To read review of book by Ian Knapp follow the link: http://sophiasociety.org/2016/08/07/media-control-by-noam-chomsky.html

Quotes from the book:
“But more crucially they wanted to control the thought of the more intelligent members of the community in the United States, who would then disseminate the propaganda that they were concocting and convert the pacifistic country to wartime hysteria. That worked. It worked very well. And it taught a lesson: State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.” 

“Elite, the intellectual community that the Deweyites were talking about, can understand the common interests, what all of us care about, and that these things elude the general public.”

“We’ll drive the stupid masses toward a world that they’re too dumb to understand for themselves.”

“That’s a small percantage of the population. Naturally, anyone who puts these ideas forth is always part of that small group, and they’re talking about what to do about those others. ”

“Now there are two functions in a democracy: The specialized class, the responsible men, carry out the executive function, which means they do the thinking and planning and understand the common interests. Then, there is the bewildered herd, and they have a function in democracy too.”

“But once they’ve lent their weight to one or another member of the specialized class they’re supposed to sink back and become spectators of action, but not participants.”

“And there is logic behing it. There’s even a kind of compelling moral principle behind it. The compelling moral principle is that the mass of the public are just too stupid to be able to understand things. If they try to participate in managing their own affairs, they are just going to cause trouble.” “We have to tame the bewildered herd.” “You don’t give a three-year-old that kind of freedom because the three-year old doesn’t know how to handle that freedom. ”

“So we have one kind of educatedional system directed to the responsible men, the specialized class.”

“You just hold a bludgeon over their heads, and if they get out of line you smash them over the head. But as society has become more free and democratic, you lose that capacity. Therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda.”

“Public relations is a huge industry. They’re spending by now something on the order of a billion dollars a year. All along its commitment was to controlling public mind.”

“The other problem was that it was becoming possible for people to organize. People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They’re not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action.”

“That was essentially the message. A huge amount of effort was put into presenting it. This is, after all, the business community, so they control the media and have massive resources. And it worked, very effectively. It was later called “Mohawk valley formula” and applied over and over again to break strikes. They were called “scientific methods of strike-breaking,” and worked very effectively by mobilizing community opinion in favor of vapid, empty concepts like Americanism.”

“You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything. Its curcial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that means something: Do you support our policy?” pg. 26

“You have got to keep them pretty scared.”

“Most of the population does not even bother voting because it looks meaningless.”

“Bombing South Vietnam, that’s because we’re defending South Vietnam against somebody, namely, the South Vietnamese, since nobody else was there.”

Sophia Society