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