But, Ms. Taylor...
When Ada JoAnn Taylor is tense, she thinks she can feel the fabric of a throw pillow in the pads of her fingers. Taylor has suffered from tactile flashbacks for three decades. She imagines herself in a small apartment in Beatrice, Nebraska. She is gripping the edges of a pillow, more tightly than she means to, and suffocating a sixty-eight-year-old widow. “I feel for her,” Taylor told me recently. “She was my grandmother’s age.”
Thus begins one of the most unbelievable stories of true crime I’d ever heard. Rachel Aviv writes in the New Yorker about a heinous crime – as bad maybe as one can imagine – and about six persons who went to jail for unspeakably horrific crimes of true evil.
Ms. Taylor can feel her hands smother to death a 68 year old woman – imagine the horror of feeling that flashback endlessly. From Leicester, North Carolina, an area just a few miles from my desk, Ms. Taylor ended up in an Nebraska prison for 19 years - she confessed to the brutal attack.
Released now, she still has flashbacks to that memory, bold and clear as ever – clear enough for her to have confessed then and clear enough for her hands to remember holding a pillow over the older woman’s face until all life had drained away. Read the article, Remembering the Murder You Didn’t Commit – Ms. Aviv is a beautiful writer.
But let me highlight this one thing – there was a problem with Ms. Taylor’s confession. The crime scene was a mess of blood and semen. The semen didn’t come from Ms. Taylor and the blood wasn’t a match. A cohort soon emerged – and confessed; but the blood didn’t match. They needed type B. More suspects were arrested and they all confessed but none until suspect six had type B blood. Six confessions were made to a grisly, awful crime and six persons sent to prison. Nineteen years later DNA confirmed that none of them had taken any part in the crime – they were all completely innocent. And yet the flashbacks to a murder never committed continue.
What if a government figured out how to influence populations in a similar way
– what if a government figured out how to shatter perceptions of reality to the point that reality no longer existed? Imagine yourself, perhaps, sitting in a rancid prison for 19 years convinced you had held a 68 year old lady while she was gang raped until you smothered her to death – the exact situation of Ms. Taylor – I know this is horrible; apologies, but this is precisely what happened. Now imagine if a hostile enemy government had figured out how to install 'unreality' into a population. What if whole superpowers could be vanquished and drained just by installing corrupted mental processes?
This is the argument from Peter Pomerantsev in an article from The Atlantic in 2014, Russia and the Menace of Unreality - How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare
His 9/9/14 piece begins:
At the NATO summit in Wales last week, General Philip Breedlove, the military alliance’s top commander, made a bold declaration. Russia, he said, is waging “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.”
Bam – two years later the info war has landed – Trump is on his throne pushing Kremlin policy and attacking America’s core. It was already a challenging situation and then traitor Trump rides a Trojan Horse inside and opens the gates at night. No one is more surprised than Putin that it worked so well; Russia did not expect or maybe even want a Trump Presidency. Info war success beyond anyone's imagination was brought to the heart of America by traitors.
How does this 'info war' assault work? The battlefield is defined - and it's your mind. The attacks are not with bombs but instead they attack the sanity of each American. Here are the final words of Mr. Pomerantsev's article:
This is why it’s so important for Moscow to do away with truth. If nothing is true, then anything is possible. We are left with the sense that we don’t know what Putin will do next—that he’s unpredictable and thus dangerous. We’re rendered stunned, spun, and flummoxed by the Kremlin’s weaponization of absurdity and unreality.
There is a reason why honesty matters – it has to do with mental health - like the way our brain works from an electrochemical and organizational perspective. My piece here, Honesty Matters, looks at why it is so unhealthy to have our nation’s sense of reality and honesty attacked. This is foundational, core stuff – the stuff inside each of us that allows our minds to be healthy.
There is a war raging right now. Russia has been trying this junk for ages – with the Trump wave they secured treasonous conspirators on the inside to open the gates to the nation.
What's next? We decide.
