February 25, 2014
Obeying the Dog Whistle
By Victor Volsky

In George Orwell's immortal dystopia Animal Farm, the ruling pigs distilled the revolutionary ideology for the stupider animals, such as the sheep, hens and ducks, to a simplistic but highly useful slogan, "Four legs good, two legs bad". Not only did it explain to the dumb masses the essence of the pig-led revolution, but it also performed an important ancillary function of silencing the opposition. Any time somebody tried to question the leaders' guidance, the proletariat on cue would start chanting in unison, "Four legs good, two legs bad," drowning out the miscreant.

How often have I wondered, listening to left-wing intellectuals bloviate on TV, how these ostensibly educated and intelligent people could, with a straight face, robotically spout arrant nonsense while contemptuously ignoring the contrary factual evidence cited by their ideological opponents, or their attempts to point out glaring contradictions in progressive "reasoning" (to the extent that reciting the talking points by rote can be characterized as "reasoning").

Conservatives are particularly aggravated not so much by the arguments of their leftist opponents as by the latter's superior attitude and reluctance to engage in serious intellectual debate. The leftists always look and sound as if they know everything worth knowing and see no need to validate their beliefs in an open give-and-take. They show palpable disdain for the opponents of their worldview whom they barely acknowledge as really human, much less respect as their equals.

But why do leftist intellectuals seem so unabashedly, even proudly, dumb? What's behind their utterly predictable, kneejerk behavior? Are they just plain stupid? To be sure, there is no dearth of dumb individuals on the left (just watch MSNBC), but most of them are smart enough. The real reason is different: They are just Pavlovian dogs obeying the dog whistle.

In his famous experiments Nobel-prize winning Russian biologist Ivan Pavlov trained his dogs to react to the bell they had been taught to associate with feeding in exactly the same way as if food was actually being delivered. The conditioned reflex, as Pavlov called this behavior, or the dog whistle in contemporary American parlance, hold pride of place in the ideological playbook of the progressives.

Many of them have impressive intellectual equipment which they employ quite effectively in their mundane pursuits. But in all matters political and ideological they rest their brains, allowing the progressive software planted in their minds by upbringing, brainwashing in the guise of education, and mass culture to take over.

From early on, they are trained, like Pavlovian dogs, to respond in a prescribed manner to certain stock terms and formulas: "wealth sharing" good, "capitalism" bad; "progressive" good, "conservative" bad; "'New York Times' good", "Fox News" bad; "Democrat" good, "Republican" bad... In short, four legs good, two legs bad. It is a very effective way of inculcating the approved attitudes and views into the minds of the adepts of the dominant creed.

Read more:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/02/o...l#ixzz2uK1WtkkH

Another great article for book marking and rereading.

Bezmenov describes how the Soviets used Pavlov's research to 'demoralize', i.e. ideological subversion of the US:

Zitat

---

" . . . They are contaminated; they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind[s], even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people... the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible . . ."
Yuri Bezmenov 1984

---

Zitat

---

" . . . in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and [the] opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower [are] spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ‘ideological subversion,’ or ‘active measures’—‘[?]’ in the language of the KGB—or ‘psychological warfare.’ What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country . . ."

---