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Poverty Is A Weapon Of The Powerful
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
By Caitlin Johnstone
June 10, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" -Learn enough about what’s happening in the world
and you realize that most people in your society
have worldviews that are completely and utterly
wrong. This can seem bold, perhaps even arrogant,
but if most people weren’t deluded about the world,
the world wouldn’t be so fucked.
And it’s not that people are dumb; intelligence
has little to do with it. Some of the most
intelligent people on earth promote the same deluded
worldviews as everyone else. The problem isn’t
intellect, it’s manipulation, and anyone can be
manipulated no matter how smart they are. This
mass-scale manipulation is the result of wealthy
people buying up narrative influence in the form of
media, political influence, think tanks, lobbying,
NGOs, etc, in conjunction with the mass-scale
manipulations of the powerful government agencies
which are allied with them.
The powerful work to manipulate the way the
general public thinks, acts and votes to ensure that
they remain in power. They pay special attention to
who the most influential people in our society are,
which is why the most prominent voices are so often
the most delusional. There are filters in place
designed to keep anyone from rising to positions of
influence if they don’t support the consensus
worldview promoted by the oligarchic empire, and
once they do rise to influence they are actively
herded into echo chambers which reinforce that
worldview.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that the
most influential voices in a virulently capitalist
society will be those who have profited and
benefited from the status quo. Of course they’re
going to believe the system is working fine; it
treats them like royalty.
This is why you can’t defer to recognized
authorities when it comes to understanding your
world; the system which selects and installs those
authorities is designed to serve the powerful, not
to tell the truth. The responsibility for
understanding your world is yours, and yours alone.
Poverty itself is a weapon of the powerful. Keep
people too poor to fund political campaigns and you
keep them powerless. Keep them too busy to research
and they can’t see through your propaganda. Keep
them desperate and you can get them hating each
other instead of hating you. They’re not just
robbing ordinary people so they can have more for
themselves; the poverty itself actually
benefits them. They would benefit from keeping you
poor even if it gave them nothing else.
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It is not a coincidence that the most crucial
nation in the oligarchic empire, the US, has the
highest level of this kind of weaponized poverty.
There’s a lot of power riding on what happens in
America, so the powerful do everything they can to
keep Americans under control.
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People who act like China lifting millions out of
poverty is no big deal have never lived in poverty.
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If you don’t oppose western imperialist agendas
against China then none of your other
anti-imperialism matters. All of the western
empire’s aggressions on the world stage are
ultimately about smashing China; that’s checkmate on
the global chessboard in the eyes of the
empire. Preventing the rise of any other nation has
been the foremost priority of the US empire
since the fall of
the Soviet Union. All the other little chess
moves on the board have revolved around this
ultimate goal. China is the only nation in a
position to surpass the US.
The western empire has been acutely aware that
China would need to be smashed since before the
empire had its headquarters in Washington. As
Winston Churchill
once put it:
“I think we shall have to take the Chinese in
hand and regulate them. I believe that as
civilized nations become more powerful they will
get more ruthless, and the time will come when
the world will impatiently bear the existence of
great barbaric nations who may at any time arm
themselves and menace civilized nations. I
believe in the ultimate partition of China—I
mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it
in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to
triumph.”
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Uh-oh, looks like Peru is going to need some help
with its Freedom and Democracy. Anyone know any
powerful governments who might be interested in
helping Peru get some Freedom and Democracy?
❖
Still mad at Assad for arming Al Qaeda and ISIS
against himself and then imposing starvation
sanctions on Syrians to keep himself from rebuilding
the country.
❖
I’m writing a horror movie about a group of
psychopathic murderers inserting themselves into the
world’s most powerful positions and terrorizing
entire populations using the most deadly military
force ever assembled.
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It’s weird how few of the people opposing
specific aspects of the imperial war machine do so
on the foundational principle that murdering people
is wrong and trying to dominate the entire planet is
bad.
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Electoral politics is decoy revolution. Don’t
like the status quo? Elect Obama for Hope and
Change! Still dislike the status quo? Elect Trump,
he’ll fight the establishment! Oh no, Trump’s a
fascist! Quick, fight fascism by electing Biden! And
you elect the status quo each time.
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Trump may have permanently broken liberals’
ability to think about politics in a way that
doesn’t revolve around Trump.
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Only infantile bootlickers want government-tied
monopolistic internet platforms controlling what
people can and cannot say about government Covid
responses that affect everyone.
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Oligarchs using disasters to rob the people and
siphon their wealth to themselves is a feature, not
a bug, of capitalism. Covid isn’t an aberration but
a continuation of a well-established pattern, one
which will necessarily last as long as the
exploitation of the working class.
“The Covid scam is the most evil thing happening
in the world!”
No, you only think that because most of the time
this well-established pattern doesn’t affect you
personally in a concrete and observable way. This
has been happening for a very long time, and it’s
going to keep happening until the end of capitalism.
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Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com
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