Uncle Tom’s Empire
CJ Hopkins
I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but, given the arrest of Julian Assange last week, and the awkward and cowardly responses thereto, I felt it necessary to abandon my customary literary standards and spew out a spineless, hypocritical “hot take” professing my concern about the dangerous precedent the U.S. government may be setting by extraditing and prosecuting a publisher for exposing American war crimes and such, while at the same time making it abundantly clear how much I personally loathe Assange, and consider him an enemy of America, and freedom, and want the authorities to crush him like a cockroach.
Now I want to be absolutely clear. I totally defend Assange and Wikileaks, and the principle of freedom of the press, and whatever. And I am all for exposing American war crimes (as long as it doesn’t endanger the lives of the Americans who committed those war crimes, or inconvenience them in any way). At the same time, while I totally support all that, I feel compelled to express my support together with my personal loathing of Assange, who, if all those important principles weren’t involved, I would want to see taken out and shot, or at least locked up in Super-Max solitary … not for any crime in particular, but just because I personally loathe him so much.
I’m not quite sure why I loathe Assange. I’ve never actually met the man. I just have this weird, amorphous feeling that he’s a horrible, disgusting, extremist person who is working for the Russians and is probably a Nazi. It feels kind of like that feeling I had, back in the Winter of 2003, that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, which he was going to give to those Al Qaeda terrorists who were bayonetting little babies in their incubators, or the feeling I still have, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Trump is a Russian intelligence asset who peed on Barack Obama’s bed, and who is going to set fire to the Capitol building, declare himself American Hitler, and start rounding up and murdering the Jews.
I don’t know where these feelings come from. If you challenged me, I probably couldn’t really support them with any, like, actual facts or anything, at least not in any kind of rational way. Being an introspective sort of person, I do sometimes wonder if maybe my feelings are the result of all the propaganda and relentless psychological and emotional conditioning that the ruling classes and the corporate media have subjected me to since the day I was born, and that influential people in my social circle have repeated, over and over again, in such a manner as to make it clear that contradicting their views would be extremely unwelcome, and might negatively impact my social status, and my prospects for professional advancement.
Take my loathing of Assange, for example. I feel like I can’t even write a column condemning his arrest and extradition without gratuitously mocking or insulting the man. When I try to, I feel this sudden fear of being denounced as a “Trump-loving Putin-Nazi,” and a “Kremlin-sponsored rape apologist,” and unfriended by all my Facebook friends. Worse, I get this sickening feeling that unless I qualify my unqualified support for freedom of press, and transparency, and so on, with some sort of vicious, vindictive remark about the state of Assange’s body odor, and how he’s probably got cooties, or has pooped his pants, or some other childish and sadistic taunt, I can kiss any chance I might have had of getting published in a respectable publication goodbye.
But I’m probably just being paranoid, right? Distinguished, highbrow newspapers and magazines like The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vox, Vice, Daily Mail, and others of that caliber, are not just propaganda organs whose primary purpose is to reinforce the official narratives of the ruling classes. No, they publish a broad range of opposing views. The Guardian, for example, just got Owen Jones to write a full-throated defense of Assange on that grounds that he’s probably a Nazi rapist who should be locked up in a Swedish prison, not in an American prison!
The Guardian, remember, is the same publication that printed a completely fabricated story accusing Assange of secretly meeting with Paul Manafort and some alleged “Russians,” among a deluge of other such Russiagate nonsense, and that has been demonizing Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite for several years.
Plus, according to NPR’s Bob Garfield (who is lustfully “looking forward to Assange’s day in court”), and other liberal lexicologists, Julian Assange is not even a real journalist, so we have no choice but to mock and humiliate him, and accuse him of rape and espionage … oh, and speaking of which, did you hear the one about how his cat was spying on the Ecuadorean diplomats?
But seriously now, all joking aside, it’s always instructive (if a bit sickening) to watch as the mandarins of the corporate media disseminate an official narrative and millions of people robotically repeat it as if it were their own opinions. This process is particularly nauseating to watch when the narrative involves the stigmatization, delegitimization, and humiliation of an official enemy of the ruling classes. Typically, this enemy is a foreign enemy, like Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Milošević, Osama bin Laden, Putin, or whoever. But sometimes the enemy is one of “us” … a traitor, a Judas, a quisling, a snitch, like Trump, Corbyn, or Julian Assange.
In either case, the primary function of the corporate media remains the same: to relentlessly assassinate the character of the “enemy,” and to whip the masses up into a mindless frenzy of hatred of him, like the Two-Minutes Hate in 1984, the Kill-the-Pig scene in Lord of the Flies, the scapegoating of Jews in Nazi Germany, and other examples a bit closer to home.
Logic, facts, and actual evidence have little to nothing to do with this process. The goal of the media and other propagandists is not to deceive or mislead the masses. Their goal is to evoke the pent-up rage and hatred simmering within the masses and channel it toward the official enemy. It is not necessary for the demonization of the official enemy to be remotely believable, or stand up to any kind of serious scrutiny. No one sincerely believes that Donald Trump is a Russian Intelligence asset, or that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite, or that Julian Assange has been arrested for jumping bail, or raping anyone, or for helping Chelsea Manning “hack” a password.
The demonization of the empire’s enemies is not a deception … it is a loyalty test. It is a ritual in which the masses (who, let’s face it, are de facto slaves) are ordered to display their fealty to their masters, and their hatred of their masters’ enemies. Cooperative slaves have plenty of pent-up hatred to unleash upon their masters’ enemies. They have all the pent-up hatred of their masters (which they do not dare direct at their masters, except within the limits their masters allow), and they have all the hatred of themselves for being cooperative, and … well, basically, cowards.
Julian Assange is being punished for defying the global capitalist empire. This was always going to happen, no matter who was in the White House. Anyone who defies the empire in such a flagrant manner is going to be punished. Cooperative slaves demand this of their masters. Defiant slaves are actually less of a threat to their masters than they are to the other slaves who have chosen to accept their slavery and cooperate with their own oppression. Their defiance shames these cooperative slaves, and shines an unflattering light on their cowardice.
This is why we are witnessing so many liberals (and liberals in leftist’s clothing) rushing to express their loathing of Assange in the same breath as they pretend to support him, not because they honestly believe the content of the official Julian Assange narrative that the ruling classes are disseminating, but because (a) they fear the consequences of not robotically repeating this narrative, and (b) Assange has committed the cardinal sin of reminding them that actual “resistance” to the global capitalist empire is possible, but only if you’re willing to pay the price.
Assange has been paying it for the last seven years, and is going to be paying it for the foreseeable future. Chelsea Manning is paying it again. The Gilets Jaunes protestors have been paying it in France. Malcolm X paid it. Sophie Scholl paid it. Many others throughout history have paid it. Cowards mocked them as they did, as they are mocking Julian Assange at the moment. That’s all right, though, after he’s been safely dead for ten or twenty years, they’ll name a few streets and high schools after him. Maybe they’ll even build him a monument.
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It seems Mr. Hopkins has hit a nerve, or a few of them, judging by the comments. They are all very interesting. As a working class slug, reading all the messages, it seems the elephant in the room and the naked emperor, (to mix metaphors) have never been identified. The issue of the last 70 or so years is that all the groups identified in the article and comments, are part of the company that is making us believe that “snow is black” or at least a dark shade of grey.
The two real reasons the Julian haters hate, is that he is blamed for exposing and causing the downfall of Hillary Clinton. That Hillary is not President is bad enough, but the other shoe is now to drop. The coming destruction of the Moloch worshipers empire and narrative causes them to abandon all pretense. They are throwing it all out the window and all the mega tons of blah blah is a cover for the hatred of the billions of souls that inhabit this earth.
For all you that are being consumed by the latest ruse planted by the Oligarchs relating to Assange
Legal Dictum: has been set out by ex prosecutor of New York State Lionel LeBron
on Lionel Nation u tube channel.
Hence basic legal case law set out for we the sheeple while we sermonize on the blatant anglo-zionist ruse in our dying western civilzation
PACE E BENE
BY DECEPTION WE MAY WAGE WAR
Brilliant peice yet again CJ. How unsurprising that the maggots have come out to feed since Assange’s arrest. These ‘journalists’ betray themselves for what they really are. Mouthpieces for the ruling classes. They protect power. Their betrayal of Julian Assange is the lowest of the low in my opinion. Here in Australia, we have the prime example of Peter Greste who writes for the ‘liberal’ The Age newspaper, but I shouldn’t be surprised at all; I read ‘Manufacturing Consent’ years ago, and know of the revelations of Udo Ulfkotte, the now deceased German journalist. Keep shining a light on the dark corners CJ.
“as long as it doesn’t endanger the lives of the Americans who committed those war crimes”
Sorry, but I really don’t give a shit about Americans who commit war crimes. They can rot in Hell.
Oh some of them already are – but I took that phrase as sarcastic.
No-one comes to heaven or a true blessing shared with hate in their heart – but that does not mean you have to deal with anyone else’s choices – only your own. But that my include attacking ourself in others instead of ourself.
I read of a GI whose comrades were ambushed and killed in Vietnam – who was triggered to revenge in the next village in a blind rage – and then lives the images and the memory every day since. A part of them live now in him and he has to face what he did regardless the circumstance. This is not a matter of sympathies but of human relationships under hate and violence and trauma.
Hate doesn’t travel to its target but poisons the heart of the hater.
Do we hate in others what we cannot bear in ourself?
This reminds me of Liam Neeson’s recent confession that many years ago he walked around with a cosh hoping to get into an altercation with a black person in order to kill them, upon learning that his friend had been raped by a man of that colour. Of course, some people respond in a reasonable way but you get that typical kneejerk outrage which is simply a mindless form of censorship and suppresses what needs to be aired and discussed.
It is a delicate matter to bring hate to light because it is in a sense like defusing a bomb.
Hate thoughts are hidden – EXCEPT where given social permissions, justifications and etc – hence the drumming up (repetitive exposures) of another people, nation, religion, or race as hateful sets the target for a circuit of emotional discharge. A directed weapon and of course the undermining of a peace loving desire to initiate catastrophic consequence.
As I see it the core denial is itself denied and protected against exposure. The way all this ‘fits together is in a sense a perfect defence of hate and fear in a lock in by guilt – accused in the other as survival in persistence of such ‘control’ or private assertive judgement.
‘Coming out’ as truly Human being is only temporarily allowed in the very young – until fitted to the mind and world of fear.
The idea of personal responsibility is become the idea of control and manipulation of the mind and of persons through guilt and punishment – when that responsibility is wished for in self inflation of power and possession and dumped on by the denied in vengeance of ‘taking back’ power. This circuit becomes opportunistic for everyone else to dump their shit or hide their power agenda.
After a dump people ‘feel better’ in a sense of release and relief but it is relative to a state of conflict and nothing in itself – and so has no lasting quality except to give way to irritations and provocations to grievance in a lather,rinse repeat of addictive cycle.
Opportunistic manipulation of conflicts to hide agenda in consolidates a sense of self-power gained from setting up or nurturing conflicts (hate).
Hate masks as caring, concern, power and protection – while a split mind believes its masking reality AS Reality. I once pondered – how (even in some mythological sense) could war in Heaven have occurred and how could a spirit or purpose of hate ATTRACT and gain support and allegiance in defence against love? While I have a much more multifaceted view of the underpinning of the mythic of narrative identity – the human experience is exactly the answer.
How can we give love – (energy and attention – ie value or worth) to the hateful?
Just watch the mind most any moment and see THAT we do this – and then perhaps become curious instead of running on defaults that SEEM real.
When I was young friends would fall out at times and might say with force; “I HATE YOUR GUTS!”. What does this mean but our guts feel hateful, and we are projecting that onto the other to get rid of it – after which we often felt remorse because at some level we know we have used them in the moment of a passion that passes but which came from out of our past and a sense of who that makes us.
I would re-phrase that : I’m all for exposing american war crimes…..in particular if it endangers the lives of the americans who committed those war crimes.
Excellent.
There are, of course, many who would read the beginning of this great, if depressing, article and think that they had found a perfect spokesman for what they themselves believe… Perhaps it could even take in a troll or two – the sort who never read a whole article, although they would soon have to confront the fact that they had been made top-ranking fools of.
What you say in sarcasm about “personal loathing” has, unfortunately, become such a fashion regarding Assange.
Ace tweet by Jonathan Cook: “Notice how the Guardian is now the go-to place for vassal state politicians – Ecuador’s Moreno, Venezuela’s Guaido – to convey propaganda on behalf of the US national security state. And the Guardian has the gall to call such stenography an exclusive” – hear, hear, Mr Cook.
There is also fairly brutal demolition of the Guardian by MediaLens which cheered me up a little bit.
In it John Pilger responds to a Guardian editorial which said ‘the Assange case is a morally tangled web. He believes in publishing things that should not always be published – this has long been a difficult divide between the Guardian and him.’ to which Pilger points out ‘These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the exposé of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.’
No wonder the Guardian hates the alternative media, especially proper journalists like Julian Assange.
Imagine if all of us who haven’t been overtaken by the propaganda were willing to pay the price and all stand up at.once. Wouldn’t that be something? After all, what do we have left to lose?
What would they do? Lock us all up? Mass drone us? At least, whatever the outcome, everyone would be unable to pretend any longer about the reality of things. Maybe they would all collapse like a deck of cards, or like those advertising blimps on The Simpsons starve to death without our manufactured consent to prop them up.
Good…but how?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eRa5mGuHXyg
😀….I did that like 10 years ago!!!
What you resist persists.
What you choose not to use, fades from non use.
But what you appreciate, appreciates.
A negative appreciation is self-reinforcing and the more we seek to overcome or escape (fear) the more tightly entangled in its reinforcement.
Thinking that expresses a negative or fearful self definition is ‘divide and rule’ or doublethink by its nature of self-contradiction, and the mind of such thinking ‘rules out’ a positive or integrative appreciation. But no one can stop doing or activating it when they know not what they do.
Engaging in the framed drama feeds the drama with identification. But watching our thought and reaction uncovers our correspondence or vibrational involvement with all facets of a conflicted reality as either a lack of feeling or upsetting feelings that respectively freeze or discharge emotional energy. The intent to kill or deny the hated or to freeze and deny expression of the feared hateful.
In some sense the Matrix movie hit an apt metaphor of human bubble realities generating charge for a machine mind to run on – as IF the instrument can usurp its creator or father – an ancient archetype.
As if thinking can actually redefine what Mind is and make it so.
The only way to come into the synchronicity of being on time and in timing is by truly being yourself – which is both a self honesty and acceptance from which to grow perspective rather than seek to reinforce or bolster a shaky foundation. So anyhow and anyway in any way that works for you.
Freedom from propaganda is no longer resorting to using it.
Better to educate ourself and each other in its deconstruction as a way to illuminate the target (our trigger points).
This IS the same basic idea as watching thought rather than being triggered to inhabiting thought bubbles.
Or in spiritual terms being vigilant for our peace – and against deceit. Without the first – the second is likely to be bolting the gate after the trojan horse has got in.
“Freedom from propaganda is no longer resorting to using it”, consciously as choice, because it is elementary mind control, which is inherently designed to preclude learning for oneself, wasting valuable
time to expand appreciation …
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
~ Edward Bernays, “Propaganda,” 1928
Just ask Justice Leveson to re-view thoroughly ‘D’ BBC 😉 & Murdoch: logic 🙂
The giving of consent may be hidden or ‘unconscious’ – but it is there.
As for BBC or whoever; I don’t tell anyone else what to think or say or do. I have my own life!
If you try to take over the lives of others, you lose your own – its a kind of false ‘possession’.
The translation of the dark arts into ‘scientific’ psychological and neurological frameworks of thought and ‘experiment’ hides in the very foundations of ‘consensus science’ exactly as it did in ‘organised religion’ – and yes both such terms are doublethink of self contradiction.
To live IN relation to a ‘mad world’ but not OF it, is to grow a sane world by living the moment at hand, for it is always nigh. But to struggle within insane framing is to believe ‘this time it will be different’.
I met a woman with her dog on a long pebble beach, who threw stones ahead into the surf – plop!
The dog eagerly chased every single stone, and never could retrieve even one. I could still see the dog chasing the stones a mile away down the beach. The woman had indicated this was his normal activity – ie what the dog did.
The dog showed no sign of disappointment – and that made me hesitate to write him off as ‘stupid’ – because the energy in motion was full of life – albeit incapable of fruition in terms of its apparently motivating goal.
Perhaps for some – simply the role of going forth for the Master is enough identity enough. ‘Whither thou throwest, I will go’. Unlike the dog, humans persist in futility joylessly and tragically – as if it CAN ever work. This feels like being under a curse, a penance or under an ‘evil spell’ because while we may tries to generate energy to give life to self-illusion – we only give our reality TO the false. So this ‘negative accrual of debt’ has one of those exponential curves to it that signifies a failure of a false foundation coming to full fruit as destructive to life, consciousness and true function.
Rather than mask and manipulate fear of extinction in demonising life-giving CO2, I would reveal this fear in our mythos or narrative identity of self-definition – but of course THAT is what is defending against exposure as if ITS life depended on darkness and cover stories.
The use of the dark arts of deceit is always a two edged sword. To give a lie is to live a lie – and have to defend it against exposure. This demands ever more sacrifice of self to the lie – but seeks to divert the consequence to others by getting them to WANT to give up their life-energy to that which abuses and in a sense feeds upon it – as it does on the manipulator.
No one in their right mind wants to hate and hurt another like themself – and so a mind has to be ‘wrong-minded’, or wrong-footed, under a false or forced thinking in order to then USE it for such a purpose – and choose to keep – it at expense of a truth now feared and therefore evaded, and denied or demonised as a covering over a consequently unrecognisable truth. So once joining in fear and hate labels people as (ie) cockroaches – the framing gives the permission to stamp them out without SEEING them as living beings – and the threat than NOT doing so is to be associated with them and stamped out. The ability to ‘blank’ another human being is the ability to dissociate in emotion-backed fantasy – while acting out on the body. (Of others, world and self).
The fear that truth shall expose hate in us as evil and unworthy of life is what sets the defence against whole truth. Which then generates perceptions and response that effectively seek to evade blame by accusing it in others. This is old religion sacrificial magic regardless its modern packaging. One may also sacrifice self in part – to acquire status or social credits. And so hate can just as well operate through using investment in victim and grievance or self-denials.
But – it takes two to tango – and to refuse to join or support a framing in deceit is to abide in the willingness of recognising truth instead of defending against it or hiding in its image and form.
I am intrigued at how Julian Assange was able to grab hold of his copy of the Gore Vidal book and then , whilst headfirsted and handcuffed , had the wherewithal to hold it upright for the Ruptly camera with his tethered hand as he was launched toward the open door of the police van.
It’s fairly obvious that he highly recommends Vidals’ critique of the national security state.
Now if it were to top the Amazon bestseller list ?? ….. With a little effort we could quite easily achieve this.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1494887991/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
@ZigZag Wanderer. Good comment, I was equally intrigued, all weekend long, checking sales, just like you
lol, earlier today i commented on exactly this matter, but with with far more context, to BigB, regarding Amazon’s largest client 🙂
What did Assange say ?
“Resist UK”
*************
The comment is below the following article, but somehow it seems appropriate here too…
https://off-guardian.org/2019/04/15/in-his-own-words-assanges-statement/
I think i’ll dig the garden a bit and mull over copy pasting 😉
Tim,
With regard to Assange’s words as he was dragged off by the police I had a slightly different take on it. I may well be wrong but I interpreted what he was shouting, and it was difficult to hear it clearly, as something along the lines of “Resist, UK! Resist the…US!”. It struck me as an appeal to the UK to not give in to the US’s extradition demands. It’s unfortunate that commas don’t feature in the spoken language!
I saw the clip he Assange said something like: Resist UK, Resist the Trump Administration. Basically he is making a plea to the British Government to resist his extradition to the U.S. Now deep down he knows that is not going to happen. Since America and Britain have almost the same world view. Same imperialist global goals. Both criminal partners in crime. Both birds of a feather. In short Assange knows he is a cooked goose and he will be extradited to the U.S. by a very obliging Britain. So I can conclude that he said those words Resist UK, more to his vast army of supporters in Britain,US, Europe and around the world to mobilise and put pressure on the UK to resist the Trump Administration. I think he was trying to rally his supporters indirectly. We all know UK and US are as bad as each other and have been for hundreds of years!
I think you are being overly cynical (again). As evidence in support of my judgement I would direct your attention to all the attempts by the elites to shut down views that challenge official narratives. The British government has just published an “Online Harms” white paper, which is supposedly about stopping terrorist propaganda and harm to children on the Internet, but hidden in the middle is a set of proposals for stopping disinformation: if these proposals had been law back in 2002/3 it would have been perfectly acceptable to push the WMD narrative, but any criticism of the narrative would have been immediately censored as disinformation. If their propaganda was as effective as you claim, they wouldn’t be bothered about people on the Internet criticising their claims. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/793360/Online_Harms_White_Paper.pdf
Perfect article. Not just about Assange but a complete overview of the current state of affairs in the world…in our psychological appraisal of the world.
We, humans, behave like machines most of the time and very little awareness of doing so. It’s worth revisiting the Milgram’s experiment if you need science to back up the complancency of the majority to the ‘masters’. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment)
But this is not new. It’s been like this forever as far as our historical memory can go. We behave like an unconscious herd that follows the lowest behavioural response in the crowd. Humanity, the human race has not evolved a bit in the last 2000 years.
We chose radical mechanistic views, radical materialistic perspectives and in the process we emptied our own humanity. We wanted to think of ourselves as above and beyond everything, capable of everything, in control until now when the result of mankind hubris is backfiring.
Human values and virtues had been on a steady decline long ago, which only now is being revealed.
Because of psychological inertia people still hold onto the rossy view fed into them by Powers and even when confronted with undeniable evidence, due to the schizophrenic fragmentation that has been breed, people actually deny the ugly and take refuge in their own delusion: It’s fear, is the result of fear steaming from ignorance.
And the ‘Powers that be’ have always rely on this fear and continue to instill more fear, it’s the perfect recipe to mantain the status quo.
They are like a blind guiding another.
The change can only come after acceptance of reality. Acceptance of this slave-like behaviour but that is a personal thing. No amount of explanation can give sight to a blind.
We’ve been warned many, many, many times but we (humans) were deaf, were blind.
Unfortunately, only through personal catastrophe can the blind see. Humanity is at a crossroads, we are going through humanity’s rite of passage. From here we can go up into a cooperative, compasionate, enviromentally conscious beings or we can go down. It seems that, sadly, we are walking the down path….this might be the end or …just the necessary wake up call before going up…
Ramdan
Not 2,000 – more like 5,000 years of hereditary conditioning. The dangerous addictive behavioural patterning leading to the over-accumulation by a few – who could form an oligarchy – was a well recognised behavioural pattern known in the Bronze Age. It was also recognised that it would destroy civilisation – so the ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, and their Near Eastern neighbours – including early Mosaic Law – held regular clean slate debt amnesties – the famous Jubilee. Michael Hudson has recently done a four part history of debt.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/the-delphic-oracle-was-their-davos-a-four-part-interview-with-michael-hudson-about-his-forthcoming-book-the-collapse-of-antiquity-part-1.html
So that lesson was forgotten, and the Petroleum Interval was harvested primarily by the most powerful plutarchy history has ever, and will ever, know. Progress and prosperity ended for all but a minoritarian few in the 70s and 80s. The spectacle and carnival of debt – with its bright lights, perpetual looped entertainment, hedonic distractions and desire-fetish techno-totem ‘things’ – kept the desire-production fantasy machine rolling. Wages, prospects, and real economic investment fell as debts exponentially grew. No one seemed to mind that their humanity was the cost of their continued consensual inclusivity. Or that the party could not last.
DotCom was an unheeded warning. Then financialised casino capitalism died. But fuck me, if they did not revive it by transferring the debt to the public – socialising it – and reinflated the ‘Mother of All Bubbles’ with ‘free’ money. Free money used to buy the future – foreclose the plane of all possibility …nihilating all progress and prosperity in the material realm – for the few: an exclusive champagne offshore yacht party in the Monte Carlo here and now.
Well, we all better start looking at what surrounds us as living history. We are living in the zenith of materiality. It is, well majoritarianly, all the wealth that ever was – as an actualised presentium. Has everyone been liberated, and is happy and free in the zenith of their materiality? Are they fuck. We have materialised our childrens future to pay for our present unhapiness.
Now that many people are starting to subconsciously realise this – that we are post-progress and post-prosperity – NOW they begin to wake to the dawning realisation that austerity is permantised and the future foreclosed. And boy, are they angry – but not at themselves for sleeping through the good times. There must be someone to blame and throw their cucumber at (see below)! Well, its been obvious for 5,000 years how this would end. But we convinced ourselves otherwise. Its no use blaming anyone else until we examine the mind for its deceit. How could we be so foolish as to believe that we could have infinite manifest materiality in a finite world?
Even here: this process is known, well studied, and historically prescient for 2,500 years or more. The material object is not the focus of the accumulation process. The material object is the focus for desire. Accumulated desires cathex on the material object investing it with ersatz wealth. That wealth is in the desire itself – not the fetishised material object. That projected wealth is consciousness – split, exteriorised, Othered, phenomenalised, consciousness. Consciousness that would otherwise be our holism and completion. All that materialised future wealth is empty consciousness. And if we do materialise the last molecule of every resource: we will still never be complete. Progress is away from the goal. Prosperity precedes physical accumulation by an empty desire-process. Our perfect wisdom cannot be bought, materially accumulated, commoditised, traded, exchanged or banked. It is simply that which the desire process itself nihilates. It is what we are when we no longer want to become more, to get more, to get ‘there’, to achieve more, to get where I belong …following the false desire trail, littered with the material artefacts of a dead foreclosed future.
Coming face to face with our true humanity, in the mirror of the reality we have created through false desire-production, would be a very good task for humanity to undertake Now – in the presential immediacy of our wanton materiality. Will we? I have no idea. Other future scenarios have more fear-first familiarity to them. Their outcomes are as predictable and determinable as they were in Sumer – 5,000 years ago. They were as unconscionable then as they are now.
Indeed.
Long time ago we choose to reward accumulation of material things. Outright agressive and despotic behaviour have been rewarded and applauded while compassion and cooperation were (and probably are) seen as deplorable signs of weakness. We fed the beast over the human.
Mankind has to confront the consequences of our dreamlike state. In spite of the bleakness of the present situation we have a unique opportunity to make things right now:
Will people listen?
Will the blind see?
I have some resonance with your ideas but hold that an extreme and catastrophic past set the splitting of a mind under terror – for those who survived a ‘terraformed world – and all who come into such an acquired or inherited model. Survival as a split mind in a physical existence under terror structured the development of both subjective consciousness, language and civilisation. It still does and is observable but for the mind’s recoil and diversion.
Before the beginning of human interest in and USE of ‘history’ was the ‘mythological era of the Gods’, ‘Suns’ or Ages, that makes NO sense to our current scientific world-view – unless seen in terms of celestial events that such a ‘Model’ rules out – but is discernible through the records of global antiquity, catastrophic geology and recent developments in plasma physics – which open to a new Cosmology. A non separative Cosmology in my appreciation.
The nature and persistence of our core archetypal patterns have not changed, but only developed different forms of expression. The ‘dramatis personae’ play out the same script – in which emulation of the gods, and sacrifice or appeal to the gods operates through masking rationalism over emotional and magical appeal. It is this ‘unconscious’ that manipulative mind control targets. It is this invocation of the power to protect a surface consciousness from what lies beneath that demands unconsciousness or denial as a condition in which fear is hidden and life made less intolerable, unpredictable or disorderly.
The projection of a uniformitarian gradualism (gradual change over millions of years) backwards is as mistaken as is the projection of our current consciousness (or world) onto our forebears in antiquity. War and genocide was part of the domination and subjugation of ‘others’ or rival gods, peoples, tribes or kingdoms. It is not new – but our technological extension and outsourcing of power to technological systems is at least as you suggest a crisis of global instability and broad spectrum destruction.
The philosophical development of religion alongside the pre-scientific focus in the world incorporated and to some degree sublimated the more visceral expression to rules or law of civilising identity – sought for as part of the philosophical unfolding of thought but also imposed by cultural and social change – including invasion and war.
Within or beneath the rational attempt to set order over chaos (archetype) is yet the predicate of defining for the purpose of prediction and control – as the development of the mind under threat of extinction or world-ending under destruction from Earth and sky, wind and flood. I used to wonder why ‘moving mountains’ would have anything at all to do with ‘God’ and is now considered metaphorical. For all this my sense of ‘God’ in not in any powers in the world- but the idea OF power as attack and rejection and destruction has usurped the power that holds all things one – in the mind of its emulation or modelling.
Insofar as aligning in a Reintegrative Purpose instead of the splitting segregation of ‘power struggle’ I don’t expect this to be intellectually communicated and then ‘applied’ but intuitively guided in all who look on insanity and see it is not their truth. We may hate the haters or the ‘unworthy’ and feel justified or vindicated in an identity set over and above them – but only while we believe it truly serves us. And that is down to who and what we accept ourselves to be. Fear can usurp the mind to do or say whatever it takes to escape or survive a personal destruction – even after recognising love, even as the dawning while the cock crows.
It isn’t beliefs I seek reinforcement in so much as recognition of the fundamental nature of the mind as the power that makes the perception and experience of a world. But HIDDEN in being put ‘outside’ on the world and it powers.
My friend, for me is a simple logic without the need to resort to any particular God or ntellectualism.
If we choose to focus on material objects external to us as ends or means to a purposeful, happy life then we end up where we are now. Someone will believe that accumulation of those objects is desirable and more important that fellow humans or natural life
…with that in mind you’ll end up lying, betraying, killing, attacking,etc and justifying all despicable actions, just for the sake of those things that you believe are valuable…This attitude is not only egocentric but actually the summum of ignorance of what life really is.
….and yes, is just a perspective….is just a change in focus what is ultimately needed….
Lack of love that seeks to regain it by possession or domination is a distortion of a true desire – in that there are qualities of love and power that are rightly ours to have and to hold and to share in – but from fear of lack in isolation rises a self-inflation of aggrandisement – or from a lack of support and protection rises the armoured disposition.
Addicts seek for substitution for true connection that they are without by the nature of both their self-convictions and the thoughts and actions that uphold them as real and inescapable. I sense that greater fears drive people to what in their framing seems a lesser evil – and as one step leads to another – an initial error or folly can generate a tragic waste of life.
Breaking the pattern – or indeed the spell – requires seeing the pattern in active awareness that brings it to a choice rather than a struggle within thoughts that bind and dispirit and indeed enslave.
On a collective level challenging the ‘mainstream consensual narrative’ in some desire for a clearer perspective as the basis for sharing life in a greater appreciation of freedom to live – serves to encourage an innate curiosity that is covered over in most as the loss of innocence to conviction under guilt, doubt and division.
If lack of love is the predicate for a lovelessness or hate that uses others as something to get from, then that is where we might allow movement or influx and expression rather than set up conditions that others and world must meet BEFORE we will bring our presence into our relationships.
A world of lies is a world of manipulative masking in which it may seem no one really sees you or listens. Perhaps meeting someone who does, wakes us to how normalised we become to substitutions that cover over a sense of lack that is pushed to the back. Out of sight but never truly out of mind because our world becomes our cover story, our narrative identity, our worldview. With all the energy and attention invested in it.
Bravo, CJ: this is about the best analysis that I have read that captures the Zeitgeist of the MSM complicity in attempting to salve the Empire-ego …in complete nihilation of any last vestige of humanity and compassion. When truth-telling is a crime… …well, we know what happens next.
Happens, or happened? Soon in the UK: if you ‘Google’ (and most search engines do) – the first three pages of results and sponsored content will be digitally watermarked – “Official – UKGov.org” … accredited by ‘Fullfact’ – the official ‘independent’ factchecking partner of UKGov. But this won’t just happen: this has been a determinant identifiable trend – well, all my adult life. Which takes us back to the late 70s and Dame Maggie T.
The relationship between state and subject has been profoundly and brutally altered: we are all interpellated automatic subjects of an authoritarian state now. We always were: but now there can be no more pretence to simulated democracy. Class relations were atomised and totally re-engineered. The right to mediate, assemble, and strike was nihilated. The workers were made wards of the market: society and community became functions of market forces – especially for working class tenants who became owners and landlords of their own property.
Thatcher’s protege Blair took the depoliticisation several stages further: installing the legal architecture of the coming police state with the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (the UK Patriot Act-lite) …and extending the power of the Executive by bureaucratic fiat, SIs, and extending the power of the Cabinet Office and the
PresidentPM by the abuse of ‘Royal Prerogative’. There was also a ‘Bill ofRightsWrongs’.The planned, paywalled, behaviourally modified and modifiable ‘Big Society’ of corporate operant conditioned individuals and families (neither society nor communities) is no good without BigData and surveillance. The MSM was co-opted and corporate-captured by Leveson and the uncharitable Common Purpose. Recent highlights in the erosion of free speech and expression, the right to criticism and dissent – and an essential public forum of debate, and the coming cyber-Iron Firewall are:
The DMCSS #FakeNews Commitee: an updated ‘Truman Show’ starring Carol Cadwalladr;
The FCO’s Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme – headed by Andie Pryce – incorporating the Institute for Statecraft and Integrity Initiative;
The G7 Rapid Respnse Mechanism – ‘all for one, one for all’ musketeer counter-disinfo capability.
The ‘Online Harms White Paper’
The Counter Terror and Border Security Act 2019
I think I can safely say, with no shred of irony – this was how Nazi Germany was actualised – incrementally, legally. All done for the security and freedom of the people. How kind and considerate: but …haven’t we seen it all before? I wonder just how many people actually feel free and secure inside the new Gulag state?
Well, with the hidden vortices of unrepayable, exponentially increasing debts; and ineluctable time and entropy – this is as good as it gets. Until a quorum of people – at least – can face the void, and not be daunted or drawn into fear-first response – no peaceful Universal Humanist solutions can emerge. I’m coining the term ‘primate protest politics’ for those who want to retain a degree of their own self-interest in progress and prosperity – at the inevitable expense of the subordinate unpersoned Other. We need clean slate amnesties and blue sky aspirations for freedom to escape its closing cage. Starting now – the only time we can be free.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/censored
Primate Protest Politics: in times of prosperity, the majoritarian exploited went along with a globally cruel, violent imperialist sociopathological regime of power – out of optimised self-interest. When prosperity ends, rather than agitate for a new, demographically egalitarian form of governance – they want their old self-interested – based on exported violent exploitation – prosperity back. Thus politics is stuck in a materialist dialectical race to the bottom from which no new life politique can emerge. The politics of materialism is practico-inert: like so:
I think that the Assange affair will go down in history as our Dreyfuss moment; a significant historical inflexion point. What we have borne witness to is a mass movement of what was once the liberal intelligentsia into a type of liberal totalitarianism which will not brook the existence of any countervailing political philosophy, not to mention a quite unapologetic and open class hatred. This newly minted reactionary worldview, is, for example, evident in the diseased nihilism of its doyenne, Ayn Rand. This ability to choose sides in what is an ongoing class struggle is something unique to the liberal intelligentsia.
”The ability to attach themselves to class to which they did not originally belong was possible for intellectuals because they could adapt themselves to any viewpoint and because and because they and they alone were in a position to choose their affiliation whilst fhose immediately bound by class affiliation were only in rare exceptions able to transcend the boundaries of their class outlook.” (Ideology and Utopia – Karl Mannheim – p.141)
Of course it hardly needs pointing out that the ex-liberal intelligentsia – East and West – have chosen to throw in their lot with the dominant bourgeois class – assuming with alacrity the role of ideologues of the new order. The above reference to Dreyfuss should remind us that the present ideological/political leitmotif is not unique. It was a phenomenon which caught the attention of one Julien Benda in his work ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals’, e.g.
” … in our times the hatred between the three orders – i.e., the court nobles, the legal nobles and the clergy – melted into one hatred, that of the possessing classes for the working class.”
Thus the petit-bourgeois minions and gofers (to use Icke’s fitting description) of the political class, the media class and the academic class – a totally reactionary grouping – now form the ideological bedrock of the contemporary regime. This transitional era in which we find ourselves conforms exactly to the morbid stage characteristic of an impending and fundamental change, a process which Gramsci in his prison cell pointed out. Morbidity in terms of identity politics, post-modernism, neo-conservatism/liberalism and the rest of the obscurantist and solipsistic claptrap characteristic of a declining social order.
Better get ready – tumultuous times ahead. The future of humanity is in the balance.
Snap! Different words, historical POV, and figures of speech – but I think we just said pretty much the same thing.
The Dreyfus affair, hmmmmmmm. Interesting comparison…
The mostly ignored evidence around the Dreyfus affair strongly suggests it was a psyop, cooked up by zionists to kick-start the ‘nudge the Jews to Palestine’ campaign. Assange / Wikileaks (and Snowden) feel like a psyop too. His 911 stance (“I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.”) tells us all we need to know. I far as I can tell, he has never published info unfavorable to Israel, and arguably only does controlled leaks the US intelligence community want out.
Francis Lee: utterly brilliant comment, Cheers. The future is indeed looking very grim Francis.
I think western establishments will be somewhat disappointed their abuse of power and menace has been unable to silence criticism. They don’t scare us like they thought they might, just as people weren’t too scared to criticise Rome, the Nazis, Stalin and the rest. They deserve to end up like Mussolini.
Slaves under a loyalty test.
True loyalty is in shared idea and common cause – but conformity and compliance in a mere show or mimicry of loyalty is what makes a slave to fear. Doing and saying what is required or believed to be required in order to survive, mitigate pain of loss or ‘rise higher’ in relation to the pressing down of pain of loss on others.
Fear is tyranny – when hidden behind asserted denials and justifications.
The cost of tyranny is giving power and freedom and love to the hateful. Thus grows a grotesque parody of life, under the coercive control of that which has none – for it is but a mimicry in form of dead concepts by which to hide the true of living from a fear and threat of pain and loss, given power over truth.
Hate works behind a mask and illuminating the lie of the mask is to be seen to attack its power to work in the dark, under cover, without public knowledge or accountability.
So hate is brought out into the open – and may seem more powerful simply because more is visible to the inability to maintain a cover story amid a disintegrating mind – and so a disintegrating mind – or grotesque and insane parody of life – is the new ‘cover story’ – that trumps reason or even the pretence of having any, to the shifting lie as the hallmark of a hateful intent.
Hate is projected that its target be elsewhere. The power given to hate in this world is given under the wished belief or emotionally assertive invocation of power and protection – but for a self apart, maintained by the sacrifice of others.
A lack of true power is revealed in the hostage to hate and fear. Bringing the lie to light is in order to undo it and be free of it – not to find the justification for hate and suckle its illusion of power set over life as personal protection.
The light of living is of true presence because radiance or extension is the original communication beneath a learned mask that was to protect within a lovelessness – and has become the usurper and guard of denied love, as if denial is the power and love weak.
Nothing but love has the power to align in common cause – but such Cause is Living and shared – and not a top-down imposition of systemic rules that rule out the very Life they originally served.
Only a recognition that we do not know what love is – has the capacity to let it in and through us – let love know itself shared. What we have made of love is a grotesque parody, a Prodigal wasteland, a Promethean torment. Seeing the false AS false is the condition of its release unless we choose to use it as yet another attempt to steal the light for a special or private self-creation by setting accusation and cause, in the evil of the ‘other’.
Hate is intolerable and to hold it in our heart separate, is to need the ‘other’ to attack and sacrifice – our Self – but under the tyrannous belief it is directed away from a ‘surviving fragment’ of a broken whole.
Storing up treasures in Heaven has a counterpart of piling up denial or hate in hell. regardless the archaic terms here the nature of a gift truly shared is a blessing, and the nature of a toxic debt repackaged to seem a gilt or gilded security is a delusional dissociation in delay of a true reconciliation of account. Who – believing what they made of love BY believing it, can expect anything BUT humiliation, loss of power and damnation from transparency to truth and willingness for communication and relationship?
The mind of an insanity has disqualified itself from love by its own conviction – and yet the illumination or NOTICING of such a mind, is the light from which a memory rises that serves or embodies reason – and can grow to recognise the value of a true foundation as the undoing of a split mind. To seek freedom from a collective insanity is not to engage in it wherever we notice our ‘mind to do so’ – but to realign our abilities to serve a different purpose than survival in its frame.
A willingness to serve wholeness of being is not an expression of possession and control – nor an attempt to mimic the forms of care and concern – but a condition through which life moves us of Itself – and this we recognize un-coercive and true – but never alone, all by ourself and left to somehow prevail or survive under a sense of lack, loss and threat to our very existence. What else could rise but a will to power in the terms of fear of loss. Do we ever HAVE it – or is it a fleeting illusion that we must worship to save ourselves in image? Is fleeting and shifting illusion all that is? Or is the capacity to give meaning and live it a witness to the power of acceptance and belief?
Freedom is the power to align with what we accept true. If this were compelled it would no longer be freedom to know what we do – but it is still within freedom because we cannot escape by denial – but only in a rising from a new acceptance – which is not really in the frame of a problem but a perspective from which to see differently – and each step is a shift from an old choice that was not recognised as choice until we stepped out from its self-reinforcing mind-loop.
The idea of power over life (in fear of Life) will shift and take any and every form. The identity in form demands this. But phishing shows the weakness of identifying in imaged form because form is NOT in itself Reality and can be misperceived or misrepresented in error and in consolidation of error as self-illusion and manipulative intent.
No illusion or complex of entangled illusion is too big to fail if it is without foundation on which to stand. There is a ‘realpolitik’ to setting your house in order. Just because a mess is too big to deal with doesn’t stop a willingness to seek a moment of willingness in pause that listens or feels for what is truly worthy of acceptance and alignment in. The thinking-mind has to serve instead of lead because it is not really thinking but running an old program of definition and control. Living thought is creative in its very nature – and connects across time and space, because shared purpose is a resonant alignment and not a drowning discord in which no voice can be heard but a programmed blocking signal.
Does Satan get to show God His Job dancing to a false tune and thus win the wager? And is this ever anything but an individual choice – regardless the forms it takes?
Can a love and worship of form or investment in form, destroy the light that informs all knowing – be that true or filtered and distorted?
Can a mind set terms on itself that sets and demands outer conditions be met or else refuse to play? Can a mind become trapped in its own spin? Only in the capacity to believe it so.
Like the baseless fabric of this vision. It’s official the Antichrist is amongst us..forsooth the hounds of hell the dogs of war are loosed amongst us…put me neck pon a block and even chop it off me duppy come back and it still a laugh..they the servo mechanism s are already dead.
George Galloway did an excellent piece on Assange in his Talk Radio show. Kristinn Hrafnsson the current journalist / editor of WikiLeaks speaks with clarity and sadness on the current trial by media we are witnessing as democracy dies in front of our eyes.
Here in the U.K. Nesrine Malik wrote an “ opinion piece “ on Assange in which she (the current high priestess of Viner’s rag ) opined that Assange should be tried for rape, that we must not allow this crime, proven to be false, to go unpunished. That this 3rd rate journalist is given a platform for her vitriol is indicative of the level to which we have deteriorated here. I phoned the Guardian about their piece, spoke to an Irish woman ( Readers Editor) who one would think would have a more measured approach considering Irish history. I myself am Irish and spoke to her to remind her of past imperial crimes against the Irish of which there are countless examples.No joy.
Never in my 63yrs have I come across such blatant propaganda and ignorance both from the now debased MSM and the punter on the street as the lies continue to work their magic amongst the population at large. I also think that many are not being fooled as along with the Skripal affair, along with the Corbyn Antisemitism claims which have only temporarily tarnished his image, people are beginning to see after 8yrs of Tory rule the desecration of truth, of integrity and the criminal use of taxpayers money for whatever the Tories see fit. That the people are not the beneficiaries of that money, that much of it is siphoned off into offshore accounts. That taxpayers money was used to lock up an innocent man, a true hero of the people.
Their reckoning is coming, it’s coming.
“Logic, facts, and actual evidence have little to nothing to do with this process”. Then we are dealing with mythology. Assange is a prince to billions of people and has been kidnapped by the ‘dark forces’. This can only be settled at Runnymede.
https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/sex-lies-and-julian-assange/4156420
Here’s a rather interesting, to put it mildly, Australian documentary about Assange in Sweden.
‘This is why we are witnessing so many liberals (and liberals in leftist’s clothing) rushing to express their loathing of Assange in the same breath as they pretend to support him, not because they honestly believe the content of the official Julian Assange narrative that the ruling classes are disseminating, but because (a) they fear the consequences of not robotically repeating this narrative, and (b) Assange has committed the cardinal sin of reminding them that actual “resistance” to the global capitalist empire is possible, but only if you’re willing to pay the price.’ – yes, fear is at the heart of it.
First and foremost economic fear, because if you don’t toe the party line you are not invited into the club, but there is also a form intellectual intimidation levied against any journalist who strays too far from the kind of group-think that defines the Guardians output.
Since Viner took the helm it is taken as read all men are either bastards or sex offenders until proven otherwise – under this rubric commentators dare not risk challenging one of the Guardian’s most cherished shibboleths: namely whenever sexual allegations arise expressing doubt about the victims version of events is tantamount to abuse, while any defence offered by the perpetrator must be viewed with the deepest skepticism (because the specifics of each case have become secondary to a broader principle: the need to atone for crimes committed by men who might have got away with it even if you are not actually guilty of anything).
Such an intellectual comfort blanket removes the need to think for yourself or analyse the strength of evidence – how else can we account for the hysterical pearl clutching produced by the ghastly Jess Phillips
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/14/julian-assange-case-makes-clear-womens-rights-secondary-political-games
Or the equally ignorant Nesrine Malik who fails to understand that gender is not the primary reason for so many questions about the accusers version of events, a version that has alarmed both men AND women providing their minds are not already closed by the kind of identity politics that litters these two abysmal articles.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/15/left-blinkered-claims-julian-assange-sexual-assault
I think for a long time the boundaries between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ have been fragmenting and melting and in many ways have, or are becoming, close to meaningless. I loathe Owen Jones far more than Assange, yet Jones is supposed to represent the ‘left’ on the left-leaning, liberal Guardian, a newspaper I’ve read for a very long time, but now can’t read without wanting to scream and rip it to shreds.
My big problem with the left is that vast swathes of them have uncritically embraced the twin chimeras of identity and gender politics, which have, paradoxically alienated the left from millions of people who don’t even know what these categories and theories mean, but who do, in their everyday lives see their communities ravaged by the vicious class politics of neo-liberalism at home and neo-imperialism abroad, and they are increasingly rejecting them; as trillions are wasted on foreign wars which should have been used at home to rebuild roads, hospitals, schools, bridges and provide for the elderly, the sick, the unemployed and rejuvinate the wider economy. So the ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ have abandoned ‘class’ for gender and identity, at a time when inequality of opportunity, lifestyle, wealth and power, have never been greater. What’s really tragic and dangerous, is that it’s not the left who are harvesting the anger of ordinary people at the misery of their forgotten lives, but the social/nationalist right. This is what’s happening across Scandinavia and it’s spreading to the rest of Europe and the United States too, which explains Trump’s popularity and while he’ll win the next election. It’s the collapse of the left ideological and their abandonment of the working class to their fate, that’s paved the way for people like Trump.
Excellent comment. A further point to note is that the Right takes electoral advantage of the identity politics as pursued by the faux left. They call it ‘cultural marxism’ (or politcal correctness) and use it to mobilize those who dislike the finger-wagging about gender in the media.
Forgot to add that what I describe (the Right taking advantage from gender identity politics) was very clear in Brasil when Bolsonaro got elected. Agitatiing against ‘cultural marxism’ was one of his main issues. The same with ‘populist’ Right wing parties elsewhere.
MichaelK: exactly bang on. Agree that the left has abandoned the working class, and hence the rise of people like Farage, Trump, Wilders, – Pauline Hanson, here in Australia. Many people are feeling lots of economic pain and confusion, and who is there to give them the answers: the Nationalistic Right. The Left is (by and large) nowhere to be seen. Fully agree Michael.
Let’s just get one thing straight. Chelsea Manning is an agent, unless you believe that in the real world these are possibilities:
From Wikipedia
On January 5, 2010, Manning downloaded the 400,000 documents that became known as the Iraq War logs.[106] On January 8, she downloaded 91,000 documents from the Afghanistan database, known later as part of the Afghan War logs. She saved the material on CD-RW and smuggled it through security by labeling the CD-RW media “Lady Gaga”.[107] She then copied it onto her personal computer.[108] The next day, she wrote a message in a readme.txt file (see right), which she told the court was initially intended for The Washington Post.[109]
The person who was sentenced to 35 years imprisonment (reduced to 7) is now feted by the media with a photoshoot in Vogue by Annie Leibovitz and very sympathetic interviews where she says precisely nothing to indicate that she leaked due to principle or indignation.
If you believe she is a genuine leaker then please post your reasons for that belief. Of course, if you believe that when government/media tell us they put someone in jail this must be the truth then you can claim that is your evidence, however, I think there are many indicators to show that people they say go to jail, do not. As far as I’m concerned, I do not believe a word I see or hear from the government/media unless there is very clear evidence to back it up.
Withholding automatic acceptance or belief is the opportunity to look at it all (whatever it is) in a different light. The mind with which we look determines the result as our perception and experience. That is already a significant reawakening of awareness and responsibility.
It ‘does your head in’ to try to work out what is going on in a world where ‘news’ of events can be made up not only piecemeal – but as a broad spectrum mind trap.
But where we choose to give attention and extend or share relations is the basis of the world we each meet. Giving true witness is the basis for receiving it – and this means the capacity to pick up on a manipulative deceit and leave it hanging – not taking the bait.
There is another perspective that I don’t see given a voice – and that is of an overriding USE of the mind of illusion to waken FROM it. This is also the idea that ‘evil’ serves a purpose unknowing.
Questioning the reality of ‘the world’ will meet the outrage of the grievance – but I am not questioning the love that is within our attachment to life in the world – only the framework that love suffers under and dies in.
The idea of Disclosure is assigned to ‘alien agenda’. What if we have it all backwards – and in alienation from our Self and Greater Life fear (demonise and attack) all Messengers of Life as a matter of (or material) ‘survival’?
Undoing alienation is an inside job – that chooses and attracts or aligns the conditions of support on purpose – rather than persist in a sense of being deprived and denied (though of course symptoms may persist after a change of direction, until they fade from non use).
Likewise no one can really choose FOR another and trying to make them choose is an entanglement in illusion that you can and HAVE done so. But I can support your freedom and thereby strengthen my own – even if your choices are not aligned with mine in form. I admit I can judge (hate) others for choices I hate in myself to inflict or to suffer – and yet it is MYSELF I hate in them – because I don’t know their life’s unfolding for them while locked into ‘myself’.
The idea of perhaps inwardly saying “thanks – but no thanks! Is an acknowledgement of the another’s right to be – without acceptance or support for choices that I hold unworthy of them as of myself. But the ability to make a choice remains the power by which – in time – a better choice can be aligned in. The alternative is this mind-control world of denial of choice and indeed consciousness – excepting as a system unit under an “Internment of Things”.
While billionaires pump the idea of transhuman upload of personality construct to bio-tech software, the human is downgraded to automaton or golem – as a living tool or discarded after being asset stripped. The mind is being reconfigured to run only the code – so now is a good time to be alive – in the truest sense of the meaning – because if not now – when?
On my journey since 2014 on waking up (partly) to the lie of 9/11 and then last year really waking up (staged death and injury) I have argued and argued and argued and argued with people. What fascinates me is that people will not change their minds even when they have no reason, logic or evidence to defend or justify their belief – absolutely none (see my article about self-styled skeptics guilty of this https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/27/44920/). For example, I’ve engaged with Mick West of metabunk infamy over the collapse of WTC-7. I’ve discussed my 10-point Occam’s Razor challenge with him and invited him to respond but in our lengthy email exchange he could not provide a single point to support fire as cause. Not a single point but it didn’t change his mind!
When I see 26 downvotes on a comment with only a single comment in response – a pathetic ad hominem – and now 11 downvotes on this comment with no argument against what I say I wonder what the downvoters think that signifies. To me it signifies people who are invested in a belief with no argument to support it and feel hostility because a view is expressed at odds with their own but which they cannot defend. Why do we need to be so invested in a belief? Why can’t we change our beliefs more easily when evidence is supplied that shows they’re wrong. I can change a belief in a heartbeat (or at least immediately be open to its being wrong) when I see the evidence bringing it into question. Then when I change my belief I’m right again – until the next time it’s shown to be wrong. So many people seem to have woken up to the 9/11 lie but then fossilised in that belief. The fact that death and injury were staged on 9/11 or that, in fact, we’re drowning in staged events or that the power elite so clearly inform us of what they’re up to remains alien to them no matter how often you point out the evidence for it. Why?
Perhaps you are quick to see everything as staged by ‘whoever they are’.
Manning”s unmanning so to speak could be part of a plea bargain – what I mean is that events can be more complex than ‘they staged it or ‘everything is their disinfo’ excepting the voice that accuses it in the other.
The next thing is that if the focus is on denial of independent journalism that challenges corrupt or secretly wielded power by holding it in some sense to account, bringing in the claim that ‘Manning is a disinfo agent’ may seem an attempt to divide or bring conflict into the issues arising from Assange’s arrest – or unravel to a fearful chaos where even more of this ‘world’ is staged than reason would allow.
In a world of perception management rather than real communication – what does it look like? How will this come over? What will people think? How can we limit the ‘damage? how can we use this to our advantage? How can we time all this so as to hide something else? How doe we make an impact and change the world?
This can also be part of a bargaining process, How do you want to be seen to be arrested? Or might be determined by Assange asking for and receiving the permission to carry Gore Vidal, or publish ‘Resist Uk’ as a ‘brexit subliminal’.
All of which is beside the point that fear of publishing any real challenge or critical view of the ‘force behind a tragic farce’ is paralysing the Media and distorting communication even without additional sowing of disinformation by design – because guessing at the intentions of others is always involving the projection of our own ego. The more we invest it in others the less sanity remains within our notice.
I cant tell you what is ‘going on’ except in terms of human consciousness in general – by which we may look at our own part specifically.
‘They’ are not a homogenous, integrated and disciplined force excepting in one sense – as I see it – and that is the urge to survive – in prevailing over or through perceived and believed threat that is then forfended, escaped, diverted or mitigated. So that may include ‘Us’ or ‘me’ in ways I am less willing to own or notice.
So in most basic terms, the collective alignment of a ‘survival mind’ is actually a destructive intent set against both human Consciousness (capitalised to discriminate from a managed perception) and through human activity, Life on Earth (capitalised to indicate a true relational being). ‘What For?’ is the question that is not asked because a default is already running as if it knows.
Invested identity sees its survival in maintaining its possession and control – so as to deny or escape loss. And a precarious sense of possessing little and having little if any power fears any change as likely to lose the little that they have.
If you stand in what you write does it matter if you get liked or not? Are ‘likes’ a true measure of anything?
I haven’t found you as receptive to other’s views in past exchanges as you perceive or present yourself to be. Its easy to think we are the ‘good guys’ – because we have some very bad actors in our sights and we are not them. I don’t look in such terms because I see the framing definitions shape the perceptions – not a ‘morally judged’ (sic) ‘pass or fail’ by assertions seeking consensus for social inclusion, worth or social credits.
Human society may be much more of a lunatic asylum than anyone in their own ‘mind’ imagines. But I favour a process of communication as the means to arrive at a genuinely positive outcome – while others have no willingness, trust or desire to open relation or communication with ‘enemies. threats or liabilities’. But every willingness to force or manipulate others into compliance or indeed self-destructive thought and act.
I sense that far from being under ‘control’ the very use of ‘control’ raises hell – and that a lot of insanity is the action and reaction of such a struggle, set in such terms, and defended against communication.
In another recent article on OG is the dictate – ‘if you are not with us you are against us’. I regard this as the basic self-other split or division that protects all hate, war and woes thereof. The mind is not intended to set identity – but to recognise and extend and share it. Fear can ‘recognize’ threat, rival or treachery in anyone and project it so as to perceive and believe – and draw forth reactions that support the belief.
Responsibility for the mind of fear cannot awaken or grow while feeding it with identity investment or sacrifice and worth-ship. Therefore calling hate from out of its mask or hiding without replicating it is in a similar vein to Wikileaks publishing the video of terrorism carried out against civilians. It was not plausibly deniable and so regardless of what many already ‘knew’ it was known to be known by mainstream exposure – and that is what is being shut down by ’embedded journalism’ as an agent of state control.
So I turn my back on ‘mainstream’ perception management and hold the qualities of life by living them and aligning in them instead of the inducements or ‘incentives’ to join in hate – that are more ’embedded’ in my thought than I generally recognize or accept as within my realm of responsibility. But while I have willingness, that is a re-education – not a conviction that damns.
Binra, I’m afraid your comment contains the sort of cliche responses I’ve come so used to expecting no matter whom I turn to.
I’m very quick to cry fakery where the power elite are involved it’s true. Very, very quick. However, there’s a perfectly good reason for that. Their fakery drips with certain hallmarks. They’re everywhere you look.
Not when you look at the evidence in its entirety. Right off the bat the story screams implausibility – not that I suspected or noticed it at all when I first heard it back in the early twenty-tens because at that stage I had no clue about 9/11 or all the rest of it. The confiding in whomever it was, the downloading of a ridiculous quantity of files in one day labelled Lady Ga Ga, etc is beyond implausible. The Wikipedia entry says it all. And we only have to think of Lenin’s quote, “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” We see evidence of the power elite infiltrating the opposing side massively. You can see in their planned events that the infiltration is planned before the event has even happened with the various aspects of the infiltration rolled out at the appropriate moments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning
You didn’t read my comment carefully, binra. The work “signifies” should be a clue. My beliefs (as far as facts are concerned) are based purely on reason, evidence and logic. Downvotes mean zero to me in terms of affecting my thoughts. It’s the significance of downvotes WITHOUT a valid opposing argument. Do you not think it’s important if people believe without reason, logic and evidence. Don’t you think that’s a pretty dire state of affairs? And what I find is that it is ridiculously prevalent no matter what side of the conspiracy fence people are on.
I wonder what you’re referring to. I’m not receptive to argument that doesn’t stand up, that’s true, but I wonder if you can nominate argument I’m not receptive to that does.
Well I didn’t argue – I simply engaged.
I’ve seen enough to suspend emotional judgements on unconformable or inconsistent accounts – and to any ‘news story’. I haven’t taken it up as my focus. I see that we can look on the power given to deceit as too big to foil, but it also speaks of cornered desperation – which of course can be dangerous to confront head on.
Following the wrong guide ‘delivers unto evil’. I focus on the basis for discerning the nature and purpose of what we accept as our guidance. The world is not what we think – but what we think determines how we see and be in relation to it.
I feel part of a psyop’s payload is to to f*** the mind that gives it attention. I look on the negative in order to free myself from its fascination and framing.
I get part of what you say, binra. I’m obsessed when there is really no reason to be because you can work these things out so quickly and move on – which I kind of do in a way. I mean, people spend hours upon hours analysing Christchurch whereas I just look at it sufficiently to work out it’s a staged event. For one thing, I cannot stomach all the nauseating witness testimony and all the ridiculous convolutions. I do admire the people who wade heroically through it, I simply don’t understand how they can stomach it – then again they do come up with some wonderful nuggets of hoaxery and get creative with it, eg, the driving dog in the Parkland shooting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt0fkI5ZdVQ. Hilarious!
If I don’t feel anything trustworthy to relate to or with – I don’t give it allegiance or alignment.
In this sense I choose not to enter into a deceit recognised as such – or at least as not who I am or accept myself to be.
I cant and do not need to have to convince anyone else of what is their own will – but I do feel to reflect the nature of what is being chosen AS choice. Not knowing what we do is the realm of human expertise set as normalised and habitual perception and response.
The complexity of deceit – as I see it – goes deep into the structuring of the mind and of society. Making up ‘reality’ seems like a terrible ‘power’ to me – but is the logical extension of a mind of judgement in its own spin. To make war upon Realty is absurd in reality but terrifying in concept – because a lie cannot ‘survive’ or in fact Live, but must sacrifice the living in order to seem to be – and this includes the denial of awareness of the lie – except in complex packages of toxic debt presented or targeted as ‘assets’ worthy of accepting.
Putting things in ‘brackets’ is a metaphor I use for “more to be revealed” – in this sense I hold a sense of probabilities or possibilities amidst a life more complex that any model or thinking can ‘out think’ and yet within a simple or unifying desire.
When hasn’t our world been mad?
My true response to that is not a historical answer, but a living appreciation for all or any moment of truly shared being. The word ‘love’ has been abused. Love remains Itself.
Hating hate only makes sense in terms of emptying myself of what does not truly have belonging. Otherwise do I not ‘hate and attack myself’ in the Other in belief that hate redeems me by destruction?
This is a rather interesting take on Julian Assange from, of all places, Fox News and and one of their opinionated journalists, the ‘rightwing’ Tucker Carlson, who single-handedly demolishes the ‘case’ against Assange. Jimmy Dore is stunned that Carlson is inclined to do this, remember he’s on the rightwing, when the assembled ranks of ‘liberals’ and the ‘left’ inside the corporate media fail so badly. What, the fuck, is going on?
You ought to put some kind of health warning on those links you supply. I made the serious mistake of clicking on Owen Jones’s pontificating shit: “You cannot be a progressive if ….” yadda yadda – and we get the liberal mantra about what is permissable to support. And Joshua Frank complaining that Assange is “misogynistic” – thus dismissing all those damning leaks because the guy who leaked is just not nice.
“….after he’s been safely dead for ten or twenty years, they’ll name a few streets and high schools after him. Maybe they’ll even build him a monument.”
Don’t forget canonization – just as the outspoken arch-bishop Óscar Romero was finally canonized 38 years after he had been safely assassinated.
We don’t need such a long scribe to understand that shooting a messenger is always more important than reading the message. Truth is verboten.
At the time, Julia Gillard was Prime Minister of Australia. Asked what she thought of Assange who had just burst on the world stage she said of his activities ‘they are a grossly irresponsible thing to do’. She disqualified herself with that because she had had the opportunity to say that it’s all so new, must examine.
She has the opportunity now to make good, but her love for Obama (the Trojan) is probably stronger.
Chuckle, very astute 😉
I don’t know Julian Assange and I’m not sure I’d get on with him if I met him but I’m pretty sure I’ve been subjected to a barrage of propaganda about him. The format is the same whenever there’s an Enemy of The State involved and its designed to paint the none true believers into a corner — you get pushed into a ‘like’ / ‘hate’ binary choice so you end up mentally worming your way around it by coming out with some anodyne like “He might be a crazy/dictator/whatever but…..” which is tantamount to agreeing with the ‘he’s an enemy of the state that should be shot on sight’. Its all about degrading or destroying the messenger so that you can neutralize the message.
(I have found myself being caught in this kind of rationalization many times. My first sentence, the routine disclaimer, might be construed as more of the same.)
A Wiki isn’t anything special, its just a piece of software that’s designed to organize and publish user generated content. I use them in its Wikipedia form or as a tool for getting technical support. Wikileaks’s secret sauce is that it has a way to make submissions anonymous and its content is moderated before publishing. This allows leaked information to be put up for public scrutiny with the moderation keeping the noise down. Even with moderation the veracity of that content has to be “TBD” — you take it with at least a pinch of salt — but its unlikely to be any worse than the thousands of other conspiracy oriented sites. The real problem with it is that judging from official reaction this content is true — the authorities aren’t going to worry too much about ongoing theories about pizza restaurants an pedophile rings (with added Clinton) but tales of dubious behaviour that gives the lie to an official line is going to incur displeasure. As for it being some subtle plot by foreign intelligence agencies, that’s certainly possible — but its equally likely that it could be a plot from a domestic agency or other well organized actor. This ultimately is the downside of a Wikileaks — the information might well be true but without much of an idea about who’s publishing it and why we’re at risk of being led around by the nose.
It’s true.
(“The demonization of the empire’s enemies is not a deception … it is a loyalty test. It is a ritual in which the masses (who, let’s face it, are de facto slaves) are ordered to display their fealty to their masters, and their hatred of their masters’ enemies.”)
– spot on analysis by the author!
Here in the U.S. the “hip” and “liberal” late-night millionaire comedians are doing their part to display complete amoral “fealty” to their wealthy masters – mocking Assange and his arrest in the most odious ways imaginable. Demonstrating yet again that our American propaganda system is absolutely airtight. There simply will be no deviation from acceptable thought and opinion allowed. So if you want to think of yourself as someone who is – “hip” and “liberal” – than surely you must laugh along with the crowd and at the apparently hysterically funny joke that is, and has been, essentially – the torture of Julian Assange. In the U.S. today, this sort of public degradation and humiliation spectacle passes – for of all things – “entertainment.”
Yes, it would make a great slogan…demonisation of our rulers enemies is not a deception… it’s a loyalty test.
And it has always been so. Those that fail the cardinal test do so at their own peril. Later to be canonised when it is safe to do so as CJ alludes to.
Those canonised at the point of death are sure to be the empires/rulers acolytes such as John McCain.
“So if you want to think of yourself as someone who is – “hip” and “liberal” – than surely you must laugh along with the crowd and at the apparently hysterically funny joke that is, and has been, essentially – the torture of Julian Assange.” – how true, but pseudoliberals have not only failed to see that Assange is being tortured, but clamour for greater privations to be inflictedon him.
The sneering of Moore, Hyde, Malik and Phillips via the Guardian has been especially revolting.
But this doesn’t stop them churning out endless ‘won’t someone think of the children’ type articles despite the fact they have been giving their tacit support to gangsters who are devouring the planet, and thus responsible for the very conditions they can’t stop whining about.
The emergence of out and out lunatics like Trump signals how even the most damaged politician can somehow seem preferable to the toxic phonies who pollute the ‘liberal’ media.
The massive migration to the starboard side of the human ship makes it easier to retch over the side. It also jeopardizes its seaworthiness. Soon we would have heard that Assange only has one ball, were there not so many Swedish witnesses. Good article, not white-hot enough.
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