In order to comprehend the ostensibly bizarre Wikileaks phenomena that is continually in the news these days, it is essential to first comprehend the concept of the ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’.
It used to be the honorific of Frank Wisner. The first chief of political warfare for the Central Intelligence Agency, used to describe the C.I.A.’s plethora of front organizations and newsmedia stooges that he was capable of playing (like a great organ with many keyboards) for synthesizing any propaganda tune that was needed for the day. More details may be gleaned in the disclosures of Operation Mockingbird.
The fact that such an omnipresent Message-Machine is not ancient history but very much current affairs, is underscored by this NYT headline “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand”, Sunday, April 20, 2008.
Therefore, today, I use the term ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ as a metaphor to pluralistically refer to the same message-machine, i.e., the intelligence apparatus for manufacturing consent and controlling dissent, and its concomitant conscious manipulation of peoples’ thoughts, feelings, actions and in-actions, in order to serve the primacy interests of the ruling-elite. The latter are, invariably, also the de facto owners of the complete messaging-system now even more globally ubiquitous than when Frank Wisner played the world for a fool.
This ‘grand organ’ is now able to even more effectively synthesize, implant, and reinforce, all the right set of beliefs (myths) among the entire world’s public – by suitably combining ‘events’ with imaginative ‘expos’ writing – which appropriately primes the world populations to acquiesce to the oligarchic agendas. While playing this orchestra is now an integral part of all state-craft, its major musical themes are entirely determined by the behind the scenes owners of the system. While some might refer to the underlying techniques as propaganda and psy-ops, ‘Mighty Wurlitzer’ singularly captures the messaging-system controlled under a unified purpose of command which is both highly compartmentalized and cellularized. Only the Mighty Wurlitzer knows the entire tune.
What this means is that not all who willingly cooperate with the Mighty Wurlitzer in synchronistically humming its themes are knowingly being purveyors of its myths and deception. Many of its most shrill echoers are often well intentioned functionaries who are fed different motivating myths at different levels in the hierarchy – sometimes the lie is different at every level – such that it suitably motivates each according to their own predilection, professional station, and mission statement.
The Mighty Wurlitzer operates on the core premise which has been empirically shown to psychologically motivate most human action. That premise was elegantly captured in the following insightful observation made at the so called “Terrorism Study Group”, that “’Public Assumptions’ Shape Views of History: Such presumptions are beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community. The sources for such presumptions are both personal (from direct experience) and vicarious (from books, movies, and myths).” Successfully implanting such presumptions and pre-suppositions among any group is to motivate its overall actions in accordance with those implanted beliefs. Thus, many intelligent peoples for whom it is otherwise inexplicable to understand why they persist in ‘United We Stand’ with absurdities, are motivated to react sympathetically to those absurdities.
To barely catch a glimpse of how it’s partially done, the following description by Col. Fletcher Prouty from the Preface to the first edition of his 1973 book “The Secret Team” is instructive:
‘There is another category of writer and self-proclaimed authority on the subjects of secrecy, intelligence, and containment. This man is the suave, professional parasite who gains a reputation as a real reporter by disseminating the scraps and “Golden Apples” thrown to him by the great men who use him. This writer seldom knows and rarely cares that many of the scraps from which he draws his material have been planted, that they are controlled leaks, and that he is being used, and glorified as he is being used, by the inside secret intelligence community.
Allen Dulles had a penchant for cultivating a number of such writers with big names and inviting them to his table for a medieval style luncheon in that great room across the hall from his own offices in the old CIA headquarters on the hill overlooking Foggy Bottom. Here, he would discuss openly and all too freely the same subjects that only hours before had been carefully discussed in the secret inner chambers of the operational side of that quiet Agency. In the hands of Allen Dulles, “secrecy” was simply a chameleon device to be used as he saw fit and to be applied to lesser men according to his schemes. It is quite fantastic to find people like Daniel Ellsberg being charged with leaking official secrets simply because the label on the piece of paper said “top secret,” when the substance of many of the words written on those same papers was patently untrue and no more than a cover story. Except for the fact that they were official lies, these papers had no basis in fact, and therefore no basis to be graded top secret or any other degree of classification. Allen Dulles would tell similar cover stories to his coterie of writers, and not long thereafter they would appear in print in some of the most prestigious papers and magazines in the country, totally unclassified, and of course, cleverly untrue.
In every case, the chance for complete information is very small, and the hope that in time researchers, students, and historians will be able to ferret out truth from untruth, real from unreal, and story from cover story is at best a very slim one. Certainly, history teaches us that one truth will add to and enhance another; but let us not forget that one lie added to another lie will demolish everything. This is the important point. Consider the past half century. How many major events — really major events — have there been that simply do not ring true? How many times has the entire world been shaken by alarms of major significance, only to find that the events either did not happen at all, or if they did, that they had happened in a manner quite unlike the original story?’
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