- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

What you will not see advertised or discussed on State (Corporate) Media is Canadian Scott Noble’s documentary Lifting the Veil. You may not see it advertised or discussed at alternative news outlets where its subject is critical of the liberal class’s cover up of its own complicity with the government’s marginalization of voices critical of capitalism and U.S. Empire. I will return to this documentary in a moment.

But first, there is what Glenn Beck characterizes as an example of “insanity.”

Corporations discovered that the media’s potential for educating the public was both valuable and profitable. Millions of Americans turn with admiration to see Oprah sitting side by side with celebrities. Thousands believe they can become the next Oprah. Millions know the latest fashion in designer clothes and home decoration or the latest popular model car or iPod. Millions believe they are informed citizens whether they view Fox News or PBS. The U.S. is still a free and fair nation at Fox or PBS; it still offers the best of all possible worlds.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a key cabinet member of the do-it-better- Obama-regime, believes the State news media can do better than it did under the Bush II regime. Despite the State Media’s attempt to block (censor?) Al Jazeera-English in the U.S., apparently, Clinton, along with thousands of Americans, tunes in to Al Jazeera’s website during the Egyptian uprising and discovers someone else is beating the U.S. at their game!

U.S. scores in math and science skills lag behind that of other nations, including the so-called “developing” nations; the U.S. also falls short in providing affordable or universal health care for its citizen; and despite “deficits” at the federal and state level, the U.S. manages to out spend every other nation combined on its military force, according to the Stockholm International Research Institute. The majority of U.S. citizens are concerned about the quality of education their children are receiving, and they have demanded health care they can afford. They have demanded an end to torture and wars. But the Obama regime knows best, and the regime’s concerns trump the concerns of the American people.

Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clinton argued that the U.S. is “losing the ‘information war’ in the world” (Huffington Post, “Hillary Clinton Calls Al Jazeera ‘Real News,’ Criticizes U.S. Media,” March 3, 2011). Global news outlets elsewhere “were making inroads into places like the Middle East more effectively than the United States.” Al Jazeera, for example, she said, “was ‘changing peoples’ minds and attitudes. And like it or hate it, it is really effective.’”

Earlier this year, Clinton declared that the foreign news outlets misrepresented U.S. foreign policy. After viewing those uprisings in Arab and in North African nations, today, she has some bright ideas!

The U.S. regime had to ask itself: Is Al Jezeera doing a better job at educating the public and doing so more effectively without, as Clinton noted, “a million commercials” and without “arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news”? After all, “Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news”. U.S. news is “not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.” What is particularly useful in watching Charlie Sheen disintegrate? U.S. news is “not keeping up” with the changing attitudes out there in the world Al Jezeera covers.

The regime itself has already responded: at the U.S. State Department, Clinton has instructed her young computer wizards to educate the American and particularly the foreign public with friendlier and informative programming. This is the Obama not the Bush II regime! We are the Democrats, not the Republicans and the people of the world need to know “our values”! Yes, Clinton said, “our,” American, “values”!

So why is Glenn Beck calling Clinton’s idea—“insanity”?

Leading alternative news outlets critical of Clinton’s comments suspect her motivates are disingenuous. Some note that her comments come at a time when the Obama regime is cutting funding to public broadcasting.

But what is “public” about public broadcasting? Its operation is based on a hierarchical structuring of people and news – as is the leading alternative news outlets. At both the “public” and alternative news outlets, the what, who, where, why, and how is still determined by a handful of whites and liberal facilitators who, despite the recently developments at NPR, posses the same aversion to those who “misrepresent” reality as interpreted by the State news media. Both “public,” alternative and State news outlets agree on the usefulness of Juan Williams, Colin Powell (who could fail to remember how educational and informative Powell’s presentation of Saddam’s hidden weapons sites was?), Jesse Jackson Sr., and other moderate whiners in expensive suits. Their appearance is intended to promote the idea of a democratic America, much like the current regime, sprinkled with an Eric Holder, a Susan Rice, and Obama at the helm of State power. But few are fooled!

I think the secretary of State is proposing less ranting and raving about Blacks, Latino/as, Muslims, immigrants, and “insanity” from the likes of a Rush Limbaugh, a Bill O’Reilly, and a Glenn Beck and more of this appearance of democracy, more of the Obama-brand-democracy. Out educate Al Jezeera! Put American ingenuity to work again with Obama-like experts waiting in the Green room!

What is “at stake here,” to quote Professor Henry Giroux, “is a notion of democracy that refuses to be reduced to the dictates of a market society” (“From “‘Morning in America’ to Nightmare on Main Street,” Truth-Out). This one-size-fits-all State news media Hillary Clinton seems to be proposing unlike Fox News, PBS or Democracy Now! will dependent more on the useful, friendlier Obama clones to sell (inform?) the world about the values of U.S. Empire and its corporate capitalism mission to the world.

As a product of this government’s fear of equality, the Obama clones would be the negation of equality, freedom, democracy. A collective, hands-on project, the carving of these hollow vesicles would demand the resignation of common sense. It has happened before: The Fugitive Slave Acts, the disenfranchisement of freed, the destabilizing of Black leadership, the dismantling of Affirmative Action, and the rise of post-racial discourse (terrorism and warfare), the government led the way in effectively crushing a viable vision of democracy. In the New World of One State TV, these Obama clones, the ideal figure of absolute complicity and acceptance, would posses no memory of the historical past, no ability to understand that the past never happens once (as Faulkner wrote), and no heritage other than the one in which the Empire and State news media has assigned to him or her.

And that is how change comes to America, Lifting the Veil suggests. It comes dressed in the corporate image of change: There is the great orator, the suits and rolled up sleeves, and the paradox: a man covered in brown skin a candidate for president of the U.S. Hope, he said, and liberals nodded. He made promises to revolutionize the U.S. domestic and foreign policies without a rifle or protest, without Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Crazy Horse, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King’s warning about war and the treatment of the invisible workers, without the “anger” and the “inflammatory” rhetoric of his militant and old time pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama promises change is coming to America!

Already, we know the corporate world has spent a record amount of money packaging and selling the Obama to State and alternative news outlets that, in turn, sold this democratic image of change to the American public. Even Hillary Clinton and husband Bill themselves were bedazzled by the shinny new product called Obama).

But American workers are increasingly seeing themselves dislodged from this narrative of American ingenuity.

Now, two years later, we cannot distinguish the U.S. from the dictatorships supported by the U.S. as easily as the Secretary of State.

(NOTE: the following atrocities are listed and visually captured in the documentary, Lifting the Veil. The film may be viewed at the end of this commentary):

The Census Bureau reports that “U.S. poverty rose 43.6 million in 2009, an increase of 3.8 million in the past year,” according to Lifting the Veil. It is the “largest total since the first 1959 estimates.”

According to the Economic Policy Institute, “1 in 4 American children now live in poverty.” For both Blacks and Latino/as, “1 in 3” children live in poverty.

After the “greatest transference of wealth in U.S. history – $12.8 trillion – to bailouts,” the Obama administration “dramatically increases government secrecy, blocking more FOIA request in 2009 than Bush did in 2008” (Huffington Post, March 6, 2010).

And there is no “ops, I made a mistake.” No apology, no blinking of the eyes, only a stead-fast deliverance of smiles and elegance, hand-over-heart, facing the flag, declaring God Bless America and all the while the corporate capitalists, according to the documentary, “earned record profits in the past year, recording their ‘best quarter ever’” (New York Times, November 23, 2010).

Obama “extends the Patriot Act without making any reforms” (CS Monitor, March 1, 2010).

Obama “cracks down on government whistleblowers more than any president in history” (New York Times, June 11, 2010).

Obama “pushes for mandatory DNA testing of those arrested for crimes, regardless of whether they have been convicted” (Politico, September 3, 2010).

“Ignoring the 70 percent of Americans who desire Universal Health Care, Obama cuts a secret deal with Insurance and Pharmaceutical companies to kill the watered down ‘public option’—while simultaneously campaigning on its behalf” (New York Times, March 16, 2010.

Obama “uses a signing statement to ignore labor and environmental standards for the IMF and World Bank” (Huffington Post, July 6, 2009).

Obama “gives permits to BP and other oil companies, exempting them from environmental protection laws” (New York Times, May 13, 2010).

Obama “announces over $8 billion in loan guarantees to promote nuclear power” (CBC, February 16, 2010).

Obama “appoints former Monsanto Lobbyist Michael Taylor as America’s food safety czar…[Monsanto,] named ‘the most evil corporation in the world’ by journalist Jeffrey Smith…provides the seeds for 90 percent of the world’s genetically modified crops” (Huffington Post, July 23, 2009).

Obama “nominates anti-marijuana zealot Michelle Leonhart for head of the DEA” (Raw Story, November, 16, 2010).

Obama “launches FBI raids on anti-war activists in Chicago and Minneapolis” (Democracy Now! September, 27 2010).

“The Obama administration proposes a 3 year freeze on domestic spending, exempting cuts to the Pentagon and Homeland Security…

[Obama] “operates a ‘black site’ at Bagram airbases, where the Red Cross has reported torture of detainees” (BBC, May 11, 2010).

Obama “continues the practice of indefinite detentions for alleged ‘terrorists,’ denying the right of habeas corpus” (Washington Post, May 22, 2009).

Obama “continues renditions of alleged terrorists and ‘militants’ to countries where they could be tortured” (New York Times, August 24, 2009).

Obama “successfully prosecutes child soldier Omar Khadr using evidence obtained through torture” (CBC, November 1, 2010).

Obama “refuses to suspend military aid to Honduras after a fascist coup outs democratically-elected leader Manuel Zelaya” (UPI, October 21, 2009).

Obama appoints Eric Holder, Head of the Justice department. “Holder had previously served as the lawyer for Chiquita Brands International when it was charged with funding death squads in Colombia” (Counterpunch, November 19, 2008).

Obama “appoints Dennis C. Blair as Director of National Intelligence…During the 1999 East Timor massacres, Blair presented Indonesian General Wisanto with an offer of increased military assistance…After the massacres, he invited the war criminal to be his personal guest in Hawaii” (WSWS, January 20, 2009).

Obama “appoints William Lynn as deputy secretary of defense. Lynn previously acted as senior vice president at Raytheon, which has billions of dollars in Defense department contracts” (Washington Independent, January 25, 2009).

Obama “refuses to sign a treaty banning the use of landmines” (MSNBC, November 24, 2009).

Obama “eases restrictions on the use of child soldiers in Africa” (The Cable, October 26, 2010).

Obama “announces a $60 billion sale of arms to the Saudi Arabian dictatorship, the largest arms deal in history” (CBS, September 13, 2010).

Obama “promises $30 billion in military aid to Israel over the next decades” (Truth-Out, February 16, 2010).

“Only a few months earlier, the UN’s Goldstone report charged Israel with massive war crimes during its assault on Gaza, including the targeting of schools, mosques and medical personnel…

[Obama] awards $250 million in government contracts to notorious mercenary outfit Blackwater aka Xe” (The Nation, June 28, 2010).

Obama “authorizes the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad, and an unprecedented declaration of executive power” (New York Times, April 6, 2010).

Obama “dramatically increases the use of drone bombers in Pakistan, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties…

[Obama] uses “cluster bombs in Yemen, resulting in the deaths of 14 ‘militants,’ and 35 women and children” (CS Monitor, June 7, 2010).

“Obama reneges on his promise to exit Iraq, announcing that 50,000 troops and over 100,000 ‘private contractors’ will remain…Instead of removing the troops, Obama simply renames them ‘transitional’ forces” (February 26, 2010).

“Obama back tracks on his promise to leave Afghanistan by July 2011…Mark Sedwill, the top civilian NATO representative in Afghanistan, claims the ‘transition’ to ‘independence’ could run ‘to 2015 and beyond’”(June 24, 2010).

And the gulag at Guantanamo is still open for the dissemination of American values…

Adopting the enemies of the U.S. will set you free? NO, Barrack Obama! No more lies, Hillary Clinton. No more propaganda. No more exclusion of voices deemed too radical for State and Alternative news media outlets. No Orwellian Big Brother TV screen, spewing more of your values!

The majority of American people reject these changes offered by the current regime.

The majority reject the creation of a U.S. dictatorship! That is why you will not see Lifting the Veil on the current or the new and improved State news media outlets!

What is happening to the planet and its people is not the result of individuals, says economist Richard Wollf. It is about a system that cannot be reformed but must be removed!

Lifting the Veil is not all doom and gloom: it is not simply the unraveling of the “insanity” of electoral politics or the political empowering of the wealthy elite and their corporate wars.

Lifting the Veil is about Hope! It is not “hope” as defined by this current regime, for this Hope, Chris Hedges says, is not in the vocabulary of the powerful. It is that Hope that only the people themselves own and nurture from generation to generation, from one uprising to another, from one civil disobedient act to the upheaval of unjust laws and dictatorships. We still posses this Hope, the documentary shows. But if we are to “fight for something that is real,” my colleague at the Black Commentator Larry Pinkney says, we must “translate Hope into action.”

Hope precedes the appearance of Brand Obama. It was present in the uprisings of workers, Blacks, Latino/.as, says John Pilger. This Hope is present in the “activism that doesn’t give up. Activism doesn’t fall silent.”

“Something is coming again. The signs are there.”

“What Obama, the bankers, the generals, the IMF, the CIA, the CNN and the BBC fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together”:

Ordinary American people for too long have been misrepresented by stereotypes that are contemptuous. The progressive attitudes of the public have seldom been reported in the media because they’re not ignorant. They’re subversive.

Lifting the Veil is the subversive message that…

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risks. It is not about the right attitude or peace of mind…Hope is about action. Hope affirms that which must be affirmed! (Chris Hedges).

The piano accompaniment is not so much music as it is the hammering of wires in the industrial mode, a harbinger of doom. And as it turns out, there is nothing in the film to save us from its earliest suggestion of menace. Not the reassurance that the institution is a hospital rather than a death camp, not the good-natured and wacky antics of the scientist donning a fierce mask to impress Little Albert the plucky human baby in a famous set of experiments, not a single routine bell of work or school by which we recognize ourselves as modern subjects. Not one of these scenes can silence the tolling bell of modernity as it calls out to us across a century of darkness and names us as we sit, not quite cowering, before the flitframes of Human Resources, our faces backlit by our computer screens like so many ancients clustered around a faggot fire at the center of the night.

Perhaps we have seen some or most of these images before. They lurk in the sensorium as a subliminal archive of what it is we know collectively—but Noble’s synthesis cracks the code of their proper arrangement. This is the order in which they need to be seen, these are the appropriate experts interviewed and brought to the film with just the right finesse of juxtaposition. Appreciating Noble’s relentlessly inquisitorial talent as a film-maker is like the moment when you first realize that a piano is not a plucked-string instrument but an instrument of percussion. Listen and learn. Noble’s skill is at such an exalted level that the wise viewer might well hold something in reserve, a suspicion that anything this good, eliciting these sorts of responses from us, might possess its own dark behaviourist powers. Glad we might be to have such a mage as Noble on our side.

While I was a grad student at Princeton, I went to Duke University for a couple of years to hang out in classes with Fred Jameson, the theorist and critic of modernism. It took me a while to get up to speed. Human Resources is the film I wish I had been able to see before sitting in on Jameson’s lectures on Fordism, Taylorism, and the whole shtick of capital and Western civ in the 20th-century industrial mode, and what that portends for culture and for the 21st century.

Is Human Resources a masterpiece? To know this, you’d have to answer the old zen conundrums, like whether a truckload of dead babies is worse than the possibly-less unsettling notion of a live one eating its way up from the bottom. I advise viewing the first half of Human Resources in the educative mode, learning the ropes of that skein of modernity that has held us so resourcefully to our tasks as good worker bees and advocates of box-style public education. I advise viewing the second half of the film with the willingness to weep that is the corollary of modernist inquiry. Unless you weep, you may be damaged by this film. It answers the significant events of the last century the way a glass answers the implicit questions of a man who peers into its reflective surface—point for point. It corresponds, in short, to reality. Perhaps this is what we mean when we say that a work is a piece of the master.

Viewer discretion, and love, advised.

Psywar explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the “elitist theory of democracy” and the relationship between war, propaganda, and class.

This film is designed both as an introduction to the concept of psychological warfare by governments against their citizens and as an exploration of certain dominant themes in American propaganda. Significant time is also devoted to different conceptions of “democracy” as theorized by figures like Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, and the “founding fathers” of the United States itself.

Psywar illuminates how the state of the world reached the point it is at today: where an imperialist United States wages several wars abroad and maintains the support of its people, despite a growing and yawning chasm between the haves (who profit from warring) and the have-nots (cannon fodder deluded by unquestioning patriotic idealism). The US has managed to drag its fellow capitalist nations along in more-or-less support of its imperialist aggressions.

People who analyze the state of the world and consider the manifest moral and humanitarian violations might be forgiven for shaking their heads that such a whopping segment of humanity could go along with such inequality, such carnage, such insouciance.

Psywar begins by looking at how people’s distorted perceptions are crafted and maintained

In the opening segment of Psywar, there is video footage of American soldiers defacing a statue of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein with the Old Glory. It was a staged event by psyop group. The film then segues into another infamous pysop about the fallen American soldier Jessica Lynch. Both events were disinformation campaigns that deliberately misreported events.

John Rendon, an “information warrior and perception manager,” is a major player in the $200 billion a year perception-management industry. Rendon is the figure who orchestrated the effort to sell the American public on a war against Iraq. The American public was buying it early on. At best, it can be stated the government thought highly enough about the public acumen that it resorted to disinformation; at least public perception matters.

The corporate media is heavily complicit in the warmongering and warring, even to the extent that psywarriors at CNN “helped in the production of news.”

Psywar points to a synergy: “The invasion of Iraq represents a pinnacle of domestic psywar in the United States, an unparalleled integration between [sic] public relations firms, corporate media, and military psyops.”

The perception management was so powerful that even soldiers were so deceived that they engaged in the greatest crime as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal at the end of World War II: aggression.

Perception management is “steeped in class warfare.” Psywar tells the story of the exploitation of workers by the wealthy Rockefeller family. Striking coal miners seeking better working conditions and pay were attacked by the National Guard who were in the pay of the Rockefeller family. It is known as the Ludlow Massacre.

In one of his last videotaped interviews, historian Howard Zinn explains the dilemma of the working poor against plutocrats such as the Rockefeller family.

The Ludlow Massacre was a PR nightmare for the Rockefellers. An early psywarrior, Ivy Lee was instrumental in attempting to rehabilitate the image of the Rockefellers. His public relations involved smears and disinformation against the coal miners and their supporters. As Psywar mentions later in the film, Lee would later propagandize for Nazis against Americans.

Early on, it became clear that public perception needed to operate behind the scenes. Staged PR was arranged, such as charity.

Richard Coniff, author of A Natural History of the Rich, challenges the philanthropy of rich – stating that the rich hold a “functional view of wealth rather than a strictly charitable view.”

Zinn agreed, noting that charity can be exploitative and that the American system is exploitative. Zinn said that the “system is maintained [...] by giving people a little bit, and giving enough people just enough to prevent them from breaking out in open rebellion”

In the second part of the documentary, Noble looked at propagating the faith. It begins with Graeme MacQueen, co-founder of the Center for Peace Studies. He also holds that the support of the people is necessary for war. However, he said “war is disgusting to most people”; therefore great psychological pressure is brought to bear upon soldiers.
National Security is there to swindle people

Christopher Simpson, author of The Science of Coercion, says propaganda is about mindset and ideology.

Recognizing this, Psywar relates how president Woodrow Wilson helped cast the propagandistic George Creel Commission which would pave the way for the US to enter World War I by planting false atrocity stories, stoking fear in Americans and calling on them to fight the good fight for democracy.

The propagandist firm of Hill and Knowlton arranged an infamous staged op as a prelude to an assault against Iraq. A teenage girl, Nasriyah, cried crocodile tears and lied about babies being ripped from incubators by Iraqi soldiers. The false story moved American sentiment to back military action against Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait.

Patriotism is the sentiment widely relied upon by governments to attain their ends against foreign foes. Historian Michael Parenti appears to challenge typical notions of patriotism. He identifies patriotism as being about greater values than attacking foreign lands; he sees it as about social justice, peace and stability, an end to racism, etc.

Another problem identified as preventing a public solidarity was that unions were based on gender and ethnicity.

Historian Sharon Smith said a breakthrough came with the anarcho-syndicalist union the Industrial Workers of the World (better known as the Wobblies) which set out to organize and include women, immigrants, and African Americans in one big union.

Anarcho-syndicalist scholar Noam Chomsky holds that it is natural for humans to free associate.

The unity among humans is thwarted by a state which uses war to accumulate power and by corporations to gain enormous fortunes. The Left worldwide labor movement is in disarray

In part 3, We the People, Psywar elucidates on how people are pawns in a system set up in favor of the wealthy.

The existence of democracy is refuted. Chomsky calls elections “a marketing exercise.”

Says William I. Robinson, editor of Critical Globalization Studies, we live in polyarchy: “a system of elite rule.” That is the way the system was designed to be.

Historian John Manley states that the so-called founding fathers were slave owners who sought to protect propertied interests. To this end, the Constitution was crafted behind closed doors. Chomsky notes that James Madison, the major framer of the Constitution, designed it to protect the opulent from the majority.

Littler known is that the US Constitution is based on the Kaianerekowa (Great Law of Peace) of the Haudenosaunee (called Iroquois in Psywar). Stephen M. Sachs, author of Remembering the Circle, lists how the Kaianerekowa allowed the Haudenosaunee to easily remove corrupt leaders, that women had a major role in decision-making, that everyone was involved in policy formation, thus creating a participatory society.

One weak link stood out in Psywar. Why did the film turn to a white man to tell the history of “native Americans”? Why not talk to one of the Haudenosaunee?

The final part of Psywar is Consumers. People are indoctrinated to see themselves as consumers. Advertising reminds people of this. The system would have people work to consume. To this end, the emphasis is on work, not leisure. It is feared that less hours of work might foment radicalism.

Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation attacked consumptive society: “The problem of capitalism is the problem of consumption. And the problem is that after your needs have been met, there is no real need for consumption.”

The system is reeling now. Neoliberalism calls for cutbacks and results in increasing inequality. Parenti said we are back to about 1900 in terms of inequality. “People are poor because they are paid less than the value that they produce. You need poverty. Poverty is needed if you are gonna have wealth.”

Psywar argues that it is the monopoly media’s relentless propaganda that holds up capitalism. Democracy and capitalism are argued to be mutually exclusive. If capitalism is sacrosanct, then you can not have democracy.

“Behind political democracy was economic equality.”

Psywar tells the story of how and why the world is the way it is now. It tells of the system, why it was concocted and why it is kept in place.

Knowledge is requisite to combat propaganda and disinformation. It is necessary to overcome the system and to erect a people-centered system that respects the needs and aspirations of the society as a whole. Psywar makes clear that public opinion is important. If it were not important, then there would be no need for perception management. It is the incessant propaganda and disinformation that creates a perception of reality. Noble reveals the framework that exploits class, race, gender, and resources to benefit the already wealthy at the expense of the masses.

Psywar is a documentary that augurs well for future filmmaking by Noble who made the film for $1500 while working a blue collar job. It is a good example of the democratization of filmmaking occurring via the internet.

You can view this film at no cost by visiting V-RADIO.org and going to the “Must See TV” tab. On the last page you will find a link to this film. I strongly urge you to check it out. Our translations team is currently working on translating this film into other languages.

Mr. Noble said he is not taking video or radio interviews at this time. However he did agree to take some time for a text based interview that I decided to share with you here.

V-RADIO: Please introduce yourself to the readers.

Mr. Noble:
Sure. I’m a writer, filmmaker and wage slave currently living on Vancouver Island in British Colombia. My first film, Psywar (“The Real battlefield is the mind”) was recently released online. It explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States.

V-RADIO: Can you describe for the readers what was the precipice, the moment that got you “out of the box”? What got you out of the mainstream dream and instead peering behind the curtain?

Mr. Noble:
I’m not sure I can pinpoint one moment in time, but I do remember being deeply disturbed by the revelation that my Aunt had been used as a human guinea pig in one of the CIA’s Cold War mind control experiments – specifically, experiments conducted at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal.

The Allen Memorial was then regarded as the preeminent psychiatric institution in Canada, so my grandparents decided to send my aunt there (a teenager at the time) to help her deal with certain emotional problems. She was only 16. From what I gather, her problems amounted to typical adolescent behavior (typical in our society, at least) – depression, delinquency, acting out and so forth.

Unbeknownst to my grandparents, the Center’s director, Dr. Ewan Cameron, was being paid by the CIA to conduct “mind control” experiments. He would later become president of the World Psychiatric Association. Techniques included massive doses of electric shock, massive doses of barbiturates, prolonged sensory deprivation, and other tortures. Indeed, one of the CIA’s torture manuals, “KUBARK’, refers explicitly to Cameron’s experiments along with earlier studies in “fear based conditioning” by behaviorists like Hobart Mowrer.

Kubark describes a process of “regression” where “subjects” can be reduced to an “infantile state”. I explore these issues in my next documentary, “Human Resources”, which was recently completed and will be online in a month or two.

Perhaps owing to her young age at the time, my Aunt was never able to recover from the trauma of her experience at the Allen Memorial. She later took her own life.

V-RADIO: In regards to your Aunt, how did you find out about what happened to her?

Mr. Noble:
It was bitterly ironic in that when she emerged from the Allen Memorial she was a basketcase and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. This was interpreted, at the time, by doctors, friends and loved ones as a worsening of her symptoms. She cried out that she had been “locked in the basement” of the center for months at a time and viciously abused by other methods — an absurd idea, it seemed. It was only many years later when the story broke that we realized she was referring to “sensory deprivation” experiments.

She refused to participate in the lawsuit against the Canadian government and the CIA due to fears that it was a sinister plot (a few victims such as Linda McDonald received a pittance — about a hundred grand), revealing that she had indeed become a “paranoid schizophrenic”, at least according to the typical diagnostic measures. The question is whether same would have happened if she hadn’t suffered through the “therapy” of the CIA. I guess if you’ve been tortured for months on end, sinister plots where the government is out to get you don’t seem so irrational.

In any case, I never met her in person. When we visited her house, we were never allowed inside. I was a kid at the time. We all regarded her as a sort of “crazy Aunt in the attic”. I have dedicated by second film, “Human Resources”, to my Aunt, whose name was Nancy Noble.

V-RADIO: What motivated you to make Psywar?

Mr. Noble:
It was an unusual process in that I planned for a documentary series from the outset: five or six films. So I didn’t have a clear idea what subjects I would tackle first. I conducted about 30 interviews with various intellectuals, activists, former spooks, whistleblowers etc., and decided to start with propaganda.

Obviously, no one film can properly address so vast a subject, so I decided to design Psywar both as an introduction to the current state of psychological warfare and as a sort of history lesson about the origins and development of PR and propaganda in the United States. Future entries will explore the Cold War period and its bastard child, The War on Terror.

The History Channel is replete with documentaries about the propaganda techniques employed by the Third Reich and the Soviet Union against its citizens, but when it comes to propaganda techniques employed by the American government against theirs – information we could actually use – we are left with very little to go on; at least in the “mainstream media”.

Part of this owes to the historical relationship between propaganda and journalism in the United States.

The “mainstream media” has worked hand in glove with both the state and powerful corporations since the beginnings of the American propaganda industry.

During WWI, figures like Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, Ivy Lee – the “founding fathers” of modern journalism and PR – all of them cut their teeth foisting pro-war propaganda on the American people. They worked for the Creel Committee and nascent intelligence agencies such as “The Inquiry”, which had three main goals: to demonize the enemy (in this case the Germans), to demonize dissidents in the homeland, and to convince the American public that it was their destiny to “make the world safe for democracy”. We all know how well that turned out.

A disturbingly similar pattern emerges after WWII. Fresh from the OWI (Office of War Information) you have the publishers of Time, Look and Fortune; the editors of Holiday, Coronet, Parade, and the Saturday Review; the heads of Viking Press, Harper & Brothers, Straus and Young; the board chairman of CBS; the editor of Reader’s Digest and so on. For more on this, I highly recommend Christopher Simpson’s book “The Science of Coercion”.

The virtual uniformity of “intellectual” and “mainstream” opinion during the Cold War should come as no surprise. It wasn’t just a question of shared class interests – though that was probably the most important factor – there was also this deeply incestuous relationship between the American state (and its burgeoning intelligence agencies), the “mainstream media”, elite–funded “think tanks”, and the corporations and banks which would seem to control all of the above.

By the time the “war on terror” rolled around you had a tiny handful of giant media conglomerates in near complete command of the flow of information. The Internet is throwing a considerable amount of sand in the gears. God willing, the machine will grind to a halt in the near future.
I think a lot of activists tend to assume that most of this stuff is common knowledge. In broad strokes perhaps it is. Yet a close friend with whom I discuss these sorts of issues on a fairly frequent basis was unaware of many of the incidents I cover in Psywar. For example: that the Jessica Lynch story and the toppling of the Saddam Statue were staged by “TPT”’s or “Tactical Psyop Teams”, that CNN used military “Psywarriors” during its coverage of the assault on Serbia, that PR hacks now outnumber journalists, that “journalists” themselves spend most of their time regurgitating PR.

There’s an ironic coincidence relating to the film itself. Literally two weeks after I first uploaded it to the Internet and sent it around to various journalists, the DOD announced that it was dropping the term “Psyops” from its lexicon. From hence forth, they declared, psychological operations would be known as “Military Information Support Operations,” or MISO.

Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but of course that’s the point. The “Department of Defense” used to be called the Department of War.

V-RADIO: Are you familiar with the BBC documentary “The Century of Self”? Did it influence your making of Psywar?

Mr. Noble:
It did, but not in the manner you might expect. Curtis is an extremely talented filmmaker with an immense repository of archival footage at his disposal (some of which I utilized in Psywar), and he puts out a great product. But I also find that he tends to exaggerate the importance of particular individuals, groups and fanciful ideas in lieu of basic class analysis; he also appears to self-censor, often at critical junctures. I don’t recall seeing the slightest hint of skepticism about the official story of 911 in “The Power of Nightmares”.

There was a great review of The Century of the Self” published by Media Lens. In it, the author quotes a passage from the film:

“Politicians and planners came to believe that Freud was right to suggest that hidden deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had lead to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again, they set out to find ways to control the hidden enemy within the human mind.” (The Century of the Self – The Engineering of Consent, BBC2, March 24, 2002)

The critic goes on to state:

“As you’ll know, if you’ve read Elizabeth Fones-Wolf’s study of the period, Alex Carey’s work, and countless books by Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, and many others, this could not be further from the truth. Post-1945, as now, the real fear of politicians and planners was the existence of dangerous +rational+ desires and fears – popular desires for equity, justice and functioning democracy; popular fears that unbridled capitalism and militarism would once again lead to horrors on the scale of the two world wars. Freud’s theories were incidental – useful in refining traditional methods of popular control perhaps, but a sideshow.”

In Curtis’ film, Bernays is presented more as a cause than effect. In reality he was joined by all sorts of other like-minded mind managers from the time period: scientists like John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, for example, and Ivy Lee, the unsung hero of embedded journalism, crisis management and the press release. Public relations evolved as a means of rescuing corporations from the wrath of public opinion, most notably in response to events like the Ludlow massacre.

The revolution in American advertising was brought about not by a single visionary but by a crisis in capitalism, namely overproduction, which mandated new and innovative ways of marketing products. There were alternatives.
Raising wages and reducing working hours, for example, but corporations were and are mandated by law to maximize profits on behalf of their shareholders.

The consumer society is a natural outgrowth of capitalism, not Freud. Endless growth means endless mountains of junk. To sell it, you have convince people that buying objects leads to happiness.

V-RADIO: What inspired you to include such a lengthy section on the American Constitution?

Mr. Noble:
People like Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays are great exemplars of what Peter Bachrach called “The theory of democratic elitism”, but they didn’t create this philosophy. They merely updated it to correspond with new developments in technology and communication. You can go back Mosca or Schumpeter or a whole slew of other anti-democratic philosophers from Machiavelli to Plato, but crucially, for our discussion, the Founding Fathers of the United States itself.

There is very little difference between Lippmann’s suggestion that “the people” are a “bewildered herd” which “must be put in place”, and John Jay’s remark that the “people who own the country ought to govern it”, or Alexander Hamilton’s quip that the people are a “great beast” needing to be tamed, or Madison’s insistence that a primary function of government is to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority”.

The overriding theme is that real democracy might produce “leveling tendencies”, in other words, an egalitarian society in which “regular people” might actually be able to participate in the running of their government (or lack thereof, depending how anarchistic your tendencies).

What has emerged as the primary form of governance around the globe is what social scientists describe as polyarchy. There’s a fancy definition for it, but the basic gist is that we get to vote every few years to elect some rich guy, write letters to our “representatives”, and if we’re really uppity – attend a demonstration – but by no means should we be permitted to actually make decisions collectively on matters of any import. Important decisions are the purview of the enlightened ones – people like Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Alan Greenspan. Or, if you like, the Founding Fathers and their “responsible set of men” – the wealthy.

I have received some criticism that the section on the Constitution and the American power structure is a “departure” from the other content. In my own view, it is impossible to understand modern propaganda without understanding the theory of democratic elitism. Indeed, the idea that modern governments (whether labeled Republic or parliamentary democracy) are or were in any way “democratic” is perhaps the greatest psyop of them all.

These structures are based on the premise that the “powers” can be “balanced by each other”, a concept which should, at this point, be recognized as a monumental failure. The majority recognized it as a con at the time of the constitutional convention, and indeed the anti-Federalists predicted quite accurately what would occur as a result.

There is a good deal of myth-making associated with colonial America. We are invited to imagine the halcyon days in which some sort of “free market” existed alongside “limited government”. Granted, it is acknowledged, there were minor problems in the form of slavery, the oppression of women and the genocide of Native Americans, but by and large you had something approaching a legitimate meritocracy: an honest to goodness bootstrap society.

The reality was quite different. As Norman Livergood explains, “In Colonial America, the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting much poorer. In 1687 in Boston, the top 1% owned about 25% of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1% owned 44%. In those same years, the poor–those who owned no property–represented 14% in 1687 and 29% in 1770.”

So you had a system of rapidly increasing inequality and class conflict, culminating in the Shay’s Rebellion and other debtor riots, which necessitated a strong Federal Government to crush the nascent spirit of democracy flowering amongst the American people.

In some ways, it should not be surprising that many Americans regard the word “democracy” with contempt.

The absurdist PR spectacles known as “elections”, in which issues like gay marriage can actually sway the balance of power, deserve nothing but disdain. But we would do well to remember that the Soviet Union also called itself a democracy.

There are alternatives, touched upon in the film that do not necessitate either tyranny of the minority or tyranny of the majority, but which rely on concepts like decentralization, anti-hierarchy, consensus decision-making and other modes of social organization. For those who would simultaneously worship the founding fathers and turn property into an idol, I recommend the words of Benjamin Franklin:

“Under presence of governing, [Europeans] have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep”. Whereas, amongst Native Americans:

“All property, indeed, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his matchcoat and other little Acquisitions absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public Convention. Hence, the public has the rights of regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the quantity and uses of it. All the property that is necessary to a man is his natural Right, which none may justly deprive him of, but all Property superfluous to such Purposes is the property of the Public who, by their Laws have created it and who may, by other Laws dispose of it.”

[see my article on Dissident Voice, Ayn Rand in Uganda, for more on right wing libertarianism]

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/ayn-rand-in-uganda-2/

V-RADIO: What kind of reactions have you had with regard to the film? Any memorable feedback good or bad?

Mr. Noble:
Overall the response has been very positive. Numerous professors from numerous countries have requested hard copies for use in University courses ranging from communications to sociology to Native American studies. The film is currently being translated into a number of languages, including Spanish, French and Arabic.

In terms of viewership, Psywar achieved viral status its first week, receiving 83,000 views in six days. Unfortunately its momentum was scotched when Exposure Room (the hosting site) removed it for reasons that were not clearly explained (I’m guessing bandwidth cost was the culprit). I have since re-uploaded the film to other websites.

The only significant negative feedback I’ve received so far has to do with the medium itself. It is argued that Psywar – a film about propaganda – is itself propagandistic. It contains moving music, slick editing and provocative imagery.

I suppose it depends how we define propaganda. If we use the simplest definition: “information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause”, then Psywar is indeed propagandistic. In Brave New World revisited, Aldous Huxley wrote that:

“Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory.”

To me, the word propaganda contains a sinister connotation: the intent to deceive. Since I didn’t set out to deceive anyone with my film, I don’t consider it an example of propaganda. Agitprop might be a better description, referring here to the politicized artwork that flourished in the first half of the twentieth Century.

We would do well to consider the idea that the most insidious forms of propaganda do not come in the form of a plainly stated thesis or obvious political viewpoint, but in the art of pseudo-objectivity. I am far less offended by the ridiculous bombast of Fox News than many a BBC or PBS documentary: films which pretend to examine issues in an objective, detached, rational manner but employ subtle propaganda techniques to mislead viewers. Censorship by omission is the most widely used device.

The use of audio/visual techniques in Psywar that might be interpreted as “manipulative” are, to me, simply an expression of my own creativity — no more propagandistic than a clever turn of phrase in an essay, and no less necessary. Especially to today’s audience. It is difficult to maintain a viewer’s interest in what Bo Filter describes as our “post-literate society”, and I make no apologies for attempting to move and entertain in addition to educate. I’m no more interested in making a boring documentary than watching one.

V-RADIO: Now that Psywar has been out for a while is there anything you wish you had put in the film that you missed, or anything you put into it you wish you had not?

Mr. Noble:
I had originally intended to cover the entire cold war period in the film, but I soon realized that would be impossible. Instead, I will be examining the cold war in my third film, “Counter-Intelligence”, which I began work on last week.

Of particular interest to me in this respect is the rise of “black propaganda”. The term is used in a variety of contexts, often benign, but a lesser known definition comes from a declassified document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and published in Chris Simpson’s seminal work on the subject, “The Science of Coercion”. Here, black propaganda includes “clandestine warfare, subversion, sabotage, and miscellaneous operations such as assassination”.

Later Counter-insurgency manuals explicitly refer to “false flag operations” such as occurred under Operations Ajax and Gladio. False flags are acts of terrorism and or other forms of violence carried out by hidden actors which are then blamed on a designated enemy. Planted evidence and patsies are usually involved. Many scholars argue quite plausibly that the “war on terror” amounts to Gladio redux, with Muslims replacing communists.

Black propaganda remains the biggest taboo in journalism.

There was an interesting sort of unspoken debate that occurred between Walter Lippmann and Harold Laswell in the aftermath of WWI. Lippmann advocated the “manufacture of consent”, which he regarded as a more humane and effective means of managing the public consciousness than brute force. Laswell, on the other hand, recommended a blending of the old and new: media control would be paramount, but selected acts of covert violence would also be necessary. It is Laswell’s vision that ultimately won the day.

One other regret about Psywar: I have a great clip of Christopher Simpson discussing the etymology of the word “communication”. I was intending to include it in the film but simply forgot about it until it was too late.

The Latin roots of the word suggest the “sharing of duties” or “sharing of burdens”. So we have terms like commune, or communion, or community and so forth: words that describe who we are and how we survive as a species. Somewhere along the line, the meaning of “communication” changed. It was no longer about the sharing of ideas but about their transmission by a select group of elites to the mass of the population. In other words, Propaganda. So the relationship was altered from one of equality to one of hierarchy.

The people on the receiving end are rendered fundamentally passive in this relationship. They are not participants but spectators. The same analogy can be drawn to the entire edifice of modern government. We are not allowed to participate in any meaningful way. But we can watch television to our heart’s content.

When I made Psywar, and when I imagine people watching it, the hope is that I am not merely transmitting a message, but that viewers will become participants by engaging with the ideas, debating them with others, and hopefully taking some sort of action in response – even if it’s just sending the link around.

There’s a certain beauty to the blog and the internet forum. It doesn’t matter if you’re a VIP or a janitor; you have equal space to express your opinions. It’s almost like the old town meetings in colonial America, prior to the constitutional convention, where slave owners and land speculators lamented the fact that the “lowliest craftsmen” were allowed to participate in debate and policy formulation. If we are ever to end the madness, we will have to recapture that spirit of real, participatory democracy and put it into practice en masse.