Listen to a reading of this article:
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The Assange case is the most powerful government in the world defending its right to lie to you.
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Q: What’s the difference between how the US deals with journalists it hates and how Saudi Arabia deals with journalists it hates?
A: Speed.
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The US is currently building a network of long-range missile systems on a chain of islands near China’s coast for the explicit purpose of threatening China. You can tell who is the aggressor in US-China tensions by asking yourself what would happen if this situation was reversed.
Per Washington’s own logic it would be perfectly reasonable, and indeed responsible, for China to set up military arsenals along both US coastlines to “contain” it and “deter” attacks on Latin American nations, as the US has an extensive history of launching such attacks and will surely try to again. But we all know what the US response to such behavior would be.
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It’s a bit annoying living in a world that’s ruled by a dying empire whose increasing desperation to retain control could lead it to initiate a dangerous military confrontation with a major power at any time.
The rise of China crashing into the Washington doctrine that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost is an unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object situation that could very easily end in nuclear armageddon.
If the preservation of US unipolar hegemony requires continually escalating military brinkmanship against nuclear-armed Russia and China as well as powerful forces like Iran, then the claim that US unipolar hegemony makes the world a more peaceful place is plainly false.
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You currently have a much higher chance of dying as a result of a nuclear war instigated by your government or its allies than as a result of someone else refusing to take a Covid vaccine. You hear about the latter threat but not the former because the mass media exist to protect imperialist agendas from scrutiny.
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You know you’re getting scammed when your government ends a long and expensive war and then the military budget goes up.
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There is no sector of US government policy more significant and consequential than the command of the most powerful military force ever assembled. There is also no sector of US government policy with less oversight, accountability, or press scrutiny.
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Besides a brief window after 9/11 the US has never really been able to sell the narrative that governments it wants to ramp up aggressions against are about to attack its easily-defended shores. So instead it does ridiculous things like claiming those governments are about to invade Ukraine and Taiwan.
The US empire never attacks, it only “defends”. All its aggressions are always about “defending” freedom and democracy, “defending” human rights, “defending” nations that can’t defend themselves, etc. Often it even “defends” preemptively, before the attacker has done anything. Sometimes the attacker is the last to find out that they were planning an attack.
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Ever since getting our eviction notice I’ve struggled to be creative because my mind is so focused on the daunting task of finding a nice yet affordable place for my family to live, and it really makes me feel for everyone for whom housing security is a chronic creativity drain. All to pay for the privilege of living on the fucking planet we were fucking born on.
I mean, think about how much creativity and innovation our species is missing out on because our dopey, primitive societal models force people to spend so much brainpower just figuring out how to stay fed and housed. That brainpower could have gone toward improving our world.
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Really I’m just a mother. I’m just a mum who wants a healthy planet and a healthy society for her kids, and I advocate the things I believe will facilitate that. You can add whatever -ists and -isms you want on top of that, but my true ideology is motherhood.
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Right now being smart and informed is a detriment to happiness because things are shitty and the more you understand the harder it is to be happy. Once we create a healthy world this will reverse; the more you understand about the world the more uplifted and optimistic you’ll be.
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19 responses to “The Assange Case Is The US Defending Its Right To Lie: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
Defending its right to lie? Is that all? More like it’s defending its “right” to kidnap, torture and kill anyone it desires on the surface of this planet, which some call Earth but others consider Hell when invaded by the USA. Said alleged democratic republic will do that to defend its right to carpet bomb and lay waste to any other effin’ country on same said planet.
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Mother effin’ Dick Cheney must be exultant these days as the two most prominent and powerful court system on that planet again have essentially vindicated his extreme rendition policies which, back early in this millennium, most honorable people condemned with no uncertainty. To be sure, some A-holes like Barak Obama who lied through his pie hole to get elected, later minimized any importance to take promised legal action against war criminals like Cheney. Just saying “we tortured some folks” was apparently enough to grant absolution to Cheney and fellow monsters, which led to the totalitarian state we now find ourselves existing in. Nearly said “living in,” but this paranoiac existence is sure not what living is intended to be for sensient beings presumably with intelligence and free will.
I’m sorry you’re getting evicted. The US and mini-me Australia suck.
Hi Caitlin – Home is extremely important to me too. My husband and I bought a small cheap house with a beautiful yard a little while after we coupled off. Never intended to make it my permanent place but circumstances caused it to be so. So I grew roots with the land. Our house is paid for as of a couple of years ago. BUT we had to fight like hell to not lose it because we were targeted. The fools that got manipulated into helping target us – many have fallen by the wayside. The ones that are left I’m sure will go the way of extinction. You and I have at least three things in common. We are sensitive. We are creative. We are angry. The Land has chosen me and I accept. You WILL prevail Caitlin.
“It’s a bit annoying living in a world that’s ruled by a dying empire whose increasing desperation to retain control could lead it to initiate a dangerous military confrontation with a major power at any time.”
By ’empire’ you mean USG, right?
Do you think USG/Amerika is locking down all these countries in Europe, NZ, Australia. Making Hungary push for more vaccines. Russia too?
Frankly, it seems to me there’s a new Empire in town and it has already supplanted Amerika which is going along with the whole agenda. Now: maybe maybe of the bad actors in the old USG-Amerika Empire are involved with the new Globalista Empire, but calling all this a product of Amerika is, at this point, I think being stuck in the past.
As to your title, that the persecution of Assange is defending their right to lie: yes, but that’s a very tame way of putting it. Basically, they are scaring anybody else who might ever be in a position to reveal nasty secrets. So the more they drag it out – like the 1/6 innocents beings locked down indefinitely in DC in bad conditions without due process – the more they can persuade people not to fight back.
It’s working.
And since in country after country the majority support lock-downs and further restrictions, it will continue to get worse until finally there is resistance but it will be too little too late.
I like your generally positive outlook – belief in the human spirit, primordial goodness etc. – but that doesn’t mean we aren’t going into a dark period which could last several generations or longer. What’s happening now looks like the Russian revolution on steroids but we are just at the beginning. Later will come the purges, in this case quite possibly involving billions, not tens of millions like the last go around.
Caitlin Johnstone, think of this time as the birth pains of the new order being born.
Things could go wrong, of course.
But the old order never gives up power voluntarily.
In a few years or decades, Australia will be transformed.
25 Million Additional Chinese immigrants.
Desalination plants along the coast pumping water further inland.
Communities farms and bushiness spring to life along the pipelines.
High speed trains connecting the major centers.
Perhaps not the future you want for your children.
But a secure one, for all that.
And Julian Assange home to a heroes welcome.
As our present journalists/propagandists live out their lives in shame, reviled.
Once we get our priorities right we can live in a state of detached equanimity.
1. Love Life.
2. Health.
3. Accommodation.
4. Enough money for food and utilities.
After those, everything else is mind fodder.
We can’t stop Nuclear Armageddon.
We can’t stop the Covid frenzy.
We can’t save Julian Assange.
We can’t stop ecological collapse.
We are outnumbered by greedy graspers.
We can but try.
First, they came for “journalists,” after redefining them as “information brokers.” Next, they came for anyone speaking truth to power through “social media,” after redefining such speech as “disinformation.” Then, they came for “parents,” after redefining them as “domestic terrorists.” Now, they will come for whatever remnants remain – because “them” and “they” are redefined as “you.”
https://seaclearly.com/2021/05/01/a-final-warning
Regarding your comment that being well informed makes it more difficult to be happy. Yes, in general, it is, and certainly, if one dwells on the ugliness in our world, it can suck you deep down, into a dark, and frightening, and lonely place. But, for me in the last few years, as we are faced with ever more horrific challenges, I have been compelled by my spirit to incarnate teachings about detachment, and even more so, loving detachment, that the sages have offered to us for millennia.
Second, I have also been inspired by the current sufferings of the world, or perhaps compelled by them, to view my/our place in the world, and indeed our world’s place in the space/time continuum in a vastly larger perspective; one of infinite existences operating inside infinite yet interrelated systems, over immeasurable ages, all too vast to comprehend. My own mortality, and the temporary nature of our world’s existence, are thus brought into view.
The first lesson teaches me to just do what I can to contribute to the good in my own little circle of life and influence, and to appreciate the beauty all around us; and the second to not take my problems, and indeed the seemingly gigantic problems of our culture, species and even planet, too seriously.
These thoughts help incredibly, and your musings, I must add, have most certainly helped to awaken them in me.
This is about Julian Assange, not about U.S./China relations. You spend the whole article fawning over China instead of rallying the troupes to defend Assange. Julian Assange needs all of our help right now.
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Also remember the tribute that Xi JinPing gave George H.W. Bush when he died. All the saber rattling is for our benefit, yes us little people, and our benefit only. I doubt that Xi is in any way concerned about the fate of Assange.
…..the more i understand the natural world, the more i’m fascinated….the more i understand the species homo assollus the more downdrafted i am…..china has a growing middle class that is perhaps the sum total of the amerikkkan population….and when they do beat the shit out of us on any battlefield, they’ll go on consuming all of what’s left in sight…5G for them….gimme, greed, gadgets, gold, and glory…….thus the saga of homo assollus….
Pretty good estimation
Just exactly WHAT do people do after they’re all woke up — pick up a gun; guillotine some VIPs; march hand in hand down Penn. Ave. forever and demand, demand, demand that the Elite behave better, or else?
Here’s what you are eventually going to HAVE TO DO because
there. is. no. other. way.
If you do not want More Of The Same that you’ve gotten after every election in the past, do not vote for another R or D, ever, no matter what an R or D promises! Jimmy Dore explains EXACTLY why.
Double standards are the distorting mirrors sending Americans their image back, i.e. good guys ™ who couldn’t lie to anybody or hurt a fly to save their lives. The propaganda constantly feeds them lies about their own identities: now imagine you are a handsome, family-loving, well-off man… like those guys you see in the Hollywood series who drive a delivery truck for a living but have their breakfast in a kitchen the size of a football field fitted with equipment it would take the average worker a dozen lifetimes to pay back. This guy was built in your image! That’s how lucky you are while the rest of the world lives in filth governed by tyrants. They believe it! Even the guys in government believe it. Especially the guys in government! It’s essential to their balance. They’re tiger papers though, as Mao put it. I loved it when this Chinese guy in Alaska told Blinken in essence: “Now listen, motherfucker, we ain’t gonna take that shit from you guys no more and you’ll have to tone down serious if you don’t want me to call in some Shaolin bitches to kick your ass!”
Twenty minutes! Blinken couldn’t believe the world outside Hollywood was so cruel. But he didn’t fight back. Wasn’t worth it, was it? This “bloodthirsty murderer of the Chinese Communist Party” just didn’t have manners, that’s all… What do you expect? Wait till I get back to Washington and slap sanctions on his sorry ass and those of his pals. The Chinese, I’m asking you… Just because there’s 1.4 billion of them going in the same direction and building futuristic armament, they think they can talk on equal footing with 333 million Americans perpetually on the cusp of civil war and wary of the elites that rob them blind by spending the best part of their taxpayer-funded astronomical “defense” budget in bribes and kickback-fed cronyism and maintenance of their eight hundred military bases round the world so that when it comes to improving weaponry, they are left with a total budget of eight dollars and twenty-five cents once the top brass have proved unable to track $2.3 TRILLION in transactions like on September 10, 2001, never to be seen (or worried about for that matter) again! These panda-lovers have no idea what they’re up against!
I’m for stamping out “motherhood”.
That is the force that has gotten us into this 7.5 Billion soul problem. We can’t sustain this population in an
organic way that does not deplete and pollute our arable soils. If the truth be told, we have overgrazed the land and are now using chemicals to sustain artificially greater harvests.
“Science and technology” will save us, some would say. But technology has benefitted the wealthy to a much greater degree than the average Joe. For those who have stocks and undergo the risks of gambling our economic system provides great benefits. The rest of us watch the forests that our lives depend on being laid waste, and pollution of our oceans might undo us all if they die….
Our planet is sustainable with a population of one billion individuals. But we persist in being like an expanding herd of deer overgrazing as if starvation was our goal.
“The Assange case is the most powerful government in the world defending its right to lie to you.” The most powerful government in the world has such a long list of lies: The Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, 9/11, the war on terror, …
I know you are trying to help people see that they are continually being lied to by the world’s most powerful government but they are not willing to see that at all. Makes me beyond sad.
“Without a Free Press, there can be No Democracy”
Thomas Jefferson
Isn’t that precisely why monopoly power has always seen the combined brainpower of the population as a threat, and that in order to rule the roost, that combined community brainpower must be kept alienated and divided from each other, by whatever means necessary??
For them, it has always been “too many cooks spoil the broth” only problem is they are not aware enough and become heartless to care that the broth they are stirring is the poison that will bring us all down.
It’s a case where their feelings of entitlement make them believe they have a natural immunity to what the ‘other’ must endure daily just to get through.
A short, simple, and direct post…and one of Caitlin’s best. Thank you, Caitlin, for saying so well what so desperately needs to be said. Tis a gift well used.
“Asserting their right to DO whatever they want…” Lots of white-flight suburbanite kids, in Biden’s Administration, CAP, DNC, The Atlantic Council… woke up, got high one glorious day a half century and grocked “hey, I’m a rich WHITE Murikan, so whatever I do it RIGHT! Repercussions, negative consequences, incarceration or bodily harm are SO for the scvartzes! Let ‘er RIP! Everybody’ll just blame RUSSIA!
We’d watched a typical UWS Manhattan mom, teaching her infant to “make” in Riverside Park. Unmasked, of COURSE! A bunch of exceedingly vulnerable au-pair, scampering away. Kids are vectors, here.
“Me, me, me, MINE,” or you’re a schmuck?