The secret of propaganda

Here's a quote from Joseph Goebbels:

"Propaganda is most effective when it is indirect. That is the secret of propaganda: to permeate the person it aims to grasp, without his even noticing that he is being permeated. Of course propaganda has a purpose, but the purpose must be concealed with such cleverness and virtuosity that the person on whom this purpose is to be carried out doesn't notice it at all."

This is what I find so chilling every time I go to see some big ass spectacular movie that everyone is lining up for. Behind all the cleverness and virtuosity is bloodlust and military murder. All the rest is cover for this hardening of our senses to the mayhem and violence our governments inflict on the world day after day. It seems so obvious to me and yet it is never talked about in any review I ever read. Eisenhower called it the Military Industrial Complex decades ago and it has only gotten stronger and more pervasive over time, so that now it's the elephant in the room or on the movie screen. These movies are about NOTHING even when they pretend to have a "message".They are a set up to get the guns out and start firing, and if they pose as being about the Triumph of the Human Spirit they are actually Triumph of the Will, and we know where that ended up going.

In Richard J. Evans's The Third Reich in Power he says "Goebbels's propaganda ministry's job was to coordinate and run the entire public presentation of the regime and its policies. "All that goes on behind the backcloth" Goebbels said "belongs to stage management."

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.