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Propaganda Brainwashing, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Propaganda Brainwashing, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Propaganda is so advanced that rank-and-file members of the public will openly cheerlead their government’s imprisonment of Assange so that their government can continue to lie to them.
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The focus shouldn’t just be on bad things done by individual plutocrats – Gates did X, Bezos did Y etc. The primary focus should be on how we shouldn’t have a system which allows any individual to have that much power over our world. No individual should have that much power to do that much harm.
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You couldn’t create a more perfect profit-generating scheme than war. Entire civilizations can be streamlined into the task of cranking out top-of-the-line, name-brand killing machines at the drop of a false flag. War will continue as long as human behavior is driven by profit.
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If you want more of something, apply capitalism; if you want less of something, apply socialism. Capitalism is great for making a ton of stuff, but for making less stuff it’s shit, whether that be making less illness, less pollution, less ecocide, less war, less prisoners, etc. Right now we live in a world that needs a great reduction of a great many things, and there’s just no way to get there as long as human behavior is driven by profit.
This is obviously true of things like healthcare, where actually eliminating illness kills demand. But it’s also true of even things like charity programs, where if you actually fix the problem people are throwing money at then a lot of professionals lose their income sources. You’ve got to actually incentivize people to disappear the problems, but capitalism doesn’t have an effective way of disappearing things. It necessarily incentivizes people to perpetuate them.
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Real Revolution Means Expanding Consciousness, Both Outwardly And Inwardly
Real Revolution Means Expanding Consciousness, Both Outwardly And Inwardly
The fight to liberate humanity from oppression, exploitation, butchery and madness is really a fight to expand consciousness.
The existential threats our species now faces are ultimately due to the fact that powerful people advance omnicidal, ecocidal, oppressive, violent and exploitative agendas behind veils of secrecy and propaganda distortion. They do evil things while deliberately keeping people unconscious of those evil things, so that the people will not use the power of their numbers to stop them.
The people do not use the power of their numbers to force a change into a healthy paradigm which puts human interests first because their perception of the world is aggressively manipulated by power structures who have a vested interest in keeping that from happening. Wealth and power are kept in the hands of elites and their underlings by propagandizing people into believing the current status quo is the only way things can be. War agendas are consented to because people are propagandized into believing this or that boogie man poses some imminent threat and needs to be eliminated. Surveillance, censorship, government secrecy and police militarization are tolerated because people are manipulated into believing they need these things.
And so on. In all cases, the key carrying agent for all of these toxic agendas is unconsciousness. If people were conscious of the real nature of these agendas and how badly they’re being robbed in order to advance them, they would refuse to consent to them and force them to stop. So they are kept unconscious of their reality by perceptual manipulation like propaganda, government opacity, internet censorship, and the war on adversarial journalism.
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Only Idiots Believe The CIA, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Only Idiots Believe The CIA, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
An assertion made by spooks is as far from evidence as you can possibly get. Really dumb that this needs to be said.
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Mainstream media outlets which publish anonymous intelligence claims with no proof are just publishing CIA press releases disguised as news.
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The most influential news outlets in the western world uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, then tell you that Russia and China are bad because they have state media.
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Imagine if a compulsive liar who you know for a fact constantly deceives people in order to hurt and exploit them told you your neighbor is going to kill you if you don’t kill him first, and you go and kill your neighbor immediately. That’s how dumb believing the CIA is.
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If you were magically transported from a sane world into this one you wouldn’t understand how everyone’s freaking out about claims that Russia paid the Taliban to attack an occupying force instead of the fact that the US empire is an occupying force all around the planet.
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Gonna quit this gig and become one of those experts they bring on MSNBC to look at the camera and solemnly say that whatever’s in the news today is “right out of Putin’s playbook”.
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“International law” only exists to the extent that the international community collectively agrees to enforce it, which means it only applies to nations that can’t control the collective narrative. That’s why so much energy goes into these cold war narrative control campaigns.
This is pretty much the US State Department’s entire job in modern times, by the way. That’s why almost everything that comes out of Mike Pompeo’s mouth is geared toward manipulating the international narrative in some way. It’s literally his entire job.
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Narrative Control Operations Escalate As America Burns
Narrative Control Operations Escalate As America Burns
Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and mainstream media are falling all over themselves with censorship and spin jobs to get the narrative back under control as mass protests continue to sweep across America.
In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed in a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”
“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told by cold warrior think tank denizen Clint Watts. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”
“Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end,” Watts added.
Those words rattle around in the memory now as America burns with nationwide protests demanding an end to the police state, and as narrative control operations ramp up with frantic urgency.
Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing@BenjaminNorton on how a cabal of editors got us listed as a “deprecated source” entirely on the basis of our political views and in violation of Wikipedia guidelines https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censors-the-grayzone-as-regime-change-advocates-monopolize-editing/ …Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing | The GrayzoneOn Wikipedia, regime-change advocates and right-wing Venezuelan opposition supporters blacklist and “deprecated” The Grayzone on political grounds, violating encyclopedia guidelinesthegrayzone.com
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Inauthentic Behavior: SouthFront is the Latest Victim of the Facebook Banhammer
Inauthentic Behavior: SouthFront is the Latest Victim of the Facebook Banhammer
The censorship of alternative media is becoming more widespread. The latest victim to fall to Facebook and YouTube’s overzealous banhammer is well-known conflict watchdog website, SouthFront.
Where can you find daily news, videos, analysis and maps about the conflict in Syria? Detailed reports about the conflicts in Libya, Yemen, and Venezuela? News about the rise of ISIS in Mozambique? The original analysis of events in the United States and Russia? SouthFront is the place, or at least it was before recently being targeted by tech giants Facebook and Youtube.
Unique and influential and reaching a global audience of hundreds of thousands, SouthFront offers both editorials and factual news reports, both in text format and informational videos. As their website says:
SouthFront focuses on issues of international relations, armed conflicts and crises… We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by the states concerned and the mainstream media.”
Censorship by Facebook and YouTube
A major disinformation and censorship drive against SouthFront was recently launched. On April 30, SouthFront’s Facebook account, which had nearly 100,000 subscribers, was deleted without warning or notice.
On May 1, SouthFront’s main YouTube account, boasting over 150,000 subscribers, was also terminated. The English language channel had 1,900 videos which racked up 60 million views over the past five years.
While the SouthFront website is still operational, the removal of its Facebook and YouTube accounts deprives it of important distribution channels that it so painstakingly built.
The censorship has been accompanied by a disinformation campaign pushed by government-linked think tanks. The move is part of a broader push by the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which has a direct liaison with Silicon Valley companies and teams focused on countering what it claims is propaganda from Russia, China, and Iran. The GEC operates with a current budget of $60 million per year.
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Police, Protests, And Human Transformation: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Police, Protests, And Human Transformation: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
One of the many good things coming out of these protests is a widening mainstream awareness of what a garbage president Obama was.
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“Without the police you’d have vigilantism!”
Vigilantism? You mean like when a band of armed thugs inflict extrajudicial violence upon someone who pissed them off? Like the police do constantly?
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Right wingers seem completely incapable of distinguishing between the ideology that’s all about holding massive demonstrations with the goal of dismantling the police and the ideology that’s all about kneeling in front of cameras wearing Kente cloth. This makes cross-ideological communication nearly impossible, about this subject and many others as well.
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Mainstream America learning that their country is a militarized authoritarian police state is not what the narrative managers wanted. Blows my mind that this isn’t more obvious to more analysts.
If these massive protests look suspicious to you, it’s because they conflict with your expectations of what an expression of grassroots energy would look like. If they conflict with your expectations of what an expression of grassroots energy would look like, it’s because you’re out of touch with where the zeitgeist is at. If you’re out of touch with where the zeitgeist is at, it’s time to revise your media viewing habits.
There are two ways of looking at these protests:
- Elite manipulators are controlling them, and are shoring up more control.
- Elite manipulators are not in control of them, and are losing control.
If you believe #1 then the establishment institutions expressing support for the protests are doing so because they like them. If you believe #2 then they’re doing it with the goal of mollifying, neutralizing and co-opting (see entire Obama administration). Given that we’re talking about a dying empire, #2 seems much more likely to me.
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Syria Spinmeisters Fumble Attempts To Narrative Manage OPCW Leaks
Syria Spinmeisters Fumble Attempts To Narrative Manage OPCW Leaks
It’s been over 72 hours since The Grayzone published new leaks further exposing how the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been lying about its investigation into an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria two years ago.
These new documents make it abundantly clear that OPCW leadership were just plain lying when they claimed that a ballistics expert named Ian Henderson was not a part of the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) in Douma and played only a “minor supporting role” there. Henderson disagrees with the organisation’s official findings implicating the Syrian government in a chlorine gas attack, finding instead that the gas cylinders on the scene were “manually placed”, indicating that the crime scene was staged and the dozens of civilians killed were the victims of a still-unsolved mass murder.
The silence on these revelations from the OPCW and its usual narrative managers has been deafening.
No reply yet from “OPCW public affairs, to my query about Greyzone allegations,m devastating if true both to official position of OPCW and to lapcat @Bellingcat. : https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/06/opcw-douma-whistleblower/ …Exclusive: OPCW chief made false claims to denigrate Douma whistleblower, documents reveal | The…The Grayzone has obtained documents exposing numerous falsehoods and misleading claims by OPCW Director General Fernando Arias to degrade the…thegrayzone.com
Peter Hitchens, one of the only high-visibility journalists to cover the OPCW scandal, tweeted when the documents first emerged: “I have today formally requested OPCW public affairs to comment on these allegations, which call into question an important statement made by the organisation’s chief and retailed by lapcat Bellingcat about the status of Inspector Ian Henderson.”
“No reply yet from OPCW public affairs, to my query about Greyzone allegations, devastating if true both to official position of OPCW and to lapcat Bellingcat,” Hitchens tweeted a day later.
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Internet Censorship, Ego Death, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Internet Censorship, Ego Death, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
There is no legitimate basis upon which to support monopolistic plutocratic megacorporations with extensive government ties silencing dissident voices in order to control the thoughts that people think about Covid-19. This is true regardless of your stance on the virus itself.
It is a known fact that Silicon Valley tech giants have extensive ties to the US government. Like, it’s not a secret. At all. Yet whenever you object to internet censorship you always get people babbling about how it’s a “private company” so it’s okay. If a company is intertwined with government power in myriad ways, how is its deplatforming behavior meaningfully distinct from state censorship? Especially when its willingness to collaborate with the government protects it from antitrust cases, thereby killing any potential competition?
“Free market” types say “If you don’t like it you can go on another platform!” No you can’t. There’s no competition. If you don’t like Twitter you can leave a platform of hundreds of millions for a platform like Gab, which is like ten people and nine of them are Nazis.
They’ll say “No biggie, go be on that tiny platform over there, there’s plenty of free speech there!” I am sure there is. There’s free speech in the desert, too. Free speech doesn’t matter if you’ve isolated yourself on a platform where your voice is only heard by a few fringey people.
They’ve herded everyone onto a few monopolistic government-tied platforms, and now they’re censoring those platforms with an increasingly authoritarian fist. There’s no “free market” solution to this problem, because it’s not happening in a free market.
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New OPCW Leaks Prove They Are Lying To Us About Syria
New OPCW Leaks Prove They Are Lying To Us About Syria
The Grayzone‘s Aaron Maté has published some explosive new leaks from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which make it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that the organisation, and the narrative managers associated with it, have been lying about the investigation into an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria two years ago.
In May of last year an Engineering Assessment signed by South African OPCW inspector Ian Henderson was leaked to the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, saying in direct contradiction of the OPCW’s official findings that the chlorine cylinders allegedly dropped upon the scene via aircraft were in fact “manually placed” there. Since Douma was then occupied by the Al Qaeda-linked and Saudi-backed Jaysh al-Islam group, who were fighting against the Syrian government, this would mean the Syrian government was not responsible for whatever killed dozens of civilians. And it would have the very serious implication that the US, UK and France launched airstrikes against the Syrian government on false grounds.
From the moment Henderson’s leaked document first emerged, both the OPCW and the establishment spinmeisters responsible for managing the imperial narrative on Syria have been dismissing Henderson’s Engineering Assessment on the grounds that he was not a part of the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM), the team which went to Douma to investigate the incident. Since that time mountains of evidence have surfaced both corroborating Henderson’s assessment and revealing that attempts to portray him as not a part of the FFM are disingenuous pedantic manipulations at best, but these new leaks by The Grayzone are the first hard proof we’ve seen that this spin job was actually an outright, bald-faced lie.The Grayzone@TheGrayzoneNews
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Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)
Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)
Within 48 hours both Facebook and then Youtube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” Other platforms may soon fall in suit, as they did with Alex Jones in 2018.
This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke. This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.
I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.
“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant.”
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/temporary-coronavirus-censorship …The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is HereAs the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for China-style control of the Internettaibbi.substack.com
Journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote an excellent essay about the dangers inherent in the increased demand we’ve been seeing for more censorship and deplatforming during the coronavirus pandemic, correctly arguing that more authoritarian control over the ideas people are allowed to discuss is vastly more dangerous than the ideas themselves.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Narrative Managers Argue China-Like Internet Censorship Is Needed
Narrative Managers Argue China-Like Internet Censorship Is Needed
Neoconservative publication The Atlantic has published an article authored by two university professors titled “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal”, subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.”
The article is actually worth reading in full, not just because it’s outrage porn for anyone who values human communication that is unregulated by oligarchs and government agencies, but because it’s actually packed full of extensively sourced information about the way Silicon Valley tech giants are collaborating with western governments to censor speech. The only difference between this article and something you might read on some libertarian website is that this article argues that all of these regulations on speech are a good thing.
Here’s an archive of the article if you don’t want to give clicks to The Atlantic, whose editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg once assured the world that “the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.” Do give it a look if this interests you and you have time.
Anthony L. Fisher✔@anthonyLfisher
Fmr. Bush admin lawyer/current Harvard Law prof Jack Goldsmith goes full-Thomas Friedman, credits China’s enlightened authoritarian approach to information as “largely right” and laments the US’ provincial fealty to the First Amendment as “largely wrong.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid-revealed-about-internet/610549/ …
“In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong,” argue the article’s authors, one of whom is a former Bush administration lawyer. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”
We Are Ruled By Wizards
We Are Ruled By Wizards
Bending reality is as simple as bending people’s perception of reality.
Throughout history, the mythology of civilizations around the world has been full of tales of men and women who mastered a mysterious, esoteric art which enabled them to use language in a way that bends reality to their will. They’ve been called wizards, witches, magicians, sorcerers, warlocks or enchanters, and the utterances they speak have been known as spells, magic, incantations, conjurations or enchantments, but the theme is always more or less the same: a member of a small elite group with the ability to voice special utterances which shape reality according to their will in a way that transcends the mundane mechanics of this world.
People have long held a general intuition that language holds a power far beyond what ordinary mortals use it for, especially since the advent of the written word which was long mysterious to all but the most elite classes in a given society. This intuition has been spot on, though perhaps not exactly in the way that ancient mythologies have envisioned.
When I say “Bending reality is as simple as bending people’s perception of reality,” I’m not making some sort of mystical or otherworldly claim; I’m just making a factual observation about the influence that narrative control has over events big and small which transpire in our world. Many people whose brains lack a healthy empathy center–i.e. sociopaths, psychopaths and other narcissists–already understand this on some level.
Humans are storytelling creatures; everything about our understanding of the world is made up of narratives that are made of language. “My name’s Alice and I was born in Detroit” is a narrative. “The universe is 13.772 billion years old” is a narrative. “If I drink that bottle of bleach I’ll probably die” is a narrative.
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Humanity Is Making A Very Important Decision When It Comes To Assange
Humanity Is Making A Very Important Decision When It Comes To Assange
The propagandists have all gone dead silent on the WikiLeaks founder they previously were smearing with relentless viciousness, because they no longer have an argument. The facts are all in, and yes, it turns out the US government is certainly and undeniably working to exploit legal loopholes to imprison a journalist for exposing its war crimes. That is happening, and there is no justifying it.
So the narrative managers, by and large, have gone silent.
Which is good. Because it gives us an opening to seize control of the narrative.
It’s time to go on the offensive with this. Assange supporters have gotten so used to playing defense that it hasn’t fully occurred to us to go on a full-blown charge. I’ve been guilty of this as well; I’ll be letting myself get bogged down in some old, obsolete debate with someone about some obscure aspect of the Swedish case or something, not realizing that none of that matters anymore. All the narrative manipulations that were used to get Assange to this point are impotent, irrelevant expenditures of energy compared to the fact that we now have undeniable evidence that the US government is working to set a precedent which will allow it to jail any journalist who exposes its misdeeds, and we can now force Assange’s smearers to confront this reality.
“Should journalists be jailed for exposing US war crimes? Yes or no?”
That’s the debate now. Not Russia. Not Sweden. Not whether he followed proper bail protocol or washed his dishes at the embassy. That’s old stuff. That’s obsolete. That’s playing defense.
Now we play offense: “Should journalists be jailed for exposing US war crimes? Yes or no?”
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Beijing Cracks Down On VPNs Amid Growing Popular Backlash To CCP Censorship
Beijing Cracks Down On VPNs Amid Growing Popular Backlash To CCP Censorship
It looks like Beijing has finally grown tired of journalists like Epoch Times’ Jennifer Zeng circulating shocking videos depicting the true depth of the crisis on the ground in China – and the government’s almost unbelievably heavy handed response.
For an example, see this video which Zeng tweeted yesterday: It’s relatively mild by outbreak standards.
During #CoronavirusOutbreak, #CCP gives you very detailed instructions including whether you should sleep together with your spouse…#COVID2019 #Coronavirus #CoronavirusOutbreak #coronaviruschina Click here for more: http://bit.ly/2uBfJPr
Weeks after Beijing ended its brief experiment with Internet “transparency” in the name of disseminating accurate info about the outbreak, the Financial Times reports that Beijing is once again trying to restrict its citizens’ access to the uncensored global internet.
China’s most popular VPN services, which allow foreign businesses and locals to circumvent internet censorship, have faced an avalanche of state-backed attacks in recent weeks, which is why many Chinese are finding it difficult to access sites like Google.
Beijing’s “Great Firewall” typically automatically restricts VPN usage during “politically sensitive” periods like the anniversary of the “June 4th Incident.” And right on schedule, VPN provides have reported “an uptick of restrictions” in recent weeks.
“We are aware of a new escalation in blocks in China, and our team is working around the clock to address the impact on connectivity,” according to ExpressVPN, which published a notice on its website Monday.
Following the death of whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang, a frustrated Chinese public demanded the government ease restrictions on speech. For a brief moment, the outpouring of frustration and rage directed at the Communist Party and its thuggish local enforcers threatened to inspire a Hong Kong-style protest movement, until a few well-placed scapegoatings helped the Politburo redirect public scorn at hapless local officials.
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