Every Moment We Focus On Russiagate, The World Comes Closer To Annihilation

The danger of Russiagate is not just in the threat it’s creating of war with a nuclear superpower, or in the McCarthyite political climate it’s created. It’s in the fact that every moment we focus on the Russia narrative, we aren’t focusing on taking the actions to prevent catastrophe for the species.

We are in the most pivotal and dangerous times in history. According to a composite study of climate data from last year, the year when catastrophic climate change will become unavoidable without drastic greenhouse gas emission reductions beforehand is 2020. The impulses of a bloated and collapsing U.S. empire are threatening to create nuclear war, whether with Russia, China, or North Korea. The inanity of our mainstream political discourse, enforced by a corporate oligarchy that depends on the mass propagation of ignorance, makes society blind to the reality of these crises.

“The increasing likelihood of nuclear war should straighten out all of our priorities,” wrote Caitlin Johnstone this month, when the U.S. severely escalated tensions with Russia by bombing Russian fighters in Syria. “We came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion during the last cold war, and the further things escalate in this new one the more likely we are to tempt fate again. The only reason we survived the extremely tense stand-offs in the last cold war ultimately boiled down to pure dumb luck in some cases, and there’s no legitimate reason to believe we’ll get lucky again.”

As this precarious world situation has developed, Russiagate has choked out serious discourse about the issue. The basis behind the Trump/Russia collusion narrative-which is still unproven-centers around the inaccurate and dangerous idea that it would be “treason” for Trump to have colluded with Russia. Treason defines coordination with a foreign adversary, as Russiagate’s propagandists have numerously made clear, and the popular use of the term serves to needlessly restart the cold war. This is, of course, exactly what the neoconservatives and intelligence operatives behind the Russia narrative were hoping to accomplish.

This imperialism-motivated mass propaganda campaign has forced people, on both sides of the “Russian interference” debate, to focus on information that distracts from what’s really important. Rachel Maddow could have spent the last year or so making climate change, not Russia, the topic she focuses on more than all others combined. The hundreds of hours alternative media journalists have had to devote to countering the Russia narrative could have been focused on the expanding inequality and U.S. warfare. The fact that the Russia narrative exists seems to have set back the movement towards overthrowing the corporate oligarchy.

And this, too, is no doubt what the narrative’s engineers intended. Russiagate is one of the spectacles that society is using to distract itself from the need for change, both because of the ruling class’ pathologies and because of the masses’ being prone to wishful thinking. This spectacle has appeared at the worst possible time. Letting it consume our attention any longer might result in our destruction.

Democrats’ Demonizing WikiLeaks Shows How Little They Care About Democracy

WikiLeaks has never had to retract a piece of information it’s published in its twelve years of being in operation. It has never hacked into the information of any institution or individual, since its purpose is to publish information that outside whistleblowers have leaked. It has consistently published leaks on the overreach of Trump’s CIA and of the Russian government’s spying practices, and Julian Assange hopes to publish Trump’s tax returns. And even Obama has admitted that there’s no proof Assange is working for Russia.

The political establishment’s attacks against Assange and WikiLeaks directly match the damage that WikiLeaks is doing to the paradigm of corporate and governmental rule-by-secrecy. Last month, when Democratic congressman Adam Schiff observedthat “WikiLeaks began posting emails from the Clinton campaign in October, just weeks before the November election” to try to implicate WikiLeaks with Russia, he was not going off of what he’d found out independently. He was helping his donors in the military contracting agencies, which gave $70,000 to Schiff in the last election cycle alone, and whose operations are being endangered by the information revolution that Assange is helping bring about.

We shouldn’t have expected the Democratic Party not to descend into this reactionary neo-McCarthyism in response to WikiLeaks’ exposing its corruption. The party is an extension of the interests of the ruling class, and so it will engage in these kinds of authoritarian behaviors when necessary. But the extremity of this reaction-the McCarthyite charges against those who hold opposing views, the effortsto silence dissenting media, the drive to start a new cold war with Russia-shows how the Democratic Party establishment has always viewed democracy.

The liberal elites propagating the anti-WikiLeaks, pro-censorship, and anti-Russia narratives have not tried to protect us from the WTO, which undemocratically imposes neoliberal policies on populations. They haven’t opposed the takeover of politics by corporations and billionaires. They’ve helped carry out the litany of U.S. interferences into sovereign democracies in recent decades. They’ve systematically suppressed and flipped millions of votes in the 2016 Democratic primaries to nominate their favored candidate. They’ve marginalized the opponents of empire and corporate power, while employing police violence and other forms of state repression to keep these dissenters powerless.

“Democrats hate democracy,” observed Caitlin Johnstone in the title of a column last year which describes how the party treats the left. “Unless you have been fully processed by the Democratic party’s corporatist conformity machine, only allowed to move up party ranks as you demonstrate brown-nosing fealty to Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, you must never be permitted access to the ‘democratic’ system of elected representation. These people are violently opposed to democracy, and yet they call themselves ‘Democrats’. And Americans are so alienated from what democracy is that this is accepted as normal.”

This autocratic entity, helped by deep state propaganda outlets like CNN and the New York Times, has no intention of stopping its takeover of humanity. As we’re bombarded with absurd propaganda spectacles like Mueller’s recent Russia indictments, notice the coercive forces that are gathering around us: increasingly militarized police, to the effect that 188 people have been killed by police in the U.S. so far this year. Escalated warfare, with the U.S. empire now preparing new wars in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and the baltics. Intensified online censorship, with governments and corporations massively suppressing the viewership of dissenting websites like Truthdig and Consortiumnews.

Julian Assange will likely always will be a criminal according to the state. But those who defy power will always be treated as heretics along with him. And there are a lot of people who defy power. So as we try to counter the establishment’s efforts to destroy and exploit, we can take solidarity through Assange’s words: “If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.”

What We Should Do When The Oligarchy Tries To Rig The 2020 Democratic Primary

2016 showed us exactly how, where, and when the forces of corporate tyranny are able to sabotage disfavored candidates. Likely Bernie Sanders voters were purged in Arizona, New York, California, and other key states in the Democratic primary. Mathematically impossible exit poll discrepancies happened in many states, all of them in Hillary Clinton’s favor. Voter registration problems, closed polling places, lost ballots, and other issues happened in numerous contests. And it was all buried by the media and the government with Orwellian success.

Almost nothing has changed about the primary process since this epic assault on democracy. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been replaced by the similarly untrustworthy Tom Perez. There are still superdelegates and closed primaries. The hackable electronic voting machines haven’t been replaced by a mandatory paper ballot system. Many have abandoned the Democratic Party altogether, and plan not to even try to vote in the 2020 Democratic primary. I’m urging those people to try to vote in it anyway-because if and when election fraud occurs, your stolen votes will serve to expose the evil of the system.

Things have changed since the start of 2016. The population is more aware and mobilized, and alternative media’s popularity has increased so much that governments and corporations are now heavily censoring it. When the Democratic Party next goes after our votes, we’ll be able to recognize the fraud, document it, and show it to a country that’s ready to accept it as fact.

When you see fraud reported in 2020, or if you have your democratic rights personally violated, please contact me on my Facebook page about it so that I can report on the incident. Others in my field with online followings, especially Jared Beck, Lee Camp, and Caitlin Johnstone, will no doubt also be ready to spread awareness of these incidents. To combat the censorship against us, which I fear will be a lot worse by 2020, we’ll need to prepare for this reporting operation by forming alliances between alternative media sites. 

By very vocally and broadly exposing the Democratic Party’s coming attack on democracy, we might be able to do unprecedented damage to the ruling establishment. With every widely publicized incident of electoral fraud, the establishment Democrat candidate’s legitimacy will be harmed, and pressure will be put onto the Democratic leadership to conduct a genuinely fair primary. I don’t know if this will lead to the DNC nominating the non-corporate candidate. But if we report on the election fraud, and if we prepare for doing this well in advance, the establishment’s attempts to sabotage democracy will backfire.

What should we do when we find out that our votes have been stolen? The same thing that those angriest few of us who knew the full extent of the 2016 election fraud did: take to the streets and organize to bring down the power structure. 2020, according to the sociologist Peter Turchin, will also be the point where the class struggle reaches a pivotal moment of social unrest. That class struggle is already rapidly becoming more dramatic, as the ruling elites use censorship, propaganda, and militarization to stifle dissent. The foundations of the corporatocracy are weakening. And the next stolen election might be what finally gets the people to take their power back.

The theft of the 2020 race has already started; in September, California Democrats voted to make California the one of the first states to vote in the primaries, which will harm any insurgent candidate since California is the state with the most delegates. Be vigilant for the next instances. The future of the republic might depend on how well we report them.

Preparing For The Next False Flag

Given the behavior of the U.S. government in not just the last year, but in the last two hundred years, a false flag event is coming. The government used the explosion of the USS Maine in 1898, which newspapers blamed on Spain without evidence, to start the Spanish-American war. The government used the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin attack, which the U.S. brought upon by firing at Vietnamese boats without provocation, to start the Vietnam War. In 1990 the government used a false testimony alleging Iraqi atrocities to create support for the Persion Gulf War. In this moment of multiple U.S. war runup campaigns, it’s the rational choice to think another false flag is imminent.

It could come in the form of a chemical attack that’s falsely blamed on Bashar-al-Assad, as was hinted at this month when Al-Nusra and the White Helmets were revealed to be planning such a provocation. It could be an indirect false flag, like the effort to blame Iraq for 9/11 (which is already being repeated with the current effortto fraudulently link Iran to 9/11). Or it could be something truly titanic, Iike a nuclear attack that’s blamed on North Korea or Russia. But it’s almost certainly going to happen.

A prologue to it happened in April of last year, when the chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria was used to justify air strikes against a Syrian air base. It made no sense for Assad to have perpetrated the attack. An international agreement in Assad’s favor was made right before the attack, and Assad knew such an action would provoke retribution against his government. When the U.N. later put out a report that promoted the official story about the attack, the report’s claims about the timing of the incident were inconsistent with those of eyewitness observers. Recently general James Mattis even admitted that there’s no evidence Assad is behind the attack. But none of that mattered to the war propaganda machine.

The media, the government, and supposedly trustworthy organizations like Human Rights Watch immediately put the blame on Assad. Skeptics were vilified, so much that when representative Tulsi Gabbard questioned the narrative, she lost support from many of her constituents, and Democratic leader Howard Dean urged her to resign from congress. “Fifteen years,” wrote Caitlin Johnstone on this year’s anniversary of the Iraq invasion, which was done through similar war deceptions. “I still have unused art supplies that are older than that. And yet when politicians and intelligence agencies say that Russia has committed an act of war against the US and Bashar al-Assad needs to be removed from power in Syria, mainstream Americans say ‘Yup, sounds about right, no further evidence required.’”

Neoconservative propagandists, especially The Guardian’s George Monbiot, have continued to attack those who oppose this latest war narrative. These attacks are part of the gaslighting strategy, where a manipulator gets the other person to question their own sanity. Gaslighting is most damaging when done by the state, since the state controls mass propaganda and conventional thought. This is how dissent is made invisible, and how history is erased so that the product of war can be sold.

The establishment narrative about the Khan Sheikhoun incident still hasn’t been solidified into the accepted history. Thanks to the efforts of Caitlin Johnstone, Robert Parry, and other alternative media journalists, millions of people know the real facts about the attack. And Tulsi Gabbard still has a good chance of being the next president. Our task is to expand these hopeful aspects by warning Americans about the war deceptions they’re being exposed to.

Do not be gaslighted into treating the deep state’s lies as truth. We are being told to trust in politicians, media outlets, and intelligence agencies whose purpose is to deceive us. Becoming insane as the state defines insanity is the way to survive.

We Have Never Been Closer To A 1984 Scenario

The important story is not about Russiagate, or about the president’s lurid affairs, or about the other media sensations we’re constantly bombarded with. The story is about a bipartisan, all-encompassing effort by the U.S./NATO power establishment (along with their parallels in Russia and China, the two other superstates) to make society ever more repressive and militarized.

It’s no wonder the corporate media tries so hard to divert our attention to other subjects. This takeover is visible in every McCarthyite media statement, online censorship expansion, and advancement of corporate and military power that happens each day. It’s directly related to the global collapse of capitalism, the climate collapse, and the other crises the world is undergoing. Its logical conclusion is something resembling the world from George Orwell’s 1984.

In a way that outcome has already happened; the machinations of the military and surveillance oligarchy are allowed to work, with the opinions of the population having no effect on this despite there still generally being “freedom of speech.” The surveillance state is encroaching into our lives more and more intimately, as the FBI has recently set up a task force for monitoring Americans’ social media activities. The United States is committing itself to obscene amounts of military spending-$160 billion over the next two years, according to the latest budget-while makingNATO allies vastly expand their own weapons stashes over the coming years. The country is turning into one big military base, with the government trying to justify its vast war spending increases through making the pettiest of cuts to social services.

War is as vastly engaged in by the United States as its details aren’t allowed into the public consciousness. Bombs are falling on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria in record numbers, while Obama’s military campaigns in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, and Niger have been continued and expanded under Trump. U.S. drone strikes have been greatly increased in the last year as well. Most dangerously, the U.S. has started bombing Russians in Syria this month, a terrifying incident after the years of NATO’s troop and tank buildups around Russia’s border. These facts are kept in the background by mainstream media, letting the American consciousness remain disengaged with the realities of our war paradigm.

“We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” said CIA director William Casey in 1981. Not even since the aftermath of 9/11 have we been closer to this state of total deception; since the 2013 repeal of a ban on covert CIA psyops, many mainstream media figures have becomecarefully trained government propaganda agents. As the intelligence community has used this to carry out a public relations campaign centered around the “Russiagate” theater, former intelligence officials have lately been put into media positions. Under the 2017 NDAA, a portion of the defense budget goes to a State Department-run “counter-propaganda” program.

The agenda behind this takeover is shown in every major statement the deep state’s propagandists make. Last week, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the senate that tech companies must intensify censorship to combat Russian “subversion,” and that a “seamless integration of multiple elements of national power” is needed between “information, economics, finance, intelligence, law enforcement and military” to combat the threats from Russia and China.

Similar things are happening in Europe, where far-right politics is rising, militarism is returning to Germany, and the EU is about to create a center for silencing “fake news.” And the trends towards militarization, surveillance, and totalitarian capitalism have also happened in Russia and China. 

These forces are finding ways to erase Orwell’s warning as they carry out this coup, like when the  neoconservative propagandist Eliot Higgins responded to skepticism of the Syria WMD narratives with the statement: “This is dangerous, Orwellian inversion of reality.” Don’t be fooled. The real danger is in what the state has been able to do because of these and other war psyops. As Chris Hedges wrote last month in Thought Police for the 21st Century: “The abolition of net neutrality and the use of algorithms by Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign agents the journalists who expose the crimes of corporate capitalism and imperialism, have given the corporate state the power to destroy freedom of speech. Any state that accrues this kind of power will use it.”

The magnitude of this takeover is too big for most people to get a sense of. It’s being accelerated by climate change, as the intensifying storms and fires of the last year have allowed for military occupations of communities and corporate takeovers of fragile institutions. It’s overlaid by false flags and manufactured crisis, as the country is bombarded with warnings about nonexistent nuclear threats from North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia. Artificial intelligence is now part of it, foreshadowinga future where advanced systems of technological control enslave the population. Certain parts of it are easier to notice, like the police militarization that’s led to 168 being killed by U.S. police so far in 2018. But these can be easily distracted from.

All these expansions of the security state are here to protect the order that the global oligarchs depend on. This is an order where the majority of Americans live in poverty while the eight wealthiest men have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world population. Where 2.3 million Americans are imprisoned by a brutal police state. Where almost 40,000 of the veterans from our perpetual wars are now homeless. Where the biosphere is being destroyed by a fossil fuel-centered corporate state. If you feel any kind of anger about this situation, you haven’t lost the will to fight the state, however powerful it becomes.

How To Defeat A War Propaganda Narrative

Our most urgent task right now is stopping the U.S./NATO military powers from destroying the world before they fade from relevance. These forces are using escalated military aggressions to compensate for the collapse of the U.S. empire, a situation that puts us under maybe the greatest nuclear threat in history. The bloodshed from America’s existing war escalations can’t be undone, with drone strike deaths having gone up 200% in just the last year. But a global catastrophe can be avoided if we stop the empire’s plans for new conflicts.

Our great leverage in this struggle for the future of civilization is public opinion. If the American people don’t support the war efforts, the government will be forced to capitulate. We’ve seen this in the staggering lengths the establishment propaganda centers have gone to to change public sentiment towards support for war, especially the war in Syria. The ruling oligarchs know they’ll set themselves up for instability if they carry out a war that the people don’t consent to. 

To change public sentiment, as the anti-war journalist Caitlin Johnstone has said, we need to seize control of the narrative. Johnstone has done this by building a large following, which she uses to spread dissenting information from outside the establishment propaganda machine’s sphere of influence. (Her online profiles, which I highly recommend following, can be found on Medium, Twitter, and Steemit).

This propaganda machine, as Johnstone and the other commentators of her kind know, is now very vulnerable. Trust in the legacy media is at around 30%, and the corporate media outlets are only reliably viewed by a declining minority of the population. Even smaller is the public’s trust in government. Alternative media is using this vacuum to sway the American consciousness towards reality, and the power centers are so afraid of this that they’re using sweeping censorship to shut down dissenting voices.

So as the state uses its vastly expanded propaganda powers to try to manufacture consent for its wars, we must counter this by telling Americans the truth. This truth is that if we reject the efforts towards war with Russia, China, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and the other target countries, we’ll be able to bring humanity back from the brink of apocalypse.

None of these countries have shown to pose a threat to the U.S. The 13 Russians recently indicted by Mueller have no ties to the Russian government, and their actions don’t vindicate the completely unsubstantiated charges that Russia hacked Democratic Party emails, hacked voting systems, and bought ads on social media. Even less credible is the claim that Russia, North Korea, and China pose a nuclear threat. North Korea has repeatedly stated it won’t strike the U.S. unless the U.S. strikes first. The no first use nuclear policy, which North Korea adopted in 2016, is also followed by Russia and China. Iran poses just as much of a threat, as Iran has fully complied with the nuclear deal.

U.S. involvement in Syria, which the power establishment wants to escalate so much that a new cold war with Russia has been created in the process, is only motivatedby oil and imperialism. The Syria chemical attacks in 2013, 2014, and 2017 that have been used to justify war all hold no relation to the Syrian government, and the 2014 attack has been shown to have never even happened. Assad is a democratically elected leader, and the west’s hatred for him comes from his disobedience towards U.S. interests. So is the case for Venezuela’s Maduro, who’s been legitimately electedas a result of his continuing Chavez’ democratic socialist policies.

“Increasingly it appears that the possibility of a new and horrid conflict (or conflicts) is nothing hypothetical,” writes Andre Vltchek of Global Research. “It is an absolutely realistic scenario, a great possibility, considering both the state of mind of the Manager, and even, progressively, the state of mind of the Western public, who seem to be totally out of touch with their position in the world and even with their own history.”

If we alert enough Americans to the absurdity of the current war narratives, and if we remind them of how they’ve been duped into war in the past, the government will have to yield to sanity. What actions we take in this moment will define the outcome. “In the meantime,” continues Vltchek, “a gruesome war dog is jumping all over, pointing in different directions, ready to bite, to devour, to bring to an end life itself on our Planet. Who will be its first victim?”

The Establishment Has Never Been This Afraid Of Losing The Information War

There’s a reason behind the establishment’s worldwide war against dissent. There’s a reason for the censorship from governments and corporations, and for the mainstream media campaign to delegitimize dissenters as Russian agents, and for the aggressive attacks against those who’ve questioned the current war narratives. This reason can’t be spoken of outside the private meeting rooms of the oligarchy, since it turns over the entire global power dynamic.

Through sharing information on social media, expanding the alternative news websites, and making millions of people aware of the deceptions taking place, we have become a legitimate threat to the deep state’s propaganda machine. We remain a threat even after all the censorship that’s been put upon us, and this is made clear in the continued attacks we’re under from the establishment. The theatrical McCarthyite senate hearings, Orwellian censorship announcements from Facebook, and anti-dissident propaganda that so frequently happens these days can only mean one thing: that the ruling class knows it’s dangerously close to losing the information war.

Our resources for winning this war include social networks like Minds and MeWe, which don’t have Facebook and Twitter’s censorship problems. We can find vital information to share throughout these platforms on sites like World Socialist Website and Consortiumnews, and from journalists like Caitlin Johnstone and Chris Hedges. Just as importantly, we need to sow distrust of the governmental and media centers that seek to deceive us. Especially when these centers make claims about the empire’s current target countries.

I emphasize that last point, because the power structure has already used diversions toward a nonexistent foreign threat to hurt efforts at revolt. The narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to win the election, fraudulently started in 2016 by John Brennan (as was recently revealed in the Republican House Committee memo), is making discourse totalitarian. Anyone who publicly speaks out against the official narrative is at risk of being accused of working for the Kremlin, and dissenting thoughts themselves are being subliminally portrayed as treasonous. Specifically, any sentiment that strays from approved thought is now “divisive” in a way that “undermines democracy.”

These unapproved thoughts have included: opposition to the corporatism and warmongering of the Democratic Party establishment, and to the party’s sabotage of democracy in 2016. Skepticism of the corporate media. Support for the Bernie Sanders campaign and for third parties. Awareness of Wall Street fraud and widespread corruption in government. Questioning of the highly suspect war narratives against Syria and Russia, and opposition to U.S. empire in general. As soon as you recognize the nature of this deception, you see how sinister it is. “If it wasn’t so completely depressing, I would say it is awe-inspiring to watch,” writes CJ Hopkins in his article The War on Dissent. “This full-spectrum type of mass indoctrination, or ‘reality adjustment,’ doesn’t happen that often. It used to only happen on the national level, typically during times of war, when the ruling classes of nation states needed to temporarily unite their populaces and demonize their enemy.”

Why is it being tried now? To stop the global revolt that’s happening against predatory capitalism and the erosion of our freedoms. Billionaires and world leaders, it was revealed in this year’s Davos Economic Forum, are more comfortable than they were a year ago, now that Trump has proven not to be a threat to globalism. The nuisance of populism, some elites are now saying in private interviews, has subsided, and corporate profits are thriving. But the attacks against dissent wouldn’t be as intense as they now are unless the ruling cabal knew we pose a formidable threat.

Don’t believe the attempts to trick you otherwise. We are powerful, to an extent that the political establishment would rather start a cold war with a nuclear superpower than let us operate normally. Speak the truth, and speak it with persistence and openness. Because if we see the war on dissent end, we’ll know the system no longer sees us as a danger.

America’s Suicide Mission

Every day, the United States proves itself to be more aggressively dangerous than its enemies have ever behaved. Civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in the last year 200% more than previously. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and other countries have been greatly expanded this last year, with America also threatening to create conflicts throughout Africa, Ukraine, and
South America. U.S. attacks in Syria have escalated so much recently that Russians as well as Syrians are now being killed by American bombs. As this threatens to unleash larger war, the Pentagon is now falsely claiming Russia and China pose nuclear threats. The CIA is well into war runup campaigns against North Korea and Iran, both of which prelude fiascos far worse than the invasion of Iraq. Even U.S. allies are participating in this reckless behavior, with Israel preparing to start a broader war against Syria after the illegal U.S.-Kurdish massacre of Syrians this month.

This is the lunatic result of an exceptionally huge empire facing its own looming demise. Empires throughout history have always reacted to their losing hegemony by launching massive, irrational war campaigns, thinking that grand military strategies will restore their former control. These empires believe themselves to be infallible even as they flail catastrophically. America showed this arrogance during the Iraq War, when the political establishment reacted to France’s not supporting the U.S.’ insane action by pettily vilifying France.

In this much more advanced part of the empire’s collapse, the country’s leadership acts with just as much more grandiosity and entitlement. The president threatens genocide because of a nonexistent nuclear threat from North Korea; Nikki Haley threatens other countries at the UN for not supporting the U.S.’ decision to make Jerusalem the capital of Israel; American media spreads inflammatory lies about Russia, like the charges of Russia’s “hacking” American elections. The largest empire in history has lost touch with reality. And expanded death and destruction is the consequence, maybe of the kind that will soon wipe out all life on earth.

“We are in new cold war that is much more dangerous than the last cold war for various reasons,” said Russia scholar Stephen Cohen in a February 2 interview with the Real News Network. “One is that the new cold war today, as we talk, includes three fronts. U.S.-Russian fronts, they’re fought with hot war. That’s Syria. That’s the reckless NATO military build-up on Russia’s western borders, which has resulted in a situation today that ordinarily artillery, not missiles, ordinary artillery, can hit Russia’s second city of Saint Petersburg. Just think about that and the instability. And the third front is Ukraine.”

And this is just one of the world conflicts that we’re now at risk of because of the United States’ aggressions. The greatest threat to world peace, as global opinion polls have long agreed with, is the United States. Our enemy isn’t Iran, or Russia, or China, or North Korea, or the seven countries we’re already at war with, but the unelected, Orwellian global power establishment which survives through manufacturing war. The neocon narrative about North Korea being on a “suicide mission” is like a projection of America’s own pathologies.

I don’t know how much hope we have of changing this situation. But I think the best thing I can do right now is spread awareness of the deep state’s most dangerous war operation, the one that targets Syria and Russia. This years-long campaign has involved maybe the most complex global propaganda effort in history. The power establishment has used false flag chemical attacks, subliminal messaging, and the Bana Alabad psyop, to manipulate public opinion towards Syrian regime change. These efforts to depose Assad and bully Putin into submission, motivated by blind desire for oil and U.S. hegemony, are now reaching a disastrous climax.

The false flag chemical attacks in 2013, 2014, and 2017 that this campaign has included give us a foreshadowing of what comes next: another attack of this kind, blamed on Assad by western authorities to justify another Iraq. The fraudulentSyrian White Helmets and the U.S.-backed Al-Nusra “rebels,” it’s been revealed this week, are planning a “chemical weapons provocation” in Syria. Israel’s planning this week to escalate its attacks on Syria, and America’s moving last month to commit to Syrian involvement indefinitely, hint what the empire plans to do after this attack happens.

Within the next month, we’ll likely be bombarded with a new and unprecedentedly dangerous pro-war narrative. Especially with the censorship that governments and corporations have imposed against dissenting voices, I doubt our efforts to counter this propaganda will be effective. But they will keep us conscious through remainder of the U.S. empire’s collapse.

When Hate Becomes Law

Don’t believe the claims from Donald Trump and his apologists that these immigration measures are “sensible.” All they are is senseless attacks against vulnerable people. Innocent families are being upended because the parents haven’t been able to fulfil the absurdly hard path to U.S. citizenship. People who’ve lived in the U.S. since childhood are being deported to countries they’ve never known. Families might soon be separated to “end chain migration,” whatever Trump means by that. Muslim and Hispanic people, regardless of their immigration status, are living in fear of being detained under the “papers, please” climate that’s emerged in immigration enforcement. Then there’s the increased threats of hate crimes and discriminatory travel bans that Muslims now live under, and the heightened threats to the Black community amid the drug war escalations and increases in police violence of recent months.

This is America’s version of the Nazi Brownshirts’ earlier attacks on attacks on Jews, which involved aggressive police tactics that are similar to what ICE agents have started doing so much in the last year. It’s facilitated by the rise in hate groups and online racism that white supremacists have been able to create in the last several decades. Its purpose isn’t to pragmatically restrict immigration, but to terrorize groups of people who the state deems to be threats.

Like its precedents in Native American genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment camps, and mass incarceration, this latest descent into barbarism has been rationalized as a way of strengthening security and well-being. These groups are criminals and lazy welfare takers, it’s been said by those who support the measures, and attacking them is self-defense. Will society stop this project before it escalates into something worse? Given what we’ve seen so far, it’s unclear.

For now, some of the country’s most vulnerable people are being targeted by a demagogic president who’s refused to disavow his supporters in the KKK and other white nationalist groups. Both Republicans and Democrats are complicit in the assault, as was shown when many House Democrats approved a budget this month which destroys DACA. This is nothing new, since both parties have helped carry out the middle eastern wars of recent decades that created America’s Islamophobic sentiments.

Every day the factors that lead to this repeat and reinforce themselves, like like we’re living through an inevitable unraveling of our collective sanity. The recent explosion in U.S.-Kurdish aggression towards Syria, illegal under international law, is threatening to unleash larger conflict. Under the Trump White House, a cabal of military officers, intelligence officials, and corporate executives are destroying the last remains of civil liberties, workers’ rights and environmental protections. To help in this takeover, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia have been greatly expanded, with Trump’s drone warfare death toll already massively surpassing Obama’s.

Behind this, governments and corporations around the world are working to control the flow of information, employing online censorship and threats from law enforcement to silence dissent. Should our paradigm of perpetual war soon spill into an uncontrollable world conflict, the crisis will be used for imposing an outright military dictatorship, as foreshadowed in Trump’s plan for a military parade. “Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations are criminalized,” wrote Chris Hedges in last year’s column The Death of the Republic. “The state assumed the power to detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious. The first of those targeted have been observant Muslims, but they will not be the last.”

There’s mostly no hope for changing the minds of those who support the state’s attacks against these groups. They’ve been thoroughly propagandized to view certain people as dangerous. But the demagogues who created this hate, like Donald Trump, Mike Cernovich, Ben Shapiro, and others, can be pilloried and countered through social activism. We can help the victims through supporting sanctuary cities, documenting the actions of ICE agents, and speaking against bigotry and hate. Our actions, however quiet and small they might seem, can destroy the ignorant and brutal paradigm we’ve created.

By Accusing Their Opponents Of Being Russian Agents, Establishment Dems Are Making Discourse Totalitarian

The paradigm of McCarthyism the establishment has created reflects how an entrenched system reacts to its own demise. As objections to the status quo mount, and as the ruling class loses control, dissent becomes less and less tolerated. At this point, the struggle between ideologies has heightened so much that almost no one can publicly voice dissenting views without being accused of working for Russia.

This attack strategy is directly descended from the paranoia of the cold war era, when civil rights supporters, socialists, and opponents of war were maligned as Russian agents. It’s been normalized through incessant media propaganda, where images of Russian spies and trolls have been drilled into the national psyche. Its effect is that anyone with an online following who criticizes the Democratic Party establishment, promotes independent journalism, or speaks out against the Russia and Syria war campaigns will almost certainly be accused of being a Kremlin troll. “In its capacity to exclude dissent,” writes Jackson Lears about the new McCarthyism, “it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.”

The purpose of this campaign is shown in the pro-imperialist and government circles its supporting narratives have originated from. The charges that Russia has hacked Democratic Party emails and voting machines, and that Russia bought ads on social media, come from highly untrustworthy U.S. intelligence officials who haven’t provided proof for their claims. All of the media’s current Russia narratives can be traced to neoconservative think tanks, like Bill Kristol’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. 

These figures’ motives are easy to guess, and were explicitly described last year by neocon senator Eric Swalwell in a Fox News interview: to replace Putin with a Yeltsin-like leader who’s submissive to U.S. interests, or at least to bully Putin into acting as that leader. This mission of theirs is born out of determination to advance American hegemony, and they don’t seem to care if World War III is started in the process. The Syrian regime change attempt these anti-Russian aggressions serve to advance recently resulted in tragedy, as U.S.-backed Kurdish forces massacred over a hundred people in in an unprovoked attack this week. This further exacerbated the push toward war between major world powers.

As the new cold war campaign has graduated into a serious nuclear standoff, with the U.S. preparing for a “preemptive strike” from Russia this month, we’re now in a fittingly totalitarian state. President Trump is about to hold an impractical and cartoonishly fascist military parade. Google, Twitter, and Facebook have set upalgorithms to intensely police dissenting voices, with Zuckerberg making Orwellian announcements about new censorship measures every week. Around a hundred people were killed by U.S. police in the first month of 2018 alone, while the president’s favorite pundits frequently use rhetoric that resembles calls for a police state. The takeover by corporations and military power continues, as the military budget was just raised by $160 billion and the Trump administration dismantles environmental and worker protections.

The factions of this oligarchy are pushing in often contradictory directions and advancing conflicting narratives. But their shared goal is to marginalize and punish free thought out of existence. The plutocrats who control this system don’t care which of these factions wins, as long as this goal of theirs is served.

And the enormous censorship against dissenting voices from social media companies and governments is just the beginning. Last year the FBI contacted the magazine CounterPunch to tell them that they’d published articles from a “Russian troll” writer named Alice Donovan. CounterPunch did their own investigation of Donovan, and found that while there’s indeed strong evidence Donovan is a fictitious online character created by anonymous people, there was also no proof this character originated from the Russian government.

There was no point to the FBI’s publicly characterizing Alice Donovan as a Kremlin tool, other than to begin setting precedent for treating all dissenting journalists as Russian agents. The McCarthyite accusations that get leveled each day against dissenting voices now have a backup in law enforcement.

We dissenters are still here, and we’re still fighting to create a world free from the power of this mindless, soulless military and corporate machine. We can avoid becoming invisible by redoubling our efforts to spread the truth, and by collaborating between each others’ organizations and websites. We can do damage to corporate power by holding mass strikes, like the ones that happened in Germany this month, so that the system will be destabilized. Remember that the state’s main goal is to make us surrender.