Conditioned like Pavlovian dogs - Rise From The Cave

The power elites manipulate the people so skillfully that they love their own oppression and hate propaganda critics.

by Jens Bernert

Right-wingers criticise the media – but does that make all media critics right-wing? Nutcases invent conspiracy theories – but does that make all conspiracy theories made up? Like the famous experiment with “Pavlov’s dog”, propaganda media try to create an automatic link between stimulus and reflex in consumers. Criticism of money = anti-Semitic = a return to the darkest times of German history. These manoeuvres are necessary from the point of view of power because the good arguments of the critics of war and capitalism can hardly be mastered in any other way. However, every individual can counterbalance the omnipresent dumbing down by passing on enlightening information.

In recent years, it has obviously been the endeavour of many quality journalists and other propagandists to hammer “Nazis are the people who say that the media lie” into the heads of readers and viewers. Through constant repetition, the false inversion “all media critics are Nazis” thus becomes a false certainty over time.

This conditioning has been running particularly intensively since autumn 2014, when propaganda in the context of the Ukraine crisis had reached an enormous level of denial of reality and numerous cheap fake news and propaganda frames had been exposed. Programme advisory boards of the public TV stations asked critical questions – and were soon replaced. The cabaret programme “Die Anstalt” made fun of badly made propaganda lies. Blogs scrupulously proved brazen falsifications in the media. And so on.

But instead of breaking down at the confrontation with reality, the counter-attack of propaganda took the form of an all-out smear campaign, freely following the motto “Challenge accepted!”. Like thirsty people in the desert with a bottle of water, the tortured propaganda minions in the media, NGOs and politics gratefully accepted the propaganda claim of the “lying press shouting Nazis”, which the Bild newspaper decisively supported with its accompaniment of Pegida from the start. Of course, you can always find a few Nazis to show off in the huge mass of those who somehow criticise the media. In general, however, media criticism has so far tended to be located on the left.

Propaganda has always existed in the West, and more massively than most people realise. But in recent years, it has reached a new quality in all areas important to the power elites and has escalated to madness.

Facts, logic, science, reason, reality or even goodness and mercy no longer play a role here. People are conditioned like a Pavlovian dog and trained against media critics, war critics and other critics of the power elites.

The term “Pavlov’s dog” is associated with world-famous experiments from the field of behavioural research and is probably familiar to most. It refers to the first empirical experiment by the scientist Ivan Pavlov to prove classical conditioning in 1905, for which Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Ivan Pavlov had observed that kennel dogs salivated just by hearing the footsteps of their owner feeding them – just as if food had been put in front of them. Pavlov assumed that for the dogs the sound of footsteps, followed shortly afterwards by feeding, was associated with eating. He hypothesised that the stimulus “the sound of the owner’s footsteps”, which was actually neutral in terms of salivation, was now associated with the stimulus “food” for these dogs and thus triggered salivation instead of food.

He conducted corresponding experiments in 1905: The presentation of food is followed by salivation, the sounding of a bell is not. If, however, the bell sounded repeatedly in connection with the offer of food, the dogs soon reacted to the sound alone with salivation. Pavlov called this phenomenon conditioning.

The population today is in principle conditioned in the same way as Pavlovian dogs and ultimately trained to oppose the propaganda of the rulers. The statement “Nazis are media critics” is repeated again and again – certainly also in more harmless, less striking versions, alternatively with “AfD” – until people have “media critics are Nazis” in their brains when the bell rings again.

What works with Nazis, right-wing extremists, anti-Semites and co. also works with “lunatics”. In public opinion, “conspiracy theorists” are considered to be such. And these in turn, according to quality journalists and propagandists, are those who contradict the official statements on important events, provide counter-evidence and just keep exposing actual crimes and conspiracies and do proper journalistic work. Propaganda likes to mix up the enlightened people, who are called lunatic conspiracy theorists, with a handful of people who believe in the invasion of the lizard people or that the earth is a disc, in order to be able to slander the enlightened people better.

Here, too, the training of the population through conditioning comes into play. It is spread a thousand times that people who deal critically with the media in the sense of science, enlightenment and finding the truth are conspiracy theorists.

When the bell “media criticism” rings again, the citizen “knows” that it can only be about a lunatic or at least turns away quasi instinctively. This works particularly well with conspiracy theorists who can be decisively maligned as “right-wing”.

Especially in the case of media criticism, double or multiple conditioning takes place, so that the media critic appears to the victims of the dressing-down as a “lunatic conspiracy theorist Nazi”. One then “for safety’s sake” keeps one’s hands off such “dangerous theories” – i.e. the truth and the exposure of the outrages of the rulers. Even if the facts quite obviously speak against the latter and expose them as liars.

And the conditioning does not only work with media criticism, of course: All critics of Merkel “are Nazis and crazy psychopaths”, all critics of the EU “are Nazis and crazy psychopaths”, all critics of war “are Nazis and crazy psychopaths”, all critics of the financial system “are Nazis and crazy psychopaths”, all critics of the exploitation of the developing world “are Nazis and psychopaths”, all critics of surveillance and censorship “are Nazis and psychopaths”, all critics of police violence and police states “are Nazis and psychopaths” – and so on and so forth.

We see in films and read in books again and again about heroes who bring the truth to light, and almost immediately it is accepted, everything changes and the bad guys are arrested. This does not correspond or no longer corresponds to reality. The enlightened are ignored or slandered and through the “kennel dog training” this happens almost automatically. If necessary supported by propaganda.

Through conditioning, the will of humanity – or at least of the Western population – is to be broken and the ability to think is to be eliminated. And those who are particularly well conditioned like Pavlovian kennel dogs then feel really good when they attack enlightened people in the supposed “heroic fight against Nazis”, or show what a supposedly great and science-guided person they are when they take action against “lunatics”.

That many “conspiracy theorists” are in fact the ones who want to do science and enlighten, and that the supposed media critic Nazis are in fact the ones who write against exploitation, surveillance, censorship, police state, the invasion of foreign countries and the murder and rape of their inhabitants – combined with an unbelievable anti-scientific propaganda orgy – is then no longer seen by the trained people. Only a few manage to use their minds and break through the conditioning. Fortunately, more and more are doing so.

The massive crackdown by the rulers on critical voices, the constant attempts at brainwashing and conditioning show that the power elites and their propagandists have no arguments, that their lies have short legs and their alleged expert testimonies are only anti-scientific madness to cover manipulation and atrocities. Their supposed truth shuns the light like the devil shuns holy water.

All this shows us the incredible power of truth and a scientific view of manipulated events. Every single dissenting voice, every critical contribution shared and communicated helps to bring down the edifice of lies. Often one hears: “What can I do as an individual?”.

Never before has it been possible as an individual, as an ordinary citizen, to achieve so much and do so much good with relatively little effort as today. All you have to do is spread critical voices.

It’s enough to put something up for discussion and point out that you don’t necessarily share the same opinion, but that this theory also exists. Every little shred of truth has incredible explosive power. Now is the right time, because things will not get better, but worse and worse.

This is where the article could end, but many would like to have examples of how media and propaganda criticism is actually justified. Some of those who have been trained would, in their desperation, use the lack of examples as an excuse to declare this article “invalid”, and think they are incredibly clever in doing so. So here are a few more expert voices on the Syrian war. And yes: the reporting on this is “lying press”, at least. This silly term, which the media itself imposed on the population for its own protection, is still far too weak to describe the media’s behaviour in invading foreign countries.

Expert voices on the Syrian war

Professor Michael Jabra Carley (1):

“The talk of ‘our moderates’ is a fiction and a cover by the US for its support for Al-Qaeda and its various allies, who are largely foreign mercenaries fighting against the secular, legitimate government of Syria. (…) whether the inhabitants of the US, Canada and Europe are willing to risk a gratuitous war with Russia for a series of lies, and in defence of the US-led Al-Qaeda invasion of Syria.”

Professor Götz Aly (2):

“While Western media sold the tall tale of seven-year-old ‘Twitter girl’ Bana Alabed from the eastern districts of Aleppo captured by ‘the rebels’ as pure truth, Franciscan priest Ibrahim Alsabagh sat in the besieged western part of the embattled city. He was grateful to government forces for defending those who were almost trapped.”

Professor Jan Oberg (3):

“(…) who had come from other countries and occupied eastern Aleppo – whether we call them rebels, jihadists, armed opposition, fighters, terrorists or otherwise. (…) I did not meet any ‘White Helmets’, members of this supposedly humanitarian organisation. Nor did I meet anyone who saw them in Aleppo or who was helped by them. (…) The major Western media also stayed away.”

Professor Werner Arnold, Deutsche Welle (4):

“Christians in Syria were able to live a relatively peaceful life for a long time. In the civil war, Aramaic communities have been targeted by radical Islamic groups fighting against the Assad regime. Experts are sounding the alarm. (…) For Syrian Christians, Arnold’s only hope is ‘that this whole rebellion will collapse at some point.'”

Professor Jörg Becker (5):

“Nevertheless, the majority of users of the mass media will simply be ignorant of the fact that the USA has been trying to bring about a regime change in Syria for years in violation of international law. That the whole terror problem has come about primarily through Western murder and Western wars. Yes, that the West has been supplying Al-Qaeda with weapons for years and has thereby made it big in the first place in order to topple Assad.”

Professor Norman Paech, quoted in part (6):

“In contrast, it has been proven, for example, that sarin was supplied from Turkey to ‘rebels’ in Syria in 2013. This was not followed up by the media in this country either. ‘The endless and disillusioning series of war lies that all US administrations have supplied us with in their warfare from Vietnam to Yugoslavia to Iraq have shattered my trust in their reports.'”

Dr Daniele Ganser (7):

“When the Syrian war broke out in March 2011, we see that they actually attacked President Assad’s security units there, that is, the police and the military. These were covert wars supported by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. (…) But they never sent tanks, (…) instead they supported radical Sunnis who then attacked the Syrians’ security apparatus. And when the Syrians fired back, they said that Assad was shooting his people.”

Professor Eva Myrdal (8):

“(…) we were able to travel freely in Damascus and from there towards the east. (…) During our trip we see calls from the Swedish Foreign Ministry and the news from international TV channels, such as CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera, in Arabic and English. We find that the discrepancies between what they claim about places where we are and the facts on the ground are systematic. And in recent months it has become even clearer that ‘international reporting’ à la Svensson is running a disinformation campaign.”

Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court (9):

“The Federal Public Prosecutor General accuses the defendant, among other things, of committing war crimes under the International Criminal Code (Völkerstrafgesetzbuch, VStGB). In Aleppo, for example, he is alleged to have commanded a district militia of at least 150 members, which belonged to the grouping ‘Ghoraba-as-Sham’. (…) the militia commanded by the accused allegedly controlled a district in the north-east of Aleppo. The militia allegedly carried out looting and captured, tortured and severely abused people who opposed them.”

Retired General Harald Kujat (10):

“But Aleppo is becoming a humanitarian disaster because terrorist groups have occupied this city, are oppressing the population and the regime, the Assad regime, is trying to liberate this city. (…) Aleppo also has a key function in supplying the terrorist groups: Al-Qaeda, there Al-Nusra, occupy Aleppo and the IS. It is just not the case that the moderate groups are fighting against the Assad regime there (…).”

Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo of Hassakè-Nisibi (11):

“Western propaganda (…) continues to talk about moderate rebels, but they do not exist: in the galaxy of armed groups, the soldiers of the Syrian Liberation Army can only be found with a magnifying glass. All the others, apart from IS, have merged into the Al-Nusra Front, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda in Syria (…) All this is very worrying: this superpower is protesting 14 years after 9/11 because the Russians are bombing Al-Qaeda militias in Syria. What does this mean?”

Professor Theodore Postol (12):

“This raises troubling questions about how the US political and military leadership concluded that the Syrian government was responsible for the alleged attack. It is particularly troubling that the WHR presents itself as a report with ‘very compelling’ findings and that numerous senior officials in the US government expressed their view that the report was accurate.”

Professor Günter Meyer (13):

“In 2007, (…) Seymour Hersh revealed that the US, together with Israel and Saudi Arabia, was building a terrorist army to overthrow the governments in Damascus. Also, former French Foreign Minister Fabius reported on British preparations in 2009 for a military attack on Syria. (…) According to Western readings, the peaceful protests of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 were put down with brutal force by the Assad regime. No mention was made of gunmen (…) Nor was there any mention of ‘hidden massacres’ of security forces.”

Scott Ritter (14):

“The CIA’s training and equipping programme can be traced back to the spring of 2011 (…) Covered by NATO air superiority, fighters against the regime in Libya were able to gain control of large swathes of the country. (…) Diverting weapons to Turkey, where they were handed over to rebel forces that had been fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since June 2011 (…) from the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Professor Götz Aly (15):

“Russia was able to extract from Turkey that the radical Islamic Al-Nusra Front (now disguised as the Fatah Al-Sham Front) and, of course, IS would continue to be fought. Both terrorist organisations were directly supported for years by Saudi Arabia, for a long time also by Turkey, indirectly supplied with US and British weapons (…) In the case of Syria, our leading politicians (and many journalists) suffer from historical blindness and loss of reality.”

Peter Scholl-Latour (16):

“The situation in Syria itself would not be so explosive if support, money and, above all, weapons were not being brought in from outside. It is significant that the rebel areas of Homs are located directly on the Lebanese border (…) then on the other hand Kilis, where the Turks (…) have recently taken up positions, and then as a third point Dara’a on the border of Jordan, it is also very easy to dress a Jordanian soldier in a Syrian uniform and say that he is a Syrian soldier”.

Karin Leukefeld (17):

“Syria’s economic centres – which were based around Aleppo, Homs and Damascus – are largely destroyed. Syria had its own pharmaceutical industry, an excellent textile industry, a food industry and large grain reserves: everything has been destroyed, looted and sold to Turkey.”

Professor Frieder Otto Wolf (18):

“One does not do justice to the matter if one describes the conflict only from the perspective of the current opposition forces in Syria. You also have to look at the long-term development and the social forces there. The West has become involved with Islamist forces here, as it did in Afghanistan and in Libya, with whom, I believe, no sustainable partnership is possible.”

Dr Daniele Ganser (19):

“Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the British and the USA have wanted to topple Assad for years (…) In academic research, they talk about regime change, i.e. a coup. (…) In order to topple Assad, his opponents have supported radical Sunnis, and these today form the IS.”

Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli (20):

“Dear Mr Hackl, your Investigative Department of ARD sent a request to me in response to a publication by RT under the title: “Swedish doctors: life-saving measures of the White Helmets are posed and dangerous.” In it, I (…) am interviewed as the head of the Swedish doctors’ organisation “Doctors for Human Rights” (SWEDHR). (…) numerous fake “life-saving” measures on presumably already dead children (…)”.

Bishop Severios Malke Mourad, quoted (21):

“According to his information, between three and four hundred Christians have been abducted in recent attacks by the terrorist militia ‘Islamic State’ (IS) on northern Syrian Christian villages. In particular, the Christian village of Tell Tamer is of strategic importance for the IS terrorists because of its proximity to the border, as it allows them to obtain weapons via Turkey.”

Volker Bräutigam and Friedhelm Klinkhammer (22):

“Programme complaint: ARD-aktuell suppresses counter-view on the Syria war (…) The report of Archbishop Tobij in the Italian parliament, after all one of the big political stages of the EU, would have been suitable to make the German audience aware of the pathetic hypocrisy of the Berlin government. He would also have given one more explanation why Rome refused on 20 October to go along with further EU sanctions against Russia, as demanded by Merkel’s cabinet.”

Professor Götz Aly (23):

“Contrary to what the initiators of the study (…) would have you believe, not almost 70 per cent of those surveyed fled Syria solely because of the Assad regime, but at most 20 per cent (…) Either the journalists responsible for this are unwilling to check statistics, or they see themselves as propagandists (…) Apart from the interpretation of the data, it is important to bear in mind that refugees seeking asylum in Germany know quite overwhelmingly which answers are opportune and which are not.”

Federal Supreme Court (24):

“(…) offensive in the city of Aleppo in July 2012, the capture of the provincial capital Raqqa in March 2013, in cooperation with the ‘Jabhat al Nusra’, the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ (ISIG) and other jihadist groups from 4. August 2013 in the offensive against Alawite villages in the mountains in Latakia province, in which many civilians were murdered, and in February 2014 in the attack on Aleppo Central Prison, in which ‘Jabhat al Nusra’ and other jihadist groups again participated.”

Professor Michael Jabara Carley (25):

“Indeed, the Syrian Arab Army is encircling the jihadist terrorists in Aleppo and pushing them towards the Turkish border to cut off their supply routes (…) A reversal is being well received everywhere except by the Western mainstream media (…) The Obama administration has directly or indirectly supported ISIS and various offshoots of Al-Qaeda in Syria.”

Dr Daniele Ganser (26):

“Yes, the attack on Syria in 2011 was also illegal. The attackers USA, Great Britain, France, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have trained brutal gangs and equipped them with weapons and have been trying to overthrow President Assad since 2011, but they have not succeeded so far. These brutal gangs must be called terrorists, but the attackers use the word ‘moderate rebels’ and thus confuse the public.”

Professor Günter Meyer, Hallertau.info (27):

“Professor Meyer also touched on the ‘White Helmets’, who received the Alternative Peace Prize last year. They are actually a civil defence organisation of the Nusra Front, in which several hundreds of millions of dollars from abroad have been invested. Nusra and IS are offshoots of the Al-Qaeda organisation, which had fought each other fiercely for some time and had since reconciled. The Nusra fighters are the most brutal of all. The reports and photos of the White Helmets’ rescue operations are often fabricated to manipulate the world.”

US Department of Defense (28):

“That said, it’s primarily al-Nusra who holds Aleppo”. Al-Nusra is the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda. – So, according to the US military, Qaeda holds Aleppo or East Aleppo.

Professor Theodore Postol (29):

“What is absolutely clear from the videos is that the location of the sarin release from which the WHR emanates, and the location where the mass casualties should have occurred had the sarin release actually taken place, is in no way connected to the scenes of casualties shown in the other videos. The conclusion is obvious, the alleged attack as described in the White House Report never happened.”

Dr Tim Anderson (book review by Jens Berger, 30):

“A different picture emerges, however, when Anderson meticulously depicts how events in Syria have been massively manipulatively reinterpreted and rewritten by an interplay of Islamist fundamentalists, US geostrategists, Wahhabi Stone Age kingdoms, Western mainstream media and non-governmental organisations. (…) The alleged Syrian rebels come from over eighty countries.”

Professor Jörg Becker (31):

“The public is misinformed and distorted about the Middle East and, of course, essential contexts are not properly conveyed to them. At the moment, almost everything you can think of is wrong in Syria and Iraq reporting. (…) The Saudi, Qatari and Turkish support of various Syrian rebel groups and the so-called Islamic State also remains unclear in the German media.”

Professor Günter Meyer (32):

“(…) that the jihadists have rejected the ceasefire from the beginning and that the civilian population is being misused as a human shield. The extremists’ snipers prevent the inhabitants of besieged East Aleppo from escaping to safety via the corridors opened by the Russians. (…) A defeat of the US-backed rebels in East Aleppo would be a huge humiliation for President Barack Obama. That’s why Washington is doing everything it can to prevent it.”

3rd Criminal Senate of the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court (33):

“According to the Senate’s findings, ‘Ahrar al-Sham’, which is to be classified as Salafist, has been striving since 2011 to eliminate the government of Syrian President Assad by force and to replace it with an Islamic state under its leadership. To this end, the hierarchically structured organisation has carried out attacks against members of the Syrian army and security forces through its military units of up to 20,000 fighters – often in cooperation with the jihadist Al-Nusra Front.”

Dr Kurt Gritsch (34):

“Qatar was in favour of regime change in Syria. So Al Jazeera supported the anti-Assad discourse. The dictator was having his own unarmed citizens shot at. What didn’t fit the picture was simply not broadcast. For example, in May 2011, ex-BBC war reporter Ali Hashem, now with Al Jazeera, had filmed armed men, Syrians and Lebanese, bringing weapons into Syria from Lebanon.”

Professor Günter Meyer (35):

“There are no funnels of such bombs anywhere, there are no splinters, everything indicates that small splinter-free explosive devices were used here. (…) That means that the only ones who had an interest in this are the rebels, and we have the Islamists here, who also had one of their headquarters in this very place. In other words, a false flag attack with the sole aim of making the Syrian regime responsible for it. This calculation has worked out.”

Atlantic Council, summary at Telepolis (36):

“An American think tank explains how the al-Qaeda militias exercise their power in already conquered areas (…) Meanwhile, it has become known that the two jihadist/salafist groups al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham have committed all other militias in Aleppo to Sharia. It is important to add here: their form of Sharia understanding.”

Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli (37):

“The three children subjected to ‘life-saving’ procedures in the second video were eventually dead, and the cause of death – that according to the White Helmets video would be attributed to chlorine gas – has been disputed by other medical opinions independently of the assessments by the Swedish doctors mentioned in the SWEDHR reports. (…) the health-status in reference to the above mentioned child could be attributed instead to drug overdose, likely opiates. (…) war-criminal behaviour represented by the misuse of dead children with propaganda aims.”

Professor Marcello Ferrada de Noli (38):

“(…) Amidst the emotional imagery of the White Helmets’ video, which showed numerous fake ‘life-saving’ measures on presumably already dead children, no one thought to question their authenticity. Wouldn’t this have been a unique opportunity for the ARD verification team? (…) you would have come across numerous articles in which I already set out my conclusions from the unethical manipulation for propaganda purposes by the White Helmets.”

Professor Günter Meyer (39):

“(…) the establishment of a no-fly zone is still demanded by Clinton. To this end, the destruction of Syrian air force bases by cruise missiles is planned. Now that Russia has installed numerous defence systems against ballistic missiles in Syria, this military intervention by the USA would inevitably lead to a direct military confrontation between the two nuclear powers. Whether Clinton will actually take this on board or is just bluffing remains to be seen.”

Professor Reinhard Merkel (40):

“This strategy is a variant of what has been called ‘democratic interventionism’ since the invasion of Iraq ten years ago: the pursuit of regime change by military means in order to establish democratic rule. In Iraq, the invaders did it themselves. (…) What is happening in Syria is an apparently milder form of intervention (…) In any case, the interveners are taking on the supposed and absurd role of innocents.”

Peter Scholl-Latour (41):

“If you take a look at how one-sided the local media, from TAZ to Welt, report on the events in Ukraine, then you can really report disinformation on a grand scale, flanked by the technical possibilities of the digital age, then you can only conclude that globalisation has led to a deplorable provincialisation in the media world. A similar thing has happened and is happening with regard to Syria and other trouble spots.”

University of Heidelberg, Colloqium 2009 (Before the War, 42):

“The Middle East is perceived in Europe as a conflict region. In contrast, in Syria, which is occasionally counted as a ‘rogue state’ in the West, a variety of peoples and religious communities have been living peacefully together for a long time. (…) ‘In no other country in this region do so many different peoples with different religions and languages live as in Syria’, explains Prof. Dr. Werner Arnold.”

Professor Günter Meyer (43):

“Already immediately after the terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda in 2001, the US government planned to change the regimes in Syria and six other Islamic countries. Since 2006, the US has pushed for the overthrow of Assad with its political influence on the Gulf states, by funding media campaigns and by training terrorists.”

Professor Eva Myrdal (44):

“DN.se writes that (in 2011) tanks rolled into the central parts of Damascus and demonstrations started after Friday prayers. Exactly on that day (… we) drove four times [through] the centre of Damascus in a taxi for family reasons (…) and we see no demonstrations, no military vehicles, no policemen. (…) Acquaintances from Baniyas (…) about what is happening in the small industrial town on the coast: ‘We don’t know who they are. They come here on motorbikes and are masked in black.'”

Professor Tim Hayward, via SWPRS (45):

“Professor Tim Hayward of the University of Edinburgh yesterday published a previously secret OPCW technical report. This says that staging by militias is the ‘only plausible explanation’ for the alleged April 2018 poison gas attack in Douma, Syria. The report seems to definitively disprove the narrative on Douma, which has been circulated by trans-Atlantic media and experts, claiming a Syrian attack. Significant doubts about this had already arisen previously based on witness testimonies.”