Social engineering is the attempt to shape the public's perception or behavior, influence the direction of social trends, or shape political policy. Social engineering has only really been possible as a scientific endeavor starting in the 20th century with advances in social science, cognitive science, psychology, and also the mass communication technology needed to subtly disseminate the desired message. Television is without question the most powerful and pervasive form of this technology. Think tanks are often quoted in televised and print news as if they represent the opinion of an impartial panel of experts, but the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of think tanks promote a right-wing agenda. Only a handful are Democratic and virtually none can be called truly left-wing.The Internet, through websites like this and through other means, offers the possibility of sharing alternate narratives about our past, present, and future.
1942 - The Office of War Information is created to consolidate U.S. propaganda efforts both at home and abroad.
1943 - Norman Rockwell's painting "Rosie the Riveter" appears on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. It is inspired by a Redd Evans song which came out the previous year. J. Howard Miller's "We Can Do It!" poster, commonly misidentified as Rosie the Riveter, is released around the same time. Both images, as well as the song, are designed as war propaganda, but later come to be identified with the feminist movement.
1946 - The Tavistock Institute is launched. Officially a British charity concerned with psychology, the institute has long been scrutinized as a source of social engineering, mass psychology, and propaganda in the Western World.
1946 - The Libertarian think tank Foundation for Economic Education is formed.
1948 - The RAND Corporation is founded by the Douglas Aircraft Company to act as a think tank for the United States armed forces.
1948 - The CIA begins a domestic media-manipulation campaign which will later become known as Operation Mockingbird. The operation involves buying off journalists to present the CIA's propaganda as fact as well as funding student and cultural organizations.
1948 - William Donovan and Allen Dulles help to create the anti-communist American Committee on United Europe. It will channel funds into many organizations which will play large roles in the creation of the European Union.
1949 - Through a front called the National Committee for a Free Europe, the CIA sets up Radio Free Europe to broadcast pro-capitalist propaganda to Soviet-bloc and Middle Eastern countries.
1950 - The first Committee on the Present Danger is convened. It acts both to influence foreign policy in a more militaristic direction and to manipulate public opinion in support of military interventions. Key figures include Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, and Tracy Voorhees.
1950 - The Aspen Institute is formed to develop the leadership style of political and social luminaries. It is primarily funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Brother Fund, and the Ford Foundation. Board members over the years include a number of powerful political insiders including Madeline Albright, David Gergen, David Koch, and Condoleezza Rice.
1950 - The CIA finances the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist advocacy group. The CCF attacks communist artists like poet Pablo Neruda while promoting American modern art and an array of musical productions in an attempt to show that America is a cultural mecca while the Soviet Union is artistically sterile and repressive.
1953 - President Eisenhower launches a propaganda campaign on nuclear power with a speech entitled "Atoms for Peace". The campaign serves to promote the nuclear industry, enhance the ideological battle against Russia, and cover for the American nuclear arms build-up. American Machine and Foundry will sell both Pakistan and Iran their first nuclear reactors under this program.
1954 - The phrase "under God" is added to the pledge of allegiance by a joint resolution of Congress.
1955 - The Foreign Policy Research Institute is founded. It advocates a militant anti-communist position. Notable early participants include Hans Kohn, Henry Kissinger, and James Schlesinger. Following the end of the Cold War, the War on Terror becomes its primary focus.
1956 - "In God we trust" is adopted as the official motto of the United States.
1958 - The American Security Council Foundation is founded. The think tank promotes a strategy of "peace through strength," and will be highly influential in Cold War foreign policy, particularly during the Reagan administration.
1964 - The Warren Commission issues their report which concludes that Oswald acted alone in killing JFK and Jack Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald. Prominent within the Commission is Allen Dulles, the man Kennedy removed from his top post at the CIA, and immediately following the release of the report, CIA mockingbirds begin to popularize the phrase "conspiracy theorist" as a derogatory term for those who question the Commission's findings.
1965 - Ken Kesey carries out the first psychedelic "acid tests".
1974 - The Fusion Energy Foundation is created to promote nuclear power and scientific research. It is accused of being a front for the LaRouche Movement and is eventually forced into bankruptcy by legal proceedings.
1977 - A think tank called the Center for Public Justice is formed for the purpose of attempting to impose Christian values on American political policy.
1977 - A hoax documentary called Alternative 3 is aired on British television. The faux-documentary alleges that the Earth is becoming uninhabitable and, as a result, the American and Soviet governments have colluded to set up a colony on Mars with a way station on Earth's moon. Immediately after the conclusion of the show, the station airing it is flooded with calls from panicked citizens who believed it to be real.
1979 - Pro-war film The Great Santini is released with support and funding from the Pentagon.
1981 - War-comedy film Stripes is released with Pentagon support and funding. There is a surge in recruitment in the year which follows.
1984 - The Heartland Institute, a right-wing advocacy organization, is founded. They will become best known for their work for the tobacco lobby, fracking companies, and a campaign comparing those who believe in global warming to the Unabomber, Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, and Osama bin Laden.
1986 - The film Top Gun is released with Pentagon support and financing. Applications for positions as Naval Aviators subsequently jump by 500%.
1987 - The FCC ends the Fairness Doctrine, a policy which had required news agencies to present controversial public issues in an honest and balanced manner.
1990 - Public support for an invasion of Iraq is ambivalent until the widely publicized testimony of "Nurse Nayirah" who describes seeing Iraqi soldiers take premature babies from their incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and leave them to die. Nayirah, whose full identity it is said must be kept secret for the safety of her family, turns out to be the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter. Her entire story is fake, and she has received coaching from the U.S. public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, for which they are paid $10 million.
1990 - Concerned about the impact that images of dead soldiers and civilians had on the American public during the Vietnam War, the Pentagon carries out a campaign to restrict and censor media coverage of the Gulf War as described in a memo titled "Annex Foxtrot".
1990 - On September 11th, before a Joint Session of Congress, President Bush lays out his vision for a new world order.
1991 - The Milken Institute, a market think tank, is founded by Michael Milken, the billionaire who largely invented high-yield bonds (junk bonds) and who pled guilty in 1990 to various financial crimes.
1992 - The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is created by accused pedophile Peter Freyd and his wife. The organization invents the term "false memory syndrome" and, despite the lack of scientific recognition of any such syndrome, launches a major PR campaign to discredit not only their own child, but children across the country who have accused either their parents or institutions of abusing them. The organization gains thousands of members, mostly other accused pedophiles.
1993 - The James Baker Institute is founded. Officially a non-partisan think tank, it hosts the Chevron Excellence in Leadership Energy Lecture Series, the Shell Distinguished Lecture Series, and for some years awards the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service.
1993 - Philip Morris creates the Advancement of Sound Science Center to circulate misinformation intended to counter the recent EPA classification of second-hand smoke as a carcinogen, and to lobby in Congress on behalf of the tobacco industry.
1994 - The Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank, is formed for the primary purpose of promoting Creationism in science classes in public high schools.
1997 - The Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank, is founded. One year before the 9/11 attacks, they will publish a document entitled Rebuilding America's Defences which calls for a massive military build up and an invasion of the Middle East and Central Asia to secure oil and gas reserves. The document notes that the American people are unlikely to support such an intervention "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event- like a new Pearl Harbor".
1997 - The military-science fiction television series Stargate SG-1 is released with support from the Pentagon. The plot of the show centers around interactions with aliens once worshiped as gods by the Ancient Egyptians. Strangely, the military and intelligence community had recently concluded a multi-decade project called Stargate which tested the possibility of using various psychic powers for military purposes. A significant figure in the Stargate project was a man named Andrija Puharich who believed he was in contact with alien entities once worshiped as gods in Ancient Egypt.
1999 - The Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank, is founded. It will be one of only a few groups to accurately predict the collapse of the housing bubble and subsequent recession in the mid-to-late-2000's.
2000 - Demos, a liberal think tank, is created.
2002 - The aptly named film The Sum of All Fears is released with Pentagon support. The plot of the film centers around the danger of weapons of mass destruction falling into the wrong hands just as the Bush administration is ramping up its bogus PR campaign about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
2005 - The military-science fiction film Stealth is released with Pentagon support.
2006 - The film United 93, dramatizing some of the events of 9/11, is released.
2007 - The film Transformers is released. This film and subsequent films in the series paint the U.S. military in a glowing light and receive considerable support from the Pentagon.
2007 - Programmer Virgil Griffith releases a free program called WikiScanner. The program shows that Wikipedia is being heavily edited by government agencies including the CIA, and major corporations including news agencies.
QUESTION: Then why does deephistory.us use Wikipedia as a source for the majority of its entries?
ANSWER: Because Wikipedia articles represent the minimum that these organizations have been forced to admit to, which is often shocking enough to the average American. Other sources are occasionally used when Wikipedia articles have been too heavily censored.
