Alexandra Kitty’s latest book, The Mind Under Siege: Mechanisms of War Propaganda.
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‘[Literacy]…makes us very accessible to ideas and propaganda. The literate man is the natural sucker for propaganda…propaganda is our Achilles heel. It’s our weak point.We will buy anything if it’s got a good, hard sell tied to it. So propaganda is the great big soft spot in the makeup of the literate man.’ — Marshall McLuhan
Editors Note: Friends, I recently launched on my Substack page a new content initiative. This curated, bi-weekly collection of articles, essays, podcasts, video presentations, interviews and the like, will be published under the broad rubric Dispatches from the No Fly Zone. This is the fourth episode…
This content comes from a variety of different sources, and features people whose tireless truth-seeking efforts I’ve long admired and respected. They have kindly agreed to allow me to republish their excellent work. By the same token, as newer or less familiar writers and analysts come to my attention, I will showcase their work should they be interested in being part of this ongoing initiative.
This episode features Alexandra Kitty, whose work I only became familiar with recently. As with the previous instalment in the series, this Dispatch includes both an article (written exclusively for this episode by Alexandra), along with an interview with herself and another individual who I also hold in high regard,Dr.Oliver Boyd-Barrett. (I hope to feature the latter’s work in the near future). This wide ranging interview was conducted by Jared Ballof Black Power Media, and readers can see a link to this interview at the end of the post.
I will return to Alexandra shortly, but first a few observations are in order. As I’ve observed previously more times than I can remember, it’s difficult if not impossible for any analyst or commentator to address any of the big issues and events of our time without singular reference to the role the establishment media plays in moulding the public’s perceptions of them. The Covid “pandemic” and more recently, the Ukraine crisis are exemplars herein.
But as are few issues in our political discourse untainted by propaganda, so too are few events in our history unsullied by its corrosive and corrupting impact. Being a former teacher of history and media studies, I can attest to this unequivocally.
If as it used to be said, ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’, then perception is nine-tenths of most people’s reality. Put another way, if as in real estate it is all about “location, location, and location”, then in public relations (i.e. propaganda), it is “perception, perception, and perception!”
At its core then propaganda seeks to insidiously manipulate and distort our perception of people, issues, events, situations, circumstance etc., for ends that rarely serve the interests of those whom its practitioners target with their clever, carefully crafted messages. It is a given that this is invariably done so by appealing to the primal fears and instincts that in varying degrees govern most of our actions, decisions and attitudes. As for responding in kind to said messages, the modus operandi of the propagandists all the while will be to exaggerate the benefits to be gained by the ‘targets’ in doing so as well as to downplay the risks.
Alexandra Kitty and I both share a similar desire for understanding the mechanics and the psychology of propaganda, with perhaps both of us being as appalled by the cynical, malignant contrivances of its artfully amoral practitioners as much as we’re fascinated by the ease with the latter are able to ply their trade so successfully and so repeatedly. And who do so, so often with otherwise rational, sceptical, well-reasoned individuals. That is, those folks not easily given to being played for suckers!
If as Victor Frankl once opined, ‘the last of the human freedoms [is] to choose one’s attitude’, then propaganda at its most corrosive, destructive and subversive, seeks to corral then usurp that freedom, often leaving us none the wiser as to the implications or the impact, at least until it’s far too late (i.e. after the damage is done). In short, our “attitude” is not an organic, internally derived conclusion, having been surreptitiously moulded from without by forces whose motives are, as noted, rarely altruistic.
For her part then, Alexandra focuses principally on how propaganda (perhaps best described metaphorically as the COVID-19 of the body politic, though in this case far more real, virulent and contagious than the pathogen du jour), enters the ‘journalism product’ and pollutes the information stream, and then how to counter it.
Beyond the obvious academic qualifications and intellectual rigour she brings to the discussion on this most vital of issues, she has an intuitive grasp of the need to communicate this knowledge to a more general audience and an ability and willingness to do so. All of this is amply evident in the interview.
The following sets out Alexandra’s stall clearly. Here’s what she has to say about the essence of propaganda:
‘If we divide the brain into its three components: analytical, emotional, andprimal, propaganda divides these core literacies which are supposed to work together. The analytical gathers facts; the emotional weighs those facts, and the primal uses those facts for survival or progress.
Propaganda deliberately disrupts organic thinking: the primal is terrorized with atmosphere of helplessness in the face of certain doom; the emotional is distracted with narrative to get people to forfeit their own emotional literacy; and the analytical is polluted with sophistry to use wrong logic…
Because analytical thinking is binary (1 and 0), it can make only two judgments, basically Us versus Them, with Us as 1 and Them as 0. Because there is only analytical literacy in schools, people don't get primal or emotional literacy to be able to realize propaganda is actually very crude and easy to counter. The problem is that it works on the brain more than the mind.’
Her more recent book Mind Under Siege is about how war propaganda works. Loaded Languageshows how language is used to trigger it. She has another book coming in 2022 called Therapeutic Journalism which is about using emotional literacy to counter it.
We will doubtless hear more from Alexandra in future Dispatches. GM.
— Propaganda as the Great Disruptor, by Alexandra Kitty
Propaganda, psyops, nudging, and gaslighting are concepts that have finally become mainstream conversation. Propaganda is meant to not just manipulate the mind, but also the brain to ensure a rigged outcome and force compliance. It is not just a gross violation of emotional rights (and yes, you have emotional rights), but it is no different than taking a hard drug: the problem is that like any drug, the more you take, the more you need with diminishing returns.
No competent government or C-suite player ever needs to stoop to using propaganda: it is a sign of failure. Propaganda has but a single purpose: to mask the ineptitude of those in power who are now trying to deflect attention away from their own failures and clean up the mess to hold on to those paper crowns they stole. Censorship is as much emotional abuse as is gaslighting -- any mechanism meant to hide reality from our perceptions is a violation of the right to find our own answers to our own problems.
Propaganda necessarily uses rote binary divide and conquer tactics where people become bigots willing to destroy the lives of perfect strangers as they throw their own freedoms, rights, happiness, progress, and lives to appease the incompetent and conniving who will destroy a society just to buy one more expensive trinket to be seen as superior.
Journalists had the absolute power to stop those games, but are willing accomplices to such destructive fear-mongering deceptions. In a world of infinity where organic plurality should be celebrated, reporters stoop to artificial linear divides contrived in the monomaniac illogic of patriarchal authority where there is only one right answer that applies to everyone.
In a world of almost 8 billion people, the notion is absurd, but why do journalists relinquish their own powers to contaminate the information stream with fear, anger, hate and dishonesty?
That was the question I sought as a psychology student in the early 1990s. I stumbled upon the fact that journalists were using press releases from various public relations firms to report on war, using paid advertising as a news report. It was outrageous, and I had incontrovertible evidence of it. I wanted to know how propaganda could infect an information stream without opposition. Why would journalists go out in public with bad information, risking backlash that would eventually destroy their credibility? How desperate for attention do you have to be?
But I also wanted to know why so many people believed those ridiculous lies in the first place, and of those who didn’t, what made them strong enough to resist?
It dawned on me: I could become a journalist to empirically study journalism being my own test subject and experimenter. Psychology had the answers, but reporters were illiterate in empirical methods and psychology.
After graduating from psychology, I went to j-school for my Master's degree, conducting studies to find the answers. The results of my experiments became fodder for my books. The answers came down to allowing society to become one-third literate: schools focus on analytical literacy, which fails us unless we are also emotionally and primally literate, too.
Propaganda works when our minds are divided and starved of emotional and primal literacy. The analytical core falls for sophistry, the emotional falls for narrative, and the primal falls for atmosphere. Journalists were both the villains and the victims of these never-ending elite Ponzi schemes.
In 2020, we saw how a world broke under the pressure of fear-mongering, and now in 2022, people are being further harmed by hate-mongering. How do we inoculate ourselves from irresponsible legacy journalism?
By ignoring it. It is akin to consuming poison meant to weaken potential competition so that the incompetent don’t have to answer for their ineptitude.
But inoculation also comes by finding plurality of ideas and looking for primary sources, such as lobbyist registries, PR firm boasts, and FARA filings: we simply need to follow the money and find the incompetence that those who bungled are desperately trying to hide.
Journalism is not empirical. Reporters crib from press releases and are stenographers for canned contrivances such as press conferences.
Nor is it therapeutic. Whenever a messenger is using atmosphere, sophistry, and narrative to make you feel helpless and without an organic and independent solution, the answer isn’t to comply, but to rebel.
Life is short and it is fleeting. You can allow the incompetent to harvest your resources and steal your happiness. It is your choice, as always.
But you cannot get the last two years of your life back. There is no rewind button and no do-overs. Propaganda doesn’t work when you remember that the life you are squandering is yours -- and there is no remedy for throwing those precious grains of time away to hide under your bed and blame the world for doing it.
I chose a life of adventure and living. I became an organic psychologist who conducted hundreds of empirically sound studies to create a true form of journalism that was therapeutic. The propagandists, gaslighters, nudgers, and psyops nerds threw their best tricks at me, and I chose to use that poisonous lead to make my own noble gold.
Fear nothing. Hate no one. Be good to yourself. Remember your tomorrows aren’t guaranteed. Use humour, skepticism, defiance and propaganda doesn’t work.
For all the expensive stunts of propaganda, its antidote costs not a cent. Legacy journalists forgot the lesson and now pay the price as indentured servants to those who see them as lesser and disposable beings.
But you don’t have to march down that path. You can make your own way on your own terms -- and no propagandist can win when you don’t play their games because you are living your own life and aren’t looking down on others or back on the regret of not living your life in the first place.
About the OPS: The Organisation for Propaganda Studies (OPS) facilitates and conducts rigorous academic research and analysis of propaganda, both historical and contemporary. Propaganda is a manipulative form of persuasion that is frequently found across political, economic, and security domains in authoritarian states as well as in liberal democracies.
Jared A. Ball is a Professor of Communication and Africana Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. and author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (Palgrave, 2020). Ball is also host of the podcast “iMiXWHATiLiKE!”, co-founder of Black Power Media which can be found at BlackPowerMedia.org, and his decades of journalism, media, writing, and political work can be found here.
Deception and fraud often exist in plain sight. The primary assumption unquestioned. Because our schooled daze taut us to regurgitate the RIGHT answers rather than develop scrutiny through questioning. Points are rewarded for memorisation skills and reframing accepted knowledge with your own words.
What if I was to tell you we breathe air not oxygen? Water is not H2O! Would you be curious or scathing in your dismissal? The program is weighted to scathing as the initial reaction because man knows everything, all has been explored. The pioneer is no longer a vocation. Only thing is when you pin down the experts in any field, they are always working with error, contaminants, constants to account for the unknowns etc.
The sheer complexity of explanations in research is there to remove inquiry by non-silo dwellers. Generalists are another vocation on the endangered list. Imagine wanting to understand lots of stuff about the world around you?
What if hydration is the primary factor to maintain our health? And we (as a society) no longer understand the fundamental components that maintain hydration? What if we were told we breathe oxygen and this fuels our body whist at the same time we notice oxygen toxicity is a thing? Cognitive dissonance must now help us out. This is how propaganda works. We’ve been so easy to fool (trusting in authority) there are lies/ deception in all things. Scrutiny is our only way out.
So I invite you to read my Substack article
We breathe air not oxygen
Medical oxygen is used as an agent to harm and or cull.
Would you like to know why it’s primarily prescribed for terminal conditions and not for breathlessness?
Air is measured by its moisture, humidity.
Oxygen is measured by its lack of moisture, water contamination. Medical oxygen has 67ppm of water contamination.
Lungs perform best with 30-50% humidity.
The alveoli requires air to reach 100% humidity. The respiratory mucosa conditions inspirational air to reach 100% humidity at the alveoli.
Can you see the mismatch? Can you see a problem with the gaseous exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide physiology paradigm? I’ve a new take on lung and blood physiology.
Oxygen is a dehydrating gas and dehydration is the mechanism that causes oxygen toxicity. The code word in medical literature is oxidation. To be effected by oxygen is to become dehydrated or lose water, moisture. Let’s remember what happened to lots of premi-babies placed in oxygen tents. They became blind. Why? Our eyes need moisture. Glasses and goggles fog because our eyes give up moisture as well as absorb moisture. Their wee premi-baby eyes were dehydrated to the point of blindness.
It’s time to review the physiology of respiration and what really happens when Red Blood Cells speedily pass through the alveoli capillary beds. Keywords are surfactant, bubbles, jettisoned, salt plus water, dark: bi-concave (contracted) to light: plump sponge like RBCs. Yes, the RBCs are rehydrated in the alveoli capillary beds. Kind of like how the ubiquitous saline drip rehydrates RBCs in your vein. We are in constant need of moisture replenishment. The lungs work to maintain blood volume along with kidneys and adrenals, and gut.
Oxygen and nitrogen exist only as a result of their manufactured process. They must be contained or they revert back to air. The manufacturing process for both oxygen and nitrogen, removes moisture as it increases pressure. Nitrogen is oxygen with the addition of carbon particles.
Air is the gaseous form of water. We live in the realm of water.
Air is bubbles.
(Oxygen is compressed air bubbles. Liquid oxygen reveals the point at extreme pressure that the bubbles become full or drops. Now you see why the light blue colour of liquid oxygen corresponds to the sky. All manufactured gases are contained in air bubbles which is why all gases have water contamination.)
Water is the liquid form of water. Water is an element. It is inert. This is why it can cycle.
Water is a full bubble or a drop.
(Read 100 reasons water is not H2O by Peter Peterson. Just need to think: 2 flammable dry gases theoretically combine to make a substance that puts out a flame! We’ve been very easy to fool!)
When water is stirred, watch bubbles escape. This is the process of making air. Oceans release air from water. Waves are masses of bubbles. Ocean air contains salt and water.
All respiratory symptoms begin with the primary insult of dehydration.
Sanatoriums of old were located next to the sea to aid lung healing. Dehydrated respiratory mucosa requires salt plus water. Hence you see the timeless salt plus water gargles and Neti pot rinses to relieve symptoms of colds and flu.
Why are colds and flu seasonal?
Cold air holds the least moisture and people are more confined in homes/work places with dry air.
Why do the fittest mountaineers perish on mountains? They encounter low pressure, cold dry air, and with extreme excursion they become dehydrated. Now add oxygen gas to their respiratory system! Do you see the potential for oxygen toxicity and death?
Would you like to experience how pressure effects lung function? Try the hyperbaric breathing technique, the Wim Hoff Method, a novice can easily hold their breath for 2.5minutes. Hyperbaric chambers can also increase lung function, blood rehydration. Use sea air or fresh air, never oxygen.
Deception and fraud often exist in plain sight. The primary assumption unquestioned. Because our schooled daze taut us to regurgitate the RIGHT answers rather than develop scrutiny through questioning. Points are rewarded for memorisation skills and reframing accepted knowledge with your own words.
What if I was to tell you we breathe air not oxygen? Water is not H2O! Would you be curious or scathing in your dismissal? The program is weighted to scathing as the initial reaction because man knows everything, all has been explored. The pioneer is no longer a vocation. Only thing is when you pin down the experts in any field, they are always working with error, contaminants, constants to account for the unknowns etc.
The sheer complexity of explanations in research is there to remove inquiry by non-silo dwellers. Generalists are another vocation on the endangered list. Imagine wanting to understand lots of stuff about the world around you?
What if hydration is the primary factor to maintain our health? And we (as a society) no longer understand the fundamental components that maintain hydration? What if we were told we breathe oxygen and this fuels our body whist at the same time we notice oxygen toxicity is a thing? Cognitive dissonance must now help us out. This is how propaganda works. We’ve been so easy to fool (trusting in authority) there are lies/ deception in all things. Scrutiny is our only way out.
So I invite you to read my Substack article
We breathe air not oxygen
Medical oxygen is used as an agent to harm and or cull.
Would you like to know why it’s primarily prescribed for terminal conditions and not for breathlessness?
Air is measured by its moisture, humidity.
Oxygen is measured by its lack of moisture, water contamination. Medical oxygen has 67ppm of water contamination.
Lungs perform best with 30-50% humidity.
The alveoli requires air to reach 100% humidity. The respiratory mucosa conditions inspirational air to reach 100% humidity at the alveoli.
Can you see the mismatch? Can you see a problem with the gaseous exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide physiology paradigm? I’ve a new take on lung and blood physiology.
Oxygen is a dehydrating gas and dehydration is the mechanism that causes oxygen toxicity. The code word in medical literature is oxidation. To be effected by oxygen is to become dehydrated or lose water, moisture. Let’s remember what happened to lots of premi-babies placed in oxygen tents. They became blind. Why? Our eyes need moisture. Glasses and goggles fog because our eyes give up moisture as well as absorb moisture. Their wee premi-baby eyes were dehydrated to the point of blindness.
It’s time to review the physiology of respiration and what really happens when Red Blood Cells speedily pass through the alveoli capillary beds. Keywords are surfactant, bubbles, jettisoned, salt plus water, dark: bi-concave (contracted) to light: plump sponge like RBCs. Yes, the RBCs are rehydrated in the alveoli capillary beds. Kind of like how the ubiquitous saline drip rehydrates RBCs in your vein. We are in constant need of moisture replenishment. The lungs work to maintain blood volume along with kidneys and adrenals, and gut.
Oxygen and nitrogen exist only as a result of their manufactured process. They must be contained or they revert back to air. The manufacturing process for both oxygen and nitrogen, removes moisture as it increases pressure. Nitrogen is oxygen with the addition of carbon particles.
Air is the gaseous form of water. We live in the realm of water.
Air is bubbles.
(Oxygen is compressed air bubbles. Liquid oxygen reveals the point at extreme pressure that the bubbles become full or drops. Now you see why the light blue colour of liquid oxygen corresponds to the sky. All manufactured gases are contained in air bubbles which is why all gases have water contamination.)
Water is the liquid form of water. Water is an element. It is inert. This is why it can cycle.
Water is a full bubble or a drop.
(Read 100 reasons water is not H2O by Peter Peterson. Just need to think: 2 flammable dry gases theoretically combine to make a substance that puts out a flame! We’ve been very easy to fool!)
When water is stirred, watch bubbles escape. This is the process of making air. Oceans release air from water. Waves are masses of bubbles. Ocean air contains salt and water.
All respiratory symptoms begin with the primary insult of dehydration.
Sanatoriums of old were located next to the sea to aid lung healing. Dehydrated respiratory mucosa requires salt plus water. Hence you see the timeless salt plus water gargles and Neti pot rinses to relieve symptoms of colds and flu.
Why are colds and flu seasonal?
Cold air holds the least moisture and people are more confined in homes/work places with dry air.
Why do the fittest mountaineers perish on mountains? They encounter low pressure, cold dry air, and with extreme excursion they become dehydrated. Now add oxygen gas to their respiratory system! Do you see the potential for oxygen toxicity and death?
Would you like to experience how pressure effects lung function? Try the hyperbaric breathing technique, the Wim Hoff Method, a novice can easily hold their breath for 2.5minutes. Hyperbaric chambers can also increase lung function, blood rehydration. Use sea air or fresh air, never oxygen.
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