The US War Machine Is Just A Rich Man's Mafia: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article:
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If you "vote out fascism" and then the president you voted for turns out to have the same effective policies as the previous administration, it's time to start asking who the fascists actually are.
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Hoo you've done it now, CIA. You are in trouble. It was all good fun when you were doing fine normal stuff like toppling governments and running torture programs and assassinating people, but collecting bulk data on Americans?? You better prepare for some accountability, mister!
And the next time you suggest the CIA might be up to something nefarious, you'll still get called a crazy conspiracy theorist.
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"Abolish the CIA" is almost too weak a position for an agency that should never have been made in the first place and should have been dismantled in the fucking nineteen sixties.
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The US war machine is just a rich man's mafia.
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It's not about Joe Rogan. It's not about Covid misinformation. It's not about QAnon, Russian trolls, domestic extremists or election security. It's about ruling power structures needing to normalize and expand the regulation of online speech to protect consent for the status quo.
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A liberal is someone who yells all day about far right truckers and far right Joe Rogan and then applauds when their president gives weapons to literal Nazis.
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Very excited to find out whether "The US intelligence community says Putin has decided to invade Ukraine any minute now" is the kind of psyop that's just designed to ramp up cold war hysteria or the kind of psyop that's designed to prime us for US proxy war aggressions.
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The PR black eye the US empire sustained from the Iraq invasion ensured that it will greatly preference using proxy forces over US troops wherever possible. Middle Eastern jihadists, Latin American reactionaries, and Ukrainian Nazis all make very good proxy forces for the empire.
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A lot of confusion about Russia and Ukraine could be easily avoided if English language news media would end the appallingly unethical practice of printing unsubstantiated assertions by opaque intelligence agencies and presenting it as a "scoop".
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The burden of proof is always on the party making the claim. It's so weird how everyone will apply this standard to things like internet forum arguments and high school debates but not to immensely consequential claims by the most powerful institutions on the planet who have a well-documented history of lying.
Make a claim that could result in winning a Twitter argument and you'll immediately be asked for proof. Make a claim that could result in thousands of deaths and it will be reported as fact by The New York Times.
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So to recap:
Nation stationing troops inside its own borders = hostile aggressor.
Nation circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, waging nonstop wars, working to destroy any nation which disobeys it, pushing nuclear brinkmanship = just normal democracy freedom stuff.
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Those who called you crazy for warning that cold war escalations could lead to hot war will be the first to tell you when hot war approaches that it is unavoidable and must be supported.
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Is there any doubt that the same propaganda machine which convinced half the US political spectrum that the highest levels of their government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin could convince the public that a proxy war started by US/NATO/Ukraine was actually started by Russia?
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News media reporters and editors are just as culpable for the mass murders committed by the US military and its proxies as the troops who fire the weapons and the generals who give the orders. And military personnel who kill people in unjust wars are exactly as culpable for those crimes as any other murderer.
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People who say China is as evil as the US simply haven't learned enough or thought honestly enough about the evils of the US.
China is better than the US. That's not because China is flawless, it's because the US spending the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions and working to destroy any nation who disobeys it makes it quantifiably worse than literally anyone else.
China is a surveillance state. The US empire is a surveillance state that also kills millions of people in wars of aggression.
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Rightists need to invent fairy tales about evil elites ushering in a Marxist dystopia because they are ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility that the evil elites are already getting their every wish fulfilled by our mundane, boring capitalist dystopia.
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Dissolution of the state in today's world just means instant absorption into the US-centralized power structure. As long as the US empire is what it is and does what it does, states are necessary and criticisms of their existence are childish nonsense based on immature analysis.
If China, North Korea, Venezuela or any other empire-targeted nation became an ideal stateless, classless, moneyless civilization it would instantaneously be absorbed by the empire. This self-evident fact invalidates all purist arguments against those governments. If your worldview does not account for the fact that there is a globe-spanning power structure working to absorb and subjugate all populations, you do not have a reality-based worldview. The empire is the very first obstacle to any leftward movement toward health in this world.
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The status quo is held in place by psychological compartmentalization. It's held in place by propaganda and brute force, naturally, but it's also equally propped up by the basic human tendency to avoid sincerely engaging with information that threatens to destroy our worldview.
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The most egregious gargantuan chunk of hypocrisy of all time has just played out and it shouldn’t go unnoticed. The American MSM has seized on the obscure Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai ( not ranked in the top 200 ) and brayed nonstop about her disappearance. Her quick reappearance was accompanied by disappointment so bloated that it almost evoked sympathy for those poor thwarted media. She had had an affair with a senior Chinese official. Big f’ing deal. As if America did not have the highest divorce rate in the world. And elects pussy grabbers and Free Willy.
But that is baby potato minor league hypocrisy. WaPo recently has published perhaps 50 stories on or mentioning Peng , loaded with scurrilous innuendo. Meanwhile results from America’s own investigations revealed that ~20,000 female soldiers in their Armed Forces were raped last year by one or more of their colleagues. No stories about that. Of course they weren’t rape rapes, the women were all lying, or they consented to their rape. Which will it be, or all of them? Even though their own investigators accepted them, and considered the ubiquitous underreporting. And the career consequences of reporting have been documented to be often near fatal. Spinning this to make it a poster theme for Army recruiters will be a challenge.
The US has created a new 4H club. Hypocrisy, Humbuggery, Hubris and Horseshxx.
I can't keep up. I was told how truckers were heroes keeping vital supplies moving during a deadly pandemic only to find they're actually a bunch of right wing racists I need to fear. I'm so glad we have a state-supporting corporate media to keep things straight.
I'm also glad you mentioned the responsibility of the troops. Once you voluntarily join an organization you become partly responsible for the actions of that organization. The just following orders line went out of fashion in the 1940s.
Caitlin hit a series of points that needed to be made with this one. One of your best.