BRAINWASHING IN AMERICA: WHY FEW DARE CALL IT CONSPIRACY
This excellent article from 2001 is just as relevant, if not more so today than ever. - W.E.
BeritKjos
"Information is useful only if citizens can put it into a framework of knowledge and use it to solve problems, form values, and make choices. Education for sustainability will help them make individual and collective decisions that both benefit themselves and promote the development of sustainable communities. [It] must involve everyone." [1] President [Clinton]'s Council on Sustainable Development
"...absolute behavior control is imminent.... The critical point of behavior control, in effect, is sneaking up on mankind without his self-conscious realization that a crisis is at hand. Man will... never self-consciously know that it has happened." [2] Raymond Houghton, To Nurture Humaneness, ASCD (curriculum arm of the NEA), 1970"The Protestant Ethic will atrophy as more and more enjoy varied leisure and guaranteed sustenance.... Most people will tend to be hedonistic..."[3] [2] Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program (B-STEP), Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1969."We were trained in all phases of warfare, both psychological and physical for the destruction of the Capitalistic society and Christian civilization. In one portion of our studies we went thoroughly into the matter of psychopolitics. This was the art of capturing the minds of a nation through brainwashing and fake mental health... During the past few years I have noted with horror the increase of psychopolitical warfare upon the American public." [4] Kenneth Goff, member of the U.S. Communist Party from 1936 to 1939.
Brainwashing is not, as some anti-Christian educators and students contend, the Biblical process of training our children to love and follow God. The word "brainwashing" refers to a planned, step-by-step attempt to "wash" family-taught beliefs from the minds of those who oppose government ideology.
In America, it would mean replacing the old Biblical values and world view with a new way of thinking that would support a totalitarian agenda. In other words, every child must become a peace child, a willing and active servant of a new world order.
A massive world-wide partnership is pioneering new strategies for social transformation. The media, the entertainment industry, computer companies, government agencies, educational institutions, the United Nations and its accredited non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have all joined together in a common quest for a global mind change. They seek solidarity -- a worldwide unity based on a new set of beliefs and values. "Obsolete" and "exclusive" loyalties to national sovereignty, Biblical values, and the unadulterated U.S. Constitution stand in their way.
Conforming the masses to their way of thinking requires all the sophisticated tools and tactics developed at the various "behavioral science research" institutes and "education laboratories" established first in England, then in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and finally in the United States. If these psycho-social engineers win their battle against an unsuspecting public, they would "wash" away individual thinking, free speech and all the other "rights" that have made America unique. The vacuum would be filled with lofty ideals, enticing images and deceptive promises designed to mold minds that match their global vision. Group thinking and other controls and "incentives" would enforce compliance. (See Mind Control and The UN Plan for Your Mental Health)
Bombard children with mind-changing suggestions
A familiar tale told to first-graders in Pennsylvania illustrates both the tactics and the planned transformation of the world. We all know the story of the Little Red Hen who wanted some bread to eat. She asked some of her barnyard friends to help make it. But the cat, the dog, and the goat all said "no." Finally she did all the work herself. Yet, when the bread was done and its fragrance spread throughout the farm, her unwilling neighbors were more than willing to help her eat it.
"Won't you share with us?" they begged.
"No," she answered. "Since you didn't help, you don't get anything."
In the context of traditional values, the moral of the story is: you get what you work for. But those who have learned to think and see from the new global perspective are led to a different conclusion. Listen to the kinds of questions the first grade teacher asked her class:
"Why was the Little Red Hen so stingy? Isn't it only right that everyone gets to eat? Why wouldn't she share what she had with some who had none?"[5]
The concerned mother who heard and reported this story asked, "What kinds of values were the children taught?" The new interpretation emphasizes love and sharing, but what is missing? How might it confuse a child's values?
The answers are obvious. The children were taught socialist values. The new interpretation vilified values that had motivated Americans to be diligent, responsible and fair. The teacher's questions were actually strategic suggestions prompting the group to ridicule traditional values, to see reality and society from the new politically correct perspective, and to intimidate and shame anyone who dared to disagree.
A new mental "framework" is vital to this paradigm shift [see chart]. But to launch the new system, the old patterns must be blurred and broken. The educational establishment knows that children who are fed a daily diet of biblical truth will resist their plans for change. They also know that students bombarded with strategic suggestions and idealized pagan images will probably reject Christianity. If schools can build the "right" kind of framework or filter in the minds of children early enough, the new global beliefs will fit right in. In other words, the battle for the hearts and minds of America's children will be won by the side that first trains children to see reality from its point of view.
This paradigm shift was no mystery to Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World. He wrote that education must provide a mental "framework... within which any piece of information acquired in later life may find its proper and significant place." [6]
In the old days, that mental framework was the biblical world view. But Huxley, like most of today's change agents, called for a New Age/global framework. Like a filter, it blocks facts and ideas that don't fit, but welcomes input that strengthens the framework -- especially when communicated through stories and images that stir the imagination and arouse strong feelings.
This shift from factual education to feeling and experience-based learning began over seventy years ago. Through the decades, the strategies used to manipulate minds in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were developed, first at the Tavistock Clinic near London and later at Germany's Frankfurt School (originally called Frankfurt Institute for Social Research). Their mind-bending methods soon spread to a rising number of psycho-social research centers in America. They were fine-tuned at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford and other American universities, at our regional educational laboratories [7] and at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies where Elian Gonzales was remediated in preparation for his return to a Communist system. (See Elian Starts Re-Education)
Bob Buford, former head of the Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management and the founder of Leadership Network also taught the new "Christian" leadership methods at the Aspen Institute.
More recently, at the 1989 Governor's Conference on Education in Kansas, Dr. Shirley McCune, then head of the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory, summarized the policy in her keynote speech:
“The revolution… in curriculum is that we no longer are teaching facts to children…. We no longer see the teaching of facts and information as the primary outcome of education.”[7]
"What will take the place of logic, fact and analysis in the coming age?" This rhetorical question was raised by Dr. Donald A. Cowan, president emeritus of the University of Dallas. His revealing answer exposes an important step toward the new consensus:
"The central way of thought for this new era will be imagination.... Imagination will be the active, creative agent of culture, transforming brute materials to a higher, more knowable state." [8]
It's easy to see why visionary change agents would prefer to inspire the imagination rather than teach facts and logic. Unlike facts and convictions, the imagination can easily be manipulated. Today's popular books, games and other forms of edutainment bring all kinds of suggestions and images that confuse the old ways of thinking and promote the new values. They twist facts, turn right and wrong upside down, stir the imagination with unthinkable suggestions, redefine words, and give new meanings to old images such as the Little Red Hen. (See Establishing a Global Spirituality)
Eventually, most students become conditioned to see everything through the new politically correct mental filter. The sight of an old social symbol (i.e. flag) or the sound of an word they have learned to hate (pastor, evil, capitalism, etc.) can now trigger emotional reactions that cannot be resolved with facts and logic.
A simple example of this process was exposed by a Christian teacher in Sunnyvale CA. During a public elementary school assembly, the students sang the words of the Peacemakers' Planetary Anthem to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner. This melody, which has symbolized freedom to those who have loved America, now became a tactical trigger used to turn hearts from the old ways to the new vision:
O Say can you see by the one light in all
A New Age to embrace at the call of the nations,
Where our children can play in a world without war
Where we stand hand in hand in the grace of creation,
Where the rivers run clean through forests pristine....
Inspiring, isn't it? The mental images behind those words illustrate the "visioning" part of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) as well as Total Quality Management (TQM). Both use the consensus process to create the collective consciousness needed for the new communities and social organizations.
In the classroom, this process of change often begins with planned "visions" that plant vivid but unrealistic goals into children's minds and emotions.
Next, students must learn to visualize scary images of the current crisis. The crisis is vital to the process. It provides the justification for environmental activism, government control, and unthinkable changes. So, in stark contrast to the lofty ideal in the song above, the students must learn to feel the pain of a dying earth abused by the ruling generation. The colorful classroom manual on global change, Rescue Mission Planet Earth, fits the bill. It is full of scary, sensational pictures and misguided children's opinions that fire the imagination and fuel anger.
Trained teacher/facilitators turn this anger toward parents and grandparents who must bear the blame for destroying our planet. This is important, because -- as in totalitarian countries around the world -- children must learn to submit to state-defined values and loyalties -- not their parents or traditional values.
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In Rescue Mission Planet Earth, page after page of pseudo-science and twisted facts prepare the reader to follow the call to political action on behalf of the United Nations and planet Earth. Unless they know the facts, children and their teachers will have little resistance to the heart-breaking images of dying trees, starving children, abused women and an overcrowded planet drowning in pollution and rising oceans.
As Al Gore wrote in Earth in the Balance, "I strongly urge the establishment of a Mission to Planet Earth, a worldwide monitoring system staffed by children...design to rescue the global environment."
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It's all part of the plan: create and/or publicize a crisis, vilify the "enemy of the people", then market the pre-planned global solution to the world -- starting with the children. As in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the school becomes a boot camp for an army of angry and self-righteous rescuers, ready to argue using their feelings, not facts, against anything that opposes their new and narrow idealism. (See third point in Paradigm Shift)
Rescue Mission Planet Earth is nothing less than "the children's version" of the United Nations' Agenda 21. Sponsored by UNESCO and other UN agencies and promoted by the President's Council on Sustainable Development (see Local Agenda 21), the propaganda-filled children's book helps create the needed "gap" between inspiring visions and a perceived crisis scary enough to evoke strong feelings, change values and motivate children to government-led social action.
"We have to re-orient education so that we turn out planetary carers (sic)," explained David R. Woollcombe [9], President of Peace Child International and head of the Rescue Mission Planet Earth project. He also serves as Consultant to the Global Vision Corporation,[10] a massive international NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) accredited to the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. Behind the backs of parents around the world, it works to transform the goals, the methods, the leaders, and the process of education. "And that," continued Mr. Woollcombe,
"...requires, as Agenda 21 said, a re-orientation of education towards sustainable development. It's a revolution we're talking about here! It's going to require new materials, it's going to require much greater involvement by young people themselves in their own teaching and education, because actually, adults don't know as much and don't care as much about the environment as many young people do. And it's going to require a much better sort of facultative education, where teacher and students together are on this exploratory journey about how you can square the circle between economic growth and prosperity...." [11]
Before you dismiss Global Vision's power and influence, consider a few of its partners and sponsors. They include UN agencies such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Centre for Human Settlements and the UN Centre for Human Rights.
It also includes numerous foundations, environmental groups, educational institutions, and media and corporate giants such as the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Princeton University Centre of International Studies, Columbia University Department of Religion, Mystic Fire Video, Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, The Image Bank, Bell Labs, Robert Muller, Noel Brown, Federico Mayor, Nafis Sadik, Maurice and Hanne Strong (See World Heritage "Protection?"), Gro Harlem Brundtland (Head of The World Health Organization), the Dalai Lama, and movie moguls Bernardo Bertolucci and Martin Scorsese. All have joined their talents and resources in a common pursuit of the global consciousness envisioned by the United Nations.
A "new way of thinking"
In 1994, President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development took a big step toward that global vision. It met with an influential group of like-minded change agents at the Presidio – the former army base in San Francisco that now houses the Gorbachev Foundation USA and dozens of other UN-related organizations. Its partners included the UN Environmental Programme, the EPA, the U.S. Departments of Education, Labor, State and Energy, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the American Federation of Teachers, Stanford, Colombia and other major universities, the Sierra Club... and the organizers of the Rescue Mission Planet Earth project.
Their joint report, “Education for Sustainability,” became a model for sustainable education. Quoting David Orr, author of Earth in Mind, it states,
"One result [of formal] education is that students graduate without knowing how to think in whole systems, how to find connections, how to ask big questions, and how to separate the trivial from the important. Now more than ever, however, we need people who think broadly and who understand systems, connections, patterns and root causes."[12] emphasis added
"Root causes" involve far more than ecology. Anything that blocks the general acceptance of the new global ideology is suspect and must be challenged. Traditional beliefs and values rank high on the list of villains to their vision of peace. For example, an international "Declaration on Tolerance," prepared by UNESCO and signed by its member nations, shows one of the major "root causes:"
- "Tolerance involves the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism."
- "Scientific studies and networking should be undertaken to coordinate the international community's response to this global challenge, including analysis of root causes and effective countermeasures, as well as research and monitoring... "
- "Promote rational tolerance teaching methods that will address the cultural, social, economic, political and religious sources of intolerance-- major roots of violence and exclusion." Emphasis added [13]
The earlier statement from Education for Sustainability stressed the "need" for "people who think broadly and who understand systems, connections, patterns and root causes" from a predetermined perspective. This kind of thinking is -- and always have been -- crucial to brainwashing in totalitarian regimes with a global mission.
A basic goal of UNESCO’s worldwide program for "lifelong learning" was summarized in Our Creative Diversity, the 1995 book-sized report from the UN Commission on Culture and Development. Published by UNESCO, it tells us that,
"The challenge to humanity is to adopt new ways of thinking, new ways of acting, new ways of organizing itself in society, in short, new ways of living." [14]
This "new way of thinking" has become the standard for mental health in America. (See The UN Plan for Your Mental Health) As head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala helped organize The National Mental Health Services Knowledge Exchange Network. Ponder its definition for mental health:
"Mental health refers to how a person thinks, feels, and acts when faced with life's situations. It is how people look at themselves, their lives, and the other people in their lives ...and explore choices." [15]
Do you wonder what Dr. Shalala and her network of health planners would consider good thinking? Or bad thinking? This definition doesn't tell us. But Al Gore's 1992 best-seller, Earth in the Balance, helps answer the question:
"The fifth major goal of the Global Marshall Plan should be . . . to organize a worldwide education program to promote a more complete understanding of the crisis. In the process, we should actively search for ways to promote a new way of thinking about the current relationship between human civilization and the earth." [16]
Vice-President Gore was referring to an environmental crisis with psychological overtones. As we pointed out in the article on Al Gore's Vision of Global Salvation, he has diagnosed our basic social problem in America and suggested a solution:
"...we feel increasingly distant from our roots in the earth...we lost our feeling of connectedness to the rest of nature."[17]
"The richness and diversity of our religious tradition throughout history is a spiritual resource long ignored by people of faith, who are often afraid to open their minds to teachings first offered outside their own system of belief. But the emergence of a civilization in which knowledge moves freely and almost instantaneously throughout the world has. . . spurred a renewed investigation of the wisdom distilled by all faiths. This panreligious perspective may prove especially important where our global civilization's responsibility for the earth is concerned." [18] emphasis added
Al Gore's "panreligious perspective" has helped lay the foundation for a global environmental ethic. His vision of a "world education program" is nearing reality. It fits right into the United Nations' education system. This "seamless system" of partnerships and governmental agencies around the world has two main goals:
- Prepare human resources for a global workforce (see Workforce Development Means Life-Long Indoctrination)
- Bring the "thinking" of the world's human resources into alignment and compliance with the new global standards for Solidarity and Sustainable Development. (See The UN Plan for Your Community)
In other words, people must learn "to look at themselves" as part of the collective society, not as individuals. Their sense of worth must be based on participation in the community and compliance with the new ideology, not on individual beliefs or independent choices. A continual barrage of classroom "assessments" and surveys must test and track how children and their parents think, "explore choices" and draw conclusions.
To win this battle for the minds of the world, the United Nations and its powerful partners have agreed to put aside integrity and employ any possible means to reach their end. But they must still must operate according to guidelines that demand, at least, a perception of the consent of the masses. Therefore, the means to their end must be both subtle and deceptive, employing all the skills and strategies proven successful in the totalitarian countries of the 20th century. Al Gore summarized the attitude behind this global agenda well:
"Adopting a central organizing principle – one agreed to voluntarily – means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action – to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the environment. . . . Minor shifts in policy, moderate improvement in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change—these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary." [19] Emphasis added
Our leaders have already shown us that Al Gore's words, "every tactic and strategy..." includes compromise, lies, deception, and propaganda. Where Biblical values have been dismissed as obsolete, these tactics seem are perfectly acceptable to those who lead this spiritual and psychological war for control of the masses. The UN, with help from the Clinton-Gore administration, have already re-invented the concept of government. Its new global management system would be based on its principle of sustainable development or rather, the 3 E's: Environment, Economy and Equity. It means using a grossly exaggerated view of the environmental "crisis" to re-educate the masses, persuading them to accept totalitarian tactics for redistributing the world's economic resources and creating socialist equality. (See Local Agenda 21- The U.N. Plan for Your Community).
Take a look at the envisioned world of the 21st century:
| OLD PARADIGM | NEW PARADIGM | |
| Beliefs | Based on Bible | Blend of New Age & earth-centered religions |
| Culture | Western individualism | Global solidarity |
| Values |
Based on the Bible
(absolute, unchangeable truth)
|
Based on human idealism
(easy to manipulate)
|
| Morals | Moral boundaries | Sensual freedom |
| Rights | Personal freedom | Social controls |
| Economy | Free enterprise | Socialist collective |
| Government | By the people | By those who control the masses |
The masses would be controlled through the Hegelian dialectic (consensus) process by globalist leaders who would view the world through the new filter of globalism. Polls, propaganda, simple slogans, and continual conflicts would be essential to its success. In fact, the greater the perceived crisis, the faster the leader can assume the coveted political powers that true freedom forbids. President Clinton has already mastered these totalitarian strategies, as Mikhail Gorbachev suggested in a 1993 editorial:
"Bill Clinton will be a great president if he can make America the creator of a new world order based on consensus."[20]
Remember, consensus demands a felt crisis, and today's moral crisis -- created by trading moral boundaries for sensual freedom -- serves the purpose well. The absence of absolute boundaries leads to social chaos which, in turn, calls for social controls that would have been unthinkable under the old paradigm. In other words, the official promotion of sensual indulgence serves a political purpose. Aldous Huxley summarized it well in Brave New World:
"As political and economic freedom... diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator... will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude."[21]
Psalm 2 fit our times:
Why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing?The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together,Against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying,
"Let us break Their bonds in pieces and cast away Their cords from us."He who sits in the heavens shall laugh....Then He shall speak to them in His wrathAnd distress them in His deep displeasure:"Yet I have set My King on My holy hill of Zion." ....Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him.
See chart: Brainwashing & How to Resist It
Endnotes:
[1] Sustainable America: A New Consensus, The 1996 Report from the President's Council on Sustainable Development, page 70, one of over 150 similar national councils implementing Agenda 21 under the direction of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. (The President's Council on Sustainable Development, 1996); page 70.
[2]Raymond Houghton, To Nurture Humaneness: Commitment for the '70's (The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development of the NEA, 1970), pages 46-47.
[3] Feasibility Study, Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program (B-STEP), Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bureau of Research, 1969
[4] The Soviet Art of Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, pages 19-20. Edited by the late Kenneth Goff, a former member of the communist Party, USA, who voluntarily testified before the Un-American Committee in Washington DC in 1939. His testimony can be found in Volume 9 of that year's Congressional Record. A friend of mine knew him and respected him greatly for his integrity and courage -- the willingness to risk his life to expose this agenda.
[5] This story was included in the first grade curriculum in New Pittsburgh, PA. The story was also told--using the new paradigm context--at a parents' meeting explaining Character Education. Anita Hoge, formerly a Pennsylvania mother and researcher, reported the story to me.
[6] James Quina, "Aldous Huxley's Integrated Curriculum," Holistic Education Journal (December 1993); 54.
[7]At the time of her 1989 keynote speech, Shirley McCune presided over the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL). The Regional Educational Laboratories are private, non-profit corporations which are funded, in whole or in part, under Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Each lab operates under a contract with the Division of Educational Laboratories, Bureau of Research, U.S. Office of Education.
[8] Spoken at a 1988 forum address at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. This address formed the nucleus for his book Unbinding Prometheus: Education for the Coming Age.
[12] Education for Sustainability: An agenda for action, the report from the "National Forum on Partnerships Supporting Education about the Environment," a demonstration project of the President's council on Sustainable Development, held at the Presidio, San Francisco, in the fall of 1994, page 11.
[14] Our Creative Diversity, UNESCO, 1995, p.11.
[15] The National Mental Health Services Knowledge Exchange Network (KEN) at http://www.mentalhealth.org/child/Wefsk4.htm
[16] Al Gore, Earth in the Balance--Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992), page 355.
[17] Ibid., page 1.
[18] Ibid., pages 258-259.
[19] Ibid., page 274.
[20] Mikhail Gorbachev, “New World Order: Consensus,” The Cape Cod Times, January 28, 1993.
The Frankfurt Institute: According the Encyclopedia of Marxism, "The Institute for Social Research was founded in 1923 by Felix Weil to be an independent academy for Marxism intended to rival any University in the standards of scholarship, and the institute carried out important research on the history and condition of the German workers' movement. It was possibly the first body to use opinion polls as a research tool."
Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), a German philosopher and social scientist directed the Institute from 1930 to 1958. He was a "close associate of Theodor Adorno, who mixed Marxism with influences as diverse as Schopenhauer, Dilthey, Nietzsche and Freud."
"After the 1923 defeat of the German Revolution, Horkheimer, and other members of the Institute to some degree, drew the conclusion that the working class could never be the vehicle for social change simply as a result of its position within the production process, and concluded that only the development of theory itself could be the scene of liberation. Horkheimer co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment with Theodor Adorno while in the US during the 1940s.... In 1949, Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt and re-established the Institute, and retired to Switzerland in 1958.""Others to be associated with the Institute as well as Horkheimer and Adorno included Leo Lowenthal, Raymond Aron, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Krenek." http://marxists.org/glossary/people/h/o.htm
Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) co-founded the Frankfurt Institute. The Encyclopedia of Marxism, <http://marxists.org/glossary/people/m/a.htm>, reports that...
The current name seems to be Frankfurt Institute for Transformation Studies. You may find their Project overview interesting."He fled to Geneva in 1933 when Hitler came to power, then went to the United States in 1934, where he taught at Columbia University and became a US citizen in 1940. His Reason & Revolution, written in 1941, made an important contribution to the understanding of Hegel and his influence on Marx."An intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army during World War II, he headed the Central European Section of the Office of Intelligence Research after the war. He returned to teaching in 1951 at Columbia and Harvard, Brandeis University (1954-65), and the University of California at San Diego (1965-76), where after retirement he was honorary emeritus professor of philosophy until his death.
"A Hegelian-Freudian-Marxist, Marcuse highlighted the cultural forms of repression and the role of technology and the expansion of the production of consumer goods in the maintenance of the stability of capitalism."
