War and Empire Links June 2019 #2

Starvation Sanctions Are Worse Than Overt Warfare. Caitlin Johnstone. June 23, 2019.

I’m titling this essay “Starvation Sanctions Are Worse Than Overt Warfare”, and I mean it. I am not saying that starvation sanctions are more destructive or deadly than overt military force in and of themselves; what I am saying is that the overall effect is worse, because there’s no public accountability for them and because they deliberately target civilians. 

If the US were to launch a barrage of Tomahawk missiles into an Iranian suburb with the goal of killing civilians, there’d be international outrage and the cohesion of the US-centralized power alliance would take a major hit. Virtually everyone would recognize this as an unforgivable war crime. Yet America will be able to kill the same number of civilians with the same deliberate intention of inflicting deadly force, and it would suffer essentially no consequences at all. There’s no public or international pressure holding that form of violence at bay, because it’s invisible and poorly understood.

Pause A Moment And Think About How Many People AREN’T Whistleblowing. CJ. June 19, 2019.

And this has all been a long-winded preamble for me to get to what I really want to say here, which is this: think about how many government insiders aren’t whistleblowing. 

Seriously, just pause and really think about that for a minute. Let it sink all the way in. We know about just a teeny, tiny fraction of the evils that our governments have been up to behind the scenes, because the people who are in a position to expose those evils and who are willing to do so are exceedingly rare. And, because of the public flagellations of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, we may be certain that they are becoming much rarer. We appear to be moving rapidly toward a world with no Chelsea Mannings at all. 

The celebrated author, journalist and historian William Blum once said that “No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.”

Narrative Management = Reality Management. Caitlin Johnstone. June 17, 2019.

The Grayzone‘s Max Blumenthal has published the first part of an investigative series on how so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are being used to manipulate the narrative about what’s going on in Syria by posing as impartial investigative bodies and circulating pro-imperialist disinformation to the western political/media class as objective fact. Part one is titled “Behind the Syrian Network for Human Rights: How an opposition front group became Western media’s go-to monitor“, and it documents a mountain of evidence that one of these “NGOs” is in fact very much state-funded and highly biased in favor of anti-Assad forces, yet still gets cited as an independent source by western mass media outlets in a way that just so happens to help make the case for western interventionism in Syria. 

“Citing the Syrian Network for Human Rights as an independent and credible source is the journalistic equivalent of sourcing statistics on head trauma to a research front created by the National Football League, or turning to tobacco industry lobbyists for information on the connection between smoking and lung cancer. And yet this has been standard practice among correspondents covering the Syrian conflict,” Blumenthal writes. “Indeed, Western press has engaged for years in an insidious sleight of hand, basing reams of shock journalism around claims by a single, highly suspect source that is deeply embedded within the Syrian opposition – and hoped that no one would notice.”

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But narrative management is in no way limited to Syria. You see all sorts of organizations used to manipulate public narratives all the time, like the cybersecurity company Crowdstrike for example, whose highly suspicious analysis of the DNC’s servers formed the foundation of the official Russian hacking narrative, and whose CEO is now a billionaire. Whether it’s longstanding foreign policy agendas like shoving Russia off the world stage, or longstanding domestic agendas like preserving the dominance of the plutocratic class and expanding surveillance and police militarization, our understanding of what’s going on in the world is constantly being messed with.

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The media-owning plutocratic class and its allies in opaque and unaccountable government agencies are in this way able to control reality, both in the way we experience it in our minds and in the way it expresses concretely. The ability to reach into people’s minds on a mass scale and interfere with their ability to understand what’s happening on their own planet and in their own society is a power so immense it’s hard to appreciate, and so staggeringly creepy it’s hard to comprehend. It’s a violation of a part of us that is so intimate and so sacred it could almost be said to border on the metaphysical. 

If we could truly see what grave intercessions into every human’s mental sovereignty these manipulators are getting away with, it would look not unlike the British Empire of old as it slaughtered, stole, raped and enslaved its way across the planet. These same colonialist actions are occurring today, largely from the descendants of these same groups of people, but stories are being fed to us day after day to keep it hidden from us.

Seven Reasons To Be Highly Skeptical Of The Gulf Of Oman Incident. Caitlin Johnstone. June 14, 2019.

1. Pompeo is a known liar, especially when it comes to Iran.
2. The US empire is known to use lies and false flags to start wars.
3. John Bolton has openly endorsed lying to advance military agendas.
4. Using false flags to start a war with Iran is already an established idea in the DC swamp.
5. The US State Department has already been running psyops to manipulate the public Iran narrative.
6. The Gulf of Oman narrative makes no sense.
7. Even if Iran did perpetrate the attack, Pompeo would still be lying.

Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems. Caitlin Johnstone. June 13, 2019.

... As I never tire of saying, the real underlying currency in our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even raw military might. The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it. 

As soon as you really grok this dynamic, you start noticing it everywhere. George Kurtz is one clear example today of narrative control’s central role in the maintenance and expansion of existing power structures, as well as an illustration of how the empire is wired to reward those who advance pro-empire narratives and punish those who damage them; just compare how he’s doing to how Julian Assange is doing, for example.

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This is why I pay far more attention in my work to narrative control than to politics. Politics is downstream from narrative control, which is why the 2020 US presidential race is already a contest to see what level of Democratic corporatist warmonger will be running against the incumbent Republican corporatist warmonger. The narrative-controlling class does its level best to hide the fact that anything’s fundamentally wrong with the system, then when people notice it’s deeply broken they encourage them to use completely impotent tools to fix it. “Don’t like how things are run? Here, vote for our other puppet!”

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The root of all our problems right now is the fact that human minds are very hackable with enough resources, combined with the fact that war, oppression, exploitation and ecocide are highly profitable. This dynamic has caused human collective consciousness to generally dead-end into a kind of propagandized, zombified state in which all our knowledge and all our thinking moves in alignment with the agendas of existing power structures. It’s much easier to continue believing the official narratives than to sort through everything you’ve been told about your society, your nation and your world since grade school and work out what’s true and what’s false. Many don’t have the time. Many more don’t have the courage. 

We will remain in this collective dead-end, hurtling toward either Orwellian dystopia or extinction via climate collapse or nuclear armageddon, until we find a way out of it.