How the U.S. Government Hides Its Being a Dictatorship

Eric Zuesse

How did this come to be?

The same group of around a thousand people who control the U.S. Government are also in control over the major newsmedia and also over the major academic institutions and think tanks and ‘charitable’ foundations, so that the public are deceived, by those ‘news’-media and the ‘experts’ that they publicize, to believe that the public rule the country (that it’s a “democracy”), and that this tiny super-rich aristocracy (a corrupt oligarchy of mega-corporate controlling owners, America’s billionaires) do not. It’s all done by deceit, and the super-rich fund it, not only directly but via their corporations.

Back on 17 March 2011, which was before Britain’s Guardian got taken over by U.S. billionaires, that newspaper headlined “Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media: Military’s ‘sock puppet’ software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda”, and they reported that, “The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. … The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations ‘without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries’.”

There was nothing new about this, except the technologies, which themselves came from corporations such as Google.

On 22 January 2015, the great independent investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed documented “How the CIA made Google”, and also “Why Google made the NSA”. The U.S. Government is in bed with its billionaires, who are the puppeteers above the political stage, controlling their puppets, who include not only the politicians whose careers they’ve funded (into the U.S. House, Senate, and White House), but their ‘news’-media.

Going all the way back to U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s decision on 25 July 1945 for the U.S. Government henceforth to be devoted, above all else, to becoming the ultimate imperial power controlling the entire planet (today this is called “hegemony”), he then determined to establish in 1947 both the ‘Defense’ Department (which had previously been the fundamentally different “War Department” ever since 1789), and the CIA, in order to achieve this new, global-imperial, goal. No nation ever before in history, except Nazi Germany, had aspired to conquer, ultimately, the entire planet. They failed to achieve it. But America’s neoconservatives — and this includes the entirety of America’s Deep State — aspired to that, and are still determined to achieve it (mainly by means of foreign subversions, sanctions, coups, and proxy-armies, but also by means of direct U.S. invasions, whenever those means fail).

On 1 July 2022, Caitlin Johnstone bannered “Ukraine Is The Most Aggressively Trolled War Of All Time” and reported that

The Ukraine war is the single most aggressively trolled issue I’ve ever witnessed. As soon as it started, Twitter was full of brand new accounts swarming anyone who uttered wrongthink about Ukraine, and now there are entire extremely coordinated troll factions working to scare people away from criticizing empire narratives about this war. It’s plainly very inorganic, so it’s good to recall what we know about the trolling operations of western militaries.

On 17 May 2021, Newsweek — normally itself an obedient member of America’s major media — took a rare time-out by headlining “Exclusive: Inside the Military’s Secret Undercover Army” and reporting that

The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called “signature reduction.” The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.

The unprecedented shift has placed an ever greater number of soldiers, civilians, and contractors working under false identities, partly as a natural result in the growth of secret special forces but also as an intentional response to the challenges of traveling and operating in an increasingly transparent world. The  explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same. … Congress has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability.

Long before this, back in 1948, Truman’s CIA began its “Operation Mockingbird” and assigned Frank Wisner to head it, who

recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) : “By the early 1950s, Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.”

Gradually, over decades, scandals of what was, virtually, CIA-controlled ‘news’ in America, led to a general assumption that the CIA ought not to contaminate the minds of U.S. citizens with the lies it was spreading abroad. Even in 1948, the Smith-Mundt Act prohibited Radio Free Europe and other U.S.-Government-operated ‘news’ organizations from allowing their falsehoods to be reproduced in domestic U.S. news-reporting. However, even that narrow limitation was proposed to be practically lifted in “The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012”, which subsequently became incorporated into the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013”, where it can be found on page 326 of that 681-page law, as “SEC. 1078”. But all of this was small potatoes because it falsely ASSUMED that the OWNERS of America’s major ‘news’-media weren’t THEMSELVES in bed with Operation Mockingbird — which they were (and are), ever since 1948. 

And, of course, Operation Mockingbird also spreads lies abroad. A simple example of the destructions that this produces is in Ethioia. One good news-report on that was published on 12 May 2021 at dehai.org and headlined “Disinformation in Tigray: Manufacturing Consent For a Secessionist War”. It linked to this study, which (at its page 60) has a section on “Supporting TPLF At All Costs: Powerful Friends in Washington”, which identified Susan Rice, of Obama’s and Biden’s Administrations, as being the main person behind this lying-campaign.  Another fine article on this matter was Andrew Korybko’s 25 October 2021 OneWorld.Press “Ethiopia Isn’t ‘Bombing Its Own People’”.

Of course, you won’t find the present article published or linked-to in any of the U.S. mainstream news-media, though it is being submitted to all of them for publication. It’s not the type of news, or commentary on the news, that they publish. This type of news can’t be mainstream-published, in a dictatorship, but ONLY in a democracy. Any dictatorship hides the truth, instead of publishing it. Conveying, to the public, truth, isn’t on the agenda, of the people who are in control.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.