To add to Caitlin's cite of Michael Parenti's observation that what is not reported and reiterated endlessly in the media - does not exist, is, as she observes, the fact that what much of what is reported is also excluded from day to day reality, as though it never happened. We select or base our cognition of reality, as the ace propaganda expert, Freuds's nephew Edward Bernays discovered, on what the authorities say it is. The US can kill a million people in Iraq, almost without notice and certainly without any great and lasting uproar in the halls of power, when they present no existential risk whatever except in the minds of the extreme paranoid. But the same power brokers are ready to see atrocity in the actions of Russia even as it faces a real existential threat in a US, NATO dominated West and affiliated shaping of the domestic and foreign policy of Ukraine, a country it borders. It is a magic curtain over the mind of the West, a magician's act with tricks and magic wands to cancel adversaries by the application of ridiculous numbers of sanctions, prohibitions and denunciations. But, as economics have noted, these fools seem to have forgotten that the world these days is almost totally integrated in neoliberal, globalist policy. The manufacture of almost all complex items is a team effort- many countries are intimately involved. If too many economies are crippled, the whole edifice could come to a standstill. That is the kind of effect no amount of propaganda, semantic maneuver, or sleight of mind can adequately cover-over or misrepresent.
To add to Caitlin's cite of Michael Parenti's observation that what is not reported and reiterated endlessly in the media - does not exist, is, as she observes, the fact that what much of what is reported is also excluded from day to day reality, as though it never happened. We select or base our cognition of reality, as the ace propaganda expert, Freuds's nephew Edward Bernays discovered, on what the authorities say it is. The US can kill a million people in Iraq, almost without notice and certainly without any great and lasting uproar in the halls of power, when they present no existential risk whatever except in the minds of the extreme paranoid. But the same power brokers are ready to see atrocity in the actions of Russia even as it faces a real existential threat in a US, NATO dominated West and affiliated shaping of the domestic and foreign policy of Ukraine, a country it borders. It is a magic curtain over the mind of the West, a magician's act with tricks and magic wands to cancel adversaries by the application of ridiculous numbers of sanctions, prohibitions and denunciations. But, as economics have noted, these fools seem to have forgotten that the world these days is almost totally integrated in neoliberal, globalist policy. The manufacture of almost all complex items is a team effort- many countries are intimately involved. If too many economies are crippled, the whole edifice could come to a standstill. That is the kind of effect no amount of propaganda, semantic maneuver, or sleight of mind can adequately cover-over or misrepresent.