The problem with Snowden isn't the secrets he exposed, but the ability to label people as conspiracy theorists because "if it were so horrible in government, someone would say someting about it"
I'm sure you've already received a pile of responses to your query about Bible verses and the ice bucket challenge, but in case you haven't:
All these verses are from the Gospel of Matthew (King James Version), chapter 6.
Take heed that ye do not your alms before men , to be seen of them : otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven .
-This is cautioning man not to be ostentatious when giving (ie publicly dumping ice buckets on their heads), because God will not reward it. I'm guessing because he's not impressed.
Therefore when thou doest thine alms , do not sound a trumpet before thee , as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets , that they may have glory of men . Verily I say unto you , They have their reward .
-Here, the reward that's spoken of is not of God (see verse 1), so it must be the applause / recognition of men who will quickly forget. God'd rewards are eternal.
But when thou doest alms , let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth :
-Give with one hand, and don't use the other to pat yourself on the back. Do it in private and don't being it into your public life.
That thine alms may be in secret : and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly. .
- God sees what you do, and more importantly WHY you do what you do. If you're doing it for the attention, God knows it and will reward you (or not) accordingly.
I could go on, but I know how busy you guys are. Thank your for your EXCELLENT analyses, and I can't wait for Thursday's show!
-Joe Shelton
The Moral Self License Donation email
I haven't finished the Sunday show yet, and I don't know if it was brought up, but I think you might have a donation opportunity on your hands. The Moral Self License. By donating to the show you can be a douchebag somewhere else in your life.
His name is Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, age 23'...from a priveleged family in London
Top Daily Story '... from Alalam TV, Tehran
[ Editors Note: Britain's MI6 has gone through their domestic Jihadi database and come up with a ringer. Will this be the first Jihadi that they arrest? It is not a silly question. I do not know of a country yet who had outlawed and put warrants out for those leaving the country to do Jihad.
There are laws for example in the US about serving in a foreign military, and of course free pass if given to American Jews like Rahm Emanuel to serve his Jewish Jihad time in the Zionist Army. He was not quite following in his father.s shoes who was a terrorist for the Irgun, but blood runs thick.
Speaking of handing out free passes, I am not aware of the Justice Department going after Americans overseas engaging in terrorist activity in Syria or Ukraine, as long as they are working for an approved contractor. I am dying to see the legal opinion that stamped that kosher... Jim W. Dean ]
___________________________________
- Interview published '... August 24, 2014 -
MI5 and MI6 have identified the British militant suspected of murdering the American journalist James Foley, senior UK government sources confirm.
The masked man with a London accent, who is said to be known to fellow militants as the beheader ''Jihadi John'', was seen in the shocking video of Foley's death released by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) extremist group last week.
While sources gave no details of the man they have identified, a key suspect is Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, 23, who left his family's £1m home in Maida Vale, west London, last year. He recently tweeted a picture of himself holding up a severed head.
Writing in The Sunday Times today Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, says ISIL is ''turning a swathe of Iraq and Syria into a terrorist state as a base for launching attacks on the West''. Unless the terrorists are stopped, he warns that ''sooner or later they will seek to strike us on British soil''.
Hammond accuses Foley's killer of ''an utter betrayal'' of everything the British people stand for. ''It is horrifying to think that the perpetrator of this heinous act could have been brought up in Britain,'' he writes.
Hammond says Foley's death ''is a reminder to us all that extremism in Iraq and Syria is not only causing huge suffering in those countries but is also a barbaric ideology threatening us at home''.
The intelligence agencies and police estimate that up to 20 British extremists a month are now travelling to Syria and Iraq to fight along with ISIL.
Editing: Jim W. Dean
__________________________________
Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=317973
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Foley issues
Why are there so many photos and videos of Foley? Who took the pictures and made the footage?
What about actual examples of his work?
Balaclava
Good morning Adam and John,
I was listening to episode 647 and noticed an error as you quoted at approximately 2:16:19 "They're not all wearing baklava(s)." As a correction you likely were intending to say Balaclava which is a ski mask or mask type headgear.
For those who have been deployed to the Middle East they will also recognize this as a shemagh (pronounced she-mog) or a Keffiyeh (pronounced ka-fee-yah) which is a versatile and culturally significant head dress.
There are specific ways that a shemagh (balaclava in this case) can be worn, most often it is tied as the following clip will show. Interestingly enough it would match the rhetoric that "John" was British as it appears that they had tied it in British/SAS fashion.
http://youtu.be/5YPU1Z-d_Ow
Hope this clarification adds some detail to your research. Thank you for your courage.
Charles M. Sennott is the Founder and Executive Director of The Ground Truth Project. He served as the Boston Globe’s Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001.
The "writer" Peter Theo Curtis was released today after reportedly being held captive in northern Syria.Strangely Curtis was transported through the entire country, passing multiple warring factions and handed over the southern Golan Heights boarder to Israel.
Sennott was also the Globes Europe Bureau Chief based in London from 2001 to 2005.
Coincidence :
Sennott leaves Jerusalem in 2001 - 9/11 war on terror starts in 2001.
Sennott leaves London 2005 - London bus bombings 2005. As head of the European branch he'd also closely follow events around the Madrid bombings in 2004.
Global Post announces the launch of the Ground Truth project in Boston 2013 - Boston bombings 2013.
Sennott's seems to be a lucky journalist, Islamic terror news follows him everywhere.
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BUENOS AIRES, Argentina '-- Sitting in the first pew before the altar at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Buenos Aires '-- the former church of Pope Francis, then-Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio '-- I waited for noon Mass to begin.
The Catholic Church had been at the center of many of our interviews and exchanges over coffee, and it seemed like we'd spent most of our time in this cathedral. But this was the first time on the trip '-- for me, the first time in maybe 20 years '-- that we'd sat for Mass. Our first interview had confirmed that, in Argentina, you could not look at the issue of abortion without also looking at the church, and the paradoxical relationship women have within it.
''The Catholic Church is a very patriarchal institution that, historically, has been opposed to women's rights,'' Victoria Tesoriero, a member of Cat"licas por el Derecho a Decidir, or Catholics for the Right to Decide, had said in that first interview. ''It has bound women to subaltern or domestic roles that are lower in rank '-- in the hierarchy. This is a place of inequality.''
And yet the Virgin Mary holds great power in the Latin American church.
Furgeson
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A few days after 18-year-old Mike Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri, White House officials enlisted an unusual source for on-the-ground intelligence amid the chaos and tear gas: the Rev. Al Sharpton, a fiery activist who became a household name by provoking rather than pacifying.
Sharpton'--once such a pariah that Clinton administration officials rushed through their ribbon-cuttings in Harlem for fear he'd show up and force them to, gasp, shake his hand'--arrived on the scene 72 hours after the shooting at the request of Brown's grandfather, who had admired his advocacy on behalf of the family of slain Florida teen Trayvon Martin.
But if the old Al Sharpton would have parachuted into Ferguson to rile up the masses, the Obama-era Al Sharpton trod a more gingerly path to justice. Over the years, the 59-year-old former Brooklyn protest leader turned MSNBC talk-show host has embraced a new identity, one that reflects his evolution from agitator to insider with all that implies. In Ferguson, Sharpton established himself as a de facto contact and conduit for a jittery White House seeking to negotiate a middle ground between meddling and disengagement. ''There's a trust factor with The Rev from the Oval Office on down,'' a White House official familiar with their dealings told me. ''He gets it, and he's got credibility in the community that nobody else has got. There's really no one else out there who does what he does.''
And the White House, as the crisis following Brown's death seemed to flare out of control, worked extensively behind the scenes to maximize The Rev's doing what he does, using him as both a source of information and a go-between. After huddling with Brown's family and local community leaders, Sharpton connected directly with White House adviser and First Friend Valerie Jarrett, vacationing in her condo in the exclusive Oak Bluffs section of Martha's Vineyard, not far from where President Obama and his family were staying. Obama was ''horrified'' by the images he was seeing on TV, Jarrett told Sharpton, and proceeded to pepper him with questions as she collected information for the president: How bad was the violence? Was it being fueled by outside groups'--and could Sharpton do anything to talk them down? What did the Brown family want the White House to do?
It was a heady consultation for Sharpton, who spent years on the outside dreaming of a place in the pantheon of the civil rights leaders he revered as a teenage street preacher in Brooklyn, and it's an irony lost on no one that his rise to White House adviser has come thanks to Barack Obama, whose restrained personal style couldn't be any more different from Sharpton's. If anything, the Ferguson crisis has underscored Sharpton's role as the national black leader Obama leans on most, a remarkable personal and political transformation for a man once regarded with suspicion and disdain by many in his own party. It's a status made all the more surprising given that Obama, America's first black president, ran on a platform of moving beyond the country's painful racial divisions while Sharpton is the man who once defined those divisions for many Americans.
What brought them together, according to numerous sources I've spoken with about this over the years, is a shared commitment to racial justice, and a hardheaded pragmatism that has fueled their success. ''He realized I wasn't as irrational or as crazy as people thought,'' Sharpton told me in an interview this week, and indeed Sharpton not only visits the White House frequently, he often texts or emails with senior Obama officials such as Jarrett and Attorney General Eric Holder, the first African American to hold that job and who, like Sharpton, views the Ferguson crisis as a pivotal one in Obama's presidency.
''I've known Al since he was 12 years old, and he's arrived at the level he always wanted to arrive at, which is gratifying,'' the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a colleague and sometimes rival, told me. ''He's the man who's the liaison to the White House, he's the one who's talking to the Justice Department.''
***
To get where he is Sharpton not only shed 150 pounds but much of his old bullhorn-in-your-face-bombast. When we talked this week, he was preparing remarks to be delivered at the funeral for Mike Brown in Ferguson planned for Monday. Sharpton said his critics ignore just how much time and experience has matured him. ''I've grown to appreciate different roles and different people, and I weigh words a little more [carefully] now. I've learned how to measure what I say,'' he said. ''Al Sharpton in 1986 was trying to be heard. I was a local guy and was like, 'Y'all are ignoring us'... That's not the case now.''
The many incarnations of Rev. Al Sharpton, 1988-2014. | AP Photo
Yet the old image is indelible. Three decades ago, the overweight, track-suited, medallion-bedecked Sharpton led a rally against a white-owned clothing store in Harlem that was subsequently burned to the ground by a deranged black protester, killing eight people. Around that time, he was convicted of defaming a white upstate New York prosecutor he falsely accused of raping black teenager Tawana Brawley in the 1980s, an infamous case that made him famous as the caricature of an inflammatory inner-city preacher immortalized by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities. Sharpton often, regrettably, played to type: During the 1991 Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn, Sharpton stoked black rage after a Hasidic Jewish driver killed a young boy with his car. At the child's funeral, Sharpton railed against Jewish ''diamond merchants'' who bought their wares from apartheid South Africa, then ran down black kids in Brooklyn. There was his much-mocked stint as an FBI informer in the 1980s. There were poorly managed mayoral and presidential bids that ended in tatters, and in deep debt.
Sharpton's mere presence remains an irritant to many white conservatives. When Sharpton this week denounced Ferguson officials for releasing surveillance footage of Brown roughing up a convenience store employee (he accused them of ''smearing'' Brown's memory), Bill O'Reilly of Fox News ripped Sharpton as a ''charlatan'' and ''race hustler'' who only cared ''about his own self-aggrandizement,'' echoing dozens of similar critics over the years.
''How is it possible... that he carries so much tainted baggage from the past, yet still enjoys enormous pull with the political class?'' was the question posed earlier this year by New York Post editorial writer Michael Goodwin, part of a Greek chorus of 50- and 60-something Gotham journalists determined to make sure Sharpton's past isn't lost in all the New Al talk.
''Why,'' Goodwin asked, ''isn't he politically toxic?''
***
Sharpton's determination to reinvent himself has a lot to do with his rise, but he owes just as much to the unique symbiosis with the president, a relationship predicated less on personal friendship than on a colder assessment of mutual self-interest by two of the most powerful African Americans in the country. ''He's calculating ... he gets the game,'' Sharpton recently told an associate when asked about why he's bonded with Obama.
''The relationship evolved over time,'' Sharpton explained to me. ''I realized he was just a different kind of guy. ... He wasn't going to be guided by emotions. He was not intimidated. There was no game you could play [with him]. The key for him was seeing that I wasn't insincere, that I actually believed in the stuff I was talking about.''
Sharpton probably never would have gotten into Obama's orbit if many of Obama's 2008 campaign advisers had gotten their way. He was an early endorser of Obama's'--bucking other black power brokers like Harlem Rep. Charlie Rangel, who lined up behind Hillary Clinton'--but the candidate's mostly white leadership team was reluctant to let him into the fold. In his memoir The Audacity to Win, 2008 Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said Obama and his staff blew a gasket when they learned that Sharpton planned a pilgrimage to overwhelmingly white Iowa in the days leading up the critical caucus vote that year.
Obama got Sharpton on the phone and, in his genial way, began discussing the logistical challenges of a visit'--maintaining all along that he wanted to make the visit happen. It took Sharpton a few minutes, but he got the message. ''I called him back and said, 'I'm not going,''' Sharpton told me. ''He told people he never forgot that.''
Sharpton called it ''the turning point'' but of course, there was more to it than that. Obama, as president, needed a single, credible national spokesman on black issues, who was willing to catch flak from black critics as he navigated toward the political center'--and he needed one whose name wasn't Jesse Jackson.
Jackson, a former top aide to Martin Luther King Jr. and the first black leader to mount serious presidential campaigns (in 1984 and 1988), had leveraged his influence with Bill Clinton in the 1990s into status as a kind of president of Black America. But that wasn't to be with Obama: Even though Jackson's son Jesse Jr. had been close to Obama in Chicago, the older man never meshed with the Illinois upstart or his people (though Jackson told me he's long been ''one of the strongest of Obama's strong supporters'').
But it was an under-the-breath, hot-mike comment Jackson made before a cable interview in July 2008 that defined his relationship with Obama; Jackson said he found Obama's speeches at black churches so condescending he wanted to ''cut his nuts off.'' Obama's team essentially wrote Jackson off after that, several members of the team told me. ''Jesse wasn't an option for us. He had gotten too old'... and Obama completely eclipsed him'--and then he had that hot-mic deal where [Jesse] said he wanted to cut [Obama's] balls off,'' a former top Obama adviser told me on condition of anonymity. ''But there really was only one Jesse, and we needed to have someone to deal with in the African-American community, and Sharpton was the next best thing, so, yeah, we sort of helped build him up. ... Sharpton was the last guy standing.''
Eventually, Sharpton'--often in consultation with Jarrett and Patrick Gaspard, the New York political operative who would go on to run the White House political office '-- carved out a unique role, defending Obama's actions to black critics. In 2010, when the influential black radio host Tavis Smiley hit Obama for failing to articulate a ''black agenda'' on jobs, Sharpton shot back, calling Smiley's charge ''stupid'' and accusing him of playing into the hands of Obama's conservative critics.
''I don't know how he's managed to do it,'' says Basil Smikle, a Democratic operative long active in Harlem politics and a veteran Sharpton watcher. ''He's an outsider's insider or an insider's outsider, depending on your perspective. He's essentially covering for the president in Ferguson. ... His power has slowly and steadily supplanted that of other black leaders locally and nationally [and] the Obama victory provided a platform for him to alternate between agitator of institutions and defender of its leaders.''
Yet as Obama's presidency enters its final two years, Sharpton'--so often criticized for being a self-promoter'--finds himself in the unusual position of being too close to a White House that seems to be losing power by the day. ''We are now living in a world where Al Sharpton is considered a sellout,'' joked one Sharpton ally.
Last year, around the time that Sharpton was participating in Obama's celebration of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s ''I Have a Dream'' speech, black nationalist and former Harvard professor Cornel West tore into Obama and Sharpton for sanitizing King's vision of economic and racial equality. ''Brother Martin himself, I think, would've been turning over in his grave,'' West told an interviewer at the time, adding: ''We saw the coronation of the bona fide house negro of the Barack Obama plantation, our dear brother Al Sharpton.''
Sharpton dismisses the criticism, telling me, ''I get hit as hard on the left as I do on the right,'' but lately he's been stepping back up the kind of activism that catapulted him to prominence in the first place. He's taken a front-and-center role in leading the protests following the chokehold killing of a black Staten Island man at the hands of police'--and will lead a huge rally in New York's smallest and whitest borough on Saturday before appearing on NBC's ''Meet the Press'' Sunday and heading back to Missouri for Michael Brown's funeral.
At home, there are flashes of the old Sharpton. New York's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, is a close ally who ran with his support in the 2013 Democratic primary (''People shouldn't forget that I opposed a black candidate for de Blasio,'' Sharpton reminded me, a reference to failed mayoral hopeful Bill Thompson). But that hasn't stopped Sharpton from publicly confronting de Blasio or his police commissioner Bill Bratton in ways that would never wash with Obama and his staff. Earlier this month, Sharpton stunned a City Hall audience by saying the mayor's biracial son Dante was a ''candidate'' for a police chokehold.
Sharpton has been much more circumspect with Obama. During his interactions with Jarrett over the Ferguson case, he urged the White House to turn up the heat on Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, to appoint a special state prosecutor to replace St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch'--who has defended the actions of the highly militarized local cops and resisted calls for a rapidly expedited investigation. ''We're not going to get a fair investigation with that guy, he's got to go,'' Sharpton told Jarrett, according to one person familiar with the exchange. A spokeswoman for Jarrett, who has been in contact in with Nixon, declined to say if she had passed along Sharpton's demand.
Sharpton, for his part, doesn't plan to wait forever for backstage results: He told me he plans ''a series of nonviolent protests to get McCullough out of the case within the next few weeks, when everything cools down a bit.''
***
Whatever happens, it's clear that Sharpton, the master of reinvention, will soon find himself at a crossroads. Even if he can lay claim to being the country's most important black leader, what will that mean once the first black president leaves office'--or when a newer generation of telegenic, Obama-inspired black leaders like Cory Booker demands their share of the spotlight?
When we talked, Sharpton told me he sees his model for success in the rear-view mirror, in the example set by Jesse Jackson.
''I never aspired to the local political fiefdom thing that a lot of people ascribed me to,'' he said. ''I saw myself as a guy who learned from Jesse Jackson how to do national civil rights. I wasn't really interested in who was going to be the next district leader in Brooklyn. My ambitions were always a lot bigger than what my critics thought my ability was.'' He goes on to list the lessons he learned from Jackson: ''The Saturday rallies ... get your own TV show ... have a national organization'''--lastly, make friends with a president.
''He was Clinton's guy,'' Sharpton bluntly told me, ''and I'm with Obama.''
The meaning of that was clear this week in Ferguson, where Jackson, who was summoned to Missouri by local preachers, has spent as much time as Sharpton, but with little of the public attention after having been almost entirely marginalized by Obama's team (Jackson confirmed to me he's had little contact with administration officials since the Ferguson crisis began).
The relentless climber in Sharpton can't help but feel proud of surpassing a role model, but he also sees a glimmer of his own future in Jackson's fate.
''I think he's now realized that he's older now '... And he realizes that I've come into my own and he's got to deal with it,'' Sharpton said of his complicated relationship with the older civil rights leader. ''[The relationship is] respectful but it's clearly not prot(C)g(C)-mentor. I still admire what he did, I just think that things pass on. I'm going to pass on'--everybody has their day.''
Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer atPolitico Magazine.
SDR
BBC News - IMF's Christine Lagarde 'under investigation'
27 August 2014Last updated at 12:46 ET French authorities have formally opened a negligence investigation into Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
She has been questioned about her role in awarding 400m euro (£318m; $527m) in compensation to businessman Bernard Tapie in 2008. She denies wrongdoing.
Ms Lagarde, 58, was finance minister in President Nicolas Sarkozy's government at the time of the award.
Mr Tapie supported Mr Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election.
He was once a majority shareholder in sports goods company Adidas but sold it in 1993 in order to become a cabinet minister in Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government.
Mr Tapie sued Credit Lyonnais over its handling of the sale, alleging the partly state-owned bank had defrauded him by deliberately undervaluing the company.
'No resignation'His case was later referred by Ms Lagarde to a three-member arbitration panel which awarded the compensation.
Investigators suspect he was granted a deal in return for his support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
Ms Lagarde said last year that her decision to refer Mr Tapie's long-running dispute with Credit Lyonnais to a panel of judges was "the best solution at the time".
Although being placed under formal investigation does not necessarily lead to charges, the development could raise questions about the rest of her term at the IMF, which is due to end in 2016.
She told AFP news agency she had no intention of resigning from the IMF.
Her lawyer, Yves Repiquet, told Reuters news agency he would personally appeal against the French magistrates' decision, which means Ms Lagarde would not need to return to Paris.
Ms Lagarde says she is returning to Washington, where she will brief the IMF board on the recent development.
She replaced Dominique Strauss-Kahn as IMF managing director in 2011.
Mr Strauss-Kahn - also a former French minister - resigned following his arrest in New York on charges of sexual assault that were later dropped.
Ms Lagarde belongs to the same opposition UMP party as Nicolas Sarkozy, who has also been placed under formal investigation on suspicion of seeking to influence judges who were looking into his affairs.
Mr Sarkozy was detained for questioning in July - the first time a former French head of state has been held in police custody.
He is hoping to challenge again for the presidency in 2017 and the allegations are seen as a blow to his hopes of returning to office.
SCO POWWOW-Russian troops enter China for military drills - English pravda.ru
On August 19, Russian troops arrived to the area of "Peace Mission 2014" military drills of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
According to RT, the drills will be held on the Chinese military range Zhurihe, from 24 to 29 August. The troops of five SCO member states will take part in the drills: Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and China. In total, the drills will involve more than 7 thousand troops.
"Today, the last echelon with personnel and military equipment of the Russian contingent of troops participating in joint military counterterrorism exercises "Peace Mission 2014 arrived in Zhurihe today, on August 19. In total, about 1,000 troops of the motorized infantry unit stationed in the town of Borzya of the Trans-Baikal Territory arrived to the territory of one of the largest military range grounds in Central Asia," the chief of the press service chief of the Eastern Military District of Russia, Colonel Alexander Gordeev told RIA Novosti.
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Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965/1973) (French: Propagandes; original French edition: 1962) is a book on the subject of propaganda by French philosopher, theologian, legal scholar, and sociologist Jacques Ellul. This book appears to be the first attempt to study propaganda from a sociological approach as well as a psychological one. It presents a sophisticated taxonomy for propaganda, including such paired opposites as political''sociological, vertical''horizontal, rational''irrational, and agitation''integration.
The book contains Ellul's theories about the nature of propaganda to adapt the individual to a society, to a living standard and to an activity aiming to make the individual serve and conform. The work concerns propaganda as an inner control over an individual by a social force.
Authorship[edit]During World War II, Ellul was a leader in the French resistance after being discharged as a professor from French universities by the Vichy regime.[1] After France's liberation, he became professor at the University of Bordeaux. He authored 58 books and numerous articles over his lifetime, the dominant theme of which has been the threat to human freedom created by modern technology. In 1947, Ellul was appointed chair of law and social history at the Institut d'(C)tudes politiques that increased his reputation as a social and political philosopher which led to the publication of his works in the United States.
Background[edit]Propaganda has long been recognized as a general phenomenon in the modern world. As early as 1928, Edward Bernays recognized propaganda as a modern instrument to be utilized to produce productive ends and ''help bring order out of chaos''.[2] Since then, there has been great difficulty in determining what constitutes propaganda in our world and what the nature of propaganda is because it is a secret action. For a long time, propaganda was simplistically viewed as being able to modify sentiments and attitudes of an individual without their being conscious of such an attempt. This limited perspective of propaganda as being only able to influence the individual psychologically was prevalent from 1920 to around 1933. Once reassessed though more emphasis was placed on the intention of the propagandist and another objective of propaganda concerned with sparking an individual to action was recognized. ''The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, inspired by Harold Lasswell'' defined propaganda as ''the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influencing the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations''.[3]
This definition seemed more accurate and was supported by others such as Goebbels, a German propagandist, who stated, "We do not talk to say something, but to obtain a certain effect."[4] Similarly F.C. Bartlett holds an accurate interpretation of the goal of propaganda as not merely as an instrument to increase political understanding of events, but to obtain results through action. Ellul supports the idea that propaganda is made primarily because of a will to action for the purpose of effectively arming policy made by the State. Leonard Doob, an American specialist, defined propaganda in 1948 as "the attempt to affect the personalities and to control the behavior of individuals towards desired ends."[5] Unending definitions show the uncertainty among specialists and the inability of definitions to encompass all that is propaganda. Just because the term propaganda cannot be defined with any degree of precision does not mean that attempts to define it should be abandoned.
"Very frequently propaganda is described as a manipulation for the purpose of changing idea or opinions of making individuals 'believe' some idea or fact, and finally of making them adhere to some doctrine'--all matters of the mind. It tries to convince, to bring about a decision, to create a firm adherence to some truth. This is a completely wrong line of thinking: to view propaganda as still being what it was in 1850 is to cling to an obsolete concept of man and of the means to influence him; it is to condemn oneself to understand nothing about propaganda. The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer to transform an opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief."[6]
Ellul does not dispute these traditional notions, however, in this book he argues that modern propaganda is viewed from an incomplete perspective. He holds that the main concern of propaganda through psychological influence is sparking action to a desired response by developing learned attitudes. Prior attempts to define propaganda failed to fully elaborate on the development of learned attitudes, thus ignoring the sociological influences of propaganda by placing more emphasis on the psychological influences. Ellul sustains that modern propaganda is based on scientific analyses of both psychology and sociology.
Summary of chapters[edit]Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes is divided into five substantive chapters discussing Ellul's analysis.
Regardless of the State, propaganda should be viewed as situated at the center of the growing powers of governmental and administrative techniques.
"Differences in political regimes matter little; differences in social levels are more important; and most important is national self-awareness. Propaganda is a good deal less the political weapon of a regime (it is that also) than the effect of a technological society that embraces the entire man and tends to be a completely integrated society. Propaganda stops man from feeling that things in society are oppressive and persuades him to submit with good grace."[7]
Chapter One: Characteristics of PropagandaModern propaganda is a technique that requires an analysis of both environment and individual to be subjected to propaganda therefore it is based on scientific analyses of psychology and sociology. Sufficient understanding of these two areas creates the most effective propaganda and without the scientific research of modern psychology and sociology there would be no propaganda. ''Step by step the propagandist builds the techniques on the basis of his knowledge of man, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his conditioning, and as much on social psychology as on depth psychology.''[8]
Part One: External CharacteristicsPropaganda is first and foremost concerned with influencing an individual psychologically by creating convictions and compliance through imperceptible techniques that are effective only by continuous repetition. Propaganda employs encirclement on the individual by trying to surround man by all possible routes, in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or his needs through his conscious and his unconscious, and by assailing him in both his private and his public life.[9] The propagandist also acknowledges the most favorable moment to influence man is when an individual is caught up in the masses. Propaganda must be total in that utilizes all forms of media to draw the individual into the net of propaganda. Propaganda is designed to be continuous within the individual's life by filling the citizen's entire day. It is based on slow constant impregnation that functions over a long period of time exceeding the individual's capacities for attention or adaptation and thus his capabilities of resistance. In order for propaganda to maintain encirclement, it must be exerted by an organization capable of influencing psychological channels that reach the individual. Psychological and physical actions are inseparable elements to propaganda, however, if no influence is exerted by an organization than there can be no propaganda because it cannot operate in a vacuum. The necessity for a physical organization limits propaganda enterprises and in order to be effective propaganda must work inside a group, principally inside a nation. Propaganda must first organize the masses in order to propagandize within the masses. In general, propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated into an organization.[10] Propaganda should no longer be viewed in terms of an orthodoxy but rather modern propaganda should be seen as an orthopraxy because it aims for participation not adherence. Participation can be active or passive: active if propaganda has been able to mobilize the individual for action; passive if the individual does not act directly but psychologically supports that action.
2. Part Two: Internal CharacteristicsThe second major element that a propagandist must understand is the environment in which the individual operates, mainly the foci of interest of the public. An understanding of the conventional patterns and stereotypes that pre-exist in a milieu provide the propagandist with material from which to build off. Propaganda is not able to create something out of nothing and is confined to developing pre-existing material thereby expressing the fundamental currents of the society it seeks to influence. These currents include accepted structures such as collective sociological presuppositions and myths that are fundamental to society.
"The Four Great Collective Sociological Presuppositions in the Modern World:
That an individual's aim in life is happiness.That man is naturally good.That history develops in endless progress.That everything is matter.The Collective Myths:
of Workof Happinessof the Nationof Youthof the Hero"[11]These currents reinforce society and hold man's major convictions and propaganda must voice this reality. Propaganda is concerned with timeliness since an individual is only moved to action if he is pushed towards a timely one by propaganda. Once it becomes history it inevitably becomes neutral and indifferent to the individual who is sensitive primarily to current news. ''Operational words'' are used to penetrate an individual's indifference. However they lose their value as immediacy passes as old facts are replaced by new ones. The ''current events man'' is carried along the current of news and caught in the events of today, losing interest in the events of yesterday. The indifferent are apolitical and without opinion, therefore they are outside of propaganda's grasp. Incidentally, there are also the undecided, people whose opinions are vague, who form the majority of citizens within the collective. These citizens are the most susceptible to control of public opinion that is dictated by propaganda. Lastly, this part discusses propaganda and truth or the ability of propaganda to relay something as true based not on the accuracy of facts but of reality. Propaganda veils the truth with falsehoods even though lying is generally to be avoided.
3. Part Three: Categories of PropagandaPresented in this chapter is a sophisticated taxonomy for propaganda, including such paired opposites as political-sociological, vertical-horizontal, rational-irrational, and agitation-integration.
Political vs. Sociological Propaganda: Political Propaganda involves techniques of influence employed by a government, a party, an administration, or a pressure group with the intention of changing the behavior of the public. The themes and objectives of this type of propaganda are of a political nature. The goals are determined by the government, party, administration, or pressure group. The methods of political propaganda are calculated in a precise manner and its main criteria is to disseminate an ideology for the very purpose of making various political acts acceptable to the people.[12] There are two forms of political propaganda, tactical and strategic. Tactical political propaganda seeks to obtain immediate results within a given framework. Strategic political propaganda is not concerned with speed but rather it establishes the general line, the array of arguments, and the staging of campaigns.
Political propaganda reversed is sociological propaganda because the ideology is penetrated by means of its sociological context. Propaganda, as it is traditionally known, implies an attempt to spread an ideology through the mass media of communication in order to lead the public to a desired action. In sociological propaganda even media that are not controllable such as individual art work, films, and writing reflect the ideology allowing for an accelerated penetration of the masses and the individuals within them.[13]
Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon where a society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself by unifying its members' behavior according to a pattern, spreading its style of life abroad, and thus imposing itself on other groups. Essentially sociological propaganda aims to increase conformity with the environment that is of a collective nature by developing compliance with or defense of the established order through long term penetration and progressive adaptation by using all social currents. The propaganda element is the way of life with which the individual is permeated and then the individual begins to express it in film, writing, or art without realizing it. This involuntary behavior creates an expansion of society through advertising, the movies, education, and magazines. "The entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate, secondly that its influence aims much more at an entire style of life."[14] This type of propaganda is not deliberate but springs up spontaneously or unwittingly within a culture or nation. This propaganda reinforces the individual's way of life and represents this way of life as best. Sociological propaganda creates an indisputable criterion for the individual to make judgments of good and evil according to the order of the individual's way of life. Sociological propaganda does not result in action, however, it can prepare the ground for direct propaganda. From then on, the individual in the clutches of such sociological propaganda believes that those who live this way are on the side of the angels, and those who don't are bad.[15]
Vertical vs. Horizontal Propaganda: Vertical propaganda is similar to direct propaganda that aims at the individual in the mass and is renewed constantly. However, in horizontal propaganda there is no top down structure but rather it springs up from within the group. It involves meticulous encirclement that traps an individual involuntarily in dialectic. The individual is led unfailingly to its adherence by talking about the dialectic until the individual discovers the answer that was set up unconsciously for him to find. Schools are a primary mechanism for integrating the individual into the way of life.
Rational vs. Irrational Propaganda: Propaganda is addressed to the individual on the foundation of feelings and passions which are irrational, however, the content of propaganda does address reason and experience when it presents information and furnishes facts making it rational as well. It is important for propaganda to be rational because modern man needs relation to facts. Modern man wants to be convinced that by acting in a certain way he is obeying reason in order to have self-justification. The challenge is creating an irrational response on the basis of rational and factual elements by leaving an impression on an individual that remains long after the facts have faded away. Individuals are not compelled to act based facts but rather on emotional pressure, the vision of the future, or the myth.
Agitation vs. Integration propaganda: Propaganda of agitation seeks to mobilize people in order to destroy the established order and/or government. It seeks rebellion by provoking a crisis or unleashing explosive movements during one. It momentarily subverts the habits, customs, and beliefs that were obstacles to making great leap forward by addressing the internal elements in each of us. It eradicates the individual out of his normal framework and then proceeds to plunge him into enthusiasm by suggesting extraordinary goals which nevertheless seem to him completely within reach. However, this enthusiasm can only last a short duration so the objective must be achieved quickly followed by a period of rest. People cannot be kept at in a ''state of perpetual enthusiasm and insecurity''. Rebellion is incited by the propagandist who knows that hate is one of the most profitable resources when drawn out of an individual. Agitation propaganda is usually thought of as propaganda in that it aims to influence people to act. Integration propaganda, on the other hand, is a more subtle form that aims to reinforce cultural norms. This is sociological in nature because it provides stability to society by supporting the ''way of life'' and the myths within a culture. It is propaganda of conformity that requires participation in the social body. This type of propaganda is more prominent and permanent, yet it is not as recognized as agitation propaganda because it is more permanent manner. Basically, agitation propaganda provides the motive force when needed and when not needed integration propaganda provides the context and backdrop.
Chapter Two: The Condition for the Existence of PropagandaThe nature of propaganda has changed over the course of time and yet it is evident that propaganda cannot exist without a milieu. The emergence of propaganda is interconnected with technology and scientific discoveries yet it can only appear and grow under certain conditions. Several events have occurred that have furthered propaganda by increasing its ability in depth and discovering new methods. Modern propaganda could not exist without the mass media or modern means of transportation which permit crowds of diverse individuals from all over to assemble easily and frequently.
Part One: The Sociological ConditionsSociety must contain elements of both an individualist society and a mass society. Propaganda aims to capture both the mass and the individual at the same time through this dual type of society. A mass society is based on individuals that are reduced to ciphers based on what they have in common to others. First conditions for growth and development of modern propaganda: it emerged in Western Europe in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth precisely because that was when society was becoming increasingly individualistic and its organic structures were breaking down. Individuals without natural organic local groups are defenseless and more likely to be caught up in a social current. On the other hand, a mass society has considerable population density in which local structures and organizations are weak, currents of opinion are strongly felt creating a certain psychological unity, and individuals are organized into large and influential collectives. Mass society is characterized by uniformity and material life despite differences of environment. Once a mass society is created, public opinion will begin to play a role to help individuals form their own personal opinion. Public opinion can only express itself through channels which are provided by the mass media of communication without which there could be no propaganda. Yet it is important that mass media be subject to centralized control in order to successfully form public opinion without any opposition. Again Ellul mentions that the individual must be caught in wide net of media through all channels. Once opinion has been formed, propaganda is able to reinforce it and transform opinion into action.
2. Part Two: Objective Conditions of Total PropagandaPropaganda thrives off of what individuals have in common with others to develop patterns of behavior and modify cultural opinions. Total propaganda recognizes that within a nation individuals should all have in common a standard of living, a culture, and an ideology. The need of an average standard of living is that people must be able to afford to buy a radio, TV, a newspaper, or go to the movies. It is mostly concerned with the densest mass which is made up of average men and not the very rich or very poor. Poor cannot do this therefore they cannot be subjected to integration propaganda because the immediate concerns of daily life absorb all their capacities and efforts. The poor can only be subjected to agitation propaganda, excited to the point of theft and murder. But they cannot be trained by propaganda, kept in hand, channeled, and oriented. More advanced propaganda can influence only a man who is not completely haunted by poverty, a man who can view things from a certain distance and be reasonably unconcerned about his daily bread, who therefore can take an interest in more general matters.
"For propaganda to be effective the propagandee must have a certain store of ideas and a number of conditioned reflexes that can only be acquired through peace of mind springing from relative security. The establishment of a mode of common life- all this leads to the creation of a type of normal man conveniently leads all men toward that norm via a multitude of paths. Propaganda's intent is to integrate people into the normal pattern prevailing in society bring about conformance to way of life. To sum up: The creation of normalcy in our society can take one of two shapes. It can be the result of scientific, psycho-sociological analysis based on statistics- that is the American type of normalcy. It can be ideological and doctrinaire- that is the Communist type. But the results are identical: such normalcy necessarily gives rise to propaganda that can reduce the individual to the pattern most useful to society."[16]
''Information'' Is an essential element of propaganda, which must ''have reference to political or economic reality'' to be credible. In fact, no propaganda can work until the moment when a set of facts has become a problem in the eyes of those who constitute public opinion.'' Education permits the dissemination of propaganda in that it enables people to consume information. Information is indistinguishable from propaganda in that information is an essential element of propaganda because for propaganda to succeed it must have reference to political or economic reality. Propaganda grafts itself onto an already existing reality through ''informed opinion''. Where no informed opinion with regard to political or economic affairs propaganda cannot exist making it an indispensable aspect. Propaganda means nothing without preliminary information that provides the basis for propaganda, gives propaganda the means to operate, and generates the problems that propaganda exploits by pretending to offer solutions. It is through information that the individual is placed in a social context and learns to understand the reality of his own situation. Information allows us to evaluate our situation feel our own personal problems are a general social problem thus enabling propaganda to entice us into social and political action. Information is most effective when it is objective and broad because it creates a general picture. With information quantity is better than quality, the more political or economic facts believed to be mastered by an individual, the more sensitive their judgment is to propaganda. In fact, only in and through propaganda do the masses have access to political economy, politics, art, or literature. The more stereotypes in a culture, the easier it is to form public opinion, and the more an individual participates in that culture, the more susceptible he becomes to the manipulation of these symbols.
Chapter Three: The Necessity for PropagandaAll propaganda is based on a need, a dual need, first there is the need of state to make it and second there is the need of propagandee to receive it. These two needs compliment and correspond to each other in the development of propaganda. Propaganda is an expression of modern society as a whole.
Part One: The State's NecessityThe State has the need to make propaganda to integrate citizens into its society, to disseminate information, and to increase participation and involvement of members of society. Sometimes the people want to take part in government affairs. However, the official leaders cannot disconnect themselves from what the people want. Being that the people in charge cant escape the people, bait must be presented to them. This acts as a disguise that must be there to hide what is really happening behind the scenes in the government . Citizens are aware that political decisions affect everybody and governments cannot govern without the support, presence, pressure, or knowledge of the people. Yet the people are incapable of making long term policy so opinion must be created to follow the government because the government cannot be led by opinion. All of this describes the "Mass-Government" relationship characterized by people demanding what has already been decided, in order to appear as though the government is actually caring about what the people need. The next part that the book discusses is psychological warfare. It is believed to be a peace policy that is used between nations as a form of aggression. This type of propaganda changes the public opinion of an opposing regime so that it can be in favor of their regime.
2. Part Two: The Individual's NecessityThe individual needs propaganda to gain satisfaction as a member of society. Individuals want to be informed and to participate in the decisions of the state. Propaganda is the outlet through which individuals obtain the satisfaction of having contributed to the state. It is a necessary instrument of a state or institution to spread information to members of the group or society. But for propaganda to succeed it must respond to a need on the individual's part as well. The individual is by no means just an innocent victim of propaganda when in fact he provokes the psychological action of propaganda by not merely lending himself to it, but also from deriving satisfaction from it. It is strictly a sociological phenomenon, in the sense that it has its roots and reasons in the need of the group that will sustain it. The great role performed by propaganda is in its ability to give the people the involvement they crave or the illusion of it in order for the masses to be artificially satisfied. Individuals are faced with decisions which require a range of information that the individual does not and cannot have without propaganda. Thus, the individual is unable to accept that he cannot form opinion on his own and is caught between his desire and his inability. People are willing and likely to accept propaganda that allows them to artificially satisfy their desire to have an opinion by hiding their incompetence. The individual does not mind being given preconceived positions because otherwise he would realize that he does not understand the problems of the modern world. The individual would then realize that he "depends on situations of which he has no control" and have to face this reality. The individual cannot live in the state of this harsh reality so he derives satisfaction from the veil created by the ideology and the sense of values it provides. The individual need psychological and ideological reasons why he needs to be where he is and propaganda is the mechanism that the state uses for this very purpose.
Chapter Four: Psychological Effects of PropagandaThe psychological effects of propaganda on an individual cannot be ignored. The individual undergoes profound changes while being propagandized mainly the diminishment of personal activity. "Propaganda furnishes objectives, organizes the traits of an individual into a system, and freezes them into a mold by standardizing current ideas, hardening the prevailing stereotypes, and furnishing thought patterns in all areas."[17] The individual is traumatized by the overwhelming force of propaganda that intensifies the prejudices and beliefs until eventually the individual has no control over his own impulses. It seeks to push the individual into the mass until his will fades entirely into that of the mass. Individuality is sacrificed for the greater cause of the nation by uniting him and blending him with others. Critical and personal judgment are subdued and replaced with ready-made attitudes and opinions. Discernment is made nearly impossible for the individual whose ability to judge is destroyed making him dependent on propaganda's ready-made opinions from then on. The individual can no longer exercise his own judgment and becomes honed into what propaganda tells him. He no longer expresses himself but his group once he accepts public opinion as his own. The artificial, impersonal public opinion created by propaganda is absorbed by the individual and he becomes filled with its conviction. When he is fully integrated in the social group and can no longer distinguish between himself and society than he has reached total alienation. In this process, the individual's personal inclinations lead to participation in the collective where he loses control and submits to external impulses. The individual is suppressed psychologically so that he can continue to live under the conditions in which society places him by providing an artificial and unreal reality that is the result of powerful propaganda.
Chapter Five: The Socio-Political Effects"In the nineteenth century, the problem of opinion formation through the expression of thought was essentially a problem of contacts between the State and the individual, and a problem of acquisition of freedom. But today, thanks to the mass media, the individual finds himself outside the battle that is now between the State and powerful groups. The freedom to express ideas is no longer at stake in this debate but it has been replaced by mastery and domination by the State or some powerful groups over the formation of opinion. The individual is not in the battle because he is the stake and the battle will determine what voice he will be permitted to hear and which words will have the power to obsess him."[18]
Part One: Propaganda and IdeologyAn ideology provides society certain beliefs and no social group can exist without the foundation of these beliefs. Propaganda is the means by which an ideology can expand without force. An ideology is either fortified within a group or expanded beyond the borders of a group through propaganda. However, propaganda is less and less concerned with spreading the ideology nowadays as it is with becoming autonomous. The ideology is no longer the decisive factor of propaganda that must be obeyed by the propagandist. The propagandist cannot be constrained by the ideology of his State but must operate in service of the state and be able to manipulate the ideology as if it were an object. The ideology merely provides the content for the propagandist to build off since he is limited to what already is present within the group, nation, or society. The fundamental ideologies are nationalism, socialism, communism, and democracy.
2. Part Two: Effects on the Structure of Public OpinionPublic opinion is an instrument of propaganda that is disseminated through the mass media of communication to the masses. While most people view the formation of public opinion as being shaped itself by interaction between different viewpoints on controversial questions, this is incorrect because public opinion is delineated by propaganda as a ''truth'' which is either believed or not believed. Public opinion ceases to be controversial and can no longer form itself except through channels of mass media. No opinion can be held until it is communicated to the masses through mass media. Propaganda uses public opinion to externalize inner opinions of the organization to the masses that eventually produces conformity.[19]
3. Part Three: Propaganda and GroupingIn regards to propaganda, there are two groups: the groups that make propaganda and the groups that are subjected to propaganda. In Ellul's view, there is a "double foray on the part of propaganda that proves the excellence of one group and the evilness of another at the same time to create partitioning". This creates isolation between groups by promoting allegiance to the group one is in and suppressing conversation between groups. The more they listen to their propaganda the stronger their beliefs and the greater their justifications for their actions. Partitioning takes place on many different levels including class, religious, political, national and blocs of nations. A superior group is able to affect the lesser groups, however, groups that have an equal amount of influence will only separate further from one another in that a members allegiance to a group develops closed mindedness. Well-organized propaganda is able to work with different elements that exist within a nation such as religion, political parties, and labor groups.
4. Part Four: Propaganda and DemocracySince democracy depends on public opinion, it is clear that propaganda must be involved. The relationship between democracy and propaganda evidently presents a conflict between the principles of democracy and the processes of propaganda. The individual is viewed as the cornerstone of a democracy which is a form of government that is made ''for the people and by the people''. However, as discussed in early chapters Ellul described the masses are incapable of making long-term foreign policy and the government needs to make these decisions in a timely manner. This is where propaganda comes into play and projects an artificial reality to the masses to satisfy their need to participate in government while the decisions are really made behind the scenes. This was also describe earlier as the "mass-government" relationship. Democratic regimes develop propaganda in line with its myths and prejudices. Propaganda stresses the superiority of a democratic society while intensifying the prejudices between democratic and oppressive.
Major themes[edit]Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes builds on prior notions of propaganda to demonstrate that while propaganda is psychological in nature it is just as much sociological in nature as well. Propaganda is not just embedded into the individual's psyche but also the cultural psyche. Propaganda works off the inner characteristics of both the individual and the society that the individual belongs. This thorough analysis made by Ellul illustrates that to downplay the importance of the sociological influences of propaganda to psychological ones is a dreadful error. Propaganda is more threatening when it begins to be recognized as sociological as well psychological in nature. Below are two major themes the first stressing the psychological aims of propaganda the second the sociological aims.
"The Lonely Crowd"[edit]The "lonely crowd" is used by Ellul to distinguish the two inseparable elements of propaganda, the individual and the masses, which must be addressed by the propagandist at the same time. As an isolated unit, the individual is of no interest to the propagandist unless he is reduced to an average. It is crucial that the individual is never considered as an individual but always in terms of what he has in common with others. The individual is included and integrated into the mass because the propagandist profits from the process of diffusion of emotions through the mass, and at the same time, from the pressures felt by an individual when in a group.[20]
In this setting, ''the individual caught up in the mass'', the individual's reactions are easier to provoke and psychic defenses are weakened. The individual must always be considered as a participant in a mass and similarly the mass must only be viewed as a crowd composed of individuals. When propaganda is addressed to the crowd, it must touch each individual in that crowd which is in fact nothing but assembled individuals. Conversely, the individual should not be viewed as alone as a listener, watcher, or reader because the individual is nevertheless part of an invisible crowd though he is actually alone. The most favorable moment to influence an individual is when he is alone in the mass, the structure of the mass is extremely profitable to the propagandist concerned with being effective.
Fundamental currents in society[edit]"One cannot make just any propaganda any place for anybody."[21] While propaganda is focused on reaching the individual, it cannot only rely on building off what already exists in the individual. Propaganda must also attach itself to the pre-existing fundamental currents of the society it seeks to influence. The propagandist must know the current tendencies and the stereotypes among the public he is trying to reach. These are indicated by principal symbols of the culture the propagandist wishes to attack since these symbols express the attitudes of a particular culture. Individuals are part of a culture and are therefore psychologically shaped by that culture. The main task of propaganda is to utilize the conditioned symbols as transmitters of that culture to serve its purpose. Propaganda must be a reflection of the fundamental structures of society to be successful and not contradictory of existing opinions. A skillful propagandist does not try to change mass opinion or go against an accepted structure. Only a bad propagandist would make a direct attack on an established, reasoned, durable opinion, accepted clich(C), or fixed pattern. ''Each individual harbors a large number of stereotypes and established tendencies; from this arsenal the propagandist must select those easiest to mobilize, those which will give the greatest strength to the action he wants to precipitate.''[22]
While propaganda cannot create something out of nothing, it does have the ability to build on the foundation already established. More importantly even though it does not create new material and is confined to what already exists, it is not necessarily powerless. ''It can attack from the rear, war own slowly, provide new centers of interest, which cause the neglect of previously acquired positions; it can divert a prejudice; or it can elicit an action contrary to an opinion held by the individual without his being clearly aware of it.''[23]
Propaganda can gradually undermine prejudices and images in order to weaken them. These fundamental currents in society create the perfect atmosphere for sociological propaganda which influences the individual through his customs and unconscious habits. Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon where a society tries to unify its members' behavior according to a pattern. Essentially sociological propaganda is to increase conformity with the environment that is of a collective nature by developing compliance with or defense of the established order through long term penetration and progressive adaptation by using all social currents. The propaganda element is the way of life with which the individual is permeated and then the individual begins to express it in film, writing, or art without realizing it. This involuntary behavior creates an expansion of society through advertising, the movies, education, and magazines. "The entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate, secondly that its influence aims much more at an entire style of life."[24] This type of propaganda is not deliberate but springs up spontaneously or unwittingly within a culture or nation. This propaganda reinforces the individual's way of life and represents this way of life as best.
See also[edit]References[edit]^Ellul, Jacques. (1964) The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books, from the translator's introduction by John Wilkinson, p.ix.^Bernays, Edward. "Propaganda". (1928)^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. xi-xii. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. x. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Origins of mass communications research during the American Cold War ... - Page 22 by Timothy Richard Glander - Language Arts & Disciplines - (2000)^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 25. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1965). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p.i, xviii. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p.4. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p.11. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p.61. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 39-40. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 64 Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 63. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 62. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 65. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 106-108. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 162-163. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Rivero (1957) "Technique de formation de l'opinion publique", L'Opinion Publique^Doob, Leonard (148). Public Opinion and Propaganda, Ch 5. Henry Holt and Company, New York.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 7. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 34. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 37. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 38. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.^Ellul, Jacques (1965). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 62.Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-71874-3.Further reading[edit]
Jacques Ellul (French: [Élyl]; January 6, 1912 '' May 19, 1994) was a French philosopher, law professor, sociologist, lay theologian, and Christian anarchist. Ellul was a longtime Professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions on the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at the University of Bordeaux. A prolific writer, he authored 58 books and more than a thousand articles over his lifetime, many of which discussed propaganda, the impact of technology on society, and the interaction between religion and politics. The dominant theme of his work proved to be the threat to human freedom and religion created by modern technology. Among his most influential books are The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.
Considered by many a philosopher, Ellul was by training a sociologist who approached the question of technology and human action from a dialectical viewpoint. His constant concern was the emergence of a technological tyranny over humanity. As a philosopher and theologian, he further explored the religiosity of the technological society.
In 2000 the International Jacques Ellul Society was founded by a group of former Ellul students. The society, which includes scholars from a variety of disciplines, is devoted to continuing Ellul's legacy and discussing the contemporary relevance and implications of his work.[1]
Life and influences[edit]Ellul was born in Bordeaux, France on 6 January 1912 to Marthe Mendes (Protestant; French-Portuguese) and Joseph Ellul (initially Greek Orthodox, but then Voltarian by conviction; born in Malta of an Italo-Maltese father and Serb mother). As a teenager he wanted to be a naval officer but his father made him read law. He was married to Yvette Lensvelt in 1937.[2]
Jacques was educated at the universities of Bordeaux and Paris. In World War II, he was a leader in the French resistance.[3] For his efforts to save Jews he was awarded the title Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2001.[4] He was a layman in the Reformed Church of France and attained a high position within it as part of the National Council.[5]
Ellul was best friends with Bernard Charbonneau, who wrote on similar themes. They met through the Protestant Student Federation during the academic school year of 1929''1930.
Jacques Ellul had three primary sources of inspiration by the early 1930s who would influence his works henceforth: Karl Marx, S¸ren Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth. Ellul was first introduced to the ideas of Karl Marx during an economics lecture course taught by Joseph Benzacar in 1929''''1930; Ellul studied Marx and became a prolific exegete of his theories. During this same period, he also came across the Christian existentialism of Kierkegaard. According to Ellul, Marx and Kierkegaard were his two greatest influences, and the only two authors of which he read all of their work.[6] Also, he considered Karl Barth, who was a leader of the resistance against the German state church in World War II,[7] the greatest theologian of the 20th century.[8] In addition to these intellectual influences, Ellul also said that his father played a great role in his life and considered him his role model.[9]
The influence of these ideologies has alternately earned him devoted followers and vicious enemies. In large measure and especially in those of his books concerned with theological matters, Ellul restates the viewpoints held by Barth, whose polar dialectic of the Word of God, in which the Gospel both judges and renews the world, shaped Ellul's theological perspective.[10] In Jacques Ellul: A Systemic Exposition Darrell J. Fasching claimed Ellul believed "That which desacralizes a given reality, itself in turn becomes the new sacred reality".[11]
In 1932, after what he describes as "a very brutal and very sudden conversion", Ellul professed himself a Christian.[12] Ellul believes he was about 17 (1929''1930) and spending the summer with some friends in Blanquefort, France. While translating Faust alone in the house, Ellul knew (without seeing or hearing anything) he was in the presence of a something so astounding, so overwhelming, which entered the very center of his being. He jumped on a bike and fled, concluding eventually that he had been in the presence of God. This experience started the conversion process which Ellul said then continued over a period of years thereafter.[13]
He was also prominent in the worldwide ecumenical movement, although he later became sharply critical of the movement for what he felt were indiscriminate endorsements of political establishments, primarily of the Left.[14] However, he was no friendlier in his assessment of those of the Right; he fashioned an explicitly anti-political stance as an alternative to both (see below).
Ellul has been credited with coining the phrase, "Think globally, act locally."[15] He often said that he was born in Bordeaux by chance, but that it was by choice that he spent almost all his academic career there.[16]
On 19 May 1994, after a long illness, he died in his house in Pessac, just a mile or two from the University of Bordeaux campus and surrounded by those closest to him. His wife had died a few years prior, on 16 April 1991.
Theology[edit]While Ellul is perhaps most noted for his sociological work, especially his discussions of technology, he saw his theological work as an essential aspect of his career, and began publishing theological discussions early, with such books as The Presence of the Kingdom (1948).
Although a son of the minority French Reformed tradition and thus a spiritual heir of thinkers like John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, Ellul departed substantially from Reformed doctrinal traditions, but unlike other European Protestant thinkers, utterly rejected the influence of philosophical idealism or romanticism upon his beliefs about God and human faith. In articulating his theological ideas, he mainly drew upon the corpus of works by the Swiss-German theologian Karl Barth and the critiques of European state Christianity made by Dane S¸ren Kierkegaard. Thus, some have considered him one of the more ardent expositors of dialectical theology,[17] which was in decline elsewhere in the Western theological scene during Ellul's heyday. Much like Barth, Ellul had no use for either liberal theology (to him dominated by Enlightenment notions about the goodness of humanity and thus rendered puerile by its na¯vet(C)) or orthodox Protestantism (e.g., fundamentalism or scholastic Calvinism,[18] both of which to him refuse to acknowledge the radical freedom of God and humanity) and maintained a roughly un-Catholic [19] view of the Bible, theology, and the churches.
One particular theological movement that aroused his ire was that of secular theology (also called death-of-God theology), based on notions that traditional Christian conceptions of God and humanity are based upon a primitive consciousness, one that most civilized people have quite overcome. This line of thought affirmed the ethical teachings of Jesus but rejected the idea that he represented anything more than a highly accomplished human being. Ellul attacked this school, and practitioners of it such as Harvey Cox, as out of accord not with Christian doctrinal traditions, but reality itself, namely what he perceived as the irreducible religiosity of the human race, a devotion that has worshiped idols such as rulers, nations, and in more recent times, materialism, scientism, technology and economics. To Ellul, people use such fallen images, or powers, as a substitute for God, and are, in turn, used by them, with no possible appeal to innocence or neutrality, which, although possible theoretically, does not in fact exist. Ellul thus renovates in a non-legalistic manner the traditional Christian understanding of original sin and espouses a thoroughgoing pessimism about human capabilities, a view most sharply evidenced in his Meaning of the City (see bibliography below). Ellul stated that one of the problems with these "new theologies" was the following:
''In consequence of the desire to make the message (kerygma) valid for all, to see all men as in the presence of God, to increase the universality of the lordship of Jesus Christ, to insist on the value of mankind generally (to the detriment of the Christian), to insist on the value of the world (to the detriment of the Church), one comes to the point of denying whatever can only be specifically Christian.[20]''''The ultimate purpose of the whole death-of-God system is to justify a certain kind of behavior on the part of Christians in relation to society'--a kind of behavior that is dictated by conformism to the modern world. So a justificatory formula is manufactured; and alas, it often turns out that theology merely amounts to a justification of the behavior of pretend-Christians. The theology of the death of God reinforces this evil tendency. It justifies a sociological impulsion. That is the kind of theology it really is, unconsciously. Nor do the marvelous intellectual operations its proponents perform with every appearance of seriousness make it less profoundly false.[21]''Ellul espouses views on salvation, the sovereignty of God, and ethical action that appear to take a deliberately contrarian stance toward established, "mainstream" opinion. For instance, in the book What I Believe, he declared himself to be a Christian Universalist, writing "that all people from the beginning of time are saved by God in JesusChrist, that they have all been recipients of His grace no matter what they have done."[22] Ellul formulated this stance not from any liberal or humanistic sympathies, but in the main from an extremely high view of God's transcendence, that God is totally free to do what God pleases. Any attempts to modify that freedom from merely human standards of righteousness and justice amount to sin, to putting oneself in God's place, which is precisely what Adam and Eve sought to do in the creation myths in Genesis. This highly unusual juxtaposition of original sin and universal salvation has repelled liberal and conservative critics and commentators alike, who charge that such views amount to antinomianism, denying that God's laws are binding upon human beings. In most of his theologically-oriented writings, Ellul effectively dismisses those charges as stemming from a radical confusion between religions as human phenomena and the unique claims of the Christian faith, which are not predicated upon human achievement or moral integrity whatsoever.
''In the Bible, however, we find a God who escapes us totally, whom we absolutely cannot influence, or dominate, much less punish; a God who reveals Himself when He wants to reveal Himself, a God who is very often in a place where He is not expected, a God who is truly beyond our grasp. Thus, the human religious feeling is not at all satisfied by this situation.... God descends to humanity and joins us where we are.[23]''''...the presence of faith in Jesus Christ alters reality. We also believe that hope is in no way an escape into the future, but that it is an active force, now, and that love leads us to a deeper understanding of reality. Love is probably the most realistic possible understanding of our existence. It is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is reality itself.[24]''On technique[edit]The Ellulian concept of technique is briefly defined within the "Notes to Reader" section of The Technological Society (1964). It is "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity."[25] He states here as well that the term technique is not solely machines, technology, or a procedure used to attain an end.
What many consider to be Ellul's most important work, The Technological Society (1964) was originally titled: La Technique: L'enjeu du si¨cle (literally, "The Stake of the Century").[26] In it, Ellul set forth seven characteristics of modern technology that make efficiency a necessity: rationality, artificiality, automatism of technical choice, self-augmentation, monism, universalism, and autonomy.[27] The rationality of technique enforces logical and mechanical organization through division of labor, the setting of production standards, etc. And it creates an artificial system which "eliminates or subordinates the natural world."
Regarding technology, instead of it being subservient to humanity, "human beings have to adapt to it, and accept total change."[28] As an example, Ellul offered the diminished value of the humanities to a technological society. As people begin to question the value of learning ancient languages and history, they question those things which, on the surface, do little to advance their financial and technical state. According to Ellul, this misplaced emphasis is one of the problems with modern education, as it produces a situation in which immense stress is placed on information in our schools. The focus in those schools is to prepare young people to enter the world of information, to be able to work with computers but knowing only their reasoning, their language, their combinations, and the connections between them. This movement is invading the whole intellectual domain and also that of conscience.
Ellul's commitment to scrutinize technological development is expressed as such:
''[W]hat is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to our humanity in the present half-century, and distinguishing between what we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot think that choices of this kind are unimportant.[29]''The sacred then, as classically defined, is the object of both hope and fear, both fascination and dread.[30] Once, nature was the all-encompassing environment and power upon which human beings were dependent in life and death, and so was experienced as sacred. The Reformation desacralized the church in the name of the Bible, and the Bible became the sacred book.[31] But since then, scientism (through Charles Darwin's theory of evolution) and reason (higher criticism and liberal theology) have desacralized the scriptures, and the sciences, particularly those applied sciences that are amenable to the aims of collective economic production (be it capitalist, socialist, or communist), have been elevated to the position of sacred in Western culture.[32] Today, he argues, the technological society is generally held sacred (cf. Saint Steve Jobs[33]). Since he defines technique as "the totality of methods rationally arrived at, and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity",[25] it is clear that his sociological analysis focuses not on the society of machines as such, but on the society of "efficient techniques":
''Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.[34]''It is useless, he argues, to think that a distinction can be made between technique and its use, for techniques have specific social and psychological consequences independent of human desires. There can be no room for moral considerations in their use:
''Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. In the end, technique has only one principle, efficient ordering.[27]''On anarchy and violence[edit]Ellul identified himself as a Christian Anarchist. Ellul explained his view in this way: "By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence."[35] And, "...Jesus was not only a socialist but an anarchist -- and I want to stress here that I regard anarchism as the fullest and most serious form of socialism." [36] For him, this meant that nation-states, as the primary sources of violence in the modern era, should neither be praised nor feared, but continually questioned and challenged.[37] For Ellul, human government is largely irrelevant in that the revelation of God contained in Scripture is sufficient and exclusive. That is, being a Christian means pledging absolute allegiance to Christ, which makes other laws redundant at best or counter to the revelation of God at worst. Despite the initial attraction of some evangelicals to his thinking because of his high view of Biblical texts (i.e., generally eschewing the historical-critical method), this position alienated some conservative Protestants. Later, he would attract a following among adherents of more ethically-compatible traditions such as the Anabaptists and the house church movement. Similar political ideas to Ellul's appear in the writings of a corresponding friend of his, the American William Stringfellow, and long-time admirer Vernard Eller, author of Christian Anarchy. Ellul identified the State and political power as the Beast in the Book of Revelation.[38][39]
Jacques Ellul discusses anarchy on a few pages in The Ethics of Freedom[40] and in more detail within his later work, Anarchy & Christianity.[41] Although he does admit that anarchy does not seem to be a direct expression of Christian freedom, he concludes that the absolute power he sees within the current (as of 1991) nation-state can only be responded to with an absolute negative position (i.e. anarchy). He states that his intention is not to establish an anarchist society or the total destruction of the state. His initial point in Anarchy & Christianity is that he is led toward anarchy by his commitment to an absolute rejection of violence. However, Ellul does not entertain the idea that all Christians in all places and all times will refrain from violence. Rather, he insisted that violence could not be reconciled with the God of Love, and thus, true freedom. A Christian that chooses the path of violence must admit that he or she is abandoning the path of freedom and committing to the way of necessity.[42]
During the Spanish Civil War Spanish anarchist friends of Ellul's soon-to-be wife came to France in search of weapons. He tried to get some for them through an old school friend of his and claimed that this was probably the one time in his life when he was sufficiently motivated to commit an act of violence. He did not go with the anarchists primarily because he had only recently met the woman that would become his wife and did not wish to leave her.[43]
Ellul states in The Subversion of Christianity[44] that he thinks "that the biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power. It incites to 'counterpower,' to 'positive' criticism, to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of "anarchism" (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century)." [45]
Ellul states in Violence that idealism serves to justify the use of violence, including:
1. revolutionary idealism (viewing violence as a means to an end and/or violence under the mask of legality)
2. generous idealism (leading to violence toward reconciliation and/or a blindness of the violence of one's enemy)
''...there is generous idealism of so many young men who risk imprisonment or death rather than participate in a war they condemn only because they idealize and whitewash their country's enemy. Those young men are heroes and fools both. They are repelled by the violence they see'--the massive, enormous violence that cries to heaven. And they are right. But seeing this highly visible violence, they forthwith make lambs, saints, and martyrs of its victims. For they close their eyes to what the enemy is really like, to his cruelty, his violence, his lies. They overlook his real intentions; they overlook the fact that he would use terrible violence if he won power. Poor young men, totally unknowing, uncomprehending, blind, perceiving only what is happening now! So they side with the enemy and countenance the enemy's violence. In France, before the Second World War, a great many people sided with the Nazis. Hadn't the Nazis, out of their generosity, protested against the violence done the Sudeten Germans, the Croats, the Germans of Danzig? Hadn't they declared that they would defend the rights of the poor and the unemployed, the victims exploited by the capitalists? Their admiration of the Nazis cost those people dearly. Again, after the war, many French people sided with communism, 'the party of the poor, the proletariat.' A few years later they were stunned by the declarations of the Twentieth Communist Congress and by Moscow's suppression of the Hungarian revolt. This is the kind of idealism that must be combated and radically condemned."''3. pacifist idealism (beliefs and lifestyles which are only possible within a larger violence-based society)
4. Christian idealism (which is always concerned with the moral goodness of the human world). This leads to concepts of progressiveness and unreserved participation with good conscience in political or scientific action. "In their idyllic world, harshness, torture, and war seem abnormal and almost incomprehensible. But it is only gross, highly visible, undeniable violence that evokes this scandalized reaction. They deny the existence of masked, secret, covert violence'--insofar as this can be concealed...."[46]
On justice[edit]Ellul believed that social justice and true freedom were incompatible. He rejected any attempt to reconcile them. He believed that a Christian could choose to join a movement for justice, but in doing so, must admit that this fight for justice is necessarily, and at the same time, a fight against all forms of freedom.[47]:404 While social justice provides a guarantee against the risk of bondage, it simultaneously subjects a life to necessities. Ellul believed that when a Christian decides to act it must be in a way that is specifically Christian. "Christians must never identify themselves with this or that political or economic movement. Rather, they must bring to social movements what they alone can provide. Only so can they signalize the kingdom. So far as they act like the others'--even to forward social justice, equality, etc.'--I say that there is no sense and nothing specifically Christian in acting like the others. In fact the political and revolutionary attitude proper to the Christian is radically different than the attitude of others; it is specifically Christian or else it is nothing.[42]:45''46
In Violence Ellul states his belief that only God is able to establish justice and God alone who will institute the kingdom at the end of time. He acknowledges that some have used this as an excuse to do nothing, but also points out how death-of-God advocates use this to claim that "we ourselves must undertake to establish social justice".[42]:76 Ellul said that without a belief in a Father God, love and the pursuit for justice becomes selective for the only relation left is the horizontal one.[42]:6 Ellul asks how we are to define justice and claims that followers of death-of-God theology and/or philosophy clung to Matthew 25 stating that justice requires them to feed the poor. Ellul says that many European Christians rushed into socialist circles (and with this began to accept the movement's tactics of violence, propaganda, etc.) mistakenly thinking socialism would assure justice when in fact it only pursues justice for the chosen and/or interesting poor whose condition (as a victim of capitalism or some other socialist enemy) is consistent with the socialist ideology.[42]:76''77
''...Jesus Christ has not come to establish social justice any more than he has come to establish the power of the state or the reign of money or art. Jesus Christ has come to save men, and all that matters is that men may come to know him. We are adept at finding reasons-good theological, political, or practical reasons, for camouflaging this. But the real reason is that we let ourselves be impressed and dominated by the forces of the world, by the press, by public opinion, by the political game, by appeals to justice, liberty, peace, the poverty of the third world, and the Christian civilization of the west, all of which play on our inclinations and weaknesses. Modern protestants are in the main prepared to be all things to all men, like St. Paul, but unfortunately this is not in order that they may save some but in order that they may be like all men.[47]:254''255''Ellul states in The Subversion of Christianity that "to proclaim the class conflict and the 'classical' revolutionary struggle is to stop at the same point as those who defend their goods and organizations. This may be useful socially but it is not at all Christian in spite of the disconcerting efforts of theologies of revolution. Revelation demands this renunciation-the renunciation of illusions, of historic hopes, of references to our own abilities or numbers or sense of justice. We are to tell people and thus to increase their awareness (the offense of the ruling classes is that of trying to blind and deaden the awareness of those whom they dominate). Renounce everything in order to be everything. Trust in no human means, for God will provide (we cannot say where, when, or how). Have confidence in his Word and not in a rational program. Enter on a way on which you will gradually find answers but with no guaranteed substance. All this is difficult, much more so than recruiting guerillas, instigating terrorism, or stirring up the masses. And this is why the gospel is so intolerable, intolerable to myself as I speak, as I say all this to myself and others, intolerable for readers, who can only shrug their shoulders." [48]
''If the disciples had wanted their preaching to be effective, to recruit good people, to move the crowds, to launch a movement, they would have made the message more material. They would have formulated material goals in the economic, social, and political spheres. This would have stirred people up; this would have been the easy way. To declare, however, that the kingdom is not of this world, that freedom is not achieved by revolt, that rebellion serves no purpose, that there neither is nor will be any paradise on earth, that there is no social justice, that the only justice resides in God and comes from him, that we are not to look for responsibility and culpability in others but first in ourselves, all this is to ask for defeat, for it is to say intolerable things.[49]''On media, propaganda, and information[edit]Ellul discusses these topics in detail in his landmark work, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. He viewed the power of the media as another example of technology exerting control over human destiny.[50] As a mechanism of change, the media are almost invariably manipulated by special interests, whether of the market or the state.[51]
Also within Propaganda Ellul claims that "it is a fact that excessive data do not enlighten the reader or the listener; they drown him. He cannot remember them all, or coordinate them, or understand them; if he does not want to risk losing his mind, he will merely draw a general picture from them. And the more facts supplied, the more simplistic the image".[52]:87 In addition, people become "caught in a web of facts they have been given. They cannot even form a choice or a judgment in other areas or on other subjects. Thus the mechanisms of modern information induce a sort of hypnosis in the individual, who cannot get out of the field that has been laid out for him by the information".[52]:87 "It is not true that he can choose freely with regard to what is presented to him as the truth. And because rational propaganda thus creates an irrational situation, it remains, above all, propaganda'--that is, an inner control over the individual by a social force, which means that it deprives him of himself".[52]:87
Ellul agreed with Jules Monnerot who stated that "All individual passion leads to the suppression of all critical judgment with regard to the object of that passion".[52]:170
''The individual who burns with desire for action but does not know what to do is a common type in our society. He wants to act for the sake of justice, peace, progress, but does not know how. If propaganda can show him this 'how' then it has won the game; action will surely follow".[52]:209''In response to an invitation from Protestant associations, Ellul visited Germany two times (1934 and 1935). On the second visit he attended a Nazi meeting out of curiosity which influenced his later work on propaganda and its ability to unify a group.[53]
To throw this wager or secular faith into the boldest possible relief, Ellul places it in dialectical contrast with Biblical faith. As a dialectical contrast to "La Technique," for instance, Ellul writes Sans feu ni lieu (published in 1975, although written much earlier.)
On humanism[edit]In explaining the significance of freedom and the purpose for resisting the enslavement of man via acculturation (or sociological bondage), Ellul rejects the notion that this is due to some supposed supreme importance linked to humanity. He states that enslavement expresses how authority, signification, and value are attached to humanity and the beliefs and institutions it creates leading to an exaltation of the nation or state, money, technology, art, morality, the party, etc. The work of humanity is glorified.
''...man himself is exalted, and paradoxical though it may seem to be, this means the crushing of man. Man's enslavement is the reverse side of the glory, value, and importance that are ascribed to him. The more a society magnifies human greatness, the more one will see men alienated, enslaved, imprisoned, and tortured, in it. Humanism prepares the ground for the anti-human. We do not say that this is an intellectual paradox. All one need do is read history. Men have never been so oppressed as in societies which set man at the pinnacle of values and exalt his greatness or make him the measure of all things. For in such societies freedom is detached from its purpose, which is, we affirm, the glory of God.[54]''''Before God I am a human being.... But I am caught in a situation from which there is truly and radically no escape, in a spider's web I cannot break. If I am to continue to be a living human being, someone must come to free me. In other words, God is not trying to humiliate me. What is mortally affronted in this situation is not my humanity or my dignity. It is my pride, the vainglorious declaration that I can do it all myself. This we cannot accept. In our own eyes we have to declare ourselves to be righteous and free. We do not want grace. Fundamentally what we want is self-justification. There thus commences the patient work of reinterpreting revelation so as to make of it a Christianity that will glorify humanity and in which humanity will be able to take credit for its own righteousness.[55]''tude sur l'(C)volution et la nature juridique du Mancipium. Bordeaux: Delmas, 1936.Le fondement th(C)ologique du droit. Neuchtel: Delachaux & Niestl(C), 1946.The Theological Foundation of Law. Trans. Marguerite Wieser. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1960. London: SCM, 1961. New York: Seabury, 1969.Pr(C)sence au monde moderne: Probl¨mes de la civilisation post-chr(C)tienne. Geneva: Roulet, 1948. Lausanne: Presses Bibliques Universitaires, 1988.The Presence of the Kingdom. Trans. Olive Wyon. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1951. London: SCM, 1951. New York: Seabury, 1967. Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1989.Le livre de Jonas. Paris: Cahiers Bibliques de Foi et Vie, 1952.The Judgment of Jonah. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971. Wipf & Stock, 2011L'homme et l'argent (Nova et vetera). Neuchtel: Delachaux & Niestl(C), 1954. Lausanne: Presses Bibliques Universitaires, 1979.Money and Power. Trans. LaVonne Neff. Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984. Basingstoke, England: Marshall Pickering, 1986. Wipf & Stock, 2009La technique ou l'enjeu du si¨cle. Paris: Armand Colin, 1954. Paris: conomica, 1990 & 2008The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf, 1964. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. Rev. ed.: New York: Knopf/Vintage, 1967. with introduction by Robert K. Merton (professor of sociology, Columbia University). This may be his best-known work; Aldous Huxley brought the French edition to the attention of an English publisher, and thus brought it to English readers. Theodore Kaczynski had a copy in his cabin and said he read it several times'--his "manifesto" addresses similar themes. See Alston Chase. 2003. "Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist," W.W. Norton & Co., p. 111, 331.Histoire des institutions. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; volumes 1 & 2,L'Antiquit(C) (1955); vol. 3, Le Moyen Age (1956); vol. 4, Les XVIe''XVIIIe si¨cle (1956); vol. 5, Le XIXe si¨cle (1789''1914) (1956).Propagandes. Paris: A. Colin, 1962. Paris: conomica, 1990 & 2008Fausse pr(C)sence au monde moderne. Paris: Les Bergers et Les Mages, 1963.False Presence of the Kingdom. Trans. C. Edward Hopkin. New York: Seabury, 1972.Le vouloir et le faire: Recherches (C)thiques pour les chr(C)tiens: Introduction (premi¨re partie). Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1964.To Will and to Do: An Ethical Research for Christians. Trans. C. Edward Hopkin. Philadelphia: Pilgrim, 1969.L'illusion politique. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1965. Rev. ed.: Paris: Librairie G(C)n(C)rale Fran§aise, 1977. La Table-ronde, 2004 & 2012The Political Illusion. Trans. Konrad Kellen. New York: Knopf, 1967. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1972.Ex(C)g¨se des nouveaux lieux communs. Paris: Calmann-L(C)vy, 1966. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1994 & 2004A Critique of the New Commonplaces. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Knopf, 1968. Wipf & Stock, 2012Politique de Dieu, politiques de l'homme. Paris: ditions Universitaires, 1966.The Politics of God and the Politics of Man. Trans./ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972. Wipf & Stock, 2012Histoire de la propagande. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967, 1976.M(C)tamorphose du bourgeois. Paris: Calmann-L(C)vy, 1967. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1998 & 2012Autopsie de la r(C)volution. Paris: Calmann-L(C)vy, 1969. Paris: La Table Ronde, 2008Autopsy of Revolution. Trans. Patricia Wolf. New York: Knopf, 1971. Wipf & Stock, 2012Contre les violents. Paris: Centurion, 1972.Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective. Trans. Cecelia Gaul Kings. New York: Seabury, 1969. London: SCM Press, 1970. London: Mowbrays, 1978. Wipf & Stock, 2012Sans feu ni lieu: Signification biblique de la Grande Ville. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.The Meaning of the City. Trans. Dennis Pardee. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970. Carlisle, Cumbria, England: Paternoster, 1997.L'impossible pri¨re. Paris: Centurion, 1971, 1977.Prayer and Modern Man. Trans. C. Edward Hopkin. New York: Seabury, 1970, 1973. Wipf & Stock, 2012Jeunesse d(C)linquante: Une exp(C)rience en province. Avec Yves Charrier. Paris: Mercure de France, 1971. 2nd ed.: Jeunesse d(C)linquante: Des blousons noirs aux hippies. Nantes: ditions de l'AREFPPI, 1985.De la r(C)volution aux r(C)voltes. Paris: Calmann-L(C)vy, 1972.L'esp(C)rance oubli(C)e. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.Hope in Time of Abandonment. Trans. C. Edward Hopkin. New York: Seabury, 1973. Wipf & Stock, 2012thique de la libert(C), 2 vols. Geneva: Labor et Fides, I:1973, II:1974.The Ethics of Freedom. Trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976. London: Mowbrays, 1976.Les nouveaux poss(C)d(C)s. Paris: Arth¨me Fayard, 1973.The New Demons. Trans. C. Edward Hopkin. New York: Seabury, 1975. London: Mowbrays, 1975.L'Apocalypse: Architecture en mouvement. Paris: Descl(C)e, 1975.Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation. Trans. George W. Schreiner. New York: Seabury, 1977.Trahison de l'Occident. Paris: Calmann-L(C)vy, 1975.The Betrayal of the West. Trans. Matthew J. O'Connell. New York: Seabury,1978.Le syst¨me technicien. Paris: Calmann-L(C)vy, 1977. Paris : Le cherche-midi 2004 & 2012The Technological System. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Continuum, 1980.L'id(C)ologie marxiste chr(C)tienne. Paris: Centurion, 1979.Jesus and Marx: From Gospel to Ideology. Trans. Joyce Main Hanks. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988. Wipf & Stock, 2012L'empire du non-sens: L'art et la soci(C)t(C) technicienne. Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1980.La foi au prix du doute: "Encore quarante jours . . ." Paris: Hachette, 1980.Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World. Trans. Peter Heinegg. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983. Wipf & Stock, 2012La Parole humili(C)e. Paris: Seuil, 1981.The Humiliation of the Word. Trans. Joyce Main Hanks. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985.Changer de r(C)volution: L'in(C)luctable prol(C)tariat. Paris: Seuil, 1982.Les combats de la libert(C). (Tome 3, L'Ethique de la Libert(C)) Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1984. Paris: Centurion, 1984.La subversion du Christianisme. Paris: Seuil, 1984, 1994. Paris: La Table Ronde, 2001 & 2012The Subversion of Christianity. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986. Wipf & Stock, 2011Conf(C)rence sur l'Apocalypse de Jean. Nantes: AREFPPI, 1985.Un chr(C)tien pour Isral. Monaco: ditions du Rocher, 1986.La Gen¨se aujourd'hui. Avec Fran§ois Tosquelles. Lign(C): AREFPPI, 1987.La raison d'ªtre: M(C)ditation sur l'Eccl(C)siaste. Paris: Seuil, 1987Reason for Being: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes. Trans. Joyce Main Hanks. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990.Anarchie et Christianisme. Lyon: Atelier de Cr(C)ation Libertaire, 1988. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1998Le bluff technologique. Paris: Hachette, 1988, 2004 & 2012The Technological Bluff. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990.Ce que je crois. Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1989.What I Believe. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989.Ce Dieu injuste . . .?: Th(C)ologie chr(C)tienne pour le peuple d'Isral. Paris: Arl(C)a, 1991, 1999.An Unjust God ? A Christian Theology of Israel in light of Romans 9''11. Transl. Anne-Marie Andreasson-Hogg. Wipf & Stock, 2012Si tu es le Fils de Dieu: Souffrances et tentations de J(C)sus. Paris: Centurion, 1991.D(C)viances et d(C)viants dans notre soci(C)t(C) intol(C)rante. Toulouse: r(C)s, 1992.Silences: Po¨mes. Bordeaux: Opales, 1995.Oratorio: Les quatre cavaliers de l'Apocalypse. Bordeaux: Opales, 1997.Sources and Trajectories: Eight Early Articles by Jacques Ellul that Set the Stage. Trans./ed. Marva J. Dawn. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.Interviews[edit]"A temps et contretemps: Entretiens avec Madeleine Garrigou-Lagrange". Paris: Centurion, 1981."In Season, Out of Season: An Introduction to the Thought of Jacques Ellul: Interviews by Madeleine Garrigou-Lagrange." Trans. Lani K. Niles. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982."Perspectives on Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks on His Life and Work". Ed. Willem H. Vanderburg. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. Toronto: CBC, 1981. New York: Seabury, 1981. Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi, 1997."L'homme lui-mªme: Correspondance". Avec Didier Nordon. Paris: F(C)lin, 1992."Entretiens avec Jacques Ellul". Patrick Chastenet. Paris: Table Ronde, 1994."Jacques Ellul on Religion, Technology, and Politics: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet". Trans. Joan Mend¨s France. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998."Jacques Ellul on Politics, Technology, and Christianity: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet". Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2005.See also[edit]References[edit]^"About IJES | International Jacques Ellul Society". Ellul.org. Retrieved 2013-11-30. ^Jacques Ellul and Patrick Troude-Chastenet. 1998. Jacques Ellul on Religion, Technology, Politics: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet, Scholars Press, pp. 2, 11.^Jacques Ellul. 1964 The Technological Society. Vintage Books, from the translator's introduction by John Wilkinson, p.ix.^"Righteous Among the Nations Recognized by Yad Vashem as of 1 January 2011 '' France" (PDF). Yad Vashem. 2011-01-01. Retrieved 2011-08-15. ^Jacques Ellul. 1981. Perspectives on Our Age, Seabury Press, p. 24.^Andrew Goddard. 2002. Living the Word, Resisting the World: The Life and Thought of Jacques Ellul,Paternoster Press, p. 16.^Timothy Gorringe. 1999. Karl Barth: Against Hegemony, Oxford University Press, p. 158.^Jacques Ellul and Patrick Troude-Chastenet. 1998. Jacques Ellul on Religion, Technology, Politics: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet, Scholars Press, p. 4.^Jacques Ellul and patrick Troude-Chastenet. 1998. Jacques Ellul on Religion, Technology, Politics: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet, Scholars Press, p. 92.^Geoffrey W. Bromiley. 1981."Barth's Influence on Jacques Ellul" in Jacques Ellul: Interpretive Essays Edited by Clifford G. Christians and Jay M. Van Hook. University of Illinois Press. pp. 32-51.^Darrell J. Fasching characterizing Ellul's thought in Jacques Ellul: A Systematic Exposition," E. Mellen Press, 1981. p. 35.^Jacques Ellul. 1981. Perspectives on Our Age: Jacques Ellul Speaks on His Life and Work, edited by William H. Vanderburg. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, p.14.^Jacques Ellul and Patrick Troude-Chastenet. 1998. Jacques Ellul on Religion, Technology, Politics: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet, Scholars Press, p. 5.^Andrew Goddard. 2002. Living the Word, Resisting the World: The Life and Thought of Jacques Ellul, Paternoster Press, p.41.^Randal Marlin. 2002. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. Broadview Press, p. 34.^Andrew Goddard. 2002. Living the Word, Resisting the World: The Life and Thought of Jacques Ellul, Paternoster Press, p. 37.^Jacob Van Vleet. 2014. Dialectical Theology and Jacques Ellul: An Introductory Exposition, Fortress Press, p. 45.^Andrew Goddard. 2002. Living the Word, Resisting the World: The Life and Thought of Jacques Ellul, Paternoster Press, 203-204. And, Jacques Ellul. 1989. What I Believe Eerdmans, pp. 167-187.^David W. Gill. 1982. "Jacques Ellul's View of Scripture," In The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 25:4.^Jacques Ellul. 1970. Prayer and Modern Man, Seabury Press, pp.118''119.^Jacques Ellul. 1969. Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, Seabury Press, pp.78-79^Jacques Ellul. 1989. What I Believe, Eerdmans, p. 188.^Jacques Ellul. 1981. Perspectives on Our Age, Seabury Press, p. 95.^Jacques Ellul. 1981. Perspectives on Our Age, Seabury Press, p. 107.^ abJacques Ellul. 1964. The Technological Society, Translated by John Wilkinson. Random House, Note to the Reader, p. xxv.^Paul A. Taylor and Jan Harris. 2005. Digital Matters: The Theory and Culture of the Matrix, Routledge, p. 23.^ abJacques Ellul. 1964. The Technological Society, Translated by John Wilkinson. Random House, p. 79.^Jacques Ellul. 1989. What I Believe, Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Eerdmans, p. 136.^Jacques Ellul. 1989. What I Believe, Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Eeerdmans, p. 140.^Jacques Ellul. 1964. The Technological Society, Knopf, pp. 143-145. And, Jacques Ellul. 1975. "The Sacred Today," in The New Demons, Seabury Press, pp. 48-87.^Jacques Ellul. 1975. The New Demons, Seabury Press, p. 59.^Jacques Ellul. 1964. The Technological Society, Knopf. p. 142. And, Jacques Ellul. 1975. The New Demons, Seabury Press, pp. 58-78.^Brooks, Michael E. Death of Secular Saint Steve Jobs in a Theologically Devoid Culture The Christian Post Sept. 2, 2012^Darrell Fasching. 1981. The Thought of Jacques Ellul: A Systematic Exposition, Edwin Mellen Press, p. 17.^Jacques Ellul. 1991. Anarchy and Christianity, Eerdmans, p. 11.^Jacques Ellul. 1991. Anarchy and Christianity, Eeerdmans. p. 3.^In Anarchy and Christianity, Ellul argues that ideally Christians should follow the example of Jesus and his attitude toward the state. Ellul writes: "In ....Jesus' face-to-face encounters with the political and religious authorities, we find irony, scorn, noncooperation, indifference, and sometimes accusation. Jesus was the "essential" disputer." Jacques Ellul. 1991. Anarchy and Christianity, Eerdmans, p.71.^Ellul, Jacques (1988). Anarchy and Christianity. Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. pp. 71''74. "The first beast comes up from the sea...It is given 'all authority and power over every tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation' (13:7). All who dwell on earth worship it. Political power could hardly, I think, be more expressly described, for it is this power which has authority, which controls military force, and which compels adoration (i.e., absolute obedience)." ^Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre (2010). Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel. Exeter: Imprint Academic. pp. 123''126. "Revelation" ^Jacques Ellul. 1973/74. thique de la libert(C), Labor et fides. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley as The Ethics of Freedom, Eerdmans, 1976.^Jacques Ellul. 1988. Anarchie et Christianisme, Atelier de Cr(C)ation Libertaire. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley as Anarchy and Christianity, Eerdmans, 1988.^ abcdeJacques Ellul. 1969. Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, Seabury Press, p. 137.^Jacques Ellul and Patrick Troude-Chastenet. 1998. Jacques Ellul on Religion, Technology, Politics: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet, Scholars Press, pp. 67-68.^Jacques Ellul. 1984. La Subversion de Christianisme, Editions du Seuil. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley as The Subversion of Christianity, Eerdmans, 1986.^Jacques Ellul. 1986. The Subversion of Christianity, Eerdmans, p. 116.^Jacques Ellul. 1969. Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, Seabury, pp. 115-125.^ abEllul, Jacques. The Ethics of Freedom. English version, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1976.^Ellul, Jacques. "The Subversion of Christianity" Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1986^Ellul, Jacques. "The Subversion of Christianity" Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1986. p170-171^Jacques Ellul. 1965. "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes," Knopf, pp. 102-103.^Jacques Ellul. 1965. "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes," Knopf, pp. 102-105; pp. 162-166.^ abcdeEllul, Jacques. Propaganda. English version published 1965.^France, Joan Mendes (trans.). 1998. Jacques Ellul on Religion, Technology, Politics: Conversations with Patrick Troude-Chastenet, Scholars Press, 63^Jacques Ellul. 1976. The Ethics of Freedom," Eerdmans, p. 251.'^Jacques Ellul. 1986. The Subversion of Christianity, Eerdmans, p.161.External links[edit]PersondataNameEllul, JacquesAlternative namesShort descriptionFrench sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchistDate of birthJanuary 6, 1912Place of birthBordeaux, FranceDate of death1994-05-19Place of deathPessac, France
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VIDEO-Graham on ISIS: 'Those Who Underestimate this Threat...Do So at America's Peril' | MRCTV
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VIDEO-WH Deputy Nat'l Security Adviser: Foley Beheading 'Absolutely' a Terrorist Attack Against U.S. | MRCTV
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VIDEO-Sen. Corker: Congress 'Certainly Should Authorize' Airstrikes in Syria | MRCTV
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VIDEO-Chris Matthews Plots Strategy With Dems on How to Use Ferguson Unrest for Midterms | MRCTV
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VIDEO-Freed Journalist Thankful for Those Who Secured his Release | MRCTV
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VIDEO-Sen. Barrasso: ISIS 'is a Threat to the Homeland' | MRCTV
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VIDEO- Innovations In Cybersecurity Technology - YouTube
Two troubling photos of a young child violently decapitating a doll were uploaded to Twitter Monday by supporters of the Islamic State terror group, in apparent tribute to the gruesome beheading of US journalist James Foley by members of the Islamist organization last week.
In one of the images, the child, masked and wielding a knife, can be seen holding up a doll dressed in an orange jumpsuit reminiscent of the one wore by Foley during his execution. A black Islamic State flag is seen hanging in the background.
''Teach your children to cut necks, tomorrow there will be a lot of rotten heads,'' stated the caption accompanying the picture.
A second photo shows the doll on the ground, its severed head, along with the knife, lying atop its body.
An image of a child holding up a doll which was uploaded to Twitter Monday is reminiscent of the beheading of US journalist James Foley by Islamic State fighters, August 25, 2014. (photo credit: Twitter)
The child's identity wasn't immediately clear, nor was the origin of the photo.
A gruesome video released online last Tuesday, showing the beheading of Foley by a man who appears to be a British national, has sparked international outrage and is fueling fears about the increasing numbers of foreign fighters joining the ranks of the Islamic State.
Foley, a 40-year-old American freelance journalist kidnapped in Syria in 2012, was shown kneeling next to a black-clad militant, with a knife to his throat, delivering what is likely a coerced message condemning US strikes on IS targets in Iraq before he is beheaded.
Earlier this month, a photograph of a Sydney-born 7-year-old boy clutching the severed head of a Syrian soldier was posted on Twitter by the boy's convicted terrorist father, Khaled Sharrouf, an Islamic State fighter. The image was taken in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa.
An edited photograph of a Sydney-born 7-year-old boy clutching the severed head of a Syrian soldier, presumably in Raqqa, Syria. (photo credit: Twitter)
''This image, perhaps even an iconic photograph '... really one of the most disturbing, stomach-turning, grotesque photographs ever displayed,'' US Secretary of State John Kerry said of the Raqqa image.
''Of a 7-year-old child holding a severed head up with pride and with the support and encouragement of a parent, with brothers there. That child should be in school, that child should be out learning about a future, that child should be playing with other kids, not holding a severed head and out in the field of combat,'' added Kerry.
VIDEO-Dutch Intellectuals Apologize to Putin for Lies on MH17, Syria, Ukraine'... | Steven Brown: "I have seen another world. Sometimes I think it was just my imagination."
Prof Cees J. Hamelink nam afscheid als Hoogleraar van de UvA.Steve Brown was er ook bij. Professor Cees Hamink een Must voor iedere journalist.
Oekra¯ne wint op alle fronten en vernietigd Russisch militair konvooimeldt deOorlogs-Telegraaf.
Wat is het verschil tussen Iran Air 655 en KL4103/MH17. Mark Rutte en de Hysterische Media De Telegraaf en de Staats-NOS.
( door Cees Hamelink)
Dear Mr. President Putin,
Please accept our apologies on behalf of a great many people here in the Netherlands for our Government and our Media. The facts concerning MH17 are twisted to defame you and your country.
We are powerless onlookers, as we witness how the Western Nations, led by the United States, accuse Russia of crimes they commit themselves more than anybody else. We reject the double standards that are used for Russia and the West. In our societies, sufficient evidence is required for a conviction. The way you and your Nation are convicted for 'crimes' without evidence, is ruthless and despicable.
You have saved us from a conflict in Syria that could have escalated into a World War. The mass killing of innocent Syrian civilians through gassing by 'Al-'Qaeda' terrorists, trained and armed by the US and paid for by Saudi Arabia, was blamed on Assad. In doing so, the West hoped public opinion would turn against Assad, paving the way for an attack on Syria.
Not long after this, Western forces have built up, trained and armed an 'opposition' in the Ukraine, to prepare a coup against the legitimate Government in Kiev. The putschists taking over were quickly recognized by Western Governments. They were provided with loans from our tax money to prop their new Government up.
The people of the Crimea did not agree with this and showed this with peaceful demonstrations. Anonymous snipers and violence by Ukrainian troops turned these demonstrations into demands for independence from Kiev. Whether you support these separatist movements is immaterial, considering the blatant Imperialism of the West.
Russia is wrongly accused, without evidence or investigation, of delivering the weapons systems that allegedly brought down MH17. For this reason Western Governments claim they have a right to economically pressure Russia.
We, awake citizens of the West, who see the lies and machinations of our Governments, wish to offer you our apologies for what is done in our name.'¨It's unfortunately true, that our media have lost all independence and are just mouthpieces for the Powers that Be. Because of this, Western people tend to have a warped view of reality and are unable to hold their politicians to account.
Our hopes are focused on your wisdom. We want Peace. We see that Western Governments do not serve the people but are working towards a New World Order. The destruction of sovereign nations and the killing of millions of innocent people is, seemingly, a price worth paying for them, to achieve this goal.
We, the people of the Netherlands, want Peace and Justice, also for and with Russia.'¨We hope to make clear that the Dutch Government speaks for itself only. We pray our efforts will help to diffuse the rising tensions between our Nations.
Sincerely,
Professor Cees Hamelink
Bron: MINA
Eerder gepubliceerd:''Professor Cees Hamelink een Must voor iedere journalist''.
''Prof Cees J. Hamelink nam afscheid als Hoogleraar van de UvA''.
VIDEO-Diane Sawyer's no-fuss sign off from ABC's 'World News' - Aug. 27, 2014
Sawyer will sign off on Wednesday night, a few days before her successor David Muir will officially take the helm.
ABC and Sawyer have made almost no fuss about her sign-off, seemingly employing the same strategy that worked when she took over for Charles Gibson just a few days before Christmas in 2009. There is no prime time retrospective or farewell tour planned -- merely a segment at the end of Wednesday's newscast.
Even the date of her last nightly broadcast was a semi-secret until she tweeted about it on Wednesday afternoon.
"See you tonight for my last night anchoring @ABCWorldNews -- great adventures ahead," she wrote.
As Sawyer alluded to with the tweet, she will be staying at ABC News, as a special correspondent of sorts, appearing on TV for big interviews and in-depth stories. She will still have an anchor title.
And it's not exactly fair to say she's leaving quietly, since "World News" has emerged victorious in the weekly ratings race after years in second place behind the "NBC Nightly News," anchored by Brian Williams.
Sawyer has "done very well for ABC News -- she's beat Brian Williams in the all-important 25 to 54 age demo on which advertising is sold," Lloyd Grove of the Daily Beast, a longtime media reporter, said on CNN's "Reliable Sources" earlier this summer.
Of the speculation about her departure, he said, "If they brought it up first, I'm sure she agreed, and if she agreed, I'm sure it was with a lot of sweeteners and her new gig is going to be pretty wonderful for her, I would suspect."
Once Sawyer steps down, all three nightly news anchors will once again be white men. Muir's publicized start date is next Tuesday, though he's expected to anchor on Labor Day as well.
Amy Robach will fill in on Thursday and Friday of this week.
Only a few fellow anchors can truly relate to Sawyer's position atop network news. One of them is Williams, who, while not a friend of Sawyer, knows her socially.
On the day in June when Sawyer announced her plan to step down from "World News," Williams placed a call to Sawyer before their respective 6:30 p.m. shows. Neither anchor has divulged what was said.
First Published: August 27, 2014: 6:19 PM ET
VIDEO-CDC Whistleblower Links MMR Vaccine to Autism; Story Promptly Censored | Truthstream Media
(Truthstream Media) Shocking revelations about alleged CDC misconduct in a study investigating the link between autism and vaccines has been made even worse by an active campaign to censor and silence the issue in the media.
A CDC whistleblower involved in a pivotal study defending official assurances of vaccine safety broke his silence to expose how the study he was involved in massaged the data to cover-up a 340% increase in autism risk for African American children under age three who received the MMR vaccine. William W. Thompson, PhD. was escorted out of CDC headquarters a few days ago, and presumably fired from his position, after being identified as the whistleblower.
For his part, Thompson told the Autism Media Channel, who released a video on his revelations, that he was tired of lying.
Since that report was released, the Autism Media Channel website has gone offline, CNN has pulled two viral iReports summarizing the facts of Thompson's statements as a whistleblower, and very few other mainstream reports have covered the issue at all. Thank you to the Autism Media Channel, Jon Rappoport and Mike Adams of Natural News and others in the alternative media for bringing this one out of the shadows.
It should be splashed all over every front page in every magazine, news website, and mainstream media channel on TVs across the nation; instead, we're getting the crickets from a Looney Tunes cartoon. The silence, in the wake of potentially millions of children damaged by these vaccines, is deafening.
The original press release, reposted on Yahoo! Finance, has an unbelievably low number of comments given the gravity of the story '' all despite the fact that this is an issue that affects so many families across the country considering the fact that autism has certainly reached epidemic proportions, as it now affects an astonishing 1 in 68 children in the U.S. alone according to the CDC's own figure (a figure that has gone up 30% just since 2012).
ON A SIDENOTE: Mel here. I don't normally sign these online petitions, but THIS one to publicly issue a retraction of the fraudulent 2004 MMR-autism study I did sign. The CDC whistleblower's name is ON THE STUDY IN QUESTION and his admission and the true data show the study is a total FRAUD. If the scientist who did the study says the data has been purposefully skewed, resulting in who knows how many millions of children getting autism, then the study must be RETRACTED.
This is 13 years '-- and too many lives '-- overdue.
RELATED: Dr. Andrew Wakefield: Callous Disregard: Autism and VaccinesRELATED: Dr. Andrew Wakefield '-- Waging War on the Autistic Child: The Arizona 5 and the Legacy of Baron von Munchausen
Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton created Truthstream Media.com as an outlet to examine the news, uncover the deceptions, pierce through the fabric of illusions, know the real enemy, unshackle from the system, and begin to imagine the path towards taking back our lives, one step at a time, so that one day we might truly be free...
VIDEO-State Department Briefing | Video | C-SPAN.org
August 26, 2014Jen Psaki briefed reporters and responded to questions on a variety of international issues,
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August 4, 2014State Department Daily BriefingJen Psaki briefed reporters and responded to questions on a variety of international issues.'Topics included'...
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VIDEO- ARE THEY TWINS? SANDYHOOK/FOLEY,,,girl"on tv" - YouTube
But a study of the four-minute 40-second clip, carried out by an international forensic science company which has worked for police forces across Britain, suggested camera trickery and slick post-production techniques appear to have been used.
A forensic analyst told The Times that no blood can be seen, even though the knife is drawn across the neck area at least six times.
''After enhancements, the knife can be seen to be drawn across the upper neck at least six times, with no blood evidence to the point the picture fades to black,'' the analysis said.
Sounds allegedly made by Foley do not appear consistent with what may be expected.
During Foley's speech, there appears to be a blip which could indicate the journalist had to repeat a line.
One expert commissioned to examine the footage was reported as saying: ''I think it has been staged. My feeling is that the execution may have happened after the camera was stopped.''
However the company, which requested anonymity, did not reach a definitive answer.
It concluded: ''No one is disputing that at some point an execution occurred.''
VIDEO-Foley execution footage may have been staged - Yahoo!7
The British Ambassador to the U.S. says that intelligence officials are "close" to identifying the ISIS member who beheaded U.S. journalist James Foley in the video that was sent. On Meet The Press, the Ambassador noticed that the ISIS agent had a British accent:
"We're not in a position to say exactly who this is," said Sir Peter Westmacott on NBC's "Meet the Press," but "I think we are close.'' Westmacott said "sophisticated" voice recognition technology was being used to identify the man who appeared in the video, but he also stressed that the threat of British nationals in ISIS goes beyond one killer.
"It's not just about one brutal murderer," Westmacott said. British intelligence estimates that about 500 Britons have joined ISIS, meaning they have the means to return to Britain or fly to America with few hindrances. "It is a threat to our citizens," Westmacott said.
A U.S. Department of Justice official told NBC News that investigators were using ''all of the tools at our disposal'' to hold Foley's killers ''accountable,'' but the official would not say whether or not any suspects had been identified.''
Jesse Jackson Nails Fox For Excluding Him From 'The White Panel You Just Had' On Ferguson
Rep. Mike Rogers Claims ISIS Is "One Plane Ticket Away" From U.S.
VIDEO-Rep. Mike Rogers Claims ISIS Is "One Plane Ticket Away" From U.S. | Crooks and Liars
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R. MI) was on Meet The Press today to scare the public about the the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIS) and the Levant, claiming that ISIS is on it's way to attacking on American soil:
''It's a very real threat,'' the Michigan Republican said on NBC's ''Meet the Press.'' ''One of the problems is it's gone unabated for nearly two years, and that draws people from Britain, to across Europe, even the United States to go and join the fight.''
''They are one plane ticket away from U.S. shores, and that's why we're so concerned about it,'' he added.
Rogers said the U.S. is safer since 9/11, but more is needed both domestically and abroad.
''We have a better system, but we're just not configured '... to continue a tempo that allows disruption,'' he said, adding that nothing was deterring ISIL for years. ''Yeah, we might be OK if we continue the posture that we're in from a defensive posture, but remember, they get new recruits every single day.''
Rogers said the U.S. also needs to engage Arab League partners ''in a more robust campaign'' and that intelligence agencies and the Defense Department need to be ''more disruptive.''
Rogers, the author of the controversial privacy stomping bill, CISPA and one of the NSA's biggest cheerleaders, sounds like he's worried about the post-9/11 fear dying down with the American people. He's retiring from Congress after this year but we all know he'll probably find a home at some lobbying firm advocating new ways to scare the people into giving up their civil liberties and engaging in more wars in the Middle East.
British Ambassador, "We Are Close To Identifying James Foley's Killer"
In Memoriam
Video: How the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge started - Telegraph
On 15 July a golfer in Florida, Charles Kennedy, was nominated by a friend to do an Ice Bucket Challenge.
At the time, the challenge was not connected to a particular charity, but Mr Kennedy decided that the money raised by his ice bucket challenge should go to ALS because his cousin suffered from the disease.
He then nominated his cousin's wife to soak herself and urge others to take it on. It then reached the radar of another ALS sufferer, Pat Quinn from New York.
The 31-year-old launched the campaign with the help of friend Pete Frates, a former Boston college basketball player who also suffers from the condition.
Mr Frates is credited with helping the challenge truly go viral after he posted a video nominating friends and stars including US football player Tom Brady. And from there it simply spiralled ...
