 Advertising slogans have always played a prominent part in the manipulation of public opinion since Edward Bernays brought the technique to the attention of corporate magnates in America during the Great Depression. Bernays was of course the father of Public Relations and his ambitions were not at all harmed by being the pushy little nephew of Sigmund Freud as well. Celebtocracy is the mystical side of capitalism and it is also the unofficial religion of the United States, a country that only exists on film. Edward Bernays is the patron saint of capitalism and the inspiration to several generations of mediocre social psychology graduates who saw a niche for themselves in the politics of persuasion. They now give expert advice to security agencies, the police and the corporations and they truly are the grease monkeys of the PSYOP industry. These analysts, propaganda specialists and psychological profilers are a huge growth industry and essential to the Anglo-American totalitarian project and the psychotic desire for 'full spectrum dominance'. If the latter stated Pentagon aim sounds a bit like an advertising slogan' it is because that is exactly what it is, the message is '8 out of 10 cats choose the Pentagon, now with added Full Spectrum Dominance for healthy teeth and claws'....caveat emptor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-spectrum_dominance It is of course obvious why these graduates are attracted to the field, if working for MacDonalds or working for MI5 were your only choices, what would you do? But getting a job in the PSYOP business is one thing, coming up with something credible is quite another, as the recent track record attests I think. So what do these behavioural scientists do to justify their continued role in increasing the paranoia of the gullible and deranged? They hold seminars and write papers on Political Radicalization, they advise politicians and security experts and spread these ideas far and wide amongst the desperate, the clueless and the political elite (which some may say are often all the same thing?). Academics like Clark McCauley, Professor of Psychology and a director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and a co-director of the National Consortium for Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (NC-START); and Sophia Moskalenko. - Sophia Moskalenko received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Homeland Security and a research fellow at the National Consortium for Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (NC-START). The abstract to their paper Terror and Political Violence sets the tone for the industry, its authors claim that it:-"conceptualizes political radicalization as a dimension of increasing extremity of beliefs, feelings, and behaviors in support of intergroup conflict and violence. Across individuals, groups, and mass publics, twelve mechanisms of radicalization are distinguished. For ten of these mechanisms, radicalization occurs in a context of group identification and reaction to perceived threat to the ingroup. The variety and strength of reactive mechanisms point to the need to understand radicalization—including the extremes of terrorism—as emerging more from the dynamics of intergroup conflict than from the vicissitudes of individual psychology." Of course alchemy of this kind that develops a 12 point taxonomy of radicalization greatly appeals to the mindset of the totalitarians and the obsessional ambition of psychology to qualify as a real science. Two very powerful motivators (even without the salary and celebrity) for those scryers that interpret the mechanisms of radicalization, for the less imaginative old buffers and 'flash Harry's' across the politico-security community that are obsessed with social control. Seems like they hang on every word. McCauley teaches and encourages research at the US Homeland Security centre of excellence at the University of Maryland where students study such topics as Terrorist Group Formation and Recruitment  This is some blurb from the programme introduction to McCauley's current research interests:- This is a 1-year project that will develop survey measures of beliefs, feelings, and intentions that sympathize with or support anti-government activism and radicalism. These measures – with an emphasis on financial contributions -- will be tested in the context of assessing support for Hizballah among Canadian residents of Lebanese Muslim descent in Ottawa, Canada. The products of the research will be two successive scientific attitude surveys and a web-based panel of Ottawa Muslims available for fast-turnaround assessment of the impact of political events. These tools will be designed to emphasize practical implications for understanding Lebanese Muslim diaspora support for Hizballah. The long-term goal is to develop tools that can track change over time in mass support for anti-government radicalism and support to terrorist organizations—tools with potential for use with diaspora and domestic groups in any country.McCauley's insistence that political radicalization is an essential precursor to terrorism has helped to set the industry standard in the PSYOP business. This neo-eugenics has now taken off amongst those with a less critical frame of reference as a new form of witchcraft, that can be used to justify gross breaches of human rights and has become a psychological justification for an imaginary war, the so-called War Against Terror which is being promoted here, as if it were real. In the UK the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Foreign and Commonwealth have combined to support a £2.4 million initiative on radicalisation and political violence. This investment is part of the wider research agenda of the Research Councils, notably under the Global Uncertainties initiative.http://www.globaluncertainties.org.uk/ The New Security Challenges Radicalisation and Violence Programme will build on the ESRC's New Security Challenges programme - see http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/newsecurity/ - and will seek to complement work in the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society programme - see http://www.religionandsociety.org.uk/ - and the AHRC Diasporas, Migration and Identities programme - see http://www.diasporas.ac.uk/ This is becoming big business, corporate interests are attracted to the field, government agencies, politicians and media outlets are all on board, paranoia, suspicion and spying are where the smart money is in post 9/11 academia. But what if the hypotheses that are driving these activities and investments are flawed? What if the definitions of both 'radicalization' and 'terrorism' here are incomplete, what if a whole sector of commercialised international security research and the academic careers it has launched are founded upon overlapping false premises and bad science? What if this was just another moral panic a phenomenon that has also been studied by social scientists and can be applied to the mythic rise in the terrorist as [1] a "Folk devil" the embodiment of all evil; [2] the end point of the radicalization process; [3] uniquely Islamic and [4] a scapegoat for imperialist military adventures used to justify breaches of international law? Wikipedia points out inconsistencies in the meaning of the term 'moral panic' itself across the Anglosphere, suggesting a different reading between American and British social scientists.
While
many believe the term was coined by Stanley Cohen to describe press
reporting and the reaction of the establishment to the behaviour of
opposing youth cultures the mods and rockers, it was actually first used by his colleague Jock Young in reference to the reaction to drug takers in Notting Hill, London. (however).... sociologists have pointed out the differences between definitions of a moral panic for American and British sociologists.
Kenneth Thompson has said that American sociologists tend to emphasize psychological factors whereas the British portray moral panics as crises of capitalism
South African sociologist Stanley Cohen described the Deviancy Amplification Spiral
which McCauleys START project in the US and Canada and the current work
at Warwick University (my alma mater) and elsewhere in the UK, seem to
demonstrate rather well to me.Cohen suggests the media overreact to an aspect of behaviour which may be seen as a challenge to existing social norms. However, the media response and representation of that behaviour actually helps to define it, communicate it and portrays it as a model for outsiders to observe and adopt. So the moral panic by society represented in the media arguably fuels further socially unacceptable behaviour. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Cohen_%28sociologist%29 According to the Deviancy Amplification Spiral then it is Fox News, CNN and the BBC that are the real vectors of political radicalisation and paradoxically academics like McCauley create the conditions for terrorism by their paranoid ideology and their mercenary attachment to irrational mutant organisations like US Homeland Security. This process which has been observed in historical analyses of the witch trials for example and the rise of European fascism is in full flow again now and its powerhouses are the university campuses where students are being taught to buy it hook, line and sinker. Academics like Clark McCauley and Christian Leuprecht are the latter day Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprengler the authors of The Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for "The Hammer of Witches", or "Der Hexenhammer" in German) the infamous treatise on witchcraft written in 1486 that set off the mostly femicidal moral panic in Europe and later America. 'The main purpose of the Malleus was to attempt to systematically refute arguments claiming that witchcraft does not exist, discredit those who expressed skepticism about its reality, to claim that witches were more often women than men, and to educate magistrates on the procedures that could find them out and convict them', says Wikipedia. The book became the handbook for witch-hunters and Inquisitors throughout Late Medieval Europe. Between the years 1487 and 1520, the work was published thirteen times. It was again published between the years of 1574 to 1669 a total of sixteen times. Regardless of the authenticity of the papal bull and endorsements which appear at the beginning of the book, its presence contributed to the popularity of the work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum Interestingly the Wikipedia entry also goes on to note that:- Popular accounts suggest that the extensive publishing of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487 launched centuries of witch-hunts in Europe. Estimations of deaths have varied widely. According to MacCulloch, the Malleus was one of several key causes of the witch craze, along with popular superstition, jealously of witches' knowledge from humanist scholars, and tensions created by the Reformation. However, as some researchers have noted, the fact that the Malleus was popular does not imply that it accurately reflected or influenced actual practice; one researcher compared it to confusing a "television docu-drama" with "actual court proceedings." The latter point about the confusion between soap opera and reality is another angle in considering the Political Radicalization school in contemporary Anglospheric academe and the militarization of social psychology under totalitarianism. It is my contention here that when these academic enterprises are considered by the principles of another academic tradition (namely Deviance Theory) within the wider field of the social sciences, the theoretical assumptions of the former do begin to look rather shaky. When McCauley tries for example, to assure us that "scientific attitude surveys" are methodologically unproblematic, alarm bells should ring loudly I think. It seems to me a little introspection on the part of these Political Radicalization theorists springing up in university departments everywhere wouldn't go amiss, but they assume behavioural taxonomies trump critical self awareness, in the hierachy of human consciousness as they say is evidenced in almost everybody but themselves. I question that assumption. If they were to concretize their abstractions we might find that they are representing a point of view which is no less terroristic than the ones they are attempting to analyse and isolate as discreet social phenomena? All that may play well with the Gung-Ho and sensationalised popular media that would like to convince us we are at war, although patently we are not, but I think the thesis does not stand up well to critical peer review. Those post-graduates who present themselves as experts in the field may well be guilty of Deviancy Amplification themselves... and, by their uncritical acceptance of the terms they employ, may not be actually doing science at all, but only acting as functionaries and fabricators in the rumour mill? I invite any such students to respond to this deconstruction of the PSYOP industry in which they are involved. The falsification of dubious assumptions within academe (upon which has been constructed a conduit for learned and scholarly disinformation and transparent propaganda)... is of course the very anithesis of science. Political radicalization is I believe, a far more complex and multi-faceted phenomenon than the new politico-academic industry would have us all believe. It seems to me that they are looking in entirely the wrong place for data and are therefore spectacularly missing the point about what has gone wrong in the world today.It is therefore the Political Radicalisation theorists who have themselves been 'radicalised' by a political doctrine with a strong connection to eugenics it would seem, maybe some universities have gone fascist, it wouldn't be the first time that has happened in recent history. In the meantime though let's toss another witch onto the fire, it may help illuminate the darkness that has befallen social science as an adjunct to totalitarian imperialism and the wider commercial/ideological corruption of academic enquiry... as now found in any thoroughly postmodern police state.
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Archive Post "Terrorism As Witchcraft and The Faculty of Paranoia" Jan 2010
In the meantime let's toss another witch onto the fire 
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