Behavior Control: Architecture of Modern Propaganda By Zahir Ebrahim

Behavior Control: Architecture of Modern Propaganda

Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org

Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, began his seminal 1928 book simply titled Propaganda, with these ominous words:

'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. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.' --- Edward Bernays, 1928, pg.1, Propaganda

Aldous Huxley, on the 30th anniversary of his own seminal 1931 allegorical novel Brave New World, made the following dreadful observations in the very opening segment of his talk on the Ultimate Revolution upon which mankind and modernity are perilously perched:

'You can do everything with bayonets except sit on them! If you are going to control any population for any length of time you must have some measure of consent. It's exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion. An element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them. Well, it seems to me that the nature of the Ultimate Revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: that we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably always will exist, to get people actually to love their servitude! This is the, it seems to me the ultimate in malevolent revolution shall we say.' --- Aldous Huxley, 1962 speech at UC Berkeley, minute 04:06

In order to understand how the comprehension of both Edward Bernays and Aldous Huxley, though both long dead, still manifests itself in these times, we must begin with the Mighty Wurlitzer.

What is the 'Mighty Wurlitzer'?

It used to be the honorific of Frank Wisner, the first chief of political warfare for the Central Intelligence Agency, used to describe the C.I.A.’s plethora of front organizations and newsmedia stooges that he was capable of playing (like a great organ with many keyboards) for synthesizing any propaganda tune that was needed for the day. See Operation Mockingbird ( http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm ) (PDF).

The fact that such an omnipresent Message-Machine is not ancient history but very much current affairs, is underscored by this NYT headline “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand”, Sunday, April 20, 2008 ( http://tinyurl.com/6qhgfg ).

Therefore, today, I use the term 'Mighty Wurlitzer' as a metaphor to pluralistically refer to the same message-machine, i.e., the intelligence apparatus for manufacturing consent and controlling dissent, and its concomitant conscious manipulation of peoples' thoughts, feelings, actions and in-actions, in order to serve the primacy interests of the ruling-elite. The latter are, invariably, also the de facto owners of the complete messaging-system now even more globally ubiquitous than when Frank Wisner played the world for a fool.

This 'grand organ' is now able to even more effectively synthesize, implant, and reinforce, all the right set of beliefs (myths) among the entire world's public – by suitably combining 'events' with imaginative 'expos' writing – which appropriately primes the world populations to acquiesce to the oligarchic agendas. While playing this orchestra is now an integral part of all state-craft, its major musical themes are entirely determined by the behind the scenes owners of the system. While some might refer to the underlying techniques as propaganda and psy-ops, 'Mighty Wurlitzer' singularly captures the messaging-system controlled under a unified purpose of command which is both highly compartmentalized and cellularized. Only the Mighty Wurlitzer knows the entire tune.

What this means is that not all who willingly cooperate with the Mighty Wurlitzer in synchronistically humming its themes are knowingly being purveyors of its myths and deception. Many of its most shrill echoers are often well intentioned functionaries who are fed different motivating myths at different levels in the hierarchy – sometimes the lie is different at every level – such that it suitably motivates each according to their own predilection, professional station, and mission statement.

The Mighty Wurlitzer operates on the core premise which has been empirically shown to psychologically motivate most human action. That premise was elegantly captured in the following insightful observation made at the so called “Terrorism Study Group”, that

“'Public Assumptions' Shape Views of History: Such presumptions are beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community. The sources for such presumptions are both personal (from direct experience) and vicarious (from books, movies, and myths).”

Successfully implanting such presumptions and pre-suppositions among any group is to motivate its overall actions in accordance with those implanted beliefs. Thus, many intelligent peoples for whom it is otherwise inexplicable to understand why they persist in 'United We Stand' with absurdities, are motivated to react sympathetically to those absurdities.

To barely catch a glimpse of how it's partially done, the following description by Col. Fletcher Prouty from the Preface to the first edition of his 1973 book “The Secret Team” is instructive (PDF book):

'There is another category of writer and self-proclaimed authority on the subjects of secrecy, intelligence, and containment. This man is the suave, professional parasite who gains a reputation as a real reporter by disseminating the scraps and "Golden Apples" thrown to him by the great men who use him. This writer seldom knows and rarely cares that many of the scraps from which he draws his material have been planted, that they are controlled leaks, and that he is being used, and glorified as he is being used, by the inside secret intelligence community.

Allen Dulles had a penchant for cultivating a number of such writers with big names and inviting them to his table for a medieval style luncheon in that great room across the hall from his own offices in the old CIA headquarters on the hill overlooking Foggy Bottom. Here, he would discuss openly and all too freely the same subjects that only hours before had been carefully discussed in the secret inner chambers of the operational side of that quiet Agency. In the hands of Allen Dulles, "secrecy" was simply a chameleon device to be used as he saw fit and to be applied to lesser men according to his schemes. It is quite fantastic to find people like Daniel Ellsberg being charged with leaking official secrets simply because the label on the piece of paper said "top secret," when the substance of many of the words written on those same papers was patently untrue and no more than a cover story. Except for the fact that they were official lies, these papers had no basis in fact, and therefore no basis to be graded top secret or any other degree of classification. Allen Dulles would tell similar cover stories to his coterie of writers, and not long thereafter they would appear in print in some of the most prestigious papers and magazines in the country, totally unclassified, and of course, cleverly untrue.

In every case, the chance for complete information is very small, and the hope that in time researchers, students, and historians will be able to ferret out truth from untruth, real from unreal, and story from cover story is at best a very slim one. Certainly, history teaches us that one truth will add to and enhance another; but let us not forget that one lie added to another lie will demolish everything. This is the important point. Consider the past half century. How many major events -- really major events -- have there been that simply do not ring true? How many times has the entire world been shaken by alarms of major significance, only to find that the events either did not happen at all, or if they did, that they had happened in a manner quite unlike the original story?'

Coldly implicit in Col. Prouty's afore-quoted empirical statement: “and the hope that in time researchers, students, and historians will be able to ferret out truth from untruth, real from unreal, and story from cover story is at best a very slim one”, is the Machiavellian notion of sewing faits accomplis in current affairs by straight-jacketing all public discourse in deception, and leaving the ferreting out of 'truth' to future generation of scholars and historians when separating myths from the calculus of hegemony can at best only be a bogus academic exercise entirely irrelevant to reversing the faits accomplis already sewn. See Convince People of Absurdities and get them Acquiescing to Atrocities: The Enduring Power of Machiavellian Political Science ( http://tinyurl.com/historys-actors ). Also see Unlayering the Middle East War Agenda: Making Sense of Absurdities ( http://tinyurl.com/unpeeling-lies ).

Wikileaks and the Mighty Wurlitzer driving Imperial Mobilization

A pertinent example of Col. Fletcher Prouty's fabricated leaks noted above, is the Wikileaks' July 2010 disclosures of 'The Afghanistan Papers' which revealed nothing new.

Wikileaks has always been a rather transparent Mighty Wurlitzer ops. It is trivial to see through the absurdity of its existence despite it promoting itself as being a sort of watchdog upon the empire, and therefore, ostensibly, being inimical to its unbridled quest for “full spectrum dominance” – just like Al Jazeera television based in Qatar, which too, absurdly enough, is permitted to function unhindered in the same nation as America's CENTCOM headquarters. Would it not be trivial for an armed to the teeth National Security State to take-out either apparatus rather trivially? And that may happen once the useful idiots have outlived their utility, for he who sups with the devil must have a long spoon!

The reason each is allowed to function is of course social engineering, the sine qua non for waging modern warfare upon civilian populations by way of deception. It spans the entire gamut of engineering consent, from mantra creation in the mainstream and diabolically controlling dissent in order to control all opposition, to actually fabricating the visible pretexts which can naturally ripen the conditions for the mantra of “clash of civilizations” to be called real before the Western public in order to sustain the otherwise untenable “imperial mobilization”. Zbigniew Brzezinski had most succinctly summed up this motivation in his book The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives: “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization”.

How can one tell manufactured reportage and fabricated leaks from the real stuff? How can one see through the Mighty Wurlitzer?

As daunting as it might appear to the mainstream television watcher, it is in fact rather straightforward for those unencumbered by blind faith in governments and its statecraft. Just look for the core-lies and unquestioned axioms of empire that are typically retained in the “leaks” and reportage which, in order to sound credible, often openly expose what is mostly already known anyway or judiciously employ some variation of “Limited Hangout” wrapped in a veneer of dissent, 'freedom of the press', and often accompanied by the facade of angst and opposition from the state.

Furthermore, look for some of the lauded dissent names rushing to support the Limited Hangout – just as it was with Daniel Ellsberg for his infamous Pentagon Papers – to afford a veneer of legitimacy to the whistleblowing revelations of supposed state-secrets having caused some great harm to the state. The extravagance enacted in the mainstream media, alternately making heroes of the whistleblowers and demonizing them, is a giveaway to the circus show being enacted for plebeian consumption. For, it matters not which side one takes, as both sides are patently false, crafted of calculated omissions and half-truths that retain core-lies, right out of the text book of the Technique of Infamy : invent two lies and keep the public busy debating which of them is true!

The role of crafty omissions in fabricating propaganda was best captured by Aldous Huxley in his Preface to Brave New World thusly:

‘The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr. Churchill calls an “iron curtain” between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals. But silence is not enough. If persecution, liquidation and the other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative.’ — Aldous Huxley, Preface (circa 1946) to Brave New World, 1931, Harper, pg. 11

To uncover omissions in a discourse is very difficult for the public who do not often have command over the domain in which the falsehoods are being perpetuated. Which is why ignorance, and being trusting of authority figures and the state, are the pre-requisites for any vile propaganda to succeed! A well-bred lack of skepticism to authority figures, whether to mainstream leaders in politics and experts in scientific disciplines, or to dissenting chiefs playing controlled opposition, thus becomes the heart of social engineering. This is also why “leaking” information from “experts” and “insiders” commands such a premium in Machiavellian statecraft. When used judiciously so as not to dilute its impact, it can herd the flock in pretty much any direction that is desired.

As further empirically evidenced in the forensic analysis presented here, these so called whistleblowing of leaky buckets also succeed in accomplishing two important elements of statecraft:

vicariously reinvigorate in the short-term public memory, the already established-by-fiat facts and core-axioms of empire;
establish new convenient facts on the ground which are subsequently accepted as revealed gospel truths because of the already established thought-stream by the scholars of empire that when something is held in secret or is classified and subsequently declassified, or is prematurely leaked to the public, that it must contain some genuine “state secrets”, and never red herrings. Such thought-streams enable the directives of NSC 10/2 for plausible deniability (and those like it which we do not know about) to be trivially impressed upon the public mind (see Anatomy of Conspiracy Theory). These revelations of presumed “state-secrets” subsequently become the new unquestioned backdrops for both state policies and public discourses – the new “doctrinal motivations” – with copious help from the Mighty Wurlitzer's refined machinery.

This enables the successful deployment of pre-planned policy prescriptions which craftily impel the various incantations of hegemony forward in baby-steps. Both, domestically by incrementally clamping down hard on rising discontent in the name of “national security”, and internationally by continuing to wage unpopular wars of preemption upon the 'untermenschen'. The infernal enemy has now been (re)confirmed to exist (despite popular skepticism) since even empire's own henchmen in their secret documents also affirm that belief (sic!). Speak of self-servingly suffering from a incestuously self-reinforced “crippled epistemology”!

Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard, un-abashedly explained the need for such invigorations of the public mind in the following majestic words, betraying his immense knowledge of Machiavellian statecraft's reliance on social engineering:

“Public opinion polls suggest that only a small minority (13 percent) of Americans favor the proposition that 'as the sole remaining superpower, the US should continue to be the preeminent world leader in solving international problems'. ... Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. .... More generally, cultural change in America may also be uncongenial to the sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power. That exercise requires a high degree of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment, and patriotic gratification.” (page 211 and onwards, PDF book)

Predictably, with rising skepticism among the public, more “harmful leaks” will occur, but understandably none which are actually substantial, like blowing the lid on 9/11 as an inside job, directly naming the top beneficiaries who shorted the Airline stocks raking in billions, or revealing how BBC came to report the demolition of WTC-7 a full 20 minutes before it actually transpired, never mind lending confirmation to any of the forensic detective work by independent researchers from the debris of 9/11, etceteras. And the main leaker du jour, Mr. patsy Julian Assange, like Mr. patsy Lee Harvey Oswald before him, will be sacrificed, perhaps with a new 'lone gunmen' enactment, or perhaps juridically, to lend the hoopla even more public respectability. Also see Dismantling the Fiction of 'Former' and 'Ex' Intelligence – Zahir Ebrahim's Response to Philip Giraldi.

It’s the exact same recipe as is used by all the other fabricated and controlled dissent assets of empire when they are not outright spinning patent lies, for spinning half-truths requires far more brilliance. One can already see the main dissent-chiefs of the West, like the venerable professor Noam Chomsky, anointed by the New York Times as “arguably the most important intellectual alive”, and the distinguished Daniel Ellsberg, excitedly supporting these Wikileaks exposés as if something ethereal was “revealed in the Sinai”.

It is not for nothing that James Jesus Angleton, Head of CIA Counter Intelligence 1954-1974, is quoted in the 1992 BBC-2 Documentary on