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GOTCHAS AND PROPAGANDA
by Kurt Saxon
A gotcha is a joke played on the unsuspecting and the unwary. It's the same as "April Fool" but works any time of the year. It is also a joke never revealed as such, which he being played for a fool may never catch on.
Gotchas are the most effective when worked on those who see but don't observe, who hear but don't listen, who read but don't analyze. Gotchas are like jiu-jitsu, using the victim's belief in his own wisdom to trick him.
A classic example of a gotcha was Orson Welles' "War Of The Worlds" 1939 broadcast. It started out as a band concert from a ballroom, which was interrupted by a news bulletin telling of a Martian invasion in New Jersey. The bulletin would stop until further details and the music would resume until another bulletin would interrupt with terrifying updates. Listeners who had missed the first few minutes of the program believed they were tuned into a concert and so thought the interruptions were real news bulletins.
As the horrors increased, thousands all over the country left their homes, got into cars and fled in all directions. The program itself was finally interrupted by police who demanded an announcement be made that the program was a work of fiction. Thousands had called the police demanding protection but it seems few, if any, had bothered to turn their radio dials. Had the story been real, in a short time it would have been on every station.
The next day the police and the media were all over Welles. The cameras showed them interrogating, questioning and accusing as Welles sat there denying that he had expected the radio audience to take the program seriously. But the cameras showed his little-boy smirk. He knew, all right. Maybe he didn't know just how great a panic he would create, but he meant to pull a classic gotcha and he did.
His next, and maybe the greatest gotcha ever pulled on movie goers, was in 1941's "Citizen Kane". The story opens with a great man's dying word, "Rosebud". The picture proceeds with reporters interviewing everyone who was close to the man about who was Rosebud. It turned out that Rosebud was a sled he had owned as a child. But that wasn't the gotcha.
As the movie begins, you see a man's hand holding a glass ball with a winter scene with swirling snow. You see the man's lips saying "Rosebud". As he dies, he drops the ball which falls to the floor and shatters and the noise causes his nurse to enter the room. All she heard was the ball falling to the floor. She didn't hear him say "Rosebud". Nobody did. So how could the reporters have known he said "Rosebud"? Gotcha! As far as I know, I'm the only one alive who made that observation.
I collect gotchas. One of my favorites is from Scientific American, November 27, 1845. Religious types resented Scientific American because it explained everything in terms of science instead of divine will. So someone on the staff made up the letter to make believers think Scientific American was in tune with the religion of its day. It was also a gotcha understood as such by the intelligent.
LETTER OF PLESIUS LENTILUS TO THE SENATE OF ROME, concerning Jesus Christ.- There appeared in these our days a man of great virtue named Jesus Christ, who is yet living among us, and of the Gentiles is accepted as a prophet of truth; but his own disciples call him the son of God. He raiseth the dead, and cureth all manner of diseases. A man of Stature somewhat tall and comely, with very reverend countenance, such as the beholders both love and fear-his hair of color of the chestnut fully ripe, plain to his ears, whence downward it is more orient, curling and waving about his shoulders.
In the midst of his head is a seam or partition of his hair after the manner of the
Nazerites.-His forehead plain and very delicate-his face without spot or wrinkle, beautiful with a lovely red.-His nose and mouth so formed as nothing can be reprehended—his beard
thickish, in color like his hair not very long, but forked,-his look innocent and mature; his eyes gray, clear and quick. In reproving he is terrible; in admonishing, courteous and fair spoken; pleasant in conversation, mix'd with gravity.-It cannot be remembered that any have seen him laugh, but many have seen him weep. His proportion of body most excellent; his hands and arms most delicate to behold. In speaking, very temperate, modest and wise. A man for his singular beauty surpassing the children of men.
For one thing, Jesus was never referred to as "Jesus Christ" while he lived and no non-believing Roman would have referred to him in that way. Also, no bible scholar took the letter seriously. But those who believed only because they wanted to believe took the gotcha as gospel.
The next and one of the best is the one about making leather out of human skin; Popular Mechanics, June, 1902. There wasn't a bit of truth to it but it must have given the Popular Mechanics staff and its more intelligent readership a lot of laughs.
Popular Mechanics June, 1902
MAKE LEATHER NOVELTIES FROM HUMAN SKINS.
Ghoulish Fad of the South Making Its Way to the
North
May Become a New Industry.
Gloves, hand bags, belts and watch fobs made of human skin are possessed by many people in the South as curiosities. The articles arc nearly all made of Negroes skin artistically tanned. Mr. A. H. Lockwood, of Chicago, recently received the following message from Louisville, Ky., inclosed with a most beautiful piece of leather:
"I send you a small piece of leather made from the hide of a Kentucky Negro. I tanned some pieces for students and 1 hope you will accept the piece I send you as a novelty."
Mr. Lockwood, who is an authority on leather, says: "A man's work may live after him, why not his hide. There are some who have been making a great fuss about this pretty work on human skin as if preservation were a crime."
The skin makes a thin but soft and substantial leather. In quality it is nearly equal to kid. There is no difference between the skin of a white person and a Negro as far as the quality of the tanned leather is concerned. It is reported that the practice of making articles from human skin is making its way to the North and that the hides of white persons are now serving as pocket books and leather cases. Soon it may be so that our cuticles will live on in the form of slippers to make merry in the dance halls, or may be to protect the "mit" of a prize-fighter, years after the breath has left our bodies.
Another favorite is the one about the submarine in Popular Mechanics, April 5, 1905. See if you can spot the gotcha.
SUBMARINE BOAT.
A patent has been granted a Bridgeport. Conn. man for a submarine boat the motive power being electricity carried in storage batteries. For
travel on the bottom of the ocean he has provided wheels. When he comes to a nice smooth stretch of sand, by attaching a few teams of seahorses the batteries can be saved for humpy places.
So there are gotchas all around and always have been. But the real gotchas were jokes and were meant to be. What we have now is what started out as gotchas but have turned into vicious, mind-enslaving propaganda.
I had learned to read by the age of six. I remember bringing a book to my mom and telling her the writer was mistaken. I don't remember what the book was about and I could have been the one who was mistaken. That was over sixty years ago and I was only a child, after all.
But I'll never forget my mom's answer. She said if the writer was smart enough to get his ideas printed in a book he knew more than we did. In one sentence she had taught me that most people believe anything they read. As I grew older I saw the truth in that. I learned by experience that most people do believe everything their politicians and preachers say and they even believed that advertisers had to tell the truth. If a story could get in the newspapers or on the radio or on TV it was true.
When I got into junior college and majored in journalism I mainly wanted to study propaganda. I knew why people believed but I wanted to learn how propagandists, politicians and preachers wrote so as to get basically intelligent people to believe some of the most stupid gotchas and outright lies.
In 1964 I joined the John Birch Society and read John Stormer's "None Dare Call It Treason". Both the Society and Stormer used the same method of convincing the unwary of a huge international plot to conquer the world and then hand it over to International Jewery.
The material was a clever collection of hundreds of unimportant and unconnected incidents, quotes and misquotes of politicians, military people and Liberal scholars, all backed up by hundreds of references the reader wouldn't be expected to check out. It was all very convincing to a reader who wanted to believe it without analyzing it and certainly not looking up the quotes, most of which were taken out of context, anyway.
The Conspiracy was a harmless fantasy until the fall of the Soviet Union. Then, without a foreign enemy, a new enemy had to be created in order for the Conspiricists to stay in business. The focus was then changed to our own government, the U.N. and our Justice Department; and of course, the Jews.
Up until that time, the Feds showed little interest in Conspirisists, since they were against Communists and certain politicians they considered disloyal. The reorganized Conspiricists then began encouraging their followers to arm against their own government. Any government would be justified in jailing those who arm against it, regardless of their reasons for doing so.
After the bombing of the Muir Building in Oklahoma City a video tape came out entitled "Reichstag 1995". The idea was based on the burning of the German Reichstag. Hitler blamed the Communists and used the burning as a justification for rounding up all the Communists and putting them in concentration camps.
The tape's message was that the Feds had bombed the Muir Building as a reason to round up all the Militia and put them in camps. It's been five years and no Militias have been shut down with the members put in camps. Why not?
Our Department of Justice is under-funded, under-staffed and not very competent. There is no way in the world they could cope with a couple hundred thousand belligerent fanatics who distrust, fear and even hate their government. Moreover, our country has seventy million gun owners. With over 220 million guns, our civilian population has more guns than all the armies on Earth, including ours. Most gun owners are hunters, farmers, ranchers and collectors with less than one per cent on the radical right. But that one per cent is too many and our economy couldn't afford to feed, house and guard them in camps and to try would only set off more gun owners who haven't as yet fallen for the Conspiritist's line.
The Conspiracy began as a series of gotchas and evolved into a lot of dangerous propaganda. Our Department of Justice, having a few good men, came up with a gotcha of its own to turn that propaganda against itself and so pacify its potentially dangerous believers. It was a classic gotcha, worthy of Orson Welles, himself. To illustrate, I've reprinted a list of Conspirisist gotchas published in 1994 by Jack McLamb, a retired Phoenix police officer. (Once a cop, always a cop).
Are You Aware That
YOU, ME AND OUR FELLOW AMERICANS ARE FACING
TOTAL DISASTER:
THAT WE'RE ALREADY INTO A FAST DEVELOPING POLICE STATE ENFORCED BY FOREIGN TROOPS THAT ARE ALREADY HERE?
DID YOU KNOW that a United Nations' flag flies over FortPolk, Louisiana? That it domiciles foreign troops put there by a secret but powerful international ruling clique? That these troops are occupying our country to back up an inhumanely repressive Gestapo, Storm Troopers and Brown Shirts all rolled into a Multi Jurisdictional Task Force?
That about a half million United Nations' troops (mostly orientals from numerous sightings) are already in America. That the unmarked black helicopters often seen in many parts of America are a part of these same United Nations' forces?
That the widely advertised economies of "military base closings" were really for the purpose of using these bases for United Nations troops and detention centers, a perfumed term for concentration camps?
ARE YOU AWARE that our American governments, federal and state, are but puppets of the world's super rich despots now working through the United Nations to establish a diabolical one world government called the New World Order?
DO YOU KNOW that their plans are for a 'Global 2000 " New World Order that calls for the peonization and enslavement of American labor, a process already 35 years along the way? The destruction of the American middle class? And a huge army of unemployed bidding against each other for the little work that is available? Did you know that the 30-year old today earns about 37% less than his father did at 30 while productivity of Americans has increased over 100% in the same period?
DID YOU KNOW that the newly passed North American FreeTrade Agreement (NAFTA) is really a first step in taking away American sovereignty? Of merging America and Americans into the New World Order as a unit with Mexico and Canada? Of destroying the 50 States of the Union and instituting a 10- region Federal Administration under FEMA? That it is the biggest single step to date of lowering American standards to that of peons?
DO YOU KNOW why mysterious coded markers are appearing on the back of much of this nation's highway signs? Could they be there as guides for United Nations' troops that cannot comprehend English or understand our maps?
DO YOU KNOW
why huge detention facilities, enough to hold over two million "detainees," have been built and are being built in much of America, especially the granddaddy of them all, the Elmendorf detention facility in Alaska already dubbed "America's Siberia'?"
DO YOU KNOW
that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is all set to put a dictatorship
in place over the
American people when martial law is
declared in the not too distant future?
DID YOU KNOW that America already has more police per capita than any nation on earth? That, in reality, this new police force will be the Multi-Jurisdictional Task Force (swat teams) that will make Hitler's Nazi Storm Troopers, Brown Shirts and Gestapo look like models of virtue? That the ATF will have actual street gangs as part of its forces? That these sadistic gangs get to keep the loot they can grab on raids, raids which will be mainly against those who are not "politically correct''? That the participants in these forces will be hooded and unidentifiable?
DID YOU KNOW that virtually all government offices, law enforcement agencies, military organizations and courts have gold- fringed American flags? That these flags symbolize that these military organizations, law enforcement agencies, courts and government officials are following laws of the high seas (British Admiralty Law) contrary to the U.S. constitution?
DO YOU KNOW that the so-called "Health Security" card now being readied for every American (Yes, all of us must be covered by the new "health care" system, mustn't we?) is really a "smart card" with a computer chip and magnetic bar code bearing your Social Security number and all the hundreds, even thousands of pages of personal data about you? That this card is readable by local or satellite scanners at all times? That it has both input and output features and will be constantly updated by the world master computer system in Belgium via satellites? That it keeps you located at all times? That it is due to be replaced by an even more sophisticated system, a computer chip embedded in our wrists, foreheads or other body parts? That these chips are embedded in our babies so that they may be tracked "for their shots" and more really inhuman, debilitating and devitalizing procedures? That these chips are now being tested in the U.S.A. and the world on prisoners, pets and livestock?
DID YOU KNOW that this same card is slated to be your debit card in a soon forthcoming cashless society? That this everything card will be your key to existence in the New World Order? That, without it, you can neither work nor buy anything?
DO YOU KNOW that our high achievers and independent thinkers are due for detention and liquidation the way Lenin and Stalin liquidated the Soviet "intelligentsia."'
DID YOU KNOW that our covert masters intend to break up the family? That whole races are slated for extermination? And especially free-minded Americans of all races? That the Christian religion is being destroyed and is slated for eradication as it was in Russia?
DO YOU KNOW that 80% of the world's population is slated to disappear, about 100 million of it by the target date of 2000 AD? That genocide is planned by our covert rulers?
ARE YOU AWARE that our clandestine rulers want to make us into mindless drug-controlled zombies that obediently and unquestioningly submit to their rapacious mandates?
ARE YOU AWARE that there is not and cannot be any "health care" in our so-called health care system? That our so-called health care system is but one more tool of the wealthy elite to rip us off, despoil us in body and mind, and control us like we were zombies? That, instead of delivering health, "health care's" ten million physicians, nurses and other personnel are, in reality, delivering more disease, more suffering and ever mounting medical bills? Bills that will exceed a trillion dollars this year (1994)?
ARE YOU AWARE that the concept of medicine is pure myth? That you cannot be poisoned into health with drugs neatly called medicines? That, instead, drugs cause our devitalization, diseases and deaths? That death rates drop by as much as 60% when physicians go on strike and cease to administer drugs? That the whole medical system is but another tool with which to control and degrade us? With which to dispatch to their makers "useless eaters" and consumers of the world's precious resources which our real international ruling despots fancy as theirs?
HAVE YOU EVER HEARD of the Club of Rome, NATO (NATO is in charge of the huge computer setup in Brussels, Belgium designed to constantly monitor every man, woman and child on earth and keep up-to-the-moment records.), the Round Table, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Trilaterial Commission, the Bilderbergers and a host of other organizations that are directed by the RIIA to implement the one world dictatorship they call the New World Order?
Jack didn't make these up. I was exposed to some of them thirty years before 1994. All of them are over ten years old. Most of these gotchas, if they had been true, would have happened by now. But none of them are true, except to people who are locked into the Conspiracy fantasy.
But say you believe them. In the back of your mind you have a Jew in your closet, an ATF man under your bed and an FBI man tapping your phone and reading your mail. You are under constant surveillance. They might even have gotten to you while you were asleep or drunk and planted a computer chip in you. You aren't going to do anything against anybody. You're neutralized and demoralized.
Are you finally getting it? It's a kind of twist on the old "If you can't fight them, join them" idea. Our Justice Department entered into an accommodation with the Conspiricist leaders, possibly unspoken, but in place just the same.
Consider what would have happened had they cracked down on the militias. There would have been a lot of martyrs, a few dead Feds and problems all around. They did give the Conspiricists regulation growls and occasionally jailed some hothead his leaders couldn't control. But otherwise, they simply let them alone. So by accommodating them by simply letting them alone, the militias do just what the Feds want them to do. They run around in the woods, away from everybody else, playing soldier, collecting ticks and chiggers, maybe some Lyme disease, a broken ankle here and there, an old vigilante gets a heart attack; no social problem at all.
Now back to propaganda and Officer Jack McLamb. Jack is an honest man. Even though he knows what he published is untrue he won't really lie. So he publishes the untruths as questions. A fine line, I know. But notice; he begins each with "Did you know?, are you aware?, do you know?" It's as if I should say "Did you know the moon is made of green cheese? Are you aware that Peruvian frogs fly like bats? Do you know that Hillery Clinton dyes her pubic hair?"
I'm sure Officer Jack McLamb has been asked if he turns his name list over to the Feds. I'm also sure he doesn't. The material he puts out neutralizes possibly dangerous people. And in scaring them half to death he as much as places them under house arrest, self-imposed. So good for you. Jack and all the other Conspiricist leaders. The counter-terrorist programs of our government and the Conspiricist leaders have prevented who knows how many violent acts committed by self-styled patriots.
So don't be caught up in the same paranoid frenzy which has stopped so many in their life's purpose. Analyze and study gotchas and propaganda if it's a subject that might get you involved and take over your life. Understand that whatever message is directed your way is produced by people who want you to believe in a certain way. All too often that way is their way, not your way. Don't be gotchaed or propagandized. Get a life and live it to your advantage and that of those you love. Don't be seduced into being a true believer who believes only that which reinforces his fantasies.
You may be familiar with the outrageous anti-government programs on short-wave. If so, I'm sure you've wondered why our government would permit such garbage going out over the air. You might think it's only because of certain rights. In my next issue I'll prove that our government wants them just as they are or they would be shut down immediately. Then you'll know that the Conspiricists are acting with full government approval.
