Category Archives: Dystopia

Gaslighting: State Mind Control and Abusive Narcissism

Posted on by
2

By Vanessa Beeley

Source: 21st Century Wire

Exceptionalism: the condition of being different from the norm; also:  a theory expounding the exceptionalism especially of a nation or region.

There are many theories surrounding the origin of American exceptionalism. The most popular in US folklore, being that it describes America’s unique character as a “free” nation founded on democratic ideals and civil liberties. The Declaration of Independence from British colonial rule is the foundation of this theory and has persevered throughout the often violent history of the US since its birth as a free nation.

Over time, exceptionalism has come to represent superiority in the minds and hearts of Americans. Belief in their economic, military and ideological supremacy is what has motivated successive US governments to invest in shaping the world in their superior image with little or no regard for the destruction left in the wake of their exceptional hegemony.

In considering itself, exceptional, the US has extricated itself from any legal obligation to adhere to either International law or even the common moral laws that should govern Humanity.  The US has become exceptionally lawless and authoritarian particularly in its intolerant neo-colonialist foreign policy.  The colonized have become the colonialists, concealing their brutal savagery behind a veneer of missionary zeal that they are converting the world to their form of exceptionalist Utopia.

Such is the media & marketing apparatus that supports this superiority complex, the majority of US congress exist within its echo chamber and are willing victims of its indoctrination. The power of the propaganda vortex pulls them in and then radiates outwards, infecting all in its path.  Self-extraction from this oligarchical perspective is perceived as a revolutionary act that challenges the core of US security so exceptionalism becomes the modus vivendi.

Just as Israel considers itself ‘the chosen people’ from a religious perspective, the US considers itself the chosen nation to impose its version of Democratic reform and capitalist hegemony the world over. One can see why Israel and the US make such symbiotic bedfellows.

“The fatal war for humanity is the war with Russia and China toward which Washington is driving the US and Washington’s NATO and Asian puppet states.  The bigotry of the US power elite is rooted in its self-righteous doctrine that stipulates America as the “indispensable country” ~ Paul Craig Roberts: Washington Drives the World Towards War.

So why do the American people accept US criminal hegemony, domestic and foreign brutal tyranny & neo-colonialist blood-letting with scant protest? Why do the European vassal states not rise up against this authoritarian regime that flaunts international law and drags its NATO allies down the path to complete lawlessness and diplomatic ignominy?

What is Gaslighting?

The psychological term “Gaslighting” comes from a 1944 Hollywood classic movie called Gaslight.  Gaslighting describes the abuse employed by a narcissist to instil in their victim’s mind, an extreme anxiety and confusion to the extent where they no longer have faith in their own powers of logic, reason and judgement. These gaslighting techniques were adopted by central intelligence agencies in the US and Europe as part of their psychological warfare methods, used primarily during torture or interrogation.

Gaslighting as an abuser’s modus operandi, involves, specifically, the withholding of factual information and its replacement with false or fictional information designed to confuse and disorientate. This subtle and Machiavellian process eventually undermines the mental stability of its victims reducing them to such a depth of insecurity and identity crisis that they become entirely dependent upon their abuser for their sense of reality and even identity.

Gaslighting involves a step by step psychological process to manipulate and destabilize its victim.  It is built up over time and consists of repetitive information feeds that enter the victim’s subconscious over a period of time, until it is fully registered on the subconscious “hard disk” and cannot be overridden by the conscious floppy disk.  Put more simply, it is brainwashing.

“Overall, the main reason for gaslighting is to create a dynamic where the abuser has complete control over their victim so that they are so weak that they are very easy to manipulate.” ~ Alex Myles

Three Stages of Gaslighting: Stage One

The first stage depends upon trust in the integrity and unimpeachable intentions of the abuser, a state of reliance that has been engendered by the abuser’s artful self-promotion and ingratiating propaganda.  Once this trust is gained, the abuser will begin to subtly undermine it, creating situations and environments where the victim will begin to doubt their own judgement.  Eventually the victim will rely entirely upon the abuser to alleviate their uncertainty and to restore their sense of reality which is in fact that of the abuser.

Stage Two

The second stage, defence, is a process by which the abuser isolates the victim, not only from their own sense of identity but from the validation of their peers.  They are made to feel that their opinion is worthless, discredited, down-right weird.  In political circles they would be labelled a conspiracy theorist, a dissident, a terror apologist.  As a consequence, the victim will withdraw from society and cease to express themselves for fear of ridicule, judgement or punishment.

This stage can also be compared to Stockholm Syndrome where a hostage or captive is reduced,by psychological mind games, back to infantile dependency upon their captor.  Narcissistic abuse bonds the victim to the aggressor via trauma.  Stockholm Syndrome bonds the victim to the aggressor via regression to an infantile state where the abuser/aggressor becomes the “parent” who will rescue the victim from imminent annihilation.  Both methods tap into the victim’s survival mechanisms to gain and maintain control.

Stage Three

The final stage is depression.  A life under the tyrannical rule of a narcissist drives the victim into a state of extreme confusion.  They are stripped of dignity & self-reliance.  They, ultimately exist in an information vacuum which is only filled by that which the abuser deems suitable or relevant.  This can eventually invoke symptoms of PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder]. Flashbacks, constant apprehension, hyper vigilance, mind paralysis, rage and even violence.  The process is complete and the victim has been reduced to a willing accomplice in the abusers creation of a very distorted reality.

Exceptionalism or Narcissism?

We are currently seeing the transformation of US exceptionalism into an abusive Narcissism.

The gargantuan apparatus of mind bending and controlling is being put into hyper drive by the ruling elite.  We are inundated with propaganda that challenges our sense of reality but only after being “tenderized” by the fear factor.  Fear of “terror”, fear of war, fear of financial insecurity, fear of gun violence, fear of our own shadow.  Once we are suitably quaking in our boots, in comes the rendition of reality that relieves our anxiety.  If we challenge this version of events we are labelled a conspiracy theorist, a threat to security. We are hounded, discredited, slandered and ridiculed.  We are isolated and threatened.

Wars are started in the same way.  Despite the hindsight that should enable us to see it coming, the process swings into motion with resounding success. The ubiquitous dictator, the oligarch who threatens to destroy all that the US and her allies represent which of course is, freedom, equality & civil liberty all wrapped up in the Democracy shiny paper and tied with the exceptionalist ribbon.

Next the false flag to engender fear, terror and to foment sectarian strife. The support of a “legitimate” organic, indigenous “revolution” conveniently emerging in tandem with US ambitions for imposing their model of governance upon a target nation. The arming of “freedom fighters”, the securing of mercenary additions to these manufactured proxy forces.  All this is sold in the name of freedom and democracy to a public that is already in a state of anxiety and insecurity, lacking in judgement or insight into any other reality but that of their “abuser”.

The NGO Complex Deployment

Finally, the Humanitarians are deployed.  The forces for “good”, the vanguard of integrity and ethical intervention.  The power that offers all lost souls a stake-holding in the salvation of sovereign nations that have lost their way and need rescuing.  A balm for a damaged soul, to know they can leave their doubts and fears in such trustworthy hands as HRW, Amnesty International, they can assuage their deep sense of guilt at the suffering being endured by the people of far flung nations because they can depend upon the NGOs to provide absolution with minimal effort on their part.  They don’t realise that NGOs are an integral part of their abuser’s apparatus, operating on the leash of neo-colonialist financing and influence.  NGOs provide the optic through which the abuser will allow the victim to perceive their world and once absorbed into this flawed prism the victim’s own cognitive dissonance will ensure they do not attempt a jail break.

In this state of oppressed consciousness the victim accepts what they are told.  They accept that the US can sell cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia that obliterate human beings and lay waste to essential civilian infrastructure in Yemen.  They accept that the US financially, ideologically & militarily supports the illegal state of Israel and provides the arsenal of experimental weapons that maim and mutilate children and civilians on a scale that is unimaginable.  They accept that a crippling blockade of the already impoverished and starving nation of Yemen is “necessary” to resolve the issues of sectarian divisions that only exist in the minds of their Congressional abusers.

The majority of Americans accept mass murder under the pretext of the right to protect, because their ability to form rational and reasoned opinions has been engineered out of them.  This is now the definition of US exceptionalism.  It is their ability to manipulate the world into accepting their lawlessness and global hegemony agenda.  In seeking to impose its own image upon our world the US has drifted so far from its founding principles, one wonders how they will ever return to them.  They have employed a recognised form of torture to ensure capitulation to their mission of world domination which entails the mental, physical and spiritual torture of target civilian populations.

In conclusion, the US has indeed achieved exceptionalism.  The US has become an exceptional global executioner and persecutor of Humanity.  Imperialism is a euphemism for the depths of abuse the US is inflicting upon the people of this world.

Our only hope is to break the cycle of abuse with empathy for the victim and with appreciation for the years of brainwashing that precedes their agonizing passive-aggressive apathy towards crimes being committed in “their name”.

This was an email I received recently from one courageous young American girl whose epiphany is testament to the resilience and survival instinct of the human spirit.

“My name is Caroline and I am a 22 year old US citizen. I only fairly recently discovered the truth about Empire/NATO’s activities in Syria and Libya and so many other countries (thanks to writers like Andre Vltchek, Cory Morningstar, Forrest Palmer). I am sickened when I remember that I signed some of those Avaaz petitions and I feel horrified at knowing that I have Syrian and Libyan blood on my hands. I want to believe that I’m not “really” guilty because I really thought (as I had been told) that I was not doing something bad at the time, but still, what I did contributed to the suffering of those people and I want to do something to atone in at least some small way, even though I probably can’t “make up” for what I did or erase my crime.

If it’s not too much trouble, could you please tell me what you think I should do, if there is anything?” 

She deserves an answer…

 

***

Author Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her blog The Wall Will Fall.

 

Related Podcast:

A dystopia in real time

Posted on by
2

By Dave Lefcourt

Source: OpEdNews.com

Let’s come straight out with it, to the US government, We the People are the enemy.

If you’ve read John W. Whitehead [1] regularly you’re already aware of that.

The tell-tale sign: surveillance camera’s seemingly everywhere. On most street intersections, photo enforced streets, roads by all schools, airports, railway stations, toll roads and all commercial stores.

Then there’s the ubiquitous, “If you see something, say something” heard in Metro subway stations, airports and railway stations. It’s portrayed as a necessary given for our “safety and protection” make us fearful of would be terrorists and other bad guys out to harm us.

But really ALL meant for the authorities to keep close tabs on us everywhere. Combined with electronic surveillance of our cell phones and computers-whether on or off-and the NSA pretty much has us under its constant surveillance.

Of course it’s all against the 4th Amendments strictures against “unreasonable searches and seizures” and without “probable cause” making it all illegal. Yet most Americans apparently don’t care taking the foolish “I haven’t done anything wrong so why worry about it” mantra.

It appears the public has been so propagandized and indoctrinated, they’ve accepted these illegal surveillance intrusions into their everyday lives.

But think about it: If the public absolutely objected to their governments spying on them these illegal intrusions could be severely curtailed, limited only to court ordered warrants for specific instances of suspected criminal activities-as legally specified in the Constitution.

The reason the government has become so paranoid of the people? They know we’re the many and they’re the few and if our police and military realized they were protecting and defending the indefensible, against the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold, against all enemies, foreign and domestic, the party would all be over.

And that necessary “revolution” returning the government to and for the people could soon be realized.

Then all our illegal wars and occupations ended, the military downsized to defend only against an imminent attack, the billions spent on unnecessary defense industry weaponry eliminated, nuclear weapons eliminated and peace in the world realized.

So our government knows its biggest enemy is its own people, not terrorists, Russia, China, Iran or North Korea.

It’s us, you and me they’re really afraid of. That’s why they take the measures they do. Why they infiltrate peaceful protests and demonstrations with agent provocateurs who initiate violence giving the authorities the pretext to interfere and shut it down. It’s how “Occupy” was shut down in 2011 with government authorities acting in coordination nationwide.

It’s why the National Guard was called out to intervene in the summer of 2014 after police shot an unarmed Michael Brown in the streets of Ferguson, MO. when citizen protests erupted.

Now protests at political conventions are cordoned off far from the convention sites fearing a repeat of the protests and demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention.

It’s also why the military draft was eliminated specifically to get a compliant, all volunteer army of draft age men and women who were a significant part of those 1968 protests.

All governments propagandize and indoctrinate its people. In the US it starts with standing to recite the “Pledge of Allegiance” in our schools, the standing for the “Star Spangled Banner”, saluting the flag, belief in our “supposed” free elections, extolling the military as our “heroes”, the Navy a “force for good”, military flyovers at professional athletic events, spotlighting service men and women in the stands eliciting a standing ovation, playing “America the Beautiful” during the 7th inning stretch.

It’s all part of the indoctrination process.

When this past season professional quarterback Colin Kaepernick was ostracized refusing to stand for the national anthem before an NFL game he was condemned in the MSM as un-American, ungrateful and a traitor to his country. Though what he did was not illegal and protected under the Constitution.

Standing for and singing the national anthem is voluntary and not required. But long standing tradition has made it “appear” as required behavior.

It’s hard to know whether Americans are the most propagandized people ever. We certainly are obedient and compliant people accepting illegal government intrusions and generally accepting the governments explanations (propaganda?) of all significant national and international incidents.

It’s almost certain the government knows with a population generally compliant to its strictures it can and will do anything with impunity knowing it will not be held accountable for its actions.

That’s why “official” Washington represents the most dangerous, rogue state entity in the world and seen by most people worldwide as the primary threat to peace in the world.

Yet to most Americans we’re the beacon on the hill embracing freedom and democracy.

In America “official” lies have been taken on a whole new meaning, become the natural order of things; a dystopia in real time.

[1] John W. Whitehead, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People” and “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State”

Orwell, Freud, and the Syrian Ruse

Posted on by
3

Reality by other means

By Jason Hirthler

Source: Dissident Voice

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

— Karl Rove speaking to a small group of reporters at a cocktail party in 2004…… printed in the Washington Post

The adjective ‘Orwellian’ is so overused mostly because it is so incredibly apt on a daily basis. George Orwell’s basic concept reflects a simple tenet of propaganda: the thing you are hiding is often hid behind its exact opposite. Orwell expressed this concept in 1984 with the government slogans, “War is Peace,” “Ignorance is Strength,” and “Freedom is Slavery.” The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud evidently suggested something similar about human nature: that to discover our true human nature, we need merely to reverse society’s moral maxims: if a commandment forbids adultery, it’s because we want to commit it. In other words, for both Orwell and Freud, we often disguise what we are doing behind claims that we are doing the opposite. We aren’t committing adultery; we’re practicing fidelity. We aren’t precipitating war; we’re pressing for peace. We aren’t seeking our own self-interest; we’re doing it all for others.

When applied to U.S. propaganda, the formula is revealing. To discover what your government is hiding, just reverse the media narrative. If the papers all say Russia is an imperial aggressor, it’s likely because Washington is. If the news networks say that Assad is a murderous monster, it’s likely because the groups we’re backing are. If the mainstream says Communism is a dire threat, it’s likely because capitalism is a dire threat. All of these examples are demonstrably true.

What confuses many readers is the fact that the first premise–that Russia, Assad, and Communism are all threats–usually has an element of truth to it, though not to the degree that it is portrayed. And so intelligent propaganda doesn’t simply traffic in lies, but rather half-truths, distortions, and omissions that themselves further distort a narrative. It is this sophisticated blend of fact, fiction, hyperbole and omission that makes propaganda so difficult to unpack for the average reader, who has little time, inclination, and practice in deciphering state-directed doctrine.

Reversing Reality

If Freud was correct, then we tend to publicly deny our greatest desires when they run counter to prevailing morality, shielding our base wishes behind a curtain of rectitude, even as we quietly pursue them. The modern instances of this in government are boundless. Example: FISA legitimates the surveillance it was designed to deter. Example: Congress abets the executive it was created to check. Example: ‘Defense’ becomes the aggression it was devised to defend against. Example: Healthcare becomes a bureaucracy built on denial of care in the name of its provision. Example. Journalism: the adversarial role of the fourth estate, becomes the adversary of the truth it was intended to protect. Journalists transcribe the diktats of power. Like the senators that notarize the mandates of the executive. Like the federal agents that entrap citizens in order to protect them. Like the drones that destroy lives to save them. Like the citizens who signal liberal values in support of imperial conquerors. Like the social justice warriors who legislate the intolerance they seek to eradicate. It seems to be a socio-political reality that the forcible assertion of one value guarantees a renaissance of its antitheses. Or is it that we forcibly assert a moral value to disguise a flowering of vice?

The process of turning a story into its opposite is fairly straightforward. If the U.S. is aggressively violating human rights, it needs to be rewritten as a defender of human rights. What this means in practice is switching the roles each of the actors assume in the narrative. Heroes become villains; villains become heroes; and victims are either genuine victims or villains depicted as martyrs for a righteous cause. This requires a good bit of romanticizing your side, demonizing the enemy, and eulogizing the victims. And then, as the author of Mein Kampf recommended, keep it simple. Your side wants one thing: peace. Your enemy wants one thing: war. And the victims want one thing: freedom.

Exhibit A

Take Syria as a recent example. The media narrative states that the U.S. and its freedom-loving allies have cautiously backed a loose confederation of rebels who rose up against Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad in 2011. In actuality, the U.S. and its freedom-hating allies have incautiously backed a loose confederation of foreign terrorists who have been paid to overthrow the elected Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Only occasionally is the real backstory hinted at, which includes weakening Shia strongholds and destabilizing independent states in the region.

In turning the truth around to justify its war of aggression, the state and its supplicant media seized upon a handful of facts as the bedrock on which it constructed a false historical narrative. Which is what you’d expect from the Orwell-Freud model. And so…Are there elements of Syrian civil society that protested Assad in 2011? Absolutely. Are there actual Syrians fighting against Assad now? Sure. Are there elements of corruption and repression in Assad’s history? Definitely. But each of these truths are used to disguise the much larger facts of unmitigated U.S. aggression.

Upon this foundation, the typical narrative is constructed. The United States government is romanticized as a virtuous mediator concerned with supporting the freedom fighters and helping them achieve the freedoms they’ve yearned for. Assad is demonized as the autocratic mass murderer who repeatedly denies these freedoms, and tortures thousands before destroying the bodies. And the Syrian people, engine of the largest refugee crisis since World War Two, are shown as the valiant victims of the war, particularly in Aleppo, where the destruction of the city in an attempt to uproot the terrorist army is leveraged to milk as much emotional content from the war as possible and to further cement Assad’s reputation as a moral monster.

The MSM didn’t stop there. It followed with a series of attempts to further demonize Assad. A massive cache of photos purportedly detailing “regime” torture. This cache was delivered from somebody named “Caesar,” a defector not unlike the fake defector, “Curveball” from the run-up to the Iraq War. Twice false flags have been utilized to claim that the evil optometrist in Damascus has in a fit of pique demanded that innocent Syrians be sprayed with chemical weapons. Now a “crematorium” where Assad supposedly cremates all the Syrian citizens he is slaughtering (supposedly because he hates humanity so much). It doesn’t particularly matter if these stories eventually unravel when evidence is shown to be lacking. The damage is done to the psyche of readers and listeners, who absorb the media reports with the uncritical acceptance of animals entering an abattoir.

The takfiri mercenaries brought in by the West to topple Assad are likewise romanticized by the press. Instead of labeling the terrorists we backed as extremists, the New York Times peddled a story that they were moderates. Beheading of children, tossing gays from rooftops, using citizens as human shields, staging rescue operations, and many other atrocities failed to prevent the media from intransigently pushing this storyline.

No Quick Fix

As you can see, there is no shortage of opportunities to apply the Orwellian label to modern reportage. That said, I’m not suggesting that the authors at The New York Times and the Washington Post are all conniving propagandists consciously preparing deceitful reportage. For every Edward Bernays, there are a dozen Brian Williams. Often, they have simply internalized the values of the institution that employs them. They recognize, perhaps consciously or subconsciously, that their careers depend on their willingness to follow a particular narrative. And they make their choice, rationalizing themselves into a clean conscience.

Which is no surprise. The human species could give a master class in self-deception. And there are psychological needs that appear more urgent for us than truth. Namely, the need to feel good about oneself and believe in one’s tribe. Set aside the need to situate the world in a comprehensible narrative, the need to fit in with one’s peer group, and the need to do meaningful work and self-actualize in society. The point is that all of these needs are undermined by the counter-narratives of the left. Counter-narratives destabilize our cleanly delineated understanding of the world; they often ostracize us from our peer group; and they threaten our ability to contribute to society in a manner approved of by society (i.e., generally contributing to the machinery of consumerism). Who has time for a reconstruction of one’s worldview, especially if it might lead to social alienation? This is why just throwing facts at heavily propagandized people doesn’t often work. There are other forces in play, which may remind us that politics is often little more than a value signaling device for human beings.

So most of us, whatever inklings we may receive of an alternative reality, will settle for doing nothing untoward, recusing ourselves from political debates, and hewing as closely to inoffensive blandishments in our speech as we can. (The only other major path is to adopt the ideologically bankrupt cop-out of lesser evilism and rant about how horrible the other party is. This provides the frisson of feeling at one with the herd, but does nothing to improve society.) In other words, we shackle ourselves to political groupthink and play the role of the conscientious centrist like any good straight man would. We have no time for the revolutionary urgency of the disenfranchised. It was Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who argued that people don’t want intellectual freedom, but rather to be told what to believe. Only then will they be happy. Otherwise, we ruin our peace of mind through choice paralysis or some variety of existential angst, or through a lack of religious faith that leaves us with no guiding myth to sustain us. Given all these apolitical factors that inform whether or not one challenges the received narrative, is it any surprise that mental slavery and ignorance are as prevalent today as in Orwell’s time?

Accelerating Capital: Completed Nihilism and The Indebted Man

Posted on by
Reply

 

By S.C. Hickman

Source: Southern Nights

In his book Data Trash (1993), Arthur Kroker writes that in the field of digital acceleration, more information means less meaning, because meaning slows info circulation. In the sphere of the digital economy, the faster information circulates, the faster value is accumulated. But meaning slows down this process, as meaning needs time to be produced and to be elaborated and understood. So the acceleration of the info-flow implies the elimination of meaning.

—Franco Berardi, And: Phenomenology of the End

The pursuit of profit is the engine of Capital, accumulation is its outcome. Profit is from the Latin profectus, meaning  “advance, increase, success, progress,” out of which the need to benefit or provide income derived. This sense that progress and success drive the need for profit, that the goal of capitalism is this abstract movement toward increasing and advancing one’s success in the world has always been at the heart of the competitive spirit. To compete or strive against others for the foremost place, this sense of the competitive spirit that has been with us at least since the first Greek Olympics. The term itself “compete” is etymologically to enter or be put in rivalry with an other,” from Middle French compéter “be in rivalry with” (14c.), or directly from Late Latin competere “strive in common,” in classical Latin “to come together, agree, to be qualified,” later, “strive together,” from com “with, together” (com-) + petere “to strive, seek, fall upon, rush at, attack”.  A sense of violent taking and war against all comers for the top prize, the best or foremost place in the Sun.

As Berardi reminds us in the old industrial economy described by Marx, the goal of production was already the valorization of capital, through the extraction of surplus- -value from labour. But, in order to produce value, the capitalist was still obliged to exchange useful things, so he was obliged to produce cars and books and bread.

When the referent is cancelled, when profit is made possible by the mere circulation of money, the production of cars, books and bread become superfluous. The accumulation of abstract value is made possible through the subjection of human beings to debt, and through predation on existing resources. The destruction of the real world starts from this emancipation of valorization from the production of useful things, and from the self-replication of value in the financial field. The emancipation of value from the referent leads to the destruction of the existing world. This is exactly what is happening under the cover of the so-called financial crisis, which is not a crisis at all, but the transition to the self-referential financial capitalism. (A: 125-126)

Financial capitalism is no longer the pursuit of profit in the Greek or Latin sense I described. No longer is there a sense of the old value of the pursuit of excellence or an ill-defined sense of virtue. Rather there is no value at all in the outward sense, but rather value has itself lost its luster and only the sheer accumulation of abstract value in the form of debt remains. But what is debt? What exactly is this debt economy of financial capitalism. And, most of all, how does the spirit of capitalism in itself bring about the death of meaning (i.e., nihilism). If as many suspect we are in the moment when Capital is completing this process of nihilism, what does that entail for humanity?

As Berardi said in a recent essay,

The colonization of time has been a fundamental issue in the modern history of capitalist development: the anthropological mutation that capitalism produced in the human mind and in daily life has, above all, transformed the perception of time. But we are now leaping into the unknown—digital technologies have enabled absolute acceleration, and the short-circuiting of attention time. As info-workers are exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that cannot be dealt with according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge, acceleration leads to an impoverishment of experience. More information, less meaning. More information, less pleasure.

This sense that there is a connection between time, language, and capitalism that is playing out the endgame of nihilism in our generation is foremost in this equation. At the forefront of this is the notion of debt, and that we are entering an era of a new Guilt Culture based on an infinite and unpayable debt. A future imploding into a black hole of guilt and shame that will leave us and our planet bankrupt and without sense or value.

I’ve written of debt in other essays: here and here in which I follow Deleuze and Guattari down the rabbit hole. Alberto Toscano in an excellent essay on Maurizio Lazzarato’s book The Making of the Indebted Man talks of the indebted this way:

Artificially kept alive until they repay outstanding debts, they stalk the landscape of commodity refuse, scavenging, salvaging, recycling to shave off infinitesimal portions of their liabilities, living-dead labour both unproductive and profitable. Telescoping hi-tech financial expropriation and the lo-tech labour in the breakers yards of global capital, the indeadted embody a moment in which subjection to capitalist imperatives subsumes life to the point that it trespasses into death…2

Thanatropic capitalism feeding off the living dead, the zombies of a system that has become total predation on human life and the planet.

In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari explain their sense of our current debt regimes:

Society is not exchangist, the socious is inscriptive: not exchanging but marking bodies, which are part of the earth. We have seen that the regime of debt is the unit of alliance, and alliance is representation itself. It is alliance that codes the flows of desire and that, by means of debt, creates for man a memory of words (paroles). It is alliance that represses the great, intense, mute filiative memory, the germinal influx as the representative of the noncoded flows of desire capable of submerging everything. It is debt that articulates the alliances with the filiations that have become extended, in order to form and to forge a system in extension (representation) based on the repression of nocturnal intensities. The alliance-debt answers to what Nietzsche described as humanity’s prehistoric labor: the use of the cruelest mnemotechnics, in naked flesh, to impose a memory of words founded on the ancient biocosmic memory. That is why it is so important to see debt as a direct consequence of the primitive inscription process, instead of making it – and the inscriptions themselves – into an indirect means of universal exchange. (p. 185)

For Deleuze and Guattari it is Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals that teaches us the truth of debt. In fact it was Nietzsche, and Nietzsche alone who provided the first hint of a theory that the “primitive socious” was inherently a “problem of inscription, of coding, of marking…” (p. 190). As they’ll state it:

Man must constitute himself through repression of the intense germinal influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every attempt at collectivity. But at the same time, how is a new memory to be created for man – a collective memory of the spoken word and of alliances that declines alliances with the extended filiations, that endows him with faculties of resonance and retention, of selection and detachment, and that effects this way of coding the flow of desire as a condition of the socious? The answer is simple – debt – open, mobile, and finite blocks of debt: the extraordinary composite of the spoken voice, the marked body, and the enjoying eye.” (AO: 190)

This sense that in financial capitalism is enforcing a cruel mimetic experiment of instilling and inscribing the Word of Capital upon the body socious; and, that we have reverted to the primitive tattooing systems by inscribing of the social body through the cruelest measures, imposing the harshest words of power over the flesh and blood of millions of indebted humans to suck every last ounce of desire from their zombie lives. This is the outcome of our completed nihilism. Capital as a machine of death and consumption, feeding off the desires of the indebted. If capitalism is defined by social production that passes through axioms of abstract quantities, flows of money and labor that are the real relations of alliance and filiation, rather than codes. Codes have become private matters, searches for meaning. This split between production and reproduction constitutes a very particular affective relation as well, which Deleuze and Guattari summarize as, “the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety. These two affects, cynicism and piety, correspond to the division of social production and reproduction. In the first, in the axioms of capital, we have a social order that reproduces itself without meaning or code. Axioms merely set up a relation between two quantities, a flow of labor and a flow of money. One does believe in, or justify, the rate at which labor is exchanged for money—it simply is. Cynicism is an affect attuned to the indifference of the axioms that produce and reproduce social life, the recognition that the flows of the market mean nothing, have no justification, than their brute effectivity. (AO)

As Nietzsche would say,

All the stupidity and the arbitrariness of the laws, all the pain of initiations, the whole perverse apparatus of repression and education, the red-hot irons, and the atrocious procedures have only this meaning: to breed man, to mark him in his flesh, to render him capable of alliance, to form him within the debtor-credit relation, which both sides turns out to be a matter of memory – a memory straining toward the future. (On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 190)

This sense of debt binding us to a system of mnemonics and cruelty, an organized and ritualistic memory system based on marking and pain – inscription of the collective socious as a system of obligation and guilt, debt and the endless deferral of payment into the future. The ancestors require sacrifice and payment, blood and guts. Alliances against this filiation must be formed, struggles against the dead, defensive gestures: the infinite deferral of debt beyond the vampirism of the dead. This whole triangular process of voice – inscription – eye becomes in our time the “spectacle of punishment”: “as primitive justice, territorial representation has foreseen everything” (p. 191).

Even while we are punished and inscribed, ritually sacrificed to the modern Moloch and his retinue of High Priests and Financiers, the Oligarchs of the World we discover that Capital no longer needs to produce visible commodities, no longer needs to produce useful goods for its wage slaves, it can now bypass us, bypass our needs, our desires, our dreams for its own infinite and digital accelerated world of pure circulation and profit. As Berardi attests,

In the sphere of the financial economy, the acceleration of financial circulation and valorization imply the elimination of the concrete usefulness of products (no matter if material or immaterial, industrial or semiotic). The process of realization of capital, namely the exchange of goods with money, was obviously slowing the pace of monetary accumulation. The virtual technology has created the possibility of skipping this slow passage through concrete meaningful useful goods. (A: 126)

Invisible, immaterial, the new financial economy runs at the speed of light in an absolute timeworld, where profit is based on the virtual circulation of abstract value (not even money, but algorithms, electronic impulses) that has been accelerated and sped up to the point of totally escaping the possibility of human understanding and— obviously—of political control.(A: 126)

Value does not emerge from a physical relationship between work and things, but rather from infinite self-replication of virtual exchanges of nothing with nothing, whose outcome is more money. Digital abstraction leads to the virtualization of the physical act of meeting, and the manipulation of things. These new levels of abstraction do not only concern the labour process, they tend to encompass every space of social life. Therefore, digitalization and financialization are transforming the very fabric of the social body, and inducing mutations in it. (A: 127)

Berardi tells us to look at the reality of debt, look at the awful effects of submission, impoverishment and exploitation that debt is provoking in the body of society. Debt is a weapon against social autonomy, a transformation of money into a blackmail. Young people are obliged to borrow money from the bank in order to pay for their studies, as the public system of education has been destroyed by the Neoliberal fanatics, and private school is costing more and more. As soon as they come out from the university they have to start paying back their debt, and they are obliged to accept any kind of precarious job, and to suffer any kind of blackmail. (A: 128)

For such creatures the future can only be bleak and full of misery and endless years of untold grief as they strive to pay their debt. Many forgo such a Sisyphean project and commit suicide. Others mentally and spiritual die inside and live out the remainder of their lives as zombies under this terrible debt system. In our time whole nations have been blackmailed into this system of debt as we ponder the EU. This same process has already happened to much of the Third World nations for years under a predatory capitalism well documented by Naomi Kline in The Shock Doctrine among other works of like caliber.

Commenting on this dark scenario Berardi says “Money, which was supposed to be the measure of value, has been turned into a tool for psychic and social subjugation. The metaphysical debt is linking money, language and guilt. Debt is guilt, and as guilt it is entering the domain of unconscious, and shapes language according to structures of power and submission.” (A: 128)

The notion that our age old systems of power and coercion have migrated into the digital age and brought about a new guilt culture to subdue and channel the desires of nations into the profit bins of a minority of Oligarchs seems ludicrous at first glance as if this were some nefarious planned and intentional affair. But is it? Is anyone or anything behind such a sinister system of slavery and control? Is this a conspiracy of madness against the human species? Berardi will liken this process not to some power behind the scenes, but rather to the inherent power of language itself and how we for two hundred years have obliterated the hold language had on the referent:

This process of de-referentialization of language—emancipation of the linguistic sign from the referent—which has been the mark of poetic and artistic experimentation with language during the twentieth century, shows an interesting similarity with the transformation in the relation between economy and monetary exchange.

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon announced dramatic changes in economic policy. Particularly he ended the Bretton Woods international monetary system. The Bretton Woods system, created at the end of World War II, involved fixed exchange rates with the US dollar as the key currency—but also a role for gold linked to the dollar at $35/ounce. The system began to falter in the ‘60s because of an excess of dollars flowing out of the US which foreign central banks had to absorb. All of this was ended unilaterally by Nixon’s decision. After a brief attempt to create a modified fixed exchange rate system, the world moved to flexible rates.

Breaking the Bretton Woods’s agreements, the American President declared that the dollar has no referent, and its value is decided by an act of language. This was the starting point of the long lasting process of financialization of the economy, based on the emancipation of the financial dynamic from any conventional standard and from any economic reality. The Neoliberal offensive started in that very moment of arbitrary assertion of the value of the dollar outside the conventional standard. The neoliberal school of the Chicago Boys said “money is creating reality” like the Symbolist poets had said: “words are creating reality”. (A: 128-130)

Words had lost touch with their referent, the natural world and environment within which we all live and have our habitus. The disappearance of the natural and the virtualization of language produced the effects we see in the world today. We are the product of a process that undermined the ancient metaphysical systems of the world that guided primitive, feudal and early modern societies. In our bid to overcome the religious and metaphysical systems that held us in their clutches we also lost the world, our world. We lost the natural in life and ourselves, lost touch with the signs that kept us anchored to the natural environment that our brain had been tied to for sex and survival from the beginnings of the human. We ourselves in our bid to transcend the animal and inhuman in ourselves became non-human. We have brought upon ourselves the semantic apocalypse we see all around us. This is the guilt we bare and the debt we will have to pay, not the tributary debt to those few dark controllers who seek to lord it over us.

It was Jean Baudrillard who wrote in the Symbolic Exchange and Death, where he announces that the economy has abandoned the old law of determination of value, and that the referent for linguistic and economic exchange was dissolved:

“The reality principle coincided with a determinate phase of the law of value. Today the entire system is fluctuating in indeterminacy, all of reality absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and of simulation. It is now a principle of simulation, and not of reality, that regulates social life. The finalities have disappeared; we are now engendered by models… The entire strategy of the system lies in this hyperreality of floating values. It is the same for money and theory as for the unconscious. Value rules according to an ungraspable order: the generation of models, the indefinite chaining of simulation.” (Baudrillard 1976)

We have become mere simulacra of our former selves, simulated creatures in a simulated world. Bound and ensnared in a world of debt, controlled by an algorithmic system of digital hypersystems we live out our lives under the guilt of a system we ourselves helped create. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We know this. We deny this. We seek solace in escape and fantasy worlds of mediatainment that even further suck dry our desires and channel our hopes and dreams into a fantasia of tomorrows that will never come.

For Deleuze & Guattari this primitive system of memory and pain will enter the stage of religion as a debt to be paid ending in the death of Christ as the payer of all debts; and, yet, it will not end there, for debt can never be repaid, so it forms the kernel of the modern State: “the new machine, and the new apparatus of repression” (AO: 192). This system of endless debt: “that finds itself taken into an immense machinery that renders the debt infinite and no longer forms anything but one and the same crushing fate: the aim now is to preclude pessimistically, once and for all, the prospect of discharge; the aim now is to make the glance recoil disconsolately from an iron impossibility. The Earth becomes a madhouse.” (AO: 192)

  1. Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. And: Phenomenology of the End. Semiotext(e) (November 6, 2015) (A) (Page 126).
  2. Toscano, Alberto. Alien Mediations: Critical Remarks on The Making of the Indebted Man. The New Reader #1, 2017

Non-Alignment and Dissent to Challenge US-Russia-China’s New World Order

Posted on by
Reply

By Gilbert Mercier

(News Junkie Post)

In groups of people there are always bullies who feel entitled, for no particular reason, to want more than the rest and to dominate the others in complete disregard of the common good. Fortunately for convivial people, bullies tend to have the psychological subtlety of dominant male gorillas who beat loudly on their chests and fight over food and females. Therefore bullies often annihilate each other. The more serious social problems occur when they collaborate to gang up on others. A primal impulse to dominate is the motivation for the insatiable quest for wealth and power, and it is a curse of the human condition. Altruism and the common global good are not why big world powers like the United States, Russia and China try to impose their rule on smaller countries; raw geopolitical dominance is the reason, and this is similar to the British, French and Spanish imperial-colonial era when countries were arbitrarily determined on maps drawn in London, Paris or Madrid. Our challenge is to break away, as countries and individuals, from the cynical and degrading notion, “to the victor belongs the spoils,” which seems to govern most behaviors. Our esteemed colleague Dady Chery initiated this important discussion in her essay, “Other People’s Countries.” To extract ourselves from the despair of corporate neocolonialism, courtesy of what looks like a new grand-bargaining era between the US, Russia and China, where other nations’ resources are assigned to spheres of influences, a two-fold solution should be considered: first, revamp the nonaligned movement (NAM); second, mount a concerted and systematic dissent, and ultimately a worldwide rebellion, against the global ruling elite apparatus.

Nonaligned movement redux

The nonaligned movement has to be understood in the context of the cold war. Even though most leaders of its founding nations were Marxists or neo-Marxists, the movement was clearly an effort to curtail the influence of the Soviet Union. The NAM officially started in Belgrade in 1961. It was founded by Tito, Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno, and Nkrumah, then the respective leaders of Yugoslavia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Ghana. The intention was for those countries, in joining forces with each other, to distance themselves from the spheres of influence of both the US and USSR. The nonaligned doctrine was probably best defined by a champion of the movement, Fidel Castro, who said that the organization’s goal was to guarantee “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of non-aligned countries in their struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great powers.”

The NAM still exists and includes 120 members, but it has largely lost its impact and forgotten its core ideology of presenting a united front against the dominant economic powers or permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). One can easily argue that the creation of BRICS, which includes the superpowers Russia and China, in addition to Brazil, India and South Africa, has helped to undermine the NAM. The reality that all NAM nations should consider from the recent events in Syria and North Korea, is that a triumvirate deal was apparently reached  despite some unconvincing rhetoric of outrage, and that Russia and China, respectively, can throw their allies unceremoniously under the proverbial bus. One can easily speculate that Iran and Venezuela, both targets for regime-change by Washington, have learned their lesson and seriously doubt that Moscow and Beijing would valiantly rescue them from US attack.

US-Russia-China: corporate imperialism’s new world order

The Alternative Right in the West fancies itself as being nationalist and therefore anti-globalist. Its discourse is so sketchy and inarticulate, however, that it fails to acknowledge that one cannot be anti-globalist without also being anti-capitalist. Capitalism, and especially supra-national capitalism, is a problem that the AltRight movement seems unable to identify. In the ideological fog of the nationalist right, globalism is wrongly identified as being a leftist notion. After a succession of meaningless palace intrigues, the incidental tenant of the White House has become an empty suit tailored from the flag of corporate imperialism. Gone are the vague populist promises of less US interventionism. A father-figure to represent the common man, a mad-dog general, and an oil-man diplomat have been given carte blanche by the military-industrial complex.

What deals were made with Russia to greenlight the April 7, 2017 US missile strike in Syria? Could it have been: if you promise to lift the economic sanctions, we’ll let you bomb Bashar al-Assad to boost Trump in the polls and, to sweeten the deal, Exxon will get favored treatment in Russian oil-extraction ventures. The US no longer philosophically clashes with China and Russia. Despite their communist heritage, the latter have more or less scrapped any remotely Marxist principle from their governing ideology. Just like in the West, Russia and China have their class of oligarchs. As long as all the world’s elite agree on how to carve the global pie, there’s no reason to fight. In recent weeks, the number of inquiries about World War III have skyrocketed on search engines worldwide. Is the fear justified or is this a psychological operation to force people into despair and submission? Would China retaliate against the US, Japan and South Korea if the US would break the taboo of using a nuclear bomb against China’s ally North Korea, or would Russia risk World War III in case of a joint attack against Iran by the US and Israel? Probably not.

The virtue of dissent and rebellion

Superpowers tend to call independent nations “rogue.” This is the spirit of nonalignment. Once in a while, a small nation like Cuba or Vietnam dares to give an imperialist geopolitical bully like Spain, the US, Japan, or France a bloody nose. Bullies fear even the slightest resistance. The little guy does have a chance, against all odds. Oppression can be overcome. The fear of war, and continuously fabricated threat of terrorism in everybody’s daily life, is a good way for government to get a society to accept policing and militarization, and continue to feed the voracious beast that is the global military-industrial complex. The state and corporate controlled media’s various flavors of propaganda serve only to induce passivity and the acceptance of a brutal world order. These can only be overcome with dissent, global rebellion and the refusal to become shadows of what we once were; the refusal to become humans without basic decency, self respect and love for our neighbors; the refusal to become humans without quality; the refusal to settle for survival in a cannibalistic world order.

 

Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photograph one by Thomas Ricker; photograph two from the archive of Zeinab Mohamed; composites three and five by Mark Rain; photograph four by David Shankbone; composite six by New 1lluminati; and photograph seven by Joe Brusky.

Manufactured Reality: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Posted on by
3

(Editor’s note: though this article was originally published in 2008 it remains sadly relevant. We’ve appended it with a more recent video from Truthstream Media which needs to be seen and shared.)

Source: Global Research

In order to force a new reality upon any targeted populace, the masters of the universe follow a simple strategy – they immediately make things twice as bad as they intend to keep them, only to take one step back after a short while, so that the new manufactured reality will be easier to accept.  This strategy holds constant from the manipulation of oil prices to the military strategy to rule the world by force.

In the terror war, nuclear terrorism has become the weapon of both first choice and last resort for American war planners.  It was more important to create the impression that nuclear war was imminent than it was to convince the world that we intended to use nuclear weapons as our ace in the hole.  The world had to be terrorized into believing that our insane cowboy president was about to unleash nuclear war upon the world, so that it could be held over the people’s heads.  The world had to be shocked and awed by American military supremacy into submitting to Bush’s demands.

America took two giant steps forward militarily, intending in the end to take one step back from the precipice of actual global thermonuclear war, to a more limited approach that only called for a limited use of “tactical” nukes.  A two-track approach to the war was undertaken; one path leading to immediate global nuclear war and another “democratic” approach, which put-off the use of nuclear weapons until some future action, in order to create unlimited opportunities for subversion where America’s full military might could be brought to bear upon more specific targets.  (Have they already been used?)  http://webwarper.net/ww/~av/www.redress.cc/global/dhalpin20080517

The threat that full-scale nuclear war in the center of the world’s primary energy basket was imminent created a global atmosphere of mortal fear and dread, while covert limited wars were simultaneously pursued.  This was intended to cow both the American people and the people in the targeted countries into submission to presidential dictates. The threat of general nuclear war was used to intimidate the targeted governments into “playing nice” diplomatically, while America interfered in their national affairs, introducing its revolutionary “democratic” form of politics, which included backing extremist groups.

Fear of US nuclear forces provided cover to American agitation in the Middle East region along the lines of “Operation Gladio,” which was used against our own allies in Europe.   In both operations, sympathetic right-wing leaders were found who could be bought, to be groomed by the CIA, to cultivate and organize local opposition groups.  From these agitated groups more violent radicals were found and hired to stage terrorist (“false flag”) attacks upon civilians and the governments, to be blamed upon their local opposition, which were usually actual patriot groups.

The second leg of the neoconservative war doctrine is the spreading of subversion under the cover of implanting democracy by force, and its companion, the spreading of force through democratic means.  Divisive political campaigns in targeted nations (including staged attacks by extremists) were engineered, to split the tribal societies into heavily-armed polarized factions waiting for retribution.

We have this apt description of this divisive American strategy from former Pakistani  ISI agent, turned human rights activist, Khalid Khawaja:

“Many of us call it a battle between East and West, between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian world, but it is neither of these. It is in fact the ruling regimes that want to dictate their will…

Ninety percent of people accept to be ruled, but there always remain some elements who refuse to succumb. They fight for freedom and resist till their last. However, in this conflict of two minorities – those who impose their will and those who resist it – the majority remains the sole victim. Yet people talk about Islam versus Christianity or Judaism. The basic theme remains the same. There is a group of people who want to impose their will, whether they happen to be Christian or Muslim, and there is a group of people who want to resist, and there is a silent majority which is trampled in between.”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GF22Df04.html

Mr. Khawaja continues to delve into the under-discussed cause of the whole war on terror:

“In Afghanistan’s case, a similar game was carried out on a massive scale when Muslim youths from all over the world were brought in by Pakistan and the US [to fight against the Soviets in the 1980s]. They were tools for the empires’ proxy war. The name of jihad was used…it is a question of a state imposing its will. The message is clear: if you are against us, we will kill you and your sympathizers. In this state terrorism, there is no exception, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Pakistan, India, the US or Israel. All are the same.

When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets crushed. When two elephants make love, it is again the grass that gets crushed. Whether states fight with each other or make friendships, it is only the tools who became victims.”

The same deception has been practiced in both Iraq and Afghanistan, to prolong both of those wars until the doctrine could be spread beyond them.  Both countries had been targeted for regime change, but nonetheless, even after the first regime was replaced, the doctrine of creating surrogate militias to promote democratic revolution was still developed in each one, targeting the new regimes.  In each country violent extremist groups, usually identified as “al Qaida related,” were put on the American payroll to fight against US troops and US installed governments.  The hiring and training of these “militia” mercenary groups falls within the recognized definition of treason, “levying war against [the United States].”

That destabilizing doctrine is now being exported into Iran from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where beachheads have been established for a planned assault upon the entire neighborhood. These training centers are terrorist camps, plain and simple.  These are the American trained terrorists who will carry the limited warfare scenario into Iran under cover of the greater threat of nuclear terrorism.  The United States of America is the world’s number one supporter and exporter of terrorism; it always has been.

In order to carry out the Israeli-centric PNAC (Project for a New American Century) terror war plan that they have committed to, Bush and Cheney have doggedly undermined America’s national interests at home and all over the world.  America’s national interest has always been based on advancing liberty and human rights to the whole world, but now, under the neocon plan, these are rights that must be earned.  Bush was sent unto the world to turn reality upon its head.

On a rotating basis, America and Israel took turns slinging threats of nuclear annihilation and libelous invective at Iran and Syria, hyping the threats to intensify the notion that a nuclear attack was becoming imminent.  As Israel and America ramp-up the war-mongering against Iran and Syria, Israel sings out the threats first, then America will provide the chorus and hopefully the highly desired “money shot” afterwards.

As a final machination, to seal America and Israel’s position, the neocon doctrine unlocked the prohibition of the offensive use of nuclear weapons, even in civilian areas.  It is this new free use of nuclear weapon doctrine that is the icing on the cake for those who are plotting to seize the world under the threat of American nuclear terrorism.  Because it is now possible, it is easy to convince us all that our cowboy administration of religious zealots is about to commit an insane act, i.e., unleashing nuclear war to eliminate the possibility of a nuclear war.

Patriotic anti-government voices in this country and in the targeted countries, helped to create a strong public perception that nuclear war was imminent.  Antiwar voices of protest like mine sound a warning to alert the people to the crimes being planned that must be heard, but in so doing, we play into the government scheme by helping to hype the threat.  It is both necessary and natural that patriots arise to defend their nations in the face of American invasion or aggression.  We play a vital role in the planned drama, as it unfolds.  We have convinced the world that Bush and Cheney were insane enough to radiate the Middle Eastern oil fields, in order to steal the world’s oil.  We now may have to convince the world that the crazies themselves are the source of most of the terrorism which we fight.

It is pretty obvious that they really are that insane, but it should be even more obvious that their greedy masters don’t want their world destroyed, they only want to control it.  Why should they actually nuke Iran, if they can persuade the locals to overthrow the regime for us, causing less collateral damage (it would be difficult to operate the Middle East oil facilities, if they were all radioactive).  We have to convince the American people that Bush even though the little dictator is both stupid and insane, the real deciders are neither of those things.  It is their wills which will prevail, meaning that there are other less final, less costly ways to takeover the oil reserves and the pipeline routes.

We have to concentrate on stopping the secret war, without being blinded by the glare of nuclear terrorism.  Exposure of American sponsorship of world terrorism (some of the very “terrorism” we are fighting) must become our top priority.  Legal actions must be taken to stop the illegal support of terrorism upon civilians by our government.  Further legal actions must be taken to separate American foreign policy from Israel, in order to bring the terror war to an end.

Israel has been the primary source for most of the “intelligence” that launched the war on Iraq, the Iranian reactors and hypothetical nuclear weapons, as well as the alleged Syrian reactors.  America turned Israel’s evidence into grounds for waging war, even nuclear war.  They are behind the new push to find other Syrian nuclear facilities as well as the alleged Iranian warhead blueprint.

Israel is behind every military move against Iran that is being brought-up in the press.  It was the first to suggest taking out Iranian reactors, the first to recommend a naval blockade of Iran and an embargo on air flights between Iran and Syria and Lebanon.  American Zionist Congressional leaders gladly took up the torches lit by Israel, to create Israeli security at America’s expense.  A Congressional resolution is awaiting passage in the Senate, which demands that our government carry-out these acts of war, both the naval blockade and the air embargo, House Resolution 1194.

The American people must rise-up in outrage to the terrorists who rule over us and stop the planned escalation, as a first step to de-escalating the war.  It is time for us to take our own two steps forward, to force the aggressors to take one step back and begin to tear-down their manufactured reality.

 

Contact author: peter.chamberlin@yahoo.com

Related Video:

A Monster Eating the Nation

Posted on by
Reply

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

Is there any question now that the Deep State is preparing to expel President Donald Trump from the body politic like a necrotic organ? The Golden Golem of Greatness has floundered pretty badly on the job, it’s true, but his mighty adversaries in the highly politicized federal agencies want him to fail spectacularly, and fast, they have a lot of help from the NY Times / WashPo / CNN axis of hysteria, as well as such slippery swamp creatures as Lindsey Graham.

There are more problematic layers in this matter than in a Moldavian wedding cake. America has been functionally ungovernable for quite a while, well before Trump arrived on the scene. His predecessor managed to misdirect the nation’s attention from the cumulative dysfunction with sheer charm and supernatural placidity — NoDrama Obama. But there were a few important things he could have accomplished as chief exec, such as directing his attorney general to prosecute Wall Street crime (or fire the attorney general and replace him with someone willing to do the job). He could have broken up the giant TBTF banks. He could have aggressively sponsored legislation to overcome the Citizens United SOTUS decision (unlimited corporate money in politics) by redefining corporate “citizenship.” Stuff like that. But he let it slide, and the nation slid with him down a greasy chute of political collapse.

Which we find embodied in Trump, a sort of tragicomic figure who manages to compound all of his weaknesses of character with a childish impulsiveness that scares folks. It is debatable whether he has simply been rendered incompetent by the afflictions heaped on by his adversaries, or if he is just plain incompetent in, say, the 25th Amendment way. I think we’ll find out soon enough, because impeachment is a very long and arduous path out of this dark place.

The most curious feature of the current crisis, of course, is the idiotic Russia story that has been the fulcrum for levering Trump out of the White House. This was especially funny the past week with the episode involving Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak conferring with Trump in the White House about aviation security around the Middle East. The media and the Lindsey Graham wing of the Deep State acted as if Trump had entertained Focalor and Vepar, the Dukes of Hell, in the oval office.

Why do you suppose nations employ foreign ministers and ambassadors, if not to conduct conversations at the highest level with other national leaders? And might these conversations include matters of great sensitivity, that is, classified information? If you doubt that then you have no understanding of geopolitics or history.

The General Mike Flynn story is especially a crack-up. Did he accept a twenty thousand dollar speaking fee from the Russian news outlet RT in his interlude as a private citizen? How does that compare to the millions sucked in by the Clinton Foundation in pay-to-play deal when Madame was secretary of state? Or her six-figure speeches to Goldman Sachs and their ilk. Are private citizens forbidden to accept speaking fees or consulting fees from countries that we are not at war with? I’d like to know how many other alumni of the Bill Clinton, Bush-II and Obama admins have hired themselves out on this basis. Scores and scores, I would bet.

Trump’s adversaries might not get any traction on the Russia story, but they may enrage the rogue elephant Trump enough in the process that he will appear sufficiently incompetent to run him over with the 25th Amendment, and I think that is the plan for now. Of course, there are some jokers in the deck. A really striking one is the story of murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich last July. He was shot in the back on the street outside his apartment one night by persons as yet unknown, and twelve days later over 40,000 DNC emails landed at Wikileaks. His laptop is reportedly in the possession of the DC cops — if it hasn’t been dumped in the Potomac. I’m generally allergic to conspiracy theories, but this looks like an especially ugly story, which might ultimately be clarified if-or-when Julian Assange of Wikileaks ever divulges the source of that data dump. Anyway, the new Special Counsel at the DOJ, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, may have to venture down that dark trail.

One way or another, though, the Deep State is determined to drive Trump from office. In the final rounds of this struggle, Trump might conceivably undertake a sudden swamp-draining operation: the firing of a great many politicized Intelligence Community officers, especially the ones legally culpable for leaking classified information to media — another area that Mr. Mueller could also shine a light on. The colossal security apparatus of this country — especially the fairly new giant NSA — has become a monster eating America. Somebody needs to literally cut it down to size. Perhaps that’s the Deep State’s main motive in moving heaven and earth to dump Trump.

When they do, of course, they are libel to foment an insurrection every bit as ugly as the dust-up that followed the shelling of Fort Sumter. Trump, whatever you think of him — and I’ve never been a fan, to put it mildly — was elected for a reason: the ongoing economic collapse of the nation, and the suffering of a public without incomes or purposeful employment. That part of the common weal is liable to completely whirl down the drain later this year in something like a currency crisis or a depressionary market meltdown engineered by yet another Deep State player, the Federal Reserve. That and the ejection of Trump could coincide with disastrous results.

Washington’s Chaoskeeping in Syria

Posted on by
1

By Martin Berger

Source: New Eastern Outlook

What is the US up to in Syria? – This question is not simply bugging the Arab world, as the whole international community has been trying to find an answer to this puzzle. This matter became especially relevant after the so-called “chemical attack” in the Syrian Governorate of Idlib that occurred on April 4 and the subsequent cruise missile strike against the Al-Shayrat air base that followed a few days later.

The initial false-flag attack, which immediately resulted in a stream of accusations against the Syrian army and the allied Russian troops, was abused by the so-called Syrian Observatory For Human Rights, which has repeatedly participated in spreading fake reports, along with unreasonable and unverified accusations against the Syrian authorities over the years. Then, in accordance with a clearly pre-planned scenario, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini along with France and Britain joined the action thriller, quickly switching the blame mode on. There can be no doubt that a stream of accusations being voiced against Damascus prior to any sort of preliminary investigation, let alone a thorough one, was what the Washington coalition was aiming at.

Why bother trying to provide any sort of evidence, when previously Washington managed to bring down an unwanted regime by simply handing over a tube filled with unknown substances that was handed over to Colin Powell for him to shake it in the air in front of the UN Security Council. Sure, it was a cheap trick but it worked due to the fact that nobody expected Washington to fall so low, using a dubious pretext to invade and destroy Iraq.

Once Washington, London, and Paris went under a wave of public outrage for their baseless acusations against Damascus, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault on April 26, acting in accordance with the instructions that Washington provided him with, rushed to present the world a “declassified report of the French secret services,” that were allegedly convinced that Damascus used sarin nerve agent to launch an attack against the town of Khan Shaykhun.

But one could remind Western powers and Jean-Marc Ayrault in particular that six days before the release of this so-called declassified report Australian doctors fell victims of sarin gas in Iraq. Should we hold Damascus responsible for that attack too? Or would we be better off admitting that ISIS militants have repeatedly used sarin and other nerve gas agents both Syria and Iraq, along with their own drones!

By the way, one would not be out of line by demanding how the blood thirsty ISIS radicals that are supposedly surrounded by the US coalition forces and cut off any outside forms of support are not simply continue using nerve agents from the warehouses that remain in their control, while Damascus has officially destroyed all of its chemical stockpiles which has been officially confirmed by the representatives of international community, but are building their own drones. Any drone production operation is something that can hardly be done in the field, especially under the nose of the vigilant French intelligence services, that chose to get engaged in a propaganda war against Damascus instead. As for their British counterparts, they are sending the so-called White Helmets in the contested areas of Syria without the slightest concern for the security of these propaganda heroes in territories occupied by ISIS.

In short, Washington’s actions and the steps taken by its loyal servants in Paris and London with a theatrical performance with “Assad’s chemical attack” and their unwillingness to conduct a thorough investigation of this incident bears a strong resemblance of the events of 2003 in Iraq, which resulted in in the complete destruction of the country and the emergence of ISIS that Washington is allegedly fighting today.

Therefore, it is hardly worth explaining once again what sort of dangerous developments on both the regional and international levels can be triggered by the repetition of the reckless scenario when Washington first makes a political decision, and then creates a political excuse to go along with it. This is how armed conflicts were started not only in Iraq in 2003, but Yugoslavia and Libya, with the so-called Western humanitarian intervention, and Afghanistan too.

Provocations like the one that occurred in Khan Sheikhoun, without a doubt, demand a professional investigation conducted under the supervision of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) by a team of international experts from various regions of the world. There can be no doubt that such an investigation must be open and transparent. The current attempts to block this approach only confirm the doubts about the sincerity of those who are trying to use the incident to push forward their own agenda, in a bid to bring down the UN Security Council Resolution 2254, going along with a time-tested regime change tactics instead.

As for the United States, it is still very difficult to say what plans Washington can try to pull out in Syria in a bid to bring Damascus down. However, Washington’s policies in the region conducted through the last two decades can be briefly described as #chaoskeeping.