Some excerpts from some of CaitOz's best recent posts... as my quarterly reminder that if you want to try to understand what is happening in the world and you aren't reading Caitlin Johnstone on a regular basis, then you're missing out on the most reliable source of perspective and best writer I've come across:
The reason we can have wildly popular narratives dominating mainstream political discourse for years on end without their containing a shred of actual reality is because human experience is dictated by mental stories far more than most people realize. Establishment power structures, who have their hands in both parties of America’s two-handed political sock puppet show, stand everything to gain and nothing to lose by using narrative control to keep the public debating fake nonsense instead of the actual horrible things this administration is doing like imprisoning Julian Assange for journalism, vetoing attempts to save Yemen, inflicting starvation sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, and initiating cold war escalations against two nuclear-armed nations.
If people truly understood the extent to which mental narrative dominates their experience of life, propaganda, advertising and all other forms of psychological manipulation would be regarded by our society similarly to physical assault or property theft. For anyone who is interested in the pernicious ways narrative manipulation is used to keep people confused and conflicted while powerful people roll out toxic agendas, Trump is a very interesting case study indeed.
If humanity is to survive, people are going to have to evolve beyond the sticky relationship with mental narrative which enables establishment spinmeisters to keep an entire nation transfixed by fake stories about a very conventionally evil president instead of pushing for the real changes we’ll need to make if we’re to overcome the existential hurdles looming on our horizon. Learning to distinguish reality from narrative will send the whole prison crashing down.
If the eyes are the windows to the soul, as they say, then smartphone cameras are the windows to the soul of our society.
In ages past we knew hardly anything about what was going on in a given civilization. Mythology about a population’s history were handed down around campfires in the form of verbal tradition from generation to generation. When the written word came around we invented something called “history”, which was really just records of the ancient propaganda from whoever happened to have won the most recent war. Then later on we got very clever and invented something called “journalism”, which was really just whatever stories the people who controlled the media wanted told.
None of these presentations were particularly conducive to understanding what’s actually happening in our society; they were all subject to manipulation by the dominant storytellers of whatever era they appeared in.
This began to change when video cameras started appearing in the pockets of ordinary people around the world, and an online network appeared which allowed them to share their recordings.
Police And Their Apologists Have Already Lost The Argument. June 5, 2020.
Turns out all it took to publicly expose a pervasive epidemic of violent tendencies in the police force was for the public to begin protesting violent tendencies in the police force.
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A police force which cannot respond to protests about police brutality without the internet being flooded with a steady stream of police brutality footage is a police force in sore need of drastic overhaul. It has already been proven that that is in fact the case. There’s no taking it back. There’s no fixing it. It’s done. The debate is officially over. Huge, sweeping changes must immediately be made, and there’s no valid reason for the protests to stop until that has occurred.
The Most Revealing Footage On Police Brutality Is These Cops Applauding Its Perpetrators. June 7, 2020.
This, right here, is a sign of a culture that cannot be redeemed. A police culture which makes no secret of the fact that cops as a collective will consistently support the most self-evidently unjustifiable acts of brutality committed by their own.
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The problem, as we’ve discussed previously, is that those in power have no intention of ever departing with the violent goon patrol which gives them the ability to brutalize the public if they get out of line. Many of them are providing lip service to solidarity and listening and understanding right now, but make no mistake: the mainstream rank-and-file public awakening to the reality that they live in a militarized authoritarian police state was not in the script, and they are getting very nervous about its implications.It will be interesting to see how this plays out, to say the least.
Why do people do this? Why whenever there’s a video of police brutality, no matter how clearly and obviously wrong it is, are there always people falling all over themselves to try and justify or spin it as something acceptable or illusory? Literally always, without a single, solitary exception?
Well, here are five reasons.
1. The Just World Fallacy
One reason is because of a glitch in human cognition known as the just world hypothesis or just world fallacy, which causes us to assume that if bad things are happening to someone, it’s because that person deserves it. Blaming the victim is more psychologically comfortable than seeing that we live in an unjust world where we could very easily become victim ourselves someday, and we select for that comfort over rational analysis. It allows us to feel as though we’re in control of our fate.
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2. Copaganda
Because journalists often rely on statements by police departments in order to report on news events, there’s a much closer relationship between the news media and the police than there is between the news media and activists or the rank-and-file civilian population. This puts the police responsible for public relations in a prime position to advance narratives that put a much friendlier faceon the cops than they have earned. This, combined with the dynamic of access journalism and fact that the news media are owned by billionaires with a vested interest in keeping their fortunes and assets protected by a militarized police force, enables police to control the dominant narrative about them.
...3. White Privilege
We’d be lying to ourselves if we pretended there isn’t also a major racial component to a lot of this.
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ESTRAGON: Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Yes, let’s go.
[They do not move.]
Curtain.
So ends both acts of the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot. One of the two main characters suggests leaving, the other agrees, followed by the stage direction that both remain motionless until curtain.
This is also the entire role of the Democratic Party. To enthusiastically agree with American support for movements calling for real changes which benefit ordinary people, while making no actual moves to provide no such changes. The actors read the lines, but remain motionless.
Barack Obama made a whole political career out of this. People elected him because he promised hope and change, then for eight years whenever hopeful people demanded changes he’d say “Yes, we all need to get together and have a conversation about that”, express sympathy and give a moving speech, and then nothing would happen. The actors remain motionless, and Godot never comes.
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Watch them. Watch Democrats and their allied media and corporate institutions try to sell the public a bunch of words and a smattering of feeble, impotent legislation to mollify the masses, without ever giving the people the real changes that they actually need. It remains to be seen if they will succeed in doing this, but they are already working on it. That is their whole entire purpose. It’s much easier to control a populace with false promises and empty words than with brute force, and the manipulators know it. That is the Democratic Party’s role.
For ages the Democratic Party and its allies have been actively manipulating leftwardly-inclined Americans away from issues which might inconvenience the powerful–issues like economic justice, anti-imperialism, slashing the military budget, ending government surveillance and police militarization, and actually getting money out of politics. Instead they’ve been encouraged to only care about issues which establishment power structures don’t care about–issues like abortion, misogyny, LGBT rights, gun control, and racism.
The powerful do not care if you have an abortion. They do not care how many bullets your gun can hold, they do not care if two guys get married or what gender pronouns you use, and they do not care if everyone is a racist or if no one is. They care about maintaining and expanding their ability to exert control over other people. If they can use prejudice or the threat of revoking rights to advance those agendas then they will certainly use them, but beyond that, they do not care.
For this reason, many who see the abusive nature of the oligarchic empire have come to look upon these issues a bit disdainfully, seeing social justice issues as a power-serving distraction from the actual issues they don’t want us pushing for like dismantling the war machine, ending plutocracy and making sure everyone has what they need. This is a major part of why, when racism suddenly became the number one hot topic in the news for days on end amid protests against police brutality, many anti-establishment types viewed it with suspicion.
But what actually seems to be happening here is a lot more interesting than some impotent and irrelevant distraction. Because people aren’t just out protesting racism, they’re calling for the complete dismantling of the entire police state, which is an essential part of the glue holding the US-centralized empire in place.
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Like I’ve been saying since last year, things are only going to keep getting stranger. Our species is unpatterning at a rapidly accelerating rate, and the people whose job it is to manipulate us back to sleep have been failing to do so with greater and greater frequency. Don’t waste emotional energy on the hope that things will eventually go back to normal, because they won’t. The good news is that what we think of as “normal” is actually as crazy and self-destructive as a species can possibly be, and life is awkwardly, sloppily stumbling toward true sanity.
Social media outlets were told that they need to censor their platforms to “prevent the fomenting of discord,” but obviously they didn’t move quickly enough, because the discord has been well and truly fomented. And now they are in a mad scramble to prevent Americans from hearing what people in foreign nations have to say about that, still apparently laboring under the delusion that this is anything other than homegrown, purebred, cornfed, American-as-apple-pie discord.
The most distinctive feature of the last four years has been expanding consciousness. Expanding consciousness of media corruption, of DNC corruption, of government corruption, of the excessive amount of power wielded by the US presidency and the absurd esteem people used to have for that position, of the abuse of immigrants, of police militarization, of unhealed racial wounds, etc.
This is encouraging, because you can’t fix something you haven’t made conscious. This is true of our own unresolved psychological issues, and it’s true of our unresolved collective issues as well. The first step toward a healthy world is expanded consciousness.
This is why increasing government opacity, internet censorship, and the war on journalism are so dangerous. Corruption and abuse thrive in darkness, and corrupt abusers want to keep that darkness intact. They want to keep things as unconscious as possible.
It’s beginning to look like that cat’s out of the bag, though, and I would be very surprised if they ever manage to get that sucker back in there.
What an exciting time to be alive
I Reckon We Can Win This Thing. June 14, 2020.
Everything keeps accelerating. That seems to be the trend here currently. Things don’t appear to necessarily be getting better or worse at this point in time, they’re just accelerating.
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For whatever reason, the inertia seems to be falling away from our species, for both our healthy impulses and our unhealthy ones. Recent events like these protests and the Covid-19 outbreak have seen more and more consciousness drawn to the need for robust social safety nets and the corrupt nature of the police state which holds the US-centralized empire together, but we’re also seeing mountains of new police assaults and new police killings, pre-planned authoritarian measures being pushed for, a sudden increase in internet censorship and narrative management, and possibly even lynchings.
It’s getting harder and harder to understand what’s happening. .
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I don’t know where we’re headed, and I don’t pretend to know. Here’s what I do know:~ Things are changing, and these changes appear to be happening at an accelerating rate.
~ Changes away from old patterns tend to make people feel psychologically uncomfortable. Everyone should definitely be prioritizing their psychological well being at this point in history, because I’m pretty sure it’s only going to get more unusual and confusing from here on out.
~ The most distinctive feature of the last four years has been expanding consciousness. ...
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All in all, I reckon we can win this thing. Not the anti-policing protests necessarily; I don’t quite know what will happen with those in the long run. I mean the whole thing. Winning it all. Actually getting out from underneath the bastards and beginning to function as a healthy organism on this planet.
It certainly appears that something inside us has ignited which wants to disrupt our trajectory toward armageddon. Doesn’t mean we’ll succeed, but I absolutely do believe we have the potential to move into a healthy relationship with our minds, with each other, and with our ecosystem.
There is no rational defense of this shooting. If someone is running away from you with a short-range weapon, it is literally impossible for them to pose an imminent threat to you. Just allowing Brooks to run out of the range of the taser, as he was already trying to do, would have nullified any potential threat to either of the two officers on the scene, because it would have been literally impossible for Brooks to tase them while continuing to run in the direction he was running.This indisputable and self-evident fact hasn’t stopped people from bleating moronic police apologia in my social media notifications since the shooting occurred.....But Rolfe decided to kill. After watching all these protests against police brutality raging throughout his country since the murder of George Floyd, after being confronted with with all the public outrage about police killing black men day after day in news headline after news headline, after his society forced him to contemplate police violence and his role in it, Garrett Rolfe still decided to kill. After all that, he watched a black man running away from him, posing no threat to him whatsoever, and he decided to kill.The fact that cops are so thoroughly inoculated against public demand that they change their behavior makes a complete farce of the decoy police “reform” agenda that establishment narrative managers have been actively trying to corral the current protest movement into to kill their support for police abolishment.There’s a feud going on in America’s new protest movement right now between those who wish to abolish, defund, dismantle, and/or disarm the police, and those who want to “reform” or “transform” the police. The former are actually pushing for a revolutionary change which actually pushes back against abusive power structures and calls for the creation of a radically different social paradigm, while the latter wants to keep policing institutions in their irredeemably corrupt state and add more funding for “de-escalation” training seminars where grown adults are told not to commit gratuitous acts of violence.Training seminars which, it turns out, Officer Garrett Rolfe had just completed.
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The widespread call to abolish America’s police state, an integral part of the glue which holds the US-centralized empire together, is revolutionary. It is not an exaggeration to say it’s as interesting and exciting as seeing a mainstream call to end US imperialism, and it is just as threatening to establishment power structures. The call for “reform”, in contrast, is just more milquetoast, Obamaesque fauxgressive verbiage designed to stagnate a real revolutionary change movement. It is as interesting and as threatening to establishment power structures as saying the US should push regime change in Syria rather than Iran.
This is where the real revolutionary energy is at in America right now, so it’s no wonder establishment manipulators are doing everything they can to co-opt it into something innocuous which won’t disturb actual power structures in the slightest. Obama made a whole political career out of telling leftwardly inclined Americans that they’re getting what they want without actually giving it to them, and now
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They’re trying to replace a real revolutionary impulse with useless narrative fluff. They have learned that it is much easier to neuter such impulses with empty agreement and a bunch of insubstantial words than to tell them no and stomp them down. Hopefully, the people have learned this too.
On Maintaining Perspective In The Year 20 Fucking 20. June 17, 2020.
Just today there are news stories about major escalations between India and Chinaand between North and South Korea. A novel virus with bizarre worldwide lockdowns and protests against the police state sweeping the most powerful nation in the world have almost eclipsed from memory the major news events from earlier in the year like dangerous escalations with Iran, Australia burning to a crisp, and a wildly corrupt US presidential primary. And it seems a safe bet at this point that all of this will soon be eclipsed by far more significant events.
For better or for worse, we are at a time of great change from which the world will likely never return. We are heading into what is probably the most significant period in human history to date, and it would be wise to pay attention.
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At this time we need to drastically change our perspectives and seriously re-evaluate our priorities. We’re all standing on a precipice together and we have no idea what the plunge will look like, and people are still babbling about whether or not you should wear a face mask at the grocery store. This, to me, is a nonsensical approach to our current predicament.
All the stuff that used to consume so much of our attention in the analysis of establishment power structures has been rendered far less important by recent developments. All these recent developments will probably be rendered less relevant by whatever major events are coming next. The only consistent pattern this year has been a greater and greater deviation from old patterns.
For that reason, it makes sense to do two things:
- Shift toward emphasizing a bigger-picture perspective of what’s going on. Fixate less on smaller occurrences and pay more attention to broader overall trends. It doesn’t mean ignore the smaller things, it just means view them in the proper context of a world that’s moving into more and more unfamiliar territory in bigger and bigger ways.
- Pay attention. Big things are happening right now, and it would be a damn shame to miss them.
Joe Biden keeps trying to out-warmonger Donald Trump, and by Joe Biden I of course mean the team of handlers who are animating the dementia-ravaged corpse of the Biden campaign like a ventriloquist operating a wooden dummy.
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Again, this is Donald Trump these people are talking about. The same president who imprisoned Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes, killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, vetoed attempts to save Yemen from US-backed genocide, is working to foment civil war in Iran using starvation sanctions and CIA ops with the stated goal of effecting regime change, nearly started a full-scale war with Iran by assassinating its top general, occupied Syrian oil fields and implemented devastating sanctions with the goal of preventing Syria’s reconstruction, greatly increased the number of troops in the Middle East and elsewhere, greatly increased the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians, and reduced military accountability for those airstrikes.
The second-to-last thing the world needs is political pressure placed on Donald fucking Trump to be more warlike. The very last thing the world needs is a US president who ends up being even more warlike than Trump.
America is a war machine on top of a police state on top of a mass media psyop. Only people who are willing to keep these psychopathic mechanisms in place are permitted to ascend to presidential candidacy. While all the news cameras focus on the relatively minor differences between presidents and presidential candidates, you can learn a lot more about America and what drives it by looking at their similarities.
I keep posting CaitOz's stuff, because I just can't help it -- too much juicy stuff. January 14, 2020.
check out more links to some of Johnstone's writing I've highlighted on this blog by clicking on the Johnstone link below
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