Governments Lie, Media Deceives... What to Believe

we'd like to believe that our governments and institutions are run by good people, or at least normal people, people like us;

but they are not;

normal people, good people, people like us do not get the opportunity to be in their place

we are ruled by psychopaths

if that sounds too harsh, its just because we don't want to believe it;

if it helps, think of them as sociopaths instead; 

(sounds less bad; doesn't mean less bad; psychopaths are mass murderers that maybe kidnap and maybe use torture, perhaps even chainsaws, on their 1, or 4, or handful of victims; sociopaths use drones, or MOABs (the Mother of all Bombs), or Fat Man and Little Boy, or economic (starvation) sanctions, on their hundreds of thousands of victims)

the sociopaths that rule us are MUCH worse than the psychopaths we fear

in any case;

there is so much utter B.S. that it has become very hard to figure out what is true;

I grew up believing what Dan Rather told me on CBS News, or Tom Brokaw on NBC, or Peter Mansbridge on CBC, or just about anyone, with their cool accents, on BBC;

I watched the Gulf War on TV from my first year university dorm room;

so naïve at the time, believing what I was told, captivated by the light show on the TV screen

10 years later, I still hadn't taken the red pill

like most, I too was glued to the TV on that fateful morning, watching as the towers came down

it was only in retrospect that I thought:

how did that 3rd tower, WTC7, come down?

for that matter, how exactly did the Twin Towers come down in the fashion they did, at freefall speed, into their own footprints?

then later...

how exactly did they find the culprits' passports in the debris of the Towers' wreckage?

are you f'g kidding me?!

so many more questions (my questions)

so many B.S. pronouncements,

so few real questions (from the media, not digging into any of the questions that I was asking/thinking)

Red Pill taken

20 years later, I'm so tired of it;

so tired of the naïve complacency of the public believing the 4th Estate;

so tired of the lack of critical thinking;

of the lack of skepticism about the latest B.S. despite all the past BS;

so tired of those features of the public allowing the perversions of justice, the absolute evil, the perpetuation of grotesquely unsustainable practices that are destroying the biosphere that our civilization, nay, our species, depends on

so tired of the public arguing on Twitter about the trivialities... like which corrupt evil con-man should (pretend to) rule the world next, Trump or Biden (while the powers that be behind the scenes really direct the play)... that we keep missing the forest for the trees

its all a mess

and, honestly, we don't really want to know how bad a mess it is, do we?

its better to just believe the lies and try to do our best going on with living our lives

while rainforests get bulldozed,

while species after species goes extinct,

while we keep belching GhGs into our atmosphere,

while we keep acidifying our oceans,

while the coral reefs die,

while keystone species are imperilled, from bees and insects to oceanic plankton

..

while Yemenis starve,

and Venezuelans starve,

and Iranians, who can't be starved b/c of their own agriculture, are deprived of medication for their children,

and Libya has an actual slave trade with active slave markets

...

all because of the evil U.S. warlords (from Trump to Obama to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Reagan to …)

fxck

so...

first rule - don't believe either the government or the media just because they are the government or media -- they are to be distrusted -- instead of believing everything they say is true, we'd be better off believing everything they say is false, unless and until it can be substantiated and proved

how so?

b/c of all the preponderance of lies

what lies?

oh, oh so many

• Guantanamo, illegal rendition, torture
• Osama bin Laden's supposed capture and death
• Saddam's WMD
• the War on Terror
• the War on Drugs
  
• Assad's chemical weapons
• US drone strikes against civilians over and over again
  
• Russia shot down MH17
• Skripal affair
  
• attempted coups and character assassinations of any and all socialist-leaning Latin American leaders, from Venezuela's Chavez to Maduro; from Brazil's Lula to Bolivia's Morales
  
• color revolutions, including to install Nazis in Ukraine
• Russiagate
• DNC server "hack"
• Assange's rape case
• Snowden and Manning persecution
  
• Bezos in bed with the CIA
• Epstein's child sex blackmailing scheme on behalf of the CIA and whomever
• the NSA's surveillance state
  
• WTC7's collapse
• Twin Towers' collapse at freefall speed into their own footprints
• Project for New American Century
• etc etc etc
  

or, how about govt allowance of corporate malfeasance

• corporate capture of EPA
• safety of fracking
• Monsanto's toxic legacy
• tobacco, DDT, PFAS & PFOS
  
• FEMA - Katrina - disaster profiteering
• Halliburton - Blackwater - Afghanistan Inc. - contractors - war profiteering
• etc etc etc
  

how about we go further back?

• JFK, MLK and Robert Kennedy assassinations
• Operation Gladio
• Gulf of Tonkin
• Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile crisis and Operation Northwoods
  
• Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• Pearl Harbor
• the Spanish-American War and other Banana Wars
• the Civil War
• etc etc etc
  

so, I've become convinced that the official stories about all of those events are bullshit;

so, now I'm suspicious about so many other things as well, though perhaps not yet convinced one way or another

like what?

• Boston Marathon bombing
• Sandy Hook shooting
• Vegas shooting
• San Bernardino shooting
• Charlie Hebdo shooting
• Paris shooting
• any accusation made by US against Russia
• any accusation made by US against Iran
• any accusation made by US against China
• etc etc etc
  

and, most recently, George Floyd's death

at the end of the day, I am very much in favor of the social justice movement and very much in favor of reining in the unlawful and egregious actions by the police, (which, in my opinion, is a phenomenon that has certainly been exacerbated by racism, but is mostly about brutality and abuse of power by bullies and sociopaths);

so perhaps it shouldn't matter to me that the trigger for the BLM movement these past few months has been orchestrated on false premises

it sure looked on that video as if George Floyd was slowly asphyxiated by the knee of Derek Chauvin

BUT was that really what happened?

(and I wouldnt be surprised if Chauvin was nonetheless a nasty cop, a brutish cop, a dirty cop.... but, did Chauvin really kill Floyd?)

we saw video of planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the towers then later collapsing; but did the (2) planes really cause the THREE (3!) Towers' collapses?!

I don't always agree with Paul Craig Roberts (I think most particularly when he discusses race issues), but I have come to entirely trust his honest pursuit of truth, wherever that truth may take him/us. He, like me, thinks that if the facts don't fit the story, then there is something wrong with the story. That was true about JFK, 9/11, and his view on mask-wearing now to decrease transmission of COVID (yes, wear them... but not any and all masks are designed to prevent the transmission of virus); and it seems to be the case also with what happened to Floyd, which triggered the social uprising that we've seen in the U.S.

Here's PCR:

Should we be protesting about George Floyd or Julian Assange? Paul Craig Roberts. July 31, 2020.

(Don't let the first 3 paragraphs dissuade you from reading the rest)

if you truly want to know what is going on in the world, you can't choose the blue pill; 

if you want to take the Red Pill:

read less / none of the mainstream media

read more of 

Caitlin Johnstone

Ian Welsh

Chris Hedges

Also (perhaps more selectively than the 3 above):

Paul Craig Roberts

And:

Edward Curtin

Glenn Greenwald

Aaron Mate

Ben Norton

Yves Smith and her contributors at naked capitalism

And also:

Guy Crittenden

John Pilger

Noam Chomsky

Howard Zinn

John Perkins

David Ray Griffin

Oliver Stone

William Blum

Amy Goodman

Abby Martin

Jimmy Dore

Lee Camp

James Corbett

Jeremy Scahill

Sharon Lerner

Krystal Ball

Eva Bartlett

Vanessa Beeley

Finnian Cunningham

Cory Morningstar

Pepe Escobar

Matt Taibbi

Dylan Ratigan

Eric Margulis

Michel Chossudovsky

James Howard Kunstler

Mike Krieger

Dmitry Orlov

John Michael Greer ('s older stuff; i.e. archdruid report rather than ecosophia)

Cognitive Dissonance / Two Ice Floes

The Saker

Moon of Alabama

Chalmers Johnson

Michael Klare

Tom Engelhardt

Andrew Bacevich

My advice, fwiw:

Read the first 4 regularly

Johnstone and Welsh in particular are consistently fantastic

Roberts and Hedges may have some differing views but are candid, honest truth-seekers

Read the rest when you come across them or when you can

 

p.s. update

this from Caitlin Johnstone on Aug. 3:

Here is a link to an article full of tips on how to punch through the obfuscations of propaganda and make sense of things, and here is a link to a Twitter list of my favorite news-gatherers and dot-connecters which you can bookmark and scroll through daily.

War and Empire Links: November 2019 #2

“No No You Guys, THIS US-Backed Coup Is Perfectly Legitimate!” Caitlin Johnstone. Nov. 14, 2019.

... Which is just so crazy. That’s how low the bar has sunk for supporting the toppling of a government today. They don’t have to claim he’s starving his own people. They don’t have to claim that he’s using chemical weapons. They don’t have to claim that he’s governing without the consent of the voting populace. Just “Yeah well some of us don’t like him and there’s some paperwork we disagree on.”

... and now the US-approved interim president is an appalling racist and absolute dimwit who calls to mind a very low-budget Bolivian version of Sarah Palin.

Bolivia’s New Puppet Regime Wastes No Time Aligning With US Foreign Policy. CJ. Nov. 16, 2019.

... This news comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. US foreign policy is essentially an endless war on disobedience, in which governments that refuse to bow to US interests are toppled by any means necessary and replaced by governments who will.

International affairs are much easier to understand once you stop thinking in terms of separate, sovereign nations and start thinking in terms of alliances and empire. What we are witnessing can best be described as a slow-motion third world war between what amounts to an unofficial globe-spanning empire centralized around the United States and its military on one side, and all the nations which have refused to be absorbed into this empire on the other. Nations which allow themselves to be absorbed are rewarded with the carrot of military and economic alliance with the empire, and nations which refuse are punished with the stick of invasions, sanctions, trade wars, and coups, with the ultimate goal being total unipolar global domination. 

Nothing takes precedence over this agenda of unipolar hegemony. As long as a nation remains loyal to the empire, it can fund terrorists, butcher Washington Post columnists, and create the worst humanitarian crisis in the world without fear of any retribution of any kind from the US-centralized empire. As a leaked State Department memo explained in 2017, so far as the empire is concerned human rights violations are nothing more than a strategic narrative control weapon with which to attack unabsorbed nations, and to be ignored when they are perpetrated by absorbed nations.
It should therefore also surprise no one that this same Washington-recognized government installed via US-backed military coup is now murdering demonstrators who object to it.

... 

 “Supporters of the coup in Bolivia can’t call it a coup,” US politician Lee Carter recently noted. “The US has a law preventing us from sending foreign aid to a new government if it was installed by a coup. So they come up with absurd claims that the military forcing Evo out somehow isn’t a coup.”

And the western mass media are falling right in line with the government forces in refusing to use this word, despite the ousting of a government by the military being exactly the thing that a coup is. This is because in a plutocracy, plutocrat-owned media is functionally the same as state media.

US Needs To Occupy Syria Because Of Kurds Or Iran Or Chemical Weapons Or Oil Or Whatever. CJ. Nov. 3, 2019.

We were told that the US must intervene in Syria because the Syrian government was massacring its people. We were told that the US must intervene in Syria in order to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East. We were told that the US must intervene in Syria because Assad used chemical weapons. We were told that the US must occupy Syria to fight ISIS. We were told that the US must continue to occupy Syria to counter Iranian influence. We were told the US must continue to occupy Syria to protect the Kurds. Now the US must continue to occupy Syria because of oil.

These wildly different reasons the public has been given for America’s need to forcibly insert a military presence into Syria all have only one thing in common, and that’s America forcibly inserting a military presence into Syria. This is because they are not reasons, but excuses. The US forcibly inserted a military presence into Syria with the full intention of keeping it there, and then started diddling a bunch of completely different narratives in order to justify the thing it already wanted to do long before any of those excuses arose.

For eight years we’ve been spoon-fed an assortment of radically different narratives explaining why the US needs to control Syria militarily, and it turns out that the US and its allies have been plotting to control Syria since long before then. This is because Syria occupies an extremely geostrategically valuable location that is in no way limited to its oil fields. In 2004 Assad launched his “Five Seas Vision“, a plan to use Syria’s supreme location to place itself at the center of a regional energy and transportation system and become an economic superpower. The nation was then plunged into chaos seven years later, but whoever manages to secure control over this location will be able to achieve the same lucrative energy and transportation control for themselves. The dispute over pipeline routes that many have highlighted is just one small example of this. There’s also the illegally occupied Golan Heights which the extremely shady Genie Energy corporation has a vested interest in, and which provides a third of Israel’s water supply, and which the US has decided to officially regard as Israeli property.

So it’s a geostrategically crucial region, and it happens to have no interest at all in allowing itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, allying itself instead with the unabsorbed nations of Russia and Iran. This has made it the epicenter of a giant global imperialist struggle the implications of which stretch far beyond its borders to the rest of the world.

This is the real reason why half a million Syrians have died in an imperialist proxy war, and why many more Syrians continue to suffer under US-led sanctions and the deprivation of their nation’s valuable natural resources. Not because of humanitarianism, not because of democracy, not because of chemical weapons, not because of ISIS, not because of Iran, not because of Kurds, and not even really just because of oil, but because there’s a globe-spanning oligarchic empire to which Syria has refused to submit. Everything else is empty narrative.

Whenever you see anyone arguing for keeping troops in Syria that aren’t there with the permission of the Syrian government, this is all they’re really supporting: a campaign to annex a strategically valuable location into the US-centralized empire. This is true regardless of whatever reason they are offering for that support. And notice how all the different reasons we’ve been inundated with all appeal to different political sectors: the oil and Iran narratives appeal to rank-and-file Republicans, the humanitarian arguments appeal to liberals, and the Kurds narrative appeals to many leftists and anarchists like Noam Chomsky. But the end result is always the same: keeping military force in a location that the empire has long sought to absorb.

By providing many different narratives as to why the military presence must continue, the propagandists get us all arguing over which narratives are the correct ones rather than whether or not there should be an illegal military occupation of a sovereign nation at all. This is just one of many examples of how the incredibly shrinking Overton window of acceptable debate is used to keep us arguing not over whether the empire should be doing evil things, but how and why it should do them them.

Don’t fall for it. It is not legitimate for the US empire to occupy Syria for any reason. At all. “Because oil” is not a legitimate reason. “Because Kurds” is not a legitimate reason. “Because ISIS” is not a legitimate reason. “Because Iran” is not a legitimate reason. “Because Russia” is not a legitimate reason. “Because freedom and democracy” is not a legitimate reason. “Because chemical weapons” is not a legitimate reason. And those who are driving this illegal occupation know it, which is why they keep shifting to whatever’s the most convenient narrative in any given moment.

Advancing Propaganda For Evil Agendas Is The Same As Perpetrating Them Yourself. CJ. Nov. 22, 2019.

You see this dynamic at play all too often from outlets, organizations and individuals who portray themselves as liberal, progressive, or in some way oppositional to authoritarianism. They happily advance propaganda narratives against governments and individuals targeted by establishment power structures, whether that’s Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Maduro, Morales, Assange or whomever, but when it comes time for that establishment to actually implement the evil agenda it’s been pushing for, they wash their hands of it and decry what’s being done as though they’ve always opposed it.

But they haven’t opposed it. They’ve actively facilitated it. If you help promote smears and propaganda against a target of the empire, then you’re just as culpable for what happens to that target as the empire itself. Because you actively participated in making it happen.

The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself. Luke Savage, Jacobin. Nov. 27, 2019.

Barack Obama is using his post-presidency to attack the Left and protect the status quo. The historical myth believed by so many liberals that Obama was a progressive leader who was hemmed in by the presidency's political constraints is collapsing fast.

...

As for that initial question of what Obama wants, the answer is that he’s told anyone willing to listen from the very beginning. Since 2016, his major concern has been to preserve a legacy whose progressive bona fides are increasingly threatened by the genuine radicalism of those to his left – and to use the vast power and influence at his disposal to stand in their way.

from Distinguishing Capitalism from Growth, by James Magnus-Johnston.

Any pretence of a sane or just democracy left?

Our increasingly Orwellian world keeps devolving closer to Collins' depiction in the Hunger Games.


Craig Murray on Julian Assange. via Edward Curtin. Oct. 23, 2019.

I rarely post other people’s articles here, but this one should be read by every person with an ounce of conscience left.  There is no doubt that the U.S. and U.K. governments, monsters of cruelty and injustice, are torturing and trying to kill Julian Assange for exposing their evil actions all around the world. Please read this and join in defense of a most courageous and suffering man of truth.


Assange in Court. Craig Murray. Oct. 22, 2019.

I was deeply shaken while witnessing yesterday’s events in Westminster Magistrates Court. Every decision was railroaded through over the scarcely heard arguments and objections of Assange’s legal team, by a magistrate who barely pretended to be listening.

Before I get on to the blatant lack of fair process, the first thing I must note was Julian’s condition. I was badly shocked by just how much weight my friend has lost, by the speed his hair has receded and by the appearance of premature and vastly accelerated ageing. He has a pronounced limp I have never seen before. Since his arrest he has lost over 15 kg in weight.

But his physical appearance was not as shocking as his mental deterioration. When asked to give his name and date of birth, he struggled visibly over several seconds to recall both. I will come to the important content of his statement at the end of proceedings in due course, but his difficulty in making it was very evident; it was a real struggle for him to articulate the words and focus his train of thought.

Until yesterday I had always been quietly sceptical of those who claimed that Julian’s treatment amounted to torture – even of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture – and sceptical of those who suggested he may be subject to debilitating drug treatments. But having attended the trials in Uzbekistan of several victims of extreme torture, and having worked with survivors from Sierra Leone and elsewhere, I can tell you that yesterday changed my mind entirely and Julian exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim brought blinking into the light, particularly in terms of disorientation, confusion, and the real struggle to assert free will through the fog of learned helplessness.

I had been even more sceptical of those who claimed, as a senior member of his legal team did to me on Sunday night, that they were worried that Julian might not live to the end of the extradition process. I now find myself not only believing it, but haunted by the thought. Everybody in that court yesterday saw that one of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes. To see my friend, the most articulate man, the fastest thinker, I have ever known, reduced to that shambling and incoherent wreck, was unbearable. Yet the agents of the state, particularly the callous magistrate Vanessa Baraitser, were not just prepared but eager to be a part of this bloodsport. She actually told him that if he were incapable of following proceedings, then his lawyers could explain what had happened to him later. The question of why a man who, by the very charges against him, was acknowledged to be highly intelligent and competent, had been reduced by the state to somebody incapable of following court proceedings, gave her not a millisecond of concern.

The charge against Julian is very specific; conspiring with Chelsea Manning to publish the Iraq War logs, the Afghanistan war logs and the State Department cables. The charges are nothing to do with Sweden, nothing to do with sex, and nothing to do with the 2016 US election; a simple clarification the mainstream media appears incapable of understanding.

The purpose of yesterday’s hearing was case management; to determine the timetable for the extradition proceedings. The key points at issue were that Julian’s defence was requesting more time to prepare their evidence; and arguing that political offences were specifically excluded from the extradition treaty. There should, they argued, therefore be a preliminary hearing to determine whether the extradition treaty applied at all.

The reasons given by Assange’s defence team for more time to prepare were both compelling and startling. They had very limited access to their client in jail and had not been permitted to hand him any documents about the case until one week ago. He had also only just been given limited computer access, and all his relevant records and materials had been seized from the Ecuadorean Embassy by the US Government; he had no access to his own materials for the purpose of preparing his defence.

Furthermore, the defence argued, they were in touch with the Spanish courts about a very important and relevant legal case in Madrid which would provide vital evidence. It showed that the CIA had been directly ordering spying on Julian in the Embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide security there. Crucially this included spying on privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers discussing his defence against these extradition proceedings, which had been in train in the USA since 2010. In any normal process, that fact would in itself be sufficient to have the extradition proceedings dismissed. Incidentally I learnt on Sunday that the Spanish material produced in court, which had been commissioned by the CIA, specifically includes high resolution video coverage of Julian and I discussing various matters.

The evidence to the Spanish court also included a CIA plot to kidnap Assange, which went to the US authorities’ attitude to lawfulness in his case and the treatment he might expect in the United States. Julian’s team explained that the Spanish legal process was happening now and the evidence from it would be extremely important, but it might not be finished and thus the evidence not fully validated and available in time for the current proposed timetable for the Assange extradition hearings.

For the prosecution, James Lewis QC stated that the government strongly opposed any delay being given for the defence to prepare, and strongly opposed any separate consideration of the question of whether the charge was a political offence excluded by the extradition treaty. Baraitser took her cue from Lewis and stated categorically that the date for the extradition hearing, 25 February, could not be changed. She was open to changes in dates for submission of evidence and responses before this, and called a ten minute recess for the prosecution and defence to agree these steps.

What happened next was very instructive. There were five representatives of the US government present (initially three, and two more arrived in the course of the hearing), seated at desks behind the lawyers in court. The prosecution lawyers immediately went into huddle with the US representatives, then went outside the courtroom with them, to decide how to respond on the dates.

After the recess the defence team stated they could not, in their professional opinion, adequately prepare if the hearing date were kept to February, but within Baraitser’s instruction to do so they nevertheless outlined a proposed timetable on delivery of evidence. In responding to this, Lewis’ junior counsel scurried to the back of the court to consult the Americans again while Lewis actually told the judge he was “taking instructions from those behind”. It is important to note that as he said this, it was not the UK Attorney-General’s office who were being consulted but the US Embassy. Lewis received his American instructions and agreed that the defence might have two months to prepare their evidence (they had said they needed an absolute minimum of three) but the February hearing date may not be moved. Baraitser gave a ruling agreeing everything Lewis had said.

At this stage it was unclear why we were sitting through this farce. The US government was dictating its instructions to Lewis, who was relaying those instructions to Baraitser, who was ruling them as her legal decision. The charade might as well have been cut and the US government simply sat on the bench to control the whole process. Nobody could sit there and believe they were in any part of a genuine legal process or that Baraitser was giving a moment’s consideration to the arguments of the defence. Her facial expressions on the few occasions she looked at the defence ranged from contempt through boredom to sarcasm. When she looked at Lewis she was attentive, open and warm.

The extradition is plainly being rushed through in accordance with a Washington dictated timetable. Apart from a desire to pre-empt the Spanish court providing evidence on CIA activity in sabotaging the defence, what makes the February date so important to the USA? I would welcome any thoughts.

Baraitser dismissed the defence’s request for a separate prior hearing to consider whether the extradition treaty applied at all, without bothering to give any reason why (possibly she had not properly memorised what Lewis had been instructing her to agree with). Yet this is Article 4 of the UK/US Extradition Treaty 2007 in full:

On the face of it, what Assange is accused of is the very definition of a political offence – if this is not, then what is? It is not covered by any of the exceptions from that listed. There is every reason to consider whether this charge is excluded by the extradition treaty, and to do so before the long and very costly process of considering all the evidence should the treaty apply. But Baraitser simply dismissed the argument out of hand.

Just in case anybody was left in any doubt as to what was happening here, Lewis then stood up and suggested that the defence should not be allowed to waste the court’s time with a lot of arguments. All arguments for the substantive hearing should be given in writing in advance and a “guillotine should be applied” (his exact words) to arguments and witnesses in court, perhaps of five hours for the defence. The defence had suggested they would need more than the scheduled five days to present their case. Lewis countered that the entire hearing should be over in two days. Baraitser said this was not procedurally the correct moment to agree this but she will consider it once she had received the evidence bundles.

(SPOILER: Baraitser is going to do as Lewis instructs and cut the substantive hearing short).

Baraitser then capped it all by saying the February hearing will be held, not at the comparatively open and accessible Westminster Magistrates Court where we were, but at Belmarsh Magistrates Court, the grim high security facility used for preliminary legal processing of terrorists, attached to the maximum security prison where Assange is being held. There are only six seats for the public in even the largest court at Belmarsh, and the object is plainly to evade public scrutiny and make sure that Baraitser is not exposed in public again to a genuine account of her proceedings, like this one you are reading. I will probably be unable to get in to the substantive hearing at Belmarsh.

Plainly the authorities were disconcerted by the hundreds of good people who had turned up to support Julian. They hope that far fewer will get to the much less accessible Belmarsh. I am fairly certain (and recall I had a long career as a diplomat) that the two extra American government officials who arrived halfway through proceedings were armed security personnel, brought in because of alarm at the number of protestors around a hearing in which were present senior US officials. The move to Belmarsh may be an American initiative.

Assange’s defence team objected strenuously to the move to Belmarsh, in particular on the grounds that there are no conference rooms available there to consult their client and they have very inadequate access to him in the jail. Baraitser dismissed their objection offhand and with a very definite smirk.

Finally, Baraitser turned to Julian and ordered him to stand, and asked him if he had understood the proceedings. He replied in the negative, said that he could not think, and gave every appearance of disorientation. Then he seemed to find an inner strength, drew himself up a little, and said:

I do not understand how this process is equitable. This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I can’t even access my writings. It is very difficult, where I am, to do anything. These people have unlimited resources.

The effort then seemed to become too much, his voice dropped and he became increasingly confused and incoherent. He spoke of whistleblowers and publishers being labeled enemies of the people, then spoke about his children’s DNA being stolen and of being spied on in his meetings with his psychologist. I am not suggesting at all that Julian was wrong about these points, but he could not properly frame nor articulate them. He was plainly not himself, very ill and it was just horribly painful to watch. Baraitser showed neither sympathy nor the least concern. She tartly observed that if he could not understand what had happened, his lawyers could explain it to him, and she swept out of court.

The whole experience was profoundly upsetting. It was very plain that there was no genuine process of legal consideration happening here. What we had was a naked demonstration of the power of the state, and a naked dictation of proceedings by the Americans. Julian was in a box behind bulletproof glass, and I and the thirty odd other members of the public who had squeezed in were in a different box behind more bulletproof glass. I do not know if he could see me or his other friends in the court, or if he was capable of recognising anybody. He gave no indication that he did.

In Belmarsh he is kept in complete isolation for 23 hours a day. He is permitted 45 minutes exercise. If he has to be moved, they clear the corridors before he walks down them and they lock all cell doors to ensure he has no contact with any other prisoner outside the short and strictly supervised exercise period. There is no possible justification for this inhuman regime, used on major terrorists, being imposed on a publisher who is a remand prisoner.

I have been both cataloguing and protesting for years the increasingly authoritarian powers of the UK state, but that the most gross abuse could be so open and undisguised is still a shock. The campaign of demonisation and dehumanisation against Julian, based on government and media lie after government and media lie, has led to a situation where he can be slowly killed in public sight, and arraigned on a charge of publishing the truth about government wrongdoing, while receiving no assistance from “liberal” society.

Unless Julian is released shortly he will be destroyed. If the state can do this, then who is next?



"He doesn’t fight the law, he fights the lawless posing as the law". Ilargi, automatic earth.


Useful quick review of history behind Assanges totally unlawful persecution

War and Empire Links: December 2018

Another evil neoconshithead bites the dust:
George Herbert Walker Bush and the Myth of the ‘Good’ Gulf War. Nora Rosenberg via nakedcapitalism. Dec. 6, 2018.

If You Murdered A Bunch Of People, Mass Murder Is Your Single Defining Legacy. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 1, 2018.

Thought experiment: 

Think of an acquaintance of yours. Not someone you’re particularly close to, just some guy in the cast of extras from the scenery of your life. Now, imagine learning that that guy is a serial murderer, who has been prowling the streets for years stabbing people to death. Imagine he goes his whole life without ever suffering any consequences for murdering all those people, and then when he dies, everyone wants to talk about how great he was and share heartwarming anecdotes about him. If you try to bring up the whole serial killing thing, people react with sputtering outrage that you would dare to speak ill of such a noble and wonderful person. 

“Look, I didn’t agree with everything he did, but you can’t just let one not-so-great thing from a man’s life eclipse all the other good things he’s accomplished,” they protest. “For example, did you know he was a baseball captain at Yale?” 

“But… what about all those people he murdered?” you reply. 

“God, why can’t you just pay respect to a great man in our time of mourning??” they shout in exasperation. ...

... George Herbert Walker Bush was a mass murderer, and the only reason that undeniable fact isn’t dominating public discourse today is because of the myopia caused by a deeply unjust power dynamic.

Anti-ISIS Coalition Airstrikes Killed Over 1,100 Civilians. Zerohedge. Dec. 31, 2018.

While it has been reported previously that Saudi airstrikes in Yemen have led to the deaths of over 10,000 inncoent civilians, a finding which according to Reuters suggested the US could be found guilty of war crimes for supporting the Saudi assault, it is time to shift attention to what is taking place a few hundred miles north. 

The reason: U.S.-led coalition airstrikes against the Islamic State have killed over 1,000 civilians in Iraq and Syria since 2014. 

In its latest monthly civilian casualty report, the Coalition detailed confirmed deaths of 1,139 civilians in airstrikes conducted since the beginning of Operation Inherent Resolve between August 2014 and November 2018, VoA reports.

Imagine If Saudi Arabia Was Not A US Ally. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 14, 2018.

In May of last year, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was given a memo by his assistant, virulent Iran hawk Brian Hook. The memo, intended to educate the struggling political neophyte Tillerson on the finer points of State Department manipulation, laid out the beltway’s standard protocol for dealing with Washington’s allies and its enemies. Hook said human rights issues are something the US government presses its enemies on but not its allies, naming China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran as examples of US enemies who violate human rights, and naming Egypt, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia as examples of US allies who violate human rights. 

“In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook wrote. “One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies. The classic dilemma of balancing ideals and interests is with regard to America’s allies. In relation to our competitors, there is far less of a dilemma. We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”

...

Saudi Arabia existed in the “enemies” column instead of the “allies”, we’d have been seeing constant mass media coverage of its butchery in Yemen for almost four years now. MSNBC, which recently went more than a year without mentioning Yemen even a single time, would be tearfully depicting the dying children with the same urgency it covered the “uniquely horrific” sarin gas attack alleged to have taken place in Syria last year, and doing so regularly. The starving children of Yemen would be on the forefront of western consciousness instead of the back burner, and demands to make it stop would be screaming from coast to coast.

How Plutocratic Media Keeps Staff Aligned With Establishment Agendas. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 10, 2018.

... for starters if the mainstream media reporters are telling us the truth all the time it would mean that the same power institutions which slaughtered millions in Vietnam and Iraq for no good reason are actually virtuous and honest. It would mean the positive, uncritical picture that is consistently painted of those same institutions which wage nonstop campaigns of bloodshed and oppression to ensure the profit of economic manipulators and war profiteers is due to those institutions possessing merits which are overall so positive that no criticism of them is needed. It would mean that the status quo of climate destruction, steadily growing wealth inequality, an increasingly Orwellian surveillance system, an increasingly militarized police force, increasing internet censorship, and crushing neoliberal austerity measures are all things people voted for using the excellent democratic political system the mainstream media defends, based on the accurate information the mainstream media gave them about what’s in their best interests.

... 

We know that the system is spectacularly screwed up, and we know that the political establishment which these mainstream outlets always defend does unforgivably evil things, so we should expect to see a lot more critical reporting and a lot less protecting of the status quo. But we don’t. We see war crimes ignored, oppression justified, the two-headed one-party system normalized, dissident narratives smeared as fake news conspiracy theories, and unproven assertions by government agencies with a known history of lying reported as unquestionable fact.

...

This part of a 1996 interview between Noam Chomsky and the BBC’s Andrew Marr describes a foundational element of Explanation 2: that there is a system in place which ensures that all the reporters in positions of influence are there not to report factually on the news of the day, but to sell a particular narrative that is friendly to the state and the status quo. Chomsky describes a “filtering system” which ensures that only those loyal to power rise to the top within the plutocrat-owned media, to which Marr objects and insists that his peers are brave truth-tellers who hold power to account. Subsequently, the following exchange takes place:

Chomsky: Well, I know some of the best, and best known investigative reporters in the United States, I won’t mention names, whose attitude towards the media is much more cynical than mine. In fact, they regard the media as a sham. And they know, and they consciously talk about how they try to play it like a violin. If they see a little opening, they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through. And it’s perfectly true that the majority – I’m sure you’re speaking for the majority of journalists who are trained, have it driven into their heads, that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, we stand up against power. A very self-serving view. On the other hand, in my opinion, I hate to make a value judgement but, the better journalists and in fact the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists have quite a different picture. And I think a very realistic one.

Marr: How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are..

Chomsky: I’m not saying you're self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

Twenty-One Thoughts On The Persecution Of Julian Assange. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 16, 2018.

1. I write a lot about the plight of Julian Assange for the same reason I write a lot about the Iraq invasion: his persecution, when sincerely examined, exposes undeniable proof that we are ruled by a transnational power establishment which is immoral and dishonest to its core. 

2. Assange started a leak outlet on the premise that corrupt and unaccountable power is a problem in our world, and that the problem can be fought with the light of truth. Corrupt and unaccountable power has responded by detaining, silencing and smearing him. The persecution of Assange has proved his thesis about the world absolutely correct. 

3. Anyone who offends the US-centralized empire will find themselves subject to a trial by media, and the media is owned by the same plutocratic class which owns the empire. To believe what mass media news outlets tell you about those who stand up to imperial power is to ignore reality

...

13. The precedent that would be set by the US prosecuting a foreign journalist for merely publishing factual information would constitute a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act, for America and for the entire world.

...

21. The persecution of Assange is essentially a question that mankind is asking itself: do we want to (A) continue down the path of omnicidal, ecocidal Orwellian dystopia, or do we want to (B) pull up and away from that trajectory and shrug off the oppressive power establishment which is driving us toward either total extinction or total enslavement? So far, B is the answer we’ve been giving ourselves to that question. But, as long as we switch before it’s too late, we can always change our answer.

Endless War Has Been Normalized And Everyone Is Crazy. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 22, 2018.

Since I last wrote about the bipartisan shrieking, hysterical reaction to Trump’s planned military withdrawal from Syria the other day, it hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse. I’m having a hard time even picking out individual bits of the collective freakout from the political/media class to point at, because doing so would diminish the frenetic white noise of the paranoid, conspiratorial, fear-mongering establishment reaction to the possibility of a few thousands troops being pulled back from a territory they were illegally occupying.

Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking. The talking heads of the corporate state media had been almost entirely ignoring the buildup of US troops in Syria and the operations they’ve been carrying out there, but as soon as the possibility of those troops leaving emerged, all the alarm bells started ringing. Endless war was considered so normal that nobody ever talked about it, then Trump tweeted he’s bringing the troops home, and now every armchair liberal in America who had no idea what a Kurd was until five minutes ago is suddenly an expert on Erdoğan and the YPG. Lindsey Graham, who has never met an unaccountable US military occupation he didn’t like, is now suddenly cheerleading for congressional oversight: not for sending troops into wars, but for pulling them out.

“I would urge my colleagues in the Senate and the House, call people from the administration and explain this policy,” Graham recently told reporters on Capitol Hill. “This is the role of the Congress, to make administrations explain their policy, not in a tweet, but before Congress answering questions.”

“It is imperative Congress hold hearings on withdrawal decision in Syria — and potentially Afghanistan — to understand implications to our national security,” Graham tweeted today.

In an even marginally sane world, the fact that a nation’s armed forces are engaged in daily military violence would be cause for shock and alarm, and pulling those forces out of that situation would be viewed as a return to normalcy. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite. In an even marginally sane world, congressional oversight would be required to send the US military to invade countries and commit acts of war, because that act, not withdrawing them, is what’s abnormal. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite.

A hypothetical space alien observing our civilization for the first time would conclude that we are insane, and that hypothetical space alien would be absolutely correct. Have some Reese’s Pieces, hypothetical space alien. ...

 The Peace President. Irrussianality. Dec. 21, 2018.

As a candidate for the presidency, Donald Trump took a lot of provocative positions. There were very few of them which a good Western liberal like myself could support. But two did make sense: that it was in America’s interests to improve its relations with Russia; and that America’s endless wars in the Middle East and Central Asia were harming the United States without bringing any benefits, and so ought to be ended. To my mind, both of these propositions are blindingly obvious, but in the odd atmosphere of American politics, they were viewed as downright dangerous. Trump’s support of better relations with Russia has resulted in him being denounced as a traitor, a paid agent of the Kremlin. And his idea that America ought to bring its wars to an end has seen him being condemned as foolish and irresponsible. 

Once elected, Trump rapidly turned his back on these views. His government imposed more and more sanctions on Russia, and Trump filled his cabinet with hawks like Mattis, Pompeo, and Bolton, and then proceeded to pursue reckless policies such as ripping up the nuclear deal with Iran. Those who hoped that Trump would bring peace were cruelly disappointed. 

Until this week, when Trump suddenly declared victory in Syria and announced that he was ordering American troops to leave that country and return home. One might imagine that this would be a cause for celebration. American interference in Syria has had catastrophic consequences. On the assumption that the government of Bashar al-Assad was doomed, the United States funnelled weapons and money to a range of opposition groups who in some cases ended up fighting themselves, and in other cases defected to join ISIS, taking their American weapons with them. They failed to overthrow Assad, but did weaken him enough to open the way for ISIS to spread across a large part of Syria. Only after the Russian intervention in Syria began in late 2015 did ISIS finally begin to retreat. Now with ISIS largely defeated, any pretence that there is a legitimate reason for American troops to be in Syria has disappeared. Trump’s decision to get out is entirely warranted. 

Yet it has led to howls of protest. Leading Republicans responded to the announcements of the troop withdrawal and Mattis’s resignation by saying that, ‘we are headed towards a series of grave policy errors which will endanger our nation,’ and that they were ‘legitimately frightened for the country’, as if ISIS were now going to be suddenly landing its troops on Roanoke Island. But it isn’t only Republicans who have been complaining. The reaction among Democrats has been equally outraged. Democratic Senator Mark Warner, for instance, described the situation as ‘scary’, while CNN (not noted for its love of the Republican Party) declared that Washington was ‘shaken, saddened, scared’, and the New York Times ran headlines such as ‘US Exit (from Syria) Seen as Betrayal of the Kurds, and a Boon for ISIS.’ 

There was a time when going to war was seen as a measure to be taken only in extremis. Unfortunately, lacking serious military competitors following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western powers decided to use the ‘unipolar moment’ to flex their muscles, with the result that they got mired in a series of apparently never-ending wars. Instead of discrediting the idea of war, these had the opposite effect – they habituated the political classes to it, so that now waging war has become normal and making peace is seen as ‘scary’. Conventional judgements about the national interest, international law, and the ethics of war have been turned on their head. 

There’s not much to like about Trump, but the one (actually very significant) thing in his favour is that he professes a desire to put a stop to all this. It would be wrong to say that Trump has been a ‘peace president’. He has, after all, continued American involvement in wars such as that in Yemen. But, to date he has yet to start a new one. 

This is actually quite remarkable. Barack Obama launched a war against Libya and got American involved in the wars in Yemen and Syria. His predecessor, George W. Bush, invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Before Bush, Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia, and before him George H.W. Bush fought the first Gulf War. And of course, Bush Senior’s predecessor Ronald Reagan invaded Panama and Grenada. One has go to back 40 years to Jimmy Carter to find a president who didn’t start a war. So, despite what I said above, by American standards Trump is indeed a peace president and, if he keeps it up, far more deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize than Obama ever was.  The fact that so many find this worrisome indicates that something has gone seriously wrong not only with our understanding of the world but also with our moral compass.

Trump Scores, Breaks Generals’ 50-Year War Record. Gareth Porter, The American Conservative. Dec. 28, 2018.

His national security team had been trying to box him in like every other president. But he called their bluff.

The mainstream media has attacked President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as impulsive, blindsiding his own national security team. But detailed, published accounts of the policy process over the course of the year tell a very different story. They show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria. 

The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone. The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state. 

The relationship between Trump and his national security team has been tense since the beginning of his administration. By mid-summer 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford had become so alarmed at Trump’s negative responses to their briefings justifying global U.S. military deployments that they decided to do a formal briefing in “the tank,” used by the Joint Chiefs for meetings at the Pentagon.   

But when Mattis and Dunford sang the praises of the “rules-based, international democratic order” that has “kept the peace for 70 years,” Trump simply shook his head in disbelief. 

By the end of that year, however, Mattis, Dunford, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo believed they’d succeeded in getting Trump to use U.S. troops not only to defeat Islamic State but to “stabilize” the entire northeast sector of Syria and balance Russian and Iranian-sponsored forces. Yet they ignored warning signs of Trump’s continuing displeasure with their vision of a more or less permanent American military presence in Syria.
In a March rally in Ohio ostensibly about health care reform, Trump suddenly blurted out, “We’re coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon—very soon we’re coming out.”  

Then in early April 2018, Trump’s impatience with his advisors on Syria boiled over into a major confrontation at a National Security Council meeting,where he ordered them unequivocally to accept a fundamentally different Syria deployment policy.   

Trump opened the meeting with his public stance that the United States must end its intervention in Syria and the Middle East more broadly. He argued repeatedly that the U.S. had gotten “nothing” for its efforts, according to an account published by the Associated Press based on interviews with administration officials who had been briefed on the meeting. When Dunford asked him to state exactly what he wanted, Trump answered that he favored an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and an end to the “stabilization” program in Syria. ...

Who I Am, Where I Stand, And What I’m Trying To Do Here. Caitlin Johnstone. Dec. 3, 2018.

My goal here in this little slot of digital real estate is to do every little thing I can to help save the world. Humanity appears to be hurtling toward extinction by way of climate destruction or nuclear annihilation, both of which are movements held in place by a transnational alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies. This unelected power establishment (which is sometimes referred to as the deep state, a term I now avoid since Republican partisans have distorted its meaning) seems to be motivated not by any ideology, nor by any loyalty to any particular nation or government, but by sheer hunger for limitless power. I place emphasis on the United States, because that’s where the largest amount of power appears to be centralized. 

In a system where money both (A) translates directly to political power and (B) comes most abundantly to whoever is sufficiently cold and unfeeling to do whatever it takes in order to become immensely wealthy, we naturally find ourselves in a world ruled by sociopaths. These plutocratic rulers use their political influence to amass more power/money for themselves and create a system that is more and more favorable to the immensely wealthy, and they buy up media outlets to manufacture public support for that system. This ongoing propaganda campaign is what I see as the key weakness in the armor of their machine, and it’s the point I spend my energy attacking here. 

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Understand this key point and you’ll understand why plutocrat-controlled media outlets are constantly smearing Julian Assange, why they never fail to fall in line to support a US-led military agenda, why they pay massive amounts of attention to some political candidates while completely ignoring others, and why they put so much energy into keeping everyone arguing over the details of how the status quo should be maintained instead of debating whether it should exist at all. The unelected power establishment uses its control over politics and media to determine what the public believes about what’s going on in their world in order to keep them from rebelling against a status quo which does not serve them; without the ability to effectively propagandize the masses in this way, they cannot rule. I therefore concentrate most of my energy here in attacking that propaganda machine and weakening the unearned trust that the public has placed in the mass media.

Ideologically, I am best described as a socialist. I believe if our species is to survive it will necessarily be without the planet-raping rat race of capitalism which keeps everyone stepping on each other’s heads, toiling to make more stuff for more people to consume regardless of whether that stuff helps the sum total or hurts it. I do not believe in the Magical Free Market Fairy that devout capitalists assure me has the beneficent wisdom to solve any problem, and in fact I see no evidence that the desire for money has any kind of wisdom at all, let alone the kind needed to overcome the immense challenges that our species faces currently. We are not going to spend, consume and toil our way out of ecocide or geopolitical battles for global dominance. If humanity still exists in the future on the other side of the immense crises on our horizon, it exists because we found an unselfish and compassionate way to collaborate together for the common good. A new world will need new ideas, but right now the closest thing to an ideological description of what a movement in that direction might look like is socialism. 

Yet my writings are mostly non-ideological. This is because the enemy I am trying to attack is itself non-ideological; the agenda to thoroughly dominate and control as many human beings as possible is no more an ideology than a street mugging is. The unelected power establishment will promote the narratives of any ideology to any sector of the population in order to advance its agendas, including capitalism, socialism, white supremacy, Zionism, Christian or Islamic fundamentalism, conservatism or progressivism. I look forward to a future where it makes sense to spend time fighting over who has the best ideology, but in an environment that is dominated by an enemy which only sees ideologies as useful tools of narrative control it makes most sense to just directly attack the narrative manipulation itself. 

You won’t therefore see many articles from me about the virtues of socialism, while you’ll see many about mass media propaganda and large-scale power dynamics. My goal is to help kill public trust in the empire which uses narrative control to maintain itself so that people can awaken from the lies and shrug off the mechanisms of manipulation like a heavy coat on a warm day, then help move humanity into a healthy direction in the new world once that is accomplished.

I do not believe humanity will be able to wake up from the propaganda narrative matrix and create a healthy world without a massive shift in the way we think and perceive. While most tend to look at what is commonly called spiritual enlightenment as an esoteric religious concept, or at most a lofty personal aspiration, I see it as a powerful yet mundane agent of social metamorphosis with far-reaching political consequences. The fact that it is possible for human beings to radically shift their relationship with thought means that it is possible for us to collectively transcend our current fear-based, easily manipulated relationship with the world and evolve into something unprecedented together. Our unprecedented ability to network and share information already in and of itself represents a drastic change in the way humans relate cognitively with the world, and there are reasons to believe a collective awakening could already be unfolding for us. Simply the fact that enlightenment is a potential that human beings have, combined with the fact that we have pressed ourselves into evolve-or-die time, indicates such a collective transcendence is a very real possibility. 

I spend time writing about insights into that possibility for this reason. Some people enjoy my thoughts on the evolution of human consciousness, others aren’t so interested, but it’s often the most honest and direct way I can think of to push toward the escape from the oppression machine. On a collective basis it likely holds the key to our avoiding extinction and creating a beautiful world, and on an individual basis waking up from believed mental narrative gives one a lot of clarity for attacking the machine and makes one impossible to effectively propagandize. Revolution is in many ways an inside job, and doing the necessary inner work to snap ourselves out of our habitual identification with thought is a great way to turn oneself into a very inconvenient weapon against the empire. 

And that’s mainly all you’ll ever see me doing with this platform these days: using essays, stories and poems to try and tear down the lie factory from as many angles as possible so that humanity can come to see things with clear eyes. I know I’m just one person and can only make so much difference, but I need to be able to tell my kids I did everything I could to help create a healthy world for them.

Beneath the Official Lies and Sordid Story Leading up to the War on Iraq: Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski’s Sam Adams Award Acceptance Speech. Karen Kwiatkowski. Gobal Research. Dec. 10, 2018.


We Are Drowning in a Devolved World: An Open Letter from Devo. Gerald V. Casale, via Vice.com. Dec. 6, 2018.

Following the band's Rock Hall nomination, founder Gerald Casale reflects on its dystopian legacy in the age of Trump.


In 2018, 15 years after becoming eligible, Devo was nominated for the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame. The honorees will be announced a week from today. I was immediately struck by the timing of our sudden recognition: When Devo formed more than 40 years ago, we never dreamed that two decades into the 21st century, everything we had theorized would not only be proven, but also become worse than we had imagined. For me, Devo has been a long journeylittered with broken dreams, but the nomination compelled me to put things in perspective. I know that many are called but few are chosen.

Forty-eight years ago, on May 4, 1970, as a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), I was front and center being fired on by my fellow Americans in the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, as we peacefully protested President Nixon’s expansion of the cancerously unpopular Vietnam War into Cambodia without an act of Congress. I was lucky and dodged the bullet, both literally and figuratively, but four students were killed, and nine more were seriously wounded by the armed, mostly teenaged, National Guard troops. Two of the four students killed, Alison Krause and Jeffery Miller, were close acquaintances of mine. Less than a year earlier, as an Admissions/Curriculum counselor to incoming students, I had admitted them to the Honors College program.

May 4 changed my life, and I truly believe Devo would not exist without that horror. It made me realize that all the Quasar color TVs, Swanson TV dinners, Corvettes, and sofa beds in the world didn't mean we were actually making progress. It meant the future could be not only as barbaric as the past, but that it most likely would be. The dystopian novels 1984, Animal Farm, and Brave New World suddenly seemed less like cautionary tales about the encroaching fusion of technological advances with the centralized, authoritarian power of the state, and more like subversive road maps to condition the intelligentsia for what was to come. 

As I started working with my Kent State poet friend, Bob Lewis, a philosophy emerged, fueled by the revelations that linear progress in a consumer society was a lie. Things were not getting better. There were no flying cars and domed cities, as promised in Popular Science; rather, there was a dumbing down of the population engineered by right-wing politicians, televangelists, and Madison Avenue. I called what we saw “De-evolution,” based upon the tendency toward entropy across all human endeavors. Borrowing the tactics of the Mad Men-era of our childhood, we shortened the name of the idea to the marketing-friendly “Devo.” We were not left-wing politicos. We were more informed by Jungian principles of duality in human nature, and we realized human flaws spread out across the political spectrum. Hence: “We’re All Devo,” an idea from which we did not exempt ourselves.