Post #1384

In the 1940s, a Hollywood movie called “Gaslight” left us a few lessons on how psychological terrorism and manipulation work. In this black-and-white thriller, an unscrupulous man convinces his young wife she is crazy through a campaign of false accusations and fabricated problems. Quite literally, the husband spends the movie secretly hiding objects and dimming the gaslights in the house, then accusing the wife of being forgetful and imagining things, thus diminishing her self-worth and distorting her sense of reality. The goal was to get rid of her while maintaining his image of a good, caring husband, a hero who only tried to save her. Usually, we the audience would be just as bewildered as the wife about her sudden insanity, but in this film we are forced to watch her self-blaming journey from the point of view of the manipulator, leaving us with a mix of helplessness, sadness, anger and terror. It is easy to sympathize with the wife. We’ve all had our lights dimmed at some point in our lives, whether we realize it or not. Unfortunately, this is not limited to interpersonal relations, it can also happen in political contexts with entire countries being subjected to psychological abuse. There’s no better example of what a gaslighter is than the United States—the world’s biggest narcissist and bully. This old Hollywood film being the origin of the term “gaslighting” is actually quite fitting given that the US government relies heavily on its massive entertainment industry and corporate media to peddle its propaganda and manipulate the world into believing it stands for democracy and human rights. All this while wreaking havoc in the Global South through wars, coups, blockades, and sanctions, killing thousands and sinking countries into humanitarian crises. https://venezuelanalysis.com/columns/the-subversive-truth-us-collective-gaslighting-will-be-defeated/