In 2006 a special international communication draft was released by the applied studies program of The Institute of World Politics (IWP) called “Ridicule as a Weapon, White Paper No. 7“. It contained sharp analysis such as this:

…U.S. strategy includes undermining the political and psychological strengths of adversaries and enemies by employing ridicule as a standard operating tool of national strategy. Ridicule is an under-appreciated weapon not only against terrorists, but against weapons proliferators, despots, and international undesirables in general. Ridicule serves several purposes:
• Ridicule raises morale at home.
• Ridicule strips the enemy/adversary of his mystique and prestige.
• Ridicule erodes the enemy’s claim to justice.
• Ridicule eliminates the enemy’s image of invincibility.
• Directed properly at an enemy, ridicule can be a fate worse than death.

More precisely, it offers this applied context:

The Nazis and fascists required either adulation or fear; their leaders and their causes were vulnerable to well-aimed ridicule. […] Like many in Hollywood did at the time, the cartoon studios put their talent at the disposal of the war effort. Disney’s Donald Duck, in the 1942 short “Donald Duck In Nutziland” (retitled “Der Fuehrer’s Face”), won an Academy Award after the unhappy duck dreamed he was stuck in Nazi Germany.

And then it concludes with this suggestion:

U.S. policymakers must incorporate ridicule into their strategic thinking. Ridicule is a tool that they can use without trying to control. It exists naturally in its native environments in ways beneficial to the interests of the nation and cause of freedom. Its practitioners are natural allies, even if we do not always appreciate what they say or how they say it. The United States need do little more than give them publicity and play on its official and semi-official global radio, TV and Internet media, and help them become
“discovered.” And it should be relentless about it.

And for what it’s worth John Lenczowski, a National Security Council staffer under President Ronald Reagan, founded the IWP.

A modern and somewhat nuanced take on what this all means today is captured in a new talk by General Glen VanHerck, head of US Northern Command:

“Rather than primarily focusing on kinetic defeat, for the defense of the homeland, I think we must get further left,” VanHerck told an audience at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “Deterrence is establishing competition by using all levers of influence as I conveyed, and most importantly, the proper use of the information space to demonstrate the will, the capability, the resiliency, and the readiness by creating doubt in any potential adversaries mind that they can ever be successful by striking our homeland.”

Putting “doubt in any potential adversaries mind that they can ever be successful”… is to ridicule them, as Rommel found out the hard way when he quickly lost all his potential to be an adversary.

A Report on the Office of Censorship from November 1945, by Byron Price (Director), has quite a lot of detail with regard to American culture during 44 months of national censorship operations.

Censorship’s work may be said to divide itself into two separate tasks. The first is to deprive the enemy of information and of tangibles, such as funds and commodities which he can use against our armies and our navies. The second is to collect intelligence of many kinds which can be used against the enemy. No censorship can fail to go dangerously afield unless it holds rigidly and resolutely to these basic purposes.

…the President issued the following statement outlining the bases of Censorship: “All Americans abhor censorship, just as they abhor war. But the experience of this and of all other nations has demonstrated that some degree of censorship is essential in war time, and we are at war.”

With all the news lately circulating about Texas hoarding weirdly pro-slavery revisionist narratives and denying history (e.g. struggle to remove revisionism and restore real history of the Alamo), it’s impossible to say Americans abhor censorship.

Without heavy censorship for example the myth of Davy Crockett finally would die, as historians repeatedly try to reveal he fought for slavery until being caught and executed.

Anyway, there are a lot of details from the WWII Office of Censorship in anecdotes like the following, which make for light reading:

Most of the censors, of course, were women, who traditionally have been preferred for the job.

Why? No more explanation about women is given. Here’s another one:

To prevent the transmission of secret information, the postal censors also had to stop such things as international chess games, for the symbols might or might not be entirely innocent.

I’ve always felt that way about chess. Also this:

One woman tried to get a letter past Censorship by concealing it in a basket of flowers which she carried off a plane at an American airport. She paid a $40 fine for censorship evasion.

Was it really concealed? I mean flowers are kind of unusual and draw attention, especially on a plane. At least she didn’t put the letter inside a bunch of balloons.

Speaking of balloons, Censorship asked Japan’s bombing campaign to be obscured from the people who were targeted until a generic “don’t touch the pretty balloons” warning finally became a compromise.

Late in 1944 voluntary censorship was presented with a unique problem in connected with the landing of Japanese bomb-carrying balloons in the western part of the United States… Censorship asked editors and broadcasters not to mention these incidents unless the War Department officially gave out information. There was complete compliance with this request, even when six persons were killed by one of the bombs in Oregon on May 5, 1945. Stories of the tragedy did not disclose the cause. […] The Japanese received neither information nor comfort about their fantastic scheme to attack the United States.

The Oregon Secretary of State today retells the bomb stories in much detail.

Taken as a whole the report consistently says that censorship must focus tightly on a narrow objective such as fighting against racism, fighting against pandemic and fighting against… I hate that I have to say it… enemies of democracy.

As the Office of Censorship report says on page 11:

It took pains to indoctrinate the censors and those charged with distributing intercepted information with the basic principle that only material having a direct bearing on the war should be reported.

All good food for thought when reading news about Tucker Carlson meeting with authoritarian leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, before speaking at an anti-democracy gathering in Budapest.

A new podcast with journalist Ravi Somaiya, to promote his book “Golden Thread“, discusses some of the latest thinking on a 1961 assassination of the UN Secretary-General:

Dag Hammarskjöld was called ‘the greatest statesman of our century’ by John F. Kennedy, but he was found dead with an Ace of Spades mysteriously placed on his body. […] In this episode, Dan was joined by award-winning investigative journalist, Ravi Somaiya, who takes him into the depths of this event and the remarkable consequences across the globe.

It’s a good listen on one of my favorite topics in history, but to be honest Ravi spoils it a bit by claiming he only did it because he was bored while working nights in boring New York.

Anyway, accountability for this incident has long been a sore and unresolved topic of white supremacists controlling African liberation from colonialism.

The U.S. refuses to declassify its intelligence files even today, so that gives this particular incident even more of a flair towards conspiracy.

What on earth is going on? Those (UN investigators) who investigate the death of Dag Hammarskjöld do not want to know about Crypto AG and those who report on Crypto AG (The Washington Post) do not mention once the United Nations scandal. We know that the US hold important undisclosed information regarding the Hammarskjöld case and we know that they refuse to share this information with the UN investigators. Why do you think the US has been withholding this information?

See also: Daily Briefing (25 October 2017) DEATH OF DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD: SECRETARY-GENERAL ASKS COUNTRIES TO MAKE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AVAILABLE

A film recently was released by another journalist, and similar to the Ravi Somaiya book (spoiler alert) he focuses viewers on the narrative of racism.

It seems “white corporate interests exploiting black people” had so much influence over British and American foreign policy that assassination was used on some leaders who tried to get involved in African independence.

With the case still unsolved 50-plus years later, Danish journalist, filmmaker, and provocateur Mads Brügger (The Red Chapel, The Ambassador) leads us down an investigative rabbit hole to unearth the truth. He, his Swedish private-investigator sidekick, and a host of co-conspirators tirelessly pursue a winding trail of clues, but they turn up more mysteries than revelations. Scores of false starts, dead ends, and elusive interviews later, they begin to sniff out something more monumental than anything they’d initially imagined.

Dag Hammarskjöld wrote amazing poetry in the 1960s, but it was the British band Motörhead formed in 1975 who penned the lines…

Pushing up the ante, I know you got to see me,

Read ’em and weep, the dead man’s hand again,

I see it in your eyes, take one look and die,

The only thing you see, you know it’s gonna be,

The Ace Of Spades

The Ace of Spades.

It became a well known implement of psychological warfare, a particular signature promoted by American soldiers in the Vietnam War five years after assassination of Hammarskjold.