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Thread: The Spectacle of Secrecy and Other Manipulation Tactics

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    Default The Spectacle of Secrecy and Other Manipulation Tactics

    Edward Curtin (http://edwardcurtin.com/) writes the following analysis on the manipulation of attention via the media and propaganda.

    Quote Jeffrey Epstein and the Spectacle of Secrecy
    Edward Curtin

    When phrases such as “the deep state” and “conspiracy theory” become staples of both the corporate mainstream media and the alternative press, we know the realities behind these phrases have outlasted their usefulness for the ruling elites that control the United States and for their critics, each of whom uses them refutably or corrobatively.
    “When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

    Only by stepping outside this narrative frame with its vocabulary can we begin to grasp the truth here in our Wonderland of endless illusions.

    Death, sex, power, intrigue, murder, suicide – these are the staples of the penny press of the 19th century, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, Hearst’s New York Journal, the tabloids, today’s mass media, and the CIA.

    People hunger for these stories, not for the real truth that impacts their lives, but for the titillation that gives a frisson to their humdrum lives. It is why post-modern detective stories are so popular, as if never solving the crime is the point.

    To say “we will never know” is the mantra of a postmodern culture created to keep people running in circles. (Note the commentaries about the Jeffrey Epstein case.) Elusive and allusive indeterminacy characterizes everything in the culture of postmodernity.

    Robert Pfaller, a professor at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria and a founding member of the Viennese psychoanalytic research group “stuzzicandenti,” put it clearly in a recent interview:

    Quote The ruling ideology since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or even earlier, is postmodernism. This is the ideological embellishment that the brutal neoliberal attack on Western societies’ welfare (that was launched in the late 1970s) required in order to attain a “human”, “liberal” and “progressive” face. This coalition between an economic policy that serves the interest of a tiny minority, and an ideology that appears to “include” everybody is what Nancy Fraser has aptly called “progressive neoliberalism”. It consists of neoliberalism, plus postmodernism as its ideological superstructure.
    The propagandists know this; they created it.

    They are psychologically astute, having hijacked many intelligent but soul-less people of the right and left to do their handiwork.

    Money buys souls, and the number of those who have sold theirs is numerous, including those leftists who have been bought by the CIA, as Cord Meyer, the CIA official phrased it so sexually in the 1950s: we need to “court the compatible left.” He knew that drawing leftists into the CIA’s orbit was the key to efficient propaganda.

    For so many of the compatible left, those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but taking the money of the super-rich, the JFK assassination and the truth of September 11, 2001 are inconsequential, never to be broached, as if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did.

    By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of influential leftists has done the work of Orwell’s crime-stop and has effectively succeeded in situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S. propaganda.

    The debate over whether Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide or not is a pseudo-debate meant to keep people spinning their wheels over nothing. It attracts attention and will do so for many days to come. There are even some usually astute people suggesting that he may not be dead but might have been secretly whisked off somewhere and replaced with a dead look-alike.

    Now, who would profit from suggesting something as insane as this?

    The speculation runs rampant and feeds the spectacle. Whether he was allowed to kill himself or was killed makes little difference.

    It’s akin to asking who pulled the trigger that killed President Kennedy. That’s a debate that was intended to go nowhere, as it has, after it became apparent that Lee Harvey Oswald surely did not kill JFK. John Kennedy’s murder in broad daylight in public view is the paradigmatic event of modern times. It is obvious to anyone that gives minimal study to the issue that it was organized and carried out by elements within the national security state, notably the CIA.

    Their message was meant to be unequivocal and clear: We can kill him and we can kill you; we are in full control; beware. Then they went on to kill others, including RFK and MLK. It takes little intelligence to see this obvious fact, unless you wish not to or are totally lost in the neighborhood of make-believe.

    As it was with Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald, so it is with Epstein. There will be no trial. Nothing is really hidden except the essential truth. Guess, debate, wonder, watch, read to your sad heart’s content. You will have gotten nowhere unless you step outside the frame of the reigning narrative.

    A corollary example of another recent national headline grabber, the Mueller investigation, is apropos here.

    Douglass Valentine, expert on the CIA and author of The CIA as Organized Crime, said in a recent interview that in all the endless mass media discussions of the Mueller investigation, one obvious question was never asked: What is the CIA’s role in it all? It was never asked because the job of the corporate mass media is to work for the CIA, not to expose it as a nest of organized criminals and murderers that it is.

    What is important in the Epstein case is the deep back story, a tale that goes back decades and is explored by Whitney Webb in a series of fine articles for the Mint Press.

    Read her articles and you will see how Epstein is just the current manifestation of the sordid history of the American marriage between various factions of the American ruling elites, whose business is sexual exploitation as a fringe benefit of being willing members of the economic and military exploitation of the world. A marriage of spies, mafia, intelligence agencies, sexual perverts, foreign governments, and American traitors who will stop at nothing to advance their interests.

    It is a hard story to swallow because it destroys the fairy tale that has been constructed about American “democracy” and the decency of our leaders.

    Webb’s articles are not based on secret documents but on readily available information open to a diligent researcher. It’s known history that has been buried, as is most history in a country of amnesiacs and educational illiterates. The average person doesn’t have Webb’s skill or time to pull it all together, but they can read her illuminating work. Often, however, it is the will to truth that is lacking.

    While Webb places the Epstein matter in an historical context, she does not “solve” the case, since there is nothing to solve. It is another story from a long litany of sex/espionage stories openly available to anyone willing to look. They tell the same story.

    Like many commentators, she draws many linkages to the Israeli Mossad’s long-standing connections to this criminal under and over world in the United States and throughout the world. She writes:

    Quote Ultimately, the picture painted by the evidence is not a direct tie to a single intelligence agency but a web linking key members of the Mega Group [a secretive group of Jewish billionaires, including Epstein’s patron Leslie Wexner], politicians, and officials in both the U.S. and Israel, and an organized-crime network with deep business and intelligence ties in both nations.
    If anything is obvious about the Epstein case, it is that he was part of a sexual blackmail operation tied to intelligence agencies. Such blackmail has long been central to the methods of intelligence agencies worldwide and many arrows rightfully point to the Mossad.

    However, while throughout Webb’s articles she draws linkages that lead to the Mossad, she only suggests CIA connections. This is similar to but milder than a point made in an article written by Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist, Did Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein Work for Mossad? Giraldi writes that the CIA “would have no particular motive to acquire an agent like Epstein.” This makes no sense.

    Of course, they would. The CIA and the FBI have a long record of such activities, and to hold such a club over the heads of presidents, senators, et al to make sure they do their bidding is obviously a strong motivation.

    Valentine’s point about not asking the question about the CIA’s involvement in the Mueller investigation pertains. Does Giraldi believe that the Mossad operates independently of the CIA? Or that they don’t work in tandem? His statement is very strange.

    The CIA is organized crime, and if Epstein is Mossad connected, he is CIA also, which is most likely. No one like Epstein could have operated as he did for decades without being sustained and protected.

    Now that he is dead there will be no trial, just as there will be no mainstream media or justice department revelations about the CIA or Mossad.

    There will be a lot of gibberish about conspiracy theories and the open secret that is the spectacle of secrecy will roll on.

    There will, of course, be much sex talk and outrage. We will anxiously await the movie and the TV “exposés.” Most people will know, and pretend they don’t, that the country is ruled by gangsters who would pimp their mothers if it served their interests.

    Those of us who oppose these criminals – and there are growing numbers all over the world – must avoid being sucked into the establishment narratives and the counter-narratives they spawn or create. We must refuse to get involved in pseudo-debates that are meant to lead nowhere. We must reject the language created to confuse.

    If revolutionary change is to come, we must learn to tell a new story in language so beautiful, illuminating, and heart-rending that no one will listen to the lying words of child molesters, mass murderers, and those who hate and persecute truth-tellers.

    As John Berger said, “In storytelling everything depends on what follows what. And the truest order is seldom obvious.”
    From: https://off-guardian.org/2019/08/18/...le-of-secrecy/
    *I have loved the stars too dearly to be fearful of the night*

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    Default Re: The Spectacle of Secrecy and Other Manipulation Tactics

    Thanks very much Cara for this excellent article

    Here's the accompanying audio interview published July 29th, 2019 between Whitney Webb and Doug Valentine cited in this article above:

    https://www.mintpressnews.com/mintca...ations/260810/

    Overview:
    MintCast co-host Whitney Webb interviews author, investigative journalist and poet Douglas Valentine about his extensive work on exposing the dark underbelly of the CIA and some of the agency’s most notorious covert programs.

    Webb and Valentine begin the interview discussing how Valentine’s journalistic work on the CIA led him to be spied on and even threatened by the agency and how being a dissident journalist in the 1990s compares to being one now. Valentine argues that, in the present, efforts to outlaw criticism of the state of Israel are like a gateway that will soon lead to the prohibition of criticism of the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies, the CIA among them.

    Valentine then touches on some of the themes covered in his book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, including his assertion that the CIA operates as “the organized crime branch of the U.S. government” and his examination of how its activities have been influenced by its decades-long relationships with organized crime networks in the United States and throughout the world.

    Lastly, Webb and Valentine discuss the CIA’s long-standing interest in manipulating the media and how those efforts also extend to alternative media, not just mainstream media outlets. Valentine discusses the methods the CIA uses to target alternative, independent media and how we are seeing its efforts take place in real time.


    .
    “If a man does not keep pace with [fall into line with] his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” - Thoreau

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    Default Re: The Spectacle of Secrecy and Other Manipulation Tactics

    Great Stuff and so true, thanks Cara.

    My son use to say that when someone new gets to be elected president of the U.S., the PTB bring him into a room, show him a clip of the Kennedy Assassination and then ask: Any questions?
    Blessed are the cracked, for they are the ones who let in the light!

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    Default Re: The Spectacle of Secrecy and Other Manipulation Tactics

    Truthstream media has a new short video that frames the recent media narrative around Epstein as a scapegoating. Very interesting and only 10 minutes:



    More on scapegoating:

    Quote Mimetic Desire and the Scapegoat Mechanism
    (Perception Warfare p 9)

    QuoteNegative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis and the new nation [the US] certainly did. . . . The downside . . . is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are, in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real.”
    —Morris Berman, A Question of Values

    There is a little-known French philosopher called René Girard who has been quietly working away at a social theory that, if correct, has the potential to overturn everything we think we know about ourselves and the world we live in. In outlining his theory of mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry, and what he calls “the scapegoat mechanism,” Gerard argues persuasively how sacrificial violence is the dark secret underpinning all human cultures. The scapegoat mechanism is the means by which a group transfers its collective hostility onto a single victim, discharging it and returning the group to unity. As I’ve tried to outline above, America’s and other dominant groups’ penchant for scapegoating is hardly a secret; but Girard repositions it from being a cultural artifact to being the cultural artifact.

    The problem which scapegoating solves is what Girard terms mimesis: an unconscious form of imitation that invariably leads to competition. Girard describes desire as the most virulent “mimetic pathogen.” This idea was simply stated, as long ago as 1651, in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.” We can see this easily enough at the microcosmic level. If two people share an affinity for each other, they make friends and share their common interests. The problem, Girard writes, is that this very affinity will eventually lead them to desire the same thing and end up as rivals. Two best friends fall for the same woman; the affinity quickly turns to antipathy and they end up murdering each other to prove whose desire is stronger. An even more common example is when two children are playing with toys: one picks up a toy and instantly the other wants to play with it. A previously harmonious arrangement quickly dissolves into anger and tears. Mimesis is like an endless dance of unconscious imitation in which people find themselves desiring things because they are desired by someone else. “Keeping up with the Joneses”: mimetic desire aroused not by the object itself but by the desire of others for the object. Competition becomes its own end, and the object of desire becomes irrelevant as previously civil neighbors become consumed by rivalry. They are now locked into a “negative identity” in which each needs the other in order to feel real. This idea is popular in movies, such as “cop hunts killer” doppelganger narratives, and in comic book characters like Batman and the Joker — opposite sides of a single coin, strengthening and justifying each other through opposition. It is also seen everywhere we look, only not quite so starkly drawn.

    Girard’s theory extends this model to encompass (and explain) entire societies. It argues that, without the release provided by sacrificial violence, mimetic desire leads inevitably to mimetic rivalry and will finally culminate in mimetic violence. Humans are so highly imitative that, without the scapegoat mechanism, violent outbreaks within any social group will spread like wildfire and decimate the whole group. If two people desire the same thing, their desire will soon spread to a third, a fourth, and so on. Once the object is forgotten, mimetic rivalry snowballs into widespread antagonism. The final stage of the crisis is when the antagonists no longer imitate each other’s desires for an object, but each other’s antagonism. Think of Rwanda.

    ...Th[e] frustrated desire for a scapegoat is then apparently strong enough to trigger another man, who identified with ... (the scapegoat) and took “defensive” action. So in the absence of the much-needed scapegoat mechanism, during a time of maximum social instability and disruption in the US community, the result was an act of inexplicable and indiscriminate mimetic violence.
    From: https://auticulture.com/blog/2013/01...n-warfare-p-9/
    *I have loved the stars too dearly to be fearful of the night*

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