Emotional Memories

By Steve Kossor

[Author’s note: I’m offering this essay about the practical and psychological roots of the 11/22/63 coup that gave us the government and corporate-intelligence establishment that has continued to exploit and despoil worldwide human and material resources with relentless vigor. I suggest that we have an obligation to future generations to offer advice and potential solutions that may enable them to recover from the institutionalization of corporate and intelligence interests within the American government. I’m offering my suggestions to help find a way out of the climate of fear that has been nurtured in us by those entities. If we don’t move beyond the search for truth in the Kennedy assassination and also do whatever we can to encourage future generations to hope for and work toward a future free of covert NSA, CIA and corporate-intelligence manipulations, we will expire without having accomplished more than documenting the horror that has befallen us. — Steve Kossor]

Emotional Memories

New ideas evolve by linking together the known with the possible within a vessel made of memory. There are two kinds of memory: cognitive and emotional. Cognitive memories are what we know. Emotional memories are how we feel about knowing. Healthy emotional memories give us hope and courage about using what we know. Unhealthy emotional memories give us pessimism and fear about using what we know. Emotional memories always trump cognitive memories. Minds poisoned by unhealthy emotional memories will believe things that are not true, correct, adaptive or healthy. When too many people become afflicted with unhealthy emotional memories, hope turns to despair and courage is overcome by fear.

Former leaders of deposed foreign governments over the past 100 years learned about this as they were being overwhelmed, struggling for survival against the onslaught of unhealthy emotional memories being implanted and nurtured in their own people by outsiders. In both the foreign “target” country and in the domestic population as well, these outsiders go about implanting unhealthy emotional memories to coerce the population to embrace changes that are not adaptive or healthy, but which meet the needs of the outsiders. We all heard the cry “Weapons of mass destruction threaten us all and must be destroyed!” but now we can recognize it as an appeal to the unhealthy emotional memory of irrational, generalized fear that has been implanted and nurtured within us.

Large portions of both the foreign and domestic populations come to embrace the take-over because its necessity is confirmed by the unhealthy emotional memories that have been implanted and nurtured in them. The last straw in the overthrow of foreign governments is the replacement of the former leaders by outsiders. That is how the government of Hawaii was overthrown in the 1800’s, and how the overthrow of other foreign governments in the 20th century has been accomplished through the covert actions of US corporate-intelligence operatives, as Stephen Kinzer has documented in Overthrow (Henry Holt & Co., 2006). John Perkins gave us an insider’s view of the process in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Plume, 2004).

There is a script. Twentieth century corporate-intelligence leaders have learned from and expanded upon the tactics of their forebears. They utilize modern technology (especially the press and news media in all their forms and popular culture outlets) to implant unhealthy emotional memories that further their ends and conceal their machinations. Greed and fear make the machine work.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and motion pictures are a thousand times more powerful than a thousand words. Modern architects of governmental overthrow know this and use motion pictures and social media to implant unhealthy emotional memories. Ridicule and disenfranchisement of those who promote healthy emotional memories and the ethical use of personal power is as predictable as it is virulent. Hitler and Goebbels understood this better than most and applied their understanding to devastating effect on the people of Germany and elsewhere, preparing their minds for the final solution long before its implementation was obvious and undeniable. Unhealthy emotional memories trumped cognitive memories then, as they always have, and always will.

Titans of industry, those committed architects of governmental restructuring based on the acquisition, preservation and controlled exploitation of other peoples’ resources have been thriving in the US since the late 1800’s. Their need to create strong, enduring unhealthy emotional memories to further their ends has never diminished. They have always used the tools available to them and the learning curve has persisted as it always does, with new tools being brought into service as soon as they become available. Kermit Roosevelt (son of the Rough Rider himself) spoke softly, carried a big economic stick, and used it with great success for American oil interests in the Middle East in the 1940’s. The ranks of unprincipled liars, cheats and scoundrels (so-called “Economic Hit Men”) have been swelling ever since, fertilized increasingly by government intelligence agencies operating their own war machines and underground economies with the tacit (if not overt) approval of elected officials. Greed and fear continue to make the world go ‘round.

In 1963, the inevitable happened

Our own government lost control over its plotters of change in foreign governments. They turned their tactics against our own leaders and against our own people. It’s worked for more than fifty years, and the manipulators of unhealthy emotional memories (nobody can ever really know the truth, nobody can really be trusted because everybody is out for themselves, a bad end awaits anyone who causes trouble, the future could be much worse, you have nothing to fear from monitoring if you have nothing to hide, etc) mean to keep it that way.

In the last fifty years, as the threads of the Kennedy assassination cover-up started to unravel, renewed efforts were made to create reinforcing unhealthy emotional memories to sustain the old ones. New books and motion pictures emerged, filled with unhealthy emotional memories. They pandered to the same dismal, pathetic, pessimistic views of ourselves and our future – saying things like: “It could be so much worse….” How we responded to this has determined the path of our country, just as it determined the future of every other overthrown government for the past 100 years. That path has been downhill.

There is new hope today, because we have some things that didn’t exist before — the internet and digital technology — but knowledge isn’t enough. It takes strong healthy emotional memories to pursue and achieve the healthy changes that we need. Healthy emotional memories are created by the presentation of simple observations that are emotionally compelling and healthy (truthful, confidence inspiring, promote camaraderie, promote fair sharing of resources, helpful toward others, move forward toward positive outcomes). Some examples include:

• We can take the action necessary to fix our situation without compromising our Constitution. 
• We can honor it by restoring power to those we elected and stop allowing secret abuses of it.
• We will strive to honor and practice, truth and justice.
• If we have gone astray in the past we will correct our course and move forward confidently, not secretively.
• Hypocrisy, deceit and greed will not be encouraged by rewarding it.

The corporate-intelligence community that persists in creating unhealthy emotional memories has to be smashed into 1,000 pieces, as President Kennedy threatened to do after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He was seduced by the allure of secret intelligence and James Bond, but he bristled at being cast in the role of a puppet (that is the only role permitted by the corporate-intelligence community for elected officials). He wanted to rule, and he thought he could. Regrettably, he told his opponents “I’m going to knock you out in the 10th round” and they knocked him out in the seventh.

Hindsight is 20/20, but we have to open our eyes.

The evidence is indisputable. The Zapruder film has been unequivocally unmasked as an edited record of the events in Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was killed in 1963. The work of researcher, John Costella, PhD: “Simple Proof of the Faking of the Zapruder Film,” has some of the scientific proof of these edits (more is coming to light as new researchers study the film’s frames). No “lone nut” could do the editing that was eventually discovered 48 years later when technology finally caught up with the perpetrators. Only the intelligence community and those responsible for President Kennedy’s security could have done this editing — to conceal their involvement in the crime and prevent the smashing of their organization into 1,000 pieces. Recently released recordings of in-flight conversations aboard Air Force One as it returned to Washington document more holes in the scheme to murder the President that has been successful only by the thinnest of margins, and that margin is constantly eroding. Kennedy’s assassination and the doctoring of the evidence was so much more than “a mafia hit.” The edits of the Zapruder film prove it unequivocally. Those who play the “mafia hit” card are missing the fact that the deck is stacked.

We desperately need leaders who have the courage to take government funding away from the occult corporate-intelligence war making machine. It cannot be allowed to run toward goals that violate our Constitution. We have to rein in and sever the tentacles that have spread out for the past 100 years that are threatening our own nation’s vitality and survival. The roots of the CIA were created to help the President get untainted information during a World War, and those roots should have been cut down drastically at the end of the war, as President Truman ashamedly admitted after Kennedy was assassinated.

Instead, they have grown, spread and metastasized into the most pervasive, intrusive and perverted thing imaginable in the body of the world. This cult of corporate-intelligence blinds us to the unscrupulous profiteers of foreign and domestic strife in our midst until their misdeeds require such enormous “bail-outs” that future generations are maimed and kept in a state of fear that is ever more paralyzing and from which no escape seems possible but in which greater sacrifices, harder work and closer monitoring is required. Only a tiny portion of the population is “insulated” from such deprivations by their connections to the perpetrators. Eventually even they will fall, because a system so selfish and exploitive inevitably feeds on itself, but that is certainly no consolation for the prey today.

[box style=”rounded”]We need to recognize that intelligence agencies and their corporate collaborators in the US have rationalized, justified and perpetrated the assassination of elected foreign leaders for over 100 years — and that domestic leaders have been their targets too. We have to recognize the harm that their predatory covert homicidal practices has done to America’s reputation in the world.[/box]

It won’t matter who we elect as President if they shrink away from the abyss of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath. That will continue to fertilize an unspeakable cult of corporate coercion, subversion and perversion of our constitutional republic’s ideals. The members of that cult are “the outsiders” who believe that sitting in perpetual grammar school is the vision of the future best suited for the rest of us. For the past 100 years, schools in America have been primarily responsible for manufacturing citizens who are incapable of weighing costs and benefits, unable to make thoughtful decisions after deliberating facts (that takes time), and who seek only the most superficial means of showing their adequacy: getting the right answers on tests and moving up to the next grade every year. John Taylor Gatto’s books, especially The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2006) document the devastation wrought by the corporate-intelligence interests that have insinuated themselves into the school business and effectively hijacked the future of the American people to suit their private and astoundingly selfish ends.

So what can we do? Well, we can learn.

The last 50 years of US history can show us the way out. First and foremost, we must learn not to run to a fight. We rushed to judgment in 1964 under the pretense of avoiding a global nuclear holocaust, preventing World War III, and other such imagined catastrophes and concluded that a “lone nut” killed the President of the United States. Good, honest people were terrified and willingly assisted in the cover-up of the crime because they were rushed to the conclusion that, to do anything else would be too dangerous for the country or to themselves. They were threatened with court martial (anyone in the military knows how utterly devastating that would be), exposure of their indiscretions by a corrupt and malevolent FBI whose director called his office “the seat of government,” or killed outright as so many have been. Still, many have talked. Their stories were unpublished and unreported, or vigorously discredited, by the mainstream media “assets” of the corporate-intelligence cult. But healthy emotional memories persist and continue to fuel the urge that almost all of us have: to tell the truth. There are more outlets for the truth now than ever before, as long as the Internet remains freely accessible. Imagine the power of a people who know the truth and have enough healthy emotional memories to put that knowledge to good use….

Whenever a governmental agency says “we must do this NOW because to think about it anymore, or to waste any more time would be courting disaster” we should fight the urge to comply. The misguided “search for weapons of mass destruction” that justified senseless warfare would not have been launched if we had resisted the urge to “run to a fight.” The misguided 2008 “bailout” of fabulously wealthy individuals whose fortunes were made by exploiting the naivety of others would not have been made if we had insisted upon taking the time necessary to weigh options, consider costs and benefits rationally and objectively, and made decisions as to where and how to intervene thoughtfully, rather than on the basis of ignorant bliss as the problem was growing, or on the basis of manufactured fear as the evidence seemingly exploded into view. Congress reacted to manufactured fear in 1964 by allowing Lyndon Baines Johnson to appoint the Warren Commission, which circumvented both local and state (Texas) laws that might have resulted in honest homicide investigations. It happened again to justify going to war in Iraq, then in Iran. The brazen “do whatever is necessary” language of the “Patriot” Act was drawn from the same reservoir of unhealthy emotional memories and rushed judgment. It gave the National Security Agency all the juice it wanted. It appears that the healthy emotional memories of a certain whistleblower asserted themselves in the nick of time.

Prescient author Michael Crichton, in State of Fear (Harper Collins, 2004) argued for removing politics from science and used global warming and real-life historical examples in the appendices to make this argument. In a 2003 speech at the California Institute of Technology he expressed his concern about what he considered the “emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science—namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.” By focusing on the controversy over global warming, his real message has been successfully obscured. Children are no longer taught “the scientific method” in school and are rendered defenseless against false claims about virtually everything as a result, from the fields of nutrition and product safety, to the need for (and the effectiveness of) government intervention in education, economics or disaster relief. Scientific truth about vaccinations is replaced by emotional rhetoric; nothing is “all good,” everything has costs and benefits. To focus on either one to the exclusion of the other, is simple-minded.

It has become painfully obvious that modern schools exist primarily for the benefit of their union members and that the education of students is at best, an accident. If children are not taught how to approach problem-solving effectively, and do not acquire the foundation skills of reading, coherent writing and arithmetic reasoning, they cannot teach others to do these things. The outsiders remain protected. That is why the foundering of public schooling in America has been progressing incessantly for the past 100 years and why we have finally raised a generation that cannot expect to have a higher standard of living than its parents. Instead, they have been taught to understand that they need and deserve government assistance, that entrepreneurs are “workaholics,” and that their attention is supposed to be captured by things, not self-directed toward them. We desperately need to supplement the education our children receive so that they are inoculated against these toxic, unhealthy emotional memories and can all become successful entrepreneurs themselves some day.

President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address warned:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Later in that same speech, Eisenhower said:

“Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”

[box style=”rounded”]That Congress has failed our children and mortgaged their financial future in a fast-buck “bailout” scheme of grotesque proportions is an incontrovertible fact. They ran to a fight.[/box]

Finally, former President Truman warned us on December 22, 1963 in the Washington Post about the monster that the CIA had become through its covert operations capability that he had absolutely never intended it to have. He wrote:

“I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President. …. But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.”

Now that the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination has passed, and hopefully before the 100th anniversary, we can learn from history and do what is necessary to save our country, or we can ignore it as students of “Social Studies” in grammar school are supposed to. We need to get out of grammar school — and stay out — no matter how much other people want to keep us in to serve their needs. The core values of “tell the truth,” “share fairly,” “help others,” “be thankful,” and “move forward,” with the encouragement of entrepreneurial activities in the young, were never more essential.  — Steve Kossor