Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle for the 21st Century (4th Edition, 2005)
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The great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than purposely or consciously evil ... therefore ... they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. —Adolph Hitler
The true dimension of covert violence and intrigue that has gone into controlling thoughts in “free” societies is so insidious that many may question the events we are describing ever took place. Thus this chapter provides a brief outline of how the minds of free people were controlled to make them unaware of, ignore, or accept, covert activities and what can only be described as wholesale terrorism against primarily peaceful nations.
Through the expansion of empires in the 19th-Century, the world had become the “countryside” from which to obtain resources for the European-centers-of-capital. The old imperial nations broke themselves battling over the world’s wealth—World Wars I and II. America was the only intact center-of-capital. The frightened leaders of the old imperial nations handed the baton to the United States to keep the entire world from gaining their economic freedom and America has done that job well.
To maintain control of the economies of periphery nations it was essential that the influence of the once rapidly developing former Soviet federation be contained. Their successful development would be a beacon for historians, social scientists, and intellectuals worldwide. Those economic and political philosophies (opposing “frameworks of orientation”) would be followed and controlling the rest of the world would be impossible:
Even if a small country like Cuba, gained their freedom and their living standards rose, the rest of the world would demand their freedom. Hence the otherwise incomprehensible destruction by the world’s most powerful nations of small weak nations such as Korea, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, and the Congo who came close to gaining their freedom. The drumbeat of the West being under imminent threat of attack by these nations was a strategy-of-tension so that the citizens of these powerful nations would support the extremely violent and terrorizing suppression of those countries break for freedom.1
As the Cold War was being won, Peter Coleman, author of Liberal Conspiracy, gained complete and unimpeded access to the archives of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an American and European writers’ support group that had been covertly established by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The path to easy publication of books and articles throughout the “free” world was through this worldwide, CIA-orchestrated and funded strategy-of-tension creating the belief within Western populations that they were about to lose their freedom to totalitarian dictators:
Five years after their victory in 1945, the Western democracies were about to lose the battle for Europe, but this time to Stalinist totalitarianism instead of Nazis. To combat this prospect, an intellectual guerrilla group was formed: over one hundred European and American writers and intellectuals met in Berlin to establish the Congress for Cultural Freedom to resist the Kremlin's sustained assault on Western and liberal values. During the 1950s the Congress spread throughout the world, creating a network of affiliated national committees, a worldwide community of liberal intellectuals fiercely committed to democratic governance, but supported by grants which, unknown to most of them, originated in the Central Intelligence Agency. Through the Congress's influential publications, conferences, and international protests, it kept the issues of Soviet totalitarianism and liberal anti-Communism alive in a largely hostile environment.... It was finally dissolved in 1967 amid the revelations of its funding by the CIA.2
Frances Stoner Saunders, in The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, discusses this further:
Whether they liked it or not, whether they knew it or not, there were few writers, poets, artists, historians, scientists or critics in post-war Europe whose names were not in some way linked to this covert enterprise.... Defining the Cold War as a ‘battle for men’s minds’ it stockpiled a vast arsenal of cultural weapons: journals, books, conferences, seminars, art exhibitions, concerts, awards.... Endorsed and subsidized by powerful institutions, this non-Communist group became as much a cartel in the intellectual life of the West as Communism had been a few years earlier (and [since it was the intellectual left that was being targeted for control through the establishment of a Non-Communist left] it included many of the same people).... It spied on tens of thousands of Americans, harassed democratically elected governments abroad, plotted assassinations, denied these activities to Congress, and, in the process, elevated the art of lying to new heights.3
According to Frances Stoner Saunders and others cited, covert coordination of the writings of Western authors—such as George Orwell (the CIA produced propaganda movies of his books), Hannah Arendt, Irving Kristol (the CIA buying 50,000 of his books for free distribution worldwide), Isaiah Berlin, Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler, Henry Luce, Bertrand Russell (who wrote some good stuff but was listed), Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Robert Conquest and Peter Coleman (who wrote the above cited exposure) and the simultaneous sabotage of media they could not control (such as Ramparts Magazine, The New Republic, the Nation and the New Statesman of which only a few were able to avoid bankruptcy from loss of their readers)—was only one of the many “black ops” and covert actions, occasionally breaking out into overt actions, which became the hidden history of the Cold War.
That hidden history was first exposed by the Church and Pike Congressional Committees in 1975 and 1976 and by many researchers and reporters since. To carry out its strategies-of-tension, the CIA had its own wire service and publishing companies. It set up and supported magazines, newspapers, and radio stations with solidly biased and beholden editorial staffs. It established the largest news conglomerate in West Germany and major media in many countries (including Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America with roughly 100 transmitters each, and many lesser-known regional radio stations beamed to Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa). Attorney William Schapp says the CIA
alone—not to mention its counterparts in the rest of the American intelligence community—owned or controlled some 2,500 media entities all over the world. In addition, it has people ranging from stringers to highly visible journalists and editors in virtually every major media organization.4 [To that we must add those controlled by the intelligence services of other nations.]
Canned Cold War editorials were sent to large and small newspapers all over the world. These editorials were available for any editor to restructure as his or her own creation (corporations and governments are doing this today). Large independent think-tanks were established, funded, and staffed with ideological supporters, as were think-tanks within universities.
Using negative buzzword labels to describe others such as communist dictatorship, subversives, and extremists and using only positive words—freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule—when talking of ourselves was the foundation of all social-control-paradigms (Eric Fromm’s “frameworks of orientation”). This is designed to create fear (a strategy-of-tension) among the populations of the wealthy nations so they would support a policy of worldwide suppression and oppression under the cover of protecting freedoms and rights.
Foundations established and funded by the CIA were only some of the many financial conduits that provided the funds for this immense operation. Money was passed covertly through more than 170 major, seemingly independent, foundations—as well as the Marshall Plan and the American Federation of Labor. The CIA’s covert propaganda budget throughout the Cold War exceeded that of UPI, AP, and Reuters even as those news services were the unwitting primary carriers of its carefully crafted views of the world. Control of the thoughts of the world through control of media content was the CIA’s biggest covert action expenditure. That the CIA offered reporters news scoops in exchange for publication of fraudulent articles tells us some of the leading columnists in the world were planting these deceptions.
Reporters with a pipeline to sensational stories rise quickly to the top. According to Frances Saunders, well-known Washington columnists such as Joe and Stewart Alsop and Walter Lippman were dinner and social friends with the managers-of-state and the CIA leaders (such as William Colby, Frank Wisner, and other managers of the CIA) who were creating this propaganda and were in on the ground floor of cold war planning. Those columnists knew that the Grand Strategy was to misinform the nation that it was under dire threat of military assault even as they knew this was pure fabrication. Those columnists knowingly cooperated and never breathed a word of the propaganda (strategy-of-tension/”framework of orientation”) scheme. The news media were scandalized when the Pike Committee exposed that over 400 journalists were in the direct employ of the CIA (at $200 a month they were cheaper than prostitutes). Of course, “A central feature of this program was to advance the claim that it [propaganda] did not exist.”5
Here then is how the propagandizing of the so-called free world was accomplished: CIA leaders moved in the same social circles as—and were personal friends of—leading columnists, newspaper editors, and media owners. With the base of fraudulent books and articles in place for researchers (as addressed above) the CIA would leak dramatic fictitious stories (missile gaps, Soviet aggression, threats from rogue terrorist nations). It was crucial for the masses to believe such stories because then they would give their support for any suppression of the colonial world’s breaks for freedom.
When media leaders published these fraudulent stories they were passed over all the wire services and every media in the nation would publish them, usually as front page news and lead articles. Follow up interviews were channeled to prepared spokespersons and the threats were confirmed. Alternative news may challenge that view eventually but initially no one stands up. In one day, not just the United States but much of the world faithfully believed what, in final analysis, was carefully crafted propaganda. In this way strategies-of-tension are still created so the masses will fully support whatever military campaign or covert activity is on the agenda of the State Department/National Security Council/President.
Below the elite group of misinformers were accredited reporters who remained accredited only by parroting what was fed them. No one—except those ideologically safe media (personal and social friends of CIA managers and top government officials)—knew this was created propaganda and accredited reporters were straitjacketed. To challenge those planted stories which the whole nation believed fully would be career and social suicide. Thus there were no reporters to seriously challenge such silly notions as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, Yugoslavia, and other tiny countries being serious military threats to America.
With the “free” media saturated with those articles carefully crafted to control the masses view of the world, propaganda became, and is still being written as, history. This can be seen in the daily news being nearly identical in today’s newspapers and newscasts while only a small portion of the world, national and local news is reported. Generally speaking, these media do not have reporters checking if those are facts, they only have reporters rushing to the phone to be the first to report what they are told.
Once a primary social-control-paradigm is carried in every newspaper and newscast in the nation as fact and every applicable organ of government is backing it, no reporter or editor would dare challenge that report. This was seen with full force when Iraq was demonized in 2002-03 in preparation for the April 2003 invasion with the goal of installing an “imperial democracy” (a puppet government). The majority of Americans firmly believed they were under the dire threats the media reports proclaimed. Any newspaper or TV news that dared take an opposing view would have lost its readers en masse, would lose their lucrative corporate advertising and, though this will vehemently be denied, those editors would have lost their jobs.
The powerful were, and are, writing history (building a “framework of orientation”) to control the thoughts of the general public well into the future (the intention is forever). Unless the process is fully exposed, sincere researchers will forever be citing these fabricated published accounts as they write history. In fact, the British and all other empires have been practicing just such black-ops to protect their empires for centuries, still are, and the OSS and CIA were taught by Britain’s MI6. The intelligence services of all nations of what is now one allied empire cooperated in misinforming their citizens to gain their backing supposedly to suppress tyrants but in reality to maintain control of the world. This orchestrated propaganda machine was eventually described by agents of the CIA itself as its Mighty Wurlitzer.6
The route to becoming well-published and well-known was therefore through parroting what came out of the Mighty Wurlitzer. Certainly most writers and reporters had no direct contact with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. But Cold War hysteria created by the intelligence services and government press releases left them no option but to parrot the same line. Thus, almost every political or economic writer and columnist was unwittingly creating the literature/historical base to suppress the world’s break for freedom, and protect the current power-structure’s control of world resources and markets.
Gross fabrications and crafted propaganda are now not only a major part of Western literature and history—they are Western literature and history. It is to the credit of the conscientious academics that did stand up and attempt to tell the American people the truth. But they were quickly silenced by McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the massive weight of the “framework of orientation” being imposed.
The destruction of the careers of 300-plus blacklisted Hollywood stars and writers—as was pointed out during the March 21, 1999 Academy Awards when the recipient of an Oscar was acknowledged by all major media as having testified against his friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee—provides just a hint of the thousands of professors and intellectuals whose careers were destroyed or badly damaged. As these conscientious voices were silenced, the careers of academics, reporters, and writers parroting the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer soared. Little did they know that, just like the hard right (Aryan Nations, Posse Commitatus, John Birch Society, et al.) absurdities, which all respectable academics know better than to source, imperial nations were creating their own reality, reporters and academics were unwittingly recording this misinformation as reality, and everyone was referencing each other as authoritative sources.
Ralph McGehee was a career CIA agent who spent the last few years of his career studying CIA archives. He concluded:
The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities. It shapes its intelligence ... to support presidential policy. Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people [and legislators] are the primary target of its lies.7
To target the American people, American intelligence services must simultaneously target those the masses look up to for designing and interpreting our world—Congress, academia, and the media. Reformed CIA agent McGehee claimed that “He has never once seen a CIA official tell the truth to Congress. Instead came a steady stream of lies.”8 Even the information going to those with security clearances is controlled. This explains why academics and other intellectuals are so misled and, in turn, mislead the masses. The Mighty Wurlitzer was established to write a history that protected powerbrokers as they imposed enormous violence upon the world to protect their wealth and power. Those outright lies and distorted stories are recorded as real history and there is little else in the media of record. Perhaps this is true of all empires but—if that pattern of social control through strategies-of-tension, covert actions, military power, and then writing history by distorting the record (creating a “framework of orientation”) is ever to be broken—we must recognize and analyze this process.
After WWII, colonial nations were declaring their full independence. Many were electing democratic governments and hoping to emulate the United States’ economic successes and freedoms. The loss of the resources in their former colonies meant impoverishment for the war-shattered historic imperial-centers-of-capital. For the American led coalition of empires to regain control it was crucial that the educational institutions and the media of emerging countries not be permitted unbiased observation and critiques of the maneuvers of the superpowers. Newly-free democracies therefore had to be covertly overthrown and puppet governments put in place (Indonesia, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, et al.). Yugoslavia too had to be militarily suppressed, fragmented, and submissive governments installed. .
Even though many of the colonial oppressed fought hard and suffered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and a few millions of casualties; most were unable to break free. Massive military and financial support was put behind puppet dictators to prevent loss of those countries by the vote. The citizens of the imperial centers accepted these interferences into other countries because the information reaching them through the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer essentially reversed reality: Dictators were described with the buzzword expression “authoritarian governments” while fledgling democracies, defending themselves against overthrow by CIA covert destabilizations, were portrayed as “dictatorships.”
Freedom and democracy are taught, preached, and believed in throughout the world. So suppression of any break for freedom could only be accomplished under a cover of “free” elections. Progressive leaders could easily explain true freedom to their followers. To silence them and subvert elections required funding the campaigns of dictators and establishing reactionary newspapers.
But not even these black-ops could fool the people into voting against their own best interests. No matter how idealistic these 2nd-and-3rd tier planners were it was obvious to them that those standing up and preaching freedom for their countries had to be eliminated. Talking to ex-CIA agent Ralph McGehee I said, “America established and orchestrated those death squads.” His instant response, “Of course we did.” As I write this, December 3, 2001—President Vicente Fox of Mexico has admitted Mexico kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, hundreds of “leftists” during the 1960s and 1970s. Leftists, of course, is a buzzword for any progressives outside the ideological control of the established political powers.
Because they were so thoroughly indoctrinated into the enemy-belief-system, idealistic people—no different than you and I but not having looked deeper—established and orchestrated death squads which assassinated thousands of teachers, professors, labor leaders, cooperative leaders, and church leaders, the budding Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, Lenins, Gandhis, and Martin Luther Kings of those countries. Then, to protect this exceptionally violent suppression of freedom and democracy by imperial-centers-of-capital, the Mighty Wurlitzers of those imperial nations created the image to the world that these primarily nonviolent, patriotic, and courageous people were terrorists and a threat to the world.
Insurgents battling for freedom today, who would be praised as heroes if they had been fighting for America’s revolution in 1776, or any other major nation’s revolution, were dealt with by U.S.-supported military forces. Potential civilian leaders, whose only threat was that they would win at the ballot box, were dealt with by CIA-orchestrated death squads. One marvels at the courage of these men and women who keep standing up for freedom and rights in their country and for their people when they knew their name would go on a death squad list. How can one help but notice that those heroes on the periphery of trading empires are fighting for freedom just as America fought for its freedom in 1776.
With U.S. military forces in 130 countries around the world, with a military budget reaching almost the level of the entire rest of the world, and with the largest of those military powers tentatively allied with America, it is impossible for America to deny it is an empire or that, with their military and trading allies, they form an allied empire. Where America was originally one of the smaller colonial empires, today—along with their allied centers-of-capital—they are, although somewhat fragile due to internal contradictions and the potential of an economic collapse, the largest and most powerful empire in history.
Of course, “trading empires” is a commonly used term but trading empires expanded and protected by military might are true empires in the deepest and most original meaning of the word. Today’s empires are only hiding under the cover of new names (free trade) and new slogans (peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule).
The Maoist-led revolution in China in 1949 triggered an intense study by the U.S. State Department that culminated in National Security Council Directive 68 (NSC-68) being presented to President Truman on April 16, 1950. Although it was not signed until September 30, 1950 (as NSC-68/2), that document’s master plan for the containment of those breaks for economic freedom (actually only an affirmation and expansion of the top secret policies of 1947: NSC-4, NSC-4A, NSC-10/2, and others) officially became America’s secret policy of covert and overt financial, economic, political, and military, warfare.9 The origin of this imperial Grand Strategy originated early in WWII (keywords, imperial, Grand Strategy, John Ikenberry).
Although the world was theoretically at peace, this directive called for increasing the U.S. arms budget by 350% ($13.5-billion to $46.5-billion). This was just under the $300-billion annual budget (year-1990 dollars) with which the United States fought the Cold War. U.S. economic and military power was being mustered to support the collapsed power-structure of the former colonial empires and suppress those emerging nations’ breaks for economic freedom.10
While admitting there was no military threat to the West, Dean Acheson’s memoir, Present at the Creation, unwittingly exposes NSC-68 as the master plan for the Cold War. It was a Grand Strategy for increasing the military budget of the United States by 350% to wage a worldwide covert war (or overt when necessary—Korea; Vietnam; the two Gulf Wars; the containment of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya; and the destabilization and fragmentation of Yugoslavia) to suppress the rising tide of social and economic revolutions which were intent on breaking the dependency imposed upon them and turning their resources to the care of their own people.
There are just and necessary covert operations such as those by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII. However OSS officers, the primary designers of post-WWII covert actions, and other Western intelligence services had been carrying out major covert operations to suppress the freedom of colonial nations well before the CIA was officially established. Very large military efforts to reinstall or maintain the old ruling elite were undertaken in Greece and China before WWII ended. Tens of thousands of valiant patriots who had held two-thirds of Greece out of Hitler's control were slaughtered. At the same time, with U.S. support, Vietnam was being reclaimed by the French, who killed 20,000 in Haiphong harbor alone and another million Indochinese before America took over the suppression of that break for economic freedom to slaughter another 3-million in the 1960s and 1970s. Britain retained her claim to Malaysia by slaughtering thousands. With American and British support, the Dutch slaughtered 150,000 Indonesians in an unsuccessful attempt to reclaim those resource-rich islands (using Dutch SS battalions which had been fighting for Hitler just weeks earlier). In one bombardment alone, over 90,000 were killed in the suppression of Madagascar’s bid for freedom. There were many more, even if smaller, suppressions of the worldwide break for economic freedom.
OSS Cold Warriors were the primary staffers of the CIA when it was first established in 1947.11 The experiences of these Cold Warriors in suppressing breaks for economic freedom (called insurgencies) between 1945 and 1950 were codified into NSC-68. All previous Security Council directives were on a learning curve which built up to that April 1950 master plan. All later NSC directives were supplemental to it. Most “insurgency” suppressions succeeded in maintaining the dependent status of the crucial “countryside” with its precious natural resources. But China, with one-fifth of the world’s people, was a big loss that reverberated in the boardrooms of major corporations, and protective government policies were called for. Managers-of-state knew well that if these revolutions were successful the imperial center would lose those cheap resources and profitable markets.
To maintain control, it was necessary to suppress and/or contain both the rising socialist centers of capital to the East and the emerging countries that might take the rhetoric of democracy and freedom seriously and either form an independent trading bloc of nonaligned nations or tie their economies to other emerging-centers-of-capital. But with the world at peace the planners admitted there was no way to get even $1-billion a year out of either Congress or the American people, and NSC-68 called for an additional $33-billion per year ($300-billion in year-2000 dollars).12
Note the simultaneous occurrences of these major events: (1) The Korean War, proving communists were bent on world conquest. (2) The Congress for Cultural Freedom, along with other black ops of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, controlling the information flow to the world. (3) And McCarthyism silencing those with the credentials and authority to tell the people anything different.
These mutually supporting events made their debut in the first half of 1950 and within two months of the finalization of NSC-68, the master plan for the Cold War.13 None of this was accidental or incidental. It was all part of the Grand Strategies of managers-of-state to create a “framework of orientation.”
While McCarthyism—painting any progressive person or philosophy as communist—was in full swing, it was political, social, and career suicide to be objective and intellectually balanced. During those 40-years of suppression of dissenting opinion, the CIA paid compliant professors to write 25-to-30 fraudulent books a year. Right-wing think-tanks were set up to produce thousands of books based on those original planted volumes. Tens of thousands of CIA articles providing a base for those fraudulent books were planted in the media around the world (to control the world’s view, 700 CIA articles were planted worldwide during the overthrow and assassination of Allende in Chile). Reporters were provided news scoops in exchange for publication of fraudulent articles. Some of the leading columnists in the world, therefore, were planting this nonsense.
For over two generations social scientists have used, and are still using, those fraudulent books and articles as the foundation of their research. Such books have been cited by official textbooks for 50 years and will be in the future. The intelligence agencies, corporate think-tanks, and state departments of all powerful nations were busy writing the same distorted history. Intellectual figures and skillful writers throughout the Western world supported and coordinated this building of, as Eric Fromm describes, a “framework of orientation.” As the quotes above on the Congress for Cultural Freedom demonstrates, only academics and intellectuals on the fringe knew the difference and even they could only be very unsure of what was real and what was not. When it was learned that the CIA had supported the printing of these thousands of books, sincere academics sued for the titles to be revealed. But the Supreme Court ruled that this would expose CIA methods and endanger the national security.14
The imperial nations of Europe also had to worry about the loss of their heartland by the vote. Post-WWII France and Italy were especially vulnerable to ballot box revolutions. Massive CIA funds were only barely able to avert that loss. It required more than money. The partisans were the only effective political force left in Italy and many were communist. Allied troops released Mafia leaders from Mussolini's prisons, armed them, and placed them in charge of the cities as they reclaimed the Italian peninsula.15
Control of the Italian elections was still in question and, besides other methods of funding conservative Italian politicians, the CIA was deeply involved in the super-secret P2 lodge, the primary group trying to prevent that election disaster for the Western world's managers-of-state. The only way to obtain a seat of power in the Italian government was through that secret lodge. The risk of an overthrow by the vote was still high. For further belief system protection, the Bologna railway bombing which killed 84 people and injured 150, and other fatal bombings in Italy were strategies-of-tension planned and carried out by the CIA-controlled Italian intelligence services and, right by the covert action training manuals that have since surfaced, blamed on the "left." The explosives from that bombing and others were traced to some of the 139 buried weapons and explosives caches for the CIA’s “Operation Gladio,” under which those bombings were carried out. In Italy alone, the right wing terrorist bombings blamed on the left numbered in the hundreds, killing several hundred and injuring many more.16 Run an Internet search for “Gladio, Ukraine” and you will learn these strategies-of-tension have been refined to take control of former provinces of the Soviet Union and other strategic parts of the world. So far (2004) it has failed in Belarus, succeeded in the Ukraine, and the externally supported regime-change battles are on-going in other former provinces.
Operation Gladio was the Italian segment of the CIA’s “Operation Statewatch” operating, with the support of other intelligence services, throughout Western Europe. Operation Statewatch was, of course, worldwide and the same dirty tricks were used by the CIA to discredit socialist elements in Japan.17 Though the cover story when exposed in September 1990 was that these were “stay behind forces” in case the Soviet Union overran those countries, they were really there to control elections through a strategy-of-tension and, if that failed, to take back by force (through assassinations, black ops, and military coups) any government lost by the vote. Their permanent in-place numbers ranged from 400 operatives in Belgium to 2,000 in Italy. The super-secret covert operation's bombings and blaming of the left in other European countries within the Western alliance were done more sensibly, where and when no one would be hurt. The purpose of strategies-of-tension worldwide, creating terrorist acts and blaming the left, was, of course, to distort what the so-called left (primarily labor leaders) stood for to deny them any wins in the elections.
In 1997-98, there were exposures of South Africa's secret service using and planting Soviet weapons in its own strategy-of-tension to blame the massacres of blacks on the African National Congress. Such framing of opponents is an old political trick and planting counterfeit letters, documents, and weapons (black ops) is standard operating procedure for intelligence services. The CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer had this all down to a science. Those bombings and other violence blamed on the left within Europe and throughout the world were to provide a base for those planted articles.
In fact, both actual and staged covert violence is used worldwide by imperial-centers-of-capital to control elections both on the periphery and within their centers of empire. In dozens of CIA-staged attacks by supposed Communist Huks in the Philippines, the hamlets were rescued by General Magsasay. As planned, the general was popularized as a hero and became America’s elected Philippine puppet.18 Strategies-of-tension creating a “framework of orientation” are standard operating procedures of most, if not all, power-structures. The famed march of the Black Shirts in Italy that supposedly put Mussolini in power was staged three days after Italy’s powerbrokers handed to him the reins of power. That showing of unrest was to consolidate that power. Germany’s famous Reichstag fire was a month after Hitler had been given power in a secret January meeting of German powerbrokers. Again the purpose was to consolidate power by gaining followers through creating the belief of an imminent threat to social tranquility and security. In Chapter seven we will be addressing how the Korean War was just such a strategy-of-tension staged to provide the loyalty base to support the expense and worldwide violence of the Cold War.
We would do well to study the CovertAction Quarterly, put out by disaffected CIA agents. They recognized that corporate America was imposing social-control-paradigms upon the world under the cloak of false scholarship, the same way America’s beliefs of lurking enemies during the Cold War had been manufactured and also the way Britain imposed the Adam Smith free trade beliefs 200 years ago. This is of such importance we obtained permission to quote Sally Covington at length. Note how her description of corporate control of information (creation of public opinion, a social-control paradigm or “framework of orientation”) is a close parallel to the post-WWII imposition by intelligence services of these same beliefs:
Spearheading the assault has been a core group of 12 conservative foundations: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Charles G. Koch, David H. Koch and Claude R. Lambe charitable foundations, the Phillip M. McKenna Foundation, The JM Foundation, The John M. Olin Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.... From 1992-94, they awarded $300-million in grants, and targeted $210-million to support a wide array of projects and institutions…. The 12 have mounted an impressively coherent and concerted effort to shape public policy by undermining—and ultimately redirecting—what they regard as the institutional strongholds of modern American liberalism: academia, Congress, the judiciary, executive branch agencies, major media, religious institutions, and philanthropy itself. They channeled some $80-million to right-wing policy institutions actively promoting an anti-government unregulated market agenda. Another $80-million supported conservative scholars and academic programs, with $27-million targeted to recruit and train the next generation of right-wing leaders in conservative legal principles, free-market economics, political journalism and policy analysis. And $41.5-million was invested to build a conservative media apparatus, support pro-market legal organizations, fund state-level think tanks and advocacy organizations, and mobilize new philanthropic resources for conservative policy change ... Conservative foundations also provided $2,734,263 to four right-of-center magazines between 1990 and 1993, including The National Interest, The Public Interest, The New Criterion, and The American Spectator.19
With millions of dollars in funding at their fingertips, conservative institutions have taken
the political offensive on key social, economic, and regulatory policy issues.... These institutions have effectively repositioned the boundaries of national policy discussion, redefining key concepts, molding public opinion, and pushing for a variety of specific policy reforms.... These groups flood the media with hundreds of opinion editorials. Their top staff appears as political pundits and policy experts on dozens of television and radio shows across the country. And their lobbyists work the legislative arenas, distributing policy proposals, briefing papers, and position statements.... The American Enterprise Institute has ghost writers for scholars to produce op-ed articles that are sent to the one hundred and one cooperating newspapers—three pieces every two weeks.... The Hoover Institution’s public affairs office ... links to 900 media centers across the U.S. and abroad. The Reason Foundation ... had 359 television and radio appearances in 1995 and more than 1,500 citations in national newspapers and magazines. The Manhatten Institute has held more than 600 forums or briefings for journalists and policy makers on multiple public policy issues and concerns, from tort reform to federal welfare policy.... The Free Congress Foundation, in addition to its National Empowerment Television, is publishing NetNewsNow, a broadcast fax letter sent around the country to more than 400 radio producers and news editors.20
As Karen Rothmyer wrote 19 years ago:
‘Layer upon layer of seminars, studies, conferences, and interviews do much to push along, if not create, the issues, which then become the national agenda of debate.... By multiplying the authorities to whom the media are prepared to give friendly hearing, [conservative donors] have helped to create an illusion of diversity where none exists. The result could be an increasing number of one-sided debates in which the challengers are far outnumbered, if indeed they are heard at all.’... [The Heartland Institute] introduced Policy Fax ... a revolutionary public policy fax-on-demand research service that enables you to receive, by fax, the full text of thousands of documents from more than one hundred of the nation’s leading think tanks, publications, and trade associations. Policy Fax is easy to use and it’s free for elected officials and journalists.... The American Legislative Exchange Council and the newer State Policy Network provide technical assistance, develop model legislation, and report about communications activities and conferences. ALEC, well funded by private foundations and corporate contributors, is a powerful and growing membership organization, with almost 26,000 state legislators—more than one-third of the nation’s total. The organization, which has a staff of 30, responds to 700 information requests each month, and has developed more than 150 pieces of model legislation ranging from education to tax policy. It maintains legislative task forces on every important state policy issue, including education, health care, tax and fiscal policy, and criminal justice.21 a
During early histories of all developing democracies powerbrokers bought up or established the major information systems, at that time primarily newspapers. That control moved from one center of power to others as media were sold or taken over but they are never released to seriously inform the masses; the occasional, or even many, exposés notwithstanding. The foundation beliefs that maintain unequal internal and external trades are not only unchallenged, they are heavily promoted.
In late February 2002, the attempted establishment within the Pentagon of an Office of Strategic Influence (office of disinformation) to plant fraudulent and distorted news in the world press to control Muslim opinion worldwide was exposed. The media took the tack that this was something new. But it was not new. Every intelligence service (the U.S. has at least 15 of them, most other nations have several) and the state departments of major countries practice disinformation and corporations and politicians practice it to control who will be elected and what laws will be written.
The corporate-owned media is there to push social-control corporate philosophies and scholars have easy access to the massive literature put out by corporate-funded think-tanks. Everyone everywhere feels he or she is thinking independently but when analyzed most information and foundation beliefs come from those disinformation centers or less than straightforward government sources. With little other information available, researchers stay safely inside permitted-parameters-of-debate. For those who dare to write or speak truly independently, the market is extremely limited. These heavily-funded schools of thought become the functioning beliefs of society (its belief system or “framework of orientation”) and all other views are crowded to the margins.
The massive effort to suppress Henry George's philosophies which spread rapidly when first introduced indicates that the managers-of-state knew well that this sensible economic philosophy was available.22 This philosophy gives equality and rights to all which meant that unearned wealth had to be given up. The powerbrokers were not about to do that. For example: In the 1917 crisis that brought on the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, in an attempt to avoid total overthrow, the Russian managers-of-state (Kerensky in this case) offered to adopt the philosophies of America’s Henry George. So they too knew this philosophy for full and equal rights were available and only reached for it in a last-ditch effort to avoid being overthrown. The Bolsheviks following the philosophy of Karl Marx were in no mood for compromise. They overthrew the provisional government and took over. Now managers-of-state of the imperial-centers-of-capital had a new threatening social philosophy to deal with.
After WWII the old imperial-centers-of-capital had shattered each other's power, and the former colonial world was revolting. The only wealth left to suppress those breaks for freedom was in America.
At the end of that war the United States had two Grand Strategy choices: join the newly emerging nations in their break for freedom or join the old imperial-centers-of-capital and suppress those insurgencies. The behind-the-scenes cultural and financial ties to Western Christian, white Europe were too great. America chose alignment with the old imperial nations and the historical record shows that this choice was chiseled in stone decades before.
For 130 years British intelligence services, the British diplomatic service, and British industry had financed university systems and think-tanks to teach neo-mercantilist free trade. U.S. intelligence services, State Department, and multinational corporations now took over that role as the British Empire crumbled. Most universities and opinion makers in Europe and America then preached those social-control-paradigms (most unwittingly) for the next 58 years (1947 to the present) and still do.
Within the old imperial-centers-of-capital it was not possible to remain in a position of influence in either government or academia if one promoted anything other than the social-control-paradigms protecting that society. The crisis of the Great Depression created openings for other social philosophies to be looked at but WWII and the Cold War permitted the re-imposing of the protective beliefs. While McCarthyism was in full swing—painting any progressive philosophy as Communist—it was political, social, and career suicide to be objective and intellectually balanced.
European professors had for centuries been the carriers of the social-control paradigms (“frameworks of orientation”) of imperialism and there was little else taught. There were however conscientious professors in the American universities who knew the history of Americans gaining their economic freedom, who knew that most other colonial nations were still under the control of imperial-centers-of-capital, and who recognized the potential of those former colonies joining the brotherhood of free nations. These idealistic and conscientious professors were recognized authorities whose views would be freely expressed through their classes and eventually the media. To take over the imperial mantle and suppress the post-WWII breaks for freedom it was necessary for America to strip these potential carriers of truth and reality out of the universities.
McCarthyism was no aberration of one individual as recorded in history. Senator Joseph McCarthy was the chosen point man for the House Un-American Activities Committee (whose members themselves were point men for the wealthy and powerful and the first echelon managers-of-state) to strip those professors out of the universities and their thoughts out of the media. Hundreds of professors and thousands of others lost their jobs as lower-level managers-of-state, congresspersons without security clearances, the universities, the media, and lay intellectuals were conditioned to keep their heads down, their mouths shut, and their typewriters silent.23
The major universities' rehabilitation of the reputation of these persecuted souls when the Cold War was won (most were dead by then) proves even the powerbrokers of universities—the very people sworn to provide an honest education to the nation and the world—knew that students and everyone else were being fed a controlled and fraudulent picture of the world.
Professors took leaves of absence to organize the CIA and then returned to their ivory towers.24 By not telling their students that they had established a massive propaganda organization that was to put all others to shame, which would have been an honest education, they, and all who knew but remained silent, became propagandists just as surely as those within the massive intelligence system they had set up.
The 1975-76 Church Committee and Pike Committee hearings exposed many of these black ops: The thousands of fraudulent books financed by intelligence services (all imperial centers were doing it). The tens of thousands of articles planted all over the world (intelligence agencies of all imperial centers were also doing this, including the CIA making movies as well as newsreels that the 50s and 60s generation watched with almost every movie). The massive literature put out by the subsidized think-tanks and subsidized academics and the thousands of books written by sincere academics but sourcing that fraudulent literature were being passed off as honest scholarly work. On top of this were the massive fictions (openly so novels and movies) written to take advantage of the created hysteria.
This was the rhetorical thunder of the Cold War. After 30-to-40 years of this hysteria during which honest and sober works were dismissed as the works of radicals, misguided souls and conspiracy theorists only a few on the fringes of academia understood how deeply they were involved in suppressing truth through parroting these carefully created beliefs that democracy and freedom was under threat. The truth can be found only through intense research and dedication and few have the time, money, or motivation to do it. Thus, although the claim is made that it is long dead, the legacy of McCarthyism and the orthodoxy it created still rules the halls of academia, the media, and the masses.
Citizens educated under those far from free thought conditions eventually moved into positions of power and, within the limitations of their power and misinterpretation of free trade, were likely sincere in their efforts to develop the world and eliminate poverty. But those who would question free trade as practiced by neo-mercantilists were silenced; at first by McCarthyism’s threat to their career and later by peer pressure and lack of financial or identity rewards. As opposed to the certainty of being cast into oblivion if one tried to stand up against the propaganda, the majority staked their careers on promoting the cosmopolitan philosophy and the high financial and career (identity) rewards that choice offered.
Thus the Brer-Rabbit, don’t throw me in the brier patchb, neo-mercantilist, Adam Smith free trade scam became firmly entrenched. To the extent we believe our own social-control-paradigms and force these policies on the world, we will seriously retard world development, continually ratchet down the wages of labor in the developed world, could collapse the world economy into a depression, and could again lay the foundations for war.c
While enjoying the followers and income they gained by publishing the social-control-paradigms and Cold War hype created by the power-structure, the media trapped themselves. Once a nation was fully propagandized, they were now controlled by their readers and advertisers. With the masses believing enemies were planning to attack them at any moment and intelligence services spending hundreds of millions of dollars continually reinforcing that belief, any media that would dare present a rationalization outside the Cold War belief system that the West was under serious threat would lose both their readers and advertisers in droves.
The market then worked its magic. With the world programmed that there were enemies lurking behind every bush, the occasional scholarly and honest critique could not be sold while paranoid and hysterical writings, and the total frauds we have been addressing, sold by the hundreds of millions.
Just as imperial powers did not dare let any nation develop their own social philosophies and become a beacon for other oppressed nations, they did not dare let the voices of the oppressed within the imperial centers, nor the voices of those on the periphery aware of suppressions, be heard. Preventing awakened political voices from reaching others with their message required destabilizing internal political groups in all allied countries. In the United States, this was the purpose first of the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthyism and then of the FBI's Operation COINTELPRO (a replay of the post-WWI shattering of the forming solid labor front: the destruction of the Wobblies [International Workers of the World, IWW]). CHAOS, Cable Splicer, and Garden Plot were American internal destabilizations by military intelligence services carried out in cooperation with the FBI. These synchronized efforts of political police became urgent when over 500 periodicals critical of the Vietnam War, with a peak circulation of 7-million, sprang up.25
Through agent provocateurs, counterfeited letters, planted narcotics, false arrests, poison-pen letters, malicious articles planted in the press, blacklisting from jobs, harassment, electronic surveillance, burglary, mail tampering, and other internal strategies of terrorist tension, hundreds of budding political groupings were destabilized. In March 1998, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) won a 15-year legal battle against the FBI for decades of spying, harassment, and disruptions as just described. During that trial, these two groups—out of hundreds spied upon and/or destabilized—proved that the FBI had conducted 20,000 days of wiretaps and 12,000 days of listening "bugs" between 1943 and 1963 as well as 208 burglaries of offices and homes of their members and had photographed or stolen 9,864 private documents.26 These are only two groups out of hundreds that were compromised and only events that have been proven. (The 2002 Patriot Act legalizes all this and more.)d
The American government was ordered to pay Fred Hampton’s family $3-million when it was proven in court that his December 4, 1969 death in Chicago was a political assassination of the above-described black-ops. After 27 years in a California prison, Geronimo Pratt was ordered released and he collected $4.5-million when, though other excuses were used by the courts, he proved that his arraignment and conviction for murder was a conspiracy between the FBI and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office.
The FBI had him under surveillance, knew he was 400 miles away at the time of the murder, and the prosecutor knew that his witnesses were government informers with no credibility. Proving these conspiracies required some of the longest court cases in American history. As few such targeted people had either resources or determined people behind them, many more innocent people had their lives destroyed by what can only properly be called America’s political police. Totally innocent political prisoners have died in U.S. prisons and others are still there.27
If the largest and most politically motivated of these hundreds of groups had been allowed to form and grow, some of their leaders would eventually have been elected to local, state, and national governments. From that position, they would have had platforms to speak to the masses.
Social philosophies not in their best interest, as had been accepted in the past when there were no other choices, are much harder to impose upon a population under conditions of true freedom. The independent views on national and international events that would have been carried by the media when addressed by those new leaders, as opposed to the desired view of managers-of-state as they suppressed both internal dissent and the world’s break for freedom, were the real threat. For exercising their democratic rights, these innocent people were systematically monitored, systematically destabilized, some were sent to prison, and their voices were never heard except by a few on the margins. Silencing those who stood up on the periphery of empire was a much harder job than silencing dissenting voices within the imperial center but—at least until the financial meltdowns on the periphery—this too was, to a large extent, accomplished.
No profound thoughts which ran counter to the mainstream were permitted on either side of the opposing Cold War blocs, rhetoric about a free, open, and unbiased educational system in the “democratic” West notwithstanding. Classics of alternative thought were taught in the universities, but they were taught negatively and the massive propaganda of the CIA's Mighty Wurlitzer, the weeding out of professors with independent thought through loyalty oaths and the threat of—or actual—job loss, and the pressure of propagandized peers assured these philosophies would only be taught as being dictatorial, violent, and/or impractical. The violence of the Cold War was to suppress the implementation of any competing philosophies so that no such example could exist to gain the allegiance of intellectuals, opinion makers, and voters.
Because the masses now have voting rights their perception of the world had to be controlled. These gross fabrications and crafted propaganda provided a firm foundation for the social-control-paradigms of the Cold War and are now not only a major part of Western literature and history; they are Western literature and history. After the Cold War was won, major universities officially restored the good name of those who were forced out of academia and had their careers destroyed. This proved that the innocence of these accused and shattered people was well understood all along by the information gatekeepers.
Understanding the suppressions and oppressions of the Cold War is essential to understanding this book's primary theses: inequalities in world trade impoverish naturally wealthy regions, and imperial-center social philosophies are imposed to protect that system of laying claim to weak nations’ wealth. History repeats itself because wealth and power are based on inequalities of both external and internal trade; the rules of which have been fine-tuned for centuries. For the powerful to permit the establishment of equality in trades would be to allow the loss of their massive accumulations of unearned wealth and power. Thus, the suppressions and oppressions of the Cold War are not an aberration. Whenever the threat to wealth and power is high, such violence against idealistic people and societies gaining their freedom is the norm.
With all political, economic, financial, and military options blocked, the defeated, dependent, and impoverished world has no options outside of what the imperial centers have to offer. All plans of the developing world fail (the specific purpose of the covert actions of the Cold War), realization takes hold that the only opportunities are those offered by the powerful, the imposed (re-imposed) social philosophy takes hold, and the old order is restored. This is an exact description of the Cold War and the re-imposition of Adam Smith free trade philosophies and neo-liberal economics upon the world that we will be addressing in depth.
We have heard we have freedom, rights, and a free press all our lives. To accept that America had, and has, a propaganda system far more extensive than most empires in history is hard to accept. After reading this book we suggest reading Mark Lane’s Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK; L. Fletcher Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Kill Kennedy; and Philip Willan’s Puppet Masters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy. In Prouty’s authoritative books (he was 1-of-3 who wrote the how-to book on U.S. covert actions) one will learn how staged violence (a strategy-of-tension) is used worldwide to control the beliefs of voters so as to control elections both on the periphery of empire and within the imperial centers. When a strategy-of-tension fails and a power-structure is faced with loss of power, actual violence is used—including assassinations of leaders of nations, covert destabilizations, and wars.
Public knowledge of each violent event is controlled through carefully crafted press releases before, during, and following those implementations of policies-of-state. This is done so effectively that the FBI knew the identities of President Kennedy’s assassins but—because the plotters reached high into government circles and the entire government would come crashing down—they did not dare move on this information.e Members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations sat on this same information in 1978 when they learned those same names from the same sources; and America’s vaunted institutions—the Justice Department, the media, the universities, and its political leaders—all failed to inform the public even when everything the FBI and the House Select Committee knew was proven in a court of law when one of the assassins sued the Spotlight for publishing his name as one of those professional killers.
The assassins were named in the courtroom of Judge James W. Kehoe (verdict February 5, 1985), United States District Court, Miami, Florida, case number 80-1121-civ-JWK, E Howard Hunt [of Watergate fame], plaintiff, versus Liberty Lobby, defendant. It was actually CIA agent E Howard Hunt’s lawyers who irretrievably damaged their own client by asking specifically who these assassins were and what the witness knew of their activities and whereabouts as they organized and carried out the assassination. Claudia Furiati came up with the same names as the assassins when she was allowed access to Cuban intelligence files to write her book, ZR Rifle: the Plot to Kill Kennedy and Castro.
Part of the CIA’s plans to overthrow the Cuban government included control of information reaching the people as that overthrow unfolded and all was in place for history to be written that this externally coached and financed invasion was an internal Cuban revolution. When the Cuban overthrow collapsed at the Bay of Pigs and President Kennedy refused to rescue that covert operation with American air power the Cubans of Miami and their CIA handlers were furious. To them President Kennedy was a traitor to what they viewed was a fight for the survival of the world as they knew it. Being hardened to orchestrating death squad activity worldwide these angry agents, under orders from higher up, assassinated President Kennedy just as they had orchestrated the assassination of thousands of others worldwide so the imperial nations would not lose control of the periphery of empire. The same propaganda machinery that was in place to control the world’s belief of how the planned overthrow of the Cuban government was an internal event was now turned to controlling the world’s belief in who assassinated President Kennedy.
When the above trial concluded, the jury foreman, Leslie Armstrong, “simply, eloquently, and painstakingly” explained to waiting print, radio, and television reporters that “the evidence was clear ... the CIA had killed President Kennedy, Hunt had been a part of it, and the evidence, so painstakingly presented, should now be examined by the relevant institutions of the United States Government so that those responsible for the assassination might be brought to justice.”28
Lane points out that a Miami television station that evening reported only that Hunt had lost a libel case and had ignored her eloquent description of the historic importance of this case. The Jury foreman challenged that station on their reporting. It was then accurately reported by that one station but was ignored by all other media, local and national. In contrast, Hunt’s winning of the first trial where none of this explosive testimony was given and which was of no historic importance was widely reported.
William F. Pepper’s An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King was released just before this manuscript first went to press. Here too we learn that, in a suit brought by the King family against one of the assassins and others unnamed, it had been proven in Judge Swearingen’s courtroom in Memphis, Tennessee, between November 15, 1999 and March 2000, that Martin Luther King had been assassinated by elements of the Memphis police and the Tennessee State Police with the operation overseen by Army Intelligence.29
King’s murder was part of the well-known Operation COINTELPRO addressed above which was established specifically to destabilize rising political groups. We encourage the reader to read the story of the 70-plus witnesses bringing this political assassination to light.
After Mark Lane’s exposure of the CIA being behind the shooting of President Kennedy I dismissed the other cited theorists. I should not have. The dynamite testimony of President Johnson’s mistress (never used so as to avoid the taint of conspiracy theorists) makes it clear most were on the right trail tracing the many threads of power directly involved in that assassination. Some of those same respected powerbrokers were behind both assassinations. Those movers and shakers were meeting to plan King’s demise less then a month after President Kennedy was shot.30 The media was just as silent on this exposure of the violent elimination of African-American leaders as they were about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The assassinations of up and coming leaders in periphery countries by death squads is standard practice. We now know that, when the threat is high, this is also practiced within the imperial centers. Units within the intelligence communities are specially trained for these jobs, the relevant government structures stand ready to cover it up (plausible denial, the title of Lane’s book, but better explained in Pepper’s), and the media, local and regional police, and the judicial system are, as you and I would be, too cowed to expose what they know.
Bobby Kennedy was loved by Americans as much as his brother. If he was elected president (and he had just won the California primary the eve he was assassinated) he would have had the will, the knowledge, and the power to expose the true assassins of his brother. That could not be permitted.31
How and why the true assassins got away with this can be summed up in two sentences: In Chapter 16 we address that anyone in power who exposed that Japan was running a pure mercantilist economy (and their company) would be totally ostracized and destroyed. In the same way if anyone in the media or academia were ever a threat to exposing the power structure they would immediately face the full force of the system and be ostracized to the margins of society or (as we see by the Kennedy’s’ and King’s assassinations) worse.
By studying the above books and this book, one will begin to understand how social-control-paradigms (a belief system or “framework of orientation”) are imposed upon an acclaimed “free press” and academia who then, largely unwittingly, impose it upon a population whose government, educational institutions, and press claim to be honest recorders of history.f
We understand why it is so hard to believe that a free media does not inform the public. But that they do not is reality. In The Best Democracy that Money can Buy (2003), Greg Palast provides many examples with solid evidence of massive corruption that would have ended the careers of powerful politicians and even brought down governments if exposed but were glossed over and ignored. Through his efforts these stories get on British television but do not get on America’s. Any American who wants to stay fully informed should study his website, www.gregpalast.com.
History is written by the powerful to protect their wealth and power. Those carefully crafted press releases and carefully crafted recordings of events is the writing of history. Because all people are trained to be just (a society could survive no other way), destabilizing other societies to lay claim to, or retain claim to, their wealth requires the imperial center to create the belief that targeted and oppressed people are enemies and/or incompetents.
To justify colonizing the world, confiscating much of the world’s wealth, enslaving entire populations to produce that wealth, and actually wiping entire civilizations off the face of the earth in the process, it was necessary to expound the belief that natives of those besieged societies were not really people (they had no soul). When it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that they were people, it was necessary to expound the belief that indigenous people were incompetent, that they could not run their own affairs (a belief only now being slowly set aside), and that technologically advanced and “civilized” societies were helping them (a primary aspect of today’s beliefs that we are documenting is also untrue).
When the blatant injustices of mercantilist imperialism became too embarrassing, the belief that mercantilism had been abandoned and true free trade was in place was expounded. In reality the same wealth confiscation went on, deeply buried within complex systems of subtle monopolies and unequal trade hiding under the cover of free trade. Many explanations have been given for wars between the imperial nations when there was really only one common thread: “Who will control resources and trade and the wealth produced through inequalities in trade?” This is proven by the inequalities of trade siphoning the world’s wealth to imperial-centers-of-capital are in place today just as when plunder-by-trade was learned centuries ago. The battles over the world’s wealth have only kept hiding behind different protective philosophies each time the secrets of laying claim to the wealth of others’ have been exposed.
Thus it is that students of statecraft and foreign policy are openly taught that what the people believe is happening is only a control mechanism created through a public education campaign (a polite way of saying propaganda), and those planning the Grand Strategies of state are “defensive realists” or “offensive realists” dealing with the "realities" of the "real" world. Trained to be "realists," students of statecraft are taught to care for their nation’s “national interest.” Students with the right connections, along with many more who moved up through the corporate, political, and military world, move into the inner sanctums of government, take a pledge of secrecy, and become the managers-of-state we have been discussing throughout this treatise. None of these upper echelon managers are trained to care for the interests of the impoverished world, while those who rose through the corporate, political, and military ranks are deeply ingrained with the need to care for the corporate world and the imperial center. For managers-of-state to care for those on the periphery of empire when the confiscation of the natural wealth and labors of that periphery are creating the wealth and power of the imperial center is an oxymoron.
While powerful nations are controlling other people’s resources or denying the use of those resources to competing centers of capital, it is necessary to create the belief that people targeted for covert or overt attack, economically or militarily, are a serious threat to “national security.” Of course, the ones under threat are the already impoverished whose natural wealth and labor production are being siphoned to the powerful developed imperial-centers-of-capital. The belief that imperial nations are under military and terrorist threat and these "good" nations are supporting "good" people on the periphery of empire is accomplished through loudly proclaiming this through the still operational Mighty Wurlitzer. Those imposed “frameworks of orientation” (Eric Fromm’s words) establish the parameters of national and international debate and the real problem, monopolies and unequal trade, is not a politically correct or economically correct subject of discussion.
The low-key approach is used only when there is no serious threat. “No serious threat” means the subject of injustices of imperial centers and unequal trades is far outside the permitted-parameters-of-debate. However, when the threat of loss of power and wealth is high, meaning imperial injustices and unequal trades are being placed on the table for discussion on the periphery of empire, Western cultures engage in massive propaganda and covert destabilizations (both internally and externally), which is exactly what we are taught is done in dictatorships.
After the threat of a break for freedom is past, only an occasional violent covert operation is necessary. Populations have been so thoroughly indoctrinated by the propaganda of the Cold War—and there is so little else recorded in articles, books, or history—that the imposed beliefs are firmly in place in the social mind. As both the survival and wealth of most citizens of the imperial centers are based on the system as structured, most are firmly within the aura of a society’s protective beliefs. Extending those beliefs to the periphery and maintaining it is what these covert and overt destabilizations are all about.
The line between the controllers and the controlled lies above the university system and the media and below the National Security Administration (&NSC), the State Department, the intelligence services, the few in Congress with high security clearances, and other inner-sanctum managers-of-state.g Whereas the elite and managers-of-state know well the “frameworks of orientation” of the masses exist, after all, they created them, the masses—and this includes most within the university system, the media, and elected officials outside the inner sanctums of government—are unaware they are being controlled through strategies-of-tension so their governments can do throughout the world just what they are warning others wish to do to them; subvert their governments and steal their wealth.
It would be a difficult task for a professor or journalist to step back and realize that his or her entire education and life’s work was little more than spreading social-control beliefs that had been imposed upon society for generations. Nor could many accept that these fundamental beliefs with little relevance to reality had been kept in place by extreme violence. Those professors and journalists would instinctively and instantly realize that all the rewards (money, career advancement, acceptance of one’s work for publication, acceptance by one’s peers, and appointments to government posts) were stacked totally in favor of parroting the social-control-paradigms.
After observing those who did stand up being totally ostracized by their peers and denied any of the above described rewards for their achievements, only an insignificant few will stand up. However, after the crumbling of the tiger economies and other nations on the periphery, this is changing. Those who question those unjust and unequal policies and provide different answers are starting to find an audience. That and the collapsing economies on the periphery of empire discrediting the beliefs imposed upon them accounts for President George Bush’s national security team’s pre-9/11/2001 study concluding that what was needed to retain dominance and control of the world’s resources was “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.h”
While ignoring all other interpretations of world events as propaganda, crucial Western news comes directly from the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer and other intelligence services’ presentation of reality. Intelligence agencies’ wordsmiths restructure every world event to the desired spin. It is this reality that ambassadors and other government agencies hand to reporters. Lower-level officials have to parrot the same words they hear from higher officials. With the many years required to reach such a position of authority, every government official has been through this many times and knows what he or she is expected to say. To deviate from the proper script, no matter how much reality demands it, would incur immediate dismissal.
Any accredited reporter seriously challenging these creations at a presidential news conference or any other high-level news briefing would quickly lose accreditation to attend such meetings. To seriously address these creations as the propaganda they are would immediately place one outside the loop, cost most their jobs, and be instant social and political suicide. That peer pressure is at the heart of a primary structure of beliefs, so little else is heard or read. Thus, children can quickly understand what adults find incomprehensible. Children are honest and have nothing to lose while adults have everything to lose and following the crowd can quickly quiet their conscience. No one challenges them there but they would face big challenges if they tried to peel aside any major portion of the social-control-paradigms/frameworks of orientation and expose the truth.
Three tenets of capitalism are: pay the lowest possible price, charge all the market will bear, and give nothing to anybody. That is a great philosophy for powerbrokers with a subtle monopoly on capital, technology, markets, and military might. It takes no deep thought to realize that these tenets of classical economic philosophy were implanted by an earlier power-structure to maximize its claims to the wealth of others (that feudal residue in our philosophy, laws, and customs). Landed aristocracy and financial aristocracy, through control of all positions of power in the Church and universities, had full control of what was taught. The social-control paradigms taught (the “framework of orientation” still with us) were philosophical tenets chosen for the protection of that society and/or its power-structure, not philosophical tenets chosen by free thought to maximize the well-being of all within that society—let alone the welfare of the rest of the world's citizens whose natural wealth and labors were confiscated to create the wealth of the imperial-centers-of-capital.
It is the trumpeting of peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule that requires that those Grand Strategies for controlling other people and their resources be kept secret. (It is also a key part of keeping it secret.) What is practiced is the total antithesis of what is preached.
Professors are conscientious and sincerely want to teach true history, honest economics, and honest political science. However, when a society is under extreme threat such as the managers-of-state of the imperial-centers-of-capital were all through the Cold War, honest expressions of threatening thoughts are not permitted in the mainstream of these soft sciences. Honest analysis can be found at the margins but those are effectively “voices in the wilderness.” Professors and intellectuals who could, and did, challenge the Cold War beliefs being imposed upon the world as a cover for those suppressions of economic freedom were stripped out of the universities and the media or were silenced.32 Instinctively understanding this process, and with the exception of a few forced to the margins, professors and the media who are aware, with a few exceptions, keep their head down.
French economic students understood that economic theory as taught had no relation to reality and in the fall of 2000 they protested and academic administrators agreed to address what heretofore had been “controversial” subjects. Twenty-seven Ph.D. economic students at the University of Cambridge, UK, signed a similar, but milder, letter of protest in 2001.
Now that the Cold War is over, opposing thought is surfacing. However those thoughts are only a whisper against the thunder of social-control-paradigms that have been carefully cultivated by the managers-of-state of powerful nations for 55 years. Biased and compliant historians of the winners of the hot wars—wars over who will set the rules of unequal trade and thus who will be wealthy and powerful—wrote this history without an understanding of the real underlying causes. President George W. Bush’s Patriot Act, copied from Hitler’s Enabling Act (the legal foundation for fascism) threatens to again silence academia and the press.
Though one would never know it listening to the operational philosophic rhetoric (maintaining Eric Fromm’s “framework of orientation”), the efficiencies of centralized planning were crucial to the West’s post-WWII success. The Cold War military buildup, the economic rebuilding of the old shattered imperial-centers-of-capital (Japan and Western Europe), and the rise of new allied centers-of-capital (Taiwan and South Korea) to prevent expansion of socialism were all a part of the centralized plans of corporate capitalism.
The question of whether socialism and central planning will work or will not work has been thoroughly established. The only two functioning economies during the Great Depression were Germany’s and the Soviet federation’s, both were centrally planned (Germany’s only because it had to usurp the rhetoric of National Socialism or be forced by its politically aware labor movement to accept Soviet socialism), and both were building industrial capital faster than had ever been built before.
Because it is viable and thus threatening, socialism has always faced the full military might of capitalism's propaganda. If it were not viable, there would be no need to demonize it. Destabilizations have prevented socialist centers of capital from becoming established, and its efficiencies have been utilized only by dictators attacking socialism (Hitler attacking the Soviet Union in WWII) and utilized by socialism when defending against not only those attacks but against the ring of steel put around them by the entire allied developed centers-of-capital after that war.
While the well-funded think-tanks were pouring out the rhetoric against central planning, covert—and occasionally overt—destabilizations (and the enormous military expenditures of emerging nations defending against the threat of military overthrow) were preventing the Soviet Union, Cuba, all Africa and Latin America, and many other nations from putting their economies together. (The hoped-for co-opting of China as she develops is still ongoing.) The reason for these destabilizations is obvious: an efficient social system providing a better standard of living for its people becomes a beacon drawing the loyalty of intellectuals and the impoverished worldwide.
The rapid restructuring of the German economy, which successfully cared for its citizens during the depths of the Great Depression even as they were being denied equality in world trade, caught the attention of the world. During the crisis of that depression, German “Bunds” were forming in every corner of the globe. Both the rapidly developing Soviet form of socialism and Germany’s rapidly developing fascist (corporate) socialism were drawing intellectual followers away from neo-liberal capitalism that was collapsing under the weight of the Great Depression.
Maintaining both power and wealth of established imperial powers required that both socialism and fascist National Socialism be contained and both were contained by military force: WWII contained Germany and the Cold War (on top of the severe Soviet losses in WWII) both contained the Soviet Union and suppressed others’ break for freedom worldwide.
Even though most of those attempting to gain their freedom looked to the United States as their political and economic model, they had the universal danger of popular leaders who were not puppets and who would turn those resources to sustaining their own people. Empires whose economies depended upon the resources of those countries for raw material for their industries would be faced with a disaster of the first order if their countryside gained its economic freedom. Those breaks for freedom had to be suppressed.
So who are the powerful? It could, unwittingly, be you or me. We all have some power. Only it is, through imposition of beliefs, turned to the protection of what we would never tolerate if we ever knew: the suppression of other peoples’ freedom and confiscation of their wealth. After all, most of us unwittingly provided full support as corporate imperialism suppressed breaks for freedom worldwide.
The CIA and the military could not have suppressed those worldwide breaks for freedom without the support of American citizens. The fact that most did not know their government was avoiding democratic choice worldwide through an offensive military policy only outlines the imposed beliefs which protect this system of claiming the wealth of others through inequalities of trade. Fully believing they live in a true democracy with a free press and educational institutions of free thought, most Americans find incomprehensible any suggestion that a belief (a “framework of orientation”) has been imposed upon them.
Only a small number of the wealthy or moderately wealthy pay any attention to imposing beliefs on the masses but they do provide generous financial support to those who do. The wealthy recognize that it is this belief that is both the source of, and the protection of, their wealth. It is likewise with the middle class. They recognize their living is tied to the current arteries of commerce and thus easily believe their security is under threat. They are totally unaware that much of this wealth comes from their society imposing inequalities of trade on weaker societies and perpetuating others’ impoverishment. Thus, a propagandized population provides the power base for managers-of-state to inflict such violence upon defenseless people, at times even upon their own people.
As in all indoctrinated societies, we each parrot what propaganda wordsmiths have carefully crafted for us. Thus, again as in all such societies, we keep persuading each other with these distortions of reality. As the need to belong to a group is paramount and beliefs define a political group, peer pressure keeps a society locked within those beliefs.
A study of CIA powerbrokers and others deeply involved in leadership positions pushing the Cold War will expose that they are powerful corporate lawyers, have developed close ties to the powerful while being educated in elite educational institutions, have other close ties to wealth, or are themselves extremely wealthy. Thus when Guatemala’s elected government was overthrown and a dictator imposed to protect United Fruit, “the head of the CIA, General Walter Bedell Smith, joined the board of the United Fruit Company, while United Fruit’s president, Allen Dulles, became CIA director.”33 Kermit Roosevelt, former Vice President of Gulf Oil, oversaw the destabilization of Iran (Operation Ajax).
John F. and Allen Dulles, both long-term powerbrokers in the State Department and CIA, came from entrenched wealth and were also corporate lawyers for others of the world's wealthy. Probably no one else except William Casey, another CIA director and leading corporate lawyer, was in on the planning for the covert actions of the Cold War throughout the CIA’s first 45 years more than they were.
The violent and powerful who carry out corporate policies, such as described in Chapters seven and eight, are good citizens, good neighbors, good husbands, and good parents who kiss their children when they put them to bed. But their loyalty is to their wealth or the wealthy who put them in power. They do not expand their view of rights to include all people.
To justify their oppression, it was once convenient to tell one another that colonial natives had no souls, and thus were not people. To redefine rights in the broadest sense and act accordingly (full rights and equality for all people), would not only shatter everything the world’s wealthy believed and everything the powerbrokers have done in our name—it would mean a total repudiation of the philosophy the imperial nations were functioning under.
If one has any doubts as to how thorough propaganda and thought control are consider the 730 American airmen shot down or crashed as they were flying sabotage and assassination teams into Byelorussia and the Ukraine and photographing territory in the heart of the Soviet federation as addressed in Chapter Seven.34
Much effort went into "damage control" to tone down that explosive story. In later documentaries and feature articles the admission of over 730 airmen lost over the Soviet Union was downgraded to 130, but, knowing they had been deceived once, each documentary noted the story might be much bigger. A few years after the exposure of the air assaults on the Soviet Union, a military spokesman in a news interview said that, "Americans would be surprised if they knew how many airmen had been lost over the Soviet Union and China." A documentary on the subject of the downed pilots showed their routes over the Baltic Sea and claimed that all planes veered off before going over Soviet territory. That falsification of history—telling a part of the story as the full story and ignoring the major story of over 10-thousand flights into the heart of the that besieged nation—required both a careful selection of facts by the Pentagon and a cooperative producer. Even as Western citizens were being brought to near hysteria that they were under dire threat of attack, there were no planes from either Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union flying towards the West with teams trained for sabotage and assassination, or any other kind of destabilization. No politician of substantial stature seriously believed the Soviets were going to attack anyone and our next chapter will document that many (most) countries throughout the world were under attack from the West.
Damage control was exercised again when CNN and Time magazine spent two years documenting over 20 instances of the use of nerve gas by Americans in Vietnam (at times against defecting U.S. Soldiers). The story (Operation Tailwind)—due to be aired and printed in July 1998—was withdrawn, senior editors who stood by their story were fired, others demoted or chastised, and the story was successfully suppressed. That surfacing of true history was quickly erased from history. When such revelations get into the mainstream media they cannot be permitted to stand.
Whenever the powerful are challenged, the longstanding tradition of the owners of newspapers backing their editors and editors backing their reporters (at least we have always been told it is so) is blown out the window. Witness reporter Ray Bonner’s banishment to obscurity by the New York Times for exposing the El Mozote massacre by U.S.-trained soldiers in El Salvador; Robert Parry’s departure from Newsweek after “path-breaking work on the Iran-Contra scandal”; The San Jose Mercury News retraction of its exposure of CIA involvement in drug trafficking and subsequent resignation of its star reporter, Gary Webb; and James Fallows’ disappearance from U.S. News & World Report for trying to insert a little reality into that publication. This author was especially appreciative of James Fallows’ writings and wondered how his broad and sensible view of the world could ever be tolerated at U.S. News. It wasn’t.
And if all we have documented to this point is not enough to prove that the West was never under threat of a military attack, that the managers-of-state knew this well, and that there was no need for intelligence agencies to alert the West about any such attack, consider this: Immediately after WWII, U.S. intelligence co-opted Switzerland’s Crypto-Ag (and other encryption companies) to obtain the codes to the most secure encryption machines sold to nations all over the world. With these codes, U.S. intelligence officials read the most secret messages of most nations, friend and foe, as easily as they might read the morning newspaper.i The National Security Administration’s ECHELON listens in on almost every conversation in the world. Its computers are keyed to detect key words and phrases and divert all communications with those words to be looked at. Important sources and destinations have all incoming and outgoing communications checked. American intelligence services and managers-of-state not only knew well there was no planned attack, they knew how weak and defenseless against the full power of the west these besieged people really were. j
Assassinations and covert actions were the least of what interested the West as they read other nations’ mail; they were responsible for most of them anyway. The economic plans of those nations were their primary interest. Playing the high-stakes diplomatic poker game of international trade with a mirror behind everyone else’s back gave the United States an insurmountable advantage in trade negotiations. They knew the most intimate secrets of nonaligned nations attempting to ally together to develop their industries and internal economies.
Few of those nations had any intention of allying their economies with the Soviet federation. Although a nation embargoed by the West would be forced to trade with them, their goal was freedom to control their resources and economies and trade with any nation they chose. (By 1998, 70 countries—66% of the people on earth—were under some form of American embargo or sanction.35 Control of trade hides behind a rhetorical cover of human rights abuses. If a nation is recalcitrant, those human rights abuses provide the legitimacy for sanctions, destabilizations, and wars.)
Though hundreds of billions of dollars were spent to destabilize emerging nations, funds can no longer be found to rebuild these shattered nations (it took over 50 years, trillions of dollars, and many millions killed to destabilize the Soviet federation). Without development funds and without access to technology and markets, the weak are again relegated to providing cheap commodities and labor to imperial-centers-of-capital. However, if the threat of loss of the countryside to the imperial centers returns, massive funds will again be available for development of those countries crucial for allies and even more massive funds for destabilization of all others.
Knowledge how propaganda works in the world’s so-called “free” press is sobering. The post 9-11 Patriot Act is a recreation of Germany’s post Reichstag fire Enabling Act under which Hitler established fascism and took all rights away from, and jailed and executed, targeted people. Entire ethnic groups are targeted in both cases, databases of potential enemies are created, those enemies are watched by a newly reorganized or newly created internal intelligence service, neighbors are asked to report on neighbors, people have disappeared with—as of this writing—no rights to lawyers, torture of suspects is openly discussed even as it is obviously practiced but not admitted.36 We must remember that the overwhelming masses of the German people were not targeted, were instead told that it was they under threat, and it was not until fascism was defeated that the excesses and abuses of other people—very similar to the abuses of other societies and other cultures we are addressing—were exposed.
However, their cover stories for their Iraqi war plans are in tatters, the Washington Post and the New York Times have admitted they were wrong in carrying the messages of this “echo chamber” without challenge, and over half the Americans are aware of the deceptions. If the main stream news ever gets the courage to tell the American people the open truth about the outright lies justifying current and past wars, there should be an earthquake change in both the American government and the media.
Without they having read this book, in Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State by Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber expands upon this chapter. As of its writing, corporations and the hard right had firm control of what the American people believe. To understand that control, this is a must read. Pay special attention to pages 4-&-5 on how the hard right coordinates their propaganda which pours out simultaneously over their media channels (especially Fox News and hard-right radio talk shows). This misinformation reverberates back and forth through this “echo chamber” to become the firm beliefs of the nation.