You have been on a battlefield for most of your life, and you probably weren’t aware of the ongoing war. The battlefield is your mind. You have probably felt at times that you are being manipulated. Nudged. It’s not your imagination. In fact, it is something Lyndon LaRouche warned of over decades. More importantly, he also provided the tools to rise above it.
How did we get to a point that the U.S. and Western Europe are arming Nazis in Ukraine and censoring anyone who objects? How have we become numb to the deliberate genocide being committed in our names in Afghanistan and Yemen? Why has it become impossible to have a calm, thoughtful discussion when people disagree on politics?
How have we reached the brink of thermonuclear WWIII, with relatively little demand from within the USA to change course?
Is it now acceptable to have a “Ministry of Truth,” a “Disinformation Governance Board” in the United States, where dissent equals disinformation?
Censorship, manipulation, and brainwashing aren’t new phenomena, but they all rely on the idea that people can be trained, like animals, or programmed like computers. But human beings are endowed with creative reason, allowing us to step outside such means of control. It was LaRouche’s reaction against the inhuman nature of cybernetics—the insane claim by John von Neuman and Norbert Wiener that the human mind is essentially identical to a highly developed computer—that impelled him toward making his most important, original discoveries.
Decades ago, Lyndon LaRouche called upon members of his movement to launch national ideology projects to study the strengths and weaknesses of different national cultures to enable people to escape the mental shackles that unconsciously imprison their minds. Think of this article as an invitation to join in reviving that project, as kind of a Psychological Warfare Inoculation Bureau.
Effectively, the assault upon you has been two pronged: Most obviously, it is to determine what you think, with emphasis on leading you to believe you have formed certain desired, predetermined opinions and conclusions on your own. More important is the assault upon your ability to think at all. In essence, the attempt is to reduce your mind to the level of a trainable animal or programmable computer. Think of the 140 characters of Twitter, or 15 seconds of TikTok.
To take up the first part, look at the ceaseless propaganda around the conflict in Ukraine as one example. Every report in the West uses the identical formulation: Putin’s “totally unjustified and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” It reminds me of the formulation “political extremist Lyndon LaRouche” pervasively repeated in the media. Is it really possible that every supposedly independent journalist stumbled upon the exact same wording? Is it really Russian disinformation to raise the history of the conflict, from the U.S.-sponsored coup in 2014, including widely reported massacres of ethnic Russians by Ukrainian forces, like that at the Odessa Trade Union Building that year? Many more such incidents occurred from 2014 to 2022, while supposed Western guarantees of the Minsk peace accords never materialized.
Is it Putin propaganda to mention the role of Nazis in Ukraine? The western media universally claim that they don’t exist, yet even a cursory search of coverage by those same outlets in prior years reveals countless reports about the Nazi leanings of Azov, Pravy Sektor, Aidar, C-14, and many others. There is open celebration of WW II Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, including truly terrifying torchlit parades. The Christchurch shooter, Brendon Tarrant, bragged that he had trained with Azov. His racist manifesto, which sported the Nazi Sonnenrad symbol featured on Azov uniforms, was later translated into Ukrainian and reportedly widely circulated there. In 2018, the U.S. Congress banned any U.S. funding from going to Azov. On October 16, 2019, forty Members of Congress, all Democrats, wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, detailing the Nazi character of these armed units in Ukraine, yet all of them who still remained in the House on May 10, 2022, voted to arm those same groups.
These are not accidents. For decades the Military Industrial Complex has been quietly incorporating both traditional and social media into its arsenal. This history includes operation Mockingbird, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Michael Aquino’s “Mind War,” NATO’s Allied Command Transformation study “Cognitive Warfare,” and the Rand Corporation’s “Whose Story Wins?” NBC has directly bragged about its role in disinformation campaigns, of “disclosing” something that was never true, as a form of information warfare. In any thinking society, citizens would be alarmed at having known liars from the intelligence community like John Brennan and James Clapper regularly featured as experts by news outlets, or former NSA director Army Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Keith Alexander running Amazon Web Services.
Further, the line between public and private sectors has been deliberately blurred in order to evade Constitutional restrictions. Edward Snowden notes that he was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, rather than directly by the CIA or NSA, when he courageously exposed the U.S. government’s mass surveillance program, run under Gen. Alexander’s direction. The Office of Information Awareness under Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld had a program called LifeLog to map out every individual’s habits, spending, friends, movements, communications, likes and dislikes; in short a full log of your life, a total profile. It was run through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and involved Peter Thiel’s company Palantir, and a CIA front called In-Q-Tel. When it came under Congressional scrutiny for violating the Constitution, it was disbanded, on February 4, 2004. The very same day saw the launch of the website of a new company called The Facebook, doing exactly the same thing, voluntarily and under a private banner, with a board that came to include Peter Thiel and the head of In-Q-Tel.
How your opinions are imposed upon you
I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called “education.” Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment… The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship... The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray… Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. The populace will in general be too busy earning a living or too lazy or just too world weary to care much about where and how they arrived at their convictions. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. [emphasis added]
—Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, 1951
If you think 1984 and Brave New World were warnings, you’ve been bamboozled. They were blueprints for the type of mind control exercised over you today. The same Huxley networks that were instrumental to introducing LSD and the whole drug counterculture into the U.S. were also central to the inception of personal computing as a branch of the same operation. John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said is useful to gain insight into how this process was managed. The channeling of computer development from advanced scientific and engineering work into personal mind “enhancement” was surrounded by the rhetoric of LSD and other hallucinogens as being consciousness-expanding. The intention was the same: to destroy the ability to think freely and creatively. To impose the “rules of the game” upon your mind.
In light of the CIA’s two-decade-long LSD program, MKUltra (1953–73), we should explore similar involvement in shaping the development of the PC.
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
—Aldous Huxley speaking to Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
Think of Huxley and “Soma” from his Brave New World next time you pass your local pot dispensary.
Think of the above quotes by Russell and Huxley when you consider the role of [anti-]social media today. Studies conducted by the Tavistock Institute, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Frankfurt School, the Rockefeller Foundation, and DARPA, among others, have extensively researched how to manipulate both individuals and entire societies. The deliberate creation of an echo chamber where all of your media feeds only contain things designed to amplify your prejudices, and to shield you from anything that challenges pre-existing beliefs, “the algorithm,” was intended to ensure the polarization of the population, creating sets of opposite tribes, only able to scream louder and louder at each other, but totally unable to examine the axioms underlying the selected trigger issues. This was intended to replace any form of deliberation in modern society. The format of media, the infinite Instagram scroll or Facebook feed, and the limitations on size are deliberate attacks on your concentration span. Despite the raising of those limits, the average tweet is still quite short, and the average TikTok video is shorter than a minute.
These methods of manipulation were incorporated into social media and video games from the very beginning. These anti-human forms of control are at the core of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Twitch, and Instagram.
The peer pressure, including from bots, the rewards/likes, the notifications to induce addictions are all part of this process. The videos The Creepy Line, and The Social Dilemma illustrate this clearly, though their conclusions are objectionable. Cass Sunstein’s Nudge is a fuller, more academic promotion of these techniques. Lt. Col. David Grossman’s work on the murder-training nature of video games is worth reading.
On a much higher level, I recommend earlier works by the LaRouche movement that are uniquely helpful in understanding this matter.
Conclusion
On May 14, 2022, an 18-year-old, Payton Gendron, walked into a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, and shot 13 people, killing 10, in a racist attack. His manifesto, plagiarized from that of the mass killer in Christchurch, featured the same Nazi Sonnenrad symbol and espoused the same racist ideology as the Nazis in Ukraine who are now recipients of billions of dollars in advanced Western military equipment. Gendron, like his model, Brenton Tarrant, chose to livestream the carnage on social media.
The media, on the controlled left and right alike, now focus the discussion on guns, rather than on the Nazi ideology that they choose to cover up in Ukraine, or on how young people are turned into mass killers. What was the role of social media in shaping the warped outlook of this young man? The role of violent video games?
Why have you allowed the discussion to be shaped the way it has been?
More importantly, where is the discussion of how to change our culture?
The “rules of the game,” the same as the “rules-based order,” are fictions created to force individuals and societies to respond predictably, as if they were animals or computers, and thus be easily manipulated by an unseen elite into predetermined results. Free trade and systems analysis are actually just white collar vehicles of theft and genocide. Blue vs. Red elections are designed to keep a permanent bureaucracy in power as a form of dictatorship. The concocted “responsibility to protect” policy of foreign military intervention, and feigned cries for human rights, are generally just covers for regime change and war crimes.
We must begin to defy the rigged rules of the game, as Bach and Beethoven did in music, as Dante and Shakespeare did in language, and Kepler and Einstein did in science. We, as human beings, can uniquely recreate and re-experience their discoveries, and even surpass them. A culture dedicated to developing thermonuclear fusion power and terraforming Mars inspires young people to emulate scientists and engineers rather than “influencers” or mass killers.
Hopefully this piece provokes you to join in this project.
