What Happens When You Propagandize A Nation Into Supporting Mass Murder
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
MOURNERS IN SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, TX They look like zombies and they might as well be zombies for all they understand about the real causes of America's social violence. Events like these promptly become exercises in herdlike behaviour according to accepted rituals.
There’s been another mass shooting in America, this time at a very small church in a Texas town of less than a thousand people. As of this writing, ABC News is reporting that at least 27 people are dead.
Texas funeral businessman Trey Ganem offering help to the aggrieved families. Surrounded by caskets, he thinks nothing of decorating his office with a decapitated deer head. This is the appalling gap in true empathy and disconnection from reality common in this land. People live immersed in horrid contradictions.
Details are scant and the response has been predictable. I follow both lefties and conservatives on social media so my feeds consist of both sides calling each other hypocrites because their responses to this shooting are different from the Manhattan attack a few days ago. Terrorism or not terrorism? You wanted the Muslim to be a terrorist but not the white guy? You wanted the white guy to be a terrorist but not the Muslim? Gun control! No gun control! Thoughts and prayers!
You know the drill.
Meanwhile the US war machine, the most efficient facilitator of mass murder on earth, marches on. And people act like it’s normal because the talking heads on TV tell them it is.
I have a lot of heavily conspiracy-minded readers who are skeptical about many of these mass shootings, and people should be skeptical when they live in a nation known to use false flags to facilitate deep state agendas. But I have to wonder if a lot of this violence can simply be explained by the self-evident fact that the American psyche is constantly being warped and twisted by the establishment propaganda machine into believing that mass murder is normal?
I mean, think about it. If you are reading this you’re probably already aware that the mass media’s job is not to tell you what is happening in the world. The mass media’s job is to tell you that the country that is invading sovereign nations and dropping bombs on civilians are the good guys, while selling you Mountain Dew.
Day after day after day Americans are pummeled with scary imagery of terrorists and Russians and “rogue states” (whatever those are) and told that “troops” are being deployed to keep a lid on the problem, which is of course another way of saying that human beings with weapons are going to kill other human beings with weapons. This is sold as a normal, expected thing, like police being deployed to a bank robbery.
Virtually all Americans are aware that their country’s military is fighting overseas. Some of them could tell you the primary areas that this is happening, while virtually nobody could tell you everywhere it’s happening, but there’s a general knowledge that fighting and killing is being done by their country in other countries. Then they turn on the news and none of the talking heads are reporting on it with furrowed brows as though it’s a terrible thing that should not be happening, like they do when there’s a mass murder in America. Hell, when Trump launched his deadly missile assault on Syria in April, pundits on all networks were practically orgasming over it.
There’s no way this doesn’t have an effect on the American psyche. Something so horrific, so abnormal, being normalized so aggressively day in and day out both overtly and subtly will necessarily warp people’s minds. There will necessarily be some people who can’t successfully compartmentalize themselves into viewing acts of human butchery as acceptable when the US military does it and unacceptable at home. And they’ll snap.
Advertising is a half-trillion dollar industry. Industries wouldn’t spend that kind of cash if it didn’t work. This proves that people are very easy to manipulate with media. If you can use it to convince an otherwise rational human being to put Mountain Dew in their body, you can use it to make them think that violence is okay. The amount of psychological shove that it takes to convince someone that what the US war machine does is not cause for alarm cannot help but have some splashback.
I’m not naive enough to think that I can rescue America from the impotent partisan culture war sniping that happens in the wake of every single mass murder without exception these days, but if I had one wish it would be to get people to pay more attention to the influence of propaganda in their lives. The more time we spend bickering over how arbitrary words like “terrorism” should be used the less time we’re spending addressing this crucial component of the US war machine directly.
America is in a state of endless war because the nationless plutocracy which has centralized itself there uses the US military as its personal mafia to bully potential rivals into compliance. This same plutocracy owns the mass media and uses it to manufacture public support for the behavior of its armed goon squad, because if Americans stop consenting to their money and resources being squandered on bombs, the civil unrest would cause major damage to their investments in the US.
America is in a state of endless war because the nationless plutocracy which has centralized itself there uses the US military as its personal mafia to bully potential rivals into compliance. This same plutocracy owns the mass media and uses it to manufacture public support for the behavior of its armed goon squad, because if Americans stop consenting to their money and resources being squandered on bombs, the civil unrest would cause major damage to their investments in the US. [Or overthrow them!—Eds]
They need your consent. They wouldn’t work so hard to manufacture it if they didn’t. America could end its global endless war by creating a real economy that isn’t propped up with the barrel of a gun, bringing all its troops home, and setting about defending its own easily-defended borders. Then the culture of violence could finally be curbed. There could be a lasting peace.
They will have to give this to you if enough of you demand it. The amount of effort they put in to lying to you proves that they are afraid of what will happen if you wake up to what they’re doing.
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About the Author
Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—America is in a state of endless war because the nationless plutocracy which has centralized itself there uses the US military as its personal mafia to bully potential rivals into compliance. This same plutocracy owns the mass media and uses it to manufacture public support for the behavior of its armed goon squad, because if Americans stop consenting to their money and resources being squandered on bombs, the civil unrest would cause major damage to their investments in the US.
Parting shot—a word from the editors The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.—Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report