CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM

ERIC ZUESSE—Le Pen is the daughter of the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen, but after taking over leadership of the far-right Party that he had founded, she expelled him from it, and has made increasingly clear, since then, that she is a progressive (including a passionate opposition to any imperialism) — so much so that now the Wikipedia article on her, in its section “Political Positions”, presents political viewpoints that would be hard to distinguish from those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders in America, and of Jeremy Corbyn in UK. The biggest difference, perhaps, between her and those other progressives, is simply that whereas in U.S. and UK the dominant political ideology is imperialist-fascist (springing from the Englishman Cecil Rhodes in the late 19th Century), that’s not so in France. (Twentieth Century France had nothing like Cecil Rhodes — a leading and impassioned champion of racist aristocratic rule.) Consequently, French public opinion isn’t as hostile toward progressivism as is the case in U.S. and UK.

CYNTHIA CHUNG—Pavlov found that depending on the category of nervous system temperament the dog had, this in turn would dictate the form of “conditioning” that would work best to “reprogram behaviour”. The relevance to “human conditioning” was not lost on anyone.

It was feared in the West, that such techniques would not only be used against their soldiers to invoke free-flowing uninhibited confessions to the enemy but that these soldiers could be sent back to their home countries, as zombified assassins and spies that could be set off with a simple code word.

At least, these were the thriller stories and movies that were pumped into the population. How horrific indeed! That the enemy could apparently enter what was thought the only sacred ground to be our own…our very “minds”!

However, for those who were actually leading the field in mind control research, such as William Sargant, it was understood that this was not exactly how mind control worked. For one thing, the issue of “free will” was getting in the way.

GLENN GREENWALD—The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world.

The classic case is Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote one of the most deceitful and destructive articles of his generation: a lengthy New Yorker article in May, 2002 — right as the propagandistic groundwork for the invasion of Iraq was being laid — that claimed Saddam Hussein had formed an alliance with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—This isn’t Operation Mockingbird. It’s so much worse. Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretence of separation, has been dropped. This is bad. This is very, very bad. Democracy has no meaningful existence if people’s votes are cast without a clear understanding of what’s happening in their nation and their world. When their understanding is being shaped to suit the agendas of the very government they’re meant to be influencing with their votes, what you have is the most powerful military and economic force in the history of civilization with no accountability to the electorate whatsoever.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Mass media punditry is divided on where to assign the blame for the plummet in public opinion of their work, with some blaming it on Russia and others blaming it on Donald Trump. Others, like a recent Forbes article titled “Restoring Public Trust In Technology And Media Is Infrastructure Investment” blame it on the internet. Still others, like a Washington Post article earlier this month titled “Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values” blame it on the people themselves.

The one thing they all seem to agree on is that it’s definitely not because the billionaire-controlled media are propaganda outlets which manipulate us constantly in conjunction with sociopathic government agencies to protect the oligarchic, imperialist status quo upon which the members of the billionaire class have built their respective kingdoms. It cannot possibly be because people sense that they are being lied to and are fed up with it.