An agency has been created under the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act which suppresses what the state judges as seditious foreign media material, helped by the measures from social media companies in this last year to fight “fake news.” So the current war runnup efforts are able to go on with virtual impunity, as most of the public figures who’ve fought the Iraq WMD claims leave these deceptions unchallenged.
Since Russia blocked U.S. regime change plans for Syria around four years ago and Ukraine was used as an opportunity for reigniting the Cold War, there’s been an often evolving establishment narrative for warring against Russia. We don’t hear anymore about the supposed Russian hacking of the Brexit vote, or of American electrical grids, or of France’s election, because these claims have all been debunked and now defeat the credibility of the other Russia narratives.
After Russian hacking of the DNC was unequivocally disproved two months ago when a group of veteran intelligence officials ran cyber tests showing a hack of the server would have been physically impossible, new claims in this area have appeared. We’re now supposed to think Russia spread propaganda on Facebook last year by purchasing ads (something evidenced only by statements that those involved were “possibly Russia-linked”), and that Russia hacked into 21 state voting systems (something the election officials of those states have refuted). There’s even a charge that the recent debates about race are fueled by Russia. As these stories collapse, we can anticipate further misinformation in this area. Possibly of a nature that lets the NATO troops quietly positioned near Russia’s borders mobilize against Russia’s forces, which are a lot more eagerly reported on by western media.
Official narratives about North Korea should be treated skeptically as well. President Trump’s genocidal nuclear threats against North Korea, endorsed by John McCain and MSNBC pundits, is a staggeringly cruel assault on a people who are still scarred from losing nearly 20% of their population in the last U.S.-Korean War. The justifications for this assault are what we’ve heard before every other regime change war in recent memory-that the country’s leader is unstable, that he’s threatening to attack us, that there’s no negotiating with him-while Kim Jong Un has in fact offered to reach a peace deal. Washington has of course rejected that offer.
We’re hearing the same about Syria, where Bashar Al Assad has been repeatedly accused of perpetrating chemical attacks against his own people that genuine investigations have vindicated Assad on in every case. These accusations are nonetheless being dramatized through the Bana Alabad psy op, wherein a seven-year-old Syrian refugee girl is gotten by adults to promote their pro-Syrian war agenda.
As is the case with Iran, which Trump and his U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley have falsely accused of not complying with the nuclear deal and which both parties are now determined to harm relations with. A regime change mission for Venezuela is underway as well, with authority figures lying about the country’s highly reliable election system being illegitimate in the case of Maduro’s victory. This while American agents are employed to disrupt the regime there through strategic protests.
The existing wars don’t even need to be justified in this way anymore-they’re just happening. Trump has already dropped about as many bombs as Obama did in all of 2016, which numbered over 26,000, as the wars in Iraq, Aghanistan and Yemen have been expanded. The military budget, which already consumes nearly all of Americans’ tax dollars, has been increased by around 10% twice this year as the White House has cut has tried to compensate through even the pettiest cuts to social services. The CIA has tried to get its drone assassination abilities expanded this month as Trump recently attacked Libya with drones.
All this is normalized by the voices of power, presented as routine military involvement that’s necessary no matter how insanely it’s inflated. Recently a columnin the Washington Post, which is run by a mega-billionaire who’s received funds from the CIA, said “Sanders bemoans the exorbitant cost of defense spending when, to be honest, it hasn’t been that much of a burden as a percent of gross domestic product for quite some time. He echoes President Dwight D. Eisenhower in railing against the military-industrial complex, a boogeyman that strikes me as decades out of date. His focus on inequality is sound, but he offers no solutions. He never reconciles his desire to alleviate global poverty with his protectionist urges.” These are lies. Virtually all of our tax dollars are now funding the military, which has become increasingly linked with companies like Raethon and Halliburton in recent decades as it’s caused not just massive poverty abroad, but the killing of over four million people since 1990 alone.
Subtle manipulations like these keep the public compliant with a constant state of war. We’re never supposed to think about how North Korea sits on likely trillions in minerals, or how Afghanistan’s opium resources are valuable to a CIA that remains a legal drug trafficking organization, or how Syria’s war zone contains a network of oil pipelines. There’s always a threat that must be countered, a “humanitarian” mission that must be carried out, a vague political or ideological necessity for continuing obscene militarism. Though most of the time, like with the Obama administration’s depleted uranium bombings or the secret decade-long continuation of the Persian Gulf War, these barbaric events are simply hidden from a distraction-saturated public.
This is robbery of some of our basic human traits: empathy for other people, the ability to nurture and be nonviolent, curiosity for unfamiliar stories and knowledge. In a society of perpetual war, the slaughter going on is presented as trivial statistics to the public, usually in these times through the phrase “collateral damage.” The details of the atrocities taking place are concealed so that the war propaganda’s consumers can comfortably dismiss accounts of them. When the victims of the wars are made known to the population they’re portrayed as monsters, invading foreigners that need to be fought. This tactic has shown in recent years through the cartoonish demonizations of Syrian refugees.
These rejections of empathy are reinforced by a culture that Chris Hedges callsAmerican fascism, the ideology right-wing demagogues have cultivated in recent decades that glorifies violence through gun fanaticism and encourages religious and misogynistic hatred. American fascism is maintained with the militarization of daily life in this country, wherein war equipment is routinely featured at public events and law enforcement is heavily armed. Symbols and slogans are the main tools for rallying people around these things, like with the zealous exaltations of the American flag and the national anthem. A culture like this is groomed through the corporate takeover of lower-class schools that’s happened in recent decades, and the rise of high-tuition colleges that our extreme military spending has made possible.
Donald Trump is the culmination of this war society. He’s surrounded himself with generals, hired a private army of mostly unnecessary security guards to use force against protesters, and gotten the militarized police organizations to pledge allegiance to him. He’s encouraged the police he’s now further arming to use more violence, talked about punching protestors and assaulting women, and used references about killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood in. His contempt for deep thought is correlated with his demands for submission from women, his disgust for dissidents and foreigners, and an unhealthy obsession with cleanliness that was shared by Adolf Hitler.
Trump and the system that produced him could destroy us. Or they could inspire us to revive a different narrative within ourselves, to strengthen our nonconformity, our inquisitiveness, our sense of compassion. We, not the war profiteers, are the ones who will make the choice between these two.
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