"Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire
"It should be blindingly obvious by now that the identity politics of race, religion and ethnicity are deeply poisonous, blinding us from seeing our common humanity. The left and the right are equally capable of weaponizing identity to justify violence." Lee Fang
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” Selwyn Duke
Julian Assange discusses the relationship between the free flow of information and war. Censorship is often a prerequisite for war.
The New York Times has published another CIA press release disguised as news, this time aimed at whipping up paranoia toward anyone who criticizes the US proxy war in Ukraine.The article is titled “Putin’s Next Target: U.S. Support for Ukraine, Officials Say”. Its author, Julian E Barnes, has written so many New York Times articles with headlines ending in the words “Officials Say” that we can safely assume the primary reason for his continued employment in that paper is because empire managers within the US government have designated him someone who can be trusted to print what they want printed. This designation would make him a reliable supplier of “scoops” (read: regurgitations of unevidenced government claims) for The New York Times.
“American officials said they are convinced that Mr. Putin intends to try to end U.S. and European support for Ukraine by using his spy agencies to push propaganda supporting pro-Russian political parties and by stoking conspiracy theories with new technologies,” Barnes writes.
Of course the report never gets any more specific than that, and of course the “American officials” Barnes cites promote their unevidenced assertions under cover of complete anonymity.
“The American officials spoke on the condition their names not be reported so they could discuss sensitive intelligence,” Barnes writes. ...
In a tyrannical dictatorship, the press is operated by employees of the government. In a Free Democracy™️, the press is operated by employees of the oligarchs who operate the government. In both cases you’re getting state propaganda, but in one of them the propaganda is disguised as objective news reporting.
If only those who cheer on new U.S. imperialist wars would consider our deplorable track record. Consider the following excerpt from a recent article by Chris Hedges. The title of his article: "Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan NightmareNATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe."
“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die. . . .
The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair....
Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya - as it did Iraq - as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.
Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S. Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media."
IMO, RFK Jr's diagnosis of what ails the US is spot on. I hope to hell we, as a country, somehow figure out a cure. And for those who aren't aware, the DNC is pulling out every trick in the book to make the primary meaningless in order to pre-ordain Biden as the winner. Further, the DNC has publicly stated in court filings that when it comes to the nominee, the DNC doesn't give a shit about the opinions of voters.
Kennedy:
Our nation's most serious problems come from as a single source of entrenched corporate, political elite. Government agencies, Congress, the defense industry, Wall Street, the media, big tech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, and pretty much big everything have a death grip on our democracy. And there's only one thing that can break that grip. And now it's not me, is you, the people. It's a populist movement, a unites left and right black and white, rural and urban, young and old. We can't just wait around for the Washington establishment to change their minds. We can't expect Wall Street to stop strip mining the middle class of its equity and as well, we can't expect the military industrial complex to promote peace, or the censorship big tech complex to promote freedom or freedom of speech. We need to do it ourselves. We have to take back power in this country for the people. Let me add one more item to the list of entrenched institutions, the Democratic National Committee, and an honest primary the candidate with the most votes would be the nominee, right. But the DNC has imposed elegant roles and make it nearly impossible for an insurgent candidate to win. It has totally rigged the system very early on. [Video of Jamie Harris of the DNC]: "Back in February, we passed a resolution unanimously within the DNC that we are all riding with Biden and Kamala Harris."