UK Propaganda Machine – Suppressing the Masses, Manipulating Minds

By TruePublica – Updated from Oct 2015:  The world of television and modern media has become a tool of de-evolution, propaganda,  social control and the manufacture of public opinion. Since the beginning of modern communication systems, nearly unlimited resources have been applied to understanding how to manipulate the human psyche.

Indeed, what we have witnessed since the Edward Snowden leaks has not only been enlightening but frightening. A clear example of this would be the UK’s law enforcement infrastructure and surveillance agencies such as GCHQ engaged in manipulating public opinion via the internet, particularly social media, documents reveal.

According to the Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman, particularly revealing is a 42-page report document entitled ‘Behavioral Science Support for JTRIG’s Effects and Online HUMINT [Human Intelligence] Operations’ and detailing JTRIG’s activities. Read his update on this report HERE.

Among them is “Providing spoof online resources such as magazines and books that provide inaccurate information (to disrupt, delay, deceive, discredit, promote distrust, dissuade, deter or denigrade [sic]/degrade)”; “setting up spoof trade sites (or sellers) that may take customer’s money and/or send customers degraded or spoof products, sending spoof e-mails and text messages from a fake person or mimicking a real person (to discredit, promote distrust dissuade, deceive, deter, delay or disrupt).

The report states that the surveillance unit “currently collaborates with other agencies,” including the Metropolitan police, Security Service (MI5), Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Border Agency, Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and National Public Order and Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).

What we have today is an increasingly sophisticated full-spectrum assault on free will and psychological well-being, and we have come to a point where it is no longer even necessary for media institutions to attempt to hide their blatant work of manipulating public opinion, manufacturing consent, and creating winners and losers in the minds of the already brain-washed public.

This article was originally written in August 2015. We wrote “Government social policies are in danger of generating a class war between the “squeezed middle” and people on the lowest incomes. The most vulnerable are the new scapegoats. The vested interests of corporations and the mega-wealthy distract these class groups away from the real reasons of why crippling austerity is imposed and state assets built up over the generations are being looted. The propaganda system that has created a permanent overclass is decades in the making.” Two years later that class war has escalated along with increased racism and political extremism.

The BBC was accused of “horrendous bias” in its reporting of the Scottish independence referendum. Political impartiality was resigned to the waste basket, household businesses were coerced into backing a NO vote. The public were threatened with increased interest rates by the Bank of England and UK banks more widely. All of this was a co-ordinated attack on democracy to change public opinion to suit the political elite and the organisations that own them.

The same can be said of Britain’s EU referendum. The treasury issued dire warnings of the consequences of leaving the EU. George Osborne and David Cameron both said the following: ‘It is clear that there would be an immediate and profound shock to our economy. The analysis produced by the Treasury today shows that a vote to leave will push our economy into a recession that would knock 3.6 per cent off GDP and, over two years, put hundreds of thousands of people out of work right across the country, compared to the forecast for continued growth if we vote to remain in the EU.’ Clearly this was bunkum.

 

SputnikNews had an exclusive interview with renowned scholar and social justice activist Professor Noam Chomsky, who spoke about current global trends in the media.

Chomsky warned that major Western media companies deliberately work to manipulate people’s consciousness and spread propaganda, organising the habits and opinions of the masses.

 

“Media creates artificial wants, atomises people and separates them from one another, making sure regular folks don’t disturb political elites. Major media corporations turn people “into isolated atoms of consumption, obedient, having the ‘right’ opinions which don’t bother political elites,” Chomsky said.

 

That’s the true agenda of media conglomerates, which spend huge amounts of money on manipulating people’s minds, the Professor told Sputnik.

“When media and modern technology get into the hands of wrong people — private tyrannies or totalitarian states — it can become a dangerous tool for suppressing the masses and serving the interests of the few governing elites“, Chomsky said.

Nowhere has this been demonstrated to such as extent in modern times as the War on Iraq and the War on Terror.

The toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 saw Iraq’s media sector shift from a handful of state-run media outlets that served as propaganda machines, to a vast array of Iraqi-owned newspapers, radio stations and television channels which are being fervently produced and avidly consumed nationally, many involved in manufacturing consent for its traumatised citizens.

Back home we saw Tony Blair fail to get consent to invade a sovereign nation and so false evidence was manufactured and then manipulated to garner public opinion and political consent that to this day everyone now knows were lies.

David Cameron was accused of blocking the inquiry set up to tell the truth about the war in Iraq, even though he publicly stated the opposite. The important pieces of information were the records of conversations between then prime minister and US president George Bush, in the run up to the war on Iraq. The idea by the political class in deploying delaying tactics was that the evidence was so damning it tarred all political parties with the same blood-soaked brush. The longer it took to publish, the less the political fall-out. That proved to be the case.

Revealing, was that scores of former ministers and officials were offered free legal advice during the Maxwellisation process about how to formulate their answers – public money used to shift blame from public figures guilty of the creation of disinformation and propaganda to deceive the public into the illegal killing of well over a million innocent people.

In May 2013 the reputable polling company ComRes asked a representative sample of the British public the following question: “How many Iraqis, both combatants and civilians, do you think have died as a consequence of the war that began in Iraq in 2003?”

Such was the propaganda machine working in over-drive that according to 59% of the respondents, fewer than 10,000 Iraqis died as a result of the war. The results are especially shocking because respondents were not asked to limit their estimates to Iraqi civilians or to deaths caused directly by violence.

In fact, the Iraq war has left not only one million civilians dead, but also created 5 million orphans, a million widows with almost no survival resources and nearly 5 million displaced. This shocking human disaster is blatantly covered up in the mainstream press as the west continues its never ending war in the region based on a raft of lies.

In the meantime, disgraced and now in administration, Bell Pottinger, the public relations firm involved in a recent disgraceful campaign to stir up racial tensions in South Africa, received $500 million from the Pentagon a few years back to make and distribute fake terrorist video’s to keep the war in Iraq and ‘war on terror’ on track. There were a number of reasons for this disinformation campaign, one of them was to scare the western general public into funding these wars.

Suppressing the masses and manipulating minds will continue to be conducted through a process of ever more sophisticated state sponsored misinformation, disinformation and propaganda campaigns supported by the new commanders of the information age. Organisations such as Google and Facebook are continually accused of censorship to suit the political agenda that benefits them the most. Hardly surprising then that the money spent on tech infrastructure is now double that of global defence spending and this year data is set to overtake oil as they most traded commodity on earth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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