Psyop

Psyop  (Illusion,  Propaganda)
Abbreviation	Psyop
Interest of	• Michael A. Aquino • Behavioural Insights Team • Dutch Safety Board • Bernard Fergusson • Fred C. Iklé • Paul Linebarger • Office of Policy Coordination • Steve Outtrim • Jon Rappoport • The 77th Brigade • James Tracy • Truthstream Media

A psychological operation (psyop) is an unit of psychological warfare, which takes a hostile stance to other people and tries to trick them.

Former CIA agent Philip Agee defined psychological operations as "propaganda (also known simply as media), work in youth and student organizations, work in labor organizations (trade unions, etc.), work in professional and cultural groups, and in political parties".

False flag

Full article: False flag

False flag attacks are classic examples of psyops.

The Battle for Public Opinion

In peacetime as well as war,the military apparatus often starts psychological operations to push public opinion in certain directions. Standard tactics include an intense media blitz by compliant media, often covertly coordinating with the government. The media is fed misleading interpretations or strongly biased selections of facts, for example of opponents' intentions or actions. If necessary the facts can be arranged (see:False flag attacks). This is meant to lead the public to an inevitable conclusion, often creating enemy images.

Cyberwarfare

Psychological operations have become a integral part in Cyberwarfare.

Superstitions

A 1950s paper from the Rand corporation dealt with superstitions of common people in Germany and eastern Europe evidenced in World War II and the techniques used to exploit these beliefs for psychological warfare. The same was done in other countries.

Technology

In 1999, the Washington Post reported about the idea to project a holographic image of Allah floating over Baghdad urging the Iraqi people and Army to rise up against Saddam. The feasibility had been established of projecting large, three-dimensional objects that appear to float in the air.

The Gulf War hologram story might be dismissed were it not the case that washingtonpost.com has learned that a super secret program was established in 1994 to pursue the very technology for PSYOPS application. The "Holographic Projector" is described in a classified Air Force document as a system to "project information power from space ... for special operations deception missions."

 

Examples

Page name	Description
"Dancing Nurses"	One of the most peculiar parts of the COVID-19 propaganda effort saw thousands of nurses dancing in choreographed routines - something that blatantly clashed with one of the other PR-messages, the one of "overwhelmed hospitals".
"Kosovo student poisoning"	The alleged poisoning of thousands of Kosovan young people by toxic gases or substances in 1990. It came in the run-up to the Kosovo War and gained lots of coverage in the international press.
'A Gay Girl In Damascus'	A false media personality to create a mood in Western liberal opinion for regime change in Syria
2021 Monkeypox Tabletop Exercise	A 2021 biological exercise which (presciently) predicted the monkeypox pandemic which started in mid May 2022
Christopher Alexander	Spooky American marketing and communications executive
Corporate media/Logic	Corporate media uses psychological tactics to attract more viewers. The tactics have become a standard set of rules how to present articles, to make sure politicians and their special interest groups can influence the public's opinion more easily and quickly. People often neglect the idea that the news on their favourite channel is biased with a reason as it fits their personal opinion.
Easter Crisis	a Cold War psychological operation to create the mood for Danish NATO membership
Epidemic of Small Plane Crashes
FEMA coffins	A bogus conspiracy about the government storing over-sized coffins for the population.
FEMA trains	Trains for the transportation of cars.
False flag	False flags are attacks intended to blame a third party. Since a 1979 conference in Jerusalem, the most common pattern in the West has been bomb attacks which authorities and the commercially-controlled media quickly blame on suicidal Muslims, promoting an overarching "war on terror" narrative, that promotes fear and is used to concoct casus bellis as needed.
Fazze	UK-based PR agency with alleged Russian connections, which promoted misinformation about the COVID-19/Vaccine.
Flat earth	Modern Flat Earth groups are organizations that more or less seriously promote the belief that the Earth is flat. In the 2010s, advocates of internet censorship often used corporate banning or shadowbanning of Flat Earth proponents as a soft start to gain public acceptance for a broader censorship
Forged 2022 Rand report	A forged paper paper allegedly produced by the Rand corporation.
Havana syndrome	Attack on US embassy staff and spies in different locations around the world.
Jessica Lynch/Rescue	Special forces rescue operation that was not actually necessary, but initiated to bring some uplifting news from Iraq.
Live action role play
Mind control	Mind Control aims to gain domination over the victim by making them cede their autonomy to the controlling person or group. Methods include lying, isolation, manipulation, indoctrination, electroshock, operant conditioning, coding / programming and "brainwashing".
Mind control/Child Abuse	Mind Control aims to gain domination over the victim by making them cede their autonomy to the controlling person or group. Children are especially vulnerable to spiritual, emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
Operation Ranch Hand	U.S. military herbicidal/chemical warfare operation during the Vietnam War
Plausible deniability	Plausible deniability, the ability to (fairly) plausibly deny having done or attempted to do something, is a key part of deep statecraft, needed to stay in the shadows
QAnon	Deep State perpetrated modified limited hangout cum distraction psyop to try to obscure the increasing public awareness of its presence
Roswell Incident	A crash reported in US media in the 1940s of a military or weather balloon. Witnesses, including military personnel later reported they were told to stay quiet and lie, as the "objects" retrieved appeared to be from extraterrestrial origin.
Russiagate
SIEV-X sinking	While presented as an tragedy caused by greedy people smugglers, the real story is probably a carefully stage-managed psychological operation, including a deliberately foreseen sinking arranged by Indonesian proxies of the Australian government, in order to put pressure on the Indonesian government to make people-smuggling illegal.
Shipwrecking
Shock Doctrine	A deliberate strategy of "shock therapy". This centers on the exploitation of national crises (disasters or upheavals) to establish controversial and questionable policies, while citizens are too distracted (emotionally and physically) to engage and develop an adequate response, and resist effectively.
Shock doctrine	A deliberate strategy centering on the exploitation of national crises (disasters or upheavals) to establish controversial and questionable policies, while citizens are too distracted (emotionally and physically) to engage and develop an adequate response, and resist effectively.
Strategy of tension	An umbrella term used for long series of covert operations by governments aimed at stressing, destabilising or unsettling target populations or states. First used in Italy to describe Operation Gladio bombings.
The Bombers Affair (Luxembourg)	Luxembourg terrorist attacks by the local Gladio stay-behind network
The secret war against Sweden	A large number of "Soviet" submarine intrusions in Swedish waters in the 1980s, in reality committed by NATO under false flag. The intrusions were about deception and PSYOPs, to change the mindset of the Swedes, to make them adapt to US interests.
'Kong Tsung-gan'	An alleged prominent Hong Kong pundit and organizer of anti-China activities, who Western corporate media used as a go-to source for quotes. Later revealed as Brian Patrick Kern, a US citizen,
UFO	Unidentified flying objects are a mysterious subject. While there have been credible reports of unsolved massive sightings, corporate media all over the world continue blaming aliens, while the world's air forces’ high-tech, massive black budgets go largely unquestioned.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Behavioural Insights Team	“Very powerful psy-ops came into play. The familiar slogan “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives” is familiar now to all of us. And that was the creation of the behavioral insights team in Number 10 Downing Street. Remarkable psychology behind that. I think the team were even very surprised by how well we behaved.”	Karol Sikora	23 April 2020
COVID-19/Panic	“People in the UK widely believed that the pseudopandemic was real, not because the scientific or statistical evidence was clear but because the government spent billions with PR firms to run “hard-hitting” media campaigns designed to convince them of it.”	Iain Davis	16 August 2022
Document:Psychological Warfare for the West: Interdoc and Youth Politics in the 1960s	“Psychological warfare has two sides: The build-up of moral strength within one's own side and the undermining of the morale of the opposing side.”	Cees van den Heuvel	1959
Fred C. Iklé	“Approximate military parity between the superpowers enhances the importance of PSYOP and POLWAR [Political Warfare]. Major adversaries equally armed and equally capable of destroying each other must turn away from shooting wars to settle their genuine conflicts. POLWAR and PSYOP pose a lower risk of escalation. Our era has become the age of terrorism, insurgency, and limited war because each of these is an essentially political method of struggle. In this era of superpower confrontation, it is no longer facetious to set Clausewitz' dictum, "War is the continuation of politics by other means," on its head. In our modern world, international politics is the continuation of war by other means.”	Fred C. Iklé	1986
Mind control	“The goal and end of Mind Control is to control and bondage the victim or survivor both during abuse and ritual and during 'normal life'”	Ritualistic Abuse Consultancy Sydney .
Mind control	“Basically, what we as therapists across the country are finding are a group of clients that formally were considered untreatable, that based on recent information we're finding are reporting having been subjects in mind control experimentation performed by the government, the CIA and the military establishment ... probably from about the late 1940's until middle 80's and may even be going on today.”	Valerie Wolf	15 March 1995
Mind control	“In late 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld appointed General Geoffrey Miller to command Guantanamo with wide latitude for interrogation, making this prison an ad hoc behavioral laboratory. Moving beyond the CIA’s original attack on sensory receptors universal to all humans, Guantanamo’s interrogators stiffened the psychological assault by exploring Arab “cultural sensitivity” to sexuality, gender identity, and fear of dogs. General Miller also formed Behavioral Science Consultation teams of military psychologists who probed each detainee for individual phobias[...].”	Alfred McCoy	2006
Mind control	“When torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated, there is still hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and those responsible deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called "the juridical person in man".”	Naomi Klein	2005
Mind control	“The aims of the concentration camp as an institution are to break the prisoners as individuals, to spread terror among the rest of the population, and to provide the Gestapo with a training ground and an experimental laboratory. [...] The typical initial reactions are feelings of detachment: 'this can't be true … things like this just don't happen'. The first few weeks are the worst; persons who manage to live through the transportation to camp and the first three months thereafter, have a fair chance of surviving. If the tortures become too intense, indifference takes the place of anxiety. Prisoners are particularly sensitive to punishments resembling those a parent might inflict upon a child. Prisoners' dreams rarely deal with situations of extreme torture but instead with comparatively smaller maltreatment. Group formation, especially around a hero or martyr, is very effectively prohibited by means of group punishments. For only a short time do the new prisoners direct their hostility primarily against their real enemy; in many cases it is soon turned against former friends or members of the family by whom the prisoners feel deserted. Old prisoners come to direct their hostility mostly against themselves. Gradually a regression to infantile levels take place, turning many prisoners into willing tools in the hands of the Gestapo. In the phase of 'final adjustment', the strangest phenomenon of all could be observed: the prisoners' identification with the guards. Certain prisoners even tried to imitate the guards' uniforms, became cruel to their fellow-prisoners, partly accepted Nazi ideology. The author's conclusion is: What thus happens in an extreme fashion to the prisoners in concentration camps, happens also, in a somewhat less exaggerated form, to the inhabitants of the great concentration camp called 'Greater Germany'.”	M. Grotjahn	1945
Mind control	“Mind Control is a system of influences which break the identity of an individual (his/her beliefs, behavior, thoughts and feelings) and replace it with a new identity”	Steve Hassan	1993
Karol Sikora	“Very powerful psy-ops came into play. The familiar slogan “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives” is familiar now to all of us. And that was the creation of the behavioral insights team in Number 10 Downing Street. Remarkable psychology behind that. I think the team were even very surprised by how well we behaved.”	Karol Sikora	23 April 2020
Social media	“Social media manipulation was pioneered by Israel in 2009, during its Gaza offensive, not by Russia and China. The UK and the US both have had online "psychological operations" for years. Calling out some actors but giving others a free pass does little to address the problem.”	Clare Daly	10 December 2021

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Institute for Statecraft & Center for Naval Analyses Joint Workshop	workshop summary	22 June 2018	Integrity Initiative	Information Warfare Study Day hosted by British Navy. Candid opinions (with a NATO-flavor) on lots of military issues.
Document:Maritime Battle Staff Information Warfare (IW) Study Day	seminar description	22 June 2018	Integrity Initiative	Information Warfare Study Day hosted by British Navy
Document:Psychological Warfare for the West: Interdoc and Youth Politics in the 1960s	book excerpt	2011	Giles Scott-Smith	A book chapter covering Interdoc's activities in the international student/youth field during the 1960s.
Document:Why some people are spreading false rumours about the Texas gunman	Article	9 May 2023	Shayan Sardarizadeh Mike Wendling	The BBC factchecks the recent 2023 Allen, Texas outlet mall shooting regarding the alleged Nazism of the Hispanic shooter
File:MindWar.pdf	paper	1980	Paul E. Vallely Michael A. Aquino
File:NATO-PSYOPS.pdf	guideline	October 2007	NATO	NATO’s standard doctrine for psychological operations. Though unclassified, NATO doctrine documents are not released to the public.

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