Deciphering The Shadows Of Power (VIDEO)

On the April 20 episode of Real Politik James speaks with historian and bestselling author James Perloff about the hidden elite influences on Western societies, politics and history over the past century. Mr. Perloff is the author of, most recently, Truth is a Lonely Warrior: Unmasking the Forces Behind Global Destruction (2013) and the classic The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline (1988). He has conducted research and published articles on America’s hidden history for over thirty years.

Perloff has also written the script for the soon-to-be-released Free Mind Films feature length production, Shadow Ring, also largely based on his historical research.

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The two discuss Perloff’s most recent book, specifically addressing elite influences on the media, culture, and Americans’ understanding of their national history.

James Perloff’s website is jamesperloff.com

Interview Highlights

In Truth is a Lonely Warrior James spends significant time examining media and culture, examining early in the book how media power is concentrating more and more into fewer hands.

This oligarchy … knew that to get public acceptance of its wars and its trade treaties and so forth, you’ve got to influence public opinion. But what better way than the media? And that’s why today you have over 90% of the media being owned by six corporations. Those six corporations are Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Newscorp, CBS and NBC Universal. In 1983 it was 50 corporations controlling 90% of America’s media. You can see how these mergers of entertainment and news are generating this monopoly where it’s almost comparable to a communist state, where you have just six corporations running everything. And there’s not much difference between these corporations.

… As I like to point out, it’s the boss who calls the shots. Since these TV stations, journals, and movie studios have the same owner they cannot step outside the lines. In fact, I was the guest on one alternative media network, and the host of that particular radio show told me that he used to work for one of these big, 50,000 watt radio stations. He had a talk show, and one day he did a show on 9/11. Then he was called in to the [manager’s] office and told, “You never talk about 9/11 on this station again.” That’s why he left and went in to alternative media. Anyone can investigate this fairly easily. I have a blog post on my website, called “A Century of Mainstream Media Lies,” which demonstrates how the media has in fact been used to give the public false illusions that have led us in to wars and other negative developments.

James was a contributor to the John Birch Society’s main organ, The New American, for over thirty years. Since he became a more vocal critic of Zionism, however, he has stopped publishing there to avoid confirming the well-known smear of that organization’s alleged anti-semitism. “They were the original truth movement back in the seventies when I joined them,” he observes.

They were already talking about the Council on Foreign Relations and Federal Reserve. And, really there was no other mass organization that was doing that. Of course, they were typically labelled “Nazi,” “racist,” when in fact they weren’t that at all. I can guarantee you, they never mentioned Zionism … They were the alternative media choice for a lot of people. There weren’t too many others. Back when I was a kid in the sixties growing up in the Boston area, if you wanted to get news there were very limited choices. You could either read the Boston Globe or the Boston Herald–the Globe represented basically the Democratic Party point of view and the Herald represented the Republican point of view–or you could watch the three TV networks–CBS, NBC and ABC, and beyond that what could you do? If you went to the public library and looked up “Federal Reserve” you would not find Eustace Mullins’ book there. G. Edward Griffin had not written his book yet. And so all you had was what the World Book Encyclopaedia had to say about the Federal Reserve and what the government wanted you to know, unless you happened to know somebody in the Birch Society, or one of the other very few alternative groups back then. There was no internet. You had no way of finding out the truth, and that’s one of the advantages today we have with shows like this and with the internet we can all interconnect and communicate. And so many people have learned the truth as a result of this modern technology.

In his research on elites James Perloff has come to the conclusion that there are several methods elites use for destabilizing countries, with wars being the most effective. Yet other techniques, he argues, involve a more subtle undermining of a nation’s political processes and culture that could be easily confused with modernization. He refers to these as

secondary means of destroying national sovereignty to restructure the world and make way for this new world order and world government … The Illuminati have long opposed monarchies. and the reason is quite simple, Let’s say that you’re a Rothschild bankster, and you want to take over an imaginary country, Finlandia. And Findlandia is ruled by a king. You have a big problem, because even though you’re a rich Rothschild banker you can’t get in to the bloodline of that king. That is one of major reasons why they have funded revolutions over the years, to overthrow kings and replace them, if not with a communist dictatorship like in the Soviet Union, with a democracy.

The reason that the Illuminati are very fond of democracy–remember “Make the world safe for democracy”–is that they know that with their wealth, that to control a nation and a democracy is 51% of the vote. With your wealth and you running the media, getting 51% of the vote is a cinch.

Perloff asserts that the handful of powerful families and interests routinely use religion and culture as a means by which to gain social and political control, and over the past several decades there can be little confusion over the fact that old traditions and symbols have been replaced by new ones, often delivered through new media conduits such as television. “What they call the ‘Golden Age of Television,’” he notes, “the years of I Love Lucy and Sargent Bilko and The Honeymooners, was designed to get Americans to buy televisions. Because if you had the stuff that you see on TV now then–this occultic stuff and political agendas being advanced on television then like it is now people would not have bought televisions. We had a more traditional moral code back then across the nation, so to get the televisions into the home they had to have this wholesome, G-rated entertainment, right? You had Superman, who would talk about, “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” right? Father Knows Best. You could never have a show by that name now.”

By the early 1960s television programming began to change, and in 1964 The Beatles were introduced to American audiences, spearheading a set of unmistakably new social sensibilities via their image and music that would be emulated by young men throughout the remainder of the decade. “Dr. John Coleman, former officer at MI6, said The Beatles were really a creation of British intelligence and the Tavistock Institute, which is a think tank devoted to mind control. When we were hippies we always thought of The Beatles as kind of these icons who revolted against the establishment. It turns out that they were actually part of the establishment and the whole dialectic of getting a revolution going and changing the basis of American culture and American thinking.”

Professor James F. Tracy is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. James Tracy’s work on media history, politics and culture has appeared in a wide variety of academic journals, edited volumes, and alternative news and opinion outlets. James is editor of Union for Democratic Communication’s Journal Democratic Communiqué and a contributor to Project Censored’s forthcoming publication Censored 2013: The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2011-2012. Additional writings and information are accessible at memoryholeblog.com.