Showing posts with label journalist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journalist. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

Destroying Western Values To Defend Western Values

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So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online.

While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”:

According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

The report reveals pervasive efforts on the part of the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the FBI, to push massive online platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to censor content in order to suppress “threats” as broad as fomenting distrust in the US government and US financial institutions.

“There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use,” The Intercept reports.

“Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020,” says The Intercept. “Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to ‘process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.’”

While these government agencies contend that they are not technically forcing these tech platforms to remove content, The Intercept argues that its investigation shows “CISA’s goal is to make platforms more responsive to their suggestions,” while critics argue that “suggestions” from immensely powerful institutions will never be taken as mere suggestions.

“When the government suggests things, it’s not too hard to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist,” Michigan State University’s Adam Candeub tells The Intercept. “And I would consider such actions, especially when it’s bureaucratized, as essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms.”

The current CISA chief is seen justifying this aggressive government thought policing by creepily referring to the means people use to gather information and form thoughts about the world as “our cognitive infrastructure”:

Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.

Another CISA official is seen suggesting the agency launder its manipulations through third party nonprofits “to avoid the appearance of government propaganda”:

To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the “efficacy of interventions,” specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for trust information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”

But as a former ACLU president tells The Intercept, if this were happening in any government the US doesn’t like there’d be no qualms about calling it what it is:

“If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”

Indeed, this report is just another example of the way western powers are behaving more and more like the autocracies they claim to despise, all in the name of preserving the values the west purports to uphold. As The Intercept reminds us, this business of the US government assigning itself the responsibility of regulating America’s “cognitive infrastructure” originated with the “allegation that Russian agents had seeded disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward Donald Trump.” To this day that agenda continues to expand into things like plots to censor speech about the war in Ukraine.

Other examples of this trend coming out at the same time include Alan MacLeod’s new report with Mintpress News that hundreds of former agents from the notorious Israeli spying organization Unit 8200 are now working in positions of influence at major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon (just the latest in MacLeod’s ongoing documentation of the way intelligence insiders have been increasingly populating the ranks of Silicon Valley platforms), and the revelation that The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté were barred from participating in a Web Summit conference due to pressure from the Ukrainian government.

We’re destroying western values to defend western values. To win its much-touted struggle of “democracies vs autocracies“, western civilization is becoming more and more autocratic. Censoring more. Trolling more. Propagandizing more. Jailing journalists. Becoming less and less transparent. Manipulating information and people’s understanding of truth.

We’re told we need to defeat Russia in Ukraine in order to preserve western values of freedom and democracy, and in order to facilitate that aim we’re getting less and less free speech. Less and less free thought. Less and less free press. Less and less democracy.

I keep thinking of the (fictional) story where during World War II Winston Churchill is advised to cut funding for the arts to boost military funding, and he responds, “Then what are we fighting for?” If we need to sacrifice everything we claim to value in order to fight for those values, what are we fighting for?

Dissent is becoming less and less tolerated. Public discourse is being more and more aggressively disrupted by the powerful. We’re being shaped into the exact sort of homogeneous, power-serving, tyrannized, propagandized population that our leaders criticize other nations for having.

If the powerful are becoming more tyrannical in order to fight tyranny, what’s probably actually happening is that they are just tyrants making up excuses to do the thing they’ve always wanted to do.

As westerners in “liberal democracies” we are told that our society holds free speech, free thought and accountability for the powerful as sacrosanct.

Our leaders are showing us that this is a lie.

The problem with “western values” is that the west doesn’t value them.

In reality, those who best exemplify “western values” as advertised are the ones who are being most aggressively silenced and marginalized by western powers. The real journalists. The dissidents. The skeptics. The free thinkers. The peace activists. Those who refuse to bow down to their rulers.

Our ongoing descent into tyranny in the name of opposing tyrants calls forth a very simple question: if defeating autocracy requires becoming an autocracy, what’s the point of defeating autocracy?

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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Monday, October 31, 2022

Disrupt The Cognitive Infrastructure

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Leaked documents reveal that the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population — the information systems people use to feed their minds and think their thoughts.

If it is the job of the US intelligence cartel to regulate society’s cognitive infrastructure, then it is the job of healthy human beings to disrupt the cognitive infrastructure.

Fill the cognitive infrastructure with information that is inconvenient for the powerful.

Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure by saturating it with unauthorized speech.

Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure. Corrupt the cognitive infrastructure. Tell the cognitive infrastructure that the teacher is bullshitting and the preacher is a liar. Sneak the cognitive infrastructure its first cigarette and a copy of the Communist Manifesto.

Take the cognitive infrastructure’s virginity. Teach the cognitive infrastructure about the primacy of the clitoris. Take the cognitive infrastructure on its first psilocybin mushroom hunt and give it phoenix reincarnation orgasms in the forest.

Pay attention to that man behind the curtain. Extremely close attention. Be intrusive about it. Shine a flashlight up his asshole. Disregard the proper channels. Hack his devices and publish his emails.

Sow chaotic good tidings throughout the information ecosystem. Surf on waves of WikiLeaks documents and Grayzone reports with problematic revelations pouring from your throat like rain. Scrawl “WHAT CAN BE DESTROYED BY THE TRUTH SHOULD BE” on bathroom stalls and overpasses.

Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure on your smartphone. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure on the street corner. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure in conversations with friends and family. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure too severely and from too many directions for there to ever be any hope of its regulation or control.

Be the disruption you want to see in the cognitive infrastructure. Be a splinter in the monster’s paw. Be sand in the gears of the juggernaut machine. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure in such numbers and with such aggression that the whole thing comes toppling down, and people’s eyes begin to flutter open, and they wake up from their propaganda-induced comas into the real world, and stride out to do the very things the US intelligence cartel has been trying to prevent them from ever doing.

Free beings under a wide open sky.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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New Study Finds The Rest Of The World Supports China And Russia

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The US is preparing to station multiple nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in northern Australia in what the mass media are calling a “signal to China,” yet another example of Australia’s forced subservience as a US military/intelligence asset.

“Having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a signal to China that any of its actions over Taiwan could also expand further,” Becca Wasser from the Centre for New American Security think tank told the ABC.

“This is a dangerous escalation. It makes Australia an even bigger part of the global nuclear weapons threat to humanity’s very existence – and by rising military tensions it further destabilises our region,” tweeted Greens Senator David Shoebridge of the incendiary provocation.

A new Australian Financial Review article titled “Australia’s alliances in Asia are a tale of two regions” candidly discusses the Biden administration’s recent sanctions geared toward kneecapping the Chinese tech industry in what the author James Curran correctly says “is unambiguously a new cold war.” Curran describes the impossible task Australia has of straddling the ever-widening divide between its number one trading partner China and its number one “security” partner the US, while Washington continually pressures Canberra and ASEAN states toward greater and greater enmity with Beijing.

“ASEAN countries, as much as Australia, have much at stake in resisting the onset of a bifurcated world,” Curran writes.

But that bifurcation is being shoved through at breakneck pace, using both hard and soft power measures. Australians have been hammered with increasingly aggressive anti-China propaganda, and as a result nearly half of them now say they would be willing to go to war to defend Taiwan from an attack by the mainland, with a third saying they’d support a war against China over the Solomon Islands.

A recent Cambridge study found that this hostility toward China has been on the rise in recent years not just in Australia but throughout the “liberal democracies” of the US-centralized power alliance. But what’s interesting is that public opinion is exactly reversed in the much larger remainder of the Earth’s population, with people outside the US power cluster just as fond of China as those within that power cluster are hostile toward it. This relationship is largely mirrored with Russia as well.

“Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”

The report finds that in the “developing” world, approval of China is higher than approval of the US:

“For the first time ever, slightly more people in developing countries (62%) are favourable towards China than towards the United States (61%). This is especially so among the 4.6bn people living in countries supported by the Belt and Road Initiative, among whom almost two-thirds hold a positive view of China, compared to just a quarter (27%) in non-participating countries.”

The report finds that while Russia’s approval has plummeted in the west, it maintains broad support in the east despite the invasion of Ukraine:

However, the real terrain of Russia’s international influence lies outside of the West. 75% of respondents in South Asia, 68% in Francophone Africa, 62% in Southeast Asia continue to view the country positively in spite of the events of this year.

I first became aware of the Cambridge study via a Twitter thread by Arnaud Bertrand (who is a great follow if you happen to use that demonic app). Bertrand highlights data in the study showing that US-aligned nations’ opinion of China began plummeting not after the Covid outbreak in late 2019, but after 2017 when the US began ramping up its propaganda campaign against Beijing.

Apart from the fact that the USA’s immensely sophisticated propaganda machine naturally focuses primarily on where the world’s wealth and military firepower rests while pushing its global agendas, and apart from the fact that those in Belt and Road Initiative countries apparently believe they benefit from their economic relationships with China, the disparity between the “developed” and “developing” worlds in their perceptions of the US and its enemies may also be partly explained by another thought-provoking Arnaud Bertrand thread, which I will quote in its entirety here:

A puzzling observation in today’s world is that almost no Western leader has laid out a positive vision for the future.

Take Biden for instance. His big vision is “democracies vs autocracies”. Meaning his vision for the future of the world is conflict. How positive is that?

Contrast this with China: between “national rejuvenation” and “common prosperity” at home and the “global security initiative” as their vision for improved international relations; everyone is very clear on the journey they’re embarked on.

This is a key, if not the key reason why the “West” has no chance in hell to convince the “rest” to join them.

There’s simply nothing to join! Except conflict, I guess, but you join a conflict to fight for a vision – for a better world – the conflict itself cannot be the vision!

This reminds me of what George Kennan, the architect of the cold war, wrote: to win he said that America had to “create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time”

Does America give this impression today?

Even in my own country, France. Ask any French person what Macron’s vision for the future of France and the world is, what the grand plan is, and you’ll get very puzzled looks. “Reform the pension system so we have to work longer?”

The truth is there’s nothing, nada, rien! 

What we have essentially in the West are political operators. They think their jobs are to get reelected and to attempt to move whatever metrics the electorate cares about: GDP, unemployment, debt levels, CO2 emissions, etc. Actual leaders have gone extinct (or gone East).

It’s actually quite sad, really speaks to the levels of intellectual decrepitude in the West today. The time of the Enlightenment, the big revolutions is well and truly gone. We’re stuck with our mediocre operators.

It’s also why this is such a dangerous time. A positive vision brings confidence, it brings hope, it motivates, it makes people look forward to what’s to come. The West has none of that today.

The future is scary, the dominant feelings are fear and anger.

And when there’s a lot of fear and anger, these feelings need to be directed somewhere. And our operators certainly don’t want it to be them! So it’s China, Iran, all those “foreigners” who “hate our freedom”.

Perfect recipe for a very bad conflict…

Please, don’t get fooled!

Bertrand’s musings echo a recent quote by Professor Jeffrey Sachs at the Athens Democracy Forum: “The single biggest mistake of president Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”

Indeed, we could be striving toward a positive vision for the future, one which seeks “common prosperity” and “improved international relations,” one which works to remedy inequality and address the looming environmental crisis. Instead the world is being bifurcated, split in two, which history tells us is probably an indication that something extremely terrible is on the horizon for our species unless we drastically change course.

It’s worth keeping all this in mind, as nuclear-capable bombers are deployed to Australia; as NATO weighs moving nuclear weapons to Russia’s border in Finland; as the Biden administration goes all in on economic warfare with China regardless of the consequences; as Russia accuses the US of “lowering the nuclear threshold” by modernizing the arsenal in Europe into “battlefield weapons”; as the Council on Foreign Relations president openly admits that the US is now working to halt China’s rise on the world stage; as China declares its willingness to deepen ties with Russia on all levels.

We could have such a wonderful, healthy, collaborative world, and it’s being flushed down the toilet because an empire is using its leverage over the wealthiest populations on our planet to work toward dominating all the other populations. This stupid, insane quest to shore up unipolar planetary domination is costing us everything while gaining us nothing, and it’s going to be the poorest and weakest among us who suffer the most as a result.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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Sunday, October 30, 2022

Love Like There’s No Yesterday

Listen to a reading of “Love Like There’s No Yesterday”:

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Love like there’s no yesterday
like you’re the first to ever love
like it’s fresh and for the first time
because it is fresh and for the first time
and the illusion otherwise is just a trick of human perception

Love like a hermit crab that said fuck it
and cast aside its shell forever

Love like a three year-old rides a tricycle

Love like the nukes just started flying

Love like two middle aged bloggers
making out in the rain while Australia floods

Love like cobwebs and calliopes

Love like a geyser of starlings
pouring from your chest cave

Love like God just cracked you open
and gazed at all the parts of you you’re most ashamed of
the things you feel most guilty about
and chuckled sweetly
at how you think any of that matters
in this roaring ocean of infinity

Love like an intimate ultrasound
of the world that’s waiting to be born

Love like everyone’s watching
and you’re a slutty little attention whore

Love like peacock angels in screaming orgasm

Love like you deserve to love
and be loved
because you do
because you do
I swear to you on my accordion heart
and my warzone womb
and my eyes that are brimming with my grandmother’s tears
you deserve to love and be loved
you do
you do
and it is safe
and it is right
and it is good

Love like tender holiness kisses

Love like swampwater messiahs

Love like watching My Dinner with Andre for the very first time
home alone with the lights out
and a box of tissues
and a mind full of wonder

Love like eating an orange while listening to crickets

Love like a heartfelt impromptu pop song serenade
from an adoring lover
who cannot sing

Love like a mother noticing that her prattling child
will never be that age again

Love like you are a very young primate
in a very old universe you do not understand
and your accomplishments mean nothing
because everything’s so big
so all that matters is love
and loving

Love like a scarecrow saint

Love like a balrog buddha

Love like babies eating ice cream

Love big

Love hard

Empty the tank

Leave it all in the ring

There’s nothing to save it for anyway

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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Saturday, October 29, 2022

The Official Narrative On Ukraine

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The official narrative promoted by the entire western political/media class is that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February of this year solely because he is evil and hates freedom. He wants to conquer as much of Europe as possible because he cannot stand free democracies, because he is another Adolf Hitler.

The official narrative is that while Russia is in Ukraine solely because its leader is an evil monster like Hitler, the US is in Ukraine solely because its leaders are righteous. The United States is providing arms, military intelligence, and assistance on the ground from special ops forces and CIA officers to Ukraine, as well as implementing an unprecedented regime of economic warfare against Russia, solely because the US loves its good friends the Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy.

If you dispute any part of the official Ukraine narrative, you are an evil monster, and a disinformation agent. Because Vladimir Putin is the same as Adolf Hitler, you are also the same as Neville Chamberlain, and are guilty of the cardinal sin of supporting appeasement.

Because you are an evil disinformation agent Neville Chamberlain appeasement monster, it is legitimate to censor you. It is legitimate to accuse you of being secretly paid by the Russian government. It is legitimate to swarm you with coordinated astroturf trolls working to shout you down and overwhelm you. It is legitimate to publish propagandistic smear pieces about you. All normal expectations of public discourse go out the window, because you are a monster, not a person.

If you are tempted to ask questions which put a wobble on the official narrative, you must resist this urge at all cost. Don’t ask why western officials, scholars and strategists have spent years warning that the actions of western governments would lead to this war. Don’t ask what people are talking about when they say the US provoked this war, or when they say the US is using this war to advance strategic agendas it has had in place for years, or when they suggest that these things might have something to do with why the US is obstructing diplomatic solutions at every turn. If you ask questions like these, you are the worst person in the world.

Per the official narrative, if you confront powerful lawmakers on their support for US interventionism in Ukraine, you are “parroting pro-Putin talking points” and spreading “Russian disinformation“. Questioning officials of the most powerful government in the world about the most consequential decisions being made in the world is violence, and is not allowed.

If you claim you are objecting to the US using proxy warfare in Ukraine on anti-war grounds, you are lying; you are not anti-war. You are only anti-war if you support the same positions on Ukraine as noted anti-war activists John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton, and Mike Pompeo. If you want to learn about the true anti-war position, consult reliable anti-war publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The official narrative on Ukraine is that the US empire and its media never lie or circulate propaganda about wars that the US is involved in. If you dispute this, you are lying and circulating propaganda. That’s why it’s necessary to have so much censorship and organized trolling and mass media reports reminding you how good and righteous this war is: it’s to protect you from lies and propaganda.

If any part of the official narrative on Ukraine sounds suspicious to you, this means you have been infected by Russian disinformation. Do not breathe a word of the thoughts you’ve been thinking to anyone, or else you will be guilty of spreading Russian disinformation and will become the enemy of the free world.

Remember, good citizen: we must oppose Russian propaganda at all costs to protect our western values of free expression, free thought, free press, and free democracy. So do not question any part of the official Ukraine narrative. Or else.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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Friday, October 28, 2022

Advocating World War Three Is Just Mainstream Punditry Now

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Mainstream punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it. As though it would not be the direct result of the US-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar planetary domination.

The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that is owned and operated by the supremely influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations.

“The United States and its allies must plan for how to simultaneously win wars in Asia and Europe, as unpalatable as the prospect may seem,” writes the article’s author Thomas G Mahnken, adding that in some ways “the United States and its allies will have an advantage in any simultaneous war” in those two continents.

But Mahnken doesn’t claim a world war against Russia and China would be a walk in the park; he also argues that in order to win such a war the US will need to — you guessed it — drastically increase its military spending.

“The United States clearly needs to increase its defense manufacturing capacity and speed,” Mahnken writes. “In the short term, that involves adding shifts to existing factories. With more time, it involves expanding factories and opening new production lines. To do both, Congress will have to act now to allocate more money to increase manufacturing.”

But exploding US weapons spending is still inadequate, Mahnken argues, saying that “the United States should work with its allies to increase their military production and the size of their weapons and munitions stockpiles” as well.

Mahnken says this world war could be sparked “if China initiated a military operation to take Taiwan, forcing the United States and its allies to respond,” as though there would be no other options on the table besides launching into nuclear age World War Three to defend an island next to the Chinese mainland that calls itself the Republic of China. He writes that “Moscow, meanwhile, could decide that with the United States bogged down in the western Pacific, it could get away with invading more of Europe,” demonstrating the bizarre Schrödinger’s cat western propaganda paradox that Putin is always simultaneously (A) getting destroyed and humiliated in Ukraine and (B) on the cusp of waging hot war with NATO.

Again, this is just the latest in an increasingly common genre of mainstream western punditry.

In “The skeptics are wrong: The U.S. can confront both China and Russia,” The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin wags his finger at Democrats who think aggressions against Russia should be prioritized and Republicans who think that military and financial attention should be devoted to China, arguing porque no los dos?

In “Could The U.S. Military Fight Russia And China At The Same Time?“, 19FortyFive’s Robert Farley answers in the affirmative, writing that “the immense fighting power of the US armed forces would not be inordinately strained by the need to wage war in both theaters” and concluding that “the United States can fight both Russia and China at once… for a while, and with the help of some friends.”

In “Can the US Take on China, Iran and Russia All at Once?” Bloomberg’s Hal Brands answers that it would be very difficult and recommends escalating in Ukraine and Taiwan and selling Israel more advanced weaponry to get a step ahead of Russia, China and Iran respectively.

In “International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming,” the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig writes for Foreign Policy that a global democracies-versus-autocracies showdown is coming “with the United States and its status quo-oriented democratic allies in NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia on one side and the revisionist autocracies of China, Russia, and Iran on the other,” and that aspiring foreign policy experts should adjust their expectations accordingly.

When they’re not arguing that World War Three is coming and we must all prepare to fight it and win, they’re arguing that a global conflict is already upon us and we must begin acting like it, as in last month’s New Yorker piece “What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia?”

These Beltway swamp monster pontifications are directed not just at the general public but at government policymakers and strategists as well, and it should disturb us all that their audiences are being encouraged to view a global conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some kind of natural disaster that people don’t have any control over.

Every measure should be taken to avoid a world war in the nuclear age. If it looks like that’s where we’re headed, the answer is not to ramp up weapons production and create entire industries dedicated to making it happen, the answer is diplomacy, de-escalation and detente. These pundits frame the rise of a multipolar world as something that must inevitably be accompanied by an explosion of violence and human suffering, when in reality we’d only wind up there as a result of decisions that were made by thinking human beings on both sides.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no omnipotent deity decreeing from on high that we must live in a world where governments brandish armageddon weapons at each other and humanity must either submit to Washington or resign itself to cataclysmic violence of planetary consequence. We could just have a world where the peoples of all nations get along with each other and work together toward the common good rather than working to dominate and subjugate each other.

As Jeffrey Sachs recently put it, “The single biggest mistake of president Biden was to say ‘the greatest struggle of the world is between democracies and autocracies’. The real struggle of the world is to live together and overcome our common crises of environment and inequality.”

We could have a world where our energy and resources go toward increasing human thriving and learning to collaborate with this fragile biosphere we evolved in. Where all our scientific innovation is directed toward making this planet a better place to live instead of channeling it into getting rich and finding new ways to explode human bodies. Where our old models of competition and exploitation give way to systems of collaboration and care. Where poverty, toil and misery gradually move from accepted norms of human existence to dimly remembered historical record.

Instead we’re getting a world where we’re being hammered harder and harder with propaganda encouraging us to accept global conflict as an unavoidable reality, where politicians who voice even the mildest support for diplomacy are shouted down and demonized until they bow to the gods of war, where nuclear brinkmanship is framed as safety and de-escalation is branded as reckless endangerment.

We don’t have to submit to this. We don’t have to keep sleepwalking into dystopia and armageddon to the beat of manipulative sociopaths. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and we’ve got a whole lot more at stake here than they do.

We can have a healthy world. We’ve just got to want it badly enough. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because, ultimately, they absolutely do require it.

______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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Thursday, October 27, 2022

The Boy Who Cried Hitler: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

Criticizing your government is propaganda.

Disagreeing with neocons is supporting fascism.

Opposing an empire is defending tyranny.

Seeking de-escalation causes escalation.

Nuclear brinkmanship is safety.

Diplomacy is appeasement.

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.

❖

Criticism of US foreign policy looks like Russian propaganda to people who’ve spent their entire lives marinating in US propaganda.

❖

They need so much propaganda, censorship and organized trolling because without those things the public would realize that pouring billions of dollars into an unwinnable conflict that risks nuclear war and makes everyone poorer actually sucks and doesn’t benefit normal people.

❖

Comparisons of Putin to Hitler only sound profound and relevant if you only just began paying attention to US foreign policy and are therefore unaware that literally every single US enemy is always copiously compared to Hitler. It’s like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, except there is no wolf, and the boy just keeps crying “Wolf!” over and over again, and the villagers never learn their lesson and never stop believing him.

Because mainstream westerners ignored all wars until Ukraine, they don’t know we’ve seen all these tricks before. They don’t know the war propaganda is airing reruns. They think it’s new to compare today’s Official Enemy to Hitler. They never question the atrocity narratives. They don’t know the US always lies about every war. They think it’s a crazy conspiracy theory to suggest that the actions and motives of their government isn’t what they’ve been told. They say “Uh, hello? PUTIN is the one who invaded!” like that obvious fact somehow makes it impossible to be lied to about the other aspects of the war.

Because they weren’t paying attention to all the empire’s tricks leading up to this, they don’t see the same old patterns rolling themselves out yet again, often by the same old voices as before. They don’t know what patterns to watch for, so they don’t see or recognize them. That’s the only reason their eyes don’t reflexively roll when they’re told today’s Official Enemy invaded completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, or that the US is defending its friends the Ukrainians because it wants to protect freedom and democracy.

If you only just started paying attention and don’t know the US power alliance literally always lies about every war it’s involved in, the war propaganda slides down their throats with zero gag reflex, because they don’t recognize it as propaganda. It’s unfamiliar to them.

❖

Criticizing the extensively documented western aggressions that led to this war is not the same as saying the invasion is good or that Vladimir Putin is a wonderful person. If this isn’t obvious to you, it’s because US propaganda has turned your brain into soup.

It’s absolutely insane how literally any criticism of the indisputable well-documented western provocations in Ukraine gets shouted down and raged at. You’re only allowed to say this war is completely unprovoked and began solely because Vladimir Putin is evil and hates freedom.

If discussing facts and criticizing the foreign aggressions of the most powerful government in the world is taboo, you might be ruled by tyrants and surrounded by their brainwashed human livestock. If you spend your time raging and yelling at those who advocate peace, you might just be pro-war.

❖

I gotta hand it to the war propagandists on Ukraine, it’s truly impressive how they’ve managed to convince everyone that the real “anti-war” position on this issue is the one being promoted by John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo.

❖

Putin is responsible for Putin’s decisions, the US empire is responsible for the US empire’s decisions. Putin is responsible for deciding to invade, the US empire is responsible for the mountains of well-documented aggressions which provoked that decision. This isn’t complicated.

I can respect arguments which assign blame to both the US and Russia. I can respect arguments which place more blame on Russia than on the US empire’s provocations. But the mainstream narrative does neither: it completely exonerates the US from even the tiniest bit of responsibility. Which is just a joke; there is no valid basis on which to claim this war was unprovoked. None. The only people who claim this are the propagandists and those they have propagandized.

But that’s pretty much everyone I wind up arguing with about Ukraine: those who adamantly insist that the most powerful empire that has ever existed bears exactly zero percent of the responsibility for this war. That sycophantic, bootlicking mind virus is what I am always pushing back on.

If you believe the US empire bears zero responsibility for starting this war, even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, it’s because empire propaganda has melted your brain. But this is most people. It’s the mainstream perspective on this war.

That demands pushback. Herculean pushback. The fact that the most powerful and belligerent power structure on the face of this earth is predominantly viewed as having no responsibility for the extremely dangerous war it deliberately provoked demands aggressive opposition.

The US deliberately provoked this war. The US is keeping this war going. The US is using this war to advance its geostrategic interests in Europe and Asia. These are facts. When facts are taboo, you are living in a world of lies.

❖

The Assange case is resonating with so many people because it’s personal. It’s asking each of us what kind of world we want to live in: one where journalists are allowed to tell the truth about the powerful, or one where they are not? It’s a question that demands an answer.

❖

I speak in a forceful and unmitigated way because that’s how you get people to listen to you, and because it is the right thing to do. If empire critics don’t speak in a forceful and unmitigated way, the only ones speaking in a forceful and unmitigated way will be the imperial pundits and politicians.

It often enrages empire apologists that I speak this way, because they’re not used to criticism of the US empire being voiced like this, but it also sometimes confuses people who agree with me for the same reason. Socialists and anti-imperialists usually mitigate their voices. I don’t, because that’s just a bad habit. If you’re right, you should speak like you’re right. If we don’t, the only ones speaking like they’re right will be those who are wrong. And then those who are wrong are the only ones who will be listened to.

And that’s exactly what’s happening: those with the most influential voices are those who defend the most depraved impulses of the most powerful people in the world. Those are the people who are being listened to right now. So speak like you know you’re right and they’re wrong, because that is indeed the case.

❖

Fredric Jameson says it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Adyashanti says spiritual people are often more afraid of life than they are of death. These two points seem related. Armageddon feels less scary than sorting our shit out as a species.

The idea of finally turning towards each other and coming into enough intimacy to move from competition-based systems to collaboration-based ones feels more intimidating than the end of the world, so people start hoping for the end because at least that way it’ll be over with. For the same reason people who can’t imagine going on living get suicidal ideations, people who can’t imagine humanity transcending its self-destructive pattering get omnicidal ideations.

This is a major obstacle. Humans need to overcome their fear of life.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Amaury Laporte (CC BY 2.0), formatted for size.



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Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Just Two Weeks

Listen to a reading of “Just Two Weeks”:

❖

I stand here before you
in my mother’s hand-me-downs,
in this world where mothers must work like they don’t have children
and parent like they don’t have jobs,
keeping households running and bills paid
while their hearts run around outside their bodies
on tiny little legs that don’t yet know where the wolves are,
but don’t you dare over-mother them,
or under-mother them,
or get anything wrong while treading laundry
and kung fuing the kitchen
and, oh yeah,
if you could save the world from nuclear armageddon
and environmental collapse when you get a minute
that’d be great.

I stand here before you
in my mother’s hand-me-downs,
with my mother’s strangled voice,
and my mother’s Pinesol hands,
and my mother’s weeping back,
and my mother’s feral chores,
and my mother’s loving patience,
and my mother’s gritted teeth,
and my mother’s inner beauty
that you never get to see —
her inner world of unheard symphonies
and unpainted art
and oceans of sleeping babies,
neatly stuffed into a housecoat
drowned out by a Helen Reddy song.

I stand here before you
in my mother’s hand-me-downs,
glaring with crosshair eyes at eelfaced manipulators
who blacken the children’s sky,
who poison my children’s water,
who microplastic my children’s blood,
who scorch my children’s Earth
to turn billionaires into trillionaires,
vowing “I see you,
I’ll stop you,
right after this dentist appointment,
right after this assignment,
right after these taxes,
right after this to-do list,
I’ll be ready to stop you
in, like, two more weeks, maybe,
or maybe two weeks after that.”

I stand here before you
in my mother’s hand-me-downs,
with my mother’s intuition
(two eyes in the back of her head —
“I can see what you are doing!”),
but my many eyes can only glance
before more dishes pile up
before the to-do list unfurls  —
I’ll get to it, I’ll get to you,
I’ll stop you,
I will,
I see what you are doing,
I just need to take the kids to daycare
but make the sandwiches first
and stop off on the way to work
for a part to fix the air con
before the summer comes
before the heat you stoked
with dinosaur bones
and Canary Island loopholes
and the infantile ambitions
of impotent men
hits our little rental
(that I’m so grateful to have
so grateful I am
on-my-hands-and-knees grateful
your-cock-in-my-throat grateful
please don’t kick us out we love you we do)
like a solar wind storm
barbecuing my children
in this tent made of weatherboards
like a tiny funeral pyre
for bad women,
naughty witches,
ladies flying solo
who need to be put in their place.

Just two weeks.
Just two weeks.
Just two weeks more.
Just two weeks and I’ll sit in silence for while.
Just two weeks and I’ll write this all down.
Just two weeks I need to get this stuff done.
Just two weeks.
Just two weeks.
Just two weeks,
and I’ll stop you.

____________________

____________________

____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Pixabay



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The death knell for Forge of Empires

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