The Dance of Death

Posted on April 18, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Hedges

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military “virtues” are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism.

Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminate and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.

The graveyard of world empires — Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian — followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society as its members retreat into privileged enclaves.

The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump’s decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.

The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” is that “collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their “greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshiping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.

“Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes,” Ronald Wright writes in “A Short History of Progress.” “Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.”

The Trump appointees — Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Alex Acosta and others — do not advocate innovation or reform. They are Pavlovian dogs that salivate before piles of money. They are hard-wired to steal from the poor and loot federal budgets. Their single-minded obsession with personal enrichment drives them to dismantle any institution or abolish any law or regulation that gets in the way of their greed. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is “a machine for demolishing limits.” There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.

Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life, Eros, the quest to love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including our own beings. One of these two forces, Freud wrote, is always ascendant. Societies in decline enthusiastically embrace the death instinct, as Freud observed in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” written on the eve of the rise of European fascism and World War II.

“It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros,” Freud wrote. “But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.”

The lust for death, as Freud understood, is not, at first, morbid. It is exciting and seductive. I saw this in the wars I covered. A god-like power and adrenaline-driven fury, even euphoria, sweep over armed units and ethnic or religious groups given the license to destroy anything and anyone around them. Ernst Juenger captured this “monstrous desire for annihilation” in his World War I memoir, “Storm of Steel.”

A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call “crisis cults.”

Norman Cohn, in “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements,” draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.

“These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it,” Cohen wrote. “But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.”

These movements, Cohen wrote, offered “a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security — even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.

“So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century.”

The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending mortality.

It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion. It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and blamed for society’s demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss.

Fake News: The Unravelling of US Empire From Within

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Prof. John McMurtry

Source: Global Research

Setting the Stage of the Press-President War

US ruling ideology and Washington power have become unstuck as never before. A war of opposing certitudes and denunciations is waged day to day between the long-ruling US corporate media and the White House. Both continuously proclaim ringing recriminations of the other’s ‘fake news’. Over months they both portray each other as malevolent liars.

US bully pulpits are now beyond show disagreements and successful media inquisitions of the past. Slanderous accusations long confined to vilifying the designated Enemy have crept into accusations of the President himself. ‘The Russians are coming’ is returning as the final recourse of smear to stop deviations from the global program of hugely profitable enemy hate and perpetual preparations for foreign war.

The ruling big lies of the US money party and corporate globalization have divided into opposing camps. The Press and the President denounce each other non-stop on the public stage, while US dark state agents take sides behind the scenes.

Fake news is the medium of battle.

Tracking the Real Fake News Built into Corporate Globalization

Beneath the civil war of official narratives, cognitive space opens for truth long suffocated by ‘the Washington Consensus’. Even the US-led G-20 has recently agreed not to automatically condemn ‘protectionism’ as an economic evil. The battle slogan of transnational corporate rule over 30 years has been quietly withdrawn on the global stage.

Is the big lie of ‘free trade’ finally coming to ground? It has long led the hollowing out of societies and life support systems across the world in a false mass promotion as “freedom and prosperity for all”. In fact beneath the pervasive fake news, a closed-door transnational corporate command system forces all enterprises across borders into a carbon-multiplying trade regime with thousands of rules to protect the transnational corporate looting and ruin of home economies and environments as the only rights enforced.

Propagandist names and fake freedoms are proclaimed everywhere to conceal the reality. The corporate-investor regime has stripped out almost all evolved protections of workers, ecologies and social infrastructures. Non-stop liquidations and roboticizations of local jobs and enterprises are reversed in meaning to ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ and ‘higher living standards’, the very opposite of the facts. Destabilization and bombing wars attack resource-rich and air-defenceless societies outside the circle of treaty subjugation.

False news allows every step. Even the happy-face Trudeau regime is taken aback by the tidal shift to national priorities. Its ministers scuttle around the US in near panic to find common cause for restoring the unaccountable regime. Multiplying carbon, disemployment and ecological plunder are ignored throughout in the longest standing fake news of all –‘economic growth”.

In fact, there is no real economic growth in universal life necessities or reduction of waste. The only growth is of volumes and velocities of transnational money exchanges, foreign commodities, and private profits to the top.

‘More prosperity for nations and the world’ means, decoded, more transnational corporate-state treaties to deprive nations of their rights to organization and production for citizens’ real needs as well as organically regulated protection of environments and ecosystems.

The consequences covered over by pervasively false cover stories are speeded-up ecocidal extractions, permanent disemployments, and wastes hemorrhaging into cumulatively more polluted oceans, air, atmosphere and life habitats. Corporate-state solutions of carbon markets for pollution rights have nowhere reduced any of these life-and-death crises, but only further and selectively enriched transnational corporations.

As for the Obama solution, “we need more Canadas”, fake news again conceals the reality. Beneath the global celebrity hype covering empty and broken promises, Canada’s Trudeau regime is essentially a brand change of PM rhetoric to advance transnational corporate dictates as ‘free trade’ and to ensure oil pipelines out of the most polluting oil basin in the world, Alberta’s tar-sands, are built through water basins and indigenous lands across Canada and the US. One cannot help but observe this is Trump’s plan too, and overrides Trudeau’s promises to protect Canada’s first peoples.

I recently sent a letter to my local MP requesting evidence for what PM Trudeau promises over months of repetition that “more free trade” means “a better life for those in the middle class and those wanting to join the middle class”. As always, there is no evidence to support the non-stop false news from the PMO. Revealingly, the “middle class” turns out to be people making $180,000 a year slated to get significant tax cuts.

Trump’s rogue elephant charge on Washington-led lies, war, and dispossession of the working class is no solution to life-blind corporate globalization. Trump in office is a US nationalist oligarch commanding policies even more blindly rapacious in despoliation of the environment and transferring far more public wealth to the rich.

The common ground of all our lives, collective life capital, does not exist for any government in ‘the free world’ or any policy of ‘globalization’. The lies that must be promulgated to advance the private corporate agenda are built into its transnational command system from the beginning.

Out of the Ruling Memory Hole with the Internet Commons

Joining the dots shows that every step of US money-party ‘globalization’ has, in fact, been driven by fake news.

No corporate media tolerance has been given in a quarter of a century to any voice demanding accountability to the common life-ground of citizens. A new game of numbers has proceeded instead. At most, a euphemistic ‘climate change’ has been endlessly debated while the totalizing destabilization of human and planetary life cycles remains without a name or collective response. Only more profitable market panaceas which do not reduce any pollution continue to divert from the deepest degenerate trends destroying the planetary life host.

On the upside, the big lies of ‘free trade’ and ‘humanitarian wars’ have been called into official question for the first time by the Trump presidential campaign, and he has been elected against the official line. Yet opposing camps are still at each other’s throats. So the perpetual fallback on accusing the long-designated foreign enemy is triggered by the fallen establishment. The fake news chorus of Russia’s aggressions now includes collusion of the Trump administration with its officials to win the US election. This mainspring diversion from reality is called back from the dead witch-hunts of the past. As then tool, facts do not count, only accusations do. The official media line is almost predictable: Russia is behind Trump’s election victory. As always, reverse projection is the mass-psyche operation to blame an official Enemy to divert attention from the life-and-death facts. The Enemy is once again accused of doing what the US has always done worse as the reason for attacking It. Russia is the usual placeholder in this reverse-blame operation. The 2016 US election of Trump is the latest variation.

Meanwhile throughout the election and its aftermath, the new transnational internet commons including Wiki-leaks over a decade has increasingly laid bare the greatest propaganda machine in history now in many-leveled crisis. The long normalized half-truths, one-sided slanting of the facts, and non-stop fallacies of inference are coming out into the open as never before. The pretexts and lies for US imperial bullying and war are exposed beyond any corporate-media gate.

This time the accusation is “interference and attack on the US presidential election” with no evidence of wrongdoing or vote manipulation whatsoever. Yet as in the long past, the method is smear with no evidence for the accusations. Ever more media repetition and shadowy insinuation does the job. It has always worked before, why not again since all the other media buttons pushed on taking down the Trump peace initiatives with Russia and opposition to globalization of US jobs have failed.

Having wondered during the election campaign whether we could be “friends with Russia” and promoted diplomatic relations into his administration, Trump can be named as the enemy in hiding to be rooted out. The real problem the fake news never mentions is that he threatens the cornerstone of the US war state over 70 years.

So when Trump won the election with his heresy still intact, the ever-ready accusation of evil-Russia connection moves into high gear although the target is the opposite of communist and an epitome of capitalist riches and connections. We see here the historical mind-lock compulsion to blame the Enemy Russia and smear whoever dissents from it, even if it is a bully-capitalist president. There are very big stakes in keeping the game going.

Yet the no-profit and unpaid analyses from the internet commons have no such ulterior motive and interest in false accusations. With more objectively informed analysts than the commercial press and unimpeachable facts like WikiLeaks going to tens of millions of readers across the world, the genie is out of the bottle. The official grand narrative and its normalized big lies are coming apart at the seams.

So blame as usual is diverted onto the accepted Enemy, now conniving with Trump to attack the 2016 US presidential election. Beneath the fake news, the fact is that positive diplomatic relations with Russia not only threaten to stop the highly profitable permanent war against it, but spike the longest pretext for US war and military domination now moving through Ukraine.

The free internet commons cannot be gagged for telling the truth. Freedom of speech in the US cannot be openly stopped without fatal loss of legitimacy of rule.

So the rest follows. All the non-corporate and non-profit messages from the critical sites on the internet commons which are speaking against the US war state inside are now vilified as ‘fake news’. A third, unofficial protagonist has entered the battle with no private profit or career motive or corporate boss to serve and a wealth of proven professional knowledge and talent at work. It has to be denounced to sustain the big lies of the ruling money-war game which is in deepening crises and conflicts all the way to the unprecedented US President-Press civil war.

The Harvard Proclamation of a New Memory Hole

The innermost fount of US ideology and war, Harvard University, has now stepped in. It is officially naming and denouncing US-critical internet sites for ‘fake news’.

Not even the medieval Church went so far in its Index Librorum Prohibitorum of prohibited writings. It was at least innocent of scientific method and openly declared its dogmas. Not Harvard.

Underneath notice, all the sites it attacks are internet commons, and none are financed by private corporate donors and captive institutions while Harvard and the corporate media are. This is the real battle agenda underneath, the long war to privatize the news for profit as everything else with anti-establishment internet criticism now the target.

In the background, Harvard University has long propagated an unexamined academic method. It normally cuts off any faculty or learned source of opposition to the private corporate rule of America and the wars of aggression to impose it on the world. Accordingly, the underling grand narrative equations of the US is Good and the designated Enemy is Evil is not questioned. It is presupposed. Malevolent motives are always assumed of the designated Enemy, down to Harvard-produced geostrategic economic and war models. So when a host of internet commons sites challenge the grand narrative framework, Harvard and satellites denounce them to stop people reading them. A long list of critical sites is accused without criteria, proof or evidence as all spreaders of ‘fake news’.

What is not recognised here is that only on the internet commons can the process of truth be free from ruling pressures to control message for external sponsors.

Here there is no commercial-profit condition to speak and write, and no livelihood dependence on private profit. There is no inducement to avoid life-and-death issues in academic obfuscation or ad-vehicle style. Internet authors not on the payroll can be free of the game of all games behind the scenes – enriching the rich further with no life-coherent criterion of truth.

These underlying conditions of the internet commons and free speech itself cannot be recognised by the academy or the corporate press without undercutting their proclaimed status as the only legitimate founts of truth. The internet commons is a new world of competitive capacities to research, understand and disseminate not bound by private money patronage (as over centuries in Harvard University).

When challenged in this way, Harvard (and the official press) are set back on their heels. They cannot think the facts through because their instituted presumptions have long been what they must presuppose and not question to acquire their credentials and pay for public speech. They must attack what calls all this into question if it effectively speaks truth to power to expose or de-legitimate the ruling system narrative as false. Harvard and the US press thus follow the reigning method of reverse projection. They accuse the effective opposition of ‘fake news’.

The most revealing fact here is that Harvard authority as other academic administrations proceed in name-calling without any valid argument or demonstration – the very basis of reasonable conclusion. Yet this is such a long tradition of presumptive accusation allowed against anyone designated as the Enemy, and anyone else exposing the falsehood of the ruling US story of moral superiority over all others and God’s blessing to lead the world by force or money.

This is why only dissenting sites from the official storyline of US freedom and rightness in all things are accused as ‘fake news’. Accusation of opposing positions is so well-worn into conditioned brains that endless repetition locks it in as self-evident. This is why attributions of vile motive are automatic from Harvard or the New York Times for any outside leader opposing US interference in their countries including elections. US hypocrisy here is staggering, but unreported. In fact, Harvard’s life-blind elite of war criminal geo-strategists, economic modellers and so on are fawned upon within the wider corporate rule they serve.

None can engage critical facts and thought challenging the US moral superiority assumptions because they have never been required to consider them. So they denounce them as once the Church denounced apostasy. In the end, US system worship is a war-state religion. It eliminates all enemies to its right to rule. Its globalizing system institutes the market laws of God. War crimes are God-blessed justice.

Freedom of Speech, the Process of Truth, and the US Constitution

Led by senior academics, journalists and technical expertise, the internet commons provide for the first time impartial witness and free speech open to public examination and circulation across borders. They are free from corporate-rank dictate and private copy-right control.

In consequence, the internet commons are liberated from private corporate profit as controlling goal. Those who know what they are talking about can speak truth to dogma and power without words to appease editors, business boards and ad revenues. Truth itself is not defined, but its principle of process is a more inclusively consistent taking into account towards life-coherent conclusion

Despite Google black-holing of radical legal facts, CIA penetration of Wikipedia, and so on, the internet commons’ freedom of speech is far beyond anything guaranteed in the US constitution. In fact, the ‘sacred US Constitution’ that all presidents give oath to “preserve, protect and defend” guarantees in the end only freedom of public speech to private money demand.

Long before the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision reverse-titled as “Citizens United”, the US constitution was structured to one overriding end – to remove prior limits to private-money right over all else, including to begin, the rule of British law and the lands of the first nations West of the Appalachians.

This is why no common life interest exists in the US Constitution from the start. People’s universal human life necessities of water, food, protection and liveable environment are ruled out a-priori. This is why civil rights themselves were first federally enforced by the ‘commerce clause’ protecting freedom of commercial bus passengers including blacks to cross borders.

It is also why the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the equal rights of freed slaves ended up being the legal basis for private-profit corporations and wealthy funds to acquire the constitutional rights of living persons (e.g., to freedom of speech for big money to buy elections and to avoid government access to financial records).

Even the iconic rights of “life, liberty and happiness” turn out to be in fact only private market rights which allow corporate ‘fictive persons’ to unlimited money wealth, protection against public redistribution, and the freedom of private wealth alone to speak to America by buying corporate self promotions and election attack ads.

The US Constitution fix goes all the way back to 1787. As professor of constitutional law at Chicago’s iconic Kent College of Law, Matthew Stanton, explains in personal correspondence:

“[The fix] goes all the way back to the 1787 coup where the 39 signatories to the Constitution sequestered themselves in a Philadelphia meeting house, with locked doors and shuttered windows, to ostensibly make adjustments to the Articles of Confederation, but instead delivered an entirely new document that enabled creating a federal system centralizing control of the economy by propertied wealth”.

Russia the Enemy: the Deus ex Machina of Fake News

We may recall that the corporate-press and Wall-Street-enriched candidate for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, started the accusation of ‘fake news’ to explain her defeat. As establishment mask of the politically correct masses with the money-war party as her paymaster, Clinton blamed her fall in the 2016 US election on the new enemy she saw arising against the official story and herself. When the ‘glass mirror’ story line did not take, she joined forces with the corporate media on another plane. ‘Fake news’ misled Americans. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the TV Networks, and other establishment tale tellers saw pay-dirt far beyond Clinton’s failed bid for president.

In fact, the corporate mass media were losing marketability by the escalating appeal of free social media. The once all-powerful press propaganda system has been increasingly deserted. The ‘fake news’ story provided a media base to condemn free internet news and commentary as immoral. The 2016 election became the leverage for a big market grab back.

Very soon it was not just ‘fake news’ to spike news cycles and subscriptions. War as peace and corporate globalization as freedom found its long place of rule – the enemy of Russia to blame. Now the news can be that Russia hacked and attacked the lost 2016 election. Russia may be a hollowed-out shell by global corporate and oligarch dispossession. But it can still continue as pretext for US-NATO war crimes and aggression reverse-blamed on it. As the European breadbasket and newly discovered fossil-fuel rich nation, Ukraine is a very big prize. Now in Ukraine’s US-led coup aftermath and ethnic civil war, evil Russia can be an ace card again to accuse for attacking the US election.

Since Russia led by Putin is drawing the line as in Crimea to support the Russia-speaking region against US-led war crimes under international law (documented in previous articles), all roads connect. “Russia’s uncontrolled aggression” is reverse-projected onto the victim again in a glorious new use. Reverse blame it for interference in the US election of Trump and kill Russia-US peace initiatives at the same time. No fact is required to verify the accusation, and no law broken is needed to insinuate treason of whoever relates with Russia’s officials in peace initiative. It can work even against an elected US president.

At the same time, the US’s own record attacking other nations’ elections and societies is thereby erased as well – continually orchestrating mass-murder and dictatorship to sabotage the electoral process from Vietnam and Chile to Ukraine in 2010 and Latin America social democracies since.

If it were a story of reverse projection by a mass-murderous psychopath, it would be too much to believe. Yet it now runs the US news cycle as the big story unfolding with no evidence of US illegality, force, or non-compliance with international law. The accusations run by themselves in US media culture and across the empire. So as 2017 Spring breaks, endless media insinuations of treason seep into the populace from corporate media sites across borders with backrooms and Congress setting up for another presidential inquisition.

It is interesting to observe two precedents. Past inquisitions were unfolded soon after Bill Clinton said in India, “it’s time to level up rather than down in global trade” and Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protections Agency, stopped corporations from outsourcing US jobs, and made peace with China as Trump sought with Russia.

The ludicrous hypocrisy, factual vacuum, and war-drums of blame-the-enemy go into high-volume operation again, led by an attack-dog media against the elected US president whose only action has been to have business-like relations with Russia. Few observe the immense stakes of the US media and war establishments in this process. Cui bono? – who benefits? – is the question never asked.

What’s new? The perpetual red herring of ‘Russia aggression’ takes everyone’s eyes off the ball – including the continuing US-drone mass murder and ecological wars built into the Trump agenda. Canada’s oil and mining corps and big banks sneak behind the pervasive fake news with a smiling Trudeau front. NATO demands more money behind Trump now fulsomely praising what he earlier campaigned on as “obsolete”, as he has done with the CIA he also condemned. Those hoping for a new departure under Trump from the big lies and war crimes as normalized operations watch in a combination of horror and hilarity.

Who connects the dots? Beneath official notice, the ruling goal of US empire is blind to its consequences of human and planetary life ruin. It has to cover itself in false news to carry on. This is why fake news is not a temporary phenomenon of the Trump era. It is the necessary veil of illusion of an eco-genocidal system. The symptoms and trends are everywhere. But a US-led prism of false inversions of reality regulates consciousness, perception and reaction to ‘steer the course’.

This is true of both sides of the Trump divide, and also in corporate Canada as the US’s largest trading partner, branch-plant and resource cornucopia. What is new is that the ruling illusions are divided against themselves at the top of the US political and ideological system. The Trump phenomenon reflects the rupture. The US empire is in deep crisis from its cumulative destruction of social and natural life support systems. Its carcinomic multiplication of private money demand with no tie to the production of means of life is the reality beneath all the false news.

Nothing is life secure. The ‘global security system’ protects only money values and sequences through life hosts. Peoples everywhere compete to make it go faster to survive. The ruling concept of ‘economy ‘inverts the systematic depletion, degradation and despoliation of the life capital of organic, social and ecological life. Universal necessities of human and fellow life are stripped, polluted and wasted as ‘efficiencies’.

President Trump has gone into the political ring to fight it out with the political establishment on a nationalist capitalist level. He is losing money in the short term. But his program in office is completely eco-blind, and the opposing mass media follow suit. All they can focus on is demonizing normal relations with the official Enemy Russia. Meanwhile Trump has all but abolished the EPA and cut off all federal funding for restoration of the Great Lakes, the most important source of fresh water heritage on the planet.

These supreme crimes under international law are recognised by none on stage. In Canada, a Nazi progeny and neo-Nazi supporter of the violent coup and civil war in Ukraine is made Foreign Affairs Minister and hustles her connections throughout the US to keep the attack-Russia juggernaut going as in the past under a continuous barrage of ethnic prejudices and fake news.

The pattern is clear but unspoken. The Enemy Russia is the auto-pilot of fake news to divert from US and client leadership failure on almost every level. Relations of mutual respect with Russia’s ambassador are ‘collusion’ and taboo.

The Reality Beneath the Questions not Asked

How does disclosure of Hillary’s Clinton’s apparatus theft of the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders get blamed on Russia? The question is not asked. The Washington mass media and visible Congress focus instead on accused “collusion with Russia” with very big stakes in the new inquisition show. Suspicions without substance run free in the mass media once the designated Enemy is smeared onto the target, even if elected president.

Who knows that the US joined the armed forces of Britain, colonial Canada and Japan to crush the 1917 Russian Revolution on behalf of the Czarist autocracy and Western capitalism? More deeply, who names the governing objective behind all the shows of force and accusation over a century since? To be managed successfully, attention must be diverted from the facts of US-led war crimes and public looting within and without US empire proclaimed as ‘world freedom’.

The new President and his Exxon Secretary of State seek business-like relations with Russia. Very big powers are coming into conflict over business and war within the US empire. Big oil in both leviathan countries are pitted against the US Enemy-and-smear establishment which has long run the show with big oil formerly leading it. Now transnational big oil in the US and Russia are leading out of the blind alley of war against each other which has so totally failed to bring benefits to either side in the long term, and has almost reversed civilization.

The dots again are not joined. The completely counter-productive war against Russia to keep the US money-war state going is deepened by Wall Street. The falling price of oil is driven beneath notice by Wall Street which has successfully short-future-traded oil down to establish its money-printing powers by debt as supreme over its rival substitute, while diverting everybody’s attention from the greatest fraud in history still going. Observe that Wall Street remains untouched even from its multi-trillion dollar heist from public and pension coffers from 2007 on.

Blame Russia is the normal chorus which Wall Street benefits from as the ultimate leader of the ruinously anti-productive money-war system. It pays off so well to the money party in more public dollars appropriated by its control and issue of money debt for everything that exists; the pervasive military-industrial complex which never gets reversed even in the peace after the planned destruction of the ‘Evil Empire’; and the corporate mass media in front turning the fake news system over continuously to promote, idealize and divert from the global empire’s war and occupation powers. The neo-con and neo-liberal war strategists alike are built into the dark state as managers uniquely dependent on Russia as the Enemy.

So it is in all their self-maximizing interests to sustain perpetual accusations of some enemy’s evil as the great cover-up story of US empire and it inherited war-crime system. Joined to despotic local oligarchies, this axis dismantles ever more societies for corporate, bank and military plunder and jackal payoffs everywhere (including the academy). There is no limit or borders to the established system invasion, and all is at the expense of public treasuries and of life support systems across domains.

President Trump does not break the fatal ruling cycle. He demands that vassal states should pay for their US military protection, a new global extortion supporting new NATO oligarchies against change which accompanies his stripping of environmental protections to pay for more war powers. Trump behind his populist bluster is a paradigm example of instituted US capitalist greed and aggression. Yet the fact that hate of the Enemy is smeared even onto him for not hating Russia too reveals the ultimate pretext of the US-NATO war machine. Behind the US-led perpetual arms build-up, border threats and bombings of mostly innocents across the globe while blaming the terrorists for the horrors now built into the global ‘growth’ system is fake news as continuous cover story. The war-criminal drone mass murders continue on unnoticed. The bank looting of public wealth is instituted more broadly. The universities, health systems and public infrastructures are privatized for profit with no life criteria of outcomes.

Trump is dispossessing the American common wealth for big US money in line with the Reagan public-looting machine before him. It drained public revenues into a black hole of US debt, blamed acid rain on trees, and portrayed orchestrated mass murderers of socialists in Afghanistan and Nicaragua as ‘freedom fighters’. What has changed in the corporate media’s fake-news today?

Trump in office is the opposite of the anti-establishment candidate he promised to be. He wars on the US Environmental Protection Agency (its only collective life protective organization). He fractions corporate taxes in a giveway to the rich beyond Reagan’s $500-billion tax cut. He privatizes the public’s falling infrastructure for speculators and developers’ long-term private tolls, profits and control for private profit at taxpayers’ expense.

Who in the corporate media or Congress questions any of it?

The Trudeau regime to the north imitates the new massive scheme of privatizing public infrastructure. But it disguises it in terms of public investment in public goods. The big banks and speculators on both sides of the border are the winners whatever the corporate media and state cover story. The common wealth is sold off under pervasive fake news masquerading as responsible and for the public good. But the drive-wheel policy mechanisms for ever more dismantling of the living earth and redistribution of more public wealth upwards to the rich march on beneath conscious comprehension.

Trump does not hide the privatization for profit of America’s public infrastructure and stripping of public health and environmental protection policies once he has rising stockholder support in office. The Trudeau Liberal party masqueraded as the social democrat NDP in promising whopping public investment to win the election, but when in office lets the giant privatization boondoggle trickle out in sunny avoidance of the facts.

The monumental schemes of robbing the commonwealth at every level are led by slanted and selective reports through every step across ever more domains. But a constant across US empire is Russia the Enemy to justify it all. In the deepening life support crises of this ruling axis, Russia’s projected ‘attacks’ still lead the show.

The Life-Blind Moral DNA of US Rule

With no common ground but belief in God’s blessing over all nations and the greatest killing machine in history to enforce it, US ideology may seem to be a psychopathic rationalization writ large.

Yet the US national morality tale governs perception so that the a-priori life-blindness is not recognised even by philosophers. The US continues to be ruled at home and abroad without life-value ground or compass. So as the US-led global market system multiplies its demands on organic, social and ecological life systems, it moves inexorably towards a few multibillionaires with more wealth than 99% of the population, steering planetary depredation to ruin as freedom and growth.

How else would a global cancer system behave? Yet almost none recognise that this system overrides life requirements at every level. The reformer Trump selects for even more wealth and power to the home rich. He attacks evolved environmental research and regulations with no better alternative. He seeks to repeal Obamacare with no public option considered. His nationalist and cost-cutting program is essentially life-blind.

The baseline of crisis goes all down to the moral DNA of the US project and its evolved economic, political and ideological system. The innermost value driver is long presupposed without question by even US moral philosophers and social scientists as the first principle of their models. Atomic self-maximization towards more private money-value without limit is the meta-program.

In consequence, the ‘global free market’ the US leads and imposes has no feedback loops to protect human or planetary life against hollowing them out for transient commodities, private profit and wastes on every level. The ruling system is structured only to ensure more money demand and commodities to those who have money to pay. Any accountability to universal life necessities is ruled out a-priori from the US Constitution, ruling market doctrine, and received theories.

As I have commented in articles prior to his presidency, “Trump is America come to meet itself”. But the US cover story has not yet been decoded in its master functions of legitimation and idealization. What makes the eco-genocidal system acceptable to human consciousness is an ultimate story line and moral syntax that transforms it into heroic liberty, individualism and moral supremacy.

This moral syntax has been imprinted into US empire since its original revolution against Britain to invade the America West to the Pacific Ocean to appropriate and destroy all the life and life support systems of the developed first peoples there as ‘freedom’, ‘development’ and ‘self-defense’. What is required for the grand narrative’s success is to hide the reality of continuous eco-genocide by continuous false representations as the virtue and truth others fail to understand.

This first principle the justifying morality tale entails the second – that an alien Enemy must always be blamed for the system’s destructive attacks on barriers and resistance to it. Conversion of all life and life support systems to limitless self-maximization of the US system and its richest citizens then proceeds under cover of fake news with wars of acquisition and control represented as courageous and beneficent for all.

For-profit private corporations are the ever more empowered legal vehicles of this transnational system which is set to select for systematic self-maximization of the rich by all market, state and war means that can be constructed to enable it, starting with the US Constitution (as explained above). This set-point is built into the legislative, judicial and executive branches so that today the system outcome is a constitutionally ordered money-party control of all three branches of government as well as the funding systems of social sciences and philosophy.

Fake news in the widest sense provides a continuous cover story to mask and justify the underlying program which is not seen – the money-war party’s limitless take from life within and without the US that depends on a designated Enemy as perennial pretext to strip the US and global commonwealth against effective opposition or change.

Prof. John McMurtry FRSC is the author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Solution and the three-volume study, Philosophy and World Problems, UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), Paris-Oxford.

Lessons from George Orwell’s ‘1984’

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Ethan Indigo Smith

Source: Waking Times

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” — George Orwell

Some fictional literature is so profound as to be relevant for decades. George Orwell’s timeless 1984 is one such literary work. One of the most influential books of our time, its message resonates today as much as it did when it was first published over 65 years ago — as shown by its recent surge to the #1 spot on Amazon’s bestseller list.

So what can 1984 teach us about the modern day?

At its core, 1984 is a post-WWII interpretation of the relationship between individuals and institutions. It changed the course of social history by spawning new language relating to the structure and mechanisms of our society, expanding the scope of human language and thought, and therefore, humanity’s understanding of itself. And that legacy seems perfectly fitting, for in the story of 1984, the world is controlled by so many restrictions that even the expressiveness of the official language, “Newspeak”, is deliberately narrowed by the ruling institutions in a way that limits the ability of individuals to express “thoughtcrime” — that which is deemed illegal by the “Inner Party”, the State.

As a work of fiction, 1984 provides a stark view of a burgeoning culture of totalitarianism. As a work of symbolism, however, it stands as a reflection of modern fact in The U.S.A. and the world today. Within its narrative, the five freedoms of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution were infringed and removed; in particular, the freedom of speech was so restricted that there was only one source of news operated by the official governing body and an entire branch of government was dedicated to steadily eliminating language deemed detrimental to the State.

Orwell created new phrases like “Newspeak” (the official, limited language) and its antonym “Oldspeak”, “Goodthink” (thoughts that are approved by the Party) and its antonym “Crimethink”, and “Doublethink” (the normalized act of simultaneously accepting two contradictory beliefs). The new language allowed his narrative to portray and expose age-old structures of thought and language manipulation – structures that have exponentially escalated in the modern day.

In 1984 all opposition is controlled and absorbed into the background. ‘Big Brother’ is the human image that represents The Inner Party (and the Party line) via the Telescreen providing an ‘official’ narrative while appropriating and misrepresenting the notion of brotherhood and unity into a ‘brand name’ — one that actually instills a psychology of collectivism, not brotherhood, just as the controllers in our own world instill nationalism and war-mindedness in the name of “freedom” and “liberty”. Indeed, the Telescreen is the primary means through which norms were forced on the society and false imagery and narratives embedded in its collective consciousness. Totally transfixed on the Party line, as told by the Telescreen, the fictional society of 1984 has lost the ability to think such that it will believe two plus two is five, as the saying goes, as long as it is presented as such on the Telescreen. They have been captive to this set up their entire lives, and, with language and thought restricted and outlawed, they are blind to their own captivity, unable to discern for themselves. Thus, lies are made to be “truths” using logic so distorted that it not only convinces the masses that two plus two equal five, but that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

In reality, individual ignorance is strength to institutions. Such distortions of language and thought (and, incidentally, history) are the perfect means by which to disempower and co-opt an entire society — means that are not limited to the works of fiction. Orwell knew that ideas do not exist separately from language. Language, in both spoken and written forms, is essential to our ability to form and communicate thoughts and ideas. That is why today the United States government, the shadow powerbrokers that control it, and the mainstream media that support it (the entirety of which is owned by only 6 corporations) continue their war on “fake news” — i.e. ideas that are skeptical of government pronouncements, and information that proves them to be false — taking aim not just at independent journalism but independent thought itself. While government surveillance of its own people continues to increase, government secrecy is at an all-time high, the sharing of ideas that challenge the status quo is becoming more heavily censored, releasing information on institutional and State activity is now punishable by law, and whistleblowers from inside the State are systematically destroyed. If that wasn’t Orwellian enough, Donald Trump’s advisors have begun coining phrases like “alternative facts”, and we have even seen the creation of an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”, an “international fact-checking network” charged with deciding what is “truth” and what is “fake news”.

If the events of 1984 continue to hold true, and the ruling Party of today gets its way, words and ideas will soon become not only censored, but illegal and eliminated altogether, controlled by increasingly totalitarian governments steering our society down a dystopian path of censorship, blind belief, and misinformation — all in the name of the State. However, as our minds are freed, one at a time, we are ultimately finding that our society is heavily embedded with such norms and structures that perpetuate false imagery, preserving the status quo of the State from the ‘threat’ of individual thinking — hence the modern war on “fake news”. We are beginning, as a society, to question such falsehood, and exercise our inherent freedom to expose it.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”. ~ George Orwell

The Last Man in Europe

The original working title to 1984 was ‘The Last Man in Europe.’ This descriptive and evocative title idea provides a clear glimpse into George Orwell’s intent, and encapsulates a main point of 1984, a title perhaps too revealing to be anything but a working title. Certainly, that is the way many of us feel when we first become aware of lies and partial-truths that are presented as reality by those in control of our society today, and accepted in totality by seemingly everyone else – it is as if we are the last lone person. Indeed, the road of the freethinker can be a lonely one, and the story’s protagonist, patriot Winston Smith, is made to believe he is the last person who questions, who looks, listens and speaks.

In a totalitarian society — be it Orwell’s fictional world or the increasingly authoritarian political regimes of today — the official narratives portrayed by the “official” media portray that a society is in consensus with the State, and that those engaged in Thoughtcrime (whether or not it is legally a crime) are isolated social outcasts and lunatics, and demeaned as “rebels” and “conspiracy theorists” (despite the existence of actual conspiracy, against which the truly conscious mind must inevitably rebel.) Yet in reality, Crimethink is what differentiates we freethinkers from those who are lost in the spell of societal illusion and, therefore, pose a threat to the status quo of the State. But this is part of the trap of Goodthink — it creates the illusion of consensus, and therefore, engenders isolation in those who do not concede.

As a master of his craft, nothing Orwell wrote was off the cuff. Now it is not overtly spoken in the book, but there are four types of people in the fictional realm of 1984. There are three described classes and a suggested fourth, only later is it implied that the Brotherhood, anti-establishment rebels — has been eliminated from the narrative jut as those in power sought to eliminate them from the society.

The Secret to 1984 is ‘4’

1984 is in part an expose on the four basic types of people in a society, the four types of institutions and the four types of institutional lies that enable them.

Characterized by how they respond to information, modern societies are made up of four archetypes of people — idiots, zealots, elitists and patriots. Idiots refuse information, zealots blindly refute information, elitists misuse information, and patriots seek and distribute information. Despite dramatic alterations in the world’s geopolitical landscape, and some fluctuation of individuals from one group/role to another over time, the dynamic between these groups has historically remained the same, and are inevitably intertwined: Idiots avoid all new pertinent information in order to maintain their perspective, never questioning the status quo. Zealots ask certain questions of certain information, ignoring unaligned information in order to maintain their perspective, supporting the status quo at all costs. Elitists question information in order to manipulate and reap gains off those who don’t know, benefiting from the status quo. Patriots question information to educate themselves and share it with others, in order that we might enhance our lives and progress beyond the status quo.

It is no wonder, then, that the patriot has been all but deleted from today’s socio-political landscape, with those acting as true patriots being demonized by the State, and the meaning of the word “patriot” distorted and confused (by the likes of George W. Bush Jr.) to mean an unquestioning, flag-waving, with-us-or-against-us brand of nationalistic idiocy. (Check out my article, The First Amendment – The REAL Patriot Act for a deeper discussion of this.) Using a practice so well-defined by Orwell that it is known today as Orwellian speak, institutions transfer and confuse words and ideas by mixing up themselves, their policies and their products with patriotic ideas and words. They take the meaning of words and archetypes, and flip them on their heads: War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and true patriotism (such as that shown by government whistleblowers) is traitorous.

In reality, the true patriots, the rebels who see through the lies of institutions and act accordingly, are removed from public consciousness in exactly the same way. In “Orwellian” fashion, the fourth deleted class of people in 1984, the Brotherhood, who are working to bring down the fascist Inner Party, are deleted through the admission of language. The other three types, which are specifically mentioned in the-book-within-the-book, the fictional The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, are the High, the Middle and the Low castes. Similarly, the other three types of people depicted in the society of Oceania are the Inner Party, the Outer Party and the Proles. The social classes interact very little.

The Inner Party and Outer Party make up 2% of the population, and are the institutionalized controllers of Oceania. They are akin to modern politicians and the financial elite, working with and against one another, and clamoring to gain and maintain power. They have privileges the other castes do not, including being able to (temporarily) turn off the propaganda-spewing Telescreens.

However, there is a pecking order within the Party. The Outer Party are given state administrative jobs and are composed of the more educated members of society. They are responsible for the direct implementation of the Party’s policies but have no say in decision making. They are the “artificial middle class” and as such, have strict rules applied to them. They are allowed “no vices other than cigarettes and Victory Gin”, are spied on via their Telescreens, and are encouraged to spy on each other, and to report suspicious activities to Big Brother.

The lower class of workers that perform the majority of menial tasks and labors are known as the Proles. They live in the poorest of conditions, are not educated, and instead are kept entertained with alcohol, gambling, sports, fiction and pornography (called “prolefeed”) — the 1984 equivalent of “bread and circus”.

According to the Inner Party and the Telescreen it controls, those who might challenge the system – the important fourth type of person – simply do not exist. The Brotherhood, the organization of patriots, are portrayed by the controlling ‘Inner Party’ as only a rumor, and the notion of their existence is belittled by the Inner Party, via the Telescreen. In Oceania, if the Telescreen is t be believed, there are no patriots, nor is such action allowed — and any who think that way are isolated by the divide-and-conquer tactic used by empires past and present. Thus, like so many in our failing society, Smith believes himself to be ‘The Last Man in Europe’…

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell

And yet, as the character of Winston Smith accurately observes in his diary, “If there is any hope, it lies with the Proles” — just as our hope for today lies with the so-called “99%”. The “proles” in our society must begin to look beyond the bread and circus, beyond the prolefeed, and become a true brotherhood, and sisterhood, by questioning information, educating themselves, and sharing what they learn with others in order that we might overcome institutional oppression and finally create the ‘golden age’ that is our combined potential.

God and Gold is Within

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” — George Orwell, 1984

Nothing Orwell wrote was by accident. The name of the character who leads the Brotherhood rebellion is named Emmanuel Goldstein, a name that translates roughly to mean God (Emmanuel) and gold are within (Goldstein). The use of this character name by Orwell asserts a developed, even transmuted human being, who has transcended the imposed limitations of the system he is opposed to, and grown from dull to refined, disempowered to empowered. It also reveals Orwell’s knowledge of how such patriotism and rebellion can become revolution.

The word “prole” is short for prolétariat, a French word derived from the Latin proletarius, meaning “a man whose only wealth is his offspring, or whose sole service to the state is as father”. A word evoking pure institutionalized collectivism, it suggests that the individual has no value other than the labor and progeny he provides to the State. (If you’re only value to the state is as a breeder and consumer, well what kind of world does, sorry, would that result in??) Now compare that definition to the name Emmanuel Goldstein, Golden Godliness is Within. In complete contrast, it is a statement of inner development, of individual enlightenment and empowerment — which, as Orwell knew, are the only forces that can successfully lead a rebellion against the institutional oppression of both fiction and reality.

So, you see, the secret to 1984 is ‘4’. Its most powerful message is in its omissions: in the omission of information, which is the only way the Party/State can maintain authoritarian control, and in the deliberately-omitted fourth human archetype, the righteous rebel, the marginalized voice of descent who is led to believe he is the “last man in Europe”. But in fact, the last man in Europe is you and I. We are everywhere. And, as we open our minds and our mouths, and embrace the gold within, we re-tell the lost narrative of the Brotherhood, and turn our Proles into our Brothers.

Cycle of Insurgency: How the US military is expected to put down an insurrection

Posted on March 30, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Justin King

Source: The Fifth Column

One of the overriding questions when discussing an insurgency within the United States has always been the debate over how the military would respond. Those who hope for the military to break ranks and join the resistance will be disappointed. Those who would believe the military will employ surgical strikes to remove dissidents through technology will be surprised. The American people don’t have to guess how the US military would respond any longer. Two respected academics chose to war game a scenario using the United States Operating Concept (2010) as a guide.

The first thing to understand about an insurrection is that it isn’t terrorism. The terms are often used interchangeably by the media, but there is a significant difference.

As pointed out throughout this series, insurgencies that matured through the cycle of insurgency win. Always. There is a reason for this. Insurgencies, though typically weaker militarily, have great advantages over their adversaries. One of the greatest small unit commanders and unconventional warfare experts in modern times, Richard Marcinko, described three things needed to win in combat: speed, surprise, and violence of action. When transferred to the strategic and operational levels, the insurgency possesses these attributes. The greatest advantages of the insurgency are:

Mobility: The refusal to stay in a static location negates technologically advanced weapons systems.
Initiative: The insurgency is able to choose the time and place of most of the battles they fight.
Surprise: Because the insurgents have the ability to choose the time and place of the fight, they can select moments when the opposition is weakest.
Camouflage: The insurgent does not wear a uniform. As the father of modern insurgency, Michael Collins, said: “Our uniform will be that of the man on the street and the peasant in the field.” This makes distinguishing between friend and foe difficult for the opposition.
Unpredictability: A force that is unpredictable on a battlefield is dangerous. Field commanders train to fight conventional wars, in which both sides attempt to take and hold territory, the insurgent seeks destabilization of the opposition’s government, not land. Tactics designed to defeat a conventional army are useless against an enemy that doesn’t seek to hold territory. The value of remaining unpredictable has created an adage in military circles: “Professional soldiers are predictable, but the world is full of amateurs.” The implied meaning is that the amateur is more dangerous.
Factional divides: In a conventional military setting, a force should function like a well-oiled machine and have clear command and control. Insurgencies typically operate with loose alliances between factions who follow a particular commander. Sometimes they work together, sometimes they don’t. Just when the opposition gains a feel for the tactics and strategy of an insurgent commander, a new one arises. This leads to unpredictable actions being taken by the various factions, which increases their overall effectiveness.
Civilian sympathies: Insurgencies typically maintain a great deal of support from the local populace, which means the opposition can’t move without information detailing those moves reaching the insurgents. In a conventional conflict, the lines of battle hinder civilians from collecting intelligence and passing it to the opposing force. It can be done, but it is difficult. Insurgencies have no front lines.

Insurgencies maintain several other key advantages, but they are more nuanced and are beyond the scope of this article.

The US Army has adopted a doctrine of “Full Spectrum Operations”. Loosely it means the combination of offensive, defensive, and either stability operations overseas or civil support operations on U.S. soil. It’s a concept developed for conventional wars, with little application in unconventional conflicts. To produce a desired outcome (a US military win), the scenario has to be carefully crafted. The academics who published Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A “Vision” of the Future were able to accomplish that. The scenario they present is:

The Great Recession of the early twenty-first century lasts far longer than anyone anticipated. After a change in control of the White House and Congress in 2012, the governing party cuts off all funding that had been dedicated to boosting the economy or toward relief. The United States economy has flatlined, much like Japan’s in the 1990s, for the better part of a decade. By 2016, the economy shows signs of reawakening, but the middle and lower-middle classes have yet to experience much in the way of job growth or pay raises. Unemployment continues to hover perilously close to double digits, small businesses cannot meet bankers’ terms to borrow money, and taxes on the middle class remain relatively high. A high-profile and vocal minority has directed the public’s fear and frustration at nonwhites and immigrants. After almost ten years of race-baiting and immigrant-bashing by right-wing demagogues, nearly one in five Americans reports being vehemently opposed to immigration, legal or illegal, and even U.S.-born nonwhites have become occasional targets for mobs of angry whites.

In May 2016 an extremist militia motivated by the goals of the “tea party” movement takes over the government of Darlington, South Carolina, occupying City Hall, disbanding the city council, and placing the mayor under house arrest. Activists remove the chief of police and either disarm local police and county sheriff departments or discourage them from interfering. In truth, this is hardly necessary. Many law enforcement officials already are sympathetic to the tea party’s agenda, know many of the people involved, and have made clear they will not challenge the takeover. The militia members are organized and have a relatively well thought-out plan of action.

With Darlington under their control, militia members quickly move beyond the city limits to establish “check points” – in reality, something more like choke points — on major transportation lines. Traffic on I-95, the East Coast’s main north-south artery; I-20; and commercial and passenger rail lines are stopped and searched, allegedly for “illegal aliens.” Citizens who complain are immediately detained. Activists also collect “tolls” from drivers, ostensibly to maintain public schools and various city and county programs, but evidence suggests the money is actually going toward quickly increasing stores of heavy weapons and ammunition. They also take over the town web site and use social media sites to get their message out unrestricted.

The scenario continues with descriptions of the activities of politicians prior to the military being involved, but the actions of the “insurgent” already guarantee a US military victory. In the presented scenario, the insurgents surrender every single advantage they have. They attempt to hold territory, losing the advantages of mobility, surprise, initiative, and unpredictability. Because they are operating openly and in a defined area, they have lost the advantage of camouflage. The battle lines established by the insurgents themselves at the checkpoints negate the benefits of civilian sympathy. They have a unified command structure that reduces unpredictability.

In the scenario, DOD responds to this threat by establishing a “show of force” to demoralize the insurgents. They then mount offensive operations by surprise to take down the checkpoints. Towards the end of the campaign, the military seizes power and radio stations and so on. It then begins mopping up operations once the civilians of Darlington have fled.

When faced with the realities of a modern insurgency, this response is completely fictional. There can be no “show of force” to insurgents who don’t take and hold territory. Because the insurgency would operate in a loosely defined area, it would be the US military setting up checkpoints (as in Iraq) that would be ambushed, not the insurgents. Wise insurgents would use mobile communications to spread their message, not a static radio station. The power stations would have been destroyed to foster a belief in the civilian populace that the government can’t even keep the lights on, much less defeat the insurgency. The civilians that conveniently remove themselves from the battlefield in the scenario will be in the line of fire during an insurgency because there is no front line. There is nowhere to evacuate to.

The academics responsible for this scenario specifically created a simple set of conditions that allowed them to explore the logistical aspects of the doctrine on US soil, without considering the real world applications. The US counterinsurgency doctrine is fundamentally flawed. Even when practiced in a foreign country, away from the intense criticism of the US media and populace, it failed to pacify Iraq or Afghanistan. In the US, the doctrine is worthless.

In the joint publication on counterinsurgency doctrine used by all branches, even before the table of contents, it spells out the expected failure. On page iii it states:

“US counterinsurgency efforts should provide incentives to the host-nation government to undertake reforms that address the root causes of the insurgency.”

In a US-based insurgency, the United States is the “host-nation government”. While the above scenario makes for a fun read, current US doctrine is to meet the demands of domestic insurgents, while protecting as much of its credibility as possible.

The Future of Crime

Posted on March 29, 2017 by Reid Mukai

(Editor’s note: This essay was originally published in G-Spot 14 Winter 1994 and later included in the anthology book Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism [Home, 1997]. Though intended as speculative satire, aspects of it now seem eerily prophetic.)

By Stewart Home

Source: Stewart Home Society

In the nineteen-sixties a group of French radicals called the Situationists suggested that ‘freedom is the crime that contains all other crimes’. Things have changed a lot since then, although those at the top of the social heap still believe that the vast mass of humanity are simply cattle to be fattened and slaughtered. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s now ten years since 1984 and the hardware for our total electronic control not only exists, it is also completely obsolete.

The industrial economy based around railways, electricity and the car is a historical curiosity. Until recently, the technological innovations revolutionising society were centred on the generation, storage, processing and transmission of information. Today, we are witnessing the rise of a new technological revolution, a bioeconomy dependent upon genetic engineering, nanotechnology and neurocomputers. Obviously, the level of scientific, technological and cultural development within any given society dictates the types of crime that may be committed within it. Among nomadic tribes, the chief crimes are rape and murder. With the establishment of agriculture and the development of a class system, theft became the major concern of those who controlled the fast expanding, and increasingly bureaucratic, legal system.

A lot of would-be trendy magazines and tv programmes like to pretend they’re covering the cutting edge of crime by running features on computer hacking. Basically, what these people present as the future of crime is hi-tech theft, with cybernauts ripping off money from bank accounts and credit card facilities. When you think about it, this scenario isn’t so different from some farmer of three thousand years ago stealing his neighbour’s cow. A theft, is a theft, is a theft, despite the fact that the methodology of larceny is transformed by technological developments.

What isn’t being reported by the mainstream media is the way in which biotechnology, based on genetic engineering, is being used to boost the profits of multinational corporations as it simultaneously destroys the health of ordinary people. At its most simple, this consists of drugs like Thalidomide being prescribed to pregnant women in Brazil, despite the fact that Thalidomide is banned in Europe because it causes children to be born without limbs. Biotechnology gets even sicker when it’s combined with pre-existing forms of mind control based on psychiatric and electro-shock treatments.

While RoboCop and Terminator were presented to the public as futuristic scenarios, they portray a situation that already exists. The technology required to remake a man or woman, either psychologically or physically, has existed for years. This is where the future of crime really lies, because the police and intelligence services require criminal activity to keep them in a job. While biotechnology is being used to transform the bulk of the population into obedient slaves, the psychological aspect of such mass brainwashing works much more effectively when a minority of individuals are programmed to act as violent psychopaths. The passive majority already accept that the constant surveillance of both public places and cyberspace is fully justified to protect them from those maniacs who threaten the smooth functioning of a well ordered society.

A huge body of publicly available literature exists on CIA experiments such as MK-Ultra, which used LSD as a means of turning ordinary men and women into mind controlled zombies. A number of MK-Ultra test subjects were programmed to slaughter their fellow citizens. Everyone from Luc Jouret and Charles Manson, to Jim Jones and Mark Chapman, the bloke who murdered former Beatle John Lennon, is a victim of coercive psychiatry which transformed them from a regular guy into a murder maniac. During LSD sessions, these future killers were subjected to ‘psychic driving’, a torture technique which consists of revelations extracted under psychoanalysis being played back over and over again, via a helmet the victim can’t remove. In the future, virtually every piece of mayhem to gain widespread publicity will be the involuntary act of some helpless sap whose murderous antics were pre-programmed in a government institution.

Alongside increasingly sophisticated mass murder programmes sponsored by the security services and multinational corporations, there will be resistance from those groups who have already been criminalised for wanting the freedom to party. The Criminal Justice Act, now in force, makes raves illegal and worse is to follow. Fortunately there are still plenty of people about who want to defend themselves from this crackdown. In England, the resistance will be led by the London Psychogeographical Association, who will use games of three-sided football to free people from the shackles of dualistic thinking. Already, the state is preparing to outlaw football played on triangular pitches, with three goals, where a tally of the goals conceded reveals who has won. The shifting allegiances this game brings into play teaches people to break out of the dualistic system of thought that tricks them into becoming victims of the mind control techniques employed by the ruling class.

When three-side football is banned, which will certainly happen in the next two or three years, the London Psychogeographical Association will organise games in abandoned multi-storey car parks and the basements of deserted office blocks. Some games will be played for a full ninety minutes, while others will be broken up by the cops. Anyone arrested will have been told in advance to claim that they are Luther Blissett, a name which has been appearing mysteriously on buildings all over Bologna, Italy, in recent weeks. Some of those who are nicked during games of three-sided football will later reappear among their friends, and with great sadness they will be killed, to free them from the programming that’s destroyed their personality and will compulsively drive them to murder anyone who resists the state. This is the future of crime and it demonstrates that the Situationists were right. FREEDOM IS THE CRIME THAT CONTAINS ALL OTHER CRIMES.

Former World Bank Staffer Explains How Neoliberalism Is Destroying The World

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

More destructive than bombs, money has become the weapon of choice for the global elite, for the hidden hand of finance can plunder and conquer entire nations, assimilate whole cultures, exploit resources and rape the earth while forcing billions into poverty, all with the surprising stealth of pen-strokes and business contracts.

Neoliberalism is the economic and political philosophic driving force in the world today. It suggests that human progress is the result of competition, best expressed by an extremist version of unfettered capitalism, where privatization of profits and socialization of losses are acceptable ethics, regardless of human and environmental costs incurred along the way.

Neoliberalism is the killer plague of the 21st century. Neoliberalism is economic fascism. It is a criminal doctrine. Globalized neoliberalism privatizes public goods for private profit. Neoliberalism led by Washington with the shameful complicity of Europe has in the last fifteen years killed between 12 and 15 million people by wars, famine, deprived health services… forced refugees. Today a small world elite of corporate and Wall Street CEOs and selected politicians call the shots. ~Peter Koenig

First defined in 1938, its global implementation today is the product of the Washington Consensus of 1989 which describes a set of economic prescriptions for developing and crisis-wracked nations created by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury Department. It is a policy which relies on the creation of social and financial crises to distract and soften target nations and peoples, creating problems while providing the ‘solutions.’

At present, Mexico is on the brink of revolution, a direct result of the fallout of three decades of neoliberal policy.

It [Neoliberalism] finds that representative democracy has been perverted through fear, putting central political decisions in the hands of power groups with special interests.The social impact of this process has been devastating, with a polarized income distribution, falling wages, increased precarious jobs, rising inequality, and extreme violence. Health conditions have also deteriorated and disorders associated with violence, chronic stress, and a changing nutritional culture have become dominating. [Source]

Journalist George Monbiot describes neoliberalism as follows:

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. ~[Source]

Economic hitman turned whistleblower, John Perkins, wrote in detail of his ‘boots-on-the-ground’ experiences in conquering third-world nations through economic aid and infrastructure financing in his seminal classic, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. He’s since been on a world crusade to expose the madness of neoliberalism, seeking redemption by connecting with many of the indigenous cultures he previously had worked to enslave and oppress.

In recent years, Greece has become a more visible victim of this policy as the IMF and the European Union have forced the people of this ancient culture into austerity and starvation as part of a plan of economic restructuring to force repayment of illegitimate debts to international bankers.

Speaking at The Delphi Initiative in 2015, economist, geopolitical analyst, and former World Bank staffer, Peter Koenig, explained the scourge of this political and economic philosophy and how it is destroying our world today.

What we are confronted with today is the globalization, and the globalization basically that we are living is like a fetish of the neoliberals. The neoliberals who want to reduce the world to one culture, to one set of values, all based on greed consumption and maximizing profits. ~Peter Koenig

Koenig also speaks of neoliberalism as the root of the type of endless global conflict we see today, including wars of occupation and their resulting terrorism, noting that the U.S. economy is now so dependent on military spending that if peace were to break out, our economy would collapse.

Although from 2015, Koenig’s message is critically important today as the world continues to wake up to the reality that our lives are in the hands of a small exploitative group of inhumane corporations and governments who will stop at nothing to control the resources which make life possible, including water, destroying any civilization that stands in its way.

The Deep State’s Dominant Narratives and Authority Are Crumbling

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

This is why the Deep State is fracturing: its narratives no longer align with the evidence.

As this chart from Google Trends illustrates, interest in the Deep State has increased dramatically in 2017. The term/topic has clearly moved from the specialist realm to the mainstream. I’ve been writing about the Deep State, and specifically, the fractures in the Deep State, for years.

Amusingly, now that “Progressives” have prostituted themselves to the Security Agencies and the Neocons/Neoliberals, they are busy denying the Deep State exists. For example, There is No Deep State (The New Yorker).

In this risible view, there is no Deep State “conspiracy” (the media’s favorite term of dismissal/ridicule), just a bunch of “good German” bureaucrats industriously doing the Empire’s essential work of undermining democracies that happen not to prostrate themselves at the feet of the Empire, murdering various civilians via drone strikes, surveilling the U.S. populace, planting bugs in new iPhones, issuing fake news while denouncing anything that questions the dominant narratives as “fake news,” arranging sweetheart deals with dictators and corporations, and so on.

The New Yorker is right about one thing–the Deep State is not a “conspiracy:” it is a vast machine of control that is largely impervious to the views or demands of elected representatives or the American people. The key to understanding this social-political-economic control is to grasp that control of the narratives, expertise and authority is control of everything. Allow me to illustrate how this works.

The typical politician has a busy daily schedule of speaking at the National Motherhood and Apple Pie Day celebration, listening to the “concerns” of important corporate constituents, attending a lunch campaign fundraiser, meeting with lobbyists and party committees, being briefed by senior staff, and so on.

Senior administrators share similarly crowded schedules, minus the fundraising but adding budget meetings, reviewing employee complaints and multiple meetings with senior managers and working groups.

Both senior elected officials and senior state administrators must rely on narratives, expertise and authority because they have insufficient time and experience to do original research and assessment.

Narratives create an instant context that “makes sense” of various data points and events. Narratives distill causal factors into an explanatory story with an implicit teleology–because of this and that, the future will be thus and so.

For example: because Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the future promises the terrible likelihood (more than a possibility, given Iraqi deployment of poison gas in the Iraq-Iran War) that America or its allies will be devastated by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This teleology leads to the inescapable need to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction by any means necessary, and remove the political will to use them by removing Iraq’s leader from power.

Politicos and senior administrators rely on expertise and authority as the basis of deciding whether something is accurate and actionable. Professional specialists are assumed to have the highest available levels of expertise, and their position in institutions that embody the highest authority give their conclusions the additional weight of being authoritative. The experts’ conclusion doesn’t just carry the weight of expertise, it has been reviewed by senior officials of the institution, and so it also carries the weight of institutional authority.

So when the C.I.A. briefing by its experts claims Iraq has WMD, and the briefing includes various threads of evidence that the institution declares definitive, who is a non-expert to challenge this conclusion and teleology? On what technical basis does the skeptic reject the expertise and authority of the institution?

We can now define the Deep State with some precision. The Deep State is fundamentally the public-private centralized nodes that collect, archive and curate dominant narratives and their supporting evidence, and disseminate these narratives (and their implicit teleologies) to the public via the media and to the state agencies via formal and informal inter-departmental communication channels.

By gaining control of the narratives, evidence, curation and teleology, each node concentrates power. the power to edit out whatever bits contradict the dominant narrative is the source of power, for once the contradictory evidence is buried or expunged, it ceases to exist.

For example, the contradictory evidence in the Pentagon Papers was buried by being declared Top Secret. The bureaucratic means to bury skeptical (i.e. heretical) views or evidence are many. Sending the authors to figurative Siberia is remarkably effective, as is burying the heretical claims in a veritable mountain of data that few if any will ever survey.

Curation is a critical factor in maintaining control of the narrative and thus of control; the evidence is constantly curated to best support the chosen narrative which in turn supports the desired teleology, which then sets the agenda and the end-game.

The senior apparatchiks of the old Soviet Union were masters of curation; when a Soviet leader fell from favor, he was literally excised from the picture–his image was erased from photos.

This is how narratives are adjusted to better fit the evidence. Thus the accusation that “the Russians hacked our election” has been tabled because it simply doesn’t align with any plausible evidence. That narrative has been replaced with variants, such as “the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee.” Now that this claim has also been shown to be false, new variants are popping up weekly, with equally poor alignment with evidence.

The primary claim of each Deep State node is that its expertise and authority cannot be questioned. In other words, while the dominant narrative can be questioned (but only cursorily, of course), the expertise and authority of the institutional node cannot be questioned.

This is why the Deep State is fracturing: the expertise and authority of its nodes are delaminating because its narratives no longer align with the evidence. If various Security Agencies sign off on the narrative that “Russia hacked our election” (a nonsense claim from the start, given the absurd imprecision of the “hacking”–hacking into what? Voting machines? Electoral tallies?), and that narrative is evidence-free and fact-free, i.e. false, then the expertise and authority of those agencies comes into legitimate question.

Once the legitimacy of the expertise and authority is questioned, control of the narrative is imperiled. The control of the narrative is control of the teleology, the agenda and the end-game–in other words, everything. If the institution loses control of the dominant narrative, it loses its hold on power.

This is why the Deep State is in turmoil–its narratives no longer make sense, or are in direct conflict with other nodes’ narratives or have been delegitimized by widening gaps between “definitive” claims and actual evidence.

There is indeed a Deep State, but its control of dominant narratives, and thus its source of control and power, is crumbling. The gap between the narratives and the evidence that supports them has widened to the point of collapse.

Bureaucratic Insanity is Yours to Enjoy

Posted on March 24, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Reposted below is Dmitry Orlov’s review of the new publication from Club Orlov Press: “Bureaucratic Insanity: The American Bureaucrat’s Descent into Madness” by Sean J. Kerrigan.

By Dmitry Orlov

Source: ClubOrlov

In contemporary United States a child can be charged with battery for throwing a piece of candy at a schoolfriend. Students can be placed in solitary confinement for cutting class. Adults aren’t much better off: in 2011 the Supreme Court decided in 2011 that anyone the police arrest, even for an offense as minor as an unpaid traffic ticket, can be strip-searched. These acts of official violence are just the tip of the iceberg in our society.

The number of rules and laws to which Americans, mostly unbeknownst to them, are subject, is hilariously excessive. But what makes this comedy unbearable is that these rules and laws are often enforced with an overabundance of self-righteous venom. Increasingly, contemporary American bureaucrats—be they police, teachers or government officials—are obsessed with following strict rules and mercilessly punishing all those who fail to comply (unless they are very rich or politically connected).

In so doing, these bureaucrats have become so liberated from the constraints of common sense that the situation has gone far beyond parody and is now a full-blown farce. Consider this recent news story involving a Virginia sixth-grader, the son of two schoolteachers and a member of the school’s program for gifted students. The boy was targeted by school officials after they found a leaf, probably a maple leaf, in his backpack. Someone suspected it to be marijuana. The leaf in question was not marijuana (as confirmed by repeated lab tests). End of story, wouldn’t you think?

Not at all! The 11-year-old was expelled and charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court. These charges were eventually dropped. He was then forced to enroll in an alternative school away from his friends, where he is subjected to twice-daily searches for drugs and periodic evaluation for substance abuse problems—all of this for possession of a maple leaf.

“It doesn’t matter if your son or daughter brings a real pot leaf to school, or if he brings something that looks like a pot leaf—okra, tomato, maple, buckeye, etc. If your kid calls it marijuana as a joke, or if another kid thinks it might be marijuana, that’s grounds for expulsion,” the Washington Post cheerfully reassures us.

A reasonable school official would recognize the difference between a technical violation caused by an oversight and a conscious attempt to smuggle drugs into the school. But school officials were intent on ignoring their own better sense, instead favoring harsh punishments.

In his new book, Bureaucratic Insanity: The American Bureaucrat’s Descent into Madness, Sean Kerrigan documents dozens of eyebrow-raising examples in which America’s rule-enforcers perversely revel in handing out absurd and unfair punishments for minor infractions. They demand total and complete submission, driven by a perverse compulsion to “put us in our place” and to “teach us a lesson.” They mercilessly punish even the most inconsequential transgressions in order to maximize our terror and humiliation.

When Sean first began following this story several years ago, he became mesmerized by this bizarre carnival of unreason. “Where is all this pent-up rage coming from?” he wondered, “and why is it being directed toward the weakest and most vulnerable members of society?” And then news stories like those mentioned above grew more and more common. Eventually, he started compiling a list of the most egregious abuses, trying to detect patterns, searching for some explanation for why your average garden-variety bureaucrat has morphed into a monster and has started to take sadistic pleasure in the suffering of innocent people.

Some people might argue that this kind of behavior is the result of political correctness gone amok. Others point to the irrational fear of terrorism and mass shootings. Yet others might think that it has to do with the bureaucrats’ fear of losing their jobs—merely for failing to comply with the exact letter of some rule. While there may be some truth to each of these explanations, they are far from adequate. Many of these bureaucratic abuses have nothing to do with political constraints on free speech, or with guns or terrorism, and in most cases the bureaucrats have the power to minimize harm, but instead they choose to maximize it.

In looking closer at each individual instance, it became clear that most of the offending bureaucrats weren’t even attempting to use their judgment but were mindlessly following written rules. Even in the most nurturing and humanistic professions—teachers and physicians—their practitioners have been robotized to such an extent that they now perform a very narrow range of actions. Thanks to all the progress in IT, their work is now quite detached from physical reality. Much of their work now consists of monotonously, mindlessly pounding at the computer keyboard. Consequently, a large portion of their waking lives has taken on an ethereal, pointless quality. Even teachers, who once had a relatively free reign in forming the minds of the next generation, are now forced to behave like machines, teaching to standardized tests and working a grueling average of 53 hours a week.

The psychological effects of this pressure have been profound. Minus the opportunities to make their own decisions and to see those positive effects of their efforts, their work has become personally meaningless, alienating, depersonalizing and psychologically damaging. As a result of this damage, American bureaucrats, although they may look like mild-mannered professionals, have become prone to sudden bouts of aggressive, sadistic behavior. They are unable to act out their repressed rage in any socially acceptable way other than by doling out punishments, fines, rejections, expulsions and other forms of objective, systemic violence.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and rest assured that this is all being done for our own good. The purpose of all of these rules and laws, from the perspective of the American system of governance, is to maximize control over everything that can be controlled and to micromanage every possible detail of our lives—in order to make them better! From student testing all the way to global trade, those in leadership positions are trying to centralize as much authority as possible in order to maximize efficiency, profit, American power… while minimizing our dignity, well-being and happiness. Oops!

In his book Bureaucratic Insanity, Sean traces the development of this trend from the early years of the industrial revolution to the modern day, from its initial appearance in factory life and in the military, to it later metastasizing to the office, and now taking over America’s schools. He argues persuasively, based on a careful and thorough review of literature in history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and social criticism, that the average American bureaucrat is literally, clinically insane. The average American bureaucrat has a warped perception of reality and an intense, repressed self-hatred. Their only way to vent their rage is by punishing others using bureaucratic methods. They demand absolute conformity because it is their only way to give their meaningless lives some semblance of meaning. They suppress all thoughts that might lead them to discover the true nature of their condition, because that would cause them to spiral down into outright schizophrenia.

The book concludes with an assessment of what we can do to insulate ourselves from this seemingly unstoppable trend, and of how we can reinvigorate our lives by giving it real meaning.

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After the Crash

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Category Archives: Authoritarianism