Edward Bernays

CIA Operation PBSUCCESS Overthrows Guatemalan Democracy, Protects United Fruit Company Interests

| Importance: 9/10

On June 27, 1954, democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz resigned under pressure from a CIA-orchestrated coup known as Operation PBSUCCESS. The intervention, designed primarily to protect United Fruit Company’s vast landholdings, inaugurated decades of military dictatorship, …

Central Intelligence Agency Allen Dulles John Foster Dulles United Fruit Company Jacobo Arbenz +3 more intelligence-overreach foreign-intervention corporate-interests banana-republic cold-war +1 more
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Bernays "Torches of Freedom" Campaign Uses Feminism to Sell Cigarettes

| Importance: 7/10

Edward Bernays orchestrates his most famous propaganda campaign, hiring a group of young women to march in New York’s Easter Parade while smoking cigarettes and announcing to press photographers that they are lighting “torches of freedom” in a strike against male domination. The …

Edward Bernays American Tobacco Company George Washington Hill propaganda media-manipulation corporate-influence public-relations health
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Edward Bernays Publishes "Crystallizing Public Opinion" Launching Modern PR Industry

| Importance: 8/10

Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and veteran propagandist for the Committee on Public Information during World War I, publishes “Crystallizing Public Opinion,” the first book to codify techniques for manipulating mass psychology in service of corporate and political interests. …

Edward Bernays American Tobacco Company Sigmund Freud propaganda media-manipulation corporate-influence institutional-capture public-relations
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