The New Federalist January 16, 1995 Pages 5-7American
AlmanacDon't Entrust Your Kids to Walt Disney!by L. WolfeWalt
Disney makes the cover of Time magazine in 1937 and 1954.During the
recent holiday season, more than 20 million American children found
the video of the Walt Disney cartoon feature Snow White under their
Christmas tree. In addition, several hundreds of millions of
dollars were spent on merchandising related to Snow White, which
was first released in movie theaters in 1937. In the six-month span
of its video release, the total gross from the Snow White marketing
blitz is expected to exceed $1 billion dollars, far more than the
gross national product of several countries in the developing
sector.
The Snow White blitz follows the success of yet another Disney
cartoon feature, The Lion King, which is now in its second run,
will be seen by more American children than any other movie in
history. That film, which was absent any human characters, took
place in an African game preserve, ruled over by predators; typical
of the oligarchical "ideals" in Disney films, the pathetic
creatures are portrayed as happy to be ruled over by the
carnivorous "royal" lions, who are occasionally shown finishing off
a few unspecified bones.
Meanwhile, the buildup has already begun for the next Disney
animated feature, Pocahontas, whose advance billing claims that it
is destined to become a "classic."
Since the 1930s, more than 3 billion people worldwide have seen
a Disney movie, each containing various brainwashing messages, with
most seeing dozens of these films. More than 100 million people
have a Disney videotape in their home, with many having a whole
shelf full. Several hundred million people have paid admission to
one of Disney's theme parks. Disney-related toys are among the most
popular in America.
As of 1993, Disney was the 24th most valuable American
corporation, an enormous conglomerate including four movie
companies, a distribution company, a cable television channel, a
record company, a book company, a chain of hotels, a National
Hockey League franchise named after a Disney movie, The Mighty
Ducks, a chain of 268 retail outlets that sell only
Disney-franchised products, and, of course, four theme
parksDisneyland in Anaheim, California, Walt Disney World, outside
Orlando, Florida, Tokyo Disneyland and Euro Disney, outside of
Paris.Reflecting Disney's global reach and penetration, The New
York Times proclaimed in 1992, that Disney's Mickey Mouse logo is
recognized by more youngsters in this country and around the world
than the American flag.
But as powerful as the Disney machine might seem, it is only a
predicate of a far larger Anglo-Venetian brainwashing operation
that created and controls Hollywood and mass entertainment. It is
this operation which picked Walt Disney up in the 1920s and funded
his studio. For their own purposes, this Anglo-Venetian elite
created the "Disney myth" of the self-made man, the embodiment of
"Americanism." And once they had created this myth, once they had
convinced the average American that Disney represented
"wholesomeness" and "family values," they used him and his movies
to help infect American culture with some of the most evil ideas of
the century.Disney Is CreatedWalter Elias Disney was born into a
humble working class family in America's Midwest at the turn of the
century. Nothing in his family background suggested any but the
most modest of futures for the young Disney. His early years were
characterized by a virulent anti-intellectualism that eschewed
"book learning" and an oft-repeated preference for the company of
farm animals to humans.
The first sign of Disney being picked up by the networks of his
oligarchical sponsors occurs in Kansas City in the early 1920s,
where he had wandered in search of a career as a "cartoonist." The
city was a center of recruitment activities for the then-resurgent
Ku Klux Klan. Seeking support for his cartoon and movie-making
ventures, Disney associated himself with the Masonic networks which
dominated the city and oversaw the Klan operations, joining the
Order of De Molay, which served as a feeder organization and "youth
group" for the Scottish Rite Freemasons. He was to remain a member
of the masons for the rest of his life, later offering it
significant funding.
But even with his Masonic connections, Disney could find little
success in his movie-making in Kansas City. Within the trade, he
was recognized as having little talent as an artist, though more as
a "huckster." What little success he did achieve was largely the
result of the work of others, most notably his partner, Ub
Iwerks.
In 1923, perhaps believing that his De Molay oaths might open
doors for him, Disney decided to go to Hollywood.
The Hollywood of 1923 was already a tightly controlled
Anglo-Venetian colony, emerging as the capital of the American film
making "industry" whose purpose was the subversion of the American
republic. At the top of the heap were powerful banking interests
and bankers, with direct connections to the powerful financial
houses of Europe. The bankers controlled the "lifeblood" of the
movie industrycapital. In that way, they effectively determined who
would survive and who wouldn't, who would be forced to merge and
who would be thrown on the dung heap, who would be stars, and who
wouldn't and what kinds of scripts would be funded for
production.
But such powerful figures, with rare exceptions, generally
stayed behind the scenes. To the average American, the powers in
Hollywood were the so-called moguls, such as Harry Cohn, Sam
Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, and Louis Mayer, etc., who ran the studios.
Beneath them was a stable of actors, actresses, directors, and
producers, and below them those who created the product that was
seen in the theaters around the country. These moguls were in turn
interconnected to the organized crime mob operations, especially as
the latter interfaced with theater chains and film
distribution.
At the level of the moguls and their bordello-like studios,
internecine warfare was encouraged, in much the same way that
families within the mafia might fight with each other for a larger
share of the spoils. When it got out of hand, or threatened to
affect the public's acceptance of Hollywood's product, the bankers
made sure that a lid was put on.
Hollywood in 1923 thus resembled nothing so much as a Sodom and
Gomorrah on the West Coast, whose decadence and sleazy
entertainment product held the nation in rapt attention.
When Disney arrived on the scene, entrance into the Hollywood
inner circle was tightly restricted. It was impossible to establish
an "independent" studio without the approval of the operators of
the bordello, its bankers.
Disney's membership in the de Molay lodge and some references
from Kansas City were apparently sufficient to get his toe in the
door.
Representatives of the most powerful bank of Hollywood, the Bank
of Italy of the brothers A.P. and Atilio Giannini, saw to it that
Disney was given a modest line of credit, and enough cash to get
his operations going and keep them slightly above water. The
critical funding relationship with the Bank of Italy, which became
the Bank of America, continued for more than 30 years.The
KingmakersThe Gianninis were directly connected into Venetian and
Genoese banking syndicates. By the time of Disney's arrival, they
were handling the funding of almost every aspect of the movie
industry, including all the major studios and the personal accounts
of the directors, stars, and the moguls themselves. They were also
handling all the personal banking of the Mussolini family.
Clockwise from right: Opening frames from the 1928 premiere of
Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie Disney's first animated film;
posters promoting other Disney animations, Pinocchio and Fantasia;
an ad for Snow White.Atilio Giannini, who handled the bank's film
industry loans, was a raving and open fascist, who later became the
head of the Mazzini Society and was placed under investigation as a
subversive fascist sympathizer; that investigation was quashed by
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
The bank was never investigated for its reported laundering of
hundreds of millions of dollars of mob monies, including funds from
the Capone syndicate and "Murder, Inc." of Meyer Lansky, et. al.
Some of these laundered funds found their way back into
Hollywood.
The Gianninis became the only source of short-term operating
capital for the film industry and its far-flung operations. It was
A.P. Giannini who personally decreed that a film in the can was to
be treated as collateral, as a form of merchandise, and given the
same kind of credit treatment as dry goods.
The Gianninis also helped create the "star system" and the
promotion of this new aristocracy. Both A.P. and his brother
insisted that the "bankability" of a film was based on proven
stars; their presence in the film was an effective guarantor of the
loan. If the Gianninis said that a given star had "fallen," that
meant the studio had to get rid of him or her if they wanted to
continue its line of credit or receive cash advances for films.
Disney was part of a "talent pool" that the Gianninis kept
around Hollywood. Disney showed a knack for survival in the
cut-throat competitive environment of Hollywood, mostly through the
manipulation of others around him; in addition, he displayed an
ability to produce a simple product, with modest appeal to the
tastes of the average American.A Mouse Is BornIn 1927, Disney's
first truly successful cartoon character, Oswald the Rabbit, was
stolen by Carl Laemmle's Universal Studios, which handled its
distribution; in addition, Universal stole much of his staff, in a
move that had the approval of Laemmle's bankers, the Gianninis.
Disney was being tested, before being let up another step in the
ladder.
He responded with the creation of his most famous character,
Mickey Mouse. Contrary to the mythology that has arisen about this
birth, Mickey was in fact the artistic creation of someone
elseDisney's partner Ub Iwerks. What gave the mouse its unique
"character" was Disney's own simplistic worldview and
personality.Unlike previous cartoon characters, even successful
ones, Mickey Mouse was "human" or anthropomorphic. As the Russian
film director Sergei Eisenstein was to write in the 1930s, Mickey
Mouse "was at once animal and human, showing the human in the
animal, and therefore, the animal in the human." This blurring of
the distinction between the human and the animal was to become a
consistent theme of all Disney's later output. It did not go
unnoticed by Disney's financial angels, who at that time were also
funding the promotion of Freudian and anti-Christian Darwinian
ideologies.
The first "Mickey" cartoon was also the first "talking" cartoon.
Disney had ordered that the change be made to a "talkie,"
immediately after the success of the Warner Brothers film The Jazz
Singer in 1927. He was no doubt influenced by his banker, Atilio
Giannini, who had stated that after The Jazz Singer, financing
would be available only for talking pictures.Steamboat Willie,
featuring Mickey Mouse, premiered to a theater stacked with Bank of
Italy clients and flacks on Nov. 18, 1928. The crowd cheered the
mouse, whose squeaky voice was Walt Disney himself. It was an
overnight sensation, with the industry papers heralding the birth
of a new star, Mickey Mouse, and hailing the "genius" of his
"creator," Walt Disney.
Up until this time, Disney had dealt with his controllers
through intermediaries, especially his brother and partner, Roy.
But following the carefully orchestrated success of the Steamboat
Willie premiere, a meeting was arranged in a Los Angeles hotel
between Disney and the Giannini brothers. He showed them drawings
for new Mickey cartoons and asked for a substantial infusion of
cash. A.P. Giannini is reported to have personally given the okay
for a major bank loan. At the same time, word was put out through
Giannini-controlled networks to promote Disney and his "Mouse,"
with the major studios ordered to cooperate in this
project.Hollywood's 'White Knight'At that time, it was common
wisdom that the so-called movie industry was controlled by moguls
who were mostly eastern European "Jews." However, these "Jews" had
almost nothing in common with the Jewish religion, and certainly
didn't follow any of its principles, especially Mosaic Law.
In fact, many of the movie executives had long since given up
practicing Judaism in any form. Louis Mayer, for example, once said
that he felt closer to the Catholic Church than to Judaism,
although he never converted; he did not practice the Jewish faith.
Harry Cohn deliberately went to work on the Jewish High Holy Days
to mock religious Jews; still others among the powers in Hollywood
became Christian Scientists, while Jesse Lasky became a follower of
the occult spiritualist Edgar Cayce.
These "Jews who were not Jews" had extensive links to organized
crime networks, especially those of "Jewish mobsters" Meyer Lansky,
Bugsy Siegel, etc.
They all were bound together by membership in a secular cult,
the Los Angeles lodge of the B'nai B'rith, whose spiritual leader
was Edgar Magnin. His grandfather had founded the I. Magnin
department store chain that was one of the first major accounts of
the Bank of Italy. Magnin became known as the "Rabbi to the
stars."
Magnin, and his followers in the Hollywood community, saw
Judaism as a racial question. He compared the B'nai B'rith and the
later large temple he built to the equivalent temple of the Masonic
order in Los Angeles. In his preaching, Magnin demanded the
secularization of the Jewish religion, and he ran the B'nai B'rith
and the temple like a business.
Magnin was closely associated with the Gianninis, developing a
relationship between the Bank of Italy and the B'nai B'rith.
At the time of the Mickey premiere, Hollywood was under
increasing attack from many quarters for eroding the morals of the
nation. The attack never significantly threatened the control over
its brainwashing product, although there were several calls for
limitations on its "lewdness." Much of the attack was deliberately
steered into overt anti-Semitism, thus concealing the real power,
as represented by the Gianninis and New York investment banker Otto
Kahn, behind Hollywood's perversity.
It was Magnin who reportedly helped convince the moguls that
Hollywood needed a "white knight," a "super clean" non-Jew whose
product could appeal to "family values." In surveying the scene,
Walt Disney with his loveable mouse was the most likely candidate
for this "central casting" role of the "White Knight of
Hollywood."
The Hollywood establishment allowed the "outsider" Disney to
create a studio whose product was aimed primarily at the children's
market, supporting him the effort, albeit behind the scenes. At the
insistence of networks directly associated with the Gianninis, the
Disney project was sanctified in the 1930 Production Code, which
stated that the industry must make a special effort to produce
films especially appropriate for children. Behind this was the
recognition that national addiction to Hollywood would be cemented
at the neighborhood theater level, and given continuity from
generation to generation by drawing children to the theaters.
Disney was in fact directly referenced in the code as exemplary of
the types of films needed for children.
At the same time, Disney himself was given the "star treatment,"
with newspaper and magazine articles making his name and his
character household words. By no later than 1931, the mere name
"Disney" associated with a cartoon or product meant its instant
acceptability by American families.
The fame and box office success of the Disney cartoons did not
translate into huge profits for his "independent" studio. In part,
that was because of the limits on the fees that trickled down from
the big-studio, mob-dominated distribution system; ultimately,
Disney was to make more money from its film-related products, such
as comic books and dolls, than from box office receipts. However,
his continual lack of needed cash kept Disney tied to the financial
lines of his controllers, and constantly in debt.
During the period from 1928 through 1934, Disney gradually
expanded the length of his product, from the short cartoon, to his
slightly longer Silly Symphonies, to his first short subject, the
enormously successful Three Little Pigs. Having reached and
extended the limits of short animated subjects, he decided to press
on, to a feature-length animated film.
The decision to make Snow White was termed a gamble by some, and
even "Disney's Folly" by others, but its success was all but
certain from the beginning. Disney had made the decision to go
ahead with the picture after a 1934 European tour where he was
feted by the oligarchy. The tour featured honors from the
Gianninis' and Hollywood's favorite fascist, Benito Mussolini, and
a royal dinner hosted by the King and Queen of England. It was
hardly likely that the oligarchical power that controlled Hollywood
would have let Disney fail.
To make sure that Snow White would be completed when Disney's
money began to ran out, the Gianninis dispatched Bank of America
director Joseph Rosenberg to view the partially completed film. As
he left the showing at the studio, Rosenberg, without emotion,
announced that the film would be a success and agreed to provide
all funds needed to complete the project (whose costs had expanded
from $250,000 to the then-astronomical amount of $1.7 million) and
give the studio an additional $1 million line of credit. Rosenberg
would provide similar services for Disney throughout the 1950s,
whenever the company needed money.
In fact, the buildup around "Disney's folly" served to keep
interest during the long, three-year period of production of Snow
White. The talk of possible failure further magnified the carefully
crafted perception of the film's success after its opening on Dec.
21, 1937. In its initial run, it grossed a then-all-time record of
$8 million, while its soundtrack recording of its songs became the
first such record bestseller, and its individual songs became
"number one" singles.How Disney BrainwashesThe production and
release of Snow White marked the beginning of a new phase of the
Anglo-Venetian's Disney project. Up to that point, Disney's primary
use for his patrons was to serve as a "white knight" amid the
perceived decadence of Hollywood; beyond that it was to establish a
niche in the "family entertainment" market, especially in the
children's market. With Snow White, Disney became a primary conduit
for brainwashing large segments of the population.
At its 1930s release, Snow White was seen by more children than
any other film in history. But unlike many movies, which are dated
and could be released only once, Snow White and other Disney
cartoon features contained no actors who grow old in later films,
dealt with "timeless" subjects, and hence were not dated. They
could be released in regular cycles (Disney chose seven years) to
catch each succeeding generation of children.
Thus, the Disney films become cultural icons, whose messages are
passed from generation to generation. In that way, the Disney film
became an essential part of growing up in America, with each
generation acknowledging that perceived fact.
Disney did not "create" the messages in his films per se, any
more than the current Disney studio did for such films as The Lion
King. Those messages are the product of a degenerate culture
dominated by the moral outlook of the same oligarchical interests
that created Disney.
As the result of a massive public relations campaign carried on
in his behalf, the American public was made to perceive Disney as
good; from that it followed, that what this good man produced, was
also good. In this way, critical judgment about what Disney
presented was suspended, in favor of the popular perception of the
"goodness" or "wholesomeness" of his product. People were
predisposed to like what he produced.
From this carefully constructed podium, Disney was set up to
preach, using as his "method" a form of Aristotlean reductionism
that became known as "Disnification." In each of his major animated
films, the Disney machine presented battles in a Manichean universe
between forces of "good" and "evil." Into this simple framework,
not-so-subtle brainwashing messages were inserted.
The Disney machine was instrumental in helping shift America
from one degraded paradigm to another, even more degraded, over the
span of several decades.
Most Americans consider themselves moral people, who believe in
God. At the same time, most Americans would say that Walt Disney's
films, especially his classics, such as Snow White are completely
compatible with their morality and their belief in God.
But nowhere in Disney films is there even any representation of
God. In fact, Disney effectively banned any mention of the word God
or the implication of belief in organized religion.
During the production of Snow White, for example, there was a
debate about a particular scene in which, in the Grimm Brothers
fairy tale from which the movie idea came, Snow White offers a
prayer to God, before going to bed. It was even pointed out by his
artists that most children offered the Lord's Prayer before they
went to sleep. "I don't give a damn," said Disney, "no one was
going to pray to God in my movie." The word "God" was excised from
the script, and Snow White was allowed to offer only a general
prayer.
Disney films, in general, reject the most fundamental principle
of Judeo-Christian belief, that man is created in the image of his
MakerImago Deiand that he is distinct from the animal, in that,
unlike any beast, he has the God-given power of creative reason.
Instead, Disney films portray animals with distinctly human
qualities, deliberately making any distinction between the species
seem arbitrary.Human creative reason is either never presented, or,
if it is, it is shown as something which gets people in trouble. In
its place, we are told to resolve things through "magic"; as Disney
was fond of saying when his story developers ran into dead ends,
where plot lines could not be resolved: "Sprinkle some of that
fairy dust." We are also told, as in Snow White, or Pinocchio, to
avoid reason altogether and to "think" emotionally, with one's
heart.
"The principle of any fine arts is to arouse a pure emotional
reaction in the beholder," said Disney in a 1955 interview,
rejecting the principles of the Golden Renaissance. "If I can't
feel a theme, I can't make a film that anyone else will feelI am
just corny enough to like to have a story hit me over the
heart."The desire to avoid representations of imago dei has
resulted in massive distortions of many fairy tales in the "Disney
version." For example, in Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid
but not in the popular Disney cartoon, the crux of the mermaid's
fervent desire is to acquire a human soul, which she associates
with the quality of "love." However, when given the ability to walk
and take the human form, she is rendered mute; she is hurt by the
cruelties of a romantic love relationship and the result is
tragedy. Ultimately, she returns to the sea, realizing that she can
never obtain a human soul, for that God-given quality is unique to
man.
Disney reduces this tale to a simple love story between a
mermaid and a man, with banal characterizations and cuteness, and a
sad ending, but with no discussion of the question of what makes a
human different from an animal, even one that looks like a human.
Where Andersen tried to help teach what makes one human, from a
Christian standpoint, Disney distorts and twists the search for an
answer into a sappy love story.
In general, Disney artists have had little trouble representing
evil, often creating images that have terrified little children.
They have had a far greater difficulty in representing the quality
of good, since it is a totally God-given quality of humanity that
cannot be reduced to a simple representation but must exist as a
more complicated thought object; what Disney produces as "good" in
his Manichean universe, comes out, as with the Little Mermaid, as a
sort of saccharine, phony sweetness.Disney vs. the Fairy TaleThe
moral education of a child begins as a series of questions to a
parent about events in the child's universe. But the subject of
such dialogue between parent and child is not the event itself, but
the thought object created in the child's mind by that event.
A classic fairy tale, of the type written by Hans Christian
Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, can assist in the formulation of
the thought objects that lead to the formulation of questions. But
the tale, in and of itself, doesn't answer those questions, and
does not alone provide the child the new thought object which
contains the germ of the answers to the moral dilemmas posed. Only
through such dialogue with a moral adult can a child's morality and
creative reasoning capacity be developed, such that he can become a
productive member of adult society.
But Disney and his sponsors have no desire to morally educate
children to become members of adult society. "If all the world
thought and acted like children, we wouldn't have any trouble,"
said Disney in an interview. "The pity is that even kids have to
grow up."
Disney claimed that the real key to the success of his features
wasn't simply in their appeal or power over children. He claimed to
have carefully chosen his subjects for their appeal to adult family
members through a form of nostalgia or sentimentality for their
youth.
"I am appealing to the child in each of us," he boasted, and its
desire to remain "childlike," free of the responsibilities of adult
society. Disney has thus helped entrap several generations in a
regressive, enforced infantilism as they take their children to see
or watch on video films that they saw with their parents years
before.
In that way, the anti-Christian, anti-human messages of the
earlier Disney films are constantly reinforced.
To accomplish this, and to make his desired points, Disney
consciously butchered the fairy tales, changing the plots, adding
or deleting characters, and enlarging or decreasing the roles of
others. In the Grimms' Snow White, for example, the seven dwarfs
are minor, nondescript characters; in his version, Disney used them
as visual representations of personality types. Similarly, the
pro-Royalist Disney demanded that Snow White be awakened by the
Prince's kiss, wanting audiences to relate to the "romantic,"
pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor, whose abdication occurred while the film
was in production, and whom Disney admired.
The family of the author of Pinocchio threatened suit over
Disney's murder of the original story. Disney's response to this
and any criticism: "After I am done, people will only remember my
version." Studies have shown him to be right: most people now think
that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the name of the fairy tale,
when it is a name Disney concocted.
Let's look at a few case studies to see the effect of Disney and
his films on America over the last fifty years.Case 1: Selling
Strategic BombingMost Americans have bought into the myth that Walt
Disney was a great "patriot," who supported the Allied effort in
World War II with anti-fascist cartoons and short training and
propaganda films.
The truth is that Disney, like most of the Hollywood moguls, was
a raving fascist who attended Nazi Party rallies in the 1930s,
according to recently published reports. Disney's contact with
proto-fascist movements began in the early 1930s, when he joined a
self-proclaimed group of "Young Turks," whose principal meeting
place was the Riviera Country and Polo Club. The invitation to the
group, which included Disney's drinking buddy Spencer Tracy, Leslie
Howard, Gary Cooper, and producer Daryl F. Zanuck, came from
another Disney friend, the actor Victor McLaglen.
McLaglen, with money from the Hearst syndicate and Giannini's
Bank of America, created a paramilitary group, which trained on the
polo fields, known as the "Hollywood Light Horse Regiment." The
group, with which Disney sympathized, held Bund-like mass rallies
and marches, and proclaimed itself ready for armed insurrection
against a "communist menace," which included the labor movement and
the New Deal supporters of Franklin Roosevelt. The group had
branches around the country, which included Ku Klux Klan members
and similar ilk, all ready for armed insurrection and a possible
coup against the U.S. government. A second group, co-founded by
Gary Cooper, the "Hollywood Hussars," espoused identical views.
Disney supported these operations, while staying in the
background. He was to continue to back proto-fascist causes until
the end of his life, with both he and his brother Roy providing
significant funding for the John Birch Society.
Disney's direct contact with the networks that supported
Mussolini was handled through his friends at the Bank of America.
His contact with the Nazis was through the Disney company lawyer,
Gunther Lessing, with whom he attended Nazi Party functions in the
mid- and late 1930s.Prints and Photographs Division/Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Library of CongressMr.
A.P. Giannini, the banker who funded Disney, with his family.
Giannini and other powerful bankers controlled the content and
casting of Hollywood's entertainment industry.
Prints and Photographs Division/ Library of CongressProducer
Louis B. Mayer Vittorio Mussolini, son of the Italian dictator,
is
honored at a Hollywood party in 1935.Lessing had a history of
involvement with British-backed Mazzini movements dating to his
service as a lawyer for the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. It was
Lessing who arranged, through Berlin, for Disney to hire Nazi
filmmaker and rumored Hitler girlfriend Leni Riefenstahl, only to
be forced to withdraw the offer following the Nov. 11, 1938
"Kristallnacht" attack on Germany's Jews outraged Americans.
Disney, however, refused to cancel her tour of his studio, despite
protests.
After the war began, Disney became one of Hollywood's most
outspoken supporters of the America First movement, a position that
he never altered until after the U.S.A. declared war Dec. 8, 1941.
When the army occupied his studio for defensive purposes in the
immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Disney screamed bloody murder,
denouncing President Roosevelt.
But with the war underway, Disney's controllers had a job for
him. He was given a government contract to make propaganda and
training shorts, at the behest of a "friend," Nelson Rockefeller,
then undersecretary of state for Latin American Affairs.
Ultimately, his work was put under the direct supervision of the
Committee on National Morale, headed by a Tavistock
Institute-linked section which included brainwashers Kurt Lewin and
Rensis Likert, as well as pollster Hadley Cantrill.
Some time in 1942, through these networks and London contacts
associated with his "polo" set, Disney was put into contact with
Major Alexander de Seversky, a former White Russian officer and
pilot, adviser to the U.S. military, the founder of Republic
Aviation on Long Island, and the designer of bomb-sights and
aircraft. De Seversky was assigned the job of popularizing a new
military doctrine of geopolitical utopianism: "strategic bombing."
To this end, he had penned the book, Victory Through Airpower, and
now recruited Disney to turn his book into a brainwashing film to
sell the doctrine to the American people and their leadership.
De Seversky claimed that the development of the airplane as a
weapon of war created the need for new military thinking. However,
rather than seeing air power as it should be understood, as an
extension of artillery bombardment, he argued that it was a "new
strategic weapon," whose capabilities must be divorced from any
other military service or related strategy. It was no longer
necessary, he said, to contemplate long and costly military
invasions of massed land- and sea-based forces. Instead, it was now
possible through mass, high-altitude bombing to render an enemy
militarily impotent and to destroy the will of its civilian
population to fight.
De Seversky argued that it required only that America build a
fleet of long-range bombing aircraft capable of carrying heavy
payloads, and to concentrate that "strategic bombing capability"
for attack on Germany and related targets in Europe and on the
Japanese islands, to bring the war on both fronts to a rapid close,
without the loss of American forces. To accomplish this
effectively, de Seversky demanded that the air forces be
constituted into their own separate military branch, as the British
had done, and given the power to develop their own strategy.
De Seversky had opened his book with a description of a
"strategic" bombing attack on the United States, resulting in the
total devastation of its cities and government. While such an
attack might not be possible yet in this war, he stated, it would
be possible soon, and he "predicted" that in the future, planes
would carry weapons of "enormous destruction" into the heart of
America. The only defense, he argued, was to have an even greater
air force that could "totally destroy" an enemy's capability to
make war, preemptively, if necessary.
De Seversky deliberately left out discussion of the consequent
monstrous civilian casualties. He seemed to imply an antiseptic and
surgically precise war, which, while admitting that some civilians
might be lost, would save more lives, especially American lives,
than it would cost.
The arguments in the book were to be used to justify a delay of
a second front in Europe, a move backed by Britain's Winston
Churchill, aimed at slaughtering as many Germans, Russians, and
Europeans as possible. But even more important, the psywar should
be seen as preparing the way for the post-war "nuclear pre-emptive
strike" against the Soviet Union as supported by the faction
associated with the evil Bertrand Russell.
The full power of the Disney studio was put behind selling this
strategy. What was produced was perhaps the most widely viewed pure
political propaganda film of all time. When it opened in 1943,
audiences were "blown away" by the power of its images, from the
black blur of bombing planes striking the United States as the film
opens, to what appears to be a fireball of destruction that marks
its end. With the "Disney" name on the film, its audience
acceptance was all but assured.
James Agee, film critic for The Nation, immediately saw the
power of the film's brainwashing message, and worried whether de
Seversky and Disney "know what they are talking about, for I
suspect that a lot of people who see Victory Through Air Power are
going to think they do. . . . I had the feeling that I was being
sold something under pretty high pressure which I don't enjoy, and
I am staggered by the ease with which such self-confidence, on
matters of such importance, can be blared all over the nation,
without being cross-questioned."
After the film's release, Cantrill and others reported poll
results showing an increase in support for "strategic bombing."
Churchill, according to his own account, ordered a private
screening of the film for himself and Roosevelt at the 1943
Casablanca conference, using it and the poll results caused by its
showing, to "sell" the reluctant President on a major step-up of
strategic bombing of Germany, and a further delay in the "second
front."
Disney remained a strong advocate of de Seversky's doctrine
throughout his life, and a strong supporter of the U.S. Strategic
Air Command. In the late 1940s, he was an outspoken advocate of the
Russell policy of use of nuclear weapons for a first strike against
the Soviet Union. Later, prints of Victory Through Airpower were
offered as "teaching tools" in U.S. history classes in high school,
free of charge, by the Disney Studio.Case 2: Disney and
EnvironmentalismSome time during a European junket in the
mid-1930s, Walt Disney was given a book by Felix Salten, a Viennese
pornographer from a salon kept by the Hapsburgs. The book was
Bambi, the story of a deer family in the forest, in an English
edition translated by Communist Party member Whittaker Chambers.
Disney remarked that the book exactly reflected his thinking about
the relationship between man and animals, and he stated his
intention to make it into a cartoon feature in the future.
Disney had himself always subscribed to the theories of Charles
Darwin and his modern co-thinkers, although it is hardly likely
that he ever bothered to read Darwin. Disney used eugenic theories
of race to explain his reasoning for never hiring a black, except
for the position of a porter, and his acceptance of the view that
some people's are "unfit" to govern themselves.
These views, and his contacts with circles in the British royal
family, brought him into contact with the Huxley family. In 1939,
he sought the advice of Sir Julian Huxley in the preparation of a
sequence depicting the origins of life for his "concert feature,"
the animated film Fantasia; Huxley was brought to the studio as an
adviser for the section orchestrated to Stravinsky's Rite of
Spring.
At the time, there was nothing resembling a mass movement for
"environmentalism" in the United States. With the release of Bambi
in 1942, Disney produced what is probably the most anti-human,
pro-environmentalist film of all time, in the form of a "children's
feature."
In the Salten story, the tamed animals revere humans as gods,
while the wild animals hate them as demons whom they call "Him." At
the beginning of the book, all creatures are willing to cede man
his dominion over nature. By the novel's end, this view is fully
dispelled, when Bambi, taken by his dying father to view the corpse
of the murdered poacher, is instructed that humans are the same as
animals, that they kill and are killed and that they have no
special right to dominion over nature.
When the book was first published in 1924, The New York Times
hailed this anti-human ethos: "The author has given us the life
story of a forest deer, and Felix Salten's comprehension of the
entire universe as well. . . . Throw away your Spinozan tomes on
pantheism and read Bambi."
Disney demanded that the book's central anti-human thesis be
kept intact. The forest, he told his artists, is the Lord's true
universe and His creation, and it was to be shown, in the most
brutal way possible, that it was man's intrusion into this universe
that destroys it. Against the advice of his own story people,
Disney insisted that the doe, Bambi's mother, be killed by human
hunters and that the killing be jerked for every tear possible from
the audience. He further insisted that a fire, caused by human
carelessness, destroy the forest.
In order to make the contrast between the human "beasts" and
their helpless, cuddly animal "victims" more obvious, Disney
insisted that all animal predators be excised from the script:
"There is nobody swooping down eating somebody else and their one
common enemy is Man. That's the conflict therekeep it
simple."Disney demanded realism in the depiction of all the
animals, but gave them anthropomorphic personalities: "I want them
to be human. I want people to forget that they are watching
animals."
He also inserted his own perverse Christian symbolism: Bambi is
born into a scene visually akin to the manger birth of Christ,
replete with animals hailing the birth of "a young prince."
The overall effect, especially on impressionable young children,
was a frightening anti-human experience that had the child
identifying with animals. Said critic Richard Williams in 1989, "I
came out of Bambi on my hands and knees."
Bambi had become the symbol of, first, all deer, and then all
animals, just as Disney intended. George Reiger, writing in Field
and Stream in 1980, observed that Disney and his staff were guilty
of the worst blasphemy. "In Disney's version, once Bambi is raised
in status from deer to Jesus Whitetail superstar, man's hunting of
deer becomes a crime comparable to the persecution of Christ."
Today, environmentalists and others have commented on the
effectiveness of Bambi's message, calling the revulsion against
harming animals because of their alleged human qualities, "the
Bambi syndrome."
But Bambi, whose box office draw has increased with each new
release, was only the first salvo in Disney's brainwashing barrage
on behalf of the Huxley networks. Coincidental with Juilan Huxley's
founding of the international environmentalist movement with
creation of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature
(IUCN) in 1948, Disney embarked on the development of what he
termed "true life" nature productions. These "live-action" films
portray animals as having human emotions, even personalities, to
blur all distinction between animal and human society. They further
imply that animals "think" or "reason" like humans, and that they
are "creative," denying the God-created distinction between man and
all lower species.
Here, Disney mirrors the thinking of the evil Jeremy Bentham,
the man who headed British intelligence at the end of the
eighteenth century and an avowed enemy of the American Republic.
Bentham claimed that animals "feel pain," much as humans do, and
therefore are to be given equal "consideration" with humans.
In Bambi and some of his other animated films that feature
animals, it might be argued that Disney was using the
anthropomorphic representations as a metaphor, in the same way as
some fairy tales do. However, it can be shown in almost every case
that Disney goes beyond what is necessary for a metaphorical
representation, to make a literal and emotional point about the
similarity between humans and animals.
In these "true life" adventures, which are the benchmark for
much of what comes later in "nature" propaganda films of the type
shown on public television, Disney goes a step farther into
outright lying. His method is a version of the "big lie" technique.
As he explained in a later magazine article, headlined The Roving
Camera, Disney tried to create the impression that what he
presented was fact, by overwhelming the audience with minute
detail, magnified by the big screen. Like Darwin's presentation of
large amounts of observable detail as proof of his unscientific
fraud, Disney indicated that all that is important in nature was
what could be seen by the camera. His Aristotleanism denies unseen
ideas that are the product of human creative reason, ideas which
become the basis for man's comprehension of nature and the basis
for his mastery of it, in the spirit of the famous commandment in
the Book of Genesis.
For his first non-animated film, Disney chose a study of Alaskan
fur seals which was shot by two nature photographers he had
encountered on a trip to Alaska. It was shot in the remote Pribilof
Islands, where fur seals migrate year after year to fight, mate,
bear children and then leave, all at once. Through careful editing,
Disney depicts seals with human feelings of love, anger, remorse,
etc. Disney likened the movie to an "animal soap opera." The
30-minute film was promoted into a huge success by the
Disney-friendly media.
The series progressed to longer feature-length movies, such as
The Living Desert and The Vanishing Prairie, released in 1953 and
1954. Disney demanded extensive editing to bring out as much
anthropomorphism as possible, even scripting the animal
"characters" as if they were, indeed, real actors.
Disney's nature series included increasingly frequent scenes of
graphic and even shocking violence and death. One critic remarked
that there was more killing going on in these so-called nature
films than in a dozen war movies. Disney defended this, stating
that violence is what characterizes all animal behavior, including
human behavior. To make it more palatable, he deliberately
"prettified" the blood and gore through orchestration to musica
technique today commonly used in horror and other graphically
violent films.The animal "stars" were given names, and their
relations with each other became totally human. In some of them, in
order to make a point in the "plot," Disney's dishonesty borders on
the grotesque. In The Legend of Lobo, for example, he used a
seemingly "wild" animal that in fact had been trained to do certain
tricks, not telling either audiences or critics about the
training.
Taken as a whole, the series is a most powerful array of films
devoted to the belief that animals are just like humans, while
presenting human civilization as their increasingly dangerous
enemy.
In a 1945 article for the Tavistock Institute thinktank-linked
journal, Public Opinion, Disney had advocated the mass distribution
of films through schools as the most efficient means of "educating"
youth. He put this into practice with his "true-life" series,
donating millions of dollars of audiovisual equipment and copies of
the films to schools across the nation. By the end of the 1950s,
nearly every child in America had seen at least one of these Disney
films and/or Bambi, either in the theaters or in school, where
specially prepared guides instructed teachers on what to say.
The "true-life" series reached an even wider audience through
the Walt Disney Presents television series. Meanwhile, the studio
continued to hammer away on rabid environmentalist themes in its
animated features, most notably 1001 Datamations, which has been
praised by animal rights activists for helping create the movement
against the use of animal skins and furs.
With The Lion King, the Disney Studio has returned to the basic
plot outlines of the "true-life" series, weaving them into a
full-length animated feature, set in an African game park, and
absent all evidence of human civilization. The film is a
celebration of the law of the jungle, with the not-so-hidden
message that animal society is the same as human in its brutality
and violence. The film is well on its way to becoming the most
widely viewed movie of all time.Case 3: Disney and the McCarthy
WitchhuntOne of the most disgusting and degrading acts of the last
half century was the toleration, and even support, by the majority
of Americans for the McCarthy witchhunt from 1945-54. Walt Disney
personally played a critical role in kicking off that operation,
sponsored by British oligarchical circles and their allies on this
side of the Atlantic, and in its "sale" to the American people.
De Molay lodge member Disney from the 1920s onward had been an
avowed "anti-communist" and supporter of fascist "anti-communist"
initiatives, especially those directed against organized labor.
Through his Masonic connections, Disney made contact with FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover, and from at least the mid-1980s, Disney
was volunteering information on "suspected communists" to the FBI.
According to documentation published in the recent Disney
biography, Marc Elliot's Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince,
Disney was providing regular reports to Hoover and to his agents in
the Los Angeles area.
Disney labelled a bitter 1941 union-organized strike against his
studio as communist-inspired, and sought to have its leaders
investigated by the FBI. The strike was in fact triggered by
Disney's abusive labor policies, which had his cartoonists and
other employees working on one of the lowest pay scales in the
industry. Disney's refusal to give anyone but himself public credit
for the creative product of the studio also contributed to the
bitterness of his abused workforce.
With Hoover's knowledge, Disney had turned to the gangster
Willie Bioff, who ran a studio-controlled union that was
effectively a branch of Murder, Inc., to help bust the strike. The
Roosevelt Justice Department, with little help from the FBI,
arrested Bioff before he could mount his intervention. Ultimately,
the strike was settled with the help of Disney's friend Nelson
Rockefeller; Disney saw to it that most of the union leaders were
either fired or forced to quit, in open defiance of labor laws then
already on the books.
Disney continued to snitch to the FBI, filing reports that were
most often the product of his paranoid imagination or pure
fabrications directed against the former strike leaders. With the
blessing of Hoover, in February 1944, Disney initiated the
formation of a Hollywood "anti-communist" brain trust, the Motion
Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals; the group
included 75 prominent actors, directors, and producers, as well as
Roy Brewer, the man who had been hand-picked by the jailed gangster
Bioff to run his union, the International Association of Theatrical
and Stage Employees (IASTE). With Disney as its vice president and
spokesman, the first task of these anti-communist crusaders was to
work against the 1944 reelection of FDR, whom they labelled "a dupe
of the international communist conspiracy."
Prints and Photographs Division/Library of Congress
Senator Joe McCarthy
Erich Andres/HamburgDresden, Germany, following the
1945 firebombing
EIRNS/Stuart Lewis
Elementary school children
celebrate "Earth Day." War on Drugs / Ganni Franco PirasIt is
important to note that, while there were many known and close
communist sympathizers and Communist Party members in and around
Hollywood at the time, the idea that they could or did control the
output of American films is pure nonsense. That output was
controlled by the same Anglo-Venetian controllers who created Walt
Disney and the Hollywood "dream machine" he became part of. For the
most part this crowd, which also effectively controlled the mobs of
Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, etc. was pro-fascist. And they, while
loudly organizing people to crow about the "red menace," authorized
the cutting of checks that paid for the stable of red-tinged
castoffs of the Frankfurt School who were employed to help in the
presentation of "Americanism" on celluloid.
It was Walt Disney who personally initiated the witchhunt in
Hollywood with a 1944 letter to Sen. Robert Reynolds (D-N.C.) which
promised the MPA's full support the attack on the "nest of red
vipers." Soon the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had
investigators all over town, handing out subpoenas.
By November 1947, HUAC, now headed by the rabidly anti-labor
Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, with the full blessing of the
industry, IASTE and the American Legion, launched the most
ambitious investigations in its history. It was during these
hearings that the committee focussed on a series of left-wing
writers, who became known as the Hollywood Ten. The ten refused,
under relentless pressure from Parnell, to answer the question that
was to become the hallmark of this era, later named for the even
more rabid, "red-hunter," the notorious Sen. Joseph McCarthy: "Are
you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" The
10 stood squarely on their First Amendment rights, yet were thrown
in jail for contempt.
The committee, working with Brewer and people in the industry,
proposed to crush the careers of those whom they targeted by the
creation of a "blacklist" that would ban anyone accused by the
committee from work anywhere in the industry for all time. On Nov.
24-25, 1947, a meeting of the motion picture industry's top people,
its studio bosses, its independent producers, and Brewer was called
at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City to discuss the
blacklist and whether they would agree to enforce it against the
Hollywood Ten and all others. Disney helped draft the infamous
"Waldorf Statement" which endorsed the blacklist and pledged its
enforcement against the Ten and anyone else who was found to be
"subversive or disloyal." He stood by this action for the rest of
his life.
By May 1947, the mere receipt of a subpoena by HUAC as an
"unfriendly witness," or even leaks from the FBI of investigation,
were sufficient grounds to be blacklisted. There were whimpering
protests from some corners, but Disney and his cronies ignored
them.
The snitch Disney claimed that one of the proudest days of his
life was his testimony before HUAC as a "friendly witness" on Oct.
24, 1947, in the afternoon session, where he attacked the
communists who had "conspired" against his studio and defended the
blacklist, presenting fabricated "evidence" against the
strikers.
The "blacklist" was soon a fact of life not only in Hollywood,
but in other industries across the country. Tens of thousands of
innocent people and their families were denied employment and
hounded by the witchhunt apparatus. The degenerate homosexual and
drunkard, Sen. Joe McCarthy, thanked Disney and the others in the
MPA for showing the way to rest of the country.Case 4: "One Pill
Makes You Larger. . ."Walt Disney, in the years before his death in
1966, was already, as were many right wingers that he associated
with, a vocal critic of the growing San Francisco-based psychedelic
counterculture. However, the same Walt Disney played a crucial role
in helping to create that counterculture.
As early as the Silly Symphonies of the 1930s, Disney had been
experimenting with the bold use of color and loud sound that
resembled nothing so much as a hallucinogenic drug-induced stream
of consciousness. Much of this experimentation later found its way
in to Disney's 1941 so-called concert feature, Fantasia. This was
later to cause Life magazine to remark that Fantasia was the first
LSD-based work of art, and that Disney was in fact the godfather of
all psychedelic art.
But there is a more direct connection between Disney and what
was to become the psychedelic counterculture. Since at least the
1920s, Disney had been obsessed with Lewis Carroll's
cocaine-influenced "children's" story, Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland. He was, he claimed, intrigued with its surrealistic
imagery, its highly illogical "logic," and its plethora of bizarre
characters. By 1945, after complicated negotiations, he secured the
rights to the story and commissioned what was to be a six-year
project to bring it to the screen.
To develop his vision, Disney turned to the one person he
thought most qualified to do the job: Aldous Huxley, already
well-known in the Hollywood set as the advocate of hallucinogenic
drug experience and who was later to become one of the architects
of the British-created LSD culture of the 1960s. He had come into
contact with Aldous Huxley through contact with his brother Julian,
first meeting him when the latter was collaborating with Disney on
Fantasia.
Disney explained to Huxley that he wanted to produce a "work of
the head," something that would be beyond a children's story, that
would produce a "dizzying experience."
Huxley worked on several scenes and an overall script outline
for the project, but before he could finish, he became a victim of
Disney's imperious rage. Huxley made the mistake of speaking out
against the brutality used against strikers, including his son, at
Warner Brothers. Disney seized the work that he had done on Alice
and asked him to leave.
Disney, following the Huxley outline, demanded that the film's
imagery be at once real and totally surreal, at once frightening
and at the same time pleasing, and always overwhelming. The
now-famous images of the Red Queen, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad
Hatter and his Tea Party came out of these sessions. When the work
was finally completed in 1951, he was certain that he had produced
a masterpiece. Following the original scenario outline from Huxley,
the film came out as almost a "free association" series of scenes,
with jarring and often disjointed images. It achieved the
"dizzying" effect that both Huxley and Disney had desired.
Disney had produced a movie that was ahead of its timeor more
precisely, was to shape a time ahead. Later studies have shown that
of all the Disney films, Alice in Wonderland, with its bright
colors and surreal, free associated images, is one of the most
remembered by the generation that was to become known as the "baby
boomers." Many were not yet born when the film premiered and others
too young to see it. But see it they did, in its many releases, or
later when it became the first (and only) Disney cartoon feature to
be regularly shown each year on television.In the 1960s, with the
nation's campuses primed with doses of mescaline and LSD, Alice in
Wonderland began to play back in another "theater." Psychiatrists
interviewing the takers of these hallucinogenic drugs, asked their
subjects to describe the visions in their "trips." "It was like
Alice, man," many would say. "You know, like the cartoon. Like wow,
you know, like shrinking. All those colors."Alice in Wonderland,
seen years ago when they were children, was now flashing back in
their drugged minds. As this became known, the movie, along with
Fantasia, became "a thing" to see and there were new
"appreciations" of their "transcendental" importance.
One of the hit songs of those days by the San Francisco rock
group The Jefferson Airplane, was called White Rabbit. It described
several images of a drug trip that could have been lifted directly
from Disney's Alice. Asked where they got their inspiration for the
song, Grace Slick, the lead singer, replied, "From Disney, man.
This is Disney. You know, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, and
hey, the White Rabbit. Feed your head, man."A Cultural IconOn July
17, 1955, Disney opened the first "theme park" in history in
Anaheim, California. It was as different from an amusement park as
Disney's animated features were from standard cartoon fare. The
concept, as Disney explained it, was to produce a "new kind of
reality," something akin to what the cyberjerks today call "virtual
reality," an artificially created universe, relying on fooling the
senses, which would provide the basis for believable interaction.
From the moment a person enters the admission gate, in fact, from
the moment he or she stands in line for a ticket, Disney takes
control of his experience, allowing him to make perceived choices
but only from a range of controlled choices. This is what
brainwashers call a "controlled environment."
In the theater, or in front of the television set, there still
exists a seemingly impenetrable physical barrier between you and
the action you are watching: the screen. In its place, Disney now
sought to create a "three dimensional life space" that people would
wander around it. By presenting carefully scripted entertainment,
as he told those involved with the project, Disney could make the
artificial reality now so much more compelling that people would
come away having "learned" things that they had neither thought,
felt, or believed before.
While Disney directed a hand-picked staff drawn from his studio
on the Disneyland project, key guidance came from outside, from the
Stanford Research Institute (SRI), one of the leading outposts in
the United States of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in
London, the British Royal family's psychological warfare
center.
The combined effort by Disney and his brain-washer advisers
produced a park divided into "fantasy" theme areas that dragged an
adult back into a series of feeling states. The effect was to
create a sense of nostalgia for an idealized past and a present and
future based on this. The feelings were triggered by
Disney-controlled images. For a child, the experiencing is totally
overwhelming, making a long-lasting impact on their young minds
which is reinforced by and reinforces their attachment to
Disney.
Disneyland's 1955 nationally telecast opening amplified its
effect on the American population.
Disney's television show in 1955 was the most widely watched
program by American families; that show featured prominently the
person of Walt Disney, who now was cast, Hollywood style, as
America's favorite old uncle, who was the symbol of all that was
"right" with America. His creation of Disneyland, "America's
favorite place," the "Magic Kingdom," was the proof that this was
so.
Tavistock-linked anthropologists have more recently started to
describe Disneyland and Orlando, Florida's Walt Disney World as
quasi-religious, twin "shrines" of American popular culture.
"It is clearly a pilgrimage site in that people go there not
just for a simple vacation but to relive the myths that they group
up on," says Conrad Kottak, a University of Michigan anthropologist
who analyzed both the mass television culture and Walt Disney
World. "You go there to relive your childhood and to see the things
that passed for gods and goddesses. It is going to see a national
mythology at a sacred site."
"People come here because they feel it's something that they
need to do," said an executive of Walt Disney World. "There is an
emotional connection to Disney at a very early age. You almost have
to come here at some time."Disney's America?"I am not Disney any
more," Walt Disney told an interviewer two years before his death
from cancer in 1966. "I used to be Disney, but now 'Disney' is
something that we have built up in the public mind over the years.
It stands for something that you don't have to explain what it is
to the public. They know what it is."
Disney thus described one of the effects of a four-decade
Anglo-Venetian cultural warfare operation against the American
population, in which he played a willing, if not always witting
part. Disney, through his films and his actions, had helped to
undermine the ability of Americans to reason creatively, to
comprehend their nation's history and the meaning of their lives.
He had "entertained" them into believing that he and his film and
theme park product represented all that was "wholesome" and "good"
about America, beckoning them to turn from complicated problems to
sentimentalism.The Disney empire continued to trade off this
mythology after its putative founder's death. However, after years
of running on "autopilot," in the late 1970s and 1980s, it started
to falter, producing an inferior brainwashing product, and losing
money. The company became a target for takeover specialists who
planned to dismantle it. At that point, London and Wall Street
intervened to protect their decades of "invested" capital in the
Disney psychological warfare machine. The company was saved from
the corporate raiders, by, among others, Michael Milken, given a
new leadership, headed by Michael Eisner, and refocussed around
producing animated films according to the "classic" Disney formula,
of which The Lion King is the latest in a string of box office
successes.
Last year, Disney initiated efforts to construct a $650 million
"American history" theme park in Virginia's Piedmont Hunt Country.
Ironically, they ran into strong opposition from the
environmentalist and protectionist movement which Disney's films
had helped create; but in the end, Disney was delayed and forced to
look for a new site only by the uncertainty of the financial
markets and the company's vast debt.
In the debate on "Disney's America," as the theme park is to be
called, some historians and others challenged Disney's ability to
accurately portray history. However, no one ever raised a peep
about the profound negative effect that Disney, for more than five
decades had had on the mind of the American population. In fact,
all the opponents made sure to pay homage to Walt Disney as a
"creative genius" and great patriot.
And, while there was locally based opposition to the
billion-dollar theme park, the majority of our citizens saw
absolutely nothing wrong with it and were disappointed by the
project's delay.
To this day, the myth first constructed by those who created
Disney persists, the myth that, while there are problems with
Hollywood in general, Disney is "wholesome" and is something to
which we can entrust the minds of our children. After all, didn't
your parents entrust you to Disney?
Yet, if we look at the effects of these decades of cultural
warfare against the minds of our population, we can see that each
succeeding generation has been more morally confused, less mentally
and creatively capable than the last. Each has been more attracted
to fantasy states, to emotionalism rather than reason, and to
increasing levels of pessimism. Disney and his films, reappearing
every seven years like locusts, have played a not insignificant
role in pushing us down this slippery slope. And yet, the American
population, seduced by the sentimentality and the fantasies spun by
the Disney brainwashing machine, eagerly await their next dose of
mental poison.
If we are to have the moral fitness to survive as a nation, then
we must reject such pernicious "entertainments," as represented by
Hollywood and its Disney machine in favor of our moral
responsibility. We must cease to want to live in "Disney's America"
and reclaim our nation for ourselves and, most of all, for our
children.