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Totalitarianism & The Five Stages of Dehumanization

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By Christiann W.J.M. Alting Von Geusau

Source: The Pulse

Hannah Arendt’s seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism(1948) makes for sobering reading in the world we see developing around us in the year 2021. Indeed, we find ourselves in an impasse of epic proportions where the essence of what it means to be human is at stake. 

“The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.” – Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published 1948

Although it is hard to claim that – at least in the West – we find ourselves once again under the yoke of totalitarian regimes comparable to those we know so well from the 20th century, there is no doubt that we are faced with a global paradigm that brings forth steadily expanding totalitarian tendencies, and these need not even be planned intentionally or maliciously. 

As we will come to discuss later, the modern-day drivers of such totalitarian tendencies are for the most part convinced – with the support of the masses – that they are doing the right thing because they claim to know what is best for the people in a time of existential crisis. Totalitarianism is a political ideology that can easily spread in society without much of the population at first noticing it and before it is too late. In her book, Hannah Arendt meticulously describes the genesis of the totalitarian movements that ultimately grew into the totalitarian regimes of 20th century Europe and Asia, and the unspeakable acts of genocide and crimes against humanity this ultimately resulted in. 

As Arendt would certainly warn us against, we should not be misled by the fact that we do not see in the West today any of the atrocities that were the hallmark of the totalitarian regimes of Communism under Stalin or Mao and Nazism under Hitler. These events were all preceded by a gradually spreading mass ideology and subsequent state-imposed ideological campaigns and measures promoting apparently “justifiable” and “scientifically proven” control measures and actions aimed at permanent surveillance and ultimately a step-by-step exclusion of certain people from (parts of) society because they posed “a risk” to others or dared to think outside of what was considered acceptable thought.

In his book The Demon in Democracy – Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, the Polish lawyer and Member of the European Parliament Ryszard Legutko leaves no doubt that there are worrying similarities between many of the dynamics in Communist totalitarian regimes and modern-day liberal democracies, when he observes: “Communism and liberal democracy proved to be all-unifying entities compelling their followers how to think, what to do, how to evaluate events, what to dream, and what language to use.”

This is also the dynamics we see at work on many levels of globalized society today. Every reader, but especially politicians and journalists, interested in human freedom, democracy and the rule of law, should carefully read Chapter 11 on “The Totalitarian Movement” in Hannah Arendt’s much-acclaimed book. She explains how long before totalitarian regimes take actual power and establish complete control, their architects and enablers have already been patiently preparing society – not necessarily in a coordinated way or with that end-goal in mind – for the takeover. The totalitarian movement itself is driven by the aggressive and at times violent promotion of a certain dominant ideology, through relentless propaganda, censorship, and groupthink. It also always includes major economic and financial interests. Such a process then results in an ever more omnipotent state, assisted by a host of unaccountable groups, (international) institutions and corporations, that claims to have a patent on truth and language and on knowing what is good for its citizens and society as a whole.

Although there is of course a vast difference between Communist totalitarian regimes of the 21st century that we see in China and North Korea, and Western liberal democracies with their growing totalitarian tendencies, what seems to be the unifying element between the two systems today is thought control and behavioral management of its populations. This development has been greatly enhanced through what was coined by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism.” Surveillance capitalism, Zuboff writes, is “[a] movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty.” It is also – and here she does not mince her words – “[a]n expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.” The modern state and its allies, whether communist, liberal or otherwise, have – for the above and other reasons – an insatiable desire to collect massive amounts of data on citizens and customers and to use this data extensively for control and influence. 

On the commercial side, we have all the aspects of tracking people’s behavior and preferences online, brilliantly explained in the documentary The Social Dilemma, confronting us with the reality that “Never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act, and live our lives.” At the same time we see in operation the “social credit” system rolled out by the Chinese Communist Party that uses big data and permanent CCTV live footage to manage people’s behavior in public areas through a system of awards and punishments. 

The mandatory QR code first introduced in China in 2020 and subsequently in liberal democratic states around the world in 2021, to keep permanent track of people’s health status and as a prerequisite for participating in society, is the latest and deeply troubling phenomenon of this same surveillance capitalism. Here the dividing line between mere technocracy and totalitarianism becomes almost extinct under the guise of “protecting public health.” The currently attempted colonization of the human body by the state and its commercial partners, claiming to have our best interests in mind, is part of this troubling dynamic. Where did the progressive mantra “My body, my choice” suddenly go?

So, what then, is totalitarianism? It is a system of government (a totalitarian regime), or a system of increasing control otherwise implemented (a totalitarian movement) – presenting itself in different forms and at different levels of society – that tolerates no individual freedom or independent thought and that ultimately seeks to totally subordinate and direct all aspects of the individual human life. In the words of Dreher, totalitarianism “is a state in which nothing can be permitted to exist that contradicts a society’s ruling ideology.”

In modern society, where we see this dynamic very much at work, the use of science and technology play a decisive role in enabling totalitarian tendencies to take hold in ways that 20th century ideologues could only have dreamed of. Furthermore, accompanying totalitarianism in whatever stage, institutionalized dehumanization occurs and is the process by which the whole or part of the population is subjected to policies and practices that consistently violate the dignity and fundamental rights of the human being and that may ultimately lead to exclusion and social or, in the worst case, physical extermination. 

In the following, we will look more closely at some of the basic tenets of the totalitarian movement as described by Hannah Arendt and how this enables the dynamics of institutionalized dehumanization that we observe today. In the conclusion, we will briefly look at what history and human experience can tell us about freeing society from the yoke of totalitarianism and its dehumanizing policies. 

The reader must understand that I am in no way comparing or equating the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and their atrocities to what I see as the increasing totalitarian tendencies and resulting policies today. Instead, as is the role of a robust academic discourse, we will take a critical look at what we see happening in society today and analyze relevant historical and political phenomena that might instruct us on how we can deal better with the present course of events that, if not corrected, does not bode well for a future of freedom and the rule of law.

I. The workings of totalitarianism

When we speak about “totalitarianism,” the word is being used in this context to describe the whole of a political ideology that can present itself in different forms and stages, but that always has the ultimate goal of total control over people and society. As described above, Hannah Arendt distinguishes within totalitarianism between the totalitarian movement and the totalitarian regime. I add to this categorizing what I believe to be an early stage of the totalitarian movement, called “totalitarian tendencies” by Legutko, and that I call ideological totalitarianism in relation to current developments. For totalitarianism to have a chance of succeeding, Hannah Arendt tells us, three main and closely intertwined phenomena are needed: the mass movement, the elite’s leading role in steering those masses and the employment of relentless propaganda.

The lonely masses

For its establishment and durability totalitarianism depends as a first step on mass support obtained through playing into a sense of permanent crisis and fear in society. This then feeds the urge of the masses to have those in charge constantly take “measures” and show leadership to ward off the threat that has been identified as endangering the whole of society. Those in charge can “remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion.”The reason for this is that totalitarian movements build on the classical failure of societies throughout human history to create and uphold a sense of community and purpose, instead breeding isolated, self-centered human beings without a clear overarching purpose in life. 

The masses following the totalitarian movement are lost themselves and as a result in search of a clear identity and a purpose in life that they do not find in their current circumstances: “Social atomization and extreme individualization preceded the mass movement (..). The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.” 

How familiar this sounds to any person observing modern society. In an age where social media and whatever else is presented on screens set the tone above all else and where teenage girls fall into depression and increased suicide attempts because of the lack of “likes” on their Instagram account, we indeed see a disconcerting example of this lack of normal relationships that were instead meant to involve in-person encounters leading to profound exchanges. In Communist societies it is the Party that sets out to destroy religious, social and family ties to make place for a citizen that can be completely subjected by the State and the dictates of the Party, like we see happening in China and North Korea. In hedonistic and materialistic Western societies this same destruction happens through different means and under the neo-Marxist guise of unstoppable “progress,” where technology and a false definition of the purpose of science erodes the understanding of what it means to be human: “In fact,” writes Dreher, “this technology and the culture that has emerged from it is reproducing the atomization and radical loneliness that totalitarian communist governments used to impose on their captive peoples to make them easier to control.” Not only have the smartphone and social media drastically reduced genuine human interaction, as any teacher or parent of schoolchildren can attest to, but the social framework has in recent times further dramatically deteriorated through other major shifts in society. 

The ever-growing Big-Tech and government policing of language, opinions, and scientific information in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, accompanied by a level of censorship not seen since World War II, has greatly reduced and impoverished the public discourse and seriously undermined trust in science, politics and the community. 

In 2020 and 2021, mostly well-meant yet often ill-advised government-imposed Corona measures such as lockdowns, mask-mandates, entry-requirements to public facilities and Corona vaccine mandates have further massively limited the unimpeded human interaction that any society needs to retain and strengthen its social fabric. All these externally imposed developments contribute from different directions to human beings, especially the young, increasingly and ever more lastingly being deprived of those ‘normal social relationships’ Hannah Arendt speaks of. Seemingly lacking alternatives, this in turn leads large groups of the population – most of them not even realizing it – into the arms of totalitarian ideologies. These movements, however, in the words of Arendt, “demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member (..) [since] their organization will encompass, in due course, the entire human race.”

The final goal of totalitarianism, she explains, is the permanent domination of human beings from within, thus involving each and every aspect of life, whereby the masses have to be kept constantly in motion since “a political goal that would constitute the end of the movement simply does not exist.” Without in any way wishing to downplay the gravity and urgency of these issues in and of themselves, or the need as a society to devise ways to deal with existential threats arising from them, Corona political and media narratives are examples of such an ideological totalitarianism that wants to completely control how human beings think, speak and act in that area of life, whist keeping them in perpetual anxiety through well-planned regular dramatic news updates (One tool being used for this successfully throughout the world is the constant well-rehearsed press conferences by grave-looking ministers in suits behind Plexiglas and flanked by experts and state flags), instrumentalized heartbreaking stories and calls to immediate action (“measures”), dealing with (perceived or real) new threats to their person, to their cause and to society as a whole. Fear is the main driving force behind keeping this perpetual anxiety and activism going.

The role of the elite

Hannah Arendt then goes on to explain what is a disturbing phenomenon of totalitarian movements, it being the enormous attraction it exerts on the elites, the “terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count amongst its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members. This elite believes that what is required for solving the acute problems society is currently faced with is the total destruction, or at least the total redesign, of all that was considered common sense, logic and established wisdom until this point. 

When it comes to the Corona crisis, the well-known capacity of the human body to build natural immunity against most viruses it has already encountered is no longer deemed relevant in any way by those imposing vaccination mandates, rejecting foundational principles of human biology and established medical wisdom.

To achieve this total overhaul for the sake of complete control, the elites are willing to work with any people or organization, including those people, called “the mob” by Arendt, whose features are “failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life.” A good example of this is the West’s dealings with the Chinese Communist Party. Although the flagrant corruption and human rights abuses – including the genocidal campaign against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang – perpetrated by this institution of repression throughout history until today are well-documented, as is its role in covering up the 2019 outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Wuhan perhaps resulting from a lab leak, most countries in the world have become so dependent on China that they are willing to look the other way and cooperate with a regime that is willing to trample on all that liberal democracy stands for. 

Hannah Arendt describes another disturbing element that is part of what she calls the “temporary alliance between the mob and the elite” and that is the willingness of these elites to lie their way into obtaining and retaining power through “the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts.” At this point it is not a proven fact that governments and their allies are lying about statistics and scientific data surrounding Covid-19; however, it is clear that there exist many serious inconsistencies that are not or not sufficiently being dealt with. 

Throughout the history of totalitarian movements and regimes the offenders have been able to get away with much because they understood very well what is the primary concern of the simple man or woman going about their daily business of making life work for their families and other dependents, as masterfully expressed by Arendt: “He [Göring] proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.” And: “[n]othing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives.”

We all long for security and predictability and hence a crisis makes us look for ways to obtain or retain security and safety, and when necessary, most are willing to pay a high price for this, including relinquishing their freedoms and living with the notion that they might not be told the whole truth about the crisis at hand. It should be no surprise then that considering the potential lethal effect the Coronavirus can have on human beings, our very human fear of death has led most of us to part without much of a fight with the rights and freedoms that our fathers and grandfathers fought so hard for. 

Also, as vaccine mandates are introduced around the globe for workers in many industries and settings, the majority is complying not because they themselves necessarily believe they need the Corona vaccine, but only because they want to reclaim their freedoms and keep their jobs so they can feed their families. The political elites imposing these mandates know this of course and make smart use of it, often even with the best of intentions believing that this is necessary to deal with the crisis at hand.

Totalitarian propaganda

The most important and ultimate tool used by totalitarian movements in the non-totalitarian society is to establish real control of the masses by winning them over through the use of propaganda: “Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda.”As Hannah Arendt explains, both fear and science are extensively used to oil the propaganda machine. Fear is always propagated as directed towards somebody or something external that poses a real or perceived threat to society or the individual. But there is another even more sinister element that totalitarian propaganda historically uses to cajole the masses into following its lead through fear and that is “the use of indirect, veiled, and menacing hints against all who will not heed its teachings (..)”, all the while claiming the strictly scientific and public benefit nature of its argument that those measures are needed. Both the deliberate instrumentalization of fear and the constant referral to “follow the science” by political actors and the mass media in the Corona crisis has been extremely successful as a propaganda tool. 

Hannah Arendt freely admits that the use of science as an effective tool of politics in general has been widespread and not necessarily always in a bad sense. This is of course also the case where it concerns the Corona crisis. Even so, she continues, the obsession with science has increasingly characterized the Western world since the 16th century. She sees the totalitarian weaponization of science, quoting the German philosopher Eric Voegelin, as the final stage in a societal process where “science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”

Science is employed to provide the arguments for the justification of societal fear and for the reasonableness of the far-reaching measures imposed to “confront” and “exterminate” the external danger. Arendt: “The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterized by its almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy (..)” 

How many such prophecies have we not heard since the beginning of 2020 and that have not come to pass? It is not at all relevant, Arendt continues, whether these “prophecies” would be based on good science or bad science, since the leaders of the masses make it their primary focus to fit reality to their own interpretations and, where deemed necessary, lies, whereby their propaganda is “marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such.” 

They do not believe in anything that is related to personal experience or what is visible, but only in what they imagine, what their own statistical models say, and the ideologically consistent system they have built around it. Organization and single-mindedness of purpose is what the totalitarian movement aims at for obtaining full control, whereby the content of the propaganda (whether fact or fiction, or both) becomes an untouchable element of the movement and where objective reason or let alone public discourse no longer play any role. 

Until now, respectful public debate and a robust scientific discourse have not been possible when it comes to the best way to respond to the Corona pandemic. The elites are keenly aware of this and use it to the advantage of forwarding their agenda, that instead it is radical consistency that the masses long for in times of existential crisis, as it (initially) gives them a sense of security and predictability. Yet this is also where the great weakness of totalitarian propaganda lies, since ultimately “(..) it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense.”

Today we see this exacerbated, as I already mentioned above, through a fundamentally flawed understanding and use of science by the powers that be. Former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, a well-known epidemiologist and biostatistician specializing in infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety, notes what is the correct application of science and how this is lacking in the current narrative: “Science is about rational disagreement, the questioning and testing of orthodoxy and the constant search for truth.”

We are now very far removed from this concept in a public climate where science has been politicized into a truth factory that tolerates no dissent, even if the alternative viewpoint merely outlines the numerous inconsistencies and falsehoods that are part of the political and media narrative. The moment however, Arendt points out, this system error becomes clear to the participants in the totalitarian movement and its defeat is imminent, they will at once cease to believe in its future, from one day to the other giving up on that for which they were willing to give all the day before. 

A striking example of such an overnight abandonment of a totalitarian system is the way in which most apparatchiks in Eastern and Central Europe between 1989 and 1991 turned from hardline career Communists into enthusiastic liberal democrats. They simply abandoned the system they were so faithfully part of for many years and found an alternative system that circumstances allowed them to now embrace. Therefore, as we know from the rubble heaps of history, every effort at totalitarianism has an expiry date. The current version will also fail.

II. Dehumanization at work

During my over 30 years of studying and teaching European history and the sources of law and justice, a pattern has emerged about which I already published in 2014 under the title “Human rights, history and anthropology: reorienting the debate.” In this article I described the process of “dehumanization in 5 steps” and how these human rights’ violations are not generally being perpetrated by ‘monsters,’ but for a large part by ordinary men and women – helped by the passive ideologized masses – who are convinced that what they are doing or participating in is good and necessary, or at least justifiable. 

Since March 2020 we have been witnessing the global unfolding of a serious health crisis leading to unprecedented government, media and societal pressure being exerted on whole populations to acquiesce in far-reaching and mostly unconstitutional measures limiting people’s freedoms and in many cases through threats and undue pressure violating their bodily integrity. During this time, it has become increasingly clear that there are certain tendencies to be seen today that show some similarities to the sort of dehumanizing measures employed as a rule by totalitarian movements and regimes. 

Endless lockdowns, police-enforced quarantines, travel restrictions, vaccine mandates, the suppression of scientific data and debate, large-scale censorship, and the relentless deplatforming and public shaming of critical voices are all examples of dehumanizing measures that should have no place in a system of democracy and the rule of law. We also see the process of increasingly relegating a certain part of the population to the peripheries whilst singling them out as irresponsible and undesired because of the “risk” they pose to others, leading to society gradually excluding them. The President of the United States expressed pointedly what this means in a major live-televised policy speech:

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing. But just don’t take it from me; listen to the voices of unvaccinated Americans who are lying in hospital beds, taking their final breaths, saying, “If only I had gotten vaccinated.” “If only.”” – President Joe Biden September 9, 2021

The five steps

Those peddling political rhetoric today that sets up the “vaccinated” against the “unvaccinated, or vice versa, are going down a very dangerous road of demagoguery that has never ended well in history. Slavenka Drakulic, in her analysis of what led to the 1991-1999 Yugoslav ethnic conflict, observes:” (..) in time those ‘Others’ are stripped of all their individual characteristics. They are no longer acquaintances or professionals with particular names, habits, appearances and characters; instead they are members of the enemy group. When a person is reduced to an abstraction in such a way, one is free to hate him because the moral obstacle has already been abolished.”

Looking at the history of totalitarian movements eventually leading to totalitarian regimes and their campaigns of state-controlled persecution and segregation, this is what happens.

The first step of dehumanization is the creation and political instrumentalization of fear and the resulting permanent anxiety amongst the population: fear for one’s own life and fear for a specific group in society that is considered to be a threat is constantly being fed. 

Fear for one’s own life is of course an understandable and entirely justifiable response to a potentially dangerous new virus. Nobody would like to get sick or die unnecessarily. We don’t want to catch a nasty virus if it can be avoided. Yet once this fear is being instrumentalized by (state) institutions and media outlets to help them achieve certain objectives, such as for example the Austrian government has had to admit to doing in March 2020when it wanted to convince the population of the need for a lockdown, fear becomes a potent weapon. 

Again, Hannah Arendt brings in her sharp analysis when she observes: “Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”

In his 9 September 2021 speech President Biden instrumentalizes for political purposes the normal human fear for the potentially fatal virus and goes on to expand it with fear for ‘unvaccinated people,’ by suggesting that they are per definition responsible not only for their own deaths but potentially for yours too because they are “unnecessarily using” ICU hospital beds. In this way there has been established a new suspicion and anxiety around a specific group of people in society for what they might do to you and your group. 

The creation of fear towards that specific group then turns them into easily identifiable scapegoats for the specific problem that society is facing now, regardless of the facts. An ideology of publicly justified discrimination based on an emotion present in individual human beings in society has been born. This is exactly how the totalitarian movements which turned into totalitarian regimes in recent European history started. Even though it is not comparable to the levels of violence and exclusion of 20th century totalitarian regimes, we are today seeing active fear-based government and media propaganda justifying the exclusion of people. First the “asymptomatic,” then the “unmasked” and now the “unvaccinated” are being presented and treated as a danger and a burden to the rest of society. How often have we not heard from political leaders during the past months that we are living through the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and that the hospitals are full of them:

“That’s nearly 80 million Americans not vaccinated. And in a country as large as ours, that’s 25 percent minority. That 25 percent can cause a lot of damage — and they are. The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning the emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or pancreatitis, or cancer.” – President Joe Biden, September 9, 2021

The second step of dehumanization is soft exclusion: the group turned into scapegoats is excluded from certain – though not all – parts of society. They are still considered part of that society, but their status has been downgraded. They are merely being tolerated whilst at the same time being berated in public for them being or acting differently. Systems are also put in place that enable the authorities, and thus the public at large, to easily identify who these ‘others’ are. Enter the “Green Pass” or QR code. In many Western countries this finger-pointing is happening now, especially towards those not vaccinated against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, regardless of the constitutionally protected considerations or medical reasons why individuals may decide against receiving this specific jab. 

For example, on November 5, 2021, Austria was the first country in Europe to introduce highly discriminatory restrictions for the “unvaccinated.” These citizens have been barred from participating in societal life and can only go to work, grocery shopping, church, have a walk or attend to clearly defined “emergencies”. New Zealand and Australia have similar limitations. Examples are manifold around the world where without proof of Corona vaccination people are losing their jobs and being barred entry into a host of establishments, shops and even churches. There are also an increasing number of countries barring people from boarding planes without a vaccination certificate, or even forbidding them explicitly to have friends over for dinner at home, like in Australia:

“The message is if you want to be able to have a meal with friends and welcome people in your home, you have to get vaccinated.” – State premier Gladys Berejiklian of New South Wales, Australia, 27 September 2021

The third step of dehumanization, mostly occurring in parallel with the second step, is executed though documented justification of the exclusion: academic research, expert opinions and scientific studies widely disseminated through vast media coverage are used to underpin the propaganda of fear and the subsequent exclusion of a specific group; to ‘explain’ or ‘provide evidence’ why the exclusion is necessary for the ‘good of society’ and for everybody to ‘stay safe.’ Hannah Arendt observes that “[t]he strong emphasis of totalitarian propaganda on the “scientific” nature of its assertions has been compared to certain advertising techniques which also address themselves to masses. (..) Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. The obsession of totalitarian movements with “scientific” proofs ceases once they are in power.”

The interesting caveat here is that the science is of course often being used in a biased way, only presenting those studies that fit the official narrative and not the at least equal number of studies, no matter how renowned its authors, that provide alternative insights and conclusions that might contribute to a constructive debate and better solutions. As mentioned before, here science becomes politicized as a tool for promoting what the leaders of the totalitarian movement have decided should be the truth and the measures and actions based on that version of the truth. Alternative viewpoints are simply censored, as we see the likes of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook engage in on an unprecedented scale. 

Not since the end of the Second World War have so many renowned and acclaimed academics, scientists and medical doctors, including Nobel Prize recipients and nominees, been silenced, deplatformed and fired from their positions only because they do not support the official or ‘correct’ line. They simply desire for a robust public discourse on the question of how best to deal with the issue at hand and thus engage in a common search for truth. This is the point where we know from history that the ideology of the day has now been formally enshrined and has become mainstream. 

The fourth step of dehumanization is hard exclusion: the group that is now ‘proven’ to be the cause of society’s problems and current impasse is subsequently excluded from civil society as a whole and becomes rightless. They no longer have a voice in society because they are deemed not to be part of it anymore. In the extreme version of this, they are no longer entitled to the protection of their fundamental rights. When it comes to Corona measures imposed by governments worldwide and to varying degrees, in some places we are already seeing developments leaning to this fourth stage. 

Even though in scope and severity such measures cannot be compared to those imposed by totalitarian regimes of the past and the present, they do clearly show worrisome totalitarian tendencies that, when unchecked, could eventually grow into something far worse. In Melbourne, Australia, for example, a euphemistically called “Center for National Resilience” will soon be completed (as one of various such centers) that will act as a permanent facility where people are to be forcibly locked up in quarantine, for example when returning from foreign travel. The rules and regulations for life in such an already existing internment facility in Australia’s Northern Territory state make for chilling Orwellian reading:

“Chief Health Officer Direction 52 of 2021 sets out what a person must do when in quarantine at the Centre for National Resilience and at Alice Springs Quarantine Facility. This direction is law – every person in quarantine must do what the Direction says. If a person does not follow the Direction, the Northern Territory Police may issue an Infringement Notice with a financial penalty.”

The fifth and final step of dehumanization is extermination, social or physical. The excluded group is forcefully ejected from society, either by any participation in society being made impossible, or their banishment into camps, ghettos, prisons and medical facilities. In the most extreme forms of totalitarian regimes that we have seen under Communism and Nazism, but also the ethnic nationalism during the wars in the former Yugoslavia 1991-1999; this then leads to those people being physically exterminated or at least treated as those that are “no longer human.” This becomes easily possible because nobody speaks for them anymore, invisible as they have become. They have lost their place in political society and with it any chance to claim their rights as human beings. They have stopped being part of humanity as far as the totalitarians are concerned. 

In the West we have thankfully not reached this final stage of totalitarianism and resulting dehumanization. However, Hannah Arendt gives a stark warning that we should not count on democracy alone being enough of a bulwark against reaching this fifth stage:

 “A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for – for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the ‘good for’ applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically – namely by majority decision – that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.” 

III Conclusion: how do we liberate ourselves?

History gives us powerful guidance on how we can throw off the yoke of totalitarianism in whatever stage or form it presents itself; also the current ideological form that most do not even realize is happening. We can actually stop the retreat of freedom and the onset of dehumanization. In the words of George Orwell “[f]reedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” We live in times where exactly this freedom is under grave threat as a result of ideological totalitarianism, something I have tried to illustrate with how Western societies deal with the Corona crisis, where facts too often seem not to matter in favor of enshrining the latest systemic ideological orthodoxy. The best example of how freedom can be recovered is how the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe ended the totalitarian reign of Communism in their countries starting in 1989. 

It was their long process of rediscovery of human dignity and their nonviolent yet insistent civil disobedience that brought down the regimes of the Communist elite and their allies of the mob, exposing the untruthfulness of their propaganda and the injustice of their policies. They knew that truth is a goal to attain, not an object to claim and thus requires humility and respectful dialogue. They understood that a society can only be free, healthy and prosperous when no human being is excluded and when there is always the genuine willingness and openness for a robust public discourse, to hear and understand the other, no matter how different his or her opinion or attitude to life.

They finally retook full responsibility for their own lives and for those around them by overcoming their fear, passivity and victimhood, by learning once again to think for themselves and by standing up to a state assisted by its enablers, that had forgotten its only purpose: to serve and protect each and every one of its citizens, and not just those it chooses. 

All totalitarian efforts always end on the dustheap of history. This one will be no exception.

Forget liberating Ukraine – We first need to liberate our minds

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Because we in the West are the strongest tribe on the planet, we are also the most deluded, the most propagandized, and the most dangerous

By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

Nothing should better qualify me to write about world affairs at the moment – and Western meddling in Ukraine – than the fact that I have intimately followed the twists and turns of Israeli politics for two decades.

We will turn to the wider picture in a moment. But before that, let us consider developments in Israel, as its “historic”, year-old government – which included for the very first time a party representing a section of Israel’s minority of Palestinian citizens – teeters on the brink of collapse.

Crisis struck, as everyone knew it would sooner or later, because the Israeli parliament had to vote on a major issue relating to the occupation: renewing a temporary law that for decades has regularly extended Israel’s legal system outside its territory, applying it to Jewish settlers living on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank.

That law lies at the heart of an Israeli political system that the world’s leading human rights groups, both in Israel and abroad, now belatedly admit has always constituted apartheid. The law ensures that Jewish settlers living in the West Bank in violation of international law receive rights different from, and far superior to, those of the Palestinians that are ruled over by Israel’s occupying military authorities.

The law enshrines the principle of Jim Crow-style inequality, creating two different systems of law in the West Bank: one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians. But it does more. Those superior rights, and their enforcement by Israel’s army, have for decades allowed Jewish settlers to rampage against Palestinian rural communities with absolute impunity and steal their land – to the point that Palestinians are now confined to tiny, choked slivers of their own homeland.

In international law, that process is called “forcible transfer,” or what we would think of as ethnic cleansing. It’s a major reason that the settlements are a war crime – a fact that the International Criminal Court in the Hague is finding it very hard to ignore. Israel’s leading politicians and generals would all be tried for war crimes if we lived in a fair, and sane, world.

So what happened when this law came before the parliament for a vote on its renewal? The “historic” government, supposedly a rainbow coalition of leftwing and rightwing Jewish parties joined by a religiously conservative Palestinian party, split on entirely predictable ethnic lines.

Members of the Palestinian party either voted against the law or absented themselves from the vote. All the Jewish parties in the government voted for it. The law failed – and the government is now in trouble – because the rightwing Likud Party of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined the Palestinian parties in voting against the law, in the hope of bringing the government down, even though his legislators are completely committed to the apartheid system it upholds.

Upholding apartheid

What is most significant about the vote is that it has revealed something far uglier about Israel’s Jewish tribalism than most Westerners appreciate. It shows that all of Israel’s Jewish parties – even the “nice ones” that are termed leftwing or liberal – are in essence racist.

Most Westerners understand Zionism to be split into two broad camps: the right, including the far-right, and the liberal-left camp.

Today this so-called liberal-left camp is tiny and represented by the Israeli Labour and Meretz parties. Israel’s Labour Party is considered so respectable that Britain’s Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, publicly celebrated the recent restoration of ties after the Israeli party severed connections during the term of Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

But note this. Not only have the Labour and Meretz parties been sitting for a year in a government led by Naftali Bennett, whose party represents the illegal settlements, they have just voted for the very apartheid law that ensures the settlers get superior rights over Palestinians, including the right to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land.

In the case of the Israeli Labour Party, that is hardly surprising. Labour founded the first settlements and, apart from a brief period in the late 1990s when it paid lip service to a peace process, always backed to the hilt the apartheid system that enabled the settlements to expand. None of that ever troubled Britain’s Labour Party, apart from when it was led by Corbyn, a genuinely dedicated anti-racist.

But by contrast to Labour, Meretz is an avowedly anti-occupation party. That was the very reason it was founded in the early 1990s. Opposition to the occupation and the settlements is supposedly hardwired into its DNA. So how did it vote for the very apartheid law underpinning the settlements?

Utter hypocrisy

The naïve, or mischievous, will tell you Meretz had no choice because the alternative was Bennett’s government losing the vote – which in fact happened anyway – and reviving the chances of Netanyahu returning to power. Meretz’s hands were supposedly tied.

This argument – of pragmatic necessity – is one we often hear when groups professing to believe one thing act in ways that damage the very thing they say they hold dear.

But Israeli commentator Gideon Levy makes a very telling point that applies far beyond this particular Israeli case.

He notes that Meretz would never have been seen to vote for the apartheid law – whatever the consequences – if the issue had been about transgressing the rights of Israel’s LGBTQ community rather than transgressing Palestinian rights. Meretz, whose leader is gay, has LGBTQ rights at the top of its agenda.

Levy writes: “Two justice systems in the same territory, one for straight people and another for gay people? Is there any circumstance in which this would happen? A single political constellation that could bring it about?”

The same could be said of Labour, even if we believe, as Starmer apparently does, that it is a leftwing party. Its leader, Merav Michaeli, is an ardent feminist.

Would Labour, Levy writes, “ever raise its hand for apartheid laws against [Israeli] women in the West Bank? Two separate legal systems, one for men and another for women? Never. Absolutely not.”

Levy’s point is that even for the so-called Zionist left, Palestinians are inherently inferior by virtue of the fact that they are Palestinian. The Palestinian gay community and Palestinian women are just as affected by the Israel’s apartheid law favoring Jewish settlers as Palestinian men are. So in voting for it, Meretz and Labour showed that they do not care about the rights of Palestinian women or members of the Palestinian LGBTQ community. Their support for women and the gay community is dependent on the ethnicity of those belonging to these groups.

It should not need highlighting how close such a distinction on racial grounds is to the views espoused by the traditional supporters of Jim Crow in the U.S. or apartheid’s supporters in South Africa.

So what makes Meretz and Labour legislators capable of not just utter hypocrisy but such flagrant racism? The answer is Zionism.

Zionism is a form of ideological tribalism that prioritizes Jewish privilege in the legal, military and political realms. However leftwing you consider yourself, if you subscribe to Zionism you regard your ethnic tribalism as supremely important – and for that reason alone, you are racist.

You may not be conscious of your racism, you may not wish to be racist, but by default you are. Ultimately, when push comes to shove, when you perceive your own Jewish tribalism to be under threat from another tribalism, you will revert to type. Your racism will come to fore, just as surely as Meretz’s just did.

Deceptive solidarity

But of course, there is nothing exceptional about most Israeli Jews or Israel’s Zionist supporters abroad, whether Jewish or not. Tribalism is endemic to the way most of us view the world, and rapidly comes to the surface whenever we perceive our tribe to be in danger.

Most of us can quickly become extreme tribalists. When tribalism relates to more trivial matters, such as supporting a sports team, it mostly manifests in less dangerous forms, such as boorish or aggressive behavior. But if it relates to an ethnic or national group, it encourages a host of more dangerous behaviors: jingoism, racism, discrimination, segregation and warmongering.

As sensitive as Meretz is to its own tribal identities, whether the Jewish one or a solidarity with the LGBTQ community, its sensitivity to the tribal concerns of others can quickly dissolve when that other identity is presented as threatening. Which is why Meretz, in prioritizing its Jewish identity, lacks any meaningful solidarity with Palestinians or even the Palestinian LGBTQ community.

Instead, Meretz’s opposition to the occupation and the settlements often appears more rooted in the sentiment that they are bad for Israel and its relations with the West than that they are a crime against Palestinians.

This inconsistency means we can easily be fooled about who our real allies are. Just because we share a commitment to one thing, such as ending the occupation, it doesn’t necessarily mean we do so for the same reasons – or we attach the same importance to our commitment.

It is easy, for example, for less experienced Palestinian solidarity activists to assume when they hear Meretz politicians that the party will help advance the Palestinian cause. But failing to understand Meretz’s tribal priorities is a recipe for constant disappointment – and futile activism on behalf of Palestinians.

The Oslo “peace” process remained credible in the West for so long only because Westerners misunderstood how it fitted with the tribal priorities of Israelis. Most were ready to back peace in the abstract so long as it did not entail any practical loss of their tribal privileges.

Yitzhak Rabin, the West’s Israeli partner in the Oslo process, showed what such tribalism entailed in the wake of a gun rampage by a settler, Baruch Goldstein, in 1994 that killed and wounded more than 100 Palestinians at worship in the Palestinian city of Hebron.

Rather than using the murder spree as the justification to implement his commitment to remove the small colonies of extreme settlers from Hebron, Rabin put Hebron’s Palestinians under curfew for many months. Those restrictions have never been fully lifted for many of Hebron’s Palestinians and have allowed Jewish settlers to expand their colonies ever since.

Hierarchy of tribalisms

There is a further point that needs underscoring, and that the Israel-Palestine case illustrates well. Not all tribalisms are equal, or equally dangerous. Palestinians are quite capable of being tribal too. Just look at the self-righteous posturing of some Hamas leaders, for example.

But whatever delusions Zionists subscribe to, Palestinian tribalism is clearly far less dangerous to Israel than Jewish tribalism is to Palestinians.

Israel, the state representing Jewish tribalists, has the support of all Western governments and major media outlets, as well as most Arab governments, and at the very least the complicity of global institutions. Israel has an army, navy and air force, all of which can rely on the latest, most powerful weaponry, itself heavily subsidized by the U.S. Israel also enjoys special trading status with the West, which has made its economy one of the strongest on the planet.

The idea that Israeli Jews have a greater reason to fear the Palestinians (or in a further delusion, the Arab world) than Palestinians have to fear Israel is easily refuted. Simply consider how many Israeli Jews would wish to exchange places with a Palestinian – whether in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem or from the minority living inside Israel.

The lesson is that there is a hierarchy of tribalisms, and that a tribalism is more dangerous if it enjoys more power. Empowered tribalisms have the ability to cause much greater harm than disempowered tribalisms. Not all tribalisms are equally destructive.

But there is a more significant point. An empowered tribalism necessarily provokes, accentuates and deepens a disempowered tribalism. Zionists often claim that Palestinians are a made-up or imaginary people because they did not identify as Palestinians until after the state of Israel was created. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously suggested the Palestinians were an invented people.

This was, of course, self-serving nonsense. But it has a kernel of truth that makes it sound plausible. Palestinian identity clarified and intensified as a result of the threat posed by Jewish immigrants arriving from Europe, claiming the Palestinian homeland as their own.

As the saying goes, you don’t always fully appreciate what you have until you face losing it. Palestinians had to sharpen their national identity, and their national ambitions, faced with the threat that someone else was claiming what they had always assumed belonged to them.

Superior values

So how does all this help us understand our own tribalism in the West?

Not least, whatever the anxieties being encouraged in the West over the supposed threat posed by Russia and China, the reality is that the West’s tribalism – sometimes termed “Western civilization,” or “the rules-based order,” or “the democratic world,” or, even more ludicrously, “the international community” – is by far the most powerful of all tribalisms on the planet. And so also the most dangerous.

Israel’s tribal power, for example, derives almost exclusively from the West’s tribal power. It is an adjunct, an extension, of Western tribal power.

But we need to be a little more specific in our thinking. You and I subscribe to Western tribalism – either consciously or less so, depending on whether we see ourselves as on the right or the left of the political spectrum – because it has been cultivated in us over a lifetime through parenting, schools and the corporate media.

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1532236818782908416

We think West is best. None of us would want to be Russian or Chinese, any more than Israeli Jews would choose to be Palestinian. We implicitly understand that we have privileges over other tribes. And because we are tribal, we assume those privileges are justified in some way. They either derive from our own inherent superiority (a view often associated with the far right) or from a superior culture or traditions (a view usually embracing the moderate right, liberals and parts of the left).

Again, this echoes Zionist views. Israeli Jews on the right tend to believe that they have inherently superior qualities to Palestinians and Arabs, who are seen as primitive, backward or barbarian-terrorists. Overlapping with these assumptions, religious-Zionist Jews tend to imagine that they are superior because they have the one true God on their side.

By contrast, most secular Jews on the left, like the liberals of Meretz, believe that their superiority derives from some vague conception of Western “culture” or civilization that has fostered in them a greater ability to show tolerance and compassion, and act rationally, than do most Palestinians.

Meretz would like to extend that culture to Palestinians to help them benefit from the same civilizing influences. But until that can happen, they, like the Zionist right, view Palestinians primarily as a threat.

Seen in simple terms, Meretz believes they cannot easily empower the Palestinian LGBTQ community, much as they would like to, without also empowering Hamas. And they do not wish to do that because an empowered Hamas, they fear, would not only threaten the Palestinian LGBTQ community but the Israeli one too.

So liberating Palestinians from decades of Israeli military occupation and ethnic cleansing will just have to wait for a more opportune moment – however long that may take, and however many Palestinians must suffer in the meantime.

New Hitlers

The parallels with our own, Western worldview should not be hard to perceive.

We understand that our tribalism, our prioritizing of our own privileges in the West, entails suffering for others. But either we assume we are more deserving than other tribes, or we assume others – to become deserving – must first be brought up to our level through education and other civilizing influences. They will just have to suffer in the meantime.

When we read about the “white man’s burden” worldview in history books, we understand – with the benefit of distance from those times – how ugly Western colonialism was. When it is suggested that we might still harbor this kind of tribalism, we get irritated or, more likely, indignant. “Racist – me? Ridiculous!”

Further, our blindness to our own super-empowered Western tribalism makes us oblivious too to the effect our tribalism has on less empowered tribalisms. We imagine ourselves under constant threat from any other tribal group that asserts its own tribalism in the face of our more empowered tribalism.

Some of those threats can be more ideological and amorphous, particularly in recent years: like the supposed “clash of civilisations” against the Islamist extremism of al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

But our preferred enemies have a face, and all too readily can be presented as an improbable stand-in for our template of the bogeyman: Adolf Hitler.

Those new Hitlers pop up one after another, like a whack-a-mole game we can never quite win.

Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – supposedly ready to fire the WMD he didn’t actually have in our direction in less than 45 minutes.

The mad ayatollahs of Iran and their politician-puppets – seeking to build a nuclear bomb to destroy our forward outpost of Israel before presumably turning their warheads on Europe and the U.S.

And then there is the biggest, baddest monster of them all: Vladimir Putin. The mastermind threatening our way of life, our values, or civilization with his mind games, disinformation and control of social media through an army of bots.

Existential threats

Because we are as blind to our own tribalism as Meretz is to its racism towards Palestinians, we cannot understand why anyone else might fear us more than we fear them. Our “superior” civilization has cultivated in us a solipsism, a narcissism, that refuses to acknowledge our threatening presence in the world.

The Russians could never be responding to a threat – real or imagined – that we might pose by expanding our military presence right up to Russia’s borders.

The Russians could never see our NATO military alliance as primarily aggressive rather than defensive, as we claim, even though somewhere in a small, dark mental recess where things that make us uncomfortable are shoved we know that Western armies have launched a series of direct wars of aggression against countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, and via proxies in Syria, Yemen, Iran and Venezuela.

The Russians could never genuinely fear neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine – groups that until recently Western media worried were growing in power – even after those neo-Nazis were integrated into the Ukrainian military and led what amounts to a civil war against ethnic Russian communities in the country’s east.

In our view, when Putin spoke of the need to de-Nazify Ukraine, he was not amplifying Russians’ justifiable fears of Nazism on their doorstep, given their history, or the threat those groups genuinely pose to ethnic Russian communities nearby. No, he was simply proving that he and the likely majority of Russians who think as he does are insane.

More than that, his hyperbole gave us permission to bring our covert arming of these neo-Nazis groups out into the light. Now we embrace these neo-Nazis, as we do the rest of Ukraine, and send them advanced weaponry – many billions of dollars worth of advanced weaponry.

And while we do this, we self-righteously berate Putin for being a madman and for his disinformation. He is demented or a liar for viewing us as a existential threat to Russia, while we are entirely justified in viewing him as an existential threat to Western civilization.

And so we keep feeding the chimerical devil we fear. And however often our fears are exposed as self-rationalizing, we never learn.

Saddam Hussein posed an earlier existential threat. His non-existent WMDs were going to be placed in his non-existent long-range missiles to destroy us. So we had every right to destroy Iraq first, preemptively. But when those WMDs turned out not to exist, whose fault was it? Not ours, of course. It was Saddam Hussein’s. He didn’t tell us he did not have WMDs. How could we have known? In our view, Iraq ended up being destroyed because Saddam was a strongman who believed his own propaganda, a primitive Arab hoisted by his own petard.

If we paused for a moment and stood outside our own tribalism, we might realize how dangerously narcissistic – quite how mad – we sound. Saddam Hussein did not tell us he had no WMDs, that he had secretly destroyed them many years earlier, because he feared us and our uncontrollable urge to dominate the globe. He feared that, if we knew he lacked those weapons, we might have more of an incentive to attack him and Iraq, either directly or through proxies. It was we who trapped him in his own lie.

And then there is Iran. Our endless fury with the mad ayatollahs – our economic sanctions, our and Israel’s executions of Iran’s scientists, our constant chatter of invasion – are intended to stop Tehran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon that might finally level the Middle East’s playing field with Israel, whom we helped to develop a large nuclear arsenal decades ago.

Iran must be stopped so it cannot destroy Israel and then us. Our fears of the Iranian nuclear threat are paramount. We must strike, directly or through proxies, against its allies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Gaza. Our entire Middle East policy must be fashioned around the effort to prevent Iran from ever gaining the bomb.

In our madness, we cannot imagine the fears of Iranians, their realistic sense that we pose a much graver threat to them than they could ever pose to us. In the circumstances, to Iranians, a nuclear weapon might surely look like a very wise insurance policy – a deterrence – against our boundless self-righteousness.

Vicious cycle

Because we are the strongest tribe on the planet, we are also the most deluded, the most propagandized, as well as the most dangerous. We create the reality we think we oppose. We spawn the devils we fear. We force our rivals into the role of bogeyman that makes us feel good about ourselves.

In Israel, Meretz imagines it opposes the occupation. And yet it keeps conspiring in actions – supposedly to aid Israel’s security, like the apartheid law – that justifiably make Palestinians fear for their existence and believe they have no Jewish allies in Israel. Backed into a corner, Palestinians resist, either in an organized fashion, as during their intifada uprisings, or through ineffectual “lone-wolf” attacks by individuals.

But the Zionist tribalism of Meretz – as liberal, humane and caring as they are – means they can perceive only their own existential anxieties; they cannot see themselves as a threat to others or grasp the fears that they and other Zionists provoke in Palestinians. So the Palestinians must be dismissed as religious maniacs, or primitive, or barbarian-terrorists.

This kind of tribalism produces a vicious cycle – for us, as for Israel. Our behaviors based on the assumption of superiority – our greed and aggression – mean we inevitably deepen the tribalisms of others and provoke their resistance. Which in turn rationalizes our assumption that we must act even more tribally, even more greedily, even more aggressively.

Cheerleading war

We each have more than one tribal identity, of course. We are not only British, French, American, Brazilian. We are Black, Asian, Hispanic, white. We are straight, gay, trans, or something even more complex. We are conservative, liberal, left. We may support a team, or have a faith.

These tribal identities can conflict and interact in complex ways. As Meretz shows, one identity may come to the fore, and recede into the background, depending on circumstances and the perception of threat.

But perhaps most important of all, some tribalisms can be harnessed and manipulated by other, narrower, more covert tribal identities. Remember, not all tribalisms are equal.

Western elites – our politicians, corporate leaders, billionaires – have their own narrow tribalism. They prioritize their own tribe and its interests: making money and retaining power on the world stage. But given how ugly, selfish and destructive this tribe would look were it to stand before us nakedly pursuing power for its own benefit, it promotes its tribal interests in the name of the wider tribe and its “cultural” values.

This elite tribe wages its endless wars for resource control, it oppresses others, it imposes austerity, it wrecks the planet, all in the name of Western civilization.

When we cheerlead the West’s wars; when we reluctantly concede that other societies must be smashed; when we accept that poverty and food banks are an unfortunate byproduct of supposed economic realities, as is the toxifying of the planet, we conspire in advancing not our own tribal interests but someone else’s.

When we send tens of billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine, we imagine we are being selfless, helping those in trouble, stopping an evil madman, upholding international law, listening to Ukrainians. But our understanding of why events are unfolding as they are in Ukraine, more so than how they are unfolding, has been imposed on us, just as it has on ordinary Ukrainians and ordinary Russians.

We believe we can end the war through more muscle. We assume we can terrorize Russia into withdrawal. Or even more dangerously, we fantasize that we can defeat a nuclear-armed Russia and remove its “madman” president. We cannot imagine that we are only stoking the very fears that drove Russia to invade Ukraine in the first place, the very fears that brought a strongman like Putin to power and sustain him there. We make the situation worse in assuming we are making it better.

So why do we do it?

Because our thoughts are not our own. We are dancing to a tune composed by others whose motives and interests we barely comprehend.

An endless war is not in our interests, nor in those of Ukrainians or Russians. But it might just be in the interests of Western elites that need to “weaken the enemy” to expand their dominance; that need pretexts to hoover up our money for wars that profit them alone; that need to create enemies to shore up the tribalism of Western publics so that we do not start to see things from the point of view of others or wonder whether our own tribalism really serves our interests or those of an elite.

The truth is we are being constantly manipulated, duped, propagandized to advance “values” that are not inherent in our “superior” culture but manufactured for us by the elites’ public-relations arm, the corporate media. We are made into willing co-conspirators in behavior that actually harms us, others, and the planet.

In Ukraine, our very compassion to help is being weaponized in ways that will kill Ukrainians and destroy their communities, just as Meretz’s caring liberalism has spent decades rationalizing the oppression of Palestinians in the name of ending it.

We cannot liberate Ukraine or Russia. But what we can do may, in the long term, prove far more significant: We can start liberating our minds.

Everything Is a Weapon: The U.S. Government Is Waging Psychological Warfare on the Nation

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings? … Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”— U.S. Army Psychological Operations recruitment video

The U.S. government is waging psychological warfare on the American people.

No, this is not a conspiracy theory.

Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the police state’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. Just recently, for example, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens… PSYOP soldiers’ key missions are to influence ‘emotions, notices, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens,’ ‘deliberately deceive’ enemy forces, advise governments, and provide communications for disaster relief and rescue efforts.”

Yet don’t be fooled into thinking these psyops (psychological operations) campaigns are only aimed at foreign enemies. The government has made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded.

Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry.

Weaponizing violence. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.

Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.

Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Weaponizing entertainment. For the past century, the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office has provided Hollywood with equipment, personnel and technical expertise at taxpayer expense. In exchange, the military industrial complex has gotten a starring role in such blockbusters as Top Gun and its rebooted sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which translates to free advertising for the war hawks, recruitment of foot soldiers for the military empire, patriotic fervor by the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the nation’s endless wars, and Hollywood visionaries working to churn out dystopian thrillers that make the war machine appear relevant, heroic and necessary. As Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster who was appointed the head of the Office of War Information, observed, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”

Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

Weaponizing fear and paranoia. The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Weaponizing genetics. Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Weaponizing the future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The facts speak for themselves.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

What we have is a government of wolves.

Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State.

Brace yourselves.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have become enemies of the Deep State.

THE SOUL OF TODAY: THE SPIRIT AS THE SIGN OF THE TIMES

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

“If we do not develop within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve to something higher.” ~Rudolf Steiner

Humanity is passing through a difficult phase in its development, and of concern is the potential risk of being plunged into deeper states of materialism and automatism. These two states are often in cooperation together, for the deeper we become embedded in material forces then the greater are the influences that can make us act without conscious thought or intention. It can also be said that there are certain forces, or agents, in this current time that are pushing for greater immersion into materialism in order to paralyze or prevent humanity’s spiritual development. In this regard, even the notion of anything ‘spiritual’ has come to be either ridiculed, diluted into commercialism, or hijacked into pseudo-spiritual forms (such as corporate retreats and online guruism).

It is important that we now cast a critical eye upon the state of human society and the nature of our times. This is not to criticize but to draw attention – to be aware of its aspects – as if to shine a light upon it. It is necessary to look beyond the ‘scenery of external affairs.’

For those people caught up within the external civilization of the moment, with its impacts, distractions, and stimulations, it is difficult to acknowledge the existence of knowledge and perceptual understanding that lies beyond the conditioned senses. Yet it must also be said that now is the time for people to live, and be guided, more in accordance with inner, or esoteric, principles than ever before. It is this connection with one’s inner life that brings greater awareness onto external events. And without this awareness, this degree of perceptive insight, then we allow greater concentrations of power to be wielded in the hands of the few, who will exercise this control over the masses in a negative way. What is necessary is awareness and intention emerging through each individualized person. It is this state of individualization, as opposed to group/mass behaviour, that marks the correct stage of human development for these times.

Taking the work of Austrian thinker/mystic Rudolf Steiner, the state of human perception and awareness can be recognized as relating to three soul stages: sentient, intellect-mind, and consciousness. Within the stage of sentient soul (i), the human being lives primarily within the world of the senses. They are drawn into their passions, desires, and are easily manoeuvred or manipulated into following trends, politics, and mass movements. These people form the majority, are swayed by the media, and are the general masses that move with the machinations of the mob.

They are influenced by the ‘influencers,’ convinced by the consensus narrative, and swim in the mainstream. The second stage, that of the intellect-mind soul (ii), represents the person of the intellect who strives to free themselves from the rash impulses of the senses. They are aware of these tendencies yet steer themselves by rational thinking. They also attempt to keep their feelings under check and express their heart’s desire through critical engagement. At the same time, this rational ordering often allies such people with conservatism, dogma, ideologies and a sense of righteousness. As they can manipulate others, so too can they be manipulated by their own allegiance to fixed systems. They can be blinded by ideals and uncritical of their own weaknesses.

Such people can appear exceedingly clever whilst lacking humanity. Broadly speaking, such people fill the ranks of the political and leadership organizations. And the third stage, that of the consciousness soul (iii) has yet to fully emerge within the current epoch. It is this stage that deals with the formation of the aware individual who is not easily influenced or swayed by the emotional-psychological masses, and the strategies employed for these persuasions.

The phase of individualization within humankind was, and continues to be, a necessary step to release the human being from the previous mode of group consciousness. The egoistic self was required in this transference into individualization. Yet the danger now is that this operational ego grows beyond its function and becomes a dominant aspect of the human being. Acting and striving from the egoistic self is what leads to the imbalance and inequality of the world. The stage of individualization is bound up with increased egoism, yet this is a necessary relationship to reach the depths of self-realization. It becomes troublesome when the ego, instead of leading to inner growth, gets projected externally and becomes the major aspect of the outward personality.

This can lead to stunted inner growth and continued external ego projection. The extremity of this is when a person sinks back into group consciousness and seeks security within a group environment. This can lead to cultic tendencies, as well as nationalism and other ideological and religious groupings. Part of the polarity tension in world affairs has been the pull between the dominant egoists and the group mentality masses. However, it can also be recognized that this stage of growth has to be lived and experienced in order to be moved through. The strains and stresses increase when people seem incapable, or are disallowed, from moving beyond this stage of human development. In this case, the person remains at the level of the lower ‘I’, which is a mass phenomenon and below that of full individualization.

The lower self becomes the dominant expression of the personality, and this can literally run amok, getting entangled in passions, persuasions, disagreements, and disputes. The worst case of affairs is when societies establish structures, systems, and forms of management that cater to this lower stage of human development. People are then caught in a loop, where the base behaviours of this lower individualization are sustained and supported, deliberately creating a civilization of stagnation and stunted growth. The task here is for people to take the direction of their life into their own hands.

The human being must establish an intention to develop their aligned individualization for it seems that there are forces opposed to this human evolvement. For this reason, it is now essential that a perceptive state of consciousness (referred to in Steiner terminology as the consciousness soul) is allowed to emerge among those people receptive and prepared for this. The consciousness soul can be said to elicit higher morals and values within the individual. This requires also that the person has an inner freedom and the ability to perceive and act beyond the confines of social conditioning. This is a form of perceptual thinking as opposed to programmed thinking. The human being has it in their power to transform themselves whilst participating in active life. In fact, life provides friction for the transformational process. And this transformation takes place in the innermost self, which later can be projected outwards into life. It is not enough to affect correct behaviour if the inner life is stunted (as is the case with so many people, especially those most visible upon the world stage). As Rudolf Steiner put it:

‘For every human being bears a higher man within himself besides what we may call the work-a-day man. This higher man remains hidden until he is awakened. And each human being can himself alone awaken this higher being within himself. As long as this higher being is not awakened, the higher faculties slumbering in every human being, and leading to supersensible knowledge, will remain concealed.’[1]

Steiner also considered entropic forces (what some would call ‘evil’ or de-evolutionary forces) as a necessary part of human development. Such forces create the friction that fuels potential development, such as the friction between the road and the tyre helps create the movement of the car. To a degree, such forces are unavoidable in physical existence. All development is a matter of stages, and each stage must be reached before attempting the move to another. Where is humanity at this current scale of development, we may wonder?

Each person must decide for themselves how they wish to live life. It can be said that a person who is ignorant of this decision, or who negates making such a decision, is more likely to fall under the sway of entropic forces, for it is these forces that target/attract the unaware or lazy souls. This recognition should encourage us to make perceptive choices in life. In every sphere of human life – whether social, cultural, or political – there are forces in operation that represent spheres of activity of greater magnitude than most people are able to realize. There are ‘universal forces’ that have been in contention – in motion – for a very long time. As for human beings, all motion, all movement, requires effort. That the many are unaware of this, only places more emphasis upon the responsibility of the few who are aware. This has always been the case and is likely to remain so for the time ahead.

The inner impulse towards working for the greater good of humanity – the ‘macrocosmic good’ – comes out of genuine understanding and not general emotions or mass psychology. It is also the responsibility for such aware individuals to gain an understanding, a level of perspective, for perceiving the events of our time. It is this understanding of forces behind events at face value that helps in the growth of the consciousness soul. Just as we can recognize there are occult forces in play in the physical realm, so too does this suggest that there are forces operable beyond the physical domain. To not acknowledge this is the same as seeing the branches of a tree swaying in the wind and to consider that the branches are moving of their own accord and under their own volition. It is a fundamental error to mistake secondary phenomena for primary causes. And when a person acts out of limited understanding, there is the potential to serve not the good but ultimately the contrary. In terms of entropic forces (my term for ‘evil’), they cannot be banished for they form a part of existence; rather, they are to be transmuted into good for them to be overcome. And this is the task of our times, the task for the spiritual soul of today.

What is needed is a re-cognition and refocusing upon metaphysical realities. Rudolf Steiner stated that if all human beings were to decide that they did not want higher development, then this potential for development would come to an end. It is therefore the responsibility of those with awareness, and inner cognition, to maintain within humankind the urge for inner evolvement. The present task for responsibly aware people today is to seek out that knowledge which comprehends not only world forces but the primary causes of events in this phenomenal, physical realm. In doing so, the person is able to raise themselves beyond petty inclinations and selfish, egoistic behaviour. This is not a denial of physical reality but rather a strengthened recognition of the primary realm of spirit.

To conclude, it can be said that there are forces coming through into this realm that humanity has limited knowledge or experience of. This is not something to be afraid of, for these forces are a part of humanity itself. We-You-I are part of the same consciousness, only that material existence – the physical life – has split, divided, and splintered these aspects. Humanity, for the most part in recent times, has been living as if a partial existence – a semi-existence – for it has been cut-off from recognition of its Source and the greater field of consciousness. The planet Earth, as well as other planets in the solar system, are entering a new alignment where it shall be easier for these correspondences to be made. That this age was coming has been known for a long time by other groupings that have power and influence within human civilization.

For this reason, these groupings have come together to create conditions across the planet – physical, mental, psychical – that would attempt to halt the emergence of greater perceptive consciousness. The attempts being made across the planet are for the realization of anesthetizing certain aspects of the human being so that it is less receptive to ‘spiritual’ or metaphysical truths and their correspondences. In other words, humanity is being further cut-off from its inherent connection to developmental impulses. Yet this approach has only a limited range of success. Humanity’s faculties can only be ‘blinded’ for so long. Evolutionary, developmental forces are far more powerful than supposed by these planetary power groups. At the same time, we need to recognize that events of world history are symptoms of the occurrences on the metaphysical level of reality, where primary, non-material aspects have their existence. These essential, primary phenomena have their impulses that come into being within the physical world of secondary phenomena. For most of humankind, these primary aspects are the unknowables.

It is time to become receptive to the forces available to us so that as a human being we can be of assistance rather than ignorant or, worse still, a hindrance. For those people capable of developing their understanding and receptivity to such impulses, it is time to begin the journey to know of the unknowables.

Assange Is Doing His Most Important Work Yet

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

British Home Secretary Priti Patel has authorized the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to be tried under the Espionage Act in a case which seeks to set a legal precedent for the prosecution of any publisher or journalist, anywhere in the world, who reports inconvenient truths about the US empire.

Assange’s legal team will appeal the decision, reportedly with arguments that will include the fact that the CIA spied on him and plotted his assassination.

“It will likely be a few days before the (14-day appeal) deadline and the appeal will include new information that we weren’t able to bring before the courts previously. Information on how Julian lawyers were spied on, and how there were plots to kidnap and kill Julian from within the CIA,” Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton told Reuters on Friday.

And thank goodness. Assange’s willingness to resist Washington’s extradition attempts benefit us all, from his taking political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 until British police forcibly dragged him out in 2019, to his fighting US prosecutors in the courtroom tooth and claw during his incarceration in Belmarsh Prison.

Assange’s fight against US extradition benefits us not just because the empire’s war against truth harms our entire species and not just because he cannot receive a fair trial under the Espionage Act, but because his refusal to bow down and submit forces the empire to overextend itself into the light and show us all what it’s really made of.

Washington, London and Canberra are colluding to imprison a journalist for telling the truth: the first with its active extradition attempts, the second with its loyal facilitation of those attempts, and the third with its silent complicity in allowing an Australian journalist to be locked up and persecuted for engaging in the practice of journalism. By refusing to lie down and forcing them to come after him, Assange has exposed some harsh realities of which the public has largely been kept unaware.

The fact that London and Canberra are complying so obsequiously with Washington’s agendas, even while their own mainstream media outlets decry the extradition and even while all major human rights and press freedom watchdog groups in the western world say Assange must go free, shows that these are not separate sovereign nations but member states of a single globe-spanning empire centralized around the US government. Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, more attention is being brought to this reality.

By standing his ground and fighting them, Assange has also exposed the lie that the so-called free democracies of the western world support the free press and defend human rights. The US, UK and Australia are colluding to extradite a journalist for exposing the truth even as they claim to oppose tyranny and autocracy, even as they claim to support world press freedoms, and even as they loudly decry the dangers of government-sponsored disinformation.

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, it will always reek of hypocrisy when US presidents like Joe Biden say things like, “The free press is not the enemy of the people — far from it. At your best, you’re guardians of the truth.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, people will always know British prime ministers like Boris Johnson are lying when they say things like, “Media organisations should feel free to bring important facts into the public domain.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, more of us will understand that they are being deceived and manipulated when Australian prime ministers like Anthony Albanese say things like “We need to protect press freedom in law and ensure every Australian can have their voice heard,” and “Don’t prosecute journalists for just doing their jobs.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, US secretaries of state like Antony Blinken will have a much harder time selling their schtick when they say things like “On World Press Freedom Day, the United States continues to advocate for press freedom, the safety of journalists worldwide, and access to information on and offline. A free and independent press ensures the public has access to information. Knowledge is power.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, UK home secretaries like Priti Patel will be seen for the frauds they are when they say things like “The safety of journalists is fundamental to our democracy.”

Extraditing a foreign journalist for exposing your war crimes is as tyrannical an agenda as you could possibly come up with. The US, UK and Australia colluding toward this end shows us that these are member states of a single empire whose only values are domination and control, and that all its posturing about human rights is pure facade. Assange keeps exposing the true face of power.

There is in fact a strong argument to be made that even all these years after the 2010 leaks for which he is currently being prosecuted, Assange is doing his most important work yet. As important as his WikiLeaks publications were and are, none of them exposed the depravity of the empire as much as forcing them to look us in the eye and tell us they’ll extradite a journalist for telling the truth.

Assange accomplished this by planting his feet and saying “No,” even when every other possible option would have been easier and more pleasant. Even when it was hard. Even when it was terrifying. Even when it meant being locked away, silenced, smeared, hated, unable to fight back against his detractors, unable to live a normal life, unable to hold his children, unable even to feel sunlight on his face.

His very life casts light on all the areas where it is most sorely needed. We all owe this man a tremendous debt. The least we can do is try our best to get him free.

Media Lies Fuel Phony Ukraine Narrative

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By Patrick Henningsen

Source: Ron Paul Institute

The idea that Ukraine and Zelensky are going to “win the war” is an absolute fantasy. It’s delusional in the extreme. And yet, so many in the West have been conditioned to really believe it.

If you are getting your narrative and information from mainstream media in a NATO nation, then my heart goes out to you. Understand that your externalized reality on this war is nothing more than a testament to the power of western propaganda. We have a state-of-the-art consensus reality machine which would make Goebbels’ head spin, and makes Stalin’s Pravda look like Nickelodeon.

Much closer to the truth is this: Ukraine is not just losing, but they are setting themselves up for a historical downthrow. If Russian Ministry of Defense dailies are even partly true (most of these are backed up by visual evidence as well), then at the current clip of 200-300 per day of Ukraine Armed Forces lost in combat may, very soon, approach the level of US soldier losses in Vietnam. In just 6 months. Mind you, it took the US ten years to lose an estimated 56,000 troops in that fruitless war of attrition.

It is becoming clearer every day that the Ukraine Armed Forces seem to have a policy of either not counting their dead, or counting them as AWOL, so as to avoid a collapse in military morale (and more actual deserters), and the inevitable international and domestic fallout from having to announce that they have 20,000 or 30,000 dead soldiers, many of whom were untrained, under equipped frontline fodder – forced into conscription by a desperate Zelensky regime eager to please his new funding sources in Washington and Brussels. If their true numbers were announced publicly each week, what do you think would happen to US, UK and EU support for Zelensky and his Nazi brigades? And how long would Ukrainians support NATO’s arm’s length proxy meat grinder war? Not long at all. It would be over yesterday.

Like the actor Zelensky, our governments are also selling a packaged fantasy to their public. Support for a losing war would end in a heartbeat should the true state of affairs become the consensus reality in the West.

When the fighting eventually stops, perhaps the smartest men in the room will then be the estimated 5,ooo Ukrainian soldiers who have already surrendered to Russian and DPR forces. Fortunate will be those who walked away from their western puppet’s deteriorating, ego-driven suicidal debacle.

The likely numbers we are looking at here across the board are simply unprecedented in recent modern conflict, and each and every data point confounds each and every fanciful, postmodernist projection coming out of our corrupt, self-reverential western mainstream media and parroting politicians who are quite clearly feeding off their own propaganda entrails now. It’s beyond disgusting. Sorry to be blunt here, but this is fast becoming the biggest propaganda bubble in the history of western military adventurism.

And that’s saying something.

And don’t expect a mea culpa from the gaggle of charlatans we have running foreign and “defense” policy in the US, UK, mutton Europe, and the rest of the supine NATO backwater nations. They will simply double-down and continue attacking any dissenters to their fanatical party line, believing that crushing free speech and debate will somehow help keep their propaganda bubble from deflating faster than it already is.

Sure, it’s an exercise in futility, but it’s one we’ve sadly come to expect from the legion of incompetent globalist bureaucrats and technocrats with a track record of repeated failures whose only real accomplishment has been to blow trillions in public money on systematically wrecking other countries, and always under some contrived moral imperative. By the way, besides being the most corrupt society and government in the western orbit, as it stands now, Ukraine is much, much further from being an independent, sovereign and free “democracy” than Russia is.

The longer the geniuses at NATO and our media continue fueling their proxy war of attrition, the more territory Kiev is going to lose. And whatever they lose, they will never get back. That’s for the simple reason that the people in those regions do not want to live in a wildly corrupt and western controlled, Nazi-ridden sectarian basket case of a failed state.

So the next time to hear someone trumpeting, “I Stand with Ukraine!”, just stop and ask them:

“Where would you draw that line on how many dead Ukrainian soldiers until we call it quits? How much territory will Kiev have to lose before we say that’s enough?”

And don’t let them go until they give you a coherent answer.

Paul Mason Says Bellingcat Launders Information For Western Intelligence

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The Grayzone has published leaked email communications between faux-left British commentator and aspiring parliamentarian Paul Mason and a shady intelligence contractor named Amil Khan which plainly shows the two plotting to use state power to subvert anti-imperialist media outlets like Consortium News and Grayzone, as well as “far left rogue academics” and the broader left more generally.

Mason has obliquely authenticated the contents of the emails with a weird, rambling Medium post claiming to have been victimized by a “Russian hack-and-leak operation.” The post does not deny the veracity of the emails. Instead, Mason bizarrely claims that they “may be altered or faked,” as though they are not his own personal communications whose accuracy he could instantly deny if they were altered or faked in any way.

This is the same as verifying the emails and then yelling “But look over there! It’s Putin!”

It would take a very silly person indeed to look at a bunch of authenticated emails showing a major British media figure conspiring with an intelligence contractor to subvert the antiwar left, and then conclude that the correct response to this would be to get angry at the Russians.

There will probably be a lot written about these leaks in the coming days, but for now I’d like to focus on the fact that, in these private communications between a media insider and an intelligence insider, the “independent investigative journalism” outlet known as Bellingcat is described as a “proxy” for western intelligence agencies and is said to receive “a steady stream of intel” from them.

“Just as Bellingcat get a steady stream of intel from Western agencies, I suspect the attacks on you and others are fed by Russian and Chinese intel,” Mason is seen telling Khan, who has been the subject of a previous Grayzone exposé.

On the team of spinmeisters Mason and Khan were plotting to assemble to undermine anti-imperialist media, Mason said that “what it really also needs is intel service input by proxy – eg Bellingcat.” Which certainly reads like an explicit call to work with western intelligence agencies to take down his perceived enemies on the left.

“Khan – a long-time advocate and associate of [Bellingcat] – did not once challenge Mason’s repeated characterization of the supposed citizen journalist collective as a clearing house for friendly spy agencies,” write Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg and Max Blumenthal.

As of this writing there has been little in the way of denial from Bellingcat of those claims the closet CIA fan Paul Mason made when he believed he was communicating in privacy. The Twitter page of its executive director and founder Eliot Higgins tweeted, “I see the Gray Zone has acquired even more hacked emails, I wonder who keeps providing them with those, hmmmm.”

When asked by a commenter if intelligence agencies leak information to Bellingcat, Higgins replied, “No and never,” which he then immediately retreated from when pressed, saying instead, “Well if we use sources that aren’t open sources we’ll use multiple independent sources to acquire the same or related data and triangulate the data to confirm its authenticity.”

Which is a mighty long pace from “No and never,” if you look at it. It’s saying well if we do get information from someone who might work for an intelligence agency, we’ll use “related data” from other sources (who themselves may or may not also have intelligence ties) to “confirm” it.

People would be well advised to take anything Higgins says about his operation with a large grain of salt. In 2016 he dismissed the suggestion that his operation is funded by the CIA cutout known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) with a “Stop reading conspiracy websites.” Less than a year later he admitted when pressed that Bellingcat does indeed receive funding from NED.

This is not the first time it has been claimed that Bellingcat operates as a proxy for western intelligence information laundering, nor the second, nor the third. As Alan MacLeod documented last year for Mintpress News, there was already a mountain of evidence that the “independent” narrative management firm celebrated and beloved by the western political/media class operates as a proxy of the western intelligence cartel. Mason and Khan’s communications are just one more piece on the pile.

Western intelligence agencies have numerous pathways through which they can get information, misinformation and disinformation into the mainstream press without people noticing that the news media are publishing government propaganda. Mason’s emails are yet more evidence that Bellingcat is one such pipeline for intelligence cartel psyops.

If there’s something the cartel wants published, they launder it through proxies like Bellingcat and then the news media run it saying it’s been verified by an “independent” “OSINT” service. And presto, you’ve got yourself some good old fashioned Langley-cooked spook propaganda.

This doesn’t mean that everything Bellingcat publishes is entirely false (the best propaganda is generally a mixture of truth with half-truth, distortion, lies by omission, and the removal of context and perspective), it just means it’s generally untrustworthy. Because it operates at the direction, knowingly or unknowingly, of sociopathic government agencies whose only interest is in domination and control.

If the term “information laundering” sounds familiar to you, it might be because you heard it used in the news, like during the George W Bush administration when Dick Cheney’s inner circle was leaking false claims about Iraq to The New York Times, “verifying” that information when contacted to confirm it, and then citing those false news reports when continuing to make the case for invasion.

The term might also sound familiar to you because information laundering was the subject of the much-ridiculed Mary Poppins jingle sung by notorious imperial narrative manager Nina Jankowicz, who also featured in the Grayzone report. Apparently Mason contacted Khan in outrage over a Consortium News piece disputing the official imperial Ukraine narrative, and Khan reached out to Jankowicz for advise on what to do.

Jankowitz told Khan that Consortium was a case of “useful idiots rather than funding,” meaning it’s not paid by the Kremlin it just publishes things that empire managers don’t like. Khan then told Mason that there was a highly suspicious gap in Consortium News publications between 2005 and 2011, which Consortium editor Joe Lauria explained in The Grayzone piece was apparently the result of Khan not doing basic fact checking and not understanding how the internet works.

Lovely.

Sing it with me now:

“It’s how you hide a little, hide a little lie! It’s how you hide a little, hide a little lie!”

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On Ukraine, ‘progressive’ proxy warriors spell disaster

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(Photo: US Embassy in Ukraine)

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

The unanimous vote by progressive lawmakers for the $40 billion Ukraine funding bill has been followed by a near-unanimous refusal to defend it. To date, no member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus – with the sole exception of Cori Bush – has publicly explained why they chose to hand over billions of dollars to the weapons industry and intensify a proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia.   

Amid this resounding silence, Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, has stepped in to fill the void. In a New Republic article titled “Why Ukraine Matters for the Left,” Duss attempts to convince fellow progressives that the “provision of military aid” to Ukraine “can advance a more just and humanitarian global order.” Duss has only praise for a Biden administration that, in his view, “should be applauded for its judicious reaction to the Ukraine crisis.” By contrast, Duss opts to launch an attack on dissident journalists, myself included, who don’t share his enthusiasm.

To make his case, Duss omits an abundance of inconvenient facts, betraying either considerable ignorance of the Ukraine-Russia conflict or a deliberate effort to distort it.

While apologia for US hegemonic projects is normal in DC foreign policy circles, Duss’ contribution is particularly noteworthy given his painstaking attempt to cast himself as an outsider. “Our political class,” Duss states, “advocates military violence with a regularity and ease that is psychopathic.” Duss’ comment is both accurate and wildly ironic, given his choice to advocate our political class’s military violence in Ukraine — with the remarkable ease that he identifies in others as psychopathic.

When it comes to how the Biden administration has handled the Ukraine crisis, Duss cannot identify a single fault. “The Biden team clearly did not seek this war,” Duss claims, and “in fact… made a strenuous, and very public, diplomatic effort to avert it.”

Duss does not explain what the administration’s “strenuous” diplomacy entailed, perhaps because even its top officials now openly admit that none existed.

In an interview with War on the Rocks, State Department counsellor Derek Chollet was asked if NATO expansion into Ukraine was “on the table” in pre-invasion contacts with Russia. “It wasn’t,” Chollet replied. The White House, Chollet explained, “made clear to the Russians that we were willing to talk to them on issues that we thought were genuine concerns they have that were legitimate in some way,” including “arms control.” (emphasis added) But when it comes to “the future of Ukraine” and its potential NATO membership, Chollet said, this was deemed a “non-issue.”

To Duss, the Biden administration’s (openly admitted) refusal to even discuss Russia’s core demands – and to only entertain issues that it deemed to be “legitimate” on Russia’s behalf – is apparently a “strenuous diplomatic effort.” If “diplomacy” amounts to enforcing US hegemony, as many in DC seem to believe, then Duss would have a case. But in the rest of the world, where diplomacy entails constructive dialogue with a semblance of parity, he does not.

Duss also takes aim at the argument, advanced by prominent leftists including former Brazilian President Lula da Silva, that a US-European pledge that Ukraine won’t join NATO “would have solved the problem” with Russia.

To refute Lula, Duss stresses that “in the weeks leading up to the war, U.S. allies, specifically German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, signaled clearly” that Ukraine’s NATO ascension “was not going to happen.” According to Duss, it is Putin who sabotaged their efforts by invading, and who “has now made that discussion moot.”

Duss omits what also happened in the weeks leading up to the war. While Germany and France did indeed float a proposal to keep Ukraine out of NATO, it was Ukraine – with US backing – that rejected it. According to an account in the Wall Street Journal, Scholtz proposed to Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 19 – five days before Russia’s invasion — that Ukraine “renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal,” signed by both Putin and Biden. But Zelensky rejected Schultz’s plan, a response that “left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.” In dismissing the Germans’ NATO proposal, Zelensky joined the Biden White House, as State’s Derek Chollet acknowledged and other Biden officials made clear in public.

Ignoring US-Ukrainian rejectionism, Duss then declares that “it seems absurd to suggest that even an ironclad public pledge from President Biden that Ukraine would never be accepted into NATO would have convinced Putin to draw back the 180,000 troops he had placed on Ukraine’s borders.” Perhaps, but that very public pledge happened to be the centerpiece of Germany’s last-minute diplomatic effort – one that Duss himself invoked, and that Zelensky (along with Biden) chose to reject.

Duss’ whitewashing of the Biden administration’s rejection of diplomacy before the Russian invasion carries over to the period since.

Since Russia’s invasion, Duss says, the White House has “acted with restraint and care not to get drawn into a wider war with Russia.” While it is true that Biden has opted not to start World War III – in other words, has opted not to trigger a global suicide pact — he has done anything but act with “restraint.” One day before Duss’ article was published, Biden authorized the delivery of medium-range advanced rocket systems to Ukraine. These rockets have the capacity to strike inside of Russia; the US is acting on Ukraine’s assurance that it won’t.

Duss may support undermining diplomacy in Ukraine and shipping off billions of dollars worth of heavy weaponry instead, but this can only be described as “restraint” if the sole measure is an immediate — rather than merely prospective — nuclear holocaust.

Duss is so impressed with Biden’s handling of the war that he cannot even detect a tangible path that could end it.  “As of this writing,” Duss declares, “I have seen no evidence of a settlement in the offing—as in, a deal that Putin would actually entertain, let alone accept—that we’re refusing to ‘push for.'”

If Duss cannot see evidence of a realistic settlement that Russia could accept, then he is being willfully blind. Russia’s explicit proposals, issued before the war and after, including two weeks into the invasion, called on Ukraine to “cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.”

It is worth noting that the latter is Russia’s only new condition: for the eight years before the February invasion, Russia formally accepted the Minsk accords, which, to end the Donbas war, would have kept the Donetsk and Lugansk regions inside Ukraine’s borders, with limited autonomy.

Duss is free to argue that Russia’s terms for ending the war are unacceptable. But to pretend that Russia has not even laid out those terms, is to essentially advocate that the war never end.

By omitting Russia’s stated terms for a settlement, Duss also allows himself to erase one of the invasion’s key causes: the 2014 Maidan coup, and the ensuing eight-year Donbas war that had left more than 14,000 people dead by the time Russian forces crossed the border on February 24th.

In his 2500+ word piece, Duss makes no mention of the Donbas war and how it began: the 2014 ouster of a democratically elected Ukrainian president, with new leadership selected by Washington; the coup government’s assault on Ukraine’s ethnic Russian and anti-coup citizens, who launched a rebellion in the Donbas; the critical role of fascists and neo-Nazis in the Maidan coup and the Donbas war since; the fascist-led sabotage of the 2015 Minsk accords, which could have put an end to the conflict. By omitting this history, Duss can also omit how the US has helped undermine the Minsk agreements by siding with Ukrainian’s far-right and choosing to use the Donbas war to “fight Russia over there” (Adam Schiff) and “make Russia pay a heavier price,” (John McCain), because Ukraine’s “fight is our fight.” (Lindsey Graham).

After ignoring Russia’s stated grounds for a peace settlement, Duss goes on to disingenuously claim that the Ukrainian government has been pushing for one.

“Ukraine presented Russia with a far-reaching set of proposals over a month ago, including a commitment to ‘permanent neutrality,’” Duss claims. “Volodomyr Zelenskiy continues to offer to negotiate directly with Putin to end the war.”

It is true that Ukraine presented Russia with a 10-point plan in late March. But Duss omits what happened immediately after: while Russia “signaled its preliminary support,” (RAND analyst Samuel Charap) Ukraine’s Western backers sabotaged it, and Zelensky acquiesced. In early April, Ukrainian and Russian officials were finalizing details for a Zelensky-Putin summit. But UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kiev and ordered him to halt diplomacy. Citing sources close to Zelensky, Ukrayinska Pravda reports that Johnson informed his Ukrainian counterpart that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” Johnson also relayed that even if Russia and Ukraine chose to sign security guarantees, the UK and its allies would not take part – rendering any such agreement worthless.

Zelensky clearly received the message, as Duss’s own source makes clear. When Duss claims that Zelensky “continues to offer to negotiate directly with Putin to end the war,” he links to a Reuters article that reveals such an “offer” to be hollow. Zelensky, Reuters reports, said he would only negotiate with Putin if Russia first withdrew entirely from Ukraine – an obvious non-starter. “Get out of this territory that you have occupied since February 24,” Zelensky said. “This is the first clear step to talking about anything.” Zelensky also “ruled out suggestions… that Ukraine should make concessions for the sake of securing a peace agreement that would allow Putin to save face.”

Thus, returning to Duss’ rendering, Zelensky’s “far-reaching proposals” were immediately rescinded under Western orders, and Zelensky’s “offer to negotiate” was premised on a condition that would have made negotiations impossible.

None of this is to suggest that Russia was justified in launching an invasion of Ukraine. To defend the use of force, which has been so catastrophic, Russia has to meet a high burden of evidence that, in my view, it has not. But one does not need to defend Russia’s invasion to see through Duss’ attempt to whitewash the US role in provoking and prolonging it.

Tellingly, Duss is openly hostile to journalists who have reported on the context that he has omitted. Out of nowhere, Duss introduces an attack on The Grayzone, the Max Blumenthal-founded news outlet that I work for. While Duss has nothing but praise for Biden, he has nothing but ad hominems for us (“pernicious authoritarian agitprop,” “atrocity-denying grifters” “click-baiting provocateurs”). After sharing this vitriol, he then immediately declares that engaging with us is “wasting time.”

I feel the same way about his juvenile name-calling, but interested readers can judge for themselves whether his insults are supported by facts. (He links to two “sources,” one a Medium blog post that, true to the neo-McCarthyite norm, peddles innuendo that The Grayzone is funded by Russia, among other smears).

If Duss is genuinely concerned about wasting time, he also might reflect on why he devotes ample space to paying lip service to progressive principles, only to ultimately endorse policies that flagrantly violate them. “Centering opposition to U.S. imperialism and militarism is an entirely appropriate starting point,” Duss states. Yet Duss’ desired end point would see leftists center U.S. imperialism and militarism, with disastrous results: among them, prolonging a proxy war against a nuclear armed power, threatening a worsening global food crisis, and sentencing more Ukrainians to death.

Even putting aside US complicity in the Ukraine proxy war and its dangers for the planet, progressives like Duss might wish to consider the likely political consequences. One obvious guide is the election of 2016, when Donald Trump won over a significant portion of voters by claiming to oppose the military interventionism that Duss is now urging progressives to embrace. Having seemingly learned nothing from 2016, Democrats in 2022 are again ceding anti-war sentiment to Republicans, 68 of whom voted against the $40 billion Ukraine bill in the House and Senate (versus zero Democrats).

As at least some Republicans vote against the proxy war, Biden has defended the domestic pain caused by his Ukraine proxy war by blaming “Putin’s Price Hike” and trying to argue that “defending freedom is going to cost.” Biden’s defense of “freedom” in Ukraine is now costing him a transatlantic flight to grovel at the feet of the Saudi autocracy, in the hopes of staving off a humiliating cost in the November midterms.  

Continuing his mealy mouthed approach, Duss both claims to support diplomacy while simultaneously declaring it to be unattainable. The US, he says, “should certainly be actively engaged in finding a diplomatic path to end the war, and avoid committing to maximalist aims that could foreclose one.” But yet, according to Duss, “for the moment that path is unclear.”

If the path toward peace for Ukraine is unclear to Duss, then that can only be because he has chosen to erase the factual background and the diplomatic solutions on offer, thereby reinforcing the “maximalist aims” that he claims to oppose. Duss’s proxy war apologia will certainly win him a warm reception in establishment DC circles. For the US progressive movement, Ukraine, and the rest of the planet, it only spells disaster.