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Category: Propaganda

  • The Mass Media Used To Publish Perspectives On Ukraine That They Would Never Publish Today

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    The other day I stumbled across a 2014 opinion piece in The Guardian titled “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war” by Seumas Milne, who the following year would go on to become the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications under Jeremy Corbyn.

    I bring this up because the perspectives you’ll find in that article are jarring in how severely they deviate from anything you’ll see published in the mainstream press about Ukraine in 2023. It places the brunt of the blame for the violence and tensions in that nation at that time squarely at Washington’s feet, opening with a warning that the “threat of war in Ukraine is growing” and saying there’s an “unelected government in Kiev,” and it only gets naughtier from there.

    I strongly recommend reading the article in full if you want some perspective in just how dramatically the mass media has clamped down on dissenting ideas about Ukraine and Russia, beginning with the frenzied stoking of Russia hysteria in 2016 and exploding exponentially with the Russian invasion last year. I doubt there’s a single paragraph which could get published in any mainstream outlet in the media environment of today.

    Milne writes about how “the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover,” and about “the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime.” He says that “Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia,” and that “you don’t hear much about the Ukrainian government’s veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government’s ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down.” He says that “after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure.”

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    In 2014 The Guardian published an op-ed about Ukraine by @SeumasMilne that would be shriekingly condemned as Russian propaganda today. I doubt there's a single paragraph in this article that could be published in today's mainstream media environment.https://t.co/Z7zRRbFrVo

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 23, 2023

    Milne says “Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive,” and says the US and its allies have been “encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan.” He correctly predicts that “one outcome of the crisis is likely to be a closer alliance between China and Russia, as the US continues its anti-Chinese ‘pivot’ to Asia,” and presciently warns of “the threat of a return of big-power conflict” as Ukraine moves toward war.

    To be clear, Milne was not some fringe voice who happened to get picked up for one Guardian op-ed by a strange editorial fluke; he published hundreds of articles with The Guardian over the course of many years, and kept on publishing for a year and a half after this Ukraine piece came out, right up until he went to work for Corbyn. He was on the left end of the mainstream media, but he was very much part of the mainstream media.

    This article would of course have drawn controversy and criticism at the time; there were many people who were on the opposite side of the debate in 2014, though they would’ve had a fraction of the numbers of the shrieking conformity enforcers we see on all matters related to Ukraine today. Milne himself says that “the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage” after the Crimea annexation, so his article would have been an outlier to be sure. But the fact remains that it was published in The Guardian, and that it would never be published there today.

    Seriously, try to imagine an article like that about what happened in Ukraine in 2014 appearing in a mainstream publication like The Guardian in 2023. Can you imagine the hysterics? The histrionic garment-rending from the establishment narrative managers? The social media swarming of Zelenskyite trolls? This is after all the same media environment that pressured CBS to retract its story about how arms shipments to Ukraine weren’t getting where they were supposed to, and pressured Amnesty International to apologize for saying anything about Ukrainian war crimes.

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    .@guardian column by John Pilger is worth reading: In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia | http://t.co/DVvcAjDB0Z

    — Katrina vandenHeuvel (@KatrinaNation) May 14, 2014

    Or how about this Guardian article by John Pilger titled “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia,” subtitled “Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world,” published two weeks after Milne’s?

    Pilger’s article is somehow even more heretical than Milne’s, saying Washington “masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev” and that “Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of ‘special units’ from the CIA and FBI setting up a ‘security structure’ that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup.”

    As with Milne, Pilger criticizes the media environment at the time, saying “propaganda” about what’s happening in Ukraine is happening in an “Orwellian style”. But again, his article was published in The Guardian, whereas today it never would be.

    Pilger has actually provided some background for this shift in mass media reporting, saying that there was a “purge” of dissident voices from The Guardian’s ranks around 2014-2015.

    “My written journalism is no longer welcome in The Guardian which, three years ago, got rid of people like me in pretty much a purge of those who really were saying what The Guardian no longer says any more,” Pilger reported in a January 2018 radio interview.

    Interestingly, a 2019 Declassified UK report found that British intelligence services began aggressively targeting The Guardian after its 2013 publication of the Edward Snowden documents, and found their in when the outlet’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was replaced by Katharine Viner in March 2015. After that point The Guardian began moving away from critical investigative reporting and began publishing softball “interviews” with MI5 and MI6 chiefs and willingly participating in the west’s information war against Russia.

    Once the western world plunged in unison into blinkered Russia hysteria after Hillary Clinton lost the US presidential election in 2016, we began seeing things like that time a BBC reporter admonished a guest for voicing unauthorized opinions about Syria because “we’re in an information war with Russia.”

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    BBC Reporter Discourages Syria Questions Due To “Information War” With Russia

    "You know you’re in trouble when the military man tries to do the journalist’s job by asking questions and holding power to account… and the journalist tries to stop him."https://t.co/DVxR3JQ6S2

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 18, 2018

    Whether or not you agree with the perspectives authored by Milne and Pilger is irrelevant to the very important fact that they could say things in the mainstream media in 2014 that they could never say in the mainstream media in 2023. The dramatic shift from a media environment where criticism of establishment Russia narratives is permitted to one where it is not permitted is worth noting, because it means there was a conscious shift toward converting the mass media into full-fledged cold war propaganda outlets.

    A lot of things have happened since 2014, but nothing about what happened in 2014 has changed since 2014. It’s still the same year it always was, because that’s how time works; nothing has changed about 2014 other than the thoughts you’re permitted to voice about it in mainstream outlets like The Guardian.

    This bizarre historical revisionism has been occurring not just in The Guardian but throughout the mainstream media. Last year Moon of Alabama published a piece titled “Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemned” which compiles many, many instances in which the mass media have reported on Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem over the years, and contrasts this with the way the mass media now whitewashes those paramilitaries and pretends they’re just fine upstanding patriots. In the years prior to the Russian invasion there were neo-Nazis in Ukraine; now there are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine and there never have been and you’re a treasonous Putin puppet if you say otherwise. Nothing actually changed about Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem; all that changed is the narrative.

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    MoA – Apr 30, 2022:

    Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemnedhttps://t.co/7suYcVyzdu https://t.co/jLsMc6kQpH

    — Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) December 4, 2022

    Everyone should be aware that the mass media have drastically changed the perspectives they’re willing to publish on Ukraine, because it proves that these outlets are not working to help create a well-informed populace and facilitate important conversations, but are in fact knowingly operating as war propaganda firms. They’re not trying to inform people about what’s going on in the world, they’re trying to manipulate the way people think about the world. These two goals could not possibly be more different.

    Power is controlling what happens; true power is controlling what people think about what happens. They’re re-writing history to influence control over what people think about the present. As old Orwell put it, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

    _______________

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  • The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

    Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.

    – George Orwell, 1984

    As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.  I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me.

    Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from the New York Times‘ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.”  It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing.  Yet it is no laughing matter, for the N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war.  So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality.  This angered me.

    The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad.  “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.” Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.

    On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley.  To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue.  When you support a U.S. war, as has always been the Times’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners. So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted. Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion? They too must never have  existed since they are not mentioned.

    But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.” No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.” U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”

    Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It just didn’t happen. Never happened. Magic by omission.  The U.S., together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocence parties, according to the Times.  (Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)

    All the problems stem from when “Mr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine n 2014.”

    Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end U.S./NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the U.S. has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Romania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the U.S. has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the U.S./NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the U.S. has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc. In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the U.S. was stone deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would respond forcefully.

    This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.

    The editorial has all its facts “wrong,” and not by accident.  The paper may say that its opinion journalists’ claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:

    • Ukraine is winning on the battlefield.
    • “Russia faces decades of economic stagnation and regression even if the war ends soon.”
    • That on Jan.14, as part of its cruel attacks on civilian targets, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing many.
    • Only one man can stop this war – Vladimir Putin – because he started it.
    • Until now, the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to deploy heavy weapons to Ukraine “for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-West war.”
    • Russia is desperate as Putin pursues “his delusions.”
    • Putin is “isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power.”
    • Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014.
    • During the last 11 months Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces …. The war is at a stalemate.”
    • The Russian people are being subjected to the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery “churning out false narratives.”

    This is expert opinion for dummies. A vast tapestry of lies, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel Prize address. The war escalation the editorial writers are promoting is in their words, “this time pitting Western arms against a desperate Russia,” as if the U.S./NATO does not have CIA and special forces in Ukraine, just weapons, and as if “this time” means it wasn’t so for the past nine years at least as the U.S. was building Ukraine’s military and arms for this very fight.

    It is a fight they will lose in the days to come. Russia was, is, and will triumph.

    Everything in the editorial is disingenuous. Simple propaganda: the good guys against the bad guys. Putin another Hitler. The good guys are winning, just as they did in Vietnam, until reality dawned and it had to be admitted they weren’t (and didn’t). History is repeating itself.

    Little has changed and so my morning sense of mourning when I remembered Nixon and Kissinger’s savagery at Christmas 1972 was appropriate. As then, so today, we are being subjected to a vast tapestry of lies told by the corporate media for their bosses, as the U.S. continues its doomed efforts to control the world. It is not Russia that is desperate now, but propagandists such as the writers of this strident and stupid editorial. It is not the Russian people who need to wake up, as they claim, but the American people and those who still cling to the myth that the New York Times Corporation is an organ of truth. It is the Ministry of Truth with its newspeak, double-speak, and its efforts to change the past.

    Let Harold Pinter have the last words:

    The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

    The post The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • U.S. Now Considering to Invade Russia: NYT

    An obliquely-written news-report in the New York Times on January 18th headlined “U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea” and subheaded “The Biden administration is considering the argument that Kyiv needs the power to strike at the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.” It reported that, “the Biden administration is finally starting to concede that Kyiv may need the power to strike the Russian sanctuary, even if such a move increases the risk of escalation, according to several U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive debate. Crimea, between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, is home to tens of thousands of dug-in Russian troops and numerous Russian military bases.”

    It goes on to say that this “would be one of its boldest moves yet, helping Ukraine to attack the peninsula that President Vladimir V. Putin views as an integral part of his quest to restore past Russian glory.” This news-story omitted to mention that according to Russian law, Crimea (which was part of Russia throughout 1783-1954 when the Soviet Union’s dictator, a Ukrainian, arbitrarily transferred it to Ukraine) was restored to Russia on 16 March 2014, when a vote by Crimea’s residents supported by over 90% the return of Crimea to being a part of Russia, and Russia accepted that application by the Crimean people, for Crimea to become again a part of Russia. None of this was mentioned in the NYT’s news-report, nor was the fact mentioned there that even U.S. polling of the residents of Crimea, both before and after the 2014 plebiscite there, found over 90% of respondents to want restoration of Crimea as being a part of Russia. All of that crucial information has been kept secret from the American people, and from the people in U.S.-allied countries — they don’t know it. The NYT’s article says only that Crimea is “the peninsula that President Vladimir V. Putin views as an integral part of his quest to restore past Russian glory.”

    Furthermore, the NYT’s news-report fails to mention that on 8 June 2020, Russia published from Putin’s office, “Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence,” which presented four circumstances, lettered “a” through “d”, under which “the possibility of nuclear weapons use by the Russian Federation” would exist; and letter “a” there is: “arrival of reliable data on a launch of ballistic missiles attacking the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies.” In other words: “the possibility of nuclear weapons use by the Russian Federation” would exist if America and Ukraine carry out “a launch of ballistic missiles attacking” Crimea. According to Russian law, Crimea is, again, a part of Russia; it certainly is part of “the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies.” It falls under Russia’s stated nuclear umbrella, Russia’s protection up to and including the use of nuclear weapons — the four official conditions under which Russia MIGHT respond by means of nuclear weapons. (And: it falls under “circumstance” “a” — the first one that is listed.)

    Russia might not employ nuclear weapons in the event of such an attack against Crimea — it might instead respond without nuclear warheads, but only with non-nuclear ones; and, since the invasion of Crimea would have been carried out by both Ukraine and America, Ukraine and/or America would be targeted. If Ukraine would be targeted, then America might defend Ukraine by further attacking Russia — perhaps only in Crimea, but perhaps not. In any case: Washington and Kiev would jointly have violated the top condition in which Russia might respond with nuclear weapons; and, so, a second attack by America and Ukraine against Russia would almost certainly result in a nuclear response by Russia; and, as Scott Ritter has already noted, any circumstance in which one or more of Russia’s red lines have already been crossed by America and/or by one of America’s allies would precipitate a launch by Russia of its entire nuclear stockpile of thousands of nuclear weapons, from land, sea, and air, which would mean, within perhaps 30 minutes to an hour, game-over for everyone, and the end of life on Earth — not by some delayed “nuclear winter,” but immediately by the direct blast-effects and the intense nuclear radiation then spread throughout the entire atmosphere of the planet.

    Though the NYT hid this crucial additional information, I don’t, though perhaps the hundreds of U.S.-and-allied news-media that I am submitting this news-report to might all decide not to publish it. Anyway: they all are receiving it on January 22nd. We’ll see which ones publish it, and whether ONLY ones that Google bans do publish it, in which case this news-report still will appear here, even if that turns out to be the only place that does.

    The post U.S. Now Considering to Invade Russia: NYT first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Rampant Speculation: Uranium, Dirty Bombs and Heathrow

    The dirty bomb and its purportedly famed radiation dispersal attributes has an undeserved mythology. It serves to bloat budgets and confer grants on specious theories propounded by specious theorists. It is all rather easy to make a security threat up, and a celluloid, Hollywood scenario of a dirty bomb going off in the middle of a metropolis killing thousands is just one of those instances. Scaring people is child’s play and often the work of the unscrupulous.

    This month, it was announced that staff at London’s Heathrow airport, where the appearance of snowflakes is enough to cancel flights, encountered what was alleged to be cargo contaminated by uranium on December 29. The Sun was the first paper to scream from the rooftops about a “Deadly shipment of uranium seized at Heathrow en route to Iranians based in UK”. The paper went on to suggest that the material in question “can be used in a dirty bomb.” In the narrative, all the appropriate countries were mentioned: dark origins in Pakistan; arrival on a flight from Oman; destination: UK-based nationals from Iran.

    The relevant authorities were also involved. Border Force agents “swooped and isolated the unregistered shipment in a dedicated radioactive room.” Counter-terrorism police “were alerted and a security probe launched into who sent the cargo.” An unnamed source excitedly told The Sun that relevant security bosses “are treating this with the seriousness it deserves. Protocol was not followed and this is now an anti-terror operation.”

    The Met Police issued a statement on January 10 confirming that “officers from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command were contacted by Border Force colleagues at Heathrow after a very small amount of contaminated material was identified after routine screening within a package incoming to the UK on December 29.”

    The Daily Mail went so far as to describe the quantity as being all uranium, running into “several kilos”. An unspecified source told the paper that, “The package contained kilos of uranium – but it was not weapons-grade.” Never one to be troubled by the irritations of evidence, the Mail ignored the Met Police’s own description of the seized cargo as being contaminated material of a “very small amount”. The Guardian was more conservative in its assessment: the shipment consisted of “metal bars embedded with uranium.”

    That such minute quantities were involved was also confirmed by the head of the Met’s SO15 counter-terror branch, Commander Richard Smith: “I want to reassure the public that the amount of contaminated material was extremely small and has been assessed by experts as posing no threat to the public.”

    Commander Smith, to his credit, was not keen to nourish the tabloid fear machine. “Although our investigation remains ongoing, from our inquiries so far, it does not appear to be linked to any direct threat. As the public would expect, we will continue to follow up on all available lines of enquiry to ensure this is definitely the case.”

    The security experts were immediately called in to sing for their ill-deserved supper. Will Geddes suggested that this was a “dry-run” operation, despite admitting that it was “speculation” on his part. “If you are trying to move contraband through an environment like a drug dealer would, you may courier it through certain channels to see which ones work before moving larger amounts.”

    Further speculation from Geddes followed. “If the uranium is unrefined, it would be used in a nuclear facility, if it is refined it would be more likely to be used in a dirty bomb. If it is refined, that would indicate a malicious device of some sort.”

    Former commander of the UK’s nuclear defence regiment Hamish De Bretton-Gordon was troubled. “For the uranium to turn up on a commercial airliner from Pakistan to an Iranian address in the UK is very suspect.” He proceeded to add fuel to the fire. “The nuclear threat has never been higher. Higher than it has ever been in the Cold War.”

    From the corridors of speculation, The Sun managed to pinch another opinion worthy of celebration by the jingoes, this time from an unnamed “former army chief”, who claimed that the “deadly shipment could have been used for a Litvinenko-style assassination plot.”

    Despite the growing compendium of concerns, a more sensible undercurrent of opinion did suggest that the uranium in question was, in all likelihood, too bulky and ineffectual to be used in the making of a bomb device. Bahram Ghiassee of the Henry Jackson Society, a neoconservative outfit not always known for its moderate stance, was critical of the news coverage suggesting that the bomb scenario was even plausible. “For dirty bombs, you need highly radioactive material … and uranium is not suitable at all.”

    It should have been also clear to the alarmists that detecting undeclared radioactive material at transport hubs and ports of entry are not infrequent occurrences, the UK being no exception.

    Since the revelation, a man in his 60s has been arrested under section 9 of the Terrorism Act of 2006, which criminalises the possession of radioactive materials with the intent of using them for terrorism purposes. He has been released on bail pending a hearing in April. While such legal wheels turn, the yellow press merchants will continue to do their worst, inflating unnecessary threats, while ignoring others.

    The post Rampant Speculation: Uranium, Dirty Bombs and Heathrow first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Lucid Summations When Tomorrow Is Today and MLK Day

    What they [regular people] need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves… what may be called the sociological imagination.

    – C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

    In what follows, I offer some conclusions I have arrived at and am skipping all the steps taken to arrive there.  Everyone needs to follow their own path to the end.

    I know Mills was right when he penned those words long ago. Arguments don’t go too far to convince others; only self-directed investigations do. It is a question of the moral will-to-truth and the desire to be free, plus the imagination to connect the dots using reason that lead to conclusions that make sense. There are many explanations for every public issue and personal problem under the sun that tell us why this or that is true or false. But since we live in an age of non-stop lies and propaganda, determination and the willingness to do our homework is essential. The following summations are the results of my study over many years, and this is a partial list.

    There comes a time to state them outright and as clearly and concisely as possible, when silence is betrayal, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said so passionately in his speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” from the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was murdered by U.S. government forces. He said:

    This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

    I feel bound by that deeper loyalty and offer these summations in that spirit.

    • The United States is now, and has long been, as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. It is led by leaders possessed by a demonic spirit leading the world toward nuclear conflagration by initiating and waging war against Russia via Ukraine.  It cares not a bit for all the dead and suffering victims of its policies there and around the world.
    • Because he so passionately denounced the warmakers and fought for racial and economic justice, MLK, Jr. was murdered by the same government that later gave him a national holiday to hide its guilt.
    • Most people in the U.S.A. do not care that this is true but wish to live their small-world lives, not thinking about it. Indifference reigns.  Another holiday means more shopping at the sale counters.
    • Anyone who reminds them of this is considered a pain in the ass or worse.
    • The violence of the U.S. state is directed not just against people in other countries but against those who live in the United States. This has long been true as the CIA and the FBI have conspired assiduously for decades to control the population while the Pentagon slaughters people all over the world.  Mind control is necessary to achieve this goal.
    • To accept this reality is anathema to most people, for it means their own government is their enemy and that they are its targets, this being contrary to the myth of democracy.
    • This targeting of Americans by their government is not new but has reached new heights in recent years as the national-security state and its organs of propaganda in the media have gone on steroids.
    • The corporate mass media, and elements of the “alternative media,” are the key organs of this propaganda and are completely infiltrated by the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI, etc.
    • Agents of these agencies, while enemies of regular people, are often seen as friends because their deviousness is profound. They smile a lot with their fake white teeth.  “One may smile and smile and still be a villain,” wrote the Bard.
    • All the wars known and unknown waged by the U.S. warfare state are based on lies and propaganda that’s been developed over a century and more. Actually since the founding of the country and its extermination of native peoples.
    • Not some foreign country or its secrets agents, but the U.S. National security state led by the CIA and FBI has assassinated all anti-war, racial and economic justice leaders who have tried to change things: JFK, Malcom X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, et al., and anyone who tries to distract from this fact by ambiguity and slick words is serving the national security state. Many of these people are assets or agents of the intelligence services and there are far more of them than one can imagine.
    • The events of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks were carried out by elements within the U.S. national-security state and not by foreign terrorists under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. That their own government would kill thousands of innocent people is beyond the imagination of so many Americans because they have bought the myth of U.S. innocence and on a personal level have come to think of themselves as victims also.
    • Such thinking is self-destructive. While it is very true that everyone has been subject to vast and never-ending government propaganda campaigns, the only remedy is to fight back by assuming all official pronouncements are false until proven otherwise, and to do one’s homework.
    • This sense of victimhood is the result of decades-long propaganda that has been promulgated by all institutions that have taught and reaffirmed a materialistic philosophy that there is no free will but only biological and social forces that make people who they are. Key to this is the promotion and use of drugs for all problems.
    • The War on Drugs has always been the War on us, a deep fake intended to distract and control the population. This includes all the happy “pills” and drugs used to silence thought and the connection between the social and the personal, like anti-depressants, etc.
    • The War on Terror was a war to kill as many foreigners, mainly Muslims, as possible, and to kill the conscience of decent people by appealing to their worst prejudices and fears. It was used to institute the Patriot Act and tighten the stranglehold of unfreedom on the population.
    • Yet this “war on terror” that has led to the wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, China, Russia, etc., was long preceded by decades long wars against Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Iraq, Yugoslavia, throughout Africa, etc. – endless open and secret wars all over the world.
    • The promotion of fear has been the prime propaganda tactic of the Deep State. Fear to immobilize the population to do as the propagandists tell us. It’s all about control. The root of all fears is the fear of death, thus the power to assassinate dissidents, wage war, and kill through “medicine” are all employed by the power elites.
    • Reality, by any simple definition, or news as the communication of reality, has been replaced by entertainment. Everything is now a spectacle geared to a crowd of naïve children who sit on the edge of their seats enjoying the disasters that are continuously promoted to induce fear and passivity.
    • The War of Drugs used against the population, while having been waged for many decades, has since March and April 2020 been internationalized and coordinated as a global coup d’état against humanity with the Covid-19 propaganda program with its lock-downs, deadly “vaccines,” and push for the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset.” Corporate media led (and leads) this propaganda pandemic narrative that has abrogated human and constitutional rights in the service of corporate capital interests, resulting in the enrichment of the richest few and the impoverishment, injury, and death of the many.  It is the vastest propaganda campaign in history and continues unceasingly even as all its claims have been shown to be false.
    • Central to all the efforts of the international gang of political and financial gangsters responsible for so many crimes against humanity is their deep-seated nihilism and their antagonism to the religious spirit of love and non-violence that informs the great religions of the world. Demonic is the best word to describe their evil deeds.
    • The digital revolution is more accurately described as the digital propaganda program with the cell phone being the key to its enactment. It is an effort to coax people into loving their machines more than the human touch and to think of themselves as extensions of their machines.  Clicking numbers, statistical analysis, the mathematical mindset, etc. have all been used to indoctrinate people into a world of artificial intelligence and robotic thinking in which flesh and blood become abstractions and nature something to be conquered and controlled.
    • This so-called “digital revolution” with its computer technology dominating people’s lives has allowed the ruling elites to penetrate deep into the population’s psyches without them knowing it. It has allowed propaganda to infiltrate every moment of every day as people click the buttons on the machines they think are their lifelines to reality.  All becomes a miasma of manufactured illusions and spectacles in the service of the “third industrial revolution.”
    • All of this is part of a “spiritual” machine revolution in which the human spirit and its connections to God, nature, and our common humanity is slowly extinguished, everything that MLK said was necessary for our salvation.
    • Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a radical non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an established order based on institutionalized violence, racism, and economic exploitation.  He was a very dangerous man to the U.S. government and all the institutional and deep state forces armed against him. So they killed him.
    • The best “service” we can offer on Martin Luther King Day is recognize that fact and oppose the evil and violent forces directing the American nightmare.
    • And to do our homework connecting the dots that run down the years.
    The post Lucid Summations When Tomorrow Is Today and MLK Day first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Recalling CNN’s Fraudulent “Interview” With A Seven Year-Old Syrian Girl

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    There’s a thread going around on Twitter by Columbia University’s Sophie Fullerton advancing the claim that I have promoted crazy conspiracy theories about child “crisis actors” in Syrian war atrocities. Fullerton has me blocked on Twitter so I can’t respond to her there, but in her thread she brings up one of the most egregious instances I’ve ever seen of US war propaganda in the mass media, so it’s worth taking some time to unpack her claims here as a public service.

    Fullerton has written for The Washington Post slamming social media users who travel to Syria and dispute the official mainstream narrative about what’s been happening in that country, and has served as an expert analyst in a Daily Beast hit piece on the progressive Gravel Institute for their scrutiny of US warmongering. So it’s fair to call her a spinmeister on the side of the US empire, and it’s probably fair to predict that her young career will bring her tremendous success and mainstream elevation as a result of this.

    “It takes a special kind of evil to see what happened yesterday in Dnipro and immediately start doing PR for the perpetrator,” Fullerton tweets, with a screenshot of me saying it’s deceitful for people to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine without also talking about the ways the US empire provoked and benefits from this war. “It should come at no surprise that this account built a following out of claiming Syrian children impacted by Assad/Russia atrocities were crisis actors,” she adds.

    Fullerton’s thread has gained a lot of traction because it has been amplified by Olga Lautman, a Senior Fellow at the imperialist think tank Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) with a large following. CEPA’s donor list includes the US State Department, the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy, and the weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and General Atomics.

    Fullerton uses the phrase “crisis actors” to evoke the image most people have of that term and what it means: conspiracy theories about actors pretending to have been wounded or otherwise involved in a false flag mass shooting or bombing incident, particularly Alex Jones’s infamous claims about Sandy Hook victims. Google defines “crisis actor” as “a person who takes part in a supposed conspiracy to manipulate public opinion by pretending to be a victim of an event such as a bombing, mass shooting, or natural disaster.” Imperial spinmeisters have a history of using the phrase “crisis actors” to smear skeptics of dubious claims by the US empire about what’s been happening in Syria as crazy conspiracy theorists who are the same as Sandy Hook deniers.

    But for her evidence of my “crisis actors” conspiracy theorizing, Fullerton cites something very different from any such claim. She cites an article I wrote in 2018 titled “That Time CNN Staged A Fake Interview With A Syrian Child For War Propaganda“, and revealingly she includes only a screenshot of the top of the article rather than providing a link. She did this because the arguments made in the article are unassailable, and she doesn’t want people to see them.

    In 2017 CNN conducted a fraudulent interview with a seven year-old Syrian child named Bana Alabed, whose name had earlier been popularized by a Twitter account operated by an adult calling for US interventionism in Syria to overthrow president Bashar al-Assad. I know the interview was fraudulent not because I’m some kind of dogged investigative journalist who spent months digging into the facts and the sources, but because I watched the interview. It is plain as day that the child was either reading or reciting words that had been prepared for her, and every comment I can see on CNN’s YouTube share of the segment agrees with this assessment. To the best of my knowledge, no serious attempt has ever been made by anyone to dispute this.

    Fullerton claims that my article “attacks Bana al-Abed”, but if you actually read it you will see that what I am in fact attacking is CNN for staging a bogus interview with a child who is clearly reading or reciting words authored by an adult, and CNN’s Alisyn Camerota for playing along with this sham. My article at no time mentions the phrase “crisis actor” (pretty sure I’ve never even used those words except in reference to claims made by other people), and it is quite obvious from the child’s awkward recitations in her CNN appearance that she is not an actor by nature.

    No intellectually honest person with any sense of normal human speech will ever claim that this interview was anything but scripted. And, I mean, of course it is. A CNN anchor asked a seven year-old child for her opinions on who is responsible for a chemical weapons attack on Syria and repeatedly asked her for her perspective on the highly complex and multifaceted conflict in her country; the only way you’re going to get answers to those questions from a child that age is if you feed them to her. This shouldn’t be a controversial thing to say.

    But even if you accept on faith the idea of a seven year-old child conducting off-the-cuff military analysis and geopolitical punditry on cable television, it is evident from the video that that isn’t what’s happening. She not only speaks like someone with no acting experience reading from a script, she sounds like someone who is not fluent in English simply sounding out English words phonetically.

    Which would make sense, because other video evidence indicates that she did not speak English very well around the time of her CNN appearance:

    In footage from an interview in Turkey (where according to the CNN chyron Alabed also conducted the Camerota interview from), Alabed is asked in English if she likes the food in Istanbul. She replies “Yes,” and when asked what food she likes, Alabed replies “Save the children of Syria.” Her mother says something to her, and then Alabed replies, “Fish.”

    She did not understand the question. But Sophie Fullerton wants you to believe this child was engaging in adult-level conversation about complicated ideas on CNN, in fluent English.

    Again, this is not an attack on a Syrian child. It would be insane and ridiculous to expect a seven year-old Syrian to be fluent in English and to be able to articulate highly advanced analysis about what’s been happening in her native country, so I am of course not criticizing her inability to do so. I am absolutely criticizing the war propagandists who put her up to it, though, and I am absolutely criticizing those who run apologia for their having done so.

    The US-centralized empire’s dirty war on Syria has had many atrocious elements to it over the years, and an abundance of propaganda and spin have been used to facilitate them. But never has it been so in-your-face brazen as when CNN staged a plainly fraudulent interview with a small child.

    ________________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

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

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ❖

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

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

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

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

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

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

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

    ❖

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

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

    ___________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Feature image via Pixabay.

     

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Top 20 Most Cringeworthy Zelensky PR Moments

    The US empire’s proxy war in Ukraine has had many jaw-dropping instances of imperialist sociopathy, propagandistic audacity and brazen journalistic malpractice that we’ve discussed in this space many times, but one of the most cringeworthy and degrading aspects of the globe-spanning narrative control campaign surrounding this war has been the way the nation’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has been turned into an ever-present corporate mascot for the most aggressive ad campaign ever devised. The way the most powerful institutions in the western world have been throwing their puppet in everyone’s face to sell the empire’s proxy warfare puts Ronald McDonald to shame.

    Here are 20 of the cringiest moments of establishment PR using Zelensky to market the McProxy War to the western world, in no particular order.

    1. A House Republican introducing a bill to place a bust of Zelensky in the US Capitol building

    Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes:

    Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) introduced a bill this week that would place a bust of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the House wing of the US Capitol building, an idea that was strongly criticized by more conservative GOP members.

    2. The fake Hollywood action hero-sounding “I need ammunition, not a ride” quote

    The only source for the quote was a single unnamed US government official, yet numerous mainstream media outlets reported it as fact instead of ignoring it for the baseless nonsense that it plainly was, and now it’s part of the official narrative.

    3. The Vogue cover shoot

    5. Time Magazine Person of the Year

    6. Star Wars: Attack of the Drones

    7. Zelensky giving a speech at the Golden Globes

    8. Zelensky giving a speech for the Grammys

    9. Zelensky getting an Academy Award from actor Sean Penn

    10. Zelensky addressing the World Economic Forum

    11. Zelensky giving a speech and ringing the bell for the New York Stock Exchange

    12. Zelensky giving a speech at the secretive Bilderberg Group (probably)

    We’d never know if Zelensky actually did end up making a video appearance because of Bilderberg’s notorious secrecy, but ahead of the meeting The Guardian reported he probably would:

    “The conference room is rigged up with video screens for shy dignitaries to make a virtual attendance, and it’s highly likely that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will Zoom in for a T-shirted contribution to the talks. Just a few days beforehand, Zelenskiy met with a Bilderberg and US intelligence representative Alex Karp, who runs Palantir, the infamous CIA-funded surveillance and data analysis company.”

    13. Zelensky giving a speech at the Cannes Film Festival

    14. Zelensky giving a speech at the Glastonbury Festival

    15. Weird Hologram Zelensky at the Founders Forum in the UK

    16. Zelensky meeting with Ben Stiller

    17. The Ukrainian flag performance in the US congress

     

    18. The bizarre Biden-Zelensky slow motion action-heroes-walking-away-from-an-explosion video clip

    19. Guest on David Letterman’s show

    20. The obligatory Bono psyop

    Honorable mention: Zelensky meeting with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to help “rebuild” (read: buy up) Ukraine

     Honorable mention: DC party at the Ukrainian embassy openly hosted by the US military-industrial complex

    Are people not tired of having their intelligence insulted yet?

    ________________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Reminder: Conscious, Pervasive Manipulation and “Fake News” is NOT New

    The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
    — Edward Bernays

    The Edward Bernays quote up top comes from his 1928 book, Propaganda. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He was also a public relations pioneer, and one of America’s most innovative social engineers.

    In the early 20th century, he was called upon to, um, persuade a wary U.S. populace into pulling a complete 180 to support their nation’s entry into World War I.

    Bernays teamed with veteran newspaperman George Creel to form the Committee on Public Information. Founded in 1917, the Creel Committee (as it came to be known) was the first government agency for outright propaganda in U.S. history.

    It published 75 million books and pamphlets, had 250 paid employees, and mobilized 75,000 volunteer speakers known as “Four-Minute Men,” who delivered their pro-war messages in churches, theaters, and other places of civic gatherings.

    The idea, of course, was to give the war effort a positive spin. “It is not merely an army that we must train and shape for war,” President Woodrow Wilson declared at the time, “it is an entire nation.”

    The age of manipulated public opinion had begun in earnest.

    Although Wilson won reelection in 1916 on a promise of peace, it wasn’t long before he severed diplomatic relations with Germany and proposed arming U.S. merchant ships — even without congressional authority.

    Upon declaring war on Germany in December 1917, the president proclaimed, “conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.” (Sound familiar?)

    In time, the masses got the message — as demonstrated by these (and other) results:

    • 14 states passed laws forbidding the teaching of the German language.
    • Iowa and South Dakota outlawed the use of German in public or on the telephone.
    • From coast to coast, German-language books were ceremonially burned.
    • The Philadelphia Symphony and the New York Metropolitan Opera Company excluded Beethoven, Wagner, and other German composers from their programs.
    • German shepherds were renamed Alsatians; dachshunds became Liberty Pups.
    • Hamburgers were transformed into “Salisbury steaks.”
    • Sauerkraut became known as “liberty cabbage.”
       

       

      Buoyed by the indisputable success of the Creel Committee and armed with the powerful psychoanalytical techniques of his Uncle Sigmund, Bernays set about to continue shaping American consciousness in a major way.

      A fine illustration of Bernays’ “smoothly functioning society” involves his efforts — for the American Tobacco Company — to persuade women to take up cigarette smoking. His slogan, “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” exploited women’s fear of gaining weight (a concern purposefully manufactured through previous advertising and/or public relations work).

      While Lucky Strike sales increased by 300 percent in the first year of Bernays’ campaign, there was still one more barrier he needed to break down: smoking remained mostly taboo for “respectable” women.

      This is where some watered-down Freud came in handy. As Bernays biographer Larry Tye said, he basically wanted to take his uncle’s works and “popularize them into little ditties that housewives and others could relate to.” With input from psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, Bernays conjured up the now legendary scheme to re-frame cigarettes as a symbol of freedom.

      “During the 1929 Easter Parade,” explains New York Times reporter Ron Chernow, “he had a troupe of fashionable ladies flounce down Fifth Avenue, conspicuously puffing their ‘Torches of Freedom,’ as he had called cigarettes.”

      As Chernow reports, Bernays augmented this successful stunt by lining up “neutral experts” to “applaud the benefits of smoking, all the while concealing the tobacco company’s sponsorship of his activity.”

      Bernays was also concealing his knowledge of tobacco’s deleterious effects. “As he hypocritically seduced American women into smoking, he was trying to wean his own wife from the nasty habit,” Chernow continues. “His daughter Anne Bernays, the novelist, recalls that whenever he discovered a pack of his wife’s Parliaments, ‘he’d pull them all out and just snap them like bones, just snap them in half and throw them in the toilet. He hated her smoking.’”

       

      It’s no wonder so many of today’s Americans — all across the ideological spectrum — are so easily and willingly duped by fake news, deep fakes, and clickbait. The system has been in place for more than a century.

      In the era of social media and a 24-hour news cycle, we are now exposed to more propaganda than ever before as Bernays’ PR progeny continue refining and honing their skills. They keep us passive, distracted, and very divided. Most Americans are thusly trapped inside news feed algorithms that serve as echo chambers to create and reinforce opinions.

      We, all of us, are the end result of an ongoing social experiment. We’ve gone from “liberty cabbage” to “flatten the curve.” We’ve surrendered the ability to discern fact from fiction. Even worse, so many of us have surrendered the desire to discern fact from fiction.

      A good place to start when challenging these realities is to accept that the past was just as corrupt as the present. There were no “good old days.” It’s not about “taking back” anything but, rather, creating something new to leave behind for future generations.

      The post Reminder: Conscious, Pervasive Manipulation and “Fake News” is NOT New first appeared on Dissident Voice.

      This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Russia’s Only International LGBTQ Film Festival Faces “Propaganda” Ban

    On December 5, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law that significantly expands restrictions on activities seen as promoting LGBTQ rights in the country. The bill, which calls for a “ban on LGBT propaganda” is, in essence, an effort to make LGBTQ existence illegal in Russia — not unlike similar measures in the U.S., such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill or the restrictions on…

    Source

  • Martin Luther King Day: Every Day is On!

    Of course, King was murdered by the Deep State on Steroids:

    Both the Jowers and the Wilson allegations suggest that persons other than or in addition to James Earl Ray participated in the assassination. Ray, within days of entering his guilty plea in 1969, attempted to withdraw it. Until his death in April 1998, he maintained that he did not shoot Dr. King and was framed by a man he knew only as Raoul. For 30 years, others have similarly alleged that Ray was Raoul’s unwitting pawn and that a conspiracy orchestrated Dr. King’s murder. These varied theories have generated several comprehensive government investigations regarding the assassination, none of which confirmed the existence of any conspiracy. However, in King v. Jowers, a recent civil suit in a Tennessee state court, a jury returned a verdict finding that Jowers and unnamed others, including unspecified government agencies, participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King. (source)

    I know King would be with class criticizing this sort of 2023 Black Un-Activism: Here’s What Black Celebrities Wore To The 2023 Golden Globes

    Boy, what would King Say — WWKS?

    “Volodymyr Zelensky Talks Hopes of War Ending During Golden Globes Video Message: ‘There Will Be No Third World War. It is not a trilogy,’ the Ukraine president said in his impact video message.”

    Think of that Goebbels-Mengele-Hitler moment, would you? I had a friend who was watching these multimillionaire frauds, the beautiful people (sic) would laugh at her and at me — she’s going through domestic violence hell, divorce hell, with systems that make the victim feel and be guilty. Me? I can write circles around most of those Holly-Dirt frauds, but alas, I am a communist, so, those frauds wouldn’t touch me with a social distancing stick of a thousand yars while all masked up and girdled up with a ZioAzovNaziLensky blue and yellow half assed flak jacket.

    Imagine, how many Goyim, Gentiles, even Christians (not all UkroNazi’s are hard-core Nazis and Satanists) are not dead and wounded in the latest meat grinder the little dictator Zelensky is heading up? And he spoke to the Golden Shower Award Recepients while they, 12,000 were KIA-ed and another 13,000 wounded? Some of the UkroNazi soldiers had frostbite on many many feet and toes and fingers, while the multimillionaire war monger, Zelensky, spoke to the cocaine and 12-step Botox folk.

    You think King would be angry?

    No message of peace from Julian Assange’s wife or father? No real heroes of peace and reconciliation speaking at the dumb-down awards. No heroines of journalism at the awards, uh?

    “A major effect of junk politics — its ceaseless flood of patriotic, religious, macho and therapeutic fustian — is to pull position after position loose from reasoned foundations,”  writer BenjaminDeMott noted (Hedges and Hedges).

    And so, all the creeps in politics, all the heads of corporations, the heads of universities, even military generals, and of course, the Press, Media, they are all two-bit actors, like ZioAzovNaziLensky. (Note: I went to the story on Golden Globes ZioLensky appearance, and it is absolutely disgusting. Sean Penn said the most ludicrous thing, and ZioAzovLensky said nothing, really, pure tripe. Read at your onw risk, and, of course, WWKD — What Would King Do?

    And that my kind readers, I know for a fact, would be putting steam under King’s collar if he were around today to see this complete blasphemy of humanity actually entertaining nuclear war, limited strikes, and more war here, there, and everywhere. And a mixed race woman, as VP!

    Here, enough of these fascists and perversions of humanity.

    King:

    The following (scroll down a bit) ran today, Jan. 11, in the little twice-a-week rag out here on the Central Oregon Coast —

    It’s mellow for me, not exactly milquetoast, but still the reality if this USA and Canada are racist countries based on Anglo Saxon invasions and pogroms of genocide and land theft and subjugation and insanity. Get those Puritans and Smith Colony and Pilgrims and Mayflower folk here so the City of London to this day can hold it’s genocidal sway over much of the world, even in this post/new colonialism.

    From Zinn’s People’s History of the United States: In that first year of the white man in Virginia, 1607, Powhatan had addressed a plea to John Smith that turned out prophetic. How authentic it is may be in doubt, but it is so much like so many Indian statements that it may be taken as, if not the rough letter of that first plea, the exact spirit of it:

    I have seen two generations of my people the…. I know the difference between peace and war better than any man in my country. I am now grown old, and must the soon; my authority must descend to my brothers, Opitehapan, Opechancanough and Catatough-then to my two sisters, and then to my two daughters-I wish them to know as much as I do, and that your love to them may be like mine to you. Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions and run into the woods; then you will starve for wronging your friends. Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not to know that it is much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them, and to lie cold in the woods, feed on acorns, roots and such trash, and be so hunted that 1 can neither eat nor sleep. In these wars, my men must sit up watching, and if a twig break, diey all cry out “Here comes Captain Smith!” So I must end my miserable life. Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all the in the same manner.

    When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indigenous peoples. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indigenous land by declaring the area legally a “vacuum.” The Indians, he said, had not “subdued” the land, and therefore had only a “natural” right to it, but not a “civil right.” A “natural right” did not have legal standing.

    The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”

    *****

    Heroes — A million of them, but for now, Paul Robeson, King and Malcolm X (NPR, be careful):

    King would be proud of this hero,

    Ana Belen Montes has repeated history by saying what she said during her trial 21 years ago: the US government’s policies against Cuba are very harsh and she behaved according to her conscience rather than the law. She added: “I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.”

    If alive, King would be protesting and getting jailed for this hero:

    The U.S. imperialists “want Alex Saab like they want Julian Assange to suffer,” charges human rights and international law expert Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, who the United Nations’ Human Rights Council appointed to serve as a special rapporteur.

    What is the great “crime” Alex Saab is accused of committing, that caused this South American diplomat to be physically pulled off of a jet while refueling at a remote African island, imprisoned, and reportedly tortured there for about a year before being kidnapped to the U.S.A.?

    The U.S. has no extradition treaty with Cabo Verde. Saab was simply seized and flown to Miami without any notification to his lawyers or family. (Source)

    And, King, if he were alive, what might he have been doing to free and condemn USA-UK-Sweden-Australia-The World for this hero? Assange.

    King would be holding this book, and thousands of others, exposing the cruelty of Capitalism and USA:

    Part One of review and discussion of Linda G. Ford’s Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart (Part Two)

    I was born a protester … My mother had to go to the school a lot and talk to the principal.— Dorli Rainey

    I am being jailed because I have advocated change for equality, justice, and peace. … I stand where thousands of abolitionists, escaped slaves, workers and political activists have stood for demanding justice, for refusing to either quietly bear the biting lash of domination or to stand by silently as others bear the same lash.— Marilyn Buck, at her 1990 sentencing (epigram in Linda Ford’s book, Women Politicals in America)

    Yeah, I sure do miss King as a topic in schools, as a centerpoint to our thinking about war and materialism and predatory and parasitic capitalism! Here, today’s Op-Ed in our small rural county, Lincoln County!

    A Day On, Not a Day Off

    MLK Jr. 56 years ago stated a point more relevant today than a half century ago: The systemic flaws of America have incubated the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

    This MLK Jr. Day was so deemed by Congress in 1994 to mark the holiday as “a national day of service.” Martin Luther King was born Jan. 15, 1929. I’ve done plenty of service-in-service-community service projects with students over the 29 years of the day’s relevance: river clean-ups, working in food kitchens, getting blankets and tents to homeless folk, cleaning up graffiti, and having teach-ins and drive-by photo shoots of neighborhoods.

    Here’s this German-Irish white guy (me) today writing about the power of not just King and his activism, but the power of so many people in the civil rights and anti-racist movement who transformed my point of view on so many global and national social justice issues.

    In addition, King, for me, would not be so vaunted without my study of Malcolm X. Or Paul Robeson, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, and so many activists in the Black Liberation Movement.

    For this county [with  89.1% white, .09 percent African American, 1.5 percent Asian, and then 4.1 percent American Indian and Alaska Native], the concept of not just celebrating King, but drilling down deeply into what he represents/-ed might fall on deaf ears. Putting him into historical context, i.e. learning about those around him before he rose to fame and afterward, adds to the value of King’s prominence.

    I had a father who was shot in Korea as a 19 year old and then in Vietnam as a 36 year old. He was in two branches of military as a regular uniformed soldier; for 32 years total. He was always supportive of my journalism, my teaching, my college pursuits, but more importantly, he backed me on my activism. He was a student of history, and the history I embraced wasn’t what mainstream historians were delving into.

    For example: Cesar Chavez and his work —  National Farm Workers Association, which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers labor union. John Trudell, son of a Santee Dakota father and a Mexican mother, who was a poet, song writer, performer and activist.

    In this county and in other places, just what does it mean to a majority of the country to give pause around King’s work? The “I Have a Dream” speech will be played in parts, over and over. I have emphasized his letter to clergy and other white leaders, in his jailhouse essay titled, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” written in longhand April 15, 1963.

    King’s letter: “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known.”

    He also penned from the jail, “The Negro is Your Friend.”

    This third Monday in January marks the birth of Dr. King Jr. We need to go beyond a few lines played back from the “Dream” speech or some of the black and white images of his 1963 march on Washington

    Throughout my college teaching – in heavily military populated El Paso, Tucson, Las Cruces, and Spokane, including instruction on military bases and posts – I got students to think deeper about King’s life, work, and teachings. Having students read, analyze and discuss his April 4, 1967 speech against the Vietnam War, delivered at New York’s Riverside Church a year to the day before he was assassinated, I ended up rallying sophisticated critiques of King’s impact on the USA.

    It was the Vietnam War in King’s time,  but my students were facing the Panama Invasion, Grenada, Kuwait, Iraq, contras in Nicaragua, dirty US-backed wars in Guatemala, Afghanistan, and so many other so-called interventions and these proxy wars. Some were Vietnam and Korea combat veterans.

    This speech was eviscerated by mainstream Press, including the New York Times and dozens of large daily newspapers. That was the point of having this speech and the Jail speech looked at and parsed – self-critique as a people, as a nation.

    King’s first point in drawing the connection between ending racism at home and curbing militarism abroad had to do with the waste of precious resources:

    “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”

    My father was his soldiers’ advocate, having verbally defied some of the businesses in the South that refused to serve his fellow uniformed men in the Big Red One (Latino and Black Americans).

    I never got to challenge my CW4 father with so much of history I absorbed. For instance, Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the United States is militarily still engaged in 85 countries, enabling or prosecuting wars in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and beyond. Maintaining over 750 overseas military bases have unfortunately spun spending for military purposes out of control, more than at the height of the Vietnam or Korean Wars.

    If Dr. King were alive today, he would be expounding against the state of our foreign and domestic policies, and would despair at all this war mongering, especially now with China in America’s sights. An arms race with China is anathema to King’s hopes and dreams of a socially, economically and culturally just world.

    King was the antiwar preacher, and he is so right about those triplets – militarism, materialism and racism.

    The post Martin Luther King Day: Every Day is On! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Western Journalists Are Cowardly, Approval-Seeking Losers

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Research conducted by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

    Which is to say that all the years of hysterical shrieking about Russian trolls interfering in US democracy and corrupting the fragile little minds of Americans — a narrative that has been used to drum up support for internet censorship and ever-increasing US government involvement in the regulation of online speech — was false.

    And to be clear, this isn’t actually news. It was established years ago that the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency could not possibly have had any meaningful impact on the 2016 election, because the scope of its operations was quite small, its posts were mostly unrelated to the election and many were posted after the election occurred, and its funding was dwarfed by orders of magnitude by domestic campaigns to influence the election outcome.

    What’s different this time around, six years after Trump’s inauguration, is that this time the mass media are reporting on these findings.

    The Washington Post has an article out with the brazenly misleading headline “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters“. Anyone who reads the article itself will find its author Tim Starks acknowledges that “Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior,” but the insertion of the word “little” means anyone who just reads the headline (the overwhelming majority of people encountering the article) will come away with the impression that Russian trolls still had some influence on 2016 voters.

    “Little influence” could mean anything shy of tremendous influence. But the study did not find that Russian trolls had “little influence” over the election; it failed to find any measurable influence at all. 

    Starks does some spin work of his own in a bid to salvage the reputation of the ever-crumbling Russiagate narrative, eagerly pointing out that the report does not explicitly say Russia definitely had zero influence on the election’s outcome, that it doesn’t examine Russian trolling behavior on Facebook, that it doesn’t address “Russian hack-and-leak operations,” and that it doesn’t say “doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.”

    None of these are valid arguments. Claiming Russia definitely had no influence on the election at all would have been beyond the scope of the study, the report’s authors do in fact argue that the effects of Russian trolling on Facebook were likely the same as on Twitter, the (still completely unproven) “Russian hack-and-leak operations” were outside the scope of the study, as is the question of whether foreign influence operations can be a threat in general.

    What Starks does not do is make any attempt to address the fact that mainstream news and punditry was dominated for years by claims that Russian internet trolls won the election for Donald Trump. He does not, for example, make any mention of his own 2019 Politico article telling readers that the Russian Twitter troll operation ahead of the 2016 election “was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known.”

    Starks also does not take the time to inform The Washington Post’s readership about the false reporting this story has received over the years from his fellow mainstream news media employees, like The Washington Post’s David Ignatius and his melodramatic description of the St Petersburg troll farm as “a sophisticated, multilevel Russian effort to use every available tool of our open society to create resentment, mistrust and social disorder” in an article hysterically titled “How Russia used the Internet to perfect its dark arts“. Or The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg in her article “Yes, Russian Trolls Helped Elect Trump“, in which she argues that it looks increasingly as though the Internet Research Agency “changed the direction of American history.” Or NBC’s Ken Dilanian (a known CIA asset), who described Russian trolling on Twitter in the lead-up to the election as “a vast, coordinated campaign that was incredibly successful at pushing out and amplifying its messages,” a claim that was then repeated by The Washington Post. To pick just a few out of basically limitless possible examples.

    Starks and his editors could easily have included this sort of information in the article. It would have greatly helped improve clarity and understanding among The Washington Post’s audience if they had. It would have been entirely possible to clearly spell out the fact that all those other reports appear to have been incorrect in light of this new information, or at least to acknowledge the fact that there is a glaring difference between this new report and previous reporting. It would do a lot of good for awareness to grow, especially among Washington Post readers, that there’s been a lot of inaccurate information circulating about Russia and the 2016 election these past several years.

    But they didn’t. And nobody else in the mass media has done so either. Even The Intercept’s report on the same story, despite having the far more honest headline “Those Russian Twitter bots didn’t do $#!% in 2016, says new study,” doesn’t name any names or criticize any outlets for their inaccurate reporting on Russian trolls stealing the election for Donald Trump.

    Indeed, it’s very rare in the west to see mainstream journalists hold other mainstream journalists accountable for their false reporting, facilitation of propaganda, or journalistic malpractice, unless it’s journalists whose approval they don’t care about like members of the opposite political faction or independant media reporters. This is because western journalists are worthless, obsequious cowards whose entire lives revolve around seeking the approval of their peers.

    The most important reporting a journalist can do in the western world today is help expose the lies, propaganda and malpractice of other western journalists and news outlets. But that is also the last thing a western journalist is ever likely to do, because western journalists seek praise and approval not from the public, but from other western journalists.

    You can see this in the way they post on Twitter, with their little in-jokes and insider references, how they’re always cliquing up and beckoning and signaling to each other. Twitter is a great window through which to observe western journalists, because they really lay it all out there. Watch their bootlicking facilitation of status quo power, their ingratiating tail-wagging with each other, the way they gang up on dissenters like zealots burning a heretic. To see what I’m talking about you have to pay attention not to their viral tweets that go off but to all the rest that receive little attention, because the ones that take off are the ones the public are interested in. If you watch them carefully it becomes clear that for most of them the intended audience of the majority of their posts is not the rank-and-file public, but their fellow members of the media class.

    Look at this Twitter conversation between Australian journalists right after the Ecuadorian embassy cut off Julian Assange’s internet access in 2018 for a good illustration of this. Former ABC reporter Andrew Fowler (now a vocal supporter of Assange) questions ABC’s Michael Rowland for applauding Ecuador’s move, and ABC’s Lisa Millar rushes in to help Rowland argue that Assange is not a journalist and doesn’t deserve the solidarity of journalists, and that Fowler is putting himself on the outside of the groupthink consensus by claiming otherwise. Millar and Rowland are part of the clique, Fowler is being ostracised from it, and Assange is the heretic whose lynching they’re braying for:

    Western journalists have a freakish herd-like mindset that makes the derision and rejection of their class the most nightmarish scenario possible and the approval of their class the most powerful opiate imaginable. They’re terrified of other journalists turning against them, of being rejected by the people whose approval they crave like a drug, of being kicked out of the group chat. And that’s exactly what would happen if they began leveling valid criticisms at mass media propaganda in public. And that’s exactly why that doesn’t happen.

    The western media class is a cloistered, incestuous circle jerk that only cares about impressing other members of the cloistered, incestuous circle jerk. It doesn’t care about creating an informed populace or holding the powerful to account, it cares about approval, inclusion and acclaim from its own ranks, regardless of what propagandistic reporting is required to obtain it. The Pulitzers are mostly just a bunch of empire propagandists giving each other trophies for being good at empire propaganda.

    A journalist with real integrity would spurn the approval of the media class. It would nauseate and repel them, because it would mean you’ve been aligning yourself with the most powerful empire in history and the propaganda machine which greases its wheels. They would actively make an enemy of the mainstream western press.

    Journalists without integrity — which is to say the overwhelming majority of journalists — do the opposite.

    None of this will be news to any of my regular readers, who will likely understand that the role of the mass media is not to inform but to manufacture consent for the agendas and interests of our rulers. But we shouldn’t get used to it, or lose sight of how odious it is.

    It’s important to be clear about how gross these people are. You can never be sufficiently disdainful of these freaks.

    _________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • We’ve Been Dominated By Narrative Control Since The Dawn Of Civilization

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The science of modern propaganda arguably got its start over a century ago during World War I when a young Edward Bernays was recruited to help sell the conflict to a reluctant American populace, after which he took what he’d learned on that front and folded it into a lifetime of work on the study of mass-scale psychological manipulation.

    That was when propaganda as we know it today came into being, with the scientific method applied to the task of refining techniques for manipulating large-scale human behavior using modern media distribution. Those methods have been in research and development this entire time, and have advanced at least as much as our other instruments of warfare have advanced since World War I.

    But that wasn’t the beginning of mass-scale psychological manipulation by the powerful. That has been going on since the dawn of civilization.

    Back when humans were a nomadic hunter-gatherer species, there was no need for tribal leaders to impose mental narratives over their tribe in order to keep them moving and behaving in the way they wanted. The animal needs of food, drink, and safety were enough to keep those small societies moving, hunting, foraging, reproducing, and fighting wherever it was necessary; they would have done those things even without the existence of language, and our evolutionary ancestors probably did exactly that for millions of years before the behavior of speech first emerged in humans.

    That all changed with the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. Once humans began learning to trick the Earth’s biosphere into making the food appear next to them, they became capable of sticking around in one place without starving, and civilizations began to emerge. Where as hunter-gatherers humans were only organizing in groups of a few dozen, with the ability to settle and build things we began congregating in villages and cities of hundreds or thousands.

    Once you’re dealing with human groups of that size with sustenance coming from farmlands and livestock, the animal impulses of hunger, thirst and safety are no longer complex enough to determine the way those humans are going to be behaving from day to day.

    Copious amounts of language will now be needed. Agreements. Protocols. Rules. Etiquette. How is the civilization planned out? How are decisions made? Who does the work? How are resources allocated? How are children conceived and raised?

    From here you can already see how the possibility of abuse is opening up. Someone’s going to be doing the work. Someone’s going to be making the decisions. Someone’s going to be deciding where the resources go, and potentially assigning a lot more to themselves than to others. Someone’s going to be deciding who gets to have sex, and potentially assigning that responsibility entirely to themselves and their supporters, and potentially not leaving any say in the matter to the women.

    Once humans moved from organizing in villages and cities to moving in kingdoms and empires, the potential for abuses increased exponentially. Then you’ve got the matter of wars and who should fight in them. You’ve got money and the capacity for vast wealth. You’ve got laws and the ability to determine what they are and whom they benefit. And you’ve got someone holding an immense amount of power over a very large number of people.

    You can’t rely on instinctual animal impulses to organize people in civilizations of that kind of complexity. To get people moving in accordance with your will, you’ve got to use narrative. You need to overlay your civilization with a conceptual world of mental stories that people believe in and move in alignment with. And that’s what has happened with every civilization that has ever existed.

    Up until the last few generations, religions played a major role in this. Getting the public valuing meekness, obedience, poverty, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s (paying taxes) while teaching them that it would be sinful to murder their rulers and take their treasure was an essential component in subjugating the masses and keeping them moving in alignment with your will. The religions of Christianity and Islam look quite different from belief systems like Confucianism, but all three are narrative overlays spread on top of giant civilizations which kept the rank-and-file public marching in accordance with the will of the powerful.

    And of course it wasn’t entirely bad. Civilization would have been impossible if everyone was robbing and killing everyone else all the time, and narratives about sin and eternal punishment were one way of keeping that from happening. The narratives of religion, law, government and culture preserved a given order where there would otherwise have been disorder; it may have been a tyrannical, exploitative and unjust order most of the time, but it was order.

    In modern western society religion plays a less dominant role in the organizing narratives, but there’s still the same amount of thick narrative overlay as we had in ancient times. In place of the priesthood we’ve got the pundits, news reporters, politicians and thought leaders, in place of heretics we’ve got tankies and conspiracy theorists, and in place of the old scriptures and doctrines we’ve got the current mainstream worldview. Before the mainstream worldview involved Jesus and God; now the mainstream worldview involves capitalism and an entirely faith-based belief in democracy.

    And just as before, it’s not all bad. It’s probably a good thing that the mainstream worldview values freedom and justice, even if our freedoms are largely illusory and our judicial systems are profoundly unfair. It’s probably a good thing that the mainstream worldview now officially opposes racism, even if that is partly because race wars and vigilante justice are inconvenient for our rulers. It’s probably a good thing that the mainstream worldview values getting children vaccinated against diseases which used to kill lots of people, even if the pharmaceutical industry does have way too much power and diseases are now used as a pretext to roll out authoritarian agendas.

    It’s not all bad, but it is bad. The status quo systems we’re manipulated into accepting by the narrative overlay on our civilization are creating terrible injustices and are imperiling our entire species. Ecocidal capitalism is killing our biosphere, imperialism is threatening our planet with nuclear armageddon, people are being starved, impoverished, abused and exploited by the sociopolitical status quo we are manipulated into consenting to by the science of modern propaganda. And it’s all for the benefit of the same types of people who took control of the dominant narratives of the ancient civilizations lived in by our ancestors.

    From the dawn of civilization, we have been ruled by manipulators. Those who rise to the top of our current civilization have the same qualities as those who rose to the top of the kingdoms and empires of old. People who are just a little bit more clever than the rest, and just unprincipled enough to use that to their advantage.

    The next stage in our development as a species, if we get to the next stage, will be to transcend this model. To transcend the model in which our lives are dominated by mental narrative, in which manipulators are able to use the fact that humans are storytelling creatures to rise to levels of power over the rest of us, in which we are forced to trade peace, justice, sanity and a healthy ecosystem for the order and stability of our ruling systems.

    This will mean becoming a conscious species. It will mean casting aside our primitive psychological delusions to such an extent that we no longer need the narrative overlay of a mainstream worldview to move in harmony with each other. That we no longer need the narrative overlay of law and government to treat each other with kindness and keep things moving in an orderly way. That we no longer need the narrative overlay of money and economy to move resources where they are needed.

    If we can achieve this one day it will be a kind of return to Eden; a return to the narrative-free innocence of the hunter-gatherer days of our ancestors. But it will be the conscious, mature manifestation of that way of life, just as spiritual enlightenment is the conscious, mature manifestation of the same nondual experience lived accidentally by babies. We won’t hunt in tribes as our species did in its infancy, we will live in civilizations, but we will live in harmony with each other and with our ecosystem, because we transcended our unwholesome relationship with mental narrative and replaced it with a wide awake direct encounter with reality.

    And I suspect that if we ever get there, it will feel very familiar. Very old, and very familiar.

    ____________________

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

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    Feature image via Camshea, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

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

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

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

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

    ❖

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

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

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

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

    ❖

    “China’s going to invade Taiwan!”

    “What? How do you know?”

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

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

    ❖

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

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

    ❖

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ___________________

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

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  • Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Still US State-Affiliated Media

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    A couple of months into Elon Musk’s control of Twitter, it’s fair to say that from an anti-censorship, pro-transparency perspective there have been a few positive results of the platform coming under new management. The revelations from the Twitter Files about US government involvement in influencing a massive social media company’s policies and actions have been indisputably newsworthy information that’s absolutely in the public interest to have, and some anti-establishment voices have been saying their accounts have been noticeably more visible since the changeover.

    It’s also fair to say at this point that Musk has allowed far more negative practices to continue than he has ended. In an excellent new article titled “Under Musk, Twitter Continues to Promote US Propaganda Networks,” Fair.org’s Bryce Greene breaks down the many different ways that Twitter is still manipulating the information its users see in ways that serve the interests of the US government.

    Greene contrasts the wildly unbalanced way media coming from empire-targeted governments is suppressed and labeled “state-affiliated media”, while US-aligned accounts which would deserve such a designation are not given it, and are often amplified and aided.

    “In short, Twitter is serving as an active participant in an ongoing information war,” Greene writes.

    I highly recommend reading the article in full, because it paints a very lucid picture of the Silicon Valley platform’s facilitation of US information interests and Musk’s role in it, but here are a few highlights:

    • “FAIR could find no examples of accounts labeled ‘United States state-affiliated media,’ even though there are many outlets that would obviously seem to fit that description,” while “PressTV from Iran, RT and Sputnik from Russia, and China Daily, Global Times, CGTN and China Xinhua News from China are all labeled ‘state-affiliated media.’”

     

    • “…none of the accounts for the US Army, National Security Agency or Central Intelligence Agency are currently labeled as a state or government entity” by Twitter.

     

    • Twitter is still displaying warning pop-ups when people attempt to like or share media from an unauthorized government.

     

    • Twitter’s “Topics” feature has been artificially amplifying media funded by the US and other NATO powers to manage narratives about the war in Ukraine.

     

    • US state media outlets Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Voice of America, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and Middle East Broadcasting Network receive twice as much funding from the US government as RT receives from Moscow, yet are not labeled “state-affiliated media”.

     

    • US-funded information ops like National Endowment for Democracy also receive no such label.

     

    • Prior to the Musk takeover Twitter announced that it supports NATO and seeks to prevent Russia from “undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.” Neither that declaration nor the policies put in place alongside it have been repealed under the new ownership.

     

    • Twitter’s top editorial position for the Middle East and Africa is still held by Gordon MacMillan of the British military’s psychological warfare unit.

    For good measure Greene spends the latter part of his article discussing Musk’s extensive role in the US military-industrial complex through his military and intelligence contractor company SpaceX, which would of course present a massive conflict of interest when it comes to resisting the US government’s attempts to tilt the flow of information in its favor online. It is a bit funny how the public narrative about SpaceX is mostly about Mars and futurism and the exploration of space, when in reality its existence predominantly revolves around aiding the US war machine’s campaigns of terrestrial conquest.

    So it’s not surprising that we find ourselves with a New Twitter that’s essentially the same as the old Twitter, just with more tolerance for right wingers and their culture war quagmires.

    When Musk’s Twitter purchase was first announced, journalist Michael Tracey tweeted an interesting observation that I’ve been referring back to ever since the change in ownership.

    “The biggest test for Elon Musk will not be whether he rolls back the most obvious ‘woke’ content policies — that should be a given — but whether he continues to let Twitter be used as a vehicle for the US national security state to ‘counter’ official enemies like Russia and China,” Tracey said.

    After two months of the same old same old in the facilitation of US information interests, I think it’s fair to say that when it comes to this question, the jury has returned with a verdict.

    _________________

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

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

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

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

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

    ❖

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ❖

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

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

    ❖

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

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

    ❖

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

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

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

    ____________________

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

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    Feature Image via Pixabay

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Under Musk, Twitter Continues to Promote US Propaganda Networks

     

    Twitter’s “state-affiliated media” policy has an unwritten exemption for US government-funded and -controlled news media accounts. Twitter even boosts these accounts as “authoritative” sources for news during the Russian/Ukrainian war.

    Intercept: Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign

    Twitter‘s change of ownership does not appear to have altered the platform’s special relationship with the US national security state (Intercept, 12/20/22).

    Elon Musk’s controlled release of the documents known as the “Twitter Files” has given us some insight into the inner workings of the social media platform. The batch of docs released on December 20 is arguably the most explosive, detailing Twitter’s deliberate shielding of US propaganda operations. After getting limited access to Twitter‘s internal systems, Lee Fang of the Intercept (12/20/22) detailed how Twitter staff “whitelisted” accounts run by US Central Command (CENTCOM), the unit of the US military that oversees the Middle East, as part of covert propaganda campaigns. In other words, Twitter protected accounts engaged in US psychological warfare operations, even though they clearly violated the platform’s terms of service.

    But this is far from the whole story of Twitter’s assistance with US influence operations. A FAIR investigation reveals that dozens of large accounts that are part of US overt propaganda networks are given special treatment from the company, in blatant violation of Twitter’s own policies.

    Through a lopsided “state-affiliated” media policy application, Twitter has actually gone against its own mission to provide “context” to users. More acutely, in Ukraine, Twitter actively promoted US funded media organizations as part of the “Topics” feature which ostensibly aggregated “authoritative” sources. The prominence of these outlets on the platform has strengthened their influence on the national media ecosystem, and has helped shape public perceptions of the entire war.

    ‘State-affiliated media’

    Twitter LogoIn 2020, as part of an effort to “provide additional context” for information users encounter on the platform, Twitter (8/6/20) announced a policy to add labels to “accounts that are controlled by certain official representatives of governments, state-affiliated media entities and individuals associated with those entities.”

    “We believe,” Twitter declared in a blog post, “people have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or indirectly with a state actor.” Twitter further said it would not “recommend or amplify accounts or their tweets with these labels.”

    The clear primary target at the time was Russian state-affiliated media, though the policy has been extended to other countries. According to Twitter‘s own numbers, accounts with the “state-affiliated” label experience up to a 30% reduction in circulation.

    As part of its policy during the Ukraine War, Twitter (3/16/22) announced its intention to “elevate credible and reliable information.” In a blog post, Twitter praised its “effective” policy implementation against Russian government accounts. They claimed that “engagements per tweet decreased by approximately 25%,” and “the number of accounts that engaged with those Tweets decreased by 49%”

    But it’s clear that Twitter’s policy isn’t applied evenly. There are numerous media operations with close ties to the US government—some even fully government-funded and -run—whose accounts aren’t labeled “state-affiliated.” Under this biased application of the policy, Twitter enables US propaganda outlets to maintain the pretense of independence on the platform, a tacit endorsement of US soft power and influence operations.

    This lopsided approach makes it clear that Twitter’s policy is not about “providing context” to users, but rather promoting the US establishment worldview. In short, Twitter is serving as an active participant in an ongoing information war.

    Delegitimizing official enemies

    Twitter defines “state-affiliated media” as

    outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.

    The policy is ostensibly apolitical and applies to all state media accounts equally, but in practice, the true purpose of the policy is clear: to delegitimize media affiliated with states opposed to US policy. The assumption inherent in Twitter’s policy is that if a state is considered to be an enemy of the US, then any media affiliated with that state is inherently suspicious. Users therefore need to be warned about the content they are consuming. FAIR could find no examples of accounts labeled “United States state-affiliated media,” even though there are many outlets that would obviously seem to fit that description.

    Twitter: Which Accounts Currently Have a Label?

    Twitter lists the countries to be targeted by the policy, which has some notable omissions. For example, the list does not include Qatar, and accounts for the Qatar-funded media outlets Al Jazeera and AJ+ do not feature the “state-affiliated” label. But even among the states that are listed, the policy is not applied equally.

    Although Twitter lists the United States and US allies like the United Kingdom and Canada as countries where “labels appear on relevant Twitter accounts,” this appears to refer to outlets based in those countries that are affiliated with other countries. Certainly there are US-linked accounts that could not more obviously fit the category of “state-affiliated” yet receive no labels.

    As an example of some blatant oversights, none of the accounts for the US Army, National Security Agency or Central Intelligence Agency are currently labeled as a state or government entity, despite being “government accounts heavily engaged in geopolitics and diplomacy.” Additionally, the accounts for the Israeli Defense Force, Ministry of Defense and prime minister are all unlabeled.

    Meanwhile, Twitter rigorously enforces the rules for states the US considers to be hostile. Accounts for major state agencies in Russia, China and Iran are generally labeled as state entities. Media outlets from those countries are also targeted: PressTV from Iran, RT and Sputnik from Russia, and China Daily, Global Times, CGTN and China Xinhua News from China are all labeled “state-affiliated media.”

    Twitter has taken extra measures against Russia after the invasion, adding explicit warnings on any post linking to “a Russian state-affiliated media website”:

    Twitter Stay Informed

    If a user attempts to like, retweet or quote tweet a post that includes this restricted media, they are given a second warning:

    Twitter: This Tweet Links to a Russia State-Affiliated Media Website

     

    Though the user is still able to interact with the content, these warnings are designed to nudge the user away from doing so, thus slowing the spread of disapproved information.

    Artificial exceptions

    Twitter’s policy defines “state-affiliated media” as newsrooms where the state has “control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.” But there are several major media accounts that seem to fit this description that have no such warning labels.

    None of the major public media outlets in the US, Britain and Canada have received the label. In 2017, NPR received 4% of its funding from the US government. The BBC receives a large portion of its funding from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The CBC receives $1.2 billion in funding from the Canadian government. Yet Twitter accounts for the BBC, CBC and NPR are all unlabeled on the platform.

    To explain this discrepancy, Twitter makes a distinction between “state-financed” and “state-affiliated” media. Twitter writes:

    State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.

    The idea that publicly supported media in either Britain or the US are independent of the state is highly dubious. Firstly, it is unclear why state funding does not fall under the “financial resources” language in Twitter’s policy; governments can and have used the threat of pulling funding to enforce their editorial judgments (Extra!, 3–4/95; FAIR.org, 5/17/05). Secondly, government influence operates on a bureaucratic level, as scholar Tom Mills (OpenDemocracy, 1/25/17) noted of the BBC:

    Governments set the terms under which it operates, they appoint its most senior figures, who in future will be directly involved in day-to-day managerial decision making, and they set the level of the license fee, which is the BBC’s major source of income.

    National Endowment for Democracy

    National Endowment for Democracy LogoA look at the US’s soft power initiatives shows far more outlets that ought to fall under the “state affiliated” label. One such conduit for funding is the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED, created during the Reagan administration, pours $170 million a year into organizations dedicated to defending or installing regimes friendly to US policies.

    ProPublica (11/24/10) described the NED as being “established by Congress, in effect, to take over the CIA’s covert propaganda efforts.” David Ignatius of the Washington Post (9/22/91) reported on the organization as a vehicle for “spyless coups,” as it was “doing in public what the CIA used to do in private.” The first NED president, Carl Gershman (MintPress, 9/9/19), admitted that the switch was largely a PR move to shroud the organization’s intentions: “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA.”

    NED operations in Ukraine deserve especially close scrutiny, given the organization’s role in the 2014 Maidan coup and the information war surrounding the Russian invasion. In 2013, Gershman described Ukraine as the “biggest prize” in the East/West rivalry (Washington Post, 9/26/13). Later that year, the NED united with other Western-backed influence networks to support the protest movements that later led to the removal of the president.

    The history of the board is a who’s who of regime change advocates and imperial hawks. The current board includes Anne Applebaum, a popular anti-Russian staff writer at the Atlantic and frequent cable news commentator whose work epitomizes the New Cold War mentality, and Elliott Abrams, a major player in the Iran/Contra scandal who later played a key role in the Trump administration’s campaign to overthrow the Venezuelan government. Victoria Nuland, formerly the foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, is a key player in US foreign policy, and was even one of the US officials who was caught meddling behind the scenes to reshape the Ukrainian government in 2014. She served on the NED board in between her time in the State Department for the Obama and Biden administrations. Other former board members include Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski and current CIA director William Burns.

    After the war started, the NED removed all of its Ukraine projects from its website, though they are still available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. A look at 2021 projects shows extensive work funding media organizations throughout Ukraine with the ostensible goal of “promot[ing] government accountability” or “foster[ing] independent media.” Despite their overt funding from a well-documented US propaganda organ, none of these organizations’ Twitter accounts contain a “state-affiliated media” label. Even the NED’s own Twitter account does not reference its relationship to the US government.

    This is highly relevant to the current war in Ukraine. CHESNO, ZN.UA, ZMiST and Ukrainian Toronto Television, Vox Ukraine are all part of the NED’s media network in Ukraine, yet their Twitter accounts have no state-affiliated label. Furthermore, some of the newsrooms in this network boast extensive ties to other US government organizations. European Pravda, the Ukraine Crisis Media Center and Hromadske—all founded during or shortly after the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014—boast explicit partnerships with NATO. Hromadske and the UCMC also tout partnerships with the US State Department, the US Embassy in Kyiv and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

    USAID plays a similar role to the NED. Under the protective cover of humanitarian aid and development projects, the agency serves as a conduit for US regime change operations and soft power influence peddling. Among other things, the organization has been a cover for “promoting democracy” in Nicaragua, and provided half a billion dollars to advance the coup attempt against Venezuela’s elected government.

    Kyiv Post and Independent

    Kyiv Post logoThe most popular recipient of NED funds has been the Kyiv Independent, a reconstitution of another NED-funded newsroom, the Kyiv Post. Though it claims to receive the majority of its funding through advertising and subscriptions, the Post website lists the NED as “donors who sponsored content produced by the Kyiv Post journalists.”

    When the Post was temporarily shuttered in a staff dispute in November 2021, many of the journalists formed the Kyiv Independent. They did this with a $200,000 grant from the Canadian government, as well as an emergency grant from the European Endowment for Democracy, an organization headquartered in Brussels that is both modeled after and funded by the NED.

    Kyiv Independent logoAfter the outbreak of war, the Independent gained over 2 million Twitter followers and attracted millions of dollars in donations. Staff from the Independent have flooded the US media ecosystem: Its reporters have had op-eds in top US newspapers like the New York Times (3/5/22) and the Washington Post (2/28/22). They often appear on US TV channels like CNN (3/21/22), CBS (12/21/22), Fox News (3/31/22) and MSNBC (4/10/22).

    Omitting the newsroom’s ties to the US government, CNN’s Brian Stelter (3/20/22) praised the Independent for going from “a three-month-old startup and relative unknown in the Western world to now one of the leading sources of information on the war in Ukraine.” Its funding drives have been promoted by US outlets like CBS and PBS (MintPress, 4/8/22).

    The top staff of the Independent have extensive connections to other US government projects. Contributing editor Liliane Bivings worked on Ukraine projects at the Atlantic Council, a think tank funded by the US and other governments that serves as NATO’s de facto brain trust. Chief financial officer Jakub Parusinski worked with the USAID-funded International Center for Policy Studies (MintPress, 4/8/22).

    Chief Executive Officer Daryna Shevchenko previously worked for IREX, an education and development nonprofit created by the State Department and Ford Foundation that still receives most of its funding from the US government. She also co-founded the Media Development Foundation, an organization funded by the NED and the US Embassy in Kyiv to promote “independent” media in Ukraine. Chief operating officer Oleksiy Sorokin got his start at Transparency International, an NGO funded by the US State Department as well as other NATO-friendly governments (Covert Action, 4/13/22).

    Boosting US propaganda

    Twitter’s policy effectively amounts to providing cover and reach for US propaganda organs. But this policy effect is far from the whole story. Through various mechanisms, Twitter actually boosts US-funded newsrooms and promotes them as trusted sources.

    One such mechanism is the curated “Topics” feature. As part of its effort to “elevate reliable information,” Twitter recommends following its own curated feed for the Ukraine War. As of September 2022, Twitter said that this war feed for the Ukraine War had over 38.6 billion “impressions.” Scrolling through the feed shows many examples of the platform boosting US state-affiliated media, with few or no instances of coverage critical of the war effort. Despite their extensive ties to the US government, the Kyiv Independent and Kyiv Post are frequently offered as favored sources for information on the war.

    The account has generated a list based on what they claim to be reliable sources on the conflict. The list currently has 55 members. Of these, at least 22 are either US-funded newsrooms, their affiliated journalists. Given the complexity of the funding channels, and the lack of information on some of these newsrooms’ websites, this number is likely an undercount:

    New Voice of Ukraine (NED, State Department)

    Euan MacDonald

    Kyiv Post (NED)

    Natalie Vikhrov

    Kyiv Independent (NED)

    Anastasiia Lapatina, Oleksiy Sorokin, Anna Myroniuk, Illia Ponomarenko

    Zaborona (NED)

    Katerina Sergatskova

    Media Development Foundation of Georgia (NED, USAID, State Department)

    Myth Detector

    Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (USAGM)

    Reid Standish

    Center for European Policy Analysis (NED, State Department)

    Anders Ostlund, Alina Polyakova

    EurasiaNet (NED)

    Peter Leonard

    Atlantic Council (NATO)

    Terrell Jermaine Starr

    If Twitter applied its own “state-affiliated media” policy consistently, these users wouldn’t be included in such a list. In fact, Twitter would actively diminish the reach of these accounts.

    Worldwide propaganda network

    NYT: Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.

    There are things the New York Times (12/26/77) could say in 1977 that it can’t say in 2023.

    The US government currently funds other media organizations that function more blatantly as arms of the state, yet none have the “state-affiliated media” label on their Twitter accounts. These outlets are part of the media apparatus set up to promote the US point of view around the world during the Cold War. The New York Times (12/26/77) once described them as being part of a “worldwide propaganda network built by the CIA.”

    The network, known as the “Propaganda Assets Inventory” within the agency, once encompassed around 500 individuals and organizations, ranging from operatives in major media like CBS, Associated Press and Reuters to smaller outlets under the “complete” “editorial control” of the CIA. Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty were at the vanguard of this propaganda operation. The Times reported in 1977 that the network resulted in a stream of US media stories that were “purposely misleading or downright false.”

    The US government continues to directly operate several of these organizations. These outlets now fall under the auspices of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a federal agency that received $810 million in 2022. That number marks a 27% increase from its 2021 budget, and is more than twice the amount RT received from Russia for its global operations in 2021 (RFE/RL, 8/25/21).

    The first “broadcasting standard” listed on the agency website is to “be consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.” While the structure of USAGM ostensibly includes a “firewall” protecting editorial independence, the outlet is unlikely to hire anyone who is not comfortable with this primary goal. Certainly the US government has over USAGM what Twitter elsewhere has defined as “control through financial resources.”

     

    US Agency for Global Media org chart

    Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

    Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty logoRFE/RL operates on a budget of $126 million and reaches 37 million people across 27 languages. It boasts that its reporting receives “daily citations in global media, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, AP, Reuters, USA Today, Politico, CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC.”

    RFE/RL has been stepping up operations in Ukraine. The network says it “serves as a media leader in Ukraine, frequently conducting high-profile interviews that are picked up across Ukraine’s top media outlets.” The news operation includes “a vast network of local news bureaus and an extensive freelance network,” according to USAGM documents. None of the Twitter accounts under the umbrella of RFE/RL have been labeled “state-affiliated media.” This includes RFE/RL Pressroom and RFE/RL’s Persian service, Radio Farda.

    Radio Free Asia

    Radio Free Asia logoRadio Free Asia reaches almost 60 million people across nine languages, mainly focused on East Asian countries. RFA receives a $47.6 million budget, with the mission of “counter[ing] authoritarian disinformation and false narratives.” “As the United States aims to re-engage with global partners on issues of diplomatic and economic importance,” USAGM states, RFA “will need to combat the malign influence of China’s disinformation juggernaut.”

    The main RFA account does not have the“state-affiliated media” label, and neither do the accounts for RFA Uyghur, RFA Burmese, RFA Korean, RFA Tibetan, RFA Vietnamese or RFA Cantonese. RFA’s largest channel, RFA Chinese, has 1.1 million followers, but no label.

    Voice of America

    Voice of America logoWith a budget of $257 million, Voice of America (VoA) is USAGM’s largest operation. Its 961 employees reach 311.8 million including 40 million in China, and 10 million Iranians. The media network’s goal is to “[tell] America’s story” and “enhance” the “understanding of US policies” in target populations.

    Aimed at Iran, VoA Farsi was described in 2019 by one former executive as pushing “blatant propaganda” with “no objectivity or factuality” (Intercept, 8/13/19). During the height of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, the outlet became “a mouthpiece of Trump—only Trump and nothing but Trump.” In addition to promoting the US-supported Iranian terrorist group MEK, the outlet “lash[ed] out at people they deem unsupportive of President Donald Trump’s Iran policy.”

    Neither the main VoA Twitter account with 1.7 million followers, the VoA Chinese account with 1.8 million followers, nor the VoA Farsi account with 1.7 million followers feature the “state-affiliated media” label.

    Office of Cuba Broadcasting

    Marti logoUSAGM includes the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), a Miami-based operation that receives $12.9 million a year to “promote freedom and democracy” in Cuba. A recent USAGM report noted OCB’s “ongoing, timely and thorough reporting of the Cuban dissident movement.” According to an OCB fact sheet, Radio Television Marti, the main network overseen by OCB, reaches 11% of the Cuban population each week through audio, video and digital content. The network’s Twitter account does not possess the state-affiliated label.

    Middle East Broadcasting Network

    Middle East Broadcasting Networks LogoUSAGM also oversees the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), an Arab-language network headquartered in Springfield, Virginia, whose mission is to “expand the spectrum of ideas, opinions and perspectives” in Middle East/North Africa countries. USAGM states that MBN is “poised to represent America like no other across the region.” The network is “fully funded” with a budget of $108.9 million.

    According to the agency, MBN reaches more than 33 million people across 22 MENA countries. Its media reached 76% of the population in non-Kurdish Iraqi territories, and in Palestine, MBN media reached 50%. MBN networks include Alhurra TV, Radio Sawa and MBN Digital. The Alhurra TV Twitter account, with 3.6 million followers, does not contain the “state-affiliated” label.

    Each of these operations are funded in whole or in part by governments, yet Twitter does not think that they classify as state-affiliated. Therefore, none of them are labeled, nor are they subjected to the limits that the platform applies to labeled accounts. If Twitter doesn’t consider a newsroom “fully funded” by the US government to be “state-affiliated,” it should be clear that its goal of providing “context” does not apply to the organs of US propaganda. The feature serves only to nudge users away from state funded organizations belonging to states hostile to the US.

    Twitter and the establishment

    Twitter’s adherence to Western foreign policy objectives is nothing new. Twitter has even openly announced that its company policy includes support for NATO. In 2021, as tensions between Russia and Ukraine were on the rise, Twitter announced that it had removed dozens of Russian accounts as “state-linked operations.” The reason Twitter (2/23/21) cited for the removal was that they were “undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.” The support for US global objectives has extended to other regions.

    In 2019, as Trump was ramping up the coup attempt and brutal sanctions regime against Venezuela, Twitter assisted the US efforts to delegitimize Venezuela’s elected government. Twitter suspended the accounts of Venezuelan government officials and agencies, including the English language account of President Nicolas Maduro himself. At the same time, Twitter “verified” officials in the US-backed self-appointed “government” attempting to overthrow Venezuela’s elected executive (Grayzone, 8/24/19).

    A longstanding issue with the platform is its arbitrary enforcement of the rules against critics of US policy. The platform often suspends or bans users for alleged violations with no explanation.

    Middle East Eye: Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army 'psyops' soldier

    Twitter‘s executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East was simultaneously working for a unit that gives the British military “the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level” (Middle East Eye, 9/30/19).

    Twitter, like other SiliconValley behemoths, has numerous links to the national security state. An investigation by Middle East Eye (9/30/19) revealed that one of Twitter’s top executives was also a member of one of the British military’s psychological warfare units, the 77th Brigade. Gordon MacMillan, who holds the top editorial position for the Middle East and North Africa at Twitter, joined the UK’s “information warfare” unit in 2015 while he was at Twitter. One UK general told MEE that the unit specialized in developing “the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level.” The story was met with near total silence in US and UK press (FAIR.org, 10/24/19), and MacMillan still works for Twitter.

    Twitter also partners with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a hawkish think tank funded by the military industry and the US government, for its content moderation policies. In 2020, Twitter worked closely with the ASPI to remove over 170,000 low-follower accounts they alleged to be favorable to the Communist Party of China. More recently, Twitter and ASPI have announced a partnership ostensibly aimed at fighting disinformation and misinformation.

    Twitter’s Strategic Response Team, in charge of making decisions about which content should be suppressed, was headed by Jeff Carlton, who previously worked for both the CIA and FBI. In fact, MintPress News (6/21/22) reported on the dozens of former FBI agents that have joined Twitter’s ranks over the years. Elon Musk’s controlled leak of internal communications, known as the “Twitter Files,” has renewed attention to the close relationship between the agency and the platform.

    Declassified Australia: MASSIVE ANTI-RUSSIAN ‘BOT ARMY’ EXPOSED BY AUSTRALIAN RESEARCHERS

    “In the first week of the Ukraine/Russia war there was a huge mass of pro-Ukrainian hashtag bot activity,” Declassified Australia (11/3/22) reported. “Approximately 3.5 million tweets using the hashtag #IStandWithUkraine were sent by bots in that first week.”

    Though Twitter has previously denied directly “coordinat[ing] with other entities when making content moderation decisions,” recent reporting has revealed a deep level of integration between federal intelligence agencies, and Twitter’s content moderation policies. In part 6 of the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi reported that the FBI has over 80 agents dedicated to flagging content on the platform and interfacing directly with Twitter leadership. Last year, emails leaked to the Intercept (10/31/22) showed how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Twitter had an established process for content takedown requests from the agency related to election security.

    The platform is clearly an important hub for pro-Ukrainian sentiment online, though not all of the activity is organic. In fact, one study (Declassified Australia, 11/3/22) released last year found a deluge of pro Ukrainian bots. Australian researchers studied a sample of over 5 million tweets about the war, and found that 90% of the total were pro-Ukrainian (identified using the #IStandWithUkraine hashtag or variations), and estimated that up to 80% of them were bots. Though researchers did not determine the precise origin of these accounts, it was obvious that they were sponsored by “pro-Ukrainian authorities.” The sheer volume of tweets undoubtedly helped shape online sentiment about the war.

    It appears that Washington understands the importance of Twitter in shaping public sentiments. When Musk originally set his sights on buying the platform, the White House even considered opening a national security review of Musk’s business ventures, citing Musk’s “increasingly Russia-friendly stance.” These concerns were prompted by Musk’s plan to bar SpaceX’s StarLink system from being used in Ukraine, after a spat between Musk and a Ukrainian official. The concerns also came after Musk (10/3/22) tweeted out the outlines to a potential peace proposal between Russia and Ukraine. This proposal was met with scorn and shock among American elite circles, where escalation rather than peace is the dominant position (FAIR.org, 3/22/22).

    Musk and the national security state

    MintPress: Elon Musk Is Not a Renegade Outsider – He’s a Massive Pentagon Contractor

    Alan MacLeod (MintPress, 5/31/22): Elon Musk “is no threat to the powerful, entrenched elite: he is one of them.”

    But Musk’s hot take on the Ukraine war should not be taken as proof of Musk’s anti establishment bona fides. Far from being an establishment outsider, Elon Musk himself is a major figure in the military industrial complex, and represents the long tradition of Silicon Valley giants being thoroughly enmeshed in the military and intelligence wars.

    Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, is a major military contractor, earning billions of dollars from the US national security state. It has received contracts to launch GPS technology into orbit to assist with the US drone war. The Pentagon has also contracted the company to build missile defense satellites. SpaceX has further won contracts from the Air Force, Space Defense Agency and National Reconnaissance Organization, and has launched spy satellites to be used by the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies (MintPress, 5/31/22).

    In fact, SpaceX’s existence is largely owed to military and intelligence ties. One of its earliest backers of the company was the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the same military research agency that gave us much of the technology that defines the modern internet age.

    Mike Griffin, then the president of the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, was a close associate of Musk’s and was deeply involved in SpaceX’s conception. When Griffin became head of NASA under Bush Jr., he awarded Musk a $396 million dollar contract before SpaceX had even successfully flown a rocket. This later ballooned to a $1 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station.

    After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Musk made headlines by offering to donate his Starlink technology to the Ukrainian government to keep the country online. Starlink, a satellite-based internet provider, was essential to Ukraine’s war effort after the Russian attack disabled much of its traditional military communications. It has enabled Ukrainians to quickly share battlefield intelligence, and connect with US support troops to perform “telemaintenance.”

    Musk’s offer to “donate” the technology earned him a lot of positive press, but it was quietly revealed later that the US government had been paying SpaceX millions of dollars for the technology—despite what SpaceX officials had told the public. According to the Washington Post (4/8/22), the money was funneled through USAID, an organization that has long been a tool of US regime change efforts, and a front for covert intelligence operations.

    Multiple reports have called the Starlink technology a game-changer in the war. The Pentagon’s director of electronic warfare fawned over Starlink’s capabilities, calling them “eye-watering.” The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff honored Musk by name, saying that he symbolized “the combination of the civil and military cooperation and teamwork that makes the United States the most powerful country in space.”

    Ukraine isn’t the only area of interest where Musk’s Starlink is involved. As protests began to rock Iran over the country’s treatment of women, the US saw an opportunity to increase internal, destabilizing pressure on the government—long a goal of US policy in the region. Amid Iran’s crackdown on the internet, the Biden administration solicited Musk for assistance in using Starlink to circumvent blackouts. Later, Starlink terminals began to be smuggled into the country.

    The relationship between Musk and the security state is so strong that one official even told Bloomberg (10/20/22) that “the US government would also use Starlink in the event of telecommunications outage,” hinting at links to high-level national contingency planning.

    Continuity of governance?

    The conversation surrounding Twitter has centered around whether or not Elon Musk is a free-speech advocate, though little has focused on the implications of a military contractor having complete control over such an important platform. Though Musk may (or may not) be stepping down as CEO, the platform will remain his domain.

    Many things have changed under Musk’s Twitter, but Twitter’s role as a megaphone for US government–funded media has not. It would take a large research study to understand precisely how much impact Twitter’s misapplication of its own policies has on the propagation. But even without this data, it is clear that the platform’s design serves to nudge users away from most media funded by Washington-unfriendly governments, and, in the case of the Ukraine War, push users toward media funded by the US government. Musk’s status as a military contractor only underscores that challenging US foreign policy objectives is unlikely to be a priority for the company.

    The post Under Musk, Twitter Continues to Promote US Propaganda Networks appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • CNN Recruits Washington’s Worst Warmonger The Instant He Leaves Congress

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    CNN has shattered the speed of light in its haste to recruit former representative Adam Kinzinger to its punditry lineup the millisecond he left congress.

    Kinzinger, who prior to being redistricted out of his House seat received handsome campaign contributions from arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, was arguably the most egregious warmonger on Capitol Hill.

    Nobody in congress lobbied as aggressively to start World War Three as Kinzinger did last year; he tried to advance a bill authorizing hot war against Russia if Moscow crossed specified red lines in Ukraine but couldn’t get cosponsors because even his fellow congressional hawks thought it was too insane. He was the loudest voice in the US government publicly advocating a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the early weeks of the war, an idea that was slammed by the mass media as it would necessarily have entailed the US military shooting down Russian war planes and aggressively tempted nuclear war.

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

    All those calls for WWIII must have landed him this gig https://t.co/W5A9zOblNG

    — Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) January 5, 2023

    Kinzinger was such a demented omnicidal maniac in 2022 that while still in office he became an official member of the empire-backed online troll farm known as “NAFO”, which was founded by an actual neo-Nazi whom Kinzinger openly supported both before and after revelations emerged of the founder’s expressions of hatred for Jews and fondness for Hitler. While still a sitting congressman he was flagging trolls with hashtags inviting them to swarm the social media comments of critics of US foreign policy who opposed his psychopathic warmongering.

    Before the war in Ukraine Kinzinger was calling for the re-invasion of Afghanistan immediately following the US troop withdrawal and raging about public opposition to “endless war.” Before that he was cheerleading Trump’s assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, calling for US interventionism in Venezuela, defending the US-backed war on Yemen, calling for the invasion of Syria, and just generally pushing for more war and militarism at every opportunity. Before that, he was helping the empire kill Iraqis as a member of the US Air Force.

    Kinzinger is such an obnoxious warmonger online that I myself have called him “the single worst Twitter account that has ever existed,” long before his CNN gig was a twinkle in his eye.

    So it’s no wonder a warmongering propaganda network snapped him up the instant he became available, ensuring that his warmongering receives as large a platform as possible. As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp quipped regarding CNN’s hire, “All those calls for WWIII must have landed him this gig.”

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

    Shame on my audience for getting such an obvious and easy question wrong (though MSNBC was certainly a reasonable guess): https://t.co/MAQjJraBrd pic.twitter.com/xcETe1fRJg

    — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 5, 2023

    Kinzinger’s assimilation into the war propaganda industry was so predictable that Glenn Greenwald included it in a Twitter poll this past October asking his audience where they expect his career will take him after he leaves congress, with CNN being one of the options. As one Twitter follower put it, the “congressman to media commentator to lobbyist revolving door spins so fast in Washington, it actually affects the earth’s rotation relative to the sun.”

    War is the glue that holds the US empire together, and to serve that purpose it requires endless war propaganda. War propagandists are not any more separate from the endless mass military slaughter they facilitate than the people who actually pull the trigger, and we see this illustrated in the way Kinzinger has been able to slide seamlessly from dropping bombs to passing bomb-dropping legislation to manufacturing consent for the dropping of bombs.

    We live under an empire that is fueled by lies and human blood, and driven by the ongoing efforts of murderous war sluts like Adam Kinzinger.

    CNN will be perfect for him.

    ________________

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

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  • Growing Up Means Extracting The Beliefs That Were Placed In Your Head By Others

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Most people never grow up. Not really.

    Growing up means maturing. It means becoming independent. It means developing into your own person and standing on your own two feet.

    Few people really do this. Because few people ever get around to extracting all the beliefs that were placed in their heads by other people.

    Most people have similar beliefs to their parents about life, society, politics and religion. If it’s not their parents it’s other influential figures in their lives like friends, teachers, or the media pundits they follow.

    More significantly, most people hold a lot of beliefs about themselves and their place in the world that were put in their heads by people they care about. The average person goes from cradle to grave without ever seriously examining their beliefs about who they are, what they’re like, or any of the other ideas about themselves that get inserted into their minds by the verbal and nonverbal communications of the people around them.

    For most people, a huge amount of their personality is pretty much locked into place in early childhood by the life experiences that they have with other people during that time. They’re still essentially who they were when they were kids, but we call them grown ups just because they’re a certain age and can have kids of their own.

    Really growing up means doing the hard, earnest work of extracting all the bullshit that was placed in our minds over the course of our lives by people who were just as immature, traumatized and confused as us. It means really excavating our beliefs about ourselves, about life, and about our world, all the way down to the old subconscious beliefs that are buried so deep inside us that we don’t even normally notice them.

    This isn’t easy. It takes work, it takes dedication, and it takes courage, because truly relinquishing long-held core beliefs is like a kind of death. But unless we’ve done it we can’t really say we have matured as human beings, because we’re still existing in more or less the same state we were in when we were children: sponge-like imitators who soaked up whatever was placed in our minds by trusted authorities.

    And to make things even harder, it turns out that there’s a whole other category of people who’ve been placing beliefs in our minds, and they’re complete strangers. It turns out that powerful people have been pouring massive amounts of wealth and effort into manipulating the way the public thinks, speaks and behaves in order to manufacture consent for agendas and status quo policies which benefit them.

    It’s obnoxiously unfair, if you think about it. You go through all the hard work of uprooting all the dopey nonsense that was put into your head by your parents, preachers and teachers since you were small, only to find out that you’ve got a bunch of other garbage in your head that was dumped there by the news media and the manufacturers of mainstream culture for the benefit of a few powerful assholes. Just as you put down your shovel and got ready to relax, you’ve got to pick it back up and get right back to shoveling.

    But hell, that’s the job. That’s what it takes to become a mature human being. You’ve got to rip out all the crap that was placed in your mind over the course of your life by confused elders and corrupt manipulators if you want to live a life that’s grounded in truth instead of bullshit.

    This doesn’t mean that you can’t have beliefs, or that you can’t have beliefs that came from other people. Humanity has been full of brilliant minds with great ideas, and the world is full of true and helpful information. The difference is that you are consciously choosing as a mature adult to take on board whatever you take on board for however long you find it useful, rather than mindlessly ingesting it into your worldview because someone told you to.

    And you can’t do that until you’ve cleared everything out. Stripped your worldview bare of everything that was put there before you were mature enough to lucidly interrogate its truthfulness, including your most fundamental assumptions about self, life, and reality. From there, you can consciously construct your own worldview based on what you have independently found to be true.

    Again, this isn’t something most people tend to do, including the powerful people who are destroying our world and driving us toward disaster and annihilation. Our world is being steered by confused psychological infants who have not done the work of becoming true adults, and it’s going about as well as it sounds like it would go.

    Humanity needs to mature if we are to avert disaster and begin creating a healthy world. We are each singularly responsible for our own role in that maturing process. Every mature human brings humanity as a whole that much closer to maturity, and provides one more voice that can help orient the world toward truth. The work starts here and now, beneath our own feet.

    __________________

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

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    Feature image via Adobe Stock.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

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

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

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

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

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

    ❖

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

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

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

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

    And they do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ___________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Propaganda Isn’t Something That Only Happens To Others: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    One of the empire’s strongest assets is the widespread assumption that propaganda is something that only happens to other people. Another is the widespread assumption that propaganda only comes from other countries and other political ideologies.

    The status quo remains the status quo because those who benefit from the status quo are able to use the wealth and power given to them by the status quo to dissuade the public from overthrowing the status quo using status quo media to manufacture their consent for the status quo.

    ❖

    The empire will use any ideology to advance its agendas. “Wokeism”, white supremacism, Zionism, Christian fundamentalism, liberalism, conservatism, progressivism — whatever ideological sympathies can be leveraged, will be leveraged.

    The empire will use Nazism and wokeness, at the same time, on the same agenda. Look at the way the empire is using neo-Nazism to advance one part of its Ukraine agenda and using woke-sounding jargon to advance another part. They’re two diametrically opposed values, but it doesn’t matter because the empire has no values besides the pursuit of power.

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    CIA front NED – which has funded US neocolonialism around the world – is using "anti-colonial" and "pro-indigenous" rhetoric to wage information war on Russia and help make Ukraine a US/NATO colony.

    There is nothing that US imperialism will not try to co-opt and empty of meaning https://t.co/CkpK396OtJ

    — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 27, 2022

    The engineering of the empire doesn’t have an ideology for the same reason mugging doesn’t have an ideology; it has one goal, and that goal has nothing to do with anyone’s values or ideals. A con man will say whatever you need to hear to get his hands on your money.

    The empire uses “wokeism” not because the empire gives a shit about social justice, but because that’s where easily leveraged public sympathies are found at the moment. Getting hung up on wokeism is like fixating on the syringe and not the hand that’s holding it or the poison it holds.

    The empire uses ideologies the way we use tools. When it doesn’t need the screwdriver, it picks up the hammer. Right now it’s getting a lot of use out of “wokeism”, and tomorrow it will be something else. Don’t focus so much on the tools, focus on who’s using them, and what they’re being used for.

    ❖

    One of the silliest things about this proxy war is how empire apologists will call it an “unprovoked invasion“, then pivot to gushing about how efficient and cost-effective the war is for advancing US strategic interests against Russia, then pivot right back to calling it an “unprovoked invasion” again.

    These are mutually contradictory positions. Either it’s a completely unprovoked invasion that the US didn’t want, or it’s a highly efficient and cost-effective way of getting Washington everything it wants. It’s nonsensical and naive to believe both.

    ❖

    The dream for automation was that it would be used to eliminate the need for human toil. In practice so far it’s only being used to increase inequality: generating more profits for the ruling class while leaving normal people poorer and more desperate. Market forces only encourage more of this.

    Apologists for the status quo are basically coming right out and telling us that automation will be used to increase income and wealth inequality, and they’re absolutely correct. That’s what’s been happening, and it will continue until it is made to stop.

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

    You asked for $25 minimum wage

    You get: First fully automated McDonalds in Texas pic.twitter.com/hd5AsBTOwX

    — ELIJAH (@ElijahSchaffer) December 22, 2022

    Meanwhile we’re seeing the steady normalization of increasingly militarized robots, which will eventually become capable of suppressing domestic uprisings without the annoying human tendency to refuse to fire upon their countrymen, or even switch sides and join the revolution. So we appear to be headed for tremendous poverty and injustice if we don’t force a change in the trajectory we’re on, and if we don’t force it soon they’ll have robotic security systems to stop us. The robots will either be made to work for us, or they’ll be used against us.

    This is the trajectory we’ll be on as long as capitalism remains in place and the class which rules it retains control of automation. Vastly unequal tech dystopia where the people are controlled by AI and weaponized robots is the final stage of capitalism (before death by ecocide).

    ❖

    I often hear people saying that those who have been propagandized into accepting the mainstream worldview are stupid, but from what I can tell the successfulness of empire propaganda in taking over people’s minds has very little to do with anyone’s intelligence. You’ve probably noticed that some of the smartest people you know in your own life uncritically regurgitate the same narratives about the world that you’ll hear on CNN or the BBC. Generally, intelligent people differ from the less intelligent only in that they have more clever justifications and defenses for the perspectives they’ve been propagandized into believing.

    The tendency to meet authority-endorsed information with critical thought and scrutiny seems to have a lot more to do with the dumb luck of having been conditioned to do so by the kind of life you have lived. If there’s any sort of personal attribute that leaves one less vulnerable to propaganda, it could be described as a sincere devotion to the truth. A sincere devotion to knowing what’s true, and to seeing, thinking and living accordingly. This quality can emerge in people of any kind of intelligence.

    A sincere devotion to the truth also happens to be the quality most essential for realizing spiritual enlightenment. It’s also the quality most essential for living a happy life. Whatever that strange spark is and whatever gives rise to it wherever it shows up, it’s pretty clear that it’s the guiding light that will lead our species to sanity.

    _________________

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

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    Feature image via Adobe Stock.

  • What is the Rules-Based Order?

    Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder & political prisoner, epitomizes what the rules-based order means in the lexicon of US empire.

    In fits of, what might well be termed, masochism, some of us now-and-then tune in to the legacy media. When doing so, one is likely to hear western-aligned politicians rhetorize ad nauseam about the linguistically vogue rules-based order. Now and then, the word “international” is also inserted: the rules-based international order.

    But what exactly is this rules-based order?

    The way that the wording rules-based order is bandied about makes it sound like it has worldwide acceptance and that it has been around for a long time. Yet it comes across as a word-of-the-moment, both idealistic and disingenuous. Didn’t people just use to say international law or refer to the International Court of Justice, Nuremberg Law, the UN Security Council, or the newer institution — the International Criminal Court? Moreover, the word rules is contentious. Some will skirt the rules, perhaps chortling the aphorism that rules are meant to be broken. Rules can be unjust, and shouldn’t these unjust rules be broken, or better yet, disposed of? Wouldn’t a more preferable wording refer to justice? And yes, granted that justice can be upset by miscarriages. Or how about a morality-based order?

    Nonetheless, it seems this wording of a rules-based order has jumped to the fore. And the word order makes it sound a lot like there is a ranking involved. Since China and Russia are advocating multipolarity, it has become clearer that the rules-based order, which is commonspeak among US and US-aligned politicians, is pointing at unipolarity, wherein the US rules a unipolar, US-dominated world.

    An Australian thinktank, the Lowy Institute, has pointed to a need “to work towards a definition” for a rules-based order. It asks, “… what does America think the rules-based order is for?

    Among the reasons cited are “… to entrench and even sanctify an American-led international system,” or “that the rules-based order is a fig leaf, a polite fiction that masks the harsh realities of power,” and that “… the rules-based order can protect US interests as its power wanes relative to China…”

    China is aware of this, and this is expressed in the Asia Times headline: “US ‘rules-based order’ is a myth and China knows it.”

    The Hill wrote, “The much-vaunted liberal international order – recently re-branded as the rules-based international order or RBIO – is disintegrating before our very eyes.” As to what would replace the disintegrated order, The Hill posited, “The new order, reflecting a more multipolar and multicivilizational distribution of power, will not be built by Washington for Washington.”

    The Asia Times acknowledged that it has been a “West-led rules-based order” and argued that a “collective change is needed to keep the peace.”

    It is a given that the rules-based order is an American linguistic instrument designed to preserve it as a global hegemon. To rule is America’s self-admitted intention. It has variously declared itself to be the leader of the free world, the beacon on the hill, exceptional, the indispensable nation (in making this latter distinction, a logical corollary is drawn that there must be dispensable nations — or in the ineloquent parlance of former president Donald Trump: “shithole” nations).

    Thus, the US has placed itself at the apex of the international order. It seeks ultimate control through full-spectrum dominance. It situates its military throughout the world; it surrounds countries with bases and weapons that it is inimically disposed toward — for example, China and Russia. It refuses to reject the first use of nuclear weapons. It does not reject the use of landmines. It still has a chemical-weapons inventory, and it allegedly carries out bioweapons research, as alluded to by Russia, which uncovered several clandestine biowarfare labs in Ukraine. This news flummoxed Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Dominance is not about following rules, it is about imposing rules. That is the nature of dominating. Ergo, the US rejects the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and went so far as to sanction the ICC and declare ICC officials persona non grata when its interests were threatened.

    *****
    Having placed itself at the forefront, the US empire needs to keep its aligned nations in line.

    Thus it was that Joe Biden, already back in 2016, was urging Canada’s prime minister Trudeau to be a leader for rules-based world order.

    When Trudeau got together with his Spanish counterpart, Pedro Sánchez, they reaffirmed their defence of the rule-based international order.

    It is a commonly heard truism that actions speak louder than words. But an examination of Trudeau’s words compared to his actions speaks to a contradiction when it comes to Canada and the rule of law.

    So how does Trudeau apply rules based law?1

    Clearly, in Canada it points to a set of laws having been written to coerce compliance. This is especially evident in the case of Indigenous peoples.2

    It seems Canada is just a lackey for the leader of the so-called free world.

    One of the freedoms the US abuses is the freedom not to sign or ratify treaties. Even the right-wing thinktank, the Council on Foreign Relations lamented, “In lists of state parties to globally significant treaties, the United States is often notably absent. Ratification hesitancy is a chronic impairment to international U.S. credibility and influence.”

    The CFR added, “In fact, the United States has one of the worst records of any country in ratifying human rights and environmental treaties.”

    It is a matter of record that the US places itself above the law. As stated, the US does not recognize the ICC; as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the US has serially abused its veto power to protect the racist, scofflaw nation of Israel; it ignored a World Court ruling that found the US guilty of de facto terrorism for mining the waters around Nicaragua.

    The historical record reveals that the US, and its Anglo-European-Japanese-South Korean acolytes, are guilty of numerous violations of international law (i.e., the rules-based, international order).

    When it comes to the US, the contraventions of the rules-based order are myriad. To mention a few:

    1. Currently, the US is occupying Syria and stealing the oil of the Syrian people;
    2. It attacked, occupied, and plundered Afghanistan;
    3. It has been carrying out an embargo, condemned by the international community, against Cuba and its people for six decades;
    4. The US has been in illegal occupation of Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay since 1903; even if deemed to be legal, it is clearly unethical;
    5. American empire has a history of blatant, wanton disregard for democracy and sovereignty;
    6. The US funded the Maidan coup that overthrew the elected president of Ukraine, leading to today’s special military operation devastating Ukraine, which continues to fight a US-NATO proxy war.
    7. Then, there is the undeniable fact that the US exists because of a genocide wreaked by its colonizers, which has been perpetuated ever since.
    8. Even the accommodations that the US imposed on the peoples it dispossessed are ignored, revealed by a slew of broken treaties.3

    The history of US actions (as opposed to its words) and its complicit tributaries needs to be kept firmly in mind when the legacy media unquestioningly reports the pablum about adhering to a rules-based order.

    1. See also Yves Engler, “Ten ways Liberals undermined international rules-based order,” rabble.ca, 17 September 2021.
    2. Read Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality, 2018.
    3. Vine Deloria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence, 1985. This governmental infidelity to treaties is also true in the Canadian context.
    The post What is the Rules-Based Order? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Claim That The Ukraine War Advances US Interests Discredits The Claim That It’s “Unprovoked”

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    One of the most illustrative examples of how the mainstream worldview is based on narratives rather than facts is the way Republican officials like senate minority leader Mitch McConnell have been branded servants of Russia despite consistent track records as virulent Russia hawks.

    “Moscow Mitch”, as Democrats absurdly titled him during the height of Russiagate hysteria in 2019, gave a speech on the Senate floor on Wednesday arguing that the primary reason to back Ukraine in its war against Russia is because doing so serves US interests.

    “President Zelensky is an inspiring leader,” McConnell said in his speech ahead of the Ukrainian president’s visit to Washington. “But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests.”

    McConnell argued that backing Ukraine “will massively wear down the arsenal that is available to Putin for future efforts to use bullying and bloodshed,” taking a stab at the Biden administration for not requesting more money for this immensely useful proxy war.

    “So I’ll say it one more time. Continuing our support for Ukraine is morally right, but it is not only that. It is also a direct investment in cold, hard, American interests,” McConnell said. “That’s why Republicans rejected the Biden Administration’s original request for Ukraine assistance as insufficient.

    “Finally, we all know that Ukraine’s fight to retake its territory is neither the beginning nor end of the West’s broader strategic competition with Putin’s Russia,” McConnell concluded. “Increasing the pressure on Putin’s regime can and should be a bipartisan priority.”

    You see US empire lackeys gushing all the time about how extraordinarily efficient and cost-effective the proxy war in Ukraine is for furthering US interests against Russia, which is funny because they spend the rest of the time talking about how this invasion was “unprovoked” and rending their garments about how horrible it is. The official imperial position is somehow simultaneously (A) “We hate this war and never wanted it,” and (B) “This war benefits us tremendously.”

    The only way to reconcile these two positions is to believe that Vladimir Putin acted against the interests of Russia in the service of the United States by invading Ukraine, for no other reason than because he is too stupid and evil to do otherwise. The other choice is to do what most empire loyalists do and simply not think very hard about those obvious contradictions.

    Alternatively, you can consider the possibility that Putin was pressured into choosing between two bad options by the many aggressive provocations the empire has been making for years. Empire apologists always claim that western provocations had nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine, but if that’s true then why did so many western experts spend years warning that western provocations would lead to an invasion of Ukraine?

    Plainly the claim that the US is just an innocent bystander helping its good buddy Ukraine because it loves freedom and democracy is discredited by the claim — often made by those very same claimants — that this war serves US interests. But you hear them bounce seamlessly between the two all the time.

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    Some of the usual suspects are using Zelensky's visit to whine about how expensive aid to Ukraine is, so it's a good opportunity for this CEPA report that notes that for just 5% of the US military budget, we've disabled 50% of Russia's military power. https://t.co/T4ksyeqx3M

    — Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) December 21, 2022

    There’s a viral thread making the rounds on Twitter right now by a historian named Brett Devereaux that exemplifies this perfectly. In the first tweet in the thread he’s enthusing about how “for just 5% of the US military budget, we’ve disabled 50% of Russia’s military power,” then in the very next post in the thread he’s weeping about what a humanitarian crisis the war is and how we just want peace, and then in the very next post after that he’s saying “from a pure realpolitik perspective, Putin’s war was a massive blunder that has strengthened the US global position, degrading Russian capabilities (which frees up resources for other threats) and strengthening our alliances.”

    California representative Adam Schiff, who has been calling this war “unprovoked” since the invasion, was saying all the way back during the Trump impeachment hearings of 2020 that “the US aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

    Another congressman, Dan Crenshaw, said on Twitter this past May that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”

    “It is in America’s interests to help Ukraine defeat one of our most powerful foes,” tweeted The Atlantic’s David French in the wake of Zelensky’s PR appearance in Washington.

    “It is in America’s national security interests for Putin’s Russia to be defeated in Ukraine,” tweeted warmongering senator Lindsey Graham.

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    US chauvinism & warmongering is so ingrained that @AdamSchiff can openly declare, in Jan 2020, that US uses Ukraine to “fight Russia over there,” and our elites applaud. Fast forward two years later when Russia fights back, and the same circle is outraged. pic.twitter.com/6B4QVFSZvV

    — Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) February 26, 2022

    Statements like these should fully discredit the official narrative that the US is helping Ukraine fight off an unprovoked attack by a reckless tyrant. These are mutually contradictory positions; either it’s a completely unprovoked invasion that Washington didn’t want, or it’s an excellent way of getting Washington everything it wants. It’s nonsensical and naive to believe both.

    But of course they do not discredit the official Ukraine narrative in the eyes of the public, because the US has the most effective propaganda machine that has ever existed. The many glaring inconsistencies and misdeeds of the empire are simply airbrushed away with a little spin and sweet talk.

    If it weren’t for the imperial spin machine, nobody would believe the US just coincidentally stumbled its way into a lucky proxy war that happens to help it advance its agendas of global domination.

    ________________

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

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  • The McProxy War Continues: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The war in Ukraine is so aggressively marketed and PR-intensive and so interwoven with US corporations we should just call it the McProxy War.

    ❖

    The mass media enthusiastically promote US propaganda of their own volition. The National Endowment for Democracy openly runs information ops to help overthrow foreign governments. Social media corporations voluntarily and intimately coordinate with US government agencies. What does the CIA even do anymore?

    ❖

    The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats say they want to do good things but they’re lying and Republicans say they want to do bad things and they’re telling the truth.

    ❖

    By golly, I’m beginning to suspect the “national security concerns” about releasing all JFK documents are concerns that it would completely invalidate the entire US government.

    ❖

    Hard proof could emerge of the CIA directly assassinating JFK and as long as it was only covered by Tucker Carlson it would have zero meaningful impact.

    Carlson now plays the role of Alex Jones: make sure he’s the only one talking about an inconvenient truth and it makes it look like a right wing crackpot conspiracy theory. Only difference is Carlson has a much larger audience and therefore kills the story much more effectively.

    What does it look like when someone criticizes nuclear brinkmanship with Russia, for example, and then starts babbling about woke M&Ms and saying the commies are trying to make your son wear a dress? It makes it all look bogus. And that’s exactly what Alex Jones would do too: say real things about how the US is arming terrorists in Syria or whatever and then turn around and start babbling about Hillary Clinton being a reptile and child slave colonies on Mars, making the whole thing look crazy.

    I used to think it was great when I’d see Tucker Carlson covering an inconvenient narrative like the chemical weapons false flag in Syria or whatever. I’d say “Ah good, it’s getting mainstream coverage!” But over the years I’ve seen Carlson’s “coverage” do far more harm than good.

    Now good faith critics of empire get associated with Carlson and his right wing ideology whenever they talk about unauthorized narratives. Even very left wing empire critics like me get called right wing for criticizing US proxy warfare in Ukraine, just because Carlson does.

    And this is possible because only the farthest fringes of the left ever talk about unauthorized narratives. No left-leaning media outlets close to the mainstream ever provide meaningful coverage to transgressive stories, so it makes it possible to spin them as right wing issues. So I’m not actually even blaming Carlson for this. Even if there wasn’t a mountain of evidence that he’s a US intelligence lackey (and there is), it’d still be primarily the fault of the left (and what passes for the “left” in the US) for leaving a right wing pundit to cover this stuff.

    And of course it’s not like Carlson is only reporting inconvenient facts. He spouts mainstream empire propaganda constantly. He’s the single most effective promulgator of anti-China propaganda in the English-speaking world. So he’s like a two-way propaganda street: the empire reverse-launders information through Carlson to make good info look dirty, and also he pipes propaganda into the minds of his establishment-wary audience making bad information look good. He may be America’s best and most effective propagandist.

    I don’t claim to know exactly how planned out this all is or who’s doing the planning, I only know that that’s the effect of what Carlson does. When someone very prominent does something very convenient for the most powerful people in the world, it’s probably not an accident.

    ❖

    ❖

    It’s possible that the empire’s violent shutdown of the awakenings of the 1960s was the mortal wound that would ultimately kill our species, and the last few decades have just been humanity lying on the ground bleeding out and waiting to die of ecocide or nuclear armageddon.

    It’s also possible that awakening is inevitable, and that the sixties were the first morning stirrings before we opened our eyes to the light.

    _______________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • US Military Thanks And Praises Retiring CNN “Journalist” For Her Service

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The US military has been showering CNN’s retiring Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr with effusive thanks and praise for her lifetime of service, giving some insight into the cozy working relationship between the media and the war machine inside the US empire.

    “Today closes a remarkable career for CNN’s Barbara Starr, a leader in the Pentagon Press Corps,” reads a post by the Twitter account for US Central Command. “Her aggressive reporting and tireless commitment to the truth brought this Nation closer to its military. She will forever be missed.”

    Starr received a standing ovation at a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday after Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder sang her praises and thanked her for two decades on the job.

    “I’d like to take this opportunity to say farewell to our media colleague, Miss Barbara Starr,” Ryder said. “Barbara has reported for CNN for over 20 years, and has been a fixture in the Pentagon Press Corps, and today marks her final day with CNN after a storied and fully-impressive — excuse me — truly impressive career.”

    “So Barbara, on behalf of Secretary of Defense Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley and the entire Department of Defense, I would like to extend a special congratulations and thank you for your many years of timely, insightful and important reporting on our nation’s most pressing defense issues,” Ryder continued. “And as someone who has worked with you for many of those last 20 years and someone who has had to take your late-night phone calls and emails and answer your tough, but fair questions, I can say from personal experience that the U.S. public and audiences worldwide have been well served by your in-depth reporting from the Pentagon, your journalistic integrity and your determination to tell the stories of service members worldwide, and to ensure the government and DOD remain transparent and accountable to the taxpayers and the American public they serve. Congratulations again, and we wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.”

    “You know Department of Defense better then [sic] most. We will miss you ! Thanks for your service to our Democracy! Free Independent Press !”, retired lieutenant general Russel L. Honoré told Starr on Twitter.

    I actually can’t think of a clearer sign that the US does not have a “free independent press” than for the US military to be gushing affectionately about the career of a longtime CNN Pentagon correspondent, myself. And I can’t think of a more disgraceful way for a journalist to retire than with a standing ovation at the Pentagon.

    Surely there can be no clearer a mark of journalistic failure than being thanked by the US military for your lifetime of service. If your journalistic relationship with the corrupt and murderous US military was ever anything other than oppositional, and their feelings toward you anything but hostile, it’s because you were never a journalist. You were their PR agent.

    And indeed one need only look at Starr’s output over the course of her career to know that this was the case. Watch her uncritically parroting US government claims about chemical weapons in Syria. Watch the infomercial-like way she reports on US “war on terror” activity in the Middle East. Watch her enthusing about what a “win” the capture of Muammar Gaddafi was for the United States. Watch her finger-wagging at the president of the Philippines after he verbally insulted the president of the United States. Compare the way she talks about allegations of Russian war crimes and US war crimes.

    “I’ve been listening to her for years, and I can’t recall a single time she wasn’t just reading a Pentagon press release,” tweeted activist Steve Patt.

    The US military has such adoration for Barbara Starr because she is a war propagandist, just like the rest of the mainstream western news media who report on US foreign policy. And the Pentagon was joined by Starr’s fellow propagandists in celebrating her storied career.

    “You are so well-respected, not only here at CNN but in the broader community of journalists — I know how well-respected you are at the Pentagon,” anchor Erica Hill told Starr on CNN.

    “CNN and our viewers have benefited greatly from her truly extraordinary reporting skills and her deep knowledge of the US military, that I truly appreciate as a former CNN correspondent myself,” said CNN’s Wolf Blitzer during his farewell to Starr.

    “So well deserved. Barbara was one of the best journalists I worked with at CNN. A Pentagon legend,” tweeted Murdoch pundit Piers Morgan.

    This is everything that is wrong with news media in the western world. Journalists are supposed to hold power to account with the light of truth, and that cannot happen if they are building warm, affectionate relationships with the people they’re meant to be aggressively scrutinizing. If the public is getting their information about the workings of the most powerful military force ever assembled by people who are friendly with and sympathetic to that military force, then they cannot possibly be getting accurate information about it. The press cannot possibly be ensuring that “the government and DOD remain transparent and accountable to the taxpayers and the American public they serve.”

    And that is of course the point. The mass media of the western world do not exist to inform, they exist to misinform. To create a compliant and obedient populace who doesn’t interfere with the mechanisms of empire or the violence necessary for upholding it. To, as CENTCOM so aptly put it, bring the nation closer to its military.

    That was Barbara Starr’s entire job, it will be the job of whoever replaces her, and it will be the job of everyone else in the Pentagon press room with 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, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • The Empire Is Built On Our Closed Eyes: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    They can’t work toward peace in Ukraine because it will serve Putin. They can’t work toward peace in Yemen because it will serve Iran. They can’t end the occupation of Syria because it will serve Assad. They can’t stop military expansionism because it will serve China.

    Or, maybe they’re just warmongers.

    ❖

    It’s actually very concerning that the US empire is now escalating the war in Ukraine by crossing many lines it said it would not cross at the beginning of the war, and justifying those escalations by basically just saying “Yeah well we decided that we want to do that after all.” Recent examples include greenlighting Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian territory, providing Patriot missiles to the Ukrainian military, and the revelation that British marines have been conducting dangerous covert ops on the ground in Ukraine.

    The empire drew a line ruling out these escalations at the beginning of the war due to fears of uncontrollable outcomes in confronting a nuclear superpower. Now it is crossing those lines without really providing any robust explanation for why it is now considered safe to do so.

    ❖

    I have said it before and I’ll say it again: if you’ve been finding yourself growing concerned about “communism”, it’s because we’re in a new cold war and that’s what your rulers have been propagandizing you to feel. You’re being manipulated into blaming the problems that are being inflicted upon you by your own rulers (including those you voted for) on a country on the other side of the planet, and on a highly marginalized and completely powerless political ideology in your own country.

    Even if you believe communism is bad, communists are nowhere remotely close to having any sort of power in or over the English-speaking world. It’s like spending your life being terrified of tigers. People are just falling for these four delusions:

    1. Thinking communists are anywhere remotely close to having power or taking power in the English-speaking world.
    2. Thinking entirely capitalist things like the Democratic Party and the WEF are “communist”.
    3. Thinking China is a threat.
    4. Confusing the concepts of “communism” and “authoritarianism”.

    Absolutely authoritarianism is growing in the west, and it must be opposed. But can’t you see that the growing tyranny in our capitalist countries has nothing to do with communism, and that confusing it as such gets you shaking your fist at China due to oppression being inflicted upon you by your own rulers?

    ❖

    In case you missed it, a recent DC swamp party for US officials, journalists, think tankers and diplomats at the Ukrainian Embassy was officially sponsored by the US arms manufacturers who’ve profited astronomically from the war in Ukraine, with the logos of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Pratt & Whitney appearing on the actual invitation.

    Are people not yet tired of having their intelligence insulted?

    ❖

    One thing to keep in mind about the Twitter Files exposition of the overlap between Silicon Valley and secretive government agencies is that the overlap is almost certainly worse in Google/YouTube and Meta/Facebook/Instagram. Twitter has historically been the least awful major platform when it comes to resisting resisting government influence.

    ❖

    Most forms of spirituality serve only to sedate people and help them hide from reality, others do the opposite and awaken you to reality. The former is the “opiate of the masses” which creates a sedentary populace; the latter is the sort that’s useful in creating a healthy world.

    I used to hang out on spirituality forums focused on enlightenment, and even with a singular emphasis on awakening it was remarkable how many members used spirituality to hide from reality. From their abusive and unsatisfying relationships and lifestyles. From their trauma. From themselves. In exactly the same way, spirituality has always been used to cover up reality, often in power-serving ways. Before it was glorifying poverty, meekness and obedience; now it’s McMindfulness and other practices to mask the sting of oppressive capitalism.

    In the same way most mind-altering drugs serve only to sedate and escape from reality while the psychedelic variety does the opposite, most forms of spirituality facilitate unconsciousness while authentic spirituality facilitates awakening.

    Authentic spirituality doesn’t seek to give you new beliefs, nor to give you spiritual practices to make reality less abrasive and confronting, but to uncover what’s hidden and stare reality right in the face. It means squarely interrogating all our assumptions about what’s true. Authentic spirituality entails no indoctrination, sedation or escapism, but a curious and sincere exploration of one’s own experience. It seeks to discover what’s true: what’s true about one’s conditioning, about consciousness, about the self, about the way life is experienced.

    There are all sorts of ways authentic spirituality can show up, and within all official branches, schools, factions and iterations of spirituality you’ll see some authentic exploration and lots of inauthentic escapism. A sincere dedication to what’s true happens where it happens.

    ❖

    ❖

    You don’t live in a free country. And no, it’s not because they make you pay taxes or that time they made you wear a mask or whatever. The real reason you don’t live in a free country is much, much bigger than that: you don’t live in a free country because the minds of your countrymen are imprisoned.

    Westerners think they’re free because they can say whatever they want and vote however they want, but what they want is controlled by mass-scale psychological manipulation. Being able to speak and vote as you wish is meaningless if the powerful control what it is that you wish.

    Westerners think they’re free because they can speak their minds, and sure, it’s pleasant to be able to do that. It would be pleasant to have your body trapped a vat with your brain plugged into a blissful virtual reality world, too — but it wouldn’t be freedom. It would be prison disguised as freedom. And that’s what we have here: prison disguised as freedom. The science of modern propaganda has been developing alongside all the other sciences for over a century, and it has advanced just as much as the others have. And now it’s at a point where it can control our very desires.

    It’s generally harder to recognize psychologically abusive relationships than physically abusive ones, because the abuse isn’t as overt, and because the psychological faculties you would normally use to assess situations have been twisted and warped. That’s what’s happening here: people are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into thinking, speaking and acting in a way that serves the powerful, and their minds have become too propaganda-addled to recognize that this is happening. We’re not free, and most can’t even recognize how unfree we are.

    And that’s our real problem: very few of us understand how profoundly unfree we are. Just how much our minds are being squished down into these teeny tiny boxes to prevent us from expanding and realizing our true power and our true potential, and the kind of world we could have. Our slavery is so pervasive that few can even see the full extent of it. Many will say they don’t feel they live in a free country, but if you ask them to explain why, they might say something about drug laws or government regulations on their business or whatever. The abuse is too big for them to truly perceive how bad the whole thing is.

    So we march along to the drumbeat of our rulers, thinking, speaking, shopping, spending, consuming, scrolling, viewing, listening, voting and behaving exactly how they want us to, and mistaking all this for freedom, because we’ve been manipulated into wanting to do those things.

    We won’t ever know true freedom until we find a way to end this. To un-jack our minds from the propaganda matrix they have built for us and begin perceiving reality clearly. Our world. Our country. Our society. Our own minds. Our own authentic desires, free from manipulation.

    Our task, then, is to help awaken as many people as we can to the reality of how unfree we truly are. To be voices whispering in the matrix, beckoning the dreamers toward the real world in as many varied and creative ways ways as we can come up with. To coax those eyes open.

    If we can get a critical mass of people waking up from their propaganda-induced comas, the primary control mechanism holding our enslavement in place will have been shattered. The primary obstacle to a healthy world will be removed.

    An entire empire has been built upon our closed eyelids. When we finally snap them open, it will have to fall.

    _________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Opposing War Is The First Step Toward Moral Politics: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

     

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Forcefully opposing the warmongering and imperialism of your rulers is the very first step toward political morality. It’s not the only step, but it is the first step, because if you haven’t taken that step then no other ostensibly moral politics you might espouse are meaningful.

    Your anti-capitalism is meaningless if you’re not aggressively opposing your government’s mass military murders for power and profit. Your anti-racism is meaningless if you’re not aggressively opposing your government’s butchery and exploitation of brown-skinned people overseas. If you’re not forcefully opposing your government’s warmongering and imperialism, then the rest of your politics are irrelevant, because they are false. A sincerely antiwar right-winger with all the wrong positions on all other issues is still a much better person than you are.

    When I see a lefty voicing solid perspectives without also aggressively opposing the warmongering, militarism and imperialism of their rulers, I personally just ignore them, because their failure in that one area has made a lie of their successes in all the other areas.

    If this seems strange or not obvious to you, it’s simply because you have not spent enough time sincerely contemplating the immense suffering and savagery that is inflicted upon our world by war and imperialism, or learned enough about who the worst offenders are on that front. Literally the only reason western warmongering isn’t met with a backlash of horror and outrage is because it’s been so normalized and propaganda-distorted for us. If we could see what our rulers are doing to people with fresh eyes, we would fall to our knees and scream with rage.

    War is the single worst thing in the world. It’s the most insane thing humans do. The most ruinous. The most traumatizing. The least sustainable. And the US-centralized power alliance is its most egregious perpetrator, by a massive margin.

    There’s no excuse for ignoring this.

    ❖

    Saying a US politician is bad on foreign policy but good on domestic policy is like saying a serial killer was nice to his family. It’s like, okay, who gives a fuck? They’re mass murderers and you should hate them.

    ❖

     

    It’s a bit nutty how the term “Old Left” gets used to describe lefties who oppose war and distrust the US intelligence cartel instead of simply acknowledging that the real left has been effectively stomped out by propaganda and psyops.

    “You’re the Old Left. Those people over there cheering internet censorship and proxy warfare and nuclear brinkmanship, they’re the left now.”

    Are you sure? Are you sure they’re not just a bunch of brainwashed dupes? Because they look an awful lot like brainwashed dupes.

    ❖

    The ruling class has near-perfect class solidarity. Their only differences are on questions like “When is it time to transition civilization to new industries” or “Just how hard can we squeeze the public before the guillotines come out,” which are always resolved fairly amicably. That’s generally about as far as it goes in terms of “power struggles” within the oligarchy or whatever you want to call it. Their class solidarity is so good that the working class struggles to even imagine it; they imagine a lot more conflict among those ranks than there is.

    If the working class had even a fraction of the class solidarity as the ruling class, revolutionary change would be inevitable. Which is why the ruling class pours so much energy into making sure that never happens; they understand the power of class solidarity better than we do.

    ❖

    “Anti-wokeness” is just as much of an establishment-serving energy sink as hyperfixation on identity politics is. It’s a very mainstream narrative push that mainstream conservative politicians are all campaigning on and mainstream right wing pundits are all advancing, clearly geared toward herding the public into mainstream conservative factions. Fixating on either side of the culture war necessarily plays into the same power-serving dynamics you think you’re opposing.

    ❖

    Increasing right-wing panic about communism is based on three major delusions:

    1. That actual communists are anywhere remotely close to having power or taking power in the west.
    2. That entirely capitalist things like the World Economic Forum, the Democratic Party, and the Biden administration are “communist”.
    3. That China is a threat.

    Rightists are panicking about communism more and more because they have been trained to panic about communism by the propaganda they consume. They have been trained to panic about communism because we’re in a new cold war and their panic serves the empire’s information interests. In reality panicking about communism in the west right now makes as much sense as panicking about ghosts or space aliens, but the illusion of a threat is made to feel real by the three delusional narratives I just listed.

    ❖

    There really isn’t enough respect for just how much better the US is at propaganda than other nations. It’s completely incomparable in its power and effectiveness. Comparing Russian and Chinese propaganda to US propaganda is comparing baby scribbles to da Vinci.

    ❖

    Perhaps the most toxic brain poison around right now is the common belief that we have some kind of patriotic duty to facilitate the information interests of our government. You see this in the way any criticism of western militarism gets labeled “propaganda” for a foreign government. If criticizing your government’s foreign policy gets you called a propagandist for Russia or China, what that means is that people believe anything other than alignment with your government’s information interests is dangerous enemy information activity which should be opposed.

    Baked into that position is the assumption that everyone needs to operate as pro bono propagandists for your government, and that anyone who does not do so is a treasonous friend of the enemy. This belief is prevalent in both the political/media class and the mainstream rank-and-file. If people didn’t feel duty bound to protect the information interests of their government, you wouldn’t see so much mindless bleating of “Russian propagandist!” and “CCP propagandist!” at anyone who criticizes the most dangerous foreign policy objectives of their government.

    And it just says so much about the power of the propaganda machine of the US-centralized empire that people not only believe the Official Lines, and they not only parrot the Official Lines, but they actively condemn anyone who calls the Official Lines into question.

    This is brain poison. Can you think of a belief system more toxic for important critical thought than one which says you must forcefully attack any dissent against the most dangerous agendas of the most powerful people in your world? I can’t. It’s a great way to keep people stupid, quiet and obedient.

    ❖

    People defend their rulers for the same reason cultists defend their cult leader: because they’ve been indoctrinated. And usually by the same psychological manipulation techniques.

    ❖

    The least likely outcome for humanity’s future is that we continue along the same trajectory we’ve been on without having to drastically change ourselves and our behavior. That is the least likely thing to happen. We’re headed for massive changes fairly soon, one way or another.

    The humanity of the not-too-distant future operates very differently from the humanity of today, either because it learned to work in cooperation with itself and with its ecosystem or because it’s an extinct species, yet most visions for our future imagine we’ll remain the same. We need to abandon the notion that the humanity of the future will move and operate in more or less the same way as the humanity of today, just with better technology. That is the very least likely of all possible outcomes.

    ________________

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

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  • The Season Finale Of The Hit Show ‘Proxy War’

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Everyone’s talking about the hit series Proxy War, an astronomically high-budget production based on an actual military conflict whose season finale is set to air this month.

    Promotional materials for the episode hint at a heartwarming season wrap-up that’s sure to make wholesome viewing for the whole family, with series star Volodymyr Zelensky being awarded 2022 Person of the Year by Time Magazine.

    This will cap off a wild first season which has seen our hero appear on the cover of Vogue, deliver speeches for the World Economic Forum, the New York Stock Exchange, the Grammy Awards and numerous film festivals, as well as having high-profile meetings with celebrity actors and rock stars.

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

    TIME's 2022 Person of the Year: Volodymyr Zelensky and the spirit of Ukraine #TIMEPOY https://t.co/06Y5fuc0fG pic.twitter.com/i8ZT3d5GDa

    — TIME (@TIME) December 7, 2022

    Proxy War has been a much-needed win for Hollywood, which for years has been largely stuck in a creative rut of meaningless remakes and sequels. A massive PR campaign for a military operation geared toward preserving US imperial hegemony is the biggest thing to hit show business since Spielberg, which is why Zelensky was presented with an Academy Award by actor Sean Penn for his stunning and transcendent performance in the series.

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    Two-time Academy Award winner #SeanPenn gifted his Oscar to Ukrainian president @ZelenskyyUa as a symbol of strength #Zelenskyy #Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar️ pic.twitter.com/8UITVC9y7T

    — CNBC-TV18 (@CNBCTV18News) November 9, 2022

    It was unclear in the beginning if audiences would warm to Proxy War, with some taken aback by the unprecedented media coverage being given to a war that their own government was officially not even involved in. Critics initially panned the practice of ascribing Hollywood action hero-sounding quotes like “I need ammo, not a ride” to Zelensky when he never actually said them, as well as the use of blatant atrocity propaganda full of ham-fisted plotlines like Russians raping babies, and the hackneyed plagiarization of the Libya propaganda narrative that the evil leader of the day is giving his troops Viagra to help them commit mass rape.

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

    Of course the "quote of the year" was invented by an anonymous US officialhttps://t.co/J3MRfAzAPx https://t.co/RtWBm6ESPE

    — Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 11, 2022

    But the numbers are in and it turns out the world is head-over-heels in love with Proxy War’s unique combination of reality TV, inspirational storytelling, mind-crushing internet censorship, and high-octane war propaganda. Naysayers may complain that they are tired of having their intelligence insulted, but as far as John and Jane Q Public are concerned, it can’t get insulted enough.

    Yes sir, western culture may be a stagnant cesspool of plastic performers, empire smut and corporate rimjobs, but boy howdy we can still spin a good yarn when we need to. Stay tuned for Season Two! Will Zelensky finally get a guest spot on Saturday Night Live? Will leading lady Olena Zelenska release that new fashion line? Will rumors prove true of a Muppet movie in Kyiv? Stay tuned and find out soon, right after this short commercial break.

    ________________

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

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  • Transformation of Political Language (Part 2)

    Perhaps one of the most amazing phenomena of the 20th and now 21st century is not Anglo-American empire, understood as military and economic power. Far more remarkable is the fact that in the scope of some two hundred years the English-speaking world; i.e., the British Empire and the American Empire, have produced a cultural and propaganda machine which has completely overwhelmed and occluded two of the oldest extant cultures in the world that of Russia and China. Andre Gunder Frank argued in ReOrient that, in fact, until the middle of the 19th century the de facto centre of the world economy was still East Asia, that is to say China. While historians have offered a variety of explanations for how the Western peninsula dominated by Great Britain overtook China in economic terms, today’s revitalised and powerful Chinese economy verified Gunder Frank’s prediction that the shift back to the East was underway. Yet the power of Anglo-American language and culture throughout the world show no signs of dissipating.

    Meanwhile the Anglo-American Empire and its suzerains are undergoing yet another “cultural revolution” in which the imperial language and culture appear even more aggressive than they were in the age of anti-communism from 1917 until 1989.

    Robert Merrill taught humanities and intellectual history for the better part of his career at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

    T.P.Wilkinson: You began as a literary scholar with a dissertation on Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Artur, essentially a subject for Medievalists. When you arrived at the Maryland Institute, essentially an art school, you developed their humanities program and courses in intellectual history. At the same time you have always been politically active, working with a variety of groups to support criticism of the regime in Washington but also publishing the work of people engaged in active opposition. Clearly your  interest in language is not merely academic. Could you talk about how you got from Malory to Maryland and Medievalism to contemporary intellectual history?

    Robert Merrill: I was propelled to write about the phenomenon of Arthurian Romance in the 14th and 15th centuries after reading Johan Huizinga’s book, The Waning of the Middle Ages. He noted certain characteristics in collapsing of forms in a culture going through the final stages of one historical epoch and before anything new emerged to replace it. This was always my insight about the romances of Arthur. They were never much about the rise of a constellation of cultural dominants but rather about their incoherence and eventual ripping apart. Studying the 14th and 15th centuries was about as good a grounding for the study of the 20th century as one could get, since in a strong way the 20th century was the “waning of the modern age.”

    Some of the post-modernists were very good but much of the movement was pretty much vapid. But that’s how the 15th century was, as well. We are living through the end of the Enlightenment and the concept of the rational human being as well as all the social and political implications of that core belief. This is therefore also the end of science, as was so clearly and buffoonishly shown in the Covid pandemic by the authorized “scientists” at the NIH, CDC, WHO and other agencies. This is also the end of the age of democracy and nation states founded on the human rights and inherent powers of people.

    The arts at the highest level are always the struggle over forms. I was asked to teach a class at the Maryland Institute College of Art because a faculty member left abruptly, and I was intrigued by the opportunity. What I found there just amazed me. This was an art college which made it clear that art was about ideas, ways of seeing, and ways of thinking rather than about materials, techniques, and forms. Artists are intellectuals and knowledge creators/disseminators. I could see immediately that I could contribute. I was soon selected to head a new Division of Humanities, which I built on the model of intellectual history, a way of studying the humanities which asserts that knowledge is unavoidably historical and grows out of the real experiences of the people who create that knowledge. There are no universals or permanent truths. But there is the relationship between formal systems of thought or representation and the worlds those systems emerge from. Intellectual history attempts to study the structure and dynamics of intellect communities and the evolution of the methods, techniques and hermeneutical practices used by scientists, philosophers, men and women of letters, and artists.

    After many years, I developed the Office of Research in order to align art production with the research in the sciences and humanities. On a more practical level, it was also a move to help with grant funding. There was very little money for “the arts,” but lots of grant money for “research.” The National Science Foundation at the time even added a provision that a team of investigators would be considered improved if it included an artist.

    TPW: Much of what has happened in American culture seems like it appears spontaneously. The US is a business centre for fashion in film, music, clothing, and all sorts of consumption. It also seems to be the best country in the world at producing and marketing its culture—even to people who have every reason to oppose the US in every other way. What do you believe is the source of the power of the American culture industry? Why does it seem irresistible? How does this relate to the power of the English language in the world?

    RM: Really, there isn’t anything about the US that is much different from preceding empires. The US has a culture industry, which it sells to every nation on earth as a way to promote the empire and create a class of people who will be quite open to ever greater penetration by the US of their economy and society. Here’s a typical example. My wife grew up in China in the 1950s and 60s. As a kid she watched classic Hollywood movies and listened to US music about as much as any American. She loved them and they created in her a fascination for the culture which could create such dreamy productions. Later as an adult she moved to America.

    The same thing was done by the European empires with the Great Britain and France leading the way. Colonial subjects were taught in school French or British history, geography, literature and it was always asserted that these were superior to the indigenous counterparts. There’s a lot that has been written about this by “post-colonial” authors; those who were educated under the colonial system but are now living in independent nations with the watershed of formal colonialism. They seem to have a leg in two different cultures.

    The US, however, does have a signal advantage and that is it created the science of modern public relations, propaganda, and scientific brainwashing. It is no longer just assigning kids in Ghana the works of Tennyson or Shakespeare; now it is applying science to re-make human consciousness by means of structuring a person’s experiences. In this it was heavily influenced by the work of B. F. Skinner and his concept of “operant conditioning.” The techniques of conditioning behaviour and consciousness is applied by agencies of the US government but more importantly by US corporations both domestically and internationally. The “consciousness industry” emerged early in the 20th century as a necessity following the development of mass production and mass consumption. This is where the US really excelled in creating a culture of consumption of goods. A good and useful history of this is Stuart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture. It traces the ways in which marketing transformed consumption from a “need” based action to a “desire” based avocation. Consumer culture is about creating one’s identity by means of the products or brands one buys (or consumes) in order to externalize an identity. A person can be what he or she desires to be by consuming products with the right image.  Image is everything, and so it is paramount to always present the products and accessories that comprise the “true you.”

    Your question asks about the source of the global power of the culture industry. I would say the power resides in the combination of corporate money and depth psychology. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, was the founder of this practice of scientific marketing. But the real quantum development came in the 1950s and 60s when the CIA hired legions of psychologists and medical doctors to apply the experimental method to the construction of consciousness and thought control. Skinner was among these psychologists. His book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity presents a total rejection of the Enlightenment assumption of the rationality of human beings and therefore of the political conditions which such rational people would create, such as freedom and the quest for dignity in one’s life. Instead of those, Skinner proposes cultural and social engineering. Cognition or thought is not some mysterious and inherently individual process but rather is conditioned, as it is learned from conditioned behaviours in specifically engineered environments.

    This is where we are today with engineered environments like the Covid pandemic, the climate catastrophe environment, and the global shortages of food, energy, and other things.

    TPW: The US was considered a model of Enlightenment revolution after 1776. The French 1789 revolution was certainly inspired by it as have been many subsequent struggles. Yet those who are old enough to remember Ronald Reagan may recall that he called the CIA-sponsored terrorists attacking Nicaragua “the moral equivalent of the founding fathers”. Repeatedly what is called at the same time “regime change” is defended with the canonical language of the American independence war. Today we find people in the West like Gerald Horne saying the independence war was an act to preserve slavery and others saying that everything in US history (or British history) can be reduced to “white supremacy”. At the same time there has also been a strong criticism of the revolutions in the 19th century—the Romantic revolutions, including those of the 20th century—as betrayals of Enlightenment ideals.  You also spent many years studying Romanticism as a Euro-American cultural phenomenon. Can you suggest a coherent way of understanding the legacy of 1776 and the so-called Romantic revolutions? Are the 20th century revolutions; e.g., in Russia, China, and Cuba, “betrayals” of Enlightenment ideals? Can these terms Enlightenment and Romanticism be used to explain anything about the development of political culture in the West?

    RM: The Age of Revolutions or the Age of Democracy is long over. It ended with the Chinese victory over the western supported Kuomintang in 1948. The Age of Revolutions did not end because there was no more need for revolution but rather because the forces for reaction mobilized and ended democratic revolutions once and for all. If you think of the revolutions that have occurred after 1948, the successful ones are still frozen in time in a permanent reactionary war of EuroAmerica against them. Think of North Korea, Cuba, Iran, all of the Nations of Latin America, and most of the nations of Africa.

    I think most presidents have called their terrorist bands something like the equivalent of the Founding Fathers. Reagan also said this about the Mujahedeen who changed into al-Qaeda. In truth, they were always a reactionary proxy militia fighting against the true revolutionaries in Afghanistan. People have totally forgotten that the socialist party negotiated a deal with the current king in Afghanistan for a new constitution and a democratic government beginning in 1964.

    The important point is that revolution, enlightenment, humanism, and democracy are all components of the same way of conceiving of a society in which political powers are derived from the inherent powers and rights of people. The purpose of politics is the happiness of all people and the successfulness of their lives. This is the essence of Marx’s work just as it is of the Romantic poets like Shelley, Schiller, Goethe, and many philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau.

    Political structures are quite susceptible to corruption because they are vested with more than ordinary powers and public moneys needed to carry out public projects. That means they also will probably need to be overthrown from time to time in order to restore true power to people.  Jefferson, who had read carefully Rousseau’s Social Contract, wrote in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

    You could not write this or attempt to put these words in action today. If you did, the FBI would have your marked as a domestic terrorist. Jefferson said on several occasions that the check people have on the abuses of power by government is revolution.

    Today, theories of government have returned to theories of monarchy; that is, the powers and rights of governments are inherent or given by God or some supernatural force and may never be overthrown.  Individual leaders come and go but the State is permanent and operates in its own rights and powers – not those give to it by people. This is the political philosophy of monarchy but our more current terms are fascism and Nazism.

    This is where we are today. The future does not look good. Orwell’s glimpse into the future at the end of 1984 is dramatic and scary, but it is not far from the truth: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.” How many lives have been stamped out in the Bush/Cheney campaign to bring “freedom” to every human on earth (otherwise knows as the Global War on Terror). The best guess would be somewhere near 20 million. And it has not nearly stopped. The Obama/Clinton/Biden “Pivot to Asia” is now promising to bring “freedom” to Russia and China. This form of this will be World War III and that may just mean the end of the human race as we have known it.

    TPW: During the US war against Vietnam there was often talk about “the American inside every Vietnamese” trying to get out. In fact, this idea seems to be the strongest one shared by Americans everywhere. A country barely two centuries old believes fervently that everyone else wants explicitly or implicitly to be just like them. This implies either gross ignorance or wanton disregard for the languages and cultures of the vast majority of the world’s population. Yet if one travels to China, South America, Africa, Western Europe, Russia, you see American stuff everywhere. In fact, in many places I know people consider their own culture and products inferior to anything from the US.  That makes what is now called “Woke” seem even more absurd—virtue signalling by formally rejecting American cultural product while consuming it at the same time. Is this mass schizophrenia?

    RM: The US has a rather simplistic conception of human nature. It was the theory of the 18th and 19th century philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, Jean Baptiste Say, and others who defined “rational man” in a mechanistic or numerical way. Sometimes this was called “Utilitarianism” or “enlightened self-interest.” It holds that human beings always behave rationally and that means they always choose to maximize their self-interest or advantage over competitors.

    This has always been only the theory of “economic man.” The economic man simply proposes that buying/selling and self-interest (greed) are at the root of everything any human ever does. Freedom is also just economics or the desire to pursue self-interest with little or no restrictions. This is exactly what G. W. Bush meant when after 9-11 in proclaiming the Global War on Terror he said that freedom was god’s gift to all people and the US would bring freedom to all people of the earth. He really only meant economic freedom.

    So the Vietnamese with an American inside trying to get out is just the economic man who wants to be able to buy and display American commodities and thereby fulfill his nature. But this is such a shallow and ethno-centric way of looking at people. Of course, everyone has some greed, but in most people it is not very important.

    I think not enough recognition is made of the fact that in WW II, pretty much all of the world was utterly destroyed. Russia lost 29 million people and 80% of the buildings in the European side of Russia were destroyed. China lost 25 million people and though it was not industrialized at the time of WW II, its agricultural production was destroyed. Only the US was untouched by the devastation of WW II. So in the years between 1945 and 1980, the US was the manufacturer of the world. US products dominated because they were often the only products available. People worldwide looked to the US for what modernization meant and they wanted to be like the US. Many revolutionary leaders such as Ho Chi Minh greatly admired the US until its war against Viet Nam taught him better.

    It was World War II that made the US the centre of the world. But that phase is now over and we are fully now in a multi-polar world. It is interesting that in the recent proxy war between the US and Russia, President Putin has made it clear that Russia no longer wants to belong to a world order dominated by the US. The US response to the independence of Russia and also China and India is to impose sanctions. That means Russian products cannot be sold in the West and Western products can’t be sold in Russia. This only enhances the separation of East and West, as Russia now has to become self-sufficient in everything from food to technology to consumer goods. Russia also has to develop economic relations with Asia, instead of the West. This is how the post-WW II American hegemony is dying.

    TPW: Since 2020 there has been – perhaps for the first time—a general recognition that censorship and propaganda are explicit practices of the US regime, not only by the government but also by Business. Throughout the anti-communist era censorship and propaganda were supposedly only practiced by “communist dictatorships”. Strangely at the same time that this censorship and propaganda by the US – openly contradicting a supposed fundamental virtue—is actually supported by enormous numbers of people. This can be seen on the street but even in academia. How did this develop and what is its significance in education and in the use of language overall?

    RM: I don’t think the deep hypocrisy in the US proclaimed values of free speech, openness, freedom of thought and conscience as opposed to the reality of propaganda, secrecy, and rigid conformity in thought and consciousness has yet been realized in any significant way. The hypocrisy is celebrated as the value. Take, for example, George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. It is based on the principles of Soros’ teacher, Karl Popper, whose book The Open Society and its Enemies gave Soros both the name and the concept. Popper contrasted open societies of the West (US, UK) against the “closed societies” of Russian communism, Nazi Germany, and totalitarianism in general. It may have been possible in the 1940s and 50s to see some truth in Popper’s claims but now that we have the predatory philanthropy of Soros and the false agenda of social democracy promoted by not just the US empire but also by billionaire oligarchs of the World Economic Forum, we can see clearly that “opening societies” is just a tactic for looting them of all their wealth. It has always been that way. The West sent missionaries to Africa and the entire “new world” in order to “open them up” to Western exploitation, genocide, and theft.

    It is often said that the censorship practiced in the Soviet Union was well known by all Soviet citizens. Official government pronouncements were always received with a certain amount of scepticism. This was actually a hold over from Czarist Russia where the ruling class and the Czars were just as distrusted as the Bolsheviks. Because of this, Russian society as a whole developed a healthy critical consciousness about what they were being told. Part of this resulted in an underground information system or Samizdat. This was not a new feature in communist Russia but existed under the Czars back as far as the 17th century, when private ownership of printing presses was outlawed. Back then, Russians just published their underground work in Western Europe and brought it back into Russia.

    In contrast, in the West (EuroAmerica) there is almost no critical consciousness with regard to public information. People are as vulnerable to government lying and manipulation as a herd of sheep. In the US, democrats believe with absolute fidelity the spokespersons for Democratic Party. And republican do the same for their spokespersons. No democrat would accept for a minute my comment about Soros’ predatory philanthropy or about Gates’ philanthrocapitalism. But they would be happy to hear the same comment if it were said about the Koch Brothers.

    There really is in the West almost no desire to understand their own information systems. News organizations like the New York Times or the Washington Post can have open relations with the CIA and very few people seem to care about it. They just believe what the “paper of record” tells them, even when this “paper of record” is proven wrong over and over again. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was virtually run out of the offices of the Washington Post by ex-CIA Post owner, Philip Graham, and his long time OSS colleague Frank Wisner. It managed to gain control by cash payments, blackmail, or simple association of most prominent journalists in the US. The operation was exposed and supposedly shut down in the 1970s, but its effectiveness continues to this day. Objectively, there is no free and independent press in the US, but most Americans still believe that there is. They believe there is because they are told by their media and politicians every day that the US has the best free and independent media in the world.

    At the current moment, the major tactic of propaganda is for powerful people to “establish the official narrative” for any event in the world. Let’s take the war in Ukraine for example. The “official narrative” is that Russia invaded Ukraine in order to restore the Russian empire. When Ukraine falls, Russia will move on to Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. After that, all of Europe will be in the Russian cross-hairs. This is the old narrative of Soviet Communism which was hell-bent to conquer the world. The truth is that Russia has always been very reluctant to go to war in Ukraine. The 2014 US installed Nazi government in Kiev has carried out genocide against ethnic Russians in the eastern provinces of Ukraine since 2014. Russia was instrumental in developing the Minsk Agreements which would keep the Donbass provinces in Ukraine in exchange for some cultural autonomy and security. While Kiev and Washington signed the agreements, they never honoured or implemented them. They kept shelling the cities of the Donbass. Finally Russia invaded in order to stop the killing of ethnic Russians.

    The nature and role of violent Nazi groups in the Ukrainian government and military has been entirely written out of the official narrative. This leaves open the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine.

    The hegemony of false narratives is accompanied by “cancel culture.” If you say anything outside of the official narrative, you will be banned from the most popular websites, you may lose your job or profession, and you might also be labelled by the Merrick Garland Department of Justice as a “domestic terrorist.” Garland has been promulgating the theory that “disinformation” is the seedbed for domestic terrorism since violent acts originate in false information. Garland has declared a war on disinformation. The Biden administration through the Department of Homeland Security created something they called “The Disinformation Board of Governors” – a parallel to the Broadcasting Board of Governors which runs external propaganda for the State Department. The “Disinformation Governors” would regulate all information in the US in order to keep the nation secure from the dreaded “disinformation.”

    When one considers the Covid pandemic in the light of disinformation, the whole situation becomes absurd in the worst ways. It was the government and its official scientists at the NIH, CDC, FDA who were promoting disinformation in their easily-proven-wrong in their narratives about zoonotic origin for the virus, the death rate, and treatments. Social distancing and masks did no good at all, and yet they were an essential part of the narrative. Really good doctors who offered truthful information about the virus were banned, fired from their jobs, and had their medical licenses cancelled.

    We are now at the moment of outright and violent suppression of thought and speech in the US. If you think or say something against the government narratives and you publish your thoughts in a way that alerts enough people, you will be crushed by the force of the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, or their adjuncts in the media owners.

    • Read Part 1 here

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  • Our Authentically Fake and Hypocritical Society of Copies

    “Ditto,” said Tweedledum.
    “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.
    – Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass, December 27, 1871

    Sometimes a trifling contretemps can open a window onto significant issues.

    As a case in point, The New York Times, a newspaper that regularly publishes U.S. propaganda without a bit of shame or remorse, recently reported on a controversy involving Simon & Schuster and Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. The report with the same information was repeated across the media.

    The publishing company had offered limited-edition, authenticated, hand-signed copies of the book for $600 each.  Nine Hundred collectors and die-hard fans bought a copy, many, no doubt, caught in hero worship and the thought that a Dylan-penned signature would grant them a bit of his fame through the touch of his hand upon their lives.

    The quest for immortality takes many forms, and the laying on of hands, even when done remotely through a signature, has long been a popular form of sleight-of-hand.

    I once shook hands with an Elvis hologram impersonator and the thrill vibrated for days.

    But these Dylan aficionados noticed something strange about the signatures: They didn’t seem to be actual signatures individually written with a pen by Dylan. As anyone knows from their own handwriting, no two signatures are the same, since the human hand is not a copy machine.  These signatures were identical.

    It turned out that those who smelled a deception were right.  Under pressure from astute purchasers, Simon & Schuster had to come clean – sort of.  They offered to refund all purchasers for the deception. They released the following statement:

    To those who purchased The Philosophy of Modern Song limited edition, we want to apologize. As it turns out, the limited editions books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form. We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.

    This statement is a perfect example of double-talk, and more.

    Then Dylan also apologized, saying that he used an auto-pen since he was suffering from vertigo and “during the pandemic, it was impossible to sign anything and the vertigo didn’t help.”  His apology seems sincere compared to the publisher’s double-talk, but then again, so did his signatures.  And the controversy has spread to the limited edition prints of his artwork.

    “Limited edition prints” – a deception in itself, as if limiting the number of copies of an original painting makes them more original.  Ten dittos instead of eleven.

    However, I am not primarily concerned with the nuances of this tempest in a teapot, which might disappear as fast as yesterday’s bluster, or it may forever tarnish Dylan’s reputation, which would be a shame if it also damaged the genuine greatness of his songs.

    I would like to focus on the following matters that I have seen through its window: language usage, a society of copies, reading texts closely, and the degradation of literacy, all of which are tangled together with non-stop government propaganda disseminated by the corporate mass media to form a major social issue.

    First, language.  Note in the Simon & Schuster apology the words: “As it turns out, the limited editions books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form.”  This is a clear deception twice over.  The books do not contain original signatures; they contain machine copies of it.  Phrasing it that way allows the company to plead innocent while also apologizing for its innocence as if they consider themselves guilty.  What exactly are they saying they are apologizing for?  Deceptions dittoed?

    And the phrase “As it turns out,” implies that Simon & Schuster was surprised that the signatures were machine generated, which is highly improbable.  It also suggests they are not responsible; such verbiage approximates the common, passive introductory phrase “it so happens” or the equally non-literate “hopefully” to begin a sentence.

    “It so happens” that I am writing these words and “it so happens” that you are reading them…as if we are victims of our own free choices.  Passive language for victims of fate who have learned to write and talk this way to avoid responsibility even for their own hope, as in: “I hope.”  Or maybe the widespread copycat use of “hopefully” is an unconscious attempt to deny pervasive hopelessness.  No matter how many times you repeat something doesn’t make it true.

    The use of such language is a reflection of an age in which determinism has for decades been repeatedly promulgated to extinguish people’s belief in freedom.  Ditto: Saying “the exact same” doesn’t make the same more same through redundancy.  You can’t get any more same than same since same means identical, or any more opposite than opposite even if you say “the exact opposite.”  The English language is suffering.

    To top it off, an esteemed book publishing company nearly a century old concludes with a sentence that a high school freshman – circa 1960 before all the dumbing-down of schooling – would realize was redundant with the words “immediately” (misplaced) and “immediate,” as if repetition would emphasize their contrition. “We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.”  Ditto.

    But who notices these things?

    Discerning readers – whether of the examples above or of a subtle controlled- opposition media article suggesting one thing while meaning another – are becoming rarer and rarer. Ideology, political party allegiances, and plain stupidity block many from grasping propaganda and media claims made out of thin air.

    Anonymous sources, subtle phrasing, real or imagined intelligence sources, the use of words such as may, might, possible, could be, etc., are a staple of so much writing and broadcast news that they fly by people used to the speed of the digital life with texting and internet browsing where repetition and copying are king.  Yes, speed kills in so many ways.  The repetition of talking points across the major corporate media, something carefully studied and confirmed years ago, has become so obvious to anyone who chooses to take the time to investigate.  It’s not hard to do but few bother; they are too “busy.”  Thus propaganda and gibberish pass unnoticed.

    Just as “The Real McCoy” (see the opening “Refrain” of Hillel Schwartz’ The Culture of the Copy) was a fake and the phrase came to represent the genuine to supposedly confirm authenticity, we are now living in an era of the counterfeit everywhere. Counterfeits of counterfeits.  Imposters.  Actors playing actors. Counterfeit traitors. Fabricated reality and copies of copies.  Ditto.  Ditto.  Ditto.  Lies about not lying.  (See The New York Times’, The Guardian’s, etc. deceptive, hypocritical, and self-serving joint letter asking the U.S government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.)

    The Dylan controversy is a very minor example of a major issue that is little appreciated for its devastating impact on society.

    For another minor example, we may ask how many times does one have to see the replay of Christian Pulisic’s recent goal against Iran in the 2022 World Cup to grasp its brilliance and to see that he was injured?  Two, three, five, ten?  And this is a sporting event, not some mall shooting or serious issue of war.  In a digital high-tech world repetition is the norm.  What does repetition do to the mind?

    What does repetition do to the mind?

    Despite the great sportsmanship shown by the players from both the U.S. and Iran on the pitch, U.S. Men’s Soccer executives, by deleting the Islamic Republic emblem from Iran’s flag on its social media sites, and the U.S. media tried repeatedly to politicize the game into a battle between the good Americans and the evil Iranians, even while a U.S. regime change color revolution was being attempted on the streets of Iran.

    What does repetitious propaganda do to the mind?

    Technology has not just allowed for machine signatures but has made us in many ways machine people who need to be hammered over the head time and again – and to like it. To go back again and again for more.  Everything but life has become repeatable.

    Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby’s reply to Nick’s statement In The Great Gatsby – “You can’t repeat the past,” Nick tells Gatsby, who responds, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, off course you can!” – perfectly captures the “reality” of a digital screen culture of illusions in which many people have unconsciously come to believe that you can instantly replay life as well.

    Indeed, to make people into machines is the goal of trans-humanists Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset and the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda. Artificial intelligence (AI) for artificial people.  While there are innocent examples of repetition, the use of it is a fundamental tactic of propaganda, whether that be through words or images. And we are drowning in repeated media/government propaganda about the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine, Covid19, Iran, China, Syria, etc.

    It’s as easy as pie to innocently repeat, as I learned recently when my wife asked me to use her cell phone to take a photograph. Bumpkin that I am who despises these machines, rather than briefly hitting the button I held it down for a few seconds and took the same photo 67 ½ times.  It just so happened.

    But the propagandists’ repetitions are no accident.  You can’t condemn Julian Assange year after year for posting U.S. war crimes – the Afghanistan War Logs – and then try to save your own ass after the man has been persecuted for more than a decade and counting.  The media who did this and then wrote the recent letter are counterfeit traitors to the truth and agents of the war criminals.  To call them journalists is to misuse language: They are imposters.

    What does repetition do to the mind? asked Tweedledum to his identical twin Tweedledee.

    Tweedledee replied, Look what it’s done to us.

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