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Important Review Article by Robert J. Burrowes, providing an incisive and carefully documented scientific and historical analysis.
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“The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” – Steve Biko, South African freedom fighter, beaten to death in an Apartheid prison cell in 1977.
So you think that you make up your own mind about what you will do, how you will do it, what you will buy and so on.
Good, because that is what you are supposed to believe. Especially when you are thinking what others want you to think.
Most of us like to believe that we have ‘a mind of our own’.
But, in fact, any serious consideration of the evidence leads to the exact opposite conclusion. In the vast majority of cases, you haven’t had a mind that was yours since you were very young. At least on anything that really matters in your life.
Let me elaborate.
In recent years, I have been writing about the Elite’s 5,000-year war against humanity with the final battle in this war now being fought.
See ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It is “Now or Never” in the Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.
Hence, I have argued, it is important to understand the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’, with its fourth industrial revolution (technocratic), eugenicist and transhumanist programs, as simply the latest manifestation of this 5,000-year war on Homo Sapiens during which Elites (local, ‘national’, ultimately global) have used a range of policies to contrive ‘great events’
orchestrated wars and famines;
slavery; human sacrifice;
imperialism and colonialism;
economic exploitation through contrived financial crises (including depressions);
‘natural’ disasters, revolutions and ‘medical’ crises to name the most obvious – to distract attention from and facilitate profound changes in world order, to kill off substantial proportions of the human population and enslave those left alive while obscuring vast transfers of wealth from ordinary people to the Elite (whether local, ‘national’ or, ultimately, global).
See ‘Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until “You’ll Own Nothing.”’
Image is from InfoBrics
This includes, for example, the Elite-orchestrated war in Ukraine which is nothing more than another manifestation of this policy – see ‘The War in Ukraine: Understanding and Resisting the Global Elite’s Deeper Agenda’
– and, for example, it is consistent with this program that depleted uranium (DU) weapons have been deployed by Britain in Ukraine, the explosion of which threatens citizens across Europe
– see ‘Britain’s Decision to Send Depleted Uranium Munitions to Ukraine Will Have Grim Consequences’ and ‘The British Gift that Keeps on Giving: Uranium-irradiated Wind and Rain for Poland, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands and London too’
– and that the United States used a nuclear weapon to destroy the Nordstream Pipelines, in this case inflicting a ‘first strike’ nuclear attack on Russia and Germany, a range of adverse environmental consequences on the populations of Scandinavia and Europe, and effectively a knock-out blow to key economies of Western Europe (by depriving them of a crucial source of energy). See ‘Nordstream – Anatomy of Dante’s Explosion’.
Both of these nuclear attacks are readily identifiable as measures consistent with the explicit Elite program to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population.
Thus, while I have previously identified four fundamental shortcomings in the efforts of anti-war activists over the past 100 years, which together account for the movement’s failure to have any impact in undermining war as an institution
– see ‘Rage Against the War Machine: What Rage? “When will they ever learn?”’
– it is also clear that another very old threat, now being embellished by new and more pernicious forms, is being ignored too.
So, as I have become increasingly aware over recent years, there is another entire dimension of war-fighting that is only being discussed at the margin and must be considered and addressed not only by those committed to ending war but by anyone who values human life, identity, freedom and free will.
Because, as is manifestly obvious to those investigating more deeply and as captured in the title of this article, there is a battle now being fought in the technocratic realm and it is being waged against all of humanity simultaneously, not just a particular population.
In essence, this battle is the final battle in the war being fought to control your mind.
To put this another way, a primary battlefield of what many now call fifth-generation warfare (5GW) is your mind and who controls it. What is 5GW? It is defined by James Corbett in the following terms:
‘Fifth-generation warfare is an all-out war that is being waged against all of us by our governments and the international organizations to which they belong.
It is being waged against each and every one of us right now, and it is a battle for full-spectrum dominance over every single aspect of your life: your movements and interactions, your transactions, even your innermost thoughts and feelings and desires. Governments the world over are working with corporations to leverage technology to control you down to the genomic level, and they will not stop until each and every person who resists them is subdued or eliminated.’ See ‘Your Guide to 5th-Generation Warfare’.
But, to reiterate the distinction in Corbett’s words: 5th Generation warfare is ‘being waged at all levels, not just the mental.’ and any review of the ‘Great Reset’ plans demonstrates the extraordinary breadth and depth of the control now being imposed.
Nevertheless, control of our minds is central to the war being fought and any successful defense in this war requires that we identify the threats to our mind and defend ourselves adequately against them. Otherwise we are poorly placed to identify and defend against all of the other threats.
Of course, using less invasive but still very effective weapons, the war to control your mind is ancient and it is this component on which this article is focused both because it is extremely advanced and is necessary if other components of the Elite plan are to be fully implemented.
Ancient? In fact, several authors have addressed this subject. For example, in their 2015 book on the subject, Marie D. Jones and Larry Flaxman observed that:
Mind control is probably as old as our awareness that we each had a mind of our own. Throughout the course of history, there are a number of names for mind control that describe a common goal: to take over a person’s innermost thoughts and control his or her behaviors and actions. Brainwashing, coercion, thought reform, mental manipulation, psychological warfare, programming, conversion, gas lighting, indoctrination methods, psychic driving, crowd control: They all describe a method by which a person’s individual thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions are disrupted, dismissed, and destroyed – even replaced with the thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions of someone else. Whether designed to create the perfect assassin or super soldier, indoctrinate prisoners of war, recruit members into a cult or religious belief system, or control the consuming masses and direct their behaviors in accordance to the political whims of the day, mind control has been used extensively in our past, is in use today, and no doubt will be used in the future. See Mind Wars: A History of Mind Control, Surveillance, and Social Engineering by the Government, Media, and Secret Societies.
And by 1956 Joost A. M. Meerloo, M.D. had already written a book canvassing a wide spectrum of mind control techniques and technologies in a variety of categories with, for just one example, an insightful discussion on how readily justice is subverted within legal systems by such techniques and technologies. See The Rape of the Mind.
Anyway, for the purposes of this article, I have distinguished four distinct categories of mind control, which have evolved at different times historically. I then explain each in turn. In chronological order, I label these different categories as follows:
- psychological mind control,
- political mind control,
- medical mind control, and
- technological mind control.
Psychological Mind Control
By far the oldest form of mind control is graphically illustrated by what I have previously characterized as ‘the adult war on children’. See, for example, ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.
This war, to briefly reiterate its essential nature, has its basis in the manner in which human adults – as parents, teachers, religious figures and in other roles – use a potent combination of ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence to terrorize children and adolescents into submissive obedience under the pretext of ‘socializing’ them.
See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’
and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
This works well for the Elite because it creates a human population that readily follows orders from parents, teachers, religious figures, employers, police, judges, military personnel, governments and anyone else ‘in authority’.
Hence, human societies everywhere are essentially populated with adults who are easily scared into uncritically obeying Elite directives, conveyed through a variety of its agents, as the past 3.5 years have graphically demonstrated. But because the fear is largely unconscious, most adults can easily be led to believe they are acting out of their own free will or, at worst, following ‘reasonable’ orders ‘for the good of the community’.
Moreover, this can occur for a number of reasons. Denied safe opportunities to focus on feeling their fear and terrorized out of expressing their anger and other feelings during childhood – the logical response to ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ or ‘utterly invisible’ violence inflicted by an adult – the child ‘learns’ a range of ways to suppress awareness of these feelings, almost invariably unconsciously, which is why their fear, anger and other feelings are not necessarily obvious to the person or those around them.
A variety of psychological mechanisms such as denial – denying the existence of a reality that frightens/angers in order to feel safe – and delusion – constructing a delusion in relation to a frightening/infuriating reality that cannot be denied or suppressed in order to feel safe – are everyday occurrences for most people. But these two psychological mechanisms are not the only ones. For one discussion of several key ways in which fear manifests but is unconsciously psychologically concealed by the individual,
see ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’.
But another outcome of suppressing awareness of how one feels – including angry – also denies the child the awareness and capacity to defend themselves against violence and other injustices. As a result most children – even those who learn to ‘bully’ – end up acting very powerlessly in the face of violence and injustice as they grow up.
And this continues into adulthood. Having ‘learned’, under threat of violence from parents, teachers and other adults, not to defend themselves against their parents, teachers and other adults as a child, the child grows into an equally powerless adult.
Thus, in the current context of threats posed by the Elite program – the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ with its fourth industrial revolution (technocratic), eugenicist, transhumanist, political and economic components – even among those who have been able to perceive the most obvious delusions being presented to them, the bulk of these individuals have proven incapable of doing little more than complaining powerlessly, begging an Elite agent to ‘go easy’ on them (by lobbying or petitioning a government or international organization such as the World Health Organization), cross-posting the latest irrelevant post from one social media platform to another, possibly advocating unspecified resistance (or strategically irrelevant action), or attending a protest demonstration.
Seeking out and applying strategic means of resistance to the ‘Great Reset’, or recognizing and acting on it when offered, has remained beyond them.
But while childhood terrorization is enough to immobilize most people into behaving powerlessly under threat, Elite agents have also invested enormous effort to work out how best to capitalize on this fear. And while fear isn’t the only psychological motivator used, it is the most powerful, with more gross or subtle versions used depending on the context. As the historical record demonstrates.
Image: COVID lockdown in Italy (Source: OffGuardian)
Obviously, as you may know, there is an extensive history of psychological manipulation of human populations particularly in relation to mobilizing national populations to support and participate in wars, which any investigation of Elite-driven propaganda prior to and during wars will illustrate. But war is only one context in which human populations are psychologically manipulated by Elites. Much of the Elite propaganda around the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’, for example, was grounded in manipulating people’s fear.
Of course, the knowledge of how to manipulate us did not drop out of the sky. But while earlier periods of human history clearly demonstrate the Elite’s intuitive understanding that triggering fear was a powerful form of behavioural control, since World War II particularly, Elite-sponsored institutions, including governments, have invested enormous sums of money to find out, as precisely as possible, how to manipulate our psychological responses to stimuli in order to control our behaviour. An excellent example of these institutions is The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the UK, founded in 1947.
But as Dr Daniel Estulin has described in great detail in his book Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses, the Institute’s sanitized name – The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations – does not describe its real work.
‘The Tavistock Institute, in Sussex, England, describes itself as a nonprofit charity that applies social science to contemporary issues and problems. [In fact] it is the world’s center for mass brainwashing and social engineering activities. It grew from a somewhat crude beginning at Wellington House into a sophisticated organization that was to shape the destiny of the entire planet and, in the process, change the paradigm of modern society.’
The book details both the Tavistock Institute network – identifying connections to research institutes, think tanks, and the drug industry, including the Stanford Research Center, Rand Corporation, Harvard Business School and Office of Naval Research in the U.S. – demonstrating its enormous reach around the world, and exposes the methods of brainwashing and psychological warfare employed.
In the words of Estulin:
‘The essential premise of the work of Tavistock is… that certain kinds of democratic “institutions represent far more efficient instrumentalities for fascist dictatorship than the traditional, straightforwardly” authoritarian models…. The psychological sciences have followed the route initially outlined in 1945 by Dr. John Rawlings Rees, grand master of psywar counterinsurgency.’
Discussing the work of psychiatrist Rees, who wrote the book The Shaping of Psychiatry by War in 1945, Estulin observes that ‘Rees called for the development of psychiatric shock troops in order to develop “methods of political control based upon driving the majority of the human population toward psychosis” through procedures of so-called programmed behavioural modification. He proposed this to render the population submissive under the post-World War II economic world order.’ See Estulin Tavistock Institute p. 6.
Of course, the budget to research ways to manipulate us psychologically to perform Elite-desired behaviours has expanded dramatically since World War II as is evident from the number and identity of organizations conducting the research.
See, for example, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
Moreover, much of this is now focused on manipulation related to the current Elite program to impose on us their ‘Great Reset’.
See ‘Government Nudge Units Find the “Best” Ways to Manipulate the Public’.
For example, a range of Elite organizations has spent millions on research to identify the most effective ways to terrorize people into submitting to injection.
See the US Social Science Research Council & National Science Foundation’s ‘Mercury Project’, ‘Mercury Project to Boost Covid-19 Vaccination Rates and Counter Public Health Mis- and Disinformation in 17 Countries Worldwide’
And, to highlight the point that it is our fear that is the Elite’s greatest asset in this war against our minds (and trumps intelligence, no matter how great), intellectuals who, in theory, should be more capable of investigating what is happening in relation to those key issues of concern to society – such as those discussed here: ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals’ – are routinely exposed as simply frightened (again, even if unconsciously so) and support an Elite-driven narrative that is readily exposed by serious scrutiny.
Anyway, if you would like to explore this dimension of mind control more fully, Daniel Smith has compiled a straightforward summary of what he considers those methods most frequently associated with the practice: brainwashing, hypnosis, manipulation, persuasion, and deception.
And in his own study of ‘mind games’, psychologist Roy Eidelson argues that ‘five issues consistently and profoundly shape the way we understand ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. They are vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness. Each of these is a core concern and the basis for one of the questions I mentioned earlier: Are we safe? Are we treated fairly?
Who should we trust? Are we good enough?
Can we control what happens to us?’
Focusing on these questions which could, in theory, usefully be at the centre of an enlightened public policy, Elites specialize in producing misleading, self-serving and widely promulgated answers that usually ‘lead us away from the more equal and more humane society most of us desire’ in order to ‘exploit these concerns for the specific purpose of advancing their own narrow interests while bringing harm and suffering to so many.’
In his book, Eidelson goes on to explain these five core concerns and examines ‘the specific mind games that the 1% use to take advantage of them’. Given their power, Eidelson concludes that ‘it’s not surprising that these five concerns figure so prominently in the propaganda campaigns of plutocrats who aim to discourage resistance to their agenda.’
Beyond any specific measures, however, the sheer complexity and far-reaching nature of the Elite ‘Great Reset’ program is frightening for most people to contemplate, let alone investigate in detail. Thus, like some other books with a futuristic or dystopian perspective,
Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock describes a phenomenon we are witnessing now: a population that is psychologically overwhelmed by the rate of change: ‘Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society.’ See Toffler Future Shock p.11.
So unlike the traveler who can return home to a familiar culture, the victim of future shock cannot. There is no going back and this is fearfully disorienting for most people (and another reason why people submit to the injection: the hope that things will then ‘go back to normal’). The adverse psychological impact of the ‘Great Reset’ has been discussed by several commentators but few realized it was deliberate and why it was so.
The point is simple: as those involved in this research have long known, fear is the most important factor driving human behaviour.
And once that fear has been deeply embedded in the unconscious by childhood terrorization, it is a straightforward task, for those who know what they are doing, to manipulate it later in life in accord with Elite prerogatives.
But it also makes virtually all humans particularly vulnerable to other forms of mind control too, including those that are political.
Political Mind Control
Since the dawn of human civilization, history records a long and steady (if occasionally interrupted) process of Elite efforts to capture and control the minds of those people within their domain, sometimes coupled with efforts to expand that domain.
Whether intent on extorting labor, securing military service, payment of taxes or imposing other forms of control, a submissively obedient population made the task immeasurably easier.
And even when violence was used to impose physical control, it was occasionally accompanied, but almost invariably followed, by efforts to subdue the prospect of any further resistance using less physically violent means. For a thoughtful discussion of how illiteracy and then literacy, for example, have been historically exploited by Elites, see ‘Risen Word’.
But it wasn’t until the C19th century when ‘modern’ methods of political mind control started to be seriously developed and deployed.
Not content with the existing and highly effective psychological methods – again, all founded on terrorizing individuals throughout childhood into submissive obedience to parents, religious figures, school teachers, employers and other significant adults in the child’s life and designed to train the child for a life of servitude – development of political forms of mind control (including ‘news reporting’, advertising, propaganda and censorship) advanced dramatically during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Thus, at least since the emergence of the international news agencies that started in the 1830s, the quality of what qualifies as ‘news reporting’ has been steadily in decline although it is uncertain that there has been a time in history when news reporting actually reported any sort of objective truth. In one sense, this is understandable. Inevitably, those who own and control a media channel have a perspective and the outlet invariably reports from that perspective, declared or not. And provided we are aware of this, we may choose to consume news from a declared perspective or ignore it if not to our taste. In any case, it is a rare outlet in the C21st that publishes a range of perspectives.
In the corporate news world, however, these days we are bombarded with what is called ‘news’ through a variety of media: television, radio, newspapers and social media via the internet. But because the corporate (mainstream) news world is owned by the Elite and its agents who therefore control the major international news agencies (Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Associated Press and United Press International) as well as the major news corporations (such as Alphabet, Comcast, Disney, AT&T, News Corporation, Time Warner, Fox, Facebook, the BBC, Bertelsmann and Baidu), the population that chooses to pay attention to it is fed a uniform and carefully-crafted narrative which is designed to promote Elite interests. This is graphically illustrated in this brief video compilation.
Watch ‘Local News Anchors Repeating Same Script Compilation’. There are no genuinely alternative worldviews in this domain.
Of course, these days, the education of journalists starts the process, with most journalists now attending a tertiary institution to learn their craft. But how effectively these institutions turn out graduates committed to unearthing and reporting the truth, whatever the cost, is something worth considering. Given the way news reporting is now so tightly controlled, while this article by Professor Bill Willers might illustrate an unusually graphic example of how news reporting has been corrupted, it will come as no surprise to those familiar with corporate journalism.
See ‘What Is Taught in Schools of Journalism?’
Because the reality is that virtually every journalist in the corporate media world becomes a hack, employed to simply write and present stories from the scripts they are given that promote the Elite narrative. And any journalist with genuine integrity keen to report the truth is not employed. Or dismissed once exposed as a truth-teller.
Moreover, journalists with genuine integrity and courage – such as Julian Assange – must create outlets of their own and the Internet now features a significant number in this category. But this does not mean that their freedom to express views that contradict the Elite narrative is respected. Of course not! Just ask Assange, now imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years in Belmarsh prison following seven years imprisonment until losing his asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, for simply reporting the truth we are all entitled to know.
‘He ripped back the veil on the dark machinations of the U.S. Empire, the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lies, the corruption, the brutal suppression of those who attempt to speak the truth. The Empire intends to make him pay. He is to be an example to anyone who might think of doing what he did.’
See ‘The Crucifixion of Julian Assange’.
Beyond Assange, other journalists with integrity outside corporate media suffer a range of outcomes, including ‘deplatforming’: removing their capacity to communicate by reducing those outlets willing to publish them. For a range of examples, see
Needless to say, every journalist in a corporate or government media setting is well aware of Assange’s fate and, while some might make use of the tolerance occasionally afforded a slight variation on the Elite-driven narrative, cowed into submissively reporting what they know to be the permissible perspective. It is safer than risking jail. Or even unemployment.
The outcome of these combined factors is that, in essence, much of what is called ‘news reporting’ by the legacy (corporate) media is nothing more than propaganda. And this has been the case for a very long time.
This has particularly included the use of propaganda, often designed to play on unconscious fears, sophisticated enough to manipulate vast proportions of large national populations to do the bidding of those responsible for controlling the methods deployed.
See the 1928 book Propaganda.
Most notably perhaps, in this case, was Adolf Hitler’s understanding of the ‘big lie’ in manipulating the German population during World War II and its use by his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who is (perhaps incorrectly) attributed with these words: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’ See ‘Joseph Goebbels: On the “Big Lie”’.
And, more recently, in a video interview, Professor Michel Chossudovsky thoughtfully discusses the importance of lies in various contexts, including in relation to 911, wars and the Covid-19 crisis.
Watch ‘When The Lie Becomes The Truth’.
In fact, to reiterate, it has been the case for very many decades already that even the most basic communication in government and corporate media is effectively devoid of educational material or truthful information designed to inform you so that you can make your own thoughtfully-considered evaluation in response to it. For another account of this, written in 1988, see
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Of course, this is precisely how the Global Elite wants it and why it has unfolded this way.
For example, this article by Lara-Nour Walton at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) thoughtfully identifies six different ways that prominent corporate media outlets lie in relation to Israeli violence against the Palestinians, now including the use of artificial intelligence.
See ‘Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage’.
Of course, it is well known and has been thoroughly documented that Elite agents, including the US government, have long subverted what is euphemistically referred to as ‘the free press’. One example of this is ‘Project Mockingbird’. This project uses CIA spies as journalists in order to control the public debate. See
‘The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up’ and
For other work that thoughtfully teases out more of the nuances employed to manipulate our minds, you can read what the following authors have identified in their respective articles: Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino highlight that frequency of repetition makes something seem true; Jordan Hall points out the increasing difficulty of making sense of anything given the variety of plausible explanations deliberately promulgated; John Pilger reminds us of the value of ‘omission’ of relevant history, truths and facts; and Caitlyn Johnstone, among other points, mentions Elite efforts to ‘exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.’
See, respectively, ‘Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity’, ‘The War on Sensemaking’, ‘Silencing the Lambs: How Propaganda Works’ and ‘Why Propaganda Works’.
And, in an update to the ‘bread and circuses’ trick used in ancient Rome, another simple but extremely effective method is to make sure that most people are comfortable enough economically (if not made vulnerable by their marginal economic existence) while deluging us with a huge range of issues to consider as well as many forms of entertainment (sport, cinema, theatre, art galleries, museums…) and use these to distract us from any central issues.
So, in the current context, while most people are debating the latest controversies in the recent game of football, tennis or basketball, and some others are arguing about whether or not the SARS-CoV-2 ‘virus’ exists, whether or not the various WHO-approved, government-imposed lockdowns and other measures were necessary, and whether or not the ‘vaccines’ are ‘safe and effective’, a multitude of other issues are presented (the war in Ukraine, a range of gender and sexual identity issues, environmental threats, economic and financial challenges… each with a range of subsidiary issues) to further overwhelm and confuse us.
This works very well with people who are already busy with work, families, financial obligations and other responsibilities, and draws our attention away from the fundamental threat: the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’ and its component eugenicist, technocratic, transhumanist, political and economic programs.
[Obviously, I am not suggesting that other issues – the risk of nuclear war, many environmental and human rights threats… – are not vitally important too. It’s just that the current Elite program threatens to destroy our capacity to consider and engage in all other issues, such as those just nominated, if it is not defeated.]
Anyway, with so many tools at its disposal, the Elite’s political war against our minds is invisible to virtually everyone.
As you will not be surprised to read, these days, the political mind control industry is huge, embracing substantial sections of national economies.
So, with virtually all human adults effectively terrorized out of the capacity for independent thinking and investigation at a young age, once an Elite narrative has been decided, the relevant propaganda is then prepared by its agents in the massive ‘public relations’ industry, worth $US107billion globally in 2023
– see ‘Public relations market size worldwide from 2022 to 2027’ – before being promulgated through its agents in international organizations, governments, the corporate media (and a relatively new and powerful weapon: corporate social media such as Facebook, Twitter [now X], Instagram, TikTok, YouTube…), education systems and the entertainment industry, while its vast censorship network
– see ‘Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know. The citizen’s starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel’ and ‘Docs Offer Glimpse Inside Censorship Industrial Complex’
– is deployed to ensure that the truth, labeled variously by Elite agents as ‘misinformation’ (false information unintentionally created or shared), ‘malinformation’ (information based on fact but used out of context to mislead, harm or manipulate) and ‘disinformation’ (false information deliberately created to mislead, harm or manipulate)
– see ‘We’re in This Together. Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation Stops with You’ – is prevented from being widely exposed.
As you might have immediately realized, such definitions vastly expand the capacity of Elite agents to censor narratives that compete with the one that is endorsed by the Elite – that is, to suppress free speech – which, of course, is how they have been used.
For more on this, see ‘A Century of Censorship’.
For example, the latest UN report on this subject uses a classically Orwellian newspeak to justify censorship in order to maintain ‘information integrity’. For the unwary, the superficially benign wording used in the report might conceal its true intent but you can judge for yourself from its opening paragraph which calls for an ‘empirically backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge. To that end, the present brief outlines potential principles for a code of conduct that will help to guide Member States, the digital platforms and other stakeholders in their efforts to make the digital space more inclusive and safe for all, while vigorously defending the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to access information. The Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms is being developed in the context of preparations for the Summit of the Future. My hope is that it will provide a gold standard for guiding action to strengthen information integrity.’
See ‘Our Common Agenda Policy Brief 8: Information Integrity on Digital Platforms’.
Given the Elite’s extensive history of using propaganda and censorship to control what people believe in order to manipulate their behaviour – while suppressing any forum that endeavours to share alternative perspectives, arguments and critiques – the problem with an ‘empirically backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge’ is that it simply means that Elite deceit, lies and manipulation would be shielded from scrutiny. Which is why this report is just another attempt to conceal Elite propaganda and censorship, in this case by labeling the Elite-endorsed narrative as the one with ‘information integrity’.
And this is why major international organizations such as the EU, WHO and UN are putting enormous effort into clamping down on those seeking to expose the truth behind Elite manipulation and manoeuvring.
As Taylor Hudak explains in a recent article about censorship proposals in the European Union, concern has been expressed about ‘loopholes that would allow the surveillance of journalists while paving the way for unprecedented interventions in the internal media market by the European Commission.’
See ‘Centralizing Information Control! Inside the EU’s Latest Proposal to Censor the Media’.
But any straightforward interpretation of the draconian censorship measures being introduced by the European Union leads to the obvious and inevitable conclusion that free speech is being terminated in Europe.
As Ben Bartee points out in an article summarizing three previous ones he has written: ‘Nation-states under EU jurisdiction can no longer be rationally said to be “free,” to the extent that they ever truly were to begin with. They are now part of a wholly integrated slave colony of the multinational technocracy, headed by the World Economic Forum and similar organizations outside of the reach of any democratic control.’
Not content with measures being taken by the UN and EU, the WHO has developed its own programs to censor us, carefully outlined in their document
‘Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats’.
As explained by Dr Michael Nevradakis the WHO ‘claims “misinformation” has resulted in an “infodemic” that poses a threat – even in instances where the information is “accurate.”’
See ‘WHO Initiative Would “Promote Desired Behaviors” by Surveilling Social Media’.
Of course, not to be left out, the US military is vitally concerned with what we are led to believe as well and US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) ‘has contracted New York-based Accrete AI to deploy software that detects “real time” disinformation threats on social media. The company’s Argus anomaly detection AI software analyzes social media data, accurately capturing “emerging narratives” and generating intelligence reports for military forces to speedily neutralize disinformation threats. Synthetic media, including AI-generated viral narratives, deep fakes [a digitally manipulated image to replace one person’s likeness with that of another], and other harmful social media-based applications of AI, pose a serious threat to US national security and civil society,” Accrete founder and CEO Prashant Bhuyan claimed. ‘Social media is widely recognized as an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning vulnerabilities and manipulate behavior through the intentional spread of disinformation.’
But Accrete will also launch a business version of its Argus software for disinformation detection later this year. ‘The AI software will provide protection for “urgent customer pain points” against AI-generated synthetic media, such as viral disinformation and deep fakes. Providing this protection requires AI that can automatically “learn” what is most important to an enterprise and predict the likely social media narratives that will emerge before they influence behavior.’
See ‘USSOCOM to Use AI to Detect Disinformation Threats on Social Media’.
As ‘Sundance’ astutely observes however, the ‘Argus detection protocol’ is incredibly expensive so by using military funding to pay for the research under the auspices of ‘national defense’ but then allowing major corporations privileged access to the technology, the US government gains effective control of a technology to manipulate its own citizens while bypassing constitutional limits on such activity (in this case, the Posse Comitatus Act which limits the power of the US government to use federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States).
To reiterate: the purpose of this AI technology is for ‘military forces to speedily neutralize disinformation threats’; that is, anything that contradicts the Elite-driven narrative. Free speech is vanishing before our eyes.
But the threats keep accumulating.
In a recent publication on its iVerify initiative, the United Nations Development Program noted that ‘Understanding online information pollution is an urgent global challenge. Misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech threaten peace and security, disproportionately affecting those who are already vulnerable.’ Thus:
‘iVerify is UNDP’s automated fact-checking tool that can be used to identify false information and prevent and mitigate its spread.’ See ‘iVerify: Supporting actors around the world for the prevention and mitigation of disinformation, misinformation and hate speech’.
But as noted by one critic, the program’s ‘automated fact-checking service’ will be funded and conducted by Elite agents in Big Tech. See ‘U.N. Unveils “Automated Fact-Checking Tool” to Counter Disinformation with Big-Tech, Soros-Funded Orgs’.
So how reliable is fact-checking in defense of the truth?
As it turns out, one recent study concludes that censorship now sometimes masquerades under the guise of ‘fact checking’. Originally an honorable attempt to confirm something as fact, it is now just a corrupt way of concealing censorship and eliminating truthful analysis from the discourse.
In her detailed report of her research into the fact checking industry, Dr Judith Brown identified about ‘500 active fact check platforms’ – noting that it is ‘likely that the number of fact check platforms is far greater than those located’ – with about half linked to media outlets.
After explaining many aspects of the fact check industry, it is clear that it is big business. In her report she notes a long list of fact checking ‘grants and donations’ from such entities as the US National Endowment for Democracy, Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Open Society, Rockefeller Fund, the EU, American and European Embassies, large media corporations, Google, Meta, and various UN agencies. She concludes her report simply:
‘Fact checkers are the mechanism of censorship. They can only do this with immense sums of money that come from the rich and powerful to support their industry…. The fact check industry’s access to wealth and power undermines democracy throughout the world.’
See ‘Fact Checking the “Fact Checkers”’.
As Ilana Rachel Daniel notes in a recent video presentation: ‘The very definition of living in a free world means access to a full spectrum of information and choices where discussion and debate of those facts lead us to a life of self-determination.’ But in her two-part presentation, which acknowledges the work of Antonio Pasquali –
see ‘Society can be controlled through its means of communication’ – she provides a fine overview of how mind manipulation is a polished art among those keen to control our behaviour and how their technologies (such as the television and smart phone) and tools (such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and the Metaverse) play a vital role in this. See ‘Mind Manipulation – Who is in Control? Part 1’ and ‘Mind Manipulation – Who is in Control? Part 2’.
In their analysis of censorship, John and Nisha Whitehead highlight the role of technology now too. ‘By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.’
In fact, the Whiteheads label this phenomenon ‘technocensorship’: ‘we are technically free to speak. In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official – or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube – may allow.’
See ‘Technocensorship: The Government’s War on So-Called Dangerous Ideas’.
And this depends, in part, on direction from government intelligence agencies.
As Larry Sanger, a cofounder of Wikipedia, noted in a recent interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald, the online ‘encyclopedia’ has ‘become an instrument of “control” in the hands of the… establishment, among which he counts the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies’. Noting that this was being observed as early as 2008, Sanger reports that ‘A great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online, on websites like Wikipedia.’
Of course, earlier this year, Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), released a trove of documents showing how the platform’s former executives colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden’ and ‘assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns’ on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies. And ‘Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also admitted that Facebook, the biggest social media platform on Earth, censored accurate information that was damaging to President Joe Biden’s 2020 election campaign at the direct request of the FBI.’ See ‘Former Editor: CIA Moderating Wikipedia’.
But the number of hurdles to a mind free of control by outsiders just keeps expanding.
Elite agents routinely employ ‘trolls’: People employed as part of ‘online armies’ to secretly promote particular perspectives on social media. This distorts people’s sense of what is happening, and why, towards the Elite perspective promoted by the ‘trolls’. See, for example, ‘Inside Israel’s million dollar troll army’.
And to reiterate a point illustrated earlier, the political component of the Elite war on our minds is not solely the preserve of international organizations, intelligence agencies, military forces and Big Tech. It is being waged by other Elite agents as well, including national governments. For just two of the latest examples you can check out recent efforts by the Australian and Canadian governments but they are typical.
See ‘Online misinformation’, ‘BREAKING: The Australian Government colluded with big tech to suppress speech on Covid: The Censorship Industrial Complex Down Under’ and ‘Canada’s censorship bill explained: A chilling law that lets the government censor user-generated content’ as well as ‘Is this the End of Natural Health Information? Google, Meta Ban News in Canada’.
Moreover, governments, including that in the United States, are resisting efforts to halt their censorship of perspectives at variance with the Elite-driven narrative.
See, for example, ‘Biden Administration Pushes Back Against Request For an Injunction Against Government-Directed Censorship’.
And even the courts, when they actually defend free speech, are resisted by governments with a range of tools. See ‘Deny, Deflect, Defend: The Censors’ Strategy on Display’.
A more blunt tool of censorship is the use of cyber attacks to close down independent news outlets, as happened to the highly reputable but unforgivably independent outlet ‘SouthFront’ on 18 August 2023, thus destroying the public record of a large body of thought on vital issues.
See ‘Cyber Attacks against Independent Media, Censorship and Double Standards’. Fortunately, after much effort, the site was restored at a new Internet address: ‘SouthFront’.
A perfect illustration of how effectively promotion of an Elite-driven narrative, combined with massive hidden censorship (including ‘fact checking’), works occurred during the past three years when most people readily accepted that a nonexistent virus was killing off a substantial proportion of their fellows and they needed to take many experimental, toxic injections to remain healthy.
Already victims of psychological mind control from childhood, and now under the barrage of Elite propaganda and the cover provided by massive censorship, relatively few people were capable of investigating the evidence for themselves: Had a unique pathogenic ‘virus’ been isolated (when none had been previously)? Were the measures taken – lockdowns, mask-wearing, PCR testing, mandatory injections – scientifically justified? What else was going on behind the scenes? Which should have led to discovery of the obscured but profound threat posed by the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’ – with its related fourth industrial revolution, eugenicist and transhumanist programs – and consideration of what it all meant for themselves and those they love.
The point is simple: Elite control of most human minds is already so extensive that most people are disinclined to even countenance an alternative to the Elite-driven narrative.
For an illustration of this, see ‘The Corona War. They’re Coming After Our Thoughts’.
But if someone does decide to challenge or expose Elite dogma in a particular context, there is yet another hurdle they might be required to navigate. Elite agents (and those in their thrall) might seek to discredit the offending individual. One way of attempting this is by applying the label ‘conspiracy theorist’ to the person concerned. This tactic has been used extensively, and effectively, since the 1950s, scaring many people into renouncing the evidence and conscientious beliefs that shaped their original perspective while scaring many others into believing that the truth-teller was lying.
As explained by academic philosopher David Coady, use of the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ serves ‘a function similar to that served by the term “heresy” in medieval Europe. In both cases these are terms of propaganda, used to stigmatise and marginalise people who have beliefs that conflict with officially sanctioned or orthodox beliefs of the time and place in question.’
See ‘In defence of conspiracy theories (and why the term is a misnomer)’.
In essence, navigating the psychological and political hurdles that stand in our way to knowing and acting on the truth is an enormous challenge. Unfortunately, these are not all.
Part 2 of this study will consider the medical and technological methods used to control our minds and explain what is necessary to “win this war”.
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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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