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Category: Propaganda

  • The Medium: An Appeal For Support

    On November 15, as 90 Russian cruise missiles struck at Ukraine’s energy network, a companion US-UK propaganda blitz blamed the Russian missiles for the deaths of two workers on a farm in Poland.

    This was a big deal. Poland is a member of Nato and Article 5 of Nato’s treaty reads:

    ‘The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…’

    The fear being, obviously, that treating a Russian attack on a Nato member as an attack on the United States or Britain could lead to rapid escalation and possible nuclear confrontation. Accurate media reporting of events in Poland was therefore vital. On November 16, the headlines said it all.

    The Times:

    ‘Russians blamed for fatal strike on Poland’

    The Telegraph:

    ‘Russian missile strikes Poland’

    The Guardian:

    ‘Russian barrage strikes Ukraine amid claims missiles hit Poland’

    The Daily Mirror:

    ‘RUSSIAN MISSILES HIT POLAND’

    Metro:

    ‘“RUSSIAN MISSILES” HIT POLAND’

    The Daily Express:

    ‘Russian missiles kill 2 in Poland’

    Daily Star:

    ‘Putin bombs NATO’

    Online, Sky News reported:

    ‘Reports Russian missiles have killed two people in Poland…’

    Channel 4 News:

    ‘“Russia missiles” kill two in Nato member Poland claims US official’

    With little known about the explosions and much at stake, the Pentagon’s spokesman Patrick Ryder was more cautious:

    ‘I don’t want to speculate when it comes to our security commitments and Article 5. But we have made it crystal clear that we will protect every inch of NATO territory.’

    In an extraordinary message aimed at President Joe Biden, Anders Aslund of the Atlantic Council said:

    ‘You have promised to defend “every inch of NATO territory.” Are you going to bomb Russia now?’

    Aslund added that Biden’s first move should be to establish a no-fly zone in Ukraine before ‘clean[ing] out the Russian Black Sea fleet’.

    Ukraine was also quick to stoke the tension. President Zelensky called it ‘a Russian missile attack on collective security’ and, as such, ‘a very significant escalation’. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said it was ‘a conspiracy theory’ to suggest missiles were part of Ukrainian air defences’.

    In fact, this version of events was rubbished on the same day the front pages appeared. Even the BBC admitted of Zelensky and Kuleba’s comments:

    ‘These claims about Russia subsequently appear unfounded.’

    And:

    ‘Polish President Andrzej Duda has said there are no signs of an intentional attack after a missile strike killed two people on a farm near the western border with Ukraine.

    ‘Earlier, US President Joe Biden said it was “unlikely” the missile had been fired from Russia.’

    After nine months of relentlessly propagandising against Russia and for Ukraine-Nato, the Guardian struggled to adapt to this new situation where it was actually good – because it led away from nuclear war – to blame the Ukrainians. A Guardian news report read:

    ‘Polish village struck by Ukraine war missile struggling with trauma’

    What is a ‘Ukraine war missile’? Is it a Ukrainian missile? Or is it a missile fired by one of the sides fighting the war in Ukraine? Might it, then, have been fired by Russia? The mangled grammar – was the ‘Ukraine war missile’ ‘struggling with trauma’? – suggested editors desperately trying to massage the message.

    Like numerous other media, NBC News reported that the missile was ‘Russian-made’:

    ‘The Polish government said a Russian-made missile killed two of its citizens Tuesday near the border with Ukraine, but U.S. President Joe Biden said that it was “unlikely” that it was launched from Russia.’

    This will surely have bewildered many readers into thinking the missile might well have been fired by Russia. Although it was clear who fired the missile, NBC described the investigation as ‘ongoing’. As Seinfeld once said: ‘It’s a hazy mystery.’

    In fact, Reuters reported on November 16 that Biden had confirmed that the blast in Poland had been ’caused by a Ukrainian air defence missile’.

    Responding to this astonishingly reckless propaganda blitz, Mark Curtis, co-founder and editor of Declassified UK, said it all:

    ‘It’s almost as if the British press sees its primary role as backing the state’s foreign policy rather than accurately informing the public.’

    And that is indeed the key role of the dozen or so major UK newspapers and also other news media ostensibly serving the British public a diet of impartial, balanced fact – their primary task is to promote, defend and whitewash US-UK foreign policy driven by corporate greed for resources, power and profit (especially fossil fuels).

    But what is so fascinating and terrible about this propaganda system – the reason we have continued writing about these issues for more than two decades – is that this is only one of the ‘mainstream’s’ smaller brainwashing functions. The real work goes much deeper.

    A Sad Heart At The Supermarket

    In 1962 – long before the full eruption of the global, 24/7 corporate monoanticulture – poet, literary critic and acutely sensitive soul, Randall Jarrell, captured the truth of ‘mainstream’ media exactly. In his collection of essays, ‘A sad heart at the supermarket’, Jarrell wrote that ‘the media’ should actually be termed the ‘Medium’:

    ‘For all these media – television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, and the rest – are a single medium, in whose depths we are all being cultivated. This Medium is of middle condition or degree, mediocre; it lies in the middle of everything, between a man and his neighbor, his wife, his child, his self; it, more than anything else, is the substance through which the forces of our society act upon us, and make us into what our society needs.’1

    But what does the Medium want?

    ‘Oh, it needs for us to do or be many things: workers, technicians, executives, soldiers, housewives. But first of all, last of all, it needs for us to be buyers; consumers; beings who want much and will want more – who want consistently and insatiably… It is the Medium which casts this spell – which is this spell. As we look at the television set, listen to the radio, read the magazines, the frontier of necessity is always being pushed forward. The Medium shows us what our new needs are – how often, without it, we should not have known! – and it shows us how they can be satisfied: they can be satisfied by buying something. The act of buying something is at the root of our world.’ (p. 66, our emphasis)

    Of course, it is this same Medium on which many of us are relying now to tell the truth about the results of a system that trains us to ‘want consistently and insatiably’. We are relying on the Medium to tell us how the Medium and its consumerism is destroying us. We are hoping for the Medium to urge us to rise up and overthrow… the Medium.

    The classic science fiction movie, The Day The Earth Caught Fire, foresaw our current predicament with astonishing accuracy, with one failing. It assumed that the Medium – and as a consequence, the public – would become more and more concerned, more and more determined to do something in the face of an authentically existential crisis. But the Medium is far too deeply entrenched in greed for that to happen. Ironically, the film’s leading character, Peter Stenning, is a journalist at the Daily Express – filming took place in the newspaper’s actual offices.

    In reality, record-breaking carbon emissions, temperatures, floods, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, animal and plant extinctions have become the new ‘normal’ for our press, ‘just the way things are’.

    Across Europe, heavily botoxed and surgically enhanced hosts of glitzy TV chat shows are being forced to mention temperature rises so extreme that even weather forecasters look worried, with even members of the public interviewed on beaches no longer smiling. But these are rarely glimpsed moments, quickly drowned out by the celebrity gossip, royal tittle-tattle and sports – the Medium is fundamentally unmoved.

    No surprise, then, that in October the corporate-advertising packed, profit-maximising, warmongering Guardian, reported:

    ‘Concerns about climate change shrank across the world last year, with fewer than half of those questioned in a new survey believing it posed a “very serious threat” to their countries over the next 20 years.

    ‘Only 20% of people in China, the world’s biggest polluter, said they believed that climate change was a very serious threat, down 3 percentage points from the last survey by Gallup World Risk Poll in 2019.

    ‘Globally, the figure fell by 1.5 percentage points to 48.7% in 2021. The survey was based on more than 125,000 interviews in 121 countries.’

    Incredibly, as carbon emissions, temperatures and extreme weather events rise precipitously, concern is falling. But why?

    In September, Media Matters described a typical case of Medium performance:

    ‘In late August a massive, unrelenting heat dome began impacting much of the western United States – breaking numerous temperature records. California is bearing the brunt of the heat, with the state’s power grid stretched to its limit. Climate scientist Daniel Swain called the heat wave in California “essentially the worst September heat wave on record… By some metrics, it might be one of the worst heat waves on record, period, in any month, given its duration and its extreme magnitude.”

    ‘While the size and scope of the heat wave is not being ignored by major national TV news networks – there have been 153 segments and weather reports on the heat and the fires it helped spawn since August 31 – only 18 of the segments (12%) mentioned climate change. Even worse, only 3 of these climate segments mentioned the need for climate action in order to stave off worsening heat waves like this one in the future.’ (Our emphasis)

    Media Matters added:

    ‘This is a pitiful performance by TV news reporters, especially considering the fact that a year ago they mentioned climate change in a collective 38% of segments on a similar record-breaking heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. There are clear links between the emissions from burning fossil fuels and the growing frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme heat. This record-breaking heat event occurs alongside a devastating flooding event in Pakistan that has displaced millions and can be seen from space, and after a summer of extreme heat and drought events in both Europe and China. The western U.S. heat wave should thus not be treated as a one-off, freak-of-nature incident, but rather contextualized in the larger global climate emergency.’

    Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist who has been repeatedly arrested on direct action protests, commented:

    ‘Just unbelievable the media’s lack of concern about ongoing, intensifying climate and Earth breakdown. It’s all around us now. A few years ago I thought for sure, by this point, these levels of flooding and heat, the media would be sounding the alarm loudly, clearly, skillfully.’

    Kalmus added:

    ‘As a climate scientist trying to sound the alarm for the good of us all, I can’t even tell you how infinitely harder this makes it’

    The Independent’s climate columnist, Donnachadh McCarthy, responded to Kalmus:

    ‘Rather in my experience, uk’s oligarch media have gone in opposite direction on a frenzy attacking all action on climate, since the 40C heatwave set Britain on fire & extreme weather engulfed all continents. Dealing with it in interviews is beyond depressing.’

    As the latest pitiful climate conference, COP27, ground to a halt this week, the BBC reported:

    ‘The final overarching deal did not include commitments to “phase down” or reduce use of fossil fuels.’

    If this was shocking news, economic historian Matthias Schmelzer placed it in astonishing context:

    ‘In 30 years of UN climate negotiations, eliminating the primary cause of global heating – fossil fuels – has never been mentioned in the decisions, not even in the COP27 in 2022.’

    What on earth has become of us, of humanity? Who are we? How can we be responding like this to the literal destruction of the stable climate on which we depend? Jarrell explained:

    ‘The Medium shows its People what life is, what people are, and its People believe it: expect people to be that, try themselves to be that. Seeing is believing; and if what you see in Life [magazine] is different from what you see in life, which of the two are you to believe? For many people it is what you see in Life (and in the movies, over television, on the radio) that is real life; and everyday existence, mere local or personal variation, is not real in the same sense.’ (p. 78, our emphasis)

    In our lives, we see the parched grass, experience the 40 degrees of heat, the fires and floods, but this is ‘mere local or personal variation’. In Life, as it were, we see car adverts, holiday offers, Black Friday deals on tech. And this genuinely seems more real.

    This is the final truth of why we are unable, most of us, to feel the disaster that is overwhelming us in plain sight:

    ‘The Medium mediates between us and raw reality, and the mediation more and more replaces reality for us.’ (p. 78)

    This is not a struggle between good and evil; it is a struggle between reality and unreality. It is a struggle between human agency and an automatic profit-maximising machine that was built by human beings but which automatically seeks to neutralise any internal or external human opposition. The state-corporate system is a runaway train, a Frankenstein’s monster.

    Ultimately, we are engaged in a struggle between truth and lies. Infinite profit-maximising on a finite planet is a lie; human survival depends on the extent to which enough of us can perceive the truth and act.

    For more than 21 years we have argued that the Medium is the lynch pin, the Achilles’ heel, for anyone hoping to stop this runaway train, to break this spell.

    When Julian Assange tried to challenge this system, the Medium turned on him, crushed his reputation, and thereby crushed the public support that might otherwise have protected him.

    When Jeremy Corbyn challenged the system, the Medium tried and failed with everything, until it threw the ultimately despicable sink, barbarically exploiting the suffering and deaths of six million Jews in the Holocaust to crush him.

    Now that the courageous, smart and principled heroes of Just for Oil, Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion are trying to save their lives, your lives and our lives by exposing the truth of fossil fuel industry insanity, the Medium is branding them narcissists, traitors, public enemies. Trashy, billionaire-owned, capitalist tabloids are assailing the opponents of runaway capitalism in the name of ordinary working people.

    It’s all very well trying to expose US-UK military crimes, to reform the Labour Party from within, to shine a bright light on climate crisis, but the real battle, the deepest need, is to destroy the credibility of the Medium that controls the public mind and politics through illusions, false allies, false promises and false hopes. We must persuade the public to reject this system and to seek out and support genuinely human, compassionate, rational alternatives not poisoned by limitless greed.

    As Noam Chomsky has commented, corporate propagandists will continue subordinating people and planet to profit until they are up to their necks in climate change floodwater. Our plan is to continue challenging them, refuting them, until that happens.

    1. Randall Jarrell, ‘A sad heart at the supermarket; essays & fables’, Atheneum, 1962, pp. 65-66.
    The post The Medium: An Appeal For Support first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Were You Deceived?

    There were more than a few people who scoffed at the COVID-19 scare pushed by governments, their compliant media, and Big Pharma. They were ridiculed as anti-vaxxers, more often than not erroneously. The virus was real, but the dangers posed to the masses, the lockdowns imposed to battle it, the useless mandated mask-wearing and the imposition of a vaccine of dubious efficacy and safety have been exposed as Establishment recklessness, a recklessness in which many billionaires made out like bandits while many of those living on the margins suffered.

    The post Were You Deceived? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • AP Editor Said She “Can’t Imagine” A US Intelligence Official Being Wrong

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    The Associated Press journalist who reported a US intelligence official’s false claim that Russia had launched missiles at Poland last week has been fired.

    As we discussed previously, AP’s anonymously sourced report which said “A senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people” went viral because of the massive implications of direct hot warfare erupting between Russia and the NATO alliance. AP subsequently retracted its story as the mainstream political/media class came to accept that it was in fact a Ukrainian missile that had struck Poland.

    AP’s firing of reporter James LaPorta looks at this time to be the end point of any accountability for the circulation of this extremely dangerous falsehood. AP spokesperson Lauren Easton says no disciplinary action will be taken against the editors who waved the bogus story through, and to this day the public has been kept in the dark about the identity of the US official who fed such extremely egregious misinformation/disinformation to the public through the mainstream press.

    It is utterly inexcusable for AP to continue to protect the anonymity of a government official who fed them such a profoundly significant falsehood. This didn’t just affect AP staff, it affected the whole world; we deserve to know what happened and who was responsible, and AP has no business obstructing that knowledge from us.

    LaPorta’s firing looks like this is yet another instance where the least powerful person involved in a debacle is being made to take the fall for it. A powerful intelligence official will suffer no consequences for feeding false information to the press — thereby ensuring that it will happen again — and no disciplinary action will be taken against LaPorta’s superiors, despite the absolute buffoonery that subsequent reporting has revealed on their part.

    In an article titled “Associated Press reporter fired over erroneous story on Russian attack,” The Washington Post reports the following (emphasis added):

    Internal AP communications viewed by The Post show some confusion and misunderstanding during the preparations of the erroneous report.

     

    LaPorta shared the U.S. official’s tip in an electronic message around 1:30 p.m. Eastern time. An editor immediately asked if AP should issue an alert on his tip, “or would we need confirmation from another source and/or Poland?”

     

    After further discussion, a second editor said she “would vote” for publishing an alert, adding, “I can’t imagine a U.S. intelligence official would be wrong on this.”

    “I can’t imagine a US intelligence official would be wrong on this.”

    Can you imagine not being able to imagine a US intelligence official being wrong? This would be an unacceptable position for any educated adult to hold, much less a journalist, still less an editor, and still less an editor of one of the most influential news agencies on earth.

    These are the people who publish the news reports we read to find out what’s happening in the world. This is the baby-brained level of thinking these people are serving the public interest with.

    Antiwar commentator Daniel Larison writes the following of the AP editor’s shocking quote:

    Skepticism about official claims should always be the watchword for journalists and analysts. These are claims that need more scrutiny than usual rather than less. If you can’t imagine that an intelligence official could get something important wrong, whether by accident or on purpose, you are taking far too many things for granted that need to be questioned and checked out first.

     

    Intelligence officials of many governments feed information to journalists and have done so practically ever since there was a popular press to feed information to, and that information certainly should not be trusted just because an official source hands it over. It is also always possible for intelligence officials to just get things wrong, whether it is because they are relying on faulty information or because they were too hasty in reaching conclusions about what they think they know.

     

    Whether the AP’s source was feeding them a line or was simply mistaken, a claim as provocative and serious as this one should have been checked out much more thoroughly before it got anywhere near publication. The AP report in this case seems to have been a combination of a story that was “too good to check” and a culture of deference to official sources in which the editors didn’t feel compelled to make the effort to check.

    Indeed, the only reason the press receive such explicit protections in the US Constitution is because they are supposed to hold the powerful to account. If the editors of a wildly influential news agency will just unquestioningly parrot whatever they are fed by government officials while simultaneously protecting those officials with anonymity, they are not holding the powerful to account, and are in fact not meaningfully different from state propagandists.

    They are state propagandists. Which is probably why they are sipping lattes in the AP newsroom while Julian Assange languishes in prison.

    As Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic observed, this is far from the first time AP has given the cover of anonymity to US government officials circulating bogus claims of potentially dangerous consequence, like the time it reported an official’s evidence-free assertion which later proved false that Iran had carried out an attack on four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, or the time it let another one anonymously claim that “Iran may try to take advantage of America’s troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

    So to recap  —

    • Powerful government official who fed AP a false story: Zero accountability
    • AP editor who asked if a report should immediately be published upon receipt of the story: Zero accountability
    • Second AP editor who says she can’t imagine a U.S. intelligence official would be wrong:  Zero accountability
    • Journalist who wrote the story: Singular accountability

    In a sane society, power and responsibility would go hand in hand. A disaster would be blamed on the most powerful people involved in its occurrence. In our society it’s generally the exact opposite, with the rank-and-file taking all of the responsibility and none of the power.

    Our rulers lie to us, propagandize us, endanger us, impoverish us, destroy journalism, start wars, kill our biosphere and make our world dark and confusing, and they suffer no consequences for it. We cannot allow them to continue holding all of the power and none of the responsibility. This is backwards and must end.

    _____________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Thoughts That Should Probably Occur More Often

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    I wonder if my own government is being truthful about its actions in that part of the world?

    I wonder if my own government is in the wrong on this issue?

    I wonder if the news media are telling the truth right now?

    I wonder if the news media tell the truth about things generally?

    I wonder if the “Evil Dictators versus Virtuous Liberal Democracies” framework I’ve been taught by teachers, pundits and politicians is the most accurate lens through which to view world events?

    Could I have been deceived about the way my government operates, at home and abroad?

    Is it possible that my beliefs about my society, my government and my world are completely wrong?

    What if the teachers, preachers and parents who helped form my worldview were relying on inaccurate information?

    Who has benefitted from the beliefs that are in my head? Is it possible that those beliefs were placed there, directly or indirectly, by people who have benefitted from my having them?

    Are there any power-serving falsehoods that I believe because it is cognitively easier to believe them than to let in information that might hurt my ego or require me to restructure my entire worldview?

    Does civilization really have to be organized in this way? Is it possible to create better systems that work for everyone? Do I only assume things can’t change because the current systems have been deliberately normalized for me?

    Are there any beliefs that were put in my head by people I love and trust that are untruthful or unhelpful? Beliefs about myself? Beliefs about my place in the world? Beliefs about my family members? My culture? My religion?

    Is there anyone in my life who regularly tries to manipulate me into thinking a certain way about things? Anyone who regularly tries to influence how I think about them? How I think about myself? How I think about others? Why are they doing that?

    What beliefs am I still holding that don’t serve me? That don’t serve the world? Could I be holding some unhelpful beliefs without even consciously realizing it?

    In what areas of my life am I in the wrong? Who have I wronged and who am I currently doing wrong to? What can I do to make it right?

    Are there beliefs that that I hold on to because I believe they are me, but when I look at them in the clear light of day I can see they are only fossilised ideas forged long ago in a moment of fear? Have I been defending those false ideas with such force that I have actually been in attack?

    How has my childhood affected my way of experiencing life and behaving in the world? Are there any psychological habits I formed when I was small and lacking in knowledge that I am still maintaining? Can I now as a strong adult begin to consciously relinquish them?

    What is thought? Am I quite sure I’m using and relating to it in the healthiest and most skillful way possible? Is it possible to move thought and thinking into a more wholesome and efficacious role in my life?

    Is it possible that I’m not perceiving reality accurately at all? That not only is the information in my head inaccurate, but my most fundamental assumptions about life and perception as well?

    Is it possible that I’ve been holding inaccurate beliefs about not only my world, my government, my society, my culture, my family and myself, but about my very nature?

    What am I, anyway? What am I really? Do I even know?

    What is this experience? What can be known about it without accessing memories of things I’ve been told, and without telling myself mental stories about it?

    What’s the real truth behind every aspect of this life?

    I wonder if it’s possible to experience beauty in each moment?

    I wonder if happiness is the natural default position of human consciousness, and we only lose it by getting mixed up in untruth?

    I wonder what consciousness is?

    I wonder what love is?

    Maybe it’s possible to explore all the questions I have about life and reality while living thoroughly immersed in the world?

    Maybe life will keep getting better the more clarity I have on what’s really true?

    Maybe life will keep getting better for everyone the more clarity we all have on what’s really true?

    Maybe this whole human adventure is a collective journey out of the darkness of confusion and into the light of truth?

    ______________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Step 1: Be a progressive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ❖

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

    ______________

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

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    Featured image via Adobe Stock Photos.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Atlantic Is A Shitty Propaganda Rag Run By Elitist Wankers

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Atlantic, which is owned by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and run by neoconservative war propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg, has published a pair of articles that are appalling even by its own standards.

    Virulent Russiagater Anne Applebaum argues in “Fear of Nuclear War Has Warped the West’s Ukraine Strategy” that the US and its allies should escalate against Russia with full confidence that Putin won’t respond with nuclear weapons.

    “Here is the only thing we know: As long as Putin believes that the use of nuclear weapons won’t win the war—as long as he believes that to do so would call down an unprecedented international and Western response, perhaps including the destruction of his navy, of his communications system, of his economic model—then he won’t use them,” Applebaum writes.

    But throughout her own essay Applebaum also acknowledges that she does not actually know the things she is claiming to know.

    “We don’t know whether our refusal to transfer sophisticated tanks to Ukraine is preventing nuclear war,” she writes. “We don’t know whether loaning an F-16 would lead to Armageddon. We don’t know whether holding back the longest-range ammunition is stopping Putin from dropping a tactical nuclear weapon or any other kind of weapon.”

    “I can’t prove this to be true, of course, because no one can,” says Applebaum after confidently asserting that more western aggression would actually have deterred Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    These are the kinds of things it’s important to have the highest degree of certainty in before taking drastic actions which can, you know, literally end the world. It’s absolutely nuts how western pundits face more scrutiny and accountability when publicly recommending financial investments than when recommending moves that could end all terrestrial life.

    On that note it’s probably worth mentioning here that Applebaum’s husband, European Parliament member Radoslaw Sikorski, recently made headlines by publicly thanking the United States for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines.

    The Atlantic has also published an article titled “The Age of Social Media Is Ending,” subtitled “It never should have begun.” Its author, Ian Bogost, argues that the recent management failures in Twitter and Facebook mean the days of just any old schmuck having access to their own personal broadcasting network are over, and that this is a good thing.

    Bogost’s piece contains what has got to be the single most elitist sentence that I have ever read:

    “A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset.”

    Nothing enrages the official authorized commentariat like the common riff raff having access to platforms and audiences. That’s why the official authorized commentariat have been the most vocal voices calling for internet censorship and complaining about the rise of a more democratized information environment. These elitist wankers have been fuming for years about the way the uninitiated rabble have been granted the ability to not just talk, but to talk back.

    Hamilton Nolan of In These Times posted a recent observation on Twitter which makes the perfect counter to The Atlantic’s snooty pontifications.

    “The best thing Twitter did for journalism was to show everyone there are thousands of regular people who are better writers than most professionals which is why the most mediocre famous pundits have always been quickest to dismiss it as a cesspool,” Nolan writes, adding, “Best thing Twitter did for the world in general was to allow anyone to yell directly at rich and powerful people, which drove many of them insane, including the richest guy on earth.”

    Of course the imperial narrative managers at The Atlantic would be opposed to normal people getting a voice in public discourse. When your job is to control the narrative, the bigger a monopoly you hold over it the better.

    ________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Zelensky And Bush To Give Joint Pro-War Presentation

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    War criminal George W Bush and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be appearing at an event next week at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, in partnership with US government-funded narrative management operations Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy. The goal of the presentation will reportedly be to address the completely fictional and imaginary concern that congressional Republicans won’t continue supporting US proxy war efforts in Ukraine.

    CNN reports:

    Former US President George W. Bush will hold a public conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week with the aim of underscoring the importance of the US continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.

    The event, which will take place in Dallas and be open to the public, comes amid questions about the willingness of the former president’s Republican Party to maintain support for Ukraine.

    “Ukraine is the frontline in the struggle for freedom and democracy. It’s literally under attack as we speak, and it is vitally important that the United States provide the assistance, military and otherwise to help Ukraine defend itself,” David Kramer, the managing director for global policy at the George W. Bush Institute, told CNN. “President Bush believes in standing with Ukraine.”

    The Struggle for Freedom event will take place on Wednesday, in partnership with the Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

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

    NEW: President George W. Bush, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen will participate in the Bush Institute’s Nov. 16 event on advancing freedom.

    More from @kylieatwood @CNN: https://t.co/cGvBylur7G

    — George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) November 10, 2022

    To be clear, there is absolutely no reality-based reason to believe Republicans will meaningfully shy away from full-scale support for arming and assisting the Ukrainian military. The proxy war has only an impotent minority of opposition in the party and every bill to fund it has passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Some “MAGA” Republicans have claimed that funding for the war would stop if the GOP won the midterm elections, but they were lying; there was never the slightest chance of that happening.

    Bush, you may remember, drew headlines and laughter earlier this year with his Freudian confession in which he accused Vladimir Putin of launching “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean, of Ukraine.” The fact that the president who launched a full-scale ground invasion which destabilized the entire region and led to the deaths of over a million people is now narrative managing for the US empire’s current aggressively propagandized intervention says everything about the nature of this war.

    Also appearing with Bush will be the leader who’s slated to become the face of the US empire’s next proxy war, Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan. CNN writes:

    Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen will also take part in the event next week. She will deliver a recorded message, in which she is expected to underscore that the struggle for freedom is a global challenge.

    And sure, why not. If you’re going to manufacture consent for proxy warfare against multiple powers as your empire flails around frantically scrambling to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world, you may as well save time and promote them all on the same ticket.

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

    Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.” pic.twitter.com/UMwNMwMnmX

    — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 19, 2022

    Many people who support the US proxy war in Ukraine now recognize that the Iraq war was a horrific disaster, but Ukraine isn’t the good war, it’s just the current war. Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the war that’s currently being pushed by the propaganda of today. The US provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invading of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda.

    It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to look back with clarity on 2022 and realize that they were lied to, yet again.

    It’s easy to oppose the last war. It’s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.

    __________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

  • For African/Black Working Class and Colonized Peoples, Midterm Elections in the U.S. Offer No Relief from War, Repression and Capitalist Misery

    Skidrow in Los Angeles, California (Photo: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) 

    The agenda was set with the Lewis Powell Memorandum in 1971. Written at the request of the United States Chamber of Commerce, probably the most influential structure of capitalist rule at the time, the concern for the Chamber was the need to find a more coherent counter-offensive to the attacks against the system over the previous years. At the center of the anti-system attacks during the 1960s was, of course, the Black Liberation Movement and the Anti-War movement.

    Powell made the argument that the capitalist class had to recognize that their very survival was at stake and that meant capitalists had to understand that as a class their interests transcended their individual enterprises.

    And while the tone of Powell’s memo was “professional” and lacked rhetorical excesses, the need for a more intentional and strategic class war was the call that leaped out from the Powell memo.

    The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation’s public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself.

    The policy implications were obvious. The U.S. ruling class concluded that it could no longer afford the “excesses” of the liberal welfare state and reform liberalism that as far as it was concerned had produced a failed war strategy, cultural decadence, rampant inflation, urban riots and demands for rights from groups representing every sector of U.S. society.

    This was the beginning of the right-wing neoliberal turn. A societal-wide counterrevolutionary policy that also required a domestic counterinsurgency strategy that would have a military, but more importantly, an ideological/cultural component. Domestically the main target of the counterinsurgency would be the revolutionary nationalist and socialist forces of the Black liberation movement and “new communist” formations.

    Internationally, the turn to neoliberalism translated into a brutal intensification of colonial/capitalist (imperialist) value extraction from nations in the global South buttressed by weak, corrupt, repressive neocolonial states politically and militarily propped-up by the U.S.

    The neoliberal counterrevolution produced irreconcilable contradictions that we are living through today. The gap between rich and poor nations and between workers and capitalists had never been more pronounced and immiseration so cruel.

    For the Black working class, the neoliberal turn was a catastrophe. The off-shoring of the U.S. industrial base with its relatively high paying jobs along with the reorganization of the economy to a service economy and the privatization wave that devastated social services and public employment where black workers were disproportionately located created structural precarity that only needed one incident to push tens of thousands into desperation. In the 2000s there were two. Hurricane Katrina and the economic collapse of 2008 that saw the greatest loss of Black wealth and income since the end of the reconstruction period between 1877 and 1896.

    Compounding this devastation, the crimes against humanity represented by the 2020 covid pandemic in which literally tens of thousands of Black people, mainly poor, unnecessarily died because the state failed to protect their fundamental human rights to health and social security.

    While Katrina exposed the fragility of Black life in the Gulf Coast, the economic crisis of 2008 just a few years later plugged millions of African workers into a desperate, depression era scramble for survival in conditions where Black labor was superfluous, and the very existence of Black life was seen as a social problem. The mass slaughter of the covid pandemic closed out the first two decades of a century that was supposed to exemplify “American” greatness with a demoralized and confused electorate turning to a washed-up hack politician named Joe Biden.

    Midterm Elections: If Stopping Fascism is on the Ballot, what was it the Africans Experienced all These Years?

    Neoliberalism was a rightist capitalist reform project. Today it informs the context for the midterms elections for African/Black workers. The objective material needs of Black workers and our desire for self-determination, independent development and peace were not on the ballot.

    And while the duopoly represents the primary political contradiction obscuring the reality of the dictatorship of capital, the most aggressive neoliberal actors now operate in and through the democratic party. Consequently, the unspoken character of the competition between the two parties is that elections have now shaped up since 2016 as a contest between the far-right elements represented today by Trump forces and the neoliberal right represented by corporate democrats tied to finance capital and transnational corporations.

    This is the undemocratic choice. The republicans represent the disaffected white nationalist petit-bourgeoisie settlers who think they are indigenous to this land. The ruling corporate capitalist elements of that party are for the most part nationalist oriented, dependent for their profits on the domestic economy. Some elements produce for the global markets, but they are in constant struggle with big capital as the capitalist economy “naturally” concentrates into its monopoly stage.

    Democrats who historically had been associated with labor and the common man even during the period when it was the party of racist segregation under the apartheid system in the South, is today the party controlled by U.S. based monopoly capital. For workers, this form of bourgeois democracy has no space or structure representing the interests of workers, the poor and structurally oppressed. The working class and poor are slowly beginning to understand that.

    That is why early evidence suggests that African/Black workers did not participate in numbers that were necessary for the democrats to have prevailed in some of those key races. The democrats have nothing to offer, no policies, no hope, and no vision.

    Some of the cowardice phony “progressives” in that party suggest that the national democrats did not push an economic message even though it was clear that the economic crisis was their most pressing concern.

    But what economic message? The democrats long ago abandoned their base and they continue to desperately find ways to dilute the influence of their most loyal base – African Americans – by seeking out that elusive white, primarily women, suburban vote.

    What the midterms reaffirmed is that the class war that Powell advocated for in the 70s as a primary strategic objective of the ruling class continues and is intensifying, even as the ruling class is in crisis and cannot rule in the same way. This means that the people must disabuse themselves of all illusions and sentimental ideas around common national interests with this reckless and increasingly irrational bourgeoisie.

    We cannot allow ourselves to fall prey to the slick propaganda that diverts attention away from the failures of the capitalist system. January 6th and Trump, evil Putin, the calculating Chinese, the exaggerated crime issue, and immigration issue, are all meant to divert us away from the fact that our lives are empty, that we have no time for friends and family, mindless soul crushing work characterizes our existence, if we have it, and the fear and anxiety that comes from a precarious existence saps our spirits and turns our confusion and anger inward.

    Ideological clarity that stems from a liberated consciousness directs us to the conclusion that it is the system that is the enemy. Not our neighbor, or the undocumented gardener or food delivery person, not the peoples of Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba who just want to live in their own way and in peace.

    The democrat party is a morally bankrupt shell, hollowed out by years of lies and corruption. Many do not want to accept the bitter reality that we (Africans and colonized peoples) must objectively acknowledge that nothing will substantially change by this election or any other bourgeois election. We can and must contest in those spaces but we are clear –  as long as power is retained by the Pan European colonial/capitalist dictatorship Black people will continue to suffer and collective humanity will face an existential threat.

    • First published at Black Agenda Report

    The post For African/Black Working Class and Colonized Peoples, Midterm Elections in the U.S. Offer No Relief from War, Repression and Capitalist Misery first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

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

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

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

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

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

    ❖

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

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

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

    ❖

    ❖

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

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

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

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

    We’re the giant.

    _____________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Names as Contradictions

    In his famous book Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell eloquently penned how elitists would render words to mean their opposite:

    “War is peace,
    freedom is slavery,
    and ignorance is strength.”

    The post Names as Contradictions first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chasing a Mirage: How Israel Arab Parties Validate Israeli Apartheid

    Regardless of the outcome of the latest Israeli elections, Arab parties will not reap meaningful political benefits, even if they collectively achieve their highest representation ever. The reason is not about the parties themselves, but in Israel’s skewed political system which is predicated on racism and marginalization of non-Jews.

    Israel was established on a problematic premise of being a homeland of all Jews, everywhere – not of Palestine’s own native inhabitants – and on a bloody foundation, that of the Nakba and the destruction of historic Palestine and the expulsion of its people.

    Such beginnings were hardly conducive to the establishment of a real democracy, perfect or blemished. Not only did Israel’s discriminatory attitude persist throughout the years, it actually worsened, especially as the Palestinian Arab population rose disproportionally compared to the Jewish population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

    The unfortunate reality is that some Arab parties have participated in Israeli elections since 1949, some independently and others under the ruling Mapei party umbrella. They did so despite Arab communities in Israel being ruled by a military government (1951-1966) and practically governed, until this day, by the unlawful ‘Defense (Emergency Regulations)’. This participation has constantly been touted by Israel and its supporters as proof of the state’s democratic nature.

    This claim alone has served as the backbone of Israeli hasbara throughout the decades. Though often unwittingly, Arab political parties in Israel have provided the fodder for such propaganda, making it difficult for Palestinians to argue that the Israeli political system is fundamentally flawed and racist.

    Palestinian citizens have always debated among themselves about the pros and cons of taking part in Israeli elections. Some understood that their participation validates the Zionist ideology and Israeli apartheid, while others argued that refraining from participating in the political process denies Palestinians the opportunity to change the system from within.

    The latter argument has lost much of its merit, as Israel sank deeper into apartheid, while social, political and legal conditions for Palestinians worsened. The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah) reports on dozens of discriminatory laws in Israel that exclusively target Arab communities. Additionally, in a report published in February, Amnesty International describes thoroughly how the “representation of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the decision making process … has been restricted and undermined by an array of Israeli laws and policies.”

    This reality has existed for decades, long before July 19, 2018, when the Israeli parliament approved the so-called Jewish Nation-State Basic Law. The Law was the most glaring example of political and legal racism, which made Israel a full-fledged apartheid regime.

    The Law was also the most articulate proclamation of Jewish supremacy over Palestinians in all aspects of life, including the right to self-determination.

    Those who have argued that Arab participation in Israeli politics served a purpose in the past should have done more than collectively denounce the Nation-State law, by resigning en masse, effective immediately. They should have taken advantage of the international uproar to convert their struggle from a parliamentary to a popular grassroots one.

    Alas, they have not. They continued to participate in Israeli elections, arguing that if they achieved greater representation in the Israeli Knesset, they should be able to challenge the tsunami of Israeli discriminatory laws.

    This did not happen, even after the Joint List, which unified four Arab parties in the March 2020 elections, achieved its greatest turnout ever, becoming the Knesset’s third largest political bloc.

    The supposed historic victory culminated to nil because all mainstream Jewish parties, regardless of their ideological backgrounds, refused to include Arab parties in their potential coalitions.

    The enthusiasm that mobilized Arab voters behind the Joint List began to dwindle, and the List itself fragmented, thanks to Mansour Abbas, the head of the Arab party, Ra’am.

    In the March 2021 elections, Abbas wanted to change the dynamics of Arab politics in Israel altogether. “We focus on the issues and problems of the Arab citizens of Israel within the Green Line,” Abbas told TIME magazine in June 2021, adding “we want to heal our own problems”, as if declaring a historic delink from the rest of the Palestinian struggle.

    Abbas was wrong, as Israel perceives him, his followers, the Joint List and all Palestinians to be obstacles in its efforts to maintain the exclusivist ‘Jewish identity’ of the state. The Abbas experiment, however, became even more interesting, when Ra’am won 4 seats and joined a government coalition led by far-right, anti-Palestinian politician Naftali Bennet.

    By the time the coalition collapsed in June, Abbas achieved little, aside from splitting the Arab vote and proving, again, that changing Israeli politics from within has always been a fantasy.

    Even after all of this, Arab parties in Israel still insisted on participating in a political system that, despite its numerous contradictions, agreed on one thing: Palestinians are, and will always be, the enemy.

    Even the violent events of May 2021, where Palestinians found themselves fighting on multiple fronts – against the Israeli army, police, intelligence services, armed settlers and even ordinary citizens – did not seem to change the Arab politicians’ mindset. Arab population centers in Umm Al-Fahm, Lydda and Jaffa, were attacked with the same racist mentality as Gaza and Sheikh Jarrah, illustrating that nearly 75 years of supposed integration between Jews and Arabs under Israel’s political system hardly changed the racist view towards Palestinians.

    Instead of converting the energy of what Palestinians dubbed the ‘Unity Intifada’ to invest in Palestinian unity, Arab Israeli politicians returned to the Israeli Knesset, as if they still had hope in salvaging Israel’s inherently corrupt political system.

    The self-delusion continues. On September 29, Israel’s Central Election Committee disqualified an Arab party, Balad, from running in the November elections. The decision was eventually overturned by the country’s Supreme Court, urging an Arab legal organization in Israel to describe the decision as ‘historic’. In essence, they suggested that Israel’s apartheid system still carries the hope of true democracy.

    The future of Arab politics in Israel will remain grim if Arab politicians continue to pursue this failed tactic. Though Palestinian citizens of Israel are socio-economically privileged if compared to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, they enjoy nominal or no substantive political or legal rights. By remaining loyal participants in Israel’s democracy charade, these politicians continue to validate the Israeli establishment, thus harming, not only Palestinian communities in Israel but, in fact, Palestinians everywhere.

    The post Chasing a Mirage: How Israel Arab Parties Validate Israeli Apartheid first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

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

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

    The war propaganda is airing reruns.

    ❖

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

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

    ❖

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

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

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

    ______________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Self-Destructive Social Habits, Loneliness, and Propaganda

    We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

    — T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”, 1925

    When many people share thoughts, speech, or conduct that is frequently repeated and becomes automatic, it is fair to call it a social habit.  Such habits tend to become invisible and unspeakable. They become part of our taken-for-granted-world.

    When I recently wrote an essay about hoarding – “The Last Temptation of Things,” many people got angry with me.  A friend wrote to me to say: “I congratulate and curse you for writing this.”  He meant it as a complement.  I took it as meaning I had touched a raw nerve and it touched off a series of further thoughts about social habits and people’s angry reactions when they are challenged.

    Some people who criticized me absurdly complained that I was supporting Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s “You Will Own Nothing” campaign, something I have opposed from the start.  Others said that I was attacking people who kept mementos and photographs, etc. and that I was advocating living in a shack.  This was clearly false.  Some got it, of course, and knew that I was using an extreme example to make a point about excessive saving of all sorts of things and how debilitating it is to surround ourselves with far more than we could ever use, need, or even know we have.  My case study was a friend’s house that my wife and I had just cleaned out in an exhaustive case of what felt like an exorcism.

    Now I see that there is a clear connection between hoarding – or whatever word you choose to give it when the saving of things is excessive – and propaganda. Both are forms of habitual clutter, one mental and the other physical, the former imposed from without and accepted passively and the latter self-created to try to protect from loss.  In both cases, the suggestion that your social habits need to be examined is often greeted as a threat to one’s “existence”  and elicits anger or dismissal.

    Sociologists, of which I am one, have various terms for what I am calling social habits.  They don’t speak the language of ordinary people, and so their lingo rarely enters into common discourse to be heard by most people. Such verbiage often just mystifies.

    But habit is a plain and clear word, and social habit simply extends the meaning I am referring to.  José Ortega Y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, and Max Weber referred to it as “usage” before settling on habit.  While usage is accurate, it lacks the stickiness of habit, which is the simplest word and one everyone understands as behavior that has become automatic through frequent repetition.

    For example, in the inconsequential realm of clothing fashions, men are now wearing tight leg-fitting pants, and it seems normal to most, just as loose pants did in the past.  It will change, of course, and a new or ”old” social fashion habit will replace it and most will go with it.  Either way you choose you lose – or win – depending on whether or not you follow the fashions of dress, which mean little or much depending on whether you interpret them symbolically as signifying  more than their appearances present.

    It is true that all ideas, language usage, and behavior become second nature until they are not.  For example, “my bad” may no longer be good, as far as I know, a phrase I have avoided along with “a ton of fun,” “you guys,” and “overseas contingency operations.”

    Some social habits persist for a very long time because they are continually reinforced with propaganda that created them in the first place.  As Jacques Ellul has emphasized, such propaganda is not the touch of a magic wand.  “It is based on slow, constant impregnation.  It creates convictions and compliance that are effective only by continuous repetition.”  Like a slowly dripping faucet, it drips and drips and drips to reinforce its point.

    Take the hatred of Russia promulgated by the U.S. government.  It is more than a century old.  Few Americans know that the U.S. invaded Russia in 1918 to try to stop the Russian Revolution.  Today’s U.S. war against Russia is nothing new, yet many people buy the daily lies about the war in Ukraine because it is a habit of mind, part of their taken-for-granted-world.

    Take the CIA assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert.  For decades the U.S. media has worked hand-in-glove with the CIA to reinforce the official lies by calling those who have exposed those lies “conspiracy theorists,” a term that the CIA itself promoted and the media continues to use daily to ridicule dissent.  The phrase “conspiracy theorist” is a handy social usage regularly used now to dismiss critics of any official claim, not just the Kennedys’ murders.  Additionally, it is used to lump together the most absurd claims available – e.g. a Martian woman gives birth to a cat in Las Vegas – with the exposure of real government conspiracies in order to dismiss both as ridiculous.

    Take the U.S. government assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that has been covered up by giving MLK, Jr. his own holiday and reducing his message to pablum.  Now you can have a day of service to forget King’s passionate denunciation of the U.S. government as the most violent nation on the earth and the government’s murder of him for his powerful anti-war stance and his campaign for economic justice for all.

    Take the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks.  They too were wrapped in propaganda from day one that has been reinforced since, resulting in the social habit shared by the majority that Osama bin Laden and nineteen Arab hijackers planned and carried out the attacks.  This propaganda supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the so-called war on terror that has never ended, the destruction of Libya, Afghanistan, the ongoing war against Syria, the aggression toward China, and the U.S. war against Russia, to name the most obvious. And it ushered in twenty-one years and counting of the squelching of civil liberties, government censorship, and surveillance.  All this with no mass resistance from a population lost in the taken-for-granted world of mind control.  Their minds cluttered with lies.

    Take the Covid pandemic propaganda that introduced  the New Normal in March 2020 and continues today.  Destroying small businesses, crippling the economies, fattening up the elites and the wealthiest classes and corporations, injecting millions with untested mRNA so-called vaccines, this diabolical Big Lie has accustomed people to accepting further restrictions on their natural rights under the guise of protecting their health while severely damaging their health.  Despite the fact that all the official claims have been proven false, the fear of death and disease, promoted for many years, has dramatically entered into the social bloodstream and additional censorship of dissenting voices has been embraced.

    In all these examples and so many more, people’s minds have been slowly and insidiously filled with ideas and distorted facts that are false and controlling, similar to a hoarder’s accretion of objects that can overwhelm them. The propagandists have stuffed them with “things” that can assuage their fear of emptiness and the consequent possibility of being able to think clearly for themselves. Excessive information is the last thing people need, for as C. Wright Mills said sixty years ago, “… in this age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it.”

    Ellul describes the modern person thus:

    Above all he is a victim of emptiness – he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing – something to fill his inner void …. He is available and ready to listen to propaganda. He is the lonely man …. For it, propaganda, encompassing Human Relations, is an incomparable remedy.  It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.

    And whenever one questions any of the social habits that sustain people’s illusions, their reactions can be sharp and shrill.  To suggest that people collect too many things out of a fear of emptiness, as I did with the hoarding piece, becomes a direct attack on some deep sense they have of themselves.  As if the “stuff” were an extension of their identities without which they would drown.  Even more threatening to so many is to question their opinions about Covid 19, JFK, RFK, the U.S war against Russia, 9/11, etc., and to suggest they have swallowed massive doses of deep-state propaganda. This often infuriates them.

    It is “unspeakable,” as the Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, as quoted by James W. Douglass in his extraordinary book, JFK and The Unspeakable:

    One of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that the [world] is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable …. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience …

    Social habits are very hard to break, especially when they are reinforced by official propaganda.  They tend to be addictive.  Ownership and use of the cell phone is a prime example.  Such phones are a key element in the digital revolution that has allowed for increased social control and propaganda.  Few can give them up.  And when your mind is filled with years of propaganda that has become second-nature, your ability to think independently is extremely limited.  There is no place for the creative emptiness that leads to genuine thought.  Dissent becomes “conspiracy theory.”

    Hollow heads filled with straw indeed.

    But Eliot may have been wrong in the way he ended his poem:

    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

    It may end with a bang while many just whimper.

     

    The post Self-Destructive Social Habits, Loneliness, and Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Destroying Western Values To Defend Western Values

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online.

    While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”:

    According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

    The report reveals pervasive efforts on the part of the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the FBI, to push massive online platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to censor content in order to suppress “threats” as broad as fomenting distrust in the US government and US financial institutions.

    “There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use,” The Intercept reports.

    “Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020,” says The Intercept. “Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to ‘process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.’”

    While these government agencies contend that they are not technically forcing these tech platforms to remove content, The Intercept argues that its investigation shows “CISA’s goal is to make platforms more responsive to their suggestions,” while critics argue that “suggestions” from immensely powerful institutions will never be taken as mere suggestions.

    “When the government suggests things, it’s not too hard to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist,” Michigan State University’s Adam Candeub tells The Intercept. “And I would consider such actions, especially when it’s bureaucratized, as essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms.”

    The current CISA chief is seen justifying this aggressive government thought policing by creepily referring to the means people use to gather information and form thoughts about the world as “our cognitive infrastructure”:

    Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.

    Another CISA official is seen suggesting the agency launder its manipulations through third party nonprofits “to avoid the appearance of government propaganda”:

    To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the “efficacy of interventions,” specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for trust information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”

    But as a former ACLU president tells The Intercept, if this were happening in any government the US doesn’t like there’d be no qualms about calling it what it is:

    “If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”

    Indeed, this report is just another example of the way western powers are behaving more and more like the autocracies they claim to despise, all in the name of preserving the values the west purports to uphold. As The Intercept reminds us, this business of the US government assigning itself the responsibility of regulating America’s “cognitive infrastructure” originated with the “allegation that Russian agents had seeded disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward Donald Trump.” To this day that agenda continues to expand into things like plots to censor speech about the war in Ukraine.

    Other examples of this trend coming out at the same time include Alan MacLeod’s new report with Mintpress News that hundreds of former agents from the notorious Israeli spying organization Unit 8200 are now working in positions of influence at major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon (just the latest in MacLeod’s ongoing documentation of the way intelligence insiders have been increasingly populating the ranks of Silicon Valley platforms), and the revelation that The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté were barred from participating in a Web Summit conference due to pressure from the Ukrainian government.

    We’re destroying western values to defend western values. To win its much-touted struggle of “democracies vs autocracies“, western civilization is becoming more and more autocratic. Censoring more. Trolling more. Propagandizing more. Jailing journalists. Becoming less and less transparent. Manipulating information and people’s understanding of truth.

    We’re told we need to defeat Russia in Ukraine in order to preserve western values of freedom and democracy, and in order to facilitate that aim we’re getting less and less free speech. Less and less free thought. Less and less free press. Less and less democracy.

    I keep thinking of the (fictional) story where during World War II Winston Churchill is advised to cut funding for the arts to boost military funding, and he responds, “Then what are we fighting for?” If we need to sacrifice everything we claim to value in order to fight for those values, what are we fighting for?

    Dissent is becoming less and less tolerated. Public discourse is being more and more aggressively disrupted by the powerful. We’re being shaped into the exact sort of homogeneous, power-serving, tyrannized, propagandized population that our leaders criticize other nations for having.

    If the powerful are becoming more tyrannical in order to fight tyranny, what’s probably actually happening is that they are just tyrants making up excuses to do the thing they’ve always wanted to do.

    As westerners in “liberal democracies” we are told that our society holds free speech, free thought and accountability for the powerful as sacrosanct.

    Our leaders are showing us that this is a lie.

    The problem with “western values” is that the west doesn’t value them.

    In reality, those who best exemplify “western values” as advertised are the ones who are being most aggressively silenced and marginalized by western powers. The real journalists. The dissidents. The skeptics. The free thinkers. The peace activists. Those who refuse to bow down to their rulers.

    Our ongoing descent into tyranny in the name of opposing tyrants calls forth a very simple question: if defeating autocracy requires becoming an autocracy, what’s the point of defeating autocracy?

    _______________

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

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  • The Great Awakening

    The post The Great Awakening first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Disrupt The Cognitive Infrastructure

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Leaked documents reveal that the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population — the information systems people use to feed their minds and think their thoughts.

    If it is the job of the US intelligence cartel to regulate society’s cognitive infrastructure, then it is the job of healthy human beings to disrupt the cognitive infrastructure.

    Fill the cognitive infrastructure with information that is inconvenient for the powerful.

    Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure by saturating it with unauthorized speech.

    Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure. Corrupt the cognitive infrastructure. Tell the cognitive infrastructure that the teacher is bullshitting and the preacher is a liar. Sneak the cognitive infrastructure its first cigarette and a copy of the Communist Manifesto.

    Take the cognitive infrastructure’s virginity. Teach the cognitive infrastructure about the primacy of the clitoris. Take the cognitive infrastructure on its first psilocybin mushroom hunt and give it phoenix reincarnation orgasms in the forest.

    Pay attention to that man behind the curtain. Extremely close attention. Be intrusive about it. Shine a flashlight up his asshole. Disregard the proper channels. Hack his devices and publish his emails.

    Sow chaotic good tidings throughout the information ecosystem. Surf on waves of WikiLeaks documents and Grayzone reports with problematic revelations pouring from your throat like rain. Scrawl “WHAT CAN BE DESTROYED BY THE TRUTH SHOULD BE” on bathroom stalls and overpasses.

    Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure on your smartphone. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure on the street corner. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure in conversations with friends and family. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure too severely and from too many directions for there to ever be any hope of its regulation or control.

    Be the disruption you want to see in the cognitive infrastructure. Be a splinter in the monster’s paw. Be sand in the gears of the juggernaut machine. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure in such numbers and with such aggression that the whole thing comes toppling down, and people’s eyes begin to flutter open, and they wake up from their propaganda-induced comas into the real world, and stride out to do the very things the US intelligence cartel has been trying to prevent them from ever doing.

    Free beings under a wide open sky.

    ________________

    ________________

    ________________

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

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  • The Official Narrative On Ukraine

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    ❖

    The official narrative promoted by the entire western political/media class is that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February of this year solely because he is evil and hates freedom. He wants to conquer as much of Europe as possible because he cannot stand free democracies, because he is another Adolf Hitler.

    The official narrative is that while Russia is in Ukraine solely because its leader is an evil monster like Hitler, the US is in Ukraine solely because its leaders are righteous. The United States is providing arms, military intelligence, and assistance on the ground from special ops forces and CIA officers to Ukraine, as well as implementing an unprecedented regime of economic warfare against Russia, solely because the US loves its good friends the Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy.

    If you dispute any part of the official Ukraine narrative, you are an evil monster, and a disinformation agent. Because Vladimir Putin is the same as Adolf Hitler, you are also the same as Neville Chamberlain, and are guilty of the cardinal sin of supporting appeasement.

    Because you are an evil disinformation agent Neville Chamberlain appeasement monster, it is legitimate to censor you. It is legitimate to accuse you of being secretly paid by the Russian government. It is legitimate to swarm you with coordinated astroturf trolls working to shout you down and overwhelm you. It is legitimate to publish propagandistic smear pieces about you. All normal expectations of public discourse go out the window, because you are a monster, not a person.

    If you are tempted to ask questions which put a wobble on the official narrative, you must resist this urge at all cost. Don’t ask why western officials, scholars and strategists have spent years warning that the actions of western governments would lead to this war. Don’t ask what people are talking about when they say the US provoked this war, or when they say the US is using this war to advance strategic agendas it has had in place for years, or when they suggest that these things might have something to do with why the US is obstructing diplomatic solutions at every turn. If you ask questions like these, you are the worst person in the world.

    Per the official narrative, if you confront powerful lawmakers on their support for US interventionism in Ukraine, you are “parroting pro-Putin talking points” and spreading “Russian disinformation“. Questioning officials of the most powerful government in the world about the most consequential decisions being made in the world is violence, and is not allowed.

    If you claim you are objecting to the US using proxy warfare in Ukraine on anti-war grounds, you are lying; you are not anti-war. You are only anti-war if you support the same positions on Ukraine as noted anti-war activists John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton, and Mike Pompeo. If you want to learn about the true anti-war position, consult reliable anti-war publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

    The official narrative on Ukraine is that the US empire and its media never lie or circulate propaganda about wars that the US is involved in. If you dispute this, you are lying and circulating propaganda. That’s why it’s necessary to have so much censorship and organized trolling and mass media reports reminding you how good and righteous this war is: it’s to protect you from lies and propaganda.

    If any part of the official narrative on Ukraine sounds suspicious to you, this means you have been infected by Russian disinformation. Do not breathe a word of the thoughts you’ve been thinking to anyone, or else you will be guilty of spreading Russian disinformation and will become the enemy of the free world.

    Remember, good citizen: we must oppose Russian propaganda at all costs to protect our western values of free expression, free thought, free press, and free democracy. So do not question any part of the official Ukraine narrative. Or else.

    ________________

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

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  • Advocating World War Three Is Just Mainstream Punditry Now

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    Mainstream punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it. As though it would not be the direct result of the US-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar planetary domination.

    The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that is owned and operated by the supremely influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations.

    “The United States and its allies must plan for how to simultaneously win wars in Asia and Europe, as unpalatable as the prospect may seem,” writes the article’s author Thomas G Mahnken, adding that in some ways “the United States and its allies will have an advantage in any simultaneous war” in those two continents.

    But Mahnken doesn’t claim a world war against Russia and China would be a walk in the park; he also argues that in order to win such a war the US will need to — you guessed it — drastically increase its military spending.

    “The United States clearly needs to increase its defense manufacturing capacity and speed,” Mahnken writes. “In the short term, that involves adding shifts to existing factories. With more time, it involves expanding factories and opening new production lines. To do both, Congress will have to act now to allocate more money to increase manufacturing.”

    But exploding US weapons spending is still inadequate, Mahnken argues, saying that “the United States should work with its allies to increase their military production and the size of their weapons and munitions stockpiles” as well.

    Mahnken says this world war could be sparked “if China initiated a military operation to take Taiwan, forcing the United States and its allies to respond,” as though there would be no other options on the table besides launching into nuclear age World War Three to defend an island next to the Chinese mainland that calls itself the Republic of China. He writes that “Moscow, meanwhile, could decide that with the United States bogged down in the western Pacific, it could get away with invading more of Europe,” demonstrating the bizarre Schrödinger’s cat western propaganda paradox that Putin is always simultaneously (A) getting destroyed and humiliated in Ukraine and (B) on the cusp of waging hot war with NATO.

    Again, this is just the latest in an increasingly common genre of mainstream western punditry.

    In “The skeptics are wrong: The U.S. can confront both China and Russia,” The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin wags his finger at Democrats who think aggressions against Russia should be prioritized and Republicans who think that military and financial attention should be devoted to China, arguing porque no los dos?

    In “Could The U.S. Military Fight Russia And China At The Same Time?“, 19FortyFive’s Robert Farley answers in the affirmative, writing that “the immense fighting power of the US armed forces would not be inordinately strained by the need to wage war in both theaters” and concluding that “the United States can fight both Russia and China at once… for a while, and with the help of some friends.”

    In “Can the US Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?” Bloomberg’s Hal Brands answers that it would be very difficult and recommends escalating in Ukraine and Taiwan and selling Israel more advanced weaponry to get a step ahead of Russia, China and Iran respectively.

    In “International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming,” the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig writes for Foreign Policy that a global democracies-versus-autocracies showdown is coming “with the United States and its status quo-oriented democratic allies in NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia on one side and the revisionist autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran on the other,” and that aspiring foreign policy experts should adjust their expectations accordingly.

    When they’re not arguing that World War Three is coming and we must all prepare to fight it and win, they’re arguing that a global conflict is already upon us and we must begin acting like it, as in last month’s New Yorker piece “What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia?”

    These Beltway swamp monster pontifications are directed not just at the general public but at government policymakers and strategists as well, and it should disturb us all that their audiences are being encouraged to view a global conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some kind of natural disaster that people don’t have any control over.

    Every measure should be taken to avoid a world war in the nuclear age. If it looks like that’s where we’re headed, the answer is not to ramp up weapons production and create entire industries dedicated to making it happen, the answer is diplomacy, de-escalation and detente. These pundits frame the rise of a multipolar world as something that must inevitably be accompanied by an explosion of violence and human suffering, when in reality we’d only wind up there as a result of decisions that were made by thinking human beings on both sides.

    It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no omnipotent deity decreeing from on high that we must live in a world where governments brandish armageddon weapons at each other and humanity must either submit to Washington or resign itself to cataclysmic violence of planetary consequence. We could just have a world where the peoples of all nations get along with each other and work together toward the common good rather than working to dominate and subjugate each other.

    As Jeffrey Sachs recently put it, “The single biggest mistake of president Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”

    We could have a world where our energy and resources go toward increasing human thriving and learning to collaborate with this fragile biosphere we evolved in. Where all our scientific innovation is directed toward making this planet a better place to live instead of channeling it into getting rich and finding new ways to explode human bodies. Where our old models of competition and exploitation give way to systems of collaboration and care. Where poverty, toil and misery gradually move from accepted norms of human existence to dimly remembered historical record.

    Instead we’re getting a world where we’re being hammered harder and harder with propaganda encouraging us to accept global conflict as an unavoidable reality, where politicians who voice even the mildest support for diplomacy are shouted down and demonized until they bow to the gods of war, where nuclear brinkmanship is framed as safety and de-escalation is branded as reckless endangerment.

    We don’t have to submit to this. We don’t have to keep sleepwalking into dystopia and armageddon to the beat of manipulative sociopaths. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and we’ve got a whole lot more at stake here than they do.

    We can have a healthy world. We’ve just got to want it badly enough. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because, ultimately, they absolutely do require it.

    ______________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Boy Who Cried Hitler: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Criticizing your government is propaganda.

    Disagreeing with neocons is supporting fascism.

    Opposing an empire is defending tyranny.

    Seeking de-escalation causes escalation.

    Nuclear brinkmanship is safety.

    Diplomacy is appeasement.

    War is peace.

    Freedom is slavery.

    Ignorance is strength.

    ❖

    Criticism of US foreign policy looks like Russian propaganda to people who’ve spent their entire lives marinating in US propaganda.

    ❖

    They need so much propaganda, censorship and organized trolling because without those things the public would realize that pouring billions of dollars into an unwinnable conflict that risks nuclear war and makes everyone poorer actually sucks and doesn’t benefit normal people.

    ❖

    Comparisons of Putin to Hitler only sound profound and relevant if you only just began paying attention to US foreign policy and are therefore unaware that literally every single US enemy is always copiously compared to Hitler. It’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, except there is no wolf, and the boy just keeps crying “Wolf!” over and over again, and the villagers never learn their lesson and never stop believing him.

    Because mainstream westerners ignored all wars until Ukraine, they don’t know we’ve seen all these tricks before. They don’t know the war propaganda is airing reruns. They think it’s new to compare today’s Official Enemy to Hitler. They never question the atrocity narratives. They don’t know the US always lies about every war. They think it’s a crazy conspiracy theory to suggest that the actions and motives of their government isn’t what they’ve been told. They say “Uh, hello? PUTIN is the one who invaded!” like that obvious fact somehow makes it impossible to be lied to about the other aspects of the war.

    Because they weren’t paying attention to all the empire’s tricks leading up to this, they don’t see the same old patterns rolling themselves out yet again, often by the same old voices as before. They don’t know what patterns to watch for, so they don’t see or recognize them. That’s the only reason their eyes don’t reflexively roll when they’re told today’s Official Enemy invaded completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, or that the US is defending its friends the Ukrainians because it wants to protect freedom and democracy.

    If you only just started paying attention and don’t know the US power alliance literally always lies about every war it’s involved in, the war propaganda slides down their throats with zero gag reflex, because they don’t recognize it as propaganda. It’s unfamiliar to them.

    ❖

    Criticizing the extensively documented western aggressions that led to this war is not the same as saying the invasion is good or that Vladimir Putin is a wonderful person. If this isn’t obvious to you, it’s because US propaganda has turned your brain into soup.

    It’s absolutely insane how literally any criticism of the indisputable well-documented western provocations in Ukraine gets shouted down and raged at. You’re only allowed to say this war is completely unprovoked and began solely because Vladimir Putin is evil and hates freedom.

    If discussing facts and criticizing the foreign aggressions of the most powerful government in the world is taboo, you might be ruled by tyrants and surrounded by their brainwashed human livestock. If you spend your time raging and yelling at those who advocate peace, you might just be pro-war.

    ❖

    I gotta hand it to the war propagandists on Ukraine, it’s truly impressive how they’ve managed to convince everyone that the real “anti-war” position on this issue is the one being promoted by John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo.

    ❖

    Putin is responsible for Putin’s decisions, the US empire is responsible for the US empire’s decisions. Putin is responsible for deciding to invade, the US empire is responsible for the mountains of well-documented aggressions which provoked that decision. This isn’t complicated.

    I can respect arguments which assign blame to both the US and Russia. I can respect arguments which place more blame on Russia than on the US empire’s provocations. But the mainstream narrative does neither: it completely exonerates the US from even the tiniest bit of responsibility. Which is just a joke; there is no valid basis on which to claim this war was unprovoked. None. The only people who claim this are the propagandists and those they have propagandized.

    But that’s pretty much everyone I wind up arguing with about Ukraine: those who adamantly insist that the most powerful empire that has ever existed bears exactly zero percent of the responsibility for this war. That sycophantic, bootlicking mind virus is what I am always pushing back on.

    If you believe the US empire bears zero responsibility for starting this war, even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, it’s because empire propaganda has melted your brain. But this is most people. It’s the mainstream perspective on this war.

    That demands pushback. Herculean pushback. The fact that the most powerful and belligerent power structure on the face of this earth is predominantly viewed as having no responsibility for the extremely dangerous war it deliberately provoked demands aggressive opposition.

    The US deliberately provoked this war. The US is keeping this war going. The US is using this war to advance its geostrategic interests in Europe and Asia. These are facts. When facts are taboo, you are living in a world of lies.

    ❖

    The Assange case is resonating with so many people because it’s personal. It’s asking each of us what kind of world we want to live in: one where journalists are allowed to tell the truth about the powerful, or one where they are not? It’s a question that demands an answer.

    ❖

    I speak in a forceful and unmitigated way because that’s how you get people to listen to you, and because it is the right thing to do. If empire critics don’t speak in a forceful and unmitigated way, the only ones speaking in a forceful and unmitigated way will be the imperial pundits and politicians.

    It often enrages empire apologists that I speak this way, because they’re not used to criticism of the US empire being voiced like this, but it also sometimes confuses people who agree with me for the same reason. Socialists and anti-imperialists usually mitigate their voices. I don’t, because that’s just a bad habit. If you’re right, you should speak like you’re right. If we don’t, the only ones speaking like they’re right will be those who are wrong. And then those who are wrong are the only ones who will be listened to.

    And that’s exactly what’s happening: those with the most influential voices are those who defend the most depraved impulses of the most powerful people in the world. Those are the people who are being listened to right now. So speak like you know you’re right and they’re wrong, because that is indeed the case.

    ❖

    Fredric Jameson says it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Adyashanti says spiritual people are often more afraid of life than they are of death. These two points seem related. Armageddon feels less scary than sorting our shit out as a species.

    The idea of finally turning towards each other and coming into enough intimacy to move from competition-based systems to collaboration-based ones feels more intimidating than the end of the world, so people start hoping for the end because at least that way it’ll be over with. For the same reason people who can’t imagine going on living get suicidal ideations, people who can’t imagine humanity transcending its self-destructive pattering get omnicidal ideations.

    This is a major obstacle. Humans need to overcome their fear of life.

    _______________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Feature image via Amaury Laporte (CC BY 2.0), formatted for size.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • One Thing to Remember for Personal Sanity

    The post One Thing to Remember for Personal Sanity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Always Opposing The Last War But Not The Current One: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Those who hate Russia the most are the ones who embody everything they claim to hate about it: they’re all pro-war, pro-censorship, pro-propaganda, pro-trolling operations, and support Ukraine in banning political parties and opposition media. They are what they claim to hate.

    Meanwhile those of us who oppose those things are told to “move to Russia”, even though we’re the ones advocating the supposed “western values” they claim to support while they’re doing everything they can to undermine them. They should move to Russia.

    ❖

    ❖

    Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the current war. The US provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invading of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda. Ukraine isn’t the good war, it’s just the current war.

    It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to see clearly and realize that they were lied to. Again.

    The US indisputably deliberately provoked this war. The US is indisputably keeping this war going. The US indisputably benefits from this war while Ukrainians, Russians and Europeans get nothing but suffering from it. Empire apologists will admit to the latter in rare moments of honesty, as Matthew Yglesias recently did when he wrote the following:

    The United States is using up a lot of military equipment in the war, but it’s being used for the purpose of destroying Russian military equipment. Since we were already fully committed to an anti-Russian military alliance, this is actually a really good deal for us. Basically, NATO equipment + Ukrainian lives are being traded for Russian equipment + Russian lives, which leaves NATO coming out ahead. That’s doubly true because NATO is much richer than Russia, so we win a long-term game of “everyone explode their weapons as fast as they can make them.”

     

    Again, though, what makes that really true is that NATO material is killing Russian soldiers, while Russian material is killing Ukrainian soldiers. That’s a deal in our favor.

    It’s easy to oppose the last war. It’s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.

    ❖

    ❖

    The fact that the White House is weighing a national security review of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase because he’s perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance” is an admission that the US government views large social media platforms as its own propaganda services.

    ❖

    There is no one who can be trusted with the authority to determine what constitutes “disinformation” or “misinformation” on behalf of large numbers of people. This is because we are not impartial omniscient deities but highly fallible, biased humans with our own vested interests.

    This fatal logical flaw in the burgeoning business of “fact checking” and “counter-disinformation” is self-evident at a glance, and it becomes even more glaring once you notice that all the major players involved in instituting and normalizing these practices have ties to status quo power.

    The idea that someone needs to be in charge of deciding what’s true and false on behalf of the rank-and-file citizenry is becoming more and more widely accepted, and it’s plainly irrational. In practice it’s nothing other than a call to propagandize the public more aggressively. You might agree with their propaganda. The propagandists might believe they are being totally impartial and objective. But as long as they have any oligarchic or state backing, directly or indirectly, they are necessarily administering propaganda on behalf of the powerful.

    Question the assumption that people saying wrong things to each other on the internet is a problem that needs to be fixed. People have always said wrong things to each other. Untruth has always existed. We’ve managed. It’s not a problem we should want the powerful to fix for us.

    ❖

     

    ❖

    Science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world. Every scientist on earth should be collaborating and communicating. Instead, because of our competition-based models, it’s the exact opposite: scientific exploration is divided up into innovators competing against other innovators, corporations competing against other corporations, nations competing against other nations.

    If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is. This is doubtless. We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich.

    It’s not too late to have this, of course. We could still abandon our competition-based models for collaboration-based ones and create paradise on earth together; we’ve just got to want it badly enough as a species.

    A collaboration-based society where everyone gets what they need wouldn’t just eliminate the inefficiencies and obstacles created by competition: it would free up the brainpower of our entire species to devote itself to innovation and discovery. As Stephen J Gould said, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

    Poverty, inequality, the patent system, the need to earn money to survive, corporate competition, corporate secrecy, competition between states, state secrecy, war, militarism; all these drainages leave us with a tiny fraction of our available scientific potential. Overcoming the existential roadblocks we’ve set up for ourselves in our near future is going to require a tremendous amount of brilliance, and we won’t have access to that brilliance until we become a conscious species and move from competition-based models to collaborative ones.

    _______________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Gaslighting of the Masses

    For students of official propaganda, mind control, emotional coercion, and other insidious manipulation techniques, the rollout of the New Normal has been a bonanza. Never before have we been able to observe the application and effects of these powerful technologies in real-time on such a massive scale.

    In a little over two and a half years, our collective “reality” has been radically revised. Our societies have been radically restructured. Millions (probably billions) of people have been systematically conditioned to believe a variety of patently ridiculous assertions, assertions based on absolutely nothing, repeatedly disproved by widely available evidence, but which have nevertheless attained the status of facts. An entire fictitious history has been written based on those baseless and ridiculous assertions. It will not be unwritten easily or quickly.

    I am not going to waste your time debunking those assertions. They have been repeatedly, exhaustively debunked. You know what they are and you either believe them or you don’t. Either way, reviewing and debunking them again isn’t going to change a thing.

    Instead, I want to focus on one particularly effective mind-control technology, one that has done a lot of heavy lifting throughout the implementation of the New Normal and is doing a lot of heavy-lifting currently. I want to do that because many people mistakenly believe that mind-control is either (a) a “conspiracy theory” or (b) something that can only be achieved with drugs, microwaves, surgery, torture, or some other invasive physical means. Of course, there is a vast and well-documented history of the use of such invasive physical technologies (see, e.g., the history of the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program), but in many instances mind-control can be achieved through much less elaborate techniques.

    One of the most basic and effective techniques that cults, totalitarian systems, and individuals with fascistic personalities use to disorient and control people’s minds is “gaslighting.” You’re probably familiar with the term. If not, here are a few definitions:

    “the manipulation of another person into doubting their perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events.” American Psychological Association

    “an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.” Psychology Today

    “a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.” Newport Institute

    The main goal of gaslighting is to confuse, coerce, and emotionally manipulate your victim into abandoning their own perception of reality and accepting whatever new “reality” you impose on them. Ultimately, you want to completely destroy their ability to trust their own perception, emotions, reasoning, and memory of historical events, and render them utterly dependent on you to tell them what is real and what “really” happened, and so on, and how they should be feeling about it.

    Anyone who has ever experienced gaslighting in the context of an abusive relationship, or a cult, or a totalitarian system, or who has worked in a battered women’s shelter, can tell you how powerful and destructive it is. In the most extreme cases, the victims of gaslighting are entirely stripped of their sense of self and surrender their individual autonomy completely. Among the best-known and most dramatic examples are the Patty Hearst case, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Manson family, and various other cults, but, the truth is, gaslighting happens every day, out of the spotlight of the media, in countless personal and professional relationships.

    Since the Spring of 2020, we have been subjected to official gaslighting on an unprecedented scale. In a sense, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has been one big extended gaslighting campaign (comprising countless individual instances of gaslighting) inflicted on the masses throughout the world. The events of this past week were just another example.

    Basically, what happened was, a Pfizer executive confirmed to the European Parliament last Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its Covid “vaccine” prevented transmission of the virus before it was promoted as doing exactly that and forced on the masses in December of 2020. People saw the video of the executive admitting this, or heard about it, and got upset. They tweeted and Facebooked and posted videos of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Bill Gates, the Director of the CDC, official propagandists like Rachel Maddow, and various other “experts” and “authorities” blatantly lying to the public, promising people that getting “vaccinated” would “prevent transmission,” “protect other people from infection,” “stop the virus in its tracks,” and so on, which totally baseless assertions (i.e., lies) were the justification for the systematic segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” and the fomenting of mass fanatical hatred of anyone challenging the official “vaccine” narrative, and the official New Normal ideology, which hatred persists to this very day.

    The New Normal propaganda apparatus (i.e., the corporate media, health “experts,” et al.) responded to the story predictably. They ignored it, hoping it would just go away. When it didn’t, they rolled out the “fact-checkers” (i.e., gaslighters).

    The Associated Press, Reuters, PolitiFact, and other official gaslighting outfits immediately published lengthy official “fact-checks” that would make a sophist blush. Read them and you will see what I mean. They are perfect examples of official gaslighting, crafted to distract you from the point and suck you into an argument over meaningless details and definitions. They sound exactly like Holocaust deniers pathetically asserting that there is no written proof that Hitler ordered the Final Solution … which, there isn’t, but it doesn’t fucking matter. Of course, Hitler ordered the Final Solution, and, of course, they lied about the “vaccines.”

    The Internet is swimming with evidence of their lies … tweets, videos, articles, and so on.

    Which is what makes gaslighting so frustrating for people who believe they are engaged in an actual good-faith argument over facts and the truth. But that’s not how totalitarianism works. The New Normals, when they repeat whatever the authorities have instructed them to repeat today (e.g., “trust the Science,” “safe and effective,” “no one ever claimed they would prevent transmission”), could not care less whether it is actually true, or even if it makes the slightest sense.

    These gaslighting “fact-checks” are not meant to convince them that anything is true or false. And they are certainly not meant to convince us. They are official scripts, talking points, and thought-terminating clichés for the New Normals to repeat, like cultists chanting mantras at you to shut off their minds and block out anything that contradicts or threatens the “reality” of the cult.

    You can present them with the actual facts, and they will smile knowingly, and deny them to your face, and condescendingly mock you for not “seeing the truth.”

    But here’s the tricky thing about gaslighting.

    In order to effectively gaslight someone, you have be in a position of authority or wield some other form of power over them. They have to need something vital from you (i.e., sustenance, safety, financial security, community, career advancement, or just love). You can’t walk up to some random stranger on the street and start gaslighting them. They will laugh in your face.

    The reason the New Normal authorities have been able to gaslight the masses so effectively is that most of the masses do need something from them … a job, food, shelter, money, security, status, their friends, a relationship, or whatever it is they’re not willing to risk by challenging those in power and their lies. Gaslighters, cultists, and power freaks, generally, know this. It is what they depend on, your unwillingness to live without whatever it is. They zero in on it and threaten you with the loss of it (sometimes consciously, sometimes just intuitively).

    Gaslighting won’t work if you are willing to give up whatever the gaslighter is threatening to take from you (or stop giving you, as the case may be), but you have to be willing to actually lose it, because you will be punished for defending yourself, for not surrendering your autonomy and integrity, and conforming to the “reality” of the cult, or the abusive relationship, or the totalitarian system.

    I have described the New Normal (i.e., our new “reality”) as pathologized-totalitarianism, and as a “a cult writ large, on a societal scale.” I used the “Covidian Cult” analogy because every totalitarian system essentially operates like a cult, the main difference being that, in totalitarian systems, the balance of power between the cult and the normal (i.e., dominant) society is completely inverted. The cult becomes the dominant (i.e., “normal”) society, and non-cult-members become its “deviants.”

    We do not want to see ourselves as “deviants” (because we haven’t changed, the society has), and our instinct is to reject the label, but that is exactly what we are … deviants. People who deviate from the norm, a new norm, which we reject, and oppose, but which, despite that, is nonetheless the norm, and thus we are going to be regarded and dealt with like deviants.

    I am such a deviant. I have a feeling you are too. Under the circumstances, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, we need to accept it, and embrace it. Above all, we need to get clear about it, about where we stand in this new “reality.”

    We are heading toward New Normal Winter No. 3. They are already cranking up the official propaganda, jacking up the fabricated “cases,” talking about reintroducing mask-mandates, fomenting mass hatred of “the Unvaccinated,” and so on. People’s gas bills are doubling and tripling. The global-capitalist ruling classes are openly embracing neo-Nazis. There is talk of “limited” nuclear war. Fanaticism, fear, and hatred abound. The gaslighting of the masses is not abating. It is increasing. The suppression of dissent is intensifying. The demonization of non-conformity is intensifying. Lines are being drawn in the sand. You see it and feel it just like I do.

    Get clear on what’s essential to you. Get clear about what you’re willing to lose. Stay deviant. Stay frosty. This isn’t over.

    The post The Gaslighting of the Masses first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national security review of Elon Musk’s business ventures which could see the plutocrat’s purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part because Musk is perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance.”

    Bloomberg reports:

    Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter.

     

    US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

    The “group of foreign investors” the Biden administration is reportedly worried about oddly includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who has already been a massive Twitter shareholder for years. The White House certainly never had a problem with foreign investors there before.

    “Officials in the US government and intelligence community are weighing what tools, if any, are available that would allow the federal government to review Musk’s ventures,” Bloomberg writes. “One possibility is through the law governing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States [CFIUS] to review Musk’s deals and operations for national security risks, they said.”

    “Musk, the world’s richest person, has taken to Twitter in recent weeks to announce proposals to end Russia’s war and threaten to cut financial support for Starlink internet in Ukraine,” says Bloomberg. “His tweets and public comments have frustrated officials in the US and Europe and drawn praise from America’s rivals.”

    “If the Twitter acquisition was to be reviewed by CFIUS for national security reasons, the agency could recommend to President Biden that he nix the deal — something Musk himself has tried and failed to do in recent months,” writes Business Insider’s Kate Duffy on the Bloomberg scoop.

    Indeed Musk has already indicated that he’d find it funny if the Biden administration blocked his purchase of Twitter, a $44 billion buy that the Tesla executive has made every legal effort to back out of. But how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that they’re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?

    Neither Bloomberg nor any other mainstream members of the imperial commentariat appear to take any interest in the jarring notion that the US government could end up banning the purchase of an online platform because it views the purchaser as having an unacceptably “Russia-friendly stance.” Not only is it uncritically accepted that the US government mustn’t allow the purchase of a social media company if the would-be buyer isn’t deemed adequately hostile to US enemies, many mainstream liberals are actively cheering for this outcome:

    This just says so much about how the US government views the function of Silicon Valley megacorporations, and why it has been exerting more and more pressure on them to collaborate with the empire to greater and greater degrees of intimacy. As far as the US empire is concerned, Silicon Valley is just an arm of the imperial propaganda machine. And empire apologists believe that’s as it should be.

    None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to things like the drastic escalations in online censorship since the war in Ukraine began, including on Twitter, or the ongoing expansion of internet censorship protocols that were already well underway before this war started. It will also come as no surprise to people whose ears pricked up when the White House summoned top social media influencers to a briefing in which they were instructed how to talk about the Ukraine war. It will also come as no surprise to those who paid attention to the public outcry when it was discovered that the Biden administration was assembling a “disinformation governance board” to function as an official Ministry of Truth for online content, or when the White House admitted to flagging “problematic posts” for Facebook to take down, or when Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop October surprise in the last presidential race was done in conjunction with the FBI.

    It is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that Silicon Valley tech companies are a major part of the imperial narrative control system. The US empire has invested in soft power to an exponentially greater degree than any other empire in history, and has refined the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to produce the mightiest propaganda machine since the dawn of civilization. Silicon Valley is being used to manipulate the way people think about world events via algorithm manipulation, censorship, and sophisticated information ops like Wikipedia in an entirely unprecedented way that is becoming more and more important to imperial control as the old media give way to the new.

    Narrative control centers like Silicon Valley, the news media and Hollywood are just as crucial for US imperial domination as the military. That the US government is weighing intervention to stop the purchase of an online platform, because it lacks confidence that the would-be owner would reliably advance US information interests, is just the latest glimpse behind the veil at the imperial agenda to control human understanding and perception.

    ________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

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

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

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

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

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

    ❖

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

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

    __________________

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

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  • The Most Powerful Weapon The West Gave Ukraine: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    It’s pretty wild how the US is sending armored vehicles to Haiti to help quash the exact sort of uprising it’s been actively trying to create in places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and Hong Kong.

    ❖

    The Pentagon is seeking sweeping new powers in preparation for a war with China, the Senate NDAA bill increases proposed military aid to Taiwan from 4.5 to 10 billion dollars, and Tony Blinken is claiming without evidence that Beijing has greatly accelerated its plans to annex Taiwan. This is all as aggressions continue to ramp up against Russia. They really are doing this thing.

    ❖

     

    So it looks like this is what we’ll be doing for the foreseeable future: calling to escalate the war in Ukraine, facilitating the escalation of the war in Ukraine, and then screaming with shock and outrage when the war in Ukraine escalates. That seems to be what we’ve got planned.

    ❖

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

    That's because the threat perception doesn't come from geography but from propaganda. Americans are the single most propagandized population on earth. https://t.co/ATBWPt4OXF

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 18, 2022

    ❖

    “Maybe my government is actually in the wrong here and is just lying and manipulating to advance its own interests?” should be a much more common thought. It’s a line of inquiry that should be taught to schoolchildren. It is by design that it doesn’t occur to people more often.

    ❖

    The most powerful weapon the west has given Ukraine is not the HIMARS, it’s the US propaganda machine.

    ❖

    The only people who support western proxy warfare in Ukraine are those who deny the extensively documented ways the western empire has provoked, sustained, manipulated and exploited this war. You can only support what’s being done by lying and/or being lied to.

    ❖

    “Calling for de-escalation actually causes escalation” is the single dumbest empire bro talking point yet to emerge from this war.

    ❖

    Still laughing about how liberals just spent months amplifying and celebrating a trolling operation founded by a literal Nazi.

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

    NAFO founder Kamil Dyszewski (@Kama_Kamilia) is an antisemitic gamer from Poland pic.twitter.com/q5YPmDOFYZ

    — Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) October 14, 2022

    ❖

    If nuclear war erupts it won’t matter whose fault it was. It won’t matter who started it. It won’t matter whether Moscow had legitimate claim to Zaporizhzhia. All that will matter is that it happened. There will be no adjudicating responsibility after the fact. We won’t be here.

    The time to turn away from the trajectory toward nuclear war is now, not later. It’s bizarre how many people I get telling me “Well if nuclear war happens it’ll be Putin’s fault,” like that will be any comfort to them as they hug their family close and wait for a horrific death.

    There’s just so much sloppy thinking about the actual end of the world. People aren’t looking directly at this thing and thinking rigorously about what it would mean. What it would entail. This is understandable; it’s a terrible thing to contemplate. But we do urgently need to.

    People don’t seem to get that nuclear annihilation is the one mistake we could make that we can’t ever fix. There’s this unquestioned assumption that if it happened there’d be some kind of course correction afterward, but there won’t be. No one will be here to do it. No takesies backsies.

    People can’t imagine their own absence. That’s why we make up stories about life after death. It’s also why we’re having a hard time squarely facing the prospect of an Earth with no humans on it. People still assume human inventions like “fault” and “blame” will remain after us.

    People kill themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge a lot. The few survivors all say that the first thought they had upon free fall was instant regret. They realize in an instant that every problem they have can be solved except for the one they have just given themselves. Imagine having that thought, but it’s all life on Earth that we’ve killed. That’s what nuclear holocaust is. A moment of instant terrible regret followed by the blackness of the void.

    ❖

    During the Cuban Missile Crisis the top news story every day was how that whole Cuban Missile Crisis situation is going. During the nuclear brinkmanship crisis of 2022 the top news stories are about Kanye, Trump and Alex Jones. We are sleepwalking toward a cliff’s edge.

    ❖

    A sane society would chase off anyone who advocated nuclear brinkmanship and drive them out of human civilization. In our society we give them punditry gigs on mainstream media platforms and lucrative jobs at influential think tanks.

    ❖

    There are people among us who dress up their personal suicidal ideations as a world-weary, humble knowing that humans are shit and we need to die. I call these omnicidal ideations, and they are not noble or humble, they are monstrous and at odds with all of life on earth. If you can’t want to live for yourself, then live for your dog. Live for the ladybugs. Live for all the innocents that don’t deserve any of this.

    ❖

    This is all completely unnecessary. There’s nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality saying states need to be waving armageddon weapons at each other. There’s no valid reason not to lay aside these games of global conquest and collaborate together toward a healthy coexistence on this planet.

    We could have such a beautiful world. All the energy we pour into competition and conquest could go toward innovation that benefits us all, making sure everyone has enough, eliminating human suffering and the need for human toil. We’re trading heaven on earth for elite ego games.

    There’s no valid reason we can’t move from models of competition and domination to models of collaboration and care. Collaboration with each other; care for each other. Collaboration with our ecosystem; care for our ecosystem. We’re throwing it away in exchange for senseless misery and peril.

    ___________________

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

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  • Are Socialists Going to Let Neoliberals Define Fascism?

    Orientation

    The linear political spectrum is bankrupt! How does it explain why socialist China is making alliances with capitalist Russia and even with fundamentalist Saudi Arabia? Why is it that so-called socialist Social Democrats support imperialist United States rather than socialist China? Why is it that right-wing fundamentalist states like India and Brazil are supporting Russia and socialist China instead of being rabid anti-communists? The linear political spectrum is not just simplistic. It serves the interests of neoliberals and New Deal liberals as we shall see.

    All over the world, centrist parties are losing elections. People are either not voting at all or they are voting for fascists. In some countries, people are voting for Social Democrats. The traditional choices between liberals and conservatives do not speak to world problems today. Additionally, just as centrist parties are collapsing (as depicted in the image above) so is the linear political spectrum model that serves as its visual description. The purpose of this article is to show how the linear political spectrum model fails to conform to actual world politics as they are practiced today.  We need a whole new spectrum model to do justice to the political and economic realities of today.

    Linear Version of the Political Spectrum

    In his textbook on Political Ideologies Andrew Heywood presents a linear perspective that looks like this:

    Communism      Socialism      Liberalism    Conservativism       Fascism

    There are many problems with this model. Let’s start with the more quantitative ones and then we will move to qualitative problems. Then I will provide lots of examples of how the linear political spectrum fails when applied to real-world politics of today. Lastly, I will show how this linear political spectrum really serves two points on the political spectrum: neoliberal libertarians and new deal liberals.

    Quantitation problems

    For one thing, to the left of communism should be anarchism. Anarchism has been a serious ideological movement for at least 200 years, beginning with William Godwin, and millions of people have fought and died for it. Secondly, within communism there should be delineated the different kinds of Leninism, including Trotskyism, Stalinism and Maoism. Third, it is unfathomable to have only one kind of liberalism on this spectrum. There is FDR liberalism but there is also centrist liberalism. But more importantly there is libertarianism that has no representation at all on the spectrum. Yet libertarianism has been predominant for over 40 years as an economic doctrine over most of the world. As we shall see later, it benefits libertarians to present themselves as more or less the same as New Deal liberals. Lastly, conservatism should also be divided into old paleoconservatives and new right-wing conservatives.

    Qualitative problems

    In contemporary Mordor politics, even this five-fold division of the spectrum is too much. The political spectrum consists of only liberals (Democratic Party) and the conservatives (Republican Party). Both socialism and communism is conveniently ignored even though thousands of people in Yankeedom claim to be socialists. The last time I checked, the Democratic Socialists of America had 90,000 people. Fascism was mostly ignored until the presence of Trump supporters brought fascism out of the closet of political scientists.

    But are liberals (Democrats) and conservatives (Republicans) truly opposite from each other? Political sociologist William Domhoff says that in practice there are differences between the two when it comes to culture and politics (gun control) religion, race and gender politics.

    But where the two parties are the same is far more significant. These similarities have at least to do with:

    • Support of capitalism as an economic system domestically;
    • Agreeing never to discuss socioeconomic class in the way sociologists would;
    • Unwillingness to engage third parties in political debate;
    • Support of imperialism around the world;
    • Support of the installation of right-wing dictators;
    • Support of Israel elites despite 50 years of Zionist fundamentalism; and,
    • Opposition against socialism around the world whether it be Leninism or social democracy.

    Furthermore, are the differences between political tendencies just matters of quantitative gradation (as in the linear model) or are there qualitative leaps which are not represented? Under the linear political spectrum, the difference between Social Democrats and New Deal liberals is presented as being quantitative or even identical when it is not. For example, Bernie Sanders whose policies are clearly New Deal liberal, could get away with saying he was a social democrat. A real social democrat historically is Eugene Debs. Debs clearly talked about class warfare and abolishing capitalism. This is not something New Deal liberals, including Bernie Sanders, ever talk about.

    The part of the political spectrum that is socialist is a qualitatively different form of economic system.There is a qualitative leap. Social Democrats, the different kinds of Leninists and anarchists are bitterly divided among themselves over the place of state, market relations and the role of workers. Yet they agree that basic resources, tools and means of harnessing energy should be collectively owned and that capitalism cannot be reformed. All socialists believe that whether in the short-run or the long run, workers are capable of running society without bureaucrats, or managers.

    Once the separation is made between those advocating socialism and those hoping to preserve capitalism, a chasm exists that is not represented on the political linear political spectrum.

    What this means is that:

    • There are far more commonalties between liberals and conservatives than there are between liberals and socialists because capitalism divides them; and,
    • There are far more commonalities between liberals and fascists than between liberals and socialists because both liberals and fascists support capitalism.

    The Linear Political Spectrum is too Simple for Today’s Complex Politics

    China forming alliances with non-socialist countries

    These days there are some very complex political configurations that defy the linear political spectrum. For example, China, which claims to be socialist, is forming alliances with countries that are clearly not socialist such as Russia, and a theocracy such as Saudi Arabia. According to the linear political spectrum model, China should only form alliances with other socialist countries like Venezuela and North Korea.

    Social Democrats (socialists) forming alliances with imperialists

    Secondly, the supposedly left-wing German Social Democrats and Greens and the Swedish Social Democrats have not lined up with China. If the linear political spectrum was accurate, Social Democrats would support Communist countries because they were fellow socialists. Instead, these Social Democrats have aligned themselves with right-wing Democrats of imperialist Yankeedom.

    Right-wing governments support a socialist country

    Thirdly, the countries that have supported Russia, and indirectly China, (moving towards a multipolar world against the imperialists) have been right-wing rulers such as Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil and to a lesser extent, Viktor Orban in Hungary. The linear political spectrum would predict that right-wing states with fundamentalist fascists in power would be rabid anti-communists, but they are not – at least internationally. My claim is that the linear way of framing political life cannot do justice to the complexity of current political life

    The Linear Political Spectrum Serves as an Ideological Tool to Support Two Points on the Spectrum – Either Neoliberals or New Deal liberals

    The Recent elections in France

    As many of you know, there was a recent election in France that was very close between Macron, Le Pen and the left wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Macron got 27% of the vote. Le Pen got 23% and the Mélenchon got about 21 ½%. The left-wing candidate failed by one point short of qualifying for the second round. So the French had to decide between the neoliberal Macron and the more conservative (or supposed fascist) Le Pen. Suddenly the neoliberal Macron discovers the linear political spectrum and presents himself, not as the center right candidate that he is, but closer to the Enlightenment values of New Deal liberalism. This is a prime minister who has presided over cuts to the French welfare system, tried to raise the retirement age and brutalized the Yellow Vests protesters for two years. Now he sings liberty, equality, fraternity. “Behold” this choir boy of Brussels, says “we have to watch out for the fascists.” It is true that Le Pen’s father was a fascist, but that doesn’t make her one. Is Le Pen’s stance against immigrants and refugees? Yes. But how does that compare with Macron in practice. Has he treated immigrants and refuges well? Hardly! Further, a comrade of mine who has lived in France for many years said that Le Pen’s program was considerably to the left of Macron. In addition, Le Pen was more likely to be pro-Russian. Sadly, the French people were tricked by Macron’s claim to define what fascism is and re-elected him. This is one case of letting a neoliberal define for socialists what a fascist is.

    The Democratic Party defining what is and isn’t fascism

    The Democratic Party has nothing to do with New Deal liberalism

    In the 2016 election, the Democratic Party had a candidate who claimed to be a socialist. Every real socialist knew that Bernie Sanders was not a socialist and at best was a New Deal liberal. Since Lyndon Johnson the Democratic Party has slid from moderate left to center-right neoliberals. In 1985 Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council moved consciously away from anything like the FDR program (see Century of the Self Part IV by Adam Curtis) and that includes the eight years of Chicago boy, Baraka Obama. In 2016, the party gave a resounding “no” to New Deal liberal Bernie Sanders as they have done for 50 years. However, the public was 50 years behind the times. When most people voted for a Democrat, they thought they were getting a New Deal liberal. For sixteen years (Clinton and Obama) the party kept disappointing them. The Democratic Party has used the public’s out of date picture of the linear political spectrum to shove austerity programs down the throats of people in the name of liberalism. The public still does not know the difference between a New Deal liberal and a neoliberal, but it knows that the Democratic Party gives them nothing and I predict they will vote them out next month and in 2024.

    Not such strange bedfellows: neoliberalism is right next to fascism on the political spectrum

    Many people do not understand how fascism occurs. It’s as if suddenly a charismatic leader arises politically without rhyme or reason and this provokes a mass hysteria with people temporarily losing their minds and swooning over the dictator.  The truth of the matter is that fascism is a product of a crisis of capitalism. There has been no fascism before the 20th century. Fascism began in the 1920s in response to a crisis in capitalism after World War I and throughout the twenties and into the 1930s. During such a crisis both liberal and conservative centrist parties lost credibility and withered, and the choices were either socialism or fascism. In fact, in the early thirties both the Democrats and Republicans wrote about how much they admired Hitler.

    If the ruling party is a right-wing party, it is possible that a new deal liberal party might be a substitute for fascism, at least for a time. In Yankeedom, both Clinton and Obama provided nothing but wars and finance capital accumulation austerity for 16 years. Yet the public did not turn to fascism. But by 2016 the lower middle class and some working-class people had had enough and elected a fascist. Why? Because Trump promised to bring back American jobs and appealed to working class people who were pushed to the margins. Small businesses were even more difficult to start up and those that existed were struggling against the large corporations. Trump’s appeal was to economic issues. Meanwhile Democratic neoliberal Hillary Clinton haughtily called these lower middle class and working-class people “deplorables”. The party embraced identity politics and lost.

    But fascism would not have won if the Democratic Party did not propose a New Deal liberal like Bernie Sanders. I’m convinced that had the Democratic Party gave Sanders their candidacy, he could have easily beaten Trump. What am I saying? The Democratic Party co-creates fascism by not running New Deal liberal candidates. My prediction is that with Uncle Mortimer as president almost two years in, by 2024 if Mordor is still standing, we will have a fascist president, whether it is Trump or someone else and the Democratic Party will be to blame. This is an example of a neoliberal party (Democrats) taking advantage of the public’s association of liberals with FDR to use that association to get themselves elected by carrying out a right wing-libertarian program.

    Neoliberals support right-wing dictators and fascists internationally

    Neoliberals in Mordor have supported right-wing dictators all over the world for 70 years. See William Blum’s book Killing Hope. In fact, the CIA is considered a liberal part of the Deep State. This doesn’t change whether Mordor’s regime is liberal or conservative. The most recent example is the Democratic administration’s support of Ukrainian fascists on and off for the past 70 years.

    If the linear political spectrum were accurate neoliberalism would be right next to fascism on the political spectrum.  So, I am saying that the linear political spectrum supports the ideology of Neoliberalism by:

    • Denying its existence in the political spectrum by not including it as a category;
    • Implementing right-wing neoliberal policies while pretending its legacy is New Deal liberalism.

    Centrism is Bankrupt in Extreme Capitalist Crises

    The linear political spectrum also makes it appear that the middle of the political spectrum is politically superior because it is not extremist. It is moderate, not hysterical like the fascism or communism. What this ignores is that when there are extreme economic, political or ecological conditions, the centrist political solutions  don’t work. The center doesn’t hold, it caves in. In certain periods of history to be a moderate is unrealistic. Gradualist trial and error won’t cut the mustard because a storm is brewing. In the conditions of our time, extremes are the only answer because capitalism has brought us to this point and neither liberal nor conservative solutions have worked. The linear political spectrum arose during naïve political times when economics was thought to be separate from politics and political scientists papered over these extreme conditions which they couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. We need a new non-linear political spectrum which:

    • Is inclusive of many more political ideologies than the five at the front of this article;
    • Is economic as well as political;
    • Accounts for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
    • Decenters the spectrum so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable. This means that all political tendencies would have be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now, liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices.
    • Flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia, or between India (fundamentalist) and China. The spectrum should not be limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.

    • First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

    The post Are Socialists Going to Let Neoliberals Define Fascism? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Crisis Management

    The post Crisis Management first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Did Latin America Gradually Turn Left? Or Neoliberal?

    To the superficial observer, it may be a blessing the despots and dictators, human rights abusers, like Argentina’s Mauricio Macri, Colombia’s Iván Duque; Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno; Chile’s Sebastián Piñera; to name just a few, are gone, have disappeared from the Latin American political arena, in what was made believe to be democratic elections.

    Good, you may think. These countries have a better future ahead.  So, who are the new “leaders” of just these four “demo-countries”?

    Argentina: Alberto Fernández; label “center-left”;

    Colombia: Gustavo Petro; label “left”;

    Ecuador: Guillermo Lasso; officially described as “the country’s first center-right president in nearly two decades”. What a lie! Moreno was so right-wing; he could easily be dubbed a fascist.

    Chile: Gabriel Boric; label “left”.

    There are many more of these “new left” leaders throughout Latin America. Those who were not recently replaced by “democratic elections”, had to bend to methods of coercion and “obedience” to stay in place or alive. Nicaragua may be a case in point.

    They all have in common being graduates or scholars of Klaus Schwab’s (WEF) Academy for Young Global Leaders (YGL). Schwab himself boasted earlier this year, how “we were able to infiltrate countries’ governments [with YGLs’] around the world.”

    So, think again. Are these countries now better off with their new “left” or “socialist” governments? Hardly. But they carry the very confusing label of being “left”- meaning for the good of the people. That, in today’s world is a total lie, outright BS.

    You must know – left and right have seized to exist already twenty to thirty years ago, when globalism entered center-stage. Now there are only Globalists and the others. The others are too many. They have to be massively reduced, by fake and coerced “vaxxes” which may cause immediate death, lingering diseases to death, destruction of natural immunity, infertility and many more deadly calamities; and endless wars, possibly nuclear wars and most certainly weather wars – all under the pretense that wars bring peace.

    What is even more disturbing than this dystopia is that today still the majority of people buy all these propaganda slogans and lies. Even if they know, something is not quite right, they still go along. Their conscience doesn’t want to infringe on their comfort zone. They are suffering under cognitive dissonance.

    They are the perfect citizens for the globalists. If they survive, they will become digitized slaves, owning nothing but being happy.

    All the new progressive LAC leaders – and many others around the world (Schwab’s pride, the YGLs) have been put into their positions to defend the anti-human Globalist Agenda. Of course, they were all “democratically elected”.

    Cyber-targeted, AI-steered, election propaganda and outright election fraud have become so sophisticated that most people can’t see it, or even if they would see it, they wouldn’t want to believe in so much evil. Good old cognitive dissonance is an integral part of the Globalists take-over formula.

    Is President Biden, a “Democrat”, the US equivalent of “left-leaning” – good for the people?

    Absolutely not. He, and his vassalic European counterparts, are abject globalists, destroying the US and Europe to the detriment of the people, following the Financial-IT complex’s mandate of artificial energy crises, food shortages, and, of course, “climate change and / or global warming” – which will lead to water shortages, to privatization of the remaining pristine water resources and eventually to water wars.

    And remember – all will be the Russians fault, and by extension the Chinese. A fake emperor always needs a fake enemy to survive. But fakeness is shining through the ever thinner vail of an imploding pyramid of lies and deceptions.

    Man-made climate change, also called “geoengineering” – or weather warfare, is part of the Reset/Agenda 2030 program, all supported by Biden, and, by scholarly obedience, also by the new LAC (Latin America and Caribbeans) leaders – and all those submissive puppets of the 193 UN members – plus the entire UN leadership. All are bought, coerced, or blackmailed.

    It’s the end-phase. Only we, the awakened, can stop this treacherous approach to a new world governance.

    First you should know that worldwide – including in Europe and even in the United States, no President or Prime Minister is being “elected” without the approval of “Washington”, which is the front and the face for the behind the scene reigning giant digital-financial interests that rule not only Washington, but the world.

    Yes, all 193 UN member countries and the UN itself and all its specialized technical “sub-organization” are controlled and directed by this digital-financial complex.

    To refresh our memories – they include on top of the financial empire pyramid, BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet. The first two are interlinked, able to act as one asset manager, if convenient. Further down, the road, follow minor giants, like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, UBS and more.

    The first three control literally all western production, including food manufacturing processes, by direct or indirect majority stock owners. They are majority shareholders in everything. This just as a background to better understand their power and leverage over the world.

    If by “miscalculation” the wrong PM or President is “elected” – he or she will be ousted. Of course, even that will be done, so that people think, the coup was carried out internally.

    Take Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan, was democratically elected in 2018 by a two thirds majority of Pakistanis. He was a leader of the people and for the people. He wanted his country to regain political sovereignty, be free to choose Pakistan’s alliances, for example China and Russia, to the detriment of the United States. Imran Khan was ousted as PM on 10 April 2022 by a Washington instigated Pakistani parliamentary no-confidence motion. He was immediately succeeded by his Washington-friendly opponent, Shehbaz Sharif.

    Any leader who doesn’t dance to the tune of Washington, or rather – doesn’t follow the orders of the WEF, backed and directed by the Cult, the IT-Financial complex, will simply be removed.

    Regime change may come in different shades of Color Revolutions. Presidents Putin and Xi are certainly in the Cult’s crosshairs. Endless lie-campaigns and war propaganda, may eventually convince the public at large that nothing less than a nuclear attack on Russia can bring peace to the world. War is Peace and Peace is War (1984, George Orwell).

    The spirit of Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, the acknowledged father of public relations and war propagandist per excellence – is alive and well.

    Latin America is just being highjacked by the worldwide phenomenon of selling neoliberal Globalism as people-friendly socialism.

    People wake up. Your leaders (sic) are not for you but against you. The same as is the case throughout the west. We, the People, have to fend for ourselves. Consciously and vehemently. Otherwise, we will be doomed.

    The post Did Latin America Gradually Turn Left? Or Neoliberal? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

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

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

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

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

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

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

    ❖

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

    ❖

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

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

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

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

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

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

    _______________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • How Philippine ‘press freedom’ has been abandoned under ‘Bongbong’ Marcos

    ANALYSIS: By Danilo Arana Arao in Manila

    Upon assuming the Philippines presidency on 30 June 2022, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr — the only son and namesake of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos — delivered an inaugural address that did not mention press freedom.

    Press freedom also went unmentioned when he delivered his first State of the Nation Address before the joint Senate and House of Representatives on 25 July 2022.

    His silence on the issue was notable given that the former press secretary Trixie Cruz-Angeles, who stepped down on 4 October 2022 due to health reasons, had stressed that press freedom would be guaranteed under the Marcos Jr administration and that the administration would “work closely” with news media.

    But as he pledged to protect press freedom on the campaign trail, certain journalists were pushed for getting too physically close to Marcos Jr.

    It also remains to be seen whether his representatives will continue to evade critical questions during press briefings or if Marcos Jr will be more accommodating of interview requests. The normalisation of these practices would be a death knell for press freedom in the Philippines.

    Media restrictions and abuse under Marcos Jr evoke memories of the Philippine media’s dark history under former Philippines president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law from 1972–86.

    The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility identifies five similarities between the Marcos regime in the 1970s and the current Marcos Jr administration.

    Distribution of propaganda
    These are the distribution of propaganda through government agencies and social media, the ABS–CBN shutdown, attacks and threats against journalists, crony press and media selectivity and propaganda films.

    There are chilling similarities between the two administrations despite Marcos Jr’s promise that he would not declare martial law.

    For the current administration, “working closely” with journalists means putting them in touch with pro-Marcos Jr vloggers, content creators and influencers. Cruz-Angeles is prioritising the accreditation of pro-regime reporters to cover official functions.

    But her claim that accreditation is open to those of all political beliefs rings untrue as pro-Marcos Jr vloggers recently established a new group (upon the suggestion of Cruz-Angeles herself) to help gain government accreditation.

    Celebrity vlogger Toni Gonzaga was granted a one-on-one interview with Marcos Jr at the Malacañang Palace in September 2022, showing how the administration accommodates those who ask soft questions. That reminds many Filipinos of Marcos Jr’s non-participation in most presidential debates and interviews during the campaign, opting to accommodate events organised by his supporters.

    During the 2022 election campaign, there were times when his handlers did not invite critical journalists, asking those invited to submit questions in advance to control the flow of press briefings.

    By accrediting pro-administration, hyper-partisan non-journalists, the Marcos Jr administration gives them legitimacy as “truth seekers” even if there is evidence they proliferate disinformation. It is also a strategy to discredit critical journalists for peddling “fake news”.

    Critical journalists harassed
    Critical journalists and media organisations are harassed and intimidated under the Marcos Jr administration, just as they were under the 2016–2020 Duterte administration. Disinformation remains rampant even after the 2022 elections.

    Red-tagging — the blacklisting of journalists and media outlets critical of the government — has continued.

    Shortly after Marcos Jr assumed the presidency, the Court of Appeals upheld the “cyber libel” convictions of Nobel Prize laureate Maria Ressa and former Rappler writer Reynaldo Santos Jr.

    While these convictions appeared to carry over the selective harassment and intimidation of the vengeful Duterte administration, the chilling effect on the media is real. Those targeted become grim reminders of what can happen if journalists and news media organisations incur the ire of the powers that be.

    The date 21 September 2022 marked the 50 years since martial law was imposed. Marcos Jr repeatedly claims martial law was necessary to tackle communist and separatist threats, dismissing accusations that his father was a dictator.

    Even the funding for the planned memorial for Martial Law victims was cut by 75 percent in the 2023 National Expenditure Programme.

    Marcos Jr intends to rewrite history textbooks to include his family’s version of the truth. By silencing his critics, he can further engage in historical denialism. This is important not just to erase his father’s dictator image but to escape his family’s legal problems like the unpaid estate tax and his mother’s conviction for seven counts of graft.

    Media repression ‘normalised’
    Media repression continues to be normalised under the Marcos Jr regime. One of his allies in the House of Representatives blocked the return of ABS–CBN, whose franchise bid was denied in 2020. Rappler and its editorial staff, including Ressa, continue to face legal problems as well as the threat of closure.

    The National Telecommunications Commission blocked 27 websites accused of having communist links in June 2022. It took a court order for the online publication Bulatlat Multimedia to be unblocked, while journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio remains in detention on questionable charges after being red-tagged and subjected to death threats.

    The murder of broadcaster Percy Lapid on 3 October 2022 — the second journalist to be killed under the new administration — also reflects the dire state of press freedom in the Philippines.

    That Marcos Jr did not mention press freedom in his inaugural speech and first State of the Nation Address reflects his disregard for critical journalism.

    Although it is still early days, his efforts to whitewash the dictatorship’s dark past and continue his predecessor’s media repression indicate that his pre-election promise of a “free press” is long abandoned.

    Danilo Arana Arao is associate professor at the Department of Journalism, the University of the Philippines Diliman, special lecturer at the Department of Journalism, the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Santa Mesa, associate editor at Bulatlat Multimedia and editor at Media Asia. This article was first published in East Asia Forum.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.