Caitlin Johnstone's essay about the death of US free speech — is right on the (pun) money

© 2020 Peter Free

 

26 June 2020

 

 

Returning to the propaganda theme

 

Americans, for the most part, are willing prisoners of their own glaringly false play. As I said yesterday:

 

 

The Lamestream assists socioeconomic Elites in turning "We the People" into easily herded, consumerist, each-other-despising lemmings.

 

This is not a beneficent societal development.

 

A nation comprised of avariciously individualistic, propagandized ignoramuses very probably will not survive against political entities that are less chaotically self-destructive than it is.

 

So, beware the United States' ceaseless Propaganda Machine. It does not operate to our benefit.

 

 

Today, Caitlin Johnstone persuasively addressed the same idea

 

She wrote that:

 

 

[W]herever possible, the power structures which dominate human civilization prefer to do so out of sight and out of mind, ideally having the inmates of the prison serve as their own wardens.

 

[A]n attitude of conformity has been manufactured from the top down to ensure than those who rise to the top of the most influential platforms are the ones who know how to toe the establishment line without being told.

 

People are hired from the same conformity-enforcing universities by executives who were selected by media-owning plutocrats based on their willingness to protect the status quo their plutocratic kingdoms are built upon, and only those who play ball within that system ever rise to major positions of influence.

 

I am . . . reminded of a quote from the movie My Dinner with Andre:

 

“I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.”

 

© 2020 Caitlin Johnstone, “Free Speech” In The US Empire Is As Illusory As “Free-Range” Eggs, CaitlinJohnstone.com (26 June 2020)

 

 

Watch the "My Dinner with Andre" movie clip, here

 

It is a brilliant presentation of what Johnstone is referring to.

 

 

Why is understanding how propaganda works important?

 

Successful brainwashing makes us:

 

 

forget that we have our heads up our asses

 

and

 

extinguishes our motivation to pull them out.

 

 

That's the whole point to the oligarchically controlled "voluntary" suppression of Reality-linked thought.

 

 

This is why I (so often) attack stupidity and greed

 

If we stay stupidly placid, we get fleeced — oppressed — and soul-shredded.

 

Those are not Holy conditions of Being.

 

 

The moral? — Pay attention or drown

 

None of this is hard stuff.

 

It just requires people to stay awake and conscious, regarding what is moving (and why) among our surroundings.

 

Imagine yourself on military patrol, during the (first or second) Battle of Fallujah.

 

Paying attention appears to be a monumental task for most of us. This may explain why genuinely (not pseudo) meditative spiritual disciplines are not popular.

 

I am continually surprised at the high proportion of folk, who unquestioningly accept the (usually vacuously partisan) nonsense and concocted bullshit that are paraded toward and over us.

 

That's what I tell my wife, when she gets irritated with me. Like when I yell at the television, while some Lamestream idiot there is spouting obvious untruths and glaring distortions for the Pablum Public to consume.

 

Yesterday, for instance, PBS's mild-mannered Judy Woodruff complicitly interviewed President Trump's former National Security Advisor John Bolton.

 

Yes, that "Chickenshit" Bolton.

 

Arguably the most supreme among America's many murderously-minded neocon warmongers.

 

Woodruff invited this poisonous creep to advance his views about President Trump's alleged incapacity to be president:

 

 

PBS News Hour, Bolton: House Democrats botched impeachment with ‘partisan process’, PBS.org (25 June 2020)

 

 

This is (and was) exactly like asking hellaciously brown-drooly diarrhea to criticize a turd.

 

Bolton's mental and moral reprehensibility has been many times proven.

 

Yet nevertheless, here comes PBS inviting "Reprehensibility Incarnate" Bolton to expound on President Toddling Donny's alleged shortcomings.

 

 

One knew what Fired John's view was going to be, when he characterized the Trump Administration as "this empty chair in the Oval Office." See the video clip, here, at its 01:40 minute mark.

 

 

We're paying for this 'diarrhea-versus-formed-feces' idiocy?

 

Do we see Caitlin Johnstone's point?

 

We not only build (and voluntarily stay inside) brainwash-delivering gulags, we pay for them.