The psychology of patriotic denial Special Report

Special Report
The psychology of patriotic denial
By Tova GabrielleOnline Journal Guest Writer
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October 14, 2004—Surely I am not the only person who can figure out that if people are secretive and uncooperative, it is probably because they're hiding something (and that the more secretive they are, the more they have to hide). So why has the mainstream press reached the consensus that the Bush Mob has hindered the 9/11 investigations because it wishes to "avoid embarrassment," rather than to "avoid incrimination"? What deeper motives might there be for their stonewalling investigations into one of the biggest crimes in our history?
As far fetched as it may seem, this wouldn't be the first time in history a country planned or executed a major attack on its own soil and blamed foreign factions for political purposes. The Reichstag Fires, which occurred under Hitler's regime in Germany, and Operation Northwoods in the United States, under the Kennedy administration during the early sixties, are two prime examples of such planning.
Unlike the rest of the world, most people in this country insist that there is not a large enough, technologically advanced enough, or rich enough power base in the U.S. that could have orchestrated the events of 9/11. Yet they are perfectly content to believe that people from a less technologically advanced and poorer country could have done so. They are willing to believe that people who are operating out of caves, far across the world from us, have more expertise than we do. These superpowered demons, headed by Osama bin Laden, apparently possess an elusive power base so magical that we cannot locate it, despite all our technology. However, we can still somehow receive updates and videos regularly from them—but, oddly enough, we cannot trace the sources of these communications.
Just like children fearing boogiemen beneath our beds, we seem to assume these dark forces are far trickier and more resourceful than the most powerful country in the world. Educated U.S. citizens, unlike the educated and thinking citizens of other countries, have suspended their common sense as if hypnotized by the shock and denial they experienced in the wake of the vulnerability they felt following 9/11. They have accepted the party line that it was evil "others," far across the world, who, by themselves, planned and executed this amazing feat (and that it is just a coincidence that this was the rationale for Bush's attacks on two sovereign countries). They cannot see that there is no evil demon with such magical, unlimited resources, but that it is our own denial-laced fears that have fueled our false beliefs in the omniscient power of the hidden "others."
Although we can see that our democracy has been taken over by powerful and well-funded religious fanatics who continually terrorize living beings across the globe, we fail to acknowledge that if they have the technology, membership, and organization to foil elections and stage phony wars (in the face of massive protest around the world), they might likewise have the resources and drive to pull off such a massive deception as the 9/11 disaster in their own country.
How long must we remain hypnotized by shock and paralyzed by fear and depression before we realize that only our own whistle-blowing will stop these people? It is well past time to examine in depth the truly terrible agendas operating in our government and to expose how these agendas are being covered up. We, apparently, are the only population that doesn't see through the charade. Every day we read of the degree to which they are willing to go in order to deceive us. Even Colin Powell called Rumsfeld and others "fÇÇÇing crazy" in their masterminding of the Iraq war.
Pride is difficult to swallow. No one wants to be a fool. In this article, I hope to help people understand how it is that we could have been so thoroughly fooled and how so many of us still remain staunchly deluded. For once we understand a problem, we need no longer be subject to its dynamic influences.
Regarding the historical details that prove that our country has indeed been inclined to attack its own people for political ends, I refer readers to historians like Howard Zinn. Herein, I offer insights arising from my expertise in the psychologies of addiction, religious cults, mind control, and hypnosis to explain how an entire country was duped, and how to recover our perspectives.
Let's begin on the level of personal psychology, of which political psychology is a manifestation. George W. Bush is a power addict and a puppet of the factions he represents. Like many power addicts, he has a history of alcoholism (as well as cocaine abuse). He is what is called a "dry drunk"—he may not drink, but he cannot face reality either, and therefore behaves with the same denial as one who does drink. Alcoholics have a compulsive need to be in control of others, since they are unable to control their own impulses and drives. They attempt to assert control by falsely inflating themselves and their causes. Everyone succumbs, on occasion, to denial when their pain becomes too great, but addicts have a particularly flagrant disregard for the truth. They cannot tolerate feelings of vulnerability and when their recovery is not going well, they replace one addiction with another.
Having given up substance abuse, George Bush has adopted fanaticism as a false means of control over his feelings of vulnerability. This is a typical response of people seeking to escape the shame of their past and their disorganized, chaotic experience. Constricting themselves within the bounds of a rigid, fundamentalist, ideological framework allows such people to shelter themselves from the potentially overwhelming levels of anxiety they may experience during the process of healthy recovery. It allows them to substitute authoritative quick fixes for actually having to think (rather than drink). They fail to develop common sense and reasoning powers to heal the disorganization and panic they experience. They are driven by a philosophy which compels them to react first and (try not to) think later.
Grandiosity is a hallmark of addicts and alcoholics because the most difficult thing for them to cope with is powerlessness. "It doesn't matter whether or not you believe in a higher power," author John Bradshaw tells people in recovery, "just that you know that you aren't it." When in power, these people deal with their feelings of powerlessness by continually attempting to convince themselves and anyone opposed to them that they are all right and others are all wrong. Their sense of loss and defeat is so strong that they need to believe, like children needing their parents' divine approval, that they have "God" on their side.
Polarized, black-and-white thinking is the hallmark of mental illness. Bush and his carefully chosen, like-minded mob represent a huge faction of similar-minded fanatics who project their rigid, fear-based internal structures upon others within a black-and-white, good-versus-evil framework of thinking. Bradshaw writes that alcoholics don''t have relationships, but instead "take hostages." We citizens are expected to observe the unspoken but classic rules that protect the alcoholic head of the family: "Don't talk, don't think, don't feel."
Such "addictive scripts" help maintain the power and façade of alcoholics and addicts. And the amazing part is that we, as citizens, may unknowingly play our parts as enablers, just like children of alcoholics. Sadly, many of us, acting as virtual children of alcoholics, play our parts in maintaining what we hope to be some measure of stability in our systems. As loyal children in an alcoholic family, many people will rigidly deny the extent to which our "parental" powers will go to manipulate and control us with fear. The defenses we may employ in our denials arise in infancy and are only finally uprooted through therapy or through insight that is willing to upset the systems we internalized.
Denial is a primitive defense; children understandably don't acknowledge the alcoholic father's insanity—after all he's the only father they've got. The Bush administration depends upon our continued fear and isolation from like-minded others to keep us bonded to it in ignorance of what it does. Inflated patriotism is but a misguided defense of a system that has the will and means to destroy us for power, just like an alcoholic parent will sacrifice all for drink. As long as we feel overwhelmed and disempowered, we won't investigate our intuitions or connect the dots.
It certainly helps the agendas of those in power if we are chronically too tired, broke and scared to think, feel, and talk. Otherwise, we might find the energy to contemplate the truth, to have insights and inspirations, and to organize. The George Bushes of our country are absolutely terrified of the power of the masses.
We have learned to "negatively hallucinate," that is, to not see the obvious, when it contradicts our beliefs. We have been raised and bred in institutions and families where the very persons preparing and conditioning us for the "real world" have hidden their own skeletons in our closets. Without our realizing it, their shames, secrets, and fears become our inheritances. While it is all right to hate Bush and company for being liars and idiots, we stop short of believing they could be evil and powerful enough to have actually organized and pulled off the 9/11 attacks.
We were hypnotized on 9/11. Some of the strategies used to bring about a hypnotic state include shock, repetition of phrases and images, and exploiting people's sense of vulnerability so that they relinquish their previously held beliefs and endorse something formerly untenable to them.
The Bush administration has employed what hypnotists refer to as a "yes set" in order to bring us under its spell: The towers were hit. Yes. People died. Yes. The world is unsafe. Yes. We know who did it. Yes. We must react now. Yes. If you are not with us you are against us. Huh? The towers were hit. People died. Yes. And so on until all the answers are the desired "yes."
After the shock and the deepening of our fear reactions through repetitive imagery and continuous intimidation and lies, we found ourselves in a state of disorganization and simulated ego disintegration. Consequently, we have been thinking with our reptilian brains rather than our frontal lobes, which means that we haven't been THINKING at all. (The reptilian brain stem is only capable of fight or flight responses, not reasoned ones).
Opening our minds to the revelations described on 911research.com and websites like it forces us to confront our deepest, survival-based beliefs: it is almost impossible for us to accept that something so extreme could happen here.
Can you imagine that when Hitler was coming into power, the general public believed the rumors? Who would have taken seriously such nightmarish images as concentration camps replete with huge ovens? Who ever had heard of such a thing? The first people who were on to it were, no doubt, dubbed "conspiracy nuts" by the public (they were, interestingly, referred to by the Third Reich as "terrorists").
In time, the truth comes out. The world had to face the ugliest truth, and when it did, it said, "Never again." But how closely now are we watching over our freedom? Are we unknowingly protecting ourselves from highly upsetting truths in order to protect our unconscious, infantile need to believe that this is a democracy and a country devoted to our well being?
Our tendencies toward denial are also enhanced by the messages from the commercial world that constantly bombards us: "Don't get excited." "Take a pill." "Soft, easy, quick." We have been raised as a country of addicts brainwashed into finding a way out of feeling pain. The longer we delude ourselves and try to avoid our pain, the greater is the infection that we create within our collective psyche.
The movie "The Truman Show" features a character who has been set up all his life to believe in a fake reality in which he was being tricked and used. He finally rejects this reality, choosing to enter the unknown and face possible death over living a lie. Why have we been afraid to imagine the worst when there is ample reason for suspicion? Are we afraid of the anxiety such a disruption could evoke in our minds? This is what the protagonist of "The Truman Show" had to face. Like him, we need to become willing to give up our sense of false security in order to stop living a huge lie. Otherwise, we will remain, like children of alcoholics, afraid of our feelings of powerlessness.
Of course it is difficult to confront our fears and insecurities. But the good news is that facing reality is the way to become empowered. Do we fear that if we discovered the worst, we might explode with anger? Or implode with despair? Who ever imagined that we'd have to worry about rigged elections? Heck, that's one of the criteria for fascism, and we hold the true ideals of democracy close to us. The psychological weakness in our collective consciousness that has allowed George Bush to abuse his power needs to be deeply examined, in order for these dynamics to change.
The clarity and thoroughness of the evidence laid out on this website allows us to take the first steps toward being able to believe that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks. Change happens incrementally. Little waves of inspiration and insight feed bigger waves. The inevitable backlash against the lies of the last three years might even lead to a truth movement. We needn't be despondent; rather, we need to get even by creating this truth movement. The evidence supporting the claims of Bush's complicity in 9/11 is readily available both on the Internet and increasingly in hardcopy. This information is as plain as math, as concrete and physical as anything you've ever learned in school.
It becomes easier to face upsetting, painful facts once we become willing to change our beliefs. George Bush's lies have paved the way for a new wave of believers. Thanks to the Bush mob's relentless lies, we are being prodded to loosen the tightest of our psychological constrictions, our beliefs in what is possible.
Beliefs are the hardest off all psychological mechanisms to change. They are the structures upon which we have built our lives. To challenge our belief system is to threaten our ideas of who we are. Doing so can be disastrously disorienting, which is why people have been so slow to catch on, but it can also be enormously relieving and empowering.
When a problem seems too huge to fix, you can't begin to change it until you change your beliefs. You need to throw out your old lenses in order to be able to perceive what you formerly couldn't see. Then you can begin to emerge from your reptilian, survival-oriented, limited brain and begin to imagine and put together the many available puzzle pieces.
Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. We need imagination now to counter the mindsets we inherited as a result of being raised in systems that were designed to protect power. We learned to believe that those with power over us were truly protecting us, despite their nasty habits and lies. We were trained not to see who our real enemies are.
But we can stop being controlled by fear now. We can utilize our healthy outrage to expose the inconsistencies in what we have been told and leave no stone unturned. Our country's situation is not hopeless for the simple reason that we are not children and we can expose the traitors who have used political power against the people they are supposed to serve.
The Bush administration is not above the law. The more this administration disrespects the citizens of this country, the more pressure it creates in people to break free of it at last and consider the extent of its insanity.
To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The Bush administration's continual lies are bound to generate more and more skepticism toward them and an increasing interest in the truth. We are consequently being led into a sort of "forced individuation."
As our truth movement gains momentum to break free of the excuses and lies, we will see who the true "terrorists" within our own government are. We will know that the so-called "war on terrorism" is a fantasy.
When we break the code of silence, we will have to walk away from the government that we have allowed to morph into an instrument of corporate control. We will then either turn back to our original Constitution or go forth and find a new vision, moving, with a keen eye for truth, into uncharted territories. It will be very exciting. But we will no longer be innocent children, for we will have become aware of what can happen if we don't carefully guard democracy, especially in this new millennium. As adults, we will have to begin by envisioning alternatives. We must begin by brainstorming a new system. No more can we allow such massive failures of our own imagination. No more "intelligence failures." It is healthy to get mad, but use that fuel wisely: Get creative and spread the truth. We can't heal what we can't feel. We can't change what we won't even dare to imagine.
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Here is an excerpt from a November 7, 2001 piece that appeared on ABC.com about a book by David Ruppe:
Friendly FireBook: U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S.Cities to Provoke War With Cuba
NEW YORK, May 1: In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro. America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: 'We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,' and, 'casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.'"
The following excerpt is from an article that appeared on September 13, 2002 in CommonDreams.org, by historian Harvey Wasserman, entitled "Bush's 9/11 Reichstag Fire":
"When Hitler was rising to power in 1930s Germany, somebody did him the favor of burning the Reichstag, the German Parliament. It's widely believed the Nazis torched it themselves. Hitler's cynical minions turned that fire into a horrific wave of terror. They blamed 'the communists' and the Jews, the trade unionists and the homosexuals. With the support of a terrified populace, they suspended civil rights and civil liberties, fattened their war machine and rode the fascist tide into a full-blown dictatorship. The rest, as they say, is history."
Tova Gabrielle's articles, short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous publications. She also has worked as a psychotherapist and substance abuse counselor.