‘The candidates are fighting for every vote in this very tight race. Republican candidate Donald Trump has the lead across the country. Clinton or Trump?’ Agents of Chaos I, director Alex Gibney, Russian television, Sky Documentaries 2020
This Trump worship thing: what was that all about? ibid.
There were too many investigations to count ... But what exactly was the story? ibid.
The first piece of the puzzle pointed us toward a cyber trail on the internet where a motley band of Russian trolls had been busy making mischief on social media … The infamous troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency, or IRA. ibid.
They [Russia] created fake news websites which they used to drive a wedge into Ukraine and push the two halves of the country apart. ibid.
The trolls spent years tracking divisions in American society. They knew that immigration and race were two of our deepest wounds. ibid.
In a display of Russian cyber power, the GRU hacked into the controls of the Ukrainian power grids and command and distribution centres to shut them down. ibid.
Russian government hackers penetrated DNS, stole opposition research on Trump. ibid. The Washington Post online article
‘Email’ Dominates What Americans Have Heard About Clinton. ibid. Gallup online article 19 September 2016
‘We did nothing wrong. It was all bullshit.’ Agents of Chaos II, Trump
Sater went to work in the only industry less regulated than Wall Street – real estate. And that’s where he met Donald Trump: ‘You cannot operate there [Russia] without what they call a roof – which is protection from somebody.’ ibid. Sater
‘We’re going to have a great relationship with Putin and Russia.’ ibid. Trump
Was Trump running to win or was he running just to make more money? ibid.
They brought his Miss Universe contest to Moscow in 2013. ibid.
Russia really did have dirt to dish … ‘The hackers target the DNC and Hillary Clinton.’ ibid. expert
‘NBC has learnt this week from court documents [Paul] Manafort [Trump’s campaign chairman, later fired] has business connections to two oligarchs with ties to the Russian Mafia.’ ibid. news
US Officially Accuses Russia of Political Hacks. ibid. CNN news banner 17 September
A hundred years ago a new theory of human nature was put forward by Sigmund Freud. He had discovered he said primitive sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings. Forces which if not controlled, led individuals and societies to chaos and destruction. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self I: Happiness Machines, BBC 2002
Bernays was the first person to take Freud’s ideas about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations for the first time how they could make people want things they didn’t need by linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Out of this would come a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying people’s inner selfish desires, one made them happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate our world today. ibid.
Freud’s idea that hidden inside all humans were dangerous instinctual drives. ibid.
‘If you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.’ ibid. Bernays, interview 1991
Bernays returned to New York and set up as a public relations counsel in a small office off Broadway. It was the first time the term had been used. ibid.
He wondered if he could make money by manipulating the unconscious. ibid.
Bernays set out to experiment with the minds of the popular classes. His most dramatic experiment was to persuade women to smoke. At that time there was a taboo against women smoking. And one of his early clients, George Hill, the president of the American tobacco corporation, asked Bernays to find a way of breaking it. ibid.
What Bernays had created was the idea that if a woman smoked, it made her more powerful and independent. An idea that still persists today. It made him [Bernays] realise that it was possible to persuade people to behave irrationally if you linked products to their emotional desires and feelings. The idea that smoking actually made women freer was completely irrational but it made them feel more independent. ibid.
For the first time politics became involved in public relations. ibid.
What was beginning to emerge in the 1920s was a new idea of how to run mass democracy. At its heart was the consuming self which not only made the economy work but was happy and docile, so created a stable society. ibid.
He [Bernays] was about to help create a vision of the Utopia that free market capitalism would build in America if it was unleashed. ibid.
This is the story of how Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind were used by those in power in post-War America to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe that Freud was right to suggest that hidden deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self II: The Engineering of Consent
An extraordinary number of mental breakdowns amongst its troops: 49% of all soldiers evacuated from combat were sent back because they suffered from mental problems. It was the first time anyone had paid attention to the feelings and anxieties of ordinary people. ibid.
Psychoanalysts were convinced they not only understood these dangerous forces but they knew how to control them too. They would use their techniques to create democratic individuals because democracy left to itself failed to do this. ibid.
In 1946 President Truman signed the National Mental Health Act. It had been born directly out of the wartime discoveries of psychoanalysts that millions of Americans who had been drafted suffered hidden anxieties and fears. The aim of the Act was to deal with this invisible threat to society. ibid.
Psychoanalysts were about to move into big business and use their techniques not just to create model citizens but model consumers. ibid.
By the early ’50s the ideas of psychoanalysis penetrated deep into American life. The psychoanalysts themselves became rich and powerful. ibid.
And as the psychoanalysts’ ideas took hold in America a new elite began to emerge: in politics, social planning and in business. What linked this elite was the assumption that the masses were fundamentally irrational. ibid.
In reality Arbenz was a democratic socialist with no links to Moscow. Bernays set out to turn him into a communist threat to America. He organised a trip to Guatemala for influential American journalists. Few of them knew anything about the country or its politics … He also created a fake independent news agency in America – the Middle-American Information Bureau. It bombarded the American media with press releases saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala as a beach-head to attack America. All of this had the desired effect. But what Bernays was doing was not just trying to blacken the Arbenz regime, he was part of a secret plot. President Eisenhower had agreed that America should topple the Arbenz government. But secretly. The CIA were instructed to organise a coup. ibid.
Bernays had manipulated the American people but he had done so because he like many others at the time believed that the interests of business and the interests of America were indivisible … He called it the Engineering of Consent. ibid.
But the idea that it was necessary to manipulate the inner feelings of the American population in the interests of fighting the Cold War now began to take root in Washington. Above all in the CIA who were going to take it much further. They were concerned that the Soviets were experimenting with psychological methods to actually alter the memories and feelings of people. The aim being to produce more controllable citizens. It was known as brainwashing. Psychologists in the CIA were convinced that this really might be possible and that they should try to do it themselves. In the late ’50s the CIA poured millions of dollars into the psychology departments of universities across America. They were secretly funding experiments on how to alter and control the inner drives of human beings. The most notorious of these experiments was run by the head of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr Ewen Cameron. ibid.
In fact Cameron’s experiments were a complete disaster. All he managed to produce were dozens of individuals with memory loss, and the ability to repeat the phrase, I am at ease with myself. And it was not an isolated case. Almost all the experiments the CIA funded were equally unsuccessful. Despite their ambitions, American psychologists were beginning to find out how difficult it was to understand and control the inner workings of the human mind. ibid.
High profile figures in American life who had previously been enthusiasts for psychoanalysis now began to question why psychoanalysis had become so powerful in America. Was it really because it benefited individuals? Or had it in fact become a form of constraint in the interests of social order? ibid.
At the same time [as the CIA’s mind-control experiments], an onslaught was launched on the way psychoanalysis was being used by business to control people. The first blow came with the best seller The Hidden Persuaders, written by Vance Packard. It accused psychoanalysts of reducing the American people to emotional puppets whose only function was to keep the mass-production lines running. ibid.