Masters of Deceit: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear, Mind Control & Brain Warfare
BY PGF
2 years, 1 month ago
“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit
The U.S. government has become a master of deceit.
It’s all documented, too.
This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; and wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad.
Worse, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
With every passing day, it becomes painfully clear that this is not a government that can be trusted with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms.
[…]
Just recently, for example, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation comes in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military has been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users.
Psychological warfare, as the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group explained in a recruiting video released earlier this year, enables the government to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.
We’ve argued this before, but about NSA spying on foreign nationals and countries. What the DoD is doing here is legitimate in the national security interest as it stands today. The problems are not this program or the US spying on enemies or potential enemies; there are two problems with this. There is no declared war, and the DoD has been permanently funded to wartime levels for 80 years now under continuing resolutions. It’s silly to argue against this spying while funding the spies like we’re at war. Will all of this be turned against us, surely, and probably already is? But as it stands right now, this is a legitimate use of the funds allocated by Congress for this purpose. We were warned against a standing army, and congress used to have power over that.
It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.
[…]
This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.
Read the whole thing.
On October 4, 2022 at 2:22 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
The presence of propagandists and PR specialists within the political and economic establishment of the U.S. has been a fact for over a century.
Most historians of the subject credit Edward Bernays (1891-1995) as the father of modern PR and also modern propaganda. The line between them is a fine one. “Life Magazine” acclaimed Bernays as one of the most-influential Americans of the 20th century in an issue devoted to the subject, and there is little doubt that was the case.
A distant relation of pioneering psychologist Sigmund Freud, Bernays combined the findings of Freud with those of such pioneers as Frenchman Gustav LeBon, one of the first specialists to study the behavior of people in groups or crowds.
Hired by the Wilson Administration during WWI, Bernays worked for the Committee on Public Information, devoting his time to shaping public opinion to favor American involvement in the Great War, a conflict President Wilson has campaigned against entering. After the war, Bernays realized that the same mass-media techniques used to shape tastes and opinions during wartime could also be applied to peacetime and the promotion of ad campaigns and mass-marketing.
Bernays penned two highly-influential books, “Crystalizing Public Opinion” (1923) and “Propaganda” (1928), and worked for dozens of high-profile clients over the decades. His work saw successful ad campaigns to convince women to smoke cigarettes, and promoted fruit sales in the U.S. on behalf of United Fruit Company in the 1940s. Alongside his commercial ventures, Bernays spin-doctored American involvement in places like Guatemala on behalf of his corporate and government clients. In the 1950s, Bernays worked hand-in-glove with the Central Intelligence Agency to carry off a “successful” coup in that same nation.
Perhaps most-fatefully for ordinary people, Bernays subscribed to the idea that ordinary people did not really know what they wanted or what they believed or thought, and had to be “steered” towards what was best for them. Who decides what is best? He adroitly sidestepped that issue, but the answer most-surely would have been managerial elites such as himself and those he served.
Bernays laid the groundwork for the sophisticated psy-ops campaigns being run today by various three-letter agencies in the USA and elsewhere, to shape the all-important narrative in favor of the elites and what they want. Equally so the corporate and NGO organizations which also use his methods, suitably updated with 21st century technology.