radiofree.asia

Category: narrative matrix

  • Assange Exposes The Empire’s True Face: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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    Julian Assange is a journalist who’s been imprisoned for doing journalism on war crimes, by an empire that claims to defend journalists and oppose war crimes.

    Assange and his persecution expose the giant plot holes in every story the western power structure tells about itself. About its love of free speech and the free press. About its opposition to tyranny. About its wars and why it wages them. Assange exposes the empire’s true face.

    And in that sense it’s interesting that the empire made the decision to jail and silence Assange, since in doing so it exposed its own tyranny and criminality far more than WikiLeaks could have ever hoped to.

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    Assange said, “It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers.” If you accept this as true, you must also accept that there are precisely zero good journalists anywhere in the western mass media, and that Assange is the greatest journalist who has ever lived.

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    The moderate position on Ukraine is to hold both Russia and the US empire responsible for their respective roles in starting and continuing this war. That’s the middle ground. But this position is regarded as freakish fringe extremism in the western mainstream and you’ll be accused of literally conducting psyops for a foreign government if you voice it, because the western mainstream is just that freakishly extremist.

    The mainstream position in the west is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and that Moscow is 100% responsible for this conflict in every way while the US is just an innocent little flower who just wants to protect freedom and democracy. When you actually spell out what the mainstream position on Ukraine is it sounds like a silly fairy tale for children, but that’s what all the most influential western pundits, politicians and government officials are actually saying. That’s how bat shit insane things are.

    The Overton window has been shifted so far in support of NATO warmongering that this middle-ground position is now regarded as fringe extremism, so they just debate things like whether or not cluster bombs should be used to fight this war that is obviously 10000% Russia’s fault. As is often the case this dynamic has already been well-described by the elderly scholar who we all love to share our opinions about:

    “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
    ~ Noam Chomsky

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    The claim that NATO is a “defensive” alliance that’s set up to promote peace is a lie that’s refuted by a swift glance at recorded history; in terms of evidence it’s crazier than saying there are alien aircraft in our skies. But you constantly hear respected pundits saying it.

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    The US presidential race is that wonderful season American liberals set aside to remind socialists that they hate them far more than they hate the right and would cheerfully burn the whole country to the ground before they’d share one iota of power with them:

    The only people who hate leftists more than rightists do are liberals, which is a bit funny because rightists think leftists and liberals are the same.

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    It’s trippy how people pour such effort into disputing whether the planet is warming when the biosphere is showing us many, many other signs of looming collapse. They completely ignore the ocean dead zones, plummeting insect populations, loss of wildlife, trees, fertile soil etc.

    I mean, what specifically is the claim here? That there’s a big evil plot across the entire scientific field to lie about warming, but all the other signs of environmental collapse are legit? Or are those fake too? If so, why only focus on the one message that benefits fossil fuel companies?

    Obviously there are powerful people looking to exploit global warming to shore up wealth and power; that’s to be expected. It would be surprising if that wasn’t happening. None of that changes the need to drastically alter the way humanity operates on this planet right away.

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    One reason it’s so hard to set up beneficial systems is because in negotiations manipulators always push for the absolute maximum amount of gain they can possibly grab while good people only push for a normal, human-sized amount of space for themselves. You see this constantly in union negotiations and politics alike: people come to the negotiation table with demands that are viewed as “reasonable” by those in power and then are negotiated back halfway from that point of “reason” as a “compromise”, while those with the power grab up everything they can get their mitts on and walk back only if forced to. This has a ratchet effect over the years which sees ordinary people losing more and more power to the ruling class.

    That’s not going to change until normal people stop letting the manipulators set the bar of what’s “reasonable” and start pushing out space for themselves with as much force and entitlement as bad people. People are going to have to stop coming to the negotiating table with their compromise, and instead show up with the demand to take back everything that was stolen from them — and more — with as much force as necessary.

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    All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The US Is War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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    The US won WW2 and then immediately plunged into the Cold War. The US won the Cold War and then immediately set to work destroying the Middle East. The US destroyed the Middle East and then immediately started another cold war in preparation for another world war. The US is war.

    A normal country wages war with the goal of getting back to peacetime. The US wages war with the goal of getting to the next war.

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    The “Uyghur genocide” narrative is a lie, the “debt trap diplomacy” narrative is a lie, the “social credit score” narrative is a lie, they’re lying about Taiwan, and they’re lying about China trying to conquer the world. They lied about every other disobedient nation, and they’re lying about China.

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    You cannot understand the geopolitics and major conflicts of the 2020s without understanding that the US empire has been actively amassing military threats in the immediate surroundings of its top two rivals that it would never tolerate anyone else amassing near the US.

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    How can anyone still support the idea of progressive reform in the Democratic Party after watching AOC transform into Nancy Pelosi before their very eyes?

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    I used to dismiss the idea of lesser-evil voting because it causes people to vote for evil political parties, thereby ensuring they vote for continued evil. Now I just dismiss electoral politics altogether, because you’ll get evil no matter how you vote since “voting” is itself a fake diversion to help manufacture the illusion of freedom and control.

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    It’s crazy how we let wealthy corporations run the media who then spend all day every day telling us we should definitely support political norms that are friendly to wealthy corporations.

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    A normal person has a conflict with someone and begins communicating and working to sort out the true from the false. A manipulator has a conflict and immediately begins working to establish narrative dominance. This is true of individual sociopaths and sociopathic empires alike.

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    Too many people look at authoritarian measures like government surveillance, online censorship etc in terms of how it will directly affect them personally rather than how it shapes society as a whole. Sure you yourself may not be directly affected by surveillance or censorship, but you have to live in a society where people’s thoughts, words and behaviors are being strictly regulated by authority in ways that serve the interests of authority. You have to live in a civilization of brainwashed, power-serving automatons instead of free thinkers who come up with creative solutions to our problems, who hold power to account, and who put the powerful in check when they don’t serve the interests of the people.

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    Civilization is a game. Like any other game, there is a points system set up to determine how well everyone is doing. Like any other game, there are people who fare better and get more points than others. And, like any other game, the rules are completely made up.

    The rules consist of made-up financial and economic systems which make up the “points” system of this game, along with made-up laws and government policies, and made-up cultural norms and societal expectations.

    One major difference between the made-up game of civilization and other made-up games is that players who don’t do well suffer real-world consequences as a result. They can go hungry or be made homeless if they don’t get enough of the made-up points. They can wind up in prison if they try to get some points in ways that are against the rules. They can even get military explosives dropped on their homes by other players if they happen to live in the wrong part of the world.

    This despite the fact that it’s all made of language — made of words. All of civilization is just a collection of stories we’ve all agreed to pretend are true. Stories about how money works. How trade works. How labor works. How society works. How we all need to be moving, organizing and consuming on this planet we were born on.

    The good news is that, like any other game, we are free to change the rules if enough players decide that’s what they want to do. It’s all made of narrative, and the narratives are only as real as we agree to pretend they are. If the current agreed-upon stories aren’t working for us, we can collectively agree to start playing by another set of rules, and if enough of us decide to do this there’s not really anything anyone can do to stop us.

    Those who benefit from the current rules of the game understand this and do everything they can to make sure we keep playing by the current rules. That’s why so much of our media is dedicated to normalizing status quo politics and manufacturing consent for the actions that are necessary to maintain the current order of things. Our information ecosystem is continually saturated with the narratives of the people who get the most points in this game we are playing.

    But again, that’s all just narrative. It’s all just story. They put so much effort into manufacturing our consent because they know they absolutely do need our consent, because we can collectively decide to change the rules of the game at any time.

    So the bad news is that we’re in a rigged game that’s stacked against us for the benefit of a few manipulative players. The good news is we don’t have to play anymore, and can choose to start playing something else whenever we are ready.

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    All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

  • The Self-Made Man Is A Myth: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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    Anyone who is capable of honest self-reflection and critical thinking understands that the “self-made man” is a myth of our culture; that anyone who amasses a fortune does so on the backs of many other people whose work made it possible, and found the opportunity to do so because of the circumstances they happened upon by chance of birth, conditioning and sheer dumb luck.

    And it’s worth highlighting that this is also true of all other personal circumstances, including those that people in this slice of the online community might take pride in. One doesn’t for example become aware of the manipulations of the powerful and the deceptions of the media because they are particularly smart and virtuous, they do so because they were lucky enough to find information from others which helped them form this understanding, and because their personal conditioning allowed them to take that information in and let it inform their worldview.

    Similarly, one doesn’t wind up opposing capitalism because of any personal specialness or righteousness; one finds themselves opposing capitalism because they happened upon socialist ideas after having meandered through a life which gave them the conditioning necessary for them to seriously consider those perspectives and take them on board. If their life had unfolded differently, through no fault or virtue of their own, they never would have happened upon those ideas, or if they had they would not have been receptive to them.

    I said “Anyone who is capable of honest self-reflection and critical thinking” above, but even those gifts come upon us largely by sheer dumb luck, brought to us by other people in the form of information and conditioning throughout our lives.

    My point is we’re all just kind of muddling our way through this thing, and our successes and failures (by whatever metric we measure success and failure) are due more to the unfolding of humanity’s collective consciousness than any brilliance or defectiveness on our own part.

    Obviously we must all try to do our very best with the hand that we were dealt in life, but it’s probably a good idea to harbor some compassion for those who don’t get it as right as we do in our eyes. We were all born into a world saturated with propaganda and dominated by abusive systems, and ultimately the degree to which we are able to see our way around in that world says as much about how good or bad we are as a seed landing on rich or sandy earth says about the quality of the seed.

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    Compare the way US empire managers shriek about the faintest whispers of the possibility of a Chinese military training facility in Cuba with their self-righteous indignation at the suggestion that Russia and China have any business opposing US activities in Ukraine and Taiwan.

    This is why you can just dismiss empire simps who decry the notion of spheres of influence regarding Russia and China and insist Ukraine and Taiwan have every right to become US proxies if they want. That simply ignores reality, as evidenced by US attitude toward the same thing.

    Demanding that Russia and China tolerate behavior from the US that the US would never tolerate from Russia or China is just demanding that the world subjugate itself to the US empire, yet you’ll see people who call themselves “anti-imperialists” doing exactly that all the time.

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    The west loves Ukraine so much that for years to come its children will be getting their limbs blown off by undetonated cluster munitions and being born severely deformed due to depleted uranium rounds.

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    I’m sorry I sincerely cannot for the life of me take seriously the position that the problem with the world’s most evil and murderous military is that it has gotten too “woke”.

    The position is absurd on multiple levels. Like oh no, a “woke” US military won’t be able to win wars, like all those wars the non-woke US military was winning in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Rightists bitch about America’s “woke military” claiming that a rainbow flag war machine will be too soft to win wars, when really they’re just mad they lost the culture war. They lost it so badly that even their last hyper-masculine institution can’t afford not to be inclusive.

    In reality, US military recruitment is hurting too bad for them to be able to reject anyone, and the reason for those recruitment struggles has nothing to do with “wokeness”. It’s because being in the US military sucks balls and everyone knows it.

    Nobody honestly believes a trans drone pilot can’t kill disobedient foreigners like anyone else. When rightists whine about America’s “woke military”, they’re really whining about LGBTQ people being accepted even in the last places they’d have ever expected them to be accepted.

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    Conservatives are everything they used to make fun of liberals for being: whiny, easily offended crybabies who run around looking for nonsense excuses to feel offended and act like victims. They’re a bunch of ridiculous, permanently triggered culture warriors and drama queens.

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    The deepest and most worthy rabbit hole you can possibly dive into is the question of identity. Not gender identity or racial identity or what ideological -ist or -ism you identify with, but the nature of identity itself.

    Deeply investigating the nature of self in your own actual experience will lead to a radical transformation in the way life is experienced and lived, because it turns out it’s not happening in the way our minds, our culture and our language tell us it’s happening. At the end of the rabbit hole it is discovered that there is no “I” anywhere to be found in your actual experience, and that it was just an unquestioned assumption that we built unhelpful psychological constructs around due to a fundamentally erroneous premise.

    Once this is seen life gets a lot less stressful and a lot more enjoyable, because it’s experienced as happening freely on its own without happening to anyone who could be diminished or damaged by its outcomes. In the end we discover that the ego can be transcended not by heroic feats of saintly austerity or by living in an ashram in India for decades, but by simply examining the nature of the ego and finding out if it actually exists in the first place.

    This is something you can verify in your own personal experience, and you should never take my word for it or the word of anyone else. The rabbit hole’s right there, right now. If you’re open to the possibility of losing yourself and your whole world in your quest for truth, hop in.

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    All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Featured image via Adobe Stock, formatted for size.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Ask Who Benefits: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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    It is the Republican Party’s job to expand the US military, rob and oppress the working class, serve US plutocrats, facilitate ecocidal capitalism, and foment division among the electorate. It is the Democratic Party’s job to do these same things while blaming it on Republicans.

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    One of the weirdest things to happen last year was the entire western political/media class deciding to start pretending Ukrainian Nazis aren’t Nazis based on literally nothing whatsoever, just because it’s convenient, and a substantial portion of the population playing along.

    This is still happening, by the way.

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    Part of the problem is that westerners live in a pre-revolutionary society that we’ve been duped into believing is a post-revolutionary society. We self-righteously look down at our noses at other nations and pity their lack of freedom and political sophistication, when in actuality we’re all deeply enslaved and the global south is the only place where anything real has been happening politically.

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    The Wall Street Journal has a new article out about how US war veterans are no longer recommending their kids join the military, which is cutting the war machine off from an important recruitment “pipeline” because the children of military families make up the majority of military recruits.

    I’ve seen a lot of right wingers sharing the article with comments to the effect of “hurr hurr, that’s what you get for having a woke military,” but they plainly didn’t read the article, because it lists many factual and entirely valid reasons why military families have stopped steering this new generation toward military careers, and none of them have anything to do with “wokeness”. Here are some excerpts:

    • “After the patriotic boost to recruiting that followed 9/11, the U.S. military has endured 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan with no decisive victories, scandals over shoddy military housing and healthcare, poor pay for lower ranks that forces many military families to turn to food stamps, and rising rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.”
    • “Deeper problems soldiers report include moldy barracks, harassment, lack of adequate child care and not enough support for mental health issues such as suicide.”
    • “Families or those who live off base can find expenses outstrip income. More than 20,000 active-duty troops are on SNAP benefits, otherwise known as food stamps, according to federal data.”

    Recruiters are struggling to meet their goals, partly due to veterans not recommending their kids enlist because it’s a shitty job no loving parent would wish upon their children, and partly because the US war machine can’t compete with Carl’s Jr.

    One recruiter is quoted as saying “To be honest with you it’s Wendy’s, it’s Carl’s Jr., it’s every single job that a young person can go up against because now they are offering the same incentives that we are offering, so that’s our competition right now.”

    I view these as positive developments. Hopefully everyone stops enlisting in the world’s most murderous military.

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    Everyone got mad at the Boy Scouts of America because they groomed boys for sexual molestation when they were supposed to be grooming them to murder impoverished foreigners in the US military.

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    Ask who benefits from the continued emphasis on electoral systems that never succeed in bringing about real change.

    Ask who benefits from the continued emphasis on culture wars over class war.

    Ask who benefits from people being continually herded into two mainstream political factions which both support empire, oligarchy and authoritarianism.

    Ask who benefits from the mass media continually focusing on the misdeeds of nations their government doesn’t like while ignoring their own government’s abuses of the needful, the marginalized and the disobedient.

    Ask who benefits from ordinary people being too busy getting the bills paid to learn about what’s going on in the world.

    Ask who benefits from those who ask these questions being labeled crackpots and conspiracy theorists.

    Ask who benefits from the widespread assumption that how things are is the only way they can be.

    Ask who benefits from the widespread assumption that the status quo is inevitable and resistance is futile.

    Ask who benefits from your beliefs about what’s possible and what’s impossible.

    Ask who benefits from each of your beliefs about the world.

    Ask who benefits from each of your beliefs about humankind.

    Ask who benefits from each of your beliefs about yourself and how you should be.

    Ask who benefits from these beliefs not just among the powerful, but among the people you know in your own life. Who put that belief in your mind, and why might they have done so?

    Any time you are presented with a narrative about how things are in a way that asks you to believe it, question who would benefit from that belief, whether it’s a large-scale narrative about the world, or a small-scale narrative about yourself and your own life.

    _________________

    All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Featured image via Adobe Stock.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The USA’s Covert Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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    In an interview shortly before his death Daniel Ellsberg said the US runs a “covert empire”, which is a really good way of putting it. A giant globe-spanning cluster of nations consistently moves in alignment with the dictates of Washington, but they all keep their official flags and their official governments, so it doesn’t look like an empire despite functioning as one in every meaningful way.

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    Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023)

    Oil on canvas. pic.twitter.com/kHBxRIML32

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 16, 2023

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    We really don’t pay enough attention to the fact that all the most influential media platforms are owned and operated by extremely wealthy people who have every motive to keep us all focused on culture wars and electoral politics so we don’t focus on class war and direct action.

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    It’s surreal how saying the FBI constantly grooms mentally ill people to get involved in terrorist plots makes you sound like a kooky crackpot, but it’s actually a well-documented fact that we just don’t talk about much for some reason.

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    The only time Trump was praised by the mass media was when he bombed Syria. The only time Biden was condemned by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.

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    The New York Times publishing an article which criticizes Ukrainian Nazis for wearing Nazi insignia, not because Nazism is wrong but because it’s bad war propaganda, was one of the most New York Times things that has ever happened.

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    The decision by some Ukrainian soldiers to wear patches with Nazi icons threatens to reinforce Russian propaganda used to justify the invasion. It also could give the symbols mainstream life after the West's decades-long efforts to eliminate them.https://t.co/TdhO6pKpFG

    — The New York Times (@nytimes) June 5, 2023

    The article even admitted that western reporters have been avoiding acknowledging the problem because they don’t want to play into “Russian propaganda”, and have actually asked Ukrainian soldiers to remove Nazi patches before taking photos. If you choose not to report something because it would hurt your side’s propaganda efforts, then you are not a journalist, you are a propagandist.

    What’s funny about the “Nazis in Ukraine” controversy is that Nazis in Ukraine is not even the strongest argument against western proxy warfare in that nation. Western propagandists could just say “Yes Ukraine has a Nazi problem but we believe the benefits of protecting Ukrainian democracy outweigh the negatives of some skinheads getting rocket launchers here and there” or whatever, and most westerners would swallow it. The only reason propaganda outlets like The New York Times feel the need to keep diddling this issue and manipulating people’s minds and gaslighting everyone about it is because they’re so habituated to pushing for complete and total narrative control on US foreign policy, so it never occurs to them to cede even the slightest amount of ground or yield even the most obvious admissions to avoid looking ridiculous.

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    The world is ruled by thugs and tyrants, the most thuggish and tyrannical of whom pour a tremendous amount of energy into convincing their populations that only other countries are ruled by thugs and tyrants.

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    If people and digital records survive the Earth’s next act of nuclear warfare, let the record show that we were seeing clear warning signs every day and overwhelmingly ignored them.

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    President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus said that the country has started to receive nuclear weapons from Russia, a long-threatened provocation and the latest sign of the worsening relationship between Russia and the U.S. https://t.co/XrExrtoXoN

    — The New York Times (@nytimes) June 14, 2023

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    Saying “America didn’t bomb Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” It’s a distinction without any meaningful difference, no matter how hard they try to spin it as an independent act that the US would’ve had no control over.

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    There’s no basis for the belief that today’s CIA and FBI are any less depraved than they were in the days of Dulles and J Edgar Hoover.

    Seriously, what’s changed since that time? There was a cold war back then? There’s a cold war now. The laws, rules and policies were drastically changed and the people who did those bad things were punished? They were not.

    There’s no basis whatsoever for the belief that the CIA and FBI did bad things in the past but don’t do bad things currently. It’s believed because it is comfortable, and for no other reason.

    We learn about bad things the CIA and FBI did “in the past” because they stand nothing to lose by us learning about bad things they wanted to do and already did. Later on what’s happening today will be “in the past” and we’ll learn what they were up to in this slice of spacetime.

    All the conditions which existed during the most notorious acts of depravity by those agencies are also the case today. Cold war. Hot war. Dissident groups. The fight for US hegemony. That’s all happening currently, and there’s no reason to believe they’re any nicer and cuddlier about it today.

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    US accuses Chinese warship of unsafe maneuver in the Taiwan Strait; China accuses US warships of being on the wrong side of the fucking planet. https://t.co/RtPFgXoW5e

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 4, 2023

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    If western governments need to keep ramping up censorship, propaganda and the persecution of journalists in order to defend western freedom and democracy, is it really freedom and democracy? And is it worth defending?

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    The only way to get a good read on what manipulators are really about is to ignore their words and watch their actions, because they only use language to manipulate and extract what they want from people. Apply this to politicians and governments, and to narcissists in your life.

    Example: if you ignore the US government’s stories about its love of freedom and democracy and rules-based order and just look at its actions, what you see is a violent and tyrannical regime which works continually to destroy and subvert nations around the world which disobey it.

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    One of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to learn in life is that projection cuts both directions. We project our bad qualities and motives onto others, wrongly assuming that they have the same character flaws as us, but we can also project our positive traits onto others who might not have them.

    In a world full of narcissists, sociopaths and manipulators, this is important to be aware of — whether you’re looking at politicians, governments, or your own interpersonal relations. In the past I’ve suffered serious consequences for assuming that someone must have healthy and relatable reasons for their harmful actions toward me and projecting my own good motives onto them, when really all they wanted was to use and subjugate me.

    You can’t assume that someone is operating from the same inner motivations as you, whether those imagined motivations are negative or positive. Some people just suck, and do things you would never do because of motives that would never even occur to you.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Featured image by Treehill via Wikimedia Commons.

  • Propaganda Restricts Speech More Than Censorship Does: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

    ❖

    The biggest impediment to free speech is people’s belief that they have it. Not censorship. Not refusal to platform critical voices. Not the war on journalism. It’s the fact that most people are propagandized into saying what the powerful want them to say, and don’t know it.

    What makes our dilemma so historically unique is that we live under an empire which makes extensive use of the post-Bernays science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to trick its subjects into believing that they are thinking, speaking, and gathering information freely. In this way our rulers suppress any revolution long before it starts, not by making people’s lives better, nor by violent repression, but by manipulating people into thinking there’s nothing to revolt against, because they have no rulers and they are already free.

    In our civilization most people are thinking, speaking, gathering information, working, shopping, moving and voting exactly as our rulers want them to, because these mass-scale psychological conditioning systems have been imposed to keep human behavior aligned with the empire. We are trained to believe we are free while behaving exactly how our rulers want us to behave, and to look down on other nations and shake our heads at how unfree their people are.

    What the average mainstream partisan really means when they say they want “free speech” is they want to be able to regurgitate the power-serving narratives that were put in their mind by the powerful. That’s not free speech, it’s deeply enslaved speech. But they can’t see it. By design.

    This problem can be addressed simply by bringing awareness to it in every way we can. Manipulation only works if you don’t know it’s happening, so drawing attention to it and describing how it happens in as many ways as possible helps people start seeing through it.

    ❖

    If the culture war looks like a psyop to you, it’s because it is. I’ve seen some people calling it a “distraction” — and to be sure it serves the powerful to keep everyone arguing about subjects that threaten the powerful in no way — but it actually goes a lot further than that. The imperial propaganda machine uses culture war wedge issues to herd us into mainstream political factions like a shepherd uses sheepdogs, always keeping us too evenly divided to accomplish anything and reinforcing echo chambers to aid in propaganda.

    Culture war wedging is a big part of the way they herd people into the ideological funneling system I’ve been talking about lately, which keeps the overwhelming majority of politically engaged people thinking, speaking and voting in alignment with the empire. As many people as possible are herded into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful. Anyone who can’t be herded into either of these mainstream factions is instead herded into fake “populist” factions, which eventually corral them back into the mainstream factions. Those few politically engaged people who can’t be herded toward any of these groups are so small in number that they can simply be marginalized and denied any sizeable platform from which to spread their ideas, and “democracy” does the rest, because the majority are supporting the status quo.

    Care about protecting trans rights? You get herded into this mainstream faction over here. Trans people freak you out a bit? You get herded into that mainstream faction over there. In this way people are corralled into political parties that are designed to serve the empire.

    If you can suck someone who’s critical of militarism and empire into the culture war, suddenly they start believing absurd things like that opposing “the woke agenda” is as important as opposing war, or that electing Ron DeSantis would be a devastating blow to the Deep State. Now instead of focusing on the US empire’s nefarious behaviors and critically viewing all mainstream politics, that person is focused on Dylan Mulvaney and will throw their support behind any mainstream politician who says Target needs to stop selling rainbow shoelaces during Pride Month.

    You see people herded into both mainstream political factions over and over again with this stuff they keep hammering day after day after day, thereby bolstering the power structure the parties which represent those factions are designed to support. They do it because it works.

    None of this means the issues raised by the culture war psyop are unimportant, it just means it’s a psyop. It’s something the powerful leverage to their advantage, and it’s important for us to be acutely aware of that and direct our political energy and attention accordingly.

    ❖

    The fact that US presidents are always murderous monsters regardless of party or platform becomes less strange and mysterious when you stop thinking of the United States as a good or neutral player on the world stage and recognize it as the hub of an empire fueled by human blood.

    That’s why I just ignore US presidential elections these days except to point out what a sham they are. A lot of well-intentioned people still hold out hope that the US can be made healthy by the right president, but anyone who would do so will never get near the presidency.

    The operation of a globe-spanning empire is too important to be left in the hands of voters. Nothing will ever be permitted to happen that could impede the operation of the empire as long as those who benefit from that empire are able to prevent it from happening. There’s just too much power riding on it.

    ❖

    It’s so destructive and degrading how the products of mainstream culture (movies, shows, music etc) are produced not based on how edifying, transformative and adventurous they can be, but on how much money they can make. The arts which get the most traction in our society wind up being not those which call us into the higher aspects of our being and encourage us to explore the bounds of human experience and potential, but those which deliver a quick ego hit and pump the brain full of fast reward neurochemicals.

    It’s been this way for generations, and it’s all people know. That everything is confined in this way starves the populace of all nourishment of mind and heart, and it narrows the scope among artists on their ideas of what is possible and what’s worthwhile. It has shrunk the confines of what artists have been willing to explore by orders of magnitude, and it’s resulted in a mainstream culture that is shallow, power-serving and uninspired from top to bottom.

    Humanity would look much different and the world would be a much better place if this hadn’t been happening all these years. Capitalist culture is brain poison.

    ❖

    Someday the leaders of ecocidal corporations will be put on trial for their crimes against our planet, and their defense that they did it to generate profits for their shareholders will be treated the same as war criminals saying they were just following orders.

    __________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Featured image via Adobe Stock.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Word “Presstitute” Is Insulting (To Sex Workers): Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

    ❖

    Responding to a war caused by NATO expansion by expanding NATO.

    Fighting Russian authoritarianism by increasing censorship.

    Fighting Russian propaganda by increasing propaganda.

    Pursuing peace by rejecting diplomacy.

    Defending Europe from Russia by bombing European pipelines.

    ❖

    Twitter has dropped its entirely appropriate designation of NPR as “state-affiliated media”, instead creating an entirely new designation, “Government Funded”, which it has also now given to the accounts of outlets like the BBC and Voice of America. You still see establishment guard dogs decrying this new label for western propaganda outlets on nonsensical pedantic grounds, but really the problem is that they’re not receiving the same “state-affiliated media” label as outlets like RT and Press TV despite being equally propagandistic. The label is designed to provide the false impression that western propaganda outlets are not propaganda outlets.

    It’s actually very revealing how huffy and indignant empire apologists are getting over the “Government Funded” label, because it shows that they see it as Twitter’s responsibility to facilitate western propaganda. Imperial spinmeisters have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that propaganda is something that only happens to other people, and any move that might disrupt that illusion even slightly is met with hostility.

    ❖

    It’s one of the most shameful jobs in the entire world to spend your time doing critical reporting on the enemies of your government while ignoring your own government’s far more egregious crimes.

    People talk about sex work as shameful, and in America they’ll even shame you for working a low-paying job like McDonald’s, when on all our screens every day we see people selling their own government’s ugly foreign policy in a line of work that is entire universes more shameful.

    That’s why I dislike the use of the word “presstitute” to refer to these people. Not because it’s insulting to the press, but because it’s insulting to sex workers.

    ❖

    Over and over and over again we see US officials talking very differently about a hot war with China over Taiwan than they talked about hot war with Russia over Ukraine. This is absolute screaming insanity, and it should enrage everyone.

    The US has no place flirting with the possibility of an Atomic Age world war over a longstanding inter-Chinese conflict that’s none of the west’s business. It should enrage us all that they’re talking about throwing our sons and daughters into the gears of that horrific war.

    ❖

    China must be stopped before it imposes totalitarian diplomacy on Ukraine and authoritarian peace in the middle east.

    We’ve got to stop China from achieving peace over there so we don’t have to stop it from achieving peace over here.

    ❖

    It’s a completely false narrative that the US is “polarized” politically. On the most consequential matters both factions are always in enthusiastic agreement; the “divisions” are limited to superficial culture war issues whose outcomes will never affect anyone with real power.

    If anything the US could stand to be far more politically “polarized”, because it would mean actual political opposition happening in the world’s most powerful country instead of nonstop kayfabe combat while the empire marches on uninterrupted regardless of who’s in office.

    ❖

    What would it mean if humans are the lone intelligence in the universe? If there are no aliens, no gods, no conscious AI waiting to emerge in the future? Well, it would mean we’ve got a lot more responsibility, for one. Nobody’s coming to the rescue. It’s on us to fix this mess.

    And I think that’s probably a big part of what drives the belief that we’re not alone — not because the evidence is particularly strong, but because of how intimidating the prospect is.

    That’s what I find when I look within myself, anyway. When I ask myself “What if we’re alone in this?” the very first response that comes up within me is, “Ah shit.”

    Because think about what that would mean. Think about it and feel about it. Not only would it mean we’re permanently on our own when it comes to fixing all our massive problems, but we’ve also got a massive responsibility not to fuck this all up. If we’re the only intelligent life in the universe, then we’ve actually got a serious responsibility to try and preserve that life.

    I mean, if we wipe ourselves out with nuclear war or environmental collapse, or with some other wonderful technology-based emergence we haven’t invented yet, then that’s bad enough by itself. But if on top that we also wiped out the only intelligent life in the universe, it’s almost infinitely worse, no? It means we didn’t just inflict that horror upon ourselves, we inflicted it upon the future of the entire universe.

    And I just think that’s probably what drives a lot of the belief that there’s something else out there. The fact that we’re all kind of intimidated by the responsibility which would come with our being alone.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Featured image via Adobe Stock.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • It’s Immoral To Serve In An Immoral Military: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

    ❖

    Deciding to enter the military is only morally justifiable if your country’s military is used in a moral and just way. There’s a weird, power-serving taboo against saying this which is born of the idea that it’s more important to protect the feelings of “our troops” than to discourage people from enlisting in the most murderous war machine on earth, but it’s true.

    This doesn’t mean that those military personnel are more responsible for the depravities they help enact than the government officials who sent them there, and it doesn’t mean they’re irredeemably evil — it just means they’re doing something immoral. We all do immoral things and make bad decisions from time to time. All it means is they need to course correct.

    Yes, many of those who enlist in the military are just doing what they feel they have to do to make some money in an unjust system, but it’s very revealing that people don’t tend to extend this same charitable sympathy to those who turn to crime out of the desperation of poverty. Most people in prison are guilty of far less egregious offenses than the things US and allied military personnel are routinely ordered to do, because they didn’t commit their crimes at the behest of a powerful government.

    And yes, to be sure those who join the military are pummeled with lies and propaganda by the culture they grew up in about what their military is and what it does, but many people who commit crimes are pummeled with false narratives and false promises by the people around them as well. That’s exactly how joining a gang tends to work, for example. Those who Charles Manson manipulated into committing murder weren’t exonerated just because they were manipulated. Manipulation is a mitigating factor in assessing morality, but it doesn’t prevent military service from being immoral any more than it prevents Mafia murders from being immoral.

    Unless you live in a nation which uses its military solely to protect its own borders and never to abuse its own citizenry, then if you choose to enlist you are doing something immoral. The US alliance is literally always at war overseas, and enlistment is therefore never moral. I guess it could even be theoretically possible for a military to always be at war overseas and still be moral, if it were fighting for moral reasons. There is no moral argument to be made that the US alliance does this, though; it wages wars of aggression for power and profit.

    Refusing to acknowledge that it’s immoral to serve in an immoral military serves no one but military recruiters, war profiteers, and the imperialists in Washington DC and Virginia. Make this clear as a society so that people can begin course-correcting away from that abusive path.

    ❖

    They keep making comparisons to WWII in order to groom us for WWIII.

    ❖

    We don’t actually need to accept that the world’s major powers are going to be engaging in increasingly dangerous brinkmanship with each other throughout the foreseeable future. Empire propagandists keep telling us we need to lay back and accept this, but we don’t.

    This trajectory toward war and nuclear holocaust is being driven by people within the US government and its allies, and there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them. We can turn this ship away from the iceberg any time we wish to. We’ve just got to want it enough.

    ❖

    People who get really into 9/11 truth or the JFK assassination often talk about how Americans would wake up if they could just really grasp what their government did, but it’s important to emphasize that this is equally true of the things the US is undisputedly publicly known to have done recently in places like Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, etc.

    Completely undisputed public facts about things the US has done since 9/11 are far more evil than just assassinating a US president or killing a few thousand Americans in a false flag terror attack. They killed millions of people since 9/11 in wars for power and profit, right out in the open, on public record.

    Really the problem isn’t getting information to Americans about the evil things their government has done, or even getting them to see it and grasp it. It’s getting them to see it deeply enough and consider it sincerely enough that it blasts through all the psychological compartmentalization and propaganda-induced conditioning that’s been holding their worldview together.

    That’s a big part of what I try to do here. I don’t do any groundbreaking investigative journalism, I don’t break any stories, I just try to find ways to help people truly see the empire for what it is with fresh eyes in such a way that it transmutes their worldview.

    ❖

    The more we learn about psychology and sociology the more undeniable it becomes that the question of whether or not you’ll lead a happy and abundant life ultimately boils down to luck of the draw, but our systems don’t reflect this. We still punish the poor for being poor, still punish addicts for being addicts, still lock people up for reasons that really amount to having been abused as children and being born in the wrong neighborhood. It’s profoundly cruel, and at this point it’s completely unscientific.

    The realization that you only have it good by pure dumb luck should open up a transformative compassion in you for those who got dealt a less fortunate hand, but instead many people jam their heads up their asses and insist everything they have is the result of hard work and virtue. Human predisposition toward egotism causes us to lose our compassion for those who did nothing other than have less luck than ourselves, solely because of what it would mean about us and our cozy little “me” stories.

    We’ve still got a lot to learn, and more importantly our systems still haven’t caught up to what we’ve learned already. It’s all a process of growing and becoming a conscious species, but god it’s excruciating to watch sometimes.

    __________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

     

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Empire-Funded Think Tanks Are Not Valid Sources: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    ATTENTION JOURNALISTS:

    It is never, ever acceptable, under any circumstances, to cite think tanks funded by governments and the military industrial complex as sources of information or expertise on matters of national security or foreign affairs.

    If you do cite them (and, again, don’t), then at the very least you need to disclose the conflict of interest their funding causes in your reporting, and you need to make it abundantly clear to your audience that it is a conflict of interest.

    This happens every single day in the western media, but just as an example take the way the independent Australian publication Crikey has shamefully published a bogus propaganda piece about the Chinese government persecuting LGBT people, with their sole source being the empire-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

    As soon as you do this, you’re guilty of journalistic malpractice. As soon as you find yourself writing anything like “According to my source from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute,” you have ceased to function as a journalist and are now functioning as a propagandist. It’s insane that this extremely obvious fact isn’t better understood.

    You all get that you can’t cite unverifiable claims by outlets like RT or Sputnik unless it’s for official statements from the Russian government, but for some reason you’ve been told that it’s okay to cite think tanks that are paid by western governments and arms manufacturers in your reporting. It isn’t, and it never has been. It has always been a brazen violation of journalistic ethics, and if you give it a moment of intellectually honest thought, you will know this to be true.

    ❖

    Australians need to stop talking about AUKUS as a “defence partnership”. It’s got nothing to do with “defence”. You don’t need long-range submarines to defend Australia’s easily-defended shores, you need long-range submarines to attack China. Anyone who doubts this hasn’t been paying attention.

    Former Prime Minister Paul Keating explained what this is probably really about the other day, saying it’s about taking out China’s nuclear-armed submarines to cripple their “second strike capability”, i.e. to allow the US to win a nuclear war with China.

    It’s not a defence partnership because it’s got nothing to do with defence, and it’s not a defence partnership because it is not a “partnership”. It’s the US empire driving Australia to its doom, to nobody’s benefit but the US empire.

    Either it’s about attacking China, or it’s about protecting our trade with China from China. Which makes more sense to you?

    ❖

    One of the biggest obstacles to building a robust anti-war movement is people’s belief that their own individual activism and opposition makes no difference, which is simply not true. Your individual activism and opposition makes ALMOST no difference, not no difference. These might sound similar, but they’re actually literally an entire infinity apart.

    If your efforts to oppose our trajectory toward World War Three made no difference, then those efforts would be pointless. But if your efforts make even the slightest bit of difference above absolute zero, all that means is a lot more people need to join you to help turn us away from this dangerous trajectory.

    Hollywood has given us the wrong impression of how these things work, because the narrative structure of movies always places all its emphasis on the actions of the individual protagonist having an immensely consequential effect. Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star. Frodo destroys the One Ring. The Avengers save the universe. The storyteller needs to make the hero’s actions have major consequences to get you to care about their adventure, and thus get you to care about the story they’re telling you.

    But real life isn’t like that. In real life it takes many, many people to bring about real change. The actions of one individual make very little difference; even people like me who have larger-than-average voices are just a tiny drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things.

    Real change doesn’t depend on the individual, it depends on the collective. We can see this just by looking around society, at what a massive billions-of-cast-members collective improvisation human civilization is. It takes the collective to keep civilization functioning, and it will take the collective to change it.

    One bee sting won’t protect the hive, but many bee stings is deadly. The bee doesn’t hesitate because its one individual sting isn’t going to bring about its Hollywood ending — it just stings.

    We need to be like that. Sting with all the power of your one sting, whatever that may be. Organizing. Attending protests. Guerrilla street activism. Writing. Tweeting. Making memes. Distributing literature. Talking to people. Making videos. Whatever you can do to help wake up the rest of the bees and alert them to the threat that our collective hive has come under.

    You won’t stop the empire by yourself. You won’t make a major difference. But you will make a difference. And there’s nothing anyone can do to stop you from making that small difference that you can make.

    Take that unstoppable small difference and work toward getting as many of the others to do the same, because enough unstoppable small differences will necessarily add up to becoming an unstoppable big difference. And once we hit that point, healthy change becomes inevitable.

    _______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Featured image via Australian Strategic Policy Institute (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

     

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Stop Calling The Iraq War A ‘Mistake’: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Reading by Tim Foley:

    ❖

    Stop calling the Iraq War a “mistake”. When you make a mistake, you make changes to ensure that mistake is not repeated. Nobody responsible for that invasion suffered any consequences of any kind, zero policy changes were made, and the unipolarist ideology which led to it has become more entrenched than ever.

    If the invasion of Iraq was a “mistake”, western government officials would be residing in prison cells at The Hague, countless pundits and journalists would now be working behind cash registers in retail shops, and US foreign policy would have undergone a massive, dramatic overhaul. Instead the exact opposite has happened — the western officials who launched the Iraq War are esteemed members of elite society, the pundits and journalists who manufactured consent for it are at the top of their field, and securing US unipolar hegemony by any means necessary is the accepted status quo norm in mainstream politics.

    This is because the Iraq War was not a “mistake”. It was a cold, calculated decision which had precisely the effects it was intended to have: the advancement of western energy interests, greater geostrategic control, and the expansion of the US war machine in key geostrategic regions. Someone who makes a “mistake” doesn’t get everything they always wanted as a result and suffer zero consequences for the damage it caused. That’s what happens to someone who took a deliberate, calculated action in their own interests.

    You can only pretend the Iraq War was a “mistake” if you accept the official reasons for starting it: getting those WMDs, spreading freedom and democracy to those poor Iraqis who we love, and making the Middle East a safer and more peaceful place for everyone. It’s not okay for grown adults in the year 2023 to believe those were the real intentions behind the invasion of Iraq.

    If the invasion of Iraq was a mistake there would have been changes put in place to make sure nothing like it ever happens again. Those changes were never made because they thoroughly intend to do similar things in the future.

    ❖

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Imagine writing this line and thinking it's normal. https://t.co/Z8ngyNWbiX pic.twitter.com/2WGh8CR2xi

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 11, 2023

    ❖

    It’s not a “whataboutism” to say it’s absurd to charge Putin with war crimes without charging George W Bush, it’s a completely devastating argument against the claim being made. If the law doesn’t apply to everyone, then it’s not the law, it’s just corruption. It’s a tool of the powerful.

    It’s hilarious that Putin has been hit with an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court not only on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, but also a few days after the Pentagon intervened to stop the Biden administration from helping the ICC compile evidence of Russian war crimes because it might lead to ICC prosecution of American war crimes.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Breaking News: The Pentagon is blocking the U.S. from sharing evidence on Russian atrocities in Ukraine with the International Criminal Court, officials said. Military leaders fear setting a precedent that might pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. https://t.co/xnHCjkkZnK

    — The New York Times (@nytimes) March 8, 2023

    ❖

    One of the funniest empire narratives we’re being asked to believe today is that the US is militarily encircling its #1 rival China, on the other side of the planet, defensively.

    ❖

    I hear people say, “I oppose the Chinese GOVERNMENT, not the Chinese PEOPLE!”

    Oh cool, so sort of like the exact same thing literally every warmongering neocon has said about literally every country they wanted to destroy since the turn of the century?

    You’re not making an important or interesting distinction when you say you oppose a foreign government and not it’s people, you’re just painting the same pretty picture over the same ugly agenda as every war slut since 9/11. Shut the hell up.

    ❖

    China should start arming Mexican cartels so they can defend themselves against the coming US invasion. Per the US playbook Washington should have no problem with this.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Invade Mexico to stop Americans from doing drugs. We know this is a good and sensible idea because we've done bad things in the past. https://t.co/d6N396OiD6

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 13, 2023

    ❖

    I’ve seen people use Marxist-sounding rhetoric to justify NATO expansion and US proxy warfare. I’ve seen people use anti-imperialist jargon to justify encirclement of China. It’s like how people used the Bible to justify racism and other ugly things. Your beliefs don’t matter if your heart’s in the wrong place.

    Reading all the right books and having all the correct concepts won’t protect you from error; only clarity of vision can keep you on the straight and narrow. And that takes hard, dedicated, rigorously honest inner work. No amount of accumulated knowledge will substitute for this.

    We’ve all known people who share what we think of as noble ideological beliefs but are actually garbage human beings once you get to know them. Having the right beliefs won’t make you a better person, and it won’t protect you from applying those beliefs in a very unwholesome way.

    Having all the right political opinions is no substitute for being a good human being. Ticking all the right conceptual boxes is no substitute for psychological health. Reading all the right books is no substitute for real inner work. Concepts are worthless without inner clarity. You’ve got to do the work.

    __________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    Featured image via Gerard Van der Leun (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

  • The Hawks Have Had China In Their Crosshairs For Years: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    Western media have erased from history all the western provocations which led to the war in Ukraine, they only report pro-western narratives, they hide Ukrainian casualties and ignore the Nord Stream pipeline bombing, then they tell you to worry about foreign propaganda.

    ❖

    Every now and then I like to highlight the fact that all this China stuff was forcast way back in 2004 by Michael Parenti, who said that the unipolarist neoconservative ideology that had hijacked US foreign policy envisioned a massive strategic confrontation with Beijing.

    “The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world,” Parenti wrote in his book Superpatriot. “The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere — including North America — the blessings of an untrammeled global ‘free market.’ The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.”

    “PNAC” refers to Project for the New American Century, the wildly influential neoconservative think tank whose members played a critical role in pushing the Iraq invasion. Since that time PNAC’s vision for the future has quietly become the mainstream US foreign policy consensus.

    After the fall of the Soviet Union the US government espoused a doctrine of securing US unipolar planetary domination by ensuring no rival superpowers develop, nicknamed the Wolfowitz Doctrine after the Pentagon official who supervised its drafting. Paul Wolfowitz would later become a PNAC member.

    What we’re witnessing now is this doctrine of maintaining unipolar hegemony at all cost colliding with the emergence of a multipolar world order, carried largely by the rise of China toward superpower status. Parenti saw this coming because like PNAC he saw that these two factors must necessarily collide.

    ❖

    The western left is absolute dogshit on war and empire. Pure fucking dogshit. Those who don’t outright cheer for imperial militarism ignore it altogether, or don’t place nearly enough emphasis on it. Those placing an appropriate amount of emphasis on it are a small minority.

    And of course that’s not ultimately all their fault; they’re swimming in the same ocean of empire propaganda and psyops as everyone else. But as we’re accelerating toward a global conflict of unfathomable horror this dereliction of duty is getting less and less acceptable. This needs to change.

    Sure there are other problems we’ve got to worry about, but none of those other problems are going to matter when we’re all dying in a nuclear holocaust. There’s no excuse for anyone who thinks of themselves as anti-imperialist to fail to stand against the empire’s brinkmanship. The US empire is rapidly ramping up aggressions against Russia and China simultaneously and in many sectors of the American left this is getting less attention than the fucking presidential election that’s almost two years away. This isn’t healthy, and it isn’t acceptable.

    People on the left — including some pretty influential ones — used to mock me for warning that mounting Russia hysteria was being used to pave the way for reckless escalations against Moscow. Now we’re closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    This isn’t something you can just ignore. This isn’t something you can put on the back burner for when you have time. The fate of our entire species is being threatened by the empire’s campaign to secure unipolar planetary hegemony; not later on in the future, but right now.

    People are watching this, and people are noticing. If the western left doesn’t step up its game on opposing brinkmanship between nuclear-armed major powers, other political factions are going to step in and fill the void. If/when that happens, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

    At what point are we going to wake up and start saying no to this? It has to be soon, because if you wait until a world war between nuclear powers has actually started, you’ve already waited too long. I highly recommend people get moving on this.

    ❖

    There’s a tendency to look at the prospect of nuclear war as an almost philosophical or spiritual subject, probably because you have to have such a big-picture perspective to consider it properly. But it’s a very concrete matter concerning actual, physical warheads and actual, physical people.

    We know that these weapons can end the world, and we know that they will do so under an increasingly likely set of circumstances. This is not religious end-times prophesying, this is an objective, scientific fact about a material situation that our leaders knowingly put us in.

    The fact that we are closer to nuclear annihilation than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis is not some act of God or fate or something that’s passively happening like the weather, it’s the result of concrete decisions made by concrete people with names and addresses. The fact that we could all die in a nuclear holocaust and the after effects thereof is right now a solid, material reality, and it should be treated like one. We should be doing everything we can to demand our leaders change their policies to make that outcome far less likely.

    ❖

    The difference between western liberals and the Proud Boys is that the Proud Boys are self-described “western chauvinists” who promote the belief that “west is best”, whereas western liberals espouse these positions without voicing them out loud.

    ❖

    The most dangerous supremacist belief system in the world is American supremacism, because the belief that the US should rule the world has humanity on a direct trajectory toward hot military confrontation between multiple nuclear-armed nations.

    ❖

    Spiritual enlightenment, inner work, personal psychology, journalism, political activism and geopolitical analysis are all different aspects of the same one thing. In their authentic forms they’re all just different manifestations of the human quest for truth: the quest to learn the truth and to let it inform the way reality expresses, whether that expression is in the way our own minds operate or in the way human civilization as a whole is shaped.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Free Speech Is For Fighting The Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    My research has led me to conclude that there’s an elite conspiracy to enslave us all and turn us all into brainwashed automatons mindlessly enacting the wishes of our rulers in a cruel dystopia built by the powerful, for the powerful.

    Haha, just kidding. That already happened.

    ❖

    Step one is learning that the mainstream consensus worldview is a lie, and that we’ve been fed power-serving propaganda since we were children about our society, our nation, our government and our world. Most people haven’t even made it to step one yet.

    Step two is getting clear on how we’ve been lied to. A lot of people who make it past step one get mixed up here. Many fall for dopey right-wing narratives about Jews ruling the world, globalist pedophile cabals, elite conspiracies to make all our kids transgendered or whatever, because their ideology prohibits them from clearly seeing the real underlying dynamics of capitalism and the empire-building of their own government. They place far too much emphasis on things like vaccines and the future of transhumanism being used to someday create an Orwellian dystopia, because their worldview prohibits them from recognizing that we’re already living in a power-serving mind-controlled dystopia.

    Others simply don’t go far enough in extracting the mainstream worldview from their minds and don’t inquire deeply enough into what’s really true. Plenty of self-identified socialists and anarchists still buy into bogus mainstream narratives about empire-targeted governments, or still buy into to the power-serving dynamics of party politics. Step two takes a lot of hard, sincere, intellectually honest work sorting out fact from fiction.

    Step three is learning what to do about all this, and beginning to take action. This means working to spread awareness of what’s really going on and helping others to make it through steps one and two, because the only thing that ever leads to lasting positive changes in human behavior is an expansion of consciousness. The more people make it to step three, the more people there are to help wake up everyone else.

    ❖

    Without the US military who would protect the world from hobby balloons and natural gas pipelines?

    ❖

    It sure is interesting how Russia is the only nation in the world that’s pushing Sweden to release its findings in its investigation into the Nord Stream bombing, while an American UN official is urging “restraint” about investigations into the incident.

    The US empire’s responsibility for the Nord Stream bombing is going to become one of those open secrets that everyone knows but nobody officially confirms, like Israel’s nuclear arsenal (which just as an aside Sy Hersh also helped expose).

    ❖

    Free speech is meaningless and worthless if you don’t use it to oppose real power. In western “democracies” the majority of people are so effectively propagandized into speaking in alignment with the interests of the western empire that they may as well be taking orders on what to say at gunpoint.

    In totalitarian regimes you say what your rulers want you to say because they physically coerced you using the threat of violence. In “free democracies” you say what your rulers want you to say because they psychologically coerced you using propaganda. The end result is the same.

    Reagan once joked about Soviets thinking they are free because they’re allowed to criticize the US government as much as they like, but really that was just projection. Westerners think they have free speech, but they never use that “free speech” to criticize the tyrannical empire they live under.

    Free speech is held as an important human right because it helps the people put a check on power. If you’re not using for that, you may as well not have it. Your speech is only free insofar as you can criticize real power, and insofar as you actually do so.

    ❖

    The reason I often use the phrase “the political/media class” is because it’s all one class, one social caste. They’re not actually separate in any meaningful way.

    ❖

    Whenever I talk about the hundreds of military bases the US empire is circling our planet with I always get people saying “We only have all those foreign bases because those foreign governments want us there for protection!”

    Yes, yes I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the fact that the US subverts, impoverishes and destroys any weaker nation that refuses to facilitate its military interests. Foreign US military bases are “protection” in the same way extortion payments to the Mafia are “protection”.

    Foreign governments don’t allow US military bases on their territory to protect themselves from their neighbors, they do it to protect themselves from the US.

    ❖

    One of the strangest things the mainstream worldview asks us to accept is that the US government (A) should be the leader of the entire world and (B) wants to be the leader of the world solely for righteous and beneficent reasons.

    Anyone else who wants to rule the world gets called a megalomaniac. We all grew up watching movies and shows about evil villains who want to rule the world. Yet the mainstream worldview asks us to accept that the US government wants to rule the world because they want to promote freedom and democracy.

    ❖

    It’s easy to see the flaws in other countries, cultures and societies. It’s much harder to see the flaws in our own.

    It’s easy to see the problems with other political parties and ideological factions. It’s much harder to see the problems with our own.

    It’s easy to see how other groups are propagandized. It’s much harder to see how our own group is propagandized.

    It’s easy to see how others are misguided and delusional. It’s much harder to see how we ourselves are misguided and delusional.

    The further away from ourselves we look, the easier it is for us to find fault. But it doesn’t benefit anyone for us to find problems in the distant other. The closer to home we look, the more good we can do with what we find.

    ________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    Featured image via Adobe Stock.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • You Have To Be Trusted By The People That You Lie To: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The widespread refusal to accept that the US government bombed the Nord Stream pipelines is based solely on the faith-based belief that the US government would never do something so evil, despite its having done many things that are far more evil than this right out in the open.

    “Okay sure they’ve been spending the last few years helping Saudi Arabia create mountains of child corpses in Yemen, but blowing up a pipeline? That would be a step too far!”

    So much government nefariousness hides behind the completely unevidenced assumption “Oh, our leaders would never do anything THAT bad!” It’s a belief that is based on literally nothing. It’s believed because it is comfortable.

    ❖

    ❖

    You only get one shot at preventing nuclear war. There will be no do-overs. There will be no course-correction. There will be no learning from mistakes that were made. This is it. Our one and only chance. We’re living it.

    Is it good enough? Are we using our one shot responsibly?

    If the mushroom clouds turn up, will anyone honestly be able to tell themselves that our leaders did everything they could to prevent this from happening, and that we the rank-and-file citizenry did everything we could to pressure them into navigating wisely around this threat?

    I personally don’t think so. I think if we meet our end that way it will be the result of a bunch of humans playing with armageddon weapons in an extremely reckless and irresponsible way with virtually no resistance from the public, because we didn’t like thinking about it much.

    ❖

    The worst thing about Australia is America. All of the most destructive and dangerous things our country has done in recent decades, and all the most destructive and dangerous things it continues to do, have been the result of our role in the US-centralized empire.

    ❖

    Hey I’ve got a smart idea, let’s make laws that require corporations to act like sociopaths, pursuing profit without any consideration for morality or human wellbeing, then let’s allow our entire civilization to be ruled by corporations.

    Oh cool we already did that, good thinking.

    ❖

    The fact that Biden has explicitly said the US will go to war to defend Taiwan, and that it won’t go to war to defend the far less geostrategically crucial Ukraine, should show you that the US does not go to war to defend human interests but to defend its own interests.

    ❖

    ❖

    The biggest problem with the western anti-war movement is that there is no western anti-war movement. All the other problems you think you’re seeing in your “anti-war movement” are at best a very, very distant second to the fundamental problem that your movement has no movement. There’s no good reason to spend your energy worrying if the peace movement is doing it wrong or including the wrong people or not organizing correctly if there is no meaningful peace movement. Focus on fixing that problem first — on creating movement rather than creating inertia and sectarian squabbling.

    ❖

    There’s this Pink Floyd line that’s been rattling around in my head, “You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to.” Because it’s so true; you can’t deceive people who don’t trust you. Propaganda only works if people don’t know it’s happening — if they don’t think of its source as untrustworthy.

    That’s why it gives me hope that trust in the mass media is plunging to historic lows: if people sufficiently distrust those who lie to them, then those lies won’t take root in their minds anymore. Without trust, the propaganda machine can’t function.

    All our world’s troubles are ultimately due to propaganda; people only consent to status quo systems which hurt their interests because their consent is manufactured via propaganda. And that propaganda only works because of public trust in the messengers.

    We can fight this by working to exacerbate public distrust in the institutions that manufacture our consent, spreading public awareness of the fact that everything we’ve been taught to believe about our nation, our government and our world is a lie. All positive changes in human behavior — whether individual or collective — are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Make people more aware that they are being deceived, and the liars will no longer be trusted by the people they lie to.

    Trust in the mass media has never been lower, meanwhile our ability to amplify our own voices and share ideas and information has never been higher. We can use this opportunity to free the collective mind from the chains of propaganda, so that we can finally get real change.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Celebrities Protect The Interests Of The Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    If you say you oppose Russia because you’re an anti-imperialist but you don’t oppose the US empire for its role in starting and perpetuating this war, then you’re a liar. You don’t oppose Russia because you’re an anti-imperialist, you oppose Russia because you’re an imperialist.

    The only people who say “Putin can end this war at any time by withdrawing” are those who deny the US empire’s aggressions which led to this conflict, which is just a nonsense garbage position based on lies. They don’t actually want peace, they just want victory for the empire. The real unbiased position which supports peace is wanting both Russia and the western empire to begin engaging in diplomacy, de-escalation and detente to end this war. But empire simps will call you treasonously biased if you support anything other than total Russian defeat.

    This dopey propaganda-addled notion that the west did nothing wrong and Putin attacked Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom actually prevents peace from happening. If one side only acknowledges the reality of the aggressions of the other side, peace is impossible. If you don’t understand how a war was started and perpetuated, then you can’t understand how peace can be started and perpetuated. The empire deliberately works to prevent the public from obtaining this understanding, because the empire wants war.

    It’s not okay for grown adults to act like Putin is just running around invading countries willy nilly because he’s a crazed madman. You’ve got a whole internet of information at your fingertips. Use it.

    ❖

    It’s impossible to overstate how much our society is shaped by the fact that those who are given the most influence and the largest platforms will experience our status quo systems as working very nicely and have a vested interest in preserving those systems which benefit them. The media-owning, culture-manufacturing class of the super-wealthy elevates people to wealth and celebrity who look like they will be good protectors of their class interests. Those people will necessarily speak fondly of the status quo political systems which let them be rich.

    These are the people who put on all the shows, movies and music almost everyone consumes, thereby engineering mainstream culture to the benefit of the super wealthy. It shapes the way the people think, speak, act and vote. What they feel entitled to. What they think is possible.

    A rich celebrity who makes millions of dollars a year in a fun, easy and egoically gratifying job is not going to be spotlighting all the lives who are being destroyed by the status quo systems which elevated them. They’re not going to favor the revolutionary changes that are needed. They’re not going to be calling for a massive, sweeping overhaul of the systems which are crushing ordinary people to death and creating widespread misery; at most they’re going to be telling you to vote Democrat or Republican and quibbling about minor disagreements on tax rates. But these are the people with the loudest voices in our society — not just the loudest, but many orders of magnitude more amplified and influential than the voices of the ordinary people who are suffering under existing systems. These loudly-amplified rich celebrities shape and direct mainstream culture.

    This dynamic plays such a massive role in hiding from mainstream attention the ways our status quo systems are exploiting, oppressing and abusing people while killing our biosphere and pushing us toward nuclear annihilation, that it’s hard to wrap your mind around how far it goes. The way everyone’s thinking about the world is so pervasively informed by perspectives that are favorable to the status quo prevents them from even noticing how bad things are for everyone else. It’s widely assumed that if you’re struggling in this mess, it’s because of your own failures. If any media you turn on depicts people who are doing basically fine and are content with the way things are while you’re barely able to keep your head above water, the take-home message is that the problem is with you, not with our systems. That you are what needs to change.

    The failings of the status quo are hidden in mainstream culture, and people aren’t permitted to consider the possibility that there might be a better way for things to be. People don’t know, and they don’t know that they don’t know. They’re kept in the dark about what’s possible.

     

    ❖

    People are like, “Oh yeah right Caitlin, it’s ALWAYS America’s fault. You’re always blaming the US for every conflict, just because it runs a globe-spanning empire which dominates the planet with violence and coercion and works continuously to keep all the other countries subjugated to it.”

    They’re like, “Right, right, blame EVERYTHING on the violent unipolar planetary hegemon.”

    It’s a lot like saying, “Okay sure we’re trapped in a room with a tiger, and sure we keep getting eaten, and yes your leg is missing and you’ve got a large bite out of your torso, but you can’t blame ALL of that on the tiger. It’s not fair. Some of it might be Steve’s fault. Steve’s kind of a jerk.”

    ❖

    People whose opinions are grounded in facts and logic don’t need to resort to accusing those who disagree with them of being secret agents working for foreign governments.

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    ❖

    Most people on this planet couldn’t give a shit who governs Crimea, but one small group insists we risk every life in existence on earth — every bee, every frog, every tree, every child — for their current t-shirt-of-the-week issue. It’s so arrogant.

    It’s one thing to draw a line and say “The world must never let anyone cross this point, even if it means risking nuclear armageddon.” It’s quite another to make that line something as trivial as the question of who governs Crimea. It’s not legitimate to risk all life over that. This is especially true because the US empire provoked this war and because even the Crimeans themselves prefer to be Russian. But even if none of that was the case, it still wouldn’t be legitimate for the US empire to risk the lives of people in Africa or South America by backing an offensive on Crimea.

    The correct response to anyone who supports this is “Who the fuck do you think you are? Who the fuck are you to risk the life of every human and non-human life on this planet over an issue only a tiny fraction of the world cares one whit about?”

    All these armchair warriors saying “We need to be brave and take a stand!” are willing to gamble billions of lives who do not consent to being gambled over a war they’re not even fighting in. All while refusing to deeply contemplate what nuclear war would entail. They’re the worst kind of cowards.

    ❖

    I just want the rapidly rising threat of nuclear war to be treated, reported on, and discussed like the supremely important issue that it is. It’s the single most important matter in the world and it just gets casually mentioned here and there like it’s just another issue.

    It’s actually a huge problem that nobody wants to talk about the single most important issue in the world and everyone acts like you’re a crazy hysterical idiot for pointing out the very real ways we’re moving closer to that very real possibility. I’ve been writing about the growing risk of nuclear war for years and people have been calling me a delusional lunatic and a Putin puppet the entire time, meanwhile we’ve demonstrably and indisputably been seeing massive steps toward that outcome and it’s still being dismissed.

    Even if you believe that all this nuclear brinkmanship is justified and good, you still need to fully acknowledge the reality of the risk and the unfathomable horrors that it would unleash upon our world. And you need to do it with all the respect and solemnity the subject deserves.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    Feature image via https://www.president.gov.ua/ (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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  • Let’s Nuke The World Over Who Governs Crimea: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Critics of the US empire have spent months compiling mountains of evidence showing that the empire knowingly provoked the war in Ukraine. Supporters of the US empire have spent months posting dog memes and accusing strangers of being paid by Putin. It’s clear who’s in the right.

    ❖

    So does everyone else in the world get a vote on whether their lives should be risked in an offensive to control who governs Crimea? Or will the Biden administration just be making that call on behalf of all living creatures?

    It’s so crazy how the fate of everyone alive and everyone who could potentially be born in the future is riding on the way two governments choose to navigate a conflict in Ukraine, just because those two governments have most of the world’s nuclear weapons. It’s like two people in a bar getting into a brawl that kills everyone in their city. Nobody else in the world gets a vote on the decisions being made that could kill everyone alive and end humanity forever; just a few people within those two governments and their militaries.

    ❖

    The US empire is telling Moscow “I’m the craziest motherfucker around, I’ll keep ramping up the brinkmanship looking you right in the eye and daring you to use nukes,” while telling the rest of the world “I am the voice of sanity that you should all look to for leadership.”

    One of the empire’s faces is the virtuous upholder of freedom and democracy, while the other face puts on an intimidating show of viciousness like a prisoner biting off someone’s cheek in the prison yard. At least one of those faces is necessarily lying.

    ❖

    Literally the only reason mainstream westerners are fine with the US empire’s nuclear brinkmanship with Russia is because most don’t understand it, and those who do understand it don’t think very hard about it. They avoid contemplating what nuclear war is and what it would mean.

    Whenever I touch on this subject I get a bunch of replies like “Yeehaw! That’s right bitch, we’re standing up to Putin!” They’re not approaching the subject with anything like the gravity they would if they understood what’s happening and had seriously thought about what could be. They don’t understand how horrifyingly dangerous it is that the empire is considering backing a Crimea offensive, and they haven’t sincerely contemplated what it would be like for every living creature to die horribly and for no one else to ever be born again for all of time.

    Whatever position you have on this whole conflict, you should be approaching the possibility of nuclear annihilation with the most profound solemnity imaginable, because it is without exaggeration the single worst thing that could possibly happen. Take it seriously, or be silent.

    ❖

    If a nuclear war between Russia and NATO erupts, the answer to the question “Was it worth it?” will be a decisive “No.” Not just for people like me, but for everyone, no matter how sympathetic they are to the western power structure and no matter how much they hate Russia. If their answer isn’t “no” immediately, it will be their answer in a matter of hours. If people don’t immediately understand the horror that’s been unleashed upon our world and how nothing could possibly have been worth it, they will understand it in short order.

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    The term Mutually Assured Destruction was first coined by Hudson Institute’s Donald Brennan in 1962, but he used it ironically, spelling out the acronym “MAD” in order to argue that it’s insane to hold weapons that can cause armageddon. These games of nuclear chicken are insane.

    The argument for nukes is that the threat of their use wards off the large-scale conventional wars we saw in WWI and WWII, but that only works if the fear of their use deters conventional attacks. The US empire is getting more and more brazen with its proxy warfare against Russia.

    It used to be undisputed conventional wisdom that hot warfare against Russia must be avoided at all costs because they’re a nuclear superpower. Now the idea of backing full-scale offensives to carve off pieces of the Russian Federation is gaining widespread mainstream traction. This disintegrates the uneasy stability that MAD is theoretically supposed to create, because MAD assumes the other side won’t be crazy enough to launch conventional offensives against a nuclear superpower due to fear of rapidly spiraling escalation into full-scale nuclear war.

    If you’ve got two people pointing pistols at each other, an exchange of gunfire might be avoided for fear of retaliation. But if one of the gunmen breaks the standoff by walking toward the other holding a knife in his other hand, odds are the other guy pulls the trigger.

    ❖

    I hate it when I get people saying “I hope we do nuke ourselves off the map, we’re horrible.” It’s not okay for a few idiots to be playing games with every life on this planet. Just because you’re unhappy with life here doesn’t mean all the innocents around the world are, doesn’t mean the animals are, the bugs, the trees. Your disaffected feelings are not a valid reason not to fight this thing tooth and claw. Keep your omnicidal ideations to yourself.

    ❖

    Westerners frame the idea of nations like Russia and China “attacking their neighbors” as though that’s somehow less moral than the US attacking nations on the other side of the planet who cannot possibly pose any threat to US national security. At least Russia can make an argument that its invasion of Ukraine was in its national security interests due to US/NATO militarization there, and China could make similar arguments if it ever attacks Taiwan. US wars are done solely to defend US planetary domination, not the US.

    ❖

    Liberals are all about examining privilege except when it comes to western privilege. Then they’re more than happy to blow up everything and everyone for their belief in their inherent ideological superiority and their right to rule over every single country on earth.

    ❖

    Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are no longer designating the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment as a “dangerous organization.” To be clear, nothing has actually changed about the Azov Regiment. It’s still the same people with the same ideology. All that changed is the Official Narrative.

    For years and years, up until just last year, the mass media had no problem acknowledging that Ukraine has a Nazi problem and calling Azov neo-Nazis what they are. All that changed is we moved into an information ecosystem of aggressive war propaganda.

    No amount of PR rebranding will magically transform Azov neo-Nazis into wholesome moderates. You can change Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC, but it’s still the same stuff in the bucket.

    ________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • A Prison Where The Prisoners Don’t Know They’re In Prison: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Talking about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine without also talking about the ways the US empire provoked and benefits from this war is the same as lying.

    ❖

    One of the main differences between myself and other commentators who talk about an elite conspiracy to implement a totalitarian dystopia is that the others warn that we are being pushed toward this dystopia, while I insist that we’re already there and have been for generations.

    When I say we’re in a totalitarian dystopia a lot of people assume I mean things like vaccine mandates or gun laws or paying taxes, but I actually mean something far, far bigger than that. I mean we’re all in a psychological prison built by the powerful to control how we are.

    The Orwellian dystopia isn’t some danger that exists in the future; it’s here presently. It just doesn’t look like what Orwell imagined. Our rulers are getting everything they want out of the current dystopia, just as much as they would in societies envisioned by dystopian novelists.

    It is true that we are seeing more and more overtly tyrannical measures rolled out in areas like surveillance and suppression of speech, but those are not means of getting us into the dystopian prison, they are means of keeping us there. They’re just tightening the bolts on our cage.

    You can tell we’re in a psychological prison because everyone’s getting crazier and crazier. Mental illness and addiction are soaring, there’s a mass shooting epidemic in the United States, and everyone’s feeling increasingly miserable and alienated. This is because we’re all propagandized to the gills. We’re acting like victims of psychological abuse because that’s what we are. We’ve spent our whole lives having our minds systematically pounded into a shape that makes us think, speak, act and vote in a way that benefits our rulers.

    Because they control the way we think with mass scale psychological manipulation, their control is total. It’s as total as it would be in the civilization laid out in Orwell’s 1984. We won’t be doing anything they don’t want us doing while our minds are locked down like this. What we have is actually far more effective than an overly tyrannical dystopia, because it looks like freedom. They let you do more or less what you want, while using mass-scale psychological manipulation to control what it is that you will want to do.

    What’s harder to escape than a maximum security prison? A prison where the prisoners don’t even know they’re in prison.

    ❖

    Sometimes it feels like our rulers make up culture war topics on the fly, just to win bets with each other.

    “Fifty bucks says we can get them all arguing about gas stoves next.”

    “Haha! No. No fucking way they’ll go for that. You’re on.”

    ❖

    Without NATO who will protect the vast expanse of radioactive ashes from the other vast expanse of radioactive ashes?

    ❖

    The most important reporting a journalist can do in the western world today is help expose the lies, propaganda and malpractice of other western journalists and news outlets. But that is also the last thing a western journalist is ever likely to do.

    ❖

    On economic policy Democrats are indistinguishable from Reagan-era Republicans. On foreign policy they’re indistinguishable from Bush-era neocons. But they’re still able to sell the idea that they’re progressive, even moving far to the left, by copious lip service to social justice.

    Democrats will bomb you, starve you with sanctions, evict you, let you freeze to death, let you die because you can’t afford medicine, let you work your fingers to the bone for pennies, but they will never, ever misgender you.

    And rightists are all too happy to take that last bit as evidence that Democrats have in fact moved “too far to the left” and argue that US politics needs to move much farther to the right to counteract all the leftist extremism.

    ❖

    People argue that you can’t blame the US for all the millions of deaths ensuing from its “war on terror” interventions because many of those deaths were caused by sectarian infighting, but that’s like an arsonist saying “It’s not my fault the house burned down! The fire did most of the damage!”

    ❖

    Ultimately the problem is not capitalism, imperialism, oligarchy or authoritarianism. Ultimately the problem is that we’re a deeply unconscious species who hasn’t yet developed a mature relationship with its recently-evolved large brain. Those other issues are symptoms of this.

    This can change quickly. Humans likely had no language of any kind for a long time, then suddenly they did. We’ve been coasting along unconsciously reacting to our obsolete evolutionary conditioning and ancient heritage of trauma this entire time, and suddenly that can stop.

    Every species eventually hits a juncture where it either adapts to changing conditions or goes extinct. All signs indicate that we are rapidly approaching that juncture currently. If we make the necessary adaptations, they will look like a change in our relationship with thought.

    ❖

    The primary complaints about Gen Z ultimately boil down to “They refuse to work shitty jobs for shit pay” and “They’re too nice to people who are different”. Which says just as much about the quality of the older generations as the quality of the new one.

    I’m always yammering on here about what it’s going to take to turn this human catastrophe around, but sometimes I think it might turn out that all that needs to happen is for all us old assholes to age out and leave the world in better hands than our own.

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Two Parties Of Capitalist Imperialists: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    They don’t just call Democrats “communists” and “Marxists” in order to attack Democrats, they do it to disappear the entire giant expanse of political spectrum that exists to the left of the capitalist imperialist Democratic Party. They want you to think that’s as far left as it gets.

    Democrats refer to themselves as “the left” for the same reason. Both mainstream factions work to shrink the Overton window into a tug-o-war between Republican capitalist imperialists and Democrat capitalist imperialists. Between two opposing factions of neoliberal neocons.

    ❖

    The problem with the belief that we must start new social media companies because the US government keeps infiltrating the popular social media companies is that it does nothing to confront the huge problem that the US government keeps infiltrating popular social media companies. Until we turn and squarely address the problem that the world’s most powerful government keeps infiltrating the popular online platforms we use to communicate with each other in order to interfere in our communications, they’re just going to keep doing it. Their actions need to be stopped.

    Sure you can keep starting new social media companies in response to this problem, but they’ll either remain small platforms without any meaningful influence or they’ll be overpowered by the US government and made to facilitate US information interests. That’s the real issue. To accept that we can only have unrestricted political speech on small platforms is to accept that we can have free speech so long as no one hears us. That we can say whatever we want as long as we speak it into a hole in the ground.

    Starting new platforms isn’t the solution to this problem. The solution to this problem is loud, forceful, aggressive opposition to the US government interfering with the way people communicate with each other on the internet until they stop. This is actually very possible to do, because the US government needs to preserve its image as an upholder of liberal values. If that image starts to deteriorate as public awareness grows that they’re working to censor worldwide political speech, their behavior will need to change. So what we can do is work to grow public awareness and opposition to the US government’s increasingly intrusive operations in Silicon Valley.

    That’s a much better use of our energy than self-isolating our dissident speech in small online platforms that have no mainstream impact. US government agencies would love it if we’d all self-quarantine ourselves in the obscure margins of the internet where we can’t infect the mainstream herd with wrongthink. We’d be doing their work for them. It’s better to stay on the largest platforms and work to open some eyes.

    ❖

    “China’s going to invade Taiwan!”

    “What? How do you know?”

    “Well we’re pouring tons of weapons into Taiwan, and we know we’d definitely invade if the Chinese were doing that in Cuba.”

    “Ahh. So you’ve got some solid intelligence then.”

    ❖

    I’m often accused of “praising” or “supporting” Russia or China, which is funny because I never actually do. People are just so accustomed to being told the US and its allies are pure good and its enemies are pure evil that anything outside this looks wildly imbalanced to them.

    It’s possible to saturate a civilization so thoroughly with propaganda that the entirely normal baseline act of focusing one’s criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive power center looks freakish and suspicious in contrast to what you’re accustomed to consuming. In reality, criticizing the US-centralized empire with appropriate and proportional forcefulness and focus looks like treasonous support for enemy nations for the same reason sunlight would seem shocking and abrasive to someone who’s lived their whole life in a cave.

    ❖

    We do not live in a free society, we live in a highly controlled society where we are psychologically manipulated into mental homogeneity in service of the powerful. Criticizing foreign countries for not having freedom like ours helps make our own society even more tightly controlled.

    We’re told we’re freer than other countries so that we won’t see how unfree we are. You can’t look down your nose at countries like China or North Korea and still clearly see how controlled and homogenized your own country is. You can’t celebrate your freedom while still lucidly understanding your oppression.

    The illusion of freedom is precisely where the reality of our imprisonment hides. We’ve been conditioned to mistake being able to choose between two fake political factions for political freedom. To mistake being able to regurgitate what we’ve been propagandized into saying for free speech.

    People say “I’m free because where I live I can say, do and experience anything I want!” But that’s not true; you can’t. You can only say, do and experience what you’ve been conditioned to want to say, do and experience by the mass-scale psychological manipulation you’ve been marinating in since birth. You can do what you want, but they control what it is that you want.

    There’s no better illustration of how unfree we are than the way westerners all think the same thoughts about how unfree people are in countries the western empire just so happens to disapprove of. We bleat in unison, “I’m so glad I don’t live in a tyrannical homogenized country like China where people aren’t free to be individuals.”

    We won’t be free until our minds are free. Until all of us (not just the lucky few who happen to stumble outside the narrative matrix) are able to shape their own perspectives based on truth rather than on what benefits the powerful. Until we’re able to become true individuals.

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Psychological Tyranny Is Still Tyranny: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Western “liberal democracies” are just totalitarian regimes with more money and better narrative management. The US-centralized empire controls the global south with bombs, bullets and blockades and controls the rest of us with mass-scale psychological manipulation.

    Sure it’s more pleasant to be sitting where we are rather than at the barrel of the gun, but don’t confuse pleasantness with freedom. It’s nice that here they let you criticize your government and buy whatever you can afford at the store. It would be pleasant to live in a vat with your brain plugged into a virtual world of endless pleasure, too, but it wouldn’t be freedom. Psychological tyranny is still tyranny.

    ❖

    You’ll never get change as long as propagandists are able to convince a critical mass of people not to push for change. You’ll never stop depraved agendas as long as propagandists can manipulate a critical mass of people into consenting to those agendas. Propaganda is enemy #1.

    Every other solution people talk about is secondary to the problem of the empire being able to psychologically manipulate a critical majority of people. Voting strategies, organizing, activism, protests, none of these things will get off the ground as long as public perception is controlled.

    The good news is that public trust in the mass media is at an all-time low while our ability to share unauthorized ideas and information with each other is at an all-time high. The bad news is it still hasn’t been enough, and online censorship is increasingly suppressing dissent.

    So we need to get moving. What we need to do is work to exacerbate public distrust in imperial media and help people to see they’re being continually deceived about their nation, their government and their world by the powerful. Propaganda only works if people trust the source.

    This is the front line of the revolution. Everything else comes second, because until you deal with the fact that our enemy has the most powerful narrative control machine in the history of civilization, none of your other revolutionary ideals will ever be able to manifest. The imperial spin machine should therefore be our primary target. Attack the empire’s news media and its manipulators in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, expose their lies, and weaken public trust in those institutions so that people can no longer be manipulated by them.

    Every positive change in human behavior — whether individual or collective — is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. All we need to do is expand public consciousness of what’s really happening. The more people wake up, the more people will be available to help us.

    ❖

    Every healthy impulse gets twisted by our rulers. The push toward equality for women got twisted into doubling the workforce and slashing worker pay. The push for racial equality and LGBT rights gets twisted into having to vote for abusive imperialist political parties. The healthy impulse for global worker solidarity sees imperialist narrative managers finger-wagging at leftists that they must display “solidarity” with protesters in empire-targeted nations and with Ukrainian soldiers fighting in a US proxy war. Everything healthy gets twisted.

    None of this means those healthy impulses are now unhealthy. Just because the narrative managers are twisting them toward sickness doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still want health. The problem isn’t social justice movements etc, it’s the manipulations that get placed overtop them. This is why I put so much emphasis on overthrowing imperial narrative control. The empire’s ability to manipulate the dominant narratives in our society is what keeps us ineffective and confused. Until we can crush their ability to twist perception of reality, they’ve got us.

    ❖

    Opposing US warmongering against China offers the antiwar left an area in which they can publicly outperform and surpass the antiwar right, because most of the rightists who are good on opposing warmongering against Russia are absolute dogshit when it comes to making peace with China. There’s a small faction of US libertarians who are good on both Russia and China, but pretty much everyone else on the right is only good on Russia.

    Most leftists could do a much better job on opposing warmongering against China, which appears to be headed toward a truly nightmarish confrontation in the coming years. Doing so would let the antiwar left reclaim some of the public ground it’s lost to the antiwar right. Best case scenario, the true left rebuilds its reputation as a real antiwar force and reclaims some of the public sympathy that has gone to the right. Another positive scenario would be the antiwar right responding by stepping up its game and getting less horrible on China to remain relevant.

    ❖

    It’s actually a good thing that young people are becoming more sensitive and demanding more sensitivity from their world. The world is troubled because there isn’t enough sensitivity, not because there’s too much.

    The world needs softer hearts, not harder hearts. It needs more people leaning in with curiosity, not leaning back with cold apathy. It needs more emotional intelligence and less emotional sedation. We’ve seen what a world ruled by hardened men looks like. It isn’t good.

    Keep growing your sensitivity. Keep peeling the callous from off your hearts. You cannot be bowled over be the beauty of the world if your eyes are covered in cataracts of insensitivity. Thick skin makes for lousy sex.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • I Support Western Values More Than The West Does: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    I’m often criticized as being “anti-west”, but I am not anti-west, I am pro-west. I am so pro-west that I want our values of peace, freedom, democracy, truth and justice to be real life things that exist in actual western civilization and not just a fiction that is taught to western schoolchildren.

    I am so pro-west that I want the west to embody the actual western values it pretends to embody. I am so pro-west that I support the practice of spreading western values to the west. I’m a western cultural imperialist, except I want to do western cultural imperialism to the west. I’m like a conquistador, a western colonialist setting sail to spread the wonders of western civilization to these godless western savages. Except instead of actually just bringing them murder, slavery, theft and disease I really am trying to bring them western civilization.

    I am so pro-west that I want the western values that were sold to me as a child to be actual things that actually exist. And because I support western values much more than the actual west does, I get called “anti-west” and told to move to China. Shit, they should move to China.

    A guy I follow on Twitter named David Gondek put it very nicely: “There is nothing wrong with western civilization that living up to its own professed principles wouldn’t fix.”

    It’s not “anti-west” to want the west to end warmongering, militarism, censorship, propaganda, government secrecy, oligarchy, injustice, oppression and exploitation, it is pro-west. The “western values” of peace, justice, equality, democracy, freedom and accountability that we were taught in school are very good things. The only problem is that the west doesn’t actually value them.

    ❖

    To be clear, the US empire is getting everything it wants out of the war in Ukraine. It claims out of one side of its mouth that this was an unprovoked invasion that it never wanted, while admitting this war is giving it everything it ever wanted out the other side. The US did not just luckily stumble into a happy coincidence that just happens to advance all of its longstanding geostrategic agendas against a longtime geopolitical target. It deliberately created this situation, and only a baby-brained idiot would believe otherwise.

    Putin isn’t waging this war because he thought it would be a nice idea to grab a bit more land, he’s waging it because he assessed that he’d need to fight off NATO aggressions in Ukraine at some point and it would be easier to do it now than later. People say “Hurr hurr, if the US provoked this war to advance its own interests then Putin’s an idiot for falling for it,” but anyone who’s ever played chess knows strategy is often about forcing your opponent to choose between two bad options, either of which benefit you.

    There’s still this notion in some anti-imperialist factions that Putin is a brilliant strategic wizard who is outfoxing the empire in a game of 5D chess, but really he’s just fighting on the back foot against a far wealthier, far more powerful foe, and it’s costing his nation dearly.

    Whether Ukraine “wins” this war or not is irrelevant to the fact that the US empire was for relatively little cost able to create a massive sinkhole for Moscow to pour its energy and attention into, freeing up the imperial machine to focus on turning the screws on China.

    ❖

    Friendly reminder that China poses a threat solely to the US empire and its agendas of planetary domination, not to the US as a country. Empire architects are intentionally confusing Americans and other westerners by conflating these two issues in a massive propaganda campaign.

    ❖

    Being a child of wealthy parents is like being born into a cult whose entire focus is reinforcing class solidarity for the ruling class. Their social culture, academic culture, family culture etc are all dedicated to building an elite commonality that excludes the common riff raff.

    That’s why the ruling class have such vastly superior class solidarity to the working class. Most of us aren’t raised with an acute awareness that we are very different from the ruling class and that their interests conflict with our own, but everyone in the ruling class is. By the time they’re mature enough to take the reins, members of the ruling class have been run through an entire cultural processing system dedicated to forming solidarity with their class, while the rest of us have been focused on keeping our heads above water.

    ❖

    One of the dopiest beliefs on the “populist right” currently is that the ruling elites care about normalizing wokeism and social justice. Our rulers don’t give a fuck about trans rights or whatever, they only care about fanning the flames of culture war to prevent a class war. Our rulers would happily incinerate every trans person in the world if it meant cementing their rule. The instant Black Lives Matter sloganeering ceases to be politically useful it will be flushed down the toilet. They don’t care about marginalized groups, they just use them.

    It’s so stupid. Like yeah, powerful plutocrats and secretive government agencies are scheming to normalize LGBT rights because they stopped caring about power and domination and just love wokeness now. Good thinking, dipshit.

    In reality, marginalized groups pose no threat to you in any way whatsoever. You are meant to view them as the enemy so that you don’t view your rulers (who don’t care about either of you) as the enemy.

    ❖

    Rightists who think of themselves as anti-establishment rebels while clapping along with Trump, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk are exactly the same as Democrats who called themselves The Resistance for clapping along with Mueller and Rachel Maddow. They’re the same kind of mainstream dupes, just with different narratives.

    “Resistance” liberals thought they were fighting the man because they were trying to get the president arrested. MAGA rightists think they’re fighting the man because something something deep state. But in reality they’re both just mainstream partisans who fully support the imperial uniparty.

    At least Democrats are honest about being Democrats. Rightists will clap along with mainstream Republican politicians and mainstream Republican pundits and then call other people mainstream partisan NPCs. Really they’re exactly the same. They’re Republicans LARPing as nonpartisan free thinkers.

    ❖

    I don’t dismiss mainstream politicians and media because it’s inherently bad to be mainstream, I do it because right now we live in a highly controlled civilization wherein the only things permitted to go mainstream are those that help (or at least do not hinder) our rulers. Right now the ruling class which controls all means of mainstream elevation only elevates things which either (A) actively advance their interests or (B) normalize the status quo we live in with things like shows and movies that depict people thriving under our current systems.

    So right now there’s a wisdom in rejection of the mainstream. But we shouldn’t confuse that with the idea that being mainstream is always bad. Our goal should be to have our own healthy values of peace, equality and justice be the mainstream one day.

    It’s a sign of toxicity to be elevated to the mainstream under the current status quo. But we should keep in mind that if we are successful in changing the status quo, the shifting of what becomes mainstream will one day be a sign of health.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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  • Awakening From The Narrative Matrix: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Western analysts spent years warning that western actions would provoke a war in Ukraine, westerners spent four years being propagandized into hating Russia, then Russia invades and now western imperialists say the war is advancing US interests. But remember: it was an “unprovoked invasion”.

    The official narrative is that western aggressions played no role in provoking the invasion of Ukraine, but if that’s true then how come so many western experts spent years warning that western aggressions would provoke an invasion of Ukraine?

    Then in the years leading up to the invasion, westerners were hammered with media-induced panic about Russia, a nation they hadn’t thought much about since the early nineties. These mass media narratives all had their origins in the US intelligence cartel, which happens to have sought the destruction of the Russian Federation since the fall of the Soviet Union.

    Oh, and don’t forget the 2019 Pentagon-funded RAND paper which found that US geostrategic interests could be advanced by provoking Russia into overextending itself in areas like Ukraine. And now western imperialists are merrily boasting that this war is being used to advance longstanding US strategic interests.

    But remember, it’s very important that you believe Putin invaded Ukraine completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom. It couldn’t possibly have been the US empire doing what it always does and advancing its geostrategic interests by sinister means after lubricating the way with mass media propaganda, wedging Moscow into choosing between two bad options. Putin is just an evil crazy Hitler man.

    Because Putin is Bad, that means the US and its allies are necessarily Good. We know this because we’ve spent our lives being conditioned by Hollywood to look for Good Guys and Bad Guys in every conflict. If someone is doing a Bad Thing, the other side must be doing Good Things.

    And while we’re all busy clapping along with this artificial children’s cartoon show version of reality, experts are saying this conflict has put our world at greater risk of nuclear war than we have ever been, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The whole world is being imperiled by a unipolarist power grab orchestrated by our rulers. The only thing keeping this from being obvious to everyone is the massive amounts of propaganda that our entire civilization has been aggressively hammered with since well before it began.

    ❖

    It is always legitimate and good to criticize the well-documented aggressions of the world’s most powerful government, wherever they occur. Always, always, always. It requires no justification. If people act like you’re a weird freak or a Russian propagandist for doing it, it’s because their position is wrong and their arguments are dogshit.

    ❖

    Every few years the right produces a billionaire with extensive ties to the US deep state who poses as a populist hero who is fighting the deep state. Before it was Trump. Now it’s Musk. Later on it’ll be someone else. But it’s just a show to make it look like someone’s fighting.

    Both Trump and Musk get the opposite mainstream faction barking and snarling at them in exactly the same way Hillary Clinton drove Republicans insane. And in reality Musk, Trump and Clinton all serve the establishment that’s defended by both the Democrat and Republican parties. It’s all kayfabe combat staged to make it look like someone’s fighting on behalf of the disaffected Americans who are growing angry with their rulers’ complete indifference to them. Give them a hero to clap along with and they won’t take up the fight for themselves.

    Keeping everyone barking at shiny figureheads who represent one mainstream faction keeps people glued to mainstream factions which are framed as for or against those shiny figureheads. This keeps everyone subscribed to mainstream worldviews.

    They don’t just control the opposition, they control the opposition to the controlled opposition. That’s what the AOC/Bernie/TYT progressives are, and it’s what the MAGA/Tucker Carlson/Elon Musk faction is as well. They pretend they’re fighting the establishment while protecting it.

    ❖

    It actually isn’t an exaggeration to compare the mainstream worldview to the virtual world depicted in The Matrix. The only difference is that instead of AI keeping us imprisoned, it’s psychopathic oligarchs and secretive government agencies, and instead of code, it’s narrative.

    Few understand just how pervasively dominated our civilization is by narrative. How all our culture, beliefs, political and economic systems, are all made entirely out of mental stories that we collectively pretend are real — towers of narrative built on top of our basic animal needs.

    The experience of the individual is likewise dominated by narrative. If you’ve ever tried to meditate, you know how the mind babbles and churns even when you try to silence it for a minute. All that babbling is made of mental stories about life that have no concrete reality. Even your very idea of yourself is made of narrative. Not just your stories about who you are and how you are, but the actual existence of a “self” that’s separate and separable from the rest of life. It’s all made of believed mental narrative, and its reality is entirely illusory.

    Because human life is so dominated by narrative both collectively and individually, anyone who can manipulate the narrative can manipulate the humans. They can manipulate how we think, speak, act, shop and vote, as individuals, and at mass scale.

    And they do.

    Power is controlling what happens. Real power is controlling what people think about what happens. Our rulers do this by exerting massive amounts of influence over news media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, think tanks, NGOs, and other systems of narrative manipulation.

    They manipulate to start wars and roll out major control agendas of course, but their narrative control goes so much deeper than that. The bulk of it consists of mundane day-to-day manipulations which manufacture the normalization of status quo systems, making us think madness is sanity. They manipulate us into thinking poverty is normal, that our economic systems are the only way things could possibly be, that militarism is good, that it’s perfectly sane and expected that we’d keep voting in political systems that never change anything no matter who we vote for, and that there’s no other option anyway.

    They don’t just lie to us about what’s happening — they lie to us about who we are. About what we should value. About how we should measure our successes and failures as individuals. We’re saturated in these narratives from birth, and they all serve those who rule over us.

    And we remain enslaved in that way: thinking, speaking, moving, working, spending, voting and behaving in perfect alignment with the wishes of the powerful. In the west we think we’re free because we can do what we want, not seeing that our rulers control what it is we will want to do. We don’t grasp how profoundly unfree we actually are, because another major purpose of the narrative matrix is to trick us into thinking that we are free. In reality we’re no freer than we would be if we were kept in a coma in a vat with our brains jacked into a digital world.

    Awakening from the narrative matrix isn’t easy. It takes work. And just like in the movie, the path down that rabbit hole begins with a choice. That choice, that red pill, is committing yourself to a sincere devotion to living in truth, come what may. Even when the truth is inconvenient. Even when the truth goes against your biases and partisan loyalties. Even when it means seeing that everything you believe is a lie.

    It takes time and effort to extract the lies from your perception, because you’ve been consuming them your whole life. It takes sincerity. It takes self-honesty. It takes a willingness to go places that you’d rather not go. And even when you think you’re done, you’re probably not.

    Extracting yourself from the narrative matrix is a rabbit hole that keeps going and going. You clear one pile of lies only to find another. You get clear on your delusions about the outer world and discover a whole dimension of delusions about your inner world. It goes on and on.

    But the clearer things get, the faster and more fun it becomes. The clearer you are on the false narratives about the world, the more effective you are at helping others see them. The clearer you are on the false narratives about yourself, the happier and more effective you become.

    And then you’re ready to fight. You’re awake enough from the narrative matrix to help dismantle it, and to help wake up others.

    And of course the Agent Smiths will appear to try to stop you. They will appear wherever you try to shine light upon things that want to stay hidden. They’ll appear as strangers on the internet. They’ll appear as your friends and family. They’ll appear in you, trying to dissuade you from looking at parts of yourself that can only exist in unconsciousness.

    But they are very beatable. Absolutely they are. Every positive change in human behavior, whether individual or collective, is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. And that’s all we’re doing here: expanding consciousness. Making the unseen seen. That’s the path. Just as in The Matrix there will be forces within and without that want to maintain the status quo of darkness and unconsciousness, but the hidden can’t remain hidden forever. “As sure as God made black and white, what’s done in the dark will be brought to the light.”

    Really we’re just an adolescent species going through an awkward and confusing transition phase as we learn to use these newly evolved brains more maturely, and our confusion is being exploited in the meantime by a few clever humans who understand manipulation better than the rest of is. That’s all this really is. We’re on the journey to becoming a mature and conscious species, and when that happens the manipulators won’t be able to function, because they won’t have these large pools of human unconsciousness to hunt in. They’ll be like sharks flopping around on the beach sand.

    We can help facilitate this by taking that red pill. By making a sincere commitment to be true to what’s true, come what may. And then awakening the others, so that we can overthrow our oppressors and build a beautiful world together.

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • Robbing The Global South, Then Scorning Its Poverty: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Michael Parenti has said that “Poor countries are not ‘under-developed’, they are over-exploited.” The west tends to look down on the rest of the world for reasons that either directly or indirectly relate to the poverty in those nations, which is silly because that poverty comes largely from western theft and exploitation. It’s like mugging someone and then scorning them for their empty wallet.

    If you boil it right down and get real about it, most of the pride in western civilization is ultimately pride in being better at killing and stealing than other people. We’re still morally at the level of invading and plundering nations while claiming it’s justified because we are stronger than them, it’s just procedurally a few clicks removed from doing that directly.

    ❖

    Here’s a good example of how empire managers try to make China’s government look like a weird alien invader who must be removed by constantly bleating “Chinese Communist Party” and “CCP” instead of just saying “China”, “Beijing”, or “the Chinese government” like they do with other countries:

    Constantly repeating the word “Communist” evokes cold war fears from the past in older people, and saying “CCP” rather than the correct CPC (Communist Party of China) is designed to remind people of “CCCP”, Russia’s abbreviation for the USSR. The goal is to mentally uncouple the nation’s government from the nation in the minds of the public, so that removing it looks like an intervention to remove a strange outside force which doesn’t belong there instead of the obscenely intrusive imperialist agenda that it is.

    ❖

    Attempts to address the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story censorship shenanigans will never gain sufficient traction, because the entire liberal political/media class believes any and all actions to hurt Trump’s re-election odds were justified. They would have supported a lot worse. As far as US liberals are concerned, “unethical things were done to hurt Trump’s re-election bid” is a moot point, because they would have supported far more unethical things to hurt Trump’s re-election; arguing about its morality will therefore never mean anything to them.

    After 2016 a consensus was formed among liberal US media that they should have actively worked to manipulate the public into voting for Hillary Clinton, rather than reporting on her numerous scandals at the time. Killing the laptop story was the manifestation of that consensus.

    The Hunter Biden laptop story will therefore never move from a partisan talking point into a nonpartisan discussion about political censorship and journalistic ethics. It is firmly locked in to the former category. They all universally believe that they did the right thing. Where the moral imperative to defeat Trump is viewed as superseding any other possible concern, nobody who does not share that view will have any inroad to talk about those other concerns. They will always be dismissed by those who viewed helping to defeat Trump as a sacred duty. It’s an intractable quasi-religious belief based on their own certainty of the superiority of their worldview.

    The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story is therefore doomed to remain another Republican partisan issue that never goes anywhere like Benghazi or Monica Lewinsky, even though its far-reaching implications for media and tech mean it really shouldn’t be categorized as such.

    ❖

    One of the most under-discussed topics in the world right now is how governments are incrementally normalizing the use of police robots that can kill you and acting like it’s no big deal.

    ❖

     

    Virtual reality is silly when we’ve barely begun exploring our normal reality. Transhumanism is silly when we’ve barely begun exploring our normal humanity. Pursuing space colonization is silly when we haven’t even learned to live on the planet we’re adapted for. What are being presented as means for facilitating greater human experience are actually means for running away from it.

    If most of us haven’t even so much as mastered the ability to sit quietly for an hour and simply be still and content with what is, maybe it’s not yet time to start hanging a bunch of fancy bells and whistles on the human adventure as though we have taken this thing as far as it goes.

    Most of the futuristic visions people hold for humanity are really just visions of humanity running away from itself. Leaving earth and colonizing space. Leaving reality and building virtual reality. Leaving humanity and becoming cybernetic. All before we’ve actually learned to just be here. Baked in to all of these visions for our future is the assumption that humanity must always be restless. Must always be discontented. Must always be flailing around grabbing for more. This will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, if believed. So it’s important not to believe it.

    What if instead of looking outward for directions to take human exploration, we looked inward? What if we as a species spent a few centuries really getting to know ourselves and what we’re made of? Maybe we’re like someone leaving a solid gold house to go treasure hunting?

    Maybe all of our problems as a species can be solved by simply awakening human consciousness to what’s really going on? Maybe all of our societal, geopolitical and ecosystemic problems would resolve themselves if we could become conscious of the forces within us that drive them?

    What if there was a real societal push for practices like meditation and self-enquiry? What if facilities for psychedelic exploration were set up for public use around the world? What if we plunged in that direction, instead of trying to run off into space and virtual reality?

    Ever known someone who’s always moving from relationship to relationship, job to job, city to city, but always running into the same problems because the real source of their discontentment sits between their ears? Maybe that’s humanity in general in our visions for the future.

    This human adventure is going to keep unfolding for as long as it exists, but we do have control over what direction it unfolds in. Seems to me it would be best to start from where we’re at and get the hang of basic human experience before getting all fancy about it. You’ve got to walk before you can run, and as far as the exploration of our inner dimensions is concerned, most of us aren’t even crawling yet.

    The adventure is right here. The journey is in you. You are your own unexplored universe. Take a breath, let the bliss rise in you, and see it for yourself, right this second. Do it now because there is only now to do it in. See? It’s all here.

    ________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • China Keeps Aggressively Surrounding Itself With US Bases: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Facts:

    • There are Chinese people with real grievances against their government.
    • The US empire’s propaganda machine will spin current protests in China to advance imperial agendas.
    • Western intelligence agencies will become more and more involved in these protests the longer they go on.

    ❖

    It still amazes me how many people who fancy themselves anti-establishment critical thinkers will spend all day mindlessly regurgitating mainstream media lines about China.

    I cannot emphasize enough how little respect I have for anyone who parrots US empire narratives about China and how completely dismissive I am of all their attempts to explain to me that it’s actually right and good to do this. Literally all of our major problems are because of the people who rule over us; if you’re buying into the narrative that who we should really be mad at right now is a government on the other side of the planet with no power over us, you’re a fucking loser. You’re a bootlicking empire simp. You’re worthless, bleating human livestock.

    ❖

    Why does China keep aggressively surrounding itself with US military bases?

    ❖

    Everyone knows the US has invaded countries completely unprovoked very recently and will definitely do so again, but we still have to pretend that Putin is the worst thing since Hitler.

    ❖

    It’s disturbing how many people I encounter who claim Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is worse than America’s invasion of Iraq because Ukraine is a “democracy”. How fucked up do you have to be inside to believe human lives are worth less because of their nation’s political system?

    Leaving aside the fact that a nation which bans political parties, shuts down opposition media, imprisons opposition leaders, and is vastly more accountable to Washington than to its own people is in no way a “democracy”, that’s just a profoundly disturbed way of looking at life. A mother holding the remains of a child whose body has been ripped apart by military explosives does not care whether her country is considered a “democracy” by the western governments who are invested in that country’s military outcomes.

     

    ❖

    Rightists correctly believe that liberals subscribe to an artificially constructed worldview designed by the powerful in the service of the powerful, but incorrectly believe that they themselves do not.

    ❖

    Common debates:

    • Which status quo party is best
    • Which side of the culture war is correct
    • How the western empire should act
    • What capitalism should look like

    Uncommon debates:

    • Should status quo politics exist
    • Should the western empire exist
    • Should capitalism exist
    • Should class war replace culture war

    And it is of course entirely by design that the former are common and the latter are uncommon. Keeping everyone debating how establishment power structures should exist, rather than if they should, ensures the survival of those power structures.

    ❖

    It’s actually a really big problem that the most visible “left” in the US is completely worthless on war and militarism. When Americans who are critical of those things look right and see people like Rand Paul and Tucker Carlson doing something then look left and see AOC and Bernie doing nothing, which side do you think they’ll choose?

    And of course this is because the so-called progressive Democrats are not “left” in any meaningful way, but your average mainstream American doesn’t know that, and perception is reality. The US is the nation where antiwar sentiment is most important and the most urgently needed, and it’s been buried on the left. Americans are trained that Clintonites are “center-left” and AOC/Bernie are “far left”, and anyone further to the left than them on foreign policy is demonized by these progressives as a Russian agent. This creates the very understandable impression that the entire left is pro-war.

    When you’ve got Ilhan Omar and AOC calling people who protest US proxy warfare at their rallies Russian operatives and antiwar leftists like Jill Stein branded as Kremlin agents, the message mainstream Americans come away with is that antiwar sentiment is only welcome on the right.

    Again, I get this isn’t true and there’s lots of antiwar sentiment on the true left in the US, but nobody sees that left. It’s denied any media presence or political validity; mainstream Americans don’t know the difference between an anti-imperialist socialist and a Berner. This causes antiwar Americans to drift to the right; I’ve watched it happen in real time with some of my US followers. I do my best to make the case for the left, but I’m just one voice amid a surging deluge of messaging they’re getting that the real opposition is on the right.

    ❖

    Naming your war machinery after the Indigenous tribes your government genocided is the modern-day equivalent of wearing the skulls of your enemies on your war horse.

    ❖

    A lot of acceptance of the status quo worldview boils down to a failure of imagination. People literally can’t imagine the possibility that reality is as different as it is from what they’ve been told by their teachers, parents, pundits and politicians. It’s actually unfathomable to them, and that is because it’s so different. The world we’re trained to see by establishment perception managers is as different from the real world as any fictional world is.

    ❖

    ❖

    The claim that capitalism is the best system for generating profits is basically correct; it’s hard to beat greed and starvation as a carrot and stick to get the gears of industry whirring. The issue here is that merely generating profits won’t solve most of the world’s problems, and in fact many of our problems come from the fact that capitalism is too effective at turning the gears of industry. Our biosphere is dying largely because capitalism values making lots of things but not un-making things; we’re choking our ecosystem to death because it’s profitable.

    Capitalism has no real answers for problems like ecocide, inequality, exploitation and caring for the needful. Yes “let the markets decide” will generate lots of profits for those set up to harvest them, but profit-seeking cannot address those very serious problems. The “invisible hand of the market” gets treated as an actual deity that actually exists, with all the wisdom necessary to solve the world’s problems, but in reality the pursuit of money lacks any wisdom. It can’t solve our major problems, it can only make more stuff and generate more profit.

    Find me a capitalist business plan for leaving a forest untouched. Find me a capitalist business plan for keeping someone free of illness, for ensuring that someone with nothing gets what they need, for giving resources to a struggling parent. You can’t. Capitalism can’t do this. These are the most important things in the world, and no possible iteration of capitalism has any solutions for any of them whatsoever, apart from “Well hopefully rich people will feel very charitable and fix those problems.” And how is that solution working out? It’s a joke.

    The “Maybe the very rich will feel charitable and fix our problems for us” solution assumes that the very same people who are wired to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top of the ladder will suddenly start caring deeply about everyone they stepped on to get there. Capitalism elevates sociopaths, because profit-seeking competition-based systems reward those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead. That’s why we are ruled by sociopaths, and it’s why looking to “philanthropy” as a solution to our problems is a ridiculous joke.

    When capitalism proponents tell socialists and communists “You don’t understand economics,” what they really mean is “You don’t understand that capitalism is the best system for generating profits.” But socialists and communists do understand this; it’s just that generating profits, in and of itself, is not sufficient.

    If lack of wealth is your major problem, then capitalism can be a tool to address it; that’s what China is temporarily doing to keep up economically with the western forces who wish to enslave it. But such measures won’t solve ecocide, inequality, exploitation, and caring for the needful. For that other measures are needed.

    If you want to make more of something (money, material goods), then capitalism can be a good way to do that. But if you need to make less of something (pollution, inequality, exploitation, sickness, homelessness, etc) it’s worthless, and other systems must be looked to.

    You can say “But communist regimes are authoritarian blah blah” all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that capitalism has zero answers for the most important problems facing our species. This still needs to be addressed, and moaning about Mao and Stalin isn’t an answer. Don’t like the iterations of socialism we’ve seen so far? Okay. Then find another answer, and remember we’ve already established that capitalism is not an answer; it cannot address the problems we’ve discussed here. So we need to find an actual answer that does actually work.

    Dismantling capitalism, if we ever achieve it, will be the most difficult thing that humanity has ever accomplished. As hard as everyone becoming a buddha, and essentially not much different. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is existentially necessary for us to do so.

    We’ll either move from competition-based systems to collaboration-based ones, eliminating all the obstacles necessary for us to do so, or we will go extinct. We are at our adapt-or-die juncture as a species.

    _____________

    New book! Lao Sue And Other Poems, available in paperback or PDF/ebook.

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • Euthanizing The Poor Is Just Capitalism’s True Face: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We’re at the most dangerous point in humanity’s abusive relationship with US unipolar domination, for the same reason the most dangerous point in a battered wife’s life is right when she’s trying to escape. The empire is willing to do terrible and risky things to retain control.

    “If I can’t have you no one can” is a line that can be said to a wife or to the world.

    ❖

    Nobody likes feeling like they’re part of the problem. The reality that the US is the most tyrannical, murderous and belligerent government on earth causes people discomfort for the same reason they don’t like thinking about factory farming or their own socioeconomic privilege.

    ❖

    Canada: We’re euthanizing people now.

    Conservatives: EVIL! SATAN!

    Canada: *Poor people.

    Conservatives: We’re listening…

    Euthanizing the poor is just capitalism finally being honest about itself. After all these years of falsely pretending to have real solutions to the problems it creates, it finally presents a solution entirely in alignment with its values that actually works.

    Capitalism’s answer to “What about the poor?” has always been “They should work harder,” and its answer to “What about those who can’t work?” has always been “They should die quickly.” But until now it’s always been spoken wordlessly in the policies enacted and the societal structures put in place. Now it’s just right there, completely undisguised. It’s refreshingly honest.

    ❖

    Landlords don’t “provide housing”, they restrict housing. The housing already exists; landlords just make it much harder for the people who need it to access it.

    ❖

    Why is AP continuing to protect the anonymity of the US official who fed them a fake story about Russia attacking Poland? This is a very important question that demands serious answers. If government officials know they can get brazen lies anonymously published in the press and still have their anonymity protected after those lies are exposed, they will with 100% certainty continue to do so. Why wouldn’t they? There are no consequences.

    It’s obnoxious and unacceptable that the mass media currently hold random social media users to higher levels of accountability than powerful government officials who circulate lies that can start wars.

    ❖

    Western politicians, pundits and celebrities circulating the false claim that Iran sentenced 15,000 protesters to death is a good example of the way fact checking and journalistic responsibility go out the window when it’s a claim about a government the US empire wants to remove. It’s also a good illustration of the point Glenn Greenwald is always repeating that the largest and most egregious purveyors of misinformation in the western world are not Russian trolls or conspiracy theorists but the mainstream western political/media class.

    ❖

    Again, the most important thing for a westerner to understand about Iran is that it’s none of your fucking business. The less western “help” Iranians are getting, the better it is for Iranians. Demands that you “support the Iranian people” are only ever made in bad faith. No material benefits come from you tweeting “yay Iranian protesters” with the relevant hashtags. All that happens is you draw more western attention to Iran, along with the support for interventionism that inevitably comes with it.

    ❖

    Advocating peace and criticizing Nazis to trigger the libs.

    ❖

    It is good that the idea of peace talks with Russia is gaining more mainstream support. It should have had full support from the beginning. It’s only due to propaganda that opposing endless escalations between nuclear superpowers isn’t the most mainstream normie position ever.

    ❖

    Probably goes without saying but anyone who believes Trump would be meaningfully better than Biden on any issue that matters didn’t pay attention when he was president.

    ❖

    I’m not a multipolarist, I’m an omnipolarist — I think everyone on earth should have an equal amount of power. I want 8 billion equal poles. Multipolarity is just the practical lesser evil to unipolarity, because it turns out unipolarity requires constant war and nuclear brinkmanship to maintain.

    People say multipolarity necessarily requires wars as well, but that’s not true. There’s no reason powers like China and the US can’t get along and collaborate in everyone’s interest. The only thing stopping that is the US empire’s desire to keep chasing total unipolar planetary domination.

    I’m always reluctant to commit to other people’s -ists and -isms, but I’m definitely big on omnipolarism and information anarchism.

    _____________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • They Keep Us Focused On Decoy Dichotomies: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Westerners are taught that evil foreign “regimes” don’t let their people criticize their government, meanwhile westerners themselves are trained to never criticize their government. They’re trained instead to criticize decoy dichotomies — false partisan nonsense — not the real power.

    Westerners are trained to criticize the actions of the other party or the beliefs of the other ideological faction, never the foreign or domestic policies which are fully supported by both parties. The power structure which maintains 99.9% of the same policies regardless of which party is officially in charge is the real government, but westerners are trained never to look there. They’re instead trained to fixate on a false two-handed puppet show diversion.

    Westerners say “Well I’d rather live here than China or Russia, because here I can criticize my government whenever I want!” Okay. But you don’t. You don’t criticize your government. You just criticize the puppets, and usually only the puppets of the party you don’t like. You never criticize your actual government. Criticizing your actual government looks like attacking the murderous foreign policy that’s supported by both parties. Attacking the authoritarian domestic policies supported by both parties. Attacking the exploitative capitalist systems supported by both parties.

    Westerners are trained not to do that. They’re trained to believe that “criticizing your government” looks like saying “Drumpf” or “Let’s go Brandon” while the same tyrannical agendas march forward regardless of who sits in the White House.

    Westerners are “free” in the same way “free range” chickens are free; sure the door’s technically open and they can technically go outside, but they’re conditioned never to do so. Western so-called liberal democracy purports to offer freedom while in practice only offering the illusion of freedom. It uses the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised to keep people trapped in an existence as blindly obedient gear-turners while cartoons about freedom play in their heads.

    ❖

    The problem isn’t “wokeism”, the problem is that important conversations like US militarism and imperialism get bogged down in ridiculous conversations about whether the US military is too woke or not woke enough instead of how it’s killing people and threatening the whole world. Engaging in either side of that debate protects the worst impulses of the most powerful and dangerous people in the world, because it moves the crosshairs of public scrutiny from the powerful to the other side of the “wokeness” culture war. This is happening all over the place.

    A good example is the way Republicans have been pushing the most horrific agendas of US imperialism but using “anti-wokeness” as a carrying agent for their propaganda, like when Jesse Kelly said on Tucker Carlson that “We don’t need a military that’s woman-friendly. We don’t need a military that’s gay-friendly, with all due respect to the Air Force. We need a military that’s flat-out hostile. We need a military full of Type-A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls.”

    Or when Psycho Rubio said “We don’t need a military focused on the proper use of pronouns. We need a military focused on blowing up Chinese aircraft carriers.”

    The culture war says you should push back on the “anti-woke” rhetoric. Anti-imperialism says you should push back on their omnicidal warmongering. It’s hard to focus on both. This is being exploited by empire managers in myriad ways. They get people chasing decoy dichotomies so they can’t focus on the powerful.

    ❖

    Step 1: Be a progressive.

    Step 2: Ignore a major problem that progressives are supposed to oppose.

    Step 3: Keep ignoring it until right wingers start paying attention to it.

    Step 4: Frame opposing that problem as a right wing position.

    See: See nuclear brinkmanship, Ukraine proxy warfare, Assange, Syria, internet censorship, etc.

    ❖

    One of the reasons people are so casual about risking nuclear war is because it’s a difficult concept for the mind to wrap itself around. Full-scale nuclear war wouldn’t just kill everyone, it’d prevent every other human who would have been born in the future from ever existing.

    ❖

    ❖

    I have no special feelings one way or the other about China or Russia, I just acknowledge the indisputable fact that they are quantifiably far less destructive than the US-centralized empire. If they weren’t being aggressively targeted by that empire I probably wouldn’t notice them much.

    ❖

    Discussion of revolution and communism in the English-speaking world is just fantasy role playing unless it begins and ends with the cold hard reality that the left has been completely neutralized and marginalized here and the numbers are nowhere close to what they need to be. Moving revolutionary leftism out of the farthest margins and closer to the mainstream should be your first and foremost objective before you talk about anything else, because otherwise you’re just LARPing. You’re arguing about a political movement that has no actual movement.

    You can do this by outreach and activism. You can also do this by finding ways to make socialism and communism look so fucking cool that people start knocking each other over to be a part of it. Finding clever ways to make it shiny and attractive in a very indoctrinated society.

    ❖

    ❖

    Anyone who tries hard to convince you to like a powerful person has traded their mind for personality cult doctrine, whether their hero is Bernie Sanders, AOC, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson or Elon Musk. Proselytizing for the powerful is a sign that critical thinking has been abandoned.

    Think about it: what would be gained by one more person having positive feelings about Elon Musk or some other powerful figure? How does that benefit the world? It doesn’t, yet people try to win converts for them constantly, just like evangelists proselytizing their religion. This is because they’re all about the individual, not the cause or the policies that individual supposedly stands for.

    Anyone who tries to convince me to support a given goal or perspective will have my interest if their case is lucid and well-argued, but anyone who tries to convince me to like a given individual is instantly dismissed as a mindless automaton. I know I won’t be hearing anything intelligent from them.

    Pushing agendas serves those agendas. Pushing individuals serves only those individuals. If you care about advancing a cause, then advance that cause. Don’t get caught up in the propaganda-friendly, thought-killing tar pit of personality worship.

    Famous people are not your friend, and uplifting the powerful only serves power. This is especially true in the power structure we currently live under where the only people who are allowed to get to the top are those who facilitate the interests of power.

    ❖

    Filmmakers can trick you into cheering for the seal or for the polar bear just by choosing which one’s being followed by the camera and framed as the protagonist. They can also trick you into cheering for cops, a corrupt legal system, or an imperialist military in the same way.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    Featured image via Adobe Stock Photos.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Real Democracy Means Democracy Of Information: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The media are lying to us, as evidenced by reality never matching with their stories.

    The politicians are lying to us, as evidenced by their never delivering on their promises.

    The capitalist class are lying to us, as evidenced by their getting richer while workers get poorer.

    ❖

    I don’t want innovations which improve my shopping experience or make smartphones a tiny bit better, I want innovations which eliminate world hunger, innovations which make it so people have more free time, innovations which help humans live in harmony with our ecosystem.

    If you’re a middle class westerner, technology is already at a point where they’re not going to be coming out with any new personal gadgets that make your life significantly better. But there’s a massive amount of room for innovation that can make life much better for people as a whole. In terms of societal transformation technology still has the ability to radically improve the quality of human life, while in terms of rugged individualism technology is just going to give the wealthiest humans more of the same kinds of toys that are already failing to make them happy.

    The line of technological progress which is premised on individuals purchasing new inventions for themselves has long passed its point of diminishing returns, and now those returns are functionally nil. We don’t really need any more inventions for individual purchase and consumption. What we need are collective-oriented innovations which change the way humans live on this planet. And it won’t look like flying cars or fancier personal gadgets, it will look like advancements which change and improve our ability to get food, shelter and resources to everyone.

    ❖

    ❖

    Democracy of the vote without democracy of information is not democracy. It doesn’t matter if people are able to vote as long as the media-owning class are able to manipulate how they vote. “One person, one vote” is meaningless if influence and control of information is highly concentrated in an elite few. And it is.

    Mass media propaganda, internet censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy and the war on journalism are all anti-democratic in nature, because they restrict the information the citizenry are allowed to access to inform their vote. And none of those instruments of narrative control have any influence from, or accountability to, the rank-and-file public. This means that while everyone gets a vote, how those votes are applied is subjected to aggressive and ubiquitous manipulation by the ruling class.

    The US empire’s unprecedented investment in soft power control systems has given rise to the most sophisticated propaganda system that has ever existed. Human thought is being manipulated at mass scale like never before. If you control how people think, you control how they vote.

    Most of the propaganda people consume every day is not to manufacture consent for any one specific agenda, but to manufacture consent for the overall political status quo which keeps our wildly dysfunctional systems in place. That’s what maintains the false two-party puppet show. Without copious amounts of propaganda, it wouldn’t be possible to keep two evenly divided political factions impotently playing tug-o-war and never ever actually changing anything. The entire status quo is built upon the ruling class’s ability to manipulate minds at mass scale.

    ❖

    Republicans are lucky because they get to just openly be Republicans. Democrats have to be Republicans in secret.

    ❖

    Elon Musk’s endless string of faceplants with Twitter is a good illustration of why the rich shouldn’t rule the world. They’re not wise. They’re not even particularly smart. They just figured out how to play our shitty capitalist system which elevates assholes and sociopaths.

    Another good illustration is Mark Zuckerberg firing 11,000 people because of his dopey Metaverse fantasy:

    ❖

    I love how mainstream newspapers are like “Let’s give regular columns to multiple fire breathing extremist warmongers, because it’s important to make sure we’re getting that key fire breathing extremist warmonger perspective.” They’re like, “How are we supposed to get the full warmongering extremist perspective from just Josh Rogin and Jennifer Rubin? Add Max Boot for extra diversity.”

    ❖

    Humanity is abandoning religion as we discover that it’s all just a bunch of unhelpful and unevidenced made-up beliefs. One day humanity will in the same way and for the same reason abandon the belief that we are all separate individuals who stand apart from our biosphere and the universe.

    ❖

    Our rulers are like a clever man who captured a baby giant and trained it not to notice how much bigger and stronger it is than him so it wouldn’t squash him and escape.

    We’re the giant.

    _____________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    Feature image via duncan cumming (CC BY-NC 2.0)

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • No Such Thing As An Objective Journalist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    I feel like we haven’t been talking enough about the fact that US government agencies were just caught intimately collaborating with massive online platforms to censor content in the name of regulating the “cognitive infrastructure” of society. The only way you could be okay with the US government appointing itself this authority would be if you believed the US government is an honest and beneficent entity that works toward the benefit of the common man. Which would of course be an unacceptable thing for a grown adult to believe.

    ❖

    It’s still astonishing that we live in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously bloviate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.

    Look at this scumbag:

    Look at him. Can you believe this piece of shit? The gall. The absolute gall.

    ❖

    There is no such thing as unbiased journalism. If someone tells you they are unbiased they are either knowingly lying, or they are so lacking in self-awareness that you should not listen to them anyway.

    The divide is not between biased journalists and unbiased journalists, it’s between journalists who are honest and transparent about their biases and journalists who are not. There are no unbiased journalists. There are no unbiased people. You’re either honest about this or you’re not.

    Of course journalists should try to be as fair and honest as they can. It’s just the epitome of childlike naivety to believe that western mainstream journalists do this.

    Reporters who support the mainstream worldview are just as biased as reporters from Russian or Chinese state media; they espouse a peculiar perspective and concrete interests and agendas. The problem is the mainstream worldview is so normalized it looks like impartial reality, so you’ll get mainstream western journalists speaking disdainfully of Julian Assange or The Grayzone or whoever because those people have biases and agendas, as though they themselves have no biases or agendas and are nothing other than impartial arbiters of absolute reality.

    Which is plainly ridiculous. The worldview which facilitates the abuses of oligarchy and empire and the status quo politics which serves as their vehicle is anything but impartial. It’s not even sane. But because it’s been normalized by propaganda it looks like baseline reality.

    The only reason the mainstream worldview is mainstream is because the world’s most powerful people have poured a tremendous amount of money into making it mainstream. That’s the one and only reason. It’s not the moderate perspective, it’s just the most funded and marketed perspective.

    All journalists have biases, and all journalists have agendas. It’s just that most of them have the mundane agenda of becoming esteemed and well-known, and the easiest way to do that is to espouse the mainstream worldview where the tide of propaganda can carry you to shore.

    The easiest way to become rich and famous in news media is to promote the interests of the rich and powerful people who own and influence the news media. The easiest way to become reviled and marginalized is to attack those interests. Your values determine which path you choose.

    ❖

    There’s no such thing as a Hollywood ending.

    There’s no such thing as an objective journalist.

    There’s no such thing as a moral billionaire.

    There’s no such thing as a humanitarian intervention.

    There’s no such thing as an honest war.

    People should learn all this in grade school.

    ❖

    ❖

    Who understands that narrative control is power? Empire managers. Plutocrats. Propagandists. Smearmeisters. Manipulators. Abusers. Cult leaders. Bullies.

    Who does not understand that narrative control is power? Pretty much everyone else.

    This is the source of most problems.

    ❖

    Platforms censoring hate speech is not the same as platforms censoring political speech and speech which criticizes the agendas of the powerful. Censoring hate speech is done to benefit the platform’s profit margins; censoring political speech is done to benefit powerful government agencies. You can make slippery slope arguments, but they’re not equal, and they’re not similar.

    You can argue with the reality that for-profit platforms will always censor the most repellent forms of speech in order to prevent their audiences from being driven from the platform, but that is reality. And it is very different from censoring on behalf of US alphabet agencies. If what you want is a platform where all legal forms of expression are allowed, then for-profit platforms are not a good vehicle for that. Perhaps you want a nationalized social media platform funded by taxpayers with robust speech protections built into its terms of use.

    There’s a massive difference between a platform banning speech which makes that platform a gross place that nobody wants to hang out at and a platform banning the way people talk about a war or a virus because government agencies told them to. It’s unhelpful to conflate the two.

    And the conflation goes both ways. People who just want to spew hate will pretend to care about fighting the power, and the powerful who want to censor the internet to suppress inconvenient speech will pretend to care about stopping hate. It’s important to be aware of these obfuscations.

    There’s a night and day difference between people who oppose censorship because they don’t want the powerful controlling human speech and people who oppose censorship because they want to say ethnic slurs. They’re not the same. A good tool for making these distinctions is to examine whether the agenda punches down or punches up. If it seeks to suppress speech on behalf of the powerful or harm disempowered communities, it’s punching down.

    ❖

    Nobody’s ever been able to answer this question: if Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine had nothing to do with western provocations, how come so many western experts spent years warning that the west’s actions would provoke Russia to invade Ukraine?

    ❖

    Ukraine is a far more celebrated and aggressively defended centerpiece of hawkish American fanaticism than Israel ever was.

    ❖

    ❖

    If you find yourself rushing to defend the foreign policy of the most militarily, economically and culturally dominant nation on earth, ask yourself why that is. Ask whom that impulse benefits. Ask how that impulse came upon you. Ask if it could have been put there by propaganda.

    ❖

    It is false to claim that capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature”. I cite as my source for this claim the fact that I am human. The truth is that those who claim capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature” are not actually telling you anything about human nature. They are telling you about their own nature.

    And it isn’t even really accurate to call it their “nature”; it’s just their conditioning. And we can all change our conditioning. The only people who deny this are those who haven’t sincerely tried to yet.

    ❖

     

    One reason I publish poetry and share insights about philosophy and spirituality on top of my political and foreign policy commentary is because as the information ecosystem gets more polluted it’s not enough to tell people what you think, you’ve got to show them who you are. As more and more energy goes into distorting and manipulating public understanding of the world, it becomes more necessary to bare your soul to the furthest extent possible so people can decide on their own whether you’re the kind of person they want to pay attention to.

    People are very distrusting in today’s environment, and rightly so; we swim in an ocean of lies. You can get around that distrust by manipulating people into thinking you’re trustworthy, or you can do it by taking transparency to the furthest extent possible and letting yourself be fully seen so that people can make up their own minds about you for themselves.

    I can’t promise that I’ll always get everything right or that I’ll always be seeing things the most clearly, but I can promise to always be honest and to always be running on maximum transparency about who I am, where I’m coming from, and what my biases and agendas are.

    __________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Capitalism Has Failed As Badly As Anything Can Fail: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    “No no you don’t understand, this US war is completely different from all the other US wars. See, the US is intervening in Ukraine for humanitarian reasons. We’re fighting a bad guy who is an evil dictator that loves war crimes and genocide. Not like all those other interventions.”

    If the US proxy war in Ukraine was meaningfully different from other US wars they would be justifying it using different arguments, not the exact same ones.

    The war propaganda is airing reruns.

    ❖

    Western punditry is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, like its own actions would have nothing to do with it.

    If World War 3 does indeed occur, it will be because the drivers of the US-centralized empire continued accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to their inability to relinquish their goal of unipolar planetary domination.

    ❖

    Pointing out the various flaws in historical attempts at communism does not address the problem that if we don’t move from competition-based models to collaboration-based ones we’re going to destroy all life on this planet in short order. We’ve still got to find a way to change.

    Have issues with Stalin and Mao? Okay. Cool. Our competition-based models are still destroying our biosphere and shoving us toward nuclear war. Our survival still depends on moving toward collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem toward the thriving of all beings. Babbling about Stalin and Mao doesn’t magically change the fact that we can’t keep doing this thing where human behavior is driven by profit and competition.

    Leaving aside that many problems with communism have been wildly exaggerated and others are the direct result of sabotage and economic warfare by the capitalist empire, those criticisms never address the problem that capitalism has no solutions for our current existential crises. So we need systems which can address those existential crises. I see no models with any hope of sustainability that don’t involve a radical transition from competition to collaboration at every level. We will either accomplish that transition or we will go extinct. It really is that simple.

    People tell me, “Capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the best system we’ve seen.”

    It’s literally killing us. It’s brought us to the brink of extinction by environmental collapse or nuclear armageddon. That’s literally the worst failure that any system could possibly achieve. When your back is against the wall and your choices are between radical change and extinction, you’ve no other options but to try radical change. That’s the juncture we’re at right now.

    The status quo political establishment has failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. We could have a world of peace, equality, justice, health and harmony, but instead we’re marching toward dystopia and extinction. It is entirely within the reach of human potential to have a collaboration-based civilization where everyone works together toward human thriving. Our rulers have delivered only competition-based systems which do the exact opposite. They failed the test. Time for something new.

    It doesn’t get any more fail than “Yeah we’ve competed ourselves into a situation where there might be a nuclear war that ends literally everything any minute now.” That’s the most fail you can have while still being alive enough to acknowledge the failure. The facts are in. They failed.

    A system that fails to that extent does not deserve to exist, and should not exist. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and if we can just shake each other awake from the propaganda-induced coma we’re all in we can force the creation of much better systems.

    ❖

    Mass media propagandists work so hard to discredit The Grayzone because they know that tomorrow it could be their own emails getting published revealing corrupt collusion with western officials and intelligence insiders.

    ❖

    Let yourself be happy. If you can’t do it for you then do it for the world. Refusing to let yourself be happy is just keeping that much happiness out of the world. It’s making it a worse place to live. Be happy.

    Refusing to let yourself be happy just deprives the world of that much happiness. Refusing to let yourself be loved just deprives the world of that much love. Refusing to let yourself be at peace just deprives the world of that much peace.

    Be happy. Not because you “deserve” it or any of that empty narrative fluff, but because the world is a hard place and any spark of happiness is sorely needed.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    Image via Pixabay

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Pretending To Seek Peace In An Unwinnable Proxy War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We should probably talk more about the fact that the US empire is loudly promoting the goal of achieving peace in Ukraine by defeating Russia while quietly acknowledging that this goal is impossible. This is like accelerating toward a brick wall and pretending it’s an open road.

    The narrative that Russia can be defeated by escalating against it makes sense if you believe Russia can be defeated, but the US empire does not believe that Russia can be defeated. It knows these escalations are only going to exponentially ramp up death and devastation.

    “Beat Putin’s ass and make him withdraw” sounds cool and is egoically gratifying, and it’s become the mainstream answer to the problem of the war in Ukraine. But nobody promoting that answer can address the fact that the ones driving this proxy war believe it’s impossible. In fact, all evidence we’re seeing suggests that the US is not trying to deliver Putin a crushing defeat in Ukraine and force him to withdraw, but is rather trying to create another long and costly military quagmire for Moscow, as cold warriors have done repeatedly in instances like Afghanistan and Syria.

    Wanting to weaken Russia and wanting to save lives and establish peace in Ukraine are two completely different goals, so different that in practice they wind up being largely contradictory. Drawing Moscow into a bloody quagmire means many more people dying in a war that lasts years.

    The US does not want peace in Ukraine, it wants to overextend Russia, shore up military and energy dominance over Europe, expand its war machine and enrich the military-industrial complex. It’s posing as Ukraine’s savior while being clearly invested in Ukraine’s destruction.

    It is not legitimate to support this proxy war without squarely addressing this massive contradiction using hard facts and robust argumentation. Nobody ever has.

    ❖

    The idea that the US and NATO have no special obligation to help negotiate a peace settlement in Ukraine only makes sense if you pretend the US and NATO played no role in causing the war in Ukraine. Which is to say it only makes sense if you believe a silly, infantile fiction. There are plenty of arguments to be made that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is immoral and illegal, but to claim it was unprovoked and exculpate the US-centralized power structure from any responsibility for provoking it is inexcusable fact-free bullshit.

    ❖

    Saying “Putin can end this war by withdrawing!” in response to discussions about what the west can do to bring peace to Ukraine is just interrupting serious adult conversations with childish prattle that only serves to cover up your desire for this war to last forever.

    ❖

    Westerners demand more nuanced and believable motives from their Marvel movie villains than from the propaganda narratives their media peddle about enemies of the US empire.

    ❖

    ❖

    Imagine living on a dying world where people are brainwashed from birth into mindless consumerism and saturated in propaganda promoting war and status quo kleptocracy and exploitation, and deciding that the real sign of societal deterioration is teenagers using different pronouns. Like okay sure we’re being marched into armageddon and dystopia by mass-scale psychological manipulation that’s so ubiquitous and pervasive that hardly anyone ever notices it or talks about it, but the real sign our civilization is crumbling is my friend’s kid using “they/them”.

    ❖

    It is always right and good to criticize the most dangerous actions of the most powerful government in the world. It is always right and good to demand the west uphold the values it claims to uphold and play by the rules it claims to play by. This is self-evident and requires no defense.

    I’ve long felt like a big part of my job here is just being the voice that says “You’re not crazy. I see it too.” Assuring people they’re not going mad when it looks like everything they were told about the world is a lie and everyone they were trained to trust is deceiving them.

    Because that is the message you will receive when you start asking the important questions and getting the important answers about ruling power structures in our world: people will act like you’re a raving lunatic for talking about US empire malfeasance and western propaganda. Only by mass-scale propaganda brainwashing would it ever appear insane to criticize the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive government on earth. It’s the most normal, sane and rational thing in the world, but it’s made to look freakish by narrative spin.

    To paraphrase Jiddu Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to be deemed sane in a profoundly insane society.

    ❖

    Boss makes a dollar,
    I make a dime,
    boss’s overseas wage slave makes a penny,
    the war victim gets death,
    the factory farmed animal gets torture,
    the biosphere gets mass extinction,
    that’s why I endorse global communism
    and the metamorphosis of human consciousness
    on company time.

    Okay it doesn’t rhyme like the original but I like it anyway.

    __________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • We’re Being Pushed Toward Nuclear War On A Fiction: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We’re being driven toward nuclear war on the completely fictional claim that Putin is a Hitler-like megalomaniac who’s just invading countries completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and won’t stop invading and conquering until he’s stopped by force.

    The news media aren’t telling people about the western aggressions which led to this war. They’re not telling people the US is keeping this war going with the stated goal of weakening Russia and is rejecting peace talks and refusing to push for peace. All people are being told is that Putin is another Hitler who won’t listen to reason and only understands violence. The world’s two nuclear superpowers are being pushed closer and closer to direct military confrontation based on a complete fiction which omits mountains of facts.

    To participate in this madness is indefensible. It is indefensibly immoral to foist a fictional version of events upon a trusting populace in order to manufacture consent for more and more aggressive acts of brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower. These people are depraved.

    ❖

    “No no you don’t understand, if we weren’t being told constantly by the media that this proxy war needs our full support and censoring the voices who dispute this and using giant troll armies to swarm and silence anyone who questions this, we might fall victim to propaganda.”

    ❖

    “You’re not anti-war, you’re just anti-AMERICAN wars,” said the person who is loudly cheerleading America’s proxy war in Ukraine.

    Warmongers don’t like being called warmongers when they support a US proxy war that was deliberately provoked by the US and is being sustained by the funding and facilitation of the US with the explicit goal of weakening a longtime geopolitical rival of the US. They get very upset when you point out the fact that they are doing this, and when people’s opposition to their warmongering is described as “anti-war”:

    They very much prefer to pretend that this time the US is on the good and righteous side of a war, because in that imaginary world they’re the cool anti-fascists standing up to an evil tyrant and those who oppose their warmongering are the real warmongers.

    “This time the US is on the GOOD side of a war! Also, goo goo ga ga I am a little baby with a little baby brain.”

    ❖

    The closer we get to nuclear war the less patience I have for sectarian spats between people who are supposed to be opposing war and militarism. Grow the fuck up and get over yourselves. This is more important than you and your ego.

    ❖

    Don’t let anyone tell you your criticisms of US warmongering make no difference; if they didn’t, the empire wouldn’t work so hard to dissuade you from making them. They work so hard to manufacture public consent for their agendas because they absolutely require that consent.

    An entire globe-spanning empire rests on our closed eyelids. Depends on keeping us in a propaganda-induced coma. Circulating ideas and information which discredit and dispute that propaganda poses a direct threat to that empire. That’s what all the censorship of dissent is about.

    Is your one tweet, video or public demonstration going to bring the empire crashing down? Of course not. But it will spread awareness by that much. And all positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of awareness. You’re nudging us all toward awakening to whatever extent you help expand awareness of truth and reality.

    We can’t be the Hollywood hero who single-handedly decapitates the machine, but we can all collectively throw sand in its gears, making it harder and harder for it to function. That’s what disrupting the imperial propaganda machine accomplishes, because that machine depends on propaganda. The weakest part of an empire that’s held together by lies and manipulation is its lies and manipulations; that’s why it’s such an aggressively protected aspect of its power. And it happens to be the one part that anyone with a voice can attack, and attack effectively.

    The nightmare scenario for our rulers is the same as the nightmare scenario for every ruler throughout history: that the masses will get sick of their rule and use the power of their numbers to get rid of them. That’s exactly what the propaganda matrix is designed to prevent.

    One aspect of this struggle that is a bit like a Hollywood movie is that it kind of is a struggle between light and darkness, because the empire depends on keeping its activities obfuscated and unseen while we’re all working to make its machinery visible and transparent. That’s why Assange is in prison. It’s also why internet censorship keeps ramping up, why propaganda is getting more and more blatant, and why online discussion is swarmed by astroturf trolling ops. Those in power are working against the people to keep things dark and unseen.

    _______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Feature image was posted to Flickr by Amaury Laporte at https://flickr.com/photos/8283439@N04/51909291570 (CC BY 2.0)

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Evolving Big Brains Only To Go Extinct From Stupidity: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    It’s really too bad that anyone who thinks it might be a good idea to stop exponentially escalating this proxy war is an evil Nazi Putin propagandist, because things are getting very very dangerous.

    Normal person: I think it would be good if everyone didn’t die in a nuclear holocaust.

    Crazy person: That means you love Vladimir Putin.

    Normal person: No I just think it would be a good idea to try to prevent the horrific death of literally everyone.

    Crazy person: How much is the Kremlin paying you to say that?

    Fucking lunatics.

    Resisting nuclear armageddon is the least partisan position that anyone could possibly have. The least one-sided. The least “campist”. It’s just being a normal human organism with the most normal human impulse you could possibly come up with. It’s absolutely insane that anyone tries to spin it otherwise.

    A society where opposing nuclear armageddon is treated as freakish and evil is the most backwards and insane society imaginable. Seriously, try to imagine anything crazier and more backwards than that. A society where everyone walks and drives backwards? That’s less crazy and backwards. A society where the dogs own the people? That’s less crazy and backwards.

    This is it. This is peak crazy. A thinking species which regards as outrageous heresy any opposition to brinkmanship that can cause its extinction cannot get any more crazy. It’s turned as far away from sanity as any thinking creature could possibly be.

    ❖

    Maybe it would be wise to stop playing the “Let’s cross Putin’s red lines, I bet he’s bluffing this time” game.

    ❖

    People who aren’t gravely concerned about the rapidly escalating brinkmanship between the US and Russia simply have not spent enough time researching the facts and contemplating the reality of what nuclear war would mean. Their composure comes solely from psychological avoidance.

    ❖

    It is a bit hilarious that humans rapidly evolved these massive brains only to become the first species to go extinct due to stupidity.

    ❖

    FYI you should always be less trusting of your government in times of war, not more.

    ❖

    Analysis of the war in Ukraine which does not account for the western provocations which gave rise to it is not analysis at all. It’s propagandistic children’s literature.

    ❖

    If your proxy war demands nonstop PR spin and mass media propaganda at maximum aggression to manufacture public consent for it, maybe your proxy war is immoral and bad.

    ❖

    ❖

    The only way you can believe Russia is threatening with nuclear weapons in a way the US is not would be to think the US has a No First Use nuclear policy. Which would of course be false and silly.

    ❖

    When one side of the new cold war wants multipolarity where world power is much less centralized and the other side wants unipolar planetary domination where the entire world obeys Washington DC and its puppet masters, it’s not hard to figure out which side is the aggressor.

    ❖

    Be completely dismissive of those who object to your criticisms of western imperial aggression. The one and only reason they expect their dopey opinions to be taken seriously is because their position has been artificially normalized by copious amounts of propaganda. That’s it.

    The one and only thing making your worldview look strange and suspicious and the worldview of empire apologists look normal is the fact that we’ve all been swimming in empire propaganda our entire lives. It’s got nothing to do with the factuality or validity of anyone’s position. In reality, focusing one’s criticisms on the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth is the normal thing to do. It’s not strange and suspicious when you do it, it’s strange and suspicious that everyone else does not.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.