Psychological warfare from it's inception has also targeted the people of the United States.
If you're sharp enough and care enough to watch the little details of the comings and goings of the CIA, and people of this type, you can see perfectly well what is going on. But most of us who don't have time to do that, we're trying to raise families, trying to go to work, get through the day, and so on. So we get this barrage of information, fake information usually, from the media that takes on the appearance of being true. In reality it is manufactured by people who have a story to promote. And, by and large, the manufacturing is done by people who have the money to pay public relations firms and so forth to put their story out. Those of us who don't have the money to hire our own public relations agent, and so on, have a little more difficult time getting access to the media.
Now to get around to the question of violence. What we've seen since the 1930's with the expansion of this type of consumer society around the world is that type of society precludes, it overwhelms, other forms of social organization. It cuts them out and proceeds, rather frequently with great violence; often including genocide, particularly of indigenous peoples; as it spreads around the world. As it spreads, it carries particular ideas with it. Particular preconceptions about what's good, and what's bad, about the world; and how things work, and so forth.
Number one, for consumer society to run there has to be someway to measure what's being bought and sold. Number two, for it to expand, it expands only at the expense of existing societies. And number three, as it overwhelms an existing society it breaks down the existing social structure and substitutes itself. This sets off a chain that both frequently damage's the people who live there, and creates resistance to these developments.
So how do you manage the resistance to the arrival of Coca-Cola, and Ford Motor Company, and so forth; when the local unions, the local social activists, and the local churches decide they've had it with what the foreign companies are trying to push on to them? How do you manage these people?
Well that comes around to the question of psychological warfare and the whole theory of how development, 'economic development' comes about. The main centers of communication research during the 1950's and 1960's were obsessed with this question of what do you do with the people of Egypt don't like the products you're trying to sell them. What if they're restless how do you keep them in line?
The first step of course, is that you broadcast radio programs or television programs that in one way or in another, either in nice words or in nasty words, say that you guys had better keep in line. And when that doesn't work, what's the next step? Well you've got some carrots and sticks. You have some economic development and so on; that's the carrot. The stick is police and military violence. Particularly counter-insurgency, so called low-intensity warfare. Methods to identify the dissidents in these various societies and to eliminate them. This process of identifying and quite literally eliminating people who are seen as inconvenient has become high science.
The illusion that psychological warfare does not necessarily produce bloodshed, or is not necessarily bloody, appears to have contributed to the rationalizations that some of the people who bridge the gap between psychological warfare and mass communication research. They rationalize their utilization of psychological warfare by saying that this would result in a reduction of bloodshed.
This is the third installment of an original series from No Agenda News. Read part four here.
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