Zwicker-to-9_11-truthers-(-4-snowshoefilms.f242
ZWICKER MEMO -- Barrie Zwicker, author of Towers of Deception: the media cover-up of 9/11, offers a partial list of techniques used by those determined to avoid or suppress discussion of the evidence:
absurdities, ad hominem sallies, bald assertions that are misstatements, bandwagon psychology, bizarre non-sequiters, bullying, diminishment of importance (of the important), dismissiveness, diversion (e.g., not answering the question), failure to provide minimal evidence, fake humility, fake open-mindedness, false parallels, false syllogisms, framing to exclude contrary outlooks, ignorance flaunted as admirable, insinuation, internal contradiction, major premises hidden in passing, misdirection, misleading asides, mixing metaphors (apples and oranges), obfuscation, restriction of options, scare tactics, setting up straw men, sweeping generalizations, and word inflation. In future parts of this series, we will illustrate Chomsky's post-9/11 use of many of these techniques.
Zwicker here also explores cognitive dissonance, psychological projection, hypnosis, trance state induction (largely as covered by Douglas Rushkoff and his book, Coercion as well as Steven Pinker (a Chomsky protoge).
Rushkoff's book is useful, but limited, especially in comparison to Julian Jaynes' work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Rushkoff examines consciousness and the manipulation of it from sort of a reformed behaviorist perspective.
We've arbitrarily inserted in this video three images that aren't especially integral: George Estabrooks' 1949 how-to book, Using Hypnosis; (two) Leon Festinger's how-to book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance; and finally (three) Jaynes' book.
Jaynes, for all his brilliance and principled being, ignored the government-corporate exploitation of the vestigial bicameral mind that he identified in his great work.
George Estabrooks (Hypnosis) was a happy cold war psy war technician: he believed in 'the mission'. Commies were evil and conniving and he would do anything he could to beat them at their purported game. For Estabrooks, hypnosis was a gimmick and he could get anybody to do anything under hypnosis and said so. Like a good behaviorist, he didn't give a rats ass how hypnosis worked, only that it did work and you had to be careful with it. Dr. Estabrooks (Colgate University) worked for various branches of secret government, undoubtedly integrated into MKULTRA.
Leon Festinger's book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, was commissioned by the CIA (via the Ford Foundation). Festinger lead a team of cold-war behaviorists to figure out how to exploit cognitive dissonance. Stanford published their manual in 1957. Like Estabrooks, the behaviorists don't bother much about why or how of hypnosis or the exploitation of cognitive dissonance works, only that it works.
Julian Jaynes (of Princeton), wasn't paying attention to the behaviorists he stidently but prematurely dismissed in the 60s.
Another arbitrary sort of insertion in this video: Frank Luntz, one of the psy-warriors Zwicker generically refers to. A free-lance psywarrior, Luntz famously sold the Bush administration on pounding 9/11 and 'the terrorists' up front in all Bush admin. speeches. David Brancaccio's July 1974 (on NOW, PBS) interview with Luntz is revealing. Luntz recalls that one of the tricks he learned from mentor Tony Schwartz (The Responsive Chord), is that you don't try to inform or teach, what you do is find narrow self-interest and fear and connect with that, find the responsive chord. In this sequence, Luntz demonstrates another Schwartz technique: throw the target off guard with rhetorical questions.
The questions are rhetorical to Brancaccio because he's imprisoned in the construct (belief system, or collective cognitive imperative) that Luntz, like Zelikow, is committed to reinforcing. snowshoefilms / yoryevrah
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