Thesis and Antithesis - Freedom and Operation MOCKINGBIRD

When one realizes that, regardless of how this or that ideology may view it, the individual’s life is essentially a dual game played against society and nature, a fact that means a continual demand for decision, he realizes the further need to think critically. More, in any adversarial situation, the good tactician follows a rule once enunciated by none other than Abraham Lincoln – that of preparing his opponent’s case just as though he were the opponent. Indeed, the one essential reason for “intelligence” – to use the military term – is understanding of what the opponent both might do and is capable of doing.

Indeed, “Be Prepared,” the Boy Scout motto with which I began my productive life quickly meant “know your adversary.” To know the adversary that is Operation Mockingbird means to recognize that in the first place that all forms of government are the people’s adversary. The democratic forms of government are no exception, for unless kept under the auspices and controlled by the people, even democratic government is an enslaver. “All men,” Abigail Adams observed, “would be tyrants if they could.” To be a good and loyal citizen of the United States requires that one view the as an adversary, citizenry as a dual game played by the individual against his government (and society).

Government, and those who would make you live as they choose for you to live, are NOT your friends.

To be country does not mean loyalty to government; in fact, to so much as trust government is antithetical to democracy, and relentless demand for sycophant loyalty by any government is to be taken as evidence of totalitarian leanings. The duty of a citizen is to be very critical, and very demanding. Measure a Sean Hannity in those terms and see what you get. Failure to be critical of what we have for government is the reason we are in the desperate straits we are.

Consider that for a moment. Only yesterday, news came that a nationally known and respected columnist, Patrick Buchanan has published a book in which he expresses openly belief that the U.S. will collapse, and cease to be as a nation. Welcome aboard, Mr. Buchanan – my friends will tell you I’ve been saying that for several years, now.

For instance, I remarked yesterday that few citizens of the U.S. have not been arrested. One in thirty-one of us is in prison or jail, on parole or probation, or awaiting sentence. The United States imprisons more of its citizens per 100,000 than and other nation extant, and that in multiples. U.S. citizens likewise pay, again by multiples, more taxes to their government than the citizens of any other nation. The U.S. citizen is victimized by government larceny and fraud more than any other citizen of any other nation on earth, and that – still again – in multiples of the next most preyed upon.

Federal larceny, fraud, and waste since World War Two alone have amounted to trillions of dollars.

THAT is an adversary!

And, of course, the Federal Government of the United States knows that were the public to somehow realize the extent to which they are being bilked, imprisoned, and enslaved, the “jig would be up.” U.S. government has become what is essentially a protection racket, its propagandists using massive and state-of-the-art electronic technology to create a virtual reality wherein the benighted citizenry lives effectively disarmed and in relentless fear.

By “effective” I mean that equally relentless court rulings, together with confusion spread by the media concerning the individual’s right to self defense and continual polemics by pacifist individuals and groups have resulted in individual uncertainty concerning when he may fight for his life or limb. Each time, for instance, that a citizen defends his person or property with a weapon, the hue and cry of the pacifists rises. Here in Texas as I write this, for instance, the freedom – even life: he is now under death threat – of man who prevented the burglary and looting of his neighbor’s house by shooting the burglars hangs in the balance.

This despite Texas “Castle” law which says he may do exactly that.

In fact, each time a U.S. citizen – Constitutionally empowered to exactly that – prevents by citizen’s arrest a crime, the same hue and cry goes up. To the news and information media and the federal auxiliary that calls itself “liberal,” only the elected government may enforce the law. All others are “vigilantes.”

To a critical thinker, all this is pretty obvious. In the first place, if such things as “rights” exist, what is the most basic of them all? Which of the several rights given by god and possessed by man is, even, shared by all life forms on the planet? Of course. Any creature that does not enjoy the most fundamental of all prerogatives, that of fighting to keep his life, is a non-entity. No such thing exists, anywhere.

What, therefore, can we say about anyone, any government, who would infringe or deny that right? In the game that is living, what must one recognize in an opponent who would arrogate to himself a right as absolutely fundamental as the right to fight for one’s life? You’re damned right – he is an adversary, and one who intends, at the very least, to make you a prisoner or a slave.

Of course, if he can accomplish that without your awareness – have Delilah cut Sampson’s hair while he sleeps – he will not have to endanger himself. Weakened, stopped, castrated – or left without male strength dedicated to your defense – you are a pet, a kept animal intended for use (you don’t, in that, recognize your state as a citizen of the “land of the free?”).

Sometime in the late sixties, I heard a federal think-tank representative address that problem in a lecture – I mean that of effectively enslaving three hundred million people without violent rebellion. He said that in order to accomplish what would be necessary would require something much more than conventional law enforcement methods and organizations. It would be necessary to “deceive, confuse, and bewilder” the public under the guise of providing for public safety while assuring continued public order. There isn’t the slightest doubt that he was referring to a federal operation already in progress, that of “Operation MOCKINGBIRD.”

Already here, we have considered certain of the MOCKINGBIRD methods, most recently those having to do with behaviorist technique and technology – including hypnosis. There are more; many more. See if you recognize them.

All propaganda is a kind of persuasion. It sounds innocent, doesn’t it? After all, the brainwashing we spoke of yesterday is the involuntary break-down of the individual’s mind, even nervous system, in order to take control of his mind and thoughts. Pavlovian and similar conditioning are more subtle, more of surreptitious nature, and – while the favored method of the Operation MOCKINGBIRD technician – they less cruel and fearsome. The techniques of studied persuasion are even less so.

But that doesn’t mean they are either less insidious, or less effective. Consider what they have accomplished; what, in other words, they have done to you:

1. They have permitted the military industrial complex corporations to spend since World War Two upwards of $15,000,000,000,000, a major factor in inflationary spending that has multiplied the cost of life in the nation by ten, twenty, even thirty times. Under the crushing weight of federal government, U.S. citizens have gone from a basic unit of society, the family, supported by one person, to a family wherein everyone – even children - must find some kind of gainful employment. Deprived thereby of normal rearing, our youth largely have devolved into fearsomely ignorant, illicit drug-consuming animals who despise their parents and teachers, rove in ravening packs in order to seek victims for their savage cruelty and instant gratification for a dozen new kinds of neurotic and psychotic addictions.

Under the relentless pressure of repressive and punitive law, arbitrary and totalitarian taxation, and waves of media and entertainment industry promoted lewdness, promiscuity, and immorality, the relationship between the sexes has been broken, with more than half all marriages failing in the first few years.

The new wave of “If it feels good, do it!” morality fomented by taxpayer-funded (of course) federal programs providing support for all manner of concupiscent depravity, together with ethics and morality-destructive rulings by federal courts, has provided for a cheapening of and contempt for human life.

2. They have squandered, and continue to squander, in wars fought solely for the purpose of profit for those same corporations, the lives of scores of thousands of our military personnel. The undeclared military intervention in Vietnam cost – utterly without benefit or profit to the U.S. citizen - 58,000 lives, 350,000 casualties, and $130,000,000,000; the wars in the Middle East have cost more than 4,700 lives, 35,000 casualties, and, thus far, $750,000,000,000. Again, the U.S. citizen has received absolutely nothing but a staggering bill for services supposedly rendered the citizens of other nations.

3. Hundreds of U.S. corporations desirous of even more profit than that already made due patronage by the U.S. citizen, and while remaining in control of their government, have gone overseas in search of greener pastures, taking with them hundred of thousands of jobs.

4. Meanwhile, their subsidiaries import millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal, stealing not only millions of jobs but hundreds of billions in social and other services arrogated to themselves by the illegal aliens. While two percent of illegal aliens actually work in the profession Mexico claims is essentially the only work “undocumented workers” do, forty-one percent are on one kind of welfare or the other, ten percent of babies born in the U.S. are born to illegal aliens, and thirteen U.S. citizens are killed daily by uninsured and drunk driving aliens. More, the average illegal alien imprisoned here has been arrested eight times, and committed thirteen felony crimes. In any given year, there are as many as 230,000 (two hundred, thirty thousand) illegal aliens in our prisons, at a cost to the U.S. taxpayer of $9,200,000,000 (nine billion, two hundred million).

And, of course, there is more. Every year, as I noted yesterday, the various legislatures state and federal continue their all-out assault on our freedoms, that while handing our tax money to 56,000 publicly-operating and legal lobbyists and thousands more of the covert and criminal kind. Daily, the U.S. President and his Executive Branch bureaucrat minions continue their assault on our privacy, eavesdropping on every conceivable aspect of our lives; that while having suspended even the right of Habeas Corpus.

Next (but not necessarily in the order of danger it represents where MOCKINGBIRD propaganda is concerned, of course), we have censorship. Mind you, state-of-the-art censorship is not done in the old, blatant manner of the Nazi stormtrooper. Oh, no. The purpose of censorship is the same as that of propaganda – to hinder critical thinking. And without adequate information, judgment and evaluation of political issues will be biased, prejudiced, and slanted. The purpose of censorship is to control the thoughts and actions of the public. The government of the U.S. and its information media treat the citizen as though he were a child, prohibiting him the material that would permit him to think critically. Operation MOCKINGBIRD government – like the think-tank “wonk” I spoke of a minute ago – insist that the citizen not only should not but cannot think and act for themselves.

Neither is there any longer doubt that they have accomplished to a large degree what they believe. One need go little further than Jay Leno’s “Jay-Walking” – or a White House press secretary who didn’t recognize reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis (do YOU?).

In the aftermath of the JFK assassination, a CIA inter-agency memo concerning conspiracy theorists was revealing of MOCKINGBIRD (to say nothing of proof of its existence). “The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other country. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.” Agents were instructed to contact members of the media - “liaison and friendly elite contacts (especially editors),” in order “to instruct these persons that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition.”

Further, the order read, “Employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of our critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”

There was more - much, much more – but it is singularly interesting to someone like me that even today, when the lawlessness and immorality of the Central Intelligence Agency is, like the now infamous WMDs in Iraq that never existed, as obvious as the Rocky Mountain range, an open-and-shut case any lawyer could make in any court, the history of everything I have discussed here remains the subject of debate. Think about it. Ask yourself why you believe the CIA’s original purpose and reason for being was to combat and deter communism, when in fact its real mission – what have we been talking about here? – was to deter democracy.

Isn’t the reason for the free press they have co-opted and seized by means of Operation MOCKINGBIRD the informed public necessary for maintenance of democracy?

THINK! Hasn’t the history of the CIA reflected relentless effort – successful effort – directed toward assassinating leaders inimical to “U.S. interests” and installing murderous dictators like Augosto Pinochet and the like? Hasn’t the CIA since its inception been run by the military industrial complex corporation, businessmen whose animosity toward democracy is almost legendary? Each and every one of the democracies overthrown by the CIA were places where the people tended to vote for policies the multi-national corporations didn’t like – labor unions, land reform, nationalization of industry, regulation protecting workers, and so on.

Look around at what’s going on today in Latin America. Iraq. You name it – name a place where the U.S. doesn’t have “interests.” If you can’t remember Cuba and Fidel Castro – or Che Guevara – look them up. See if you can figure out why we hate Fidel Castro so.

Operation MOCKINGBIRD has literally hundreds, even thousands, of journalists on its payroll. It owns dozens of media organizations for the purpose of disseminating CIA propaganda. It owns controlling interests in foreign newspapers, radio, and television networks. In fact, in 1985, a proprietary company of “the Company,” Capital Cities, bought ABC news. WHY?

Why does the United States Government want to own a major news network?

Well, for one reason, the fact that you don’t recognize the incontrovertible truth of what I’m saying. The fact that things like the evil of the CIA and the industrial military complex corporations is still a matter of debate. And the fact that political and economic power generated by “deceive, confuse, and bewilder” – fragment and set one against the other – has permitted the CIA corporations to completely subvert and seize or control otherwise all of corporate business in the United States. By creating literally hundreds of foundations with which to finance domestic operation – Capital Cities, for instance – the CIA co-opted others like Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller.

With each new success of the kind, the Operation MOCKINGBIRD agents added to their propaganda arms – “news” services everywhere, “news” services and networks that clamored for new corporate power. And guess what . . .

Out of the funding resulted from the “new businesses,” the New Right – neo-conservatism grew. SURPRISE!

Are you paying attention? All of this has been done right in your face. Begin a study of what I’m saying, the evidence is incontrovertible. THE PEOPLE IN QUESTION ARE SAYING SO!

But I digress. Censorship is also done by law, law resulted from the demands of a public totally “bewildered” – remember the think-tank guy? – by MOCKINGBIRD propaganda. Hate mongering extremists from either end of the political spectrum use every verbal tool in the behaviorist’s repertory in an unrelenting effort to divide and conquer the electorate politically, and to encourage lawsuits silencing dissent and ruinous to the public’s interests in controlling government and the corporate powers that own it.

Efforts to gain control the Internet, for instance, are beginning. The CIA already posts on behalf of the federal government as much as half of the pornography there, pornography that, of course, CIA writers and television pundits will rail against in order to demand federal government control. Rather than instruct the viewer to simply push the buttons necessary to turn off the computer, or otherwise control what children watch (strange, isn’t it, that in a nation so concerned for its children that for every penny it spends in, for instance, and effort to recover those missing, it spends $100,000 on munitions?), the extremist pundits and talk show hosts plead and inveigh for the government to do it.
More, the duplicitous ACLU – “American Civil Liberties Union” – strives just as mightily to confuse matters even more (talk about “limited hangout!”). Have you ever looked into what happened to any of the seemingly bizarre “civil rights” actions they prosecute? DO it – and be prepared for an eye-opener.

Consider, while you’re thinking critically about the ACLU, all those heroic patriots (with their lapel pin flags, and the unctuous “thank yous” to the troops) of yellow network journalism. I mean, in case you’re so MOCKINGBIRD benighted that you missed it, those fulminating firebrands of television who would set everybody against everybody. Consider, too, that in the last few years free speech has come under such scheming scrutiny that we have also had speech-censoring lawsuits intended to stop Oprah Winfrey from “libeling” beef – that by the State of Texas – a suit by the State of Florida aimed at making it illegal to criticize citrus growers (you should just drink your pesticide-laden juice and shut the hell up), and more.

Presumably, anyone who speaks up to warn against lead in Chinese toys will be sued by corporate “America.” Sweat shop owners in India, China, and fifty more places will likewise sue to silence their critics (in the new Land of the Fee created by the CIA and its MOCKINGBIRD Operation, the guy with the enough money can silence anyone – how good and attorney can you pay for?).

In closing this time, I can’t help but mention Mika, the de rigueur female on the “Morning Joe” program, who - when “Joe” averred that had there been no one armed present at the time of the latest lunatic hunting expedition into a crowded place, as many as hundreds might have died - labeled the remark “inane.” Think – critically - about that one. What kind of biasing mental condition could make an otherwise apparently intelligent (I concede the possibility of PMS) adult say something so impossibly stupid?

Tell us, honey – what do you think would have happened?

"The Moojas Know We Can't Stay Forever . . ."

The Fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975.

Everything seems to be about word definition these days. In a world where for most people reality is made up all but entirely of words, that’s crucial. Put another way, the power to manipulate opinion by manipulation of language is the stuff political power is made of today. Equivocating, twisting, and otherwise torturing the meaning of words is the chief stock in trade of the modern government and its resident propagandists.

Think about it. Not only does democratic rule depend upon control of the public’s opinion, so does tyranny. No tyrant doubts that the people can pull him down: there are always too many “subjects” to defeat in open warfare, should they revolt. Tyranny, of course rules by fear – “kill one and terrorize a thousand.” So, however, does democracy. “Government,” George Washington observed,” is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

But whereas tyranny originates from fear, democracy begins with public choice. And choice depends on opinion. “There,” Shakespeare said, “is the rub.” The tyranny of the majority must not only obtain power by shaping the public’s opinion, it must keep power the same way. Is it any wonder, then, that in the Twenty-First Century with its marvels of science and technology – space flight, nuclear-powered vessels, brain and heart surgery, and the rest – propaganda and the methods of mind and opinion control should have been a proportionately funded and concomitantly developed science? Assured control of what you think, my friends, is of paramount importance to those who aspire to power and control of your money and destiny. It is in point of rationally incontrovertible fact the matter daily uppermost in their minds.

And we, the people of the United States, live largely – decisively so, anyway – separated by science and technology from the real world and its reality. Recently, I learned that most children in a local high school didn’t know what a callous was. Most were incredulous when I explained. Amusingly perhaps, all but a tiny percentage gave a job at MacDonald’s as an example of hard work.

Where things like the war in Iraq are concerned, everything becomes surreal for most – a percentage as high as eighty percent. No one, including young men and women about to leave for Iraq and mortal combat, has any real idea about the reality of a gunfight. Some years ago, teaching law enforcement personnel, I found the same thing. In every instance of the kind of ignorance encountered and refer to here (and I interviewed literally hundreds over a period of years and across the length and breadth of the nation), I found reality supplanted by a Hollywoodian special effects, made for television, virtual-only reality.

During preparation of this website, I took issue over something pontificated to the public by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, that being the “humanity” of our precision bombing (surgically accurized ‘Shock and Awe”). When I pointed out the actual effect of a two-thousand bomb’s detonation, a number of people honestly questioned my description. They didn’t believe me, apparently even when they had read the same figures on internet websites. It didn’t take me long to realize why. All of the same people had no concept whatever of blast effect. The gas-fire explosions of Hollywood and television, you see, produce only fire and smoke in theatrically huge proportions, no blast. Debris from the special effects “blast,” moreover, floats through the air, rather than hurtles at screaming, bullet-like velocity.

During premier of the movie entitled Saving Private Ryan, I was among veterans interviewed by a local television station concerning the flick’s then much-vaunted reality. I said I hadn’t seen the movie, probably wouldn’t bother, and that the idea of reality in a movie about war struck me as pretty silly. To the interviewer’s protestations, I responded with the question, “How does the combat in Saving Private Ryan smell? Have you any idea how a bunker smells after everyone in it has been blown to shreds by a shell or grenade?” The woman at the table next to mine choked, then sat staring at her plate obviously struggling to keep ingested the bagel she had been eating.

And so on. TV and the movies are at least a virtual reality, a visual, even emotional depiction. Words are something else, too – something capable of even more surrealism. I used to entertain and tease my sons by demonstrating that I could with words alone create in their minds a ten-ton chocolate Sunday, topped by a five hundred pound cherry. I could create a king in France (there is no King of France, you know), marry him to a princess – the Princess of Lower Slobovia, no less – and the like. It was great fun.

And it’s the stuff political power is made of. I won’t bore the reader here with a re-iterated description of the staggering volume of prevarication to which the public is being subjected these days by our media and government, however. My point relates more to a news item on television this morning, that having to do with the most recent tactical device to be employed by “insurgents,” combatants engaged in “sectarian violence,” or whatever today’s bon mot may be. The tactic, first Fox News, then CNN, said, is that of including small children among occupants of an explosives-laden vehicle intended to first penetrate check points, then be detonated with the children inside once the bombers have exited the vehicle and fled.

Horrible. Depraved. Despicable. But there’s a problem with the story - whether to believe it. In the first place, I – for one – actually find it hard to believe that any human being can stoop that low. It simply doesn’t seem humanly possible (at least until you consider carpet bombing, “shock and awe” with 2,000 lb. bombs, and the rest). Then there’s the fact that FoxNews has time and time again demonstrated itself willing to say almost literally anything in order to further the public’s support of this all but totally asinine operation. You can’t, in fact, rationally believe anything they say or portray having to do with the present administration and its demagogueing, messianic-appearing machinations.

More, I know about Operation Mockingbird, the CIA propaganda program designed specifically to serve exactly that purpose – to create, in other words, the Orwellian nation in which we have come lately to live.

Looking for corroboration, I switched to CNN, then channel after channel, trying to find another report of the story. After a time spent dodging the advertisements – more outright lying and fraud designed in the state of the art by the very best of opinion control experts – I found the story again. Sure enough, it was also being reported elsewhere. But was it true? This is a story about Iraq, after all, and the major media are also ruled by IRS and the government. When I had checked the BBC and Frankfurter Zeitung, the German newspaper online, I also found the story, but both sources got their story from a report by a U.S. Brigadier General, Michael Barbero.

Tilt. What’s the truth? Well, I’ll have to check with my sources in Iraq. I’ll know in a few days.

The experience nevertheless serves to make my point having to do with the Mockingbird media and the effect of words on the mind. In the hands of a skilled propagandist using state-of-the-art technology and the super-funding available to governments like ours, the mind becomes putty in the hands of an artist.

The “state of the art” has reached heretofore unimaginable proportions, none more insidious than what I’ll call pointedly the Anna Nicole Smith Tactic. Desperate to keep the public distracted from the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of divert attention from the fact of what the taxpayers are getting for their two-thirds of a trillion dollar a year military spending, the media hides this and similar truth behind the smoke and mirrors of lurid tabloid material masquerading meretriciously as news reporting.

I’ve spoken of it here before, but the latest example of the smoke and mirrors deception is more subtle, and a good example of the genre. I speak of the current flap over firings of U.S. Attorneys by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (incidentally, have you ever seen a man with a more vapid, “what’s going on – where am I?” look?). Having sworn to do something about getting our much put-upon (three and four tours in combat sounds more like German troops in World War Two than U.S. soldiers) troops, the poltroon congress needs – desperately, as I said – a distraction. Anyone who has watched these affairs can predict what will happen, and I won’t waste ink here except to point out what the Congress would undeniably rather be doing.

The pandering of lobbyists in the halls of Congress must resemble the feeding frenzy of sharks, all to assure that our young men and women stay in combat, dying and being maimed solely in order to assure continuingly massive profits for the military industrial complex. “America,” the final outcome of this as plain as the nose on your face. Worse, you have had what must certainly be the most object and demonstrative lesson in history, that of Vietnam.

And yet you stand by, in the words of Markham, “stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox.” Brain-dead, rendered effectively unaware by relentless Operation Mockingbird propaganda disseminated by the nation’s Uriah Heep media, you stand by while thousands are being maimed and killed. Buffaloed by words being wielded like a bullfighter his cape, you suck up cynical, Orwellian slogans and logically half-baked argument like the lurid prophesies of what will happen in the aftermath of our leaving.

Think! What will happen not only became inevitable with the invasion that will forever remain astonishing in my mind for its utter tactical and strategic stupidity, there is no way for us to stop it without causing over time its equivalent. People are going to die (oh, there’s a way to prevent that, but you – Mockingbird brain-washed and indoctrinated – would never do that), lots of them and no matter whether we stay or leave. We did that; we did it when we elected George W. Bush and the swine in Congress.

To quote Herb and others writing from Iraq, "The Mooja's know we can't stay forever, and when we leave, the place is all theirs. It's their country."

Yesterday, I answered mail from a U.S. Senator concerning, it said, national security. “Security?” I answered. “The way you can give us security is impeach that moron, then resign – all of you!” They won’t do that, of course – not as long as the press can go on covering up what they are. People are going to die on account of our “Mission Accomplished,” all right. Congress and the media see to that. The question is how we can justify forcing our own to be among the dead by keeping this Jack S. Phogbound gang in power.

Human sacrifice intended to appease the gods and expiate crime like what we have done in Iraq went out of fashion long ago. At that, only because it was the Mayans and the Aztecs was it ever the “American Way.”