The use of the mass media to propagandize for war was dramatically increased in World Wars I and II. This was contemporaneous with the rise of behaviorism in psychology, fueled by the conditioning experiments of Pavlov and Watson that demonstrated the means by which behavior could be controlled.
Once John Pierpont Morgan gained control of the major newspapers in the United States in 1915, he immediately began pushing for American involvement in World War I with lurid tales of German soldiers cutting off the arms of Belgian schoolchildren and crucifying Belgian nuns.
The famous lawyer Clarence Darrow offered $1000 to anyone who could prove such nonsense … and, of course, never paid out a dime. But, eventually, the U.S. Congress and American public, treated to false information about the sinking of the Lusitania and a German-Mexican plan to retake the American Southwest, gave Morgan his war.
The Nazi propagandist Goebbels in Germany applied the term “The Big Lie” in reference to British wartime propaganda, but the Germans allegedly did their share of propagandizing in “Operation Himmler”, which blamed the destruction of a border radio tower and other skirmishes on Poland in 1939, thereby justifying the German invasion of the latter and provoking Britain and France into all-out war.
All of the mass lies up to the end of World War II were mostly a distortion of real but somewhat nebulous historical events. As the 20th century progressed, a new type of mass lie was invented—involving not the interpretation of history but the actual creation of historical events.
To create history, one must first produce a momentous fictitious event that can be realistic enough to fool enough of the public when coupled with a slick selling of the false narrative. The merging of diabolical politics with Hollywood special effects and increasingly sophisticated computer technology made all of this possible.
The first pure creation of history occurred in the form of the Apollo moon landings and returns, which could not be successfully performed in 1969 and still cannot today because of, among other things, the near-impossibility of withstanding the massive radiation threat posed by the Van Allen belts and the technological difficulties in blasting off from the surface of a remote planetary body with substantial gravity.
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Yet, by 1969 Hollywood had developed cinematic techniques that, although still amateurish and full of mistakes, seemed real enough when sold to an American public that had at that time around 70% confidence in the trustworthiness of the mainstream media. Indeed, it has long been alleged that Stanley Kubrick, the famous Hollywood director of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was recruited for the very purpose of creating a fictitious moon landing.
Apollo was followed in the early part of the 21st century with major staged events, including 1) an aerial attack replete with large, sophisticated airplanes—supposedly flown by untrained pilots at low-altitude approaching the speed of sound—that crashed into the strongest buildings ever built by mankind and brought them down in a matter of a few minutes (September 11); school mass-shootings by “crazed” youth at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut and Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida,; and sensational explosions at world-famous events (e.g., the Boston Marathon bombing).
These faux historical events employed sophisticated video techniques (real-time video compositing of planes hitting the second World Trade Center Tower) and computer software (fake information inserted onto FAA screens during the aircraft hijacking drill coinciding with the tower collapses on September 11).
It didn’t matter that the video feeds on September 11 were incredibly flawed and amateurish, showing huge aircraft with fiberglass and aluminum noses disappearing stealthily into the towers or, in one case, even passing through the second tower intact;or that the cell phone calls from American Airlines 77 (later shown to have never taken off from Dulles International) were impossible to make.
It didn’t matter that there were Hollywood special effects galore (i.e., fake blood and amputations at the Boston Marathon bombing and elsewhere) or virtual bullets that disappeared into thin air during the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand or a host of other bloopers. The official narratives were replayed over and over again on Western media to stamp the official narrative into the minds of an unsuspecting public.
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Many of these staged events also took advantage of planned drills to provide a large numbers of crisis actors and a “cast of thousands” (more Hollywood) to further promote the narrative. That there were drills and simulations running concurrently with the staged events is beyond doubt given the marquee sign, sign-in sheets, and FEMA manual for the drill at Sandy Hook and the loudspeaker messages and newspaper accounts of a drill at Boston and the videotaped dress rehearsals at Douglas High—not to mention the aircraft hijacking drills on September 11.
Perhaps the greatest of all fictitious events is the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021, still ongoing.
One may accept that there is a SARS-COVID-2 virus (although this has been debated in some quarters) and that it has a certain low-level of lethality (bordering on the seasonal flu.) But, as a classic “pandemic”, COVID-19 is a fiction because it can only be called such by the World Health Organization’s revised 2009 definition, which excluded the need for a pandemic to “cause enormous numbers of death and illness”, thereby allowing virtually any seasonal infection that crosses national borders to be called a pandemic if authorities so desire.
Even if one accepts the COVID death tolls spewed out by the World Health Organization worldwide, then the total of less than six million or so world-wide COVID-19 deaths by the end of 2021 was less than .1% of the world’s population, a far cry from the 3% who died during the 1918-1919 Spanish flu But there is every reason not to accept the official numbers, since the worldwide death rate remained unchanged at .076 (7.6 per thousand) from 2019 (pre-COVID) to 2020 (post-COVID).From the outset, the controlled data from the Diamond Princess cruise liner (where 13 of 3700 mostly elderly passengers in a very confined location with minimal treatments available died) and the USS Roosevelt (where only one of almost 6000 younger enlisted and officer personnel in a similar situation supposedly died of COVID) proved that COVID-19 was not a dire threat to humanity.
It was further confirmed early on that COVID-19 was easily treatable by low-cost and widely available drugs such as Ivermectin. But if the general public got wind of all this, how could all the lockdowns and restrictions and risky experimental vaccines be sold to the public? So, the global elites mobilized a large campaign of 1) false scientific reports, 2) false media stories (no, Virginia, the hospitals were not overflowing with COVID patients or running out of oxygen or ventilators), bogus causes of deaths (whatever became of the annual influenza toll and major cardiac and respiratory and other major death sources?), rewriting of medical textbooks (what, no such thing as natural or herd immunity?), etc. While there may still be arguments in some quarters over the reality of COVID-19, there is little doubt who benefited from it all—coercive governments, financial elites, and monopolistic social media.
Tragically, those at the highest levels of government and society view mass lying and the creation of venal myths as a wicked game. William Casey, CIA chief under President Reagan, supposedly boasted how “We will have succeeded when everything the American people believes is false”. According to the journalist Ron Susskind, a senior Bush administration official—allegedly Karl Rove—derisively referred to truth-seekers during the Iraq War as a “reality-based community” and claimed that “We [in the Bush Administration] make our own reality.”On the other side of the political spectrum, high-ranking governmental officials such as Ben Rhodes, who led destabilization efforts in the Middle East under President Obama, and Jake Sullivan, current National Security advisor to President Biden, have joked in emails about all the lies they pull over the American public.
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Arguably the most audacious of the truth assassins is Phillip Zelikow, a former high-ranking American national security advisor and prominent member of the neoconservatives who pushed for American control of the Middle East and authored the preposterous 911 Commission Report—allegedly before the Commission even met. Among Zelikow’s expertise were publications on—no kidding—the creation of public “presumptions” (myths).
The powerful film documentary disputing the official narrative of the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing in 1985 was entitled “A Noble Lie”, based on a great deal of expert testimony that the building was blown up from the inside. There was, of course, nothing ‘noble” about the Oklahoma City narrative or any of the others that have been designed to lead Americans and other Western nation into endless wars, disarming of its citizens, and curtailment of individual liberties. But when will the recent blasphemies of history—and especially the false creations of history—be removed from the history books? When will schoolchildren learn that we never went to the moon, that there were no planes or Arab hijackers on September 11, that Sandy Hook Elementary School was abandoned long before the “mass shooting” drill on December 14, 2012, that the bullets and blood in Christchurch were all fake, that there never was a true COVID-19 pandemic, etc.? When, when, when?
Modern humans have lived on this planet for perhaps 75,000 years, civilizations have been around for less than 10,000 years, and the Renaissance and Enlightenment with their colossal artistic and scientific achievements date back but a few hundred years. In the meantime, humans have overpopulated the Earth, degraded its water, land, and air, and exhausted much if not most of its available natural resources. Through it all, the shining justification for human existence and our distinctive superiority over all other species has been our ability and desire to discover the truth about the physical world around us and the record of our existence.
The search for truth is the fundamental basis for all moral behavior, because if no serious effort to determine the truth is made beforehand that action is inherently immoral, regardless of any other utilitarian or deontological rationale. So, if the mass of humanity permits the rich and powerful among us (the “people of the lie”) to decide for us that historical truth—and now even scientific truth in the age of COVID– are merely expendable nuisances and that science and history and morality are nothing more than artificial realities, what, then, is the purpose of humanity?
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