Of Mental Images

Two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media experienced

Letters from Vienna #50

It speaks for us, those living in the putatively “free”, “democratic”, “open” West, that we need to be manipulated but less so that it’s so easy for what Churchill termed “the High Cabal” (aka Global Deep State) to do so. A case in point is the Korean War, which, officially and ostensibly, began in June 1950.

“The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event” Walter Lippmann wrote in 1921. “That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts.”[1]

Since 1921 things have got much, much worse. As Herman & Chomsky pointed out in the 1980s: “two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media experienced by US citizens.”[2] It really and truly isn’t hard to manipulate us at all. A bunch of co-conspirators sitting in a single room could easily agree on a narrative to fool us, and we’d most probably fall for it.

“While all the influences operating on the decision to divide Korea for purposes of accepting the surrender of the Japanese forces there at the end of World War II cannot here be explored” Roy E. Appleman wrote in 1960, “it appears that American military consideration of an army boundary line in Korea began at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. One day during the conference, General of the Army George C. Marshall called in Lt. Gen. John E. Hull, then Chief of the Operations Division, U.S. Army, and a member of the U.S. military delegation, and told him to be prepared to move troops into Korea. General Hull and some of his planning staff studied a map of Korea trying to decide where to draw a line for an army boundary between U.S. and Soviet forces. They decided that at least two major ports should be included in the U.S. zone. This led to the decision to draw a line north of Seoul which would include the port of Inch’on. Pusan, the chief port of Korea, was at the southeastern tip of the country. This line north of Seoul, drawn at Potsdam by the military planners, was not on the 38th Parallel but was near it and, generally, along it. The American and Russian delegates, however, did not discuss a proposed boundary in the military meetings of the Potsdam Conference.”[3]

There is, interestingly enough, another version of events, or rather: a hint of what was going on behind the scenes and what the Global Deep State was contemplating in 1945 or even earlier.

“The long-range, strategic planning of the Cold War,” opined Fletcher L. Prouty, “began as early as the Cairo and Teheran “Big Four” Conferences of late November 1943…That planning led directly, without a single day’s interval, from the end of World War II, September 2, 1945, to the United States’ involvement in what became the Indochinese war, which began on that same date. These Conference plans also included the Korean war that began five years later, in June 1950.”

“These facts were confirmed in a speech made by John Foster Dulles before the American Legion Convention in St. Louis, quite coincidently on September 2, 1953, when he confirmed the United States’ involvement in this “desperate struggle’s first eight years in Indochina.” Before that “no win” warfare had ended, not less than $570 billion had been channeled into the coffers of this war-making High Cabal at a cost of 58,000 American lives.”

“This type of limited warfare was not designed solely for the purpose of making war to make money, as has been the case throughout history for most countries; but it was necessitated by the knowledge, as early as 1943, that certainly for the future, the atomic bomb demonstrated that effective warfare, as it was known since the dawn of mankind, has ended. The almost timeless era of conventional warfare is over. There will be no more “victorious” wars. There will be moneymaking, meaningless wars. The next real, all-out, and unlimited war will lead to Armageddon on Earth. It will be the last.”[4]

Thus, when Prouty stumbled upon a vast depot of arms, which he expected to be shipped back to the United States he was told that it would be sent to Korea and Indochina instead. The aim of the division of Korea, thus, was to foster a local war.

The problem the High Cabal (aka Global Deep State) was confronted with was how to create mayhem while pretending to stand for law and order. The means it found was to effectively silence the ostensibly “free”, “open” and “critical” press.

Everywhere the West supported nasty, evil regimes, whether in Vietnam, Kenya or Korea but pretended that this was all necessary in its arduous, tedious and demanding “fight against Communism”.

Sadly, the media shamelessly played along with this appalling and criminal charade and they continue to do so; if anything, they have got much, much worse. Merely the lies, targets defamed and technology have changed but little else. Before it was the “Soviets”, now it is “the Russians”.

In September 1946 George II returned to Greece. An associate of the Greek Fascists he was far from popular yet a plebiscite was rigged to facilitate the imposition of his reactionary regime.

George Polk reported: “The real facts are that long before the plebiscite took place, the Army and police had rounded up or scared away all persons known to have anti-monarchist sentiments. Thus, the Greek government…and the Allied Military Force Observing the Greek Elections were able to proclaim stoutly that the plebiscite was free. It was, but well-rigged.”[5]

“We American reporters who watched the arrival of King George,” Polk wrote Howard K. Smith on November 7, 1946, “a terrified little man expecting an assassin’s bullet any minute, were described as being Communists by several of the most important Greek newspapers.”[6] Little has changed over the years. Now, anybody who is the least bit critical is termed a “conspiracy theorist” or a “Putin stooge”.

Nevertheless, and unusually, Polk continued to report what he actually saw: “The roundup of persons even vaguely suspected of not approving the government and not loving the king seems endless, and the most stupid part is that the roundups are progressive in nature. For example, when the government seizes a whole village as hostages for nearby “bandit” activity, relatives of the captured persons immediately “take to the hills”.”[7]

What he didn’t quite understand was that there was a method to the madness: the “High Cabal” (Global Deep State) was sowing the seeds of chaos. The fact that the government in America could get away with portraying the conflict in Greece as a fight against Communism was all that mattered. The “mental image of the event” then, as now, is all that counts.

“Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one,” (Under Secretary of State) Acheson intoned (in 1947), “the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Europe…”[8]

“Truman began by saying that the gravity of the world situation affected American security. But, he said, he would focus on only one potential flashpoint: Greece and Turkey. The Greek government, the President revealed, had made a formal appeal to the United States for assistance, along with a request for the assignment of American administrators, economists, and technicians to ensure that aid be given effectively. The Greek mission, Truman added, would include American military personnel. The Greek Army, he said, needed supplies and equipment to restore the authority of the government. Only the United States could supply this help. Truman said he had considered asking the United Nations to intercede but could see no way to achieve such an intercession.”

“In truth, the President was moving his country outside the principle of collective security, outside the framework of the United Nations. Nor did he mention that the government Washington would be backing was both monarchist and reactionary. Though he mentioned Athens’s “mistakes” and “extreme measures”, Truman said nothing of the repressive practices which had driven thousands of Greeks into the hills to fight as guerillas.”[9]

“In the years and decades to come, the Truman Doctrine would enable successive American policy makers to intervene on behalf of “free peoples resisting armed minorities”. The road from Athens ultimately led to Saigon.”

(Special counsel to the President) “Clifford…said that the tone of urgency in the Truman Doctrine reflected the temper of those times. “We had to meet Senator Vandenberg’s strategy for getting the aid package through Congress,” he explained. Vandenberg’s prescription: “Scare the hell out of Congress.” Clifford also wanted to “send a signal to Stalin.””[10] Those, such as George Polt, who had integrity, who actually told the truth and refused to go along with all the lies were simply murdered.

In Korea, likewise, the Great American Public wasn’t let into a nasty little secret: that they were supporting the “bad guys”, the “black hats”, (certainly not the “good guys” (if there were any)) in Korea.

“At the end of 1945, (the commander of US occupation forces) Hodge and his advisers created a four-point plan to destroy the movement for independence in southern Korea. First, they would build an army staffed by former officers of the Japanese army to isolate the south from the independence movement in the north. Second, the Korean National Police, the instrument of violence the Japanese had used to suppress opposition to Japanese rule, would be rebuilt. Where the KNP’s original mandate had been to crush opposition to the Japanese occupation, the organisation’s new mandate would be to quell opposition to the successor occupation of the United States. Third, the occupation government’s alliance with right-wing, anti-egalitarian, pro-collaborationist forces would be strengthened. And fourth, opponents of the new regime would be rounded up and jailed. This amounted to a declaration of war on the Korean People’s Republic. By 1948, Hodge’s war on the independence movement in the south had driven the movement’s supporters into graves, into jail, underground, or to the north.”[11]

When the war escalated, the Americans were by no means surprised: “When newspapermen that torrid Washington summer day called at the Pentagon…” an aide said privately that the United States expected the attack. “This officer pointed to “the fact that ships were ready to evacuate the families of American officers and others in South Korea as evidence that the invasion was not a surprise.”[12]

Of interest to note is the timing: “Two years to the day after Congress passed the conscription act of 1948, the Korean War broke out. No conflict could have come at a more providential time for the Military, for the 1948 UMT (Universal Military Training) act had been limited to just two years’ duration, it was expiring, and the Pentagon wanted a new, extended, much stronger act. To achieve this goal, nothing could be more helpful than a demanding crisis.”[13]

Of far greater significance however was Germany. In 1950, in the wake of the Korean War, the Americans could openly recruit Nazis (who’d been secretly advising them on how to defeat the anti-Fascist partisans in Greece), could staff the German army with former Nazis and could argue that German rearmament was necessary once more.

Truth might be the first casualty but it’s also the only real hope of ending any war; the current conflict in Ukraine is no exception to this rule. Critical, courageous and honest voices are needed to follow in the footsteps of the late, great George Polk. The more truthful people are, and the greater their honesty, the better for everyone.

---

[1] p.11 Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann

[2] p.14 Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky 

[3] pp. 2-3 South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, Roy E. Appleman 

[4] p.xxiv JFK, L. Fletcher Prouty

[5] pp.76-77 The Polk Conspiracy, Kati Marton

[6] p.77 Ibid

[7] p.79 Ibid

[8] p.91 Ibid

[9] pp.92-93 Ibid

[10] p. 93 Ibid

[11] p.95 Ibid

[12] pp.1-2 The Hidden History of the Korean War, I.F. Stone

[13] p.112 The Warfare State, Fred J Cook