When Numbers Lie

February 03, 2023

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An Englishman and an American have The Ukraine Talk (Douglas Maccregor)

January 03, 2023

Decoding the Pentagon’s online war against Iran

October 01 2022

From a click of a button in the US to violence on the streets of Tehran, the latest protests in Iran are being engineered and provoked from outside.

Photo Credit: The Cradle

Source

By Kit Klarenburg

The civil unrest in Iran in response to the recent death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was waiting at a Tehran police station, although rooted in legitimate grievances, also bears the hallmark of a western-sponsored covert war, covering multiple fronts.

Mere days after the protests erupted on 16 September, the Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon had initiated a wide-ranging audit of all its online psyops efforts, after a number of bot and troll accounts operated by its Central Command (CENTCOM) division – which covers all US military actions in West Asia, North Africa and South and Central Asia – were exposed, and subsequently banned by major social networks and online spaces.

The accounts were busted in a joint investigation carried out by social media research firm Graphika, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which evaluated “five years of pro-Western covert influence operations.”

Published in late August, it attracted minimal English-language press coverage at the time, but evidently was noticed, raising concerns at the highest levels of the US government, prompting the audit.

While the Washington Post ludicrously suggested the government’s umbrage stemmed from CENTCOM’s egregious, manipulative activities which could compromise US “values” and its “moral high ground,” it is abundantly clear that the real problem was CENTCOM being exposed.

#OpIran

CENTCOM’s geographical purview includes Iran, and given the Islamic Republic’s longstanding status as a key US enemy state, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a significant proportion of the unit’s online disinformation and psychological warfare efforts were directed there.

A key strategy employed by US military psyops specialists is the creation of multiple sham media outlets publishing content in Farsi. Numerous online channels were maintained for these platforms, spanning Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even Telegram.

In some cases too, fake journalists and pundits, with numerous “followers” on those platforms emerged, along with profile photos created via artificial intelligence.

For example, Fahim News claimed to provide “accurate news and information” on events in Iran, prominently publishing posts declaring “the regime uses all of its efforts to censor and filter the internet,” and encouraging readers to stick to online sources as a result.

Meanwhile, Dariche News claimed to be an “independent website unaffiliated with any group or organization,” committed to providing “uncensored and unbiased news” to Iranians within and without the country, in particular information on “the destructive role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in all the affairs and issues of Iran and the region.”

Their respective YouTube channels pumped out numerous short-form videos, presumably in the hope they would be mistaken for organic content, and go viral on other social networks. The researchers identified one instance in which media outlets elsewhere had embedded Dariche News content into articles.

An army of bots and trolls

Some of the fake news organizations published original material, but much of their output was recycled content from US government-funded propaganda outfits such as Radio Farda and Voice of America Farsi.

They also repurposed and shared articles from the British-based Iran International, which appears to receive arm’s length funding from Saudi Arabia, as did several fake personas attached to these outlets.

These personas frequently posted non-political content, including Iranian poetry and photos of Persian food, in order to increase their authenticity. They also engaged with real Iranians on Twitter, often joking with them about internet memes.

Pentagon bots and trolls used different narrative techniques and approaches in an attempt to influence perceptions and engender engagement. A handful promoted “hardliner” views, criticizing the Iranian government for insufficiently hawkish foreign policy while being excessively reformist and liberal domestically.

One such bogus user, a purported “political science expert,” accrued thousands of followers on Twitter and Telegram by posting content praising Shia Islam’s growing power in West Asia, while other “hardliner” accounts praised the late General Qassem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), slain in an illegal US drone strike in January 2020, as a martyr, and encouraged the wearing of hijabs.

The researchers state the purpose of these efforts was unclear, although an obvious explanation is the Pentagon sought to foster anti-government discontent among conservative Iranians, while creating lists of local “extremists” to monitor online.

Orchestrated opposition

Overwhelmingly though, Pentagon-linked accounts were viciously critical of the Iranian government, and the IRGC. Numerous Pentagon bots and trolls sought to blame food and medicine shortages on the latter, which was likened to ISIS, and posting videos of Iranians protesting and looting supermarkets captioned in Pashto, English, and Urdu.

More sober posts criticized Tehran for redistributing much-needed food to give to Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, while others highlighted embarrassing incidents, such as a reported power outage that caused the country’s chess team to lose an international online tournament.

Furthermore, multiple fake users claimed to seek “justice for the victims of #Flight752”, referring to the Ukraine International Airlines flight accidentally shot down by the IRGC in January 2020.

Using hashtags such as #PS752 and #PS752justice hundreds of times, they blamed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei personally for the incident.

Following the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February, these accounts used Persian versions of widely-trending hashtags #No_To_Putin and #No_To_War – themselves overwhelmingly disseminated on Twitter by pro-Ukraine bot and troll accounts, according to separate research.

The users condemned Khamenei’s verbal support of Putin and accused Iran of supplying drones to Moscow, which it was claimed were used to kill civilians.

They also pushed the narrative that Iran’s collusion with Russia would result in adverse political and economic repercussions for Tehran, while making unflattering comparisons between Khamenei and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“One has sold Iran to Russia and ordered their peoples’ murder,” one account tweeted. “The other is wearing a combat uniform alongside his people and has stopped the colonization of Ukraine by Russia with all his might.”

Scattershot fury

There were also cloak-and-dagger initiatives intended to damage Iran’s standing in neighboring countries, and undermine its regional influence. Much of this work seems to have been concerned with spreading panic and alarm, and creating a hostile environment for Iranians abroad.

For instance, accounts targeting audiences in Afghanistan claimed that Quds Force personnel were infiltrating Kabul posing as journalists in order to crush opposition to the Taliban. They also published articles from a US military-linked website that claimed on the basis of zero evidence that the bodies of dead refugees who’d fled to Iran were being returned to their families back home with missing organs.

Yet another damaging false narrative perpetuated by this cluster in late 2021 and early 2022 was that the IRGC was forcing Afghan refugees to join militias fighting in Syria and Yemen, and that those who refused were being deported.

Iraq was a country of particular interest to the Pentagon’s cyber warriors, with memes widely shared throughout Baghdad and beyond depicting IRGC influence in the country as a destructive disease, and content claiming Iraqi militias, and elements of the government, were effective tools of Tehran, fighting to further Iran’s imperial designs over the wider West Asia.

Militias were also accused of killing Iraqis in rocket strikes, engineering droughts by damaging water supply infrastructure, smuggling weapons and fuel out of Iraq and into Syria, and fuelling the country’s crystal meth epidemic.

Another cluster of Pentagon accounts focused on Iran’s involvement in Yemen, publishing content on major social networks critical of the Ansarallah-led de-facto government in Sanaa, accusing it of deliberately blocking humanitarian aid deliveries, acting as an unquestioning proxy of Tehran and Hezbollah, and closing bookstores, radio stations, and other cultural institutions.

Several of their posts blamed Iran for the deaths of civilians via landmine, on the basis Tehran may have supplied them.

Laying the ground

Other CENTCOM psychological warfare (psywar) narratives have direct relevance to the protests that have engulfed Iran.

There was a particular focus among one group of bots and trolls on women’s rights. Dozens of posts compared Iranian women’s opportunities abroad with those in Iran – one meme on this theme contrasted photos of an astronaut with a victim of violent spousal abuse – while others promoted protests against the hijab.

Alleged government corruption and rising living costs were also recurrently emphasized, particularly in respect of food and medicine – production of which in Iran is controlled by the IRGC, a fact CENTCOM’s online operatives repeatedly drew attention to.

Women’s rights, corruption, and the cost of living – the latter of which directly results from suffocating US sanctions – are all key stated motivating factors for the protesters.

Despite the rioters’ widespread acts of violence and vandalism, targeted at civilians and authorities alike, such as the destruction of an ambulance ferrying police officers away from the scene of a riot, they also claim to be motivated by human rights concerns.

Establishment and fringe journalists and pundits have dismissed as conspiracy theories, any suggestions that protests in Iran and beyond are anything other than organic and grassroots in nature.

Yet, clear proof of foreign direction and sponsorship abounds, not least in the very public face of the anti-hijab movement, Masih Alinejad, who for many years has encouraged Iranian women to ceremonially burn their headscarves from the confines of an FBI safehouse in New York City, then publicizes the images online, which travel round the world and back via social media and mainstream news outlets.

A regime-change war by other means

Alinejad’s activities have generated a vast amount of fawning and credulous media coverage, without a single journalist or outlet questioning whether her prominent role in the supposedly grassroots, locally-initiated protest movement is affiliated with foreign hostile interference.

This is despite Alinejad posing for photos with former CIA director Mike Pompeo, and receiving a staggering $628,000 in US federal government contracts since 2015.

Much of these funds flowed from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the US government agency that oversees propaganda platforms such as Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America, the latter of which has produced a Farsi-language show fronted by Alinejad for seven years.

These clusters of social media posts may appear innocuous and authentic in an age of click-bait and viral fake news, yet when aggregated and analysed, they form a potent and potentially dangerous weapon which it turns out is one of many in the Pentagon’s regime-change arsenal.

كيف ستعيد أميركا تشكيل العالم بعد أوكرانيا

 السبت 2 نيسان 2022

رأي أسعد أبو خليل

ملامح مرحلة جديدة في تكوين العالم وتوزيع القوى والقوّة فيه ترتسم بسرعة. الحكومة الأميركيّة في طور تأنيب الضمير (الإمبريالي) ومراجعة الذات (الحربيّة). هي غير راضية عن شكل الكوكب. كانت تظنّ أن انهيار الاتحاد السوفياتي سيضمن لها السيطرة على الكون لأجيال وأجيال. ما مِن إمبراطوريّة تظنّ أن سيطرتها يمكن أن تزول أو أن تضمحلّ. ضمان الاستمراريّة الأبديّة للسطوة الأميركية هي الشغل الشاغل لمخطّطي البنتاغون. كان واحد من أولى أعمال وزير الدفاع الأميركي الأسبق، دونالد رامسفيلد، تشكيل لجنة من الخبراء والمؤرّخين لاستخلاص دروس عن انهيار الإمبراطوريّات في التاريخ (أتى ببرنارد لويس، المستشرق الصهيوني، من أجل أن يشاركهم انطباعاته عن الخطر الإسلامي وعن دروس انهيار الإمبراطوريّات الإسلاميّة.). كل تقارير «استراتيجيّة الأمن القومي» التي تصدر عن كل إدارة جديدة تكون مهووسة بالأخطار المحتملة من جهات محدّدة، خصوصاً الصين. لم تكن أميركا تحسب حساباً للخطر الروسي. هي اليوم في مرحلة إعادة النظر. من المرجّح أن هناك إعادة تنظيم للميزانيّة العسكريّة والاستخباراتيّة لرصد ميزانيّة أكبر لمواجهة الخطر الروسي (الكونغرس زاد على رقم الميزانية التي طلبها منه بايدن). لا تزال أميركا تستخف بالقوّة الروسيّة مقارنة بخوفها من الخطر الصيني الداهم. القوة الاقتصاديّة هي أهم عناصر القوّة في الحسبان الأميركي لأنها هي التي تؤهل لميزانيّات عسكريّة ضخمة. ميزانيّة روسيا العسكريّة لا تصل إلا إلى 8 في المئة من الميزانيّة العسكريّة الأميركيّة العملاقة. اللحاق مسألة صعبة، والحصار الاقتصادي الخانق الذي باتت أميركا تتقنه لخنق الشعوب فعّال للغاية في إضعاف القوة العسكريّة. وحدهما إيران وكوبا، أوجدتا طرقاً ووسائل للخروج من الحصار الجائر بخسائر أقلّ (نسبيّاً، لكن الـ«إيكونومست» اعترفت قبل أسابيع أن اقتصاد إيران أفضل ممّا كان وممّا تريده له أميركا).

ميشال مورو غوميز ــ كوبا

أميركا غير راضية عمّا يجري في أوروبا اليوم. هي كانت واثقة أنها حاصرت روسيا وستمنعها من ممارسة أي نفوذ خارج حدودها. حتى في داخل حدودها، هي كانت ناشطة في التجسّس وفي الاختراق عبر منظمات المجتمع المدني ومن قبل الإعلام المُسمّى «جديد» و«مستقل» (ماذا لو أطلقنا على الإعلام المُموَّل من إيران وصف «المستقل» كما تطلق وسائل إعلام «جديدة» على نفسها وصف المستقلّة فقط لأنها تتلقّى التمويل من حكومات ومؤسّسات أوروبيّة رجعيّة، لكنها تجزم أن لا أجندة عند حكومات أوروبا لأنها منزّهة). وكان أي معارض روسي، ولو لم يحظَ بشعبيّة في بلاده، يتلقّى تغطية واسعة وبطوليّة في إعلام الغرب. وكل معارض روسي يمرض، يكون هدفاً لمؤامرة من بوتين. وقبل أسابيع نشرت صحف غربيّة خبراً عن مقتل صحافيّة روسيّة كانت قد انتقدت بوتين. هكذا كانت العناوين. لكن عندما تقرأ الخبر تدرك أن الموضوع هو عنف شخصي، وأن صديقها قتلها وأنه ليس من أسباب سياسيّة لما جرى. ولنتذكّر أن يحيى شمص (المتهم بصلات مخدراتيّة) تلقّى تغطية واسعة في إعلام الغرب فقط لأنه معارض لحزب الله. فلنتوقّف لبرهة عند هذه المفارقة: تلقّى يحيى شمص تغطية في إعلام الغرب أكبر بكثير من تغطية النائب محمد رعد، الذي نال أكبر عدد أصوات في آخر انتخابات. هذا يعطينا فكرة عن معايير وحسابات الغرب (أشكّ أن واحداً من المراسلين الغربيين، أو واحدة، التقت بمحمد رعد). أميركا قلقة من التحدّي الذي لاقته من بوتين في هذه الأزمة. لم تكن تتوقّع ذلك مع أنه كانت هناك مؤشرات على نقمة روسيّة-صينيّة من سلوك الغطرسة الأميركي والذي تجلّى في الغزو الغربي لليبيا.

الحكومة الأميركية غاضبة جداً وهذا يظهر في سلوكها. حظر الإعلام الروسي وإصدار تنبيهات تويتريّة عن روابط لإعلام معاد ــــــ مع دولة ليست أميركا في حالة عداء رسمي معها ــــــ يشي بحلول مرحلة جديدة في العلاقة الدوليّة وفي إدارة الوضع الداخلي. ما إن تحرّك الجيش الروسي حتى اضمحلّ الخلاف في الداخل الأميركي وأصبح اليسار الصغير في الكونغرس الأميركي متحمّساً للحرب، ويشارك القوى المتنفّذة في الحزبيْن في عنفوان الوطنيّة والإصرار على السيطرة الأميركية الكليّة. لم تعد مساحة النقاش في الغرب كما كانت حتى في سنوات الحرب الباردة. كانت هناك إمكانيّة مناقشة فرضيّات الإدارات الأميركيّة عن الاتحاد السوفياتي، لكن هذا غائب اليوم. تجول بين الصحافة الأوروبيّة والأميركيّة ولا تجد أي مساحة نقديّة. ليس هناك من رأي معارض أو مختلف. حتى الكتّاب الذين يعارضون ــــــ أو كانوا يعارضون ــــــ توجّهات إمبراطورية الحرب سكتوا، لا بل أسهموا من خلال كتاباتهم في المجهود الحربي (هالني مثلاً كتابات ميشيل غولدبيرغ، الكاتبة في «نيويورك تايمز»، والتي عرفتها بعد 11 أيلول وكانت في موقع «صالون» من القلّة المعترضين على التعامل الأميركي مع المسلمين).

ماذا ستفعل أميركا في خلال الأزمة وبعدها. على الأرجح أن الإدارات المتعاقبة ستلجأ إلى جملة من السياسات والأعمال بما فيها:

أولا- تدعيم حلف شمال الأطلسي وزيادة الإنفاق العسكري فيه. ألمانيا باشرت بزيادة الإنفاق العسكري وسيكون مطلوباً منها الأكثر. ألمانيا أعلنت على الفور زيادة إنفاقها العسكري بنسبة 112 مليار دولار، ممّا يزيد نسبة الإنفاق من مجمل الناتج القومي إلى 2 في المئة من 1.53 في المئة والتزمت ستّ دول في حلف شمال الأطلسي بزيادة الإنفاق العسكري بنسبة 133 مليار دولار. حتى السويد الحيادية المسالمة التزمت بالزيادة. وسويسرا ضربت بحياديّتها التاريخيّة عرض الحائط كي تمتثل للمطالب الأميركيّة بالإذعان والطاعة من قبل كل دول أوروبا، في «الناتو» وفي خارجه. ونسبة الـ 2 في المئة من الناتج القومي على الإنفاق العسكري كانت قد وصلته دول اليونان وكرواتيا وبريطانيا وإستونيا ولاتفيا وبولندا ولتوانيا ورومانيا وفرنسا ــــــ وهذه النسبة كانت قيادة «الناتو» قد طلبتها. أميركا كانت في مرحلة إعداد للمعركة المقبلة. وبدلاً من تخفيض عدد أعضاء الحلف، ستصرّ أميركا على زيادة الأعضاء وقد تصرّ في مرحلة لاحقة على ضمّ أوكرانيا إلى الحلف لاستفزاز روسيا واستدراجها إلى مواجهة عسكريّة. وليس مستغرباً لو أن أميركا أصرّت على حيازة ألمانيا على السلاح النووي (تحتفظ أميركا بسلاح نووي على الأرض الألمانيّة بالرغم من معارضة الشعب هناك لذلك في السبعينيّات والثمانينيّات). وعدد الأسلحة النوويّة الأميركيّة في أوروبا غير معروف (سرّي) وهو يُقدَّر بـ 100 منتشرة في ست دول على الأقلّ. وهذا السلاح نُشر منذ الخمسينيّات ولم يؤثّر انهيار الاتحاد السوفياتي على وضعه. أي أن أميركا تستعمله ليس فقط لتخويف الاتحاد السوفياتي بل لبسط سيطرة أميركيّة تامّة على القارّة.

ما إن تحرّك الجيش الروسي حتى اضمحلّ الخلاف في الداخل الأميركي وأصبح اليسار الصغير في الكونغرس الأميركي متحمّساً للحرب

ثانيا- التفكير الجدّي في إنزال السلاح النووي التكتيكي إلى الميدان. والسلاح النووي التكتيكي هو سلاح يقضي على أحياء في مدن بدلاً من تدمير مدينة بكاملها. و«نيويورك تايمز» نشرت قبل أيّام مقالة تحاول فيها جعل فكرة استعمال النووي التكتيكي مقبولة من العامة. وقد أدلى مسؤول استخبارات سابق في أميركا برأيه، وقال: «لا يمكنك إدارة الخدّ الأيسر كل الوقت». والحديث عن السلاح النووي التكتيكي سبق هذه الأزمة. ومن المعروف أن أميركا هدّدت نظام صدّام به. ففي اللقاء الشهير قبل الحرب في 1991 بين جيمس بابكر وطارق عزيز، هدّد جيمس بابكر، في تلميح كان أقرب إلى التصريح، بأن أميركا ستردّ بصورة فظيعة إذا أصاب جنودها سلاح كيماوي عراقي (لم يكن النظام العراقي يملك سلاحاً كيماوياً كما هو معروف). وأميركا كانت على وشك استعمال النووي التكتيكي في معارك تورا بورا في أفغانستان كي تهدم الجبال فوق رؤوس المختبئين فيها عندما أصيبت بالحنق من الفشل في العثور على حليفها السابق، أسامة بن لادن. طوّرت أميركا بعدها قنبلة الـ«مواب» وهي قنبلة ذات قدرات تدميريّة هائلة لا يفوق قدرتها إلا السلاح النووي. ولم تتوقّف أميركا عن رمي الـ«مواب» على أفغانستان ــــــ التي لم تعانِ، بنظر إعلام الغرب، وإعلام التمويل الغربي إلا بعد مغادرة جيش الاحتلال الأميركي لها.

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اليوم، أميركا في موقع صعب. كيف تقترب من الصين أكثر وهي تكنّ عداءً نحو الصين يفوق عداءها نحو روسيا؟ والعلاقة بين الصين وروسيا ممتازة

ثالثا- جعل حلف شمال الأطلسي حلفاً عالمياً. لقد رُفعت مرتبة قطر في التحالف مع أميركا. في الوقت الذي كان فيه حكام العرب ينتظرون الفرصة للقاء بايدن (الذي لا يزال يرفض مهاتفة محمد بن سلمان)، دعا بايدن الأمير القطري إلى لقاء خاص وحميم في البيت الأبيض، وتمّ الإعلان عن رفع مرتبة قطر إلى «حليف أساسي من خارج الناتو». واللقاء بين بايدن والحاكم القطري سبق الحرب على أوكرانيا وهو تضمّن حديثاً عن مدّ ألمانيا وأوروبا بالغاز القطري (يبدو أن أميركا كانت مستعدّة جيداً لهذه الأزمة، قبل أشهر من التدخّل العسكري الروسي). ولقد أخذت قطر مرتبتها الجديدة على محمل الجدّ وهي تحاول جاهدة الظهور بمظهر الدولة الغربيّة في عواطفها الجيّاشة نحو الشعب الأوكراني. لم يلقَ شعب فلسطين هذه العاطفة الجيّاشة من قطر من قبل. إعلام النظام القطري لم يكن في هذه الأزمة إلا اجتراراً لإعلام حلف شمال الأطلسي، وتتعامل «الجزيرة» وغيرها مع أوكرانيا أنها هي قلب العروبة النابض.

رابعا- إيلاء الحلفاء بين الأنظمة الاستبداديّة أهميّة أكبر وتولية مصالحهم في العلاقات. أسابيع فقط من الحرب الروسية على أوكرانيا وأميركا تصلح علاقاتها مع النظام السعودي والإماراتي. النظام القطري لا يحتاج إلى عناية خاصّة لأنه مطلق الطاعة والولاء ومرتبته التحالفيّة ارتفعت في نظر واشنطن. والنظام السعودي عبّر عن امتعاضه في حديث مع «وول ستريت جورنال» عن كثرة الإشادة الأميركيّة بالحليف القطري. لكن تحفّظ الحكومة السعودية والإماراتيّة، وحتى حكومة العدوّ، عن اعتناق موقف «الناتو» بالكامل (بالنسبة إلى روسيا) أزعج الحكومة الأميركيّة. لكن بدلاً من رفع العصا بوجه الحلفاء، عمدت واشنطن إلى إرضائهم وتكرار مواقف الدعم والتعهد بالدفاع عن أمن النظام. لم تعد أميركا تتحمّل رقصات توازن بينها وبين العدوّ الروسي. وأميركا هي اليوم في حالة عداء مطلقة ضد روسيا. والحلفاء من أمثال السعودية والإمارات سيحظون بالمزيد من الدعم الأميركي، السياسي والعسكري. سنسمع عن شحنات سلاح جديدة وعن قواعد أميركية جديدة وعن وفود وزيارات كثيرة. والحاكم السعودي الشاب بات في موقع تفاوضي حول صعوده إلى العرش، وحظوظ نيله الرعاية الأميركيّة لصعوده باتت شبه محسومة. الاهتمام بطغاة الخليج كان بادياً هذا الأسبوع، حيث حرص وزير الخارجية الأميركي، أنتوني بلينكن، على ترضية محمد بن زايد ومبعوثين سعوديّين. والأكاديمي الشاب، غريغوري برو، على حق عندما علّق قائلاً إن هذا الاهتمام من قبل إدارة بايدن بالأنظمة الاستبداديّة بالخليج ينسف نظريّة هنتنغتون من أساسها.

خامسا- حظر التسليح الروسي. هناك قانون أميركي من عام 2017 يُعرف بأحرفه الأولى، قانون «كاتسا» وهو يفرض عقوبات على الدول التي تدخل في عقود مع روسيا في مجال الدفاع والاستخبارات «بصورة كبيرة». أي إن القانون ضبابي وهو كان يفترض أن يعاقب تركيا والهند لاستيرادهم شبكة «أس 400». لكن مرتبة الحلفاء أدّت إلى التساهل كما أن علاقة تركيا بروسيا وبأوكرانيا أفادت أميركا لتمرير رسائل. لكن مساعي التفاوض التركيّة قد لا تكون مُحبّذة في واشنطن لأن أميركا تريد من هذه الحرب أن تستمرّ إلى ما لا نهاية لو أمكن من أجل استنفاد طاقات وموارد روسيا. وقد كتب ديفيد شينكر (عرّاب نخبة «ثوّار» لبنان) مع زميل له من «مؤسّسة واشنطن» مقالة في «وول ستريت جورنال» يدعوان فيها إلى التشدّد في العقوبات على الحلفاء الذين يستوردون السلاح من روسيا. لن تتساهل أميركا في هذا الخصوص بعد اليوم. أي إنه من المتوقّع أن تزيد المبيعات الأميركية من الأسلحة.

اليوم، أميركا في موقع صعب. كيف تقترب من الصين أكثر وهي تكنّ عداءً نحو الصين يفوق عداءها نحو روسيا؟ والعلاقة بين الصين وروسيا ممتازة

سادسا- التعامل مع مثلّث القوة في العالم. ريتشارد نيكسون نظر إلى توزيع القوى في العالم ورأى أن العالم المثلث الأقطاب يحتّم محاولة طرف فيه جذب طرف آخر له. هذا ما حفّزه على تجاوز موانعه العقائديّة من أجل أن يبيع تايوان ويغضّ النظر عن عدائه المرضي ضدّ الشيوعية لكسب الصين إلى صف أميركا. لم تصبح الصين حليفة لكن كل ما يحتاجه المُخطّط في العلاقات الدوليّة أن يكون طرفه أقرب إلى طرفٍ ثانٍ من الطرف الثالث في المثلّث. وهذا ما حصل وأضعف الموقع السوفياتي. كان وضع الاتحاد السوفياتي سيكون أفضل بكثير لو أنه اعتنى أكثر بإصلاح العلاقة مع الصين لتفويت الفرصة على التآمر الأميركي ضدّه. اليوم، أميركا في موقع صعب. كيف تقترب من الصين أكثر وهي تكنّ عداءً نحو الصين يفوق عداءها نحو روسيا؟ والعلاقة بين الصين وروسيا ممتازة وهي أوثق بعد أزمة أوكرانيا لأن الصين تحتاج إلى تعاون روسي من أجل اجتراح سبل تجاوز العقوبات الأميركية القاسية والوحشيّة (هي وحشيّة على الشعوب قبل أن تكون ضد الأنظمة). ومهما حاولت أميركا أن تُبعد الصين عن روسيا، فليس لديها ما تعطيه للصين غير تخفيف حدّة العداء الشديد. وتخفيف حدة العداء لا يغيّر من التخطيط الاستراتيجي الأميركي الذي يتعامل مع الصين على أنه الخطر الأكبر. أميركا كان لديها الكثير لتقدّمه للصين في عام 1970: عضويّة مجلس الأمن وطرد تايوان من الأمم المتحدة بالإضافة إلى إنشاء علاقة ديبلوماسيّة، بالإضافة إلى التعامل مع الصين على أنها دولة أكبر مما كانت في حينه. ماذا تستطيع أن تقدّم أميركا للصين اليوم؟ اعتبارها دولة عظمى وهي كذلك من دون مبالغة أميركية ديبلوماسيّة.

سابعا- جرّ روسيا إلى حروب إنهاك. هناك نظريّة أن الحرب الروسية في أوكرانيا لم تكن إلا فخّاً نصبته أميركا لها. وأميركا تحمّست كثيراً لهذه الحرب وكان واضحاً أنها كانت تعدّ لها. كانت القوّات الأميركيّة قد انتشرت في أنحاء مختلفة من أوروبا خصوصاً في بولندا، بالإضافة إلى تولّي أجهزة الاستخبارات الأميركيّة مهمّة تقرير أجندة الصحف الأميركيّة. فتحتُ ثلاث صحف من باب التجربة: «نيويورك تايمز» و«واشنطن بوست» و«غارديان» البريطانيّة. نفس الأخبار والعناوين موجودة في الصحف الثلاث، ومنسوبة كلّها لمصادر عسكريّة واستخباراتيّة أميركيّة. كانت الصحف البريطانيّة تتميّز عن الصحف الأميركيّة لكن ذلك تغيّر منذ الحرب في سوريا حين تطابقت التغطية بالكامل وأصبحت الـ«غارديان» أكثر تصلّباً في الصهيونيّة وفي تأييد آلة الحرب الأميركيّة من صحف أميركا. قد تصل أوكرانيا وروسيا إلى تسوية لكن أميركا ستعطّلها. طلع المبعوث الأوكراني إلى مفاوضات تركيا بين الطرفيْن بتصريحات متفائلة لكن وزير الخارجيّة الأميركي سرعان ما أبطل مفعول التفاؤل وخفّض منسوب الترحيب بشأن التقدّم في المفاوضات. أميركا تبحث عن حرب أفغانستان جديدة كي تغرق روسيا في حرب لا تنتهي إلا بانهيار الدولة. ليس هناك من تعداد للسلاح الذي هطل على أوكرانيا، لكن تذكّر أو تذكّري أن حتى السويد والنروج شاركت في الحرب الأوكرانيّة.

ثامنا- التركيز على دول العالم النامي في الاستراتيجيّة الأميركيّة لصنع تحالف عالمي ضد أعدائها. الصحف الغربيّة ضجّت بقوّة التحالف العالمي الذي تقوده أميركا (طبعاً تحت مسميّات الحريّة ــــــ وتحالف الحريّة هذا يضمّ مستبدّين من كل حدب وصوب)، لكن الوقائع في تصويت الجمعيّة العاميّة للأمم المتحدة أثبتت عكس ذلك. كانت أميركا تريد أن تحصل على إجماع كل دول العالم لكن تحالفها كان غربيّاً صرفاً. دول كبرى في العالم النامي حاولت الحفاظ على مسافة من موقف أميركا. الهند وجنوب أفريقيا والصين وباكستان كلّها تحافظ على علاقة وديّة مع روسيا. ستضطرّ أميركا إلى إنفاق المزيد من المال وشحن المزيد من السلاح وشنّ المزيد من الحروب لجلب المزيد من دول العالم النامي إليها. لقد فضحت هذه الحرب الطابع العنصري الصارخ للتحالف الغربي ومعاييره. لم يعد ممكناً ستر طبيعة سيادة العنصريّة البيضاء في صلب التحالف الغربي. لا يمحي ذلك الترحيب بمسؤول من هذه الدولة الآسيويّة أو نشر خطاب وزير الخارجية الكيني الذي هو في الأساس أداة بيد الإدارة الأميركيّة. (واختفى وزير الخارجية الكيني عن الساحة بعد خطابه في الأمم المتحدة، والذي أرادته البروباغندا الأميركيّة أن يصبح شهيراً لأنها استعملته بصورة عنصريّة كي تُكسي عدوانيّتها بلسان فرد أفريقي).

تاسعا- الحرب الدعائيّة ستستعر أكثر من أي وقت. رأينا ذلك على مرّ الأسابيع الماضية. «واشنطن بوست» (وهي أكثر مطبوعة ملتصقة بأجهزة الاستخبارات الأميركيّة) دعت جهاراً إلى تكرار تجربة الحرب الباردة في شنّ «حرب ثقافيّة» ضد روسيا وغيرها من أعداء أميركا. لكن الصحيفة نسيت أن الحرب الثقافية الماضية تضمّنت نشر عقيدة بن لادن وصحبه حول العالم لأن تلك العقدية كانت مؤاتية ضد الشيوعيّة.

نحن في مرحلة قلقة ومضطربة من العلاقات الدوليّة. صحف الغرب (وتوابعه في بلادنا) مشغولة بالتدخّل العسكري الروسي في أوكرانيا. لكن التدخّل الأميركي في أوكرانيا لا يقلّ عن تدخّل روسيا. هل من شكّ أن ضبّاطاً أميركيّين يقودون كل العمليات العسكريّة الأوكرانيّة؟ هل من شك أن هناك شركات علاقات عامّة تكتب خطب القادة الأوكرانيّين (لقد علمنا رسميّاً أن شركة علاقات عامّة استأجرتها حكومة بايدن كي تكتب خطب سفيرة أوكرانيا في أميركا). أميركا لن تتوقّف، هي ستستمرّ لأنها في طور الانتقام من تحدّي روسيا لها. والانتقام الأميركي، كما رأينا بعد 11 أيلول، أبشع بكثير من عوائد القبائل العربيّة القديمة.

* كاتب عربي ــــ حسابه على تويتر
asadabukhalil@

Journalist Roman Kosarev: “It’s not Russia starting a war, it’s Russia ending the war that’s been happening here the last 8 years”

March 26, 2022 

Eva Bartlett

Eva Bartlett is an independent writer and rights activist with extensive experience in Syria and in the Gaza Strip, where she lived a cumulative three years (from late 2008 to early 2013). She documented the 2008/9 and 2012 Israeli war crimes and attacks on Gaza while riding in ambulances and reporting from hospitals. In 2017, she was short-listed for the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

While in Donetsk a few days ago, I met RT journalist Roman Kosarev, who has been based in the Donbass republics, covering Ukraine’s war on the people, a war ignored by Western media and politicians.

Follow Roman’s work:

https://t.me/corrkosarev

https://www.rt.com/search?q=roman+kosarev

https://www.facebook.com/rkosarev

Related Links:

*My (2019) Donbass war report & interviews:

Under Fire from Ukraine and Misperceived by the West, The People of the DPR Share Their Stories

More by Eva Bartlett

• “Western media will not report on humanitarian aid provided by Russia”–my brief appearance on Telesur, from the Donbass
• Alex Christoforou on Ukraine’s 8 year war on the Donbass & Russia’s military operation in Ukraine
• International Criminal Lawyer on “The Legality of War”
• Russian Military expert Andrei Martyanov on Russia’s denazification & demilitarization operation in the Ukraine
• Geopolitics & Empire interviews Dmitry Orlov on Russian military operation in Ukraine
• “Donbass and Crimea – an insider view from journalist Eva Bartlett”

The opinion of a professional about the special operation in Ukraine (MUST READ!)

March 09, 2022

Note by the Saker: one of our readers today sent me a very interesting document in Russian.  First, I thought “more of the same” (5th columnist stuff) but then I started reading it and I changed my mind.  This was clearly written by a military professional, his name is Alexander Dubrovsky.  It was posted here and here.  So I literally *begged* our new Russian translators to make even a “quick and dirty translation” because I wanted to get the info to you as fast as possible (in the meantime, I was writing this).  And one of them did!  (Thank you N.!!!). 

While Dubrovsky’s views are not “Holy Writ” his testimony and analysis is, I think, priceless, especially for those who live in Zone A.  We don’t have to agree with every letter, but I urge you to read it very carefully and in full.  I consider this text so important that I will post it under “guest analyses” and not “Saker Community translations” because I want to give it max visibility.  All our articles under “guest analyses” are written for the Saker blog or by permission, never taken off the Internet without the author’s permission.  But, as the ancient Russian saying goes, “rules are for the cause and not the cause for the rules” 🙂

Kind regards

Andrei

***

As promised, I am not inventing anything more about the special operation in Ukraine, giving the floor to professionals.

The source is unknown to me; it came via WhatsApp. It is published without notes and without editing, only some places highlighted by me.

Subjective opinion.

(Let’s try to make sense of the situation without hysteria and insults.)

It’s hard for everyone. Our guys are dying. Citizens of Ukraine are dying. But the hardest part is for the military, acting both in reserve, both Russian and Ukrainian, who have gone through “hot” conflicts. I’m grinding my teeth from impotence, I’m not personally sure — could I have carried out the Commander-in-Chief’s order had I been in the ranks today. To minimize civilian casualties is understandable, we are one people. And how to try not to cause critical damage to the APU — I have little idea within the tactics of my own unit.

I categorically object to the publication of the number of combat losses until the operation has entered its final phase. This is a gift for someone else’s information war, a trump card in the hands of the enemy, the dispersal of false information among outright alarmists inside the country: “they all lie, hide, underestimate”, “no war”, “mothers, don’t let your sons”, “how I want peace”, “how much more blood can be shed”…

You can and should. Soldiers and heroes are dying. Who came to the army not to polish paving stones with their shoe soles, but to defend the Motherland. Even at the cost of his own life. This was a mistake of the General Staff, the people should clearly understand the objectives of the operation, its necessity, the inevitability of victims. Not the current price.

It sounds cruel, but such is the harsh military reality. We will wipe our own and women’s tears after the Victory, we will bow to every widow, mother, bride, sister for the feat of their men.

The first stage of the operation…

We underestimated the enemy’s power of informational, ideological, psychological resistance, they were waiting for us. Literally on the very first day, with one click of American bloody fingers, they deprived us of the support of the civilian population and those AFU units ready to become neutral. Millions of dollars, thousands of IT guys, global media corporations cut Ukraine off from any objective information, it stank in our country.

And our main losses were in the first three days. Now they will be rapidly reduced. Peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, like the Crimean one— are no longer carried out by the Russian army. The fighters received other orders, got involved, got angry, regrouped, any hopes for active support from the civilian population and those parts of the AFU who had changed their mind were dispelled.

There were few flowers and bread loaves to be seen, the people have been crushed by propaganda and lies, intimidated into insanity by the Nazis. Another important point was missed in the calculations — almost 600 thousand Ukrainians have passed through the ATO zone in the Donbas since 2014, today they have replenished the territorial defense everywhere, many have something to fear. Especially in the wake of fakes about executions without trial by the ATO.

Can you imagine what, during a year of service there, the Nazis stuffed into their heads – gave them the opportunity to shoot at the settlements of “quilted jackets and colorados” with impunity, to mock the civilian population there. So, the calculation for the help of locals and APU was inaccurate, the cancer in Ukrainian society is simply monstrous. But… we will cure it.

If we explain our tactics of the first days… this is a creatively reworked “reconnaissance by combat” of the Great Patriotic War. Only with a deep and rapid penetration into the Nazi-occupied territory. We provoked the activity of the enemy with tactical groups, deliberately drawing out parts of the APU and the National Guard from their locations. With a small number withstanding the terrible counterattacks of tanks and armored vehicles, of a superior in number motorized infantry.

Sometimes it was impossible to suppress the “Grads”, artillery and mortars hidden in residential neighborhoods that were nailing you. Urban areas could not be cleaned methodically in combat formations, causing supporting fire, attack helicopters, sappers, flamethrowers, tanks to carry machine-gun emplacements in houses and social infrastructure facilities.

This is a war unfamiliar to us veterans. Especially when the sky is under your full control, airfields are packed with attack aircraft and bombers, operational and tactical missile systems are in service, there is a lot of heavy artillery. Now it has become clear even to civilians: the correct name for what is happening truly is “a special military operation for denazification.” And the demilitarization of Nezalezhnaya was completed by the end of the third day.

The APU, as a single, manageable and effective structure, has ceased to exist. Today, there are dozens of groups of different numbers isolated from each other, hiding in cities and towns. No centralized supply, no air support, no approach of reinforcements. They are not able to act within the framework of any plans of the Ukrainian General Staff. Just crowds of armed men with orders to stand to the death.

The main groups “North” and “East” were beheaded and deprived of command — these are 22 brigades, which had been entrusted with the honorable duty to drown Donbass in blood at the beginning of March. We beat them to it by a week or two, starting our own special operation. Now 150 thousand people (together with national soldiers) are marinated in “cauldrons”, cut off from each other. For a second — this was done by smaller Russian forces… and in five days.

There is no organized resistance in other operational areas. Separate parts of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), national battalions, sabotage groups. Everyone acts at their discretion, with varying degrees of activity. There is no way to move in columns, regroup, replenish ammunition, fuel, equipment even in local warehouses, everything is systematically destroyed by high-precision weapons and aircraft.

In a week or two, 80% of the AFU will turn into detachments completely devoid of ammunition, fuel, medicines, and food. Mentally and physically exhausted, without a unified command, goals and objectives. For the army, this is a terrible thing – despondency and decay. Especially for the Ukrainian, which is held by fear, propped up by Bandera detachments. Servicemen fear for the fate of their families in the rear.

The second stage of the operation…

Recognizably, the Syrian scenario. A neutral or terrorist-fearing population, among which it is almost impossible to identify militants. The Russian Army does not take such settlements – it surrounds cities with Bandera national battalions. Soon we will observe buses and “export tours” in the direction of the Western region. As soon as they are “ripe” without any support and help from outside.

In other places, cities are taken into semi-encirclement, thereby inviting the defenders to leave the territory on their own. No organized military columns, heavy equipment – all these goods are being destroyed. Individually, expensive. Yes, there is a danger of the appearance of a large number of sabotage groups, however, strategically three main tasks of the special operation are being solved: minimizing losses among the civilian population and infrastructure, our units and the army of Ukraine.

For the Russian and Ukrainian military to be cutting each other up with rapture is much too a luxurious gift for Washington and the Euro-Reich. The Bandera’s “partisan detachments” will get on your nerves, but the idea of the command is not bad. They will become legitimate prey for counter-terror detachments, military police and Ramzan Kadyrov’s men from the National Guard. Who do not take terrorist prisoners, they wipe them out… wherever they may find them. Denazification in the literal sense of the word.

An even sadder fate awaits the numerous mercenaries of the EuroReich, from which they form not military units (no time), but sabotage and tactical groups. Our General Staff has already stated that it does not consider them combatants with all the ensuing consequences, no conventions on prisoners of war apply here. I am sure that a special, cruel and purposeful hunt will be conducted for these “soldiers of fortune”. Poor devils…

The third stage of the operation.

I will not tell you in detail how and where the fighting unfolds, there is enough information from professional experts in the public domain. But everything is happening strictly according to plans, we have not even started transferring reserves, and they are standing in columns in the border areas. Losses are not just tolerable (from a military statistical point of view) — insignificant. Not a single unit has been allocated for re-formation or rest, which means it is fully combat-ready.

Look at the map, estimate the distances, marches, constant clashes, regrouping, maneuvering for tens of kilometers, and remember – our guys are opposed by the third largest army in Europe and extremely motivated Nazi formations. We need to tighten up the rear, rest elementary, maintain equipment, perform a bunch of previously unforeseen actions.

There is no need to pressure anyone, to demand more decisive actions – Flags of Victory over Mariupol, Sumy, Chernihiv, Kharkov, Odessa, and even more so, useless Kiev with its three million panicked, propaganda-pumped citizens. The objectives of the operation are strategy and tactics – in this completely new page in the art of war, haste is unacceptable.

My classmate at the Academy asked yesterday in a personal post:

Why is military aid to Ukraine not destroyed right at the arrival airport?

Why is it even possible for NATO transporters to visit the airspace of Ukraine?

Do you have a feeling that our diplomats are beginning to drain the efforts of the army? … All sorts of bad thoughts are wandering around in my head.

According to point number three. There will be no drain, all the goals of the special operation will be fulfilled. This is categorically repeated every day by the hardened Lavrov, and Putin announced yesterday. The French “peacemaker” Macron is all washed up with his mediation. And Medinsky in Belovezhskaya Pushcha is subtly mocking the metrosexuals from the Ukrainian delegation. There’s no one there to talk to.

Look at the brave Commander-in-Chief Ze, how he looks. Complete disintegration of the personality under the influence of drugs. The Americans will not allow him to negotiate and his own Nazis will kill him. The task is different – to completely destroy the country, drown it in chaos, so there will be nothing left over for anyone.

The special operation does not stop, there will be no more delays. Every day of delay categorically harms us, unplanned diplomatic, political, economic and military problems appear. Only speed and onslaught, until in the West they begin to assess the situation with a cool head.

About flying transporters with NATO symbols delivering weapons. This is impossible, the sky over the Nezalezhnaya and the south of Russia is closed for flights. They will make ground deliveries from Poland. And we will not destroy such convoys with “humanitarian aid”. Why, you ask? Better ask another question — who exactly is in power in Ukraine?

Outright Nazis. They took millions of civilians hostage in cities without humanitarian corridors, drove terrified people into basements and subway stations. Poisoning people with lies about “Russian atrocities”, mass shootings, executions, violence, carpet bombing. They place civilians with machine guns near strategic command and control facilities. As in Kiev at the SBU building, closely adjacent to the St Sofia Cathedral.

Zelensky’s curators and Bandera battalions are staging a humanitarian catastrophe, leaving the towns and villages of Donbass and blowing up everything: bridges, substations, pumping stations. Remember the liberation of Ukraine and 1945, the agony of the Third Reich. The quote of the demoniac, issued in the orders on the destruction of the entire infrastructure of Germany: “if the war is lost, it absolutely does not matter that the people will die.”

It is useful to know history in order to predict the behavior of the Nazis. Such is the ideology, social norms of life, worldview.

So, military columns will not be destroyed for three reasons. Firstly, these are trophies. Secondly, weapons will not get to the combat-ready units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the national battalions of the South-East — the addressees are sitting in “cauldrons”. Thirdly, everything will be transported by ordinary civilian trucks, the rear transport of the AFU units is together with its parts, or destroyed in fleets.

Calculate and hit container trucks? Yes, you can. Just keep in mind — all the roads to the border checkpoints with “kind-hearted Europe” are clogged with columns of cars of fleeing Ukrainians for hundreds of kilometers. The traffic there is terrible. There are women and children in the cars. And Poland and Hungary did not move the inspection points into the depths of their territories, did not increase the checkpoint capacity with additional personnel.

That is, Ukrainian border guards with their “colleagues” keep people waiting for days to cross the border. Continue to describe the scenario that Kiev and Washington are counting on? Or can you figure out for yourself what kind of TV picture the whole “civilized world” expects? They dream that bloodthirsty Russians will start bombing civilian cars… or the railway.

But it is hard to believe in such scenarios, it is clear to everyone – Ukraine is completely lost, no amount of weapons will help it anymore. But some parts will definitely be delivered to Lvov, mercenaries and ideological Banderites will receive them. And then in groups proceed to commit sabotage, intimidate local administrations across the country, try to disrupt our communications and supply lines.

But this is another special operation, a police one. One that Ukrainians themselves are able to carry out with minimal Russian help, as they get over their shock. This is their land, they live here. Announce a reward of five thousand dollars for an anonymous denunciation — in a day all saboteurs and partisans will end. This is the kind of country it is.

But we’ll make it sooner…

I want to reassure you, for the twelfth day our guys are operating in a different operational and tactical reality, losses will rapidly decrease. If earlier there was a strict order not to cause even hypothetical harm to civilians, civilian objects… today it has been modified. In one sentence: “not to the detriment of the personnel of the units.” As a military man, I am completely satisfied: now the humanitarian sensitivities are over – real work will go on.

Fired at a column – in response will follow the entire military-technical menu. Such orders only work that way. Will the civilian population suffer? Yes, some losses are inevitable, but not through our fault. We do not storm cities according to Regulations, but bypass or surgically act with special forces, as in Kharkov. With the use of previously completely unknown tactics of urban combat by night maneuver groups. Let’s talk about this separately.

Let the Ukrainians pickle themselves in the cities, digesting the Banderites who have settled in and the “territorial battalions” fooled by Nazi propaganda. Who can no longer cope with looters there, never mind the “reflection of aggression”. This is not our problem now, no matter how cruel the words may sound.

The final turning point will come after the cleansing of Kharkov, blocking or taking Odessa. All the heroic self-defense forces of other settlements will dissolve by themselves, obvious signs of a humanitarian catastrophe are already visible in the surrounded cities. The fog, when it is completely fake, subsides most quickly in the dark, invigorating coolness and on an empty stomach.

The population is not morally ready to stand to the last. Ukrainian social networks are already full of messages from places where local administrations remained after the arrival of the Russian Army, food is being delivered smoothly, street lighting is on, local police control the streets. With each new day, the fake hysteria will subside, the thought will come to the drugged heads: what next?

Will the encircled Banderites begin to commit atrocities in their impotent anger? Well, Ukrainians should also carry this cross on their own. Of course, we will try to do everything to rescue children and the elderly. But Putin will not allow to bear sensitive losses, this is not that war.

It was not us who raised the fiend of hell, nurtured it, allowed it to seize power and hostages in the person of an entire nation. It was not us, who armed them and sent them to kill Donbass, taught them to hate Russians. Criminal indifference and complicity is also a punishable act. Not by us, by life itself.”

I agree that in some places it is very cynical, but this is only from the point of view of a civilian. Any military action –that is a different reality…

ТГ «СпокойноМаша»

Alexander Dubrovsky

https://alex-o-mire

Bernays and Propaganda – Propaganda Continues Unabated – Part 5

March 11, 2021

Source

In most nations, when a particular criminal conduct reaches epidemic proportion, the government finally acts decisively to eradicate it. Not in America; they solve the problem by legalising it. They did this with influence-peddling (lobbying) and drugs, the same now occurring with domestic propaganda which has been against the law for a very long time to protect citizens from psychological manipulation and control by their own government. The law has always been ignored, but Congress is now dispensing with the pretense in repealing two major laws, the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act (1) (2) (3) (4) and the 1987 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, so as to permit the authorities to disperse false and misleading propaganda and campaigns of misinformation against its own people. Of course, the government has always done this surreptitiously, sometimes to an overwhelming extent as in the case of war marketing, but it has always been illegal. After this, it won’t be. One Pentagon official claimed this new provision will have “No checks and balances. No one will know if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false”. In an article in USA Today, it was quoted that the US military (Pentagon) already spends about $4 billion per year on propaganda to sway public opinion, much of that directed domestically. (5) (6) (7)

We now have the sock puppets, (8) (9) the fake social media personas on the Internet, used by the US military and intelligence agencies to affect and lead public opinion in many countries, usually with the intent of inciting civil unrest and revolution. It has been obvious for some time that these tactics have been used domestically as well, the new legislation simply legalising the process. Many US government agencies have obtained this software that permits them to flood the social media with fake people making fake posts in support of government positions and discrediting those who hold contrary views or are critical of the government. The software is extremely detailed, providing extensive backgrounds for these fictitious people, permitting a single human to assume the identities of as many as 1,000 fake people, and make them appear to actually be in a certain physical place or even attending an actual event. They control the IP address, making it impossible to detect that a single person in one location is orchestrating all that activity. The program manual states, “There is a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas”. The contract requires “virtual private servers” located in and outside the US, to give false locational information, and also requires what it calls “traffic mixing”, blending the persona controllers’ internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that offers “excellent cover and powerful deniability”.

This “Persona management software” is now being used to manipulate public opinion on key issues, with unlimited numbers of virtual people regularly flooding US social media with pro-government propaganda in attempts to manage public perception and kill political activism. This is called “counter-messaging” and the Pentagon has made no secret of its activities in promulgating “black propaganda” – which means knowingly spreading lies to mislead and misinform the public for the purpose of stifling political dissent. In its increasing fear of political activism, the US government has labeled the Internet as a “breeding ground for domestic terrorists”, and appears to include in this category anyone who questions the government’s version of events. This is all part of a massive program to intimidate, manipulate, and crush all public dissent, and to control not only domestic discussion but also to actively manipulate worldwide opinion. Their activity is becoming common in China where, on the occurrence of an event containing useful propaganda fuel, we often see a flood of commentary on Weibo supporting the American position, these ostensibly being posted by native Chinese but almost inevitably originating in Fort Langley, Virginia.

The government has used these in smear campaigns (10) (11) (12) against reporters and other high-profile individuals who criticise US government policy, to the extent of creating fake Facebook and Twitter accounts in their names, containing fake posts meant to be personally damaging, and have even created fake websites and Wikipedia pages purporting to belong to an individual, all for the purpose of discrediting “dissidents”. When a Taiwanese scientist aired his research identifying the 5 haplotypes of COVID-19 and proving America had to be the original source since these types existed only in the USA, the VOA harassed the man so badly online that he closed all his social media accounts and went dark.

The US government performs surveillance and infiltration in attempts to control the public dialogue in many nations, creating Twitter-like social media platforms in other countries, ostensibly local but all monitored and controlled by US agencies. Most are the work of USAID. The Americans innocently proclaim the purpose as “encouraging open political discussion” (in every nation but the US), but it’s a ‘discussion’ they mean to control entirely and skew to satisfy their agenda of inciting unrest and revolution. One such platform in Cuba was widely ridiculed when knowledge of it became public in early 2014, and was killed. (13) (14) (15) Even the Associated Press reported that it “was set up to encourage political dissent”, but White House officials claimed they wanted only “to provide Cubans with a platform to share ideas and exchange information”, claiming it was used to “share cricket scores” and by farmers to “share market prices”. Maybe, but it was used primarily for political destabilisation. The State Department and USAID actively pushed for these platforms after their successes in causing the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Iran. The State Department also provided several million dollars to a team of American hackers to develop a system known as a mesh network to enable US-sponsored dissidents in Cuba to communicate more freely and securely, with USAID committing yet another several million to the same cause. This is precisely what the US has been doing in Hong Kong for many years now.

The real owners and controllers of Google are reading from the same script. Google is not actively propagandising, but functions as an information gateway with all searches heavily censored and prioritised so that we see only what the secret government wants us to see and receive only the information they want or permit us to have. (16) Facebook and Twitter are not better. (17) Wikipedia is different, being one of the most criminally-dishonest active propagandists in the world. (18) There is surprisingly little in Wikipedia that is not either censored or outright false. If you want to know the number of protons in a Cesium atom, you will find the correct answer, but in any area related to history, politics, wars, government, the Jews, Israel, Arabs, ‘Axis of evil’ members, crimes of governments and corporations, the truths of the European bankers and their ravaging of the world, Wikipedia is 95% sanitised misinformation. And this propaganda is intense; Wiki has tens of thousands of ‘volunteers’ constantly scouring all the page entries to find items requiring editing or deleting. Many people have reported correcting an obviously false entry only to discover moments later that their corrections had been deleted and the page locked. Perhaps the biggest laugh is Wiki’s claim that “Content Requires Verifiable Data”. Maybe, but only from you.

The final pillar of this social engineering is the Jewish-owned and/or controlled media and entertainment industries which have long since abandoned the dissemination of truth and information and wholeheartedly adopted the primary task of propagandising the public mind. Today, the topics are different than the war marketing of Bernays, but – and this is very important to understand – the intensity remains the same. Just as Bernays once flooded every possible media channel with war-mongering hatred, today those same channels are directed to nations other than Germany (China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Libya Cuba, Syria, Venezuela), to the instillation of fear (the war on terrorism) which is easily manipulated to achieve astonishing measures of social control, and to detail-less information to maintain public ignorance and confusion on all important issues. Paul Craig Roberts wrote that “The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government. The function of the “mainstream media” is to sell products and to brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups.” (19) That is precisely correct.

The book publishers are also onside in this vast propaganda campaign. The content of educational texts especially is heavily controlled by the disparate elements of the propaganda machine, with countless topics and theories proscribed. Howard Zinn was a notable exception in having some of his “radical” (i.e. accurate) history books published, but today, only shortly after his death, all his books are being removed from school libraries and destroyed. During the past two or three generations it has become increasingly difficult, and now almost impossible, to publish books on topics that would pose a threat to the activities of the secret government, and more than a few individuals have been killed for trying. The concentration of media and publishing power is not an accident, but part of a plan to eliminate information contradictory to the best interests of Bernays’ invisible people. Today, many publishers and authors will testify that Amazon actively suppresses many books while pretending to sell them.

Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood, (20) (21) wrote “What is amazing is the extent to which they succeeded in promulgating this fiction throughout the world. By making a ‘shadow’ America, one which idealized every old glorifying bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination. Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made.”

The US movie industry is the worst of all media for fictionalising history and reality and replacing them with fabricated mythology. A recent example is Steven Spielberg’s unforgivably distorted portrayal of Lincoln and slavery and the American civil war. It was the Rothschild’s Barings Bank that financed the slave trade, and a great many if not most of the slave traders were Jewish. Furthermore, we have adequate documentation that it was European Jewish bankers who stimulated the slavery-related rift in American society to instigate the civil war. In this context, Spielberg’s movie is an especially offensive false and mythical portrayal of the true facts. As one columnist noted, Spielberg’s movie “had too many negroes and too few Jews”. The upshot is that tens of millions of gullible Americans will take with them to their graves a totally and absolutely false understanding of a critical period in their nation’s history.

That is the real issue, and that brings us back to Bernays who wrote: “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world to-day. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation.” It also begins very early to indoctrinate little minds.

“The American Jews have always used their films as an active propaganda channel to transmit not only their own political agenda but the fiction of US culture, values and way of thinking to people in other nations, these films containing an outpouring of individualism or struggles in pursuit of freedom or the realisation of the American Dream. They have always portrayed an idealised society intended to evoke in others a kind of yearning for America and the things it appears to be. All is cleverly arranged, with meticulous attention paid to the smallest details of setting, with the American flag so often prominent and Americans always portrayed as leaders of the world. All of this is a large and persistent attempt at a kind of cultural colonisation of the world, the Jews excelling at the presentation of a superficial layer of intense audio and visual effects that are “so image rich and content poor that they manipulate our emotions and short-circuit our reason”.”

The great objection to all this is that the presentation is totally false, the US being nothing like the mythical movie presentations, and the values promulgated and unconsciously accepted are not actually held by Americans, and certainly not by the nation’s leaders. Like everything similar emanating from the US, American movies are stimulating, high-quality lies, which is why many nations restrict American content.

All of the above, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the advertising industry, Hollywood movies and TV programs, book publishing and book selling, Wikipedia, and the social media, are controlled by Jews. Their control over information is almost complete, giving them the power to directly influence people’s thoughts and behavior and to alter the course of events. All of these follow the same inescapable propaganda script. (22) (23) (24) They are not apologetic about this control; Philip Weiss wrote an article in Mondoweiss titled, “Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?”. (25) I can think of several objections.

Control over the mass media and of the movie industry have always been central to the dissemination of propaganda in the US, with the media presenting the narrative to be adopted and the movies glorifying the propaganda myths disguised as entertainment. The US is the one nation most thoroughly saturated by the media, Americans being bombarded daily with thousands of images on what is essentially political ideology, guiding popular opinion in a predefined direction. The media themselves and many branches of the government spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the art of public propaganda directed at the bewildered herd, this mass media bombardment daily shaping the American view of reality. American author Gore Vidal wrote:

“You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque. The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity, much less dissent.” (26)

All of the so-called values that Americans hold so dear and appear so determined to inflict on all other nations, have their origin in the propaganda disseminated by Bernays’ invisible government through this tightly-held media cartel. Dr. Nancy Snow, an assistant professor of political science, wrote “Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable. What the American people don’t know is that American propaganda is hidden, and its characteristics, integrated into communications and entertainment, convince people that they are not being manipulated. Propaganda is not supposed to be part of an ‘open society’. Much of our media now are so image rich and content poor that they just serve to capture the eye, manipulate our emotions, and short-circuit our reason. The propaganda and advertising industries therefore function increasingly like adult obedience industries. They instruct their audiences in how to feel and what to think, and increasing numbers of people follow and accept the cues without question.”

Snow described one of her previous jobs as being a “propagandist” for the US Information Agency. She said, “In the US, we don’t think of ourselves as a country that propagandises, even though to the rest of the world we are seen as really the most propagandistic nation”. According to her, the US has more PR professionals than news reporters, and the global reach of what Bernays called Public Relations is just a euphemism for propaganda that involves the entire US media. One example of this was the appointment of an advertising professional as Undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs. In an article in the LA Times, Naomi Klein wrote that “[Charlotte Beers] had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and she’s built brands for everything from dog food to power drills, and that her task now was to work her magic on the greatest branding challenge of all – to sell the United States and its war on terrorism to an increasingly hostile world”. (27) (28) (29) Secretary of State Colin Powell actively defended this: “There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can re-brand American foreign policy, re-brand diplomacy.” (30)

I wrote elsewhere of the fake stories the US military produced for its invasions of Iraq and Libya, with fabricated video of locals apparently cheering the American invaders as liberating heroes. You may have wondered why ‘protestors for freedom’ in many foreign nations (Iraq, Libya, Jugoslavia, Iran, Ukraine) inexplicably seem to create all their protest signs in English; they are all fake, meant for an American audience. Here is some background for you, from a speech given at the US Air Force Academy by John Rendon, a PR consultant employed by the US military. Rendon said, “I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician. I am a politician, an information warrior and a perception manager”, at which point he reminded his audience that when US troops entered Kuwait City during the first Persian Gulf war, they received a wildly enthusiastic greeting from hundreds of Kuwaitis waving US flags. He then asked, “Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City were able to get American flags? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then”. (31) (32) It is interesting that Americans boast so openly about their perverted manipulation of the world’s peoples. This was Pompeo boasting, “We lied, we cheated, we stole.” And the American people cheered.

American propaganda foolishness knows no bounds. Some years ago, prior to President Bush’s helicopter landing in a public downtown park on his visit to Italy, I watched dozens of Secret Service agents with cans of paint, spray-painting all the grass a lovely shade of green so Bush would look prettier on TV. When a US President or State Secretary speaks to an empty hall at the United Nations, the media obligingly cut and paste an audience from another speaker’s talk to make Americans proud that their leader was enthusiastically applauded by a full house.

Today, every part of America is all about marketing the brand, selling the sizzle instead of the steak. The operating philosophy is termed “perception management”, the attempt to substitute a utopian fictionalised version of events for reality. Great efforts are made to determine which actions or attitudes or sentiments to portray to the American public and the world, which items of information should be denied to the public, and which “indicators” are necessary to convey to audiences to influence their emotions and dull their objective reasoning. This perception management combines some facts, some unrelated truths, a great deal of deception, all wrapped in layers of what is termed “psychological operations”, and used to sell patriotism, wars, capitalism, fear and fascism. This is the legacy of Lippman and Bernays: an entire nation has degraded to the point where product substance is irrelevant and brand perception is everything.

The picture in Americans minds of their own country consists of a vast array of misinformation, falsehoods and myths, covering every facet of the human experience and which they fervently, and even belligerently, believe to be true. The reason I have dwelt on the topic of propaganda to the extent I have done, is to demonstrate the equal truth that the picture foreigners hold in their minds of the US also consists of the same vast array of lies, misinformation, falsehoods and myths, their understanding of the US equally as flawed as that of the Americans themselves. Almost everything we read, see and learn about the US is mythical propaganda far removed from reality. We are buying the sizzle without the steak, paying for the brand without understanding or even receiving the product.

Bernays’ secret government has been taking control of the ideological foundations of all of America, the propaganda onslaught including the political, corporate, banking, foreign policy, military, media, and academic sectors of the nation, attempting to force all into a single cohesive mental state. It isn’t simply information or misinformation. By controlling the sources and so deciding what you can and cannot see or learn, they plan to decide how you feel and what you think, and ultimately who has or does not have a voice. This is what led CIA Director William Casey to state, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” (33)

The world finally appears to be awakening to the fictional foolishness that is America today. The Pew Research Center has done several recent studies which document a growing distrust of everything American in most countries (34), including China and Western Europe. At the same time, it notes that American citizens are receiving an increasingly narrow view of important world issues, exacerbating their already fabled ignorance. Pew also note that while the American people receive limited information reduced to child-like sound bytes lacking breadth, depth and context, this deliberately fabricated ignorance also increases the ease of propagandists to make false claims that appear real and are difficult to question.

One recent example was the political coup in the Ukraine, the second time the US has overthrown an elected government in that nation. The Americans first instigated a mini-revolution and installed Julia Tymoshenko as their puppet president, this queen’s reign terminated prematurely when she was imprisoned for massive fraud, embezzlement and murder. The Americans then invested – by their own admission – more than $5 billion to destabilise the country with an impressive amount of violence in a second attempt to take control. This disintegrated when most of Eastern Ukraine, especially the Crimea, objected to the US effort and voted to separate from the Ukraine and rejoin Russia. For background, the Crimea had always been part of Russia but was only recently ‘given’ to the Ukraine as a peace measure; its citizens are virtually all ethnic Russians and wanted to return home.

However, the US media carried only the news and video of riots, omitting the fact that they were all US-inspired and financed and that the CIA had a huge contingent resident in Kiev that was masterminding the events from the US Embassy. They specifically omitted video of the “democratic protestors” returning to the US Embassy compound afterward to collect their pay. The riots were attributed to Russia’s “meddling” and presented as cries for freedom by the Ukrainian people, and the secession vote by the Crimean residents which was entirely self-initiated, was described in the US media as a “Russian invasion” of the Crimea. It is in this context that the US climbs on its hypocritical moral white horse and pretends to “warn” Russia about “interfering in Ukraine’s elections”, filling American hearts with pride in their nation’s fight for truth and freedom. With this heavily-propagandised false picture flooding the US media, most Americans believe they clearly understand the situation in the Ukraine and that Russia is indeed “the evil empire”. In fact, they understand nothing clearly and what little they know is wrong, but when a nation’s government so thoroughly controls the media and the narrative, and is a pathological liar, what hope is there for the people?

This ‘perception management’ marketing of the US brand is not limited to US soil; even more time and money are spent on managing perceptions in other nations, one of these being China. The US spends more than $300 million in China each year on marketing their productless brand. It isn’t only obvious outlets like the Voice of America; the Americans make Herculean efforts to plant pro-American messages in newspapers, magazines, social media Weibo and WeChat, in the topic outline of speeches, placing visiting professors in schools and universities in China, and in thousands of other sources that reach the public. This is entirely a psychological warfare operation and is described by the Americans in these terms. The aim of this huge effort is simply to employ all manner of lies and misinformation to make China’s government look bad in the eyes of its people (and the world).

As one example, the U.S. Consul-General in Guangzhou, Jim Levy, filled the internet with outright false or badly-twisted information about sudden racial discrimination against blacks in China. For background, all visas expired during the COVID-19 epidemic, requiring foreign nationals to return home and wait for approval of new visas. Many Africans, in China to purchase low-cost goods to ship home, and reluctant to lose their income source, failed to comply, essentially hiding underground. As health officers were making the rounds to test foreigners and obtain health codes, there were many stories of Africans jumping out of windows (hopefully first-floor windows) to escape the medical authorities and avoid the necessary quarantines. Finally, the police had to instruct apartments and hotels to not provide accommodation to anyone lacking a valid visa, but the US Consulate filled Chinese social media and foreign airwaves with stories titled, “African nations, US decry racism against blacks in China”. (35) (36) My opinion of Levy is not high, especially since he was using his American diplomatic post to further the political aims of his Jewish masters. In a similar manner, Alan Dershowitz, another American Jew, this one from Harvard, not long ago gave a speech to AIPAC, the Godzilla of Jewish influence in the US, where he asked all Jews to create as much pressure as possible on China’s imaginary human rights violations in Tibet, to take the world’s attention off the Jewish atrocities in Palestine. International politics supported by propaganda, i.e. “perception management”, is a dirty business.

Hong Kong today is saturated with CIA and other US-based media control, their long-term propaganda campaign being the entire source of the Western-oriented political agitation and the persistently negative views of China that originate there. George Soros, another American Jew, finances the seditious “China Media Project” at Hong Kong University, creating a massive anti-China campaign and responsible for much of the violence there. The violence and chaos in Tibet and Xinjiang all have the same source. Philip Agee, a former CIA agent (37), wrote that the US has been conducting this illegal interference in Tibet since prior to the 1950s and 1960s, claiming that his duties in the CIA involved attempting to penetrate and manipulate the institutions of power, infiltrating and manipulating political parties, trade unions, youth and student movements, intellectual, professional and cultural societies, religious groups, women’s groups and especially the media. He details how he paid journalists to publish American propaganda as if it were the journalists’ own information, and how the CIA spent huge sums of money intervening in foreign elections to promote and elect an American puppet candidate. The NYT had very little nice to say about Agee in their obituary. (38)

Jonathan Power told us of one highly-placed British diplomat who stated, “One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism”. (39) (40) Power wrote further that “America Is Sadly In The Grip Of ‘Exhausted Ideas’”. (41) And as Naomi Klein noted, nations don’t generally object to America’s so-called ‘values’, but to the fact that the US never adheres to them. Critics see only US unilateralism, defiance of all international laws, great wealth disparity, and increasing unjustified crackdowns and violations of civil rights. She wrote that America’s problem “was not with the brand but with the product”, and that the great and increasing international anger – and it is anger – arises “not only from the facts but also from a clear perception of false advertising”. In other words, American hypocrisy, the Utopia Syndrome I wrote of earlier. However, Americans seem oblivious to these realities and are redoubling their efforts to propagandise not only all Americans but the world.

Introduction – If America Dissolves…  https://thesaker.is/if-america-dissolves/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 1 of 5 — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 2 of 5 — The Marketing of War — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-marketing-of-war/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 3 of 5 –– Democracy Control – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-democracy-control/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 4 of 5 –The Transition to Education and Commerce – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-transition-to-education-and-commerce-part-4/

Bernays and Propaganda – Part 5 of 5 — Propaganda Continues Unabated — You are now here.

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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.

His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

*

Notes

(1) https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736

(2) https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736/text

(3) https://newswithviews.com/smith-mundt-act-of-1948-and-the-coup/

(4) https://www.rt.com/usa/smith-mundt-domestic-propaganda-121/

(5) https://jonathanturley.org/2012/05/20/how-about-some-government-propaganda-for-the-people-paid-for-the-people-being-propagandized/

(6) https://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2013/06/27/afghanistan-propaganda-military-contractors/2463739/

(7) https://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2013/07/08/pentagon-propaganda-post-somali/2498339/

(8) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

(9) https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2014/04/18/military-sock-puppets-nsa-trolls-cia-shills/

(10) https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/01/03/never-forget-how-the-msm-smeared-assange-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

(11) https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/03/03/how-and-how-not-to-beat-a-smear-campaign/

(12) https://thegrayzone.com/2020/08/18/us-government-funded-coda-story/

(13) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/u-s-created-cuba-twitter-sow-unrest-reports-ap

(14) https://apnews.com/article/904a9a6a1bcd46cebfc14bea2ee30fdf

(15) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitter-zunzuneo-stir-unrest

(16) https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is-the-worlds-biggest-censor-and-its-power-must-be-regulated

(17) https://nypost.com/2021/01/04/ted-cruz-twitter-most-brazen-and-google-most-dangerous/

(18) https://www.serendipity.li/cda/censorship_at_wikipedia.htm

(19) https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/01/24/the-media-destroyed-america/

(20) https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Their-Own-Invented-Hollywood/dp/0385265573

(21) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118657.An_Empire_of_Their_Own

(22) https://researchlist.blogspot.com/2011/06/jewish-ownership-of-big-media.html

(23) http://tapnewswire.com/2015/10/six-jewish-companies-control-96-of-the-worlds-media/

(24) https://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/jews-in-the-media-hollywood/

(25) https://mondoweiss.net/2008/02/do-jews-dominat/

(26) https://www.latimes.com/la-bk-gore-vidal-1989-08-04-story.html

(27) Naomi Klein | The Spectacular Failure of Brand USA; https://naomiklein.org/spectacular-failure-brand-usa/

(28) http://www.pbs.org/pov/borders/2006/de_sellingamerica.html

(29) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-04-fg-beers03-story.html

(30) https://www.alternet.org/2002/03/brand_usa/

(31) https://nexus23.com/warfare2/the-rendon-group-reloaded/

(32) http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_Pentagon%27s_Information_Warrior

(33) https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/03/the-dangers-of-privatized-intelligence/

(34) https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/how-americans-see-problems-of-trust/

(35) https://abcnews.go.com/International/foreigners-black-people-unwelcome-parts-china-amid-covid/story?id=70182204

(36) https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/04/11/african-nations-us-decry-racism-against-blacks-in-china/23975666/

(37) http://www.philipagee.com/

(38) https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/obituaries/10agee.html

(39) https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7021898632.pdf

(40) https://www.globalissues.org/article/163/media-in-the-united-states

(41) https://www.eurasiareview.com/22042020-america-is-sadly-in-the-grip-of-exhausted-ideas-oped/

The ‘Cancel Culture’ phenomenon: kind of hate-hush all over the world

March 01, 2021

by Ghassan and Intibah Kadi for the Saker Blog

Who remembers the Herman’s Hermits and their 1967 song ‘There’s a Kind of Hush’? The hush the song speaks of is a hush of love, and it was a world of dreams in the sixties in the West, despite the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights protests in the USA and other global conflicts. The peace movements were strong and vibrant, and there was hope that the peace-loving youth will have their way and make a difference; because they genuinely believed in the slogan that ‘all you need is love’.

Alas, the love-hush seems now to be replaced with a hate-hush, and it is engulfing the world, particularly the West, with unprecedented anger and vile displays of demeanour, and this seems to be part of the ‘New Normal’ that some are pushing down our throats.

Not long ago, inspired by another song of the 1960’s, the article pondered where have all the flowers and peace movements gone. In such a short period since, discord and trouble has steeply risen to unprecedented levels, where we are witnessing now an ominous step forward into the abyss and a huge fall in the trajectory of humanity.

In comparison and as an example, when the Lebanese civil war erupted in 1975, it didn’t really come as a surprise to anyone as the specter of such calamity had always hung in the air and sat on the agendas of opposing political groups, as well as on the narrow minds of religious groups that held back unsettled sectarian scores for decades, even centuries.

In hindsight, it seems unfathomable as to how did the German people become so brainwashed and vulnerable to Nazi propaganda. They incrementally discarded all the humane values they had known before, replacing them with nationalist, exclusionist and supremacist values, eventually engaging, wittingly or unwittingly, in supporting or perpetrating injustices on minority groups including Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, the disabled, just to mention a few. Shockingly, when the civil war began in Lebanon, the Lebanese people actually saw a similar phenomenon happen right in front of their eyes. The world witnessed town turning against town, suburb against suburb, neighbour against neighbour, inflicting the most horrendous crimes of maiming, sniping, torturing and killing each other. The same happened again in Yugoslavia as it fell apart.

In more ways than one, latent hatred was expected to eventually manifest itself. If and when old sentiments are not dealt with and brought to closure, such an outcome of a build-up and explosion is to be expected.

But what we are witnessing today, in the West, is something quite different; a case where many people develop boiling, seething, foaming and frothing rage and hatred against others for no apparent reason or history at all.

In America at least, there are a number of actual issues that cause rage and dismay, such as unresolved racial tensions and injustices, perceptions of stolen elections, mishandling of the Corona Virus, the economy and so on. However, these issues are dealt with so vehemently, often with grave, unjust, illegal and disproportional measures, leaving many wondering if America is teetering on the brink of a civil war.

Most striking is the alarming phenomenon of other Western countries taking on board many of the divisive American-specific issues, all with the rage and social divisions that define America’s social status quo. People make ‘all or nothing’ stands and polarity on so many issues, reaching new frenetic levels each day. Even when a legitimate reason for anger exists, the expressions of these can be increasingly extreme and irrational and treated as a defining issue, one worthy of labelling, whether in America or elsewhere.

The authors observed that many people from all different sides of the political divide, within and outside the USA, when asked, are unable to rationally express the reason behind their extremely heated stands. Such a psychological situation can destroy the West; or what is left of it. Close friends, friends who have known and loved each other for decades accuse each other of the most heinous of ‘crimes’, attach labels to each other, just because they ask simple questions, trying to understand the rationale behind their feelings.

And feelings they are, because they are not well-conceived and fact-finding-based views, and their answers provided are merely emotionally based.

In the very near past, people and friends in particular, used to have deep political discussions with peers. They disagreed quite often, but such diverse views were discussed in a civil manner with the assumption that people had the right to have different views and opinions.

In the West today however, it seems that the ‘agree-to-disagree’ principle is no longer. The current rule is ‘you are either with me or against me’. Where have we heard this before? Instead of ‘me’ it was ‘us’?

Not only are we witnessing extreme and unwarranted actions between disagreeing individuals, we are also witnessing this on a collective level, one we often refer to as ‘thought-policing’. Its repercussions in recent times are rapidly morphing into what can only be described as torture ‘techniques’ such as the likes of ‘Cancel Culture’. This is exactly synonymous to the act of ‘banishment’ during the Spanish Inquisition days and the Witch-Hunt eras. Nothing much has changed, or perhaps things have gone full-circle.

In that time, ‘banishment’ meant that the banished ones lost their jobs, became socially isolated, prohibited from trading or buying goods, and quite often, this preceded being burnt alive at the stake. And, now it appears that ‘Cancel Culture’ means virtually the same thing. Whilst the victim may still be lucky enough to trade and buy commodities online, it still generally involves losing one’s job, stature, friends, memberships of associations, and facing humiliation and defamation among many other things. The only basic difference today is the absence of being put to death.

Prior to any banishment or ‘Cancel Culture’ being implemented, just like in the past where such people were branded as heretics, they are now given labels such as ‘denialists’ (disagreement with climate change theory), ‘anti-vaxxers’ (questioning the effectiveness and safety of COVID vaccines) and others. What is interesting here in all this madness, is that a person could be labelling another, only to end up themselves being labelled for something else. Someone who labels another as a ‘denialist’ may find him/herself branded as an ‘anti-vaxxer’.

What is most sinister perhaps is that, on one hand we see this violent, unexplainable, unwarranted irrational level of anger, but on the other hand, we see the West endorsing and accepting other irrational policies that can destroy it, but yet no one is batting an eyelid. Any keen observer can see that a whole myriad of changes have been imposed on the Western society, each of them alone can destroy the Western culture. Without much effort, we can see many such changes, but it suffices to mention the following:

1. Political correctness that has gone way too far and continues to erode personal freedom of expression.
2. The climate change debacle/hoax that elevated Greta to the level of becoming Time Magazine’s person of the year.
3. The destruction of Western family values.
4. The over-emphasis on LBGTI rights and all the changes imposed on the mainstream society, including such things as banning the use of words like mother and father.
5. The COVID-thing; lockdowns, conflicting information, the vaccines that we know little about, the presence of nefarious people of influence like Fauci and Gates in decision-making.
6. Confusing young school children with gender issues and almost encouraging them to become homosexual and/or transgender.
7. The silence of the public regarding the censorship regulations of Facebook and Twitter.
8. The silence of the public about the plans of the WEF’s ‘Great Reset”.
9. The growing acceptance of thought policing and compliance to the state and media.
10. The public indifference towards the groundless sanctions against Russia and their possible effect on global stability and peace.
11. The public lack of knowledge and indifference about the support of their governments to Neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
12. The West losing its industrial base under the watchful eyes of Western Governments.
13. The West suffering from a huge drop in number of students majoring in STEM subjects.
14. The West suffering from a growing lack of desire of young adults to have children and raise families.
15. Giving blanket and unconditional support to abortion, even in the absence of any medical, psychological and justifiable reasons, including late-term abortion, and considering it (ie abortion) as a human right.

When people in the West are asked, why do those who do not agree with the above or accept it say nothing? The response is invariably fear, fear of being targeted and being subjected to the ‘Cancel Culture’.

Coerced to endorse the revolution of anger and phantom ideology, Westerners, especially the youth, have been socially engineered to become the corner stones of ‘controlled opposition’, all the while, they seem to have been conditioned to ‘unsee’ the real issues that threaten their survival in the future.

Coming to the crunch question; with what appears as increasing irrationality and insanity all around, have people been recently, or maybe incrementally, subjected to systemic brainwashing that renders them into such a state of irrationality, anger, volatility and blindness? If that is the case, then how was this achieved?

This brings to mind the tactic of subliminal advertising, a technique developed as early as in the 1950’s in which a person is subjected unknowingly to an advertisement. It can be sound-based or visual. A visual one is based on techniques like inserting a single advertisement frame, say of a bag of popcorn, into a movie. Movies show motion by playing a series of still frames, around twenty per second. In a single frame it is not noticeable by the conscious mind, but is picked up by the subconscious, and in this example given, will create a stimulus to buy popcorn. There is much evidence of more sinister or politically motivated subliminal messages inserted into Hollywood movies. Legal questions arose around this technique.

From such a simple, unsophisticated technique, in the same decade, a secretive project on behaviour modification was undertaken named Project MKUltra, eventually becoming the subject of an American Senate Intelligence Hearing . Mind-control technology took off, reaching ever new heights (or lows?), not just enhancing business and socio-political agenda, but becoming a crucial component of warfare, even with special strategies for social media, to target the public and their perceptions, making them compliant or malleable and even activating them to the extent this discussion indicates. Intibah Kadi’s work on this is cited in the preceding link to an academic paper.

The question is where else, apart from media and social media, have such techniques been used? What kind of technology and to what extent and what ends has this been taken to? And has such systemic brainwashing that we suggest, been ramped up in these last few years when Trump was President of the USA? This is predicated on the suspicion of Trump acting at times as the ‘disruptor” of a particular set of the ‘establishment’, or ‘swamp’ as he named it, one that either rejected him or he alienated.

This also brings to mind an old movie in 1977 by the name of Telefon, a fiction based on a few people who on the surface appear to lead a normal life, but in reality, are a team of professional assassins designated to kill certain individuals upon receiving a vocal message they had been hypnotized to respond to like robots.

Have we actually reached such days of a ‘New Normal’ in terms of the evident, debased level of social discourse, labeling, shaming and damning? Ironically, ‘New Normal’ is a term we hear every day, courtesy of world leaders, various officials and, of course, from the head of the World Economic Forum. Or is it ironic? Will brainwashing and behaviour modification techniques go far beyond that of what we commonly understand and well into the realms of Artificial Intelligence and Electromagnetism? And in these new realms, what extent, if any, do these play a role in these shocking days of ‘Cancel Culture’, the suspension of critical thinking and general mob-rule behaviour permitted for some in the West in recent years?

But above all, did the Western mind deteriorate naturally as a result of attrition or did social engineering cause it to devolve in a manner that fires it up chasing red herrings all the while being totally blind to what really matters? Or has it been manipulated by a devious master plan that makes any science fiction movie look like a Batman Comic?

Bernays and Propaganda – The Marketing of War

February 15, 2021

By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog

In the revelation of propaganda as a tool of public mind control and its use for war marketing, it is worthwhile to examine the historical background of Bernays’ war effort. At the time, the European Zionist Jews had made an agreement with England to bring the US into the war against Germany, on the side of England, a favor for which England would grant the Jews the occupation of Palestine for a new homeland. Palestine did not ‘belong’ to England, it was not England’s to give, and England had no legal or moral right to make such an agreement, but it was made nonetheless. The Jews had created in US President Wilson an intense desire to enter the war, but the American population had no interest in the European war and public sentiment was entirely against participating.

To facilitate the desired result, Wilson created a body named the Committee on Public Information (CPI), to propagandise the war by the mass brainwashing of America. The group was led by a muckraking publicist/advertising man named George Creel, and the CPI was known as “The Creel Commission”, but it appears Creel was only a ‘front’, with little contribution to the events that actually occurred. The CPI was staffed with a heavy slate of psychologists and carefully-selected men from the media, academia, advertising, and the movie and music industries. Two of the most important members were Walter Lippmann, whom Wilson described as “the most brilliant man of his age”, and Edward Bernays, who was the group’s top mind-control expert, both Jews and both aware of the stakes in this game. Bernays planned to combine his uncle Freud’s psychiatric insights with mass psychology, blended with modern advertising techniques, and apply them to the task of mass mind control. Movies were already powerful new tools for misinformation and opinion control, as was radio, and TV would soon be added to this list.

“Wilson’s agreement to create the CPI was actually a turning point in world history, the first truly scientific attempt to form, manipulate and control the perceptions and beliefs of an entire population.” (1) (2) (3)ho

With Wilson’s authority, these men were given almost unlimited scope to work their magic, and in order to ensure the success of their program and guarantee the eventual possession of Palestine, these men and their committee carried out “a program of psychological warfare against the American people on a scale unprecedented in human history and with a degree of success that most propagandists could only dream about”.

In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Lippmann wrote, “The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event … For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.” And it was this psychological manipulation that these men employed to turn an entire nation of peaceful Americans into rabid war-mongers. (4) (5)

Note to readers: Some part of the immediately-following paragraphs is not mine. They are partially verbatim and partially paraphrasing, of some content I discovered many years ago and, even with diligent effort, I am today unable to locate the original source.

Having received permission and broad authority from the US President to “lead the public mind into war” and, with success threatened by widespread anti-war sentiment, these men determined to engineer what Lippmann called “the manufacture of consent”. The committee first identified all the different ways that information flowed to the population, examined the characteristics of each, and filled every channel with specially-crafted pro-war material. Their effort was unparalleled in its scale and sophistication, since the CPI had the power not only to manufacture false news and distribute it nationally through all channels, but to officially censor news and withhold information from the public. “They produced and distributed many thousands of ‘official’ press releases, virtually functioning as the information arm of the US government and were in fact the major provider of war news to the nation.”

These men wasted no time in organising a vast propaganda network and began flooding the US with anti-German propaganda consisting of hate literature, hate movies, songs, media articles and much more.

Lippmann and Bernays divided their Committee into nineteen ‘divisions’, each responsible for a different type of propaganda, and each utilising the expertise of vast numbers of psychologists, advertising experts, media personnel and movie moguls. (6) (7) The intention was to flood every means of communication with the goal of inciting hatred of everything German and to promote American entry into the war as the only option for patriotic Americans. They filled every part of US print media with anti-German hate propaganda. In the News Division alone, in an average week, more than 20,000 newspaper columns carried entirely false propaganda articles produced by the CPI, promoting hatred of Germany and Germans, describing atrocities that had never occurred and painting the Germans as vicious and inhuman monsters. Lippmann and Bernays not only instituted (compulsory) “voluntary guidelines” for the inclusion of their monstrous tales in all media, but they rigidly enforced a censorship in the American mass media to suppress any contradictory content.

Bernays cleverly realised that much of the public is disinclined to read long articles, and so formed a special division to produce brief rants and sound bytes meant to arouse the loathsome emotions of those with short attention spans. They created a Syndicated Features Division employing popular novelists to produce essays containing the official propaganda, which reached 10 to 15 million people each month. Another division was responsible for the cartoon sections of newspapers and other media, with the stated intention to “mobilize and direct the scattered cartoon power of the country for constructive war work”. They employed thousands of cartoonists who “achieved new heights in hate-mongering”, picturing the Germans as primitive and evil animals who stole, killed or raped everything they encountered.

They created a similar Division for Cinema that resulted in the Hollywood production of dozens of outrageous and virulently anti-German movies, hate films containing completely fictional tales of atrocities and bestialities committed by the Germans. Bernays was the source of movie scenes where “dirty” Germans (and later the dirtier Japanese) machine-gunned brave American pilots while parachuting to the ground. (8) None of these tales were ever true; these and all others were total fabrications. Then, as now, the motion picture industry in the US was entirely controlled by Jews who were eager to assist. One Jewish editorial stated that “every individual at work in this industry wants to do his share . . . through slides, film leaders and trailers, posters and newspaper publicity they will spread that propaganda so necessary to the immediate mobilization of the country’s great resources”.

In addition to movies produced by the film studios, the CPI created its own Film Division which produced 60 or 70 “official” films that were viewed by many tens of millions of people each week. They created an Advertising Division to influence commercial advertisers to insert anti-German war propaganda into newspaper and magazine advertising, with almost every major US publication carrying a large quota of these ads. Then, as today, much of the media was Jewish-owned or controlled, and these men received much free space.

They created a ‘Division of Work with the Foreign Born’ (9) to reach all immigrants in the country in their own languages, and used members of these communities to propagandise their own people, especially targeting all military-age foreigners who might become war conscripts. The CPI hired bi-lingual speakers to target every specific immigrant group in the US, and even had a Sioux ‘Four-Minute Man’ delivering speeches in seven native languages. They specially targeted all Jews in America, providing Yiddish speakers in thousands of theaters and workplaces. There also was a Foreign Section with sixteen divisions, which established offices in over thirty countries, to propagandise the populations of other nations.

Lippmann and Bernays wrote: “It is a matter of pride to the Committee on Public Information, as it should be to America, that the directors of English, French, and Italian propaganda were a unit in agreeing that our literature was remarkable above all others for its brilliant and concentrated effectiveness”.

Bernays’ Speaking Division organised a group known as the “Four-Minute Men’, 75,000 volunteers who gave speeches provoking hatred and fear of Germany and Germans, and urging war. They used farmers to appeal to farmers and businessmen to businessmen, with short, rousing speeches filled with imagery. These were so emotionally-loaded they often had dreadful consequences, in thousands of instances mobs gathering afterward and vandalising German homes and businesses in their city. (10) In total, their speakers gave nearly 8 million speeches to more than 300 million Americans, all provoking hatred of Germany and Germans, and urging war. (11) (12) (13) (14) (15)

A continuing atrocity is that even today misinformation sources like Britannica and the Smithsonian, and many American history websites, carry articles claiming “the CPI’s representatives, known as four-minute men, traveled throughout the U.S. urging Americans to buy war bonds and conserve food.” (16)

The Committee particularly targeted women, establishing a major Women’s Division, from fear that women “might constitute a subversive element in the nation, detrimental to wartime unity and the smooth functioning of [mandatory military conscription]”. They created a womens’ Four-Minute Man division to speak at womens groups and matinees to counteract the resistance to sending their sons and husbands to war. They inserted themselves into many women’s magazines where they controlled the cover and much of the internal content, encouraging women to send their sons to war, claiming he would return as “a man” instead of a corpse. The Ladies Home Journal, once the most inoffensive of publications, had many covers with dirty anti-German posters and most every issue with patriotic articles written by Bernays’ staff extolling the sacrifices of war.

One of Bernays’ mind-control divisions was responsible for popular music, the CPI hiring thousands of songwriters to create songs with anti-German lyrics, these playing constantly on the nation’s radio stations. Another division was responsible for public library content, tasked with the removal of any books favoring Germany, including the works of famous German authors and philosophers. Everything favorably German was censored, removed from public accessibility, or destroyed.

Perhaps the division most indicative of the moral bankruptcy of these men was their work with public school children. They heavily utilised psychologists in programs to spread hatred of Germany throughout America’s public school system where small children were taught the full gamut of Bernays’ hateful propaganda, then used as travelling salesmen to visit other schools and spread the hatred to their classmates, delivering totally fabricated tales of German atrocities to other small children. Uncounted thousands of children were organized as Four Minute Men speakers, with more than 200,000 schools participating. Bernays’ psychologists did their work well: American children became not only hate-filled but terrified of Germans. After these inflamed propaganda sessions, many American children demonstrated their “patriotism” by groups attacking German-Americans and stoning them, sometimes being congratulated by local newspapers for “doing their duty”. The ‘patriotic’ Boy Scouts of America contributed to the effort by regularly burning bundles of German newspapers that were on sale, and Germans were regularly insulted and spat upon by other citizens.

Bernays’ group published many thousands of children’s books and comics containing the most vile and hateful propaganda lies. Libraries sponsored anti-German childrens’ ‘story hours’ that used hate propaganda supplied by Bernays. Sunday school children were given coloring books depicting and encouraging violence against Germans.

Bernays’ Public literature attacked everything German in America, including schools and churches. In many schools the German language was forbidden to be taught to “pure Americans”, and administrators were urged to fire “all disloyal teachers”, meaning any Germans. The names of countless towns and cities were changed to eliminate their German origin: Berlin, Iowa became Lincoln, Iowa. German foods and food names were purged from restaurants; sauerkraut became ‘liberty cabbage’ and German Shepherds became ‘Alsatians’.

All American orchestras were ordered to eliminate from their performances any music by classic German composers like Beethoven, Bach and Mozart. In some states, the use of the German language was prohibited in public and on the telephone. German professors were fired from their universities, German-language or German-owned local newspapers were denied advertising revenue, constantly harassed, and often forced out of business.

Bernays instituted a program of questioning the patriotism and loyalty of all Germans in America, including those who had lived there for generations. He created a plan that enlisted volunteers to gather information on Germans, forming a semi-official organisation named the American Protective League that eventually had more than 200,000 members deputised as FBI agents to “police” community loyalty. This group and others “investigated” every German, and soon every person with anti-war views, as prima facie evidence of treason.

Germans were forced to gather in public meetings and denounce Germany and its leaders. They were forced to purchase war bonds and publicly declare their allegiance to the US flag. As Bernays’ rhetoric reached dangerous levels, the anti-German hysteria and violence increased proportionately. Many Germans were forcibly removed from their homes, often torn from their beds during the night, taken out into the street and stripped naked, beaten and whipped, then forced to kneel and kiss the American flag. Many were tarred and feathered, then forced to leave their cities or towns. Some were lynched from trees. Priests and pastors were dragged out of their churches and beaten for giving sermons in German. (17) (18) (19) (20)

The anti-German hysteria had people seeing spies everywhere, with House and Bernays greatly inflaming this trend by preparing Wilson’s infamous “Flag Day” speech (21) (22) where he claimed “The military masters of Germany have filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and have sought to corrupt the opinion of our people”. Newspaper editors were screaming that all Germans were spies who were poisoning American water supplies or infecting medical shipments to hospitals, and that most “ought to be taken out at sunrise and shot for treason”. The Saturday Evening Post, one of America’s most popular and influential magazines, announced that it was time to rid America of Germans, “the scum of the melting pot”. Congressmen recommended hanging or otherwise executing all Germans in America, State Governors urging the use of firing squads to eliminate “the disloyal element” from the entire state. The US Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels stated that Americans would “put the fear of God into the hearts” of these people.

According to Bernays, the key was to dehumanise and demonise the German people by filling American minds with fabricated tales of horror. The compliant media, largely Jewish-owned, obediently carried fake stories of poisoned candy being dropped from airplanes, German soldiers skewering babies like shish kebabs, the raping of nuns, and so much more. Eventually, the stories were accepted as true and the public’s natural resistance to war was overcome. From his uncle Freud, Bernays learned that a particularly effective strategy for demonising Germans was the use of atrocity stories. According to Harold Lasswell:

“So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations that every war must appear to be a war of defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about who the public is to hate. A handy rule for arousing hate is, if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity. It has been employed with unvarying success in every conflict known to man.” (23)

The CPI used every weapon available to spread their message to, as Creel would later say, “turn the American people into one white-hot mass (of hatred) . . .” Their psychological travesty so indoctrinated the public that daily life in America became infused with hatred and with Americans automatically conditioned to disgust and hatred for all things German.

They succeeded, and not only in the US. Teams of the same Jewish ‘specialists’ were following the same script in most other nations, all instilling massive hatred for Germans who, in every nation were vehemently portrayed as evil incarnate, simply from the fact of their German origin. In countries all around the world, the media spread the same message of hatred against Germany and the Germans.

In Brazil, anti-German demonstrations and riots consumed the country, with German businesses being destroyed and Germans being assaulted and killed. The Brazilian press carried Bernays’ intensely anti-German atrocity propaganda, stimulating demonstrations that were very ugly anti-German affairs. In some cities, hundreds of businesses, schools and homes were burned. In Porto Alegre, almost the entire German district was burned to the ground. In others, almost all German assets were seized. (24)

In almost every nation, the German-language press and use of the German language completely disappeared during the war from fear of reprisal, as did all German schools and most businesses. None re-opened. In Canada and Australia, many names of towns or streets were changed to eliminate their German origin. In Britain, France, and Canada also, thousands of people were falsely interned and their apartments and shops most often looted. They didn’t miss any opportunity; in one case, they found a photo of a German soldier with a child on his knee and published it with the caption, “One wouldn’t believe I have just killed the mother.” The Jews’ atrocity war propaganda in Canada was almost as bad as in the US, with even the military vandalising German businesses, and all Germans not imprisoned having to register with the government. (25)

The UK was as bad as the US. Persons bearing a German name were driven to despair, driven out of their positions and their businesses ruined.  The Guardian archives document that anti-German riots in England were remarkable for their destruction and violence. “Some Germans were pursued into their homes by the mob and pitched through the windows into the street, others were ducked in troughs, and others had their clothing stripped off their backs.” (26) The anti-German hysteria became so severe that King George V had to change his German name of ‘Saxe-Coburg’ to ‘Windsor’, and relinquish all his German titles. (27)

Most Americans are aware that during the (again Bernays-induced) national hysteria during the Second World War the US government forced more than 100,000 US-born Japanese into concentration camps, but history has deleted the fact that many more Germans were interned in concentration camps in the US prior to and during the First War. German Mennonites who refused the draft as conscientious objectors were given prison sentences for as long as 30 years, and many died from abuse and torture in US prisons. Not only were Germans imprisoned, but all their assets were confiscated, this during both world wars, and not only personal assets but entire corporations owned by Germans were simply seized and sold. The government amassed more than half a billion dollars in seizures, nearly equivalent to the entire national budget at the time. Bayer in America was auctioned off on its own doorstep, to a friend of the Administration. (28) In fact, the US military entered every country with a German corporate presence and claimed ownership of all German assets. This portion is of such consequence I have dealt with it in detail in a separate article. (29)

While Bernays was “making the world safe for democracy”, that safety was not meant for Americans. Under the coaching of Col. E. M. House who was Wilson’s Jewish handler, Wilson passed oppressive legislation including the Espionage Act and Sedition Act that were prepared by Bernays, were entirely fascist in content and which made illegal anything that might hinder American entry into the war. Freedom of speech and assembly, and press freedom virtually disappeared from America during this time, it eventually becoming illegal to say or write anything critical of the US government, its officials and even its “symbols”.

Any expression of objection to American entrance into the war would result in a fine of $10,000 (ten xyears’ average wages at the time) or 20 years in prison, with much of the policing power given to what were in effect private vigilante groups like the infamous American Protective League that operated virtually without oversight. The suppression of public opinion and of dissent, and the control exercised on anti-war communication was universal. The Espionage Act stated “Every letter, writing, circular, postal card, picture, print, engraving, photograph, newspaper, pamphlet, book, or other publication, matter or thing of any kind containing any matter which is intended to obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States is hereby declared to be non-mailable.” Nothing was permitted that might prevent the successful recruitment of American soldiers for a war that only the Jews wanted.

Because of Bernays, atrocity propaganda, the deliberate spreading of fabricated evils and inhuman war crimes became the foundation of the Committee’s efforts. With all of this and much more, Bernays and Lippmann turned America into a hotbed of hatred for the entire German population, accomplishing the goal of the Zionist Jews to use the US military as a tool, their own private army in the European war to fulfill their ambition for Palestine, and thus these two men changed the course of history.

Of course, the causes and aims of the propaganda were far more evil than anything the supposed ‘enemy’ had contemplated, but the goal was to not only invent an enemy but to make that enemy “appear savage, barbaric, and inhumane”, and thus worthy of destruction. This process has been followed many dozens of times in recent history, the latest being the US-Israeli destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria. Usually, the compliant media repeat and embellish the stories without attempt at confirmation and, in virtually every instance, later attempts to confirm the atrocity tales prove fruitless with researchers able to uncover no evidence whatever of the events. Think of Iraq’s gassing of hundreds of thousands and burial in mass graves and the tales of Libyan Viagra; these and many others proved groundless fabrications – typical atrocity propaganda. Prior to the Iraq invasion, stories appeared of Saddam using wood shredders to eliminate political opponents and dissidents but, as always, researchers later determined there was no evidence whatever to support those horrendous allegations. Thanks to Bernays, there were World War One tales of Germans cutting off the breasts of every woman they encountered, of eating babies, of rendering the bodies of massacred Jews for fat and glycerine to make weapons, tales of a tub-full of eyeballs collected by the Nazis. After the war, Bernays openly admitted that he used fabricated atrocities to provoke hatred against Germany. It appears the media will cooperate in propagating the most fantastic lies, and the people will believe almost everything they read.

Bernays and his group produced thousands of posters containing lurid descriptions of these fake atrocities (30), to say nothing of the newspaper articles, cartoons and so much more, but the historical record of this years-long tapestry of lies and hate has been quite well buried. It is possible to find copies on the internet of many wartime posters, but this collection has been well sanitised with virtually all of the genuinely evil and dirty productions apparently lost to history. The narrative today in the history books casually dismisses all this as “an innovative use of graphic arts to stir patriotism”, but it was hatred rather than patriotism that was being stirred, and both America and the Jews will one day need to openly face this entire reprehensible chapter of history.

The official story is that after World War One, propaganda developed such a poor reputation that the US Congress terminated the Committee in disgust, “ending these activities amidst great controversy”, and refused to bother with funding to preserve and archive its vast collection of hate literature and propaganda, but the truth is that the White House, Congress and the Committee conspired to eliminate or destroy much of the evidence of their crimes. There exists a section of Records of the Committee on Public Information in US Government archives (31), but little of use remains, the more dangerous elements all sanitised. And in fact, far from developing a bad reputation, Bernays and his propaganda methods became widely popular with governments and large corporations for both consumerism and the control of public perception during peacetime.

This wouldn’t be the last time Lippmann and Bernays would use these techniques against Germany. This massive attack was repeated little more than ten years later to destroy Germany and push it into yet another war the Germans didn’t want. In the 1930s, the same Jewish European bankers with largely the same agenda wanted the US to join another war they planned to initiate against Germany. In 1933 they embarked on an extensive worldwide commercial war intended to destroy Germany financially, with newspaper headlines screaming “Judea Declares War on Germany”. They had already induced in Roosevelt “an intense desire for war”, but were having the same problem again with the unwilling American public. And they employed precisely the same solutions, this time demonising Hitler.

In all of this, Lippmann and Bernays were not working independently or without guidance. Prior to their massive ‘war effort’ in the US, they had operated a successful pilot test case in the UK, using British newspapers owned by their controllers, primarily Rothschild, to determine the efficacy of their methods. You may want to think about this next sentence and apply it to recent world events. “They (Bernays and his group) practiced revealing fabricated stories of atrocities, false accusations of terror and brutality against any nation or people they wanted the public mind to view as “the enemy”, then tested and evaluated public reactions to their manipulations of this false propaganda.”

Compare those words with George W. Bush’s demonisation of Iraq, the sordid tales of mass slaughters, the nuclear weapons ready to launch within 15 minutes, the responsibility for 9-11, the babies tossed out of incubators, all the fake propaganda against Saddam and Iraq to get the public mind onside for an unjustified war launched only for political and commercial objectives. Compare them to the demonisation of Khaddafi in Libya, his supplying of Viagra to his troops so they could rape more women, the long list of fabrications and lies to get the public onside for yet another war launched for more political and commercial objectives. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and dozens of other demonisations followed this same template, usually culminating in wars and invasions. It was Bernays who created “war marketing”, the theory and the template for the manipulation of public opinion, the plan and pattern for the propaganda and lies that the US government would use repeatedly for the next century to successfully deceive the American public about its motivations and actions in more than 100 military adventures, and to blind everyone to the tragic results of America’s brutal foreign policy. This is the man Americans celebrate today as “the father of Public Relations”.

The plan to mass-engineer public opinion began in a propaganda factory at Wellington House in London in the early 1900s, with Lords Northcliffe and Rothmere, Arnold Toynbee, and of course our two war-marketing geniuses Lippmann and Bernays. It was from this source that the scheme was hatched to force the Rothschild’s privately-owned Federal Reserve banks onto the US Congress, and that trained and coached Lippmann and Bernays on the methods of molding American public opinion to push the US into the First World War for the promotion of Zionism. Bernays’ book ‘Propaganda’ offers a clear vision of his training, not only for war marketing but for the pathology of American consumption, automobiles, the hysteria of patriotism and much more.

Funding reportedly came from the UK Royal Family, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, and eventually included the formation of trans-Atlantic relationships. At various periods, memberships in the Tavistock Institute, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Rothschild’s Round Table, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Club of Rome, the Stanford Research Institute, the Trilateral Commission and NATO, were interchangeable. They also created the ideology for the large American Foundations like Rockefeller and Carnegie that today play a silent but major role in population management.

Wellington House eventually morphed into the Tavistock Institute, which was created at Oxford University in London by the founders of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Round Table (Rothschild again), and was essentially a kind of mass brainwashing facility beginning as a psychological warfare bureau. It was the Tavistock Institute’s studies in psychological programming that were used to create and then exploit a grand mass hysteria during the cold war, evoking fearful delusions of a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union that even led to millions of Americans building bomb shelters in their back yards. In Tye’s biography of Bernays (32), he wrote that

“It is impossible to fundamentally grasp the social, political, economic and cultural developments of the past 100 years without some understanding of Bernays and his professional heirs.”

Many dirty things emerged from this rat’s nest of Satan-worshippers, one being Britain’s Psychological Warfare Bureau which hatched a plan to destroy Germany not by attacking the military but by virtual genocide of the population. It seems that international bankers owned munitions plants and other valuable military targets on both sides of the war fence, and wanted their property maintained in working order in spite of the war. The solution was saturation bombing of the civilian population to collapse the morale of the German people. These ‘scientific sociologists’ determined that the destruction of 65% of German housing, usually including its occupants, would be sufficient to achieve such a collapse. This was the origin of the fame of the British aviation hero “Bomber” Harris, who carried out these night raids – always at night – that culminated in the fire-bombing of Dresden. The explanation of night raids is usually given as safety for the bomber crews, but its purpose was mostly to engender more terror among the civilian population. Working class housing areas were targeted because they had a higher density and firestorms were more likely.” This would disrupt the German workforce and Germany’s ability to produce war materials in its defense. Harris’ widespread deliberate massacres of German civilians – and those by the Americans as well – were desperately kept secret from the public and still appear nowhere in history books in useful detail or with any sincere attempt to accurately estimate civilian casualties. As I pointed out elsewhere, this was the plan that US General Curtis Lemay was following, the same low-level night raids attempting to exterminate the populations of Japan and Korea.

Everything we have seen, read, or heard in the past 70 years that demonised other nations, usually leading to military intervention or “color revolutions”, stems from this template by Lippmann and Bernays originally to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and to promote the agenda of Zionism. This template has been in constant use by the US government since the World War I, ‘engineering consent and ignorance’ in the American and Western populations to mask nearly a century of atrocities, demonising innocent countries and peoples in preparation for 60 or 70 politically-inspired ‘wars of liberation’ fought exclusively for the financial and political benefit of a handful of European bankers, using the US military as a private army for this purpose, resulting in the deaths and miseries of hundreds of millions of innocent civilians.

It does not appear widely-known, but the intense anti-German propaganda surrounding World War I (and also World War II) had an aim additional to the seizure of Palestine, and this was the destruction of the culture and the very soul of Germany. Churchill was clear on this matter, stating “This war is for the soul of the German people.” It was largely successful. There is no question that Bernays’ propaganda had a devastating effect on Germans and their cultural heritage. (33) Germany today is a cowed nation, still humiliated and still paying billions in reparations for crimes it never committed, in large part because the propaganda has never ceased. Even today, movies and TV programs depict Germans as cold robots lacking humanity, and we were recently treated to a widely-publicised revelation that Hitler had been cursed with a “twisted micro-penis”. Few peoples today are ashamed to admit their national heritage, but no Germans boast of being German. Where in America do we find German beer halls and restaurants, German churches or newspapers? In 2004, The Guardian published a review of a book titled “The loneliness of being German”. (34) This is not an accident.

In one CPI publication, Professor Vernon Kellogg asked “Will it be any wonder if, after the war, the people of the world, when they recognize any human being as a German, will shrink aside so that they may not touch him as he passes, or stoop for stones to drive him from their path?” (35) No wonder at all.

In this context, you may care to read my recent article titled “The Anger Campaign against China”, (36) and think of the physical and other attacks ethnic Chinese are experiencing today in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and other Western nations. Consider the accusations of ‘genocide’ in China’s Xinjiang, China’s ‘cover-up’ and full blame for COVID-19, all the (undocumented) tales of spying, of IP theft, of prison camps, of forced abortions, of being ‘Communists’, and much more. Only the atrocity details have changed; all else is the same. Bernays’ template is being followed to the letter, in preparation for World War III.

Introduction – If America Dissolves – http://thesaker.is/if-america-dissolves/

Part 1 of 5 – Bernays and Propaganda – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda/

Part 2 of 5 – This current essay

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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English-language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/ and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

Notes

(1) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-180963082/

(2) https://theconversation.com/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-76270

(3) https://www.history.com/news/world-war-1-propaganda-woodrow-wilson-fake-news

(4) https://www.amazon.com/Public-Opinion-Original-Walter-Lippmannn/dp/1947844563

(5) https://archive.org/details/publicopinion00lippgoog

(6) https://propagandacritic.com/previous-version-propaganda-critic/articles/ww1.cpi.html

(7) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-180963082/

(8) Cinema as an imperialist weapon: Hollywood and World War I; https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/08/holl-a05.html

(9) https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1917-72PubDip/comp1

(10) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-180963082/

(11) https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/citywiseblog/one-hundred-years-ago-anti-german-hysteria-consumed-cincinnati/

(12) https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2017/03/11/anti-german-hysteria-city-during-wwi/98895422/

(13) https://spartacus-educational.com/FWWantigerman.htm

(14) http://www.revisionist.net/hysteria/index.html

(15) http://www.revisionist.net/hysteria/german-triangle.html

(16) https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/wilson-asks-for-declaration-of-war

(17) https://www.npr.org/2017/04/06/522903398/lynching-of-robert-prager-underlined-anti-german-sentiment-during-world-war-i

(18) https://journal.historyitm.org/2013/10/17/feathered-and-tarred/

(19) https://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/05/wwi-and-german-americans.html

(20) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4992032/Germans-AMERICA-World-War.html

(21) https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/u-s-president-woodrow-wilson-gives-flag-day-address

(22) https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/president-wilson-proclaims-flag-day-224127

(23) http://www.revisionist.net/hysteria/cpi-propaganda.html

(24) https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1168&context=historyfacpub

(25) https://www.warmuseum.ca/firstworldwar/history/life-at-home-during-the-war/enemy-aliens/anti-german-sentiment/

(26) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/13/anti-german-riots-lusitania-1915-first-world-war

(27) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-25450726

(28) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-confiscated-half-billion-dollars-private-property-during-wwi-180952144/

(29) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/04/the-greatest-intellectual-property.html

(30) https://www.historyhit.com/anti-german-propaganda-posters-from-world-war-one/

(31) https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/063.html

(32) https://www.amazon.com/Father-Spin-Edward-Bernays-Relations-ebook/dp/B0091I177W

(33) https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/german-americans-during-world-war-i/

(34) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/sep/07/germany.society

(35) https://propagandacritic.com/previous-version-propaganda-critic/articles/ww1.demons.html

(36) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/08/blog-post_49.html

This article appeared first at the Saker Blog

Bernays and Propaganda

By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog

February 06, 2021

Many years ago, the Jewish-American political commentator Walter Lippmann realised that political ideology could be completely fabricated, using the media to control both presentation and conceptualisation, not only to create deeply-ingrained false beliefs in a population, but also to entirely erase undesirable political ideas from the public mind. This was the beginning of not only the American hysteria for freedom, democracy and patriotism, but of all manufactured political opinion, a process that has been operative ever since. Lippmann created these theories of mass persuasion of the public, using totally fabricated “facts” deeply insinuated into the minds of a gullible public, but there is much more to this story. An Austrian Jew named Edward Louis Bernays, who was the nephew of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was one of Lippmann’s most precocious students and it was he who put Lippmann’s theories into practice. Bernays is widely known in America as the father of Public Relations, but he would be much more accurately described as the father of American war marketing as well as the father of mass manipulation of the public mind.

Bernays claimed “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind” it will be possible “to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it”. He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the ‘engineering of consent’, and to accomplish it he merged theories of crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud. Bernays regarded society as irrational and dangerous, with a “herd instinct”, and that if the multi-party electoral system (which was fabricated by a group of European elites as a population control mechanism) were to survive and continue to serve those elites, massive manipulation of the public mind was necessary. These elites, “invisible people”, would have, through their influence on government and their control of the media, a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and responses of the citizenry. His conviction was that this group should flood the public with misinformation and emotionally-loaded propaganda to “engineer” the acquiescence of the masses and thereby rule over them. According to him, this manufactured consent of the masses, creating conformity of opinion molded by the tool of false propaganda, would be vital for the survival of democracy. (1) (1a) (2)

Bernays wrote, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” He stated that in America, people are governed, their minds molded, their tastes formed, their ideas suggested, largely by men they have never heard of. He claimed, “This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner. In almost every act of our daily lives we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” (3)

In his main work titled ‘Propaganda’, (4) (4a) which he wrote in 1928, Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy in which individuals were inherently dangerous (to the rapacity of the elites) but could be harnessed and channeled by these same elites for their economic benefit. He wrote further that “No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any … wise idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by … those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders. Fortunately, the … politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold and form the will of the people.” He clearly believed that virtually total control of a population was possible, and perhaps easy to accomplish: “So vast are the numbers of minds which can be regimented, and so tenacious are they when regimented, that (they produce) an irresistible pressure before which legislators, editors, and teachers are helpless.”

And it wasn’t only the public masses that were ‘inherently dangerous’, but a nation’s leaders fit this description as well, therefore also requiring manipulation and control. Bernays realised that if you can influence the leaders of a nation, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you can control the government and the country, and that is precisely where he set his sights. Bernays again: “In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power. There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities.” He went on to tell us that “The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses.” And in this case, the “few” are the wealthy elites, their even wealthier bankers, and their brethren who control the media, publishing and entertainment industries.

US President Wilson was desperate to fulfill his obligations to his handlers by putting the US into the First World War as they wished, but was having little success with public opinion at home; few Americans wanted to enter the European war. In 1917 Wilson founded what was called The Committee on Public Information, of which Bernays became a star member. It was Bernays’ vast propaganda schemes and his influence in promoting the patently false idea that US entry to the war was primarily aimed at “bringing democracy to all of Europe”, that proved so successful in altering public opinion about the war. Thanks to Edward Bernays, American war marketing was born and would never die.

Until the First World War, these theories of creating an entirely false public opinion based on misinformation, then manipulating this for population control, were still only theories, but the astounding success of propaganda by Bernays and his group during the war laid bare the possibilities of perpetually controlling the public mind on all matters. The “shrewd” designers of Bernays’ “invisible government” developed a standard technique for what was essentially propaganda and mind control, or at least opinion control, and infiltrated it throughout the US government, its departments and agencies, and its leaders and politicians. Coincident with this, they practiced infecting the leaders of every identifiable group – fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social – and encouraging these men to likewise infect their supporters.

Bernays was apparently stunned by the outstanding success of his democracy slogan and hate campaign in swaying public opinion in favor of war, and so immediately began to apply his model to peacetime enterprises. “In applying his uncle’s Freudian theories to deal with public conceptions, Bernays realised that provoking a fear of communism and then manipulating the public’s emotions toward it, could be a sure recipe for success in the widespread engineering of popular opinion and control of the population. This theory was so powerful that it became a weapon of its own during the cold war.” The term ‘propaganda’ had acquired a poor reputation so Bernays created and promoted the term ‘Public Relations’, but of course his processes were no such thing. Bernays’ PR ethic involved psychological manipulation and control of the public mind through cleverly-devised – and thoroughly false – propaganda.

Bernays carries the blame for more than American entry into the two world wars, having been instrumental in paving the way for the US cannibalisation and military colonisation of much of the world, and for the US installing and supporting the dozens of brutal military dictatorships around the world. His first international project was helping to engineer the US overthrow of the popular elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. At the time, the Rockefellers’ United Fruit Company and various US elites and international financiers owned most of Guatemala including 70% of all the arable land, the communications facilities, the only railroad and shipping port, and controlled most exports. When Arbenz commenced expropriations and land redistribution, Bernays developed a massive propaganda campaign that colored Arbenz as communist, a terrorist, an enemy to democracy, a blot on humanity, and much more, to the extent that American public opinion supported an outrageous travesty and one of the most brutal violations of human rights in US history. Bernays’ template has been used about 70 times with US invasions of that many nations, which is one source of the vast disconnect between what the American people believe their government has done and what it has actually done. As a side note, Guatemala appealed to the United Nations to stop the Americans’ massive interference in their country, a plea that was sympathetically received by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold who proved troublesome for the US. He would do so again a few years later, and would be assassinated by the CIA for his trouble.

I discussed earlier the black and white mentality that pervades America. Much of this is supported by the witch-hunting versions of Christianity that Americans have embraced, but much of the blame must be laid on Bernays’ propaganda methods. Bernays himself asserted that propaganda could produce rapid and strong emotional responses in the public, but that the range of these responses was limited because the emotional loading inherent in his propaganda would create a kind of binary mentality, eventually forcing the population into a programmed black and white world – which is precisely what we see in the US today. This isn’t difficult to understand. In a discussion of a landscaping option for our garden, we could have a range of dispassionate responses from antipathy to adoration, but when Bernays flooded the public with fabricated tales of Germans killing babies, the range of potential responses was not dispassionate but rather entirely emotional and would be limited to either abhorrence or perhaps a blocking of the information. In a sense, our emotional switch will be forced into either an ‘on’ or ‘off’ position, with no other reasonable choices. We see this in debates on subjects like global warming, where positions do not correspond to educational or employment circumstances, nor to experience, but tend to be strongly emotional responses along ideological and political lines with precisely the kind of binary mentality Bernays predicted.

It is interesting to note that the manipulators eventually became the manipulated. Wilson, in his eagerness to manipulate public opinion in favor of war, failed to realise he was himself being manipulated by his handlers, by these same elite propagandists whose war ambitions he was fulfilling, as well as other schemes they had already planted in his mind. The puppeteer became the puppet, and the practice became permanent. The elite few, as Bernays called them, realised early on the potential for control of governments, and in every subsequent US administration the president and his White House staff, the politicians, the leaders of the military and intelligence agencies, all fell prey to this same disease of shrewd manipulation. Roosevelt’s “intense desire for war” (5) (6) (7) in 1939 was the result of this same infection process and, once infected, he of course approved of the infection of the entire American population. George Bush with Iraq and Obama with Libya and Syria are not different. Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

Bernays was very correct in stating that a society’s ability to participate in a democracy was dependent on how well-informed the society was, but Americans fail to appreciate that it is ignorance and not knowledge or education that protects the existence of multi-party political systems. That is why American leaders, controlled by the same “invisible government” and with a fully-compliant elite-owned media, have intentionally misrepresented their current policies and actions to the public, while their “elite few” specialised in massive historical revisionism, especially American history in the world and the effects of that history on other nations. By keeping Americans ignorant and uninformed, their minds filled with foolish and false myths, and forever distracted by irrelevancies, American leaders and their puppet-masters have used Bernays’ theories to control public opinion and beliefs with lies, religion, patriotism and emotional propaganda. It was very much an “engineered ignorance” created by a continuing program of misinformation, manipulation and deception, a shrewdly-planned subversion of the American public.

The almost overwhelming political-religious ideological fog permeating America today is due to generations of institutionalized deception and propaganda, and is the direct cause of much of the renowned ignorance of the American people. Their capitalist ideology as well, is rooted in economic misconceptions and false propaganda, with the result that almost no Americans today have any understanding of the real (and largely criminal) reasons for their nation’s economic success. The astonishing extent of the binary polarisation of politics and government is another example, yet few Americans have any understanding of their condition. As one author noted, “The wealthy in America have created an inherently imbalanced system that is exploitable by the wealthy and they are working through the use of propaganda and misinformation to convince Americans that the system is just, or, if anything, unfairly biased toward the poor.” And again, “The economic system that America has developed is dependent on the exploitation of foreign countries and the acquisition of foreign resources, which is why (the US) pursues a strategy of global preeminence.” He went on to state that the foreign policy of the American Right-Wing has been developed through extensive propaganda and exaggeration of foreign threats in order to maintain the conditions for public support and to justify the suppression of dissent.

I have written before that no Right-Wing government could survive in the full light of day with all truths exposed, because most of these truths are bitterly anti-social and designed only to create a flow of a nation’s wealth to the relatively few members of the elites and financiers. In order to function at all, a Right-Wing government like that in the US must be increasingly secretive and rely ever more heavily on Bernays and on his propaganda in order to produce in the population both his engineered consent and engineered ignorance, without which a democracy could not survive. This is so true that after World War II, the US military heavily restricted media control in occupied Germany and Japan because it recognized that the media could easily educate citizens to the dangers of the American presence both at home and in Europe. This veil of secrecy has been carried to an extent that the American and international elites have created what one writer called a massive framework of lies that functions as an arena within which the desired propaganda ideas are presented to the American people as information, but where the reality is very different from that in which American leadership functions. The same writer stated so perfectly, “Within this framework of lies the world appears to be a simplistic place of good and evil. The feeling of Americans that we are the most successful people on earth, and that America is the most successful country, is used to support the idea that America’s policies are inherently altruistic because our culture tells us that success is the measure of goodness. What is actually the case, though, is that America is successful precisely because American policy is not altruistic.”

The next essay in this series will outline in detail the beginnings – and the devastating results – of Bernays’ initial efforts.

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Mr. Romanoff’s writinghas been translated into 28 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English-language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes‘. His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/ and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

Notes

1. https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Consent-Edward-L-Bernays/dp/B0007DOM5E;

(1a) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/The_Engineering_of_Consent_%28essay%29.pdf

(2) http://classes.dma.ucla.edu/Fall07/28/Engineering_of_consent.pdf

(3) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/203430-the-conscious-and-intelligent-manipulation-of-the-organized-habits-and

(4) https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598; (4a) http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html

(5) https://famguardian.org/Subjects/Scams/FDR/fdr.htm

(6) https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/article/wikileaks-1941/

(7) https://mises.org/library/roosevelt-nobody-knows