Divide And Brainwash: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

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In 2016 the most corrupt and murderous government on earth dealt with public discontent by selling a sociopathic billionaire as the anti-establishment presidential candidate, then in 2020 sold a lifelong empire lackey as the revolutionary people’s uprising against that candidate.

“You want a revolution? Here. Here’s a revolution for you to have. There. Done. Glad you got that out of your system.”

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– Set up an imperialist oligarchy which rules as tyrannically as any monarch.

– Remain hidden and unaccountable.

– Propagandize people into thinking they’re free.

– Whenever there’s unrest due to systemic injustices, let them elect one of your employees who promises to change things.

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The imperialist oligarchy deliberately keeps the public poor, busy and confused and then directs their resulting anger toward Russia, China, immigrants, and people from the other political party. Our anger at each other protects them from our anger landing where it belongs.

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Propagandists know you don’t need to give the average person factual reasons to believe something. You don’t even need to give them financial reasons. All you need is to make sure your claim validates their current worldview. Rigidly-held belief structures facilitate propaganda.

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Americans will happily give Israel billions of dollars a year to murder Palestinian civilians and then brush off a panhandler on the street because he might spend the money on booze.

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Israel is getting another Prime Minister who was partly raised and educated in the United States with extensive ties to US power and speaks English with an American accent. Stop acting like these are two separate countries.

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The US power alliance’s genocide in Yemen remains the single ugliest thing that is happening in our world today. What will it take for humanity to cease averting its eyes from this horror?

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If anyone had done this to a US-backed vessel the mass media would be full of headlines with the words "pirates" and "piracy". https://t.co/vlfTRAAqnO

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) June 1, 2021

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Enlisting in the US military should be infinitely more taboo and shameful than being a sex worker.

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Until mass media was invented the best carrying agent for establishment propaganda was religion.

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I have no problem with people saying that the furthest-left politicians in the most powerful government on earth should be a lot further left than they are. Setting up centrists like AOC as “far left” and “the best we’ll ever get” builds a roadblock to further leftward movement.

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“Leftists” who try to derail the anti-imperialist conversation by concern trolling about human rights within Pentagon-targeted nations are the same as rightists who try to derail the racial justice conversation by concern trolling about “black-on-black crime”.

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One of the biggest challenges for a developing anti-imperialist, at least in my experience, is learning to differentiate between those who actually want to end the oligarchic empire and those who just want the empire to act a bit more cosmetically nice than it does. These are two completely different positions, especially because the latter is pure fantasy: you cannot have a globe-dominating unipolar power structure that doesn’t use violent force to maintain that world order. Yet the two groups often wind up moving in overlapping circles.

I’ve never had trouble knowing what my own position is toward the empire, but I’ve often struggled figuring out who shared that position. There was a long unfolding process of going “Ohh, we’re not on the same page at all. You want entirely different things from what I want.”

Most of the sectarian fighting you see on the left splits along those lines: those who want to end the oligarchic empire, and those who want the oligarchic empire to be a bit nicer. These two positions are ultimately irreconcilable, so those factions will never get along.

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If there are indeed extraterrestrials and they are indeed flying around our world in strange aircraft, we are more likely to get the truth about this from the extraterrestrials themselves than from the US military.

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The US government is pure swamp; you can’t use the swamp to fix the swamp. Democrats were never going to use a Special Counsel to remove Trump. Trump was never going to take down the Deep State. The US government isn’t going to investigate itself and reveal the truth about aliens.

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Perhaps the best explanation for the many reports of unidentified flying objects demonstrating maneuvers and features we don’t understand is that we’re hurtling through a vast and mysterious universe that our barely-evolved primate brains know almost nothing about.

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If there are ETs visiting us they probably already treat this planet more like a home than we do.

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Humans focus on outer space to avoid focusing on inner space.

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Maybe the world really did end in 2012. Everything’s been unraveling into an exponentially expansive field of weirdness ever since.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/divide-and-brainwash-notes-from-the