On the Awakening at Western Civilization's Sunset

In the present day, individuals live between ways of life. In our temporal age of constant flux, existence can be dizzying. As things change, most exercise the powers of hope so as to cope, and, in the process, lose their will to act, for hope is a passive occupation. But, as many people these days are commenting on, many have chosen not to settle for a pair of fingers merely crossed for a better tomorrow. While most countries lose their sovereignty to interdependence through globalization of the current international system-- the process of which empowers a very real uberclass that lives above and beyond common law and traditions--many populations have begun to more fervently identify with their native countries, and even their local communities.

These “stirring” individuals have had enough of the long Anglo-American treadmill of exploitation and domination. They wish to restore Basic Freedoms given to them by Nature or God. In this essay, we’ll focus on the US-based part of the overall Global Awakening dubbed by US foreign policy hawk, Zbigniew Brzezsinki, the “global political awakening.” Although the ideas corresponding to the Peace and Patriot Movement--participants of which henceforth referred to as Peace Patriots-- are revolutionary in scope, many do not wish for the typical sort of Revolution. In other words, their work is not designed to replace one Regime with Another.

On the contrary, a radical revision of the role of Institutions--Institutions which, in the eyes of a near-majority of those who associate themselves either with the Peace Movement or the Patriot Movement are the obsolete, but everpresent machinery of a deep power structure designed to steer society--should work towards fostering conditions of freedom in all nations.

This would entail knowing the true leaders of the Corporations, Foundations (as the joke goes, especially those with “free” or “private” in their literature), Steering Committees and Governments which make economic and social society, instead of focusing on Presidents and Prime Ministers, who are once removed from the true policy makers in Government and Corporate Directorships; that is, those who truly make the decisions about what to promote in the mainstream.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, as the Business Plans of contemporary Corporations called for the expansion of markets into foreign countries, this power structure became globalized. And today, unlike in any other time period, the reach of the elite (elites have always existed, and, as Aldous Huxley assumes, always will) extends across the entire planet. To see this, one need only look at the transnational dealings of market maker Goldman Sachs or the transnational eco-terrorism of British Petroleum (in the Gulf), the War Racketeer, Shell (in Iraq), other Big Oil players, BigPharma, the chemical industry and so on. The gross sum = Eisenhower’s Military-Industrial Complex.

Some of the big-picture-economic philosophies (“big picture” meaning the large brushstroke, an overview of the present age, and not its opposite, the countless micro-policies giving rise to the big picture, the way thing are at any given time) of the Peace Patriots, regarding how to fairly remake society, are typically associated with the right-wing of the political spectrum. As an aside, this right-to-left-wing political spectrum doesn’t hold in water, if not for it’s over-simplicity, for the apolitical nature of many people, who do not see themselves primarily as the citizens of political organizations.

Those aforementioned “right-wing” ideas stem from the work of Adam Smith who wrote in detail of Free Markets and Capitalism, which he saw as coming to fruition in conditions of “perfect freedom” and given to “natural liberty.” By way of “free associations,” individuals could enter into the marketplace, sell their labor, and acquire the goods they needed and wanted, with little or no third-party interference. Theoretically, ubiquitous competition would team-up with its partner cooperation to set fair prices and weed out poor quality. Many of these people most readily identify themselves as libertarians.

It is not, however, only libertarians who give attitude to the American-Global Awakening to the elitist colorization of power structures, but also many people who, had they not awoken and unsubscribed to what some have termed the “false right-left wing paradigm”, would consider themselves liberals or democrats, not Republicans, the close cousin of libertarianism. These individuals collectively give the Peace Patriots its progressive tones.

The Progressives among the Peace Patriots value a responsible environmentalism, and scoff at the political-environmentalist rhetoric highlighting as our gravest threat “Global Warming” and “Overpopulation.” They might instead choose to bring up legal charges against the world’s largest polluter--the United States Department of Defense and Pentagon--on the road to abolishing these war making machines altogether. As Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine in US history, wrote: War is a Racket. War benefits those psychopathic individuals and Corporations with the resources enough to make wars.

Another element of this section of the Peace Patriots is a progressive economic policy, whereby public representatives invest for the country based on fair formulas and an altruism that is first rewarded, and then adopted in the culture of the elected leaders. Progressive-Libertarianism in economics would promote the values of entrepreneurship through free associations, the new organizations and Institutions arisen therefrom, and a framework designed to give Representatives the privilege to be a conduit for beneficial collective endeavors.

The Peace Patriots represent an unprecedented progressive-libertarian political movement. Not only is the movement globalized yet diverse, but, also, its main-progenitors are scholastically informed activists, who, in an important demonstration of nuance, are wholly uninterested in the Presidents, Prime Ministers and Political Parties historically used to distract such movement’s away from those whom truly guide their lives.

This movement is very much skeptical of revolutions and the solutions handed-down from mass media and in spectacular speeches.

The history of Revolutions is not one of populist--that is, for the people-- victories, but, rather, social cataclysms that oft led to the splintering, decay and eventual elitist-driven remaking of cultures. As these societies came closer to Revolution, what is today termed “partisanship” increasingly ruled. This is precisely what we see transpiring today.

In France, at the end of the eighteenth century, that Revolution gave rise to the Reign of Terror and the attempted consolidation of Europe, and beyond, in the form of the Napoleonic Wars; In Russia in 1917, Revolution gave rise to Leninist and Stalinist Gulags and Great Purges, and a highly stratified socialist System in which psychological domination by education and the manipulation of the command-and-control economy greased the wheels; the National Socialist Revolution of 1933 Germany gave rise also to dictatorship and genocide.

Instead of Revolution, Peace Patriots champion a global spiritual and psychological Awakening, which is posited to then propel humanity to a next stage of maturity. The “unwashed masses” will then understand, and choose to deal with, the techniques of domination designed to coerce and control their lives and species: for instance, psychological terrorism in the form of toxic stimuli (the sounds and images of propaganda and public relations), contrived crises (false flag), crises generally, fear-mongering, economic scarcity, the alteration of human biochemistry by the introduction of toxic chemicals into the environment (through food, inoculation, and aerial spraying), and other forms of new eugenics.

The Awakening will function to undermine the usefulness of such techniques.

What does an awakening at civilization’s sunset entail?

The term “global political awakening” can be attributed to Zbigniew Brzezinski. He has referred to the phenomenon as “a truly transformative event on the global scene.” He goes on:

“For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. There are only a few pockets of humanity left in the remotest corners of the world that are not politically alert and engaged with the political turmoil and stirrings that are so widespread today around the world. The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination.”

Brzezinski sees the Global Awakening as among the most dramatic and significant phenomenon in geopolitics that has ever taken place, and it “is apparent in radically different forms from Iraq to Indonesia, from Bolivia to Tibet.” Brzezinski asserts, “the worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening.” He writes further:

“America needs to face squarely a centrally important new global reality: that the world's population is experiencing a political awakening unprecedented in scope and intensity, with the result that the politics of populism are transforming the politics of power. The need to respond to that massive phenomenon poses to the uniquely sovereign America an historic dilemma: What should be the central definition of America's global role?”

In his book, “Out of Control,” Brzezinski defines two issues of “major importance”: how to define concepts freedom and the good life. He argues, “the first pertains to the meaning of citizenship and the second to the essence of the human being.” In the same book, he discusses the conflation of morality and law. That, increasingly, what is legal is considered moral, and that which is illegal, is considered immoral, not the other way around. So, therefore, by making new law, one can make new morality.

In the book, Brzezinski outlines the way in which corporate-dominated mass media gives to the child his view of the world. He pens:

“On the whole, the values conveyed by the media repeatedly manifest what justifiably might be called moral corruption and cultural decadence.

“Today, for much of the world--and especially for the young-- television is the most important instrument both for socialization and education. In that respect, it is rapidly replacing the roles traditionally played by the family, by the church, by the school.

“Television gives the young viewer a first glimpse of the outside world. It first defines--and does so compellingly, by combining the visual and the audio impact--the meaning of the good life...It conditions desires, defines aspirations and unacceptable behavior.”

Brzezinski continues by enunciating the “staggering” facts on televisions effects on behavior. How so many people spend so much time glued to their television sets. As far as the so-called “programming” televisions offers, the “programs” “clearly extol self-gratification...normalize violence and brutality, encourage sexual promiscuity through example and stimulated peer pressures...the result is loss of control over social behavior.”

As Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, historian, mathematician, and social critic wrote in his book, “The Impact of Science on Society,” the importance of mass psychology “has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called “education.”

A nagging question, which has gone under-emphasized by most analysts of the Global Awakening, is what exactly Brzezinski means with his term?

Could it be that he truly means that, because the mass media extends to almost every corner of the globe, the ability to plug people into the grids of power has worked to be a coup over people’s minds? Is his language consciously doublespeak intended to confuse Peace Patriots and their colleagues the world-over into thinking they can take it easy? Or, more optimistically and, I think, more likely, as the present continues to shape a future System more desperate and hopeless than the current one, are larger numbers of people becoming inclined towards, or welcoming of, Populist Activism?

For each action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Let’s now take a walk in our minds on one of Einstein’s thought dreams. Imagine the development of an immense power, abused and expanded upon. A tyrant leading an exhaust-less War of Terror aimed to so change the environment of a people, that they themselves are also changed in the process. Imagine the remaking of societies and purges by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, but not just within their imaginary-line borders; instead, by way of a Global State, a World Regime--if you will. Imagine the power such a Global Institution causes. According to Newton’s laws of motion, there is to this series of tyrannical Actions myriad opposite Reactions.

What one observes in the reading of history is that, often as power centralization quickens, decentralizing tendencies arise and contradict that primary trend, thereby at least slowing it. Andrew Gavin Marshall elaborates on the primary way in which Technological Globalization has changed the world:


“The Technological Revolution has led to a diametrically opposed, antagonistic, and conflicting geopolitical reality: never before has humanity been so awakened to issues of power, exploitation, imperialism and domination; and simultaneously, never before have elites been so transnational and global in orientation, and with the ability to impose such a truly global system of scientific despotism and political oppression. These are the two major geopolitical realities of the world today. Never in all of human history has mankind been so capable of achieving a true global political psycho-social awakening; nor has humanity ever been in such danger of being subjected to a truly global scientific totalitarianism, potentially more oppressive than any system known before, and without a doubt more technologically capable of imposing a permanent despotism upon humanity. So we are filled with hope, but driven by urgency. In all of human history, never has the potential nor the repercussions of human actions and ideas ever been so monumental.”

Generating these countering trends is a sort of information war, ongoing. Although it might sound cliche, the impact of today on history is unimaginable. The volume of the vector that jet-propels modern man’s exchange of symbols and language on is greater than all those ages we consider the turning points of our Civilization: greater than European fascism and World War II; greater than the American and French Revolutions; greater than the Renaissance; the Black Plague, and on and on down the ages.

The exchange of symbols and language is not repeating history, or even rhyming with history--as Twain would have it--but truly making it. As high technology and communications have divorced the present from bygone ages, the associated quickening in society’s primary events, also known as “progress”, have enlarged the impact of decisions and actions by individuals like never before.

Moreover, we live today in the digital age, like flies through a digital matrix of widow webs. Although many futurists envisaged, and still do, the nature of a technetronic society as non-intimate, and likely to usher in a near-totally atomized public of robot zombies, the truth of the situation points towards a near-opposite reality.

Issues such as those brought up by the 9/11 Truth Movement have become mainstream political issues, according to Time Magazine. As the incrementally creeping Abuse of Power protects, first and foremost, the “witting” Uberclass, as well as the armies of opulent and psychopathic cronies, the Global Awakening reacts and intensifies.

Make no mistake that, by any historical standards, the fast flux of man’s modern society is, in religious terms, truly a transfiguration. Websters defines “to transfigure” like this: “to give a new and typically exalted or spiritual appearance to.” To Christians, one keystone example of this is Jesus’ appearance upon the mountain. Matt. 17: 1-9

Now, how do You live and pray while wide-awake at Civilization’s Sunset?

Please see: Andrew Gavin Marshall. The Global Political Awakening and the New World Order, published by Global Research:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19873

Poway Skatepark now under Boot of Big Bro?

All around us, technological innovations have digitalized society to such a point that the whereabouts of each of us can be known at all times. From GPS in passports, cell phones and cars, to computer cameras and microphones, privacy today is little more than a fading memory.

The bizarre surveillance grid, easily observable by each of us, represents a grave threat to the harmonious functioning of society, as data collection empowers the collectors. In the suburbs of San Diego, California, where, alongside southern California generally, skateboarding was born to relieve surfers of boredom on days when the surf was flat, skateboarding culture’s clash with overbearing city and county statutes has reached a new level.

The official reason behind biometric identification at a skatepark in Poway, California is to prevent vandalism, bullying, blah blah blah (read: et cetera). But the new requirement for skaters and parents to enter the park through a “biometric” thumb scanner represents one small instance amidst an American landscape increasingly dotted by militarized architecture.

In order to access the park, skaters and others visitors must go through the turnstile after their thumbprint is taken by the device.

Park users were asked to register at the park and will be required to sign a liability waiver, provide a thumbprint and have their photo taken, which will then be uploaded to a computer. Registration and admittance to the park is free--how considerate.

Not surprisingly, considering their near ubiquitous presence on US streets, computerized surveillance cameras were also installed at the park. Thereby, city officials can match video of violators with filed photos. Depending on the severity of actions, park-goers may be denied access to the park for days, weeks or indefinitely.

Poway senior recreation supervisor, Greg Sundberg, claims the skate park has experienced many problems in the recent past, such as vandalism in restrooms, graffiti, fires and visitors bringing bicycles into the park, which is not permitted.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Poway parent Shelly Smart said of the scanner.

Manufactured by NextgenID, the scanner cost the city $5,700, according to Frank Casteleneto, a city engineer. Altogether, the city spent $91,000 on recent security upgrades to the park., despite California’s 28% unemployment rate. City staff believe the scanner will also help prevent minor violations, like skaters not wearing helmets or kneepads, or kids sneaking bicycles into the park.

Identification cards were originally planned to help secure the park, but the idea was scrapped due to the likely prevalence of card-swapping among people. Out-of-town visitors will be required to provide a thumbprint for temporary access to the park. Sundberg said the new system would enable the city to restrict usage to certain age groups on specific days.

“We can program these scanners so that we can have a kids-only day … or an adults-only day,” he said.

Poway residents, Josh Thomas, 17, and Rancho Bernardo resident Matt Valencia, 18, said they see the scanner as violating their rights. The two did, however, plan on submitting their prints so that they could continue to use the park.

“I don’t want (the park) to be trashed, but I don’t think this is the way to go about doing it,” Josh said.

Ramona residents Erika Jacons and Adam Small visit the park several times throughout the week. Although Jacobs said she undesrstands the city’s want to create a safe environment and maintain the park, she believes the security camers would have sufficed as deterrent enough.

There are “so many ways to get around [the thumbscanner],” said Jacobs, 20. “Kids are smart.”

Is the biometric scanner at Poway an isolated incident? Or is it merely a symptom of an increasingly monitored everyday life in the United States?

In the first decade of the 21st century, much of the world has witnessed the unveiling of a total information network, whose stated purpose is to defend against terrorists, namely Al Qaeda. Could it instead be to ensure that people and society are highly predictable? In countries like Britain, all e-mails and telephone conversations, after having been handed over to the proper authorities by Internet Service Providers, are organized and stored by supercomputers. In the United States, electronic wiretapping goes back 150 years. The technology has been a seriously contested issue in the US on and off for 50 years.

Technocract (read: unelected leader)Zbigniew Brzezinski has written extensively on what he terms “a distinct new historical era,” particularly in his book "Between Two Ages." The ages referenced here are the industrial era and technetronic era. Part of this new age entails a move by the US, and most of the west, away from industrial society and into a technetronic society. He wrote:

“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

ECHELON is a code word for an automated global interception and relay system operated by the intelligence agencies of five nations, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is the capstone of the project. The earth-orbiting listening posts of which ECHELON is comprised are, officially, on the front lines in the United States-led war on terrorism. The signal-seeking spacecraft play a crucial role in eavesdropping on nations, as well as within the borders of the US itself. Some reports suggest that cell phone traffic, ground line chats and faxes, telexes and satellite telecommunications links, as well as Internet emails are intercepted across the globe. The information, once electronically recorded, is organized by supercomputers running with state-of-the-art software.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s nephew, Mathew Brzezinski, penned a book called “Fortress America,” which details what he argues is an emerging siege mentality in the US intended to create a maximum security state, such as those security states the United States has financed all over the world in "periphery" countries; that is, countries on the fringe of the anglo-american empire. Other terms for these lands are the vestigial "Third World" moniker and "developing countries" label.

Mathew writes that the manufacture of such sophisticated surveillance technology is simple, but that getting it into place and solving legal issues is not.

"The technological and legal foundations for blanket surveillance had already been laid in 2003," Brzezinski wrote in his book. "All that was lacking was the political and social will to bring all this technological wizardry to bear in the war on terror. It wouldn't happen overnight or without another catastrophic incident, something that upped the ante and put America in the same survival mode on par with Israel: a nuclear detonation, a biological outbreak, a mass casualty event. But if the stakes were high enough, would we be more willing to accept life in a maximum security surveillance state?"

Brzezinski’s scrupulous book centers on this question: How much disruption will the American people tolerate as its government tries to find “the balance between security and liberty?”

So, as the everyday lives of US citizens are monitored in perpetuity, will the invasive nature of such surveillance technologies remain tolerated? Although the main purpose of such an infrastructure might be to collect revenue through fines, the machinations could be abused further, aiding in a sort of domestic purge as economic and social tensions reach a crescendo.

The thumbscanner at Poway can be seen as a relatively harmless measure taken by city officials concerned about the safety and appearance of the park. But, considering the generally non-threatening nature of young adults, except for the to-be-expected hooliganism, one must ask: will the thumbscanner, alongside the surveillance cameras, pay itself off to the benefit of Poway residents, all the while without sucking young skateboarders and their parents out of cash for minor offenses?

Special Alert: Language Update from Pentagon

At the beginning of July, the Associated Press reported that the Army planned to drop the Vietnam Era moniker “psychological operations,” citing that it can seem ominous.

Drilled into soldiers of the Vietnam Era and after, the goal of such techniques have been to win “hearts and minds” of peoples, foreign and domestic.

The Defense Department’s new, more neutral term, is “Military Information Support Operations,” or MISO. The name-change parallels the early 2009 move away from the Bush Administration terms, “The Global War on Terror” and “Long War” to the term “Overseas Contingency Operation.” For now, the term “War on Terror” remains the dominant one.

U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, Ken McGraw, said the new designation, adopted in June, is a more accurate reflection of the unit’s job of producing leaflets, radio broadcasts, and loudspeaker messages to influence enemy soldiers and civilians.

Psychological warfare operations have been a keystone feature of US foreign policy techniques in especially the latter half of the twentieth century, and on into the current one. In the early years after the Second World War, for example, the new Central Intelligence Agency, taking the place of the Office of Strategic Services, found itself unprepared to counter a monolithic propaganda blitz, and organization effort, based out of the Soviet Union. Western Culture was portrayed by Soviet propagandists as decadent and degenerate. Soviet culture, so went the official myth, was the culture of the future.

The western intelligence community, with US organizations like the CIA-bankrolled Congress for Cultural Freedom at the pyramid’s top, countered the Soviets by portraying Soviet society as America’s antithesis: instead of a society based in freedom and democracy, like American society, communist culture was totalitarian , dictated, gray and unfree.

These psychological operations were dubbed “covert action” by early intelligence community operatives in the post-war era, and included everything from books and symphonies to Hollywood films. There indeed was an atmosphere of imperialism about such efforts, and Hollywood even called its post-war markets, not markets, but “territories.” Discussion by the public of such phenomenon is historically belittled and brushed under the rug, called by the hard-of-thinking mere “conspiracy theory.”

These propaganda-derived, present day public relations techniques were helped along, in the early twentieth century, by the godfather of propaganda, Edward Bernays, who wrote:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

In a republican society, that is a society based in law designed to protect the Supreme Rights of all, especially the poor against the opulent, “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses” is illegal. Obviously, it is also highly amoral.

For more on Bernays and the birth of modern public relations, one need only You Tube the great BBC documentary, “The Century of Self.”

“One of the catalysts for the transition is foreign and domestic sensitivities to the term ‘psychological operations’ that often lead to a misunderstanding of the mission,” McGraw said about the July 2010 name change.

The change of name is to be extended to all military services, though the form in which the change will take across the many army agencies remains unknown. The Army’s only active duty psychological operations unit, based in Fort Bragg, is called the 4th Psychological Operations Group.

The change was directed from the top, by Pentagon policy makers working for Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The old term is considered to be an atavistic artifact of the Cold War Era, and one that implies subterfuge and misinformation. Presumably, the new term is designed to avoid the implications associated with the old.

Language is passed down the culture creation chain to smaller information distributors, thereby causing a change in word choice among participants in the information and language exchange. An analogy might be the process whereby public drinking water arrives at consumers through the private sector. In the private sector, business of all sizes tend to use public water for their products, since the water is cheaper to use. Through the distribution of private products constituted with public water, many of the chemicals, such as lithium and sodium fluoride, reach the public. Therefore, it’s an inevitability that, a US citizen for example, will drink fluoridated water in his lifetime.

In a process of mass Synesthesia (synesthetes experience a muddling of the senses), the algorithm of the symbols, words and laws of cultures produce a certain way of knowing and understanding in that culture’s participants.

Another analogy of how language spreads comes from economics, specifically the concept of trickle-down theory, oft associated with Reaganomics. The term trickle-down was coined by humorist Will Rogers, who said during the Great Depression that “money was all appropriated from the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.” Proponents of such policies argue that, when the top income earners invest heavily into business infrastructure and equity markets, more goods will be produced and available on the market at lower prices, thereby spurring job growth for middle and lower class individuals. This logic sees economic wealth flowing from top to bottom. What astute observers point out, is that the trickle-down effect in this construct is very minimal.

The allegiance of many individuals in the Reagan administration to trickle-down premises might have been due to the fact that the concept is a truism. Clearly the largest investments by the apex income earners make markets. That is, after all, what Goldman Sachs claims to be its main service to the global economy, and, after a zero trading loss during the first quarter of 2010, there’s no denying that that firm is a top income earner. Just like how in trickle-down theory only bread crumbs fall from the table of the uberclass, the true meanings behind changes away from terms like ‘psy-ops’ go unannounced to the lower and middle class “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.” As I mentioned beforehand, the change of moniker is one towards a more neutral choice of words.

One of the premiere enunciators of Reaganomics under Reagan was former assistant secretary the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, who today is a force in the public US policy discussion. A staunch opponent of primary trends in US public and corporate culture, Roberts recently said of US propaganda techniques:

An article in the journal, Sociological Inquiry, casts light on the effectiveness of propaganda. Researchers examined why big lies succeed where little lies fail. Governments can get away with mass deceptions, but politicians cannot get away with sexual affairs.

The researchers explain why so many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, years after it has become obvious that Iraq had nothing to do with the event. Americans developed elaborate rationalizations based on Bush administration propaganda that alleged Iraqi involvement and became deeply attached to their beliefs. Their emotional involvement became wrapped up in their personal identity and sense of morality. They looked for information that supported their beliefs and avoided information that challenged them, regardless of the facts of the matter.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained the believability of the Big Lie as compared to the small lie: “In the simplicity of their minds, people more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have such impudence. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

What the sociologists and Hitler are telling us is that by the time facts become clear, people are emotionally wedded to the beliefs planted by the propaganda and find it a wrenching experience to free themselves. It is more comfortable, instead, to denounce the truth-tellers than the liars whom the truth-tellers expose.

All-in-all, the big lie is composed of innumerable and oft contrived little lies, such as the switch away from the vaguely violent “psy-op” to the more neutral “Military Information Support Operation.” I suspect that, just as the “Global War on Terror” has yet to be superseded by “Overseas Contigency Operation,” “psy-op” will remain the popular catchphrase.

Alfred H Paddock Jr., a retired colonel and former Director for Psychological Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 1986 to 1988, dislikes the new name both because it is vague and misleading, uncatchy and unmarketable.

"Somehow it gives a nefarious connotation, but I think that this baggage can be overcome," said Paddock of the old term. In Vietnam an Laos, Paddock served three combat tours with Special Forces.

"Military Information Support Operations, or MISO, is not something that rolls off the tip of your tongue," Paddock said. "It makes it even more difficult for psychological operations personnel to explain what they do. That they still have the capability to employ programs and themes designed to influence the behavior of foreign target audiences."