Brainwashed - Brainwasted America
EG Warman
by Mack White
Sixty-four years ago this month, six million Americans became
unwitting subjects in an experiment in psychological warfare.
It was the night before Halloween, 1938. At 8 p.m. CST, the Mercury
Radio on the Air began broadcasting Orson Welles' radio adaptation
of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. As is now well known, the story
was presented as if it were breaking news, with bulletins so realistic
that an estimated one million people believed the world was actually
under attack by Martians. Of that number, thousands succumbed to
outright panic, not waiting to hear Welles' explanation at the end
of the program that it had all been a Halloween prank, but fleeing
into the night to escape the alien invaders.
Later, psychologist Hadley Cantril conducted a study of the effects
of the broadcast and published his findings in a book, The Invasion
from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. This study explored
the power of broadcast media, particularly as it relates to the
suggestibility of human beings under the influence of fear.
Cantril was affiliated with Princeton University's Radio Research
Project, which was funded in 1937 by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Also affiliated with the Project was Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR) member and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) executive
Frank Stanton, whose network had broadcast the program. Stanton
would later go on to head the news division of CBS, and in time
would become president of the network, as well as chairman of the
board of the RAND Corporation, the influential think tank which
has done groundbreaking research on, among other things, mass
brainwashing.
Two years later, with Rockefeller Foundation money, Cantril
established the Office of Public Opinion Research (OPOR), also at
Princeton. Among the studies conducted by the OPOR was an analysis
of the effectiveness of "psycho-political operations" (propaganda,
in plain English) of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Then, during World War II, Cantril÷and Rockefeller money÷assisted
CFR member and CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow in setting up the
Princeton Listening Center, the purpose of which was to study Nazi
radio propaganda with the object of applying Nazi techniques to
OSS propaganda. Out of this project came a new government agency,
the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS). The FBIS
eventually became the United States Information Agency (USIA),
which is the propaganda arm of the National Security Council.
Thus, by the end of the 1940s, the basic research had been done
and the propaganda apparatus of the national security state had
been set up--just in time for the Dawn of Television ...
Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman reveal that,
when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the
left to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of
logical thought. Here, information is broken down into its component
parts and critically analyzed.
The right brain, however, treats incoming data uncritically,
processing information in wholes, leading to emotional, rather than
logical, responses. The shift from left to right brain activity also
causes the release of endorphins, the body's own natural opiates--
thus, it is possible to become physically addicted to watching
television, a hypothesis borne out by numerous studies which have
shown that very few people are able to kick the television habit.
This numbing of the brain's cognitive function is compounded by
another shift which occurs in the brain when we watch television.
Activity in the higher brain regions (such as the neo-cortex) is
diminished, while activity in the lower brain regions (such as the
limbic system) increases. The latter, commonly referred to as the
reptile brain, is associated with more primitive mental functions,
such as the "fight or flight" response. The reptile brain is unable
to distinguish between reality and the simulated reality of
television. To the reptile brain, if it looks real, it is real.
Thus, though we know on a conscious level it is "only a film," on
a conscious level we do not--the heart beats faster, for instance,
while we watch a suspenseful scene. Similarly, we know the commercial
is trying to manipulate us, but on an unconscious level the
commercial nonetheless succeeds in, say, making us feel inadequate
until we buy whatever thing is being advertised--and the effect is
all the more powerful because it is unconscious, operating on the
deepest level of human response. The reptile brain makes it possible
for us to survive as biological beings, but it also leaves us
vulnerable to the manipulations of television programmers.
It is not just commercials that manipulate us. On television news
as well, image and sound are as carefully selected and edited to
influence human thought and behavior as in any commercial. The news
anchors and reporters themselves are chosen for their physical
attractiveness--a factor which, as numerous psychological studies
have shown, contributes to our perception of a person's trust-
worthiness. Under these conditions, then, the viewer easily forgets
--if, indeed, the viewer ever knew in the first place--that the
worldview presented on the evening news is a contrivance of the
network owners--owners such as General Electric (NBC) and
Westinghouse (CBS), both major defense contractors. By molding
our perception of the world, they mold our opinions.
This distortion of reality is determined as much by what is left
out of the evening news as what is included--as a glance at
Project Censored's yearly list of top 25 censored news stories
will reveal. If it's not on television, it never happened. Out of
sight, out of mind.
Under the guise of journalistic objectivity, news programs subtly
play on our emotions--chiefly fear. Network news divisions, for
instance, frequently congratulate themselves on the great service
they provide humanity by bringing such spectacles as the September
11 terror attacks into our living rooms. We have heard this false-
hood so often, we have come to accept it as self-evident truth.
However, the motivation for live coverage of traumatic news events
is not altruistic, but rather to be found in the central focus
of Cantril's War of the Worlds research--the manipulation of the
public through fear.
There is another way in which we are manipulated by television
news. Human beings are prone to model the behaviors they see around
them, and avoid those which might invite ridicule or censure, and
in the hypnotic state induced by television, this effect is
particularly pronounced. For instance, a lift of the eyebrow from
Peter Jennings tells us precisely what he is thinking--and by
extension what we should think. In this way, opinions not sanctioned
by the corporate media can be made to seem disreputable, while
sanctioned opinions are made to seem the very essence of civilized
thought. And should your thinking stray into unsanctioned territory
despite the trusted anchor's example, a poll can be produced which
shows that most persons do not think that way--and you don't want
to be different do you? Thus, the mental wanderer is brought back
into the fold.
This process is also at work in programs ostensibly produced for
entertainment. The "logic" works like this: Archie Bunker is an
idiot, Archie Bunker is against gun control, therefore idiots are
against gun control. Never mind the complexities of the issue.
Never mind the fact that the true purpose of the Second Amendment
is not to protect the rights of deer hunters, but to protect the
citizenry against a tyrannical government (an argument you will
never hear voiced on any television program). Monkey see, monkey
do--or, in this case, monkey not do.
Notice, too, the way in which television programs depict conspiracy
researchers or anti-New World Order activists. On situation
comedies, they are buffoons. On dramatic programs, they are
dangerous fanatics. This imprints on the mind of the viewer the
attitude that questioning the official line or holding "anti-
government" opinions is crazy, therefore not to be emulated.
Another way in which entertainment programs mold opinion can be
found in the occasional television movie, which "sensitively"
deals with some "social" issue. A bad behavior is spotlighted--
"hate" crimes, for instance--in such a way that it appears to be
a far more rampant problem than it may actually be, so terrible
in fact that the "only" cure for it is more laws and government
"protection." Never mind that laws may already exist to cover
these crimes--the law against murder, for instance. Once we have
seen the well-publicized murder of the young gay man Matthew
Shepherd dramatized in not one, but two, television movies in
all its heartrending horror, nothing will do but we pass a law
making the very thought behind the crime illegal.
People will also model behaviors from popular entertainment which
are not only dangerous to their health and could land them in jail,
but also contribute to social chaos. While this may seem to be
simply a matter of the producers giving the audience what it wants,
or the artist holding a mirror up to society, it is in fact
intended to influence behavior.
Consider the way many films glorify drug abuse. When a popular
star playing a sympathetic character in a mainstream R-rated
film uses hard drugs with no apparent health or legal consequences
(John Travolta's use of heroin in Pulp Fiction, for instance--an
R-rated film produced for theatrical release, which now has found
a permanent home on television, v ia cable and video players), a
certain percentage of people--particularly the impressionable
young--will perceive hard drug use as the epitome of anti-
Establishment cool and will model that behavior, contributing to
an increase in drug abuse. And who benefits?
As has been well documented by Gary Webb in his award-winning
series for the San Jose Mercury New, former Los Angeles narcotics
detective Michael Ruppert, and many other researchers and whistle-
blowers--the CIA is the main purveyor of hard drugs in this
country. The CIA also has its hand in the "prison-industrial
complex." Wackenhut Corporation, the largest owner of private
prisons, has on its board of directors many former CIA employees,
and is very likely a CIA front.
Thus, films which glorify drug abuse may be seen as recruitment
ads for the slave labor-based private prison system. Also, the
social chaos and inflated crime rate which result from the
contrived drug problem contributes to the demand from a frightened
society for more prisons, more laws, and the further erosion of
civil liberties. This effect is further heightened by television
news segments and documentaries which focus on drug abuse and
other crimes, thus giving the public the misperception that crime
is even higher than it really is.
There is another socially debilitating process at work in what
passes for entertainment on television these days. Over the years,
there has been a steady increase in adult subject matter on
programs presented during family viewing hours. For instance, it
is common for today's prime-time situation comedies to make jokes
about such matters as masturbation (Seinfeld once devoted an entire
episode to the topic), or for daytime talk shows such as Jerry
Springer's to showcase such topics as bestiality.
Even worse are the "reality" programs currently in vogue. Each new
offering in this genre seems to hit a new low. MTV, for instance,
recently subjected a couple to a Candid Camera-style prank in which,
after winning a trip to Las Vegas, they entered their hotel room
to find an actor made up as a mutilated corpse in the bathtub.
Naturally, they were traumatized by the experience and sued the
network. Or, consider a new show on British television in which
contestants compete to see who can infect each other with the most
diseases--venereal diseases included.
It would appear, at the very least, that these programs serve as
a shill operation to strengthen the argument for censorship.
There may also be an even darker motive. These programs contribute
to the general coarsening of society we see all around us--the
decline in manners and common human decency and the acceptance of
cruelty for its own sake as a legitimate form of entertainment.
Ultimately, this has the effect of debasing human beings into
savages, brutes--the better to herd them into global slavery.
For the first decade or so after the Dawn of Television, there
were only a handful of channels in each market--o ne for each of
the three major networks and maybe one or two independents. Later,
with the advent of cable and more channels, the population pie
began to be sliced into finer pieces--or "niche markets." This
development has often been described as representing a growing
diversity of choices, but in reality it is a fine-tuning of the
process of mass manipulation, a honing-in on particular segments
of the population, not only to sell them specifically-targeted
consumer products but to influence their thinking in ways
advantageous to the globalist agenda.
One of these "target audiences" is that portion of the population
which, after years of blatant government cover-up in areas such as
UFOs and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, maintains a cynicism
toward the official line, despite the best efforts of television
programmers to depict conspiracy research in a negative light.
How to reach this vast, disenfranchised target audience and co-
opt their thinking? One way is to put do cumentaries before them
which mix of fact with disinformation, thereby confusing them.
Another is to take the X Files approach.
The heroes of X Files are investigators in a fictitious paranormal
department of the FBI whose adventures sometimes take them into
parapolitical territory. On the surface this sounds good. However,
whatever good X Files might accomplish by touching on such matters
as MK-ULTRA or the JFK assassination is cancelled out by associating
them with bug-eyed aliens and ghosts. Also, on X Files, the truth
is always depicted as "out there" somewhere--in the stars, or some
other dimension, never in brainwashing centers such as the RAND
Corporation or its London counterpart, the Tavistock Institute.
This has the effect of obscuring the truth, making it seem
impossibly out-of-reach, and associating reasonable lines of
political inquiry with the fantastic and other-wordly.
Not that there is no connection between the parapolitical and the
paranormal. There is undoubtedly a cover-up at work with regard to
UFOs, but if we accept uncritically the notion that UFOs are anything
other than terrestrial in origin, we are falling headfirst into a
carefully-set trap. To its credit, X Files has dealt with the idea
that extraterrestrials might be a clever hoax by the government,
but never decisively.
The labyrinthine plots of the show somehow manage to leave the
viewer wondering if perhaps the hoax idea is itself a hoax put
out there to cover up the existence of extraterrestrials. This
is hardly helpful to a true understanding of UFOsand associated
phenomena, such as alien abductions and cattle mutilations.
Extraterrestrials have been a staple of popular entertainment since
The War of the Worlds (both the novel and its radio adaptation).
They have been depicted as invaders and benefactors, but rarely
have they been unequivocally depicted as a hoax. There was an
episode of Outer Limits which depicted a group of scientists
staging a mock alien invasion to frighten the world's population
into uniting as one--but, again, such examples are rare. Even in
UFO documentaries on the Discovery Channel, the possibility of a
terrestrial origin for the phenomenon is conspicuous by its lack
of mention.
UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, the real-life model for the French
scientist in Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third
Kind, attempted to interest Spielberg in a terrestrial explanation
for the phenomenon. In an interview on Conspire.com, Vallee said,
"I argued with him that the subject was even more interesting if
it wasn't extraterrestrials. If it was real, physical, but not ET.
So he said, 'You're probably right, but that's not what the public
is expecting--this is Hollywood and I want to give people
something that's close to what they expect.'"
How convenient that what Spielberg says the people expect is
also what the Pentagon wants them to believe.
In Messengers of Deception, Vallee tracks the history of a wartime
British Intelligence unit devoted to psychological operations.
Code-named (interestingly) the "Martians," it specialized in
manufacturing and distributing false intelligence to confuse the
enemy. Among its activities were the creation of phantom armies
with inflatable tanks, simulations of the sounds of military ships
maneuvering in the fog, and forged letters to lovers from phantom
soldiers attached to phantom regiments.
Vallee suggests that deception operations of this kind may have
extended beyond World War II, and that much of the "evidence"
for "flying saucers" is no more real than the inflatable tanks of
World War II. He writes: "The close association of many UFO
sightings with advanced military hardware (test sites like the
New Mexico proving grounds, missile silos of the northern plains,
naval construction sites like the major nuclear facility at
Pascagoula and the bizarre love affairs ... between contactee
groups, occult sects, and extremist political fa ctions, are
utterly clear signals that we must exercise extreme caution."
Many people find it fantastic that the government would
perpetrate such a hoax, while at the same time having no
difficulty entertaining the notion that extraterrestrials are
regularly traveling light years to this planet to kidnap people
out of their beds and subject them to anal probes.
The military routinely puts out disinformation to obscure its
activities, and this has certainly been the case with UFOs.
Consider Paul Bennewitz, the UFO enthusiast who began studying
strange lights that would appear nightly over the Manzano Test
Range outside Albuquerque. When the Air Force learned about his
study, ufologist William Moore (by his own admission) was
recruited to feed him forged military documents describing a
threat from extraterrestrials. The effect was to confuse Bennewitz
--even making him paranoid enough to be hospitalized--and discredit
his research. Evidently, those strange lights belonged to the Air
Force, which does not like outsiders inquiring into its affairs.
What the Air Force did to Bennewitz, it also does on a mass
scale--and popular entertainment has been complicit in this process.
Whether or not the filmmakers themselves are consciously aware of
this agenda does not matter. The notion that extraterrestrials might
visit this planet is so much a part of popular culture and modern
mythology that it hardly needs assistance from the military to
propagate itself.
It has the effect not only of obscuring what is really going on
at research facilities such as Area 51, but of tainting UFO research
in general as "kooky"--and does the job so thoroughly that one need
only say "UFO" in the same breath with "JFK" to discredit research
in that area as well. It also may, in the end, serve the same purpose
as depicted in that Outer Limits episode--to unite the world's
population against a perceived common threat, thus offering the
pretext for one-world government
The following quotes demonstrate that the idea has at least
occurred to world leaders:
"In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget
how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some
outside, universal threat to make us realize this common bond.
I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if
we were facing an alien threat from outside this world."
(President Ronald Reagan, speaking in 1987 to the United Nations.)
"The nations of the world will have to unite, for the next war will
be an interplanetary war. The nations of the earth must someday make
a common front against attack by people from other planets."
(General Douglas MacArthur, 1955)
Some one remarked that the best way to unite all the nations on
this globe would be an attack from some other planet. In the face
of such an alien enemy, people would respond with a sense of
their unity of interest and purpose." (John Dewey, Professor of
Philosophy a t Columbia University, speaking at a conference
sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1917)
And where was this "alien threat" motif given birth? Again, we
find the answer in popular entertainment, and again the earliest
source is The War of the Worlds--both Wells' and Welles' versions.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that H. G. Wells was a founding
member of the Round Table, the think tank that gave birth to
the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) and its
American cousin, the CFR. Perhaps Wells intentionally introduced
the motif as a meme which might prove useful later in establishing
the "world social democracy" he described in his 1939 book
The New World Order. Perhaps, too, another purpose of the Orson
Welles broadcast was to test of the public's willingness to believe
in extraterrestrials.
At any rate, it proved a popular motif, and paved the way for
countless movies and television programs to come, and has often
proven a handy device for promoting the New World Order, whether
the extraterrestrials are invaders or--in films like The Day the
Earth Stood Still--benefactors who have come to Earth to warn us
to mend our ways and unite as one, or be blown to bits.
We see the globalist agenda at work in Star Trek and its spin-offs
as well. Over the years, many a television viewer's mind has been
imprinted with the idea that centralized government is the solution
for our problems. Never mind the complexities of the issue--never
mind the fact that, in the real world, centralization of power
leads to tyranny. The reptile brain, hypnotized by the flickering
television screen, has seen Captain Kirk and his culturally diverse
crew demonstrate time and again that the United Federation of Planets
is a good thing. Therefore, it must be so.
It remains to be seen whether the Masters of Deception will, like
those scientists in The Outer Limits, stage an invasion from space
with anti-gravity machines and holog rams, but, if they do, it will
surely be broadcast on television, so that anyone out of range of
that light show in the sky, will be able to see it, and all with eyes
to see will believe. It will be War of the Worlds on a grand scale.
Jack Kerouac once noted, while walking down a residential street
at night, glancing into living rooms lit by the gray glare of
television sets, that we have become a world of people "thinking
the same thoughts at the same time."
Every day, millions upon millions of human beings sit down at the
same time to watch the same football game, the same mini-series,
the same newscast. And where might all this shared experience and
uniformity of thought be taking us?
A recent report co-sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation
and the Commerce Department calls for a broad-based research program
to find ways to use nanotechnology, biotechnology, information
technology, and cognitive sciences, to achieve telepathy, machine-
to-human communication, amplified sensory experience, enhanced
intellectual capacity, and mass participation in a "hive mind."
Quoting the report: "With knowledge no longer encapsulated in
individuals, the distinction between individuals and the entirety
of humanity would blur. Think Vulcan mind-meld. We would perhaps
become more of a hive mind--an enormous, single, intelligent entity."
There is no doubt that we have been brought closer to the "hive
mind" by the mass media. For, what is the shared experience of
television but a type of "Vulcan mind-meld"? (Note the terminology
borrowed from Star Trek, no doubt to make the concept more familiar
and palatable. If Spock does it, it must be okay.)
This government report would have us believe that the hive mind
will be for our good--a wonderful leap in evolution. It is nothing
of the kind. For one thing, if the government is behind it, you may
rest assured it is not for our good. For another, common sense
should tell us that blurring the line "between individuals and the
entirety of humanity" means mass conformity, the death of human
individuality. Make no mistake about it--if humanity is to become
a hive, there will be at the center of that hive a Queen Bee, whom
all the lesser "insects" will serve. This is not evolution--this
is devolution. Worse, it is the ultimate slavery--the slavery of
the mind.
And it is a horror first unleashed in 1938 when one million people
responded as one--as a hive--to Orson Welles' Halloween prank.
In a sense, those people who fled the Martians that night were right
to be afraid. They were indeed under attack. But they were wrong
about who was attacking them. It was something far worse than
Martians. Had they only known the true nature of the danger facing
them, perhaps they would have gone to the nearest radio station with
torches in hand like the villagers in those old Frankenstein movies
and burned it to the ground, or at least commandeered the new
technology and turned it towards another use--the liberation of
humanity, instead of its enslavement.
RELEVANT LINKS
U.S. Government Report: Human Beings to be Merged with Technology
to Create a "Hive Mind" - Sydney Morning Herald
To receive a free copy of Mack White's book,
FACTS ABOUT SEPTEMBER 11, write him at mack...@austin.rr.com
with your mailing address.
Posted by:
Eldon Warman
http://ww.detaxcanada.org