Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
There is always common ground for those who dare to seek it.
Remember the “Russians hacked our election!” hysteria – or have you already forgotten? That entire narrative collapsed under a deluge of factual evidence that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) data release was an insider job, and a compelling lack of evidence of any other Russian hacking.
That failed narrative has now been replaced with a new mass hysteria: “a new cultural Civil War is inevitable.” In this narrative, America has succumbed to us-versus-them divisions divided by all-or-nothing ideological bright lines.
Snap out of it, America: you’re being played, just as you were played by the absurd “Russia hacked the election” mania.
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The core strategy here is the destruction of any common ground: once the delusion that there is no common ground left has been cemented by relentless mainstream and social media hysteria/ propaganda, the populace fragments into echo-chamber fiefdoms of ideological conformity that are easily manipulated by the political-financial power structure.
Once the populace has been fragmented into ideologically divisive camps, controlling the resulting mass of warring mobs is easy. Rather than recognize the commonality of their powerlessness and impoverishment, the fragmented fiefdoms are easily turned on each other:
From the point of view of each fragmented fiefdom, , the problem isn’t structural, i.e. the dominance of extreme concentrations of wealth and power; the “problem” is the other cultural-ideological fiefdoms.
Once the masses accept this false division and the destruction of common ground, their power to reverse the extreme concentrations of wealth and power is shattered. The play is as old as civilization itself: conjure up extremists (paying them when necessary), goad the formation of opposing extremists, then convince the populace that these extremists have been normalized, i.e. your friends and neighbors already belong to one or the other.
This normalization then sets up the relentless demands to choose a side– the classic techniques of misdirection and false choice.
Just as you’re sold a triple-bacon cheeseburger or a hybrid auto, you’re being sold a completely fabricated cultural civil war. There have always been extremists on every edge of the ideological spectrum, just as there have always been religious zealots.
In a healthy society, these fringe pools of self-reinforcing fanaticism are given their proper place: they are outliers, representing self-reinforcing black holes of confirmation bias of a few.
In times of social, political and financial stress, such groups pop up like mushrooms. In times of media saturation, a relative handful can gain enormous exposure and importance because the danger they pose sells adverts and attracts eyeballs/viewers.
Add a little fragmentation, virtue-signaling, demands for ideological conformity and voila, you get a deeply fragmented and deranged populace that is incapable of recognizing the dire straits it is in or recognizing the structural sources of its impoverishment and powerlessness.
In other words, you get an easily mallable populace at false war with itself.
There is always common ground for those who dare to seek it. The Powers That Be are blowing up the bridges as fast as they can, whipping up fear and hatred of the Other, fanning the flames of extremism and claiming extremists are now normalized and everywhere.
All of this is false. Would you buy an entirely manipulated cultural civil war if it was advertised as such? If not, then don’t buy into the false (but oh so useful to the ruling elites) narrative of an “inevitable cultural Civil War.”
IOW’s, The Politics of Distraction
FBI-we had informants on both sides at C’ville–
http://www.blacklistednews.com/FBI_Admits_Federal_Informants_Linked_to_Deadly_Charlottesville_Riots%3B_Unlikely_To_Face_Charges/60420/0/38/38/Y/M.html
…and participants.
I’m having great difficulty finding common ground with the bosheviks. BTW that yogi is full of shit and not in touch with reality. It makes no difference whether the bolsheviks state of mind is a reflection of the relationship with themselves or their value you as a person. Their actions are what counts and they want to kill you. Do not think of the progressives as snowflakes they are bolsheviks who want to kill you. Snowflakeism is just a tactic to keep liberals on their side.
cliff…………I’ll 2nd that.
I work in a deeply progressive industry, city, and company. Most of these people would have no idea what a bolshevik is, haven’t actually heard of antifa until the past week, etc.
We recently passed legislation that made it so I don’t have to be forced through my taxes to pay for voluntary abortions. There are multiple women here who have actively gone out to protest this stating that it is an action of people like ME oppressing THEM and removing their access to health care.
They take it as a given that the “common ground” is me paying for their abortions. They take it as an affront and an oppression to be told “you can have your abortions, but you can’t make me pay for it.” Therefore to them to reach “common ground” again is only on the terms that they have abortions paid for them by others.
I’ve contributed plenty to Charles, he’s a “super nice guy”, but agreed with the others… he is completely glossing over what’s going on here.
Christians, Conservatives, Libertarians, etc. have been finding “common ground” for a century now and it has been a steady relentless march of destruction for everything they stand for. Because “common ground” for the communist, the avowed progressive, and even just the conflict averse rabbit who wants to be conservative but afraid to speak up… always means us stepping aside and giving them whatever they want like spoiled children who can’t handle being told to clean their own room… much less outright told no.
“Free Abortions” = Common ground for people I work with.
“All Trump Supporters are Scumbags” = No big deal on Twitter
“I think both sides have responsibility” = MOTHER FUCKING RACIST NAZIS!!!!!
Sorry Charles… your point is nice but when you say “there is always common ground for those who dare to seek it” you aren’t acknowledging that part of that “dare to seek it” might require PUSHING BACK because so far the ground is 100% theirs.
I usually like this Author but he is way off on this one.I have nothing in common with Communists , Marxist or Socialist of any kind especially those that want to kill me or the Anglo-Saxon people’s of this world.Go anywhere where you do not speak a common language like Los Angeles . You’ll see real quick you have little in common with people who speak a different language or come from a different culture.
OK, I understand that we are being played but at the same time, I want the monuments left alone. Am I supposed to let them destroy all the monuments and whatever else they want to do because I’m reacting just like they want me to? We never draw a line; they never stop actively destroying us in a hundred different ways. Never doing nothing is being played like a Cuck too. The line should have been drawn when they effectively banned the Rebel Flag, the song Dixie and Andrew Jackson. The line should have been drawn when they started Affirmative Action Quotas, dumbing down the government schools, didn’t integrate Negro colleges, took Christianity out of the government schools and public places, made abortion legal, gave us NAFTA, made homosex legal, refused to stop Vote Fraud, started Chem-spraying, created sterilizing GMOs and vaccines etc etc. We need a real Counter Revolution; Trump can’t stop TPTB NWO without help, like the Right marching in the streets too.
“…made homosex legal….”
yeah, that’s a big problem. fucking moron, go back to fucking your goats (female, of course)
gv,
don’t stay away so much-you used to make good comments during the campaign season,keep doing it and quit being the self appointed commissar of gay pc here–
It’s a cultural and national collapse; it happens. I bet the Romans felt the same way when those dirty barbarians started getting cushy military contractor jobs on the border.
All nations die; ours is next. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to deal with it. If we get lucky and we manage to wipe out our all internal enemies and find the gumption to re-found the US, we might be able to do another 250 years. But it won’t be easy.
It only takes one side who believes there is no common ground.
Logical arguments and appeals to commonality will not work when a death squad is at the door.
CHS speaks truth again. It’s too bad there are so many delusional people who believe that “white genocide” or “cultural Marxism” is an actual thing. Too late for those people; they will need to be stamped down.
“stamped down”, eh? For having an opinion, eh?
Ahhhh, yet another libtard’s love for Constitutional Rights in full display.
Go suck a diseased donkey dick.
I was hoping that anonymous comment was sarcasm.
That anonymous with the lowercase a, which requires deliberately typing it that way… and with that writing style and stance… is a community infiltrator. Similar to catfish.
Hi Stucky! Sell that house yet?
Closing on Aug 30th !!
(No St Joey statue needed ?)
I guess you missed the whole Marxist revolution in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Do us favor and take a long walk off of a short pier.
Any time a white person marries out of their race is white genocide. The resultant product is diminished as a white person. I have family that did this and the results are not good for the produced humans. Lifetime conflict. Two cousins went black and results were not what they would have been had they stayed with whites. One had her face disfigured by her boyfriend’s straight razor. Jews don’t sully their bloodlines and neither do Asians. Kumbaya and BBC are overrated.
Don’t feed the troll.
The culture that I believe in is NOT under attack?
OK.
Got it.
Yippee.
Stupid me. It’s all just an illusion. I suppose.
I feel better now.
Now that I have been reeducated, I’m gonna apply for one of those Soros funded Antifa protestor jobs since, you know, we’re so culturally similar.
The idea that your culture is under attack is a right wing paranoid figment of your imagination. You should sign up for a Soros protesting job. I’m pretty sure that they could use a big 6’7″ Austrian, you know, for the sake of diversity and multiculturalism or some such shit..or at least to play the four spot on their new basketball team…can you still play D?
Hi everyone. I usually find Smith fascinting reading, but this time I must disagree.
I don’t think it is possible to find common ground with the left. What can we possibly share at this point? Our love of Chipotle? Our hatred of King Geoffrey and Queen Cersei? Amazon Prime’s awesome 2 Day Express Shipping? Any ground we have in common at this point seems irrelevant.
Anymore, I don’t think I want any common ground. I have a couple liberal friends who are outliers- they hate mainstream liberals as anti-liberals and consider themselves “classical” liberals and they really, really hate antifascist fascists, or as I like to call them, “Anti Fa-Fas.” They’re friends, but if you hate communism, how excited are you going to get when a couple communists become merely somewhat socialist?
I’ve said here in the past I think we live in at least 5 Americas: A black one, A mainstream (white) one, a Rich one, a poor one, and an illegal alien one. None of these Americas understand each other and none of them really likes each other. I think when the time comes, they’ll tear each other apart.
With the last vestiges of “Federal America” with its common culture of civility, citizenship, Christian values, the Heroic Founders, and English and English/European culture being eroded away and the left’s attempt to wreck that culture and replace it with “McWorld,” what have we got left to unite us? America is basically dead and they killed Her. So welcome the civil war. To borrow from a stupid Newsweek headline, “We’re all Yugoslavians now.” Arm yourself accordingly, because I believe a period of butal and unending strife is upon you.
I think Smith is wrong. What common ground can we find and why would we want it? The folks who blindly supported Hillary at all costs, who want to take away my right to defend myself, who want to tell me what to think, who want schools to be lefty indoctrination camps, who want to take all my money away to give to the illegals they want here working and voting, who want to rip down all the monuments and history of our country while forcing their fake history of islamic accomplishments upon us, who use education, the media, and the government to beat us over the head with their bullshit ideology, who want to use reverse racism to ensure white males never hold a job or express an opinion again, who want a system where skin color and non-male gender is all you need to succeed, who want to use kids to spy on parents, who want to dictate our healthcare, religious, and social habits and beliefs and choices to us, who want to control us in countless ways and have their idiotic beliefs backed up with government force…. I got no common ground with them.
Seeing what they’ve done to my country, I would rather have them IN the ground than find a way to share it with them.
Being a patriotic American in this day and age is an exercise in pain and sorrow. It’s going through the 5 stages of grief. It’s like watching someone you love slowly wither and die and there’s no way to help or comfort them. It is irrevocable, irresistable, and unavoidable. There’s even an element of humiliation to it, as the left makes a mockery of the process and those of us who mourn it. So when the war finally breaks out, I don’t think I’ll be shocked or in mourning for long, because these people have been killing America for a long time. I just hope when the war is over, their side loses. I also hope the nameless manipulators Smith mentions profiting from this also receive their due. I can’t see either side wanting them around.
Smith is a fascinating man, but I think the time for conciliation and common ground is over and we’re all just waiting for the clock to run out. Even anti-gun liberals I know are getting interested in guns.
Gilbert
EXCELLENT!!
Let me offer a GUESS as to what the author means by them being just like us.
Think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs … the very bottom rung. Security, food, shelter. Sure, we’re truly all the same in that regard. Throw in love of family, hoping our children have a better life than ourselves, … yeah, sure. I won’t argue that.
But, HOW we get there? THAT’S where the rub is. What “freedom” MEANS, along with other philosophical questions, even further divides us.
No sir, except for the basics, we are not alike at all.