Beyond Propaganda: Discourse of War and Doublethink. “When the Lie Becomes the Truth”

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Jean-Claude Paye and Tülay Umay

Since the attacks of September 11, we are witnessing a transformation of the way the media report the news. They lock us in the unreal. They base truth not on the coherence of a presentation, but on its shocking character. Thus, the observer remains petrified and cannot establish a relation to reality.

The media are lying to us, but at the same time, they show us that they are lying. It is no longer a matter of changing our perception of facts in order to get our support, but to lock us in the spectacle of the omnipotence of power. Showing the annihilation of reason is based on images that serve to replace facts. Information no longer focuses on the ability to perceive and represent a thing, but the need to experience it, or rather to experience oneself through it.

From Bin Laden to Merah, through the “tyrant” Bashar al-Assad, media discourse has become the permanent production of fetishes, ordering surrender to what is “given to see.” The injunction does not aim, as propaganda, to convince. It simply directs the subject to give flesh to the image of the “war of civilizations”. The discursive device of “War of Good against Evil,” updating the Orwellian doublethink process must become a new reality that de-structures our entire existence, of everyday life in global political relations.

Such an approch has become ubiquitous, especially regarding the war in Syria. It consists of cancelling a statement at the same time as it is pronounced, while maintaining what has been previously given to see and hear. The individual must have the ability to accept opposing elements, without raising the existing contradiction. Language is thus reduced to communication and cannot fulfill its function of representation. The deconstruction of the faculty to symbolize prevents any protection vis-à-vis the real to which we are in submission.

Enunciating a Statement And its Opposite at the Same Time

In the reports on the conflict in Syria, the double think procedure is omnipresent. Stating at the same time a thing and its opposite produces a decay of consciousness. It is no longer possible to perceive and analyze reality. Unable to put emotion at a distance, we cannot but feel the real and thus be submitted to it.

Opponents of the regime of Bashar al-Assad are dubbed “freedom fighters” and Islamic fundamentalist enemies of democracy at the same time. It is the same with regard to the use of chemical weapons by belligerents. The media, in the absence of evidence, express certainty as to the Syrian regime’s responsability, although they mention the use of such weapons by the “rebels”. In particular, they relayed the statements of magistrate Carla Del Ponte, a member of the UN independent commission of inquiry into violence in Syria, who said, on May 5, 2013 on Swiss television, “According to the testimonies we have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of sarin gas.” This magistrate, who is also the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia can hardly be called indulgent toward the “regime of Bashar Assad.” “Our investigations should be further developed, verified and confirmed through new evidence, but according to what we have established so far, it is the opponents who used sarin,” she added. [1]

The White House, for its part, did not want to consider this evidence and has always expressed an opposite position. Thus, as regards the August 21 Ghouta massacre, it released a statement explaining that there is “little doubt” of the use by Syria of chemical weapons against its opposition. The statement added that the Syrian agreement to allow the UN inspectors in the area is “too late to be credible.”

Reduction of qualitative to quantitative.

Following the use, August 21, 2013, of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus, Kerry reiterated the “strong certainty” of the United States concerning the liability of the Syrian regime. A U.S. intelligence report, released by the White House and said to rely on “multiple” sources, also said that the Syrian government used nerve gas in the attack, the use of which by the rebels is “highly unlikely”. [2]

The individual is placed outside the differentiating power of language. That which is qualitative, that which is certain, is reduced to that which is quantitative, to the “different degrees of certainty” expressed previously by Obama or the “high certainty” pronounced by J. Kerry. The “very little doubt”, as to the liability of the Syrian regime, also mirrors the “highly unlikely” responsibility attributed to opponents. Quality is thereby restricted to a quantitative difference. Quality, that which is, becomes at the same time, that which is not or at least that which may not be, because it no longer expresses a certainty, but a certain amount or degree of certainty or doubt. The opposites, “certainty” and “doubt” become equivalent. The qualitative difference is reduced to a quantitative gap. There is no longer any quality other than that of measurement.

This reduction of qualitative to quantitative has otherwise already invaded our daily lives. We no longer refer to the poor but to the “less fortunate”. Similarly, we no longer encounter invalids, but “less able persons”. The least skilled jobs are now given names that deny de-qualification. Thus, a cleaning woman becomes a ” housekeeper”, the cashier disappears in favour of the “sales assistant” and garbage Collector are now called « sanitation worker ».

The separating power of language is annihilated. Words are turned into verbal phrases that build a homogenized world. We are in a world in which everyone is advantaged. No more are there qualitative differences between human beings, but only quantitative differences. The vision of a world of perfect homogeneity where only equals exist, no longer differing other than quantitatively, was already foreseen by George Orwell in Animal Farm: « All are equal, but some would be more so than others » « [3].

Absolute Certainty in the Absence of Evidence.

The word, which describes and differentiates things, is replaced by an image, by that which is everything at the same time as being nothing. Instead of a word referring to an object, degrees of certainty concern only the feelings of the speaker. These verbal phrases are not intended to designate objective things, but to place the person who receives the message in the perspective of the speaker, to lock them in the warped meaning created by the latter.

Expressed certainty can detach itself from facts and present itself as purely subjective. It does not refer to an observation, but refers to a condition posing as objective through a quantization operation.

The certainty of U.S. and French authorities also distinguishes itself in that it is built on equivocal data, on the invocation of evidence of liability of the Syrian regime, although they recall the impossibility of knowing who struck and how chemical weapons were used. It is no longer possible to construct an objective certainty, because the observation of facts is defused and leaves room for the stupefaction of the observer. Expressed certainty no longer separates true from false, since the ability to judge is suspended.

Precisely, subjective and objective certainty is undifferentiated. It is not a matter of believing what is stated, but of believing the authority who speaks, no matter what he says. Statements of Presidents Obama and Holland are immediately given as absolute certainty, ie: they occupy the place that Descartes gives to God “as a principle guaranteeing the objective truth of subjective experience…” [4]. The matter of going through the steps of objective verification, through the judgment of existence, does not arise to the extent that certainty is set free from all spatial and temporal constraints. It is posited in the absence of limits, in the absence of what psychoanalysis calls the “Third Person”, the place of the Other. [5]

Removal of the “Third Person”

Absolute certainty, posing as the be all and end all, installs a denial of reality, that which escapes us. It does not recognize loss. Constituting “we” is no longer possible because it can only be formed from that which is missing. The monad, for its part, lacks nothing because it is fused with state power. Fetishes fabricated by “the news” fill the void of reality, occupy the place of that which is missing and operate a denial of the third party.

Absolute certainty is opposed to the establishment of a symbolic order integrating the “third person” [6], the domain of language. The proper function of language is to signify that which is real, knowing that the word is not reality itself, but that by which it is represented. Jacques Lacan expresses this necessity with his aphorism “the thing must be lost in order to be represented”. [7]

On the contrary, absolute certainty attaches words to things and does not take into account their relationships. In the absence of a ’third person’, it prevents any real articulation with the symbolic. This absence of linkage is the formation of a social psychosis wherein that which is stated by power becomes reality. The deficiency also allows the emergence of a perverse structure that reverses the speech act and prevents identifying the reality of the psychosis.

Enrolling us in psychosis, the discourse of French and American authorities originates in perverse denial. It constitutes a coup against language “coup because disavowal is situated at the logical basis of language” [8]. Denial of reality is realized by a commodification of words and a procedure of cleavage. The cynical coup is this: “pervert that by which law is articulated, make language the reasonable discourse of unreason” [9] as with “humanitarian war” or “counter-terrorism”.

Counter-terrorism legislation is presented as rational actions to dismantle the law in favour of the fabrication of images. U.S. law is particularly rich in these pictorial constructions, such as the “lone wolf”, a lone terrorist related to an international movement, the “enemy combatant” or “unlawful belligerent” that exist, because they are designated as such by the U.S. President. The enemy combatant, as illegal belligerent, may be a U.S. citizen who has never been on a battlefield and whose “military action” amounts to an act of protest against a military engagement. Deviation from that which is stated by the powers that be is no longer possible. Similarly, any protection against its real threat is removed. The reality manifests itself without dissimilation and can henceforth petrify us.

The suppression of the Third Person reducing the individual to a monad, no longer having an Other outside of state power, allows authority, especially as regards discourse on the war in Syria, to produce a new reality. Evidence of the guilt of the Syrian regime exists, because authority says so.

A “disturbing strangeness”.

The absence of a “third person” settles us in transparency, in a never-never land beyond language. It removes the relationship between interior and exterior. The expression of the omnipotence of the U.S. President, his will to break free from the constraints of language and of any judicial order, reveals our condition, its reduction to “naked life.” There then occurs “a special kind of scary” Freud calls Unheimliche [10], a term which has no equivalent in French and which can as well be translated as “disturbing strangeness” and as “disturbing familiarity.”

It would be, as defined by Schelling, something that should have remained hidden and which has reappeared. Unveiled, worldly things appear in their raw presence as Real. Where the individual believed himself at home, he suddenly feels driven from his home and becomes strangely foreign to himself. The inside of our condition, our annihilation is thrown out and appears to us as a plaything of the U.S. executive branch. The staging of our division, “disturbing strangeness”, becoming that which is most familiar to us, suppresses intimateness by replacing it.

Freud suggests a dissociation of the ego. The latter is then pulverised and can no longer display the Real, the threat that petrifies it. Freud speaks of the formation of a stranger “I” that can turn itself into moral conscience and treat the other part as an object [11].

This mechanism reappears as the return of the repressed archaic, that which is intended to hide the distress of the nursing child. The “disturbing strangeness”, produced by Obama’s speech is of the same order. It instrumentalises what happened in Iraq in order to prevent us from forgetting our impotence. Thus, it reinforces “the permanent return of the same” constitutive of a sense of “disturbing strangeness” or disturbing familiarity. The process of repetition presents itself as an inexorable process, like a power that we cannot confront.

Jacques Lacan confirms this reading. Echoing the work of Freud on the “disturbing strangeness”, he shows that anxiety arises when the subject is facing the “lack of lack” that is to say, an all-powerful otherness that invades the self to the point of destroying every faculty of desire. [12]

In fact, the two translations, the first highlighting the strangeness, the second its familiar character, make each highlight one aspect of this particular anxiety that one can also deal with thanks to the notion of transparency. Interior and exterior confusing themselves, the individual is at once struck by the strangeness of seeing his impotence, by his interior deprivation exhibited outside himself and by the colonization of his intimacy by the spectacle, become familiar, of the enjoyment of the other.

Denial and Splitting of the Ego.

Dissociation is an archaic defense attempt when faced with a power with which one cannot cope. This disintegration of the Ego allows the return of a “déjà vu”. The Superego calls one to see oneself as an infant, as one who does not speak, thus causing a feeling of “disturbing strangeness”.

Faced with the imperative need to believe in the responsibility of Bashar Assad, the individual must suspend contrary information and treat it as if it did not exist. He proceeds to a denial of all that is different, then couched in the regressive position, that of the umbilical union with the mother, a stage preceding language, before the appearance of the function of the father. [13]

The denial of the contradiction between a thing and its opposite, the responsibility of the Syrian government and the use of chemical weapons by the rebels, is the act of denying the reality of perception seen as dangerous because the individual would then have to face the omniscience displayed by the powers that be. To contain the anxiety produced by the “disturbing strangeness”, the subject is forced to juxtapose two opposing and parallel ways of reasoning. The individual then has two incompatible unlinked visions. The denial of the opposition between these two elements removes any confliction; because there coexists within oneself two opposing statements that are juxtaposed without influencing each other. This denial rests on what psychoanalysis calls the “splitting of the ego.”

The cleavage gives one the opportunity to live on two different levels, placing side by side, on the one hand, “knowledge”, the use of sarin gas by the rebels, and on the other hand a dodging of confrontation with a suspension of information. This is to prevent any struggle, any symbolism in order to enjoy the full omnipotence of the powers that be. In the absence of a perceived lack in what one is told, one finds oneself beneath the conflict in an annulment of any judgment.

Orwell has also highlighted this procedure in his definition of “doublethink.” It consists in the following: “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,” while being able to forget, « whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed ». Then one must forget, ie: “consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you have just performed. ” [14]

Cleavage is recurrent in the speech surrounding the war in Syria. Things here are regularly affirmed, at the same time as that which contradicts them without a relationship being established between the different enunciations. Contrary to statements by Carla Del Ponte, Washington would first have arrived, “with varying degrees of certainty,” at the conclusion that the Syrian government forces had used sarin gas against their own people. However, Barack Obama, at the same time, said the United States didn’t know ” how [these weapons] were used, when they were used or who used them” [15]. The operation places the subject in fragmentation, unable to react to the nonsense of what is said and shown. One cannot cope with a certainty that is claimed in the absence of evidence.

The logical reversal of language building becomes a manifestation of the power of the U.S. executive. It exhibits a capacity to overcome any language organisation and thus all symbolic order. The absurdity reclaimed by the statement is as a coup against the logical basis of language. It henceforth has a petrification effect on people and captivates them in psychosis.

Notes

[1] « Les rebelles syriens ont utilisé du gaz sarin, selon Carla Del Ponte », Le Monde.fr avec Reuters, le 6 mai 2013.

[2] « Syrie : les États-Unis ont la “forte certitude” que Damas a eu recours à des armes chimiques », Le Monde.fr, le 30 août 2013.

[3] « All are equal but some than others », Georges Orwell, in Animal Farm.

[4] Charles-Éric de Saint Germain, L’Avènement de la vérité Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, L’Harmattan 2003, p. 37.

[5]Dominique Temple, “Lacan et la réciprocité”, 2008, http://dominique.temple.free.fr/reciprocite.php?page=reciprocite_2&id_article=202

[6] Le « Tiers » est ce qui défusionne l’enfant de la mère, lui donnant ainsi accès au champ du langage et de la parole. Il permet l’assujettissement du sujet à un ordre symbolique.

[7] Jacques Lacan, « Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse » – in : Écrits 1, Le Seuil, Paris, 1966.

[8] Houriya Abdellouahed, « La tactilité d’une parole. Le pervers et la substance », in Cliniques méditerranéennes N° 72, Érès , p.5, http://www.cairn.info/revue-cliniques-mediterraneennes-2005-2.htm

[9] Op. Cit., p. 8.

[10] Unheimliche est un adjectif substantivé, formé à partir de deux termes : le préfixe Un, exprimant la privation et l’adjectif heimlich (familier). La traduction « l’inquiétante étrangeté », d’abord proposée par Marie Bonaparte, ne tient compte ni de la familiarité signifié par heimlich, ni de la négation marquée par le Un. Aussi d’autres traductions ont été proposées telle que « l’inquiétante familiarité ». Lire les remarques préliminaires de François Stirn à la traduction de Une inquiétante étrangeté, par Marie Bonaparte et E. Marty, Profil Textes Philosophiques, Philosophie, octobre 2008, www.esparedes.pt/escola/images/freud_etrangete.pdf

[11] Le partage en deux éléments séparés a pour conséquence « que l’un participe au savoir, aux sentiments et aux expériences de l’autre, de l’unification à une autre personne, de sorte que l’on ne sait plus à quoi s’en tenir quant au moi propre, ou qu’on met le moi étranger à la place du Moi propre —donc dédoublement du Moi, division du Moi, permutation du Moi— et enfin, le retour permanent du même », S. Freud, « Inquiétante étrangeté et clivage », in L’Inquiétante étrangeté et autres essais, Gallimard 1988, p. 236.

[12] Régine Detambel, « Sigmund Freud, L’inquiétante étrangeté autres essais, http://www.detambel.com/f/index.php?sp=liv&livre_id=656

[13] « Inquiétante étrangeté et clivage », http://theses.univ-lyon2.fr/documents/getpart.php?id=lyon2.2002.ravit_m&part=66598

[14] « Retenir simultanément deux opinions qui s’annulent alors qu’on les sait contradictoires et croire à toutes deux… Oublier tout ce qu’il est nécessaire d’oublier, puis le rappeler à sa mémoire quand on en a besoin, pour l’oublier plus rapidement encore. Surtout, appliquer le même processus au processus lui-même. Là, était l’ultime subtilité. Persuader consciemment l’inconscient, puis devenir ensuite inconscient de l’acte d’hypnose que l’on vient de perpétrer. La compréhension même du mot « double pensée » impliquait l’emploi de la double pensée. », George Orwell, 1984, première partie, chapitre III, Gallimard Folio 1980, p.55

[15] « Les rebelles syriens ont utilisé du gaz sarin, selon Carla Del Ponte », Op. Cit.

This article was first published on our French language website www.mondialisation.ca

Article in French :

Discours de la guerre et double pensée. L’exemple de la Syrie. Mondialisation.ca, 29 of June of 2014

The Stealing of America by the Cops, the Courts, the Corporations and Congress

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.” —Author Tom Clancy

Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures, foreclosures, etc.—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is theft.

We’re operating in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where instead of Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves stealing from the rich to feed the poor, you’ve got the government and its merry band of corporate thieves stealing from the poor to fatten the wallets of the rich. In this way, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. All the while, the American Dream of peace, prosperity, and liberty has turned into a nightmare of endless wars, debilitating debt, and outright tyranny.

What Americans don’t seem to comprehend is that if the government can arbitrarily take away your property, without your having much say about it, you have no true rights. You’re nothing more than a serf or a slave.

In this way, the police state with all of its trappings—from surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT team raids, truancy and zero tolerance policies, asset forfeiture laws, privatized prisons and red light cameras to Sting Ray guns, fusion centers, drones, black boxes, hollow-point bullets, detention centers, speed traps and abundance of laws criminalizing otherwise legitimate conduct—is little more than a front for a high-dollar covert operation aimed at laundering as much money as possible through government agencies and into the bank accounts of corporations.

The rationalizations for the American police state are many. There’s the so-called threat of terrorism, the ongoing Drug War, the influx of illegal immigrants, the threat of civil unrest in the face of economic collapse, etc. However, these rationalizations are merely excuses for the growth of a government behemoth, one which works hand in hand with corporations to profit from a society kept under lockdown and in fear at all times.

Indeed, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the real motivating factor behind erecting a police state is not to protect the people, but to further enrich the powerful. Consider the following costly line items, all part of the government’s so-called quest to keep us safe and fight terrorism while entrenching the police state, enriching the elite, and further shredding our constitutional rights:

$4.2 billion for militarized police. Almost 13,000 agencies in all 50 states and four U.S. territories participate in a military “recycling” program which allows the Defense Department to transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police. In 2012 alone, $546 million worth of military equipment was distributed to law enforcement agencies throughout the country.

$34 billion for police departments to add to their arsenals of weapons and equipment. Since President Obama took office, police departments across the country “have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” While police departments like to frame the acquisition of military surplus as a money-saving method, in a twisted sort of double jeopardy, the taxpayer ends up footing a bigger bill. First, taxpayers are forced to pay millions of dollars for equipment which the Defense Department purchases from megacorporations only to abandon after a few years. Then taxpayers find themselves footing the bill to maintain the costly equipment once it has been acquired by the local police.

$6 billion in assets seized by the federal government in one year alone. Relying on the topsy-turvy legal theory that one’s property can not only be guilty of a crime but is also guilty until proven innocent, government agencies have eagerly cashed in on the civil asset forfeiture revenue scheme, which allows police to seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the cops keeps the citizen’s property. Eighty percent of these asset forfeiture cases result in no charge against the property owner. Some states are actually considering expanding the use of asset forfeiture laws to include petty misdemeanors. This would mean that property could be seized in cases of minor crimes such as harassment, possession of small amounts of marijuana, and trespassing in a public park after dark.

$11,000 per hour for a SWAT team raid on a government dissident. The raid was carried out against Terry Porter, a Maryland resident who runs a welding business, is married with three kids, is outspoken about his views of the government, and has been labeled a prepper because he has an underground bunker and food supplies in case things turn apocalyptic. The raiding team included “150 Maryland State Police, FBI, State Fire Marshal’s bomb squad and County SWAT teams, complete with two police helicopters, two Bearcat ‘special response’ vehicles, mobile command posts, snipers, police dogs, bomb disposal truck, bomb sniffing robots and a huge excavator. They even brought in food trucks.”

$3.8 billion requested by the Obama administration to send more immigration judges to the southern border, build additional detention camps and add border patrol agents. Border Patrol agents are already allowed to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. As one journalist put it, “The surveillance apparatus is in your face. The high-powered cameras are pointed at you; the drones are above you; you’re stopped regularly at checkpoints and interrogated.” For example, an American citizen entering the U.S. from Mexico was subjected to a full-body cavity search in which she was subjected to a variety of invasive procedures, including an observed bowel movement and a CT scan, all because a drug dog jumped on her when she was going through border security. Physicians found no drugs hidden in her body.

$61 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, one of the most notoriously bloated government agencies ever created. The third largest federal agency behind the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, the DHS—with its 240,000 full-time workers and sub-agencies—has been aptly dubbed a “runaway train.”

$80 billion spent on incarceration by the states and the federal government in 2010. While providing security, housing, food, medical care, etc., for six million Americans is a hardship for cash-strapped states, it’s a gold mine to profit-hungry corporations such as Corrections Corp of America and GEO Group, the leaders in the partnership corrections industry. Thus, with an eye toward increasing its bottom line, CCA has floated a proposal to prison officials in 48 states offering to buy and manage public prisons at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, the prisons would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and states would have to maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years. This has led to the phenomenon of overcriminalization of everyday activities, in which mundane activities such as growing vegetables in your yard or collecting rainwater on your property are criminalized, resulting in jail sentences for individuals who might otherwise have never seen the inside of a jail cell.

$6.4 billion a year for the Bureau of Prisons and $30,000 a year to house an inmate. There are over 3,000 people in America serving life sentences for non-violent crimes. These include theft of a jacket, siphoning gasoline from a truck, stealing tools, and attempting to cash a stolen check. Most of the non-violent offenses which triggered life sentences were drug crimes involving trace amounts of heroin and cocaine. One person imprisoned for life was merely a go-between for an undercover officer buying ten dollars’ worth of marijuana. California has more money devoted to its prison system than its system of education. State spending on incarceration is the fastest growing budget item besides Medicaid.

93 cents an hour for forced, prison labor in service to for-profit corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. What this forced labor scheme has created, indirectly or not, is a financial incentive for both the corporations and government agencies to keep the prisons full to capacity. A good portion of the 2 million prisoners in public facilities are forced to work for corporations, making products on the cheap, undermining free laborers, and increasing the bottom line for many of America’s most popular brands. “Prison labor reportedly produces 100 percent of military helmets, shirts, pants, tents, bags, canteens, and a variety of other equipment. Prison labor makes circuit boards for IBM, Texas Instruments, and Dell. Many McDonald’s uniforms are sewn by inmates. Other corporations—Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, Boeing, Motorola, Compaq, Revlon, and Kmart—also benefit from prison labor.”

$2.6 million pocketed by Pennsylvania judges who were paid to jail youths and send them to private prison facilities. The judges, paid off by the Mid Atlantic Youth Service Corporation, which specializes in private prisons for juvenile offenders, had more than 5,000 kids come through their courtrooms and sent many of them to prison for petty crimes such as stealing DVDs from Wal-Mart and trespassing in vacant buildings.

$1.4 billion per year reportedly lost to truancy by California school districts, which receive government funding based on student attendance. The so-called “solution” to student absences from school has proven to be a financial windfall for cash-strapped schools, enabling them to rake in millions, fine parents up to $500 for each unexcused absence, with the potential for jail time, and has given rise to a whole new track in the criminal justice system devoted to creating new revenue streams for communities. For example, Eileen DiNino, a woman serving a two-day jail sentence for her children’s truancy violations, died while in custody. She is one of hundreds of people jailed in Pennsylvania over their inability to pay fines related to truancy, which include a variety of arbitrary fees meant to rack up money for the courts. For example, “[DiNino’s] bill included a laundry list of routine fees: $8 for a “judicial computer project”; $60 for Berks constables; $40 for “summary costs” for several court offices; and $10 for postage.” So even if one is charged with a $20 fine, they may end up finding themselves on the hook for $150 in court fees.

$84.9 million collected in one year by the District of Columbia as a result of tickets issued by speeding and traffic light cameras stationed around the city. Multiply that income hundreds of times over to account for the growing number of localities latching onto these revenue-generating, photo-enforced camera schemes, and you’ll understand why community governments and police agencies are lining up in droves to install them, despite reports of wide scale corruption by the companies operating the cameras. Although nine states have banned the cameras, they’re in 24 states already and rising.

$1.4 billion for fusion centers. These fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance and intelligence efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, have proven to be exercises in incompetence, often producing irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence, while spending millions of dollars on “flat-screen televisions, sport utility vehicles, hidden cameras and other gadgets.”

In sum, the American police state is a multi-billion dollar boondoggle, meant to keep the property and the resources of the American people flowing into corrupt government agencies and their corporate partners. For those with any accounting ability, it’s clear that the total sum of the expenses being charged to the American taxpayer’s account by the government add up to only one thing: the loss of our freedoms. It’s time to seriously consider a plan to begin de-funding this beast and keeping our resources where they belong: in our communities, working for us.

The Awakening – Clash of Civilizations

Posted on July 27, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

Despite the furious efforts of the world’s Machiavellian destroyers, humanity is waking up. We’re seeing significant progress in exposing the ongoing brutal Gaza extermination, the mass revelation of chemtrails and other neo-scientific incursions, the disastrous effects of EMFs of every source, GMO food manipulation, tectronic surveillance and monitoring, and the front and center clearly induced global war and the militarization of society.

We’re in the thick of it now.

Don’t let these events and seeming contests of ideology throw you. There’s nothing level about this playing field, and the mass narrative is strong propaganda. Don’t even listen to it. Rely on your heart and alternative sources. Their only weapon is our consent by yielding to their lies. Disinformation serves several purposes, the most insidious of which is to introduce doubt to your heartfelt conviction regarding the reality of what is obviously before you. Keeping the mass mind at bay is imperative to their program.

Why? If we woke up to the truth we’d stop our participation and/or rise up and overthrow them. And they know that.

Major Signs of Awakening

As mentioned above, there are many manifestations that the Truth is flooding in to human consciousness. What we collectively do with this information is one thing; what we individually do with it is the key. We either activate, or we don’t. The more who do, the greater the mass awakening. With or without the masses, the awakening is coming to pass anyway, come what may. That’s the wonderfully exciting reality. What the naysayers and foot draggers do with it is their business, and their demise if they choose wrongly to ignore what is more obvious by the minute.

That Israelis are sitting on a hill sipping drinks in their beach chairs cheering the slaughter of civilian Palestinians should send shivers up anyone’s spine. That a captive population is being mercilessly annihilated on any pretext should shock even the most hard of hearing soul. Yet the mainstream media pounds its narrative of who the poor defenseless “good guys” are versus the obvious genocide and territory grab by an invading army.

Why not? The US has been doing this for decades, as have the Israelis. The conditioning runs deep. Literally mindfucked Amerikans are cheering just as avidly as is a swath of other similarly infected Canadians and Europeans and other mentally and spiritually disturbed Zionists around the world. The rest of the world sees it for what it is. A targeted slaughter and annihilation of something that’s in the way of another globalist maneuver for psychopaths to get what they want. And when it comes to the rabid Zionists everyone stands back. The puppet powers and similarly cowed populace don’t dare touch them. Zionist fingers are in every facet of today’s societal and governmental fabric. The world is afraid to confront them.

Yet the truth of this masqueraded massacre is for all to see. The onus is on humanity. And the alternative is becoming crystal clear.

Financial, Governmental and Mad Scientific Schemes are Increasingly Obvious

Besides the obviously engineered take down of the Middle East and now Ukraine, there are many other fronts this hurricane of Truth is eroding in the human psyche. The geoengineering of our climate, oceans and soil are also becoming painfully, for them, clear. As long as real information is available hungry souls will find it and be forced to process it.

We also clearly see the central banking system, the FED, and our manipulated financial structure being exposed. Sitting helplessly watching no longer becomes an option. Pulling out of their system is a given eventuality, and it’s happening, as it becomes more evident by the day that major governmental powers are run by bought-off crooks and stooges.

The geoengineering chemtrail scam, poisoning humanity from it’s skies for whatever pretense, is taking a serious beating as communication and committed activism exposing this global affront wears away the veneer of outright lies and denial of such an obvious phenomenon. Take a look at the recent results of sincere, concerned determination to bring this issue to the forefront of public awareness:

Our EMF Bombardment

Another insidious attack on our health and freedom is the electromagnetic assault on humanity, all in the guise of convenience, “conservation” and safety of course. Never mind the horrific surveillance invasion of our planet, the very presence of so many electromagnetic rays from so many man-made sources permeating our existence is one of the greatest threats to us, altering our genetic and physical make up and even influencing our thoughts and inherent impulses.

Besides France banning wi-fi in schools and Russia’s cellphone for youngsters prohibition, here’s just one example of the growing backlash under way:

Brazilian Courts order lower electromagnetic pollution

The Brazilian Judiciary determined to reduce the level of electromagnetic pollution generated by power lines to standard adopted by Swiss law (1.0 microtesla).

Two associations of residents in São Paulo — the largest city of Brazil — proposed the action. The plaintiff has pleaded to not be exposed to electromagnetic fields incompatible with the human health.

The electromagnetic fields generated by power lines that cross these areas is 10 times greater than the level determined by the court. The judgment of the Court of State of São Paulo (Tribunal de Justiça de São Paulo) has determined that the concessionaire of electric power reduces the electromagnetic field generated by power lines that pass through these neighborhoods. (Source)

GMO Rejection

The public outcry against genetically modified foods and the resultant use of the killer chemical glysophate has been front and center for quite a while. While the Monsanto dynasty and its network of affiliate chemical and distribution companies and ongoing governmental bribes and planted personnel continues its campaign, the rise against such infected food tyranny has been proportionally greater.

You just don’t mess with conscious people’s health. Period. And there are more of us by the minute.

Russia, China and a host of other nations are refusing to import GMO products. That this is so front and center in the public mind, whatever their entrained reflexive minds tell them, highlights this issue. Even more so in Amerika, whether to have these tampered with foods even labelled is appearing at their ballot boxes is keeping this subject front and center.

That’s pretty tough to ignore, even for the most brain dead, Brave New World “Epsilon” cretin out there.

The awakened civilization rolls on.

The List Continues

If you need further encouragement, get involved. You’ll see signs of it everywhere. Major inroads of Truth are being made by the minute as these disgusting forces continue to attempt to forge their desired goal of a subservient, complacent and even happily servile work force. Damn them, and do it with gusto.

Don’t be deceived, it’s all a wicked charade. A ploy, a scam: a counterfeit civilization they’re trying to construct that true conscious humanity is dissolving by the hour.

Disconnect – disobey – and de-enlist. Break your unconscious and conscious agreements. The parasites will shrivel up and disappear.

The time is now. It’s ours for the taking. And receiving.

Much love always, keep on, Zen

Processing Distortion with Peter B. Collins: Big Data Shows Only 5% of FBI Domestic Terrorism Cases Are Untainted

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Peter B. Collins

Source: Boiling Frogs

Peter B. Collins Presents Attorney Stephen Downs

As a retired lawyer, Steve Downs volunteered to represent a local Muslim who was entrapped in an FBI sting. From that, he learned of other similar cases, and he co-founded Project Salam. Their new report, Inventing Terrorists: The Lawfare of Preemptive Prosecution, analyzes about 400 domestic terrorism prosecutions since 2001 and finds that 72% of the cases involved preemptive investigations that included paid informants and provocateurs who often supplied the idea and the means for plots that were then exposed to fawning media outlets. Another 22% of the cases involved minor, non-terrorist crimes that were manipulated and amplified by the FBI. The numbers show a clear pattern of abuse, mostly of Muslim suspects.

*Stephen Downs spent most of his career as an attorney for New York State’s judicial oversight commission. You can read the report and browse the database here

Listen to the Preview Clip Here

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/wp-content/uploads/PD.clip.0039.Downs.mp3

Deep Anger

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Darren Fleet with Stefanie Krasnow

Source: Adbusters

In a better world, there’d be no reason to write this. In that world, plastic bags would be outlawed, rednecks would voluntarily stop driving those obnoxious Ford F-350s and the yogis in yuppie neighborhoods would stop believing that a hybrid SUV could save the planet. But that’s not the world we live in.

In this world, when push comes to shove, most of us are too comfortable to care, too polite to speak out. With so much at stake we need to rediscover something we lost along the way: our anger.

I’ve been around a while now and all I can say is that everything has gotten worse. Deforestation. Species extinction. Overfishing. Melting glaciers. CO2 through the roof. We won a few symbolic victories here and there, but the big picture is total loss. And that’s why this isn’t your standard a-better-world-is-possible-peace-and-love-we’re-all-in-this-together-be-the-change-you-want-to-see circle jerk that has become the cachet of an entire generation of professional activists.

I’m a child of the “awareness generation,” the one who grew up learning to reduce, reuse and recycle. I remember first learning about global warming and climate change in high school in the 90s. Back then it was called the Greenhouse Gas Effect. Most of my early environmental knowledge came from classroom videos about acid rain, slash-and-burn logging in the Amazon and the hole in the ozone layer. There was also the slogan “think globally, act locally” plastered across my Social Studies 11 class wall. Those of us who cared two cents about anything believed in that mantra religiously, even though by that point almost everything around us—the school supplies, the clothes on our backs, even the food in our stomachs—came from across an ocean.

At the same time that we were learning to be more conscientious about our market choices, the global bazaar was pried open by the WTO, NAFTA and GATT trade regimes, effectively eliminating any possibility we had to make truly environmental choices. Before we were even old enough to know about our carbon footprint, it was already ten times that of a kid in the developing world. Meanwhile, our history books were full of inspirational Gandhi, MLK and Mandela quotes, all driving home the point that change, even revolution, was sentimental, nice, easy, positive. The first time the cops threatened to arrest us at an environmental protest, we shit our pants. Turns out positivity has its limits. And that’s exactly how we got into this mess.

There’s nothing worse than interorganizational bitching, especially among environmental campaigners and NGOs. We’re like a bunch of abused children taking out our frustrations on each other when we should be unified and directing our focus elsewhere. But since we don’t have the collective gumption to stand up to the man, we squabble among ourselves; it’s the only way to release the impotent rage we all feel. Even so, I have this to say: every time I see one of my environmental heroes jump on the corporate bandwagon to say some stupid-ass shit about how there are no sides in the climate struggle—how pessimism is an affront to the imagination—my heart breaks.

Recently, best-selling environmental author, TED talker, anthropologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence Wade Davis went down that road. In an interview with a Vancouver newspaper he reflected proudly on his days as an energy company consultant, saying, “In all these resource conflicts, there are no enemies, only solutions.” This kind of well mannered sweetness, in the face of such a violent problem, is our greatest problem.

So if we’re going to get serious about disrupting an increasingly apocalyptic horizon, we’ve got to challenge the feel-good Hallmark sentiments that inundated my generation. We have to say fuck the TED talks, with their sincere but vacuous optimism. Fuck the positivity gurus claiming the world is not dying, it’s only changing. And fuck environmentalists willing to play nice with Big Oil and Big Energy, saying things like: “you’re not going to stop the tar sands. It’s naive to think you can,” as Davis recently proclaimed. This type of thinking sounds a lot like those fearful souls who thought apartheid was too entrenched to defeat, that Big Tobacco was too rich to take on, that austerity was too fixed to shake—that there’s nothing you, or I, or we can do in the face of a multi-trillion dollar industry. Truth is, nothing on this Earth is inevitable.

Last year, I watched in amazement as a group of radical First Nations scholars brought down the house in Vancouver at an academic conference called Global Power Shifts. Rather than reply with academia’s standard response when confronted with a social issue—“that’s problematic”—they had the guts to take a stand. One in particular, Dr. Glen Coulthard of the Yellowknife Dene, delivered a paper saying that folks on the front-lines of land, climate and environmental battles in Canada are tired of being told not be angry; that given the ongoing process of colonization, theft and exploitation, anger is not only the natural response, but the only moral response.

What he hinted at was a resurgent anger. Deep Anger. The type of anger that overturns tables, defends the weak from the strong, would rather die than live on its knees. Most mainstream environmentalists don’t like this kind of language. It means you have to do more than sign a petition. It means you can’t count miniscule corporate concessions as victories. It means you have to let yourself unravel a bit.

In our culture, anger is seen as impolite, brutish, violent and indulgent. It’s politically incorrect. It makes people squeamish. We’re afraid of anger like we’re afraid of obsessive passion and overt eroticism. Anger is dark and dirty, but Deep Anger is a form of empathy, care, even love.

Psychologists explain that anger is a natural and appropriate response to violating behavior, to situations where our boundaries have been crossed. Not having a say in whether or not ecocide is going to happen—and being asked to participate in a calm and nice debate about whether or not the tar sands should expand or not—is a violation of our boundaries. Yet somehow, we’re expected to smile and keep our imaginations open as if positivity were the goal of the movement.

The great irony is that, despite our civilization’s claim to reason, there is a deep irrationality, a fatal blind spot blocking out emotion and sanity. We’re so deeply in denial about what is happening to our planet that we’re risking our own extinction.

Unless humanity breaks through the denial, unless we start to get angry—fuckin’ angry—then we won’t ever be able to accept the challenge at hand. We won’t ever be able to rise up and face our planetary reality … we won’t ever be able to fight … and we won’t be able to win.

Inequality Has Been Eliminated

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Chad Hill

Source: the Hipcrime Vocab

Have you heard? Inequality has been eliminated.

What? You didn’t know that? Well, certain “professional” economists have proved it is true.
You may wonder, when you drive around your town, why formerly occupied strip malls lie abandoned, and the only local businesses are Cash-For-Gold, Payday Loans, Dollar Stores, and tattoo parlours. You may ignore the people standing near freeway exits with signs begging for work or money (these have exploded where I live), or the people rolling around shopping carts with all their worldly possessions, or the people living in their cars. It’s all an illusion. Detroit? Chicago? Merely a mirage.

You may wonder at all the empty, shuttered factories, or the fact that the Wal-Mart Super Store is the town’s biggest employer, or that “help wanted” signs seem to appear only in the local Arby’s or Home Depot (or my favorite “owner operators wanted”). You may puzzle at the foreclosed homes stripped of copper and being overgrown with weeds that litter towns from coast to coast. The entire neighborhoods that lie empty and abanadoned? Another mirage, silly. The crumbling roads and local governments “tightening their belts?” Not happening.

Not happening. Nope, none of it.

You may have heard stories about people thirty or forty years ago with high-school educations being able to get jobs that supported families, allowed them to buy a house and save money. You may have heard about people able to save up enough to go to college by just working a summer job. You may have heard of people twenty or thirty years ago with full-time jobs that had benefits such as paid vacations and health care, which are now being stripped away job by job. You may have heard about something called a “union.”

False. All false. The world is getting more equal every day thanks to globalized corporate capitalism. The economists told me so.

You may even know people who have lost their job and are unable to find another one because employers discriminate against the unemployed. You may know someone with huge debt burdens because the cost to train workers is borne entirely by the workers themselves, and you have to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt just to get a job at all. Or you may know someone who was foreclosed upon, or drowning in debt due to an unforeseen circumstance or medical emergency. You might know people who’ve had to take jobs with much lower pay and benefits than the ones they had before. You may know people working brutally long hours, or denied extra work time so that they don’t qualify for health care benefits. You may know people who have used food stamps to feed themselves or their families, even though they work full time jobs. You may know older people who have to work because they can’t afford to retire.

They all deserve it. All of them. They’re all lazy. Laziness has exploded since 2008, don’t you know. Everyone gets exactly what they deserve. It’s never been better time to be a worker under capitalism.

You may look on the outrageous fortunes spend by the rich and conclude that they are reaping more and more benefits by breaking wages and shipping jobs overseas. Don’t you believe it! Their riches are making everyone better off. Just look at Bill Gates! He gives money to poor people in Africa. And Steve Jobs. He invented the iPod in his basement, or something. Soaring CEO salaries are great. The bailouts were all paid back. And the soaring stock market prices will make everyone rich! Don’t worry about the costs for food, housing, education and transport. The “free market” will take care of it all and unleash abundance, but only if the “job creators” don’t have to pay taxes. Those trust fund kids getting unpaid internships and getting jobs downtown – that’s just a natural part of capitalism, it has nothing to do with inequality. The fact that entire cities are unaffordable for people making less than six figures? College and health care costs? Forget about it. Nothing to do with inequality, which, by the way, has been going down, not up. Besides, even if it were going up, inequality doesn’t matter, what matters is that life is getting better even for people even at the bottom. They love being in debt and working for minimum wage! And besides, the life for the average person is getting better and better the more riches the wealthy and powerful accumulate. After all we have smart phones. SMART PHONES!!!

All those people protesting around the world? They just don’t understand capitalism.

You may even have read books and articles asserting that we are a “winner-take-all” economy, a “servant economy,” or something like that. Not true! Those books and articles were all written by “leftists” and “liberals” who don’t understand science and statistics. Articles like this are just sensationalism by liberals who hate our freedom:

76% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck (CNN)

The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business Community (NYT)

The Financial Vulnerability of Americans (House of Debt)

Employment Down, Profits Up: The Aftermath of the Financial Crisis in 1 Graph (The Atlantic)

‘Happy Days’ no more: Middle-class families squeezed as expenses soar, wages stall (Wall Street Journal)

A Dozen Facts about America’s Struggling Lower-Middle-Class (Brookings)

America’s Sinking Middle Class (NYT)

Why So Little Media Coverage of How the Rich Are Becoming Richer and the Middle Class Wages are Being Squeezed? (Naked Capitalism)

RIP, the middle class: 1946-2013 (Salon)

Yep, Being a Young, American Adult Is a Financial Nightmare (The Atlantic)

Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal (Rolling Stone)

Median CEO Pay Just Topped $10M for the First Time (Slate)

Upgrade or Die (George Packer)

San Francisco’s Income Inequality Rivals that of Developing Nations (Vanity Fair)

Gap Between Rich And Poor In Manhattan “Rivals Sub-Saharan Africa” (Gothamist)

How did the economists come to this conclusion, you ask? Well, Piketty made a few spreadsheet errors. And thanks to that, the professional economist caste can breathe a sigh of relief that all of the things I named above don’t exist, and happily go back to their blackboards and spreadsheets in their corporate-funded free-market think-tank cubicles and university offices.

Because inequality is entirely dependent upon r being greater than g. That is, the rate of return to capital (yes, let’s just argue about what constitutes “capital,” that will make this whole thing go away), must be greater than g, the rate of growth of the economy. Because, heaven knows, it’s not like workers could ever get paid less than the growth of the economy, right?

Right?

Read the full article here: http://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2014/06/inequality-has-been-eliminated.html

Notes Toward a Future of Activism

Posted on May 29, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Micah White

Source: Reconstruction 10.3

<1> Contemporary activism begins from the realization that for the first time in history, a synergy of catastrophes face us. Our physical environment is dying, our financial markets are collapsing and our culture, fed on a diet of junk thought, is atrophying — unable to muster the intellectual courage to face our predicament. While some may caution against immediate action by pointing out that societies often predict perils that never come, what is remarkable about our times is that the apocalypse has already happened.

<2> When we compare the anxiety of our age to that of the Cold War era, we see that what differentiates the two periods is where the threat is temporally located. During the Cold War, the threat of nuclear destruction was always imagined to be in the future. What terrorized the Cold War generation was the thought of life after a nuclear holocaust. Anxiety was therefore centered on what life would be like “the day after” the future event, which was symbolized by the blinding light of a mushroom cloud on the horizon. Thus the post-apocalyptic narrative was deployed in a series of nuclear holocaust science-fiction stories either to mobilize fear in the name of anti-nuke peace — the exemplar of this tactic being the horrifying and scientifically realistic 1984 BBC docudrama Threads in which civilization collapses into barbarism — or, like Pat Frank’s 1959 novel Alas, Babylon, convince a wary public that winning and happily surviving nuclear war is possible, given resourcefulness, discipline and patriotism.

<3> But for those of us alive today, the catastrophic event is not located in the future. There is no “post”-apocalyptic per se because we are already living in the apocalyptic. And although we can anticipate that life is going to get starker, darker and hellish, the essential feature of our times remains that we do not fear the future as much as we fear the present. We can notice this temporal shift in the work of James Lovelock, whose Gaia Hypothesis is gaining traction inside and outside of the scientific community. According to Lovelock’s latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, even if we were to immediately cease all C02 emissions, sudden and drastic climate change will still occur. In fact, Lovelock argues that a drastic decrease in emissions would trigger climate catastrophe immediately whereas continuing emissions will trigger climate catastrophe eventually and unpredictably. This realization — that the line into a post-climate-change world has already been crossed — fundamentally changes the temporal and spatial assumptions underpinning activist struggles. And the first aspect of activism that must be rethought is our notion of temporality.

<4> The typical activist project is inscribed within the horizon of a modern conception of temporality. The modernist activist acts as if we occupy a present moment that is a discrete point on the linear progression between a mythical, ancient past and an either utopian or dystopian future. But if we accept this model, then the goal of the activist can only be to change the future by preventing the dystopian possibility from being realized. This involves pushing for changes in laws and behaviors in the present that will impact our predictions of how the future will be. But activism based on this temporal model — which as John Foster points out in The Sustainability Mirage: Illusion and Reality in the Coming War on Climate Change underpins “green capitalism” and “sustainable development” — inevitably fails. For one, unable to accurately predict the future, we constantly play the game of basing our actions on rosy predictions while the future grows increasingly gloomier. Another problem with relying on linear temporality is the assumption that time moves in only one direction. Without the freedom to imagine going backwards, we are left the task of steering the runaway train of industrialization without hope of turning around.

<5> Of course, linear time is not the only way to understand temporality and some models can have even worse political consequences. Take for example, the notion that time is cyclical. For the Roman Stoics, time was marked by a series of conflagrations in which the world was razed and a new one formed only to be razed again. In times of adversity when resistance seems impossible, such as the build-up to World War 2, a watered down version of cyclical temporality sometimes enters the cultural consciousness. It infected Nazis who cheered total war and anti-Nazis who used the spurious argument that only by a catastrophic Nazi triumph would a communist state be realized because only then would the people rise up. A similar line of thought was pursued by Martin Heidegger in a letter to Ernst Jünger in which he wondered if the only way to “cross the line” into a new world is to bring the present world to its awful culmination. Unlike the linear conception of time that calls the activist to act in order to realize an alternate future, the cyclical conception is often leveraged to justify inaction or worse, action contrary to one’s ideals.

<6> To escape the problems of linear time and cyclical time, activism must rely on a new temporality. Perhaps the best articulation of this new activist temporality is in the work of Slavoj Žižek. In his most recent book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek blames the failure of contemporary activism on our assumption that time is a one-way line from past to future. He argues that activism is failing to avert the coming catastrophe because it is premised on the same notions of linear time that underpin industrial society. According to Žižek, therefore, a regeneration of activism must begin with a change in temporality. Paraphrasing Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Žižek writes, “if we are to confront adequately the threat of (social or environmental) catastrophe, we need to break out of this ‘historical’ notion of temporality: we have to introduce a new notion of time.” This new notion of time is a shift of perspective from historical progress to that of the timelessness of a revolutionary moment.

<7> The role of the activist should not be to push history in the right direction but instead to disrupt it altogether. Žižek writes, “this is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement. An act of ‘divine violence’ would then mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress.” To accomplish this act of revolutionary violence involves a switch of perspective from the present-looking-forward to the future-looking-backward. Instead of trying to influence the future by acting in the present, Žižek argues that we should start from the assumption that the dread catastrophic event — whether it be sudden climate catastrophe, a “grey goo” nano-crisis or widespread adoption of cyborg technologies — has already happened, and then work backwards to figure out what we should have done. “We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny — and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.” In other words, only by assuming that the feared event has already happened, can we imagine what actions would need to have been taken to prevent its occurrence. These steps would then be actualized by the present day activist. “Paradoxically,” he concludes, “the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable.”

<8> Žižek is right to suggest that activism is at a crossroads; any honest activist will admit that lately our signature moves have failed to arouse more than a tepid response. The fact is that our present is being swallowed by the future we dreaded — the dystopian sci-fi nightmare of enforced consumerism and planet-wide degradation is, day-by-day, our new reality. And thus, activism faces a dilemma: how to walk the line between false hope and pessimistic resignation. It is no longer tenable to hold the nostalgic belief that educating the population, recycling and composting our waste and advocating for “green capitalism” will snatch us from the brink. Likewise, it is difficult to muster the courage to act when the apocalyptic collapse of civilization seems unavoidable, imminent and, in our misanthropic moments, potentially desirable. Žižek’s shift in temporality offers us a way to balance the paralyzing realization that our demise is inevitable with the motivating belief that we can change our destiny. By accepting that as the world is now we are doomed, we free ourselves to break from normalcy and act with the revolutionary fervor needed to achieve the impossible.

<9> The question for would-be activists is therefore not, “how does one engage in meaningful activism when the future is so bleak?” but instead “how does one engage in revolutionary activism when the present is so dark?”

<10> Corresponding to the necessary temporality shift is a spatial change in activism. The future of activism will be the transformation of strictly materialist struggles over the physical environment into cultural struggles over the mental environment. Green environmentalism, red communism and black anarchism will merge into blue mental environmentalism — activism to save our mental environment will eclipse activism to reclaim our physical environment. A key opening to this new form of politics appeared in 1989 with the founding of Adbusters, the internationally distributed anti-consumerism magazine whose subtitle is The Journal of the Mental Environment.

<11> Adbusters is a Situationist inspired offspring of the environmentalism movement. At the time of its formation, there was an active anti-logging movement in British Columbia, Canada. And responding to sagging public support for cutting down old growth trees, the logging industry introduced the “Forests Forever” advertising campaign. As the name suggestions, this campaign argued that the logging industry was not cutting down forests as much as they were protecting forests. It was the kind of disingenuous advertising ploy known as “greenwashing”– a term that, it is worth noting, originated in that same year. Disgusted by what he saw, Kalle Lasn, who was an experimental filmmaker at the time, created a short claymation anti-ad in which an old-growth tree explains to a sapling that a ancient forests are being replaced by tree farms. His intention was to air the anti-ad on the same television stations that the logging industry had used.

<12> When Lasn tried to buy airtime for his anti-ad on the same television station that aired the Forests Forever advertisements, he was refused. That was the founding event of Adbusters: the realization that while corporations can lie to us via the airwaves, we are unable to respond using the same means. But the message of Adbusters goes beyond concerns over the veracity of the information we receive — and here we would do well to follow Jacques Ellul who spoke of the difficulty in distinguishing between information and propaganda. Instead, it is a matter of how the advertisements we see populate our minds with a picture of reality. This picture of reality, our worldview, colors everything we perceive. Thus, the mental environmentalist movement is concerned with the pollution of our minds.

<13> While some may wish to frame this transition in terms of a new development, I think it is just as accurate to view it as an old phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, for example, “pollution” had an exclusively unscientific, immaterial and spiritual meaning. In the 14th century to pollute meant to desecrate, defile, or contaminate what is sacred such as one’s soul or moral sensibility. Not until the late nineteenth-century did pollution take on the scientific and materialist connotation it has today. The unfortunate consequence is that with the changing meaning of the word pollution, we’ve become increasingly concerned about desecration of our external, natural environment while ignoring the defilement of our internal, mental environment. The future of activism is a return to the early meaning of pollution.

<14> Activism is entering a new era in which environmentalism will cease viewing our mental environment as secondary to our physical environment. No longer neglecting one in favor of the other, we will see a push on both fronts as the only possible way of changing either. This will involve a shift away from a materialist worldview that imagines there to be a one-way avenue between our interior reality and the external reality. Instead, recognition of the permeability of this barrier, an exploration of the mutually sustaining relationship between mindscape and landscape, will open, and reopen, new paths for politics.

<15> This movement toward an activism of the mental environment is based on an ontological argument that can be stated succinctly: our minds influence reality and reality influences our minds. Although simply stated, this proposition has profound implications because it challenges the West’s long standing Cartesian divisions between internal and external reality that serve to ignore the danger of mental toxins. Whereas traditional politics has assumed a static mind that can only be addressed in terms of its rational beliefs, blue activism believes in changing external reality by addressing the health of our internal environment. This comes from an understanding that our mental environment influences which beings manifest, and which possibilities actualize, in our physical reality.

<16> At first it may seem like a strange argument. But the imaginary has been a part of environmentalism since the beginning. Most people trace the lineage of the modern environmentalist movement back to Rachel Carson’s 1961 Silent Spring. Carson’s book argued that the accumulation of toxic chemicals in our environment could work its way up the food chain, causing a widespread die- off. It may not have been the first time the bioaccumulation argument had been made, but it was the first time that it resonated with people. Suddenly, a movement of committed activists and everyday citizens rallied under the environmentalism flag.

<17> Looking back on Carson’s book from the perspective of mental environmentalism, it is significant that it begins, not with hard science as we may expect because Carson was a trained scientist, but with fantasy. The first chapter, entitled “A Fable for Tomorrow,” reads like a fairy tale: “There once was a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” She then goes on to describe an idyllic, pastoral community known for its abundant agriculture and wild biodiversity. She writes of foxes and deer; laurel, virburnum and alder; wild birds and trout. However, the beauty of the place is not permanent – an evil, invisible malady spreads across the land. Birds die, plants wilt and nature grows silent. The suggestion is that the land has been cursed; if this were a different story perhaps the farmers would have prayed, offered sacrifices to the gods or asked their ancestors for help. Instead, Carson shifts the blame away from transcendental forces and back to the materialist domain of man. “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life on this stricken world.” Carson concludes, “The people had done it to themselves.”

<18> Some literary critics have argued that the reason “Silent Spring” resonated with the larger public, sparking a movement of everyday people is largely due to this opening fable. They explain that Carson’s story takes Cold War era fears of radioactivity (an invisible, odorless killer) and redirect them into a new fear over environmental pollution that is, likewise, an invisible, odorless killer. This is a compelling interpretation that explains the rhetorical power of Carson’s story but it misses the larger point. Namely, that at its origin, environmentalism was grounded in a mythological story about a cursed land. Faced with a choice over whether to continue in this fantastical, narrative vein or enter the domain of scientific facts, environmentalism tried the latter. Environmentalism has thus become a scientific expedition largely regulated by Western scientists who tell us how many ppb of certain pollutants will be toxic and how many degrees hotter our earth can be before we are doomed. But here we see again the linear temporal model cropping up again which may explain the inability, according to James Lovelock, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to predict the rising temperatures we have experienced. In light of the failures of the exclusively scientific approach, it is worth considering another option.

<19> What if Carson had written about how the disappearance of birds was accompanied by the appearance of flickering screens in every home? What if she had drawn a connection between the lack of biodiversity and the dearth of infodiversity? Or the decrease in plant life and the increase in advertised life? To do so would necessitate a new worldview: a blue worldview that acknowledges the interconnection between mental pollution and environmental degradation, spiritual desecration and real-world extinctions.

<20> Keeping one foot within the domain of imagination, environmentalism could speak not only of the disappearance of the wild birds due to physical pollutants but also their disappearance due to mental pollutants. We could wonder at the connection between a culture’s inability to name more than a handful of plants, and the lack of biodiversity in the surrounding nature. And instead of assuming that the lack of biodiversity in external reality caused our poor recognition skills, we would entertain the opposite possibility: that the fewer plants we recognize, the fewer plants will manifest.

<21> Blue activism begins with the realization that internal reality is connected to external reality and then wonders at the relation between pollution of internal reality and the desecration of external reality. The primary pollutant of our mental environment is corporate communication. It is no longer controversial to claim that advertisers stimulate false desires. Any parent knows that after their child watches the Saturday morning cartoons they will suddenly “need” new toys, new treats, new junk. But the effects of advertising go beyond, what the marketers call, “demand generation”. Advertising obliterates autopoesis, self-creation. It is an info-toxin that damages our imagination and our world picture, essential elements of our mental environment. Activists must work on the assumption that there is a connection between the level of pollution in our minds and the prevalence of pollution in our world. At the most basic level, this is because when our minds are polluted, and our imaginations stunted, we are unable to think of a different way of doing things. At a more complex level, it is because our mental environment dictates, to a certain extent, whether certain beings manifest in our physical environment. Naming calls beings into existence and when all the words we know are corporate-speak, the only beings that will manifesto are corporate- owned.

<22> To understand how the pollution of the mental environment can impact the manifestation of beings, consider the story of the Passenger Pigeon. In 1810 one of the great American ornithologists, Alexander Wilson, observed a flock of Passenger Pigeons so plentiful that it blacked out the sun for three days. On another occasion he documented a flock estimated to be two hundred and forty miles long and a mile wide and comprised of over a billion — 1,000,000,000 — birds. A century later, the last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden on September 1, 1914. How do we explain this alarming extinction of the Passenger Pigeon?

<23> If we take a materialist activist position, then we will argue that their sudden demise is due to a combination of forces, all of which are located outside the psyche: overhunting combined with unenforced laws against killing the birds in their nesting places was exacerbated by the telegraph which was used to track the birds over hundreds of miles. The species death of the passenger pigeon is thus interpreted as a tragedy of specific technologies: guns, nets, laws and communication systems. Of course, this account is not wrong; it would be mistaken to argue that these technologies did not play a major factor in their extinction.

<24> But physical environmentalism boils down to conservationism. It is allopathic, only able to treat the symptom, the disappearance of the birds, without considering the root cause. By focusing our attention exclusively on material forces, we are confined to certain activist tactics: a spectrum from reformist gestures of calling for greater enforcement of environmental protection laws, courageous tree sits and militant ELF arsons. And while these actions are commendable, and with open acknowledgment that a diversity of tactics is necessary, the focus on a secular materialist politics is limiting our success. Under this model, Ted Turner is considered a philanthropic hero because he is the nation’s largest landowner and maintains the largest privately owned bison herd. What we do not need is a rich patron of endangered species, but instead a world without endangered species. That requires more than money, it necessitates a paradigm shift.

<25> The unexplainable extinction of the passenger pigeon is a symptom of the state of our mental environment. Species facing extinction can only be saved if we take their disappearance as a symptom and address the root cause of their disappearance. Because of an over-reliance on a secular, materialist conception of politics, scientists dictate the aims of activists. The irony is that our exclusive concern over the physical environment renders us unable to save it.

<26> The curious interplay between our imagination and external reality gives credence to the argument that the struggles over the mental environment are the future of activism. The future of activism begins with the realization that only with a clear mind, a clean mental environment, do we approach the possibility of a clean physical environment.

<27> Dispel immediately the notion that our mental environment is unique to each individual. Just as we share our natural environment, we also share our mental environment, which is crafted through the culture we consume – the television shows we watch, the websites we frequent and the symbols and concepts that comprise our thoughts. Thus, the mental environment is not something entirely within us but is instead something that is outside of our complete control and shared collectively.

<28> Activism of the mental environmentalism is not a politics of solipsism, or an attempt to dodge the imperative of direct action. Instead, developing a politics of anti-consumerism and anti-materialism, places the role of imagination back into the forefront. Denying corporations the right to dominate our mental environment is the most effective long-term strategy of insurrection in the twenty- first century because it directly influences the manifestation of our natural environment. By targeting the mental polluters, vandalizing billboards and blacking out advertisements, we do more than clean up urban blight — we clear a creative space for a revolutionary moment.

The US Government Thinks it Can Fool Us into a War with Russia

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Nick Bernabe

Source: The Anti-Media

It seems like only a few months ago (because it was) when the government that rules America was condemning the brutal crackdown against protesters by the Ukrainian government. The then-Russian backed regime was fending off large crowds of protesters who were angry about the Ukrainian government’s close ties with Russia, resorting to violence and anti-riot tactics to disperse the crowds.

In a statement issued by the White House on January 19th, before the new Western backed ‘legitimate’ government of Ukraine took power, US officials condemned the violence against protesters:

“We are deeply concerned by the violence taking place today on the streets of Kyiv and urge all sides to immediately de-escalate the situation. The increasing tension in Ukraine is a direct consequence of the government failing to acknowledge the legitimate grievances of its people.

Instead, it has moved to weaken the foundations of Ukraine’s democracy by criminalizing peaceful protest and stripping civil society and political opponents of key democratic protections under the law. We urge the government of Ukraine to take steps that represent a better way forward for Ukraine, including repeal of the anti-democratic legislation signed into law in recent days, withdrawing the riot police from downtown Kyiv, and beginning a dialogue with the political opposition.

From its first days, the Maidan movement has been defined by a spirit of non-violence and we support today’s call by opposition political leaders to reestablish that principle. The U.S. will continue to consider additional steps — including sanctions — in response to the use of violence.”

In a noble yet ironic –selective at best– attempt to stand up for human rights, what the US government said in the above statement made sense. Kind of.

While fighting for freedom of speech is a good thing, it should be stood up for even when it’s inconvenient. Now, as the US and allies in the West deliver billions in loans, tech and intel to the new central-banker-run government in Ukraine, Kiev is fully engaging (and killing) pro-Russian protesters in the East of Ukraine and even in the Southwestern port city of Odessa. Ahh yes, the sweet smell of selective humanitarianism.

Then –lockstep with American political talking heads– US media outlets immediately began referring to these pro-Russian (former)protesters as insurgents, militants, militiamen, radicals, separatists and terrorists just before the killing started a few months ago. They knew it was coming. 40 pro-Russians were burned alive in a building on Friday and there was hardly a mention of it in the news. You see, now the protesters are called terrorists so it’s okay to kill them. When did the media stop calling them protesters and start calling them terrorists? When it became politically convenient. Iraq remembers.

The US government (and citizen by default through taxes) is actively supporting the crony, human rights abusing, unelected Ukrainian regime through billions in loans, military training and equipment of which we can only speculate about.

As an American citizen, I do not consent to this insane foreign policy. And, according to a recent survey by the Wall Street Journal, it seems that at least 47% of Americans agree with me:

Americans in large numbers want the U.S. to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

In a marked change from past decades, nearly half of those surveyed want the U.S. to be less active on the global stage, with fewer than one-fifth calling for more active engagement—an anti-interventionist current that sweeps across party lines.

…The poll findings, combined with the results of prior Journal/NBC surveys this year, portray a public weary of foreign entanglements and disenchanted with a U.S. economic system that many believe is stacked against them. The 47% of respondents who called for a less-active role in world affairs marked a larger share than in similar polling in 2001, 1997 and 1995.

Good! So the propaganda isn’t working, but the government doesn’t really care about public opinion anymore. After all, how many Americans would actually support sending billions of US dollars to an oppressive Ukrainian puppet regime while our own schools and infrastructure dwindle into a bureaucratic wasteland and the country falls $16+ Trillion into debt? Not me.

Another small detail to remember as the US government escalates tensions in Ukraine under the banner of de-escalation (I know it’s Orwellian, but what isn’t nowadays) is that the American government likely helped overthrow the democratically elected, Russian-aligned former government of Ukraine. As this leaked tape of a conversation between diplomats proves, the US government hand picked central banker Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the new ‘legitimate’ leader of Ukraine long before the coup took place. Oh yeah, “Fuck the EU” while we’re at it!

Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, later haphazardly apologized for her remarks that were recorded and leaked anonymously when she appeared at a press conference, clearly shaken up and taken back by the leak:

So while the US government and their media cohorts continue to push for the West’s version of “stability, democracy and self-determination” in Ukraine, the truth is that they were and continue to be part of the driving force causing these very problems they seek to fix. But hey, what’s new?

In no way do I seek to condone Putin or Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Russia is also a large oppressor in the region and is an oligarchy which is structured and governed much like America, for the rich. The Russian-American proxy war in Ukraine will have one guaranteed loser, the innocent Ukrainian civilians who are caught in the crossfire of this banker resource conflict. Both American and Russian citizens must regain control over their governments or these injustices will continue. Please share this article if you think WWIII is a bad idea.

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