How Socialism Could Soon Come To Dominate American Politics

The Bernie Sanders movement, despite being viewed cynically by some hardcore socialists, is a vital step towards genuine socialist revolution in the near future. By normalizing the terminology of socialism, and by putting ideas like single payer health care into the mainstream, Sanders has prepared the country for a genuine upheaval of capitalist institutions and systems.

Socialism, as George Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, is what every society should be trying to achieve: “From one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that every-one does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.”

A system where exploitation of labor is allowed, even in “reformed” or “regulated” doses, is incompatible with this goal. Under capitalism, there will always be people who are enslaved or abused by businesses, and this alone makes capitalism unacceptable. Only now, when capitalism is threatening to upend civilization through economic and ecological collapse, is society becoming ready to get rid of it.

Around forty percent of young Americans, polls in the last few years have shown, view socialism favorably, compared to around thirty percent who view capitalism favorably. The rise of Democratic Socialists of America, along with more radically anti-capitalist groups, shows the mobilization that’s gone with this trend. As the most educated and most economically deprived generation in recent history, American millennials are trying to drastically change society towards democracy and egalitarianism. And the movement they’re part of goes beyond the United States.

“What’s so specifically important about this is that in a period of growing political radicalization among young people, among workers, they start to look for oppositional information, they become interested in socialism, revolution, terms like ‘equality,’ those terms which previously would bring thousands of readers to the World Socialist Web Site, now were bringing no readers to the World Socialist Web Site,” Said World Socialist Website’s David North in January. “In other words, they were setting up a quarantine between those who may be interested in our site and the WSWS. From being a bridge, Google was becoming a barrier, a guard preventing access to our site.”

The socialist movement’s path to power is filled with systemic obstacles, ones that go past the censorship North mentioned. For decades, the American consciousness has been flooded with intense demonizations of socialists and anti-imperialists, coming from propagandists in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Gaslighting, the tactic of convincing a victim that they’ve imagined the wrongs that have been done to them, is what this campaign has centered around. 

Those who disobey the system are always told not just that they’re mistaken, but that they should be grateful for what capitalism and the war state have given them. The rich have become worshipped, and the vulnerable have become hated, under the elimination of solidarity with the poor that always happens when neoliberalism takes over.

Censorship, as we’ve seen, has been capitalism’s next response to disobedience- followed by violence. But ultimately, when a state reacts with violence, it can strengthen the resistance. Those who protested the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 were attacked with dogs, rubber bullets and grenade attacks. They were maligned by the corporate media, ignored by politicians, and, in some cases, systematically intimidated by the FBI through false explosives charges. Still their actions inspired hopes for nonviolent resistance across the nation, and the anti-pipeline movement has been a lot stronger since the events at Standing Rock.

This victory isn’t isolated. The movement against corporate capitalism and militarism is a lot bigger than the media has shown us. In the last two months, worker strikes have broken out in Germany. Teacher strikes have been happening in the U.S. in recent weeks, and they’re still growing. Protests against the Syria and North Korea war efforts have happened in the last year.

The marches to end the gun industry’s hold over government show what the younger generations are capable of. All it could take to overwhelm the corporate state is the creation of another Occupy-like mass protest movement, which could snowball into something much bigger than Occupy under this political environment. When the protesters go after not just the gun lobby, but after the military and the banks, capitalism will be under attack like never before.

The Last Days Before World War III

The years-long drawing out of the American empire’s propaganda runup to a world war makes perfect sense. For a conflict as big as the one being planned by neoconservatives, including Trump’s new national security advisor John Bolton, the American people need a large buffer time between when the “threat” is first hinted at, and when the bombs start dropping. I falsely expected this runup to reach its destination by the end of last year, but 2018 seems a near-certain year for it to happen in.

Just look at the ever bigger geopolitical disruptions that are being normalized right now. In the last two months, the U.S. has committed to Syria involvement indefinitely, backed Kurdish troops so that an illegal massacre of Syrians could take place, bombed Russian troops in Syria, increased aggressions toward Russia’s ally Iran under false pretenses, and stood by as Israel has escalated its attacks on Syria while planning a broader war with Iran.

You could say World War III is already happening, if only on a scale that’s limited to the middle east. And every factor shows the U.S, in its desperate moment of imperial collapse, will let this spill over into worldwide catastrophe. John Bolton’s promise last year that Iran’s government will be overthrown “by 2019” shows how close we are to it.

“Prior to the end of 2016 the average American rarely even thought about Russia, almost never thought about Vladimir Putin, and had no idea what a Kremlin was,” writes Caitlin Johnstone in her article We Are One False Flag Event Away From World War 3. “Now hatred for Russia is at the forefront of consciousness in mainstream America, and now infected the UK as well and is quickly metastasizing throughout Australia and Europe. The wood has been slowly dried for some major future event, and a false flag event will be like a lit match on the kindling. The media will pick it up and run with it full-throttle, and people will be herded by fear toward the war door.”

NATO’s military actions towards Russia aren’t just in response to Russia’s colonialist takeover in Ukraine. The American empire sees Russia as a threat to its control over Syria and other regions, so it’s using all the old cold war tactics to bully Russia into submission: intensive demonization of Putin and Russia in American media. Pressuring NATO allies into joining in the fight. Preparing the Pentagon for a bogus threat of a “preemptive strike” from Russia. Blacklistings of anti-imperialists as Russian agents. It’s a march to disaster that only makes sense when you’re in the bubble of Washington DC groupthink.

To make the absurdity of it obvious, wild McCarthyite conspiracy theories come from even top U.S. officials while they pitch this cold war. Last month the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats charged at a senate hearing that Russia and China were conspiring to sow “subversion,” and that visiting Chinese students are potential spies. All without any attempt at substantiation. When will Americans stop taking their leaders’ war commands seriously? History and basic psychology show the war propagandists don’t have much to worry about; when you’ve got a person angry and fearful, there’s no limit to what you can make them believe or do.

Alternative media journalists, marginalized as “fake news” and heavily censored by online platforms, cannot even name the culprits of this war campaign without being called conspiracy cranks. This culprit cabal, properly known as the “deep state,” is the unelected series of military and intelligence operatives whose influence goes deep into media, the Democratic and Republican parties, and now the policies of the formerly rogue Trump administration. Ignoring the deep state makes the whole problem invisible.

“Absolutely, there is a deep state, because the deep state is the intelligence agencies that do not have oversight,” said senator Rand Paul last week. “Only eight people in Congress know what they’re doing, and traditionally, those eight people have been a rubber stamp to let the intelligence communities do whatever they want. There is no skeptic among the eight people that are supposedly overseeing the intelligence community.”

This hidden reigning caste, along with their partners in corporate America, have no problem with letting society deteriorate as the country’s leaders carry out these grandiose military adventures. Amid a new annual military budget of $700 billion, the U.S. national debt is now at $21 trillion, showing the fragility and incompetence that empires fall into during their late stages. America, warned MIT economist Peter Temin last year, is regressing into a third world country for most of the population. Neoliberal capitalism, rampant governmental corruption, an erosion of civil liberties and democratic institutions, and a permanent state of war have battered and confused the population.

A society like this is vulnerable to war campaigns, as long as the deep state can manage to make their campaign all-encompassing and dramatic. Otherwise the people might see the misery this system has forced them into, and refuse to go along with the establishment’s deceptions.

So the fear is constantly being ratcheted up: media scares about Russia’s nukes and demands for the president to “do something about Russia;” claims from intelligence officials that Russia is targeting American power grids; headlines complaining about how much the U.S. needs to expand its unparalleled military stash to compete with Russia. So is the case for Iran and North Korea, two other clearly non-threatening nations which Bolton is still well on the path to starting wars with.

In January, President Trump said: “I would love to be able to bring back our country into a great form of unity. Without a major event where people pull together, that’s hard to do. But I would like to do it without that major event because usually that major event is not a good thing.” Trump being an unmoderated version of the rest of the United States warmongers, this could be a hint at a coming false flag that’s used to set off these conflicts. The U.S. government has an extensive history of false flags, and has used them several times in recent years to justify Syrian military involvement. So Johnstone is most certainly right that at some point, when the public is fully acclimated to war, a “major event” will conveniently materialize.

When will the event come? If this March 17 statement from Russian General Staff spokesman General Sergey Rudskoy is reliable, it’s being planned already: “We have reliable information at our disposal that US instructors have trained a number of militant groups in the vicinity of the town of At-Tanf, to stage provocations involving chemical warfare agents in southern Syria.” He continued: “The provocations will be used as a pretext by the United States and its allies to launch strikes on military and government infrastructure in Syria.” This when the Russian government has clearly threatened retaliation if U.S. attacks on Syria are expanded.

Johnstone’s prescription is to expose the deep state’s lies so that Americans will reject the calls to war when the provocation comes. But the empire is determined to do as much damage as possible, and I think we need to fight this war effort more directly. We need to build a nationwide resistance to militarism, involving antiwar strikes, protests, mass boycotts of the war tax, and disobedience from armed service members. We need to create a Vietnam-level antiwar movement, and fast. Millions of Americans are willing to take these actions. All we need to do is tell them how urgently they need to mobilize.

The Establishment’s Efforts To Crush Dissent Show How Close We Are To A Revolution

The secret about the massive takeovers that the corporatocracy has recently made is that they’re all a reaction to the threats the establishment is now under. It’s telling that the deep state’s Russia fearmongering campaign, which has been used to stigmatize and censor dissenting voices, began in mid 2016-right after the popular opposition to establishment politics had proven itself through events like the success of the Sanders campaign.

The ultimate goal of the Russia campaign is to keep enough people from venturing out of the establishment propaganda echo chambers, and from accessing the information they’ll need for revolt. Despotism, especially the faux-democracy that America’s oligarchy represents, depends on the population being kept in intellectual poverty. When people can’t recognize when the media is lying to them into wars, don’t know enough about their preferred politicians and parties to hold them accountable, and have a dim understanding about the history and workings of their government, they can’t fight tyranny even if they know they’re being oppressed. This is the dynamic that’s started to disappear with the rise of online alternative media, and that the ruling elite are trying to recapture.

The war on dissent has worked in some ways. Since late 2016, when the Washington Post published an unsubstantiated list from PropOrNot which accused the top twenty leftwing alternative news sites of being “Russian propaganda,” many Americans have been quickly dismissing any non-mainstream articles as Russian “fake news.” RT, in particular, is now seen as utterly unreliable among followers of corporate media.

This Fahrenheit 451 shift in thinking has brought what Chris Hedges calls the “Iron Wall,” a barrier that’s being built against ideas that challenge the ruling oligarchy. Its emergence has been frightening, as Hedges illustrates: mainly at the direction of “liberal” leaders, an Orwellian dictatorship has been taking shape, with the steps towards it being too small for most to become aware of the takeover in time. This despotic system may have the military resources and technology to snuff out dissent like has never been done before. But if we continue the actions that drove the system to fortify itself in this way, the system will soon have to give in.

If we keep supporting candidates that go against establishment politics-and if we work to expose the future electoral fraud those candidates will be attacked with, which can be done by shedding light on the coming rigging of the 2020 Democratic primary-the establishment will keep being under siege by the voters. Especially, as Caitlin Johnstone advocates, if we do all we can to sabotage the campaign of the 2020 Democratic candidate if that candidate doesn’t represent our interests. And this is all aside from the mass protest movements we’ll need to start outside of electoral politics.

If we keep spreading information which counters the lies of the establishment, the old propaganda systems won’t be able to hold sway. Neoliberalism and globalization are discredited in the minds of an impoverished population. The corporate media and the government it serves are distrusted and hated. Too many cracks are appearing in the system for pro-establishment narratives to be effective, so the power centers are frantically making up media distractions. If we keep speaking truth to power, especially through the blacklisted online alternative media outlets, we’ll be able to keep an informed public alive.

If we keep working to topple the corporate state, it will be toppled. The history of revolutions has shown it; when unrest comes, for a time the establishment will try to stifle it, but the power dynamic ultimately shifts around if the revolutionaries can sustain their action.

We need to act now though; the system, in its reaction to our showings of dissent, is turning more repressive every day. Hopefully we’ll be able to dismantle it in time.

The Democratic Establishment Is Now More Dangerous Than Trump

With the realignment that’s happened since neoconservatives defected towards the Democratic Party in response to candidate Trump’s relative isolationism, there are now two main factions of ruling class politics. One is the arch-nationalistic strain that’s taken over the Republican Party. The other is the class of traditional neocons and neoliberals that make up the Democratic Party, “moderate” Republicans, the military and intelligence establishments, and their media branches in networks like MSNBC. The latter is more established and coherent in its goals, which makes it the more dangerous one.

This faction-loosely called the deep state-is naturally ignored by the media it controls, so those in the alternative media need to constantly remind people of it. I’ve already done several deep analyses of it and its workings. But its actions in recent months have been unprecedented, and frightening on an urgent level. There are hundreds of pages’ worth of working parts to this subject. But here’s the best analysis I can do of it at the moment, starting with the nature of its intentions.

The commands

The deep state, for which the Democratic Party is just the current main extension of, has been reaching its present form for decades. It’s existed in some form since the U.S. government began, because “deep state” is simply the definition of an unelected power structure. But since the middle of the twentieth century, it’s been setting up massive circles of control over society.

There’s been the creation of the CIA, an organization that’s unaccountable to congress and has helped the U.S. carry out global psyops, spying, and coups; the reign of the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, which have imposed brutal pro-corporate reforms on much of the world; the rise of neoliberalism, which has made it so that Jeff Bezos and the other eight richest men in the world now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the global population. And the changes that have correlated with it are Orwellian without hyperbole.

It’s no longer enough for the NSA to be processing all of Americans’ digital information, or for American police to be more militarized than ever, or for intelligence agencies and large corporations to be in direct partnership through the Domestic Security Alliance Council. Per the censorship rules of the last year from online companies, anyone who challenges the establishment must become a target for state retribution. The apparently all-encompassing threats of Russian “subversion” have made it clear: if you think outside the CNN mainstream, you’re posing risk of undermining American society.

Restrictions to posting on Facebook, suppressed search results for dissenting websites, and systematic reductions of Twitter followers are just the mildest weapons the deep state is using to correct thoughtcrime. A step up from that is when Google starts de-ranking RT and Sputnik, as it did in November. Up from that is the Justice Department’s forcing RT America’s leadership last year, under threat of arrest, to register as foreign agents.

Up from that is law enforcement prosecuting any disfavored people as Russian agents, which is already being done in its early stages with the federal investigations into Jill Stein’s nonexistent Russia ties. When the state can define you as a traitor, as Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange have learned, they can torture or even kill you. The latter penalties are exceptional, but they have already been used on some dissidents. And the advanced police/surveillance state that’s emerging will soon make dissent easier to crush in these ways.

The direction of public discourse is also helping in this crackdown against free thought. For the last year or so, a habit has been seen from many liberals of quickly accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being a “Russian troll” or a “Russian bot.” The fact that the corporate media would condition this McCarthyite view into its followers is vastly ominous. When Americans see their fellow citizens as traitors for opposing the establishment narratives, the government will eagerly fulfill Americans’ demands to have those dissenters punished.

The lies

The two ruling class factions share many of the same goals, and promote many of the same lies-just look at how Democrats have made the crucial number of votes in passing President Trump’s repeal of Dodd-Frank, expansions of presidential spying powers, 2017 NDAA bill, and budget bill that will destroy DACA. But at least Trump’s lies are regularly exposed by the mainstream media. When establishment politics produces lies, the lies are propagated without scrutiny, passing quietly into the mainstream consciousness.

Joy Ann Reid can tweet last August that “All candidates raise money from corporate donors,” despite that being demonstrably untrue; corporate Democrats can base their campaign against the Sanders insurgency around claims that most Americans oppose universal health care and free college, even though polling shows that to be false; Democratic pundits can uniformly try to bury the evidence that the 2016 Democratic primary was rigged. Then there’s the salacious campaign from many Democratic propagandists to portray Bernie Sanders as a Russian agent, a tax cheat, and a closet sexist. These revisions go virtually unchallenged, orienting discourse towards a worldview that makes the ruling class impervious to opposition.

All this is expected though. Deception is inevitable from despotic power centers. What’s unprecedented are the technological tools this oligarchy has to manipulate the population. Since January, for instance, Facebook has been making its search algorithms promote “reliable” news sources like The New York Times, while Facebook’s numerous pro-establishment censorship measures, including ones based in artificial intelligence, marginalize dissenting voices.

This is also happening in different forms with what the journalist Daniel Herman has described as Google’s “algorithmic fake news” regarding search results for subjects like Russian hacking. And the media outlets these actions help are themselves becoming even more establishment-oriented; many former intelligence officials have been getting positions in networks like MSNBC in the last year, which chillingly correlates with the dozens of 2018 Democratic candidates who have backgrounds in the CIA. Appropriately, the intelligence agencies have become newly trusted by Democrats after the media’s intensive anti-Russia propaganda campaign, which stems from those agencies.

In his latest column, Chris Hedges has described this purge of dissent as “building the Iron Wall.” “Before the algorithms were put in place last April, searches for terms such as ‘imperialism’ or ‘inequality’ directed internet users mostly to left-wing, progressive and anti-war sites,” writes Hedges. “Now they are directed primarily to mainstream sites such as The Washington Post. If you type in ‘World Socialist Web Site,’ which has been hit especially hard by the algorithms, you will be directed to the site — but you have to ask for it by name. Searches for associated words such as ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ are unlikely to bring up a list in which the World Socialist Web Site appears near the top.”

What the political establishment is doing with these reality revision powers is truly terrifying.

The wars

The consequences of these propaganda and censorship expansions hasn’t just been a dangerous liberal faith in intelligence agencies, or the new McCarthyite dynamics mentioned. Partly because of the embrace of Russia-related fearmongering from the Democratic Party and its allies, we are closer than ever to World War III. The international zeal to attack Russia for the recent UK spy poisoning, for which there’s still no evidence Russia is behind, shows just how perilous things have gotten.

NATO has troops, tanks, and nuclear bases surrounding Russia, amounting to an armed mob threatening this country that’s been such a nuisance to the western empire. The media’s two-year war campaign against Russia has no doubt acclimated much of the American public to any potential armed conflict, as is true in many of the other NATO countries. Stephen Cohen statedlast month that we’re in a new cold war, one that’s more dangerous than the last because of the new players in Syria, Ukraine, and China.

The neocons, meanwhile, are doing everything possible to exacerbate the situation by escalating in Syria; if recent statements from Russian officials are true, the U.S. and its ally Al-Nusra are about to stage false flag chemical attacks so that Syria can be struck again. The Trump administration’s relative unwillingness to escalate with Russia and Syria have made “Russiagate” necessary, working as a tool to pressure Trump to take more hawkish actions lest he be labeled a “Russian agent.”

This is apparent with the complains from many establishment Democrats that Trump’s Syria strikes last year didn’t go far enough. Along with the outrage from establishment liberals last month that Trump didn’t respond to Putin’s nuclear posturing aggressively enough. Then there are the objections from pundits like Rachel Maddow to Trump’s agreeing to peace talks with North Korea. Somehow, Democrats are now more militaristic than their opponents.

The supporters of the new cold war effort, meanwhile, can rarely be persuaded to see the baselesness of all of the deep state’s charges against Russia. I’ve found this from talking with them. They always insist, almost reluctantly, that Putin’s corruption and abhorrent human rights policies must mean that the intelligence agencies are telling the truth this time, Iraqi WMDs disregarded. What other response could one get after so much abusive Russiaphobic fear-drillings from media and government? What might follow, despite the good intentions of these Americans, is the thermonuclear destruction of all life on earth.

“The US-centralized empire is rapidly approaching post-primacy and needs to act fast to move some major chess pieces into place so it can prevent the rise of a multipolar world,” wrote Caitlin Johnstone today. “The goal is to quickly manufacture a global coalition to cut Russia out of the global stage, and this new dance with the UK and the EU is just the latest step toward that direction. Not even the most psychopathic imperialists want a hot conflict with Russia if they can avoid it, but they will gamble with all our lives very close to the edge in an extremely dangerous cold war, because that’s what the empire needs to do to survive.”

I urge Trump supporters, Libertarians, and others who acknowledge the deep state’s existence to work with me towards its defeat. Despite the ideological differences I have with these groups, our most urgent task is to disable the propaganda and authority systems of this force for potentially omnicidal war. Our first step in this task will be to counter the deep state’s deceptions through alternative media; from there we can mobilize Americans towards dismantling the power structure.

We Might Be One More Occupy Movement Away From Breaking The Oligarchy

With the repeal of Dodd-Frank-a decision that couldn’t have happened without seventeen senate Democrats-the American people have one more reason to want to destroy the political establishment. This comes after decades of slashed social benefits, tax increases onto the poor and middle class, shipped out jobs, destroyed worker benefits, privatizing of essential services, manufactured endless war, and legalized corporate crime as despotism has taken over society. So we already have more than enough reasons.

When will the turning over of the power structure come? The sociologist Peter Turchin expects the cycle of inequality and social unrest will reach a boiling point in or around 2020, when the population, according to his prediction, becomes too angry not to mobilize. “The presidential election which we have experienced, unfortunately, confirms this forecast,” wrote Turchin in a blog post right after the 2016 election. “We seem to be well on track for the 2020s instability peak. And although the election is over, the deep structural forces that brought us the current political crisis have not gone away. If anything, the negative trends seem to be accelerating.”

Turchin talks about this event with dread because he’s seen how revolutions have happened throughout history, and he knows violence is inevitable. The labor battles of the early 20th century and the social movements of the 60’s, which Turchin cites as precedents for his cyclical unrest theory, escalated to violent clashes many times. The incidents at the WTO and Occupy Wall Street protests have already shown this pattern repeating.

But the key part of these clashes is that they’ve largely been created by the authorities, not the protesters. Shootings of striking workers like the 1913 Ludlow Massacre, assaults on antiwar protesters like the 1970 Kent State shootings, and the unprovoked beatings and tear-gassings of Occupy protesters by police all show that the state will use violence both to control, and to manipulate, disobedient people. These attacks manipulate the activists by provoking violence from the angrier ones among them, which gives the state an easy way to respond with brutality and stigmatization.

When certain branches of AntiFa have embraced violence, even as just a self-described “last resort” to stopping far-right rallies, the establishment has been able to demonize all who oppose it as terrorists. The easing of police militarization barriers that happened last August, at around the time the corporate media was notably attacking AntiFa, showed how eager the ruling elite are to exploit any hint of violent opposition. Revolutionaries like Gandhi and King recognized similar lessons, and their nonviolent methods of resistance negated entire power systems.

As lower class populations around the world are moved to act against corporate power, the vast majority of what’s coming out of this is nonviolent. Jeremy Corbyn’s movement is rising in British politics relentlessly, and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (current membership at over 32,000) are puttingmore and more strain on the corporatocracy. The McCarthyite propaganda, anti-“fake news” censorship, and media distractions aren’t doing enough to stop this uprising; the people are determined to take back power, and it might only take another Occupy-like mass protest movement to activate enough people.

I urge people to do all they can to create this movement-participating in protests, organizing protests, and covering those protests through alternative media are the main actions I’d advise. But when our uprising intensifies, the oligarchy will go past calling us Russian agents. Police violence will no doubt be used, through what’s now a more militarized nationwide police force than ever. President Trump, who’s already turning police against us, could utilize Obama’s presidential authorizationfor sending in the military as a domestic police force. The political atmosphere, as Chris Hedges predicts about this coming social unrest, will get ugly.

“When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game,” John Lennon said. “The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.” This is what we’ll need to remember when the state starts to retaliate.

The American People Can Stop War With Russia If We Want To

When a drive to war gets manufactured, reason leaves the conversation. History gets forgotten. Nuance is not tolerated, and opponents of the official narrative are demonized. All that matters is destroying the enemy that the state and its media have put in front of us, an enemy so terrible that war is the only option. But this doesn’t mean resisting war will never work; it’s (rarely) worked before, and it has a chance of working during the establishment’s current effort to escalate with Syria and Russia.

Right now, the state’s propaganda systems are maybe more vulnerable than they’ve ever been. Americans are outraged at the poverty and dysfunctionality that the war-enforced neoliberal paradigm has created, and the politicians and pundits who promote the lies of the corporatocracy are distrusted and mocked. If not for the state’s repressions against dissent, Bernie Sanders would be president, alternative media would likely have surpassed the corporate media’s viewership by now, and activists would be poised to upend the system-but the establishment has remade the rules of the game through its censorship and other assaults on
democracy. So our way to stop the war campaign, and the rest of the ruling elite’s plans, is to fight from an increasingly subversive position.

In addition to the more direct actions of organizing antiwar events, demanding politicians reject the war efforts, and resisting paying war taxes, our most important task is changing the consciousness of the American people against establishment narratives. “Mass media propaganda is why things don’t get better and keep getting worse,” wrote Caitlin Johnstone recently about how propaganda is used to pacify the people, who would otherwise be able to easily overpower the state with their numbers. “Not corruption, not a two-headed one-party system, not foreign influence, not gerrymandering, not a garbage electoral system, not crooked politicians, not the stupidity of the public. Mass media propaganda.”

There are far more people who distrust media and government than there are who’ve been assimilated into the echo chamber of corporate propaganda. The latter are virtually unswayable; the diabolical manipulations of the war demagogues create circles of mass hysteria and fear. But the others are the ones we’ll be able to build the war opposition out of. And the absurdity of the war narratives should make that easy for us.

We’re being told the U.S. needs to strike Syria, an action that the Trump administration is considering despite Russia’s explicitly threatening military retaliation if it happens. The case for it is based in claims that Assad has done chemical attacks this year-a charge that’s come from the State Department at a time when the U.S. is trying to sabotage the Syrian state, and the reports of which come from the known imperialist front group the White Helmets.

This charge also comes within a year after the U.S. claimed Assad perpetrated a chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun. A claim that’s been made only on empty assertions, and that was contradicted in the report that Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) put out on April 11, 2017:

“Our U.S. Army contacts in the area have told us this is not what happened. There was no Syrian ‘chemical weapons attack.’ Instead, a Syrian aircraft bombed an al-Qaeda-in-Syria ammunition depot that turned out to be full of noxious chemicals and a strong wind blew the chemical-laden cloud over a nearby village where many consequently died. This is what the Russians and Syrians have been saying and – more important –what they appear to believe happened.”

The rest of the case for “doing something about Syria” consists of casual media demonizations of Assad, psyops like the Bana al-Abed public profile, and several other chemical attacks that Assad has been proven not to be behind. The “war” rhetoric about Russia also rests on false charges that are individually easy to see through, but whose numerousness makes the Russia narrative seem indisputable. 

When you notice the falseness of a few of them, though, the magnitude of the lies we’ve been told throughout the last two years becomes easy to accept. The establishment’s claim that Russia hacked the DNC emails, aside from its transparent motive of deflection, has been proven through VIPS’ forensic digital tests not to have occurred. Says the July 24 VIPS memorandum:

“Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying was performed on the East coast of the U.S. Thus far, mainstream media have ignored the findings of these independent studies [see here and here].”

As Orwell said about removing oneself from a false and narrow reality, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” It’s information like this that can lead to a person’s worldview being upended, which is why governments and corporations are working so hard to censor this information. We’re spreading it around with the hope that humanity can see reality before fantasy destroys us.

How Democratic Politics Has Become Authoritarian

In response to the rise of Donald Trump and the explosion in dissenting media, a movement has emerged among political elites to further deprive the population of their democratic rights. This effort, as illustrated by Matt Taibbi in his 2016 articleIn Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears, has been taken to chilling lengths by the Democratic Party, and by what Caitlin Johnstone calls the “McResistance” to Trump.

The role of which party gets to be the main purveyor of militarism and national security authoritarianism has switched over to the Democrats-the recent migrationto the party by neoconservatives like Robert Kagan has solidified this. Liberal media outlets like MSNBC are putting many former intelligence officials into their punditry positions. The Democratic Party is running numerous former intelligence officials as candidates in the 2018 midterms, so much that if Democrats take the House this year, these direct deep state alumni will make up half of the congressional Democratic caucus.

It’s a characteristic response from the Democratic establishment to the grassroots activists’ attempts to run non-corrupt candidates within the party: running even more Democrats who will serve the interests of the corporate state. But these are minor details within the echo chamber of ruling class propaganda. Diversions toward lurid Trump scandals, supposed Russia threats, and partisan attacks are constantly made, engaging the populace while a totalitarian state makes its moves.

“In 2003, the Democratic Party supported the Bush administration’s invasion of
Iraq and provided it with the necessary political cover,” reads World Socialist Website’s recent address to this issue, titled The Russian meddling fraud: Weapons of mass destruction revisited. “Now, the Democrats, along with their appendages among the organizations of the upper-middle class, are at the forefront of the campaign for war, employing neo-McCarthyite tactics to criminalize opposition while seeking to subordinate all popular opposition to the Trump administration to its right-wing and militarist agenda.”

Complete with the classic arms race media rhetoric, where Russia is absurdly portrayed as a threat to America’s exceptionally huge military stockpile status, this new Cold War infects the political conversation. Russia narrative skeptics have warned from the start that by feeding into the baseless claims about “interference” and “collusion” for partisan reasons, liberals are increasing dangers of conflict with a nuclear superpower. And now that the U.S. and Russia are in open military combat in Syria while the U.S. and Russia exchange nuclear threats, the narrative’s propagators can’t deny what a perilous game they’ve gotten us into.

Yet just by making these statements, I’m making myself a traitor and a Russian agent in the eyes of mainstream America. Those who share my views like to laugh at the constant charges of us being Kremlin stooges, but it is the new McCarthyism, and it poses a serious threat to democracy and free thought. Its effect is irrevocable steps toward World War Three. We can’t acknowledge the utter lack of evidence behind the charge that Russia has poisoned a former spy in Britain, which Theresa May is using to threaten retaliation against Russia. We can’t oppose the U.S.’ disastrous and criminal involvement in Syria, even as Russia has threatened this week to attack the U.S. if the U.S. carries out its plan to strike Syria again.

We should have anticipated that the establishment would respond in this way when its power became challenged. The deep state has constructed an alternate reality within its propaganda influence, a reality where all that goes against the political establishment is misguided “fake news” at best and foreign subversion at worst. And this shift has happened as easily as a change in the messaging of the corporate news outlets.

Right now, Democrats and some Republicans are demanding a $300 million Department of Homeland Security operation for fighting “Russian social media propaganda” to be put in the March 23 spending bill. Don’t lament these attacks, because they’re only in reaction to the threat we pose to the global oligarchy. Fight back against them. Call your representatives about opposing this spending bill, among the other actions we can take. Stand up for your right to a free and just society.