From pauls@css.itd.umich.edu Ukn Dec 15 07:56:51 1992 Received: from log.css.itd.umich.edu by redspread.css.itd.umich.edu (AA03379); Tue, 15 Dec 92 04:56:19 -0800 Received: from nosegoblin.css.itd.umich.edu by css.itd.umich.edu (5.67/2.2) id AA09000; Tue, 15 Dec 92 12:54:53 -0500 Received: by nosegoblin.css.itd.umich.edu (5.65/dumb-1.0) id AA28872; Tue, 15 Dec 92 12:54:47 -0500 Date: Tue, 15 Dec 92 12:54:47 -0500 From: pauls@css.itd.umich.edu Message-Id: <9212151754.AA28872@nosegoblin.css.itd.umich.edu> To: poliarch@red Subject: larouche Status: RO X-Status: >From ccs!ccs.covici.com!covici@uunet.UU.NET Sat Dec 12 15:19:07 1992 Received: from relay2.UU.NET by css.itd.umich.edu (5.65/2.2) id AA21614; Sat, 12 Dec 92 15:19:06 -0500 Received: from uunet.uu.net (via LOCALHOST.UU.NET) by relay2.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA25441; Sat, 12 Dec 92 15:19:05 -0500 Received: from ccs.UUCP by uunet.uu.net with UUCP/RMAIL (queueing-rmail) id 151854.1253; Sat, 12 Dec 1992 15:18:54 EST Received: by ccs.covici.com (UUPC/extended 1.11v); Sat, 12 Dec 1992 14:44:56 est Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 14:44:53 est From: "John Covici" Message-Id: <2b2a4139.ccs@ccs.covici.com> Organization: Covici Computer Systems Reply-To: "John Covici" To: uunet!css.itd.umich.edu!pauls@uunet.UU.NET Subject: If You Want to Feed Somalia -- You Must Demand Development!! Status: RO X-Status: TEXT OF SCHILLER INSTITUTE LEAFLET: - If You Want to Feed Somalia, - - You Must Demand Development! - For more than a year now, the world has sat by while the nation of Somalia, and many others, have starved to death. Hideous pictures of starving children have come into your living room, reinforcing the idea that there is nothing you can do. Now, President Bush has sent troops into Somalia, claiming that they will ensure the delivery of food supplies to the starving. But will this solve the problem? No, not unless you mobilize to force through a full development program for not only Somalia, but Africa as a whole. Somalia is dying as a nation. Africa is dying as a continent. You have been told that it's their fault, for having too many babies, or corrupt leaders. But that's not true. The fact is that Africa, and Somalia, have been killed by a systematic policy of underdevelopment--underpayment for their exports, underinvestment for their infrastructure, and massive looting through usurious debt policies. - The Development Program - With development, Somalia could be feeding itself today. The United States should implement the following action program. 1. Food must be brought to people, not the people to the food. Special trucks and overland transport vehicles are required. Food must be delivered together with the means of transport. 2. U.S. soldiers must not only deliver food supplies, but begin immediate construction of roads and bridges for lasting infrastructure. U.S. soldiers must act like a corps of engineers, building, not killing. The U.S military deployment must not be used as a pretext to set up a new colonial protectorate system, nor to establish a new U.S military base in Mogadishu. 3. Africa's debt must be frozen or cancelled. During 1986-91, Africa paid out more money to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) than it received! It is like sucking blood to take any debt payments from starving people. 4. Feed the 23 million people in the Horn of Africa, not only the 4 million people in Somalia. This is the only way to prevent mass migrations, leading to further regional disintegration. Food reserves must be mobilized now from the ``surplus'' of Europe, the U.S.A., and elsewhere. 5. Start new development projects. According to the United Nations, the area in southern Somalia between the Jubba and Shabeelle rivers, with technology, can feed 50 million people a year--ten times Somalia's present population. 6. The IMF and other bloodsucking financial institutions which have bled Africa, as well as other nations and peoples, must be replaced with a new just world economic order. - Fight for Development - Therefore, to feed Africa on a longterm basis, we must not just send soldiers into Somalia, or elsewhere. What we must do is create the conditions for Africa to develop, so that it can feed itself and grow. Join our fight today--for Africa, for all humanity. Hold rallies, vigils, and marches. Call and visit your congressman. Call the White House and the President-elect. Distribute this leaflet at places of worship, shopping centers, and schools. The following statement was issued by the Rev. James Bevel, former candidate for vice president on the LaRouche independent ticket, on Dec. 10. "Today, we suffer mass destruction, because yesterday, we did not lay the foundation for reconstruction. In the midst of this nightmare, even the best minds seek magical solutions. However, no stable construction, or reconstruction, can proceed from anything less than a properly conceived and correctly laid base. With the fundamental principles that undergird a working, constitutional-democratic republic under attack and uprooted in our nation, we as a nation cannot give constitutional, or moral leadership. So, we offer brute force, and another form of colonial rule. Now in this crisis, if African-Americans do not work for the constitutional rights of the African people, I would say they were hard pressed to prove they are not anti-African, and anti-American. If Christians refuse a Christian economy to Africa, are they not anti-Christian? Who are you? And which side are you on? Let it not be said of you that ``ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden underfoot of men.'' I call on statesmen, religious leaders, and labor, community, and student leaders, to come together to forge a new, constitutional self-hood and nationhood document, that can serve as a catalyst and guide to a new thrust for freedom and justice. This should use the principles and methods that are in keeping with the freedom and justice sought. If we react to the present-day destruction, rather than lay a foundation, then tomorrow there will be another reaction, rather than reconstruction." -- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com >From ccs!ccs.covici.com!covici@uunet.UU.NET Sat Dec 12 15:20:11 1992 Received: from relay2.UU.NET by css.itd.umich.edu (5.65/2.2) id AA21621; Sat, 12 Dec 92 15:20:09 -0500 Received: from uunet.uu.net (via LOCALHOST.UU.NET) by relay2.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA25744; Sat, 12 Dec 92 15:20:13 -0500 Received: from ccs.UUCP by uunet.uu.net with UUCP/RMAIL (queueing-rmail) id 151856.1267; Sat, 12 Dec 1992 15:18:56 EST Received: by ccs.covici.com (UUPC/extended 1.11v); Sat, 12 Dec 1992 14:46:26 est Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 14:46:20 est From: "John Covici" Message-Id: <2b2a4192.ccs@ccs.covici.com> Organization: Covici Computer Systems Reply-To: "John Covici" To: uunet!css.itd.umich.edu!pauls@uunet.UU.NET Subject: Turn Off Your TV: part 10 Status: RO X-Status: Turn Off Your TV--Part X The Making of Sports Into a Secular Religion by L. Wolfe The same theoretical outlook that was behind the mass brainwashing of Nazi Germany is found in the mass crowd phenomenon of spectator sports. Sigmund Freud's principal point in {Mass Psychology and the Study of the I} was that masses of people can be organized around appeals to the emotions. Mass rallies, for example, appeal not to reason, but to the emotions, for the appeals to be successful. The most powerful such appeals are to the {unconscious}, which has the power to dominate and throw aside reason. ``The mass has never thirsted for truth,'' he writes. ``They demand illusions and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as what is true. They have an evident tendency not to distiguish between the two.'' Freud further states that under this condition, with man's reason dominated by {emotionalism} and unable and {unwilling} to look for Truth, the individual in a mass or crowd loses his moral conscience, or what Freud calls his {ego ideal}. This is not necessarily a bad thing for the individual, the evil Freud claims, since the moral conscience which he later named the {Over I} or {superego}, causes man to ``unnaturally'' repress his basic animal instincts; this, Freud claims, produces neuroses. In a crowd organized around people's emotions, the individual will exhibit a tendency to ``let himself go,'' to free himself of all moral and social inhibitions: ``Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian--that is a creature acting by instinct.... Nothing about it [how a person behaves under such crowd condition] is premeditated....'' ``It [a crowd] cannot tolerate any delay between its desires and the fulfillment of what it desires,'' writes Freud, stating that this is why the individual is so willing to let himself become a part of a powerful mass experience which can gratify those emotional desires. Such crowds, observes Freud, have regressed to {the mental life of children}. They operate, not according to reason, but according to irrational, emotional desires. In this mindless, emotional state, individuals are easily manipulated by leaders who can shift the values of the masses to coincide with the crowd's infantile fantasies. We'll take a look at a typical sports crowd. {You're watching a professional hockey game. Sitting next to you are an accountant and a school teacher, each in declining middle age. Below you is a teenage couple; over to the side is a banker, and just behind you are a couple of lawyers, with their young sons. It's a close game. ``Knock that bum down,'' screams the lawyer, ``Don't let him skate like that.'' ``Kill him,'' screams the lawyer's young son. ``Put the body on him.'' A fight breaks out on the ice between two players. The crowd rises, cheering wildly as the home team player lands punch after punch, bloodying his opponent. The lawyers cheer the loudest. The announcement of penalties is greeted with more cheers for the home team combatant, as the referees escort the players to the penalty boxes. Finally, the action begins again. A home team player breaks in for a clear shot on goal. The little black puck shoots into the net behind the opposing goalie. A goal. Lights flash all around and pandemonium breaks out in the crowd. The banker gets so excited that he spills his beer all over the teenage couple. Everyone is laughing. Everyone is happy, as they celebrate the home team's goal.} Was there any difference in the behavior in that crowd of the adults and the children? Not really. What has been described is a common example of the {mass infantilism} that we have referred to. Now think for a moment about the televised football game we described earlier. The person described was not {in} a crowd per se, but was watching a televised game in his living room. {Yet he displayed the same kind of emotional responses as if he were present at the stadium}. This demonstrates the power of televised sports to induce behavior in what the brainwashers call an {extended crowd}. In the television era, there are two audiences for every sporting event: one that is present at the event and one that is viewing the event, usually, as it happens, on the television screen. The first audience is limited by the size of the stadium, and even the largest stadiums are limited to well under 100,000 people. The television audience, especially for a major sporting event like a football game, numbers in the millions. The spectator in the stadium, as well as the viewer in the living room, are linked by the common perception of the events on the {playing field}. They are aware of each other's existence: The fanatic at home hears the crowd noise on the television set and sees shots of the packed stands. The fan in the stands knows of the massive television viewership {through his own and his fellow fans' habituated viewing habits.} ``If I were home, I'd be watching,'' he thinks. If he is at the game, he hopes to attract the attention of the television camera crews, so that he might be seen by the fans at home. The television brainwashers like Fred Emery of Tavistock have noted this phenomena. Someone watching his favorite show is only {vaguely} aware that others are watching as well, giving rise to a sense of isolation. The viewer of a sporting event is {keenly} aware of the existence of others, the brainwashers say, and therefore participates in a common, {mass experience of enormous perceived importance}. The perception of importance is self-validating: If one million people are doing the same thing, at the same time, it {must} be important. Each sporting event, therefore, takes on a {psychological significance} to the viewer. It becomes a common, emotional bond between him or herself and {one million or more} other people. Some recent psychological surveys of Americans between the ages 15 and 50 found that when they were asked to list significant events that occurred within their lifetimes, an extremely large number listed {sporting events}, and many listed several such events. Similarly, among American males especially, this {co-participation} in spectator sports, creates a sense of {identity} with fellow {fanatics}. A Mets fan walking down the street seeing another person wearing a baseball cap with a Mets logo develops a sense of {comradeship} with this unknown other. He gives him a wave, and maybe a raised fist, signifying solidarity with ``the cause.'' The same person will routinely avert his eyes from the gaze of a homeless person and even another person dressed the same as he. Thus, the {mass spectator experience} extends beyond the timeframe of any single game or even season, to become a part of the personality, a process of childlike {identification} with objects and feeling states. The point to be made here is that viewing spectator sports in a habituated way, over an extended period of time, does alter a person's personality because it causes him to respond to situations from an emotionally determined set of reference points. As we said, it makes you stupid and more animal-like. This is not something that can be turned on or off like a television set. Just as we have explained previously that the {hidden messages} of the television stay with you even when the set is off, {playing back} even years later, so does this pattern of {emotional, non-thinking response}, caused by habituated viewing of sports, stay with you. Playback Now, think back to what we had said about the Gulf War and the briefing by General Norman Schwarzkopf on how the plan of attack against Iraq secured military victory. Try to remember {your response} to this briefing, that so openly and consciously was made to resemble a football coach's victory press conference. Didn't it call up the same kind of emotional response that you had when {your} team won an important game? Didn't you want to raise your fist in the air and say: ``We really knocked the crap out of the Iraqis, didn't we. We really took it to them.'' {This is your sports mentality playing back, on cue}. The people who organized that press conference {knew} that you had been programmed to respond that way. By using the {language} of sports to describe the war, they were triggering a {playback} of infantile emotions associated with spectator sports, limiting your critical reasoning capacities. A month earlier, the 1991 Superbowl between the New York Giants and Buffalo Bills had featured a halftime spectacular, staged by Hollywood producers, with the ``nothing-should-be-spared'' cooperation of the U.S. Department of Defense, {celebrating the dedication} of the game to the war effort, then in its savage aerial bombardment phase. With 80,000 people in the stands wearing yellow ribbons for the troops standing and cheering, waves of military planes flew over the Orange Bowl. More than {150 million} people in this country watched the halftime extravaganza end with rock singer Whitney Houston screeching her way through the National Anthem. (Her rendition, complete with fireworks, was turned into a rock video and was soon the number one song in sales in the United States.) As several commentators noted, the Superbowl had been turned into {the largest war rally in the history of the world}. It was the {spirit} of that Superbowl {war rally}, that ``coach'' Schwarzkopf evoked, quite consciously, with his briefing. Be Like Mike Let's shift focus slightly. {You and your son are watching a close basketball game, in its final seconds. The clock ticks down, as Michael Jordan, the superstar of the Chicago Bulls, takes the ball at midcourt. ``It's all down to one play,'' says the television announcer. ``It's all up to Michael. They're clearing out the lane for him.'' Then the announcer is silent, as the clock ticks off the time in tenths of a second. It's under ten seconds now. Jordan starts his move toward the basket. Suddenly, near the foul line, he feints to his left, then twists around to his right, launching himself into the air. Somehow, he is propelled through a maze of arms, to the rim and he slams the ball through. The clock reads no time left. ``He's done it,'' screams the announcer. ``Or should I say, he's done it again! Amaaazing!''} Did you ever think about what goes on in your son's mind as he watches the game? On the one hand, he is {fixated} on the screen, taking in the action as it happens. But something else is going on as well: He is fantasizing that he could ``Be Like Mike,'' as the ad for the sports drink says in its jingle, that he could be famous and spectacular like Jordan or another athlete. He will try to act out this fantasy, perhaps by trying to practice and copy some ``move'' or mannerism of the superstar athlete, or under certain circumstances by buying some product the athlete endorses. In such ways are sports {heroes} copied by the young. But what about you? How do you watch the same events? You're in middle age or slightly younger. Superstardom has passed you by. In your heart of hearts, you know that you can't really ``Be Like Mike,'' in that 35 to 45 year old body of yours. But the ``dream'' dies hard: You still can connect with fantasies and times of your youth, through the sports viewing experience. {You could have been like Mike, if only things were different,} you fantasize. {You have been ``transported'' to an infantile state, through associations and identifications with experiences of youth}. This is made possible by the now-universal mass culture of sports and especially television sports; you remember some game that you may have seen or even played in, some experience akin to what is taking place on the screen in front of you. It is this power to make associations with an infantile, fantasized past, that is a key to much of the power that spectator sports has over you. {It is a way to shut off the reality of the current world, by calling forth a fantasy world in which your infantile self participates}. Often, the habituated viewing of spectator sports will have the effect of creating a {false past} for the individual, in which he or she has so strongly imagined some fantasy from his childhood, that he now believes it to be true. Many males who never made it close to a football field will tell their friends that they actually played for their schools. The habituated viewing of spectator sports calls forth the most infantile part of a person, and that infantilism often leads to a distortion of one's true self and past, further crippling creative reason. None of this started with television; it has been going on far longer than that. But, as we have said before, the mass proliferation of sports through television has universalized this {neurosis} throughout much of the adult male population. Brainwashing by Numbers We have also noted that fanatics have their unique way to communicate with each other. The {language} of sports, meaning the terms used to describe various actions, rules, etc., of the major sports, have become a part of popular language. It is for this reason that the Schwarzkopf briefing could be understood by those watching it. A major portion of the {sports language} is {numbers}--the endless amount of statistical information used to quantify and therefore analyze the events taking place on the {playing field}. These numbers are totally useless for the conduct of human affairs on a day-to-day basis. They tell people nothing about the real world or things that might truly matter in their daily lives. Yet, it is a simple fact, that more people can tell you what the records of the starting pitchers are in today's Yankee-Orioles baseball game, than where the dollar closed in Tokyo. My father once tried to impress on me the frivolity of sports ``numbers.'' He told me that when he was a young clerk in a shipping firm he was riding the elevator with a friend. He and his friend were rattling off a comparison between the batting averages of the then-Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants starting teams, arguing furiously over the merits of the players. Later that day, my father was called to the office of the president of the company to bring some price quotes on brass valves. There was one missing. ``What's the price on this?'' the president asked him. ``I don't know,'' my father replied. ``I'll have to go look it up.'' ``I was on the elevator with you a little while ago,'' said the president, quite angrily. ``I'd have gotten an answer immediately if I asked you Willie Mays' batting average. That you know by heart, but what I pay you to know you have to look up!'' But aside from creating useless and meaningless clutter in the minds of millions of sports fans, the statistical explosion around sports has had another, more important mind-destroying effect. It has tended to cause people to try to judge everything by numbers, by {counting} and in so doing, it has made them more prone to brainwashing through {public opinion polls} of the type we have discussed in previous sections of this report. The pollsters themselves have noted this. They say that Americans have been conditioned by sports statistics to accept the statistical results of polls as {inherently true}. It is easy to see why from a typical sports argument. ``Listen,'' says one fellow. ``I say that Conseco isn't half the player that Cal Ripken is.'' ``Oh yeah?,'' says the other guy, ``Well just look at his numbers. He has more career home runs, more runs batted in....'' ``Right, but Ripken has a higher lifetime batting average and he has played in 1,730 consecutive games,'' the first fellow answers. And so on. These ``debates'' take place {millions} of times, every day. In each, statistics are used as {accurate measurements}. They are accepted as {facts}, to be used in argument. Poll results are presented in the same way. As a result of your brainwashing by sports and sports statistics, you never bother to question whether such results are fraudulent. ``Hey, just show me the numbers,'' says the sports fan. ``If it's a statistic, it's a fact.'' Such {statistical reasoning}, with everything placed into neatly, counted categories, with ``facts'' represented as columns of counted objects, is coherent with an {Aristotelian} representation of the universe. It leads to a linear interpretation, to a fixed reality. {Truth}, as we have been discussing Truth in this series, can {never be defined from such arrays of statistically presented facts.} Truth is located in the {process} of creative reason that determines the hypothesis governing the means by which hypotheses {change.} The {Socratic method}, as practiced by Plato and the great Christian thinkers, like St. Augustine, seeks Truth in {what cannot be counted}, and in the rejection of a fixed, counted universe. It is {a quality of mind}, the same quality of creative reason that allows man to participate in God's creation and that distinguishes him from the animal, that alone determines Truth. Habituated sports viewing leads to a fixation on {numbers} and the statistical representation of Truth. This fixation {neurotically} reduces the ability of the mind to reason in the {Socratic} manner necessary to discover Truth. The Gambling Disease The fixation of the sports fanatic on numbers also leads to another addiction: Gambling. Sports gambling, both legal and illegal through an organized-crime controlled network of betting parlors, is a {multi-hundred billion dollar annual business}. Like sports itself, it is controlled and encouraged through the oligarchy's Dope, Inc., the international drug cartel which uses the betting process to launder dope monies. The sports fanatic turned serious bettor, begins to associate {only} with the numerical content of the games, reduced to the so-called {odds}. According to studies, they care little about actual teams and tend only to have a ``favorite'' team if it wins money for them. To do so, to ``win'' money for the bettor, the team {need not win} its games, only ``beat the point spread,'' to lose by fewer points than the odds had predicted. In the end, the sports gambler gets his {fix} from the thrill of putting himself at the {mercy of the gods of Fate}. He may pretend that there is science to what he does, that there is a ``system'' by which one carefully places his or her bets to beat the ``odds.'' But any gambler knows that what drives him to continue to bet is the sensation that when one has won, that he has somehow defeated the gods of Fate. Figures show that the number of people afflicted with the {sports gambling neurosis}, a variant of the overall sports neurosis, is growing. While some government officials profess concern about this, the fact is that it is the government itself which is increasingly directly sponsoring the growth of sports gambling. Several states, such as Washington, have now legalized betting point spreads on football and other games; it is justified as a means to generate revenue, with the argument being that if the state didn't tap the gambling cash flow, the monies would simply be bet elsewhere. Some preliminary studies have revealed, however, that well-advertised, state-sponsored sports betting {encourages} gambling among people {who would not have thought to bet otherwise}. Learning to `Root' This leads us back to a discussion of {who} is responsible for the growth of the mind-destroying sports addiction in the United States and the role that television has played in that process. As we have shown, before the advent of television, there was only one truly national sport, baseball, and its brainwashing effect on the population was limited. Not surprisingly, it was found in that pre-television period that sports fanaticism within a given population was dependent on the ability to attend games, be they at a ``major league'' or ``minor league'' level. The highest-penetration mass media of the time, radio, provided a means to maintain fan interest when it was impossible to attend games, but the effectiveness of that medium in promoting fanaticism depended upon the {possibility} of attendance at games. This brings us to an important observation about how the brainwashing process works. The process by which someone becomes an obsessive sports fanatic is culturally learned. You are taught by American culture how to {root}, how to respond to the {cues} that bring forth the {emotional, infantile} responses from the individual. A few decades back, I was in attendance at a Mets game at the old Polo Grounds in New York. By baseball standards, it was an ``exciting'' game, with the cheering crowd very much ``into'' the events on the field. I couldn't help notice one fellow in our section of the stands who seemed quite ``out of it.'' He sat in silence as fans all around him rose to cheer a home run by the home team. At first, I thought he was rooting for the other team. Then, I saw him sit in the same stoney silence when they, too, hit a home run. I decided to ask him if something were wrong. ``I'm from England, you see,'' he said. ``I thought if I read some books about your baseball, I could follow what was happening. But I just can't get what you chaps are all so thrilled about.'' Such examples tend to disprove LeBon's contention that crowd behavior is based on what he called {contagion}, or simple ``copy cat'' type responses to what fellow crowd members were doing. Freud's observation that a crowd must be {cued} to respond to events, or directed by a {leader} is more to the point. The baseball crowd is {culturally led}, conditioned by a mass sports culture to make the ``proper'' infantile emotional responses to the events on the playing field. The Englishman, whom I learned was quite a sports fanatic within his own culture--cricket and soccer were his obsessions--was completely ``lost,'' looking for {cues} in baseball. The {intensity} of a person's connection to the sports experience--{how deeply you are addicted}--has some relationship to a {visual} experience, not just reading about them or listening to radio broadcasts. Stated another way, {spectator sports must be watched to ``hook'' you}. The more you watch, the more intensely you become hooked, the more infantile your potential responses, and the more impaired your creative reasoning powers, for the reasons previously discussed. Television provides the perfect vehicle for the mass promotion of spectator sports brainwashing. It fixates the mind on the images on the {playing field}, totally immersing the brainwash victim in the sports experience. As studies done by media analysts have shown, television recreates the excitement of being at the event, while it is happening, establishing an identity between all those who are watching and all those present in the stands, in a way that even the most skilled radio sports announcers could only approximate. Think for a moment about how you learned to root for a sports team. Isn't it true that your first memory of spectator sports is watching a game with your father or brother? You learned that it was alright to respond emotionally to what you saw at the stadium or on the screen. You followed the {infantile} behavior of your elders in rooting for your team. Isn't it also true that among your first discussions about seemingly adult events centered on the exploits of one of those teams that your brothers, sisters, or parents were interested in? This pattern of behavior is true even for areas where in-person attendance is not possible or only possible in a very limited way. It is true because of the widespread availability of spectator sports on {television}. Who Controls Your Pusher? As we have shown elsewhere, everything that you see and have seen on television is a result of decisions by a small elite. This elite controls the major television networks, the cable channels and the major production studios. This elite is in turn controlled, both directly and indirectly, by oligarchical banking and financial interests centered in New York, London, and similiar financial centers. These are the people who deploy the brainwashers at such places as the Tavistock Institute and the networks of the Frankfurt School. They were patrons and promoters of such people as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and were ultimately responsible for putting Hitler into power. As we have shown, they have promoted {television} as their principal means of mass-brainwashing control. It is this {oligarchical elite} who have sanctioned the massive proliferation and promotion of spectator sports on television to brainwash you, in much the same way that their factional ancestors used the {Roman spectacles}, with their gladiator and other sports competitions, to control the masses. With the approval of this elite, billions of dollars in television money was channeled into the promotion and expansion of the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL), as well as major league baseball. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing through much of the 1950s, sports programming on television represented the single largest block of any programming type, enabling sports to achieve a saturation of the population as had never occurred before in history. The sports teams themselves, until the most recent period, were owned by powerful families, many of whom had connections to either the {oligarchical elite} itself or to organized crime networks, sanctioned and controlled by this oligarchy and the organized crime-linked Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL). The Mara family--which owns football's New York Giants--and the Yawkey family--which owns baseball's Boston Red Sox--are examples of this. Sports teams were often passed on as possessions from one generation to the next in these families, much as the oligarchs transfer their other possessions. In the beginning, much of the money came from brewery-linked interests, who were in turn connected to criminal organizations during the Prohibition period, such as the Rupert interests that formerly owned the New York Yankees. Some of these ``beer'' connections remain today, for example between the Busch family and baseball's St. Louis Cardinals. In the more recent period, there has been a growing interlock with interests associated with Dope, Inc. and its propaganda and defense arm, the networks of the ADL. Often these interests are included within financial groupings that own teams; for example, George Bush's family involvement in the Texas Rangers baseball team. Occasionally, they appear undisguised, as in the form of organized-crime-connected George Steinbrenner, the once and future owner of the Yankees. Overlap With Media Elites There is now also a direct overlap between media and sports elites. One example is television mogul Ted Turner, the owner of Cable News Network and the Atlanta Braves. Another example is Time/Warner's ownership of Madison Square Garden, along with the New York Rangers hockey team, the New York Knicks basketball team, and the MSG sports cable network. At the behest of the oligarchs who control our political establishment, professional sports has been given important exemptions from anti-trust provisions, enabling the major sports teams collectively to operate {as if they were a trust}, in the worst robber-baron tradition of that term. Sports team management rigs ticket prices, establishes television contracts, sets salary and compensation rates, etc. This has created a pool of {billions of dollars} for the massive promotion of the nation's sports addiction; as is usually the case with mass addictions, the {addicts}--the sports fanatics themselves--fund both the profit and the expansion of their own addiction. At this point, sales within the U.S. economy alone related to consumer {sports purchases}--tickets, equipment, cable services, literature, but excluding the costs of the salaries of players, television contracts--are estimated in the {several hundreds of billions of dollars} annually. Getting Your Daily Fix If sports are a mind-destroying addiction, then television is your {main pusher}. It is the principal means by which the majority of the nation's sports addicts get their {daily fix}. On any given day, no matter what the season, there will be approximately 30 million {different} sets tuned to sporting events, according to an industry study. Obviously, on certain days, with ``special'' games like the World Series or basketball playoffs, those numbers will double, triple, or even quadruple. For an event like the Superbowl, the figure might go higher still. While early television sports programming helped expand interest in mass spectator sports, it also helped {hook} our population on habituated television viewing. In the early 1950s, when Americans first bought television sets in large numbers, more than half the purchasers listed {sports programming} as their main reason for the purchase. That was not surprising: More than 30 percent of all people buying newspapers say that they do so for the sports pages and well more than half say that they read the sports pages first and longer than any other section of the paper. The sports seasons are to be compared to a {serialized story}, whose conclusion is unknown, lasting over a period of several months. Thus, each sports contest has a {past}, a history that involves the teams in the event and their records and deeds prior to the game. It has a {present}, in the events of the game itself. And, it has an {anticipated future}, the implication being that even though the result of a particular contest might be final, the outcome of the season, as a whole, remains in doubt. When the season concludes, there is always next season: ``Wait 'til next year'' is the refrain of the fans of losing teams. A variant of that for a person who roots for {many} teams in the same area, is ``Wait 'til {the} next season,'' when he hopes that a team in another sport will do better than the one that has just ``failed'' him. In this way, the viewer is {programmed} to move from game to game, from season to season, without leaving his couch. Sports contests, especially major sports contests, are thus the perfect {soap opera television serial} and as such encourage habituated viewing. It should not surprise anyone that the brainwashers who profiled response to television knew this from their earliest studies. None of this would work if television couldn't bring the mass-brainwashing experience to the subject in an effective way. The television camera limits the field of view. It can create isolation from the common crowd experience described by Freud and others in his mass psychology. Early television, while capturing the excitement of seeing a sports event as it was happening, often underplayed the sense that millions were watching as the viewer was watching. In part, this was because of the limits of the new technology: The single camera tended to fixate on the prime point of action in each game and the crowd miking was poor. In part, it was because early announcers tended to chatter too much. Having come from a radio experience, they described the events on the field, thus duplicating what the camera could see. Much of this has since been corrected, from the brainwashers' standpoint. New camera technology has made available an explosion of {viewpoints} of each game, with the development of slow-motion instant replay and multiple camera angles. The first games featured a single camera; Now there might be as many as 10-15 at a single football game for example. Crowd miking and modern sound mixing bring the action closer to realism and directly into your living room. And importantly, the improvement in the quality and size of the images on your screen draws the mind deeper into the audiovisual event. There are still some problems with announcers and commentators, who, from the brainwashers' standpoint, don't know when to allow the images and sounds from the {playing fields} to speak for themselves. The balance is still being ``fine tuned,'' so to speak. If the mix still offends the true sports fanatic, there is always the mute button on the remote control. Roone Arledge, the former head of ABC-TV Sports, and the man who developed the format for ``Monday Night Football,'' talks about sports programming needing to capture the full sense of the ``spectacle.'' The idea, he says, is ``not to bring the game to the viewer, but to bring the viewer to the game.'' There are variations on that theme but the concept is the same: You must {grab the mind of the fan} and then hold it within the fantasy world being projected on the screen. If successful, your efforts will succeed because the {infantile emotional connection} to the event will be made by the viewer: He will get his {fix}. By the way, Arledge no longer heads ABC Sports: He now heads ABC News! And Now to the Videotape Before we move on to the last section of our report, we should make some observations on the role of television news in promoting your sports addiction. The sports slot is usually the longest single slot in the local evening news program. It features highlights of the local teams' games, as well as highlights from other games of sports in season. According to profiling information, the local sportscast is most often given as a reason for watching a particular station's local news programming. Such surveys found that viewers cared most strongly about how their sports news was reported. In addition, while, as we have reported elsewhere, viewers had trouble remembering details of news stories reported, studies have also shown that most sports fans {will remember the major sports story of a given night}. They will also remember the scores of their team's games. In large part, this is because much of the language of sports is {numbers}, and the {scores} are the major content of sports news programming. Sports addicts are like idiot savants; they have a surprising memory for otherwise useless numbers. The more television gives them such numbers, the more they will clutter their minds with them, and the less they will be able to exercise their power of reason. Instead, they will use them to communicate the next day with their fellow brainwash victims: ``Hey, did you see McGuire's 40th homer on the news last night? 475 feet over the left field wall. Some shot, huh?'' ``I know how to make everyone go crazy, completely nuts,'' the brainwasher Hal Becker said a while back. ``Just have a phony highlight tape of a big football game. It's easy to do. Then run the wrong score. People will go crazy. They won't be able to figure out what happened. They need the television sports news to {confirm} the results of what they saw with their own eyes in the afternoon. If they don't match, they'll go into a loop.'' -- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com >From ccs!ccs.covici.com!covici@uunet.UU.NET Sat Dec 12 15:20:16 1992 Received: from relay1.UU.NET by css.itd.umich.edu (5.65/2.2) id AA21626; Sat, 12 Dec 92 15:20:15 -0500 Received: from uunet.uu.net (via LOCALHOST.UU.NET) by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA28476; Sat, 12 Dec 92 15:20:13 -0500 Received: from ccs.UUCP by uunet.uu.net with UUCP/RMAIL (queueing-rmail) id 151855.1262; Sat, 12 Dec 1992 15:18:55 EST Received: by ccs.covici.com (UUPC/extended 1.11v); Sat, 12 Dec 1992 14:45:40 est Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 14:45:34 est From: "John Covici" Message-Id: <2b2a4164.ccs@ccs.covici.com> Organization: Covici Computer Systems Reply-To: "John Covici" To: uunet!css.itd.umich.edu!pauls@uunet.UU.NET Subject: Turn Off Your TV: part 9 Status: RO X-Status: Turn Off Your TV--Part IX The Making of Sports Into a Secular Religion by L. Wolfe We're back again for another dialogue. I'm sure by now most of you know the way this works: since watching television lowers your capacity to reason, we keep the set off while we have our discussion. So, if it's not already off, as I hope it is, go over and turn it off. In this section, we are going to discuss the way you are brainwashed by spectator sports and the way television has facilitated that brainwashing. I have a sense that what we are going to say might anger some of you, but bear with me and see the argument through to the end. We might as well get right to the point: those of you who call yourselves {fans} of one or more teams of any sport, be it baseball, football, basketball, hockey or of players in more individualized games such as tennis or golf, are {addicted to a mind-crippling infantilism that reduces your power of creative reason.} And it is that power and {only} that power of morally informed, creative reason that makes man different from the animal. Let's make some preliminary observations to support our thesis. As we have stated time and again in this series, man is created in the living image of God and has been given by his Creator the Divine Spark of reason. It is that quality, that Divine Spark, in each of us that makes us truly human. Anything that reduces our capacity to reason makes us less human, more like an animal. Organized sports in this country, and especially professional and college level sporting events, are {mass brainwashing experiences}, precisely along the lines outlined by Gustav LeBon and Sigmund Freud in earlier parts of our report. They cause the individual personality to regress to a more infantile, more irrational state; while watching a sporting event, a person becomes part of a mass of similarly addicted infants who fixate on events taking place within the defined boundaries of a {playing field}, in a {game} whose rules are arbitrarily defined. Each sporting competition is a thinly disguised celebration of what your brainwashers have called {instinctual human aggressiveness}, the same kind of aggressiveness that people like Freud say {proves} that you are an {animal} driven toward destruction. These aggressive, destructive drives, says Freud, are {part of man's animal nature}. Sooner or later, man must succumb to the power of such drives, Freud and neo-Freudians claim. The purpose of society, according to Freud, is to regulate and control through various forms of coercion, the outbursts of this innate bestiality against which the human mind is ultimately powerless. Christian civilization is premised on a contrary view of humanity. Man, created in the image of his Creator, seeks to perfect his existence through use of creative reason in search of Truth; that is the only acceptable definition of perfection as a human process. Society is organized to provide man the means by which to accomplish this task, nurturing those powers of creative reason and affording the opportunity for man to act on that reason in an effective manner. To the extent that one needs a fit body to serve the power of reason, exercise and sports can play a {limited} role in man's search for Truth. But muscular activity can {never} be a substitute for nurturing one's creative powers. Morally informed reason rules the body. Modern sports, especially as organized as a mass spectator event, serve a contrary purpose. Besides acting as {ritualized} celebrations of aggressiveness, sports create an {illusion} of perfection, acted out within the measured boundaries of the {playing field} and according to the arbitrary rules of a {game}; perfection becomes something that is {counted}, a thing which is measured, that has been severed from man's relation to Truth and to his Creator. Mass organized spectator sports, as presented and marketed through television, thus work to undermine the most basic concepts of Christian civilization. With their endless piles of statistics, with their arbitrary rules, with their mass spectacle, with their celebration of power of muscles and instinct over the human mind, and with their worship of heroic deeds in the absence of reasoned activity, they create a form of {pagan ritual}, that has become a {substitute religion} for most Americans. So that's our thesis restated: sports is {a mind-destroying pagan religion}. I warned you that it might be hard for some people to swallow, since I know how addicted many of you are to {your} sports. After all, if you are an American, and especially an American male, you have been raised in a {sports-dominated} culture. We're going to take a look at that. We'll first examine the penetration of spectator sports into our culture, before re-examining the psychological underpinnings of the mass brainwashing operation. The `Sporting' War As we have said before, the most effective brainwashing of Americans is the kind that they don't realize is happening, the so-called soft brainwashing. I want you to think back to an image we referred to earlier. In February 1991, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf gave an internationally televised briefing on the strategy and tactics of the ground war component of Operation Desert Storm. At the time, the press compared the general to a {successful Superbowl coach} giving a description of the {game plan} that had earned him victory. Schwarzkopf had conceived the war {as if it were a football game} and had redefined a classic military flanking maneuver in {football terms} as a Hail Mary play. He had first explained what he was doing in those {football terms} to his staff; he reiterated that explanation to the American people. He was speaking a {language}--the language of sports--that {he knew} most Americans would understand. In fact, most of the war was presented to the American public as {if it were a spectator sporting event}, complete with statistical analysis that measured every aspect of the fighting--the numbers of dead, the numbers of bombs dropped, the numbers of bullets used. This was the {scorecard}, as the Pentagon and other briefing officers called it, and as the press, and especially the television news, reported it. In the end, the American people followed General Schwarzkopf as he tallied up the {score}: according to the numbers, our side had {clearly won}, just as the football team that scores more points wins its game. And just like with a televised football game, the U.S. propagandists, including Schwarzkopf, tried to keep Americans fixated on the events on the {playing field}, in this case the ostensible battle between ``coalition'' and Iraqi armies. Left off the {scorecards} were the horrific casualties to innocent Iraqi women and children and the devastation to that nation's vital {civilian} infrastructure. Such pictures have for the most part even today been kept from the American people to preserve the image of the ``clean war'' fought within the bounds of {good sportsmanship.} How well did this presentation work? Think about your own responses to the war and to the Schwarzkopf briefing. Didn't you find yourself {rooting} for the {home team}, the Americans and their allies? And didn't you feel elated when you were told and shown the results with maps and charts, in much the same way that you might feel if your favorite team won a championship like the Superbowl? Around the country, in the same bars where the television sets feature Monday Night Football or the Basketball Game of the Week, there were reported to be raucous celebrations after the ``victory'' in the Gulf War, similar to what occurs when the home team wins such televised games. ``I feel like we've won the Superbowl,'' one middle-age bargoer told a reporter that night. ``No, better, like we've won two Superbowls.'' Remember our Hal Becker, the brainwasher from the Futures Group who disdainfully calls all of you ``homo the saps.'' Back in 1981, he commented on the Vietnam War experience. America, he said, ``wants a clear winner, like in a football game. {Our mythology of sports} demands it. When we didn't get a clear winner in Vietnam, support for the war fell apart.... We need to beat up on someone. Then our {sports psyche} takes over and we understand what happens. You win big and the score comes up on the evening news.'' When a survey was taken after the war asking Americans to name a figure from history to which they compared General Schwarzkopf, few people named military leaders like General Dwight Eisenhower or General Douglas MacArthur. Instead, {many people} named the late Green Bay Packer football coach, Vince Lombardi, the winner of the first two Superbowls in 1967-68. Lombardi is, among other things, famous for a quote that General Schwarzkopf admires: ``Winning isn't everything. It is the {only} thing.'' The {sports psyche} that Becker refers to is imbedded deep within American culture. It is why people understood what General Schwarzkopf was talking about with his ``Hail Mary Play'' and it is why {he himself understood what he was doing in that way.} It is reflected in that Lombardi quote about winning. It should more appropriately be called the {jock persona}, a mythical mass personality type, whose values are determined by the {lessons of the playing fields}. Our Sports Addiction I want now to focus on the mass penetration of sports into our lives. And here television has played a critical role. While our sports-dominated culture did not begin with the television age some 40 years ago, it has been {transformed} and {universalized} by television. For one thing, the sheer amount of sports has expanded exponentially in that period, as well as the ease with which one can {participate} in a spectator sporting event. Let's take a look at some basic numbers. Of the 6-8 hours each American watches television a day, and the 42-56 hours he or she watches a week, it is estimated that at least 6-8 hours involve sports programming. Obviously, there are many people in the society who have less interest in televised sports; women, for example, are more addicted to their soap operas than to sports, so the average viewing figure is misleading. Among a sizeable segment of the population, especially the male population, who are addicted to sports, the number of hours a week devoted to sports viewing will average well in excess of 16 hours. We'll put that another way. Among this segment of the population, which is demographically teenaged to middle-aged males, a person spends the equivalent of {one full waking day, every week} watching sports. But the addiction is even worse yet, because among that segment of the population most addicted, the numbers can go even higher: as much as 30 hours a week or even more could be spent in front of the tube watching your favorite teams. Sounds impossible? Think about this: You are a fan of your local basketball team and your local football team, and a fan of your local hockey team as well. Each of the games of these teams is carried on either network or other free television or on cable (most sports fans {must} have cable or satellite dishes that have access to cable channels for this reason). Your football team plays once a week during the season, in a game that lasts between 3-4 hours; your basketball team plays 3-4 games a week in games that average 2-3 hours; your hockey team plays a similar number of games averaging about 3 hours. The seasons themselves overlap. There will be some conflicts when games on a given day either occur at the same time as each other, or overlap, but it is easy to see that there are {at least} 20 hours of sports viewing {easily} possible just in what we are discussing. But if you are a {real fan}, then you can't miss the Monday Night Football game, even if your team is not playing; and you might also want to watch an ``important'' college football game on Saturday afternoon and maybe even the second game of the professional football doubleheader on Sunday. None of what I am describing is far-fetched for the ``normal'' sports addict. And when you total it all up, you come to about {30 hours a week during the seasons described spent in front of the television set watching sporting events}. We are excluding from these figures a person who attends a sporting event, since if he is in attendance he {probably} will not be watching the game on television--although there have been an increasing number who bring their Sony ``Watchman'' television sets to games. Eliminating also extremely popular sports like golf, tennis, wrestling, and boxing, and concentrating on what are considered the major sports--baseball, football, hockey, and basketball--brainwashers profiling the American population have found that there is what appears to be a {universalized addiction} to all these sports. Most {fans} will watch all the sports named, with the possible exception of hockey, which still lacks franchises and therefore fans in many parts of the country. This universalizing process is the result of a proliferation of teams fueled by television revenues and a television-created mass audience. Sports and TV At the dawn of the television age in 1950, there was only one truly national sport, baseball, which had a 152 game season, running from April to October, when the World Series is played, for 20 teams divided into two leagues. The National Football League had a schedule running from September to December, with a single championship game. The National Basketball Association had many fewer teams than it does today, playing a shorter season culminating in a championship series, while the six-team National Hockey League, with teams only in New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Montreal, and Toronto playing from October to March in a 50-game season, culminating in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Now, 40 years after the mass proliferation of television and 15 years after the start of the mass penetration of pay cable networks, football and basketball have joined baseball as truly national sports, with hockey expanding its regional base. There are now 28 baseball teams playing a 162-game season, extending from April to October, with a spring training from February through April that features some televised games; the season culminates in playoffs, which in turn end in the World Series. The NFL now has 28 teams in two conferences playing a 16-game schedule running from September through the end of December when playoffs are held which end in the single-most viewed sporting event, the Superbowl in late January. The NBA has 27 teams playing an 82-game schedule, which runs from October to the beginning of April, with playoffs that can run until May. The NHL now has 24 teams in an 82-game season running from October to mid-April, with playoffs that can run until early June. There is now a total, year-round brainwashing immersion of huge numbers of Americans in televised spectator sports: As the sports' leagues expand, as the seasons enlarge, the addicted are becoming {more addicted} and the television set is the major source for their {fix}. Before television, the four mass spectator sports under discussion had a total yearly attendence of 30 million (1950 figures, approximate). Now, their total in-person attendance is more than tripple that figure. However, well over {1 billion} people watch such events on television. The television audience for the Superbowl {alone} is more than 100 million in the United States and another more than 200 million worldwide! According to some estimates, by the turn of the century, with the further penetration of America by wired cable systems, viewership for major sporting events will almost double. And remember, we haven't even included college football or other popular sports in our figure! We are not talking here about so many billion viewers who each watch a single, different sporting event. We are talking about the {habituated viewing} of several hundreds of events by a segment of the population that numbers in the several {tens of millions} and the viewing of a hundred or so events by another population segment double or triple that figure. The Psychology of a Fanatic As we learned in the previous sections of this report, the soft brainwashing process that alters or creates social values relies on {habituated} viewing habits. And this brings us to the first point of our thesis, which many of you sports addicts may have challenged when we first offered it. Your repeated habituated viewing of sports, especially televised sports, has altered the way you think. In fact, the more you watch sports, the less capable you are of morally informed reasoning. You are losing your mind to your {fanaticism}, to your addiction to sports. {Sports are totally unimportant and meaningless activity for human existence. Whether one team or another wins a particular game, whether it be a minor league baseball game or the Superbowl, it is totally and absolutely meaningless} for the present and future existence of human civilization on this planet. The problem is that most of you don't really believe this. Oh, you can accept it in the {abstract}, all right. You know that whether the Redskins or the Cowboys win won't make a bit of difference as to whether the depression is ended. But sports are a part of your {private mental life}, they are like a {personal possession} that has little objective real value, but to you has a great deal of subjective, emotional value. And you really don't like someone telling you what to do about these {personal parts} of your life. You sort of resent it, don't you? But now take a good look at yourself. It's Sunday afternoon. You sit in front of the television set, your hands sweating, as your favorite football team is locked in a tight game with their bitter rival. The clock is ticking down. One more good play, and they'll be in range of the winning field goal. The pass is completed. You thrust your fist in the air, as the home stadium crowd roars its approval through the television set's speakers. Your hands are wet with sweat; the crowd is cheering. They line up for the field goal. You can't sit still; you rise from the chair. Now, you can't even watch and you look away from the screen. The kick is up. ``It's ... it's goooood,'' says the announcer and you jump up and down, as the fans in the stands are shown celebrating. They've won, you think, and you {feel} great. If the kick had missed its mark, and {your} team had lost, you would have {felt} bad and dejected and so would all its other fans, both in the stadium and watching on their television sets. For the three or so hours of that game, the world outside the television set {did not exist}. People were dying in Bosnia. Others were starving in Africa. Within a few miles of the stadium, youth were destroying themselves with drugs. The economy continued to go to hell. But for those three hours and especially those last few moments, that world, {the world that matters}, did not exist. {Emotionally} this game and all other games, to one degree or another, do {mean} something to you. This is the infantile {emotionalism} that we are talking about. It does not involve your reasoning capacity at all; it bypasses it completely, putting you into a state of emotionalized fantasy, disfiguring your creative reasoning power in much the same way as an intense sexual fantasy. If someone should try to deny you your {fix}, to turn off your 7-30 hours of sports on television a week or reduce your viewing hours, you'd scream bloody murder and maybe even physically assault whoever tried to enforce such an unwanted change in your addictive behavior. That is how {addicted} you are to your {emotional fix} on sports. And this is one of the ways in which you are {brainwashed} by television. {To be continued. -- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com >From ccs!ccs.covici.com!covici@uunet.UU.NET Sat Dec 12 15:20:19 1992 Received: from relay1.UU.NET by css.itd.umich.edu (5.65/2.2) id AA21631; Sat, 12 Dec 92 15:20:17 -0500 Received: from uunet.uu.net (via LOCALHOST.UU.NET) by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA28484; Sat, 12 Dec 92 15:20:14 -0500 Received: from ccs.UUCP by uunet.uu.net with UUCP/RMAIL (queueing-rmail) id 151857.1274; Sat, 12 Dec 1992 15:18:57 EST Received: by ccs.covici.com (UUPC/extended 1.11v); Sat, 12 Dec 1992 14:47:11 est Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 14:47:05 est From: "John Covici" Message-Id: <2b2a41bf.ccs@ccs.covici.com> Organization: Covici Computer Systems Reply-To: "John Covici" To: uunet!css.itd.umich.edu!pauls@uunet.UU.NET Subject: Who Owns The Environmentalist Movement? Status: RO X-Status: - Chapter 10 - - Who Owns the Environmental Movement? - What follows are excerpts from Chapter 10 of {The Holes in the Ozone Scare,} published in late summer 1992 by 21st Century Associates. The close collaboration of the environmental movement with the giant chemical cartels in their drive to ban CFCs poses the fundamental issue that will be raised in this chapter. It will be a great shock to many readers, but the fact is that the environmental movement was created and is to this day financed and directed by the leading aristocratic families of the United States and Europe, especially Great Britain. This is one of the most controversial assertions of this book, but ironically, it is one of the easiest to prove. All one has to do is trace the origin of the money that finances the environmental movement. The more difficult concept to convey is the nature of environmentalism itself. The basic problem is that environmentalism is not a rigorous definition of anything. Recent polls indicate that more than 90 percent of the American public consider themselves ``environmentalists.'' Yet every environmental proposal submitted to popular vote over the past four years has been soundly defeated. Why the contradiction? The answer lies in the questions asked by the polls--questions that are not usually reported in the press. For example, when asked if they like trees, open spaces, mountains, and wildlife and are opposed to toxic chemical waste dumps, more than 90 percent of those polled answer affirmatively. Why not? Only a deranged person would be opposed to the beauty of nature. Only those who actually enjoy those wastelands known as parking lots, shopping centers, malls, and their equally ugly modern architecture would answer in the negative. However, when those being polled are asked if they believe that man is the source of all evil and if, to preserve nature, they support forced abortion and sterilization to control world population along with the elimination of automobiles, electricity, hot showers, flushing toilets, refrigeration, beef, fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides, the answer is a solid kick in the rear. Therein lies the inherent contradiction in the term ``environmentalism.'' This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the majority of the members of mainstream environmental groups supports the first set of beliefs but is decidedly against the second set of beliefs. At the same time, the leaders of the majority of the environmental groups are fanatical advocates of the second set of beliefs (as long as it is not they who have to give up their cars). The fact is that most environmentalists are moral and loving human beings who would be shocked to learn what they are really supporting. We intend to expose the nature of this deceit. Lacking any other term, we mean by environmentalism the set of beliefs that considers that people are the problem, that animals and insects are more important than human beings, that modern science and technology are evil, and that the world's population--especially darker-skinned people--must be dramatically reduced to what are euphemistically called ``sustainable'' levels. Back to Nature Twenty-five years ago, those who believed that Mother Nature comes first and humankind second were part of an insignificant fringe, considered radical by most Americans. These environmentalists were visible mostly at the level of the antinuclear street demonstration, where marijuana smoke wafted around ``Back to Nature'' posters on display. Today, however, what used to be extremist ``environmentalist '' ideology has become mainstream, permeating American institutions at every level, from corporate boardrooms to the Federal Reserve, the Congress, the White House, the churches, homes, and schools. Official lore from the environmental movement's publications asserts that the movement emerged from the grass roots. The truth, however, is that funding and policy lines come from the most prestigious institutions of the Eastern Liberal Establishment, centered around the New York Council on Foreign Relations, and including the Trilateral Commission, the Aspen Institute, and a host of private family foundations. These foundations and institutes are the policy-making and implementation arms of what is known as the Eastern Establishment. They are run largely by leading members of the Anglo-American blueblood elites. Over the past 25 years, these foundations have poured hundreds of millions of dollars every year into the anti-industry, environmentalist, and population-control campaigns of hundreds of ``public interest'' groups. Additional billions have been poured into sponsoring university departments of ``environmental studies,'' which now turn out thousands of professional environmentalists every year. Many of these professional environmentalists act on the basis of political ideology, not hard science. This network of foundations created environmentalism, moving it from a radical fringe movement into a mass movement to support the institutionalization of antiscience, no-growth policies at all levels of government and public life. As prescribed in the Council on Foreign Relations {1980s Project} book series, environmentalism has been used against America's economy, against such targets as high-technology agriculture and the nuclear power industry. This movement is fundamentally a green pagan religion in its outlook. Unless defeated, it will destroy not only the economy, but also the Judeo-Christian culture of the United States, and has in fact come perilously close to accomplishing this objective already. The vast wealth of the environmentalist groups may come as a shock to most readers who believe that these groups are made up of ``public interest,'' ``nonprofit'' organizations that are making great sacrifices to save the Earth from a looming doomsday caused by man's activities. In fact, the environmental movement is one of the most powerful and lucrative businesses in the world today. Foundation Funding There are several thousand groups in the United States today involved in ``saving the Earth.'' Although all share a common philosophy, these groups are of four general types: those concerned, respectively, with environmental problems, population control, animal rights, and land trusts. Most of these groups are very secretive about their finances, but there is enough evidence on the public record to determine what they are up to. Table 10.1 lists the annual revenues of a sampling of 30 environmental groups. These few groups alone had revenues of more than $830 million in 1990. This list, it must be emphasized, by no means includes all of these envirobusinesses. It is estimated that there are more than 3,000 so-called nonprofit environmental groups in the United States today, and most of them take in more than a million dollars a year. The Global Tomorrow Coalition, for example, is made up of 110 environmental and population-control groups, few of which have revenues less than $3 million per year. The Nature Conservancy, with revenues of $254 million per year and land holdings of more than 6 million acres worth billions of dollars, is just the best known of more than 900 land trusts now operating in the United States. tables for chapter 10 - Table 10.1 - - ANNUAL REVENUES OF - - SELECTED ENVIRONMENTALIST GROUPS - - - (dollars, 1990,1991) - Organization Revenues African Wildlife Foundation 4,676,000 American Humane Association 3,000,000 Center for Marine Conservation 3,600,000 Clean Water Action 9,000,000 Conservation International 8,288,216 The Cousteau Society 14,576,328 Defenders of Wildlife 6,454,240 Earth Island Institute 1,300,000 Environmental Defense Fund 16,900,000 Greenpeace International 100,000,000 Humane Society 19,237,791 Inform 1,500,000 International Fund for Animal Welfare 4,916,491 National Arbor Day Foundation 14,700,000 National Audubon Society 37,000,000 National Parks Conservation Association 8,717,104 National Wildlife Federation 77,180,104 Natural Resources Defense Council 16,000,000 Nature Conservancy 254,2511,717 North Shore Animal League 26,125,383 Population Crisis Committee 4,000,000 Rails-to-Trails Conservancy 1,544,293 Sierra Club 40,659,100 Student Conservation Association, Inc. 3,800,000 Trust for Public Land 23,516,506 Wilderness Society 17.903,091 Wildlife Conservation International 4,500,000 WWF/Conservation Foundation 51,555,823 Zero Population Growth 1,300,000 {Total} 830,367,693 Sources: {Buzzworm,} Sept/Oct 1991; {The Chronicle of Philanthropy,} March 23, 1992.