Listen to a reading of this article:
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April 2022: Zelensky speaks at the Grammy Awards
May 2022: Zelensky speaks at Cannes Film Festival
June 2022: Zelensky hosts SNL
July 2022: Zelensky stars as himself in an action biopic co-starring The Rock
August 2022: Zelensky releases his own breakfast cereal and clothing line
September 2022: Celebrities are flocking to the new Hollywood pop religion known as Zelenskyyology
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It’s often a long, awkward process learning that literally everyone in both mainstream political factions serves the oligarchic empire. For most people you have to get your hopes dashed over and over again by your heroes before learning this lesson, and even then many don’t.
It runs counter to everything you’re taught in life that nobody in either camp is there to help you. There’s a fundamental assumption that someone among them must be decent. But if you watch carefully with enough intellectual honesty you’ll see it again and again: there’s a line that, for one justification or another, none of them ever end up crossing, and it’s the line where they would have to begin providing meaningful opposition to the oligarchic empire.
At first it makes no sense. How can there be no good guys? Not one? Then you realize: it’s because you’re living in an oligarchic empire which only elevates people who serve its interests, whether it’s in politics, government, or media. The “opposition” between mainstream factions is an illusion cooked up by the empire and continually reinforced by its narrative managers.
But you only see this if you’re intellectually honest enough to overcome your own cognitive biases. Otherwise you’ll keep doing mental gymnastics to justify the bullshit coming from Bernie, AOC, TYT, Tucker Carlson, Trump, MAGA pundits, wherever your biases are located on the map.
And then when you do see it people accuse you of being an angry hater who doesn’t have anything positive to say about anyone in politics or media, when really it’s got nothing to do with being negative but with your understanding that the machine always protects the machine.
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The more weapons you pour into this war, the further the mission will creep. You'd have to be blind not to see it at this point. It's a bottomless money pit geared not toward stopping an invasion but toppling Moscow and securing US unipolar domination. https://t.co/jgHhFUUeoY
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 21, 2022
This proxy war isn’t about defending Ukraine, it’s about quashing a nation which has consistently resisted absorption into the US-centralized imperial blob. That agenda is best served by keeping this war going as long as possible and making it as gruelling and costly as possible for Moscow. Peace is not on the menu.
Even if Ukraine does somehow achieve total victory in the near term, it wouldn’t mean peace, it would mean more war. If Russia is driven out the war will just change shape into a concerted effort to oust Putin and shatter the Russian Federation.
This war could easily have been avoided with a little diplomacy and low-cost, high-reward concessions. The US had good visibility into the Kremlin’s plans, so they knew this. They chose not to because they wanted to use this war to hurt Putin.
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A massive percentage of the people who are getting Russia and Ukraine right are going to turn into the worst people in the world once conflict shifts to China. Pretty much only the anti-imperialist left and a specific subset of antiwar libertarians will get both issues entirely correct.
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I get asked if I think the US should do anything if China attacks Taiwan. I tell them I don’t think the US should do anything if any nation does anything. The US is the very last nation on earth that should ever do anything about any other nation.
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We don’t talk enough about how disturbing it is that Silicon Valley megacorporations have just accepted that it’s their job to help the US win a propaganda war against Russia and everyone’s just going along with that like it’s fine and normal.
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Man: [steals most of everyone’s wealth]
Everyone: Hey give that back!
Man: You’re all just jealous of my success.
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People ask why I write about the US government instead of my own government. It's because the US is my own government. I just skip the irrelevant middle man. https://t.co/qx0K0dPbMr
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 22, 2022
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Can’t believe empire managers have the gall to keep babbling about “disinformation” even as they work to extradite a journalist to the United States to defend the empire’s right to lie to us about its war crimes.
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I’ve met some cute kids in my time but nobody’s as adorable as people who think Assange can get a fair Espionage Act trial in the United States of America.
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I want to live in this idyllic fantasy world where the US pours weapons into foreign nations because it cares deeply about their freedom and orchestrates the military encirclement of Russia and China because it wants to protect the world from tyranny.
The mainstream news media is empire fanfic for slow kids.
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Your average Ivy League graduate working for a prominent military industrial complex-funded think tank has less insight into what’s happening with Russia and China than your average random citizen with internet access and sincere curiosity about those nations.
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People who’ve escaped abusive relationships with bitchy, vindictive, passive aggressive manipulators have a natural advantage when in comes to deciphering the malevolence of the US empire.
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21 responses to “MSM Is Empire Fanfic For Children: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
I am so sick of seeing that disgusting little pig’s ugly mug leering out as he acts the most challenging (and likely final) role of his acting career. Ze’s candidacy was bankrolled by the infamous billionaire gangster Ihor Kolomoisky, founder of the original neonazi Azov Brigade, who was part owner of the TV network in which Ze starred in a sitcom series – as the President of Ukraine. Ze won big on the platform of making peace with Russia and the Donbass republics, but he’s refused to implement the plans agreed to in the internationally brokered Minsk accords of 2014 and 2015. Soon new laws further discriminating ethnic Russians followed, first abolishing Russian (and Magyar) as official national languages, and then by a race law, an actual damn race law, in Europe, in the 21st century, claiming that “Slavics” are a separate race ineligible for full Ukrainian citizenship. The final provocation came early this year when his government he massed almost half the Ukie army to invade Donbass, to implement Azov’s Final Solution to the Russian Problem.
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It’s all so utterly disgusting, once again what Putin rightly called “the Empire of Lies” using corrupt tinhorn politicians in arrogant little countries as sacrificial lambs to achieve its impossible goal of unrivaled global hegemony. All this needless death and destruction, again brought to you courtesy of the people of the United States. Because either there is such a thing as collective guilt, as the victors applied it to Germans and the Israelis do to Palestinians today, or there is not.
Whilst I agree with absolutely everything you say Caitlin, I need some solutions.
We all just keep bitching away about how appalling the US is, how fake this war is, what a fleabag (Z)elensky is, how Russia is being drawn into this … but what can we do about it? Anything?
I’m wondering how on earth Ukraine is going to continue with no young men left. They are dying in horrendous numbers, and their corpses being abandoned, to be buried by the Russians, who to their great credit, do so with Orthodox ritual. The captured POWs are old men, way past their fighting age.
As all of Europe … even Australia … sends their old junk weapons to Ukraine with gusto, I keep wondering what the hell they are thinking. Ukraine has to stop before it is completely depleted. It’s like the knight in the Monty Python movie.
As for the US, it proves once again what a despicable crowd of criminals run the place, and how much they need to be eliminated for the sake of the good American citizens and the citizens of the world.
The last country on earth that should be the leader is the US.
The degree of idiocy of this guy is already surreal. In general, the “Western world” has chosen such a path, the one of the smoothest and plainest stupidity.
I wonder if SNL was ever that good. It was a litmus test of hip and best observed stoned, kind of like listening to Talking Heads. Most people I know who watch SNL are conservative, the same with the band U2. Zelensky hosting wouldn’t seem any more ironic than a photo op with Bono.
Caitlin and Tim, you assume that because The People of the US have elected warmongers time after time after time, that they must not know the truth about something or someone;. In other words, they’re just not well-informed enough. If they were better informed, they’d do SOMETHING to get rid of the 536 R and D warmongers holding elected offices in DC, right? Otherwise, why would you continue writing — good finger exercise?
IMO your belief matches that of those who believe that Trump was/is Putin’s puppet and that Putin meddled so much in US voters’ minds that that is the one and only reason why Trump sat in the Oval Orifice for four years. Both sets of believers are IMO incapable of facing pretty harsh reality — part of which is that people kill for money, whether by pulling a trigger or providing the ammunition or placing a mark on a ballot or buying US treasury bonds that will allow the US to continue killing and killing and killing. And that, when push comes to shove, people will do just about anything to survive.
There was no internet in the late 1920s, all of the 1930s and early 1940s Germany — in other words, during the post-WW1 march-up to WW2. Ordinary Germans (and Brits and the French and the Russians, as well) sometimes had literally no alternative sources of information to that given to them by their government(s).
In 1946 an average German could reasonably argue that he/she “didn’t know” what his/her government was doing to the world during the war. No such case can be made by those who have been living in the US for the first two+ decades of the 21st century. IMO, the latter (especially those financially dependent upon the MIC in one way or another) would have had to be either DELIBERATELY blind or willing accomplices to NOT realize what the US had been doing to the rest of the world for that period of time. And that is but the tip of the iceberg of pre-2000, post-1890 US aggression around the world. Maybe children could support this claim, but adults, no way.
The REALITY is that the US’s decades-long pattern of behavior proves beyond reasonable doubt that the vast majority of people in the US FULLY SUPPORT what the US government has been inflicting on the rest of the world. Guilty as charged. Possibly as much as 20% of the adult US population is against their government’s behavior, but that is probably a generous over-estimate, not underestimate.
The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the US populace fears atoning for its blatantly obvious mortal sins so much that it fully supports a perpetually-increasing war budget in order to AVOID punishment by the millions who have been victims of US hegemony. In other words, at this point in US history, the vast majority of the population of the the US believes that the US must CONTINUE its unjustified, world-wide killing spree or be subjected to probably very harsh, Versailles-Treaty/Nuremberg-trial-like punishment / blow-back. The voters know that the US collectively saying “we’re sorry” to their victims definitely ain’t going to cut it. They know this because if the roles were reversed, they themselves would never accept such an apology.
Caitlin and Tim, in a recent article your rightly stated that ”War is the glue that holds the empire together. A politician can get away with opposing some aspects of the status quo when it comes to healthcare or education, but war as a strategy for maintaining global dominance is strictly off limits.”
Just exactly WHY is this the case, Caitlin and Tim? It is because Job 1 of the Elite-owned MSM is to keep the present fatally-flawed Matrix exactly as it is – one which ABSOLUTELY REQUIRES a perpetually expanding human population AND a perpetually expanding MIC. That Job 1 includes destroying candidates who stand for office against the US’s 70+ year-old tradition of using military force to threaten and, when necessary, outright destroy nations that resist US diktat, under the lie of spreading freedom and democracy.
This is the reason that Trump got what he got from the MSM after committing the Mortal Sin of shaking hands and making nice with Mr. Putin in Helsinki; because that mere handshake threatened to end the US Elite’s perpetual war for USD hegemony and, thus, the justification for the MIC whose end would literally mean the end of the US economy as it is presently “designed”. (Just think about that summit meeting from Trump’s and Putin’s point of view. Trump knew that he wasn’t Mr. Putin’s puppet. Mr. Putin knew with absolute certaintly that he was not controlling Trump. Yet “17 US intelligence agencies” stated in public, at every opportunity, that Trump was Putin’s puppet …………even though they ALSO knew with absolute certainty that that was not true. Just exactly WHY did they do that lying? Because a peace treaty between the US and Russia would be a threat to the US’s war-based economy. What other possible reason could there be?)
Once again with feeling, no antiwar candidates are ever going to be elected by US voters. That is NEVER, repeat NEVER, repeat NEVER going to happen UNLESS those candidates spell out in great detail a plan in which the present DoD contract system is MAINTAINED, but the contracts from here to eternity will be for the production of bullet trains instead of bullets; a Liberty-Ship-like production system for building wind turbines, solar panels, vanadium-flow storage batteries, etc. and to rebuild vital infrastructure. The Elite of America will not allow such an arrangement to come into being because that system would be “socialism”. The US Elite prefer the present arrangement and they will do everything in their power to make sure nothing changes. For example, they’re going to spend billions over the next few months to make absolutely sure that voters will vote for an R or a D when they step into a voting booth in a few months.
CNN, etc. are never in a million years going to allow a candidate to elucidate such a plan during their carefully stage-managed “debates”, so what are these candidates to do? They should use their precious, fleeting, on-air time to accuse the script-writers and CNN of doing exactly what they are doing – restricting discussion — and to direct the millions of viewers to their YouTube videos, or their own web sites, in order to find out exactly what their “new plan for America” is “because the Elite that control what you are seeing tonight are not going to allow me to state what this new plan for America is during this phony debate. What I have to say takes some time to say it. You’ll have to go somewhere else to find out what my detailed plan is. I think you’re going to love it. It’s the only way out of our war-addicted economy.”
“ It’s often a long, awkward process learning that literally everyone in both mainstream political factions serves the oligarchic empire.”
Indeed, both wings belong to the same bird. Would that everyone got this first time around.
Yes, the MSM is directed at our slow witted youth. Hitler had his Youth Corp and Mao had his Red Guard. All empires prime the status quo by targeting the youth. That is why so much effort has been expended dunbing them down for the last two or three generations.
You are mostly correct. It is in fact Israel steering the US ship of fools.
You are a very great corroborator of my life thought. But in a nation fed poison food, one must be realistic and somewhat forgive the victims. A miracle how capacity for comprehensive thought develops in us humans. i separated off far from the crowds long ago. It is a communication from the universe that we can reach the same conclusions from entirely different environments. But the alpha cretans have announced that nuclear war is feasible even if most of us die.
It’s a bit like Evel Knievel who, after suffering a crushed pelvis and femur, fractures to his hip, wrist, and both ankles, and a concussion that kept him in hospital for weeks in his failed Caesar’s Palace bike jump in 1967, decided to jump the Grand Canyon, reckoning there would be just enough of him left on the other side for all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men to be able to put him together again. Only in America! :o)
You forgot to mention the new gee wizz fast food chain Zelensky’s Burgers coming to a neighbourhood near you soon. The hamburglar Joe Biden is suitably impressed with this addition to an already saturated junkfood market.
ha.
“June 2022: Zelensky hosts SNL” Ha ha ha ha ha!!! Wait for it.
“June 2022: Zelensky hosts SNL”
Got me. I didn’t realize you were goofin’ and I was like, Jesus Christ, Zelensky was on SNL? Am I out of touch or what?!
Speaking of Jesus, that kid had some pretty good values I think. He did have a temper on him though. Smashed up the tables of the neo-liberals if I recal, for no other reason than they were doing what they do best, crackin’ spreads and swindling people while committing treason against life itself.
He also had a sarcastic side it seems to. Like when he told the rich man to sell his possesions to the poor if he was really serious about doing something worthwhile, knowing that there was zero possibility that the rich man would ever do any such thing.
Basically mocking all the gatekeeping poseurs who go about pretending they sincerely desire to do good things; like in today’s world, those that tell us nightly their only wish to inform the less fortunate among us of the reality of our situation, because that’s how they roll, when the truth is the only the thing that interests them is maneuvering their way into the right time slot, so they can start recieving those 1 million dollar bi-weekly paychecks they so richly deserve.
Because to steal and rework a classic from our host regarding Jimmy Dore and Ana Kasparian: what seperates a Tucker Carlsen-type and say, a Chris Hayes-type? About $30 million per annum.
Caitlin’s final par really nailed it. As for JC, he never lost his temper he was ‘asserting his Fathers authority’ Max
Prince of Peace remember
He did get awfully mad at that poor fig tree for not having a fruit for His Hungry Holiness to eat even though it wasn’t the` season. Cursed it, he did, and the poor thing wilted right up. But since he’s the Son o’ God, it wasn’t the temper tantrum of an omnipotent spoiled brat, or a fairy tale made up later by a bunch of superstitious ignoramuses
“Like when he told the rich man to sell his possessions to the poor if he was really serious about doing something worthwhile”…
I haven’t read that stuff for over half a century but wouldn’t it be rather that Jaycee told the rich man to GIVE his possessions to the poor?
Otherwise, how to we approach the whole shebang? The poor man asks for a loan from the merchants of the temple so that he can purchase the possessions the rich man is prepared to SELL to him? Will there be a special discount attached to the deal? How is this supposed to work out?
Lmao … Nice catch.
“It was in this way that the rich man and Blackrock trapped the poor in a cycle of debt and ended up owning all their properties.”
My only excuse for getting this simplest of Biblical messages wrong, I’ve been livin’ way too long in a Capitalist World.
the ivy league pick the applicants with the “right” pedigree because the statistics showed that the family background (class), not GPA nor SAT nor IQ, is by far the best indicator of “success” during and after college. for those institutions, education is all about investing in the next generation so that the statue quo in which they rule will be served.
the entire curriculum of the Kennedy School – Harvard where most of our “elites” get their “education” (credentials) to be the “leaders” of the democracy can be boiled down to the question of how the “elites” with superior character and intelligence can “lead” the inferior masses into accepting the status quo, convinced that they are the deciders in charge.
The MSM is like the fungus ophiocordyceps and the population is the ants. The metaphor breaks down only because almost all of the metaphorical ants knowingly and eagerly ingest the metaphorical spores.
I’m glad I finished watching the 1992 GeorgeCarlin special “JamminInNewYork” shortly before your latest column was shared-you’re a tough act to follow.