“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman
Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.
The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.
Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
This last point is particularly disturbing.
Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.
In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.
Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.
Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.
Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.
Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Interceptreported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.
Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.
Flagging you as a danger based on your correspondence. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.
Don’t believe it.
As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.
Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.
They definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
And they certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting police brutality and racism, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.
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.
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.
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.”
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*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.
Is our expansive evolution in technological advancement a wrong turn for humanity? Or has it evolved without our consciousness keeping up to steward it effectively?
One of my first really disquieting insights about the planet and the pace of change came when I saw the film “World Out of Balance” or “Koyaanisqatsi” in the 1980’s.
The concept behind the film was that Nature has an exquisite balance between various forces, and that’s when I first thought about the likelihood of the existence of a higher intelligence.
The film was jarring because it showed dramatically, now 40 plus years ago, the havoc that was wreaked by technology not just on the environment, but how human technology was literally putting the world out of balance – a harmony that was naturally sustained prior to human intervention.
Computers Introduced Me to Rapid Change
At that time, I just getting interested in computer graphics and I encountered “Moore’s Law”, which refers to the observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.
That meant that processing power doubled in the same span of time, allowing graphics, for example, to go from color, to 3D, to 3D with texture mapping and other effects, and on and on.
One example of this was the original movie Jurassic Park, which was made with 3D models of dinosaurs having their wire frames “texture mapped” – covered with skin and then animated on a Silicon Graphics work station. The processing power required to render these images quickly enough for a 30 frames per second film was staggering.
I just Googled the company. As I suspected they are extinct like the dinosaurs; and the process I described above now happens on a phone, or on a website, and films are using artificial intelligence to fool audiences.
As I began writing about digital video and animation, and attended conferences, I found myself on a carousel of a continual need to adapt to change, and “upgrade” my system to keep up with the latest advancements.
It worked for me for a while and I enjoyed integrating solutions based on a creative understanding of what was coming out, but eventually, I realized that I could no longer keep up.
I had to take a break from the relentless pressure, which I did, and ended my tech writing career.
It was around that time I was reading Eckhart Tolle, and learning how the Ego, the voice in my head, always wants MORE.
The Continued Acceleration of Change
Moore’s law for integrated circuits was only the beginning, of course. We now have the promise of quantum computing and the reality of artificial intelligence, which both have the potential to put the world as we knew it even more out of balance.
When we consider our human conditioning, the wider the gap between one’s childhood where one “learns the ropes” and perhaps conforms for one’s safety and one’s adulthood — when everything has changed creates intense discomfort relative to the gap in years.
For a dinosaur like me the continual need to “download the app” is stressful. For my friends’ grandchildren it’s just part of being alive.
Peter Russell, in his new book “Forgiving Humanity” uses a sobering term – Exponential Change – as he describes how rapid changes in technology first affected agrarian culture, increased dramatically with the industrial revolution and accelerated again with the advent of computer technology and integrated circuits.
It’s Not You, It’s Exponential Change
He reaches a conclusion that is both profound and daunting:
“This doesn’t mean humankind has taken a wrong turn. Spiraling rates of development, with all their consequences, positive and negative, are the inevitable destiny of any intelligent, technologically-empowered species.”
So the fact that we have knocked the world out of its natural harmony is something that is part of evolution? In essence, we are a part of nature that keeps pushing the envelope, but it can have dire consequences for a species that goes too far?
That is certainly what we are up against with respect to artificial intelligence, where the notion of exponential change in terms of brute intellectual capacity, is making many experts wary of consequences of an “intelligence” that vastly dwarfs human capabilities.
Consider the difference between exponential change versus simple, let us say, incremental change. Exponential means that is multiplied by its current value, or the power of 2. Anyone who has played with relationships like that in math knows how rapidly it can spin out of control.
Calculations of this order of magnitude quickly go beyond what the human brain can process.
And how does this expansion of potential knowledge affect consciousness today?
Peter Russell takes one of the driving forces of exponential change – AI – and discusses his new book by interviewing “his clone” in a fascinating video.
There is the possibility that with enough shocks or consequences that humanity may begin to glean that a purely intellectual approach to reality is the reason for our imbalance, and that knowledge itself, without wisdom or “being”, is fraught with peril. Blind intellect alone creates conflict with a higher, natural intelligence which it ignores.
Russell uses the analogy of how a wheel that spins faster and faster will eventually come apart.
Taking a Cosmic Perspective – Collectively and Individually
In the video Russell’s “clone” suggests that a way for humanity to adapt, and actually align with the natural forces that have brought it to this point, is to begin to take a truly “cosmic perspective” and see our species in true proportion to the vast universe in which we now find ourselves.
Advances like the Webb Telescope have opened humanity’s eyes to a more accurate understanding of the vast scale of the universe we inhabit. We now know that galaxies move in clusters of unimaginable proportions.
Russell points out that there are trillions of stars and life might have evolved to an intelligent level on some of these, and that perhaps such life has found itself at the point where we are many times in eternity.
We have to confront the stark reality that from such a perspective within the vastness of Nature, we are here for only a brief interval both as individuals – and indeed perhaps as a species.
Russell suggests that such a perspective can make us more aware and grateful for our higher capabilities in areas beyond the intellect, such as art, culture, and probably philosophy. Humanity needs to become more deeply human once again rather than purely mental, as the computers we use are just brute intellect.
A Shift Beyond Copernican Proportions
Such a “renaissance” would be like a new Copernican revolution. Most of us have a perspective (in consciousness) that WE are the center of all existence.
But from a “cosmic” perspective we must recognize that cannot be true; it must be an illusion. We can begin by sensing the truth through our bodies that we are organic beings within dimensions of a vast organism (maybe like the microscopic organisms that exist in our gut and make our “lives” possible are organic beings within us) – and this recognition could serve to dampen both our hubris as a species as to how important we are (dominant on this planet), but also make this a cornerstone of a viable personal philosophy.
I don’t know if I will be here to witness it, but I sense that this shift is very much in line with current trends toward a more dramatic “Disclosure” of our place in the universe – revealing that several other interplanetary or interdimensional species have been here, communicated with humans and are still monitoring human affairs.
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who gained prominence when he speculated that “Oumamoua” – the interstellar object spotted entering and leaving our solar system recently, showed that it was intelligently controlled. He has since begun Galileo project to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
All of this is finally putting to rest the misgivings of the famous Brookings memo that greatly contributed to the secrecy around UFOs – the memo speculated that if extraterrestrial life were a proven reality many social structures, religions and institutions would collapse. Better to hush it up.
But of course, we are now witnessing the dissolution of many conditioned beliefs and the institutions that these flawed beliefs supported; among them our belief in our dominance as a species and our self-importance as individuals.
It would give me hope to see the shift completed with a deep comprehension of our connection to the universe both epigenetically and spiritually.
Three interesting facets of news over Niger appear to be doing the rounds. Firstly, that a terrorist group in Nigeria has openly appealed to the Nigerian President – who also happens to be the ECOWAS leader – to avoid at all costs a military intervention in Niger; secondly, that Joe Biden took the initiative to meet the same gentleman Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the corridors of the United Nations, hinting that huge amounts of U.S. investment could be directed towards Nigeria if Tinubu played ball; and thirdly, that just recently, the stakes were raised in Niger when its junta announced that it had invited the armies of both Mali and Burkina Faso onto its soil to help defend themselves against an “intervention” which ECOWAS has threatened was on the cards only days earlier.
But Biden’s little chat with Tinubu says a lot about the realities of what is going to happen and what can happen on the ground as clearly his administration does not want another proxy war between East and West on its hands before the re-election run up next year. The question of whether the U.S. would support ECOWAS militarily has been answered by Biden’s bribe to the Nigerian president. It’s not going to happen.
Tinubu, who is certainly the man at the centre of events, gives the impression in interviews that he is under great pressure from ECOWAS members to intervene, but he is the one cooling tempers and looking for a diplomatic solution. And yet, his comments to the press seem to have been written by the U.S. state department such is the proximity of his office and the U.S. administration – debunking the myth of how much ECOWAS is influenced by France (given that the majority of the countries are former French colonies). The Nigerian president’s role as ECOWAS chief is under the spotlight.
What does he really want? Are his objectives focussed more on Nigeria rather than the bloc?
Joe Biden’s offer of a fresh injection of investment from U.S. firms hasn’t seemed to hit the mark. It seems that Tinubu is after even faster and even easier cash.
Tinubu said that African democracies are “currently under assault by anti-democratic forces within and outside the continent”, which is really state department jargon for “the Russians are coming”.
He then called on the “American-backed development finance and multilateral institutions, which were designed to support war-torn Europe after World War II, to adopt a swift and comprehensive reform to meet the developmental requirements of young democracies in Africa”.
The translation isn’t too cryptic. Can the U.S. intervene and, also, while they’re at it, pump our central bank full of never-never-pay soft loans from IMF and World bank? Cheers!
Neither Biden nor Tinubu though seem to be bothered about the possibility of a fourth francophone African country falling into the hands of Mother Russia. Mali and Burkina Faso, who both can be assumed to be vassals of Russia have shown great solidarity with Niger which has lost no time kicking the French out and becoming a major pain in the arse for western elites who are confused about the events and want to oversimplify the nuances. “We lost Niger to the Russians” may be the well worn cliché although the facts on the ground and more complicated. There certainly seems in Niger to be an endearment towards the new junta’s government but Russia’s role so far is unclear.
About the only thing that Putin and Biden agree on is they don’t want a war in Niger.
It’s easy to forget though that Niger was a key player in ECOWAS and that many of its members placed great importance on Niger’s front line assault on Islamic groups in the region – which, if given more freedoms, could cause havoc right across West Africa but in particular in neighbouring Nigeria.
For the moment though, the so-called pressure from ECOWAS is unlikely to manifest itself beyond chest beating. ECOWAS members may have the hunger for intervention but they don’t have the guts for a war, which neither the U.S. or Russia will bankroll, so sobriety is likely to take over the narrative in the coming days. The war in Ukraine, the abysmal foreign policy blunders of Biden, the deluded arrogance of Macron and the emergence of BRICS have all contributed to the current crisis in Africa as the old relationship with the West is put to the test, with disastrous consequences. The only thing left of Obama’s “soft power” idea he conjured up in 2015 after his humiliation in Syria is a suitcase full of cash for a corrupt West African leader to share with his cabal. Pretty pathetic.