Caitlin Johnstone tells it like it is
Caitlin Johnstone tells it like it is
When
Mattis says that the Russian government is trying to “undercut and compromise
our belief in our ideals,” he is saying that Moscow is interrupting the lies
that Americans are being told by the plutocrat-owned media. As we’ve been
discussing a lot recently, control of the narrative is absolutely essential for
rulers to maintain their rule. When you hear establishment policy makers
babbling about “Russian propaganda” and Putin’s attempts to “undercut and
compromise our belief in our ideals,” all that they are saying is that the
plutocrats who rule America need to be able to control the way Americans think
and vote, and that the Russian government is making it a bit harder for them to
do that.
Mattis:
Putin Is Trying To “Undermine America’s Moral Authority”
At a
graduation ceremony for the US Naval War College (barf), US Secretary of
Defense James Mattis asserted that Russian
President Vladimir Putin “aims to diminish the appeal of the western democratic
model and attempts to undermine America’s moral authority,” and that “his
actions are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but to undercut
and compromise our belief in our ideals.”
This would
be the same James Mattis who’s been overseeing the war crimescommitted by America’s
armed forces during their illegal occupation of Syria. This would be the same
United States of America that was born of the genocide of indigenous tribes and
the labor of African slaves, which slaughtered millions in Korea, Vietnam,
Cambodia, Iraq, Libya and Syria for no legitimate reason, which is partnered
with Ukrainian
Nazis, jihadist factions in Syria and Iranian terror
cultists, which supports 73
percent of the world’s dictators, which interferes
constantly in the electoral processesof other countries as a
matter of policy, which stages coups around the world, which has encircled the
globe with military bases, whose FBI still targets
black civil rights activists for persecution to this very
day,
which routinely enters into undeclared wars of aggression against noncompliant
governments to advance
plutocratic interests, which remains the only country ever to use
nuclear weapons on human beings after doing so completely needlessly in Japan, and which
is functionally a corporatist oligarchy with no meaningful “democratic model” in
place at all.
A casual
glance at facts and history makes it instantly clear that the United States has
no “moral authority” of any kind whatsoever, and is arguably the hub of the
most pernicious and dangerous force ever assembled in human history. But
the establishment Russia narrative really is that cartoonishly ridiculous: you
really do have to believe that the US government is 100 percent pure good and
the Russian government is 100 percent pure evil to prevent the whole narrative
from falling to pieces. If you accept the idea that the exchange is anything
close to 50/50, with Russia giving back more or less what it’s getting and
simply protecting its own interests from the interests of geopolitical rivals,
it no longer makes any sense to view Putin as a leader who poses a unique
threat to the world. If you accept the idea that the west is actually being
far more aggressive and antagonistic toward Russia than Russia
is being toward the west, it gets even more laughable.
In order
to believe that the US has anything resembling “moral authority” you have to
shove your head so far into the sand you get lava burns, but that really is
what is needed to keep western anti-Russia hysteria going. None of the things
the Russian government has been accused of doing (let alone the very legitimate
questions about whether or not they even did all of them) merit anything but an
indifferent shrug when compared with the unforgivable evils that America’s
unelected power establishment has been inflicting upon the world, so they need
to weave a narrative about “moral authority” in order to give those accusations
meaning and relevance. And, since the notion of America having moral authority
is contradicted by all facts in evidence, that narrative is necessarily woven
of threads of fantasy and denial.
Establishment
anti-Russia hysteria is all narrative, no substance. It’s sustained by the
talking heads of plutocrat-owned western media making the same unanimous
assertions over and over again in authoritative, confident-sounding tones of
voice without presenting any evidence or engaging with the reality of what
Russia or its rivals are actually doing. The only reason American liberals
believe that Putin is a dangerous boogieman who has taken over their
government, but don’t believe for example that America is ruled by a
baby-eating pedophile cabal, is because the Jake Tappers and Rachel Maddows
have told them to believe one conspiracy theory and not the other. They could
have employed the exact same strategy with any other wholly unsubstantiated conspiracy
narrative and had just as much success.
In
reality, Russia is nothing other than a rival power structure that the
US-centralized empire wants to either collapse or absorb, but they can’t just
come right out and tell the public that they’re dangerously escalating tensions
with a nuclear superpower because westerners live in an invisible empire ruled
by insatiably greedy plutocrats, so they make up nonsense about Putin being
some kind of omnipotent supervillain who has infiltrated the highest levels of US
government and is trying to take over the world.
Of equal
interest to the Defense Secretary’s “moral authority” gibberish is his claim
that Putin’s actions “are designed not to challenge our arms at this point but
to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals.”
I mean,
like… what? So Russia isn’t challenging America militarily and isn’t taking any
actions to attempt to, but it’s trying to, what, hurt America’s feelings? All
this new cold war hysteria and nuclear brinkmanship has basically been America
acting like a bitchy high school drama queen because Russia is saying mean
things about it behind its back? How does a guy named “Mad Dog” get to be such
a thin-skinned little snowflake?
I’m just
playing. Actually, when Mattis says that the Russian government is trying to
“undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals,” he is saying that Moscow is
interrupting the lies that Americans are being told about their government by
the plutocrat-owned media. As we’ve been
discussing a lotrecently, control of the narrative is absolutely
essential for rulers to maintain their rule. When you hear establishment policy
makers babbling about “Russian propaganda” and Putin’s attempts to “undercut
and compromise our belief in our ideals,” all that they are saying is that the
plutocrats who rule America need to be able to control the way Americans think
and vote, and that the Russian government is making it a bit harder for them to
do that.
More and
more, the threads of the establishment narrative are ceasing to be
unconsciously absorbed and are being increasingly consciously examined instead.
This development has ultimately nothing to do with Russia and everything to do
with our species moving out of
its old relationship with mental narrative as it approaches
evolve-or-die time in our challenging new world. I
am greatly encouraged by what I am seeing.
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