Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The 2024 presidential election will be THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF ALL TIME, because if Americans don’t make the correct choice between the two candidates something terrible might happen to their country. The US might even turn into an abusive totalitarian dystopia where everyone’s mind is controlled by propaganda engineered to shape them into unthinking gear-turners for a globe-spanning empire.

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People on one side of the partisan divide are being trained to fear a future fascist takeover. 

People on the other side are being trained to fear a future communist takeover. 

Both sides are being trained to overlook the oligarchic totalitarian takeover that has already occurred.

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Three things are certain when there’s a major international conflict:

1. The western empire will be involved, and on the wrong side.

2. The western media will insist the empire is on the right side.

3. Westerners will tell you, “You don’t get it! THIS time we’re the GOOD GUYS!”

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It always gets spun as “supporting Russia” to say the US and its allies provoked the war in Ukraine, but that’s moronic. You don’t have to support Russia at all to acknowledge the well-documented ways the US empire provoked and sustains this war to advance its own agendas. You can hate Putin with all your heart, mind, body and soul and still acknowledge those extensively documented and glaringly obvious facts. Spinning the acknowledgement of obvious facts as sinister support for a foreign government is done solely to prevent criticism of our own rulers.

The only people who use phrases like “Putin apologist” are US empire apologists. And I’m not just reversing the accusation, I’m highlighting a fact: their accusations are seldom if ever directed at those who love Russia, they’re directed at those who criticize US foreign policy. The overwhelming majority of accusations of Kremlin loyalty are directed not at those who cheer for Russia and support Putin, they’re directed at those who criticize things the US empire is doing. This tendency could only arise from a fierce loyalty to that empire.

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Some of the most toxic and impossible people to associate with are those who expect you to play by their rules and hate who they hate and value what they value and act like the whole world revolves around them. And today we are ruled by a giant empire who does exactly that.

The US empire has all the personality characteristics of a malignant narcissist. It sees people as resources to exploit instead of humans to relate to, it communicates to manipulate and control rather than to connect and understand, and anyone who doesn’t center its desires as a priority above all else becomes its enemy.

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US foreign policy in the 2000s emphasized giant overt ground invasions (Iraq, Afghanistan). In the 2010s it shifted emphasis to arming proxies (Yemen, Libya, Syria). In the 2020s it’s moved to staging massive proxy conflicts on the borders of its top two rivals (Ukraine, Taiwan).

With each adjustment it gets harder to perceive the depravity of the empire. It was easy when it was just Bush-style smash-and-grab ground invasions, but it’s been getting sneakier and sneakier about its murderousness to maintain international support and avoid antiwar sentiment. 

And yet the empire is still just as murderous and destructive as it was under the Bush administration. Its creation of the Ukraine conflict is just as evil as anything Bush or Obama did. More so really, because now we’re getting closer and closer to nuclear annihilation. The task of opposing the empire’s warmongering has thus become more and more difficult, but it’s also getting more and more important. We do need to keep helping the public see what these bastards are doing and the destruction they’re causing and the armageddon they’re risking. 

And people are getting left behind as the warmongering gets sneakier. Many people who opposed Bush’s warmongering are now cheerleaders for the US proxy warriors orchestrating conflicts with Russia and China. It’s important to work to keep the manipulators from confusing people.

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Imperial information control has two major components: secrecy and manipulation. 

• Government secrecy keeps people from knowing about the evil things the empire is doing.
• Propaganda and censorship manipulate public thought about the evil things that can’t be kept secret.

Imperial secrecy takes the form of government classification and opacity and the brutal persecution of whistleblowers and journalists who transgress it. Imperial manipulation takes the form of propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and mass media blackouts.

Empire managers work to keep as much information as possible about the empire from being made public, but once it is public they can still keep the information from having a major impact by manipulating whether people pay attention to it, and by manipulating how people see it. In this way public understanding of the empire’s abuses is continuously obfuscated; even after information makes it past the walls of opacity, there’s still a whole other line of defense which is arguably more of an obstacle, because the impact of the information can be neutralized.

Whistleblowers, leak publishers and investigative journalists are very important in getting information past the walls of secrecy, but after they’ve done that there’s a whole other battle that needs to be fought: getting the public to notice, understand, and think clearly about the information.

But what’s cool is that anyone can play a role in that second battle. Not everyone can be a whistleblower or leak publisher or investigative journalist with a massive scoop, but everyone can help fight against imperial information manipulation by working to circulate the truth. You can do this by spreading awareness of the information that’s publicly available about the abuses of our rulers. Spread it online and offline, in whatever ways you can think of. Disrupt the manipulation machine with hard facts, and with robust and attention-grabbing arguments.

That’s where I find I’m best used in this fight. I’m not out there breaking stories and talking to sources and spending weeks combing through FOIA documents (though I am grateful to everyone who does), but I do have a knack for using words to help people see the information that has been made public with more clarity.

One huge obstacle to revolutionary change is that people can’t really see the depravity of the empire, because they’ve been conditioned not to look at it too closely, and because they’ve been habituated to it their entire lives. It’s possible to help them see it with fresh eyes.

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Featured image via Adobe Stock.