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End of Nuclearism or the End of the World: Utopian Dreams, Dystopian Nightmares

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By Richard Falk

Source: Global Justice in the 21st Century

We are living amid contradictions whether we like it or not, driving expectations about the future toward opposite extremes. Increasingly plausible are fears that the ‘sixth extinction’ will encompass the human species, or at least, throw human society back to a technology of sticks and stones, with a habitat limited to caves and forests. This dark vision is countered by gene editing designer promises of virtual immortality and super-wise beings programming super-intelligent machines, enabling a life of leisure, luxury, and security for all. Whether the reality of such a scientistic future would be also dark is a matter of conjecture, but from a survival perspective, it offers an optimistic scenario.

On political levels, a similar set of polar scenarios are gaining ground in the moral imagination, producing national leaders who seem comfortable embracing an apocalyptic telos without a second thought. The peoples of the world, entrapped in a predatory phase of global capitalism, are using their democratic prerogative to shut down dissent, rationality, and science. On one side, 122 governments pledge a legal commitment to the prohibition of nuclear weapons as an unprecedented prelude to the abolition of the weaponry; on the other side, all nine nuclear weapons states, and their closest allies, oppose the prohibition and opt for modernizing their nuclear weapons arsenals even devising strategic plans for their possible use, prompting an urgent search for counter measures.

John Pilger issues a solemn reminder that Nevile Shute’s On the Beach depicting a post-nuclear human future that is now more resonant than when it was published in 1957. Leaders that could bluff their way to shared catastrophe bellow forth in Washington and Pyongyang, each deluded by the belief that military options even with nuclear weapons are the only geopolitical security blanket worth relying upon, projecting a reckless obliviousness to the risk of losing their balance while engaging in inflammatory rhetorical posturing alarmingly close to the nuclear precipice.

As Pilger also points out, the liberal opposition to this right wing populism in the West is also dangerously disposed toward warmongering. Donald Trump is being pilloried by a bipartisan anti-Russian hysteria that imposes harsh sanctions, seemingly intent on driving Putin’s Kremlin into a corner from which there is no retreat except by way of confrontation, and possibly war.

We read of record heat waves, extreme weather events, extended droughts, and wild fires as common as clouds in the sky without blinking. The newspapers report that climate scientists are ready to push the panic button in reaction to the latest studies of grim global warning trends, while the Trump factor renews coal mining and treats denial a political virtue.

While these alarming realities dim the light of hope for many of us, the American stock market, a barometer of capitalist expectations by the shrewdest investors, achieves record heights. At the same time famine warnings have been officially endorsed for a series of long suffering populations: Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, northern Nigeria, Gaza. The entire Middle East is being turned into a war and conflict zone, with an anti-Iran warmongering coalition pressuring Iran to choose between nuclear deterrence and sectarian warfare inflamed by militarist Israeli/U.S. grand strategy that appears to be motivated by a regional vision of geopolitical pacification.

How best to endure in the face of such fatalistic dualisms? That may be the question of our time, dodged for the sake of sanity by almost all of us, at least most of the time. Business as usual, while living with therapeutic forms of cultural blindness, the opioids of those fortunate enough to live for now in gated communities, whether on the scale of private dwellings or walled off countries.

Recently a lively young woman told me that many of her friends had decided not to have children because they are so fearful of the storm clouds of the future, and refuse to wait around for liberating rainbows. At the other extreme, today’s International Edition of the New York Times contains a front page ad of enticement encouraging attendance at an International Luxury Conference to be held in Brussels, November 13-14, on the demeaning theme of “What’s Next: Luxury in a Turbulent World.” My somewhat impatient response—‘whatever turns out to be next, it will not be and should not be luxury!’ More likely, those grown accustomed to luxury will shift their residences to those underground homes built by Silicon Valley billionaires on vast tracts of lands in the New Zealand countryside as the ultimate hedge against an imminent global catastrophe. It could be that the NYT conference will devote its attention to this form of post-apocalyptic luxury living! Yet that assumes a quite unlikely focus on how the world of luxury is adapting to the unpleasant realities of the Sixth Extinction.

On The Beach 2017

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By John Pilger

Source: Axis of Logic

The US submarine captain says, “We’ve all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you’re never ready, because you don’t know when it’s coming. Well, now we do know and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.

The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and lifeless now.

A curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and New Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last cities, towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most buildings will remain untouched, some illuminated by the last flickers of electric light.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

These lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men appear at the beginning of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, which left me close to tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same.

Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent.

Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the living world.

I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as the US Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world’s second most lethal nuclear power. There was no justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder.

The “sanctions” are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.

Their main aim seems to be war – real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.

The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste whole societies – the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called “a noble cause” and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an “exceptional people”. He was not referring to the Vietnamese.

Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young teenagers. “Listen up,” he said. “We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom.”

At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders took their own lives. Listen up, indeed.

A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls “an eternal present”. Harold Pinter described this as “manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously “the left” are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today revert to one name: Trump.

Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics”, wrote Luciana Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man — not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system – beckons great danger for all of us.

While they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardiansuppress the essence of the most important political story of our time as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.

On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a “Soviet agent”), the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the United States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war on Russia.

Unlike every other Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a caveat from Trump himself that it was “clearly unconstitutional”.

A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia.

This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the “national security” managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther King called them “the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today”.

They have encircled Russia and China with missiles and a nuclear arsenal. They have used neo-Nazis to install an unstable, aggressive regime on Russia’s “borderland” – the way through which Hitler invaded, causing the deaths of 27 million people.  Their goal is to dismember the modern Russian Federation.

In response, “partnership” is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin — anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon. Their history tells them to get ready.

The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea, through which pass China’s economic lifelines.

The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, “if required”, he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute’s fiction.

None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits, dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding clichés. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.

The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on China, John Bordne, a member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based in Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 – during the Cuban missile crisis – he and his colleagues were “told to launch all the missiles” from their silos.

Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded – but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not “stand down”.

At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United States was such that US officials who were on official business in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 – the year Shute wrote On the Beach – no official in the State Department could speak the language of the world’s most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed, aimed at Russia.

The bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. The terms “left” and “right” are meaningless.  Most of America’s modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats.

When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America’s longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings – murder – by drones.

In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study, Obama, the “reluctant liberal warrior”, dropped 26,171 bombs – three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.  Having pledged to help “rid the world” of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War.

Trump is a wimp by comparison.  It was Obama – with his secretary of state Hillary Clinton at his side – who destroyed Libya as a modern state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration groups knew him as the “deporter-in-chief”.

One of Obama’s last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a record $618billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has endorsed this.

Buried in the detail was the establishment of a “Center for Information Analysis and Response”. This is a ministry of truth. It is tasked with providing an “official narrative of facts” that will prepare us for the real possibility of nuclear war – if we allow it.

Google Censors Block Access to CounterPunch and Other Progressive Sites

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By Eric Sommer

Source: CounterPunch

The U.S. government, and the information technology companies which collaborate with it, is moving fully into the camp of governments which relentlessly utilize the internet to collect users online data, monitor their activities, and control what they can see and do.

First, there was – and is – the NSA, National Security Agency of the U.S., which collects the emails, phone records, social media data, and more from millions of U.S. citizens and the people of the world.  Software companies like Google cooperated silently by providing NSA access to its users until Edward Snowden made this odious system public.

Now Google, at the behest of its friends in Washington, is actively censoring – essentially blocking access to – any websites which seek to warn American workers of the ongoing effort to further attack their incomes, social services, and life conditions by the U.S. central government, and which seek to warn against the impending warfare between U.S.-led Nato and other forces against countries like Iran, Russia, and China, which have in no way threatened the U.S. state or its people

Under its new so-called anti-fake-news program, Google algorithms have in the past few months moved socialist, anti-war, and progressive websites from previously prominent positions in Google searches to positions up to 50 search result pages from the first page, essentially removing them from the search results any searcher will see. Counterpunch, World Socialsit Website, Democracy Now, American Civil liberties Union, Wikileaks are just a few of the websites which have experienced severe reductions in their returns from Google searches.  World Socialist Website, to cite just one example, has experienced a 67% drop in its returns from Google since the new policy was announced.

This conversion of Google into a Censorship engine is not a trivial development.   Google searches are currently a primary means by which workers and other members of the public seek information about their lives and their world.  Every effort must be made to combat this serious infringement on the basic rights of freedom of speech and freedom of press.

World Socialist Website, the hardest hit victim of this e-censorship, is attempting to mobilize public opinion, and other effected websites, in a broad campaign against Google censorship.   More information on the censorship, including detailed numbers can be found in articles here.

It is imperative that working class people struggle for truly democratic use of the internet, beginning with total freedom to view a wide range of topics, not just those which Google – and Washington – think Americans and the world should be able to see.

How mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media pump their government’s lies to deceive the public

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Intrepid Report

Now that finally the U.S. government has officially terminated its arming and training of the jihadist gangs that are fighting to overthrow and replace Syria’s government, the neoconservative mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media are disagreeing with each other over how to communicate this fact to the American people without contradicting, or otherwise violating, the false ‘history’ they’ve all been presenting and preserving, throughout the past five years, which has described the U.S. government as being opposed to the jihadists in Syria, instead of as the U.S. government’s arming and training jihadists to overthrow and replace Syria’s government. That’s a pretty blatant ‘historical’ lie, which they’ve all been maintaining, now, for five years; and, they’re at loggerheads over whether or how they’ll deal with it, now that the program (whose very existence they’ve helped the government to hide from the public) has been so publicly and suddenly ordered to end.

On July 19, a neoconservative Democratic Party newspaper, the Washington Post, headlined one of their many anti-Trump news-articles, “Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow.” Their angle on this (actually momentous and constructive) action by Trump to abandon ‘the rebels’ (almost all of whom are, in fact, jihadists), was that this Republican president had done that in order to please Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (who defends Syria’s government, which secular government is knee-jerk-vilified in this and all American newspapers), and the WP article quoted neoconservatives who criticized the move by Trump to end the program.

The August 7 issue of a neoconservative Republican Party magazine, The Weekly Standard, headlines “Trump Got This One Right: Shutting down the CIA’s ghost war in Syria,” and doesn’t attack the previous, Democratic, president for having initiated and run that “ghost war,” and doesn’t make clear what it was, or why it was being waged, but does say hostile things against the leaders both of Russia and of Syria, such as that “Putin . . . has the blood of many Syrian civilians on his hands,” and allegations also against the Syrian government, such as:

Russian and Syrian jets have indiscriminately and repeatedly bombed civilian targets. The Assad regime has used chemical weapons, which Trump himself objected to, bombing a Syrian airfield in response. The United States cannot endorse these war crimes by allying itself with the perpetrators of mass murder in Syria.

Besides the fact that at least some of those assertions are demonstrably false, the United States government has actually (and often) done such things as that propaganda-article alleges Russia and Syria to have done, but nothing is said in this far-right magazine about that; readers of The Weekly Standard don’t get to see even a mention of this reality. The publication fools its readers, instead of informs them.

What’s even more important to take note of here, however, is that the article does not so much as even just mention the key fact: that Russia’s forces were invited into Syria by Syria’s secular government, in order to defend it against the jihadist gangs America was assisting, and that America’s forces weren’t invited by Syria’s government, but are instead invaders there, trying to overthrow that government, and are not only trying to help to defeat the ISIS jihadists who have also invaded Syria in order to overthrow Syria’s secular government. The crucial fact, that the Obama administration was insistent that Russia in Syria not bomb Al Qaeda forces in Syria and that that insistence upon protecting Al Qaeda there was the key reason why Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to reach an agreement with Russia about Syria had failed (they were actually sabotaged by his own boss, President Obama), is ignored by The Weekly Standard. (Also ignored by this far-right magazine is that the U.S. government has the blood of at least as many “Syrian civilians on its hands” there, as does the Russian government or any other participant in the war. That magazine’s playing to this false ‘us’-against-‘them’ prejudice, insults the intelligence of its readers, but is done in order to divert their duped reader’s attention away from the reader’s real enemies, which include the owners of that magazine, who want to manipulate, instead of to inform, their readership, for the benefit of Republican aristocrats. Those aristocrats need these dupes to remain duped.)

This shows that even when Republican ‘news’ media defend a Republican president who is reversing an imperialistic policy of his Democratic predecessor, it’s done in such a way, so it’s designed to keep the American public still deceived about the actual ugly history, which indicts both of America’s political parties—indicts the U.S. government itself, at its highest levels, where both parties are united together, in order to conquer the entire planet (including Syria, including Russia), for the benefit of America’s aristocrats.

Instead of reporting this crucial truth, The Weekly Standard says:

Russia intervened in Syria in September 2015, and the timing was not accidental. Just months earlier, in March, the “Army of Conquest” took over the northwestern province of Idlib. This rebel coalition was no band of moderates. It was led by Nusra and included its closest Islamist and jihadist partners. The Army of Conquest was on the march, threatening the Assad family’s stronghold of Latakia on the coast.

The message the magazine is trying to convey to its conservative American readership, is that Russia there was defending “the Assad family,” and not defending Syria’s sovereignty over Syria’s own territory—not defending the independence of the Syrian government, from the demands of the U.S. aristocracy (which are mainly concerned with building oil and gas pipelines through Syria in order to replace Russia as the main energy-supplier to the world’s biggest energy-market, the EU, by the U.S. and its royal Arab allies as the main energy-suppliers there).

This is an imperialistic war, and the only way for the U.S. aristocracy to win it, is militarily (and/or via coups such as it did in Ukraine) to break apart Russia’s foreign alliances, in order to grab control of Russia’s assets (including that oil and gas)—but the U.S. oligarchs are also going after China’s assets, and Iran’s assets, and the assets of any well-armed government that’s not yet a vassal-nation to the U.S. aristocracy (vassals such as Europe, Japan, and all other U.S. allies).

America (with the assistance of the Sauds, and of the U.S. aristocracy’s other fundamentalist-Sunni business-partners in the Middle East) uses jihadists to serve as those “boots on the ground,” against secular governments such as Syria and Russia, because that’s a lot cheaper to do than to re-institute the U.S. military draft and to send tens of thousands of American soldiers out to overthrow, or at least to weaken, the ‘enemy’ government. It’s much cheaper “boots on the ground,” to grab new territory via these proxies, than via U.S. troops.

The supreme international issue in our time is sovereignty—the independence, or freedom, of nations. It’s international democracy, which is really at stake, in all of this. The alternative (which the U.S. government leads) is international fascism. It’s a vast program, not composed merely of invasions (the ‘Defense’ Department) and of coups (the State Department, etc.).

Now that (after 24 February 1990) the United States has been committed to world-conquest, there is, regarding international news-reporting in the United States, nothing that is fundamentally true that’s reported in the U.S. ‘news’ media, regarding international relations—it’s all based upon a shared lie by both wings of the U.S. aristocracy, Republican and Democratic, saying that the U.S. government supports freedom and democracy around the world, and that the nations which the U.S. government is trying to conquer, do not favor international freedom and democracy. The standard American account (that it supports, instead of opposes, democracy around the world) is the exact opposite of the truth.

For example: How much publicity did the U.S. ‘news’ media provide when twice in one day the secretary general of the United Nations said that the U.S. president’s insistence upon having a veto-power regarding who would, and who would not, be allowed to become Syria’s next president, was “totally unfair and unreasonable” and that instead “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people.” No publicity for those statements. None at all. The fact (that the U.S. president refused to accept that “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people”) was shocking. But it wasn’t reported to the American people. Americans never knew about it.

How much publicity did the U.S. ‘news’ media provide when the U.S. government was one of only three governments in the entire world to vote in the U.N. General Assembly against a resolution to condemn racism, fascism, and denial of the Holocaust? None. None at all. The fact was shocking. But it, too, wasn’t reported.

And: How many Americans know that on the night of 24 February 1990, the U.S. president secretly told the chancellor of West Germany that all of their statements to Soviet President (soon to become only Russia’s president) Mikhail Gorbachev that the U.S. and its alliances would end the Cold War on their side if the Soviet Union and its alliances did on theirs, had been mere lies and that the Cold War would henceforth continue to be waged on the Western side until Russia itself would be conquered?

How can a nation be a ‘democracy,’ while its government (and its ‘news’ media) hides the most important parts of history, and pumps instead lies, to its people, regarding international relations? Who is the actual sovereign in the United States—its public, or its aristocracy?

And how many U.S. news media will carry this article, which is submitted to all of them, to publish free-of-charge? For any of them that has a large audience, to publish it, could precipitate an unprecedented revolution within the U.S. aristocracy itself (a revolution against their lies), because it would, in effect, officially acknowledge that the existing ‘history’ is founded upon lies. But, if this fact is not publicly recognized in the U.S. now, then when will the truth about these matters be allowed to be published here? Or, will it ever? Or will it never.

The Washington Post’s article said that “a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” said: “Putin won in Syria.” The anonymous source didn’t say: “The Syrian people won in Syria.”

Western-sponsored polls in Syria showed that 55% of Syrians wanted Assad to remain as president, and 82% of Syrians blamed America for the presence of jihadists in Syria trying to overthrow Assad.

Are the U.S. ‘news’ media hopeless—beyond salvaging? Is democracy in America beyond salvaging? Is 1984 here locked-in? What would that mean for the future of the world?

‘News’ media in the countries that are allied with the U.S. are just as trashy. For example, here’s an article from a brilliant blogger ripping to shreds an August 1 article from Britain’s Reuters ‘news’ agency, about the war in Yemen. That Reuters ‘news’-report could just as well have been published by the New York Times or Washington Post.

Maybe ‘news’ media now are that rotten all over the world. But any mainstream ‘news’ medium in the U.S., or its allied countries, has no realistic basis for criticizing ‘news’ media in other nations. Yet they do criticize the press in those nations, constantly. That’s just another lie, from ‘news’ media that might as well be pure lies.

The presumption when reading the ‘news’ should therefore be: What are they really trying to sell, and to whom? In a world dominated by lies, the thing that’s actually more important than anything else, is the motives. And nothing should then be believed on the basis of trust. In international relations, everything now is war, and the first victim of war is truth. And that is the reality today.

Globalisation: Hyperstition, Surveillance, and the Empire of Reason

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By S.C. Hickman

Source: Techno Occulture

Edmund Berger in his essay Underground Streams speaking of various tactics used by the Situationists, Autonomia, and the Carnivalesque:

“Like the Situationists the Autonomia would engage with the tradition of the Carnivalesque alongside a Marxist political analysis. Bakhtin had described the carnival as “political drama without footlights,” where the dividing line between “symbol and reality” was extremely vague, and the Autonomia had embodied this approach through their media-oriented tactics of detournement. But under a regime of emergency laws a great portion of the Autonomia was sent to prison or into exile, leaving its legacy through an extensive network of radical punk and anarchist squats and social centers.”

One of the things we notice is that the Autonomia movement actually struck a nerve at the heart of Power and forced their hand, which obligingly reacted and used their power over and dominion of the Security System to screen out, lock up, and exclude this threat. That’s the actual problem that will have to be faced by any emancipatory movement in the present and future: How to create a movement that can be subversive of the system, and yet chameleon like not rouse the reactionary forces to the point of invoking annihilation or exclusionary measures?

A movement toward bottom-up world building, hyperstition, and exit from this Statist system will have to do it on the sly utilizing a mirror world strategy that can counter the State and Public Security and Surveillance strategies.  Such Counter-Worlds of Exit and Hyperstitional instigation will need to work the shadow climes of the energetic unconscious, triggering a global movement from the shadows rather than in direct opposition.

In many ways as I think we need a politics of distortion, allure, and sincerity, one that invents a hyperstitional hyperobject among the various multidimensional levels of our socio-cultural systems, calling forth the energetic forces at the heart of human desire and intellect, bypassing the State and Corporate filters and Security Systems of power and control. Such a path will entail knowing more about the deep State’s secret Security apparatus and Surveillance methodologies, technologies, and tactics than most thinkers are willing to acknowledge or even apprehend. Like the Hacker movements of the 90’s up to Anonymous one will need to build shadow worlds that mimic the stealth weapons of the State and Corporate Global apparatus and assemblages; but with one caveat – these weapons are non-violent “weapons of the mind”, and go unseen and unrecognized by the State Security Systems at Local and Global levels.

A global system of mass, warrantless, government surveillance now imperils privacy and other civil liberties essential to sustaining the free world. This project to unilaterally, totally control information flow is a product of complex, ongoing interplay between technological, political, legal, corporate, economic, and social factors, including research and development of advanced, digital technologies; an unremitting “war on terror”; relaxed surveillance laws; government alliances with information technology companies; mass media manipulation; and corporate globalism. One might say it as the Googling of the World.

The United Stats internally hosts 17 intelligence agencies under the umbrella known as the Security Industrial Complex. They are also known for redundancy, complexities, mismanagement and waste. This “secret state” occupies 10,000 facilities across the U.S. Over the past five years the total funding budget exceeded half a trillion dollars. The notion of globalization which has its roots in the so called universalist discourses of the Enlightenment had as its goal one thing: to impose a transparent and manageable design over unruly and uncontrollable chaos: to bring the world of humans, hitherto vexingly opaque, bafflingly unpredictable and infuriatingly disobedient and oblivious to human wishes and objectives, into order: a complete, incontestable and unchallenged order. Order under the indomitable rule of Reason.1

This Empire of Reason spreads its tentacles across the known world through networks and statecraft, markets and tradecraft, war and secrecy, drugs and pharmakon.  The rise of the shadow state during Truman’s era began a process that had already been a part of the Corporate worldview for decades. The monopoly and regulation of a mass consumption society was and always will be the goal of capitalist market economies. In our time the slow and methodical spread of the American surveillance state and apparatus has shaped the globalist agenda. Because of it the reactionary forces of other state based control systems such as Russia and China are exerting their own power and surveillance systems as counters to Euro-American hegemony.

Surveillance is a growing feature of daily news, reflecting its rapid rise to prominence in many life spheres. But in fact surveillance has been expanding quietly for many decades and is a basic feature of the modern world. As that world has transformed itself through successive generations, so surveillance takes on an ever changing character. Today, modern societies seem so fluid that it makes sense to think of them being in what Bauman terms a ‘liquid’ phase. Always on the move, but often lacking certainty and lasting bonds, today’s citizens, workers, consumers and travelers also find that their movements are monitored, tracked and traced. Surveillance slips into a liquid state.

As Bauman relates it liquid surveillance helps us grasp what is happening in the world of monitoring, tracking, tracing, sorting, checking and systematic watching that we call surveillance. Such a state of affairs engages with both historical debates over the panopticon design for surveillance as well as contemporary developments in a globalized gaze that seems to leave nowhere to hide, and simultaneously is welcomed as such. But it also stretches outwards to touch large questions sometimes unreached by debates over surveillance. It is a conversation in which each participant contributes more or less equally to the whole. (Bauman)

Our network society has installed its own “superpanopticon” (Mark Poster). Such a system is ubiquitous and invisible to the mass of users. As Poster states it “The unwanted surveillance of one’s personal choice becomes a discursive reality through the willing participation of the surveilled individual. In this instance the play of power and discourse is uniquely configured. The one being surveilled provides the information necessary.” For Poster, this supply of self-surveillance is provided through consumer transactions stored and immediately retrievable via databases in their constitution of the subject as a “sum of the information in the fields of the record that applies to that name.” The database compiles the subject as a composite of his or her online choices and activities as tracked by IFS. This compilation is fixed on media objects (images, text, MP3s, Web pages, IPs, URLs) across the deluge of code that can be intercepted through keyword pattern recognition and private lists of “threatening” URLs.2

Our so called neoliberal society has erased the Public Sphere for the atomized world of total competition in a self-regulated market economy devoid of politics except as stage-craft. As authors in the Italian autonomist movements have argued for the past fifty and more years, this “total subsumption” of capital upon the life-sphere has been accomplished through “material” and “immaterial” means.  According to these authors, capital in late capitalism and neoliberalism has attempted to progressively colonize the entire life-sphere. Resistance, they argue, comes through the “reserves” to capital that remain as the social and intellectual foundation from which capital draws, including through “immaterial labor” using digital means. Gradually during modernity, such theorists have argued, life itself has been taken as a target for capitalist subsumption, through the cooptation of communication, sexual and familial relationships (Fortunati 1995), education, and every other sphere of human activity, with economic exchange and survival as the ultimate justification for all relationships.3

Capital’s “apparatus of capture” has become increasingly efficient and broad in its appropriation of selves as subjects of its political economy through the combination of appropriating governmental functions such as: buying off political actors and agencies, cutting public funding to modernist institutions and infrastructures, redefining the agenda of education and other cultural institutions toward capitalist values, owning and narrowing the focus of the media, forcing family structures and individuals to adapt to scarcity economies, and using government police and surveillance forces and economic pressures to crush resistance. In short, it is said that neoliberalism has advanced by the totalitarian institutionalization of national and international capitalism, one nation after another, using domestic means to force compliance in domestic markets and using international pressures (economic, military, cultural) to do the same to other countries, cultures, and peoples. (Day, pp. 126-127)

The increased accuracy (or believed accuracy) of increased surveillance and feedback targeting through the collection of social big data and its analyses and social and political uses (ranging from drone predators to state surveillance in both democratic and communist/ authoritarian governments to consumer targeting— for example, the targeting done by Target Corporation, as described in a 2012 New York Times article [Duhigg 2012])— belong to a conjoined mechanism of cybernetic and neoliberal governmentality, which crosses governmental and corporate databases and organizations. Social big data seeks to demarcate trends, which then directly or indirectly act as norms, which further consolidate individual and group action within market-determined norms (Rouvroy 2013). People are forced into competition, into a “freedom” that is monitored and checked within systems of feedback control. As Norbert Weiner suggested in the Cold War period (Wiener 1954, 1961), communicative control can be used toward a discourse of “rationality”; a rationality that is seen as proper to a given political economy. The documentary indexing of the subject provides the codes for the subject’s social positioning and expressions by others and by itself. Thanks to networked, mobile devices, the subject can attempt to continuously propose him- or herself to the world as the subject of documentary representation. (Day, pp. 132-133)

Those of us in the West who use mobile devices are becoming hooked into an elaborate datasociety in which every aspect of our lives is conditioned to enforce a self-regulatory system of choices and taboos. The surveillance is done at the level of individuals, who are monitored and whose actions are predicted throughout key moments of their consumption or production, marking changes in trends and phase states, and recalculating the trajectory of entities according to these new parameters and relationships. Our algorithmic society is splicing us all into a grid of total control systems from which it will become increasingly difficult to extricate ourselves.

As Douglas Rushkoff said recently digital technology is programmed. This makes it biased toward those with the capacity to write the code. In a digital age, we must learn how to make the software, or risk becoming the software. It is not too difficult or too late to learn the code behind the things we use—or at least to understand that there is code behind their interfaces. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of those who do the programming, the people paying them, or even the technology itself.4 More and more our mass society is being programmed through an immaterial grid of datafied compliance and surveillance that captures our desires and regulates our choices. In some ways we’ve become the mindless generation, unable to stand back from the immersive worlds of our technosphere in which we live and breath. We’ve become enamored with our Mediatainment Industrial Complex that encompasses us to the point that those being born now will not know there ever was a word without gadgets. In fact we’ve all become gadgets in a market world of science fiction, our desires captured by the very gadgets we once thought would free us from the drudgery of time. Instead we’ve been locked within a world without time, a timeless realm in which the very truth of history has been sucked out of it and instead we live in a mythic time of no time, prisoners of a cartoon world of endless entertainment and false desires. In such a world the virtual has become actual, we wander through life caught in the mesh of a fake world of commodity cartoons, citizens of a dreamland turned nightmare. Shall we ever wake up?

Modern radical thought has always seen subjectivation as an energetic process: mobilization, social desire and political activism, expression, participation have been the modes of conscious collective subjectivation in the age of the revolutions. But in our age, energy is running out and desire, which has given modern social dynamics their soul, is absorbed in the black hole of virtualization and financial games, as Jean Baudrillard argues in his 1976 book, Symbolic Exchange and Death. In this book, Baudrillard analyzes the hyperrealistic stage of capitalism, and the instauration of the logic of simulation.

The end of the spectacle brings with it the collapse of reality into hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another reproductive medium such as advertising or photography. Through reproduction from one medium into another the real becomes volatile, it becomes the allegory of death, but it also draws strength from its own destruction, becoming the real for its own sake, a fetishism of the lost object which is no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denegation and its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. […]

The reality principle corresponds to a certain stage of the law of value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather that the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra. We must therefore reconstruct the entire genealogy of the law of value and its simulacra in order to grasp the hegemony and the enchantment of the current system. A structural revolution of value. This genealogy must cover political economy, where it will appear as a second-order simulacrum, just like all those that stake everything on the real: the real of production, the real of signification, whether conscious or unconscious.

Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model. The entire apparatus of the commodity law of value is absorbed and recycled in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value, this becoming part of the third order of simulacra. Political economy is thus assured a second life, an eternity, within the confines of an apparatus in which it has lost all its strict determinacy, but maintains an effective presence as a system of reference for simulation. (Baudrillard 1993a: 71-72, 2).5

We’ve all become simulations now. It’s not our bodies that matter in this digital universe of data, but rather the dividual traces we leave across the virtualized world that can be manipulated to produce profit. In the sphere of semiocapitalism, financial signs are not only signifiers pointing to particular referents. The distinction between sign and referent is over. The sign is the thing, the product, the process. The “real” economy and financial expectations are no longer distinct spheres. In the past, when riches were created in the sphere of industrial production, when finance was only a tool for the mobilization of capital investment in the field of material production, recovery could not be limited to the financial sphere. It also took employment and demand. Industrial capitalism could not grow if society did not grow. Nowadays, we must accept the idea that financial capitalism can recover and thrive without social recovery. Social life has become residual, redundant, irrelevant. (Bifo)

Those of us of an older generation still remember what existed the other side of the virtual screen, but the mass of young being born now will not have that luxury and their minds will be completely immersed in this new virtual actuality with no sense of the Outside.

While those on the Left still ponder outmoded political worlds the world of capital has abandoned both the political and the social. It’s time to wake up … I wanted to say, “before it’s too late”. My problem, my despair is that it is already too late. And, yet, I continue throwing out my little posts in hopes that someone is listening, that someone will awaken from their dogmatic slumber and act… is that you?

  1. Bauman, Zygmunt; Lyon, David. Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (PCVS-Polity Conversations Series) (pp. 79-80). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
  2. Raiford Guins. Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (Kindle Locations 1304-1308). Kindle Edition.
  3. Day, Ronald E.. Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (History and Foundations of Information Science) (p. 126). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
  4. Douglas Rushkoff. Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 1363-1367). Kindle Edition.
  5. Berardi, Franco Bifo. After the Future (Kindle Locations 2276-2294). AK Press. Kindle Edition.

The State is at War — with the Future

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By Thomas L. Knapp

Source: The Fifth Column

It’s turning into a long hot summer for the emerging global counter-economy.

In June and July, an international group of law enforcement agencies took down two of the largest “Dark Web” marketplaces, Hansa and Alphabay.

Then on July 25, the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued a weird, barely coherent, press release seemingly kinda sorta but not exactly declaring its own plenary authority over all things cryptocurrency.

On the heels of the SEC’s fit of apparent glossolalia, the US Department of Justice announced its indictment of cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e for “money laundering” even as one of the site’s admins, Alexander Vinnik, was arrested in Greece.

What we’re seeing is the latest bit of backlash from a political establishment scared witless by technologies which threaten to make it superfluous.

A friend of mine who writes under the pseudonym dL notes that “[t]he trajectory of technology follows a repeated path. When first introduced, it gives an asymmetric advantage to the individual. Over time, the state catches up and the asymmetric advantage shifts to the state.” Maybe he’s right. Maybe the political class will be able to nip a bright future in the bud and maintain its grip on power.

On the other hand, Victor Hugo seemed quite sure that “one withstands the invasion of armies; one does not withstand the invasion of ideas.”

We stand at the doorway of a future featuring money without borders, work and trade without permission. That future represents existential crisis for the political class: The end of the state as we know it. Absent the ability to tax and regulate its host, the parasite known as government starves and dies.

The situation is equally dire for the rest of us.

High-profile takedowns like the Silk Road, Alphabay, Hansa and BTC-e, large as they loom in the moment, are mere speed bumps. The road to the future remains open, and the only way to plausibly close that road off entirely is to essentially pull the plug on every technological development since the introduction of the personal computer. What would that look like? Think the Dark Ages, the Great Depression, and North Korea all rolled into one.

There’s no doubt that the American and global political classes are willing to go there. Any number of regimes have done so on a temporary and semi-effectual basis in times of unrest, and American politicians have seriously proposed ideas like an “Internet Kill Switch.” The excuse for such proposals is to protect us from terrorists and drug dealers, but make no mistake: Their real purpose is to protect our rulers  from us.

That’s what’s at stake, folks.  We can free ourselves or we can return to the caves. There is no third alternative.

 

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Recordings Reveal FBI Gave Man a Rifle, Urged Him to Carry Out Mass Shooting to ‘Defend Islam’

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

It’s become a near-weekly occurrence. Somewhere in some state, the FBI will announce that they’ve foiled yet another terrorist plot and saved lives. However, as the data shows, the majority of these cases involve psychologically diminished patsies who’ve been entirely groomed, armed, and entrapped by FBI agents. Simply put, the FBI manufactures terror threats and then takes credit for stopping them.

But what happens when they take it too far? What happens if the FBI actually tells someone to conduct a mass shooting? Well, in Milwaukee, WI, we are seeing this unfold first hand.

A little over two years ago, Samy Mohamed Hamzeh, 25, found himself in the midst of an FBI sting. Little did he know that he was being groomed for terrorism by the same government who claims to fight terrorism.

Hamzeh was born in the U.S. but lived much of his childhood in Jordan before moving to Milwaukee when he was 19. For four years, Hamzeh lived an entirely normal life, until one day, he was contacted by people who wanted to radicalize him and give him weapons.

The group, entirely controlled by the FBI was plotting to shoot up the Humphrey Scottish Rite Masonic Center during an event.

In February of 2016, the FBI announced they had foiled a terror plot by a man who was planning to kill at least 30 people to “defend Islam.” Americans cheered, and everyone felt safer — the FBI had saved us from extremists once again.

However, that’s not how things actually happened.

For months, two corrupt FBI informants goaded Hamzeh into obtaining weapons. According to his attorneys, hundreds of hours of recorded conversations show the FBI pressed Hamzeh into getting these weapons and eventually began pushing him to carry out a mass shooting.

Despite the intense peer pressure from people pretending that they were mass murderers, Hamzeh resisted. He didn’t even want the guns. Now, his attorneys have filed a motion to get him released on bond because they say he’s been set up.

The informants, the motion states, “frequently lobbied Hamzeh to get a machine gun despite his repeated protests that all he wanted was a legal handgun to protect himself.”

In spite of the FBI claiming Hamzeh was going to carry out a mass shooting — they were attempting to force him to do — the recordings, according to his attorneys, show he resisted and adamantly refused to ever participate in violence.

Even after the FBI announced their foiled terror plot, they were unable to charge Hamzeh with anything other than possessing a machine gun and a silencer. And even these items had been essentially shoved into his lap by the FBI.

As the Journal-Sentinel reports, a psychiatrist who evaluated Hamzeh in jail concluded he does not fit a profile of someone who would kill strangers and “has a strong moral code with a very prominent conscience and empathy.”

“There is also no evidence that Hamzeh ever made any plans or was doing anything other than making empty boasts to express his resentment about Israel or to gain attention,” reads their brief in support of the bond motion.

Hamzeh has now been in jail for a year and a half because the FBI tried to make him carry out a mass shooting that he didn’t want to do. And, he could be there much longer as each of the charges for the weapons — that he also did not want — carry 10 years a piece.

If Hamzeh never had any intention of carrying out a terror attack and the weapons were forced on him by the FBI, why on Earth would this be on the news and touted as some foiled plot?

Well, the answer to that is simple.

Former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes actually reveals the answer as he defends the tactics used by the FBI to set up poverty-stricken men by offering them large sums of money and weapons to commit crimes.

After he defended the FBI’s role in bribing poor, mentally diminished people to get them to commit crimes, he let out a bombshell statement, confirming what many of us already know.

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cause the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half,” states Fuentes. “You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

There you have it. The FBI puts Americans in danger by grooming otherwise entirely innocent people into doing harm — so they can keep fear alive.

But what would’ve happened if Hamzeh would’ve actually carried out this shooting that the FBI was trying to force on him? Would the FBI still claim they had informants attempting to groom him? Would they admit to forcing him to accept weapons?

David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps intelligence officer, the second-highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer, had this to say about these most unscrupulous operations:

“Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.”

Indeed, we’ve become a lunatic asylum.

 

Google ‘News’ is hideous

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By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

Even before its recent “redesign,” which was claimed to provide an “uncluttered” look, Google News was one of the worst news aggregator sites on the Internet. Many longtime Google News users have complained about the site’s quality and dubious “news” content. Google has offered no reasonable explanations for its poor business decisions that have resulted in Google News being a repository for misleading news links. Keeping in mind that Google received its initial seed investment from the CIA’s IN-Q-IT, now known as IN-Q-TEL, the agency’s venture capital firm in the Silicon Valley, the CIA may be playing some sort of massive social network experiment on Google News users.

The fact that Google News programmers cannot seem to distinguish between “World News” and “U.S. News” is laughable for a multi-billion dollar company that has supposedly recruited the best and brightest technologists into its ranks. The following appeared under Google News’s “World News” section on July 3, 2017:

“Media reaps benefit from Trump attacks,” The Hill

“White House pays women 80 cents for every dollar paid to men,” CNN

“New Jersey welfare fund arrests spark anti-Semitic sentiment,” USA Today

“Police Say Abduction Suspect Viewed Sexual Fetish Website,” U.S. News & World Report, with a story on the same subject regarding the University of Illinois appearing in the Champagne/Urbana News-Gazette

“Colorado man mistakes son for intruder, shoots and kills him,” WHIO

“5 significant gas explosions in Pennsylvania in the past decade,” PennLive.com

Something is seriously wrong with Google’s algorithms or the foreign programmers they have hired, to the exclusion of American employees, do not realize that from a U.S. perspective, events in Washington, DC, New Jersey, Illinois, Colorado, and Pennsylvania do not constitute “World News.”

Even Google News’s Science offering is trashed by nonsensical click bait, such as a Washington Post story, titled “No, NASA is not hiding kidnapped children on Mars.” The story emanates from comments made on the Infowars show by Alex Jones and his guest Robert Steele about a secret program to kidnap children and send them to Mars. With the advent of the Trump presidency, those who were once considered “controversial” are now just plain crazy. Yet, such wild rantings are found under “Science” in Google News!

Google News’s search engine is no better. Some apologists for Google claim that the searches are tailored for each customer. If that is so, why do this editor’s searches on various countries and areas of the world come back with the first ten stories being about sports. I do not like professional sports and never visit sporting websites. Therefore, if Google is to be believed, no sports stories should be returned on searches on international place names.

As an example, the following comes back from Google News on a search for “Barbados”:

“Marion makes Africa umpire team,” The Nation

“Barbados lose football opener to Dominica,” Nation News

“Young Gems leave for Botswana,” Nation News

Try out a search for “South Africa,” not an insignificant country, and returned are:

“England v South Africa: Faf du Plessis to miss first Test for family reasons,” BBC Sport. Among professional sports, which I detest in general, cricket is dead last on the list of topics to be ignored. This “top news story” about South Africa is followed by:

“South Africa disappointed by Cosafa exit,” BBC Sport. Cosafa is the Council of Southern Africa Football Associations and not a Covfefe-like typo by Donald Trump. This is a totally unimportant story about professional football of the soccer variety. Who cares? I don’t. Ranked around number five is a story about an upcoming no-confidence vote by the South African parliament against Jacob Zuma, the president of the country. Yet, cricket and soccer stories are given more prominence by Google News.

Try another country, New Zealand, and the result is the same, except rugby is considered more important by Google News than anything else happening in the nation:

“Lions beat New Zealand on tiniest of margins, and a thrilling finale awaits,” The Guardian

“New Zealand club rugby player in intensive care with spinal injury,” Telegraph (UK). Sad story, but the player might have taken up a safer line of work, like programming actual news stories for Google News searches.

Ranked third by Google in the search return is a fairly important story:

“New Zealand’s immigration laws favour the rich, a South African family says.” Radio New Zealand.

Ranked fourth is another non-news topic concerning Google News’s other distraction affectation, Entertainment News:

“Katy Perry gushes about her great ‘love’ for New Zealand,” Newshub. Katy Perry? Really, who gives a crap about her? Hillary Clinton loves her, as do many women motorcyclists. I don’t and don’t want stories about Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, or Taylor Swift returned on searches about important events around the world. Unless, of course, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, along with Madonna, go missing on a flight over New Guinea and Don McLean writes a song about them. He could title it “American Magpies.”

Google News received five thumbs down before their recent “redesign.” Now, there are not enough thumbs in the world to express displeasure about them.