Other Minds

 

“I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.” Senator George McGovern

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“Which of these brave young men dying in the rice paddies of Vietnam might have written a symphony,” he said in a quiet voice. “Which of them might have written a beautiful poem or might have cured cancer? Which of them might have played in the World Series or given us the gift of laughter from a stage, or helped build a bridge or a university? Which of them might have taught a small child to read? It is our responsibility to let those men live.”  Robert F Kennedy – excerpt from the book “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” – by David Talbot.

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We claim to be a tolerant society and our social media kingpins ensure liberal soccer moms and sensitive college kids that the deplorables will be de-platformed for spreading hate and bile. We have been endlessly warned by the right-wing that bleeding heart lefty corporations run America and we are becoming dangerously soft, hopelessly woke. The Chinese will eat us for breakfast!

But now that mask is coming off in all its Nazi glory. Twitter and Facebook have given users the green light to praise Azov with impunity!

On Facebook, you can safely proclaim your support for these “real heroes,” you can salute their “patriotic role” in the war, promote them as they “courageously defend” Ukraine. Now you can even call for violence against “Russians” and get away with it.

We are indulging our blood lust. It has not been this bad for years. We used to do this with Iraq every decade or so. We kill several hundred thousand of them or maybe a million until we get bored and move on to another country we can throw “against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

Americans live inside a prison where they have more humans locked up than anywhere else in the world. We are surveilled constantly. We are subjected to a trans-media propaganda network that would make all the tyrants of the twentieth-century blush. We might as well have big screens in the sky spooking us with myriad Emmanuel Goldsteins. We have so many: Vladimir Putin, the Specter of Trump, COVID-19, the Ayatollah, Xi Jinping, ISIS, truckers, the un-vaxxed, the un-boosted, the Taliban, Maduro, Assad, North Korea, Hamas rockets, drug dealers, Communists, immigrants, RT, etc.

Unfortunately, this would cost a lot of money. We need those tax-dollars for Israel, the coming war with China, arms for our brave neo-Nazi proxies, and beefing up our nuclear weapons arsenal. Besides, TV and the social media feeds still work just as good.

Zelensky is wrong. We lost our humanity a while ago. Before it’s too late, we should get it back. Kicking off World War III would be a catastrophic detour. – Connor Freeman, ‘Have We Lost Our Humanity’ – The Libertarian Institute, 3/17/22 (excerpt via natyliesbaldwin.com)

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People get outraged when I say we are being aggressively propagandized about Ukraine, but this fact is not seriously in dispute. The mass media have been relatively straightforward about it, though of course they fail to mention their own role in the propaganda campaign.

It seems like those who are new to the concept think that “propaganda” means making up fictional stories whole cloth, so they mistakenly assume that this is a claim that Russia never invaded and Ukrainians aren’t dying and suffering. But all it really means is that the narrative framing is manipulated. They’re not lying that there’s a war, they’re just manipulating the way people think about the war. How it’s happening, who’s to blame for it, whose agendas are served by getting it started and keeping it going, etc.

No good liar lies all the time. The best liars very seldom tell full-blown lies, always preferring to lie by omission, by distortion, by half-truth, by disproportionate focus, and by uncritically reporting other people’s lies in a way that suggests they’re true.

It’s all moving so fast now. Censorship and propaganda, the two arms of imperial narrative control, are escalating like nothing we’ve ever seen before. The doors on information control are being slammed and bolted shut all around the world as fast as the empire managers can get away with it. Caitlin Johnstone – ‘They’re Enslaving Our Minds and Driving Us Toward Destruction’ (excerpt – via caitlinjohnstone.com)

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“We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear.  There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy [God]. He [God] wants men to be concerned with what they do; our [devils] business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them” – The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

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“Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.” ― Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor

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“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”
― Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

 

Photo by Dan Wayman on Unsplash