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The USA’s Doll House: A Vast Tapestry of Lies and Illusions

Edward Curtin
This is an updated and revised version of the full cover-story that appeared in the important publication, garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 003. Issue 004 is due out this week and I urge readers to purchase it. You will read articles there that you will find no place else, brilliant, eye-opening analyses of issues that the MSM will never touch.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005

While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia, the American people hole up in an illusionary dwelling constructed to reduce them to children afraid of the truth. Or is it the dark?

This is not new; it has been so for a very long time, but it has become a more sophisticated haunted doll’s house, an electronic one with many bells and whistles and images that move faster than the eye can see. We now inhabit a digital technological nightmare controlled by government and corporate forces intent on dominating every aspect of people’s lives.

This is true despite the valiant efforts of dissidents to use the technology for human liberation. The old wooden doll houses, where you needed small fingers to rearrange the furniture, now only need thumbs that can click you into your cell’s fantasy world. So many dwell there in the fabricated reality otherwise known as propaganda. The result is mass hallucination.

In a 1969 interview, Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to ever bring to trial a case involving the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, said that as a result of the CIA’s murderous coup d’état on behalf of the military-industrial-financial-media-intelligence complex that rules the country to this day, the American people have been subjected to a fabricated reality that has rendered them a nation of passive Eichmanns, who sit in their living rooms, popping pills and watching television as their country’s military machine mows down people by the millions and the announcers tell them all the things they should be afraid of, such as bacteria on cutting boards and Russian spies infiltrating their hair salons.

Garrison said:

The creation of such inanities as acceptable reality and unacceptable reality is necessary for the self-preservation of the super-state against its greatest danger: understanding on the part of the people as to what is really happening.

All factors which contribute to its burgeoning power are exaggerated.
All factors which might reveal its corrosive effect on the nation are concealed.

The result is to place the populace in the position of persons living in a house whose windows no longer reveal the outside but on which murals have been painted.

Some of the murals are frightening and have the effect of reminding the occupants of the outside menaces against which the paternal war machine is protecting them. Other murals are pleasant to remind them how nice things are inside the house.

But to live like this is to live in a doll’s house. If life has one lesson to teach us, it is that to live in illusion is ultimately disastrous.

In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.[1]

Fifty years have disappeared behind us since the eloquent and courageous Garrison (read On the Trail of the Assassins) metaphorically voiced the truth, despite the CIA’s persistent efforts to paint him as an unhinged lunatic through its media mouthpieces.

These days they would probably just lock him up or send him fleeing across borders, as with Assange, Manning, and Snowden.

It is stunning to take a cue from his comment regarding the JFK assassination, when he suggested that one reverse the lone assassin scenario and place it in the U.S.S.R.

No American could possibly believe a tale that a former Russian soldier, trained in English and having served at a top Soviet secret military base, who had defected to the U.S. and then returned home with the help of the K.G.B., could kill the Russian Premier with a defective and shoddy rifle and then be shot to death in police headquarters in Moscow by a K.G.B. connected hit man so there would be no trial and the K.G.B. would go scot-free.

That would be a howler! So too, of course, are the Warren Commission’s fictions about Oswald.

Snowden, Assange, and Manning

If we then update this mental exercise and imagine that Snowden, Assange, and Manning were all Russian, and that they released information about Russian war crimes, political corruption, and a system of total electronic surveillance of the Russian population, and were then jailed or sent fleeing into exile as a result, who in the U.S., liberal, libertarian or conservative, would possibly believe the Russian government’s accusations that these three were criminals.

Nevertheless, Barack Obama, the transparency president, made sure to treat them as such, all the while parading as a “liberal” concerned for freedom of speech and the First Amendment. He made sure that Snowden and Manning were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, and that Assange was corralled via false Swedish sex charges so he had to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (a form of jail).

He brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight people, more than all former presidents combined. He hypocritically pardoned Manning on his way out the door as if this would polish his deluded liberal legacy after making her suffer terribly through seven years of imprisonment.

He set the stage for Trump to re-jail Manning to try to get this most courageous woman to testify against Assange, which she will not do, and for the collaborationist British government to jail Assange in preparation for his extradition to the United States and a show trial. As for Snowden, he has been relegated to invisibility, good for news headlines once and for a movie, but now gone and forgotten.

Obama and Trump, arch political “enemies,” have made sure that those who reveal the sordid acts of the American murderous state are cruelly punished and silenced.

This is how the system works, and for most Americans, it is not happening. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care, just as they don’t care that Obama backed the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S trained killers, and then Trump ranted about all these “non-white” people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S., as it has been doing throughout Latin America for so long.

Who does care about the truth? Has anyone even noticed how the corporate media has disappeared the “news” of all those desperate people clamouring to enter the U.S.A. from Mexico? One day they were there and in the headlines; the next day, gone. It’s called news.

The Sleepwalkers

But even though a majority of Americans have never believed the government’s explanation for JFK’s murder, they nevertheless have insouciantly gone to sleep for half a century in the doll’s house of illusions as the killing and the lies of their own government have increased over the years and any semblance of a democratic and peaceful America has gone extinct.

The fates of courageous whistle-blowers Assange, Manning, and Snowden don’t concern them. The fates of Hondurans don’t concern them. The fates of Syrians don’t concern them. The fates of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Palestinians don’t concern them. The fates of America’s victims all around the world don’t concern them. Indifference reigns.

Obviously, if you are reading this, you are not one of the sleepwalkers and are awake to the parade of endless lies and illusions and do care. But you are in a minority.

That is not the case for most Americans. When approximately 129 million people cast their votes for Donald Trump and HilIary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, you know idiocy reigns and nothing has been learned. Ditto for the votes for Obama, Bush, Clinton, et al. You can keep counting back. It is an ugly fact and sad to say.

Such a repetition compulsion is a sign of a deep sickness, and it will no doubt be repeated in the 2020 election. The systemic illusion must be preserved at all costs and the warfare state supported in its killing. It is the American way.

It is true that average Americans have not built the doll’s house; that is the handiwork of the vast interconnected and far-reaching propaganda arms of the U.S. government and their media accomplices. But that does not render them innocent for accepting decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind by believing that a totally corrupt system works.

The will to believe is very powerful, as is the propaganda.

The lesson that Garrison spoke of has been lost on far too many people, even on those who occasionally leave the doll house for a walk, but who only go slightly down the path for fear of seeing too much reality and connecting too many dots. There is plain ignorance, then there is culpable ignorance, to which I shall return.

Denying Existential Freedom

One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free. This has been going on for at least forty years, ever since the Church Committee’s revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control program, MKULTRA. Everyone was appalled at the epiphany, so a different tactic was added.

Say those programs have been ended when in fact they were continued under other even deeper secret programs, and just have “experts” – social, psychological, and biological “scientists” – repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain.

Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled – e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hairstyle, etc. Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people.

Do this in the name of helping people with their emotional and behavioral problems that are rooted in their biology and are beyond their control. And create criteria to convince people that they are sick and that their distress has nothing to do with the coup d’état that has rendered them “citizens” of a police state.

We have been interminably told that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump — what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world. Science for idiots.

Drip by drip, here and there, in the pattern of the best propaganda, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul says – “for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates conviction and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition”[2] – articles, books, media reports have reiterated that people are “determined” by biological, genetic, social, and psychological forces over which they have no control.

To assert that people are free in the Sartrean sense (en soir, condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past, a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets.

One who doesn’t grasp the truth since he doesn’t read the New York Times or watch CBS television. One who believes in nutty conspiracy theories.

The conventional propaganda – I almost said wisdom – created through decades-long media and academic repetition, is that we are not free.

Let me repeat: we are not free. We are not free.

Investigator reporter John Rappoport has consistently exposed the propaganda involved in the creation and expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) with its pseudo-scientific falsehoods and collusion between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. As he correctly notes, the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program has morphed into modern psychiatry, both with the same objectives of disabling and controlling people by convincing them that they are not free and are in need of a chemical brain bath.[

Robert Kennedy assassin hospitalized after prison stabbing.”[4]

RFK assassin, RFK assassin, RFK assassin … all the media said the same thing, which they have been doing for fifty-two years. Their persistency endures despite all the facts that refute their disinformation and show that Senator Kennedy, who was on his way to becoming president, was murdered, like his brother John, by forces of the national security state.

Sartre and Bad Faith

Lying and dissembling are ubiquitous. Being deceived by the media liars is mirrored in people’s personal lives.

People lie and want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They like the doll’s house. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi).

In Existential Psychoanalysis he put it thus:

In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. But with this ‘lie’ to myself, the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.

Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind the government’s and corporate media’s lies and propaganda, even as the shades of the prison house ominously close around us and the world edges toward global death that could arrive in an instant with nuclear war or limp along for years of increasing suffering.

Those of us who write about the U.S. led demented wars and provocations around the world and the complementary death of democracy at home are constantly flabbergasted and discouraged by the willed ignorance of so many Americans.

For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from fine journalists and writers committed to truth, not propaganda. There is actually far too much truth available, which poses another problem.

But it doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple, opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves.

We are awash in information (and disinformation) and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer.

The problem is the will to know. But why? Why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance? That too. Willful ignorance, ditto. Laziness, indeed. Careerism and ideology? For certain.

Upton Sinclair put it mildly when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.” Difficult? No, it’s almost impossible.

But then there are many very intelligent people who have nothing to lose and yet adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies that have them in their grip.

As do many others, I know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true. They close down.

This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe, threatens Russia, China, and Iran, among many others, and expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.

As for Assange, Manning, and Snowden, their plight matters not a whit.

In fact, they have been rendered invisible inside the doll’s house, except as the murals on the windows flashback their images as threats to the occupants, Russian monsters out to eat them up.

As the great poet Constantine Cavafy wrote long ago in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” and they never come: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”

Then again, for people like U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, who knows the Russian barbarians have and will come again, life must be terrifying as he tries so manfully to bar the gates. The Russians have been the American solution in this fairy tale for so long that it’s hard for many Americans to believe another story.

The Two-Headed Monster

On the one hand, there is the massive propaganda apparatus operated by American intelligence agencies in conjunction with their media partners.

On the other, there is the human predilection for untruth and illusions, the sad need to be comforted and to submit to greater “authority,” gratefully to accept the myths proffered by one’s masters. This tendency applies not just to the common people, but even more so to the intellectual classes, who act as though they are immune.

Erich Fromm, writing about Germans and Hitler, but by extension people everywhere, termed this the need to “escape from freedom,” since freedom conjures up fears of vertiginous aloneness and the need to decide, which in turn evokes the fear of death.[5] There are also many kinds of little deaths that precede the final one: social, career, money, familiar, etc., that are used to keep people in the doll’s house.

Fifty years ago, the CIA coined the term “conspiracy theory” as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK. All the media echoed the CIA line.

While they still use the term to dismiss and denounce, their control of the mainstream media is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, etc., the coups disguised as color revolutions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Hong Kong, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner there, drone murders, the Iranian “threat,” the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing and the Russia-gate farce, the “criminals” Assange, Manning, Snowden – everything.

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Fox News, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. – all are stenographers for the deep state.

So much of the ongoing propaganda travels under the banner of “the war on terror,” which is, of course, an outgrowth of the attacks of September 11, 2001, appropriately named and constantly reinforced as 9/11 in a wonderful example of linguistic mind-control: a constant emergency reminder to engender anxiety, depression, panic, and confusion, four of the symptoms that lead the DSM “experts” and their followers to diagnose and drug individuals.

The term 9/11 was first used in the New York Times on September 12, 2001 by Bill Keller, the future Times’ editor and Iraq war cheerleader. Just a fortuitous coincidence, of course.

Jacques Ellul on Propaganda

Jacques Ellul has argued convincingly that modern propaganda in a technological mass society is more complicated than the state and media lying and deceiving the population.

He argues that propaganda meets certain needs of modern people and therefore the process of deceit is reciprocal. The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty.

Ellul says, “He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair.” But he can’t live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense.

He wants to participate and have opinions that suggest he grasps the flow of events. He doesn’t so much want information, but value judgments and preconceived positions that provide him with a framework for living. Ellul wrote the following in 1965 in his classic book Propaganda:

The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a ‘key’ that will permit them to take a position, and even readymade opinions….The man who keeps himself informed needs a framework….the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be; the more fragmented the canvas, the simpler the pattern; the more difficult the question, the more all-embracing the solution; the more menacing the reduction of his own worth, the greater the need for boosting his ego. All this propaganda – and only propaganda – can give him.[6]

Another way of saying this is that people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the “truth.” But such so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda, and while it satisfies people’s emotional need for coherence, it also allows them to think of themselves as free individuals arriving at their own conclusions, which is a basic function of good propaganda.

In today’s mass technological society, it is essential that people be convinced that they are free-thinking individuals acting in good faith. Then they can feel good about themselves as they lie and act in bad faith.

Culpable Ignorance

It is widely accepted that political leaders and the mass media lie and dissemble regularly, which, of course, they do. That is their job in an oligarchy. Today we are subjected to almost total, unrelenting media and government propaganda.

Depending on their political leanings, people direct their anger toward politicians of parties they oppose and media they believe slant their coverage to favor the opposition.

Trump is a liar. No, Obama is a liar. And Hillary Clinton. No, Fox News. Ridiculous! – it’s CNN or NBC.

And so on and so forth in this theater of the absurd that plays out within a megaplex of mainstream media propaganda, where there are many shows but one producer, whose overall aim is to engineer the consent of all who enter, while setting the different audiences against each other. It is a very successful charade that evokes name-calling from all quarters.

In other words, for many people their opponents lie, as do other people, but not them. This is as true in personal as well as public life. Here the personal and the political converge, despite protestations to the contrary. Dedication to truth is very rare.

But there is another issue with propaganda that complicates the picture further. People of varying political persuasions can agree that propaganda is widespread. Many people on the left, and some on the right, would agree with Lisa Pease’s statement in her book on the RFK assassination, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, that “the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time.”[7]

That is also what Garrison thought when he spoke of the doll’s house.

If that is so, then today’s propaganda is anchored in the events of the 1960s, specifically the infamous government assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, the truth of which the CIA has worked so hard to conceal. In the fifty or so years since, a vast amount of new information has made it explicitly clear that these murders were carried out by elements within the U.S. government, and were done so to silence the voices of four charismatic leaders who were opposed to the American war machine and the continuation of the Cold War.

To turn away from this truth and to ignore its implications can only be described as an act of bad faith and culpable ignorance, or worse. But that is exactly what many prominent leftists have done. Then to compound the problem, they have done the same with the attacks of September 11, 2001.

One cannot help thinking of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called these people in the 1950s: “the compatible left.” He felt that effective CIA propaganda, beside the need for fascist-minded types such as Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton, depended on “courting” leftists and liberal into its orbit. For so many of the compatible left, those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but often taking the money of the super-rich, the JFK assassination and the truth of September 11, 2001 are inconsequential, never to be broached, as if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did. By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of influential leftists has done the work of Orwell’s crime-stop and has effectively succeeded in situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S. propaganda. They truncate the full story to present a narrative that distorts the truth.

Without drawing a bold line connecting the dots from November 22, 1963 up to the present, a critique of the murderous forces ruling the United States is impossible.

Among the most notable of such failures are Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Howard Zinn, and Chris Hedges, men idolized by many liberals and leftists. And there are many others who have been deeply influenced by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Zinn and follow in their footsteps.

Their motivations remain a mystery, but there is no doubt their refusals have contributed to the increased power of those who control the doll’s house. To know better and do as they have is surely culpable ignorance.

From Bad to Worse

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites?

The answer is obvious.

It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter.

The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why. All the while the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful with the growth of electronic media and cell phone usage.

The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population.

This fragmentation of consciousness prevents people from grasping the present from within because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.

Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other. The latter, whose bibles are the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Democracy Now, The Guardian, etc. – can only see propaganda when they can attribute it to Trump or the Russians. The former see everything as a liberal conspiracy to take down Trump.

The liberals have embraced a new McCarthyism and allied themselves with the deep-state forces that they were once allegedly appalled by, including Republicans. Their embrace of the formerly despised war-monger John Bolton in the impeachment trial of Trump is a laughable case in point, if it weren’t so depraved and slimy.

It surely isn’t the bloodthirsty policies of the Trump administration or his bloviating personality, for these liberals allied themselves with Obama’s anti-Russian rhetoric, his support for the U.S. orchestrated neo-fascist Ukrainian coup, his destruction of Libya, his wars of aggression across the Middle East, his war on terror, his trillion-dollar nuclear weapons modernization, his enjoyment of drone killing, his support for the coup in Honduras, his embrace of the CIA and his CIA Director John Brennan, his prosecution of whistle-blowers, etc.

The same media that served the CIA so admirably over the decades became the liberals’ paragons of truth. It’s enough to make your head spin, which is the point.

Spin left, spin right, spin all around, because we have possessed your mind in this spectacular image game where seeming antinomies are the constancy of the same through difference, all the presidents coined by the same manufacturer who knows that coin-flipping serves to entertain the audience eager for hope and change.

This is how the political system works to prevent change. It is why little has changed for the better over half a century and the American empire has expanded.

While it may be true that there are signs that this American hegemony is coming to an end (I am not convinced), I would not underestimate the power of the U.S. propaganda apparatus to keep people docile and deluded in the doll’s house, despite the valiant efforts of independent truth-tellers.

How, for example, is it possible for so many people to see such a stark difference between the despicable Trump and the pleasant Obama? They are both puppets dancing to their masters’ tunes – the same masters.

They both front for the empire.

In his excellent book, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State, Jeremy Kuzmarov assiduously documents Obama’s crimes, including his CIA background.[8]

As Glen Ford, of Black Agenda Report, says in the first sentence of his forward, “Barack Obama may go down in presidential history as the most effective-and deceptive-imperialist of them all.” Read the book if you want all the details. They form an overwhelming indictment of the con artist and war criminal that is irrefutable.

But will those who worship at the altar of Barack Obama read it? Of course not.

Just as those deluded ones who voted for the reality television flim-flam man Trump will ignore all the accumulating evidence that they’ve been had and are living under a president who is Obama’s disguised doppelganger, carrying out the orders of his national security state bosses. This, too, is well documented, and no doubt another writer will arise in the years to come to put it between a book’s covers.

Yet even Jeremy Kuzmarov fails to see the link between the JFK assassination and Obama’s shilling for the warfare state. His few references to Kennedy are all negative, suggesting he either is unaware of what Kennedy was doing in the last year of his life and why he was murdered by the CIA, or something else. He seems to follow Noam Chomsky, a Kennedy hater, in this regard.

I point out this slight flaw in an excellent book because it is symptomatic of certain people on the left who refuse to complete the circle.

If, as Kuzmarov, argues, Obama was CIA from the start and that explains his extraordinarily close relationship with the CIA’s John Brennan, an architect, among many things, of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, and that Obama told CIA Director Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted,” and the CIA killed JFK, well, something’s amiss, an enormous gap in the analysis of our current condition.

The doll’s house is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites that run the show and ably abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners. It is a spectacle of open secrecy, in which the CIA has effectively suckered everyone into a game of to-and-fro in which only they win.

Our only hope for change is to try and educate as many people as possible about the linkages between events that started with the CIA coup d’état in Dallas on November 22, 1963, continued through the killings of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK and on through so much else up to September 11, 2001, and have brought us to the deeply depressing situation we now find ourselves in where truthtellers like Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden are criminalized, while the real perpetrators of terrible evils roam free.

Yes, we must educate but also agitate for the release of this courageous trio. Their freedom is ours; their imprisonment is ours, whether we know it or not. The walls are closing in.

Lisa Pease is so right: “The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.”

If we don’t follow her advice, we will be toyed with like dolls for a long time to come. There will be no one else to blame.

[1] Interview with Jim Garrison, District Attorney of Parish of Orleans, Louisiana, May 27, 1969 at https://kennedysandking.com/images/pdf/garrison-interview-05-27-1969-trans.pdf

[2] Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, Jacques Ellul, Vintage Books, 1973, pp. 17-18

[3] https//blog.nomorefakenews.com/2017/07/11/cia-mind-control-morphed-into-psychiatry/

[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sirhan-sirhan-stabbed-robert-f-kennedy-assassin-hospitalized-after-prison-stabbing-2019-08-31/

[5] Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm, Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1941

[6] Ellul, op cit., p. 140

[7] A Lie Too Big To Fail, Lisa Pease, Feral House, 2018, pp.500-501

[8] Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State, Jeremy Kuzmarov, Clarity Press, 2019

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Maxxwoll
Maxxwoll
Feb 13, 2020 9:04 PM

Welcome to the Truman Show.

TFS
TFS
Feb 13, 2020 9:53 AM

1. William Blum does a more than adequate run down of American Exceptionalism:
https://williamblum.org/

2.American Exceptionalism, the illusion, has been known to large swathes of the American community.
https://twitter.com/Bakari_Sellers/status/1227558780017221638

3. And how American politics may have been changed forever if this man was still alive and saved us all from Hillary Clinton.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=who+killed+jfk+jnr&sp=EgIYAg%253D%253D

4.Comedians like George Carlin, have always pulled back the curtain on the illusion. Jimmy Dore is leading the way……..dare you look?
https://www.youtube.com/user/TYTComedy/videos

Bob
Bob
Feb 11, 2020 10:59 PM

The murder of MJK should always be mentioned when the murders of Malcolm X, JFK, MLK, RFK are discussed. The deep state could not add the murder of Edward Kennedy, so they murdered MJK and framed Edward. His choice was between defending himself and appearing crazy or begging for forgiveness for his failings.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 12, 2020 8:15 AM
Reply to  Bob

Don’t forget John Lennon, who the Rightwing psychopaths hated with a fury.

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 12, 2020 8:38 AM
Reply to  Bob

I have read quite bit around this view to admit that the waters are very murky around the Chappaquidick story. In due course, Hollywood got in on the act and did a hatchet job on Ted which rather confirms (for me) that there is more to the story than we are led to believe.

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 12, 2020 8:50 AM
Reply to  Hugh O'Neill

I have just remembered my father’s deep disappointment, as if to say that here was our last best hope gone. I have the same reaction now whenever I read who is the latest recipient of the JFK “Profiles in Courage” award, awarded by Caroline Kennedy.; past recipients include GHW Bush no less. How is it possible that Caroline Kennedy can ‘act’ in such a way – but perhaps she has no choice? I keep nominating Tulsi Gabbard or James Douglass but somehow they never get a mention…

Pathwhisperer
Pathwhisperer
Feb 11, 2020 7:27 PM

The presence of the congenital conartists, psychopaths, in the bamboozling described above needs to be examined. Today i would say that the triad of the NSA, FBI and the fusion centers (at least the one affiliated with the NYPD) are essentially run by human adelpho parasites/psychopaths. (They know who i am and have made numerous assassination attempts.) https://pathwhisperer.info

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 11, 2020 10:19 PM
Reply to  Pathwhisperer

‘Even paranoiacs have real enemies’.

Pathwhisperer
Pathwhisperer
Feb 12, 2020 7:41 PM

Ah, well. Who’s my target audience? Psychotic scared rabbits, who have to believe they live in a world safe for scared rabbits, or, my fellow researchers/writers who need to protect themselves and in particular recognize and believe the first few attacks?

Hugh O’Neill
Hugh O’Neill
Feb 11, 2020 7:15 PM

Perhaps if Edward Curtin had referred instead to the works of William Pepper, then your sense of integrity might be less affronted.

Eric Zuesse
Eric Zuesse
Feb 11, 2020 12:51 PM

Though the literary style of this article is effective, the author here displays unreliable methodology and argument. I agree with the author’s basic [point but cannot accept his argumentation and ‘evidence’ in it, which are low quality. For example:

“Many people on the left, and some on the right, would agree with Lisa Pease’s statement in her book on the RFK assassination, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, that “the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time.”[7]”

That links to this book: https://www.amazon.com/Lie-Too-Big-Fail-Assassination/dp/1627310703?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-ffnt-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1627310703

Here is the opening of the reader-review that was the most-clicked as being “helpful” in evaluating that book:

75 customer reviews

Top Reviews
George Bailey
3.0 out of 5 stars Read with caution
January 12, 2019
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
My two cents, so far:

I have been looking forward to the release of this book because I have been a fan of Lisa Pease’s work for many years. However, while just browsing around the book before I read it from start to finish, I have come across two inexplicable errors. She has Jesse Unruh sitting in the back seat of the patrol car with Sirhan when he was transported to Rampart station (pg 23). Among all the LAPD files, FBI files, Grand Jury and trial testimony, and the numerous books and articles written about this event, I have not seen one account which puts Jesse Unruh in the back seat. This is not a trivial error. The details of the transport of Sirhan from the Ambassador Hotel to Rampart station were important enough to warrant the prosecution calling three witnesses at trial to cover it.

She also repeatedly relies upon the statements of alleged witness, Marcus McBroom. It can be easily demonstrated that McBroom is a liar, having made repeated false statements. If McBroom’s statements were true, then he would be a very important witness, so it is essential for anyone doing in-depth research on this event to check out McBroom’s claims. If one does that, it becomes clear McBroom is not being truthful.

*** EDIT 01/19/19: I will eventually post some thoughts in a comment to this review about the author’s treatment of Marcus McBroom (see comment 36). This is a serious error that raises questions about her investigative process. It incorporates flawed analysis, poor judgment, and at the very least, a biased presentation of the evidence, if not a deliberate attempt to deceive readers. Marcus McBroom is a liar, he is not credible, period. I challenge anyone to make a case to the contrary – it cannot be done. The case Lisa Pease tries to make has internal contradictions which she either ignores or cannot see, and omissions which could only have been deliberate. That being the case, one has to ask where else has she made such errors in this book? *** End of EDIT

*** EDIT 01/16/19: A third error I want to point out is the author has Kennedy’s “unofficial bodyguard” waiting “stage right” as Kennedy finishes speaking to the crowd in the Embassy ballroom. I know of no evidence to support that assertion. All of the trial testimony I have seen and at least two broadcast news cameras have the bodyguard, Bill Barry, stage left. Since Lisa Pease is a writer of screenplays, I must assume she knows the meaning of “stage left” and “stage right” and uses those terms carefully to make it clear to which side of the stage she refers. Since there was a last minute change of plan regarding where Senator Kennedy would go after finishing his speech, and this change led him directly to the assassin (ambush), it is basic investigative practice to ascertain the details of who made the change and why, and where were Kennedy’s security people before and after. Again, in my view this is an important detail. *** End of EDIT

*** EDIT 1/27/19: Unfortunately, the more I read, the more problems I find in this book. Lisa Pease relies heavily on eyewitness interviews and testimony to support her narrative. The eyewitness evidence in this case is difficult to sort out because there is a lot of it and it is rife with problems. In many cases, interrogators did an inadequate job of asking questions needed to clarify important details. There is also considerable contradictory testimony among witnesses, even some who were in the same place at the same time. Many witnesses’ stories changed over time, and there is substantial evidence that witnesses’ accounts were influenced by other witnesses and media reports. I am finding that Lisa Pease has provided misleading representations of some eyewitness accounts by including testimony that fits her agenda and leaving out that which does not. I am going to have to put the details in the comments to this thread otherwise this review is going to get way too long (if it isn’t already). Witnesses, George Green and Booker Griffin, are two more examples of the author’s deliberate attempt to deceive her readers. (See comments 37 and 38) *** End of EDIT

How does Lisa Pease research the RFK assassination for decades and make such errors? For me, this creates the problem of no longer being able to trust Lisa. I am now going to have to vet everything in this book that I have not already researched in detail. …

Hugh O’Neill
Hugh O’Neill
Feb 11, 2020 2:16 PM
Reply to  Eric Zuesse

Eric. Whilst George Bailey may be able to find fault with elements of Lisa Pease’s argument, I would suggest that such nit picking over minutiae has an ulterior motive. Both you and Mr. Bailey claim you agree with the main contention that the assassination of RFK was not as it was claimed by the state apparatus. That surely should be sufficient motive for you to demand the release of Sirhan. However, we all know that won’t happen, because that might be an admission that he was just another Patsy, and that The assassination of RFK was preemptive Coup d’état. Mr. Bailey should spend more time with his big rabbit friend Harvey.

Eric Zuesse
Eric Zuesse
Feb 11, 2020 2:52 PM
Reply to  Hugh O’Neill

No, Bailey didn’t do ‘nit picking’, and your reasoning throughout is poor. My reader-comment included just the opening of Bailey’s destruction of Pease’s credibility, honesty and logic. You miss the entire point and then you fail even to look at his review to see the rest of it. I never refer (other than critically) to a source that isn’t trustworthy, and I also never link to an article that does. I appreciate and respect Edward Curtin’s skillful use of metaphors and of certain other literary devices, and I almost invariably agree with his articles on their basis viewpoints, but if I linked in my articles to sources such as that, I would be ashamed, because a nonfiction writer’s fundamental obligation to the audience is to provide only trustworthy sources and links to same for the reader to check out on that person’s own.

As regards your “That surely should be sufficient motive for you to demand the release of Sirhan,” I again say no, because I maintain public silence on all matters regarding which I do not yet know sufficiently solid and conclusive evidence to state a position. What I am objecting to in Curtin’s article here is that the methodology is shoddy, and I certainly wouldn’t want to do the same sort of thing myself. However, I can at least say this: I do not trust the U.S. Government’s verdicts or public positions on any assassinations or anything that has international implications. The U.S. Government ever since 26 July 1945 has been a veritable lying machine controlled by its Deep State, no authentic democracy. Consequently, I love some of the literary devices in Curtin’s article presenting the same general viewpoint that I hold. If I cited as sources everything that agrees with me, my articles would be trashy, as almost all are. The problem with articles such as that is that they can preach effectively only to the choir of same-0believers, and cannot persuade intelligent readers to join the choir. I don’t care how many fools there are out there — I am not trying to persuade them; I am no propagandist, not even if propaganda is the only thing that publishers publish. If I won’t maintain my integrity, what is left? Whatever it is, I don’t want it.

Hugh O’Neill
Hugh O’Neill
Feb 11, 2020 7:19 PM
Reply to  Eric Zuesse

Eric. Let’s suppose that Bailey is legit, and that he has categorically proved that Pease is a fantasist, liar and has invented evidence to slander and accuse of murder most foul those paragons of morality, the CIA and FBI. Where does this all lead to? Were we foolish to imagine that RFK was not just the hapless victim of a random act of violence and that we should just get over it?
Suppose Edward Curtin had instead referred to the works of Sirhan’s Attorney, William Pepper? Pepper is no fantasist and has a reasonable grasp of legal procedure and what constitutes evidence.
I am no lawyer, but surely all the defence has to show is that the prosecution of Sirhan was shonky? I would reserve the nit picking of evidence Until such time as the CIA is the accused. You can indulge your sense of integrity then.

Eric Zuesse
Eric Zuesse
Feb 11, 2020 8:14 PM
Reply to  Hugh O’Neill

I am all in favor of re-doing the ‘justice’ on all of those assassinations, and more, but I am not in favor of assertions as to precisely whom the perpetrators were or weren’t. It WASN’T “justice.” Justice needs to be done. I am inclined to think that some of America’s top leaders should be assigned the top guilt in those matters. But maybe none were, in any. (I would be shocked if the latter were the case.)

Eric Zuesse
Eric Zuesse
Feb 11, 2020 8:22 PM
Reply to  Hugh O’Neill

You want these matters re-tried. So do I. Obviously, Curtin does. That is not the issue here.

Antonym
Antonym
Feb 12, 2020 3:45 AM
Reply to  Eric Zuesse

The U.S. Government ever since 26 July 1945 has been a veritable lying machine controlled by its Deep State, no authentic democracy.

That’s the Potsdam Declaration day drawn up by Truman, Churchill and Stalin. The last invaded Japan 2 weeks after.
President Truman championed civil rights in the US and in its military plus retired poor: not the fingerprints of a Deep State puppet president.

Wasn’t the US take over ~ one and a half decade later on?

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 12, 2020 8:16 AM
Reply to  Antonym

Truman was a puppet of the Zionassties who bankrolled him.

harry stotle
harry stotle
Feb 11, 2020 8:09 PM
Reply to  Eric Zuesse

‘How does Lisa Pease research the RFK assassination for decades and make such errors?’ – as you acknowledge yourself, Eric, the thrust of Edward Curtin’s article transcends this level of minutiae.
The anomalies you raise may be an important factor when assessing the credibility of the Kennedy book but add little to understanding how or why certain realities are created so as to manipulate the public mood.

I’ve just finished the Netflix doc’ ‘Who killed Malcolm X’.

One of themes explored in the film is the importance Malcolm X attached to black communities unlearning the false consciousness imposed on them at school, in the workplace, by the police force and of course by the media and political class.
As an aside there was no serious attempt to investigate his assassination while two innocent men lost 20 years of their lives in prison.

Isn’t this what the Dolls House is really about: mass duping of the public for nefarious economic ends by an elite that holds a vice like grip on power – the aftermath of Kennedy and Malcolm X’s death are just two examples of how this corrupt apparatus works?

Edward Curtin
Edward Curtin
Feb 11, 2020 9:24 PM
Reply to  Eric Zuesse

I am far from “ashamed” by my “low quality” argument, as you call it, nor by my reference to Lisa Pease’s excellent book, A Lie Too Big to Fail. What I find particularly strange with your criticism, Eric, is that in an article of 6,000 words I mention Pease’s book twice in passing but you find a need to trash my logic, argument, and “unreliable methodology.” I thought it was just academics who misuse that word methodology to criticize others. It does have that ring of seriousness, though, erroneously serious. Let me assure you I don’t use “methodology,” so it can’t be “unreliable.” Perhaps you meant my method or logic.

Lisa Pease has ably defended herself against the criticisms made by the anonymous George Bailey of it’s a wonderful life fictional fame (see the comments with the amazon review). Good researchers love anonymous sources, don’t they. I hope I didn’t reference any in my article. Our mysterious reviewer George Bailey says it “is not a trivial error” that Pease mistakenly puts Jesse Unruh in the back seat of the LA Police car with Sirhan Sirhan rather the the front seat. Really? Not trivial? That’s funny. He accuses Pease of a “deliberate attempt to deceive her readers.” He uses the old rhetorical trick of opening with “I have been a fan of Lisa Pease’s for many years, and then he slams her. Oh, Mr. Bailey, suddenly you have become a disgruntled anonymous fan. It’s a not so wonderful life for disenchanted lovers, iis it? How shall I reference your quote at the end of my comment here? *Anonymous reviewer …..and erstwhile fan of Lisa Pease from, Bedford Falls – not a joke (check this on amazon)* Who’s putting on whom?

Pease has admitted a few mistakes in a book of over 500 pages. Such mistakes are quite normal. Her overall point is rock solid, however, and that is what Bailey and you, Eric, are disparaging for reasons only the two of you know, just as you are doing with my article. I’m surprised you didn’t pick up on my typo in the spelling of en soi as en soir. I’m sorry if you were deceived. It wasn’t deliberate.

Eric Zuesse
Eric Zuesse
Feb 11, 2020 10:33 PM
Reply to  Edward Curtin

It is because I fervently want all of the 1960s assassinations to be be totally retried that I was disappointed to see any questionable source cited for supporting this view. Your central allegations, however, are the ones that directly relate to the title of your article. I also 100% agree with that. However, yet again, I see only speculative “support” being cited to back it up. I have no respect for professional philosophers, nor for psychoanalysts. The only things that can be cited in support of any theory are empirical findings and this includes proven demonstrable and unquestionable historical facts, such as would reasonably be accepted by a criminal court as having been proven to have occurred. Other than that, there is no sound legal-forensic case regarding the history of the matter nor of the interpretation of it to be found in your article. I would LOVE to be able to say that not only do I agree with the theory you present but I accept each and every factual allegation and item of evidence that you have presented to back it up. I started out reading your engagingly written presentation hoping to be persuaded by it but ended up wondering “Is that the caliber of ‘evidence’ he’s building this case upon?” and concluding “Yes, sadly, it is.” I quickly became very disappointed.

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 11, 2020 11:20 PM
Reply to  Eric Zuesse

Eric. We are now almost 52 years from the assassination of RFK. Much of the crucial evidence you claim to desire has been lost (deliberately destroyed) and key witnesses have died. Your passion for justice might sound more convincing if you could categorically provide witnesses and testimony as to your concerns somewhat closer to the time of the incident. When precisely did you see the Damascene light and suspect that not was all as it was claimed to be? St. Peter is taking notes in his big book…

Eric Zuesse
Eric Zuesse
Feb 11, 2020 11:48 PM
Reply to  Hugh O'Neill

You are correct. But I didn’t say it would have to be presented in a court of law. It could be done outside that, but not like this:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/mlk-assassination-loyd-jowers
I propose that historians of one of those assassinations — each one having a different theory of the case on it — would select a widely respected prosecutor to investigate all the previously established evidence on it; and, then, a different widely respected prosecutor and widely respected criminal defense-attorney would be selected and widely respected appropriate judge selected, in order to assemble a trial adhering to U.S. laws, and the whole process being filmed by a cracker-jack director, in order to produce a documentary, funded as a movie to be presented as a profit-making venture, but with volunteer contributions by associated nonprofits; that is, by nonprofits in the related areas of interest. Probably the JFK assassination would be the one to start with, especially because it was the most-clearly mega-historic.

This would be of interest to historians, and to all who are concerned about geostrategy of the past 60 years, as well as to political scientists who write about the American system of government during that period of time. But it would be funded by the commercial interest that the public would have in the entire enterprise.

If Hollywood is too corrupt to be interested in doing this, then maybe Oliver Stone might have contacts outside the U.S. who might. I don’t know how to contact him.

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 12, 2020 1:14 AM
Reply to  Eric Zuesse

Eric. In one sense, I love your idea and I am sure Oliver Stone would embrace it if he thought it might make any difference. He was vilified for his film JFK in which he re-played the Jim Garrison court case, which film made a huge difference and prompted new laws of disclosure, all of which the CIA simply ignores. The CIA are not just the Unspeakable, they are the Untouchables – in the Elliot Ness sense (moral lepers would be another meaning). For a “widely respected” journalist, you come across here as being touchingly naive:
“…a widely respected prosecutor to investigate all the previously established evidence on it; and, then, a different widely respected prosecutor and widely respected criminal defense-attorney would be selected and widely respected appropriate judge selected…”
Gimme a break. Wasn’t it the fact that the “widely respected” Earl Warren was named the eponymous Warren Commission precisely to give it the veneer of “integrity” whilst the whole show was run by the “widely-respected” – but recently sacked for treachery – one Allen Dulles, that pipe-smoking, avuncular old mass murderer.
However, there is no such thing as an original idea. Once upon a long time ago, didn’t the old BBC stage a re-trial of Lee Harvey Oswald and found him innocent. One doubts whether the BBC could ever be so honest ever again; Aunty Ben was caught with her knickers down when she reported the collapse of the “Salomon Brothers Building” (WTC7) about 25 minutes too early. The BBC also aired a series entitled “The men who killed Kennedy” and astonishingly, a documentary entitled “Dead in the Water” about the attempted sinking of the USS Liberty. Now it is they who are “dead in the water” their knickers gone for a burton, after their part played in the blaming of Assad for the CW attack on Douma and their toxic attacks on the disgruntled former employees (aka “Whistle Blowers”) of the OPCW.
Eric, you either believe in fairies, or you are being more than a tad disingenuous. Fool or knave? But who am I to judge? Nothing is incorruptible, and you have probably already been got at, in which case you have my deepest sympathy. Even Jesus asked for the chalice to pass his lips.

Eric Zuesse
Eric Zuesse
Feb 12, 2020 2:29 AM
Reply to  Hugh O'Neill

Hugh, Earl Warren was not appointed by independent outside historians. He was appointed by JFK’s successor LBJ on the advice of his selected AG Nicholas Katzenbach who wrote to his boss “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large.” Neither Katzenbach nor LBJ was independent of the matter, nor historian, nor outside the Government. Your suggestion that what I have proposed is at all similar to what the Warren Commission was, is laughable. I didn’t read further in your comment.

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 12, 2020 2:59 AM
Reply to  Eric Zuesse

Eric. You do me too much honour by engaging in the correspondence because I am a complete nobody. Although I have a Master’s degree in (Nautical) History, I am not beholden to any academic institute, nor publication, nor hidden agenda. I am that pesky voice in the wilderness.
We actually agree 100% on the fundamental point i.e. the corruption of the Warren Commission. We have more that unites us than divides us. We can both agree that the Establishment had clearly decided to find LHO the lone nut assassin. From that alone, we have sufficient proof to satisfy all the angels, saints and scholars that the framing of LHO as Patsy was planned long before the assassination and the cover-up continues to this day. Because of 57 years of criminal concealment, we can easily infer a ‘modus operandi’ with which to connect the assassinations of MLK and RFK (throw in Patrice Lumumba and Dag Hammarskjold for good measure?).
But I have to ask, what would be the frigging point of a docu-drama panel of widely-respected historians (all easily controlled) to reach a verdict? If they say “Guilty” it would be ignored. If they say “Innocent” it will be dismissed. Pointless distraction from the crimes happening before our very eyes!
If you really meant what you would like me to believe (though God knows why) then one possible avenue to pursue would be the indictment and prosecution of the 3 authors of the ‘academic’ paper “Catastrophic Terrorism”. Can you not see that “widely-respected” historian and academic, Philip Zelikow was micro-manager of the so-called “9/11 Commission”- another Allen Dulles i.e. the fox in charge of the investigation of the murder of the chickens. Once Zelikow squeals, he brings the rest tumbling down (in my fantasy world).
Finally, was not Arthur Schlesinger a widely-respected historian? What about other “widely-respected” historians like Dallek, Beschloss, Brinkley, Goodwin, Caro, Kinzer etc. (My apologies to hordes unmentioned).

Antonym
Antonym
Feb 12, 2020 3:24 AM
Reply to  Hugh O'Neill

I am a complete nobody.

Can we have a few more of your kind here please?

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 12, 2020 3:48 AM
Reply to  Antonym

Very kind of you, A. Perhaps the Meek shall inherit the Earth, what’s left of it? The motto for Nobodies:
“Nemo me impune lacessit”. Or, “J’Accuse”.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 12, 2020 8:18 AM
Reply to  Antonym

Were you getting lonely?

Hugh O’Neill
Hugh O’Neill
Feb 12, 2020 7:10 PM

Yes, until Ed himself joined in, then Harry. Eric has done a runner now, feeling either exposed or outnumbered.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 18, 2020 2:24 AM
Reply to  Eric Zuesse

“Oliver Stone might have contacts outside the U.S. who might. I don’t know how to contact him.” Try IMDbPro→Agent, etc.

Joseph Olson
Joseph Olson
Feb 11, 2020 8:50 AM

“Breathtaking: Solving Nuclear 9/11” > “Exposing NIST Jenga Game” > VeteransToday(.)com > finally, WTC vaporized declassified, arrest the REAL terrorists

ReadyForWhatsComing
ReadyForWhatsComing
Feb 11, 2020 5:38 AM

Great article and you’re right about most of it…it’s been planned much longer than many realize. One may look to America the Beautiful to see that….For Amber waves of Grain. Amber means electron in Greek! America, America God shed His grace on the. What’s the definition of shed again? To rid oneself of temporarily or permanently as superfluous or unwanted. It all started back in the garden of Eden. The fruit Adam and Eve ate from was the tree of knowledge of good & evil. Central Intelligence Agency, ran by the Pentagon. Look into Project Paperclip when we brought the evil Nazi scientists in our own military and stacked the roster with a whose who of lucifarian satanists and you may start to get it. Normally wikipedia pages are whitewashed. Look at Jack Parson, Manhattan Project and one of the key people in creation of NASA, friends with Scientology founder, L Ron Hubbard, and you will see that they’re all satan worshipers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)#L._Ron_Hubbard_and_the_Babalon_Working:_1945.E2.80.9346 Aliens are demons. Both are real. The virus ravaging the world now is a bioweapon that has HIV components. We’ll learn, likely later in the play, that the virus and vaccine have alien DNA. WHO and the governments of the world already have the agreements in place to bring about world government. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYkeAZwN2N8 There is no stopping it either, not only is what to come from the Antichrist, but its also judgement sent from God! Many of you will roll your eyes, that’s also from God. It’s all in the Bible and what was described in the book of Revelations has already started…debatable of where we’re at. In any event, the world as we have known it is over. And YES, it was all an illusion- exept MOST IMPORTANTLY- our own SINS, our choices, words, how we treat other people, etc.

Antonym
Antonym
Feb 10, 2020 1:20 PM

JFK threatened to make peace with Khrushchev, something that would be fatal for the Atlantic Anglo military – industrial complex. His assassination was an experiment by the CIA to see if they could get away with a domestic coup d’etat. Turned out to be easy-peasy.
For their official job they could even fail many times: no clue about the Chinese delivery of an atom bomb design plus plutonium to Pakistan in 1982, the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 or the September 11 2001 attack in the US without being cut back or replaced. 9/11 became their easy launchpad to make the takeover “official” and permanent: the new department of Deep State (Homeland) security. The Senate, Congress, Judiciary and MSM rolled over like nine pins.
The US run from Fairfax county + Lower Manhattan over Washington D.C.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 8:50 PM
Reply to  Antonym

JFK threatened Israel if they continued their A-bomb production. He was keen on ending the control of the US economy by the cabal of private banks (nearly all Jewish controlled) misleadingly called the ‘Federal’ Reserve. He was sure asking for the Kidon treatment, and Israel much preferred LBJ, a total stooge, as his reaction to the USS Liberty atrocity showed.

nottheonly1
nottheonly1
Feb 10, 2020 11:53 AM

The notion exists and has been ushered countless times before and Pink Floyd had it in a song, too:

‘The better it gets – the better it gets.’ Riding the Gravy Train. And how it happens quite so often in my brain, an alternative version offers itself with timely accuracy. It is also what Your writing inspires, of course, but for various reasons there. The first one is, that one can look at all my posts over the years and find out that I have repeatedly pointed to this beautiful 800 pound Silver Back Girl in the Tiny House of the American Psyche. But then again, I am also a ‘Space Farmress, Huntress and Gathress’ and consider what happens as that what happens on a exponentially larger perspective.

With the hope not to repeat myself in any way, I like to say that Your article is proof for a new natural law, that can be observed easily once one is introduced to it. Like the car that You just bought is parked at every freaking corner.

‘The Worse it Gets – The Better the Writing’

Reading Your article thus proves that we are in the deepest shit one could ever imagine.

Having noted – due to its veracity over the years – similar, or idential patterns and currents in the psyche of people in general and americans specifically, I would like to respond to the content of Your most laudable essay in detail – but would create an equally long comment, which I do not have the audacity to put on fellow commenters and readers alike.

But it could certainly be of interest to You and all other wide open minded Minds to continue this discussion of utmost importance – a discussion that is constantly interrupted by neo-con psychopaths and the ‘realities/distractions’ they create.

But the discussion must not cease. It must be had wherever, anywhere and everywhere.

¡Viva la Filosofía!

nottheonly1
nottheonly1
Feb 10, 2020 12:14 PM
Reply to  nottheonly1

Typos shmypos. “…or identical patterns…”

And I forgot the point.

Getting shafted and exploited to Death without recourse created the Blues.

Similarily, the writing of Edward Curtin is like the Blues of the political and psychological abuse by the religious fascists. Since ‘Blues’ is already taken, maybe a new term can be created that relates to the written Blues without the music. Which gives me an idea…

Thank You for this marvelous Gem!

Doctor K
Doctor K
Feb 10, 2020 10:41 AM

There was a coup in Hong Kong?

Certainly in the recent local elections the overwhelming majority voted for pro-democracy candidates.
Is that what you mean?

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 8:51 PM
Reply to  Doctor K

‘Pro-democracy’? What the heck is that, under neo-liberal capitalism? The UK? Ha-de-ha-ha!

clickkid
clickkid
Feb 10, 2020 9:39 AM

Yes, how to change people’s minds, or at least to get them to consider alternatives.

Unfortunately, discussion hardly ever changes minds. Direct personal experience is usually what is needed. A mother can tell her child a hundred times not to touch the stove, but it doesn’t work as well as a blistered finger.

“All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.” – Mao Tse tung

austrian peter
austrian peter
Feb 10, 2020 9:08 AM

I agree with all that you say and spend my retirement years talking truth to power. When will the great masses wake up and understand how they are being abused? I have written a book about all this and I write an article each week from the point of view of UK for my American readers:
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2020/02/08/the-financial-jigsaw-issue-no-90/

Wilmers31
Wilmers31
Feb 10, 2020 5:54 AM

The best way to deal with the US is to ignore them. They are just so dumb and full of themselves.

Look at what Pompeo said in Kazakhstan:
“We fully support Kazakhstan’s freedom to choose to do business with whichever country it wants, but I am confident that countries get the best outcomes when they partner with American companies,” he said. “You get fair deals. You get job creation. You get transparency in contracts. You get companies that care about the environment and you get an unsurpassed commitment to quality work.”

Why did he go to Kazakhstan, people can contact the American firms direct! Maybe it was on his bucket list.

Transparency in contracts is a lie, a big fat Pompeo lie. I see it in Australia every day, contracts with US software companies are screwing us and they are ‘commercial in confidence’ – no transparency at all!!!

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 7:16 AM
Reply to  Wilmers31

I spoke with a local vigneron some few years ago. He was pulling a lot of his white grape vines to replace them with red. Because the Chinese prefer red. Apropos of nothing he observed that dealing with the Chinese, in exporting, was great, because their word was their bond. Americans, on the other hand, were nightmares, untrustworthy and duplicitous in most cases, always seeking to put one over on the locals. I guess he was just an ‘anti-American’.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 10, 2020 10:31 PM

“Apropos of nothing he observed that dealing with the Chinese, in exporting, was great, because their word was their bond.”

The other way around, importing, I found the same thing many decades ago when buying large quantities of unique hi-tech product (specific components needed to support our own output). Then I ‘retired’ to become an individual, small-to-very-small order customer of sellers on sites like AliExpress and others, reliant on such electronic malls to help sort out problems of misdescription, malfunction, poor-to-nonexistent quality, the advertising and sale of nonexistent product to secure cashflow between payment and refund, etc. Talk about my status change being an eye opener. Eye opener isn’t the word. My advice: if you’re an individual ‘consumer’ who wants or needs to buy Chinese product direct, wait until it shows up on Amazon.

Open
Open
Feb 10, 2020 10:02 AM
Reply to  Wilmers31

“The best way to deal with the US is to ignore them”
But they won’t ignore you .. It looks as if they are in the process of producing a surveillance drone for every person on the planet. Certainly an armed one, for some quarters.
Even if they are not dispatching a physical drone to hover near every person’s window, there is already a virtual drone in everyone’s face in the form of a mobile phone.
Still, the concept of ignoring them is a valid argument and is a very strong one. In fact, it is an obligation for every sane person to boycott all American products and services, starting with the entertainment junk.

lysias
lysias
Feb 10, 2020 3:41 PM
Reply to  Open

I don’t have a cellphone. I have never had a cellphone. Everyone is free to do the same.

Tedss
Tedss
Feb 18, 2020 2:32 AM
Reply to  lysias

An impractical or ineffectual suggestion is actually carrying watet for the surveillers/slavers.

wardropper
wardropper
Feb 10, 2020 4:29 AM

It reminds me very much of FaceBook, which I almost never use, except to check up on some of my relatives living abroad.
If the subject matter is the weather, cute animals, mainstream versions of so-called news, etc., I can happily relax in the knowledge that I have a pretty sizeable clutch of “friends” who will share such material with me.
But if I talk about nine-eleven and the war-mongering associated with it, the number of those friends drops to two…
Reason enough to get out of FaceBook. Those people don’t want to know me at all.

Neil MacLeod
Neil MacLeod
Feb 10, 2020 4:24 AM

As education is primarily preconditioning for propaganda, those most educated are most easily propagandized. – Jacques Ellul

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 10, 2020 2:30 AM

An extract from the above Jim Garrison quote:
“All factors which contribute to its burgeoning power are exaggerated.
All factors which might reveal its corrosive effect on the nation are concealed.”

The phrasing reminds me of the KFK speech to the editors (April 20th 1961) a couple of days after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-society-of-newspaper-editors-19610420 .JFK’s descriptions of Communist subversion could be equally levelled against US Foreign policy and the covert activities of the CIA. One has to wonder if there was a subliminal connection being drawn, because at the time of speaking, JFK was only too well aware of the CIA’s treachery. He must have understood that the CIA fully intended the invasion to fail (hence all the leaks to the press) so that the US Forces would be deployed en masse (they were indeed primed ready to go). However, the CIA/Hollywood version as deployed in the plain awful film “The Good Shepherd” has it that it was Angleton’s son who had spilled the beans in pillow talk to his African (Commie) fiancee whom the Angleton character later has thrown from an aircraft. (Who writes this bollocks?)

There are certain movie stars who seem to be CIA Choice actors: De Niro and Tom Hanks always ring “Disinformation” alarm bells for me. Matt Damon is another. Whether this is knowingly on these actors’ parts or more likely, they are the way the CIA wishes to see itself portrayed. I suppose one ought to throw George Clooney into this camp, but I don’t watch too many movies to make a fair guess. In the finally analysis, the CIA fully understands and exploits the the frail of the Human Condition. Nothing is incorruptible, and corruption is their raison d’être – corruption of all that is good, honest, fair, decent and just. Let’s hear it one more time from old fatso: ‘We lie, we cheat, we steal”. A rare moment of truth, though far too modest because it barely scratches the surface of their Black Arts.

A. Scott Buch
A. Scott Buch
Feb 10, 2020 12:06 AM

“. . . this spectacular image game where seeming antinomies are the constancy of the same through difference. . .” Brilliant!

Could we say the technical term for this method of disinforming is called Schismogenesis?

-白森

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 9, 2020 10:51 PM

As always, Ed Curtin makes us stop long enough to reflect on the absurdity of the official accounts from the murder of JFK to the false flag of 9/11. (There is a myriad of unimaginable crimes and lies before between and after, but these 2 events are the stand-outs in my life time, and the moments when we could have glimpsed just how naked the emperor is. Perhaps that glimpse of naked evil is too traumatic for some, but look we must.
I wholeheartedly agree with Ed’s contempt and condemnation of scums and shills like Chomsky (and some commenters here below) who try and paint JFK as being just as bad as any other POTUS and thus undeserving of our grief. I imagine that there were many such dissemblers around Golgotha.
On further reflection of the many lessons implicit from the JFK assassination, was the collusion and foreknowledge of the overwhelming majority fo the Establishment e.g. the deputy AG Katzenbach who helped organise the Warren Commission in order to ‘prove’ that Oswald was a lone Communist – to dispel the suspicion of a Coup d’Etat. The election of Oswald as the Pasty was designed so that he could be used as a cases belli for war with Cuba and/or Russia. You have to admit, these guys were amazing opportunists and could play any tune on their Mighty Wurlitzer.
JFK had to resort constantly to covert communications to negotiate with other heads of state because the State Dept decided Foreign Policy, just as John Foster Dulles did for Eisenhower, and his brother Allen running the CIA. That such unelected psychopaths had such power shows how utterly corrupt the system which had allowed that to happen. (And yes, perhaps it was ever thus).
Why do many of us still grieve the loss of JFK? Because he wanted the same as the overwhelming majority of people on this Earth, and fought for it despite knowing the risks he ran.
But even in our grief, we can take some comfort from the fact that he stood up to his generals and denied them their opportunity to bomb Russia into the Stone Age. As long as we can keep the memory of JFK, then there is hope. If the CIA shills and scum bury JFK, then hope will have suffered a mortal blow. It is up to us to keep the immortal flame burning. It is better to light a candle, than to curse the darkness.
To Ed, keep lighting those candles.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 11, 2020 12:46 AM
Reply to  Hugh O'Neill

“I wholeheartedly agree with Ed’s contempt and condemnation of scums and shills like Chomsky (and some commenters here below) who try and paint JFK as being just as bad as any other POTUS and thus undeserving of our grief.”

Why would you choose to attack with such denigration somebody who holds a different, but considered and supported, opinion from you (as distinct from somebody who voices a different opinion from you using misinformation, fabrication, etc. to support it)?

A Summary of Chomsky’s Attitude

Assuming that his thoughts about the JFK assassination have been reported accurately, Chomsky’s attitude appears to be as follows:

He is aware that the assassination was almost certainly the result of a conspiracy of some sort, and not the work of a lone nut.

The assassination had no clear political consequences. In particular, there was no significant change in official US policy in important areas, such as Vietnam and Cuba.

The absence of a significant change in policy between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations demonstrates that any JFK assassination conspiracy did not originate at a high level of the US government.

While the killing of President Kennedy was regrettable, it was no more or less tragic than any other murder.

People who identify themselves as left–wing, and who are disposed to question the current distribution of power, could occupy their time more productively than by trying to work out who really killed President Kennedy.

Excessive interest in a relatively trivial event is irrational.

Further information on Chomsky’s public statements leading to the above summary at the link above, including the postword:

It ought to be clear to anyone who has read this article that what Chomsky is against is the idea that the JFK assassination was the result of a conspiracy that originated at a high level within the US government. This is absolutely not the same thing as a belief in the Warren Commission’s poorly supported lone–nut hypothesis. For more about this crucial and widely misunderstood distinction, see The Political Context of the JFK Assassination [Emphasis added].

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 11, 2020 7:43 AM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Evening R. I must be brief. Chomsky is no fool, but an expert dissembler. His opinion is not sincere but is a calculated act of deception and as such he intentionally muddies the waters. In my books, that makes him an accessory to the crime.
Do I need to show you why his logic is utterly flawed and does not pass the smell test?
First: there was no change in foreign policy re Cuba or Vietnam. Which planet is he (or you) living on? JFK was pushing hard to get out of Vietnam and NSAM 263 proves this point – but don’t take my word: check Prouty. NSAM 273 was the complete overthrow of 263, written by one who clearly had foreknowledge of JFK’s imminent demise.
If Oswald did not act alone, then he had to have accomplices ergo a “Conspiracy”. Whoever acted with Oswald was of zero concern to the FBI or CIA ergo they were part of it. That the very offices of State, Pentagon, CIA, FBI, Justice, MSM etc. could all act to conceal their murder of the elected POTUS proves that the criminal cover-up continues to this day.
And Chomsky thinks this is not significant? Who cares who murdered JFK? I bloody do.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 12, 2020 3:27 PM
Reply to  Hugh O'Neill

“I must be brief.”

OK.

“JFK was pushing hard to get out of Vietnam and NSAM 263 proves this point – but don’t take my word: check Prouty. NSAM 273 was the complete overthrow of 263, written by one who clearly had foreknowledge of JFK’s imminent demise.”

Brief back:

NSAM 263: JFK was cautiously hedging his bets. You interpret NSAM 273 as being written with foreknowledge of Kennedy’s assasination. Many others don’t. Prouty has some conclusions on both that are no more valid than Chomsky’s. Throughout 1963, (prior to 22 November) Kennedy made several public statements confirming that withdrawing was not an option, winning “against Communism” was an overriding priority (citations would take more time). I have no dog in the fight so stop outlining a prejudgement, start making a case.

“Chomsky is no fool, but an expert dissembler. His opinion is not sincere but is a calculated act of deception and as such he intentionally muddies the waters. In my books, that makes him an accessory to the crime.”

If you are proven correct it would, as it remains an unproven assertion it is simply calumny.

Hugh O’Neill
Hugh O’Neill
Feb 12, 2020 7:29 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

R. You have no dog in the fight. I shall refrain from suggesting you are Chomsky’s female canine.
JFK had visited VietNam in the early 1950s and fully understood that it was an anti-colonial struggle which the French would lose. He had a strong record In the Seanate as a lone voice standing up for post colonial independence in Algeria, Indonesia, Congo etc. and thus he ran contrary to the Dulles gangsters.
When he reached the WH, he realised he was surrounded by Imperialists, especially in the Pentagon, still smarting over the “Loss of China” and annoyed that they were not allowed to use nukes in Korea. JFK sought out Gen. MacArthur for advice, which strengthened his case for withdrawal. If JFK made public statements at variance to his private beliefs, one can only imagine he was playing a political game to confound his domestic enemies.
JFK’s Peace Speech of June 2nd 1963 put on record that he could coexist with Communism, so that rather deflates you’re feeble argument.
Ergo, j’accuse both you and Chomsky of being dissemblers. Calumny indeed. If the cap fits, wear it.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 19, 2020 6:52 AM
Reply to  Hugh O’Neill

“R. You have no dog in the fight. I shall refrain from suggesting you are Chomsky’s female canine.”

Just caught up with this as I tend not to return to pages that have fallen off the right-hand end of the top row list of articles on the front page. Sorry, nobody’s bitch. Chomsky gives his reasons, you give yours. As he hasn’t addressed yours directly there are only yours to consider.

“JFK had visited VietNam in the early 1950s and fully understood that it was an anti-colonial struggle which the French would lose.”

So a French loss was some sort of political conditional in his thinking. OK.

“He had a strong record In the Seanate as a lone voice standing up for post colonial independence in Algeria, Indonesia, Congo etc. and thus he ran contrary to the Dulles gangsters.” OK.

“When he reached the WH, he realised he was surrounded by Imperialists, especially in the Pentagon…”

A critical thinker and a strong voice in the Senate for a well defined stance runs for and gets himself elected to the Presidency only then to discover that the White House bureaucracy and the Pentagon is stuffed with ruthless persons of a quite opposite viewpoint? What are you saying? That Aung San Suu Kyi is Kennedy’s posthumous bitch? Yeh right.

“If JFK made public statements at variance to his private beliefs,”

How variant would they have to be? Outright variant? Slightly variant? Somewhat variant? Carefully calculated enough to leave the most contentious points until later (c.f. the UN and Oslo stances on Jerusalem, where that age-old, often unvocalized, political strategy is made verbally explicit)?

‘one can only imagine”‘

Which ‘one’? I.F. Stone? Or some close-enough-for-jazz one, with all his three neurons in a carnival row?

“he was playing a political game to confound his domestic enemies.”

Wot? Our Jack?

So which would you prefer? “Chomsky 1, O’Neill 1” or “Chomsky 0, O’Neill 0”?

“Ergo, j’accuse both you and Chomsky of being dissemblers. Calumny indeed. If the cap fits, wear it.”

Pompous, reflexive (nod to Chomsky) ad pratenum.

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 11, 2020 7:53 AM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Rob, in my haste to respond, I had not read the 2nd link which contains the text below:

“If Kennedy had been perceived as a class traitor, he would have been replaced peacefully. The fact that he was killed shows that any domestic conspirators must have come from some way below the top of the internal power structure”.

Sorry, pal. That statement is complete and utter tosh! If you find that convincing, then I cannot help you.

Bobo
Bobo
Feb 11, 2020 10:45 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Chomsky is an evil two faced govt-controlled-dissident-by-choice. His dissent is narrow and without consequence.

Maxxwoll
Maxxwoll
Feb 13, 2020 9:10 PM
Reply to  Bobo

by vocation, you mean.

moriyah
moriyah
Feb 11, 2020 7:43 AM
Reply to  Hugh O'Neill

I, a Canadian, remember clearly: sitting in an Ottawa class room at the age of 7 listening to the intercom and the Principal as he explained in a trembling voice that the President of the United States, our neighbor, had been shot dead.
At that young, impressionable, conscious and aware age I was terrified for the first time. More terrified than the first time a machine gun was stuck in my face on Parliament Hill.
The days and years stretched out in my mind from then till today knowing all along what transpired then and now. Some call it blowback. Some call it six ways to Sunday.
Reading ‘None Dare Call it Conspiracy’ 10 yrs later did not make it any easier to carry this memory I have of the first man of power to speak to truth. JFK was imperfect, as we all are, but he saw the fragility of peace and the fraility of mans morals as clear, or clearer, than any before or since. He did his part as well as any and enjoys his restful sleep far more than we enjoy ours.
The living do, and shall, envy the dead.
Is Trump perfect? No! But, he is alive, aware, conscious, and, not corrupt. The fall of America will be far further than the fall of Rome unless each American recants their worship of the almighty US Dollar and the fictions of Santa Claus.
No matter whose name you preach in it is time …
Time to grow up USA!
Remember, the love of money is THE root of all evil.

Gerda Halvorsen
Gerda Halvorsen
Feb 9, 2020 9:30 PM

Exceptional essay, Edward. It took a lot of my stray thoughts and made sense out of them!

RobG
RobG
Feb 9, 2020 9:19 PM

Unusually for me, I can’t find fault with anything in this piece. It’s an excellent summary of the post-war world and US hegemony (well, one fault: the war never really ended in 1945).

Have a drink on me, Edward.

RobG
RobG
Feb 10, 2020 12:05 AM
Reply to  RobG

Galloway, on his MOATS this evening, quite blatantly came out and said that the coronavirus in China was probably started by the Americans.

I totally agree with this assessment, but what I found amazing is that the likes of GG came out and said it.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 7:23 AM
Reply to  RobG

Apparently this coronavirus is more dangerous to those with certain receptors in their lungs, a human sub-group most represented in East Asians. Funny that.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 11, 2020 3:41 AM

“Apparently this coronavirus is more dangerous to those with certain receptors in their lungs, a human sub-group most represented in East Asians. Funny that.”

If true it’s amonst the first of many known targeted or accidental artificial ethno-afflictions. Did you know that serious (but of course hotly contested) 2006 and 2014 genetic analyses showed that four (4) European matriarchs gave rise to 20% of the world’s complement of Ashkenazim, and, together with other, less prolific lines, a full 80% of the world’s current complement of Ashkenazim have European mitochondrial DNA? One can only hope that nobody tells CRISPR-Cas9.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 7:22 AM
Reply to  RobG

That is the central Truth-WW2 never ended. The USA just took leadership of the global fascist forces, and launched an unending reign of terror across the planet, one now culminating in the concatenation of the ecological Holocaust, neo-liberal implosion under debt and inequality and increasingly deranged aggression by the dying ‘Real Evil Empire’, most recently seen in the bio-warfare attack on China.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 9, 2020 8:53 PM

In the rotten, morally corrupt and spiritually wicked West, the brainwashing is voluntary. Point out almost any of the Great State Lies, say the JFK, RFK and 9/11 ‘Laughs’, and the good citizens will almost immediately wax wrath. Not only will ‘conspiracy theory’ that delicious mantra that replaces nassty intellectual effort. be belched loudly, but the higher the interlocutor is in the power structures, say in presstitutism, the more vigorous will be the dissent. One individual, a high-level apparatchik in a local media empire which has now fallen on hard times, of my acquaintance, usually a mild-mannered and invariably polite chap, on the mention of Chomsky in relation to Israel (the object of undiluted love and admiration for all good local Thought Controllers)did a virtual Mr. Hyde transformation, and I quickly changed the topic back to cricket. Most middle-class Australians are immensely ignorant and monumentally self-satisfied, attributes that are not serving them well as the global economic and ecological Holocausts deepen and broaden. Hard times are coming, and, although the populace still responds well, even heroically, to disaster, as the bushfire cataclysm showed, they are led and controlled by truly Evil imbeciles.

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Feb 9, 2020 11:33 PM

Everyone I know either reads The Guardian, watches ABC, or listens to Democracy Now. Most of them are fairly comfortably middle class, and white collar.
It’s psychologically and materially safer for them to remain inside the Dolls House looking at the murals on the windows thinking that is reality.
As Edward points out.
Many times, I’ve tried to steer friends and acquaintances towards articles like this one; even handed them printed off articles in person, or tell them to check out sites like here or The Greanville Post or The Saker.
There was almost always no response, nothing to say, nothing is happening (Pinter) tho one time, one of my friends told me direct to my face: ‘Capitalism’s been really good for us’… which pretty much sums it up.
I no longer bother trying to get them to see how the World really is.
Monumentally self satisfied also sums it up.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 7:27 AM
Reply to  Gezzah Potts

‘Capitalism’s been good for us, and the fact that it will kill all our children is just dumb bad luck’. Or is it a version of Friedman’s famous observation that ‘Capitalism is good for the Jews’. He meant ‘elite Jews’, of course, but you get the drift.

nottheonly1
nottheonly1
Feb 10, 2020 11:26 AM
Reply to  Gezzah Potts

It’s psychologically and materially safer for them to remain inside the Dolls House looking at the murals on the windows thinking that is reality.

Working like a Charm! – Up to a certain point that is. That certain point is Death. And it applies to both – the creature and its brain. In any combination. First brain dead and then croaking, or croaking before ever having figured out how fucked up things really are.

Latest conspiracy theories have it, that smoking Cannabis will prevent any infection with the virus (or others of that size) due to the fact that the aetherial oils present in smoking Cannabis are coating the respiratory lining with an anti-viral (pico-) layer that prevents the smoker from getting sick.

So, instead of vaccinating and getting shots with toxic shit in it, people should start taking up smoking Cannabis (flowers, please). Out of bed and the first joint – up to the last one before you go to bed. That will take care of the virus like a much better charm than the delusions of the A/american population.

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Feb 10, 2020 12:18 PM
Reply to  nottheonly1

I did that for years and years N, tho havn’t, er, inhaled for quite a long time.
It’s not a consolation (for me) but at least we know how fucked up things are.
As I told Richard Le Sarc a few days ago, a lot of my mag customers have young children – 4, 5, 7 years old, just innocent, adorable kids, and I have a friend in another city whose daughter recently turned 5.
They’re the ones I feel sorry for, those that have no say in what their fate will be. It sucks N, and we both have a fairly good insight in what’s coming, as others on this site do as well.
Wallowing in pessimism or accepting our actual reality?
How are people in Uruguay? Are they pretty awake to what’s happening in the World, or are they also like all those who sit in the Dolls House staring at murals? Is Neoliberalism as rampant there as it is thruout the West? Is there a strong anti capitalist Left in Uruguay?
Connecting with nature helps, and music, as I’ve also told you, cheers mate.

nottheonly1
nottheonly1
Feb 12, 2020 5:10 AM
Reply to  Gezzah Potts

Uruguay had a soft coup and has significantly slid to the right of right. One could say it got a ‘Brazilian job’. Sadly though, the majority eats doritos and other U.S made ‘food’ ‘products’.

Yesterday I did some errants in our district capitol Maldonado (an amazing place) using the Omnibus – public transportation. There are no school buses as in the U.S. Students/kids take the regular omnibus to gether with everybody else.

In front of me to the left was a mother of about mid 30 and her 10 years old son sat to the right in a single seat. At the catholic school, a large number of students enters the bus. Among them two obvious brothers entering in line. They are both massively obese. Maybe 10-12 years old. The first one has his mouth filled to the teeth and is chewing accordingly. The second one is also chewing and what appears to be part of a burger bun is sticking at the angle of his mouth.

I had to laugh so hard over this comical picture that the woman in front of me (whose son was of ideal constitution) turned around sharply and laughed with me. Nobody else knew what we were laughing about as it appears that only the two of us had even noticed this SNL-style performance by two obese, shit-eating kids.

Uruguay just blends smoothly into the ultra-right movement. When I talk to people, their response is generally that there is nothing one can do, really. As what one should do would create resistance of the machine. Never before have I also not experienced so many people talking bad of their own kine. For those Uruguayos I have talked to re. politics, all others were idiots. Maybe, because there are few mirrors for people to look into?

I wasn’t really up to par for three weeks, because I was hit by lightning. Very unpleasant experience. Very painful, too. Lots of things didn’t get done in a crucial time. A friend of mine says “C’est pool, la vie.”

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Feb 12, 2020 6:24 AM
Reply to  nottheonly1

Thanks for the reply N. Yeah, I vaguely knew about the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) a few years back. Sad to hear Uruguay has had a Bolsonaro type experience as well.
Soft coups, colour coups, violent coups, outright invasions and massive bombings. Nothing is too small for the evil twisted bastards in Washington.
Anything to maintain hegemony and the Empire.
Just went for a trip round Maldonado then on Streetview on my phone.
Went to the wonderful looking Parque Municipal Mancebo, which I got down most of that dirt track at the entrance.
The sort of place I could spend ages in taking in nature.
Went down a few streets, and around the shore of Laguna Del Sauce also.
Had a smile when I spotted the very English sounding Ocean Park. Hopefully it’s not like the Costa Del Sol in Spain!
Beautiful looking countryside, and noted the hills. For some reason I thought Uruguay was flat.
The psychological impact Neoliberalism has on people is just depressing and disheartening. Just sat on a train here in Melbourne, and nearby 3 yuppie types, and all they could talk about was making money. Sigh.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 11, 2020 10:27 PM
Reply to  nottheonly1

But all the dolls are Chucky, not Barbie or Ken.

Mussa Pie
Mussa Pie
Feb 9, 2020 8:50 PM

Q.E.D.

Brian Eggar
Brian Eggar
Feb 9, 2020 7:36 PM

What is so sad is that in order to write the propaganda, you must first know the truth in order to cover the facts.

I am surprised there is no mention about climate change. For a long while, I thought that what they were doing made no sense at all. With a little research helped by the Global Warming Policy Forum, I was not prepared to learn that it is all based on a fundamental falsehood and that it is the temperature of the earth that dictates the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and not the other way round.

Unfortunately with recent events, we appear now to have met the end game and are now entering the period when bioweapons will reduce the current world’s population by say 80% and what is even worse, there is nothing we can do or say about it. The pestilent Genie has been let out of the bottle and never to return. Anybody who believes it was an escape from the biological laboratories in Wuhan, deserves to go in the first wave. Gene editing by CRISPR could have done so much good for the world and instead is now being used to instigate its demise.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 9, 2020 9:05 PM
Reply to  Brian Eggar

The denialist slush-fund that you mention, has NO scientific standing. What you refer to is a familiar denialist disinformation scam. It refers to the situation at the ends of glaciations, and as the Earth returns to the inter-glacial conditions that we enjoyed in the recently deceased Holocene period. The world commences warming due to the effects of the Milankovich Cycles, which causes ice-sheets to retreat, changing the planetary albedo, releasing CO2 and methane from melting permafrost, and INCREASING the greenhouse effects of those gases.
At present the situation is entirely different. The next glaciation was thousands of years away, until the forcing of greenhouse gases by human activities, such as agriculture then the release of greenhouse gases, principally CO2, from industrialisation, caused the current, anthropogenic, warming and climate destabilisation. I do agree with you re. CRISPR and bio-warfare-given the totally diabolically Evil nature of Western ruling elites, it is inevitable.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 11, 2020 4:39 AM

“The denialist slush-fund that you mention, has NO scientific standing.”

It seems not to have occurred to you that end-times denial of any sort (climatic, biological, etc.) is mostly not concerned with the science of any particular discipline because it is at root pure end-times denial.

Willem
Willem
Feb 9, 2020 9:21 PM
Reply to  Brian Eggar

I don’t buy the
‘[we are] now entering the period when bioweapons will reduce the current world’s population by say 80% and what is even worse, there is nothing we can do or say about it’, for the simple reason that they don’t have that technology.

12 monkeys is a great film, but still, only a narrative. The narrative of deadly viruses spread over the world by ‘them’ as done by (amongst others) zerohedge is as true as the doom scenarios about the economy they are giving zerohedge since its inception.

You are also not right that you can only write propaganda if you know the truth. Most propaganda is bullshit, and bullshit can be written by anyone. Example: that thing you write about climate change. Nobody knows why the climate is changing, and that includes the ones who say that it is because the earth warms.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 7:36 AM
Reply to  Willem

The reasons why the planetary climate is rapidly destabilising are very well established. At root it is due to the Earth’s heat balance being disturbed, and heat is accumulating in that system, mostly due to the absorption of re-radiated heat by greenhouse gases, like CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, CFCs etc. At present that heat imbalance is about 4 watts/metre2 per second, or the equivalent of several Hiroshima size bombs, per second. Most, c.90%, is sequestered in the oceans, ensuring millennia of climate destabilisation.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 11, 2020 4:44 AM

“At present that heat imbalance is about 4 watts/metre2 per second, or the equivalent of several Hiroshima size bombs, per second. Most, c.90%, is sequestered in the oceans, ensuring millennia of climate destabilisation.”

Typical western profligancy. Several Hiroshima size bombs per second when they could be doing the job just as well with one big hydrogen bomb per second.

RobG
RobG
Feb 10, 2020 12:16 AM
Reply to  Brian Eggar

The Earth’s climate is controlled entirely by the Sun (and at the moment the Sun is going through a minimum period of activity).

Everything else is complete bullshit.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 7:37 AM
Reply to  RobG

The Sun is the main driver of the planet’s climate, but NOT the sole one. Didn’t you do high school science?

Open
Open
Feb 9, 2020 4:13 PM

Bread and circuses. and ..

Religion

https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/exclusive-cardinal-george-pell-fr-anthony-bongiorno-and-the-killing-of-maria-james,13554Although the linked artice deals primarly with investigating a murder in Victoria, Australia, it also reveals a lot of non-stop despicable behaviour by those (almost untouchable) held in high esteem by the Establishment.

Gary Weglarz
Gary Weglarz
Feb 9, 2020 3:48 PM

(“citizen-consumers are daily less interested in whether something is a fact than in whether it is convenient that it should be believed.”) – Alex Carey quoting Daniel Boorstin (1961)

The Boorstin quote above came two years before I was asked, at age 13 years, to credulously believe in a “magic bullet” because it was for we Americans, and the world at large – “convenient” – to do so.

One “believes” the blatant baseless propaganda of “Kuwaiti incubator babies,” or “Iraq’s WMD’s, or “Gaddafi’s viagra fueled rape camps,” not because one has been provided with “facts,” but because of the “inconvenience” in terms of the “citizen-consumer” being able to maintain their world view and sense of reality if one fails to “believe.”

Sadly we in America inhabit a nation in which the majority seek not only the latest technical “conveniences,” but also the very latest in such – “convenient beliefs” (manufactured for us of course – often out of thin air). Beliefs designed to help the typical American citizen to somehow desperately maintain our tattered and fragmented “sense of reality” for at least another moment longer, just perhaps “one more election cycle,” or at least until the next blockbuster “super-hero” movie or iPhone release comes along to distract.

Ready-made, fabricated, fact-free “beliefs” are the “product,” and the MSM are simply the disposable “packaging.” Given the eye-watering stench that now emanates from all Western MSM – clearly this “packaging” rots and composts quite readily. “Storage” of this ever growing psychic waste of course does remain a problem. And wonder of wonders, there is need for any messy “critical thinking” in any of this. The citizen-consumer need only consider his/her – “convenience.”

Thank you Ed Curtain for a great post.

For those who find any of this lacking the preferred level of optimism, I offer an inspirational quote from Kafka – “There is infinite hope, but not for us.”

clickkid
clickkid
Feb 9, 2020 2:52 PM

A brilliant essay by Edward Curtin, but I want to bring a dose of optimism to the table.

Doll Houses don’t come free. They have to be paid for – and they are expensive.

Those who care to look will find the doom of the doll house written in the worsening finances of the US government – and the bankruptcy of its European and Japanese vassals.

Taxes and borrowing aren’t enough any more. Money is being created out of nothing to directly finance the US Budget deficit; quantitative easing etc. Look at the goings on in the repo market since September. Negative interest rates in Europe and Japan – and coming soon to the US – are the signs of the coming collapse of the Doll House.

Frank Zappa (himself with links to the military-industrial complex), said this about the Doll House:

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

That’s where we are now as America slips into fascism. If you look at the increasing immiseration of the broad mass of people in the US – and in its vassal states,then it is clear that the illusion is becoming increasingly expensive.

soze
soze
Feb 9, 2020 8:59 PM
Reply to  clickkid

Why would you need taxes if you can create money out of nothing? You don’t. Taxes are a tool for social control.

The so called deficit is the reflection of how much money is being put into the system (by “printing money”). You need to put money into the system to keep it working, to make sure there is enough money to trade the goods and services created in the economy. That is why there has always been a deficit, why there will always be a deficit and why it is not really a problem.

The only thing that can really pose a problem for the current financial system of the US empire is if the dollar is no longer the reserve currency for the world. And that is why they have fought so hard to keep it the reserve currency. Financial crisis come and go, the system goes on. Most of these “crises” have been engineered to begin with.

It doesn’t matter that maintaining the illusion is expensive when you can create as much money out of nothing as you need to pay for it. It is the rest of the world that is really paying for it, and as long as the rest of the world keeps doing that the system will go on.

clickkid
clickkid
Feb 9, 2020 10:41 PM
Reply to  soze

Join the discussion…

Sure, reserve status is the key.

Since December 2013, foreign central banks as a group, have stopped accumulating US Treasuries on a net basis – the first time this has happened in the post-1971 era. Foreign private accumulation of dollars and treasuries has always been much more fickle., driven more by speculation than by policy.Thus,it will turn on a dime, according to the whims of US financial markets.

The problem with ‘printing money’ and increasing the Fed’s balance sheet is that at some undefined level, yet to be established, confidence in the dollar could disappear virtually overnight. There are numerous candidates, known and unknown,to be the factor which triggers this. We got very close in 1979, when interest rates had to be driven up to nearly 20% in the US.

Therefore the US needs to keep reserve currency status, because those dollars are held in T-Bonds – ie lending to the US.

Deficits obviously do matter – even for the US – becaue if they didn’t, then politicians, competing with each other to bribe the electorate, would have an incentive to reduce taxes basically to zero. That they do not do this, shows that there is a limit to borrowing and printing.

I appreciate the point you make about social control.

BigB
BigB
Feb 9, 2020 2:38 PM

“en soir – in the evening”.

This essay seems philosophically confused to me. For even if it is a typo: the ‘(etre-)en-soi’ (being-in-itself) – is the objective, pre-existent ground that can be neither “condemned to be free” nor have an attributable “free will”. Not outside panpsychism or pantheism.

Ed weaves the three mainstream 20th century Theories of Truth – of correspondence, coherence, or pragmatism – to present the casual reader with a very confused metaphysical synthesised truth theory. Which confounds the main sociological discourse of the 20th Century – to the present – of Structure v Agency. To what extent can the autonomous conscious agent of ‘free will’ be free of the structures – laws, norms, rules, scripts, and conventions (collectively Bordieu’s *habitus* – or habituation of dispositions) – of socially constructed reality? [That is: of Berger and Luckman’s ‘Social Reality’ – not to be confused with anything that can be said to be truly real]. Not very. The ‘duality of structure’ is in itself a propagandistic illusion. As is also, perhaps confusingly, referred to in the Ellul passage quoted?

Structures create agents that create structures – in a continuous dialectical loop of social constructivism of reality (or realities). Those structures are ‘non-necessitating’ – in that we do not necessarily have to follow cultural conventions. This implies a limited autonomous freedom. Accompanied by a very limited agency. We can indeed suggest alternate social realities. In doing so: we will soon find how real socially constructed reality really is. And how vigorously maintained it is (Berger and Luckman’s ‘universal maintenance’ …that which we are engaged in now). The social stock of knowledge is rigidly maintained by the constructed ideology of the false ‘free will’ agency of the ‘ideological-I’. Which is itself maintained in and constructed by the objectively logical-rational structure of language-activity. Where structural-agency is enacted. Here. Now. In this discourse.

We exist in language-activity. We cannot construct, communicate, or coordinate shared existential experiences or behavioural actions without language-activity. We cannot even have the sorts of experience we do without it. This is the Wittgensteinian ‘private language’ argument. I can have an unpleasant experience: but I cannot call it ‘pain’ without recourse to publicly accessible language-activity. If we accept this logic – as indeed we must – private agency becomes an illusion (along with enclosed private property). Inside and outside; public and private; structure and agency; subject and object; become indistinct ideal type analytical categories – not actually existent objective and substantialist entities. Such combined structural-agency is what Giddens called ‘structuration’. Linguistic structures produce linguistic agents who produce linguistic structures. Which – through covenants of consensus across communities of discourse – become sub-cultures or sub-universes of social realities (roughly – Bordieu’s social ‘fields’). The state – the ‘Doll’s House’ – is what we do and what we say within the hegemonic cultural discourse. There is no inside: there is only the structural-agency of the state itself. Which is perhaps the ‘Russian Doll’ constructivism – of doll’s ‘houses within houses’ (agency free of structure) – which is the underlying logical-rational structure here?

Was there really a bifurcation in the universe of discourse on precisely the 22nd November, 1963? Or is this all part of a larger trans-historical discourse or Western Intellectual Tradition? A metaphysical essentialist discourse that has no first cause. But can be traced back at least as far as the proto-metaphysics of the Ionian School over two and a half millennia ago?

As soon as you pre-categorise ‘objects’ as a different ontological kind to ‘subjects’ you enter the metaphysical essentialist presence of the ideological-I – the falsely independent agent (free of structures). If you attribute different ontological substances to them – as mind-independent objects and object-independent minds (body-mind substantialisation and problematisation) – then you have the substantialist Cartesian (and Sartrean) subject. Which is a pure object-independent consciousness and structure-free mind. With intrinsically ‘free will’: condemned to be free to construct its own essentialist structures and projects …via the absolutist ‘ens causa sui’ (attributable to a God). Which is the essentialist ‘fish out of water’ outside the structuration of socially constructed consciousness. Who is the independent hyper-individualist ‘I’ that is absolutised as free?

Sartre fell into the same metaphysical narrative trap as Husserl and (the Nazi) Heidegger before him. Even as they hoped to escape that trap. In pre-supposing the essentialist metaphysical ideological-I …that which deceives the deceivers in the Spectacular. If we cannot accept the fundamental fact that we live in ideological speech-activity; that we propagandise only ourselves; and this is not attributable to anyone else …then we will be lost to the conception of the ideological-I forever.

Which is the root of the root of the heterodox Zen discourse …there is no independent idealistic ideological-I. It is a cognitive representation only. And all its structures and agency are representations and imagistic depictions too. In fact, the whole cognitive culture we live in is a self-propagandised ideologically constructed consciousness too. One which we refuse to deconstruct too far because we cannot let go of the ideological-I construct …without constructing new ontologies and narrative stories …Russian Dolls within ideological Russian Doll’s Houses.

There is a very obvious moral here: all ontological binarisms are violences. A familiar post-structuralist refrain. But without an alternative to the metaphysical essentialist ideological-I – and the all-encompassing cultural hegemony it constructs as a meta-narrative (even as it deconstructs aspects of its own grand narrative) – we are caught constructing Russian Dolls inside Russian Dolls …ad infinitum.

All I can state – uncategorically – is that there are no subjects and no objects. It is a root categorical error we repeat over and over. Language-activity is no benign medium: it creates all violence and enclosed private property by repeating the separation of subjects and otherised commodified objects. Which is why we cannot declare the ‘en-soi’ objective ground in anyway separate when we mix commentary and philosophy without extending the illusion. Subjects and objects; states and subjects; structures and agents; public and private; culture and nature; all arise in the same ideological movement and are the ontological bedrock of all violence, sectarianism, and war. When we can create and enact a linguistic discourse without them …then we will already know and be at peace.

milosevic
milosevic
Feb 9, 2020 10:57 PM
Reply to  BigB

for a truly Spectacular finale to your Discourse, perhaps you can Deconstruct your own Subjectivity into a puff of Post-Modern smoke.

BigB
BigB
Feb 10, 2020 1:25 AM
Reply to  milosevic

There is nothing postmodern about my critique. Subjectivity is no more real than objectivity: except that we socially reify them as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The Western Intellectual Tradition has reified rational and logical objectivism to the point of absoluteness. The ‘Continental School’ or Postmodern critique – which are both pejorative terms deriding the perceived lack of objectivism – has deconstructed analytical rationality to the point of meaning nihilism. By taking away any foundational certainty and challenging the ultimate intelligibility of the world as a logical formalist structure.

In between: there is a middle way for consciousness and language. One that is liberational of the ideological-I form and the ideological-We form. Both of which are socially constructed fabrications responsible for the deaths of millions. And the ongoing ecogenocidal species extinctionism in which we are engaged.

We did this before. There are two further twists to my deconstruction. One is that we are not truly rational. The other is we are not truly conscious. Therefore: the idea we are conscious, rational, agents of free will – condemned to exercising our freedom – is a social construction that ignores many of the findings of cognitive neuroscience and cognitive linguistics. Remember ’embodiment’? I’m still waiting to move the conversation in that direction.

Wittgenstein pointed out the limitations of language. When subjectivity goes ‘poof’ into a whisp of smoke …so does objectivity. And the whole hierarchy of violent binarisms. What is left resists all representation: yet contains all sense and all meaning. Pretty much everything that social construction – or in ecological terms: social destruction – denies and deprives humanity of …including its own humanity and dignity. You make non-sense of language by objectifying or subjectifying it.

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Tractatus 7)

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 12, 2020 10:07 AM
Reply to  BigB

“Therefore: the idea we are conscious, rational, agents of free will – condemned to exercising our freedom – is a social construction that ignores many of the findings of cognitive neuroscience and cognitive linguistics.”

Why would you suppose that the unearthings of those Johnny-come-latelys, cognitive neuroscience and cognitive linguistics, constitute ‘findings’ in that regard? I mean, who discovered the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb? Howard Carter? Tomb robbers, The priests who sealed them in? Of those that were his personal effects, Tutankhamun? The caftsmen who made them for him? The miners who dug up those that were precious earths and gems? …?

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 12, 2020 10:09 AM
Reply to  milosevic

I gave you a thumb up. I don’t think it will help.

David G. Horsman
David G. Horsman
Feb 10, 2020 6:54 AM
Reply to  BigB

There is a very obvious moral here: all ontological binarisms are violences. A familiar post-structuralist refrain.

Violences? That is nonsense. Structuralism is an attempt to duscuss our biologically determined cognition. It is valid to that extent.

Certainly this doesn’t accurately reflect reality. By it’s nature it is gross symbolic and efficient reduction of it. And violence and aggression are part of those binary modelling determined by our evolution.

However there is nothing intrinsically violent about black vs white. Binary symbols are frequently gradients and do not deny the existence of gray.

Like most philosophic arguments you greatly exaggerate and over extend an obvious feature.

Perhaps I do not understand your use of jargon here. It’s not my field but I do appreciate your argument and thank you. I privately refer to this as the canonical fallacy though. Another eclipsed view essentially.

BigB
BigB
Feb 10, 2020 12:31 PM

Structuralism is a methodology that seeks to understand the unconscious organisation of human perception, cognition, and behaviour. Our sense apparatuses and our visceral responses – collectively termed ‘affect’ – are biologically determined. Everything else – including feelings and emotions – are socially constructed. Lisa Feldman Barrett – among many others – has written a non-specialist book about this …”How Emotions Are Made” (socially constructed emotion theory). There are whole institutions covering affect theory – eg the Tomkins Institute. “Affect is biology: emotions are biography” is the most simplistic rendition. If everything beyond affect is social constructivism: how are we separate from our social settings?

If you are really considering biology: then I must turn to Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela. The two Chilean biologists behind what has been termed “The Santiago Theory of Consciousness”. Which states that the organism and its environment co-specify each other; as they co-adapt and co-evolve together. A process they termed “structural coupling”. The organism maintains its own structural integrity (termed “autopoiesis”): without becoming independent of the environment. It retains a certain autonomy beyond mere determined behaviourism – in that it does not have to respond to every environmental signal to trigger an adaptive behaviour. In other words: stimulus is non-necessitating of a response. Dependent on affect: we can choose a conditioned response …or develop a novel behaviour.

Which is the limited autonomy of which I spoke. The conception of a radical Sartrean autonomy: ‘free will’ and radical freedom from social structures is a vast overstatement and dismissal of human social biology. To be clear though: social constructivism is NOT biologically determined. It is acquired and socialised from infancy: and beyond the biological core of affect …social structures are basically epigenetic. Heritable traits that are not genetically determined. The whole biological determination narrative is part of the ideology that make social structures seem permanent. If we did not have them: we would be subject to the Hobbesian bestial ‘state of nature’. See “Biology as Ideology”.

Free will is a basic re-statement of Rational Choice Theory. Which implies conscious rational choice (free of structures). You may have heard of Kahneman-Tversky ‘irrationality’? One of the most basic findings of cognitive neuroscience is that we are neither rational or conscious …in the radical senses suggested here. Human cognition is 98% due to the cognitive unconscious. Which, due to it being ‘structured like a language’ – and that language must be majorly publicly accessible – means that the cognitive unconscious is collective. As the Collective Cognitive Unconscious – that structures human behaviour like a language – private and public aspects are indistinct and not individuated as radically separated.

Which is the later Wittgenstein’s ‘form-of-life’ perspective of language as a tool …of ‘meaning and use’. Which inspired Austin, Searle, Ryle, Rorty, etc to develop social constructivism, speech acts, performative utterances, neo-pragmatism, etc. Which brings me full circle to what I already wrote. Structures and agency are ‘structurally coupled’ and largely performed or enacted in language. Which takes on a broader context of any meaningful behaviour. Behind which lurks no ‘performer’, ‘knower’, ‘actor’, or hidden human nature.

‘Wokism’ is largely metaphysics, I’m afraid. And a benign view of binarism or duality evaporates at the level of broad inclusivity in social structures. The invented rational mind co-invents our bestiality. Which is projected onto socially constructed outgroups and is enacted as repression, oppression, and in extremis …genocide and war. They are all entailed in the false construction of binaries and the application of bi-valent logic. Which always priviliges and foregrounds one over the other. In social reality: are you absolutely sure white is equal to black – and male to female?

Everything I have said is plastic. Nothing is strictly determined – especially not genetically or biologically. We do not have to be determined sociologically, economically, and epigenetically conditioned by cultural prejudice. Including the false construction of an ideological-I that is rational, independent of structure, free to act, fully conscious, unconditioned by externalities. Such a construct can only exist in an object-independent mind of pure consciousness. Which, unrecognised by most, is exactly the false construct of mind that got us into this particular mess. Which is exactly how diffuse normative power works.

Changing that rigid orthodoxy via conversations like these at least indicates exactly how socially constructed hypernormativity works. It’s got nothing to do with the ‘CIA’. It is us who choose to want it to be this way. So we can cling to the imaginary fully conscious, rationally independent, agent of free will we socially construct ourselves to be. Freedom is freedom from such metaphysics …freedom that is fully available to all. Not just the imaginary ‘woke’. That is just another iteration of the ideological-I: that would have minds structurally uncoupled from environments and social structures. Which is the root of all violence. To avoid such repetetive errors and pitfalls: we are going to have to be more biologically and philosophically savvy. Which is the root of Varela’s ’embodied enactivism’. To which the “Embodied Mind” is still the most accessible introduction. To the philosophy very few care to read.

dmatthews
dmatthews
Feb 9, 2020 2:16 PM

Julian Assange, as much as I deplore what we hear of his current predicament (if it’s true), was reportedly annoyed by suggestions that the events of 11/9/2001 were not at all as presented to us by George Bush, Tony Blair etc.

I believe that should not be brushed over.

Open
Open
Feb 9, 2020 5:10 PM
Reply to  dmatthews

In 2004, talking about the progress on the war on terror, G W Bush said: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful,” he said, “And so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people,” he continued, “And neither do we.”
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1870938_1870943_1870951,00.html

KLL
KLL
Feb 9, 2020 7:43 PM
Reply to  dmatthews

@BigB – I was trying to remember what your comment reminded me of and then it clicked. It’s the Python’s terrific send up of a certain kind of – now outdated – pompous pseudo-intellectual gibberish favoured by those keener to impress than enlighten:

Some people have made the mistake of seeing Shunt’s work as a load of rubbish about railway timetables, but clever people like me, who talk loudly in restaurants, see this as a deliberate ambiguity, a plea for understanding in a mechanized world.

The points are frozen, the beast is dead. What is the difference? What indeed is the point? The point is frozen, the beast is late out of Paddington. The point is taken.

If La Fontaine’s elk would spurn Tom Jones the engine must be our head, the dining car our esophagus, the guard’s van our left lung, the cattle truck our shins, the first-class compartment the piece of skin at the nape of the neck and the level crossing an electric elk called Simon.

The clarity is devastating. But where is the ambiguity? It’s over there in a box.

Shunt is saying the 8:15 from Gillingham when in reality he means the 8:13 from Gillingham. The train is the same only the time is altered. Ecce homo, ergo elk. La Fontaine knew his sister and knew her bloody well. The point is taken, the beast is moulting, the fluff gets up your nose.

The illusion is complete; it is reality, the reality is illusion and the ambiguity is the only truth.

But is the truth, as Hitchcock observes, in the box? No there isn’t room, the ambiguity has put on weight. The point is taken, the elk is dead, the beast stops at Swindon, Chabrol stops at nothing, I’m having treatment and La Fontaine can get knotted.

The resemblance is stunning. 😉

Allie
Allie
Feb 9, 2020 7:49 PM
Reply to  KLL

LOL – Gavin Millarrrrrrr!! One of my favourite Monty Python sketches and as you say a great puncturing of pseudo intellectualism, “clever people like me who talk loudly in restaurants”, we all know blowhards like that!

Hugh O'Neill
Hugh O'Neill
Feb 9, 2020 11:00 PM
Reply to  KLL

Bravissimo. You have hit the elk right between the antlers and knotted the horns of the dilemma. A veritable cornucopia from which the matador is tossed, pierced and trampled into stream-of-unconscious bullshit. Ole.

BigB
BigB
Feb 10, 2020 12:25 AM
Reply to  KLL

Yeah, yeah, yeah, very droll. Only the essay above really does contain some fundamental errors. Ed meant the ‘etre-pour-soi’ …not ‘en-soir’ (in the evening). Which it would have been pedantic to point out: if he was not a Professor of Sociology. There is nothing I wrote that would not be accessible to anyone who has studied sociology or philosophy in the past. I studied in the late 70s, early 80s, and Berger and Luckman was already a standard text then. And Wittgenstein was all the rage.

Roll on 40 years: and the dominant discourse remains virtually unchanged. The idea of the social construction of reality is still treated with scepticism. The century long deconstruction of representationalism, ontological dualism, metaphysical essentialism, and the correspondence theory of truth have come and gone …and everything stays the same. Maybe because no one dares to ask: “Why?”

Because the subject of every discourse – and the chooser of every ethical, aesthetical, and mystical value – is the ideological-I. Which gets a free pass: even as it is the conduit of all normative power. So every radical critique is akin to being Pythonesque.

But you miss the irony – or the tragedy – of reaffirming the duality of structure and agency is a performative powerlessness. Think about it. In objectifying the structures of power, and internalising our passivity of representation – we unwittingly serve power. We are automatic subjects subordinated by our own alienated powers. If we can successfully recognise how diffuse normative power is socially constructed across communities of practice and communities of speech – we can change the way power operates with our structural-agency. Which is a performative and enacted activism. If we get our object-relations right: the need for the socially created institutions of capitalism, private property rights (privatised justice and the very rule of law that is persecuting Julian), privatised money and debt (usury, interest, arbitrage, derivatives, and rent), and globalised market ontologies all dissolve. The ideological state superstructures supporting the enclosure, protection, and prosecution of private property rights of the ideological-I are dependent on the cultural reproduction of the ideological-I …in discourses much like this.

The vast tapestry of lies and illusions of the title is the social construction of the ideological-I. Nothing more or less than the totalisation of the ideology of the imaginary ‘I’. Which is the sociological samsara and ‘free will’ avidya that is persecuting us all with our own alienated powers. So, who is the joke really on? 😉

http://perflensburg.se/Berger%20social-construction-of-reality.pdf

https://wwzc.org/dharma-text/only-knowing-commentary-vasubandhus-trimsika-karika

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 11, 2020 10:41 PM
Reply to  dmatthews

‘Reportedly’. By whom?

Betrayed planet
Betrayed planet
Feb 9, 2020 2:04 PM

That is a great article, putting into words succinctly the abominable weight of corruption we daily must endure, the US and U.K. being the most egregious. I remember the day Kennedy was assassinated, my father let out a strangled sob, went a deep red and proceeded to cry. I was 6yrs old, living in Dublin, Ireland. It was the only time in my life I saw my father cry. My actual awareness of the underlying corruption and deep malaise began the day Bush Jr was elected, from somewhere deep in my being an awareness began to develop on hearing of his triumph in what was clearly to me a rigged result. I started to look beneath surface, the fraud, the lies.
I have given up trying to inform people of what the real, true story of our species decline into hell is. I am treated much of the time as though I am the ill one, the one with catastrophic thinking, the crazy who hasn’t got the first clue of reality, that I am the spreader of fear and propaganda.
I am leaving the U.K., tired of the xenophobia, racism, police state policies. There is a further unpleasantness developing as people ( those same people who disregard the warning signs) on an unconscious or subconscious level realise life is no longer the way it was. The nastiness and hate filled reactions to others who might be different, who have tried to expose the truth, is increasing with a vileness I personally have never witnessed before. As an Irish person and a woman living in the U.K. since many years, recently in the past two maybe three yrs I have been subjected to a lot of abuse.
This article spells out what is underneath in the sensitive underbelly of people’s daily lives, of the new world we now inhabit where truth is to be maligned and those who speak truth are to be ridiculed and sidelined.
I am fortunate that I paint, that I have a creative world nobody can take away from me because now for me that is all there is left. If people cannot now see our coming demise with every signpost posting the way, that’s their bloody problem. I am past caring.

Gardenfiend
Gardenfiend
Feb 9, 2020 3:43 PM

But apart from that things are ok 🙂

Betrayed planet
Betrayed planet
Feb 9, 2020 5:15 PM
Reply to  Gardenfiend

Emm, wonder if you would have come out with that little aside if I hadn’t mentioned I was female.

Sophie - Admin1
Admin
Sophie - Admin1
Feb 9, 2020 5:43 PM

Why’d you wonder that? You don’t even know what gender Gardenfiend is, nor is there anything remotely sexist or antagonistic in their comment. It’s just a wry observation on the bleakness of things. Let’s not go full radfem on this.

Gardenfiend
Gardenfiend
Feb 9, 2020 7:04 PM

Yeah I was going for wry. It really wasn’t my intention to upset you, or laugh at you.

milosevic
milosevic
Feb 9, 2020 11:23 PM

I read that as a sarcastic expression of agreement with your comments (as suggested by the smiley), not as any sort of disparagement or criticism.

Betrayed planet
Betrayed planet
Feb 10, 2020 1:40 PM
Reply to  Gardenfiend

I am I think hypersensitive at this point. I completely agree that it was an over reaction. The past couple of years have not been easy.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 9, 2020 9:18 PM

I see that the frenzy of Sinophobic hatred mobilised by the MSM sewer-dwellers in regard to the novel coronavirus, has led to an outburst of attacks on Chinese and other Asians in the UK waste-land. I’d bet a penny to the pound that they are outnumbering the quantity and virulence of the, often phony, incidents of ‘antisemitism’, (eg daring to disagree with a barking Zionassty).

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 10, 2020 2:16 AM

“I see that the frenzy of Sinophobic hatred mobilised by the MSM sewer-dwellers in regard to the novel coronavirus, has led to an outburst of attacks on Chinese and other Asians in the UK waste-land.”

The more we can persuade British sinophobes to put themselves into close proximity with the precious bodily fluids of possibly infected Chinese persons, the more we should offer to help China out by offering as many of their actually infected as possible free treatment on the NHS.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Feb 10, 2020 10:15 AM

Outnumber ? Dwarf is also a good verb.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 10, 2020 2:07 AM

“I remember the day Kennedy was assassinated, my father let out a strangled sob, went a deep red and proceeded to cry. I was 6yrs old, living in Dublin, Ireland. It was the only time in my life I saw my father cry.”

I was on the stairs down to our then basement flat when a ground floor tenant, looking very shocked, opened her door to see who was moving outside and passed on the news because she just had to have some communication about it with somebody, anybody, else.

“My actual awareness of the underlying corruption and deep malaise began the day Bush Jr was elected…”

I was pretty well settled in my assessment of massive preparations for the final obliteration of the commons and its commoners by the time knowledge of Dubya as an anthropomorphic entity entered my conciousness, but to catch the tv news on the day it won the Republican nomination and see this hominid detach itself from the background to approach the microphone dragging its knuckles along the ground as it walked was still something of a shock.

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Feb 10, 2020 3:08 AM

Bang on the nail BP… I too have given up trying to get friends and acquaintances to see how the World really is, and am treated like I’m a conspiracy theorist or asked if I’m mentally okay or accused of being a Putin lover.
I also see more callousness, nastiness, and a blatant disregard towards others who are different. Or poor. Mass conformity and groupthink on steroids in our brave new world.
For gods sakes tho…. Don’t come to Australia. Its as bad (if not worse) here than how you describe things are in the UK. I’d choose somewhere in rural South America or Asia where they haven’t been poisoned by the Neoliberal juggernaut and ‘Western values’.

Pablo
Pablo
Feb 10, 2020 11:50 AM
Reply to  Gezzah Potts

I was on holiday in Sicily last September, travelling solo, and in trying to gain entry to the small hotel in Milazzo where I was staying for the night, I happened to meet an elderly Australian couple exiting the front door. They introduced themselves, we will call them Bill and Sheila. We enjoyed a brief but friendly chat on the doorstep; they lived in Sidney but were on an extended three month holiday across Europe which was drawing to a close.

Later that evening I bumped into them in a restaurant and they invited me to join them at their table. The chat all went well until we somehow got around to discussing The assassination of JFK, RFK, MLK and the events of 911, when I happened to mention the fact that although two planes supposedly hit two buildings (the twin towers); a third building alongside them also collapsed without anything hitting it and that the upper section fell at free fall speed for several seconds…. At this point Bill could take no more and uttering the phrase “conspiracy theory,” which I was able to inform him was a creation of the CIA, he dashed to pay his bill, swiftly followed by his wife departed the restaurant with a look of complete terror. I have never experienced anything like this before and so was quite shocked that they would be so completely naive.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 8:59 PM
Reply to  Pablo

Ah, Pablo-you met what our binyip Bolsonaro, Fuhrer, ‘Smoko’ Morrison, the Pentecostal Pest, calls the ‘ Quiet Australians’. Brainwashed from birth, and self-lobotomised.

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Feb 10, 2020 9:02 PM
Reply to  Pablo

I see that everywhere here Pablo, that same reaction you saw from Bill and Sheila. When I’ve been out on protests or campaigns for Wikileaks & Julian Assange, or Anti War marches; many passersby can’t get past quick enough.
You can actually see the fear in their eyes.
All their rigidly held beliefs; courtesy of soundbites from the presstitute media here (especially Murdoch) are being threatened by you standing there holding up a placard – or discussing 9/11, or war crimes in Iraq, etc.
It’s like small children covering themselves with a blanket, deeply fearful of removing the blanket and seeing what’s around them.

JudyJ
JudyJ
Feb 10, 2020 10:34 PM
Reply to  Gezzah Potts

Gezzah,

You can actually see the fear in their eyes.

Whilst not wishing to make light of a serious subject, your description did make me chuckle as I could relate to it so well. You’ve hit the nail on the head. Whenever I try to present the ‘alternative’ viewpoint in discussions I find the immediate reaction is an awkward silence accompanied by THAT look which says it all – nothing more, nothing less but I just know straight away that it’s time to change the subject to the latest celebrity gossip…you know, the issues that have really serious implications for all of us. 😀

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Feb 10, 2020 10:59 PM
Reply to  JudyJ

Ha ha ha… Robbie Williams latest revelation? The $30,000 dress Kim Kadashian wore? How Bono is out there ‘saving the world’ (again) or Meryl Streep waxing lyrical about the glorious days of the Obama Presidency….
Should I mention Harry and Megan?
Er, no. Cheers Judy, have a good week😁

Dungroanin
Dungroanin
Feb 9, 2020 1:48 PM

I can’t really help but feel a little bit cheated of a full satiating sundays feast by Edward C’s effort.

If he wants to join dots – they don’t start in 1963 and the Filicides of the Kennedys.

If he wants to say the CIA is the supreme power – then he deliberately fails to see that these are only praetorians who have always served greater masters – these who own all they survey and have more than any.

Propaganda is Perception Management is Advertising is Religion is Divine power – which is so ancient and inbuilt that humans in these civilisations are SELF policing and deluding – it is not new.
Edward Curtain surely knows it, as do the ancient and new powers – so lets us not pretend it is a defect of modernity.

Ask a religious believing person to imagine, just for one hour, there is NO GOD.
They are incapable and start believing you are the devil!

Copernicus got murdered just to get the dumb masters to allow that the Earth was NOT the centre of the cosmos and the Sun doesn’t orbit us! So that humanity could progress and they would not lose their powers over the masses.

The ancient Chinese Celestial Empire had a nervous breakdown and went into seclusion when it’s fleets returned from mapping the globe with news that there were OTHER civilisations and empires out there! Fortunately for humanity they have remerged and along with the other ancient civilisations still exant may save us from the rapacious Pyramid builders as their own godhoods finally slips.

Freewill and freedom is easy to fabricate in the masses minds – as Religion and worship of Kings and fantasies of Money creation have and still are perpetrated.

In the UK people are led to believe they have ‘chosen’ Brexit & Bozo and rejected democratic socialism and Corbyn- when it was manipulated and fixed by VOTE rigging.
Hell they even want us to believe Marx was AGAINST the ancient masters ….instead of being commissioned to write the new ‘bible’ with its obscuring story of money.

So in wanting to join dots Mr Curtain needs to follow the trail back a few more centuries and look forward to the planned dots of the monetisation of all remaining nature on the planet.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 10, 2020 1:32 AM
Reply to  Dungroanin

“Copernicus got murdered just to get the dumb masters to allow that the Earth was NOT the centre of the cosmos and the Sun doesn’t orbit us!”

  1. In 1533 the Pope, with others, attended a lecture outlining Copernicus’s heliocentric theory.
  2. In late 1542, Copernicus had a stroke and was paralysed.
  3. In May 1543, Copernicus died from the effects of the stroke.

But perhaps you meant Galileo?

  1. In 1633 Galileo appeared before the Inquisition to defend his 1632 book on Copernicus’s heliocentric theory v the previous geocentric theory. He was forced to recant his advocacy for heliocentrism and was sentenced to house arrest.
  2. In 1642 Galileo died from the effects of cardiac problems, having continued to write (but not publish, also forbidden) and receive visitors during his 9 years of house arrest.

Inventing bullshit to justify tinfoil paranoia is easy; researching diligently to substantiate justified theories requires greater effort.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 7:41 AM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Giordano Bruno?

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 19, 2020 7:11 AM

I doubt he was thinking of Bruno, but yes, though Bruno was a much grander heretic, in the speculative theological sense, than either Copernicus or Galileo seem to have been. Hence the higher price?

Dungroanin
Dungroanin
Feb 10, 2020 8:37 AM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

Thanks for that – I don’t actually sit and prewrite my insta commenr and do therefore get the occasional names mixed up and dates to, and done on a phone with a thumb!

The gist of my thought is clear enough as shown that you got what i was alluding to.

And in the clarification the initial opinion is enhanced.

So what of my substantive point robbo?

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 19, 2020 7:22 AM
Reply to  Dungroanin

“So what of my substantive point robbo?”

As stated, I’m not sure what that is.

magit
magit
Feb 9, 2020 12:12 PM

What bothers me about the doll house description is that it has limited its argument to only one nation state. But the nation state system is a feedback controlled system that regulates conscious human behaviors. That NSS divides, sorts, and differentiates 8 billion humans into 206 different versions of the doll house. The next concern is failure to recognize that propaganda narratives do not often arise from within the container, instead privately owned, global media establishes, for each local nation state, narratives which are often contradictory between nation states.

Humanity is no where allowed to think for itself. What if Media is mobster owned?

Nation state organized governments are armed structures designed to deny the people their needs, so the elites can satisfy their needs. Humanity needs to change that IMO.

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Feb 9, 2020 12:07 PM

Bloody hell Edward – that was very long, but… you hit so many nails on the head, with so much information, as well as painting a vivid picture of where our (Western) society is at.
My eyes first began to open when the United States invaded tiny Grenada way back in 1983, and the questions began in my head… Why? And this, of course, was before there was any Internet.
My eyes were further opened when I joined a Central American Solidarity Group a few years later. And I learnt of the sheer barbarity and horrors inflicted on people in countries like Nicaragua and Guatemala.
I havn’t taken anti depressants for over 10 years, even though I was informed by ‘professionals’ I needed to take them for the rest of my life.
I chose to bin them, just as I’ve also binned the presstitutes masquerading as ‘journalists’. Boycott the bastards. Its that simple.
And havn’t read anything written by Chomsky for years, nor will I go anywhere near Democracy Now and Ms Goodman with a 100 foot barge pole. I also strongly think one of our regular visitors to this very site would definately fall into the category of ‘compatible left’, especially given his vile views on Syria.
Oh yeah, and I also believe in nutty conspiracy theories as well…
Appreciate the quotes from Harold Pinter, Jim Garrison, and Jacques Ellul, tho I have read Harold Pinters acceptance speech in full a couple of years back.
Will reread this again tomorrow to let it further sink in, cheers.

michaelk
michaelk
Feb 9, 2020 11:57 AM

I think there’s a fundamental problem here; that is… people, the vast majority, don’t actually want to live in the ‘real world.’ In fact life would probably be impossible, far too hard and difficult, if one did live in and recognise the world for what it is. Living within a cosy ‘narrative’ linked to various myths is preferable. As long as the is enough ‘bread and circuses’ provided liberally, most people are satisfied with their lot. Reality is too much of a burden to bear.

Toby Russell
Toby Russell
Feb 9, 2020 11:28 AM

Much of this article is excellent but I agree with other commenters who lament its negativity and its situating the start of the rot in 1963. The divide-and-conquer strategies it details are as old as elitism itself. They are just getting more sophisticated as the various technologies of mass-production and digitization make the reach and depth of propaganda almost total.

Our only hope for change is to try and educate as many people as possible[.]

I see education of this type as only part of what needs to be done. Education on its own is as depicted in the article: people don’t want to know. What is needed, in addition to the constant and mostly thankless task of disseminating the truth about past and contemporary events, is the scientific paradigm change that is already well underway.

Say those programs have been ended when in fact they were continued under other even deeper secret programs, and just have “experts” – social, psychological, and biological “scientists” – repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain.
Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled – e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hairstyle, etc. Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people.

The determinism rightly derided in this article is the logical progeny of materialism, which can by its own premises admit neither free will nor consciousness. Meanwhile, experiments shedding light at the subatomic scale point to digital physics, which growing numbers of leading physicists support. Digital physics asserts that this not a matter-based universe: it is information-based, or digital. Logically then, it is computed, a kind of virtual reality, which means the Known Universe is a subset of something larger from where it is being computed. This article at Scientific American offers a small taste of the debate and is – I find – quite easy for the layman to follow. For reality to be information based, logic demands that mind must therefore be fundamental, not an accidental consequence of matter: information is essentially meaning, or meaningful, by definition, and only mind can create/process meaning.

To repeat, the science is pointing in this direction. Resistance to the logic that leads to mind, or better, to consciousness, is indeed very strong, but the better science and what can rightly be derived from it will out in the end. As Max Planck put it: “Science advances one funeral at a time.” The truth will out. Consciousness is characterised by many qualities, one of which is inexhaustible curiosity. As the funerals come and go, our understanding of reality will improve. That’s where the hope lies.

binra
binra
Feb 9, 2020 11:23 AM

The issue is of invested and defended illusion, set against and at cost of truth, as the persistence and development of a consciousness founded in deceit.

Within the deceit, different illusions are held to be more true than others, and so the battle of narrative judgement operates the effective block to receiving truth as the simple unadulterated nature of our being.

Invested illusions are bubble realities seeking reinforcement and protection against exposure. They are also a means of opening and unfolding experience, consciousness, learning and a basis for choice that can be re-aligned with truth as a result of learning what doesn’t work and releasing it for what does.

The first attack on truth is self-attack – and is the first false flag of denied and unrecognised responsibility – or (no less effective as attack) the taking on of responsibilities of others – such as assuming guilt for the lack of love in a parent during our formative experience of acquiring the focus of a masking identity as the basis for adaptation and learning in a ‘world’ of lovelessness or threat.

Those with pet hates and invested vendetta may decry my bringing this into the Human Conditioning – of which our socio-political is but an example – but unless we bring the ‘separation trauma’ into awareness it continues to frame us in a ‘Human Condition’ under which perpetual war is inevitable and necessary – but always seeking the mask of concern and protection, or outraged justification.

Many are coming to equate Humanity with ‘cancer or virus’ on the Earth – and tellingly projecting the innocence of being on Earth as ‘sacred’ victim. But this is the thinking that is being accepted an run upon our mind that DOES the thing it purports to defend against or accuses ITS sins in the Other.

‘That we are being lied to’ – can be the lie by which we except our self and presume to judge over others. In other words a ploy by which to seem to be a truthteller and as a trojan horse, gain acceptance.
That you are already engaged in self-deceit is less easy to communicate or even open a channel of communication. Especially for any who are heavily invested in blame and punishment – for the exposure of our own errors as ‘sins’ is our damnation.

Logic and reason have to be founded somewhere or in some accepted value to then operate consistently and reliably – but the ability to believe the untrue and indeed the self-contradictory, is the capacity to operate along insane premises – to their logical conclusion.

The attempt to assert and defend a lack of substance towards the wish or drive to ‘become real’ – is in no small way effected by the projection of ‘sin and hate’ OUT and AWAY from an excepted or ‘escaped’ sense of self to the undermining and destruction of Others – by which to seem to gain power and buy time.

What is not obvious to merely thinking ABOUT psychic-emotional or relational conflict, dissociation and deceit, is that our sense of solidity or physicality – as a boundary condition for the bubble reality is opened or expanded by actually and directly looking.

Whether this opens to peace of unconflicted being or the reasserting of the mind of its ‘doll’s house’ identity is the measure of our willingness of transparency to truth – to who and what we truly are.
But the experience of the ‘re-interjection’ of the mind over the simple or direct ‘knowing of being’ is always some measure of awareness opened to, that cannot be altogether reversed, denied or covered over – because at some level we are aware that we do this or are part of such – and so have a basis from which to be curious in the willingness to know.

Focusing on the lies of others as if to become thereby ‘more true’ or relatively good, worthy and escaping of blame and penalty, is a way of using the perceived sins of others to hide our own.

“The fictional self is who you thought you were after you forgot that you were love. You may also include every invented reality you used to embellish those misconceptions. Everything must have a context, even the ego. When a fictional aspect of personality is face to face with true existence, such questions arise as: ‘Who am I? How can my projections and inventions be integrated with reality? How can these self-generated factors, unsupported by reality, be made real?’ Existence exposes truth, and it can be a great defender of your own truth if you allow it to shatter that which is not really you. However, if you persist beyond your challenges and revelations to enforce your invented reality with intentional deception, you will enter the world of sin. Sin is a much simpler thing than you may think it is. It is just the force and mischief used to instill and empower invented realities. To the degree that you have made such investments, you have moved away from God.

“In the ways of the world, a great deal of energy is spent on judgment, which is nothing less than competition for dominance among invented realities. Judgment is a cruel, childish game of egos, competing for position. The sly, unspoken intent is that he who succeeds in sustaining a judgment is above judgment. That is not true. The fact is, the ego cannot and will not forgive. Withholding forgiveness is the ego’s assault against life. Love does not judge. Only the ego judges, and through judgment it will perish. Your love will sustain your immortality, for love knows nothing of judgment.

(Jeshua – from Love Without End)

kevin morris
kevin morris
Feb 9, 2020 11:08 AM

Jim Garrison paid a huge price for his insights into the workings of the machine. Fifty years on, thanks to articles such as the above and courtesy of off Grauniad we are presented with some of his insights totally free of obligation whilst in the comfort of our homes. As a bonus we are presented the opportunity of moral superiority over figures such as Noam Chomsky because sometimes they fail always to support every one of the sacred cows in our canon.

Jim Garrison fought with distinction for his country during the second world war and showed exemplary courage in facing down those who wished the truth of the Kennedy assassination to remain secret.

I fear a brave man’s name is being taken in vain.

lundiel
lundiel
Feb 9, 2020 11:07 AM

It won’t work. Trying to prevent the free flow of information is worse than the ‘disease’ you are trying to prevent. Conspiracy theories abound, many won’t believe a word they’re told, while others will cling to what they’re told like drowning men to driftwood. The more you prevent it the worse it will get. Information isn’t political, it just is. Meanwhile the virus is spreading, it affects every aspect of our lives and nothing is what it seems….or everything is true and must be dogma, there is no middle ground, the march goes on. We either wake up or march to oblivion.

Harry Stotle
Harry Stotle
Feb 9, 2020 10:57 AM

Operation ‘get Corbyn’ is a perfect exmplar of the process Edward Curtin alludes to.

Large swathes of the commentariat and even within the Labour party itself attributed Johnson’s election victory to Corbyn, rather than the version of Corbyn entirely manufactured by the MSM.

Corbyn the antisemite – Corbyn the Russian stooge – Corbyn the IRA sysmpathesiser – Corbyn the friend of Hamas, – mind boggling lies all lapped up by the Dolls House dwellers.

Like addicts at the ‘pre-contemplation stage’ they failed to recognise the nature of their own pathology so blindly accepted the media narrative, while those that did challenged the media orthodoxy were invariably censored by ‘liberal’ platforms such as the Guardian.

Remember when this belter was ‘moderated’ i.e. censored, for not abiding by ‘community standards’.

“There is nothing more ludicrous than the spectacle of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left being lectured by the same so-called moderates who enabled Johnson’s victory and whose empty rhetoric is not supported by the cold hard facts.

In 2017, on a pro-Leave manifesto, Corbyn raised the Labour Party’s share of the national vote by 10 percentage points, the party’s biggest increase since the 1945 General Election.

In April 2019, a poll of polls in the Daily Telegraph predicted that the Tories would lose 59 seats in the event of a General Election, making Labour the largest party in the Commons. 5 months later, Labour centrists forced the party leadership to promise another referendum – only this time one which excluded the option of a no-deal Brexit.

In the election which followed, Labour lost 59 seats, of which 55 had voted Leave in the 2015 referendum. Of the remaining four, three had been safe Tory seats before the previous election.

Yet despite the Labour’s Brexit policy reversal and the most relentless campaign of character assassination ever directed against a Labour leader by the corporate media – reinforced by the antics of the supposed moderates in his own party – Corbyn still won more than 10 million votes.

This was 600,000 more than Blair got in 2005 and was a bigger share of the vote (32%) than that achieved by Brown in 2010 (29%), Miliband in 2015 (30%), Kinnock in 1987 (31%) and Foot in 1983 (28%). Apart from Foot, these were all centrist Labour leaders who faced far less hostility from the media and their own parliamentary party than Corbyn did. And 3 of them (Brown, Blair and Miliband) were up against weaker Tory leaders than Johnson.

The notion that moving to the centre will guarantee electoral success is further discredited by the dismal performance of the LibDems and the 18 self-styled moderates who, prior to the election, defected from their parties and subsequently lost their seats. No wonder the corporate media are peddling this idea so enthusiastically.

As for the suggestion that Labour’s election defeat was a rejection of hard-left policies, this is yet another centrist fiction. For example, the party’s manifesto proposed increasing public spending as a proportion of GDP to 43%, compared to 45% in Germany, 48% in Sweden and 56% in France.

Apropos projected tax increases, Labour would have raised the top rate of corporation tax to 26% compared to 27% in Italy, 29% in Germany and 34% in France. And polls such as the Opinium poll (September 2019) – which found that only 12% of voters and 6% of Labour defectors rejected its economic policies – consistently showed that Labour’s policies were popular.

Apart from Labour’s disastrous promise to hold another referendum, the one other factor which decided the outcome of the election was the voting behaviour of the elderly. According to a YouGov poll of 42,000 adults who voted in the 2019 General Election, Labour won 44% of the vote and the Tories 33% in the 18-59 age group. Even in the 18-69 age group Labour maintained a lead over the Tories (40% to 37%) and, by 43% to 29%, did much better than the Conservatives among those educated to degree level or beyond.

However, it was the Tories’ massive lead over Labour amongst the over 70s (64% to 17%) that won them the election. These are voters whose political views are, more than any other generation, shaped by the lies and distortions of the anti-left mainstream news outlets.

An analysis published by the journal Science in January 2019 showed that they are four times more likely to share fake news on Facebook than younger age groups and suggested that the effect of ageing on cognitive function means that there is a large demographic of voters in their 60s and beyond who are unable to determine the trustworthiness of news sources.”
https://off-guardian.org/2020/01/15/what-community-standards-did-this-comment-breach-25/

We are reminded again thanks to Edward Curtin’s fantastic article that for ‘community standards’ we should read comment moderated for not abiding by the manufactured reality we think you should uncritically accept.

Dungroanin
Dungroanin
Feb 9, 2020 1:01 PM
Reply to  Harry Stotle

Lets also NEVER forget of Up-Pompeos Gauntlet to stop a Labour win.

And the guaranteed means of it – postal vote fraud.

Does anybody you know, even know what percentage of thevotes were postal?

Everyone I ask seems to place it well below 15%.

It had increased exponentially to 18% in as many years in the 2017 poll.

This time it has DOUBLED again to an average FORTY PERCENT!

That is an average- which means in certain constituencies will be the majority of votes cast.
Many constituencies will have therefore have a fantastical turnout in the 70-80% ! Never seen in any mature democracy without compulsory voting.

The UK suffered a coup as real as the US 1963 one. But the overlords didn’t want to wait to depose the elected government so they’pre-deposed’ it.

Corbyn is the deposed freely elected PM of the UK.

kevin morris
kevin morris
Feb 10, 2020 9:57 AM
Reply to  Dungroanin

Brilliant! Labour didn’t lose the December 2019 because it had stood against every attempt to comply with the people’s wishes expressed clearly in 2016, but because a coup was staged.

I suggest you get out more!

Dungroanin
Dungroanin
Feb 10, 2020 11:09 AM
Reply to  kevin morris

Pompeo?

Postal Votes?

Fixed polls?

A very British Coup.
A Junta government.
A controlled msm.
No coverage of the lies, murders, protests and defeats going on at all.
You can try and laugh it off – but WE are coming for you – pitchfork production going through the roof. ✊️

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 11, 2020 10:45 PM
Reply to  kevin morris

The ‘people’s wishes’-do you mean the 52% of brainwashed, mostly senile, fools who won’t even live to see Britannia sink without trace? The other 48% are what-‘unpeople’?

Mike Ellwood
Mike Ellwood
Feb 9, 2020 1:16 PM
Reply to  Harry Stotle

Thanks Harry. I was almost going to upvote you, until I saw you going with the ageist nonsense that people in their 60s are unable to determine the trustworthiness of news sources. Perhaps you’d like to take our votes off us as well?

Harry Stotle
Harry Stotle
Feb 9, 2020 5:50 PM
Reply to  Mike Ellwood

Fair point Mike, I agree that the assertion about age is problematic.

Even so it was said that if the GE vote was only available to those over 65 Labour would have been obliterated.

Conversely if the vote was restricted to those who are 25 or younger then the tories would have been wiped.

One possible explanation is that older voters are the biggest consumers of traditional printed media, ie, the rabid, right wing redtop: few who had a single positive thing to say about Corbyn.

lundiel
lundiel
Feb 9, 2020 6:11 PM
Reply to  Harry Stotle

I’m guessing it’s more a case of those who vote are if the generation that benefitted from post war growth and were given opportunities (free adult education) and bribes (council house give aways, share options in utilities and cash for turning their building societies into banks) that no other generation of ordinary folk have ever been given before. Once my generation is gone and our children realise the hopelessness of their situation, there will be change…..if they’re still alive to see it.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 9, 2020 9:38 PM
Reply to  lundiel

They won’t, in general, be alive to see it. The ecological Holocaust is unstoppable.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 9, 2020 9:37 PM
Reply to  Mike Ellwood

Mike, some people in their 60s, 70s, 80s etc are capable, but many are comprehensively not. A deal of those were never able to chew gum and fart at the same time, but the number of the intellectually insufficient and morally pernicious grows with age. It’s a demonstrable fact. The brain decays, and life embitters.

George Mc
George Mc
Feb 9, 2020 1:36 PM
Reply to  Harry Stotle

I would have thought that folk in their 60s (and I’m almost there myself!) would have been wiser to the machinations of the media – having seen so much more bullshit and how it works.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 9, 2020 9:32 PM
Reply to  Harry Stotle

The senile are those most prone to dementia, existential hatred of the young who will survive them and general neurological, sub-pathological, decay. The vote should be withdrawn at 70.

George Cornell
George Cornell
Feb 10, 2020 10:27 AM

But when would you like it to start? I think each age-related tranche of voters has their own foibles and weaknesses, compensated in variable degrees by their own strengths and insights. Being over 70 and still able to find my car in the parking lot, I may be taking this personally, but looking back I was a naive uniformed voter until I was at least 40. Suitably intense distrust of the media takes time to acquire, yet MSM is the dominant source of information on political matters for the young.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 9:07 PM
Reply to  George Cornell

Not all 70 year olds, or 20 year olds, are alike. On average, as the voting record shows, the older are disproportionately, greedy, nassty, self-interested and plain vicious. There are plenty of 20 year olds like that, but the numbers swell with age.

paul
paul
Feb 10, 2020 12:22 PM
Reply to  Harry Stotle

Labour is a lost cause, a dead end, a waste of space, a waste of a man’s rations, a waste of time, effort and energy.
It should just be consigned to the dustbin of history, to make way for something productive.
Whichever neoliberal, pro austerity, warmonger Friend Of Israel picks up Jezza’s crown.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 9:04 PM
Reply to  Harry Stotle

That slimy feminazi, Polly Toynbee, in the Guardian sewer, today speaks of four disastrous Labour results in a row, conveniently erasing the near victory and massive swing of 2017 from memory, the vicious, old, Blairite (numerous expletives deleted).

johny conspiranoid
johny conspiranoid
Feb 9, 2020 10:27 AM

If Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Howard Zinn, and Chris Hedges did not observe the limits of what they are allowed to say they would not be able to make a living in the way they are now. Chomsky himself made this observation about Andrew Marr. They are at the extreme left end of acceptable opinion beyond which you are out of a job.

lundiel
lundiel
Feb 9, 2020 11:20 AM

It doesn’t matter. This is far more important than a job. It truly is reason Vs oblivion. Information exists, you can’t delete it, all you can do is dampen it’s effect for a limited period. When the dam bursts it will be far worse. All we are doing now is storing up problems for the future by putting those who rule us in an impossible situation. One where they would rather destroy us all than take their hands from their eyes. The likes of Chomsky have a duty to tell the truth.

Willem
Willem
Feb 9, 2020 1:59 PM
Reply to  lundiel

According to the propaganda model, dissident writers are marginalized, yet Chomsky’s books are bestsellers, published by amongst others Penguin and they are sold at airports.

So either the propaganda model does not apply to Chomsky, or Chomsky is not a dissident writer.

It took me some time to find out, that the latter option is the right answer.

And the reason why Chomsky is allowed to speak about leftist issues is because

A) anyone with half a brain could have thought for himself that US foreign policy is not in the interest of the population that is bombed, sanctioned or occupied by the US. All that Chomsky does is make it much more convoluted than it actually is (making it easy for readers to waste their time or even get lost in Chomsky’s wording)
B) Chomsky answer to all of this is: one should for a Democrat. Not Sanders, but Clinton or Warren (not that Sanders is El Salvador, see https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OLNQEHbusSA, but I mean if you do believe in lesser evil (as Chomsky does): why prefer Clinton over Sanders)

All this is so silly, but really that is all it is.

I liked manufacturing consent, but have come to the conclusion that it must have been written, almost entirely by Edward Herman and not by Chomsky.

As for Hedges and other on compatible left, the same applies. All they tell is that what we already know, but in a convoluted way filled with half truths and lies about other ‘regimes’, ‘climate change’, and polluting corporations that can only be stopped if we stop eating meat or stop with flying. Their handwringing solutions do not lead us anywhere. That’s what makes them useful.

I always wonder what they make of their own life’s themselves. Do they think that acting like a dissident writer is a useful job? – How do they justify their own behavior to themselves?

But perhaps that is not so difficult after years of writing propaganda (in Chomsky’s case, over 50 years). At some stage you probably start to believe your own bullshit.

soze
soze
Feb 9, 2020 9:20 PM
Reply to  Willem

You will not find anybody that agrees with everything that you happen to believe in.

Some of these fellas may have hidden agendas, some are just uninformed or misinformed. Nobody is an expert in everything.

For example I agree with Hedges on a lot of things, and it would be extremely hard for me to believe he is some kind of controlled opposition based on his writings. But then he also supports that manufactured “Extinction Rebellion” cult. (Not to say I don’t believe in global warming.) I also believe he supports the official story of 9/11.

Gall
Gall
Feb 9, 2020 9:36 PM
Reply to  Willem

Actually Noam Chomsky wasn’t the first person to write about “Manufacturing Consent” both Edward Bernays in Propaganda followed by Marshall McLuhan in his various writings. All he did was summarize this information in Manufacture of Consent much like Howard Zinn did with alternative American history stripped of its usual triumphalism in an a Peoples History of the United States.

Both authors performed a service much like Will Durant did when he wrote the Story of Philosophy.

My problem with Chomsky is that in many ways he contradicts himself when he became a partisan supporter of the Democratic Party like Chris Hedges as noted earlier.

Either they believe what they are saying in which case they are suffering from extreme cognitive dissonance or they sold out.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 9, 2020 9:41 PM
Reply to  Willem

Chomsky’s writings are quite understandable, and contain a plethora of foot-notes and references that are totally hidden or denied by the brainwashing systems. He’s wrong, in my opinion, over some things, but who is not?

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Feb 10, 2020 12:35 PM
Reply to  Willem

I’ve read that at other places Willem that Edward Herman wrote most of Manufacturing Consent, and Chomsky’s name was added for saleability and marketing purposes.
I no longer read or listen to anything Chomsky says anymore.
The wool fell from my eyes years ago.
When Edward mentioned the ‘compatible left’ – the first name that popped into my head was Louis Proyect!

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 10, 2020 9:08 PM
Reply to  Gezzah Potts

Proyectile belongs at ‘Spiked’.

Gezzah Potts
Gezzah Potts
Feb 10, 2020 10:26 PM

Funded by Charles Koch Foundation for fecks sakes! Apparently over $300000 or so via a US Spiked Inc. So much for… ‘Living Marxism’. Even The Guardian reported on that. Yeah, Proyectile would be right at home there.
You really have to wonder how many gatekeepers are out there who proclaim to be ‘socialist’ or, um, ‘unrepentant marxists’.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 11, 2020 10:48 PM
Reply to  Gezzah Potts

‘Living Marxism’ was a Rightwing, libertarian, Thatcherite wheeze, ever since the rag was taken over decades ago. As ‘Marxist’ as Gummo.

kevin morris
kevin morris
Feb 10, 2020 10:25 AM
Reply to  lundiel

By the sound of it, you don’t have one.

Robbobbobin
Robbobbobin
Feb 10, 2020 12:43 AM

Marr-Chomsky interview 1996:

Marr: “How can you know I’m self-censoring?”
Chomsky: “I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

Marr webchat 2017:

StinkNormal asks:

In February 1996, you interviewed Noam Chomsky on the BBC’s The Big Idea and asked him to explain his “Propaganda Model” and how it pertains to the mainstream media. Unwittingly, you provided a perfect illustration of the model by demonstrating your unfamiliarity with the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

One of the most illuminating exchanges during the interview was the following:

Marr: “How can you know I’m self-censoring?”

Chomsky: “I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

At this point in the interview, your reaction suggested that the proverbial penny had dropped for you regarding your role as, with respect, a cog in the well-oiled propaganda machine.

So I’m curious to know whether this exchange with Chomsky was an epiphany for you regarding your own journalism? And is there any difference in your philosophy of journalism pre-Chomsky interview and post-Chomsky interview?

Andrew Marr replies:

I remember this interview very well. I was – quite rightly – nervous of Chomsky, who is a formidable intellect. When he suggested that “if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting”, I immediately realised that this was not so much brilliant, as unanswerable. He comes quite close to the position that the propaganda model means “everybody who disagrees with me”. And the conversation was taking place in the context of me expressing disbelief, in his view, that all mainstream journalists were essentially the same – I had said that it seemed to me the Guardian and the Telegraph posed very different world views. And that journalists varied hugely in their own politics and temperament. He is brilliant, but he is a brilliant conspiracist, so therefore no, it wasn’t a matter of the proverbial penny dropping, still less an epiphany.

You pays your money and your choice.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 11, 2020 10:49 PM
Reply to  Robbobbobin

If Marr said anything different, his wealth would evaporate.

milosevic
milosevic
Feb 10, 2020 1:45 AM
Willem
Willem
Feb 9, 2020 9:35 AM

In a time that I still took Chris Hedges (far too) seriously, I saw him performing on YouTube where he introduced his new book in (it seems to me) a very nice book store with a very nice audience

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GeE5WnTUsF8

I just skimmed through that performance again and what is obvious is that

A) Hedges proclaims the end of the world (he really means with climate change and corrupt politicians that the world will end)
B) this can only be stopped if we resist
C) tells us that we should resist, and that it is up to ‘us’ to start a revolution, yet never tells us how we can successfully resist.

All this is typically Hedges: you must feel depressed to where the world is going, and then you must resist. – But how?

Hedges implicite answer, as this is following by example is: quitting your job (like Hedges did from The NY Times) get a pulpit (publish at Truthdig), preach the apocalypse to the masses, and demonstrate in the streets (where you get jailed every once in a while).

Someone here, or at another site, recommended others to Read Dietrich Bonhoeffer letters from prison, which I am currently reading and I think it is a great book. Bonhoeffer is an inspirational and highly religious person, which is somewhat amazing for me, because I am not really into religion and spirit. Yet, Bonhoeffer seems to me the exact negative of what Hedges is (Hedges also preaches and is affiliated to the church), that is that Bonhoeffer acts because it feels right to act in the way that he is acting. Being human is all he preached, and that is all. Hedges, on the other hand, preaches that we are all doomed, and it’s all our fault because we didn’t ‘resist’.

Bonhoeffer ended in jail (and was murdered by the Nazi’s after which he became a saint for the Protestant church), which, however was never his intention. Bonhoeffer got busted, that’s all. If Hedges could be made into a saint, I am sure he would like that a lot, certainly if he wouldn’t have to suffer for it. In this YouTube performance (that I linked to above) he already acts like a saint (he who knows best), and he also does that at other performances.

Here is what Bonhoeffer says on ‘duty’.

‘The responsibility for it rests on the commander, not on the person commanded. But no one who confines himself to the limits of duty ever goes so far as to venture, on his sole responsibility, to act in the only way that makes it possible to score a direct hit on evil and defeat it. The man of duty will in the end have to do his duty by the devil too.’

That was true for Eichmann, and that is true for all of us who have to do their ‘duty’. What makes it our duty to follow Chris Hedges?

Bonhoeffer also says that: ‘To talk of going down fighting like heroes in the face of certain defeat is not really heroic at all, but merely a refusal to face the future.’

Now I am quite sure that Hedges’ fighting against ‘empire’, ‘climate change’ or ‘the deep state’ (all hollow words that Hedges likes to talk about a lot) does not lead to certain defeat for Chris Hedges. Yet it does for all who follow his example.

Caveat emptor

Gall
Gall
Feb 9, 2020 9:05 PM
Reply to  Willem

Truth Digg lost me when they started promoting Robert Reich who like Bernie Sanders began sheep dogging for Hillary Clinton just like the Young Turkeys. As far as I was concerned Truth Digg was beginning to manifest symptoms of extreme cognitive dissonance by promoting the epitome of warmongering neoliberal arrogance Hillary Clinton.

soze
soze
Feb 9, 2020 9:22 PM
Reply to  Willem

Find me somebody that you agree with and I will find something that they are wrong about.

Vera Lynn
Vera Lynn
Feb 10, 2020 12:28 AM
Reply to  Willem

Chris Hedges didn’t quit his job at NYT – he was fired

Loverat
Loverat
Feb 9, 2020 9:23 AM

‘The problem is the will to know. But why? Why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance? That too. Willful ignorance, ditto. Laziness, indeed. Careerism and ideology? For certain’

Great, and thought provoking. The categories listed above – stupidity, ignorance, ideology, careerist, liar always fascinate me. It would be really interesting to observe someone like George Monbiot be forced to read this article and then question him.

To see if it made a difference to him, whether his warped views were down to stupidity, ignorance, too afraid to discover the truth, careerist motivated by paycheck- or a cynical liar in the full knowledge the Guardian and its content is controlled by UK intelligence services. It would be fascinating.

There are a few examples which are easy – Eliot Higgins – careerist liar, Oliver Kamm – likewise – Louis Proyect- ideology. But alot out there who probably fall into the stupid,ignorant/ group think categories. Maybe Rachel Riley and much of the celebrity world.

George Mc
George Mc
Feb 9, 2020 10:26 AM
Reply to  Loverat

The reason these celebrities tow the line is that their careers are bound up with their public pronouncements or, to be more precise, how acceptable their public pronouncements are to the vested interests. We are not living in a totalitarian state where those who say the “wrong things” may be “disappeared”. But inconvenient opinions mean career death: loss of position (“We do not want to be linked with the offensive views of this person”), drying up opportunities (nobody wants to be associated with an “undesirable”), and, even though the brave pronouncer will not go to jail, he/she will indeed effectively disappear from the media show anyway – and that is where they all know their livelihood lies.

soze
soze
Feb 9, 2020 9:28 PM
Reply to  Loverat

‘The problem is the will to know. But why?

Ignorance is bliss.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 9, 2020 9:43 PM
Reply to  Loverat

Proyectile’s sole ‘ideology’ is Proyectilismo.

George Mc
George Mc
Feb 9, 2020 8:47 AM

On the topic of The Great American Non-Stop Picture Show, Gore Vidal’s essay “The Last Empire” is good. An excerpt:

On the Ides of August 1945, I joined the 13 million Americans who headed home to enjoy… well… being alive was always the bottom line. Home turned out to be a sort of fairground where fireworks went off and the band played Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree and a fun house flung open its doors and we filed through. We enjoyed halls of mirrors where everyone was comically distorted, rode through all the tunnels of love and took scary tours of horror chambers where skeletons and cobwebs and bats brushed past us until, suitably chilled and subdued, we were ready for the exit and everyday life. But unfortunately, to the consternation of some and the apparent indifference of the rest, we were never really allowed to leave the fun house; it had become a part of our world, as were those goblins sitting under that apple tree.

Willem
Willem
Feb 9, 2020 8:07 AM

‘It is true that average Americans have not built the doll’s house; that is the handiwork of the vast interconnected and far-reaching propaganda arms of the U.S. government and their media accomplices.’

True, but what is also true is that there is nothing new or American to this doll house. It’s Plato’s cave that has been designed by rulers who need myths (of their greatness) in order to ‘justifiably’ rule over the population. That system is as old as the world.

That we live in this reality may have nothing to do with bad faith. It could just as well be that people see no other option than to be believe in the narrative that is spun before their eyes. Please note that propaganda is not made for people who know from experience (bombs e.g.) how empires work, but for people who live comfortable as long as they believe in the myth. The prospect of nihilism is what people keep thinking that what is not true is true. And it could only be bad faith if they could acknowledge that there is an alternative reality (which they can’t, because they consider that nihilism). It’s for this reason that I consider these pessimistic viewpoints, as produced in Curtin’s essay, only partly right. Like Gramsci said: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. The latter part is missing in the essay.

But it would be wrong to blame the author, because for ‘the will’ part, we (the readers) are just as responsible as the writer is.

So here is a job for you, dear reader, convince your neighbour who believes in the myth that the myth is just that (a myth) AND provide him or her with an alternative reality that is not leading to chaos and nihilism.

And since you cannot change everything in one go, you have to change one thing at the time. What is the first thing you would like to change? – For me, that would be the introduction of basic income.

I am happy that Curtin calls the phonies by name: Hedges, Chomsky… These people have some interesting views, but very little and if you would believe all their words you would surely end up in a blind alley where you must vote for a Democrat (Chomsky), or get tear gassed by the police (Hedges)

C/Nice essay

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 9, 2020 7:03 AM

I suggest that if you think Obama was pure CIA, that you ought to read the article ‘Obama and the Jews’, by Pauline Yearwood, that appeared in the Chicago Jewish News on October 24, 2008. It outlines how Obama was, and no doubt remains, a creature of the wealthy Chicago Jewish elite, talent-spotted at college by a Zionist teacher, given his first employment in a Jewish legal firm, and financed in his political career by worthies like the Pritzkers, Penny Pritzker later being appointed by him as Commerce Secretary. As Abner Mikva, a former judge, Congressman and Bill Clinton apparatchik states in the article, in his opinion history will show that Obama was not the first black US President, but the first Jewish one.

Gall
Gall
Feb 9, 2020 6:56 AM

The only problem I have with Ed Curtin’s article aside from the “Abandon all hope all ye that enter” pessimism of the piece is the fact this American delusion started long before JFK got his head blown off near Dealey Plaza.

One book to read is American Exceptionalism and American Innocence A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror Roberto Sirvent, Danny Haiphong which was reviewed on this site.

Two others are Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building by Richard Drinnon and American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David E. Standard.

Another one is by Independent Presidential Candidate Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah with Unsettling Truths The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.

Was the American Revolution a “flop? According to Paul Pirie.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-american-revolution-was-a-flop/2013/07/03/fd077db0-e02b-11e2-b2d4-ea6d8f477a01_story.html

No it was probably one of the most successful propaganda coups in history.

Antonym
Antonym
Feb 9, 2020 6:27 AM

In the 1960’s the CIA & co were just trying out their domestic reach unofficially and illegally. It is only after the convenient 9/11 event that they managed to roll over Congress, Senate, Judiciary and MSM to formalize their full spectrum dominance of Washington D.C with their “Homeland Security department” aka the Ministry of Truth.

The biggest enemies of the original Constitutional USA today are not located in Beijing let alone Moscow but in Fairfax county West Virginia.

Richard Le Sarc
Richard Le Sarc
Feb 9, 2020 7:04 AM
Reply to  Antonym

Nope-they’re located in Tel Aviv and throughout the ‘Israel First’ Fifth Column in the USA itself.

Gall
Gall
Feb 9, 2020 8:00 AM
Reply to  Antonym

Actually the machinery was already in place before 9/11 and the “last refuge of the scoundrel” or this case scoundrels “Patriot” Act with the introduction of the Anti-Terrorism and Death Penalty Act of 1995 that immediately followed the Oklahoma City Bombing which interestingly was drafted by current Democrat Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Funny how that goes?

Anyway the plan was to take down the WTC and set America on the road to police state in ’93 but there was a glitch. The bombs (not bomb since a single bomb doesn’t leave an oval crater the almost the size of a football field) were misplaced and didn’t take out the foundation of the Twin Towers but instead only took out six levels of the parking structure.

A plan that as we know eventually succeeded with additional “special effects” in 01.