CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—One of the advantages the empire propagandists have over normal people is that these things are all we’ve ever known. We’ve never experienced a healthy world, so we don’t experience the shock and outrage we’d otherwise experience at what these pricks are stealing from us by keeping that healthy world from us.
-
-
ED CURTIN—When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a presidential aspirant, folded his cards and conceded the current pot to Donald Trump – what he euphemistically called suspending his campaign for the presidency – he let his justifiable hatred of the Democratic Party, their undermining of his campaign, and their pro-war and genocidal agenda get the best of him. His trust in Trump is naïve in the extreme. With the issue that Kennedy has made central to his work in recent years – Covid and the “vaccines” – Trump is in the opposite camp.
-
EDITOR—Garland discusses the place of nonconformist thinking—including “conspiracy theorists”— has in a healthy society, especially as it relates to the questioning of narratives and concepts bolstering a particular social arrangement or ruling class, and the reasons why the term has become a way for the establishment to denigrate and contain such individuals, thereby preserving the status quo and normalcy. Examined questions: who has the right to revise the laws? Social deviancy. Conspiracy theorists. The nature of mainstream beliefs. The role of media. Collective belief system organised by the ruling class.
-
EDITOR—Here’s Roger Waters’ impassioned denunciation of rapidly creeping fascism in Britain, where free speech is being criminalised to suppress, among other things, criticism of Israel’s depraved extermination of Palestinians. In that regard, Britain is no different or worse than the rest of Europe’s vassal states, all in the cusp of US power, and led by similar, morally rotten Ziocon elites. The crackdown on free speech throughout the collective West may shake some out of the complacent illusion of living in a “democracy” instead of in a cynical, certifiably sociopathic and fully dystopic global oligarchy, much as Orwell described it in his classic 1984 (although, as an anti-communist, he aimed his arrows at the USSR instead of the capitalist regimes).
-
BRUCE LERRO—What is the place of shock in the arts? Surely one of the callings of the artist is to move a society beyond the comfortable, the taken-for-granted and the obvious. In the early part of the 20th century, Cubists, Dadaists and Surrealists did this as a reaction to the Renaissance and Baroque conventions. Before a society is crumbling this is a very important calling. However once social cracks appear and spread, too much shock from the arts is counter-revolutionary. The Romantic artist imagines that shocking people might propel masses of people into social action. This may be true. But too much shock can result in anesthetizing, not moving people. Past a certain point artists should be creating constructive visions of the future not tripping over themselves about how to outrage a public already frightened by social conditions.
