Zero Percent of Elite Commentators Oppose Regime Change in Venezuela
Teddy Ostrow, via FAIR
A FAIR survey of US opinion journalism on Venezuela found no voices in elite corporate media that opposed regime change in that country. Over a three-month period (1/15/19–4/15/19), zero opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post took an anti–regime change or pro-Maduro/Chavista position. Not a single commentator on the big three Sunday morning talkshows or PBS NewsHour came out against President Nicolás Maduro stepping down from the Venezuelan government.
Of the 76 total articles, opinion videos or TV commentator segments that centered on or gave more than passing attention to Venezuela, 54 (72 percent) expressed explicit support for the Maduro administration’s ouster. Eleven (14 percent) were ambiguous, but were only classified as such for lack of explicit language. Reading between the lines, most of these were clearly also pro–regime change. Another 11 (14 percent) took no position, but many similarly offered ideological ammo for those in support.
The Times published 22 pro–regime change commentaries, three ambiguous and five without a position. The Post also spared no space for the pro-Chavista camp: 22 of its articles expressed support for the end to Maduro’s administration, eight were ambiguous and four took no position. Of the 12 TV opinions surveyed, 10 were pro-regime change and two took no position.
(The Times and Post pieces were found through a Nexis search for “Venezuela” between 1/15/19–4/15/19 using each paper as a source, narrowed to opinion articles and editorials. The search was supplemented with an examination of each outlet’s opinion/blog pages. The TV commentary segments were found through Nexis searches for “Venezuela” and the name of the talkshow during the same time period, in the folders of the corresponding television network: NBC News/CBS News transcripts, ABC News transcripts, and PBS NewsHour. Non-opinion TV news segments were omitted. The full list of items included can be found here.)
Corporate news coverage of Venezuela can only be described as a full-scale marketing campaign for regime change. If you’ve been reading FAIR recently (1/25/19, 2/9/19, 3/16/19)—or, indeed, since the early 2000s (4/18/02; Extra!, 11–12/05)—the anti-Maduro unanimity espoused in the most influential US media should come as no surprise.
This comes despite the existence of millions of Venezuelans who support Maduro—who was democratically elected twice by the same electoral system that won Juan Guaidó his seat in the National Assembly—and oppose US/foreign intervention. FAIR (2/20/19) has pointed out corporate media’s willful erasure of vast improvements to Venezuelan life under Chavismo, particularly for the oppressed poor, black, indigenous and mestizo populations. FAIR has also noted the lack of discussion of US-imposed sanctions, which have killed at least 40,000 Venezuelans between 2017–18 alone, and continue to devastate the Venezuelan economy.
Many authors in the sample eagerly championed the idea of the US ousting Maduro, including coup leader Juan Guiadó himself, in the Times (1/30/19) and Post (1/15/19), and on the NewsHour (2/18/19).
The Times made its official editorial opinion on the matter crystal clear at the outset of the attempted coup (1/24/19): “The Trump administration is right to support Mr. Guaidó.” Followed by FAIR’s favorite Times columnist, Bret Stephens (1/25/19):
The Trump administration took exactly the right step in recognizing National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s constitutionally legitimate president.
It’s generally a nation’s supreme court that has the final say on who is constitutionally legitimate, but in this case they can apparently be overruled by a foreign government—or a foreign newspaper columnist.
The Post editorial board also joined Team Unelected President (1/24/19):
The [Trump] administration’s best approach would be to join with its allies in initiatives that would help Venezuelans while bolstering Mr. Guaidó.
The Times even produced an opinion video (4/1/19) with Joanna Hausmann, “a Venezuelan American writer and comedian,” as she is described in her Times bio. Between sarcastic stabs at Venezuela’s “tyrannical dictator” and cute animations of “Ruth Bader Ginsburg in workout clothes”—Hausmann’s self-described “spirit animal”—come more serious declarations about the nation’s political situation:
Juan Guiadó is not an American right-wing puppet leading an illegitimate coup, but a social democrat appointed by the National Assembly, the only remaining democratically elected institution left in Venezuela…. Let’s provide humanitarian aid and support efforts to restore democracy.
Odd that the Times didn’t find it necessary to note a blaring conflict of interest: Hausmann’s father is Ricardo Hausmann, Juan Guaidó’s appointed Inter-American Development Bank representative. Mint Press News (3/19/19) bluntly described him as the “neoliberal brain behind Juan Guaidó’s neoliberal agenda.”
It would be ludicrous to think the Times would withhold as blatant a connection to Maduro if one of his aides’ daughters made a snarky opinion video calling Juan Guaidó a would-be “brutal dictator”—even if our theoretical commentator was “an independent adult woman who has built a popular following on her own,” as Times opinion video producer Adam Ellick said in defense of the omission. Such a crucial relationship to a powerful Chavista politician would never go undisclosed—in the unlikely event that such a perspective would be tolerated in the opinion pages of an establishment paper.
These are just a few of many media pundits’ endorsements of Guaidó—someone whose name most of the Venezuelan population did not even recognize before he declared himself interim president. Put more accurately, they are endorsements of a US-backed coup attempt.
One of the more muddled regime change endorsements came from Rep. Ro Khanna’s Post op-ed (1/30/19), in which he says no! to military intervention, no! to sanctions, yet yes! to… “diplomatic efforts”:
The United States should lend its support to diplomatic efforts to find some form of power-sharing agreement between opposition parties, and only until fair elections can take place, so that there is an orderly transition of power.
“Diplomatic” is a reassuring term, until you realize that US diplomacy, as FAIR’s Janine Jackson explained on Citations Needed podcast (3/20/19), is “diplomacy where we try to get other countries to do what we want them to do”—in this case, effecting a “transition of power” in another country’s government.
Francisco Rodríguez and Jeffrey D. Sachs (New York Times, 2/2/19) envision similar efforts for a “peaceful and negotiated transition of power,” and Khanna made sure to characterize Maduro as “an authoritarian leader who has presided over unfair elections, failed economic policies, extrajudicial killings by police, food shortages and cronyism with military leaders.”
In other words, Maduro the Dictator must be overthrown—but don’t worry, the US would be diplomatic about it.
Those that didn’t take explicit positions nonetheless wrote articles blaming all or most of Venezuela’s woes on Maduro and Chávez. Economics wiz Paul Krugman (New York Times, 1/29/19) gave his spiel:
Hugo Chávez got into power because of rage against the nation’s elite, but used the power badly. He seized the oil sector, which you only do if you can run it honestly and efficiently; instead, he turned it over to corrupt cronies, who degraded its performance. Then, when oil prices fell, his successor tried to cover the income gap by printing money. Hence the crisis.
Note that Krugman failed to mention the 57 percent reduction in extreme poverty that followed Chávez’s replacement of management of the state-owned oil industry (which has been nationalized since 1976, long before Chavismo). Nor does he acknowledge the impact of US sanctions, or any other sort of US culpability for Venezuela’s economic crisis.
Caroline Kennedy and Sarah K. Smith (Washington Post, 2/5/19) did not explicitly blame Maduro and Chávez for Venezuela’s “spiral downward,” but similarly ignored evidenced US involvement in that spiral. There are only so many places where you can point fingers without naming names.
Dictatorship-talk—writers lamenting the horrific and helpless situation under an alleged “dictator”—characterized many of the ambiguous and no-position articles. In the Post (1/24/19), Megan McArdle asked:
You have to look at Venezuela today and wonder: Is this what we’re seeing, the abrupt end of Venezuela’s years-long economic nightmare? Has President Nicolás Maduro’s ever-more-autocratic and incompetent regime finally completed its long pilgrimage toward disaster?
By simply describing the declining situation of a country (Times, 2/12/19, 4/1/19) and using words like “regime” (Times, 2/14/19), “authoritarian” (Post, 1/29/19) and, of course, “dictatorship” (Post, 1/23/19; Times, 2/27/19) in reference to government officials, commentators create the pretext for regime change without explicitly endorsing it.
The Sunday talkshows and NewsHour also couldn’t find a single person to challenge the anti-Maduro narrative. They did find room, however, for three of the most passionate advocates of regime change in Venezuela: Sen. Marco Rubio (Meet the Press, 1/27/19), Donald Trump (Face the Nation, 2/3/19) and Guaidó himself (NewsHour, 2/18/19).
Other TV regime change proponents included Florida Sen. Rick Scott (Meet the Press, 2/3/19), 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls Peter Buttigieg (This Week, 2/3/19) and Amy Klobuchar (Meet the Press, 3/17/19), Sen. Tim Kaine (Face the Nation, 3/17/19), and Guaidó-appointed, Mike Pence-approved “chargé d’affaires” Carlos Vecchio (NewsHour, 3/4/19).
But leave it to Nick Schifrin of the NewsHour (1/30/19) to bring on “two views” of the US intervention question that are both pro-regime change and pro-US intervention. View No. 1 came from Isaias Medina, a former Venezuelan diplomat who resigned from his post in protest against Maduro. Medina made the unlikely claim that 94 percent of the Venezuelan population—or 129 percent of the population over the age of 14—support US intervention to overthrow the Maduro government:
Not only I, but 30 million people, support not only the US circumstance, but also the Latin American initiative to restore the rule of law, democracy and freedom in Venezuela.
View No. 2, the ostensibly anti-regime change take, came from Benjamin Gedan, who served on the Obama administration’s National Security Council as director for Venezuela and the Southern Cone. When asked if he supported Trump’s moves to sanction Maduro and possibly use US troops to oust him, Gedan responded:
I think both of those steps are problematic. I think the sense of urgency that the United States administration has shown is absolutely correct…. The question is, how can we assist the Venezuelan people [to] promote a peaceful transition in Venezuela, without harming the people themselves, or fracturing the coalition that we have built over two administrations?
In other words, how can we overthrow the Venezuelan government without destroying the country—or “fracturing the coalition we have built”? The US has many options on the table, but none of them involve not pursuing the overthrow of Maduro.
In the “no position” camp for TV news, New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger (Face the Nation, 1/27/19) noted that the problem with US support for Guaidó is one of “both history and inconsistency”:
Our history in Latin America of intervening is a pretty ugly one, and the inconsistency of not applying the same standards to places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where the president has embraced strong men, I think may come back to make the United States look pretty hypocritical, not for the first time.
Sanger indulged in the popular “hypocrisy takedown”: The problem, as presented, isn’t that the US disrupts democracies, destroys economies and kills people, but rather that it does so inconsistently. While vaguely acknowledging the US’s horrific track record of Latin American interventions, and Trump’s cherry-picking of governments worthy of regime change, Sanger didn’t take the logical next step of calling for the US to keep its hands off Venezuela. Instead, he called Maduro’s supporters—defined as “China, Russia and Cuba”—“not a great collection,” and failed to push back against the claim that Maduro “fixed the last” election. Without a formal declaration, Sanger did all the ideological preparation for foreign-backed regime change.
That elite media didn’t find a single person to vouch for Maduro or Chavismo, and that almost all the opinions explicitly or implicitly expressed support for the ouster of Venezuela’s elected president, demonstrates a firm editorial line, eerily obedient to the US government’s regime change policy.
This isn’t the first time that FAIR (e.g., 3/18/03, 4/18/18) has found a one-sided debate in corporate media on US intervention. When it comes to advocating the overthrow of the US government’s foreign undesirables, you can always count on opinion pages to represent all sides of why it’s a good thing. And the millions of people who beg to differ? Well, they’re just out of the question.
Featured image: New York Times cartoon by Patrick Chappatte (1/31/19) featuring Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó.
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So now PBS stands for Public Bull Shit . Mind you they also showed a film purported to be a US air attack on terrorists stealing oil from Syrian oil wells and driving it to Turkey but it was actually the Russians doing the bombing and the USA sitting on their hands.
Sky and Channel 4 are particularly poisonous in their coverage, doing lengthy puff pieces to support the coup. Some cloned third rate female media hack like Alex Crawford covering the “rapturous applause” for Gweedo, the “new Messiah”, “man of the people”, “rock star”, “going to church with his mother”, “helping a woman who had fallen over.”
Lengthy coverage of economic hardship, without any mention of 20 years of US economic strangulation, theft of tens of billions of Venezuelan assets or the heist of 80 tons of Venezuelan gold by the Bank of England.
The power and water outages – US cyber attack casually dismissed.
“Maduro’s supporters taking refuge in 5 star hotels.”
“Fear and repression.” No curiosity at all about comparing how public order is dealt with in Gaza, Paris or elsewhere. Or how an opposition politician seeking the violent overthrow of the elected government and soliciting a foreign invasion would be dealt with in the US or UK.
No pretence whatsoever of balance, objectivity, or seeking the other point of view.
Exactly what you would expect from this presstitute stenographer scum.
Could there possibly be any more conclusive proof the random guy is anything other than a pretty boy mannequin puppet of the US?
Not often that I post a link to Fox News but I could not resist this one.Tucker interviews Anya Parampil.
https://russia-insider.com/en/rt-infobabe-anya-parampil-goes-supernova-tucker-carlson-about-venezuela-must-watch/ri26922
breitbart dot com has just published that Juan Guaidó is the legitimate President.
How can breitbart know better than the rest of the world?
A bit off-topic perhaps, but I see that poor old Corby has put his foot in his mouth again. He apparently has read and reviewed a book, ‘Imperialism’ by J.A.Hobson a ground-breaking polemic which came out in 1902. Hobson was a new radical liberal and among other things moved among the leftist intelligentsia including L.T. Hobhouse who like Hobson wrote for the Guardian (yes, you read that correctly) under the tutelage of C.P.Scott, the then editor. Hobson and Hobhouse were affectionately known as ‘the 2 Hobs’.
What has caused the present storm in a teacup was the fact that Corbyn read and did a review of this work. Horror of horrors there was a reference to the Rothschild banking syndicate. Of course the zionists have gone berserk: ”Corbyn has read an ‘anti-semitic’ book!!. In point of fact their was only one reference to Rothschild – p.57 – throughout the entire book, and no references at all to Jew, Jews, Jewish, either in the text or the index. But of course this didn’t stop the zionist lobby who are now in full cry. We must now not read certain books because they are intrinsically ”anti-semitic’. Well goodbye George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf then, they will be placed on the zionist version of the catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
Of course leading the charge have been the MSM including the Guardian and New Statesman – naturally.
It will also regale readers of OffGuardian to know that the neo-con rag is sponsoring a night with – wait for it – Tony Blair!! tickets available. Yep, can’t wait for my evening edification at the hands of a primary war criminal and mass murderer.
Francis Lee: well someone should just go there and conduct a citizens arrest on the evil pile of blubber (Blair). In fact, get a few people into the audience and take turns at heckling the prick. Loudly. Oh, regards the first part of your excellent comment, the whole anti semitic hysteronics is about censorship and silencing critics of Israel’s brutal blood drenched occupation and its war crimes. Yeah, I know that’s plainly obvious to readers at OffGuardian, but to your Tom & Jane Smith of Swindon, how obvious is this deliberate smearing by the Zionist lobby?
Are we not missing the point? I read it as a really rather tenuous and desperate self-defence of capitalism. The book, after all, was about imperialism – and couched in the metaphors of its day.
Anti-semitism is a metonym in defence against anti-capitalism. If you are anti-capitalist, you must be an anti-semite, right? Only an anti-semite – incapable of discerning the few from the Jew – would attack capitalism. That was the whole point of the IHRA confusionary intentional conflation. The confusion is not mine, it is the twisted logic of the capitalist, projecting their own racist hatred as a self-defence mechanism. A confused conflation that JC himself has fallen for – in his appeasement ritual after the Mear One micro-scandal (which raised its head again yesterday) When he said:
“Second, there are people who have come to see capitalism and imperialism as the product of conspiracy by a small shadowy elite rather than a political, economic, legal and social system. That is only a step from hoary myths about “Jewish bankers” and “sinister global forces”.
There are clearly those among the neoliberal Nomenklatura (brilliant site BTW, Gezzah) – who are a bit tetchy about the inter-dynamics of capitalism and imperialism. And what is the third pillar of MLK’s triple evil? Racism. It makes a good defence in breaking up the dynamic association of capitalism, militarism, imperialism, and racism …leading to international poverty and global immiseration. Of course they are not all linked. Capitalism is a pure ethic of humanitarian development. One that benefits all people equally …well some more equally than others – but that is meritorious and incentivising for the dirty, no good, lazy, backward people in this world!
And they (ahem, Mark Regev – who said that?) found this passage from 2012 (?) on MayDay …the Communist First of May …International Labour Day? Probably just a coincidence!
I’m surprised they haven’t pointed out the anti-semitic nature of the Labour slogan – “For the Many; not the Few” …rhymes with… Perhaps they would not stoop so low? They are getting that desperate, perhaps they will?
BigB: point taken, and agree that it’s also used as a defence of capitalism – ‘the status quo’ also. Glad you found the Neoliberalism Softpanorama site excellent. Its so huge with so many subsections, you could spend a whole week on there. Think the guy behind it is from Czech Republic or Hungary, but it’s a valuable resource also. Here in Melbourne for Mayday, they had signs up basically saying ‘Celebrate May 1st By Going On A Shopping Tour Of Melbourne’ or something similar to that. I glanced at the sign and just went…. WTF?
It’s not off topic as the US media mentioned here appear to e controlled by supporters of Israel and both Chavez and Maduro have supported Palestine.
This whole Venezuelan thing has got me totally confused. I simply can’t decide if “intervention” is code for “meddling” or if “meddling” is code for “intervention”.
As for “sanctions” – do they or do they not include years of unremmitting, indirect internal subversion by the “moderate” classes of the former local Venezuealan/international financial skimming racket satrap-middlemen against the “regime” of Chavez and Maduro or are they confined to the direct external intermeddling of nation states?
This is just an indication of what to expect in the event of forthcoming military aggression against Iran and/ or Venezuela – endless cheerleading from the loathsome MSM, very crude third rate propaganda campaigns and an unending stream of not very convincing lies parroted by presstitute stenographers..
What surprises me most is the very crude and blatant nature of all this. They are lying, everybody knows they’re lying, and they even brag about how they’re lying (like loudmouth Pompeo.) It’s like Hitler before the attack on Poland – he said he needed a pretext for war. It didn’t need to be particularly convincing. All that mattered was winning, and then he’d be the one writing the history books. The ham fisted false flag at Gleiwitz provided the required pretext.
I’ve been expecting an attack on a US ship in the Persian Gulf by the “terrorist IRGC” for some time. Cheney wanted to stage one, and Pompeo/ Bolton are likely to follow suit. We have just had Pompeo’s “Maduro wanted to flee to Cuba but the Russians stopped him” BS from Pompeo. They tried the same thing with Gaddafi in 2011. And similar lies that Assad’s wife Asma had fled the country. These clowns really need some new material.
Hunt wants to ban RT after the Salisbury false flag.
Listening to the CBC, I’ve gotten the impression they have figured out the coup attempts are not working. A few months ago they were bombastic on the Maduro “regime” (always a code word for “government we don’t like”) and referred to him inevitably as “Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro”). It was clear they were bouncily sure he was a total goner. this morning’s reporting was more sedate: it was “unclear” how much military support Guaido enjoyed. by which is meant of course: very clear but in a direction they’d rather not report upon. But still, there was less fat-headed bombast in the overall tone.
Well spotted. BBC integrity is becoming an oxymoron.
The CBC unfortunately has gone neocon in the last years .I used to watch and hear on the radio CBC news and programs all the time. I don’t even listen anymore , save when my spouse ,who is tuned in to same all the time, the bull$hit spun all the time just like the MSM in the US .Not much different .And to think I used to contribute financially to
this false news agency.Personally ,I think that things started going South when Chrytia Freeland was appointed foreign Minister. We are now officially part of the US system.
“That elite media didn’t find a single person to vouch for Maduro or Chavismo, … demonstrates a firm editorial line, eerily obedient to the US government’s regime change policy.”
Indeed, but the piece in my opinion does not fully recognise the deep infiltration of the US MSM by the CIA. Once you recognise that it becomes easy to see why they say what they do.
Tens of thousands of deaths in Venezuela due to sanctions. Tens of thousands of deaths in Britain due to a cruel and insane government and its vendetta against people who are struggling financially.
It’s those lefties you want to watch out for, though – they’re REALLY dangerous…
Few of those elites opposed the brutal invasion of Iraq. The NYT, which as far as I can tell, stands for itself, and for Israel, was chief cheerleader.
The political media elite propagandising for regime change in Venezuela are the same people who have for years been jumping up and down with indignation about foreign meddling in domestic affairs. But no one is supposed to notice.
Interesting to note that during the Nazi ascendancy in Germany – roughly 1923 until 1934 – there was a huge resistance leftist movement comprising of the Communists (KPD) and Social-Democrates (SPD). The combined electoral, membership predominance was always bigger than the Nazis with the KPD/SPD outvoted the NSDAP. This being the case the Nazis even stole some of the left’s clothing by calling themselves National Socialists. They even had a red flag, red flags being of course traditionally the emblem of the left. Both the SPD and KPD had their own mass circulation newspapers, respectively, ‘The Red Shock Troop’ and the ‘Red Flag’. The Nazis eventually came to power though still outvoted by the combine left, when Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the Chancellor, this was followed by the Reichstag fire and the enabling acts which effectively broke the opposition in 1934.
All very sad and interesting. What exactly was the point, however? Namely this, where is the opposition in the US and the West more generally? Has there even been such an overwhelming absence of any significant opposition to an oligarchal tyranny in history? Is it now possible to manipulate public awareness where even the most blatant and insane policies and agendas are seemingly swallowed wholesale by the public? There was a time when oppositionists were persecuted and tortured through their body in order to reach their soul. However, such crude methodology is deemed any longer necessary; the modern Torquemada generally eschews such outdated methods and goes straight for the soul.
The use of mass psychology and PR is found to be more effective than the dungeon and the stake. As was the case in Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and H.G.Wells’ ‘Time Machine’ mankind in the mass has been reduced to an obedient soul with a cabbage for a brain. Revolutionary or Oppositionist literature? No-one would wish to read them or engage in such activities as the mass of the population seem fixated into looking into their smart phones. Orwell posed the question that why should mankind wish for freedom and democracy; this rather begs the question. He went further and suggested that it was perhaps easy to turn them into obedient animals in the same way as selective breeding could produce a species of short-horned cattle. A world of rabbits ruled by stoats, or live gorillas and walking corpses.
Maybe this is a shade too pessimistic, 1984 did not arrive and Orwell opined that he had only written such a pessimistic book because he was seriously ill at the time. But if there is going to be a resistance it had better start moving quickly.
Just reading “Coleman_John_-_The_Tavistock_Institute_of_Human_Relations”
Very interesting and very enlightening , you can get it in pdf format , worth a read if you have time.
Looks really interesting, thank you.
I spent my teenage years in apartheid South Africa. The crudeness and shamelessness Of The propaganda onslaught these days has gone far far beyond the crap the Boers used. Of course they were also fond of making unpersons of their critics, not to mention all the people who slipped on the soap in the shower at John Vorster Square.
It’s profoundly depressing to see this shit going on in the world now. No one is embarrassed or reticent about outright lying right out in the open.
I think I’d go into a very deep spiral downward without OffG in particular speaking the truth to power. To know I’m not alone in feeling sheer horror at these outrageous lies is really a very valuable gift and thank you so much.
Metta 🙏
KarenEliot, you’re not alone in feeling dumbstruck at the sheer insanity. If you’re not already aware of them, I’d also recommend podcasts UK Column and 21st Century Wire. The more voices telling the truth, the better.
…also Craig Murray’s website and Consortium News.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
https://consortiumnews.com/
information clearing house
strategic culture
offer good broad collection and critique too
“…Coleman_John_-_The_Tavistock_Institute_of_Human_Relations”
Very interesting and very enlightening , you can get it in pdf format , worth a read if you have time.”
A very dossier “publication” indeed (“dossier” as in “dodgy”).
Have the time? What, only 45 minutes, as in “Maduro’s massive arsenal of WMD could be deployed to blow up the Capitol within 45 minutes”? 45 minute pass time: is the word “arsenal” an attempt to sex that up (using “arse” as in “Nice arse!”)?
There is plenty written about the manipulation and propaganda the state employs – Bernays’ “invisible government”. And the Tavistock school of mass applied psychology – social-Skinnerism as I call it. Being the credit issuer in a fiat token economy of symbolic exchange is not a power that should be devolved to the corporate banking system. It should be a national, sovereign, transparent, and democratically accountable responsibility of a collectively autonomous people. Therein lies a large part of the problem.
So they lie, manipulate, and control the media. This is a given: a normative of statecraft. So why do the people enter into voluntary servitude …erm, voluntarily? Why are the led …led? This has become a lifelong fascination of mine. The state is the state, it does what states do. No more needs to be said in critique of that, probably not after the Chomsky/Herman propaganda model of manufactured consent. The Guardian, for instance, will do every day what the Guardian does. And yet there is still a state. And yet there is still statist propaganda. No matter how ridiculous it gets – and in dead duckgate doesn’t get any more surreal – yet we are still voluntary wards of the state. Why?
Distraction, hedonism, lack of imagination (mono-dimensionality), voter apathy, and dependent authoritarian personalities offer a scope of partial explanations. Failure to respond to the obvious manifest legitimation crisis is a key current symptom. Voters respond by delinking from the process – but still they vote to legitimate our state dependency …no matter how infantalising, and no matter how degrading, and no matter how austere …we still vote to justify the systematic oppression. And if we vote wrongly, we are ignored. And still there remains an apathetic voluntary servitude and loyalty to the state. The voter is the archetypal Job of politics: voting for their own depoliticisation, desovereigntisation, and apathy …no matter how many trials they are put through. Their loyalty never wavers.
Well, it does eventually. And rather than take autonomy for themselves – which is a lawful and non-violent accord of the land – they look for crypto-despotic demagogues to empower with their own disenfranchised autonomous sovereignty. The state is corrupt: but the people have been corrupted too. Most of state power is, in fact, lateralised as peer-to-peer pressure to conform. Associational conformism are the bricks from which the state assembles its superstructures. Statism is not top down – no one could commit to that amount of imposition without betraying an open fascism. Para-statal power is lateralised and horizontal to the vertical statist axis. There is a state – because we want there to be a state. For sure: the sudden decision not to have a state would be met by violent repression – for which Britain has always been a world class leading repressor. We like to bitch and moan about ‘them’ – but we never look to ‘us’ as an alternative. Just a different ‘them’ – which makes us vulnerable to authoritarianism.
The dichotomy of them and us – state and people – is misleading. We voted for this. We justified every single choice that was made. And we did it willingly. Now we have got to the point where our autonomy is breached, and the state we wanted did not materialise the way we wanted it to – mainly, but not wholly, because the state power is asymmetrical and orientated toward the state – not the people …now we have reached this point, it would do well to contemplate our own radical responsibility for the current, erm, state of affairs.
Now, overnight anarchism would be anarchy – given the current collective consciousness of the people. But we could at least start thinking about taking our autonomous sovereignty back gradually. Through direct democratic means. No need for anarchy or violence: a slow managed devolvement of power to where it belongs – with the people. Concomitant would be a re-education, a reformation of infantalised consciousness, a growing sense of humanity and holism that can only come through responsibility and the true freedom of choice. We need to have faith in humanity and belief in each other – not delegate autonomy to a corporate captured neoliberal Nomenklatura who want to depoliticise us forever. We need to grow a pair and take abdicated responsibility away from mock elections and simulated democracy and repatriate it as a directly administered communal autonomy and Constitutional self-sovereignty. UK Inc can then be put under new management – lawfully – any time we want. Now would be good.
“So why do the people enter into voluntary servitude …erm, voluntarily? Why are the led …led?”
It’s just self interest, BigB, along with laziness and fear.
That’s what people are generally like.
And those who manipulate them are very well aware of the fact.
We who come here and read a lot of good sense are still not sure what to do about it, however.
WD
Indeed, all the factors you mention. The dynamics of this world are really rather mundane. Its just a bunch of people making choices. Uninformed, unconscious choices (unconscious unchoosing). Under neoliberalism, the right to choose is monopolised and asymmetric. But it is still a bunch of people making choices.
The hidden dynamic is habit energy – making the same choices out of habit. Reductively, politically – we think we get one choice per five years (in the UK: under the fixed term parliament). But we are choosing unconsciously every thought-moment. Asymmetry aside, those choices add up to the world-as-it-presents. In every meaningful way, changing those choices – particularly the parameters of choice (belief systems) – changes the world. One person changing their POV is a drop in the ocean – but a million, a billion, our first trillion …the world is qualitatively changed forever. Simply by people becoming aware of the choices they make.
Under capitalism, those choices are limited to capitalised outcomes – but that can change too. As it stands – and lets hope it doesn’t come to pass – but no one can force us into a particular way of seeing. They can, and do, try and manipulate that …but everyone is responsible for their own cognition. No one controls reality, that is so much silliness. In fact, ‘they’ are more mind controlled – by their own thinking – than ‘we’ are. And yes, that is the worlds smallest violin I am playing.
It is a simple matter of self-education to make a better set of choices for a better outcome. If we keep making the same reflexive choices, out of self interest, laziness and fear …we give our power of autonomous agency away. To those who do what they will with it. It keeps going until we realise we have a choice, and a vested responsibility in making it …for a better world.
‘No need for anarchy’
Anarchy (rules WITHOUT rulers) is exactly what we need Big B.
Anarchy is not chaos.
Government is chaos: Economic, social, climate and military.
When all hierarchies are removed we will have peace.
No one is born a leader. They are ‘manufactured’ by ignorance and arrogance. They are often made psychopathic by the absence of any Love in their lives.
The future beckons with a bloody hand.
Then we start all over again.
FD
Read what I said carefully to see we are totally aligned. My only caveat is that autonomous unity – or anarchy – cannot just happen. There would have to be a transition, I personally reckon around 100 years (which we don’t have), for people to unlearn and be re-educated – not in an Orwellian sense, more and organic spiritual discovering of who we really are. So, a natural education, focused as if people matter – note a rote learning and inculcation with capitalist values …which Paulo Friere aptly named the “banking” style of education – as if a person were a deposit account for the para-capitalist state to invest with its own authoritarianism. An education that would be the very opposite of that – the development of a Universal Humanism.
Among the other social transitions would also obviously be the establishment of a free press – one that published that novelty …the truth. Direct democracy or a transitional progressive representation (truly representative plenipotentiaries who govern from a mandate given by a fully engaged constituency – not representing themselves or the corporations) can only come from the fully informed consensus of the people. Being fully involved as a democratic autonomous agent should be enough stimulus to bring disenfranchised people back into the political forum – at least at a local level …where their opinion and vote counts.
Hierarchical rule would have to be phased out, and fully informed autonomous unity phased in. The transition would not be smooth or organic. Beyond basic survival needs – comfortable sovereign sufficiency – would have to be assured …other wise fear-first barbarism and survivalism would be the prevalent dystopic. Food and energy sovereignty and distributive justice must be prioritised. Healthcare, welfare, and education all assured and prioritised as progressive. Monetary and fiscal stimulus must be the democratic, transparent, and direct rule of the people – not under the usury of the corporate banks …usufruct not usury. None of this can be capitalised – from interest bearing debt and compounded annual growth rates – with profit margins. The democratised state must be the sovereign currency issuer (debt or debt-free finance matters little if we owe to ourselves and can can cancel (debt amnesty or Jubilee) surplus debts).
All of this would have to be accompanied by a massive downshift in materialised throughput – more with less – which demands tax justice, land justice, and distributive justice …the reversal of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession. It would require the nation state – within a framework of international cooperation – of becoming localised and neo-self-sufficient. International trade would be under something like Keynes’ ‘eco’ Bancor – where deficits and surpluses were equalised to prevent imperial imbalances. Surplus capital could fund the regenerative life commons …or a small international ‘police’ force …not the imperial US sixth fleet.
None of this can happen under capitalism. Humanity begins when capitalism ends. My outline plan for a humanist planet might seem like toked navel fluff now, but it is worth having a plan …because capitalism is in its death throes. If the successor system cannot be based on material growth vectors – quite simply because there may not be much material left. In trying to be optimistic, I cannot deny that there may not be a successor state …but lets hope there is. And start planning as if there will be. Socialism transitioning to federated autonomous unity (spiritual anarchy – not a bunch of yobs smoking weed all day) or fascism transitioning to barbarism seems to be the set of outcomes we face. If we rule out the unconscionable outcomes for now.
Humanity can only heal toward a sense of inclusive holism, if and when everyone is involved as a cooperative community of equals. Then communities become Sanghas of personal and spiritual community development. The economy becomes Magga – the path of human development. Then we have a purpose – not an atomisation – and a coming together in equality. A coming together with each other and with nature – our extended community …in and Age of Reuniting and Rejuvenation. All we have to do is get rid of capitalism, or be ready when capitalism gets rid of itself. To update Rosa: it’s socialism/spiritual eco-anarchism or fascism/barbarism …thems the choices.
BigB – your comment about a natural education reminded me of this essay by Emma Goldman, which contains some truly inspirational ideas:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1917/ferrer.htm
I voted twice today. Local elections and your closing comment – to which ‘none of the above’ or ‘thanks but no thanks!
False mind-framing is the nature of no real choice. Of course the mind is ingenious and can weave toxic debts into seeming assets to generate complex packages to attract investment.
The mind that got us into deceit is not the means to get us out – excepting as a ruse by which to seem to be on the right side while ensuring the persistence of the core illusion in perhaps different forms.
Where do we accept authority?
is the mind self-authoring?
or is that a usurping of authorship in self-illusion – regardless how many join in its allegiance?
It appears that the Earth (Gaia, if you like) will purge capitalism before it self destructs Big B.
It will be up to the sHell shocked survivors to pick up the pieces. Hopefully, they will be made wiser by the devastation and loss that surrounds them.
If contrary to narrative propaganda, our past was catastrophic – as experience of terrifying and terraforming series of events that gave rise to a ‘consciousness’ of defensive dissociation that effectively emulates or reenacts its archetypes, then we are self-generating and replicating our beginning in our ending.
The assigning of powers to gods of Earth and Sky is itself a power of the mind or of the Word ‘made flesh’. Or rather made manifest. Now we assign powers to a legion of derivatives.
The mythic archetypes structure the narrative mind. Science thinks to be above that in its Promethean ignorance and arrogance.
Perhaps we can agree that the ‘Story’ that is running is broken or bankrupt, exhausted and failing – no matter how ingeniously the same old themes are repackaged or rebranded to sell or suckle upon as if an escape from toxic debt.
No need to wait for a new story. Simply disinvest in allegiance to the ‘same old’ in any of its shape-shifting deceits – and bring willingness present in curiosity and desire.
For what?
Can we uncover living desire that is NOT fear-framed?
Can we embody or make manifest anything that is truly worthy of giving and receiving for its own sake and not as a means to get something from or get rid of something onto?
A mind in its own spin can think to make a heaven and find itself in hell.
Is there another source or basis for thought than what we are ‘already thinking’?
Is ‘hell’ essentially a conviction in fully justified ‘hate’?
Is there a Higher Court than our own judgemental convictions?
Is it possible to want to be ‘right’ over anything and everything else and prove it by destruction?
Wormtongue has set the mind in a dark place.
But only by willingness to listen and give allegiance there.
Wisdom comes to those who release their claim to know – in and of themself.
We are in this together – and all together in a common Cause.
But the perversion of a true desire sets a mind against its own function.
Forms change.
Meeting a true and shared need finds the pathways of fulfilment. All who join in support share in its blessing and extend it. the roles each plays are secondary to the living purpose.
The issue with the human mind and personality complex is to identify in role as status or worth – as a segregative and special sense of self.
Leadership is any and every kind of initiative in the witnessing to a living worth – but life’s fossilisation into rigid and set currency or code of meanings is the imprint of its passing and not the movement itself.
Love has no need but to share itself, because its nature and law is sharing.
But in a grasping of dead concepts given sacrifice as the means of power and protection rising from a fear of lack and loss. Denied, or withheld love and life is the shadow or corollary to the denier.
Using the word love in a world of its denial and substitution with a manipulative masking evasion, is likely to lose attention because it is always woven into the lie as an appeal for sympathy or allegiance – but often in the guise of the wounded and broken love from which a call to hate rises in victory. For in this world of hate given power, love is weak and must be protected, hidden, masked over, and kept out of mind – lest weakness undermine its role as controller and protector against a chaos of its own but unrecognised making.
This attempt to suppress, by assertion is a ‘self’ that seeks either the mask of love or the mask of a righteous grievance for its denial.
But beneath all such coverings of entanglement is the true and original movement to know and be known.
We have entanglement in the mask and we have true life in the movement of its being us.
Whatever tools or roles we adopt or align in – they will extend or magnify the purpose we accept by acting from it.
Without self-awareness and self-responsibility there can only be the abnegation of consciousness that manifests as a blind demand to be led or fed in its loss of communication to conditioned responses.
Self-illusion is not a sin – but an error of mistaken identity. Persisting in sacrifice of love to feed or persist in the error is the wages of death – and a dead concept life and world – until the original error is revealed and corrected.
How we see our self is how we see others. Not in terms of form, but in terms of worth.
If identities of polarised conflict cannot meet in shared purpose then their egos are held more dear than the call to recognise another as ourself or ourself in the other.
The self-illusion is the fear that divides, to rule in secret.
Denied fear must cover its tracks in false causes.
When deeper fears are triggered or revealed – where is the willingness to stay present and discern the true need?
“There is plenty written about the manipulation and propaganda the state employs – Bernays’ “invisible government”. And the Tavistock school of mass applied psychology – social-Skinnerism as I call it.”
Are you responding to my derisional response to Coleman’s delusional wittering?
There’s no doubt that the WWII Allies developed at the time some extremely dubious psyops and have since gone on to make a bad brew much, much more poisonous. But the terminally shitbrained Coleman added nothing to a rational awareness of their evil except a gross, mindless self-indulgent adjuvancy that renders their MK-U and other directly or indirectly programmed/programmable (as in “passive smoking”) victims or potential victims even less self-protectively functional than all of his bête noires added together. I was going to timeline just one sentence of his sadly deficient Beatles confabulation by way of illustrating the depths of his stupidity and self-contradictory ignorance in his rush to pompous-ass pre-digested judgementality but the voices in my head kept on saying over and over “why fucking bother?
Your last line prompts me to point out that a self-defeating futility is not in the act itself but in the invested identity in outcome or attempt to change the other.
Do ‘voices in our head’ EVER support anything but a kind of mind-capture?
The prompting that I joined with in writing this observation was felt first as a formless recognition in alignment with the desire to be free of deceit – and share in ‘the living’.
I was pleased that you addressed some of the devices of deceit – because merely personalising evil and attacking it in others invokes voices in our head by which we are given to hate rather than witnessing to love’s honesty.
Thinking in the heart holds a quality of guidance and support within a relational sense of being – but the head of our own tale-spin works a passive victim to a correspondence or sympathetic resonance of hatefulness – or evil – that like vomit is projected away from self as to get rid of a toxic ‘violation’.
But when we get rid of evils onto our world or to others in it – we are putting it there as a way of seeming to escape or mitigate a FELT dissonance, conflict and hatefulness in our self.
The liability in giving away or outsourcing guilt, conflict and pain of loss to others and world, is that what we choose to give sets the currency of our awareness and acceptance of being – and only SEEMS to be a personal or private profit under the split off sense of incorporated allegiance in doing so – that is of joining in hate as a source of power and protection against fear of pain of loss.
To hate the deceit would best be resolved by giving it no power to have real effects in our self, by interjecting between us and our awareness of true relation. Else we hate in the other what we fear and give power to in our self – and effectively engage in a battle of hate – which is a psychic distortion and contagion that works through the attempt to take power from the other that is unconsciously given them.
While what I seek to articulate is not hard to understand – the readiness to accept it may make it impossible – because a primary sense of personal power and protection is achieved through blame. In other words, assigning, framing and directing guilt and associated penalty is an underlying corruption to any true currency of exchange. The undoing of guilt is not in displacing it from a self-exceptionalism to a body or world, but by recognizing instead an error calling for correction. Once an error is associated and framed in irrevocable sin, a part of us – and of our Reality is set ‘outside change’ and forever apart – as a ‘crime upon History’ where history is itself framed as a personalised victim in the enacting of the death of love.
The collective enactment of the denial or killing of love is a joining in hate as a world set ‘outside change’ and forever apart. This is ‘mind-capture’ or mind control – but who or what exactly is captured by or capturing? Deceits are founded in deceit.
In order for programs to run, the appropriate operating system has to be running. Or in a variation of this, in order for malware to run the system, the system has to be hacked. Our minds are not merely quantitative but qualitative, and yet investment in form-based meanings blinds us (by phishing reaction) to qualitative communications.
We give meaning to our world – either on true current-see or in attempt to change the meanings we have given power to, ‘outside ourself’.
Those who align in fear are those without awareness of belonging in light as an integrality of being – and not in some scripted self-specialness set over a hated world.
The wish to rule the world is a misplaced identification in divided self that engenders chaos as its source of justification, validation and right to power.
I guess you are replying to me? Nothing so subtle I’m sorry to report. No voices, just a combination of exigency and poetic licence. I was/am running late migrating a web site from one hosting service to another and realized, after checking out a couple of dates for a timeline, that it was going to take longer than I was prepared or able to give it, so I backed off a detailed refutation of Coleman’s gibbering and just asserted the overall sentiment of it instead.
Orwell wanted to title it 1948.
Publishers refused.
The massive international – and financial backing for Hitler – including the non support of German opposition by British Gov – is all background to what a narrative historical foreground keeps obscure.
I am reminded of Pasteur’s anecdotal recant on his deathbed;
“Bernard was correct. I was wrong. The microbe (germ) is nothing. The terrain (milieu) is everything.”
(Bernard was Claude Bernard, who got the terrain theory from Antoine Béchamp (who called it the microzymian theory).
This is why we have everything backwards. We WANT the hero in our dream and so we get the shadow of its denial.
WE WANT the power of possession and control INDEPENDENT of our true Relational Field and so we operate AS IF we have it – and suffer our own results.
“Everything is BACKWARDS; everything is upside down! Doctors destroy health, Lawyers destroy justice, Universities destroy knowledge, Governments destroy freedom, Major media destroys information, And religions destroy spirituality”. ~ Michael Ellner
Division into eaters and meat (Wells) is a physically framed depiction of a desire for a dream of dominion that can only be had with a corresponding unconsciousness. The distribution of psychic and emotional energies reflects the active desire – not the presented narrative identities of its enacting.
To what extent are we ‘hacked’ as a proxy or ‘asset’ to a loveless agenda?
Or in pre-tech terms, deceived.
Is the ‘Matrix’ of self-illusory identity politics DONE to ‘innocents’ or is there a hidden complicity – hidden in the need for ‘ignorance’ or unconsciousness?
We buy into it and believe in it – to an extent at least. There is no use blaming them for gaming the system – we are the system: us and them. There is a dialectical materialism of leader and led; ruler and ruled; the Master Slave dialectic – but we both share the Nietzschian Will to Power – we both get something out of it …even if it is, as it is now, a law of diminishing return. We supported the state when the return on autonomy invested was worthwhile. Well, a majoritarian sufficient quorum did. And those who voted against the minority government: only did so because they had different views of how their prosperity and standard of living should be administered …they did not vote against the system per se. We are the system: and the system is us.
They might be credit, technology, and militaristic imperialists – but we share in the unequally divided spoils of war …the oil, the resources, the gold, the precious earth minerals. They do it for us, so long as they can cream off the lion’s share. No one is claiming it is anything but unequal and asymmetric – grossly so. But the majoritarian ethos is not to destroy the inequality system: but to make it more equal …that is to accept the imperialism, racism, supremacism, militarism, and human and environmental degradation – in return for a greater share of the material rewards. That is why it is a dialectical materialism – it is not the materialism that is the complaint of precariat …it is only that they are not getting enough of it.
This is why the system perpetuates despite all its contradictions, iniquities, and injustices …we want it. That is, there is an insufficient quorum of people who reject war in favour of peace, and reject capitalism for all its systematic cruelty. We are as much part of that as ‘they’ are. Indeed, it is the projected ‘they’ that is our own displaced conscience. We hate the neolib/neocons: without being able to accede that there would be no neolib/neocons, no imperialism. no jihadis, no terrorism, no interventions, no famine, no imperialism, etc. without us. It is our way of life that is causal: even if the asymmetry is taken into account. These are all capitalist dialectics. There is no capitalism without consumers.
If there was a sudden influx of new credit (it’s coming from the financialisation of nature): then your average protester against the inequalities of the system would go back to their somnolent social quietus. Once their local quota of desired materialism could be satisfied (no one is ever satisfied, but that is the DNA of the system). If Corbynomics could rejuvenate the working classes and revive hollowed out communities – no one would care where the bad faith bloodmoney came from. Or how many lives it destroyed. Or how much environmental degradation it caused. Or whether it foreclosed the future for humanity. All of which is terrible salient today: the start of the MayDay pseudo-Green revolution.
This ends when we reject materialism. To reject materialism: we must develop an inner state of peace …to counter the outer state of war. When we are sufficient in ourselves: we no longer need the ‘outer’ materialism. It is our displaced desiring-dreams that are materialised. They all come with hidden energy footprints and quotas of injustice. Collectively, they add up to imperialism and war. And climate racism and global immiseration. If we could be neo-self-sufficient in an extended community and local environs – of networked autonomous mini-republics …there is no need for materialism (beyond a sustainable quota that never needs to grow exponentially); or lifestyle imperialism over the global poor. That is what climate justice should really be about. Not maintaining champagne socialism and neoliberal globalism for a short interlude. One that forecloses the future for humanity.
“This ends when we reject materialism. To reject materialism: we must develop an inner state of peace …to counter the outer state of war. When we are sufficient in ourselves: we no longer need the ‘outer’ materialism.”
What’s the matter with matter? Tangibility and visibility gives form to the formless.
So identifying in the FORMS of life as if things in themselves – gives the mind of such attempt a sense of ‘self-in-itself’ – which is by (its own self) definition at odds with and set against the whole – and with ‘others’ seen as separated autonomous bodies – because life has been rendered invisible by gaining such a world.
Countering war is war – the undoing of war is to give it no place in our heart and mind – such as to love and align in the peace of unconflicted being. Where is that? Not IN a world of deceits – but within the gift of being prior to the division or filtering mind of ‘control’.
Note that witnessing and abiding in and for an integrity of shared being may look like war – but I am talking of the active purpose given welcome and magnification in our living.
Rejection of a false choice is not rejection so much as no longer giving it regard as a meaningful basis for choice.
Otherwise, that which is rejected is given the energy of a self-denial that attracts into manifestation the very conditions in which it can find acceptance. Such is the need of the denied for light.
So the releasing of a ‘possession and control mind’ of its assertion over your body and world is bringing body and world (all the levels of our human being) to a quality of relational communication – through a willingness to – as you suggest – choose in awareness rather than habitually react. But the active willingness is our part that allows a reintegrative movement of life and love to be and in a sense ‘do’ itself – through willingness – and thus without the wilful assertion of an usurping ‘doer’.
So in any truly felt quality of recognition finding expression, we need to – in a sense shut up and get out of the way – rather than the immediate interjection of a ‘define-predict-control’ reflex.
Peace is untouched by the insanity of the mind – excepting it is made unwelcome and unrecognisable – because those who love to hate must hate to love – and so hate its ‘intrusion or violation’ of their ‘peace’ which they never actually rest in because there is always something intruding on an attempt to protect a fantasy of life from Life.
The idea of self-sufficiency is actually realised in relationship or giving and receiving as one. Coming into alignment and balance within relational being no longer seeks outside for love, power or peace or joy, because it is no longer giving hate to its projections or denials or investing in self-hate and denial as if to destroy or cut off from the Living.
Learning to see differently is the willingness to actually look. If the mind has already attacked (judged) how can it see?
I foresee a millennium or more in which the sense of physical or material as separate from psychic-emotional – or any expression separate from its active purpose – fades and is replaced by integrated trust. Minds that think to know can become psychotically traumatised by losing their framework of current integration.
The world of an ‘apocalyptic’ unveiling is associated with fear – and fear ramps up division, conflict and control as the attempt to keep the curtains that cover… fear.
Recognising and noticing fear will recognize the ‘intrusion’ or temptation to abandon your peace, in illusions or deceits of a need to DO something NOW. But the alignment of thought to peace of simple being or unconflicted awareness is bringing the mind to the heart – or bringing the darkness to the light – instead of attempting to bring light to darkness.
Sacrificing light to darkness is to lose it for a world of lies in which a false light ties us to a Promethean fate.
Conflict is the means of so engaging (and terrorising) attention that nothing else can get in.
Its hard to find the switch when the light is turned off, and impossible where darkness is accepted as the new standard.
The body-form-matter is determined by what we use it for. Judgemental division cuts a Living One to pieces and attempt to make a NWO. Releasing the mind of division opens to a discernment of true from false – so as to restore awareness of wholeness. This may seem abstract, but our human lives are very specific – releasing judgement of others allows a rising of a fresh perspective to the willingness for peace. But there is the rub, because where we are invested in hate is a block of self-assertive identity. Using hate as a means of self-definition is backwards – but once accepted – everything is seen backwards and it is love that invokes a defensive rage – because anything invested with self is protected AS self – until brought to that which identifies truly.
The defences against awakening are unimaginably impregnable and overwhelming – to the framing of the mind that made them in self-protection.
“…networked autonomous mini-republics…”
One of the most critical “political” keys. All strains of human mindset are needed but none can survive the social pressures of all.
Write a book or just anthologize your various writings and self-publish electronically (there are several existent platforms of which to make use. Your thoughts need far more public airtime.
And this sums up perfectly what the role of the Establishment media is. Presstitutes for Empire, for Imperialism, and to maintain the status quo. I noted a few commenters mentioned Goebbels or Goebbelesque. That also sums up perfectly what the media have become. Boycott them. Ignore them. Or failing that, stand outside a TV station with a placard saying ‘Whores For Empire And Imperialism – Cheersquad For WW3’, or do what Aaron Mate did on Twitter to Rachel Madcow the other day and show them up for the liars they are. The establishment media are like the cops. Neither are our friends, period.
Welcome to USA’s Goebbelesque TV reality show.
Double down.
Keep repeating the lies.
Keep up the charade.
Me thinks we are entering a Marie Antionette moment.
Stock up on the popcorn cuase this sure beats Netflix.
The American Press Institute found, “Just six percent of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in the media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public’s view of other institutions.”
That high… seriously, the US is supposedly the worlds leading “democracy” (ha!) and not even one person in ten buys in to the official narrative..?
Robotic presentations of a dead agenda
https://willingness-to-listen.blogspot.com/2019/05/robotic-presentations-of-dead-and.html
Sit back in the comfort of your own home and watch us exploit and subjugate yet another foreign country. Yes your home with all those nice little luxuries you have purchased to comfort you in the knowledge that your world will forever be safe and secure under the auspices of your freedom loving government. That’s it, just sit back and watch. You just know their won’t be a drone strike on your property or that your door will be broken down and armed men will take you to a prison or worse to a place of no return. Stay safe. Watch it all unfold on your TV. The excitement is palpable as we see our forces engage and destroy all those bad guys who stand in the way of our righteous mission. It’s really just like a Hollywood movie isn’t it ? It’s on TV. You are safe though so just watch as we attend to the affairs of others in far off lands. It’s all quite normal you know.
As a failed conceptual artist: I came with the idea for an installation – the Bleeding iPhone – on a cross, of course. It would bleed with the blood of 10 million Unpeople (no one knows the true figure) from NATO/IMF/UN’s Secret Holocaust. On the screen behind would flash images of child soldiers and child miners – forced to dig the blood coltan at gunpoint. Images of the genocidiaires’ in chief – Museveni and Kagame. Images of Rwandan and Ugandan occupying troops. Images of prostitution and rape. The guards and the overseer keep the pittance, the child gets malnourished. And lead poisoning or silicosis. Plenty more to replace them. Images of the acid mining tailings contaminating the groundwater – killing the fish and all acquatic. life. Poisoning humans too. This will eventually leach into the sea – poisoning the waters off Somalia – killing the local fish. Accompanying images of Somali pirates and the released smell of rotting fish. Then images of Foxconn workers committing suicide. That is, until Apple got them safety nets and counselling. The working conditions and the hours stayed the same. If you don’t want to feed your family, there is a vast army of unemployed who do. You get the picture.
$24 trillion for the world economy, mobile phones for everyone, some guff about “conflict free” supply chains to assuage the bourgeois conscience, and sshhhh about the Holocaust.
I didn’t get the commission by the way. I couldn’t get the gallery owners attention. He was too busy on his iPhone.
https://images.app.goo.gl/pkjfgRbxpss4K4i6A
I had the idea of the Apple i-Doll.
Make your own i-Life’ and be free to do ANYTHING you want with it – and don’t forget the code for waking up from the experiential extension to your own thought control.
… and a deep sleep fell upon Adam.
Terror and horror are the proofs of sin. But the Cross was not merely a precursor to Big Brother’s Boot on the face of a true Presence – but a witness for waking up.
What you choose to USE anything for is your i-Life.
Or you can relinquish a private will and its conflicted world for a living presence that is known by sharing.
Fixating on horror does not heal it, but it may reveal a need FOR healing.
The use of evils and grievances for private agenda is a key to freeing our mind.
Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof, means own and address what is coming up within the day you give to Life so as to share it.
Power of Mind given to hate generates hateful results. But it is not a separate power so much as a wish to use power for a separate or private agenda – set over and against the whole and therefore your Brother – who is Brother by virtue sharing in the same life and not by a gender.
When you have no use for hate, how will it maintain your employ?
I am not picking on you – but on the normalisation of an anti-nature.
If you had to choose joy OR grievance – instead of trying to make them one through some sort of narrative identity complex – would there really BE a choice is the true nature of the choices and their outcomes were in the Clear?
Can we motivate and align in the power of true desire instead of trying to coerce a ‘resistant and reluctant nature’ to conform and comply to the stick of guilt and fear?
Does our sense of investment in power or control operate a self reinforcing feedback of the need to control and of the systems and devices of control – such as to keep the god of terror alive by which to maintain the subjective prison for the sake of the guards employ?
You have something right in your installation – in that Life (in the body) IS suffering – as the Buddha teaches and as the Cross teaches. Transcendence of the body-limiting mind is moving past the subjection of its fixation that dissociates to a world or surface reality of temporary ‘escape’ into which of course the fear leaks or breaks in, breaks down and kills.
The conditions we cultivate in our self, our relations and environment can be deeply compassionate without projecting our hates and fears onto them as if to then fix them or make them feel better – and this was was I commonly met when I experienced a completely unexpected suicide of one I love dearly. Many cannot think or meet or deal with horror and so they distance by affecting to care and in so doing, wanted me – in agony of loss – to help THEM feel better. Do you see that it was not their fault – for they know not what they do?
The ‘separative’ mind is structured to a fear-driven denial as its survival – but I do not accept this as the true of being – but as what we have ‘made’ of life – through the wish to run our own version through a capacity to deny or become unmindful of what Is (true).
There IS a Call to heal but it is not recognised under a call to vengeance. A call to hate seems like a call to sympathy when masked in a framework of justified compliance or indeed sacrifice.
And note that if the oppressed have struggled for identity under oppression, that is worthy of honouring in order to grow beyond – in right timing of a free willingness, just as we need to be able to embrace our feelings truly to at some point rise in free willingness to embrace life anew. Resurrection is a true honouring release of the past – but its blessings remain with us. Love waits only on willingness to share it – but the shock of love lost is a traumatic ‘separation’ of alienation from our Life, that affects our species over millennia – not just specific times and places and events.
I hold we ‘devolved from Consciousness by the way – and so I don’t call on the same witnesses as the myth of slime evolving through predation as a blind urger to persist. I see the blind urge to persist as the energetic structure of an identification in using the body lovelessly; the iDoll.
Comments are playing the lottery.
How many trees to plant to offset the CO2 from unread comments?
Comment sections are lining up to play the lottery.
Comment/Comments as Comments approach infinity is naught.
What is the sound of one hand thumbing/typing said unread comment?
I was once an immodset moderator.
Mortal terror and fear of pain of loss, underlies all tyranny. Have you another view?
Framed in terror is the struggle of defence against it – and the emulation and alignment within it.
The conventional commenting framework reiterates the same themes repeatedly.
Human conditioning reiterates the same themes repeatedly.
How you choose to frame your reality is up to you.
But the ability of mind to recognise a framing is the shifting from a distorted and conflicted reality to a recognition of coherence.
It is the nature of the mind to see what does not fit or support its framing as dissonant, ridiculous or offensive.
As for C02 – the life giving must be demonised in order to frame self-destruction as attractive, salvatory or a necessary moral sacrifice.
Framing of the mind in its own thinking our capacity for self-illusion.
And in a sense – the ‘self’ illusion.
Usurping of the true by the false MUST be a giving up of the true to the false and CANNOT be an actual power set over and against true.
Does that have relevance for Venezuela?
The wielding of the US proxy for global tyranny.
My last comment was a responding ‘installation’ to BigB’s post, reflecting perennial themes in terms of modern tech-induced dissociations – and while it did not specifically address Venezuela, the situation in Venezuela – as part of our new world disorder is not a separate symptom or disease from the body politic – which is also the politic of the Corps.
Framing in the corporate is a resonant correspondence to the ‘love of form’ associated with ‘Satan’ – or form based reality AS the ONLY truth – which as a world MUST rule out the Creative from a mind to possess and control.
Insofar as we are invested in and participant in this world, the practical issue is the basis of our guidance or ‘intel’. Because EVERYTHING else is subordinated to its framing interpretation.
The usurping of ‘intel’ is mind-control. But always by the agreement or consent of the subject but through the framing in deceit. Nonetheless, the decision to act as if something is true is and act of acceptance and belief and investment of identity that then automatically elicits protection or defence. Mind-capture is where the subjects operate the protection and enforcement of their own unfreedom.
How is it possible that power of life and in life be brought so low?
For Life is not absent.
But is the rendering of such a conflicted and limited state an actual and active choice being enacted as direct and lawful consequence of ideas being given acceptance, investment and allegiance?
Are we running on false or indeed a deceitful ‘intel’? – under a notional security that operates a law of diminishing returns?
Beneath the sideshow are surely such an entangled mess of dependencies, that anything true has to be denied because it would reveal the lie in any of innumerable facets that cannot then be limited and so any part of a hateful and deceitful system is deemed ‘too big to fail’ and given not only protection but persists as an ongoing sacrifice of the living to the dead. So give them narratives of diversionary shock fear to leverage hope of saving from a ‘framedevil’ by which to feel ‘morally justified’ by compliance of investment that makes it their own.
Time can waste as well as being wasted.
Under shock-doctrine time is collapsed to a fight flight imperative. YOU MUST ACT NOW TO SAVE the Planet, humanity, the polar bears, your children, the future, your self.
This is the undermining and overriding of the mind ‘s capacity to monitor its own thought – and the hack by which to induce belief by reaction of invested identity.
Does fear MAKE you powerless or do you GIVE power to fear.
Where you go for your ‘intel’ remains your choice – always. But you must see that the usurping of a mind under fear operates to block out and deny any other voice.
There is a basis for self-governance that has not ‘sold itself’ to fear.
This means owning and reviewing our conflicts and contradictions with a willingness to uncover healing, integrative opportunity and practical ways to grow and embody trust in place of hates and fears born of judgement set in private and polarising agenda of possession and control. Its framing is hidden only by our willingness to focus within or through its limiting belief.
If you want to possess reality in form, you limit your reality. The form does not DO it to you – nor another who invites you to share the form. But the invested identity in form sets up an addictive ‘hungry ghost’ by which to seem possessed of an insatiable lack. Driven by compulsion and weaponised to defend control of supply.
With the regimes footsoldiers in lock step on this one what could possibly go wrong? Well the main event for one thing. We are witnessing mass fabrication of events which appear to have not happened in Venezuela. A mass hallucinogenic hysteria pumped out over the ether in a you-tubed fantasy of White Helmet proportions.
Well the trusted forth estate have now departed on last gravy-train to shitsville in their apparent boondoggle of career choices. The truth lies buried and we are living through dangerous times…yet again.
The hymns of avarice WILL be sung thus.
Anyone who wavers from the choir will be maligned, ostracised and silenced by the bloody weight of ruthlessness.
Apart from fantastic sites like Off-G where will opposition to state sponsored terrorism come from?
The British is media is at least as bad as the US with the likes of the Guardian producing hourly, pro regime change bulletins, or context free analysis of brutal sanctions imposed by the US (the acceptable way to harm or kill people in the eyes of western media).
Academia seems to have lost itself in identity politics while the average British citizen prefers Hollywood blockblusters to political analysis when it comes to learning about international conflicts.
One thing’s for sure, control of disinformation (by the media) is a key element in santising the form of cryptofascism that has gripped the US and vassal states like Britain who support it.
To really understand the sinister mechanics of how this kind of PR apperatus works I recommend Norman Finkelstein’s ‘Gaza: an inquest into its martyrdom’ because in places like Palestine (and for Palestine you can also read Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, etc) ‘truth’ becomes something that is defined by the oppressor rather than by any sort of objective reality.
This is why they have been gunning for Julian Assange and why we should show solidarity with him as well as the likes of George Galloway and Craig Murray who have done their bit to raise awareness of the crimes Assange and Wiki exposed.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/free-julian-assange-imperialism-on-trial-tickets-61053548808
It would seem that the west’s Intelligence community – CIA, MOSSAD, MI6 GCHQ – is now in complete control of the Anglo-Zionist media. It seems now ironic that the sole remaining publication that even approaches an opposition voice in the Israeli daily Haaretz and Gideon Levy – incredible! It was always a (bogus) claim of the western media that unlike the State controlled media of the Soviet Union the media in the west was, being privately owned, free from censorship and bias. Actually what has happened to the western media is that it has, in the spirit of neoliberalism, been outsourced from to the private sector, and now simply functions as a propaganda apparatus seemingly bent on war. Openly baying for war these people like a malignant disease, a terrifying pestilence who are taking us to the brink of destruction; a modern version of the Black Death which wiped out half of Europe. The western media: the Black Death gone global.
Such is the Grip that the American MSM has over the American people, who are notoriously regarded as unaware of the rest of the World(outside the USA), and of course, the “Talking Heads” in the MSM rely entirely on their fat salaries that they wouldn’t dare upset the apple cart, by seeking the truth behind the lies they are required to spew into American lounge Rooms every evening.
The Venezuelan people of course, well remember the ousting of Mr Chavez some years ago by the M.I.C. and his subsequent “mysterious death” which resulted in Mr Maduro’s rise as President(elected by the Venezuelan people).
They want nothing to do with the American Puppet Mr Guiado
Is the Jeffrey Sachs approving of this the same one who co-wrote the report about 40 000 sanctions deaths? Unreal.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/04/russia-think-tank-study-shows-how-to-overextend-and-unbalance-the-us-of-a.html
The wheels are falling off the ugliest empire
Expert commentators are always wrong. This is proven by P Tetlock by using simple experiments like asking: who is going to be the next president of the USA?
Turned out that a dice (random chance) is more Predictive in judgment than a political expert.
How would that be possible if it was not conflict of interest?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_Political_Judgment:_How_Good_Is_It
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/18/the-guccifer-2-0-gaps-in-muellers-full-report/
Assange Kim.com Rich
Jews up to no good again
Thumb down all you want, it’s not so easy for people to prove me wrong, and all too easy for me to prove myself correct
Lest We Become What We Hate
Are you falling for the trap of so wanting to be right as to then not being accurate.
If anyone knows and loves or is someone Jewish who does not fit your blanket judgement – then it is revealed as a race or group hate rather than a criticism of ideas, issues or actions.
That there may be a baby in your bathwater is then thrown out – and an actual anti Jewish smear feeds the manipulation of the Jewish identity in the reinforcement of the ‘others’ who hate and deny you JUST for being Jewish.
Therefore you also risk being associated with the very agenda that you purport to be against – and losing support from many who may support a critical view of specific ideas, issues, actions etc.
So regardless what your focus tells you is wrong and against which you get an identity of being ‘right’ from – you are letting hate run your mind – and inciting others to join in hate that targets people who are NOT responsible for your grievance – which you haven’t indicated the nature of.
Deceit is the underlying evil to be revealed as baseless. Regardless the forms it masks in or through.
The need to project it onto the SCAPEGOAT is the deceit or magic by which to feel better about yourself (less hateful) while not addressing your own. I am not picking on you personally. This is a fundamental block to waking responsibility for what IS in our power to change.
Giving power to negative projections as your PRIVATE self-protection is a subconscious agreement by which ‘consensual reality’ operates as narrative control. That there are some who wilfully manipulate the hate and fear and consequent hopes and dreams of others who are less awake and aware is part of the (acquired or conditioned human) nature of a mind and world at war with itself.
Earlier today I watched an interview about ‘Russiagate’ with Aaron Maté and Chris Hedges – and I had two intuitions. One that Aaron was Jewish, and two that he was the son of Gabor Maté. They are both examples of witness and willingness for life regardless of the conditions arraigned against them. the courage of their convictions.
In science – if there is ONE example that disproves the theory – then either the theory has to be modified to accept the exception or thrown out.
Even the OT ‘Lord God’ in wrath was willing to stay his Hand if there was even ONE Just Man.
Is there One Just thought in your heart?
Look to the Living!
What makes us truly human is our willingness to extend humanity especially when tempted to forsake it.
Or we become what we hate.
Well go ahead, John. Demonstrate that “the Jews” are behind the US manipulation of Venezuela. I am very skeptical, if you don’t mind me saying.
The Zionist element have been agitating for the destruction of Venezuela for a long time. Venezuela broke off relations with Israel and recognised Palestine as a result of the many genocidal Zionist massacres in Gaza. That by itself is enough reason for the Neocohens to seek to destroy a country. They have been spreading fairy stories for years now about how Iran or Hezbollah or whoever is taking over Venezuela and is going to murder everyone in their beds. When Iran built a bicycle factory in Venezuela, they were trying to pass it off as a nuclear weapons plant, so the Venezuelans marketed it as the “atomic bicycle.”
This is not a question of proof. It’s a question of common decency.
“Jews” does not describe our enemy here.
Yes, you read this article correctly. This is the actual state of the so called “free press” and freedom loving media in America. Goebbels would have given anything to have this kind of complete control of the state’s propaganda apparatus and narratives. In America’s neoliberal capitalist paradise literally everything is a “commodity” – including the “truth” – which is of course always for sale and available to be purchased by the highest bidder.
Let us not forget Edward Bernays, possibly *the* progenitor of propaganda. He, a public relations initiator in the 1920s, wrote a book called Propaganda in which he stated clearly: that the propaganda created during WWI demonstrated that it was possible to “regiment the public mind” every bit as easily as it was for the military to regiment its “bodies.” That it was the job of the *intelligent minority* to direct the thinking of the bewildered herd.
And the MSM – at all levels and across the western world – have been doing this pretty much ever since, even if not before. And it would appear, from my small experience, that it is often the more highly educated, comfortably off, bourgeoisie (all levels) who soak up the mis/disinformation spread by the MSM and believe it all. Because, I think, at some level it suits them and their ways of life.
Hit the nail on the head there I think. Coping with cognitive dissonance (dukkha by another name) as best they can.
“Keep shopping it’ll all be OK”
Bernays was right. Evil and right. And we see it playing out in MSM and world events every day. Populations en mass are a bewildered herd and are easily shepherded the their doom.
While you are on the right track – perhaps via Adam Curtis documentary ‘Century of the Self’ – that was more about the provision of ‘PR’ services to ‘peacetime’ use for those who paid for them – and thus who became a cosy-self-interest agenda.
The Book “The Secret History of the First World War” – featured on Corbett Report Documentary of the same name – gives a clear sense of how events and outcomes can be set up and effected without knowledge by those notionally in control. This approach to power did not stop and has only developed since – along with technological extensions of the means to manipulate perceptions.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hidden-History-Secret-Origins-First/dp/1780576307
The manipulation of perceptions and the effective capture of minds is largely unnoticed and unchallenged by those who think within such framing unawares. One of the basic methods is to generate or associate an evil with a target, and set off a reaction of righteous hate over un-faced fears.
Until we undo the evils in our own mind – we are delivered unto evil by our own thinking – often provided or nurtured by others who likewise align in a manipulative deceit as a source of power or self-interest.
The easiest way to evade the undoing of our own ‘deceits’ or self-illusion running unchecked – is by accusing it in others and joining in the throwing of stones or any form other weaponised hate.