Category Archives: corporate news

Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

Within 48 hours both Facebook and then Youtube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” Other platforms may soon fall in suit, as they did with Alex Jones in 2018.

This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke. This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.

I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.

Journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote an excellent essay about the dangers inherent in the increased demand we’ve been seeing for more censorship and deplatforming during the coronavirus pandemic, correctly arguing that more authoritarian control over the ideas people are allowed to discuss is vastly more dangerous than the ideas themselves.

“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant,” Taibbi writes. “It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.”

“Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous,” says Taibbi.

Taibbi argues against the increasingly normalized trend of elevating “authoritative” content while silencing content which does not wear that magical label in an attempt to fight disinformation. If you examine which content is considered “authoritative”, you’ll find a bunch of outlets who have consistently lied to the world about war after war, who spent years promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin had infiltrated and secured control over the executive branch of the US government, who consistently normalize a status quo which is wholly incompatible with the surviving and thriving of life on this planet.

Google, who owns Youtube, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has called on the government to take “a more active role” in regulating “harmful content”, and has been actively collaborating with government agencies and government-funded think tanks to decide what content to remove. Social media executives are now routinely called before government hearings and lectured about the need to increase censorship under the implicit threat of antitrust cases being brought to bear. These massive corporations now consistently censor with an extreme bias against governments which refuse to bow to the demands of the US government and its allies.

In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Whenever anyone objects to censorship on these massive platforms they’re always told that those platforms are private companies who are free to do what they like on their private property, but how “private” is a corporation that is interlaced with government power with increasing inseparability? The reality is that in a corporatist system of government with vanishingly few meaningful distinctions between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.

Proponents of increased internet censorship have already openly conceded this point. A recent Atlantic article by two legal professors subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong”, the case is made that western internet censorship will necessarily involve a collaboration with “private” corporations and government power.

“As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China,” the article’s authors favorably argue. “Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.”

Apart from the fact that they are here claiming that increasingly authoritarian speech control is good and necessary, these two bootlickers are absolutely correct. Human communication is indeed being controlled using the so-called “private sector” to circumvent constitutional limitations which prohibit the government from censoring speech directly.

These Silicon Valley tech corporations have ensured their continued monopolistic dominance by demonstrating their willingness to collaborate with establishment power structures, so there are no platforms of anywhere near the same size and influence that people can move to if they don’t feel like letting government-tied plutocrats police what thoughts are permitted to enter into their minds. This has given this corporate-government alliance the ability to control the thoughts that people are allowed to share, discuss and think about in the same way totalitarian governments can, with the false mask of freedom plastered over it.

A truly free being does not need an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to protect their mind from David Icke. A truly free being does not want an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to exert any control whatsoever over what ideas they are permitted to share and what thoughts they are permitted to think. A truly free being opposes with all their might any attempt to lock in a paradigm where human communication (and thereby thought) is controlled by vast unaccountable power structures which benefit from the absence of dissent.

Be a truly free being. Oppose this intrusion into your mental sovereignty.

Reactions to the Corona Virus Hint of a Wider Agenda

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By James O’Neill

Source: Land Destroyer

The western world has gone into a phase of unprecedented lockdown. Major airlines have ceased international operations. It is an open question is to whether or not they will be able to resume operations when and if the current draconian restrictions are lifted. In Australia, the Federal government has ceased to sit and the government has announced that this parliamentary closure will extend until at least August.

Quite why such a lockdown is necessary is unclear. No convincing explanation has been offered by the government and it is an extreme step that comparable nations in North America, the United Kingdom and all of Europe have found unnecessary. One of the most alarming consequences of this fundamental attack on the notion of Parliamentary accountability is that the decision was met with acceptance by the official Opposition and muted negative comment, if at all, by the major mainstream media.

Media coverage of the pandemic has been extraordinary. At least half of the nightly main television news bulletins have been devoted to coverage of the pandemic, although whether it actually adds to our degree of knowledge is at best debatable.

The statistics as to those affected, dying and recovery are presented each night like some grizzly football score. How accurate or complete those statistics are is a very open question. They are presented however as some form of immutable truth with nary a question as to their accuracy or reliability.

There are serious questions being asked as to the real origins of the current pandemic. We are constantly told by the mainstream media that it originated in China, and that “fact” is presented as something beyond question. The more we learn however, the less reliable that complacent assertion appears to be.

It is true that the first mainstream media reports of the virus came out of China’s Wuhan City, and urban agglomeration of some 12 million inhabitants. That reporting betrayed a number of assumptions that are difficult to sustain.

Where a virus is first reported does not automatically equate with where it began. One reason for this is that people being infected or dying are not necessarily correctly defined as to the cause of death or illness. This is particularly the case here with multiple instances of the illness were initially defined as the current illustration of the annual influenza epidemic which inflict and kill millions of people each year.

A second factor is that a virus can be imported into a country, either by accident or deliberately, by those acting for or on behalf of another nation. This is not idle speculation in the present case. There is now very good evidence that the virus was imported into the city of Wuhan at a time contemporaneous with the holding in that city of the quadrennial Military Games.

Representatives of more than 100 nations attended and participated in those games. The United States contingent was of particular interest for a number of reasons.

The first is that its soldier participants had their worst medal performance since the games were first held a half century ago, not winning a single gold medal and finishing well down the medal table.

The second factor was that the hotel where the United States military participants stayed was itself a hotbed of infection, recording more than 40 cases of employees and guests infected by the virus. This is a remarkable coincidence that challenges the laws of probability theory.

A third clue is the way the western media have reported the Chinese experience. They have given prominence to United States President Donald Trump’s description of the pandemic as the “Chinese virus”. We know from 100+ years of experience with the Spanish flu of 1919 how a false label can be used to define an entire country on a wholly false basis.

The record clearly shows that the Chinese government alerted the World Health Organisation as soon as they had established the reality of the virus they were dealing with. This was before most western countries had even acknowledged that there was a problem.

This suspicion has been reinforced in recent weeks by the reporting of western media of the actions of the Russian and Chinese government to provide assistance where it was asked for. The Italian government for example was refused assistance by its European Union “partners” and it was the Russians who flew in giant planes full of urgently needed medical supplies, taking a lengthy roundabout route because of obstructive flyover permission.

This assistance was greeted with a sneer by the western media who contrived to find some sort of Russian plot in a selfless humanitarian exercise. A similar result was seen in the media’s response to Chinese aid which was denounced as either medically inadequate or done with ulterior motives.

In neither case was that View shared by the governments involved, the medical staff of the overstretched and under resourced hospitals, or the citizens of those countries aided by the Russian and Chinese medical supplies.

The writer Dimitri Orlov, who recently returned to live in Russia after many years residence in the United States, had a cynical but arguably realistic view of the virus. On 8 April 2020 he had this comment to make on his Patreon:

“China has just taught the world a major masterclass in biowarfare defence. It doesn’t matter whether SARS-Covid-19 was concocted in a United States biowarfare laboratory or not. The point is, it could have been, because why else would the United States have bio- warfare laboratories scattered around the globe? And why were they collecting DNA samples from local populations except to target them using bioweapons? And so after some amount of uncertainty and vacillation China opted to treat the SARS-COV-19 outbreak as an act of war and won! Russia has followed suit, and although it is too early to declare victory it too is likely to score a win on the biowarfare front.”

I respectfully share Mr Orlov’s view. We also have the curiously unexplained events at the United States’ Fort Detrick biowarfare facility. In July 2019 the facility was forced to temporarily close, reopening at the end of the year. It is one of the literally hundreds of such United States facilities scattered around the globe.

What makes Fort Detrick of particular interest in the current context was that it was known to be working on a Covid-19 type biological weapon. That the United States had succeeded in developing such a weapon was publicly proclaimed by Johns Hopkins University in October 2019. The timing of this announcement, the problems at Fort Detrick and the outbreak of the coronavirus goes beyond mere coincidence.

The wall to wall media coverage of the outbreak in the western media nonetheless fails to raise these fundamental and clearly relevant points.

It is one of the grim ironies of the present pandemic that the United States may well turn out to be the principal victim, at least among western nations. Even there, some questions exist. We know from the published data thus far that 70% of the fatalities in the United States have been in the black population, that represent only 10% of the national population.

Television pictures showing mass graves being created in public parks will do little to assuage growing public concern that allegedly “the richest country in the world” cannot even properly treat or bury their own disadvantaged citizens.

The consequences of this pandemic are likely to be vastly greater than originally thought. The average citizen would do well to strap themselves in for what is going to be a very bumpy ride.

COVID-19: A Pretext for World Government and Totalitarianism

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We are now beyond the point of no return.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

The crazy thing about the COVID-19 “crisis” is how easy it is for the state and its media to frighten the public and manipulate ill-informed citizens into embracing economic and social decapitation. 

Blinded by scary headlines based on irrational speculation—subsequently revised downward and published on page C-23 of corporate newspapers demanding a bailout—the American people have embraced authoritarian measures supposedly imposed to win a battle against an invisible enemy. 

We are now beyond the point of no return. The inflicted economic and social damage has already taken a heavy toll and it will get worse the longer health bureaucrats, state governors, and a remarkably clueless president and his apparatchiks demand we stay imprisoned in our homes, frightened of a bug the state and its media have fictionally rendered as an insatiable and inescapable Gorgon of Doom. 

https://twitter.com/BarbaraMcK42/status/1246210326405599232

Scott C. Tips, president of the National Health Federation, writes:

In February 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO)—never known for its accuracy or consistency—declared a “Pandemic” for the coronavirus and claimed that the mortality rate for the novel coronavirus disease now designated as COVID-19 was 3.4%, while that for the seasonal flu was 0.1%. Of course, the news media ran with those numbers and splashed scary headlines across the World stating how much more deadly this new virus was than the seasonal flu. The problem with WHO’s statement, however, was that they applied two different formulas for the two viruses. For the COVID-19 disease, for example, they simply didn’t count any of the mild cases of COVID-19 that resolved themselves; yet, they did with the seasonal flu. If WHO were to apply the same formula to seasonal flu cases as it did with COVID-19 cases, then the seasonal flu is revealed more truthfully as being twice as deadly as the COVID-19 virus.

In other words, the globalist WHO—essentially a PR group for transnational Big Pharma and what should be considered the health-industrial complex—is engaged in massive fraud. 

The COVID-19 aggrandizement and propaganda campaign is not simply a public relations scheme for Big Pharma and its highly dubious—and often deadly—vaccines. It also serves as a cover for authoritarian measures the ruling elite have schemed to put in place for decades, measures designed to monitor and control everything you do. Orwell’s helicopters peering in bedroom windows in search of sex offenders—or drones in search of the infected and suspected vaccine scofflaws—are now a stark reality.

9/11 wasn’t sufficient. The reach of that false flag event’s fear quotient and authoritarian measures were limited and ultimately muted. The fairy tale prospect of cave-dwelling terrorists plotting dirty bomb attacks on kindergartens and other nefarious acts of deviltry had limited effectiveness and relatively short shelf life. 

However, an invisible virus portrayed as a pandemic on par with the Black Death is far more effective than a cartoon nemesis like Osama bin Laden in the ongoing effort to move cattle—as our rulers consider us—in the preferred direction. 

In addition to “smart” surveillance and control of the populace, the virus panic is being manipulated to cover and shift blame for a ransacked economy. 

“The economy was already faltering. The false boom stimulated by a decade of monetary meth was likely turning to bust even before the virus,” writes Keith Weiner. 

The real culprits pushing for economic collapse—the globalist financial class and kindred corporate fascists—want to attribute slamming on the economic brakes and toppling an already precarious house of cards to a virus that so far is little worse than seasonal flu, if that. 

It is now obvious a thoroughly propagandized populace will readily accept what amounts to an open-ended house arrest and the nonsensical authoritarian demands of the state—don’t go outside, don’t go to the grocery store or pharmacy, fashion DIY masks out of t-shirts and furnace filters, snitch on your neighbors if you suspect an infection, condemn the preppers as selfish hoarders, et cetera. 

Our future is no longer in doubt. The psychopathic control freaks are steering us toward world totalitarianism. Henry Kissinger recently advocated as much in the War Street Journal, following up a similar call for by the former “Right Honorable” Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. 

A virus has accomplished what the war on manufactured terror was unable to pull off—driving us with nary a bleat of complaint toward the rocks of economic and social destruction. 

Saturday Matinee: All Governments Lie

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All Governments Lie

Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone

Source: Kanopy

Independent journalists expose government lies and corporate deception, inspired by the legendary investigative journalist I.F. Stone.

With government deception rampant, and intrusion of state surveillance into private life never more egregious, independent voices like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Amy Goodman are crucially important. All three are inspired by the iconoclastic rebel journalist named I. F. Stone, whose fearless, independent reporting from 1953 to 1971 filled a tiny 4-page newsletter which he wrote, published and carried to the mailbox every week.

This documentary will change the way you look at the mainstream media. Giant media conglomerates are increasingly reluctant to investigate or criticize government policies, particularly on defense, security and intelligence issues.

 

Watch the film on Kanopy here.

A New World Is Being Born: What Will It Be?

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

We are hearing from many that the world after Covid-19 will be different.  The question is:  Different in what way?  Will it be better or worse?

Elites are working to make it better for them, and worse for the rest of us.  About that the evidence is clear.  The Big Boys are being bailed out and their debts covered.  Everyone else, except those already marginalized and without a recent work record and fixed address, got a month’s rent and extended unemployment benefits.

Big Pharma sees massive profits in the virus, Government sees more power to control

But the disparity in economic benefits is only a part of it.  Powerful vested interests, such as Bill Gates and Big Pharma, are determined to vaccinate us all, and to control our movements with an internal passport called “vaccinated, health cleared” or other words to that effect.  New tracking procedures and technologies are to be put in operation reminiscent of the “mark of the beast” to police the access of varous categories of people to various areas and benefits.

Experts point out that just as we cannot be vaccinated against the common cold, except perhaps for the past year’s version we cannot be vaccinated against Covid-19 and other mutating viruses, but the experts are already being shouted down. No expert opinion is to be permitted to stand in the way of vaccination profits.

Neither will nutrition and vitamin advocates be allowed to get in the way.  Bill Sardi predicts that orchestrated scares generated by mandatory recalls of “toxic” vitamins await us ( https://knowledgeofhealth.com/modern-medicine-laid-bare/ ). Big Pharma is determined to acquire control over vitamins and homeopathic remedies, and the FDA is Big Pharma’s likely pawn.

Vaccination has been elevated above cure, as Big Pharma and its shills such as CNN shout down the positive experience doctors report of successful treatments with Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin, and the effectiveness of Vitamin C, Vitamin D3, and Zinc in strengthening the ability of immune systems to fight off the virus.  Big Pharma-influenced medical orthodoxy cannot get out of the box it has been put into.  When new thinking and experimentation are needed, those capable of thought are hasseled and even blocked by FDA regulations and dogmatism.

The permanent government and its security agencies see in the population’s fear and confusion opportunities to put into place more tyrannical measures, more set-asides of Constitutional Rights, more impairments on free speech.  The ability of freedom to resist oppression is ever diminished.

Various descriptions of the expected dystopia are offered on the Internet.  But it does not have to turn out this way.  It is up to us. Demoralized and fearful, we can accept more government power as we did after 9/11.  Instead, we can collectively recognize the massive failure everywhere of Western leadership and construct a more liveable and sustainable society.

The failure of leadership is an opportunity for real change

CNN, the New York Times, and the rest of the controlled media tell us every day that President Trump represents the failure of leadership.  But the failure of leadership goes beyond all the leaders of the last 30 years and resides in the system itself.  Global, “self-regulating,” greed-driven, financialized, soulless capitalism cannot unite people into a sustainable community.

The failure of leadership resides in the long-term failure of leadership that made Western societies vulnerable by moving high-productivity, high-valued jobs offshore in order to raise corporate profits at the expense of domestic consumer incomes.  It means the movement offshore of the ability to produce medicines, N95 masks, and other needed resources for national survival.  It means dependency on foreign powers.  It means the inability to function without massive imports.  However you look at it, globalism is a death sentence.  Its only advantage is to the rich, and the advantage comes to them in the form of cheap labor that swells their profits while it shrinks domestic incomes and the purchasing power of the population.

Without incomes to drive the economy, the elites provided loans and expanded credit in order to provide spending power based in personal debt to absorb the offshored production brought home to sell in American markets. The cost of college education soared as its quality declined.  Education subsidies were cut and student debt substituted in its place.  Inflation was understated in order to deny Social Security pensioners cost-of-living increases. Medicare payments to health care providers were squeezed down.  The social safety net was ripped again and again. More and more people fell out, and homeless populations grew providing fertile breeding grounds for Covid-19.

The income and wealth distribution in the US went from fair to extremely unequal in a short time as the rich profited from the Federal Reserve pumping trillions of dollars into the prices of financial assets and from corporations buying back their own stock, thus decapitalizing the corporation while taking the company into debt, all for the temporary benefit of higher bonuses for executives and more capital gains for shareholders.  The elites killed the economy for short-run benefits to themselves.

These destructive polices were the work of greed-driven short-term thinkers—people whose only vision was “I want even more.”  And it is these unworthy people, not their victims, that Uncle Sam is now rescuing.  The massive unpayable debt bubble that already overhung the economy is being blown larger.  The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury are in the process of destroying the US dollar in futile efforts to save the super-rich from their own greed-driven misbehavior.

In place of this insane approach to the economic crisis, there is a sane approach.  The bailed out corporations and banks are in effect being purchased by the government.  Therefore, they should be treated as the nationalized corporations that they are.  Once nationalized, the government, unlike the corporations, can create the money to pay the salaries and health premiums. The predicted 30 or 40 percent unemployment can be avoided.  It is better to pay salaries than to pay unemployment benefits.  The psychological difference alone is worth a vast amount.

The inability of the high-cost American private health care system to cope with the present medical crisis is apparent.  A profit-driven health care system is the highest cost system to have.

Profit is built in at every level, which raises costs to levels that private insurance and Medicare refuse to reimburse.  The result is shrinkage, not expansion of the system.  Just look, for example, at the number of hospitals, especially in rural areas, that have recently closed.

Moreover, the coverage of a private system—and Medicare itself—has massive gaps.  The resistance to a nationalized health service is ridiculous, especially as a nationalized service can coexist with a privatized one.  Two are clearly better than one.

Nationalization has numerous benefits.  It permits the large unwieldly enterprises, created, for example, by the mergers of giant banks like Chase Manhattan and J.P. Morgan, to be broken up and to reestablish the separation of commercial from investment banking.  The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws were ignorant policymaking at its worse. Nationalization permits the government to bring home the offshored production of global US corporations and to put the US workforce back to work in middle class jobs.  It is win-win for the American people.

Once the giant monopoly corporations are broken up, they can be privatized and returned to private ownership on a fair value basis, not on the giveaway basis of a pennies on the dollar sale. The money the government receives from their sale can be used to retire government debt.

For individuals, the life- and economy-suffocating heavy debts should be written down to levels that can be serviced by their incomes.  Michael Hudson and I proposed a “debt jubilee” as a solution:  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/03/25/a-brady-bond-solution-for-americas-unpayable-corporate-debt/   Others have taken up our call:  https://truthout.org/articles/1200-only-goes-so-far-its-time-to-abolish-debt/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=98cb6aac-8ef8-4e0e-b80e-24a1d1f92ef6

Currently the Federal Reserve is socializing debt without writing it down.  This is nonsensical as it bails out debt by expanding it. 

In the US there is so much dogmatic prejudice against anything that has a tint of socialism, even as a temporary expedient measure, that thought and sensible action face strong barriers.  If we cannot overcome these barriers, we are destined for far more difficult times.

Can community be restored or will nationality degenerate into the clans and tribalism of Identity Politics?

The greatest challenge we face is to restore the concept of community.  There was a time when  the United States was a community, a unique one as it consisted of a multitude of ethnicities. As each wave of ethnic immigrants arrived, they passed a test on the Constitution, learned the national language, and became assimilated into the American community.

This community has been destroyed by a variety of forces, the latest being Identity Politics.  Identity Politics prohibits community by breaking down the population into mutually hostile groups by gender, sexual preference, race, and whatever classification can be invented or imagined.  The result is a Tower of Babel.  A Tower of Babel is not a community.

Instead of community, the US is a place where hatreds are cultivated with those claiming the status of victims doing the most hating and those assigned the status of victimizer being most hated.  Initially, white hetereosexual males were the primary hate objects, but lately we have the transgendered hating the feminists who say that a woman is a woman, not a man who claims to be a woman.  The transgendered attacks on well-known feminist leaders are violent in their language and are likely to progress into violent deeds.  Various unassimilated immigrant groups battle each other over who controls disputed territory.  Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinians has enraged Muslim immigrants against Jews.  Violent racial attacks on white people are becoming more common.

For decades Women’s Studies have taught hatred of men, and Black Studies have taught hatred of Whites.  This taught hatred is now supplemented by the New York Times 1619 Project.  In place of assimilation, we now have mutual hatreds.  How do we escape from this?

Perhaps the challenge from Covid-19 will force us to come together again in order to prevail over the virus, which in mutated versions might be with us forever.  A coming together would be helped by an economic bailout perceived as fair rather than as the one-sided approach that has been taken. A debt jubilee provides the necessary fairness.

The elites by thinking only of their interests are in the way of the opportunity that crisis provides to bring people together.  If we can’t be brought back together, we can forget about unity beyond the boundaries of our own victim or identity group.  In place of community, we will be organized in clans of seperate identities.  The absence of unity at home will make us a sitting duck for enemies abroad.

We know what the Dystopian Wish List is.  Can we come together with an anti-dystopian wish list as a mutually supportive community or have the elites succeeded in atomizing us into disparate tribal hate groups?

The Culture of Fear: Coronavirus and the Human Animal

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By Steve Attridge

Source: Waking Times

Fear is a weapon. It is also a deadly disease, far more potent than Corona virus. It also tells us much about our society, our relationships and ourselves. Fear inhibits thought, it restricts freedom, it limits imagination and it isolates us from each other and ultimately from ourselves. It is also a useful political and cultural tool to bend and even break people.

A dictionary definition of fear is that it is an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm.

So it is a mental state. An imaginary act, and the key word is threat. There are well over five hundred fears and phobias, and the list is growing as our culture becomes increasingly terrified of itself, narcissistic and neurotic.

There is real fear and there is manufactured fear. If someone is running at you holding a machete and saying they want to kill you then flight or fight kicks in and fear is good. If a suicide bomber jumps at you shouting Allah Akbar fear is good. It will also help the adrenalin to kick in when you run away. To stay put and ignore your fear is just silly.

But manufactured fear is something else altogether. It may be based on something entirely imaginary, such as four years ago if the majority voted for Brexit the economy would collapse overnight. People actually said that. It didn’t. Or it may be based on something real, like coronavirus, but then be distorted. In that case the fear is not a healthy response, it’s kneejerk reaction that paralyses us from proper understanding.

The manufacture of fear has three steps to it; one. Seed it. Two – let it grow. Three – harvest it. Why frighten people? Because frightened people are diminished. They shrink. They eventually lose their humanity. They are easy to manipulate. The holocaust is a terrible example of this.

Just think of the things that have been used to frighten us: Brexit, the Corona virus, financial collapse, political correctness, global warming – all of these things have a currency of fear. Even something like the TV license is designed to create fear. You get a letter from the TV Licensing agency – of course outsourced by the BBC with tax payers money to get someone else to do their dirty work. You’d think if the BBC was so great they’d say – look what amazing things you’re getting for your money – re runs, WOKE dramas and propaganda – who wouldn’t want to pay for that. But no – the letter is a threat, full of words like warning, enforcement, penalty, criminal, which criminalise you in advance and is designed only to frighten you into paying their absurd tax – over five billion a year to supplement ludicrous salaries, exorbitant expenses, and substandard programming that fewer and fewer people want to watch.

The coronavirus is the latest example of fear mongering and it is part of a bigger picture. In a surveillance society and where police are already being used to monitor people, it only takes a few emergency powers to crank up the law telling us where we can go, who we can go with and how long we can stay there. The army is on standby.

In terms of a Fear index this virus also shows how far we have come along the road of expecting others to do our thinking for us.

This virus is nasty but it does not justify the global terror unleashed by constant media fear mongering. In the UK 6,600 people have died of flu and 120,000 people have been hospitalized with it during the 2019-2020 flu season, but we haven’t got our knickers in a twist over that. At the time of making this video 71 have died in the UK of coronavirus. It seems that most people recover from the virus. It is real but it is distorted in how it is presented and perceived. And we must guard against false perceptions. Science is still grappling with this virus so we should be wary of those who espouse certainties.

We live in a world of manufactured fears because in a sense they are easier to deal with than real fears. And so many people think they know best. And they can’t shut about it and themselves. I was in a coffee shop in London’s Soho about a month ago. Next to me was a man wearing expensively scruffy jeans, a little goatee beard hiding a double chin, and talking very loudly. It was clear he was a metropolitan liberal and, I had to smile, it turned out he worked in television. The woman he was talking at, rather than to, nodded furiously at everything he said and constantly furrowed her brow to create the illusion of thought. In fifteen minutes he poured ridicule on Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Brexit, Nigel Farage, global warming – all the usual suspects for metropolitan liberals – as well as Israel, the virus, the Syrian government, racists, fascists – these last two seemed to be everyone who didn’t think like him. He said he found all these things terrifying and only the ignorant wouldn’t be scared shitless by them. As he pontificated he scoffed a panini with ham and lettuce and smashed avocado on the side. He also had a double expresso. The woman held a Pierre Cardin bag.

Four things about this. One. The ham came from a pig. If motormouth with a beard really wanted to experience fear, indeed terror, just visit an abattoir. Two. Avocado farming is causing deforestation, destroying ecosystems, funding drug cartels, and contributing to climate change. In the biggest avocado producing region in the world in Mexico, farmers are illegally razing pine forests in order to plant lucrative avocado trees. Three. Coffee is often used by drug cartels to smuggle drugs. Drug cartels are often used to protect coffee production. Migrant workers are paid poorly and are at the mercy of seasonal variations. Many die. Four. Pierre Cardin has repeatedly come under fire for using suppliers that employ child labour that amounts to slavery. Fear of starvation often forces these kids into slavery, and many become ill. Many die prematurely. So while Motormouth was pontificating his litany of moans the real holocaust of fear and suffering was on the little table in front of him where the ghosts of a thousand stories went unheard.

My point is that people prefer their fears when they can blame someone else and not take responsibility for the actual concrete details surrounding them. That requires real thought and real responsibility.

Fifty years ago, the psychiatrist R.D. Laing said that we are becoming frightened of our own minds. Psychophobia. That the medical profession is constantly coming up with new illnesses, new phobias, new forms of depression, so that eventually everyone is ill, just as in WOKE thinking everyone is a victim or an oppressor. So, everyone is frightened of something. But what they are actually frightened of is themselves – of the body that harbours disease, of thoughts that are no longer allowed, ideas that are frowned upon, or even outlawed, of speech that dares to criticise and articulate uncomfortable truths. So this is the real virus – the manufacture and dissemination of fear. And it’s deadly.

Social media narrows our field of vision and experience too by placing us in discrete groups of like-minded people – and of course we collude in this – so that people start to feel the whole world thinks like them. Then when differences do strike , people either get ‘triggered’ or terrified or abusive.

The supermarket is full of murderous intentions. The person who last week was a good liberal is now considering hacking an old man to death to steal his toilet roll. The woman who last week was delivering meals on wheels is now thinking of battering her neighbour with her shopping trolley because she’s taken the last 23 tins of baked beans. At my local hospital people have ripped the hand sanitisers off the walls and stolen them and filched toilet rolls from the hospital toilets. In America there are queues outside gun shops as people panic buy weapons because of the virus. This is a culture that has been fed on fake news, news as propaganda, partial science, WOKE thinking and a popular culture that is addicted to zombies, invasions, virus stories, and an arts culture that has been sanitised to the point of banality. Walk into a crowded room and say you’ve got corona virus and sneeze and then see how long before people are smashing each other to the ground to get out.

We are so used to living in our little bubbles that we have lost touch with the real, with each other and with ourselves. We are slaves to fear. We are paralysed by it, from small nagging anxieties to full-blown pathologies. Peoples imaginations have become shrunken receptacles for fear.

The lion doesn’t fear attacking the antelope. The mosquito doesn’t fear biting. The hawk doesn’t fear flying or hunting. These creatures are simply being themselves and their natures are acting through them, that they may survive.

People will say – Oh but we have bigger brains. We’re top of the pile. But the question is not how big the brain is but how much of it is used. To judge by the behaviour of many, about one per cent, so in reality we may be on the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder.

It is also impossible to separate the idea of fear from religiosity. Is the coronavirus some sort of punishment by something greater than ourselves, of retribution, of being judged, of something supernatural out to get us, of hell. And traditionally of course religions use fear to control people. If you think there is something out there that knows every thought you have then you might start to fear your own thoughts. In a largely secular society those primitive, animistic, religious fears leap into all kinds of strange territories – why doesn’t the government (i.e. a god substitute) save us? Is it a judgement and punishment from nature? And so it gets complicated and messy.

During this virus, there is much talk of communal solidarity, as in certain communities in World War Two. People helped each other. There will be cases of that, but it’s a bad analogy. During that war there was a perceived common enemy out there and a common purpose. With the virus the enemy is our own biology, our neighbours and the strangers around us. So there is fear everywhere, inside and out. Is he or she a disease on legs? Am I?

Fear weakens and diminishes us. Many have forgotten how to imagine the big picture. To join up the dots. I used to teach a course on Leonardo Da Vinci. The whole purpose of the course was to help people, including myself, to reawaken Renaissance thinking. Focus on detail but always be aware of the big picture. To put apparently isolated events and facts into the larger map. Like the elephant in the land of the blind, where one person touches the trunk and thinks that is an elephant, another the tail and thinks that is an elephant. But it needs someone to see that it is the sum of the parts that makes something what it is. To make connections, not based on wild speculations, but on what is there. And if people laugh at what you discover, or hate you for it, then too bad. Because it is more important to think fearlessly in the hope that you can then live fearlessly.

A few possible ways out of this (there are others, of course):

Magical thinking and Life Writing. Using language to explore and liberate rather than to inhibit or control or punish.

Imaging fear in order to control it, and not the other way round. Image making as a positive route through life. I carry a notebook and if something scares me I make a doodle of what I think the fear looks like. Pretty soon I’m smiling at it.

Reclaiming the unconscious as a journey full of delights and dangers and a place where ideas and thoughts and events can be rehearsed and explored. I think many of my books attempt this, and often fail, but at least I try. I do the same in my teaching.

Related to the unconscious is jettisoning the taboos surrounding certain words and thoughts. Reclaiming free speech, and therefore free thought. Then the world starts to crack open rather than shut down.

Understanding that orthodoxies invariably become corrupt and controlling, in religions and in politics and culture. The way to correct this is by teaching critical thinking – i.e. how to think and not what to think.

Refocusing on the individual as the prime focus for collective action.

Observing Elites Manipulate Our Fear: COVID-19, Propaganda and Knowledge

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By Robert J. Burrowes

While humans stand on the brink of precipitating our own extinction, with the prospects of now averting this remote – see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ – virtually everyone remains unaware of the critical nature of our plight. Moreover, the ongoing human death toll from the activities that are generating this crisis numbers in the many millions each year while the number of species driven to extinction is estimated at 200 per day.

In contrast, a virus that is killing a very small proportion of the minuscule number it has infected is causing panic in many countries around the world, devastating the travel and tourism industries while emptying supermarket shelves of food and that apparently most vital of commodities: toilet paper.

According to the Johns Hopkins University Coronvirus Resource Center (which is presumably separate from the JHU bioweapons research facility), the last time I checked it before this article was sent for publication, official reports indicate that the COVID-19 virus has so far infected 372,563 people in a world population of 7,800,000,000 (that is, about .0048% of the human population), killing 16,380 (4.3% of those infected) with 100,885 (27%) recovered already (and many more highly likely to do so). Of course, there is an unknown number of people who have contracted the virus but not reported it (through ignorance or intention) thus indicating that the death rate from the disease is (probably significantly) lower than the official rate.

Moreover, as one doctor has reported after researching the data on Italy, where the greatest rate of COVID-19 infection has occurred: ‘80% of the deceased had suffered from two or more chronic diseases’ and ‘90% of the deceased are over 70 years old’. In addition, ‘Less than 1% of the deceased were healthy persons’ defined, very simply, as ‘persons without pre-existing chronic diseases’. Given that northern Italy has one of the oldest populations and the worst air quality in Europe, which has already led to an increased number of respiratory diseases and deaths in the past, these are undoubtedly factors that help to account for the current local health crisis. See ‘A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19’.

Obviously the utterly inadequate response to the genuine crisis in which humans now find themselves and the panic-stricken response to a simple virus tells us a great deal about how human fear is working in these two contexts and the way in which elite agents, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), governments, medical personnel and the corporate media, have no trouble manipulating this fear to serve elite interests. A few minutes listening to or reading government and medical personnel commenting on COVID-19, as reported in the corporate media, is enough to reveal the extent of the fear they are peddling, although to those who are terrified, this is not obvious at all. It is just frightening.

While the multifaceted existential crisis clearly requires a concerted response ranging from nonviolent strategies to compel key corporations in various industries to desist from their biosphere-destroying behaviours to convincing ‘ordinary’ people to systematically reduce their consumption to relieve pressure on the biosphere as well, the virus problem requires either zero precautions for those individuals who make a point of maintaining their health (preferably by eating healthily-prepared biodynamic/organically grown vegetarian whole food etc which sustains their immune system), or the simplest of precautions (perhaps including taking some nutritional supplements such as vitamins A and C, for example), commensurate with precautions one might take to avoid catching the flu.

Of course, it should be noted, like many other threats to human health – including ‘doctor error’ (see, for example, ‘Table Of Iatrogenic Deaths In The United States’ and ‘Johns Hopkins study suggests medical errors are third-leading cause of death in U.S.’), heart disease, cancer and tuberculosis – the flu kills vastly more people, every day, than COVID-19 is doing. For example, according to the WHO, which ignores deaths from other diseases such as cardiovascular disease that can be influenza-related, seasonal influenza may result in as many as 650,000 deaths each year (an average of 1,781 each day) due to respiratory illnesses alone. See ‘Influenza: Burden of disease’. That is, the global death toll from COVID-19 in the months since it originated is equal to the global death toll from flu every nine days.

Moreover, if we were seriously concerned about our world, the gravest and longest-standing health crisis on the planet is the one that starves to death 100,000 people each day. No panic about that, of course. And no action either.

So, leaving aside this last point, the key question is this: Why aren’t people scared of the prospect of imminent human extinction and behaving powerfully in response, while vast numbers of people are terrified of catching one particular virus (but, apparently, not scared of being killed by their doctor or catching other viruses, contracting heart disease, cancer or TB) and acting insanely as a result?

And the short answer to this question is this: The elite is using its international organizations (particularly the United Nations and its agencies), governments, education systems, corporate media and other agents to suppress people’s awareness (and hence fear) of the threat of extinction so that business-as-usual (that is, profit-maximization) can continue for as long as possible unhindered by efforts to contain this existential crisis while deliberately triggering people’s fear in relation to COVID-19 so that a greater degree of elite control can be achieved and greater profits can be secured by exploiting certain opportunities (such as ‘short-selling’ on the stock market and profit-making by pharmaceutical corporations) that the panic arising from the virus generates.

Let me elaborate.

If one investigates the state of Earth’s biosphere, it quickly becomes evident that the biosphere is under siege on many fronts: There is the ongoing threat of nuclear war (perhaps started regionally) as the Cold War infrastructure containing this threat has been progressively dismantled. There is the ongoing threat posed by the progressive collapse of biodiversity as habitat is destroyed at an accelerating rate while animals, birds, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles and plants are killed in vast numbers by a multitude of concurrent assaults. There is the ongoing threat posed by the climate catastrophe. There is the ongoing threat posed by the deployment of 5G (and electromagnetic radiation generally). And these threats are complemented by the imminent collapse of the Amazon, the widespread radioactive contamination of the Earth, the use of geoengineering and the ongoing ecological destruction caused by the many ongoing wars and other military activity. Among a wide variety of other threats.

The nature and details of these threats are readily available – again, for example, see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ – and can be accessed by virtually anyone on Earth interested. Moreover, there is a great deal of evidence to support the argument that human extinction is now imminent given the synergistic impact of these (and so many other) threats. In essence, if one chooses, one can consider the evidence oneself and use this knowledge to behave sensibly and powerfully in response.

However, only a rare individual is seeking out and considering this wide range of evidence so that they can consider modifying their behaviour in light of this multifaceted crisis. Why?

Because our fear allows our life circumstances (‘I am busy with work/my family’ etc.) and elite agents, such as the corporate media, education systems and the entertainment industry, to distract us from paying close attention to these interrelated crises. This means that, if we do pay attention, it is usually to the corporate media’s version of the ‘evidence’, as presented by corporate scientists, and we are directed how to interpret this information; only the rarest individual seeks out the science for themselves or reads the scientists who courageously tell the truth. See, for example, ‘Arctic News’. In this way, strategically-focused action based on an analysis of the driving forces, even by those who self-label as ‘activists’, can be prevented and business-as-usual continues.

In contrast, because events such as the COVID-19 virus – like the long list of such threats (including AIDS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS], Mad Cow disease and Ebola) that preceeded it – are created to expand elite political, economic, social and geopolitical control as well as to generate greater profits in some sectors of the economy (including through stock market windfalls by ‘short-selling’), our fear is deliberately played upon by the propaganda distributed through various elite agents. The resulting panic ensures that the bulk of the human population – willing to surrender control on the promise of greater material security – serves elite interests precisely. For a sample of the literature and videos that thoughtfully discuss points such as these, as well as others consistent with them (such as the push for compulsory vaccination and marginalization of the elderly), see ‘COVID-19 Coronavirus: A Fake Pandemic? Who’s Behind It? Global Economic, Social and Geopolitical Destabilization’, ‘This Is a Test: How Will the Constitution Fare During a Nationwide Lockdown?’, ‘China – Western China Bashing – vs. Western Biowarfare?’, ‘CoVid-19 – What the government is really covering up’, ‘Plunging stocks, pandemic fears, quarantines – what’s the real operation?’, ‘How Many People Have Coronavirus?’, ‘The Coronavirus Phenomenon is a Political Pandemic, not a Medical Emergency’, ‘The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020”’, ‘The Coronavirus Hoax’, ‘Pandemic: The Invention of a Disease Called Fear. People are being “Herded”. Disrupting the World Economy’, ‘Coronavirus scare – the hoax of the century?’, ‘Corona Panic – erstaunliche Einblicke / stunning insights’, ‘The Coronavirus: Crown Jewel of the New World Order or Crippling Blow to Globalization?’, ‘Coronavirus and the Gates Foundation’ and ‘In a Europe Closed Down by the Coronavirus the EU Opens its Doors to the US Army. Could the Defender become the Invader of Europe?’

In essence then, knowledge – whether of those actually possessing it but even of one’s own – is marginalized because once people are scared, their fear overwhelms their capacity to think, assess, evaluate and critique, as well as to feel the other emotional responses that tell them what is actually taking place. Only the occasional individual pauses to consider – and research – what is happening in order to respond powerfully.

Of course, knowledge might not be easy to acquire given that, in this instance, there are various theories, apart from those mentioned above, about what is happening. These include the hypotheses that the virus is a (deliberately or even accidentally) released bioweapon – see ‘Author of US Biowarfare Law: Studies Confirm Coronavirus Weaponized’, ‘Who Made Coronavirus? Was It the U.S., Israel or China Itself?’, ‘China is Confronting the COVID-19 Epidemic. Was It Man-Made? An Act of of Bio-warfare?’ and ‘Bioweapons Expert Speaks Out About Novel Coronavirus’ – and that the virus is being used to obscure the death toll from the deployment of 5G (already done extensively in Wuhan, for example). See ‘Wuhan China, One Big 5G FEMA style Camp & Not because of Coronavirus’ and ‘China, 5G, And The Wuhan Coronavirus: The Emperor’s New Virus’.

However, just because knowledge requires effort, it does not mean that it is not available if we conscientiously apply our intelligence to identify and investigate credible sources, such as those mentioned above. Moreover, if knowledge is genuinely sought, we might also need to spend time endeavouring to comprehend the complexity of some issues, starting by asking key questions. In this case, for example, there are many people benefiting from this crisis but doing so even though they work at different points in relation to it. How does this help us to understand what is going on?

The fundamental problem, of course, is that applying intelligence to a challenge is effectively impossible if, as is the case with the bulk of the human population, the individual is (unconsciously) terrified and hence easily stampeded into panic, especially if the stampede is precipitated deliberately to serve specific elite ends.

So why is virtually everyone so (unconsciously) terrified? Unfortunately, it is the standard state of virtually all human beings after being terrorized into submission by parents, teachers, religious figures and other adults during childhood. But also denied the opportunity to feel and release this fear, the individual suppresses their awareness of the fear which simply remains in the unconscious endlessly shaping behaviour without the individual even realising. For a full explanation of this, including the roles that ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence play in generating this outcome, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

One way in which this works is as follows. Children start learning at a very young age to identify, often unconsciously, when a parent or other adult is delusional about something. This is particularly the case when this involves the parent projecting their fear onto the child (or something the child is doing), when there is actually no danger. See ‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’. The child can perceive the parental projection because the child’s perceptions are not yet as damaged as those of the adults around them. However, because the adult is always fearfully attached to their delusions and projections as a key outcome of their own childhood terrorization experience, the child also quickly learns that if they seriously contradict a delusion or projection held by the parent/adult, they are highly likely to be punished. And so the child acts to avoid punishment by not challenging the delusion/projection.

As Anita McKone further explained her understanding of this process during a recent discussion, she noted the way it feels for the parent in this context: ‘If you don’t help me to keep safe from my projected fear/delusion (which, of course, for me is absolutely real), then I consider you to be dangerous to me and I will attack you!’ The problem for the child in this circumstance is that the parental fear and the threat it poses are overwhelming and so, after a time, the child copies the fear and ceases to remember how things actually were. But without a subsequent opportunity to feel the fear holding this delusion/projection in place, the child will retain this delusion/projection for life, just as the parent has done.

However, the problem is that once a childhood fear is suppressed, it spends the remainder of the individual’s life seeking ways of being felt and expressed. This can occur in ways that are easily not noticed, such as feeling scared while watching a horror movie. However, the most usual ways in which this suppressed fear manifests in later life is by projecting it at activities undertaken by one’s children that trigger this fear. And because it is not actually frightening to control the child’s behaviour, the parent will seek this control so that they can feel the relief of (temporarily) getting their own fear back under control.

But another way in which this fear can be given a safe outlet on something that is not actually frightening, is by participating in ‘socially-approved’ activities that allow the fear to be expressed. For example, the people who are participating in the panic-stricken purchase of foods and goods from supermarkets are simply responding to their unconscious fear which has been deliberately triggered to enable elite-desired outcomes for greater social control to be achieved by making political use of this panic. Again see articles cited above such as ‘This Is a Test: How Will the Constitution Fare During a Nationwide Lockdown?’

In essence then, the COVID-19 pandemic was created as just another step in the endless effort to fully establish elite political, economic and social control. With the WHO, governments, medical personnel and the corporate media warning the population (with their superficially suppressed terror readily accessible) of the dangers of the virus and directing them to respond in particular ways under threat of punishment, governments implementing measures to restrict freedom and movement (including ‘lockdowns’, border closings, bans on gatherings in a variety of public contexts and a range of other drastic measures), the corporate media endlessly referring to and discussing possible ‘horror’ scenarios, people’s fear is readily triggered to ensure there is little resistance to the ongoing curtailment of their rights (and many even end up asking for these curtailments if it will make them feel safer).

The fundamental problem is this: once we fearfully surrender a right, it is rarely won back. And we are one step closer to living in a dystopian (technologically-monitored and controlled) police state. If you think this won’t/can’t happen, I gently encourage you to read the relevant references cited above, each of which was carefully chosen because it illustrates this point in one way or another.

Whether COVID-19 is intended to be the final step or just another in what remains of the series, we will soon know. In any case, if we are not resisting strategically, the elite will ultimately succeed.

So here is the summary:

Our existing parenting and education models are designed to produce submissively obedient children, students, workers, soldiers and citizens. After all, we want children, students, employees, military personnel and even citizens who obey orders, not think for themselves. But this outcome can only be achieved by terrorizing children throughout childhood until they suppress their awareness of their own self-will so completely that they submit to the will of adults virtually without protest. Now devoid of their own unique and powerful self-will, they become sheep herded from one supermarket to the next by their own fear. No need for a shepherd.

Then, when the global elite plans and implements its next move, using COVID-19 as ‘cover’ on this occasion, to consolidate its ever-tightening grip on the human population (more militarized policing, new and improved police/military weapons systems, privacy-abusing law, surveillance technology, facial recognition system, vaccination regime, genetically-mutilated organism, monetary or banking convenience….), it simply instructs its agents in the UN, government, education systems, the corporate and social media, and elsewhere to carefully explain why this particular response is so beneficial to everyone with genuine critiques confined to those few outlets with modest audiences, such as this one, that tell the truth.

Terrorized into accepting adult dogma as a child, the typical adult now participates in many delusions, such as the one that the choice offered at elections constitutes having a say in how a country is governed. Devoid of the capacity to critique society beyond the most superficial level, elite propaganda is devoured as ‘knowledge’. And once their deeply-suppressed terror is triggered, these ‘adults’ will be readily panicked into doing as the elite directs. People in a terrified state are in no condition to defend themselves and their rights and so they readily give these up on the promise of not having to feel afraid.

What can we do?

Well, because the foundation of this entire elite-controlled world is the submissively obedient individual, the world can only be rebuilt as we might like it if we stop terrorizing children into being submissive. So I would start by parenting and educating children so that they become powerful. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

If you need help to parent in this manner, try ‘Putting Feelings First’ and learning how to nistel to your child(ren). See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If you know someone who is frightened, or even panicking, about COVID-19, and you feel capable of doing so, it will help them enormously if you are able to listen to them talk about, and feel, their fear. Again, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If you want to better understand the origin, identity and behaviour of the global elite and why it is insane, see the section headed ‘How the World Works’ in ‘Why Activists Fail’ and the articles ‘Exposing the Giants: The Global Power Elite’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

If you want to better understand the link between suppressed fear and panic-buying in supermarkets, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

If you wish to campaign to defend our rights and the integrity of our biosphere, then consider doing it strategically. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy. The global elite is not about to give way unless we compel it to do so. We have plenty of power if we deploy it strategically.

If you wish to remove a corrupt or electorally unresponsive government, see Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

If you wish to fight powerfully to save Earth’s biosphere against those governments and corporations so intent on destroying it, but you prefer local engagement, consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which outlines a simple program to systematically reduce your consumption and increase your self-reliance over a period of years.

You might also consider joining the global network of people resisting violence in all contexts, particularly that inflicted by the global elite, by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Or, if none of the above options appeal or they seem too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that: 

  1. I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
  2. I will not travel by plane
  3. I will not travel by car
  4. I will not eat meat and fish
  5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
  6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
  7. I will not buy rainforest timber
  8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  9. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
  10. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
  11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
  12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Each of the measures nominated in the section above identifies ways in which we can restore our power to resist elite insanity and/or take strategic action to resist elite violence once we have the power to do so.

If we do not take measures such as these, the insane global elite will continue to manipulate us into doing its bidding, usually using more insidious techniques than COVID-19, until human beings cease to exist. As touched on above, the evidence strongly suggests we do not have much time.

What you decide is therefore critical.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

 

Cyber Forces Manipulate Public Opinion

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By Vladimir Platov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The influence on public opinion is one of the primary functions of the information space, presented today not only by TV, radio and print media, but also by the Internet and social networks. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that the CIA is especially focused on obtaining control of the information field and seeks ways to influence it. Thus, in the middle of the last century, the agency began a large-scale secret operation named Mockingbird on the territory of the U.S. and abroad. Most of the documents related to said operation are still classified. The purpose of Operation Mockingbird was to secure the CIA’s control over the media and the information space in America and beyond by establishing an extensive network of agents in leading publications, news outlets, radio and television all around the world.

After numerous pieces of evidence of illegal CIA activities in the media, including those executed through Operation Mockingbird, a special working group called the Church Committee (named after Senator Frank Forrester Church III, a Democrat from Idaho) was established in 1975 in the U.S. Senate. The Commission was later transformed into the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence.

In 1976, the Committee even prepared a separate report detailing the CIA’s interference into the U.S. and foreign media in order to misinform the public. In particular, the report notes: “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial hook publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”

After investigations and hearings held by the U.S. Congress, it was decided to forbid the CIA to continue Operation Mockingbird. In 1976, George W. Bush, appointed director of the CIA, even announced the following new policy: “Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual relationship with any full‑time or part‑time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.” However, he added that the CIA will continue to ‘value’ voluntary cooperation with journalists, which is obviously always influenced by money.

Many experts are convinced that Operation Mockingbird has not been completely terminated and is being carried out not only through traditional media, but also in the cyberspace. The operation’s main targets in its current form are all those who speak against the policy of the White House. From here arise numerous anti-Russian and xenophobic campaigns of the U.S. special services, which preserve the CIA’s traditions of working not only with journalists, but also with social networks controlled by Washington.

A large-scale research “The Global Disinformation Order 2019: Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation” was carried out recently by Oxford University. It focuses on the ways public opinion is swayed by via the Internet and social networks. In the resulting report, the researchers showed that the number of countries where attempts of organized manipulation of public opinion with the help of social networks were detected has more than doubled since 2017. The authors registered 28 such countries back then, and the number went up to 48, then 70 in 2018 and 2019 respectively. 25 countries cooperate with private Internet companies to disseminate propaganda on the Internet.  The most popular among them is Facebook, and the second most popular platform for attempts at manipulation is Twitter. At the same time, the researchers found that 56 countries, in one way or another, have organized campaigns to misinform users of social networks. The leading perpetrators are the United States and the United Kingdom.

Today many countries possess special cyber forces, whose representatives use social networks to try and influence the opinion of Internet users from certain countries, different religions and political beliefs. Special attention is paid to such efforts in the Pentagon and American security services. Only Americans (ideally those who know the language of the country being manipulated) are involved in these activities. The CIA’s website even has a detailed description of the people who can apply for such jobs. In order to further impact the public, today the FBI is even trying to recruit Russians living in the United States through social networks (in particular, Facebook), as reported by CNN.

Anti-Russian sentiment of the main direction of Operation Mockingbird is evidenced by several media outlets which are independent from Washington. The same goals are pursued today by U.S. intelligence agencies. “The U.S. State Department considers the battle against state-run media from Russia, Iran and China one of its top priorities,” said Acting U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Heather Nauert in March 2018. That is why the U.S. budget for fiscal year 2019 includes $661 million meant to finance the BBG (Broadcasting Board of Governors), which is engaged in anti-Russian propaganda. The White House project for the budget of the U.S. government in 2021 entails the allocation of $700 million for the information war ‘against Russia’s destructive influence.’

Britain is not behind the United States in waging a hybrid war. A special unit in the British cyber forces is called JTRIG, and it is this unit’s ‘specialists’ who quite often carry out propagandistic cyber operations, which have recently most often been directed against Russia. Among these are the anti-Russian fuss around Skripal poisoning, groundless accusations of Russia’s alleged involvement in the crash of the Malaysian plane MH-17 over Donetsk, and accusations of Moscow’s aggressive actions in Syria. Such work is done using both the cyberspace, as well as media which are loyal to London. The 77th brigade of these troops is working specifically on Twitter. They actively attempt to undermine the users’ faith in their own beliefs, trying to convey ‘their thoughts’ by appealing to emotions. Further promotion of the propagandistic struggle against Russia, £18 million is going to be spent by the British government on ‘counteraction’ in Eastern Europe and on strengthening the ‘independent media’ in the Western Balkans. This was reported by the press service of the British Foreign Office.

NATO also has a cyber force, which includes over 13,000 military personnel. The organization is called CCDCEO and is located in Tallinn.

Governments have long used propaganda, but digital tools have made it more complex and effective. Over the past few years, intelligence agencies have mirrored the experience of activists in using social media to disseminate information and are now actively using these methods. Additionally, interactive tools, such as data analysis software, allow for adapting cyber warfare to be more effective against certain groups of people, maximizing its impact.