The New Normal’s Religion of ‘Techno-Voodooism’ has Bewitched the World

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Reid Mukai

If Covid-19 has been a boon for anyone, that would be Big Business and Big Tech – overblowing fears, widening the wealth gap and facilitating global control through all-powerful technology the world now depends on.

By Dr. Mathew Maavak

What happens when systems cross the threshold of peak complexity and can no longer be improved in their current forms?

Decision-makers can commission competing models in order to pick a winner. This however calls for patience, prudence and sound oversight. Alternately, they can pounce on a fantastical blueprint that will supposedly gel via Artificial Intelligence and get to play monopoly at the same time. An all-in-one solution!

Such thinking was precisely what beleaguered the F-35 combat aircraft program with its estimated $1.7 trillion in lifetime costs. After 20 years of troubled development, the stealth fighter’s problems have become so insurmountable that there is talk in the US Air Force of considering a clean slate fighter jet program to replace its ageing F-16s.

The F-35 illustrates the other barely-analysed pandemic infecting our world – that of ‘technological voodooism’ (coined by the author for want of a better term).

Returns on investments these days are no longer measured by healthy profits generated by proven products. The devotees of techno-voodooism are essentially totalitarians who believe that not just markets, but the world itself, must be reorganized and monopolized by an enlightened few in a smart era called the Great Reset. The prime agency promoting this technopia is the World Economic Forum (WEF) which has promised a wonderful world where we will “own nothing” and yet “be happy.”

The outcome thus far has been societal meltdowns, malfunctioning jets in the skies and iRobot Roomba vacuums that meander aimlessly on the floor. The modern adage ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ may have been lost on iRobot’s C-Suite executives. Roomba machines use “artificial intelligence to scan room size, identify obstacles and remember the most efficient routes for cleaning.” But the quest for greater efficiency and profits at lesser costs – a process which Buckminster Fuller called ‘ephemeralization’ more than 80 years ago – has resulted in smart updates and berserk gadgets. Even after the vacuum is reset, IoT connectivity ensures that the robot is updated back to its state of regression.

Now, imagine the consequences of similar systems breakdowns worldwide? For starters, consider the point of singularity when robot chefs are updated with a new definition of what constitutes meat? A berserk Roomba machine can at least be switched off and plopped down as a paperweight. That is not an option for Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes which reportedly used artificial intelligence to bend aerodynamic laws on the cheap.

The string of Boeing disasters – as well as other failures mentioned thus far – has not deterred the merchants of techno-voodooism. Instead, every new crisis is seen as an opportunity for AI-mediated quick fixes and big profits. Remember Big Tech’s apocalyptic Covid-19 projections of the previous year?

Pseudosciences, based on the chimera of smart systems have been allowed to run amok, emboldening the WEF to claim that Covid-19 “lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world.” Tell that to the tens of millions of small businesses who have lost their livelihoods to multinational corporations. Just how did cities improve with the archipelago of trash that piled up during lockdowns? What about the environmental impacts which happen to be a pet peeve of the WEF?

It is not just cities that have supposedly “improved” with Covid-19. Bill Gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the United States – coincidentally at a time when lockdowns have worsened food security and incomes among the poor. Logically, this great humanitarian could have matched his suite of predictive analytics software with owned farmland capacity to alleviate lockdown-induced hunger, but Gates is reportedly too busy promoting synthetic beef and vaccines.

The global ‘coronapsychosis’ has in fact accelerated wealth fractionation at the expense of the mid-to-low income classes. Just 655 people now own $4 trillion in wealth, while 200 million can’t cover a $1,000 expense in the United States alone. Imagine the sheer numbers of the impoverished worldwide, especially in nations bonded to the Anglo-American compact?

As for Covid-19 itself, inconvenient facts are routinely censored or shadow-banned by AI-powered social media platforms and search engines. Annual flu deaths in the US – which the British Medical Journal once questioned whether it was more PR than science – have surprisingly disappeared from official health statistics due to the pandemic.

Big Tech will not allow us to question the efficacy of vaccines developed in the West. After all, Artificial Intelligence has seemingly accelerated the development of vaccines that would have otherwise taken years or decades to research, test and deploy.

We should not ask why dozens of people (as of early February) had contracted a rare blood disorder after taking vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. Or why there is an alarming number of deaths from Norway to Spain to the Netherlands post-vaccination? Or even how thousands of Israelis could test positive for Covid-19 despite receiving Pfizer/BioNTech jabs?

The Covid-19 vaccination figures in Israel are so alarming that two researchers have even called the fiasco “a new Holocaust.” Yet, the Israeli government wants local authorities to maintain a database of its vaccine refuseniks. (The Nazis, too, once maintained a meticulous database of “undesirables” in localities they were about to occupy, but that historical parallel is lost on today’s lamestream media).

Supine Governments

Techno-voodooism did not emerge in a vacuum. It thrived in tandem with ‘inclusivity’ and ‘sustainability’ programs which, in turn, handed the reins of power, scholarship and opinion-making to a horde of half-wits worldwide. This is one reason why governments, backed by spineless bureaucrats and academics, are increasingly surrendering national sovereignties to Big Tech.

One can imagine the quid pro quo: A post-retirement sinecure; jobs for children and relatives; and coding opportunities for trolls who push the Big Tech agenda. No wonder planes are falling from the skies and a raft of disasters await humanity throughout this decade.

Europe is an exemplar in this regard. Its leaders are now worried that Apple and Google may end up issuing Covid-19 health certificates before the union can reach a consensus. Isn’t that the job of sovereign governments with taxpayer-funded healthcare systems? But this trend is getting more sordid by the day.

Bureaucrats are falling over each other to gift vaccine roadmaps and distributions systems to Big Tech because their AI-driven systems can supposedly deliver optimal outcomes. They should just pick Bill Gates’ concept of using mosquitoes as airborne syringes. Call it a bang for the bite!

These shameless capitulations are not limited to the healthcare sector alone. Entire government machineries are gradually hived off to Big Tech. The trailblazing US state of Nevada may even allow tech giants to set up their own governments. These entities can impose taxes, form school districts and even run the judicial system. The first such ‘smart city’ may break ground as early as 2022. What could possibly go wrong?

In the final analysis, while the author argues that Artificial Intelligence and smart systems have real, sectoral potentials, these have been hijacked by the techno-voodooism of Big Tech. We should therefore brace ourselves for a very turbulent decade!

Stagflation Subterfuge: The Real Disaster Hidden By The Pandemic

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

In recent economic news, headlines are being dominated by concerns over rising bond yields. Increased bond yields are a sign of a possible spike in inflation and, logically, they call for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in order to prevent that inflation.

Higher bond yields also mean there is a competitive alternative to stocks for investors – both factors that could trigger a plunge in the stock market.

If one studies the real history behind the stock market crash during the Great Depression, they will find that it was the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes that caused and prolonged the disaster after they had created an environment of cheap and easy money throughout the 1920s. Former Chairman Ben Bernanke openly admitted the Fed was responsible back in 2002 in a speech honoring Milton Friedman. He stated:

“In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

This then raises the question – inflation or deflation? Will the Fed “do it again?”

Probably not in exactly the same way, but we will see elements of both inflation and deflation soon in the form of stagflation.

It’s a Catch-22 that the central bank has created, and many (including myself) believe that the Fed has created the conundrum deliberately. All central banks are tied together by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the BIS is a globalist institution through and through. The globalist agenda seeks to trigger what they call the “Great Reset,” a complete reformation of the global economy and capitalism into a single one world socialist system… managed by the globalists themselves, of course.

In my view the Fed has always been a kind of institutional suicide bomber; its job is to self-destruct at the right moment and take the U.S. economy down with it, all in the name of spreading its cult-like globalist ideology.

The only unknown at this point is how they will go about their sabotage. Will the central bank continue to allow inflation to explode the cost of living in the U.S., or will they intervene with higher interest rates and allow stock markets to crash?

Either way, we face a serious economic crisis in the near future.

Increasing Inflation Means Economic Recovery?

Mainstream economists will often argue that rising yields and inflation are a “good thing.” They claim this is a sign of rapid economic recovery. I disagree.

If “inflation” was the same as “recovery,” then there would not have been total economic collapses in Argentina in 2002, in Yugoslavia in 1994, or in Weimar Germany in the early 1920s.

I do not see recovery. What I see is the rapid devaluation of the dollar’s buying power due to massive fiat printing through stimulus measures. The Fed and the U.S. government are buying a short-term surge in economic activity, but at a hidden cost. This is a condition that the Dollar Index does not even begin to address, but obvious in prices of necessary goods and commodities.

Keep in mind that all of this is being done in the name of responding to the pandemic. The pandemic is the ultimate excuse for the active destruction of the U.S. economy. Stimulus measures have devolved into helicopter money being thrown about haphazardly as billions are siphoned primarily by major corporations and through fraud. People who are clamoring for a $2,000 relief check from the government have no idea that corporate welfare has been ongoing for the past year along with billions in retroactive tax refunds. All of that money printing is going to cause damage somewhere. It cannot be avoided.

It’s Not About The Pandemic

Let’s make something clear first: The pandemic is NOT the reason for the stimulus flood. The pandemic did very little to hurt actual business in the U.S. Rather, it was the lockdowns that did most of the damage.

Think about that for a moment – federal and state governments crushed the economy through lockdowns, then offered the solution of vast stimulus measures. This in turn is destroying financial stability and generating rapid price inflation.

Conservative states and counties that refused to shut down are recovering at a much faster pace than leftist states which imposed draconian restrictions on citizens. Yet, the lockdowns did nothing to stop the spread of COVID-19 in blue states. So, the lockdowns accomplished no discernible advantage for the public, but they did give the central bank a perfect rationale to further erode the dollar.

This resulting price inflation is something that not even the red states can escape.

For example, home prices are rapidly expanding beyond the market bubble of 2006. This is partially due to millions of people participating in perhaps the largest migration in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Anyone who is able is moving away from major cities into suburban and rural areas. But, home prices also have a historic habit of inflating along with currency devaluation. The cost of maintaining and remodeling an older home, or building a new home, rises as the prices of commodities like lumber inflate.

And lumber prices are certainly inflating! Softwood lumber prices are up at least 110% from a year ago, and are climbing as much as 10% in a week.

Home rentals also do not escape inflation, as the rising cost of maintaining properties forces landlords to increase rents. The only places where rents are decreasing are major cities that Americans are seeking to flee, such as New York and San Francisco.

Inflation In More Than Just Housing

The majority of commodities continue to see price inflation across the board. Food and energy prices have been creeping higher for the past year. Governments are once again blaming the pandemic and “stresses on the supply chain,” which may have been a believable claim nine months ago, but not today. Anything to hide the fact that all that stimulus has inflationary consequences.

Dollar devaluation is the most visible in terms of imported goods. In other words, it costs more dollars to buy goods outside the U.S. as the value of the dollar falls. And since the majority of U.S. retail is supplied by foreign producers, this means that average American consumers will suffer the brunt of inflationary consequences. Public stress and anger will be high.

Pandemic Lockdowns Are Just An Excuse

This is why the COVID-19 lockdowns must continue and the pandemic fear factory must remain active. The globalists need a cover event for the Reset and they need to keep the citizenry under control, and the pandemic can be blamed for just about anything. I think this is why we are already seeing the media hyping the existence of “COVID mutations.” Do not be surprised if the Biden Administration tries to implement a national lockdown sometime this year in the name of stopping the spread of a “more deadly” COVID-19 variant.

It won’t matter that the previous lockdowns were useless and all the data shows that keeping the economy open is a superior policy. It might seem like logic is going completely out the window, but there is a very logical reason for what is happening in the minds of globalists.

Stagflation comes into play through losses in certain sectors of the economy, high unemployment and the inability of wages to keep up with costs.

There is the continued dismantling of the small business sector, which, again, I believe is being destroyed deliberately. It’s not a mistake that small businesses were predominantly targeted as “non-essential” during the lockdowns. It’s also not a coincidence that the majority of COVID-19 PPP loans went to big box corporations while small businesses received almost nothing. The small business sector is being erased, leaving only the corporate sector to provide for consumers.

This may be why Democrats are so adamant about raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Wages are already rising according to market demand and region. The average non-skilled worker in the U.S. is making around $11 an hour. There is no need for the government to interfere, unless they have ulterior motives.

A $15 minimum wage would likely crush what’s left of small businesses, and only corporations that are receiving the bulk of stimulus dollars will be able to afford to pay workers the higher rate. On top of that, years from now the government could claim they “took action” to front-run stagflation by increasing people’s pay. But a $15 minimum wage is most useful to the establishment in the short term because it muddies the waters on the inflation issue.

Prices will continue to rise due to dollar devaluation, but the media and government will say that it has nothing to do with the dollar and everything to do with companies raising shelf prices to offset increased labor costs.

The Biggest Threat In The History Of American Society

I suspect that the establishment will do everything in its power to distract the public from the biggest threat in the history of American society – the stagflationary time bomb.

If they admit to its existence then the public could prepare for it, and they don’t want that. If Americans were to decentralize their local economies, support local small businesses instead of big box retailers, start producing necessities for themselves, and if they started developing currency alternatives like local scrip backed by commodities… then they would be able to survive a national financial crisis.

In fact, I guarantee that any community, county or state that takes these steps will immediately be targeted by the federal government, further revealing the truth: The establishment wants the public to suffer.

They want economic disaster. They do not want people to have the option of taking care of themselves. They need people scared, desperate and malleable, or they will never achieve their Reset agenda.

Post-Pandemic Landscapes: Behavior Modification as the New Consensus Reality

Posted on March 14, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

The ‘Covid Event’ gave the unreal world its great coup over the place of the real. This perception intervention gave the final stimulus necessary to tip the twenty-first century into an awaiting technologically manipulated reality. A new landscape is emerging where, for the first time, the human mind is finding itself out-of-place within its own territory. What are now being termed the emerging ‘post-pandemic’ landscapes are likely to be hazardous territory for our mental, emotional, and physical states. The human condition is under modification.

New forms of power are on the rise, embedded within structures of health security, that are re-imagining our social lives, living and workspaces, and our physical and digital movements. Until now, the spider’s web of social control mainly operated below the waterline in a space where an almost intangible world existed beyond governance or accountability. Now the Kraken awakes and is unashamedly coming to the surface. The beast of behavior modification is spreading its tentacles through our most established social and cultural institutions without shame – all in the name of health security (the new nom de plume of social management). These institutions include the media, city life, the office, and – perhaps most of all – the online-digital world. The modification of these spaces is set to further desensitize, anesthetize, and dehumanize us. It is as if the collective human mind is being groomed and prepared for a new consensus reality of ‘normalized dissonance.’

The post-pandemic landscape is merging physical pandemics with its own viral digital epidemics that are infecting the human psyche. The Italian philosopher Franco Berardi has noted that our ‘electronic mediascape’ is putting ‘the sensitive organism in a state of permanent electrocution.’[1] The social body is being deliberately targeted by strategies that cause anxiety, fragmentation, exhaustion, confusion, polarization, and fear. We can see this through national and local lockdowns; social distancing; anti-social interaction; social ostracization; loss of economic independence, and more. In early July, Prof Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society (the UK’s national academy of science) stated publicly that face masks should be worn in all public spaces (as they already are in many places in Europe and worldwide). Not wearing a face covering, he added, ‘should be regarded as “anti-social” in the same way as drink driving or failing to wear a seatbelt.’[2] This is nothing short of encouraging a regime of public shaming. The human condition is being subjected to a new rhythm of the modern power-machine that is breaking down our social alliances.

The established conditions that created a sense of social reality are being dissolved and replaced with processes aimed at managing the masses through forms of separation and quantification. That is, the techniques necessary to begin the formation of a technologized humanity. These processes seek to reduce human life, and its environment, to something measurable and predicable – a life ordained by algorithms. These imposed changes are creating a disequilibrium in the human psyche – a fragmentation of the human self. Furthermore, they are seeking to break down our trusted social relations.

There is something insidious creeping up into the global collective that is attempting to create a world of sleepwalkers, plied with fear-pills, updated with vaccines, programmed with nonsense, and dismissive of alternative thinking. As a conscious, biological organism we are being prepared to mimic the automation of the machine. Humanity is mentally sleeping and slipping into the void where a new form of the ‘social collective’ awaits us.

Techniques are being devised and employed to produce normalized and standardized behavior in order to create a socially managed populace. The collective human mind is being adapted and adopted into an infrastructure of control that operates largely through modes of digital connectivity. I refer to this rising mechanism of social engineering as the modern power-machine (MPM) that exerts control over human expression and autonomy of behavior. To enact this, a consortium of institutions have been selected to structure contemporary societies toward specific functions that give the promise of security and human well-being whilst developing increased social dependency. This is the post-pandemic landscape now rapidly arising and to which all future generations shall be born into.

Childhood’s End

Luciano Floridi, a professor of philosophy and the ethics of information, believes that human civilization is shifting into a phase of ‘hyperhistory.’ A hyperhistorical society that is dependent upon integrative technologies, says Floridi, could also become human-independent – that is, not needing us. Life on this planet is being developed into an infrastructure that favors machinic intelligence and artificial organisms, thus de-territorializing the human experience. Our urban environments may soon be more conducive to artificial life than biological ones. No one is yet ready for the mutation at hand. We are being programmed to take on a new position in the world that will erode the possibility of human transcendence; a world where the ‘flesh robot’ will eventually become the reality consensus.

We are witnessing an unprecedented migration of humanity from its physical space to the digital-sphere – an environment of surveillance and technocratic social management. The incoming generations will recognize no fundamental difference between the digital-sphere and the physical world as this mergence will form the reality they are born into. To the new generations, the digital-physical-sphere will be their only reality for they will have been born without the offline-online distinction. In the words of Luciano Floridi, they were born onlife. This is now their reality, and it is ‘onlife.’ The world that many of us recognized as being human will never be the same again. With the ‘onlife’ mode, a new era of history begins. Childhood comes to an end when they stop being a child and become a user. It is then that they inhabit whole new realities – realities they may believe to be ‘user-generated’ when in fact the reverse is more the case.

Connectivity and access will be part of the regime of the new power-machine. And the rights of access are going to be a matter of consensus health security (as addressed in New Dawn 180/181). To be a part of the power-machine will mean opting-in to its sanctioned, and on-surveillance, connections. Soon, opting out will be made an almost impossible alternative. Connecting into the power-machine will become the new cartography of the ‘human reality.’ Living ‘manually’ will become one of the last few remaining sites of resistance as human life becomes regulated-by-automation.

The City as Machine Cradle

Modern living, especially within dense urban metropolises, as well as within poverty-stricken neighborhoods, severely affects the human psychological condition, as well as affecting the nervous system. Journalist Naomi Klein has noted how a form of ‘Pandemic Shock Doctrine’ is emerging where city metropolises are forming suspicious partnerships with large tech conglomerates to re-design city living. Klein has stated that the quarantine lockdowns were not so much to save lives ‘but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.’[3] One tech CEO that Klein interviewed commented that: ‘There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology…Humans are biohazards, machines are not.’[4] Several local city governments are in negotiations with large private tech companies to create a ‘seamless integration’ between city government, education, health, and policing operations. Further, the individual home will become a smart-enclosed hub for the urban dweller. All this, and more, as a ‘frontline pandemic response.’

Online learning, the home office, telehealth, and online commerce are all now a part of an emerging investment landscape to convert existing physical-digital infrastructures to cloud-based ones that will be incorporated into the arriving fully-completed 5G network. All in the name of providing citizens with a securitized ‘virus free’ landscape. Erich Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google/Alphabet and now chair of the Defense Innovation Board that advises the Department of Defense on military A.I., announced publicly with a straight face:

‘The benefit of these corporations, which we love to malign, in terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health, the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your life would be like in America without Amazon.’[5]

Schmidt has now been hired to head up the task force commissioned to reimagine New York’s post-Covid reality. And he won’t be alone. High-tech is now jumping to get into partnerships with local governments in order to bring a safer, more ‘securitized’ landscape into civil society – all for ‘our’ benefit.

The business office landscape is also under re-organization to further regulate and isolate the social interactions of working colleagues. It can be said that a new form of business behavior modification is in the works. In a recent business analysis published in Bloomberg by Jeff Green and Michelle F. Davis, they suggested that:

The pre-Covid workplace, with its shared desks and common areas designed for “creative collisions,” is getting a makeover for the social distancing era. So far, what employers have come up with is a mash-up of airport security style entrance protocols and surveillance combined with precautions already seen at grocery stores, like sneeze guards and partitions.[6]

The authors of the report also foresee that the newly returned office worker will likely be encased in a makeshift cubicle made of plexiglass sheets. A new mode of anti-interaction is clearly in the works.

Hundreds of major companies, at least, are planning what they call ‘employee re-orientation programs’ and have already hired ‘thermal scanners’ to monitor employees for fevers, according to the article’s sources. The authors also noted that there has been a spike in job postings for ‘tracers,’ who would track down the contacts of anyone who tests positive for the covid-19 virus. In short, companies are now looking for a range of solutions to keep people away from one another throughout the working day. IBM, for example, is looking into using existing sensors or finding new technology to detect when people are too close together or ‘trending’ in that direction. Another report from the UK[7] noted how companies were looking into developing their own specialist employee smartphone apps that would operate elevators hands-free. The language employers are using includes creating ‘safe bubbles’ around employees and monitoring so that these ‘safe bubbles’ do not overlap. How would they manage such monitoring?

Various companies, the UK report goes on to say, are looking to teach artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor the video cameras that are monitoring the employees. Dr Mahesh Saptharishi, Motorola Solutions’ chief technology officer (based in Boston) explained that AI algorithms can offer feedback about ‘pinch points’ where people are too close together. Instead of employers (read ‘humans’) having to spend time (read ‘waste time’) watching the actual video, they can ‘ask’ the AI how well social distancing is being observed overall, and where problem points are.[8] So that’s the issue solved then. We’ll just rely on AI algorithms to tell us how to ‘social distance’ in our non-interacting bubbles and we can modify our behavior accordingly. Job done!

What this also signifies is that in order to be able to modify our behavior, machine intelligence will need to gather ever greater datasets about us. That is, ‘smart cities’ and ‘secure offices’ equals increased surveillance which equals expanded datasets. The ‘Black Iron Prison’ that Philip K. Dick saw coming is now hitting us squarely in the form of surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance Capitalism

Professor Shoshana Zuboff, the author of the widely acclaimed The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, has said that digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. With the rapid rise of data collection for commercial gain, Zuboff says that: ‘The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information.’[9] People are reduced to being less than products because they are rendered into being a mere ‘input’ for the creation of the real product which is the data. Predictions about peoples’ futures are sold to the highest bidder so that these futures can be profited from or altered to favor better commercial gains. Zuboff considers surveillance capitalism to be, at its core, parasitic and self-referential – a parasite that feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.

Human experience is considered free to be taken as raw material and it is this that becomes the product of value. From this material, organizations decide to intervene in our lives to shape and modify human behavior in order to favor the outcomes that are most desirable for commercial gains. Behavioral modification is now in the hands of private capital – and undertaken with the minimal amount of external oversight. At its most basic, humans have been reduced to ‘batteries’ that produce datasets for algorithms and machine learning to process. What is most worrying is that, by and large, the general populations are ignorant of what is going on quite literally beneath their fingertips. As Zuboff notes, people unknowingly end up funding their own forms of domination.

Through its operations of technocratic ‘normalization’ and the deliberate breaking up of social alliances, the power-machine age is manufacturing a new standardization of the human body and mind. With the encroachment of socially managed interventions, people are made vulnerable to the increased destabilizing of the human self. The human sense of ‘self’ and identity has become a fragile thing; it is analyzed, scrutinized, and criticized through social media; it is modified through surveillance capitalism; and it is increasingly being rendered by AI facial recognition systems such as Clearview. As these post-pandemic landscapes become increasingly rolled out in more social environments, we are likely to see, as a consequence, an ever-greater fragmentation of the human self.

The Fragmented Self

It is no exaggeration to say that humanity is entering a period of existential crisis that has perhaps not been last witnessed since the Middle Ages. Only this time, we don’t have our religious institutions to offer us salvation. The responsibility is upon our shoulders of finding salvation through becoming fully human in the face of dehumanizing forces. At present, we are being bombarded with such contradictory information that many people are unable to find coherence or to make a whole picture out of the shards. That is, the human mind is finding it increasingly difficult to see the patterns and to connect the dots. Many people will also now be experiencing forms of cognitive dissonance. One definition of this state is: ‘Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviours to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.’[10]

The result of this is that the mind desperately wishes to reduce this discomfort and restore balance by seeking – or being provided with – a coherent picture, or closure. The danger here is that this ‘closure’ or ‘coherent picture’ may be provided by an external source, institution, or body (a structure of orthodox ‘authority’) and many people will jump onto it as a way of gaining closure, and thus comfort. When, in truth, we need to find this coherence and closure within ourselves, through our own resources. With the increasing breakdown of social relations and an interactive human environment, people’s consciousness is being further pushed into compartmentalization where events are seen as random rather than interrelated and meaningful. This lack of meaningfulness will be compensated for by the rise of virtual attractions as the digital-sphere increasingly becomes the ‘safe and secure’ home that people turn to. Critical thought, perceptive observation, and intuitive knowing will be under the onslaught of nullifying behavior modification.

As we are now seeing in the public space, self-identity (race, sexuality, etc) is becoming a target of division, further creating doubt, anxiety, and social polarization. Psychologically, people are being pushed to acquiesce, submit, and accept the measures that are being implemented as the ‘new normal’ post-pandemic landscapes. And the more we submit, the more we become vulnerable to further submission and disempowerment. Bureaucratic regimes and administrative structures will creep further into our living, work, and leisure lives until a form of what French philosopher Michel Foucault calls disciplinary power will dominate over the human condition. New forms of social discipline and collective obedience are fostering an artificial and engineered state of perception. We are right in the middle of a time of intense ‘enforced socialization,’ or what Edward Snowden recently referred to as an ‘architecture of oppression.’ For some, the only response to this overwhelming ‘architecture of oppression’ will be to find their comfort zones – such as sitting in their chairs at home with their ‘surrogates’ roaming the digital-physical landscape on their part.[11] Or, as the 2008 computer-animated sci-fi film Wall-E depicted, growing lazy and obese while robots cater to all their needs, while indulging in infantile entertainments. We can only hope this shall never be the case.

Humanity has entered unprecedented times. Such times demand an unprecedented response. It appears that we are now being asked to ‘step up’ to accept our responsibility for our human becoming, and so to become fully human. By doing nothing, we are allowing our behavior to be modified and our self-identities to be splintered. In these post-pandemic landscapes, the choices we make will be choices that, like never before, determine our future as a human species. I suggest it is time now for declaring our unity as an empowered fully human species – by not accepting the push of the power-machine into distanced and disempowered individuals.

The Mechanism of Invisible Empire

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Reid Mukai

“The invisible hand has created an invisible cage…blinding us and dividing us, allowing the ruling class to exploit us and subjugate us.”

By Hiroyuki Hamada

Source: Off-Guardian

When the whole society becomes a theater of absurdity, the puppeteers become kings and queens of insanity. The society loses its logic, history, facts, honesty, sincerity, creativity and imagination, as the monstrous imaginations of the deranged ruling class devour humanity and nature.

The invisible cage of authoritarianism comes in the shape of a bottomless pyramid. Fear and hopelessness fill the dimly lit bottom layers. Layers and layers separate us, alienate us and dehumanize us. The pain of “others” becomes your gain. The power of oppressors becomes your safety: The safety of living in the dangerous imaginations of the kings and queens.

But such a thought vanishes as quickly as our minds get flooded back with the numbing noises of the insane theater, while our remaining logic, seriousness and honesty are ridiculed and attacked by fearful fellow humans with cynicism, hopelessness and cowardliness.

The world doesn’t look like that at all for those who belong to the club of kings and queens. The unruly mass with no understanding of the righteous path of “humanity” has been inherently expendable for them. This has been shown over and over: colonization of natives by Europeans, enslavement of African people, genocides of many sorts.

But one also sees the same blunt inhumanity embedded among us today: homelessness, deaths by treatable diseases, hunger, deaths by substance abuse, suicide, poverty, refugees, mass incarceration, state violence, the psychological torture of alienation. The kings and queens don’t recognize those as issues to be solved with their resources.

Instead those issues represent forms of punishment for those who fail to secure viable positions within the capitalist hierarchy. The fear of the punishment and the fear of the authority work together to lock us in positions in the hierarchy, forcing us to protect our positions which systemically and structurally threaten our wellbeing 24/7; we live in a system of structural extortion.

As we have become free-range people in the “divine farm” of modern-day kings and queens, we have lost our access to the fundamental material reality. A sterile cage with screens, mandatory injections, electronic tracking within the invisible fence; human mice for profits, feed for data harvesting, an ever greater degree of spiritual death. It is not hard to start connecting the dots to see how things can lead into a grim future.

But what does such a fear do to the population, which has tolerated an assortment of abuses as their “punishment”? To those who manage to ignore their fellow humans living on the streets as invisible beings or fail to feel the pain of those being cornered into substance use and desperate acts of self-destruction?

Would they believe the words of those who question, or the words of the ruling class promising a glorious future of AI, green capitalism, genetic engineering, digitization and financialization?

And before we ask such a question, one must wonder if such a question is even allowed when the socioeconomic/political trajectory of the empire has been firmly within the imperial framework of the two capitalist political parties.

The capitalist hierarchy absorbs what it needs by allocating special positions within it: Natural resources, narratives, facts, history, people, political ideologies or anything that sits in time and space. The kings and queens monopolize them— material resources as well as people with skills and knowledge are captured to serve. Once monopolized, the valued items are commodified, to be distributed in ways that benefit those same kings and queens.

Meanwhile such a process occurs in layers and layers, projecting myths, exploitive narratives, false history and erroneous facts onto our collective consciousness—a fake reality which covers our eyes while we push our mortal bodies around in the real world.

The images projected onto our psyche vary according to our positions in the hierarchy. Each narrative validates and justifies our positions in the hierarchy. Kings and queens find themselves to be worthy rulers of the universe, while the masses see themselves as freedom-loving people who do their best in a world of opportunities.

In such an equation authoritarianism presents itself as a swinging pendulum between fascism and social democracy as it moves forward on the capitalist path in space and time. The carrot and stick carefully manage projected images to stay within the capitalist framework of acceptable ideas. Corporate politics and corporate activism play crucial roles in making the pendulum swing, therefore ensuring that the capitalist interests always go forward while appearing to be “democratic”.

Those who rely on terrorist tactics of various sorts attempt to resist the system by attacking the valuable, captured elements that work for the system. The damage compromises social dynamics in ways that deprive those who are already deprived, while dividing the population that should be uniting to dismantle the oppressive system.
Guided by agent provocateurs and corporate NGOs, righteous anger against oppressors turns into a justification for draconian measures, destruction of communities for urban renewal, and a catalyst for new projects of exploitation.

As a set of capitalist imperatives pushes the capitalist contradiction to the limit, completely depriving people’s ability to reconcile the false perceptions and the material reality, it is time for an urgent mobilization to change the trajectory of exploitation into a new field with a new set of rules. We are told that enemies are coming, a natural disaster is coming or a disease is coming, forcing us to mobilize ourselves to adjust to a new path of plundering for the kings and queens.

Any crisis, real or not, against the backdrop of a hierarchical structure imposes two sets of momentum that keep us within the capitalist farm. The first set has to do with fear of the authority, which keeps our frustration directed against ourselves, each other and oppressed “others”, while firmly gripping the destabilized psyche of the population—creating an ironic psychology of supporting oppressive authority against our own interests.

The second set has to do with the material constraints imposed by the particular crisis—we become enemies to each other fighting amongst ourselves to survive. We are put in the capitalist cage. And we are forced to protect our cage, which is constructed with vertical strength to withstand fear of the authority, horizontal strength to withstand attacks by competitors, and a solid floor to prevent one from falling down from the position in the hierarchy. The whole structure is held together with violent force of exploitation and subjugation.

THE GREAT RESET

”The Great Reset” is packaged as a “great solution”. Just like how the ruling class has marketed “green capitalism”—carbon trading, carbon capture, reforestation, and other resource exhausting green schemes and technologies for profit, it’s designed to prop up capitalism but it is also intended to transform capitalism to have more effective control of social relations while keeping the capitalist hierarchy intact.

Capitalism is getting a new OS, and it needs to be restarted. Just as “green capitalism” has destroyed real environmentalism in the name of saving the planet, it is designed to destroy anti-capitalist activism in the name of “revolution”.

One of the prominent leftist tools under a capitalist framework has been grass roots activism to affect state regulations and state guidelines to contain momentums of exploitation and subjugation created by Wall Street as well as capitalist social institutions. The stock market guided economy (falsely advertised as the only system that works) allows the ruling class to dominate social policies according to their interests; it prioritizes ruling class wealth accumulation while sacrificing social relations among the general population; it is extremely inefficient, unstable and economically unjust.

The capitalist state has been a great tool in ensuring the interests of the ruling class to be a priority. The socialist revolution takes over the capitalist state, it nationalizes corporate entities and sets up the economy, education and the rest of social institutions and social relations to be guided by people’s interests. Various incarnations of the above strategies to counter capitalist exploitation and encroaching imperial hegemony have attempted to do two major things.

First, they have prioritized people’s interests by emphasizing projects that benefit the general population while providing social safety nets, infrastructure for the people, environmental regulations and so on. Second, they have allowed economic activities based on people’s needs which can grow organic community dynamics based on humanity and nature.

“The Great Reset,” on the other hand, is a project of the ruling class meant to take away those measures from the people and utilize them to further solidify their dominance over the people. Since the owners of the farm are plenty rich already, they won’t need a big farm. Their social engineering skills as well as the greater control over the economy will be put to a test in building a sustainable farming business with a smaller herd.

This is why it seems that all activism has turned into enforcing or defying the various virus lockdown measures which have been instrumental in enforcing the trajectory of “The Great Reset.” Remember how all environmental activism was swallowed by the single idea of reducing carbon emission? Fearmongering slogans of apocalyptic narratives involving climate change, strong NGO guided activism, and corporate science emphasizing the topic of global warming have created the huge snowballing momentum to fight climate change at all costs, sidelining and coopting all other important environmental activism.

This has also contributed to the idea that it is no longer relevant to insist on being a part of systematic efforts in dismantling the capitalist system and building an alternate system which allows humanity and nature to prevail in harmony; we are told that we don’t have time to build socialism anymore. We are encouraged to be a part of green solutions by the capitalists as a result.

We are being told that casino capitalism for profits must end to introduce “stakeholder capitalism”. But of course, since the notion is coming from the profiteers who have colonized, corporatized, militarized and financialized, we can presume that they are talking about ensuring their own interests by directly guiding the economic decisions instead of continuing the show called the economy by the “invisible hand.” We are told that we should be provided with universal basic income, free housing and other social services as long as we follow the regulations and policies of public-private partnership.

What sort of conditioning will we be subjected to after being deprived of our inherent relationships to ourselves, to each other, to our communities and to nature, forced to be a part of destructive industrial farming, digitalization of everything with massive resource extraction, colonization of our communities with multinational franchises and enslavement of our souls in the invisible cage of indoctrination and propaganda?

We already have such a system in the US—it’s called mass incarceration in the private prison system. We are being told that the economy must not be merely guided by growth and it must be replaced by a sustainable one.

However, coming from those who have greatly restricted meaningful economic growth among the general population in order to subject livelihoods to the brutal capitalist framework, what they really mean is to restrict productive social relations among the people so that they must subsist with bare minimum requirements, eventually cornered to be a smaller herd, more manageable with less resources—an economic solution which can only be conceived by criminal minds. Who knows what role vaccines will play in it.

Who knows what sort of living hell people will be subjected to as our lives are treated like numbers in high frequency trading, or our entire lives are put on hold by AI customer representatives.

Note how the policies will be designed to be achieved by co-opting leftist agendas. The invisible hand has been busy building a brand new invisible cage to perpetuate the violent reign of kings and queens in the name of “revolution”—a fascist revolution that is.

Now, I would like to emphasize that these trajectories are not set in stone. The problem is that those possibilities are highly unlikely to be examined by concerned people within the capitalist framework. There is a structural problem in the system. Let me go back to the pendulum. Just like any other capitalist social institution, the capitalist political institution serves the ruling class; it can serve as a crime laundering devise. As soon as a topic involving criminal activities is destined to be “political”—it dissociates itself from criminal elements and becomes “legitimate”.

Various social institutions kick in to support such a view since they are all funded by the ruling class—media presents it as such, legislature codifies it as such, executive branch executes it as such, judicial branch judges it as such, academics support it as such, educational institution cements it as such and so on. It becomes normalized to be a part of social policies.

Once the topic is on the political table embellished with a glorious history and myths of the nationhood of the United States of America, the topic becomes officially “political”, not criminal, and it is now safely and generously handled by the corporate entities.

The rendered topic floats in an artificial realm of political myths, tradition, and the gladiator battle culture of political authorities as a commodified symbol representing a fictitious version of the actual topic. Ordinary people can’t approach it coherently for what it is anymore unless they are rich and influential enough to access all moneyed social institutions. Moreover, all the criminal records of officials are discarded, forgiven and forgotten as a new regime comes in every four years.

This is how destructive foreign policies of colonialism, corporatism and militarism, and exploitive predatory domestic policies of all sorts have been implemented against people in the name of freedom, justice and humanity. This is how environmental concerns have turned into “green capitalism”. This is how we are being mobilized today under the guise of virus lockdowns.

People watch and cheer the pendulum swing between political extremes within the capitalist framework. Bits and pieces of awareness beyond the imperial framework can only be perceived with tools approved by the framework, effectively keeping those with the awareness within the ideas of the ruling class.

If you hold a world view that does not fit in it, you end up being categorized as a supporter of a political villain or simply labeled as “fascist”, “communist” and so on. Needless to say those terms are solely defined by acceptable ideas, acceptable history and acceptable myths of the capitalist hegemony.

The fact that the US government has supported fascist regimes across the globe while brutally intervening against socialist countries across the globe won’t be admitted for instance.

HOW CAPITALIST HIERARCHY SHAPES IDEAS

If one holds a view that defies the prevalent narrative, the individual can become a target of the authority as well as a target of multiple political extremes within the capitalist hegemony. For instance, if you oppose Israeli war crimes from an anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist position, you can be persecuted as a dissident by the establishment, while being labeled as anti-Semitic by supporters of Israeli policies. (You may also be labeled a Zionist shill by those who believe that Jews are taking over the world and so on).

The position that points out that Israel is a crucial part of the imperial structure, serving the imperial hierarchy while benefiting from its generous support, cannot be fully discussed due to how narratives are formed by the network of the imperial institutions.

The political pendulum doesn’t only create an illusion of “democracy”, it also defines what is acceptable while tearing communities apart. It utilizes its violence as a springboard to perpetuate and strengthen its grip on the exploited.

That’s why the living hell for Palestinian people keeps functioning as a devise for imperialism—the more Palestinians suffer, the more anti-Semitic sentiment emerges, which in turn justifies Israeli violence, which in turn serves the imperial agendas. That’s why victims of Katarina had to be victimized by “urban renewal” after going through the gravely tragic event.

Capitalist hegemony does not allow an honest discussion because imperialism is kept invisible by default, the capitalist cage is invisible and the guiding hand of capitalists is invisible. The capitalist framework simply corners people into having dead-end arguments. Period.

With the virus situation, we are told that there are good people who wear masks and stay home and bad people who selfishly defy the rules and spread “conspiracy theories”. The dynamics among acceptable narratives within the capitalist framework create the circular arguments of a screaming match. These dynamics exclude and belittle any understanding which goes beyond the artificial range of ideas created by the capitalist institutions: you are fake news, you are a denier, you are a conspiracy theorist, you are a grandma killer, communists are taking over and so on. Without recognizing this mechanism, any attempt to unify the momentums will result in a populism which emulates the existing social structure—another reactionary revolution at best, but more likely it will create more divisions and destabilization among the people, resulting in perpetuation of the capitalist hierarchy.

This is why there is no discussion of accountability for the death and suffering created by lockdown measures and there is no discussion about the meaning of why we are going through a structural shift. And when the deaths and sufferings will be put on the political table, financial vultures will devour them in the emerging social impact bond markets (see studies by WRENCH IN THE GEARS).

The invisible hand that is supposed to guide us to freedom, justice and humanity has created an empire ruled by the unprecedented accumulation of power for the few. The invisible hand has created an invisible cage over us, and it has been blinding us and dividing us, allowing the ruling class to exploit us and subjugate us.

Now, it must be clearly stated that what we perceive as the dystopian future of The Fourth Industrial Revolution—AI, blockchain, digitalization, financialization, green capitalism and so on—can’t be separated from the invisible hand and the invisible cage. It cannot be allowed to be defined by capitalist institutions as a “legitimate political topic” instead of what it really is.

The newly built cage hasn’t been built, but if we fail to see it for what it is in its context, we will simply be forced to embrace some version of it as one of the “legitimate” capitalist trajectories. That’s how it works when our society is a theater of absurdity.

I want to live a life that breaks open the invisible cage and firmly shake hands with nature and humanity. If you have stuck around this far with me, I trust that you feel the same…or not. Either way, we must start our conversations.

Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms

Posted on March 8, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.

This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience. We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.

Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.

For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team, The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket. All this is documented and not disputed. It is shocking only to those who don’t do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.

With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive. It therefore should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves. Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.

Just the other day The New York Times had this headline:

Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.

Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.” This is guilt by headline. It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook that owns Instagram. That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.

Which brings me to the recent work of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship. As I understand their arguments, they go like this.

First, the corporate media have today divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the “allegedly” liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read” the “allegedly” conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc. They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It’s business driven since electronic media have replaced paper as advertising revenues have shifted and people’s ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically. Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed Taibbi and concurs: part one here) have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.

Secondly, the great call for censorship is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as The New York Times, who now employ “tattletales and censors,” people who are power hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting voices that they can recommend should be banned. Greenwald says:

They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous ‘disinformation.’

Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.

In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.

I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so. If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core. For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many. The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.

To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense. These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.

In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations. Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.

Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc. The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.

That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.

But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell. It is a symbiotic relationship. As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the “financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Their wealth and power has increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc. They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.

As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter Dale Scott, in “The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld,” says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest running Director of the CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell:

There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director.

It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA. He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors, including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his “Mighty Wurlitzer” was “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.” This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to propagate the CIA’s messages.

Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short. Their critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing of Consent model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey. Like old school journalists who knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them from wandering into dangerous territory.

The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case. His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.

To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues. To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.

This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state’s assassinations of his father and uncle, JFK. It is why his wonderful recent book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces. These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be. They must be dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father’s ghost, the last politician who, because of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.

So they killed him.

There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi. He controls the can opener for so many. He has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual. The assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are eschewed.

To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – “This far and no further” – and jump over it. That’s where the true stories lie. That’s when they’ll see the worms squirm.

US Foreign Policy: War Is Peace

Posted on March 3, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephenLendman.org

A permanent state of war on invented enemies is longstanding US policy.

It’s been this way throughout most of the post-WW II period.

Terror-bombing Syria last Thursday was one of many examples — escalating US aggression against the nation and people by Biden.

The Syrian Arab Republic threatens no one. President Assad is supported by most Syrians.

Yet Obama/Biden launched preemptive war on the country in March 2011.

US forces illegally occupy northern and southern areas.

The Pentagon and CIA use ISIS and likeminded jihadists as proxy forces to advance US imperial aims in Syria and elsewhere.

Washington under both right wings of its war party intends permanent occupation of the country.

Sergey Lavrov noted the diabolical scheme, saying:

Washington is “making the decision to never leave Syria, even to the point of destroying this country” — more than already he should have added.

Lavrov also stressed the US forces occupy “Syrian territory illegally, in violation of all norms of international law, including Security Council Resolutions on reconciliation in the Syrian Arab Republic.”

“They continue to play the separatism card.”

“They continue to block, using their levers of pressure on other states, any supply even of humanitarian aid, not to mention equipment and materials necessary to restoring the economy in the territories controlled by the government, and in every way possible force their allies to invest in territories outside Damascus’s control.”

“At the same time, they illegally exploit Syria’s hydrocarbon resources” by stealing them.

Longstanding US plans call for partitioning Syria and other regional countries for easier control.

According to former Global Policy Forum director James Paul, partitioning Syria “is the Israeli solution,” adding:

The Jewish state’s “overarching goal is to weaken every Arab state by bringing religion and ethnicity into the equation.”

The plan for Syria is partitioning it into Kurdish, Alawite and Sunni states.

Balkanization of Middle East countries is also longstanding US policy.

Regional expert Mahdi Nazemroaya earlier explained that “(r)egime change and balkanization in Syria is very closely tied to the objective of dismantling the ‘resistance bloc’ formed by Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, the Palestinians, and various Iraqi groups opposed to the US and Israel.”

US/NATO/Israeli regional aggression aims to achieve this objective — what failed so far and won’t likely fare better ahead, but continues anyway.

In cahoots with Israeli interests, Obama/Biden launched preemptive war on Syria in 2011.

For hardliners in both countries, the road to Tehran runs through Damascus.

Control over the Syrian Arab Republic is seen as a way to weaken and isolate Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

According to Algerian academic Abdelkrim Dekhakhena, Bush/Cheney’s 2003 aggression against Iraq “metamorphosed into an apocalypse that swept the core nations of the region.”

“Chaos and destruction” followed with no end of it in prospect.

Washington’s notion of democracy building is suppressing its emergence everywhere and eliminating it wherever it exists.

Endless US Middle East wars created instability and human misery.

US regional aggression is aided by ISIS and other terrorist groups — created by the CIA to advance Washington’s control over regional countries, their resources and populations.

According to Biden’s doublespeak through his press secretary Psaki — paid to lie for her boss — he OK’d escalated US aggression in Syria to “protect Americans (sic),” adding:

Further aggression will aim to “deescalate tensions.”

The above doublespeak mumbo jumbo defines Washington’s war is peace policy.

Endless US wars by hot and/or other means have nothing to do with democracy building, pursuing peace, or protecting Americans.

They have everything to do with advancing Washington’s diabolical imperial agenda that prioritizes unchallenged global dominance.

Psaki also defied reality by claiming that preemptive terror-bombing of Syria on Thursday underwent a “thorough legal process (sic).”

There’s nothing remotely legal about naked aggression in Syria or anywhere else.

A decade of US war against the Syrian Arab Republic and its long-suffering people perhaps will continue in perpetuity.

The same diabolical agenda continues in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Libya, along with war by other means against numerous invented US enemies — notably China, Russia and Iran.

Washington’s rage to dominate other countries by brute force defines what the scourge of imperialism is all about.

There’s no end of it in prospect.

Biden’s longstanding support for wars on invented enemies suggests further escalation of hostilities on his watch.

Confrontation by belligerence and other means will likely be prioritized over pursuing peace and cooperative relations with other countries.

It’s the diabolical American way — addicted to warmaking, abhorring peace and stability.

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Facebook hires ex-NATO press officer and social media censor Ben Nimmo as intel strategist

Posted on March 2, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Alan Macleod

Source: The Grayzone

Ben Nimmo, a former NATO press officer and current senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, has announced Facebook has hired him to “lead global threat intelligence strategy against influence operations” and “emerging threats.” Nimmo specifically named Russia, Iran and China as potential dangers to the platform.

His announcement was greeted with joy by several NATO officials but was not met with such enthusiasm by others. “More censorship on the way as the former NATO press officer turned Pentagon-funded ‘researcher’ who labeled real people as Russian bots and peddled disinformation to link Jeremy Corbyn to Russian active measures moves to big tech,” responded investigative journalist Max Blumenthal.

Nimmo’s questionable past certainly raises questions over whether such an official having a substantial say in what 2.8 billion Facebook users worldwide see in their feeds is such a positive step for the free and open exchange of information.

More censorship on the way as the former NATO press officer turned Pentagon-funded “researcher” who labeled real people as Russian bots and peddled disinformation to link Jeremy Corbyn to Russian active measures moves to Big Tech https://t.co/XcfGbdPJtv

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 7, 2021

“Disinformation agents”

For example, in 2019, U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn revealed secret Conservative Party documents showing negotiations the Tory government had with the U.S. over the privatization of the National Health Service (NHS). With just days to go before the U.K. general election, the scandal could have toppled the government and brought into power the most radical antiwar, anti-establishment government in the country’s history. Corporate media went into overdrive to spin the news, and Nimmo was a key part of this, immediately announcing, without evidence, that the documents “closely resemble…a known Russian operation.” His supposedly expert conjecture allowed the story to become “Corbyn’s links to Russia” rather than “Tories privatizing the NHS in secret.” Nimmo’s work helped the Conservatives to an election victory and consigned Corbyn to the scrapheap.

This was much to the relief of Nimmo’s Atlantic Council, who had branded Corbyn the “Kremlin’s Trojan Horse” — someone pushing Moscow’s agenda abroad. A British Army general was of a similar opinion, claiming that if Corbyn were to win the election, the military would respond. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also said that the U.S. government was “doing its best” to prevent a radical leftist from winning power in the U.K.

Nimmo has been extremely liberal with whom he labels Russian disinformation agents. In 2018, his research identified one Twitter user, @Ian56789, as a “Kremlin troll.” In reality, the user, Ian Shilling, was a British pensioner, as Sky News was easily able to confirm, interviewing him on air and asking him the patently absurd question if he was actually a Russian bot or not. Despite clearly being a flesh and blood human, Shilling’s account was later deleted anyway.

In the past, Nimmo has also insisted that Valentina Lisitsa was an influential Russian bot. In reality, she is an internationally known concert pianist, as one Google search would have shown. This sort of behavior does not augur well for those critical of Western foreign policy, who have faced constant harassment, suspension, or outright bans from social media.

https://twitter.com/ValLisitsa/status/978559232508416000

Pro-war putsch

The Atlantic Council began as an offshoot of NATO itself and maintains extremely close connections to the military alliance. It continues to receive major funding from Western governments and weapons contractors, and its board of directors is filled to the brim with former American foreign policy officials such as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Henry Kissinger. Also appearing on the board are no fewer than seven former CIA directors and a number of top military generals, such as Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, Wesley Clark, and David Petraeus.

In recent years, the council’s employees have penetrated deep into big tech and social media organizations. In 2018, it announced it had partnered with Facebook to aid in the curation of Facebook news feeds of users worldwide, giving it considerable power over what sort of views to highlight and which to demote. One year previously, Jessica Ashooh left the position of the council’s Deputy Director of Middle Eastern Strategy to take the position of Director of Policy at Reddit, the eighth-most visited website in the United States. However, as with many intelligence agencies, it is unclear whether one truly “leaves” the Atlantic Council.

It is not just Russia that is in NATO’s crosshairs. Last week, the Atlantic Council published an anonymous, 26,000-word report stating that their goal for China was regime change and advising President Biden to draw a number of “red lines” around it, beyond which the U.S. would respond militarily. Meanwhile, the head of STRATCOM, Admiral Charles A. Richard, wrote that the U.S. must prepare for a potential nuclear war with Beijing.

Greater control

The military escalation has been mirrored by an intensifying online propaganda war, where the U.S. has attempted to isolate China economically and stop advancing Chinese technologies such as Huawei’s 5G network, mobile phone, and semiconductor manufacturer Xiaomi, and video sharing app TikTok. Nimmo has played his part in ramping up suspicions of nefarious Chinese activity online, claiming the existence of a wide-ranging pro-Beijing bot network encouraging Americans to believe that China has handled the COVID-19 pandemic far better than the United States. That Americans might have come to that conclusion on their own appears not to have been considered.

There is an enormous government effort to convince its population of the existence of (foreign) government efforts to manipulate their opinions online. In a massive case of projection, Western governmental organizations point the finger at their enemies, all the while securing greater access and control over the means of communication themselves, to the point where it is now difficult to distinguish where the deep state ends and the fourth estate begins. Nimmo’s move from NATO to NATO-aligned think tank to Facebook is just another example of this phenomenon. Perhaps the reason Nimmo is not looking for any Western influence operations online is that he is part of one.

REVIEW: Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies by Edward Curtin

Posted on February 28, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Ray McGinnis

Source: Off-Guardian

Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a selection of essays. They reveal what stirs author Ed Curtin’s heart, his mind, and his path toward clarity. With each chapter he passionately reflects on the state of his country and what matters most to him. It is a compelling read.

The epigraph at the beginning of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” comes from Theodore Roethke’s poem “In A Dark Time”. Here the poet describes a state of disorientation and dislocation of identity. Roethke asserts this is essential to achieve clarity, insight and wisdom. In a dark time, one discovers the fragmented and broken state of things. With this fitting epigraph, Ed Curtin proceeds to alert his readers to the fragmented and broken state of things in America, and the task of its citizenry to begin to see more clearly.

The topics Curtin, a former professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, takes up are not original to him. But they are marked with his own articulate original stamp. One aspect of his novel contribution is that Curtin steps beyond standard frameworks of political analyses.

Three themes have permeated his attention from a young age: truth, death and freedom. He cites an excerpt from an interview with the poet Kenneth Rexroth who told journalist Lawrence Lipton in 1959:

Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.

Rexroth referred to this system of fraud as the “social lie.” And in Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies, Curtin takes on the task of describing the roots of the fraud, and its more recent manifestations. He also takes time to point out, despite the burdens society grapples with in an age of deceit, that beauty, art, love, and whimsy are among the qualities that persist as signs of grace.

In his essay “Inside America’s Doll House: A Vast Tapestry Of Lies” Curtin cites Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans who in 1969 brought to trial a case naming persons connected to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Garrison attempted to show that the assassination of JFK was the work of the CIA and Allen Dulles.

However, Garrison was routinely described as a lunatic by CIA-connected media spokespersons. It was Garrison’s conclusion that American citizens passively consumed television news that was laced with propaganda. Such propaganda was manufactured to preclude Americans from “understanding…what is really happening….”

Garrison warned that Americans were living “in a doll’s house.” Building on the hard lessons Jim Garrison learned from the trial in 1969, Ed Curtin observes:

In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.

His book was also released in winter 2020, some 57 years after JFK’s assassination.

Curtin notes that in 2009:

[President] Obama backed the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S. trained killers, and now [followers of Trump complain about] all these ‘non-white’ people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S…

After 2009. it was learned that U.S. officers at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies trained members of the Honduran military to oust democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. In 2009 and the years following Honduras has had one of the highest rates of murder in the world. These have been driven by death squads connected to the Honduran military. But this coup mattered little to both President’s Obama and Trump, while Hondurans have paid the price in murder, increased debt and poverty.

Examples of what Curtin raises continue since his book was published in late 2020. For Venezuelans it matters little whether a Republican or a Democrat is president in the USA. Under Donald Trump there was a failed attempt in May 2020 to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. And on the first day of his presidency, Joe Biden signed an executive order declaring the United States recognizes Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the nations’ President. This despite Maduro winning over 67% of the popular vote in 2018; That the second candidate in the election results was Henri Falcón who won 21%; And Juan Guaidó wasn’t even a candidate in 2018. Imagine if Venezuela protested the result of the 2020 United States election, and recognized Mitt Romney as president (who ran in 2012 but didn’t run in 2020).

With Biden there is a change of tone from Trump, but many American foreign policies remain the same. Former President Jimmy Carter said of Venezuela’s 2012 elections when Hugo Chavez was re-elected:

…of the 92 elections that we’ve [Carter Centre Foundation in Atlanta] monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.

But that story that doesn’t conform with the media’s narrative. So, it goes down the memory hole.

Curtin notes that while average Americans have not constructed the doll’s house they live in, they are complicit. It is average Americans who have accepted “decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind.” A consequence of accepting illusory narratives is that people are not really free.

In order to cope with a plausible lie, consumers of the news play dumb. And Curtin notes most Americans…

want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked.

As they become a people of the lie, repeating the lies they are fed, a memetic desire arises in society. And the repetition of these lies fuels violence and scapegoating. The doll’s house that Americans (and many citizens of other countries who consume the news uncritically) live in, are reinforced by contracts they have made with the world. This is in order to enhance their social standing, financial status, professional advancement and maintain familial harmony. That kind of peace of mind and contentment require individuals not to venture out far from the doll house, in case they encounter truths they find hard to handle.

Curtin notes that the Central Intelligence Agency began to use the term “conspiracy theory” in a memo on April 1, 1967. This was to discredit assassination theories about other plausible actors in the death of the slain president on November 22, 1963. And he notes that it just so happens that the term “9/11” was first used on September 12, 2001, by future New York Times editor Bill Keller to designate the language for how to refer to the day of the attacks. By using a term synonymous with dialing an emergency number in the United States, the term became fused with feelings of “anxiety, depression, panic and confusion.”

It is useful to note that at the time of the attacks on September 11, 2001, the emergency number in Saudi Arabia was 999. In Afghanistan the emergency numbers were 102, 112 and 119. The numbers in Yemen were 191 and 194. The emergency numbers in the United Arab Emirates were 112, 998 and 999. The emergency number in Libya was 1515. The number in Kuwait was 112. The numbers in Iraq were 104, 115 and 122. In Syria emergency numbers were 110, 112 and 113. In Lebanon the numbers variously were 112, 140, 175 and 999. The emergency numbers in Egypt were 122, 123 and 180. Across continental Europe the emergency number to call on September 11, 2001, was 112. The emergency numbers in Iran were 110, 112, 115 and 125.

Curiously, 911 was a number to dial an emergency uniquely in the United States, Canada, Mexico (as well as 065, 066 and 068), and South America. 911 was not an emergency number in the states where Arabs were alleged to have plotted to attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

In some future scenario – were it to ever happen – might rogue American terrorists fly planes into skyscrapers in Tehran, Iran? And in such a scenario, might such terrorists plot an attack on a January 10th, 12th or 15th of a given year, fusing the day of the atrocity with the abbreviation for a date synonymous with one of the numbers Iranians dialed in case of an emergency?

In his essay “Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore,” Curtin notices that by “referring to September 11 as 9/11,” Keller ensured…

an endless national emergency became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or holocaust. It is a term that pushes all the right buttons evoking unending social fear and anxiety. It is language as sorcery; it is propaganda at its best.

Because Curtin suspects that the repetition of the term “9/11” is embedded in an advanced form of mind-control, he refuses to use the term in relation to the attacks. Instead, he uses the phrase “the attacks of September 11, 2001.” Whatever vocabulary we use to refer to the attacks, Curtin advises that we find one that can unbind us from the mesmerizing impact of its official shorthand repeated endlessly, subliminally evoking confusion, depression and panic in its hearers.

As our post-modern society has evolved, the task of creating propaganda is more complex. And so, the complexity of society drives a majority to want ready-made frameworks for understanding their reality coherently. Curtin shows that…

people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the ‘truth,’ but that so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda.

Nonetheless, the propaganda is efficient enough to allow most people to deduce that they’ve reached their conclusions of their own free will. Most people will assume that they’ve been provided with a suitable range of information about the key points of a given topic in order to decide what is trustworthy. However, the same consumers of the news will regard as inconceivable that the narrative they’ve been led to accept contains cherry-picked news that omits perspectives that are off-message. Surely, wouldn’t any dissenting voices that are worth knowing about would be given a hearing on the six o’clock news?

Curtin concurs with author Lisa Pease who wrote in her book A Lie Too Big To Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy:

The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.

To support his assessment, Curtin points to numerous examples in different chapters across his book. This includes a chapter on “The Message From Dallas, JFK and The Unspeakable,” where he summarizes JFK author James W. Douglass’ layer-by-layer excavation of a CIA-backed assassination of a president who had turned from war-making toward peace-making.

In another chapter titled “What Are We Working For ‘At Eternity’s Gate’,” Curtin writes about the rat-race. He recalls a summer job as a clerk in a General Motors office in Manhattan. The “bait” was the salary, and so his youth was spent that summer confined to a boring job.

As I read Curtin’s description, I thought about some of the jobs I had: working a night shift as a hotel security guard, a cleaner at a private golf club, and working at a vehicle repair shop for the Ministry of Forests for the Province of British Columbia. The latter I spent a summer affixing forestry vehicle identification serial numbers on the side of government trucks.

The author mentions a film about the life of Vincent Van Gogh, titled At Eternity’s Gate, which offers a vision of new possibilities for what it means to work, to be alive. For Van Gogh it was the “act of painting” that was “the stroke of genius.” And so, for the impoverished painter it was not the completion of paintings that was important, but immersing himself in painting. This was the key to life.

In this essay, Curtin invites the reader to contemplate what it means to live and to ask ourselves why we work. He tells us:

For Vincent the answer was simple: reality. But reality is not given to us and is far from simple; we must create it in acts that penetrate the screens and clichés that wall us off from it.

One of the screens that Curtin had to penetrate was a slogan he was taught as a United States Marine:

My rifle is my life.

Curtin saw through the slogan, recognizing that being human meant to be a lover of life and being committed to waging peace.

In yet another essay, “The Sexual Passion of Winston Smith”, Curtin details the commodification of society, where everything can be bought and sold. As he speaks about the body’s commodification, Curtin reminds us that part of the body – “the tongue is a bell, tolling out its [language’s] meaning.” It is finally the tongue that helps us in speech to “tell the truth that propagandists try to deny.”

In his book, the author offers suggestions for pointing a way forward that can help us search for truth in a landscape of falsehoods. One of these is poetry. He points out that citizens in Chile, Ireland and Russia know their national poets and can quote their works “by heart.” But in America poets and poetry are ignored. A new generation is too busy checking Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. But Curtin argues:

Poetry is the search for truth. It marries outer to inner.

The best of what poetry can offer helps a society…

address questions of value and ultimate concern…of truth and lies.

He contrasts these with…

screen and selfie culture [where] these matters are irrelevant.

In addition to truth and lies, Curtin points to myriad oddities that dot the landscape of America’s cultural past. Many of the rock n’ roll bands in the mid-sixties were viewed as part of a countercultural/anti-war protest movement against the establishment. There are books like one by Alex Constantine, The Covert War Against Rock, that document operations by the CIA and FBI to discredit and disrupt the lives of pop-rock stars identified as subversive. Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and others had extensive intelligence files on them. Constantine cites a leaked intelligence memorandum discussed in testimony before the Church Committee on April 26, 1976.

Regarding certain recording artists, the FBI wrote to its agents:

Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges….Send articles to newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt….Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death.

But was another arm of the intelligence community simultaneously grooming anti-establishment recording artists? In Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies Curtin notes that Buffalo Springfield performed in concert, along with the Beach Boys, at the United States Military Academy at West Point, in Orange County, New York, on November 25, 1967.

Curtin points out that this is “a very odd venue for a ‘dissident’ rock group.” Their Top Ten hit in the spring of ’67 – “For What It’s Worth” – invited radio listeners to consider, though it wasn’t “exactly clear” what was “happening,” to “stop,” and “look” at what was “going down.”

How did members of Buffalo Springfield feel about performing at the military academy when there were “battle lines being drawn?” And what an odd thing for cadets at West Point to be listening to lyrics that warn:

step out of line, the man come and take you away.

Citing David McGowan’s Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, Curtin notes that “Papa” John Philips of the Mamas and the Papas attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, and that his dad was a Marine Corps Captain:

John’s wife had worked at the Pentagon and her father was involved in covert intelligence in Vietnam.

The Doors Jim Morrison, a neighbor and friend of Philips, was the son of U.S. Navy Admiral George Morrison who was the commander of American Naval ships during the Gulf of Tonkin incident that accelerated the Vietnam War.

Frank Zappa’s father happened to be a chemical warfare specialist.

Curtin notes others like David Crosby and Stephen Stills were also from military family backgrounds. And many of these young musicians all converged at Laurel Canyon:

Although they were draft age, none of them [were] drafted as they played music, dropped acid, and created the folk-rock movement…

Were these musicians’ part of intelligence community operations, as much as the agents who were harassing them? Or as David McGowan asks, was…

the entire youth culture of the 1960s…created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray…?

With each chapter, Ed Curtin takes us into different rooms in the doll’s house, and helps us connect the dots. His stories and reflections, in an age of “fake news”, are essential reading.

In the quest for truth, readers of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies will be advised to take the road less travelled. This road requires we quiet our minds, and welcome silence. It is a road less travelled where each must ask: what can I do to help transform our terrible, corrupt, beautiful world longing to be more human, just and peaceful?

Curtin does not intend for us as readers to simply finish his book unfazed. He hopes his chapters might rouse us to find ways to resist in this age of permanent war and oligarchy, in a world still longing for peace and justice.

Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is available in digital and paperback versions at Amazon and other retailers. For more info and praise for the book, visit Ed Curtin’s website: www.edwardcurtin.com

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