The world is in new territory now, not so much that criminal elites are manipulating governments and raping the planet, that’s centuries old. We have reached a point where up and down are considered opinions and there is no right or wrong, no values, no natural laws, no human condition, only tweets and smears and insanity.
That said, we move to the task of today, defining a new role of propaganda and how intelligence agencies use media to destroy their enemies, not the usual way, the way America learned to hate the Hun or to smile at Hiroshima and killing Japs, but something else.
The Obama administration, in a last gasp, has released a report citing Russia as rigging a presidential election in the US. The seriousness of this allegation is unappreciated in Russia. Evidence of this is the reaction of Russia Today and Sputnik News, the two agencies cited as “proof” that Russia’s aims were to undermine America’s political system.
This is the heart of what we are going to discuss today, how a government controlled press organization, can exacerbate a problem and even become a liability. Moreover, one then also begins to look at a deeper issue, and that is one of “penetration” and “influence.” Let’s talk about that.
For years, Veterans Today has been attacked for opposing American military “cowboyism” around the world, for the slavish behavior of Langley and the Pentagon, clearly under the control of City of London banking interests or working for the Saudi-Israel destabilization axis.
To understand some of the context, we only need to go back to 9/11, which we see as, yes a Saudi-Israel operation, timed after another rigged American presidential election, to subvert America’s government and have her military force unleashed under full and absolute “axis control.”
America got new laws, surveillance and torture became the rule, unilateralism and aggression or as Bush called it “pre-emptive” war became the norm and a clear plan to gut central Asia of any genuinely independent political entity took form.
Israel infiltrated Indian politics, played Pakistan and India into a “box” of permanent brinksmanship, and drew China into the conflict, and then Iran as well. Iran was moved against from Afghanistan and Baluchistan, “rebels,” and assassination teams, then from Azerbaijan as well, while a massive drug empire in Afghanistan financed it all.
Narcotics were used to destabilize the republics of Central Asia, while under the guise of cooperation in the War on Terror, the CIA and Mossad moved in, displacing Russia and recreating a soon to be activated Cold War narrative.
This all came together as NATO expansion and the overthrow of Ukraine made clear the real target, not Central Asia but something closer to Europe.
Today Poland is a military dictatorship, Ukraine a failed state under criminal control, the Black Sea an “American Lake” while Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Azerbaijan and the Baltic States are now melding into a new Nazi homeland, aimed at Belarus and Russia, soon to dominate a European Union in the process of dismemberment and ruin.
Let’s go even further. Today former Senator Jeff Sessions is being under consideration to take over as Attorney General of the United States. Back in 2001, George W. Bush nominated John Ashcroft, another former Senator, as Attorney General. We don’t need to go into how Ashcroft turned into a disaster and how Ashcroft and later Alberto Gonzales led to not only a regime of torture and militarism but of financial fraud that took down the American economy and ran up $15 trillion in debt.
As a reminder, Ashcroft was “available” for the job because he had lost an election to former Arkansas governor Mel Carnahan. Carnahan was dead, quite possibly murdered, and this is not a wild conspiracy theory, not that long before Senator Paul Wellstone of Wisconsin had been murdered also. Well, Carnahan, a dead man, beat Ashcroft, a man hated in his own state, who better to guarantee “justice” for the American people? This is how America became a police state.
Jeff Session is worse, oh so much worse, a life history of serving special interest, of racism, of toadying, of pervasive ignorance and utter disrespect for human rights in favor of serving wealth and religious extremism. This is no secret to the American people, Sessions is hated and his nomination was intended, as with the election rigging and sea of childish accusations that followed, to undermine confidence in America.
The same with the Pentagon, with former General Jerry Boykin, a “formerly” brilliant soldier, the man responsible for the failed Carter Iran hostage raid, the man who pushed for war with Iraq in 2002 by validating false WMD stories, a man who hates all Muslims, gays, a man steeped in fake news and conspiracy theories, this is the guy, a cultist and fanatic, who is cleaning the last of the real warriors from the Pentagon. The American people have long known Boykin to be a joke as well, this is no accident.
The rehashed neocons, an education secretary that hates schools, an environmental secretary that denies global warming, and yes, a probable former KKK member as attorney general, discrediting America and pushing it toward civil war, there is a plan here as well, leaving the banksters and the “axis” as “last man standing” in a world nobody is going to survive.
Why all this background, you might ask. Toward that end, I might explain that this is far from enough, that where we are and where we are going is very much tied to where we have been. The change is the dynamic, the internet and the creation, in the US at least, of a hunger for mystery and fulfillment. A secret envy of psychologists has always been for the rich lives that the classic paranoid enjoys. To the delusional paranoid, they are the center of a universe, always a “Moriarity” as a foil, targeted by aliens, stalked by black helicopters, always a secret destiny, every failure the result of a plot. This world, devoid of individual responsibility, ready to “tweet” blame at a moment’s notice, has it over nasty reality hands down.
In a world where real Moraritys do exist but where rational discernment doesn’t, an industry has built itself of the tissue and cobwebs of blogs and podcasts, offering the certainty, the rich fulfillment of the paranoid without the expensive diagnosis and the nasty restraint of life in a state institution. Now the state itself is the institution and the most delusional of all are the keepers, the reality more and more are taking note of.
For a quick background on the mechanism, one must look at the hardware itself, the “devices.” Is it possible to retrain the mind to have no discernment, no attention span, to addict itself to forms of gratification tied to alienation and anti-social behavior? The answer is yes.
Social propriety, or the hypocritical perception of same, has prevented any real analysis of the mechanisms used to subvert the psyche. There is one obvious road that has been used and that is pornography. No human interaction, not one free to be indulged in by any but those above the law, the Epstein’s and Trumps, the Janners and such, can match what is deliverable through devices that freely access the million terabyte cloud of filth every smart phone, every tablet, every laptop can now reach with impunity.
A simple search of recent torrents on Pirate Bay, the famous Swedish downloading site, shows that 90% plus of all files loaded into the cloud and downloaded from the cloud depict violent or sexual behaviors intended to stimulate appetites often harmful and even criminal in nature.
Not every American can drag a wife 40 years his junior off the streets of Manila or Bratislava or grab, with impunity, anyone of any age that appeals to one’s reptilian drives.
Thus pornography has been the “entry drug” for retraining the human psyche, numbing values, imbuing a sense of unaccountable entitlement, feeding rage and honing a taste for torture and tyranny.
Pornography and the feeding of paranoid delusions through conspiracy theories, two thumbs on the same crippled hand, have opened a floodgate that has reached the darkest recesses of the empty and dissatisfied lives of the majority of Americans.
You see, modern America is an empty and lonely place, with exceptions, culture exists, families have survived, some communities prosper and some social cohesion has endured. This is the exception and the numbers can be shown in the recent election with 46% voting for Trump and, and this is guesswork and hypothesis alone mind you, the majority of those willing to accept the impossible or very improbable, that being a childishly angry and self-indulgent narcissist who will suddenly become imbued with capabilities and characteristics inconsistent with what is known of him.
Thus we return now, to the original question, framed as best we can, as to why Russia Today or Veterans Today might be a soft target for “penetration” and a psychological warfare operation. We have seen the changes, the honed desire for quick solutions, for sleaze, for smears and dirty sex, for conspiracies and “targeting.”
The easy targets of course, women, minorities, “the Jews,” Muslims, Hispanics, those with education, successful professionals, and of course the cartoonish “left.” There is something long suspicious here, that mix of Woody Allen types, lending themselves toward caricaturizing, reminiscent of the Nazi cartoons of their public love affair with anti-Semitism during the last century.
One might ask why the forefront of social reform or human rights movements in the US is always taken up by those easily discredited or, more rightly, why the media carefully chooses to promote the despicable and easily hated and to tie them to that which is laudable and decent?
Thus we have to methodologies for penetration. One is to give a message we want killed to the wrong messenger. When foreign press, at odds with US policies that are often of late morally repugnant, seek allies, they find them readily among those they are unaware were most probably sent to them as a “messenger intended to be killed.” Point being, a wrong messenger can kill a good message.
Back during the 1970s, the height of activism in America, a war was ended because the messengers opposing the war were decorated veterans, often maimed and disabled, compelling figures who also represented heroism and sacrifice. Since that time, attempts to duplicate their “big win” using whining academics or angry “street people” with ad hoc front groups has been a “big fail.” When police brushed aside the “occupy” demonstrators, the public was silent.
What isn’t told is that for police to attack hundreds of disciplined and highly trained combat veterans is not the same thing. Veterans in the 1970s antiwar movement looked on armed police as untrained amateurs playing with fire. In many cases, there was real brotherhood with police, often veterans themselves, and in other cases, cautious respect and a realization that “poking the bear” is not always wise.
Today when “activists” are elevated, there is generally a purpose, and that is to discredit their message.
More recently, there is an insidious new methodology at hand. With the addiction to conspiracies and smears, with fake news, more extreme the better, the largest audiences are drawn to the least likely stories. Trump’s primary advisors, Generals Flynn and Boykin and even Trump himself, have supported bizarre conspiracies like Pizzagate, fabricated as a joke by bloggers, but pushed through Facebook and Google, YouTube channeling, and we will get into that, into “viralism.”
Thus, when publications like Russia Today or Sputnik, start looking, not like tabloids, but more like 3rd rate blogs, mixing their quality journalism with wild conspiracies and ranting anti-American diatribes, taking on what they have seen work effectively to mold American thinking, the enjoy huge gains in readership.
What they don’t see is that they were intended to be lead exactly there, to become a caricature of themselves and to become an “example” when “proof” is needed of Russian guilt where none exists.
Who would do that? Who is that smart? Do people actually plan this kind of operation?
Inside America, there are those prepared to take every wrong turn for the next four years of what many now assert to be Russian control of America, and build that into anger and hate. We aren’t talking about the disenfranchised or nonsensical, we are talking about powerful and dangerous people.
To those, this election is taken just like the Iranian seizure of the American embassy personnel in Tehran in 1979, a national humiliation, placing an ignorant clown in the White House, tasked with turning the world over to control by Russia and China. You see, the majority of American voters feel they were cheated, these are the best educated and the most powerful. To them, Russia put Trump in office by manipulating the poor and ignorant.
Worse still, everything seen, everything read, leads to these very false conclusions. Early as September 2016, the stories hit the news about Trump staffers meeting with Russia, planning to rig the election.
The problem is this, the real plot, if there was a plot and I am saying “yes,” there was a plot, was not against Hillary Clinton but rather Russia. It is Russia now stained with a 9/11 or Pearl Harbor type attack on America, destroying the very fabric of American democracy.
I can also see how much was done to make it appear like Russia did it. So much more went into the wrongdoing that altered this election, and this isn’t the first time it was done. We saw it in 2000, we saw it in 2004. There is no mention of the shadowy Federalist Society and the powerful CIA intelligence contractors who focused here at home.
There is no discussion of how, in state after state, election officials have been bought off by drug cartels and organized crime on a massive scale, part of the process that began in 2005 when the Supreme Court authorized unprecedented bribery through “Citizens United.”
Russia was walked right into this one, into something more serious than anyone begins to understand and getting to the truth, and punishing those really guilty has to be a priority. The reason is clear, or should be. Why would someone place the Mark of Cain on Russia unless they intended to do something very unpleasant to a nation with thousands of nuclear weapons.
If you don’t think there are those “out there,” like the group now taking over Washington, who plan exactly that, then you just aren’t paying attention.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
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