'Psychological resistance to facing election fraud'

[SpaceBuddy008]

HighLights & InSights.......

Diane Perlman: 'Psychological resistance to facing election fraud'

This article has been read 3664 times.
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The Silence of the Scams

By Diane Perlman, Newtopia Magazine

for the entire article:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=20738

Few Americans know about the historic event that happened on January 6, 2005, the official date for counting electoral votes. For the first time since 1877, congressmembers challenged the electoral count. Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio, accompanied by the lone senator, Barbara Boxer of California, led the challenge of the Ohio vote count. Although massive fraud was reported around the country, only Ohio was officially cited.

It is curious that an issue so profound and consequential is barely on the radar screens of most Americans, especially those who voted for Kerry.

Though we are not certain of the actual outcome, statistically impossible discrepancies exist between results of exit polls and official counts in counties without paper trails. Also documented are patterns of anecdotes about corrupted procedures and accounts of strange behaviors, phenomena and illegal interventions in Ohio as well as other places. Many say there is fraud in every election, but there was far more in 2004 than in any previous year, and if the errors were random, about half would go in Kerry's favor. Virtually all went in Bush's favor.

But rather than demanding a thorough investigation, the American people seem eager to forget the incidents and put the election behind them, thus implicitly supporting such corruption.



A Political Psychological Puzzlement

~Under what conditions do millions of allegedly "free" people knowingly acquiesce to being deceived, dominated and deprived of their own political will? How is it that even those who were politically engaged for the first time resign themselves to an unjust fate, refusing even to consider what happened to our country?

~In other words, how do so many people live with the knowledge that they have been tricked before, were just tricked again--and then submit to life under the power of those who tricked them?

~Censorship, brainwashing and intimidation create an environment of passivity and fear in subtle yet powerful ways that keep the system going with the complicity of those who have been robbed.

We must wonder what is going on in the collective psyche that allows the systematic and progressive usurpation of power.

Confusing Outcome with Process

Many don't want to deal with the corruption because they believe that challenging fraud won't change the outcome, so there's no point. This might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It represents a kind of immature, black-and-white thinking, as the outcome is a separate issue from the process. Even if it doesn't affect the outcome, voter suppression is criminal.

Paradoxically, refusal to examine the process prevents discovery, which might change the outcome. The Ohio vote challenge required two-hour debates in the House and Senate. Most Democrats who supported the challenge, emphatically stated that they didn't expect it to change the outcome, as if they were intimidated into making that point first or they would be ridiculed and dismissed. Most Republicans ignored their actual words and made emotional, even hysterical accusations of them not accepting the outcome, being sore losers, and worse. Republicans ignored the issue of voter suppression and praised Kerry highly for not making a big deal out of this.

~To bring the popular vote to a tie, it only has to add up to half that, 1,750,000, or an average of 35,000 votes per state,

Learned Helplessness

Psychologist Martin Seligman's theory of learned helplessness explains how when one's repeated actions have no effect, people learn that what they do doesn't make a difference and give up, even in situations where they can potentially make a difference. People worked hard on this election and believe that they lost. They are burned out. They feel all their hard work, time, energy and money didn't help so they don't want to deal with it. Learned helplessness is also associated with elevation of levels of cortisol and immune suppression--suggesting it is ultimately not adaptive or healthy to give up. Conversely, taking action in the face of injustice is a sign of health, enhanced immune response and can be an antidote to depression.

~The Courageous Minority

The reactions listed above are completely natural. Carl Jung said that consciousness is a work against nature. To go against the collective tide of ignorance, conformity and cowardice is a work against nature taken on by the courageous few. This collective, archetypal drama described by Jung was popularized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero's Journey. The Hero is the one who is willing to take on challenges that most people fear. According to Jung, the hero archetype represents the progressive force in society.

The people I have witnessed working intensely to investigate and challenge voter fraud, have a particular psychological profile. They are courageous and willing to face pain and fear. They call up their strength to challenge authority, as our lives, our freedom and democracy depend on it. They are unable to deny what is going on or remain silent. They are the heroes, in our mythical, archetypal Hero's journey, willing to face the dragons who are guarding our "National Treasure."




"A citizen's last stand is at the ballot box"....Theresa Fedor, former teacher and now courageous Ohio representative from toledo area -who called for His Blackwellness's resignation before the election and gave exhilirating speech at count every vote rally in columbus precceding the historic vote challenge- which many Everyday AmeriCan ! heroes here at DU helped to happen !!!
Republicans are selfish

[havocmom]

1. "Learned helplessness" is part of the porblem

WILLFUL IGNORANCE is another part.

Good article. Thanks for posting it. Let's keep this kicked for the night shift.

[DELUSIONAL]

2. I've been saying LEARNED HELPLESSNESS since 2000

and I can see the psychological manipulation.

I believe that 9/11 is part of the process of making the majority of Americans helpless in the face of raging fascism.

In the animal research -- a rat or similar lab animal is shocked repeatedly so that the shock becomes "normal". Then the animal is given an opportunity to escape and it can't. Goats have to be literally dragged away from the torture.

There is one theory that the flight or flight response shuts down after a long period of torture (even psychological torture).

This is vastly simplified -- but my guess is that KKK Rove at some point in his brief college education took Psychology 101 and learned about Learned Helplessness -- and realized that if this could be used on a massive scale he could control the nation.

[SpaceBuddy008]

3. Reaganism really accelerated the 'feel good' mentality- cool to be vacuoUS

Blind optimism, avoidance of honest reflection

we are trained to live with lies

here is a rant from me about 'falseness' in January story

HOW DARE THEE? Democracy IS Deliberately Criminally, Hastily being frog-marched to the GallOWs. Adding insult to injury it's Horribly OutRageous that, Insidiously it is AN OFFICIAL State-Secret! The powers that be have coldly calculated that America and Americans will lie to themselves, tell themselves lies and Live with a Lie. For the most part they may be right, many are physically & emotionally energy-sapped, distracted, conTrolled, apathetic, demoralized and even Zombified. Many millions though, are ascending to that MounTain Top where the view is so grand, omnicient and the scent wafting from the grounds of our election system, smells FOUL with falseness, fraud and an unholy alliance of corporations, judges and elected? officials AND money twisting, unsportsmanlike a process requiring fairness, transparency, integrity into an abomination- a crime syndicate having undue control of the Public and Human right to Vote. The basic Way to petition Our Servant, elected governments, for a redress of grievances.

http://cleveland.indymedia.org/news/2005/01/14147.php

http://www.breweriana.co.uk/bb/Holsten%20-%20Get%20Real!.jpg


LOVE & Righteousness are the winds of change pushing at our backs and....lifting up our 'tracks'

[Peace Patriot]

4. Please see my post at...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x361818

I have a theory about election fraud denial, having to do with peoples' dependence on the news monopolies for their sense of belonging to a nation, to the larger American community. The news monopolies have blackholed this story, and although they have been guilty of lies and propaganda, time and again, many people still feel that if it's not in "the news," it isn't real. This would be especially true for those who don't know that the TV networks changed the exit polls (that showed a Kerry win) to fit the official result (Bush wins). But even learning of this egregious breach of trust--the journalistic crime of the ages, as far as I'm concerned--they still might return again and again, to the news monopoly news, because there is nothing else holding us together as a nation, certainly not Bush and his "pod people" in Congress. The news monopolies are an umbilical cord, a conduit. Even smart people, who know all about the lies on Iraq WMDs, and are at least suspicious about 9/11 and that lack of any air defense over DC, still plug into "the news" as presented by the news monopolies.

I have some expereince with propaganda, having attended Catholic schools all my young life. At some point, the thinkers and the creative minds rebel. It is characteristic of some human beings, and probably of most of us, to despise propaganda and to question it. But it does take courage, for such questioning can threaten the fundamentals in your life--your relationships with family and friends, and, if the Catholic Church is to be believed, your very relationship with God. (They say that questioning makes stronger faith, but they don't really believe it or encourage it, because real questioning must hold out the possibility that the dogma that you are questioning, and indeed, the entire edifice on which it sits, is totally false.)

It can tear you up, though. It is no small thing to question or to reject an edifice of authority, a fundamental of your life.

I think we have a very similar situation with election fraud deniers. And it is not their distrust in government that is at issue. Many profoundly distrust the government, and especially the Bush Cartel regime. It's something deeper--their faith that the news monopolies, for all their flaws and lies and commercialism, are giving them some sort of real United States of America to be part of.

Many remember collective events, and experienced great national collective events, as TV phenomenon--the 1960 debates on TV, the Cuban missile crisis, the Selma march, JFK's assassination, RFK's assassination, Martin Luther King's assassination, the Vietnam war and the Vietnam war protests, Watergate, Nixon's resignation (and some very traumatic public events leading up to it), and, more recently, 9/11, the most traumatic public event of all, all on TV (for most people). We remember Congress singing the national anthem on the steps of the capitol as if we were there. But we weren't. TV brought us there. (It didn't catch the signs of demolition of the WTC, nor did it ever wonder why the Pentagon had no air defense on 9/11, but it did bring us the Congressmen.)

With a divisive and hateful regime in Washington--one that does not represent the majority of Americans, but rather a repressive and bigoted minority--and which considers most of us citizens beneath consideration, and which is establishing fascist control over everything we hold dear--our Consitution, our vote, our religious freedom, workers rights, environmental protection, our schools--there is nothing to unify us as a nation, nothing to hold us together, except for this screen on which we watch the broadcast of national events.

We may hate what we see. We may be skeptical. We may not believe the half of it. We may throw things at the TV. We may abandon it for days and even weeks. But we keep going back to it, relying on it, thinking that they can't really lie to us ALL THAT MUCH. (Some of us have cut that umbilical cord, but many have not.)

Because why? Because it's doing something for people beyond information, names, images, facts. It is creating a fantasy nation to which we think we belong. The discrepancy between real nation and fantasy nation has become so large that what we're seeing isn't real any more. It's a spin of a spin of a spin. An illusion of belonging. An illusion of dialogue. An illusion of democracy. Yet many believe that if something isn't contained within that illusion (election fraud 2004, for instance), it isn't real.

How to handle election fraud deniers:

This is a very difficult problem, much like telling a believing Catholic that his religion is a pack of lies, lo these last 1,500 years (since certain events around 500 A.D., including editings of the Bible)--if you were to attempt such an argument. But of course wise people don't attempt arguments like that. The Catholic person may even know all the history, and may even agree with you, but still needs and believes in the mystical connection to Jesus (via St. Peter) on which the Church bases its authority as the only true Christian faith.

(Please note: I have nothing but respect for such faith--as long as it doesn't lead to burning people at the stake, or use force or political pressure or other wrongful means to impose itself on others. It does not have to be reasonable. That is not the nature of faith. As in poetry and art, and psychology, the Catholic, by his belief, can establish a positive connection to Jesus, whether St. Peter is in it or not, and if he believes that there is an authority that can tell him what God wants, that is his right, so long as he doesn't harm others).

However, with regard to election fraud deniers, we have the problem that their attachment to the nation through the news monopolies threatens us all, because it blinds them to the fascist coup that is in progress in our country, and retards action on the one reform that could save our democracy, and that is still possible at the state/local level: election reform.

But I don't think we're going to get very far with facts and arguments, if the person has this emotional attachment to the fantasy nation on TV (or even in print--although readers are more likely to be persuadable with facts and argument). With most people, I would say, break it to them gently, starting with the TV networks changing the exit polls to fit the official result. You have to break through that illusion/delusion that causes them to believe that the TV networks wouldn't falsify election data right there on their TV screens, giving them doctored exit poll information, denying them the correct numbers, lying to them outright--and thus denying them strong evidence of fraud.

I was astonished to find this out--and I already had seen enough evidence to convince me that the election was stolen. I, too, thought that CNN & co. would more or less tell me the truth. I believed that on election night. It took me some hours to figure it out, and even then I wasn't sure what they had done, until I got onto Jonathan Simon's and Steven Freeman's early reports (through DU).

By damn, they CHANGED it! That stood out to me like a flashing red firetruck light. While everybody was fussing about what numbers they'd changed, and how, and why, and what it all meant, I was still open-mouthed with amazement that they'd given the American people WRONG NUMBERS, on purpose--and then tried to act like it was all a routine matter--"adjusting" the exit poll numbers to fit the official tally.

Geez. Anyway, people need to know why they think Bush won--the illusion that was created--and that it is quite impossible to prove that Bush won.

We have hard evidence of the exit poll fiddling (see exitpollz.org), as well as experts who affirm that Kerry won the exit polls (the US Count Votes Ph.D. group, Steven Freeman and others), and various discussions and statistical analyses of the early polls, the later polls, the changed data, the astronomical odds against the Bush win, etc., including our own TruthIsAll here at DU.

As for proving Bush won, just tell them a bit about paperless electronic voting, and the GEMS tabulators (and who owns and controls it all, with secret programming code).

One biggie that comes up is, why didn't the Democrats object? Why did Kerry concede?

The best answer is that the Bush Cartel controls the Congress. There would have been no justice there, no matter what evidence was brought. And the bulk of this evidence is necessarily inferential, because Bush Republicans blocked any requirement of a paper trail in electronic voting (no paper trail in a third of the country).

There are a lot of ways your discussion with election fraud deniers could go from here (there is so much MORE evidence). I suggest backing off, once these few points are made--or going right to the remedy: state/local public pressure for verifiable elections.

Don't fatigue people who are living in IllusionLand. They have enough to deal with, to realize that the TV networks deliberately gave them falsified exit poll numbers. (But you might throw in that exit polls are used worldwide to verify elections--and that experts have thoroughly debunked the excuses that the pollsters have given for the discrepancy.)

I am assuming that the election fraud denier is a generally open-minded person, not a Bush Cartel Koolaid drinker nor a Bush political propagandist. I wouldn't waste any energy on such people. I think the only people we should be talking to, about this matter, are other Kerry voters. We need to reach the disenfranchised majority.

There is a deeper problem which I don't know how to solve. And that is: With an illegitimate government in Washington DC, that does NOT represent the majority--and that really represents only a very tiny group of super-rich people--and if the news monopolies cannot be trusted, and should be avoided for the brainwashing propaganda machines that they have become--what holds us together? How do we access our national community? What makes us a nation, or rather, how do we expereince being a nation?

For me, the monuments in Washington DC have become cold marble. They used to give me chills--especially the Jefferson Memorial. They mean nothing to me now. They are just the bricks and cement and buildings and landsccapes that have been taken over by a hostile power. I have no reverence for the Supreme Court or Congress or the White House. These have become empty institutions to me, unworthy of a free people. I know some courageous people are putting up mighty struggles there now. I'm not saying it isn't worth it. Not at all. I'm just saying that my sense that, for all the chicanery and really bad war crimes (Vietnam, El Savador, Nicaragua...) that have been planned there, I always had a sense that the institutions could right themselves, and that justice was possible, until now.

...or, more particularly, I have always felt that people had a chance in the political system, to be heard and to change things, and that Washington DC was the heart and the symbol of that progressive notion. That feeling is gone. Washington DC has become the heart and the symbol of a fascist coup run by the most cynical and power-hungry men ever to gain control of our government, and, because of our wealth and our power, they are the most dangerous men on earth.

The ideals haven't become empty. Jefferson's words haven't gone away. But I just don't feel that the nation that I am part of is centered in Washington DC, as it was in my heart and mind before. I would certainly like to see the people regain control of their federal government, but I don't think the recovery of our democracy and our country is going to have anything to do with what happens in DC. It's going to happen--and is happening--in the states and counties and towns, and between people.

And I can understand people clinging to that place, to that idea--Washington DC--which they mostly have contact with through the news monopolies. We have nothing yet to replace it, except our belief in each other and in what we think our democracy should be.

Also, this fascist coup has vast power over us. We can't ignore it. We must try to keep track of what it's doing, support good people, and provide what good influence we can. It's possible that public pressure efforts are slowing down or checking some of the extremist policies. We can't just assume that it isn't. But we need to be fully aware of the illusions and delusions that are created by the news monopolies (and I would say, especially when we think we're winning some point--as with this devious, phony, private Bush Cartel election "commission," wherein we MIGHT win "a paper trail" but could lose the whole ballgame if the Bush Cartel federalizes elections).

I am part of this nation, and it is part of me. I know that more deeply now, being unplugged from the news monopolies, than when I was plugged in. I guess you just have to have faith that America still exists--and exists in a very strong and moving way--somewhere outside of BushWorld.

[SpaceBuddy008]

5. thank you-thoughtful reply, nice to hear you 'air it all out'

the election was, in effect... canceled.

with regards to your point about collective events managing collective psychosis, and the other replies mentioning 'learned helplessness' here is what book I'm reading says about 11/22/1963

the authors write that "...the ultimate purpose of the assassination was not political or econopmic, but sorcerous: for the control of the dreaming mind...something died in the American people on November 22, 1963--call it idealism, innocence or the quest for moral excellence. It is the transformation of human beings which is the authentic reason and motive for the Kennedy murder..."

and actualy it is the earliest memory of 'outside' that comes to my mind and the first rememberance as realizing there was this thing called a Tv, cause my parents had it on alot and their attention drew my attention to it, remember sitting on the floor in front wood-grain cabinet with legs, and very close and sensing the emotion that 'something' was not Good.

so now with the 'control' class professionals, doctors, lawyers, security and police apparatus, the ones who do most of the flying and all....

hostages to careerism, lifestyles, money are generally assumin' the ostrich position and selfishly choose 'respectability' consumerism, hedonism over ensuring a Just Future for ..yes even the 7th generation

when the king is in trouble at the castle he surrounds himself with the 'guards' buying loyalties with paychecks...i sometimes wonder if the economy is being depressed simply to make it more likely the youth must choose to be soldiers.

the simple points I try to make are

~all irregularities favor bush

~for months and days before election his approval rate was 48% but somehow in spite of great unpopularity and the most massive GOTV drive ever got 51%

~some places had more votes than voters registered

~media lied about wmd's and help sell an illegal war, why believe anything they say, and wonder why they try to hide all the discussion from the internet

~and this is not about bush or kerry but the day we are all equal-voting day, week the public and human right to vote and the laws passed to uphold the sacred duty.

~finally why did we have worse problems than the new world odor from Florida in 2000...ask? the republicans they have been 'in-charge'

UNPRECENDENTED in American history for government to claim, assume Inalienable rights to rig, run, ruin and OWN YOUR LIFE! and help dig your grave , how are you and WE? going to rescue our country and humanity from this dangerous abyss? Lets get real and ON THE BALL, pick it up a notch, for..., We have lost the ability to replace our government by the ballot box, our creation claims they don't need The people's consent anymore. We must talk and act on this affront DAILY. What happened to the AmeriCaN Dream? SORRY-thats classified. Secret Vote Counting Delays OUR Dreams.

STEAL Our VOTE? Steal OUR Future

GOVERNMENT OWNS YOU?

Natural Law
BirthRights
Inalienable Rights

declaration of the inviolabilty & individuals sovereignity of bodies, minds, souls & 'sentient' thought processes

foster awakeness~raise awareness~build genuine community~enable wiser choices...glow and grow the flame of dreaming UP renewal..redemption

Testify
when..Purified
to..Sanctify
and...Rectify
so that The Dream ..will not die

LawSuit to e-Vict Secret Vote Counting & Hasten Death of DRE's
by CultureJamCleveland Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2005 at 5:40 PM
http://cleveland.indymedia.org/news/2005/02/14696.php

global enslavement or planetary healing

[MontageOfFreedom]

7. The horrifying part is its true....But the wake up call is rising. n/t

http://www.bushcheated04.com

[mod mom]

8. Beautifully insightful, PP. I always enjoy your thoughtful posts. nt

[pauldp]

6. a kick for a great thread! n/t