US Interventionism Always Makes Things Worse: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

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Friendly reminder that it’s impossible to get a clear understanding of what’s going on in the world without accounting for the fact that very powerful people within your own society are actively working very hard to manipulate your understanding in their favor.

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Obviously believing unproven US or Ukrainian claims about what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine is as dumb as believing unproven Russian claims about what’s happening there, and anyone advocating for direct NATO military intervention against Russia is an enemy of our species.

Advocating skepticism of unproven claims made during a war and saying nuclear superpowers should not attack one anothers’ military forces on the basis of those claims should literally be the least controversial position that anyone could possibly voice about anything.

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US military interventionism always makes things worse and never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will accomplish. It’s stupid to have to keep saying this year after year. There’s nothing wrong in Ukraine that direct US military intervention couldn’t make much, much worse.

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It’s been universally understood since Stalin got the bomb that nuclear-armed powers must never go to war with each other, but everyone’s so insane now we’re seeing daily op-eds and news segments about how NATO could attack the Russian military in Ukraine without starting a nuclear war.

Nuclear superpowers must never go to war with each other. This is the single most existentially important thing for the human species to understand. It’s been understood for generations, and it didn’t magically stop being true because you saw a bunch of Ukrainian flags and some unconfirmed pictures of alleged war crimes.

People say things like, “Putin believes he can rely on the nuclear threat to keep us from confronting him!” Yeah that’s how military strategy works, dipshit. He has a military strength that his enemies need to respect. That means you shouldn’t attack Russia, not that you should.

For years I’ve had idiot QAnon cultists telling me nuclear weapons are a hoax and they’re not real. Now all of a sudden my online notifications are full of shitlibs saying almost the same thing.

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Still hilarious that the United States of America thinks it has the moral authority to tell other nations how they should respond to a military invasion.

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Do you truly believe it’s a coincidence that mainstream Americans were made to despise Putin with a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that turned out to be pure bullshit in the years preceding an unrelated US proxy war against Putin? What would it mean if it wasn’t a coincidence?

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Looks like Jen Psaki’s making a major career move from spreading US government lies to spreading US government lies on cable news.

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If you look at the behavior of the US empire underneath all the narratives, two things become clear:

1. It plans to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world by halting the rise of China.
2. It can only accomplish this via actions that will massively disrupt the entire world.

The strongest argument for a multipolar world is that maintaining a unipolar one necessarily requires endless violence and continually escalating nuclear brinkmanship. It is literally unsustainable.

There’s no valid reason nations can’t just get along and collaborate toward the greater good of humanity without one of them trying to dominate all the others. The unipolarist impulse to rule the earth stops this peaceful and collaborative world from emerging. There is no “Pax Americana”. Unipolarism is the opposite of peace.

People try to argue that if the US wasn’t the unipolar world dominator then it would be China or someone else, because it’s “human nature” to want to take over the world. But there was never a unipolar world hegemon ever in human history until three decades ago; you can’t claim something that has only happened one single time is “human nature”.

Europeans set sail and conquered people around the world. China built a wall. Also the idea that China seeks to replace the US as global tyrant assumes that Beijing has been watching the US empire crush itself under its own weight and thinking “Ooh, yeah, that looks awesome. Let’s definitely do that.”

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It says so much about how propagandized people are and how insulated their ideological echo chambers have become that their first thought when encountering someone with a foreign policy opinion they disagree with is “I bet this person is a secret agent from a hostile government.”

I’m always like, really? That’s your go-to? That I’m saying what I’m saying because I’m an operative for a foreign intelligence agency? Can’t possibly just be that I just have different opinions about the world’s most powerful government than the ones you hear on TV? How distorted does the information landscape have to be that criticizing the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive power structure on earth is something people view as weird and suspicious?

It really tells you how powerful the empire’s narrative domination is. Even leaving aside how normal criticizing the world’s largest power structure ought to be, how homogeneous has the information environment become where any divergence of opinion sticks out so much that it’s met with such intense shock that people think you’re a foreign agent?

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Russian perspectives need to be banned and Germans need to be jailed for supporting Putin and the news media need to push US government narratives and Silicon Valley algorithms need to aggressively boost those government narratives, because that’s what it takes to protect the western world from tyranny.

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Few people sincerely want the truth about the world. Most just want politicians and pundits to whisper reassuringly in their ear, “Don’t worry. We’ve got this. Your schoolteachers told you the truth about everything, and so did the news man. You are on the side of righteousness.”

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/us-interventionism-always-makes-things?s=r