I used to say, "At least the Russians know Pravda (which means "truth" in Russian) is bullshit, so they either seek out the samizdat, or they use what they know to read between the lines of Pravda to guess what's really happening."
Well, some "samizdat" was also a bunch of bullshit.
What's interesting is that what Pravda etc said about the West was true. That became obvious in the 1990s and onward. But because it lied about the internal situation which everyone could ascertain, the attitude automatically applied.
One could argue that in the West since the local info from those same news corps is usually true or can be reasoned about in a predictable way - the populace automatically believes everything the media tells it about the world. Which is mostly lies, blatantly so.
Russian people have always been aware of government propaganda, but they have a fatalistic attitude toward it. That's pretty much how I feel now about all the US government bullshit, and I think the general population is headed toward adopting the same attitude. When lies become too great to swallow, it is inevitable.
As a child of the sixties, I and our family, were heavily involved in anti war and anti nuclear bomb demos in Sth Aust.. As you correctly point out, there is no movement. I think there is a SA branch of Anti Nukes but it's got a low profile.
On US gov doing nasty things to their own, there's the Tuskegee incident, the Hanford nuclear release, just to see where the winds take it, and our facourite, releasing LSD into the subway for a few off the top of my head.
In SA we had the atom bomb tests which they failed to inform the local indigenous population they were going to do. I've spoken with Bobby Brown born nearby and even though he was a baby at the time, he remembers the black cloud that blotted out the sun and the sickness that followed after for many. He died last year and would have been the same age as me at 69ish. He did say to me that he thought it may shorten his life. And, yes, he was a stolen child bought up in Koolunga in the states mid north.
I was involved in the Nuclear Freeze movement in '84. There was more respect for American human rights then (or just plain human rights) - than there is now.
Probably one reason you're not seeing people in the streets is everyone saw what the American militarized gestapo police did to the Occupy Wallstreet protests, not to mention a young women getting her arm blown off from a grenade thrown by privatized police at the Dakota pipeline protest (while Obama and Democrats did jack shit about it). The corporate motherfuckers running the country now, are not only brutalizing protestors, but also arresting journalists. So ... there's that.
Not saying there wasn't some of that a few decades of go. Of course there was. But another problem is we now have a (much wider) surveillance state, where one arrest can ruin your job security for the rest of your life. And you will likely be harrassed and arrested at every subsequent protest you might want to participate in. Not to mention doxxed on social media and constant harrassment /surveillance by the American gestapo deep state.
So you end up having to make a choice of sacrificing everything, possibly even your life, for some ideology that yes, is moral and correct. But that's a huge step not everyone is willing to take.
Additionally, I have seen were as they did with WikiLeaks they are seizing bank accounts and of course PayPal has done some of this too. While this is not yet commonplace, they are doing so much criminal activity right out in the open this will certainly become a standard procedure to stop people like us.
Yesterday's Redacted has an interview with an activist trying to arrange help to Syrian people suffering from the earthquake. They discuss all these fucking western platforms blocking all means of trying to do that. What else can describe that but pure evil.
This is so hopeful and by the way for what it is worth I had already sent a message to my reps here for this very request! I asked them to start investigating Biden and I thought since they are all republicans well!
I figure if we can at the very least get these fucking warmongering democrats administration into a battle that hopefully ends in impeachment they will have to get their feet off the gas pedal of their war machine!
Yes - the authoritarian state has tightened its grip. I remember when they first anounced the Homeland Defense Dept. - for me, at the time, it sounded like something right out of the German Stasi "Fatherland" security state. Many Americans now are also poorer - given wealth inequality has reached incredible levels. Who would have believed a few decades ago so many Americans would be falling into food insecurity? And with poverty comes more desperation and dependency on those who are in authoritative power.
That is so true. I just this morning saw an ad that Google adds to their searches stating that Social Security is going to run out of funds a year earlier than expected! Since this affects me it is really a scary thing to see. I would never have believed as a child that I would be alive to see the horrible place that this country has been put in.
Just look at the state of American health care in the US compared to all other major countries. Meanwhile, you have a sitting (Democrat) president ordering train workers not to strike for decent working/safety conditions and sick leave - that use to be a given a few decades ago for American workers like myself.
We really now are in a dystopia one only used to read about in SciFi novels, or George Orwell. I mean, Jesus, everytime Joe Biden opens his mouth at some media event - it's like listening to a geriatric demented hospice care patient. The guy is not ALL THERE. And he's the spokesman for the country. The Leader. It's a shit show.
I always chuckle when I see reference to former East Germany's Stasi as if some ultimate repression and surveillance organization. Perfect example of the western propaganda success.
Sure. It's becoming easier to get through to the Westerners regarding those points in light of everything that's going on. Previously it was hopeless. Still is for quite a few.
I had an opportunity to hear an activist who had been arrested for pouring animal blood on ballistic missile fuselages. He was a part of the Swords into Plowshares group begun by Daniel Berrigan. That fellow was looking at an 18-year prison sentence for his protest.
Americans”know” their country is democratic and benign and humane. I am reminded of a quote attributed to the boxer Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth...”. Americans will learn the error of their baseless opinions when their world is rocked, when their dream home is in ashes, when their money can buy nothing, when their biggest fear is their armed neighbors. When reality smacks America in the mouth, it may be the boot of LE on the neck, or very possibly a toxic air that burns the skin and leaves no survivors.
I am getting the sense that some parts of the collective mind are coming unstuck. But it's always brightest before the total solar eclipse, or something like that.
"The worst thing about Australia is America. All of the most destructive and dangerous things our country has done in recent decades, and all the most destructive and dangerous things it continues to do, have been the result of our role in the US-centralized empire". Caitlin
The Anti-Vax debate has been very successfully used by the Elites & their deep state douche bags to split the Left. What else is new?
It's good though to see many Americans getting together (Jimmy Dore, Dennis Kucinich, Tulsi Gabbard, Ron Paul, Roger Waters, Chris Hedges, Max Blumenthal, etc.) are putting their differences aside in order to hopefully spark more resistance to the horrific militarism that has taken over the world right now - putting us all on the brink of a nuclear holocaust.
ps: Screw Code Pink and their douche baggery. I haven't trusted that org since Benjamin pushed for Biden among other soft-pedaling garbage. The org is not legit.
pss: The Rage against the Machine Anti-War event is this Sunday, February 19th.
Somehow I don't think the USA had anything to do with the "Rabbit-proof Fence". But how to put that on a scale of atrocities, I'm not really sure.
I do agree that the USA has a very evil influence on Australia. Whether or not removing that influence will make Australia a "better place" really depends on one's definition of "better place".
"The biggest problem with the western anti-war movement is that there is no western anti-war movement."
Well, one of the reasons so many people try to analyze the anti-war, atni-imperialism movement, or the lack thereof, is that they agree with that statement and wonder what can be done about it.
Let me suggest that maybe the analysis, the questioning, has not gone deep enough. The violence of our rulers and their institutions, the support they get from the people, must grow out of daily life, because it obviously does not fall upon us from Mars.
Start from wherever you are, and work from there. To ask why there isn't an effective anti-war movement, you must question why you aren't participating in one, or why the one you are participating in isn't effective. People's answers will be locally different but will cohere later. Keep asking, keep pushing, consult the evidence. Try to explain yourself to yourself. If there is hope, it lies in us, not in cursing out opponents. We have already wasted enough time on that.
Unfortunately, this is not quite true. The PR industry (which stands for Public Relations--or PRopaganda) discovered in their days of working for the tobacco industry, more than half a century ago, that you don't have to convince the public a lie is true. All you have to do is "manufacture doubt." If people aren't sure whether cigarettes cause cancer or not ("I saw this article that said a top scientists says it isn't true..."), or whether climate change is real or not, or who's lying about Ukraine, they do nothing. And that's all the toxic industries need, to go merrily on their way of making money from death. What's happened in the US this century is that the "culture wars", a real thing that's been roiling around since the Sixties, have been heavily amplified until we have a hot angry division between two camps. It's said that this is result of the media finding a niche where each outlet feeds its audience what it wants to hear, including emotional triggers, because this is what gets clicks and clicks are what brings the money in. No doubt true, but it's also awfully convenient for the ruling class, at a time of inequality so stark that in the past it brought on the pitchforks and guillotines. There is great anger but people are training their guns on each other instead of the ruling class. It's hard for me to believe the ruling class just got lucky; I think they worked to amplify this division. They've got all the psychosocial experts they need, and free access to media outlets of every sort from the New York Times to Qanon.
Yes, and what do you think Caitlin is saying when she writes "We can fight this by working to *exacerbate public distrust* in the institutions that manufacture our consent"?
I think perhaps you misunderstand. All a powerful industry has to do to avoid government taking actions on the people's behalf is render the situation unclear, so that people who aren't sure whether tobacco really causes cancer, or secondhand smoke or pesticides are really harmful, or climate change is real or caused by humans, will do nothing. The PR company doesn't have to persuade the public that the threat is false--just make it unclear. Increasing distrust of corporate media is a necessary step toward liberation but it doesn't help people figure out what to do, or unite them--without unity we can't accomplish much which is why, I think, the PTB have invaded "fringe" media to ensure it's neatly divided into two warring camps.
Unity is a religious construct and a liberal shibboleth. It is a prayer for the total subordination of all mankind to an imagined or more likely projected subjectivity that, like all such things, is puppeteered by a relatively small number of humans. (What would Jesus do? As lawyers say, it depends.) Unity as a norm serves these subjectivities and their particular interests more than it serves humans as a species or as living specimens. Only under Unity in subordination can such hostile, fragile subjectivities as joint stock corporations persist and govern action, i.e. exercise "power". In calling for unity, you're not trying to eliminate the conditions that cause the problem, but merely attempting to capture and discipline the problem under color of reform or redemption to an arbitrary standard, as if they were moral agent-subjects. If that tack had real effects that served the subjective interests of participants, it would exhibit them far more reliably than it does.
This is in contrast to other, intersubjective phenomena such as alignment, consensus, and concurrence, which require no grand drama or self-alienation and yet produce powerful effects. Who's trying to impose grand purity dramas on the Rage Against the War? I'm not currently standing in Washington listening to speeches, but so far it doesn't appear to be the Mises Caucus or the People's Party, rather, it is the legacy owners and inheritors of the monopoly on moral property who collect moral rents from their expropriation of moral capital and stand to lose their moral income streams in case they are deposed. Despite the possibility that they too are seeking to capture the machine to prove they can drive it in better style, I've come to a position of critical support for the event.
Since this myth of unified action is unachievable, since mythical ideals tend to unify people in acceptance of permanently unfavorable conditions, since network effects are exponential, and since general strikes are far more illegal than demonstrations, I agreewith Caitlin that it is more important and effective to undermine the conditions under which people could be unified against their own autonomous (but common) interests, than to try to run exhausted competitive challenges on inherently disadvantageous terrain.
Nice to run into someone who believes as strongly as I do that ‘unity’ is never what we aspire to: unity of purpose perhaps, but an acceptance that there will always be disagreement and differences and dislikes within any healthy movement or community or association. I first noticed that the call for ‘unity’ did not make sense back in my days as a young Muslim more than 20 years ago. Wow! Feeling my years, writing that!
I think there’s dogma we can stomach and dogma we oppose. If we teach children from early on that their professed religion is a dogma, that anti-communism is a dogma, that xenophobia can be a dogma, maybe we pay more attention to what we say we actually believe, and opt for reticence over emotional acceptance. Peer pressure may be the most insidious, effective means of getting people to believe emotionally, without reflection or thought.
Consider this--The Vietnam peace movement, if it had a theme, was John Lenon's, "All we are saying is give peace a chance." Now, having coopted the language of war into our fiber so deep our "activism" calls us to be warriors as we "rage against the war machine." Just as America cannot kill its way to peace, the peaceable cannot rage their way to peace. If MLK taught us anything it was the central theme love must play. "Lift up your voice and sing till earth and heaven ring!"
With mass media suppression we have widespread ignorance of truth. Widespread refusal to accept it, of course, would likely follow for most -- but not all.
Propaganda is based on confused ideas about belief, what it means, and how it operates in the human mind. There are many lies so sacrosanct that the fact they are lies, fables or fiction, simply doesn't matter: they cannot be debunked, even if they are basically nasty. It's a strange fact about humans and human experience. And that's the problem. We "knowingly" -whatever that amounts to - make up stuff, and then believe in it. But one positive function of suffering is that it tends to bring you down to earth. Except of course for the sadists and masochists- who actually enjoy it. But that isn't "most people," who just want to bring up a family, enjoy a football game and a beer. And people who prefer thinking, art, intellectual games, etc.. Not that the groups don't overlap. So we can expect some pushback when all this lands or - crashes. Because there is a limit, and it has to do with beer, food, kids, and various types of games. Take that away at your peril.
Have you ever been in a situation reported on by news media? They usually get at least some details wrong. But it's true that US media lies much more blatantly about non-US topics.
Absolutely! Another so-called "conspiracy theory" proven correct. We all knew the US was behind this. Another factor is that the US may have pushed the release of this information in an attempt to push Russia into WWIII to cover up its involvement in the Ukraine biolabs and money laundering (see Clandestine's substack and Twitter posts). To believe that the US is not capable of such an evil is so naïve as to be laughable (no, if you believe that, you deserve to be ridiculed, for YOU are part of the problem).
We are living in an eternal denial about our gov, wrongdoing, because we just hear, read, and watch what the government wants we know. Western mainstream media corporation parrot what the mogul of the press order to print and say. We have been told lies since pre-K until that are shaping our reasoning.
“All our world's troubles are ultimately due to propaganda; people only consent to status quo systems which hurt their interests because their consent is manufactured via propaganda. And that propaganda only works because of public trust in the messengers.”
Trouble is, as humans turn away from belief systems that once comfort and were trusted, they quickly seek alternatives. Sometimes they find what fills that space are simply cults peddling different propaganda. Which they come to believe and trust with equal vehemence. We’re all looking for community, hope and meaning. And sometimes that’s on offer though totally unhinged from reality. 😢
"Propaganda only works if people don't know it's happening — if they don't think of its source as untrustworthy."
An old joke: a Russian and an American are on a airline flight from Moscow to Washington. The American asks the Russian what he does for a living.
The Russian answers "I work for the government."
"Why are you traveling to the United States, then?"
"I want to study American propaganda techniques."
The American responds, a smug look on his face "oh, but there is no propaganda in America!"
"Exactly!" the Russian replies.
People in the Soviet Union also thought that they were the freest in the world.
"People in the Soviet Union also thought that they were the freest in the world." - well, no.
I used to say, "At least the Russians know Pravda (which means "truth" in Russian) is bullshit, so they either seek out the samizdat, or they use what they know to read between the lines of Pravda to guess what's really happening."
Well, some "samizdat" was also a bunch of bullshit.
What's interesting is that what Pravda etc said about the West was true. That became obvious in the 1990s and onward. But because it lied about the internal situation which everyone could ascertain, the attitude automatically applied.
One could argue that in the West since the local info from those same news corps is usually true or can be reasoned about in a predictable way - the populace automatically believes everything the media tells it about the world. Which is mostly lies, blatantly so.
Russian people have always been aware of government propaganda, but they have a fatalistic attitude toward it. That's pretty much how I feel now about all the US government bullshit, and I think the general population is headed toward adopting the same attitude. When lies become too great to swallow, it is inevitable.
As a child of the sixties, I and our family, were heavily involved in anti war and anti nuclear bomb demos in Sth Aust.. As you correctly point out, there is no movement. I think there is a SA branch of Anti Nukes but it's got a low profile.
On US gov doing nasty things to their own, there's the Tuskegee incident, the Hanford nuclear release, just to see where the winds take it, and our facourite, releasing LSD into the subway for a few off the top of my head.
In SA we had the atom bomb tests which they failed to inform the local indigenous population they were going to do. I've spoken with Bobby Brown born nearby and even though he was a baby at the time, he remembers the black cloud that blotted out the sun and the sickness that followed after for many. He died last year and would have been the same age as me at 69ish. He did say to me that he thought it may shorten his life. And, yes, he was a stolen child bought up in Koolunga in the states mid north.
I was involved in the Nuclear Freeze movement in '84. There was more respect for American human rights then (or just plain human rights) - than there is now.
Probably one reason you're not seeing people in the streets is everyone saw what the American militarized gestapo police did to the Occupy Wallstreet protests, not to mention a young women getting her arm blown off from a grenade thrown by privatized police at the Dakota pipeline protest (while Obama and Democrats did jack shit about it). The corporate motherfuckers running the country now, are not only brutalizing protestors, but also arresting journalists. So ... there's that.
Not saying there wasn't some of that a few decades of go. Of course there was. But another problem is we now have a (much wider) surveillance state, where one arrest can ruin your job security for the rest of your life. And you will likely be harrassed and arrested at every subsequent protest you might want to participate in. Not to mention doxxed on social media and constant harrassment /surveillance by the American gestapo deep state.
So you end up having to make a choice of sacrificing everything, possibly even your life, for some ideology that yes, is moral and correct. But that's a huge step not everyone is willing to take.
Additionally, I have seen were as they did with WikiLeaks they are seizing bank accounts and of course PayPal has done some of this too. While this is not yet commonplace, they are doing so much criminal activity right out in the open this will certainly become a standard procedure to stop people like us.
Yesterday's Redacted has an interview with an activist trying to arrange help to Syrian people suffering from the earthquake. They discuss all these fucking western platforms blocking all means of trying to do that. What else can describe that but pure evil.
Starting at 1:38:45 here:
https://rumble.com/v29snu0-this-is-war-bidens-nord-stream-attack-back-fires-as-putin-demands-un-meetin.html
This is so hopeful and by the way for what it is worth I had already sent a message to my reps here for this very request! I asked them to start investigating Biden and I thought since they are all republicans well!
I figure if we can at the very least get these fucking warmongering democrats administration into a battle that hopefully ends in impeachment they will have to get their feet off the gas pedal of their war machine!
Yes - the authoritarian state has tightened its grip. I remember when they first anounced the Homeland Defense Dept. - for me, at the time, it sounded like something right out of the German Stasi "Fatherland" security state. Many Americans now are also poorer - given wealth inequality has reached incredible levels. Who would have believed a few decades ago so many Americans would be falling into food insecurity? And with poverty comes more desperation and dependency on those who are in authoritative power.
That is so true. I just this morning saw an ad that Google adds to their searches stating that Social Security is going to run out of funds a year earlier than expected! Since this affects me it is really a scary thing to see. I would never have believed as a child that I would be alive to see the horrible place that this country has been put in.
Just look at the state of American health care in the US compared to all other major countries. Meanwhile, you have a sitting (Democrat) president ordering train workers not to strike for decent working/safety conditions and sick leave - that use to be a given a few decades ago for American workers like myself.
We really now are in a dystopia one only used to read about in SciFi novels, or George Orwell. I mean, Jesus, everytime Joe Biden opens his mouth at some media event - it's like listening to a geriatric demented hospice care patient. The guy is not ALL THERE. And he's the spokesman for the country. The Leader. It's a shit show.
Exactly. It really could be a Saturday Night skit if it wasn't so pathetic.
I always chuckle when I see reference to former East Germany's Stasi as if some ultimate repression and surveillance organization. Perfect example of the western propaganda success.
Well at the time that's what I thought. I have been just as much a victim of American propaganda as anyone else. I'm no hero.
Sure. It's becoming easier to get through to the Westerners regarding those points in light of everything that's going on. Previously it was hopeless. Still is for quite a few.
I had an opportunity to hear an activist who had been arrested for pouring animal blood on ballistic missile fuselages. He was a part of the Swords into Plowshares group begun by Daniel Berrigan. That fellow was looking at an 18-year prison sentence for his protest.
Was it David Suter who actually left the US and headed to Sth America after revealing some of the underground bases too? Ecuador maybe?
I was just told I cannot share this post because people have reported it as abusive. Caitlin, you must be doing your job.
What could be more abusive than suggesting we ought to find a way to avoid total incineration?
Who told you this?
Americans”know” their country is democratic and benign and humane. I am reminded of a quote attributed to the boxer Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth...”. Americans will learn the error of their baseless opinions when their world is rocked, when their dream home is in ashes, when their money can buy nothing, when their biggest fear is their armed neighbors. When reality smacks America in the mouth, it may be the boot of LE on the neck, or very possibly a toxic air that burns the skin and leaves no survivors.
What’s LE? (Ne) Liberal Economics?
Law Enforcement
I sincerely hope we can free the collective mind. It’s our only chance.
I am getting the sense that some parts of the collective mind are coming unstuck. But it's always brightest before the total solar eclipse, or something like that.
Actually it is always darkest...
Pink Floyd line. "Us and them... them ...them.... them ....them...."
Man, did I use to listen to Pink Floyd all the time - in college. Amazing music.
"The worst thing about Australia is America. All of the most destructive and dangerous things our country has done in recent decades, and all the most destructive and dangerous things it continues to do, have been the result of our role in the US-centralized empire". Caitlin
It is time to end this one-sided arrangement
Actually Australia led the way with tyrannical COVID lockdowns, so there’s that.
CDC Data confirms COVID Vaccination knocks up to 24 years off a Man’s life, and Australia's quackcination rate is > 90%!!
https://expose-news.com/2023/02/08/cdc-confirm-c19-vaccine-knocks-24years-off-mans-life/
The worst is yet to come to NSW - Australia.
The Anti-Vax debate has been very successfully used by the Elites & their deep state douche bags to split the Left. What else is new?
It's good though to see many Americans getting together (Jimmy Dore, Dennis Kucinich, Tulsi Gabbard, Ron Paul, Roger Waters, Chris Hedges, Max Blumenthal, etc.) are putting their differences aside in order to hopefully spark more resistance to the horrific militarism that has taken over the world right now - putting us all on the brink of a nuclear holocaust.
ps: Screw Code Pink and their douche baggery. I haven't trusted that org since Benjamin pushed for Biden among other soft-pedaling garbage. The org is not legit.
pss: The Rage against the Machine Anti-War event is this Sunday, February 19th.
Somehow I don't think the USA had anything to do with the "Rabbit-proof Fence". But how to put that on a scale of atrocities, I'm not really sure.
I do agree that the USA has a very evil influence on Australia. Whether or not removing that influence will make Australia a "better place" really depends on one's definition of "better place".
"The biggest problem with the western anti-war movement is that there is no western anti-war movement."
Well, one of the reasons so many people try to analyze the anti-war, atni-imperialism movement, or the lack thereof, is that they agree with that statement and wonder what can be done about it.
Let me suggest that maybe the analysis, the questioning, has not gone deep enough. The violence of our rulers and their institutions, the support they get from the people, must grow out of daily life, because it obviously does not fall upon us from Mars.
Start from wherever you are, and work from there. To ask why there isn't an effective anti-war movement, you must question why you aren't participating in one, or why the one you are participating in isn't effective. People's answers will be locally different but will cohere later. Keep asking, keep pushing, consult the evidence. Try to explain yourself to yourself. If there is hope, it lies in us, not in cursing out opponents. We have already wasted enough time on that.
Unfortunately, this is not quite true. The PR industry (which stands for Public Relations--or PRopaganda) discovered in their days of working for the tobacco industry, more than half a century ago, that you don't have to convince the public a lie is true. All you have to do is "manufacture doubt." If people aren't sure whether cigarettes cause cancer or not ("I saw this article that said a top scientists says it isn't true..."), or whether climate change is real or not, or who's lying about Ukraine, they do nothing. And that's all the toxic industries need, to go merrily on their way of making money from death. What's happened in the US this century is that the "culture wars", a real thing that's been roiling around since the Sixties, have been heavily amplified until we have a hot angry division between two camps. It's said that this is result of the media finding a niche where each outlet feeds its audience what it wants to hear, including emotional triggers, because this is what gets clicks and clicks are what brings the money in. No doubt true, but it's also awfully convenient for the ruling class, at a time of inequality so stark that in the past it brought on the pitchforks and guillotines. There is great anger but people are training their guns on each other instead of the ruling class. It's hard for me to believe the ruling class just got lucky; I think they worked to amplify this division. They've got all the psychosocial experts they need, and free access to media outlets of every sort from the New York Times to Qanon.
"All you have to do is 'manufacture doubt'"
Yes, and what do you think Caitlin is saying when she writes "We can fight this by working to *exacerbate public distrust* in the institutions that manufacture our consent"?
I think perhaps you misunderstand. All a powerful industry has to do to avoid government taking actions on the people's behalf is render the situation unclear, so that people who aren't sure whether tobacco really causes cancer, or secondhand smoke or pesticides are really harmful, or climate change is real or caused by humans, will do nothing. The PR company doesn't have to persuade the public that the threat is false--just make it unclear. Increasing distrust of corporate media is a necessary step toward liberation but it doesn't help people figure out what to do, or unite them--without unity we can't accomplish much which is why, I think, the PTB have invaded "fringe" media to ensure it's neatly divided into two warring camps.
Unity is a religious construct and a liberal shibboleth. It is a prayer for the total subordination of all mankind to an imagined or more likely projected subjectivity that, like all such things, is puppeteered by a relatively small number of humans. (What would Jesus do? As lawyers say, it depends.) Unity as a norm serves these subjectivities and their particular interests more than it serves humans as a species or as living specimens. Only under Unity in subordination can such hostile, fragile subjectivities as joint stock corporations persist and govern action, i.e. exercise "power". In calling for unity, you're not trying to eliminate the conditions that cause the problem, but merely attempting to capture and discipline the problem under color of reform or redemption to an arbitrary standard, as if they were moral agent-subjects. If that tack had real effects that served the subjective interests of participants, it would exhibit them far more reliably than it does.
This is in contrast to other, intersubjective phenomena such as alignment, consensus, and concurrence, which require no grand drama or self-alienation and yet produce powerful effects. Who's trying to impose grand purity dramas on the Rage Against the War? I'm not currently standing in Washington listening to speeches, but so far it doesn't appear to be the Mises Caucus or the People's Party, rather, it is the legacy owners and inheritors of the monopoly on moral property who collect moral rents from their expropriation of moral capital and stand to lose their moral income streams in case they are deposed. Despite the possibility that they too are seeking to capture the machine to prove they can drive it in better style, I've come to a position of critical support for the event.
Since this myth of unified action is unachievable, since mythical ideals tend to unify people in acceptance of permanently unfavorable conditions, since network effects are exponential, and since general strikes are far more illegal than demonstrations, I agreewith Caitlin that it is more important and effective to undermine the conditions under which people could be unified against their own autonomous (but common) interests, than to try to run exhausted competitive challenges on inherently disadvantageous terrain.
Nice to run into someone who believes as strongly as I do that ‘unity’ is never what we aspire to: unity of purpose perhaps, but an acceptance that there will always be disagreement and differences and dislikes within any healthy movement or community or association. I first noticed that the call for ‘unity’ did not make sense back in my days as a young Muslim more than 20 years ago. Wow! Feeling my years, writing that!
I think there’s dogma we can stomach and dogma we oppose. If we teach children from early on that their professed religion is a dogma, that anti-communism is a dogma, that xenophobia can be a dogma, maybe we pay more attention to what we say we actually believe, and opt for reticence over emotional acceptance. Peer pressure may be the most insidious, effective means of getting people to believe emotionally, without reflection or thought.
I couldn’t agree more.
Consider this--The Vietnam peace movement, if it had a theme, was John Lenon's, "All we are saying is give peace a chance." Now, having coopted the language of war into our fiber so deep our "activism" calls us to be warriors as we "rage against the war machine." Just as America cannot kill its way to peace, the peaceable cannot rage their way to peace. If MLK taught us anything it was the central theme love must play. "Lift up your voice and sing till earth and heaven ring!"
With mass media suppression we have widespread ignorance of truth. Widespread refusal to accept it, of course, would likely follow for most -- but not all.
Propaganda is based on confused ideas about belief, what it means, and how it operates in the human mind. There are many lies so sacrosanct that the fact they are lies, fables or fiction, simply doesn't matter: they cannot be debunked, even if they are basically nasty. It's a strange fact about humans and human experience. And that's the problem. We "knowingly" -whatever that amounts to - make up stuff, and then believe in it. But one positive function of suffering is that it tends to bring you down to earth. Except of course for the sadists and masochists- who actually enjoy it. But that isn't "most people," who just want to bring up a family, enjoy a football game and a beer. And people who prefer thinking, art, intellectual games, etc.. Not that the groups don't overlap. So we can expect some pushback when all this lands or - crashes. Because there is a limit, and it has to do with beer, food, kids, and various types of games. Take that away at your peril.
Have you ever been in a situation reported on by news media? They usually get at least some details wrong. But it's true that US media lies much more blatantly about non-US topics.
I lived in S. Florida during Hurricane Andrew. To this day they grossly, to say the least, under report the fatalities.
Absolutely! Another so-called "conspiracy theory" proven correct. We all knew the US was behind this. Another factor is that the US may have pushed the release of this information in an attempt to push Russia into WWIII to cover up its involvement in the Ukraine biolabs and money laundering (see Clandestine's substack and Twitter posts). To believe that the US is not capable of such an evil is so naïve as to be laughable (no, if you believe that, you deserve to be ridiculed, for YOU are part of the problem).
We are living in an eternal denial about our gov, wrongdoing, because we just hear, read, and watch what the government wants we know. Western mainstream media corporation parrot what the mogul of the press order to print and say. We have been told lies since pre-K until that are shaping our reasoning.
“All our world's troubles are ultimately due to propaganda; people only consent to status quo systems which hurt their interests because their consent is manufactured via propaganda. And that propaganda only works because of public trust in the messengers.”
Trouble is, as humans turn away from belief systems that once comfort and were trusted, they quickly seek alternatives. Sometimes they find what fills that space are simply cults peddling different propaganda. Which they come to believe and trust with equal vehemence. We’re all looking for community, hope and meaning. And sometimes that’s on offer though totally unhinged from reality. 😢
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
~LH
Sincere seekers find though they may pass through various stages on the way. Know, be love and trust yourself.