http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/warfare.htm
The Tavistock "Mother"
The historic center of this mass psywar apparatus is based outside London,
in the Tavistock Center. [2] Established in the aftermath of World War I
under the patronage of the Duke George of Kent (1902-42), the original
Tavistock Clinic, led by John Rawlings Rees, developed as the psychological
warfare center for the royal family and British intelligence. Rees and a
cadre group of Freudian and neo-Freudian psychiatrists, applied wartime
experience of psychological collapse, to create theories about how such
conditions of breakdown could be induced, absent the terror of war. The
result was a theory of mass brainwashing, involving group experience, that
could be used to alter the values of individuals, and through that, induce,
over time, changes in the axiomatic assumptions that govern society.
In the 1930s, Tavistock's extended networks developed a symbiotic
relationship with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, created by
European oligarchical networks, which focussed on the study and criticism of
culture from a neo-Freudian standpoint. In the late 1930s, with its
operations transferred from Germany to the New York area, the Frankfurt
School coordinated the first analysis of the impact of a mass media
phenomenon, i.e., radio, on culture--the Princeton-based ``Radio Research
Project.'' [3]
With the outbreak of World War II, Tavistock operatives took effective
control of the Psychological Warfare Directorate of the British Army, while
its allied network in the United States embedded itself in the American
psychological warfare apparatus, including the Committee on National Morale
and the Strategic Bombing Survey.
By war's end, the combined influence of Tavistock (which became the
Tavistock Institute in 1947) and of the former Frankfurt School operatives,
had created a cadre of ``psychological shock troops,'' as Rees called them,
and ``cultural warriors'' numbering in the several thousands. Today that
network numbers in the several millions around the world, and it is the
single most important factor in determining the design and content of mass
media product.
The "Pictures in Your Head"
In 1922, Walter Lippmann defined the term ``public opinion'' as follows:
``The pictures inside the heads of human beings, the pictures of themselves,
of others, of their needs and purposes, and relationship, are their public
opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by
individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion, with capital
letters.''
Lippmann, who was the first to translate Sigmund Freud's works into English,
was to become one of the most influential of political commentators. [4] He
had spent World War I at the British psychological warfare and propaganda
headquarters in Wellington House, outside of London, in a group that
included Freud's nephew, Eduard Bernays. [5] Lippmann's book Public Opinion,
published one year after Freud's Mass Psychology, which touched on similar
themes, was a product of his tutelage by the Rees networks. It is through
the media, Lippmann writes, that most people come to develop those
``pictures in their heads,'' giving the media ``an awesome power.''
The Rees networks had spent World War I studying the effects of war
psychosis, and its breakdown of individual personality. From their work, an
evil thesis emerged: Through the use of terror, man can be reduced to a
childlike and submissive state, in which his powers of reason are clouded,
and in which his emotional response to various situations and stimuli can
become predictable, or in Tavistockian terms, ``profilable.'' By controlling
the levels of anxiety, it is possible to induce a similar state in large
groups of people, whose behavior can then be controlled and manipulated by
the oligarchical forces for whom Tavistock worked. [6]
Mass media were capable of reaching large numbers of people with programmed
or controlled messages, which is key to the creation of ``controlled
environments'' for brainwashing purposes. As Tavistock's researches showed,
it was important that the victims of mass brainwashing not be aware that
their environment was being controlled; there should thus be a vast number
of sources for information, whose messages could be varied slightly, so as
to mask the sense of external control. Where possible, the messages should
be offered and reinforced through ``entertainments,'' which could be
consumed, without apparent coercion, and with the victim perceiving himself
as making a choice between various options and outlets.
....
In the mid-1970s, Eric Trist, who, until his death in 1993, headed
Tavistock's operations in the United States, and Tavistock's main media
``expert,'' Fred Emery, reported on their findings of the impact of 20 years
of television on American society. In Emery's 1975 work, Futures We Are In,
they reported that the content of programming was no longer as important as
the sheer amount of television viewing. Average daily viewing time had risen
steadily over the two decades since the introduction of the medium, such
that by the mid-1970s, it ranked as a daily activity only behind sleep and
work, at almost six hours a day (since then, it has risen still further, to
more than seven hours, with the addition of video games, home videos, and so
on); among school-age children, the time spent viewing television ranked
just behind school attendance. These findings, Tavistock indicated, strongly
suggested that television was like an addictive drug. Similarly, Emery
reported on neurological studies which, he claimed, showed that repeated
television viewing ``shuts down the central nervous system of man.''
Whether this claim holds up under scientific scrutiny, Emery and Trist
present persuasive argument that general, extensive television viewing
lowers the capacity for conceptual thinking about what is being presented on
the screen. The studies show that the mere presence of images on television,
especially within appropriate news or documentary format, but also within
general viewing, tends to ``validate'' those images, and imbue them with a
sense of ``reality.''
Trist and Emery find nothing wrong with such developments, which indicate
that television is producing a brain-dead generation. Rather, they show how
this development fits into a larger global plan for social control,
implemented by Tavistock and its allied networks on behalf of its sponsors.
Society, they state in A Choice of Futures, a book published in the same
time period, has been plunging through progressively lowered states of
mental awareness, to a point where even the Orwellian fascist state is not
attainable. At this point, thanks to television and other mass media,
mankind is in a state of dissociation, whose political outcome will be
manifested in a ``Clockwork Orange'' society, named for the book by the late
Anthony Burgess, in which roving youth gangs habitually commit acts of
random violence, and then return home to watch the news about what they have
done on the ``tube.''
The brainwashers point out that this development, for which they say the
violence of Northern Ireland is a model, was not induced by the effects of
television alone. Society has been put through ``social turbulence'' in a
series of economic and political shocks, which included the war in Vietnam,
the oil price shocks, and the assassination of political leaders. The
psychological impact of those events, for whose responsibility they neglect
to properly ascribe to the Anglo-American establishment, were magnified by
their being brought into homes, in gory and terrifying detail, by television
news broadcasts. Under the Trist-Emery scenario, one can imagine hearing the
tag line for a future late news program: ``The end of the world. Details at
11.''
Consolidating the Paradigm
In a 1991 anthology of the work's of Tavistock which he edited, Trist wrote
that all of the international ``nodes'' or centers of the institute's
brainwashing apparatus were deployed for the central purpose of
consolidating the paradigm-shift to a ``post-industrial world order.'' Their
goal, he stated, was to make the shift irreversible. In this work, and in
other locations, Trist, like Alexander King, urges a mass ``reeducational''
campaign to break the last vestiges of national resistance, especially
within the United States, to this new, one-world order.
Approximately ten1 years earlier, another of Tavistock's minions, Bertram
Gross, in a paper delivered to a 1981 World Future Society conference
attended by Al Gore, provided a glimpse of what this ``new world order''
might look like. Gross argued that in the period ahead, the world would be
offered what Tavistock likes to call a ``critical choice''--a set of
options, all of which appear to be bad, but, because of applied terror and
pressure of events, a choice is nonetheless forced and the ``less bad''
option taken. Western industrial society will break down into chaos; this
chaos can, he said, either lead to a fascism of the authoritarian type that
the British helped install in Nazi Germany, or to a more humane and
benevolent form of fascism, which Gross called a ``friendly fascism.'' The
choice, Gross proclaimed, is to attempt to go back to the old industrial
paradigm, under which there will be Nazi fascism; or, to embrace
post-industrialism, where there will be a ``friendly fascism.'' The latter,
he said, is clearly preferable, since it is merely a transition to a new
``global information world order,'' which will involve more personal choice
and freedom, a true open and participatory mass democracy.
For Gross, the choice is clear: In any case, there will be pain and
suffering; but only the ``friendly fascism'' of the global information
order, of a society wired together by cable television, satellites, and
computer lines, offers hope for a better ``future.''
Who shall administer this ``friendly fascist'' world order? Gross explained
that there now truly exists a ``Golden International,'' a term that he
credited to the late Communist International (Comintern) leader Nikolai
Bukharin. It is an enlightened international elite, based within the
powerful European-centered oligarchy that controls the global multinational
communications industry, as well as other critical resources and global
finance. This elite must be instructed and informed by the intelligence of
the Tavistock networks; they must be shown that the great masses of
television-fixated mental zombies can be won easily to this brave new world,
through inducements of entertainments and the endless supply of
``information.'' Once the masses are won over, through ``education,'' then
the resistance within national sectors will collapse.
In 1989, under the initiative of Trist, Tavistock convened a seminar at Case
Western Reserve University to discuss the means to bring about a
``stateless'' international fascism--a new global information world order.
In 1991, Tavistock devoted its journal, Human Relations, to the publication
of the papers from that conference. In several of the papers, the call went
out for the deployment of the mass media on behalf of this project.
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Tavistock's Language Project: The Origins of "Newspeak"
Printed in The American Almanac, May 5, 1997
At the start of World War II, Tavistock operatives, including Brig. Gen.
John Rawlings Rees in the Psychological Warfare Directorate, were busy at
work on a secret language project. The target of that project was not the
``enemy,'' but the English language itself, and the English-speaking people.
The Tavistock crowd had picked up on the work of British linguist C.K.
Ogden, who had created a simplified version of the English language using
some 850 basic words (650 nouns and 200 verbs), with rigid rules for their
use. Called ``Basic English,'' or ``Basic'' for short, the product was
ridiculed by most English-speaking intellectuals; Ogden's proposal to
translate Classic literature, such as Marlowe and Shakespeare, into Basic,
was rightfully attacked as an effort to trivialize the greatest expressions
of English-language culture.
But in the bowels of the psywar directorate, the concepts behind Basic were
key to large-scale control of dangerous ``thought.'' A simplified English
language limits the degrees of freedom of expression, and inhibits the
transmission of meaning through metaphor. (For a more detailed discussion of
language and metaphor, see Lyndon LaRouche, ``On the Subject of Metaphor,''
Fidelio, Fall 1992. It is then easy to create a ``reality'' that can be
shaped through the mass media, such as radio. A reduced language is a
straitjacket for the human mind.
The British Ministry of Information, which controlled all broadcasting and
news dissemination, decided to experiment with the effectiveness of BASIC
was asked to produce was asked to produce some newscasts in Basic, which
were broadcast in a number of foreign sections of the BBC, including the
Indian Section, which included among its operatives 1984 author George
Orwell and close friend Guy Burgess, who later was to be involved in
Britain's biggest postwar Soviet spy scandal. The results were carefully
monitored.
Those involved quickly discovered that, with some modification, the language
was ideal to present a censored, edited version of the news. Since it lent
itself to simple, declarative statements, it gave those statements the
character of fact, even though the information being reported was heavily
censored or even self-admitted propaganda.
Some historians have claimed that Orwell's ``Newspeak,'' in his 1984, is a
simple parody of Basic. To the contrary: Orwell was one of the most avid
supporters of the Basic concept of reduced language. What appealed to him
most was its simplicity and its apparent ability to abolish ``jargon.'' He
also thought that anything without real meaning, when reduced to its Basic
translation, would be easily seen to be absurd. The utopian Orwell, in his
letters, expressed concern over the power of the Ministry of Information
(Miniform, as it was known) to control and manage the news. It was that
aspect of the process, not Basic's degrading of the English language, that
he parodied in 1984 with his ``Newspeak,'' controlled by Minitrue, the
Ministry of Truth.
British "empires of the mind"
Following the presentation of a special report of the Ministry of
Information on these findings in 1943, the Basic project was placed on
``highest priority'' in the War Cabinet, at the insistence of Prime Minister
Winston Churchill. The project, now-declassified papers reveal, was to be
expanded to include work in the United States. While not revealing the
secret research on the psychological implications of Basic, Churchill became
its cheerleader, promoting the new language as the basis for a renewed bond
between Britain and its former colony, America. On Sept. 6, 1943, in a
speech at Harvard University, Churchill called for ``a new Boston Tea
Party,'' to overturn the English language and replace it with Basic. Telling
his audience of Anglophiles that they were at the ``headstream'' of a mighty
cultural sea change that would have a ``health-giving effect,'' he declared
that the power to control language ``offer[s] far better prizes than taking
away people's provinces or lands or grinding them down in exploitation. The
empires of the future are the empires of the mind.''
But the public side of the project met resistance from the British and
American public, who, while not necessarily grasping the full implications
of Basic, nonetheless resented being told how to speak. And there was no
support forthcoming from the U.S. President, Franklin Roosevelt, who
considered Basic ``silly.''
However, reports from the Ministry of Information to the special War Cabinet
committee said that the language was unwieldy. Rather than overturn the
English language, the reports argued, it were easier to simplify the
latter's usage by example of the mass media news broadcasts. Radio
newscasts, which had been made up of long descriptive commentaries before
the war, took on the shorter formats that are featured today. The long
sentences, often with literary overtones, gave way to shorter, more direct
sentences and simple vocabulary.
Television news has adopted this linguistic style: simple direct sentences,
with a very, very limited vocabulary. Television newscasts, never too
informative and erudite, have become less so in recent years, as they were
forcibly dumbed down. When Roone Arledge, the former head of ABC sports,
took over its poorly rated news division in the mid-1970s, he demanded that
news broadcasts be simplified and made easier to understand.
In a 1979 article in Washingtonian magazine, media expert and political
scientist John David Barber supported Arledge's approach to the news,
arguing that its language ``passes right over the head of the great lower
half of the American electorate.'' He compiled a list of 31 words that he
thought should be excised from a CBS news broadcast; included was the term
``political conspiracy.'' Wrote Barber, ``There is no way that [that]
vocabulary can catch and hold the average high school graduate.'' Most news
directors agree with that assessment: Vocabulary analysis of newscasts
reveals that, other than specialized terms, names of places, and proper
names, far less than Basic's 850-word vocabulary is employed. The vocabulary
of non-news television is even more degraded and limited.
Recent studies have shown that the vocabulary of the average American, while
not quite at the Basic level of 850 words (excluding proper nouns and
specialized terms), is plunging toward that level.
