by Miles Mathis
first published 1st of July 2013
Since Ralph Nader ran for President in 1996 on a platform built on the indistinguishability of the Republican and Democratic parties, it has been widely recognized that the political spectrum has narrowed drastically over the past century. There has been an ever-increasing commentary on it coming from both sides, liberal and conservative. Even the mainstream media is allowed to mention it occasionally, though they are generally trying to deflect you away from the fact. But in this paper, I would like to suggest that the game is even deeper. It isn't just that your choices have been narrowed— or that they have been non-existent for many decades. It is that the entire political game has been refashioned specifically to confuse you. In other words, politics has become just one more part of the greater media, and the fundamental use of media is and long has been to de-educate you and uneducate you, so that you can no longer make a sensible judgment about anything. It is not just your vote they wish to take from you, it is your mind itself.
Consider, for instance, the word “liberal”, which I have just used above. The meaning of the word has flipped since the 1960's, and this flipping has been no accident or natural outcome of change. In 1968, a liberal was anti-war and distrustful of the government. If you thought the government was generally benign, that it was waging wars for good reasons, and that its corporate ties were healthy, you weren't a liberal, you were a conservative. That's what conservative implies: conserving the status quo. The government in 1968 was pretty much what it is now, minus a few degrees of evil, so that was the status quo. That was the way things were. If you were happy with that, you were a conservative, because you wished to conserve the current state of things. You were probably profiting from it very well. If not—if you wanted things to change drastically—you were a liberal. You wanted us to get out of Vietnam, quit fighting illegal and immoral wars, and start treating people all over the world better— including our own people.
Today, these terms have flipped in most important ways. It is now liberals who are more likely to be status quo. Liberals or Democrats no longer have much of a problem with continuous and illegal wars. Yes, the current anti-war movement still tends to come out of the Democratic Party, but it is so small it is almost negligible. Most liberals are now fine with war, as long as it benefits their personal portfolio. And polls have indicated for many years that liberals are more likely to trust the government, are more likely to desire a large government, and are less likely to believe conspiracy theories. It is now conservatives that are more likely to distrust the government. This is rich, because we now see many people—and not just the young—who style themselves conservative while acting like 1960's hippies. They may not dress like hippies (although, if they own Harleys, they may), but in many other respects, the similarities are striking. Their political talk is all about freedoms, they wear the “don't tread on me” patch, they fly the flag upside down, and they think of cops as pigs.
As one example, we can take Mike Adams at Natural News, who calls himself a conservative. I like Mike and agree with him on most things. I have always let his conservative tag pass, since I know the terms are now meaningless, but on further study I began to see it as a sign of something deeper. Mike doesn't have long hair and doesn't look like a pot smoker, but other than that, he is a hippie. Pretty much down the line, his views are the views of a 1960's liberal. In just about every way imaginable, Mike is anti-government, anti-authoritarian, and anti-fascist. He has a few tangential views that might be labeled conservative by a current liberal, but he would be accepted by 1960's liberals as one of their own. His stance on GMO's alone would win him a club card.
So what does it mean? Has society and government changed so much that liberals must now be conservatives, and the reverse? Have we become so liberal that that old liberals are balking at the progress? Although I have heard some say it (think Rush), no person awake would believe it. No, just the opposite its true: the proto-fascist government we had with Nixon has flowered into full-blown fascism, and we are on the brink of a police state. That was exceedingly clear with Bush and should be just as clear with Obama. That is the opposite of liberal. We have not stopped waging illegal wars and embraced peace: we have two new wars a year and spend much more now on the military than we did then. We just hide the wars a little better. We have them in remote countries and refuse to let the press in. The press is now more completely owned by the government, and it only reports what it is told to report.
If the definitions of words like “liberal” did not reverse for natural reasons, we must assume they were reversed on purpose, to fit someone's agenda. But why and how could anyone flip the definitions of words? Isn't that beyond the capability of anyone? Don't we have dictionaries that set terms and keep them standard? Hardly. Dictionaries are written by people, not by God. And the media is now powerful enough to redefine words, if it should want to. It does want to. The media, not the schools, not you, is now in control of your education and your child's education, and they have plenty of time and money to get the job done. They can sell you day as night and black as white, and have.
But why? Why reverse the definitions of words? Wouldn't that create chaos? Exactly.
You may wish to recall that in the late 1960's, at the same time the FBI was running an infamous program called COINTELPRO, the CIA was running a parallel program called CHAOS. Both programs were directed at liberals—mainly progressive blacks and hippies. Well, that CIA acronym was no accident. One of the things they perfected at that time was the art of psychological warfare, and one of the cleverest things in the PW arsenal became word warfare. The pen is mightier than the sword and all that, you know. These agencies discovered that one of the best ways to confuse the opposition was to infiltrate it. We already know that. But once you infiltrate, you have to then do something. Infiltration by itself won't help you. Most people assume that infiltrators simply spied and taped and then turned State's evidence. Even most top researchers of the time assumed that. Later research showed that infiltrators often took on leadership roles, suggesting plots and supplying arms, plans, transportation, and so on. That is the information we get from alternative sources today concerning FBI abetting of so-called terrorist plots. But it goes even deeper than that.
You see, foiling specific plots and specific groups is a piecemeal approach. It requires a constant surveillance and a constant war. The government has to infiltrate each group separately. But what if all progressive groups could be eradicated simultaneously, with very little effort?
Think of the evolution of pest control. People used to control roaches, termites and mosquitoes by stepping on them or swatting them. Later, they discovered they could spray large areas, killing thousands or millions. But pest control didn't become high-tech until they discovered ways to control reproduction. With chemical disruptors, it was found that insects could be prevented from being born, solving the problem at the foundation. In the same way, the government began treating opposition control like pest control. They were looking for ways to prevent opposition groups from forming in the first place. If they could disrupt the nervous systems of the “liberals”, the opposition thoughts would fail to jell and the groups would never coalesce.
For the most part, they have achieved this, and they have achieved it with minor use of chemicals. Of course they do spray us and drug us to the gills, but unlike insects, they do not want us dead. They have to limit the chemicals, because they need us alive enough to go to the mall and spend money. They need us alive enough to go to work for DOW and Monsanto and the Department of Defense. Nor do they wish to totally disrupt our ability to procreate. They need slaves in the next generation, so that won't do. They just need us confused, like a bug running around in circles. One way they achieve that is by changing the definitions of words every decade or so.
Anthropologists will tell you that one of the defining characteristics of a human is its ability to use language. What separates us from other animals is our ability to speak and write in complex symbols. Language and manual dexterity have allowed us to do almost all we have done. So disrupting language must be the most powerful weapon against us, short of removing our thumbs. This is why we have seen such a concerted attack on language since the 1950's, not only in the paring down of vocabulary, the jettisoning of grammar, and the ignoring and ignorance of classic literature, but in the unmooring of words from their old definitions. The very ground has been removed beneath speech and writing, and what you learned in a previous decade probably no longer applies.
I first noticed this phenomenon when critiquing physics. To get to the bottom of some prickly modern problems, I was forced to return to old papers and to the original mathematical proofs. Many times I had to go all the way back to Newton or before, to fully comprehend the current mess. What I found was not only mathematical errors in the equations, but the flipping of definitions. Sometimes this was a flipping of a postulate, which is a sort of mathematical definition. But oftentimes it was simply the flipping of a common word like “field” or “particle” or “real.” Surprisingly, most of the flipping of words I found happened in the 20th century. This is surprising since I would have thought going in that the language of Newton or Maxwell would be the most foreign and changed, due to its age. But this was not the case. Very little flipping of terms happened in the 18th or 19th centuries. Most of it happened in the 20th, and the deeper into the 20th century I got the more I found.
To me this indicates that word warfare was not perfected until the 20th century. It was used to full effect first by early Marxists, art critics, culture critics, and quantum scientists, then discovered by the government, which finally used it to confuse and ultimately derail opposition. I am not interested in the evolution and history of word warfare here, and others may trace it back much further, to Hegel, Kant, or even back to Plato. What matters in this context is that word warfare, though used on a limited basis since the beginning of time, wasn't successful in completely destroying continuity and standards until the past half-century, and that it was the US Government that perfected it. Not Nazi Germany, not Russia, not China, but the US. These other governments certainly recognized and made wide use of word warfare, but the US has been the first to use an all-encompassing media and a total co-option of language to control its population with little force. The US hasn't needed a purge of the intellectuals or a mass killing to instill fear and obedience. It has been able to limit and ultimately destroy opposition by disrupting human thought at the level of language.
Of course the program has included outright lying on a mass scale, decades of manufactured events, manufactured and fake news, and the other known methods of propaganda and thought control. But little or no attention has been given to subverting of language at the most basic levels, by changing definitions on purpose, dislodging grammar, and keeping all “standards” in constant flux. I could go through hundreds of other definitions of common words, showing how they have been flipped, but I am not that kind of researcher or writer. That is a job for someone else. All I intend to supply my reader here is the main lines of the argument and the conclusion. By understanding how many common words have been flipped and pushed, you may be able to better resist your own indoctrination and confusion. You may be able to read more closely and with more attention to exactly how you are being spun.
In the case of the word “liberal”, I recommend you consider how much damage can be done to a set of ideas by reversing the definitions beneath them. For instance, if you are like me or Mike Adams and still hold to a set of beliefs that would have put you in the liberal camp in 1968, how might you be affected if all your tags and groups are re-assigned? It makes it harder to find your allies, for a start, since all the signage has changed. You may join any number of groups who call themselves conservatives or liberals, and still never find anyone who holds your opinions. Those old 1960's liberals lost their tag, so what do they call themselves now? They aren't liberals, they aren't conservatives, what are they? Where are they meeting and under what banner?
The truth is they have been splintered and confused. Losing their natural tag has been devastating, in and of itself. Old soldiers knew that if you could steal the enemy's flag, it might be psychologically equivalent to killing one of their leaders. Standards are very important to group identity, and a flag is not called a standard for nothing. Well, a tag is like a flag, and when the hippies' tag was stolen from them and re-assigned to a different group, they were thrown into confusion. When the 60's liberals were left without a tag, they began the confusion by arguing about a new tag, or how to refine the old tag. Should they now be neo-liberals, progressives, Greens, what? As you know, people can and do argue about titles and tags and words until the cows come home, for all the good it does them. Here we are in 2013, and the 1960's liberals still haven't figured out who they are or what to call themselves. Mike Adams calls himself a conservative, others call themselves libertarians, others call themselves Greens or anarchists, but there is no continuity or power. It all dissolved with the loss of the language.
We see the same thing with the black community, which has seen its title and tag change with every decade. Infiltrators have proposed changes based on manufactured arguments, and the leaders have allowed themselves to be fooled. First they were negroes, then blacks, then Afro-Americans, then African-Americans, then People of Color, and so on. Not only could outsiders not keep up, the blacks couldn't keep up either. There was no continuity, so confusion reigned. Again, this was not an accident or a mistake. This was part of the program, and the changes came from outside. The black community, like the liberals as a whole, were finessed by infiltrators. The CHAOS was created.
The same thing applies to the woman's movement. By whispering in ears, infiltrators convinced women to be offended by the word “lady”, then by the word “girl”, then by the word “woman”—which was replaced by womyn—then by the word “female”, which also included the masculine component “male”. By 1990, women had no tag for themselves. Like The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, they were beings without names. You could only point to one of that gender and silently chew the air. As with blacks, this could only confuse everyone, but the central characters the most. Men were at a loss, and so said pretty much nothing, but women were even more confused. They said a lot, of course, but none of it to the point. A tempest without direction was the only outcome, and this was just as the programmers wanted it. Empowerment has been the catchword, but the last thing really desired. While blacks and women and liberals talked empowerment, they were being eviscerated by the loss of language. Their empowerment meant nothing, since it has also been secretly redefined as disempowerment.
George Orwell famously warned us of word warfare in 1948, with his Ministry of Truth and its Newspeak, but few have realized how pervasive it already was then, and how ubiquitous it has become since. Although the entire language has been flipped multiple times, most assume Orwell's world is still somewhere in the future: something to look out for. Most see only the obvious examples of Newspeak, like the Patriot Act or the Peacekeeper missile. But these overt cases are the least dangerous, precisely because they are overt. Much more sinister are the thousands of examples that have gone unrecognized. Word warfare has continued to remain mostly undetected, and the difficulty in detecting it has made it especially insidious. The government doesn't even have to ban or discourage study of Orwell, for instance, since it has found that many or most people take a warning of something as evidence it isn't happening. Most assume that because Orwell warned of Newspeak, and because Orwell is not discouraged or banned by the government, the government must not be running Orwellian programs. They assume the instances of Newspeak must be limited to a few high-profile and therefore defused cases, like the ones I mentioned above. Everyone can see through titles like the Peacekeeper missile, right? So how dangerous could that be? It is just an inside joke, right?
Like many other things, propaganda is best hidden in plain sight. It is most covert when placed where people least expect it—which is everywhere all the time. People expect a little buffoonery like the Peacekeeper missile, but they don't expect a Spanish Inquisition. That is, they don't expect everything to be a lie. It never occurs to them that the entire structure around them—language, news, media, entertainment, science, art, everything—is manufactured and false. They can even see a movie like The Matrix, which tells them precisely that, and they think it is something to do with the future, or with robot bugs. But it has nothing to do with the future. Both Orwell's Ministry of Truth and the Matrix have been functional for decades. The book 1984 was written in 1948, and they tell you Orwell switched the last two numbers as a convenience, warning that such a society might arise in about 40 years. But that isn't the right analysis. The year 1948 is important because it is the year after the founding of the CIA. Orwell actually wrote 1984 in 1947, and the book was published in 1948. Well, 1947 is year one of the CIA, which is the real Ministry of Truth, the real Matrix.
Military intelligence has since split into a hundred tentacles, with the CIA now just one of many factions and acronyms. But it is this squid that is the Matrix. It is this squid that is the Ministry of Truth.
So why should Hollywood be warning you of it? Because Hollywood was one of the first things engulfed by the squid. The CIA had taken over Hollywood and the central parts of the mainstream media by the late 1950's, since it needed both for postwar propaganda. It never released control, and and has even tightened it since then. But some in Hollywood and film are not happy about it, and they resist to the extent they can.
So why does the CIA allow films like The Matrix? Aren't they afraid we will read the signs right? Not really. They have found by long experience that almost no one reads signs right. The few that do are ignored as cranks. Besides, the best way to create misdirection is to send people as close to the truth as you can, then divert them on a clever curve away from it. So the intelligence communities actually welcome films like The Matrix. Often, they even create them. If they don't create them from the ground up as purposeful misdirection, they take a finished product and tweak it to create the misdirection. By making just a few subtle changes, a script can be turned from a clear exposé to perfect propaganda, diverting the audience in a beeline away from the truth. Blame can even be shifted away from the guilty to the innocent, framing a desired enemy. Just remove the CIA agent as bad guy and replace him with a robot or Satanist or Tea Partier, and the job is done.
Because the intelligence community now has control over almost everything you see or hear, they can make these last-minute changes. It has been admitted by the mainstream media itself that the CIA and other agencies are doing this, including the White House. The New York Times admitted in one of its own Op-Eds that this was common procedure. The CIA pre-reads the news, all movies, all TV programs, all books, and most major internet content. It then has the option of line-by-line deletion or addition, and this is where words are flipped, characters are replaced, fake plotlines are introduced, etc. And this is why they also want total internet control. The last things they don't control are minor websites like mine and other personal blogs. Many blogs connected to mainstream sites (like the major papers and magazines, Huffington, Salon, MSN, Opednews) are edited, censored, or otherwise controlled—and some of them are ghostwritten by the CIA itself. But online, some content still makes it through completely uncensored. The current way the CIA deals with that inconvenience is to blackwash this information as unreliable, un-peer-reviewed, and un-American, but they would prefer to outlaw it altogether.
Since they don't have the direct spin option on papers like mine, they have to rely on the small size of my readership. They figure that I marginalize myself by my own intelligence. Since only intelligent readers can follow me, my maximum damage is limited to 3% of the population. They don't have to waste any resources marginalizing me, since I am pre-marginalized by Nature. But more popular websites eventually have to be taken over by the squid or squashed.
This allows me to make a somewhat humorous aside. I mentioned above that the US hasn't needed a purging of the intellectuals, and in other places I have joked that this is because a purging of intellectuals in the US would endanger only about a dozen people. But we now see another reason a purging of the intellectuals hasn't been necessary. In the sort of propagandized “democracy” we have—where the masses are controlled by military intelligence via the media—real intellectuals are no danger. In the past, when your average person read books and when the media supplied him with some real information, an intellectual might make a contribution to society and to cultural and political life. But the public has been trained to distrust intellectuals and all other non-government experts. This while at the same time the CIA has replaced all expert commentators with its own talking heads. In the distant past, commentary in the media might have been done by those who knew something of their fields, but now that commentary is instead supplied by “everyman” blowhards like Sean Hannity, who has no degree, no expertise in anything, and who just reads from a script. In such a milieu, all education is obsolete and all educated people can be treated like whooping cranes: proud maybe, and beautiful, but dwindling, antiqued, and ultimately inconsequential.
It is for this reason that the educated are free to say pretty much whatever they like: it just doesn't matter. They can have all the theories they like, and discuss them amongst themselves, and the CIA sees no good reason to intervene. So what if someone writes a book or paper proving the Matrix and revealing all its subtle forms? The book will not find a publisher, will be limited to a tiny audience, and the government may not even have to post a response or tape a denial. The mainstream media can drown out any real news, proof, or discovery with a million manufactured stories. They don't need to censor or outlaw anything, much less murder anyone, since it is much more efficient to simply bury any truth under a slagheap of fake murders, fake celebrity news, and fake commentary. Why create a martyr when it is much easier to create a pauper? Why kill a story when you can bury it without killing it? The media is now so controlled and so ubiquitous, it could bury the Second Coming. Jesus could arrive and begin performing miracles and raising the dead, and the mainstream media would simply set up a bigger and brighter tent nextdoor, with more exciting CGI miracles and dead-raising. Christ wouldn't have a chance. He would be forgotten by Friday, pauperized and back in the carpentry business, building endtables for Pottery Barn.