Lucky Strike Three!

Immune Resistance to Propaganda

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

and left the vivid air signed with their honour. *

Stephen Spender-1934

Edward Bernays (1891–1995), was an early architect of the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, the “engineering of consent.” During World War I, he served on the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a propaganda unit mobilized to “package, advertise and sell the war” to isolationist Americans. Making the World Safe for Democracy and Hun atrocity porn won over most, others were imprisoned. Future wars built on the CPI blueprint for marketing strategies.

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud’s 1921 book mapped out subconscious levers of manipulating social group mind through herd instinct, using key influencers as thought leaders. After the War to End Wars, Bernays incorporated techniques and ideas from his war efforts, his CPI colleague and Pulitzer prized journalist, Walter Lippmann, as well as his uncle, Sigmund Freud, to go public.

Developed commercial advertising using Freud’s theories about subconscious drives to sell products in the Roaring 1920’s, and pioneered Public Relations, evil twin of Journalism, with his 1923 book, Crystallizing Public Opinion. His 1928 bombshell Propaganda lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education, but primarily as consumers.

Lucky Strike cigarettes exploded the taboo on women smoking in public in 1929, with Bernays conducting the campaign to reel in strikes by association with women’s rights and freedom. The modern woman smoking signified independence. Fashion magazines featured models smoking languidly. NYC debutantes, flapper influencers ceremoniously lit up cigarettes in the Easter Day Parade to flaunt their liberation. Generations of addicted women followed the men. Not free, not liberating.

Walter Lippman’s 1922 book, Public Opinion warned that citizen based democracy was being eroded by media manipulation and propaganda. Declared it dangerous and politically disastrous to no avail. This series prebunks psy-ops to come by promoting healthy herd immunity to propaganda.

Bernays applauded using the power of mass media for persuasion, with advertising and political PR as a mental health tool. A Therapeutic System to direct irrational emotions into displaced desires for something they can buy. Bernays’ dream of Persuasion being enshrined in the Bill of Rights has extended the First Amendment’s Freedom of Speech farther than Privacy made it with the 14th.

He helped his corporate client, United Fruit Company, make bananas the most popular fruit in America, replacing domestically grown apples. Their Chiquita brand owned 42% of land in Guatemala. When socialist populist Jacobo Arbenz was elected president in 1951, the government of Guatemala seized 200,000 acres of uncultivated land owned by UFC, divided into 100,000 plots for farmers and offered payment on the taxed value. Chiquita had only paid centavos on ludicrously low assessments.

The CIA worked with Bernays to overthrow Arbenz with a pioneering PSY-OPS, combining “psychological warfare, political action” and “subversion,” with a small, paramilitary band of 500 in the military coup of 1954. Staging radio broadcasts of an invasion with overwhelming force as news alerts, terrified Arbenz into fleeing the country with his family and top aides. They’d been scheduled for “eliminating immediately”, with 100,000 more assigned for disposal into prison work camps.

Successive military juntas made Guatemala safe (and cheap) for banana monocropping, while waging civil war on their indigenous peasants for decades, murdering more than 100,000 citizens. Operation Sherwood documents were declassified in 1997, revealing the open secret that the CIA directed the coup, plus the “roll up of Communists and collaborators” in our backyard. “Their first covert operation in Latin America became the model for future CIA activities.”

PSY-OPS became MISO, Military Information Support Operations, (not the fermented soy bean probiotic), targeting foreign audiences under the Army’s 8th Group, “Masters of influence. Experts in Deception.” Modeled on Israel’s Mossad motto? Its 2014 manual was already being used domestically as global echoes of international news bites, crafted for specific audiences on the rebound.

COVID Psyops dwarfed Sherwood, merely an acorn for the dark oak forest of global psychological persuasion through fear, misinformation, omission, and medical murder, using mass communication technology and captured media/academia/governments like a Mighty Wurlitzer. Ultimately, it is a military industrial operation, seeded, sprayed and harvested for the New Wine of Totalitarian Inoculation.

We should take stock of our victories, defeats and entrenched positions to calculate tactics and strategies for the looming storm. Honor ourselves as vaxx dissidents for emerging from fringe to mainstream, even if the heavy lifting was done through their own hubris, arrogance and product line. Prophets weren’t heeded, until extreme damage was clearly done. Thirty years in the wilderness is long enough. I’m no Moses, although partial to Burning Bushes.

Never say Never, but another Pandemic is flogging a dead horse. TerroristsR/Us, Alien Invitation, Apocalypse Now, AI Basilisk, Climate Chaos, Economic Collapse, Political Paralysis. Endless Possibilities. Somewhere out of left field, harbingers of terror are being brewed up. Don’t Enter that Basement! we shout. Many will still walk down the steep stairs without a flashlight, searching for a switch.

Thought Leaders are producing dozens of books and articles Looking Back at Covid, five years on. Limited Hangouts, Mistakes Were Made, Novel Coronavirus narratives are relentlessly pushed. Our contrarian comments are essential to dim the gaslighting.

Immune Enhancement Koan: Pin the Donkey on the Tail of the Elephant in the Room. Awareness doesn’t generate Action. Determination is not a Drug, although coffee could help. Before Adding WonderBerries, Subtract Toxic Waste. Bernay’s Cafe aqua and pink neon sign prominent in Miami Vice’s pilot show was a Signal, not a Symbol.

*British spelling