YES, I did it! … I bought the last issue of the SPIEGEL (36/2002). The cover caught my eyes in exactly the way as it was supposed to do. Due to its magic power it made me buy the SPIEGEL without even thinking about it. And this all happened in a KONSUM supermarket (KONSUM – the famous “super market chain” in the GDR)! When we were children – during the (less consumption orientated) GDR times – we used to make fun about KONSUM by saying that KONSUM would be an abbreviation of „Kauft Ohne Nachzudenken Schnell Unserem Mist.“ (“Buy quickly our rubbish without thinking about it.”). And there another circle got closed – I guess, I fell for a secret KONSUM-SPIEGEL conspiracy which has been going on for years. Anyway, cheer up! – “shit happens”, even in the best families J

But seriously, the KONSUM is not the one to blame, because I really wanted to buy the SPIEGEL. It also wasn’t this cheap inner feeling which was looking for sensations being on the search for “more and more details” about “September 11^th”. The cover of the SPIEGEL itself shows – what else – the still existing WTC towers. The North Tower is burning, the South Tower is just getting attacked. Interesting mixture within the journal – the SPIEGEL does exactly what everyone expected after one year in the “New World”. Terror revival. Exactly one week before the “anniversary”.
The headline was chosen adequately: “September 11^th – The day that changed the world.” I would like to quote the first lines of the main article “The second Rome” (from p. 92 on):
“On the day, that changes the world, the sky appears in deep blue just like taken from the paint-box of Franz Marc. The sun gives the leaves a deep Tizian red. Even the shadows are soft and glimmering on the East Coast of the United States in these early hours of September 11^th, Cézanne pastel. There is almost no wind blowing.
The world is an autograph album. And gets turned into a book of death within a few minutes.”
Yikes! How long must the SPIEGEL editors have taken for such an introduction? I guess, they must have been on a works outing to a picture gallery just before writing this article? Or maybe the secretary, who had to type this article, said, that she would like to read something nice in the SPIEGEL? J
We will never get to know about that, but that doesn’t matter. Moreover I shall thank the SPIEGEL for giving me some ideas for my own introduction. But I am afraid that I have to follow the SPIEGEL and hence write a “September 11^th”-revival e-Mail soon, too.

Also interesting and to read “with a twinkling eye” – an interview with Mrs. “Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs” Condoleezza Rice. In contrast to that you can also find a really interesting interview with the Swiss economist Fredmund Malik – “Masterpiece of Desinformation”. The American Economical Miracle of the Nineties as a gigantic bluff … Another interview with Fredmund Malik you can find under http://www.manager-magazin.de/koepfe/mzsg/0,2828,177197,00.html (only in German).

A second circle (smaller than the first one  - but a real one though) got closed only last week. It started in May 2002 when I gave a presentation about the topic “Public Relations”. When searching for information about this topic you will come across the name of Edward L. Bernays sooner or later. And the very same name I found in an online article by Dr. Tim O’Shea (English: http://www.thedoctorwithin.com/articles/doors_of_perception.html, German: http://www.miprox.de/USA_speziell/Warum_Amerikaner_beinahe_alles_glauben.html). Bernays was fondly called “the Father of Spin”. The article is among other sources based on the book “Trust Us, We’re Experts” by Stauber & Rampton, from which I also included some quotations.  

Some of the first sentences of the article match very well with the sense or non-sense behind the “Hint”-e-Mails. Those lines remind me of some responses to the first “Hint”-e-Mails:
“We are the most conditioned, programmed beings the world has ever known. Not only are our thoughts and attitudes continually being shaped and molded; our very awareness of the whole design seems like it is being subtly and inexorably erased. The doors of our perception are carefully and precisely regulated. Who cares, right?”  

Who was this Edward L. Bernays?
“From his own amazing 1928 chronicle Propaganda, we learn how Edward L. Bernays took the ideas of his famous uncle Sigmund Freud himself, and applied them to the emerging science of mass persuasion. The only difference was that instead of using these principles to uncover hidden themes in the human unconscious, the way Freudian psychology does, Bernays used these same ideas to mask agendas and to create illusions that deceive and misrepresent, for marketing purposes.”

 

The article is really worth reading, because it is tidying up with some of our fallacies which have whizzed through our brains for years. Democracy – what is that? Bernays had his own idea of it resp. he put the ideas of others into practise in an exceptional way:

“As a neophyte with the Committee on Public Information, one of Bernays' first assignments was to help sell the First World War to the American public with the idea to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy.’”  

What did and how did it Bernays then?
“Bernays’ job was to reframe an issue; to create a desired image that would put a particular product or concept in a desirable light. He never saw himself as a master hoodwinker, but rather as a beneficent servant of humanity, providing a valuable service. Bernays described the public as a 'herd that needed to be led.' And this herdlike thinking makes people ‘susceptible to leadership.’ Bernays never deviated from his fundamental axiom to ‘control the masses without their knowing it.’ The best PR happens with the people unaware that they are being manipulated.”

To give a concrete example:
“A few years later, Bernays set up a stunt to popularize the notion of women smoking cigarettes. In organizing the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City, Bernays showed himself as a force to be reckoned with. He organized the Torches of Liberty Brigade in which suffragettes marched in the parade smoking cigarettes as a mark of women's liberation. Such publicity followed from that one event that from then on women have felt secure about destroying their own lungs in public, the same way that men have always done.“
The online article is full of little wisdoms and may cut anyone of us into the quick (or you already know how the wind blows) or may make us node our heads. It is therefore not surprising that the Nazis tried to use Bernays for their purposes, but he denied a direct cooperation. Bernays’ “Propaganda” became the gold standard from the end of the 1920s on and the achievements of Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda Goebbels were based on the experience of Bernays. Only since the Nazi times the word “Propaganda” got its negative meaning.

What do big industrial trusts do then? They want to sell their products, because they live from that in the end. Between the industry and the consumer you have to interpose a public relations agency. But even the best advertisement (the differences between advertisement & public relations are very thin) can’t satisfy every doubt the consumer would have – in the end she/he isn’t that stupid. But such kind of “problems with the masses” Bernays already had to face 70 years ago and his creative urge referring to this seemed to be almost fatiqueless. He got 104 years old though. Hence he must have had a lot of time to study the psychology of people and vice versa to guide them resp. let them be guided. But more of that next time.

Have a nice, sunny day. Yours, Michael. 

PS: You can also forward this e-mail to people you know – I don’t mind that at all.