The important story is not about Russiagate, or about the president’s lurid affairs, or about the other media sensations we’re constantly bombarded with. The story is about a bipartisan, all-encompassing effort by the U.S./NATO power establishment (along with their parallels in Russia and China, the two other superstates) to make society ever more repressive and militarized.
It’s no wonder the corporate media tries so hard to divert our attention to other subjects. This takeover is visible in every McCarthyite media statement, online censorship expansion, and advancement of corporate and military power that happens each day. It’s directly related to the global collapse of capitalism, the climate collapse, and the other crises the world is undergoing. Its logical conclusion is something resembling the world from George Orwell’s 1984.
In a way that outcome has already happened; the machinations of the military and surveillance oligarchy are allowed to work, with the opinions of the population having no effect on this despite there still generally being “freedom of speech.” The surveillance state is encroaching into our lives more and more intimately, as the FBI has recently set up a task force for monitoring Americans’ social media activities. The United States is committing itself to obscene amounts of military spending-$160 billion over the next two years, according to the latest budget-while makingNATO allies vastly expand their own weapons stashes over the coming years. The country is turning into one big military base, with the government trying to justify its vast war spending increases through making the pettiest of cuts to social services.
War is as vastly engaged in by the United States as its details aren’t allowed into the public consciousness. Bombs are falling on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria in record numbers, while Obama’s military campaigns in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, and Niger have been continued and expanded under Trump. U.S. drone strikes have been greatly increased in the last year as well. Most dangerously, the U.S. has started bombing Russians in Syria this month, a terrifying incident after the years of NATO’s troop and tank buildups around Russia’s border. These facts are kept in the background by mainstream media, letting the American consciousness remain disengaged with the realities of our war paradigm.
“We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” said CIA director William Casey in 1981. Not even since the aftermath of 9/11 have we been closer to this state of total deception; since the 2013 repeal of a ban on covert CIA psyops, many mainstream media figures have becomecarefully trained government propaganda agents. As the intelligence community has used this to carry out a public relations campaign centered around the “Russiagate” theater, former intelligence officials have lately been put into media positions. Under the 2017 NDAA, a portion of the defense budget goes to a State Department-run “counter-propaganda” program.
The agenda behind this takeover is shown in every major statement the deep state’s propagandists make. Last week, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the senate that tech companies must intensify censorship to combat Russian “subversion,” and that a “seamless integration of multiple elements of national power” is needed between “information, economics, finance, intelligence, law enforcement and military” to combat the threats from Russia and China.
Similar things are happening in Europe, where far-right politics is rising, militarism is returning to Germany, and the EU is about to create a center for silencing “fake news.” And the trends towards militarization, surveillance, and totalitarian capitalism have also happened in Russia and China.
These forces are finding ways to erase Orwell’s warning as they carry out this coup, like when the neoconservative propagandist Eliot Higgins responded to skepticism of the Syria WMD narratives with the statement: “This is dangerous, Orwellian inversion of reality.” Don’t be fooled. The real danger is in what the state has been able to do because of these and other war psyops. As Chris Hedges wrote last month in Thought Police for the 21st Century: “The abolition of net neutrality and the use of algorithms by Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign agents the journalists who expose the crimes of corporate capitalism and imperialism, have given the corporate state the power to destroy freedom of speech. Any state that accrues this kind of power will use it.”
The magnitude of this takeover is too big for most people to get a sense of. It’s being accelerated by climate change, as the intensifying storms and fires of the last year have allowed for military occupations of communities and corporate takeovers of fragile institutions. It’s overlaid by false flags and manufactured crisis, as the country is bombarded with warnings about nonexistent nuclear threats from North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia. Artificial intelligence is now part of it, foreshadowinga future where advanced systems of technological control enslave the population. Certain parts of it are easier to notice, like the police militarization that’s led to 168 being killed by U.S. police so far in 2018. But these can be easily distracted from.
All these expansions of the security state are here to protect the order that the global oligarchs depend on. This is an order where the majority of Americans live in poverty while the eight wealthiest men have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world population. Where 2.3 million Americans are imprisoned by a brutal police state. Where almost 40,000 of the veterans from our perpetual wars are now homeless. Where the biosphere is being destroyed by a fossil fuel-centered corporate state. If you feel any kind of anger about this situation, you haven’t lost the will to fight the state, however powerful it becomes.
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