Transparency for the powerful would solve most of our problems. Corrupt power structures and their corrupt systems simply cannot function in the light. This is what Assange and WikiLeaks have tried to address. This is why Assange and WikiLeaks have been so aggressively targeted.
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Most of the legwork for rolling out a new imperial propaganda narrative is actually done long before the rollout itself. The bulk of the work was done in preceding decades: training civilians throughout their lives to trust the institutions that will be launching said narrative. Rather than fighting every single propaganda narrative that crosses your screen, your energy is therefore better spent attacking the foundation of trust upon which all propaganda narratives are built. Showing everyone how untrustworthy these institutions are at their very root.
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A standard American libertarian who consistently opposes war and militarism is a better person than any western self-styled “leftist” who does not. We’re talking about mass murder here. It doesn’t matter how good your other positions are if you’re fine with mass murder for power.
War is the worst thing in the world. It’s the most insane, most evil, most destructive, least sustainable thing humans do. Ending it is therefore the most urgent matter. Someone who consistently supports ending war, militarism and imperialism is better than someone who doesn’t.
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The harder you look at the various dynamics of US imperialism, the creepier it all gets. It really is the creepiest fucking thing in the whole entire world. https://t.co/TC5qO9Ofhf
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 26, 2021
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Biden changing virtually nothing after all that shrieking about Trump seems surprising until you remember that Trump also changed virtually nothing during all that shrieking about Trump. If you take all the behavior of the entire US empire into account, the changes in that empire’s behavior from presidential administration to presidential administration are differences of a fraction of a percentage point.
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It’s so stupid and undignified how everyone pretends the important decisions of the US empire’s operation are actually being made by that empty dried up husk of a man.
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We really haven’t been making fun of the western empire enough for pretending to care about the lives of Muslims in China. The entire world should be pointing and laughing at that shit.
The more you think about it, the more laughable it gets. The US-centralized power alliance spends two full decades killing millions and displacing tens of millions in Muslim-majority countries, then turns around and starts yelling “Won’t somebody please think of the Muslims??”
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The US has been rounding up Italian Americans and systematically exterminating them in concentration camps. If you don’t believe me, you are a genocide denier. Questioning my assertion or demanding proof of my claim makes you guilty of genocide denial. You are basically a Nazi.
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Never forget the time Wolf Blitzer argued against ceasing to murder Yemeni civilians, on the grounds that it would cost Americans jobs because the murder weapons are made in America. https://t.co/fMlXQLfqa5
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 26, 2021
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It would be better if interrogating the powerful was a rotating civic duty like jury service rather than something done by career journalists with a vested interest in maintaining good relationships with the powerful. The obsequious questions at press conferences make this clear.
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A big part of Russiagate’s success was that it was a conspiracy theory marketed to people who had no experience with conspiracy theories, so when dots were connected for them by Rachel Maddow et al. they assume there must really be a connection. One with more experience in such things would know that conspiracy theories often fall through, that good conspiracy theory is as rare as good journalism, that those dots often don’t really connect, that things aren’t always as they seem and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
So we wound up with all these liberal intelligentsia types going “Well that Russian talked to that Trumpy guy so there’s definitely a connection” and weaving this whole tapestry in their minds, when someone who’d been on conspiracy forums a few years would know to just relax and watch.
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“Mental illness doesn’t discriminate.”
Yes it does. It discriminates by income. The less you have, the more likely you will suffer from depression, anxiety, substance abuse and other contributing factors to mental illness. To promote mental health, promote economic justice.
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We can’t stop killing our ecosystem because it’s some people’s job to kill the ecosystem. That’s bananas.
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We’re so disconnected from ourselves, from the land, from our roots, from a real sense of depth, that we allow Hollywood and Washington to manufacture it for us. We let them tell us where the meaning is. What’s worth living for. What’s worth dying for. And it always serves power.
It’s so hard to find meaning in a civilization that is saturated with power-serving bullshit from root to flower. Where so much of our “culture” is just fake plastic nonsense arranged to advantage the unacknowledged rulers of an unacknowledged empire. Where screens reach out pummel your consciousness with propaganda for capitalism and imperialism all day long.
But there are deep rivers within us. We can know them.
__________________________
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and 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. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 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.
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29 responses to “Corrupt Power Can’t Function In The Light: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
Video: Julian Assange’s father, John Shipton, interviewed prior to embarking on his “Home Run for Julian” World Tour (25/4/2021) https://candobetter.net/node/6113
On Saturday 24 April, at the iconic A1 Bakery Restaurant on Sydney Road in Melbourne’s northern suburb of Brunswick, supporters of Julian Assange had lunch to see off Julian Assange’s father John Shipton, just before he embarked on his second “Home Run for Julian” tour. He was going to visit Northern New South Wales and Southern Queensland. Then on 17 May they would depart Australia for the United States. They would firstly tour the Eastern states, including New York and Washington, D. C. Thence he would tour California. Then he planned to visit Ireland, Scotland and Britain. He will be speaking to political figures and media figures in those countries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2ZPbIYbtiE
John is now hopeful that Julian Assange will be accompanying them back home in the final leg of his “Home Run for Julian” tour.
How you can help John Shipton bring Julian Assange back home to Australia with him
To help ensure that John Shipton does bring Julian Assange back home to Australia, supporters of Julian Assange back here, in Julian’s home town of Mebourne, and elsewhere, could, in the following ways, make the wider Australian public aware of the facts about Julian Assange:
1. Attend the weekly Friday evening vigil from 6:30pm outside Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station.
2. Help organise other protests in support of Julian Assange;
3. At these events:
(i) Hand out leaflets in support of Julian Assange, for example leaflets printed from the PDF file at https://candobetter.net/sites/default/files/upholdTheRuleOfLawForJulian.pdf;
(ii) Ask to borrow the megaphone so that you, yourself, can speak to members of the public in support of Julian Assange as I and others have.
4. Distribute leaflets about Julian Assange elsewhere.
5. Post to Twitter, Facebook, other social media, and on web blogs and on news sites, such as https://wsws.org, messages in support of Julian Assange
When more other fellow Australians, who share our anger at the treatment of Julian Assange, become active in ways, such as is described above, it should be possible to get a proper discussion of Julian Assange on the floors of Federal Parliament and in our newsmedia.
When this occurs, Prime Minister Scott Morrison will face the choice: Either uphold his duty of care to all Australian citizens and demand that the British government end its illegal imprisonment of Julian Assange or face political oblivion. The same goes for other Federal politicians on both sides of Parliament who have, up until now, ignored Julian’s plight.
I accept that there’s some things that need to be kept secret temporarily.
Political donations ain’t one of them.
Unfortunately, the “light” for most folks is on TV.
3,964 Dead 162,610 Injuries: European Database of Adverse Drug Reactions for COVID-19 “Vaccines”
“Corrupt power structures and their corrupt systems simply cannot function in the light. This is what Assange and WikiLeaks have tried to address. This is why Assange and WikiLeaks have been so aggressively targeted.”
Disagree. The fundamental corruption of US government and media institutions is overt and unambiguous. It is indeed aggressively open and obvious. The “citizen” knows he or she lives in a neoliberal whorehouse of military state capitalism. The system does not stay in power because its propaganda obscures reality. It grows in power the more obviously bogus and all encompassing its propaganda becomes. It’s fundamental demand is not that the citizen “believes” the propaganda–but that he or she act as if its were true. It controls by terror not belief but action. Assange is the bellwether of the machine’s vindictive destruction of those who act against it.
Last year my cousin Guido disappeared. We always wondered what happened to him. Thanks Caitlin for clearing that up.
” rolling out a new imperial propaganda narrative”
Its never a new narrative.
Its a rebranded narrative.
Tragically, that ‘light’ may have to be ‘The light of a thousand suns’ Caitlin.
Have you thought about publishing these types of posts in book form? I’d love to see that!
Well good, because I have just such a book coming out in a few days.
Great! I assume you’ll share the title in an upcoming column?
“If you don’t believe me, you are a genocide denier. Questioning my assertion or demanding proof of my claim makes you guilty of genocide denial. You are basically a Nazi.”
There’s something seriously wrong with this lady. Every genius has a touch of insanity. Maybe that’s it.
31 Reasons Why I Won’t Take the Vaccine
By Rabbi Chananya Weissman
Reason 30 resonates with me very well.
30. I see all the lies, corruption, propaganda, manipulation, censorship, bullying, violation of medical ethics, lack of integrity in the scientific process, suppression of inconvenient adverse reactions, dismissal of legitimate concerns, hysteria, cult-like behavior, ignorance, closed-mindedness, fear, medical and political tyranny, concealment of protocols, lack of true concern for human life, lack of respect for basic human rights and freedoms, perversion of the Torah and common sense, demonization of good people, the greatest medical experiment of all time being conducted by greedy, untrustworthy, godless people, the lack of liability for those who demand I risk everything… I see all this and I have decided they can all have my place in line. I will put my trust in God. I will use the mind He blessed me with and trust my natural instincts.
Which leads to the final reason which sums up why I will not get “vaccinated.”
31. The Whole thing Stinks
https://www.globalresearch.ca/31-reasons-why-i-wont-take-vaccine/5740534
I think we are about to see some REAL change – the very public signing of the massive China – Iran deal is evidence of this !
The new SILK ROAD will be paved with GOLD and piped with clean CNG !
The Rottenchilds won’t have a place at the BRI table – Russia has already dropped them !
https://mondestuff.com/world-news/putin-announces-total-independence-from-rothschild-controlled-us-dollar/#disqus_thread
Storms are very close and coming to all of us. Follow the money to learn. The same institutions who provoked the 2008 financial crisis and benefited from it with taxpayers money given by Obama are now selling what they have. Privileged info they have from Washington, my guess.
“Wall Street banks ditch $19 billion of stocks in ‘unprecedented’ block trade selloff”
“It would be better if interrogating the powerful was a rotating civic duty like jury service rather than something done by career journalists with a vested interest in maintaining good relationships with the powerful. The obsequious questions at press conferences make this clear.”
Quite an admirable democratic idea. Have the people ask questions, with follow-up when the powerful use double-talk and obfuscation to avoid those questions. I go to candidate forums and legislative forums. You can’t get a straight answer because the party is briefing the flunkies on “talking points” so they can avoid serious discussion of problems that need to be solved.
Mandatory dis-respect can sometimes backfire of bullies!
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China and Russia have made it absolutely clear that they recognize the sad fact that the oligarchy in firm control of the western alliance is adamantly intent on burning all possible diplomatic avenues of cooperation and dialogue as the Hindenburg of the western financial system continues to careen towards a fiery oblivion.
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It did not take long for the behaviorist zombies and NATO-philes managing the recent United States color revolution to undo any remnant of hope that some form of sane foreign policy might emerge from the United States establishment.
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This great article can be read here:
China and Russia: The New Guarantors for Justice in the Face of a Self-Cannibalizing West by Matthew Ehret!
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/03/27/china-russia-new-guarantors-for-justice-in-face-self-cannibalizing-west/
Until recently the word, “Ghetto”, often referred to upper class well-to-do neighborhoods, which were the equivalent to our modern day gated communities, except that they were located more often than not, close to the well protected palaces, etcetera; just in case anyone ever tells you about the horrible lives their ancestors had, having to live in the Ghetto.
“Democrats care about “black” people the same way Jeffery Epstein cared about young girls. Using a combination of hypocrisy and gaslighting, the party Malcolm X rightly described as foxes who eat African-Americans while pretending to be allies has thrived for decades by leveraging the pains of their most loyal voting bloc. They are back at it again as Joe Biden and the Democrats are gnashing their teeth in counterfeit indignation over the recently enacted Georgia voting laws.
Yesterday afternoon, Biden—the same bigot who once called young “black” men predators who need to be locked up—was apoplectic as he equated the bill Georgia governor Kemp signed with Jim Crow. To which I respond with a resounding STFU Joe! You know what is Jim Crow? Enacting legislation that favor the very wealthy and indenture everyone else into a life of financial anxieties and/or poverty. Policies that cater to Wall Street while decimating Main Street. The reality is that the Democrats, even more than the depraved Republicans, have done more to create a nation of separate and unequal societies where the uber-rich live like royalty while the bottom 90% are being ground into dust.”
Teodrose FIkremariam
Lovely essay, I just posted on YouTube a short time ago something to the same effect, and received a threatening phone call from the police about 30 seconds later for having done so. So, yes, you are so right, it’s a lovely world run by even lovelier people. The problem apparently is that certain low-lives, such as myself, keep exposing the crimes of these psychopaths to the victims who were under the delusion that they were solely responsible for their own actions. In the U.S. if you can ever escape the Ghetto, and of course the Ghetto can even be a corn field or hog farm, if the police have anything on you, they will leverage that to blackmail you into doing dirty work for them (much like the Epstein affair) and then you see what appears to be black on black crime, but really, it’s just white people doing a genocide number.
you could put out your own book.
i believe we are all victims of a vast conspiracy theory. not the one Hilary spoke of being right wing.) they are too obviously evil..
the one i like best is the worst one.
we are being led to the slaughter house….sooner rather than later .
so much of what one sees is experimental to see if it works….like forexamle the recent leak by the scientist at Pfizer, who said, “We are learning how to hack Life.”
hacking Life to make beautiful Aryan babies? to take the Immortality Pill. i heard about while waiting in line for y blood test. unsettling story that one was…you live 10,000 years and at 25 years of age….
of course the ramifications mean for sure…they cannot allow longer lives for EVERYone.
can they?
the stage is set now because we expect the poor not to get vaxed, only waxed.
Politics is the problem and there can never be a political solution. Politics is set up to manage power and it will always manage that power for the benefit of those who hold the power. Any attempts to wrest power from them directly or indirectly will result in the harshest of penalties. Furthermore, attempting to play within the rules is futile as acknowledging the rules is to be attached to them. No change will come from a modification or adjustment of the current political system. Our salvation will need to come in the form of a narrative that is ‘not of the current system’, something orthogonal and unexpected. Most likely this will come as a reactionary force to areas of the system that begin to fail as we approach the limits of growth demanded by the current capitalist economy. This change will be so radically other that it will involve a whole new paradigm in thinking about our relationship to Gaia. If we begin this task of changing our consciousness, we will find that the trappings of the current power structures will loosen their hold on us. It is precisely those patterns of thinking that awakening seeks to dissolve, that the current game uses to keep us in check.
Moonlight, you write “Our salvation will need to come in the form of a narrative that is ‘not of the current system,’ something orthogonal and unexpected.” You are right, of course. To understand why I say this, see my book.
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The book is called “The Tomb in the Garden; the First Easter and a Gospel of Jesus.” It is available as an ebook at the Amazon online bookstore. This Easter, April 2 through April 6, it can be acquired at no charge.
Thanks Jim. I’ll check it out.
Mental illness definitely discriminates – unless you don’t consider psychopathy a form of mental illness.
As for Biden, the Democrats wasted a lot of time, money, phony candidates and effort making Biden president and to stopping Bernie Sanders. The truth is that most of Sanders social ideas are admirable, but he destroyed too much of his credibility and lost too many supporters by, to this day, supporting Russiagate and continuing to declare it to be a credible and truthful representation. Furthermore, since the U.S. political scene is corruptly dominated by two parties who, by their actions are nearly the same in most respects, few if any of sanders ideas had/has any chance of being enacted anytime soon.
Caitlin Johnstone’s worldview: Can be stated in a syllogism: 1. Socialism has failed disastrously everywhere it has been implemented; 2) Everyone knows this; 3; Therefore, what the world needs is more socialism on the biggest scale ever.
Old decomposing chestnut, that one Frederick.
Capitalschism is where the plutocrats:
1. Privatise the profits.
2. Socialise the losses.
BTW, the MIC is Socialist because it’s almost entirely funded by the taxpayers.
Such shameless dishonesty. Ignore China, ignore American sanctions and coups and wars to wreck socialist countries, then crow that they have flaws. Pure deceitful filth and blatant propaganda being regurgitated by someone who probably couldn’t write a coherent hundred word essay on socialism.
“Everyone knows this” he says. What stupidity.
World Tyranny Is Here!!!
I don’t care if the vaccine is fantastic and is perfectly safe, it is incredible that we, humanity are being forced to have our sovereign bodies injected by governments around the world that we know are corrupt, that are not adequately responding to the looming extinction event due to the climate crises, that perpetrate wars and murder millions, that surreptitiously or openly supplant democratically elected leaders with dictators, and daily commit atrocities, and force billions to have to endure having to accept the unacceptable throughout our entire lives.
Weekly confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people, Mar 27, 2021 (ourworldindata.org). If this is true it seems that this enforced vaccine is hardly justifiable. And now this: COVID vaccine passports: New York first with vaccination proof system (usatoday.com).
This is TYRANNY!!! Yet the public is too propagandized to recognize it! This animation clearly explains exactly what is happening (Love Your Servitude – Aldous Huxley & George Orwell – YouTube). It seems quite important that people become aware of how “forced injection” and it is clearly forced, even without making it a law, but by withdrawing and restricting our freedoms is nothing more than modern TYRANNY. Please share this far and wide.