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This is the psychological dimension of the "High Cabal's" general onslaught against American workers, just as the "war on terrorism" is the military dimension and corporate crime and tax cuts for the rich comprise the economic dimension.
We are living under the beginning stages of a
military
dictatorship in precisely the same way that 1930s Germans suffered under the
Nazi regime.
As in the case of Nazi
Germany, state-sponsored propaganda (brainwashing) is a vital part of the Bush
regime's strategy.
New propaganda slogans are being overtly
and subliminally implanted by Bush and his gang through their speeches and
actions:
Some of these mind programming tactics are
so subtle that they can be overlooked in the hubbub of everyday life. For
example, have you been aware that the very way in which the "public discourse"
is being carried on is a subtle brainwashing strategy? In 2002, the Congress,
the media, the man and woman on the street are encouraged to ask only this
question: How should the U.S. conduct its war against Iraq?
What about the
questions:
The way in which the Bush
junta is conducting itself is an interesting brainwashing technique in itself:
Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, and the others continually commit OUTRAGES but
don't excuse them, explain them, or invite reflection on these affronts to
morality and sanity. In fact, when some timid media voice criticizes the Bush
junta, the person is demonized as questioning behavior which is beyond
reproach.
Americans are being brainwashed to ask only the questions the Bushites allow and they are programmed to see everything the Bush junta does as unquestionably correct. The brainwashing has gone so far that Americans no longer see what has happened to our country.
In an earlier article, I reviewed
the varied aspects of personality profiling and simulation. While serving as
Head of the Artificial Intelligence Department at the U.S. Army War College,
1993-1995, I conducted studies on profiling, psychological programming, and
brainwashing. I explored and developed personality simulation systems, an advanced
technology used in military war games, FBI profiling, political campaigning, and
advertising. Part of my discovery was that:
Personality simulation systems are being used to create political campaigns that apply voter profiles to control their voting behavior. TV commercials and programs use personality simulation to profile viewers to control their purchasing and viewing behaviors. And sophisticated propaganda and brainwashing techniques are being used by the Bush junta to keep American citizens under control.
The long evolution of
developing procedures to control human behavior all came to a head in the modern
world with Pavlov, a Russian scientist. Pavlov made the discovery that you can
condition a dog to salivate on command simply by associating food with the
ringing of a bell. Once that association is fixed in the dog's mind, the food
can be removed and the dog will salivate merely when it hears the bell.
Pavlov carried out the identical experiments on
human beings with the same results. Those principles have been adapted to
television and motion pictures and can now make Americans salivate in response
to a wide array of bells and whistles. We can call it phase one in the evolution
of human behavior control.
Phase two was accomplished by the same Russian scientist, Pavlov. Very few people know of this part of his research. During a particularly severe storm in Russia, heavy rains continued for days and Pavlov's laboratories were flooded. Pavlov and his research assistants were able to return to the laboratory only after the flood waters had receded days later. Upon returning, Pavlov discovered something truly remarkable. Before the flood, many of the dogs had been conditioned to respond to various stimuli. Lo and behold, all traces of the conditioning in the dogs had disappeared! Bells, food, nothing could induce the former salivation response that had been so carefully implanted in the dogs' nervous systems.
What mysterious influence could
account for this remarkable turn of events, Pavlov wondered. So, being a good
scientist, he studied carefully what had transpired while he was away from the
dogs. They had been left without food or warmth. They had been isolated for
days; some of them had drowned. They had been subjected to extreme stress, never
knowing if they would live or die. These were the factors that had produced the
washing away of the previous conditioning from the dogs' brains - brain-washing.
Pavlov and other Russians followed up this line of research, but it was the Chinese communists in the 1950s who first saw its real potential for use with human beings. They employed these very principles in brainwashing American and other Allied prisoners of war during the Korean conflict. Isolation, periodic denial of food or water, cold and exposure, extreme stress associated with uncertainty of life or death--these conditions, together with a continual barrage of indoctrination produced the erasing of previous beliefs and behavior patterns in American soldiers in particular. Thus brainwashing became phase two in the evolution of human behavior control.
But brainwashing is not very reliable,
as the remarkable film "The Manchurian Candidate" shows. The trigger mechanisms
can be tampered with, sometimes even erased, before the desired behavior can be
carried out.
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To show to what extremes the CIA is willing to go in developing the technology to control human behavior, they funded the "research" or Dr. Jose Delgado. Delagado was infamous for implanting radio-activated electrodes in animals (and possibly in humans).
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"We need a program of psychosurgery and political control of our
society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who
deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. |
Phase three in the development of thought
and behavior control techniques occurred at Stanford University in the 1960s,
with a scientist named William Colby. Colby was a Freudian psychiatrist whose
work was funded by Department of Defense grants attempting to solve a problem
outlined by the DoD: controlling human behavior. Colby learned how to capture
the belief systems of his psychiatric patients. He then put these belief systems
into computer programs. He refined his research until he was able to capture a
patient's personality structure in the computer and then use this computer model
to control the patient's behavior.
B. F. Skinner developed the concept
of operant conditioning in which a subject--animal or human--receives
reinforcement for desired behavior.
The techniques of Pavlov, Colby, and Skinner have been taken over by political campaign managers, television producers, and advertising executives. Today, the average person is bombarded with conditioning messages throughout each day. We are conditioned to believe, feel, think, and act as other people choose. In study after study, cultural conditioning instruments (TV, popular songs, Web sites, newspapers, magazines) have been shown to elicit specific behaviors on the part of the "receiver."
In this article, I'm using the word "brainwashing" in a non-technical sense, to refer to any attempt to influence or coerce another person. All communication has some element of persuasion, even if only to persuade a person to receive and/or consider the communication. So in some sense I'm attempting to "brainwash" the reader of this article as does any communicator. You can distinguish between positive and negative "propaganda" or "brainwashing" by asking these questions:
"The threat from the Elders of Zion or from Wall Street [or from terrorists or Iraq or American dissidents], together with a revealed knowledge of 'truth' necessitates inquisition and intrusion into every aspect of a subject's life through the agency of the propaganda machine and terrorist police. Propaganda and police are closely interwoven; terror controls communication, which communicates, amongs other things, terror. Propaganda and terror are, in a very real sense, two sides of one coin. Wrong action springs from wrong thought, or from the wrong nature of a Jew or capitalist [or Muslim extremist or American dissident], and it is most economically dealt with at source. The police must detect wrong thought; propaganda must correct it or the police must eradicate it, whereupon propaganda must replace it. The police terror is the modern inquisition, and must, in the interests of the class or the race, be permitted to see into the soul of every person. Not only does heresy weaken the state in the face of its internal and external enemies, it is not in the true interests of the heretic. Better be burned at the stake than live in mortal sin, which can so easily taint others. . . . A hell on earth must be created to incline the flock to heaven. In the words of Orwell's 1984 hate is love."
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My time of service at the Army War College
also gave me the opportunity to study:
When our
nation was created, its founders understood that all facets of the government,
including the military, are created to serve the needs of the people. The
American colonists had fought against a British army which did whatever its
corrupt civilian monarch and other leaders told it to do. This is why Samuel
Adams made the important distinction between the need for and the danger of a
standing army.
"A Standing Army," Adams asserted, "however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the Liberties of the People."
From the beginning of the establishment of a standing military, military personnel have had one of two primary mind-sets:
1. I will remain loyal to my sworn pledge to uphold the U.S.
Constitution, no matter what. If I consider a civilian or military order or
operation to be contradictory to the Constitution, I will not follow the order
and will do whatever is in my power to stop the unconstitutional operation.
2. I will do whatever my civilian and military
commanders tell me to do, without reflection on whether or not what they are
ordering is permitted by the Constitution (since I want to get ahead in the
military). This mind-set is represented by such people as:
"Militarism means a domination of the military man over the civilian, an undue emphasis on military needs, policies, spirit, values and ideals. . ."Militariness means a readiness to defend one's country's interests by force of arms, the acceptance of the military profession as honourable and necessary. Only a complete pacifist could validly condemn militariness. Others, aware that wars are facts of life, however unpleasant, would agree that every nation has to cultivate some militariness."
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On August 22, 2002, the Department of
Defense and the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C. announced that the
Iowa Army National Guard's 1st Battalion, 194th Field Artillery, was being
ordered to federal active duty to locations within the United States for
homeland security missions as part of Operation
Noble Eagle II.
This constitutes an illegal operation on the
part of the Bush junta in scrapping the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878: in a
nutshell, this act bans the use of the military against American civilians. This use of military personnel to control and harass the American
civilian population (and General Eberehart's and other military leaders'
mindless acceptance of this illegal action) is such an outrage that the American
people should immediately speak out against it and do everything possible to see
that this presidential crime is punished to the full extent of the law.
The use of U.S. military personnel and weapons against American civilians has occurred many times. To cite just two:
Since the Korean
War, the "High Cabal" has been brainwashing the American public into new,
distorted concepts of war and the military:
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war . . . and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
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A number of rabid right organizations
provide the Bush junta propaganda support:
Any informed American is aware that the "High Cabal" carries on its efforts to turn America into a full-fledged dictatorship through a number of organizations. A partial list would include:
Yowsuh! the Bush puppet gang
replied, and went into immediate action, creating a new Office of Global Communications (OGC) to
coordinate the administration's foreign policy message and huckster America's
image globally. The OGC supplants a smaller propaganda group set up during the
war in Afghanistan, when the Bush junta feared that the US was losing the public
relations battle even though winning the war.
The U.S. government has had a propaganda arm since 1942, centered in the US International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB). IBB broadcasts in 52 languages around the world and includes:
The umbrella group running this
propaganda operation is the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an agency of
the U.S. Government. Radio Sawa is a service of U.S. International Broadcasting,
an arm of BBG. Radio Sawa operates on the assumption that communicating directly
in Arabic with the peoples of the Middle East by radio will win their attention
and respect.
Pattiz, a wealthy contributor to former
President Clinton, describes the Radio Sawa mission as follows:
"We are committed to making sure people can hear America's voice and better
understand our country and what it stands for."
Programming includes talk-radio shows where
people can call in and ask questions about the United States, its government and
its people. As well as being available via Nilesat, Arabsat, and Eutelsat, Radio
Sawa broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on FM frequencies throughout the
Middle East.
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Fortunately, a large number of people in the Arabic world are not taken in by the Bush regime's clumsy effort to brainwash youth in the Middle East, as this article in the Al-Ahram Weekly Online Web site indicates. |
"What's wrong with propaganda?" asks Ayman El-Amir in the article just referred to. "Nothing, except if you claim that it is not what it appears to be. Almost all countries practice propaganda in one form or another, depending on the policy agenda and the region of interest.""The United States has consistently been a good exporter of its short-term myopic interests, and a bad promoter of the ideals of the value system on which it was founded. That may explain why outside Europe, the US of the post-World War II era found itself more in the bad company of ruthless dictators, rather than in the good company of democratically elected leaders."
"The chances are the Arab youth themselves will split the strategy: take the US sound and discard the US agenda."
As this article is being written (August, 2002),
Dubya is trying to brainwash the American people into thinking that the economy
is okay, that only a few "bad-apple" CEOs of corporations have crossed the line
of criminal behavior, and that no new legislation is necessary to stop runaway
corporate crime that his administration has encouraged.
Fortunately, a considerable
number of Americans, including even some of the usually supine press, are seeing
through this propaganda swindle. An August 13, 2002 MSNBC opinion piece by
William Saletan brands the effort "Bush’s Fake Forum."
"This afternoon at the President’s Economic Forum in Waco, Texas, President Bush and Vice President Cheney sat side by side on the stage of a packed auditorium for more than an hour. That’s the first time they’ve been that close together for that long in public since Sept. 11. Evidently they’re no longer afraid of terrorists. What they’re afraid of is Americans."
An August 14, 2003 Washington Post editorial called the "forum" a confidence game.
"The theme of those reports was that the country needs lower taxes, that most corporate executives are honest and that the solution to corporate scandals is less, not more, regulation."Recession and the cost of war and the cost of homeland defense have increased our deficits," Mr. Bush said yesterday. At his forum, there was no one to remind him that tax cuts are playing their part too. In the real world, they're part of the arithmetic."
Frank Rich's 8/17/02 Op/Ed, "The Waco Road to Baghdad" caught even more of the brainwashing aspect of the fake forum.
"Though the president's harshest critics think he's stupid, I've always maintained that the real problem is that he thinks we are stupid. He never doubts that his show will distract us from bad news. Waco was supposed to make us forget the latest round of economic headlines: stagnant wages, slowed growth, new all-time records in personal bankruptcies and consumer borrowing."
The fake forum was seen in its true colors when the Bushites had to admit that the participants were coached in what to say. Their attempt to call the coaching material "talking points" just didn't cut it.
A powerful
strategy of clandestine brainwashing is to send a communication with two,
paradoxical messages.
For example, the movie series, The Godfather,
contained these two contradictory messages:
Even intelligent people can be taken
in by this brainwashing technology of paradoxical messaging. An example of this
phenomenon is a current operation by the Advertising Council.
The Ad Council expresses its overall purpose in this way: "We marshall [sic] the volunteer forces of advertising agencies and media companies to affect [sic] positive social change." You can, in the example below, interpret "effect positive change" as "brainwash people into fearful submission."
One of the Council's current operations is called the "Campaign for Freedom." If you believe the Council,
"The initiative is designed to assist Americans during the war on terrorism through the development and distribution of timely and relevant public service messages. This first round of PSAs for the campaign has been created to celebrate our nation's freedom and remind Americans about the importance of freedom and the need to protect it for future generations.""According to research, Americans are looking for messages that will inform, involve and inspire them during the war on terrorism. This inspirational campaign is advertising's gift to America on the occasion of its birthday, Independence Day." All of the ads conclude with the powerful tagline, "Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it."
The first of six video clip "messages" involves the image of an American urban block, with the voiceover:
"On September eleventh, terrorists tried to change America forever."
The image changes to the same urban street but this time with American flags hanging in front of every house.
"Well, they succeeded."
Now, that seems rather prosaic,
doesn't it? The message is: "We showed those terrorists what we're made of!"
Nothing to quarrel with, is there?
Well, maybe. Note the critical element of the image/message: EVERY house has a flag in front of it.
So the paradoxical message is: America is changed forever to a 200 percent patriotism that can see no wrong with whatever the Bush administration does.
I recommend you examine all six Ad Council "messages" to see the paradoxical communications in each.
Theme |
Ordinary Message |
Paradoxical Message |
Main Street USA |
We showed those 9/11 terrorists what we're made of. |
America's been permanently changed into a country of 200 percent jingoistic patriotism. |
Church |
Aren't you happy you don't live in a war zone. |
You actually do live in a war zone. |
Library |
Aren't you glad you live in a country where you can read what you want to and no one will bother you. |
You're living in a country where police and intelligence agencies monitor what you read and can arrest you on suspicion of subversive activity. |
Diner |
Aren't you glad you live in a country where you have free speech. |
You're living in a country where you must be careful of what you say, because you can be arrested for nothing more than dissent. |
Arrest |
Aren't you glad you live in a country where you can't be pulled over by a police officer, your car searched, and your being arrested on nothing more than suspicion. |
You actually live in a country where you can be pulled over by a police officer, your car searched, and your being arrested on nothing more than suspicion. |
Choice |
Aren't you glad your supermarket aisles are full. |
Get ready for the possibility that food won't be available. |
The other one I'll analyze here is one in which a college age kid goes into a library and hands a list of books on a request slip to a female librarian.
The boy says to the librarian, "I can't seem to find these books anywhere."The librarian types them into the computer and says, "These books are no longer available."
He says, "I didn't know."
The librarian says, in an accusatory tone, "May I have your name please?"
"Why?" the boy replies.
As he walks away, he's seized by two men.
"What did I do?" he asks in desperation.
"We just have a couple of question."
We hear the kid gasping as they roughly drag him off.
The "message" ends, as all
six do, with the tag: "Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it"
Some rather bright people have taken the "message" of this video clip to be:
"Thank God, that can't happen in America." And based on that reading of the communication, they assume that the showing of the video on national TV is a positive thing.
You can only believe that "message" if you
don't know that the F.B.I. is already checking libraries to see what people are
reading. In other words, that isn't a scene of a non-reality but of a very
present reality.
"The average person in the US watches about four hours of television each day. Over the course of a year, we see roughly twenty five thousand commercials, many of them produced by the world's highest-paid cognitive psychologists. And these heavily produced advertisements are not merely for products, but for a lifestyle based on a consumer mind-set. What they're doing, day in and day out, twenty-five thousand times a year, is hypnotizing us into seeing ourselves as consumers who want to be entertained rather than as citizens who want to be informed and engaged. We need to take back the airwaves as a sphere of mature conversation and dialogue about our common future."
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I want to end this article with a little
reverse "brainwashing," using these excellent posters.
My thanks to Micah Wright for the propaganda posters used in this article
Reference
Updates:
