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by Edward Curtin
from
LewRockwell Website
is the most problematic task
the mind can face."
It's a common experience. But few people draw the obvious conclusion about the present: that our present appearance might be equally laughable.
The personal past seems to be "over there," an object to be understood and dissected for its meaning, while the present seems opaque and shape-shifting - or just taken-for-granted okay.
Historical perspective,
even about something as superficial as appearance, rarely
illuminates the present, perhaps because it makes us feel ignorant
and unfree.
...and its penetration and working relationships with so many publications and media outlets, including,
These exposés show how
vast was
the CIA's propaganda network
throughout the media and the world, and how many people participated
in the dirty work. Joel Whitney, in his recently published book, Finks - How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers (the word "tricked" ignores the eager accomplices), tells this scandalous story in illuminating detail.
His account informs and nauseates simultaneously, as one learns,
The story makes your skin
crawl...
This is not a criticism. He does say that,
Despite his use of tepid language about the present, especially that word "vaguely," it seems that Whitney thinks similar propaganda activities are going on today, which is why a blurb for Finks at his publisher's website (OR Books) and at amazon.com by James Risen of the New York Times, who has written two books about the CIA, strikes such an odd note.
It reads:
Are these the good old
days? Such language usage makes one wonder: is it just a quickly
scribbled blurb or carefully chosen words?
How could they have done
such things? It's just outrageous! But that was then, not now. It's
different now; we are older but wiser.
The documentation is in
the doing, and it doesn't take a genius to grasp how blatant it is.
It is in no way "vague." But it does take good faith, and a passion
for truth, which is sorely lacking. Why this is so is a key issue I
will return to.
There may or may not be a comparable Congress for Cultural Freedom today, but with advanced technology and the internet, it may not be needed. Methods may change; intentions remain the same. What was once done surreptitiously is now done blatantly, as I wrote in January: the deep state has gone shallow.
Fifty years ago the CIA coined the term "conspiracy theory" as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcom X, MLK, and RFK.
All the media echoed the CIA line.
While they still use the term to dismiss and denounce, their control of the MSM is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about,
The,
...all are stenographers
for the deep state.
This has been going on for at least forty years, ever since the Church Committee's revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control programs. Everyone was appalled at the epiphany, so a different tactic was employed.
Just have "experts," social, psychological, and biological "scientists," repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain. Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled - e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hair style, etc.
Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people.
Do this in the name of
helping people with their emotional and behavioral problems that are
rooted in their biology and are beyond their control. And create
criteria to convince people that they are sick.
It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
How convenient!
George H. W. Bush,
Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump -
what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world.
Science for idiots.
To assert that people are free in the Satrean sense (en soir, condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past , a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets, but being totally out of it.
One who doesn't grasp the
truth since he doesn't read the New York Times or watch CBS
television.
As he correctly notes,
the CIA's MKULTRA mind-control program has morphed into modern
psychiatry, both with the same objectives of disabling and
controlling people by convincing them that they are not free and are
in need of a chemical brain bath.
Once you have convinced people that they are not free in the most profound sense, the rest is child's play. Convinced that they are puppets, they become puppets to be played.
Who would want to get
people to believe they were not free?
They do so through close reading (a skill once taught in schools) and historical knowledge without waiting for documentation, though sometimes it arrives from sources such as Wikileaks, FOIA requests, or government leakers like Edward Snowden or Chelsey Manning.
While not always definitive, many of these analyses clearly raise disturbing questions that give the lie to the presstitutes' claims of innocent objectivity.
Their arguments are laid bare so the CIA's and deep-state's handiwork shines through.
...and many others have so demolished the propaganda that the question of why so many liberals and left-leaning people still refuse to accept the obvious echoes in the ears of those familiar with the Congress for Cultural Freedom's machinations to set leftists and liberals against each other through media manipulation.
While left and right-wing
disinformation collaborationists are everywhere and the CIA
obviously has its people placed throughout the cultural and media
landscape, it is clear to me that there is something else involved.
The term 9/11 was first
used in the New York Times on September 12, 2001 by Bill Keller,
the future Times' editor.
In other books he has shown how the CIA's role in drug trafficking is directly linked to the massive increased usage of heroin and other street drugs, another face of the drugging of the country.
Thus the "institutional" structure and consequent practices of one of the most ruthless propaganda and terrorist organizations of the United States' deep-state (the Phoenix program) continues to this day here and abroad.
To think that the
Agency's handiwork once carried on under the banner of the Committee
for Cultural Freedom does not continue today would take extreme
naïveté, the inability to reason, historical ignorance, plain bad
faith, or a combination thereof.
...can only see propaganda when they can attribute it to Donald Trump or the Russians.
Why has this group, together with their Republican and conservative fellow travelers, embraced a new McCarthyism and allied itself with the deep-state forces that they were once allegedly appalled by?
It surely isn't the policies of the Trump administration or his bloviating personality, for these liberals,
The same media that
served the CIA so admirably over the decades became the media that
became liberals' paragons of truth. Why?
Their content, style, and
juxtaposition suggest an answer to the schizoid subtleties of master
manipulators, and how cultural/political propaganda works in oblique
ways off the front pages.
The war was started under President Obama in March 2011 by the United States/NATO/Israel with the arming of Islamist "freedom fighters" in an effort to overthrow President Bashar al Assad.
But the Sunday morning
Times reader is immediately told otherwise, as they have been for
the past six years of carnage. Most probably don't notice the
deception as they flip to the table of contents where they see a
photo of cream puffs and coffee.
It is an article titled "Empire of Dust" by Molly Young, also a contributing writer. It is a title that suggests further disintegration of a most serious nature (no, not the American Empire), yet it is an article about Amanda Chantal Bacon and the rise of the wellness industry.
A photo of this "beatific" 34 year old entrepreneurial guru in a flowing white gown in a half-lotus position, seated on a marble kitchen countertop surrounded by some "magical" rocks, takes up an entire page.
The photo, a Barthian signifier if ever there were one, is clearly meant to be deciphered by the Times' clientele for secrets to the beautiful, luxurious, and peaceful life due to one of means and exquisite taste, one who will spend five dollars on a newspaper and live a balanced, Epicurean life of self-care and sophistication.
Bacon's massive
light-filled kitchen with its marble countertops - a sine qua non of
today's "good life" - serves the usual elitist function of drawing
in readers with a discerning, moneyed eye.
From there Young takes us to Los Angeles, where she interviews the lifestyle guru Bacon, and we hear about Spirit Dust, Beauty Dust, Sex Dust, vaginal steaming, spirit truffles, and sunbathing the vagina, and to the Hamptons where she again spots Brain Dust in an expensive store that also sells "boeuf-bourguignon-flavored dog biscuits."
Young, having traversed the golden triangle - Brooklyn, L.A., and the Hamptons - tells us how Bacon captures her imagination even as she "was ashamed of its capture."
She drinks Power Dusted coffee with the Moon Juice founder who tells her,
After offering mild criticisms' and writing that after visiting Bacon's house she,
Young covertly orders bee pollen from her phone and ends by telling us that the Moon Juice bee pollen she has ordered,
The reader is left to
wonder who is dumber or smarter despite or because of the Brain
Dust.
One flips from "Sex Dust" to disgust and heartbreak in a page turn.
The reader is walked step-by-step into a piece of political propaganda, as Robert Worth tells us that,
This deception is then quickly followed with the claim that Assad used,
Worth tells us that,
One has to give credit to Worth for a masterful double-deception here, first by accusing the Syrians and Russians but not the United States of repeatedly bombing hospitals and civilian areas, and then segueing to the "Bosnian" war with nary a mention of the U.S./NATO conspiracy to dismantle Yugoslavia through proxies and the subsequent massive bombing of Serbia and Serbian civilians that were clearly war crimes committed by the liberal saint, Bill Clinton.
Throughout this piece Worth repeatedly accuses the Assad government of war crimes and atrocities while whitewashing the United States. Immediately following his assertion of Syrian war crimes, he tells the Sunday Times' readers that,
This claim is based on a totally discredited claim made in February 2017 by Amnesty International, and Worth, knowing that there is no evidence for this, cagily uses the words "suggesting" and "alleged."
But juxtaposed with the war crimes assertions, only a careful reader searching for truth would notice the trick, surely not a Time Magazine reader already predisposed by the daily Times's constant flow of government lies.
Quoting a speech by Assad in which he claimed there was a "huge conspiracy" to dismantle and destroy Syria, Worth dismissively rejects this obvious truth by quoting an anonymous former regime official (a common tactic) who says he was shocked by the speech.
If Assad had given a different speech, Worth notes,
This is the imperial
mindset at its finest, all rolled into an extensive New York Times
Magazine article meant to enlighten and inform its alleged
sophisticated readers.
Illiteracy has become the norm and stupidity the rule as the electronic revolution has destroyed people's ability to concentrate or stay focused long enough to realize they are being taken for a ride by propagandists and that they are being purposely overloaded with information meant to create a felt need for "Brain Dust."
This has been going on for so long that to admit one is still being taken for a ride is equivalent to admitting to gullibility so profound that it must be denied. It is one thing criticize the politicians you hate - George W. Bush and Donald Trump for liberal Democrats and Bill Clinton and Obama for conservative Republicans - and to call them liars.
But to contemplate the fact that the CIA has been lying to you through all these mouthpieces and your vaunted news sources are stenographers for the intelligence agencies is too much reality to bear.
Sure...
Assert them repeatedly, even when they have been proven false or fraudulent. Sex Dust and Power Dust may be absurd con jobs, but they sell.
They meet a "need," a need created by the society that has slyly equated power with sex for a population that has been convinced they have neither and need drugs to endow them with both.
A piece about Brain Dust may not have the drawing power of a Paris Review interview with Ernest Hemingway or Boris Pasternak, but then there were no "lifestyle gurus" in those days when people read real literature, not today's New York Times best sellers.
Propaganda was more
literary in those days; it had to have substance. In a "wellness
culture," it has to have style. Today the only time you hear the
word substance, is in "substance abuse," which is fitting.
Everyone looks great that
way, or so they think.
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