There is a war going on and we are all involved. It isn't taking place in Liberia or Iraq or Afghanistan. The battles aren't being fought with smart bombs and ground troops, and the enemies aren't foreign governments or terrorists. The battlefield isn't even physical, it is the subjective mind. This war is being fought to create reality, a specific reality planned by military specialists with psychology degrees. At stake are individuality, free will and the ever elusive "truth." The enemy is crimethink to use Orwell's apt newspeak term. The guerilla terrorists are subversives like myself who introduce ideas that are not part of the official version of "truth" that serves the agenda.
IW is the military's newspeak abbreviation for Information Warfare which is the science of manipulating people and opinions that in PSYOP leaflets is presented as a lofty goal instead of an insidious encroachment on our basic humanity. Napoleon knew the importance of IW: "There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind." The manipulation of information was also Goebbel's specialty, "It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise." The U.S. government has taken IW further than any previous despot was able to. IT knowledge is now being used to defend and attack. Wars are no longer won with firepower but with semantic strength.
IW consists of PSYOP, military deception (MILDEC) and Electronic Warfare (EW). The goal according to a Navy report being to "deny information, influence, degrade or destroy adversary information capabilities." MILDEC is designed to "reinforce the desired target perceptions."
PSYOP is military Psychological Operations which consists of "Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator's objectives. Also called PSYOP. See also consolidation psychological operations; overt peacetime psychological operations programs; perception management," according to the Department of Defense.
One indicator of the success of PSYOP is the fact that their existence and certain frightening euphemisms like "peacetime psychological operations," and "perception management," are unknown by the majority of American civilians who are also targets. PSYOP is used to help spin media and make sure that information/propaganda is uniform in order to influence foreign and domestic groups and people. Whatever "peacekeeping mission," or third world exploitation we happen to be involved in must be justified by control of "the global information infrastructure."
In a de-classified PSYOP document the planners are frank about their goals: "The trend to involve U.S. military in peacekeeping operations, where the use of violence is carefully prescribed by restrictive rules of engagement has further emphasized the need for effective information activities." "Information, and it's denial is power." "The state or entity most able to effectively control or manage information, especially managing the perceptions of particular target audiences, will be the most influential."
The "tools of the trade" include television, radio, newspapers, leaflets, posters, loudspeakers and face to face communication. These mediums allow "civilian perception management." The measure of "receptivity effectiveness" is a "change [of] behavior in a favorable manner," i.e. the "desired way." They call what they do "truth projection." Deconstructionist Michel Foucalt denied the existence of an observable, objective truth and the military use this to their advantage, creating their own brand of truth and selling it to the people.
The relationship between the media and the military have become tighter since "truth projection" became so important to U.S. interests. This makes free speech in mainstream media an outdated idea. In "peacekeeping" missions from Grenada and Panama in the 80's to Afghanistan and Iraq in the new century, the media has participated with the military in everything from blackouts, specific planned involvement and "embedding" reporters into military units. Americans love a good soap opera and embedding, which was designed to boost civilian support and troop morale, allows reporters to capture nostalgic, heartwarming stories to further narrow civilian perceptions of our role in overseas meddling and third world exploitation.
In March of 2001, members of PSYOP began internship at CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Though CNN denies that PSYOP influenced reporting, their presence alone is a danger to our freedom. The internship allowed PSYOP members to study media from the inside out and was certainly used as an intelligence gathering opportunity. The most important period of information control is right before and after the crisis and it is easy to see how this process was used on the American public, especially prior to and after 9/11.
On that day, the "bad guys" were quickly pointed out and pinned with "black hats" using an old Reaganite perception management trick. Bin Laden was our Goldstein, the face associated with our two minutes hate. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of psychology saw the obvious conditioning exercise that day. The videos of the towers falling was incredibly powerful symbolically. After being coupled over and over with the image of bin Laden, the fear that the explosions evoked was sublimated to anger at the bearded image of the supposed head of the shadowy Al-Qaeda network. The anger and hate was then extended when the image of Palestinians dancing on the West Bank was later shown after hours of the towers collapsing on repeat. This justified, in most people's minds, our bombing of Afghanistan, and the death of thousands of civilians from an innocent third world country that had nothing to do with the attack on September 11.
Shortly after this the media coverage was all decidedly pro-Bush. Any anti-Bush, or anti-war rhetoric was considered practically equal to harboring terrorists. We got a nice propaganda film, Blackhawk Down which put a positive spin on our intervention in Somalia and established our troops as international freedom fighters restoring "democracy" to the world. Of course "democracy" is just a word and the military's definition of democracy has little to do with the definition of most of the people who are supposed to believe in it. In fact personal freedom, especially freedom of speech counters the military's goal of spreading their own peculiar style of liberty. According to the military now, to paraphrase Mao, "Democracy grows out of the barrel of a gun," or maybe more aptly "through the effective manipulation of 'truth.'"
The war for the control of information and the minds of humanity is being fought without the knowledge of the majority of the American public who are caught up in it. If we lose this war one of our most valuable freedoms, the freedom of thought, may be lost. Despite the use of powerful words like freedom and democracy by the military, without access to unbiased information the idea of democracy and freedom that our military supposedly fights to protect may become obsolete.
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