Amerika

It is not paranoia if they are actually out to get you, as the old saying goes, but it needs balancing with another wisdom: we have met the enemy, and he is us. Each of us, by choosing individualism, or the notion that our only duty is to our own mental state of contentment, forms a mighty herd which then denies big issues and chases trivialities.

Many people right now, having realized that something is deeply wrong with the course of our civilization, have invented all sorts of scapegoats. These are always shadowy figures in power who are manipulating us in order to deflect our attention from the “real” agenda, which usually takes on mythological dimensions.

It is popular now to think that spy agencies or psychological warfare agencies are running the show behind the scenes instead of simply being agents of the bureaucracy which controls our democratic process. While it would simplify our mental model if that were true, it makes no sense given the nature of agencies.

Agencies are jobs programs. To succeed in them, you do what your boss wants, and he does what his boss wants. This goes all the way up to the top, namely to the source of funding, which is dependent on political activity and therefore, is controlled by the people who make the deals.

The psyop conspiracy theory starts with interns:

Two leading US news channels have admitted that they allowed psychological operations officers from the military to work as placement interns at their headquarters during the Kosovo war.

CNN hosted five psy-ops officers as temporary, unpaid workers last year, while NPR took three, all from the army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The army’s psychological operations are prohibited by law from manipulating the US media.

No one knows why these psyops officers were working at major media companies, but the simplest option is the likeliest: they were training in how to produce realistic news stories. If nothing else, it helps to learn the equipment and procedures from the professionals.

The trail grew hotter when the Smith-Mundt Act was repealed:

For over sixty years, the Smith–Mundt Act prohibited the U.S. Department of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) from disseminating government-produced programming within the United States over fears that these agencies would “propagandize” the American people. However, in 2013, Congress abolished the domestic dissemination ban, which has led to a heated debate about the role of the federal government in free public discourse. Although the 2013 repeal of the domestic dissemination ban promotes greater government transparency and may help counter anti-American sentiment at home, it also gives the federal government great power to covertly influence public opinion.

However, this was likely more about news sources already paid for by government than new propaganda:

Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It’s viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran, self-immolation in Tibet, human trafficking across Asia, and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.

The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long-standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 1970s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they “should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.” Fulbright’s amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who argued that such “propaganda” should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. “from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity.”

If you look more closely, you will find that diversity prompted this change, and sadly diversity is not a psyop but a failed policy:

To be clear, only State Department-made news, not Pentagon-made news, will be available to Americans. Who are the targets? One example, Foreign Policy explains, is the Somali community in St. Paul, Minnesota. In Somalia, there are three choices for news, a government source said: “word of mouth, Al-Shabaab or VOA Somalia.” While that’s not true in Minnesota, the government still wants to reach Somalis: “Those people can get Al-Shabaab, they can get Russia Today, but they couldn’t get access to their taxpayer-funded news sources like VOA Somalia… It was silly.”

We would like to find the lizard people pulling the strings, but economic explanations make more sense: individuals act for their own benefit, and in bureaucracies, this means attending to political needs as well as the practical concerns of the stated functions of their jobs.

Tags: censorship, propaganda, psychological warfare, smith-mundt act