizens and neighbors into consumers who use their purchasing power to propel themselves down the road to happiness.
“Without a moral compass, however, such a transformation promotes a patronizing and ultimately cynical view of human nature and human possibilities, one as likely to destroy lives as to build them up.”
It would be a disservice to Russian manipulation skills to suggest that all those skills were learned at the feet of Bernays and Goebbels. Ever since Peter the Great replaced the Russian language with French in his court, and probably before that, the Russian culture has included intense jealousy of Western culture. And every century they get better at finding methods to undermine it. Those methods include manipulation of more than perceptions. They involve manipulation of power structures.
MAGA is a mafiaist organization, and it is the creation of Russia.
Where ideologies maintain political positions that are at least purported to come from truthful representations of fact, mafias are built on credible lies. In other words, goebbelsology.
The first rule of post-Bernays goebbelsology is that one must never let its rules be written, or recorded in any form. In fact, one must deny its existence, just as the capital-M Mafia always denies its own existence. For that reason a lot about this list of rules is speculative, assembled from sources such as Goebbels' Principles of Propaganda, Leonard W. Doob, Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 1950 pp. 419-442 and Propagation and Persuasion; Jowett & O'Donnell
Following is from a Southern Methodist University synopsis of the Doob work:
Propaganda - Goebbels' Principles
https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Propaganda/goebbels.html
Joseph Goebbels
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, beside being an intriguing character, was the Propaganda Minister for Hitler's Third Reich. He was recognized as a master of propaganda as his work was studied after WWII. Goebbels did not survive to enjoy the recognition; he and his wife committed suicide on 1 May 1945, a week before the final collapse of the Third Reich.
After the war, US personnel discovered a very large diary dictated by Goebbels. In it are his principles of propaganda. Leonard Doob's 1950 article details them from a translation of the diary by Louis Lochner (1948).
Hitler's Basic Principles
These principles are abstracted from Jowett & O'Donnell.
Avoid abstract ideas - appeal to the emotions.
Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases.
Give only one side of the argument.
Continuously criticize your opponents.
Pick out one special "enemy" for special vilification.
Goebbels' Principles of Propaganda
When reading these propaganda principles, keep in mind that they were applied in wartime (WWII) and involve issues that don't arise otherwise. It's a long list, but Goebbels was dealing with the complexity of an all-out war. While reading them you may realize that some of the principles are generally applicable and not limited to wartime. Some might be quite familiar today. It is interesting to note that Goebbels' principles derive from Hitler's own ideas of propaganda.
Propagandists must have access to intelligence concerning events and public opinion.
Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority.
It must issue all the propaganda directives.
It must explain propaganda directives to important officials and maintain their morale.
It must oversee other agencies' activities which have propaganda consequences.
The Propaganda consequences of an action must be considered in planning that action.
Propaganda must affect the enemy's policy and actions.
By suppressing propagandistically desirable material which can provide the enemy with useful intelligence.
By openly disseminating propaganda whose contents or tone causes the enemy to draw the desired conclusions.
By goading the enemy into revealing vital information about himself.
By making no reference to a desired enemy activity when any reference would discredit that activity.
Declassified, operational information must be available to implement a propaganda campaign.
To be perceived, propaganda must evoke the interest of an audience and must be transmitted through an attention-getting medium.
Credibility alone must determine whether propaganda output should be true or false.
The purpose, content, and effectiveness of enemy propaganda; the strength and effects of an expose'; and the nature of current propaganda campaigns determine whether enemy propaganda should be ignored or refuted.
Credibility, intelligence, and the possible effects of communicating determine whether propaganda materials should be censored.
Material from enemy propaganda may be utilized in operations when it helps diminish that enemy's prestige or lends support to the propagandist's own objective.
Black rather than white propaganda must be employed when the latter is less credible or produces undesirable effects.
Propaganda may be facilitated by leaders with prestige.
Propaganda must be carefully timed.
The communication must reach the audience ahead of competing propaganda.
A propaganda campaign must begin at the optimum moment.
A propaganda theme must be repeated, but not beyond some point of diminishing effectiveness.
Propaganda must label events and people with distinctive phrases or slogans.
They must evoke responses which the audience previously possesses.
They must be capable of being easily learned.
They must be utilized again and again, but only in appropriate situations.
They must be boomerang-proof.
Propaganda to the home front must prevent the raising of false hopes which can be blasted by future events.
Propaganda to the home front must create an optimum anxiety level.
Propaganda must reinforce anxiety concerning the consequences of defeat.
Propaganda must diminish anxiety (other than that concerning the consequences of defeat) which is too high and cannot be reduced by people themselves.
Propaganda to the home front must diminish the impact of frustration.
Inevitable frustrations must be anticipated.
Inevitable frustrations must be placed in perspective.
Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.
Propaganda cannot immediately affect strong counter-tendencies; instead it must offer some form of action or diversion, or both.
These would be principles guiding the conduct of propaganda operations.
References
Goebbels' Principles of Propaganda, Leonard W. Doob, Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 1950 pp. 419-442
Propagation and Persuasion; Jowett & O'Donnell
These Rules of Goebbelsology were derived from those works:
Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.
Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.
The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.
This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.
The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.
Propaganda must facilitate aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.
Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.
It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.
It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.
The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it.
There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.
It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.
We have made the Reich by propaganda
Propaganda is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If the means achieves the end then the means is good... the new Ministry has no other aim than to unite the nation behind the ideal of the national revolution.
During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information.
That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.
To attract people, to win over people to that which I have “realized” as being true, that is called propaganda.
Goebbelsology in action: a script for a very short play
“Yuri, that is half liter of vodka speaking. You are full of it.”
“Evgeny, I tell you I can do it.”
“OK, Yuri, let us make interesting. I bet you hundred thousand rubles, even money.”
“Evgeny, you are on.”
“Good. You shall see… Um… what was it again I am going to get them to believe? (You are right, I am drunk.)”
“You were going to get ten thousand Americans to believe world is flat.”
“Da. That. I start tomorrow. Get ready to pay, Evgeny.”
“Yuri. Please. Americans gullible, not that gullible. You get ready to pay.”
***
Addiction is a disease.
Power is an addictive substance.
Goebbelsology is the recruitment technique used by dealers of all kinds of addictive drugs.
(How else would you get people to try something that everyone knows is destructive?)
***
Goebbelsology In Nature
Cordyceps fungus infects the brains of ants and gets them to sacrifice themselves to the capo di tutti capi, cordyceps.
The rabies virus takes over the brains of mammals, getting them to sacrifice their self-interest while turning them into genuine zombies with no purpose in life other than to increase the power of their sentient capo di tutti capi, who is Rabies.
Goebbelsology infects the brains of humans and gets them to sacrifice their human thinking capability to their capo di tutti capi. In this case the capo di tutti capi is Vladimir Putin.
Mafiocracy Component 6: Trolling of Social Networks
Social Network trolling is a new, powerful application of goebbelsology. Goebbelsology on steroids. While its practitioners have a clear interest in practicing their craft, thankfully prime practitioner always had difficulty keeping his mouth shut.
In the words of the (assumed) late restaurateur, convicted felon, caterer, brutal military commander, and creator of three St. Petersburg based troll farms, Yevgeny Prigozhin, from a 23 Aug 2023 story by Shaun Walker and Pjotr Sauer in The Guardian:
“An indictment resulting from Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election alleged Prigozhin and companies linked to him were behind a network of pro-Donald Trump Facebook and Twitter profiles, apparently part of a slew of Russian efforts to boost Trump’s candidacy.
The fake profiles shared pro-Trump content and even made payments to unsuspecting real Americans to buy equipment for rallies.
The US indictment was later withdrawn, but when asked about allegations of electoral interference last November, Prigozhin appeared to admit them, with a characteristically gruesome metaphor (emphasis is mine):
“Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.”
Prigozhin’s goal with his skillful use of goebbelsology was clearly to remove both kidneys and the liver of free societies, starting with the United States of America.
If you think that the tactic is to promote a “far right” (whatever that means) agenda, dare I say that you, dear reader, are naive and gullible?
What is being promoted is strife. To accomplish that, the mafiaist finds a cause that serves the interests of a particular industry and creates strife that serves that industry’s interest.
Thus, a social network’s marketable inventory of views and clicks and social graph data is supercharged by rabidly active echo chambers of any variety: “right” or “left” or Earth-is-flat ranters or insecure teenagers whose concern about their social standing has them living on the network on the verge of depression. It makes no difference what the actual beliefs are, as long as they arouse passions, that is, views and clicks and social graph data.
For example, the transition industry generates an average of one million dollars per physical trans patient, and a lesser but significant amount for non-physical gender transitioners. At the same time, the whole subject of gender transition, particularly among insecure adolescents, arouses lucrative flame wars for social networks and lots of disruption of Western society for Russia. If you’re a member of one of those three constituencies, what’s not to like?
Then there’s this:
Kristofer Goldsmith was managing social media for a major veterans’ organization when he found an impostor version of his site:
At first he thought it was one of his own users who created a site to amplify his organization’s message. But it turned out that it was an impostor site run by Russians.
“Foreign adversary that was targeting American veterans using Veterans’ grants...”
“This led me to a two year investigation into all the ways that foreign adversaries target troops, veterans and families online.”
Mafiocracy Component 7: False Flag Operations
When a mafia wants to create popular outrage against its adversaries, the false flag is a useful tool – but only when used with competence.
In September 1999, as Russia sought to build popular support for its invasion of Dagestan and its second Chechen War, a series of explosions destroyed four apartment buildings in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk. The handling of the crisis by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin boosted his popularity and helped him win the presidency a few months later.
While the explosions appeared to be the work of Chechen rebels, a number of telltale signs indicated that that was not the case. Perhaps the most telling, and most incompetent, of those signs revealed itself when on 13 September, Russian Duma speaker Genadiy Seleznyov made an announcement in the Duma about receiving a report that another bombing had just happened in the city of Volgodonsk – three days before the bombing actually took place on September 16.
The type of explosives used, as well as other details, indicated that the bombings were the work of the Russian government, which stonewalled all attempts at an objective investiagation.
A standard practice of Russia is to orchestrate protests and violence in the name of opposition in order to destabilize the government of a country they want to control, creating a pretext for annexation and / or installation of a puppet regime.
Another false flag technique is to offer ridiculously generous contracts in the name of an adversary (Ukraine) to a naive close relative of the leader of the adversary (Hunter Biden), for services for which the relative is obviously unqualified. At an opportune later time, the resulting appearance of corruption is brought to the attention of the adversary’s voters.
Mafiocracy Component 8: Signaling The Consequences Of Opposition
One of the modus operandi of the MAGA mafia is illustrated in Mitt Romney’s decision to vote for acquittal in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, as reported in a story By McKay Coppins about his book Romney: A Reckoning in The Atlantic and also in Huffington Post .
During the Senate trial of the then-president, Coppins wrote, an unnamed member of the Republican leadership told Romney “he was leaning toward voting to convict” but “the others urged him to reconsider.”
“‘You can’t do that,’ Romney recalled someone saying. ‘Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children.’ The senator eventually decided they were right,” Coppins added.
A GOP congressman had earlier told Romney he chose not to vote for Trump’s second impeachment “out of fear of his family’s safety.”
“The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?” Coppins wrote.
“On Wednesday, Romney, a fierce critic of Trump, announced he would not be seeking reelection in 2024.”
There’s also this story “It begins with a text message from Angus King, the junior senator from Maine: ‘Could you give me a call when you get a chance? Important.’
Romney calls, and King informs him of a conversation he’s just had with a high-ranking Pentagon official. Law enforcement has been tracking online chatter among right-wing extremists who appear to be planning something bad on the day of Donald Trump’s upcoming rally in Washington, D.C. The president has been telling them the election was stolen; now they’re coming to steal it back. . There’s talk of gun smuggling, of bombs and arson, of targeting the traitors in Congress who are responsible for this travesty. Romney’s name has been popping up in some frightening corners of the internet, which is why King needed to talk to him. He isn’t sure Romney will be safe… He’ll want to know about this, Romney thinks. He’ll want to protect his colleagues, and himself.
Romney sends his text: “In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.”
Somehow this tribe called MAGA is purported to have an ideology. Remarkably, many call it “conservative” even though it has nothing to do with conservative ideology. It is no more ideological than La Cosa Nostra. The mafia.
Need I explain how a mafia works? There’s a power addict at the top, the capo de tutti capi, who creates a fear-driven cult of personality. Everything the party does serves to enhance the capo de tutti’s power and wealth. All human values other than loyalty are simply dispensed with.
Since before the Russian Revolution, the governance of Russia has been in the hands of a mafia. Human beings who challenge power, people such as Alexei Navalny, are simply poisoned or shot.
Stalin had seven secret police chiefs. Of the seven, four of them (Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, Lavrenty Beria and Viktor Abakumov) were executed. Yagoda's execution was supervised by his successor Yehzov, whose own execution was supervised by his successor Beria. Then Beria was executed after Stalin’s death.
Who actually pulled the trigger to kill Beria? Wikipedia attributes that to General Pavel Batitsky, but for years it was attributed to none other than Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev was certainly present in the mob that kidnapped Beria and had him killed.
One of the chiefs, Vasily Blokhin, was especially efficient in organizing mass executions, having personally pulled the trigger on 15,000 of them. So feared was he that he was actually allowed to live to the ripe old age of 60.
That’s the way it works in a mafia. Whether your name is Batitsky, Khrushchev or Blokhin, you rise in prominence in proportion to your brutality. Fear equals respect; there are no other factors in that equation.
You And I Are Targets Of Mafiocracy
Perhaps as you read about goebbelsology you felt a bit of self-congratulation that as an intelligent, educated, literate, non-MAGA person you are not a target of Mafiocracy.
But it would be a huge mistake to think that sums it up. Because goebbelsology targets the pain buttons of the “woke” as well as those of the “far right.” (Those terms are in quotes because this author does not believe they are meaningful as words to describe anything but groups pain team fans. A pain team very similar to a professional sports team, and pain team fans are very similar to sports team fans. They like to support their team with noisy rallies and they like to find fault with the judgment of officials. But there’s hardly more ideological substance to left vs right than there is to Red Sox vs. Yankees.)
Example: twenty years ago the content of public debate about abortion centered on the question “When does life begin?” Since then, abortion has become a team sport, the opposing sides being “Pro Life” and “Choice” – ignoring the fact that there are people on both sides who agree on many issues, such as the conditions when abortion is and is not acceptable as a matter of public policy. But regardless of one’s thinking about the nuances of the matter, one must choose a side and shout at the other side.
What accounts for the fact that abortion has become a team sport? Was it just spontaneous, or is are the social media trolls working overtime to fan the fans?
The answer can be seen in articles such as Buzzfeed’s “This Is How Your Hyperpartisan Political News Gets Made” by Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed News Media Editor , Posted on February 27, 2017. The article shows that the very same news story can presented, using variations of headlines and graphics, to inflame the passions of both MAGAs and Wokes.
Goebbelsology and Wokeism
Recall Hitler’s last point about propaganda: “Pick out one special ‘enemy’ for special vilification.”
Bill Maher says it well: “Part of the appeal of a Herschel Walker or a Donald Trump or any number of egregious a__holes Republicans have backed is in their mind the worse a candidate is the more it says to Democrats ‘Do you see how much we don’t like what you’re selling, all that socialism and identity politics and victimhood and oversensitivity and cancel culture and white self-loathing and forcing complicated ideas about race and sex on kids too young to understand it? Literally anything would be better than that.’ That’s their view, that’s why you can be a really bad dude in Republican politics and it’s not a deal breaker.”
There are many sources of America’s polarization, and much of it arises organically. All populations have their joiners, and joiners will join wherever they find a group with which to rant. It might even be because they actually believe in what is being ranted, though just as often the choice involves no more ideology than in choosing whether to be a fan of the 49ers or the Chiefs.
Goebbelsologists understand that, and in the case of the jealousy-driven Russian Mafia, the point is to raise the level of shrillness as the fans scream at each other. And they do that with incredible subltlety and skill. (Russians are good at four things: aircraft engineering, ballet, manipulation of perceptions, and brutality. Over the years they have either driven to exile or executed those who display other competencies. The gene pool in Russia is getting shallow.)
An even more striking illustration of the skill of Russian goebbelsologists is in their masterful orchestration of fear of a repeat of Nazi dictatorship. We have all seen “the left’s” (whatever that means) version of the rise-of-fascism fear story (I happen to share that concern.)
But did you know that very same fear story is used by goebbelsologists, with necessary slight changes in the script, to inflame the passions and fears of “the right” (whatever that means) over the threat of a rise in fascism?
A distasteful part of writing involves subscribing to distasteful publications to see what they’re telling their minions. After paying for one of them I saw that they depend on their not-so-observent subscribers that a paywall-protected video of theirs is available on another site for free. That site presents their “Letter to the American Church.”
That video uses the same tactics as Goebbels and Hitler skillfully used alarms over communists to drive the masses as well as as the kingmakers Hindenburg, von Papen, von Schleicher to make Hitler Germany’s chancellor.
Think about that. The same message, the same images, the same alarms, are used to inflame both sides against each other! Josef Goebbels would be proud!
***
Following is a strategy for dealing with the one component of Mafiocracy that you and I can most immediately do something about.
You and I can blunt the force of goebbelsology in an individual. And when that individual starts questioning the articles of faith that goebbelsology sold to them, others in their group will notice and will start asking their own questions.
What You And I Can Do About It
If you agree that Donald Trump is unfit for public office, and that any candidate, “conservative” or “liberal” (whatever those terms mean) would be a better U.S. President than Trump, then consider this approach to helping his followers understand what is happening and what is at stake.
Operation Enlighten
Here’s a strategy for dealing with the one component of Mafiocracy that you and I can most immediately do something about.
Look for opportunities to engage your MAGA and Woke friends and family members with a discussion about behavior, mentioning nothing about politics, media, etc.
Start with something like this:
“Have you ever found out that some jealous family member has been feeding you untrue gossip about another family member? You had no reason not to believe it until you came across something that showed they were lying to you. Have you experienced that? Plenty of people have.
Or have you watched as a co-worker put all their energy into skillfully discrediting an office rival whose success and effectiveness aroused their jealousy?
Why do people do that?
Well, jealousy is just a hard thing to explain, and it’s typically hidden so you don’t see where all that lying is coming from.
Whole groups of people often behave that way. Look at the way the fans of sports teams can get at each others’ throats as though the sport is a matter of life and death.
Often, those jealous folks do it in an amateurish way. But others have picked up skills in the dark art of manipulation of perceptions, so that the people they’re talking to have no idea that their view of the situation has been expertly engineered.
In fact, it’s not uncommon.
Sad, isn’t it.
You know how it is with jealous people, right? They just can’t stand the presence, or even the existence, of others who have their lives more together than their own. Rather than focusing on improving their own situation, they spend seemingly endless amounts of energy on a variety of tactics just to cut others down.
With practice, sadly, they get good at causing turmoil in the life of their target or targets. At the same time, they learn how to keep themselves and their own role in that turmoil out of view.
Whole nations can behave like individual people, consumed with jealousy about the success and the freedoms enjoyed by people of other nations.
One thing I wonder about is why Americans all seem to be so angry.”
***
At this point they will start talking because they have been encouraged to exhibit their anger. Do not argue. If you agree with one or more of their positions, say so and reinforce that agreement with examples and stories that show you’re on the same page.
For example, if they say something about men competing in women’s sports and you happen to agree that that is bad, cite your own examples and enthusiastically agree with them. If on the other hand you don’t agree with them on that or another issue, let it go and find one that you do agree on. Make that the main subject of the conversation. After that, find something else that you can agree on.
Your purpose is to get them to see that you, the person outside their cult, are actually a reasonable human being, in contrast to what they have been relentlessly taught about “people like you.”
Keep the conversation going as long as possible. Find an activity you both like to do, like bowling or hiking, or board games, and try to find a time to do it together.
Ease into talk about goebbelsology, but only in a historical context: how it started with Edward Bernays and was adopted by Goebbels. Talk about the principles of goebbelsology and then say something like “when I read about goebbelsology I started to understand how important it is to get information from a variety of sources.
When you think the time is right, bring up the conversation about the behavior of jealous people, and mention how dictatorships tend to be jealous of people in democracies. Don’t mention Russia until you feel the time is really right.
When that time comes, there will be an attempt to argue. Don’t do it. Don’t advocate anything. Just speak as someone interested in history.
With some luck, eventually they will start to see the light.
De-programming a cult member is never quick and easy. And remember, Woke can be as much a cult as MAGA.
If you agree with the aims of this effort, please take a moment to share this post with others who might share our mutual concerns.
Trump must be stopped.
1https://www.channel4.com/news/nigel-farages-funding-secrets-revealed
2https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2016/10/arron-banks-the-man-who-bought-brexit
It's terrible the way Trump used the presidency to cement his power by bringing in cronies to weaponize the DOJ, the FBI, the IRS and others to persecute his political opponents. Of course, that's what Putin does, so it's small wonder that Trump followed suit, taking his lessons from one of the most ruthless dictators of our time, Vladimir Putin. By the end of his presidency Trump had very nearly assembled a cabal of party loyalist judges, prosecutors, and propagandists such that he could take absolute control of the federal government, never to have an honest election again.
Everything that I've said above is indisputably true. But of course it's true about Biden, not Trump. Trump clearly never did ANY of that.