It’s happening just like the other war runups Americans have been subjected to for the last several generations. White House officials repeat lies about the targeted countries, like the complete falsehood that Iran hasn’t complied with the nuclear deal. Respected institutions enforce the war propaganda, like how the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has issued fraudulent reports this year linking Iran to 9/11. Our minds are bombarded, through a highly consolidated and CIA-controlled media, with ideas that make war seem necessary. Like the belief that North Korea will one day decide to destroy itself by striking the U.S. first, which Kim Jong Un has explicitly refuted multiple times.
Our daily lives reflect how people must have functioned during the transitions into Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Behind all of our regular experiences is a constant, but seemingly distant, attack against democracy and human rights. Then we all find ourselves in an era of fear, struggle and state coercion. America has come close to those extreme dictatorships in the past during wartime, like when Japanese Americans were put in camps in World War II or when opposing Woodrow Wilson’s wars became illegal. But only now does the state have the surveillance apparatus, military equipment, and oligarchic control over society to create something maybe more repressive than any past regime.
The online alternative media that we used to defeat the Syria war runup have come come under attack. Government and corporations are blacklisting, censoring, and threatening dissenting outlets and journalists. These vestiges of truth, crippled as dissenting news sites have had their viewership forced down as much as 80% in recent months, could be wiped out when the FCC repeals net neutrality this month. Yet it was inevitable that the global elite would respond this way to the recent rise of rebellion, and their fear is that we’ll keep fighting after they’ve taken away our tools.
The information revolution might need to continue through on-print alternative media, likely in the form of pamphlets and papers that are put out by independent underground journalists. As our rights to protest and assemble keep being eroded, open resistance will have to be tried under risk of state retribution, like is already true in many ways. Blacklisting, harassment, enforced poverty, surveillance, detainment, and violence are how free thought will increasingly be met with after the next war starts.
These responses have become more common in the past year as the Trump administration has expanded the existing wars. And the next wave of repression could come when a major terrorist attack happens, which will no doubt be blamed on one of the current regime change countries and used to implement a police state.
Still, if we keep working toward the overthrow of the corporate capitalist war empire and the creation of a more just system, the empire’s wounds will only keep getting bigger. Capitalism is in crisis, giving way to competing radical movements as the ongoing economic recession inflames revolutionary sentiments around the world. Financial, geopolitical, and ecological systems are becoming unstable. The ruling oligarchs are using psy-ops to divert the blame for these upheavals onto external threats, mainly Russia. But the fractures in the neoliberal, globalized system are too big for them to hide the truth.
Now and during the coming war effort, we’ll be targeted with all the propaganda tactics used during the Iraq invasion and other military ventures. We’ll be shown claims about supposed atrocities and threats by the designated enemies. Skeptics will be treated as traitors and atrocity deniers. The slogans, non sequiturs, forced associations, and astroturfing which define modern government psy-op campaigns will subtly try to corral us into supporting the war. If we don’t have the wisdom to resist these tactics, the histories of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes will be repeated, not as tragedy but as farce.
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