Cathy Vogan, executive producer of Consortium News‘ webcast CN Live!, coined a new term to describe rule by psyops, or psychological operations: psyopcracy. And Consortium News‘ existence is devoted to fighting it.
According to Wikipedia: “Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce behavior perceived to be favorable to U.S. objectives.”
William Casey, C.I.A. director under Ronald Reagan, said: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
Thus the American people are continuously subject to a number of psychological operations otherwise known as “the news.” Combating these false constructs of the world through media is Consortium News‘ mission.
U.S. intelligence officials feed journalists disinformation to create a false narrative that is intended to mislead the public and cover-up what is actually taking place.
The constant reinforcement of these lies becomes entrenched in the public mind and after time comes to be accepted as unquestionable truth.
Here’s an explanation of how the C.I.A. did it in Vietnam:
Through such operations, the American people were led to believe for years that the United States was winning in Vietnam, when it was actually losing, as the Pentagon Papers proved.
Since then, many examples have followed of completely false stories being planted into people’s minds to start and keep a war going, the fake WMD narrative in Iraq perhaps the most infamous.
Today the wars people are being fooled about are in Ukraine and Gaza.
Sometimes a psyop doesn’t involve inserting false information, so much as leaving out what’s true.
The American people, and by extension people around the world, have been led to believe that an unprovoked Russian madman started the war in Ukraine.
That’s because they are purposely not told that the war actually began in 2014 after a U.S.-backed coup in Kiev led Russian speakers in Donbass to declare independence, after which the coup government militarily attacked them.
Other facts are removed from the story, such as Russia’s proposed treaties with the U.S. and NATO in December 2021 that would have prevented Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian civil war.
The history of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine is also whitewashed to lead the U.S. public into believing that Israel is the “victim” that is only “defending itself.”
Robert Parry, the founder of this website, in March 2017 wrote the article, “How US Flooded the World with Psyops,” in which he reported for the first time: “Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that – over the past three decades – have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home. The documents reveal the formation of a psyops bureaucracy under the direction of Walter Raymond Jr., a senior CIA covert operations specialist who was assigned to President Reagan’s National Security Council staff to enhance the importance of propaganda and psyops in undermining U.S. adversaries around the world and ensuring sufficient public support for foreign policies inside the United States.”
So many people are subject to psyops that telling the truth becomes a formidable task. You become the one that is out of step. You are the one that seems to be mad.
Main photo: Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; U.S. Army General Henry Shelton, chairman, Joint Chief-of-Staff and Senator John Warner (R-VA), at Pentagon press conference © Jim Watson / USN / Wikimedia Commons.
