The empire depends on ignorance, says Caitlin Johnstone. The more stupid, racist, gullible, and easily distracted we become, the nastier agendas the empire can roll out.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley)
The U.S. has imposed sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for using her position to oppose the most thoroughly documented genocide in history.
At the same time, the U.S. has removed Syria’s Al Qaeda franchise HTS from its list of designated terrorist organizations, because its leader successfully carried out the regime change in Damascus that the western empire had been chasing for years.
At the same time, the U.K. has added nonviolent anti-genocide activism group Palestine Action to its list of banned terrorist organizations for opposing the Gaza holocaust.
At the same time, the Israeli prime minister who is carrying out that holocaust has nominated the American president who is helping him perpetrate genocidal atrocities for a Nobel Peace Prize.
At the same time, Israel has continued its ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza, while also arresting the Israeli journalist who helped expose the IDF officials who cooked up fake atrocity propaganda about burnt babies on Oct. 7.
At the same time, the Trump administration has enraged its MAGA base by concluding that Jeffrey Epstein had no client list for any kind of sexual blackmail operation and definitely committed suicide.
The western empire is one nonstop insult to our intelligence. The peace advocates are terrorists, the genocide architects deserve peace prizes, the journalists are dangerous, and Epstein was just a wealthy socialite who made a few mistakes.
They do everything they can to make us stupid via propaganda, Silicon Valley information control, and indoctrination schooling systems, and then they treat us like we’re morons for the rest of our lives.
The empire depends on ignorance. The more stupid, racist, gullible, and easily distracted we become, the nastier agendas the empire can roll out. Now here we are watching a live-streamed genocide unfold right in front of our eyes for nearly two years while being tube fed a daily diet of the most ridiculous lies imaginable.
As Aaron Bushnell said, this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Read sites frequented by nice, well educated progressives. It’s all Trump’s fault. If the Dems take back control, all will be well. I’ve become persona non grata on some by explaining how the Ds are neolibs, enablers of an econ system that defines away devastated human communities and destroyed ecosystems as externalities. Even more upsetting to them, I’ve pointed out that the State Dept. of supposed nice guy Biden was run by neocons. Yet the blinders seem to stay in place. Thus so does empire and its requirement for endless wars.
I have often said that the majority of Americans are the stupidest, most ignorant, brainwashed and arrogant people in the world. I will stop saying this.
Americans are set upon by the most evil government, billionaires and capitalist business elite in the world. They have no more culpability than any other oppressed people in the world. It is not their fault if they are blind to the suffering of the Palestinians or any other oppressed people in the world. Americans are cowed and afraid like any other oppressed people.
It is the fault of the rich and powerful that rule them, in business, government, and so on.
Who will save them? They need someone or something to save them from the evil that rule them, just as any oppressed people do.
The Dems repealed New Deal financial regs, which led to ’08. They bailed out Wall St. while people who lost jobs, pensions, houses got nothing. Look at the egregious harm of mass layoffs done to fund stock buybacks benefitting only CEOs and their bankster cronies. All fine with the MSM. We the working class majority get the message; these aren’t New Deal Ds. We have no political party allies. That’s why all the non-voters (they’re saying NO) and the desperate votes for the Rs.
However, like my grandfather the Wobbly, I reject the idea we have to wait for some elitist vanguard to rescue us. The implication is we’re too stupid to manage our own interests. As Eugene V. Debs said “I would not lead you into the promised land even if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as you hands and get yourselves out of you preset condition. As it is now, the capitalists use your heads ad your hands.” We gain nothing by allowing some other elitist head to use our hands.
We’re definitely through the looking glass, no doubt.
A key talking point floating around in neo-con circles today is that Tucker Carlson’s a first-rate buffoon for predicting dreadful outcomes just prior to Trump’s bombing campaign against Iran. Since those awful results didn’t manifest, Carlson’s being mocked relentlessly.
See, it’s okay to go out and drunk drive all you want, no one should ever warn of the potential devastating consequences. We should never err on the side of caution either, especially when nuclear weaponry and nuclear energy sites are targeted; bombs away!
A carbon copy script of Germany Nazism is now playing, with just another cast of beings, being led by the nose to the slaughter.
Only this time the accumulative global outcome for all already, apparently, is going to be many many factors more catastrophic, when it ends.
This methodology to defeat political opponents by government fiat didn’t start with Israel and Gaza. This official public censorship exercise has its public origins in a 2014 report, published by The Interpreter website, that Russian “disinformation” ranks among the gravest threats to the West. The report, entitled The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money, was written by Russian regime-change advocates Michael Weiss and Peter Pomerantsev, each with extensive links to neocon and anti-Russian think tanks. Pomerantsev writes regularly for The Guardian and argued for the creation of an NGO that would create an internationally recognized ratings system for disinformation (an impossible task) and the need for news outlets to hire “counter-propaganda editors” to determine information “safe” for publication. The US State Department commenced similar studies in relation to the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts so this is all about establishing a single narrative on global political issues and our current “sanitized” MSM news reports are the result.
Journalist James Carden has debunked the Pomerantsev claims here.
We are witnessing the crude commodification and certification of truth by police state methods in order to crush popular dissent and enable war crimes and genocide.
The Australian anti-Semitism envoy Jillian Segal appeared on the ABC’s 7.30 Report to advance the case for the new Federal government program to remove “hate speech” from out media, universities and cultural organizations. Segal repeatedly refused to be drawn on what constitutes “hate speech” preferring instead banal generalities. Apparently we can all readily see and agree on what constitutes hate speech. No, Segal insists, it will not be her views or that of Israel determining Australian government policy; that will be determined by the Federal Government. Her whole presentation was an insult to all adults who accept that opposing political views are real and cannot be airbrushed out of existence.
Her unstated assumptions were: (i) that the government would be bound on assessment standards supplied by the Israeli government and Jewish leadership; (ii) that vilification of Israel or any of its government policies would automatically qualify as hate speech; (iii) that serious criminal and financial sanctions would need to be applied to individuals and organizations to bring them into line.
The Australia Federal government has been trapped by its own adolescent view that deep political divisions can be resolved by “being nice” and sharing cups of tea while singing Kumbaya. It also ignores the Constitution which specifically prohibits any MP being required to vote for or support legislation based on any system of religious beliefs, in this case the religious claims of the Israeli government used to subjugate and murder innocent Palestinians.
The moral bankruptcy of this exercise is shocking and should be rejected in its entirety.