As the oligarchy tries to take tighter and tighter control over the human race, using manufactured nuclear threats, military repression, censorship and mass propaganda to crush and deflect from dissent, we need to be vigilant of its manipulations. With the legalization of covert CIA psyops, and with the 2007 coordination between media leaders to create an echo chamber (as revealed by WikiLeaks), the propaganda is now layered and monolithic. This is the nature of the machine we’re fighting.
Resisting the machine’s attempts to assimilate ua into its beliefs, as the journalist Caitlin Johnstone has pointed out, can’t be done with wits alone. The state’s deception tactics are too complex and large, making universal skepticism of media and government the most effective way to avoid being fooled. But the specific manipulation tactics should be exposed, if only to prove that they exist and are worth being resisted in this way. Here are some of those instances where you can be sure a deception is happening.
When a media narrative is blatantly inconsistent with reality
In March of last year, WikiLeaks published the findings from a CIA document hack, codenamed “Vault 7.” The leak revealed, among many other things, that the Obama White House had taken direct orders from Citibank on cabinet appointees; that the DNC had been planning to rig the primary for Clinton as far back as 2014; that the CIA was watching Americans through mobile device cameras and smart TVs. Forbes, the Washington Post, and other corporate media outlets responded with headlines saying Vault 7 told us nothing new.
This is maybe the closest the deep state has gotten to Orwellian doublethink so far. Those who accepted this media narrative had to suddenly believe that they’d known the leak’s contents beforehand, even though this wasn’t true.
Other examples of this real life “reality control,” as 1984 also called the doublethink tactics, usually involve how we’re made to view basic politics and history. The U.S. intelligence agencies lied us into a catastrophic war in 2003, the mainstream narrative acknowledges, but we should at the same time trust those agencies when they come out with unproven and politically convenient charges against Russia. Donald Trump is a monster, we’re rightly told one day, but on April 6, 2017, the day Trump ordered strikes against Syria, we’re told he’s heroic. Glaring inconsistencies get negated by the constant, authoritatively stated revisions from the propaganda machine. Most recently this shift of reality was accomplished when the Washington Post claimed, after months of portraying Trump as Putin’s puppet, that “Trump’s presidency and policies became a Russian disinformation target” after the election.
In each case it’s done, as Caitlin Johnstone illustrates in her piece from last year How To Spot A Media Psyop, through slogans, non sequiturs, forced associations, and astroturfing. As the U.S. imperialist establishment moves towards war in multiple countries, we need to try hard to detect lies like these.
When the media shows us an enemy we’ve seen dozens of times before
The way Americans are being shown Kim Jong Un, Putin, Assad, Maduro, and the leaders of Iran is identical to how we’ve been shown all the leaders of past regime change nations. There’s always a foreign leader, sometimes presented as mentally unstable, who poses a threat to the United States, or to a people who must be “liberated.” To make the war campaign emotionally charged and immune to all rational discussion, this leader always has to be characterized as too dangerous for America to not take action against, like when Saddam Hussein was said to be “worse than Hitler.”
The distortions of the current regime change countries and their leaders are too numerous to cover here. But as we navigate through a sea of propaganda, we should pay attention to how these figures are represented; does it really make sense for Kim Jong Un, however brutal a dictator he is, to be planning to one day destroy his country by starting nuclear war? Why would Assad have used chemical weapons in Khan Sheikhoun last year if he knew this would provoke international retaliation? Why would Putin be planning on a preemptive nuclear attack, as the Pentagon is now claiming, if he knows this would only lead to Armageddon? Why would the Iranian government continue to pursue nuclear weapons if it knows this would only give the United States reason to invade?
Ironically, the United States now represents the irrational and aggressive state that it accuses its enemies of representing.
When the media tries to hide the real crisis
Last month in Davos, Switzerland, world leaders and billionaires publicly
acknowledged the disarray that the world they control is falling into. A clash between the major world powers, the speakers stated, is now very possible. The wildly inflated and unstable state of global markets was mentioned. Even the extreme economic inequality was talked about. The climate catastrophe, the global rise of reactionary politics, and the recent dangerous outbreak of conflict between Turkey and Syria were no doubt silently thought about by many of those in the meeting.
But our crisis was acknowledged and nothing more. When the elites do try to address our problems, they come up with fantasy-based solutions: further pursuing free-market economics, geoengineering the biosphere, trying to restore politics to a “moderate” state. Otherwise they drag us deeper and deeper into catastrophe, like how America’s foreign policy leaders have responded to the collapse of their empire by instigating dangerous conflicts with Russia, Iran and North Korea. The source of the problem is denied, the state of delusion becomes worse and worse, the future of life on earth is handed over to a nuclear superpower that’s lost its mind.
The real crisis doesn’t come from Russia, nor from terrorism, nor from dissent against the establishment, but from the institutional and cultural rot that dominates all parts of the old order. Our real threats are the global corporations, the big banks, the military and intelligence establishments, the Democratic and Republican parties, and the corporate media. The false reality they’ve created could give way to a saner paradigm, if we choose to remain sane.
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