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Bread and circuses
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“”The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
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| —Frank Zappa |
Bread and circuses (from the Latin panem et circenses) is when an authoritarian politician stays in power by distracting the sheeple with trivialities so that they do not realize that the government is screwing them over. Often, this tactic works. The phrase was coined by the Roman satirist Juvenal.
Examples include the use of gladiatorial games (and the eponymous chariot races) in Ancient Rome, dictatorial elections (where there is only one person on the ballot, and it's the incumbent), and appeals against the so-called "war on religion" during times of economic distress. A fictional example is the titular competition in the recent dystopian novel series The Hunger Games;
the books go so far as to name their fictitious regime "Panem", straight out of the original Latin. Other examples include the 1975 dystopian film Rollerball, which also has a gladiatorial theme, and Oceania's society as described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Proles are fed with junk entertainment mass-produced by the Ministry of Truth and bad beer.
All out of bubblegum[edit]
Many conspiracy theorists, such as Alex Jones, Alan Watt, and Mark Dice, often argue that the Illuminati/global elite is responsible for using sports, music, film, and other forms of entertainment as modern day bread and circuses. This is being done to distract the sheeple from their deviant plans to form a one world government and to then kill 80%, or 90% (depending on which moron you're listening to) of the world's population.
In 2010 and 2012, Dice boycotted the Super Bowl for this very reason, and cited the fact that the founder of the NFL, Walter Camp, was a Skull & Bones member, and used this as "evidence" that it is an "Illuminati created distraction"![1]
Granted, one only has to look as far as borderline-conservative-propaganda shite like God's Not Dead and Sound of Freedom to see the grain of truth in these half-baked theories.[citation NOT needed]