July 20, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - - "
Scrum"
As some readers may have noticed, Antony Blinken has the State Department festooning
its embassies around the world with “BLM”
banners and the rainbow flag of the sexual identity
movement known commonly as LGBTQI+. As our virtuous
secretary of state explained in April, when he
authorized these advertisements for America’s
splendidly raised consciousness, the BLM pennant
commemorates the murder of George Floyd in
Minneapolis last year; the familiar LGBTQI+ colors
will fly on our flagpoles in foreign capitals “for
the duration of the 2021 Pride season.” So our
guitar-strumming chief diplomat put it when
announcing this… this policy, I suppose we are to
call it.
Turning a just cause into cover for an extremely
aggressive foreign policy makes for a pretty weird
sight, if you have seen any of the pictures. Then
again, so does our Tony as he flits around the world
on the wings of an angel.
In the same line, there is that CIA
recruitment advertisement made public in May,
the instantly infamous “woke video.” This is an
absolute doozy, as all who have given it the 2
minutes 26 seconds it requires seem to agree. I am a
woman of color, I am the daughter of immigrants, I
understand complicated policy questions but can belt
out a folk song in Spanish, I suffer a trendy form
of anxiety, “I earned my way up the ranks of this
organization,” and I am a spook: This is the gist,
as insidious as it is hopeless.
“The intelligence community,” we are
reminded, is an equal opportunity employer. One is
not surprised: It has long been evident there are
simply not enough Yalies to get done all the
subversions, coup-fomenting, drug-dealing,
assassinations, and media corruption the agency is
charged with executing—all in its defense of
democracy, of course.
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch, those among us with
the shrill voices of children continue to defend the
veracity of a chemical weapons attack in Syria three
years ago even as the evidence of a put-up job and
the corruption rife at the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is open-and-shut.
Aaron Maté has owned this story since his reports in The
Grayzone appeared earlier this year, though
others, including your
columnist, were on the case at the time the
false flag was hoisted.
To be noted: The mainstream press has
scandalously left the OPCW story unreported. It is
independent media, or allegedly independent media,
that smear Maté and others with the usual
light-as-air charges—creatures of Assad, paid by the
Russians, and so on. An especially vulgar
commentator who goes by the Twitter name Vaush—and
who poses as a “libertarian socialist,” we must not
miss—now takes to comparing “Assadists” such as Maté,
whose reporting has been exemplary, with Holocaust
deniers.
Lmao Assadists are literally Holocaust-denial tier with their "arguments". Sad!
Out in Silicon Valley, we have Reddit, among the
most influential social media platforms now active,
censoring thousands of users whose views do not
conform to official versions of events and to our
official ideology altogether. This is evidently the
work of one Jessica Ashooh, a 30–something who moved
over from the Atlantic Council—NATO–funded, U.S.
government–funded—five years ago to serve as
“director of policy.”
Ashooh’s background, which includes a spell as a
propaganda adviser in Abu Dhabi, is strongly
suggestive of spookery, or, at a minimum,
objectionable collaboration with intelligence
agencies.
The New Yorker published a
squeaky-clean account of
Ashooh’s censorship regime as she arrived at Reddit.
Alan Macleod, an admirably scrupulous reporter for MintPress
News, dispensed with the fluff and fog in a
straight-ahead piece on
Ashooh published a month ago.
There are numerous other such cases. Notable
among them is YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s recent
explanation, in an interview at
the World Economic Forum, the Google-owned video
platform’s conscientious efforts to direct viewers
away from independent news sites in favor of
“responsible sources”—this in the interest of our
democracy, like everything else in this line one
reads about these days:
The sooner we recognize these and many similar
events as disparate dimensions of a concerted war
waged against us, the better we will understand the
air we breathe and the water we drink. The sooner we
cast these events in an historical context, the more
readily will we grasp the gravity of our
circumstances. Given the remarkable speed with which
this war proceeds in the wrong direction, I count
these circumstances very near to dire.
Control of perception and control of information
are the fields on which this war is waged. What is
at issue? What is the prize?
For well more than a century, foreign policy has
been the purview of sequestered elites—white, WASP,
typically of New England background. America’s
conduct abroad was their purchase. There was no need
to defend this arrangement because no one challenged
it, with exceptions such as the Anti–Imperialist
League at the turn of the last century. In a series
of books published in the 1920s, notably The
Phantom Public (Macmillan, 1927), Walter
Lippmann fairly celebrated the state of ignorance
this imposed on the public:
The private citizen today has come to
feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back
row…. Public affairs are in no convincing way
his affairs. They are for the most part
invisible. They are managed, if they are managed
at all, at distant centers, from behind the
scenes, by unnamed powers.
Lippmann was writing about the cultivation of
ignorance to the advantage of the elites whose
ordained right to govern without popular knowledge
or interference was a running theme in his many
books.
During the Cold War, with the emergence of news
departments at the new television networks and later
on new communications technologies, maintaining this
ignorance required a certain measure of conscious
effort. It was during this period culture itself was
turned to the state’s purposes.
The results are before us. They are two.
One, the extent to which most Americans are
utterly oblivious to what goes on in the world
around them is not short of astonishing. Even the
educated, above-average reader of The New York
Times typically has not the foggiest idea of
the truths Maté unearthed in his OPCW reporting, or
the Pentagon and the CIA’s support of the fanatical
jihadists who have sought the downfall of the
(secular) government in Damascus for the past
decade, or the immense fraud of Russiagate, or
countless other matters of consequence.
Read the above-noted New Yorker piece on
censorship at Reddit. Side-by-side and without a
pause, read Alan Macleod’s MintPress piece
on the same topic. This is the manufacture of
ignorance as plainly as it can be displayed. It is
by way of this prevalent ignorance that the U.S. has
turned itself from republic to imperial power in the
course of seven decades while uttering the word
“empire” is counted evidence of a deranged mind.
Who? Us?
Two, as the reading exercise just recommended
will indicate, our prevalent ignorance is now
challenged—and again, new technologies are the
vehicle by which this challenge is pressed. And to
challenge American ignorance is more or less
inevitably to challenge American empire.
Take note: Your Times-reading friends,
all those addicted to the baby talk of NPR, the
silliness of MSNBC, and the faux seriousness of CNN
will proceed happily in the dark, having nothing to
worry about because they do not know anything and do
not want to be disturbed. No, it is the producers
and consumers of independent media who are the
concern of those elites defending themselves against
the scrutiny of a threatening minority of people who
have learned the value of thinking and seeing for
themselves.
Those of a certain age should have no trouble
recalling the extensive FBI and intelligence
programs fashioned to infiltrate the left (as it was
then), to plant agents provocateurs, to
cultivate sectarian division and violence (just as
the CIA did and does in nations it wishes to
destabilize). The soporific suburbanites washing
their cars on Saturday afternoon were not the Cold
War-era worry. Those with their eyes opened or
opening were the worry.
This was the nature of the war then and it is the
nature of the war now.
There is no left in our time—there is only the
“left.” It is now mere fashion statement to identify
oneself as “leftist.” Gore Vidal once remarked, “We
don’t have politics in America. We have elections.”
To borrow and bend the phrase, We don’t have a left
in America, we have passingly stylish poseurs,
almost invariably ill-educated and ill-read.
Given how lost these people are in the quite
beyond belief rubbish of “wokery” and all the bunkum
attaching to identity politics—an ignorance of
another order—our “left” is a sitting duck for those
intent on leading it down harmless paths and away,
far, far away from all questions to do with power.
Keep those flags flying, Tony: Bomb Syrians and
sanction Venezuelans in the name of black and gay
people. Tape pitiable people in the CIA’s corridors
as they spout all the coded language of identity, a
language without meaning. Keep the poseur pundits
and their audiences—“I’m progressive,” “I’m a
leftist,” “I’m a socialist,” “I read The Nation”—harmlessly
preoccupied with the distractions they need to
assuage the emptiness of their lives.
Keep everyone calm as you tell them that
protecting them from the perilous impurities of free
speech only looks like censorship.
This is the war some Americans, a few, wage
against most Americans in the service of an empire
that must be occluded so long as this is possible.
This is how it is waged, and where. Understanding
this is the first step out of our darkness and
toward some flickering light.
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