a judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, rather than of ensuring justice.
Yesterday Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty of all 30 counts he was charged for in the Boston Marathon bombing trial. For those following the case who think critically, this came as no surprise not because of any hard evidence proving Tsarnaev’s guilt, but because on the second day of the trial Tsarnaev’s attorney Judy Clarke declared Tsarnaev was guilty in her opening statement saving the state the time and effort of having to prove its case and answer numerous glaring unanswered questions such as the ones asked by WhoWhatWhy and 21st Century Wire.
Now that this particular show trial is over, the government and corporate media will attempt to brush all uncomfortable questions under the rug and, as with JFK, WACO, Oklahoma City Bombing, Columbine, 9/11, Sandy Hook, etc., it will be left to independent researchers and journalists to search for the truth.
The following essay is intended to provide a brief overview of topics addressed in a discussion graciously recorded by Julie Vivier at the offices of the Center for Research on Globalization in Montreal Canada on August 5, 2014.-JFT
Modern propaganda techniques utilized by the corporate state to enforce anti-democratic and destructive policies routinely entail the manufacture and manipulation of news events to mold public opinion and, as Edward Bernays put it, “engineer consent” toward certain ends.
Such events include not only overt political appeals, but also acts of seemingly spontaneous terrorism and militarism that traumatize the body politic into ultimately accepting false narratives as political and historical realities.
Western states’ development and utilization of propaganda closely parallels the steady decay of political enfranchisement and engagement throughout the twentieth century. Upon securing a second term in 1916, the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson plunged the United States into the most violent and homicidal war in human history. Wilson, a former Princeton University academician groomed for public office by Wall Street bankers, assembled a group of progressive-left journalists and publicists to “sell the war” to the American people.
George Creel, Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays and Harold Lasswell all played influential roles in the newly-formed Committee on Public Information, and would go on to be major figures in political thought, public relations, and psychological warfare research.
The sales effort was unparalleled in its scale and sophistication. The CPI was not only able to officially censor news and information, but essentially manufacture these as well. Acting in the role of a multifaceted advertising agency, Creel’s operation “examined the different ways that information flowed to the population and flooded these channels with pro-war material.”
The Committee’s domestic organ was comprised of 19 subdivisions, each devoted to a specific type of propaganda, one of which was a Division of News that distributed over 6,000 press releases and acted as the chief avenue for war-related information. On an average week, more than 20,000 newspaper columns carried data provided through CPI propaganda. The Division of Syndicated Features enlisted the help of popular novelists, short story writers, and essayists. These mainstream American authors presented the official line in a readily accessible form reaching twelve million people every month. Similar endeavors existed for cinema, impromptu soapbox oratory (Four Minute Men), and outright advertising at home and abroad.[1]
With the experiences and observations of these war marketers variously recounted and developed throughout the 1920s (Lippmann, Public Opinion, The Phantom Public, Bernays, Propaganda, Crystallizing Public Opinion, Creel, How We Advertised America, Lasswell, Propaganda and the World War), alongside the influence of their elite colleagues and associates, the young publicists’ optimism concerning popular democracy guided by informed opinion was sobered with the realization that public sentiment was actually far more susceptible to persuasion than had been previously understood. The proposed solutions to guarantee something akin to democracy in an increasingly confusing world lay in “objective” journalism guided by organized intelligence (Lippmann) and propaganda, or what Edward Bernays termed “public relations.”
The argument laid out in Lippmann’s Public Opinion was partly motivated by the US Senate’s rejection of membership in the League of Nations. An adviser to the Wilson administration, a central figure behind intelligence gathering that informed postwar geopolitical dynamics laid out at the Paris Peace Conference, and an early member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Lippmann increasingly viewed popular democracy as plagued by a hopelessly ill-informed public opinion incapable of comprehending the growing complexities of modern society. Only experts could be entrusted with assessing, understanding, and acting on the knowledge accorded through their respective professions and fields.
Along these lines, journalism should mimic the then-fledgling social sciences by pursuing objectivity and deferring to the compartmentalized expertise of established authority figures. News and information could similarly be analyzed, edited, and coordinated to ensure accuracy by journalists exercising similar technocratic methods. Although Lippmann does not exactly specify what body would oversee such a process of “organized intelligence,” his postwar activities and ties provides a clue.
Edward Bernays’ advocacy for public opinion management is much more practical and overt. Whereas Lippmann suggests a regimented democracy via technocratic news and information processing, Bernays stresses a privileged elite’s overt manipulation of how the populace interprets reality itself. Such manipulation necessitates contrived associations, figures and events that appear authentic and spontaneous. “Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval,” Bernays notes,
“and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public’s consent to a program or goal … We reject government authoritarianism or regimentation, but we are willing to be persuaded by the written or spoken word. The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.[2]
Bernays demonstrates an affinity with Lippmann’s notion of elite expediency when pursuing prerogatives and decision-making the public at large cannot be entrusted to interpret. In such instances,
democratic leaders must play their part in leading the public through the engineering of consent to socially constructive goals and values. This role naturally imposes upon them the obligation to use educational processes, as well as other available techniques, to bring about as complete an understanding as possible.[3]
Written in the early 1950s, these observations become especially apt in the latter half of the twentieth century, where the US is typically a major aggressor in foreign (and eventually domestic) affairs. Yet what does Bernays mean by, for example, “educational processes”? An indication may be found by noting his central role in the promotion of tobacco use, municipal water fluoridation, and the overthrow of the democratically-elected Arbenz regime in Guatemala.[4]
With the advent of the national security state in 1947, secret programs emerge where the people are as a matter of course intentionally left unaware of the state’s true rationales and objectives.
Indeed, a wealth of contemporary historical examples suggest how the “engineering of consent” is wholly calculating and anti-democratic, and where the crises requiring such drastic and immediate public relations and military measures are themselves the result of the same leadership’s policies and actions. The US economic provocation of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Tonkin Gulf incident precipitating US military occupation of Vietnam are obvious examples of such manufactured events.
Similar techniques are apparent in the major political assassinations of the 1960s, where to this day the public is prompted to partake in the false reality that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole culprit in the murder of President John F. Kennedy, much as Sirhan Sirhan was responsible for the death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
In fact, in each instance overwhelming evidence points to Central Intelligence Agency involvement in orchestrating the assassinations while training and presenting Oswald and Sirhan as the would-be assassins.
The US government’s assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., probably the most influential African American public persona of the twentieth century, is not even open to debate, having been soundly proven in a court of law.[5] Yet as with the Kennedys, it is a genuine public relations achievement that much of the American population is oblivious to the deeper dynamics of these political slayings that are routinely overlooked or inaccurately recounted in public discourse.
Along these lines, in the historical context of Operation Gladio, the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing, the events of September 11, 2001, the London 7/7/2005 bombings, and lesser episodes such as the “shoe” and “underwear” bombers, the engineering of consent has reached staggering new heights where state-orchestrated terrorism is used to mold public opinion toward acceptance of militarized policing operations, the continued erosion of civil liberties, and major sustained aggression against moderate Middle Eastern nations to cartelize scarce resources and politically reconfigure an entire region of the world.
Again, the public is essentially compelled to believe that political extremism of one form or another is the cause of each event, even in light of how the sophistication and scope of the Oklahoma City and 9/11 “attacks” suggest high-level forces at work. If one is to delve beneath the public relations narrative of each event, the recent Newtown massacre and Boston Marathon bombing likewise appear to have broader agendas where the public is again purposely misled.
Conventional journalists and academics are reluctant to publicly address such phenomena for fear of being called “conspiracy theorists.” In the case of academe this has severely curtailed serious and potentially crucial inquiry into such deep events and phenomena in lieu of what are often innocuous intellectual exchanges divorced from actually existing social and political realities that cry out for serious interrogation and critique.
The achievements of modern public relations are further evident in the Warren and 9/11 Commissions themselves, both of which have spun the fantastic myths of Allan Dulles and Peter Zelikow respectively, and that today maintain footholds in public discourse and consciousness.
Indeed, the “conspiracy theory” meme, a propaganda campaign waged by the CIA beginning in the mid-1960s to counter criticism of the Warren Commission report, is perhaps as little-known as Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program where hundreds of journalists and publishers actively devoted their services to spread Agency disinformation. The overall effect of these combined operations has been an immensely successful program continues to shape the contours of American political life and mediated reality.[6]
The present socio-political condition and suppression of popular democracy are triumphs of modern propaganda technique. So are they also manifest in the corporate state’s efforts to engineer public acquiescence toward such things as the colossal frauds of genetically modified organisms masquerading as “food,” toxic polypharmacy disguised as “medicine,” and the police state and “war on terror” seeking to preserve “national security.”
[2] Edward Bernays, Public Relations, Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952, 159-160.
[3] Ibid. 160.
[4] “You can get practically any ideas accepted,” Bernays reflected on the campaign to fluoridate New York City’s water supply. “If doctors are in favor, the public is willing to accept it, because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows, or doesn’t know … By the law of averages, you can usually find an individual in any field who will be willing to accept new ideas, and the new ideas then infiltrate the others who haven’t accepted it. Christopher Bryson, The Fluoride Deception, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004, 159.
[5] William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, New York: Verso, 2003.
In Dedication to Michael Hastings, Jan. 28, 1980 – June 18, 2013
The Rolling Stone journalist who was murdered after discovering this story
Terrorism: systematic intimidation as a method of governing or securing political or other ends
To properly understand the events surrounding Malaysian Airlines ‘flight MH370’ on the 8th of March 2014, a person firstly has to realise that it was a ‘terrorist’ attack’. Now ‘terrorists’ do not hi-jack an aircraft simply to fly it around until it runs out of fuel and crashes; the hi-jacking has to have a ‘political’ agenda’.
To understand what this ‘political agenda’ was, one has to consider why the aircraft was hi-jacked, and what the target was to have been. General Wesley Clarke gave us the ‘agenda’ in 2001, which was for America to attack certain nations starting with Iraq and ending with Iran. However there was a ‘further’ agenda, and that agenda involved Russia and to be more specific, the Ukraine.
The main impediment for any American attack on Iran, is that Iran has treaties with two major world players; China and Russia. There is another problem; Iran has been aware of the impending attacks for over a decade and has built defences to her front. She has, however, been dependent on Russia to defend her back door.
Russia has been finding its ‘superpower’ status again, and America has been endeavouring to stifle Russia’s growth, especially in the military arena. Russia’s best known naval base is Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea, which was part of the Ukraine. The American political agenda has been to win the Ukraine away from Russia, into the European Union. This would have removed the Russian naval base from the Russians and turned it over to the EU.
However, Russia would not have stood idly by and permitted such political actions to go unheeded, so an ‘excuse’ would be required to place European and American forces in the Ukraine. Those forces would naturally be designated NATO. What was needed was a ‘suitable’ terrorist target which was not American, but of a NATO member, that would permit an immediate retaliatory reaction from that country and NATO. The only possible ‘terrorist’ targets for this agenda at this time were the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, honeymooning in the Maldives.
Thus we have the motives for two political agendas, attacking Iran and weakening Russia. There is also a third agenda, and that is to separate China from Iran and Russia. This third agenda was highlighted by ‘Air Force 1’ being booked on the 3rd of March 2014, five days prior to the ‘Terrorist attack’ which claimed the lives of 153 Chinese nationals to fly to China on the 19th of March, 2014.
The ‘terrorist’ agenda was set when it was announced on the 8th of March 2014, that two ‘false’ passports were detected within the group of passengers that boarded ‘flight MH370’. It was also initially stated that there were ‘other’ suspects who had also boarded ‘flight MH370’.
Now ‘terrorist’ attacks involving aircraft are not new, they date back to at least the 1960’s when one remembers the hi-jacked passenger airliner that was landed at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda, and subsequently rescued by Israeli commandos, of whom the only casualty they suffered was ‘Jonathon Netanyahu’, the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu. Then in the 1980’s, there was a new form of terrorism and aircraft, that being the ‘bomb’ planted within the luggage area and exploding in mid-flight and the most recognised was the crash at Lockerbie in Scotland, of which the ‘Americans’ were extremely quick on the scene and took total control of the investigation.
And then in 2001 there was the ultimate ‘terror’ event that was even given direct media coverage as ‘hi-jacked’ passenger aircraft were flown into the two towers of the World Trade Centre, and Benjamin Netanyahu was there to say that ‘this was good for Israel’! Of course there is little coverage of the fact that Dick Cheney was ‘in charge’ of American ‘Military exercises’ that supplied ‘cover’ for this event.
This very same scenario was again in operation as the Malaysian Airlines ‘flight MH370 left KL International Airport on the 8th of March 2014 and then flew northeast over Malaysia and into the South China Sea, into an area where America and Thailand were holding ‘Military Exercises’, and then vanished!
Flight MH370 is the latest 911 terrorist attack
Matthias Chang, the former top political advisor to Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia, noted that the bizarre disappearance of MH370 coincided with the US-run Cobra Gold and Cape Tiger military exercises – just as previous “disasters” have mirrored suspiciously-timed drills and exercises:
Whatever happened with the ‘commercial’ radar that the Malaysian Air Traffic Control were using to monitor ‘flight MH370’ entry into Vietnamese Air Traffic Control at 0121 hours, the Vietnamese Air Traffic Control in Ho Chi Minh City waited 17 minutes before they inquired from Malaysian Air Traffic Control as to the whereabouts of flight MH370. Malaysia then claimed that the Malaysian Air Traffic Control then requested another Malaysian Airlines aircraft in the vicinity to try and contact flight MH370, and that contact was raised at 0138 hours Malaysian time.
This is the media report from the 10th March 2014:
According to Malaysia’s New Straits Times newspaper, contact was briefly made with the aircraft before it vanished. It was being flown by Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, a highly experienced pilot, and first officer Fariq ab Hamid. “We managed to establish contact with MH370 just after 1.30am and asked them if they have transferred into Vietnamese airspace,” a pilot on another Malaysia Airlines flight told the New Straits Times.”
“The voice on the other side could have been either Captain Zaharie or Fariq, but I was sure it was the co-pilot. “There were a lot of interference … static … but I heard mumbling from the other end. That was the last time we heard from them, as we lost the connection,” he said.
So sometime after 0119 hours, Malaysian Air Traffic Control has asked another aircraft in the region where flight MH370 had vanished off their radar screen, to try and contact via radio MH370, and there was some contact, sufficient for the pilot of that aircraft to identify the voice of the 1st Officer, Fariq ab Hamid. Thus the supposed actual last radio contact with flight MH370 was at 0138 hours!
There is something very wrong with this story. If everything had been normal, then flight MH370 would have contacted the Vietnamese Air Traffic Control, once they had moved out of the Malaysian Air Traffic Controls area. This has not happened for at least 17 minutes. Again, with the supposed contact between the two Malaysian Airliners, the contact was not clear and precise. Something is extremely wrong. If flight MH370 did have radio communication, then it should have logged in with the Vietnamese Air Traffic Control.
So at 0138 hours the Malaysians know something is very wrong, but what are they doing about it? Absolutely nothing! Why! Is this the same scenario that occurred in America with 911?
Initial reports were that flight MH370 had crashed in the South China Sea
The initial reports of ‘flight MH370’ were that it had crashed in the South China Sea. This is why the first couple of days search for the ‘missing’ aircraft was north of Malaysia. However local fishermen on the north side of Malaysia reported seeing a low-flying aircraft, which simply means the authorities were informed and well aware that flight MH370 had not crashed in the South China Sea.
Authorities are also investigating several reports of locals claiming to have seen the lights of a low-flying aircraft in an area off the Malaysian coast, just below the Malay-Thai border. It is this area which is now included in the widened search area for missing Malaysia AirlinesFlight MH370.
A fisherman who was in his boat at sea, says that at about 1.30am he saw the lights of a low-flying aircraft in the area of Kuala Besar. Azid Ibrahim told The Star newspaper in Malaysia that the plane was flying so low that the lights were “as big as coconuts”. And another man, about 30km south of Kota Bharu, is reported to have seen “bright white lights” from what he thought was a fast-descending aircraft at about 1.45am on Saturday morning. He has since reported what he saw to authorities after seeing the lights from his home that evening.
In this search, both the Australian Sydney Morning Herald and the ‘New Strait Times’ reported on the 10th of March that the Malaysian Government was being ‘assisted by the FBI, the American ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Boeing has joined an official US team investigating the disappearance, saying it would act as technical adviser to the US National Transportation Safety Board team already in South-East Asia to offer assistance.
In other words, the ‘search for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370’ is not a Malaysian government investigation but a full on American investigation orchestrated by the FBI’s CIRG!
The FBI members ‘assisting’ the Malaysian Government would have to have expertise in both ‘terrorism’ and ‘hijacking’. This means they would belong to the FBI’s “Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG)”. To understand exactly what type of person these FBI members are, let me refresh what I had written about James F Yacone and his involvement in the Aurora Theatre massacre in Colorado in the article; ‘Fitzpatrick’s Law’
Andrew S. MacGregor is an experienced military and law enforcement officer. Born in 1947 in Yarraville, Melbourne, Australia, Mr. MacGregor served in the Citizens Military Forces of the Victoria Scottish Regiment and as Senior Constable with the Victoria Police. Since 1998 he has conducted extensive research on the Port Arthur Massacre and other Australian ‘lone-nut’ shootings. MacGregor began playing the Bagpipes at age ten, and was active for 14 years as a member of the Victoria Police Highland Pipe Band.
As the nation approaches the first anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, mainstream media are predictably excluding from their tragedy porn any substantive analysis of the idiosyncratic, misleading, and in some cases flagrantly propagandistic reportage of the event that might call the official story into question.
As with a majority of scandals and coverups over the past several decades where powerful interests are implicated, American journalism has become more and more complicit if not actively involved in delivering dubious information that establishes a dominant narrative, while thereafter failing to vigorously interrogate and amend faulty coverage that leads to vast public misconceptions.
The assassination of JFK, the falsely-reported Tonkin Gulf incident that sparked the costly Vietnam War, and the similarly questionable events of 9/11 that have together brought the US to the present national and geopolitical impasse all come to mind. One is left to ponder how the behavior of a wholly government-controlled media system would differ from our corporate-run consciousness industry that routinely and shamelessly showboats its First Amendment protections.
The consequences of such a communication breakdown are vast, with countless lives and entire nations having been undermined and destroyed. Moreover, the “first drafts of history” become plagued by myth and distortion that eventually cohere as collective memory, thus robbing a people of their self-determination, nullifying their humanity, and ensuring that the cycle repeats interminably.
Those rationally dissenting from the official record and who occupy positions to alter public opinion are usually written off by establishment-controlled media outlets as “conspiracy theorists,” “wackos,” and so on. If such individuals cannot be neutralized through defamation or blackmail, and if they possess information or occupy positions where they are capable of posing a serious and immediate threat to official fictions and thus the power structure itself, they are prone to becoming oddly “suicidal,” (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), or are simply killed outright (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, and here and here).
What else won’t we see in the corporate media’s series of heart-tugging memorials devoted to the anniversary of Sandy Hook? The two most recent and obvious indications that the event itself is at the very least a coverup include, first, the wholly unreported story of the Obama administration’s $2.5 million payout (read: bribe) to state and local law enforcement agencies directly involved in responding to the incident, and second, what is by almost any measure the entirely illegal destruction of pertinent evidence in the demolition of the crime scene itself.
Empowered by the internet as their primary means of communication, a broad array of independent researchers have conduced an impromptu “truth commission” that together calls the Sandy Hook narrative presented by corporate news media into serious question. For those with eyes to see and the ability to think critically they have also shamed the mainstream journalists directly involved in (mis)representing the event to the American public.
Yet without a genuinely independent investigation of the incident apart from the oversight and influence of the [Governor Dannel] Malloy and Obama administrations, the broader public will likely never know what actually took place on December 14, 2012 in Newtown Connecticut. As has too often been the case throughout the last half century, the prospects are high that yet another “big lie” has again taken root in the ever-malleable and somnambulent public mind.
After the Crash 