Psywar (2010) and the Weaponization of Public Relations | Under the Docs 017

➡ The film “Thigh War” discusses the use of psychological operations and propaganda to manipulate public perception, with examples from the early 1900s to the 2000s. It highlights how stories like Jessica Lynch’s rescue in Iraq were used to distract from less favorable news, such as the bombing of Al Jazeera’s TV station. The film also explores the role of PR firms in creating narratives to support war efforts, such as the fabricated story of Iraqi soldiers killing babies in incubators during the Gulf War. Lastly, it traces the use of propaganda back to the 15th century Catholic Church, showing its long history in shaping public opinion.
➡ The text discusses the role of propaganda in shaping public opinion, starting from President Woodrow Wilson’s era to modern times. It highlights how propaganda was used to rally support for wars and later applied in marketing and public relations. The text also reveals the origins of PR firms and press releases, which were created to improve the Rockefellers’ public image after a violent incident against unionizing workers. Lastly, it suggests that the solution to propaganda is a more informed public that openly discusses and understands its workings.
➡ The movie starts off as a documentary but gradually shifts into a lecture by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, promoting socialist ideas and criticizing capitalism. It also discusses the Iroquois’ form of democracy, but overlooks their practice of slavery. The film also explores the role of Ivy Lee, a pioneer in public relations, who used media manipulation to improve the image of corporations. However, the movie’s impact seems to be more significant among left-leaning audiences, promoting socialist ideologies.
➡ The speaker discusses a film, expressing mixed feelings about it. They enjoyed the first half but found the second half confusing and overly critical of capitalism. They suggest that if you only watch the first half, you’re not missing much. They also mention an upcoming film about MK Ultra, and encourage sharing their show, “Under the Docks,” which reviews documentaries. They end with a rap verse, possibly a theme song for their show.

A movie about psyops that it itself is a psyops. Yeah, under the docks. Under the docks. Under the docks. Yeah, under the docks. I’m Sean Criss, this is Paranoid American. We’re back under the docks today. Thigh War 2010 film directed by Scott Noble and narrated by Michaela J. This is part of the Mind Control month. And it really switches gears a little bit. It’s still MK Ultra heavy, still heavy on the public perception, but this one sticks to psychological operations and warfare and propaganda and how it’s used to manipulate the public to kind of push them in directions they want to go in.

And plus, unlike Chaos, this one talks about things that happened in the, I mean, early 1900s, but also goes all the way up into the 80s, 90s and even early 2000s. So there’s some examples here that are a little bit more relatable, especially on this topic of mind control, which usually gets sandwiched between the 1940s to the 1960s. Plotting the course. There’s some good key claims and I, like you said before, that it’s not just focusing like some claims from 1953 or, or you know, the late 60s. It has more modern things. And that’s one of the first claims.

It’s actually one of the first claims in the film that Jessica lynch heroism and villainizing countries, that this whole Jessica lynch story was fabricated by a PR firm to get the Americans public, the American public behind the war in Iraq. And I’m pretty sure this one happened when I was actively in the military. So I was, I. I didn’t go and put on the Jessica Lynn shirt or anything and go out and parading or anything. But I don’t know if it felt like a relatable story, like damn, bro, it’s getting real out here for some, for some of us, right? Not realizing.

And in this movie they make a few specific claims that Jessica lynch fulfilled this fictional narrative, that they wanted to push a female Rambo mixed with a damsel in distress that gets rescued by Special Forces. And it was a total PR boost because the war didn’t have the greatest face on it. The US Also wanted to take some aggressive actions that could have looked bad without something to jupose it against, without something to contrast it with. For example, the same day that that story happened, the big Jessica Lynch Special Forces rescue operation, the U. S also blew up Al Jazeera’s TV station and killed the journalist.

But that part didn’t get a lot of airplay because of this big, you know, damsel in distressed female rambo Jessica lynch story. So I thought that was an interesting and very specific claim that this documentary made. Yeah. And the way that they presented it is perfectly like a movie. It was like a movie trailer, right, Like Jessica lynch in Saved in Iraq or like whatever, you know what I mean? Like you can see it on every channel and I wasn’t in the armed forces. But that’s a good perspective of what you’re saying because I remember it just being plastered on every single television.

Wherever you were at, you were seeing like Jessica lynch and Saved and the, the her on the stretcher and the like, I’m okay, they got me. And the same day the film says, like tanks were rolling in, like right into Iraq. Like it, it was so coordinated that you can see that that’s how you get people ready for war, because no one really likes war until you do something of this nature. Well, in that particular point, the, the way that this documentary sort of puts a nice period at the end of that sentence is that whenever you see these war campaigns getting a lot of pr, there’s a good chance that that’s what you would call a substitute story.

And the only reason it’s there is to replace bad news with good news. So whenever you see these rescue missions or you see these like heartfelt war stories, they’re doing that to make sure that the nightly news has a nice 5, 10 minute piece where they won’t talk about another thing. And to get into another point, the Hill and Knowlton’s role in a lot of the. This is a PR firm that was. Were there for not just the Iraq war, but the original Gulf War. And they were claimed to be behind the Princess Naira babies in incubators, which got us into the Gulf one, you know, the, the original Iraq war, which if people don’t know about that story, Princess Nara was in front of Congress telling her how the Iraqi soldiers went into a hospital smashing babies in incubators.

And it’s what we call atroc propaganda where people are using the most vile thing that, like in human nature, where you’re like, what? They’re just stomping on like incubated babies. It gives people the push to be like, yeah, let’s go kill those guys. Like, and, and everybody’s on that narrative when this is one of the examples where they get a minor, this, this underage girl to say this in court as if she was an eyewitness. And one of the lines is that they were taking these babies out of incubators and leaving them to die. And starve all alone on the cold floor.

And then it cuts to show George Bush, senior Herbert Walker Bush repeating what the girl said. And it’s, and it’s such a wild sequence of events when you realize, okay, this story was legitimately, this is not like a speculative conspiracy theorist wacko statement, right? That this story was created by a PR firm given to the Saudis. The Saudi, you know, grab a daughter of one of the Saudi princes. She actually goes into a core, an international court, and says this thing that had been workshopped by a PR campaign. And then once she says it out loud, now the president of the US ex CIA director can also say it out loud.

And it’s not like, oh, I’m not saying it. I’m just repeating what this little girl said. What are you calling her a liar? You calling that crying child a liar? And yeah, she was a liar. But the truth was that even when this story broke, the fact that she was lying probably doesn’t get printed on the front page and doesn’t make all the headline news. This gets printed in the back of the paper, in the fine print, so that everyone that emotionally connected, oh my God, they’re doing what to babies? That’s what sticks with them. And then that was all the priority campaign was all about.

That was another really wild and, and slightly more recent example of this. What’s so powerful about pr, it shows you too, is that they actually had on 60 Minutes like a year later that she was lying. Because there was investigated journalists that were like, hey, we went to the hospital, we talked to the people that work there. They were like, yeah, that never happened. That’s not what it was. And it’s still. But the PR was so effective, the campaign, that people didn’t even blink eye. Like they were like, well, I don’t know, they probably did it, man.

Like, you couldn’t change people’s mind on that. And this one, I guess, piggybacking on that. I don’t know if this was one of your key claims, but they make this statement amongst the context of this, that this is clearly propaganda. PR firms put all this propaganda, but that propaganda is the primary means in which the rich communicate with the rest of society. And that they do this by selling you a product, a political candidate, a law or a war. I mean, there’s probably more than that, but those four kind of examples and that during all some of these, these news stories, the CIA literally had psyop warriors working out of Fort Bragg that were stationed in the CNN headquarters in Atlanta.

So this is, this is goes way beyond just a small group facilitating these weird psyop wars. This was a military operation. And the film, one of my other claims, I know the film talks about like Edward Bernays, which we always talk about. Love hearing about Edward Bernays. I’m sure that many people know about him, but one of the things I thought was important too is that they talk about the 15th century in the Catholic Church using propaganda and using media like art and poems and things of that nature to shape the faith of their. Their disciples of like, hey, man, you know, you got to go this way.

This is, this is the right way of the Lord. And I thought that was significant because we always talk about the godfather of propaganda and PR with Edward Bernays, but now they’re delving into a farther. Going farther back, which they even talk about. You know, obviously propaganda was before even the Catholic Church, but this was a significant moment of where they had an example of the power source at the time, which was the church was able to use propaganda to change the perception of the people. Yeah. It’s not a coincidence that the biggest funder of the arts and writing was the church.

And they’re like, paint us in a good light. Yeah. Also, one of the key things in this, the element of this that I really dug is, you know, a lot of people talk about Trump as the worst president. My nominee for the worst president of all time has always been Woodrow Wilson. And they do not paint him great in this. And I’m glad that there was more aspects of like, even with his, like, victory speeches and talking about, like, you know, it’s a noble cause for us to be in these world wars and using the techniques of patriotism to like, really grab the, the, the nation into like, hey, we need to go say we’re the heroes.

And that’s where we got all of these wars after that, because that was the blueprint of like, hey, we’re the heroes. We’re the good guys. We’re only going to war if necess. It’s a necessity. And the reason it’, necessities because bad guy X is taking over all these lands and only good guy America could come in there and save the day. Yeah. And this, I guess this is where propaganda, they make a point that it starts in war. You get all these people going off to wartime and they need to sell this war on the, the population funding it.

The population that’s receiving the war. Everyone needs to be the target of this, the psyop warfare. And then there’s a certain Point some sometime after World War I that they say, like, hey, what if we take this military psyop knowledge and we use this for marketing and we use it for just like selling people on all kinds of stuff. And the one biggest example they threw in here, and I, I didn’t know this, or maybe I’ve read it in like Howard Zinn and then forgot it since then. But that the modern version of public relations and these PR firms started in 1914 when there was a coworker uprising and they were demanding better treatment and they wanted to unionize and all this.

And it resulted in this thing called the Ludlow Massacre in which the Rockefellers paid a whole bunch of people to go in strong arm. And like some people died. Someone was shot to death because they were trying to stomp out this union organization. And as a result of that, people started hating the Rockefellers. So he hires this guy named Ivy Lee and he, he creates the first PR campaign, the first PR firm, really. And it’s. And he actually invented the entire concept of a press release. And apparently before this happened, press releases didn’t exist. The journalists would have to go and find their own news.

But when they create the press release, you go to the newspaper, like, wait, you mean I don’t have to like leave my desk and you just kind of wrote everything I need and I can just sort of put a little bit of flair on and put my name on it and my job is done? Yes, please, more of that, please. And that they also recommended Rockefeller start going around handing money to people on the street that he started Rockefeller foundation and give people scholarships and he helped the poor. And it’s just a tiny, tiny fraction of the money that he was exploiting from people.

But in doing this creates what we now know today is just press releases and PR campaigns. It was all to make sure people didn’t revolt against the Rockefellers for killing co workers. That’s what a wild backstory. And yeah, it’s the birth of philanthropy, right? Like now that we know, like, oh, Bill Gates is donating his money to Africa, or it’s this use a little small piece of your wealth which would be significant to someone that doesn’t have any money. Like, right. 100 grand to them is a drop in the bucket. But you. 100 grand to me is a lot, right? So that the perspective changes everything.

And Ivy Lee, I’m glad you brought him up because that’s something I’m getting into a little bit later because to me, he’s somebody that kind of is not mentioned as much as Edward Bernays. Right? Everybody knows who Edward Bernays is. Well, not everybody, but more than you would expect. Ivy League kind of just sits in that background and he was. Because this Ludwig massacre, they shifted the blame. Like well these coal miners were getting aggressive. We had to get the National Guard in. And they were like, they painted them into this idea of like this revolt was dangerous and they forgot to mention about the children and women that were killed.

Hidden treasures and overboard moments. Some of the hidden treasures for me is, is the different quotes from Woodward Wilson, the different quotes from like Ivy Lee and the Rockefellers and really putting this foundation of, for what we know as modern day philanthropy and, and the, the way that the modern society works because these PR firms and propaganda go hand in hand. I thought one of the cool things that they mentioned is like, you know, you had freedom fries at when I think France didn’t want to. I, I don’t remember the context behind that. But the freedom fries want to help back us when we went to invade Iraq, I believe.

And anyone that didn’t want to help us do that, they were like, what did they have to do with 9 11? We were like, shut up and join. Yeah, but before that you had Liberty cabbage, right? Which I don’t know if everybody knows about that but you know, we’re over here eating that Liberty cabbage. That was the way they framed things. And I thought it was cool that they were able to piece the modern day propaganda with the old. It hasn’t changed much, they’ve just shifted names and shifted places. But that blueprint has remained the same.

Right. I think that was sauerkraut, right? Because sauerkraut was too German and we want to help the Germans so we called it Liberty Cabin. For me, the, the biggest hidden treasure of this movie. You know, documentary, it does something that not a lot of conspiracy documentaries ever do, man. It actually offers a solution. It’s. It says at one point like well how do we do this? And they list out some of the false solutions. For example, limiting free speech. And I like that this movie is like, well you definitely don’t want to limit free speech in order to reduce propaganda because now everyone’s paying the price and, and propag.

It doesn’t solve the issue. And this documentary, it makes the point that the way to combat propaganda and psychological warfare is just a more informed public where we talk about propaganda openly more often and how it works and who’s behind it and what are the effects of it. And like this movie itself sort of I mean, maybe in a self serving way, like it is part of the solution. Just knowing about who Ivy Lee is. For example, the origins of a press release, why did it exist and the roots of so much of this in military psychological operations and how it transitioned into just straight up consumerism.

Knowing about that and talking about that and having, I don’t know, like maybe like a nightly news thing, like propaganda in the news, maybe that’s something we should, we should start working towards. But that, that would be the solution because now you can be more aware of it and it’s not just affecting you, you know, subconsciously now. I think that’s, you know, sort of a whimsical view of the future where things are getting more complicated, we’ve got less time to dissect stuff. We’re just going to let AI figure it out for us. Yeah. Make it really easy.

Hopefully I will be like, hey, this is kind of propaganda. I don’t think so. I don’t think so either. And I think also a hidden gem too. For me, like one of the hidden treasures was they had a quote from Walter Lippman, who is a prominent writer and journalist, and he said the public must be put in its place. It must be their function to be spectators and not participants in the drama of politics. And I thought that quote right there really solidified this. Elites versus the working class. Now the overboard moments for me is kind of what you said was one of the hidden treasures.

I thought, not that it’s bad, right. Like I had to poke something at it and I think it was a little bit too hippie dippy, like, oh, it just, if we just all love each other and, and you know, stop buying things and, and centering ourselves, we’ll be fine. Right? We won’t be consumers anymore. And I, and I like the message, I understand it, but you could see that’s when like towards the end of the film, like the bias really gets out of what their message was. And that would be my overboard moment. The little too much peace and love, bro, and everything’s fine.

Well, not, it’s, it’s a little ironic because the, the first, I’ll say 20 to 30 minutes of this movie feel very objective. It’s just, here’s the thing that happened, here’s the backstory, here’s the people, like, very, very incredibly objective. And as you go over the course of the movie, by the time it ends, you’re just reading a full on Noam Chomsky book. You’re at a Noam Chomsky lecture, literally, Noam Chomsky ends up taking up most of the screen time. As this documentary progresses, we get a lot of Howard Zinn in there. It feels like it, it plays a little bit of a switcheroo, like it itself is doing a cy war on you as you watch it, because you’re like, damn, this movie’s making so many great points.

And then by the time it’s over, you’re like, why do I feel like I want to support socialism all of a sudden? Why am I so anti capitalist? And they, for me, that’s kind of like the jump the shark overboard moment is that somewhere in here they say, in all, capitalism is basically part of this big cy war. And therefore, if you read between the lines, it’s like, vote for Noam Chomsky, vote for Bernie Sanders. Should have almost been a Bernie Sanders ad at the end of this there. And there’s also something that kind of irritates me a little bit when I see this as being used to prove a point where they’re talking about the Iroquois and that before President Madison, I think that they were talking about the Iroquois had this superior form of democracy and that there was like voluntary economic systems and everything was so much more balanced and justified.

And they’re, they’re propping these Iroquois up, up this very specific part of the confederacy in the Iroquois nation. But they don’t mention that they also practiced slavery. And they would do like, you know, go and scout people and, and kidnap women and children and force them to just work, you know, in like, basically slave conditions. That always gets glossed over like, oh, my God, the Iroquois, they were so perfect, the perfect democracy, that maybe not. If you were a settler and you got kidnapped and scalped and now you’re like being forced to reproduce for them, maybe you don’t think they have the perfect form of democracy from that perspective, but you rarely get that in like a Howard Zinn production.

And then it really does venture towards the end into just socialism and anti consumerism. And they do. They make so many really good points, right? They make great points in their criticism of capitalism, but at a certain point I, I like pause it. I was like, wait, is this the sill? Did I. Did someone switch out the movie? Like, they did a hard cut and all of a sudden now it’s like a socialist documentary. What happened to the cyborg thing? It felt like they just meandered intentionally. Again, well done if that was the intent. And then at the very, very end, they start talking about mind control and it’s like my guys, like don’t bite off more than you’re willing to chew here.

I can see the run time doesn’t go for nine hours. Let’s. Let’s stay folk. Like, they could have made this an hour long and cut the entire second half of it. And it would have been better for in my opinion. So it was. It should be relayed as the Noam Chomsky war, right? Let’s test the waters with a deep dive. Mentioned it earlier. My boy Ivy Lee, man, I think Ivy Lee was deserved a deep dive on him because he was involved in a lot more things than people realize. Or as I realized I had saw this film a while ago, but I.

It refreshed my memory on him. And not only did he come out with the press release which changed the way that we use media now, right? Like now all you have to say is like, oh, let me just switch these words around. No, they were attacking you, right? And you just use simple words and simple phrases. It was part of the. He worked with the Pennsylvania railroad after the 1906 accident, issuing public statements and promoting safety reform. Shift blame and to rebuild trust. So he was every little catastrophic event right there saying, like, okay, th. This is what really happened.

And to spin, right, this is the first where we’re getting not just political spin, but corporate spin of whatever happened. Now let’s spin that into a positive and blame it. Shift blame. Get it off the. The. The focus off us. You talked about the Ludwick incident and massacre of April 20, 1914, where John D. Rockefeller hires him and goes, hey, man, I’m in a mess. And he kind of develops this whole framework of if you give money back. And we’ll switch how this story paint these villains as these workers instead of you. You’re the good guy, you’re the hero giving the money out.

And that’s when you would hear things phrases of like, you know, Rockefeller going out and giving a dime to like, a group of civilians and buying ice cream for like, you know, a neighborhood and such things of that nature, which would seem like, whoa, look at this generous dude. And they kept trying to build this whole reputation of elites being kind, gentle souls, that they need all this money so they can help us a little bit, get us a little apple every now and then. Yeah, I. One of the quotes they have from Ivy League was that the corporations needed to reflect warmth and caring, and they were basically the opposite.

They had to reflect the opposite of what they really were. And this is all part of that. For example, I’m sure Ivy Lee did not invent the idea of a staged photo op, but stage photo ops became part of the formula. So now if you were doing a PR campaign or crisis management, then these stage photo ops were sort of the currency that you dealt in. And that once Ivy Lee started doing this, other people took notice. And now it’s an industry unto itself. Whereas before that it was just some weird guy making these weird suggestions in this new uncharted territory.

And now he, you know, he gave birth to the entire thing and that he was so good at it, he gets hired by the Germans, you know, in World War II by IG Farben, who are part of like the Nazi inner circle. And that one of the Ivy League campaigns that he puts together for IG Ferbin was actually being directed under Goebbels. So you’ve got this like this non partisan right, not in a good way, but like a globalist scum faction that starts to take form where it’s like, I don’t care, as long as you’re paying.

I’ll be the mercenary. So Ivy Lee and pretty much all other PR firms they mentioned this documentary are painted as these international mercenary war criminals. Ripples and ways, man. I, I don’t know how much historical significance maybe this film has brought about. I don’t know how many people actually know about this film. It’s like not a film that’s wide range, but I would say if it does have any relevance, it’s more into the left leaning and a crowd. I think that you could see a lot of these because Chomsky’s in it. That’s like a huge left guy that, that like they’re all over.

And as the film like we discussed progresses, it gets more into that like communistic, socialistic paradigm where like, you know, this utopia of where like, oh, it’s all capitalism’s fault. And I think the impact of this film, if any, would be to a lot of these left organizations that are like pushing socialism more and more. In the back of my mind, and I know it’s a false equivalence, but in the back of my mind I see Chomsky or Howard Zinn come out and, and it’s kind of like, yeah, this capitalism, it’s, it’s the cause of all of our problems.

The government’s corrupt. So let’s just go ahead and give the government a little bit more power and more leeway to do what they want because, you know, the problem is probably the solution to the prop. So I would say that this movie in particular, probably doesn’t have its own ripples and waves, but what it does is it hones in on the most conspiratorial aspect of Noam Chomsky and of Howard Zinn. And if you’re not familiar with Howard Zinn, he wrote a book called the People’s History of the United States, which maybe it’s propaganda. I legitimately think it’s a great.

I. I recommend it. Even if you are anti. Laughter. If you’re, you know, heart, you know, conservative through and through, whatever you think you are, I still recommend a People’s History of the United States because it really does show at least the. The working man’s point of view for. Through a lot of these historical events that we’ve only heard the official story of. But, yeah, I think that this movie is more about the ripples and waves that Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky have had, not necessarily the. The cy war movie. All right, man. Stink or swim.

I might have to. To pull like a. Like a cheat code. I’m gonna call this one a floater. Like, I don’t know if it’s. If it’s gonna flush all the way down or not, right? I don’t know if it’s gonna sink or swim. It just kind of float in there a little bit. If we were to. To cut this log into two, half of it would sink and the other half would swim, right? So if you just watch the first half of this movie and. And then the power goes out and you just forget to watch the rest of it, you’re great.

You’re actually probably better than if you finished the rest of the movie. So I don’t know, man. It’s. The first half is a swim and the second half is a sink in my mind. For me, I mean, there’s a lot of great information in this film. I like the aspect of putting Edward Bernays and talking, all that, but it’s a sink for me because it’s just too. Gets too much in the weeds for me with all this, like, oh, we’re gonna save everything with socialism. Like you said, more government’s always the answer. And just like always talking bad about capitalism, in which I understand capitalism has flaw.

I don’t even talk about capitalism anymore. I just call the free market. But this, like, idea that the free market is just consumerism and that’s like the reason why all wars exist. It. It just like loses me. I’ve seen this film before. I like the film, but as far, it’s just hard for me to recommend so I Gotta Sink does itself such a DennisService where the second half of the film starts to discredit the first half. And there’s no worse crime in my mind to take. To take something good and then start ruining it after the good part’s already done.

Like, guys, just stop hitting yourself at this point. But it would certainly appeal more to one type of person than another type of person. But yeah, I agree. I guess overall it’s kind of like a sink. But if you have. If you find yourself watching it and you only get halfway through and you get pulled away, don’t feel like you’re missing anything by not finishing it. On the horizon. What we got up next. The next one is a movie called American Mind Control. MK Ultra. So I’m actually kind of excited about this one. If you go online right now and just search for MK Ultra documentary, this ends up being one of the top hits.

It’s on Apple, it’s on a few other platforms. So yeah, let’s. Let’s check this one out. And again, don’t forget to share the show under the docs with all your friends. The place where we watch the documentary so you don’t have to. Right. Go to paranoidamerican.com go to killthemockingbirds.com and we’ll see you next time. This is under the Docks. Peace under the docks. Yeah, under the docks. Buried deeper we breaking the locks under the docks. Under the Docks yeah, Under the Docks. Learn about the full history of the Bavarian Illuminati. Adam Weishaupt Alumbrados Jesuits, Rosicrucians, Freemasons and more from the 18th century to modern day we expose it all.

That’s right. It’s the Illuminati comic from Donut and Paranoid American. Get yours now@illuminaticomic.com paranoid I scribbled my life away driven the right to page one Will it enlight your brain Give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hey maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cost they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated matters the apex execution aflame you out nuclear bomb distributed it war rather gruesome for eyes to see Max them out that I light my trees blow it off in the face you’re despising me for what, though calculated and rather cutthroat, paranoid American.

Must be all the blood smoke for real? Lord, give me your day, your way, vacate, they wait around to hate? Whatever they say, man, it’s not in the least bit? We get heavy rotate when a beat hits a thing? Cause you’re welcome for real? You’re welcome? They ain’t never had a deal? You’re welcome, man, they lacking appeal? You’re welcome? Yet they, they doing it still you’re welcome?
[tr:tra].