The marketing of Evil: How radicals, elitists, and pseudo-experts sell us corruption disguised as freedom.

The marketing of Evil How radicals, elitists, and pseudo-experts sell us corruption disguised as freedom WRITTEN BY David Kupelian PUBLISHED BY WND Books (Cumberland House Publishing), Nashville, 2005 ISBN: 1581824599, Hardcover, pp. 256, $34.95 CDN 

In 1916, Father Edmund Walsh was ordained a Jesuit priest. In 1919, at the end of the First World War, he founded the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. In 1922, Walsh went to Rome, where he was assigned the papal relief mission to Russia. Having undergone a revolution five years earlier, Russia was in the midst of a government-engineered famine which claimed over five million lives. The Bolshevik government was also conducting a religious purge in which twenty-eight bishops and over 1,200 priests were murdered or executed.

For Walsh, this was a baptism of horror. Russia wasn't in trouble, he wrote in May 1922--the world was. Expressing "fear for the consequences in the economic, the political, the social, the religious, and educational orders of the entire world," Walsh viewed communism as "the most reactionary and savage school of thought known to history, bringing with it a reign of terror that makes the French Revolution insignificant."

Walsh reasoned that while the French Revolution was limited to France, the Bolsheviks envisioned "World Revolution, or in other words, universal Socialism with its concomitants--no state, no government, no belief in God, no marriages, no religion or, in a word, the total destruction of the present Christian civilization and the substitution of the Communist state."

In 1917, Our Lady of Fatima warned that unless Russia was consecrated to her Immaculate Heart, Russia's errors would spread through the world. Which they did, first through revolutionary war and then, despite the much-vaunted "fall of communism," through marketing. Which is simply war through other means.

"Marketing is the application of the knowledge of human psychology to the task of persuasion," writes David Kupelian, managing editor of WorldNetDaily.com, in. his brilliant new book The marketing of Evil.

"What psychology has taught the marketing world is that the most powerful persuasion of all takes place not through above-the-board appeals to reason but by directly targeting the emotions."

He then describes exactly how this is done. As his first example, he provides a detailed description of how homosexuality has been sold to the world as equal to heterosexuality, contravening the natural law and ushering in same-sex "marriage" as "fair" and "good" and a "right" which brooks no opposition and prosecutes it critics.

How were long-held views opposing homosexuality so easily transformed into "enlightened tolerance" and open support?

Easy, Kupelian argues: "The debate will be won by whoever conjures up the strongest emotions of sympathy in the audience." By skillfully attaching "positive" images and emotions to homosexuality, listeners begin to question their "assumptions" about it.

With doubts entering the mind like a camel's nose under a tent, it isn't long before the kind-hearted person abandons his moral beliefs and says to himself: "Who am I to interfere with a homosexual's happiness?"

Kupelian then moves to the successful overturning of biblically-based laws, achieved with a multi-pronged campaign of lying propaganda that has resulted in the legalized atrocities characteristic of western culture today--the most heinous of which is abortion.

How did vice become virtue? A wrong become a right? By telling lies, admits Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who campaigned hard and cynically for a woman's "right" to a safe abortion, though he eventually denounced the practice as the crime it is.

"We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one," says Nathanson who, along with Betty Friedan and Lawrence Lader, founded NARAL in the 1960s. "Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1 million."

Today, the abortion death toll in North America is pushing 50 million. Fifty million!

"There are no words to describe how bad (abortion) really is," nurse Carol Everett tells Kupelian, before describing a process that will cause many readers to wince with revulsion.

To compare abortion to the Jewish Holocaust in Europe is inaccurate, Nathanson states. "It is not enough to pronounce it absolutely evil. The abortion tragedy is a new event, severed from connections with traditional presuppositions of history, psychology, politics and morality. It extends beyond the deliberations of reason, beyond the discernments of moral judgment, beyond meaning itself. It trivializes itself to call itself merely a holocaust or a tragedy."

What it really is, Nathanson continues, quoting Holocaust expert Arthur Cohen, is "a mysterium tremendum, an utter mystery to the rational mind--a mystery that carries with it not only the aspect of vastness, but the resonance of terror, something so unutterably diabolic as to be literally unknowable to us."

Ultimately, Kupelian's wide-ranging treatise confirms what Walsh understood from his earliest days in Russia: this is a war on humanity. The enemy wants to kill us all, using any and all means--the most important of which is the direct attack on the family via a relentless campaign for "sexual liberation." It's a tactic Lenin, and later Stalin, used to full advantage, says Soviet expert Mikhail Heller whom Kupelian quotes: "The communist encouragement of sexual immorality during marriage, approval of abortion, and forcing women out of the home into the work force, accomplished its purpose of destroying the Russian family."

A primary instrument for prosecuting the war on humanity in the West is, and has been, the mainstream media, which have been hugely responsible for the dumbing down and rotting out of their audiences' minds and souls.

Ditto for the North American educational system which, since the days of John Dewey, has transformed itself from a system of learning into a system of secularist socialist indoctrination, converting its gullible students into cult members who parrot leftist pieties while ruining themselves with destructive sexual activity.

This is a powerful book--one that should be read by anyone who wants to understand how the West, once known as Christendom, became so sickened and enfeebled.

That said, I felt the book should have contained a section on the role of the talk show in marketing evil--beginning with The Phil Donahue Show of the 1970s, where such "luminaries" as Madlyn Murray O'Hair (who was almost singlehandedly responsible for removing prayer from American schools) were routinely given air time for their "controversial" (read "godless" and "destructive") views.

The book also merited a stronger ending; I don't think Kupelian's prescription of prayer and homeschooling are enough. While I believe daily prayer, particularly the Rosary, and daily Mass will do more than anything else could to reverse Man's ravaged moral condition, I also believe too few people are adopting this regimen at a time when the mountainous crimes of this world, particularly abortion, are crying out to heaven for justice.

Paula Adamick is Catholic Insight's columnist in London, England