Critics, already shut out from the corporate media, are relentlessly attacked and silenced for threatening the public’s quiescence while the U.S. Treasury is pillaged and the nation is disemboweled.
“War Inc.” – by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com
No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design.
On Aug. 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general. Since August 2021, Biden has approved more than $8 billion in weapons transfers from existing stockpiles, known as drawdowns, to be shipped to Ukraine, which do not require congressional approval.
Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congress has approved over $53.6 billion ($13.6 billion in March and a further $40.1 billion in May) since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion. War takes precedence over the most serious existential threats we face. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion while the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Our approved assistance to Ukraine is more than twice these amounts.
The militarists who have waged permanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past two decades have invested heavily in controlling the public narrative. The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler. Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor.
Protesting the war in Ukraine, “Three Tyrants Stalin Putin Hitler.” (Amaury Laporte, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions.
In the face of this barrage, no dissent is permitted. CBS News caved to pressure and retracted its documentary which charged that only 30 percent of arms shipped to Ukraine were making it to the front lines, with the rest siphoned off to the black market, a finding that was separately reported upon by U.S. journalist Lindsey Snell. CNN has acknowledged there is no oversight of weapons once they arrive in Ukraine, long considered the most corrupt country in Europe. According to a poll of executives responsible for tackling fraud, completed by Ernst & Young in 2018, Ukraine was ranked the ninth-most corrupt nation from 53 surveyed.
There is little ostensible reason for censoring critics of the war in Ukraine. The U.S. is not at war with Russia. No U.S. troops are fighting in Ukraine. Criticism of the war in Ukraine does not jeopardize our national security. There are no long-standing cultural and historical ties to Ukraine, as there are to Great Britain. But if permanent war, with potentially tenuous public support, is the primary objective, censorship makes sense.
War is the primary business of the U.S. empire and the bedrock of the U.S. economy. The two ruling political parties slavishly perpetuate permanent war, as they do austerity programs, trade deals, the virtual tax boycott for corporations and the rich, wholesale government surveillance, the militarization of the police and the maintenance of the largest prison system in the world. They bow before the dictates of the militarists, who have created a state within a state. This militarism, as Seymour Melman writes in The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline, [published in 1985] “is fundamentally contradictory to the formation of a new political economy based upon democracy, instead of hierarchy, in the workplace and the rest of society.”
“The idea that war economy brings prosperity has become more than an American illusion,” Melman writes. “When converted, as it has been, into ideology that justifies the militarization of society and moral debasement, as in Vietnam, then critical reassessment of that illusion is a matter of urgency. It is a primary responsibility of thoughtful people who are committed to humane values to confront and respond to the prospect that deterioration of American economy and society, owing to the ravages of war economy, can become irreversible.”
If permanent war is to be halted, as Melman writes, the ideological control of the war industry must be shattered. The war industry’s funding of politicians, research centers and think tanks, as well as its domination of the media monopolies, must end. The public must be made aware, Melman writes, of how the federal government “sustains itself as the directorate of the largest industrial corporate empire in the world; how the war economy is organized and operated in parallel with centralized political power — often contradicting the laws of Congress and the Constitution itself; how the directorate of the war economy converts pro-peace sentiment in the population into pro-militarist majorities in the Congress; how ideology and fears of job losses are manipulated to marshal support in Congress and the general public for war economy; how the directorate of the war economy uses its power to prevent planning for orderly conversion to an economy of peace.”
Rampant, unchecked militarism, as historian Arnold Toynbee notes, “has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations.”
This breakdown is accelerated by the rigid standardization and uniformity of public discourse. The manipulation of public opinion, what Walter Lippman calls “the manufacture of consent,” is imperative as the militarists gut social programs; let the nation’s crumbling infrastructure decay; refuse to raise the minimum wage; sustain an inept, mercenary for-profit health care system that resulted in 25 percent of global Covid deaths — although we are less than 5 percent of the world’s population — to gouge the public; carries out deindustrialization; do nothing to curb the predatory behavior of banks and corporations or invest in substantial programs to combat the climate crisis.
Critics, already shut out from the corporate media, are relentlessly attacked, discredited and silenced for speaking a truth that threatens the public’s quiescence while the U.S. Treasury is pillaged by the war industry and the nation disemboweled.
You can watch my discussion with Matt Taibbi about the rot that infects journalism here and here.
The war industry, deified by the mass media, including the entertainment industry, is never held accountable for the military fiascos, cost overruns, dud weapons systems and profligate waste. No matter how many disasters — from Vietnam to Afghanistan — it orchestrates, it is showered with larger and larger amounts of federal funds, nearly half of all the government’s discretionary spending. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
An organization like NewsGuard, which has been rating what it says are trustworthy and untrustworthy sites based on their reporting on Ukraine, is one of the many indoctrination tools of the war industry. Sites that raise what are deemed “false” assertions about Ukraine, including that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and neo-Nazi forces are part of Ukraine’s military and power structure, are tagged as unreliable. Consortium News, Daily Kos, Mint Press News and The Grayzone have been given a red warning label. Sites that do not raise these issues, such as CNN, receive the “green” rating” for truth and credibility. (NewsGuard, after being heavily criticized for giving Fox News a green rating of approval in July revised its rating for Fox News and MSNBC, giving them red labels.)
Crowd control training at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany, Feb. 18, 2016. (U.S. government)
The ratings are arbitrary. The Daily Caller, which published fake naked pictures of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was given a green rating, along with a media outlet owned and operated by The Heritage Foundation. NewsGuard gives WikiLeaks a red label for “failing” to publish retractions despite admitting that all of the information WikiLeaks has published thus far is accurate. What WikiLeaks was supposed to retract remains a mystery. The New York Times and The Washington Post, which shared a Pulitzer in 2018 for reporting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election, a conspiracy theory the Mueller investigation imploded, are awarded perfect scores. These ratings are not about vetting journalism. They are about enforcing conformity.
NewsGuard, established in 2018, “partners” with the State Department and the Pentagon, as well as corporations such as Microsoft. Its advisory board includes the former director of the C.I.A. and NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden; the first U.S. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO.
Readers who regularly go to targeted sites could probably care less if they are tagged with a red label. But that is not the point. The point is to rate these sites so that anyone who has a NewsGuard extension installed on their devices will be warned away from visiting them. NewsGuard is being installed in libraries and schools and on the computers of active-duty troops. A warning pops up on targeted sites that reads: “Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.”
Negative ratings will drive away advertisers, which is the intent. It is also a very short step from blacklisting these sites to censoring them, as happened when YouTube erased six years of my show On Contact that was broadcast on RT America and RT International. Not one show was about Russia. And not one violated the guidelines for content imposed by YouTube. But many did examine the evils of U.S. militarism.
In an exhaustive rebuttal to NewsGuard, which is worth reading, Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, ends with this observation:
“NewsGuard’s accusations against Consortium News that could potentially limit its readership and financial support must be seen in the context of the West’s war mania over Ukraine, about which dissenting voices are being suppressed. Three CN writers have been kicked off Twitter.
PayPal’s cancellation of Consortium News’ account is an evident attempt to defund it for what is almost certainly the company’s view that CN violated its restrictions on “providing false or misleading information.” It cannot be known with 100 percent certainty because PayPal is hiding behind its reasons, but CN trades in information and nothing else.
CN supports no side in the Ukraine war but seeks to examine the causes of the conflict within its recent historical context, all of which are being whitewashed from mainstream Western media.
Those causes are: NATO’s expansion eastward despite its promise not to do so; the coup and eight-year war on Donbass against coup resisters; the lack of implementation of the Minsk Accords to end that conflict; and the outright rejection of treaty proposals by Moscow to create a new security architecture in Europe taking Russia’s security concerns into account.
Historians who point out the onerous Versailles conditions imposed on Germany after World War I as a cause of Nazism and World War II are neither excusing Nazi Germany nor are they smeared as its defenders.”
The frantic effort to corral viewers and readers into the embrace of the establishment media — only 16 percent of Americans have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers and only 11 percent have some degree of confidence in television news — is a sign of desperation.
[Related: WATCH: Joe Lauria on Democracy Now!: ‘More Than One Side of Story’]
As the persecution of Julian Assange illustrates, the throttling of press freedom is bipartisan. This assault on truth leaves a population unmoored. It feeds wild conspiracy theories. It shreds the credibility of the ruling class. It empowers demagogues. It creates an information desert, one where truth and lies are indistinguishable. It frog-marches us towards tyranny. This censorship only serves the interests of the militarists who, as Karl Liebknecht reminded his fellow Germans in World War I, are the enemy within.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
I’m wondering how the heck this article got published in Salon, considering how much pro-war/ anti-russian hysteria it’s been peddling. Will it cause some readers to perhaps wonder about the disconnect between rational analysis and what they’ve been reading?
The ultimate irony is that Putin is a voice for moderation inside the Siloviki – the powerful who govern Russia. If Putin disappeared tomorrow, we would probably get Nikolay Patrushev, the national security advisor, as the next leader. He has some interesting things to say. Patrushev thinks the US is trying to provoke the Chinese in order to sanction and seize their assets just like the Russians because — the US has become a robber nation, stealing assets of others in order to shore up US financial markets.
US troops are fighting in Ukraine and have been since 2014. I’m not talking about mercs but US special forces.
Re-read that paragraph, and Chris is making a different and highly important point, but the fact remains that the US is indeed at war with Russia.
Cassandra was right, after all, as we all know today. Too bad King Priam was clueless, but not as clueless as most of us today.
All true. Period.
A very long war is the US hope now. Nothing the US has planned in wars has worked out for the last 20 years, so we ought not to trust that it will all work out as the US hopes this time.
If the Russian plan succeeds, the Ukraine Army will collapse from the pressure of its losses to the meat grinder, and Ukraine will go the way of Afghanistan (and South Vietnam before that) in sudden disaster sweeping over it as its Army suddenly gives way, despite US hopes to drag it all out for as long as possible (Vietnam’s Decent Interval).
Is it possible? The question has been rising up, particularly over the past few years as more and more acts of the controlling state become increasingly brazen. What’s the limit on these acts, what restrains or checks them? How should this consideration be melded into the constitution for protection?
This country is facing possibly its most severe crisis in its history, in which the dream of citizen government is throttled away to non-existent, particularly due to the self-interests of a plutocracy.
Is it possible that writers for CN could be kicked off twitter, that paypal could refuse service on trumped-up nonsense? Is it possible journalist Julian Assange (speaking of one of the most brazen acts) could be imprisoned all these years, and threatened as he has been? Is it possible a hidden coup has occurred, or has been developing all the way back to 1953 (or further) with the coup in Iran?
Is it possible a president bent on peace and progress could be assassinated by government-associated forces?
Perhaps none of these are possible. Perhaps they are instead the play of unhinged minds and “conspiracy theorists.” Or is that charge a cover, hysteria while charging hysteria? In which case a sober analysis might reveal the truth. Instead, the tools of censorship and demonizing run out full play–even to questioning, merely asking questions. These ad hominum attacks ALONE make the accusers suspect.
I am grateful to this site for its continued search for rational answers and insights into these problems. Thank you. Please stay safe and keep up your courageous work.
Like a single person on a cocaine binge that has lost control, the only hope for averting catastrophe is some sort of outside intervention. The US has been heading for exactly this point in earnest since the neocons and now neodems have assumed more and more control, burrowing into the enduring bureaucracies of government. The growing panic in “neo circles”, perhaps only dimly acknowledged, is that Russia and China, not to mention a 100 or so other nations are poised to provide that intervention. Not to mention the ass-kicking that is on its way from Mother Nature.
All these $$$ billions yet no money for students’ debt relief. What a phony and hypocritical society. And Ukraine will be in hock for many decades to come…many.
Thus spoke Hedges:: “Rampant, unchecked militarism, according to Arnold Toynbee, ‘has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations.’”
The most recent empire to fall apart is the British Empire, which was challenged by the rise of Germany, a late-comer to European power, which wanted overseas colonies in an attempt to rival British resources and trade. The British Empire fell apart due to bankrupting itself in two wars with Germany, and to independence movements in its overseas colonies, but also to the rise to world power of the United States, which itself became a de facto empire, committed to defending capitalism and private enterprise against what it saw as a communist Russian bid to become the predominant world power.
British “civilization” did not break down with the loss of its empire, but empires are created by and maintained with military power. Looking forward, if the U.S. wishes to maintain its dominence, then it will have to defend Taiwan against Chinese invasion, and risk war with its mightiest adversary. The alternative is to allow those Taiwanese who wish to emigrate to come to America, allowing China to take the island over without a fight. But this would signal the preeminence of the Chinese empire, and the end of American world dominance. It would also undermine the power and prestige of the ruling class, causing upheavals at home, and so will never happen without a fight over Taiwan, a là Vietnam, only worse.
Empires are a step toward world government, which seems desirable inasmuch as wars between nations would be eliminated. But struggles, violence, and killing will continue on other grounds, as we see in the rise of internal violence in the U.S. currently. Conflict is part of life, and there are always reasons for struggle, inasmuch as real or perceived injustice is always present. The best hope of international cooperation is that global warming will become so severe that rival nations will be forced to cooperate to curb it. But it could equally be a motive for further wars. Ironically, the energy that generated new wealth and created a growing middle class (the constituency for democracy) is poisoning the atmosphere and making the planet unlivable – for humans, at least.
Who knows? It may yet turn out alright. The future is a vast, dark continent. But the multitudes of the poor and the suffering don’t want a free press and the vote. They want enough food and shelter to survive, and (more and more) less extreme weather.
A bright side to the utter debasement of the media is that it is now possible to read the New York Times in record time. Just skip the many articles that are obviously packed with lies and propaganda, scan the human interest stories, skip almost all pop culture articles, play some of the games, if you like, and bang you’re finished.
Thanks for a brilliant article.
Among our most sacred American illusions is that America is a “democracy”. In the 18th century, those who were for
independence from one empire in order to set up their own were not in favor of “democracy” at all. Blacks
in the Carolinas were not included and are not considered citizens in the Constitution. Neither do Indians whose land
was invaded share in share in any equal rights.
It has been presumed that America is a “democracy” but equal participation is non-existent for millions.
War defense spending is favored for a “democratic” and supposedly “free” nation in FDR’s speech
on May 16, 1940, and pursuant militarization and is never acknowledged by liberals or other liberals/progressives.
It can be maintained that Germany’s National Socialism was a protest of the establishment. The violence and antisemitism was similar to what we in the US have today, not so much in Donald Trump
as in trumpism. A skilled demagogue can exploit these explosive feelings and Donald Trump is skilled in demagoguery. (See
Thomas Childers, “The Nazi Voter”)
Thanks again for your insights.
Newsguard? Means guarding against real news. Also so sad and ominous to see what happened to Wikipedia. What is happening all around us. Watching the Zelensky show where he shuts down every possible critic and spouts outrageous propaganda and is quoted on every lie he tells. Amazing how locked down the information apparatus in America and I assume Europe, possibly to a lesser extent. Is there a ray of light anywhere. Yes, tiny specks of light hunted by Newsguard. Maybe there is hope with the young if they stopped being sidetracked by their obsession with gender identity and racism. They seemed to be the worst of all when it comes to being led over the cliff like lemmings.
I intend to vote for Scott Ritter as a write-in candidate for NY Senator opposing Schumer. It would better if he would run for the office and ask Diane Sare to withdraw, as she is not likely to get many votes because of her LaRouche association. Clearly we need an anti-war party.
Super article – really nails it.
Especially Hedges’ comment about the militarists controlling the public narrative: “The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler. Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor.”
The long parade of “Hitlers” from Nasser to Hussein to Ghaddafi to Assad to Putin – with various others in between – reminds me a lot of the Hitler audition scene in the old movie “The Producers” (“Will the dancing Hitlers please wait in the wings? We are only seeing singing Hitlers!”).
It seems that this propaganda construct is designed to put people into a World War II mindset, just like the anti-Russian campaigns put people into the old Cold War dualism. Biden’s absurd, neo-Wilsonian “democracies vs. authoritarians” dichotomy fits exactly within this construct. (The “democracies” include feudal monarchies and dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and Egypt; authoritarian regimes seem just to be places that have chosen the wrong leaders.)
The risk of all this “Hitler” talk – like the misuse of the terms “genocide,” “antisemitism” etc – is to water down and render suspect the real crimes of Hitler and the Nazis. Paul Craig Roberts seems to have fallen into this trap.
Mr Hedges wrote:
”Those causes (for the current debacle in Ukraine) are: NATO’s expansion eastward despite its promise not to do so; the coup and eight-year war on Donbass against coup resisters; the lack of implementation of the Minsk Accords to end that conflict; and the outright rejection of treaty proposals by Moscow to create a new security architecture in Europe taking Russia’s security concerns into account.”
He might have included the earlier putsch in Ukraine – to wit – ‘The Orange Revolution” of 2003. There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured western trained thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.
Freedom House and the Democratic party’s NDI helped fund and organise the “largest civil regional election monitoring effort” in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.
Going back further the ideology of one Dmitry Dontsov was the theoretical inspiration of all that is rotten in modern day Ukraine. I should point that in 1944 the massacres of Poles took place in Galicia where some 100,000 were massacred by the deadly duo of Stepan Bandera (ONU-B) Ukrainian Nationalist Party, and the political wing of the movement and Roman Shukhevych (UPA) Ukrainian Insurgent Army the military commander. Both were later assassinated but the spirit still lives on, particularly in Canada. This is the scum that the west endorses.
I love the fact that Chris Hedges quotes yet another author who not only recognizes the current state of US foreign policy, but also outlines clear and sane instructions on how to end the brutal regime that Americans and the rest of the world are direct victims of. When Seymour Melman writes “if permanent war is to be halted, the ideological control of the war industry must be shattered.”, he is delivering his audience a blueprint for humanity to survive this critical juncture in time. The solution is not skewed in any way, but is rather straight to the point and unambiguous. If anyone is ever going to join anything, it has to be the grass roots movement to save the planet from the dual crisis of endless war and climate change.
I believe that if every person in the world is given the uncensored facts and encouraged to critique those facts as much as possible, the majority of the people will find agreement on a new path forward. Making people aware though is a monumental task that can only begin with a grass roots movement. We can all do our part in a variety of ways such as introducing everyone we know to the other side of the story. This is the first step to removing the corporate control of our government, because without universal awareness, we can achieve nothing.
Once someone has evolved past the mainstream narrative, that person then must be handed the blueprint for the transformation into a functioning democracy. After all, removing the culprits is a useless exercise if another equally brutal regime replaces the former. If or when we get to this stage, I would also be confident that everyone will willingly participate in a peaceful but definitive revolution. The stakes have never been higher. That democratic revolution is collectively our last hope for saving the human race.
Thank you Chris Hedges for your tireless efforts to expose the truth. You inspire me.
Helo Alex Nosal. I can sense that you are genuinely concerned about the state of affairs in America. But I want to point out that this is not merely an American situation, it describes the state of affairs worldwide. I believe what we are all dealing with is much larger than you or anyone else can imagine. There are a few good souls out there who stand up for the truth, and other noble thoughts, and good for them, I hope they continue.
But, I think we are quickly approaching a time when the people on the street will begin to realize a very sobering fact. We are in the midst of an ever expanding and exploding human presence on a finite and dying planet. What does this mean? It means the Garden of Eden is coming to an end so to speak. We have ruined our home and will continue to do so, that is painfully obvious. In the coming years we as people will be confronted with a concept that is totally foreign to the vast majority of humans, now and all throughout history : the eventual end of this place and time. There are no more “New Worlds”. No place to escape to, to start over, to hide. When that realization sinks in I expect there will be total mayhem like we have never seen, ever. When all the cellphones and other distractions cease to function, there will literally be hell on earth. My advise is to stop whatever it is you are doing, and begin to contemplate this. Start to prepare for yourself, your friends, and family. The ugly actions we see all around us have a common source, and it is contrary and against every decent thing that exists, it is a very real power. The earth and life we were all given was a gift, from a God who loves us, a perfect place, a place where we humans were given free will, and this mess is the result. Its what happens when humans begin to think and act like we are perfect, we are not perfect. We are flawed. We need to rely on the perfect God who created us, who loves us in spite of our weaknesses, and who is now reaching out to us. Take the hint, and reach out to God, he has a plan for everyone who seeks him. Christ will be returning just as he said he would, at the end of this time, to take his people too a new home. Seek Jesus out and you too can rest in peace and hope. Have a good one !
Whereas in reality it is those media organisations that wage infowar on their own countrymen who are the real traitors.
NewsGuard should actually be called BrainGuard since it only exists to change the function of the human brain to mush. Even Daily Kos, a mostly establishment, Democratic Party shambles of opinion, is considered a “danger” by the corporations and government entities running this Clockwork Orange extension of the Google browser. A society of irreversible social credit is not far from being implemented by our country no matter which of Empire’s heaven-ordained parties is running things into the ground. If the Stasi or the Chinese Communist Party have set the precedent, we’re more than ready to implement it in order to save democracy.
Thanks for this reference to A Clockwork Orange, 1962, Antony Burgess. The wikipedia account on it is inadequate. It is much more a telling of how brainwashing and conditioning leave a people self-absorbed and powerless.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” Matthew 5:9
But, LonnieLad the propaganda machine will have us believe that evangelical nutters like Mike Pompeo are in fact the children of God and that they are peacemakers. How do we square that obscenity ?
Thanks Chris, your attention to the propaganda lie is exactly
what Paul Tillich said in many of his sermons to his students: That the
media is one of the worst forces of tyranny. And that was back in 1965.
Demonic power, and both Tillich and James Luther Adams would
assert its reality were they alive witnessing the mutilation to words
that you’ve described.
Lies destroy truth, truth destroyed turns reality on its head, and
then it’s Orwell’s 1984 we’re entering or by now slipping down into its abyss.
Great article! I’ll be passing it on to friends. Thanks for keeping up the lonely fight for truth and for including a link to Joe Lauria’s tour de force rebuttal of NewsGuard’s baseless accusations, which I had somehow missed despite being a frequent visitor to this website.