Cognitive Warfare
“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions.... Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown." Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
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Cognitive warfare is a disinformation process to psychologically and gradually weaken the recipients of the information, thus directing public discourse. This is done to manufacture cracks in societal harmony and to damage confidence in institutions.
I am now recording my essays as well and you can listen to this one here.
Twenty-five years ago, on February 23, 1997, sixty-five million people sat down in front of their television sets to watch Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List. Such a huge audience was unheard of, especially for a black and white film. But it had struck a chord with the public, in an era that seems like a hundred years ago now, when people still naively believed their governments had their best interests at heart. There was no doubt that the United States and its allies had saved the world from a terrible evil. We were the superheroes and our might had been used for right.
“It was a staggering audience response for that subject matter and a black-and-white film,” said Warren Littlefield, then head of NBC Entertainment, which ran Schindler’s List unedited.
Ford had bought the advertising for the film for upwards of 10 million dollars. Littlefield agreed with Spielberg that traditional advertisements interrupting the film would be a terrible idea for so profound a subject matter. A radical solution was found where Ford ran a pair of “low-key, 60-second commercials immediately before and after the film, narrated by Lauren Bacall.”
The reason I mention this is that Ford happened to be an odd choice for Spielberg’s film. Its founder Henry Ford was a believer in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document circulated by the Czarist Russian secret police in the early years of the twentieth century, purporting to be a “meeting of Jewish leaders from many nations who were planning to dominate and enslave all mankind and destroy Christianity.”
The Russian government “used this document to try to focus the anger and hostility of Russians who were suffering under poverty, illiteracy, censorship, and lack of civil rights on the Jews.”
Ford was perhaps his era’s most high-profile and efficacious antisemite, who among other efforts used his newspaper The Dearborn Independent to attack Jewish control of the film industry. You would think that having such a blight attached to the film would be untenable. But none of this mattered when it came to airing Schindler’s List on NBC.
Not when 10 million dollars was involved.
Spielberg was silent about the blight on Ford’s participation. So, here you had perhaps the most moving film of the Holocaust ever to be made—by a Jewish man—and being advertised by a company with the worst possible history of antisemitism.
The people watching the movie and perhaps buying a Ford car afterwards because of the ads, had no idea about this contradiction behind the scenes. Would it have made a difference if they had known? Probably not. We feign horror at finding out children work in mines so that we can have cell phones and in sweat shops so that we can buy cheaper clothes, but we still buy the products.
In the same contradictory manner, we can be horrified by what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany, but we also want to buy a Ford car from a company with a history of antisemitism because it’s “all-American.”
If there is anything that we learn from this it’s how easily logic, along with our innate sense of right and wrong, and all the attributes that we think we possess as decent human beings, go out the window when we are faced with either opportunities to obtain something that we desire or we are in danger of losing something that we don’t want to give up.
Joost A. M. Meerloo, in The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, makes this observation about Hitler:
“Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot—it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”
“Hitler's psychological artillery was composed primarily of the weapon of fear. He had, for example, a network of fifth columnists whose main job was to sow rumors and suspicions among the citizens of the countries against which he eventually planned to fight...Fear began to direct people's actions. Instead of facing the real threat of German invasion, instead of preparing for it, all of Europe shuddered at spy stories, discussed irrelevant problems, argued endlessly about scapegoats and minorities.”
This is exactly what we see happening all around us now! Instead of focusing on those who are taking away our freedoms, we are preoccupied with who is “controlled opposition,” and whether or not the war in Ukraine is actually real.
Right on cue, Covid has retired from center stage, but not without continuing assurances that a new pandemic is right around the corner, and we must prepare for it as we would prepare for—yes, war.
Five years ago, the prophet of doom, Bill Gates, warned us, “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war – not missiles, but microbes.”
To defeat the next pandemic, Gates now tells us that we must prepare like the military does. Here are some of his suggestions:
Medical reserve corps, with lots of people with training and expertise ready to deploy.
Pairing the medical and military experts, so the military can provide logistics and secure areas.
Simulations, or “germ games” to see how well leaders are prepared.
Lots of advanced R&D in areas of vaccines and diagnostics.
He reiterates that the only way to keep the death rate below 1% is through isolation and testing. According to him, Australia got it right and if we want to defeat the next pandemic, we must be prepared to do what they did.
Here we are, literally, poised on the cusp of World War III. Clearly the methods the military used to end wars hasn’t worked. It has only made things worse. Yet Gates says we should apply those methods to defeating a virus.
Madness!
Conveniently, just as the mandates were being lifted, war descended upon us. The mass psychosis brought on by menticide that I talked about in my essay Utopian Madness has succeeded.
Covid was bad but Putin is worse. This could mean nuclear war. All those biolabs the United States has in Ukraine; Putin has been targeting them.
Remember when Rand Paul said, “Isn’t it all just theater?” to Dr. Fauci, accusing him of funding gain of function research in the Wuhan lab?
Just yesterday I saw this:
“New reports suggest Covid originated in a Wuhan market, not a laboratory. ‘When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,’ said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who co-authored both studies, told The New York Times. The researchers found no evidence to back the theory that Covid originated in a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
First it started in the wet market. Then it didn’t. Now it did again?
I’ve noticed lots of people repeating Rand Paul’s phrase, “It’s just theater.”
And the other favorite, “It’s just a distraction.”
I started saying it too, until I shook my head to clear my brain and stopped. Could it be I was being brainwashed as I said those seemingly valid words?
Repeating this mantra over and over removes us further from the reality that our overlords want us to forget about. It isn’t ‘theater’ for Ukrainians who, at this moment, are experiencing the confusion and terror of an invasion.
It isn’t ‘theater’ if, as I read this morning, Putin puts Russia's nuclear deterrent forces on high alert in response to 'illegitimate Western sanctions.'
The war will continue to escalate, or it will die down. It doesn’t matter to the overlords. Either way, the majority of the populace will be so worn out by this fresh psychological assault that they will go along with whatever they are told to do next.
This war is putting the final touches on the blurring of the lines between reality and fiction that Covid started. There is no country where that line has been more erased than in Ukraine. Its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, used to be the star of a television show called Servant of the People. The show tells the story of Vasily Petrovich Goloborodko, a high school teacher who unexpectedly wins the Ukrainian Presidential election after a video of him ranting about corruption goes viral.
And then, wonder of all wonders, fiction became reality and Zelensky was elected President of Ukraine on 21 April 2019. How did this happen?
Let’s go back to 2015 and commentary by Michel Chossudovsky. Chossudovsky is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Ottawa and founder of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Wikipedia describes him as a “Canadian economist, author and conspiracy theorist.
Wikipedia: In November 2017, The Globe and Mail reported that NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence described …. the CRG as an "online refuge for conspiracy theorists" and suggested that NATO specialists viewed it as "a link in a concerted effort to undermine the credibility of mainstream Western media—as well as the North American and European public's trust in government and public institutions."
I don’t know about you, but I would say that the MSM doesn’t need anyone to undermine its credibility, nor does the government need ‘conspiracy theorists’ to undermine the public’s trust. These entities have accomplished that goal themselves.
In a 2014 Global Research TV interview, Chossudovsky described the election of Zelensky as a Neo-Nazi Coup and a perfect example of cognitive warfare:
“This was an act of war against Ukraine. It is a carefully led intelligence operation at the level of intelligence, military, diplomatic. It is part of a broader global military agenda of destabilization of nonconventional warfare which is led against several countries simultaneously. This coup d’état in Ukraine is part of an agenda of global conquest. Regime changes under these circumstances where you start supporting Neo-Nazis is an act of warfare. Particularly when the lives of civilians are used to justify a political agenda. With regard to Ukraine, I’m referring to the sniper fire of February 20, which we documented very carefully at the time, and which has subsequently been revealed to have been led by those who are currently in the coalition government.”
In US President Barack Obama’s February 2, 2015, interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakiria, he admitted that the United States “had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.”
The United States government has been very good at going into foreign countries where it wanted to gain control and fomenting social conflict and violence, furthering impoverishment and thus dependence of those countries on the United States. These countries are then “saved” by loans. The United States is currently the world’s most brutal and powerful loan shark.
It was IMF programs (IMF programs are designed to provide short-term balance-of-payments assistance to member countries) that did Eastern European countries in and started them on the road to total compliance. As a result, bread prices skyrocketed overnight 300%, the cost of electricity went up 600%, transportation rose 900%. Bending under this impossible weight, NATO built up armies within eastern European countries, pressing in upon Russia when it had promised not to do this.
Putin had every reason to be concerned then and has every reason to be more concerned now. With this new war, he reached out to the Ukrainian military that it would be “easier for us to make a deal with you” than with “this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis,” apparently referring to Ukraine’s government.
Who would deny Putin is also a thug? Or China’s Xi Jinping? Biden was one once, but he is now just a puppet of the far worse thugs who control him (a subject I’ve written about in other essays).
Chinese government official Lijian Zhao posted this photo on twitter with the caption Never forget who's the real threat to the world:
We can’t just blame everyone else. We have to be honest and take responsibility for our own country’s wrongdoings. We all watched the horror what unfolded in Afghanistan. I wrote about it in my essay And So It Goes...
Since Biden became president the war on reality has plunged us into a nightmare of chaos, dissension, illogic, and confusion, the likes of which we have never seen.
The most effective way that they have of controlling us is through the media. Just as they shut down our dissenting voices, they are now shutting down our ability to hear or see the news of the war from other points of view.
Canada’s minister responsible for broadcasting said the government was investigating “all options” for getting a state-owned Russian TV network off the nation’s airwaves amid rising anger over the invasion of Ukraine.
Today I found that I can no longer access my RT news app on my phone, and it has been shut down in Australia.
Telegram may now restrict some channels if the situation in Ukraine escalates, says Telegram’s founder.
Anonymous hackers claim responsibility for Russian Government website outages and claim to have hacked into State TV broadcasts.
We simply do not know if the news we are receiving is true or not. Not any of it.
What we can do is communicate with people across social media platforms who live in Ukraine and other affected nations. Judging by what I’ve heard first-hand, I would say some pretty bad things are happening. Let’s hope that the channels stay open, while being realistic that at any time, we could be shut off from the internet and the world turned dark.
The cognitive warfare is escalating and the MSM is becoming increasingly outlandish.
Recently, Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted a cry for help to Elon Musk:
“While you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.”
The billionaire tweeted back:
“Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.”
Within a few hours, Elon Musk’s tweet had over 507k likes and thousands of gushy comments.
On Saturday, when Russian space chief, Dmitry Rogozin said that the International Space Station (ISS) could come crashing down onto Earth and hitting the United States or any other country except Russia, in retaliation to the US sanctions against Russia, Musk came to the rescue again, suggesting that SpaceX would stop the ISS from crashing to Earth.
And then, suddenly, Sean Penn pops up in Ukraine where he just happens to be filming a documentary. Here he is in full battle gear, in an article for the Los Angeles Times:
Sorry, did I read that right? Isn’t this the guy who is known for his anti-war views that have never changed…until now?
Even worse, he recently said that being unvaccinated was like 'pointing a gun in somebody's face.' Penn believes that only the fully vaccinated should be allowed outside their homes.
Ukraine is under 37% vaccinated. Is he forcing everyone on his film set to be vaccinated?
How can anyone take the United States’ claims of fighting for democracy seriously when it has imposed mandates on its own people, forcing them to be injected with an experimental gene therapy or they will lose their jobs, locking them in their homes and now calling anyone who dares dissent a domestic terrorist? Just across the border in Canada, Trudeau condemned Putin as a tyrant whilst freezing the bank accounts of his own people and not allowing the unvaccinated to leave the country.
When the Truckers’ convoy shows up in Washington DC by March 6, in time for Bien’s State of the Union address, will Biden use it as an excuse to do the same?
Incredibly, the majority have fallen under the spell of this cognitive warfare and believe these actions by our government are fully justified to keep us “safe.”
On May 20, 2021, NATO Review published an article, Countering cognitive warfare: awareness and resilience. It’s fascinating since we know that NATO use these methods to manipulate the populace. Here is an excerpt:
“In cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battlefield. The aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes and influences individual and group beliefs and behaviors to favor an aggressor’s tactical or strategic objectives. In its extreme form, it has the potential to fracture and fragment an entire society, so that it no longer has the collective will to resist an adversary’s intentions.
“The aims of cognitive warfare can be limited, with short time horizons. Or they can be strategic, with campaigns launched over the course of decades. Several successive campaigns could be launched with the long-term objective of disrupting entire societies or alliances, by seeding doubts about governance, subverting democratic processes, triggering civil disturbances, or instigating separatist movements.
“Cognitive warfare integrates cyber, information, psychological, and social engineering capabilities to achieve its ends.
“[Cognitive Warfare] seeks to sow doubt, to introduce conflicting narratives, to polarize opinion, to radicalize groups, and to motivate them to acts that can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive society. Social networking sites induce social proofing, wherein we mimic and affirm others’ actions and beliefs to fit in with our social groups, which become echo chambers of conformism and groupthink.
“The rapid pace of messaging and news releases, and the perceived need to quickly react to them, encourages “thinking fast” (reflexively and emotionally) as opposed to “thinking slow” (rationally and judiciously). Even established and reputable news outlets now post emotional headlines to encourage viral diffusion of their news articles.
“People spend less time reading their content, even as they increase the frequency in sharing them. Social messaging systems are optimized to distribute short snippets that often omit important context and nuance. This can facilitate the spread of both intentionally and unintentionally misinterpreted information or slanted narratives.”
We have been pushed into our separate bubbles and we need to make an extra effort to get out of them. Back into the real world, encountering real people. Looking into a real person’s face—without a mask—sharing a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, talking, debating. Getting used to once again accepting differing points of view is what we need to do.
In this war that we now find knocking on all of our doors, we cannot be sure the bombs we are seeing dropped inside of our devices are real in the outside world. Those people walking down the road, escaping their village, the buildings with the inside hanging out, perhaps it’s all just theater.
One of my favorite films (taken from a book) is The Year of Living Dangerously.
The year is 1965. The fiercely nationalistic government of the god-king Sukarno has brought Indonesia to the brink of chaos. Engulfed in the violence are Guy Hamilton, a Western journalist; Billy Kwan, his Chinese-Australian cameraman; and the young British woman they both love.
One of the most powerful scenes in the film is when Kwan, who had become disillusioned with his hero Sukarno, talks about the shadow puppets. Instead of looking at the actual characters, one views the shadows on the wall. The shadows are beautiful. Even the ugly parts look mysterious and lovely.
The shadows have engulfed us. We are lost in this shadow world, lured there by technology and drugs. We have been trapped there by cognitive warfare. This rape of our minds.
The reality is that the Biden administration wants this war. It ushers us into a new Cold War. Who will profit from this? The Military-Industrial Complex.
Who pays the price while the rich get richer?
The American people pay the price. The Ukrainian people pay the price. The Russian people pay the price. The European people pay the price. The Chinese people pay the price.
Beyond the profitability of war, it prepares a public to become even more docile so that when the time is right, we will return to our prisons once more. The prisons that overlords like Bill Gates are so busily preparing for us.
As I write these words, early morning on Sunday, February 27, 2022, the cries for war grow louder. The United States must stand up and defend Ukraine against the evil Vladimir Putin and tyranny! People across the free world are demanding this, not realizing the irony that at the same time they accept being locked away and living under tyranny themselves.
Who would ever believe this could happen?
In the summer of 1967, as my family returned to the United States for a respite from our world traveling adventures in our bright red VW van, I was excited to be returning to the most wonderful country in the world. I was going home.
For seven days, we sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on a Cunard ship, arriving in Montreal in time for Expo 67 before beginning one last, cross-country journey to Los Angeles.
Traversing the southern states, I only remember cockroaches as big as my fist, or so they seemed to me, and once, getting out at a gas station in a town that boasted a sign—Friendliest God-fearing town on Earth— terribly thirsty, and approaching the drinking fountain to find a sign in bold letters Whites only.
That sign stopped me cold. I didn’t know what to do. I’d been in many countries where I’d feared drinking the water because it might make my body sick. But never a fear like this. Never a fear that if I drank this water, my spirit would become infected with a disease far worse than any bodily ill. How could I drink from such a fountain?
It seemed worse than walking through Dachau and seeing the ovens and the pictures of all those suffering millions. Well, it wasn’t worse, there was no way to compare the two. But that at least that had been a walk through the past, ghosts and bones left as reminders so that we as conscious human beings could learn and change our ways. Yes, Dachau was a story to be told so that it would never be forgotten, hopefully not re-lived. Like the story of Oskar Schindler, not only had he save so many Jews, but the story went on to remind millions the world over that we should never again give in to tyranny.
Sadly, people seem to have very short memories.
I thought of how I’d stood in the bookstore in Cairo right before the 6 Day War, armed military outside, the voice of Nasar blasting from microphones to annihilate the United Staes and its stooge Israel. At first, we’d been thrilled to find books about the US in English, but when we opened them, we found they were published in the Soviet Union and were filled with propaganda. The only photos were terrible ones depicting poor neighborhoods, drug addiction, crime, racism, with commentary about the evils of capitalism and how the US was ruled by a few wealthy who oppressed the poor and killed the blacks. My mom had been incensed. Yes, that happened but it wasn’t part of our world, we weren’t like that, and she had dismissed it far too easily.
But now, I faced the reality that the books had talked about, with my own eyes, in front of my face. I stood rooted to the ground, the heat from the pavement searing my feet through my thin sandals, unable to move. I stood as surely as I had stood in front of the Berlin Wall, a wall that had claimed the lives of so many while trying to escape to freedom. Here, too, was a wall enslaving an entire race of people. It was an Evil, as vile and insidious as anything that had happened down through history. This reality that confronted me was not yet a story to be told, a story to be learned from. It was happening right now, and I was experiencing it in my homeland.
At last, I could stand my thirst no longer and I drank from the fountain. It came down to a physical need, no longer moral or philosophical. The water was cool and refreshing as it ran down my throat. It did what it was supposed to do: quenched my thirst. It was horrible that I’d had to make such a choice in this God-forsaken land. And it was a God-forsaken land, no matter how many Bible thumping churches were spread across the towns and cities. It was God-forsaken to have a sign like that, plain as day and no one thinking twice about it. What was the difference between one person and another? We all got thirsty. We all cried and laughed about the same things, wished and hoped for the same things.
I remembered the nuns we had visited in Germany; the nuns who had not only helped Jews to escape during the war but now ministered to the Germans in prison awaiting sentencing at the Nuremberg trials. How courageous they were. How forgiving. Why couldn’t everyone be more like that?
I sure wasn’t like that.
I felt ashamed that my thirst had overcome my convictions. Couldn’t I have been stronger? Couldn’t I have done something? At least, I could have torn down the sign and then taken a drink. But to what end? I was just one person. I supposed there were many like me who came to the fountain, disapproved of what they saw, but drank anyway, rationalizing their actions by thinking that they were just one person.
And that is the problem: we all think we are just “one person.” And we are. But one person can start a revolution of thought and action.
Still standing in front of the fountain, not yet able to turn away from what I had done, I thought of what kind of courage it took for someone of color to bend down and drink. Certainly, more courage than it took for me not to drink, and I hadn’t even accomplished that much.
I thought of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He’d had that kind of courage. His voice had risen against the tide, compelling people to rise up with him. Less than one year later, that voice would be silenced by an assassin’s bullet. But of course, I didn’t know that then.
I also didn’t know that one day, I would be called a racist, and other vile names, for daring to raise the example of MLK as a leader who would have stood against the violence during the BLM riots. I didn’t know as an idealistic child of eleven that instead of receding, the evil would keep on growing until it threatened to engulf us all.
I turned from the fountain and headed back to the car. A hot breeze kicked up dust and a miniature tornado whirled dizzily past, carrying debris along with it. The owner of the gas station, a beefy fellow in bleached overalls, waved at me and smiled. He seemed nice—and he was nice, that’s what made life so maddening.
“Your daddy told me about your journey. You must be dying to get home, young lady.”
I nodded. Yes, I was.
“Have a souvenir from the friendliest, most God-fearing town on earth,” he said, clearly oblivious to the irony of that statement. He handed me a miniature New Testament, shiny-black with gold-trimmed pages, and I was too timid to refuse, not wanting to see his nice façade fall away and the judgment appear.
Driving through the deserts of Nevada, profound beauty that made me gasp with wonder, it dawned on me what I would find at the end of my journey. I had desperately wanted to return home to my comfortable, familiar world and find it exactly the same as when I’d left. And so, it would be. But the thing was, I was different. I would never again simply accept what I was told without investigating it for myself. I had seen and experienced too much at such a young age and it had opened my eyes to the goodness and the beauty, but also the pain and the evil of it all.
Arriving in Los Angeles at last, the city lights twinkling at dusk, I made a resolution. I might only be one person, but I would do something with my life to change the world. I would stand up against wrong. It was a tall order. An enthusiastic commitment made by a young girl with very little understanding of the impact such a resolution would have upon her life.
But we all must start somewhere. There must be a place where we draw that line in the sand and then consciously step over it, embracing our journey, no matter the consequences. There must be a time when we tear down the sign and invite everyone to drink at the fountain.
Source: Break Free with Karen Hunt
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