booksmusic

On Propaganda, Brainwashing and Other Forms of Manipulation

Aldous Huxley: Brave new World/Brave New World Revisited ISBN 978-009951847-1/ 978-009945823-4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “Propaganda in favour of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest, offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign and domestic scapegoats, and by the cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that […] the most cynical kind of realpolitik becomes a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.” Does this sound familiar to you?

It was written in 1956 under the impression of Stalin and Hitler’s success in rallying and manipulating the masses on the one hand, and the excessive consumerism of the US society on the other hand. The author was Aldous Huxley, the mind and hand behind the dystopian novel “Brave new World” and a collection of related essays under the title “Brave New World Revisited.” In “Brave New World revisited”, Huxley devotes two chapters to propaganda, the good and the bad propaganda, and furthermore offers interesting ideas about the over-population of the world, brainwashing, chemical alterations of the mind and other forms of willful manipulation.

“Brave New World” itself needs no recommendation. The novel, published in 1932, features on the curriculum of most English classes and has lost none of its attraction. It portrays a society with custom made humans, genetically pre-determined to do certain tasks, and the liberty to think individually replaced by the liberty to consume without limits and to drop out of reality by taking drugs. I read the novel in high school with fascination, although I didn’t fully understand it, and I reread it a few months ago. This time I devoured it with a sense of exhilaration, rediscovering many angles I had forgotten about. I was overwhelmed by Huxley’s tremendous foresight and his talent as a writer.

I was even more surprised by the depth of his reflexions in “Brave New World Revisited”. As with Karl Marx, it is funny to identify the points where Huxley was wrong in his predictions (cf. the chapter on over-population). It is much less funny to find out, that he was right in many instances and anticipated the effects of propaganda when disseminated through social networks, of changes in behaviour through indoctrination and a reward policy for compliant behaviour. Every page is fascinating in a frightening way.

“Brave New World Revisited” furthermore exposes how modern science – sociology and psychology mainly – can quickly become useful tools of dictators to brainwash the individual. Extended periods of stress make men succeptible to believe in values opposed to those he used to believe – Pavlov’s theories at work. Huxley explains here the scientific background of the conditioning of the human race as it happens both in “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s 1984. It’s brutal.

The lines quoted at the beginning of these posts obviously lead to reflect President Trump’s election campaign and the strategy of the Brexiteers to manipulate the UK referendum to leave the European Union. Or the genocide in Rwanda, greatly favoured by the insidious hate-speech broadcasted by “Radio Milles Collines”. Or the videos shared by Daech. Or the TV station “Russia Today”, mxing facts and fiction to confuse the audience.

Huxley’s yardstick of efficient “bad” propaganda is Joseph Goebbels for under him, the Nazis perfected this black art like no one else. Today, our societies are under threat again. Not by some foreign countries, terrorists or immigrants, no, they are being threatened by our own politicians, by complying social networks and by millions of users tagging along. Passivity is no option, for the numbers are against us who defend truth, equality, the rule of law, plurality and democracy. It is time to stand up.

The fascination of horror – that was one of the ideas that flicked up when I read “Brave New World” and “Brave New World Revisited”. At the time I often listened to a piece written by Bela Bartok, written during World War I, the Piano Quartet No. 2:

A Piano Quartet Ressurected from the Archives

To Write or to Love, to Be or to Fail

Franz Kafka: Das Schloss (English title: The Castle) ISBN 978-3-596-90456-3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ⭐️ A surveyor comes to a village and tries to gain access to a castle and the clerks who seem to work there. His name is K. He fails. K. is confronted with the hostility of the local population. He is an alien, and aliens are not welcome. Aliens disturb the established order, by not knowing the rules, by not fitting in, by not having a defined place in society. At the same time K. becomes a victim of auto-suggestion in a way people fall victim today to conspiracy theories. The population of the village stands in awe before the clerks, though it is not known whether they have any leverage over people’s destiny. The surveyor imagines a battle with the invisible clerks and interprets events only within this mental framework.

The unfinished novel deals with social isolation, loss of control, the feeling of being manipulated by an opaque system, elements that today trigger fear among the vulnerable parts of Western populations and contribute to the success of populists and extremists. Kafka started to work on this novel in 1922 after he had suffered a collapse, triggered by a worsening lung tuberculosis. At the same time he felt the constant need to assess whether he had made the right choices in his life. He wrote the first two chapters from his own perspective: I, Franz Kafka. While he was working on the third chapter, he switched to the third person singular: K. Why? His biographer Reiner Stach hints at the fact he was about to describe an erotic scene.

The novel deals with another issue: the essence of social relations. In Kafka’s novel, the surveyor tries to get to know people who may help him gain access to the castle. Some of the people in the village switch sides for the same reason. They try to manipulate K. for their own personal goals. The utilitarian aspect eclipses the emotional content of human relationships. Kafka had difficulties with people. With almost all people. His family, especially his father, his friend Max Brod, for whom he felt at times deep friendship and at other the need to distance himself. His relations with women were rides on a psychological roller-coaster and marked more by fantasies than by an acknowledgment of the facts.

Kafka’s novel “Das Schloss” certainly is the most mysterious one. Many interpretations have been advanced, most of them focus on what the castle may stand for. Kafka had told Brod the broad lines of the end – K. dies of exhaustion and solitude – and he interpreted the castle as a symbol for the mercy of God. Kafka identified himself with his Jewish origin and was sympathetic to the Zionist cause, but he had no substantial religious feelings. Psychologists, linguists and sociologist have came forth with different ideas about the novel’s meaning.

I have come up with an idea of my own and you are at liberty to reject it. The castle could stand for something that Kafka longed for and failed to achieve: a true, symbiotic relationship with a woman he could respect, venerate and live with. Love, actually. Kafka’s relationships with women were permenantly interfered with: He was thrown off course by his own dilemma of having to chose between writing and marrying his fiancée Felice Bauer, by his desire to be alone and to be with someone, by the moral codex of his and Felice’s parents, by historical events like World War I, a deteriorating health and his at times excentric way of life and sexual anxiety. The sheer number of obstacles on the way to happiness is a central element to understand Kafka’s life and a key idea of “Das Schloss”. And Kafka enjoyed a few happy moments with Felice in a Czech hotel of the name of “Schloss Balmoral”.

I think one of the great strengths of Kafka’s novel is the fact that a number of different interpretations are possible. Modern art makes the audience, the spectator, the reader part of a piece of art, and as such any reader can find his own truth in “Das Schloss”. Kafka could not stop thinking about himself; if his novel made readers think about themselves, their place in society, the essence of their existence, I think he would have been pleased.

Another strength is the language. Towards the end of his career, Kafka had developed a way of writing that not only became his hallmark, but also defined a new style as such, the language of modernity. He focused on the essence of words like some composers focuse on the essence of single notes, omitting any ornament, writing in a totally unadorned, almost bureaucratic style. At the same time, his style is never boring, Kafka develops momentum, tension, beauty even, and keeps the reader under the spell of his words, without distracting or manipulating his perception.

Kafka’s technique has two effects: First, he gives the reader a frame and a canvas with a few silhouettes, the reader’s fantasy is supposed to fill in the rest. Second, his style also confers the oppressive emotions that penetrate the story, emotions originating in the modern industrial and bureaucratic age, where life is governed by forces that the individual can not control or understand. Both effects taken together make thecreading of “Das Schloss” fascinating. It is a mysterious work, but a masterwork nonetheless.

Music that leads me to reflect my life, my past, my possible future, the meaning I give my existence – there are quite a few pieces that come to my mind. I will settle today for a little known and little played composer: Nikolai Medtner and his Sonatina in G major:

Exploring parallel universes

A Guide for Tyrans and Would-Be Dictators

Gustave Le Bon: La Psychologie des Foules. (Psychology of Crowds) ISBN 978-2-13–062062-4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Over the past two decades, several historic developments have baffled me: the high approval rates of the Russian president Vladimir Putin, the naive belief of Islamists that they can submit Western democracies, Brexit and finally the electoral victory of Donald Trump. Each event involved fascinated crowds, masses of people obeying a type of logic that defied my understanding. I was intrigued, and while I was reading books about Putin, the grief of ordinary Americans and the theories of the political scientist Eric Voegelin assimilating Communism and Fascism to modern religions, a distant memory from my studies in sociology re-surfaced: Gustave Le Bon’s early study of the psychology of crowds.

I had only read a short introduction to Le Bon’s theories as a student, which was good enough to pass that exam, but now that I actually had read “Psychology of Crowds”, I realize I should have read it much earlier. Even if certain ideas of Le Bon did not survive the test of time – social sciences, psychology and medicine have made a lot of progress since 1895 – the general trust of his theory remains valid.

Crowds, in Le Bon’s sense, are marked by “the evanescence of the conscious personality [of the individuals forming the crowds] and the orientation of feelings and thoughts in one direction.” Crowds cannot undertake actions that require a high degree of intelligence, they are easily manipulated, animated mostly by emotions and prone to violence that can take the shape of an act of heroism – soldiers charging in a battle against all odds – or an act of riot or vandalism. One of Le Bon’s basic ideas is that a crowd will act in a way that may harm its individual members, but since the individual’s conscience has been switched of, this apparent contradiction becomes irrelevant. Thus a crowd will take decisions that the isolated member of the crowd would most likely not take.

A crowd easily takes up any ideas “whose time has come”, ideas that have been around for some time without being articulated by a large number of people. Le Bon identifies long-term factors preparing the ground and short-term factors triggering a crowd into action. Crowds just as easily switch ideas, and the attention of a crowd is best captured by an image that embodies such an idea. Two telling examples came to my mind: Christ on the cross and Donald Trump’s border wall between Mexico and the United States.

Even if the fact of Jesus’ existence and his crucifixtion can be scientifically disputed, the oral transmission of this “breaking news”, the exceptional character of the story and much later the graphic representation made this, real or imagined, act of martyrdom a symbol so pwerful that it became one of the key elements of a 2000-year-old religion.

A more modern idea is Donald Trump’s wall. Everybody can picture a wall, the image suggests a means of defence against an invasion of “bad hombres”, another powerful Trumpesque image, a protection against an external enemy. It may also suggest the protection of an internal resource, like the US steel economy. Again, it is not important whether the wall will ever be built or whether it will actually keep criminals out. A positive emotion is attached to the image, and that’s why this idea animated so many to vote for Trump. That’s also why Trump fights so hard for it. The key element of his credibility is at stake.

From these initial findings, Le Bon moves on to other interesting theories. A dysfunctional society cannot be changed for the better by remodeling its institutions. What has this to do with crowds? Le Bon identified in the French society at the turn of the century a crowd of unhappy citizens, the product of a misguided educational system. He was greatly concerned about it and he was right. World War I was seen in France as a great chance to purify the a society deemed rotten. An illusion of course, but it explains the initial enthusiasm of French soldiers and the huge public support for the war.

In our days we see unhappy crowds too: the “Gilets jaunes” in France, the Brexiteers in the United Kingdom. The European Union has failed to mitigate the consequences of a globalised and deregulated economy. They angry crowds have no constructive solutions at hand, their power is exclusively destructive. If Le Bon is right, these crowds could only be tamed by a new narrative of Europe, a convincing image of prosperity, hope, pride and protection, embodied in a new a European identity. What is Europe supposed to be? What do we Europeans want it to be? Those are the questions to be asked. Giving the European Parliament greater leverage and holding a referendum on the issue of summertime was not nearly enough. Europe suffers an identity crisis. If Europeans cannot be fascinated by the idea of building a peaceful, economically thriving and cosmopolitan society, then the European project is dead.

To amuse you I would like to quote Le Bon’s idea about leaders, leaders of a crowd or leaders of a pack. “They are being recruited among those neurotic, excited, half-alieniated who border the insanity.” Well? Anyone coming to your mind? I bet. And how did this person come to power? Partly by aaccusing the media to spread “fake news” and circulating through social networks a counter-narrative, full of lies, half-truths and distorted facts that appealed to his voters.

Le Bon would have been horrified by the possibilities of social media. At the end of the 19th century he identified three elements threatening good governance: the weakening of traditional beliefs, the freedom of speech of the crowds and the many newspapers printing everything and anything. At this early stage of modernity already, Le Bon observed that politicians lose the initiative in setting an agenda and are increasingly driven by the opinions popular with the crowds. “If one single opinion could gain sufficient track to impose itself, it would soon exert a tyrannic power”, he writes. Lenin’s communism, Hitler’s totalitarian regime, Trump’s wall and Brexit – they all fit perfectly into this scheme. What a prescient man Le Bon was!

However his book deserves a cautious interpretation. Le Bon derived a large part of his theories from his personal observations. He did not collect and analyse empirical data as modern sociologists would do. His opinions about the natural inferiority of women and a hierarchy among races are obviously wrong. Nevertheless Le Bon’s “Psychology of Crowds” remains a n interesting read, especially in these troubled times. I am sure that Steve Bannon has read it. I am sorry Hillary Clinton did not read it.

The Nazis used a powerful, evocative music written by Franz Liszt as a propaganda tool. It was broadcasted several times a day as the jingle announcing the news from the Eastern front. It’s from the symphonic poem “Les Préludes”:

How a romantic composer got hijacked by the Nazis

Blood, Sweat and Tears or the Delight to Be a Victim

heroic failure

Fintan o’Toole: Heroic Failure. Brexit and the Politics of Pain. ISBN 978-1789540987⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Now that Theresa May has failed to secure a majority for Brexit plan A, it begins to show that neither the opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn nor May herself have a plan B. Actually, there shouldn’t even have been a plan A. The initiators of the 2016 referendum never meant it to succeed. They wanted to shake up the political establishment, but not to ruin their country by pushing it out of the European Union. Fintan o’Toole, an Irish historian, literature critic and columnist, has written a well-researched, well-articulated analysis of the British, or rather the English, psyche that led to the disgraceful spectacle we have observed over the past two years.

As my desperation has been nurtured over the past two years by the many lies told by Brexiteers to their unsuspecting victims, the British voters, I take the unusual step of wrapping a review of this interesting and irritating book in two distinct personal letters. My frustration has to be vented, and this is the place to do it!

Dear Brexiteers,

I know you are busy toppling your government and polarizing your country even further, so I will be brief and not detract your attention from serving your country. About Brexit – I wish you to leave the EU as fast as you can. Preferably without a deal. Because I want you to fall flat on your face. I want you to feel the heat of competition under WTO rules, the burden of bankruptcy of your inefficient economy, the dead weight of a dysfunctional public administration and the shame triggered by derelict infrastructure no longer funded by Brussels. I WANT YOU TO FEEL PAIN! ENORMOUS, UNBEARABLE PAIN.

Fintan o’Toole’s book pushed my anger at British politics at a new level. The book’s general idea is easy to understand. Emotionally, the UK has not overcome the fact that victory in World War II did not lead to prosperity and international prestige, but translated into economic hardship, the dissolution of the empire and a relative decline in global importance. I perfectly understand that this amounted to a huge disappointment. However the psychological trick that UK politicians used to deny this fact and to compensate this feeling of loss is appalling: self-pity.

The UK apparently feels best when it’s beleaguered, but once the enemy is vanquished, heroism has lost its purpose. O’Toole shows that politicians looked for a new villain that a) could be used as a scapegoat for all that went wrong (Thatcherism, the Falkland War etc.) and b) that could make Britons rally around the Union Jack. The EU was perfectly suited for both. Self-pity went viral through the endless repetition of “It’s all Brussels fault” and “Germany still is the enemy, only now it sails under the European flag.” If you marry self-pity with auto-suggestion, you end up with Brexit, hard or soft, depending on the size of your ego.

Why did all this work? O’Toole speaks of a perfect cycle of self-pity and self-love. “We deserve to be loved, but we are hated because we are so wonderful”, he says. British logic? British humour? The lack of recognition has over decades been sublimed and transformed into political masochism. “The political erotics of imaginary domination [by the EU] and imaginary submission are the deep pulse of the Brexit drama”, o’Toole writes. The pleasure to be a victim, the delightful feeling to be exempted from any responsibility, has become the goal of British politics. The EU’s function is “to be a more insidious form of Nazism”. O’Toole presents a horrifying analysis here, but I suspect it comes very close to the truth. You relish pain? You’ll get pain. Plenty of it.

Dear Remainers,

I wish you a lot of courage. The less enlightened part of your journalists and politicians has condemned you to spend blood, sweat and tears, and is far from certain that your coming sacrifices will ever be rewarded. These people have left the path of rationalism long ago, they discard the empirically verified for day-dreams and wishful-thinking as Fintan o’Toole shows with many examples at hand. Since those politicians have been democratically elected, there’s little to be done about that, as long as a majority of British voters prefer lies to truth. We, the European people, will offer you exile anytime, but unfortunately the United Kingdom can only be saved by its own people. That’s you.

O’Toole puts forward an interesting fact that should be considered by all Remainers. He reflects the improbable alliance between two social classes, far apart one from each other, that support Brexit: parts of the working class and parts of the upper class. As a binding agent he sees “the sheer joy of being able to fuck everything up.” It’s stupid to break stuff, but let’s do it anyway, just for fun. And never mind the consequences, says the political punk Boris Johnson. A little bit of “Dunkirk Spirit” and British improvisation will do miracles.

If this is the spirit of the Brexiteers, Remainers must acknowledge that the next generation will have to pay for the fun that old, bored, rich, white men like Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg have right now. This a point women are sensible to. They don’t want the future of their children being gambled away for the thrill of a former stock broker like Farage. Brexit is about emotions, o’Toole says. On both sides. Right. So let’s use emotions like the Brexiteers do. There are only 32 million men compared to 33 million women in the UK. That gives women a real majority. Use it! It may be too late to stop Brexit, but it’s not too late to shape a post-Brexit future limiting the damage Brexit will do.

Unless a miracle happens between today and March 23, the UK will hit a wall at full speed abd finally wake up and acknowledge the realities of the 21st century. Economically, it is of marginal importance, compared to heavy-weights like the China, India, the US and the European Union. As for its political and military potency, let’s not talk about it. The EU Council fares better without constant British interfering, and the UK’s nuclear weapons are just as obsolete as the British pound. Past sacrifices on Europe’s battlefields will not be forgotten, but the United Kingdom itself has made them irrelevant by not embedding them in a narrative of a sustainable European peace and prosperity after the war. Britons fought for Europe from 1940 to 1945, yet they fought against Europe almost since the German capitulation.

And before you get me wrong: The EU botched up a lot of things, as o’Toole underlines. But Brexit is going to make the situation worse, especially for the UK. Many on this side of the Channel are sick of trying to convince Britons that, on the long run, cooperation is better than confrontation for both sides. Dear friends, for you will remain friends, you can fight now with Russia, China and President Trump on your own. Soon, you will be alone. Good luck and good-bye.

Am I angry? You bet. What about music? I’ll settle for something violent and cruel tonight: Aribert Reimann’s opera “Lear”:

Lear – You are men of stone

A Perpetual Fate, a Perpetual Disgrace

Roth, Joseph: Juden auf Wanderschaft (English title: The Wandering Jews) ISBN 978-3-423-13439-9 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Reading Kafka, reading about Kafka and reflecting the fate of the Jews from Eastern Europe – it’s all part of the same story. Kafka was an assimilated Jew living in Prague, and during World War I, thousands of Jews from Russia and Galicia fled to what would later become the Czech Republic. The Austrian-Hungarian Empire was suffering defeat after defeat on the Eastern front, and former Austrian outposts were overrun by Russian troops, forcing the local Jews to flee. Russia was no friend of the Jews. Neither was Prague.

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) , a writer turned reporter, narrates the story of the Eastern Jews, despised by their assimilated cousins in Western Europe and most of the rest of Europe. Filthy, poor, dishonest, uneducated – thise were Jewish prejudices against Jews, gladly taken up by anti-Semitists anywhere in Europe. “The Wandering Jew”, published in 1927, is a disturbing book, even after so many years. So little has changed. If you look at the current stereotypes attributed to refugees from Syria, Irak, Afghanistsn, Libya… you know where they stem from. And Anti-Semitism of course is alive and kicking.

Roth’s book is brutal when it comes to describe how Eastern Jews have been treated since the late 19th century and up to 1933, a date after which all Jews in Europe risked to run a common fate: annihilation. This is balanced by his description of the Eastern Jews’ communities, their industriousness, their internal solidarity, their faith, the rich cultural traditions, their unshakable will to live and their courage to pursue their luck in foreign countries, whatever price they may have to pay.

The wandering of the Jews – for up to the foundation of Israel they lacked a true fatherland in a territorial sense – pushed them to seek a political and ideological home: Palestine. Not just a territory, no, a political concept, a dream. Zionism, the logic consequence of more than 1000 years of European Anti-Semitism, the way out of the eternal dilemma: assimilation or discrimination? It’s hard to say what was worse in Roth’s eyes since he showed little sympathy for the superficial Western bourgeois society of which he was a product. Roth studied in Lviv and Vienna, he later lived in Vienna, Berlin and Paris.

Roth explains it all very well, and any honest reader looking at the refugee debate in Europe, President Trump’s idée fixe about a protective wall on the Mexican border or the Middle East shows that the so-called Western civilizations use stereotypes and concepts in their debates almost identical to those used some 100 years ago. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the biggest fool of all? Speaking about fools, Roth taught me something I didn’t know yet. Every Stetl had its Batlen, a storyteller, a joker or, as Roth puts it, somebody who reflected useless ideas. I sense a subversive element here and I love this kind of social subversion. Watch and listen to the Batlen, for he speaks the truth!

The laconic style in which Roth describes life in a Stetl, the relationships among Jews and between Jews and gentiles and between the Jews and God made me smile occasionally. These descriptions appear funny like in “funny little people” – the Hobbits come to my mind. Actually, there is nothing funny about them. The stoicism with which the Eastern European Jews supported their internal political and cultural divisions and the hostility of the environment is remarkable. It hides the earnest that filled these people’s minds. Roth says the Jewish people can be punished by God, but never abandoned.

Finally, in the context of Eastern Jews settling in Berlin, Roth mentions something important: “Everything is improvised […] One must always be ready to move and carry one’s few belongings, some bread and an onion in one pocket, the Tefillin in the other. Who knows whether one will not be forced to wander again in the next hour.” From German Jews I occasionally hear that, once more, “the suitcases are packed”. In the light of a revival of Anti-Semitism in Germany, this is no surprise. It certainly is a disgrace. At the same time it would appear that it never has been different: a perpetual threat, a perpetual disgrace. And this text grows longer and longer, and it’s message will reach, once more, the wrong audience…

Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, qis celebrated with a prayer, the Kol Nidrei. Max Bruch and Arnold Schönberg have set it to music:

A light is sown for the repenting sinner