The Enemy of the Moment

People seem to like being scared. Haunted houses, horror movies, scary stories. Pretty much anything spooky so long as it doesn’t get too out of hand. For the past few years, terrorism has been our favorite phantom menace - the evil force that lurks among us and can’t be controlled or predicted, except by vigilance and the endless telling of spooky stories to scare our socks off. Lately though, it seems that the terrorist boogeyman is getting boring and people are looking for a new thrill - or are being handed one.

As Billmon points out:

The war on Al Qaeda wasn’t sweeping enough, so it had to become the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. Iraq was a great emotional ride while it lasted … but now that it’s degenerated into the dry heat version of Vietnam, it’s no help at all — not just because America is losing, not just because the war is unpopular, but because it’s no longer dramatic enough to justify the kind of emotional mobilization that feeds the totalitarian impulse.

So the brown invaders crossing “our” border and daring to demonstrate in “our” streets have become the new Islamofascists — the necessary enemy of the moment.

The reason this “new” threat which is now our nation’s “number one problem” seems so artificial is that it appeared out of nowhere almost overnight in the public mind, despite the fact that we’ve faced these problems for decades as a nation. They have only been trotted out and injected into the cultural bloodstream because our other drug, terrorism, is wearing off. People are getting immune to its effects.

So we’re witnessing an upping of the ante, which - like terrorism - reduces us to what Spiral Dynamics would call a level two “purple” meme where we are reacting according to “tribal” instincts. We seek as our primary psychological fulfillment safety & security, protection from harm and family bonds (ie, white skins versus brown skins). Bundled with this low level tribal social mentality is an “animistic” worldview which is “threatening and full of mysterious powers, spirit beings which must be placated and appeased.”

Occult Warfare

Lucky for us, the U.S. military and intelligence organizations have a long and fruitful history of dealing with superstitious groups of people and the spirit beings of mysterious powers which keep them up at night. It’s called psyops, or psychological operations. One exceptionally interesting figure in this world was Air Force Brigadier General Edward G. Lansdale, whom Oliver Stone believed may have been the “operational head” of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and who was also allegedly photographed at Dealy Plaza. An article on a U.S. Army website describes Lansdale as “a former advertising executive who almost single-handedly prevented a communist takeover of the Philippines.”

And from an interesting article on the Parascope website, we find the following accounts of Lansdale’s astonishing psyops successes:

Lansdale believed that the key asset of the psychological combatant is a thorough understanding of the target audience’s beliefs and values. The mores and myths that shape a society’s culture, he argued, must be exploited if a psywar campaign is to be effective. Lansdale applied his strategy ruthlessly in the Philippines, where he served as the CIA’s chief operative during the early 1950s counterinsurgency campaign against the country’s Huk rebels.

“To the superstitious, the Huk battleground was a haunted place filled with ghosts and eerie creatures,” Lansdale later wrote. One of his favorite psywar stunts “played upon the popular dread of asuang, or vampire” to drive the guerrillas from Huk-held territory:

“A combat psywar squad was brought in. It planted stories among town residents of an asuang living on the hill where the Huks were based. Two nights later, after giving the stories time to make their way up to the hill camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush along the trail used by the Huks. When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the asuang had got him and that one of them would be next if they remained on that hill. When daylight came, the whole Huk squadron moved out of the vicinity.”

Later employed in Vietnam, Lansdale also cued into the Asian fascination with astrology, paying North Vietnamese astrologers “to write predictions about coming disasters to certain Vietminh leaders and undertakings, and to predict unity in the south.” But the fascination the defense industry had with matters of myth and magic didn’t end there either. It only gets weirder:

In 1964, the U.S. Army commissioned one of the most extraordinary strategy papers ever produced in the history of unconventional warfare. Titled “Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic, and Other Psychological Phenomena, and Their Implications on Military and Paramilitary Operations in the Congo,” the report is a treatise on paranormal combat, discussing “counter-magic” tactics to suppress rebels who are backed by witch-doctors, charms, and magic potions.

The supernatural warfare report was authored by James R. Price and Paul Jureidini, two analysts at the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) at American University in Washington, D.C. […]

The report is both anthropological and strategic, demonstrating the degree to which the study of human cultures can be employed as a weapon. Price and Jureidini worked for SORO’s Counterinsurgency Information Analysis Center, which the Army hired to prepare an analysis of “the role of supernatural or superstitious concepts in a counterinsurgency in the Congo,” according to the report’s introduction. The study was thought necessary because of “the purported use of witchcraft, sorcery, and magic by insurgent elements.” The report elaborated:

“Magical practices are said to be effective in conditioning dissident elements and their followers to do battle with Government troops. Rebel tribesmen are said to have been persuaded that they can be made magically impervious to Congolese army firepower. Their fear of the government has thus been diminished and, conversely, fear of the rebels has grown within army ranks.”

After reviewing the phenomenon of supernatural insurgency, the report weighs the costs and benefits of trying to use “counter-magic” against the rebels — to co-opt these ideas instead of trying to wipe them out. In regions “where insurgents rely upon ‘medicines’ and ritualistic practices to protect them from firepower, the suggestion to devise and employ magical practices in counterinsurgency operations is obvious and tempting,” the report says. For example, “counterinsurgency planners will be able to concoct ‘medicines’ and other devices within in the superstitious framework of the target group, with which to neutralize and overpower the spells cast by insurgent witch-doctors.”

The report ultimately warned though that by promoting these irrational superstitious beliefs, they could be playing with fire.

“Should the central government successfully use occult methods to defeat a movement based upon such methods, the very concepts of sorcery and magic which lend impetus to the insurgencies of the moment may gain strength and acquire even greater trouble-making potential for the future.”

In the end, the report suggests using traditional means — namely, brute force — to suppress the witchcraft warriors. [… The report concluded that] “there is every reason to believe that disciplined troops, proficient in marksmanship, and led by competent officers, can handily dispel most notions of magical invulnerability.”

There also seems to exist a 1967 military document on a similar theme entitled, The Use of Superstitions in Psychological Operations in Vietnam. The introduction lays the groundwork of just how and why manipulating a population’s superstitions works.

A strong superstition or a deeply-held belief shared by a substantial number of the enemy target audience can be used as a psychological weapon because it permits with some degree of probability the prediction of individual or group behavior under a given set of conditions. To use an enemy superstition as a starting point for psychological operations, however, one must be sure of the conditions and control the stimuli that trigger the desired behavior.

The first step in the manipulation of a superstition as an enemy vulnerability is its exact identification and detailed definition of its spread and intensity among the target audience. The second step is to insure friendly control of the stimuli and the capability to create a situation that will trigger the desired superstitious behavior. Both conditions must be met or the psyops effort will not yield the desired results; it might even backfire.

Evidently, there is a long history between the social sciences - specifically anthropology - and the Age of Empires. An article on Army.mil called “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship” details the intimate connections between the two. Particularly interesting is their assertion that anthropology has always been the “hand-maiden of colonialism.”

Anthropology actually evolved as an intellectual tool to consolidate imperial power at the margins of empire. In Britain the development and growth of anthropology was deeply connected to colonial administration. As early as 1908, anthropologists began training administrators of the Sudanese civil service.

The idea was to understand the enemy within the context of his own society (cultural relativism) rather than simply destroying him with brute force. Or rather, to get inside peoples’ minds so that they would bring down their leaders “on their own” (or refrain from doing so, in other instances).

Elimination by Illumination

Such thinking was also applied to the Communist situation in Cuba in the 1960’s, according to an article on a site called Propaganda Matrix:

The Kennedy era, anti-Castro covert action plan Operation Mongoose was designed to destabilize Cuban society and turn it against Fidel Castro. Under the umbrella of this strategy was a program dubbed ‘Elimination by Illumination.’ It is found in the Congressional Record, in “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” November 20, 1975. The plan was developed by an American Intelligence military psy-op specialist named Edward Lansdale.

The operation was to have an American Submarine surface inside Havana harbor at night and project a movie of a Jesus-like figure on the underside of the low-lying clouds that form over the harbor at night. A plane with muffled motors was to have circled just above the clouds while another operative with a loudspeaker exhorted the Cubans below to overthrow “Godless Communism.”

The plan was never put into action but was seriously considered and, as stated, remains in the Congressional Record to this day.

Conspiracy afficianados might recognize a reincarnation of this plan in the form of the relatively obscure Project Blue Beam scenario, which will allegedly be a tool in the arsenal of the New World Order’s plans for a One-World Religion:

The “BLUE BEAM PROJECT” will pretend to be the universal fulfillment of the prophecies of old; as major an event as that which took place 2000 years ago. In principle, it will make use of the sky as a holographic projection screen for space-based laser-generating satellites (star wars). These projectors will project simultaneous images to the four corners of the planet, in every language by region. It deals with the religious aspect of the NEW WORLD ORDER.

[…] Specifically, the “show” will consist of laser projections of multiple holographic images to different parts of the planet, each receiving different images according to the predominating regional religious faith. Not a single area will be excluded. With computer animation and sound effects appearing to come from the depths of space, astonished followers of the various creeds will witness their own returned Messiah in spectacularly convincing lifelike realness.

The various images of Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Krishna, etc., will merge into ONE after “correct explanation” of the mysteries, prophecies and revelations are disclosed. This “ONE GOD” will in fact function as the “Anti-Christ”, who will “explain” that the various scriptures “have been misunderstood”- that the religious of old are responsible for turning brother against brother, nation against nation - that the religions of the world must be abolished to make way for the GOLDEN AGE (NEW AGE) of the One World Religion, representing the One God they see before them.

(See also the Maitreya’s “Day of Declaration” for something weirdly similar possibly in the works) Religious holograms projected into the atmosphere aside, reading through these documents certainly made me wonder what it would look like if the U.S. government turned some of these tricks against its own people (seeing as it seems to be particularly fond lately of treating us the same way as it treats its enemies). What are our superstitions?

According to the author of the above-mentioned Vietnam psyops document, we would have to look for a superstition which is not only widely held, but real and predictable. Now, with our vast array of Christians and atheists and religious minorities in America, it seems unlikely that a hologram of of a caucasian bearded Jesus over Washington, D.C. would necessarily mobilize us to collective action. But what would? Both Henry Kissinger in 1991 and Ronald Reagan in 1988 had some thoughts on what might do it:

“Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government.” - Henry Kissinger

“In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” - Ronald Reagan

Curious speculation from powerful men that is. Do they know something we don’t? Something which former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister Paul Hellyer saw fit to point out as recently as last year:

“The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, “The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide.”

And then there is the testimony of Carol Rosin in 2000 before Congress about her old boss, Wernher Von Braun (originally a Nazi scientist turned US missile and NASA man):

“He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy….Then terrorists would be identified….Then we were going to identify third-world country “crazies.” We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons. The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.

Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.

And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card. “And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie.”

Aliens and UFO’s, of course, cut across all the strata of religious, political and economic divisions within our country. Thanks to thousands of hours of television and movies, we all have a fairly uniform vision and fear of the alien menace that lurks just beyond our atmosphere. We’ve seen the crop circles and cow mutilations and abduction reports and children’s drawings and X-Files episodes. I’ve said it myself elsewhere on this site that aliens - not the atomic bomb - were the single biggest thing I was scared of as a kid. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. The imagery is embedded deeply in all of our subconscious minds. For later activation in some kind of supernatural psyops campaign?

What can I say - I kinda like being scared. But I also like being able to pick out who my enemies are rather than having them handed down to me from military strategists and social planners - since after all, there’s a good chance it’s them!

aliens, anthropology, army, conspiracy, cuba, fear, ghosts, government, history, immigration, kennedy, magic, military, new world order, psy ops, psyops, sociology, superstition, vampires, vietnam