Not shocking that many so-called liberals support authoritarian state mandates & are dehumanizing the “other”
Glenn Greenwald: "During the Trump years, the CIA and the FBI became overwhelmingly popular among American liberals.”
I’m going back to regular work tomorrow. I’m not a writer. I hope this post has a low level of cringe, typos, and other errors.
It’s time to stop being shocked about compliance and dehumanization
Many who watch or read corporate news media are being fed a steady diet of subtle and not so subtle forms of propaganda (more on that further down). This propaganda includes plenty of fear—a highly employed tool used for coercion (see religions and cults).
This propaganda combined with obedience to authority test results1, conformity test outcomes 2, and the placebo3 and nocebo4 effects shows us that it’s high time to stop being shocked that a lot of our fellow humans will comply with state control and participate in the dehumanization of the so-labeled “other” who does not comply.
For sustained dehumanization and fear, the media works with our easily suggestible brains
For an example of how suggestible humans are, just look at the estimates of the placebo cure rate which range from a low of 15% to a high of 72% . Also consider the opposite nocebo effect. Researchers in Munich in Germany “looked at 31 empirical studies and found that not only does the nocebo effect exist, it’s surprisingly common.5”
“[Western diplomats] dismissed the [Rwandan] station as a joke.”
[Rwandan Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines] stated aim was “to create harmonious development in Rwandese society” but nothing could have been further from the truth. It was set up and financed by Hutu extremists to prepare the people of Rwanda for genocide by demonising the Tutsi and encouraging hate and violence.
Some people—including the Belgian ambassador and staff of several aid agencies—recognised the danger and asked for international help in shutting down the broadcasts, but it was impossible to persuade western diplomats to take it seriously. They dismissed the station as a joke.
Oh, but we’re sophisticated Westerners.
BULL SHIT!
In his approximately one hour long talk, split into six short videos, about dehumanization6, neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman discussed several experiments, one of which was about whether or not one group would be treated more harshly by the other group based on a brief comment about the other group by the guy in the lab coat. The lab coat guy would comment about the other (fake) group (paraphrased), “They are good people,” or “Those people are animals” and the results on how harshly the other (fake) group were treated with more intense shocks to wrong answers correlated with whether or not they were referred to as animals or good people. Easy.
In another experiment, all that was done was to label a person’s hand with a religious affiliation and pretend to stick that hand with a needle. There were slight measurable differences in empathy just based on the label. This happened with atheists and the hands labeled atheist too.
A propagandists dream come true: Ex-security state agents now employed to deliver the news
Maybe they’re ex-security on paper only. Glenn Greenwald’s latest “NBC News Uses Ex-FBI Official Frank Figliuzzi to Urge Assange's Extradition, Hiding His Key Role” points out a dangerous development:
The most dangerous, and under-discussed, development in corporate media is the spate of ex-security state agents now employed to deliver the “news.”
As reported by Real Clear Politics in mid-2021, Glenn Greenwald also stated:
“During the Trump years, the CIA and the FBI became overwhelmingly popular among American liberals.”
“They worshipped the FBI and the CIA because they viewed it as the bulwark against Trump. So if you are serving a liberal audience, the last thing you know your audience wants to hear, and their audience is disappearing, so they are petrified of them, is anything that is questioning of or critical of the FBI on top of which all of these news outlets are filled on their payroll with former operatives of the FBI and the CIA.” 7
Operation Mockingbird types of effort are not necessary anymore
In the Real Politics article, Mr. Greenwald encourages us to look up Operation Mockingbird:
“If you go and Google, and I hope your viewers do, Operation Mockingbird, what you will find is that during the Cold War these agencies used to plot how to clandestinely manipulate the news media to disseminate propaganda to the American population. They used to try to do it secretly. They don't even do it secretly anymore.8”
Thanks Glenn, I’m familiar with Operation Mockingbird.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, aka Corporate Interests of America) has never been our friends, yet many movies and television shows have drastically improved their image after the findings of the Church and Pike Congressional Committees 9 in the mid 70s.
It’s in these Church/Pike commissions that the public learned about a variety of “Intelligence” activities, including:
— Operation MKULTRA
For nearly ten years, 1953 to 1964, the CIA secretly dosed American and Canadian citizens with LSD. Through front companies, the CIA worked with over 80 institutions—hospitals, prisons, and universities—where they experimented on human beings with drugs and hypnosis combined with verbal and physical abuse.10
Is it reasonable that a program would operate for over a decade without graduates?
I speculate that programs like MKUltra were still in practice, under a different name, and that there were graduates all during the 11 years and beyond.
— Operation Mockingbird
Domestic and foreign journalists and about twenty-five US news organizations provided cover for CIA activity. These news organizations include the New York Times, CBS, Time Inc,, Newsweek, ABC, New York Herald‑Tribune, the Saturday‑Evening Post, Scripps‑Howard Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers and more.11
Regarding Mockingbird, the Church committee deliberately misrepresented the scope. In Carl Bernstein’s 25,000 word essay (TL/DR the entire article) for Rolling Stone titled “CIA and the Media” in 1977, he wrote:
[T]op officials of the CIA, including former directors William Colby and George Bush, persuaded the [Church] committee to restrict its inquiry into the matter and to deliberately misrepresent the actual scope of the activities in its final report.
Bernstein continued:
The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress. The general outlines of what happened are indisputable; the specifics are harder to come by. CIA sources hint that a particular journalist was trafficking all over Eastern Europe for the Agency; the journalist says no, he just had lunch with the station chief. CIA sources say flatly that a well‑known ABC correspondent worked for the Agency through 1973; they refuse to identify him. A high‑level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966; he does not know who they were, or who in the newspaper’s management made the arrangements.12
Asch Conformity Test:
https://sites.psu.edu/dps16/2016/03/17/aschs-conformity-experiment/
These links about replication are not exhaustive.
Replication in 1974: Results show that on a total of 18 trials, 62.5% of Ss conformed on 1 or more of these trials.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1975-09524-001
Replication in 1990: Results yielded a conformity level of 72.7%. More women (92%) than men (50%) conformed at least once
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-01155-001
Replication in 2008 shows that today’s students act much the same as Asch’s of over a half-century ago.
https://ahp.apps01.yorku.ca/2008/06/asch-conformity-replication/
Replication in 2010: “The results showed that, in line with Asch's basic findings, the minority women participants conformed to the majority. However, our study produced two different results: While minority women conformed, minority men did not.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22044061/
"With its naturally fluctuating course, depression is a highly placebo-responsive condition: mean placebo response rates in antidepressant clinical trials are 30% to 40%"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181672/
"On average, treatment with placebos produced a response that was 72% as large as the response to active drugs."
— https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24164777/
"The researchers discovered that the placebo was 50% as effective as the real drug to reduce pain after a migraine attack."
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect
placebo 15-72%
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-sense/201201/the-placebo-effect-how-it-works
See footnotes 3 and 4.
Ibid.
“Watergate shocked the American public and spurred many of its representatives in Congress to demand an investigation into the past activities of [the FBI, CIA,] NSA and others. The result was the creation of two congressional committees in 1975, chaired by Frank Church (D-ID) in the Senate and Otis Pike (D-N.Y.) in the House of Representatives. Their hearings exposed secret, arguably illegal wiretapping, bugging, and harassment of American citizens, including Supreme Court justices, reporters, and government officials, all in the name of collecting intelligence about threats to national security. The most notorious case, first exposed in the 1960s and fully documented by the Church Committee, was the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr. by the NSA and by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, who believed him to be part of a Communist conspiracy.”
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2015/05/06/40-years-ago-church-committee-investigated-americans-spying-on-americans/
NBC Archive of Frank Church not naming NSA but discussing them:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YAG1N4a84Dk
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA525280
https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports.htm
MK Ultra PDF on the NY Times site:
https://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/13inmate_ProjectMKULTRA.pdf
Ibid,