Then in late January when the calendar debunked the Military Times incendiary headline “Russia preparing to attack Ukraine by late January”, that same outlet ran a much less viral story with the headline “Russia not yet ready for full-scale attack says Ukraine“.
This past Friday the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, Melinda Haring, tweeted the following:
“Putin has big weekend plans in Ukraine: 1) he’s going to cut power and heat, knock out Ukrainian navy and air force, kill general staff and hit them with cyber attack; 2) then install pro-Russian president and 3) resort to full-scale military invasion if Ukraine doesn’t give in.”
And, of course, none of these things happened. The weekend came and went, Haring issued a sheepish admission that she got it wrong, then immediately turned around and proclaimed that “Putin may strike on Weds”, then later pivoted to “We’ve been so focused on Russian troops and tanks that we missed Moscow’s strategy: strangle Ukraine’s economy and sap the resolve of its people.”
No way. I'm a think tank expert. We make predictions. We get some right, we get some wrong. Things looked mighty bad on Friday. They still do. Putin may strike on Weds or he may sit on the border and just menace us all. VVP hasn't called yet to tell me his plans. Did he call you? https://t.co/VUatu9wdYW
On January 14th we were told by NBC that we could expect a Russian invasion of Ukraine “within a month’s time”. On February 14th the prediction was as unfulfilled as the wishes of a Jordan Peterson fan on Valentine’s day.
Then British outlets The Daily Mirror and The Sun told us that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to come at precisely 1am GMT on Wednesday, citing “American intelligence agencies”. This prediction, whose frightening “DAWN RAID” presentation likely gave sales a bit of a boost, was again debunked by the hands of the clock.
“The 3am time (1am GMT) when US intelligence sources suspected a Russian attack came and went without incident last night as Putin continued to keep The West guessing,” The Sun’s updated online article now reads.
Last week the US president told US allies that Putin may invade on February 16th, a prediction Ukraine’s President Zelensky made fun of in a widely misinterpreted joke. This claim also has been discredited by the clock.
And now we’re being told that nobody seriously believed Russia was going to invade on the 16th, and that February 20th is the real invasion date.
“The prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 16 was always overhyped,” Politico tells us. “The time frame to really keep an eye on is what happens shortly after Feb. 20.”
Radio evangelist Harold Camping famously predicted that the Apocalypse would occur on September 6, 1994, then again on September 29 of the same year, and then again on October 2. In 2005 he revised his claim and said the real Rapture was coming on May 21, 2011, and then when that failed to pan out he said it was happening on October 21 of that year. Whenever he got a prediction wrong he’d just do some more magic Bible math and move the date into the future.
Camping was one of many exploitative Christian cult leaders who’ve falsely predicted the Second Coming over the years amassing thousands of followers with an early form of tabloid clickbait. The difference between the Harold Campings of history and the Ukraine invasion prognosticators of today is that Harold Camping died disgraced and disdained instead of being elevated to lucrative positions in the most influential news media outlets on the planet.
Today’s Harold Campings will invent all kinds of justifications for their shameless participation in a transparent government psyop designed to advanced the unipolarist geostrategic agendas of the US hegemon once their war forecasts fail to bear fruit. The most common justification will be to claim that the Biden administration’s hawkish posturing and strategic information warfare is what deterred the forcible annexation of Ukraine into the Russian Federation. As we discussed previously, this claim is logically fallacious, explained here by Lisa Simpson:
We’re already seeing this “we stopped the Russian invasion” narrative circulated by unscrupulous pundits like Tom Friedman of the New York Times, whose spectacularly awfulcareer differs from a stopped clock only in that it is wrong two additional times per day.
“If Vladimir Putin opts to back away from invading Ukraine, even temporarily, it’s because Joe Biden — that guy whose right-wing critics suggest is so deep in dementia he wouldn’t know Kyiv from Kansas or AARP from NATO — has matched every Putin chess move with an effective counter of his own,” writes Friedman.
Putin could just as easily have launched a virulent propaganda campaign claiming the US is about to invade Mexico any minute now and threatening severe repercussions if it does, and then taking credit when the invasion fails to occur for his bold stance against the Biden regime. It would have been the easiest thing in the world; just copy the western script replacing each instance of “Ukraine” with “Mexico” and each instance of “Crimea” with “Texas”.
We’re also seeing a new narrative in the oven with claims of a Russian cyberattack against Ukraine, which as an invisible attack whose evidence is classified would serve the imperial face-saving effort, with the added bonus of justifying further economic warfare on Moscow.
“This is such a transparent scam,” journalist Aaron Maté recently tweeted of the hacking claims. “The warmongers crafting new US sanctions on Russia have repeatedly said that Russian cyberattacks could trigger them. With no invasion happening, this is Plan B.”
This is such a transparent scam. The warmongers crafting new US sanctions on Russia have repeatedly said that Russian cyberattacks could trigger them. With no invasion happening, this is Plan B: https://t.co/vKUBszrdrO
The Ukraine invasion that never arrives is showing us once again that when it comes to Russia you really can just completely ignore all the so-called “experts” in the mainstream media. Just dismiss 100 percent of everything they say, because any random schmoe’s best guess would be better than theirs.
Looking to the mainstream media for truth is like looking to a prostitute for love. That’s not what they’re there for. That’s not their job. If you believed these predictions, the correct thing to do as they fail to come true is not to engage in a bunch of mental gymnastics justifying it, but to drastically revise the worldview and your media consumption habits which caused you to believe this crap in the first place.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
The Associated Press has published yet another article based on unevidenced assertions by anonymous government officials about the scary horrifying frightening Russian menace, this time to accuse another media outlet of promoting propaganda. Without a trace of irony.
“U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday accused a conservative financial news website with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda and alleged five media outlets targeting Ukrainians have taken direction from Russian spies,” AP reports. “The officials said Zero Hedge, which has 1.2 million Twitter followers, published articles created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence. The officials did not say whether they thought Zero Hedge knew of any links to spy agencies and did not allege direct links between the website and Russia.”
“The officials briefed The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence sources,” AP adds, repeating the refrain we’re all familiar with now which is always used to justify a complete absence of evidence or accountability for incendiary claims about governments the United States doesn’t like.
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So @joebiden’s spooks are smearing random websites as Russian agents if they challenge White House warmongering and lies. A direct government attack on free speech. https://t.co/AK79MPdldp
You have to scroll down to the eleventh paragraph for some examples of the “Kremlin propaganda” that Zero Hedge is accused of “amplifying”. These turn out to be entirely innocuous objections to western imperial narratives that were “written by people affiliated with the Strategic Culture Foundation,” an outlet the Biden administration sanctioned last year “for allegedly taking part in Russia’s interference in the 2020 U.S. election.”
“Recent articles listed as authored by the foundation and published by Zero Hedge include those with the headlines: ‘NATO Sliding Towards War Against Russia In Ukraine,’ ‘Americans Need A Conspiracy Theory They Can All Agree On’ and ‘Theater Of Absurd… Pentagon Demands Russia Explain Troops On Russian Soil,’” writes AP’s Nomaan Merchant.
You can read those three articles AP lists by clicking here, here and here respectively. Decide for yourself if these are sinister foreign psyops which require the urgent attention of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world acting in concert with one of the most influential news agencies on earth, or if they are not in fact relatively reasonable opinions which only stand out because they fall outside the Overton window of what’s considered acceptable debate in the tightly controlled spectrum of mainstream political discourse.
For its own part, Zero Hedge says that “this website has never worked, collaborated or cooperated with Russia, nor are there any links to spy (or any other) agencies.” The Associated Press offers no evidence or arguments to the contrary.
Zero Hedge happens to be one of the numerous outlets who periodically avail themselves of my open offer for anyone to republish my work free of charge if they want to, and what’s funny is I was just the other day noticing the number of views they get when they do so and marvelling that the US narrative control machine hasn’t done a better job of reducing their audience. Now a few days later here’s the US intelligence cartel using its media mouthpieces to brand it a Kremlin propaganda operation in what Electronic Intifada director Ali Abunimah calls a “direct government attack on free speech.”
I’ve disagreed with plenty of things I’ve seen published in Zero Hedge. I’ve also seen a lot of very useful information which is highly inconvenient for the US-centralized empire. It’s that exact kind of information that the empire has been working very hard to marginalize and minimize amid widespread public access to the internet.
The US government is not actually worried about Russian propaganda. The US government is worried about people disrupting US propaganda. Every day we’re offered new reasons why it’s important to regulate what online materials are seen by people, from fake news clickbait to Russian propaganda to Covid misinformation to foreign trolls to domestic extremism to election security, and the only thing they all have in common is that the solution is a more tightly regulated internet. At a certain point you can only conclude it is internet regulation itself that they are after, in the same way you’d conclude after a stranger kept offering you different reasons why you should let him hold your wallet that he’s really just after your wallet.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The ability to control the thoughts people think about what’s going on in their world is the only thing standing between the oppressive, exploitative status quo and revolutionary change. The powerful understand this while the general public do not. There is nothing, literally nothing, they wouldn’t be willing to do in order to ensure their control over dominant narratives.
When they warn about Russian propaganda causing people to think wrong thoughts in their heads, they are so close to admitting the truth that they’re all acutely aware of: that human minds are very hackable, and that this can be used to advance the interests of power.
Protecting this narrative control mechanism is the first and foremost priority of our ruling power structures, because it’s what all their other control mechanisms are built upon. That’s a major part of why the media have been acting so strange these last few years, and it’s a major part of why everything seems so weird and why so many people feel like they’re going a bit crazy when they try to understand the world.
Right now we’re looking at a race. Between humanity trying to awaken from the psychological cages that have been constructed for us, and the builders of those cages trying to finish tightening those bolts so they can lock down our minds forever.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
The official story is that we live in a free democracy where our teachers tell us the truth about our nation, our government and our world when we are children, and then the free press continue telling us the truth about our nation, government and world when we are grown, and then every few years we have free and fair elections in which we use this truthful information to make decisions about which politicians and policies to vote for, and it is only by pure coincidence that what we vote for just so happens to benefit the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet.
In the official story, the democratic process consistently fails to let us progress beyond a status quo of profound inequality, injustice, oppression, exploitation, war and ecocide because that’s simply how people are voting in their free and fair elections. The official story maintains that this occurs because the populations of all free democracies coincidentally happen to be organically divided into two ideologically opposed camps of equal size, creating a political deadlock which just so happens to benefit the people who profit from profound inequality, injustice, oppression, exploitation, war and ecocide.
Per the official story, society is driven by the majority, and it is only by an immensely widespread and startlingly consistent series of coincidences that society remains perpetually shaped in a way that benefits a small minority of rich and powerful individuals.
“These are some pretty strange coincidences,” you might find yourself thinking. “What are the odds that a society which is driven by the will of the people would so consistently benefit a small minority of rich and powerful individuals to the disadvantage of the voting majority, across so many separate nations, from generation to generation for many decades, without ever deviating from this pattern? Seems like the rich and powerful must be tipping the scales in their favor somehow.”
The official story holds that you are a crazy conspiracy theorist if you say this, and should be shunned and denied any platform from which to speak to a large number of people.
The official story is that this sort of society, which only serves the worst people in the world by pure coincidence, is so wonderful that it needs to be exported to every corner of the earth. Also by pure coincidence, all of the nations which most urgently need freedom and democracy always just so happen to occupy land of immense geostrategic importance for planetary domination and resource control.
In the official story, the United States and its allies are always on the right side of every international conflict, and it is only by a series of unfortunate accidents and intelligence blunders that this alliance is killing far more people with military violence and starvation sanctions than any other power structure in today’s world. The news media feed us accurate information about each and every one of those conflicts, explaining truthfully why each country’s government needs to be toppled to free the people of that nation, and it is only by coincidence that we suddenly stop getting news reports about how those people are doing once they have been liberated from their tyrannical oppressors.
The official story tells us that while the US might not always make perfect foreign policy decisions, it’s better to have them leading the free world than to risk some tyrannical regime like Russia or China taking over. If the US wasn’t constantly invading countries and dropping bombs and staging coups and starving civilians and fomenting unrest and arming terrorists and torturing people and escalating cold war aggressions against nuclear-armed nations, the world could find itself ruled by bad guys.
The official story protects the official story. Anyone who disputes any part of the official story is peddling misinformation, or is a Russian propagandist, or is an anti-semite, or is a dangerous extremist, or is mentally ill, or is whatever they need to be in order to ensure that they are never taken seriously by anyone and are silenced on social media and are never given a mainstream audience. Any dissent from the official story is evidence that you must be prevented from interfering in the official story, according to the official story.
In the official story, our world will be guided by this truth-based free and democratic status quo in a way which benefits all of humankind. If it seems like inequality is getting worse or governments are becoming more authoritarian or capitalism is becoming more exploitative or wars are getting out of control or the ecosystem is dying or we’re hurtling toward nuclear war on multiple fronts, that’s just your stupid brain trying to trick you, and you should stop listening to it immediately and re-acquaint yourself with the official story.
Here. Here’s some celebrity gossip. Did you see that Superbowl ad? Come watch a movie on this streaming service. Take some time off, calm down, have a beer, and then plug your mind back into the official story. Just ignore the parts of yourself which find it intolerable. Only the official story is trustworthy. Only the official story has the answers. Block out all the other noise, jack your mind firmly into the matrix, and be the loving loyal gear-turner you were born to be.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the theologian Paul Tillich’s famous book, The Courage to Be. Widely read in the days when an educated public read books, it is long forgotten. In it, Tillich surveys the history of anxiety and fear and their relation to courage, religious faith, and the meaning of life. His closing sentence – “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” – became acclaimed as an astute description of the existential need to find a foundation for faith and courage when their foundations were shaking.
His writing profoundly influenced many, even when they didn’t wholly agree with him. This included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, commenting on Tillich’s death in 1965, said, “His Christian existentialism gave us a system of meaning and purpose for our lives in an age when war and doubt seriously threatened all that we had come to hold dear.”
I mention The Courage to Be not to engage in a recondite theological and philosophical analysis, which is the last thing we now need, but to contrast his call for spiritual courage with what we have been experiencing pouring forth from the mass corporate media for years There is a drumbeat of fear-mongering so intense and constant that it is almost comical if it weren’t so effective in reducing people to quaking, frightened children.
Primarily about Covid and the need to obey the authorities and submit to being jabbed with mRNA Covid “Vaccines” – the idolatrous religion of bio-security – this religion of fear goes much further and much deeper. Scenarios of fear have been rehearsed and produced for decades by the intelligence/IT/media giants on a multitude of issues, large and small. They are rooted in a spiritually nihilistic political propaganda campaign that is exponentially increasing fear, anxiety, and despondency on a vast scale, which is its intent. Fearful people are easily cowered and controlled. The elites know that regular people throughout the world are fed up with being subjected to violence and abuse in multiple forms, and if courage triumphs over their fears, they might join in worldwide solidarity and revolt, as they have been doing in various places recently. To prevent this, the authorities must use terror tactics to divide and conquer them. If people dare to rise up and even question the propaganda, they have been and will be called terrorists for doing so. Dissent is now equated with terrorism and thus it must be censored.
All this fear-mongering draws on people’s normal fears of “not to be,” meaning dead. It is, of course, understandable not wanting to be dead, but living in constant fear is a living death. Tillich, who suffered deep trauma as a chaplain in the trenches of WW I and was later dismissed from his teaching position in Germany when Hitler came to power, wrote that courage is rooted in the spiritual acceptance that underlying our individual lives is the power of Being, by which he meant God, and that fear and anxiety about our fates can be confronted only through the courage to accept in faith this foundational reality.
I think it is self-evident to anyone who glances at the mainstream media that fear is their staple. In just the last week or so, I have seen The New York Times, an official organ of propaganda if there ever were one but known historically as the Grey Lady for understatement, tell its readers in a hyperventilating style that anxiety about climate change has spawned a growing field of therapeutic treatment for sufferers, how deer in your back yard are infected with Omicron, how the Russians are coming, etc. This is the typical fear promoting propaganda that headlines all the media sites every day and has been doing so for years. Any casual observer can list them on a daily basis, from major to minor matters to fear.
Yet despite this constant, blatant propaganda, governments flip the truth and warn that anyone who questions this are conspiracy theorists intent on causing trouble and therefore must be watched and refuted. Just the other day the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” saying:
The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.
After twenty years of such obvious propaganda, you would think these people would be embarrassed, but they obviously are not and intend to propagate this bullshit for years to come. They and their media accomplices have taken their lingo lessons straight from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
On the bio-security religious front alone, Kit Knightly of Off-Guardian has recently reported that the authorities have warned us that there is a vast underdiagnosis of heart disease that may stealthily be coming to get us (not from “vaccines,” of course) and that HIV testing and vaccines look to be the next big push, for there is now the claim that a new variant of HIV is spreading in Europe. President Biden declared in December 2021 that his administration was aiming to “end the HIV/Aids epidemic by 2030.” While Covid restrictions may be easing, the mRNA “vaccine push” is not, and their promoters will only find different germs to defeat with “vaccines” and tests to ease the fears of the propagandized public, so many of whom have been turned into hypochondriacs.
The promulgation of the fear of germs and disease and foreign and domestic “threat actors” is permanent. For anyone naively thinking that there will be an easing of this elite war of lies, I would suggest they rethink that assumption. The state of siege that is the Covid crisis will be followed by many more, and this germ warfare includes a vast array of foreign variants, led by Russia and China. We are in a permanent crisis and emergency engineered by the ruling classes to maintain their control.
This elite war against regular people has no end in sight. The elites know that people get worn down over time and lose hope; thus, they plan for the long haul and keep hammering away. Paul Tillich’s book is important because of its stress on the need for courage in the face of the fear-mongering. Without a spiritual foundation to sustain one for the long haul, depression will lead to despair or surrender. History should teach us this. The evil ones often win, at least in the short run, and each of us doesn’t have a long run. Our time is brief.
The great dissenters and rebels of the past, even when not overtly religious, kept faith with their comrades and causes because they felt a deep, unbreakable, invincible connection. It is called different names or none at all. Maybe faith is the best word. Faith in what? Some call it God, as I do. Words can’t explain it; I feel it. Others say nothing and just carry on, sustained by the invisible. Some call it faith in human solidarity. The names don’t matter. It is not about naming but experiencing. The poet D.H. Lawrence said wisely that we are transmitters of life, “and when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.” And he added in his inimitable style: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.” It is not easy, but fear helps us fall out.
There were those who called Tillich an atheist because his philosophical explanation sounded too abstruse, which is true. But he made a fundamental point about how as human beings we participate in Being, which is the ground of our existence. We are part of something that is far larger than our puny selves – beings in the sea of Being. Who can deny that? His call to courage hit a resonant cord with believers, agnostics, and atheists alike. Not a poet but a German trained immigrant scholar who emigrated to the U.S.A., his language was steeped in heavy philosophical verbiage, yet it found a wide audience in its analysis of fear, anxiety, and especially courage because it was about fundamental truths. Courage is fundamental, as is faith.
The Spanish poet Antonio Machado put it less philosophically and more elegantly:
I talk always to the man who walks along with me;
– men who talk to themselves hope to talk to God
Someday –
My soliloquies amount to discussions with this friend,
Who taught me the secret of loving human beings.
….
And when the day arrives for the last leaving of all,
And the ship that never returns to port is ready to go,
You’ll find me on board, light, with few belongings,
Almost naked like the children of the sea.
We are children of the sea and courage keeps us afloat.
Humor also helps, for we are funny creatures.
It is not often that one escapes an unintended assassination attempt. I am glad to say that I have.
This is an example of the power of fear. Where I live, the winter has been quite cold and there was a recent ice storm with thick ice everywhere on top of snow. My wife was fearful of falling and so had bought hiking poles for herself and me as Christmas gifts. I said I didn’t want them and wouldn’t use them; that I wasn’t afraid, that I had faith in my ability to sustain myself. So I didn’t use them, which angered her. One day when the ice in the driveway and on the car was inches thick, she cajoled me into using the sticks to reach the car. She set them for me with their clips at the proper height, since they are adjustable. We toddled down the pathway to the car, setting one pole out ahead of the other in turn. I exaggerated my need for them, bending far over as if I were in great need of the crutches. Approaching the driveway, I extended my right hand pole out in front and it collapsed because the clips weren’t set tight and I went flying face forward onto the ice. She looked at me in fear, not sure if I was dead or hurt or if her fear had made her into an accidental assassin. She needn’t worry. It was funny.
We all fall eventually, but in the meantime, worrying about it is self-defeating. It is a reaction to fear. Worrying is a form of preying on oneself (etymology: to seize by the throat with one’s teeth and kill), and it can be induced – and is – by the campaigns of fear that we are being subjected to.
The courage to be was Tillich’s way of saying that we are upheld by far more than we know. Call it Being, Tao, the Great Spirit, or God. Courage is contagious and will carry us on. It is what we need to resist the fear-mongers who are at our throats.
When it comes to the ever ascending techno-economic colossus of China, it is year-round open season in the West for monopoly media and government officials to invoke whatever opprobrium, throw it against the wall and hope it sticks, if not repeat the defamation. Evidence does not matter. It can be cooked up. And the same story can be repeated ad nauseam because if someone hears it often enough, it must be true, … right?
The Beijing-hosted Winter Olympics are happening, and this provided an opportunity for Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai to meet with gathered western media and clarify misconceptions or doubts about her narrative. But that is not how western monopoly media operates. Still she met with two journalists, Sophie Dorgan and Marc Ventouillac, from the French sports newspaper L’Equipe.
The Associated Press notes of the interview that Peng was “prepped and ready to talk for the first time with western media about allegations she made of forced sex with a former top-ranked Communist Party official.” It comes across as saying she would produce canned responses. Given the hullabaloo that exploded after her Weibo social-media post, many people would want to forgo such an interview. But Peng had opened a can of worms with that post, a post she soon after deleted. It was incumbent that she clear the air much more than she had done hitherto. Going into such an interview cold turkey was not in the cards. Besides, it is normal and recommended that athletes prepare for an interview.
AP writes of a “restrictive interview arranged with Chinese Olympic officials.” Isn’t every interview/interaction restricted in some sense? So what was the purpose of the adjective “restricted”? And since it is taking place at the Olympic venue, wouldn’t arrangements best be made by Olympic officials from China? But the AP framing is pointed: behind the scenes, Chinese officials were controlling the process. Does China not have a responsibility to look out for one of its citizens, whether Peng is at fault or not through her own (mis)handling of the situation? There is nothing sinister in this.
One of two L’Equipe journalists, Marc Ventouillac, told AP “he is still unsure if she is free to say and do what she wants.”
“It’s impossible to say,” he said in English. “This interview don’t give proof that there is no problem with Peng Shuai.”
In other words, Ventouillac doesn’t know. How could he know? There is nothing substantial for AP to seize on here.
So instead AP writes,
China’s intent, however, was clear to him [Ventouillac]: By granting the interview as Beijing is hosting the Winter Olympics, it appeared that Chinese officials hope to put the controversy to rest, so it doesn’t pollute the event.
Really? First, how was the Chinese intent clear? Second, when AP writes “it appeared that Chinese officials hope to put the controversy to rest,” the phrasing “it appeared” does not speak to clarity or certainty. It instead appears that the AP is backing down from its stance on Ventouillac’s clarity of Chinese intent. Third, where does the phrase “Chinese officials hope” come from? Did the journalists interview Chinese officials? This was not stated anywhere. If not having spoken to Chinese officials, then how would the French journalists know what Chinese officials were hoping for? This is pure conjecture without any substantiation. Is this journalism?
AP tries a different take:
“It’s a part of communication, propaganda, from the Chinese Olympic Committee,” Ventouillac told The Associated Press on Tuesday, the day after L’Equipe published its exclusive.
More questions are raised by this. What communication was that? Who communicated it? What exactly was stated in the communication? Why is this communication termed propaganda? Is there anything meaningful in this short quotation by AP? If not, then why was it not edited out of the article? It appears that the propaganda is coming from AP.
More supposition follows:
With “an interview to a big European newspaper, they [China] can show: ‘OK, there is no problem with Peng Shuai. See? Journalists (came), they can ask all the questions they wanted.’”
Why not? I don’t think China cares so much about the ruckus stemming from the Weibo post. It is small potatoes compared to allegations of US presidents, current and past, involvement in sexual scandals. But, understandably, Peng would like to clear the air, and China would like to help out an athlete who has been a good ambassador on the tennis court.
However, AP puts a different spin on this:
“It’s important, I think, for the Chinese Olympic committee, for the Communist Party and for many people in China to try to show: ‘No, there is no Peng Shuai affair,’” Ventouillac said.
Speaking of small potatoes, how does a social media faux pas stack up against allegations, patently false though they are, of genocide? If there is nothing more to the issue than a regrettable posting on her social media account that blew up into an international fiasco, then, of course, Peng would like to put the issue to rest.
The Women’s Tennis Association is unconvinced, saying that the L’Equipe interview “does not alleviate any of our concerns” about the allegations she made in November. First, what concern? The AP piece makes it sound like a concern about the allegation and not about the well-being of the player. Second, what concern is an allegation of a crime committed outside the WTA’s jurisdiction to the WTA? Is the WTA an international forensics and prosecutorial agency now? Third, is it any business of the WTA, especially since Peng has stated she wanted to be left in peace?
Simon has two demands: “As we would do with any of our players globally, we have called for a formal investigation into the allegations by the appropriate authorities and an opportunity for the WTA to meet with Peng — privately — to discuss her situation.” We would like to meet privately with Peng. Privately, so she should appear before the WTA brass alone? The WTA is not alone; Simon stated “we.” Why can Peng not bring anyone to accompany her? A lawyer would be a good start. And what if she doesn’t want to meet?
Two other key words here are “would do.” Has the WTA ever acted in such capacity before, beyond words?
When 19-year-old tennis star Jelena Dokic, a victim of parental abuse, asked the WTA to not issue credentials to her parents, the WTA keenly stressed that Dokic’s personal arrangements were “a private matter.”
Nonetheless, although Peng’s matter is public now (and social media is not a medium if you want privacy), are the details of Peng’s matter not private as far as the WTA is concerned?
What did the ATP, the men’s equivalent of the WTA, do when one of its former star players, the phenotypically Black James Blake, was assaulted by a white New York plains clothes officer James Frascatore? I never heard the then ATP president, Chris Kermode, issue any statements of concern for Blake. I am unaware of any ATP calls for a formal investigation into alleged, and subsequently confirmed, police brutality.
Nowadays, German tennis star Alexander Zverev finds himself dogged by allegations of domestic violence made by a former girlfriend. All the ATP has done publicly in this matter is issue new domestic abuse guidelines. I have not heard of ATP concern for the player or the alleged victim.
The WTA has come up with its own framing of the incident. WTA chief executive Steve Simon stated, “Peng took a bold step in publicly coming forth with the accusation that she was sexually assaulted by a senior Chinese government leader.”
That is Simon’s framing. First, was the Weibo post a big step or big mistake by Peng? Second, when you put out a statement, then get it right. Simon’s statement is factually inaccurate. The “senior Government leader” has been retired for a few years. It should have read a former senior vice premier of the State Council. Is Kamala Harris ever called a leader of the United States? Simon has willfully positioned Peng’s paramour, Zhang Gaoli, in the leadership position in China. Had anyone outside of China ever heard of Zhang before Peng’s Weibo post?
Conveniently appearing at the end of the AP piece are the following:
Ventouillac said Peng “seems to be healthy.”
Originally 30 minutes were allotted for the interview, but it lasted nearly an hour.
Ventouillac said the journalists had asked all the questions they wanted.
And, “There was no censorship in the questions.”
Telling is what was unmentioned in the AP article: that Peng denies an assault as having happened.
Is that clarity? I submit that there remains a question still answered: why did she write of being forced to have sex in the first place? She denies it having been the case, but she put it out there in social media. Hence, the once posted allegation is something that anti-China types can and will latch onto to besmirch the nation.
It is not up to the WTA, ATP, IOC, AP, US, EU, NATO, IMF or whichever entity to force Peng to do anything she is uncomfortable with. She is not a criminal. At worst, she was engaged in thoughtless mischief. If she says it never happened, everyone has to accept her at her word. Peng is the only one who knows with 100 percent certainty her truth. If need be, she knows that there are plenty of people out there who would listen to her story.
Meanwhile in Washington, there is a “leader,” a sitting president with an accusation of sexual assault against him. Tara Reade has never backed down from her allegation against Joe Biden, but the domestic US mass media has given him a pass, belying the two-faced nature of American media when it comes to the alleged malfeasance of American officials versus the allegations of wrongdoing against officials in a state-designation enemy.
If you “vote out fascism” and then the president you voted for turns out to have the same effective policies as the previous administration, it’s time to start asking who the fascists actually are.
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Hoo you’ve done it now, CIA. You are in trouble. It was all good fun when you were doing fine normal stuff like toppling governments and running torture programs and assassinating people, but collecting bulk data on Americans?? You better prepare for some accountability, mister!
And the next time you suggest the CIA might be up to something nefarious, you’ll still get called a crazy conspiracy theorist.
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“Abolish the CIA” is almost too weak a position for an agency that should never have been made in the first place and should have been dismantled in the fucking nineteen sixties.
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The US war machine is just a rich man’s mafia.
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It’s not about Joe Rogan. It’s not about Covid misinformation. It’s not about QAnon, Russian trolls, domestic extremists or election security. It’s about ruling power structures needing to normalize and expand the regulation of online speech to protect consent for the status quo.
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A liberal is someone who yells all day about far right truckers and far right Joe Rogan and then applauds when their president gives weapons to literal Nazis.
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Very excited to find out whether “The US intelligence community says Putin has decided to invade Ukraine any minute now” is the kind of psyop that’s just designed to ramp up cold war hysteria or the kind of psyop that’s designed to prime us for US proxy war aggressions.
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The PR black eye the US empire sustained from the Iraq invasion ensured that it will greatly preference using proxy forces over US troops wherever possible. Middle Eastern jihadists, Latin American reactionaries, and Ukrainian Nazis all make very good proxy forces for the empire.
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A lot of confusion about Russia and Ukraine could be easily avoided if English language news media would end the appallingly unethical practice of printing unsubstantiated assertions by opaque intelligence agencies and presenting it as a “scoop”.
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The burden of proof is always on the party making the claim. It’s so weird how everyone will apply this standard to things like internet forum arguments and high school debates but not to immensely consequential claims by the most powerful institutions on the planet who have a well-documented history of lying.
Make a claim that could result in winning a Twitter argument and you’ll immediately be asked for proof. Make a claim that could result in thousands of deaths and it will be reported as fact by The New York Times.
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So to recap:
Nation stationing troops inside its own borders = hostile aggressor.
Nation circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, waging nonstop wars, working to destroy any nation which disobeys it, pushing nuclear brinkmanship = just normal democracy freedom stuff.
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Those who called you crazy for warning that cold war escalations could lead to hot war will be the first to tell you when hot war approaches that it is unavoidable and must be supported.
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Is there any doubt that the same propaganda machine which convinced half the US political spectrum that the highest levels of their government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin could convince the public that a proxy war started by US/NATO/Ukraine was actually started by Russia?
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News media reporters and editors are just as culpable for the mass murders committed by the US military and its proxies as the troops who fire the weapons and the generals who give the orders. And military personnel who kill people in unjust wars are exactly as culpable for those crimes as any other murderer.
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People who say China is as evil as the US simply haven’t learned enough or thought honestly enough about the evils of the US.
China is better than the US. That’s not because China is flawless, it’s because the US spending the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions and working to destroy any nation who disobeys it makes it quantifiably worse than literally anyone else.
China is a surveillance state. The US empire is a surveillance state that also kills millions of people in wars of aggression.
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Rightists need to invent fairy tales about evil elites ushering in a Marxist dystopia because they are ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility that the evil elites are already getting their every wish fulfilled by our mundane, boring capitalist dystopia.
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Dissolution of the state in today’s world just means instant absorption into the US-centralized power structure. As long as the US empire is what it is and does what it does, states are necessary and criticisms of their existence are childish nonsense based on immature analysis.
If China, North Korea, Venezuela or any other empire-targeted nation became an ideal stateless, classless, moneyless civilization it would instantaneously be absorbed by the empire. This self-evident fact invalidates all purist arguments against those governments. If your worldview does not account for the fact that there is a globe-spanning power structure working to absorb and subjugate all populations, you do not have a reality-based worldview. The empire is the very first obstacle to any leftward movement toward health in this world.
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The status quo is held in place by psychological compartmentalization. It’s held in place by propaganda and brute force, naturally, but it’s also equally propped up by the basic human tendency to avoid sincerely engaging with information that threatens to destroy our worldview.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) sought to use podcaster Daniel Dumbrill, a long-time Canadian resident in China, for propagandistic purposes. The media savvy Dumbrill was prepared for this.
Said Dumbrill, “Today, I’m going to indisputably and unmistakably demonstrate how mainstream media shapes your views and opinions through manipulation, dishonesty, and outright lies.”
Influenced by the late journalist Robert Fisk, I avoid the term “mainstream media” for the simple reason that state/corporate media is not my mainstream. So I call such media what it is “state/corporate media” or “monopoly media” à la Ben Bagdikian or “mass media.” I prefer independent media or independent writers that, is my mainstream. I keep tabs on the monopoly media because it, unfortunately, has an audience and is influential. So an awareness of the content and monopoly media’s message is necessary to reveal and refute its factual inaccuracies and twisted narratives. Dumbrill is finely attuned to the realities of China and acutely aware of the geopolitical intrigues in the world. He is able to intellectually cut through disinformation without difficulty and reframe it into a honest representation.
Steven D’Souza, a senior reporter with CBC interviewed Dumbrill on China and propagandizing. Dumbrill knew to expect dishonesty from the CBC.
When allegations were brought up about Chinese machinations in Xinjiang, Dumbrill revealed the source, the Australian so-called think tank ASPI, as a tool of imperialist disinformation as evidenced by its funders. Despite this, D’Souza ignored what Dumbrill had informed him and used ASPI disproportionately as an information source in his program without informing viewers of ASPI’s affiliations and funding. Dumbrill’s counter-argument about ASPI was omitted.
The biggest offense of the CBC, according to Dumbrill: “was their desperate attempt to find something they could pull out of context from a near half hour interview with me and ending up with only 3.5 seconds of usable footage to twist into their narrative.”
D’Souza suggested that Dumbrill was participating as a paid influencer to propagandize for the Chinese state. Dumbrill firmly closed the door on that innuendo saying, “I don’t benefit financially from anything I do. As a matter-of-fact I go through through great expense, both time-wise and financially to do what I do. I’m not belonging to any kind of a state apparatus here. I can travel around freely and see everything for myself as well…”
Nonetheless, in the program aired by CBC, a 3.5-second comment is attached to an unrelated and out-of-context narrative, positioning Dumbrill as a paid influencer of Chinese propaganda.
Dumbrill decries the absence of journalistic integrity, calling such manipulation “unethical, dishonest, and even fraudulent behavior.”
When questioned by Dumbrill why he had done this, D’Souza evaded the question, saying he was too busy.
So Dumbrill gives D’Souza one more time to set the record straight publicly:
After reflecting on our conversation and watching your final product, do you stand by that work — both in a personal and professional capacity? It will be useful if you dare say that you stand by this kind of reporting, and I don’t suspect that you could admit that you are ashamed of this piece without risking your pay check. Therefore, I think your silence, which I think you are inevitably going to go with, will at least give us enough hope that at bare minimum you are self-aware enough to recognize that you are a sell-out and everything you are pretending to look for in this report.
By all means, watch the Dumbrill piece and reach their own conclusions.
Because of his integrity, knowledge, and ethics, Daniel Dumbrill is one trusted source for my mainstream information.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” say the media in a nation whose government has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions in military operations overseas so that it can literally rule the world like a comic book supervillain.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” say the westerners as they consume propaganda cooked up by their government and corporations on devices manufactured by stolen resources and exported slavery made possible by mass military slaughter, starvation sanctions and unipolar global domination.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” say the politicians who put on a daily performance of pro wrestling-style fake opposition against a political party they agree with on every major issue which is owned by the same corporate masters they serve.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” says the civilization that lets people starve and die of exposure and lack of medications because they didn’t win at a make believe game of accruing made-up numbers in their imaginary bank accounts by participating in a pretend economy.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” says the nation with the world’s largest prison population which they still to this day use as literal slave labor.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” parrots a brainwashed population in unison, just as it was programmed to do by the largest and most sophisticated propaganda system that has ever existed.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” blare the screens that have been indoctrinating us since birth to accept a murderous, oppressive, exploitative, omnicidal, ecocidal status quo that is driving our species toward extinction on myriad fronts.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” says the mind that has been warped and twisted its entire life to only function in ways which serve the powerful people who rule its own nation.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” say the inhabitants of a globe-spanning empire they don’t even know exists even as they blindly toil in its service their entire lives.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” say the masses as they ignore the freakish, backwards power structure that has been grinding them into the dirt.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” bleats a nation of unthinking automatons as they mindlessly crank the gears of an insatiable armageddon machine that is fueled by human blood.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” says a society that has turned away from sanity, turned away from truth, turned away from our authentic selves, all in service of a few clever people who discovered that human minds are hackable if you can just confuse their inner light.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” we say, because it’s safer to yell impotently into the void than to turn and face the irrational wrath of our violent oppressors and demand change in the only people we can change: ourselves.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” we say, because it’s easier to believe lies than to push against the uncomfortable feelings that cognitive dissonance brings up and find out what’s really going on over there.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation” we say, because we’re too brainwashed and befuddled to conceive of a world where governments don’t compete and strive to dominate each other and we instead collaborate together toward the good of our entire species.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” we say, instead of looking at ourselves, and looking inward, and letting life get a word in edgewise, and letting truth take seed, and sprout, and blossom, and turning away from this self-destructive nonsense, and building a healthy world.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” we say, because that’s what everyone else is saying.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” we say, because to say anything else gets shouted down.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” we say, because all the screens in our lives told us to.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” we say, because thoughts are easily manipulated and perception is reality.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” we say, because thoughts happen to us, thoughts aren’t something we do.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” we say, from our minds that have been shaped by propaganda, on our social media platforms that are rigged for propaganda, into an information ecosystem that is made of propaganda.
“China is a freakish, backwards nation,” we say, and we say, and we say, and we say, as they lock down our minds and harness our voices and steer us closer and closer toward the cliff.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
Propaganda isn’t just about manufacturing consent for wars and ridiculous governmental measures we’d never normally accept. That’s what most people think of when they hear that word, but there’s so very, very much more to it than that.
The lion’s share of propaganda goes not toward convincing us to accept new agendas of the powerful, but toward keeping us entranced in the status quo dream world which enables the powerful to have power in the first place. Toward normalizing status quo systems and training us to shape ourselves to fit into them like neat little cogs in a well-oiled machine.
And it’s not even a grand, monolithic conspiracy in most cases. The giant corporations who indoctrinate us with their advertisements, their Hollywood movies and shows, their apps, their websites and their news media are all naturally incentivized to point us further and further into delusion by the fact that they benefit from the status quo systems which have elevated them to wealth.
So day in and day out we are presented with media which train us what to value, where to place our interest and attention, what success looks like, and how a normal human behaves on this planet. And it always aligns perfectly with the interests of the rich and powerful.
They don’t just teach us what to believe. They teach us who we are. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded on that test.
These artificial constructs take up such vast portions of our personal psychology that people will live their entire lives completely enslaved to them, making them their entire focus. This enslavement is so pervasive that people will often even take their own lives based on what those made-up constructs tell them about who they are and what they’re worth.
And it’s all a lie. A dream world, made entirely of narrative, constructed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful. Things as intimate as the thoughts in our heads and the movement of our interest and attention are controlled and dominated with iron-fisted force, all for the benefit of some stupid made-up games about imaginary money and fictional authority.
So most of us sleepwalk through life chasing make believe goals and fleeing artificially constructed demons. Too preoccupied with the illusion to look up and notice the thunderous majesty of life as it really is, and usually too confused to truly perceive it even on those rare occasions when we snap out of the trance for a moment to make an effort.
Untangling yourself from this dream world isn’t easy. It takes time. It takes work. It takes a deep, sustained curiosity about what’s really going on underneath all the muddled mental chatter, about what life truly is underneath all the stories we’ve been told about what life is, about who we truly are underneath all the stories we’ve been told about who we are.
The difference between what we’ve been told and what we find over the course of this investigation is the difference between dream and waking life. The real world is as different from the status quo narrative about the world as it is from any other work of fiction. The two things really could not be any more different.
And the good news is that just as your false view of yourself and your world shaped your human expression in the service of the powerful, the rolling back of that mind fog shapes your human expression into something else entirely. Something grounded in reality. Something authentic. Something primal. Something that exists not for the benefit of some faceless oligarchic empire, but for the same reason the grass grows and the galaxies spin in the cosmos.
And that’s what humanity looks like on the other side of this awkward transition phase that our species is going through at this adolescent point in its development. Free from illusion. In harmony with the real. Enslaved to nobody. Striding clear-eyed into the mystery of what’s to come.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
— Frank Zappa, Interview with Jim Ladd, “Zappa On Air,” April 1977.
We are no longer free.
We are living in a world carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy, but it’s an illusion.
We think we have the freedom to elect our leaders, but we’re only allowed to participate in the reassurance ritual of voting. There can be no true electoral choice or real representation when we’re limited in our options to one of two candidates culled from two parties that both march in lockstep with the Deep State and answer to an oligarchic elite.
We think we have freedom of speech, but we’re only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners allow.
We think we have the right to freely exercise our religious beliefs, but those rights are quickly overruled if and when they conflict with the government’s priorities, whether it’s COVID-19 mandates or societal values about gender equality, sex and marriage.
We think we have the freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. Punitive programs strip citizens of their passports and right to travel over unpaid taxes.
We think we have property interests in our homes and our bodies, but there can be no such freedom when the government can seize your property, raid your home, and dictate what you do with your bodies.
We think we have the freedom to defend ourselves against outside threats, but there is no right to self-defense against militarized police who are authorized to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, and granted immunity from accountability with the general blessing of the courts. Certainly, there can be no right to gun ownership in the face of red flag gun laws which allow the police to remove guns from people merely suspected of being threats.
We think we have the right to due process, but that assurance of justice has been stripped of its power by a judicial system hardwired to act as judge, jury and jailer, leaving us with little recourse for appeal. A perfect example of this rush to judgment can be found in the proliferation of profit-driven speed and red light cameras that do little for safety while padding the pockets of government agencies.
We have been saddled with a government that pays lip service to the nation’s freedom principles while working overtime to shred the Constitution.
By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect the constitutional rights of the citizenry while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants.
We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth—in terms of profit and resale value—to our “owners.”
Under the new terms of this revised, one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and “we the people” have none.
Only in our case, sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, we’ve allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.
The problem with these devil’s bargains, however, is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.
We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all: the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.” In exchange for the promise of safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, lower taxes, lower crime rates, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, over-criminalization and government corruption.
In the end, such bargains always turn sour.
We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.
We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.
We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”
We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red-light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in hefty fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.
We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, “we the people” are being reminded that we possess no rights except for that which the government grants on an as-needed basis.
Indeed, there are chilling parallels between the authoritarian prison that is life in the American police state and The Prisoner, a dystopian television series that first broadcast in Great Britain more than 50 years ago.
The series centers around a British secret agent (played by Patrick McGoohan) who finds himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic retirement community known only as The Village. While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.
Much like the American Police State, The Prisoner’s Village gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.
Described as “an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia,” The Prisoner is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy.
Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of mankind to meekly accept his lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of his own making.
The Prisoner is an operations manual for how you condition a populace to life as prisoners in a police state: by brainwashing them into believing they are free so that they will march in lockstep with the state and be incapable of recognizing the prison walls that surround them.
We can no longer maintain the illusion of freedom.
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz criticized the Biden administration’s dangerous escalations against Russia on the House floor on Monday, not because he thinks needlessly ramping up cold war brinkmanship with a nuclear-armed nation is an insane thing to do, nor because he believes the US government should cease trying to dominate the world by constantly working to subvert and undermine any nation who disobeys its commands, but because he wants US aggressions to be focused more on China.
“While the Biden administration, the media, and many in congress beat the drums of war for Ukraine, there is a far more significant threat to our nation accelerating rapidly close to home,” Gaetz said. “Argentina, a critical nation and economy in the Americas, has just lashed itself to the Chinese Communist Party, by signing on to the One Belt One Road Initiative. The cost to China was $23.7 billion — a mere fraction of a rounding error when compared to the trillions of dollars our country has spent trying to build democracies out of sand and blood in the Middle East.”
While the Biden Admin, the media, and many in Congress beat the drums of war for Ukraine, there is a far more significant threat to our nation.
China is a rising power. Russia is a declining power. Let us sharpen our focus so that we do not join them in that eventual fate. pic.twitter.com/VUQwfUFCZ7
“China buying influence and infrastructure in Argentina to collaborate on space and nuclear energy is a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine and far more significant to American security than our latest NATO flirtation in the plains of Eastern Europe,” Gaetz continued. “China is a rising power. Russia is a declining power. Let us sharpen our focus so that we do not join them in that eventual fate.”
For those who don’t know, the “Monroe Doctrine” refers to a decree put forward by President James Monroe in 1823 asserting that Latin America is off limits to European colonialist and imperialist agendas, effectively claiming the entire Western Hemisphere as US property. It essentially told Europe, “Everything south of the Mexican border is our Africa. It’s ours to dominate in the same way you guys dominate the Global South in the Eastern Hemisphere. Those are your brown people over there, these are our brown people over here.”
That this insanely imperialist and white supremacist doctrine is still being cited by high-profile politicians to this day says so much about what the US government is and how it operates on the world stage. This is especially true given that Biden himself just articulated the same idea in so many words last month when he declared that “Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.”
U.S. maintains its Monroe Doctrine as Biden assures that Latin America is "America's front yard" pic.twitter.com/VhNxIVdV4Z
So on one hand Gaetz is opposing warmongering against Russia and condemning the trillions spent on US wars in the Middle East, which by itself would normally be a good thing. But the fact that he only opposes doing that because he wants to focus imperialist aggressions on another part of the world to preserve US unipolar planetary domination completely nullifies any good which could come from his opposition to aggressions somewhere else.
This is a very common phenomenon on the right end of the US political spectrum; you’ll hear a politician or pundit saying what appear to be sane things against the agendas of DC warmongers, but if you pay attention to their overall commentary it’s clear that they’re not opposing the use of mass-scale imperialist aggression to preserve planetary domination, they’re just quibbling about the specifics of how it should be done.
Tucker Carlson has been making this argument for years, claiming that the US should make peace with Russia and scale back interventionism in the Middle East not because peace is good but because it needs to focus its aggressions on countering China. He inserts this argument into many of his criticisms of US foreign policy on a regular basis; he did it just the other day, criticizing the Biden administration’s insane actions in Ukraine and then adding “Screaming about Russia, even as we ignore China, is now a bipartisan effort.”
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp summarized this dynamic well in response to a recent Reason article making the same “Make peace with Russia to focus on taking down China” argument, tweeting “Unfortunately, a lot of the opposition to war with Russia is rooted in this idea that the US needs the resources to eventually fight China. We need more people to view war for Taiwan as dangerous and foolish as war for Ukraine.”
Unfortunately, a lot of the opposition to war with Russia is rooted in this idea that the US needs the resources to eventually fight China. We need more people to view war for Taiwan as dangerous and foolish as war for Ukraine. https://t.co/MDUBYCN9dY
Do you see how this works? Do you see how wanting to refocus US firepower on a specific target is not actually better than keeping that firepower diffuse? The difference between “Let’s have peace” and “Let’s have peace with Russia and stop making wars in the Middle East so that we can focus on bringing down China” is the difference between “Stop massacring civilians” and “Stop massacring these civilians because you’ll need your ammunition to massacre those other civilians over there.”
And it’s especially stupid because it’s the exact same agenda. One imperial faction believes it’s best to preserve US hegemony by focusing on bringing down the nations which support and collaborate with China, while the other imperial faction wants to go after China itself more directly. They both support using the US war machine to keep the planet enslaved to Washington and the government agency insiders and oligarchs who run it, they just manufacture this debate about the specifics of how that ought to happen.
This is what Noam Chomsky was talking about when he said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
Liberal NPCs Hate Russia, Conservative NPCs Hate China
"The frenzied, shrieking hysteria I’m witnessing right now among Trump’s base regarding China looks and moves in the exact same way the mental zombification of Russia hysteria looked and moved"https://t.co/QdUl2canc8
That strictly limited spectrum of debate is known as the Overton window, and imperial narrative managers work very hard to keep shoving that window further and further in the favor of the oligarchic empire they serve. In order to prevent us from arguing about whether there should be a globe-spanning capitalist unipolar empire in the first place, they keep us arguing about how that empire’s interests should best be advanced.
The longer the drivers of empire can keep us debating the details of how we should serve them, the longer they can keep us from turning toward them and asking why we should even have them around at all.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
Finally our mainstream press and broadcasters show signs of waking up to the cynical, pervasive, propaganda campaign official Washington wages to obscure its imperial pursuits. Finally there is some suggestion—not more—that the mainstream may someday stop participating in the antidemocratic onslaught of lies and subterfuge they have very willingly assisted in inflicting upon us for most of this century.
Amid tough talk from European and American leaders, a new MintPress study of our nation’s most influential media outlets reveals that it is the press that is driving the charge towards war with Russia over Ukraine. Ninety percent of recent opinion articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have taken a hawkish view on conflict, with anti-war voices few and far between. Opinion columns have overwhelmingly expressed support for sending U.S. weapons and troops to the region. Russia has universally been presented as the aggressor in this dispute, with media glossing over NATO’s role in amping tensions while barely mentioning the U.S. collaboration with Neo-Nazi elements within the Ukrainian ruling coalition.
The state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has committed an absolutely jaw-dropping act of journalistic malpractice amid the west’s mad scramble to whip up public hysteria about China.
Daniel Dumbrill, a Canadian video blogger who lives in China and frequently criticizes western narratives about the Chinese government, has posted a series of videos on Twitter which proves the CBC deceitfully edited part of an interview with him to make it appear as though he was saying the exact opposite of what he’d actually said.
In a newly released segment titled “How China uses influencers to squash human rights concerns“, the CBC warns its audience about “westerners living in China with pro-government views” who act as social media “influencers” and were “invited on trips organized and often paid for by the Communist Party.” The CBC then introduces Dumbrill as a “China-based influencer” who makes “videos defending Chinese policy in Xinjiang” that were “often amplified by state media.”
After framing Dumbrill in this way, the CBC then inserted a short, out-of-context clip of Dumbrill saying “If anywhere else in the world was doing the same thing, it would be called a marketing campaign.” After introducing Dumbrill as a pro-China influencer whose work gets amplified by Chinese state media, the sudden insertion of that clip makes it look as though Dumbrill is defending himself and confessing to being part of a Chinese marketing campaign, especially after the video then cuts away and CBC’s Steven D’Souza moves to another subject with a “But China isn’t just using influencers at home…”
A review of the interview footage that video clip was taken from however makes it abundantly clear that Dumbrill was in fact saying the exact opposite of what he was portrayed as saying.
While the CBC only used about three seconds of footage from what Dumbrill says was a 23-minute interview, Dumbrill’s own footage from that interview shows that Dumbrill had explicitly denied being part of any propaganda campaign shortly before his out-of-context “marketing campaign” comment, and that he’d used that phrase to refer not to himself but to the unbalanced way the west has been reacting to Beijing’s attempts to promote its image to the world.
You’ve actually got to watch both clips to fully understand how unconscionable the CBC’s deceitful edit was. Don’t worry, they’re quite short. First watch this clip of the way the CBC framed Dumbrill’s comment:
Now watch this footage posted by Dumbrill. Notice his explicit denial of D’Souza’s accusation that he is part of any campaign and pay attention to the context in which he makes the “marketing campaign” comment:
To see where they pulled the 3.5 second soundbite from, here's the context. The "marketing campaign" reference is at the end. They pulled this by-the-way supporting auxiliary point out of context & painted me as answering as a participant, not an external commentator as stated. pic.twitter.com/o41L49krPU
Dumbrill not only denies being part of any kind of campaign but adds that he doesn’t benefit financially from his video blogging about China and in fact does so at great personal expense. His “marketing campaign” remark is snipped out of a thoughtful, nuanced objection to the way Beijing working to improve its public image gets labeled an “influence campaign”, a rather nefarious-sounding term not typically applied to western cities, provinces and nations who do more or less the same thing. It’s crystal clear that he’s not making that observation in any relation to himself and his work but rather speaking objectively about Beijing’s behavior, entirely separate from the accusation of being a propaganda influencer.
D’Souza knew this. He sat there with the CBC editors and knowingly put together a deceitful propaganda piece falsely framing someone else as admitting to being a government propagandist. All with the funding of Canadian taxpayers.
This is made even more ironic by the fact that the CBC segment is dominated by the analysis of a think tanker from the anti-China narrative management firm Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which D’Souza never bothers to inform CBC’s audience is extensively funded by governments and the military-industrial complex. Dumbrill had even posted footage of the interview where he’s seen telling D’Souza that citing think tanks funded by governments and the arms industry without telling your audience that that’s what you’re doing is journalistic malpractice, which is plainly true. And they went and did exactly that anyway.
A war machine-funded think tanker appearing on a brazenly propagandistic show on western state media to explain the dark mechanics of Chinese propaganda is so twisted it’s actually delicious.
“Do you have any shame about doing exactly what you claim others are doing: pushing state propaganda?” journalist Aaron Maté tweeted at D’Souza in response to Dumbrill’s footage. “If you have any remote interest in journalism, you should have Daniel on — live — and let him respond to your smear job.”
Somehow I doubt that’s going to happen.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
I’m declassifying evidence that Nigeria is planning a false flag operation in Switzerland. Are you ready? Here it is:
Nigeria is planning a false flag operation in Switzerland.
See, the evidence is me asserting it. If you doubt this evidence, you’re a propagandist for Nigeria.
What? You want proof? I just gave you the proof. I gave you my declassified intelligence assessment.
I mean obviously I can’t give you the raw intelligence you’re asking me for without revealing sources and methods and compromising intelligence officers in the field. Is that what you want? For me to compromise intelligence officers in the field? Do you work for Nigerian intelligence?
The evidence is secret. It’s secret evidence. What I can give you is the information we’ve obtained through thorough intelligence gathering methods in which our intelligence agencies have a degree of confidence. You’re free to doubt it and believe Nigerian propaganda instead, if that’s the sort of person you are.
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Making your whole thing about opposing a rival political party is what people do when they lack the integrity to oppose the murderous empire that’s fully backed by both parties.
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That saying “They got you fighting a culture war to stop you fighting a class war” is something you’ve got to take seriously. You can’t just dismiss it. Because if it’s at all true, even somewhat, then discourse on today’s left is completely fucked and ultimately power-serving.
Certainly you can’t reduce everything to class. Racial and sexual power dynamics are of course very real. The problem would be if those in power kept everyone focused on culture war dynamics instead of class, and kept the discourse from threatening real power. Is that happening? Is it happening at all? To any extent? Because to any extent that it is happening, power is being served and our own interests are being undermined.
You can’t just leave this question unanswered and unaddressed. It needs to be sincerely grappled with.
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Whenever your anger is focused on any figure besides the western empire and its facilitators, the propagandists have succeeded in doing their job.
It’s obvious that the Iraq invasion was facilitated by propaganda. It should be equally obvious that the powers who pushed that propaganda would have developed and refined their methods and learned new techniques since 2002, and that they would be using those tricks in today’s world.
Any time there’s a new escalation against an imperial target you’ll get people comparing the propaganda to the lead-up to Iraq, and then you get people pushing back with “This isn’t Iraq! It’s different in X ways!” But it wouldn’t look exactly the same. The science of propaganda has advanced a lot since that time.
There’s always some reason why this or that act of militarism or interventionism is completely different from its disastrous predecessors. Always. It’s all just bullshit designed to throw off our basic sense of pattern recognition.
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I’m a tankie, but only because that word now means “Anyone who focuses their criticisms on the most murderous power structure on earth.”
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Anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to fight the Russians hasn’t watched enough MMA.
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Someone who wants to make peace with Russia in order to focus on ramping up aggressions against China is as worthless to anti-imperialists as someone who wants to legalize drugs so that law enforcement can focus on locking up gay people would be to civil libertarians. Being dovish on Russia but hawkish on China is not better than being hawkish on both; you’re pushing the same amount of aggression toward what is ultimately the same imperialist agenda, you’re just doing it a little differently.
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The trouble with social media hate mobs is they don’t work on the people you want them to work on. Being subjected to a bunch of people yelling at you online can ruin your day if you’re a caring person who’s affected by how people feel about you, but if you’re a sociopathic politician, pundit or celebrity it’ll just be funny to you. So if you’re a healthy person you can be easily silenced and shut down by a few aggressive social media accounts, while if your brain has a missing or malfunctioning empathy center you’re guaranteed to keep your voice. It’s one of the many ways our setup uplifts sociopaths.
Until we find a way for healthy people to be as comfortable in the spotlight as sociopaths are, they’ll always have a massive advantage over us. So many aspects of our society are tilted to the advantage of people with no empathy, like the way capitalism rewards anyone who’s willing to do whatever it takes to out-compete everyone else and climb to the top. In a sense that’s the source of all our major problems.
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If you want to have integrity you want your personal psychology to line up with your political ideals. Plenty of leftist men harbor deep-seated misogyny. Many libertarians who promote personal responsibility blame their personal problems on others. You want it all to line up.
It’s nothing to be ashamed of if your psychological landscape doesn’t match your ideals; that’s pretty normal. It’s just a matter of patiently doing the inner work necessary for your mind to match your ideals, your speech to match your mind, and your actions to match your speech.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
The Russians are coming! So says the Australian mainstream media.
To be honest, I don’t know what the Murdoch press is saying as my equilibrium depends on my not reading it. The other major media chain, Nine Entertainment, is in full neo-Cold War mode.
Nine Entertainment, as its name implies, has been best known for televising sport. In 2018 it took over Fairfax Media. A family media dynasty was established when John Fairfax bought the Sydney Herald in 1841. When Nine bought Fairfax it acquired the sole ‘serious’ papers of Australia’s largest cities, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) and the Melbourne Age, the national Australian Financial Review and the national capital’s Canberra Times. This was some haul with respect to the potential to influence public and policy-making opinion.
Fairfax’ finest hour was when it published the hard-hitting weekly National Times, from 1971 to 1986, that period mostly under the benign chairmanship of patrician James Fairfax. Chaos then ensued, then corporatisation. The loss of classified advertising revenue and the slow take-up of digital media by the then CEO with no media nous led to long term cost-cutting and significant retrenchment of seasoned journalists. The distinct character of the Age was abolished. A proud but reduced staff saw the cynical selloff in 2018 by the then CEO and complicit Board.
The Fairfax/Nine masthead is ‘Independent. Always.’. A loyal old-timer claims that this latter-day label was devised as a marketing ploy. These days it’s a joke, yet with no embarrassment shown by editorial and management.
Fairfax/Nine still has good and committed journalists. But its World coverage? A shocker. Straight down the line Atlanticist bilge. Fairfax/Nine retains correspondents in Washington DC and London and they faithfully toe ‘the correct line’.
The DC correspondent, Matthew Knott, lived through the Trump Presidency, implicitly decried it, but didn’t look behind it or see the continuities. Once Trump goes, we’ll be back to truth and beauty. Knott readily bought into the Russiagate myth. Knott reminisces in December 2021 upon returning to Australia. Nice guy but … Remarkably, comments on the latter article indicate that some readers valued his reportage.
These correspondents seem universally jejune, read nothing out of the square, seemingly no history whatsoever. In the tough days of the (first) Cold War, establishment-linked journalists (aka the Australian Denis Warner) knew what role they played, whereas their successors are babes in the woods.
The recent London-based journalists (Nick Miller, Bevan Shields, Latika Bourke) have been perennially abject. Thus we have them toeing the line on Putin’s ‘bullying’ (5.9.14), Russian interference in the West’s appropriate dismantling of Syria (16.4.18), Russiagate (17.7.18), the Browder/Magnitsky steam train (23.3.18, 1.12.18), the downing of MH17 (20.10.14, 3.6.15, 24.5.18, 8.3.20, 10.3.20, 11.3.20, 1.9.20, 10.9.21), the Skripal novichok ‘poisonings’ (8.3.18, 16.4.18, 10.10.18, 3.9.20, 5.2.21), the Navalny circus (3.9.20, 28.1.21, 5.2.21), and Russia’s ‘imminent invasion’ of Ukraine (29.1.22).
Their reporting of British politics itself has been lamentable (Corbyn was a bogey). They misrepresent key details on the Julian Assange affair (20.11.19, 23.9.20), have ignored the long background, not least Sweden’s political complicity and Britain’s profound judicial complicity, and have generally remained indifferent to his torture and to the monumental significance of the Assange trial to journalistic integrity.
However, Fairfax/Nine’s DC and London correspondents are padding for the main game. The main dish for its readers is the reprinting of articles from American and English mainstream media – the New York Times, the Washington Post, The UK Telegraph, Reuters, Bloomberg, AP, etc., etc. Unadulterated propaganda. Independent Always indeed.
I speculate on the mentality of the relevant editors behind this slavish reproduction of slop. Are they under instruction from senior editorial and management? Do they actually believe this stuff they reproduce? Do they think that these sources are models of probity? Were they born yesterday? Is it easier and cheaper than doing one’s own research?
A peak of the steady drip was on 27 January 2022 when no less than four articles appeared on the problem that Russia and its evil leader Putin poses for ‘freedom-loving’ peoples.
Thus we get Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, UK Telegraph, on German appeasement of Russia. Andrew Kramer (no SMH link), New York Times, on just what dastardly means Russia will deploy in its imminent invasion. Jeff Mason and Humeyra Pamuk, Reuters, on the further brutal sanctions envisioned by the ringmaster Biden if Russia pulls any naughty business. And Jeremy Warner, UK Telegraph, on how Putin’s destabilisation of Ukraine could lead to global chaos in the markets!
I made an online comment to the latter article noting that if ‘the markets’ were so responsive to fake news then why pay any attention to them? The comment didn’t appear, exposing how sensitive they are to reflections on their own stupidity. Can’t they take a joke?
The highlight of Fairfax/Nine’s sterling contribution to the infowar was an Editorial of 20 January. Some highlights:
Russian media is inventing stories about atrocities against Ukraine’s large Russian-speaking minority
[Putin’s] reluctance to co-operate with an investigation into the crash
his illegal annexation of Crimea
This is the same man who sends his agents to the West to kill political dissidents with poison nerve gas and radioactive tea.
All these gems and more in 600 words! It may be only a coincidence that the aforementioned Bevan Shields, the ‘exceptionally talented journalist and editor’, has only recently been appointed Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.
On the home front, Fairfax/Nine’s Eryk Bagshaw and Anthony Galloway work non-stop in condemning China per se, with its presumed evil ambitions through authoritarian means to dominate the Eastern Hemisphere, on its way to global dominance.
Master of Ceremonies on matters international at Fairfax/Nine is longtime hack Peter Hartcher. The much-experienced Hartcher has never been the same after a stint as North American correspondent. Hartcher recently enthused about the satrap Australian government’s preposterous ‘deal’ to build and utilise nuclear-powered submarines (AUKUS) – that will give China its comeuppance, he claims.
More recently, Hartcher was pumping up the British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’s hysterical proposition that China and Russia might wage war simultaneously. This aroused Australia’s sometime Prime Minister and master wordsmith Paul Keating, after a previous spat with Hartcher, to label Truss’ claim as ‘nothing short of demented’, that Britain ‘suffers delusions of grandeur and relevance deprivation’ and that Hartcher was ‘the press gallery’s most celebrated beat-up merchant’. Quite.
I have written multiple letters to the SMH letters editors complaining about the preponderance of fake news in its World coverage. None have been published. No letters from anyone have been published on such coverage, and I can’t believe that I’m the only one offended and nonplussed by being treated as an idiot. Attempts to comment critically online on such coverage is also met with comprehensive censorship. They must know what they’re doing.
The ABC, the national broadcaster, is similarly afflicted. Its daily coverage of ‘the imminent Russian invasion’ provides no background whatsoever. Nothing about the decades-long NATO encirclement, nor the US-led February 2014 coup in Ukraine, nor the slaughter of Russophone Ukrainians in the Donbas (especially the burning of the Odessa trade union building in May 2014), Russia’s accommodation of the large numbers of Ukrainians fleeing war, Kiev’s marginalisation of the official status of the Russian language, etc.
As with Fairfax/Nine, there is no mention of the senior German General saying ‘cool your jets’, of the Croatian President saying ‘count us out’, and of Ukraine’s President Zelensky himself demanding essentially ‘for the sake of Ukraine’s economy and society, shut up!’
Indicative is that ABC heavies haven’t confronted that their erstwhile heroine Hillary Clinton might not be heroic and that there might be something more deeply problematic about the US polity than the seeming aberration of Donald Trump.
As with the print media, critical feedback is ignored.
The ABC has suffered long term budget cuts and pressure to ‘conform’ from a succession of reactionary governments (not least under pressure from the Murdoch media and the Institute of Public Affairs, a corporate-funded pressure group) which seems to have been internalised. It’s a mindset of cultural cringe to English language Anglo-America in the face of a curious, ultimately unknowable and potentially malevolent Other.
Israel has always been a litmus test with the Australian media. A peep of criticism of that illustrious apartheid state and the feedback systems are bombarded with outrage by the cheer squad. Occasionally, an editorial in Fairfax/Nine lets through a damning article – as in the recent kerfuffle over the Director of the iconic summer Sydney Festival inviting sponsorship from the Israeli government for an Israeli participant.
However, the local Zionist lobby always gets its right of reply, in the process highlighting that its members are the only contributors who have the privilege of writing complete bullshit. Here are representative print contributions, in response to the Palestine revolt against their ongoing oppression (May 2021), and in response to the boycott of the Sydney Festival (December 2021).
I have never understood how commercial media can put propaganda before profit. Perhaps there’s a captive audience in Australia for Fairfax/Nine print media because the only alternative (save for Western Australia) is the odious Mr Murdoch.
A rare voice of sanity in Australia on international issues is the online site Pearls & Irritations, created by a longtime senior federal public servant. It provides a venue for people to write intelligently on China, in particular, and for ex-ambassadors and senior public servants and others who can’t find a voice in the Australian mainstream print media duopoly or the public broadcaster.
The American-Anglo crazies don’t care about the integrity or sovereignty of Ukraine (think Serbia and Kosovo) or the welfare of Ukrainians. They don’t care whether Europe freezes. They only care for the ultimate dismantling of an independent Russia, a renewed Yeltsinisation of that country and of countries within its current sphere of influence.
Our respectable media is happy to oblige by providing a compromised ‘journalism’ masquerading as intelligence. Why do we continue to tolerate this shit?
Then in late January when the calendar debunked the Military Times incendiary headline “Russia preparing to attack Ukraine by late January”, that same outlet ran a much less viral story with the headline “Russia not yet ready for full-scale attack says Ukraine“.
Now here in early February, the Murdoch press has put out a spin piece of a sort we’re likely to see more of in coming days claiming that Russia has not invaded because the US and its allies have “ruined” Moscow’s plans by telling everyone the invasion is coming. In an article titled “Ukraine-Russia tensions: Moscow’s plans ‘ruined’ after US and Britain call out possible invasion“, Ukraine’s defense minister Hanna Maliar tells Sky News that Putin has not yet invaded because his murderous plot was thwarted by a plucky band of imperial states who would not be prevented from speaking their truth.
NEW: Revelations by the UK & US about the threat of a new Russian invasion of Ukraine are "ruining" Moscow's plans, deputy defence minister tells @SkyNews It came as accused ok a fake video attack plot to frame forces & forge an excuse to invadehttps://t.co/0jWQJRVbJF
“It’s important to understand that when we or our western partners name the date of the possible invasion, we are ruining their plans,” Maliar told Sky News. “And the dates that were already told in public – it’s ruined plans, nothing will happen in these days. But the danger still exists.”
In the same piece Ukraine’s information minister Oleksandr Tkachenko was asked if he believed Russia would already have invaded if not for all the western talk of an imminent attack, to which he replied, “As a typical robber, if he does not see defence or at least does not see talking, he will act.”
At no time in the article is any consideration given to the possibility of a far simpler explanation for the missing Russian invasion: that Russia never intended to invade. That possibility is just skimmed right over in favor of the seemingly far less likely scenario that the Russian government thought it could orchestrate a massive invasion without anybody saying anything about it and was forced to abandon its plans in disappointment when that nonsensical gamble failed to pay off.
And now we’ve already got western media publishing other Ukrainian military claims that the real invasion will be coming on February 20th.
“February 20 is noted as a potential start date for the invasion: that is when the Winter Olympics ends in Beijing, and President Putin, 69, eager to woo the Chinese, may not wish to tarnish the event,” The Times wrote in late January.
As February 20th comes and goes without an invasion and predictions of false flag operations and Kremlin-backed coups fail to pan out, we will likely be seeing more such spin jobs from the western media claiming that those things did not happen because of measures that were taken by the US and its allies to prevent it. It may be used to score political points by claiming Biden “prevented” a Ukraine invasion with his willingness to stand up to Putin by pouring weapons into Ukraine and sending troops to Eastern Europe.
These claims will be built entirely on specious reasoning.
The fallacious nature of the narrative that western powers are thwarting diabolical plots from the Kremlin with their cold war aggressions is best illustrated in this short clip from The Simpsons in which Homer believes that bears are being kept out of a generally bear-free neighborhood by the newly invented “bear patrol”.
“Ah, not a bear in sight! The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm,” says Homer.
“That’s specious reasoning, Dad,” Lisa replies, picking up a stone from the ground. “By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.”
“Oh, how does it work?” asks her father.
“It doesn’t work,” says Lisa. “It’s just a stupid rock. But I don’t see any tigers around, do you?”
At which point Homer offers to buy Lisa’s rock from her, because he’s a fuckin’ idiot.
The logical fallacy that has afflicted both Homer Simpson and those who claim the US power alliance is preventing a Russian invasion of Ukraine is known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc (“with this, therefore because of this”), which is the fallacy that correlation implies causation. It’s when someone puts forward the claim that because two things happened concurrently (or failed to happen as in the examples we’re looking at here), one must have caused the other. Homer’s bear patrol kept the bears away. Lisa’s anti-tiger rock kept the tigers away. The west’s shrieking about an imminent Russian invasion kept the Russian invaders away.
Alternatively, it’s possible that there were no bears or tigers threatening the streets of Springfield, and that there was no Russian invasion threatening Ukraine. That this was all a narrative used to ramp up cold war escalations, move some expensive military inventory, manufacture the global consensus that Putin is a Hitler-like menace who must be aggressively checked at all times by all nations, or potentially heaven forbid to lay the groundwork for aggressions from US/Ukraine/NATO powers.
However this thing unfolds, it’s a safe bet that the rhetoric won’t be getting any more logically sound any time soon. So keep that Simpson’s clip handy.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
The western media are blaring headlines today about a “revelation” by the US government which does not actually reveal anything because it contains nothing but empty narrative fluff.
“U.S. reveals Russian plot to use fake video as pretense for Ukraine invasion,” reads a headline from CBS News.
“US reveals Russia may plan to create fake pretext for Ukraine invasion,” claims another from The Hill.
The claim is that the Russian government is plotting to fabricate a false flag operation using a graphic video with crisis actors in order to manufacture a pretense for a full-scale military invasion. State Department Spokesman Ned Price and AP reporter Matt Lee had an exchange about this claim at a Thursday press conference that you simply must watch if you haven’t already.
Please watch this video in which journalist Matt Lee accuses State Dept. spokesman Ned Price of veering into "Alex Jones territory" by making the claim that Russia plans to stage a "false flag" attack with "crisis actors" — Price then sneeringly calls Lee a Russian propagandist pic.twitter.com/5xMsbfWYgz
Lee pointed out that claims about false flags and crisis actors were “getting into Alex Jones territory” and asked for the evidence for these extraordinary claims, which one would think is reasonable since extraordinary claims are generally considered to require extraordinary evidence. Price said that the evidence is “intelligence information that we have declassified,” and when Lee asked where the declassified information was Price looked at him like he just asked the stupidest question in the world and said “I just delivered it.”
The exchange goes on to reveal that Price really did mean that the completely unverified government assertion he’d just regurgitated is the evidence for the claim being made, meaning the evidence of the government assertion is that assertion itself.
Refusing to relent, Lee kept hammering the point that a completely unsubstantiated assertion is not the same as evidence especially given all the government assertions that have proved not to be true over the years.
“Matt, you said yourself you’ve been in this business for quite a long time,” Price replied. “You know that when we make information, intelligence information public, we do so in a way that protects sensitive sources and methods.”
Ahh, so the evidence is secret. It’s top secret evidence, to protect “sensitive sources and methods”. It sure is convenient how all the evidence of immensely consequential claims made by a government with an extensive history of lying is always far too sensitive for the public to be permitted to scrutinize.
“You also know that we do so, we declassify information only when we’re confident in that information,” Price continued. “If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government of other governments and wanna, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that’s for you do to.”
So if you doubt the credibility of governments with a very well-documented history of lying about exactly this sort of thing, you’re at best a useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and at worst a Kremlin operative yourself.
Yep, sounds legit. That’s definitely the sort of thing government officials say when they feel like they’re being truthful.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted about the exchange, “This is wild. The State Department’s spokesman can’t comprehend why the Associated Press feels the need to distinguish between a claim and a fact, and becomes visibly offended—and then angered—by the suggestion that his claims may require evidence to be accepted as credible.”
Wild indeed. Assertions are not evidence. A government declassifying itself making an unsubstantiated assertion is not “declassifying” anything. This is not the sort of behavior anyone would accept from anyone else, except perhaps a televangelist or a cult leader, but it’s already being treated as truth by US and British politicians.
"Declassifying" yourself making a claim is not declassifying anything. Assertions are not evidence. It's bat shit insane how the US government will claim it is "declassifying" information that amounts to nothing more than US government assertions and people just accept that. https://t.co/iNm2kao2in
If I got on here for example and began drumming up publicity with claims that I have evidence that extraterrestrials are visiting this planet, and then after racking up millions of views and lots of publicity my evidence turned out to be a video clip of me saying “Extraterrestrials have been visiting this planet,” I would be called a liar, a scammer, and a clickbait grifter, and rightly so. I could then claim that I can’t provide any further evidence beyond my own assertion without compromising my sensitive sources and methods, but I’d still quite rightly be called a liar, a scammer, and a clickbait grifter.
But if I’m the most powerful institution in the world and have an extensive history of lying about exactly the sort of claim I just made, that’s considered fine and normal within the mainstream western orthodoxy.
Wild. Just wild.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
The anti-China panic sweeping Canadian politics has descended from tragedy into farce.
A month ago I mockedGlobe and Mail Report on Business columnist Eric Reguly for complaining about China-based Zijin Mining purchasing Neo Lithium. The nominally Canadian firm extracts lithium in Argentina.
Reguly succeeded in stirring a national security scare about minerals extracted 10,000 kilometres from Canada. Since he published “The West is asleep while China hoards key minerals” on December 18 the opposition parties have repeatedly criticized the Liberals for failing to conduct a “national security review” of the Neo Lithium sale. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole called it “critical” to review the purchase of Argentinian resources by a Chinese firm while NDP MP Charlie Angus tweeted, “How is it possible that Ottawa gave the thumbs up to a Chinese takeover of Neo Lithium? This is a critical metal for the renewable economy. There is a major geopolitical fight for control of these minerals and Canada is being left on the sidelines.”
Opposition MPs forced Innovation, Science and Industry minister François-Philippe Champagne to explain the lack of review before a federal committee. At the industry and technology committee meeting a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute demanded a review of the sale. In all seriousness Jeff Kucharski claimed, “our national security interests don’t end at our borders. The mere fact that the lithium mine is in Argentina, and not in Canada is really irrelevant.” But Kucharski is calling for a Canadian, not Argentinian, government national security review.
In an article on Neo Lithium Kucharski wrote, “Resource firms should be considered as contributors to advancing Canada’s national security interests, irrespective of where their activities and assets are located.” With Canadian-based or listed mining firms operating thousands of international projects, Kucharski’s logic would grant Ottawa remarkable leverage over the global mineral supply and (probably) threaten Canadian companies’ vast profits. Right-wing, pro-corporate, voices don’t generally argue for measures that undermine Canadian mining firms (Why would a government allow a Canadian company into their country if it meant foreign sovereignty over their resources?). But, the ‘threat’ of China’s rise elicits all manner of double standards and absurdities.
Another China double standard is the discussion of Canada creating a foreign agents’ registry. Last week the Globe and Mail quoted a spokesperson for Canadian Friends of Hong Kong saying that “Canada needs a foreign agents registration act like those in Australia or the United States, as well as a centralized reporting centre for victims of intimidation by the Chinese government.” In the following sentence of the article Ian Bailey and Steven Chase quote “Mehmet Tohti, executive director of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project” (URAP). But URAP ought to be listed on any foreign agent registry worth its salt. URAP’s website says it “is funded by the Washington-based National Endowment Fund for Democracy for its Advocacy work in Canada.” The NED was established in 1983 to work alongside the CIA. In 1991 Allen Weinstein, a founding member and president, told the Washington Post, “a lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
In a recent expose The Canada Files noted that Tohti has “far deeper connections to the NED than those stemming only from URAP. In 2004, Tohti was a co-founder of the NED-funded World Uyghur Congress. He was a ‘Special Representative’ of the WUC to the European Parliament between 2010 to 2012, and even served as Vice-President of the World Uyghur Congress for two separate terms.”
Tohti and URAP played an important role in pushing Parliament’s subcommittee on human rights to adopt a resolution calling China’s treatment of Uighurs a genocide. The House of Commons subsequently followed suit, which has pushed the Trudeau government towards more conflictual relations with Beijing.
The Globe and Mail’s senior parliamentary reporter, Steven Chase, has quoted Tohti in a half dozen articles over the past two years. Chase has also written numerous articles about the need for a foreign agents’ registry. I did not find any article in which he mentions that Tohti’s group is funded by a CIA cut-out organization.
An important force pushing for a foreign agent registry is Kucharski’s MacDonald Laurier Institute. Its fellows have published recent op-eds titled “Canada needs a foreign agent registry to help it tackle China’s influence” and “The persistent threat of foreign interference in Canada’s democracy”. As part of their supposed concern with foreign governments interfering in Canadian politics, the MacDonald Laurier Institute established DisinfoWatch.org. In December it published “Influence Operation Targeting Canadian 2021 Federal Election”. The report noted, “The Chinese government has repeatedly demonstrated its readiness to advance its interest in Canada by directly manipulating Canadian political debate and policy through the use of disinformation, threats, intimidation, and influence operations directed at Canadian diaspora groups.”
Well, surprise, surprise, DisinfoWatch is also funded by the US government. The bottom of its initiating statement notes that “Development of the DisinfoWatch platform is funded by the United States Department of State’s Global Engagement Center and the US Embassy in Ottawa with support from Journalists for Human Rights.” And to move from hypocrisy into the realm of farce, the MacDonald Laurier Institute has received significant sums from the governments of Taiwan and Latvia.
Those calling for a foreign agents’ registry are not principally concerned with foreign influence in Canadian politics. They are obsessed with stopping the world’s most populous country from someday transplanting the US to become its most powerful.
• On February 4 China Canada Focus will be hosting a free webinar with Noam Chomsky on Canada’s growing conflict with China.
Stockholm, February 2, 2022 – Kyrgyzstan authorities should drop their criminal investigation into independent news website Kaktus.media and allow all media outlets to operate freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday.
The prosecutor’s office stated that the article, reposted from the Tajik website ASIA-Plus, inaccurately alleged that Kyrgyz soldiers fired the first shots in the confrontation, which could constitute a violation of Article 407 of Kyrgyzstan’s criminal code, which bans the “propaganda of war” and the publication of information “with the aim of provoking aggression or igniting military conflict.”
The penalty for conviction is a fine of up to 100,000 soms (US$1,180) or up to five years in prison, according to the criminal code.
Kaktus.media founder and director Dina Maslova told CPJ via messaging app that investigators summoned her and two of the outlet’s editors for questioning on Monday, and she believed the case was a part of authorities’ wider crackdown on the independent press in Kyrgyzstan.
“Kyrgyz authorities’ investigation into Kaktus.media for so-called ‘war propaganda’ offenses is absurd, and is an obvious attempt to intimidate and harass the outlet,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Republishing news from foreign outlets is not a crime. Authorities in Kyrgyzstan must immediately halt their investigation into Kaktus.media and let all independent outlets operate freely.”
Maslova told CPJ that such “war propaganda” charges have not been brought before in Kyrgyzstan to her knowledge, so she did not know how the case would develop.
Maslova said that Kaktus.media, one of the country’s most popular news websites, reprinted the ASIA-Plusarticle on the border conflict on the evening of January 27, but deleted it soon thereafter.
The next morning, following an outcry on social media, the outlet issued a statement explaining that the goal of publication had been to show the Kyrgyz public what kind of information Tajik authorities were distributing to their citizens. The Kaktus.media editorial team “has always adhered to and continues to adhere to the national interests of the Kyrgyz people,” the statement said.
Later that day, a small group of demonstrators protested outside Kaktus.media’s office, calling for the outlet to be closed down and making calls against other prominent independent outlets, according to newsreports.
On the evening of January 31, state news channel Ala-Too 24 broadcast a report on Kaktus.media, and called for outlets to be held accountable for publishing false information; that report did not mention that the article in question was a reprint.
Since January 28, Kaktus.media has reported a number of attempts to hack its Instagram account and the personal accounts of its journalists on social media platforms, and the outlet has been subject to trolling and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, reports said.
On January 31, dozens of media outlets, journalists and media advocacy organizations published an open letter calling on authorities to stop their “mass attack” on media outlets and journalists through criminal cases, coordinated trolling, and surveillance.
CPJ emailed the prosecutor general’s office for comment, but did not immediately receive any reply.
There’s so much more to propaganda than just manufacturing consent for governments and wars. It trains us what to value. What to think a successful human being looks like. Where to place our interest, energy and attention. It shapes our very personalities. It warps our humanity.
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Show me someone who doesn’t think propaganda has much power and I’ll show you someone who’s been highly propagandized.
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If people could understand the massive, yawning gulf between the world as it actually exists and the narratives we’ve been fed about it since childhood, there’d be immediate revolution. The real world is as different from the propaganda world as it is from any work of fiction.
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The CIA is officially forbidden to conduct operations in the US. What the CIA is not officially forbidden to is hand an unscrupulous American news reporter a bombshell scoop about a foreign government which just so happens to build a narrative in the US that advances CIA objectives.
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That which has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. It applies to arguments, it applies to claims by US intelligence agencies.
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Propaganda has distorted people’s perception of reality so severely that Twitter cares more about musicians pulling their content from an app because they don’t like a podcaster than the fact that the most powerful government in the world is flirting with nuclear war.
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Medicare for all ❌ Stop deportations ❌ End kids in cages ❌ Stop genocide in Yemen ❌ Cancel student debt ❌ $15 minimum wage ❌ Slash military spending ❌ Most progressive administration since FDR ❌ Any meaningful progress whatsoever ❌ Lots of tweets about Joe Rogan ✅
America’s buddies Saudi Arabia and Israel have been bombing their neighbors constantly with extensive US support. The friendship between these nations and the US exists not in spite of their nonstop military butchery but exactly because of it.
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If all the countries involved in a dispute say there won’t be a war and only one country says that there will be, it’s not hard to figure out who the aggressor and instigator is.
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There are easily ten thousand issues in this world that are of greater concern than the fact that Russia annexed a small territory that overwhelmingly wanted to be annexed in 2014.
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It’s not that I always side against the US, it’s that I side against whatever side is in the wrong and that tends to be the most powerful and destructive regime in the world. If you don’t think believe the US could be consistently on the wrong side of foreign policy disputes, it’s because you’ve been extensively propagandized about its behavior on the world stage.
It can’t rightly be called anti-US bias if your criticisms of the US are unassailably correct. You simply cannot dispute the fact that no other government is doing anything that rises anywhere near the level of depravity as spending the 21st century killing millions of human beings in wars of aggression. It’s not that I have some arbitrary grudge against the United States and frame all my positions on every issue to fit that bias, it’s that the US really is quantifiably and demonstrably the most tyrannical government on earth by an extremely wide margin and thus naturally tends to be in the wrong.
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The social engineers will always prefer to censor dissident voices online via algorithm manipulation rather than overt deplatforming when given the choice, simply because it silences a lot more people with a lot less public outcry.
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If you agree with an ideological faction on every issue it’s not because you share the same values and principles, it’s because you suffer from a lack of values and principles. You’re just a blind follower of the herd.
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What do you suppose would be the public response if a mainstream outlet published a story like this with a similar accompanying feature image as a criticism of the Israel lobby? https://t.co/SJGHSU8OvM
Gonna go get a degree from an Ivy League university and become a senior fellow at a prominent think tank so I can make extremely intelligent observations like “Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler and Ukraine is Poland” and “Xi Jinping is Adolf Hitler and Taiwan is Poland”.
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We’re seeing the narrative that Tucker Carlson is a Russian agent aggressively pushed by mainstream pundits not to attack Carlson himself, but to manufacture the consensus that anyone who criticizes US policy on Russia is suspicious and untrustworthy.
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If you get your information about the world from Tucker Carlson you’re just as MSM-brainwashed as if you get your information about the world from Brian Stelter or Rachel Maddow. The brainwashing just happens in slightly different ways. Sure Carlson might say true things I agree with sometimes, but so does Anderson Cooper; they just tell different truths and different lies. Propaganda doesn’t work if it’s all bullshit all the time; there has to be some truth mixed in.
The people in my mentions who regurgitate MSM talking points on China because they heard it from Tucker Carlson think they’re so very different from the people in my mentions who regurgitate MSM talking points on Russia because they heard it from Wolf Blitzer, but they’re not. They’re exactly the same.
The TV man is not your friend.
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If Russia was an actual threat they wouldn’t have to keep lying about it all the time.
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In ancient history our stress hormones were used on saber toothed tiger attacks. Now they’re used on made-up mental narrative fluff like whether we’re adequate, what others think of us, a podcaster saying things we don’t like, Vladimir Putin annexing Eastern Europe, or China taking over the world.
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It’s not legitimate to complain that people talk about problems without taking action or offering solutions. Spreading awareness that there’s a problem is taking action toward a solution. All positive shifts in human behavior are always preceded by an increase in awareness.
You’re not going to get to solutions until a sufficiently large percentage of the populace understands and accepts that they are needed. Even if you do come up with the perfect solution on your own without the help of the collective, you won’t have the numbers to enact it. Maybe you’ve read a bunch of books and got a fancy degree and you’ve come up with the perfect utopian model for society, but it’s going to make jack dick difference if only you know it. People first need to understand that our current systems don’t work, and then to understand why.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
Despite the British government’s evidence-free claim that Russia was planning to install a puppet regime in Ukraine being debunked within hours and then shown to be a US intelligence claim dishonestly packaged as a British one days later, mass media outlets still to this day repeat the allegation like it’s a real thing. Despite the entirely unevidenced US government claim that Russia was plotting to stage a false flag attack in eastern Ukraine failing to prove true in subsequent weeks, US Senator Bob Menendez went on CNN over the weekend and declared that this false flag which never actually, physically happened was grounds to sanction Russia effective immediately.
The US political/media class is just saying whatever it wants about what Russia is doing and planning to do with no regard for facts or evidence. Nothing is too cartoonishly hysterical; in fact the more clickbaity and attention-grabbing the better. They feel free to scattergun these outlandish claims willy nilly all over our information ecosystem because five years of Russia hysteria have taught them that they will suffer exactly zero professional consequences when they are proven wrong, and that they will in fact see their stars rise as a reward for advancing the interests of the US empire.
It’s interesting how in all the talk about “media literacy” over the last few years and the push to teach the public to distinguish between real news and fake news, the overwhelming majority of the mainstream public has remained blissfully unaware that it’s actually bad practice to swallow unevidenced assertions by western government officials about countries the US doesn’t like. Despite this government’s extensive and thoroughly documented history of lying to us about exactly this sort of thing over and over again for generation after generation, it’s still considered perfectly normal and acceptable to just deep throat whatever it tells us to believe without the slightest twinge of gag reflex.
So this is just a quick, friendly reminder while all this Ukraine stuff is happening that the burden of proof is always on the party making the claim, and that any claim that has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. This applies to individuals, and it most certainly applies to untrustworthy governments as well.
When the corporate media pushes for war, one of its main weapons is propaganda by omission.
In the case of Ukraine, it omits history of NATO expansion, the US role in the 2014 coup, and the integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian military.https://t.co/3KXETrRwmC
The epistemological razor “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” is generally attributed to Christopher Hitchens, who ironically has a rather significant history of failing to follow his own advice when it comes to claims made by western government agencies. But that’s precisely when it is most important to take Hitchens’s razor to heart: not when you’re arguing with someone about whether or not God exists, but when a very consequential claim is being made by the most powerful people on our planet.
Anything that’s been asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. It’s true of arguments, it’s true of government claims, and it’s especially true of claims coming from governments that we know for a fact make false claims all the time.
What this means is that a simple “Nah” is all that’s required whenever you’re presented with these claims, or if you’re feeling particularly generous a “Proof or it didn’t happen.” If anyone objects to your low-energy dismissal of their parroting claims by western governments, simply tell them that what has been put forward without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. They might want you to try to prove their position wrong, but that ain’t how the burden of proof works, buttercup.
Hitchens’s razor. It slices. It dices. It wins arguments. It keeps the news man from turning your brain into clam chowder. Use it, and use it often.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
The declines of U.S. capitalism and of its imperial position provoke fear among its mainstream politicians. Their response, in large part, has been to deny that any such decline is happening. These politicians do this partly by acting as though the U.S. remains in the globally dominant position it occupied in the second half of the 20th century. Thus, to maintain this illusion, they start wars in the Middle East, maintain military bases in dozens of countries, intervene in other countries at will and describe the U.S. as the global guarantor of peace, security, and democracy.
One thing I’ve been meaning to write about these last few days has been the way mass media pundits have been insinuating or outright asserting that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is literally an agent of the Russian government.
Carlson has been accused of promoting Russian propaganda by mainstream narrative managers for frequentlycriticizing the Biden administration’s hawkish posture toward Russia regarding the entirely unsubstantiated claim that Moscow is preparing to launch an unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine. We’ve been seeing things like Anderson Cooper innocently musing that “It is striking how neatly Kremlin propaganda seems to dovetail with Carlson’s talking points” and this CNN segment from December with Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter and tinfoil hat Russiagater Julia Ioffe wondering aloud about why Russian state media seem to be so fond of Carlson. By mid-January, Democratic Party operatives were openly demanding that Carlson be investigated for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
“This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States,” tweeted former DNC official Alexandra Chalupa, best known for colluding with the Ukrainian government in 2016 on opposition research against Donald Trump.
This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States. https://t.co/5JkLuCKoBn
The accusations and insinuations increased, eventually leading to Carlson outright denying being a Russian agent in a recent interview with The New York Times saying, “I’ve never been to Russia, I don’t speak Russian. Of course I’m not an agent of Russia.”
As you would expect, this denial was then spun by the same demented mainstream pundits who’ve spent the last five years being wrong about Russia as evidence that Carlson is a Russian agent.
“Tucker Carlson told The New York Times he’s not a Russian agent amid controversy over his pro-Kremlin stance,” blares a headline by Business Insider.
“What would a Russian agent say if asked if they were a Russian agent?” tweeted former FBI special agent Clint Watts in response to Carlson’s denial.
“Tucker Carlson Denies Being Russian Agent After Taking Kremlin’s Side,” says a viral tweet by former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi.
“Narrator: After he helped destroy American Democracy, it turned out he was, indeed, a Russian agent … though a rather silly one,” added MSNBC’s cartoonish “intelligence” expert Malcolm Nance.
“Tucker Carlson is walking proof that you don’t need to be an agent to be a useful idiot,” former FBI agent Peter Strzok told MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, apparently less willing to commit to the bit than his FBI peers.
“Why hasn’t Tucker Carlson registered as a foreign agent?” reads a viral tweet from the notorious Lincoln Project.
“Of course I’m not a Russian agent”: Tucker Carlson Denies Being Russian Agent After Taking Kremlin's Side https://t.co/SklUAqIzan
I’ve never gotten used to the insane McCarthyite accusations which US liberals will hurl without a second thought at anyone who disagrees with them. Every time it happens it startles and alarms me, and this latest trend of claiming that opposition to US military posture toward a nuclear superpower constitutes evidence of being a treasonous foreign intelligence operative is a marked uptick in the madness.
I’m highlighting this deranged behavior not to defend the odious Carlson, but to point out that it works very much in the US empire’s favor to have a bunch of influential narrative managers aggressively manufacturing the consensus that anyone who criticizes America’s posture toward Russia is suspicious and untrustworthy.
The mass media, whose primary job is to propagandize the masses and who have an extensive history of lying to the public to manufacture consent for war, are not pushing the belief that Tucker Carlson is suspicious and sinister for questioning the official narrative about Russia. They are pushing the belief that anyone is suspicious and sinister for questioning the official narrative about Russia. That’s the message that people are receiving from this line that’s being pushed by narrative managers and ex-federal agents. Anyone who is successfully indoctrinated with this belief will become inoculated against wrongthink about that nation because they will reflexively distrust the motives of anyone who says anything that differs from the officially authorized line.
That’s the real value of this framing for the imperial propagandists. They don’t care about Tucker Carlson, who serves their agendas more often than not. They care about making sure that current and future establishment narratives about Russia will be swallowed hook, line and sinker by the mainstream public without the slightest twinge of gag reflex. You don’t even need to silence dissent if you can simply render it impotent.
It’s worth considering the possibility that all the artificially manufactured Russia hysteria we’ve seen over the last five years has been geared toward building public support for the exact escalations we are seeing today. After all, it says a lot that Russiagate began with unevidencedclaims by US intelligence agencies who have an extensive track record of lying, resulted in the reignition of a new cold war against a nation long targeted for destruction by the US intelligence cartel, and now there are tons of weapons being flown in to Ukraine and US troops are being moved to Eastern Europe in response to a threat we’ve still seen no evidence is actually real.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If you can control what people believe about a certain thing, then you can control what they will do and what they will allow in response to that thing. Controlling people’s beliefs about reality is controlling their reality. If you can convince people that anyone who disputes what you’re saying about a government you don’t like is suspicious and not to be trusted, then you can keep them believing everything you say about that government.
It’s clear that it is very, very important to the narrative managers that we believe what we are told about Russia. Now we’re just waiting to find out toward what specific end that agenda is being driven.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, 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.
My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea . . . and then nail the door shut.
— author Charles Bowden, 2010 NPR interview
There is so much daily that expresses so much about the slippery slopes we are in globally because of predatory-penury-parasitic-pugilistic capitalism.
In the USA, on this continent, north, and south of those colonial and Manifest Destiny “borders,” the amount of both absurdity and abomination is magnified in a world of protracted panic.
It’s there, truly, the panic. Young people are offing themselves with Narcan and with opiates. There are more dreams not only deferred, but dreams turned into nightmares by a thousand cuts.
We have a world where getting into uniform, with a rifle, with a joystick for murder incorporated, is the new abnormal. Hitch up in the killing machine US Army for $50K.
If this isn’t blasphemy, then, you know we have lathered ourselves on that slippery slope of the multi-pronged Faustian Bargain.
Then, more mercenaries recruited for big bonuses: Make that the disgusting US Army,
You know how messed up the USA is, from A to Z, and the news continues to illustrate the dying empire. Paying punks to enlist in the killing machine!
FORT CAMPBELL, KY — The U.S. Army is offering its largest bonus ever for new recruits with up to $50,000 available to qualified individuals who sign on for a six-year active-duty enlistment.
The total incentive package for a new recruit is based on a combination of incentives offered for the selected career field, individual qualifications, length of the enlistment contract, and the ship date for training.
In the past, enlistment incentives for full-time soldiers could not exceed $40,000.
The Army is competing for the same talent as the other services as well as the private sector and must have the ability to generate interest in the current employment environment, according to Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, who leads U.S. Army Recruiting Command in its mission to fill full-time and part-time vacancies in about 150 career fields in the regular Army and the Army Reserve.
“This is an opportunity to entice folks to consider the Army,” said Brig. Gen. John Cushing, who serves as the deputy commanding general for operations under Vereen at USAREC. “We’ve taken a look at the critical (military occupational specialties) we need to fill in order to maintain the training bases, and that is where we place a lot of our emphasis.”
Now run that up against The Man who coined the term Military Industrial Complex, and a new book written by, well, shall we call that person part of the elite, part of the chosen people from Ivy League and East Coast silver spoon roots. And, in the magazine that for many is a sell-out, for sure, Jacobin: Here, the article reviewing the man and the book.
Crisscrossing the country, Butler denounced US warmaking abroad and ruling-class violence at home as two sides of the same bloody coin, telling audiences from Racine to Roanoke that America was divided into “two classes”:
On one side, a class of citizens who were raised to believe that the whole of this country was created for their sole benefit, and on the other side, the other 99 percent of us, the soldier class, the class from which all of you soldiers came.
Butler published a short book, War Is a Racket, collecting the key themes of his orations in 1935. Later, in an essay in the socialist magazine Common Sense, Butler confessed to having been a “racketeer for capitalism,” elaborating that, as “a member of our country’s most agile military force,” he had served as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers.” In 1936, Marine Corps informants sent to spy on the ex-general observed him speaking on a panel alongside self-identified Communists and reported that “the General appeared to us to be either insane or an out and out traitor.”
[Major General John A. Lejeune, head of the Marine Corps, calls on General Smedley Butler in camp at Frederick, Maryland in 1922. (Bettmann / Getty Images)]
And, as an aside, but a big ASIDE, we are in a time of collective cholera of the conscious, in this remote work, remote being, remote news world. Just watching the fake left, Amy Goodman, daily (M-F) with an absolute stiff arm to authority, as the Democracy Now newsroom in New York is with Goodman, solo, while her correspondents, including Juan Gonzalez, are stuck in their homes with their laptops and tiny cameras and mic delivering their fear porn.
Imagine this happening today, 2022 — Verboten, again, in the Zoom Doom of Dead Consciousness. Mask up, sit on your toilet, tune into Zoom, if you are lucky:
[Students at the University of California at Berkeley filing in to listen to Smedley Butler’s Peace Day address in 1939. (Library of Congress)]
I analyzed Juan’s book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, a while back. Remember, Juan was once in the radical group, the Young Lords.
Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, said “…in Murder CityCharles Bowden plunges in head-first, without a parachute. There are moments when the book threatens to burst into flames and burn your hands.”
We are in a time of cholera of the consciousness, of infantalized masses following the dictates of a few chosen people, men and women of those classes, those groupings, the vetted and vaunted few, the ones who have been knighted by the lords of finance insurance real estate, and, more than FIRE, but the complex: Butler, War is a Racket.
Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket — and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people — didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump — or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.
There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.
Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.
Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.
A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.
Read the short book, then scale it up to today! Trillions stolen from US taxpayers, and all the apps, all the services of the private money hecklers who have gotten sweetheart contracts with every branch of the government you and I supposedly fought for. All those trillions in bribes and bailouts. Imagine that, a Trump LLC and then a CitiBank Biden BBB. And before these two scoundrels? Do the history, look at the administrations, and figure it out. Here, just one short diatribe featuring one hell of a Satan, Kissinger. Beware of the verbiage I deploy to singe this fellow and those presidents who have utilized this war criminal. I have already gotten emails threatening me for the Blog Post. And notice all those cozy photos of Henry Kissinger with all the tribes of descrutive capitalism, a la war. War on us, war on societies, war on nations, war on children, war on ecology, war on thought, war on agency, war on the human body, war on thought. “Tribalism Rules.”
So here we are, now, the kernel of this diatribe today — our faces. Oh, how we give up more and more each day, until the chip is in the back of the neck, and those bots are gathered in our organs with graphene building blocks to our souls.
Again, I harp on this one blasphemey, IRS demanding facial recognition — and that agency is for us, right? A truly representative form of democracy demands we the people have a huge say in what happens to us, and that’s not just idiotic voting, but again, “War is a Racket” is now “Banking-AI-Pharma-Med-Entertainment-Science-Education-Prisons-Law-Congress-Energy-Transportation-Chemicals-Engineering-Space-Data” ARE the Racket.” This is yet another single story that comes to us via the Net which is yet another chink in the armor of humanity plucked from our souls:
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the US will require people to submit a facial scan through a third party provider to make payments or file taxes online. The system raises obvious privacy concerns.
Currently, users only require a username and password to log into their IRS accounts. But starting the summer of 2022, users will need to verify their identity through a third-party identity verification company called ID.me. The change was first noticed by Krebs on Security.
So you dig a bit, and find out who these millionaires and hedge funders and social impact investors are behind this “third party” (gouging, sick profiteers) outfit, ID Me!
Nader’s good, but he can only go so far. Yesterrday, 1/20, on Democracy Now, a rare media visit for Ralph Nader, who has been locked out of board rooms, out of newsrooms, locked out of so much for decades, when his memory, his insight, his analyses are vital to institutional memory and his own sort of harping against the profiteers.
He has to beat those dead horses, multiple times, year after year . . . dead horses tied to the fact there are no real journalists in the legacy media, and that there are no cops working the FTC or DoJ or EPA or FDA. He is spot on, but he never gets on NPR or PBS or Fox or CBS. Nader is spot on about Republicans being fascistic and messianic. They are, of course, worse:
And the reporters didn’t take him to task there. The reporters, either they’re not doing their homework or they’re full of taboos. I mean, they never raise the corporate supremacy over our country. There isn’t a single agency in the federal government that isn’t influenced maximally by corporate lobbies. And Congress is swarmed by corporate lobbies. You have 500 drug company lobbyists full-time assigned to Congress, and there are 535 members of Congress. And these corporations are strategically commercializing every aspect of our society, commercializing childhood, strategically planning the tax system, the food system, the health system, fighting global warming remedies, the fossil fuel industry, ExxonMobil. They’re planning our genetic inheritance. Commercializing childhood should be a left-right issue, conservative issue. The press never asks about it. The self-censorship of the press is overwhelming. That’s why we have to have a more independent media.
We have to have — I mean, look at the coverage of Ukraine. As Katrina pointed out, if our country was invaded in a span of 40 years from the north, with 50 million casualties, what do you think we would do? Do you think we would just station troops on the northern border? We would have taken over the northern country and annexed it. And that’s why dictator Putin can get away with what he’s doing now, in terms of public opinion of the impoverished Russian people, is because they remember. They have their casualties in their families from the western frontiers, started with Napoleon.
And here we are, expanding a military alliance for arms sales for the military-industrial complex, because, as was pointed out, a condition of joining NATO is to buy the F-16 and other weapons in Eastern European countries. NATO is a military alliance organized against the Soviet Union. And now they’re expanding it in Eastern Europe and putting troops there. It’s, here we go again, a completely preventable conflict. What Putin really wants is Ukraine never to join NATO, no strategic offensive weapons in the Ukraine. He’s asking for ending strategic weapons in Europe — that is not going to happen.
But the press asks war-inciting questions. NPR asked it. David Sanger asked it. They asked war-inciting questions. It’s like Vietnam all over again. It’s like Iraq all over again. They don’t ask peace-inciting questions about diplomacy. And this is a dangerous situation, and the press just isn’t doing its job. It isn’t just Biden.
He can’t communicate how the GOP is opposed to everything that’s defined as human. You don’t make moral appeals to the GOP, like Senator Warnock just did. You show that they are opposed to sending $250 and $300 monthly checks to 65 million children, which has stopped now, and the GOP will not expand it. I mean, that’s a good political item to communicate to the American people. Those 65 million children come from conservative and liberal families who are both deprived. He doesn’t know how to communicate. The GOP knows what it wants. It’s messianic. It’s fascistic. It’s driven. And the communication from the Democrats, from the DNC to the White House, is weak. It’s anemic. And the public senses that. (source)
Finally, a story NOT covered in legacy media or left wing media. Ralph doesn’t get it yet. He still believes in his book title, how billionaires will save the world.
He’s dead wrong about the above statement/title of one of his books. And, here it is, again, social impact investing, and the soul of humanity, especially youth, being sucked up by the ultra rich and investment teams for their data and their compliance — The Internet of Bodies and Human Capital Futures Bets In Brazil
In the coming years, global financiers, will attempt to meld dynamic pricing and mobile payments with biometric digital identity, Internet of Body sensors, and blockchain smart contracts and then weave it all into an expansive spatial web meant to control our social and economic relations in both the material world and, through digital assets, rights and privileges, in the Metaverse, as well. Click here to listen to an interview I did with Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter that goes into more detail about how impact investing connects to digital twins, and mixed reality.
Surely it is twisted to view communities as resource deposits of untapped data, but that is the logic of end-stage capitalism. The infrastructure needed to scale human capital finance profit are ICT (Individual Communication Technology) devices including phones, tablets, and inexpensive computers like chrome books; wearable technologies and biosensors; and 5-6G used in combination with data-dashboards that verify impact data against predictions and success metrics laid out in the terms of the deals. These are all things one finds in recreation centers in the United States now, and given inroads made by the Aspen Institute, Stanford, Harvard and the like, they will very likely become standard issue in the favelas, too. Not because any of it is good for children, but because the children’s data has value, and their compliance has value.
The Metaverse will be populated by compliant avatars. Beyond social impact, the conditioning of the young to cyborg life is going full throttle. Meanwhile for portfolio managers, children’s futures are just tranches of investment – data commodities. It’s only business. — Alison McDowell, Wrench in the Gears (dot) com!
Most people I talk with do not have the bandwidth or wherewithal to understand this next stage, end stage, capitalism into our very souls, which is fascism, inverted totalitarianism, all bunched up in a world of chaos, all drawn and quartered on the backs of us, vis-a-vis all these scams of Build Back Better variety, or UN’s sustainability goals and Universal Basic Income propaganda, and the 4IR and WEF — the fourth industrial revolution is part and parcel of the Great Reset.
This sort of stuff Alison writes about does get under many of our skins, but for the most part, I know so many people who have given up, who think that we all are data mined anyways, that we have all our info in the banking-IRS-DMV-insurance-medical-education superhighway of giving up all agency, anyway, so what’s the big deal we are being tracked, and what’s the big deal that our kids are being watched and what’s wrong with our ovaries and prostates and such being monitored by the Internet of Bodies and Nano-Things when we just have to lean back and enjoy this new world?
And I have harped for 17 years here at Dissident Voice, and decades before, in newsrooms, in classrooms, in homeless shelters, in programs for the disenfranchised, on stage, at conferences for sustainability, on my radio show, elsewhere. I have harped and harped about the false flags, about the overlords drilling into our very being, about more and more of our agency stripped from us daily, not as part of a huge democratically controlled system of community building, power to the people organizing, or we are the 80 Percent movements, but to mine our souls so we are ghosts in their machines.
The agency we have given up was with that passport, all those sick people who pressed my ass at various border control passings. Strip searched and body cavity groped twice. Then, all the shot records needed to go here and go there. All the proof of life in school (Iowa IQ tests), the SAT, the LSAT, all the tests (run by the chose people, millionaires) and all the records of accomplishment, of criminal involvement, all the credit scores and all the car blunders, all of that kept for THEM, the Complext, the Insurance, Real Estate, Finance, FIRE, millionaires who get legislation in THEIR favor passed through the tricks of pimping and prostituting and arm twisting and outright bribery.
Imagine, protests and cops rounding us up, and then court cases, appearances, the hassles, the humiliations. Try it out for size.
How many arguments have I had with MD’s who know squat about nutrition and each time challenged me and my vegetarianism? Me, running 6 miles a day, biking 30 and scrambling underwater and up hills?
How man dirty arguments about “that” history, versus a new and improved revisionist history vital to a population from which to rise up and take on the paymasters, the body snatchers, the mind thieves?
Until we are here, 2022, in a chamber of stupidity, all the dumb and worthless stuff out there, all the racists and white-priviledged perspectives out there pounding it in the heads of unsuspecting youth, K12, TikTok, YouTube, all of the Net and WWW. All the Ivy League and Oxford-trained scum who determine not only our futures, but write our histories, and what they write is almost always semi-dead wrong. Because without the voices of the oppressed, those on the streets, in homeless camps, those suffering poverty and the inflammatory disease of capitalism; i.e., fines-tolls-fees-surcharges-service fees-handling charges-tickets-code violations-late fees-taxes-triple taxations-levies-processing fees-mortgages-ball on payments-PayDay loan rigged systems — without their voices at the forefront, and in the newsrooms, inside schools, and in the publishing houses and the actual process of writing their own stories, then we have the tin ear writers and prognosticators and anthropologists and psychologists, the elite, the highly connected, the bias of the white man and white woman writing about us.
They get it wrong 90 percent of the time!
Now, if this graphic doesn’t run chills up and down your spine, then, you are not following the overlords’ script. Catch up please!
Dig down and listen, watch, read: And it’s not pretty, and it’s not slick, and it’s not all east coast, Ivy League, London Bridges Falling Down stuff.
The piece was written and published December 2021, even though Chuck died in 2014.
Here, a gravel-voiced Chuck talking to the California Commonwealth Club. Mostly about the lies around the war on drugs. I talked with Chuck years ago, in the 199os, in Juarez and El Paso. I was working on things for the two newspapers, and he was working the narcotraficante stories. That’s a whole other story, of my life maybe some autofiction is due, but for now, here, from the young writer who wanted to interview Chuck in Tucson, but never got the chance since Chuck died at 69 in his sleep. His piece is from the heart, and good.
It was 2011 and I was scraping by in San Francisco, spending hours at the public library, tinkering with writing projects, browsing the stacks during breaks. The name on the book’s spine—Charles Bowden—was familiar yet unfamiliar; essayist Rebecca Solnit, a neighbor with whom I’d recently taken a long walk, had referenced Bowden, telling me that “he could make your skin crawl by describing a Q-tips factory.” Uncertain what that meant, but eager to learn, I slipped Murder City from the shelf, intending to start it when I got home, sip some vodka, have myself a relaxed Friday evening.
Little did I know that Bowden, a veteran investigative reporter from the South-west, author of twenty-five-plus books about polluted rivers, crooks in silk suits, flies swarming over pooled blood, collapsing communities, contract killers, rattlesnakes, and desire, had a slightly different plan. In a 2010 NPR interview, he summarized his approach to crafting stories on the page: “My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea . . . and then nail the door shut.”
So, I end with a dead man, his words not dead, the voice alive on YouTube, and what an interesting conversation it would be with him now, as it would be with Andre Vltchek, with Kevin Zeese, with David Graeber. So many others, long gone, or just gone. Even Gonzo Thompson.
I have been coming to this city [Ciudad Juárez] for thirteen years, and naturally, I have, like everyone here, an investment in the dead. And the living. Here is a story, and like all stories here, like Miss Sinaloa, it tantalizes and floats in the air, and then vanishes. — From Murder City
Charles Bowden (1945-2014) was the author of scores of books including A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior; Down By the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family; Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future; and Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. In Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, he presented a devastating chronicle of a city in collapse where not just the police and drug cartel members die as violence infects every level of society. Luís Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway, said “…in Murder City Bowden plunges in head-first, without a parachute. There are moments when the book threatens to burst into flames and burn your hands.” Bowden was a contributing editor for GQ and Mother Jones, and also wrote for Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Aperture. Winner of a 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, he lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Post Script — One story is worth a thousand points of stabbing (not lights). Two here to end this missive. If you haven’t figured out how ugly the overlords and then the Eichmann’s are, then, gain, read, live, walk the streets:
The queen and her minimum wage payout, oh those billionaires! The pay for the 20-hour-per-week job is £9.50, or the equivalent of $12.96 an hour. That reflects the U.K.’s new minimum wage, which will rise from £8.91 an hour now to £9.50 an hour in April.
“I apologize to the person who appeared before me and to our entire community for having failed to meet the high standards that we expect of our judicial officers, and that I expect of myself,” Alexis Krot said in a statement posted on the court’s website.
The statement was dated Tuesday, days after she ordered Burhan Chowdhury to pay $100 for failing to get rid of weeds and other vegetation at the rear of his property. The judge’s apology followed a TV report about the case and criticism about how she treated the man.
“Shameful! The neighbors should not have to look at that. You should be ashamed of yourself,” Krot said during the online hearing. “If I could give you jail time on this, I would.”
Chowdhury, a native of Bangladesh, explained that he was weak with cancer. A son, Shibbir Chowdhury, said he helps his father with the yard but was out of the country at the time last year.
Last July, Vladimir Putin supplied the mythical basis [BAD LINK FROM SNYDER: here is a functional link to see Putin’s article] for Russian war propaganda in an essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” The essential idea is that Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a thousand years ago in Kyiv. … It takes some fanciful thinking to see here a reason for Russia to invade Ukraine in the 21st century, as it seems prepared to do. … Putin’s idea is that Ukraine is a fraternal nation because of how he personally feels about the past. This is known as imperialism. It flies in the face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral principle of democracy.
Putin’s article did NOT assert that “Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a thousand years ago in Kyiv.” It didn’t even assert that “Russia has the right to invade Ukraine.” Furthermore, the allegation that Putin’s view that’s expressed there advocates “imperialism. It flies in the face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral principle of democracy” is likewise a boldfaced lie. Moreover, Russia’s Government has consistently denied that it has any intention to invade Ukraine, but instead asserts that if Ukraine invades Donbass, then Russia will not allow that invasion to conquer the residents there. Russia’s position has consistently been that only the people who live in Donbass have the right to determine whether or not — and the terms under which — they will be ruled by the government in Kiev that was installed (against the will of over 90% of them) in February 2014 when the democratically elected President of Ukraine was forcibly overthrown by what America’s Government calls a “democratic revolution,” and by what Russia’s Government and the head of the “private-CIA” U.S. firm Stratfor, and many historians, call a coup, which was imposed by the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration, in order to replace Russia’s naval base on Crimea by a new U.S. naval base there (which Obama wasn’t able to do, though his coup conquering Ukraine otherwise succeeded). Several of the mercenaries that the U.S. hired (some from Georgia, for example, as shown in these videos) subsequently confessed to having participated in it. (And, subsequently, the U.S. regime charged Putin with ‘aggression against Ukraine’, and with ‘seizing Crimea’, and issued sanctions against Russia for that.)
Here are some key passages from Putin’s article (the article that Snyder lies against):
The determination of nationality, particularly in mixed families, is the right of every individual, free to make his or her own choice. But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today is completely different because it involves a forced change of identity. And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. … And I will say one thing – Russia has never been and will never be ‘anti-Ukraine’. And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide.
Putin, as well as Francois Hollande of France, and Angela Merkel of Germany, brought the Donbass government and the Ukraine government together in 2015 and got the Donbass and Ukraine to sign onto an agreement in Minsk, promising that those two then-warring parties would call a truce until both of them would agree to negotiate together and arrange some degree of autonomy for Donbass within the Ukrainian federation, but after it was all signed, Ukraine (with backing from the U.S.) steadily refused to negotiate at all with Donbass. Merkel, Hollande, and Putin, had worked together to get the Minsk accords agreed-to and signed by the two sides, but the Ukrainian side then stonewalled, refusing to comply with the agreement. Putin’s consistent position has been the same as Hollande’s and Merkel’s, on this, and remains so to this day: BOTH sides must comply. (Donbass has always been willing, but Ukraine never.)
The rest of Putin’s article is a history of the relationship that has existed between Russia and Ukraine. Snyder’s article that alleges to be about Putin’s article ignores that history, just as he lies about the rest of the article. And that’s from a Professor at Yale.
(The present article is being submitted to over 200 U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media including the Washington Post, for possible publication.)
The corporate media always carry water for the state, and they are never more dangerous than when the nation is on a war footing. Right now the United States government is sending weapons to Ukraine. One wouldn’t know that because of constant references to “lethal aid.” The euphemisms and subterfuge are necessary for a very simple reason. Everyone except the Washington war party knows that provoking war with Russia is extremely dangerous.
Yep. Just hanging around, killing time, waiting to find out whether the US is going to start World War 3 now or a little later on.
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Washington: Russia’s gonna invade Ukraine.
Moscow: We’re not gonna invade Ukraine.
Kyiv: Yeah Russia’s not gonna invade Ukraine.
Washington: Russia’s definitely about to invade Ukraine.
Entirety of western media: RUSSIA 100% CERTAIN TO INVADE UKRAINE ANY SECOND NOW
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Both Moscow and Kyiv agree that there wil be no unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. Washington keeps insisting that if there’s a war Russia will be the aggressor, but in reality all that has to happen for their not to be a Ukraine war is for US/NATO powers not to start one.
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It’s actually a bit enraging to see western elites kicking around people’s emotions and personal psychology like a motherfucking hacky sack with bullshit propaganda all the time just to make money for the military-industrial complex and advance some dopey geostrategic agendas in Eurasia.
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Biden says “everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” Jen Psaki says Eastern Europe is “our eastern flank”. The US government firmly believes its territorial borders extend to the outer planets in our solar system.
.@PressSec: "We have a sacred obligation to support the security of our eastern flank countries…It's important to remember who the aggressor is here…it is Russia who has tens of thousands of troops on the border of Ukraine. They have the power to deescalate." pic.twitter.com/Rtzy0RJ8h3
I’ve never encountered anyone who can refute my claim that the US is quantifiably the most evil and destructive government in today’s world. They try, but they generally weren’t even aware of the facts that I use to make my case until I show them to them. This says so much about the power of US propaganda.
Hardly any westerners are aware that the US government has spent the 21st century slaughtering millions in wars of aggression, or that it’s circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates. This stuff should be the first thing anyone learns when they’re beginning to research international conflicts and global power dynamics. Instead it’s like this obscure esoteric secret that’s hidden from them while they’re fed an IV drip of propaganda about Russia and China.
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If you’re a leftwardly-inclined politically active person in the western world, you will eventually discover that many of the figures you were initially drawn to are terrible on imperialism and militarism. How you respond to this discovery says a lot about your character.
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Whenever someone regurgitates a western propaganda narrative, ask them what articles they’ve read disputing that narrative. If they say “none” (or more commonly “What articles dispute this??”, which means the same thing), they’ve admitted to having no idea what they’re talking about. And at that point they’ve already lost the argument, because they just admitted they’ve done no real research into whether or not their claim is actually true. They just told you they’re blindly regurgitating television narratives without bothering to check if they’re factual.
If the narrative you just repeated is the same as what the TV and the US State Department are saying, and you haven’t researched opposing perspectives on that narrative, you haven’t done any actual research at all. You’re just a mindless automaton acting out your programming.
After this has been established, you can go ahead and say they’re done. If they keep going I sometimes say “If I had just admitted to doing zero meaningful research into whether or not the claim I just made is true, I personally would shut the fuck up about it.”
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The old model of slavery came with bad PR and you had to feed and house your slaves. The new model of slavery has great PR, you don’t even have to pay them enough to house themselves, plus it’s easy to profit from the way the slaves are always forced into debt with interest.
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So before Covid, a local school where one of my kids used to attend, had prominent race issues. Namely, teachers were being accused of being blind to obvious racist incidences against black students. The normalized notion of racism was so rampant that the school was forced to embrace some sort of deprogramming sessions by a parent-led committee on the issue. However, this committee itself was ultimately deemed rather racist in its own way by the school’s black alumni group. To me, at the end, it became rather obvious that the whole momentum was part of a corporate political campaign for the Democratic Party establishment. The same people who raised their fists and said “Black Lives Matter” turned out to be the supporters of Joe Biden who has bragged that he was the architect of crime bills and The Patriot Act—the very root of the school to prison pipeline, the racist, colonial “war on terror,” the prison industrial complex and so on. Is irony completely dead as “reality” continues to be stretched to fit the ruling class interests? In the end, I felt so dirty and violated to be a part of that committee’s activities.
Fast forward to the Black-Lives-Matter-only-if-you-are-vaccinated era, and this school is voluntarily implementing a strict mandatory vaccine policy with few exemptions. My son doesn’t like to gossip and he never really talks behind anyone’s back. But the other day, he said that the whole school is basically bullying the few kids that have not received the experimental injections. He was particularly upset about his Black friend being given a hard time, after being subjected to the blatant racism previously.
There are some harsh numbers regarding race-related matters and the Covid “vaccines”. In NYC, where Covid “vaccine” mandates are effectively shutting people out from indoor activities, roughly half the Black people have chosen not to receive the experimental injections. How can anyone justify segregating half the Black people from indoor activities? What is that? And what is wrong with businesses that, without a mandate, voluntarily exclude unvaccinated people from entering their premises when statistical risk factors for getting the illness in question range from obesity to old age to having chronic conditions. To be clear, the efficacy of the Covid injections are being debated by scientists and doctors vigorously, along with their safety issues. Yet, there are business owners who are calling themselves “community leaders” for being medical cheerleaders for big pharma, proud of being brown-nosed social climbers at the expense of those who make their own medical choices. And if we take the whole US, 40% of small Black-owned businesses have been wiped out. This whole virus event is a giant urban renewal push disguised as war on virus—don’t they realize what people have gone through with war on crime, war on drugs and so on?
It’s really demoralizing to really understand that the mechanism of exploitation and subjugation is rather simple. The power of the wealthy oligarchs is so huge that they own everything. They own the media. They own the politics. They own the governments. They own the scientists. They own the military.
And the same people who own everything tell us that we have to respect the separation of powers, we have to rely on “representative democracy,” and we have to obey the legal system which is ultimately ruled by Supreme Court judges who are appointed by, well, the same people who own everything. Needless to say, the whole thing is made to divide us and consecrate the rich and powerful as priests of capitalism, because they own everything and all powers are designed to concentrate in their hands, while the people are effectively deprived of all power.
In the US, the power of the people is represented by two corrupt corporate political parties. I mean, they don’t really represent people, but they pretend that they do. The situation is so obvious and blatant that it is tedious to even mention, but the reality is that this mechanism of two corporate entities engaging in ritualistic battles within a strictly curated capitalist framework has been so effective in staging the appearance of “democracy” that it is hard to discuss the social dynamics in the US without it. No matter what ideological leaning one has as an American, the larger than life theater of historical myths, dramas, glories of wars, nationalistic emotions and the reverence of the American flag are likely to be a part of the internalized authority which builds its footings in the minds and the bodies of those who are born on this land.
Anyway, it really doesn’t matter because when people play politics—meaning you cheer for one of the corrupt political parties—you are not supposed to talk about how money controls social institutions and how our values, beliefs and norms are determined by the interests of the ruling class, and how the economic caste order effectively enforces capitalist imperatives to perpetuate the reign of money and violence.
Believe it or not, today, this sort of understanding is labeled as “conspiracy.” Right, you are a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy nut case if you happen to call out corporate crimes, their criminal conspiracies and so on and so forth. How obvious can it get? Rich people dominate corporate politics with the good old righteousness of exceptionalism, and a colonial attitude with the kinder, gentler face of liberal politics, and it is perfectly OK to call a simple Marxist analysis of exploitation a “conspiracy.”
The tendency to obscure the mechanism of capitalism is mirrored exactly among many of those who oppose the overwhelming push for Covid lockdowns, Covid “vaccine” mandates and so on. For many of those who stand on the other side of the virus event, the entire mobilization is described as a “communist takeover.” That’s right. All those diehard capitalists who have been conspiring to perpetuate their interests through World Economic Forum, IMF, World Bank and so on are communists now. How convenient? You can’t have capitalism without opportunism.
But the whole thing makes perfect sense. Both ends of the capitalist spectrum, fascists and social democrats, have always struggled to perpetuate capitalist hegemony together. At the end of the day, their ultimate goal is to perpetuate the capitalist caste hierarchy and their righteous positions within it. One step with the left leg goes forward as the right leg moves forward to balance the momentum of the imperial hegemony — just as the hopelessly corrupt Hilary Clinton gives birth to a Donald Trump Presidency, which, in turn, gives the Democratic Party a reason to exist. Left, right, left, right, the empire moves forward as it gently shifts its weight left to right. As they march the imperial-scape together, they sing derogatory smears against any revolutionary momentum. Both sides are free to argue and fight as long as they adhere to the imperial imperatives of capitalism. The corporate media ensure that the narratives are told to fit this dynamic. Those who do not belong to the dynamics are portrayed as “others”–fringe extremists to be demonized from multiple angles.
How does the empire gain its mythical aura of authority? Easy. They play a good old protection racket scheme against unsuspecting “good people.” For example, they tell people that terrorists are coming, while “secretly” funding the killers in ways which are not so secret to the people. People get the idea: “Oh I see. we have to pay the protection fee. Otherwise, we get fucked up.” Or, for example, they tell people that plague is coming, and force people to get injected with special medicines. If the people refuse, their jobs are taken away, their families are split apart, you can’t eat at a restaurant and so on. They can effectively turn everyone into a dangerous element with an infection until proven “healthy” by the designated means of the authority. There goes the presumption of innocence along with informed consent out of the door.
This is a big deal. There is a huge reason why an authority must prove someone guilty without a reasonable doubt. Otherwise, people can be arbitrarily accused of committing any crime and then punished for it. And without informed consent, people can be forced to drink Cool Aid just because they are told to do so. Moreover, as soon as the feudal overloads deal with the life and death of the people, they effectively consecrate themself as gods. A politician would claim that Covid “vaccines” are sent by God. Cultural figures would start accusing those who refuse the medication of “defying the law of nature,” defying “science” and so on, effectively turning Bill Gates and the rest of the snake oil salesmen into gods of our times.
So now it seems that even this pretend “democracy” is being taken away by the acceptance of decrees under an “emergency” just like any other fascist take-over.
Colonizing humanity and nature
How is it even possible, though? The capitalist assaults come in stages. First, it attacks to destabilize, infiltrate and tear communities apart. It destroys the fabric of communities and turns vital institutions useless. It cultivates the ground on which the invaders can turn themselves into the new providers of artificial social relations, resources and facts. Then the colonizers embark on domesticating people with their own beliefs, norms and values to exploit them and subjugate them.
Social institutions are taken over by capital. As they lose their functions for the people, they are further bought and sold by the oligarchs to transform themselves into machines for the ruling class interests. In every step of the process, people are mobilized to destroy and reassemble their own institutions only to be domesticated by the resulting fake institution for the ruling class. Corporate NGOs, corporate think tanks, paid academics, paid scientists, corporate politicians are always ready to help in this regard. This is how education has been taken away from the people. This is how healthcare has been taken away. This is how politics has been taken away.
The people’s institutions are intentionally deprived of resources so that they must rely on the rich and powerful to function. Then, privatizing and corporatizing transform the institutions into entities for profit, indoctrination and domestication. The more you struggle financially, the more you are likely to be trapped in a cycle of exploitation—an ironic reality imposed by the capitalist hierarchy in which those who could gain the most by overthrowing the establishment are pressured the most to obey the capitalist imperatives. Meanwhile those with privileged positions are conditioned to protect the status quo. Hierarchies of ideas, ideologies, religions, and people are formed. The caste system built by all elements permeates the empire—what’s good for the empire naturally floats as the opposing elements sink systemically and structurally. People are forced to compete in serving the interests of the oligarchs regardless of the ultimate consequences to them.
This is how people are indoctrinated to hate the system that gives power to the people—socialism, and are forced to crave the system that strangles them—capitalism. Here is a brief summary of how socialism is actively demonized in our society:
1. Point out results of imperial assaults against socialist countries and claim socialism doesn’t work.
Examples:
Give them economic sanctions, then call the countries “economic disasters”.
Send death squads to destabilize their countries, then call the enemies of the western hegemony “strong man,” “dictator,” “butcher” and so on.
Attempt to overthrow the government by massive propaganda campaigns, then call them oppressive.
2. Claim that no ideology, country or government is perfect, in order to ignore the injustice and inhumanity systematically and structurally imposed on the entire capitalist hegemony and beyond by the western ruling class.
Examples:
Claim that socialism and capitalism are the same when they are not historically and in practice. Capitalism is a system guided by forces of accumulated wealth and power. It manifests as imperialism at the global scale. Historically, socialism has emerged to counter imperial exploitation and subjugation. Socialist countries have been vehemently assaulted by organized forces of imperialism. The equation totally dismisses these obvious historical dynamics, while also obscuring the very nature and mechanism of capitalism, itself. This position is often expressed with the use of the word totalitarianism. Although the term has been largely normalized in the western cultural sphere, historically, this term has been used by reactionary forces to equate fascism (which operates within the framework of capitalism) and socialist countries with the intention of demonizing socialist countries.
Claim that all violence must stop as the capitalist hegemony targets a socialist country, knowing that the imperial hegemony can topple the socialist country by many means if the country stops engaging in self-defense.
Demonize political leaders who defy the western hegemony saying that although the West is atrocious the dictators aren’t worth saving anyway.
3. Utilize an emotional personal anecdote in demonizing “socialism” in its entirety, totally ignoring its inner workings to forward the interests of the people, imperial dynamics and so on. Reactionary voices of those who betray their countries of origin in seeking to secure positions within the empire are often promoted by the capitalist media.
Examples:
“My grand dad was killed by communists.”
“My family members were imprisoned by a socialist regime.”
“So and so is killing its own people. I know because I’m from there and you are not.”
4. Simply rely on propaganda lies concocted by capitalist social institutions.
Examples:
Just mock, ridicule and demonize socialists. The notion is fully normalized so there is no need to explain. The burden of proof is on those who defy the notion.
Engage in 1, 2 and 3 using the propaganda lies.
Where is this giant monster swinging right to left, guided by the selfish motives of the ruling class, going? Is it going to put us all in a digital prison as it continues to digitalize, financialize, and transhumanize, colonizing humanity and nature? Is it going to declare a war against China? These are very significant concerns, but it is unlikely that they will be on the table for all of us to examine anytime soon. Our thoughts and ideas are constantly, systemically and structurally beaten into shapes by layers of capitalist institutions over and over so that they fit into the capitalist framework. Then the momentums of pros and cons are safely exchanged within the imperial framework at the expense of the people who struggle to secure their livelihood within it.
When we are beaten by the capitalists, we are put against each other. As we fight back, we are forced to attack our fellow community members as our institutions are further colonized as I described above. In the corporate political theater billions of dollars are spent in picking between hardened corporatist Joe Biden, and “reality TV show star” Donald Trump, but we cannot embrace the political institution which can truly function as our own—such a drastic shift is firmly demonized, again, as “socialism,” “communism,” Marxism and so on.
Look at how doctors and nurses are forced to be complicit in the ongoing virus event. They are forced to limit treatment options. Effective early treatments such as Ivermectin or HCQ, which have saved countless lives in other countries, are being ridiculed as snake oil, because as long as there are effective treatments for the virus, the experimental gene therapy drugs can’t have emergency use status. All this goes on as Covid “vaccine” deaths are blatantly covered up in the US and in other Western countries. The health professionals are forced to put people on deadly ventilators, deadly remdisivir, and deadly sedatives—the real reason why there are so many deaths in the US, along with the fact that obesity is a hidden killer in patients with seasonal respiratory illness. The more they try to protect their positions within the institution, the more they compromise the whole institution. Doctors, scientists and the rest of the healthcare professionals who wish to protect the institution by speaking the truth about the virus and experimental injections are censored, harassed and fired for doing so, while those who obey are forced to be complicit in failing their patients with profit-oriented protocols.
This is what the system does when it’s driven by, and for, the oligarchs.
Their exploitive schemes create crises on many fronts—environmental crisis, health crisis, housing crisis, economic crisis, psychiatric crisis, you name it. The ruling class officially designates a chosen crisis to impose prepackaged corporate “solutions” for more profits, more power grab and readjustment of the capitalist trajectory. In the process, they destroy vital social institutions and reassemble them for domestication. Nothing else matters other than the chosen crisis and the associated corporate schemes. Other crises deepen as the capitalist trajectory is recalibrated and the capitalist hierarchy is readjusted. They will not run out of crises as long as they exploit and subjugate. Crises are not predicaments for those who can buy their way out of anything, they are opportunities for them. And they have nothing to lose in the process. We are forced to do their work of destroying our own institutions. We are forced to do their work of turning them into our cages. They can buy most of anything, and if they can’t, they destroy it, then they can simply buy and sell any remaining elements, repackage them as something else and sell them back to the people.
See how it works?
As we further lose our connections to ourselves, to each other, to our community and nature, we are freely subjected to propaganda and indoctrination through ruling class sanctioned entities. Psychology has been applied to adjust individuals to the hardships of capitalist behavioral conditioning. Sociology has been applied to shape collective behaviors within the capitalist framework. Economics has been applied to justify the capitalist domination. Politics has been applied to ritualize the normalization of the feudal hierarchy. Now, we see science being applied to shift the trajectory of exploitation and subjugation.
Our behaviors are largely based on establishment-supplied social relations, facts, culture, and so on. We don’t generally act because we perceive actual events in our lives. Most of us go through our lives on auto-pilot mode within the structurally sanctioned capitalist framework. The Covid event clearly shows this aspect of our lives. People wear masks, social distance and follow lockdown measures when clearly stipulated; however, at the personal level, most of us do not act like there is a deadly plague out there. The masks, very possibly contaminated with the “deadly virus” are thrown away everywhere without being treated as biohazard materials. People wear masks only to enter a restaurant, then take them off to eat with strangers stuck in an enclosed space. As soon as we are born into our society, we learn to perceive the capitalist framework as our guiding principle over our actual perceptions. This makes us extremely vulnerable to top-down mobilization, as we see with the virus event. As soon as we are systemically and structurally forced into following instructions, then facts, our perceptions, and experts’ opinions become totally irrelevant before the decrees coming out of the establishment. The process of colonization of humanity and nature has been ongoing for generations, deeply affecting how we are, and it is accelerating.
Being deprived of our actual perceptions based on material reality, and the subsequent manufacturing of our perceptions based on the imperatives of the ruling class interests contributes to acute divisions among dissidents as well. The urgency of capitalist oppressions together with marginalization of ideological positions has often cornered those who voice their concerns into prescribing “solutions” based on their own condition, regardless of the consequences to others. This often happens over class lines, or against those who are victims of imperial violence. The classic example was seen during the imperial war against Syria. Many anti-war dissidents had taken a position in support of the US military intervention of Syria to varying degrees due to the western demonization of the Syrian government, western propaganda that glorified the US backed terrorists as victims of Syrian violence and etc. (Those who stand with enemies of the empire are strongly urged to amend their anti-imperial positions. This urging comes from across the spectrum; for instance, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges and others who are considered “dissidents” adamantly demonized leaders of targeted countries and repeated official propaganda narratives justifying the toleration of violence against those countries–By the way, both Chomsky and Hedges also hold starkly discriminatory opinions against unvaccinated people, echoing their strong condemnations of the middle eastern leaders.)
This has resulted in acceptance of the US military attacks and the US support for violent opposition groups inside Syria. Those American people who insisted on saving the children of Syria by bombing Syria and by supporting brutal terrorists, who would behead children, failed to see the great sacrifice paid by the majority of Syrian people, who were in support of their government and their military. Activist communities were split into pieces, while the momentum greatly exacerbated the US led war against the Syrian government. The situation began to turn as independent journalists—Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett and others—started to report from Syria on the actual situation—in which the majority of the Syrian people have approved the determined government policy against the west backed terrorists and the US colonial policies which had strangled Syrian people on many grounds.
The war on virus, which has directly targeted our entire society, as well as the global dynamics, has presented itself as a great divider among us. Our alienated perceptions have effectively prevented our ability to understand the course of action taken by others. The excruciating hardship of those who wear masks 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, or more, to keep their jobs, or the anger and bitterness of those who were forced to be vaccinated against their will to remain employed, or the predicaments faced by those who chose to be fired for their medical choice, are not shared by those who do not share the circumstances and perspectives. The virus event kept people away from each other, prevented freedom of speech, and prevented freedom of assembly while deeply dividing people on many grounds. It is appalling that US media outlets actually told their audience to cut their ties to friends and family members who are not vaccinated. Anger, frustration, fear and hatred have been boiling in our communities.
Sadly, the situation is not any better among those who oppose the draconian virus measures. For example, some people see anyone who complies with a government mandate as an enemy, even if non compliance would have meant a total loss of livelihood. I’ve seen a sad instance in which a bar owner, who courageously spoke against the government “vaccine” mandate for his customers, was mocked and ridiculed for complying with the strict mandate, though not doing so could have resulted in loss of his business. This sort of atmosphere effectively prevents constructive community actions. It prevents natural growth of genuine social relations among the people based on creativity and practical means. The real struggle involves real observations of facts and spontaneous reactions to associated events. Ultimately, it cannot be prescribed by those who stand outside of the particular circumstance. Without the existence of a genuine institution for the people to coordinate overall strategies and educate people about the mechanism of exploitation, this sort of arbitrary behavior of purging would emerge only to exacerbate alienation and division among those who should be united to counter the ruling class assaults. What Lenin said in last century still stands on this regard. It also cultivates a defeatist attitude to embrace martyrdom as the only plausible goal of resistance.
The establishment understands this mechanism very well. That is why organized efforts of socialists, communists, and Marxists have been vehemently attacked by the US empire. As long as we stand with the establishment in demonizing any potential to build revolutionary momentum, we are bound to stay within the framework of the exploitation. Our goal is to change the exploitive system to the one that benefits our mutual well-beings. We are not the enemies of each other. On this point, we have a lot to learn from the Syrian government, which has been allowing reconciliation between those who took weapons against the people and those who lost their family members by the violence.
Anti-Chinese sentiment
I have already written briefly about China and the virus event here, and here. This topic continues to be crucial because China continues to present itself as the biggest obstacle to the western capitalist hegemony. Although China is fully integrated in the global market economy, it continues to resist western domination of its social fabric through western neoliberalization and financialization. This makes total sense if we understand the very reason why China opened itself to the market economy—it has done so to put its economic activities under the guidance of the Communist Party of China. It allows China to grow economically in providing for its people while preventing western propaganda infiltration, development of western guided black market, and western capitalist restructuring of Chinese social structure.
That is why we are flooded with anti-Chinese rhetoric today.
All western wars are ultimately imperial in nature. War on virus is not an exception. Those who operate within the capitalist framework— including those who claim to resist the lockdowns and the experimental Covid injections—express their disdain toward the imperial enemy as a gesture to express their allegiance to the empire even when they must oppose their feudal overlords.
Historically, the western capitalist mobilizations—war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror and so on—that reshape and perpetuate its structural integrity occur in tandem with imperial dynamics. The slogans and talking points have always included anti-communist/anti-socialist elements.
The war on drugs was about destruction of minority communities as much as about destruction of Latin American movements to defy the US hegemony. The war on terror ended up destroying the middle eastern countries which have cooperated with the US hegemony to varying degrees. The US simply does not tolerate an alternative system that demonstrates the viability of social relations outside of the imperial framework. Millions have perished. One out of hundred people became refugees. Countries were destroyed. The momentum of war on terror exacerbated institutionalized racism and structural violence within the US as well, ultimately depriving people of legal rights through the National Defense Authorization Act, the Patriot Act, installation of the surveillance state, militarization of police and etc.
China has experienced capitalist onslaughts of colonialism, colonial wars, chemical/biological attacks, proxy wars, propaganda campaigns, regime change operations, trade embargoes, trade sanctions, economic war and more even before it embarked on the path of socialism with its revolution.
China has seen it all.
There is a reason why we keep hearing “China is complicit,” “the Chinese system is coming,” and “China is violating human rights” over and over. Because the war on virus follows the same rule. It restructures our society to perpetuate the oligarchy, and the momentum of exploitation and subjugation parallels the imperial violence against targeted countries. This is why hundreds of military bases are surrounding China, while multiple propaganda projects are being carried out—Hong Kong, Tibet, Uyghur, continued lies about Tiananmen Square, outright deceptions stating China has killed millions of its own people.
As long as the movement of resistance being built in the west stays within the framework of imperial exploitation and subjugation, ultimately, it will serve the empire very effectively. The oscillation between fascism and social democracy applies within imperial dynamics as well. For example, within the imperial framework, Nazi Germany was cultivated by the US industries to assault USSR, its failure to do so then became a justification for the US to construct its imperial hegemony. Famously, Nazi scientists and even some political figures were absorbed into the US empire (see Operation Paper Clip). The current atmosphere emerging is not new or any more deadly than the imperial essence, itself. This dynamic is crucial to understand. Failure to do so would allow another oscillation within the empire which could perpetuate the empire. On the surface, China seems to be a part of the momentum generally referred to as the “Great Reset.” However, meanwhile, the western allies in the pacific are also arming themself to encircle China militarily. China is under tremendous pressure to accept western led financialization and neoliberalization of their social structure. The situation greatly echoes how USSR and its allies were subjected to containment and encirclement. China seems to recognize the dynamics very well as I explain shortly.
Or, down the road, the fascist “Great Reset” might grow into a modern day economic Nazi to give a legitimacy to its counterpart within the western hegemony just like how the US achieved its imperial status after the WW2. The history could certainly rhyme. Such a possibility can’t be ruled out, but who wants to become another Nazi to be destroyed by the empire? All players understand these dynamics. The US won’t allow its own allies to threaten its own interests, while some allies are very eager to please the empire by playing their role in enforcing imperial imperatives—see how draconian measures in pushing big pharma vaccines, along with digitalization, financialization and the rest of the 4th Industrial Revolution, are forcefully forwarded in Australia, Canada and so on.
Perhaps the role of Israel in the imperial dynamics should be pointed out here to illustrate the dynamics. The violence which has been inflicted by the Israeli regime against neighboring countries and beyond serves the war-based US economy while punishing those who defy the imperial hegemony. Israel plays a violent guard dog for the empire under US protection, takes on the blame for it and sustains itself in this imperial relationship. Israel has been faithfully playing its role in the war on virus by relentlessly vaccinating its people while introducing various associated measures as well. Again, understanding the war on virus requires understanding imperial dynamics.
Meanwhile, China clearly understands its position within the imperial dynamics. China is not about to impose on itself a deadly neoliberal restructuring such as the USSR suffered as it was being demolished. China is not about to accept colonial war on its soil in any form including biological attacks, proxy war or economic war. If China sees its economic sphere as a part of its socialism with Chinese characteristics, it stands to reason that China would have to confront the waves of the western socio-political-economic restructuring associated with the virus event appropriately.
It’s none of western business if China develops its own Covid vaccines and virus measures in order to protect its financial sovereignty against western waves of Covid-related neoliberal restructuring and financialization.
It’s none of western business if China ends up succeeding in all of the above and turning the occasion into an opportunity to strengthen its economic viability, scientific progress and international presence with the overwhelming approval of its people.
Parasites devouring paralyzed hosts
Twisting around fear and putting people against each other in consecrating the unconditional authority of corporate entities over families torn apart, communities destroyed, and individuals rendered hopeless and hateful is not anything nature meant for us humans.
We are looking at parasites devouring paralyzed hosts. This is the very essence of an inhumane social formation called capitalism described precisely by Karl Marx. It is revealing that the formation is called “communism” even by those who claim to “resist”.
Again, the colonized institutions ultimately act as cages for capitalism. They work together to recalibrate the caste system.
Over and over we’ve been deceived. We are mobilized to play ritual battles on political theaters. We are mobilized to play “activism” on social theaters. We are mobilized to play good citizens on cultural theaters. We are mobilized to fight “others” on colonial theaters of war. As long as we run around within the framework of the oligarchs, we just shift the blame among ourselves and we keep fine tuning the very feudal hierarchy that traps us as expendable beings.
The wealth and power hoarded by the parasitic minority never belong to them. They are blessings of nature and humanity belonging to the harmony among us. Those oligarchs have only one thing—they are astronomically richer than the rest. They monopolize what belongs to us all in order to domesticate humanity and nature. But life can’t be contained by their primitive cage. So they have been modifying life to fit within the narrowly defined framework of their own kingdom. We became dumber, we are less brave, we are more cynical and hypocritical. None of it is acceptable from any angle from which we look at it. The current social formation is extremely destructive to our species. If we fail to grasp the situation, gene therapy drugs, psychotropic drugs, behavioral conditioning and so on will be fully used to exacerbate the situation, commodifying our minds and bodies as our lives are more and more digitized and financialized. If we become the products to be consumed, we are subjected to planned obsolescence, reduced quality, reduced diversity and so on just like any other items around us. They spread their tentacles in taking over social institutions. They freely attenuate and amplify the roles of institutions in orchestrating the material reality to suit their interests. Again, they paralyze people with illusions, lies, deceptions, drugs, carrot and stick and eat us alive. We do not deserve this parasitic social formation.
We need a system which firmly ensures that the material reality reflects a harmony of man and nature. For one thing, the ridiculous rituals of corporate politics, corporate slogans for health, and so on have no place in getting us out of this feudalism of money and violence. How can we all step back a little and take a look at what is really going on, calling out the parasites for what they are? How can we recognize that the same colonizers who destroyed countries across the globe have embarked on psychological asymmetrical urban warfare against us? We are told that we are all in this together only to find ourselves shooting each other. We are told to flatten the curve only to see our communities flattened to be swallowed by corporate entities. How can we build our communities with social relations based on our needs? How can we build social institutions which can help us build a social formation that serves us all?
The parasites devour the hosts because they do not have the ability to engage in the creative process of life. They must lie and deceive to imprison the subject population so that the captive beings are forced to construct the kingdom for the parasites. Parasites are not the all-seeing gods which they present themselves to be. In order to survive and embrace the blessings of the universe as one of the species on our planet, we must recognize this destructive state of being and somehow move beyond it.
We are hardly the only ones screaming. We are a fraction of a huge momentum of humanity continuing to make a point about our species’ obvious predicaments. The following words came from George L. Jackson shortly before he was murdered in California’s San Quentin Prison (I thank John Steppling for mentioning the quote recently):
Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.
— George L. Jackson, Blood in my Eye, January 1, 1972
Like Fred Hampton said:
… you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can run a freedom fighter around the country but you can’t run freedom fighting around the country. You can murder a liberator, but you can’t murder liberation.
— Fred Hampton, Speech delivered on April 27, 1969 (Movement Vol. 5. No. 12, The Movement Press, January, 1970)
Major western news publications are running a story about a sinister plot by the Russian government, and — you may want to sit down for this — the sources of the report are anonymous, and the evidence for it is secret.
The New York Times reports that according to anonymous individuals within the US and British governments, Russia is currently plotting to topple the existing government of Ukraine in some way using some method and then somehow install a puppet regime that is sympathetic to Moscow using some sort of means. What specifically those means and methods might be are not revealed to us in this very serious news report.
“The communiqué provided few details about how Russia might go about imposing a new government on Ukraine, and did not say whether such plans were contingent on an invasion by Russian troops,” the Paper of Record informs us. “British officials familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intent was both to head off the activation of such plans as well as to put Mr. Putin on notice that this plot had been exposed.”
Sounds like Britain has taken what the US actually did to Ukraine in 2014, and rebooted it for Russia. Here's Obama-Biden official Victoria Nuland & then-US Amb. Geoffrey Pyatt privately deciding to install Arseniy Yatsenyuk ("Yats is the guy") as Ukraine's next Prime Minister: https://t.co/PDoXBIY5kMpic.twitter.com/0fTraRMEvl
Now if you are hoping to be provided with some sort of evidence for these incendiary claims, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you, because get this: the journalists reporting on this story have not seen any evidence. Apparently they’re just passing on unverified government assertions made by unknown spies to their readers because they were told to, which I guess is something journalists can do now?
I know, I know, I was a little surprised when I learned that too. But here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth:
“The British communiqué provided no evidence to back up its assertion that Russia was plotting to overthrow the Ukrainian government,” the Times reports.
You will be reassured however to learn that despite the actual evidence of the actual Russian nefariousness being kept invisible to us, anonymous officials within the US government have reviewed the intelligence gathered by anonymous British spies for us and concluded on our behalf that the evidence is solid.
“In Washington, officials said they believe the British intelligence is correct. Two officials said it had been collected by British intelligence services,” The New York Times informs us.
You see that? These claims about a devious Russian conspiracy have been confirmed by anonymous government operatives in both the US and the UK. That’s two separate, completely unconnected governments independently verifying that these claims are true. That’s called independent corroboration, gentlesirs. Basically the same as ironclad proof.
This story – which the British government has handed to media outlets – is so fake that it doesn't sound remotely credible to anyone who knows anything about Ukraine.
If Russia were to conjure a scheme like this, Moscow would choose someone from the largest opposition party. https://t.co/9JfyZ6Atb0
It does seem a little strange to me, though, that after taking great license to report anonymous government assertions without evidence The New York Times seems to take issue with the Russian government making unevidenced claims.
“Russian officials have repeatedly denied any intention of launching an attack against Ukraine, dismissing such accusations as ‘hysteria’ and claiming without providing evidence that it is the government in Kyiv that is seeking to escalate tensions,” write the article’s authors.
When this report came out I was a bit surprised by the way unproven claims by anonymous government sources are treated as actual news stories for grown adults to read instead of empty nothing stuff to be ignored and flushed down our mental toilet tubes, as I’m sure you were too. But I did a little digging and it turns out that this sort of thing is actually quite commonplace within western news media institutions, like when we were told without evidence that the Russians were plotting a false flag operation in Ukraine, or like when we were told without evidence that the Russians are using high-tech ray guns to scramble the brains of US diplomats and spies and it turned out to be baseless, or like when we were told without evidence that the Russians were paying Afghan resistance fighters to kill western occupying troops and it turned out to be false and wrong, or like when we were told without evidence that Russians interfered in the United States election and it monopolized all news reports and political discourse for years, or like when we were told without evidence for years and years that Russia was about to invade Ukraine any minute now and then it kept not happening.
I’m sure this time is different, though. After all that practice and all that trial and error, I’m sure our trusted news media institutions have perfected their craft and are now masters at reporting the truth.
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deputy defence minister tells 
accused 
ok a fake video attack plot to frame 
