Call It The Department Of Aggression, Not 'Defense': Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Most of what consumes human attention is narrative; stories about what's happening, which can be easily manipulated by the powerful. Things that are not narrative include weapons, troops, and resources. You can punch through the narrative distortion by just watching where the weapons, troops and resources go.
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If you believe the mainstream narrative about any US-targeted nation you will wind up on the wrong side of debates about that nation. This is because the US empire is the single most corrupt and murderous institution on earth and its power is held in place by lies and propaganda.
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It's so obnoxious how the empire destroys entire countries and sows chaos, destruction and poverty around the world and the only mainstream pushback we ever see against any part of this is opposition to the arrival of immigrants who are fleeing that devastation.
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Hey remember when it was confirmed that the CIA still plots assassinations of journalists, with a known plan drawn out in 2017 against Julian Assange, and then nothing whatsoever was done about this horrifying fact?
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I still routinely run into people online who think Assange's extradition case is about the 2016 WikiLeaks publications. It's probably believed by a majority of politically active liberals, even though the news media never actually told them this. Gaslight people enough about reality and eventually they'll start gaslighting themselves.
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It's silly to call the US war machine the Department of Defense. The US military doesn't do "defense", it does nonstop unprovoked aggression around the world. Defense is what the nations who resist US acts of aggression against them are doing.
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Propaganda targets government policymakers as much as the general public. Policymakers get most of their information about the world not from secret briefings but from mainstream news reporting and its various amplifiers within their circles. That's why so-called free democracies get to claim they don't have domestic propaganda: because the official elected governments aren't the ones distributing that propaganda, and are in fact often its targets. The distributors of propaganda are unaccountable power structures who nobody gets to vote for.
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All US elections are fraudulent on the national level. None of them ever permit real opposition. It's a one-party system controlled by plutocratic and military institutions fraudulently disguised as democracy. Shut the fuck up about Latin American elections.
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Western civilization is so free and democratic that its rulers allow regular elections to determine which of their puppets will represent them and advance their interests going forward.
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The sensible position is to focus on criticizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth, which is indisputably the USA. That is the real conversation. It is those who try to divert that discussion to criticism of other governments who are guilty of "whataboutism".
"The US is indisputably far more murderous than China and our criticisms should reflect this."
"You're doing a whataboutism!"
"No, you are. Stop trying to divert the conversation from criticisms of the most powerful and destructive government with whataboutisms about China."
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The political/media class spent years hammering a Russia scandal that was obviously bogus from the beginning and is being proven so more and more as time passes, and this same class still has the gall to act outraged that people distrust it about Covid. They caused that distrust.
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All you need to know about Russiagate is that it began with unsubstantiated claims made by the US intelligence cartel and ended in cold war escalations against a nation long targeted by the US intelligence cartel. All the rest was just unethical political and media opportunism.
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It's very revealing how many of those "Vote Democrat for damage reduction and then fight the power with direct action" lefties always do the voting Democrat part but never the direct action part.
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Socialists who promote imperialist narratives are like that guy who got unplugged from the Matrix and then agreed to betray his comrades in exchange for being plugged back in.
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Anti-imperialism sorts out the real ones from the phonies because you can gain a massive following and lots of cred in leftist circles championing economic justice and opposing police abuse while tacitly supporting western imperialist foreign policy, but the reverse isn't true. You can get amazingly far in left punditry by being basically a garden variety shitlib plus the occasional "defund the police"-type remark, but you can't get far in left circles by just talking about foreign without also talking about domestic policy, so if they do you know it's not about building a brand.
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"We must eliminate white supremacy," said the political and economic institutions whose entire existence is built on the murder and exploitation of darker-skinned populations in the Global South.
Shitlib institutions give mountains of lip service to disadvantaged groups to distract from their refusal to ever cede any ground to the left on capitalism or imperialism, which is funny because both of those things are disproportionately destructive to disadvantaged populations.
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I'd have a little more sympathy for my fellow Americans if the God-damned propaganda wasn't so freaking obvious. It's like everyone's swooning over a third grade production of Hamlet. Really? This is all it takes?
It's like the curtain gets pulled back revealing the Wizard of Oz and Dorothy and rest see it, but just go right on talking to the apparition, leading the Wizard to think, "I'm right to fool these people; their brains are on the order of turnips. Good thing I'm here to guide them, or it would all devolve into chaos. Seems I'm the real good guy here." This is diabolical but not necessarily wrong, as far as phoney Wizards go.
Our friends across the pond would call this a piss-take, and after Caitlin's article was the most honest thing I could come up with, desolate as it leaves us.
How do you manage always to keep your mind so clear?