Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/19/revisiting-operation-mindfuck.html
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Never talk about Operation Mindfuck, ever.
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today’s propaganda – born in the 17th century to propagate the Catholic faith and reborn in the 20th century as “public relations” – is no longer about convincing people to believe in whatever story the source happens to be selling.
I’d assign at least equal blame for the current mess to the PR campaigns on behalf of the tobacco industry. The goal for them may still have been to sell their deadly lies, but they created the infrastructure that the far right now uses undermine trust in institutions. The very existence of the Tobacco Institute and the astroturfs “smoker’s rights” organisations, and similar efforts by other toxic industries and movement conservatism, called into question the legitimacy of institutions operating in good faith.
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I’m talking about Operation Mindfuck right now!
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Never think about Operation Mindfuck, surely?
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This story is fake news.
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Make enough fog to cloud the minds of the populous and you can do anything to line your pockets with gold.
Did I get it right?
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Water is still wet.
Fire is still hot.
Gravity still ‘sucks.’
And there are still four fucking lights.
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Yes, with the ultimate goal of getting people to use actual critical judgment and logical thinking to cut through the BS (as much as possible, at least). Not enough people have gotten through to that level, unfortunately. :-/
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Prove it.
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I thought LBJ fucked the throat wound.
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Absolutely. He actually chided me for failing to articulate that very thing.
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Hail Eris
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Yeah, the term “Operation Mindfuck” is an old Discordian one, and as one of the first Discordians it inspired Robert Anton Wilson to use it in the Illuminatus! trilogy, much like he tried to define “fnord”. Kerry Thornley described a different sort of Operation Mindfuck, and Adam Gorightly’s Historia Discordia has some interesting examples of Jake Day letters and other ur-texts that he found in Greg Hill’s old archives.
Of course, it could just be a mindfuck by Adam Gorightly himself, so think for your self. Standard caveats apply, and so on.
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Operation Mindfuck was directed at a motivated, engaged population that was horrified how a “democracy” could throw away so much treasure and lives in Viet Nam.
What’s going on now, goes beyond sarcastic misinformation, and is all about demoralizing the enemy- the american people. Linking todays activities with that era, is itself an example of disinformation designed to demoralize the opposition. COINTELPRO never ended, it just got renamed.
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I guess, but sometimes it really is hard to tell if someone’s joking / trolling :-/ though I remember John Oliver saying, shortly before the election, something like “Trump is either racist, or pretending to be racist, and in the end, is there a difference between those?”
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Kembrew McLeod made basically the same point about OM in his book Pranksters: Making Mischief In The Modern World: he said there was “blowback” and this was before Trump.
It’s as if RAW, Krassner and Leary wagered that people could make themselves as smart as they were; and they lost that bet. (So far?)
They were perhaps too subtle about it. I mean, it took me maybe four or five readings through RAW’s novels to go “Hey, waitaminnit - there are factual inconsistencies in these books, so many that they must be intentional - hey, that’s the final piece of the puzzle! A message that we shouldn’t trust him either!” (insert galaxy-brain gif here)
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