Lee Camp with cutting edge stories that need amplification and more debate: the Cuban embassy “mysterious” sound waves that weren’t; the US, which touts itself as the best democracy in the world, classified as #25—behind Estonia and Chile—in the World Democracy Index 2018, and so on.
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GAITHER STEWART—Do rabid protesters-hooligans undermine their own movements by devastating shops and burning cars? Or do undercover agents do the dirty work to sully the name of the protest movement? For secret services of the world know how to use the “strategy of tension” and false flag operations: secret agents burn ten cars and blame it on protesters and then crack down on the whole movement. Secret agents were at work in Berlin in 1933: “Burn the Reichstag in Berlin, blame it on a Communist and establish the Nazi dictatorship.”
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PATRICE GREANVILLE—The clamor about four Americans recently killed in Syria reeks of infantile petulance: what do you expect when you send soldiers into battle zones? Some professions have built-in risks. Ask any firefighter. Yet this response—used, as noted elsewhere, to make Trump walk back his promise to get the US troops out of Syria—is only too typical of American discourse. The ugly fact is that for a variety of reasons, none too healthy or honorable, the American people have been conditioned to believe in fighting endless wars with practically no casualties, or a ratio of losses so absurdly small when compared to the enemy’s that every casualty is mourned indignantly, as if the targets of American meddling had no right to inflict any punishment on our legions.
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NICK TURSE—he U.S. military is finally withdrawing (or not) from its base at al-Tanf. You know, the place that the Syrian government long claimed was a training ground for Islamic State (ISIS) fighters; the land corridor just inside Syria, near both the Iraqi and Jordanian borders, that Russia has called a terrorist hotbed (while floating the idea of jointly administering it with the United States); the location of a camp where hundreds of U.S. Marines joined Special Operations forces last year; an outpost that U.S. officials claimed was the key not only to defeating ISIS, but also, according to General Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, to countering “the malign activities that Iran and their various proxies and surrogates would like to pursue.” You know, that al-Tanf.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The real issue here was not values but perception. The US war machine pours an immense amount of energy into perception management, making sure that ordinary Americans either (A) ignore the horrific things that are being done in their name or (B) think that those things are awesome and patriotic. The offending post was clearly attempting to accomplish (B). A team of paid social media propagandists simply did not understand that ordinary human beings wouldn’t resonate with a message that amounts to “Hey I see you’re all preparing to bring in the new year, so watch how good we are at killing large numbers of people!”, and some damage control became necessary when everyone got freaked out. Can’t have people opening their eyes to how insane America’s relentless military expansionism has gotten, after all.
