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?”