by Johnny McNeill – unpublished author of ‘Gaslighting Gilligan‘ (© 2017 – free download – released via Berlin on 25th June 2017).

“The best propaganda is that which works invisibly to penetrate the whole of life, without the public having any knowledge of its propagandistic initiative”. Joseph Goebbels.

An excerpt from #GaslightingGilligan in the chapter ‘Nostalgia’ (pages 150/151);

‘Like the flatscreen panacea, Narcisstate’s Radio BU’s would flood the populous’ airwaves with pretexts created to give extended play to many, many more much older songs spanning the 60’s until early 2000’s for the Boomers through to the Millenials alike…

Musical nostalgia advertising had always been a premier selling point to draw consumers into buying products and so just a few more wouldn’t hurt. A lot more would hurt even less. All manner of all things and people past would now become their present and an emotional romanticised version of their future within Narcisstate…

Proxy platitudes filled TV, radio and ‘suggested’, ‘sponsored’ and shared social media proxy pages to universally resurrect the childhoods of all… [with] Supermarkets and malls seamlessly turned into Boomers, Gen X, Y and Z retail disco’s…’ – ‘Gaslighting Gilligan’ © 2017 (free download)

I genuinely didn’t want to write this piece and had been putting it off for a couple of weeks – until now. I procrastinated mainly because so many of my friends were enjoying sharing an important part of their past but also because people in general can get very angry at unpopular truths – and angrier still – at the messenger of such truths…

“They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies – the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions“. Aldous Huxley, ‘Brave New World Revisited’, 1958

Nearly six decades later we unwittingly revel in this Brave New World where despite our innate drive not only to belong but to ‘matter’, the overwhelming majority of people always have and will always remain inescapably obscure. That’s just a fact of life on a planet that’s now nearing 8 billion souls – all with our “infinite appetite for distractions” platformed principally by broadcast media.

However as I’ve been trying to relay to people since 2017, Facebook – as part of ‘the flatscreen universe; cinematic, TV and tablet’ provided a conduit not only for individuals to matter but to electronically elevate our very existences; to be acknowledged beyond ourselves and our immediate circle and as such, It afforded us an ‘excitable’ yet relatively effortless ‘escape’ route from monotony through a dopamine driven technological platform that enabled us to acquire yet another form of instant gratification via a ‘superficial transcendence’.

Upon having this potential to sell to the entire online world ‘This is me. This is who I am’ or rather more accurately ‘This is [my version of] me. This is who [I want you to believe] I am’, literally billions of us began to partake in the third largest PsyOps campaign platform in human history – so called ‘social‘ media.

We excitedly offered up our experiences (and information!) by voluntarily projecting our lives into a vast anonymous audience. But only to present a positively cherrypicked facsimile version of ourselves in order to represent (mainly) that which was very best of us – in our equally anonymous, occasionally painful and even shameful existences. (As a 25 years served ex-Squaddie and male survivor of domestic abuse, I’ve been especially guilty of this).

However a healthy way to project ourselves honestly in a positive light and in particular, to express our individuality, is to let people know who we really are through our musical choices; through the transcendent, even spiritual influences with which we made unforgettable, profoundly emotional connections that go towards ‘summing up’ our very being.

Connections like the first album we ever saved up our pocket-money for and bought – mine was Blondie’s ‘Parallel Lines’ (thumbnail image courtesy of Chrysalis Records) – which has the emotional, as well as psycho-sexual capacity to move us so powerfully (as Debbie Harry did me) that long-forgotten but hard-wired music and lyrics can do – to transport us back in time instantly…

…to a specific place that saturates us in pre/adolescent memories associated with near-tangible feelings in more normal, more innocent times which (I hope) have been mostly good for most people, that have helped define our individual character today and as I’ve alluded, we can genuinely, positively, publicly express through our musical preferences.

However conversely, it’s this very same emotional power housed specifically in musical nostalgia that is being made to embody a ‘collective popular’ experience – and as such has made it a perfectly invisible, brilliantly deniable, gaslight-propaganda weapon;

I really don’t like to be the one to break it to you all but this viral ‘Ten albums over 10 days’ initiative encouraging each of us to tag a Facebook friend and exponentially share every day, didn’t just materialise in some random spotty kids bedroom. No, this is part of invisibly vast and sustained propaganda plan that I’d been tracking and piecing together since September 2016.

“Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves”. Eric Hoffer

It’s another #ToryAnalytica propaganda drive sealing us within a nostalgic ‘pseudo-reality’ to transport us back to the past, “tourists in your own youth” that is designed to simultaneously, subconsciously associate and invoke childhood experiences and cherished feelings reflected in long-lost relatives, relationships, friendships and fashions – all against a selectively-romanticised backdrop of ‘better’ British times…

‘Ten albums over 10 days’ is another thread of the same pervasive #Volksgemeinschaft soap opera we’ve been sealed within, which most recently has taken the form of #ClapForTheNHS & #ClapForCarers, as well as #ClapForBoris but which itself is all rooted in the decades long drip-fed Psychosocial Engineered culture of British exceptionalism.

If you want a fuller picture of how we’ve been made “tourists in our own youth” then click my 2017 piece ‘Brexit – A Very British Cult-Film Classic Cinematic Coup’ between the flags (below my musical collage).

All I ask is that when the penny finally drops – and it will – is that you direct your individual and collective anger at the fascist propaganda proponents themselves and not at me – the mere messenger.

NB – Yes it’s tad self-indulgent but it is my blog after all and so the collage below is an honest, ‘musical sum of me’. It’s in no particular order although since first hearing them in 1991, R.E.M. have been and continue to be my spiritual mainstay and tour-guide on this plain, through the hard times and the good.

Also, yes it’s more than ten albums but then I couldn’t give a fuck for #ToryAnalytica instruction or their propaganda campaigns. Oh and don’t forget – like it or not – this 👉#TickTockTroops👈 is inevitable…

‘Brexit – A Very British Cult-Film Classic Cinematic Coup’ (2017)

🇬🇧 https://wp.me/p94Aj4-ho 🇺🇸(🇷🇺)

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“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth”. Khaled Hosseini.

#NarcissistFascist characteristics…

‘Gaslighting Gilligan’ by Johnny McNeill; a contemporary dystopian ‘fiction’ about the intrinsic, interconnectedness of both personal & State-political domestic abuse, was released from Berlin on 25th June 2017. It is copyright ©️ but is a *free*-to-share public-service PDF download from here. 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇨🇦🇦🇺🇳🇿

Twitter: @GasGilligan