The most damaging people you will ever meet in your life are not those who are overtly hostile to you, the obviously malicious individuals who openly pursue your harm. The people you will look back on as having had the most pernicious impact upon your life are those you allowed in close, those who presented a friendly, trustworthy face and then used the intimacy that you naively gave them to insidiously sabotage who you are as a person.
The exact same thing is true of politics. American TV screens blare away about the horrors of ISIS, Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons and white supremacist demonstrations, while US military drones have Middle Eastern children terrified of the sky. The man in the scary mask in a terrorist beheading video elicits a very clear, strong “NO!” from the audience, despite the fact that his faction has killed and terrorized far fewer people than the US war machine has, and despite the fact that he’s likely enjoying the benefits of US funding.
You see this dynamic everywhere. There’s no good reason Hillary Clinton voters shouldn’t be okay with President Trump, for example; all the evil stepshe’s taken on behalf of the US power establishment are no worse than all the many warmongering, racist, ecocidal and corrupt things her supporters insisted everyone look past because nobody’s perfect and purity is bad. The only difference is that his establishment politics have a slightly uglier face, usually expressed via his Twitter account. Clinton knew how to look into the camera and recite the right lines with the right Black Hole Sun grin plastered across her bloodthirsty neocon face, and Trump doesn’t.
Rex Tillerson, in Hillary’s old job, recently said in a conversation with another of his smiley-faced Secretary of State predecessors, Condoleezza Rice, that US sanctions on North Korea are proving successful because dead fishermen keep washing up on Japan’s shores. They get sent out to fish because they don’t have any food, and they get stuck out at sea and starve to death because they can’t afford enough fuel to ensure their return. He just sat there, casually discussing the slow, cruel deaths of sanctions victims like it’s a good thing. Check it out:
In reality those North Koreans are no less dead than they would have been if they’d been shot with an M4 rifle or ripped apart with cluster munitions, but since sanctions are presented as a peaceful means of conflict resolution by the establishment propaganda machine nobody really trips on it. They are also no less dead than they would have been had their own leader killed them with chemical weapons, but such allegations are treated as unspeakable horrors crying out to the heavens for vengeance by western corporate media.
The US always uses sanctions as a prelude to overt war, in the same way a siege was used before storming the castle of an enemy in medieval times. It is considered the only acceptable way of deliberately slaughtering civilians of a noncompliant nation, and it is done constantly. Questioned in 1996 about reports that half a million Iraqi children were killed by UN sanctions, another US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, said that “the price was worth it”. Like she was paying.
Had the countless victims of US sanctions been mowed down with machine gun fire, there would have been international outrage, but since they are being slowly deprived of nutrition until they suffer multiple organ failure and eventual cardiac arrest, it barely causes a blip in the radar. You can even get away with nonsensical accusations against a noncompliant leader of “starving his own people” by refusing to bow to the demands of US-led power, which makes as much sense as if US and coalition forces were launching Tomahawk missiles into that nation’s villages and then saying their leader was “exploding his own people.” Makes exactly as much sense and causes exactly as much damage.
All US policy works like this. When you look at the raw, stark reality of what the US power establishment is actually doing to the American people and to the world, you naturally recoil in horror. But because they put a smiley face on it, with well-trained politicians reciting 20-second sound bytes and millionaire pundits spinning everything that happens in a positive light, the screaming red reality of what’s actually happening fails to register. Americans are crushed to death under the exploitative prison system and Walmart economy, trillions of dollars are poured into killing strangers on the other side of the planet while communities all over America have no clean drinking water, but if you turn on the TV you’d think the worst thing happening in the world is that some Muslim people get violent once in a while and Donald Trump had sex with a porn star.
Everything’s fake and they’re all liars. It’s a plastic clown mask on top of a blood-spurting hellscape. Sometimes I think the only thing keeping Americans from waking up to the reality of what’s going on with their country is compartmentalization; one day they make the mistake of lifting the lid and taking a quick peek at a little research on what’s really happening, and then slam it down with a shriek. Most never reopen it. They go back to their comfortable CNN/CIA matrix where everything makes sense if you dissociate hard enough.
It’s got to come out eventually, though. Mankind can’t run from itself forever.
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44 responses to “Beware The Smiling Face Of Establishment Politics”
Hopefully you look back at this article in hindsight, and realize how Stupid and wrong you were about Trump.
And that destroys your credibility.
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Lifting the lid and taking a quick peek at some filth repugnant shit. Uhhhhhhh, Keep the lid on. Do you really want to peek? Catlin can as she show us by giving us a Trump-Hillary appetizer followed by a salad of balsam-marianated Condoleezza Rice and Rex Tillerson. That is enough to clear your bowls by itself.
It’s got to come out eventually, though. Mankind can’t run from itself forever.
Men like horses are among the most stubborn animals alive and the capacity for men to indulge themselves with fantasy is endless. Run till you drop.
some filthy repugnant sh–
It is always something.
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Just discovered your website.
Great material!! in a sad sort of way.
My wife like the majority of Americans lives her life in ignorant bliss. Oblivious of whats really going on.
Our enemies of “Western freedom and democracy” (lmao) comprise of the following Russia china etc..the old tried and true targets created by the puppetmasters.
I often feel completely frustrated like I am the odd man out sorta like Winston Smith in 1984.
The sad thing is that if the average American turned off their tv,radio,video games etc and did some research they would soon realize the naked truth before them!!!
Unfortunately that aint going happen without a lot of pain first folks in one form or another!!!
When the awakening does begin to unfold the world will become no doubt a better place for all not just the scumbag 1 percenters.
I too bury my head in the sand, thanks for giving me a reason to pull it out every once and awhile.
I think the most important thing at this point is for media to keep finding ways to blame America’s appalling actions on others. (Current scapegoats include Russia, Israel and North Korea.) There’s nothing we can do about it, anyway. Decades of work went into successfully splitting apart those who would have otherwise organized to push back against the slow implementation of fascism by our own government.
No question, much of the media marketed to liberals have worn their smiley-face buttons as they successfully pitted middle class against poor, workers against their “working brothers and sisters” who were phased out of the job market as the US lost millions of jobs. Much work went into pitting us against each other by race, and media worked hard to peddle the most derogatory stereotypes of low-income and poor white people — in this case, without wearing their smiley-faces. What could go wrong?
I don’t know where (if anywhere) we can go from here. We the Ordinary have divided and conquered ourselves. Soon, we’ll be called upon to send our urgent donations to another batch of rt. wing Democrats (marketed as “bold progressives”) running for Congress, and we will remain on the course that was first set by Reagan in the 1980s. I guess all we can do now is take it day by day, hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
THANK YOU so much for a great and accurate article!
Consistently clear-eyed and cogent. Thank you for speaking truth in your unique voice. A Thousand claps for this much-needed piece to cut through the noise.
Thank u so much for this article & ur perspective on this world! Your writing matters! I can’t find a way to copy this article tho. Any suggestion ?
Have you tried using the social share icons? Or you can cut & paste the URL. Hope that helps!