The Insanity Of The Manipulated Masses

By James Donahue

During the weeks after 9-11 and during a time when the Bush Administration was talking about aggressively attacking the invisible enemy he called "world terrorism," something very strange happened to a lot of Americans.

I think just about everybody went crazy.

Everywhere you looked the American flag was flying. That familiar red, white and blue design was displayed on store fronts, on every flag pole, and cars.

Young men and women rushed to local recruiting offices to sign up for military service because they wanted to defend their country against a yet undefined enemy.

America was like a hive of disturbed bees, buzzing about wildly, prepared to sting anything that looked threatening, and sacrificing their all to do it. Nobody was thinking. Everybody was going to war even though nobody knew who the enemy was.

While patriotism is usually a good thing, somehow I thought there was a lot of overplay going on. And for many, it still is. Throughout the Midwest those flags are still waving. They all came out again after we got the news that Osama bin Laden was assassinated. Why would we celebrate that?

Even our leadership was caught up in the frenzy. The Bush Administration sent troops off to attack Afghanistan because intelligence allegedly said that Osama bin Laden was the mastermind behind the attack. And even though Osama is a native of Saudi Arabia, intelligence said he was operating with the Al-Qaeda, a group of radical Moslem militants operating in Afghanistan. Thus we bombed, shot and killed Afghanistan people. Then we shifted our attention to Iraq and did the same thing there and for even less defined reasons.

Ten years later we are still in Afghanistan in what has turned out to be the longest war in American history. We also are in Iraq even though we are told that this war is “winding down.” And our troops are still caught in a strange quagmire that can't seem to be resolved. Many thousands of innocent civilians in both countries are dead. Over 6,000 of our troops are dead and many more are hospitalized and maimed for life.

New intelligence revealed that the attack might really have been perpetrated in Saudi Arabia. In fact, most of the terrorists involved in taking over the airplanes allegedly used in the 9-11 assault are said to have been from Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan or Iraq. A growing number of conspiracy theorists question whether any aircraft were used in the attacks at all.

Talk about going off half cocked.

While war insanity was going on our legislators let a document called the Patriot Act slip into law without a fight. That document, designed to strip Constitutional freedoms and turn the nation into a police state, has since fallen under severe public attack. Congress finally agreed to take a look at it; something the members neglected to do the first time around. Sadly, while some revisions were made, the Patriot Act remains on the books to this day. Our government continues to monitor our telephone, Internet, FAX and all other forms of electronic communication.

How could stuff like this happen in the United States?

Writer David McGowan, in an article in the Web's Online Journal, titled "Funtionally Insane Americans," suggested that most people in the United States were so emotionally upset during the days following the 9-11 attacks that they lost touch with reality. I think they found safety in numbers and a form of hive mentality took over.

McGowen wrote: "the severity of any individual's insanity is a function of the degree of that person's disconnection from reality.

"That definition, of course, is entirely dependent on how 'reality' is defined. From the point of view of the state, 'reality' is whatever the shapers of public opinion say it is. Anyone who disagrees with the voices of authority is, therefore, insane."

One example of the mass hysterical insanity was an arrest in Albany New York of a man who wore a "peace" T-shirt in a shopping mall. That the man associated himself with the peace activists of the 1960s so incensed the war-charged masses that the man was actually led away in handcuffs by uniformed police officers.

Of course not everybody in America bought into the war fever. I was among the thousands of people voicing concerns to one another via the Internet in those crucial weeks. The media all but ignored public demonstrations opposing military action. Public comment, we quickly found, could lead to open verbal if not physical confrontation.

How could so many people be guided into mass hysteria like that?

The 9-11 event was so severe and unexpected, it seemed to glue the public into a state of mass fear. That we were constantly shown the video clips of the airplanes flying into the World Trade Center towers was a form of collective conditioning. After this, it did not take much for the nation's leaders to take us in any direction they chose.

Jeff Rense suggested on his web site that mental manipulation can be accomplished through our television sets with more than images. He said U.S. Patent No 6,506,148, for example, is a device for "nervous system manipulation by electromagnetic fields from monitors."

Rense writes: "Certain monitors can emit electromagnetic field pulses that excite a sensory resonance in a nearby subject, through image pulses that are so weak as to be subliminal.

"This is unfortunate since it opens a way for mischievous application of the invention, whereby people are exposed unknowingly to manipulation of their nervous systems for someone else's purposes.

"Such application would be unethical and is of course not advocated. It is mentioned here in order to alert the public to the possibility of covert abuse that may occur while being online, or while watching TV, a video, or a DVD."

 They wouldn't do that would they?