Op-Ed by Charlie Robinson
“My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the Chief Propagandist job. We haven’t talked about propaganda. Propaganda, I’m not against propaganda, every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.” – Richard Stengel, Former Obama administration official & Editor-in-Chief of Time Magazine.
The first step in the propaganda process requires that the government be built up to mythical proportions so that their actions are above reproach by the common person. People always look at what the Nazis in Germany did in the lead up to the second world war as the blueprint for propaganda, but they were not the first or the last to use it to control the public.
When the United States captured hundreds of German scientists and intellectuals through Operation Paperclip, they did not just acquire blueprints to advanced rockets and bright minds, they also inherited a philosophy of deception towards their own citizens on a variety of topics. The Nazis had been scaring the hell out of their own people with stories about flying saucers and aliens for years and were surprised and disappointed to learn, once brought into the American culture, that the United States did not have an active disinformation campaign against their own people on these topics. It might be coincidental, but Operation Paperclip ramped up in 1945 & 1946, just one year before the Roswell UFO crash in New Mexico in 1947 kicked off 70+ years of UFO discussion and the launch of the science fiction genre in comic books, science fiction novels, radio, film, and later on television. Could the Nazis that were relocated to America be responsible for the creation of the UFO mythology? It has to be part of the discussion about what is really going on, especially once it is understood that high-level former Nazis literally started NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 1
What is not up for debate any longer is that governments all over the world use lies and propaganda against their own people, and the United States is no exception. In fact, the Obama administration took the unusual step of legalizing propaganda through the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 when they changed the original Smith-Mundt Act to allow the American government to use propaganda against their own people, but they were nice enough to put limitations on how many hours per week were allowed. 2 The most obvious problem with this new paradigm is that they do not label which stories are real and which ones are part of this new allowable amount of disinfo crickets that are legally allowed to be in this batch of information peanut butter.
It is not as if the government was telling the truth to the public before the passage of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, it is just that they made it officially legal as a way to cover their own tracks. The lies have always been there, but the thought of trying to legalize it is a relatively new step.
An example of an overt piece of government propaganda is the “magic passport” story of 9/11 where news presenter Garrick Utley, with an almost straight face, told the viewing audience a story that was such a giant load of bullshit that he almost couldn’t get the words to actually come out of his mouth. The reason why his face was almost straight was that he felt compelled to throw in the line “if you can believe that” while explaining the story as if it was some sort of compromise with his brain and lips where he agreed to throw in the last-minute disclaimer if they would allow this preposterous story to actually come out of his mouth.
According to his report, on 9/11 two planes filled with jet fuel exploded when they crashed into the Twin Towers, but a hijacker’s paper passport flew out of his pocket, through an exploding plane that had just crashed inside of a building, out of the exploding building that was just hit by an airplane filled with enough fuel to fly a transcontinental trip, across several city blocks that would later be filled with debris from collapsing buildings, and landed at the feet of an FBI agent in almost perfect condition. 3
But not to be outdone, the mainstream media also reported that hijacker Muhammed Atta wrote a suicide note explaining the entire operation and who all was involved, took the note and put it in his luggage which he checked onto the plane that he was going to blow up. The FBI (once again) happened to find the note because the airline lost his bag (actually the one part of the story that is believable) and they were able to search it, where they just happened to discover detailed information about everyone who was involved. 4
Here is a question to ponder: why would a hijacker put his suicide note in a bag that he was taking on the plane that he was planning to crash into a building? That seems to defeat the purpose of leaving a note behind if they know that the note is going to be blown up as well.
This is called government propaganda, and this is really just a fancy word for “lies”. These lies were a litmus test to see how gullible the viewers really were, how loyal to their televisions they had become, and how easy they were going to be to trick into a couple of future wars that were already in the final stages of planning before the first plane had crashed into the buildings. If the story had been changed to include fairies dropping the passport, or gremlins hiding the luggage, it would not have been any less believable.
And people wonder why Trump called CNN “fake news”? He may be wrong on lots of things, but he nailed this description. CNN is fakety fake fake to its core.
The reason why Trump is correct in his assessment of the mainstream media is that they have become an integral part of the way that government propaganda is delivered. The Central Intelligence Agency can put out press releases all day long, but without the nightly news and compromised newspapers doing their parts, the stories go nowhere. The media is essential in delivering the message that the CIA wants the people to consume, such as that one country is now a threat to the rest of the world, that their leader is actually a dictator, that their people are being mistreated by this newly discovered authoritarian ruler, and then they pose the question to the viewers in the United States asking whether the American military should be called to “restore democracy” next week or next month? The option to just leave the particular country alone never seems to make it into the list of potential options being discussed, but what is talked about are particular words and phrases that never actually mean what they are portrayed to denote.
When a viewer hears the term “spreading democracy” in the context of helping out other countries, that is code for an invasion by the United States and their allies. That is what the term actually means. It does not in any way mean that the American government, American media, or the American military actually want this particular country to be democratic. It means that the leader running the country in question is not playing ball with the American foreign policy directors and they are, from this point on, now going to be referred to as being a dictator and killer of their own people so that the viewing audience will develop an unfavorable opinion of that government and start to support the opinion being pushed out from the CIA through their complicit comrades in the media.
Another variation of this wordplay is the term “Humanitarian Aid”, which is basically the American version of the Trojan Horse. Nobody really knows what the aid consists of except those that have initiated the offer, it often includes weapons and military training, and it always has major strings attached, but it sounds like a nice offer from the concerned American government. One clear way to tell that the offer is garbage is to check to see if America has also slapped sanctions on the country because they work to cripple a country through the prohibition of goods being imported.
This is the art of saying one thing while actually meaning something else. Politicians and intelligence agencies specialize in this form of double-speak as a way to send two very different messages simultaneously. Those unfamiliar with the translations might think that their words are to be taken literally. They should not be.
The propaganda stories that make it on the nightly news are designed to make people uneasy about certain groups of people from particular countries and to think about events the way the media and government prefer, but if all other agendas are stripped away, the core purpose for the propaganda is to control the viewer’s actions through fear. That is the bottom line for all effective propaganda, to get people reacting from an instinctive level without any critical thought to what is actually being said, who is really saying it, and what it might really mean. They want people to be in fear and make their opinions of the world from a low-vibrational level that sees the planet as a hostile and dangerous place that can only be navigated with the assistance of government, therefore keeping them relevant, necessary, and most importantly, in control.
The American government’s favorite hobby is trying to scare the shit out of the people. Every year for the past two decades there is some new potential event that is poised to kill just about everyone, only to fizzle out over time and be exposed as nothing to seriously worry about.
Americans tend to get bogged down with lightweight issues that do not really matter all that much, like Colin Kaepernick kneeling down during the national anthem and Kathy Griffin holding a fake Trump head and a knife. Want to know what does not get mentioned and is actually disrespectful to Americans? Things like targeting political opponents with the Internal Revenue Service 5, secret FISA courts used to grant search warrants 6, police shooting unarmed black people 7, police shooting dogs for barking during their no-knock raids 8, police shooting mentally ill people 9, police planting guns on the bodies of people that they shoot 10, the government bailing out the big banks with trillions of dollars in taxpayer money, sending soldiers to die in foreign lands over oil, prosecuting journalists for exposing the crimes of the government, free speech zones, giving taxpayer money as “foreign aid” to countries that do what America wants them to do, and forcing vaccines as a requirement for attending the schools that are paid for with taxpayer money 11.
Some government propaganda is more long-lasting and done to create a narrative, most of which are totally contrived and put out there to paint the picture of a caring government. Martin Luther King would probably be rolling over in his grave if he knew that the same government that murdered him also gave him a holiday in his honor. This is governmental virtue signaling on a massive scale where they pretend to give a damn about equal rights even though the American government was found guilty of being behind the assassination plot years later. 12
All of these things are important to have discussions and debates about, but the media would prefer if people focus on the unimportant issues like what Kim Kardashian named her new baby, and not on the actual important topics like where did the Coronavirus come from and who stands to benefit in the aftermath.
Charlie Robinson is the host of “Macroaggressions with Charlie Robinson” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, I Heart Radio, and Ickonic.
Notes:
1 Business Insider, February 19, 2014, Jeremy Bender, “9 Nazi Scientists Who Helped Build The American Space Program”.
2 Foreign Policy, July 14, 2013, John Hudson, “U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News To Americans”.
3 The Guardian, March 18, 2002, Anne Karpf, “Uncle Sam’s Lucky Finds”.
4 Aviation Pros, April 18, 2006, “Luggage That Didn’t Get Put On Sept 11 Jet Provided Lead To Terrorists”.
5 Redstate, July 19, 2013, Mike Gamecock Devine, “Obama’s Political IRS, Free Speech Targeting And Campaign Finance”.
6 NPR, June 10, 2013, “FISA Court Has Approved Majority Of Surveillance Warrants”.
7 Mapping Police Violence, “Police Killed More Than 100 Unarmed Black People In 2015”.
8 Washington Post, June 4, 2015, Radley Balco, “Lawsuit: St. Louis County Sent SWAT Team, Killed A Dog Over Code Violation”.
9 Huffington Post, June 1, 2015, Nick Wing, “25 Numbers That Show Police Killings Are A Bigger Problem Than We Ever Knew”.
10 Boing Boing, September 11, 2018, Mark Frauenfelder, “Baltimore Police Officers Carry Toy Guns To Plant On People They Shoot”.
11 California Legislative Information – S.B. 283.
12 Newsone, January 20, 2014, Kirsten West Savali, “Did You Know? US Government Found Guilty In Conspiracy To Assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
Image: Truthstream Media
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