“And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died”
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died”
– Don McLean, “American Pie”
The
Nazis had a name for their propaganda and mind-control operations: weltanschauungskrieg –
“world view warfare.” As good students, they had learned many tricks of
the trade from their American teachers, including Sigmund Freud’s nephew,
Edward Bernays, who had honed his propagandistic skills for the United States
during World War I and had subsequently started the public relations industry
in New York City, an industry whose raison d’ȇtre from the start was to serve
the interests of the elites in manipulating the public mind.
In
1941, U.S. Intelligence translated weltanschauungskrieg as
“psychological warfare,” a phrase that fails to grasp the full dimensions of
the growing power and penetration of U.S. propaganda, then and now. Of course, the
American propaganda apparatus was just then getting started on an enterprise
that has become the epitome of successful world view warfare programs, a
colossal beast whose tentacles have spread to every corner of the globe and
whose fabrications have nestled deep within the psyches of many hundreds of
millions of Americans and people around the world. And true to form in this
circle game of friends helping friends, this propaganda program was ably
assisted after WW II by all the Nazis secreted into the U.S. (“Operation
Paperclip”) by Allen Dulles and his henchmen in the OSS and then the CIA to
make sure the U.S. had operatives to carry on the Nazi legacy (see David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles,
The CIA, and The Rise of America’s Secret Government, an
extraordinary book that will make your skin crawl with disgust).
This went along quite smoothly until some
people started to question the Warren Commission’s JFK assassination story.
The CIA then went on the offensive in 1967 and put out the word to all
its people in the agency and throughout the media and academia to use the
phrase “conspiracy theory” to ridicule these skeptics, which they have done up
until the present day. This secret document – CIA Dispatch 1035-960 – was a
propaganda success for many decades, marginalizing those researchers and
writers who were uncovering the truth about not just President Kennedy’s murder
by the national security state, but those of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and
Robert Kennedy. Today, the tide is turning on this score, as recently
more and more Americans are fed up with the lies and are demanding that the
truth be told. Even the Washington Post is
noting this, and it is a wave of opposition that will only grow.
The CIA Exposed –
Partially
But back in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s,
some covert propaganda programs run by the CIA were “exposed.” First, the
Agency’s sponsorship of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, through which it used
magazines, prominent writers, academics, et al. to spread propaganda during the
Cold War, was uncovered. This was an era when Americans read serious
literary books, writers and intellectuals had a certain cachet, and popular
culture had not yet stupefied Americans. The CIA therefore secretly worked to
influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual
elites. Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999
book, The Cultural Cold
War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters, and Joel Whitney
followed this up in 2016 with Finks:
How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, with particular
emphasis on the complicity of the CIA and the famous literary journal The Paris Review.
Then in 1975 the Church Committee hearings
resulted in the exposure of abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. In 1977
Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire
– “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and
publications (The New York Times, CBS, etc.)
that worked with and for the CIA in propagandizing the American people and the
rest of the world. (Conveniently, this article can be read on the CIA’s
website since presumably the agency has come clean, or, if you are the
suspicious type, or maybe a conspiracy theorist, it is covering its deeper
tracks with a “limited hangout,” defined by former CIA agent Victor Marchetti,
who went rogue, as “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of
the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they
can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort
to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing
to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is
usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the
matter further.”)
Confess and Move On
By the late 1970s, it seemed as if the CIA
had been caught in
flagrante delictoand disgraced, had confessed its sins, done
penance, and resolved to go and sin no more. Seeming, however, is the
nature of the CIA’s game. Organized criminals learn to adapt to the
changing times, and that is exactly what the intelligence operatives did.
Since the major revelations of the late sixties and seventies – MKUltra,
engineered coups all around the world, assassinations of foreign leaders,
spying on Americans, etc. – no major program of propaganda has been exposed in
the mainstream media. Revealing books about certain CIA programs have
been written – e.g. Douglas Valentine’s important The Phoenix Program being
one – and dissenting writers, journalists, researchers, and whistleblowers
(Robert Parry, Gary Webb, Julian Assange, James W. Douglass, David Ray Griffin,
Edward Snowden, et al.) have connected the U.S. intelligence services to dirty
deeds and specific actions, such as the American engineered coup d’état in
Ukraine in 2013-14, electronic spying, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.
But the propaganda has for the most part continued unabated at a powerful
and esoteric cultural level, while illegal and criminal actions are carried out
throughout the world in the most blatant manner imaginable, as if to say fuck
you openly while insidiously infecting the general population through the mass
electronic screen culture that has relegated intellectual and literary culture
to a tiny minority.
Planning Ahead
Let me explain what I think has been
happening.
Organizations
like the CIA are obviously fallible and have made many mistakes and failed to
anticipate world events. But they are also very powerful, having great
financial backing, and do the bidding of their masters in banking, Wall
St., finance, etc. They are the action arm of these financial elites, and
are, as Douglass Valentine has written, organized criminals. They have their
own military, are joined to all the armed forces, and are deeply involved in
the drug trade. They control the politicians. They operate their own propaganda
network in conjunction with the private mercenaries they hire for their
operations. The corporate mass media take their orders, orders that need
not be direct, but sometimes are, because these media are structured to do the
bidding of the same elites that formed the CIA and own the media. And
while their ostensible raison d’ȇtre is to provide intelligence to the nation’s
civilian leaders, this is essentially a cover story for their real work that is
propaganda, killing, and conducting coups d’états at home and abroad.
Because they have deep pockets, they can afford
to buy all sorts of people, people who pimp for the elites. Some of these people do
work that is usually done by honest academics and independent intellectuals, a
dying breed, once called free-floating intellectuals. These pimps analyze
political, economic, technological, and cultural trends. They come from
different fields: history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political
science, cultural studies, linguistics, etc. They populate the think tanks and
universities. They are often intelligent but live in bad faith, knowing
they are working for those who are doing the devil’s work. But they collect
their pay and go their way straight to the bank, the devil’s bank. They
often belong to the Council of Foreign Relations or the Heritage Foundation.
They are esteemed and esteem themselves. But they are pimps.
El Diablo
Ah, the devil! He’s their man. A man
of many names, but always an impostor. These pimps know his story and how
he works his magic, and this is what their paymasters want from them: ways to
use the old bastard’s bag of tricks to conjure confusion, and sow fear and
paranoia. And to do this slow and easy in ways no one will recognize
until it is too late.
For like culture, propaganda relies on myths,
symbols, and stories. Some prefer to say narratives. But nothing is
more powerful. Controlling the stories is the key to powerful propaganda.
The pimps can spin many a tale.
Tell people endless tales of the good guys
and the bad, of how the bad are out to get you and the good to save you. Think
of the use of symbols in the telling of these stories. They are
crucial. The word symbol comes from a Greek word to throw together.
Symbols that represent the in-group or the “good guys” are used to create
social solidarity within the in-group. Stories are told to accompany the
symbols; stories, narratives, or myths tell of how the good guys are fighting
to hold the group together and the bad guys are trying to rip the community
apart. The symbolic and its opposite – the diabolic (to throw apart) –
the angels against the devils – el diablo. Very simple, very old.
The aliens are out to get us. And el diablo is always the ultimate other,
the man in red, the reds, the commies, the Russians, the others, immigrants,
the blacks who want to move next door, Muslims, gays – take your
pick. Satanic rituals. Black magic. Witchcraft.
Methods of Propaganda
Infecting minds with such symbols and
stories must be done directly and indirectly, as well as short-term and
long-term. Long term propaganda is like a slowly leaking water pipe that
you are vaguely aware of but that rots the metal from within until the pipe can
no longer resist the pressure. Drip drop, drip drop, drip drop – and the
inattentive recipients of the propaganda gradually lose their mettle to resist
and don’t know it, and then when an event bursts into the news – e.g. the
attacks of September 11, 2001 or Russia-gate – they have been so softened that
their assent is automatically given. They know without hesitation who the
devil is and that he must be fought.
The purpose of the long-term propaganda is
to create certain predispositions and weaknesses that can be exploited when
needed. Certain events can be the triggers to induce the victims to react
to suggestions. When the time is ripe, all that is needed is a slight
suggestion, like a touch on the shoulder, and the hypnotized one acts in a
trance. The gun goes off, and the entranced one can’t remember why (see:
Sirhan Sirhan). This is the goal of mass hypnotization through long-term
propaganda: confusion, memory loss, and automatic reaction to suggestion.
Intelligence Pimps and
Liquid Screen Culture
When the CIA’s dirty tricks were made
public in the 1970s, it is not hard to imagine that the intellectual pimps who
do their long-range thinking were asked to go back to the drawing board and
paint a picture of the coming decades and how business as usual could be
conducted without further embarrassment. By that time it had become clear
that intellectual or high culture was being swallowed by mass culture and the
future belonged to electronic screen culture and images, not words. What
has come to be called “postmodernity” ensued, or what the sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman calls “liquid modernity” and Guy Debord “the society of the spectacle.”
Such developments, rooted in what Frederic Jameson has termed “the
cultural logic of late capitalism,” have resulted in the fragmentation of
social and personal life into pointillistic moving pictures whose dots form
incoherent images that sow mass confusion and do not cohere. From the
mid-1970s until today, this generalized disorientation with its flowing and
eternal present of appearing and dissolving images has resulted in what is
surely a transformed world, and with it, transformed worldviews. The
foundations have collapsed. Meaning and coherence have become difficult to
discern. Stable personality has been disassociated, memory downloaded,
attention lost, the psyche materialized, sexual identity confused, the electronic
mind-body interface established, and the electronic and pharmaceutical drugging
of the population accomplished. Really? Yes.
Did not the intelligence agencies foresee
all this? Did not they see it and plan accordingly? Did they not
notice that about the time their old dirty deeds were being exposed, a movie
burst onto the screen that introduced a theme familiar to them and their Nazi
friends? I mean the 1973 hit, The
Exorcist, wherein Satan struts his stuff, four years after
Mick Jagger strut his across the stage at Altamont, singing “Sympathy for the
Devil,” while shortly after a killing took place down in front of him and the
1960s were laid to rest. But during the 1970s The Exorcist and its
theme of the devil’s hold on people came to life and was taken up with a
religious fervor by the entertainment industry and promoted by Oprah Winfrey,
Geraldo Rivera, and other media luminaries, who went about promoting el
diablo’s hold on so many helpless victims. Occult, magic, and satanic
themes became pop staples and would remain so up until the present day. I
would suggest that readers put aside their reservations at what may seem
sensational and watch this video.
Then ask yourself: what is going on here?
The CIA as Prophetic
But maybe a better question than did the CIA
foresee these developments, would be to ask if it has been involved in the
occult and satanic world itself, before and after the social developments of
“liquid modernity.” The answer is yes. Indeed, all the
characteristics of the social and cultural developments I mentioned previously
in reference to postmodernity have been a major part of its work before this
new world emerged: “the disassociation of stable personalities, memory erasure
and the implanting of false memories, materializing the psyche, confusing
sexual identity, establishing the electronic mind-body interface, and
electronic, hallucinogenic (the CIA introduced and spread LSD in the 1960s),
and pharmaceutical drugging,” to name but a few. In anticipating these
developments the CIA was at the very least predictive. Disinformation,
acts of terrorism, coup d’états, assassinations flow out of a marriage to
the Nazis made in hell – Talbot’s “devil’s chessboard” – but they are linked to
much more. Peter Levenda, in Sinister
Forces: A Grimoire of
American Political Witchcraft, a trilogy on sinister forces in
American history, puts it this way:
The CIA, satanic cults, and UFOs, the
mythology of the late twentieth century is surprisingly coherent even though
the masks change from case to case, from victim to alleged victim.
The CIA, of course, does exist; their mind control programs from BLUEBIRD to
ARTICHOKE to MK-ULTRA are a matter of public record. Their history of
political assassinations and the overthrow of various foreign governments is
also a matter of record. Satanic cults – or perhaps we should qualify
that and say ‘occult secret societies’ – also exist and are a matter of public
record; their attempts to contact alien forces by means of ceremonial magic and
arcane ritual (including the use of some of the same drugs and other techniques
as the CIA used in its mind control programs) are also well-known and
documented. Some of these practitioners were – and are – well-known men
and women who have not denied their involvement (such as rocket scientist Jack
Parsons in the 1950s and Army Colonel and intelligence officer Michael Aquino
in the 1990s). The CIA also aggressively researched American cults and
secret societies in an effort to discover the source of paranormal abilities
and ancient mind control mechanisms. And while the jury is still out on the
question of UFOs, there is no doubt that government agencies have attempted to
track, to analyze them, and to explain them away. Again this is a matter
of public record, including FBI and CIA documents in addition to military
records.
Skeptical
readers may find this strange to consider. That would be a mistake.
The web of connections is there for anyone who cares to look. For more than
fifty years occult themes and rituals have been part of world view
warfare. Drugs, shamanism, black magic, and the occult – staples of the
CIA then and now. It is well known that Hollywood, television, and the
media in general have been working closely with the intelligence agencies for a
long time. Especially since 2001, films and television programs have glorified
the CIA, our “good” spies, and the military. The mystification of reality has
found its best friend in the electronic and internet revolution as strange and
“subversive” beliefs are dangled like candy for little children. Good and
evil move through the public consciousness like passing sun and shadows.
Weird conspiracy theories “pop up” to titillate and obsess, and to drive out
the serious findings of dedicated and disciplined writers and researchers who
have discovered the truth about real government conspiracies. Sowing
confusion is the name of this deadly game, and if you find yourself confused,
you are in good company.
But many are catching on and realizing that
what seems strange but innocent is part of a much larger effort to hypnotize
the public to agree to their own destruction through the ingestion of what can
only be called black magic.
The eloquent writer and brave American, Jim
Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to
bring a trial in the assassination of President Kennedy, put it this way
in On The Trail of The
Assassins, the story of his quest to solve the murder of JFK.
I knew
by now that when a group of individuals gravitated toward one another for no
apparent reason, or a group of individuals inexplicitly headed in the same
directions as if drawn by a magnetic field, or coincidence piled upon
coincidence too many times, as often as not the shadowy outlines of a covert
intelligence operation were somehow becoming visible.
Rub Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, the right way
and the CIA emerges into the light. You can see its shadowy outline with
your eyes wide shut. As it says on CIA headquarters: “You shall know the
Truth, and the Truth will set you free.”
