I Speak, You Speak, We All Speak Newspeak

Posted on July 30, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Joziah Thayer

In George Orwell’s infamous book 1984, Big Brother imposes Newspeak on the people of Oceania. Newspeak is defined as “a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought — personal identity, self-expression, and free will — that threatens the ideology of the regime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalized such concepts into thoughtcrime.”

Society today has dimensions of Newspeak infused into our everyday lives. We are all polarized penguins waddling our way through the masses, blocking, deleting or belittling anyone who has opposing views until we find ourselves face first in a corner. After waddling like penguins into the walls of our echo-chambers, we turn around and face the world, but by then we have become territorial terriers ready to attack anyone who threatens to breach the walls of our carefully crafted echo-chambers. Instead of protecting the truth, we protect our truth.

The consequences of this are that instead of the truth being known, there are two truths; and this process will duplicate and recycle itself until there is no truth, there are only lies and propaganda. People like Marc Lamont Hill are a perfect example of Newspeak being in full effect in our society today. Hill made comments about the Israeli oppression of Palestinians and he was fired, not because he said something anti-Semitic, but because he said something unacceptable in society today — in Orwellian terms Marc Lamont Hill committed a thoughtcrime.

Instead of having actual free speech, we have accepted speech. We protect the illusion of free speech— like a lonely man in the desert, protecting his paradise, which in reality is just a mirage. The will of the people will never be honored so long as we elect monetarist gargoyles in suits that are afraid of change because it means their demise. In America, we have a representative democracy and what we need is a direct democracy. A democracy in which our votes as citizens mean something and our elected officials are held accountable or voted out.

Perhaps the worst case of Newspeak in society today is when it involves war. Major news networks have long-winded debates about what they call “America’s role in the world.” This is a form of Newspeak. Instead of saying that we are actively bombing eleven sovereign nations, killing innocent men, women, and children, mainstream media casually calls it “America’s role in the world.” Another term commonly used as a form of Newspeak is: “Our troops are protecting American interest overseas,” How is it Newspeak? The accepted language for America’s endless wars is that America is only spreading democracy around the world. This “accepted language” couldn’t be any further from the truth, yet anything that deviates from this accepted language is deemed an unacceptable thoughtcrime and that is what makes it Newspeak.

War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies. – Arthur Ponsonby (Falsehood In War-time)

We often acknowledge the faults of our government, our media, and our financial system, but in doing so we neglect to acknowledge our faults. Our way is the only way! It is as if the masses have been rocked to sleep or hypnotized into being binary static robots incapable of walking outside of the dotted line or thinking outside of the box.

Newspeak is not to be confused with “Political Correctness,” it is far more dangerous than that. Political Correctness is divided among party lines. What is politically correct to a Republican is most likely going to be politically incorrect to a Democrat and vice versa. Newspeak is not divided among party lines, Newspeak foments at will in both parties and if left uncorrected politics will remain the cesspool of polarization that it is today. The powers-that-be have no interest in fixing our political system — in their eyes, it’s working just fine.

The Thought Police Are Coming

Posted on July 25, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Hedges

Source: TruthDig

Chris Hedges gave this talk Tuesday, June 11, at an event held in London in support of Julian Assange.

Ask the Iraqi parents of Sabiha Hamed Salih, aged 15, and Ashwaq Hamed Salih, aged 16, who were killed by shrapnel in Baghdad on July 31, 2004, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the man and his two young daughters who saw their wife and mother shot to death and were themselves wounded in a car fired upon by U.S. Marines in Fallujah on July 22, 2005, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the parents of Huda Haleem, an 18-year-old girl, and Raghad Muhamad Haleem, a 5-year-old boy, shot dead by U.S. soldiers on June 2, 2006, in Iraq’s Diyala province what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the parents of the 15-year-old boy choked with a wire and then shot to death by U.S. Marines in Ramadi on Aug. 10, 2006, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the relatives of Ahmed Salam Mohammad, who was shot dead on Nov. 27, 2006, when U.S. troops attacked a wedding party near Mosul, an attack that also left four wounded, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the families of the over one dozen people shot to death with .50-caliber machine guns by bantering U.S. Apache helicopter crews in east Baghdad in July 2007—the crew members can be heard laughing at the “dead bastards” and saying “light ’em up” and “keep shooting, keep shooting”—a massacre that included two journalists for Reuters—Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh—what they think of Julian Assange. Ask the then 10-year-old Sajad Mutashar and his 5-year-old sister, Doaha, both wounded, whose 43-year-old father, Saleh, was shot to death from the air as he attempted to assist one of the wounded men in the Baghdad street what they think of Julian Assange.

There is nothing like the boot of the oppressor on your neck to give you moral clarity.

None of these war crimes, and hundreds more reported to the U.S. military but never investigated, would have been made public without Julian, Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks. That is the role of journalists—to give a voice to those who without us would have no voice, to hold the powerful to account, to give the forgotten and the demonized justice, to speak the truth.

We have watched over the last decade as freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose government abuses and lies have been obliterated by wholesale government surveillance and the criminalizing of the leaking and, with Julian’s persecution, publication of these secrets. The press has been largely emasculated in the United States. The repeated use of the Espionage Act, especially under the Obama administration, to charge and sentence whistleblowers has shut down our ability to shine a light into the inner workings of power and empire. Governmental officials with a conscience, knowing all of their communications are monitored, captured and stored by intelligence agencies, are too frightened to reach out to reporters. The last line of defense lies with those with the skills that allow them to burrow into the records of the security and surveillance state and with the courage to make them public, such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond, now serving a 10-year prison term in the United States for hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The price of resistance is high not only for them, but for those such as Julian willing to publish this information. As Sarah Harrison has pointed out: “This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it.”

Even if Julian were odious, which he is not, even if he carried out a sexual offense, which he did not, even if he was a poor houseguest—a bizarre term for a man trapped in a small room for nearly seven years under house arrest—which he was not, it would make no difference. Julian is not being persecuted for his vices. He is being persecuted for his virtues.

His arrest eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities carried by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments in the seizure of Julian two months ago from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power, no matter what their nationality, will be hunted down around the globe and seized, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where journalism is outlawed and replaced with propaganda, trivia, entertainment and indoctrination to make us hate those demonized by the state as our enemies.

The arrest of Julian marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism and constant state surveillance, now far advanced in China, that will soon define our lives. The destruction of all protection of the rule of law, which is what we are witnessing, is essential to establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian state.

The BBC China correspondent Stephen McDonell was locked out of WeChatin China a few days ago after posting photos of the candlelight vigil in Hong Kong marking 30 years since student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were gunned down by Chinese soldiers in June 1989.

“Chinese friends started asking on WeChat what the event was?” he wrote. “Why were people gathering? Where was it? That such questions were coming from young professionals here shows the extent to which knowledge of Tiananmen 1989 has been made to disappear in China. I answered a few of them, rather cryptically, then suddenly I was locked out of WeChat.”

In order to get back on WeChat he had to agree that he was responsible for spreading “malicious rumors” and provide what is called a faceprint.

“I was instructed to hold my phone up—to ‘face front camera straight on’—looking directly at the image of a human head. Then told to ‘Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese.’ My voice was captured by the App at the same time it scanned my face.”

Governmental abuse of WeChat, he wrote, “could deliver to the Communist Party a life map of pretty much everybody in this country, citizens and foreigners alike. Capturing the face and voice image of everyone who was suspended for mentioning the Tiananmen crackdown anniversary in recent days would be considered very useful for those who want to monitor anyone who might potentially cause problems.”

This is almost certainly our future, and it is a future that Julian has fought courageously to prevent.

In another sign the noose is tightening, the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., the country’s national broadcaster, were raided by federal police last Wednesday. The raid was carried out because the broadcaster had disclosed detailed accounts of Australian special forces in Afghanistan killing unarmed people, including children. That story was generated, in part, by a leak of hundreds of classified military documents. The police raid and search through raw footage and thousands of files, emails and internal documents appear to be part of a hunt for the source, who will, no doubt, be arrested and imprisoned.

Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy—diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory—to arrest a nationalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May order the British police to grab Julian, who has never committed a crime? Under what law did Donald Trump demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States?

The psychological torture of Julian—documented by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and ill treatment, Nils Melzer—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of the novel “1984.” It is said the Gestapo broke bones and the East German Stasi secret police broke souls. Today, we too have refined the cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. This is why Julian, his physical and psychological health in serious decline, has been moved to a prison hospital. We can all be taken to George Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to be made compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures”—and you can be sure there are American intelligence operatives here assisting the British in the psychological torture of Julian—have destroyed thousands of detainees in black sites around the globe. These techniques, including prolonged solitary confinement, are the staple form of control in maximum-security prisons in the United States, where the corporate state makes war on its most oppressed and politically astute underclass—African Americans.

There has been a coordinated smear campaign against Julian by our Thought Police, one that is amplified by the very media organizations that published WikiLeaks material. The campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called for eradicating the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroying Julian’s reputation.

This character assassination was championed by the Democratic Party establishment after WikiLeaks published 70,000 hacked emails copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State, to the Clinton Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs provided to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, should have remained hidden, that the public did not have a right to know, but they can’t then call themselves journalists.

WikiLeaks has done more to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. In addition to the war logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and their interference in foreign elections, including in the French elections. It disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened to save Snowden from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow after he made public the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence agencies. The Snowden leaks also revealed that Julian was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”

We must build popular movements to force the British government to halt the extradition and judicial lynching of Julian. We must build popular movements to force the Australian government to intervene on behalf of Julian. We must build popular movements to reclaim democracy and the rule of law. If Julian is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Donald Trump has attacked as “the enemy of the people,” to hold power accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the pillaging of the ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and women to swell the profits of corporations and consolidate the global oligarchs’ total grip on power will no longer be part of public debate. First Julian. Then us.

More Than a Threat, America’s Criminal Ways

Posted on July 22, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Gordon Duff

Source: New Eastern Outlook

It is one thing watching the news, such as it is, a mix of conspiracy theories, flummery and distraction but quite something else watching the United States under its current regime wage war and politics. We haven’t seen this kind of theatre since Goebbels, Himmler and Von Ribbentrop.

How does one describe Secretary of State Pompeo’s trip to Iraq in early May 2019? Do remember that the United States already murdered two million Iraqi civilians, that was done openly and many of those who planned that fake war backed by fake intelligence now advise Trump, names like “John Bolton” for instance.

The blubbering monstrosity Pompeo, reeling from a failed coup attempt in Venezuela, lands in Baghdad to threaten the Iraqis with 4 nuclear armed B 52s and an American aircraft carrier “racing to the scene.”

Why? The answer is simple, and Trump openly admits it, the Israelis told them to do it. Ouch!

How about Israel? Problems there? Didn’t several hundred rockets just land somewhere inside Israel? Didn’t their US financed “Iron Dome” missile defense system utterly fail? More than that, something else far more serious was exposed.

Not one social media post, not one photo, no interviews, not even a phone call to relatives in the United States was made from Israel regarding these attacks. To be clear, the attacks were in retaliation for the killing of Palestinian protesters by not just IDF forces but armed Israeli civilians.

As an aside, the real threat isn’t from inside Israel, a proven total surveillance state capable of unprecedented tyranny, but that Israel’s model is being sold to nations around the world, particularly the United States, where Facebook and Google, two companies controlled by Israeli passport holders, are leading the way to a draconian society with few nations holding the line.

That those nations are either bombed or sanctioned or both by the United States is telling.

Tyranny as Patriotism

The assumptions aren’t just wrong, they are ignorance in its purest form. Hiding behind patriotic songs, pompous rhetoric and always “hugging the flag,” America is a nation run by gangsters. Was it always that way? To an extent, that answer would be yes, but even the criminal elites, the slave traders, opium shippers, land speculators and robber barons of American history would never have imagined what today has brought.

The world is terrified of America. It is one thing for a nuclear superpower to bully the world on behalf of the wealthy elites that own America’s government. When those elites run every government, not just the US, but Europe as well, Africa and Latin America, much of Asia too, and stage fake wars, quite probably fake terror attacks, mass murders, and many suspect so-called “natural disasters,” we are in uncharted waters here.

Every advancement in science and technology is placed into the waiting hands of, well who? We can thank the controlled media, another equally theatrical organization dominated by fake opposing sides tasked with polarizing the public on issues like abortion rights, vaccinations, racial hatred and class envy, with making a Frankensteinian world possible.

The Threat of Science and Technology

Many are aware that, during World War II, science was pushed to new depths. In America it was the Manhattan Project, creating a capability of incinerating entire cities and making much of the earth’s surface uninhabitable.

In Japan, among their efforts was a biological weapons program under “Unit 731.” Headquartered in China, the Japanese developed weaponized forms of the most virulent diseases known to man, tested them on the Chinese along with American prisoners of war, and unleashed them on the world with limited success. Japan even tried spreading the Black Plague to the United States by attaching infected rats to balloons.

Japan also had a nuclear program and built several very large submarines capable of delivering aircraft off the US coast in order to do to America exactly what it did to Japan. There are records, still classified, that show both Japan and Germany exploding nuclear devices during the closing days of World War II.

Anecdotally, uranium oxide from Germany, destined for Japan by submarine in April 1945, to be used against the United States, was diverted to the Manhattan project with the vessel carrying it, the U234, docked at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There are many such untold stories from World War II, and here is why some of them matter so much.

Let’s look at Unit 731. What happened to the scientists, the war criminals, who unleashed the plague on China’s cities? They came to the US under “Operation Paperclip,” under the auspices of CIA founder Allen Dulles and his assistant, a young Naval officer, Richard Millhouse Nixon. This was the origin of the American biological warfare program that now runs allegedly “peaceful” labs around the world in places like Tbilisi, Georgia.

These facilities are part of the reason so many fear the US. Information on the real research is more than rumors. We know the US has been collecting DNA samples from specific “target” populations, particularly in the Russian Federation, collected and collated by the same organizations that are capable of creating “designer disease.” In fact, this capability comes up in publications, demonstrating the frightening capability of tying genetically modified diseases to racial and/or ethnic markers in human DNA.

An Ethnically Cleansed Planet

Real or not, there are wide perceptions at government level, across Africa for certain but elsewhere as well, that “weaponized medical science” is misusing research into vaccines and studies of genetics to create a world as envisioned by eugenicists in the late 19th and early 20th century.

A movement funded by the wealthiest American families, America began sterilizing its “unfit,” based on race, religion or even social gossip. From Indy Week:

“In Britain, eugenic thought was more of an abstract concept of a utopian society that would prove difficult to put into practice. However, eugenic ideology found fertile ground across the Atlantic in the United States. With the rising influx of immigrants after 1890, increased urbanization and related social ills, people needed a promise of stability and a better future. Eugenics seemed to have the answers. During its heyday, it enjoyed broad support across a variety of social and political spectrums: from social reformers and humanitarians to staunch racists, from strict conservatives to progressives, and from academic and medical communities to religious circles. And it had the financial backing of some of the wealthiest capitalists in the country, including the Kellogg, Carnegie, and Harriman family fortunes.

A national Eugenics Record Office was established in 1910 to collect pedigrees of families suspected of carrying defective genes, and several organizations were formed to promote the study and practice of eugenics. These organizations would sponsor “Better Babies” and “Fitter Families” contests at state fairs across the country. Eugenics exhibits proclaimed “Some people are born to be a burden on the rest, ” with a flashing light going off every 16 seconds to signal the birth of another possibly defective human. Eugenic sermon contests were held across the nation, and biblical passages were quickly reinterpreted to show how eugenics was perfectly compatible with Christian thought. Indeed, advocates claimed, Jesus himself was a eugenicist, according to Christine Rosen’s book, Preaching Eugenics. Scary stories about degenerate family lines sometimes completely fabricated were widely disseminated.

Although eugenics may have started out as a serious science, and elements of it would later shift to the valuable studies of genetics and heredity, the ideology was hijacked by people who knew little about the science and needed a reason to justify their own prejudices. The national Eugenics Record Office would spend years amassing volumes of data on individuals and families, combining “equal portions of gossip, race prejudice, sloppy methods and leaps of logic, all caulked together by elements of actual genetic knowledge to create the glitter of a genuine science,” Edwin Black writes in War Against the Weak.

The goal of the eugenics movement in the United States was to get rid of the “bottom tenth” of society. This, eugenicists hoped to accomplish through restrictive immigration laws, miscegenation laws and forced sterilizations of the unfit. The “fit” of society were imagined as healthy, white, middle-class or higher, educated, English-speaking Protestants bearing a remarkable resemblance to the eugenicists who defined the word “fit.’”

Still the Same Game?

Were one to delve into a darker view of geopolitics than is normally publicly espoused, one where governments, perhaps themselves controlled by what is now termed the Deep State, act in a broadly criminal manner, a pattern emerges. Not all patterns are viable, some if not most are agenda driven and data is always subjective, with fakery and propaganda working its way into the accepted narrative.

One might even go further, that the “accepted narrative” is, in itself, only fakery and propaganda. In fact, stringently focused analytical models reveal exactly this truth.

What is clear is that policies are being enacted that favor lower birth rates in developing nations due to poverty, disease and war.

Moreover, there is a wealth of evidence that scientific research and technological development doesn’t stop at social engineering or even “thought control.” Modeling reveals a broad agenda of capabilities that mirrors the values of those oligarchical elites that so long ago decided a “custom bred” humanity of mindless drones controlled by elites is the only desirable future for mankind.

Thus, when the CIA or USAID builds mysterious laboratories in the dark recesses of the world, Romania, Tbilisi, Georgia, Southern Libya yet no research is published and the only “output” is occasional outbreaks of genetically engineered experimental diseases, fears and suspicions become reality.

One must remember, and this is fact, not conjecture, that the origin of Hitler’s Germany traces to Americans. Hitler’s race laws originated in America and Hitler was long a student of America’s “Black Stork” laws that mandated killing unfit children. From the Guardian:

“Various methods of eugenic euthanasia – including gassing the unwanted in lethal chambers – were a part of everyday American parlance and ethical debate some two decades before Nevada approved the first such chamber for criminal executions in 1921.

Hitler proudly told his comrades how closely he followed American eugenic legislation. ‘Now that we know the laws of heredity,’ he told a fellow Nazi, ‘it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.’”

Conclusion

Looking at who overtly rules America today, giving no credence to claims of a Deep State or secret societies, we are still faced with overwhelming proof that the “American democracy” is controlled by oligarchical hereditary elites that favor ethnic cleansing and elimination of those they deem unfit.

Though the seats of government may be held by those with different names, the money behind them, the think tanks, the fake institutes, are all under control by these forces.

The policies? Open ethnic cleansing for sure, overtly through sanctions and war, less openly through supporting clearly fascistic regimes around the world, a policy America adopted long ago. When the reins of control in Washington fall into the hands of right-wing extremists, these policies which are always present go a step further, as is now being seen under the Trump regime.

As Trump will be attending the 75th anniversary of the D Day landings in France, a real examination of that war and Hitler’s truncated rule of Europe, would reveal how not only did Hitler follow policies learned from America but how he was funded by Americans as well, from his earliest career to continued full partnership in war industries right up until the end of the war.

It would not be inaccurate to call Hitler a failed American experiment, one like so many others, Diem in Vietnam, the repressive regimes in South Korea, Chaing in China and ten dozen “tin pot” dictators placed in power by the CIA, with that list growing each day.

The goal? Technology and science wielded to create a world envisioned long ago, one with few people, endless power for the debauched few where the self-anointed “high born” could look down from their lofty heights on humanity as though it were a giant ant farm.

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today and the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

How Evil Wins: The Hypocritical Double Standards of Political Outrage

Posted on July 21, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.”—Kurt Vonnegut

Please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to the Trump Administration has not been paying attention.

No matter what the team colors might be at any given moment, the playbook remains the same. The leopard has not changed its spots. Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that the American police state that is continuing to wreak havoc on the rights of the people under the Trump Administration is the same police state that wreaked havoc on the rights of the people under every previous administration.

Brace yourselves.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle, a tsunami approaches.

Case in point: in Charlottesville, Va.—home of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, champion of the Bill of Rights, and the nation’s third president—city councilors in a quest for so-called “equity” have proposed eliminating Jefferson’s birthday as a city holiday (which has been on the books since 1945) and replacing it with a day that commemorates the liberation of area slaves following the arrival of Union troops under Gen. Philip Sheridan.

In this way, while the populace wages war over past injustices, injustice in the here and now continues to trample innocent lives underfoot. In Charlottesville, as in the rest of the country, little is being done to stem the tide of the institutional racism that has resulted in disproportionate numbers of black Americans being stopped, frisked, shot at, arrested and jailed.

Just recently, in fact, Phoenix police drew their guns, shouted profanities, assaulted and threatened to shoot a black couple whose 4-year-old daughter allegedly stole a doll from a dollar store. The footage of the incident—in which the cops threaten to shoot the pregnant, young mother in the head in the presence of the couple’s 1- and 4-year-old daughters—is horrifying in every way.

Tell me again why it’s more important to spend valuable political capital debating the birthdays of dead presidents rather than proactively working to put a stop to a government mindset that teaches cops it’s okay to treat citizens of any color with brutality and a blatant disregard for their rights?

It doesn’t matter that Phoenix and Charlottesville are 2100 miles apart. The lethal practices of the American police state are the same all over.

No amount of dissembling can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America. As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

So stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other. Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware. Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware. And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

The world has been down this road before.

As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free:

Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.

We are no longer living the American Dream. We’re living the American Lie.

Indeed, Americans have been lied to so sincerely, so incessantly, and for so long by politicians of all stripes—who lie compulsively and without any seeming remorse—that they’ve almost come to prefer the lies trotted out by those in government over less-palatable truths.

The American people have become compulsive believers: left-leaning Americans are determined to believe that the world has become a far more dangerous place under Trump, while right-leaning Americans are equally convinced that Trump has set us on a path to prosperity and security.

Nothing has changed.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).

Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip, shoot and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials are no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace. Indeed, they continue to keep the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies and slaves rather than citizens.

SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families. Nationwide, SWAT teams continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activities or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own heavily armed law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties continue to rise.

The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police. Police forces continue to be transformed into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. In training police to look and act like the military and use the weapons and tactics of war against American citizens, the government continues to turn the United States into a battlefield and “we the people” into enemy combatants.

Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners. School districts continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment for childish infractions: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. In this way, the paradigm of abject compliance to the state continues to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior.

For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense. States continue to outsource prison management to private corporations out to make a profit at taxpayer expense. And how do you make a profit in the prison industry? Have the legislatures pass laws that impose harsh penalties for the slightest noncompliance in order keep the prison cells full and corporate investors happy.

Censorship hasn’t stopped. First Amendment activities continue to be pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state. The courts continue to be dominated by technicians and statists who are deferential to authority, whether government or business. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years have most often been characterized by an abject deference to government authority, military and corporate interests.

Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal, while reinforcing the power of the police state and its corporate allies.

The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements. On any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether it’s your local police, a fusion center, the National Security Agency or one of the government’s many corporate partners, is still monitoring and tracking your every move.

The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers. Under the pretext of protecting the nation’s infrastructure (roads, mass transit systems, water and power supplies, telecommunications systems and so on) against criminal or terrorist attacks, TSA task forces (comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams) continue to do random security sweeps of nexuses of transportation, including ports, railway and bus stations, airports, ferries and subways, as well as political conventions, baseball games and music concerts. Sweep tactics include the use of x-ray technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs, among other things.

Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, continue to re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” Indeed, this is the agency that is notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad. America’s expanding military empire continues to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.

The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government continues to be the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our so-called representatives. It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep. In fact, many Americans have been so carried away by their blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their respective political gods that they have lost sight of the one thing that has remained constant in recent years: our freedoms are steadily declining. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government.

So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past 50 years, it will be just another lie.

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”

The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”

Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”

In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.

Life is good in America, too.

Life is good in America as long as you’re not one of the hundreds of migrant children (including infants, toddlers, preschoolers) being detained in unsanitary conditions by U.S. Border Patrol without proper access to food and water, made to sleep on concrete floors, go without a shower for weeks on end, and only allowed to brush your teeth once every 10 days.

Life is good in America as long as you don’t have to come face to face with a trigger-happy cop hyped up on the power of the badge, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and disposed to view people of color as a suspect class.

Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Life is good in America as long as you’ve got enough money to spare that you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%.

Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

The Civil War Now in America

Posted on July 17, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Saker

America is controlled only by its wealthiest, and they are solidly in control of both political Parties. However, now that they are in control, they are fighting bitterly amongst one-another. They are on two sides. Concerning foreign policies, and domestic policies, Republican Party billionaires hate especially Iran, and especially all progressivism. By contrast, concerning foreign policies, and domestic policies, Democratic Party billionaires hate especially Russia, and accept some progressivism. (They need to do the latter so that they can be considered to be liberals and thus tolerated or even admired by Democratic Party voters. That’s necessary for them because, for example, Democratic Party voters would be just as turned off toward a politician who is financed by and fronts for the conservative Koch brothers, as Republican Party voters would be turned off toward a politician who is financed by and fronts for the liberal George Soros — and everybody knows that billionaires fund the major politicians; it’s not a totally hidden fact. Soros and other liberal billionaires can claim to be ‘public spirited’, which is necessary for them in order to be able to appeal to liberals; but the Koch brothers and other avowedly conservative billionaires have no need to make that pretense in order to appeal to conservatives.)

Actually, all billionaires are conservatives, because they need to be that, in order to call a country like America “democratic” instead of “dictatorial,” and they need that myth of American ‘democracy’ in order to prevent a revolution, which would strip them of their power. (No American billionaire calls America a “dictatorship,” even though it is and each of them knows it, since they collectively are the dictators here, and since they don’t become involved in politics, at all, unless they want to remain in control over it. The richer a person is, the more conservative the person tends to be, and billionaires are the richest people of all, so all of them are actually conservatives. Even billionaire liberals are conservative, because otherwise the individual would be fomenting revolution, and none of them is doing any such thing — what would they be revolting against, if not themselves? They can pretend to be progressive, but only pretend. Furthermore, every study shows that the richer a person is, the more involved in politics the person tends to be. Poor people are the least involved in politics, and this is one of the reasons why the U.S. is a dictatorship. It’s a dictatorship by the richest, and throughout thousands of years that has been called an “aristocracy,” as opposed to a “democracy.”

The first scientific study of whether the U.S. is a dictatorship or a democracy was published in 2014 and it found that America is a dictatorship and that its richest are in control over it. Only wealth and political involvement determined whether a person’s desired governmental policies get passed into law and implemented by governmental policies, the researchers found. Furthermore, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Consequently, the public’s desires are actually ignored by the American Government. It’s not responsive to what the public wants; it is responsive only to what the politically involved super-rich — the people who mainly fund politics — want. And those billionaires also control, or even own, all of the major ’news’media, and so their propaganda filters-out such realities as that the country is a dictatorship, no democracy at all.

Barack Obama was, from the very first moment when he became President, aiming to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government, and the reason for that was never made clear, but some people thought it was because Syria is allied with Iran, and some of them thought that it was instead because Syria is allied with Russia. When the Democrat Obama negotiated and signed the multinational pact in which Iran guaranteed that it would produce no nuclear bombs and the U.S. and its allies would end their sanctions against Iran, the reality became clear that Obama didn’t actually hate Iran (which the Republican Trump clearly does). Obama was invading Syria because it’s allied with Russia, not because it’s allied with Iran. His successor, the Republican Donald Trump, is just as anti-Iran as Obama was anti-Russia. Whereas the Republican Party especially hate Iran, the Democratic Party especially hate Russia. And that’s because their billionaires do — the Democratic ones hate Russia the most, and the Republican ones hate Iran the most. That’s the biggest single difference between the two Parties.

The main personal difference between Obama and Trump (other than that Obama was intelligent and Trump isn’t) is that Obama was a much more skilled liar than Trump is. For example, he was able to string Vladimir Putin along until 2012 to hope that Obama’s ‘reset with Russia’ wasn’t merely a ploy. On 26 March 2012, Obama informed Dmitry Medvedev to tell Putin that “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [the incoming President Putin] to give me space. This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” However, it was all a lie. The fact is that, already, Obama was actually planning, even as early as 2011, to overthrow the neutralist Government right next door to Russia, in Ukraine, and to replace it with a rabidly anti-Russian regime on Russia’s doorstep, which he was planning to bring into NATO even though only around 30% of Ukrainians wanted Ukraine to join NATO. But Putin had no way of knowing that Obama was planning this. And immediately after Obama’s February 2014 coup in Ukraine, around 60% of Ukrainians suddenly wanted Ukraine to join NATO. (That’s because the newly installed Obama regime propagandized hatred against Russia.) Obama won Ukraine as being an enemy of Russia; it’s as if Putin had wrangled a coup in Mexico and suddenly Mexicans turned rabidly hostile toward the U.S. But it was a Democrat who did this, not a Republican. And the Republican Trump is just as hostile to Iran as Obama was to Russia. These aren’t foreign governments that are interfering in America’s foreign policies; maybe Israel is doing that, and maybe Saudi Arabia is, and maybe UAE is, but certainly America’s 585 billionaires are. And they are allied with those three Middle Eastern countries. When America imposes sanctions against a country in order to wreck the target-nation’s economy, that target-nation is officially an ‘enemy’, and that’s because it is allied with or at least friendly toward either Russia, or Iran, or both. America’s 585 billionaires control America’s foreign policies, but disagree on whether America’s top enemy is (if the billionaire is a Republican) Iran, or (if the billionaire is a Democrat) Russia.

For example: If the next President is Biden, then conquering Russia will be the main foreign-policy goal, but if the next President is Trump, then conquering Iran will be.

Information is power, Julian Assange and the public’s right to know

Posted on July 16, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Carla Binion

Source: Intrepid Report

I’ve been writing political commentary for decades. Starting in the late 80s and through around the time of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and for a few years beyond I wrote many articles that were published online. Some appeared in Online Journal (now Intrepid Report), at Consortium News, at TomPaine.com, at BushWatch, at the Smirking Chimp and several other sites.

The U.S. and the world seemed to be more politically awake around the time of the Iraq War than they are today. During that time, the majority of people were aware that the Bush administration’s rationale for the war was false. The public soon realized the “weapons of mass destruction” excuse was a lie. People were paying attention, informing themselves, reading articles and listening to alternative media that told the truth about the war.

Today governments are still lying to the public about war and trying to cover up war crimes. However, unlike during the Iraq War, governments are now getting away with some of their most egregious lies, including their propaganda against Julian Assange.

The corporate press (as opposed to independent media) have falsely portrayed the U.S. government’s mistreatment of Assange. Because of this, the public doesn’t fully understand that the real reason Assange is being persecuted is that he exposed war crimes and other evil deeds of powerful U.S. political figures. It seems very few people are aware of the defining facts about the Assange case.

Based on my recent conversations with alternative journalists, I know I’m not the only one wondering how the U.S. public has grown so indifferent to protecting the rights of non-mainstream journalists and whistle-blowers. My friends and I have raised the question: Is public indifference mostly due to our being exposed to years of propaganda, to a general feeling of being powerless to challenge the powerful, or is it just fatigue?

The people will have to put up at least a little bit of a fight on behalf of whistle-blowers and other truth tellers if we have the heart to protect the limited freedoms we have left. One obvious place for average citizens to start is ascertaining the facts about the Assange case, and that means digging past the many smears, lies and distortions the public has been told.

This kind of independent citizen investigation is one way the public was able to determine that the Iraq War was based on untruths. Being well informed helped people avoid jumping on the bandwagon for perpetual regime change war. Today some of the same politically powerful people who fooled us about Iraq are still trying to deceive us into supporting illicit wars.

It might help alleviate the problem if more people once again worked to become accurately informed. We need to learn from reliable alternative news sources (not from corporate media) and care enough to speak out against unjust war. The world would benefit if the pubic would make the effort to find out what is true about Assange and support him and other whistle-blowers who tell us the truth about war crimes and other government misdeeds.

Thomas Jefferson was right to say the only way we can have any semblance of democracy is if we have a public that is well informed. Information is power, and a public that doesn’t seek or value it will be powerless

The Forever War Is So Normalized That Opposing It Is “Isolationism”

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

After getting curb stomped on the debate stage by Tulsi Gabbard, the campaign for Tim “Who the fuck is Tim Ryan?” Ryan posted a statement decrying the Hawaii congresswoman’s desire to end a pointless 18-year military occupation as “isolationism”.

“While making a point as to why America can’t cede its international leadership and retreat from around the world, Tim was interrupted by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard,” the statement reads. “When he tried to answer her, she contorted a factual point Tim was making— about the Taliban being complicit in the 9/11 attacks by providing training, bases and refuge for Al Qaeda and its leaders. The characterization that Tim Ryan doesn’t know who is responsible for the attacks on 9/11 is simply unfair reporting. Further, we continue to reject Gabbard’s isolationism and her misguided beliefs on foreign policy. We refuse to be lectured by someone who thinks it’s ok to dine with murderous dictators like Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad who used chemical weapons on his own people.”

Ryan’s campaign is lying. During an exchange that was explicitly about the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ryan plainly said “When we weren’t in there, they started flying planes into our buildings.” At best, Ryan can argue that when he said “they” he had suddenly shifted from talking about the Taliban to talking about Al Qaeda without bothering to say so, in which case he obviously can’t legitimately claim that Gabbard “contorted” anything he had said. At worst, he was simply unaware at the time of the very clear distinction between the Afghan military and political body called the Taliban and the multinational extremist organization called Al Qaeda.

Watch the 5 minutes that have people talking Tulsi!
A soldier's truth about the establishment war machine driving US foreign policy https://t.co/JC0MqYSEmT #DemDebate – #TULSI2020 pic.twitter.com/kJnp3gRfKq

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) June 27, 2019

More importantly, Ryan’s campaign using the word “isolationism” to describe the simple common sense impulse to withdraw from a costly, deadly military occupation which isn’t accomplishing anything highlights an increasingly common tactic of tarring anything other than endless military expansionism as strange and aberrant instead of normal and good. Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism. This removal of a desirable opposite of war from the establishment-authorised lexicon causes war to always be the desirable option.

This is entirely by design. This bit of word magic has been employed for a long time to tar any idea which deviates from the neoconservative agenda of total global unipolarity via violent imperialism as something freakish and dangerous. In his farewell address to the nation, war criminal George W Bush said the following:

“In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led.”

A few months after Bush’s address, Antiwar‘s Rich Rubino wrote an article titled “Non-Interventionism is Not Isolationism“, explaining the difference between a nation which withdraws entirely from the world and a nation which simply resists the temptation to use military aggression except in self defense.

“Isolationism dictates that a country should have no relations with the rest of the world,” Rubino explained. “In its purest form this would mean that ambassadors would not be shared with other nations, communications with foreign governments would be mainly perfunctory, and commercial relations would be non-existent.”

“A non-interventionist supports commercial relations,” Rubino contrasted. “In fact, in terms of trade, many non-interventionists share libertarian proclivities and would unilaterally obliterate all tariffs and custom duties, and would be open to trade with all willing nations. In addition, non-interventionists welcome cultural exchanges and the exchange of ambassadors with all willing nations.”

“A non-interventionist believes that the U.S. should not intercede in conflicts between other nations or conflicts within nations,” wrote Rubino. “In recent history, non-interventionists have proved prophetic in warning of the dangers of the U.S. entangling itself in alliances. The U.S. has suffered deleterious effects and effectuated enmity among other governments, citizenries, and non-state actors as a result of its overseas interventions. The U.S. interventions in both Iran and Iraq have led to cataclysmic consequences.”

Statement from Ryan Campaign on Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/3vuV62kl1S

— Tim Ryan (@TimRyan) June 27, 2019

Calling an aversion to endless military violence “isolationism” is the same as calling an aversion to mugging people “agoraphobia”. Yet you’ll see this ridiculous label applied to both Gabbard and Trump, neither of whom are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists. Gabbard supports most US military alliances and continues to voice full support for the bogus “war on terror” implemented by the Bush administration which serves no purpose other than to facilitate endless military expansionism; Trump is openly pushing regime change interventionism in both Venezuela and Iran while declining to make good on his promises to withdraw the US military from Syria and Afghanistan.

Another dishonest label you’ll get thrown at you when debating the forever war is “pacifism”. “Some wars are bad, but I’m not a pacifist; sometimes war is necessary,” supporters of a given interventionist military action will tell you. They’ll say this while defending Trump’s potentially catastrophic Iran warmongering or promoting a moronic regime change invasion of Syria, or defending disastrous US military interventions in the past like Iraq.

This is bullshit for a couple of reasons. Firstly, virtually no one is a pure pacifist who opposes war under any and all possible circumstances; anyone who claims that they can’t imagine any possible scenario in which they’d support using some kind of coordinated violence either hasn’t imagined very hard or is fooling themselves. If your loved ones were going to be raped, tortured and killed by hostile forces unless an opposing group took up arms to defend them, for example, you would support that. Hell, you would probably join in. Secondly, equating opposition to US-led regime change interventionism, which is literally always disastrous and literally never helpful, is not even a tiny bit remotely like opposing all war under any possible circumstance.

She’s not “antiwar” – she’s anti a US war. She’s totally pro the Russian air war in Syria and celebrated Russian air strikes that have killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians.

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) February 6, 2019

Another common distortion you’ll see is the specious argument that a given opponent of US interventionism “isn’t anti-war” because they don’t oppose all war under any and all circumstances. This tweet by The Intercept‘s Mehdi Hasan is a perfect example, claiming that Gabbard is not anti-war because she supports Syria’s sovereign right to defend itself with the help of its allies from the violent extremist factions which overran the country with western backing. Again, virtually no one is opposed to all war under any and all circumstances; if a coalition of foreign governments had helped flood Hasan’s own country of Britain with extremist militias who’d been murdering their way across the UK with the ultimate goal of toppling London, both Tulsi Gabbard and Hasan would support fighting back against those militias.

The label “anti-war” can for these reasons be a little misleading. The term anti-interventionist or non-interventionist comes closest to describing the value system of most people who oppose the warmongering of the western empire, because they understand that calls for military interventionism which go mainstream in today’s environment are almost universally based on imperialist agendas grabbing at power, profit, and global hegemony. The label “isolationist” comes nowhere close.

It all comes down to sovereignty. An anti-interventionist believes that a country has the right to defend itself, but it doesn’t have the right to conquer, capture, infiltrate or overthrow other nations whether covertly or overtly. At the “end” of colonialism we all agreed we were done with that, except that the nationless manipulators have found far trickier ways to seize a country’s will and resources without actually planting a flag there. We need to get clearer on these distinctions and get louder about defending them as the only sane, coherent way to run foreign policy.

The Limited Mind: Why Fear is Driving Humanity to Extinction

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

I have previously written many articles describing one or more aspects of the dysfunctional nature of the typical human mind, together with an explanation of how this came about and what we can do about it. See, for example, many of the articles republished in ‘Key Articles’ and the source documents ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

I have also explained that it is this dysfunctional psychological foundation that generated the behaviors, as well as the political, economic, legal and social institutions (such as capitalism), that are driving the multifaceted and existential crisis in which humanity now finds itself.

Moreover, on that basis, my own focus has significantly evolved from the research and nonviolent activism that occupied me for several decades to now include an ongoing effort to have this psychological dysfunctionality addressed as a central feature of our efforts to understand and transform dysfunctional political, economic, legal and social institutions as well as to understand and end war (including the threat of nuclear war), the environmental crisis (including the climate catastrophe) and all other ongoing conflicts that bedevil humanity.

You may believe that psychology is unimportant to your understanding of conflict or that it is the realm of specialists but, in fact, it is crucial to any deeper and complete understanding of the origin and unfolding of our crisis and it is far from complicated simply because any psychological dysfunctionality can be explained in straightforward language which is readily understood by most people. For a sample, try ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’.

But because only the rarest psychologist and psychiatrist understands human psychology – as I have explained in ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ – most of the literature on psychology and psychiatry is virtually incomprehensible, not to mention inaccurate. This lack of understanding has four immediate and disastrous outcomes.

First, it leads to groups of psychological symptoms being linked together and then given an arbitrary label (so that the fields of psychology/psychiatry can sound as if they know what they are talking about while excluding those who do not comprehend their jargon).

Second, it provides cover for the pharmaceutical industry to profit massively from the manufacture and sale of drugs that theoretically suppress key symptoms of, rather than cure, the psychological dysfunction that has been ‘diagnosed’.

Third, it precludes accurate diagnosis and treatment of any dysfunction: obviously, if a problem is not understood it cannot be responded to powerfully so that the issue is resolved. (Of course, it is more profitable for practitioners and the pharmaceutical industry if any dysfunction is not resolved but simply requires ongoing – that is, endless – ‘therapy’/drugs.)

Fourth and most fundamentally of all, it limits the domain of what is considered psychological dysfunctionality to those with ‘identifiable’ mental illnesses. But psychological dysfunctionality goes well beyond those considered to have a mental illness and is simply an outcome of the fact that mental health, like physical health, has many dimensions that require appropriate attention for the human organism to function optimally.

So, beyond the many examples I have offered previously in the articles I cited above (and others not cited but also available on the ‘Feelings First’ website), I would now like to describe further common examples of psychological dysfunctionality that are impeding both activists and those they are trying to mobilize in the effort to save Earth’s biosphere and avert human extinction, particularly given the timeframe in which this must now happen. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

As a result of the ‘socialization’ (more accurately labeled ‘terrorization’) to which all children are subjected throughout their childhood and adolescence (which involves inflicting unending ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence on them during these periods) – see ‘Why Violence?’ – the typical young human being obediently (or, often enough, unconsciously) acquires the set of attitudes, beliefs and values (as well as the consequent behaviors) that are approved by the significant adults (and predominant institutions) in their life. These attitudes, beliefs and values, however, are often so deeply entrenched by the (unconscious) fear that holds them in place that they are never subjected to serious scrutiny by the individual: whether functional or otherwise, they are accepted without question and, over time, acquire the status of ‘incontrovertible fact’ (as the individual perceives them).

The most obvious (and highly negative) consequence of being terrorized into accepting the attitudes, beliefs and values of the significant adults (and predominant institutions) around them is that the capacities to analyze a problem or conflict (often including its roots in the nature of their society), to seek out relevant (and perhaps complex) evidence to understand the issues arising from it, to plan a strategy so that underlying drivers of the problem or conflict are addressed in depth and to then behave strategically (often in concert with others) to achieve this outcome are simply never developed beyond the most superficial levels (sufficient, say, for a socially approved career, whether trade or professional).

As a result, the typical human being is simply going through the routine of ‘growing up’ (which also critically involves being further terrorized into becoming a submissive citizen and worker/soldier at school for a decade or more: see ‘Do We Want School or Education?’), choosing post-secondary education and/or an approved job doing what someone else tells you, and then doing that job (or an equivalent) for decades (usually having a partner and children in the process and perhaps some hobby as well).

Fundamentally, humans are terrorized into taking on the ‘socially-constructed delusional identity’ that their society imposes on them and then calling it ‘me’. Their personal life journey is now so utterly obliterated from their awareness that the idea of seeking out their own unique destiny never even occurs to them. Of course, some people (in industrialized societies at least) are compensated for their sacrifice: wages, entertainment, travel and other trinkets. But, for most, these trinkets are given in sparing quantities and for many others around the world (in deliberately ‘underdeveloped’ countries), not at all.

Terrorized into believing that this is all that life has to offer, only the rarest individual aspires to more. Endless consumption of goods and services (no matter the quality, beauty or functionality) – see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ – at the expense of the Earth, becomes the reason for living. Because life itself no longer has meaning.

So here we are, a human population that is so devoid of self and planetary awareness that we are on the brink of precipitating our own extinction. Do you really believe that this is where we would be if we were all psychologically functional? Manipulated and controlled by an unaccountable global elite that is utterly insane – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – using its many agents, including governments, to easily deceive us into consuming ever more in pursuit of capitalism’s ‘God’ – endless economic growth (that is, corporate profit, power and privilege) – the bulk of the human population submissively unaware (except of the latest scandal or sports result) and most activists (who purport to be trying to do something about the perilous state of the world) incapable of thinking, planning and acting strategically to struggle for outcomes that are so desperately needed. See, for example, ‘Why Activists Fail’.

So what can we do?

Well, given that the enormous psychological dysfunctionality of most humans is the primary driver of our accelerating rush to extinction – again, see ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ – I encourage you to seriously consider incorporating strategies to address this dysfunctionality into any effort you make to improve our world.

For most people, this will include starting with yourself. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

For virtually all adults, it will include reviewing your relationship with children and, ideally, making ‘My Promise to Children’. Critically, this will include learning the skill of nisteling. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

For those who feel psychologically capable, consider campaigning strategically to achieve the outcomes we need. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy. The global elite is deeply entrenched – fighting its wars, exploiting people, destroying the biosphere, invading/occupying resource-rich countries – and not about to give way without a concerted effort by many of us campaigning strategically on several key fronts.

If you recognize the pervasiveness of the fear-driven violence in our world, consider joining the global network of people resisting it by signing the online pledge of ‘The People ’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World ’.

But if you do nothing else while understanding the simple point that Earth’s biosphere cannot sustain a human population of this magnitude of whom more than half endlessly over-consume, then consider accelerated participation in the strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’.

Or, if this feels too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

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

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

Conclusion

There is a great deal wrong with our world, which continues to get worse every day. And, as should be obvious from my argument above, if we as a species do not start to remove the (largely unconscious) fear that limits our minds and governs our behavior, we will continue contributing to this predicament rather than resolving it.

I am well aware that this point is not where the typical individual wants to start and that is assuming the point is even understood. After all, because most fear is unconscious, it is easy for people to fail to identify their own dysfunctional behavior (or to rationalize it by believing in the ‘importance’ of what they do). So while you may like to believe that we do not have to ‘start’ with this point, collectively speaking, we cannot ignore it either, if human survival is our aim.

The key issue is that for our strategy to mobilize people in this great struggle for survival to be effective, we must also be mobilizing parents, teachers, religious leaders and other adults to reconsider and profoundly revise their relationship with children. This is because every child who is not dysfunctionalized becomes a powerful agent for change. If we do not do this, we will continue to undermine the overall struggle, even if we precipitate some interim victories along the way.

My own preoccupation is ending violence, averting human extinction and building anew and sustainably our relationships with the Earth and each other. What about you?

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

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: war

The Forever War Is So Normalized That Opposing It Is “Isolationism”