Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.
Every normal person will tell you they want peace and abhor mass-scale violence. Then the mass media start doing what they always do and churning out stories about atrocities in an empire-targeted nation, and all of a sudden people find themselves supporting airstrikes on that nation’s capital, and believing they came to that position all on their own.
This happens because most people are unaware that the western news media do not exist to report the news. They exist to administer propaganda on behalf of the western empire.
Our news outlets. Our search engines. Our social media algorithms. Our most prominent online information resources. Our mainstream podcasts and Youtube pundits. Our AI chatbots. They’re all rigged by the rich and powerful to manipulate our understanding of the world. And most of us have no idea this is even occurring.
Propaganda is very effective if you don’t know it’s happening to you. That’s why westerners are far more propagandized than the populations of nations with overtly authoritarian governments. In a nation with strict speech laws and press regulation people know the state media they’re being fed is government propaganda, whereas westerners are so propagandized they don’t even KNOW they’re propagandized.
There’s an old joke that goes like this:
A Soviet and an American are on an airplane seated next to each other.
“Why are you flying to the US?” asks the American.
“To study American propaganda,” replies the Soviet.
“What American propaganda?” asks the American.
“Exactly,” the Soviet replies.
The mass-scale psychological manipulation worms its way into western minds without their having any idea that it’s happening. Then all of a sudden you’ve got Trump supporters who just spent ten years proudly proclaiming that their man is going to end all the wars and bring about world peace enthusiastically cheerleading for decapitation strikes in Tehran. They think they came up with the idea all on their own, but in reality they were skillfully manipulated into that position by the most powerful people in the world.
You see it over and over again. People’s natural, healthy impulse to support peace and oppose mass murder gets hacked and reversed by the mass-scale psychological manipulation of the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed. From cradle to grave they are attacking our innate goodness and working to twist us toward evil and abusiveness.
We think we live in a free society, but in reality we live in a mind-controlled dystopia where people are systematically psychologically conditioned to support the world’s ugliest agendas driven by the most powerful and depraved individuals on our planet. The more you think about it, the creepier it gets.
But, again, propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. The more people understand that our view of world events is being aggressively manipulated by our rulers, the less effective these propaganda operations will become. All we have to do is help our fellow citizens and netizens wake up to the fact that that’s what’s going on. Once they lose the ability to manipulate the way we think, speak, act and vote, the possibility of a free and healthy world is just a click away.
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Caitlin Johnstone 