40 Comments
Dec 13, 2021Liked by Caitlin Johnstone

It's really astonishing how much Western media is just propaganda bullshit. This is especially embarrassing coming from the supposedly left Guardian.

Expand full comment
author

That "left" reputation is exactly what makes the Guardian so uniquely destructive.

Expand full comment

The Guardian has been carry water for Zionism for a long time; my go-to litmus test. If they can't get this simple bit of injustice right, what hope for reliability elsewhere can they offer?

Expand full comment

One metric of a nation's veracity is the quality and quantity of its propaganda. Judge America and its vassals accordingly.

If Israel can have nuclear fucking submarines, China can have whatever weapons systems they damn well want.

Keeping the name of Jullian Assange alive anytime one of these effete bluebloods pinches out one of their dishonest screeds strikes me as an entirely appropriate way to keep things in perspective.

As Caitlin noted, stopping a war and raising the military budget ( a la Trump/Biden) means no one is really stopping the war; only shifting the battlefield.

All wars begin with advertising.

Expand full comment

"Shifting the battlefield," is what scares a lot of us, we get the crazy idea, they're laughing at us? What's likely to happen as Delta gets it's teeny green butt whupped by Omicron; but one's mucosal, one's hijacking PASC ravaged immune systems; NOTHING closes-down & all of us figure out everything we believe is BS indoctrination (that we're powerless to resist: eviction, wage theft, usurious debt and subjugation, we'd formerly ignored?)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=210&v=XUfmo80kAxI&feature=youtu.be

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-10-09/review-the-five-stages-of-collapse-by-dmitry-orlov/

https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/12/6/22821677/nyc-de-blasio-withheld-covid-neighborhood-death-data

Expand full comment

FWIW: posting a bunch of links without any explanation of what they are about is a sure way of being ignored. I dunno, maybe someone followed it -- not me.

Expand full comment

And so you do the same thing! Amazing. Can't you consolidate all this into a coherent position that the "rest of us" might consider your argument? Have you no original thought at all? Are you just an AI spamming us? Or are you just too lazy to put together an argument for your position?

Expand full comment

Roughly two dozen of us, in the US CONSTANTLY cited Ms Johnstone's superb articles on nascent "lefty" blogs (along with others) to facilitate her getting stuff aggregated, FOLLOWING our post. Hopefully astute, but ALWAYS pertinent, apropos our rant?

Expand full comment

The last time Chinese forces were in combat was 1979, admittedly, in support of the loathsome Khmer Rouge (which was also supported off and on by the United States).

Compare with the track record of the United States since 1979.

Expand full comment

I'm surprised this wasn't George Monbiot, who still takes the Guardian coin, but hasn't lent one word of support to Assange.

Expand full comment

Tisdall accidentally lets the truth slip - the fact that China's economic power is starting to surpass the US is alarming to the existing hegemonic cartel, and the true cause of the desperate saber-rattling. One note: by all accounts, China's attempt at cultural annihilation in Tibet would qualify as oppression/subjugation.

Expand full comment

The US funded the separatist movement in Tibet as part of the US long term plan to encircle China. The Dalai Lama became a puppet/hostage of the US by accepting money from the CIA in the 1950's. https://youtu.be/Z-zWnuMKKIE

Expand full comment

Monopoly media CAN only see competition to be CRUSHED (at taxpayer expense; using our kids to murder, indenture, rob or enslave folks). Japanese Imperialists were valued trade partners; until we'd seen them as a THREAT over our subjugation of Chinese, Philippines, Malaysian... "protectorates?"

Expand full comment

The Roderic Day reference was very good. His article is quite long but very informative.

Expand full comment

Good article. I look forward to you writing about COVID19 government tyranny, including in your own country.

Expand full comment
author

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/?s=covid

led me to your article: "How To Actually Effectively Cope With Your Covid-19 Anxiety"

While some might criticize it for its "new age tone", I appreciated the internal exploration you were advocating and the mix of the mind with the physical. It brought up recollections of a great massage (which is so much more than just being "rubbed down") and how I was able (after decades of failure) to realign my back through that concentration of what is happening in your body that you wrote about. (FWIW: a stretch that took at least an hour with concentration on each new pain that was revealed until finally a "freight train" started up (Ka-chunk, Ka-chunk, Ka-chunk) and my disk popped back into place.)

I found these words of wisdom:

"I think the virus is a real thing, and also our fear will be used by ourselves and others to manipulate us."

This is so true. When being lied to about something (like COVID) People want to deny that "thing" rather than perceive how that "thing" is being used to manipulate them. Once that thought is in place, "It is all a giant conspiracy.", we've descended into our own "Rabbit Hole" of Aphonia that Snowden wrote about. This phenomena is why the Anti-Vaxxers and the Pro-Vaxxers are so vocal (and let's throw in some Ivermectin) -- both sides are "right" to a certain degree.

Pretty much, you wandered so far and wide one should have gotten lost. Maybe you should become a "shrink".

Expand full comment

Nailed it... and the sickening display of the Lib/Lab duopoly falling over itself to play lapdog Deputy Sheriff in the Taiwan Straits

Expand full comment

Imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism for a reason. It was literally the end of the line for capitalism, meaning it could go no further on its own. Socialism was thought by some to organically grow out of imperial states and transnational monopolies. Others saw the need for a worldwide class war to force the transition that would never happen on its own. Socialism, in order to be effective, has to reconstitute the imperial stage of capitalism. The dictatorship of the proletariat must be infinitely more imperialist than the dictatorship of capitalists. If not, we're doomed, and socialism wasn't what we thought it was. For clarification:

https://beforethedawn.substack.com/p/imperialism-after-history

https://beforethedawn.substack.com/p/socialism-and-capitalism

Expand full comment

Thank you very much, Caitlin -- I also have a completely different question:

In all of these Covid-19 death statistics there is still a HUGE elephant in a room:

-- China has nearly four (4) time larger population than our beloved country, the US.

-- China reportedly had less than 10,000 virus deaths. We have so far about 700,000 deaths.

If these numbers are even remotely correct, we have almost 600 times higher mortality.

Are we a failed country with incompetence and massive corruption at every level of society? What is happening to us? Who we really are?

China's reported Covid-19 deaths numbers are usually dismissed as "fake" - without any convincing analysis. Here is one attempt by experts, however. Since I am NOT an expert, any competent review of the report below? Many thanks in advance.

The misunderstood—and misrepresented—Zero COVID policy in China --- 13 December 2021

This analysis of China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been submitted as a contribution to the WSWS Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic. The WSWS is respecting a request that the author’s identity not be publicly disclosed.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/13/chin-d13.html?utm_term=china-covid-policy-13-09-2021&utm_medium=email&utm_source=allnewsletters&utm_campaign=allnewsletters

Expand full comment

Idiotic propagandists, at least Murdoch was clever bastard. Imaging the state and media hadn't treated Assange so fucking badly and just released him , they might have stood a chance of convincing the rest of us they have our best interests at heart. Whatever the MSM says cannot be trusted even a little bit. I think the majority now see this clear as day. The least among us (the thickest but most corrupt) rose to power and it is now destroying civilisation. Long may it continue.

Expand full comment

To be clear. : I don't mean let it destroy actual civilisation, I mean their idea of it. We don't have civilisation yet. Out of the ashes and all that...

Expand full comment

Yeah, but it'll be our ashes, not theirs.

Expand full comment

GCHQ PRESS RELEASE

Expand full comment

Always the blindered Sinophile, gleefully hyperbolic and solidly anti everything American, you fail to acknowledge that China's economic expansionism is committing ecocide on the planet just as decisively as the USA's militaristic expansionism. Not to mention the oppression of the Muslim Uighurs. Though I won't deny that your evaluation of Biden's intentions to be accurate; by increasing the war toys industry's budget, he is just shifting the battlefields and he's writing new oil and gas leases in environmentally sensitive areas.

All the governments of the world are owned by the war toys industry and their co-dependent fossil fuel and mineral extraction industries. China's imperialist oligarchs have never really expanded much beyond their own borders, but they have always built a "silk road" to manipulate foreign powers economically. Beaten back into their own borders pretty decisively in the late 19th and early 20th century by the "F-UK-US" alliance that now includes the Zionist occupiers in Palestine and Wahhabist despots in Saudia Arabia, the 21st Century Silk Road has pretty much toppled America's dominance as a trading partner in most of the rest of the world, wisely investing in infrastructure over weaponry and expensive projections of force in multiple theaters.

Unfortunately, their technology and ways of inhabiting the world are just as unsustainable as ours and they tend to commit genocide against other cultures living within their borders, creating their own version of the complacent wage slave. They have to install nets around factories to keep workers from killing themselves jumping out of windows. They probably should legalize cannabis. American wage slaves are happier than ever.

As the song said, nobody can be right when everybody is wrong. The imposition of will on others without their consent is wrong and mankind has been doing it all wrong since they decided to start growing their own food and building cities, thousands of years ago. In all those thousands of years, little has changed for the warmongering sex fiends who take charge besides the sophistication of population management methodology and the efficacy of the implements of mass murder.

Otherwise, the world is cantonized into church/state fiefdoms in constant competition for the domination of the world's supply chains and there have only been a few dozen families in control of the logistics of resource utilization and distribution the whole time. The bloody footprints of Great Pirate families (Buckminster Fuller. Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth) such as Borgia, DeMedici, Guggenheim, DeBeers, Morgan and Rothschild are plain as day in Post-Columbian historical records. The only reason the NWO cartel has never been able to solidify their hegemony is because there's too much infighting for the top spot, yet the Rothschild's own the central banks in over a 100 countries. They're present in China too, but the party owns the central bank.

Fuller mistakenly theorized that the Great Pirates went extinct with the American and French revolutions and the rise of the so-called constitutional democratic republic, but they really just morphed into billionaire CEOs and megachurch pastors, manipulating everything from behind the curtain. It really seems like the only thing that's going to convince these greedy, stupid people is for us to eat one or two of them in a live stream. The rest of them will no doubt get in line and put their money into projects building everything back green from Main Street up, rather than Wall Street down. I vote for Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Bezos is the only one who is actually self made and the idea for Amazon was actually his ex-wife's. The rest come from old money and Gates is a perfect example of a genocidal psychopath from a long line of genocidal psychopath bourgeoisie who originated in central England, were among the early Massachusetts Bay Colony colonizers and were leaders of the western expansion and genocide of the original people of the Pacific Northwest.

Up until 245 years ago and the Industrial Revolution spearheaded by the American oil and steel magnates, fulfilling their Manifest Destiny, Mother Nature was able to pretty much heal herself without too much fuss from the scars of warfare and the monoculture of humans, their plants and animals on cemented over wetlands, plowed under grasslands, clear cut forests and dredged from the ocean floor. In that time, human industry has modified over three quarters of the planet's surface and caused the extinction of two thirds of it's flora and fauna. An ecosystem's stability, in terms of resilience to extreme weather, tectonic and volcanic events, is proportional to it's diversity.

We are the only species on the planet that sells resources to each other and commit mass murder to protect their sources. Predator capitalists, of both the American style and the Chinese oligarchs calling themselves communists have become an invasive species threatening the entire biosphere, We cannot kill the planet before it will kill us. The tornados in the Midwest this week were just a harbinger of things to come. The people of every developed nation need to stand up and demand a global cease fire and immediate greening of everything. More important than reducing emissions, we need to make huge efforts to restore indigenous biodiversity to our residential centers and agricultural lands or Mother Nature will do it for us, as we witnessed in Kentucky last week.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/US-China-Trade-War-Shareable.jpg

Expand full comment
author

Only in the most propaganda-addled of minds does opposing the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive government on earth look like "Sinophilia" and "anti everything American". Nothing I said here was the slightest bit hyperbolic. Stopped reading there. Your entire worldview is born of sloppy thinking and bad media consumption habits.

Expand full comment

You may not see your words as hyperbolic, but others might and your response is the irrational ad hominem insult of an intellectually dishonest opinionated extremist who is extremely rigid in her thinking. At least I have the intellectual integrity to read every world of your rants, Madame Colonizer in Denial and actually address your premises, not your competence to make the assertions.

Expand full comment

"intellectual integrity" should mean being able to state a position and defend it coherently -- not just repeating disparate, disconnected facts and opinions that have no relationship to one another other than in your mind.

Perhaps you have a point -- what is it?

Expand full comment

I fail to see why we should classify Caitlin's condemnation of the current American-led global empire as either "gleefully hyperbolic" or her writings as solidly "anti everything American."

Her comments focus mainly on the shit America pulls, and since this draws from what constitutes a vast and seemingly limitless steaming pile of source material, one may be forgiven for assuming that Caitlin is indeed anti everything American as you state, but this is simply not the case. I've never heard her say one bad thing about Breaking Bad, for example, and her article condemning the Muppets has yet to be written. Perhaps Walter White or The Cookie Monster never publishing an article in the Atlantic ginning up a nuclear war with China or Russia might have something to do with that.

People once upon a time called me anti-American because I refused to participate in or condone our war on Vietnam, so I remain aware of the abject uselessness of the term when I see the tired old epithet being hurled, even today.

Expand full comment
User was indefinitely suspended for this comment. Show
Expand full comment

If you aren't interested in participating in the conversation, please don't. Riff gave you some great advice.

Expand full comment

My best advice is to continue reading her blog without comment.

Expand full comment

Great piece, I would suggest Simon Tisdall read Caitlin. I don’t think he is lying, conscious of what he is doing. I don’t think of his position as manipulation. I think he is fully indoctrinated in this stuff and he is telling his truth.

Expand full comment

I'm not sure what we should take away from your assertion that we're being marched to war by true believers and not deceivers. They want us to march in any case.

Expand full comment

That’s a good conclusion I agree with you.

Expand full comment

I think it might be interesting to have an analysis of how these people (I refer to Tisdall and his kind) all manage to get on the same page at once. Of course there is no overt coercion (I assume) or even transmission; the answers would probably have to be sought in their own perhaps unguarded testimony, their biographies and their circumstances, their eagerness to please their masters by anticipating their masters' desires. Although in Tisdall's case their does seem to be a more direct attachment -- how else to explain his astounding blindness to the hundreds of American military bases circling the world, or its numerous interventions, especially military interventions, in foreign countries?

Expand full comment

You comment made me think of Manufacturing Consent where Chomsky noted that no one needs to stand behind Brian Williams with a gun; anyone in his position has already proven time and again that no gun is necessary. I assume the same holds with cucks like Tisdall. Whether these slugs are self-deluded or true believers matters to me not at all.

Expand full comment

It might matter if you wanted to change, or at least subvert their opinions, and the opinions of those who take them seriously. I understand Dr. Chomsky's point, but I'm after the details in the hope that I can weaken or destroy the operation.

Expand full comment