The technological revolution is making the world more democratic. Or so most people believe. Modern broadcasting and internet connectivity makes it infinitely more difficult for the world to ignore ideas held by large numbers of people and increasingly burdensome for a ruling minority to dominate a larger group without arousing concern or inciting protest.

But even as technology facilitates the transfer of factual information to and from all parts of the world, the systematic broadcast of ideological material by governments, often directed at carefully selected and unsuspecting audiences, is increasingly effective as a tool to influence the politics and the collective behavior of foreign populations.

Psychological warfare, as defined in Political Warfare and Psychological Operations, a 1989 publication of the National Defense University at Ft. McNair in Washington, is the "planned use of communications ... conducted to create in target groups behavior, emotions, and attitudes that support the attainment of national objectives." A psychological operation, however, is part of a larger strategy, usually termed "political warfare." James A. Baldwin, a Vice Admiral in the U.S. Navy, explains a strategy for conveying "images, ideas, speeches, slogans, propaganda, economic pressures, even advertising techniques to influence the political will of an adversary." Such operations, he predicts, will be "at the forefront of our national security agenda" in coming years, as the cold war era has ended and the world is increasingly beset by low-level and regional conflict.

While this kind of activity is generally associated with military and intelligence operations, it depends as much on the expertise of scientists trained in the unconscious aspects of human behavior as on military know-how. "Many agencies are involved in such activities," acknowledged Carnes Lord, former Director of International Communications at the National Security Council, during a 1986 symposium of the National Strategy Information Center. "(T)he U.S. Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps are organizations with dedicated missions in this area," he added, and both "have a very important psychological-political component."

Indeed, propaganda -- both overt and covert -- has become a key element in a highly visible and intensely controversial aspect of U.S. operations abroad - “regime change.” More money is spent on propaganda-related activities than on military hardware and its maintenance.

The Euromaidan coup in Ukraine, for example, cost a sum of five billion dollars US, according to Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe (1), and none of that went to combat equipment or ground troops. In other words, all that money was spent on “special” warfare tactics such as recruitment of agents and informants, secret funding for front groups, distribution of literature and training materials, support to right-wing media, cultivation of pro-western political figures (oligarchs and extremists), and economic meddling. All of this activities, sometimes called “unconventional warfare” or “low intensity conflict,” are actually forms of propaganda.

Similiar back stories can be related about virtually all regime change operations, whether they ended up as mililtary conflict or not. Syria, for instance, has been the target of a ferocious destabilization effort which ultimately resulted in military training and arms shipments to so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) radicals who had been hired on as surrogates to bring down the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Most ended up defecting to the Islamic State terrorist enterprise, also known as ISIS. Few seem to notice that this is a virtual reenactment of US stragegy in Vietnam circa 1965.

Libya posed an entirely different problem for Washington’s regime change apparatus. As Africa’s wealthiest nation, it was a well governed state (regardless of any disinformation you may have been fed) with a prosperous and content populace, the highest standard of living on the continent, and a life expectancy comparable to Europe. (2) Stirring up trouble was a bit more difficult there, even for the world’s “indispensable” nation. So Libya had to be flattened with air power, first by US forces, then with Washington-supervised NATO bombing. The result has been another stable nation destroyed and quickly falling into ISIS hands.

But propaganda grows more sophisticated all the time. Senior Researcher Lawrence Kincaid, of the Johns Hopkins University’s Social and Behavioral Sciences unit, has developed a technique to gauge the long-term achievements of propaganda. The process, known as "cognitive mapping," rates the opinions and beliefs of research subjects on a scale of 1 to 50. Thus, claimed an article published in the school’s alumni magazine back in the 1990s, "Kincaid is able to sum up a whole population's attitudes, and changes in attitudes, over a long period."

But what is this propaganda and how does one measure it? One of the problems with tracking the money that goes to finance the so-called “color revolutions” is that the information is mostly “off the books.”Little of the $5 billion that went into Maidan has ever been revealed, though some interesting facts have been uncovered.

One NGO (“non-governmental organization”) operating on behalf of Washington is CANVAS. Formerly known as Otpor, it received funding from the U.S. State Department to pose as a Serbian grassroots group in the color revolution against Slobodan Milosovic, says one news source. The same source advises that since that time the group has been “transformed into a full-time ‘revolution consultancy’ for the US.” The writer also reveals that pamphlets distributed by the group to Kiev protesters were nearly identical replicas of flyers disseminated in Cairo and states:

...[S]ources in Kiev ... report that [paid] anti-government protestors have been recruited ... from among university students and unemployed to come by bus into the heart of Kiev. (3)

A map from CANVAS’s own website shows current programs around the world - concentrated, not surprisingly, in countries where Washington is most likely to feel the urge to meddle - Belarus, Venezuela, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe and Vietnam among them.

NGOs are the the personification of American intervention abroad and have been since the late 20th century. Like the government-bankrolled US Institute of Peace, which promotes anything but peace, and the Orwellian-sounding National Endowment for Democracy, “non-governmental” is hardly a fitting word for these organizations as their sole purpose is to act as proxies for the US government, hiring on locals to spread ideas and concepts that would never be accepted coming directly from Americans. In other words, the purpose is to conceal the fact that the US is manufacturing the news and intent on provocations that could eventually lead to regime change or some other disastrous goal.

The practice of spreading information through channels that cannot be traced to the U.S. is called "covert propaganda" by the military and intelligence branches of government. This practice is used both to conduct operations in which the U.S. wishes to conceal its involvement and for the communication of ideas in which the government's interest is obvious and thus must be attributed to a neutral source in order to be credible.

Such propaganda campaigns are nearly always part of larger efforts to influence the attitudes and behavior of foreign governments, insurgencies or mass audiences. These projects, loosely termed "psychological operations," may consist of ideological, cultural, or political communications that are part of a strategy intended to achieve U.S. objectives which cannot be gained through diplomacy.

That is the nature of propaganda, and were it not so frighteningly effective, it’s obvious that the world’s dominant military power would never concentrate so much of it’s wealth on information warfare.