Caitlin Johnstone

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

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The Washington Post’s unbelievably sleazy smear piece against independent media outlet The Grayzone can be summed up with its line “The First Amendment guarantees free speech rights even for Americans believed to be spreading foreign propaganda. But…” 

The whole thing is designed to manufacture support for criminally prosecuting dissident American journalists on the grounds that they violated US sanctions by working for Iranian media years ago, and to give the reader the false impression that The Grayzone is funded by foreign states without actually advancing the claim and eating a libel suit.

And the hit piece is having its intended effect; you see professional empire apologists all over Twitter today promoting the false claim that The Grayzone is funded by Iran and Russia. The empire’s information warriors now have one more weapon they can use to weaken public trust in dissident journalism whenever it presents an inconvenient narrative.

All because some Grayzone staff were involved with foreign media outlets in the past, which only happened because there are no major western media outlets which platform dissident voices like theirs who criticize the western empire and its actions. These people are being persecuted for disagreeing with their government. It really is that simple.

The Washington Post is one of the worst propaganda rags ever to exist in any country. If I’d published such an article for such a depraved empire propaganda outlet, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.

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“Antisemitism” should never even enter the conversation when it comes to Palestinians themselves. Projecting an old European bigotry onto an Arab population who would hate their oppressors regardless of whether they were Jewish, Christian, Hindu or Taoist is ridiculous bullshit.

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Biden: I have here an Israel-approved peace deal, so now all we need is for Hamas to approve it and we can have peace in Gaza.

[Netanyahu walks onstage, takes a shit, grabs the peace deal Biden was holding, wipes his ass with it, hands it back to Biden, walks offstage] 

Biden: So yeah, like I was saying, the only obstacle to peace is the refusal of Hamas to accept this peace deal…

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NATO is both (A) preparing for hot war with Russia and (B) rapidly taking numerous steps to provoke such a war. They’re currently developing “land corridors” for a direct ground war with Russia while simultaneously moving to allow Ukraine to strike deeper and deeper into mainland Russia with NATO-supplied weapons. These escalations would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, but nuclear brinkmanship has become so normalized for us in 2024 that it now barely makes a blip in the discourse.

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Trump said in a recent interview that he believes Israel should be destroying Gaza much more rapidly and that he would not have withdrawn from Afghanistan if he were president. I can’t believe how open this prick is being about wanting to start wars and advance longstanding agendas of the neocons and the CIA in every way, and how despite all this I’m still getting Trump supporters telling me he’s been ending the wars and fighting the deep state.

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Democrats are seriously asking people to believe that Trump’s second term would be much much worse than his first term, but that Biden’s second term would not.

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Things get a lot clearer when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run a bunch of worldwide military operations, it’s a worldwide military operation which happens to run a national government.

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One way of looking at it is that everything you were taught in school about your nation, your government, your society and your world is true, and that your news media would never lie to you. That the world is a mess only because people keep voting for the wrong political leaders and making poor personal choices. This is the mainstream consensus worldview.

Another way of looking at it is that the world is a mess because we are ruled by a loose transnational alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies who use governments as tools to advance their global power agendas, hiding their rulership behind propaganda and the illusion of democracy. That we are marched into endless war, exploitation, ecocide and nuclear brinkmanship because a bunch of sociopaths believe their wealth and power are more important than human life, a healthy society, and a healthy planet.

Another way of looking at it is that actually no one is in charge — that the separate self is a hallucination caused by a glitch in human cognition, that the human organism is a whirlpool of conditioning patterns that is inseparably interwoven with the material world, that free will is a fairy tale we have told ourselves, and that the oligarchs and empire managers are just the tip of an icicle falling to the earth, acting in accordance with their own unconscious conditioning with no real agency or control of their own just like everybody else. That the world is a mess because of an unfolding of conditioning patterns whose origins stretch back to the dawn of life on this planet.

Another way of looking at it is that the world is a mess because humans are just in an awkward evolutionary transition phase where these newly evolved brains of ours haven’t yet come into a mature relationship with their capacity for abstract thought. That we look awkward and silly right now in the same way birds probably looked awkward and silly at some point before that class of animal life got the hang of flight. That the only reason we’re able to be whipped about by propaganda and convinced to consent to competition-based systems that are causing wars and destroying our biosphere is because our immature relationship with thought causes us to latch onto mental narratives out of fear and desire for security. And that one day we will adapt beyond the dysfunctional way we create psychological egos and ego agendas and become a fully conscious species, at which point we will become impossible to propagandize and will begin to move in harmony with terrestrial life instead of in competition with it.

Another way of looking at it is that the universe is just trying to behold itself. That the dawn of life on this planet allowed the universe to experience itself with sense organs, that the arrival of humanity allowed it to think thoughts and learn about itself, that the arrival of human science has allowed it to peer deeper and deeper into itself with greater and greater detail, that the arrival of inner disciplines has allowed it to bring consciousness to the previously unseen workings of human psychology, and that the arrival of journalism and the internet has allowed it to see aspects of societal dynamics and power structures that used to have very little light on them. That the world is a mess only because there is still much that remains unseen — in terms of technological insight, in terms of socio-political insight, and in terms of collective psychological insight.

The further down the rabbit hole you go, the less room you can find for blame and hatred, and the more innocent everything ultimately looks. This doesn’t contradict the obvious fact that there are people in this world whose behavior is very destructive and who must be immobilized for the safety of everyone else, it just means there’s an innate innocence underlying it all. An innocence that will be there even if we wipe ourselves out and take all terrestrial life with us.

Humans are a deeply beautiful animal, regardless of how this adventure unfolds, or how much time it has left before it’s over.

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