On September 7th, NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, acknowledged that the war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, like Western ‘news’-media say, but much earlier, in 2014, and that Russia’s invasion in 2022 resulted from NATO’s efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO and to bring NATO’s military forces closer to Russia’s borders: “He [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” In other words: Russia’s invasion actually was defensive, not aggressive, on Russia’s side. And Stoltenberg proudly proclaimed that Russia has been defeated in that defensive objective, because instead both Sweden and especially Finland (one of the nearest nations to The Kremlin, other than the nearest of all, which is Ukraine) rushed to join NATO as a direct result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Stoltenberg was so proud of having turned to dust Putin’s goal of making Russia safer, that Stoltenberg repeated many times NATO having done the exact opposite of what Putin was urging. Stoltenberg was clearly proud to have overseen the frustration of Russia’s need for a defense against a possible blitz-nuclear attack by NATO.
Furthermore: Stoltenberg acknowledged that this war is and has been good for NATO because it’s forcing NATO member countries to increase their expenditures on military weapons, and is thereby forcing down these countries’ expenditures on other matters that voters usually care more about.
The war didn’t start in February last year. It started in 2014. The full-fledged invasion happened last year, but the war, the illegal annexation of Crimea, Russia went into eastern Donbas in 2014.
Since then, NATO has implemented the biggest adaptation on this Alliance in modern history, in decades. And part of that is to invest more in defence. I think I’ve told you before that I know it’s hard to allocate money for defence, because most politicians want to spend money on health, on education, on infrastructure instead of defence. …
The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty, that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.
The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.
So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite. He has got more NATO presence in eastern part of the Alliance and he has also seen that Finland has already joined the Alliance and Sweden will soon be a full member.
Stoltenberg’s speech on September 7th ignored America’s coup, and he even ignored that the coup was quickly followed by the breakaway of Crimea because a plebiscite was held there on 16 March 2014, which produced a 90%+ vote for Crimea to again be a part of Russia, of which Crimea had been a part from 1783 to 1954. And he ignored that the breakaway of Donbass resulted after the Obama-installed Ukrainian government started in April 2014 an ethic-cleansing invasion of Donbass because over 90% of the voters there had voted for the Ukrainian President whom Obama’s coup had replaced, and Obama didn’t want those voters ever again to vote in a Ukrainian election.
So, although what Stoltenberg said there was true, it was very incomplete, because it failed to mention the coup, and the coup-regime’s ethnic-cleansing campaign, though those American initiatives were actually the things that started the war in Ukraine.
American society spawns trauma and this trauma expresses itself in a variety of self-destructive pathologies, including the erosion of democracy and rise of neo-fascism.
Corporate capitalism, defined by the cult of the self and the ruthless exploitation of the natural world and all forms of life for profit, thrives on the fostering of chronic psychological and physical disorders. The diseases and pathologies of despair — alienation, high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, morbid obesity, mass shootings (now almost two per day on average), domestic and sexual violence, drug overdoses (over 100,000 per year) and suicide (49,000 deaths in 2022) — are the consequences of a deeply traumatized society.
The core traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt — are celebrated. The virtues of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice, are belittled, neglected and crushed. The professions that sustain community, such as teaching, manual labor, the arts, journalism and nursing, are underpaid and overworked. The professions that exploit, such as those in high finance, Big Pharma, Big Oil and information technology, are lavished with prestige, money and power.
“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in The Sane Society.
The classic works on trauma by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Gabor Maté and Dr. Judith Herman state bluntly that what is accepted as normal behavior in a corporate society is at war with basic human needs and our psychological and physical health. Huge segments of the American public, especially the tens of millions of people who have been discarded and marginalized, endure chronic trauma. Barbara Ehrenreich in “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” describes the life of the working poor as one long “emergency.” This trauma is as destructive to us personally as it is socially and politically. It leaves us in a state of dysphoria where confusion, agitation, emptiness and loneliness define our lives. Whole segments of American society, especially the poor, have been rendered superfluous and invisible. As Dr. van der Kolk writes, “trauma is when we are not seen and known.”
“Our culture teaches us to focus on our personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms,” Dr. van der Kolk notes.
Trauma numbs our capacity to feel. It fractures our self. It disconnects us from our bodies. It keeps us in a state of hyperarousal. It makes us confuse our desires, often artificially implanted by the consumer society, with our needs. Traumatized people view the world around them as hostile and dangerous. They lack a positive image of themselves and lose the capacity to trust. Many replace intimacy and love with sexual sadism, which is how we became a pornified culture. Trauma creates what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls a “counterfeit” world defined by phantom enemies, lies and dark conspiracies. It negates a sense of purpose and a life of meaning.
Trauma, Dr. Herman writes, “impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately.” It induces feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, she writes, “as well as the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that occurs in daily life. Trauma severely compromises the capacity for intimacy. Trauma can dramatically reduce focus to extremely limited goals, often a matter of hours or days.”
“If trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce trauma,” Dr. Maté writes. “Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources — these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”
Trauma also drives many to flee into the arms of those who are orchestrating the abuse.
Systematic and repetitive trauma, whether by a single abuser or a political system, destroys personal autonomy. The perpetrator becomes omnipotent. Resistance is accepted as futile. “The goal of the perpetrator is to instill in his victim not only fear of death but also gratitude for being allowed to live,” Dr. Herman writes. This trauma lays the foundation for the most insidious characteristic of all tyrannies, large and small. Total control. Prolonged trauma reduces its victims to a state of psychological infantilism. It conditions them to plead for their own enslavement.
“We are not content with negative obedience, not even with the most abject submission,” George Orwell wrote of the ruling “Inner Party” in his novel “1984.” “When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.”
Christian fascism, the subject of my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” preys on this trauma. It replicates systems of control common to all tyrannies, including cults. Christian fascists skillfully break down adherents, severing them from their families and communities. They manipulate their shame, despair, feelings of worthlessness and guilt – the byproducts of their trauma – to demand total obedience to the church leadership, who are almost always white and male. These leaders, supposedly spokespeople for God, cannot be questioned or criticized. The connecting tissue among the disparate militia groups, QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-abortion activists, right-wing patriot organizations, Second Amendment advocates, neo-Confederates and Trump supporters that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 is not only this Christian fascism but trauma.
“Totalitarian governments demand confession and political conversion of their victims,” Dr. Herman writes. “Slaveholders demand gratitude from their slaves. Religious cults demand ritualized sacrifices as a sign of submission to the divine will of the leader. Perpetrators of domestic battery demand that their victims prove complete obedience and loyalty by sacrificing all other relationships. Sex offenders demand that their victims find sexual fulfillment in submission. Total control over another person is the power dynamic at the heart of pornography. The erotic appeal of this fantasy to millions of terrifyingly normal men fosters an immense industry in which women and children are abused, not in fantasy but in reality.”
Donald Trump is a perpetrator and savior. He personifies the callous indifference of patriarchy, wealth, privilege and power towards the vulnerable, as well as the promise that once his cultish followers surrender to him they will be protected. He inspires in equal measure fear and solace.
“People who embrace the small tyrannies are much more susceptible to embracing the large ones,” Dr. Herman told me. “When you have a political party that embraces the subordination of women, the subordination of people of color, the subordination of gender non-conforming people, and the subordination of non-Christians, then it’s not a party that embraces democracy. It’s a party that is looking for a fascist leader and is going to find one.”
In Dr. van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” he opens with stark statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that “one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.”
The endemic trauma in American society, which is getting worse under the onslaught of the gig economy, pronounced social inequality, indiscriminate police violence, the climate crisis and the seizure of the political process and most institutions by corporations and the ruling oligarchs, is our most serious public health crisis. It has grave individual, social and political consequences.
“If trauma is truly a social problem,” Dr. Herman in “Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice” writes, “then recovery cannot simply be a private individual matter. The wounds of trauma are not merely those caused by the perception of violence and exploitation. The actions or inactions of bystanders, all those who are complicit in or who prefer not to know about the abuse or who blame the victims, often cause deeper wounds.” “Full healing,” she adds, “because it originates in a fundamental injustice, requires a full hearing within the community to repair through some measure of justice the trauma survivors have endured.”
You can see my recent two-part interview with Dr. Herman here and here.You can see my interview with Dr. Maté here.
“Recovery has to take place in relationships,” Dr. Herman said in my interview. “When people feel reconnected to their communities and re-accepted in their communities, then the shame is relieved and the isolation is relieved, and that really creates the platform for healing.”
The key is community. Not virtual communities. But communities where we can reconnect and see in our wounds the wounds of others. It requires access, without onerous medical bills, to mental health professionals. It requires dismantling the corporate structures of oppression. It demands a new ethic, one that values empathy and self-sacrifice. We must reject the cynicism, indifference and cult of the self that all tyrannies inculcate in those they dominate to keep them passive. We must reach out to our neighbors, especially those in distress and those who are demonized. We must uncouple from consumer society and turn away from the allure of our cultural narcissism.
The moral philosopher Bernard Williams argues that resentment and indignation are as important as empathy and connection to solidify social bonds. It is not only our own dignity we must protect, but the dignity of others. These “shared sentiments” he writes “bind people together in a community of feeling.” Acts of resistance around these “shared sentiments,” this “community of feeling,” establish ourselves as distinct, autonomous beings. We may not defeat these tyrannies, but by battling against them we free ourselves from the grip of the small and large tyrannies that deform American society.
Part 1 of this study introduced the subject and discussed the psychological and political methods used to control our minds. Part 2 will consider the medical and technological methods used and explain what is necessary to win this war.
MedicalMind Control
Mind control methods extend far beyond childhood terrorization reinforced by other psychological as well as political methods in their various forms.
Most notoriously, no doubt, among his other ‘experiments’, Dr. Josef Mengele supposedly studied mind-control at Auschwitz, with these ‘medical’ experiments sometimes leading to the death of his subjects.
A Freedom of Information document in 2010 exposed the ongoing, if relabeled, work of MK-Ultra – the illegal human experimentation program initiated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1950s which employed many former Nazi and (Italian) fascist scientists (discussed further below) – including some of its less savoury elements such as its torture of children ostensibly in its conduct of ‘mind control’ experiments. See ‘MK-ULTRA: CIA Mind Control, Sleeper Cells and Child Kidnappings’.
Other research has documented how much of MK-Ultra’s ‘medical torture’ was conducted within and beyond US borders, secretly and without the consent of those impacted, including on indigenous children and black prisoners. One Canadian victim testified in court that she had been held against her will and that her torturers ‘drugged her with LSD and other substances, subjected her to electroshock treatments, and exposed her to auditory indoctrination’ as part of their attacks on her mind. See ‘New Docs Link CIA to Medical Torture of Indigenous Children and Black Prisoners’.
But for a reasonably comprehensive and horrific overview of the US government’s longstanding and ongoing efforts to subvert the autonomy, including mental autonomy, of its citizenry – including identification and description of key programs beyond MK-Ultra, such as ‘Cointelpro’ (‘a series of secret projects conducted by the FBI between 1956 and 1971 aimed at “neutralizing political dissidents”… [by] “making them incapable of engaging in political activity by whatever means.”’) – see ‘U.S. Government Projects & Programs That Have Included Criminal and Unethical Actions Against Civilians’.
This account documents many US government programs, such as that labeled ‘Project Bluebird’ (later relabeled ‘Project Artichoke’), which was designed to deliberately create dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities) ‘using trauma and inhumane practices for the purposes of mind control’, and ‘Northwoods’, designed ‘to trick the American public and international community into supporting a war by attacking and killing innocent U.S. citizens and blaming it on terrorism’. See ‘Trauma-Based Victimization & Mind Control – Overview’. But there are many other examples carefully described, documented and illustrated on this website.
These projects, like others, were not the work of some fringe agency but again used Nazi scientists as well as a long list of prestigious US institutions, corporations and military bases as locations for the experimentation. See ‘Project Monarch: Nazi Mind Control’.
But medical mind control is not limited to secretive work by government agencies, corporations and ‘research’ institutions. Many versions of it are imposed openly on society with devastating consequences.
Most notably, since early in his now very long career, ‘the conscience of psychiatry’ Dr Peter Breggin has ‘continued to develop the brain-disabling principle of psychiatric treatment. It states that all physical treatments in psychiatry – drugs, electroshock and psychosurgery – disable the brain and that none improve brain function.’ See ‘The Brain-Disabling Principle of Psychiatric Treatment’ in ‘Psychiatric Reform Accomplishments’.
In his extensive body of work – elaborated in The Conscience of Psychiatry: The Reform Work of Peter R. Breggin, MD – Breggin has exposed and often effectively campaigned to halt a long series of invasive psychiatric interventions against those people unfortunately targeted by ‘organized psychiatry, drug companies, and government agencies’. The book also offers ‘a probing critique of the psychopharmaceutical complex.’ If you prefer to read a summary (up to 2008) of Dr Breggin’s work to defend the human mind, you can do so at ‘Psychiatric Reform Accomplishments of Peter Breggin, M.D., 1954 to the Present’.
But Dr Breggin, with the support of his wife Ginger, is still campaigning to defend your mind, most recently against the threats posed by the Covid-19 ‘vaccine’ with its mind- and life-destroying ingredients including nanotechnology (which is discussed further in the section headed ‘Technological Mind Control’ below). See ‘Blurring Lines: Nanotechnology, Vaccines, and Control’.
Beyond these measures, however, the public has long suffered the deliberate release into communities of both ‘approved’ pharmaceutical drugs and ‘illegal’ drugs which are designed to control the mind of those impacted, even if it is just done by making people mentally and, hence, socially dysfunctional.
Of course, medical mind control is also deployed as one of the weapons used to control victims of torture in which psychiatrists have also long been willingly complicit. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’.
Technological Mind Control
Unfortunately, however, as horrifically effective as long-standing psychological, political and medical mind control measures have been already, there are many new weapons in the arsenals of those intent on controlling our minds. These mind control weapons are technological and, with most of the research driven by the intelligence and military communities within national governments, these efforts have been well funded and made steady progress during the C20th and advanced rapidly after World War II.
Hence, a human future worth living – which presumably includes a mind capable of conceiving and manifesting individual identity, freedom and free will – now hangs by a thread.
So this means that, in addition to the four points explained in the ‘Rage Against the War Machine’ article cited above, the traditional focus by antiwar activists on the threat posed by wars generally and the threat posed by nuclear weapons particularly is failing to take into account two vital elements of the overall threat: the ancient war on the mind that is now being enhanced by a wide range of technocratic control weapons and, as an extension of this, the manner in which war-fighting is being technocratized to remove humans from the picture altogether.
The latter development which, to reiterate, is an extension ofthe rapidly advancing mind control, means that we are almost at the point when a transhuman individual suitably placed in the chain of command could be ‘ordered’ by an artificial intelligence (AI) program to launch full-scale nuclear war.
Which means that the challenges for both freedom activists and anti-war activists, as well as any ‘ordinary’ human being, are far greater in this rapidly advancing technocratic age than at any previous time in human history.
Building on long-standing techniques to manipulate previously terrorized people into feeling, thinking and doing what they are told, particularly since World War II the Elite has sought technological means of mind control as well.
At its simplest, this has included the use of television as a weapon for mass mind control, which was already happening extensively by the 1960s. In a documentary demonstrating this, the presenters illustrate how a variety of techniques are used to manipulate viewers into holding the views endorsed by those intent on controlling the narrative. How this is done varies and, for example, ranges from the messaging itself – which might be overt or be concealed in such a way that it is only perceived unconsciously – to the rate of flicker which can alter the state of consciousness to make one more receptive to some form of programming. Watch ‘Ultimate TV Mind Control Documentary’.
Beyond this, however, enormous effort has gone into much more technologically direct forms of mind control.
Nevertheless, and despite the physically invasive nature of his earlier work, Delgado’s later work was done wirelessly, ‘with his most advanced efforts developed without electrode implants used at all’. That is, ‘he achieved the brain manipulating effects at a distance, without any physical contact or devices attached to the living creature being manipulated’. By changing the frequency and waveform on an experimental subject, ‘he could completely change their thinking and emotional state’. See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP pp.140-141.
Consequently, since the 1950s, a long series of technologies has been or is being developed which enhance the Elite capacity to control our minds in an enormous variety of ways, compromise our health, disable us, alter us genetically or kill us, as they choose. Needless to say, in the United States such efforts have garnered significant CIA and Defense Department support. Here is a sample of more of these technologies.
Among its other weapons possibilities, researchers Dr Nick Begich and Jeane Manning have explained how the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program – known as HAARP, a joint project of the United States Air Force and Navy based in Alaska and designed to study the ionosphere in order to develop new weapons technology – ‘could be used against humanity in a way that would change what people think, believe and feel.’ See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP p.8.
Citing Michael Hutchison’s 1990 book – see Mega Brain, New Tools and Techniques for Brain growth and Mind Expansion – which described how new technologies were being used to improve learning and memory but also for human behavior modification, Begwich and Manning noted that ‘External stimulation of the brain by electromagnetic means can cause the brain to be entrained or locked into phase with an external signal generator… overriding the normal frequencies causing changes in the brain waves; which then cause changes in brain chemistry; which then cause changes in brain outputs in the form of thoughts, emotions or physical condition…. brain manipulation can be either beneficial or detrimental to the individual being impacted.’
Writing in 2001, Begich and Manning go on to note that ‘The work in this area is advancing at a very rapid rate with new discoveries being made regularly…. Radio frequency radiation, acting as a carrier for extremely low frequencies (ELF), can be used to wirelessly entrain brain waves…. The power level needed to achieve a measure of control over brain activity is very small – from 5 to 200 microamperes – which is thousands of times less than the power needed to run a 60 watt light bulb…. The new tools include electrical cranial stimulation devices, sound systems, light pulse systems and a large variety of other brain entrainment and feedback devices.’ See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP pp.134-135.
Commenting on Hutchison’s 1994 sequel – see Mega Brain Power: Transform Your Life with Mind Machines and Brain Nutrients – which also highlighted the rapidity of developments in the field, Begich and Manning note that Hutchison was using his periodical Megabrain Report: The Psychotechnology Newsletter to discuss ‘technologies for healing nervous system disorders, correcting attention deficit and hyperactive disorders in children and curing drug and alcohol dependencies among other things.’ However, while they claimed that ‘Electromedicine of this type is emerging as one of the most exciting areas of medical research’, they lamented that ‘military research continues to look at these technologies as weapon systems rather than as human potential enhancing tools.’ The book devotes considerable attention to military research in the field that is not classified. See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP p.135.
In their detailed investigation of the mind control issue, Begich and Manning drew attention to the work of Dr. Patrick Flanagan, ‘one of America’s most gifted inventors’, who was ‘recognized for inventing what was the most advanced brain entrainment device, and possibly human-to-computer interface, on the planet – the Neurophone.’ That was in 1962. Years later, Flanagan noted that the HAARP project could be ‘the biggest brainentrainment device ever conceived’. According to HAARP records, at full power the device can send VLF and ELF waves using many wave forms at energy levels sufficient to affect entire regional populations. See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP p.136.
But why impact only ‘entire regional populations’?
Building on earlier work he had done investigating the psychophysiological impacts of ELF (extremely low frequency) field waves on living organisms – see ‘Psychophysiological Effects of Extremely Low Frequency Electromagnetic Fields: A Review’ – in a 1995 paper published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, Professor Michael A. Persinger concluded that ‘Within the last two decades… a potential has emerged which was improbable but which is now marginally feasible. This potential is the technical capability to influence directly the major portion of the approximately six billion brains of the human species through classical sensory modalities by generating neural information within a physical medium within which all members of the species are immersed.’ See ‘On the Possibility of Directly Accessing Every Human Brain by Electromagnetic Induction of Fundamental Algorithms’. And, of course, all human beings are immersed within the medium known as Earth’s atmosphere.
Begich and Manning discuss a range of mind control technologies including ‘brain biofeedback’ – which enables a person to learn how to manipulate their own brain waves, using a computer initially, in profound ways – thus offering the opportunity ‘to take greater control of ourselves through better control of our minds’. At its most benign, this technology has assisted people to reach higher meditative states, helped children suffering from attention deficit disorders and enabled adults to break drug and alcohol dependencies. Unfortunately: ‘It is disturbing to realize that governments are interested in these technologies, not for beneficial individual uses but in order to gain increased control over populations they view as dangerous. These technologies offer both great promise and a high potential for abuse.’ See Angels Don’t Play This HAARP p.138.
If you would like to watch an articulate, straightforward account of the development of some of the early technological methods of mind control, Dr Nick Begwich offers one in about eleven minutes from the 12:45 mark of this video: ‘NWO – The Battle For Your Mind & Body’. But an internet search will reveal a wide range of videos in which Begwich presents his research findings as well as his concerns.
Of course, this concern about how the technology could be deployed is shared by others.
One clear consequence of the continuation of the apparent politics of secrecy surrounding technologies enabling remote control of the human brain is that the governments, who own such technologies, could use them without having to consult public opinion. Needless to say, any meaningful democracy in today’s world could be disrupted, through secret and covert operations. It is not inconceivable that in the future, entire population groups subjected to mind control technologies, could be living in a ‘fake democracy’ where their own government or a foreign power could broadly shape their political opinions by means of mind control technologies. See ‘Electromagnetic and Informational Weapons: The Remote Manipulation of the Human Brain’.
And in 2018, Professor Antoine Jérusalem explained progress made in using sound waves to control the human mind. Describing ‘non-invasive neuromodulation – changing brain activity without the use of surgery’ Jérusalem explains it thus: ‘the principle of non-invasive neuromodulation is to focus ultrasound waves into a region in the brain so that they all gather in a small spot. Then hopefully, given the right set of parameters, this can change the activity of the neurons.’ The aim is to control the neuronal activity without damaging the brain tissue. While keen to acknowledge potential benefits, Jérusalem concedes inherent problems. How dystopian could it get? ‘I can see the day coming where a scientist will be able to control what a person sees in their mind’s eye, by sending the right waves to the right place in their brain.’ He advocates regulation. See ‘Mind control using sound waves? We ask a scientist how it works’.
Of course, research in the field of technological manipulation of the mind is not confined to the West with countries like China doing considerable research in the field as well. The People’s Liberation Army is considering a variety of psychological warfare technologies ‘that it envisions leveraging for future operations. These include advanced computing, especially big data and information processing; brain science, especially brain imaging; and legacy proposals that remain of interest, including sonic weapons, laser weapons, subliminal messaging, and holograms.’ See ‘Chinese Next-Generation Psychological Warfare: The Military Applications of Emerging Technologies and Implications for the United States’.
As you might have expected, the most recent efforts at technological mind control have included research into the use of nanotechnology. In their research on the subject, Prithiv K. R. Kumar & Albert Alukal explained, with a sequence of images, how nanotechnology could be delivered into a specific part of the brain and what constituents would be required to achieve particular outcomes, including in relation to brain damage repair. See ‘Control of Mind using Nanotechnology’.
And Tyler Nguyen and colleagues wrote another paper that cites shortcomings in some approaches to ‘brain stimulation’ and goes on to discuss the possibility of using ‘magnetoelectric nanoparticles’ (MENs) which was originally proposed in 2012 but later demonstrated. ‘The nanoparticles can be injected into a vein or via intranasal administration, forced to cross the blood–brain barrier (BBB) and consequently localized to a target region by applying a magnetic field gradient…. The unique properties of MENs, due to their small size (~ 30 nm)… may provide significant improvements over currently used techniques in efficacy and tissue penetration for noninvasive brain stimulation.’ See ‘In Vivo Wireless Brain Stimulation via Non-invasive and Targeted Delivery of Magnetoelectric Nanoparticles’.
But as Ana Maria Mihalcea MD, PhD elaborates her own research in this field, she highlights ‘the capability of the Nanotechnology in the C19 injections as well as the Nanotechnology we inhale via geoengineering chemtrails and food supply to control the human mind.’ She goes on to write: ‘All aspects of human functioning can be altered in the brain without the recipient of the technology knowing it…. Quantum Dots, Carbon Nanotubes (Graphene) and Lipid Nanoparticles creating Hydrogel are all components discussed previously in my posts.’ See the following article and earlier ones accessible below it: ‘“Control of Mind Using Nanotechnology” – 2020 Scientific Paper Explains Complete Thought and Brain Control through Nanotechnology’.
And lest you think that geoengineering nanoparticles can’t be a serious problem, Dane Wigington’s recent interview of an anonymous whistleblowing scientist working in the agricultural sector in the U.S. reveals a program that sprays 40 million tons of nanoparticles onto the Earth’s surface annually. Of course, given the range of functions that nanoparticles can be designed to perform, we can only speculate on the proportion of these nanoparticles sprayed that might be devoted to mind control. Watch ‘Nanoparticle Contamination Cover-up: Answers from a Scientist’.
And in the last of her trilogy of books on geoengineering, Geoengineered Transhumanism: How the Environment Has Been Weaponized by Chemicals, Electromagnetism & Nanotechnology for Synthetic Biology Elana Freeland notes that ‘Millions of “neurograins” collecting and communicating data to remote hubs are now in all human brains…. “Absolute limits” are now about tininess, the micro, nano, pico, and femto of particles whose extraordinary power is disguised as insignificant but actually hands over the keys to the kingdom of remote control over bodies and brains to those who control technology proximate to the subatomic quantum threshold.’
In an interview on the subject, Freeland simply observes: ‘They prepped us for 20 years with what we breathed in [the nanoparticles – mainly metals such as Barium, Strontium, Aluminum (the worst for humans), Chromium, Lithium… – they dropped on us] and now one of the things that’s going in through the jab [Covid-19 injection] is software and hardware, microprocessors, so that the 5G, 6G systems – and notice I am including 6G I want to make that clear: There is 6G out as well. It’s just that they have not announced it but it’s up and running – … this nanotechnology that I am talking about can run our behaviour, our thoughts, our feelings and our emotions. And I am not talking about the future.’ Watch ‘Slobodni podcast #27 Elana Freeland’.
As much as I appreciate Babáček’s long-standing efforts, there is no prospect of this happening given Elite plans to control the mind of every individual living.
Hence, we must resist it ourselves.
Strategically Resisting Efforts to Control Our Minds
Elite efforts to control our minds are long-standing, multifaceted and sophisticated although most trigger people’s (unconscious) fear as a basic component of their efforts.
Terrorized during childhood into submissive obedience to authority, bamboozled by a staggering array of mind control techniques and technologies of which there is almost zero public awareness, entranced by the latest technological gadget while reassured by the delusional promise of greater ‘privacy, security and convenience’, only a rare human is perceiving how these individual components are just parts in an overarching program that is progressively drawing us into a trap which will render those of us left alive into transhuman slaves within the technocratic walls of the Elite’s ‘smart’ cities.
Thus, for example, the vast number of people who accept payment to do Elite bidding – including those working in the public relations, propaganda, censorship and technological mind control industries – have clearly been terrorized out of their moral autonomy and, hence, are incapable of perceiving and acting in concert with the general human interest.
But most people are already so entrapped by a combination of Elite measures that there is no realistic prospect, in the timeframe available, of helping them to escape Elite influence sufficiently to survive the current range of threats to their identity, privacy, security, freedom and life by resisting these threats effectively.
Unfortunately, this includes most people who were able to perceive the delusions presented to us in relation to the ‘virus’, injectables and the various mandates.
Thus, the number of people capable of resisting effectively (that is, strategically) the foundational components of the Elite program is relatively few.
But if you regard yourself as one of these individuals, then here are the key things you need to be doing to maximize the prospects of your children having minds of their own and to defend a future worth living.
Tragically, we are at a point in human history when the obstacles to retaining autonomy over one’s mind are enormous. But how a child is parented is the most crucial variable in the ultimate outcome for the individual.
And if you have retained sufficient control over you own mind, then you will know, intuitively if not intellectually, that resisting the Elite’s complex and sophisticated program is going to require considerable effort both by you as an individual and by those we can mobilize to respond powerfully too. And this will not include lobbying or petitioning Elite agents. See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’
In essence, this means that your resistance to the Elite program must be strategic. If it is not, Elite insanity will ensure that sufficient and, if necessary, overwhelming violence will be inflicted on us to compel compliance with their will. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.
So if you are committed to being strategic in your resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.
More simply, and as a minimum, you can download the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 23 languages (Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Slovak and Turkish) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘One-page Flyer’.
And you might also consider organizing or participating in a local strategy to halt the deployment of 5G, given its crucial role in making the Elite’s ‘smart city’ technocratic prisons function. See ‘Halting the Deployment of 5G’.
If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.
Moreover, if this strategic resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram or Signal groups (with links accessible from the website).
Conclusion
Most humans laud the idea of ‘a free society’ and’ freedom of the individual’ but don’t even realise that what we most need is freedom of the mind. We pay lip service to the rights to freedom of thought, expression and conscience but lack the powerful mind necessary to meaningfully exercise these rights, often settling for superficial symbols of ‘freedom’ such as the right to choose the form of our exploitation employment, how we spend our spare time, the sporting team we support, and the style and color of our hair and clothing.
The reality is that we are terrorized throughout childhood into submissive obedience to authority leaving us highly vulnerable to the comprehensive range of psychological, political, medical and technological weapons directed against our minds. In this circumstance, identifying the truth about what is really happening in the world is a challenge far too great for most people.
Moreover, in the situation we now face, even among those who have been able to perceive the most obvious delusions being presented to them, the bulk of these individuals have proven incapable of doing little more than complaining powerlessly, begging an Elite agent to ‘go easy’ on them (by lobbying or petitioning a government or international organization such as the World Health Organization), cross-posting the latest irrelevant post from one social media platform to another, possibly advocating unspecified ‘resistance’ (or strategically irrelevant action), or attending a protest demonstration.
Seeking out and applying strategic means of resistance to the overall Elite program – the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ with its fourth industrial revolution (technocratic), eugenicist and transhumanist components – or recognizing it when offered, has remained beyond them.
Hence, any candid assessment of the evidence presented above leads to one conclusion: The Elite war on human minds is now so advanced and effective that death or transhuman slavery for everyone on Planet Earth is virtually inevitable.
As Steve Biko noted all those years ago: ‘The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.’
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
-Steve Biko, South African freedom fighter, beaten to death in an Apartheid prison cell in 1977.
So you think that you make up your own mind about what you will do, how you will do it, what you will buy and so on.
Good, because that is what you are supposed to believe. Especially when you are thinking what others want you to think.
Most of us like to believe that we have ‘a mind of our own’.
But, in fact, any serious consideration of the evidence leads to the exact opposite conclusion. In the vast majority of cases, you haven’t had a mind that was yours since you were very young. At least on anything that really matters in your life.
Hence, I have argued, it is important to understand the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’, with its fourth industrial revolution (technocratic), eugenicist and transhumanist programs, as simply the latest manifestation of this 5,000-year war on Homo Sapiens during which Elites (local, ‘national’, ultimately global) have used a range of policies to contrive ‘great events’ – orchestrated wars and famines; slavery; human sacrifice; imperialism and colonialism; economic exploitation through contrived financial crises (including depressions); ‘natural’ disasters, revolutions and ‘medical’ crises to name the most obvious – to distract attention from and facilitate profound changes in world order, to kill off substantial proportions of the human population and enslave those left alive while obscuring vast transfers of wealth from ordinary people to the Elite (whether local, ‘national’ or, ultimately, global). See ‘Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until “You’ll Own Nothing.”’
Both of these nuclear attacks are readily identifiable as measures consistent with the explicit Elite program to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population.
Thus, while I have previously identified four fundamental shortcomings in the efforts of anti-war activists over the past 100 years, which together account for the movement’s failure to have any impact in undermining war as an institution – see ‘Rage Against the War Machine: What Rage? “When will they ever learn?”’ – it is also clear that another very old threat, now being embellished by new and more pernicious forms, is being ignored too.
So, as I have become increasingly aware over recent years, there is another entire dimension of war-fighting that is only being discussed at the margin and must be considered and addressed not only by those committed to ending war but by anyone who values human life, identity, freedom and free will.
Because, as is manifestly obvious to those investigating more deeply and as captured in the title of this article, there is a battle now being fought in the technocratic realm and it is being waged against all of humanity simultaneously, not just a particular population.
In essence, this battle is the final battle in the war being fought to control your mind.
To put this another way, a primary battlefield of what many now call fifth-generation warfare (5GW) is your mind and who controls it. What is 5GW? It is defined by James Corbett in the following terms: ‘Fifth-generation warfare is an all-out war that is being waged against all of us by our governments and the international organizations to which they belong. It is being waged against each and every one of us right now, and it is a battle for full-spectrum dominance over every single aspect of your life: your movements and interactions, your transactions, even your innermost thoughts and feelings and desires. Governments the world over are working with corporations to leverage technology to control you down to the genomic level, and they will not stop until each and every person who resists them is subdued or eliminated.’ See ‘Your Guide to 5th-Generation Warfare’.
But, to reiterate the distinction in Corbett’s words: 5th Generation warfare is ‘being waged at all levels, not just the mental.’ and any review of the ‘Great Reset’ plans demonstrates the extraordinary breadth and depth of the control now being imposed.
Nevertheless, control of our minds is central to the war being fought and any successful defense in this war requires that we identify the threats to our mind and defend ourselves adequately against them. Otherwise we are poorly placed to identify and defend against all of the other threats.
Of course, using less invasive but still very effective weapons, the war to control your mind is ancient and it is this component on which this article is focused both because it is extremely advanced and is necessary if other components of the Elite plan are to be fully implemented.
Ancient? In fact, several authors have addressed this subject. For example, in their 2015 book on the subject, Marie D. Jones and Larry Flaxman observed that:
Mind control is probably as old as our awareness that we each had a mind of our own. Throughout the course of history, there are a number of names for mind control that describe a common goal: to take over a person’s innermost thoughts and control his or her behaviors and actions. Brainwashing, coercion, thought reform, mental manipulation, psychological warfare, programming, conversion, gas lighting, indoctrination methods, psychic driving, crowd control: They all describe a method by which a person’s individual thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions are disrupted, dismissed, and destroyed – even replaced with the thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions of someone else. Whether designed to create the perfect assassin or super soldier, indoctrinate prisoners of war, recruit members into a cult or religious belief system, or control the consuming masses and direct their behaviors in accordance to the political whims of the day, mind control has been used extensively in our past, is in use today, and no doubt will be used in the future. See Mind Wars: AHistory of Mind Control, Surveillance, and Social Engineering by the Government, Media, and Secret Societies.
And by 1956 Joost A. M. Meerloo, M.D. had already written a book canvassing a wide spectrum of mind control techniques and technologies in a variety of categories with, for just one example, an insightful discussion on how readily justice is subverted within legal systems by such techniques and technologies. See The Rape of the Mind.
Anyway, for the purposes of this article, I have distinguished four distinct categories of mind control, which have evolved at different times historically. I then explain each in turn. In chronological order, I label these different categories as follows:
This war, to briefly reiterate its essential nature, has its basis in the manner in which human adults – as parents, teachers, religious figures and in other roles – use a potent combination of ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence to terrorize children and adolescents into submissive obedience under the pretext of ‘socializing’ them. See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
This works well for the Elite because it creates a human population that readily follows orders from parents, teachers, religious figures, employers, police, judges, military personnel, governments and anyone else ‘in authority’.
Hence, human societies everywhere are essentially populated with adults who are easily scared into uncritically obeying Elite directives, conveyed through a variety of its agents, as the past 3.5 years have graphically demonstrated. But because the fear is largely unconscious, most adults can easily be led to believe they are acting out of their own free will or, at worst, following ‘reasonable’ orders ‘for the good of the community’.
Moreover, this can occur for a number of reasons. Denied safe opportunities to focus on feeling their fear and terrorized out of expressing their anger and other feelings during childhood – the logical response to ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ or ‘utterly invisible’ violence inflicted by an adult – the child ‘learns’ a range of ways to suppress awareness of these feelings, almost invariably unconsciously, which is why their fear, anger and other feelings are not necessarily obvious to the person or those around them.
A variety of psychological mechanisms such as denial – denying the existence of a reality that frightens/angers in order to feel safe – and delusion – constructing a delusion in relation to a frightening/infuriating reality that cannot be denied or suppressed in order to feel safe – are everyday occurrences for most people. But these two psychological mechanisms are not the only ones. For one discussion of several key ways in which fear manifests but is unconsciously psychologically concealed by the individual, see ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’.
But another outcome of suppressing awareness of how one feels – including angry – also denies the child the awareness and capacity to defend themselves against violence and other injustices. As a result most children – even those who learn to ‘bully’ – end up acting very powerlessly in the face of violence and injustice as they grow up.
And this continues into adulthood. Having ‘learned’, under threat of violence from parents, teachers and other adults, not to defend themselves against their parents, teachers and other adults as a child, the child grows into an equally powerless adult.
Thus, in the current context of threats posed by the Elite program – the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ with its fourth industrial revolution (technocratic), eugenicist, transhumanist, political and economic components – even among those who have been able to perceive the most obvious delusions being presented to them, the bulk of these individuals have proven incapable of doing little more than complaining powerlessly, begging an Elite agent to ‘go easy’ on them (by lobbying or petitioning a government or international organization such as the World Health Organization), cross-posting the latest irrelevant post from one social media platform to another, possibly advocating unspecified resistance (or strategically irrelevant action), or attending a protest demonstration.
Seeking out and applying strategic means of resistance to the ‘Great Reset’, or recognizing and acting on it when offered, has remained beyond them.
But while childhood terrorization is enough to immobilize most people into behaving powerlessly under threat, Elite agents have also invested enormous effort to work out how best to capitalize on this fear. And while fear isn’t the only psychological motivator used, it is the most powerful, with more gross or subtle versions used depending on the context. As the historical record demonstrates.
Obviously, as you may know, there is an extensive history of psychological manipulation of human populations particularly in relation to mobilizing national populations to support and participate in wars, which any investigation of Elite-driven propaganda prior to and during wars will illustrate. But war is only one context in which human populations are psychologically manipulated by Elites. Much of the Elite propaganda around the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’, for example, was grounded in manipulating people’s fear.
Of course, the knowledge of how to manipulate us did not drop out of the sky. But while earlier periods of human history clearly demonstrate the Elite’s intuitive understanding that triggering fear was a powerful form of behavioural control, since World War II particularly, Elite-sponsored institutions, including governments, have invested enormous sums of money to find out, as precisely as possible, how to manipulate our psychological responses to stimuli in order to control our behaviour. An excellent example of these institutions is The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the UK, founded in 1947.
But as Dr Daniel Estulin has described in great detail in his book Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses, the Institute’s sanitized name – The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations – does not describe its real work.
‘The Tavistock Institute, in Sussex, England, describes itself as a nonprofit charity that applies social science to contemporary issues and problems. [In fact] it is the world’s center for mass brainwashing and social engineering activities. It grew from a somewhat crude beginning at Wellington House into a sophisticated organization that was to shape the destiny of the entire planet and, in the process, change the paradigm of modern society.’
The book details both the Tavistock Institute network – identifying connections to research institutes, think tanks, and the drug industry, including the Stanford Research Center, Rand Corporation, Harvard Business School and Office of Naval Research in the U.S. – demonstrating its enormous reach around the world, and exposes the methods of brainwashing and psychological warfare employed.
In the words of Estulin:
‘The essential premise of the work of Tavistock is… that certain kinds of democratic “institutions represent far more efficient instrumentalities for fascist dictatorship than the traditional, straightforwardly” authoritarian models…. The psychological sciences have followed the route initially outlined in 1945 by Dr. John Rawlings Rees, grand master of psywar counterinsurgency.’
Discussing the work of psychiatrist Rees, who wrote the book The Shaping of Psychiatry by War in 1945, Estulin observes that ‘Rees called for the development of psychiatric shock troops in order to develop “methods of political control based upon driving the majority of the human population toward psychosis” through procedures of so-called programmed behavioural modification. He proposed this to render the population submissive under the post-World War II economic world order.’ See Estulin Tavistock Institute p. 6.
And, to highlight the point that it is our fear that is the Elite’s greatest asset in this war against our minds (and trumps intelligence, no matter how great), intellectuals who, in theory, should be more capable of investigating what is happening in relation to those key issues of concern to society – such as those discussed here: ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals’ – are routinely exposed as simply frightened (again, even if unconsciously so) and support an Elite-driven narrative that is readily exposed by serious scrutiny.
And in his own study of ‘mind games’, psychologist Roy Eidelson argues that ‘five issues consistently and profoundly shape the way we understand ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. They are vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness. Each of these is a core concern and the basis for one of the questions I mentioned earlier: Are we safe? Are we treated fairly? Who should we trust? Are we good enough? Can we control what happens to us?’ Focusing on these questions which could, in theory, usefully be at the centre of an enlightened public policy, Elites specialize in producing misleading, self-serving and widely promulgated answers that usually ‘lead us away from the more equal and more humane society most of us desire’ in order to ‘exploit these concerns for the specific purpose of advancing their own narrow interests while bringing harm and suffering to so many.’ In his book, Eidelson goes on to explain these five core concerns and examines ‘the specific mind games that the 1% use to take advantage of them’. Given their power, Eidelson concludes that ‘it’s not surprising that these five concerns figure so prominently in the propaganda campaigns of plutocrats who aim to discourage resistance to their agenda.’ See Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible.
Beyond any specific measures, however, the sheer complexity and far-reaching nature of the Elite ‘Great Reset’ program is frightening for most people to contemplate, let alone investigate in detail. Thus, like some other books with a futuristic or dystopian perspective, Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock describes a phenomenon we are witnessing now: a population that is psychologically overwhelmed by the rate of change: ‘Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society.’ See Toffler Future Shock p.11. So unlike the traveler who can return home to a familiar culture, the victim of future shock cannot. There is no going back and this is fearfully disorienting for most people (and another reason why people submit to the injection: the hope that things will then ‘go back to normal’). The adverse psychological impact of the ‘Great Reset’ has been discussed by several commentators but few realized it was deliberate and why it was so.
The point is simple: as those involved in this research have long known, fear is the most important factor driving human behaviour.
And once that fear has been deeply embedded in the unconscious by childhood terrorization, it is a straightforward task, for those who know what they are doing, to manipulate it later in life in accord with Elite prerogatives.
But it also makes virtually all humans particularly vulnerable to other forms of mind control too, including those that are political.
Political Mind Control
Since the dawn of human civilization, history records a long and steady (if occasionally interrupted) process of Elite efforts to capture and control the minds of those people within their domain, sometimes coupled with efforts to expand that domain.
Whether intent on extorting labor, securing military service, payment of taxes or imposing other forms of control, a submissively obedient population made the task immeasurably easier.
And even when violence was used to impose physical control, it was occasionally accompanied, but almost invariably followed, by efforts to subdue the prospect of any further resistance using less physically violent means. For a thoughtful discussion of how illiteracy and then literacy, for example, have been historically exploited by Elites, see ‘Risen Word’.
But it wasn’t until the C19th century when ‘modern’ methods of political mind control started to be seriously developed and deployed.
Not content with the existing and highly effective psychological methods – again, all founded on terrorizing individuals throughout childhood into submissive obedience to parents, religious figures, school teachers, employers and other significant adults in the child’s life and designed to train the child for a life of servitude – development of political forms of mind control (including ‘news reporting’, advertising, propaganda and censorship) advanced dramatically during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Thus, at least since the emergence of the international news agencies that started in the 1830s, the quality of what qualifies as ‘news reporting’ has been steadily in decline although it is uncertain that there has been a time in history when news reporting actually reported any sort of objective truth. In one sense, this is understandable. Inevitably, those who own and control a media channel have a perspective and the outlet invariably reports from that perspective, declared or not. And provided we are aware of this, we may choose to consume news from a declared perspective or ignore it if not to our taste. In any case, it is a rare outlet in the C21st that publishes a range of perspectives.
In the corporate news world, however, these days we are bombarded with what is called ‘news’ through a variety of media: television, radio, newspapers and social media via the internet. But because the corporate (mainstream) news world is owned by the Elite and its agents who therefore control the major international news agencies (Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Associated Press and United Press International) as well as the major news corporations (such as Alphabet, Comcast, Disney, AT&T, News Corporation, Time Warner, Fox, Facebook, the BBC, Bertelsmann and Baidu), the population that chooses to pay attention to it is fed a uniform and carefully-crafted narrative which is designed to promote Elite interests. This is graphically illustrated in this brief video compilation. Watch ‘Local News Anchors Repeating Same Script Compilation’. There are no genuinely alternative worldviews in this domain.
Of course, these days, the education of journalists starts the process, with most journalists now attending a tertiary institution to learn their craft. But how effectively these institutions turn out graduates committed to unearthing and reporting the truth, whatever the cost, is something worth considering. Given the way news reporting is now so tightly controlled, while this article by Professor Bill Willers might illustrate an unusually graphic example of how news reporting has been corrupted, it will come as no surprise to those familiar with corporate journalism. See ‘What Is Taught in Schools of Journalism?’
Because the reality is that virtually every journalist in the corporate media world becomes a hack, employed to simply write and present stories from the scripts they are given that promote the Elite narrative. And any journalist with genuine integrity keen to report the truth is not employed. Or dismissed once exposed as a truth-teller.
Moreover, journalists with genuine integrity and courage – such as Julian Assange – must create outlets of their own and the Internet now features a significant number in this category. But this does not mean that their freedom to express views that contradict the Elite narrative is respected. Of course not! Just ask Assange, now imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years in Belmarsh prison following seven years imprisonment until losing his asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, for simply reporting the truth we are all entitled to know.
‘He ripped back the veil on the dark machinations of the U.S. Empire, the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lies, the corruption, the brutal suppression of those who attempt to speak the truth. The Empire intends to make him pay. He is to be an example to anyone who might think of doing what he did.’ See ‘The Crucifixion of Julian Assange’.
Needless to say, every journalist in a corporate or government media setting is well aware of Assange’s fate and, while some might make use of the tolerance occasionally afforded a slight variation on the Elite-driven narrative, cowed into submissively reporting what they know to be the permissible perspective. It is safer than risking jail. Or even unemployment.
The outcome of these combined factors is that, in essence, much of what is called ‘news reporting’ by the legacy (corporate) media is nothing more than propaganda. And this has been the case for a very long time.
This has particularly included the use of propaganda, often designed to play on unconscious fears, sophisticated enough to manipulate vast proportions of large national populations to do the bidding of those responsible for controlling the methods deployed. See the 1928 book Propaganda.
Most notably perhaps, in this case, was Adolf Hitler’s understanding of the ‘big lie’ in manipulating the German population during World War II and its use by his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who is (perhaps incorrectly) attributed with these words: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’ See ‘Joseph Goebbels: On the “Big Lie”’.
And, more recently, in a video interview, Professor Michel Chossudovsky thoughtfully discusses the importance of lies in various contexts, including in relation to 911, wars and the Covid-19 crisis. Watch ‘When The Lie Becomes The Truth’.
In fact, to reiterate, it has been the case for very many decades already that even the most basic communication in government and corporate media is effectively devoid of educational material or truthful information designed to inform you so that you can make your own thoughtfully-considered evaluation in response to it. For another account of this, written in 1988, see Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Of course, this is precisely how the Global Elite wants it and why it has unfolded this way.
For example, this article by Lara-Nour Walton at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) thoughtfully identifies six different ways that prominent corporate media outlets lie in relation to Israeli violence against the Palestinians, now including the use of artificial intelligence. See ‘Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage’.
For other work that thoughtfully teases out more of the nuances employed to manipulate our minds, you can read what the following authors have identified in their respective articles: Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino highlight that frequency of repetition makes something seem true; Jordan Hall points out the increasing difficulty of making sense of anything given the variety of plausible explanations deliberately promulgated; John Pilger reminds us of the value of ‘omission’ of relevant history, truths and facts; and Caitlyn Johnstone, among other points, mentions Elite efforts to ‘exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.’ See, respectively, ‘Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity’, ‘The War on Sensemaking’, ‘Silencing the Lambs: How Propaganda Works’ and ‘Why Propaganda Works’.
And, in an update to the ‘bread and circuses’ trick used in ancient Rome, another simple but extremely effective method is to make sure that most people are comfortable enough economically (if not made vulnerable by their marginal economic existence) while deluging us with a huge range of issues to consider as well as many forms of entertainment (sport, cinema, theatre, art galleries, museums…) and use these to distract us from any central issues. So, in the current context, while most people are debating the latest controversies in the recent game of football, tennis or basketball, and some others are arguing about whether or not the SARS-CoV-2 ‘virus’ exists, whether or not the various WHO-approved, government-imposed lockdowns and other measures were necessary, and whether or not the ‘vaccines’ are ‘safe and effective’, a multitude of other issues are presented (the war in Ukraine, a range of gender and sexual identity issues, environmental threats, economic and financial challenges… each with a range of subsidiary issues) to further overwhelm and confuse us. This works very well with people who are already busy with work, families, financial obligations and other responsibilities, and draws our attention away from the fundamental threat: the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’ and its component eugenicist, technocratic, transhumanist, political and economic programs.
[Obviously, I am not suggesting that other issues – the risk of nuclear war, many environmental and human rights threats… – are not vitally important too. It’s just that the current Elite program threatens to destroy our capacity to consider and engage in all other issues, such as those just nominated, if it is not defeated.]
Anyway, with so many tools at its disposal, the Elite’s political war against our minds is invisible to virtually everyone.
As you will not be surprised to read, these days, the political mind control industry is huge, embracing substantial sections of national economies.
So, with virtually all human adults effectively terrorized out of the capacity for independent thinking and investigation at a young age, once an Elite narrative has been decided, the relevant propaganda is then prepared by its agents in the massive ‘public relations’ industry, worth $US107billion globally in 2023 – see ‘Public relations market size worldwide from 2022 to 2027’ – before being promulgated through its agents in international organizations, governments, the corporate media (and a relatively new and powerful weapon: corporate social media such as Facebook, Twitter [now X], Instagram, TikTok, YouTube…), education systems and the entertainment industry, while its vast censorship network – see ‘Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know. The citizen’s starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel’ and ‘Docs Offer Glimpse Inside Censorship Industrial Complex’ – is deployed to ensure that the truth, labeled variously by Elite agents as ‘misinformation’ (false information unintentionally created or shared), ‘malinformation’ (information based on fact but used out of context to mislead, harm or manipulate) and ‘disinformation’ (false information deliberately created to mislead, harm or manipulate) – see ‘We’re in This Together. Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation Stops with You’ – is prevented from being widely exposed.
As you might have immediately realized, such definitions vastly expand the capacity of Elite agents to censor narratives that compete with the one that is endorsed by the Elite – that is, to suppress free speech – which, of course, is how they have been used. For more on this, see ‘A Century of Censorship’.
For example, the latest UN report on this subject uses a classically Orwellian newspeak to justify censorship in order to maintain ‘information integrity’. For the unwary, the superficially benign wording used in the report might conceal its true intent but you can judge for yourself from its opening paragraph which calls for an
‘empirically backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge. To that end, the present brief outlines potential principles for a code of conduct that will help to guide Member States, the digital platforms and other stakeholders in their efforts to make the digital space more inclusive and safe for all,
while vigorously defending the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to access information. The Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms is being developed
in the context of preparations for the Summit of the Future. My hope is that it will provide a gold
Given the Elite’s extensive history of using propaganda and censorship to control what people believe in order to manipulate their behaviour – while suppressing any forum that endeavours to share alternative perspectives, arguments and critiques – the problem with an ‘empirically backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge’ is that it simply means that Elite deceit, lies and manipulation would be shielded from scrutiny. Which is why this report is just another attempt to conceal Elite propaganda and censorship, in this case by labeling the Elite-endorsed narrative as the one with ‘information integrity’.
And this is why major international organizations such as the EU, WHO and UN are putting enormous effort into clamping down on those seeking to expose the truth behind Elite manipulation and manoeuvring.
As Taylor Hudak explains in a recent article about censorship proposals in the European Union, concern has been expressed about ‘loopholes that would allow the surveillance of journalists while paving the way for unprecedented interventions in the internal media market by the European Commission.’ See ‘Centralizing Information Control! Inside the EU’s Latest Proposal to Censor the Media’.
But any straightforward interpretation of the draconian censorship measures being introduced by the European Union leads to the obvious and inevitable conclusion that free speech is being terminated in Europe.
As Ben Bartee points out in an article summarizing three previous ones he has written: ‘Nation-states under EU jurisdiction can no longer be rationally said to be “free,” to the extent that they ever truly were to begin with. They are now part of a wholly integrated slave colony of the multinational technocracy, headed by the World Economic Forum and similar organizations outside of the reach of any democratic control.’ See ‘Brutal EU Censorship Regime Takes Hold, “Free Speech” Advocate Elon Musk Folds, YouTube Adopts WHO “Misinformation” Policy’.
Of course, not to be left out, the US military is vitally concerned with what we are led to believe as well and US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) ‘has contracted New York-based Accrete AI to deploy software that detects “real time” disinformation threats on social media. The company’s Argus anomaly detection AI software analyzes social media data, accurately capturing “emerging narratives” and generating intelligence reports for military forces to speedily neutralize disinformation threats. Synthetic media, including AI-generated viral narratives, deep fakes [a digitally manipulated image to replace one person’s likeness with that of another], and other harmful social media-based applications of AI, pose a serious threat to US national security and civil society,” Accrete founder and CEO Prashant Bhuyan claimed. ‘Social media is widely recognized as an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning vulnerabilities and manipulate behavior through the intentional spread of disinformation.’
But Accrete will also launch a business version of its Argus software for disinformation detection later this year. ‘The AI software will provide protection for “urgent customer pain points” against AI-generated synthetic media, such as viral disinformation and deep fakes. Providing this protection requires AI that can automatically “learn” what is most important to an enterprise and predict the likely social media narratives that will emerge before they influence behavior.’ See ‘USSOCOM to Use AI to Detect Disinformation Threats on Social Media’.
To reiterate: the purpose of this AI technology is for ‘military forces to speedily neutralize disinformation threats’; that is, anything that contradicts the Elite-driven narrative. Free speech is vanishing before our eyes.
But the threats keep accumulating.
In a recent publication on its iVerify initiative, the United Nations Development Program noted that ‘Understanding online information pollution is an urgent global challenge. Misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech threaten peace and security, disproportionately affecting those who are already vulnerable.’ Thus:
So how reliable is fact-checking in defense of the truth?
As it turns out, one recent study concludes that censorship now sometimes masquerades under the guise of ‘fact checking’. Originally an honorable attempt to confirm something as fact, it is now just a corrupt way of concealing censorship and eliminating truthful analysis from the discourse.
In her detailed report of her research into the fact checking industry, Dr Judith Brown identified about ‘500 active fact check platforms’ – noting that it is ‘likely that the number of fact check platforms is far greater than those located’ – with about half linked to media outlets. After explaining many aspects of the fact check industry, it is clear that it is big business. In her report she notes a long list of fact checking ‘grants and donations’ from such entities as the US National Endowment for Democracy, Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Open Society, Rockefeller Fund, the EU, American and European Embassies, large media corporations, Google, Meta, and various UN agencies. She concludes her report simply:
‘Fact checkers are the mechanism of censorship. They can only do this with immense sums of money that come from the rich and powerful to support their industry…. The fact check industry’s access to wealth and power undermines democracy throughout the world.’ See ‘Fact Checking the “Fact Checkers”’.
As Ilana Rachel Daniel notes in a recent video presentation: ‘The very definition of living in a free world means access to a full spectrum of information and choices where discussion and debate of those facts lead us to a life of self-determination.’ But in her two-part presentation, which acknowledges the work of Antonio Pasquali – see ‘Society can be controlled through its means of communication’ – she provides a fine overview of how mind manipulation is a polished art among those keen to control our behaviour and how their technologies (such as the television and smart phone) and tools (such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and the Metaverse) play a vital role in this. See ‘Mind Manipulation – Who is in Control? Part 1’ and ‘Mind Manipulation – Who is in Control? Part 2’.
In their analysis of censorship, John and Nisha Whitehead highlight the role of technology now too. ‘By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.’
In fact, the Whiteheads label this phenomenon ‘technocensorship’: ‘we are technically free to speak. In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official – or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube – may allow.’ See ‘Technocensorship: The Government’s War on So-Called Dangerous Ideas’.
And this depends, in part, on direction from government intelligence agencies.
As Larry Sanger, a cofounder of Wikipedia, noted in a recent interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald, the online ‘encyclopedia’ has ‘become an instrument of “control” in the hands of the… establishment, among which he counts the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies’. Noting that this was being observed as early as 2008, Sanger reports that ‘A great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online, on websites like Wikipedia.’
Of course, earlier this year, Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), released a trove of documents showing how the platform’s former executives colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden’ and ‘assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns’ on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies. And ‘Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also admitted that Facebook, the biggest social media platform on Earth, censored accurate information that was damaging to President Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign at the direct request of the FBI.’ See ‘Former Editor: CIA Moderating Wikipedia’.
But the number of hurdles to a mind free of control by outsiders just keeps expanding.
Elite agents routinely employ ‘trolls’: People employed as part of ‘online armies’ to secretly promote particular perspectives on social media. This distorts people’s sense of what is happening, and why, towards the Elite perspective promoted by the ‘trolls’. See, for example, ‘Inside Israel’s million dollar troll army’.
A more blunt tool of censorship is the use of cyber attacks to close down independent news outlets, as happened to the highly reputable but unforgivably independent outlet ‘SouthFront’ on 18 August 2023, thus destroying the public record of a large body of thought on vital issues. See ‘Cyber Attacks against Independent Media, Censorship and Double Standards’. Fortunately, after much effort, the site was restored at a new Internet address: ‘SouthFront’.
Already victims of psychological mind control from childhood, and now under the barrage of Elite propaganda and the cover provided by massive censorship, relatively few people were capable of investigating the evidence for themselves: Had a unique pathogenic ‘virus’ been isolated (when none had been previously)? Were the measures taken – lockdowns, mask-wearing, PCR testing, mandatory injections – scientifically justified? What else was going on behind the scenes? Which should have led to discovery of the obscured but profound threat posed by the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’ – with its related fourth industrial revolution, eugenicist and transhumanist programs – and consideration of what it all meant for themselves and those they love.
The point is simple: Elite control of most human minds is already so extensive that most people are disinclined to even countenance an alternative to the Elite-driven narrative. For an illustration of this, see ‘The Corona War. They’re Coming After Our Thoughts’.
But if someone does decide to challenge or expose Elite dogma in a particular context, there is yet another hurdle they might be required to navigate. Elite agents (and those in their thrall) might seek to discredit the offending individual. One way of attempting this is by applying the label ‘conspiracy theorist’ to the person concerned. This tactic has been used extensively, and effectively, since the 1950s, scaring many people into renouncing the evidence and conscientious beliefs that shaped their original perspective while scaring many others into believing that the truth-teller was lying.
As explained by academic philosopher David Coady, use of the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ serves ‘a function similar to that served by the term “heresy” in medieval Europe. In both cases these are terms of propaganda, used to stigmatise and marginalise people who have beliefs that conflict with officially sanctioned or orthodox beliefs of the time and place in question.’ See ‘In defence of conspiracy theories (and why the term is a misnomer)’.
In essence, navigating the psychological and political hurdles that stand in our way to knowing and acting on the truth is an enormous challenge. Unfortunately, these are not all.
Part 2 of this study will consider the medical and technological methods used to control our minds and explain what is necessary to win this war.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”—H.L. Mencken
First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers.
In light of the government’s tendency to exploit crises (legitimate or manufactured) and capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state, one has to wonder what so-called crisis it will declare next.
It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.
Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what the nature of the next national emergency might be (terrorism, civil unrest, economic collapse, a health scare, or the environment) as long as it allows the government to lockdown the nation and justify all manner of tyranny in the so-called name of national security.
As David C. Unger writes for the New York Times: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”
Here’s what we know: given the rate at which the government keeps devising new ways to establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems at taxpayer expense, each subsequent crisis ushers in ever larger expansions of government power and less individual liberty.
This is the slippery slope to outright tyranny.
You see, once the government acquires (and uses) authoritarian powers—to spy on its citizens, to carry out surveillance, to transform its police forces into extensions of the military, to seize taxpayer funds, to wage endless wars, to censor and silence dissidents, to identify potential troublemakers, to detain citizens without due process—it does not voluntarily relinquish them.
The lesson for the ages is this: once any government is allowed to overreach and expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. As Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe recognizes, “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable.”
Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.
In this way, every crisis since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government.
Each crisis has also been a test to see how far “we the people” would allow the government to sidestep the Constitution in the so-called name of national security; a test to see how well we have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly we’ll march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance we offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.
Most critically of all, it has been a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—could survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.
Unfortunately, we’ve been failing this particular test for a long time now.
Indeed, the powers-that-be have been pushing our buttons and herding us along like so much cattle since World War II, at least, starting with the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, which not only propelled the U.S. into World War II but also unified the American people in their opposition to a common enemy.
That fear of attack by foreign threats, conveniently torqued by the growing military industrial complex, in turn gave rise to the Cold War era’s “Red Scare.” Promulgated through government propaganda, paranoia and manipulation, anti-Communist sentiments boiled over into a mass hysteria that viewed anyone and everyone as suspect: your friends, the next-door neighbor, even your family members could be a Communist subversive.
By the time 9/11 rolled around, all George W. Bush had to do was claim the country was being invaded by terrorists, and the government used the USA Patriot Act to claim greater powers to spy, search, detain and arrest American citizens in order to keep America safe.
Despite the fact that the breadth of the military’s power to detain American citizens violates not only U.S. law and the Constitution but also international laws, the government has refused to relinquish its detention powers made possible by the NDAA.
Then Donald Trump took office, claiming the country was being invaded by dangerous immigrants and insisting that the only way to keep America safe was to expand the reach of the border police, empower the military to “assist” with border control, and essentially turn the country into a Constitution-free zone.
That so-called immigration crisis then morphed into multiple crises (domestic extremism, the COVID-19 pandemic, race wars, civil unrest, etc.) that the government has been eager to use in order to expand its powers.
Joe Biden, in turn, has made every effort to expand the reach of the militarized police state, pledging to hire 87,000 more IRS agents and 100,000 police officers, and allowing the FBI to operate as standing army.
What the next crisis will be is anyone’s guess, but you can be sure that there will be a next crisis.
So, what should you expect if the government decides to declare another state of emergency and institutes a nationwide lockdown?
You should expect more of the same, only worse.
More compliance, less resistance.
More fear-mongering, mind-control tactics and less tolerance for those who question the government’s propaganda-driven narratives.
Most of all, you should expect more tyranny and less freedom.
Given the government’s past track record and its long-anticipated plans for using armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems in response to a future crisis, there’s every reason to worry about what comes next.
Mark my words: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if and when another crisis arises—if and when a nationwide lockdown finally hits—if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public— then we will truly understand the extent to which the powers-that-be have fully succeeded in acclimating us to a state of affairs in which the government has all the power and “we the people” have none.
In the meantime, if all we do to reclaim our freedoms and regain control over our runaway government is vote for yet another puppet of the Deep State, by the time the next crisis arises, it may well be too late.
Infinite Jest is frequently attention-repellent. David Foster Wallace’s brick-sized novel is physically challenging, an 800g book that forces you to flick back and forth to the errata. This is not optional. Major plot points hinge on throwaway glosses.
I was a bratty, bookish 15-year-old when it was published in 1996. A 1,000-page-plus novel bloated with endnotes that have their own footnotes was an irresistible challenge. David Foster Wallace was not an obscurantist in his own literary taste — he taught Stephen King and Thomas Harris at Illinois state university — but Infinite Jest is a book at bloody-minded war with its own bookness. With its maddening excess of information that you must hold in your hand as best you can, it feels more like the internet.
As well as being attention-repellent, it is also sometimes just repellent. There are scenes of comedically extreme horror: a woman dying after the handbag that holds her artificial heart is snatched from her, a man dying in his own filth while obsessively watching reruns of M*A*S*H, a dog dragged behind a car until all that’s left is a leash, a collar and a “nubbin”. Before livestreamed mass shootings and animal cruelty for clicks, Wallace knew that the grisly and grotesque was what the public wanted.
He did not see the future. But he saw the forces shaping the future, and understood the ways they would deform people in turn.
In an aside, Wallace writes about how, with the introduction of the “Teleputer” (what we would call a laptop), video calls enjoyed huge popularity, followed by dramatic decline. Users quickly discover that being seen is enormously anxiety-inducing, partly because it means you must visibly be paying attention to the other party at all times, partly because you must also pay attention to how you look when making a call.
The answer to this anxiety is, first, “high definition masking” — a flattering composite of the user’s face digitally overlaid on the screen. Then comes actual masking — hyperreal rubber versions of the user’s face that can be quickly strapped on for calls. Eventually, in response to this “stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance”, consumers revert to audio-only, which is now “culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity”.
This divide between the real and the represented has been borne out by our experience of Zoom, Instagram and TikTok: filters are now so advanced that they can be applied to moving images, and you can digitally beautify yourself while livestreaming. Only instead of resorting to rubber masks, we remodel the flesh itself: “filter face” tweakments, intended to bring the human closer to the digital ideal, are on the rise. Wallace was right about the way pervasive exposure to our own image would break us. It’s just that the way we’ve responded is, somehow, even more dystopian than he imagined.
Infinite Jest’s near future is now our near past, and in 2008, Wallace killed himself after suffering decades of profound depression. By the middle of the next decade, his greatest novel had been recast as a byword for tedious white masculinity, the author himself cancelled. This was, at least in the biographical sense, deserved. In 1990, Wallace had met the poet Mary Karr. He was a resident in a halfway house, she was a volunteer, and he became obsessed with her. They dated, they broke up, then he assaulted and stalked her. In 2018, Karr tweeted that he had “tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son age 5 home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on.”
The novel includes multiple men in recovery steeping in the shame of their past violence, and it would be nice to imagine that this was Wallace examining his own conscience. On the other hand, it also includes a reciprocated love story between the large, lunkish, David-Foster-Wallace-ish character Don Gately, and the beautiful, idealised, Mary-Karr-ish Joelle van Dyne. Infinite Jest was, arguably, an implement of his ongoing harassment and should not be dishonestly mined for signs of redemption.
Still, it is a very contemporary thing to demand moral purity in artists: the kind of impulse that, perhaps, comes from seeking simplicity when far too much knowing is possible. “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” asked Claire Dederer, as though to be an audience is inevitably to be an accomplice. Good art can be made by people who’ve done bad things, and perhaps only a monstrous man can faithfully portray the outlines of his own monstrosity. Reading is not an act of worship, although one of the problems for Infinite Jest is that certain male readers have treated it as such.
And so, Infinite Jest has plummeted from literary touchstone to confirmed red flag. In a viral tweet from 2020 listing “Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man’s Bookshelf”, the first item was “A dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest”. The “dog-eared” was important: it was the act of having read it, rather than posing as someone who might read it, that sounded the klaxon.
But unread copies could be equally alarming: when the actor Jason Segal bought Infinite Jest in preparation for playing Wallace in a film, he recalled that the female bookseller rolled her eyes and said: “Every guy I’ve ever dated has an unread copy on his bookshelf.” Nicole Cliffe made it number four on her catalogue of “Books that Literally All White Men Own”.
I have never run into a “DFW guy” — they’re probably more of an American campus thing. But I ran into the “Philip Roth guy” at university and recognise the type: clammy, proprietorial, forcing his literary taste on girls in lieu of forcing himself. That I had read Infinite Jest felt vaguely embarrassing. All that effort, and it turned out the most high-status option would have been to not read it and then be glibly dismissive.
It’s perversely appropriate that Infinite Jest ended up holding such a key place in the vocabulary of this irony-bound strand of performative feminism, because irony was one of the things that Wallace was both appalled and fascinated by. In a 1993 essay, he writes that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in US culture.”
Infinite Jest isn’t above irony, but it often pits itself against irony. “It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy,” thinks one character. Another feels an “aftertaste of shame after revealing passion of any belief and type when with Americans, as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief” (the weird syntax is because this character is Quebecois). When sincerity is untenable, it becomes easier to engage with symbols than things.
Over and again in the novel, the “real” gets displaced by the representation, like the rubber faces that can replace flesh ones on video calls. One of the centrepiece scenes of Infinite Jest features a geopolitical strategy game called Eschaton — a kind of Risk, but played by teenagers with balls and rackets to stand for missiles. The game comes violently undone when the players start hitting each other and the referee can’t work out how to distinguish between the territory and the map. As for the M*A*S*H-obsessive, “crucial distinctions had collapsed” between the fiction and the real.
And maybe this is connected to the novel’s weirdly well-informed interest in transsexuality. The gender ideology that makes front-page news now was a niche interest in the Nineties, confined mostly to academic papers and message boards for transitioners. Wallace’s inclusion of a young, effeminate, gay, “gender-dysphoric” character and a middle-aged, masculine, straight crossdresser suggests a hefty familiarity with the sexology literature long before any of this had crossed into the mainstream — it’s effectively a thumbnail sketch of the influential theory, developed by Ray Blanchard in the Eighties and Nineties, that male transsexuality divides into “two types”, the autogynephiliac and the homosexual.
But it also fits with the vision of an America where the signifiers that stand for “woman” hold more weight than the physical fact of femaleness. Gender as we experience it now — the idea of an “essence” or “true self” that renders the material body irrelevant — couldn’t have come to exist without the internet. Only when technology allowed people to present themselves as pure language, signifier unmoored from signified, did it become possible to believe that sex was malleable or unreal. Maybe transsexuality fascinated Wallace because he saw it as another way that humans confuse the symbol with the thing itself, the feminine with the female.
This summer, I started rereading Infinite Jest, mostly out of curiosity. It is, still, a very annoying book. But there’s something I didn’t understand about it in 1996 that I do now I’m older than Wallace was when he wrote it. He saw American culture as an exhausted force, trapped smirking in a hall of mirrors. And he saw that getting worse as screens extended their influence.
One of Wallace’s influences, Thomas Pynchon, wrote stories about the technology that made America possible: geographical surveys (Mason Dixon), the postal service (The Crying of Lot 49). Infinite Jest is about the technology that could undo a state: a kind of entertainment so compelling that it turns consumers utterly away from reality. It asks whether the real, or something like it, might be worth recovering.
It is, still, a difficult book — and difficult in new ways. The wheedling presence of my phone is competition that Infinite Jest never had to contend with the first time around. The disturbing fact of Wallace’s own bad acts, too, was not available to me in the Nineties, and even if it had been it probably wouldn’t have struck me as a problem for the novel. But the difficulty is, and always has been, the point. Of course Infinite Jest could be shorter, lighter, less infuriating. But if it’s heavy, it’s because it’s weighing you back down in the physical world.
On June 6, Tucker Carlson, America’s most-watched TV pundit, launched a new show on Twitter. No longer reined in by Fox News executives, Carlson was free to ask a big, explosive question: “What exactly happened on 9/11?” He answered himself: “Well, it’s still classified.”
A few months earlier, Carlson had appeared on Clayton Morris’s podcast and brought up World Trade Center Building 7, widely viewed as the Achilles heel of the official story of 9/11:
“If you say, like, ‘What actually happened with building 7? Like that is weird, right? It doesn’t—like, what is that?’… If you were to say something like that on television, they’d flip out. You’d, like, lose your job over that. It’s an attack on my country. Can I ask? I don’t really understand. Do buildings actually collapse? No, they—maybe they do. I don’t know. But, like, why can’t I ask questions about that?”
Carlson’s words betray his cognitive dissonance. “Do buildings actually collapse (like that)? No, they—maybe they do.” He almost blurts out the obvious truth—“no, they don’t”—before correcting himself with the (possibly sarcastic) “maybe they do. I don’t know.”
Carlson built his career by cultivating a reputation for straight talk, unfazed by political correctness. But as he suggests, straight talk about 9/11 in general, and WTC-7 in particular, is unwelcome in today’s USA. In mainstream media, even asking questions in unacceptable.
Why can’t we ask questions about Building 7? Because the answers are all-too-obvious—and all-too-embarrassing to the rulers of the intertwined American and Israeli empires.
World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story high-rise, collapsed into its own footprint at 5:21 pm on September 11, 2001, seven hours after the Twin Towers were destroyed. Numerous witnesses reported police and emergency personnel announcing that WTC-7 was about to come down. Seconds before it fell, witnesses overheard a countdown to demolition (“five-four-three-two-one”) on police radio, followed by the massive explosion that precipitated the “collapse.”
The obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 threw a monkey wrench into the US government’s official 9/11 narrative. WTC-7 had been one of the most important buildings in America. It housed the CIA’s second-largest headquarters after Langley, Virginia, as well as the Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission with its Enron files, the Internal Revenue Service, and many of America’s biggest corporate heavy hitters. What’s more, WTC-7’s 23rd floor was the home of New York’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM), where the local and federal governments would manage their joint response to any major disaster—like 9/11.
The OEM response to 9/11 should have been run from the 23rd floor of WTC-7. But it wasn’t. Why not? In an ABC-TV interview with Peter Jennings conducted on the morning of 9/11, then-NYC-mayor Rudy Giuliani provided the answer: “We were told the World Trade Center was going to collapse,” so they moved to an alternate site. Giuliani’s confession of foreknowledge of the unprecedented and vanishingly improbable “collapse” of the Twin Towers raises the question of why the 343 firefighters who died on 9/11 didn’t get the same warning.
For seven years, the feds stalled and obfuscated. A 2002 FEMA report sidestepped WTC-7, admitting that any hypothesis the authors could imagine (not including the unthinkable one, demolition) had “only a low probability of occurrence.” The 9/11 Commission Report, issued in 2004, did not even mention the destruction of the WTC-7. Network TV imposed a blackout on footage of its “collapse.”
Finally, in 2008, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its long-overdue report on WTC-7. According to the authors, a hitherto-unknown physical phenomenon, “thermal expansion,” had caused a beam to unseat itself, magically removing all of the building’s vertical support and setting off 2.5 seconds of absolute free-fall followed by about five seconds of near-free-fall.
The NIST report, of course, is ludicrous. For details, watch the film Seven featuring University of Alaska professor Leroy Hulsey, who led a detailed computer simulation of the building’s destruction.
But we didn’t really need to wait for Hulsey’s report. Just listen to Larry Silverstein, the close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu who bought the World Trade Center two months before 9/11, doubled the insurance, and fortuitously skipped his usual breakfast at the top of the North Tower that morning. In the PBS documentary America Rebuilds, broadcast in 2002, Silverstein confesses to “pulling” (i.e. demolishing) Building 7. He later collected roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars in insurance money on that very building, along with four billion for the rest of the World Trade Center—the fruits of his bizarre double indemnity claim that he had suffered two completely separate and unrelated terrorist attacks from the two planes.
The obvious fact that the authorities lied and are still lying about Building 7 raises the question of what else are they lying about—and points to the only slightly less-obvious demolitions of the Twin Towers. Like Building 7, the Twin Towers disappeared at near-free-fall acceleration into the path of most resistance, indicating that they too had had all of their vertical supports taken out with synchronic precision. Just as the sudden demise of Building 7 cannot be plausibly blamed on a few minor office fires of undetermined origin, the likewise sudden, symmetrical, and complete destructions of Towers 1 and 2 cannot possibly have been the result of random damage caused by relatively modest office fires kindled by kerosene (jet fuel).
But the Towers were “overkilled” in unconventional explosive demolitions quite unlike the implosion of Building 7. Indeed, so much explosive force was used to pulverize the Towers that most of the contents of the buildings, including more than 1100 human bodies, were apparently vaporized into nothingness. And of the 1,640-odd victims who did leave at least a sliver of fingernail or a splinter of bone to be recovered by the most meticulous sifting-and-bucketing operation in history, many were blasted to smithereens, leaving only a few bone fragments to be recovered years later from the rooftops of neighboring buildings: “For example, a search in 2010 found 76 more fragments of remains on the roof of the 40-story Deutsche Bank building 250 feet from the South Tower. Previously, over 750 human bone fragments, each less than a half-inch long, were collected from this roof.”* How the massively explosive destruction of the two Towers, and the vaporization of its occupants and their office equipment, could ever have been mistaken for a natural gravity-driven collapse is one of those mysteries that will leave future historians scratching their heads.
The explosive destruction of the World Trade Center, conducted in such a way that it could be (quasi-)plausibly blamed on plane crashes and fires, required immense amounts of money and expertise, as well as insider access to the buildings. One often-overlooked requirement was that the perpetrators, who had invested so much in their elaborate demolition plans, would have needed to be 100% certain that planes would hit the buildings to provide a pretext for the demolitions. So they could not have simply allowed radical hijackers to attempt to seize control of planes and try to fly them into the Towers. The odds of successful plane-into-building hits, given that there had been no successful hijackings in the US for decades, would have been near zero. So, the perpetrators must have controlled the aviation aspect of 9/11, presumably by flying planes into targets by remote control. That would explain why there is no evidence that any alleged hijackers were even on board the alleged attack planes, and abundant evidence to the contrary.
Obviously powerful insiders were responsible. The question is, which insiders?**
The short answer, to which most students of the issue would agree, is “the neoconservatives.” Fanatically loyal to Israel, and desperate to turn the US military against their Muslim enemies, the authors of Rebuilding America’s Defenses (September 2000) famously announced that their yearned-for “process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event–like a new Pearl Harbor.”
9/11 was the neocons’ new Pearl Harbor. 9/11’s shocking imagery and 2000+ casualties closely resembled the original 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, whose psychological impact transformed an 80%-antiwar opinion into an angry hornets’ nest of warmongers. But 9/11 was not merely designed to launch the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or even the destruction of “seven countries in five years.” Its less-obvious but more important purpose was to implant Islamophobia deeply and permanently into the western subconscious mind. By equating Islam with terrorism, 9/11 hoodwinked the west into viewing Israel’s enemies as its own. The 9/11-triggered Islamophobia epidemic will probably continue to fester and spread for decades to come. Indeed, it will likely outlast the zionist entity itself.
But despite PNAC’s prognostications, 9/11 failed to contribute to the establishment of a “new American century.” Though the US military was successfully hijacked and turned against Israel’s enemies, the cost to the empire itself was astronomical, not only in terms of dollars but also in reputation and soft power.
While the US was bogged down in West Asia, fighting countries it should have befriended, peer competitors Russia and China arose to challenge America’s imperial dominance, and the BRICS alliance emerged heralding a multipolar world. When the dust settles, it is likely that 9/11 will be seen to have hastened the demise of the US empire by two or three decades. And the zionist entity, too, will soon be relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history, 9/11 or no 9/11.
So, the whole murderous hoax—a vivid display of the evil men are capable of—will turn out to be futile. As the Qur’an tells us, “They plot and Allah plans; and Allah is the best of planners.”
—
*WTC Bone Fragments Still Surface a Decade After 9/11
**Two notable books that offer somewhat different lists of likely perpetrators are Christopher Bollyn’s Solving 9/11, which focuses on the billionaire zionist oligarchs who privatized the World Trade Center shortly before 9/11 alongside their Mossad accomplices; and Kevin Ryan’s Another 19, offering an alternative list of suspected Deep State operatives with the means, motive, and opportunity to have contributed to one or more aspects of the crimes of 9/11.
When the Soviet Union broke up, and ended its Warsaw Pact military alliance, and ended its communism — all of which happened in 1991 — there was a very clearly understood verbal agreement that the U.S. and its NATO military alliance against the Soviet Union made to the Soviet leaders, repeatedly promising that NATO would not expand toward Russia’s borders; or, as George Herbert Walker Bush’s U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, famously put it at the time, that NATO would not expand even “one inch to the east.” In other words, America promised that if the Cold War would end on the Soviet side, then it would end also on the American side, and so its military alliance wouldn’t expand to become nearer to Russia’s command-center The Kremlin, which would constitute a threat to blitz-invade Russia from that more-nearby nation.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, didn’t demand the termination of America’s military alliance against the Soviet Union, as a condition for the Soviet Union to end its military alliance against America and its NATO, but demanded only that NATO no longer would be a military alliance against Russia — that NATO would not take any of the former Warsaw Pact countries, nor any of the former Soviet countries, the countries that adjoin or are near to Russia and that would then become a threat to become a staging-area to invade Russia.
If America wins its war against Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine, then the next step will be placing its missiles against The Kremlin onto Ukraine’s border 300 miles and five minutes of missile-flying distance away from their target, to blitz-behead Russia, and so to ‘win’ WW III.
At this stage, Russia has only two realistic options to achieve national security: either it will form a mutual-defense pact with China guaranteeing that any nation which invades either Russia or China will immediately find itself in a WW III against BOTH China and Russia; or else, it will relocate Russia’s capital city out of Moscow, which is now only seven minutes away from NATO, into Novosibirsk, which is nearly 2,000 miles and 40 minutes away from NATO and also away from Japan — truly a safe location for Russia’s capital city (which no western-Russian city can be). Russia is the only nation that is so vast it contains a city located nearly 2,000 miles away from any U.S.-or-allied military base or launching site. It needs to take advantage of this unique national-security asset which it contains.
Other countries have moved their capital cities, for far lesser reasons; so, Russia should do it now, in order to achieve national security (which is the biggest reason imaginable). And, then, all of the trillions of dollars that America has been spending to conquer Russia will be immediately turned to dust. Once Russia has moved its capital to Novosibirsk, nothing that America does will be able to threaten Russia seriously again. It would radically transform international relations, because U.S.-and-allied aggression would finally have a natural limit. There would then be one country, at last, that the voracious U.S. empire won’t be able to grab. And this, of course, would also make Russia a magnet for all other countries that haven’t yet been successfully grabbed by the U.S. and now hosting any of its 900 foreign military bases. So: the number of U.S.-occupied countries might then finally begin to decline — which decline would add yet more to the entire world’s security, by removing the world’s biggest national-security threat. America’s foreign military bases threaten every nation, and don’t merely vassalize the given nation. Simply moving Russia’s capital to Novosibirsk would achieve all of this — for Russia, and for the world.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
After the Crash 