The Deep State Can Crush Our Voices, But Not Our Ideas

The global elite are rapidly purging information that threatens their power. In January, after neoliberalism had been delegitimized with Trump’s election and the Democratic Party establishment had collapsed, the corporate state officially declared war on dissidents. The CIA, FBI and NSA, which have long been controlledby large corporations, issued a report saying Russia had interfered in the 2016 election by having its reporters at RT expose corruption in American corporate and governmental institutions. Challenging authority was now an act of treason. 

And the intelligence agencies have since applied that new rule by targeting activists, having the online companies they control censor alternative media, and requiringRT reporters and their “associates” to register as foreign agents-with the penalty for not doing so being removal from the airwaves. This happens as the world is bombarded with psy ops, which the CIA has carried out with impunity since a propaganda ban on the agency was repealed in 2013. These psy ops have included revisions of our language. Like with the ardent efforts to crush belief in a Deep State-which is simply the term for an unelected power establishment-and to portray the term “neoliberalism” as a meaningless pejorative when it’s meant to describe a political system based around profit.

Surrounding this have been constant warnings about some all-encompassing artificial enemy, mainly Russia. The reasons for restarting the Cold War with Russia-an ally before it interfered with American regime change plans in Syria around four years ago-are continually updated as the previous claims fall apart. Three months ago Russia was supposed to have stolen the election by hacking the DNC, then that was proven wrong by forensic investigators and the focus switched to Russia’s supposedly hacking state voting machines. Then the election authorities of those states refuted that, and the focus is now on “Russian-linked” figures purchasing online ads.

Reality is always revised to fit what vindicates the power structure. Facts that threaten this structure, even ones involving things like the recent U.S.-perpetrated genocides in several countries, are erased amid what Time Magazine once called an “eternal present.” The revisions that crush dissent most effectively are the ones that say neoliberalism serves the masses (like with the lie that corporate trade deals help workers), and the ones that say dissenting views are unpopular (like with the lie that Bernie Sanders legitimately lost the 2016 election). One of the corporate state’s great victories in this area has been the crushing of labor unions. Organized is labor is now absent from the consciousness of most Americans after around nine decades of the authorities’ suppressing and demonizing unions.

This propaganda campaign is meant to make those who dissent feel isolated, absurd, and powerless. And to make it feel safe and logical to love Big Brother, to support the perpetual wars, to align with the billionaire class, to exalt the symbols of violence, nationalism, and religious dogma that the corporate state surrounds itself with. This mass assimilation into the corporate ideology can be leveraged into elite-manufactured pro-corporate movements like the Tea Party, which mirror the pro-government mass rallies of dictatorships like North Korea. 

What saves us from inescapable totalitarianism, and in this case the loss of a future for our species through climate apocalypse, is that ideas cannot be killed. The knowledge the Deep State suppresses will continue to survive in private data archives put together by dissidents. But deeper than that are the ideas and emotions that fight fascism-individualism, equality, empathy-that will always be part of the human psyche. The impulses to control and harm, which oligarchy depends on, won’t disappear either. But neither will the combat between these two forces. And the oligarchical force is losing dominance right now.

“We are on the margins,” said Chris Hedges in a recent interview with World Socialist Website. “But that does not mean we are not dangerous. Neoliberalism and globalization are zombie ideologies. They have no credibility left. The scam has been found out. The global oligarchs are hated and reviled. The elite has no counterargument to our critique. So they can’t afford to have us around. As the power elite becomes more frightened, they’re going to use harsher forms of control, including the blunt instrument of censorship and violence.”

Violence has been part of this for many years now, most blatantly with the shootings, dog attacks, and beatings of protesters last winter in Standing Rock. Barack Obama, a major contributor to the climate crisis, responded by refusing to stop the oil pipeline construction in Standing Rock and by seeing how events there would “play out.” Then the Trump regime took office, insured the construction of the oil pipeline among its massive environmental crimes so far, and purged the White House website of climate data while defunding the NASA satellites used for tracking climate change. 

Far-right sites are now spreading online ads celebrating Trump’s wiping out the “climate change agenda,” which a fourth or so of the population would still agree was right of Trump to do. For some years, Trump and his propagandists will be able to keep convincing their followers of the climate’s stability. Then sea level rise, droughts and catastrophic storms will expand too much for anyone to deny what’s happening. At that point the elites will try to seize on the crisis for establishing a supreme military state, wherein almost all of the population lives in a society that’s rotted from the inside. 

We can rouse people toward building a more democratic and sustainable future, though, as climate change already manifests with extreme hurricanes and fires throughout the continent. Each of us must find our niche for helping achieve this, or the immortality of ideas might not be of much use to us.