Listen to a reading of this article:
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We live in a world of manufactured lack, manufactured enemies, manufactured crises and manufactured consent. We’ve had sufficient resources to care for everyone for generations. All our wars are based on lies. All our problems are cooked up by a few psychos with too much power.
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Ever since he came to Australia my American husband still finds it strange to see a parrot out in the open instead of sitting in a cage. I feel much the same whenever I see George W Bush.
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The capitalist class has never voluntarily returned anything it has stolen from the working class; every time it manages to give people less it never reverses it, no matter how much greater profits become. Capitalism is never going to get less abusive. It will only grow more so.
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If there were good billionaires they wouldn’t still be billionaires.
It’s impossible to be a good billionaire, not just because it’s immoral to remain that wealthy in a world full of need and because all billionaires are parasitic middlemen siphoning the profits off other people’s labor, but also because in order to obtain that much wealth you generally have to manipulate the actual movement of human civilization to your benefit in some way.
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“You’re anti-American!”
No I’m anti-war, anti-militarism, anti-empire, anti-ecocide, anti-oligarchy, anti-capitalism and anti nuclear brinkmanship. It just happens that the US is at the center of a globe-spanning power structure that is the worst offender on all these fronts by an extremely wide margin.
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The most evil and destructive things Trump did as president weren’t the Trumpian things but the American things. The things his predecessors and his successor are also guilty of doing.
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If the US empire ran out of excuses to use and test its extremely profitable military arsenal on impoverished foreigners, it would simply invent more excuses.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around, because it’s so much more profoundly evil than we’re ever taught to anticipate, but it really is an objective fact that people who make money manufacturing military weapons have a tremendous amount of influence over how and when those weapons are used. A war profiteer can pour money into campaign contributions which incentivize policymakers to push for acts of military interventionism, and pour money into think tanks and lobbying to give those policymakers an excuse to do so. This is all perfectly legal, and it happens constantly.
It’s exactly the same as murdering human beings at mass scale and selling their body parts for a tremendous profit. And it’s deemed perfectly reasonable and acceptable.
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I grow continually more and more amazed at how western media get away with citing think tanks funded by governments and defense contractors to promote imperialist propaganda. If everyone understood that they do this constantly and what that means, it would end the mass media.
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The real heroes of 9/11 were those precious few who immediately took a stand against the jingoistic hysteria that swept across public consciousness and opposed the horrors the western empire was about to unleash upon the world.
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History seldom vindicates the peacemongers. Not because they aren’t right, but because history is written by warmongers.
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Covid could just as easily have been used to transfer wealth from the wealthiest to the poorest and pay people to voluntarily stay home and to take the vaccine. Instead it’s seen a massive wealth transfer to the very wealthiest, and vaccine mandates that will hurt the poorest.
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We’re a few months out from seeing American libertarians angrily sharing around a video of police beating an unvaccinated Black person for noncompliance with some new authoritarian law, and seeing liberals in the comments cheering for the police.
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Don’t look to other leftists to figure out how to think about a given issue, look at the values and priorities which led you to the left in the first place. The group consensus and your most deeply held values will not always be in alignment.
Humanity is deeply insane, even the parts of humanity which align with your ideological preferences. For this reason it’s never a safe bet to go along with the consensus positions of your ideological faction instead of figuring things out on your own based on your own values.
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There are a lot of people who correctly ask “who benefits?” whenever there’s a potential false flag event yet fail to ask who might benefit from a religion that glorifies poverty, meekness, humility, docility, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
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True humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, and it isn’t thinking of yourself less. True humility is the deep, all-pervading insight that the very phenomenon we call “self” is pure illusion.
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You just have to wonder how much of a mass-scale psychological pummelling human consciousness can take before it snaps. And you have to wonder what might lie on the other side of that snap. Maybe something bad. But maybe something very, very good.
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It’s a tricky tightrope walk the oligarchs have to do, making sure they don’t steal too much of our wealth and freedom all at once so we don’t rise up and take it back. It’s easy to forget that we’re actually the ones with all the power here. Only problem is we don’t yet know it.
They’re more afraid of you than you are of them. It’s true of spiders, snakes, and oligarchic imperialists.
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25 responses to “Manufacturing Dystopia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
If you are unsure as to why a political/foreign relations event has occurred, you just haven’t yet figured out the incentive structure. Cui bono?
The hope I have is from the thousands of people like you gaining consciousness. When you realize that people want you to hate yourself and others, you gain better coping skills and stop reacting so much.
Regarding “… you have to wonder what might lie on the other side of that snap.” Georg Lichtenberg(1742-1799) said: “I do not know if things will get better when they change, but i do know that things have to change so they can become better.”. On the other hand, throughout my lifetime revolution has always been coming, but never arriving and change always went in the wrong direction so my optimism is rather stifled.
From the observation, that billionaires are not special, and attract those who are willing to throw the masses under the bus for getting their share of the wealth, and that more money correlates with less empathy, i see only the option of limiting the amount of financial wealth a single person can control. We will never be able to surpass the elites efficency in dividing the masses, so an actual revolution is highly unlikely.
The Coyote https://youtu.be/QBIyT6FiVoE
pain farms with their non-urban romances
with sonic maidens who cite rimbaud
scarf-wrapped earrings without chances
of restitution in the arms of the cold
alone is the coyote who scratches carefully
down the vacant streets of storefront tombs
alone is the coyote who dances madly
with anyone who ritualizes under the moon
pain is lost in the womb of promise
a paradise founded in the dying guilt
blaming all in the tomb of compromise
in the precise wound that it helped to build
alone is the coyote who suffers openly
vinegar to the lips of dying flesh
alone is the coyote who acts majestically
on the stage of count-down when his life is a mess
the torch is set to the sweet pavilion
where the ladies dangle their husbands
on diamond-studded leashes worth millions
in the fine print of contracts of understand
alone is the coyote who left all behind him
to chance freedom in the wisdom of the fool
alone is the coyote who changes his mind
when the chance comes to break all of the rules
distance is a metaphor divided in ruin
to the victor the ashes, to the victim the crown
resistance is a luxury provided with doom
where the fool-hardy fantasize all the way down
alone is the coyote who thirsted so patiently
for the moment of truth that betrayed so soon
alone is the coyote who stalks all the graveyards
digging up the promises sworn to the moon
Caitlin, thank you for fixing the comments section.
The topic of ‘manufacturing’ is vital to understanding where reality starts and finishes. ‘They’, the manipulators, would have us ignore actual reality and subscribe to their manufactured one – believing and fearful of dangers created deliberately to keep us subdued and compliant.
Some of us know this, but the challenge is how to spread this awareness to enough people to neutralise the threat.
The manipulators make this awareness (labelled as misinformation, conspiracies, etc) into the threat, so how do we reverse that? Speaking the truth and quoting verifiable facts is not enough, because most people won’t get as far as checking the facts because they are conditioned to resist and change to their perceived reality.
So, it must be done covertly, to bypass the conditioning – the blocks and filters. The question I have, is how?
“All of our problems are cooked up by a few psychos with too much power.”. Yeah. Like the pandemic.
Well said, Caitlin. I give the same answer to idiots who accuse me of being “anti-American”. What does that actually mean? If the crimes of American imperialism are being held up as examples of virtue, we are truly lost. The truth hurts, as my momma used to say.
Manufactured 9/11 terrorists planning the destruction of the United States from caves in Afghanistan.
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Manufactured bats with SARS-CoV-2 in caves in Yunnan Province in China flying a thousand miles to Wuhan to start a pandemic across the globe.
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Except that the so-called terrorists were being paid by the Pakistani ISI that worked closely with the United States CIA.
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Except that the manufactured bats never fly more than 150 miles from their abandoned mine shaft in Yunnan Province and no animal has ever been found that has a SARS-CoV-2 virus infection.
Thank you, Caitlin, for doing the hard work that the MSM should be doing. Facing and framing the horrible truth of what is happening to our society, our press, our government, our military, our environment and our health and education. No one does it better than you, Chris Hedges, Chomsky and very few others. Voices crying in the wilderness of corruption, greed, hubris and folly. I am 80 years young and still fighting for peace, justice and truth, every day. Welcome back from your brief break! Take as many breaks as you need to keep your sanity in a world gone mad.
The World Socialist Web Site does it better than anybody. But Caitlin and The Grayzone and Consortium News also do a great job. Hedges has become too establishment for my taste, after he refused to support the WSWS when the WSWS was under attack. And Chomsky supports “lesser evilism” which I find to be anathema.
Caitlin, enough already with the global empire. What I want to hear about is the imposition of fascist control over a Western democracy–what is occurring now in Australia. I’m very concerned, not only for the liberty of Australians, but also for what this portends for the other democratic counties. My suspicion is that we are seeing the first trial run of the early stages of the Great Reset, the plan by the the oligarchs of the World Economic Forum to “change everything.” Please report to your readers on the insane things being done by governments there, including that horrible Health Minister telling us to get used to the New World Order.
OK, but if you think Australia’s democracy is in danger, America’s is in much worse shape, with more corruption, greed, injustice and inequity, and is causing existential problems on a massive scale!
That’s exactly why I want to take advantage of the opportunity to have on-the-ground reporting (within 5 km of course…) from a land very far from my home in California. I want some clues for what we’re in for here.
Do you really believe that “global empire” has nothing to do with the rise of fascism and the backwardness of Australia? Australia is wholly owned by the United States imperialists. The global empire is the source and the cause of the rise of fascism and the elimination of human and civil rights all over the world. For more information about this, read the World Socialist Web Site, which has been reporting on globalization and fascism for decades, including the subornation of the nation of Australia by the United States.
That’s fair. What I’m requesting is a highly localized focus on what the global empire is doing to Australians. We’ll be next, in the U.S.
It’s absolutely stunning how many people have been saying this to me without taking even one second to check and see if I have not in fact written about what is occurring now in Australia.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/09/08/australia-has-no-bill-of-rights-and-it-shows/
I had read that, but didn’t get the personal take I had been hoping for. What does it feel like to have troops in the streets, and ridiculous rules enforced by humorless police? I’d like to hear your stories about everyday Ozzie life under the New World Order. Less conceptual, more personal, please.
I don’t have any, and neither does anyone else I know. We’re inside a bit more than usual and we wear face masks at the store. It’s hard on teens socially. Troops on the streets are in a different state from me. People who are calling it Nazi Germany are hysterical morons.
Thank you. Those were the impressions I was hoping for.
When anything becomes ‘mandatory’, whether it be work, conscription, patriotism, consuming or vaccines, you’ve just gotta be suspicious.
Welcome back Caitlin. How was your break?
Vaccines do not belong on your list. Vaccines are mandatory because of science and the known nature of viruses and how they spread. Just like a parachute is mandatory when jumpng out of an airplane if you intend to live after doing so. Unless you don’t believe in gravity, that is. Talk to Gallileo.
i agree.
I chose not to ‘believe’ in anything Carolyn.
That’s where all the problems of the world started.
Belief in God, country, capitalism, socialism and the MSM.
We’ve been duped, dumbed down and distracted.
I’ll consider the vaccines when the experiment is over.
Meanwhile, I stand outside the world’s biggest laboratory looking in.
What happened to the comments section?
Caitlin got sick and tired of some of the inane and nasty comments and I don’t blame her. No doubt those types of comments will return, but I hope not.