You've Never Heard Of Alex Carey

"'Americans are the most propagandized people of any nation.'"

"The subject embraces a 75-year-long multi-billion dollar project in social engineering on a national scale."

"'The manufacture of consent... was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy' Walter Lippman wrote. 'But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique... Under the impact of propaganda, it is not longer possible... to believe in the original dogma of democracy.'"

And other fun facts you would learn if you lived in a democracy. It's worth pondering on why any half-way decent course on Russian or Chinese history in America thoroughly discusses their social engineering projects- the Five Year Plan, the Cultural Revolution, etc.- as a given, while our own social engineering projects- corporate propaganda, the National Highway Act- are never even mentioned in spite of being significantly larger in scale. We don't even know that there were social engineering projects in this country. Imagine being a Russian student and never learning about the Five Year Plan or a Chinese student never learning about The Great Leap Forward (and the parallels of the US to these massive state-controlled behemoths are frequent and often unflattering), and you're beginning to get a sense at how fucking stupid American education is. And to rub it in, you get smug libertarians like John Stossel (who is, ironically, a pure and perfect product of our education system) snarking on how American kids are ignorant because teachers get paid as if they somewhat resembled human beings. If you don't know the kind of things Carey talks about, you're ignorant about 20th century American history- just like I was before I read the book, and probably still am. It would be remarkable if it were otherwise.