“If your answer to every failure of government is more
government, you’re an alcoholic trying to drink yourself sober.” Will Spencer
Before people had an easy way to see video of police
shootings, headlines crediting the police with righteous actions couldn’t be
effectively questioned. The police say their job is to preserve law and order.
Watching the videos of what they frequently do eliminates the possibility of
taking that seriously; “one unfortunate incident, collateral damage, a few bad
apples”; Police murder routinely and with immunity. You reply it’s only a few
bad cops, so why don’t the good cops stop the bad ones? There can be good
policing, but good war making is harder to define.
‘Consumers’ don’t think about these things beyond what their
TV tells them. The focus of most ‘consumers’ is sensual pleasure which keeps
them occupied, and if that fails, the backup is drugs to relieve anxiety,
depression and stimulate ‘happiness’; our Brave New World ‘consumers’ are complacent grazing animals at peace in the
fields, nothing to think about. Just bend and chew. Don’t worry, be happy.
‘Consumers’ are unable to turn around and throw off what has been done to them.
They don’t see it. They wouldn’t consider it. They’re living in a universal
super-welfare state. Their needs are satisfied, especially the central need:
pleasure. It isn’t gained or worked for. It’s given, and it requires state
violence, in their minds, to succeed.
America is an authoritarian
society where citizens are trained from infancy to follow orders, and submit to
a cloud of humiliating rituals devised by an ever-expanding range of government
and private “security services” and to worship leaders, police, soldiers,
anyone wearing a uniform, or a business suit. ‘Good’ Americans generally aren’t overly concerned with reality.
Histories, politics, economics, the inner workings of the media, are
complicated subjects best left to experts. Good Americans trust that such
experts explain what happened, or what is happening, to them. With all the demands of work, family,
Facebook, Twitter, shopping, keeping current with the Kardashians, there simply
aren’t enough hours in the day to scrutinize everything ‘our’ leaders are
doing, or the “information” the TV tells them.
Controlling any population for any length of time, requires
some measure of consent. We live in a mafia state that uses the facade of
democracy, whose rulers use the media and judiciary to stay in power.
Terrorists don’t take away our rights: government does.
Politics is how we describe a violent system that uses
threats and force to steal from its inhabitants. It molds society through naked
aggression; a willingness to kill someone for violating a seatbelt law or not
obeying a uniformed state assassin.
Is there anything a politician can/would do that would drive
Americans to do the right thing? The American political landscape is thoroughly
built on the idea of law and order enforced by those who don’t police their own
ranks. Murder begins where self-defense ends and government always turns that
on its head. There’s wailing by the usual suspects in the media and in the
police bureaucracies of a war on cops in a Lewis Carroll world where
police/state violence is civilization and defending yourself against such
government hooliganism is barbarism. There’s a new law in the works to grant
total immunity to any law enforcement official for any of their actions:
Gestapo anyone?
The average government-controlled American ‘consumer’ is an
intensively vaccinated borderline autistic fat man slumped in front of a screen
battling a high-fructose corn syrup comedown.
A government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims,
enslaves, breaks its own laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power
at almost every turn can’t be trusted.
Every society is ruled by powerful elite. They prey upon ‘consumers’
working their way into positions of power and influence, using a combination of
brains, connections, and nonsense. The mob generally looks up to them,
impressed by the show. You can hear the difference in how the ‘news’ is
presented these days and the way it once was. It has the ring of being written
by Goebbels these days where once it had a Jack Webb ring to it.
Dostoyevsky
wrote: “Above all, don’t lie to
yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a
point that he can’t distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so
loses all respect for himself and for others.” Orwell knew when you limit
what can be said you eventually limit what can be thought: ‘consumers’ lie to
themselves without knowing that they’re doing it. Hold any opinions you
like; but only a narrow range of approved
opinions will be allowed in public. Our own soft totalitarianism hasn’t yet advanced to the complete
fabrication of history, although that isn’t far off.
When your first
response to an attack by foreign invaders is to crack down on your own
citizens, it’s not unreasonable to wonder who ‘our’ leaders blame for ‘terrorist’
attacks. America has its own “two minutes of hate” each night on the TV just
like Orwell predicted.
‘Consumers’ are
distrustful of each other, so they’re incapable of presenting a united front
against the threats posed by ‘our’ government and its corporate partners. Politicians
are despised by realistic people because they won’t leave them alone. They decree how we will be allowed to live,
what we must do and what we can’t do. It’s
none of their business.
In America one group
demonizes all Muslims and calls for more war. An opposing faction forgives all
Muslims calling for peace and understanding. The two sides mindlessly shout at
one another and drown out the obvious larger global issues. ‘Consumers’ are
consequently made impotent, irrelevant and ignored: divided and conquered.
The concentration of
so many people opposing Trump, rather than opposing American corruption and
wars, serves to distract. His attempt to reset American relations and reduce
tension with Russia is used to lay the foundation for impeachment and/or
charges of treason. Diplomacy is dead and the Empire’s protection racket grows as
it commits mass atrocities abroad; there’s no reason to believe they haven’t
and won’t do so here, to rally support for an ever-expanding police state.
‘Our’ government has lost legitimacy in the eyes of
‘consumers’ who rebelled by electing an outsider in the form of Trump: The
collapse of American traditional politics is because its bankrupt capitalist economy has become something else. The ruling
class has decided to blame it all on Russia. ‘Our government’ is tearing itself
apart in a pointless power struggle within the ruling parties who no longer
have legitimacy to govern.
When your mind surrenders to whatever official foolishness
is being fed to it you’ve become a totally compliant, scramble-headed,
functionally psychotic member of society, whose attention span is measured in
seconds, and whose brain you can fill full of fancy medicines to keep it from
completely melting down in response to the stress of the cognitive dissonance
that it has to deal with daily. Orwell captured this mental disagreement in ‘1984’ where the Party executes the
sudden switch from war with Eurasia to war with Eastasia, and Party members
adjust their thinking accordingly. It’s Mind Control. You bombard folks with
conflicting realities and contradictory information until they’re rendered
incapable of thinking critically. Then you fill their heads with whatever brand
of psycho nonsense your cult is peddling.
Every day it gets more absurd. Who says Trump ain’t a good
politician. His lies are as good as any other political lies.
Democracy is impossible with a misinformed public. Oligarchs
need it to be that way. I’m tired of being told to ignore my lying eyes, to ignore
common laws of physics and common sense, to accept ever more implausible
explanations for obvious causes of events. This is the age of deception
sponsored by the forces that organize modern corporate/oligarch rule.
The focus of journalism is to insure the national fictions
continue. Power in America is displayed by who controls access to mass media
journalists who silence viewpoints that threaten the System that provides
‘journalists’ with a livelihood. The crafty way to keep ‘consumers’ passive and
obedient is to control the range of acceptable opinion, allowing lively debate
within that arena thereby giving the illusion that free thinking is happening,
but all the time the system’s aims are being reinforced by limiting the range
of debate, conspiracy theorists, anyone.
If a nation’s
leader’s doing what that nation’s public wants is a reflection of how much that
nation is a democracy, then a person would be hard-pressed to say that America is
a ‘democracy’. What dictatorship calls itself one? Our ‘news’ media are propagandists for
government so can America really be a
democracy? Americans, who
receive most of their ‘news’ from broadcast media, are virtually mental slaves
of the aristocrats who control those ‘news’ media. They can’t see outside their
tunnel, which was designed by agents of those aristocrats.
We don’t have a
government that we approve, but one that we tolerate. The oligarchs who control
it also control the ‘news’ media: To control the ‘news’ that the public
receives, is to control them. Where was real
coverage of the coup d’états we raised, supported, and enabled in Ukraine and
in Libya for recent examples? The “coverage” is limited to the lives of
tabloid celebrities and distortions of any objectivity.
Why do you think
that might be?
To keep ‘consumers’
dumbed down, uninformed, working, taxed, consuming, mesmerized by sports and
sex, and bored to prevent them from taking any action against government that’s
becoming more tyrannical, and repressive daily. America is tribal in its
divisions and it has nothing to do with thinking.
American attacks are
called defense and Orwell is proved correct daily.
Read this excerpt
from the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the conservative majority
ruled that corporations are persons, with all the rights and privileges
pertaining thereto.
“We now conclude
that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not
give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have
influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those
officials are corrupt. The appearance
of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose
faith in our democracy.”
‘Our’ system serves the few at the expense of the many.
“True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at
one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them
the desire to do right is precisely the same.” ― Robert E. Lee
No comments:
Post a Comment