By Caitlin Johnstone
July 10, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - A big part of the problem with Yemen is that the
photos of starving kids are too often captioned with
"Ohh, look how sad" instead of "Your government is
doing this on purpose."
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Warmongers are saying, "If we leave Afghanistan
and it returns to Taliban control it will be like
the whole war achieved nothing!"
Uh, yeah. Yeah it will be lots like that. How
about that, huh?
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The only reason Americans think it matters who's
president is because no one's ever compiled all the
data about the entirety of US government behavior
around the world to show what a microscopic fraction
of a percentage point of that data actually changes
between administrations.
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My social media feeds are full of Americans
literally trying to crowdfund their own survival
while the nation's worst are adding hundreds of
billions of dollars to their wealth, but wanting to
change this system makes you an extremist.
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The Assange case isn't about national security,
it's about narrative control. Nothing WikiLeaks
published endangered the American people, it
endangered a globe-spanning empire's ability to
control our understanding of what's happening in the
world. This could not be permitted.
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Listening to The Young Turks
defend themselves from the outrage that has
rightly
come their way in left wing media circles you'd
think Jimmy Dore broke into their studio and forced
Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian at gunpoint to lie
about Aaron Maté being a secret agent for a foreign
government.
Imagine if all the people yelling that it's time
to move on from TYT smearing Maté as a secret agent
of foreign dictators had from the very beginning
just spent all that energy telling Cenk and Ana they
need to retract and apologize for a disgusting and
unacceptable act. If left indie media had simply
united along the very simple and obvious "No we
don't accuse leftist antiwar journalists of being
secret agents for foreign governments", this would
have resolved very quickly and wouldn't have gotten
anywhere near as vicious as it did.
It's not okay to smear antiwar journalists as
secret agents of a foreign government. It's not okay
to smear antiwar journalists as secret agents of a
foreign government. For fuck's sake, people. This
should be the most basic, bare-minimum,
slap-in-the-face obvious position for everyone to
the left of Joe Biden.
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It's just absolutely amazing the amount of
creativity people will pour into coming up with
excuses for supporting the worst impulses of an
unfathomably corrupt and murderous globe-spanning
empire.
❖
The revolution will not be televised, because
someone dug up its old tweets and now the revolution
is too problematic to platform.
❖
The next anti-imperialist socialist voice to rise
to a position of prominence will with absolute
certainty become the subject of many urgent news
reports solemnly informing us that that person is
problematic for some reason. Might be antisemitism,
might be Kremlin cronyism, might be something else,
but they will find something to warn us about, and
they will warn us and warn us until that prominent
voice is distrusted and its influence nullified.
Seriously, try to think of an influential voice
who consistently opposes western imperialism but
hasn't been smeared as an antisemite, a Kremlin
asset, a closet right-winger or a kook at some
point. Such figures simply are not permitted to
emerge without being viciously smeared anymore.
If western leftists ever want to be more than a
glorified group chat, they're going to have to stop
letting this happen. They're eventually going to
have to plant their feet and resolve to keep shoving
toward their agendas regardless of deliberate
divisive concern trolling tactics about the specific
individuals within that movement.
As soon as the capitalists figured out that
leftists actually have values and care about things
while their opponents do not, and that this could be
weaponized, they were guaranteed to keep doing so to
keep the left down. At some point we do need to stop
letting them do this and just go.
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It is good that people are becoming more aware of
the very real distinctions on the American left.
Progressive Democrats are not the same as
anti-imperialist socialists, and pretending
otherwise was only causing unhelpful tension and
confusion. It's good there's more clarity now.
This doesn't mean the two groups need to be
isolated from each other, it just means they're
different and it's important to be aware of that.
There are issues on which the two groups are in
alignment, and they can work together on those
issues. But be aware of the differences; it's just
like how antiwar right-libertarians can work
together on some issues with antiwar socialists, but
it does no one any good to pretend those two groups
are the same. Progressive Democrats can likewise be
worked with on some issues, just be crystal clear on
the differences.
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More and more manipulators are coming out into
the light and being seen for what they are. More and
more often the predators are no longer hidden in the
tallgrass or camouflaged as logs in the river, but
out in the open on a white tile floor with everyone
looking at them.
This trend will continue.
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