The US Empire Will Be Defeated By The US Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article:
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Empire managers: Putin invaded Ukraine!
Public: Oh no! What should we do about it?
Empire managers: Greatly increase military spending, work to weaken Russia, and censor dissenting opinions.
Public: Wait, aren’t those things you’ve always wanted to do anyway?
Empire managers: Hush.
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Russian propaganda poses a much smaller threat to the western world than the various government agendas that are being rolled out under the justification of fighting Russian propaganda.
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Fuel prices are soaring in part because of an economic war the US empire willfully initiated in response to a proxy war the US empire deliberately provoked and westerners are being trained to look at their shrinking bank accounts and yell "Damn you, Putin!"
Only by massive amounts of propaganda would people consent to unprecedented acts of economic warfare which directly hurt them and benefit them in no way shape or form.
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As the world slides closer to nuclear war it would be cool if Americans could take a break from a debate about gun laws that will with absolute certainty lead nowhere and seriously discuss whether they want their government waging a rapidly escalating proxy war against Russia.
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The spectrum of acceptable debate on US foreign policy ranges from (A) war hawks who insist the US has never done anything wrong to (B) "progressives" who say the US is basically a good faith actor who just makes well-intentioned oopsie poopsie mistakes but should still definitely keep arming Ukraine. Position (B) is the furthest you're allowed to go away from "the US never does anything wrong" in mainstream discourse. It includes Bernie Sanders' foreign policy advisor, who smears and dismisses leftists who say the US is acting in a malignant way in Ukraine.
No voice at all is ever given to the (in my opinion correct) position that the US is a tyrannical regime whose immense body count is explained not by accidents but by the desire to dominate the world at any cost. The elimination of this position from the debate is by design.
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Sure noble wars can be fought in theory and have been fought in practice. It's just that you've got swamp water for brains if you believe that's what the US is doing.
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Never attribute to conspiracy what can be adequately explained by the inevitable corruption and tyranny of status quo capitalism.
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Whatever ends up collapsing the US empire is far less likely to come from Russia or China than from the US empire itself.
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A big part of the western nervousness about China revolves around the fact that we're about to be surpassed by an ancient civilization of non-white people who are indigenous to their land and have never been truly conquered and colonized by Europeans.
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If you don't respect the way China has been able to pull so many of its people out of extreme poverty, and don't get why such actions would cause such unified support for their government, it's simply because you lack an adequate understanding of the anguish of extreme poverty.
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I've met some cute kids in my time but nobody's as adorable as westerners who talk about Chinese people being propagandized.
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The Chinese government exerts a lot of power over its population, but it also takes responsibility for the way it uses that power. The USA's rulers exert a comparable amount of power over its population, but they never take any responsibility for what they do with it.
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Can't believe Mohammed bin Salman is sullying Saudi Arabia's name by meeting with the president of the United States.
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Putin should try staging a few mass beheadings and dismembering a Washington Post reporter with a bone saw to get on America's good side.
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Many empire apologists aren't actually defending the empire, they're just defending against the suggestion that everything they believe about their nation, their media, their government and their world, is a lie.
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The most impressive feat of engineering this century has been of the ‘social’ variety: funneling mainstream political attention into agendas which don't inconvenience the powerful in the information age where the ravages of capitalism and imperialism are right there to be seen in plain sight.
The social engineering necessary to keep politically inclined people fixated on agendas that either won't lead anywhere or which trouble the powerful in no way, even as we entered an unprecedented age of information access, is one of the most awe-inspiring human achievements in history.
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only by massive amounts of propaganda would any sane person allow the government to force them to be injected with an experimental vaccine...with NO double blind placebo testing...and produced by known felons driven by pure greed....
"I've met some cute kids in my time but nobody's as adorable as westerners who talk about Chinese people being propagandized," ... without being the least bit aware of any of the horrific things Western Nations, in particular the USA, did to China over the last two centuries.
Princeton and Yale built a huge part of their endowments on Opium sales in China protected by US Marines, and that's one of the nicer things.