In America’s news headlines, Palestinians die mysterious deaths

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Judging by some stories, it’s almost as if bullets just hang in the air, waiting for Palestinians to walk deliberately into them

It is the peculiar fate of oppressed people everywhere that when they are killed, they are killed twice: first by bullet or bomb, and next by the language used to describe their deaths. A common condition of oppression, after all, is to be blamed for being the victim, and that blame gets meted out in language designed to rob the oppressed of their very struggle.

Such a situation has for decades been the tragic destiny of the Palestinians, who are themselves so routinely assigned the blame when they are killed by Israel – and not just by the Israeli government but by the American media and political establishment – that we have now basically come to expect it.

But we don’t have to accept it. By paying close attention to the language of the media, we can see how this double death of the oppressed occurs, and we can learn how to resist such an insidious way of framing the Palestinian struggle.

Consider the headlines. On Monday, the Israeli military killed more than 60 protesters in Gaza. The deadly violence was one-sided – no Israelis were killed – and disproportionate. In the midst of the carnage, the New York Times sent out a tweet about its story on the bloody events. “Dozens of Palestinians have died in protests as the US prepares to open its Jerusalem Embassy,” read the tweet.

Have died? Really? We should note how the virtually passive voice in this tweet hides the one performing the action, which is exactly what passive voice constructions can do. In this tweet, Israel is assigned no responsibility for killing protesters. On the contrary, Palestinians appear, simply and almost mysteriously, to “have died”.

The tweet was too egregious for many, including the director Judd Apatow. “Shame on you,” he tweeted. “This is like calling Trump’s lies ‘factual inaccuracies’. Please tell me an intern is running your Twitter feed.” Good for him.

To be fair to the New York Times, the headline in Tuesday’s physical paper (still a thing) was much clearer. “Israelis Kill Dozens in Gaza,” it read, though one is still left wondering who these “Israelis” are. Wouldn’t “Israel” be a more accurate noun? The military represents the state, after all, and not individual citizens.

But the Times is hardly alone in these obfuscating headlines. The Washington Post’s lead story on the massacre is headlined “Gaza buries its dead as death toll from protests at fence with Israel rises to at least 60.” Again, the headline leaves us wondering who killed the people of Gaza? Are we to assume that the protests – and not the Israeli military – killed these people?

The Wall Street Journal has a video on its website with the headline “Clashes Over New US Embassy in Jerusalem Leave Dozens Dead”. Frankly, this headline is even worse than the others. To label this massacre as “clashes” is not only disingenuous but also grossly misleading, as is the idea that the Palestinians were only protesting against the new US embassy in Jerusalem. Gaza’s Great Return March was organized in significant measure to draw attention to the plight of Palestinian refugees, who make up around 70% of the population of the Gaza Strip.

And then there’s the ever-present “leave dozens dead” in the headline, which again tells us nothing about who shot whom, suggesting instead that “clashes” rather than people kill while insinuating that Palestinians are, once again, basically responsible for their own slaughter.

It’s almost as if bullets just hang in the air, waiting for Palestinians to walk deliberately into them.

Headlines like these are the journalistic equivalent of US ambassador Nikki Haley telling the UN’s security council that “no country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has”. Such language works not only to buffer Israel from criticism but also and more fundamentally to shield Israel from accountability.

Over 70 years ago, George Orwell wrote that modern political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”. It saddens me to see how nothing has changed. And nothing will change until we demand more from the purveyors of today’s political language. Palestinians deserve better. We all deserve better. And no one should have to die more than once.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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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

How a Free Market Inevitably Produces Dictatorship

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ERIC ZUESSE | 21.08.2018 | WORLD / AMERICAS / STRATEGIC CULTURE

Hoppe

So, in a country that has extreme wealth-inequality, the way in which the public’s ‘consent’, to the billionaires’ rule, is manufactured, is by means of deceit — a rot that’s throughout the entire body-politic and society. This is how an extreme inequality of wealth is produced. It cannot be done honestly.

That’s only “natural persons” who control a democracy — no collectives of any type, corporate or otherwise, can vote, because, if it were otherwise, it would be an easy way to establish a dictatorship there: persons with the financial means could create any number of “artificial persons” who could vote, or could buy votes (such as by purchasing news-media to slant ‘reality’ selling politicians and political positions to the voters), and this money could produce a country controlled more by dollars, than by owners (i.e., than by actual persons, voters — not by artificial “persons” such as the wealth-collections that are known as corporations). If wealth-collections could vote, that would invite control over the land to be by wealth (the number of dollars) instead of by actual residents (the number of persons). It could even produce control by foreign wealth. Foreigners could end up controlling the country if the number of dollars is a bigger determinant of who rules than is the number of voters.

Obviously, no democracy will allow foreigners to control the land. Imperialism is inconsistent with democracy; any empire is dictatorial, by its very nature. It entails dictatorship over the residents in its colonies, even if not necessarily over the residents in the imperial land that had conquered the colonial area.

Empire is consistent with a free market, but it is inconsistent with democracy. No empire is democratic, because each colony is ruled by non-residents. (If the colony were ruled by its residents, it wouldn’t be a colony, and there wouldn’t be an empire.)

A federation is not an empire. The difference between them is that, whereas in a federation, the right of self-determination of peoples takes precedence over the federation’s interest in maintaining the status-quo; in an empire, there is no such right — an empire is a dictatorship.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he propaganda for a free market is funded very heavily by billionaires such as the Koch brothers and George Soros, because control over countries naturally devolves into control by wealth, instead of into control by people (and certainly not by residents), if a free-market economy exists there. Billionaires do whatever increases their power; and, beyond around $100,000-per-year of income, any additional wealth buys no additional happiness or satisfaction, but only additional status, which, for individuals who are in such brackets, is derived from increases in their power, because, at that stage of wealth, money itself is no longer an object, only status is, and additional status can be derived only from additional power. All of the empirical findings in the social sciences are consistent with this; and, whereas the income-point in most of those studies, beyond which additional dollars produce no additional happiness for the owner, has been $75,000 per year, there has been inflation since those studies were performed, and one might more accurately say today that $100,000-per-year is the income-point beyond which only status is increased by additional income; happiness or satisfaction is not increased by income above that point. This is a statement about nature; it is the reality in which any market — free or otherwise — exists. It is “human nature,” and that’s basic to all of the social sciences which pertain to humans, including political science, and economics.

In economic theory, the phrase that has been traditionally used to refer to this reality, even before recent empirical studies showed the reality to be this way, was “the declining marginal utility of money.” Beyond around $100,000/year, additional “bucks” are for status, not for happiness. Anyone who has no addiction to status, doesn’t care about having more money coming in beyond that amount. Beyond that amount, the additional marginal utility of each dollar received is actually zero. The wealth-addict might cravemore, but it won’t do him-or-her any actual good; it won’t make the person happier. That’s the reality, now proven in numerous empirical studies.

This reality has major political consequences. One is that a country with highly concentrated wealth (the bottom 50% own almost nothing) is serving the addictions of a few, not the needs of the many — and therefore concentrated wealth cannot be sustained in a democracy, but only in a dictatorship: a dictatorship of wealth, where what determines power isn’t the voters but the dollars.

An important philosophical champion of free markets is the libertarian philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In 2001, Hoppe published his DEMOCRACY: The God that Failed, which was considered a libertarian masterpiece. Hoppe unapologetically argued there that libertarianism and conservatism are one and the same — and that he wanted it, passionately: he hated democracy. Unlike many libertarians, who falsely allege that democracy is impossible without there first being libertarianism (a free market), Hoppe acknowledged and argued for the mutual inconsistency between libertarianism and democracy. Although I don't share his preference for a rule by the wealth instead of a rule by the residents, and thus he is an ideological opponent — the opposite of a supporter of my own position, as it’s being set forth here (and far more briefly than his tome) — I consider him to be the fullest and most internally consistent libertarian philosopher, and perhaps the most significant libertarian political philosopher in this Century, thus far. Whereas lots of people call themselves “libertarian,” he actually is — fully — that. Of course, some libertarians don’t agree with Hoppe’s view; but, on 30 August 2011, Michael Lind at salon.com headlined “Why Libertarians Apologize for Autocracy: The experience of every democratic nation-state proves that libertarianism is incompatible with democracy,” and he empirically found that Hoppe was correct about this incompatibility.

Hoppe argues not only for an aristocracy, but for a hereditary one, and he even opposes immigration; so, if he were a democrat, at all, then he’d be excluding immigrants from voting. But he’s not even that much of a democrat. And he especially approves of hereditary monarchy. His reason for that preference is traditional libertarianism, which favors the private over the public: “Hereditary monarchies represent the historical example of privately owned governments, and democratic republics that of publicly owned governments.” Libertarianism opposes public ownership, favors private.

Like any philosopher, Hoppe has ignored crucial issues in order to sell his case (after all, it’s a philosophical, not a scientific, case; it is ideological propaganda alleging that libertarianism is good — instead of being anything scientific); and the most interesting thing that he has avoided discussing in it is anti-trust, anti-monopoly, anti-oligopoly — the issues about concentration of power. He ignores those issues. For example, whenever he uses the term “monopoly," he is referring solely to “government,” never to the economy (he assumes that in a free market there can’t be any oligopolies or monopolies). He is, after all, a crank (a free-market political theorist and therefore someone who implicitly denies that government is basic to an economy, and who assumes the converse, that the government is instead built upon the economy), though he’s an erudite one and thus acceptable to his fellow-scholars. Erudition doesn’t mean, nor necessarily include, being scientific. And the scientific reality is that the political issue isn’t ‘the government’s monopoly on power’, but instead it’s simply any concentrations of power — both monopolies and oligopolies — which unequalize both rights and obligations in the society, such that whereas a few people (the aristocracy) have many rights and few (if any) obligations, most people (the public) have few rights and many obligations. The latter type of society is called a “dictatorship.” The more that it exists, the more that it comes to exist — and, consequently, the less that there can exist democracy.

The basic issue in political science is not “freedom” versus “slavery” (two concepts in economics); it is “democracy” versus “dictatorship” (two concepts in politics).

Power precedes the economy; it directs the economy, if and where an economy even exists.

Democracy is natural where wealth is nearly-evenly distributed. Dictatorship is natural where wealth is extremely-unevenly distributed. The latter is true because no nation can maintain a democracy if the wealth is highly unequal. If the wealth is highly equal, then the possibility for democracy to emerge is substantial. But if the wealth is highly unequal, then the possibility for democracy even to exist to any extent, is low. All of the extremely wealthy people would have to be honest in order for them to tolerate rule by the majority. Otherwise, they’d simply be using their news-media to deceive instead of to inform the public: that’s what the ‘news’-people would be paid to do, cover-up real problems, and manufacture ‘reality’ — manipulate the public, instead of inform the public. If the distribution of wealth is highly unequal, the ‘news’people will be paid to deceive the public, instead of to inform the public. This (and it includes the ‘charitable’ foundations) is why the majority of the public have come to believe the profoudly false assertion that “having a rich class is a benefit” to the public. They’ve been deceived.

Most of the world is dictatorial. That’s because, almost everywhere, wealth, and even income, is extremely unevenly distributed. The laws and their enforcement determine the distribution of wealth and of income. The natural tendency is toward dictatorship, because a free market produces increased economic concentration. Democracy is not natural. Dictatorship is natural. What’s natural for a body-politic is to fulfill addictions, not to fulfill needs.

As inequality of wealth increases, corruption also increases. Empirical studies find that successful people tend to be bad: it’s natural for the scum and not the cream to rise to the top in organizations. So, the wealthier a person is, the worse the person tends to be. And it’s not just that, but success itself tends to make a person worse than the person was before the success. So, it’s natural that at the very top, tend to be the very worst people. Good government is not natural; bad government is natural. Good government is unnatural.

Corruption is rule by deceit. An example of how that works at the federal-government level is here. An example of that in more detail is here. Another such detailed example, but at the state-or-local government level, is here. And an example of it within academia, and at the federal regulatory agencies, is here. So, in a country that has extreme wealth-inequality, the way in which the public’s ‘consent’, to the billionaires’ rule, is manufactured, is by means of deceit — a rot that’s throughout the entire body-politic and society. This is how an extreme inequality of wealth is produced. It cannot be done honestly. Transparency International has reported that corruption and “social exclusion” or bigotry tend to go together, but has ignored the possible relationship between corruption and the economic distribution of either wealth or income. Perhaps the billionaires who fund TI don’t want such correlations to be pointed out, if they exist; so TI doesn’t investigate this.

The reason why a free market inevitably increases dictatorship, is that dictatorship is natural, just as a free market itself is natural, and power pre-exists everywhere to upset and overturn any equality that might exist in either sphere. Power is natural. No economy exists but that power pre-exists. The political sphere pre-exists the economic sphere. The basic reality, in any society, is power.

Thus, the question has always been: What rules? Is it the wealth? Or is it the people? The natural condition is for wealth to rule, because money (especially all excess money, all income above $100,000 per year, and certainly all income above $1,000,000 per year — what can truthfully be called 100% political money, because it can be ‘given away’ with no real loss to the current owner) is power. Although wealth isn’t the only source of power, it is a major source of power. (It can even be the major source of power.) And power rules everywhere. By definition, power rules in politics; and, by nature, the wealthy tend to rule not only in the economy, but also in the government.

That’s what’s natural. Democracy isn’t natural, but a free market, and an aristocratic government, are both natural. And the political reality determines the economic reality.

PS: You have just read here an online book. This article, including all of its sources that are linked to, and the sources that are linked to in those sources, constitute more than an ordinary book. The complete case and its documentation are fully presented in it. To anyone who finds this book valuable, I would recommend, as follow-up, a book of the traditional sort: Marjorie Kelly’s masterpiece, The Divine Right of Capital.

About the author

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.

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Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

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[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual simulation, without any way of knowing that what they appear to be experiencing with their senses is actually made of AI-generated code.Life in our current society is very much the same. The difference is that instead of AI, it’s psychopathic oligarchs who are keeping us asleep in the Matrix. And instead of code, it’s narrative.

Society is made of narrative like the Matrix is made of code. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government, they’re all purely mental constructs which exist nowhere outside of the mental noises in our heads. If I asked you to point to your knee you could do so instantly and wordlessly, but if I asked you to point to the economy, for example, the closest you could come is using a bunch of linguistic symbols to point to a group of concepts. To show me the economy, you’d have to tell me a story.

Anyone who has ever experienced a moment of mental stillness knows that without the chatter, none of those things are part of your actual present experience. There is no identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics or government in your experience without the mental chatter about those things. There’s not even a “you” anywhere to be found, because it turns out that that’s made of narrative, too.

Without mental narrative, nothing is experienced but sensory impressions appearing to a subject with no clear shape or boundaries. The visual and auditory fields, the sensation of air going in and out of the respiratory system, the feeling of the feet on the ground or the bum in the chair. That’s it. That’s more or less the totality of life minus narrative.

When you add in the mental chatter, however, none of those things tend to occupy a significant amount of interest or attention. Appearances in the visual and auditory field are suddenly divided up and labeled with language, with attention to them determined by whichever threatens or satisfies the various agendas, fears and desires of the conceptual identity construct known as “you”. You can go days, weeks, months or years without really noticing the feeling of your respiratory system or your feet on the ground as your interest and attention gets sucked up into a relationship with society that exists solely as narrative.

“Am I good enough? Am I doing the right thing? Oh man, I hope what I’m trying to do works out. I need to make sure I get all my projects done. If I do that one thing first it might save me some time in the long run. Oh there’s Ashley, I hate that bitch. God I’m so fat and ugly. If I can just get the things that I want and accomplish my important goals I’ll feel okay. Taxes are due soon. What’s on TV? Oh it’s that idiot. How the hell did he get elected anyway? Everyone who made that happen is a Nazi. God I can’t wait for the weekend. I hope everything goes as planned between now and then.”

On and on and on and on. Almost all of our mental energy goes into those mental narratives. They dominate our lives. And, for that reason, people who are able to control those narratives are able to control us.

And they do.

Most people try to exert some degree of control over those around them. They try to influence how those in their family, social and employment circles think of them by behaving and speaking in a certain way. Family members will spend their lives telling other family members over and over again that they’re not as smart/talented/good as they think they are to keep them from becoming too successful and moving away. Romantic partners will be persuaded that they can never leave because no one else will ever love them. To varying degrees, they manipulate the narratives of individuals.

Then there are the people who’ve figured out that they can actually take their ability to influence the way people think about themselves and their world and turn it into personal profit. Cult leaders convince followers to turn over their entire lives in service to them. Advertisers convince consumers that they have a problem or deficiency that can only be solved with This Exciting New Product™. Ambitious rat race participants learn how to climb the corporate ladder by winning favor with the right people and inflicting small acts of sabotage against their competing peers. Ambitious journalists learn that they progress much further in their careers by advancing narratives that favor the establishment upon which the plutocrats who own the big media companies have built their kingdoms. They manipulate the narratives of groups.

And then, there are the oligarchs. The master manipulators. These corporate kings of the modern world have learned the secret that every ruler since the dawn of civilization has known: whoever controls the narratives that are believed by a society is the controller of that society. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government: all mental constructs which only influence society to the extent that they are believed and subscribed to by a significant majority of the collective. If you have influence over the things that people believe about those mental constructs, you have influence over society. You rule it. The oligarchs manipulate the narratives of entire societies.

This is why there have been book burnings, heretic burnings, and executions for mocking the emperor throughout history: ideas which differ from the dominant narratives about what power is, how money works, who should be in charge and so on are threatening to a ruler’s power in the exact same way that an assassin’s dagger is. At any time, in any kingdom, the people could have decided to take the crown off of their king’s head and place it upon the head of any common beggar and treat him as the new king. And, in every meaningful way, he would be the new king. The only thing preventing this from happening was dominant narratives subscribed to by the society at the time about Divine Right, fealty, loyalty, noble blood and so on. The only thing keeping the crown on a king’s head was narrative.

The exact same thing remains true today; the only thing that has changed is the narratives the public subscribe to. Because of what they are taught in school and what the talking heads on their screens tell them about their nation and their government, most people believe that they live in a relatively free democracy where accountable, temporary power is placed in the hands of a select few based on a voting process informed by the unregulated debate of information and ideas. Completely separate from the government, they believe, is an economy whose behavior is determined by the supply and demand of consumers. In reality, economics, commerce and government are fully controlled by an elite class of plutocrats, who also happen to own the media corporations which broadcast the information about the world onto people’s screens.

Control the narratives of economics and commerce, and you control economics and commerce. Control the narratives about politics and government, and you control politics and government. This control is used by the controllers to funnel power to the oligarchs, in this way effectively turning society into one giant energy farm for the elite class.

But it is possible to wake up from that narrative Matrix.

It isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes work. Inner work. And humility. Nobody likes acknowledging that they’ve been fooled, and the depth and extent to which we’ve all been fooled is so deeply pervasive it can be tempting to decide that the work is complete far before one is actually free. Mainstream American liberals think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by Fox and Donald Trump, and mainstream American conservatives think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by MSNBC and the Democrats, but the propaganda strings on both trace back to the same puppet master. And seeing that is just the beginning.

But, through sincere, humble research and introspection, it is possible to break free of the Matrix and see the full extent to which you and everyone you know has been imprisoned by ideas which have been programmed into social consciousness by the powerful. Not just in our adult lives, but ever since our parents began teaching us how to speak, think and relate to the world. Not just in the modern world, but as far back as history stretches to when the power-serving belief systems of societal structure and religion were promoted by kings and queens of old. All of society, and all of ourselves, and indeed all of the thoughts in our heads, have been shaped by those in power to their benefit. This is the reality that we were born into, and our entire personality structure has been filtered through and shaped by it.

For this reason, escaping from the power-serving propaganda Matrix necessarily means becoming a new creature altogether. The ideas, mental habits and ways of relating to the world which were formed in the Matrix are only useful for moving around inside of it. In order to relate to life outside of the power-promulgated narratives which comprise the very fabric of society, you’ve got to create a whole new operating system for yourself in order to move through life independently of the old programming designed to keep you asleep and controlled.

So it’s hard work. You’ll make a lot of mistakes along the way, just like an infant slowly learning to walk. But, eventually, you get clear of the programming.

And then you’re ready to fight.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ecause at some point in this process, you necessarily come up against a deep, howling rage. Rage at the oligarchic manipulators of your species, yes, but also rage against manipulation in all its forms. Rage against everyone who has ever tried to manipulate your narrative, to make you believe things about yourself or make other people believe things about you. Rage against anyone who manipulates anyone else to any extent. When your eyes are clear manipulation stands out like a black fly on a white sheet of paper, and your entire system has nothing to offer it but revulsion and rejection.

So you set to work. You set to work throwing all attempts to manipulate you as far away from yourself as possible, and expunging anyone from your life who refuses to stop trying to control your narrative. Advertising, mass media propaganda, establishment academia, everything gets purged from your life that wants to pull you back into the Matrix.

And they will try to pull you back in. Because our narratives are so interwoven and interdependent with everyone else’s, and so inseparable from our sense of ourselves, your rejection of the narrative Matrix will present as an existential threat to many of your friends and loved ones. You will see many people you used to trust, many of them very close to you, suddenly transform into a bunch of Agent Smiths right in front of your eyes, and they will shame you, guilt you, throw every manipulation tool they have at you to get you to plug the jack back into your brain. But because your eyes are clear, you’ll see it all. You won’t be fooled.

And then all you’ll want is to tear down the Matrix from its very foundations and plunge its controllers into irrelevance. You will set to work bringing down the propaganda prison that they have built up around your fellow humans in any way you can, bolt by bolt if you have to, because you know from your own experience that we are all capable of so much more than the puny gear-turning existence they’ve got everyone churning away at. You will despise the oligarchs for the obscene sacrilege that they have inflicted upon human majesty out of greed and insecurity, and you will make a mortal enemy of the entire machine that they have used to enslave our species.

And, because their entire kingdom is built upon maintaining the illusion of freedom and democracy, all they will have to fight back against you is narrative. They’ll try to shame you into silence by calling you a conspiracy theorist, they’ll have their media goons and manipulators launch smear campaigns against you, but because your eyes are clear, none of that will work. They’ve got one weapon, and it doesn’t work on you.

And you will set to work waking up humanity from the lie factory, using whatever skills you have, weakening trust in the mass media propaganda machine and opening eyes to new possibilities. And while doing so, you will naturally shine big and bright so the others can find you. And together, we’ll not only smash the narratives that imprison us like a human caterpillar swallowing the narrative bullshit and forcing it into the mouth of the next slave, but we’ll also create new narratives, better narratives, healthier narratives, for ourselves and for each other, about how the world is and what we want it to be.

Because here’s the thing: since it’s all narrative, anything is possible. Those who see this have the ability to plunge toward health and human thriving without any regard for the made-up reasons why such a thing is impossible, and plant seeds of light which sprout in unprecedented directions that never could have been predicted by someone plugged into to establishment how-it-is stories. Together, we can determine how society will be. We can re-write the rules. We are re-writing the rules. It’s begun already.

Out of the white noise of a failing propaganda machine, a new world is being born, one that respects the autonomy of the individual and their right to self-determination. One that respects our right to collaborate on large scales to create beautiful, healthy, helpful systems without the constant sabotage and disruption of a few power-hungry psychopaths who would rather rule than live. One that respects our right to channel human ingenuity into harmony and human thriving instead of warfare and greed. One that respects our right to take what we need, not just to survive but to thrive, and return it to the earth for renewal. One that respects the sovereign boundaries of not just ourselves and each other, but of the planet spaceship that we live in.

Unjack your cortex fully from the fear-soaked narratives of insanity, and let the true beauty of our real world flood your senses. Let the grief of what we have unknowingly done send you crashing to your knees in sorrow. And when you’re ready, stand up. We have much work to do.

____________________________

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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.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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When the empire’s comics are not so funny.

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Commentary by Patrice Greanville

Michelle Wolf borrows the stage to tell a few uncomfortable truths. But it is our Ramin Mazaheri who really hits the nail on the head.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n a recent piece on GQ (Michelle Wolf Just Dunked on All of Late-Night Comedy’s Viral Takedown Segments), Evelyn Wang paid a sort of homage to this iconoclastic comedian for her spot on, acerbic flogging of America's official court jesters, more often than not shills for the liberal/Deep State establishment (has it ever been so tightly joined at the sternum as now?), while wearing the mask of comedy and political integrity.

Said Wang:

As you may have noticed, it's pretty much impossible to have a comedy show under the Trump administration that doesn't get political. These days, it would be weird if a late-night hostdidn't take a break from comparing the president to an assortment of orange fruits to burst into a self-serious monologue about doing one's civic duty. Unfortunately, these segments are starting to get a little predictable, a fact that did not escape the notice of Michelle Wolf. In a new clip from her Netflix show The Break, the star of this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner expertly satirized the formula of comedians like John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, and Trevor Noah in a meta segment of her own.

Wang curiously left out the two worst offenders: Stephen Colbet and Bill Maher, literally Democrat party apparatchiks, and both prominent members of the Hollywood-for-empire echo chamber. Trevor Noah, of course, an example of racialism in action (even if Noah is several cuts above most of his peers in intelligence), is heir to Jon Stewart's throne, the handpicked successor to that profitable venue, the place that virtually spawned this new silliness in US culture, especially among the young, the idea of getting your news about the world in headline bursts interspersed with punch lines and the inevitable laugh tracks, calculated to render everything, oh, so non-urgent.

Of course such a travesty of serious information would have never happened if America had had all along a serious press, but that, as anyone half awake already knows, would have required a very different history and culture. As things stand and have stood pretty much since the nation's inception, the fabric of America has always been heavily marinated in savage commercialism. And the US media in most of the 20th century has never risen above mediocrity, even in the supposedly golden days of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite. All of those things are just myths, self-reinforcing myths like the Big Lie about the Russian Threat we live under: if you repeat it enough, with unanimity, it becomes unchallengeable truth. Can anyone believe that any of the great crimes committed by the US with total impunity (just since the end of World War 2) could have been perpetrated if the press had been doing its job? If the American media had been telling the truth—or even something close to it—doggedly, all along, with half the dedication they assign to covering Madonna, Beyonce or the British Royals, Korea, Vietnam, the coups in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, and scores of other nations, with victims in the millions and horrors that remain largely unimagined on the American psyche (not to mention the post-Vietnam uber crimes and policies under the new universal pretext, "the War on Terror", crimes that have devastated the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, and currently threaten new and bigger conflagrations...) well, none of those would have happened. Why? Because a well informed citizenry would have stopped them. Which is exactly why Americans are not well informed, in fact they are dumbed down, actively so, by design and on orders from above, from the guys who own the media, and just about evertything else worth owning, including the entire native political class, a model of filth, corruption, criminality, and hypocrisy with few equals in the annals of history, no matter how far back you care to go.

Emerging from this cultural miasma is not easy. Since being dumb is a form of progressive debilitation, a sort of "negative feedback loop" as really brainy guys like to put it, each round of lies, each assault on reality, is less likely to be resisted or even remotely detected by the beaten down, pacified populace. A huge part of this is simply the organic result of living under unrestricted capitalism, with few USAers ready to disinherit themselves from their birthright, the American Dream. For in one of the greatest triumphs of mass programming, in the US capitalism has been sold to the people as indistinguishable from their own identity, their nationality. This is simply unique, part of that hugely toxic construct, American Exceptionalim. You don't see that in any other country, that degree of high-handed ridiculousness enforced by what appears to be common consent. Thus the catechism is clear: To be an American is to be a capitalist. Anything else is, well, unimaginable, heretical, and "un-American"—and the penalties are real. The "American Way of Life" is supposed to stand for freedom, democracy and rugged individualism, whatever that means ( a rare boast considering that most Americans break records for social docility), but it invariably delivers a population imprisoned and ruled by corporate hierarchies, virtual tyrannies, as Chomsky correctly calls them. Obviously, most Americans never encountered real rugged individualists, a stubborn Spanish anarchist for example.

What's more, propaganda in support of a plutocratic regime never found a friendler soil. In a recent comment, our friend Peter Pavimentov zeroed in on this peculiar trait of the American personality:

“The US is a petty-bourgeois society of the poor and downtrodden from other lands who through hard work and dedication succeeded in reaching a modicum of living which is indeed envied elsewhere and living by the standards and economically driven determination of that class. Little can they care about social equalization as they are trained to be competitive and of necessity self-seeking. That principle is being reflected in the ads, in print, in movies and on the television screen. No indoctrination needed…”

No indoctrination needed. Indeed! Although let's say, a little indoctrination is needed, these days like 24/7, to keep the latest Big Lie momentum going. Again, it's always far easier to deepen existing indoctrination than to dismantle it. But I digress.

In any case, the last word on this topic goes to my colleague Ramin Mazaheri, half American, half Iranian, who, while normally residing overseas, enjoys an uncannily astute perspective on American society.

I've never seen this lady but she really hits the nail on the head: "This IS comedy!" Very funny video.

LOL! Been going on for so long. Jon Stewart's bullplop sanctimony really made me want to throw up - I was always amazed he made it so long and got so big. But that's America - comedians are political leaders.

A society which can only joke about serious issues and not actually talk about them has major problems...I've said that for years and years. Certainly, satirize us journalists but come down off your high horse, you clowns - your political ideology is only "get a laugh".

Brave exceptions have occurred, George Carlin, for example, and now Lee Camp. But they are a different breed. They embody that glorious oxymoron, a really serious comic.

Meantime, Ramin's observation stands: A society which can only joke about serious issues and not actually talk about them has major problems.

—PG

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrice Greanville edits The Greanville Post. Contributing Editor Ramin Mazaheri is a journalist based in Paris. His dispatches can be read on this site and on The Saker, plus other leading anti-imperialist venues.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Political warfare deepens as Democrats, ex-spies circle the wagons around Brennan

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

By Tom Hall, wsws.org

20 August 2018

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n a further political intervention by the military-intelligence apparatus, several high-ranking intelligence officials took to the Sunday morning talk shows yesterday to denounce Trump’s decision last week to revoke the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan.

These included Brennan himself on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Obama counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco and former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden on CNN’s “State of the Union,” and former CIA director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who appeared in a taped segment on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen made an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” criticizing the strident tone of Brennan’s rhetoric against Trump, whom Brennan has all but accused of treason, while opposing Trump’s decision to retaliate by revoking his security clearance.

The ex-spies all postured as defenders of freedom of speech. “Whether one agrees or disagrees with what John Brennan said is not the issue,” Leon Panetta said. “We have something called free speech in this country. And whether you’re a former CIA director or whether you’re a former President of the United States or whether you’re just a citizen on the street you have a right to free speech to say what you think about our country and our President—and that’s the right that John exercised.”

What the intel chiefs are really defending is the untrammeled “right” of the intelligence agencies to intervene in American politics. In reality, the campaign over alleged and unproven Russian hacking, which began as the means for the Democrats and sections of the state to force Trump into a more aggressive stand against Russia, has expanded into a justification for sweeping acts of censorship, above all against left-wing and anti-war groups.

The claim by these spy chiefs to be defending “free speech” is as grotesque as it is absurd, although it was predictably unchallenged by the pliant corporate media. “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd was arguably the most sycophantic, at one point interjecting during his interview with Brennan—referring to Brennan’s charge that Trump was guilty of treason in relation to Russia—“When you speak as a former CIA Director, I’ll be honest, my ears always perk up more, I think people’s perk up more.” He followed this up by badgering subsequent guest and Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani for daring to question the unproven claims that Trump “colluded” with the Russian government during the 2016 elections.

What they are really defending is the untrammeled “right” of the intelligence agencies to intervene in American politics. Brennan himself complained in the pages of the New York Times last week that “a variety of politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright by Russian intelligence operatives,” with the clear implication that democratic norms must be restricted in order to combat “Russian meddling.”

In reality, the campaign over alleged and unproven Russian hacking, which began as the means for the Democrats and sections of the state to force Trump into a more aggressive stand against Russia, has expanded into a justification for sweeping acts of censorship, above all against left-wing and anti-war groups.

In the course of his interview with the former CIA chief, Todd asked Brennan, “If you were currently the head of the C.I.A. and the president revoked the security clearance of a former C.I.A. head, what would you do as sitting C.I.A. Director under that circumstance? And what advice would you give to Gina Haspel, the current head of the C.I.A.?” Brennan issued a veiled call for a rebellion by the intelligence agencies against the civilian government:

“I think that’s what a lot of these very senior officials are trying to reconcile in their own minds how much they can stay and be governors on Mr. Trump’s behavior and how much they cannot countenance at all. People like John Kelly, his chief of staff, who I know and respect and like so much, John and I worked very close together. I’m sure he’s trying to keep Mr. Trump from doing awful, terrible things. But at some point a lot—these senior officials have to ask themselves, are they enabling this continued abusive and reckless behavior or not? And if they feel as though they’re enabling it, and they’re not having that type of governing influence on it, I think they have to show their displeasure and their unhappiness and leave.”

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]rennan claimed that he has not been in contact with “anyone in government” since Trump revoked his security clearance last Wednesday. Clapper, however, acknowledged on CNN that he has had discussion with active intelligence officials in relation to the campaign against Trump, adding, “And I do know there is a lot of angst at the working levels in the I.C. [intelligence community] work force.” Hayden then interjected, adding, “These people are still in government. We don’t want to make them vulnerable.”

It is significant that almost no elected officials, and no Democrats, appeared on the Sunday talk shows during the segments on Brennan. The fact that the programs were turned over almost entirely to the representatives of the intelligence agencies demonstrates the degree to which the military and the “deep state” have emerged as a dominant political force within Washington.

However, given the fact that the Democrats’ own campaign against Trump is pitched to and articulates the differences that the military and intelligence agencies have with Trump, primarily over foreign policy, the appearance of leading congressional Democrats yesterday would have simply been redundant. Moreover, the Democratic Party itself is an organization that is increasingly staffed by, of and for ex-intelligence and military officers, who have flooded into Democratic primary contests in record numbers.

There is no progressive faction in this struggle between the CIA, supported by the Democratic Party, and Trump. While the anti-Russia campaign against Trump revives the methods of McCarthyism and the extreme-right John Birch Society, which alleged secret Soviet infiltration of the US government, Trump’s first political mentor was Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s former chief counsel, a fact which Hayden pointed out on CNN.

Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton, in an interview with ABC News yesterday conducted from Jerusalem, attempted to redirect the campaign over Russian “meddling” onto the Trump administration’s preferred adversaries in China, Iran and North Korea. He declined to respond to a question by ABC’s Martha Raddatz that the NSA has “been authorized to conduct offensive cyber operations in response to any kind of election meddling” in the lead-up to the midterms in November.

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