PSYOPS? You tell me...

I am not foolish enough to suggest this is pure PSYOPS, but I am suggesting a piece like this goes a long way to pressuring (scaring) us into going along with peace at any price.

From Daniel Greenfield, July 12, 2008. The Terrorist Brainwashing of the Civilized World

The process of brainwashing comes in multiple stages. One of the earliest stages commonly involves physical violence or an environment of threatened violence. This is followed by the creation of new coping mechanisms to appease the sources of that violence. This is in turn followed by repetitive propaganda to rationalize and justify the coping mechanisms. This allows the perpetuation of the coping behavior, the appeasement of the source of violence, even as the violence continues to escalate. When the brainwashing has been fully successful, the subject will have accepted the coping strategies as a system for living and even a system of faith.

While most people tend to think of brainwashing as something that has been scientifically developed and deployed as a planned strategy, in fact it’s been a part of humanity for thousands of years. It’s something that most conquerors have known about. It’s used with unconscious precision by everyone from slave owners to abusive husbands and rapists, gangsters, warlords, dictatorships and terrorists. It is of course the underlying system through which the transformation of America and for that matter Europe and Israel is taking place.

The key to brainwashing is that it relies on the threat of violence to cow its targets into compliance with a process, at the end of which the target will feel that he not only deserves the violence, but that it is in his own best interest to surrender to the violence and comply with and believe everything he has been told.

The use of violence in brainwashing, any violence from a beating to a terrorist bombing, creates a sense of helplessness by destroying the existing coping mechanisms. In our current crisis, repeated terrorist attacks create an ongoing sense of helplessness, by demonstrating that security and military forces cannot prevent the violence.