Wednesday 27th of November 2024
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telling "these bastards" off will make you feel better....

They can’t work toward peace in Ukraine because it will serve Putin. They can’t work toward peace in Yemen because it will serve Iran. They can’t end the occupation of Syria because it will serve Assad. They can’t stop military expansionism because it will serve China.

Or, maybe they’re just warmongers.

 

 by Caitlin Johnstone

 

It’s actually very concerning that the US empire is now escalating the war in Ukraine by crossing many lines it said it would not cross at the beginning of the war, and justifying those escalations by basically just saying “Yeah well we decided that we want to do that after all.” Recent examples include greenlighting Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian territory, providing Patriot missiles to the Ukrainian military, and the revelation that British marines have been conducting dangerous covert ops on the ground in Ukraine.

I have said it before and I’ll say it again: if you’ve been finding yourself growing concerned about “communism”, it’s because we’re in a new cold war and that’s what your rulers have been propagandising you to feel. You’re being manipulated into blaming the problems that are being inflicted upon you by your own rulers (including those you voted for) on a country on the other side of the planet, and on a highly marginalised and completely powerless political ideology in your own country.

Even if you believe communism is bad, communists are nowhere remotely close to having any sort of power in or over the English-speaking world. It’s like spending your life being terrified of tigers. People are just falling for these four delusions:

  1. Thinking communists are anywhere remotely close to having power or taking power in the English-speaking world.
  2. Thinking entirely capitalist things like the Democratic Party and the WEF are “communist”.
  3. Thinking China is a threat.
  4. Confusing the concepts of “communism” and “authoritarianism”.

Absolutely authoritarianism is growing in the west, and it must be opposed. But can’t you see that the growing tyranny in our capitalist countries has nothing to do with communism, and that confusing it as such gets you shaking your fist at China due to oppression being inflicted upon you by your own rulers?

In case you missed it, a recent DC swamp party for US officials, journalists, think tankers and diplomats at the Ukrainian Embassy was officially sponsored by the US arms manufacturers who’ve profited astronomically from the war in Ukraine, with the logos of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Pratt & Whitney appearing on the actual invitation.

Are people not yet tired of having their intelligence insulted?

One thing to keep in mind about the Twitter Files exposition of the overlap between Silicon Valley and secretive government agencies is that the overlap is almost certainly worse in Google/YouTube and Meta/Facebook/Instagram. Twitter has historically been the least awful major platform when it comes to resisting resisting government influence.

Most forms of spirituality serve only to sedate people and help them hide from reality, others do the opposite and awaken you to reality. The former is the “opiate of the masses” which creates a sedentary populace; the latter is the sort that’s useful in creating a healthy world.

I used to hang out on spirituality forums focused on enlightenment, and even with a singular emphasis on awakening it was remarkable how many members used spirituality to hide from reality. From their abusive and unsatisfying relationships and lifestyles. From their trauma. From themselves. In exactly the same way, spirituality has always been used to cover up reality, often in power-serving ways. Before it was glorifying poverty, meekness and obedience; now it’s McMindfulness and other practices to mask the sting of oppressive capitalism.

In the same way most mind-altering drugs serve only to sedate and escape from reality while the psychedelic variety does the opposite, most forms of spirituality facilitate unconsciousness while authentic spirituality facilitates awakening.

Authentic spirituality doesn’t seek to give you new beliefs, nor to give you spiritual practices to make reality less abrasive and confronting, but to uncover what’s hidden and stare reality right in the face. It means squarely interrogating all our assumptions about what’s true. Authentic spirituality entails no indoctrination, sedation or escapism, but a curious and sincere exploration of one’s own experience. It seeks to discover what’s true: what’s true about one’s conditioning, about consciousness, about the self, about the way life is experienced.

There are all sorts of ways authentic spirituality can show up, and within all official branches, schools, factions and iterations of spirituality you’ll see some authentic exploration and lots of inauthentic escapism. A sincere dedication to what’s true happens where it happens.

You don’t live in a free country. And no, it’s not because they make you pay taxes or that time they made you wear a mask or whatever. The real reason you don’t live in a free country is much, much bigger than that: you don’t live in a free country because the minds of your countrymen are imprisoned.

Westerners think they’re free because they can say whatever they want and vote however they want, but what they want is controlled by mass-scale psychological manipulation. Being able to speak and vote as you wish is meaningless if the powerful control what it is that you wish.

Westerners think they’re free because they can speak their minds, and sure, it’s pleasant to be able to do that. It would be pleasant to have your body trapped a vat with your brain plugged into a blissful virtual reality world, too — but it wouldn’t be freedom. It would be prison disguised as freedom. And that’s what we have here: prison disguised as freedom. The science of modern propaganda has been developing alongside all the other sciences for over a century, and it has advanced just as much as the others have. And now it’s at a point where it can control our very desires.

It’s generally harder to recognise psychologically abusive relationships than physically abusive ones, because the abuse isn’t as overt, and because the psychological faculties you would normally use to assess situations have been twisted and warped. That’s what’s happening here: people are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into thinking, speaking and acting in a way that serves the powerful, and their minds have become too propaganda-addled to recognise that this is happening. We’re not free, and most can’t even recognise how unfree we are.

And that’s our real problem: very few of us understand how profoundly unfree we are. Just how much our minds are being squished down into these teeny tiny boxes to prevent us from expanding and realising our true power and our true potential, and the kind of world we could have. Our slavery is so pervasive that few can even see the full extent of it. Many will say they don’t feel they live in a free country, but if you ask them to explain why, they might say something about drug laws or government regulations on their business or whatever. The abuse is too big for them to truly perceive how bad the whole thing is.

So we march along to the drumbeat of our rulers, thinking, speaking, shopping, spending, consuming, scrolling, viewing, listening, voting and behaving exactly how they want us to, and mistaking all this for freedom, because we’ve been manipulated into wanting to do those things.

We won’t ever know true freedom until we find a way to end this. To un-jack our minds from the propaganda matrix they have built for us and begin perceiving reality clearly. Our world. Our country. Our society. Our own minds. Our own authentic desires, free from manipulation.

Our task, then, is to help awaken as many people as we can to the reality of how unfree we truly are. To be voices whispering in the matrix, beckoning the dreamers toward the real world in as many varied and creative ways ways as we can come up with. To coax those eyes open.

If we can get a critical mass of people waking up from their propaganda-induced comas, the primary control mechanism holding our enslavement in place will have been shattered. The primary obstacle to a healthy world will be removed.

An entire empire has been built upon our closed eyelids. When we finally snap them open, it will have to fall.

 

First published by Caitlin Johnstone December 7, 2022

Caitlin Johnstone is a reader-supported independent journalist from Melbourne, Australia. She now lives in the US. Her political writings can be found on Medium and on her Facebook page,

 

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/the-empire-is-built-on-our-closed-eyes-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/

 

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switching conflicts.....

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted on Thursday that the much-criticized withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he called “America’s longest war,” helped Washington redirect resources to Ukraine just months later....

Appearing at the State Department for a year-end press conference, Blinken painted a rosy picture of Washington’s diplomatic accomplishments. The exit from Afghanistan, which happened in August 2021, came up because one reporter took issue with Blinken’s claim of strong relationships with US “allies and partners,” some of whom she said were critical of how that US handled that operation.

Consultations were “sustained, they were intense, and we strongly took note of everything that we heard from allies and partners in advance of the decisions that President [Joe] Biden made and that we made,” Bliken insisted, arguing that claims otherwise are “not born out by the facts.”

Though the reporter had asked about lessons of that withdrawal in “dealing with Russia and China,”Blinken proceeded to argue that “if we were still in Afghanistan, it would have, I think, made much more complicated the support that we’ve been able to give and that others have been able to give Ukraine” against Russia.

The last US soldier departed from the Kabul airport on August 31, 2021. The US-backed Afghan government had collapsed without much of a fight two weeks earlier, leaving the Taliban in control of the country – as they had been in 2001.

While the cost of the 20-year conflict has been estimated at over $2 trillion, the US spent almost $73 billion in 2021 dollars on training, equipping, maintaining and supplying the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), most of it from the Pentagon budget. The bulk of ANDSF weaponry and equipment ended up in Taliban hands.

By comparison, the Russian Defense Ministry estimated earlier this week that total Western aid to Ukraine this year amounted to over $97 billion. The Pentagon alone has spent at least $20 billion in direct “security assistance” to Ukraine since February 2022, by its own admission. Other US government departments, NATO and EU members accounted for the rest.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky visited Washington in person on Wednesday, receiving a pledge from Biden to fund Kiev for “as long as it takes” and a $1.85 billion packet of weapons and ammunition, including a battery of Patriot air defense missiles. Zelensky also addressed a special joint session of Congress, with a plea to approve another $45 billion in aid for 2023. The Senate did so the following day.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/568776-us-afghanistan-withdrawal-ukraine-aid/

 

 

 

WE KNEW THIS: 

battle ready-ish...

 

 

... SEE ALSO:

 US can't stop meddling in central asia… to gain access to the heartland…….

 

as time goes by….

 

blatant violations of the UN charter...

 

the bad, the ugly and the crazies... when the empire strikes…..

 

would another hundred years have?...

 

the future of finance on a globally warming planet...

 

joke of the day…...

 

folly of a US dictator…..

 

canadian snow job diplomacy…...

 

canada's fascists…...

 

the USA is the troublemaker for europe…..

 

the US never had one (a moral compass)…...

 

the warmongers…...

 

with love from saudi arabia……..

 

nothing new.......

 

lead up the garden path.....

 

spilling the beans on "the dismissal"...

 

preparing for war... while we're asleep...

 

delusions…..

 

the empire is дерьмо……..

 

why the US isn't winning wars...

 

going blind-ish...

 

freedom, freebum, freedumb….

 

fake news, misinformation, disinformation and deliberate media porkies….

 

removing the liberal pricks out of a prickly diplomatic relationship…..

 

on 3 july 1979, the CIA...

 

how time flies...

 

nothing learnt... MESSAGE TO THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT…...   FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

towards the heartland......

 

by The Courier of Strategists

The latest note from the Institut Montaigne, setting out the prospect of a break-up of Russia, is pure American neoconservative discourse. Beautiful strategy of entryism of the most die-hard American networks. This publication is a fault on two counts: it encourages the intellectual laziness of a certain French employers at a time when the European Union is the big economic loser of the change in progress. It blocks the debate on the options of French policy. In any case, the French ruling circles are encouraged to live in a parallel reality. Waking up will be hard.

The most recent of the notes from the Institut Montaigne, signed Bruno Tertrais, is entitled " The Fall of the Russian House ».

« Exactly one hundred years after the birth of the Soviet Union, on December 30, 1922, we may be witnessing its second death: Mr. Putin's attempt to reconstitute a privileged sphere of influence around Russia is in the process of turn to disaster. And this disaster may have only just begun. Because we see less and less how Russia could emerge from the top of its Ukrainian adventure ».

You don't have to be an expert in geopolitics to follow the thread of the article: Russia will lose the war in Ukraine; Vladimir Poutine has the choice only between the radicalization and the fall. 

One of the spokespersons of French neo-conservatism

Bruno Tertrais is director of the Foundation for Strategic Research. He has always softly denied it: but he is one of the French purveyors of neoconservative points of view, at least since the 2003 Iraq war. 

His article unfolds in a fairly disembodied vision, very characteristic of neocon discourse. Apart from asserting that Russia can no longer "stabilize" its near periphery (crisis of Nagorno-Karabakh) and assertions without proof of the dysfunctions of the Eurasian Economic Area, the author never speaks of the great geopolitical change underway: accelerated strengthening of ties with India, China and Iran, rapprochement with Saudi Arabia. We would also like, for example, for Tertrais to talk to us about the complex relations between Russia and Turkey (a member of NATO, which nevertheless gives the Alliance a lot of trouble). 

There is also nothing about the war in Ukraine. If Russia is losing the war there, what about the Ukrainian army then, with its gigantic losses (10 men killed in the Kherson region in August September; 000 in the Bakhmout region in recent weeks; more than 10 killed since the end of February); with the infusion of money and Western weapons; with its inability to stop Russian strikes on electrical infrastructure, 000% destroyed? 

Shameless Russophobia

In reality, Tertrais does not do geopolitics, he has his doctorate in russophobia. An anthology both laughable and pathetic:  

Contemporary Russian political culture is marked by a de facto alliance between the men of the security services (the siloviki) and those of organized crime. The behavior of the army is an incarnation of this, even stronger by the very structure of the Russian armed forces: soldiers who are often left to their own devices because of the weakness of the corps of non-commissioned officers, and officers whose culture warfare was forged by the “counter-terrorism” operations in Chechnya (1999-2009), or more recently in Syria: an unleashing of blind violence devoid of any moral concern.

Fortunately Bruno Tertrais has the selective criterion! Because the alliance of intelligence services and elite corruption applied to the United States of America… But no, his thing is the hatred of Russian reality. The article tends towards scenarios where Russophobia is increasingly concentrated:

« As for the scenarios, the least unfavorable would be that of Germany after 1945. After the Götterdämmerung, the Stunde Null: shock and trauma, followed by introspection and healing. But [Russia] does not have the tradition of the rule of law, albeit dotted with interruptions, which was that of Germany at the time. Not to mention that it will be difficult to subject him to a Nuremberg. And that she will not be placed under the tutelage of a benevolent protector...

More likely, then, here is the North Korean scenario: the confinement and radicalization of a fortress Russia, in which Putin or his successors would keep the country's population in a permanent state of war.. (...) »

Wait, it's not over: 

« A notch higher on the scale of pessimism, Russia would become for the most worried a kind of Mordor (“black country”), a desolate land in which the forces of evil prepare their revenge and the reconquest of Middle-earth. . This savagery of Russia is already at work, say fans of JRR Tolkien, who already compare the behavior of the Russian military to that of the Orcs, these half-beast, half-human soldiers who know no limits in horror. Exaggeration? Not so much if one realizes that Russia has been emptying for ten years of its most brilliant brains and, more and more, of its middle classes. But Russian society has become criminalized ». 

You are not on the Crazy Ukrainian Telegram feed! You are reading a publication from the well-established Institut Montaigne: 

The further you read, the more discoveries you make: 

« Could the Russia of this new “Time of Troubles” (smutnoye vremya, the anarchy of the early 1990th century) resemble, in the extreme, the Somalia of the XNUMXs, in which militias and gangs ruled , their recruitment pool fueled by the return of bitter conscripts, including many former prisoners? »

In fact, everything must lead to the “neocon” paroxysm:  

« The Somali scenario would also be that of the break-up of the Russian nation-empire. If the "vertical of power" built by Mr. Putin were destroyed, how can we imagine the maintenance of a State thirty times larger and ten times more populous? 

In the United States and in Europe, the same debate as thirty years ago would reappear: should we prefer the dissolution of the country and its weakening (Vice-President Dick Cheney), or its durability in view of its nuclear status ( Secretary of State James Baker) ?  

French neoconservatism 

In fact, we must thank Bruno Tertrais, because he reveals to us, with a good touch of naivety, the structure of American and Atlanticist neoconservatism: a strong dose of irrationality fueling a very brutal project of looting and destruction of sovereign states. Tertrais cites Brzezinski, Dick Cheney…

He could also tell us that he is contributing to a well-orchestrated neo-con offensive.

We will refer for example, these days, to the policy memo by Luke Coffey for the Hudson Institute which enjoins Westerners to prepare "for the final collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Russian Federation". The entire construction of Tertrais's article works on the same idea: definitively destroy the USSR – which would still exist – and dismantle the Russian state. 

Or to an article published on Euractiv, co-signed by Anna Fotyga, Polish Member of the European Parliament and former Foreign Minister of her country, and Batu Kutelia, former Georgian Ambassador to the United States and Deputy Secretary of the National Council of Georgia security. We hear about the inevitable collapse of Russia. 

Those who are interested will take the time to compare the three texts. Same elements of language, same hatred, not only of Vladimir Putin but of Russian reality. For these authors, Russia should not exist. 

We understand the context of these publications: the Pentagon pushes for a negotiation which makes it possible to preserve a not too stunted Ukrainian state. The neoconservatives are die-hards and they have done everything in recent weeks to drown out the American voices who think that American reason of state should lead to finding a compromise with Russia before the latter has definitively marked its territory by moving from Kharkov to Odessa. These are arguments that bear: it has not been said enough that a certain number of elected Republicans were not present to listen to Zelensky during his speech before Congress. And the Republican Party is deeply torn on this issue. 

There is also the fear in neoconservative circles of seeing European opinions waver. Bruno Tertrais and the Institut Montaigne join the chorus of neocons on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Double political fault of the Institut Montaigne

We are nevertheless surprised to see the Institut Montaigne stray into the neo-conservative impasse at this point. And it is all the more damaging since the voice of the Institute counts both with the big French bosses and in the Macronian system of power. 

I knew the Institute when Laurent Bigorgne was its director. I was part of working groups there and published on higher education. The dominant line was clearly neoliberal but there was still room for other points of view. Laurent Bigorgne, with his subtlety and his immense work force (pushed to the point of "workaholism" as the circumstances of his resignation showed) knew how to conduct complex orchestras.

We had noticed the real influence – some would say growing – of Bruno Tertrais on the geopolitical points of view of the Institute. But there, we are no longer in the influence; we are in pure and simple propaganda. 

This is doubly a political fault on the part of the Institute. 

Firstly because the French employers, who largely finance the Institute, would need us to question their good-natured Atlanticism, which has allowed them so far to sink into globalization as if into an income – where the American, British, German or Italian elites have had a conquering attitude in the open economy revolving around a Sino-American axis. 

Secondly, because within the Macronian system, voices should be heard that support the presidential inclinations to go towards a negotiation with Russia. 

You don't have to be a Gaullist to see that the European economy will do very badly from the boomerang effect of Russian sanctions. Instead of making a nuanced voice heard, calling for the European Union to be an actor in mediation, the Institut Montaigne joins the chorus of hardliners. You can't imagine more counterproductive. 

Contrary to what Bruno Tertrais says, the rest of the world is distancing itself from the attitude of the United States and the European Union. The very warm welcome Xi Jinping booked Dmitry Medvedev ou the last telephone conversation between Putin and Modi, which confirmed the tightening of economic ties between Russia and India, should make you think. What place will there be for French companies in the new Eurasian space? 

We are at a time when the role of a French think tank close to employers would be to bring everyone back to earth, in the well-understood interest of the French economy. With the neoconservative takeover of geopolitical analyzes at the Institut Montaigne, we are unfortunately going in the opposite direction. 

source: The Courier of Strategists

 

READ MORE:

https://en.reseauinternational.net/les-neoconservateurs-francais-tombent-le-masque/

 

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

WE COULD ALSO DIVIDE THE USA INTO LITTLE PIECES (STATES), AS WELL AS FRANCE INTO ITS VARIOUS FORMER PISSY PROVINCES...

NAPOLEON APPRECIATED THE WORK OF ABBE SIEYES THAT BYPASSED THESE BASTIONS OF POSSIBLE UNREST, BY CREATING DEPARTMENTS DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION....

 

 

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