The nature of the war against Americans in the past, is the nature of the war now.
Flags at U.S. embassy in Montevideo. (U.S. Embassy Uruguay) Equador)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
As some readers may have noticed, Antony Blinken has the State Department festooning its embassies around the world with “BLM” banners and the rainbow flag of the sexual identity movement known commonly as LGBTQI+.
As our virtuous secretary of state explained in April, when he authorized these advertisements for America’s splendidly raised consciousness, the BLM pennant commemorates the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year; the familiar LGBTQI+ colors will fly on our flagpoles in foreign capitals “for the duration of the 2021 Pride season.” So our guitar-strumming chief diplomat put it when announcing this… this policy, I suppose we are to call it.
Taking the very serious cause for equal rights and turning it into cover for an extremely aggressive foreign policy, it makes for a pretty weird sight, if you have seen any of the pictures. Then again, so does our Tony as he flits around the world on the wings of an angel.
In the same line, there is that CIA recruitment advertisement made public in May, the instantly infamous “woke video.” This is an absolute doozy, as all who have given it the 2 minutes 26 seconds it requires seem to agree. “I am a woman of color, I am the daughter of immigrants, I understand complicated policy questions but can belt out a folk song in Spanish, I suffer a trendy form of anxiety. I earned my way up the ranks of this organization,” and I am a spook: This is the gist, as insidious as it is hopeless.
“The intelligence community,” we are reminded, is an equal opportunity employer. One is not surprised: It has long been evident there are simply not enough Yalies to get done all the subversions, coup-fomenting, drug-dealing, assassinations, and media corruption the agency is charged with executing—all in its defense of democracy, of course.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, those among us with the shrill voices of children continue to defend the veracity of a chemical weapons attack in Syria three years ago even as the evidence of a put-up job and the corruption rife at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is open-and-shut.
Aaron Maté has owned this story since his reports in The Grayzone appeared earlier this year, though others, including your columnist, were on the case at the time the false flag was hoisted.
To be noted: The mainstream press has scandalously left the OPCW story unreported. It is independent media, or allegedly independent media, that smear Maté and others with the usual light-as-air charges—creatures of Assad, paid by the Russians, and so on. An especially vulgar commentator who goes by the Twitter name Vaush—and who poses as a “libertarian socialist,” we must not miss that—now takes to comparing “Assadists” such as Maté, whose reporting has been exemplary, with Holocaust deniers.
Lmao Assadists are literally Holocaust-denial tier with their "arguments". Sad!
— Vaush (@VaushV) July 9, 2021
Out in Silicon Valley, we have Reddit, among the most influential social media platforms now active, censoring thousands of users whose views do not conform to official versions of events and to our official ideology altogether. This is evidently the work of one Jessica Ashooh, a 30–something who moved over from the Atlantic Council—NATO–funded, U.S. government–funded—five years ago to serve as “director of policy.”
Ashooh’s background, which includes a spell as a propaganda adviser in Abu Dhabi, is strongly suggestive of spookery, or at a minimum, objectionable collaboration with intelligence agencies.
The New Yorker published a squeaky-clean account of Ashooh’s censorship regime as she arrived at Reddit. Alan Macleod, an admirably scrupulous reporter for MintPress News, dispensed with the fluff and fog in a straight-ahead piece on Ashooh published a month ago.
There are numerous other such cases. Notable among them is YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s recent explanation, in an interview at the World Economic Forum, the Google-owned video platform’s conscientious efforts to direct viewers away from independent news sites in favor of “responsible sources”—this in the interest of our democracy, like everything else in this line one reads about these days:
War Against Us
The sooner we recognize these and many similar events as disparate dimensions of a concerted war waged against us, the better we will understand the air we breathe and the water we swim in. The sooner we cast these events in an historical context, the more readily will we grasp the gravity of our circumstances. Given the remarkable speed with which this war proceeds in the wrong direction, I count these circumstances very near to dire.
Control of perception and control of information are the fields on which this war is waged. What is at issue? What is the prize?
For well more than a century, foreign policy has been the purview of sequestered elites—white, WASP, typically of New England background. America’s conduct abroad was their purchase. There was no need to defend this arrangement because no one challenged it, with exceptions such as the Anti–Imperialist League at the turn of the last century. In a series of books published in the 1920s, notably The Phantom Public (Macmillan, 1927), Walter Lippmann fairly celebrated the state of ignorance this imposed on the public:
“The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row…. Public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers.”
Lippmann was writing about the cultivation of ignorance to the advantage of the elites whose ordained right to govern without popular knowledge or interference was a running theme in his many books.
During the Cold War, with the emergence of news departments at the new television networks and later on new communications technologies, this ignorance required a certain degree of conscious cultivation. It was during this period culture itself was turned to the state’s purposes.
The results are before us. They are two.
Utterly Oblivious
One, the extent to which most Americans are utterly oblivious to what goes on in the world around them is not short of astonishing. Even the educated, above- average reader of The New York Times typically has not the foggiest idea of the truths Maté unearthed in his OPCW reporting, or the Pentagon and the CIA’s support of the fanatical jihadists who have sought the downfall of the (secular) government in Damascus for the past decade, or the immense fraud of Russiagate, or countless other matters of consequence.
Read the above-noted New Yorker piece on censorship at Reddit. Side-by-side and without a pause, read Alan Macleod’s MintPress piece on the same topic. This is the manufacture of ignorance as plainly as it can be displayed. It is by way of this prevalent ignorance that the U.S. has turned itself from republic to imperial power in the course of seven decades while uttering the word “empire” is counted evidence of a deranged mind. Who? Us?
Two, as the reading exercise just recommended will indicate, our prevalent ignorance is now challenged—and again, new technologies are the vehicle by which this challenge is pressed. And to challenge American ignorance is more or less inevitably to challenge American empire.
Take note: Your Times-reading friends, all those addicted to the baby talk of NPR, the silliness of MSNBC, and the faux seriousness of CNN will proceed happily in the dark, having nothing to worry about because they do not know anything and do not want to be disturbed. No, it is the producers and consumers of independent media who are the concern of those elites defending themselves against the scrutiny of a threatening minority of people who have learned the value of thinking and seeing for themselves.
The War Then & Now
FBI Cointelpro memo.
Those of a certain age should have no trouble recalling the extensive FBI and intelligence programs fashioned to infiltrate the left (as it was then), to plant agents provocateurs, to cultivate violence (just as the CIA did and does in nations it wishes to destabilize). The soporific suburbanites washing their cars were not the Cold War-era worry. Those with their eyes opened or opening were the worry.
This was the nature of the war then and it is the nature of the war now.
There is no left in our time—there is only the “left.” It is now mere fashion statement to identify oneself as “leftist.” Gore Vidal once remarked, “We don’t have politics in America. We have elections.” To borrow and bend the phrase, We don’t have a left in America, we have passingly stylish poseurs, almost invariably ill-educated and ill-read.
Given how lost these people are in the “woke” rubbish and all the bunkum attaching to identity politics—an ignorance of another order—our “left” is a sitting duck for those intent on leading it down harmless paths and away, far, far away from all questions to do with power.
Keep those flags flying, Tony: Bomb Syrians and sanction Venezuelans in the name of BLM and gay people. Tape pitiable people in the CIA’s corridors as they spout all the coded language of identity, a language without meaning. Keep the poseur pundits and their audiences—“I’m progressive,” “I’m a leftist,” “I’m a socialist,” “I read The Nation”—harmlessly preoccupied with the distractions they need to assuage the emptiness of their lives.
Keep everyone calm as you tell them that protecting them from the perilous impurities of free speech only looks like censorship.
This is the war some Americans, a few, wage against most Americans in the service of an empire that must be occluded so long as this is possible. This is how it is waged, and where. Understanding this is the first step out of our darkness and toward some flickering light.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Mr. Patrick,
Thank you for this excellent summary of the crisis of ignorance of almost everyone in this Country with what “our” government is doing and how the massive propaganda program is implemented via the complicit media, intelligence agencies and phony “think tanks” and other corrupted institutions which should be informing us rather than propagandizing us. It is truly appalling how few people are aware of the dire danger to the freedom of press is presented by the Julian Assange case, even though there is readily available excellent discussions of that case available from independent journalists. Instead of finding those credible sources, the willfully ignorant people readily accept the government’s lies about the case. That is just one example. You have summarized the problem very well. I would like to believe that the people will somehow come to understand that this problem exists but I see no reason to be optimistic about the prospect.
Touché, once again, Patrick!
The only flags that should be flying from US embassy poles are false flags.
The more they boast, the less they have to boast about.
God bless Patrick Lawrence for driving a dagger into the insidious distraction that is Woke-ism. Lawrence tells us to focus on the most important issue: US imperialsm.
Amen to that.
Once again Patrick hits the pulse of what is really going on in the US but also the West in general -btw did not Roosevelt allegedly say
regarding Somoza-who should need no introduction-He may be a son of a bitch but he is our son of a bitch-which shows that he was an imperialist-he could make comments about decolonization in India or Indonesia but the US colonies were Latin America in that historical period
Nobody knows who said that.
hXXps://washingtonmonthly.com/2006/05/16/but-hes-our-son-of-a-bitch/
the powers that be want us to be afraid. they want us silent even when some of us know better and who assess what is going on.
So fear is their weapon. I am afraid too.
But the worst is feeling that I am helpless since the facts are not permitted, so I can’t make any case for seeing through the lies. So I am making a LIST.
1. Listen to the silence , listen, listen, listen. Then look : at the list of truth tellers I am now making and share the list with everyone.
I am NOT alone. Many outlets are reporting on Julian Assange. I found about 12 good ones. Then converse with others on those sites. The censorship is emasculating and terrifying. Attacking it by constructing and sharing THE LIST is the best I can do now, opening the dialogue.
Then lonely voices in the wilderness are no longer alone, at all, at all.
If and. when a list is censored someone else needs to come up with an idea.
Share this list, please!
I’m glad to see that you remember Herr Schivelbusch’s epilogue and Mr. Kaufman points out the concentration of modern publishing in just a few hands severely limits the breadth of one’s vision in much the same way that your breadth of vision was limited when required publishing licenses were handed out by the crown. You put your finger right on the basic problem (without being this explicit) – once the MSM’s earworm gets in their head, there’s no getting it out, facts, logic, etc be damned.
The USA demand for everyone to follow the “rules-based international order” it has manufactured is refused by its “enemies” for obvious reasons. As described by Russian Alexander Dugin, “It is an order based on the only way to interpret democracy is as the rule of the majority by a minority, where the only way to interpret freedom is as individual freedom and the only way to interpret human rights is by a projecting a modern, Western, individualistic version of what it means to be human on other cultures”.
International law is ignored by the USA and Israel. Who needs it, when we devise our own??
Thanks for this article. It really is getting depressing seeing all this happening. I am 74 and lived around the world for several years before coming back to the states. Discussing anything with my siblings, who keep their faces plugged to CNN and read the NYT rag, turns into a viscious argument. it doesnt matter. who you watch on the boob tube..Fox is just as ridiculus. I turned off my TV years ago and read from many sources. Yours in particular. I try and support those that are independent and have good mind. Understanding what our country has become is so important but most people have no idea what is happening. Most don’t seem to care. This is a very dangerous situation. Thanks for trying to enlighten the masses. Good luck. If it starts working our leaders will come up with the headlines that the LGBTQI are being murdered in Russia, Syria, China, Iran, Egypt, Libya and Venezula. Oh and dont forget Cuba. This might be the pretense for WW3.
Thanks, Patrick Lawrence, for another great article, one of the most important yet.
Living through the “immense fraud of Russiagate” and the covert invasion of Syria, stage-managed to look like it didn’t exist (for which one of the propaganda organizations even won an Oscar), I have the feeling of living in a real-life “Truman Show”, realiziing ever more clearly that we’re in a fantasy world concocted by mass media and intelligence.
The question is what those who are “taking the first steps out of darkness towards the flickering light” – the concluding words of Lawrence’s essay – should do.
Indeed, the internet and the new electronic media are helping humanity by providing this flickering light. But the flickering light is getting dimmer may be going out. As Lawrence describes, the major internet behemoths are undergoing a “Gleichschaltung”, becoming increasingly controlled by the empire. As shown in the case of Reddit. And independent media are increasingly suppressed.
Harold Pinter put the matter clearly, over 15 years ago: “To maintain that power [of the empire] it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”
One route may be to return to the early days of the internet – specifically by systematically boycotting the would-be monopolists like Google/Youtube, Facebook and Twitter – and increasingly using the likes of Rokfin, Panquake and others.
When the U.S. ruling class publicly, albeit covertly codified its imperial ambitions in 1947, it set us on this pathway of inevitability where “exceptionalism” overlaid with constant fear of the ‘Communists!’ was drummed into its people in stark black and white, hyper-emotional terms.
From the application to a formative and malleable schoolchild’s consciousness the inculcating the daily ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ (to a mythologized flag as prime identity symbol) to the ‘conquering of the wilderness/frontier’ i.e. John Wayne vs the Indian ‘savages,’ or ‘Japs,’ and even the Viet Cong via Hollywood.
It always came down to and does being about the ‘Other,’ an ‘us vs them’ besieged survivalist mentality national narrative fostered commensurately via a long-term Pentagon/Security State relationship with Hollywood that put the armed forces and its massive equipment inventory (ships, planes and tanks, etc) as well as covert direct funding, such as enjoyed and employed by the NFL. Both, as entertainment/diversion—and recruiting platforms—continue in that lucrative relationship. Psyops have always taken a precedence for getting a mass bang for the buck
As the OSS in WW II was dominated by Wall Street’s blueblood scions and their paters, so too was, and is, the CIA in continuing that tradition.
“… [Bill “Wild Bill”] Donovan found that the staid businessman, the type who would have led a perfectly sedate and uneventful life if not recruited to the OSS, made the perfect field agents. The OSS also made a point of recruiting people who could get along well with others, especially people of other races and cultures, and conducted psychological testing to confirm that trait.
The result was perhaps the most unusual collection of spies and analysts ever assembled, a mix of wealthy blue bloods, sons and daughters of the rich and powerful, men and women who looked more like the businessmen they were before the war and not the skilled killers they were training to be.
Newspapers joked that OSS must stand for “Oh So Social” because the recruits looked as though they were taken from the Social Register. The halls of the OSS were full of DuPonts,Vanderbilts, Roosevelts, Morgans and Mellons. The cousin of Winston Churchill, a star polo player, worked in the OSS. So did Ilya Tolstoy, grandson of the famous novelist. A columnist for the Washington Times wrote of the new OSS that:
If you should by chance wander into the labyrinth of the OSS, you’d behold ex-polo players, millionaires, Russian princes, society gambol boys, scientists and dilettante detectives. All of them are now at the OSS where they used to be allocated between New York Palm Beach, Long Island, Newport, and other meccas frequented by the blue bloods of democracy. And the girls! The prettiest, best born, snappiest girls who used to graduate from debutantedom to boredom now bend their blond and brunette locks, or their colorful hats, over their work in the OSS, the super-ultra-intelligence-counter-espionage unit that is headed by the brilliant “Wild Bill” Donovan.”
Page 155 of The Forgotten Five Hundred — Gregory A. Freeman- Published by New American Library—2007
Thank you Patrick Lawrence and CN for being tellers of truths. I’ll pass this article along as I do so many in hopes of finding an audience with some I know gathering their information from the cable news world of ignorance and manipulation. A few have been receptive but most are not and it’s the few armed with actual information who helped bring positive changes in the past and hopefully will again.
William.
Thanks for reading and then writing.
What you suggest, and your experience, are quite so. Ours is a polity divided according to what people are willing to hear and know and what they insist on not hearing and knowing. I have estranged siblings due in some measure to this. It remains only to keep “seeing and saying”–my irreducible definition of journalism–in what context one finds oneself in.
Personal gold star to Mr. Lawrence for apt use of the term “bunkum” in his piece. Con-grats!
While many seem content to remark on the emperor’s clothes, what about his new rules? Isn’t a key question always: who gets to make the rules? And isn’t the answer nearly always naked power?
We’re supposed to believe Congress & Corporate Media & the Public are flummoxed when questions are formulated & raised of ever-mounting treachery of their cadre of enemies? Why then, after an appropriate moment of wailing & gnashing & rending, is the answer always the same? More war money, more tax cuts, more threats.
The long con of the U.S. public appears to be working like magic. It won’t be that much longer at this rate until all 10 disappear, well, probably not the 2nd. Just be sure to bend all those guns, germs & steel in the desired direction. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The PTB profess to love their own children. Just not their future well being? We see you, Tony Phony Baloney.
I thank you, Robert, and all others commenting.
Two things strike me vividly as I read along, One, many of us share the experience William (above) described. It is the consequence of so long and so relentless a propaganda program inflicted upon us. Two, there is a wonderful spirit running through these comments. Everyone knows the score and everyone is alive, unbowed, as to what the future holds. P.L.
The author omits Franklin Roosevelt from the historic picture. Fdr was the world anti-imperialist leader. His policies resumed the 19th century US leader ship of anti-imperialism. The sovereign American republic and its friends made the Modern world. Imperialism, including its present stage called globalism, is the enemy of western civilization. End it is fair to say that globalism’s foreign wars and other atrocities are simply illegal, illegitimate, and an affront to the national identity of the United States.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an ultra-imperialist. He was an American blue blood. Firmly a member of the ruling elite. Far too many people believe otherwise, as you apparently do, because of the New Deal and the WPA during the great depression of the 1930s. But Roosevelt only enacted these policies to prevent violent revolution in this country, which he was perceptive enough to see was ready to explode. It was a tactic to preserve capitalism. There was nothing progressive about it.
If you read the Pentagon Papers, Roosevelt was opposed to France getting Vietnam back as a colony and was a staunch defender of Indian independence. You are right about his motives for the New Deal, but the comment you were responding to was about his views on decolonization.
In the book, “As He Saw It” by Roosevelt’s son Elliot, Roosevelt laid it all out on the table for Churchill:
Father broke in. ‘Yes. Those Empire trade agreements are a case in point. It’s because of them that the people of India and Africa, of all the colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are.’
[…]
‘You mentioned India,’ he [Churchill] growled.
‘Yes. I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.’
thank you, carolyn zaremba..
and of course, patrick lawrence!
“…the concern of those elites defending themselves against the scrutiny of a threatening minority of people who have learned the value of thinking and seeing for themselves.”
This could have been written about certain people in any age of mankind. In 1840 the Abolitionists were 5% or less of the population, yet by 1864 Union troops were fighting to reunite this country, a country to be without slavery.
As some very wise people have said “the fight persists” and though good is so much slower than evil it will win.
Thanks for a brilliant analysis of the charade manufactured to continue the hoax of a land devoted to democracy. As you point out the function of empire is to grab resources by sanctions, color revolutions or, those failing, war. Meanwhile back at the farm keep them docile with the incessant lies or , as you put it, the manufacture of ignorance. I can’t thank you enough.
Bravo!
And preaching to the choir.
And,
Don’t let “them” steal lgbtq and progressive.
Protest Loudly! – Always!
After reading this piece, my respect for the author has increased even further. I am especially referring to his courage to tackle culturally sensitive issues like BLM and LBGTQ+ movements – more specifically, the misuse of these movements by our rulers to deceive and manipulate the public, and to obfuscate their (the rulers’) imperial, exploitative and genocidal policies.
The BLM movement has long been coopted. And what consenting adults do behind closed doors should be nobody’s business. Don’t understand me wrong. I realize that their civil rights are a broader issue and must be protected. But flying flags in embassies? Advertising fir CIA? Really? It is in the the interest of both groups to understand how their movements have been coopted. This cannot go well in the long run. By allowing this to happen, I believe, they will earn resentment, and lose goodwill from a significant part of the broader community in the long run. Wake up – you and your interests are being misused!
Yes, the war has come home- in all forms. Not only the exploitation and colonization of our “homeland” but also all the methods of propaganda, manipulation and coercion that, until now, were used to put down resistance in overseas colonized territories are being used domestically.
I used to be a supporter of the Dem Party, until “it left me” with the election of Obama. Ever since, one of the best ways to lose a friend has been to justify my decision not to move along with the party. Things are only getting worse. Since a long time already, challenging any NPR narrative will do the same thing.
Recently I have developed a corollary to Mark Twain’s adage that it is easier to fool a person than to convince him that he has been fooled. And my corollary is: it is even easier to lose a friend by pointing out how he has been fooled.
Anyway, it has been difficult since quite a while already to have an open discussion on most issues because of the political polarization. But today, thanks to the domestic propaganda, it is even worse. People are not only polarized, they also have different facts. And that’s because of the successful domestic propaganda.
I hope with every fiber in my body that the the rulers will fail, but the signs are ominous. I am so disappointed in my fellow citizens. The information is out there. There are great news outlets (like this one, and many more) and great journalists (like this author, and many more). Why is the vast segment of the population blind? What can we all do to change this?
I hear you and know how you feel. Whenever I dare speak my realist views to a group of NYT-reading, MSNBC/CNN-watching Democrats, I immediately sense that I am regarded by the others as a turd in the punch bowl. Hence, I tend, more often than not, to keep my mouth shut. It’s a form of self-censorship, which is what goes on routinely at most news outlets. Conform, or look for another job.
Feeling your pain Nathan. It’s lonely trying to share insight and understanding. Who’s game for the struggle? TDS took out the few I had. Feel like I’m stuck in “invasion of the body snatchers”.
Dem’s left me with Clinton and Nafta but Humphrey promising more bombs than Nixon was my first clue. Too young to vote then, now finding no one not local to vote for. Supporting JD’s are as worthless as trying to figure out what’s going on by reading NYT or listening to NPR. Counterproductive worse than waste of time. May have to take pilgrimage to a Jimmy Dore event to share reality. Thanks for sharing. John
Thank you. I have lost several “friends” over the past decade or so because I call them out on their errors in thinking and challenge their ignorance. Yes, operating from a different set of “facts” due to propaganda from the government is a disease in this country.
Thank you Nathan (and CN / Patrick Lawrence) for this. It has been more than a few years now that most of the people I know simply refuse to be critical of anything the Democratic Party does (we do agree the Republicans are rather insane) or who they choose to represent us in elections. To say I have lost and / or angered friends is putting it lightly. Like others on the comment thread I have given up on saying anything or sending them fine pieces like this one (or other similar pieces). I come to CN to find solace that some people are aware of where this is all headed and how we are being lied to.
Don’t hide amongst the Heard
Don’t look the other way
and don’t believe a single word
of what they have to say
You better speak out while you can
better formulate a plan
Cuz this may be your final chance
to stand against The Man
They are silencing our voice
they control our every move
So much fuckery is happening
but there’s nothing we can prove
We can feel the velvet chains
grow shorter every day
and as of late they take less pains
to hide their power play
We must put antipathy aside
if we hope to change the course
we must cross the great divide
and join each other as one force
It’s time to oppose
those upon the throne
and take away their power
because they wish to own
the souls of those who meekly stand
divided and alone
Won’t you stand with me Brother
Won’t you join me in the Fight
Shoulder to shoulder
It’s time to set things right
Together we can do it
Together we are strong
Together we will shift the tide
The Battle has begun.