Listen to a reading of this article:
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The US is the only nation on earth whose entire economy is built on arms manufacturing and security guarantees to tyrannical Gulf states. It’s not just correct to call the US empire a uniquely evil power structure, it’s correct to say it’s impossible for it not to be.
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Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemen and proxy warfare in Syria are many thousands of times more evil and horrific than the assassination of one Washington Post columnist, but because the empire is built on that kind of bloodshed it gets far less attention.
Biden continuing the unbroken presidential tradition of courting the Saudis is not a betrayal of US values but a very normal expression of them. You either want the complete dismantlement of the US empire or you don’t. If you don’t, quit bitching about how the sausage gets made.
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New meme template just dropped. pic.twitter.com/CYcZgb5NIQ
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) July 16, 2022
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The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Republicans say they will do evil things and then do evil things, while Democrats say they will not do evil things and then do evil things.
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On one hand polls say Americans don’t want Biden to run again, but on the other hand there’s zero chance Democrats put forward a different candidate who’s better than the rotbrained empire mummy.
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Friendly reminder that Russiagate was a psyop which had its origins in the US intelligence cartel, was used to facilitate longstanding agendas of the US intelligence cartel, is the reason liberals are now cheerleading the US proxy war in Ukraine, and that only an idiot would call this a coincidence.
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Anyone who still buys this schtick is a fucking moron:
19 year old "Zaporizhzhia Avenger" took down a Russian Su-25 plane with an Igla (Needle) man-portable-defense-system.
This is his sixth plane, and he also took down a cruise missile.
Superheroes do exist in real life. pic.twitter.com/bWd5TZ3EdW
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) July 17, 2022
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Current proxy warfare tactics in Ukraine have no chance of delivering a swift defeat to Russia. What they do have is a pretty good chance of creating a costly military quagmire for Russia and a 100 percent certainty of creating massive profits for the arms industry.
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The biggest lie the hawks ever sold was that their militaristic policies prevent the problems they actually create. Militarizing against Russia caused this war. The war on terror created terror groups. Continuing the encirclement of China will likely lead to a nasty confrontation there. Etc.
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Working to bring down Moscow and Beijing would be a great way to move toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony while simultaneously unleashing the kind of worldwide economic chaos and desperation that shock doctrine capitalism engineers have heretofore only ever dreamed of.
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At the end of this clip Bolton cites “classified information” as the reason he won’t name the other US coups he’s helped orchestrate, calling to mind when Assange said “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security”:
John Bolton was asked to elaborate on his comment last weekend that he “planned coup d’etats” when in the WH: “This is something some of the snowflakes on the Left really were kind of shocked at, but when you’re looking out for America’s best interests, you do what’s necessary.” pic.twitter.com/7XC7xvRVuR
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 16, 2022
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The most important job of the western media right now is convincing the public that the world’s major powers splitting into two increasingly hostile alliances is probably nothing to worry about.
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Celebrities “getting political” is not a problem in itself. The problem is that most of them don’t start growing their political awareness until they’re already famous, when they’re informing their worldview from inside an elite echo chamber that has a vested interest in preserving the status quo.
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Believing there are good billionaires is even dumber than believing there are good US presidents, and believing there are good mainstream media pundits is even dumber than believing there are good billionaires.
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The Guardian is the nastiest war propaganda rag in the world, and Simon Tisdall is the nastiest war propagandist at The Guardian.
Literally demanding the apocalypse. pic.twitter.com/4svR2XCYNA
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) July 17, 2022
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No one ever espouses a mainstream political worldview because they have thoroughly examined all the options and sincerely believe that one’s the best. It’s always because they don’t know other political worldviews exist, or aren’t sufficiently familiar with them, or have been propagandized into believing false things about them, or because they work in a career that is advanced by adhering to mainstream political perspectives.
This is true because mainstream political worldviews do not exist to help people and make good things happen, they exist to facilitate plutocracy and empire. Nobody who deeply investigates their nature and contrasts them with alternatives comes away thinking they’re the best, whether they’re someone with left-wing or right-wing sympathies or anywhere in between.
The only reason mainstream politics are mainstream is because powerful manipulators pour a tremendous amount of wealth and energy into making them mainstream. If there were actually a “marketplace of ideas” on that front, mainstream politics would die.
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The empire still fears the public. If it didn’t it wouldn’t bother rolling out so much propaganda ahead of all its depraved actions — it would just act. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they’re still afraid of what we’ll do to them if we decide we don’t consent.
Just something I think is worth calling to mind once in a while.
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33 responses to “The Biggest Lie The Hawks Ever Sold: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
The lies have gotten more blatant and absurd since they got away with 9/11.
It’s a lot of work to figure out what’s real and fake anymore and it’s exhausting. But that’s probably their plan.
We’ve been lied to forever. It’s just become more blatant since they got away with 9/11.
“…They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they’re still afraid of what we’ll do to them if we decide we don’t consent.”
….’my’ ‘murcan government and i bet yours and every one else’s doesn’t manufacture [honest] ‘consent’… which would require full knowledge of the actions of ‘our’ ‘government’….it’s more accurate to say they manufacture fraud…
…the f@cking scumbags won’t even release ‘our’ government documents as to what happened to U.$. president jfk 60 years ago!!…never mind any honest info about the absolute scumbaggery ‘our’ government is up to right now….
…tmk, none of us ‘murcans have ever been privy to any honest, transparent audits of the accounts at our [not] federal [no] reserve bank$ter cartel… particularly with respect to who gets to use/direct ‘our’ newly-created money in ‘the first round of spending’….i believe those who control the money, those whose families have controlled the money for a looooong time, etc., ((((LARGELY))))control our lives… they make the rule$… they foist the stinking puppet politicians who dominate our legislatures…they control ‘the dominant microphone$/media’, etc. ad nauseam…..
…and not one public peep….ever… that’s control, fellow slaves!…
Modest proposal: “We* have the BEST policy in the world”, where BEST = bringing evil shit together”.
We = the collective elite of “the West” and allies who get a license to their BEST.
Too much censorship and now there are just lies to be believed. How to make plans about the future if nothing is truth but lies? That would explain how badly the strategy is at this point.
The art of war has been known for thousands of years, yet people and empires act as if the fundamentals have changed.
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The art is this: In any conflict, the parties at war are burning themselves down. Very few volleys are materially changing things for the other side any more than their volleys are screwing your side over. So, you have to burn yourself down slower than the opponent burns themselves down.
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Terrorists inherently know this (“We just have to not lose for a long time”), and that is terrifying to an empire. And the empire lost decisively to the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. Larger powers play more politely, they have a lot to lose and they burn themselves to the ground at an appreciable pace, the way an empire’s worth opponent is supposed to do.
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I cannot yet tell if the US/NATO or Russia is burning themselves down faster in the the war in Ukraine. However, it is clear none of the parties have figured out this ancient secret to the nature of war.
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Jonathan
Sorry, more properly, you have to get them to burn themselves down faster than you are burning yourself down. That’s the art of war. Trying to burn yourself down slower is more Von Clausowitz, which doesn’t really work, and has ruined the Western understanding of conflict.
Suffering doesn’t have to be far around the other side of the world for Americans to ignore it. Suffering can be found sleeping under every bridge in America.
It’s just, as Caitlin frequently points out, that propaganda has successfully blinded Americans to any suffering that is not their own.
Russiagate was a psyop that originated in the evil, arrogant brain of Hillary Clinton, to explain to herself how she could *possibly* have lost the 2016 election, given that she was the PERFECT candidate, and one that everyone would *naturally* want to vote for, given that the Republican candidate was an old friend of hers, if crude and boorish, who would stampede voters into her arms.
… the difference? Killary admitted she lost.
Biden meets with Bonesaw. Is it a coincidence that Biden and Bonesaw are names that start with the letter B? Yes it is. Nuff about that.
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Catlin, What is America to do? We got bills to pay and mouths to feed and there ain’t no rest for the wicked. Americans drive to work. Biden would suck Bonesaw’s cock if he could get gas back down to $4 a gallon. Nobody would complain. Inflation intensifies suffering.
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Nobody would complain. That is the thing. The suffering of others is out of sight and out of mind. Americans work to keep wolves away from their doors. Community is dead. everything is about money. and it is of no benefit to Americans or others to have any interest at all in what happens in the rest of the world. Money decides how everyone thinks.
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Nobody is not nobody, and some would complain of course. Perhaps as much as 15% of the human race would complain. But the thing is nobody would complain. The other 85% who run the world in their imitative way turn into bullies when they don’t get their way. Making the 15% who dream into nobody. The rich, and their politicians are some of the 85%, am minority, but black souls come in many types. The rich and their politicians only have more power than the obedient who follow in their slavish ways.
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Public school taught these lessons but it was not in the curriculum.
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Any suffering is out of sight and out of mind. Most people don’t care. America has no anti-war movement. Bullies run the show. Here, everybody wants more.
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There are people who actually rate presidential performance according to how low gas prices were during their term in office. They see nothing wrong with this. Explaining it is wrong is a waste of breath. These people may seem stupid, but that is what alien philosophies look like. These people want Trump back. There are a lot of them.
Suffering doesn’t have to be far around the other side of the world for Americans to ignore it. Suffering can be found sleeping under every bridge in America.
It’s just, as Caitlin frequently points out, that propaganda has successfully blinded Americans to any suffering that is not their own.
Why are the powers-that-be that control the US going to spend billions over the next few months during the run-up to the November election? The answer is amazingly simple. To make sure that millions of pigeons (voters) will once again peck at either an R or a D, makes absolutely no difference which, when they enter the voting booth. And that is exactly what the vast majority of pigeons will do. Are they (have they in the past been) “free” to do otherwise?
Thank you for that video. It sadly explains much.
We will see in the coming months many journalists being abducted in the middle of the night to never be seem again. Perhaps one or another will have to become political exiles. Because too many having some sort of Assange status is not a good strategy to reelect leaders. The MSM will shape what is and what is not.
It is a common practice to silence divergent voices since America’s colonial past. No one in Europe knew what was going on. After 300 years a bit of info came out but enough to let anyone horrified. Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine. People don’t have a clue about what the “good guys” did and still doing there.
Caitlin is like the AntiGoebbels. Let me suggest a lead graphic around “rotbrained empire mummy”. And “convincing the public that the world’s major powers splitting into two increasingly hostile alliances is probably nothing to worry about” is a tall order. I commonly refer to humanity as hateful monkeys but even people should be concerned about the same bunch who crashed and burned in Afghanistan and Iraq going after Russia and China. It seems like an amoeba would be worried about that.
But it’s distractingly hyperbolic to say “The US is the only nation on earth whose entire economy is built on arms manufacturing”. Yes the US military budget is by any rational standard grotesque, and yes the US is the world’s largest exporter of weapons, and yes American politicians are essentially outright owned by the MIC, but most of the US economy is still nonmilitary. In fact a big part of what keeps militarism going is the myth that it’s necessary for the economy, when it’s actually a drag on it.
The suffering is kept out of sight and out of mind. That is how ‘Omelas’ works.
You hit the nail on the head again, Caitlin. I never stop wondering why Americans think there is a difference between the Democratic Party and the Republicans. If this was true, the US policy would be totally different as soon as one of the parties takes office. The Democratic Party want a war with Russia whereas the Republicans would go to war tomorrow with China or Iran once they are in power. Unlike those in the West, we are not stupid not see that US/NATO alliance atrocities have continued under both parties.
US politics is an English Civil War reenactment followed by a potlatch.
“I never stop wondering why Americans think there is a difference between the Democratic Party and the Republicans.”
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The psychological explanation is the ‘Dunning Kruger Effect’.
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https://www.verywellmind.com/an-overview-of-the-dunning-kruger-effect-4160740
I haven’t heard that any of the mainstream media figures need body guards. Isn’t that amazing?
This war in Ukraine will not continue at its current pace but will escalate over the next year or two. Russia just cut off gas to Germany permanently. This winter will bring acute crisis to the EU. World War 3 is coming in the next year or two. What that looks like is anyones guess. The US is giving long range rockets to Ukraine and they promised not to strike Russian soil. Who believes that.
“Working to bring down Moscow and Beijing …..”? Who wants to destroy these states? The empire isn’t ready yet to rase the Russian and Chinese states. They justify the blood-feast at the table of the hapless Amerikan present and future taxpayer. Too many boon years ahead for the war profiteers’ cartel. In Ukraine, they don’t want to repeat the mistake made in Afghanistan–draining too much blood from Soviet Russia. Just enough the meet Wall Street’s expectations.
The error in your comment, an error somewhat reflected in Caitlin’s post, is that the U.S. and western plutocrats remain in charge of the Ukrainian war and the world in general. We’re so used to this TINA understanding of things that we can’t see or feel the earthquake now occurring. Russia and China are in the process of pulling off a global coup, beginning in Ukraine, which will bring down the West-dominated status quo. Whether that coup takes the world to a better place remains to be seen, but the drastic change in the so-called world order is now a virtual certainty.
There’s two of them and they bounce! The Ukraine war has nothing to do with a coup but is a defensive measure against the threat of Nato’s advance east that the latter could easily have avoided by making Ukraine a buffer-state if they hadn’t wanted to 1/ weaken Russia 2/ sell weapons 3/ possibly secure a pipeline route from Azerbaidjan on the Caspian sea to northern Europe via Georgia on the Black sea (which is why they also want Georgia in Nato).
Russia and China and the other BRICS and SCO countries just want to go about their business (BRI, EAEU, North-South corridors) without asking permission from the self-proclaimed gendarme of the world that turned out to be an abusive wolf in sheep’s clothing. Additionally, they want to use their own currencies because recent history has shown that they can’t trust the West (nor could Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan…) with their funds. The US/UK don’t obey any international UN laws but fly the Jolly Roger, stealing oil in Syria, freezing the belongings of people just because they’re Russian like Abramovich and others, which is highway robbery without the romanticism linked to the presence of a horse-drawn stagecoach…
There comes a time when enough is enough. For three centuries, Barbarossa and his successors’ Barbary pirates did just that in the Mediterranean. At the height of their might in the XVIIth century, in their chief base of Algiers, formally part of the Ottoman Empire but essentially free from Ottoman control, they held as many as 40,000 European slaves captured at sea. The US fought two wars against them in 1801 (allied with Sweden) and 1815, the Brits and the Dutch bombarded Algiers in 1816 and the French eventually colonized the joint in 1830 – which admittedly led to other injustices but it all started with putting the pirates and their extra-territorial overreach out of business and that’s what Russia and China intend to do with criminal US led Nato (ask Julian Assange…) if push comes to shove. Nothing to do with a coup or even an offensive martial posture! The writing on the wall is just “give us a break or else…”
No, Pascal, the Ukraine SMO didn’t start off as a coup but as a defensive measure taken in response to a coup. But when the West went all out to destroy Russia via insane amounts of military aid, blanket sanctions and relentless media “cancellation,” and then those actions boomeranged on the West to the point of threatening the immanent collapse of much of Europe, the Russians and Chinese certainly smelled the blood in the water. Let’s see how aggressive Russia gets in the next few weeks, after having largely decimated the Ukranian army. And there’s not a damn thing the U.S. and NATO and all the western plutocrats put together can do about it. I can hear Russia and China saying in unison, “Cancel this!”
Truer words have never been spoken! It’s a dramatic state of affairs that the very survival of the US economy is based on wars – and therefore lies cuz who wants to tell people that? However let’s face it: they stop killing people 24/7 (with the last budget increase, it’s gonna be 25/7) they plunge into poverty, period. Hunter’s gotta buy his crack in shanty towns and Lindsay his smirks at Walmart. Hence the reaction on both sides of the aisle when the question gets to funding the MIC. It’s like the bell at mass. It rings and both sides get up and start singing the same psalm. No question asked, that’s the way it is, tradition. That’s how the church beat goes on.
Imagine a guy says “Wait a minute here, do we really have to do that? Does this psalm really make sense? Is it adapted to the situation?”
Get the fuck out of here your miscreant commie from the CCP before we tear you limb from limb! Preacher? Add another $20 billion for Ukraine and $20 billion more for Taiwan while you’re at it!”
Preacher: … but the poor and the homeless in our county…
Congregation: Fuck the poor and the homeless! Charity is all very well for decorum like the crib for Christmas. Who wants the crib all year round? Same for charity! You give, you make sure everyone knows you’ve given, call the media, have a telethon, a worldwide campaign against starvation in the Third World with prestigious sponsors like… Who? Yeah Bill Gates, Bezos, Musk, Buffet, Zuck, the whole bunch, until you get your “good guy” (TM) certificate printed on a Stars and Stripe, possibly a few pom pom girls to keep the rhythm going but then you have to go and bomb them motherfuckers cuz we’re talking serious here! Reality! Economy! Dollars! In God we trust! So get these $40 billion out there for Christ’ sake! What? No I’m not taking the name of the Lord in vain! I’m just emphasizing! Do you prefer for fuck sake or f*r f*ck s*ke? Well let’s say for Chr*st’s s*ke and get on with it goddammit!
“And while you’re on the phone, call a couple of think tanks, so they find us a good Christian reason for bombing these bastards back to the Stone Age! If you want to get anything done in this country, you’ve got to do it yourself!”
This is the most hilarious comment I’ve read anywhere!
Caitlin, watch out! Here’s a reader who is giving you a run for your money.
Preacher: … but the poor and the homeless in our county…
Congregation: Fuck the poor and the homeless!
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This is what everyone living in private bubbles does. Cell-phones have intensified the isolation. Everyone not in your device.
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f*ck em
The objective of the propaganda narrative is to mislead anyone that is being propagandised in making them believe the desired outcome of the propagandist to imprint a mindset in the intended target of the propaganda victims for example the horizontal view of politics as either being left or right is a manifestation of propaganda in the tradition of creation vs evolution when in fact politics is vertical the aristocracy being up and the slaves being down but the slaves will blame each other and aristocracy reaps the hereditary reward of generational privilege as for creation vs evolution it was the vatican and pope gregory in 1540 that invented the word propaganda and created the propaganda academy or vide so the priests and missionaries would learn to seek out and target non hierarchy around the globe and making the victim cultures submissive to the aristocratic planetary order supported by the church which is a branch of aristocracy there is no left or right its just aristocracy vs the slaves just up down
If the situation was hopeless then the propaganda would not be necessary
No. Its hopeless. Propaganda is like having the band play on the Titanic as it sinks.
Caitlin; I can understand why your husband loves you. You bring sanity to his life, or perhaps he does to you. Regardless you are both fortunate to have one another.