I finally watched Water Time, Alan Weisbecker’s film embedded in a road-trip with his dog Honey in search of waves to ride. The six-year expedition out of Long Island gave him a chance to show dozens of people the truth about major events has been manipulated. Turns out that surfers are as brain washed as the rest and equally impervious to reason.

Half a century on most Americans refuse to even consider the overwhelming evidence that the  brothers Kennedy were snuffed because they were bad for the business of war; or that the system can assassinate a man and then cynically declare his birthday a Federal holiday.

Two years ago I read a review of the film by David Ray Griffin, the theologian who has meticulously – and beyond any doubt – exposed the official story of 9/11 as a fraud and cover-up.

This film is an odyssey of truth, which operates at several levels, using music, cascading imagery, and recorded interviews. The scenery is beautiful, the music eclectic, and the message compelling – a message reflecting anguish at the bogus pretexts for war…During his trip, he filmed the responses of some 60 people to whom he presented what he considered irrefutable photographic evidence that the assassination of JFK had been an inside job. What he discovered was an uncanny lack of curiosity – even resentment – from people who did not want to be put in a “mood of discomfort.” Having never heard any of this evidence in the media, some of the people even declared Weisbecker mad. Such reactions, Weisbecker said, illustrated what Orwell’s Newspeak called crimestop, “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, on the threshold of any dangerous thought.” Moving on then to the evidence about the MLK and RFK assassinations, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing – where “not enough people were killed” to launch a war – and, finally, the attacks of 9/11, where enough people were killed. The film’s message is our individual responsibility to create peace by facing lies.

False flag operations to justify aggression have a long history. In more recent memory the Gulf of Tonkin fabrication launched the Vietnam War; the Pearl Harbour deception catapulted the US into World War 11 and the 9/11 inside job primed the 21st century wars. From Afghanistan to Libya, countries have been destabilised, dismembered and ruined. The performance is repeated in real time in Syria. ‘Humanitarian intervention’ is hypocrisy drenched in blood.

Here’s how the BBC introduced its 1992 documentary about Operation Gladio.

This BBC series is about a far-right secret army, operated by the CIA and MI6 through NATO, which killed hundreds of innocent Europeans and attempted to blame the deaths on Baader Meinhof, Red Brigades and other left wing groups. Known as ‘stay-behinds’ these armies were given access to military equipment which was supposed to be used for sabotage after a Soviet invasion. Instead it was used in massacres across mainland Europe as part of a CIA Strategy of Tension. Gladio killing sprees in Belgium and Italy were carried out for the purpose of frightening the national political classes into adopting U.S. policies…

The war on terror, itself the progeny of a false flag, is now the cover for shredding constitutional rights, curtailing civil liberties and coercing citizens into accepting the ‘security’ of a permanent police state. The strategy relies on a compliant media to entrench the official narrative of every attack, and a supportive coterie of judges, public prosecutors and on occasion defence lawyers to sanctify democide and implicate patsies. From the Boston marathon bombings – for which an innocent young man will be executed – to the airport attack in Brussels embellished by fake videos, the template of murder and corruption is the same.

Professor James Tracy – fired by his university for questioning the official version of the Sandy Hook massacre – says the propaganda has an enduring psychological effect.

Advances in hidden governance and concentrated media ownership have made the “war on terror” possible via increasingly fine-tuned trauma based mind control–in other words the enforcement of belief through overwhelming events subsequently placed in meaningful narrative context absent any contradictory information. Such a phenomenon is readily apparent among the younger generations, particularly as they have come to rely on US government-sponsored conspiracy theories in order to make sense of momentous political events bearing upon their lives.

But he found media undergraduates were able to develop a critical and rational response when they were exposed to specific and established facts.

The class proceeded to read and discuss Barrie Zwicker’s Towers of Deception: The Media Coverup of 9/11, and view several documentaries, including Massimo Mazzucco’s September 11: The New Pearl Harbor. As the term proceeded an almost uniform sense of cognitive dissonance, disbelief and denial among students turned to uncertainty, and eventually an acknowledgement that they had been compelled to accept as fact a carefully-crafted myth, one paving the way for the “war on terror” that has largely defined their lives and those of their loved ones. The myth has required massive government propaganda abetted by a “free press,” which to this day refuses to interrogate and bring to light the greatest mass murder of US citizens in the nation’s history.

This was the first class on 9/11 taught by Professor Tracy, and the last in a twenty-year career. The experience is entirely exceptional as institutions of higher education are now “the foremost underlying link in the ideational bulwark upholding the national security state.”

It’s not a new phenomenon. In The Power Elite,  published 70 years ago, C. Wright Mills distinguished genuine public opinion from mass-media  indoctrination made possible by “modern regressive educators”.

Men in masses are gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source. Men in public confront issues, and they are aware of their terms. It is the task of the liberal institution, as of the liberally educated man, continually to translate troubles into issues and issues into the terms of their human meaning for the individual. In the absence of deep and wide political debate, schools for adults and adolescents could perhaps become hospitable frameworks for just such debate. In a community of publics the task of liberal education would be: to keep the public from being overwhelmed; to help produce the disciplined and informed mind that cannot be overwhelmed; to help develop the bold and sensible individual that cannot be sunk by the burdens of mass life. But educational practice has not made knowledge directly relevant to the human need of the troubled person of the twentieth century or to the social practices of the citizen. This citizen cannot now see the roots of his own biases and frustrations, nor think clearly about himself, nor for that matter about anything else. He does not see the frustration of idea, of intellect, by the present organization of society, and he is not able to meet the tasks now confronting ‘the intelligent citizen.’

This is abundantly clear in Britain. Last year the natives voted at a general election to choose which of the two major parties would better inflict austerity, poverty and inequality upon them and asset-strip the state. Now they are being conned into voting to remain in the European Union.

The EU cannot be ‘reformed’. It is a protection racket run by a cartel of banks and corporations. Austerity is merely the smash and grab phase of dead-end capitalism –  the road to neo-feudalism in the absence of resistance. Greece is not an anomaly says Thomas Fazi.

Not only has the neoliberal regime gone largely unchallenged all throughout the West – its ideological dogmas broken only insofar as it was necessary to keep the system alive (quantitative easing – i.e., printing money and giving it away to banks and the wealthy  – being the most obvious example); in the case of Europe, the political-financial elites successfully exploited (and to some extent ‘engineered’) the crisis to lodge the most violent attack on democracy, labour and the welfare state in recent history, and to impose an even more extreme neoliberal order on the continent. This has resulted in the greatest transfer of public resources from the public to the private sector, and from the lower and middle classes to the wealthy, in Europe’s modern history, in what can only be described as a classic case of economic shock doctrine.

Democracy is a dead herring. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will establish corporate rule making Westminster irrelevant, except as a distraction and a source of jobs for the political class. As John Hilary shows it is quite simply a charter for deregulation, an attack on jobs and an end to democracy.

Europe’s ‘migrant crisis’ is not a spontaneous development. It’s social engineering intended to ethnically cleanse Europe by radically altering the demographic profile of nations. This is of course entirely consistent with globalisation. A British vote to exit Europe would be a serious inconvenience, possibly even a threat to the American imperial project by the example of disobedience it will set.

But this is unlikely, because Honey, they shrunk the kids.