By Caitlin Johnstone
May 06, 2023
Your rulers do not care what race you are. They do not care if you are gay, transgendered or nonbinary. They do not care how many bullets you are allowed to have in your gun. They do not care whether you are allowed to have an abortion or not. They do not care if you are racist, sexist, ableist, ageist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic or fatphobic. They do not care about diverse representation in politics or media, and they do not care about any lack thereof. All they care about is that we all keep thinking, speaking, working, consuming and voting in ways which keep them rich and powerful and keep us poor and powerless. And they will happily keep us arguing as intensely as possible about the things they do not care about so that we don’t turn our attention to the things they do care about.
This doesn’t mean those other issues aren’t real concerns, and in fact our rulers stand everything to gain by exacerbating the injustices involving issues they don’t care about in order to keep attention in those convenient areas. But the solution to the problems our rulers don’t care about is the same as the solution to the problems our rulers do care about: overthrow our rulers.
Western mass media are saturating the airwaves with the narrative that Wednesday’s drone bombing of the Kremlin was a “false flag”, by which they mean that Russia did it to themselves to advance some nefarious agenda.
False flags are a thing and they do happen, but to act like that’s the most likely explanation for the Kremlin bombing when Russia is currently at war with a neighbor who has the means, motive and opportunity is something only a propagandist would do. Especially when oligarchs from that neighboring nation are openly incentivizing people to attack Russia with drones for cash rewards, when Zelensky’s coinciding absence from the country prevented immediate retaliation, and when Atlantic propagandists are writing enthusiastically about the sophisticated drone facilities they visited in Ukraine.
In 2017 I was temporarily suspended by Facebook for posting an article about known false flags, because until 2022 mainstream narrative managers considered false flags to be a crazy crackpot concept. That changed the moment the idea became useful to western propagandists.
When this changed in early 2022 it initially took journalists by surprise, because until then they’d only ever heard “false flag” used to dismiss people like Alex Jones:
Please watch this video in which journalist Matt Lee accuses State Dept. spokesman Ned Price of veering into "Alex Jones territory" by making the claim that Russia plans to stage a "false flag" attack with "crisis actors" — Price then sneeringly calls Lee a Russian propagandist pic.twitter.com/5xMsbfWYgz
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 3, 2022
I say we arm Russia against Russia. If it’s bombing its own government buildings, its own pipelines, its own captured power plants, then it’s the best proxy force against Russia we’ve got. Send the Russians tanks and F-16s immediately.
Russia’s fighting Russia over there so we don’t have to fight Russia over here.
A westerner who spends half their time criticizing the US empire and half their time criticizing the US empire’s enemies isn’t providing “balance”, they’re just spending half their time contributing to an already wildly unbalanced information environment that is overwhelmingly biased in favor of US-friendly narratives.
Westerners constantly respond to criticism of US foreign policy with “You love Putin and think he is good” because they really, truly subscribe to a children’s cartoon “Good Guys vs Bad Guys” worldview. To them, saying one side is Bad means you think the other side is Good.
To a mature adult, criticizing US foreign policy is just criticizing US foreign policy, which is something everyone should do all the time. To a propaganda-addled manchild, this is a struggle of Good versus Evil, and if you’re not one then you must necessarily be the other.
Crazy how the response to Democrats saying “You have to vote for the corrupt warmonger with dementia or else America will be overrun by fascism” is mostly “Okay we’ll vote for the the corrupt warmonger with dementia” and not “Okay so we need to tear down the entire system then.”
Reading Julian Assange’s sardonic Jonathan Swift-style letter to the king is a reminder of what they took from us. His publishing and his persecution have overshadowed just what an incisive mind he has. We could really use his analysis right now, but they took him offline.
Assange's Dad
Oil on canvas (60 x 48")Painting I submitted to the Archibalds. pic.twitter.com/x1X9rs5BDU
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 5, 2023
It’s obnoxiously self-righteous and condescending for older generations to worry about how the new generations are turning out. Imagine being left a bat shit insane civilization and a dying world by the people who made it that way and having to listen to them bitch about how your generation isn’t doing it right.
If you’re going to worry about the new generations, don’t worry that they’re becoming too different from the old, worry that they might remain too similar. We haven’t exactly been crushing it out here, folks. We failed. We faceplanted as hard as a generation could possibly faceplant. Let’s just hope they’re becoming different enough from us that they can undo our fuckups.
Pranksters mowing a giant penis on the grounds of an elite coronation party feels like the beginning of the end of something. People find the idea of a British king in 2023 absurd, and public opinion of the monarchy will only go down from here. Idols keep falling off their pedestals.
This sort of thing is happening everywhere; public figures once held in high esteem just keep losing face. The Catholic Church pedophile scandal kind of started it off. Twitter showed everyone that celebrities are just idiots with bad opinions. US presidents are ridiculous cartoons now, with the last one an incoherent buffoon and the current one a disintegrating dementia patient.
And it feels like it’s happening faster and faster. The Dalai Lama trying to tongue kiss that kid. Chomsky meeting with Epstein. Bernie Sanders falling all over himself to serve the establishment he once vocally decried. People just don’t get to keep their heroes anymore.
The pedestals we used to place people on are being eroded by the fact that everything’s so much more visible than it used to be. There will never be any more saints, because in the age of ubiquitous cameras people can’t falsely claim “miracles” happened when there’s no footage. We’re able to share evidence, ideas and information exponentially faster and more effectively than we could before, and we can do it on a grassroots level, and it turns out that when you do that all the Super Special People we used to place above us don’t look so special anymore.
And of course they don’t looks so special because they aren’t so special. All the people we used to regard as superior to ourselves were always just schmucks like us.
And I think there’s something very empowering and democratizing about this growing collective realization.
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