Are You Brainwashed?

Lonnie Wolfe at Executive Intelligence Review

Are you brainwashed? What about some of your neighbours, are they brainwashed? Before you answer that, let us ask you a few preliminary questions: Do you believe that the United States was struck by a terrorist attack on Sept. 11? Do think that the people behind that attack were “Arabs” and that its “mastermind” was this fellow Osama bin Laden, operating from a cave in Afghanistan? Do you believe that the way to stop terrorism is to hit them hard, to hit them at their “bases” in such places as Afghanistan, and to hit the nations who might sponsor them, like, say Iraq?

And what about the economy? Do you think that the recent fall of the stock market, and the weakness in the economy, have been caused by the Sept. 11 attacks? Well, if you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you probably are brainwashed! If you answered “yes” to more than one, you are definitely a “goner.”

“But,” you, reply, “isn’t that what most people think? Wouldn’t they answer those questions the same way I do?” Well, the answer to that is, yes. But, we would remind you: Just because the majority of people might BELIEVE something to be true, doesn’t make it true. All it means, is that you and most of your neighbours are suffering from a mass delusion–or, put more bluntly: YOU ARE BRAINWASHED. So, the question is, really, how did you get this way? How did you come to believe things like those statements in the first questions were true? “Well, I heard it on…. Well, I saw it on…. Well, I read it in….”

You needn’t bother finishing those statements; we can do it for you: You, and your neighbours were told the “truth” by the mass media. The American “news” media, which is so proud of calling itself “free,” and has been patting itself on it back for the wonderful job it has done for all us during and after Sept. 11, is the largest, most expensive, mass-brainwashing machine ever assembled in human history. It is a machine that so completely brainwashes the nearly 300 millions Americans, that the Nazis’ infamous Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels would be envious.

Here are the essential facts of what happened on Sept. 11: According to Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, whose assessment is shared by many competent specialists on terrorism and irregular warfare, in this country and around the world, what took place was not a terrorist attack, but strategic, covert special operation, organized to have the appearance of a “terrorist” attack. Mr. LaRouche and others concur that, given both its scope, and the extent of the cover-up and misdirection which followed, such an operation could not have been organized by any Arab terrorist cells or networks, nor by an Arab or Middle Eastern state, nor any combination of the above; it had to be organized from within the United States, with the participation and connivance of a rogue network within the Anglo-American intelligence and military establishment.

As with any such covert special operation, there is a psychological warfare component, intended to maximize its effectiveness against a targeted enemy, to confuse that enemy and misdirect him. In the case of the Sept. 11 attack, the targeted enemy is the POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES AND ITS CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT. The “psywar” component of the operation is being carried out by the American media-machine, with the intent to brainwash the American people INTO ACCEPTING THE ONGOING COUP D’ETAT AGAINST OUR CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT.

Does that mean that the directors of the U.S. mass media are involved in the operation? No; it doesn’t work that way. As EIR explained and documented in a 1997 special report, the U.S. media are controlled and run as a cartel, by the Anglo-American establishment. As such, it routinely serves the interest of that establishment, reporting what it wants, and suppressing what it doesn’t want reported; or slanting reporting to conceal reality. Thus, the media’s performance before, during and after Sept. 11 could be pre-discounted by those who planned the operation, so as to become a feature of it; it were merely required to insert certain specific “psyops” content into this media – brainwashing apparatus, for it to be spread far and wide with the desired effects on you and your neighbours.

The brainwashing methods are relatively simple and classic. First, use the terror itself to put people into a state of shock, making them more susceptible to suggestion. Then resort to the “Big Lie” technique to repeatedly hammer home your psywar message–those affirmative answers to the questions we first asked. And most importantly, lie, by suppressing all counter-evidence, by refusing to report anything that might point to the assessment shared by Mr. LaRouche and others: the cover-up. All this has been done, along with initial softening of the population to the mass delusional suggestion of the enemy image and the alleged capabilities and motivations of the so-called terrorists, PRIOR TO THE LAUNCHING OF THE ATTACK ITSELF.

Don’t be so hasty in dismissing the possibility of your own brainwashing. The enemy knows your profile and uses it. Doesn’t that make you a bit angry–maybe for the right reasons, for the first time in a few weeks?

Our report below is designed to give you a view from inside this brainwashing process, to see how it has worked on you and your neighbours. And, while we can’t yet say who precisely is behind what was done to this country–is still being done–we can show you how they think about brainwashing and use your weaknesses against you.

Psychological Terror as a Means of Warfare: Dresden Redux
Before discussing the brainwashing operation itself, we provide a little background on the use of terror against mass civilian populations. Not surprisingly, this was pioneered by the brainwashers of the Anglo-American establishment.

As commentators on the scene at “Ground Zero” of the World Trade Center (WTC) attack on Sept. 11 surveyed the devastation, they reached for metaphors to describe the incredible scene. “It looks like Dresden,” said one, referring to the firebombing of that German city by the Allies in 1944.

Dresden had no military value as a target. For centuries, it had been a center of German cultural heritage–a heritage that had everything to do with positive developments in human civilization, and nothing to do with the Nazi disease that had been imposed on Germany by the Anglo-American financial elite. Dresden was chosen for destruction as an act of TERRORISM, directed, not against the Nazis, per se, but the German people.

The firebombing of Dresden, creating a raging inferno of destruction that slaughtered more that 100,000 human beings, was conceived and directed by a group of social psychiatrists at the Strategic Bombing Survey, affiliated with the Special Operations Command of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This group was effectively overseen by the head of the British Psychological Warfare Directorate, Brig. Gen. John Rawlings Rees, the director of the Tavistock Clinic in London, which, since the 1920s, had served as a center of psychological warfare operations of the British Empire.

The team at the Strategic Bombing Survey, which included a host of U.S.-based Tavistock operatives, such as Kurt Lewin, Rensis Likert, and Margaret Mead, theorized that the terror inflicted on the German population through the “message of Dresden” would break their will to fight, leaving them fearful, frightened, and disorganized. They projected that it would have a lasting effect on Germany, removing that nation from among the great states of Europe, making it a permanently psychologically scarred entity. The German people, they argued, would be made to realize that “all that is German” could be wiped away, all of its culture and history, in an instant, as it were, by powers who would oppose an assertive future Germany.

In his 1941 book, “Time Perspective and Morale,” Kurt Lewin described the psychology behind the use of this terror tactic for mass effect:

“One of the main techniques for breaking morale through a `strategy of terror’ consists in exactly this tactic–keep the person hazy as to where he stands and what just he may expect. If, in addition, frequent vacillations between severe disciplinary measures and promises of good treatment, together with the spreading of contradictory news, make the cognitive structure of this situation utterly unclear, then the individual may cease to know when a particular plan would lead toward or away from his goal. Under these conditions, even those individuals who have definite goals and are ready to take risks will be paralyzed with severe inner conflicts in regard to what to do.”

As the pilots and their crews came to realize what they had done—the creation of a raging inferno, burning civilian targets and civilians—many returned to their bases horrified. At the instruction of the psyops warriors, the crews had not been fully briefed on the mission. Now, they were greeted by teams of psychologists and others, who would profile their responses to the terror they had unleashed; they were told, as the crews who later dropped, unnecessarily, atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, that it would “shorten the war.”

As one former intelligence officer remarked decades later, “we killed for pure terror, slaughtered people as A TERRORIST WOULD. And, it had no effect on shortening the war. In fact, it seemed to help rally the German people to the Hitler government. The fools who designed this mission probably extended the war” (emphasis added).

The attack on the U.S. Sept. 11, in particular the WTC attack, was designed for a similar PSYWAR brainwashing effect.

The Sept. 24 issue of “The New Yorker,” commented that, according to “defence experts,” the Sept. 11 strike “was clearly an example of what military strategists call `psyops’; that is, a brand of warfare whose aim is not to disable military targets, but to sap the overall will of a nation and its people.”

The article goes on to quote from a 1999 paper by military strategist and analyst Joseph Cyrulik of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., “Asymmetric Warfare and the Threat to the American Homeland”: “By killing and wounding people, damaging and destroying their homes and communities, disrupting their jobs and economic livelihoods, and undermining their confidence and sense of security, an enemy can inflict pain to the point that people demand a change in their government’s policies.

“Used at the right time and place … an attack could destroy the people’s faith in their government, their military, and themselves. It could become a decisive attack against the political will of an entire populace.”

Cyrulik is part of a network of “thinkers” who seek to change all military doctrine to meet alleged 21st Century threats; in so doing, this network wants to activate psyops, including “covert warfare” such as assassinations. While we can’t say that such people are directly responsible for what occurred on Sept. 11, their assumptions about strategy, tactics, and the elevated value of psychological warfare, as well as the misdirection involved in their ascribing powers to “terrorist organizations” or “rogue states” fit nicely into the overall operation.

There are new methods, not available at the time of the Dresden attack, for maximizing the psychological effects of a TERROR CAMPAIGN that parallel standard brainwashing techniques. One involves the repetition of terrifying images, the kind that would make a person recoil, and then compelling that person to continue viewing them. Such terrifying images weaken the ability of the mind to reason, making it more susceptible to suggestion and manipulation.

In the hours following the attack on the World Trade Center, every television media outlet in the United States broadcast, again and again, the images of the airplanes smashing into the Twin Towers, from all conceivable angles, and then, the shots of the two towers collapsing. It was easily the most terrifying real-life image that most Americans had ever seen.

A population induced into a state of terror and shock was then bombarded with SUGGESTION: images started to appear, the mugshot-like photos of the alleged perpetrators, and the image of the “evil mastermind” behind the deed, Osama bin Laden.

And, you still believe that you weren’t brainwashed?

The Movies in Our Heads

“God, this is just like a movie,” exclaimed CBS anchor Dan Rather as the first of the World Trade Center towers collapsed. “Only, it’s the real thing.” Did you have the sense, as you were witnessing the horror of the WTC attack, that you, too, had seen this before? You probably had–and that is part of the brainwashing operation.

In the last five years, there have been at least a half-dozen movies, whose plots have centered on a terrorist attack on the United States. Hollywood statisticians have estimated that these have been viewed, both in movie theaters and home videos, by more than 100 million people. And, many of these movies, in the recent period, have portrayed “Arabs” or “Islamic fundamentalists” as being behind the terrorist assaults.

Each of these latter films has some “expert” advisor, usually a “former counterterrorism expert” and, in some cases, someone who has worked in the military. While it would be a leap to say that the movie-production companies or the “experts” are necessarily witting accomplices in the current plot, the movies, with their “steered” scripts helped people believe that “Arab” terrorists might be capable of what was done on Sept. 11.

Long before there was television, images were placed, for “playback” in America’s memory banks–first by the print media, and then, starting early in the 20th Century with the first of the real mass media, the movies. Hollywood is a component of the Anglo-American media cartel, a point made more obvious by recent creation of “entertainment conglomerates” through mergers and acquisitions. Thus, a mere handful of companies, with interlocking boards, comprised of people within the Anglo-American establishment, controls all of what we see in the multiplexes, on television, in the print media, and, more lately, on the Internet.

As movies were becoming a truly mass-media phenomenon, the Anglo-American commentator Walter Lippmann described their power, along with the power of media generally, in shaping “public opinion”–what you and your neighbours think. In his 1921 “handbook” on the mass manipulation of the public mind, “Public Opinion”, Lippmann, who had been trained by Rees, among others, at the British propaganda directorate during World War I, writes in his introductory chapter, “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads”:

“Public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts, and there is nothing obvious about them…. The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes and relationships, are their opinions. Those pictures acted on by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters…. The picture inside [the head] so often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside.”

Somewhere in your memory banks, were planted the “pictures in your head” of the WTC attack. New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane writes in the magazine’s Sept. 24 issue, “How often have we listened to these words [since Sept. 11]. The statement of fact: `The worst terrorist bombing since Oklahoma City.’ The promise: `Make no mistake about it–we will hunt down the enemy, we will find the enemy, and we will kill the enemy.’ The caution: `You can’t fight a war against an enemy you can’t see.’ And the ominous look ahead: `This is a time of war; the fact that it is inside our border means that it is a new kind of war.’ We have learned such sentiments like a script; that we have heard it again and again [in the days since Sept. 11] has not diminished the sternness with which we have given our assent.

“Just one problem: it IS a script. All the lines quoted come from `The Siege,’ a 1998 thriller directed by Edward Zwick.”

The plot of that movie involves a network of “Arab” terrorist cells, which commit acts of increasingly violent intensity, against civilian targets in New York City. Video clips of President Clinton commenting on the attacks launched, by his administration, against the networks of Osama bin Laden are spliced into the movie footage. As the terrorists wreak more havoc and kill more people, New York City is placed under martial law; anyone who looks “Arab” is rounded up and placed in internment camps, even as the violence continues.

In the end, the movie becomes a sermon on how to moderate attacks on the Constitution, and on ethnic profiling of Americans, while the nation goes on to fight the foreign, “Arab”-terrorist enemy.

When “The Siege” opened in November 1999, it was greeted with protests from the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, who charged that it “portrays Arabs and Muslims as an homogeneous, threatening mass,” and labelled the film, produced by Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox, “dangerous and incendiary.”

Despite such protests, and relatively poor reviews, the movie sold several score millions of dollars worth of tickets and has done well in its video release. In remarking how successful the movie-brainwashing effort has been, Lane noted, in the “New Yorker,” that the majority of Americans reacted to those events with the same kind of unreasoned emotion that they express at the multiplex or in the home theaters:

“And the exclamations from below, from the watchers of the skies caught on video, as they see the aircraft slice into the side of the tower: where have you heard those expressions most recently–the wows, the whoohs, the `holy shits’–if not in the movie theaters, and even on your own blaspheming tongue.” Hollywood, through films like the “The Siege” and “Die Hard,” writes Lane, has provided a “sensory education … fed to a hungry public.”

In the days following the attack, President Bush’s approval rating shot up to above 90%, and stayed there, especially after his nationally televised address of Sept. 13. Following the speech, a CNN commentator observed that President’s approval was so high because he was behaving the way Americans expected him to: “Like the President in `Independence Day’ [a blockbuster movie about an attack on Washington and the U.S. by aliens] or the guy from the `West Wing’ [a popular television show].”

And, you think you haven’t been brainwashed?

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