Reality has been lost in an era of mass illusion. The fabricated narrative of warfare disguises a vast operation of mass simulations, enacted for the viewing public as ‘news events’, with a paraphernalia of embedded journalists and missile-eye-view cameras.

There is no underlying reality of war, referred to by media images. Instead, the images ARE the actual operational mode of war.

In the following membership piece, we explore the psychology of the War Hoax, including symbolic encounter, fake events, Wag The Dog and image processing, virtualisation of war and much more.

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A WORLD OF DECEPTION

The membership journey has taken many twists and turns: From exposing the origins and structure of the Brave New World Order system, to questioning many fundamental truths about the world.

What matters, on this intellectual and spiritual quest, is the effort to break open the uniform process of reality production and shatter its seeming self-evidence into pieces. 

It ultimately serves as an attempt to reverse our view of the world — shifting our perspective by introducing something new and unsettling into the order of things. 

What seemed natural before, now starts to look artificial; what presented itself as a glorious triumph, suddenly appears stale; what was evident, becomes shady. 

This is not an easy process for some to undertake, and in the end, many revert to their comfortability as an escape from re-evaluating their deepest perceptions.

The Hoax Hierarchy is like a ghost — Phantoms of Reality: They haunt reality by staging its excluded other — no matter if this ‘other’ really exists or if it has to be feigned.

One field of inquiry in which this question arises is in relation to war, and in this piece, I hope to share some research that exposes the fraudulent and deceptive nature of this mass theatre show.

We have all been exposed to these ideas in one way or another, I’m sure. Deception is a traditional component of political and military conflict. Many argue it is intrinsic to all human interaction.

To this end, almost every conflict is fought on at least two grounds: the battlefield and the minds of the people via propaganda. This is not a new thing. In fact, it is commonly written about.

Traditionally, both ‘sides’ become guilty of misleading their people with distortions, exaggerations, subjectivity, inaccuracy and even fabrications, in order to receive support and a sense of legitimacy.

As Winston Churchill famously is quoted in saying during World War II:

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

War deception can come in many forms, and is not restricted to a singular avenue to achieve its end:

This includes using selective stories that come over as wide-covering and objective, constructing partial facts or historical context, and using narrow sources of experts to provide insights.

Using a narrow range of discourse, judgments are often made by the public while the boundary of discourse itself, or the framework within which the opinions are formed, are often not discussed. The narrow focus then helps to serve the interests of the propagandists.

Indeed, war is always accompanied with lies. However, many never take the time to analyse if the sphere in which these lies are happening.. could also be one giant lie itself.

In this piece, I won’t be going over the traditional aspects of war by any sense. Instead, I will be looking further beyond the narrative to examine the greater psychology that drives warfare.

It is when we apply true objectivist logic and reasoning that we find some shocking revelations.

I will attempt to argue that war, in its entirety, is a vast operation of perception management, coupled with strategic relocation and social manipulation to instigate any so-called ‘conflicts’.

Before beginning, it is important to distinguish just what type of deception I will be exploring.

A fundamental dichotomy to be found in this confusing world is the division of deception into ‘active’ and ‘passive’ categories. Put simply, passive deception is designed to hide real intentions and capabilities from the public. Here, they are hiding something which really exists.

Active deception, on the other hand, is the process of providing the public with evidence of intentions and capabilities which you do not, in fact, possess.

War is a fraud the likes of which many will never comprehend, in which script writers create illusions to create an event. They make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what should intelligible, as a means to make the event itself unreadable.

However, some of us aren’t completely blind to the matrix. Some of us see through the cracks.

We see that not only does war contain components of falsehoods, but the very concept and nature of warfare itself is a giant falsehood. War is a digital fabrication.

This may seem like a radical statement. How on earth could this be possible at all?

To begin, let’s explore some powerful writers who have challenged the philosophical premises.

This will help set the stage for others to identify the cracks in the wall, to soon be peeped through.

QUESTIONING WAR: THE WRITERS

When examining critical questions surrounding war analysis, we must first look to those who have had a profound impact on literature and the framework of this grand narrative.

The first, Jean Baudrillard, was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist, responsible for some of the most important pieces of work that challenge the false realities of the society.

His book, Simulacra and Simulation is subtly featured in The Matrix. More on this next month.

Staying true to poststructuralism before it was taken over by cultural marxists, Baudrillard and others would raise important questions about the foundational makeup of many belief structures. 

Baudrillard would become an enemy of the left for his viewpoints on war, in which he didn’t oppose conflicts per say, because he was convinced they were nothing more but simulated theatre shows.

The next, Michael Ignatieff, wrote Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond — in which he explores the ethical, moral and philosophical questions raised by the war in the former Yugoslavia. 

In the book, he puts special emphasis on the ramifications of waging a so-called war that involves very limited casualties and collateral damage, in a seemingly just and moral cause.

James Der Derian also outlined the Military-Industry-Media-Entertainment alliance, among others.

These authors, particularly Baudrillard, are well ahead of their time with regards to understanding how war related to advertisement, mass media, and the television. 

Studying their work provides a mapping of, and an engagement with, key challenges of war, outlined as three distinct critiques. I will use their work in these areas to reinforce thoughts I have about war.

We will start by discussing what took place in the aftermath of the Second World War and its relationship to the notion of deterrence. The next part will look at the way war endures after the end of the Cold War, particularly by discussing the Gulf War and its lack of symbolic encounter.

Particularly, its simulated aspect, and the way it relates to war as processing, scripting and modelling. 

Finally, the last part outlines the relationship between war and ‘the policing of events and singularities’ particularly in relation to the War on Terror. This ends with a short discussion of what Baudrillard calls ‘fractal’ war’: the way society is in many ways at war with itself.

Could war be nothing but a virtual theatre show, in which sides maneuver together in a giant game?

When combining previous membership revelations with the discoverties of these writers, the lid is blown open once and for all on this grand deception.

DETERRENCE AND SYMBOLIC ENCOUNTER

War is as real, as the economy is real, or mass production is real. It exists, but it is a dead zombie system that does not actually involve conflicts, rather strategic re-locations, staged events and more.

To explore first explore what is happening on the ground, we must explore just how war relates to deterrence, before unlocking the key to the indefinite virtuality of modern warfare. 

This helps us appreciate the way in which the rules of the game have changed, or may have always been, with incidents and events occurring without meaning. This is important to remember.

War, if we are to call it that, has a fundamental lack of symbolic encounter between enemies. The goes back to war being considered, in the classic, Clausewitzian sense, as an encounter between two opposing forces. There are no opposing forces, only corporate constructs masquerading as nations.

The conception of war as a symbolic act is lost. Rather, wars are waged as a business strategy with a detached manner: This is the rule of modern way of life: nothing personal! 

War in practised in the same manner: Pragmatically, not symbolically.

This is equally true for the war in the media. The same war is fought in respect to morphing world opinion. It is the same as those fought on the battlefield, with no clear distinction between both.

The sleeping masses have forgotten that war is a symbolic exchange between two counterparts that have a hateful relationship. Today, war is waged clean, surgical, mathematical, punctual and efficient — in which the other is denied their status as the ‘other’, with no formal recognition and cooperation.

Perhaps we might say that the most intriguing aspect about the war is not the build up, conduct or media-coverage, but what this illustrated about war as such. According to Baudrillard:

“The referent changes from being one of battles between armies to one of the simulation of this battle. Uncertainty seeps into war (‘is this really a war?’) and what used to be at stake in a war of violence (such as conquest or domination) are no longer the underlying principles of war’s ontology.

This uncertainty spawns wars of ‘pure speculation’ waged as advertisement campaigns.” 

(Baudrillard 1995: 28-29).

Indeed, the stakes are intentionally raised so high, that war can be waged without matching the classical representation of warfare. Simulated images can be programmed continuously.

The masses accept that so-called nations don’t fight each other due to the potential of ‘world annihilation’, allowing them to maintain their face as legitimate and continue carrying out the dissolution process of borders towards a one world order. This is where things get interesting.

If we accept that real war has disintegrated and lost its principles under the virtual catastrophe of total nuclear and orbital war, we are forced to reconsider what a theory of war implies.

In our membership video, Inconvenient Truths and Fake Metanarratives, we explored how nuclear bombs and atomic weaponry are fantasy concepts, conjured (in fact) by the same system.

There is also good evidence to believe other ‘weapons of war’ are also just fear-based deceptions.

Now, let’s combine that with the notion of fake deterrence. Nuclear bombs, the great ‘evil’ threat, are the silver lining that justifies that broken logic of modern warfare. War advisors argue they are ‘smarter’ than to engage in actual warfare with an end, due to the hostile nature of these weapons.

Double programming. Simulation piled upon simulation. This characterises the Phantoms.

The political stake is dead, only simulacra of conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes remain.”

(Ibid.: 33-34).

We know the stakes – Poppy fields, oil control, civil unrest, disatablization, occupation. The US has over 1,000 military bases across the world. This isn’t to ensure so-called enemies will rebel, but rather act as business headquarters to continue processes and prevent resistance.

Any real conflicts that arise on the ground are purely a result of this international social combustion.

There are no wars, there are no boogeyman super weapons, and the world is occupied by one group. This is a cold hard truth for many in the so-called ‘truth movement’ to accept, as with historians:

“Traditional theorists of war must be at a loss before the explosion of their object of study.

For, paradoxically, it isn’t the bomb which has exploded, but the war-object, which has exploded into two separate parts — a total, virtual war in orbit and occupation on the ground.

The two have neither the same dimensions nor the same rules…”

(2002b: 22-23).

Humanity has been fooled, and any future conflicts that may arise due to the ongoing coronavirus saga, will simply be the re-modelling of their giant territory. China looks to be the new shift.

This does not actually mean a country called ‘China’ will be at war. This is all part of the script.

Arguably, what is ultimately evident is that the War Hoax theory does not so much result in a revised theory of war, as it challenges and displaces war as an object itself. The lid is blown open. 

It is not so much a theory of war that is lacking, but a proper critique of war’s ontology.

So, now that we understand the blueprint for how the masses are deceived in relation to conflicts in the modern world, we must take a look at how this information is ultimately processed by the mind.

It is here we find just how deep the layers of war programming go.

SIMULATION AND WAR PROCESSING

The common feeling that the war is a farce can be drawn mainly be due to two characteristics:

The first one, is the unusual visual presentation of war in media coverage. 

War is organised according to a combination of precision, of surgical, mathematical and punctual efficacy; a media-driven frenzy with no distinction between reality and biased narratives.

This ideal has transposed itself into the media coverage. Like the journalists themselves, all broadcasted images are carefully selected by the military, allowing only a certain type of release.

Viewers could look at beautifully arranged fireworks over Baghdad at night or at computerised animations of missile flights and crosshairs. It is all a digital illusion.

All of this trickery is intended to evoke the impression of a high-precision and civilised war, while the insignificance of the images also leads to associations to a computer game.

There is no actual war, only so-called war images, and it was in this revelation that Baudrillard articulated impressions a well-orchestrated media event, than a conflict itself.

He starts book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, for example, by stating that: “From the beginning we knew that this war would never happen” (Baudrillard 1995: 23).

It is therefore not a matter of whether the a country starts bombing en masse or not, but something quite different: War is about the ontological status of war itself. It is not meant to be ‘won’

This bares a striking resemblance to the central theme of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

How much of the book do people really understand?

People are quick to accept the very real omnipresence of mass surveillance, as is seen in the novel, but dismiss other larger philosophical notions about fake wars and fake enemies.

How can they not see that ‘real life’ conflicts are just constructed media fables?

Continuing on, and the ‘Gulf War’ is also mentioned in the film, Wag The Dog. It is in this film that we find the metamorphosis of Orwell’s vision and Baudrillard’s analysis.

WAG THE DOG: THE POWER OF MEDIA

Last month, we briefly explored the importance of the film Wag The Dog in relation to the fabrication of the political sphere. Here, this film reveals how PR teams control the messages.

However, the film goes a little deeper, with the underlying plot exposing the premise of war hoaxery.

In the movie, shortly before an election, a spin-doctor and a Hollywood producer join efforts to fabricate a war in order to cover up a Presidential sex scandal.

In Wag the Dog, the fake war, or the “appearance of war”  becomes a real and welcome distraction for the American people thanks to the superior Hollywood special effects and the excellent skill of a public relations expert, Conrad Brean and Hollywood director Stanley Motss.

Conrad Brean organises the war to distract the public from the president’s sexual misconduct with the ‘teenage’ Firefly. There are 10 days before the election, and the task is to ensure that the story of misconduct does not feature in the daily news — especially not on the Washington Post.

Motts boasts that the war footage “is a complete fucking fraud, and it looks a hundred percent real.”

Conrad Brean encourages us to be skeptical about official narratives because they are often constructed in such a way as to reveal a hidden or deceptive agenda.

Importantly, during a discussion over production elements of the war, hee encourages us to question the official narrative relating to the Gulf War. Was the video footage of this war real? 

Brean neither confirms nor denies the fact that it could have been shot it in a studio in Falls Church Virginia. “The truth? I was in the building when we shot that shot… One-tenth scale model of a building.” 

Likewise, at the conclusion of the film, a news report about a violent incident in Albania is shown, but it is ambiguous whether this is a true event or simply a continuation of the fictional war.

And after all, if war video footage is on national television, then there must be a war.   

This is where the film, Orwell and Baudrillard ultimately meet as one. The ‘real’ is whatever is broadcasted on the television, while the actual real — whatever that is — is hidden.

The media becomes part of the story through the sensationalist and dramatic headlines. There is a ‘just-in report’ with ‘poignant pictures’ to inject drama. Other headlines such as the ‘late-breaking news — from Air Force One’ reinforce the dramatic urgency of the occasion.

The government does not need to prove the “truth” or veracity of the information.  

As Brean says, “We don’t need it to prove out. We’ve got less than two weeks till the election, so we just need to distract them.”

Bream uses subtle psychological powers of persuasion to influence, control and define the terms of the debate. For example, the question, ‘does the government have a B3-bomber?’ focuses people’s attention on the country’s defence needs. 

But whether or not there is such a bomber is completely irrelevant.

In the film, war is show business; war is a pageant. It is part of the greatest show on earth, the president is a product and the supporting actors have been “cast” to perfection, even the drug-addled war hero, who enters as a convict in chains.

As Brean notes, “We’re not gonna have a war, we’re gonna have the appearance of a war” and he sets about re-constructing “reality” or inventing a parallel narrative that ensures that the president is re-elected. In a ‘room with talent’ and amidst a buzzing electrified atmosphere, talented show-business personnel thrive on the story.

The director in the Hollywood studio sifts through the Village Library to choose a combination of special effects that combine to give a chilling and authentic picture of an authentic war effort.

As Desmond Tutu reminds us: “Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.”  This is particularly true with the patriotic jingles crafted of by the script writers.

This film reveals the core premise of the war theatre.If you haven’t checked out the film, please do.

Full Members, I will be going into further details on this film and the previously explored influence of cinema and media on the collective subconscious programming of the masses.

Wag The Dog assists in a fantastic way to understand the illusion of warfare. It is an extension of the political circus — also a manufactured construct — and continues to fool generations of people.

ART IMITATES LIFE

Whilst the plot of Wag the Dog anticipates George Bush Jr’s push into Iraq in 2003 and the manufactured stories relating to weapons of mass destruction, it also harks back to George Bush Sr’s debacle in Kuwait and the hesitant push into Iraq in 1991.

It is alleged that Washington hired a number of public relations firms to manipulate support for the war and to overcome resistance. At the time up to 48 per cent of the public were against it.

One of the world’s largest public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton masterminded the Kuwaiti campaign. They invented a horror story that evoked a particularly strong emotional response.

The story came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah who said her life was at risk. She recounted that she had witnessed soldiers taking babies from incubators and leaving them to die.

You may all be familiar with this story. It turned out to be a publicly admitted hoax.

Parallels are also evident with the representation of the war in Iraq (2003), which was crafted as a need to overthrow a dictator who supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. 

Few in the media questioned the lack of WMDs. Why? Perhaps, because the truth simply didn’t make as interesting a story as the heroics of a bunch of American soldiers who were fighting for the ‘American way of life’ and an end to terrorism.

Same script, used over and over again. When will people wake up?

Now that we have set the stage and explored the concepts behind war movie operations, many of you must be thinking: But Ethan, if war is a hoax, what about the conflicts that happen on-the-gound between countries? What about the millions that have died in war across the world?

First, I would respond with the following questions: How much do we really know about what happens on-the-ground? Are things really like they seem?

VIRTUALISATION OF WAR

On closer examination, the concept of war reveals itself to really be ‘closed circuit conflict’, that reels off mechanically like a boring television script. And just like in any boring TV script, the flatness of the plot has to be compensated by special effects. 

If we are to examine the definition of war, the general findings are this: Nations are mobilised, soldiers fight and die, victories are won. However, have you ever actually seen this take place?

Most modern wars often contain no formal declaration of hostilities, the combatants are strike pilots and computer programmers, the nation is enlisted as a viewing audience, and, instead of defeat and victory, there is only an uncertain endgame. Think to the proxy war examination before.

Look at Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa — why are these spanning decades? Predicted to last lifetimes?

This is because the definitions of war do not match the actual reality of so-called wars on the ground. There are larger agendas at stake, all fed to the public via calculated transmissions.

In his books, Ignatieff raises the possibility that virtual wars, so much easier to fight and control, could become the way shadow powers impose their will in the century ahead. He was right.

Further, more than three decades before Ignatieff wrote about ‘virtual wars’, Baudrillard had already noticed how the virtual leaked into the real with regards to the Vietnam War.  

For example, in 1967, he claimed that the TV images of the war take us away from human reality, and classical conceptions of war, towards a world of advertising (2001: 42).

Paul Patton, James Der Derian and others have also outlined various ways in which the virtual is also associated with how the military employ electronic technology and communication devices.

This includes a focus on ‘new media’ such as real-time TV, CNN-effects, high-speed information. 

Let’s refer back to our piece, Follow The Signs, to understand more about war virtualisation.

The motion picture Apocalypse Now and the war in Vietnam were ‘cut from the same cloth’. The film is as much part of the war, as the war is part of the film. 

Rather than the war itself, the only reality that exists in the minds of masses when thinking of war is the images displayed at any given time. These images represent symbols that form perspective.

Or, by drawing upon Baudrillard’s important work, war is not so much ‘like a film’, rather it is a film: 

“With a script, a scenario that has been implemented … war becomes a gigantic special effect, cinema becomes the paradigm of war, and we imagine the “real” war as if it was only a mirror of its filmic being.”

(Baudrillard 2007a: 119).

Seen in this way, it is possible to think of virtual war, not in terms of a shift from one state to the next, but rather as an implosion which severely challenges how we think of social reality, as it saturates war with ambivalence and lack of distinction.  

War becomes reversible, as it might mean anything and everything, evident in notions like (Orwell’s) ‘War is Peace’ motto, but also in a vast network that affects the relationship between war and television, technology, advertisement, social media and the economy.

This notion raises how such non-events, like warfare, turn the concept of war into ‘war-processing’. 

War processing indicates how warfare is driven by rationalisation and technicalisation, becoming a force directed not against adversaries, but abstract operations. This is not war.

Warfare has subsequently been supplanted for the model of warfare. This turns war into a replica of its own simulated modelling, devoid of passions and contingency: a war no sane person should believe in, as it has become purely operational. 

According to Baudrillard, with each succeeding war, we move closer to a single world order. 

“Today, that world order, which has virtually reached its end, finds itself grappling, in all the current convulsions, with the antagonistic forces spread throughout the dimension itself. 

A fractal war of all cells, of all singularities, rebelling in the form of antibodies. A clash so elusive that the idea of war has to be rescued from time to time by spectacular set-pieces like the Gulf War.”

(Baudrillard 2003: 63).

Behind this simulated narrative of fighting to the death and of ruthless world stakes, the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else; unnamed, never spoken. This is, with the equal complicity of both adversaries, the total liquidation of themselves.

The great hoax of countries if revealed through the illusion of warfare; dissolving into each other:

“Tribal, communitarian, pre-capitalist structures; every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organisation, that is what must be abolished, that is the object of murder in war.

And war itself, in its immense, spectacular death apparatus, is nothing but the medium of this process of the terrorist rationalisation of the social — the murder on which sociality will be founded, whatever its allegiance, communist or capitalist. 

Total complicity, or division of labour between two adversaries .. for the very end of reshaping and domesticating social relations.”

(Baudrillard 1994a: 37).

We can thus conclude if the Afghanistan war is a motion picture, Osama Bin Laden played the lead.

Examining the war hoax can be a truly eye-opening experience for those willing to see the truth.

SEEING THE LIGHT, MOVING FORWARD

In the end, it is necessary that we use facts as a contrast against which the aestheticised, whitewashed reality of the war, can be scrutinised and deconstructed.

Exposed as not the only possible reality of war, but only in the light of its radical other can the reality of war be denaturalised and revealed as a self-display of power and hegemony.

By focusing on the fake war — constructed in Hollywood production studios — we ignore the real war.

The production of false reality is a real kind of warfare itself: Not only is it a monologue of power, a speech without response, but the terrorism of life codes can be like a war-like attack on our senses.

War is not real, is is a fantasy concept. There are no opposing sides fighting for dominance.

Instead of clear disjunctions, the blurry chaos of simulation has taken over. Today, the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather than the ‘outdated’ reality principle.

The lies are so deeply embedded that only those who are meant to see the lies, will indeed see.

For others, including the vast majority of the public and even many truthers, will keep believing.

Believing in an impending conflict, or a nuclear bomb that will destroy the planet, or the ‘geopolitical relations’ of each ‘country’, is ultimately a distraction to reinforce the false power structure.

For those who can use this information to transform their perceptions, however, will fly.

Fatalism, such as emotionally investing in war fiction, offers an unpalatable interpretation of the world, and it leads to resignation. I don’t resign — I want clarity, and a lucid consciousness. 

When we know the rules of the game, then we can change them. In this respect, I am a man of true enlightenment and I will not stop until I break away from the chains that have shackled me.

No longer ruled by the forces of intergenerational propaganda.

No longer scared of the ‘threat’ of a big bad ‘world war’ that will destroy everything.

Ready to face the future with optimism and hope. For when we dispel the lie system, we can truly grasp the infinite possibilities that await us. We can regain our true selves, whatever that may entail.

Next month, we will continue to explore just how the psychology of mass belief operates, and how this era of simulation is merely a preparation for an era of hyperreality that will seal these cracks.

As the world transitions to a generation in which the ‘real’ is simply unreachable, we will continue to document the truth about what is being replaced under the surface. A false reality; The Phantasm.

We are getting into the DEEP END now, ladies and gentlemen. It is a privilege to be here with you.

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WHAT DO YOU THINK?

What are your thoughts on the content covered this month?

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FULL MEMBERS

OUT NOW: No-Dig Episode #02 with The Free Radicals

An exclusive challenge series and awareness project!

TOMORROW: Member Circle Podcast

Ethan will be breaking down on-the-ground conflict hoaxes.

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NEXT UP

Re-Engineered: From Simulation To Hyperreality

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