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Why,
in the context of a clear Iranian threat to Israel, would the New York
Times not share with its readers that PLO/Fatah (i.e. the
‘Palestinian Authority’), the government of any future ‘Palestinian State,’
has an intimate relationship with the judeophobic and genocidal ayatollahs (Part
0)? We will answer this question here. The
question is important because the New York Times cannot plead
ignorance: this information was on its front page in 1979, when
Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas essentially created the Iranian regime and
installed Ayatollah Khomeini in power (Part
0). But
this is not just about the New York
Times; other media, as they typically do, have followed this newspaper’s
lead. So is the New York Times a symptom of a system problem? Are the
media, as a system, tools of psychological warfare? This is our
question. To
explore this question we must first grasp the concept. In
war, if your morale is high and the enemy has lost the will to fight,
then—other things equal—you’ve won the war. How to achieve this? By
manipulating information. Hence, psychological
warfare. The
principle is as old as war. In his Art of War the ancient Chinese
strategist Sun Tzu emphasized: “All warfare is based on deception.” Whenever
possible, he counseled, defeat through deceit before the battle even begins:
“supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without
fighting.” Sun
Tzu’s insights have myriad applications to situations of ‘conflict,’ broadly
understood. Many of his principles and recommendations are useful to power
elites making geopolitical moves in times of ‘peace,’ and even when dealing
with domestic rather than foreign ‘enemies.’ To
wit, undemocratic power elites, meaning to stay in power, will sometimes open
fire on their own civilians, but this is messy (and may backfire), so they
often prefer deception: they manipulate meanings and distort the perception
of reality. After all, you don’t need (so much) violence—and you run fewer
risks—if people can be made to believe and desire what you decide. Psychological warfare is therefore sometimes called political warfare. There
is an interesting science here. How can power elites harness the structure of
human cognition and information flows to influence masses of people? Enter: communication research. Historian
Christopher Simpson explains that, “This
relatively new specialty crystallized into a distinct discipline within
sociology—complete with colleges, curricula, the authority to grant
doctorates, and so forth—between about 1950 and 1955.”[1] Remarkable.
In just five years ‘communication
research’ established itself in the US academic scene—as if out of nothing.
But a closer inspection dispels that appearance. As
Simpson documents in Science of
Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960,
those quickly setting up ‘civilian’ communication research after WWII had
been responsible for wartime psychological warfare. And these “government psychological warfare programs helped
shape mass communication research into a distinct scholarly field, strongly influencing the choice of
leaders and determining which of the competing scientific paradigms of
communication would be funded, elaborated, and encouraged to prosper.”[2] Huge
rivers of US taxpayer money were diverted, often clandestinely and illegally. [Quote
from Simpson starts here] “At
least six of the most important U.S. centers of postwar communication studies
grew up as de facto adjuncts of government psychological warfare programs. For years, government money—frequently with no
public acknowledgment—made up more than 75 percent of the annual budgets of Paul
Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia University,
Hadley Cantril’s Institute for International Social Research (IISR) at
Princeton, Ithiel de Sola Pool’s Center for International Studies (CENIS)
program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and similar
institutions. The U.S. State
Department secretly
(and apparently illegally) financed studies by the National Opinion Research
Center (NORC) of U.S. popular opinion as part of the department’s cold war
lobbying campaigns on Capitol Hill, thus making NORC’s ostensibly private, independent
surveys financially viable for the first time. In
another case the CIA
clandestinely underwrote the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) studies
of torture—there is no
other word for it—of prisoners of war, reasoning that interrogation of captives
could be understood as simply another application of the social-psychological
principles articulated in communication studies. Taken as a whole, it is unlikely that communication research could have emerged in anything like its present form without regular transfusions of money for the leading lights in the field from U.S. military, intelligence, and propaganda agencies.”[3] [Quote
from Simpson ends here] Academics
who tried to be independent or—worse—critical
of the power-elite paradigm were called ‘communists’ and hauled before
McCarthyite tribunals or otherwise harassed and persecuted.[4] The well-behaved advanced their careers within a tightly
controlled network of ‘communications research’ professionals steered by Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ), the main academic vehicle.
It
was not just POQ that was
compromised, however. “The American Sociological Review (ASR), published by the American
Sociological Society, overlapped so frequently in its officers and editorial
panels with those of Public Opinion
Quarterly and its publisher, the American Association for Public Opinion
Research, that board members sometimes joked that they were unsure which
meetings they were attending.”[5] Simpson
remarks upon the “unusually close liaison that some of the journal’s authors
and editors maintained with clandestine psychological warfare projects at the
CIA, the armed services, and the Department of State.” Several of these
people “were largely dependent on government funding for their livelihood.”[6] Government funding... John
Stuart Mill once explained that to coin a name is almost irresistibly to reify a ‘thing’—you imagine that
something (some thing) is really ‘there’ merely because you
have a name for ‘it.’ This trap waits in ambush for any political analyst who
invokes ‘the government.’ Careful. Is it
really very helpful to say that ‘the government’ set up ‘communication
research’? The phrase ‘the government’ refers to a massive bureaucracy, a
gigantic set of functionally articulated positions and roles filled by people
who are rotated in routine fashion—they come and go. But according to whose
influence are those positions and roles filled? Who pulls the strings? Consider
who funded communication research before ‘the government’ got involved: “During
the second half of the 1930s, the
Rockefeller Foundation underwrote much of the most innovative communication
research then under way in the United States. There was virtually no federal support for the social
sciences at the time... The [Rockefeller] foundation’s administrators believed, however, that mass media constituted a uniquely powerful force in modern society, reports Brett Gary, and financed a new project on content analysis for Harold Lasswell at the Library of Congress, Hadley Cantril’s Public Opinion Research Project at Princeton University, the establishment of Public Opinion Quarterly at Princeton, Douglas Waples’ newspaper and reading studies at the University of Chicago, Paul Lazarsfeld’s Office of Radio Research at Columbia University, and other important programs.”[7] We
see, then, that ‘communication research’ beneficiaries of US government
largesse after the war had been
Rockefeller beneficiaries before
the war. Had Rockefeller covertly turned the US government into an extension
of self? Consider
just one postwar example. In the 1950s, “the
Rockefeller organization appears to have been used as a public front to
conceal the source of at least $1 million in CIA funds for Hadley Cantril’s
Institute for International Social Research.”[8] In
the Carnegie and Ford networks we find the same pattern: “The
major foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation,
which were the principal secondary source of large-scale communication
research funding of the day, usually operated in close coordination with
government propaganda and intelligence programs in allocation of money for
mass communication research.”[10] US
Intelligence could easily coordinate itself in secret with the Carnegie,
Ford, and Rockefeller networks because the US Congress, in the
National Security Act of 1947, had authorized US spies basically
to do as they pleased.[11] Now,
there is no need to speculate as to the point of all this, because the people
who set it up did us the favor of explaining their purposes. Edward
Bernays—famous ‘father of public relations,’ ‘father of spin,’ and a main
designer of US psychological warfare operations in WWI—opened his 1928 book Propaganda with the following lines: “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.” According
to Bernays, propaganda is good for you: “the orderly function of group life”
is simply impossible unless we have “our tastes formed, our ideas suggested,
largely by men we have never heard of.” These men, a “trifling fraction,”
says Bernays, are the select few “who understand the mental processes and
social patterns of the masses…, who pull the wires which control the public
mind, …[and] harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and
guide the world.”[12] As an
important hired gun for that “trifling faction,” Bernays was busy spinning
“the engineering of consent” (as he called it) as a wholesome and necessary
thing for democracy. His book Propaganda was the ultimate recursive
achievement: propaganda on behalf of propaganda (no doubt he chuckled on
every line.) Right
around the time that Propaganda was published, the Rockefeller
Foundation was supporting the early efforts of theorists Harold Lasswell and
Walter Lippmann. Echoing Bernays, they argued that you and I cannot govern
ourselves, so ‘democratic’ power elites should, via ‘communication research,’
manage and steer us.[13] “Persuasive
communication aimed at largely disenfranchised masses became central to
Lippmann’s strategy for domestic government and international relations. He
saw mass communication as a major source of the modern crisis and as a
necessary instrument for any managing elite... Lasswell extended the idea,
giving it a Machiavellian twist. He
emphasized employing persuasive media and selectively using assassinations,
violence, and other coercion as a means of
‘communicating’ with and managing disenfranchised people. He advocated
what he regarded as ‘scientific’ application of persuasion and precise
violence, in contrast to bludgeon tactics.”
[14] At a Rockefeller-sponsored
seminar, Lasswell argued that “The elite of U.S. society (‘those who have
money to support research,’ as Lasswell bluntly put it) should systematically
manipulate mass sentiment.” They should, in other words, control the
representation of reality, and of its meaning, in order to force people indirectly without
seeming to. This would be “ ‘the establishment of
dictatorship-by-manipulation,’ ” as one lonely seminar outlier, Donald
Slesinger, bitterly protested.[15]
This
“dictatorship-by-manipulation” is what I call ‘sloppy totalitarianism’ (see Appendix A). Such
a dictatorship, of course, cannot be established without considerable direct
tutelage and supervision over the people who work in the media, writ large;
accordingly, the ‘communication research’ infrastructure created with
Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller backing “underlies
most college- and graduate-level training for print and broadcast
journalists, public relations and advertising personnel, and the related
craftspeople who might be called the ‘ideological workers’ of contemporary
U.S. society.”[16] By
such means the majority of media workers can be made docile, educated to
avoid certain taboo questions (see Part
2). The
small handful at the top is different. They
must be full members of Bernays’ “trifling fraction” or else directly in
their thrall or pay. This was explained by Udo Ulfkotte, editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of
Germany’s largest newspapers, in a recent confession to clear his conscience,
as he does not expect to live much longer. Those responsible for content in
the major Western media, Ulfkotte claims, knowingly and routinely publish CIA
propaganda.[16a]
Possibly
you will find Ulfkotte’s confession surprising. But he is saying that the CIA
does what the 1947 National Security Act authorized it
to do: corrupt the foreign media. From
a formal perspective, it all has a certain beauty: the proud citizens make
the bosses kneel before their demands, the inception of which is a
media-based education controlled by the same bosses. Ever so
‘democratically,’ the system is managed. Some have called this ‘directed history.’[17] Can
it be resisted? Yes, so long as you can sniff the ‘news’ for the direction that the power elites are nudging us
into. But can that be done? Yes,
provided you can put together a good general model of power-elite values and
intentions. That’s
easier than you may suspect. Consider:
Who created the system that trains the media? The Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller
networks. So the question is this:
What do these wire-pullers want? To answer we must consider their most
expensive behaviors, because, as economists never tire of pointing out,
people’s real preferences are revealed in what they pay for. So
notice: at the same time that
Rockefeller was sponsoring the first ‘communication research’ efforts, the
Carnegie and Rockefeller networks spent—quite literally—billions financing
American eugenics, easily the most consequential social and political
movement of the first half of the 20th c.[18]
Why so important? Because American eugenics became German Nazism. As
historian Edwin Black documents in War
Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race,
overseas Carnegie and Rockefeller funding for key institutes, individuals,
and organizations in Germany was
crucial to the rise of German eugenics, which in turn became Nazism (Part
5). The German Nazis copied legal precedents and strategies first
pioneered by Carnegie- and Rockefeller-funded American eugenicists (Part
5). Henry Ford, for his part, published on his own dime so much
explicit antisemitic and pro-Hitler propaganda that in 1938 the Third Reich
famously awarded him its highest medal for non-Germans. A terse statement of the above worldview is
‘pro-Nazi.’
But did this worldview survive into the postwar,
when the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller networks created the training
infrastructure for media personnel? And if it did, wouldn’t the cooperative
media moguls—certainly included in Bernays’ “trifling fraction”—have to share
it? A well-chosen anecdote is worth a thousand
demonstrations: “There are some things the general
public does not need to know, and shouldn’t.”[19] —Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, What
shouldn’t you know? In 1988, right as Graham celebrated with the CIA the
principle of cover-up, her own Washington
Post was busy making sure that US citizens didn’t learn about the CIA’s
postwar recruitment of vast hordes of Nazi war criminals—at the very least
tens of thousands—into its ranks (see Part
6). That’s what.
Now,
the test of any scientific model is whether it can solve important
outstanding riddles better than existing models. So let us ask: do we have
one such riddle handy—one that dissolves if only we attribute a ‘pro-Nazi’
worldview to the US power-elite? Jump
back to our introductory example (Part
0). As we saw, PLO/Fatah—poised
to build a ‘Palestinian State’ on strategic Israeli territory—led the
creation of the genocidal Iranian regime that openly threatens to exterminate
the Israeli Jews. Thus, if US bosses mean to protect Israel, as the dominant
model alleges, then their support for a ‘Two State Solution’ appears totally
‘ungrammatical.’ Paradox. And
here’s another riddle. Most
Westerners, despite their prejudices, would not abide that the Jewish State
be compelled to cede strategic territory to
Iranian leaders, who announce their ambition to repeat the Holocaust.
Therefore, if the media is really controlled by ‘the Jews’ (as so many
believe), the NYT should—‘grammatically’—be replaying for everybody what it
splashed on its front page in 1979: that PLO/Fatah created the judeophobic and genocidal Iranian regime (Part
0). But the NYT is now studiously silent on this. Again: paradox. Both
paradoxes dissolve, however, if those in power, and in control of mainstream
media content, are the same US power-elite networks that helped produce the
Nazis. For lovers of Nazis are not lovers of Jews—that would be
‘ungrammatical.’ Political grammar—as we shall see—is the key to
unlocking the logical operations of psychological warfare, and therefore of
modern geopolitics. We explain it next.
[1] Simpson, C. (1994). Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare.
New York: Oxford University Press. (p.3) [2] ibid. [3] ibid. (p.4) [4] ibid. (pp.101-02, 106) [5] ibid. (p.50) [6] ibid. (pp.48-49) [7] ibid. (p.22) [8] ibid. (pp.60-61) [10] ibid.
(p.9) [11]
“Did the National Security Act of 1947 destroy freedom of the press?: The red
pill...”; Historical and Investigative Research; 3 Jan 2006; by Francisco
Gil-White [12] Bernays, E. L. (1928). Propaganda. New York: Horace
Liveright. (pp.1-2) [13] Simpson, C. (1994). Science of Coercion: Communication
Research and Psychological Warfare. New York: Oxford University Press.
(pp.13, 15-17) [14] ibid. (p.17) [15] ibid. (p.23) [16] ibid.
(p.3) [16a] “Editor of major newspaper says he
planted stories for CIA”; Digital
Journal; 26 Jan 2015; by Ralph Lopez “German
journo: European media writing pro-US stories under CIA pressure (VIDEO)”; Russia Today; 18 Oct 2015. [17] “Directed History? Hey, We Told You
So”; The Daily Bell; December 05,
2015; by Anthony Wile [18] Black,
E. (2003). War against the weak: Eugenics and America's campaign to create
a master race. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. [19] Linda Steiner writes in the Encyclopedia of American Journalism: “In her autobiography, Katharine Graham described how her
husband [Philip L. Graham, who inherited the mantle of Washington Post publisher from his father-in-law, Katherine’s
father] worked overtime during the
[CIA] Bay of Pigs operation to protect the reputations of some Yale friends
who had backed the venture. But in a 1979 book called Katherine the Great, Deborah Davis went further to allege, among
other things, that [Post Executive
Editor Ben] Bradlee and Philip Graham had collaborated with the Central
Intelligence Agency, and that Philip Graham was the main contact in a CIA
project to infiltrate US media. Davis also identified—wrongly, it turns out—a
Harvard classmate of Bradlee as A CIA agent and as the Watergate reporters’
source Deep Throat. After a number of people criticized the book and Bradlee
documented thirty-nine errors, [publisher] Harcourt Brace Jovanovich disavowed
the book and shredded twenty thousand copies. A small company, National Press
in Bethesda, Maryland, republished the book, however, in 1987. After Graham died, the liberal commentator Norman Solomon
wrote in a widely republished column that the Post had mainly functioned as a ‘helpmate to the war-makers’ in
the White House, State Department, and Pentagon. He said it used classic
propaganda techniques to accomplish this: evasion, confusion, misdirection,
targeted emphasis, disinformation, secrecy, omission of important facts, and
selective leaks. This more
conservative side of Graham emerged, for example, in a well-publicized speech
she gave at CIA headquarters in 1988: ‘We live in a dirty and dangerous
world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and
shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take
legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to
print what it knows.’ ” SOURCE: Steiner, L. (2008). Graham, Katherine. In S. L.
Vaugh (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American Journalism. New York: Routledge. Notice that Graham claims that “democracy flourishes” when
power elites manage this ‘flourishing’ by deciding what the masses get to
know. This corresponds rather exactly to Lippmann’s and Laswell’s model of
‘democracy.’ |
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