Let´s Pretend You Don´t Exist

History of “social engineering” remembers a great variety of unscrupulous “crowd tamers” ready to strike people with a whip of control. Over the years we have seen power hungry elites juggling with post-truth politics and normalization of big lies.

The latest “trend” in crowd manipulation is… silence, in psychological warfare known as ghosting. Although the concept of selective silent treatment is nothing new, its political scale in last decades makes the use of the strategy unprecedented.

If we agree with George Bernard Shaw: «The worst sin to our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that is the essence of inhumanity”, the lingering elites choose to commit the deadliest of sins through disdainful ostracism and variety of “sounds of silence”.

If silent treatment in a relationship is a sign of disguised abuse, on a massive scale it is used to “erase” signs of dissent and punish groups that do not adhere to the imposed illogical and abusive “norms”. The good example is act of “muffling” riots: the political leaders ignore demands of the “crowd”; the mass media fail to report it, or minimize the importance of protests and falsify the number of participants.

Discriminatory silence of legislators is a breeding ground for administrative harassment; a targeted individual simply has no one to complain to, and his efforts to reveal corruption and cronyism will be publicly mocked by propagandists as “delusions of gang-stalking”.

Vietnam War era Veterans were exposed not only to Agent Orange but also to systemic ghosting a la mode: “Lie, Delay, Deny until They Die”. Veteran homelessness has also been comfortably and hypocritically ignored by several consecutive administrations.

For many, President Trump´s communication style brought hope that the silence would be broken in a decisive manner, with accountability as music to our ears. Unfortunately some members of his administration seem unresponsive and VA remains a Choke Point for many wronged Veterans. The uninterested staffers, who block crucial intel and communication under guise of building a “protective wall” around the President, can´t ignore an important correlation: as long as his supporters are being “muzzled”, the elected official will be harassed. The attempts of impeachment by hammer or by sickle target both the “vocal” President and electoral freedom of people. Only reactive counter-intelligence can help to end the “silence of the folks” and make the President truly audible to our common fiends.

 Choice of weapons tells a lot about the strategists…Although harmful and aimed to be discouraging, the tactic of silent treatment can work only if used occasionally to wait out a minor political storm. Incredibly, some high-and-mighty oligarchs lack emotional intelligence and are simply lazy enough to opt for turning the defensive strategy in a whole political system. Overwhelming administrative autism is used as attrition warfare to wear down dissidents with low resources and high morale. The regime´s VIPs fancy themselves as ever-lasting and superior enough to pretend that people´s rights and opinions simply do not exist.

Defensive tactics stem from insecurity and silent treatment is condemned to fail as a long term strategy. With time, ignored people start to feel ambushed and get angry, and there´s no animal as dangerous as cornered crowd. Regimes hoping to wait out storm of the century by silent impeachment of freedom will be caught into a major whirlwind. It’s comin’ a gully washer…

Joanna Rosamond