This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Orientation
Dogmatisms as a process not content
What does it mean to think dogmatically about something? On the surface, dogmatism seems associated with religious beliefs. While most world religions can be dogmatic, this implies there is no dogmatism outside of religion. We know that is not true. Many people accuse socialists of being dogmatic. In fact, socialists accuse each other of the same thing. Instead of looking at dogmatism as connected to content, to a particular set of beliefs, suppose we treat dogmatism as a process that can be applied to any set of beliefs? It is tempting to think that dogmatism would be more likely to be on the right-wing side of the political spectrum but moderates or leftist can be just as dogmatic. Here In Mordor, the neoliberal Democratic Party’s commitment to free market fundamentalism is a great example center-right dogmatist.
Interpersonal experience of talking to a dogmatists
When we think of arguing with a dogmatic person what is the experience like for us? For one thing, the person we’re talking with is overly certain that they are right. Going back and forth with them is not perceived as a dialectical process whereby new knowledge is created. Rather, it is like a king of the hill battle with each trying to take down the other. Closely related to this overconfidence in argument is a dualistic way of posing the problems. You are either right or wrong. There is nothing in between. There is no middle ground, no messiness. Dogmatic thinkers are rigid in their structures.
This article will follow Judy J. Johnson’s book What’s So Wrong with Being Absolutely Right: The Dangerous Nature of Dogmatic Belief. Judy Johnson identifies fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking. Five include mental predispositions, four have to do with emotional disorders and the rest having to do with behavior. In Part II of this article, we will identify the causes of dogmatism, covering the fields of sociology, psychology, bio-evolutionary Darwinism and physiology.
Dogmatism and a Family of Resemblances
Working towards a brief definition, dogmatism is a characteristic that combines cognitive, emotional and behavioral characteristics that result in prejudicial closed-minded belief systems that are pronounced with rigid certainty. It is driven by a) emotional anxiety, b) cognitive narrowness, and c) energized behavior. However, It is true that in stressful situations most of us will have some of these features but not as a way of life. In the average person fatigue, boredom, depression and illness might also produce dogmatism, but only temporarily. A dogmatist will claim to know things with certainty without evidence. A radical skeptic says we can know nothing unless it is certain. Neither dogmatists nor skeptics conduct open-minded inquiry. An open-minded person will say that while nothing is certain, some facts are closer to certainty than others.
Dogmatists are not the same as fanatics
According to Bob Altemeyer in his book Authoritarian Specter, dogmatists, fanatics and zealots are soulmates with some distinctions. He says that fanatics and zealots show excessive frenzied enthusiasm for beliefs that have an absurd or bizarre quality. While some dogmatists are likely to share some of these beliefs, most do not have the emotional extreme dimension of a fanatic or zealot. In general, fanatics occupy what has been called the lunatic fringe, while dogmatists appears relatively more moderate in their beliefs and they imply less dramatic action. Political or religious zealous dogmatists can move society in extraordinary directions. People championing religious beliefs had the highest zealot and highest DOG scores in Altemeyer’s research.
Critical thinking is not the opposite of dogmatic thinking
Johnson points out that although much has been written about how to promote critical thinking skills like inductive and deductive reasoning, abstract analysis, synthesis and evaluation of data, less attention has been given to the deeper psychological conditions that seriously impair one’s ability to think critically at all. Johnson point out that dogmatists can take a class in critical thinking, but if unmet sociological, psychological and biological needs are pushing them in dogmatic directions, their minds will not be sufficiently open to turn theory into practice beyond the class.
Dogmatic vs Openminded Thinking
Fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking
- Intolerance of ambiguity: black and white, either/or thinking
- Defense cognitive closure (having barbed wire around declarations)
- Rigid certainty (cannot state the conditions for being proven wrong)
- Compartmentalization: sealing off contradictory beliefs
- Lack of self-reflectiveness: refusal to bend-back and analyze themselves
- Belief associated with anxiety or fear (they underestimate their ability to cope)
- Lack of a sense of humor to keep perspective
- If humor is used, it is sarcasm at own or others’ expense
- Belief associated with anger: oversensitivity to unintentional infringements
- Excessive pessimism
- Preoccupation with power and status
- Glorification of in-group vilification of out-group
- Authoritarian submission: excessive obedience and blind trust of authorities
- Authoritarian aggression towards minorities
- Arrogant, dismissive communication style
Openminded thinking
People who are open-mindedness have little need to change the beliefs and values of people who think differently, unless opposing beliefs directly threaten their own or others’ freedom. They confront the issue, not the person, rarely infer motives for an opponent’s stated beliefs or jump to conclusions when someone changes the topic. Johnson notes that dogmatism should not be confused with open-minded, passionate social activism which creates popular movements. Open-minded people speak out, they do not lash out.
They are willing to suspend judgment and admit they do not know. They explore multiple points of view and are less preoccupied with social conventions. Open-minded people are not easily manipulated by propaganda. They are less vulnerable to external reinforcements like flattery or bribery. Because they are self-reflective they can recognize when their personal needs shape, control, or distort information. When a truth seems to be discovered, their approach is conditional, probable, not absolute, and final. Cognitively flexible adults are more likely to have been raised by parents who enabled them to feel securely attached. Table A at the end of the article compares the fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking with my interpretation based on Judy Johnson’s description of what open-mindedness would look like.
Historical Background of Dogmatism Research
Little was written about dogmatism as a distinct personality disposition until the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany when Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich sought to understand why Germans were drawn to Hitler. In reaction to fascism in the 1930s, Adorno wrote The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. He was criticized because his scale only measured the authoritarian right-wingers.
Milton Rokeach is credited with the first attempt to correct the problems inherent in the F scale in his book The Open and Closed Mind (1960). His questionnaire was assumed to accurately measure dogmatism independently of ideological places on the political or religious spectrum. Rokeach is acknowledged to have made the first attempt to piece together the complex psychology of dogmatism, but his approach was limited to descriptions and measurement. He did not elaborate on the causal influences. Johnson notes Rokeach had nothing on physiological predispositions, or evolutionary predispositions. Neither did he account for early childhood development, parenting styles, social learning and how cultural institutions influence open vs closed thinking. His main contribution was that dogmatism is not merely a cognitive deficiency. How good is Rokeach’s research? It is not a valid, internally consistent measure of dogmatism. Why not? It lacks validity and reliability.
Altemeyer did extensive research into right wing authoritarianism in Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1988) and in the Authoritarian Spector (1996). His research methods are very rigorous.
His definition calls dogmatism unjustified certainty, not as an unchangeable mind (Rokeach). His other questionnaires that are pertinent to dogmatisms include:
- The Right wing authoritarian scale
- Left wing authoritarian scale
- The religious fundamentalism scale
- Attitude towards homosexuality scale
- Posse against radicals
- Zealot scale
The most important criticism of Altemeyer’s work is that his scale does not tap the emotional and behavioral characteristics of dogmatism. It is limited to a measure of cognitive style.
We will now begin our review of the 14 characteristics of a dogmatic personality.
Five Cognitive Ingredients in Dogmatic Thought
The Five Characteristics of Dogmatic Cognition are:
- Intolerance of ambiguity (either/or thinking) due to anxiety
- Defense cognitive closure
- Rigid certainty – composure
- Compartmentation (sealing off contradictory beliefs)
- Lack of self-reflectiveness
Johnson claims the tendency to simplify thought is the granddaddy of dogmatism and that accompanies all five cognitive characteristics. Each of the five characteristics fail to thoroughly acknowledge and investigate complicated issues. Conceptual complexity is the degree to which we can consider several dimensions of a problem or argument at once. This is called differentiation. The second element of cognitive complexity is recognizing commonalities among the components within those dimensions. This is called integration.
Intolerance of Ambiguity: Black and White Thinking
Central beliefs begin in childhood as bipolar generalizations about the external world, other people and oneself. Central beliefs also reflect worldviews that are initially derived from parents and expanded or modified by teachers, religious leaders, peer groups, cultural and political institutions, social myths and cultural rituals. But some adults (dogmatists) remain at the level of bipolar generalizations. For example, the borderline personality exhibits cognitive splitting in which the person splits abstract concepts into dichotomous polarized compartments. This is similar to the trait compartmentalization of dogmatism
The absent of a spectrum between dogmatic acceptance and cynicism
Our belief and disbelief systems consist of a spectrum stretching from deep commitment to moderate commitment to skepticism and ultimately to cynicism. Dogmatic people have greater gaps between their belief and disbelief in the middle of the spectrum. In the case of religion, Johnston says extreme dogmatist even reject related religious beliefs. She reports that when fundamentalists are away from home, they are not likely to attend services in the only Christian church available if the Church is a different denomination.Should questions arise about an entirely different religion, dogmatic believers would prefer to consult their own parishioners rather than read and discuss dissimilar tenants with authoritative sources for that religion.
Sudden vs gradual changes in belief
Old beliefs are replaced suddenly (not gradually) with an unquestioning embrace of new ones presented by dazzling, prestigious authority figures. Religious dogmatists avoid analyzing and synthesizing old beliefs and new beliefs. When faced with doubt, they seek religious revivalists’ movements that offer a chance for a fresh beginning wherein the contradictions between the old and new beliefs are left to fester while being papered over by the new ideology.
Need for Certainty
While the human desire for clarity, predictability and safety during times of change and stress is normal, dogmatists transform these natural desires into dire necessities.
Dogmatic systems claims to absolute certainty are generally not evidence-based claims. For example, Karl Popper, one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers of science, writes that there are three criteria for scientific evidence:
- It must be able to generate predictions
- It must be capable of being tested and falsified
- It must survive attempts at refutation
Dogmatic certainty does not feel compelled to make predictions, make claims falsifiable or respond to the refutation points of an adversary by modifying their original claim.
In their need for certainty, dogmatists have learned to suppress their anxious feelings behind rigid proclamations of absolute truth. For the dogmatist, not knowing is an embarrassment that must be concealed. As an antidote to fear, ignorance and powerlessness, dogmatism calms the mind.
Defensive Cognitive Closure
Defensive cognitive closure is like having barbed wire around a declaration and daring their adversity to climb over it. The use of “only” is a likely indicator. In science, when scientists say some social or psychological phenomenon is nothing but chemistry or physics, they are laying down the gauntlet. Humble admissions of hesitation or qualification or suspending judgments are seen as signs of stupidity. Sadly, this can apply to Marxists who refuse to stay current in anthropology and trot out the old anthropology of Marx and Engels that is 150 years old while refusing to incorporate new findings. They present the same stage theory of history over and over again. Failing to acknowledge how far they have fallen behind, they mask ignorance with cynicism about new theories or research findings.
Compartmentalization
Compartmentalization occurs when a person seals off beliefs that contradict the main networks of belief and keeps them from interacting with those main sets of beliefs. An easy example of this is a football fan who is loyal to his team no matter what because the team plays in the fan’s locality. Someone reminds him that the players on his football team and the owners are not from the same location as the fan. The fan acknowledges this, but never allows these facts to enter into the part of his mind that is loyal to his team. Evidence of non-local residence on the part of the players and the owners is isolated and quarantined. Johnson gives another example. Christians support war and the extralegal use of torture while refusing to acknowledge that these practices contradict their supposed support for universal rights.
Lack of Self-reflectiveness
Dogmatists are anti-psychologists. They are not curious about what might be going on in the minds of others and they are uninterested in their own internal life, whether it be thoughts, emotions, goals, drives and any contradictions that might exist between them. When they make a mistake and if they admit they were in the wrong, they do not think about their history of making mistakes and what they could do to correct them. They might say something like “what’s the point of mulling over regrets. What’s done is done”.
This same lack of insight applies to their perception of the minds of others.
Dogmatists will not understand why some people do not like them or try to avoid them. Chances are they will externalize the problem and blame their friend rather than look at the problem dialectically, as the result of both the other person and themselves. Dogmatists have poor listening and conversation skills yet demand attention. Johnson claims that lack of personal insight is a dogmatist’s greatest wound.
Four Emotional Characteristics of Dogmatic Thought
We now turn to the emotional dimensions of dogmatism. Unlike feelings, which are transient, emotions are more enduring. In part because dogmatic people are uninterested in their own minds they have little sense the power of their mind (whether interpretations, explanations of assumptions) has in controlling their emotions. Dogmatic people do not have emotions that come and go. Emotions are perceived as an alien force over which they have no control. For dogmatic people emotions have them. They say things like “once I get wound up in a heated discussion, I just can’t stop”.
Johnson claims that there are four emotional needs that dogmatists are trying to satisfy. The first is the need to know that things connected to perceived survival are relatively stable. Exploring subjects that are not immediately connected to that are perceived as a threat. Therefore, curiosity is looked down on or punished. The second need is to defend against anxiety. Johnson says domineering parents who impose arbitrary rules, who criticize, ridicule, threaten and inflict ruthless discipline and physical abuse leave the child feeling shameful and unwanted. A reaction formation emerges as a shield for anxiety. A wall of contrived certainty barricades the anxiety within.
The third need is for a stable social connection. Chronic doubts about status within groups interferes with the ability to engage in complex cognitive processing. Socially anxious people have difficulty starting and sustaining a quality discussion with others because they are preoccupied with how the other person is evaluating them. Lastly the dogmatist, like everyone, needs to feel a common dignity. However, instead of dignity coming from self-perception, dignity is sought after in groups. Because their status in groups is unstable, they are less likely to find dignity within them, except if it is a special kind of group, as we will see.
According to Johnson, the four emotional ingredients of dogmatism are:
- Anxiety and fear
- Lack of a sense of humor
- Oversensitivity to unintended infringements which result in anger
- Excessive pessimism and despair
Anxiety and Fear
Johnson argues that dogmatists are driven emotionally by fear and anxiety. Their dogmatism is designed to protect them against these emotions. They lack confidence that on their own they can cope with events that come their way. Because they cannot tolerate ambiguity, they catastrophize events that are mildly unpleasant as dangerous and worth armoring themselves against while arming themselves against others. Anxious people seem unable to clearly process events. Politically they are very susceptible to political authorities who pander to their fear. Instead of politicians being models of grounded optimism and calmness, we have fear-mongering melodramas. Leaders like Trump can potentially turn dogmatists into fascists.
Lack of a Sense of Humor
Having a sense of humor means you can step out of situations and see them in perspective. Humor allows for a break in being serious before returning to serious endeavors. Lack of humor (being humorless) means you are serious all the time. Being dead serious can wear a person out. As we will see in the section on dogmatic behavior, dogmatic people have status anxiety, so that humor at another person or at a group’s expense will be seized on. When they laugh at all, the dogmatist laughs at people, not with people.
Oversensitivity to Unintended Infringements Which Result in Anger
In part, because the dogmatist has status anxiety he is constantly unsure of how others are perceiving him. This is why he responds well to military life since there a person knows their rank and what is expected of them. But in civilian life relations between people are vague and the dogmatic person wants social relations to be crystal clear. Because they lack a sense of play and humor, they cannot imagine that vague behavior done to them was unintentional. Dogmatic people are likely to have bad cases of road rage. When someone cuts them off, they immediately take it personally. “They did that deliberately”. They do not easily think situationally. The person might be late for work, not paying attention for their exit, or having to rush to the hospital. For them, everything is personal and interpersonal. Dogmatists with guns are more likely to be trigger happy. “Nobody fucks with me”. They can’t give people the benefit of the doubt. To do so is the same as to showing weakness. Johnson says,
Those who are low self-monitors (self-reflectors) are often unaware of gestures and facial expressions that transition their words but may provide additional unintended meanings. Innocuous questions become red alerts to their adrenal glands. Simple inquiries are twisted into accusations. (227)
Excessive Pessimism and Despair
Lastly, dogmatists have a pessimistic view of human nature which includes themselves as well. Whenever the dogmatists examine things, their refrain is mostly, ”it has always been this way”. Dogmatists do not like change, and their hope is to make the present the past as soon as possible. There the present can be fit into the rigid categories the dogmatist has built for them.
Summing up, on an emotional level, the functions of dogmatic belief systems are the reduction of fear and anxiety, building up pride, status and smugness in groups, and protection against feeling joy or hope. If dogmatists feel these emotions, they fall further down when things don’t work out. The dogmatist would rather experience a steady, low-grade pessimism than roll with the ups and downs of life as an open-minded person might.
Five Behavioral Characteristics of Dogmatism
Dogmatism is not just what is going cognitively and emotionally. Dogmatism is also about how people behave and act. The five behavioral characteristics of dogmatism are:
- An arrogant, dismissive communication style
- Preoccupation with power and status
- Glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group
- Dogmatic authoritarian submission to authorities
- Dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities
An arrogant, dismissive communication style
Although a dogmatist may not be very good at it, they will attempt to use pretentious, pompous language to impress or intimidate someone in discussions with others. Johnson says dogmatists have a hard time following and incorporating aspects of a discussion as they go. A spontaneous back-and-forth flow of conversation might mean the dogmatist’s failure to keep up without woodenly and awkwardly superimposing their beliefs into the conversation. Johnson says dogmatists have a short temper and machine-gun style of communication. They talk at others, not with them. They don’t listen carefully because they are getting ready to make their next point. She says disagreements elicit sighs, frowns and rolling eyes, a rigid body posture and a strident voice. This dismissive communication manner papers over individual and group fears of being exposed as inadequate, insignificant, wrong, ignorant or stupid. Built into dogmatism is a false pride that functions as a defense against being found out.
Preoccupation with power and status
Uncertainty in one’s place in the class, race or gender hierarchy leads to attempts to either stabilize one’s place, or move up in the hierarchy. Forms of behavior include emulation, keeping up with the Joneses, name-dropping or reifying official titles. Johnson reports that on being introduced to someone the dogmatist immediately wants to know the kind of work the person does, where they live, and what their race, ethnicity is. They are drawn to professions that reward them with visible displays of status, believing that uniforms and badges grant instant authority and respect. Up to a point this makes evolutionary sense as natural selection rewarded social learners who observed and copied the most successful individuals. However, since good people can have low status and bad people can have high status, getting answers to the dogmatists’ questions does not guarantee a predictable response. But for the dogmatist bent on labels, this can lead to prejudicial thoughts and/or discriminatory actions.
Johnson points out that dogmatists have a desperate need to achieve identity, the respect of others, the presence of self-esteem and dignity. A group that not only welcomes but panders to those whose self is inconsistent or fragmented with privileged status and instant dignity becomes powerfully appealing to brittle identities.
Glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group
Johnson writes that the size of the group membership alone sometimes gives the group legitimacy in the minds of anxious people. When a social system disintegrates to the extent that people lose their group identity and shared values, they become anxious and vulnerable to joining clearly structures groups that are hierarchically ordered. This seems to be the case if they suspect that by joining the group, they will abdicate personal responsibility for assessing the logic of group objectives. These are the circumstances in which the most despicable deeds occur. Authoritarian in-groups also involve being nationalist or even fascist.
Just as there is one and only one dogma and the rest are either false or evil, so too the group that shares the same dogma (the in-group) is good and any group outside of it is demonic. Everything is us vs them, never an expanding, evolving we.Those who are dogmatic cannot distinguish between the social authority and the qualities of the individual person. Either they think the information is true because they respect the authority or the information is false because they distrust the authority. They cannot seem to tolerate instances where an author they respect is wrong or lying or an authority they normally distrust could be telling the truth.
According to Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarian Specter, authoritarianism means the principle of blind submission to authority, as opposed to individual autonomy in thinking and acting. He defines authoritarianism as the co-variation of three kinds of attitudes:
- Authoritarian submission to established authorities
- Authoritarian aggression against anyone the authorities target
- Conventionalism adhered to by society and established by authorities
Dogmatic authoritarian submission to authorities
Albert Bandura spent the better part of his career in social psychology trying to understand the relationship between violence on television and its transition to real life. Bandura’s major concepts of observation and modelling lay emphasis on the influential power of role models who have three characteristics: they are attractive, appear to be an expert and they have power (perhaps political). But dogmatists are attracted to characters who do things that most people would consider immoral and they are not punished. This can apply to parents, peers, authority figures or prestigious people.
Self-efficacy is the individual’s belief that he or she can generate and coordinate the necessary thoughts, emotions, social skills and behaviors required to achieve their goals. Dogmatic authoritarian submission appeals to people who feel the lack self-efficacy. Hence, they are attracted to authorities who are successful at getting away with things that do not require the efficacy that dogmatists themselves lack.
Authoritarian submitters represent extremes of ingratiating loyalty. This can be seen in German soldiers following orders to kill six million Jews. “I was only following orders” they say. It can be seen in results like the Milgram experiment when many more people “went all the way” in shocking the participants than any psychologist had predicted. We find it in the behavior of all the followers of the cults of the 1970s to 1990s from the Peoples Temple to scientology to the Democratic Workers’ Party. Lastly, we can see it in the US soldiers’ treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo.
Dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities
Altemeyer found that high scorers view the world as a dangerous, fearful place. They felt threatened that racial diversity programs at work or in education might destabilize their identity. The typical things authoritarians will say is “some kids just need a good whuppin” or “Increased crime and drug use is caused by parents and educators who are too soft on discipline”. They might say, that immigrants are taking our jobs. Since dogmatists typically do not care or follow science or the scientific method, they might not be aware that race theory has been shown to be false. They might say these terrorists need to be taught a lesson, not understanding that most people in the world today think the United States is a terrorist state.
If you haven’t already done so, please see how the fourteen dogmatic characteristics of personality compare to a personality that is open-minded in Table A at the end of this article.
Coming Attractions
In part two, we will examine the causes that make the dogmatic personality the way they are. Economies can be expanding and prosperous or they can be contracting with tight labor markets. Which might produce a higher percentage of dogmatic people and why? Do dogmatic people cut across all social classes or are they more likely to be found in some classes more than others? How much might parenting styles impact the likelihood that people will become dogmatic? What about PTSD experiences such as witnessing death in wars, torture and rape? Is there any relationship between PTSD and dogmatism? What might that relationship be? The overwhelming number of people are religious, yet openminded people will not relate to their religion in a dogmatic way. What kind of religion will dogmatists be drawn to?
What can personality theory tell us about dogmatism? What might the theories of Alfred Adler, Karen Horney and Erik Erikson tell us about the dogmatic personality? Cognitive psychologists have identified four levels of cognition: negative automatic thoughts, distorted cognitive interpretations, pessimistic explanatory styles and irrational assumptions. There is a definite relationship between these cognitive liabilities and dogmatism.
Lastly, is there anything biological involved in dogmatism? Is there a gene for dogmatism? In evolutionary theory human beings strive for both dominance and cooperation as well as for aggressiveness and sociality. How might dogmatism fit into this? Physiologically some people are predisposed to anxiety and others have an overly active amygdala. What might this have to do with dogmatism? As it turns out, lack of oxytocin and dopamine are connected to dogmatism, but how? Discover answers to all these questions in Part II.
Table A Dogmatic vs Openminded Thinking
Dogmatic Thinking Examples of Dogmatism Open-minded Thinking 1) Intolerance of ambiguity Black and white
Either/Or
“I’m sticking to my guns” “Once I make up my mind…”
“You’re either with the terrorists or you’re with us”
Tolerance of ambiguity Can suspend judgment
2) Defense cognitive closure (Having barbed wire around declarations)
“Only an ignoramus or someone stupid would think otherwise” Open, inviting a response 3) Rigid certainty Cannot state conditions of being proved wrong.
“There is no doubt in my mind” Flexibility Qualifying statements
Falsification – stating conditions where you could be proven wrong
4) Compartmentalization Sealing off contradictory beliefs
“My country right or wrong” Suppressing the atrocities over history
American dream today
Dialectically using contradictions to create new knowledge 5) Lack of self- reflectiveness
Refusal to bend-back and analyze themselves
“The reason I got fired was that my boss was out to get me.” Self-reflective of one’s own part in creating problems 6) Belief associated with anxiety or fear (they underestimate their ability to cope)
“If they leave me I will never recover” Curiosity and confidence in their ability to cope 7) Lack of a sense of humor to keep perspective If humor is used, it is sarcasm to undermine the gravity of the situation
Making jokes about getting fired
Uses humor to keep things in perspective 8) Belief associated with anger. Oversensitivity to unintentional infringements
Road rage “They cut me off intentionally”
Does emotional work Gives people the benefit of the doubt
9) Excessive Pessimism “Things have always been this way“ “There is nothing I can do”
“People are selfish”
Moderate optimism, not pollyannish
10) Pre-occupation with power and status Emulation – keeping up appearances Name-dropping
Fetishizing official titles
Is aware of, but not preoccupied with status and power 11) Glorification of in-group Vilification of out- group
Nationalism Racism – immigrants are taking our jobs
Critical of in-group Welcoming of out-group
12) Authoritarian aggression Towards minorities
“Spare the rod and spoil the child” “These terrorists need to be taught a lesson”
Assertive, not aggressive Sympathetic to minorities
13) Authoritarian submission Excessive obedience and blind trust of authorities
German soldiers following orders Cult participants following leaders
Critical of the authorities 14) Arrogant dismissive communication style “You’re in no position to talk” Open to what is strange or appears to be a problem The post The Dogmatic Personality first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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My colleague Rachel Yehuda studied rates of PTSD in adult New Yorkers who had been assaulted or rapes. Those whose mothers were Holocaust survivors with PTSD had a significantly higher rate of developing serious psychological problems after these traumatic experiences. The most reasonable explanation is that their upbringing had left them with a vulnerable physiology, making it difficult for them to regain their equilibrium after being violated. Yehuda found a similar vulnerability in the children of pregnant women who were in the World Trade Center that fatal day in 2001. Similarly, the reactions of children to painful events are largely determined by how calm or stressed their parents are.
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of TraumaOh, I know I sometimes blithely say, “Violence is in the DNA of Americans.” Or, I say, “Americans are colonized, in constant fear, flight, freeze mode because of their intergenerational trauma put upon so many millions here and tens of millions outside the border of U$A.” Or, yep, “Collective Stockholm syndrome brought upon the masses through Disneyfication, McDonaldization and Infantalization.” I am serious, though, about epigenetic trauma, and if a child witnessing pain, hate, parents shooting up, violently attack each other, poverty, drug use, all of that “stuff,” well, the DNA is in fact changed for the babe, the juvenile, as all those stress hormones — there are dozens and hundreds in concert with all sorts of other bodily functions tied to the gut and brain and cortisol interplay — they morph child into hyper-vigilant and hyper-reactive and possibly hyper-mentally disjointed teens … And then what happens to them in adulthood?
You have to wonder what is in the water, meat, air, soil, Cheetos when we see this in Greece but nothing of the sort in Palestine, Ohio. I am looking at how collectively traumatized Americans are, in so many ways, from education, TV, militaristic leaders, lynchings, the entire reservation and internment and hateful Gilded media Class shitting on us. Two trains, two countries, two derailments, two different collective responses.
Police said 12,000 people had gathered by the large esplanade in front of the parliament to demand accountability for Tuesday’s head-on collision near the central city of Larissa that has sparked widespread outrage.
At least 57 people were killed and dozens were injured when a passenger train with more than 350 people on board collided with a freight train on the same track in central Greece.
Yikes. This says a thousand things and draws upon a hundred topics in one photo: Freemont, OH protesters?
Vinyl chloride train cars were derailed and then the company just burned the tankers, instead of paying for a slow pumping out and transfer, releasing PCBs, dioxins, you know, the stuff of Agent Orange. Into the air, all over the place. And so, if this isn’t vitally important to everyday life, to the crimes of Nuland-Kagan Family-Blinken-Garland-Yellen-Albright-Sherman and what occurred in their parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and then passing on those morphed genetic traits to THEM, and now we pay the price for their trauma and misanthropy, well, we are a completely blank society if we can’t get into the streets daily and fight for our rights to NOT look deeply into this, and connect the dots — and there are so many dots, as in why so much hatred of Russia is coming from those Neocons, those people whose family lines were in the Holocaust — we are missing a great opportunity to see what motivates these elitists.
A person’s experience as a child or teenager can have a profound impact on their future children’s lives, new work is showing. Rachel Yehuda, a researcher in the growing field of epigenetics and the intergenerational effects of trauma, and her colleagues have long studied mass trauma survivors and their offspring. Their latest results reveal that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders. Yehuda’s team at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y., and others had previously established that survivors of the Holocaust have altered levels of circulating stress hormones compared with other Jewish adults of the same age. Survivors have lower levels of cortisol, a hormone that helps the body return to normal after trauma; those who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have even lower levels.
PARENT’S STRUGGLE, CHILD’S RISK
A variety of studies, many using long-term medical records from large populations, have found that certain experiences affect future descendants’ health risks.
— Victoria Stern
Look, these are highly complex studies, if we just use biologic-genetics-endocrine studies. We do not ALWAYS have to rely on DNA material and long-term studies with petri dishes and billions of points of data to UNDERSTAND what happens in a household where parents are criminals, neglectful, mean, violent, unattentive, poor and struggling, never there, always in turmoil. The Nazi Holocaust? The wiring of the brain man is going to be the hardest to pin down, whereas diabetes is the easiest to connect to parents passing on those traits. But truly, the brain — that gut-serotonin-reuptake connection “thing” does determine brain functioning, cognition, disposition, outlook and personality as well as the deeper psycho-biological formulations of what it is to be a human under a thousand points of stress, both in the womb and under a kitchen table shivering from fear. What sort of Complex PTSD will ever be held to account for those children and parents and all the people bombed by Ukraine in Donbass? In Syria? All those witnesses to / survivors of war, and those who wage war, wage crimes against humanity? Alley of Angels in Donbass, erected for those victims of the Nuland-Obama-Kagan war on Russians, i.e. Maidan Coup onwards:
So what happens, then, with American Society, whereupon the media and politicians deny history, context, stories, points of view, and necessary peaks into other people’s struggles and lives? What collective amnesia, confusion, memory hole worshipping occur in a society hit with both sides of the invented liberal-conservative line, one that never existed until The Man, The Corporations, found it necessary to make the Asian, Latino, African-American as enemy, as the drain on the Majority’s lives, their concept of peace and neighborhood, their belief in myths. The Majority being The White Man/Woman! How much early childhood and juvenile and peer trauma can we attribute to a Biden or a Trump or Pelosi or any of these elites who go to elite finishing schools, prep schools, colleges, entering the dungeons of law schools, MBA programs, International Scam institutes? Does an Albright, with her own odd biography tied to her family, get a pass, get some sort of human compensatory feeling for her belief system?
Do we see the pain and the struggle and the conflicting views and her own ego lined up in those wrinkles of life?
“It’s one thing to find out you’re Jewish… but another to find out that relatives had died in concentration camps. That was a stunning shock.” Madeleine Albright first learned of her Jewish identity when she was 59, two weeks before being sworn in as the first female Secretary of State in U.S. history. “It was a complicated family story,” she said in an interview. Investigations by the Washington Post revealed that, although Albright was raised Catholic, her parents were born Jewish. She also discovered that 26 of her family members, including three grandparents, had been murdered in the Holocaust. Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague on May 15, 1937, the oldest of three children of Josef and Anna (Speeglova) Korbel. In 1937, Josef Korbel was serving as a press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. He worked for Czechoslovakia’s first democratic president, Tomas Masaryk, who retired in 1935, and his successor, Edvard Benes.
What sort of triple epigenetic trauma lurked in her brain? Ed Bradley interviewed America’s first female secretary of state in 1997. Albright died at 84.
I could go deeply into epigenetics, and this Adverse Childhood Events, a tracking system (unfortunately, on the digital data dashboard tied to performance) that does in fact take into consideration the huge uphill battle many youth have growing up in stressful and dysfunctional and non-attentive and violent and poor homes:
Of course, most of my life as teacher, mentor, journalist, social worker, activist has been entwined with the people I teach-mentor-serve-report on-advocate for and where they came from. What about my homeless female veterans? What got them to join the armed services? What caused them to use drugs and end up homeless and end up in my office talking about supports and other avenues of healing and getting a better footing I might have? All my female clients both civilian and military were sexually assaulted, abused and raped. That trauma is complex because it is never just one blow to the head, one violent forced rape. So many things tied to the context of how and where and who it happened with, and then, the failure of our society to deal with this trauma, the failure of courts, cops and politicians. Unfortunately, the elite, those Albright kind of folk, except younger and into tech-data-tracking-social impact investing, they are using ACEs for PROFITEERING:A red flag for me in Gavin Newsom’s “child-friendly” proposed budget was the $45 million he allocated to screen children and adults in Medi-Cal for ACEs. I’m writing this post to express serious reservations I have about the process of developing ACE (Adverse Early Childhood Experiences) scores for people. ACEs are getting tremendous media exposure of late. While I believe this to be a crucial pubic health concern, my fear is that ACE prevention and mitigation interventions will become vehicles for “innovative” finance and will expand profiling of vulnerable populations.
I want to make it clear from the outset that I acknowledge childhood trauma does result in long-term negative health consequences for individuals. I’ve seen it in my own family. I also recognize that systems of structural racism have inflicted stress and violence on communities of color and indigenous peoples for generations, resulting in high rates of chronic illness that make them attractive targets for “social impact” schemes. People have a basic human right to treatment and care, which should not be conditioned on surveillance and having data harvested to line the pockets of social impact investors.
What concerns me about ACEs is the “scoring.” Why should a standardized rubric developed under the auspices of one of the largest managed healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente, label clients and structure the way a doctor, therapist, social worker, or educator can care for them? How did this tool come to have such a far reach, and whose interests will it ultimately serve? Is a reliance on “scores” an intentionally-constructed framework that allows providers to limit their scope to “fixing” individuals and families rather than advancing a more radical approach whereby systemic causes of community trauma, trauma rooted in our country’s deep racist history, can be acknowledged, holistically assessed, and begin to be ameliorated? And finally, will this “scoring” system be used to transform the treatment of childhood trauma into a machine for “pay for success” data speculation? I believe it will. (“ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Scores: Part of the “Pay for Success” Plan? Feb. 5, 2019, Wrench in the Gears, Alison McDowell)
So, this level of exploitation for profit has flooded the American landscape generation after generation, until we are here, in that GAD moment for many — generalized anxiety disorder. Chaos, inertia, cancel society, trigger warnings, up is down, racism is okay sort of thinking. Until someone like me who has been witness to other people’s direct trauma and who has been a trauma navigator and of course been a teacher too, within gang programs, tied to low income communities, prisons, elsewhere considered “on the other side of the railroad tracks” writes about it as a way of making sense of what I have seen and heard, and some of it has been horrific, beyond belief, and in one sense, some of it can’t be repeated even in a Dissident Voice newsletter. I’ll finish this very superficial treatment of collective trauma and epigenetics with my own flipping through Showtime’s offerings, or what have you. I was attempting with open mind and heart to get into the documentary on Chelsea Manning, XY Chelsea.
Look, I am a friend to many communities within the LGBTQA+ grouping, and know the story of Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, born Bradley Edward Manning; December 17, 1987. A whistleblower. This documentary, however, was so self-indulgent, so steeped in a sort of dumbed-down look at a person in constant struggle that it was filled with affectations and was difficult for me to get any traction on it. I have read good accounts about Bradley-Chelsea. I know Chelsea also got on the Podcast Circuit in March 2022 and said the most idiotic things about Putin, Russia, the SMO, Ukraine. Very very sad case of misinformed person. I won’t link one of those shows here. So, to get through the midnight hour of insomnia, I found a gem:
Here, the YouTube blurb: Raw and unflinching examination of the courageous and remarkable life of basketball star and social justice activist Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Born Chris Jackson, he overcame tremendous adversity to reach the NBA and found his true calling when he converted to Islam. His decision not to stand for the national anthem, however, turned him from prodigy to pariah. Told candidly by Abdul-Rauf himself more than 20 years later it’s the remarkable story of one man who kept the faith and paved the way for a social justice movement.
Look, I just came back from coaching the Special Olympics basketball team, and we have one more practice before a March 18 out-of-town state tournament. I work with these amazing young adults, and I was not about to tolerate at the end of my night this Manning self-indulgence.
ACEs — Manning had boozer parents, in Oklahoma, violent, and of course, poor. Abused and neglected, Bradley was a lost soul, and decided to join the military to get some meaning in his life. Chelsea states in the flick that there are many transgender folk in the armed services. Many reasons. Definitely worth looking into.
Then, well, I knew some of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s story, Chris Jackson growing up in Stars and Bars, KKK, Mississippi, dirt poor, no father, and a mother who never told him who is father was. His older brother shot squirrels and doves with a pellet gun for food, not fun. They were always hungry. You have to watch this film, man.
It will uplift you, and it will deeply solidify in you, I hope, why this country is so traumatized, deeply spiritual lobotomized, inertia bound in terms of real history, and so so disassociative around who the real enemies are. So many incapable elite human failures pounding the war drums, so many in high and middle office stealing from us, and yet no boiling tar and pokey features and sharpened pitchforks. Abdul-Rauf, a true hero. The best basketball athlete Shaq ever saw:
He shared how his turning point came one day when he visited his mother’s home. He opened the refrigerator and it was empty. He went to the restroom to wash his hands. When he leaned on the sink, it collapsed on the floor. That was it. After playing for two years at LSU, he told his LSU coach he wanted to play in the NBA. “My mother is everything (to me)…I got to take care of her,” Abdul-Rauf emotionally said. His coach’s response surprised him. He told him it was the best decision he could make. He knew if he went pro, he would be able to take care of his mother. So he did. In 1990, Abdul-Rauf was the third overall pick of the Denver Nuggets during the NBA draft.
It is a tough one, since I will not be standing for the national anthem this coming March 18, which I have always shown as my own deeply enmeshed protest of the stars and stripes, my own military trauma, and of course, like Mahmoud, my education through Fred Hampton, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and ten thousand others.
His views about America changed, and he found that his beliefs no longer aligned with what he observed. People he looked up to changed, he noticed. To protest oppression, he refused to stand for the American national anthem. It stirred controversy, and some say his stance was the blueprint for what would come 20 years later when 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the anthem to protest racial injustice. Kaepernick kneeled at a preseason game against the Chargers for the first time on Sep. 1, 2016. “It sounds cliche, but when I say I was so comfortable with my information, I was so comfortable with my faith and my position. I was so comfortable with my belief in God and how things are going,” Abdul-Rauf said. His faith was bigger than the game, he said. This was not the first time he had chosen not to stand for the anthem, but it was the first time someone had noticed. It cost him his home, which the Ku Klux Klan burned down, and his NBA career.
Shit-dog, the deeply ingrained trauma of growing up, and in both Manning’s and Johnson’s cases, an absent father in variations on a theme. Chelsea struggled with identity in Oklahoma, and Mahmoud struggled with a neurological condition, a mind draining and body pounding condition that in fact made him into a god-like basketball player.
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That neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are offering anything to alleviate the problems working people face is illustrated by their campaign fear-mongering – the former over “fascism” and the latter over “socialists” and “radicals.” No matter which party dominates the midterm elections, do not expect either will herald in fascism or socialism.
Actual socialists in Congress would demand we stop instigating war with Russia, (now topping $66 billion), and instead eliminate homelessness (costing $20 billion) and hunger ($25 billion) as emergency first steps. Those swayed by Republican propaganda need not fear impending socialism: 100% of the Democrats including Bernie, AOC and the Squad voted like neo-cons for tens of billions in handouts to military contractors to further war in Ukraine.
Concerning any supposed threat of “fascism”, some of us explained soon after Trump was elected, “so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy. No such problem exists here in the US.” Impending fascism is no more real than any impending socialist revolution that will result if the Democrats win the midterms.
It is particularly regretful that many leftists themselves stoop to this low level of seeking to scare people about fascism to get them to vote Democratic. Leftists should be educating people to think for themselves, to organize together to fight for their rights, not instill fear of some bogeyman.
Neither party has anything to offer to improve our lives which could win us their vote. They offer us fear and hatred of the other party. Ironic, as both parties are substantially the same thing.
Whoever we vote for, we will be voting for authoritarian corporate rule, with the national security state, the real US government – an unelected one – running the show. The national security state has been more aligned with the Democrats than the Republicans since 2015-16 when Trump began denouncing their wars in the Middle East.
To use the now meaningless terms of “left” and “right”, the Republicans are far more to the left than the Democrats on the war in Ukraine. For instance, 68 Republicans – 57 in the House and 11 in the Senate – voted against the $40 billion Ukraine military package (out of their 50 in the Senate and 212 in the House). All the Democrats toed the national security state line on squandering now $66 billion to advance war against Russia.
This is reminiscent of 2008 when the Republicans stood more left during the first bailout for Wall Street banks, whose ruthless greed had caused a world economic meltdown. The first corporate handout package was voted down, 228-205, with 133 Republicans voting against it. Only a third of the Republicans (65) joined with 140 Democrats to vote for it, while 95 Democrats voted against.
For almost one day the “leftist” Congressional Progressive Caucus published a letter to Biden asking him to support negotiations to end the Ukraine war. But they almost immediately withdrew it and apologized, scared they would be seen as aligned with “rightwing” anti-war Republicans. They pointed out that the Democrats, like good Bush-Cheney neo-cons, “have strongly and unanimously supported and voted for” every military escalation in the war.
Meanwhile, we have alleged extreme “fascists” like Marjorie Taylor Greene taking traditional left positions, calling for Free Assange, Defund the FBI, and condemning the tens of billions wasted in the proxy war with Russia. It may be true she would welcome the FBI being used to crush left wing movements, but then how is that different from many on the left welcoming the FBI and CIA being used to suppress Trump and the MAGA movement?
In the midterm elections a number of Democrats make an issue of voting for them to protect women’s right to choose. However, we can expect women’s right to abortion will be forgotten the day after the election, junked like past Democrat promises to take US troops out of Iraq, create national health care, and raise the minimum wage. Biden himself had not been a supporter of the Roe v Wade decision on women’s right to choose, even supported a constitutional amendment that would allow states to overturn it and pass their own laws about abortion – basically the same as the recent Republican Supreme Court decision.
The 2022 midterm elections are expected to cost $9.3 billion. Whether we swallow the just-so story that Trump stole the 2016 election, or the just-so story that the Democrats stole 2020, in reality, US elections were long ago stolen and auctioned off to corporate funders.
This $9.3 billion would have allowed 215,278 children under six to live above the poverty level for all of 2022. The child poverty rate increased from 12% in December 2021 to 17% in January 2022, the highest rate since the end of 2020, under Trump. This means 3.7 million more children in poverty because the monthly Child Tax Credit payments were not renewed by Biden. As a result, poverty rates for Latino and Black children went up more than among White children, all under the allegedly pro-People of Color Democrats.
Child poverty remains the same under the past “Fascist” President and the present “Socialist” President. That is basically the choice we are offered – the election will not change the conditions we face, be it child poverty, our declining standard of living, never-ending neo-con wars, or worsening global warming. Elections offer us only a choice of which party we hope against all hope would do something for us. Neither corporate party presents us with solutions, they only present obstacles. Change will only come when more of us stop being passive observers and become the very agents of the change we hope some of those in elected position would be.
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I’ve written about this so much and have gotten students to research some of the direct and indirect topics tied to: Who are your masters, and how far will you go to get and keep a job? One solution for one issue — say, looking at crops and regulating soil wetness with a drone is good, but what are the negative consequences of drone tech and drone community college programs? CIA, NSA, FBI, ATF, Cops, and other deals? Is there always a trade off, you know, Fat Man and Little Boy, the consequences of pursuing “science” with the $$ coming from, well, nefarious sources. Lords of War paying for everything.
And then, this goes way beyond greenwashing, etc. I have had students wanting to get a BS in engineering, say, to do work on drones, which back then (ohe, 20 years ago) was one way to help mitigate climate heating’s negative effects on people, communities, land, crops, ecosystems. You know, all that great work to get satellites into space because satellites will help scientists save the world.
But now? Drones? They are everywhere on the battle field, in the cops’ toolbox, everywhere, and not for the good of humankind, unless that good includes bombing wedding parties, and dropping viruses and other poisons on people.
We looked at many seemingly benign companies, like GE, and back then there was this green component of GE, you know what I am talking about: wind turbines, efficiency, solar panels. So, keeping those engineers working on turbines while creating some existential firewall between the war machines GE makes, that was also a topic we looked into.
So, it was possible you could come out of college with a BS, and end up in GE’s green energy arena, without ever touching base with the military arm of the company. That is the silo of old.
General Electric’s (NYSE: GE) aviation subsidiary secured a nearly $284 million contract with the Defense Logistics Agency to provide helicopter engine supplies to the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force. (2021). General Electric Aviation, Lynn, Massachusetts, has been awarded a maximum $149,693,969 firm-fixed-price, requirements-type delivery order against a five-year subsumable basic ordering agreement (SPE4AX-22-D-9409) for T700 engine supplies. This was a sole-source acquisition using justification 10 U.S. Code 2304 (c)(1), as stated in Federal Acquisition Regulations 6.302-1. This is a five-year contract with no option periods. Location of performance is Massachusetts, with a Sept. 30, 2026, performance completion date. Using military service is Army. Type of appropriation is fiscal year 2022 through 2026 Army working capital funds. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency Aviation, Richmond, Virginia.
The U.S. Air Force has awarded GE a $1.58 billion firm-fixed-price contract to supply F110 engines for the Boeing F-15EX Eagle II. This selection makes GE the sole propulsion provider for the U.S. Air Force’s entire planned F-15EX fleet. GE is currently delivering Lot 1 engines for the F-15EX, including two test aircraft currently undergoing flight testing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
Again, jobs, jobs and more jobs, but at what price, and how far will young people go in trying NOT to perpetuate the war machine, the killing machines, and then, of course, how easy is it to go to school, debate philosophies and cultures and politics, and then attempt to apply some humane ethics to one’s course in life, but then to get a job that is not in any way, shape or form part of the matrix, part of the ugly corporate world of exploitation, penury, and profits at any cost, ethics be damned?
One main point of education, in my humble opinion, is to dig under the surface of everything, and in the English writing classes I taught — once mandatory for an undergraduate degree — included working on argumentative papers, and research papers with all the elements of rhetoric covered: classification, cause and effect, process, solutions, and more. To question the profession you might be entering into: the work ethics, the companies’ profiles, what the challenges are, what sort of negative and possible illegal things the companies might be involved in. You know, what is the problem in the nursing profession, or education field, or architecture profession, or marketing company? The idea is to find the dirt and find the issues tied to a profession a student might think she or he is going to pursue.
Education now is floundering like it never has floundered, and with the higher ups there as MBAs, institutional managers, those who go take executive courses/seminars to learn how to NOT be educators, and how to learn how to cut personnel costs, and how to be more efficient and what to inject into more and more watered down curriculum to satisfy the CEOs bottom line business needs, they are part of the downfall. Just what do those drone companies want from a student graduating? The masters at the top of higher education will submit to the corporations.
What involvement did GE have in nuclear weapons production?
Kelle Louaillier (KL): In 1984 in the United States, thousands of companies were involved in some way in producing parts for nuclear weapons systems. GE produced more parts to more major nuclear weapons systems than any other corporation. GE was involved in the promotion of nuclear weapons to the government and in production since day one, with its role in the Manhattan Project.
Specifically, GE was responsible for the critical components, including, for example, the neutron “trigger” for every US nuclear bomb. Notably, before becoming president, Ronald Regan was a spokesman for GE. (Source)
These are the companies profiting most from war.
1. Lockheed Martin
- Arms sales 2010: $35.73 billion
- Total sales 2010: $45.80 billion
- Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 78 percent
- Total profit: $2.93 billion
- Total employment: 132,000
- Sector: Aircraft, Electronics, Missiles, Space
2. BAE Systems
- Arms sales 2010: $32.88 billion
- Total sales 2010: $34.61 billion
- Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 95 percent
- Total profit: $1.67 billion
- Total employment: 98,200
- Sector: Aircraft, Artillery, Electronics, Missiles, Military vehicles, Small arms/ammunition, Ships
3. Boeing
- Arms sales 2010: $31.36 billion
- Total sales 2010: $64.31 billion
- Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 49 percent
- Total profit: $3.31 billion
- Total employment: 160,500
- Sector: Aircraft, Electronics, Missiles, Space
4. Northrop Grumman
- Arms sales 2010: $28.15 billion
- Total sales 2010: $34.76 billion
- Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 81 percent
- Total profit: $2.05 billion
- Total employment: 117,100
- Sector: Aircraft, Electronics, Missiles, Ships, Space
5. General Dynamics
- Arms sales 2010: $23.94 billion
- Total sales 2010: $32.47 billion
- Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 74 percent
- Total profit: $2.62 billion
- Total employment: 90,000
- Sector: Artillery, Electronics, Military vehicles, Small arms/ammunition, Ships
6. Raytheon (NYSE: RTN)
> Arms sales 2010: $22.98 billion
> Total sales 2010: $25.18 billion
> Arms sales as pct. of total sales: 91%
> Total profit: $1.88 billion
> Total employment: 72,400
> Sector: Electronics, MissilesThose are 2010 stats, and even then the numbers were hiding other routes from US taxpayers to make the Lords of War, well, Gods. Try looking at the stats for 2022; additionally, there are fewer and fewer young people even attempting to play the thought experiment of what if we could stop the war machines, stop paying our taxes for their criminality, and then, to do this: connect every bolt and wire and coat of paint to anything made to produce death, either directly as munitions, or their delivery systems, or even the logistics and intel around war war war.
This is verboten in schools, colleges, truly in many venues, as it is verboten to question the mRNA’s, forced innoculations, forced social distancing, forced mRNA proofs to enter college. Questioning the military murdering machines pushing for more weapons for a Nazi Ukraine? You’ll be tarred and feathered. There are no more discussions about the true price we pay for USA policy targeting Russia and China. No true discussions about what theft is, grand theft, stealing gold reserves from places like Russia, Iran, Venezuela.
This has all been normalized, especially the past 15 years. Support this country, but still fight for the culture wars, the right to be all or nothing you can be. You have to be pronoun neutral, pro-Anything LGBTQA+ conjures up, and the Amnesia has to be deep.
This is the image (below, and it is a sad sack of crap) that also creeps into students’ brains going to college. This is sick, and alas, multimillionaires like Ellen who complained about being discriminated against early in her career, well, she is rubbing elbows with a war criminal:
Or take it to a non-LGBTQA+ multimillionaire’s absurdity, and go for the Black Absurdity, that Black Misleadereship class.
Thus, all of the cultural wars invented by the Liberal and Neoliberal media, and their sleeper cells — higher education liberal arts fools — get us here, really. But I have shown the power of another war criminal to infect all administrations:
So, forget about it, as they say in Mafia land. You can’t criticize a media darling, a war criminal like Kissinger. Never, and to attempt to bring him up now, in 2022, when you can’t get students to think or rethink or think for the first time the crimes of Ukraine under Zelensky and then way back, too. They don’t know who Kissinger is, in the regular schools, and then in those Ivy League ones, Kissinger is a real dream, a hero.
You will be kicked out of your part-time job, big time. Most college teachers are part-time, at the beckon call of perverse chairs and administrators.
And why not? College is for corporations telling worthless VPs and Presidents and the phalanx of administrators and deans working the college scam what needs to be taught.
Of course, this quote (below) is from 2009, and the numbers are, well, way low ball. Think of the deaths caused by depleted uranium, all the pollution, the PTSD, the cultural chaos, all of it. The murdering by Bush, even while he hangs out with liberals like Ellen and Obama, well, it keeps on delivering, that death and carnage. How to put a price on a country destroyed by USA bombs bursting in air and economic bombs and CIA bombs never not going off?
Why is a “gay Hollywood liberal sitting next to” the worst war criminal of the 21st Century? [Noam Chomsky has said the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq was the worst war crime of the 21st Century] President Bush lied about Saddam Hussein having threatening weapons of mass destruction to justify invading defenseless Iraq. “Be kind to everyone?” President Bush’s unnecessary war against Iraq resulted in a reported “1 million dead” Iraqis, “4.5 million displaced, 1 million to 2 million widows, 5 million orphans. (“Bush’s War Totals,” By John Tirman, The Nation, January 28, 2009)
So here we are, now, the crux of the blog — “Background Checks, Algorithms, and the Re-making of the Abnormal” over at Dissident Voice by Mike Templeton. It’s good, of course, and looks at pre-crime, looks at how AI determines who will be in and who will be out. Mixed up with data and then personality tests and profiles, the Kings of AI have us all by the short-hairs. Templeton looks at credit scores, criminal records, evictions, those things. He doesn’t go far enough in terms of other factors the AI Kings can deploy to get us kicked out of civilization. In fact, as you read this, a prospective employer is too, and then, wham, I am pigeon holed for non-compliance, for nasty revolutionary zeal, which makes me a bad worker. Here, a quote, a long one, from his essay, contextualizing Templeton’s words/essay:
A great deal of attention has been paid to the problems of carceral injustice and the increasing use of AI for things such as predictive policing. Much of this research has revealed that these digital technologies serve to recreate economic disparities, racism, and other forms of social discrimination while removing the stain of human agency toward a flawed ideal of objectivity. Less attention has been paid to the use of these digital technologies in pre-employment background checks. This essay examines the use of AI and algorithmic data analysis and the ways these technologies and procedures create a caste of humans who are barred from employment and rendered economically invalid. In the final analysis, AI and algorithmic data analysis in the service of pre-employment background checks reproduces Foucault’s human monster in a contemporary form, a human monster that bears the stigmata of digital unpredictability.
More than 90 percent of all new hires are subjected to some type of background check prior to employment. These background checks search criminal history and records, including non-convictions, debt history, credit ratings, and other data that can offer a picture of the financial health of a potential new hire.1 The idea behind background checks is to ensure the safety of employees and, in the case of schools and hospitals, students and patients. While many states have laws that limit both the reach and use of background checks, the practice of investigating a potential employee’s background is now standard and widespread. In a short piece in the journal Academe, Ann D. Springer explains that universities might be looking for information that would indicate a potential hire’s “character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living.”2 A university may deem it important to determine exactly what kind of person they are considering, and this may include that person’s “character.”3 While the point of Springer’s article is to reveal the potential dangers of background checks, she also pins down one of the main issues in performing such checks: “What if an employee commits a crime or breaks the law? An employer who knew of such past bad acts may be held responsible for failing to act on that knowledge, even if future actions were and are difficult to predict.” Liability can consist of many things like the risk of theft in the case of people with a criminal history of crimes against property or people who are so financially unstable they pose a theft risk. Liability could also be physical danger from people who have a history of violent offenses. In terms of how to predict potential danger and liability, this has been elusive, and companies have generally decided to err on the side of caution and refuse to hire anyone whose background check reveals something that could be seen as dangerous. But prediction is the key to understanding how background checks function in contemporary culture.
It is the digital realm that finds the invalid intolerable because the invalid present the type of unpredictability that is intolerable to digital systems. While companies, organizations, and universities advertise the justification that the background check is in the interest of safety, it is in fact the intolerable danger of the unpredictable that must be ferreted out by the background check. The primary reason for adding algorithmic technology to background checks can only be toward the elimination of unpredictability, otherwise a simple rap sheet would suffice. The reason a simple rap sheet is insufficient is that a human being must look a list of past offences and make a judgment call as to the likelihood of future danger, and this would only compound the levels of unpredictability with the addition of a secondary human consciousness. Above all else, the system must control, neutralize, and lockout any threats to absolute predictability. Thus, we have a caste of people who are determined to be invalid by a system that is no longer bound by human consciousness. Since no human makes this determination, the status of invalidity is the fault of the invalid who have only themselves to blame for their behavior, be it bad credit or a felony conviction. In the final analysis, we are left with a caste of untouchables who will forever remain both economically externalized, in that they are forbidden entry into economic viability, yet completely captured and internalized since they are digitally quantified and categorized. Their status as invalid is dependent on a detailed record of their failures and transgressions. It is the invalid who have taken over as the abnormal, the moral degenerates, and the human monsters.
Yep, those felonies hobbling millions, and I was one of those social workers, helping just released prisoners to get back on their feet: housing, email, safety nets, probation officers, jobs. Yep, felony friendly, or second chance employers are few and far between. My take is that felonies and misdemeanors should all be expunged once a person does his or her time.
Again, nuance is what I teach, and to be realistic, there are literally tens of millions of Americans who have interfaced with the Law somehow and those intersections have a computer and written record — speeding tickets, civil cases, and even as witnesses and even those family members of accused or convicted of a crime. All of those records the Man, The Man, the Boss, is privy to. And, think about another nuance — My Word Press blog, and this Dissident Voice — “a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and justice.” Anything published here, including this, will be part of my profile, my who, what, why, when, where and how of my personality, my pre-employment profile. Look up “Paul Haeder and Anti-Higher Education” on Google CIA. The first page hit on Google, well, enough to get anyone who might be considering me for a job as an educator to think twice about me, and that’s Google, not the Checkr and other sources that can track down my name and then any term tied to it to see what I have written about, say, against the fields of education, social work, journalism, teaching, environmental movement, the US systems of, well, suppression and oppression. (About 154,000 results –0.44 seconds — Paul Haeder and Anti-Education).
Now, if you put my name into Orbitt.net, then “all” the dirty laundry is exposed, or at least, some percentage of the laundry or articles out there since there are 24 pages of my work, only dating back to 2017. If you look me up over at Dissident Voice, well, you can go back to before 2010 and find any number of my commentaries-polemics-rants covering any number of topics with my anti-authority, anti-capitalism filter applied.
Templeton looks at the tools at the Man’s disposal for delving into official records, but there are other aspects of this culture in America where we are pigeon-holed and monitored. The very nature of how the worker has no rights, really, at work. CCTV in the workplace? Badges and photos. Reports on the job. Evaluations. Forced urine tests? Haircut codes? Is it fair or correct or ethical for anyone thinking of hiring me to even dive into all the journalism I’ve done, all the Op-eds I’ve written, all the Dissident Voice pieces I’ve penned? Of course not, but in today’s world, and even the world I was debating with, say, 20 years ago, the Americans — and unfortunately, this is the attitide for most people in the world — are perfectly fine with the employer or agency or government looking into your past. Sort of this shit idea of, “If you don’t have anything to hide, then why not let the employer or agency or government use that information. If it’s out there, and you posted it or wrote it, then you have to live with it.”
Some parts of your internet history are public record. This includes your social media profiles that you haven’t set to “private,” personal blog sites and any other information that you post publicly and share online. Because this information is public, anyone can read it, including a would-be employer. The employer doesn’t have to disclose that he’s looking at your public digital footprint, either. Under the Fair Credit Reporting laws, an employer only has to tell you that he’s going to run a background check when he uses a company in the business of compiling background information. If he checks you out himself, he can do it without telling you. (source)
That’s a more mellow quote, really, for what the American believes, both the Republican Leaning and the Democratic Party leaning. Hell, just yesterday, I was disagreeing with the guy working on my house, and he’s 69, broken body big time, and he can’t afford medical care for a bad knee and spinal disc issue, and he said his home he and his wife had down here was ripped out from under him after falling for Bush’s loan modification deal in 2008. Foreclosure, and now the place is listed at $750,000. All that equity down the drain. In the end, though, he constantly berates Trump, DeSantis, but he nary says a negative word against Biden or Pelosi. Every time a screw breaks on the job, he blames China, and he still believes Putin has entered our electoral system. I told him that the constant rant against Trump goes nowhere with me, since the rant is equally deserving for the Biden Bumbler. I told him that as a communist, err, socialist for most audiences, I have studied my position and politics and US domestic and international positions long enough to know a corrupt system when I see it or live under it. He said, “Well, then, why don’t you move to Russia if you’re communist.”
That is the penetrating and lubricating oil of this country. A 69 year old, broken down guy who thinks Russia is communist; working odd jobs, and he’s a musician, too, who lost that gig because of, well, greedy capitalist owner not able to keep a cook on at night; and he gives me the old heave ho, “Love it or Leave it.”
I reminded him that if Trump gets in, in 2024, that’s his country, his democratic party’s doing, the media’s doing, and with this love it or leave it mentality, well, the voters — his fellow citizens — have spoken and voted in their parasite, Trump. What then? Is he going to love it (Trump, the system) or leave it? He said he go to DC and kill Trump if he gets in in 2024. Literally go after him. More bluster from a Democrat.
There it is, though, this is AmeriKKKa. This place in 2022 is despicable, more so than I thought possible even in my lifetime. Truly, on many levels, and alas, I’m not 105 years old or ninety-something like Kissinger is, but at 65, with a robust anti-establishment and anti-government bent from a socialist POV, I know why we are here. At this late stage capitalism running the 80 percenters into the ground, we have the youth going for more brainwashing. Wacky.
There are many reasons you might blog about your job. You may want to brag about your accomplishments, vent about your cheese-moving coworkers or sociopathic boss, reveal whom you caught with whom on the floor of the server closet or simply recount the day’s events as a way of decompressing.
Whatever your reasons, if you blog, you take on all the liability and employment security risks that come with publishing to a potential readership of a billion people — even though the actual size of your audience may be just a handful of people or no one.
Work Blogging Risks
How is blogging different from just putting up a personal Web site? “The difference is that the easy-to-use tools available for blogging take away the barriers to getting online,” says Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties advocacy group.
The danger to blogging about your job comes when you allow no-brainer publishing technology — together with a mistaken sense of anonymity — to embolden you to record observations more appropriate for a private, paper-based journal than a global electronic network.
“People need to think long and hard about whether they’re comfortable blogging about work in an unprotected way,” Jeschke says.
One workplace blogger puts it even more plainly: “When you start a blog, you have to assume you’re going to be found out,” says the anonymous author of Waiter Rant, which chronicles the trials and tribulations of a New York City restaurant server.
Being fired for blogging, which is known as “getting dooced” in the blogosphere, really happens — and when it does, it often gets lots of news coverage. Delta Air Lines, Google, Ladies Home Journal, Wells Fargo and an Ohio congressman are among the employers that have reportedly terminated workers over their blogs. (Monster dot com)
So, all my work going up against many employers, filing appeals to denied unemployment, and then filing with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries several different cases of discrimination for being sacked for being old, a male, and radical, those future employers can tap into official files using middlemen surveillance services. All the words, all the articles, and some interviews of me in print and on video on the Internet, they too can be found and USED against me. All of that is just fine for prospective employers to scan and skim and to utilize in order to decide if I am a viable candidate for the job.
I’ve written about millions of Americans who have lost their driver’s license privileges because of debts, not because of driving while intoxicated or for other driving infractions. Because they owe for court costs, owe for back child support. Their job prospects are pretty grim without a license.
Suspending driver’s licenses as a penalty for non-payment of fines and fees unrelated to public safety is a self-defeating policy. It intensifies pressure on individuals already struggling with job loss and financial hardship, and it adds strain to relations between police officers and the public they serve. It makes the slope of failure even more slippery for millions of the most vulnerable Americans. And it’s the law of the land in 42 states.
So, that means the prospective employer can fish through another set of data bases — suspended licenses — and eliminate more people from the workforce. Most jobs require transportation, as they call it, reliable transportation with proof of auto insurance.
Predictable algorithms, and all that soft shoe, again, part of the shifting baseline, now accepted, DNA tests, blood tests, urine test, complying with any “background” check, then, of course, proof of mRNA, and, there you have it. We’ve gone from a majority of people coveting their privacy to a society that doesn’t care.
A society that doesn’t push back against their own “party,” since whichever manure party they may be backing is the right manure party. And, then, love it or leave it.
All of the conversations today are dead, since most Americans are colonized by bad education, patriotism, by really bad entertainment, by Legacy Mainstream Propaganda, by the entire hubris of exceptionalism.
The post … and we Clapped and Danced When Miguel and Becky Won the Coding Olympics! first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Dear Barbara,
I hope that my email finds you and Bruce in good health and doing fine.
I will try to answer your interesting questions, please note that my answers are from my personal point of view, it is built on daily observations, readings, talking to different people, and even watching tv now and then, with no pretenses whatsoever.
How would you characterize the class structure in Russia in terms of upper class, upper-middle class, middle class, and working class?
The super-rich and oligarchs: This thin social layer is an entity by itself, it owns assets and shares in the big companies, banks and financial institutions. There is an uneasy peace between them and the government that regularly gathers them and “politely” reminds them of their social responsibilities and where their riches came from. They are at the present untouchable due to the fact that some of them are on boards of companies belonging to the state or near persons holding high positions in the government. That is when the political situation becomes corruptible.
The upper-middle class include the upper echelons of the government bureaucracy, the top management of companies, banks and financial institutions and people holding valuable assets (immovable and moveable). There is very little upward movement, the danger of moving downwards exists.
The middle class: mostly concentrated in the cities, professionals, engineers, teachers, doctors, small lawyers, office workers, shop owners, and small businessmen. This is a relatively new class for Russia. Dynamic with porous boundaries, the danger of slipping to its lower level is higher than making a leap into its higher level or to the upper-middle class.
The working class is the most interesting and complex class. The classic working class person is in the military industrial complex, metallurgy, auto industry, oil and gas, power generation, and all types of transportation. The upper classes make a point of a pretense of treating them well which includes salaries, perks and bonuses. Construction is a big part of the economy. Skilled workers are mainly Russians or citizens of the Russian Federation. There is a big part of the low skill jobs that are done by migrants from republics of what once was the Soviet Union. Their numbers are significant, including, janitors and, delivery workers. They mostly do not integrate and hold on to their religion (mostly Muslim). Some of them are involved in misdemeanors and crimes, which are blown up and generalized to a whole nation or region. This is a sharp weapon in the hands of the authorities, pitting the migrants against locals. There is much more to be said but I will leave it for other occasions.
How do the different classes feel about “The Oligarchs” (billionaires in Russia) – do they think they deserve what they have?
I am afraid that my reply to this question is going to be a short one because there are no ambiguities or subtleties. Once again in my opinion it is not just a matter of class but a nearly unanimous negative attitude, especially from the working and middle classes and even from some of the upper classes. The Communists and left are just itching to nationalize some industries or at least have a better tax law. Fortunately, the majority of the people see the oligarchs as acquiring their fortunes like in Gustave Myers book History of Great American Fortunes as not having earned it.
What’s the range of differences in how the Russian people see the American people?
The range is narrow, and it does not depend on class. Rather, it depends on age and the change in subtle things like music, art, and clothing. I think that the average Russian attitude is negative, this is especially true for people older than 25 years. It is also a reaction to the US and western policies in demonizing and humiliating the Russian people. A western person a priori thinks that he is superior, and this not only on official state levels but in the mentality of the ordinary person. It is ubiquitous in art, literature, and Hollywood. From Harry Truman to Joe Biden nothing much has changed.
The Russian reaction was predictable, I am now mentioning daily stuff – not high politics or economics. It all started by making fun of the Americans and their ignorance about the history and geography of Russia, as well as their traditions and literature. Allow me to tell you one of the more famous stories of a well-known comedian (Mikhail Zadornov) who passed away not so long ago.
A Russian is traveling to the US to visit his friend, at the customs when they open his suitcase, they find a bunch of small branches (around 50 cm) tied together. The inspectors immediately are very suspicious. The Russian tries to explain that these branches are for the Sauna where they dip them in water and lightly hit each other (this is the Russian way and Sauna for some is like a religion, they can talk endlessly about which trees should be chosen for the best smell). The inspector’s eyes become like saucers. “This guy is not only a narcotic maniac, he is also sadomasochistic.”
I am not being flippant. I just want to show that ignorance and prejudice from nuclear policy to sauna lead us to making stupid decisions.
At the present the majority of the Russians, as a reaction to all the Russophobia, sanctions against any kind of activity, from industry and science to art and sport have really stiffened their stance against Americans. There is a set of people, belonging to the TV, cinema as well as some economists, and sports celebrities who are pro-western, which is not exactly pro American. Anyway, many of them have left Russia after the beginning of the conflict with Ukraine. I should point out that in a real capitalistic society, a filmmaker or a painter is on his own in making his life. In Russia the majority receive help from the government on a regular basis. It is especially galling to the Russian taxpayer, who thinks his money is being wasted on someone who curses his country.
The Russians reacted coolly to the departure of US brands of fast food and clothes. This left many Americans wondering. Russia is not what it was in the 1990s. This is a different time. Russians now bring up their children not to eat fast food and drink soda pop (not always successfully), just like any sane parent in the US would do.
How do the different classes in Russia feel about China?
I do not think it is just a matter of classes. Defining how the Russians feel about China should be according to a number of factors that would include class. At the present there are two more or less evident trends. The first trend is supported by the state, the left, Communists and some of the nationalists who support strong ties with China on many levels. The Russians want to be sure that the Chinese have their backs through the Chinese Silk Road project and the Russian oil and gas supply to China. The liberals and pro-westerners try to find fault in any Chinese initiative.
However, all that being said, there is the human, psychological factor that broadly affects a significant number of Russians. There are cases when it is definitive and that is race. Many Russians, as most Europeans, cannot easily rid themselves of their racism that appeared after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They see themselves as superior and have been taken in by the western propaganda. The ignorance and prejudice regarding Russia about China is colossal in dimension. Culture and humanitarian sciences are Eurocentric. The Yellow Peril of the early 20th century is alive and well. Anti-Chinese propagandists love to bring up the border conflict that took place in 1969 between the Soviet Union and China.
The Russian Far East regions have a special relationship with China. There are some that welcome trade and financial possibilities while others are afraid that they would swamp their region and take it over. The Chinese buy unprocessed Russian timber from Siberia, and some of the local producers are eager to do this because they get paid in US dollars. The government frowns upon this, and a lot of commotion is raised. Despite their racism, the upper-class businessman is still eager to do business with China. The average man is wary and cautious. It is only the incomprehensible, myopic, bone-headed American foreign policy that is driving Russians to overcome their racism and have more sympathy for the Chinese.
How do the different classes feel about the European continent around the natural gas issue?
Soviet gas reached Germany in 1973 and each side signed a contract for 20 years, after lengthy negotiations. The German side noted that in spite of the different ideologies, all the procedures were very business-like. Since then, the Soviet, and afterwards the Russian supply of gas continued more or less smoothly to Germany and most European countries as well. Countries that have natural resources to sell as a policy diversify their routes of outlet. Just by taking a look at any modern map of gas or pipelines of nearly every producing country one can notice that. Therefore, Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines were logical and legitimate, especially if your pipeline passes through territory that is unstable.
The prevailing opinion about Europeans and gas supply has been formed by the fact that Europe has blocked Russian assets that are counted in hundreds of billion dollars, besides stopping the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The Russians took a step from their side, dividing the countries that they were supplying with gas into “friendly” and “unfriendly”. The friendly would continue to pay in US dollars or euros while the unfriendly that had blocked Russian assets would pay in Russian rubles. Although the contracts were in US dollars, Russia decided that blocking their assets was a force majeure clause, and they therefore took this step to defend their interests. It is not so much a class issue as it is an issue that affects nearly the whole nation. The majority of the Russians are fed up with Europe, with the gas issue and all the holier-than-thou attitude of nations filled up to their elbows in the blood of the people of the Third World as well.
With affection and respect
HCE
• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
The post How Different Classes in Russia Feel About Yankeedom, China and Europe: More Letters from Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Note to our readers: These are letters from a comrade of ours who currently lives in Russia. English is not the first language of HCE so please be understanding. In order to preserve the integrity of these letters, we kept the original phrasing as best we could.
March 11th
Hello Barbara,
Thank you for your message and concern. My wife and I are passing through a difficult phase in our lives. After our second vaccination in December, we, for some reason or other, went through a period of being sick, myself in a light form while my wife gave me a scare. Anyway, that is behind us. Barbara, I thought that in my late years, being 80 years old now, we would settle down and I would take good care of my wife, go for long walks in the forest-parks of Moscow. Fate, however, had other plans for us, and here we are in the midst of another war and sanctions surrounded by nations led by clowns, comedians, lunatics, and obsessed madmen. Allow me to give you my opinion on a number of issues.
The dependence of Europe on Russian natural gas
The US tried all the possible tricks to stop the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. Generally, they want this energy market for US companies, in spite if the fact that gas will be in liquid form and transported by ships. The port that has to receive the liquid gas must have a very expensive plant. Besides the market factor there is the geopolitical factor of having Europe depending on the US for their energy. Russia has always delivered through thick and thin and always will. I wonder whether the US and their companies will be just as trustworthy.
Zelensky’s dirty bomb threat
Chernobyl, the place where the terrible catastrophe happened, is located in the Ukraine. Zelensky declared that he would consider making an atom bomb if not given the security guarantees that he was asking for from Europe and the US on the second day of the war. He had in mind using materials from the damaged reactor and make a “dirty bomb”. I think that was the last straw. Russian special troops immediately moved to occupy Chernobyl. Thank goodness not a single shot was fired as the Ukrainian troops laid down their arms. The 8 years that the people of Donbas served as a shooting gallery for the Ukrainian nationalists and fascists has finally come to an end. Chernobyl at the present is being patrolled by joint Russian – Ukrainian units. There is a huge Sarcophagi covering the damaged reactor (if you see a clip or pictures, it is so ominous and awe striking. It makes you shiver).
The Mood of the Russian people
Now let me discuss the mood of the Russian people who I see on the street, the people who I talk to, and what I read and watch on local tv. Russians differ in their assessment of the war. By far the broadest section supports their president, and especially their armed forces. They are mainly working class, solid people, nationalists, and the majority of the left including CPRF.
Since the nomination of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ obsession with Russia’s and Trump’s supposed ties with them, these Democrats have played a terrible role in pushing the Russian people more to the right. Anything that is seen as part of the Democrats, like BLM, MeToo, or LGBT is derided here. White supremacy is on the rise. I have tried on many occasions to explain, for example, BLM. The conversation usually begins with “I don’t take a knee before a N.” So, I have to explain the rules of US football, who Colin Kaepernick is and the conditions of his kneeling during the national anthem. Presenting the subtleties of this is not easy when Russians are already riled up. The Communist Party in Ukraine was prohibited many years ago and in this void came nationalism and religion. Both cards were used to divide the Russians and the Ukrainians. Russia has officially declared that the aim of their operation in the Ukraine is demilitarization and denazification.
Then there is a loud minority of very young people guided by NGOs financed by the West, part of the humanitarian intellectuals, artists, and actors. They are against their army and its operations in the Ukraine. The Russian Government has started taking measures against openly anti-Russian channels like Echo Moscow and Dozhd/Rain.
The situation in Russia is characterized by a retreat of the liberals and pro-western opposition. The polls show that the support for the president is 75% as of today, March 11. The street is calm, my apartment is near a university and campus and I see hundreds of young people going about their studies. I see people shopping, and I go shopping too. No panic, no rush. If the West thinks by imposing draconian sanctions it will change the mood of the people, then it is right but exactly in the opposite direction, instead of the critical and quite often satiric attitude towards the authorities. In fact, they are consolidating and supporting it. A new world is being born and Russia with all her faults and problems is the midwife and godmother. I will stop here but I have lot more to say. Please let us continue with the dialogue
With affection and respect
HCE
Dear Bruce,
Before writing on my observations on religious hostilities, allow me to make some notes on what the Ukraine fascist and ultra-national ideology is based on and where it comes from. I will not go too far back in history but pick it up after WW2.
Nazi collaborators and their role:
The Ukrainian government after the disintegration of the Soviet Union till today, with V. Zelensky have tried their best to whitewash and portray these collaborators as heroes and founders of the Ukraine State. I have chosen to describe Stepan Bandera, who probably is the most popular among the fascists who march with his portrait. Kindly find below my translation from Russian about Bandera. I have taken extracts from an article and what seemed to me important that would provide an idea of the basis for fascism.
The History of S. Bandera and the rehabilitation of fascism in Ukraine including by V. Zelensky
Bandera Stepan Andreevich was a leader and organizer of the Ukrainian national movement in Western Ukraine and considered a terrorist. He was a member of the Ukrainian military organization (from 1928) and the Organization of the Ukraine nationalists (OUN) from 1929, and organizer of a series of terrorist acts. Bandera was condemned by the Polish authorities to life in prison and his memory has not been rehabilitated till now. He was considered a criminal.
Stepan Bandera and his supporters sought “independence” through violence, revolution, and genocide. The theoretical activity of the Bandera supporters started in Poland, their most notorious terror cases was the killing of government personalities Soviet Cousul Andre Mailov in 1933. In 1934 he participated in the organization in the killing of the Polish minister of interior Bronislav Peratski and the director of the Ukraine academic gymnasium Ivan Babi. He organized an explosion in the offices of the “Pratsia” newspaper.
In the summer of 1934, polish authorities arrested Bandera. On January 13, 1936, Stepan Bandera and his accomplices were sentenced to death for the murder of Peratski. Then the death penalty was changed to life in prison, which he spent till 1939 in Polish prisons. After the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939 he was freed.
During the German occupation, Bandera and his supporters cooperated with Hitler’s Germany and they terrorized the population. Poles and Jews were killed most of all. Immediately after the capture of Lvov the Bander, supporters jointly carried out mass pogroms.
In our days in Ukraine one of the dates that is commemorated as the “liberation movement for the independence of Ukraine” is 30 June 1941, when the Bandera supporters in Lvov declared the restoration of the Ukrainian state. In the “Act of the declaration of the Ukraine state”, there was the following point:
“The newly created Ukraine state will closely cooperate with the great National –Socialist Germany under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler, who is creating a new order in Europe the world and helps Ukraine to free itself from the Moscow occupation”
After the war, Stepan Bandera lived in Munich and worked for the British security services. A Soviet agent executed him in 1959.
The Ukraine authorities and V. Zelensky personally make a hero out of Bandera. Monuments are erected and marches take place in his honor in which the participants call for the killing of Russians. The original text of the link above contains pictures of the fascists in Ukraine during their marches, as well as a document in Ukrainian and its Russian translation, where Bandera and his supporters glorify Hitler and fawn over the Nazis, I recommend taking a look at it.
This is the ideology of a minority that has managed, with the financing and support of the West, to create an atmosphere of hate and terror, Russophobia, and xenophobia. The forces that could have stood up to them were either banned (the communists), or brainwashed and tempted by the dream of EU and NATO.
Fascist and nationalistic ideology in Ukraine is not a phenomenon that is purely local. it is part of the populist ultra-right ideas that have swept Europe and the US. These include the appearance of fascist movements that rode on the wave of capitalist austerity instability, lack of steady employment, to scapegoating refugees for the lack of capitalist prosperity.
Place of Religion: Ukraine Greek Orthodox vs Ukraine Greek Catholic Church
There is another card that has been played by the west, the card of religion. Little has been said in the western media about this, but the fact that religion started to play a big role in the life of the people of the countries who were living in what was the Soviet Union is undeniable. People of various classes and occupations became religious, some even fanatics.
Very briefly, historically in Ukraine there were two main religious tendencies. Ukraine Greek Orthodox in the East and Ukraine Greek Catholic in the West. Relations are not the best. The Ukraine Greek Catholic Church actively cooperated with Nazi Germany during its occupation of Ukraine. Moreover, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Greek Orthodox Church in Ukraine from being part of the Moscow Patriarchy split into different parts mainly along nationalistic lines. This hatred was built not only on theological differences, but on property, including churches and land.
Economic self-sufficiency
I do not know whether you have heard Sergei Lavrov’s interview. There were the following words that made an impression on me:
“As for our economic problems, we will deal with them. We have coped with difficulties at all stages of our history when these difficulties arose. But this time, I assure you, we will get out of this crisis with a completely healthy psychology and a healthy consciousness. We will have no illusions about the reliability of the west as a partner. We will not have any illusions that the West, when it talks about its values, does not really believe in its promises and spells, and we will have no illusions that the West is capable of betrayal at any moment. It will betray anyone and betray its own values.” TASS reports Lavrov’s words. (My translation)
With affection and respect
HCE
• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
The post Economic Tectonic Shifts: Letters from Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Remember how the notion of freedom was spun by the ideologues of neoliberalism for decades prior to COVID? The freedom to consume. The freedom to make money. The freedom to be plunged into poverty and debt.
Platitudes about ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘standing on your own two feet’. A relentless ideological attack on the state and collective responsibility. The doctrine of ‘no such thing as society’ Thatcherism. Ideologically, at least, the individual and ‘the market’ were paramount. But in reality, of course, there was no genuine rolling back of the state: its machinery was used differently to facilitate the needs of global capital while attacking the labour movement.
In all this ‘freedom’, there was never much talk in the mainstream political and media narrative about the plight of the poor or workers who felt the brutal effects of the brave new world of neoliberal capitalism.
Never sufficient analysis about offshoring manufacturing and service-sector jobs to cheap labour economies to boost profits. This was merely presented as efficiency and job creation for poorer countries, as if the owners of industry were on some kind of humanitarian mission.
But it was only ever the old colonialist mentality passed off in new clothing.
Today, this mentality manifests by subjecting poorer nations to IMF-World Bank ‘structural adjustment’ directives and beating them into being ‘business friendly’ and compliant with the needs of global (Western) capital. Spin it any way you like, whether ‘foreign direct investment’ or ‘liberalising’ the economy, it amounts to richer countries merely using or loaning back money to the poorer countries (with strings) that they stole from them over the centuries.
Courtesy of lop-sided trade deals, the WTO and the international financial institutions, we see a model of ‘development’ characterised by indebtedness, displaced populations resulting from ‘infrastructure projects’ (to facilitate the needs of capital) and a deliberate running down of indigenous models of agriculture.
There was not much talk about ‘freedom’ in relation to the subsequent state-corporate economic brutality experienced by society’s most marginalised, highlighted, for instance, by Arundhati Roy in The Ghosts of Capitalism – the ‘invisible’ and shoved-aside victims of a rampant neoliberalism, with a good dose of state-backed violence always on hand to secure compliance.
Their ‘freedom’ never amounted to much in the first place.
Economic structural violence waged against people, economies and ecosystems courtesy of elite interests bent on monopolising energy, money, food, land and violence across the globe.
Yet the system now purports to care about the well-being of those it persistently regards as ‘collateral damage’ and ‘economic fodder’. A system that by its very nature concentrates money, control and power at the top of the pyramid.
Consider that prior to COVID, Pfizer was “the least trusted company in the least trusted industrial sector in the United States”, according to Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice.
But we are supposed to have faith in Pfizer and disregard its lengthy corporate rap sheet and its unscrupulous profiteering practices regarding its COVID vaccine rollout across the globe. We are supposed to trust its products and its vaccine data that it is trying so hard, with help from the US Food and Drug Administration, to keep from the public.
At the same time, to facilitate uptake of Pfizer’s injections, we hear a lot about ‘collective responsibility’. A much-maligned concept in a dog-eat-dog neoliberal regime. Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and others spin vaccine sceptics’ talk of ‘freedom of choice’ regarding what is allowed to be injected into their own bodies as selfish and the domain of right-wing women haters and fascists.
The right to protest, to free speech, to associate and so forth were (and often continue to be) suspended as people were locked down waiting for ‘the vaccine’ thanks to a virus that mainly targets those over 80 and those with compromised immune systems due to existing (serious) morbidities.
We have seen all manner of state interference in the private lives of citizens over the past two years.
Political leaders like Macron, Trudeau, Biden, Merkel and Arden – the frontline managers and facilitators of private capital – have seemingly become so concerned about the public’s welfare that their freedoms and rights must be trampled on by the state.
Those who demand freedom and have questioned the mainstream COVID narrative have been labelled ‘anti-vaxxers’, ‘granny killers’, irresponsible and as prioritising their own selfish needs over those of the collective.
Even those who claim to be of the ‘left’ have become part of the ideological apparatus of the state: joining in the chorus and defending tyranny as well as Big Pharma’s rushed-to-market injections and its right to your body and right to make billions in the process.
Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine brought in $37bn in 2021. Nick Dearden calculates the NHS has paid a mark-up of at least £2bn – six times the cost of the pay rise the UK government agreed to give nurses last year.
Moreover, Dearden argues companies like Pfizer behave more like hedge funds, buying up and controlling other firms and intellectual property, rather than traditional medical research companies.
He says:
The truth is, they aren’t the sole inventors of the vaccine. That was the work of public money, university research and a much smaller company, Germany’s BioNTech. As one former US government official complained, the fact we call it the ‘Pfizer’ vaccine is ‘the biggest marketing coup in the history of American pharmaceuticals’.
Even though many on the ‘left’ have campaigned against the brutality of capitalism over the years, they bought into the fear propaganda from the start without question, helping to pave the way for pharma’s distorted profits, the destruction of small businesses and the loss of countless livelihoods due to lockdowns.
Many stood by in silence and watched the mega rich accrue enormous profits. Research by Oxfam has shown that the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn between March and December 2020. The world’s 10 richest billionaires collectively saw their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID.
While lockdowns and restrictions were imposed on ordinary people and small businesses, the winners were the likes of Amazon, Big Pharma and the tech giants. The losers were small enterprises and the bulk of the population, deprived of their right to work and an entire panoply of civil rights.
A report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) stated that COVID-19 policies had severely disrupted economies and labour markets in all world regions, with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020, most of which were in emerging and developing countries.
Among the most vulnerable were the 1.6 billion informal economy workers, representing half of the global workforce, who were working in sectors experiencing major job losses or had seen their incomes seriously affected by lockdowns. Most of these were self-employed and in low-income jobs in the informal sector.
For policies that were supposedly brought in to protect health, there has also been immense damage resulting in lengthy non-COVID healthcare waiting lists for all manner of life-threatening diseases and conditions.
A more logical approach to protecting public health would have involved the promotion of a targeted strategy based on risk along with early intervention treatments as set out in the Great Barrington Declaration. But this was not even up for debate. Censorship and smears were the norm.
Locking the global population in their homes, or in places like India compelling millions to walk huge distances or travel in crowded conditions to return to the countryside, until a vaccine was made available smacks of incompetence or worse – a predetermined agenda.
Writing in the Contemporary Voice of Dalit journal (31 October 2021), researchers Krishna Ram and Shivani Yadav note the effects of COVID policies in India:
The economic tumult caused by the pandemic over the past two years has the potential to double the nation’s poverty… Our calculations show that around 150–199 million additional people will fall under poverty in 2021–2022; a majority of which are from rural areas, owing to the immiserate nature of the rural economy. Further disaggregation reveals that the SC/ST [Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes], casual labour and the self-employed are the most impacted groups.
It is clear who was influencing the lockdown-COVID public health policy. In a report by Yohan Tengra of the Awaken India Movement, it is described how the Gates Foundation and Big Pharma have infiltrated and co-opted key public health institutions at the national level in India, not least the COVID-19 National Task Force.
Tengra says the report has exposed:
… not just the names of those who are sitting in this task force but also how they are financially connected to the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine mafia. This task force has been responsible for the aggressive push to lockdown, mandatory mask requirements, forced testing of asymptomatics, dropping ivermectin and hcq from the national protocol, suppressing vaccine adverse events and a lot more!
It was fitting that an MP recently asked in Canada’s parliament just who does the government serve: Klaus Schawb and the World Economic Forum (WEF) or Canadian citizens?
A pertinent question. But any enquiry should also look to include the wider digital-financial-industrial complex which has used COVID as cover for bailing out financial markets and restructuring capitalism and trying to manage the long-term falling rate of profit.
These issues are at the heart of the ‘Great Reset’ or ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ that Klauss Schwab and others talk of. Concepts that – like neoliberal globalisation in the 1980s – are given a positive spin and which supposedly symbolise a brave new techno-utopian future.
The WEF, Big Finance, Big Tech, the Gates Foundation and Big Pharma have been heavily promoting the COVID-Great Reset agenda from the start. This has to date resulted in the reinvigoration of an ailing pharma sector with a multi-billion-dollar windfall, the eradication of smaller firms and jobs, cementing the dominance of the online retail giants, global chains and the digital payments sector and the injection of much-needed liquidity into what were by late 2019/early 2020 collapsing financial markets.
In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulated neoliberal agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, pressing home the notion of individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the state, trade unions and the public sector. This reflected economic changes underpinned by notions of the primacy of the market and individual consumer choice.
But there is now a new ideological shift. We hear claims of a ‘democratic deficit’, whereby individual rights are said to be undermining the wider needs of society. The message is that individual freedom is posing a threat to ‘national security’, ‘public health’ and ‘safety’.” As a result, there must be clampdowns on the right to travel, associate and protest and on freedom of speech.
As stated by journalist Iain Davis in a recent article, a commitment to the ‘public interest’, ‘safety’ and protecting the population from ‘harm’ will replace freedom and democracy. Technocracy: The Operating System For The New International Rules-Based Order (unlimitedhangout.com)
As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by economic factors. Neoliberalism has privatised, deregulated, exploited workers and optimised debt to the limit. We have collapsing markets kept afloat by endless financial injections and an overall declining rate of profit with firms suffocating under mountains of debt.
AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision (3D manufacturing, drone technology, driverless vehicles, lab grown food, farmerless farms, robotics, etc) are also on the horizon.
A mass labour force – and therefore mass education, mass welfare, mass healthcare provision and entire systems that were in place to reproduce labour for capitalist economic activity – might in the near future no longer be required. Labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed. So, if labour is the condition for the existence of the working class, why bother with the working class?
COVID has accelerated economic restructuring and the shift towards an authoritarian form of capitalism that is ultimately to be based on a Chinese-style social credit system to ensure the population complies with its coming servitude.
Former WEF-sponsored ‘young global leaders’ like Trudeau, Macron, Merkel and Arden rose to the political helm of various countries after having been suitably groomed. They will continue to fulfill their roles by managing dissent through mass surveillance and clamping down on civil rights as the effects of inflation (induced by the liquidity injected into the system), joblessness and post-COVID austerity measures kick in.
They will, of course, still facilitate freedom: the freedom of the billionaire class to continue to plunder across the globe. And the freedom for citizens to submit.
The post Economic Restructuring, Democratic Deficit and Locking Down Liberty first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the theologian Paul Tillich’s famous book, The Courage to Be. Widely read in the days when an educated public read books, it is long forgotten. In it, Tillich surveys the history of anxiety and fear and their relation to courage, religious faith, and the meaning of life. His closing sentence – “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” – became acclaimed as an astute description of the existential need to find a foundation for faith and courage when their foundations were shaking.
His writing profoundly influenced many, even when they didn’t wholly agree with him. This included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, commenting on Tillich’s death in 1965, said, “His Christian existentialism gave us a system of meaning and purpose for our lives in an age when war and doubt seriously threatened all that we had come to hold dear.”
I mention The Courage to Be not to engage in a recondite theological and philosophical analysis, which is the last thing we now need, but to contrast his call for spiritual courage with what we have been experiencing pouring forth from the mass corporate media for years There is a drumbeat of fear-mongering so intense and constant that it is almost comical if it weren’t so effective in reducing people to quaking, frightened children.
Primarily about Covid and the need to obey the authorities and submit to being jabbed with mRNA Covid “Vaccines” – the idolatrous religion of bio-security – this religion of fear goes much further and much deeper. Scenarios of fear have been rehearsed and produced for decades by the intelligence/IT/media giants on a multitude of issues, large and small. They are rooted in a spiritually nihilistic political propaganda campaign that is exponentially increasing fear, anxiety, and despondency on a vast scale, which is its intent. Fearful people are easily cowered and controlled. The elites know that regular people throughout the world are fed up with being subjected to violence and abuse in multiple forms, and if courage triumphs over their fears, they might join in worldwide solidarity and revolt, as they have been doing in various places recently. To prevent this, the authorities must use terror tactics to divide and conquer them. If people dare to rise up and even question the propaganda, they have been and will be called terrorists for doing so. Dissent is now equated with terrorism and thus it must be censored.
All this fear-mongering draws on people’s normal fears of “not to be,” meaning dead. It is, of course, understandable not wanting to be dead, but living in constant fear is a living death. Tillich, who suffered deep trauma as a chaplain in the trenches of WW I and was later dismissed from his teaching position in Germany when Hitler came to power, wrote that courage is rooted in the spiritual acceptance that underlying our individual lives is the power of Being, by which he meant God, and that fear and anxiety about our fates can be confronted only through the courage to accept in faith this foundational reality.
I think it is self-evident to anyone who glances at the mainstream media that fear is their staple. In just the last week or so, I have seen The New York Times, an official organ of propaganda if there ever were one but known historically as the Grey Lady for understatement, tell its readers in a hyperventilating style that anxiety about climate change has spawned a growing field of therapeutic treatment for sufferers, how deer in your back yard are infected with Omicron, how the Russians are coming, etc. This is the typical fear promoting propaganda that headlines all the media sites every day and has been doing so for years. Any casual observer can list them on a daily basis, from major to minor matters to fear.
Yet despite this constant, blatant propaganda, governments flip the truth and warn that anyone who questions this are conspiracy theorists intent on causing trouble and therefore must be watched and refuted. Just the other day the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” saying:
The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.
After twenty years of such obvious propaganda, you would think these people would be embarrassed, but they obviously are not and intend to propagate this bullshit for years to come. They and their media accomplices have taken their lingo lessons straight from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
On the bio-security religious front alone, Kit Knightly of Off-Guardian has recently reported that the authorities have warned us that there is a vast underdiagnosis of heart disease that may stealthily be coming to get us (not from “vaccines,” of course) and that HIV testing and vaccines look to be the next big push, for there is now the claim that a new variant of HIV is spreading in Europe. President Biden declared in December 2021 that his administration was aiming to “end the HIV/Aids epidemic by 2030.” While Covid restrictions may be easing, the mRNA “vaccine push” is not, and their promoters will only find different germs to defeat with “vaccines” and tests to ease the fears of the propagandized public, so many of whom have been turned into hypochondriacs.
The promulgation of the fear of germs and disease and foreign and domestic “threat actors” is permanent. For anyone naively thinking that there will be an easing of this elite war of lies, I would suggest they rethink that assumption. The state of siege that is the Covid crisis will be followed by many more, and this germ warfare includes a vast array of foreign variants, led by Russia and China. We are in a permanent crisis and emergency engineered by the ruling classes to maintain their control.
This elite war against regular people has no end in sight. The elites know that people get worn down over time and lose hope; thus, they plan for the long haul and keep hammering away. Paul Tillich’s book is important because of its stress on the need for courage in the face of the fear-mongering. Without a spiritual foundation to sustain one for the long haul, depression will lead to despair or surrender. History should teach us this. The evil ones often win, at least in the short run, and each of us doesn’t have a long run. Our time is brief.
The great dissenters and rebels of the past, even when not overtly religious, kept faith with their comrades and causes because they felt a deep, unbreakable, invincible connection. It is called different names or none at all. Maybe faith is the best word. Faith in what? Some call it God, as I do. Words can’t explain it; I feel it. Others say nothing and just carry on, sustained by the invisible. Some call it faith in human solidarity. The names don’t matter. It is not about naming but experiencing. The poet D.H. Lawrence said wisely that we are transmitters of life, “and when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.” And he added in his inimitable style: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.” It is not easy, but fear helps us fall out.
There were those who called Tillich an atheist because his philosophical explanation sounded too abstruse, which is true. But he made a fundamental point about how as human beings we participate in Being, which is the ground of our existence. We are part of something that is far larger than our puny selves – beings in the sea of Being. Who can deny that? His call to courage hit a resonant cord with believers, agnostics, and atheists alike. Not a poet but a German trained immigrant scholar who emigrated to the U.S.A., his language was steeped in heavy philosophical verbiage, yet it found a wide audience in its analysis of fear, anxiety, and especially courage because it was about fundamental truths. Courage is fundamental, as is faith.
The Spanish poet Antonio Machado put it less philosophically and more elegantly:
I talk always to the man who walks along with me;
– men who talk to themselves hope to talk to God
Someday –
My soliloquies amount to discussions with this friend,
Who taught me the secret of loving human beings.
….
And when the day arrives for the last leaving of all,
And the ship that never returns to port is ready to go,
You’ll find me on board, light, with few belongings,
Almost naked like the children of the sea.We are children of the sea and courage keeps us afloat.
Humor also helps, for we are funny creatures.
It is not often that one escapes an unintended assassination attempt. I am glad to say that I have.
This is an example of the power of fear. Where I live, the winter has been quite cold and there was a recent ice storm with thick ice everywhere on top of snow. My wife was fearful of falling and so had bought hiking poles for herself and me as Christmas gifts. I said I didn’t want them and wouldn’t use them; that I wasn’t afraid, that I had faith in my ability to sustain myself. So I didn’t use them, which angered her. One day when the ice in the driveway and on the car was inches thick, she cajoled me into using the sticks to reach the car. She set them for me with their clips at the proper height, since they are adjustable. We toddled down the pathway to the car, setting one pole out ahead of the other in turn. I exaggerated my need for them, bending far over as if I were in great need of the crutches. Approaching the driveway, I extended my right hand pole out in front and it collapsed because the clips weren’t set tight and I went flying face forward onto the ice. She looked at me in fear, not sure if I was dead or hurt or if her fear had made her into an accidental assassin. She needn’t worry. It was funny.
We all fall eventually, but in the meantime, worrying about it is self-defeating. It is a reaction to fear. Worrying is a form of preying on oneself (etymology: to seize by the throat with one’s teeth and kill), and it can be induced – and is – by the campaigns of fear that we are being subjected to.
The courage to be was Tillich’s way of saying that we are upheld by far more than we know. Call it Being, Tao, the Great Spirit, or God. Courage is contagious and will carry us on. It is what we need to resist the fear-mongers who are at our throats.
The post The Fear Not to Be first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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One of the fundamental economic laws under capitalism is for wealth to become more concentrated in fewer hands over time, which in turn leads to more political power in fewer hands, which means that the majority have even less political and economic power over time. Monopoly in economics means monopoly in politics. It is the opposite of an inclusive, democratic, modern, healthy society. This retrogressive feature intrinsic to capitalism has been over-documented in thousands of reports and articles from hundreds of sources across the political and ideological spectrum over the last few decades. It is well-known, for example, that a handful of people own most of the wealth in the U.S. and most members of Congress are millionaires. This leaves out more than 95% of people. Not surprisingly, “policy makers” have consistently failed to reverse these antisocial trends inherent to an obsolete system.At the same time, with no sense of irony and with no fidelity to science, news headlines from around the world continue to scream that the economy in many countries and regions is doing great and that more economic recovery and growth depend almost entirely, if not entirely, on vaccinating everyone (multiple times). In other words, once everyone is vaccinated, we will see really good economic times, everything will be amazing, and we won’t have too much to worry about. Extremely irrational and irresponsible statements and claims of all kinds continue to be made in the most dogmatic and frenzied way by the mainstream press at home and abroad in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the deep economic crisis continually unfolding nationally and internationally. Dozens of countries are experiencing profound economic problems.
While billions of vaccination shots have already been administered worldwide, and millions more are administered every day (with and without people’s consent), humanity continues to confront many major intractable economic problems caused by the internal dynamics of an outdated economic system.
A snapshot:
- More rapid and intense inflation everywhere
- Major supply chain disruptions and distortions everywhere
- Shortages of many products
- “Shortages” of workers in many sectors worldwide
- Shortened and inconsistent hours of operation at thousands of businesses
- Falling value of the U.S. dollar and other fiat currencies
- Growing stagflation
- Millions of businesses permanently disappeared
- More income and wealth inequality
- High dismal levels of unemployment, under-employment, and worker burnout
- Growing health insurance costs
- Unending fear, anxiety, and hysteria around endless covid strains
- More scattered panic buying
- The stock market climbing while the real economy declines (highly inflated asset valuations in the stock market)
- Spectacular economic failures like Lehman Brothers (in the U.S. 13 years ago) and Evergrande (in China in 2021)
- All kinds of debt increasing at all levels
- Central banks around the world printing trillions in fiat currencies non-stop and still lots of bad economic news
- And a whole host of other harsh economic realities often invisible to the eye and rarely reported on that tell a much more tragic story of an economy that cannot provide for the needs of the people
The list goes on and on. More nauseating data appears every day. Economic hardship, which takes on many tangible and intangible forms, is wreaking havoc on the majority at home and abroad. There is no real and substantive economic improvement. It is hard to see a bright, stable, prosperous, peaceful future for millions under such conditions, which is why many, if not most, people do not have a good feeling about what lies ahead and have little faith in the rich, their politicians, and “representative democracy.” It is no surprise that President Joe Biden’s approval rating is low and keeps falling.
What will the rich and their political and media representatives say and do when most people are vaccinated, everyone else has natural immunity, and the economy is still failing? What will the rich do when economic failure cannot be blamed on bacteria or viruses? To be sure, the legitimacy crisis will further deepen and outmoded liberal institutions of governance will become even more obsolete and more incapable of sorting out today’s serious problems. “Representative democracy” will become more discredited and more illusions about the “social contract” will be shattered. In this context, talk of “New Deals” for this and “New Deals” for that won’t solve anything in a meaningful way either because these “New Deals” are nothing more than an expansion of state-organized corruption to pay the rich, mainly through “public-private-partnerships.” This is already being spun in a way that will fool the gullible. Many are actively ignoring how such high-sounding “reforms” are actually pay-the-rich schemes that increase inequality and exacerbate a whole host of other problems.
It is not in the interest of the rich to see different covid strains and scares disappear because these strains and scares provide a convenient cover and scapegoat for economic problems rooted in the profound contradictions of an outmoded economic system over-ripe for a new direction, aim, and control. It is easier to claim that the economy is intractably lousy because of covid and covid-related restrictions than to admit that the economy is continually failing due to the intrinsic built-in nature, operation, and logic of capital itself.
There is no way forward while economic and political power remain dominated by the rich. The only way out of the economic crisis is by vesting power in workers, the people who actually produce the wealth that society depends on. The rich and their outmoded system are a drag on everyone and are not needed in any way; they are a major obstacle to the progress of society; they add no value to anything and are unable and unwilling to lead the society out of its deepening all-sided crisis.
There is an alternative to current obsolete arrangements and only the people themselves, armed with a new independent outlook, politics, and thinking can usher it in. Economic problems, health problems, and 50 other lingering problems are not going to be solved so long as the polity remains marginalized and disempowered by the rich and their capital-centered arrangements and institutions. New and fresh thinking and consciousness are needed at this time. A new and more powerful human-centered outlook is needed to guide humanity forward.
Human consciousness and resiliency are being severely tested at this time, and the results have been harsh and tragic in many ways for so many. We are experiencing a major test of the ability of the human species to bring into being what is missing, that is, to overcome the neoliberal destruction of time, space, and the fabric of society so as to unleash the power of human productive forces to usher in a much more advanced society where time-space relations accelerate in favor of the entire polity. There is an alternative to the anachronistic status quo.
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It is almost taken for granted, if not an article of faith, in the progressive milieu (e.g., here) that the US empire is declining. Does this hold up, or is it comfort food for the frustrated hoping for the revolution?
First, it is essential not to confuse the ongoing decline of the living conditions of US working people with a decline in the power of the US corporate empire. The decline of one often means the strengthening of the other.
In the aftermath of World War II, the US was the world manufacturing center, with the middle class rapidly expanding, and this era did end in the 1970s. It is also true the heyday of uncontested US world and corporate neoliberal supremacy is over, its zenith being the decade of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies. Now, looming on the horizon is China, with the US empire and its subordinate imperial allies (Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Italy) unable to thwart its rise this century, even more than when China stood up in 1949.
Yet the US imperial system still maintains decisive economic and political dominance, cultural and ideological hegemony, backed by tremendous military muscle. If US ruling class power were in decline, why have there been no socialist revolutions − the overturning of capitalist rule − in almost half a century? What would the world look like if the US lacked the muscle to be world cop?
Imperialism continually faces crises; this is inherent to their system. The question is: which class takes advantage of these crises to advance their interests, the corporate capitalist class or the working class and its allies at home and abroad. In the recent decades, capitalist crises have resulted in setbacks for our class, and a steady worsening of our conditions of life.
Previous proponents of US empire decline have predicted its demise with an expanding Communist bloc, then Germany and Japan with their supposedly more efficient capitalist production methods, then the European Union encompassing most of Western Europe into a supra-national entity, then the Asian Tigers, and then BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). All challenges turned out to be wishful thinking. Now the proponents of decline expect China itself will soon supplant US dominion. We explore a number of the economic, political, and military difficulties the US empire confronts in its role as world cop.
Imperial Decline or Adjustments in Methods of Rule?
A common misconception among believers of US ruling class demise holds that imperial failure to succeed in some particular aim signifies imperial weakening. Examples of setbacks include Afghanistan, the failure to block North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, catastrophic mishandling of the COVID pandemic, and seeming inability to reign in the mammoth US national debt. However, throughout history, successful maintenance of imperial hegemony has never precluded absence of terrible setbacks and defeats. Most importantly, the fundamental question arising from a setback is which class learns to advance its interests more effectively, the imperial overlords or the oppressed.
The US rulers, as with other imperial nations, have proven adept at engineering more effective methods of control from crises, as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine illustrates. For instance, in the mid-20th century the imperial powers were forced to relinquish direct political governance of their colonial empires, often due to costly wars. Until after World War II, the Western nations owned outright most of Africa and much of Asia. Yet this new Third World political independence did not herald the end of imperial rule over their former colonies. The imperialists simply readjusted their domination through a neocolonial setup and continued to loot these countries, such as siphoning off over $1 trillion every year since 2005 just through tax havens.
Likewise, for seven decades the imperial ruling classes endured repeated defeats attempting to overturn the seemingly invincible Russian revolution. But they only needed to succeed one time, using a new strategy, to emerge victorious.
A third example, the growing US national deficit due to the cost of the war on Vietnam forced Nixon to no longer peg the value of the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce. After World War II, the US had imposed the dollar as the international reserve currency, fixed at this exchange rate. Today gold is $1806 an ounce, yet the dollar continues as the world reserve currency. The US rulers resolved their crisis by readjusting the manner their dollar reigned in international markets.
A fourth example is the world historic defeat dealt the empire at the hands of the Vietnamese. Yet Vietnam today poses no challenge to US supremacy, in sharp contrast to 50 years ago.
The US ruling class is well versed in the lessons gained from centuries of Western imperial supremacy. They have repeatedly demonstrated that the no longer effective methods of world control can be updated. Bankruptcy in methods of rule may not signify a decline, but only the need for a reset, allowing the domination to continue.
Part 1: US Economic and Financial Strength
Decline in US Share of World Production
A central element of the waning US empire argument comes from the unparalleled economic rise of China. As a productive powerhouse, the US has been losing ground. As of 2019, before the COVID year reduced it further, the US share of world manufacturing amounted to 16.8%, while China was number one, at 28.7%.
Similarly, the US Gross Domestic Product itself (GDP) slipped from 40% of the world economy in 1960 to 24% in 2019. GDP is the total market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country.
When GDP is measured by the world reserve currency, the dollar, the US ranks first, at $21 trillion, with China number two at $14.7 trillion. Using the Purchasing Power Parity measure of GDP, which measures economic output in terms of a nation’s own prices, China’s GDP surpasses the US at $24.16 trillion. By either measure, a steady US erosion over time is evident, particularly in relation to China, and a major concern for the US bosses.
Worsening US balance of trade reflects this decline. In 1971 the US had a negative balance of trade (the value of imports greater than the value of exports) for the first time in 78 years. Since then, the value of exports has exceeded that of imports only two times, in 1973 and 1975. From 2003 on, the US has been running an annual trade deficit of $500 billion or more. To date the US rulers “pay” for this by creating dollars out of thin air.
Ballooning US National Debt
The ballooning US national debt is considered another indicator of US imperial demise. The US debt clock puts the national debt at $28.5 trillion, up from $5.7 trillion in 2000. According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) numbers, the US debt is 118% of the GDP, near a historic high point, up from 79.2% at the end of 2019.
The international reserves of the imperialist nations do not even cover 2% of their foreign debt. In contrast, China tops the list with the largest international reserves, which covers 153% of its foreign debt.
However, today US debt as a percent of GDP is lower than in World War II, at the height of US economic supremacy. Germany’s debt to GDP ratio is 72%. Japan’s is 264%, making its debt over two and a half times the size of the country’s GDP. China’s is 66%.
Yet a key concern with the ballooning national debt − inflation caused by creating money backed with no corresponding increase in production − hasn’t been a problem in any of these countries, not even Japan. The immediate issue with debt is not its size in trillions of dollars, but the degree annual economic growth exceeds the annual interest payment on the debt.
In the US, this payout costs almost $400 billion a year, 1.9% of GDP. Federal Reserve Board president Powell stated: “Given the low level of interest rates, there’s no issue about the United States being able to service its debt at this time or in the foreseeable future.” Former IMF chief economist and president of the American Economic Association, Olivier Blanchard likewise declared: “Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost” given that “the current US situation in which safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, is more the historical norm than the exception.” According to these ruling class economists, the huge size of the US national debt presents no economic difficulty for their bosses.
Technological Patents
Patents are an indicator of a country’s technological progress because they reflect the creation and dissemination of knowledge in productive activities. Today China is on the technological cutting edge in wind power, solar power, online payments, digital currencies, artificial intelligence (such as facial recognition), quantum computing, satellites and space exploration, 5G and 6G, drones, and ultra-high voltage power transmission. In 2019, China ended the US reign as the leading filer of international patents, a position previously held by the US every year since the UN World Intellectual Property Organization’s Patent Cooperation Treaty System began in 1978.
The failure of the US rulers to thwart China’s scientific and technological advances threatens the preeminence the US holds on technological innovation. Rents from the US corner on intellectual property is a major contributor to the US economy. The drastic measures the US has taken against Huawei exemplify the anxiety of the empire’s rulers.
US technological superiority is now being challenged. Yet, as John Ross points out, “Even using PPP measures, the US possesses overall technological superiority compared to China…. the level of productivity of the US economy is more than three times that of China.”1
The US Still Controls the Global Financial Network
While the world share of US manufacturing and exports has shrunk, the US overlords still reign over the world financial order. A pillar of their world primacy lies in the dollar as the world’s “reserve currency,” an innocuous term referring to US sway over the global financial and trade structure, including international banking networks, such as the World Bank and the IMF.
Following the 1971 end of the dollar’s $35 an ounce peg to gold, Nixon engineered deals with the Middle East oil exporting regimes, guaranteeing them military support on condition they sell their oil exclusively in dollars. This gave a compelling new reason for foreign governments and banks to hold dollars. The US could now flood international markets with dollars regardless of the amount of gold it held. Today, most of the world’s currencies remain pegged directly or indirectly to the dollar.
To facilitate growing international trade, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) was created in 1973. SWIFT is a payment and transaction network used by international banks to monitor and process purchases and payments by individuals, companies, banks, and governments. Dominated by the US, it grants the country even greater mastery over world trade and financial markets. Here, China poses no challenge to US supremacy.
After the euro became established, the percent of world reserves held in US dollars diminished from the 71% share it held in 2001. Since 2003, the dollar has kept the principal share, fluctuating in the 60-65% range. Today, the percent of world nations’ currency reserves held in US dollars amounts to $7 trillion, 59.5% of international currency reserves.
In 2021 the dollar’s share of total foreign currency reserves is actually greater than in the 1980s and 1990s.
Because only a few reserve currencies are accepted in international trade, countries are not free to trade their goods in their own money. Rather, over 90% of nations’ imports and exports requires use of the dollar, the euro, or the currencies of other imperial states. The Chinese RMB, in contrast, constitutes merely 2.4% of international reserves, ranking China on the level of Canada. The US continues as the superpower in world currency reserves, while China is a marginal player.
The US Dollar as the World Reserve Currency
The US maintains preeminence because banks, governments and working peoples around the world regards US dollar as the safest, most reliable, and accepted currency to hold their savings.
A capitalist economic crisis, even when caused by the US itself, as in 2008, actually increases demand for the dollar, since the dollar is still viewed as the safe haven. People expect the dollar to be the currency most likely to retain its value in periods of uncertainty. Ironically, an economic crisis precipitated by the US results in money flooding into dollar assets, keeping world demand for dollars high. The 2008-09 crisis enabled the ruling class to advance their domination over working people, fleecing us of hundreds of billions of dollars.
SWIFT data show that China’s RMB plays a minor role in world trade transactions. While China has become the world exporter, its currency was used in merely 1.9% of international payments, versus 38% for the US dollar, with 77% of transactions in the dollar or euro. This means almost all China’s own imports and exports are not traded in Chinese currency, but in that of the US and its subordinates.
Being the leading force in SWIFT gives the US a powerful weapon. The US rulers can target countries it seeks to overthrow (such as Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Iran) with sanctions declared illegal by the United Nations. SWIFT enables the US rulers to prevent those countries’ access to their overseas bank accounts, blocks their access to international trade as well as loans from the World Bank, the IMF and most international banks. The US uses its authority in the World Trade Organization to prevent countries like Venezuela from demanding the WTO punish the US for disrupting Venezuela’s legitimate trade by means of these sanctions.
Arguments that China and Russia are abandoning the dollar point out that, while in 2015 approximately 90% of trade between the two countries was conducted in dollars, by spring 2020 the figure had dropped to 46%, with 24% of the trade in their own currencies. This shows some increasing independence, yet almost twice as much China-Russia trade still takes place in the dollar rather than in their own money. Further, their moves from the dollar have been in reaction to US imposed sanctions and tariffs, forcing them off the dollar, not from their own choice to cast aside the dollar as the international currency.
If China and Russia had the means to create a new world economic order they could withdraw their over $1.1 trillion and $123 billion invested in US Treasury bonds and use the funds to start their own international financial structure.
That China pegs the RMB to the dollar, rather than the dollar pegged to the RMB, also indicates the economic power relations between China and the US. China has expressed unease about the US potential to cut China off from the SWIFT network. Zhou Li, a spokesperson for China’s Communist Party, urged his party’s leaders to prepare for decoupling from the dollar, because the US dollar “has us by the throat… By taking advantage of the dollar’s global monopoly position in the financial sector, the US will pose an increasingly severe threat to China’s further development.”
While China has displaced the US as the primary productive workhouse of the world, it remains far from displacing the US as the world financial center. The size of China’s economy has not translated into a matching economic power.
Part 2: Military and Ideological Forms of Domination
The US regards as its Manifest Destiny to rule the world. The US bosses equate their national security interests with global security interests; no place or issue is insignificant. The US sees its role as defending the world capitalist order even if narrow US interests are not immediately and practically involved.
The Question of a US Military Decline
The second central element of the waning US empire argument is based on the US armed forces failures in the Middle East wars. However, they overlook that the US rulers suffered more stinging defeats in Korea 70 years ago and Vietnam 50 years ago, when the US was considered at the height of its supremacy. While over 7000 US soldiers and 8000 “contractors,” a code word for mercenaries, have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is much smaller than the 41,300 troops killed in Korea, or the 58,000 in Vietnam. Although in wars against Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, the US ruling class could not achieve its aims, these peoples’ anti-imperial struggles were derailed, a US key objective. To the extent the peoples of these countries “won,” they inherited a country in ruins.
Likewise, the rising British empire suffered defeats at the hands of the US in 1783 and 1814, but this had little impact on 19th century British global ascendancy.
Save Iraq in 1991, the US has not won a war since World War II. Yet even in its heyday, the US military did not take on and defeat another major power without considerable outside aid. Spain was mostly defeated in Cuba and the Philippines before the US attacked. The US entered World War I after the other fighting forces were reaching exhaustion. In World War II, the Soviet Red Army broke the back of the German Wehrmacht, not the US. Only against Japan did the US military play a key role in crushing an imperial rival, though even here, the bulk of Japanese troops were tied down fighting the Chinese.
While today, the US military is reluctant about engaging in a full-scale land war, this has been mostly the case for the whole 20th century before any alleged imperial deterioration. Previously, the US rulers proved adept at not entering a war until it could emerge on top once the wars ended.
The “Vietnam syndrome,” code word for the US people’s opposition to fighting wars to defend the corporate world order, continues to haunt and impede the US rulers when they consider new military aggressions. This “syndrome,” which Bush Sr boasted had been overcome, has only deepened as result of the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles. Yet the corporate class took advantage of these wars to loot trillions from public funds, with working people to pay the bill.
The US is spending over a trillion dollars to “upgrade” a nuclear capacity which could wipe out life on the planet. Even if US military capacity were diminishing in some areas, this is immaterial so long as the US still can, with a push of the button, annihilate all it considers opponents, even if this means a likely mutually assured destruction. The US also possesses similarly dangerous arsenals of biological and chemical weapons. It is not rational to think the US rulers spend mind-boggling sums of money on this weaponry but will not use them again when considered necessary to preserve their supremacy.
The US empire’s military dominion remains firmly in place around the world. Peoples’ struggles to close US military bases have met with little success. US ruling class de facto military occupations overseas continue through its over 800 bases in over 160 countries. These constitute 95% of the world’s total foreign military bases.
To date, if there has been any lessening of US military destructive capacity, no new armed forces or uprisings have dared to take advantage of this. If some national force considered it possible to break out of the US world jailhouse, we would be seeing that.
Hybrid Warfare: US Regime-Change Tools Besides Military Intervention
Military victory is not necessary for the US rulers to keep “insubordinate” countries in line. It suffices for the US to leave in ruins their attempts to build political and economic systems that prioritize national sovereignty over US dictates.
When incapable of overturning a potential “threat of a good example” through military invasion, the US may engineer palace coups. Since 2000, it has succeeded in engineering coups in Honduras, Bolivia, Georgia, and Haiti, to name a few.
Alternatives to fomenting a military coup include the US conducting lawfare to overturn governments, as seen in Paraguay and Brazil. The US ruling class also skillfully co-opts “color revolutions,” as seen in the Arab Spring and in the implosion of the Soviet bloc. Worldwide, the US regularly violates the sovereignty of nations through its regime-change agencies such as the CIA, USAID, and NED.
Besides invasions, coups, lawfare, election interference, and color revolutions, the US relies on its command over the global financial system and the subservience of other imperialist nations. This enables the US overlords to impose crippling sanctions and blockades on countries that assert their national sovereignty. The blockades on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and Syria constitute a boot on their neck, which have only become more severe the more these peoples valiantly defend their independence.
Condemnation of these blockades by working people and nations worldwide has yet to have material effect in constraining this imperial cruelty against whole peoples. Rather than a decline of the US empire’s ability to thwart another country’s right to determine their own future, there have been changes in method, from overtly militaristic to more covert hybrid warfare. Both are brutal and effective means of regime change.
US-First World Ideological Hegemony
The corporate leaders of the West wield world dominion over the international media, including news services, social media, and advertising. Their Coke and Disney characters, for instance, have penetrated even the remotest corners of the world. Today most of the world’s viewers of the news are fed a version of the news through media stage-managed by the US and its subordinate allies. In addition, there are almost 4 billion social media users in the world, with six social media companies having more than one billion users. China owns just one of these. Only the US and its subordinates have world reach in their control of news and social media, while China does not.
Ramon Labanino, one of the Cuban 5, illustrated how the US rulers use their media to foment the July 12 regime change operation in Cuba:
We are in the presence of an international media dictatorship, the big media are in the hands of imperialism and now the social networks and the alternative media also use them in a masterful way. They have the capacity, through data engineering, bots, to replicate a tweet millions of times, which is what they have done against Cuba. A ruthless attack on social networks and in the media to show a Cuba that is not real. On the other hand, we have an invasion in our networks to disarticulate our computer systems so that even we cannot respond to the lies. The interesting thing is the double purpose, not only that they attack us, but then we cannot defend ourselves because the media belong to them… Within the CIA, for example, they have a special operations group that is in charge of cyber attacks of this type and there is a group called the Political Action Group that organizes, structures and directs this type of attack.
Worldwide use of media disinformation and news spin plays a central role in preserving US primacy and acceptance of its propaganda. As Covert Action Magazine reported:
United States warmakers have become so skilled at propaganda that not only can they wage a war of aggression without arousing protest; they can also compel liberals to denounce peace activists using language reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Take the case of Syria. The people and groups one would normally count on to oppose wars have been the ones largely defending it. They have also often been the ones to label war opponents as “Assad apologists” or “genocide deniers”—causing them to be blacklisted.
The ruling class media’s effective massaging of what is called “news” has penetrated and disoriented many anti-war forces. This illustrates the appalling collapse of a world anti-war opposition that almost 20 years ago had been called “the new superpower,” not some decline of the US as world cop. Corporate media operations play a role comparable to military might in perpetuating US global control.
Part 3: The Threat US Rulers Perceive in China
Secretary of State Blinken spelled it out:
China is the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system, all the rules, values and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin responded to Washington’s view that the international system operates primarily to advance US corporate interests:
The ‘rules-based order’ claimed by the US…refers to rules set by the US alone, then it cannot be called international rules, but rather ‘hegemonic rules,’ which will only be rejected by the whole world.
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov recently said:
The United States has declared limiting the advance of technology in Russia and China as its goal…They are promoting their ideology-driven agenda aimed at preserving their dominance by holding back progress in other countries.
The Challenge China Presents to US Rulers Differs from that of the Soviet Union
China’s development poses a threat to imperialist hegemony different from the former Soviet bloc. China competes in the world markets run by the Western nations, slowly supplanting their control. China’s economic performance, 70 years after its revolution, has been unprecedented in world history, even compared to the First World countries. In contrast, the Soviet economy after 70 years was faltering.
China does not provide the economic and military protection for nations striving to build a new society the way the Soviet Union had. The importance of the Communist bloc as a force constraining the US was immense and is underappreciated. The Communist bloc generally allied itself with anti-imperialist forces, encouraging Third World national liberation struggles as well as the Non-Aligned Movement. The Communist bloc’s exemplary social programs also prompted the rise of social-democratic welfare state regimes (e.g., Sweden) in the capitalist West to circumvent possible socialist revolution.
Now, with no Soviet Union and its allies to extend international solidarity assistance to oppressed peoples and nations, countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea are much more on their own to defend themselves against US military maneuvers and blockades.
As John Ross points out, China is capable of slowly supplanting US-First World power over a long period of time, but in no position to replace these imperial states as world hegemon, nor does it desire to do so. US products are being driven out by China’s cheaper high-quality products and China’s more equitable “win-win” business arrangements with other countries, offering the opportunity for Third World countries to develop. However, China cannot displace the US in the world financial system, where the US and its allies retain overwhelming control.
The US has proven incapable of impeding China from becoming an independent world force. No matter the tariffs and sanctions placed on China, they have had little impact. Yet, the US has caused China to digress from its socialist planned economy, through US corporations and consumerist values penetrating the Chinese system.
Part 4: The World if the US were in Decline
Revolutions on the International Stage
A weakened US imperialism would encourage peoples and nations to “seize the time” and score significant gains against this overlord’s hold on their countries. Yet since shortly after 1975, with the victories in Vietnam and Laos, a drought in socialist revolutions has persisted for almost half a century. If the US empire were in decline, we would find it handicapped in countering victorious socialist revolutions. However, the opposite has been the case, with the US rulers consolidating their hegemony over the world.
This contrasts with the 40-year period between 1917 and 1959, when socialist revolutions occurred in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, eleven countries across eastern Europe, and Cuba. These took place in the era of US rise, not decline. During this period, the US empire had to confront even greater challenges to its dictates than presented by today’s China and Russia in the form of the world Communist bloc, associated parties in capitalist countries, and the national liberation movements.
During the period of alleged US imperial demise, it has been socialist revolution that experienced catastrophic defeats. In the last 30 years, the struggle for socialist revolution has gone sharply in reverse, with the US and its subordinates not only blocking successful revolutions but overturning socialism in most of the former Communist sphere. The last three decades has witnessed greater consolidation of imperial supremacy over the world, not a deterioration.
The socialist revolutions that continue − North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba − have all had to backtrack and reintroduce private enterprise and capitalist relations of production. North Korea has allowed the growth of private markets; Cuba relies heavily on the Western tourist market. They have this forced upon them to survive more effectively in the present world neoliberal climate.
A victorious socialist revolution, even a much more limited anti-neoliberal revolution2 , requires a nation to stand up to the imperial vengeance that enforces neo-colonial subjugation. Small countries, such as Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, have established political and some economic independence, but they have been unable to significantly advance against crushing blockades and US-backed coups in order to create developed economies. Historically, the only countries that have effectively broken with dependency and developed independently based on their own resources have been the Soviet Union and China.
Raul Castro made clear this world primacy of the US neoliberal empire:
In many cases, governments [including the subsidiary imperial ones] do not even have the capacity to enforce their sovereign prerogatives over the actions of national entities based in their own territories, as these are often docilely subordinated to Washington, as if we were living in a world subjugated by the unipolar power of the United States. This is a phenomenon that is expressed with particular impact in the financial sector, with national banks of several countries giving a US administration’s stipulations priority over the political decisions of their own governments.
A test of the US overlords’ decline can be measured in the struggle against US economic warfare in the form of sanctions. To date, the US can arm twist most countries besides China and Russia into abiding by its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, and Iran. The US rulers still possess the power and self-assurance to ignore United Nations resolutions against economic warfare, including the UN General Assembly’s annual condemnation of the US blockade on Cuba. The peoples and nations of the world cannot make the US rulers pay a price for this warfare.
Domestic Struggles by the Working Class and its Allies that Shake the System
If the US empire were weakened, our working class could be winning strikes and union organizing drives against a capitalist class on the defensive. But the working class remains either quiescent, its struggles derailed, or most strikes settled by limiting the degree of boss takebacks. The 1997 UPS and 2016 Verizon strike were two that heralded important gains for workers. So far, however, the weakening class at home is not the corporate bosses, but the working class and its allies.
The workers movement has not even succeeded in gaining a national $15 minimum wage. The US rulers can spend over $900 billion a year on its war machine even during a pandemic that has killed almost 700,000, amid deteriorating standard of living − no national health care, no quality free education, no raising of the minimum wage − without angry mass protests. This money could be spent on actual national security at home: housing for the homeless, eliminating poverty, countering global warming, jobs programs, and effectively handling the pandemic as China has (with only two deaths since May 2020). Instead, just in the Pentagon budget, nearly a trillion dollars a year of our money is a welfare handout to corporations to maintain their rule over the world. This overwhelming imperial reign over our workers’ movement signifies a degeneration in our working class organizations, not in the corporate overlords.
A weakened empire would provide opportunities for working class victories, re-allocating national wealth in their favor. Instead, we live in a new Gilded Age, with growing impoverishment of our class as the corporate heads keep grabbing greater shares of our national wealth. Americans for Tax Fairness points out:
America’s 719 billionaires held over four times more wealth ($4.56 trillion) than all the roughly 165 million Americans in society’s bottom half ($1.01 trillion), according to Federal Reserve Board data. In 1990, the situation was reversed — billionaires were worth $240 billion and the bottom 50% had $380 billion in collective wealth.
US billionaire wealth increased 19-fold over the last 31 years, with the combined wealth of 713 billionaires surging by $1.8 trillion during the pandemic, one-third of their wealth gains since 1990.
This scandalous appropriation of working people’s wealth by less than one thousand bosses at the top without causing mass indignation and working class fightback, encapsules the present power relations between the two contending classes.
With a weakened empire, we would expect a rise of a militant mass current in the trade unions and the working class committed to the struggle to reverse this trend. Instead, trade unions support corporate governance and their political candidates for office, not even making noise about a labor party.
With a weakened empire, we would expect the US working people to be turning away from the two corporate parties and building our own labor party as an alternative. In 2016 the US electorate backed two “outsiders,” Bernie Sanders and Trump, in the primaries against the traditional Democratic and Republican candidates, but this movement was co-opted with little difficulty. That the two corporate-owned parties still wield the power to co-opt, if not extinguish, our working class movements, as with the mass anti-Iraq war movement, the Occupy movement, the Madison trade union protests, the pro-Bernie groundswells in 2016 and 2020, shows the empire’s continued vitality, not deterioration.
In 2020 most all liberals and lefts capitulated to the Democrats’ anti-Trumpism, under the guise of “fighting fascism.” The “resistance” became the “assistance.” The promising Black Lives Matter movement of summer 2020 became largely absorbed into the Biden campaign a few months later. If the corporate empire were declining, progressive forces and leftist groups would not have bowed to neoliberal politicians and the national security state by climbing on the elect-Biden bandwagon. The 2020 election brought out the highest percent of voters in over a century to vote for one or the other of two neoliberal politicians. This stunning victory for the US ruling class resulted from a stunning surrender by progressive forces. To speak of declining corporate US supremacy in this context is nonsense.
Likely Indicators of a Demise of US Supremacy
For all our political lives we have been reading reports of the impending decline of US global supremacy. If just a fraction of these reports were accurate, then surely the presidential executive orders that Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, and Cuba are “unusual and extraordinary threats to the national security of the United States” would have some basis in reality.
If US corporate dominion were declining, we might see:
- The long called for democratization of the United Nations and other international bodies with one nation, one vote
- Social democratic welfare governments would again be supplanting neoliberal regimes
- Replacement of World Bank, WTO, and IMF with international financial institutions independent of US control
- Curtailing NATO and other imperialist military alliances
- End of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency
- Dismantling of US overseas military bases
- Emergence of regional blocs independent of the US, replacing the current vassal organizations (e.g., European Union, OAS, Arab League, Organization of African Unity)
- Nuclear disarmament rather than nuclear escalation
- Working peoples of the world enforcing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions
- A decline of the allure of US controlled world media culture (e.g., Disney, Hollywood)
Part 5: Conclusion: US Decline looks like a Mirage
Proponents of US decline point to two key indicators: its diminished role in global production and ineffectiveness of the US ruler’s military as world cop. Yet, the US rulers, with the aid of those in the European Union and Japan, maintain world financial control and continue to keep both our country and the world under lock and key.
The US overlords represent the spokesperson and enforcer of the First World imperial system of looting, while compelling subservience from the other imperial nations. None dare pose as potential imperial rivals to the US, nor challenge it in any substantial manner.
It is misleading to compare China’s rise to the US alone, since the US represents a bloc of imperial states. To supplant US economic preeminence, China would have to supplant the economic power of this entire bloc. These countries still generate most world production with little prospect this will change. A China-Russia alliance scarcely equals this US controlled First World club.
To date, each capitalist crisis has only reinforced the US rulers’ dominion as the world financial hub. Just the first half of this year, world investors have poured $900 billion into the safe haven US assets, more than they put into funds in the rest of the world combined. So long as the US capitalists can export their economic downturns to other countries and onto the backs of its own working people, so long as the world turns to the US dollar as the safe haven, decline of US ruling class preeminence is not on the table.
The last period of imperial weakening occurred from the time of US defeat in Vietnam up to the reimposition of imperial diktat under Reagan and his sidekick, Margaret Thatcher. During this time, working peoples’ victories were achieved across the international stage: Afghanistan, Iran, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Grenada; Cuban military solidarity in Angola, Vietnam’s equivalent in Cambodia; revolution in Portugal and in its African colonies, in Zimbabwe, and seeming imminent victories in El Salvador and Guatemala. At home, a rising class struggle current arose in the working class, as in the Sadlowski Steelworkers Fight Back movement and the militant 110-day coal miners strike, which forced President Carter to back down. This worldwide upsurge against corporate rule ended about 40 years ago, as yet unmatched by new ones.
Proclamations of a waning US empire portray a wishful thinking bordering on empty bravado. Moreover, a crumbling empire will not lead to its final exit without a massive working peoples’ movement at home to overthrow it. Glen Ford observed that capitalism has lost its legitimacy, especially among the young: “But that doesn’t by itself bring down a system. It is simply a sign that people are not happy. Mass unhappiness may bring down an administration. But it doesn’t necessarily change a system one bit.”
Capitalism is wracked by crisis – inherent to the system, Marx explained. Yet, as the catastrophe of World War I and its aftermath showed, as the Great Depression showed, as Europe in chaos after World War II showed, capitalist crises are no harbinger of its collapse. The question is not how severe the crisis, but which class, capitalist or working class, takes advantage of it to advance their own interests.
A ruling class crisis allows us to seize the opportunity if our forces are willing to fight, are organized, and are well-led. As Lenin emphasized, “The proletariat has no other weapon in the fight for power except organization.” In regards to organization, we are unprepared. Contributing to our lack of effective anti-imperialist organization is our profound disbelief that a serious challenge at home to US ruling class control is even possible.
Whatever the indications of US deterioration as world superpower, recall that the Roman empire’s decay began around 177 AD. But it did not collapse in the West until 300 years later, in 476, and the eastern half did not collapse for 1000 years after that. Informing a Roman slave or plebe in 200 AD that the boot on their necks was faltering would fall on deaf ears. We are now in a similar situation. The empire will never collapse by itself, even with the engulfing climate catastrophe. Wishful thinking presents a dysfunctional substitute for actual organizing, for preparing people to seize the time when the opening arises.
- John Ross, “China and South-South Cooperation in the present global situation,” in China’s Great Road, p. 203.
- There is a continuous class struggle between popular forces demanding increased government resources and programs to serve their needs, against corporate power seeking to privatize in corporate hands all such government spending and authority. This unchecked corporate centralization of wealth and power is euphemistically called “neoliberalism.” An anti-neoliberal revolution places popular forces in political control while economic power remains in the hands of the capitalist class.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.
— Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist
America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.
The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.
This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live and the constantly shifting crises that keep the populace in a state of high alert.
Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.
We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of a virus, fear of the unmasked, fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government. The list goes on and on.
The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.
Fear makes people stupid.
Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.
Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.
This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.
This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology, endless wars, COVID-19 mandates, etc., hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.
All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.
Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police, marauding SWAT teams, and egregious assaults on the rights of the citizenry.
America has already entered a new phase, one in which communities are locked down, employees are forced to choose between keeping their jobs or exercising their freedoms, children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents, and law-abiding Americans are finding their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented and their communications monitored.
These threats are not to be underestimated.
Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.
Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.
So far, these tactics are working.
An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America.
Each successive crisis in recent years (a COVID-19 pandemic, terrorism, etc.)—manufactured or legitimate—has succeeded in reducing the American people to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”
Sanchez continues:
I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…
I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…
Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.
As history makes clear, fear leads to fascistic, totalitarian regimes.
It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.
A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.
The following are a few of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state:
· The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).
· The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.
· The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.
· The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
· The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.
· The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.
· The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.
· The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.
· The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.
· The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.
The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.
“Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized,” writes Jeffrey Tucker. “Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect.”
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.
Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring.
It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences.
For example, neuroscientists have observed how quickly fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports:
In the experiment, researchers taught male mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by associating the scent with mild foot shocks. Two weeks later, they bred with females. The resulting pups were raised to adulthood having never been exposed to the smell. Yet when the critters caught a whiff of it for the first time, they suddenly became anxious and fearful. They were even born with more cherry-blossom-detecting neurons in their noses and more brain space devoted to cherry-blossom-smelling.
The conclusion? “A newborn mouse pup, seemingly innocent to the workings of the world, may actually harbor generations’ worth of information passed down by its ancestors.”
Now consider the ramifications of inherited generations of fears and experiences on human beings. As the Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, fear, trauma and compliance can be passed down through the generations.
Fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it now operates in our contemporary world—all of which raises fundamental questions about us as human beings and what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.
In the words of psychologist Erich Fromm:
The post Freedom from Fear: Stop Playing the Government’s Mind Games first appeared on Dissident Voice.[C]an human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love—that is to say, can man forget he is human? Or does human nature have a dynamism which will react to the violation of these basic human needs by attempting to change an inhuman society into a human one?
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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When sex offenders can move more freely around New York City than someone who has chosen natural immunity, it’s time to get some things off my chest. And who better to talk with than the person I trust the most? To follow… is a self-interview.
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Mickey Z.: How’s it going with the mandate?
Mickey Z.: Coercion is not consent, my friend. And if my hometown is so concerned about our collective health, why don’t they mandate a safe, affordable home for everyone? How about meaningful jobs that pay a living wage? Mandate less crime and more libraries.
MZ: I get the idea.
MZ: If they wanna control what goes into our bodies, why not insist that organic produce be made available at affordable prices and be consumed every single day?
MZ: I see what you mean.
MZ: Mandate that all lawns be turned into organic vegetable gardens. Did you know that lawn is the single most irrigated crop in God’s Country
? MZ: You’ve made your point.
MZ: Mandate people not commenting on social media until they’ve done some fuckin’ research. The next person who repeats the “ivermectin is horse dewormer” nonsense trope is the one who needs to be isolated from society.
MZ: Wait… you’re not gonna defend ivermectin, are you?
MZ: I’m not defending anything except adding facts to the conversation. Equine ivermectin — as the name implies — is made for horses. The FDA approved another kind of ivermectin for humans. It’s meant to treat infections in the body that are caused by certain parasites and was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015.
MZ: What has that got to do with COVID-19?
MZ: You might wanna pose that question to the National Institutes for Health (NIH). They endorsed several studies showing ivermectin can be effective for treating Covid. For example, the American Journal of Therapeutics published a study that found: “Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of #ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”
If you’re interested in more reality, click here and here and here. Read those links closely and then congratulate yourself for knowing more about ivermectin than any corporate media outlet or reporter — from Fox to CNN.
MZ: If ivermectin works, why is it being badmouthed by the mainstream?
MZ: Possibly because, according to the FDA, the only way the Covid “vaccines” could qualify for emergency use authorization is if “certain statutory criteria have been met.” For example: “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.” If doctors prescribe ivermectin, the jabs aren’t needed and thus don’t rake in billions for Big Pharma (and set the stage for endless boosters). Follow the money.
MZ: Is this why you’re calling this the“Covid Twilight Zone”?
MZ: It’s one of many reasons. The biggest might be the charade of PCR tests.
MZ: Please elaborate.
MZ: The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test works by converting the virus’s RNA into DNA (coronaviruses don’t have DNA). The PCR process makes millions of copies of the manufactured DNA by running it through “cycles” in a process called amplification. The more cycles run, the more the DNA can be copied. If no copies can be made, theoretically, no virus is present. The test provides a yes-no answer rather than any indication of how much virus was found, how old the virus is, or whether or not the virus is even capable of infectivity.
The test is so flawed that in Tanzania, it returned positive results for a goat and a piece of fruit!
The post Welcome to the Covid Twilight Zone: Mickey Z. interviews Mickey Z. first appeared on Dissident Voice.According to the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, the PCR test is responsible for an unknown amount of false-positive results because too many cycles have consistently been run from the start. Even the sainted Dr. Fauci himself has explained that anything over 36 cycles will result in finding only dead nucleotides that create false positives. Meanwhile, over 40 cycles of amplification have been regularly used for Covid testing for 18 months.
As a result, the test results have been declared useless by some because anything beyond a cycle threshold of 35 will detect past, latent viruses which no longer pose a threat. The probability of a false-positive result is as high as 97 percent at 35 cycles or higher. This very much explains how there could be 38 million cases of the flu in 2019-20 but only 1,822 in 2020-21. Meanwhile, there have been (as of this writing), a reported 40,172,000 positive Covid tests in the U.S. Translation: The “gold standard” Covid test most likely can’t tell the difference between different respiratory diseases.
Kary Mullis invented the PCR test — for which he was given the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Before he passed away in 2019, Mullis stated that his test is “incapable of diagnosing disease” as it cannot distinguish between inactive and reproductive viruses. He said this about Fauci (the man who spearheaded the use of PCR tests for Covid-19): “This man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there, you will know it. He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.”
The CDC announced that after December 31, 2021, it will withdraw the PCR test to diagnose SARS-CoV-2.
MZ: It sounds like too little, too late.
MZ: Indeed. The damage is done. I urge readers to keep the flawed PCR test in mind every single time they hear news reports of rises in cases and deaths. The people making these reports literally have no idea what’s going on.
MZ: Anything else do you wanna get off your chest?
MZ: Social distancing is another lie. Click here to learn how the 6-foot-distance rule has no evidence to support it. Click here to learn how wearing a mask as a method of reducing the transmission of a virus has no compelling evidence to support it. Click here to learn how the Covid vaccines aren’t even vaccines, aren’t proven to be safe and effective, and could be causing damage to their recipients. In fact, mRNA vaccines released into an active pandemic will be less effective and cause many variants. And please don’t get me started on the global cost of the unnecessary lockdowns.
MZ: I believe I’d very much like to get you started on that!
MZ: If you insist. It comes back to flawed testing. PCR false positives created the illusion of a crisis. The inherently faulty and highly exaggerated counts of cases and deaths have led to lockdowns, economic crises, social unrest, and authoritarian measures. The powers-that-be took advantage of this illusion to enrich the billionaire class and grant dangerous amounts of power to governments. The global cost of this deception is difficult to stomach.
MZ: Try me.
MZ: For 18 months and counting, we’ve been conditioned to fear a virus based on the numbers: cases and deaths. You may think knowing the exact numbers doesn’t matter. You may think it’s heinous or “anti-science” for anyone to even question the official count. If that’s what you’re feeling right now, I invite you to explain your perspective to some of the humans impacted by the lockdowns; e.g.:
- 72 million children pushed into illiteracy
- The famine-stricken residents of Yemen, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, and northeastern Nigeria
- 9.3 million wasted and 2.6 million stunted children
- 15 million girls and women now dealing with unintended pregnancies
- 13 million girls who might be forced into child marriages
- 2 million girls enduring genital mutilation without campaigns in place to protect them
- All the Japanese women caught up in an 83 percent increase in suicide
- 10,000 additional children dying each month from hunger
The numbers matter immensely but very few people seem to want to hear anything that challenges their acceptance of the “official” narrative. Every time you mock or ignore well-documented writing on this topic, you are showing ZERO concern for the tens of millions whose lives have been devastated thanks to lies and propaganda.
While you gleefully support totalitarian mandates with the bogus claim of “saving lives,” 10,000 additional children are dying each month across the globe thanks to the lockdowns and your compliance.
MZ: Grim stuff. Any closing thoughts?
MZ: If the readers of this article take their health seriously, take the state of the world seriously, and take themselves seriously, they’ll click on every link provided above. They’ll care enough and be curious enough to read that info closely and then ask themselves why the media, the corporations, and the government are trying to sell us a completely different narrative.
MZ: Do you have any hope the readers of this article will do any of that?
MZ: In the words of Henry Rollins, “Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.” No hope here but what I do have is passion and commitment for digging up and sharing facts.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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According to Reuters, more than 500,000 farmers attended a rally in the city of Muzaffarnagar in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on 5 September. Hundreds of thousands more turned out for other rallies in the state.
Rakesh Tikait, a prominent farmers’ leader, said this would breathe fresh life into the Indian farmers’ protest movement.
He added:
We will intensify our protest by going to every single city and town of Uttar Pradesh to convey the message that Modi’s government is anti-farmer.
Tikait is a leader of the protest movement and a spokesperson of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Indian Farmers’ Union).
Since November 2020, tens of thousands of farmers have been encamped on the outskirts of Delhi in protest against three new farm laws that will effectively hand over the agrifood sector to corporates and place India at the mercy of international commodity and financial markets for its food security.
Aside from the rallies in Uttar Pradesh, thousands more farmers recently gathered in Karnal in the state of Haryana to continue to pressurise the Modi-led government to repeal the laws. This particular protest was also in response to police violence during another demonstration, also in Karnal (200 km north of Delhi), during late August when farmers had been blocking a highway. The police Lathi-charged them and at least 10 people were injured and one person died from a heart attack a day later.
A video that appeared on social media showed Ayush Sinha, a top government official, encouraging officers to “smash the heads of farmers” if they broke through the barricades placed on the highway.
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar criticised the choice of words but said that “strictness had to be maintained to ensure law and order”.
But that is not quite true. “Strictness” – outright brutality – must be imposed to placate the scavengers abroad who are circling overhead with India’s agrifood sector firmly in their sights. As much as the authorities try to distance themselves from such language – ‘smashing heads’ is precisely what India’s rulers and the billionaire owners of foreign agrifood corporations require.
The government has to demonstrate to global agricapital that it is being tough on farmers in order to maintain ‘market confidence’ and attract foreign direct investment in the sector (aka the takeover of the sector).
The farmers’ protest in India represents a struggle for the heart and soul of the country: a conflict between the local and the global. Large-scale international agribusiness, retailers, traders and e-commerce companies are trying to displace small- and medium-size indigenous producers and enterprises and restructure the entire agrifood sector in their own image.
By capitulating to the needs of foreign agrifood conglomerates – which is what the three agriculture laws represent – India will be compelled to eradicate its buffer food stocks. It would then bid for them with borrowed funds on the open market or with its foreign reserves.
This approach is symptomatic of what has been happening since the 1990s, when India was compelled to embrace neoliberal economics. The country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital which rides roughshod over democratic principles and the needs of hundreds of millions of ordinary people.
The authorities know they must be seen to be acting tough on farmers, thereby demonstrating a steely resolve to foreign agribusiness and investors in general.
The Indian government’s willingness to cede control of its agrifood sector would appear to represent a victory for US foreign policy.
Economist Prof Michael Hudson stated in 2014:
American foreign policy has almost always been based on agricultural exports… It’s by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.
On the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture. In return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.
The drive is to drastically dilute the role of the public sector in agriculture, reducing it to a facilitator of private capital and leading to the entrenchment of industrial farming and the replacement of small-scale farms.
Smashing protesters’ heads
A December 2020 photograph published by the Press Trust of India defines the Indian government’s approach to protesting farmers. It shows a security official in paramilitary garb raising a lathi. An elder from the Sikh farming community was about to feel its full force.
But “smashing the heads of farmers” is symbolic of how near-totalitarian ‘liberal democracies’ the world over now regard many within their own populations.
The right to protest and gather in public as well as the right of free speech has been suspended in Australia, which currently resembles a giant penal colony as officials pursue a nonsensical ‘zero-COVID’ policy. Across Europe and in the US and Israel, unnecessary and discriminatory ‘COVID passports’ are being rolled out to restrict freedom of movement and access to services. And those who protest against any of this are often confronted by a massive, intimidating police presence (or actual police violence) and media smear campaigns.
Again, governments must demonstrate resolve to their billionaire masters in Big Finance, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, the World Economic Forum and the entire gamut of forces in the military-financial industrial complex behind the ‘Great Reset’, ‘4th Industrial Revolution, ‘New Normal’ or whichever other benign-sounding term its political and media lackeys use to disguise the restructuring of capitalism and the brutal impacts on ordinary people.
This too, like the restructuring of Indian agriculture – which will affect India’s entire 1.3-billion-plus population – is also part of a US foreign policy agenda that serves the interests of the Anglo-US elite.
COVID has ensured that trillions of dollars have been handed over to elite interests, while lockdowns and restrictions have been imposed on ordinary people and small businesses. The winners have been the likes of Amazon, Big Pharma and the tech giants. The losers have been small enterprises and the bulk of the population, deprived of their right to work and the entire panoply of civil rights their ancestors struggled and often died for. If a masterplan is required to deliver a knockout blow to small enterprises for the benefit of global players, then this is it.
Professor Michel Cossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization says:
The Global Money financial institutions are the ‘creditors’ of the real economy which is in crisis. The closure of the global economy has triggered a process of global indebtedness. Unprecedented in World history, a multi-trillion bonanza of dollar denominated debts is hitting simultaneously the national economies of 193 countries.
In August 2020, a report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) stated:
The COVID-19 crisis has severely disrupted economies and labour markets in all world regions, with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020, most of which are in emerging and developing countries.
Among the most vulnerable are the 1.6 billion informal economy workers, representing half of the global workforce, who are working in sectors experiencing major job losses or have seen their incomes seriously affected by lockdowns. Most of the workers affected (1.25 billion) are in retail, accommodation and food services and manufacturing. And most of these are self-employed and in low-income jobs in the informal sector.
India was especially affected in this respect when the government imposed a lockdown. The policy ended up pushing 230 million into poverty and wrecked the lives and livelihoods of many. A May 2021 report prepared by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University (APU) has highlighted how employment and income had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels even by late 2020.
The report, ‘State of Working India 2021 – One year of Covid-19’ highlights how almost half of formal salaried workers moved into the informal sector and that 230 million people fell below the national minimum wage poverty line.
Even before COVID, India was experiencing its longest economic slowdown since 1991 with weak employment generation, uneven development and a largely informal economy. A recent article by the Research Unit for Political Economy highlights the structural weaknesses of the economy and the often desperate plight of ordinary people.
To survive Modi’s lockdown, the poorest 25% of households borrowed 3.8 times their median income, as against 1.4 times for the top 25%. The study noted the implications for debt traps.
Six months later, it was also noted that food intake was still at lockdown levels for 20% of vulnerable households.
Meanwhile, the rich were well taken care of. According to Left Voice:
The Modi government has handled the pandemic by prioritising the profits of big business and protecting the fortunes of billionaires over protecting the lives and livelihoods of workers.
Michel Chossudovsky says that governments are now under the control of global creditors and that the post-Covid era will see massive austerity measures, including the cancellation of workers’ benefits and social safety nets. An unpayable multi-trillion dollar public debt is unfolding: the creditors of the state are Big Money, which calls the shots in a process that will lead to the privatisation of the state.
Between April and July 2020, the total wealth held by billionaires around the world has grown from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion. Chossudovsky says a new generation of billionaire innovators looks set to play a critical role in repairing the damage by using the growing repertoire of emerging technologies. He adds that tomorrow’s innovators will digitise, refresh and revolutionise the economy: but, as he notes, let us be under no illusions these corrupt billionaires are impoverishers.
With this in mind, a recent piece on the US Right To Know website exposes the Gates-led agenda for the future of food based on the programming of biology to produce synthetic and genetically engineered substances. The thinking reflects the programming of computers in the information economy. Of course, Gates and his ilk have patented, or are patenting, the processes and products involved.
For example, Ginkgo Bioworks, a Gates-backed start-up that makes ‘custom organisms’, recently went public in a $17.5 billion deal. It uses ‘cell programming’ technology to genetically engineer flavours and scents into commercial strains of engineered yeast and bacteria to create ‘natural’ ingredients, including vitamins, amino acids, enzymes and flavours for ultra-processed foods.
Ginkgo plans to create up to 20,000 engineered ‘cell programs’ (it now has five) for food products and many other uses. It plans to charge customers to use its ‘biological platform’. Its customers are not consumers or farmers but the world’s largest chemical, food and pharmaceutical companies.
Gates pushes fake food by way of his greenwash agenda. If he really is interested in avoiding ‘climate catastrophe’, helping farmers or producing enough food, instead of cementing the power and the control of corporations over our food, he should be facilitating community-based and lead agroecological approaches.
But he will not because there is no scope for patents, external proprietary inputs, commodification and dependency on global corporations which Gates sees as the answer to all of humanity’s problems in his quest to bypass democratic processes and roll out his agenda.
India should take heed because this is the future of ‘food’. If the farmers fail to get the farm bills repealed, India will again become dependent on food imports or on foreign food manufacturers and lab-made ‘food’. Fake food will displace traditional diets and cultivation methods will be driven by drones, genetically engineered seeds and farms without farmers, devastating the livelihoods (and health) of hundreds of millions.
This is a vision of the future courtesy of Klaus Schwab’s (of the elitist World Economic Forum) dystopic transhumanism and the Rockefellers’ 2010 lockstep scenario: genetically engineered food and genetically engineered people controlled by a technocratic elite whose plans are implemented through tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership.
Since March 2020, we have seen the structural adjustment of the global capitalist system and labour’s relationship to it and an attempted adjustment of people’s thinking via endless government and media propaganda.
Whether it involves India’s farmers or the frequent rallies and marches against restrictions and COVID passports across the world, there is a common enemy. And there is also a common goal: liberty.
The post Smashing The Heads of Farmers: A Global Struggle Against Tyranny first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Just as many predicted over a year ago, the rollout of the vaccine for Covid-19 and its implementation has introduced intense polarization and social segregation through the implementation of mandatory vaccination for employees and vaccine passports. Medical authoritarianism and the burgeoning biosecurity state are here, expanding in real time. In New York City, San Francisco, France, and Italy, vaccine passports are mandatory for entrance to nearly any indoor public venue: restaurants, bars, museums, cinemas, and more. Also, hundreds of corporations, colleges, federal and state agencies are mandating rushed emergency experimental injections with no long-term knowledge of side effects.
Yes, we’re all well aware that the Pfizer vaccine just got full FDA approval. Did anyone think that it wouldn’t? Did anyone in the media bother to ask if the forces of power, money, and technocratic medical tyrants would back down and not give full approval, considering how these forces have managed to shape reality and scare to death half of the population over a disease with a very low mortality rate? Regardless of your opinion of how severe the disease is, mandates and passports are incontrovertibly coercive, tyrannical measures. If the vaccines do not stop transmission, which the medical authorities have already admitted to varying degrees, then what is the point of these mandates and passports?
Furthermore, the vaccine passport will effectively be discriminatory since minorities are less likely to get the vaccines. African Americans especially have lower vaccination rates, for good reasons, the US medical establishment experimented on black populations throughout the Cold War and even beyond. It’s not difficult to see the ramifications of bio-digital segregations. One does not need a PhD or medical degree; in fact, these “credentials” seem to blinker one’s view in support of this new form of discrimination.
In the view of what we might term the technocracy, or perhaps the emerging biosecurity establishment, it is virtuous to separate the “clean” vaxxed from the supposedly disease-carrying, uneducated, lower-classes who won’t take these experimental shots.
All of the power and money, all the “Science
” snowballed into an unstoppable corporate/government momentum which shows no signs of letting up. All that propaganda, the deliberate lies about mask efficiency (they don’t work) and vaccine holiness (they don’t prevent transmission) they’ve been shoving down the public’s throats for over a year and a half? Yeah, the nanny-state politico-medical tyrants are not going to give up this narrative without a fight. They are doubling down on the fear and quest for total obedience and control. It suits late-stage capitalism just fine if small and medium sized businesses go under and the excess labor supply of the unemployed are evicted and go hungry. They are extraneous to the monopoly cartels which run the “economy”, which is run by giant tech corporations, the stock market, the military-industrial complex, and the FIRE sector, multinational conglomerates who operate with almost no competition in nearly every industry.There is no way to fight back against these abuses of power through the court system. In my opinion, the most rational approach would be to boycott, in any way possible, the corporations and public institutions that are going along with vaccine mandates and passports. Part of this involves the vote with your dollars approach. Hurting the corporate lemmings and technocrat sociopaths in their wallets and lack of tax revenues are the only things they will understand.
If you were thinking of traveling to Europe, skip France and Italy. Guess what? If globally millions of tourists suddenly gave the middle finger to these two countries and vacationed elsewhere, the dent in lost revenue and GDP might actually have some effect on the political establishment. In France and Italy citizens are rightly fed up with protests every day against the passports, and many vaccinated people have burned their vaccine papers in solidarity.
Similarly, if people in the US abstained from traveling to and spending money in NYC and SF, every restaurant owner, museum board, theater, and small business would then put immediate pressure on city, state, and federal politicians to ban vaccine passports, hopefully for good. If millions of people refuse to shop and do business with companies that have mandatory vaccination requirements for their employees, it would also put immense pressure to relent.
Investors should also divest from corporations that insist on mandating vaccines for employees. It may, in fact, be legal for companies to do so, but it is frankly coercive and is a sort of crossing of the Rubicon, blurring one’s private life and medical choices with public duties, to create a new type of “good citizen”, a biopolitical subject serving capitalism with zero critical thinking skills.
For those in the workforce facing mandates, such as federal/state public employees and health care workers, if possible it is definitely worth considering if another career/job can be found. If enough teachers, nurses, etc., quit or go on strike against their employee mandates, pressure can be applied and the mandates could potentially be lifted.
It’s worth pointing out that the goalposts continue to be changed from slowing the pace of transmission to eradicating the virus- from two weeks to flatten the curve (tacitly acknowledging that coronaviruses cannot really be stopped) to mandates for wide swaths of public and private work, as well as military and police presence on the streets of Australia, to name one of the most obvious police state measures. The goalposts are changing to determine our “good citizen” status. Before, one simply had to go along to get along, obey the laws, pay taxes, and keep one’s head down; now, not only are we expected to do and say the right things, but to inject the right experimental drugs into our bodies.
My humble prediction is the goalposts are going to continue to move. The game is akin to the frogs boiling slowly in the pot; by consenting to our own freedom being curtailed and our own imprisonment, the establishment gets what it wants without having to crack down using excessive force and coercion. The innate desire to have access to public spaces, to go on vacation, will lead many people ignorant of the wider implications to accept these new dystopian measures. The horizon of getting “back to normal” will recede faster as new variants naturally emerge, as viruses tend to do, and this will continue to be used as a new scare tactic, even as death rates effectively returned to normal four months ago (May of 2021) in the US, and many other countries show no more excess deaths, or none outside normal yearly variations, as well in 2021.
The virus is now endemic, but the powers that be are going to insist upon using it as a weapon for total control over the population. We’re through the looking-glass, we now have a form of “scientism” which is irrefutable no matter how unsettled the truth really is. Statistics such as death counts from Covid are unreliable, with doctors confessing to listing Covid-19 as the primary cause of death when it’s not- dying “from Covid” is conflated as dying “with Covid”. Deaths from the lockdowns are not seriously considered, even though many scientists are on record stating that the lockdowns led to a large chunk of the excess deaths.
Frankly, the near future looks pretty bleak for the US and the chances to have an open, honest dialogue about the seriousness of the pandemic, the capitalist world-system which stands to gain by using a 21st century tech-driven shock doctrine, and the police-state that will be built on the back of the panic caused by incessant propaganda. The fault lines are deepening and Democrats yammer to “trust the science” without any understanding themselves, and are willing to demonize anyone who doesn’t get an experimental jab or wear two masks while alone in their car; while Republicans continue to frame the “reopen the economy” debate in terms of those supposedly wonderful job-creating corporations, all the while being willing to sell the average worker out for an extra buck or two. Both parties are more than willing to screw over the poor, minorities, and working classes; if either cared about their citizens’ lives they wouldn’t throw people out into the streets via the mass evictions that are already underway.
As imperial decline and rot deepen, and the domestic surveillance apparatus pulls its noose tighter against our necks, our best bet to resist these freedom-crushing decrees is to deploy citizen power, mass protests, and coordinated direct action against inhumane vaccine mandates and police-state vaccine passports.
The post Boycott Vaccine Mandates and Covid Passports first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Collage by Mickey ZIn response to the events of September 11, 2001, the emergency use authorization (EUA) concept was created. The ostensible idea was to empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow the use of potentially life-saving products (e.g. medicines, etc.) after a terrorist attack. However, the EUA designation was not put into effect until late 2020 — for the COVID-19 “vaccines.”
The squashing of civil liberties in The Land of the Free
is hardly a novel idea. For just a few (of endless) examples, one may recall Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (1996), Espionage and Sedition Act (1917), National Defense Authorization Act (2011), or the FBI Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO (technically 1956-1971, but probably still going). Also, the interned Japanese-Americans in the 1940s just might have something to say about FDR’s concept of “freedom.” Doling out and taking away rights is essentially a side quest for America’s power elite.A common theme of these power grabs involves exploiting a crisis. Two decades ago, the Bush-Cheney Administration used the guise of “emergency” to reshape the country’s psyche. Steps that seemed like temporary precautions are now deemed permanent and normal. These include a wide range of changes like the Transportation Security Administration, three-ounce bottles of liquid, full-body scanners, a “No Fly” list, and the completely laughable concept of taking off your shoes before going through security (soon to be rendered fully obsolete thanks to foot scanners).
All of the above (and so much more) would’ve once seemed like details from a bad, futuristic novel. Today, they exist without comment. The powers-that-be have effectively conditioned us to accept whatever is imposed upon us. And, post-9/11, that included the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act,” a.k.a. the USA PATRIOT Act.
This totalitarian salvo includes what the ACLU called “a host of alarming and unconstitutional anti-speech provisions” and was been condemned by three state legislatures and almost 250 municipalities across the United States.
Adele Welty declared the PATRIOT Act to be “a serious threat to the exercise of our Constitutional rights.” Welty’s son Timothy lost his life in the WTC collapse — one of the 343 firefighters who died that day. She later testified before the New York City Council and said, in part: “[The USA PATRIOT Act] undermines our Fourth Amendment right to privacy and expands the ability of the government to use wiretaps and computer surveillance and to look at confidential medical, financial, business and educational records.”
Such talk of rights and overreach sounds quaint to today’s ears. Like the internet or cellphones, the USA PATRIOT Act is just something that’s passed down to new generations without examination, thought, or even conscious awareness. That’s part of what made it so easy for the elites to use the COVID-19 pandemic to garner even more control and wealth.
Twenty years later, we’ve come full circle to see the emergency use authorization of an experimental gene therapy being forced upon a compliant population. If you scare enough people for a long enough time, they’ll believe anything. They’ll even trust their abusers to help them. It’s trauma bonding on a macro scale.
That’s how they got us to line up in our socks for a flight. One alleged shoe bomber event happens, a frenzy is created, and Americans happily surrender rights for the illusion of safety. Today’s thugs in charge use a faulty PCR test to inflate Covid numbers, impose useless and psychologically damaging mitigation tactics like masks and distancing, and then tell us how lucky we are that they’re here to save us with a magic shot. But, if the shot doesn’t work or causes injury, you can’t sue them.
Here in New York City, we’re living under a vaccine mandate — almost 20 years to the day of 9/11. Unvaccinated adults can’t attend movies, work out at gyms, visit museums, or dine in restaurants. It’s to protect everyone, of course. Except that unjabbed children under 12 can go anywhere they want. Why? Because science, of course. To question this decree is to expose yourself as a potential domestic terrorist. But the authorities won’t have to find you. Your friends and neighbors will gladly turn you in — to protect everyone, of course. Remember: We’re all in this together! (Even the ACLU is now in favor of mandates.)
Meanwhile, the majority of black and Latino adults in the Big Apple have wisely avoided the shots. Thus, this mandate is limiting the ability of People of Color to live their lives and make a living. Sounds like “structural racism” to me. Not a peep has been heard from Black Lives Matter or any other #woke organization. Some call it coincidence.
There’s a direct line from the anti-anarchist Palmer raids to the smashing of labor unions to the Red Scare to FISA to today’s demonization of anyone who questions the patently insane Covid narrative. There’s also a direct line running through all those, um, helpful citizens who gleefully support the repressive tactics imposed by a cabal of Corporate and State actors.
Unless and until everyday people break free of the programming, there will be more experimental drugs, more invasive technologies, more surveillance, more artificial intelligence, and more transhumanism. You’ll never stop lining up to be scanned, injected, genetically modified, and “enhanced.” There is only one hope and one path away from this dystopian future vision: rediscover the subversive of thinking for yourself.
The post COVID-19 and 9/11 (Never Forget?) first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the America public believe is false.
— William Casey, CIA Director, February 1981
All propaganda succeeds because it satisfies needs that it has first created. If you follow the daily rat-a-tat mainstream news reports and react to them, you will be caught in a labyrinth that has been set to entrap you. You will keep finding that your mind will be like a bed that is already made up and your daylight hours filled with nightmares. What you assume are your real needs will be met, but you will swiftly tumble into the free-floating anxiety that the media has created to keep you on edge and confused. They will provide you with objects – Covid-19, the U.S. “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, the Russian and Chinese “threats,” the need to crack down on domestic dissidents, 9/11, etc. (an endless panoply of lies) – that you can attach your anxiety to, but they will be no help. They are not meant to; their purpose is to befuddle; to make you more anxious by wondering if currently there is any contrast between the real world and the apparent one. The corporate mainstream media serve phantasmagoria on a 24/7 basis, all shifting like quicksand. For anyone with a modicum of common sense, this should be obvious. But then again, as Thoreau put it:
The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.
Perhaps some health expert will soon recommend that 24 hours of sleep a day is optimal, but maybe I am dreaming or being redundant.
For many decades, the corporate mainstream media and the CIA have been synonymous. They were married down in hell and now daily do the devil’s work up above. Now that news is conveyed primarily through digital media via the internet, their power to induce electronic trances has increased exponentially. Linguistic and visual mind control is their raison d’être. Fear is their favorite tactic. And since the fear and anxiety of death is the archetypal source of all anxiety, death becomes a core element in their fear-mongering.In a recent powerful article, Canadian independent journalist Eva Bartlett, a brave and free war correspondent who has reported from inside Syria and Gaza, has shown how the ongoing Covid-19 “fear porn” spewed out by the media has dramatically increased people’s anxiety levels and thrown so many into a perpetual state of near panic. This, of course, is not an accident.
Fear immobilizes people and drives them into a cataleptic state where clear thinking is impossible. They become hypnotized in a “private” space that is actually social, an instantaneous identification with the media news reports that are addressed to millions but feel personal and greatly exacerbate the great loneliness that lies at the core of high-tech society.
As I have said before, the new digital order is the world of teleconferencing and the online life, existence shorn of physical space and time and people. A world where shaking hands is a dissident act. A haunted world of masked specters, distorted words and images that can appear and disappear in a nanosecond. A magic show. A place where, in the words of Charles Manson, you can “get the fear,” where fear is king. A locus where, as you stare at the screens, you are no longer there since you are spellbound.
In a high-tech society, loneliness is far more prevalent than in the past. The technology has imprisoned people behind their screens and now the controlling forces are intent on closing this mechanistic circle if they can. They call it The Great Reset.
They have spent decades using technology to invade and pare down people’s inner private space where freedom to think and decide resides.
They have repeated ad nauseam the materialistic mantra that freedom is an illusion and that we are amazing machines determined by our genes and social forces.
They have reiterated that the spiritual and transcendent realms are illusions.
And they have pushed their transhuman agenda to assert more and more power and control.
This is the essence of the corona crisis and the push to vaccinate everyone.
Drip by drip, year by year, they have cultivated the necessary preconditions and predispositions for this technological fascism with its nihilistic underpinnings to succeed.
When the inner dimension of existence is lost, there is no way to critique the outer world, its politics, and social structure. Dissent becomes a useless passion when people instantly identify with the social. Human nature doesn’t change but social structures and technology do and they can be used to try to destroy people’s humanity. Herbert Marcuse put it clearly long before the latest digital technology:
This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new ‘immediacy,’ however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking – the critical power of Reason – is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition.
Once upon a time, people sat together and talked. They even touched and shared their thoughts and feelings. They conspired in a most natural way apart from the prying eyes and ears of the electronic spies. Now so many sit and check their cell phones. They “connect,” thinking they are with it while not knowing they have been lured into another dimension where frenetic passivity reigns and trance states are the rule.
“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” said Jacques Ellul in his masterpiece, Propaganda. He was being simultaneously accurate and facetious. For propaganda provides a doorway to pseudo-community, a place to lose oneself in the group, to satisfy the need to believe and obey in mass technological society where emotional emptiness and lack of meaning are widespread and the need to fill up the empty self is dutifully met by propaganda, which is a drug by any other name, indeed the primary drug. The empty-self craves fulfillment, anything to consume to fill the void that a consumer culture dangles everywhere. Think alike, buy alike, dress alike – and you will be one big happy community. It is all abstract, of course, even as its rational character is irrational, but that doesn’t matter a whit since the fear of “not going along” and appearing dissident plagues people.
Now we have endless digital propaganda that is the “remedy” for loneliness. Ah, all the lonely people, keeping their masks in a jar by the side of the door together with Eleanor Rigby. They think they know what their masks are for but don’t know why they are lonely or that they have been played with. Masks upon masks are donned to ward off the fear that is pumped out through the electronic airwaves. It is doubtful that many ever heard of William Casey or can imagine the breadth and depth of the propaganda that he and his current protégés in the intelligence agencies and corporate media dispense daily.
“When everything the American people believes is false.” Casey must be smiling in hell.
A grim submissiveness has settled over the lives of millions of hypnotized people in so many countries. Grim, grim, grim, as Charles Dickens wrote of his 1842 visit to the puritanical Shaker religious sect in western Massachusetts. He said:
I so abhor, and from my soul detest, that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of its healthful, graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path to the grave….
And yet, the fundamental things still do apply, as time goes by. Love, glory, loneliness, beauty, fear, faith, and courage. Lovers and true artists, fighters both, resist this machine tyranny and its endless lies because they smell a rat intent on destroying their passionate love of the daring adventure that is life. They feel life is an agon, an arena for struggle, “a fight for love and glory,” a case of do-and-die. They have bull-shit detectors and see through the elites’ propaganda that is used to literally kill millions around the world and to kill the spirit of rebellion in so many others. And they know that it is in the inner sanctuary of every individual soul where resistance to evil is born and fear is defeated. They know too that the art and love must be shared and this is how social solidarity movements are created.
Listen. The fight is on. “This Has Gotta Stop.“
The post The Incantational Bewitchment of Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Both chronic stress and manipulative abuse can lead to an impairment of cognitive functioning. Whenever humans experience ongoing anxiety, their prefrontal cortex will generate increasingly higher levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone that helps us deal with threats and danger. If stress — real or perceived — becomes chronic, we can get stuck in this state of high alert. The brain cannot differentiate between real and fake news. It initiates and sustains the body’s stress response for as long as you feel anxious, tense, worried, or scared.
- The projected overall 2021 poverty rate is 13.7 percent of Americans.
- 78 percent of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.
- Roughly 30 million Americans are without health insurance.
- Americans collectively hold about $81 billion in medical debt.
- Approximately 325,000 Americans (age 12 or older) are sexually assaulted each year — about 1 every 93 seconds. As for those under 12, 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of reported child sexual abuse. Keyword: reported.
- The top three causes of death in the U.S. would be mostly preventable in a society that included economic stability, access to quality health care, protection of the environment, an emphasis on healthy eating habits, and even a modicum of humanity. Instead, each year, heart disease kills about 650,000, cancer kills 600,000, and the third leading cause of death is (wait for it) medical error — taking out at least 250,000 Americans per year. The powers-that-be test their corporate medicines and procedures on us while granting themselves immunity from liability.
According to the American Psychological Association:
- 63 percent of Americans reported that the future of the nation is a significant source of stress
- 62 percent were stressed about money
- 61 percent were stressed about work
- 51 percent were stressed about violence and crime
- 43 percent were stressed about health care
Fifty-six percent said that the mere act of staying informed by following the news causes them intense stress. Three out of four Americans reported experiencing at least one stress symptom in the last month — and this survey was taken BEFORE the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns.
Prices go up. Rents go up. The number of billionaires goes up. Everything goes up… except wages and quality of life. I could go on but you get the idea. Everyday life in the Home of the Brave
— by definition — keeps the vast majority of its residents in a state of deep distress and high anxiety.
High anxiety = high cortisol. High cortisol negatively impacts our executive functioning, e.g.:
- Inability to pay attention
- Decrease in visual perception
- Feeling agitated and unorganized
- Memory loss
- Loss of emotional regulation and rational thinking
This explains why so many of us jammed into supermarkets to fight each other for the right to hoard inordinate amounts of toilet paper when the dangerous and unnecessary pandemic lockdowns were implemented.
When stress is chronic and cortisol is raging, we make exponentially more mistakes. We struggle to complete tasks, we lose concentration, we forget basic information, and we repeat ourselves in conversation. Since life itself in this corrupt culture is a source of relentless anxiety, most of us live in an altered state of inefficiency and confusion. However, this reality is so normalized that it’s become invisible and we often think we’ve got it good. After all, look at all these neat gadgets we own and get to stare at all day, every day.
Think about it: We’re alive because our ancestors were the ones who used anxiety and hyper-vigilance to survive. The more casual or reckless early humans weren’t around long enough to pass on their genes. So, here we are — hard-wired with a hair-trigger fight-or-flight response — and we’re stuck in a world in which simple acts like breathing air or visiting a doctor are unhealthy or possibly lethal. Translation: We are the ideal subjects for a grand social experiment.
If you were a member of the elite class — or the proverbial 1% — wouldn’t you prefer that the masses were pliable, easily controlled, and happy to settle for crumbs? Why wouldn’t you rig circumstances in such a way as to keep billions of potential challengers off-balance, frightened, and divided? What better way to maintain power and control than to implement an insidious form of group manipulation? It’s what cult leaders do. It’s what domestic abusers do. It’s what dictators do. And what are those in power if not abusive and narcissistic sociopaths?
I know, the easiest and most alluring path for you right now is to dismiss this as a “conspiracy.” I get it. Life seems far more palatable if you choose denial. It feels so much simpler if you choose to believe those on top are not abusing you. You may even tell yourself that people never do things like create an oppressive, unfair system just to keep their fellow humans subdued and passive. If that’s your premise, let’s explore it for a few minutes.
Would the folks who run things in God’s Country
ever coerce people through abusive behaviors? You might want to ask the detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay. As reported by the New York Times, the U.S. hired “two C.I.A. contract psychologists” to create a program that used “violence, isolation and sleep deprivation on more than 100 men in secret sites, some described as dungeons.” Tactics included waterboarding and cramming men into small confinement boxes. The idea here was to induce so much chronic stress, it would break their resistance.Human Rights Watch has documented other devious and abusive red-white-and-blue techniques paid for by your hard-earned tax dollars; e.g., mock execution by asphyxiation, stress positions, hooding during questioning, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, and use of detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce debilitating stress.
The Land of the Free
incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. The Center for Constitutional Rights reports that such prisoners are “repeatedly abused by their guards, fellow prisoners, and an ineffective and apathetic system. They suffer beatings, rape, prolonged solitary confinement, meager food rations, and frequently-denied medical care.” All in the name of punishment and pacification.Perhaps the best comparison for America’s brutal molding of its citizens is domestic abuse. The United Nations defines domestic abuse as “a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner.” Read that again: a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control.
Abusers, says the UN, use actions or threats of action to influence others. This includes any behaviors that frighten, intimidate, terrorize, manipulate, hurt, humiliate, blame, injure, or wound someone. Are you frightened by the lack of financial stability? Are you terrorized by the threat of sexual assault or injury by medical error? Does the possibility of eviction, homelessness, and poverty manipulate you into making choices you abhor, choices that violate your deepest values and individual freedoms?
If you declare “the system is broken,” just about everyone will agree with you for one reason or another. But what if it’s not broken? What if it’s running exactly as it’s designed to run? A minuscule percentage of humans make the rules and thus reap virtually all the material rewards. The rest of us suppress our desires, our individuality, and our dreams in the name of survival — in its most meager sense. We’re wounded and intimidated into submission, too programmed and fearful to even think about rebellion… let alone solidarity with all the other victims.
Pro tip: All it takes to flip the script is for each of you to change your mind. Demand more pleasure instead of less pain. It doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it can’t be like this if we take off the blinders and see the ugliness of reality.
“To ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant,” writes Noam Chomsky. “Difficult because the answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are often not only ugly but also painful. To understand the truth about these matters is to be led to action that may not be easy to undertake and that may even carry a significant personal cost.”
Truths like those discussed in this article are ugly and painful but that’s why the big lies are invented in the first place. On that note, I leave you with this from the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley:
The post The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed first appeared on Dissident Voice.Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few.— The Mask of Anarchy, 1819
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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As soon as I heard Biden say, “We will hunt you down,” about the Afghan airport bombers, I knew that the US would immediately kill some Afghan women and children. The US will slaughter women and children at the drop of a smallpox blanket, an H-bomb, Agent Orange or a reaper drone. When the rampaging trillion-dollar-a-year military and surveillance empire feels it has been wronged there is no limit to its blood lust.So today we have the report that the US drone-striked an Afghan family, killing six children, ages two to ten, and three adults. The empire’s mockingbird media will spin this as unfortunate but necessary and, no matter how much evidence the empire offers to the contrary, US serfs will believe that they have rights and freedoms and are a “model” for the world. So another story today won’t faze them any more than dead Afghan children:
Today former New York Times science writer Alex Berenson was permanently banned from the intelligence agency tentacle known as Twitter. Berenson tweeted that the covid vaccines do not prevent infection and transmission — which is exactly what the vaccine pushers themselves have said previously — the vaccines only lessen symptoms — but the little people aren’t allowed to tell truths about lockdowns or vaccines — vaccines developed and marketed at “warp speed” and so obviously harmless, useful and necessary that tens of millions of people have to be bribed, brainwashed, threatened, vilified, censored, entered in million dollar lotteries, thrown out of work and smashed back to feudalism in order for people to take them.
“Covid” is no more going to end than the war on terror ended. It’s too profitable, it’s a gold mine. Covid even has a bigger market — a potential 7 billion customers shot up with yearly boosters. Whenever the government declares a war something — Communism, drugs, cancer, terrorism — the war will be endless, highly profitable for a few, and send the working class majority running in fear farther and farther away from truth, health and answers.
The vaccine is your God. The vaccine is your government. The vaccine will decide how much 1st Amendment you get. The vaccine will decide how much freedom of movement you’re allowed. The vaccine is the be-all and end-all and you will have this piped into your brains 24/7 from every direction. If you want your Social Security checks and Medicare, take the shot. If you want to see a movie or eat at a restaurant, take the shot. If you want to travel, take the shot. If you want out of your house, take the shot. If you want us to let you live at all, take the shot. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” was one of the funniest jokes we ever told you. So long and so many freedoms ago…
Fighting a civil war about this suits us just fine. We have many more things we’d like to do to you as we get ready for the homeland calamity (not security) of the US dollar losing its reserve currency status. Unlike you beggars, we plan ahead. Many of you don’t even know where your next meal or tent encampment is coming from. We want this vaccine as bad as we wanted the Iraq War and if you don’t like it, you’re a traitor to health, freedom, old people and children — you are a pestilence that’s destroying our way of life. It feels really great to concentrate all of our problems on powerless little vermin like you. If you were gone, everything would be all right.
Probably sacrificing a bunch of you will make this plague go away. Follow the science. It’s not like we’re superstitious witch doctors. Wear your mask in the restaurant when you walk to your table because the virus floats up there whether you’re seven feet tall or five feet tall — when you sit down at your table, take your mask off because the virus isn’t there. Basically, the virus likes you sitting down, lying down, shutting up, staying home, shooting up, obeying and making Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos richer. What’s good for them is good for you and what’s good for you is doing everything we say when we say it even if it contradicts something we said five minutes ago — beating you down and getting you mindless is where we want you.
But the one true God is the vaccine. Take the poison, goddamn you. The Rev. Tony Fauci don’t know nothin’ about no gain of function research. Jesus, even people at Jonestown were more cooperative than you are. But we love you, we’re concerned about you. That’s why we prohibited millions of you from working and then watched you go broke, losing your jobs, homes and savings. That’s why we gave you Medicare for All. Oh, wait…
Just take the shot, we’ve got all kinds of things in store for you if you don’t. We’ve only just begun to fight, doctors and nurses will be our armies, they will vanquish you, hospitals will be our castles and the drawbridges will be pulled up on you unvaccinated polluted rabble. And stop being paranoid and libelous about good people like us, we’re the best people, we are so superior to you, it’s infuriating that we even have to explain ourselves — you’d think that we’ve maimed and killed people with DES, Oraflex, Vioxx or the Swine Flu vaccine — or killed innocent women and children with reaper drones. Alarmist know-nothings!
“Two weeks to flatten the curve…” If you were gone, everything would be all right. Hurry up and take the poison, goddam you. We have to make more progress. Tomorrow belongs to us!
The post US: the Sickness Unto Death first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.
— Thomas Paine, Letter to Mr. Erskine, Paine’s Complete Works, Vol. 3, p. 179.
Those men, whom Jewish and Christian idolaters have abusively called heathens, had much better and clearer ideas of justice and morality than are to be found in the Old Testament, so far as it is Jewish; or in the New.
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Footnote 28
All that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the dark ages – has been done in spite of the Old Testament
— Robert Green Ingersoll, About the Holy Bible, (May 19, 2017) Part III. The Ten Commandments
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it for religious conviction.
— Blaise Pascal
Orientation
According to Andrew Seidel, 32% of Americans think it is very important to be Christian to be truly American. But what does it mean to be an “American”? Well, if being an American has anything to do with the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, many Americans are in serious trouble. For example, Seidel writes:
On the first 4th of July of Trump’s presidency, National Public Radio tweeted the Declaration and Trump supporters lost their minds. They were sure NPR was calling for a rebellion against Trump. (80)
But the problem is even deeper because Americans really don’t know the bible very well either:
The bible has been edited rewritten, supplemented, translated, retranslated and mistranslated so many times that claims of immutability are laughable. Yet about 30 percent of Americans, many of them Christian nationalists, believe in the bible literally …word of their god. (115)
In fact, according to Seidel:
research shows that atheists know the Bible better than Christians. (115)
In 1951, 53% of Americans could not name even one of the gospel. In 2010, 49% couldn’t.
Claim
My article is a review of a very powerful book written by Andrew Seidel called The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American. As Seidel says, the purpose of the book is to utterly destroy the myth that the founders of the Constitution were committed to founding a Judeo-Christian nation. The contrast between the Bible on the one hand and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution on the other is so great that, as Seidel says, one is almost forced to choose: are you a Christian or an American?Part of the book is dedicated to exposing the notion that the founders themselves had any sympathy for Christianity. Secondly, it is to show how both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution directly contradict both the Old and the New Testaments. Thirdly, within the Bible the Ten Commandments are shown to be anti-Constitutional. Lastly, the book shows how it was only through a propaganda campaign during times of national fear such as The Civil War and the anti-communist scare that right-wing preachers smuggled in Christian propaganda onto coins and paper money (In God We trust); and into the Pledge of Allegiance (One nation Under God).
Qualifications
This book does not argue that religion should be absent from our culture. It only says that religion should be absent from our constitutional identity. In fact, research shows that in societies that have a separation of church and state, people are more religious than when there is no separation. Seidel argues that when there is no separation, people take religion for granted.
Secondly, there is no simple relationship between separation of church and state and whether someone is religious or not. Someone can be religious and endorse the separation of church and state. Thirdly, while some founders were deists and others were theists, even though some were theists does not prove they used their religion to found the nation. People can make a distinction between their private and public political commitments. Fourthly, founders who were Christian were only supportive of the teachings of Jesus. There was no implication of support for any Catholic or Protestant institutions or teaching.
Qualifications about my being an American and supporting the Constitution.
It would be natural to think that in attacking Christian nationalism as being un-American, I identify with being an American. I don’t. My purpose in using the term “un-American” is to offer an immanent criticism of Christian nationalism. Immanent criticism means criticism from within the principles of my adversary. What I am saying is you don’t even live up to your own principles of being an American by failing to abide by the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. An externalist criticism would be to criticize Christian nationalism from a Buddhist, Muslim or socialist perspective.
Also, in defending the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence against the Bible, it doesn’t mean I am uncritical of the of either of these American documents. As a result of reading Seidel’s book, I do have a newfound respect for the importance of separating Church from the State. There are clear limits set on religion’s invasion of science or politics. While secular laws could be much tighter, the justification for insisting on the separation is very well thought-out and it is still very important over 200 years later.
Were the Founders Christian?
Seidel uses many sources to show that the painting of Washington praying in the snow was a piece of artistic Christian propaganda. Washington was not a good Christian. He attended religious services irregularly, he didn’t kneel during prayer and often skipped out of Church early. He refused to have a priest at his deathbed. Jefferson took a more militant stand against Christianity. He attempted to rewrite the Bible cutting out the references to supernaturalism, miracles and slaughter in the hopes of salvaging something. Jefferson said later that his efforts were like “pick out diamonds from a dunghill.” Jefferson and Madison were very critical and suspicious of organized religion and the “priestcraft” that accompany them. Some founders treated the Trinity with contempt, calling it Abracadabra.
When the founders mention “The Creator” the Christian nationalists break out in celebration, declaring victory. Hold your horses and bugles! Nowhere is Jesus or Yahweh specifically mentioned. Virtually all cultures have a creator god who are more or less involved in his creation. The same is true with the Golden Rule. Christian nationalists act is if this rule was unique to Christianity. Most cultures in the world have their own version of the Golden Rule often dating to thousands of years before Christianity. Furthermore, when god was named it was “nature’s” god. Seidel rightly points this is more likely to resemble the god of the wind or the trees than the description of a biblical god. Nature’s god is a pagan god, not the Judeo-Christian monotheistic god.
The founders engaged in what Seidel calls “strategic piety”:
Writers were wise to choose language that would take advantage of the majority religiosity but still remain wholly nonsectarian. It was designed to be acceptable to deists and orthodox alike. (88)
In psychological terms the founders were playing to people’s confirmation bias- our innate selection and interaction of evidence to support our existing beliefs. (90)
Do You Need God to be Good?
For themselves, the founders thought their morality was sufficient to guide them and religion was unnecessary. However, some of the founder thought religion was necessary to keep the masses moral. For many founders, religion was not the source of morality, but a substitute for it. Without religion, the masses could not be moral. But the founders were not fussy about which religion filled the bill. Washington and Adams suggested that any religion, not only Christianity, can replace morality.
So the Founding Fathers were elitists. But were they were right about the capacity of large populations to prosper and live morally without religion?
Do Secularists Produce Worse Societies than the Religious?
The short answer is – no. Seidel points out:
Social science now unequivocally shows that the less religious a society, is the better off it is. We now know that religion is not necessary for society to succeed. (49)
Within America the states with the highest murder rates tend to be highly religious – Louisiana and Alabama. States with the lowest rates are the least religious the country, like Vermont and Oregon.
Of the top 50 safest cities in the world, nearly all are in relatively non-religious countries. During the Holocaust, the more secular the people were, the more likely they were to rescue and help persecuted Jews.
The least religious countries:
Have lowest rates of violent crime and homicide
Are the best places to raise children
Have lowest levels of intolerance vs race
Have the highest in women’s rights
Are the most prosperous
Within the US, those states that are the most religious have societal ills:
Highest rates of poverty
Highest rates of obesity
Highest rates of infant mortality
Highest rates of teen pregnancy
Lowest level of educated adults
Highest rates of murder and violent crime (49-50)
There were Christian Colonies but no Christian Nation
Christian nationalists are right to point out that during the colonial period most of the colonies were religious, whether they were Puritans, Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, or Quakers. However, when the founders wrote the Constitution, they kept these religious beliefs outside the politics of founding a nation. The religions of the colonists did not help them to overthrow the British. Every colony was part of the British Empire, which was subjected to a Christian king. Colonial history also precedes the separation of Church and state which was part of the Constitution. The colonies were a British outpost, subject to a divine king. This is exactly the political theology the founders were fighting against. Table A is a contrast between the structure of life during colonial history vs after the declaration of independence. Please take a look at Table A.
The Bible as a Piece of LiteratureThe Bible is unlike other literature. Seidel points out that unlike like Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, Aesop’s fables and the legends of Greek and Roman mythology, which stood on their own merits, the Bible’s reputation was imposed and propagated over thousands of years with fire and brimstone. It was then reinforced regularly through weekly ceremonies. It is an authoritarian document which doesn’t have rhetorical appeal based on reason. Instead, the Bible is a document people must live by and bow down to, no matter what.
The un-American, Authoritarian Nature of the bible
Exclusivity and obedience
Right out of the gate the bible is exclusionary, rather than inclusive. Yahweh picks the Jews as his “chosen” people, whereas in the Constitution, at least theoretically, all are welcome. Whereas in one of Paul’s letters Christians are told to obey the authorities, in fact, they are servants of God. For example, Abraham is commanded by God to murder his son Isaac as an offering. God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for looking back to see the destruction. God demands the killing of first-born children unless there is lamb’s blood on the family door frame. This contrasts with the Declaration’s note to rebel against the authorities when they are tyrannical. Why? Because “we the people” rule.
Monarchies and divine dictatorships
In the Bible God does not rule by consent of the governed. Neither is there a separation of powers for governing, God rules by decree. God loves monarchies. Seidel points out that the first two books of the bible are titled “Kings”. Many of the heroes in the bible are kings, specifically, Saul, David and Solomon. Whatever rights people have been given by God. Likewise, God can take away those rights. Following the Enlightenment people have human rights which no political or religious authority can take away. In terms of following rules, the Judeo-Christian God of Christian propaganda says that God lays down the laws once and for all. In fact, with different versions of the Bible the laws change. Under the American Constitution laws can be changed by amendments. Objectively, the origin of the laws was from an Early Iron Ages society 1200 BCE years ago. The Constitution is close to 250 years old, while drawing from Greek and pre-Christian Roman law.
Faith and reason: how do we know?
If faith is defined as believing in something in spite of evidence, the Founding Fathers had no room for faith and that is how they came to understand the Constitution. They went through an evolving process of dialectical reasoning internally and debating, compromising and tinkering over months. Most of the founders tinkered with inventions, kept up with the sciences and saw politics, itself, as a science.
For those who followed the Bible, the Bible was given to them completed. God did not encourage any input from humanity. You simply had faith. You believed in the Bible in spite of evidence. Belief in miracles is just one instance. So too, when it comes to Christian nationalists in politics, there is no room for compromise or tinkering. Since they believe they are acting in the name of God, compromising with non-believers is not being true to God. On the whole, Seidel says:
what a Christian government looks like: exclusive, exclusionary, divisive, hateful, severe and lethal. (106)
Crime and punishment
When it comes to punishment the Bible paints with broad brush strokes. The punishments are inflexible and extremely violent. God destroys Canaan as well destroying all those believing in other gods. Disobedient children are stoned; so are wizards and women having premarital sex. Heretics and witches are tortured and followers are told that disobedience will be dealt with fire for eternity. The Constitution, on the other hand, simply strives to make punishment be proportionate to the crime, and punishments are limited to this lifetime.
Guilt and innocence are handled in opposite ways. In the Bible, whole groups are condemned as guilty and the guilt is inherited across generations. In the Constitution, there is no collective guilt. Individuals are found guilty and that guilt is not inherited by their sons and daughters. Finally, in the Bible it is not very important that innocents suffer and are killed, provided the guilty party does not get away with anything. In the Constitution the situation is the reverse. It is better that the guilty get away than for the innocent to be punished unjustifiably.
Origin and destiny
For the Bible, life on earth is a reform school. Why do people need to be reformed? Because in the mythological Garden of Eden, Eve ate the fruit the devil offered her even though God forbade it. Humanity was condemned from that time forward. While self-improvement is possible, ultimate redemption can only come from the sacrifice of Christ for humanity. In terms of future generations of humans, that is not the concern of Christian nationalists. The idea is you earn a ticket to the Promised Land and the Devil take the hindmost.
I’m afraid that the Constitution is far less dramatic. Individuals, according to Locke, are blank slates. Locke said parental socialization does matter, but in the end, it is the individual’s responsibility for what they make of themselves. There is no need for redemption either in this life or the next. However, the Constitution, unlike the Bible, was written for future generations of humanity on Earth. Please see Table B for a summary.
The Authoritarian Nature of the Ten CommandmentsStrange gods and idolatrous images
The Ten Commandments is only a small part of the Bible, but they allow us to contrast in a very concentrated form extreme differences between this sacred document and the Constitution. The first commandment is a direct attack on religious freedom. “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” The Constitution guarantees the freedom to worship any God, not just the Judeo-Christian one. The second commandment forbids making images. This iconoclastic mania on the part of the Protestants resulted in the destruction of centuries of magnificent artwork. The Constitution, on the other hand, allows for making pubic images to honor its heroes. Any trip to the Lincoln memorial or a trip to Mount Rushmore will reveal that the non-superstitious use of images is possible and can bring great inspiration.
Blasphemy and coercive church attendance
The third commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy god in vain”, is really about controlling language. There is a double standard about blasphemy. Jews can blaspheme heathen deities, but it is a capital crime to blaspheme Yahweh. In contrast, the Constitution makes a distinction between words and deeds. It says in effect “sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me”. The Constitution says criticism of all religion is legal. The fourth commandment to “Keep holy the Lord’s Day” is more sinister than it seems. Seidel says this is not about rest for the weary. It is really about shepherding the population to churches on days when most people are not working. Priests complain about poor attendance at church. What better way to herd people into church then by first saying even the Lord needs to rest, and so do you. But no sooner do people discover they are entitled to a day off than they find themselves in church listening to sermons. While there is nothing in the Constitution which tells people not to work, there is also nothing in the Constitution that forbids workers from taking matters into their own hands. They can legally join unions, and strike in order to have some time off. As the saying goes, it was labor that gave Yankees the weekend.
Honor your parents no matter how authoritarian or abusive they are
The fifth commandment says honor thy father and mother. Sounds pretty good except that the foundation of it is to honor your biological parents, no matter what they do. No matter what the parents do they should be honored. Though this has happened all too late in Yankee history, there are now child-protective services to allow children to get away from abusive and violent parents. Not all parents are worthy of respect. Furthermore, the Bible is talking out of both sides of its mouth when they talk about this because Jesus also makes a big deal about leaving your parents to come follow him.
Clannish, parochial rules towards murder, stealing and lying
Seidel chunks together the sixth, eight and ninth commandments and attacks them for their clannish, exclusive nature. Whether it is killing, stealing or perjury, the Bible only forbids these things when it is done to fellow Jews and Christians. With non-Jews or Christians, all bets are off. You can kill, steal or lie in dealing with people from other religions. In the case of the Constitution, killing, stealing or lying is punishable no matter what religion one is as well including people who have no religion at all.
Patriarchal repression of sexuality
The seventh commandment about committing adultery has an even narrower interpretation than the previous three commandments. In this, even within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the laws of adultery do not apply to married men, but only to married women. Seidel says fathers can sell their daughter into sexual slavery but only to another Israelite. Men can get away with rape, if they pay the victim’s family 50 shekels and then marry the victim.
The Christian Bible tries to halt and repress their flock’s interest in sex by promoting celibacy. We only have to look at the record of the Catholic Church and its priests to reel in disgust over such a monstrous policy. Seidel points out Judeo-Christianity tries to kill the sex instinct, distort it and vilify it to ensure loyalty to the leader, not to one another. This is a common tactic that male cult leaders use with their followers. It builds up spiritual debt. Lusty, guilty sinners are bound more tightly to the person who can expiate their sin, Jesus, and later, priests. In the Constitution there are laws against adultery, but they apply to men as well as women and there are laws that apply to rape and sexual slavery that are punishable.
The tenth commandment is not about actually fooling around with your neighbor’s wife. Rather, it’s about lusting after your neighbor’s wife even if you do nothing. This is where the 10 Commandments crosses the line into Orwell’s thought crime. Evil thoughts are the same thing as evil actions. Being angry is the same as being violent. As Jefferson said, the powers of government apply to action not opinion. You cannot be thrown in jail for having an opinion. Please see Table C for a summary.
Smuggling in Christianity via Theological PropagandaIn God We Trust on coins during the Civil War
“In God We Trust” was smuggled onto coins in 1863 in the middle of the Civil War and was pushed through between 1861 and 1864.
“Evangelical Christianity” invaded and polarized the political debate in the cases leading up to the Civil War. It turned the democratic process which relies on compromise into a battle over sacrosanct issues of faith.” (262).
“One nation indivisible” became “one nation, under God, indivisible”. As Seidel says this change places religion, one of the most divisive and murderous forces in history, right in the middle of a badly needed unifying sentiment.
To choose something so divisive to replace a unifying sentiment in the middle of a war that actually hindered the nation shows hubris typical of religious privilege. (272)
Christianity promotes slavery
Appeals to the Bible justified revivals in the slave trade and slave prisons. The pulpit and the auctioneers’ block stand in the same neighborhood. (267)
Christian resistance to slavery was nowhere to be found when the colonies instituted slavery in the 1600s. (268)
It was used at a time of national peril and danger when people were too busy dying for the Constitution to protect it from a rear-guard assault, to promote their personal religion. (272)
Bible thumping anti-Communists
In 1954 the Pledge of Allegiance was changed. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all” became “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Since the communists were atheists, it was hoped that the communists would get the message that they were not welcome.
A year later “In God We Trust” was added to paper currency in 1955.
What better way to spread the missionary spirit within Yankeedom than by putting it on currency everyone has to use? US currency would effectively become a Christian missionary. (271)
In his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America Kevin Kruse exposes the following coordinated Christian attacks on the secular world:
- 1953 National Day of Prayer – Congress agrees
- 1953 National prayer breakfast
- 1953 Congressmen propose 18 separate resolutions to add “under God” to the pledge
- 1954 “In God We Trust is placed on a US postage stamp
- 1954 Prayer room in US capital is added. It added a stained-glass window depicting the lie that Washington prayed in the snow at Valley Forge
- Congress added “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance
- 1955 Eisenhower signs a bill placing “In God We Trust” on US paper currency
- 1956 Cecil B. Demille’s movie The Ten Commandments is released
- 10 commandments monuments made of granite are gradually erected on government property around the country
Soon the words “American and Christian” became synonymous.
Billy Graham wedded evangelism and anticommunism in the Christian anti-communist crusade. Religious stars such as Fulton Sheen, Oral Roberts, Billy James Hargis and Norman Vincent Peale all achieved new prominence in the early and mid 1950s. They bombarded TV, making people sick with fear. ‘To be an American is to be Christian. All atheists are communists’. (284)
Circulating coins, paper money and flag-waving pledges weren’t enough for nervous anti-communists. Soon time off from a secular education was granted for religious instruction.
In 1952 the court decided that releasing children from public schools classes to receive religious education did not violate the Constitution. Religious release time allows churches to piggyback the machinery of the state and mandatory attendance to inculcate religion. It was meant to help religious sects get attendants presumably too unenthusiastic to go to religious class unless moved to do so by the pressure of this state machinery. (286-287)
Conclusion
Seidel’s work challenges Christian nationalists to face the fact that the founding documents of the United States as a nation directly contradict the Ten Commandments and, more generally, the Bible. These Christians would have to trade their fundamentalism for a far more liberal theory of religion to square with the Constitution. On the other hand, secularists can be somewhat assured that while they are under attack by the right-wing religious forces, the Constitution with all its class biases, lack of limits on capitalism, its racism and sexism, is still an important support document, mostly for its clear separation between Church and State.
• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
The post The Bible vs the Eagle: Why Christian Nationalism is un-American first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.
― Thomas Jefferson, (Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville(
It is time to recalibrate the government.
For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.
By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.
We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.
This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.
These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.
That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.
This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.
“The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”
Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.
There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.
The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.
So what can we do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?
It won’t be easy.
We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.
This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.
We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.
We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.
We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.
We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.
In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.
That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.
In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.
The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.
In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.
Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.
We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.
Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.
Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.
Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?
As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”
Clearly, our leaders have stopped listening to the American people.
We are—and have been for some time—the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government—from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.
We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American. We are relatively expendable in the eyes of government—faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars.
What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?
In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.
These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.
This way lies madness.
Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.
How to do this? It’s not rocket science.
There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.
Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.
Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.
Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.
That’s their job: make them do it.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.
The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.
The post Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Citoyen Chouette ArchiveLiberte-Egalite-Fraternite: under Macron’s pass sanitaire guillotine?
For the few of us who are students of history, and its aficionado travelers, meaning those who muse and wonder at times about how significant figures of the past would view our often dire predicament, it is rather obvious that, for example, the founding fathers of the French Revolution such as Danton, Mirabeau, St Just, and Robespierre would be shocked and angry by what has recently happened to their Republic. Even France’s last great statesman General de Gaulle, if alive today, would have likely been deeply enraged by the state of affairs in a country he loved and fought for with his heart and soul.
In the era of President Emmanuel Macron, who is merely a cynical actor, figurehead, and France’s public relation person-in-chief passing for a statesman, but who truly is a loyal servant of global corporatism, our revolution’s founders, as well as the subsequent republics’ principles, like the one of the Fifth Republic of de Gaulle, have been insulted, slapped in the face, and assaulted by some sort of insidious and limp dictatorship, under the cover of a health crisis. A complex authoritarian strategy using the pretense of shielding French citizens, often against their will, in this new lucrative conceptual war.
Citoyen Chouette ArchiveThe post France Neoliberal Macron: Vanguard of a Covid Global Corporate Dictatorship? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This war on a virus is even more advantageous than the previous conceptual one: the war on terror. In General Macron’s war, syringes are the weapons delivery system of choice, needles like billions of little worker bees at the ready to jab you for an invitation to control freedom, and a moderate slice of happiness: the joy once you have obtained the French COVID pass Sanitaire to go to museums, movie theaters, inside restaurants, and avoid wearing masks outdoors.
French citizens should be aware that the very motto of our dear Republic, Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite is under the assault of king Ubu Macron and could, without a strong popular resistance, be decapitated by the cold blade of Macron’s virtual guillotine. In a form of dictatorial grab of power for the benefit of big biotech and big pharmaceutical companies. Macron’s pernicious pass sanitaire, just approved by France Assemblee Nationale, is a power grab by global corporate imperialism. Of course, all of it done with a wink, a tan and a smile! All of it done for the greater good of ungrateful “Gaullois refractaire” French citizens, in the continuity of the pesky Gilets Jaunes. Science lover poseur Macron, an enlightened modern day Julius Caesar, is bent on defeating obscurantism armed only with syringes to deliver his brand of salvation through vaccines. Those who have been in the forefront of the street protest in France to resist this hybrid neoliberal dictatorship personified by Macron are the still active Gilets Jaunes.
Photo Credit by Marco VerchFrom war on terror to war on virus: maximum profit for big tech and pharma
Forget about the good old so-called war-on-terror, fading slightly since its start in September 2001 but still a nice little threat in the background, big enough to keep the military-industrial complex flush with cash. A new conceptual global war was needed: the global war on COVID virus came at the right time. This one is even more promising, as it potentially concern the entire world population or 7.5 billion people. The COVID war has also been an easy sell for the general population, as it can be viewed as a war of necessity with humans “all in it together.” It can also provide an astronomical stream of revenue by making vaccination mandatory. In terms of profit from pandemics, vaccine companies have not been the only beneficiaries of this COVID gold rush.
Citoyen Chouette ArchiveBig tech companies have racked up billions of dollars at a furious pace since March 2020 and the various restrictive measures of lock-downs and curfews. The likes of Amazon, Zoom and streaming media have handsomely benefited from the imposed partial move to a virtual world. As matter of fact, worldwide stock markets have become junkies to this trend: addicted to the war on COVID benefits.
Needless to say, this vast stream of income is also potentially endless because of the virus mutation into different variants. One loses track of this Greek alphabet catalogue. It was Alpha first or the English variant, then Beta or the Brazilian one, more contagious than the rhythm of Samba, and now it is the Delta variant originally called Indian mutation. As the virus mutates, as they all do, it could potentially take us all the way to Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. The side effect of the Delta variant’s rapid spread has been to allow Macron, and soon many others, head-of-states or figureheads, to tighten back the screw on fundamental liberties.
Rule by decree, states of emergency, arbitrary measures, absurd,or not, are a form of abuse of power that neoliberals like Macron are really enjoying. It is an insidious form of dictatorship under a benevolent disguise of the enlightened rulers forcing their citizenry’s behavior. In France a law is about to pass, in parliament, to make vaccine for healthcare workers across board mandatory. If they do not comply by September 15, 2021, they will be fired. In the case of France, this should be viewed as a prelude to mandatory vaccination for the entire population.
Photo Credit by Roger Jones.Killing personal freedom and liberties
In France, government controlled mainstream media critiques rightly calling the Macron administration’s sweeping COVID policies a “dictature sanitaire” or healthcare dictatorship have been labeled conspiracy theorists. This is pure disinformation, as what defines a dictatorship, semantically speaking, is a government, elected or not, forcing policies on its citizens. It is done under the premise that it is an action for the benefit of the common good, but nonetheless it is the exercise of authoritarian power on a population.
Through the COVID-19 pandemics, governments have learned that, if fear and paranoia were prevalent enough, and they run a lot of polls in their respective population, any dictatorial measures could be implemented without risking much social turmoil. A great majority of people did, and would likely comply again to other lock-downs, wearing masks outdoors, curfews, but without much protest. Now the final frontier is mandatory vaccination from 12 years-old on, which will give you some sort of health passport. If approved. this pass would give people the right to live almost free. This new type of passport, given to you as a reward to your obedience, will give you access to a mythical promised land often called by Macron “the return of the happy days!”
Photo Credit by Marco VerchCOVID fear mongering: subterfuge to hide climate collapse threat
There is no doubt, for any rational minds, that contesting the reality of the COVID pandemic is pure conspiracy theory. More than that, it is full blown lunacy! There are two radical anti-vaxers thought processes here: firstly, deny the existence of the pandemic entirely; secondly, which might be even more disturbing, an unshakable belief that the virus was man made, and released on purpose by the like of Fauci, Bill Gates, and a hand full of mad scientists. And, of course, here’s the icing on the cake: they’re all acting on behalf of a cabal of globalist pedophiles. These are the kinds of conspiracy theories that currently get you banned on social media.
As much as they are colorfully insane, this type of COVID-19 conspiracy theory denials are not, in essence, any worse than climate change crisis denial. The difference being that your average run of the mill climate change denier won’t get banned on social media. The nature of the capitalist global corporatism system, where neoliberals like Macron are leading figures, is not to create a crisis from scratch, which is either an impossible or very challenging task, but instead to take advantage of crisis either to further general policy goals, or in most cases benefit punctually from them like an opportunistic predator. This predatory aspect is after all the very nature of capitalism.
Photo Credit by Jeanne MenjouletBesides the numerous advantages that Macron, his political colleagues and their patrons from the billionaire class have found in the COVID crisis, as explained above, not only huge financial gains for pharmaceutical companies, but also for tech companies involved in this sort of forced quantum leap to the virtual world. In brief, this has been a chance to brutally shock the global economy. Not to make it more equal or sustainable, but quite exactly the opposite: COVID has been an opportunity to concentrate wealth even more in fewer hands with a net result of more social inequality.
Because in today’s press one story is always used to hide another, the pandemic has been also a blessed opportunity to hide, not the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room, but instead the 10,000-ton Godzilla wrecking the planet: Godzilla, in this case, being the growing certainty of an upcoming global climate collapse.
Photo Credit by Jeanne MenjouletOf the “Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite motto of the French revolution, all the great values have been trampled and gutted. With lock-downs, curfews, mandatory masks and vaccine, Liberte is now gone. In the era of Macron, a former investment banker, nobody can talk about Egalite in a country which is on its way to become almost as unequal as the United States; and last but not least, how could anyone see any Fraternite left? The community sense of brotherhood died quite some time ago in France. There is no brotherhood left, no deep sense of connection within the nation, we are not “all in this together”.
In reality, there is only all of us, common men and women worldwide, against the billionaire class that controls the levers of the global corporate imperialist machines, with their political servant facilitators acting as heads of state. The specific names within the political class are of little significance since they represent the identical interests. It’s a bit like the names given to the COVID variants. The Delta variant, portrayed as the top threat right now, started more modestly as India’s mutation. Who knows, perhaps in some billionaire class circles, Emmanuel Macron is just called factor X, LV or MANU.
Citoyen Chouette Archive
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Police made sweeping arrests of Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens after protests rocked the country in May during Israel’s 11-day attack on Gaza. Officers were documented beating demonstrators, and in some cases torturing them while in detention. Police also failed to protect the Palestinian minority from planned, vigilante-style attacks by far-right Jewish extremists.
This was the damning verdict of an Amnesty International report published last week. The findings indicate that Israeli police view the country’s Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population, as an enemy rather than as citizens with a right to protest.
The report echoes what Palestinian leaders in Israel and local human rights groups have long said: that the default policing of the Palestinian community in Israel is racist and violent. It reflects the same values of Jewish supremacism seen in the Israeli army’s brutal treatment of Palestinians under occupation.
The contrast between how police responded to protests by Palestinian citizens and supportive statements from their leaders, on the one hand, and to incitement from Israeli Jewish leaders and a violent backlash from the Jewish extreme right, on the other, is stark indeed.
More than 2,150 arrests were made following May’s inter-communal violence. But according to reports cited by Amnesty, more than 90 percent of those detained were Palestinian – either citizens of Israel or residents of occupied East Jerusalem.
Most face charges unrelated to attacks on people or property, despite how their demonstrations were widely portrayed by police and the Israeli media. Rather, Palestinian protesters were indicted on charges such as “insulting or assaulting a police officer” or “taking part in an illegal gathering” – matters related to the repressive policing faced by the Palestinian minority.
‘Torture room’
Amnesty cites repeated examples of unprovoked police assaults on peaceful protesters in cities such as Nazareth and Haifa. That contrasts with the continuing indulgence by police of provocations by the Jewish far-right, such as their march through Palestinian neighbourhoods of occupied East Jerusalem on 15 June, during which participants chanted: “Death to Arabs” and “May your village burn.”
Amnesty also documents testimony that Israeli police beat bound detainees in Nazareth’s police station – setting up what the local legal rights group Adalah has described as an improvised “torture room”.
In addition, a protester in Haifa appears to have been tied to a chair and deprived of sleep for nine days, using torture techniques familiar to Palestinians in the occupied territories.
In contrast, Israeli police were alerted in real time to messages from Jewish far-right groups about precise plans to smash up “Arab” shops and assault Palestinian citizens on the street. And yet, police either ignored those warnings or were slow to respond. An investigation by Haaretz has further suggested that police subsequently failed to use film footage to identify these Jewish vigilantes and, as a result, made few arrests.
This picture of police turning a blind eye to planned Jewish violence echoes scenes from the time of the protests. Footage showed police officers allowing armed Jewish thugs – many bused in from settlements – to wander freely around Palestinian neighbourhoods during a curfew on the city of Lod. There was even footage of police and Jewish far-right extremists conducting what looked like joint “operations”, with police throwing stun grenades as Jewish extremists threw stones.
Jewish politicians who incited against the Palestinian minority – from Israel’s former president, Reuven Rivlin, and Lod’s mayor, Yair Revivo, to far-right legislator Itamar Ben-Gvir – have faced no consequences.
Charged with ‘terror acts’
Instead, police arranged what amounted to a provocative, entirely unnecessary assault by special forces on the home of a Palestinian community leader, Kamal al-Khatib, to arrest him. The deputy head of the northern Islamic Movement was charged with supporting terrorism after he expressed pride at what he called the minority’s solidarity with the people of Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem.
And last week, apparently too late for inclusion in the Amnesty report, Israel’s racist policing moved in new directions.
Small numbers of Palestinian citizens suspected of attacking Jews were charged with “terror acts”, in some cases without any physical or DNA evidence tying them to the crime. In several cases, the defendants were indicted based on confessions made after prolonged interrogation by Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet.
Israel’s legal system is treating inter-communal violence as an act of terror when Palestinian citizens are involved, and as an ordinary law-and-order issue – assuming it is dealt with at all – when Israeli Jews are involved.
Underlining this distinction is the decision to place Palestinian citizens of Israel under administrative detention, jailing them without charge and not allowing lawyers to see the supposed evidence against their clients. This draconian move – with one such order approved last week by Defence Minister Benny Gantz – is usually reserved for Palestinians under occupation, not Israeli citizens.
Settling scores
In its report, Amnesty pointed to public statements from Israeli police commanders indicating that the current harsh crackdown is really about “settling scores”. And in part, that is true.
Nearly two decades ago, a judicial-led public inquiry concluded that Israeli police treated Palestinian citizens as “the enemy”. Nothing has changed since. Police regard it as their primary job to protect the privileges of the Jewish majority by keeping the Palestinian minority crushed and obedient, as a subordinate community inside a self-declared Jewish state.
The eruption of protests in May, which caught police off-guard, was implicitly a sign that they had failed in that role. Police interpreted the demonstrations as a public humiliation for which “deterrence” needed to be urgently restored.
Israeli politicians, including the then-police minister, Amir Ohana, as well as the Jewish far-right, viewed the protests in much the same light. They argued at the time that police were being held back by legal niceties, and that it was the job of Jewish citizens to back police by taking the law into their own hands.
Yet, the “settling of scores” with the Palestinian minority relates to a separate matter. External observers, such as Amnesty, tend to notice Israel’s racist policing only when direct violence is used against Palestinian citizens. But the Palestinian minority’s experience of discrimination from police is much broader.
For years, the minority has been taking to the streets in large numbers to protest against not only the violent policing of dissent, but a complementary near-absence of policing towards Palestinian communities in Israel when it comes to tackling crime.
The harsh repression seen in recent weeks contrasts strongly with police inaction as a crime wave has swept Palestinian communities, with each year bringing a record number of violent deaths. Both Palestinian and Jewish criminal gangs have exploited the policing void in Palestinian towns and villages, knowing that they are free to act as long as the violence is “Arab-on-Arab”.
Even during the Covid-19 lockdowns, Palestinian community leaders kept up the pressure, leading go-slow convoys of dozens of cars along Israel’s busiest roads to draw attention to Israel’s racist policing priorities.
These presented a different kind of humiliation for police. Unusually, commanders were forced onto the back foot, swallowing unrelenting criticism and condemnation for failing to deal with crime in Palestinian communities. It even became one of the top issues for Palestinian parties in Israel’s string of recent elections.
Now, police are having their moment of revenge. “You want more active policing? We’ll give you more active policing. See how you like this!” seems to be the new message of the mass round-ups.
Jewish supremacism
The reality is that both kinds of policing towards Palestinian citizens – the violent policing of dissent, and the lack of policing of crime – are rooted in the same, ugly ideology of Jewish supremacism.
This is the same supremacism highlighted in a report early this year by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. It broke new ground in the human rights community by explicitly identifying Israel as an apartheid state, one that treats Palestinians as inferior, whether in the occupied territories or inside Israel, and Jews as superior, whether in Israel or in the illegal settlements.
The new Amnesty report is the latest snapshot of a society where everything follows that apartheid logic, including policing. That should surprise no one, because apartheid is, by definition, systematic.
Most Jewish Israelis, whether they identify with the left or right, have shown little interest in the lethal crime wave that for years has washed over Palestinian communities near their own, despite the regular protest campaigns by the Palestinian minority.
And now – through their silence – most ordinary Jewish Israelis and their politicians have demonstrated that they support, or are at least indifferent to, the current crackdown by police on the Palestinian minority. The deeper causes of May’s protests, and the violent backlash from the far right, appear to have provoked little self-reflection.
The Israeli Jewish public seems equally unconcerned by the fact that Jewish far-right thugs have chanted “death to Arabs” on their streets, that videos show police cooperating with those thugs, or that police have been making mass arrests of Palestinian citizens for weeks on end, while failing to search for the Jews who were filmed attacking Palestinians.
Belligerent occupation
The truth is that Israeli police get away with racist, violent policing because wider Israeli Jewish society approves. Police regard themselves as defenders of a Jewish supremacism that many ordinary Jewish citizens see as their birthright.
The Palestinian minority hoped that it had opened a tentative conversation with Israeli Jews both about the responsibilities of police in a state claiming to be a democracy, and about the right of Israel’s 1.8 million Palestinian citizens to personal security.
There was much fanfare at Mansour Abbas’s United Arab List becoming last month the first party representing Palestinian citizens to enter an Israeli government coalition, ousting former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power. Like other Palestinian parties, Abbas put changes to the racist police culture in Israel at the top of his platform.
But any signs of progress have been all too readily snuffed out by a reassertion of Jewish supremacism by police and their Jewish far-right allies, and by the silent complicity of wider Israeli Jewish society.
Israel had a chance to address its racist policing policies, but that would have required the difficult work of examining the much wider apartheid structures that underpin them. Instead, most Israeli Jews are happy to reassert the status quo – oppressing all Palestinians under Jewish rule, whether they are subjects of a belligerent occupation or third-class citizens of a Jewish state.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post Israel: Racist, violent policing is at the heart of apartheid first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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This Spring The Economist published various stories about the impending economic boom and I immediately wanted to know what planet (or drugs) these forecasters were on. Headlines of positive after-effects abound but read through to the end of some of these stories and the economic windfall is not all that the headlines have foretold: “Enjoy the coming boom while it lasts. Before long, there may be a twist in the tale.” Other media outlets have been spinning a similar story with CNBC telling its readers, “The economy is just starting a boom period, where second-quarter growth could top 10%, and 2021 could be the strongest year since 1984” and The New York Times relating that economists are predicting “a supercharged rebound that brings down unemployment, drives up wages and may foster years of stronger growth.”
This is economic astrology where if you are a Libra you could read the impending economic situation as going either way as if American psychic Jeane Dixon were back amongst the living telling us: “You are going to receive some unexpected news.” Back on planet earth, the economy is not only far from booming but even the Financial Times is cogently relating that businesses are about to face even more serious issues of financial pain: “Almost a third of global restructuring experts said that more than half of their clients that needed financing during the pandemic in 2020 would find themselves in financial distress again…”
In England, 11% of pubs are predicting business failure if the restrictions are not lifted next week and last week Andrew Lloyd Weber announced he would open his six theatres “come hell or high water” after having to spend £1 million a month to keep in with lockdown measures. Even if one might lose sympathy for someone in Lloyd-Webber’s position having to remortgage his home in Belgravia, to think that smaller theatres are shutting their doors permanently due to lockdown. Already Waitress on West End and Frozen on Broadway announced last year that they are closed permanently. Nightclubs in the UK are to remain closed and musical events are also being threatened as the current rules allow for capacity limits of 50% (or 1,000 maximum) indoors. It is clear that for many in the arts and entertainment industries the economic future boom is but a dream.
Despite the need for lockdown to control the spread of COVID-19, there are serious questions that are being asked by many of the British vaccinated business owners who don’t see that the lockdown measures are sending a clear message with many claiming that the government is contradicting the message of vaccination as allowing for an opening of the economy.
I recently interviewed journalist Laura Dodsworth whose book, A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic, addresses how SPI-B (the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour), a team of behavioural scientists working inside Whitehall that advise SAGE and ministers, has worked to create a climate of fear amongst the British population to encourage compliance with lockdown. Criticising the totalitarian tactics of terror that suppress rational thinking across the population, Dodsworth’s book details the government’s use of behavioural psychology and the weaponisation of fear in order to treat people as if we were systems to “manage” underscoring how this form of fear-mongering has raised serious questions about the society being created and the government that thinks using fear as a form of social control is acceptable. Giving copious examples as to how the British government has used the pandemic to divide society along the lines of compliance where masks are used to signal obedience, Dodsworth notes the misleading use of statistics, bad science and the media complicity in spreading misinformation.
Dodsworth is not alone in noting the contradictions between government messages and the weaponising of fear. Behavioural scientists like Patrick Fagan have come out swinging over how the British government weaponised fear while causing what Fagan contends as even greater damage in what he calls “Operation Fear” writing, “With our decision-making outsourced, we can now all relax into our Netflix, Deliveroo and PornHub, and leave it to the state to do all that hard thinking stuff for us (phew).” Despite Fagan being on the right of centre, the voices from across the political spectrum questioning the state of economic and psychological wellness during lockdown for the poor and struggling have been mounting as have the criticism of mainstream media that has recently redacted its own stories about the laboratory hypothesis.
We have seen Hollywood stars singing to us, the many videos of people serenading their compatriots from their balconies and myriad advice columns like “Bored at home? 36 fun & productive things to keep you entertained.” But what about the many who haven’t the time or money to afford Netflix or online language courses? Or the fact that businesses are legally mandated in many countries to pay their workers while being locked down?
I recently interviewed business owners in the US and Italy about the impacts of lockdown on their businesses. What was most shocking to learn aside from the economic toll handed to smaller businesses was that every single owner had many stories of clients who are afraid to come into their shops and some even afraid to leave their homes. Where Stephen Martin’s recent article addresses “eugenical fascism” and the reality that lockdown deaths, Dodsworth’s book similarly notes that COVID-19 deaths are never put into a comparative framework such that these deaths have been used by the media and the authorities to exploit fear while creating a quite dystopian future.
Still, not all businesses are suffering. Large sectors of the online retail market are doing quite well largely due to low overhead and online sales. Online gardening sites and retailers operating through larger online venues like Amazon Marketplace are also experiencing an uptick in business. One unexpected market boom during the pandemic has been in the vaping industry where businesses like cartridge thread battery have seen a 200% increase in revenue which the company chalks up to people quitting cigarettes over the past sixteen months. 2020 saw the UK’s largest online shopping sales ever, at $180.39 billion in sales just two places behind China and the US.
However, working-class jobs are rarely done online and these are the workers most at risk of being exposed to the virus and the loss of earnings. So while major media speaks confidently about the impending economic boom while backtracking from its claims last year that the “lab leak hypothesis” was conspiracy madness, it now seems that this virus may very well have been the result of “gene splicing” in a laboratory environment. It’s no wonder that most of us don’t know what to believe aside from the negative balance in our bank accounts.
We were warned in the early days of the pandemic that COVID-19 poses a serious threat to a very specific demographic and governments across the planet were slow to react. And when they did react, most employed draconian and psychological tactics in order to scare us all into compliance. Major media kept in step with misinformation at times tending to look away from obvious contradictions in policy such that even Italians are laughing at current colour regimes meant to mitigate a virus that the wealthy can avoid simply by taking a vacation to Sweden where they can go about maskless as the plebes back home suffer the mask mandates in 38˚C heat.
Even while Boris Johnson’s vaccine rollout is being lauded, there is no good reason to pat him on the back as Patrick Cockburn notes, “Johnson’s responsibility for the vaccination campaign is shaky, but his culpability for these mass deaths is not in doubt.” Still, there are many questions to be answered as to why governments chose to use psychological tactics to frighten us into our homes while telling us that the economy is set to boom.
As recent history demonstrates how American psychologists were involved in the Global War on Terror through practising “enhanced interrogation” methods—what many psychologists contend was the aiding and abetting in torture—we must ask questions as to why we are now being prepped for an economic revival when most of us are looking for money in the sofa cushions to buy food.
The post The Lie of the Booming Economy and “Operation Fear” first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
