There should be a compendium page on the Internet to post screenshots of every instance of big-profile platform censorship of a dissenting view on an issue. Then readers can figure out for themselves how much of it lacks even the most tenuous justification.
The more success and momentum our anti-empire cause creates, the more propaganda and censorship will be thrown at us. A desperate enemy is dangerous!
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it feels like things are coming to a head. We need to push back against every attempt to silence us! Thanks Caitlin!
I’d like to think things are going to change but to believe this you aren’t paying attention to what others believe. My friends and family think I’m lost in a conspiracy world. They read the MSM and get sucked in by the smooth writing. When I point them to articles that debunk the NYT or WSJor WaPo they refuse to read them.
Have you read Professor Mattias Desmet's work on Mass Formation Psychosis? It helped me understand how blatantly obvious truths are easily dismissed by friends and family.
$20 on Kindle is outside my book budget right now, but I've had others recommend it to me so I need to read it. The reviews give me an idea of the content and it would certainly shed some light on deep state. The current CIA-CNN propaganda machine just launched another "Your neighbor might be colluding with Putin" campaign. The MSM has become a stenographer for the CIA. Fortunately, the clumsy campaigns only manage to influence the truly brainwashed. Our job is to push back against the lies - relentlessly. Understanding Mass Formation Psychosis will show how to awaken the hordes of Zombies!
"To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall."
Josef Goebbels Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin
Having read most of Goebbel's speeches over time and based on the audience, the location as he states and the theme, they are often all very different even on the same subject, I thought that someone in the Biden entourage may have also copied such writings to tailor their propaganda and communication efforts. But I seriously doubt who could even understand the often 'not-so-subtle' messages by Goebbels in his prime, contained therein.
Pompeo? Bolton? (Just joking)
Let's not forget H. Clinton. Hard to beat this one......"we came, we saw, he died".
Her role at the time, US Secretary of State. Yes. Hard to believe. US Secretary of State.
A US benchmark. if ever there was one. ,
Communicating, US-style, is much better practised in places like Abu Ghraib, (tortured prisoners) for 20 years in Guantanamo Bay (political prisoners) and with the largest US bombardment ever in Cambodia and Laos, (still killing today). We won’t mention sanctions, 500,000 dead children in Iraq,) assassinations by drones, depleted uranium weaponry and as far back as Korea and Vietnam, napalm.
Now Ukraine by proxy. On the horizon, Taiwan, by proxy again.
Every country except Israel, a possible target.
What a history. The likes of Goebbels and his ilk, saints by comparison.
I've always liked Clinton's quote about how the military coup in Honduras was "restoring the democratic order", it pretty clearly showed what their opinion of "democracy" was.
I would have thought that the way they all ages ago bipartisanly embraced the fascist ideology embedded in, let alone the overt language of, “Homeland security” was the clue.
It doesn't have to. Other people can take her insights and fashion them for distribution around their own circles. I think that's kind of the bigger point of Caitlin's work.
They don't have to. If they fracture the liars' bloc along lines not of its own choosing, they're winning. If they're discrediting the idea of nobility, that's winning. If they're making space to desecrate the nobility, that's also winning. The idea that everything has to be a battle royale with winners and losers is Greek idiocy.
Forced only in the sense that there is nothing else, so they believe it. They are told that North Korea is the best country in the world. Surely they like hearing that. Maybe every country is like this.
In the 1970s a Soviet general told Canadian writer Farley Mowat, "The difference between Soviet propaganda and American propaganda is that no one believes ours."
The point about warmongering vs racism isn't quite right.
In fact most of the biggest warmongers ARE the worst racists and xenophobes. It is that racism and xenophobia ("American Eceptionalism") that underlies the US huge military spending and constant military and economic warfare towards destruction of other countries. People like Nuland and Blinken they view the rest of the world as mere cockroaches to be crushed.
In the Middle East if you look at Israel that's the same factor.
So no it's not either or. The biggest warmongers are the worst racists
In fact, racism is the foundation of nazism and all further derivations. First, one has to vilify, demonize, and dehumanize some other people and then the rest follows.
The most recent is Russiagate and all prior "poisonings", "doping" etc. One of the biggest critiques of Russia is not aggressively fighting all that at the appropriate times. They just let it slide. And it accumulated.
They may not have much room to avoid it. Graeber, from his essay on manners:
"This leads to my second point: that any attempt to create a genuinely egalitarian ethos on the basis of principles of formal deference is ultimately impossible. There is a fundamental contradiction here. The logic of setting an abstract being apart necessarily involves setting it off against something; in practice, that always seems to mean creating a residual category of people—if not some racial or ethnic category, then workers, the poor, losers in the economic game— that are seen as chaotic, corporeal, animalistic, dangerous. By this logic, for instance, North American racism is not the great exception to the possessive individualism on which the country is founded— an anomaly for some reason never seems to go away— but something essential to its nature."
Russians, at least, know when not to play stupid games for stupid prizes. This isn't the sissy-ass slap fight on the Agon. This is and was a war.
It is not to score some points with somebody or make records in some world registry. It's to prevent wars at their worst. As the current one in Ukraine was very much preventable had Russia not been asleep.
This is also why I keep underlining that it is dangerous to keep following this framing promoted in the media that there is a "west", with by implication a dangerous uncivilised jungle in the rest of the world.
That foundational racism - and the exploitation and war it seeks to justify - Its the entire foundation of the colonial and neocolonial projects that underly our current economic systems.
When people buy into the concept of the "west" , they are perpetuating the hatred that fuels and funds the perpetual war machine.
It follows that the citizens - or denizens - of countries that are doing poorly will be propagandized,
especially in countries like the US where myths of success and superiority are prominent. When myths don't coincide with facts, propaganda moves in as rationale: yes, we would be, should be doing well, were it not for Chinese/Russian messing in our affairs. Were it not for socialists/communists, malcontents and trouble-makers.
#10 is priceless. Anyone who takes disagreement personally should accept we are all capable of being wrong about everything. It’s why I pay to read the things you write that I often disagree with and yet upon reflection occasionally see the value and truth in your viewpoint. Love your passion for expressing what you believe in.
In my personal opinion, the mainstream left represents nothing. They don't focus on their platform, hell, their platform really has no basis like "healing the soul of America". They superficially represent concepts such as racism, sexism, or LGBT rights. Yet as you mentioned when there is a call to act, they quickly share their true colors. This was clear when they basically said better luck next time to women losing basic bodily autonomy. "We don't have enough votes to bother codifying Roe V.Wade" Literally, they just gave up. Or the insults to the African American populace who opposed Biden during his 2020 campaign. You know because he is racist. lol He actually is.
The propaganda against China and Russia feeds off the idea that they are our enemies. They aren't, how much business do we do with China? If you actual know any Chinese people, they are well...people...Obviously, there isn't any real hostility from them. Russians aren't full of hate towards the United States, people forget that even if what we hear about a country's government is true, it ignores the populace. Strange, we Americans hear a lot about World War 2 and how Germany was really bad...today...We love Germany. Why? Our government says to. Also strange is how one day we can love France, hate them the next, then ignore them. It is whatever our empire says at the time.
At the end of your day you really hit the nail on the head. Being racist is bad, being a warmonger is worse. There is no reason to be at war with China or Russia, neither is mounting a direct attack on the US, hell, neither attacked a member of NATO lol. Yet somehow they are the aggressor towards us? I hate neither China or Russia, or any other country. I recognize they are filled with human beings good and bad. Some times(most often) the bad ones are in leadership. The US is filled with those.
>their platform really has no basis like "healing the soul of America".
They don't use that same bombastic language, but they're thinking it in a different, less New Agey way. As the Professional-Managerial Class, they have suffered the ordeal of advanced education, demonstrated their ability to stay fast to their truth, and thus have "earned" the right to reform everything and everyone. It's really just the expansion of capitalist accumulation into social and symbolic relations, a kind of Deist ideology merged with Puritan praxis.
"International relations" is exactly a Cave of Shadows.
The Democrats seem to be the ones who try to hold ownership over their minority groups that they know what's best for them. I think their advanced education has brought them a more standardized approach as you don't see intellectual diversity among Democrats, in my opinion. Rather like a corporate heirarchy that possesses a rigid structure.
"It's really just the expansion of capitalist accumulation into social and symbolic relations, a kind of Deist ideology merged with Puritan praxis."
11. Depend on your classic liberal Democrat friends to set your centrist border, in other words to define for you what is definitively not actually leftist philosophy, but rather a contrived status quo charade to deflect and disarm you. Remembering that (#10), "they’re commenting on their own inner conditioning," sadly.
States that are doing well, as in the socialist state of Kerala, have no need of propaganda. By definition, a state that is doing well has little disparity in income- certainly not the wild sort we have in the West .Unlike us, these states use wealth for the common good.
So true! Because faux alternate views, "two sides of an issue" are presented on corporate media, most Americans aren't aware of all the information, ideas and views that are being excluded.
True. Most are ignorant (by design), some are rightfully angry (Trump supporters) and a few look at the spectacle with awe and trepidation (me). Interesting times.
I was restricted for 30 days on facebook one year ago for stating my opinion that "Americans believe a lot of propaganda "
There should be a compendium page on the Internet to post screenshots of every instance of big-profile platform censorship of a dissenting view on an issue. Then readers can figure out for themselves how much of it lacks even the most tenuous justification.
Badge of honor
How long before I am censored or banned for stating that the USA doesn't have free speech?
Wow.
Try having an opposing opinion on Reddit
The more success and momentum our anti-empire cause creates, the more propaganda and censorship will be thrown at us. A desperate enemy is dangerous!
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it feels like things are coming to a head. We need to push back against every attempt to silence us! Thanks Caitlin!
I’d like to think things are going to change but to believe this you aren’t paying attention to what others believe. My friends and family think I’m lost in a conspiracy world. They read the MSM and get sucked in by the smooth writing. When I point them to articles that debunk the NYT or WSJor WaPo they refuse to read them.
Have you read Professor Mattias Desmet's work on Mass Formation Psychosis? It helped me understand how blatantly obvious truths are easily dismissed by friends and family.
I’ll look for it if you will look for Aaron Good “American Exception”
$20 on Kindle is outside my book budget right now, but I've had others recommend it to me so I need to read it. The reviews give me an idea of the content and it would certainly shed some light on deep state. The current CIA-CNN propaganda machine just launched another "Your neighbor might be colluding with Putin" campaign. The MSM has become a stenographer for the CIA. Fortunately, the clumsy campaigns only manage to influence the truly brainwashed. Our job is to push back against the lies - relentlessly. Understanding Mass Formation Psychosis will show how to awaken the hordes of Zombies!
Deal!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDAi0NdlN8hNArLl765PXe8tsTKmOciGL
That American soft power encompasses the globe should tell you about the reach and breadth of American propaganda.
Also the level of it. It's appealing to the lowest instincts of the human animal.
"To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall."
Josef Goebbels Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin
Having read most of Goebbel's speeches over time and based on the audience, the location as he states and the theme, they are often all very different even on the same subject, I thought that someone in the Biden entourage may have also copied such writings to tailor their propaganda and communication efforts. But I seriously doubt who could even understand the often 'not-so-subtle' messages by Goebbels in his prime, contained therein.
Pompeo? Bolton? (Just joking)
Let's not forget H. Clinton. Hard to beat this one......"we came, we saw, he died".
Her role at the time, US Secretary of State. Yes. Hard to believe. US Secretary of State.
A US benchmark. if ever there was one. ,
Communicating, US-style, is much better practised in places like Abu Ghraib, (tortured prisoners) for 20 years in Guantanamo Bay (political prisoners) and with the largest US bombardment ever in Cambodia and Laos, (still killing today). We won’t mention sanctions, 500,000 dead children in Iraq,) assassinations by drones, depleted uranium weaponry and as far back as Korea and Vietnam, napalm.
Now Ukraine by proxy. On the horizon, Taiwan, by proxy again.
Every country except Israel, a possible target.
What a history. The likes of Goebbels and his ilk, saints by comparison.
I've always liked Clinton's quote about how the military coup in Honduras was "restoring the democratic order", it pretty clearly showed what their opinion of "democracy" was.
I would have thought that the way they all ages ago bipartisanly embraced the fascist ideology embedded in, let alone the overt language of, “Homeland security” was the clue.
And this is why the Caitlin's blog will never spread widely.
It doesn't have to. Other people can take her insights and fashion them for distribution around their own circles. I think that's kind of the bigger point of Caitlin's work.
All those combined circles will not match the one Goebbels was talking about. That's my point.
They don't have to. If they fracture the liars' bloc along lines not of its own choosing, they're winning. If they're discrediting the idea of nobility, that's winning. If they're making space to desecrate the nobility, that's also winning. The idea that everything has to be a battle royale with winners and losers is Greek idiocy.
In North Korea, people are forced to accept propaganda. In the US, half the population willingly absorbs it.
Forced only in the sense that there is nothing else, so they believe it. They are told that North Korea is the best country in the world. Surely they like hearing that. Maybe every country is like this.
Try to separate church and state, and you end up with civic religion every time.
Nope.
There are lots of other ideas and dialogue in that country. The majority CHOOSE to live in the distortion bubble.
In the 1970s a Soviet general told Canadian writer Farley Mowat, "The difference between Soviet propaganda and American propaganda is that no one believes ours."
The point about warmongering vs racism isn't quite right.
In fact most of the biggest warmongers ARE the worst racists and xenophobes. It is that racism and xenophobia ("American Eceptionalism") that underlies the US huge military spending and constant military and economic warfare towards destruction of other countries. People like Nuland and Blinken they view the rest of the world as mere cockroaches to be crushed.
In the Middle East if you look at Israel that's the same factor.
So no it's not either or. The biggest warmongers are the worst racists
In fact, racism is the foundation of nazism and all further derivations. First, one has to vilify, demonize, and dehumanize some other people and then the rest follows.
The most recent is Russiagate and all prior "poisonings", "doping" etc. One of the biggest critiques of Russia is not aggressively fighting all that at the appropriate times. They just let it slide. And it accumulated.
China should not be making the same mistake.
They may not have much room to avoid it. Graeber, from his essay on manners:
"This leads to my second point: that any attempt to create a genuinely egalitarian ethos on the basis of principles of formal deference is ultimately impossible. There is a fundamental contradiction here. The logic of setting an abstract being apart necessarily involves setting it off against something; in practice, that always seems to mean creating a residual category of people—if not some racial or ethnic category, then workers, the poor, losers in the economic game— that are seen as chaotic, corporeal, animalistic, dangerous. By this logic, for instance, North American racism is not the great exception to the possessive individualism on which the country is founded— an anomaly for some reason never seems to go away— but something essential to its nature."
Russians, at least, know when not to play stupid games for stupid prizes. This isn't the sissy-ass slap fight on the Agon. This is and was a war.
It is not to score some points with somebody or make records in some world registry. It's to prevent wars at their worst. As the current one in Ukraine was very much preventable had Russia not been asleep.
Conversely the word racist is used to vilify, demonize and dehumanize
This is also why I keep underlining that it is dangerous to keep following this framing promoted in the media that there is a "west", with by implication a dangerous uncivilised jungle in the rest of the world.
That foundational racism - and the exploitation and war it seeks to justify - Its the entire foundation of the colonial and neocolonial projects that underly our current economic systems.
When people buy into the concept of the "west" , they are perpetuating the hatred that fuels and funds the perpetual war machine.
KILL YOUR TV, STOP CONSUMING POISON.
I’ve been to China many times (and would love to go back) and I can confirme that what you’re saying here is perfectly true.
Thank you Caitlin🙏
It follows that the citizens - or denizens - of countries that are doing poorly will be propagandized,
especially in countries like the US where myths of success and superiority are prominent. When myths don't coincide with facts, propaganda moves in as rationale: yes, we would be, should be doing well, were it not for Chinese/Russian messing in our affairs. Were it not for socialists/communists, malcontents and trouble-makers.
Wards(?) of countries doing well will be propagandized too, lest they try to claim a share of the gains instead of "sacrificing" for their bosses.
#10 is priceless. Anyone who takes disagreement personally should accept we are all capable of being wrong about everything. It’s why I pay to read the things you write that I often disagree with and yet upon reflection occasionally see the value and truth in your viewpoint. Love your passion for expressing what you believe in.
I was wondering why she never responds to my comments but does to everyone else, even people that make the nastiest remarks. I went insane over here 😤
In my personal opinion, the mainstream left represents nothing. They don't focus on their platform, hell, their platform really has no basis like "healing the soul of America". They superficially represent concepts such as racism, sexism, or LGBT rights. Yet as you mentioned when there is a call to act, they quickly share their true colors. This was clear when they basically said better luck next time to women losing basic bodily autonomy. "We don't have enough votes to bother codifying Roe V.Wade" Literally, they just gave up. Or the insults to the African American populace who opposed Biden during his 2020 campaign. You know because he is racist. lol He actually is.
The propaganda against China and Russia feeds off the idea that they are our enemies. They aren't, how much business do we do with China? If you actual know any Chinese people, they are well...people...Obviously, there isn't any real hostility from them. Russians aren't full of hate towards the United States, people forget that even if what we hear about a country's government is true, it ignores the populace. Strange, we Americans hear a lot about World War 2 and how Germany was really bad...today...We love Germany. Why? Our government says to. Also strange is how one day we can love France, hate them the next, then ignore them. It is whatever our empire says at the time.
At the end of your day you really hit the nail on the head. Being racist is bad, being a warmonger is worse. There is no reason to be at war with China or Russia, neither is mounting a direct attack on the US, hell, neither attacked a member of NATO lol. Yet somehow they are the aggressor towards us? I hate neither China or Russia, or any other country. I recognize they are filled with human beings good and bad. Some times(most often) the bad ones are in leadership. The US is filled with those.
And the U.S. actually attacked a NATO country: Germany. It blew up the Nordstream pipeline.
Yes, Kaitlin addressed that in earlier writing and the most interesting this is that despite it being obvious, no one said anything.
We attacked Iraq with many terrorist during 9/11 having Saudi passports?
The United States is not a country, it is merely a global mafia.
>their platform really has no basis like "healing the soul of America".
They don't use that same bombastic language, but they're thinking it in a different, less New Agey way. As the Professional-Managerial Class, they have suffered the ordeal of advanced education, demonstrated their ability to stay fast to their truth, and thus have "earned" the right to reform everything and everyone. It's really just the expansion of capitalist accumulation into social and symbolic relations, a kind of Deist ideology merged with Puritan praxis.
"International relations" is exactly a Cave of Shadows.
I was referring to this, one of their branches. https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/healing-the-soul-of-america/#:~:text=Healing%20the%20soul%20of%20America%20means%20facing%20up%20to%20the,ambitious%20measures%20to%20fix%20them.
The Democrats seem to be the ones who try to hold ownership over their minority groups that they know what's best for them. I think their advanced education has brought them a more standardized approach as you don't see intellectual diversity among Democrats, in my opinion. Rather like a corporate heirarchy that possesses a rigid structure.
"It's really just the expansion of capitalist accumulation into social and symbolic relations, a kind of Deist ideology merged with Puritan praxis."
I think you really summed it up here.
"
Every time I hear "Latinx" I think, there go another thousand votes. The Ds don't seem to care about that.
It seems you are not alone in that, Patrick...not by a long shot.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/06/hispanic-voters-latinx-term-523776
11. Depend on your classic liberal Democrat friends to set your centrist border, in other words to define for you what is definitively not actually leftist philosophy, but rather a contrived status quo charade to deflect and disarm you. Remembering that (#10), "they’re commenting on their own inner conditioning," sadly.
States that are doing well, as in the socialist state of Kerala, have no need of propaganda. By definition, a state that is doing well has little disparity in income- certainly not the wild sort we have in the West .Unlike us, these states use wealth for the common good.
So true! Because faux alternate views, "two sides of an issue" are presented on corporate media, most Americans aren't aware of all the information, ideas and views that are being excluded.
Two-sided competition is a religious sacrament in the Western heritage.
Indeed. 🙄
Not all Americans are propagandized.
Cat: I agree. I am really tired of all Americans being treated like Boobus americanus.
True. Most are ignorant (by design), some are rightfully angry (Trump supporters) and a few look at the spectacle with awe and trepidation (me). Interesting times.
" Being a warmonger is worse than being a racist. " This is so true.