We’re in a lot of trouble! Because you people, and 62 million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than 3 percent of you people read books. Because less than 15 percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole and entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube! This tube is the Gospel. The ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people!
And when the largest company in the world controls the most awesome, goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network! So you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television’s a goddamned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business.
But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion!
BY 1976, the Rockefellers controlled every leading news outlet in the United States.1 They could dictate what news should be conveyed to the public and what news should be withheld. Americans remained unaware that they had been dragged into World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War, and the war on “terror” by the money cartel; that the Depression had occurred by design; that their gold had been shipped to Basel, Switzerland, to create an occult economy; that their educational, religious, judicial, and political systems were ruled by the Rockefellers; that their constitutional rights and national sovereignty had vanished; that the CIA had become an agency that served almost solely to advance Rockefeller interest; and that the U.S. State Department remained in the hands of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), who alone possessed the power to draft and dictate national and international policy.
As soon as the CFR was established in 1921, the editors and publishers of America’s leading newspapers were obliged to join the CFR in order to obtain news of national and international developments and of the adoption of new political and economic strategies. Every leading mover and shaker in the country, including the industrial giants, the global bankers, and the political and military leaders, met each week in secret at the Pratt House in New York. Those who were excluded from these meetings were deprived of any insight into the inner workings of the nation and the world.
Every leading mover and shaker in the country, including the industrial giants, the global bankers, and the political and military leaders, met each week in secret at the Pratt House in New York. Those who were excluded from these meetings were deprived of any insight into the inner workings of the nation and the world. “Harold Pratt House” by Gryffindor is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
In 1937, Arthur Hay Sulzberger, chairman of the board of the New York Times, became a prominent CFR member, and stories circulated that the Rockefellers had purchased the nation’s most prestigious newspaper for $17.5 million. The stories gained credibility when Sulzberger, that same year, became a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation.2 Following these developments, a flock of top Times executives and reporters were granted CFR membership, including Sulzberger’s son-inlaw Orvil E. Dryfoos and his grandson Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, both of whom would ascend to the position of publisher of the nation’s most prestigious newspaper. Other Times staffers who became part of the CFR rank and file were Harding Bancroft, James Reston, A. M. Rosenthal, Seymour Topping, Max Vrankel, Harrison Salisbury, C. l. Sulzberger, and David Halberstam.3
The emergence of the Council on Foreign Relations as a main source of inside information for the New York Times provided the Rockefellers and their ilk with the opportunity of manufacturing stories in order to produce political and economic results. “All the news that is fit to print became, in many instances, all the news that the Rockefellers deem fit for profit—even accounts that are completely untrue and outlandish. To protect their oil interests in the Caspian Sea, the Rockefellers arranged for stories to appear in the Times by Walter Duranty that depicted the Soviet Union under Stalin as a “socialist paradise.”4 Such portrayals of Communist Russia caused the American public to express no qualms about becoming Stalin’s ally during World War II, even though the Soviet dictator (unbeknownst to the readers of the New York Times) had engaged in pogroms that would put Adolf Hitler to shame. The Times was the perfect outlet for the tales of the “socialist paradise.” Speaking of the power of the premier New York newspaper to influence public opinion, James Reston wrote: “A significance of the Times is its multiplier effect. What appears in the Times automatically appears later in other places.”5
Representatives of every major newspaper and magazine in the country flocked to seek entrance at the Pratt House. The membership list of the CFR came to include editors, publishers, and correspondents from the Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Post, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal, along with the Arkansas Gazette, the Des Moines Register, the Des Moines Tribune, the Guy Gannett Company, the Houston Post, the Minneapolis Star, the Minneapolis Tribune, the Denver Post, and the Louisville Courier.6 They all joined in the perpetuation of bogus news and false reporting.
This development was neither unnoticed nor unacknowledged. In 1953, John Swinton, former chief of staff at the New York Times, stated the following at the New York Press Club: “There is no such thing in America as an independent press. You know it and I know it…. The business of the journalist is to destroy truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his county and his race for his daily bread. You know it, and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals for rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”7
Despite this outcry, the “intellectual prostitutes” continued to gather at the Pratt House to spin their latest stories. In 1968, Admiral Chester Ward, a former member of the CFR, wrote: “Out of its 1,551 members, 60 were listed in official CFR reports as engaged in ‘journalism.’ An additional 61 were listed in ‘communications management,’ a highly descriptive title, because CFR members do indeed ‘manage’ mass communications media, especially the influential segments. They control or own major newspapers, magazines, radio, and television networks.”8
The Rockefellers’ control over the CIA tightened their stranglehold over the media during the postwar era. In 1953, Allen Dulles, the CIA director and Rockefeller lackey, initiated Operation Mockingbird. This undertaking consisted of the recruitment of leading journalists and editors to fabricate stories and to create smoke screens in order to cast the Agency’s agenda in a positive light. Among the news executives who took part in this undertaking were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Entire news organizations eventually became part of Mockingbird, including the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald-Tribune. With over 400 journalists now on the take along with mainstream news outlets, the Agency could operate to expand the Rockefeller interests in Europe, the Middle East, and South America, without fear of exposure.9 Americans would remain uninformed of the CIA’s involvement in the heroin trade. They would be kept in the dark about the Agency’s participation in overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, Turkey, Greece, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. They would not be aware that the CIA’s covert operations on behalf of the Rockefellers would bring them into a series of endless wars.
Operation Mockingbird would persist into the 21st century, and CIA files regarding such monumental undertakings as Operation Gladio and Operation Condor would remain classified as confidential and unavailable for inspection. The refusal to disclose any information about these undertakings was in keeping with the compliance of the media. Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post and a Mockingbird operative, said: “There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”10
The Rockefellers’ stranglehold remained virtually unbreakable since they also controlled the big businesses that provided the advertising revenue for the media. At the snap of their fingers, the family could cause the cessation of ads from the country’s leading drug companies, automobile manufacturers, banks, airlines, insurance firms, retail outlets, food distributers, and oil companies. Such action would cause most media outlets to fold. Newspapers, in particular, derive over three-fourths of their revenue from advertising. In 1968, Ike McAnally, a columnist for the New York Daily News, wrote: “The most persistent influence upon the editorial policies of metropolitan newspapers today is the large advertiser. In many instances these advertisers … make open and contemptuous demands upon the front offices of newspapers to support the left wing…. Newspapers have surrendered unconditionally to left wing front office pressures, real and imaginary.”11
By 1952, when television succeeded the newspaper as the primary creator of public opinion, the Rockefellers had seized control of the tube. William S. Paley, chairman of the board of CBS, became a CFR member and a trustee of the Ford Foundation. Along with Paley, other CBS executives were sucked into the CFR’s vortex, including Frank Stanton, who served as CBS’s president and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute; Arthur Taylor, who succeeded Stanton as president; Michael O’Neill of CBS publications; CBS directors Roswell Gilpatrick, Courtney Brown, Henry Schact, and William Burden; and CBS newsmen Charles Collingwood, Richard C, Hottelet, Marvin Kalb, Larry LeSueur, Daniel Schorr, and Walter Cronkite.12
It was a small wonder that CBS aired a two-hour special on Friday, December 28, entitled “The Rockefellers.” The program, which was narrated by Cronkite, was (in the words of Gary Allen) “so sugary it must have sent thousands of diabetics scrambling for their insulin.”13At the conclusion of the program, Cronkite stared into the camera and said that if any family had to possess so much wealth and power, it was fortunate for everyone that it was the Rockefellers.14 Walter failed to mention that the family whom he praised possessed controlling interest in his network.15
Along with CBS, the Rockefellers extended their tentacles to NBC and ABC. David Sarnoff, the head of NBC, became a fixture at the Pratt House, along with NBC directors Thornton Bradshaw and John Petty and the network’s leading newsmen John Chancellor and Irving R. Levine. The principal interest of this network, too, remained in the hands of the Rockefellers.16 The same was true of ABC, America’s third network, which had fallen under the control of the Chase Manhattan Bank.17
The one-eyed tube in the living room of homes throughout the country became the central point of American interest and fixation. Television viewing was encouraged by parents, often as a means of controlling the children, who would stare at the screen for hours on end. The content of the first children’s programs was banal and mentally destructive; even more destructive was the replacement of real family interaction by television viewing, as the dinner table was replaced by the “TV dinner” in front of the tube. Not surprisingly, the children became increasingly covetous of the items advertised by the media, demanding that they be given such things, lest they not be like their friends.18
In 1975, Eric Trist and Fred Emery of London’s Tavistock Institute published their findings of the impact of 20 years of television on American society in a work entitled Futures We’re In. They reported that the average daily viewing time had risen steadily over the two decades since the introduction of the medium to become a daily activity that ranked only behind sleep and work. The average American now stood glued to the tube for six hours a day. Television, the researchers concluded, had become an addictive drug that served to “shut down the central nervous system of man.” Strange to say, Trist and Emery found nothing wrong with this development, even though their findings indicated that television was producing a brain-dead generation.19
Television, the Tavistock researchers discovered, could control how people thought and what they thought. It could cause them to abandon their long-held beliefs and convictions; it could transform their morality. Knowing this, the Rockefeller Foundation began funding research in mind control. An early study performed by Carl Hovland of Yale University showed that fear was a primary factor in manipulating human behavior. Fear, Hovland found, did not have to be imminent but could concern matters of the future.20
Television, the Tavistock researchers discovered, could control how people thought and what they thought. It could cause them to abandon their long-held beliefs and convictions; it could transform their morality. Knowing this, the Rockefeller Foundation began funding research in mind control.
This finding prompted the Rockefeller Foundation to fund experiments in mind control under the auspices of the CIA—an undertaking that became known as MK-Ultra. The ideal subjects for these experiments were the children who had been placed in the Catholic orphanages of Quebec. The overriding purpose of this venture was to identify the means by which human beings could be transformed into dutiful citizens of the New World Order.
In post–World War II Montreal, thousands of children who had been placed in Catholic orphanages were suddenly proclaimed as mentally retarded and handed over to Catholic asylums for the insane. The motive for the reclassification was money. Subsidies for orphans, under the government of Prime Minister Maurice Duplessis, were $1.25 per day for orphans and $2.75 per day for mental patients. Moreover, the church could receive substantial financial assistance for building new psychiatric hospitals. Mr. Duplessis was much praised by the press for his commitment to the mental health of the people of Quebec.21
Over 20,000 children, most from unwed mothers, ended up in the Catholic asylums.22 The asylums were run by such religious orders as the Sisters of Providence, the Sisters of Mercy, the Gray Nuns of Montreal, the Sisters of Charity of Quebec, the Little Franciscans of Mary, the Brothers of Notre Dame-de-la-Misericorde, and the Brothers of Charity.23 Children were subjected to forced labor and physical torture. “They would plunge our heads into ice-cold water if we did something wrong,” Clarina Duguay, a surviving Duplessis orphan, said. Duguay also testified to being chained to a bed and forced to scrub the floors of the asylum from morning to night.24
Martin Lecuyer, another survivor, said that the children received no schooling but were sent to work on nearby farms. “The farmers would pay the religious community for the work we did,” he said. “This was slavery, that’s the word for it.”25 At night, Lecuyer claimed that he was regularly sexually assaulted by a religious brother from the time he was 11. When he complained to a superior about the abuse, he was beaten with a leather strap.26
But the sexual abuse, forced labor, and torture paled in comparison with the drug experimentation that was conducted with Rockefeller funding under the cloak of MK-Ultra. The children served as guinea pigs for Chlorpromazine, a drug known as a “chemical bully club” because of its mental and physical consequences. A chief side effect of the drug is tardive dyskinesia, a central nervous system disorder that results in grotesque facial conditions and involuntary body movements. The use of Chlorpromazine on the orphans was part of the MK-Ultra mind control program of the CIA.27 Dr. Ewen Cameron, the psychiatrist who conducted appalling tests on human subjects at McGill University, spearheaded much of the experimentation with, of course, Rockefeller funding.28
In addition to Chlorpromazine, the children were also subjected to electric shock, lobotomies, mental conditioning by ongoing television and radio broadcasts, and doses of additional drugs, many hallucinogenic. Clarina Duguay said that she began receiving Chlorpromazine two weeks after she arrived at St. Julien Hospital. The nuns had told her the drug would help her sleep. It did more than that. “It made me a zombie,” she maintained. “I had no energy. I was always feeling sleepy, had a hard time getting up. I was getting the drug every night.”29
Paul St. Aubain, another Duplessis orphan, said he was lobotomized at St. Michel Archange, a Catholic asylum in Joliette, when he was 18. “I wasn’t ill,” Mr. St. Aubain said. “They did it without my consent, without my permission. They were experimenting on me. I was their prisoner.” He said he was also subjected to electroshock therapy and daily doses of psychiatric drugs.30
Many of the children, like Mr. St. Aubain, suffered permanent brain damage. Some died. Their bodies were buried on an 800-acre plot of ground on the outskirts of Montreal that was next to a pig sty. The land was owned by the Archdiocese of Montreal, which was governed by Cardinal Paul-Emile Leger, a leader of the progressive party at Vatican II. Albert Sylvio, a Duplessis orphan who had been placed at St. Jean de Dieu, recalled transporting more than 60 bodies of fellow orphans to a mass grave site during the 1950s. “We put them in cardboard boxes,” he said. “There was never any ceremony. Some had died on the operating table. Some had been sick and some committed suicide.”31
Death had its reward for the religious sisters and brothers in charge of the orphans. The bodies of many of the children were sold to local medical schools for dissection. A Quebec law passed in 1942 allowed the members of religious orders to sell unclaimed remains for $10.32
The results of the experimentation were highly beneficial for the Rockefellers. They now knew, based upon the research conducted with drugs and hypnosis, that the key factor, as the Tavistock researchers had discovered, remained fear. By 1960, the Rockefellers employed their control of the media to proclaim the message that the world was grossly overpopulated, that the earth’s natural resources were being depleted, and that the climate was undergoing a disastrous change. They became convinced that this new message would cause the peoples of the world to band together in a new alliance to save the planet. The news of the impending doom would cause international law to be imposed upon all nations. Sharp sanctions would be in effect for all violators by global watchdogs. Life on planet Earth was coming to an end.
This was the new snake oil.
And the public swallowed it.
1 Gary Allen, The Rockefeller File (Seal Beach, California: ’76 Press, 1976), pp. 65–76.
2 Emanuel M. Josephson, Rockefeller “Internationalist” (New York: Chedney Press, 1952), p. 19.
3 Allen, The Rockefeller File, p. 67.
4 S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the “New York Times” Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 6.
5 James Reston, quoted in Allen, The Rockefeller File, p. 66.
6 Ibid., pp. 67–68.
7 John Swinton, “On the Independence of the Press (1953),” Constitution Society, January 28, 1999, https://www.constitution.org/pub/swinton_press.htm, accessed March 8, 2019.
8 Ibid., p. 66.
9 Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
10 Katharine Graham, quoted in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (New York: Verso, 1998), p. 31.
11 Ike McAnally, quoted in Allan, The Rockefeller File, pp. 74–75.
12 Ibid., pp. 68–69.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 “Who Controls the Media?” The Global Movement, January 2012, http://www.theglobalmovement.info/wp/areas-of-focus/global-financial-war/who-controls-the-media, accessed March 8, 2019.
19 Ibid.
20 Punam Anand Keller and Lauren Goldberg Block, “Increasing the Persuasiveness of Fear Appeals: The Effect of Arousal and Elaboration,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 22, No. 4, March 1966, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2489793?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, accessed March 8, 2019.
21 Clyde H. Farnsworth, “Orphans of the 1950’s, Telling of Abuse, Sue Quebec,” New York Times, May 21, 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/21/world/orphans-of-the-1950-s-telling-of-abuse-sue-quebec.html?pagewanted=all, accessed March 8, 2019.
22 News Staff, “Duplessis Orphans Want Montreal Burial Site Dug Up,” CTV News—Montreal, Canada, June 18, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20111022154328/http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20040619/duplessis_orphans_040618/, accessed March 8, 2019.
23 Clyde H. Farnsworth, “Orphans of the 1950’s.”
24 Christine Hahn, “The Worst of Times: How Psychiatry Used Quebec’s Orphans as Guinea Pigs,” Freedom, May 22, 2003, http://www.freedommag.org/english/canada/reports/page01.htm, accessed March 8, 2019.
25 Peter Rakobowchuk, “Duplessis Orphan Can’t Forget Sexual Abuse Almost 60 Years Ago,” Brooks Bulletin, December 21, 2006, http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2006/11_12/2006_12_21_Rakobowchuk_DuplessisOrphan.htm, accessed March 8, 2019.
26 Ibid.
27 Hahn, “The Worst of Times.”
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 William Marsden, “Duplessis Orphans Call for Exhumations,” National Post, June 19, 2004, http://canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/duplessis_orphans.html, accessed March 8, 2019.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.