https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/apocalypse_now_the_governments_use_of_controlled_chaos_to_maintain_power
Apocalypse Now: The Government’s Use of Controlled Chaos to Maintain Power
Figure One: Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers...throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern.
Figure Two: And this pattern is always the same?
Figure One: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find...and it’s themselves. And all we need do is sit back...and watch…and let them destroy themselves. — “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Twilight Zone
Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it?
All the signs seem to point in this direction.
For years now, the government has been pushing us to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.
This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—has manifested itself in the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today.
Why is the Deep State engineering this societal madness? What’s in it for the government?
What is playing out before us is a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps the populace fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of standing united in defense of our freedoms.
It’s not conspiratorial.
It’s a power play.
Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, understood the dynamics behind this power play.
In the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Serling imagined a world in which the powers-that-be carry out a social experiment to see how long it would take before the members of a small American neighborhood, frightened by a sudden loss of electric power and caught up in fears of the unknown, will transform into an irrational mob and turn on each other.
It doesn’t take long at all.
Likewise, in Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind (produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s studio), unexplained crises lead to a technological blackout that leaves the populace disconnected, disoriented, isolated, suspicious, and under attack from mysterious ailments and each other.
As one of Leave the World’s characters speculates, the culprit behind the escalating catastrophes, which range from WiFi outages and mysterious health ailments to cities under siege from rogue forces, may be the result of a military campaign intended to destabilize a nation by forcing people to turn against each other.
It’s really not so far-flung a scenario when you consider some of the many ways the government already has the ability to manufacture crises in order to sow fear, fuel hysteria, destabilize the nation and institute martial law.
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture health crises. Long before COVID-19 locked down the nation, the U.S. government was creating lethal viruses and unleashing them on an unsuspecting public.
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture civil unrest and political upheaval. Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has been using agent provocateurs to infiltrate activist groups in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” them.
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture economic instability. As the national debt continues to rise upwards of $34 trillion, with little attempt by federal agencies to curtail spending, it stands as the single-most pressing threat to the economy.
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture communications blackouts. Internet and cell phone kill switches enable the government to shut down communications at a moment’s notice. It’s a practice that has been used before in the U.S. In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels (reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone). In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked (again, same rationale). And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down (this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man).
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture terrorist attacks. Indeed, the FBI has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.
The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture propaganda aimed at mind control and psychological warfare. Not long ago, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation came in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military had been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users. Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda. In fact, the CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.
We must never forget that the government no longer exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.
Rather, “we the people” are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.
Think about it: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.
In almost every instance, the U.S. government has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.
Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, trap and control us.
Are you getting the picture yet?
The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms.
It’s telling that in Leave the World Behind, before disaster strikes, the main characters—on their way to a family vacation—are utterly oblivious, connected to their electronic devices and insulated from each other and the world around them. Adding to the disconnect, the family’s teen daughter, Rose, is fixated on binge-watching episodes of Friends, even as the world falls apart around them. As TV critic Jen Chaney explains, the sitcom’s presence in the story “underlines how human beings crave escapism at the expense of embracing the actual present, a different way of ‘leaving the world behind.’”
We’re in a similar escapist bubble, suffering from a “crisis of the now,” which keeps us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.
Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.
“Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man’s capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandists, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks.”
Yet in addition to being distracted by our electronic devices and diverted by bread-and-circus entertainment spectacles, we are also being polarized by political theater, which aims to keep us divided and at war with each other.
This is the underlying cautionary tale of Leave the World Behind and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”: we are being manipulated by forces beyond our control.
A popular meme circulating a while back described it this way:
“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar ... and why?”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government has never stopped shaking the jar.
....
https://brownstone.org/articles/silence-of-the-damned/
Silence of the Damned
None of our civil institutions shows the slightest inclination to talk about the injustices of the last few years, let alone the possibility that those injustices continue their impact today, and could emerge again at any time. All it needs is another ‘crisis’ and the whole sorry saga could start all over again.
Chief among these derelict institutions is the mainstream press. Melbourne’s two daily newspapers are no exception. One masthead regales its subscribers each Friday with an email from the editor trumpeting the stories they’ve covered, and by omission, the stories they haven’t. A recent email listed stories including ‘the most ambitious and expensive transport project in Victoria’s history,’ which uncovered ‘alleged politicisation of the Victorian public service.’ Yawn. The email then goes on, in a breathtakingly proud, unknowingly ironic, and sinister paragraph that one simply couldn’t make up (emphasis added):
Holding governments, businesses and the powerful to account and protecting the public from harm should be the core business of any serious news outlet. That might sound to you like a relatively uncontroversial statement, which is why the fact that [masthead name redacted] and its stablemates are the only publications pursuing this kind of serious and difficult public interest journalism continues to baffle me. Restrictions on press freedom and the prohibitive cost of this work deters many, which is why we are eternally grateful for the support of your subscription.
Holding to account? Protecting from harm? There is one gigantic story that should fit squarely into that mission statement, and this masthead steadfastly refuses to touch it. Think excess deaths and vaccine injury. Think censorship and control. Think crisis manufacture and ready-made solutions. It is either mass cognitive dissonance on the part of the entire editorial staff or deliberate suppression, that The Story is not given a run.
‘Continues to baffle me?’ The word ‘baffled’ does a lot of heavy lifting these days, as in ‘doctors are baffled’ when a fit professional footballer drops dead. What it really means is “I know what caused this, but I will not say the truth.”
And the bit about ‘restrictions on press freedom?’ Such an offhand remark, implying ‘Yeah, those restrictions are a pain in the neck, but totally justified because of the number of conspiracy theory nut jobs out there, who are doing the holding-to-account on a shoestring budget, but we can’t get by unless you continue to pay for a subscription to our government-funded propaganda to keep you looking the wrong way.’
No one will talk about The Story. And they will never talk about it. In Russia, they still haven’t talked properly about the crimes of the Soviet era. What makes us think the West will come to terms with crimes of the Covid era?
David Satter wrote It Was a Long Time Ago and it Never Happened Anyway in 2012. I’ve written here and here about some aspects of his book which resonated with the experience of the years 2020-2023. As we watch that story fade into nothingness from the front page and daily press conferences, there is one grand theme that makes Satter’s book utterly compelling today.
It. Never. Happened.
If it didn’t happen, how can a newspaper run a story about it? If it never happened, how can a court case ever be mounted to seek justice for the injured, the widowed, the orphaned? If it never happened, why compensate those who lost livelihoods, and those whose dreams turned into nightmares?
Satter explores the moral choices under totalitarianism, and explains how a whole people came to rationalise the evil in which they participated. The rationalisation in turn explains why there is nothing to see here, nothing to reconcile, nothing to investigate, nothing to apologise for.
A catechism of excuses, able to be recited on demand, evolved in the aftermath. The same ones are repeated today:
- Everyone was guilty, so none of us is guilty.
In June 1957, a meeting of the Communist Party plenum confronted the leading Stalinists with their crimes. Satter notes:
Confronted with their crimes, the leading Stalinists became inexplicably humble. They depicted themselves as cogs in a machine, helpless functionaries who were incapable of taking responsibility for their actions. The accusations, they argued, constituted a monstrous injustice – not because they were guiltless, but because others were as guilty as they were. (p142)
…
The last thing they wanted was to go into the past and see how horrible they all were. (p146)
- We had to do it, everyone was doing it.
Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, many difficulties stood in the way of judging the Soviet leaders. The first was that the crimes of the Stalin era had been carried out under conditions of mass terror, and the leadership was as terrorized as anyone else. Khrushchev, for example, lived in daily fear that he would be eliminated. (p146)
…
In addition, Soviet leaders were committed to a totalitarian ideology….A communist leader who was guided by the ideology was pushed toward compliance and, inevitably, crime. (p146)
…
…ordinary citizens faced the same pressures themselves. If those who exercised power were schooled in unthinking obedience, ordinary citizens were almost always compromised by the daily need to dissimulate in a monolithic society. (p146)
- Protesting or speaking out would only make my life worse.
Soviet leaders signed death sentences for citizens, sometimes many hundreds of people at a time. One of these leaders was Alexei Kuznetsov, who organised the defense of Leningrad during the war. He was believed to have been secretly opposed to the repressions in which they took part. His son-in-law said
It is necessary to know the historical conditions of 1937-38. The troika was made up of representatives of the party, NKVD, and prosecutor. The main person was the head of the NKVD. The list (of condemned persons) would not have been changed if one member of the troika refused to sign. It would not have saved anyone. The person refusing to sign would only have added his own name to the next list. (p149)
- We didn’t know
Anastas Mikoyan was a politburo member for three decades. He was also believed to be secretly opposed to the repressions, yet he signed execution lists. His son Stepan recounts:
He signed lists with the names of many people….But you either had to sign or kill yourself, in which case you would die an enemy of the people, and all of your family would be shot, and all who worked for you would be arrested. (p152)
Mikoyan later wrote
There were many things that we did not know. We believed in many things, and, in any case, simply could not change anything. (p156)
- We should be forgiven
Stepan Mikoyan again, on his father’s culpability:
We should relate to these people as persons who had no choice. Those who did more than necessary (to save themselves) we should condemn. If a person did what he was forced to do, it is necessary to forgive. If he did more than was necessary, he should be condemned. (p157)
Not everyone bought these excuses for Stalinist atrocities, just as some today don’t buy them in respect of Covid crimes. In the Soviet era, one of these was Alexander Yakovlev, who despite being at one time in charge of propaganda, came to suggest ot Yeltsin and Putin that they make personal statements of repentance (Yakovlev himself was criticized as unwilling to follow his own advice). Satter recounts:
Yakovlev told me in 2003 that people often deny having committed crimes or having anything to repent for. “I say to such a person, ‘You voted?’ He says ‘I voted’. You did not object? ‘I did not object.’ You attended meetings? ‘I attended meetings.’ This means you participated and should repent. In the final analysis, this is the only path to a new future for this tortured country.” (p161)
The upshot is that after reciting the 5 excuses above, there is nowhere else to go but to say that It Never Happened. In the aftermath of the Covid disaster, we seem to be getting to this point. “Everyone was doing it – we all administered the shot. We all did the dance in the empty wards. We all coerced, then shunned, our friends. We all wanted to travel. Everyone demanded a vax pass to get a haircut or a coffee. Don’t blame me! What use would speaking out be? I didn’t know the shots caused myocarditis! Or excess deaths! I’m continually sick myself! I’m actually a victim too! You should forgive me!”
The only place to go after all this, is It Never Happened. Just like Melbourne’s masthead, it is a non-event.
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