radiofree.asia

Category: narrative matrix

  • Nobody Who Supports NATO Is A Moderate: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    Someone who believes the US or its proxies sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines can tell you exactly what they’d stand to gain from it and how little it would cost them. Someone who believes it was Russia has to perform weird mental contortions about Moscow sending some kind of message to the world and Putin being insane, or entertain the absurd notion that Russia could only stop Europe from obtaining Russian natural gas by destroying Russian pipelines. This says a lot about whose arguments are stronger.

    The west has blamed Russia for bad presidents, for western racism, for western political divisions, for inflation, for pretty much every bad thing western power structures are responsible for, but blaming Russia for attacks on Russian pipelines is probably going to take the cake.

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    The Wolfowitz Doctrine, penned after the fall of the USSR, describes the US policy of ensuring that no other power develops which could challenge US supremacy. It’s important to understand that this wouldn’t just apply to nations like Russia and China, but to the EU as well.

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    Nobody who supports NATO is a moderate.

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    Being an American liberal means wearing a “Punch Nazis” t-shirt while cheering Biden as he arms Nazi paramilitaries in Ukraine and Hillary Clinton as she praises Italy’s election of a fascist prime minister.

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    Looking forward to when things heat up with China so we can find out whether Australia is going to be Washington’s next Europe or its next Ukraine.

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    Both sides of the Ukraine proxy war are threatening to use nukes. Both Russia and NATO 100 percent understand that nukes may be used by either side and their use is never off the table. The mutual nuclear threat is always there, regardless of what mouth noises either side is making about them. It’s weird how many people I’m running into who don’t get this.

    This conflict doesn’t magically get dangerous because of what some Russian official happens to be saying on a given day. It would be just as dangerous if nobody was saying anything about nukes. The threat is there regardless of what anyone says, and it’s rapidly escalating.

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    It sure was nice of governments to assign themselves the responsibility of regulating how we talk to each other online. I don’t remember anyone asking them to do this, and it sure sounds like a lot of work, but by golly they’ve volunteered for the job anyway:

    “How do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble?”

    I keep tripping on this part. She’s saying people should be forbidden to say certain things about a war, on the absurd grounds that free speech can prevent peace. Even if you ignore the tyrannical mentality from which this claim arises, it also just makes zero logical sense. People saying online that a war is justified prevents that war from being ended? What? How? How could that possibly even happen? What the fuck are you talking about?

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    If someone criticizing nuclear fucking brinkmanship looks like adoration for Putin or Russian propaganda to you, it’s because you’ve been so brainwashed by western propaganda that the most normal thing imaginable looks freakish and sinister in your eyes. Criticizing your government is normal. Criticizing agendas of unparalleled existential importance is normal. Criticizing the most powerful government in the world is normal. Only by tremendous amounts of propaganda are these extremely normal things made to look abnormal.

    Online discourse is crawling with people who really, truly, sincerely believe that if someone doesn’t fully support their government’s foreign policy with Russia and believe 100 percent of what their government says about it, it means they love Vladimir Putin and support everything he does. You either believe Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom and support your government’s actions against Russia no matter how much it costs or how much it risks, or you love the Kremlin and think Putin is a saint. Those are the only two possibilities.

    If you can propagandize someone into believing their government is pure and virtuous, they will necessarily see any opposition to that government as evil and malicious. That’s why anyone questioning official narratives about Russia can only be an evil tankie who hates democracy.

    Someone who tells you that you love Putin and believe he’s perfect is really telling you that they love their own government and think it’s perfect. They see their government as pure and virtuous and worthy of blind obedience, so failure to do so is indicative of nefariousness.

    ____________________

    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.

  • The Profit Motive Is Crippling Humanity: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    The US military has seven branches of service:

    • Army
    • Navy
    • Air Force
    • Marines
    • Coast Guard
    • Space Force
    • Mainstream Media

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    It’s hard to grasp just how badly humanity is handicapping itself by excluding all solutions that can’t generate a profit. There’s a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we’re limiting ourselves to a very small, very shitty fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we’re omitting any which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the fuck alone. We’re also shrinking the incentive to cure problems rather than offer expensive, ongoing treatments.

    Or even a project as fundamental to our survival as getting all the pollution out of our oceans. The profit motive offers no solution because there’s no way to make a surplus of money from doing so, and in fact it would be very costly. So the pollution stays in our seas, year after year. People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there’s no way to make it profitable. And people would come up with far more solutions if they knew those solutions could be implemented.

    How many times have you had an awesome idea and gotten all excited about it, only to do the math and figure out that it’s unfeasible because wouldn’t be profitable? This is a very common experience, and it’s happening to ideas for potential solutions to our problems every day.

    The profit motive system assumes the ecocidal premise of infinite growth on a finite world. Without that, the entire system collapses. So there are no solutions which involve not growing, manufacturing less, consuming less, not artificially driving up demand with advertising etc.

    It’s hard to appreciate the significance of this artificial limitation when you’re inside it and lived your whole life under its rules. It’s like if we were only allowed to make things out of wood; if our whole civilization banned the entire spectrum of non-woodcraft innovation. Sure such a civilization would get very good at making wooden things, and would probably have some woodcrafting innovations that our civilization doesn’t have. But it would also be greatly developmentally stunted. That’s how badly we’re limiting ourselves with the profit motive model.

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    A lot of the “Great Reset” environmental chatter comes from the capitalist class flailing around trying to reconcile impossible contradictions baked into capitalism like the premise of infinite growth on a finite world and the fact that there’s no way for saving the environment to be profitable. So they’re planning all these new models which won’t do anything to save the environment, but will yield massive profits.

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    Anyone accusing you of “repeating Russian talking points” is just saying you criticize the foreign policy of the US and its allies. That is always what they truly mean by that once you really drill down on what they’re saying and why they are saying it. The argument is that because Russia criticizes the foreign policy of the US-centralized empire, you never should. Which is self-evidently extremely moronic.

    It’s literally impossible to be an aggressive critic of US foreign policy with a sizeable audience and not be accused of repeating Russian taking points. Literally every single high-profile person who does so gets accused of Kremlin loyalty, without a single, solitary exception.

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    Those who tell you to “move to Russia” when you criticize the foreign policy of the western empire are the same people pushing for internet censorship and the silencing of unauthorised media and demanding retractions from any western outlet that forgets to parrot the official line.

    “Move to Russia!” No, you move to Russia. You’re the one trying to suppress dissent and criticism of the powerful. I’m the one who is living by western values as they were sold to me and demanding normal scrutiny of the most powerful empire of all time. You don’t belong here.

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    Hello we’re the westerners, we’re awesome because we live in free democracies with a free press where everyone is equal. Also, let’s spend weeks crying over a dead monarch at the urging of the news media because her blood makes her better than normal people.

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    One of the many consequences of learning about how fucked things are is a growing frustration over wanting things to change while they only get worse. In my experience, which you may of course take or leave, the answer to this dilemma is contained in the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” A more secular version might read, “Make peace with what you can’t change in this moment, bravely make whatever changes can be made in this moment in your surroundings and in yourself, and learn to distinguish between the two.”

    You’re only one human in a chaotic, confusing cacophony of eight billion, and there’s very little you can do to single-handedly effect the massive changes our species needs no matter how clever you are. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. You can do little things to help make this planet a slightly gentler place every day, you can work to spread awareness of what’s true, and you can contribute in your own small way to the expansion of human consciousness (both in yourself and in the world).

    Act to whatever reasonable extent you can act, then let go and relax into this beautiful existence. Make peace with what you cannot change in this moment, make what small changes you can, and learn to tell the two apart. The more you learn about our current plight the more necessary it becomes to learn how to do this.

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    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 via Pixabay

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • It’s A Big Club, And You Ain’t In It: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    Brian Stelter went from a mainstream media gig to a gig at Harvard. Jen Psaki went from a gig in the Biden administration to a gig in the mainstream media. Mike Pompeo went from a gig in the Trump administration to a gig with a DC think tank. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.

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    I’m actually less disdainful of the British royal family than I am of all the sniveling sycophants who are worshipping them right now. The royals were born into this ridiculous charade; these losers are choosing it.

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    Brits who lived their whole lives thinking it was their free choice to have a royal family have been getting a rude awakening these last few days:

     

     

     

     

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    The Australian Football League was going to have a moment of silence for the queen but cancelled it when they realized it was the AFLW Indigenous round, meant to honor Indigenous Australians. Which actually tells you everything you need to know about the queen, and Australia.

    “Oh wait it’s the Indigenous round, we probably shouldn’t celebrate Her Majesty.”

    “Oh yeah why not?”

    “Well you know, on account of all the genocide and killing and stealing and oppression and brutality.”

    “Wait, so you’re saying it would have been okay honor people who did those things any other time?”

    “Sure, yeah.”

    It’s like saying we were going to have a moment of silence for the Hitler family, but then we realized it’s Yom Kippur and we didn’t want to be disrespectful to Jews who might find honoring Hitler offensive on that particular day.

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    Of course the US empire wanted the war in Ukraine. That’s why it knowingly provoked it and actively intervened to prevent peace from breaking out in the early days of the conflict. It’s been using this war to advance its geostrategic interests in Eurasia at very little cost to itself.

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    From 2016-2019, mainstream liberals were indoctrinated with hatred of Russia using a conspiracy theory born of the US intelligence cartel that the White House had been infiltrated by the Kremlin. Now a deliberately provoked, totally unrelated war leverages that hate.

    Hmm.

    Spinmeisters now act like the discredited Trump-Russia collusion narrative never happened; this narrative which monopolized the news media and greatly altered public perception of Moscow on totally baseless grounds has been memory holed while its propaganda effects live on. We’re looking at a war in Ukraine that was knowingly provoked, by the very same empire whose propaganda engine just spent years manipulating the public into hating Russia for reasons that were (A) false and (B) completely unrelated to Ukraine. And now those very same liberals who spent years insisting that Trump’s entire family and cabinet were moments away from being dragged from the White House in chains are all waving blue and yellow flags and shouting “Slava Ukraini!”

    It would have taken a pretty strong propaganda push to shift mainstream liberals from the position they were at just a few years ago:

    Hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm.

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    If we were being told the truth about this war they wouldn’t be banning Russian media, we wouldn’t be hearing propagandistic messaging like “unprovoked invasion” at every mention of Ukraine, and those expressing skepticism about all this wouldn’t be swarmed by astroturf empire trolls.

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    My critics are like, “You’re not a REAL anti-imperialist, if you were you’d be assisting the propaganda campaigns of the most powerful empire that has ever existed to help it subvert and conquer the nations who disobey its commands.”

    I will not mitigate my criticisms of the empire I live in by equating them with the lesser crimes of other countries. Why would you even want me to do that? The only honest reason I can think of is that you want me to go easy on your cognitive dissonance. No. Fuck off. Face it. Turn and face the horror our empire inflicts on the world.

    Of course it would be easier to shake my fist at foreigners rather than demand change in the empire that my country is a part of. Duh. That’s why you do it. I will not.

    People want me to equate the full magnitude of the murderous butchery and weaponized starvation that our western empire is engaged in with these piddling crimes of other countries so they don’t feel bad. Fuck that. Feel bad. Feeling bad means you’ll need/want to change it.

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    Gosh that Pentagon-commissioned 2019 Rand Corp paper on how to break Russia is just chock full of convenient coincidences:

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    People defend capitalism on the grounds that it creates abundance, and in a sense they’re right: capitalism is an effective way to drive up production and consumption. The problem is there’s no wisdom guiding it, so the world is being choked with garbage while people go hungry.

    Haves exploiting the labor of have-nots will indeed get the gears of industry creating lots of stuff. But now we’re creating too much stuff, so much that it’s killing our biosphere, even as vast inequalities remain and far too many go without the basic necessities in life. The “invisible hand” of the free market is worshipped as a sentient deity who always knows what’s best, but in reality it’s completely bereft of wisdom and intelligence and cannot move in harmony with the real needs of the real world. It’s a mindless force that is driving us to disaster.

    This isn’t a problem you can just ignore. You can’t keep waxing on about how much stuff capitalism has been able to create while that stuff is destroying our ecosystem and making this planet uninhabitable. It’s a problem that urgently needs solving, and capitalism can’t solve it.

    Capitalism offers no solution to the problems of ecocide and inequality. As long as exploitation remains profitable, exploitation will remain. As long as ecocide remains profitable, ecocide will continue. Human behavior cannot remain driven by profit. We need something new.

    ___________________

    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.

  • Capitalism Has No Solution To Ecocide: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible get to just stay in power indefinitely and suffer no meaningful consequences of any kind.”
    ~ John F Kennedy (paraphrased)

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    Ecocide will continue as long as ecocide is profitable. No possible iteration of capitalism can address this problem. This, in and of itself, is a sufficiently strong argument that capitalism must be abandoned.

    No model where human behavior remains driven by profit can address the problem that ecocide will continue as long as ecocide is profitable. That’s why so many capitalism proponents are reduced to simply pretending that ecocide isn’t a problem.

    Eco-consciousness and anti-capitalism go hand in hand, but the liberals are dominating environmentalist discourse while the commies frequently neglect it. This is a strategic and moral error. This is the strongest argument against capitalism, and it’s one which needs to be made.

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    It can take a while for a principled antiwar leftist to learn that in the big picture they have very little in common with so-called progressives who mostly ignore US imperialism and just want the empire to forgive their student loans. The difference between a leftist who opposes capitalism and empire and your average Bernie Sanders progressive is considerably greater than the difference between your average Bernie Sanders progressive and your average MSNBC Clintonite.

    None of this means progressives can’t be worked with on points of convergence, it just means they’re ideologically different and it serves no one to pretend otherwise. The same is true of antiwar right-libertarians. Ultimately there’s commonality wherever class interests align.

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    I’m as distrustful as anyone of the new mainstream UFO narratives, but when congress is saying UFOs are a threat that is “expanding exponentially“, it probably deserves attention. I don’t know why they’re saying it, but they’re not saying it for no reason. There’s an agenda here, whether it’s weaponizing space or running cover for new military technology or just securing more money for the military-industrial complex. I’m not willing to commit to any position on what exactly they’re up to, but they’re clearly up to something.

    Not many people from my sector of the political fringe are looking at this, and I think that’s partly because there’s so much uncertainty and partly because it doesn’t really fit into any of our models for understanding the world. But whatever it is, it’s worthy of at least some attention.

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    The more information that comes out about the effectiveness of psychedelics in treating psychological trauma the more outrageously criminal it looks that these medicines have been suppressed for generations while the world was being destroyed by a highly traumatized species.

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    We’ve all had the experience of wanting to change something undesirable about our behavior but not being able to. This happens because the forces driving that behavior are not yet conscious. This is what’s happening with the self-destructive behavior of humanity as a whole, too.

    There’s a misconception in our society that people stop their self-destructive behavior when they apply “willpower”, which is really just empty head noises. Actually people change when there’s an expansion of consciousness. That’s what we’re waiting on with the human species too.

    That’s ultimately why we’re destroying our planet despite knowing it’s bad for us. We can talk all we want about capitalism, corruption, empire and ecocide, but underneath it all what we’re really looking at is the struggle of a thinking species to become a conscious species.

    So for me the answer to the “what can we do?” question is usually, expand consciousness. Spread awareness of what’s going on in the world, expand our consciousness of what’s going on in ourselves, anything you can do to bring awareness to previously unconscious important matters.

    And people are already doing this. That’s all healthy activism generally is: people working to spread awareness of an important issue. That’s also what real journalism is, it’s what real political dissent is, and what authentic spirituality is. It’s all about expanding awareness.

    Working toward a healthy humanity is essentially the task of strolling through the dark hallways of our collective unconscious and flicking on the lights, one by one. It’s not easy, but the more lights get switched on the more awake people there will be helping us switch on the rest of them.

    __________________

    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 via IndoMet in the Heart of Borneo (CC BY 2.0)

  • Political False Dichotomies: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    You may vote and debate freely on any issue which does not affect the functioning of the empire. When it comes to how money, weapons and resources move around the world, however, you suddenly find that your votes don’t matter and your position has no mainstream representation. They’ll let you argue until you’re blue in the face over whether or not you can have an abortion or whether minorities should have civil rights; they might even let you vote on it. But things like military expansionism and neoliberal globalization and deregulation are off limits.

    The empire relies on false political dichotomies like Democrats vs Republicans to keep everyone fighting over issues which don’t affect the functioning of the empire so the machine can trudge onward uninterrupted by the local riff raff. That is the entire job of those parties.

    The mainstream media exist to keep everyone spellbound by those false dichotomies on the level of discourse and debate. They manufacture culture wars which split the populace in half over an issue which doesn’t affect the empire, then continually feed into that debate.

    The Bernie/AOC/TYT “populist left” and the Trump/Tucker Carlson “populist right” factions are there to lure parts of the population who get a little too curious about the raw mechanisms of empire back into the political false dichotomy so they stop asking unauthorized questions.

    The entire political/media class exists for this purpose: not to help people, not to fight for civil rights, not to create a well-informed populace so that democracy can function, but to keep the grubby little mitts of the unwashed masses far away from the true levers of power. That’s their whole entire function.

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    Social media is where people go to pretend they’re anxious about culture war wedge issues to avoid admitting to themselves that they’re really anxious about economic, societal and environmental collapse and rising risk of nuclear war.

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    The mass media have been aggressively pushing a single narrative on Ukraine, Silicon Valley is censoring people who disagree with the US government about Ukraine, US officials admitted they’re circulating disinfo about Ukraine, but you need to be worried about Russian propaganda.

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    People aren’t grasping the significance of the fact that Silicon Valley is now shutting down content creators not because they allegedly harm the public good but because they disagree with the US government about a war. The censorship we’re seeing on Ukraine is a wildly unprecedented escalation.

    I strongly opposed Silicon Valley censorship on issues related to Covid, but that was done on the pretense that those who were censored threatened public safety. Now there is no such pretense, it’s just “We mustn’t allow people to think wrong thoughts about a war.”

    Financial censorship like YouTube demonetization and cutting people off from PayPal can be just as effective at silencing them as outright censorship, because it hurts their ability to create content full time. I know I couldn’t do what I do without support from patrons.

    They’re no longer pretending to be administering this kind of censorship for the public good; they’re just openly doing it to control public thought about a war in allegiance to their government. This is a new and drastic step, and it makes one wonder what the next one will be.

    If you mentally mute the justifications for each new expansion of censorship protocols and picture it as a cluster of unauthorized speech, it looks like a circle whose radius keeps expanding and expanding over time. That’s what this is really about: continually expanding that radius using bogus justifications, from Russian trolls to election security to domestic extremists to Covid to Ukraine.

    And now we’re at the point where consent for this expansion has been so widely manufactured that they don’t even need to be sly about it. They can just say “Yeah well that hurts our government’s propaganda war against Russia, so we can’t have that.” This is huge.

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    Propaganda, censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation keep getting worse because the US-centralized empire needs to prevent the emergence of a true multipolar world and it will need to manufacture a lot of consent for the drastic actions needed to accomplish this.

    Stopping the rise of China requires knocking out its pillars of support like Russia. These are massive and extremely dangerous agendas that will financially hurt and existentially imperil pretty much everyone. Empire managers can’t allow a free flow of information in such times.

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    Rightists fixate on the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab like they’re the source and summit of all the world’s ills because this allows capitalism proponents to hold on to the belief that the system would be working fine if you just got rid of those few bad apples.

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    “It’s not capitalism it’s corporatism” is not an argument, it’s just vapid word-diddling. Nobody cares if you don’t like the word “capitalism” being applied to our current systems. Nobody cares if you feel your pet word is being mistreated. Address the argument.

    If your only line of argumentation consists of quibbling about definitions (incorrectly I might add), then you don’t have a line of argumentation. Address the actual arguments or stop interrupting adult conversations.

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    A globe-spanning empire is held together by the widespread and entirely faith-based belief that the best possible political, economic and foreign policy systems just happen to be the ones you’ve been told your entire life to support by mass media and schooling.

    _________________

    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, 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.

  • UK To Swap Out Top Sociopath For A Different Sociopath: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    Boris Johnson resigning would only be interesting in an alternate universe where there was some remote chance that he won’t be replaced by another depraved sociopath.

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    Remember when rich people were so worried about Jeremy Corbyn raising their taxes that they spent months pretending to believe he was a closet Nazi? They really committed to the bit, too. You weren’t even allowed to call it a bit because they’d start saying you’re a Nazi for defending a Nazi. It was wild.

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    1. Use narrative manipulation to divide the population into a roughly 50/50 ideological split.

    2. Ensure you control both of those factions.

    3. Convince everyone that the only reason nothing changes is because their half of the population doesn’t win enough elections.

    Everyone’s pulling on a rope that doesn’t lead anywhere and doesn’t do anything, convinced by powerful manipulators that they’re engaged in a life-or-death tug o’ war match of existential importance. Meanwhile the powerful just do as they like, completely indifferent to that spectacle and its back-and-forth exchanges.

    A group is artificially split into two sides and told to pull a rope in opposite directions while someone else stands back and shoots them all with a BB gun. When they complain about the welts, they’re told it’s happening because their side isn’t pulling hard enough. But really they’d be getting shot no matter what they did.

    This doesn’t mean give up, it just means give up on the fake tug o’ war game. If you’re playing tug o’ war while someone rummages through your handbag looking for cash, the first step to stopping them is putting down the rope and going after them. It’s like if everyone was pushing on a fake fire escape in a burning building: the first step to getting them out of there is showing them that the door is just painted on the wall and doesn’t lead anywhere. That’s not telling them to give up hope, it’s just telling them to give up on an ineffective strategy.

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    Every claim the western “rules-based international order” makes about itself and its values has been discredited by the persecution of Julian Assange.

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    Current US and NATO proxy warfare in Ukraine isn’t sufficient to defeat Russia, or even to stop Putin from continuing to capture territory in eastern Ukraine. All it’s sufficient for is making the war costly for Moscow while Ukrainians keep dying. That’s because this is exactly what the empire wants.

    “I care about Ukrainians, so I support a negotiated settlement” is a morally coherent position.

    “I care about Ukrainians, so I support direct hot war with Russia” is also morally coherent, if insane.

    “I care about Ukrainians, so let’s keep doing what we’ve been doing” is not morally coherent at all.

    It makes sense to support a negotiated peace settlement if you want to save Ukrainian lives. In a twisted, deranged sense it also makes sense to support direct NATO intervention against Russia to save Ukrainian lives. But continuing with the current plan clearly does not make sense as a strategy for saving Ukrainian lives, because it just keeps getting them killed.

    I of course point this out not to advocate a third world war, but to show that the western empire does not care about Ukrainian lives and isn’t doing what it claims to be doing with its proxy warfare in that country. If the empire cared even the slightest whit about Ukrainian lives it would be drastically changing its approach, one way or the other. The fact that it’s just maintaining the status quo of continuous death is their confession that they only care about grand chessboard maneuverings for global control, not the actual people who are fighting and dying.

    ❖

    One funny thing about Twitter is that the target audience for most posts made by blue-check journalists and pundits is not their followers but other blue-check journalists and pundits. Western news media is just one big circle jerk of bootlicking assholes seeking validation from other bootlicking assholes.

    That’s why so many of their tweets get so little traction but they’ll still have one or two blue-ticks chuckling at their esoteric witticisms and obscure references in the replies; it’s because they’re tweeting for each other, not for normal people. And that’s how the entire profession works.

    The Pulitzers are just a bunch of propagandists giving each other trophies and assuring each other they’re doing brave and important work. Meanwhile the public just gets more and more disgusted with them, but they don’t care because their validation doesn’t come from the public. They complain that they don’t get enough respect when in reality they get far too much. They’re absolutely the worst people on earth. A bunch of worthless, simpering sycophants, the whole lot of them.

    ________________

    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, 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 Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Ukraine Is The Most Aggressively Trolled War Of All Time: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    There’s a lot going on in America and the people are very stressed out and frightened, but don’t worry, there’s nothing the US government won’t do to make sure more High Mobility Artillery Rocket systems get to Ukraine.

    Rest assured Americans: no matter how dark things may seem right now, no matter how insecure and uncertain you may feel, you can sleep soundly knowing your government is moving mountains around the clock to make sure the Ukraine war becomes a strategic quagmire for Moscow.

    ❖

    The Ukraine war is the single most aggressively trolled issue I’ve ever witnessed. As soon as it started, Twitter was full of brand new accounts swarming anyone who uttered wrongthink about Ukraine, and now there are entire extremely coordinated troll factions working to scare people away from criticizing empire narratives about this war. It’s plainly very inorganic, so it’s good to recall what we know about the trolling operations of western militaries.

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    Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media | Hacking | The Guardian https://t.co/IFH9KsXTxa

    — Abbas (@Abbas_Muntaqim) July 11, 2021

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    How did we miss this year-old Newsweek report about a secret and unaccountable Pentagon "undercover force" which "carries out domestic and foreign assignments" that include "campaigns to influence and manipulate social media"? https://t.co/zo7liETtnn pic.twitter.com/nTibeLpZxH

    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) April 13, 2022

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    British Army unveils ‘Twitter troops’ for social media fight – Channel 4 News https://t.co/OZbpqIOmUj

    — Patricia Dowling (@ketchmeifucan) June 29, 2022

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    We're used to hearing about state-backed Twitter campaigns from the likes of Iran and Russia, but why do we never hear about US and UK social media ops? (Spoiler: it's not because they don't exist) https://t.co/Aj7i3LNAZD

    — WIRED UK (@WiredUK) October 8, 2019

    ❖

    So the western empire is responding to a war that was caused by NATO expansion by greatly expanding NATO, at the same time we learn that the Biden administration doesn’t even believe Ukraine has any chance of winning that war. This is going great, guys. Good job everyone.

    ❖

    Sure the worst case scenario of all this brinkmanship with Russia is nuclear war, but on the other hand the best case scenario is securing planetary domination for an empire that has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression for power and profit. Totally worth the risk!

    ❖

    When you realize the US really only has one political party, you cease seeing one good party protecting people from a bad party and start seeing one giant party threatening to take away people’s civil rights if they don’t obey and submit. You suddenly understand that saying one party is a “lesser evil” is like saying a boxer should want to get hit by his opponent’s left hand because his right cross hurts more. It’s two arms on the same boxer, and they’re both working together to knock you out.

    A boxer doesn’t go into a match planning to get punched in the face by his opponent’s left hand while avoiding the right, he goes in planning to defeat his opponent. The opponent is the uniparty and the oligarchic empire which controls it.

    It is true that each hand is used differently in boxing, with the lead used mostly for jabs and hooks and the rear hand mostly for crosses, but they’re both used together to set up a knockout blow. The fact that the parties are used differently doesn’t mean they’re not working together.

    Most good boxers will tell you they’d rather fight someone with a solid cross than someone with a solid jab. Sure the jab does less damage at first, but it’s such an effective strike that it can nullify your entire offense and grind you down until you can’t continue. In exactly the same way, the Democratic Party is far more effective in shutting down revolutionary movements and stagnating progress than the Republicans, and, just like a jab-cross combination in boxing, is used to set up the Republicans to deliver the knockout blow.

    What is the correct response to this? Is it to say “Hmm, I’d better let him punch me with his left hand, because if I don’t he’ll hit me with his right and it’ll hurt more”? Or is it to bite down on your mouthpiece and start throwing heavy leather until you knock his ass out?

    ❖

    It’s just a cold hard fact that no matter how strong and independent a woman you think you are, your quality of life will be severely affected by the quality of the person you have babies with. Abortion is the final safeguard against giving birth to the child of an unworthy man. And no matter who you are reading this, you personally know women who’ve been temporarily deceived into thinking they were having sex with a worthy man.

    ❖

    Forced birthers in the US are like, “We’ll adopt your baby! Okay actually we’ll probably just let them fall through the cracks of a grossly inadequate foster care system leading to a childhood of trauma and neglect, but after that we’ve got a very well-funded prison system that can take care of them.”

    ❖

    One thing we learned from Covid is that being stuck inside sucks. Space colonization would be like being in permanent lockdown with no windows, no Uber Eats, no birdsong or rain on the roof and no chance of ever going home. Even if it somehow became possible, it’s a dumb idea and I hate it.

    And there’s no reason to believe it will ever become possible. Science is nowhere near finished learning about all the countless ways the human organism is inseparably intertwined with Earth. The belief that we can solve our problems with space colonization is unscientific. We’re just going to have to change how we function as a species.

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    Astronauts lose decades' worth of bone mass in space that many do not recover even after a year back on Earth, researchers said Thursday, warning that it could be a "big concern" for future missions to Marshttps://t.co/p7Mp9deDih

    — AFP News Agency (@AFP) June 30, 2022

    The biggest obstacle remains the fact that science has no idea how to sustain human life in a way that is separate from earth’s ecosystem. We don’t even have any evidence that it’s possible. We’re no closer to being able to do it than we were a thousand years ago; today’s space stations are not independent of Earth’s ecosystem in even the tiniest way. They’re still 100 percent dependent on terrestrial supplies, which is an unsustainable model if you’re talking about actual colonization.

    The idea of space colonization appeals to the capitalist mentality because it means we can keep expanding our population and keep expanding the economy and keep harvesting and consuming resources in the way we have been. But there’s literally zero scientific evidence that it’s feasible.

    A future of space colonization is a fairy tale we tell ourselves so that we won’t have to change. So we can keep up our egocentric way of functioning without adapting and transcending our self-destructive patterns. We’re like a slacker who refuses to get off their parents’ couch and get their shit together who babbles made-up nonsense about NFT get-rich-quick schemes when asked about their plans for the future.

    Collective extinction is easier to imagine than collective ego death.

    ____________

    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, 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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  • Let’s Fight WW3 Over Lithuania: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The problem with anti-imperialists who spend all their time criticizing the evil US empire is that there aren’t nearly enough of them.

    ❖

    People who respond to criticisms of the US by babbling about the misdeeds of other governments are just saying you should never criticize the most powerful government in the world for any reason.

    ❖

    Hey I’ve got a great idea, let’s start World War Three over a NATO country that most Americans don’t even know exists.

    Liberals learned the word “Lithuania” ten seconds ago and they’re ready to nuke Moscow over it.

    ❖

    ❖

    If you’re on the front lines risking your own life fighting and killing Russians for Ukraine, I will happily listen to your opinion on why there should be no negotiated settlement to end this war. Otherwise, shut the fuck up you pathetic couch warrior.

    ❖

    The worst thing about the George W Bush administration is that it never ended.

    ❖

    I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere, but here in Australia it’s pretty easy to convince the average citizen that Assange shouldn’t be extradited to the United States just by sharing a few facts. The only reason more don’t is because the press spent so much time smearing him instead of telling the truth.

    It mostly comes down to the fact that the mainstream western press spent so much time aggressively smearing Assange after the 2016 WikiLeaks drops about Hillary Clinton. That shaped public perception of this issue more than anything else. They were relentless, and they were vile.

    That’s why it doesn’t make much difference when mainstream publications decry Assange’s persecution after aggressively smearing him all those years. You can’t damn a man ten thousand times and then defend him once and have your defense be remembered. You can’t churn out bullshit smear piece after bullshit smear piece about Assange like this:

     

    And then expect the public to just absorb editorials like this:

    People aren’t simply going to accept that after you’ve spent years conditioning them to want Assange’s head on a spike.

    If people know the facts about Assange’s persecution, they’ll overwhelmingly be supportive. If they just consumed mainstream news media between 2016 and 2019 without really drilling down and researching the Assange case, they’ll tend to be unsupportive.

    This is the media’s fault. Between 2016 and 2019 smearing Assange was a way of demonstrating to current and prospective mainstream media employers that you will do anything, anything at all, to defend the empire. It was a great way to advance your career, and many did so.

    If the press were actually working to create an informed populace as their job purports to be, there would be a tremendous amount of support for Assange. The reason that hasn’t happened is because their real job is the exact opposite: to manipulate, deceive, and propagandize.

    It’s impossible to despise the mainstream western press too much, in my opinion. They’re paving the way to destruction and dystopia just as much as the plutocrats and politicians. They whine that the public hates them, but really the public doesn’t hate them enough.

    ❖

    The Trump administration was an educational time to observe how the “populist right” is easily manipulated into defending standard Republican actions like killing the Iran deal, assassinating Soleimani, arresting Assange, starving Venezuelans, killing attempts to save Yemen, etc. Every single time Trump rolled out a foreign policy decision that would have looked perfectly at home in the Bush administration, I’d have MAGA people in my notifications explaining why his action was actually good and hurt the Deep State. Literally every single time, without a single, solitary exception. They were led around by the balls the entire time.

    The so-called populist sentiments on the American right are manipulated toward the agendas of oligarchy and empire in exactly the same way as the progressive sentiments on America’s so-called left. The whole thing is subject to very aggressive and very effective narrative control.

    It’s a safe guideline that any movement which pushes people to align with either of America’s two mainstream political parties is controlled from top to bottom. If their solution to America’s problems at any time includes voting for Republicans or Democrats, they’re not worth listening to.

    That’s why when I see people championing obvious empire lackeys like Ron DeSantis as populist heroes and babbling about drag queens and trans people even as we’re moving closer to the brink of nuclear war, I tend to be pretty dismissive of their entire movement.

    ❖

    All you need to do to kill leftward movement is flood the information ecosystem with enough confusion about socialist and anti-imperialist issues that it becomes impossible to hold a lucid position on them without copious amounts of research. Few are willing and able to do this.

    It’s easy to sit back and judge people for believing propaganda and failing to push for real change in adequate numbers, but if you look at the vast quantity of sophisticated psyops distorting everyone’s picture of the world it’s very understandable there’s so much confusion.

    As long as only a small minority of people have the willingness and ability to put in long hours to try and understand what’s going on, it will remain easy to manipulate all leftward movement into impotence or complicity. Something very, very big is going to have to 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, 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.

  • The Mainstream Worldview Is Self-Evidently Bullshit: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    They’ve lied about every war, and they’ve openly acknowledged lying about this very war, but you’re a Kremlin agent if you say they’re lying to us about this war.

    ❖

    The mainstream worldview is self-evidently bullshit. If our media and education systems were telling us the truth about the world and our “democratic” systems actually worked, our society would be arranged to serve the interests of the many rather than an elite few.

    You can tell the mainstream worldview is bullshit just by looking at its fruits. We’re killing our biosphere to serve an economic system that’s creating greater and greater inequality while wars rage and nuclear brinkmanship threatens to wipe us all out and corruption rules the earth.

    The world is as it is because the way the majority of people in the most influential nations think, act and vote is being continuously manipulated by the powerful, for the powerful. The mainstream worldview is just a giant bundle of power-serving lies and manipulations.

    ❖

    The thing about the entirely predictable admission by Biden officials that sanctions are hurting ordinary Russians a lot more than they’re hurting the Kremlin is that the US empire is fine with that. The US empire doesn’t use sanctions to punish leaders, it uses them to foment unrest and hopefully spark a coup or civil war.

    During an interview in 2019 then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo effectively admitted that this is what the US empire uses sanctions for: not to influence the behavior of the government, but to coerce the people into ousting their government. State Department documents from 1960 show the US government discussing this exact same strategy regarding economic warfare against Cuba. This is a longstanding practice.

    ❖

    Western liberal democracy is when corporations and bankers place all blame on the government, the government places all blame on the electorate, and the electorate absorbs all the consequences of the corporations, bankers and government without ever even getting a vote on any of the major decisions those entities make.

    Ordinary citizens are assigned full responsibility for their social and financial struggles and their privacy rights are being eaten away. Powerful people are never held accountable for their immensely destructive decisions and they are protected by a wall of government secrecy.

    Accountability and transparency should have a directly proportional relationship with power: the more power you have the more consequences you face for your actions, and the less privacy you’re entitled to. In our society it’s literally the exact opposite. It’s completely backwards.

    ❖

    Just as western plutocrats and politicians want all the power and none of the responsibility, so too do their mouthpieces in the mainstream media. Highlighting their errors is harassment, criticizing them on social media is cyberbullying, calling out their sleaziness is Trumpian.

    These people are broadly despised yet believe they’re doing a fantastic job. They insulate themselves in tightly cloistered self-validating echo chambers, so a member of the common riff raff tweeting harsh truths at them is experienced as an unexpected assault.

    This class participates in an ongoing propaganda operation to manufacture consent for the status quo, and without them the world would look completely different. Their voices are orders of magnitude more powerful than ordinary people’s, yet they want no responsibility for this role.

    ❖

    If I had the Thanos glove I wouldn’t use it to impose my personal ideology on the world, I’d use it to make all the secrets of the powerful visible to everyone and democratize information sharing so people could decide for themselves what course of action to take in response. All government secrets, all corporate and financial secrets, all the secrets of media institutions, would all be immediately visible and placed in front of everyone’s eyes. Then everyone gets a device with access to a global public forum to talk about everything they’ve learned.

    I’d just let people see everything and then choose their own adventure. Maybe they’d choose to create the kind of egalitarian society I’d like to see, maybe they’d create something else. It’s up to them. All I did was end the subversion of their personal and collective sovereignty.

    ❖

    In all the controversy about whether the US should be associating itself with a murderous tyrannical regime like Saudi Arabia please don’t forget that the US is far more murderous and tyrannical than Saudi Arabia by an extremely massive margin.

    “Oh noes, Biden should be embarrassed to be seen with a tyrant like MBS!”

    Bitch, MBS should be embarrassed to be seen with a tyrant like Joe Biden.

    ❖

    ❖

    Conservatives will happily make kids pledge allegiance to flag and republic every day at school and sit in class learning about how they live in the greatest country on earth, then they’ll freak out about LGBT issues because “the children are being indoctrinated.”

    ❖

    Mainstream western proponents of “democratic socialism” never call for an end to imperialism because they are fully aware that their version of “socialism” is entirely dependent upon imperialist domination and exploitation.

    ❖

    People who believe humanity can make positive changes toward health and harmony tend to be people who’ve made such changes in their own lives. People who believe human nature is selfish and destructive tend to be selfish and destructive people. We’re just describing ourselves. We’re describing the insides of our own reality tunnels and then dressing it up as some grand knowledge about objective reality.

    Really none of us know humanity’s fate, because our thinking about human potential and human nature is filtered through our personal experience of humanity from the inside. It is a mystery, and we can just let it be a mystery.

    _________________

    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, 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.

  • The US Empire Will Be Defeated By The US Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Empire managers: Putin invaded Ukraine!

    Public: Oh no! What should we do about it?

    Empire managers: Greatly increase military spending, work to weaken Russia, and censor dissenting opinions.

    Public: Wait, aren’t those things you’ve always wanted to do anyway?

    Empire managers: Hush.

    ❖

    Russian propaganda poses a much smaller threat to the western world than the various government agendas that are being rolled out under the justification of fighting Russian propaganda.

    ❖

    Fuel prices are soaring in part because of an economic war the US empire willfully initiated in response to a proxy war the US empire deliberately provoked and westerners are being trained to look at their shrinking bank accounts and yell “Damn you, Putin!”

    Only by massive amounts of propaganda would people consent to unprecedented acts of economic warfare which directly hurt them and benefit them in no way shape or form.

    ❖

    As the world slides closer to nuclear war it would be cool if Americans could take a break from a debate about gun laws that will with absolute certainty lead nowhere and seriously discuss whether they want their government waging a rapidly escalating proxy war against Russia.

    ❖

    The spectrum of acceptable debate on US foreign policy ranges from (A) war hawks who insist the US has never done anything wrong to (B) “progressives” who say the US is basically a good faith actor who just makes well-intentioned oopsie poopsie mistakes but should still definitely keep arming Ukraine. Position (B) is the furthest you’re allowed to go away from “the US never does anything wrong” in mainstream discourse. It includes Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisor, who smears and dismisses leftists who say the US is acting in a malignant way in Ukraine.

    No voice at all is ever given to the (in my opinion correct) position that the US is a tyrannical regime whose immense body count is explained not by accidents but by the desire to dominate the world at any cost. The elimination of this position from the debate is by design.

    ❖

    Sure noble wars can be fought in theory and have been fought in practice. It’s just that you’ve got swamp water for brains if you believe that’s what the US is doing.

    ❖

    ❖

    Never attribute to conspiracy what can be adequately explained by the inevitable corruption and tyranny of status quo capitalism.

    ❖

    Whatever ends up collapsing the US empire is far less likely to come from Russia or China than from the US empire itself.

    ❖

    A big part of the western nervousness about China revolves around the fact that we’re about to be surpassed by an ancient civilization of non-white people who are indigenous to their land and have never been truly conquered and colonized by Europeans.

    ❖

    If you don’t respect the way China has been able to pull so many of its people out of extreme poverty, and don’t get why such actions would cause such unified support for their government, it’s simply because you lack an adequate understanding of the anguish of extreme poverty.

    ❖

    I’ve met some cute kids in my time but nobody’s as adorable as westerners who talk about Chinese people being propagandized.

    ❖

    The Chinese government exerts a lot of power over its population, but it also takes responsibility for the way it uses that power. The USA’s rulers exert a comparable amount of power over its population, but they never take any responsibility for what they do with it.

    ❖

    ❖

    Can’t believe Mohammed bin Salman is sullying Saudi Arabia’s name by meeting with the president of the United States.

    ❖

    Putin should try staging a few mass beheadings and dismembering a Washington Post reporter with a bone saw to get on America’s good side.

    ❖

    Many empire apologists aren’t actually defending the empire, they’re just defending against the suggestion that everything they believe about their nation, their media, their government and their world, is a lie.

    ❖

    The most impressive feat of engineering this century has been of the ‘social’ variety: funneling mainstream political attention into agendas which don’t inconvenience the powerful in the information age where the ravages of capitalism and imperialism are right there to be seen in plain sight. 

    The social engineering necessary to keep politically inclined people fixated on agendas that either won’t lead anywhere or which trouble the powerful in no way, even as we entered an unprecedented age of information access, is one of the most awe-inspiring human achievements in history.

    ________________

    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, 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.

  • Kayfabe Populism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    It’s so important that the public have no real say in US politics that the empire not only set up two oligarchic puppet parties which pretend to oppose each other, but also set up fake populist movements within each of those factions which pretend to be fighting the establishment within those parties.

    It’s a very clever illusion that sucks up almost all real opposition. If you don’t fall for the first kayfabe conflict and realize the game is rigged for the powerful, you can still end up buying into the fake populist movements set up to oppose them. I fell for them both early on in this commentary gig. But after a while of watching what they do (as opposed to just listening to what they say) and seeing where they actually stand and fight or refuse to fight, you see it’s all an Inception-level fakery. The opposition is controlled, and so is the opposition to the opposition.

    It’s like when you dream you’re waking up from a dream but you’re actually in another dream; you awaken from the liberals-vs-conservatives puppet show and then turn to the fake progressive Democrats or the bullshit MAGA camp as a solution, but you’re still asleep.

    This all sounds like an awful lot of work to go through until you remember that an entire globe-spanning empire depends on the ability to prevent the American public from either (A) voting in a disruptive government or (B) fighting a revolution. So much power rides on their ability to do this.

    ❖

    Ever since the school shooting in Texas we’ve been watching an entire country learn that it’s not actually cops’ job to save anyone or risk any danger and the only reason they assumed otherwise was because of movies and TV shows.

    ❖

    Idea for an action movie: The Rock needs to rescue his kid from an elementary school where there’s an active shooter, but first he needs to fight his way through an army of cops trying to stop him.

    ❖

    You end mass shootings in America by ceasing to have America serve as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by violence and nonstop mass media psyops. It’s not impossible. It’s not even difficult. It’s just not an option anyone in charge would ever consider.

    ❖

    I’m finding myself having less and less patience with people who think the US is an innocent little flower regarding the Ukraine war. It’s like, come on. Grow the fuck up.

    ❖

    Friendly reminder that for a fraction of the cost of funding a world-threatening proxy war against Russia the US could simply have protected Zelensky from the neo-Nazi militias who were threatening to lynch him if he tried to make peace with Russia and prevented this entire war.

    ❖

    The airhead mainstream narrative that Ukrainian forces have been destroying Russian troops and humiliating Putin in epic win after epic win has become unsustainable:

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

    Russian troops are making steady progress in Ukraine’s east. That's sparking fears they could be poised for a bigger breakthrough, and leading to increasingly panicked calls from Kyiv for more powerful weapons https://t.co/TbneLP3ABF

    — Bloomberg (@business) May 27, 2022

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

    Ukraine says troops may retreat from eastern region as Russia advances https://t.co/Xw5oM8OIcZ pic.twitter.com/KcHSb59CN2

    — Reuters World (@ReutersWorld) May 28, 2022

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

    Ukrainian leaders project an image of military invulnerability against #Russia. But commanders offer a more realistic portrait of the war, where outgunned volunteers describe being abandoned by their military brass and facing certain death at the front. https://t.co/YLu9M28Cx8

    — Sudarsan Raghavan (@raghavanWaPo) May 26, 2022

    Another shout out to all you big brave sofa warriors who’ve been screaming that a negotiated peace settlement is unacceptable and helping the US empire throw Ukrainian lives into the gears of a stupid proxy war for US unipolar hegemony while you sit safe at home eating Doritos.

    ❖

    If you’re more hawkish than Henry Kissinger, you’re too fucking hawkish.

    ❖

    Whenever I try to talk about the risk of the Ukraine war escalating into a nuclear holocaust I get people telling me if that happens it will be Putin’s fault. Like that would make it okay somehow. Like that would somehow validate all the steps our leaders took to get us to that point.

    Of all the intensely stupid ways team loyalty and partisanship can express itself, I really don’t think you could come up with one dumber than “Our nuclear brinkmanship isn’t a problem because it’ll be the other side who launches the first nuke” if you tried.

    Even pretending it’s certain that Russia would be the one to initiate a nuclear exchange, would that thought actually comfort you when you feel the earth shake? Would you feel any better about the decisions which gave rise to that moment by telling yourself Putin started it? I mean if there’s any time when it doesn’t matter who “started it”, it’s surely when the “Mutual” and “Destruction” part of Mutually Assured Destruction goes into action? I think at that point all our dopey team sports cheering and booing pretty much goes out the window, no?

    ❖

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

    Nowadays whenever there's an agenda that's of high value to the US empire there is a 100% chance you'll soon see shitlibs using woke-sounding jargon to promote it. pic.twitter.com/KD56cBI4wo

    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) May 28, 2022

    ❖

    Hollywood lies about what American journalists really do in the same way it lies about what American soldiers and police really do, and it has just as disruptive an effect on people’s perception of reality.

    ❖

    People who accuse you of having Kremlin loyalties when you question or criticize the US empire are admitting that they don’t care whether statements are true or false, only whether they demonstrate loyalty to our rulers. That’s the lens through which they examine the world, and it’s pure brain poison. How can people think lucid thoughts and engage in lucid discourse about ideas and events when they are continuously measured not by how truthful they are but by what loyalties they appear to demonstrate? They cannot.

    ❖

    Empire loyalists have exactly two arguments:

    1. “That foreign leader my government dislikes is comparable to Adolf Hitler.”

    2. “If you object to what my virtuous government has planned for that leader it means you love and support that leader.”

    ❖

    I honestly don’t understand how anyone can stay abreast of the day-to-day depravity of the oligarchic empire without a daily practice geared toward inner peace. Things are so insane and confusing and only getting more so; you’ve got to have a regular discipline to form stability.

    Meditation, self-enquiry, healing and energy practices, whatever gets you there, but surely you’ve got to have something before you can stare into the face of the beast continuously without going mad. I can’t imagine looking at this thing every day without any kind of a practice.

    ________________

    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, 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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  • Has America Tried Bombing Its Mass Shooting Problem? Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Oh cool it’s the part of the news cycle where Democrats and Republicans pretend something’s going to change about American gun laws for a few days.

    “It’s a gun control problem!”

    “Nuh-uh it’s a mental health problem!”

    [Nothing changes about gun laws or mental health care]

    [Repeat]

    ❖

    There’s probably a correlation between the fact that the US is the only nation with a mass shooting epidemic and the fact that Americans are the most aggressively propagandized population on earth.

    If you took any armed population and psychologically pummelled them from birth with narratives about how mass military slaughter is fine while turning them into underpaid, alienated gear-turners and giving them an artificial culture mass-produced in Los Angeles, you’d probably see some mass shootings.

    There’s only so far you can warp the human psyche before it snaps. Bash hundreds of millions of people in the brain their entire lives with indoctrination programs telling them madness is sanity and sanity is madness, and eventually a few of them are going to wind up mass murderers.

    It’s surely not a coincidence that the nation which serves as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by mass murder and war propaganda and mass-scale psychological manipulation is the only nation with a mass shooting epidemic. But this will never be studied.

    It will never be studied because empire is invisible to mainstream science and social psychology, in the same way it’s invisible to mainstream media, mainstream politics, and mainstream academia. The empire is not even acknowledged to exist within the spheres of mainstream thought, and this is a deliberately engineered reality. The spheres of mainstream thought which prevent people from understanding that we are dominated by an unacknowledged empire which stretches across nations and influences our lives more than virtually anything else our attention is diverted to are actively influenced by that very empire.

    We are all marinating in the US-centralized empire: its influence, its propaganda, its artificially manufactured culture, its ways of thinking. We’re so immersed in it we can’t see it. It’s like water for fish to us. So we won’t see any research into its influence on the collective psyche.

    ❖

    It’s weird how every US president is expected to say something after a mass shooting when US presidents are always orders of magnitude more murderous than the act they’re decrying.

    “Who’s the one person we should look to after a horrific mass murder? Oh how about the head of the most murderous power structure on earth whose very existence depends on nonstop mass murder?”

    ❖

    Everyone shit their guts out for weeks when Trump made some asinine tweets about North Korea but Biden repeatedly threatening direct hot war with China while waging a world-threatening proxy war against Russia is just fine normal stuff.

    ❖

    In terms of contemporary analysis of conflict and strategy, Henry Kissinger hasn’t been one of the world’s worst war hawks for decades. This is true not because he has gotten less psychopathic, but because everyone else in Washington has gotten more so.

     

    Yes Henry Kissinger is a war criminal. Yes Henry Kissinger is a psychopath. Yes the world will be better off when it is finally disencumbered of him. And, also, the US foreign policy establishment has grown much, much more insane than Henry Kissinger.

    ❖

    The US empire has been using impoverished human beings from the Global South as testing animals and target practice for its instruments of war in preparation for much larger military confrontations that it has long been planning for.

    ❖

    You’ve got to graduate from an Ivy League university and read all the latest reports from the most esteemed think tanks to get smart enough to understand why it’s a good idea to fight Russia and China at the same time.

    ❖

    If there was a giant multitrillion-dollar corporation that was allowed to kill anyone it wants to secure its success, its behavior would not be functionally different from that of the US empire.

    ❖

    I never give mainstream media “credit” on those rare occasions when they do something right. They’re supposed to get it right. You don’t get brownie points for not lying and propagandizing as aggressively as you normally do. You don’t give a cop credit for not shooting everyone.

    ❖

    If you’re a popular comedian living under a murderous and tyrannical globe-spanning empire, it’s pretty pathetic to spend your career punching any direction but up.

    ❖

    It doesn’t take much work to understand that the US government is an evil institution. It does take a fair bit of work to understand that the US government is a uniquely evil institution on the world stage, with no one else coming anywhere close. People have trouble getting this; for some reason it’s not too psychologically confrontational to acknowledge that your government is or is allied with one of many bad actors, but it often causes a lot of cognitive dissonance to grapple with the possibility that it’s the absolute worst actor, by a very large margin.

    _______________

    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, 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.

  • MSM Is Empire Fanfic For Children: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    April 2022: Zelensky speaks at the Grammy Awards

    May 2022: Zelensky speaks at Cannes Film Festival

    June 2022: Zelensky hosts SNL

    July 2022: Zelensky stars as himself in action biopic co-starring The Rock

    August 2022: Zelensky releases his own breakfast cereal and clothing line

    September 2022: Celebrities are flocking to the new Hollywood pop religion known as Zelenskyyology

    ❖

    It’s often a long, awkward process learning that literally everyone in both mainstream political factions serves the oligarchic empire. For most people you have to get your hopes dashed over and over again by your heroes before learning this lesson, and even then many don’t.

    It runs counter to everything you’re taught in life that nobody in either camp is there to help you. There’s a fundamental assumption that someone among them must be decent. But if you watch carefully with enough intellectual honesty you’ll see it again and again: there’s a line that, for one justification or another, none of them ever end up crossing, and it’s the line where they would have to begin providing meaningful opposition to the oligarchic empire.

    At first it makes no sense. How can there be no good guys? Not one? Then you realize: it’s because you’re living in an oligarchic empire which only elevates people who serve its interests, whether it’s in politics, government, or media. The “opposition” between mainstream factions is an illusion cooked up by the empire and continually reinforced by its narrative managers.

    But you only see this if you’re intellectually honest enough to overcome your own cognitive biases. Otherwise you’ll keep doing mental gymnastics to justify the bullshit coming from Bernie, AOC, TYT, Tucker Carlson, Trump, MAGA pundits, wherever your biases are located on the map.

    And then when you do see it people accuse you of being an angry hater who doesn’t have anything positive to say about anyone in politics or media, when really it’s got nothing to do with being negative but with your understanding that the machine always protects the machine.

    ❖

    This proxy war isn’t about defending Ukraine, it’s about quashing a nation which has consistently resisted absorption into the US-centralized imperial blob. That agenda is best served by keeping this war going as long as possible and making it as gruelling and costly as possible for Moscow. Peace is not on the menu.

    Even if Ukraine does somehow achieve total victory in the near term, it wouldn’t mean peace, it would mean more war. If Russia is driven out the war will just change shape into a concerted effort to oust Putin and shatter the Russian Federation.

    This war could easily have been avoided with a little diplomacy and low-cost, high-reward concessions. The US had good visibility into the Kremlin’s plans, so they knew this. They chose not to because they wanted to use this war to hurt Putin.

    ❖

    A massive percentage of the people who are getting Russia and Ukraine right are going to turn into the worst people in the world once conflict shifts to China. Pretty much only the anti-imperialist left and a specific subset of antiwar libertarians will get both issues entirely correct.

    ❖

    I get asked if I think the US should do anything if China attacks Taiwan. I tell them I don’t think the US should do anything if any nation does anything. The US is the very last nation on earth that should ever do anything about any other nation.

    ❖

    We don’t talk enough about how disturbing it is that Silicon Valley megacorporations have just accepted that it’s their job to help the US win a propaganda war against Russia and everyone’s just going along with that like it’s fine and normal.

    ❖

    Man: [steals most of everyone’s wealth]

    Everyone: Hey give that back!

    Man: You’re all just jealous of my success.

    ❖

    ❖

    Can’t believe empire managers have the gall to keep babbling about “disinformation” even as they work to extradite a journalist to the United States to defend the empire’s right to lie to us about its war crimes.

    ❖

    I’ve met some cute kids in my time but nobody’s as adorable as people who think Assange can get a fair Espionage Act trial in the United States of America.

    ❖

    I want to live in this idyllic fantasy world where the US pours weapons into foreign nations because it cares deeply about their freedom and orchestrates the military encirclement of Russia and China because it wants to protect the world from tyranny.

    The mainstream news media is empire fanfic for slow kids.

    ❖

    Your average Ivy League graduate working for a prominent military industrial complex-funded think tank has less insight into what’s happening with Russia and China than your average random citizen with internet access and sincere curiosity about those nations.

    ❖

    People who’ve escaped abusive relationships with bitchy, vindictive, passive aggressive manipulators have a natural advantage when in comes to deciphering the malevolence of the US empire.

    ___________________

    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, 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.

  • Israel’s PR Problem, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Israel’s mounting PR crisis boils down to the fact that its violence and oppression isn’t happening in some far off land as in the case with US wars, it’s happening right at home surrounded by video cameras and enforced by police and soldiers who are not adept PR spinmeisters.

    Israeli apartheid is imposed not by trained propagandists but by armed thugs who’ve been told their whole lives that the people they’re responsible for keeping in check are inferior. They don’t think how it’s going to look when they, for example, assault mourners at the funeral of a Palestinian American journalist who was slain by IDF sniper fire. If the whole thing was being upheld by spinmeisters like Jen Psaki, Michael McFaul and Jake Tapper it would unfold in a much more media-friendly way, but it’s being largely upheld by people who’ve been indoctrinated with an apartheid mindframe their entire lives instead.

    Combine that element with the dramatic uptick in recent years of video cameras and internet access, and you’ve got a surefire recipe for the defeat of a generations-long perception management campaign that had until that point been very successful.

    I mean, whatever your opinion on Israel/Palestine in general and this latest episode in particular, you really can’t dispute that the caption in this tweet is just objectively true:

    Public approval of the Israeli apartheid regime, like approval of the US police, has plummeted in direct proportion to the ubiquitousness of video cameras. In much the same way DNA testing vindicated prisoners who’d insisted on their innocence for years, a new technological development proved true what a marginalized population had been saying all along.

    So in that sense the increasingly mainstream opposition to the Israeli status quo has been a rare victory for alternative media and citizen journalism: ordinary people recording and spreading the truth without the permission of establishment narrative managers.

    I think it’s basically accurate to say that the human adventure is mostly about becoming more and more conscious, of both our inner and outer worlds. And it doesn’t get much more conscious than raw video footage circulating on a global mind network.

    That’s why the Israeli regime kills journalists, and that’s why the US-centralized empire is working to legalize and normalize extraditing and imprisoning them. In a weird way it really is kind of a fight between the forces within humanity who want to switch the lights on versus the forces who wish to keep the lights off.

    ❖

    ❖

     

    There is no “The Squad”. There’s the US congress which is responsible for facilitating the continued domination of a globe-spanning empire, and running alongside that there are a few social media accounts who periodically make progressive-sounding noises on the internet.

    “The Squad” isn’t a political faction, it’s a soundtrack to an empire. It’s soothing noises people can listen to while the US hegemon destroys the world.

    ❖

    They used to call you crazy if you warned that we’re being propagandized to support a war with Russia. Now they call you crazy if you don’t support the war with Russia.

    ❖

    Obviously the only logical response to a war that was caused by NATO expansionism is to dramatically expand NATO.

    ❖

    NATO is a “defensive alliance” like Hiroshima and Nagasaki were defensive nuclear strikes.

    I guess you can call anything a “defensive alliance” if you categorize everything it does as “defense”, up to and including wars of aggression to topple foreign governments. I mean I suppose if you assume it’s your God-given right to control everything that happens in the world then anyone who disobeys your will can be construed as an aggressor against your imperial divine right, and therefore anything you do in response to them is defensive in nature.

    ❖

    It’s just amazing how quickly and effectively the spectrum of debate was limited to “We should engage in tons of nuclear brinkmanship” versus “We should only engage in a fair bit of nuclear brinkmanship”. No space is allowed in the Overton window for “No nuclear brinkmanship, please”; that was transformed into a “Russian talking point” and therefore taboo.

    The US propaganda machine is the most powerful force on earth.

    ❖

    “We’re turning into China,” complained the citizen living under an empire that is vastly more tyrannical than China.

    ❖

    You’re only as free as you allow your world to be. The impulse to control and manipulate life is what gives rise to egoic consciousness, which is what chains us to the wheels of suffering. What presents as a path to security is really the path to insecurity.

    In setting the world free, we set ourselves free. In setting ourselves free, the world becomes that much freer.

    _______________

    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, 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.

  • Fake Political Parties In A Fake Democracy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    I remember feeling such solidarity with Democrats who opposed Bush’s warmongering. I sincerely did not know it was just empty political posturing for them and they’d happily sign off on any war no matter how insane as long as the president doing it had a (D) next to their name.

    ❖

    All the Democratic Party’s actions make sense when you switch from thinking of it as a political party whose job is to enact the will of voters to thinking about it as a narrative control operation whose job is to prevent the local riff raff from tampering with the gears of a globe-spanning empire.

    The US doesn’t have political parties, it has narrative control ops disguised as political parties. One of them overtly promotes capitalism and imperialism by appealing to Americans’ worst impulses, the other covertly diverts healthy impulses back into capitalism and imperialism.

    An elephant and a donkey fight in a puppet show and the crowd cheers for one or the other while thieves pick their pockets. And when people start to notice their wallets are missing, they’re told they can stop the pickpocketing by cheering louder for their favorite puppet.

    People ask why the Democrats never codified Roe vs Wade into law, and the answer is, because that’s not their job. Their job is not to enact the policies you elected them to enact. Their job is not even to win elections. Their job is to keep you staring at the puppet show while the empire has its way with the world.

    ❖

    The Democratic Party is like one of those perpetual fuckups who does all the wrong things and makes all the wrong decisions and never stops blaming all their self-generated problems on everyone else.

    ❖

    Calls for civility and polite protesting always have a lot less to do with the actual protest at hand than with elites getting nervous about the commoners figuring out that their superior numbers mean they can do whatever they want to whoever they want and nobody can stop them.

    ❖

    Democracy is when you get to vote on which oligarchic muppet will ceremonially pardon a turkey on Thanksgiving but not on whether your government should greatly escalate the risk of nuclear war.

    ❖

    Still can’t believe US officials flat out admitted to the press that they’ve been circulating disinformation to the public about the Ukraine war and then like three weeks later it came out that the US government now has a Ministry of Truth for countering disinformation.

    ❖

    Yes the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth is headed by a weird ridiculous person. Please don’t let that distract from the vastly more significant fact that the Department of Homeland Security has a Ministry of Truth.

    I already know that my plea here is in vain, because focusing on the ridiculous shitlib has a mainstream partisan slant while focusing on empire narrative management about wars and foreign enemies does not. The mainstream partisan angle wins out every time.

    ❖

    All Americans need to really deeply ingest the fact that their government is currently decoupling Covid relief funding from Ukraine proxy war funding because it wants to make sure that the proxy war funding actually passes. Really sit with what that says about everything.

    ❖

    Imagine if instead of deliberately provoking and funding a proxy war against Russia that could get everyone killed, the US had pledged to back Zelensky militarily against the Nazi factions who were threatening to kill him if he made peace with Russia like he campaigned on doing?

    ❖

    The US proxy war in Ukraine is more serious than Iraq. It’s more serious than Vietnam. The body count is lower for now, but this is a confrontation that Russia has increasingly valid reasons to see as a direct existential threat. This war truly endangers every life on earth.

    ❖

    Ah for the good old days before 2022 when “We should try to avoid nuclear war” was an uncontroversial position.

    ❖

    It’s evident now that there’s literally no cap on how much more US interventionism the western political/media class will support in Ukraine. There’s no escalation the Biden administration could propose that they wouldn’t support and call everyone a Kremlin agent who opposes it.

    ❖

    There doesn’t seem to be any conscious, thinking force driving the escalations against Russia and China. It’s more like watching a force of nature like a hurricane or a wildfire. Just microbes mindlessly responding to the stimulus of global capitalism, with no one ultimately in the driver’s seat.

    ❖

    U2 performing in Kyiv should reassure Gen Xers that as much as people bitch about Instagram influencers and TikTok stars our phony pop culture bullshit still has everyone else beat.

    ❖

    Zelensky: So what we need from you Americans is your continued military support, your continued financial support, your continued moral support, and your LIVE FROM NEW YORK IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT!

    [music starts playing, we all die a little inside]

    ❖

    Elon Musk became the Libertarian Messiah because he’s their strongest argument that capitalism can save the world. A billionaire Pentagon contractor is their strongest argument that capitalism can save the world.

    ❖

    The English language has many words for insanity. Probably for the same reason people who live way up north have many words for snow.

     

    ________________

    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, 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.

  • The Most Joe Biden Thing Ever: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    A hostile military alliance expanding to Russia’s borders isn’t a provocation, sending weapons to be used by CIA-trained fighters backed by US intelligence isn’t a proxy war, those Nazis aren’t Nazis, you’re being censored for your own good, trust the media, the government is your friend.

    ❖

    It’s a good thing Trump lost because otherwise Roe v Wade would be on the chopping block and immigrants would still be getting mistreated and the Iran deal would still be dead and the military budget would keep inflating. That bastard would probably have us on the brink of World War 3 by now.

    ❖

     

    Joe Biden doing a live infomercial for Javelin missiles while everyone who voted for him worries about women’s reproductive rights is the most Joe Biden thing that has ever happened.

    ❖

    Once you see that both mainstream US parties are part of a single oligarchic power structure it stops looking like a battle between opposing parties and looks more like one giant bully standing in front of voters saying “Let me hit you with my left fist or I’ll hit you with my right.”

    What is the correct response when that happens? What’s the correct response when a mainstream political party keeps communicating that they’ll never do anything to help you but you need to support them anyway or they’ll let their friends in the other mainstream political party take away your rights? Is it to say “Ah well the left fist won’t hurt as much so that’s clearly the lesser evil,” or is it to take on an oppositional relationship with the tyrant who keeps punching you with both fists year after year?

    ❖

    Learning about what’s wrong with the world is like watching a marathon of shitty Scooby Doo episodes from the sixties, except it’s way more repetitive and predictable, and the villain under the mask is always the US empire.

    ❖

    Western media keep shrieking about Russia’s nuclear threats as though it was some kind of secret that Russia will use nukes if it feels its existence is threatened, and as though western powers wouldn’t nuke Russia for the same reason.

    ❖

    ❖

    The only argument against the observation that the US/NATO/Ukraine power structure could easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost diplomatic concessions is “Actually Putin would have invaded anyway because he’s a cartoon supervillain who does evil things for no reason.”

    War is all the worst things that can happen to a person multiplied by the population you target. When you refuse diplomacy, you are condemning whole cities to unimaginable suffering.

    ❖

    Nobody actually believes “tankies” are dangerous, some people just have a deep psychological need for the US empire’s fiercest critics to be wrong because it’s more comfortable than considering the possibility that everything you’ve been taught about the world is a lie.

    ❖

     

    There’s a lot in the news right now but none of it is as important as the fact that we’re being shoved toward nuclear war for no good reason by a few idiots who want to rule the world.

    Again, the real risk of nuclear war is not that any side will deliberately start one but that the explicit agreement in “Mutually Assured Destruction” will be set into motion by a nuke being deployed by accident, miscommunication, miscalculation or malfunction as things escalate. During the last cold war such accidental nuclear exchanges came all too close to happening multiple times. The more tense the nuclear standoff gets, the greater the likelihood of such an event occurring:

    We survived the last cold war not by skill or by competence, but by sheer dumb luck. There’s no logical reason to assume we’ll get lucky again.

    ❖

    So yeah, just so we’re clear, the US empire is rapidly restructuring the systems people look to for information about the world in order to ensure iron-fisted control over our dominant narratives while it scrambles to subvert its rivals in cold war maneuverings and secure unipolar planetary hegemony.

    The primary purpose of expanding censorship and propaganda on subjects like Ukraine, Russia, Covid, extremism etc is not to control the narrative about those subjects specifically, but to expand and normalize censorship and propaganda. Narrative control is an end in itself, and it’s the absolute highest priority because all the empire’s power is built upon it.

    Few seem to understand that the oligarchic empire seeks narrative control as an end in itself. They’re not always necessarily increasing censorship and propaganda about a given topic because of that topic; it’s often mainly because they want to normalize and expand censorship and propaganda. Certainly there are narratives right here and now that the empire would rather we believe, but that’s of secondary strategic importance to ensuring ongoing and continually expanding control over all narratives around the world into the future.

    Not all powerful people support the same narratives, but all powerful people seek narrative control. Narrative control is power. Any manipulator understands this, from the most powerful oligarchs right down to the narcissistic gossip queen at the office.

    Any manipulator of any level spends an extraordinary amount of energy working to dominate the stories people tell about them and about others. This is because they know humans are storytelling creatures, and if you can control the stories they tell, you control the humans. This is most especially true of the globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States; its narrative control via corporate news media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley is completely unparalleled and historically unprecedented.

    Censorship, propaganda, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation are just different aspects of narrative control. Nobody does this as well as the US-centralized empire and its managers. Nobody ever has.

    _______________________

    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, 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.

  • Siding With The US Empire Is Always Wrong: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    If you get the feeling that all this Ukraine flag-waving is one more vapid mainstream propaganda initiative used to manufacture consent for an agenda that has nothing to do with what you’re being told, it’s because that’s exactly what is happening.

    ❖

    In this war Russia has killed many Ukrainians and Ukraine has killed many Russians and the US empire has killed many Ukrainians and Russians.

    ❖

    It’s nuts that there are still grown adults who think Putin invaded Ukraine for no other reason than because he is evil and hates freedom.

    ❖

    Focus less on the Azov Battalion and more on the fact that the US deliberately provoked this war with the goal of toppling Moscow and is threatening all our lives with increasingly reckless brinkmanship against a nuclear superpower.

    ❖

    People who promote a US/NATO war with Russia are more dangerous and depraved than racists, homophobes, transphobes and antisemites, and they should be treated accordingly. They are the most dangerous extremists on earth. This should be completely uncontroversial and obvious to literally everyone.

    ❖

    More Americans know Marge Simpson’s sisters’ favorite TV show than know their government is waging a deliberately provoked and profoundly dangerous proxy war against a nuclear superpower. This is because mainstream western media — all of it — is propaganda.

    ❖

    Everyone should be able to say whatever the fuck they want about a proxy war instigated by the world’s most powerful government that could very easily end up sparking a nuclear war.

    ❖

    If you’re on the side of the US empire on any issue you are on the wrong side. This doesn’t mean the other side is always necessarily in the right, it just means a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by lies, murder and tyranny will always be in the wrong. Yes, it is that simple.

    ❖

    It must be the most soul-destroying thing in the world to go to journalism school, study hard, graduate in front of your whole family, work your ass off building up a resume, get a steady job, and then find yourself writing hit pieces about disobedient Youtubers for The Daily Beast.

    ❖

    Twitter is nature’s way of dispelling the common misconception that liberals are smart.

    ❖

    If I was the world’s biggest narcissist, I’d probably try to become the richest person on earth, and do everything I can to make sure everyone’s always talking about me, and convince everyone that I’m going to save the world with my technology so I get a weird cult to worship me.

    ❖

    Twitter being biased in favor of one nation’s government is vastly more consequential than Twitter being biased in favor of one US political party. So far we’re only seeing emphasis on the latter, indicating that Twitter will continue functioning as a US propaganda/censorship apparatus. It should probably get more attention that it’s effectively impossible to have any kind of major media company in the US and not have it be absorbed into the US propaganda machine.

    ❖

    The Assange case is very simple: the most powerful government in the world is trying to criminalize journalism about its nefarious behavior anywhere in the world. You can sum it up in a breath. It’s only narrative spin and smears that make it seem like some big complicated thing.

    ❖

    Empires haven’t disappeared as the world grows more conscious of the evils of empire, they’ve just gotten sneakier and bitchier. They used to nail you to a piece of wood in public if you defied them, now they’ve got to go through this whole deceitful lawfare process just to kill one journalist.

    Empires used to just openly conquer foreign territories because they want to own them. Then it became about “civilizing” them. Now they pretend it’s about “freedom and democracy”, and they don’t even make you change your flag to theirs.

    Empires used to exterminate entire towns who dared to disobey them, now they have to launch these giant bitchy propaganda operations to psychologically manipulate populations into hating their enemies.

    Empires are just really sneaky, bitchy, gossippy, backstabby versions of what they’ve always been. They’re just as oppressive and violent, but the fact that there are more eyes on their behavior means they have to be so much more manipulative and covert about what they do.

    The more visible things become, the more hard work and cleverness is required to run an empire. That’s why they’re working so hard to make things less visible via censorship, propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the criminalization of journalism.

    ❖

    The biggest mistake you can make is to trust that your leaders’ actions would seem more sensible and appropriate if you knew what they know and understood what they understand. The wars really are as horrific and as pointless as they appear. The escalations in tyranny really are as bad as they seem. It’s not that you don’t understand what you’re looking at, it’s that you’re not a sociopath.

    ❖

    Your thoughts and opinions matter. Know how you can tell? Because every single day the world’s most powerful people pour an immense amount of wealth and energy into trying to manipulate them.

    ❖

    When a loved one is very self-destructive you can’t control their fate; at some point you’ve just got to let them make their mistakes and hope something in them wakes up before they wind up dead. That’s pretty much how you’ve got to be with the entire human species at this point.

    _________________

    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, 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.

  • Shitlibs Are Foam-Brained Human Livestock: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    The hyperbolic language westerners use to describe fairly normal modern warfare in Ukraine suggests they’ve invested exactly zero thought in what their own governments have been doing in the middle east for the last two decades.

    It’s like, yes, killing, violence and destruction is what war looks like. You’re describing the thing that war is. It’s creepy that you’re only just discovering this now. What did you think your government has been using to conduct its wars this whole time? Dank memes?

    ❖

    Before the Ukraine war I would’ve told you it’s impossible for me to despise shitlibs any more than I already do and impossible for me to have less respect for their foam-brained worldview. But I would have been wrong. Very, very wrong.

    ❖

    If your understanding of world events doesn’t account for the easily quantifiable fact that the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth by a massive margin, nothing else in your understanding of world events will be fact-based.

    There’s only one government that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, continually working to destroy any nation who disobeys it, and has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions. It isn’t Russia. It isn’t China. One must account for this reality.

    That’s tyranny. That is the thing that tyranny is. If it isn’t tyranny to bully and brutalize the entire world into obedience by any degree of violence necessary, then tyranny is a meaningless concept. The US just happens to export the majority of its tyranny outside its borders.

    ❖

    ❖

    The fact that CNN+ couldn’t even get 10k people to pay for its content shows why Silicon Valley needs to tilt its algorithms to boost mainstream media content while hiding indie media: people only look at that bullshit when they’re forced to. If it wasn’t for Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation outlets like CNN would have died years ago.

    ❖

    Journalism would greatly benefit from its practitioners becoming far more disdainful of the approval of their peers, rather than seeking that approval like crack fiends. In journalism when you were respected by all the other journos it used to mean you were probably doing something right; now it’s a sure sign you are doing something wrong.

    ❖

    Can’t shake how weird it is that we’re hurtling toward nuclear annihilation and we’re still all babbling about Will Smith and face masks.

    ❖

    Future generations, if there are future generations, will look back in horror at the fact that we just let billionaire corporations not only profit from war but actively lobby for more war via think tanks, campaign funding and other influence ops.

    ❖

    The fact that Australians are being pummeled with war propaganda about China combined with the freakishly hawkish alarmism about the Chinese security pact with the Solomon Islands should make all conscious Australians a bit nervous. If you don’t think the US empire would happily sacrifice Australia in a proxy war against a major rival, I suggest you take a closer look at Ukraine. Will Australians be sending our kids off to die fighting China over the Solomon Islands, or will it be over Taiwan? Find out in the next thrilling episode of Empire Management!

    It doesn’t need to be this way. There’s no legitimate reason major powers need to compete with each other and wave armageddon weapons at each other and try to dominate each other. We can just all collaborate toward the greater good of everyone. This is all absolute madness.

    ❖

    I do hope those of you who hate China but started following my work because you like my Russia/Ukraine takes are not under the illusion that we are friends. We are enemies and I deeply despise you. When things heat up with Beijing I’m going to spend every waking hour trying to make you rage-cry.

    ❖

    When the ecosystem is dying because of economic systems which depend on infinite growth on a finite world, your choices are either (A) abandon those systems or (B) pray that sociopathic oligarchs somehow get us into space in the next few years. Guess which one we’re going with.

    ❖

    ❖

    Humanity’s major problems arise from the impulse to control. Ecocide arises from the impulse to control nature. Empire arises from the impulse to control civilizations. Oligarchy arises from the impulse to control political outcomes. Ego arises from the impulse to control life.

    A healthy humanity would be free of the impulse to manipulate and exert control: over life, over people, over nature. But it would be so different from the humanity we know now that falling into that way of functioning would be a kind of death. And it would feel like a death.

    Sometimes it seems like people want the world to end, want humanity to go extinct. I’d suggest that this may be a confused expression of an intuited truth: that there’s something good on the other side of ending all this. But it’s the end of our dysfunction, not of our species.

    _______________________

    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, 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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • This War Is A Propaganda Campaign Wrapped In A Psyop: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The country with the worst elections in the western world, whose government intervenes in foreign elections more than any other government on earth, is waging a dangerous proxy war to save democracy in Ukraine, a nation which is not a democracy by any reasonable definition.

    ❖

    Anyone who trusts any government is a fool. Anyone who trusts the world’s most powerful government is a damn fool. Anyone who trusts the world’s most powerful government while it runs massive propaganda ops for a dangerous proxy war should be forbidden to use the grown-up scissors.

    ❖

    It’s impossible to overstate how completely blanketed by propaganda distortion the Ukraine war is. US spooks saying they’re leaking disinfo to the press, Ukrainian war propaganda, the blackout on Ukrainian losses, the uncritical media acceptance of allegations against Russia, etc. This war is a propaganda campaign wrapped in a psyop.

    There are only two possibilities: you either (A) accept the fact that the information ecosystem around this war is too polluted to know very much of anything for certain and adjust your perceptions accordingly, or (B) you believe false things about this war. That’s it.

    Propaganda only works on people who don’t know they’re being propagandized. If you’re acutely aware that a historically unprecedented effort is going into manipulating your understanding of what’s happening in a strategically crucial war in the digital age, you’re more grounded.

    And of course the propaganda cuts both ways. Obviously it does. Uncritically believing Russia-aligned sources about this war is just as sure to give you an inaccurate picture of events as uncritically believing US/NATO/Ukraine-aligned sources (i.e. all mass media). It’s psyops all the way down.

    One thing that helps is rather than forming hard beliefs about what’s going on in this war, assign probabilities instead. Label different narratives zero, low, moderate, high or very high confidence like a spook analyzing intelligence. Might as well, because spooks are distorting it all anyway.

    This is one of those situations where your own best guess about what’s happening is infinitely superior to what you’re told by the news media, because at least you know your own best guess is assembled in good faith while you know news media narratives are rife with propaganda distortion. If you’re genuinely interested in understanding what’s going on with this war, get as much information from as diverse an array of sources as possible, preferencing those who don’t appear aligned with any power structure and aren’t egoically or financially invested in any side.

    ❖

    ❖

    Zelensky, man. The last time a powerful empire poured this much PR and perception management into the image of a foreign Jewish leader it involved stained glass and crucifixes.

    ❖

    It was clear we’d reached a whole new level of Orwellian doublethink when it turned out liberals will call literally anyone in the world a Nazi except actual, literal Nazis.

    ❖

    You know capitalism is totally working when there are people getting paid millions to help start wars by people who make billions from wars while Silicon Valley megacorporations are censoring those who try to end wars and everyone’s praying the world’s richest man will stop this.

    ❖

    There are no “private” companies worth billions of dollars. In a corporatist system it is impossible to grow that big without becoming intertwined with ruling power structures. This is especially true for corporations of immense political consequence, like social media platforms.

    ❖

    We are surrounded by propaganda at all times. Our entire civilization is saturated with it. When you say you support internet censorship to stop “Russian propaganda”, what you are really saying is that you only want your own rulers propagandizing you.

    ❖

    The notion that some opinions are Russian is one of the most mind-destroying beliefs ever circulated in a secular society.

    ❖

    All the shitlibs yelling “Don’t listen to Chomsky!” for his comments about Ukraine will soon be yelling “Listen to Chomsky!” when it’s time to wheel him out again to tell everyone they need to vote Democrat.

    ❖

     

    The weirdest thing about interacting with Ukraine flag accounts online is how seriously they expect to be taken while saying ridiculous bullshit. No I’m not an evil demonic monster for opposing nuclear brinkmanship and online censorship and saying the US lies about wars. Shut up, idiot.

    If you look at their responses to criticisms of the establishment line on Ukraine it’s always like ten percent MSM propaganda and ninety percent empty outraged sputtering. Just vapid emoting. And they sincerely seem to expect you to take that seriously and treat them like adults.

    ❖

    A mainstream news reporter is someone who uncritically publishes information provided by government agencies like it’s news and does investigative pieces on Twitch streamers who say wrong things about Ukraine and then wins three Pulitzers for their fearless hard-nosed journalism.

    ❖

    Watching Hollywood movies is weird when you’re acutely aware that everyone on the screen loves Biden and supports internet censorship and wants a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

    ____________________

    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, 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. 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Assange Case Invalidates US Criticisms Of Russia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    If you’ve been following the news about Ukraine but still don’t understand that it’s the single most aggressively narrative managed and psyop-intensive war in human history, there is a 100 percent chance you believe false things about what’s happening there.

    ❖

    It’s not a question of if the US played a role in Imran Khan’s removal but how and to what extent.

    ❖

    We’re about to see a judge sign off on Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States for exposing the empire’s war crimes while that same empire blasts us all in the face with an unprecedented war propaganda campaign about rescuing Ukraine’s freedom and democracy.

    “Russia must be held accountable for its war crimes,” said the empire while imprisoning a journalist for trying to hold it accountable for war crimes.

    Just the fact that the US and UK are imprisoning a journalist for exposing the war crimes of a war criminal president—just that one fact by itself—completely invalidates all criticisms of Russia from Washington and its allies.

    Fun little factoid: if you subtract all the narratives being used to justify it, the Assange case looks exactly the same as the world’s most powerful government imprisoning a journalist for telling the truth.

    ❖

    ❖

    “Opinion” segments and articles in mainstream news media exist not to give you an idea of what opinions are out there but to define what opinions are permissible. The front page teaches you what to think, the opinion section teaches you how to think.

    ❖

    Once you figure out that corporations are part of the government it becomes clear what corporate media propaganda and corporate internet censorship really are.

    ❖

    The Russiagate psyop got “liberals” okay with internet censorship, cold war brinkmanship, and being lied to by the mass media day after day for the greater good, and now the US empire just so happens to be ramping up all three of those things to facilitate agendas against Russia.

    ❖

     

    Public consent for Silicon Valley censorship has been used to justify a wider and wider radius of speech suppression to the point that we’re now seeing the hammer dropped on people whose only crime is criticizing the most dangerous agendas of the world’s most powerful government.

    Many of us warned from the beginning that protocols to silence figures like Alex Jones would be expanded to include things like anti-imperialists being purged en masse for their political speech. The only ones who disputed this are idiots who now regret their position and those who wanted to suppress dissent all along.

    Are you listening now, assholes? Do you still think our opposition to this was about “supporting Alex Jones,” or do you now see that it was always about resisting government-tied monopolistic megacorporations being given the authority to censor worldwide speech for the US empire?

     

     

    Free speech is important not because it’s nice to be able to say what you want, but because it creates a check on the powerful. The ability to freely share ideas and information is what makes it possible to bring attention to problems, change minds, stir the zeitgeist, and organize mass resistance.

    For this reason there should be no speech restrictions on the platforms where people have come to congregate to share ideas and information besides illegal activities like child pornography. Not because it makes Johnny Proudboy sad if he can’t speak, but to put a check on power.

    That’s why it’s a moot point whether censorship on those giant platforms technically violates free speech laws or not; it violates the spirit behind the very reason those legal speech protections were created in the first place, namely to move power from the government to the people. And for this spirit to be upheld it’s necessary that all ideas and information are allowed to be shared freely, not just some of them. Because there’s no institution you could trust as an official arbiter of what ideas and information are valid without creating a power imbalance.

    People should be allowed to scrutinize any and all narratives of the powerful. They should be allowed to share unauthorized ideas and information. They should even be allowed to lie, because otherwise the only people allowed to lie will be the powerful. Democratizing information sharing is democratizing power.

    ❖

    Remember after 9/11 when Republicans got it into their heads that you need to torture people all the time to prevent terrorism, and then a TV series started on Fox where the hero tortures people all the time to stop terrorists? Propaganda was way more ham-fisted back then.

    ❖

    Oh yeah well what about the RUSSIAN empire, huh?? What about CHINESE imperialism? What about the IRANIAN unipolar world hegemon? How come you never criticize CUBA for circling the planet with hundreds of military bases?? What about VENEZUELAN nuclear brinkmanship, you hypocrite?

    ❖

    My haters are a fun mix of uninformed imperialists who think I’m crazy for saying the US is trying to rule the world and informed imperialists who think I’m naive for saying the US shouldn’t try to rule the world.

    ❖

    Never let anyone shame you for focusing your criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive government. It’s not strange and suspicious that you do that, it’s strange and suspicious that more people don’t.

    ❖

    Humanity will either extinguish itself in a cataclysm of its own making or awaken from its delusion-based conditioning and become a conscious species. And whichever one happens, all our partisan bickering and sectarian spats will look pretty ridiculous in retrospect when it does.

    ____________________________

    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, 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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • When You Lie It’s Misinformation, When They Lie It’s Cool: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The most powerful empire that has ever existed, which is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and continuously works to destroy any nation who challenges its global dominion, claims that it is in a global power struggle against “authoritarianism”.

    ❖

    Russia will lose the propaganda war on every front, at least in the west. It will lose every narrative dispute about alleged war crimes in the court of public opinion, whether those allegations are true or not. The US military is beatable, the US dollar is beatable, but the US propaganda machine is an unstoppable juggernaut.

    ❖

    Can’t believe we’ve been watching people lose their social media accounts for posting “misinformation” this whole time only for US officials to come right out and admit that they’ve been running an active disinformation campaign where they knowingly circulate lies about Russia.

    A random guy says something on social media that differs from mainstream consensus? That’s misinformation; he needs to be de-platformed. The most powerful government in the world uses the most powerful media institutions in the world to circulate disinfo? That’s just fine normal stuff.

    It’s actually really disturbing that US empire managers now feel comfortable just leaking the fact that they are blatantly lying to the public to win a psywar against Putin. It means they’re confident they can get the public to consciously consent to their rulers lying to them for their own good.

     

    ❖

    US officials: We are circulating disinformation in an infowar against Russia.

    Me: Those US officials said they’re circulating disinformation in an infowar against Russia.

    Liberals: Oh yeah right Caitlin, everything’s just a big, giant conspiracy!

    ❖

    Twitter consults with the US government when deciding what to censor, consults with US government-funded think tanks to determine what people see on the platform, conducts censorship in favor of US government narratives, and has the gall to label others “state-affiliated media”.

    Twitter is state-affiliated media.

    ❖

    Don’t take life advice from unhappy people, don’t take creative advice from people who don’t create, don’t take career advice from people whose careers aren’t where you want yours to be, don’t take advice on the Ukraine war from people who supported the Iraq invasion.

    ❖

    People tell me, “Talk to Ukrainians!”

    No matter how many Ukrainians I talk to, it will still be an objective fact that the US government and western media have a well-documented history of lying about every war, and that wanting direct hot warfare between nuclear superpowers is fucking insane.

    ❖

    It’s amazing how many arguments I run into that essentially boil down to “Your opinion is Russian.” It’s like the word “Russian” stopped referring to a nation and its population and now refers to some sort of metaphysical quality of one’s soul, similar to the word “Satanic”.

    ❖

    The other day a longtime lefty follower called me a bootlicker for saying the US military should not directly attack the Russian military in Ukraine. Opposing US military interventionism and World War 3 is bootlicking now. War propaganda is turning people’s brains into soup.

    ❖

     

    The agenda to create a one world government is not some hidden conspiracy involving secret societies and shadowy figures with Jewish surnames. The US empire is openly working to unite the planet under a single power structure which effectively functions as one government.

    ❖

    Washington DC is the hub of the imperial political machine, Virginia is the hub of the imperial war machine, California is the hub of the imperial propaganda machine.

    ❖

    In the end we’re just a confused species who entered into an awkward developmental transition phase because our brains evolved too fast.

    We wound up with the ability to think abstract thoughts but without the wisdom to refrain from identifying with them. With the ability to invent nuclear weapons but without the wisdom to refrain from building them. The ability to conquer our ecosystem without the wisdom to refrain from doing so. To write vast tomes of philosophy that contain not one line telling us how to feel content in our own bodies, on our own home planet. To construct entire belief systems that are utterly useless for living in harmony with what is.

    I’m sure birds and whales went through awkward evolutionary transition phases as well before they turned into the graceful flyers and swimmers they are today. Their early ancestors probably looked downright ridiculous for a while. It’s just that their transitions didn’t involve giant prefrontal cortices in their skulls that make childbirth painful and could easily give rise to the end of all life on earth.

    The birth of a human baby is difficult due to the size of our enormous, rapidly evolved brains relative to the more slowly evolved pelvic bone. The birth of a sane humanity will be difficult for similar reasons.

    I do believe we have the ability to make the jump from this awkward transition phase to become a truly conscious species. But it looks like if we make it, it’s going to be by the skin of our omnivore teeth.

    __________________

    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, 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. 

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  • US Interventionism Always Makes Things Worse: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Friendly reminder that it’s impossible to get a clear understanding of what’s going on in the world without accounting for the fact that very powerful people within your own society are actively working very hard to manipulate your understanding in their favor.

    ❖

    Obviously believing unproven US or Ukrainian claims about what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine is as dumb as believing unproven Russian claims about what’s happening there, and anyone advocating for direct NATO military intervention against Russia is an enemy of our species.

    Advocating skepticism of unproven claims made during a war and saying nuclear superpowers should not attack one anothers’ military forces on the basis of those claims should literally be the least controversial position that anyone could possibly voice about anything.

    ❖

    US military interventionism always makes things worse and never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will accomplish. It’s stupid to have to keep saying this year after year. There’s nothing wrong in Ukraine that direct US military intervention couldn’t make much, much worse.

    ❖

    It’s been universally understood since Stalin got the bomb that nuclear-armed powers must never go to war with each other, but everyone’s so insane now we’re seeing daily op-eds and news segments about how NATO could attack the Russian military in Ukraine without starting a nuclear war.

    Nuclear superpowers must never go to war with each other. This is the single most existentially important thing for the human species to understand. It’s been understood for generations, and it didn’t magically stop being true because you saw a bunch of Ukrainian flags and some unconfirmed pictures of alleged war crimes.

    People say things like, “Putin believes he can rely on the nuclear threat to keep us from confronting him!” Yeah that’s how military strategy works, dipshit. He has a military strength that his enemies need to respect. That means you shouldn’t attack Russia, not that you should.

    For years I’ve had idiot QAnon cultists telling me nuclear weapons are a hoax and they’re not real. Now all of a sudden my online notifications are full of shitlibs saying almost the same thing.

    ❖

    Still hilarious that the United States of America thinks it has the moral authority to tell other nations how they should respond to a military invasion.

    ❖

    Do you truly believe it’s a coincidence that mainstream Americans were made to despise Putin with a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that turned out to be pure bullshit in the years preceding an unrelated US proxy war against Putin? What would it mean if it wasn’t a coincidence?

    ❖

    Looks like Jen Psaki’s making a major career move from spreading US government lies to spreading US government lies on cable news.

    ❖

    If you look at the behavior of the US empire underneath all the narratives, two things become clear:

    1. It plans to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world by halting the rise of China.
    2. It can only accomplish this via actions that will massively disrupt the entire world.

    The strongest argument for a multipolar world is that maintaining a unipolar one necessarily requires endless violence and continually escalating nuclear brinkmanship. It is literally unsustainable.

    There’s no valid reason nations can’t just get along and collaborate toward the greater good of humanity without one of them trying to dominate all the others. The unipolarist impulse to rule the earth stops this peaceful and collaborative world from emerging. There is no “Pax Americana”. Unipolarism is the opposite of peace.

    People try to argue that if the US wasn’t the unipolar world dominator then it would be China or someone else, because it’s “human nature” to want to take over the world. But there was never a unipolar world hegemon ever in human history until three decades ago; you can’t claim something that has only happened one single time is “human nature”.

    Europeans set sail and conquered people around the world. China built a wall. Also the idea that China seeks to replace the US as global tyrant assumes that Beijing has been watching the US empire crush itself under its own weight and thinking “Ooh, yeah, that looks awesome. Let’s definitely do that.”

    ❖

    It says so much about how propagandized people are and how insulated their ideological echo chambers have become that their first thought when encountering someone with a foreign policy opinion they disagree with is “I bet this person is a secret agent from a hostile government.”

    I’m always like, really? That’s your go-to? That I’m saying what I’m saying because I’m an operative for a foreign intelligence agency? Can’t possibly just be that I just have different opinions about the world’s most powerful government than the ones you hear on TV? How distorted does the information landscape have to be that criticizing the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth is something people view as weird and suspicious?

    It really tells you how powerful the empire’s narrative domination is. Even leaving aside how normal criticizing the world’s largest power structure ought to be, how homogeneous has the information environment become where any divergence of opinion sticks out so much that it’s met with such intense shock that people think you’re a foreign agent?

    ❖

    Russian perspectives need to be banned and Germans need to be jailed for supporting Putin and the news media need to push US government narratives and Silicon Valley algorithms need to aggressively boost those government narratives, because that’s what it takes to protect the western world from tyranny.

    ❖

    Few people sincerely want the truth about the world. Most just want politicians and pundits to whisper reassuringly in their ear, “Don’t worry. We’ve got this. Your schoolteachers told you the truth about everything, and so did the news man. You are on the side of righteousness.”

    _________________________

    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, 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. 

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  • Sure, Ukraine Is The First War The US Hasn’t Lied About: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    If, hypothetically speaking, the US wanted to rule the world, it likely would have begun planning years ago to subvert the rise of China. Step One would have involved a plan to cripple the powers who support it, like Russia. They’d have begun propagandizing us for this years ago. Hypothetically speaking.

    It’s a good thing this is a hypothetical scenario and the US has no plans of global domination, because otherwise by now we’d probably have been marinating in a virulent anti-Russia propaganda campaign for five or six years and would be brainwashed into cheerleading for Russia to be choked off from the global economy with the goal of toppling Moscow.

    This hypothetical scenario could never happen in real life, because such a propaganda campaign would require western intelligence agencies to plant stories demonizing Russia in the western press for years, and our free press would never uncritically publish claims by spy agencies. That would be flat-out propaganda. The free press are full of hard-nosed muckraking journalists who shine the bold light of truth on government agencies to hold the powerful to account. They’d never act as willing proxies for government agencies working to manufacture consent for unipolarist geostrategic agendas.

    And it’s a good thing, too. Can you imagine if the US and its allies and the entire western press were working together, wittingly or unwittingly, toward toppling powerful nuclear-armed nations in the way the USSR was toppled? Things would be getting very crazy and confrontational by now.

    Thank God we live in a free society where government agencies are transparent and accountable, where military geostrategic objectives are rigorously checked by democratically elected officials, and journalists never face any consequences for telling the truth about these things.

    Because we might be staring down the barrel of nuclear armageddon just to fulfill the unipolarist fantasies of a few powerful psychopaths if the situation I just laid out were anything but purely hypothetical.

    ❖

    Fucking ridiculous that it’s 2022 and it’s still a shocking and controversial position to say your government and media are lying to you about a fucking war.

    You know you’re living under an empire with the most sophisticated propaganda machine that’s ever existed when it can lie about literally every war it’s ever been involved in and then when you say they’re lying about the latest war people still act like you’re a paranoid lunatic.

    ❖

    Someone who acts like it’s absurd to think the US may have played an underhanded role in starting a war is someone you can just ignore.

    ❖

    Putin is responsible for Putin’s decisions, the US empire is responsible for the US empire’s decisions. Putin is responsible for choosing to launch an invasion of Ukraine, the US empire is responsible for deliberately provoking that invasion with the goal of removing Putin.

    It’s just amazing the mental gymnastics people will do to avoid confronting the basic, commonsense fact that the US could very easily have prevented this war with a little diplomacy and instead chose not to because the war advances its own goals.

    ❖

    My take on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock is that we’re the closest we’ve been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis and it’s only continuing to escalate.

    ❖

    Never forget that the real reason they hate John Mearsheimer is for being objectively, indisputably correct about how wrong they are.

    Shitlibs can forgive a lot of things. They can forgive you for being a Bushite warmonger. They can forgive you for having been a racist or homophobe. They can even forgive you for being an active Nazi. But the one thing they can never forgive is being right about their wrongness.

    ❖

    Still blows my mind that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and escalating cold war tensions with Moscow which helped lead us to where we’re at now, and yet liberals spent that whole time calling him a Putin puppet.

    ❖

    This war has outed a lot of closet empire supporters who got excited about Putin’s invasion because at long last now the US power alliance is The Good Guy, and now they’re spending their time screaming at those of us who’ve declined to play along with that infantile framing.

    “Haha, now surely these disobedient lefties will fall in line and support our beneficent imperial leaders- Hey! What the hell do you all think you’re doing??”

    ❖

    I keep getting people telling me I “just hate America,” which is silly in so many ways it’s hard to even know where to start. If they’re referring to the nation’s land and people, then no of course I don’t hate them. If they’re referring to its government or the oligarchic imperial power structure that runs it, then of course I do. It’s the single most murderous and destructive power structure on earth. Everyone should hate it.

    It says so much about how propagandized people are that they think “You hate America!” is some kind of scathing accusation. The US empire has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions and shows no signs of stopping. It is normal and good to hate such things.

    ❖

    The warning signs that our competition-based systems are unsustainable will get less and less subtle until we either move to collaboration-based systems or receive our final warning in the form of climate collapse or nuclear armageddon.

    _______________________________

    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, 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. 

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  • Erasing History To Own Putin: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    It enrages me that “westsplaining” is a word now. Fuck off you ridiculous NPR-addled shitbrains. The absolute gall to protect a murderous globe-dominating empire from criticism and accountability for its non-stop meddling and oppression using words disguised to sound like social justice jargon. Fuck you.

    ❖

    “This war had nothing to do with NATO! They weren’t even gonna add Ukraine to NATO!”

    Okay then why not simply guarantee that to Russia and avoid a horrific war with limitless potential to escalate?

    “They just- well you just can’t give in to Putin. Not even on imaginary stuff.”

    Really? ‘Not giving in to Putin’ as purely a matter of principle is something that’s worth thousands of lives and potentially risking nuclear war?

    “Yes. You make concessions on one imaginary thing and next thing you know he’s demanding we emancipate the leprechauns.”

    Are you quite sure that’s true? Because it sounds like bullshit. Are you quite sure the threat to add Ukraine to NATO wasn’t actively reified in numerous ways by western powers with the goal of provoking Russia into a war that could be exploited to topple Moscow?

    “Shut up.”

    ❖

    Putin is bad so Yuri Gagarin didn’t go to space and Tchaikovsky wasn’t a good composer and Dostoevsky was a lousy writer and Sputnik was designed by Lockheed Martin and Anton Chekhov was Welsh and Khabib Nurmagomedov was born in Minnesota.

    ❖

    There’s nothing wrong in Ukraine that a little US military interventionism couldn’t make much, much worse.

    ❖

    One of the many reasons the US sucks at winning wars despite its reputation is that a for-profit military system is as efficient and cost-effective as a for-profit healthcare system. Worse really, since trillions of dollars could never go unaccounted for in the Department of Health and Human Services.

    It’s a lot harder to win wars when your military doesn’t exist for that purpose, but exists rather to generate profits. So the USA’s massively bloated military budget is not a great indication of how powerful its military actually is. They’re quite literally not getting much bang for their buck.

    The US empire’s real might lies in its tactics of economic and financial manipulation, and even more in its unparallelled system of international narrative control. The way it uses Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the oligarchic media to manipulate public thought is unprecedented. This is what I’m pointing to when I say people tend to overestimate the power of the US war machine and underestimate the power of the US propaganda machine.

    ❖

    The strongest argument against the US empire’s proxy war activities in Ukraine is not Nazis, nor biolabs, nor rising gas prices, but the fact that it is bringing the human species ever closer to an extinction-level event after which nothing else will matter.

    ❖

    Those who deny that the brinkmanship between the US and Russia is putting us at unacceptable and ever-increasing risk of nuclear war are simply psychologically compartmentalizing away from the horrifying facts. The source of their claim is their own cognitive dissonance.

    “X has to be true because the alternative is too horrifying to contemplate” is not a legitimate position to have on a very important issue. Get honest with yourself, man.

    I found out about nuclear war in about ’84, when I was around nine. I snuck out of bed to watch TV and my parents were watching a dystopian flick called “Threads”. After about five minutes, I legged it back to bed, my heart thumping in my throat. In many ways, that was the end of my childhood.

    For years after, the possibility of nuclear holocaust loomed over my little head with every passing plane. It ruined everything. Eventually though I found ways to reframe the threat, disassociate from the anxiety. Compartmentalizing away until it didn’t feel like a thing anymore.

    It’s still a thing though. It’s a thing more than ever.

    Cowardly people would say I “grew up”, which is a projection. Honest people would say I put in place some coping strategies that were helpful as a child, but no longer useful as an adult. Courageous people have eschewed those strategies in themselves already.

    I am no longer a powerless child who has no say in what happens, I’m a grown-ass adult who can do something about it. To keep those layers of comfortable dissociation and soothing reframes in place is not only dishonest, it’s cowardice. Feel the fear and face the facts, even though it’s hard.

    Whenever you see someone dismiss the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation, you are seeing a child telling you the fairytales they use to get to sleep at night. As cute as that may be, it’s also what keeps this from being seen, which is what keeps the madness in place.

    Remember that kid though? Remember how you just wanted some adults to stop being crazy, and stop making those stupid things? You wanted an adult to stand up and make it right? You can be that adult now. You should be that adult now. You owe it to your little self.

    ❖

    That you are is much more interesting than how you are. You could be nothing. Instead you’re a giant-brained biped that gets to walk around and look at things and think abstract thoughts. That’s light years more interesting and impressive than, like, having a university degree or being good at the stock market.

    That giant leap from being nothing to being a sentient ape mutant is much, much more vast than the relatively insignificant click from being unemployed to being a millionaire. If you just spend your life really being here, truly relishing this gift, then that’s a life well spent.

    An entity that’s never gotten to be a human would be much more impressed with humanness itself than with the specifics of what a given human has achieved and whether it has won the approval of its parents. Just be human. Just be here. Look. Listen. Breathe. Be.

    This is amazing.

    ___________________________

    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, 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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Awesome Power Of US Propaganda: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Sometimes I can only stop and stare in awe at the power of the US propaganda machine. Almost the entire global north has been paced into perfect alignment with cold war agendas geared toward securing US unipolar dominance by an unprecedented propaganda and censorship campaign.

    There’s nothing intrinsic in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which says the nation must be strangled to death by unheard-of levels of economic warfare from Washington-loyal governments. A huge international consensus needed to be manufactured for that specific response, and the public needed to go along with it. Just absolutely incredible.

    By securing control of global narratives via Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and plutocratic “news” outlets, the US empire has effectively supplanted the UN and international law in its ability to get whole groups of nations moving in a certain way with the consent of the governed. The human species is being led around like a dog on a leash by a collective mind control system of unparalleled and unprecedented sophistication that hardly anyone even notices. Imperial propaganda is the single most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our society.

    ❖

    What is the functional difference between state media broadcasters uncritically reporting what the government tells them to report and western news media outlets which always uncritically report “scoops” that are fed to them by government officials?

    ❖

    ❖

    The fawning hero worship of Zelensky is the most embarrassing and self-debasing thing liberals have done since those pink pussy hats.

    ❖

    War is without exception the very worst thing in the world. The most insane, the most traumatizing, the most self-destructive, the least sustainable. All of the parties involved in this war should have done everything possible to avoid it, and any who claim they did so are lying.

    ❖

    The hawks from the first cold war claimed the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicated their brinkmanship, which meant all those nuclear close calls we had during that period were worth it, but it turns out all that happened was a short break before resuming the insane nuclear brinkmanship.

    We see now that this is set up to go on for a very, very long time. This completely invalidates the belief that these “great power competition” games of nuclear chicken are sane and worthwhile, because if you keep rolling the dice on nuclear war day after day and year after year, eventually they’re going to come up snake eyes. The only sane choice on the table is therefore to move into a cooperative, friendly relationship with these powers, because facts in evidence show very clearly that trying to dominate and subvert each other will keep going and going until it eventually results in a nuclear conflict.

    We came close to wiping ourselves out many times during the last cold war; very close in some cases (look up Vasili Arkhipov). And now we’re back at the most dangerous levels of nuclear brinkmanship since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is unsustainable.

    ❖

    ❖

    It says so much about the madness of our species that half the controversies surrounding this war exist because we made up a rule that killing people with chemical and biological weapons is illegal but killing them with bullets and military explosives is perfectly fine.

    ❖

    If you have a problem with someone highlighting the culpability of the most powerful government on earth in giving rise to this war, it’s because imperial propaganda has turned you into a power-worshipping bootlicker.

    ❖

    “Aha I see you’ve been speaking critically of the most powerful government on earth. That looks very strange and suspicious to me. Perhaps you are a secret agent working for a foreign government. I am very intelligent.”

    ❖

    Empire loyalists hold that the US empire may stage coups and threaten foreign nations in ways it would never allow itself to be threatened, and that if those nations retaliate against those actions the empire bears no responsibility whatsoever.

    ❖

    There’s a common unexamined assumption that the US can’t possibly have a villainous role in every major world conflict, that sometimes it’s just other governments being evil and that’s it. But there really is one uniquely evil asshole on the world stage who fucks with everything.

    Few people have trouble believing there’s a uniquely evil tyrant in the world. They just have a hard time accepting that it’s their own government.

    __________________________

    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, 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. 

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  • This Ain’t Putin’s Price Hike: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Higher fuel and food prices are a sacrifice I’m prepared to make in exchange for a greatly increased likelihood of nuclear armageddon.

    ❖

    Let’s be clear: you’re not paying more for necessities to punish Putin and save Ukraine, you’re paying more for necessities to fund an economic war of unprecedented scale geared toward collapsing Russia to help secure US unipolar domination of this planet.

    It’s not “Putin’s price hike”. This was all orchestrated by the empire, from root to flower. The goal is to use economic warfare and a costly counterinsurgency against western-backed Ukrainians to either collapse and balkanize the Russian Federation or foment enough discontent to secure regime change in Moscow. This is because Putin refuses to kiss the imperial ring.

    The western empire could not possibly care less about Ukrainians beyond the extent to which they can be used to roll out this agenda. There hasn’t been nearly enough public rage about the fact that the US government knew this war was coming, knew exactly how to prevent it with very low-cost concessions to Moscow, and chose not to. They made that choice in order to advance this agenda.

    That’s what you’re paying for as the your cost of living skyrockets. Not freedom and democracy. Not saving Ukrainian lives. Just the very mundane and unsexy unipolarist objectives of a few sociopathic empire managers. Empire managers who, of course, will have no trouble paying for things like fuel and groceries while ordinary people struggle.

    And if you think these cold war escalations against Russia are hurting your bank account, wait til the imperial crosshairs move to China.

    ❖

    One under-appreciated aspect of online censorship is how the fear of losing a valuable platform understandably causes people to self-censor, thereby widening the radius of the censorship campaign’s effectiveness a lot further than the actual censorship.

    It’s exactly the same as the “cooling effect” that the persecution of whistleblowers and journalists has on leaks and investigative journalism. People shying away from speech they could be punished for does a lot more to restrict speech than the punishments themselves.

    If for example a chemical attack occurs in Ukraine and is blamed on Russia, there will be great fear of questioning the official narrative about it on YouTube for fear of losing one’s platform because YouTube has banned skepticism of official stories about violence in that nation. People will self-censor to avoid being punished for their speech.

    This is the exact same principle as a king having an artist who spoke ill of him tortured in the public square in order to deter future acts of dissent. Just re-packaged to be more palatable for the modern world.

    ❖

    When someone brings up bad things the US does in response to outrage over bad things Russia does, it’s not to defend Russia. It’s to get the US to stop doing bad things.

    Bleating “whataboutism” at sincere attempts to get the US empire to stop doing evil things is just defending those evil things. You’re basically just saying “Shut up! Now’s not the time to talk about the bad things the US power alliance does, we’re on something else right now!” Okay, so when? Never? Nothing has ever been done about the crimes of the empire. No meaningful changes whatsoever were made after Iraq.

    Russia invading Ukraine doesn’t magically erase the fact that the western empire has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions in wars of aggression and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it. Putin would have to work very, very hard to catch up to those numbers. That still needs to be talked about, and it still needs to end.

    People talk about this like it’s something in the past, something the US and its allies did back in history but now it’s Russia doing it. No, this is happening currently in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela etc, and will continue to happen unless drastic changes are made.

    The murderousness, tyranny and omnicidal recklessness of the US-centralized empire is a problem of unequalled urgency regardless of what Russia happens to be doing. You can’t just bleat “whataboutism” and make that go away. It’s a problem that urgently needs to be dealt with.

    It’s an objectively good thing if more attention is brought to that urgent problem by someone saying “Oh you’re upset about this war? Wait til you hear about what your own government has been doing.” Any attempt to interfere in their pointing this out is facilitating mass murder. Either help draw attention to this problem or stop interrupting people who are drawing attention to it with power-serving gibberish about “whataboutism”.

    ❖

    Western leaders appear to have gone to the NYPD Academy of De-Escalation.

    ❖

    During the Cuban Missile Crisis everyone had a healthy fear of nuclear annihilation, and people wanted de-escalation above all else. Today hardly anyone even cares about the insane nuclear brinkmanship games being played, and all mainstream factions are calling only for escalation.

    ❖

    Schrödinger’s Putin: Simultaneously a crazy deranged lunatic and also much too level-headed and rational to respond to western escalations with nuclear weapons.

    ❖

     

    Love how shitlibs finally decide to become “anti-war” the second their “anti-war” activism has a chance to help manufacture consent for World War 3.

    ❖

    Four years of demented propaganda about an imaginary Trump-Russia conspiracy, Kremlin Facebook memes and GRU bounties in Afghanistan turned liberals into a bunch of gnashing, frothing zombies starved for Russian flesh. Ukraine just gave them something to sink their teeth into.

    ❖

    ❖

    I don’t understand the common sentiment on the left that we need to spend a lot of energy criticizing Putin for this war in the same way we criticize our own rulers for their warmongering. Like even forgetting about all the things western powers did to give rise to the war in Ukraine, what specifically is the argument here? That the English-speaking world doesn’t have enough criticism of the Russian invasion, and has too much criticism of NATO aggression? That if more antiwar lefties scream about Putin he’ll go “Ah shit I pissed off a few fringe westerners, let’s cancel the war you guys”? It just doesn’t seem like those who make such claims have thought very hard about the position they’re trying to advance.

    Our voices can do far more good criticizing the actions of our own governments, which receive barely any criticism, than those of someone else’s government which gets tons. It also can’t be denied that there’s a major propaganda push to manufacture consent for dangerous agendas which pre-date the invasion by many years. Is my voice better used opposing those dangerous agendas, or in helping to facilitate them by saying the same things everyone else is already saying?

    Putin is bad! Putin is bad and his war is very bad!

    There. I did the thing. Can anyone tell me what I just accomplished, apart from greasing the wheels for new cold war escalations? Did I plow any new ground? Expand awareness in any new direction? What specific good did I do?

    None that I can see.

    The fact that the Russian people are doing a better job of holding their government to account with massive antiwar protests than people in western nations have says terrible things about us and our obsequiousness to our warmongering masters. If you can’t criticize your government, you are more obedient than Russians living under Putin.

    Criticizing Putin is the easiest thing in the world for a westerner to do right now. Low cost, maximum clicks, but has zero impact on the conflict and will save zero people. Criticizing the west for its role is hard; it gets you outrage mobbed, deplatformed and shunned. But it could work.

    None of these outrage merchants would ever dream of going against their own government, because if they tried they would find themselves smashed against the invisible walls of our inverted totalitarian cage. On some level they know this. That’s why they project.

     

    ______________________

    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, 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. 

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  • The US Chose This Conflict: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Just your regular reminder that the US empire (A) had solid intelligence that this war was coming, (B) knew they could prevent it by making very reasonable, low-cost concessions like promising not to add a nation to NATO that they didn’t want to add anyway, and (C) chose not to.

    ❖

    It’s 2022 and people still believe the US is pouring weapons into a foreign country to protect freedom and democracy. That’s like being 57 and still believing in the Tooth Fairy.

    ❖

    The US empire has had a standing policy of preventing the rise of any rival superpowers since the USSR collapsed, by which I mean that policy was explicitly laid out in writing within months of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Both Moscow and Beijing have refused to kiss the imperial ring, and crippling Russia is an essential part of hamstringing China’s rise. This was all planned years ago.

    Gilbert Doctorow described back in 2017 how Moscow and Beijing have formed a mutually beneficial “tandem” based on their respective strengths; Russia as a major military force who is willing to confront the US empire, and China as a rising economic superpower. Empire managers had previously expected that Moscow would be forced to pivot to Washington and become a member state of the empire. The fact that it chose Beijing instead to retain its sovereignty is what set all this in motion.

    This was all planned years in advance. It’s no coincidence that we were hammered with narratives originating from US intelligence agencies which inflamed hysteria about Russia in the years leading up to this, most of which had nothing to do with Ukraine. I mean for Christ’s sake, even the one narrative that did involve Ukraine occurred because a CIA officer (ridiculously labeled a “whistleblower” by the mass media) just so happened to be in the right place at the right time to get it rolling.

    So we’re all going to suffer financially and live under the risk of total obliteration via nuclear war in a long-planned confrontation geared toward obtaining total planetary domination, just because a few manipulators in the US government decided that would be a good thing.

    It doesn’t need to be this way. Never did. There’s no good reason why nations can’t just get along and work together for the common good of all. The only reason that’s not happening is because of this insane desire to dominate and control instead of collaborate and thrive.

    ❖

    Again: pouring weapons into Ukraine is not how you save lives. You save lives by accepting Russia’s conditions. Pouring weapons into Ukraine is how you try to draw Moscow into a long, bloody insurgency like the US did in Afghanistan and Syria which will cost thousands more lives.

    These demands will be met whether Kyiv agrees to them or not:

    The only difference is agreeing to them now saves thousands of lives. Kyiv cannot stop Russia. Whether Russia is dumb enough to be drawn into waging a gruelling counter-insurgency against empire-backed proxy forces is another matter.

    Western governments are making no real secret that they know this is an unwinnable war for Kyiv. They had more faith in the Afghan regime’s ability to hold up against the Taliban than they do in Ukraine. And rightly so. This is just wasting human lives.

    This is a proxy war to advance US unipolarist objectives. Nothing more, nothing less. If you still support it because you like the US empire then just say that; don’t pretend it’s about saving lives, and don’t pretend you give a shit about Ukrainians.

    ❖

    It was correct to oppose the dangerous agendas that were rolled out by the US empire in the jingoistic hysteria after 9/11. Doing so didn’t make you an Osama lover, and it didn’t mean you supported the killing of Americans. And anyone who claimed otherwise was being an asshole.

    It is correct to oppose the dangerous agendas being rolled out by the US empire in the jingoistic hysteria of the Ukraine war. Doing so doesn’t make you a Putin lover, and it doesn’t mean you support the killing of Ukrainians. And anyone who claims otherwise is being an asshole.

    ❖

    I’m old enough to remember when disagreeing with someone’s opinion didn’t mean they’re a secret agent conducting psyops for a foreign government.

    It says so much about where we’re at as a civilization that one of the most outrageous, controversial and incendiary things you can do on social media today is criticize the most powerful government in the world for its role in starting a war.

    It’s laughably absurd to demand that only Putin be criticized for this when already so few are criticizing the western actions that led us here. It’s infantile and insulting to the intellect. It deserves not the slightest shred of respect. It deserves only disdain and rejection.

    You don’t get to saturate the western world with a single homogeneous and plot hole-riddled pro-NATO narrative, ban media outlets who dispute that narrative, and then still scream at people for criticizing NATO actions that led to a war. That’s not a thing. Shut your dopey mouth.

    ❖

    Nuclear war is the single greatest and most immediate threat to our species today and avoiding it should be our absolute foremost priority. Whatever your other concerns, agendas, desires or ideological preferences, none of them will matter if nobody is left on earth. For anything else you fear or desire to be at all relevant in the future, war between nuclear superpowers must first be averted. This is self-evident.

    ❖

    Western powers initiating de-escalation and detente is the only sane option on the table, and those who are calling for it are being shouted down, censored and marginalized while hawkish escalations and brinkmanship are being advocated by the entire political/media class.

    ❖

    Putin is responsible for Putin’s decisions, the western empire is responsible for the western empire’s decisions. Putin is responsible for choosing to invade, the western empire is responsible for choosing the actions which led to that decision. Not complicated.

    It’s the Russian people’s job to hold their leaders to account, and it’s our job to hold our leaders to account. The western empire could end this anytime and pursue de-escalation and detente. It’s choosing not to. That choice is costing lives and leading us toward nuclear war.

    You have power. If you choose to impotently masturbate your emotions about Putin rather than choosing to exercise that power by calling on your own leaders to turn away from this destructive path, then the consequences of that decision are, to some extent, on you.

    ❖

    ❖

    74 percent of Americans say they support a US/NATO no-fly zone in Ukraine because the press and the pollsters aren’t doing their fucking job and telling people what those words mean.

    I repeat that it would really help if we switched from calling it a “no-fly zone” to calling it a “directly attack the Russian military zone”.

    When people tell me a no-fly zone or other military attack on Russia wouldn’t lead to nuclear war I like to ask them “Are you willing to bet every life on earth that you’re right about that?” Really press them on this one. Make them answer, and make them justify their answer.

    ❖

    It’s very revealing how in the minds of empire apologists the conflict under debate is always comparable to World War 2, the one war that the US can justify having entered into eighty years ago, instead of all its many other wars since that it can’t justify at all.

    ❖

    All the talk about World War 2 lately reminds me of how the Soviets beat Hitler while the US needlessly nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki and burned 100,000 civilians alive in Tokyo and then used its global narrative control to take credit for winning the entire war.

    ❖

    When you refuse to fully examine your western privilege, defense will look like an attack.

    When you refuse to examine your western privilege, you can talk about your trauma all the damn day long while inflicting vast amounts of trauma on families in the name of “not giving in” to Putin.

    When you refuse to examine your western privilege, you can claim a country on the other side of the world that you didn’t know the name of last week is something you’re willing to blow the world up for in order not to “give up”, like it was ever “yours” in the first place.

    When you refuse to examine your western privilege, you can comfortably buy the lie that you’re perpetually up-punching in every conflict, always the little Marvel hero coming to save the world from the big bad evil villain.

    When you refuse to examine your western privilege, you refuse to examine why everything in the world is “ours” to “defend” and why no things are ever “none of our damn business.”

    When you refuse to examine your western privilege, you perceive someone taking a privilege away as someone taking something that was “yours” that was never yours in the first place.

    When you refuse to examine your western privilege, you indulge in a kind of political Munchausen syndrome where you are a perpetual victim that is always being bullied.

    When you refuse to examine your western privilege, you can read one (1) New York Times think piece about a situation you knew literally nothing about five minutes ago and assume that your new-found opinion is the only opinion that exists and every other opinion needs censoring.

    ❖

     

    We don’t make a big enough deal about how MSNBC fired Phil Donahue for not supporting the Iraq war. Couldn’t ask for more damning evidence that mass media institutions care about conducting propaganda and not truth or facts or holding the powerful to account.

    Corporate media have every incentive to beat the drums of war as loud as possible 24/7, from ratings, to maintaining access to government officials, to defending the status quo their plutocratic owners have built their kingdoms upon. Anyone who wants to make money in news media now knows that in order to do that you’ve got to consistently demonstrate that you will always promote the interests of the oligarchic empire at every opportunity. Donahue didn’t play the game.

     

    ___________________________

    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, 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. 

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  • Every US Enemy Is Hitler: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    It’s just incredible how even after all this time, after all those wars, after all those lies, it’s not even occurring to most mainstream westerners to investigate whether the US could possibly have had anything to do with starting the war in Ukraine.

    There’s one asshole in the room who always starts shit. Any time any shit has started he’s always been involved. And hardly anyone’s even looking at him thinking, “I wonder if that shit-starting guy has anything to do with this?”

    ❖

    I am convinced that mainstream culture’s fascination with World War II has made us all dumber. Everyone just lives in this dopey children’s cartoon now where every US enemy is Hitler and they’re the brave hero who is fighting Hitler.

    ❖

    Ukraine has no chance of winning this war alone, no matter how many weapons are sent to it. All weapons can do is make the war more costly for Russia, which it’s in the US empire’s interests to do. Stop pretending your calls for more weapons are anything more noble than that.

    You’re not trying to save lives; only the negotiation of a ceasefire can do that. All you’re doing with your calls to arm Ukraine is helping the most powerful empire that has ever existed make this war more expensive for Moscow and hurt Putin’s popularity at home and abroad.

    This was the USA’s strategy in arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the first cold war; to give the Soviets their own Vietnam. A costly quagmire that consumed their wealth and military focus for years, contributing to their downfall. They’ve already re-employed this strategy in Syria, where a US official openly admitted they worked to create a “quagmire” for Moscow:

    Now they’re hoping to pull off the same trick again, to any extent possible. That’s all this is. It’s not about saving lives or stopping a war, it’s about grand chessboard maneuverings to maintain US planetary domination.

    This will not save lives. In fact if it is successful it will ensure the loss of a great many more as an unwinnable war drags on long after it could have been over. This doesn’t benefit Ukrainians. It doesn’t benefit Americans. It doesn’t benefit Europeans. It only benefits the unipolarist agendas of a few powerful psychopaths.

    If you still want to support arming Ukraine on the basis that it will benefit the unipolar hegemony of a globe-spanning empire because you believe that empire’s continued dominance is a good thing, be my guest. But again, don’t pretend what you’re cheering for is anything nobler than that.

    ❖

    After 9/11 we were intensively bombarded with messaging about a sinister foreign leader, creating an environment of shrill hysteria that was very hard to stand up against. This was used to whip up support for pre-existing objectives of US geostrategic dominance.

    Sound familiar?

    Would people have consented to two back-to-back full-scale ground invasions without 9/11 and the aggressive narrative management campaign which followed? Would people have consented to economic warfare that could hurt us all and nuclear brinkmanship that could get us all killed without the Ukraine invasion and the aggressive narrative management campaign accompanying it?

    It’s times like these where it’s most important to be intensely, aggressively skeptical of the agendas of our rulers, and unfortunately it’s also times like these where you’ll get yelled at the most forcefully for doing so. But we know better than to be shouted into silence now.

    ❖

    More concerning than backing Nazi militias in Ukraine is the far more widespread, far more deadly, and equally white supremacist belief we’re seeing throughout the western world that invading a nation of white people is horrific while invading a nation of brown people is normal.

    ❖

    There are those who think maintaining a hostile client state on Russia’s border is worth any amount of brinkmanship to accomplish, and then there are those who understand what nuclear war is.

    ❖

    If these insane escalations between the US and Russia don’t scare the shit out of you it’s either because you don’t understand them or because you are psychologically compartmentalizing away from what you do understand. It’s one or the other.

    We are far, far too close to the brink of an unthinkable series of events from which there is no return. And none of the loudest voices are calling for it to be scaled back. They’re calling for it to escalate further. Sometimes a lot further.

    Many influential pundits and politicians are now calling for a NATO no-fly zone in Ukraine, which would require directly attacking the Russian air force and Russian air defenses.

    We’re speeding toward a cliff and nobody in charge has a foot anywhere near the brake pedal. If anything, the political/media class is demanding the gas pedal be pushed to the floor.

    Is what the US and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for? This is the single most important question in the world right now, and hardly anyone seems to be asking it.

    Our rulers are rolling the dice on the life of every terrestrial organism, and people are still babbling about whether Democrats or Republicans are harder on Russia and trying to score political points. Hardly anyone has their head up and their eyes fixed on what may be coming.

    ❖

    If you heard something, looked outside, and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, how much thought do you imagine you’d be having about the importance of NATO’s open-door policy with Ukraine?

    ❖

    Everyone’s freaking out about RT when all they’d have to do to kill it is simply allow leftist and antiwar opinions on western mass media. You’d steal their entire audience. But we all know that’s never going to happen because it was never actually about Russian state media; it’s about silencing opponents of the official imperial narrative.

    ❖

    Dear shitlibs,

    Saying that hawkish escalations spearheaded by the most powerful empire in history led to undesirable consequences in Ukraine is not actually the same as an abuser saying “look what you made me do” and does not have “what-was-she-wearing energy.”

    Love, Caitlin

    This criticism shows up in my online notifications literally every single time I talk about the role of the US empire in paving the way to the Ukraine invasion, and to be clear, the battered spouse and rape victim in their analogy is not Ukraine but the US empire. The poor widdle US empire. They’re literally demanding that no one on the internet criticize the most dangerous actions of the most powerful and destructive government on the face of this planet. At all. It’s just unbelievable that they think this is a normal and acceptable thing to do.

    It’s simply forbidden to talk about the role the world’s largest power structure had in this conflict. You’re only allowed to say it’s happening solely because Putin is evil and hates freedom.

    ❖

    “You can criticize the US empire AND Russia, Caitlin.”

    One of those is already being criticized at fever pitch by literally all government and mainstream media institutions in the entire western world, while the other is almost never criticized by those institutions in any meaningful way.

    ❖

    I saw someone in the comments of a post about nuclear war say “it would be Putin’s fault” if one happens. Like that would be any consolation to anyone on earth when the bombs go off. People still think about this thing in terms of political point-scoring, that’s how fucked we are.

    ❖

    Deteriorating material conditions can cause people to rise up against their government. Imperialists understand this, which is why they work to foment unrest with starvation sanctions in empire-targeted nations while at home keeping people fed just enough to prevent an uprising.

    _________________________

    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, 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. 

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  • Civilized Nations Kill With Sanctions And Proxy Armies: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Pouring more weapons into Ukraine is not how you save lives; you save lives by negotiating a ceasefire. Pouring more weapons into Ukraine is how you create a long and expensive military quagmire for Russia at the cost of many thousands of lives to advance US strategic interests. While making a vast fortune for the arms industry.

    ❖

    Issuing a guarantee that you would never add a nation to NATO who you don’t plan on adding anyway is a no-brainer when the alternative is mass military butchery.

    I mean, unless your goal was to provoke mass military butchery.

    ❖

    If the Kremlin wanted to kill large numbers of people it should have done so with starvation sanctions and proxy militias like a civilized government.

    Fashion has moved on since the early 2000s, you savages.

    ❖

    You’re not allowed to talk about the known US/NATO/Ukraine actions which experts have been warning for many years would lead us to where we’re at. You’re only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked, in a vacuum, solely because he is evil and hates freedom.

    ❖

    Only talking about the guilt of the invader and not the things that were done to provoke that invasion is exactly what I’d want people to be doing if I’d just provoked an invasion.

    ❖

    Believe it or not it’s actually always completely legitimate to criticize the actions of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, especially when those actions clearly paved the way to a war.

    ❖

    The fact that western media cover Ukraine in a wildly different way from US-led wars is actually immensely important and points to a problem that urgently need attention. Anyone who takes issue with that should shut the fuck up and stop interrupting adult conversations.

    ❖

    Literally every single time I say NATO powers paved the way to the Ukraine invasion I get some liberal claiming that’s like asking what a rape victim was wearing. No, actually, victim blaming a rape survivor is not at all like criticizing the most powerful and deadly power structure in the world.

    Liberals have been bleating this line ad nauseum for days, and it’s about the most obnoxious and most shitlib thing you could possibly come up with.

    ❖

     

    Empire apologists always try to distort power dynamics to make it seem like they’re the brave up-punchers sticking up for the little guy. It’s tiny Ukraine against big bad Russia, not Russia against a globe-dominating empire of which Ukraine is just one member state. It’s the brave freedom fighters of Syria versus Assad, not Assad against a planetary unipolar hegemon using proxy forces to effect regime change. It’s Israel against the big strong Muslim nations which surround it, not an entire empire of which Israel is just one member state picking on far weaker powers. Etc.

    ❖

    For years anti-imperialists have been calling for detente and warning that all this cold war brinkmanship with Russia could lead to hot war. Now hot war is here as a direct result of refusing to pursue detente and they’re trying to act like we’re the assholes.

    ❖

    Gonna be real fun when the consensus that it’s fine for government-tied Silicon Valley corporations to censor online speech in the fight against “misinformation” moves from targeting Covid skeptics to targeting people who disagree with mainstream cold war narratives about Russia.

    ❖

    The solution to a crisis that was created by brinkmanship is not more brinkmanship. The solution to a crisis that was created by brinkmanship is detente.

    ❖

    Saying the US government is still a far worse offender in the mass military slaughter department than Russia will be met with hysterical shrieking and the rending of garments now, but it’s still indisputably true and if you disagree with it it’s because you’re propagandized.

    That the US is the most murderous government in today’s world is just an easily quantifiable fact. Putin will have to work very, very hard to catch up to those numbers. This is important to note not because of some genocidal dick measuring contest, but because it points to what a healthy attitude toward US military butchery would look like through eyes untinted by propaganda manipulation.

    ❖

    Theoretically the actual US/NATO military decision makers know imposing a no fly zone over Kyiv would be insane, since it’s a one-way ticket to another world war; probably a very fast and radioactive one. But the fact that so much of the official US political/media class has been calling for one discredits it forever.

    They sincerely don’t seem to understand what it is that would be stopping the Russian planes from flying under such a scenario. They think it’s like a rule you make and then the Russians go “Aww shucks I wanted to fly there but it’s against the rules now.”

    This is the only appropriate level of response to this madness:

    ❖

    Obviously anyone who had anything whatsoever to do with supporting the Iraq invasion should shut the whole entire fuck up about Ukraine for all eternity.

    Don’t let people act like Iraq is some distant memory. It happened 19 years ago. The Simpsons stopped making good episodes longer ago than that. It just happened, the consequences are still unfolding, the occupation is still ongoing, and they’re still using the same old tricks.

    ❖

    Hollywood teaches us that heroism looks like an individual stopping a bank robbery or leaving a criminal tied up outside the police station so we don’t realize that real heroism looks like a collective rising up against our plutocratic rulers and creating a healthy world.

    ________________________________

    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, 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. 

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  • No Actually The US Empire Is Still The Power To Criticize: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    I believe that the situation in Ukraine is a crisis created solely by Moscow and that the US power alliance is just an innocent little flower who is being unfairly blamed. I also believe Santa is real, because I am a tiny little child who will believe anything.

    ❖

    After watching the way the US and its allies have been handling the Ukraine situation, how confident are you that they can be trusted to navigate all these dangerous cold war escalations without inadvertently triggering a nuclear exchange? I’m not in the slightest bit confident, myself.

    ❖

    I keep seeing people on the left making awkward, labored statements condemning Russia’s Donbas intervention in these weird “Look at me I can criticize Putin just like I criticize the US” performances that they’re clearly only putting on to avoid accusations of Kremlin loyalty, and it’s just silly. The US empire is still the power structure one’s criticisms should be focused on, no matter how badly empire apologists wish it weren’t so.

    Don’t feel pressured to denounce Russia’s actions just to make a show of appearing impartial. If you understand that the US empire both (A) created this problem and (B) is many orders of magnitude worse than Russia, then stand by that, because you’re right and they’re wrong.

    It’s so stupid how the Overton window of acceptable debate has been moved so far in favor of the empire that we’re now expected to treat this very mild step by Moscow like it’s on equal footing with the worst atrocities of the most powerful and destructive government on earth. Imperial narrative management has made people feel so ashamed and apologetic for criticizing the empire that they’ll seize even the dopiest opportunity to show everyone that they’re not some kind of Russian troll or secret agent or whatever. It’s dumb, it’s debasing, and it should stop.

    Focusing one’s criticisms on the most powerful and destructive government on earth requires no justification and no apology, and it’s certainly nothing to feel ashamed of. It’s not strange and suspicious that you do it, it’s strange and suspicious that more people don’t.

    ❖

    The US is the very last government on this entire planet who has any business talking about respecting the sovereignty of other nations. Absolute dead last.

    Pointing out things the US has done while it shrieks about the actions of a foreign government will get you accused of “whataboutism”, but it’s not a whataboutism. It’s pointing out that the US is the absolute least qualified government on earth to comment on the issue at hand.

    ❖

    It’s not actually legitimate to constantly violate international law all around the world and then cry when another nation does it. You don’t get to make the rules meaningless and then bitch when they are treated like they’re meaningless. That’s not a thing.

    It’s not really about hypocrisy; being hypocritical is no great evil in and of itself. What it’s about is actively creating an environment which causes these things to happen, and then shrieking bloody murder when they happen. It’s about placing the blame exactly where it belongs.

    If you want nations to respect international law, Step 1 is to cease being the single worst violator of international law in the entire world. It’s not valid to create an environment of lawlessness and then rend your garments when people treat it like what it is.

    If someone starts stealing everyone’s stuff and nobody stops him, pretty soon you’re going to see other people start stealing to make sure they have stuff too. Whose fault would that be in that situation? It’s the one who created that Wild West environment in the first place.

    You can’t have a serious conversation about opposing Russia’s actions in Ukraine without answering these questions:

    You can’t just bleat “whataboutism” or “two wrongs don’t make a right”; you have to answer them. Otherwise it looks like you’re just making whatever empty noises will let you rule the planet.

    You can’t just put your fingers in your ears and compartmentalize away from the fact that everything the western political/media class is saying about Russia and Ukraine today is completely meaningless under the shadow of the behavior of the globe-spanning US-centralized empire. Either squarely address the fact that the US and its allies do not play by the rules they are demanding Russia play by or stop pretending you’re doing anything other than pro bono propaganda work for the largest and deadliest power structure on earth.

    ❖

    The country with no democracy says it’s important to defend the democracy of the other country with no democracy.

    ❖

    Ukraine’s sovereignty is important enough to risk World War 3 over but not important enough to refrain from backing neo-Nazi militias to stage a coup there in 2014.

    ❖

    If the Democrats have been moving to the left then why are they indistinguishable from Bush administration Republicans?

    ❖

    Not that anyone cares but the fastest way to lose my respect as an anti-imperialist is to spend your energy attacking other anti-imperialists. Because it shows that your understanding is so shallow that you think we’re doing well enough for us to be able to afford wasting our firepower on each other. Either that or it shows that your ego comes before the cause. It’s one or the other, and either way you’ve shown yourself to be fairly worthless.

    ❖

    Mass-scale psychological manipulation is a science that’s still advancing. The government agencies who use that science would have every reason to test out mass psyops for no other reason than to learn and gather data to advance the science. It’s not like you can test it in a lab.

    I mean, we know for a fact that they’ve already done this. We just don’t know how far it goes.

    _______________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.