I Hate to Say, ‘I Told You So’ . . .

My mind is still reeling about last Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, in which 22 year-old Jared Lee Loughner took the lives of 6 people and wounded another 13.  Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is still in critical condition, we are told, though, thankfully, she continues to improve.  Today, part of me wants to say, “I told you so,” but another part of me just wants to crawl into a hole and hide.  Initial news reports Saturday afternoon were quick to tell us that Loughner, once he had been identified as a suspect, was a drug- and alcohol-abusing loner who published screeds about the treasonous American government, religion and mind control in his online social network accounts.  They were less forthcoming about the reasons why he did so, and without understanding these crucial facts, I fervently maintain that we are doomed to live with countless many more Jared Lee Loughners being groomed among us.  Therefore, with the sole interest in preventing more tragedies such as last Saturday’s, I boldly propose we look more carefully at the facts we have.

Loughner was troubled – of that, there can be no doubt.  But lost in the endless speculation about him – that he’s schizophrenic, that he’s a racist, that he hates the government, that he’s antisocial – is perhaps the most telling actual fact that has been discretely brushed aside by nearly every major and most minor news outlets regarding his motivation for acting as he did January 8th:  there are records in the possession of the police that demonstrate Loughner went to them for help after a former “friend” had posted an unflattering, fake profile of him on peekyou.com.  He was, obviously, ignored by them.  He was being terrorized, and police did nothing about it.  True – this news appears on the most mistrusted news station in the world, Fox news, but that should be enough to give anyone pause; perhaps our mistrust of Fox News is being manipulated so that we likewise doubt this fact as such.  We know for whose benefit Fox always acts; no thinking person trusts them for good reason, which makes it even more incredible that this station is the one that has broadcast the fact Loughner had gone to police for help because his identity had been stolen for nefarious reasons (to portray him as something other than that which he, himself, claimed to be).  In what imaginary parallel universe is Fox ever the sole distributor of facts?  You instantly want to dismiss it, but you ought not to, not least because police complaints are a matter of public record.  In those regarding Loughner, we see not only that he, himself, was the victim of a terror campaign, but that the rest of his family was as well.

For who knows how long Loughner’s identity had been co-opted, but it’s clear that, indeed, it was to some degree and for an as-yet unstated – though apparently nefarious – reason.  Should we take, then, at face value the reports that he was merely a drug- and alcohol- abusing bully?  At the very least, shouldn’t we consider that the all-too-familiar path to becoming a bully is the experience of having once been bullied?  Loughner’s father has allegedly said his son was out of control, but we don’t know if he understood what very well may have been happening to his son – whether or not he knew his son was merely reacting to being a target who was tortured and terrorized each and every day of his life for what appears to be quite some time.  In this covert war our government is still waging against liberals opposed to the military domination of other countries by it, it is highly unlikely it will ever be proved Loughner is the victim of government interference, and for someone unfamiliar with the covert warfare arsenal historically used by our military dictatorship against citizens of this country – among which is an arsenal of the most intrusively designed and insidiously deployed weapons, colloquially called, “mind control” weapons – it can be damned difficult for him or her to understand the malignant perversion which results from the deployment of these weapons against a target’s personality and personhood, the destruction of which is the end goal of them, even if that someone is a more than usually sympathetic parent.  (Turns out the New World Order is actually the same, old world order except with better – in the sense they are less detectable and therefore more indicative of our government’s guilt – weapons.)  If Loughner’s parents didn’t have a realistic understanding of what was happening to their son, why should we expect people who are paid to write scandalous stories to give us one?  Loughner wasn’t born a schizophrenic, or a government dissident, or a white supremacist.  Whether or not he actually became any of these things, has merely been repudiated as such, or was induced to do what he did last Saturday by insidious means of persuasion the average person has no idea our government has long had the ability to propagate in an individual’s mind is unclear at this point.  What I can tell you is that people interfered with by our government in this way are numerous, scared and hopeless.  They also tend to be one other thing:  naively brave.

I am speaking, of course, about the people who risk their lives trying to tell you about the heinous covert warfare your government has waged against you, one of whom may (or may not) actually be Jared Lee Loughner.  They don’t rant about the government because they hope to become famous (or infamous), or because they want to be regarded by you as crazy.  They are, generally speaking, thoughtful, passionate and – yes – distressed.  And they are increasingly children whose normal development has been corrupted.  In Loughner’s case, we heard about his arrest record, his bullying, his drug and alcohol abuse and his dropping out of community college, but we also heard very little about the aforementioned complaint to police.  That’s a shame because before Loughner was any of these things – if ever, indeed, he was the more reprehensible things – he was, himself, being bullied in the most treacherous way imaginable.  His trust had been elicited and then betrayed by someone who may never have had any intention of being his true friend, and, as a consequence, his reputation was crafted into that of the most repugnant and monstrous type of sociopath known – the white supremacist.  That reputation is what caused his alienation from (so-called) decent society – not the other way around – long before he ever thought of purchasing and using a gun against a member of the group of people that has given billions of dollars to defense contractors and security contractors to develop, distribute and use the type of weapons about which Loughner railed and of which he may very well have been a victim.  That this young man chose violence against others (as opposed to the self-inflicted violence which the young, bullied, gay men who killed themselves last fall chose) as a means to mitigate the threats he perceived around him is reprehensible and inexcusable; nevertheless, we must face the fact that normal people do not behave in these ways.  Troubled people behave in these ways.  Normal people must be driven to such desperate acts.  For as little as we know about Loughner, this is without doubt true of him, and this should be the first – and last – fact we hear about him until all other facts are known.  But it isn’t.  What we are hearing instead is the same tired mix of cliché and stereotype, which makes it extremely difficult for us to see that Jared Lee Loughner could very easily be any of our sons.  That’s because the one war you can never win is the one you don’t know that you’re in.

Rush Limbaugh, the most prolific user since Joseph Goebbels of ad hominem disparagements that can only be qualified as hate speech, blamed metal music, in predictably hypocritical fashion.  Mother Jones appears more sympathetic, merely condemning Loughner as mentally ill, a “schizophrenic,” the traditionally common and deliberate misdiagnosis made unprofessionally by health care contractors under the influence of the U.S. military, or untrained casual observers which are then, in cases of public outrage such as this, picked up by professional (that is to say, paid and not necessarily truthful) opinion makers.  TIME, CBS.com, The Atlantic and Forbes have done just that and offered very little critical thinking about the story being presented to the world regarding Loughner.  We are so anxious to take sides against one another in our debates about who the true Americans are and air our speculations over who are not true Americans, standing beside the bodies of the dead and wounded, we have not stopped to educate ourselves about the very real threats to all of us that the young man who foolishly went to police looking their help because he was aware that his identity had been taken over virtually for nefarious purposes was trying to tell us:  that he, like untold millions of Americans today was being interfered with by an entity with the power to destroy his (and through him, that of others) life.

If Loughner is yet another Manchurian candidate, he is but one of the many millions of actual Americans whose free will has been supplanted using one or more of the many, many weapons in the hands of the military, police and average Americans working with them that are designed to do just that.  As such, both his personality and behavior may very well have been corrupted by these people for their own ends for years and is in no way representative of Loughner’s true personality and behavior.  People such as Loughner are obviously the only ones who are intimately acquainted with how our military dictatorship oppresses its serfs using covert weapons, and I ask you now, to whom should we listen when they testify to their persecution, if we are not willing to listen to them?  Their testimony is all we have that can save us from becoming like them.  The people who wage covert war are not going to tell us this is what they are doing.  As a much-maligned target of this military dictatorship myself, I am inclined to give any first-hand witness of its godless misdeeds the benefit of the doubt because I, too, have been the victim of it.  It’s the least I can do for one who may very well be another tortured and terrorized soul, disturbed though Loughner without doubt is, because I know that people such as he have been robbed of the deepest, most fundamentally human parts of their psyches – the parts that make revelations such as this nearly impossible (I say “nearly impossible” because there is one way in which they are still possible; first commenter whose explanation of precisely how they still are that I receive gets a free copy of Eric Metaxas’s new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer:  Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Here’s a hint.)

The very same day of the attack, commentators on the wall of one of my more provocative FaceBook ‘friends’ were squaring off:  those defending Sarah Palin’s call to target (and reload as often as necessary) even nominal liberals such as Gabrielle Giffords, and those who were rightfully condemning her for her incitements to violence.  One fellow wrote, “If we could only get all of the bleeding heart liberals to rest their case the world would be a much more reasoned place to live. But no! Sadley (sic) we must all listen to and read constantly the moronic rantings (sic) and blatherings (sic) from a sad little group who just had their asses handed to them in the change of power in the House of Reps; this week. And if we the people will hold those we put in office accountable and vote even more of the liberal socialist out of office then maybe we can all breath (sic) a little easier knowing that morons and idiots that think the government (sic) owes them and those that think like them a higher standerd (sic) of living than they have earned off the hard working backs and out of the tax paying pockets of everyone else,” to which I responded, “I remember deciding when I was about 5 or 6 that it was stupid to waste ergs judging people I didn't know because, well, I didn't know them and what use were judgments about them, then? And since I couldn't meet every single person in the world, it was a supreme waste of energy that could be expended more profitably than forming baseless opinions about people, to make those baseless opinions in the first place.”  Now, I’ve had sporgery before on FaceBook, and perhaps the profile alleged to have posted this comment is not actually the author of them, but as any FaceBook user knows, despite its Rights and Responsibilities agreement that every FaceBook user is obliged to agree to when he or she creates an account, FaceBook sanctions threatening, obscene and disparaging right-wing opinion makers far, far, far less than its moderators (need to) delete comments from those who take more rational positions than, for example, the first in this example.  These are the types of comments being thrown around (and much worse) there, in this war against liberals, and they betray a mindset of domination that in no way represents the ideals of truth and freedom, common humanity, a Christian or other ethic, never mind a patriotic one.  This is the philosophy of the brute ‘social Darwinist’ who believes in nothing but his power to dominate others in the sturm and drang of life.  This is the mindset of the fascist; me against you, no such thing as community (again, Christian or other), or shared, public government.  Surely, the only person that ultimately matters is the one in front of you, but none of these alleged right- (and, sadly, many alleged left-)wing combatants seems to understand this.  Not surprisingly, this fellow’s response was to qualify my post as a rant, just as Loughner’s posts about our military dictatorship have been characterized.  I don’t know if the author of these comments is a fan of Rush Limbaugh’s, or not, but he seems to use the same thoughtless, paint-with-broad-black-brushstrokes tactics as the master manipulator does, who, in one fashion or another, leads all the talking heads with his vitriol.

We may never know truly who Jared Lee Loughner is, and that is the only certainty we should, by today, understand that we have because that certain uncertainty – like the fake white supremacist posing as Jared Lee Loughner on peekyou.com – is exactly the reason for which your government has designed these covert weapons:  to keep you ignorant of what more and more of the persecuted here in America know to be true about our military dictatorship.  Our sympathies today are with those who were shot, the only apparent victims of this tragic event, but I challenge you who claim to be people of faith to think very carefully about what happens to those of us who are persecuted by our government because of our willfully foreshortened scope of vision, and include in your prayers for the victims of last Saturday’s attack Jared Lee Loughner and his pained and confused family as well.

There’s really not much more that needs to be said than this - except, perhaps, that you can expect many, many, many more Sirhan Sirhans and Jared Lee Loughners in the days and weeks to come, unless you who believe you have a right to live free of military interference by your government on the most basic level of your existence stand with those of us who know we most certainly do not possess that right in America today, and you challenge this fascist dictatorship in which we all live.

Boy – do I hate to say, ‘I told you so.’  These essays just keep getting harder and harder to write despite their apparently necessary redundancy.

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Not Quite the Same Tea in Palin's "Tea Party"

I didn’t write about Sarah Palin’s visit to Boston last month at the end of her “Tea Party” tour, Wednesday, April 14^th. Sometimes, the task of sifting the treasure from the trash in a story is just too overwhelming; whatever observations I have to share with my readers come not so much from the actual who, what, when, where, why and how of it, but from the examination of how our government manipulates our perceptions of those things. A recent conversation with a clerk in my neighborhood health food store got me thinking about these binary components of our political tableau and about how successful our government has been because of them. Tea time today seems an appropriate time to turn my attention to Ms. Palin’s stunt on the common and contribute a fresh, badly needed perspective.

We Americans are used to politicians who act as though they understand the issues of greatest concern to us when they so obviously don’t. This discrepancy in our political discourse is now so familiar it’s a foregone conclusion, and its rich history gives us much material to scrutinize – far more than can be analyzed in this little blog. What is immediately obvious is the fact that where this discrepancy exists, only those already in power – no matter their party affiliations – benefit from it. We, those without power, are left fighting not the true battles to see our problems taken up by our leaders, but rather, whomever those running for office pit against us with this contrivance: weak on crime and terrorism ‘liberals’ v. hawk neocons, anti-empire protesters v. oil and military bourgeoisie. Ms. Palin is certainly a politician. She knows that garnering the kind of support she needs to afford the type of pervasive PR every politician who’s selected by our corporate leaders needs in order to control the public discourse requires her to set forth talking points of no relevance to the average American. That’s how she proves her status as a quisling to her backers. Thus, her “Tea Party” tour. But she's also so much more than that.  With one breath, she’ll tell you America’s problem is big government, and then with another, she’ll assure you she wants a strong defense – in an age when the Pentagon’s budget is (and has been for quite some time) in excess of $75 billion dollars annually and all that money (which we borrow from Saudi Arabia and China at exorbitant interest rates) goes to – what else – big outsourced government, also known as the private security industry. The average American doesn’t see this contradiction reinforced in evening news broadcasts, or morning and afternoon talk shows, or popular non-fiction, so it believes it doesn’t exist, even though all it takes to see it is a willingness to do so.  Palin wants to keep the military industrial complex happy because those are the people who fund her campaign “war chest,” and so we may rightfully ask, "Is Sarah Palin merely a politician, or a soldier, herself, and, if so, what kind of soldier?”

“I trusted Obama to change the direction our country was headed, but so far, I’ve seen no change. We need smaller government,” one Palin supporter commented to a WBZ news reporter the day of her party. That’s the news bite the majority of New Englanders heard, followed by Palin, herself: “I want to tell you – [nah] – we’ll keep clinging to our constitution and our guns and religion, and you can keep the change,” as if this mission statement hasn’t been forcibly undertaken by every administration since Reagan’s. “Smaller government” isn’t our issue, clearly, and it hasn’t been their issue, either, for the last 30 years, as we can see from the Pentagon’s budget, the proceeds of which have been distributed to ‘free’ market privateers who have completely undermined our constitutional republic by replacing public government that represents us all with the permanent police state they control. Less corrupt, more effective government – without the propaganda shrink wrapped around the agenda of items permissible to discuss in the public discourse – is the issue. Palin’s tea ‘parody’ represents far more closely the fête the Mad Hatter threw for Alice than the 1773 demonstration in Boston Harbor for that reason. So one must ask – is it really ‘tea,’ or something else, at the heart of Palin’s ‘protest?’

“Well, that’s why I get to live in the bubble I live in – thanks to people like you,” the clerk said to me that day, without even a hint of shame, when I told her about my blog. She’s about the age of the initial group of youth who cast their first votes when Viacom’s MTV inaugurated its Rock the Vote campaign in 1990, becoming the first global corporation to sponsor mass, direct American civics education – bad mass, direct American civics education, at that. For her, as for most Americans, self-governance begins and ends at the polling booth every four years, when she and her cohorts organize themselves into that type of “mob” which Founding Father James Madison decried as the enemy of the American Constitutional Republic in Federalist Paper No. 10 – that democratic mob made up of the most powerful factions of people in our country (such as the broadcasting industry), whose interests are the only ones our elected officials represent. Madison, like all the other Federalists, despised democracy and preferred to it instead a constitutional republic in which the people elected “virtuous” men to represent everyone, not merely the most powerful of the body politic.

But here’s the catch: to whom can a concerned Patriot turn for help in fighting fascist hypocrites such as Palin now that we’re down this rabbit hole – where up is down, down is up, and nothing our politicians say or do makes patent sense? Ron Paul supporter Michael Edward has made good use of the disaffection of those of us who understand these things about our politicians and our lost form of government, but when we scratch the surface of his “Restore the Republic” movement, we find the same type of hypocrisy that calls for less, not more effective, civil government. It’s easy to see that what they want is actually vigilante-style “independence,” the freedom to live as lawless frontiersmen in the mistaken belief that that is what our Founding Fathers wished for us.

I admit it – much of Edward’s research is spot on, and he demonstrates a thorough understanding of the singularly most distressing aspect of our emerging socialist state: the totalitarianism that a group of privileged (less and less honorably elected) people increasingly exert over the majority of us. But that the one, effective antidote to this situation is a government-less, “free market” exploitation of the issues at the heart of our attempts to promote the commonwealth our Founding Fathers intended us to create is a fallacy, one they are prepared to cling to, if necessary, with guns in hand. They couldn’t be more closely aligned with the neocons they claim to abhor.

There is an unmistakable pattern of propaganda at work here: embedded into a manufactured issue that takes a perspective beneficial only to those who created the issue is a grain of truth to which we are drawn, but then the subsequent dialogue is inevitably channeled in a way that benefits only those people who created the ‘issue.’ With its ‘answer’ of no government to its specious ‘problem’ of big government, it’s easy to see that Restore the Republic is clearly a “false flag” organization created to ensnare unsuspecting disaffected Americans by pretending to be something that it is not – representative of the interests of the average American.  I can only deduce his organization is a false flag, one of the many propaganda tools of "historic" importance George W. Bush ordered the quislings of his Global Communications Office to create in 2003 for his never-ending covert war.

Then there’s the hatred of the other that is so assiduously promoted by American culture that's also used to undermine belief in a public government that has given us everything from the interstate highway system to the enforcement of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, of anyone who doesn’t ascribe to the anti-humanistic notion we are all nothing more than animals in a jungle, of anyone who remembers a time when the American government wasn’t directly involved in creating debased culture that encourages us to fight amongst ourselves.  Probably the most detrimental war being waged against the American citizen is in the area of quality public education.

Thomas Jefferson, our 3^rd president and the author of the Declaration of Independence, was a firm believer in universal, government-supported education for all Americans, regardless of their ability to pay for it. He and a group of his colleagues put together what can only be called the first charter school in Washington, D.C., by pledging the sum of $200 in ten installments in 1805 for its creation, when he was barely solvent. Together, they raised more than $35,000 to start this, the forerunner to the public school, just to prove to lawmakers that publicly-supported education was worth financing with public funds – and they succeeded. Less than a decade-and-a-half later, the Commonwealth of Virginia created the first public institution of higher learning, the University of Virginia, and Jefferson became its first head. Jefferson envisioned what recent educators would call constructivist principles as the basis of good, universal education, but since the 1970s, education has been turned into an enterprise where only performance matters, an enterprise in which even basic science and history facts have been relegated to the rubbish heap. In the last 20 years especially, the charter school movement has done everything it can to create an elite class of citizens culled for advancement from those students that demonstrate susceptibility to indoctrination, not the ability to think critically. Charter schools still get public funding, but it’s the private funding mechanism that has ultimate decision-making power in our classrooms, given that it is they, through their access to local political representatives vis-à-vis their respective tax bases, who now dictate whatever government requirements the schools must meet for accreditation. This isn’t the type of influence Jefferson and his colleagues believed was the right of citizens in a constitutional republic. Though they could have predicted it, they would never have tolerated the undue influence of the corporation in American society. In an age when accurate science and history information is under siege, the proliferation of this system of education is troubling indeed.

Jefferson also had such disdain for the power exerted by religious leaders, and such a mistrust of institutionalized religion, that he wrote his own version of the gospels in which he redacted all the supernaturalism that he felt obscured the collective wisdom of the ancient texts. And he made certain that anyone who so chose could follow his example and freely worship G_d as he or she pleased. That’s why the first organizing principle of our nation’s founding documents, the first amendment to our federal constitution, established a clear-cut separation between church and state. He would be appalled if he were alive today that American church leaders now have the power to perform the duties of civil law enforcement and arrest people, thanks to George W. Bush’s administration.  Perhaps Sarah Palin’s former party leader didn’t expressly call our Constitution “just a piece of paper,” but he certainly acts as though he believes that is all it is.

By all accounts, we can see that the "smaller" government of the former neocons and the even smaller -- or non-existent -- government of the Tea Party -- actually exists, particularly where it concerns services such as quality education, so what the heck is Palin and the crazies that follow her around talking about?  And where did Christine O'Donnell come from?  Here, we can benefit from some more history to help answer our mounting questions.

In 1953, the CIA engineered the coup against Iran's reformist leader, Moussadgh, by paying poor Iranians to pretend, by conducting mass protests, that Moussadgh was unpopular and that there was a legitimate counter party to him.  They did this to install the pro-west business (Great Britain, especially), oil cartel-friendly Shah.  Then the CIA did the same thing 20 years later in Chile, ushering in the brutal, pro-fascist Pinochet dictatorship.  In 1981, Ronald Reagan made it legal for the CIA to do the same type of theatre here, in America, and, as we've already seen, to infiltrate "for the purposes of influencing the activities of" all political action groups in order to polarize factions against each other.  He did so because he realized - as every great dictator does - that conquering a people is easier when they are fighting each other, instead of you.  Probably the most ludicrous thing Tea Party candidates such as newly "elected" Christine O'Donnell tell people about the surge in popularity of Tea Party candidates is that the American people want them, the true conservatives, because neocons such as Rush Limbaugh aren't right-wing enough.   All those Tea Party "protestors" at their rallies?  Government-paid, militants-for-hire.  Remember -- the Joint Forces have been working in America since 1996 with all the CIA's and FBI's tools and technologies, and the ability to hire from your neighborhood minions to do their street theater.


Now, I'm not saying there aren't some seriously stupid, deluded people in the Tea Party "movement," but the Tea Party is clearly another type of propaganda tool the CIA uses -- misdirection. While you sit here deriding them, or laughing at their staged stupidity on The Colbert Report, or The Jon Stewart Show, your civil society is being transformed exactly the way Nazi Germany was in the First and Second Solutions (and you know what that led to; that's right - the Final Solution, which is well under way), and every legitimate activist working to change this already patently fascist government is derided as crazy -- just like Tea Party candidates.  Propaganda tools such as these are the reason why the American public has been deluded into believing it is still a government of, by and for the people, and that it isn't already every horrible thing the Tea Party candidates say they want for America's future government, which is no government at all, according to them.  That's exactly what you have -- no public, shared government, just a police state.  So we've come to the point where we can now answer the question, "Who is Sarah Palin, and is she a member of our military, and if so, what type?"  She's clearly not a mere politician, and if she's not, neither are any other Tea Party "candidates," including Christine O'Donnell.  Since they're using CIA-developed tools, we can justifiably deduce they are members of the CIA and, that being the case, that they are not legitimate political figures, or true freedom-loving American patriots, or any type of entity that can benefit you, the American people.  They're puppets on a string, and the people pulling those strings are the fascists in control of our government.

We could all use a bubble tea break from the sophistry of Palin and the neocons, I understand, but buckling under the pressure to rid the public discourse of pernicious voices such theirs, as our Founding Fathers instructed us to do, would ensure our enslavement to this fascist status quo, and slavery is not what this country was created to perpetuate. This is the issue facing all Americans today:  American fascism, and it is the responsibility of us all to fight and defeat it. So I turn to you today with my plea – save yourselves. The Sarah Palins of the world aren’t interested in doing that. They’re off somewhere, training in the uses of their favorite T, the next mind-control weapon.

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Hearts and Minds: The Other War Our Government Has Been Waging

Ever wondered what happened to that other war, the one for “hearts and minds,” that our government has been fighting – what it is, whether or not we’re still in it, who it affects, and how the U.S. is faring? Though you may not realize it, this war is as real as the ones in the Middle East, despite its rhetorical camouflage, and it is one that affects us as much today as it does every other person on the planet, not just those in that war-torn region. Valentine’s Day seemed the perfect day to reflect on this war for our hearts and minds since, like the wars on terror and in Iraq and Afghanistan, it hasn’t gone away with the passing of the Bush Administration, as many of us had hoped it would, even though we were told explicitly that it never would. Here, I offer my thoughts somewhat belatedly (due to the inopportune yet predictable upper respiratory infection I somehow managed to acquire with, as usual, no predisposing factors other than my propensity to speak out against our fascist government).

The war for hearts and minds began with Bush’s creation of the innocuous sounding Office of Public Policy-cum-Diplomacy to replace his wartime communications office in 2001. Bush appointed Charlotte Beers, former head of advertising giants J. Walter Mather and Ogilvy, as undersecretary for public policy to head his Office of Diplomacy and turn America into an “elegant” brand (Time, November 14, 2001). Beers’ tenure was short. She resigned in March, 2003, and her office was a magnet for criticism. The GAO dutifully reported in September, 2003, that it had wasted millions of dollars, leading us to believe – rightly, or deliberately wrongly – that the agency was both ill-conceived and mismanaged and might therefore soon go the way of the Dodo bird. Even still the programs Beers initiated – some known, such as Radio Sawa, and some not, as the way propaganda goes – still exist and are now managed by the Office of Global Communications (New York Times, March 3, 2003; Counterpunch, August 13, 2003; Rich, 2006, pp. 31-32; Guardian, July 31, 2002). The only thing we know for sure is that this White-House-directed office still exists. ''He [Bush] told us that we were going to be at this for a long, long time,'' one participant in the February 19, 2002, meeting that established the then unnamed Office of Diplomacy said, ''that we were setting a template for future presidents, that we had to think big, strategic, historic thoughts.'' (New York Times, February 20, 2002) Now, everyone knows that radio was used by the Axis powers during World War II, but we hear little about the Allies’ formidable counterparts in its own broadcasting propaganda machine. “Axis Sally” and “Tokyo Rose” are probably the most famous radio personalities that figure in our collective consciousness of the bad guys’ wartime spin to build their esteem in the minds of those whom they conquered as well as to discourage Allied soldiers by inflating their battlefield successes and minimizing the Allies’ triumphs. But such propaganda tools weren’t unique to the Axis powers, and they did have their American counterparts. American propaganda has come a long way in the last fifty or so years, thanks to the burgeoning spy technology industries and campaigns to keep you ignorant of these technologies, which have been developed using and deployed against U.S. citizens. Your government has so much power working to create a fantastical vision of the United States in the collective consciousness, we might as well live in Duloc. Since we can’t, it would behoove us to look at some of the tools our government uses in this other never-ending war in case we ever find ourselves sick and tired of living in a fantasy world where none of us is free (as we do today). First, though, let's review the history of politicians' use of the hearts and minds imagery and why they continue to use it.

Digby gives us a terrific summation of the evolution of the use of the hearts and mindsrhetoric, including it’s transition from a rallying cry for revolutionaries to propaganda used to pacify “counter-insurgents.”

Founding Father John Adams first used the terms "hearts” and “minds” together to describe the American revolution, when he wrote to his fellow subjugated citizens of the British empire to persuade those yet unconvinced of the need for revolution, “. . . in the minds and hearts of the people, a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.” One hundred sixty years later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt then used the term “hearts and minds of the people” to rally a dispirited country in the midst of the depression. “In these days it [national unity] means to me a union not only of the states, but a union of the hearts and minds of the people in all the states and their many interests and purposes, devoted with unity to the human welfare of our country.”

British Gen. Sir Gerald Templer was the first to invoke the sense of mission to subjugate those under British colonial rule to its will using the hearts and minds rhetoric in its contemporary counter-revolutionary sense, when he discusses his strategy for victory over Malayan rebel forces during the Malayan Emergency in June, 1952. “The answer [to conquering the counter-insurgents] rests in the hearts and minds of the Malayan people.” In 1965, Lyndon Johnson was the first American president to use the hearts and minds counter-revolutionary rhetoric to speak about dividing the populace in Southeast Asia to curb communism: “. . . ultimate victory [in Vietnam] will depend upon the hearts and the minds of the Vietnamese,” he declared.  When you hear an American president use the "hearts and minds" rhetoric today, what he is actually doing is dividing insurgents from counter-insurgents - us from them - usually, the exact opposite of his hypocritcal profession of unifying the country.

Though our forefathers used the phrase, “hearts and minds,” in a much different manner than we see our leaders using the phrase today, both groups of men understood the things for which they were using the symbol of the heart and the symbol of the mind to be will and consciousness, respectively – that motive force that underlies all human activity and the integrative factor that puts it to use when the external world impinges on one’s interpersonal one. Hearts and minds. Will and consciousness. Rhetoric decoded.

Today’s American war for hearts and minds, or will and consciousness, officially began long before the invasion of Iraq and is, as a PSYOP program designed by the CIA and implemented by the U.S. military throughout the world, including our own country, a cornerstone of training for the new Iraqi security forces. But it’s also a lot more. In “A Nation Challenged: Hearts and Minds” Elizabeth Becker and James Dao write that President Bush’s decision to transform his White House Office of Wartime Communications into a permanent Office of Global Diplomacy was based on his objective “to spread a positive image of the United States around the world and combat anti-Americanism, . . . “ [emph. added; New York Times, February 20, 2002], and combat is exactly in what it is engaged. That's why PSYOP was developed by our military -- the people in charge of combat.

We already know the classic PSYOP measures used by our government to combat those opposed to its warmongering, including covert counterintelligence against American citizens. Today’s hearts and minds campaign is waged no differently, and, in fact, Bush tells us that himself: “. . . [its] major goal, officials said, is to stem what the White House sees as a rising tide of anti-Americanism” by use of “the media, the Internet and a range of covert operations to try to influence public opinion and government policy abroad, including in friendly nations.” [emph. added; New York Times, February 20, 2002] Certainly, there can be no friendlier nation to America than itself, and those of its citizens who appear unfriendly to the government, Bush also tells us, are as likely to become our government’s targets as any Arab, Iraqi or other: “If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.” That was our Commander-in-Chief’s declaration of war against our nation’s very own citizens – against you, should your will and consciousness happen to be in opposition to those of him and his cabal.

To most of my regular readers, these things will come as no surprise. I’ve reiterated the how’s and wherefore’s of our targeting over and over again, though it’s hardly necessary for me to have done so. To those new to this blog and unaware of the extent of the fascist repression we suffer at the hands of our government and its minions, much of what is recounted here may be difficult to believe, which is why I try to include as many references to others’ work as possible. But fascism, as a phenomenon, is hardly new, and it has its distinct hallmarks, all of which can be seen to exist in the current, as well as former, administrations, such as the Office of Global Communications.

We’ve already seen how propaganda was used during World War II to craft the perception of military superiority of each combat force, but consider that our image of fascism today is inextricably linked to that period of world history. One can’t go a single day without finding a program on Hitler, or Nazi Germany, or their white supremacist legatees, the skinhead gangs, while flipping through the cable channels: Hitler and the Occult, Hitler’s Managers, The Last Days of the Third Reich, The Hunt for Hitler. If it’s not on The History Channel, it’s on the Discovery Channel, or Biography, or the FBI channel, or the military channel. Because the picture of the archetypal fascist is Hitler, and because this particular image is omnipresent, when you think fascist, you think Nazi. But that’s not all you think. You also think, when you see this flood of Nazi history, that fascism is a problem relegated to the now very distant mid-20^th century European history books, and that we good Americans defeated it. And that’s the most successful propaganda out there today because fascism is still very much alive. Fascism has never gone away, just as it’s never been the exclusive province of Europeans. Your government propagandists know that mind persists, and they want to give yours no opportunity to reflect on evidence that fascism does as well, which is why they’ve been working so hard to persuade you that fascism isn’t here now, or that fascism exists here only in a nascent group of zealots waiting in the wings.

This essay is too little space to review all the propaganda related to our own dispiriting epoch, so we’ll move on to explore another of the techniques used in the war for hearts and minds by today’s American government, another of the hallmarks signifying its fascism. To do so, I’ll use not simply my own experience but the experience of others, too.

It was an unusually hot, mid-spring day in 2006, and I was at my city’s annual “peace fair,” an event this fascist regime stages every year to convince those of its deluded populace with the power to fight its corruption that it need not concern itself with how the city is run. I was reviewing the literature at one organization’s table when an elderly man sidled up next to me. We’ll call him Mario.

“The Bush Administration – it’s just like Hitler,” he grumbled, turning over a leaflet on the table in front of us. “Just like it.” I had trouble recalling what of late Bush had done to earn our condemnation; Congress had recently renewed the Patriot Act, which it did again in 2009. That’s the opus of the unmaking of America that most people who consider Bush comparable to Hitler cite as representative of his leading fascist characteristic, his propensity to use the judicial system to legitimate his undemocratic, inhumane and uncivilized policies. My face must have been a blank. He continued.

“When I was a boy, my parents moved back to the village in Italy from where they came, and when I was 16, the Nazis came. They said to me, ‘You will join us, and you will get one of your friends to join us, or we will shoot someone in your family every day until you do.’ What could we do? All of us boys went with them the next day – all of us, and many of the older men.”

“Stalk, or be stalked.” Force is a common ploy used by today’s SS to recruit the populace – to win their “hearts” by bending the will of the people into alignment with theirs. These groups of vigilantes are contracted out by our government, and, like Blackwater in Iraq, operate under no hindrance of civil law. They incent landlords for access to targets’ dwellings so they can destroy, over long periods of time, furniture, furnishings, precious momentos. They even kill the targets’ family members. People who stalk willingly are certainly sociopaths, but to where can someone who refuses to do the bidding of stalkers turn? Who, after all, wants to lose members of their family? Civil law enforcement is certainly no help, nor are other government agencies, who stand feebly by, or even aid these SS-like vigilantes.

Sometimes, the incentive offered to citizens to persecute their law-abiding fellow citizens is less overt. Maybe your house needs aluminum siding, or you can’t seem to find the right fertility treatment to give you the family you’ve always wanted. ‘Gaslight one of our targets and -- presto! Here’s that great deal on siding, or the fertility regimen that actually works.’ Everyone wins – except the law-abiding target who’s doing nothing but trying to revive civil society.

That’s how the heart, or will, of those who may be opposed to our fascist American government is conquered by it. Now, to the minds.

We’ve already discussed some forms of broad messaging propaganda that is used by our government to convince us what it does around the world is noble, honest and freedom-enhancing (when, in actuality, it does all it can to undermine "democratic" governments who get in the way of big businesses). W even justified the invasion of Iraq to the United Nations General Assembly in September of 2005 by envisioning the transformation of the Middle East, a region of the world known for its political and civil repression of ordinary citizens but one that nevertheless did not attack the U.S., which used to be the only determinant for our Commander-in-Chief to declare war on a sovereign nation: “Across the world," Bush declared, "hearts and minds are opening to the message of human liberty as never before.” This is where W betrayed the real reason he and his cabal were anxious to conclude the transformation his father had begun but never finished – his fear that democracy would happen organically in strategic Middle Eastern countries, as it had erupted in Syria and Turkey, without the opportunity for him and his cabal to place their own factotums in the governments of those countries so they could refashion them in the image of the current American government's perverse idea of democracy.

TV and radio campaigns representing all manner of American falsehoods are broadcast all the time: the American military is a great career choice for your child; the economy is correcting; banks need bailouts. And when the ball of confusion is too much to think about, there’s endless sporting events and holidays to distract us. Panem et circenses. But some minds resist even the most pervasive messaging and require manipulation on a case-by-case basis, ensuring not simply that broad messages are received as intended but also, discrete ones as well. Mind, you will recall, persists, as our government well knows, and it is more supple than government would wish. Its nature indicates more measures for its taming than simple broad messaging such as TV ads and news story spin, which is why Bush warned his new cabinet officers in the Office of Global Communications they “. . . would be at this [propagandizing] for a long, long time.” Mind persists, and any message vying for its attention needs to persist as well.

Take the case of silent sound technology, which even advertising agencies use today, though you’d never know about this if you watched programs such as Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory. Silent sound, or holosonic audio spotlight, is sound delivered directly to the part of your brain that interprets audible sound but is completely inaudible.  Now, it's possible for you to be messaged in a library to be quiet, in a store to buy a particular product (or, at least, not to shoplift it), and if that wasn't bad enough, yes -- it's true -- there is technology that can actually read your thoughts remotely.  Ventura produced an episode of his show in 2009 on the Air Force’s HAARP program alleging it was developing similar capabilities in un-American secrecy (along with the capability to control the weather). The program contained not just outdated information but no information on the current use of silent sound. Sadly, it also contained out-and-out lies proffered by mind control expert, Nick Begich, who said our government began developing mind control technology in the “1960s” when it actually began studying LSD in the 1940s and brainwashing techniques in now famous cases in the 1950s. Begich, Ventura notes, is the brother and son of Congressmen and, as such, are as suspect in their work as is Ventura.

There is no doubt that the use of these last-enumerated technologies constitutes torture. The unwitting people upon whom their development has been tested are bioslaves, and those upon whom they have been used are political prisoners no different than Chinese nationals who were sent to reeducation camps by Chairman Mao, no matter where in the world their victimization takes place. Today, that group potentially includes us all, but so long as debates rage over whether water-boarding Arabs constitutes torture among human rights activists here and abroad, and people outside the United States shrug their shoulders and turn away from action that compels the United States to uphold the Geneva convention for terror suspects in their custody, those of us who’ve been targeted by our government for EM psychotronic torture don’t stand a chance in hell of gaining anyone’s notice, never mind, help.

So there you have it – the truth behind our government’s war for our hearts and minds, how they have been waging that war, and against whom. If all of this information is new to you, congratulations – you’ve been conquered by the highly successful war for our hearts and minds. Now all you have to do is ask yourself whether conquered is what you want to be, or you can simply give up, as so many Germans did during the Third Reich’s reign, and live with your Hitlers and the hell they will cause you.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

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Barack Obama is the Commander-in-Chief of a Military that has for Decades Persecuted American Political Dissidents, Declassified Gov't. Documents Show

Awarding the Nobel Prize for Peace to him when so many Americans languish in wall-less prisons designed to isolate them and prevent them from influencing society is an hypocrisy of the worst type.

Millions of American -- and, indeed, world -- citizens live in the once merely prophesied Orwellian condition of continuous state-sponsored monitoring, tracking and repression. The tracking and undermining of political dissidents began in American in the 1950s, with the CIAs now well-known development of mind-control technologies, code-named COINTELPRO, which centered on the social extermination of legitimate activists through sophisticated slander campaigns, and MK-ULTRA, which technologies now include the use of electromagnetic, radar and microwave radiation to adversely affect human behavior, causing, among other effects, false diagnoses of mental illness. Attorney Brian Glick details the FBI’s use of these tactics and technologies on American political activists from the once diverse field of political activism that included the American Indian Movement, the Women’s movement, the nuclear disarmament movement (all now dead or so impotent they may as well be) in his 1989 pamphlet, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It (South End Press). American industry, sponsored by the American government and working collaboratively with the Department of Defense, has, for decades, developed these technologies to aid governments in tracking those the state fears will oppose its policies. They represent the world’s leaders in surreptitious, freedom-crushing, wall-less prison technology.

Legacy consumer products of these technologies include Ambient Technology’s “voiceless” telephone, which allows persons paralyzed by diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to send brain waves to a computer to record their “speech,” or even make a telephone call. Though the device used in Ambient’s demonstration uses a neck collar, smaller, “nanotech” devices that do the same thing can be implanted anywhere in the body near nerve centers, including surreptitiously during routine dental work, should the state wish to implant a dissident. All that is required is a sufficiently incentivized dentist. No thought of the recipient of such an implant can be private.

Dr. Caroline Lucas, MEP for Southeast England, warned in Parliament of the dangers inherent in electromagnetic weapons, one of which is designed to subtly influence human behavior using inaudible speech above range of hearing. “Silent Sound” works as a Pavlovian trigger, suggesting to the receiver whatever behavior the entity controlling the technology wishes to embed. “Electro-magnetic (EM) weapons are one of the newest and most serious military developments in the world today. Enormous secrecy surrounds their development. . . . Unless this development is stopped, we are entering an Orwellian ‘1984’ type scenario, which could potentially permanently transfer enormous power to those in control of the technology.”

The U.S. leads the world in another industry critical to its promotion of U.S. business interests throughout the world: public relations. Anyone reading this post will rightly be skeptical of even the most obvious and provable fact related above supporting the thesis that the U.S. government is the leading terrorist organization in the world simply because his or her government has likely been roped into its “war on terror,” believing in good faith exactly what the U.S. has told them about the threat of terrorists to itself and its allies. ‘Why,’ they might reasonably wonder, ‘have we such a problem with terrorists if this spy and mind control technology exists? Surely, if it is being used to control political dissidents, can’t it be used to control terrorists as well?’

Yes. Those are the questions. And their answers lie in the many, many, many charges and exposés of empire building and cupidity leveled at conservative-run benefactors of the invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. From pre-invasion security analysis widely published in the New York Times and elsewhere, to documentaries such as those produced by Michael Moore, 9/11truth.org and David Earnhardt, to the more recent documentation provided by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, the world has had a steady diet of facts proving factually, anecdotally and circumstantially that the U.S. government has, indeed, undertaken a mission to conquer the world for corrupt business interests, and to do it militarily. One such military weapon they have had at their disposal is the ability to create many “Manchurian candidates,” assassins programmed to commit whatever act of terrorism enables the U.S. government to initiate its “war on terror” using Silent Sound technology. The power to create America’s own Reichstag Fire incident is one the U.S. government has had for a long time.

There is no doubt that the flying of commercial airplanes into the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon and tragically, a field in Pennsylvania, was a military operation. But exactly whose military operation it was remains as much a mystery to the world today as it was that bright Tuesday morning in September of 2001. The world has been told that the terrorists who hijacked these planes had no other objective except a “symbolic” attack on the United States. Does that sound reasonable? The alleged mastermind behind the attacks is still free, roaming the world, and menacing no other similarly fortified American dominion or American-allied country; the few furtive attacks in places such as Mumbai attributed to terrorists alleged to be loosely connected with him have been equally as futile, though just as devastating and evocative of terror, and this is a man whose personal fortune, never mind the religious zeal by which we’ve been told he is motivated, is so great he could personally fund the establishment of conventional, not guerilla, armies in every alleged terrorist backwater in the Middle East, North Africa and Indonesia. Even so, these attacks do not a war make -- certainly not a war that anyone with the power to evade the terrorist surveillance matrix that was already well-established on 9/11 would wage, were he serious about waging any war. The citizens of Spain understood that and quickly rejected their government’s calls for the same type of security state in which Americans now live after the ETA attacks in Madrid in 2004. Why not Americans? If Silent Sound can be used to condition individuals and discrete groups of people, why not large swaths of the population for whom panem et circenses is ineffective, too? All they need is the airwaves.

The further and further history travels from the events of 9/11 and its aftermath, the easier and easier it becomes to see that the “war on terror” is really just a “war for terror,” sponsored by the very people who claimed to be its first victims: the U.S. government. That’s what good PR does -- it manipulates the perceptions of its targets and then offers explanations for those perceptions. Almost nothing about the official U.S. government explanation of the 9/11 attacks has been demonstrated to be reasonable, verifiable, complete, or accurate, supporting the claim by many that those attacks were, if not orchestrated by the U.S. government, then permitted for its use as an opportunity to promote U.S. business expansion in crucial middle eastern regions.

These facts are without doubt: (1) the U.S. government has turned from a country of, by and for the people, to one in which “law and order” is indiscriminately applied by an increasingly repressive state mechanism operating throughout the federal, state and local levels, who apply their law and order more brutally and injudiciously to opponents of their empire-building raison d’étre; and (2) the people who have engineered this turn are the same types of people who have done the same things in other countries: they are fascists. They’re not corporatists. They’re not free marketeers. They’re not conservatives. They’re fascists. Those industrialists who were proved through Congressional investigation to have been behind the failed fascist coup in 1933 that General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, refused to lead against Roosevelt’s administration have finally succeeded.

The bottom line? The fascist battle cry is, ‘Markets must be protected.’ They oppress all those who interfere with their mission to use the world and its resources -- natural, human or other -- to make themselves rich through unjust “laissez-faire” economic policies in creating and developing these markets. Their policies create destruction and misery for the most vulnerable people in the world, misery so unfathomable legions of other human beings devote their lives to trying to negotiate with these fascists to get them to change those policies, and they do whatever they can to dominate those legions, their opponents. Whatever they can. Today’s award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Barack Obama was just another one of their ploys to make you believe all is right with the current world order. But the Nobel Prize for Peace Committee has long distinguished itself as a pawn of these fascists, and so their ludicrous ceremony today should surprise no one. They are rightly subject to suspicion. Henry Kissinger, the man who, as investigative reporter Christopher Hitchins demonstrated, prolonged the Vietnam war only to surrender eventually under the same terms as had been proposed in Versailles four years previous to the surrender, was a recipient of their esteem, and there have been others just as, or more, dubious -- while legitimate peacemakers such as Oasis of Peace, the planned Jewish-Arab community in Israel, has been nominated more than a dozen times in the last 25 years and routinely rebuffed.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to the head of America’s fascist government is yet one more example of that government’s overweening influence in a world too terrified to confront it, the biggest and worst terrorist organization the world has ever seen. It’s time to stop cowering, open our eyes and see it for what it is: Hitler’s wet dream. Those who continue to implore us not to do so -- to deify the very warmongers who’ve ushered in the destruction of humanity through the destruction of the human mind and the ideals it alone can conceive, ideals such as freedom -- should be shunned, no matter the color of their skin, or the depth of their pockets. Conciliation didn’t work in World War II to make anyone either more secure or more free, it hasn’t worked since then. It won’t work now.

I know these things because I am one such targeted dissident of the U.S. government, an “uppity” bioslave of the Pentagon’s programs to create the many forms of AIDS decimating and enslaving large portions of resource-rich countries -- just exactly according to the widely published plans they made in the 1960s to do so, and because I choose not to ignore the obvious. Finally, I can only repeat the words of Elie Wiesel’s Moshe, the Beadle, from his autobiographical story, Night, when the Beadle pleaded with his fellow villagers for their attention after being taken to a concentration camp and escaping:

“ . . . listen to me. It’s all I ask of you. I don’t want money or pity.
Only listen to me.”

The Beadle perished, along with most of the rest of his villagers, in the Holocaust.

www.multistalkervictims.org

www.thehiddenevil.com

www.freedomfchs.org

www.mobbing-usa.com
www.artificialtelepathy.blogspot.com

NPR: America’s TASS

On Friday, September 4^th, 2009, Morning Edition aired a report by Jon Hamilton (“In Future, Science Could Erase Traumatic Memories”) about scientific research into the role played by the protective molecular sheath around the brain cells of the amygdala in the creation of traumatic memory. Scientists have developed a drug they can use to dissolve this sheath and erase painful memories thereby. Hamilton notes this research promises a pharmaceutical cure for people who suffer from psychological disorders involving traumatic memories, such as those with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. What Hamilton doesn’t say is that without traumatic memories human culture would be a wasteland and humanity, itself, a thing of the past.

Forget Che T-shirts showing up on the backs of foreign youths in YouTube vids from the Czech Republic. Forget long hours at the library reading and studying The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet or The Tragedie of King Lear. Strike the works of Marcel Proust from all your library catalogues, your college curricula, your book stores, book club offerings and your amazon.com wish lists; you’ll have no need to understand the relationship between thought and memory and its importance to identity because you’ll have no identity, once your memories – traumatic, or other – are wiped. You’ll be a clean, empty consuming machine, thanks to the scientists manipulating your amygdala, the last step – not the first – in the state control of mass and individual consciousness.


Ernesto Che Guevara’s grand vision to unite the countries of South America to fight 20^th century colonization by industrialists came from genuine pain he experienced when he toured the continent and saw the needless, grinding poverty in which people lived, the exploitation of miners and valuable land, the preventable or treatable diseases – not just leprosy – from which he saw children dying. His pain was deep and it was real and it was transformative – just not in the way the powers that be approved. Guevara possessed that ability which is the basis of morality; he was empathic, and that ability to feel the pain others feel is the one that enables us to create ethical relationships and societies based on them – to create just laws, not merely indiscriminately applied law-and-order. It is this legacy of morality that is the thing that makes us human. Without it, we’re merely Homo sapiens. In the painful memory-free future Hamilton giddily introduces to us, there will be no need for revolutionary, or counter-, culture because there will be no revolutionaries, and no voices to counter the messages which the state sanctions, such as those we hear on NPR about how great it is for technocrats to erase parts of our brains. No more Che T-shirts – because there will be no more Ches. No civil society either. Forget the freedom of the individual, which once upon a time included the right to informed consent. New York University’s Joseph LeDoux, whom Hamilton features in his report, claims the potential human subjects with whom he’s discussed his treatment for PTSD are perfectly willing to get rid of a few normal brain cells to be rid of their traumatic memories. To him, this equates with “consent.” But is it?

In 1974 – the same year Sen. Ted Kennedy called for an investigation into the CIA’s programs to destroy people’s minds in order to replace their personalities with psychically-driven messaging – the social engineering work of Dr. José Delgado of Yale University was presented to Congress (U.S. Doc. 506: "Congressional Record Vol. 118, Part 5," 92nd Congress 2nd Session, February 23, 1972 to March 1, 1972, pp. 5567-5577), with his advice for billion-dollar funding of corporations and institutions to produce mass broadcast media aimed at virtual brainwashing. He recommended that children be normalized to this brainwashing beginning in elementary school. His work grew out of the CIA’s program in actual shock treatment and brainwashing techniques, of “shock therapy” -- principally, the program created by Canada’s Dr. Ewen Cameron, who had been under contract to the CIA and was one of the subjects of Sen. Kennedy’s investigation.

Delgado offered Congress some nifty tips on how to get the public to go along with the ‘cultural revolution’ he had designed to erase independent thinking by erasing the self, which he said was a phenomenon that has no basis in either ancient history, or in neurophysiology. He seems to have forgotten, or have been ignorant of the facts, that ancient Rome first conceptualized the ideal of the citizen as a thinking, free individual and that millennia of moral evolution has more or less always come down on the side of individual freedom, which is why so many people around the world have waged revolutions in order to attain it (including, once upon a time, even Americans), giving people such as he the opportunity to make careers out of undermining it.

Now, we see the fruition of Delgado’s recommendation that “mass media” be engaged in producing “informative and entertaining programs” to indoctrinate the masses to the benefits of mind control in TV programs such as Survivor, which reinforces the anti-humanistic notion that we are all nothing more than animals, capable only of following the most wily of leaders who entreat us to dispose of others in order to ensure our survival; and the Sci-Fi Channel’s Mind Control with Derren Brown, which shows how fun it is to ‘play’ people by turning their minds against them – making a person bend over five times in a row by dropping five, dollar coins on the sidewalk ahead of them, for example. The proliferation of “reality” TV, which depicts only the most base behavior of H. sapiens.


To this very incomplete list we may now also add Morning Edition’s report about the purported advancement of science in the treatment of wholly man-made psychic problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, not by doing away with the actual events that create the psychic trauma (war) but by erasing the memory of the traumatic event in the mind of its victim – by a new form of “brain” washing – by disabling the amygdala.  In LeDoux’s “advanced,” pain-free future, you’ll have only that identity which the state has given you – the one the state wants you to have so you can go around the world, or perhaps just next door, and oppress and kill other human beings (because you’ve been messaged persistently through mass media culture to believe we’re all animals anyway and this is what animals do; they kill each other) without the messy side-effect of a troubled conscience. You won’t need to know how emotions and the memories they provoke humanize and inform socially-supportive decision-making and behavior because all your behavioral decisions will be made for you (‘Be all you can be -- join the Army!’), and, as is the goal of all brainwashing, you will be told what your perceptions mean to you (‘This isn’t a flour-paste wafer and wine; it’s flesh and blood!’ And, ‘These two planes we inadvertently and coincidentally failed to acknowledge as threats knocked over the impact-resistant twin towers!’). You won’t have to understand proverbs such as, “Pride goeth before a fall” because character, too, will be superfluous, and you won’t have any need for the succor scripture offers when facing moral dilemmas – because you’ll have none. By then, morality and the wisdom about it contained in all cultures’ religious texts will be anachronistic, “Let my people go” replaced with chants of “Let my people go . . . to the mall.”

I bet if Hamilton could track down LeDoux’s alleged group of compliant patients and tell them the actual history of our government’s hand in the programming of our minds on both individual and mass levels they’d be a whole lot more reluctant to hand over their brain cells to people like LeDoux. But that would be informed consent – once, the international standard for participation in medical experiments according to the Common Rule, which has never been adopted by the U.S. Another principle I am sure Dr. LeDoux is aware does not constrain his inhumane research is one also developed at Nuremberg but never adopted here in the United States – the one that dictates a researcher be willing to be his own guinea pig, or refrain from conducting any research in which he is not.

Every time a government – any government -- develops a new, more inhumane, more surreptitious technology to control groups of people or to kill them (incrementally or outright), it does so to use it. Why do you think the world is on pins and needles over every contract North Korea has with a manufacturer whose products have the potential to be used as nuclear components? Everyone tacitly acknowledges this universal truth. Our government didn’t make the atom bomb to not use it. It didn’t develop mind control techniques and technologies to not use them to oppress its citizens, as a review of attorney Brian Glick’s 1989 War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It demonstrates. It hasn’t spent billions of dollars to create the behavior-modifying mass media tools it so clearly has developed to not use them. Hamilton adds a perfunctory note that the brain dissolving technology has detractors who fear misuse by governments and others, as if that fear isn’t more than adequately justified, and to him, perhaps they’re not. Perhaps he’s too young to know the U.S.’s history of persecution of its activists, of its development of biological weapons that include those which destroy the human mind as well as brain. It’s a little difficult to believe, though, that mere age has blinded him so that he cannot even do a little critical thinking and investigating. NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling said in a recent AIR program regarding his story about an immigrant who died in administrative custody in New Jersey that the truth isn’t objective (something I.F. Stone said repeatedly throughout his career). Consequently, it also is not innocuous – something else of which Mr. Hamilton seems to be blissfully unaware. The truth about the ways in which American government scientists have been socially engineering American society is that they’ve been doing it on both individual and mass scales, and for quite some time, to weed out revolutionary voices, facts about which there is more than ample evidence – much of it, as attorney Glick shows us, in the government’s very own words. Perhaps Mr. Hamilton needs to spend some time as Mr. Zwerdling’s protégé and learn how to recognize the truth – or at least learn how to investigate a subject to uncover it. A little education in the humanities couldn’t hurt him, either. I’m not talking about science fiction; I’m talking about a survey of literature, history and philosophy: Lord of the Flies and War and Peace, the Federalist Papers and A People’s History of the United States, Kant and Buber. And don’t, for heaven’s sake, forget the Proust. Advocates of any technology should understand the consequences of their advocacy given the fact such technology is always misapplied by governments. At the very least, Hamilton needs to visit a federal depository for congressional records and start reading up on the truly heinous “science” our government has funded over the last 60 years, if he’s going to report on science issues truthfully.  As for LeDoux, if an amoral person such as the one LeDoux proposes scientists create were writing this rebuttal, this would be the point at which the author would suggest that a brain such as his be the first to be destroyed. Since such a person is not writing this rebuttal, I can only pray LeDoux’s paymasters have no more monstrous projects in which to engage his vapid intellect -- not for the sake of his own immortal soul, but for the sake of his children’s and grandchildren’s imperiled future. More amoral people the world does not need; no one remains untouched by them.

I’ve suspected for a while now that National Public Radio is truly just the mouthpiece of our fascist government ever since it began airing sympathetic coverage of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which it persistently and inaccurately labels a “war,” thereby obscuring the true empire-building raison d’étre of our military missions and the designs for world domination of our government leaders who promote those missions, two facts more than well established through decades of research by academics, activists and former insiders such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and John Perkins, respectively. I dismissed NPR as utterly irrelevant when it aired a story by a talk radio host and southern college professor who claimed some virtue to the demands she made on her husband for remuneration with expensive jewelry after she’d had his baby. Diane Rehme, with her “push presents!” Once upon a time, a crude sector of middle-class white America routinely charged poor African-American women with creating children solely to procure welfare “benefits,” which justified Congress’s whittling of those benefits until Bill Clinton did away with them entirely. From a moral standpoint, in what way is Ms. Rehme’s behavior any different? A caller from Virginia on a mid-morning talk show has prominent airtime to voice his opinion that the aid about which Congress was then voting to send to Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded Iraq was unjustified because, according to him, all the Afghans knew how to do was to have children they couldn’t afford, and the host neither countered that Afghanistan has one of the most persistently high infant mortality rates of any country, nor challenged the man to confine his opinions to the topic under discussion (which was whether the U.S. should essentially offer the Afghans this bribe for the use of their country to wage overt war in Iraq and covert war there). I think now, though, it would be a mistake to write off NPR as either irrelevant, or harmless, or inept because with its airing of its “science” report September 4^th it’s clear “National Public” radio is neither of national benefit, nor public, but merely a state tool run by mindless, uncritical bureaucrats in the employ of the fascists that run our country; bureaucrats paid to prosecute inhumane and anti-American mind-control programs such as those proposed by Dr. Delgado. It is as reliable a source of truthful reporting as was TASS and exists only to validate whatever propaganda the U.S. government wishes to inculcate in the minds of Americans.

Freedom cannot exist if it doesn't exist at least in the human mind as an ideal to which humans may aspire.  When all the revolutionary voices have been chemically altered not to respond to genuine tragedy appropriately by questing towards ideals such as freedom, the revolutionaries will be gone for good, and so, too, will all freedom.  Our society will be a mawkish morass of culture perpetuated by tragicomic innocents such as those depicted in David Byrne's True Stories.  Nice people -- but not the folks you want fighting dictators that chemically alter human minds. The bureaucrats who run NPR should be ashamed of themselves, but perhaps they can’t be. Perhaps they’ve already had fatal exposure to the LeDouxs of this world.

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