Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
I write a lot about government secrecy and the importance of whistleblowers, leakers and leak publishers, and for good reason: governments which can hide their wicked deeds from public accountability will do so whenever possible. It’s impossible for the public to use democracy for ensuring their government behaves in the way they desire if they aren’t allowed to be informed about what that behavior even is.
These things get lots of attention in conspiracy circles and dissident political factions. Quite a few eyes are fixed on the veil of government opacity and the persecution of those brave souls who try to shed light on what’s going on behind it. Not enough eyes, but quite a few.
What gets less attention, much to our detriment, is the fact that the primary mechanism of our oppression and exploitation is happening right out in front of our faces.
The nonstop campaign by bought politicians, owned news outlets, and manipulated social media platforms to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world contribute vastly more to the sickness of our society than government secrecy does. We know this from experience: any time a whistleblower exposes secret information about the malfeasance of powerful governments like NSA surveillance or Collateral Murder, we see not public accountability, nor demands for sweeping systemic changes to prevent such malfeasance from reoccurring, but a bunch of narrative management from the political/media class.
This narrative management is used to shift attention away from the information that was revealed and onto the fact that the person who revealed it broke the law or misbehaved in some way. It’s used to convince people that the revelations aren’t actually a big deal, or that it was already basically public knowledge anyway. And it’s used to manipulate public attention on to the next hot story of the day and memory hole it underneath the white noise of the media news churn. And nothing changes.
We’ve seen it happening over and over and over again. The narrative management machine has gotten so effective and efficient that it’s been able to completely ignore the recent revelation that the US, UK and France almost certainly bombed Syria in 2018 for a completely false reason. A few half-assed Bellingcat spin jobs and an otherwise total media blackout, and it’s like the whole thing never happened.
What this tells us is that our first and foremost problem is not the fact that conspiracies are happening behind a curtain of government secrecy, but that the way people think, act and vote is being actively manipulated right out in the open. Government secrecy is indeed one aspect of establishment narrative control, but controlling the public’s access to information is only one aspect. The bigger part of it is controlling how the public thinks about information.
The reason people never use the power of their superior numbers to force real change, even though they’re being exploited and oppressed in myriad ways by the ruling class, is because they’ve been propagandized into accepting the status quo as desirable (or at least normal). The propaganda of the political/media class is therefore the establishment’s front line of defense. Its most powerful, and essential, weapon.
This is important for dissidents of all stripes to understand, because it means we’re not just passively waiting around for another Manning or Snowden or an Ian Henderson to give us information which we can use to fight the oppression machine. Those individuals have done a great public service, but the battle to awaken human consciousness to what’s really going on in our world is in no way limited to leakers and whistleblowers. It is not at the mercy of government secrecy.
If you are engaged in any type of media, you are engaging the narrative matrix which keeps the public asleep and complacent. It doesn’t matter if you have a Twitter account, a Youtube account, some flyers or a can of spray paint: if you are capable of getting any kind of message out there, you are able to directly influence the mechanism of your oppression. You are able to inform people that they are being lied to, you are able to explain why, and you are able to point them to where they can find more information.
This is extremely empowering. You do not need to wait around hoping that some bombshell piece of information makes it past all the various security checks and spinmeisters and triggers a real social awakening. You can be that information. You can become a catalyst for that awakening.
The key to turning this ship around does not lie hidden somewhere behind a veil of government opacity. It lies in you. It lies in all of us. We can begin awakening our fellow humans right now by attacking the narrative management of the propaganda machine that sits right in front of us, unarmored and unhidden.
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To seize or maintain power, one must sway masses. Its a fact of life. Libertarians are too idealistic, just not idealistic and insane like commies are. Propaganda is part of what we are.
“The most awesome God-damned force in the whole godless world…..”
Turn off the fucking God damned television!
From the time I was a small child my father called it The Idiot Box.
Then, when my nephew was small, he saw Nintendo games and said, “The Japanese have finally won.”
’round my house, it was the boob-tube
annuit coeptis novus ordo seclorum <—-==
'There's more to this ole world than what meets the eye'
This is why I wrote my book Caitlin, and after six years, I am finally at the stage of publishing. It exposes the fraud and manipulation behind our global financial system which is so complex that people even think that banks take deposits to lend them out to their customers!
Our younger people even think that their money in the bank is owned by them – they don’t know that it is at risk of being stolen every day . They think this is all conspiracy plots and yet it is all accessible knowledge easily obtained on the internet – by the banks themselves!
I honestly cannot recall the last time I received any information from any of her listed propagandist.
Caitlin is mostly right again (as usual), but it is already too late to prevent the inevitable outcome. The dumbing down of the American sheeple that started with the advent of public schools (in the mid 1800s) has passed the point of no return. And that is compounded by the immigration of millions from third world countries who are even more oblivious to what is going on. There is literally nothing that will wake up a large enough segment of the population to cause a change of course. Dick Cheney could hold a televised news conference tomorrow and admit everything about 9/11 and it would change nothing. The MSM would mostly ignore and bury the story, and what little bit of coverage it got the pundits would say he said the exact opposite of what he actually said. Everyone who still believes the official narrative about 9/11 (which unfortunately is most people) would just continue to believe what they believe now. The only thing we can do is prepare to try to survive the inevitable collapse, and hope there is enough left after the dust settles to try to rebuild some semblance of a civilization. But we can always take comfort in the fact that we were “winning” while Trump was president.
good summation, but sad. oh well, I’m just going to enjoy the time I have left until the Bolsheviks take it all. Not my guns of course, if they come for them they will take some casualties.
“This is not our country anymore. It is not our government. It is not our FBI. It is not our media. All of these are in the hands of our enemies. All the authoritative institutions of our society have been hollowed out, taken over, and repurposed to our dispossession and destruction. And one of the chief tools this system uses to destroy us is our own patriotism and naïve trust in the people who despise us.”
This is one of the most important lessons we can teach, for when people cease to trust the media and the government—when they see them as a hostile elite, as enemies of the people—that is the beginning of populism. https://www.counter-currents.com/2020/01/richard-jewell-2/
As Pogo once said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Did Caitlin declare the Afghanistan Papers (staged leak) was a bombshell?
Everyone else did.
45 some odd years after the Pentagon papers staged leak.
It’s better to eat your forearm off than wake up reading the columns from Caitlin Johnstone or Pat Buchanan.
Go read Beaty’s “Iron Curtain Over America.” Our country has been in the hands of our enemy for a long, long time. It seems every generation some subset of people figure it out, but on balance the masses stay oblivious.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. Too many people are invested in the status quo. This consists of: commercialism, debt, pension plans that likely not be there when you have spent all those years investing and doing what the system has taught you to do. Start being a rebel on a personal level and if enough of us do that, big changes will occur.
I don’t know, Caitlyn…
I think there is great value in letting the Narrative play out to determine who the real actors are and who is controlling the script.
Who controls what we think?
Who controls what we think about?
Is there a difference?