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Brainwashing: How The British Use the Media For Mass Psychological Warfare

BRAINWASHING:

How The British Use The Media for Mass

Psychological Warfare

by L. Wolfe

Printed in The American Almanac , May 5, 1997.

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Mass Brainwashing

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``I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just

let me control television.... You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If

the world outside the TV set contradicts the images, people start trying to change the

world to make it like the TV set images....''

--Hal Becker, media ``expert'' and management consultant, the Futures Group, in an

interview in 1981 [1]

In the 15 years since Becker's comment, Americans have become even more ``wired'' into a mass media

network that now includes computer and video games, as well as the Internet--an all-surrounding

network whose power is so pervasive that it is almost taken for granted. As the standup comic said, ``We

are really a media conscious people. I know a guy who was run over by a car in the street. He didn't

want to go to the hospital. Instead, he dragged himself over to the nearest bar, to check out whether he

made it onto the evening news. When it wasn't on, he said, `What does a guy have to do, get killed, to

get on television?'|''

In the highest circles of the British monarchy and its Club of Isles, this great power is not taken for

granted. Rather, it is carefully manipulated and directed, as Becker describes from a limited standpoint,

to create and mold popular opinion. In a 1991 report published by the Malthusian Club of Rome, entitled

``The First Global Revolution,'' Sir Alexander King, top adviser on science and education policy to the

royal family and Prince Philip, wrote that new advances in communications technology will greatly

expand the power of the media, both in the advanced and developing sectors. The media, he proclaimed,

is the most powerful weapon and ``agent of change'' in the fight to establish a ``one-worldist,'' neo-

Malthusian order that will transcend and obliterate the concept of the nation-state.

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Brainwashing: How The British Use the Media For Mass Psychological Warfare

``It is certainly necessary to engage in a broad debate with the journalists and the top

media executives involved to study the conditions for them to be able to define this new

role,''

King wrote.

In his project, King's Club of Rome can count on cooperation from the media cartel, which is a British

asset, as documented in our report. It can also call on the capabilities of a mass psychological warfare

machine, also run by the British and their assets, which extends into key phases of media production,

and includes writers and psychiatrists who help shape the content, and the pollsters who fine-tune and

analyze the impact on targetted populations. Beyond this interacting network, there are millions of

participants involved in the production, distribution, and transmission of media messages, whose

thinking, in turn, has been shaped by the content of the media product, and who are, effectively, self-

brainwashed by the culture within which they live.

The Tavistock "Mother"

The historic center of this mass psywar apparatus is based outside London, in the Tavistock Center. [2]

Established in the aftermath of World War I under the patronage of the Duke George of Kent (1902-42),

the original Tavistock Clinic, led by John Rawlings Rees, developed as the psychological warfare center

for the royal family and British intelligence. Rees and a cadre group of Freudian and neo-Freudian

psychiatrists, applied wartime experience of psychological collapse, to create theories about how such

conditions of breakdown could be induced, absent the terror of war. The result was a theory of mass

brainwashing, involving group experience, that could be used to alter the values of individuals, and

through that, induce, over time, changes in the axiomatic assumptions that govern society.

In the 1930s, Tavistock's extended networks developed a symbiotic relationship with the Frankfurt

Institute for Social Research, created by European oligarchical networks, which focussed on the study

and criticism of culture from a neo-Freudian standpoint. In the late 1930s, with its operations transferred

from Germany to the New York area, the Frankfurt School coordinated the first analysis of the impact of

a mass media phenomenon, i.e., radio, on culture--the Princeton-based ``Radio Research Project.'' [3]

With the outbreak of World War II, Tavistock operatives took effective control of the Psychological

Warfare Directorate of the British Army, while its allied network in the United States embedded itself in

the American psychological warfare apparatus, including the Committee on National Morale and the

Strategic Bombing Survey.

By war's end, the combined influence of Tavistock (which became the Tavistock Institute in 1947) and

of the former Frankfurt School operatives, had created a cadre of ``psychological shock troops,'' as Rees

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Brainwashing: How The British Use the Media For Mass Psychological Warfare

called them, and ``cultural warriors'' numbering in the several thousands. Today that network numbers in

the several millions around the world, and it is the single most important factor in determining the

design and content of mass media product.

The "Pictures in Your Head"

In 1922, Walter Lippmann defined the term ``public opinion'' as follows:

``The pictures inside the heads of human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of

their needs and purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which

are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are

Public Opinion, with capital letters.''

Lippmann, who was the first to translate Sigmund Freud's works into English, was to become one of the

most influential of political commentators. [4] He had spent World War I at the British psychological

warfare and propaganda headquarters in Wellington House, outside of London, in a group that included

Freud's nephew, Eduard Bernays. [5] Lippmann's book Public Opinion, published one year after Freud's

Mass Psychology, which touched on similar themes, was a product of his tutelage by the Rees networks.

It is through the media, Lippmann writes, that most people come to develop those ``pictures in their

heads,'' giving the media ``an awesome power.''

The Rees networks had spent World War I studying the effects of war psychosis, and its breakdown of

individual personality. From their work, an evil thesis emerged: Through the use of terror, man can be

reduced to a childlike and submissive state, in which his powers of reason are clouded, and in which his

emotional response to various situations and stimuli can become predictable, or in Tavistockian terms,

``profilable.'' By controlling the levels of anxiety, it is possible to induce a similar state in large groups

of people, whose behavior can then be controlled and manipulated by the oligarchical forces for whom

Tavistock worked. [6]

Mass media were capable of reaching large numbers of people with programmed or controlled

messages, which is key to the creation of ``controlled environments'' for brainwashing purposes. As

Tavistock's researches showed, it was important that the victims of mass brainwashing not be aware that

their environment was being controlled; there should thus be a vast number of sources for information,

whose messages could be varied slightly, so as to mask the sense of external control. Where possible,

the messages should be offered and reinforced through ``entertainments,'' which could be consumed,

without apparent coercion, and with the victim perceiving himself as making a choice between various

options and outlets.

Lippmann observes in his book that people are more than willing to reduce complex problems to

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Brainwashing: How The British Use the Media For Mass Psychological Warfare

simplistic formulas, to form their opinion by what they believe others around them believe; truth hardly

enters into such considerations. Appearance of reports in the media confer the aura of reality upon those

stories: If they weren't factual, then why would they be reported? Lippmann says the average person

believes. People whose fame is in turn built up by the media, such as movie stars, can become ``opinion

leaders,'' with as much power to sway public opinion as political figures.

Were people to think about this process too much, it might break down; but, he writes,

``the mass of absolutely illiterate, of feeble minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and

frustrated individuals is very considerable, much more considerable, there is reason to

think, than we generally suppose. Thus a wide popular appeal is circulated among persons

who are mentally children or barbarians, whose lives are a morass of entanglements,

people whose vitality is exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has

comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion.''

Stating that he saw a progression to ever-less-thought-provoking forms of media, Lippmann marvels at

the power of the nascent Hollywood movie industry to shape public opinion. Words, or even a still

picture, require an effort for the person to form a ``picture in the mind.'' But, with a movie,

``the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining has been

accomplished for you. Without more trouble than is needed to stay awake, the result

which your imagination is always aiming at is reeled off on the screen.''

Significantly, as an example of the power of movies, he uses the D.W. Griffith propaganda film for the

Ku Klux Klan, ``The Birth of a Nation''; no American, he writes, will ever hear the name of the Klan

again, ``without seeing those white horsemen.''

Popular opinion, Lippmann observes, is ultimately determined by the desires and wishes of an elite

``social set.'' That set, he states, is a

``powerful, socially superior, successful, rich urban social set [which] is fundamentally

international throughout the Western Hemisphere and in many ways, London is its center.

It counts among its membership the most influential people in the world, containing as it

does the diplomatic sets, high finance, the upper circles of the army and navy, some

princes of the church, the great newspaper proprietors, their wives, mothers, and daughters

who wield the scepter of invitation. It is at once a great circle of talk and a real social set.''

In a typical elitist fashion, Lippmann concludes that coordination of public opinion is lacking in

precision. If the goal of a one-worldist ``Great Society'' is to be realized, then ``public opinion must be

organized for the press, not by the press.'' It is not sufficient to rely on the whims of a ``super social set''

to manipulate the ``pictures in people's heads''; that job ``can only be managed by a specialized class''

which operates through ``intelligence bureaus.'' [7]

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Brainwashing: How The British Use the Media For Mass Psychological Warfare

The "Radio Research Project"

As Lippmann was writing, the radio, the first major mass media technology to invade the home, was

coming into prominence. Unlike the movies, which were viewed in theaters by large groups of people,

the radio provided an individualized experience within the home, and centered on the family. By 1937,

out of 32 million American families, some 27.5 million had a radio set--a larger percentage than had

cars, telephones, or even electricity.

That same year, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a project to study the effects of radio on the

population. [8] Recruited to what became known as the ``Radio Research Project,'' headquartered at

Princeton University, were sections of the Frankfurt School, now transplanted from Germany to

America, as well as individuals such as Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport, who were to become key

components of Tavistock's American operations. Heading the project was the Frankfurt School's Paul

Lazerfeld; his assistant directors were Cantril and Allport, along with Frank Stanton, who was to head

the CBS News division, and later become its president, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND

Corporation.

The project was presaged by theoretical work done earlier in the studies of war propaganda and

psychosis, and the work of Frankfurt School operatives Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. This

earlier work had converged on the thesis that mass media could be used to induce regressive mental

states, atomizing individuals and producing increased lability. (These induced mental conditions were

later dubbed by Tavistock itself as ``brainwashed'' states, and the process of inducing them called

``brainwashing.'')

In 1938, at the time he was head of the music section of the Radio Research Project, Adorno wrote that

listeners to radio music programs:

``fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They

listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear.... They are not childlike, but they are

childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded.''

The Radio Research Project's findings, published in 1939, backed up Adorno's thesis of ``enforced

retardation,'' and serve as a brainwashers' handbook.

In studies on the serialized radio dramas, commonly known as ``soap operas'' (so named, because many

were sponsored by soap manufacturers), Herta Hertzog found that their popularity could not be

attributed to any socio-economic characteristics of listeners, but rather to the serialized format itself,

which induced habituated listening. The brainwashing power of serialization was recognized by movie

and television programmers; to this day, the afternoon ``soaps'' remain among the most addictive of

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Brainwashing_ How The British Use the Media For Mass Psychological Warfare - by L. Wolfe.pdf

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