Campaign blames fearmongering blitz for mental health pandemic. Citizens objecting to Britain's COVID-19 psychological warfare have launched a counter-advertising campaign seeking to defuse the government's "dirty bomb" of "ensuring obedience through fear."
The government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) behavioral scientists have strayed into "seriously unethical practice" by "actively stoking" fear and creating a "mental health pandemic," the counter-fear Recovery campaign notes.
Recovery campaign van circles the BBC offices
"The biggest campaign of fear that the world has ever seen" has been "at its worst in the United Kingdom, where SAGE and the government took a conscious decision to use fear to ensure that people comply with restrictions," Recovery emphasizes in its "End the Campaign of Fear" drive.
Recovery cites statistics from Britain's Center for Mental Health explaining how 20% of adults (8.5 million) and 15% of children (1.5 million) in England alone will suffer from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders as a result of the fear campaign.
Speaking to Church Militant, mental-health ethicist Niall McCrae commended the Recovery campaign as "a brilliant demonstration of how to play oppressors at their own game."
"Governments have succeeded in terrifying their citizens with behavioral-psychology tactics used by totalitarian regimes. From an ethical standpoint, this is evil. The authorities have turned on their people, and we should do all we can to correct their lies," Dr. McCrae said.
Big media companies have now banned the "End the Campaign of Fear" advertising operation on entirely spurious grounds, Jon Dobinson, creative director and the brain behind Recovery's advertising campaign, reveals.
I never thought that the government of a country whose uniform I once wore with such pride would sink so low.GabTweet
Recovery is now working with a smaller outdoor media company and has secured a site for its poster in central London. It will also still display the billboard outside the BBC on an advertising van that will circle the studios, says Dobinson.
Dobinson, the CEO of award-winning advertising agency Other, asked a leading psychologist to analyze how the government's "Look Him/Her in the Eyes" poster campaign aimed to trigger fear.
A psychologically manipulative advertisement by the British government designed to terrorize citizens into compliance
"At the top [of the poster], our trusty NHS [National Health Service] instructs you to 'look him in the eyes,'" the psychologist said. "You automatically track down to the accusatory eyes staring straight out at you."
"Your brain's panic button — the amygdala — is activated, releasing stress hormones that prepare your body for 'fight or flight.' Blood supply diverts from your 'thinking brain' — the prefrontal cortex – causing it to temporarily shut down."
Governments have succeeded in terrifying their citizens with behavioral psychology tactics used by totalitarian regimes. GabTweet
The psychologist explains how the viewer's "threat system has been activated: by the frightening stare; by the authority of those promoting the message; by the stark, capitalized order," and the viewer is "already primed to feel guilty in response to the next instruction: 'Tell him you always keep your distance.'"
"The small, innocent name under the oxygen mask urges us not to ask questions," the psychologist explains. "This is a real COVID-19 victim — you should know better. Shame on you."
The repetitive mantra orders citizens to stay home in order to help the NHS and save lives. The striped warning colors of the banner emphasize the emergency — and "in an emergency, you do not question the authority, the logic or the evidence," the psychologist notes.
The centerpiece of the State's fear campaign
Posters at every supermarket and railway station use imagery and language designed with one aim in mind: to ensure obedience through fear, Recovery observes, while broadcasters justify a daily diet of terrifying sensationalized and misleading stories.
Britain's Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) issued a statement Thursday warning that the country was "in the grip of a mental health crisis, with children most affected."
"The extent of the mental health crisis is terrifying, but it will likely get a lot worse before it gets better," RCP president Dr. Adrian James said.
Nearly 400,000 children and 2.2 million adults have sought help for mental health problems during the pandemic.
"Our children and young people are bearing the brunt of the mental health crisis caused by the pandemic and are at risk of lifelong mental illness," Dr. Bernadka Dubicka, RCP chair of the child and adolescent faculty, added.
But McCrae noted that it was "distasteful" for mental health professionals "to be screaming about a mental health crisis" when behavioral psychologists themselves have "shamelessly promoted the factors causing psychological turmoil in children: school closure, masks, prohibition of normal social activities and excessive reliance on the internet."
"Practitioners are not responsible for the behavioral psychology tactics, but they are responsible for not speaking out," Dr. McCrae added.
I have only once before seen anything like it. This was when I was posted to East Germany in 1962.GabTweet
Iconic British novelist Frederick Forsyth, author of classic thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, also spoke out the same day against "the campaign of mass fear that reduced a once brave nation to trembling terror."
"I have only once before seen anything like it. This was when I was posted to East Germany in 1962," Forsyth wrote. "Such a brainwashing tactic was employed to frighten East Berliners into believing that the Berlin Wall was a defensive measure to protect them from tiny West Berlin and that the Stasi was their guardian. The wall was, of course, an instrument of enslavement."
"I never thought that the government of a country whose uniform I once wore with such pride would sink so low. Those responsible should be identified without delay and ousted from all office over us," the novelist insisted.
Novelist Frederick Forsyth condemns COVID fearmongering
In March, Church Militant reported on how Britain's government intentionally deployed tactics of psychological warfare used in wartime and by totalitarian regimes to turn its citizens into "compliant subjects of lockdown."
Church Militant examined the "Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviors" (SPI-B) paper listing nine ways of achieving behavior change, including persuasion, incentivization and coercion. The paper offered 25 options from behavioral science for the government to act on.
"A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened," the paper reports, recommending the government to heighten "the perceived level of personal threat" among "those who are complacent" by recourse to "hard-hitting emotional messaging."
"Manipulating mankind's most primitive instincts to change people's behavior is taken from the textbook of tyrants," the Recovery campaign remarked. "That's why the deliberate creation of fear to control behavior has long been regarded as unacceptable by experts in psychology and politics."
The psychologist interviewed by Dobinson confirmed that the government's scaremongering advertising campaign had a devastating impact on mental health.
"This advert activates our already overstimulated stress systems, making them ever more vulnerable to fear messaging. Sustained stress leads to physical and mental health damage: stroke, heart attack, cancer, suicide, OCD, depression," the psychologist told Recovery.
The government is now the largest advertiser in Britain, spending £184 million of taxpayer money in 2020 alone on fear-inspiring COVID warnings and advertisements. Government broadcasting regulator Ofcom has taken to banning stories that could threaten compliance with State policy.
