The Only Truly Civilized People are Anti-War

The Only Truly Civilized People Are Anti-War

lewrockwell.com

By Gary D. Barnett

December 5, 2019

“What is left after war is silence: The silence of the death; the silence of the debris; the silence of the birds! After war even the screams of sadness are silent because the pain is in the very depths of the soul!”  ~ Mehmet Murat ildan

Justification for war has taken many paths. All those paths were tainted and immoral, and all those paths led only to death and destruction. There is never a need for war; there is only a want for war. This hard fact is very disturbing to those who have been manipulated through fear to not only support and accept war, but to embrace the very concept of national pride and aggression. This I believe exposes the major failing of man, as the killing of others is also the killing of the human soul.

War knows no bounds. It is indiscriminate in its brutality, in its scope, and in its torturous methods. It matters not who are the victims, whether men, women, children, entire families, communities, or the flora and fauna of nature. It breeds massive suffering, famine, death, and homelessness, and leaves only stark landscapes filled with the lifeless bodies of rotting flesh. It is literally the curse of mankind.

If war were waged in order to solve a legitimate local threat due to an active attack on our soil, it would be self-defense, not war, and would have to end immediately once that threat was squelched. Any force evident after the immediate threat subsided, would be nothing more than pure aggression, and therefore criminal and immoral. Considering that all U.S. wars since the inception of this country have never been due to any direct attack on the mainland, and therefore not self-defense, the entirety of U.S. war history has been one of only barbarous invasion. This is a difficult truth to accept, but until accepted by the masses, war will be unending, and intensely perilous to civilization.

The idea of war is not normally one of the people at large, unless that idea is planted in their psyche due to the trickery of the controlling class. This is normally accomplished by fomenting fear among the common citizenry due to the creation of false-flag strategies of terror meant to cause alarm. Heavy mainstream media propaganda is used to spread lies about alleged monsters from afar. The state can create an enemy simply by false claims and accusations about everything from unfair trade, non-existent weapons production, charges of human rights abuses, and a myriad of other reasons that can lead to regime change operations through aggressive measures. Natural human emotions are easy to stoke, and the general populace is often fooled into a false sense of rage that turns into acceptance of heinous acts carried out by the state.

Elite controllers and the puppet political class seek war in order to gain support in times of popular dissent or disapproval. They seek war to support the banking and corporate class for monetary gain. They seek war to gain territory, whether by actual possession or in order to take geopolitical control. They seek war to steal the natural resources of other countries, and in the process exploit the people for their own gain. And in all cases, mortal invasion by these warmongers is meant to expand empire. Currently, especially considering the U.S., this seems to be a primary factor, as the future of war appears to be in large part based on a global consolidation of power by a select group of oligarchs mainly outside the political arena, but in concert with them.

Many refer to this plot as the creation of a “New World Order,” including some of those responsible for orchestrating this coup. In fact, this seems to be the desired and planned agenda of the fascist oligarchs. Of course, this is almost always attributed by the mainstream to “conspiracy theory,” but then that gives credence to my assertion, as those who scream “conspiracy theory,” a term coined purposely by the CIA, are normally trying to eliminate or marginalize the truth tellers. Actually, the globalization of the politics of control is now in the advanced stage, so a conspiracy is already evident, and is not theory.

It is crucial to understand that war is always about money, power, and control. Without ever being directly threatened or having its mainland attacked, the United States has been at war 93% of its entire existence. How could this be possible since there has never been any legitimate reason to defend this country from aggression at home? This should be a stark reminder to the bourgeoisie who in the past were fooled into supporting state murder, to rethink their undying support for the criminal and murderous policies advanced by this nation-state called America.

There have been plenty of bad people and bad regimes, and countries that have a history of committing heinous acts of war in the past. There is any number of brutal dictators, tyrants, and evil politicians in this world, all with control over military might. But none have ever reached the level of death, destruction, and military presence as the U.S. Empire. This is not pleasant to hear, but it is the truth. With that knowledge, it is time for Americans to stop the terror and murderous wars committed by their own country, because this country is the world leader in violence. It is unethical to condemn the acts of those in other lands when one’s own acts are far more savage and deadly. Common ethics require correcting self before attempting to correct others.

Civilized society requires a peace-loving, anti-war stance. With war, no true civilization exists, as war brings about barbarity, depravity, and inhumanity toward mankind. That is the essence of a cold and heartless society, not one that embraces culture, intellect, art, compassion and enlightenment. Peace and harmony amongst people is the only way to create a civilized society, and one that will sustain and prosper throughout time.

The Best of Gary D. Barnett

Wall Street Journal investigation confirms Google operates censorship blacklist

Source

http://www.wsws.org

Andre Damon

18 November 2019

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal has confirmed many of the central allegations made by the World Socialist Web Site in 2017 regarding Google’s censorship of the internet.

In an extensive article published Friday, the Journal concludes that, contrary to Google’s repeated assertions, the company maintains blacklists of individual websites and intervenes directly to manipulate individual search results.

On July 27, 2017, the World Socialist Web Site reported that changes to Google’s search algorithm, internally dubbed “Project Owl,” had drastically reduced search traffic to left-wing, antiwar and progressive websites.

The WSWS based its assertions on Google’s public declarations that it was seeking to “surface more authoritative content” and demote “alternative viewpoint[s],” as well as detailed data from the WSWS’s analytics systems and data provided by other websites and publicly available web and search traffic estimators.

Based on these data points, the WSWS concluded that Google was operating a blacklist of opposition news outlets, the primary impact of which was to restrict access to left-wing and antiwar websites.

The WSWS was a central target of this initiative. As we explained: “Google has severed links between the World Socialist Web Site and the 45 most popular search terms that previously directed readers to the WSWS. The physical censorship implemented by Google is so extensive that of the top 150 search terms that, as late as April 2017, connected the WSWS with readers, 145 no longer do so.”

On August 25, 2017, David North, the chairperson of the WSWS International Editorial Board, published an open letter to Google asserting:

Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree. Political blacklisting is not a legitimate exercise of whatever may be Google’s prerogatives as a commercial enterprise. It is a gross abuse of monopolistic power. What you are doing is an attack on freedom of speech.

These assertions have been dramatically confirmed by the Wall Street Journal investigation. Its report concludes:

Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by US or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.

The report went on to substantiate its claim that the company’s actions were in contradiction to its public statements:

Google has said in congressional testimony it doesn’t use blacklists. Asked in a 2018 hearing whether Google had ever blacklisted a “company, group, individual or outlet … for political reasons,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of public policy, responded: “No, ma’am, we don’t use blacklists/whitelists to influence our search results,” according to the transcript.

But the newspaper’s investigation concluded that Google takes “what the company calls ‘manual actions’ against specific websites,” adding, “The company could also blacklist a website, or remove it altogether.”

The Journal report argues that Ben Gomes, “one of Google’s early search executives,” was an early advocate of direct, manual intervention into search terms. It was Gomes who announced what would later be known as “Project Owl” in an April 25, 2017 blog post under the title, “Our latest quality improvements for Search.”

In that blog post, Google claimed that its efforts to promote “authoritative” news sources were an extension of its attempts to combat efforts to “’game’ our systems in order to appear higher in search results.” But the investigation by the Wall Street Journal reveals this to be a total fraud.

“There’s this idea that the search algorithm is all neutral and goes out and combs the web and comes back and shows what it found, and that’s total BS,” the newspaper cites an unnamed former executive as saying. “Google deals with special cases all the time.”

The report documents how the company maintains its blacklists:

Engineers known as “maintainers” are authorized to make and approve changes to blacklists. It takes at least two people to do this; one person makes the change, while a second approves it, according to the person familiar with the matter.

The Journal reviewed a draft policy document from August 2018 that outlines how Google employees should implement an “anti-misinformation” blacklist aimed at blocking certain publishers from appearing in Google News and other search products.

Its report continues:

Google’s culture of publicly resisting demands to change results has diminished, current and former employees said. A few years ago, the company dismantled a global team focused on free-speech issues that, among other things, publicized the company’s legal battles to fight changes to search results, in part because Google had lost several of those battles in court, according to a person familiar with the change… “Free expression was no longer a winner,” the person said.

The investigation by the Wall Street Journal raises serious questions about the coverage of Google’s censorship in the New York Times. After publishing a report on September 27, 2017 on the front page of its business section concerning the WSWS’s open letter opposing Google’s censorship, including an interview with David North, the Times went on to attempt to discredit accusations that Google was carrying out political censorship.

In a follow-up article, Daisuke Wakabayashi, who conducted the interview with North, sought to whitewash Google’s censorship regime, echoing the company’s self-serving denials without any serious examination of the facts. Wakabayashi wrote: “Google said political ideology was not a factor in any aspect of its search results. Google said that whether a user is conservative or liberal is not part of the information collected by the company, and that it didn’t categorize web pages by political leanings.”

This, too, was a fraud. Google’s decision about which sites were “authoritative” was clearly political in nature.

In 2018, Google set up a “news initiative” to “Clean Up False News,” as the New York Times reported. Among its partners are the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, all of which circulated false statements by the Bush administration regarding so-called “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, among countless other lies.

Google’s statements about promoting “authoritative” news outlets is code for promoting news outlets that support US foreign policy and the lies that underpin it, because, as the Journal writes, “search is a zero-sum game: A change that helps lift one result inevitably pushes down another.”

Aside from the initial report in the New York Times and a report by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, the vast majority of corporate news outlets simply ignored the WSWS’s reporting.

But notably, before he was gagged and arrested, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange penned a letter to an online event organized by the WSWS warning about the dangers of internet censorship. It stated:

While the internet has brought about a revolution in people’s ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting democratic phenomena has shaken existing establishments to their core. Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially, logistically and financially integrated with existing elites, have moved to re-establish discourse control… I commend WSWS for drawing attention to this phenomenon.

In the three years since Google announced its efforts to bury “alternative viewpoint[s],” the censorship drive by major technology corporations has only intensified. In multiple mass deletions, Facebook and Twitter have removed left-wing accounts and pages with millions of followers.

Last month, Twitter announced that it would ban all political advertisements on its platform, while Facebook, despite the declarations by Mark Zuckerberg that it will not carry out political censorship, announced that it would remove any posts that include the name of the alleged CIA “whistleblower” in the Trump impeachment inquiry.

The motivation for the relentless efforts at political censorship promoted by all factions of the political establishment is their fear of the growth of working-class opposition all over the world, which is bound up with the growing audience for socialism.

Andre Damon

Sam Spruce: My Political Considerations Today

Sam Spruce

Nov 17, 2019

Jeremy Corbyn

MY POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS TODAY

One of the biggest problems in society at the moment seems to be the lack of correct cognitive models of the socioeconomic situation. I am on the internet quite a lot and read people’s comments about money, about billionaires, about poverty, about the failing social services, the benefit system, the failing NHS and very rarely do their ideas about these issues match mine. So I try to explain where some of the problems lie and it is difficult because we don’t even have the language to refer to correct cognitive tokens to talk about the correct relationships between things. Occasionally I attempt to describe some of the underlying issues to create a perspective that enables a different interpretation and understanding about some aspect of all this.

But broadly speaking we are struggling to coordinate our communication to make collective sense of various issues. A simple example would be that people complain that Tesco should pay their taxes as if Tesco is an immoral entity doing harm to the world. Tesco is a fine company and does a lot of good. But I can’t say that because, according to those people who interpret Tesco as doing evil, it puts me on the wrong side in their model of the world. Most people who simply think Tesco is great are generally thinking about it in limited terms and are supporting the economic model in which it exists. The thing about Tesco is it is the emergent manifestation of the underlying socioeconomic interpretations currently in existence in the collective mind of the people operating in the system. In other words Tesco is a successful and productive company in the current dynamics of how we operate. If there is something wrong – and there certainly is – then it is the mechanisms by which we are operating.

Noam Chomsky makes an important observation that many of the world’s most serious problems could be solved by simply abiding by the law. He doesn’t go on to make the point, but I will, that the significant issue is consistency. In other words it doesn’t matter what those laws are, what matters is that they are followed consistently. That way, if things aren’t working out then you can alter the laws. So if you have a plan you have to stick to it. Not ad infinitum but whilst you are enacting the plan you have to stick to it. If it isn’t working out then you don’t breach the plan and carry on because then, when things are not working, you don’t know if it is your breaching of the plans or the plans that are at fault. The approach of attempting to fix the situation by breaching the plans gives rise to that well known frustration that “it is one law for them and another law for us” scenario. Very often those breaking the law in high places perceive what they are doing which breaks the law as acting to prevent the strict adherence to the law creating a negative result. The problem with Tesco is we need more appropriate plans and laws.

So why did the Tories underfund the NHS? It strikes me as most interesting that the Tories did not need to underfund the NHS to achieve the plan to privatise the health service. In fact, it may be the very thing that scuppers their plans. And so it is ironic that their underfunding has at least highlighted that something is wrong in the minds of the population. Whilst the cognitive model of how the NHS operates is not understood by the general public then they perceive it as underfunding and it makes sense for people to agree it needs more funding. It probably doesn’t.

It is the restructuring of the NHS in line with the neoliberal cognitive model that is causing the majority of the problems we see. I will point out that I have just used the term “neoliberal” which is only just floating into the collective cognitive model enough that I can sometimes use it as a cognitive token without having to explain in detail what it is. Without the word “neoliberal” I would need to write an essay on neoliberalism before I could carry on. The restructuring of the NHS from a service provided by the collection of people it serves to a pyramid marketing system to incentivise people to work in the industry for profit in order to render a service we collectively desire is fundamentally self contradictory and cannot work. So, even without underfunding, the NHS would be in crisis because a lot of the money currently supplied from the ‘government’ is paid to independent corporations who are in it for the sole purpose of rendering a profit for shareholders.

Say the NHS transport costs 100 per annum then they put it out to tender and a company offers to provide the transport for 90 then the ‘NHS’ appears to be getting the same service for 10 less than it used to and this is understood to be more economically efficient. Then the private company needs to keep 10 for profit leaving 80 to pay for the transport. The private company is not being bad, these are simply the rules of the system. Now, in simple terms, you get 80% of the transport you once had for 90% of the cost. There are two simple ways that can be employed to render what looks like the same service. One is to not invest in the infrastructure by, for example, not servicing the ambulances as often or not purchasing new ones when they are needed, and the other is to pay the workers less for the same job. The private companies don’t mind because when the system needs investment they simply don’t tender for next year’s contract. They did some work and they gained some profit – that is what they are about. But the whole system begins to collapse.

The American insurance-based health care system costs about six times as much for the same product as the NHS. And it is not even provided for all the population. But for those that get it, the service is of a high quality akin to the service previously supplied by the NHS. The NHS has been restructured to fit the American model. Had the Tories not underfunded it we would see the same degradation but it would have been over a longer time frame. They, presumably with the corrupt disaster capitalism paradigm, perceived the mechanism of underfunding as accelerating the point at which the offer of insurance-based health care would appear to be a solution. They have run up against a very tight line whereby they may have alerted the public to the crime a little too early.

Jeremy Corbyn (as representing the grass roots comprehension and cognitive models) is the only politician to make it clear that, not only does he understand it is the structural changes that are the problem, but has confirmed this interpretation by pointing out that Labour will repeal the Health and Social Care Act 2012 because it is the initial and primary point at which the NHS was structurally reorientated to fit the American insurance based model. No amount of increased spending by government would fix the underlying problems that are being introduced under the neoliberal cognitive model of how things work. Obviously immediate benefits would be seen by injecting more cash but the long term disaster would simply be staved off in the short term. It is important to stave off the disaster but it is virtually ineffective with respect to solving the real problem.

We need to change the direction of politics in the UK.

Labour might not solve all our problems but they are turning the ship decisively from the imminent catastrophe and towards a serviceable future.

And whoever thought it was a good idea to ask politicians if they would press the Nuclear Button as a measure of whether we are safe in their hands when the consensus cognitive model is insane enough to interpret our survival as being dependent on the willingness to destroy the world?

Bolivia Is the Latest Successful US-Backed Coup in Latin America

Bolivia Is the Latest Successful US-Backed Coup in Latin America

http://www.mintpressnews.com

By Alan Macleod  @AlanRMacLeod

November 12th, 2019

Bolivian President Evo Morales “resigned” at gunpoint Sunday, after army generals publicly demanded his resignation, despite convincingly winning re-election just three weeks ago.

The preceding 21 days were filled with fractious demonstrations and counter-protests from Morales’ supporters and opponents. On October 20, Morales had secured enough votes to win the election outright in the first round without the need for a run-off against his closest challenger, Carlos Mesa. However, Mesa cried fraud, citing supposed irregularities in the vote-counting procedure, claiming Morales did not receive the requisite vote share to ensure his victory. The Organization of American States (OAS) and the U.S. government repeated this claim, although neither group provided evidence of fraud. Morales invited the OAS to audit the election as he was confident of its veracity. Indeed, a report by the Washington-based Center for Economic Policy Research found that the vote totals were “consistent” with those announced, finding no irregularities whatsoever. Despite this, the local U.S.-backed opposition went on the attack.

Right-Wing Rampage

On Saturday, veteran political scientists Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad warned that “a coup is brewing against the elected government” of Bolivia, expressing their concern at the “fascistic” violence percolating throughout the country. In Santa Cruz, a stronghold of the wealthy white elite who oppose Morales, the office of the electoral authority was burned down. Meanwhile, in Vinto, opposition groups kidnapped local mayor Patricia Arce, cut her hair off and painted her body red, publicly dragging her through the streets and abusing her, forcing her to commit to leaving office.

#Bolivia | Mayor #PatriciaArce was forced to walk barefoot for several kilometers while listening to sexist and racist comments.#HumanRights #HumanRightsViolation pic.twitter.com/s98E1KyaCD

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) November 7, 2019

Victor Borda, President of Bolivia’s Chamber of Deputies, was also forced to resign after coup forces attacked his house and kidnapped his brother.

The squalid US-backed fanatics of the Bolivian right ransack the house of the country’s elected president, Evo Morales. And the havoc is just beginning. Let no one call them “pro-democracy.” pic.twitter.com/rwwvOSAEaA

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 11, 2019

As soon as Morales stepped down, the police, who had refused to serve his government, ordered his arrest and vandals ransacked his house. Meanwhile, the conservative opposition joyously burned the flag of Bolivia’s indigenous people (a majority of the country’s population), in the clear hopes that the coup would mark a return to rule by the white elite who had been in power since the time of the Conquistadors.

La whipala es símbolo de resistencia de los pueblos indígenas del Abya Yala. Esta imagen resume una de las razones del golpe contra @evoespueblo. pic.twitter.com/uN0Nulu5Gv

— Patricia Villegas Marin (@pvillegas_tlSUR) November 11, 2019

The United States Applauds the Coup

The Trump administration released an official communication Monday, not just endorsing the coup, but all but stating “we did it.” “The resignation yesterday of Bolivian President Evo Morales is a significant moment for democracy in the Western Hemisphere,” it read, claiming the events constituted the “preservation of democracy.” It also sent a clear threat that more regime change operations were to come, and they already knew who the targets were:

 These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail.  We are now one step closer to a completely democratic, prosperous, and free Western Hemisphere.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also welcomed the events, claiming that Bolivia could now be “ensured free and fair elections.” Michael McFaul, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, was even more pleased. “Morales has fled. Excellent!” he exclaimed on Twitter. The U.S. government has long opposed Morales and his Movement for Socialism party’s agenda of nationalizing Bolivia’s resources to help its people. However, it inadvertently helped him get elected in the first place. Shortly before the 2006 election, the U.S. embassy in La Paz put out a public statement saying it could, under no circumstances, accept a Morales presidency. This enormous election meddling backfired, however, as his polling numbers surged as a result.

While the Trump administration intimates that this will not be the last, the Bolivia case is merely the latest in a long line of U.S.-backed coups in the region. Historian and former State Department employee William Blum calculated that the U.S. has overthrown over 50 governments since 1945, many of them in the region it considers its “backyard.” For example, in 2009, the U.S. supported a coup against the leftist government of Manuel Zelaya, blocking any regional or international response. Hillary Clinton later boasted that, in her role as Secretary of State, she had “rendered the question of Zelaya moot.” Since 2009 the country has been ruled by a right-wing military dictatorship that brutalizes its population, leading to a mass exodus of refugees northward, one of the principal (but unspoken) drivers of the so-called refugee caravan crisis on the U.S./Mexico border. In 2002, the U.S. sponsored and took part in a briefly successful coup against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, only for it to be reversed by a massive display of collective solidarity from Venezuela’s people who refused to accept the situation and inspired loyal units to retake the presidential palace and rescue Chavez. Haiti was not so lucky. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, leader of a grassroots people’s movement, was overthrown in U.S.-backed coups in 1991 and 2004, leaving the nation with a corrupt puppet government that turned the country into the huge, impoverished sweatshop for Western corporations it is today.

This continual interference gave rise to the wry comment in Latin America that the safest place in the world is the U.S. because it is the only nation without an American embassy.

In 13 years in office, the Movement for Socialism has revolutionized Bolivia, nationalizing the country’s key resources and putting the proceeds towards social programs tackling the population’s most pressing concerns. Poverty was reduced by 42%, and extreme poverty by 60%, with unemployment halving. School enrollment and the provision of electricity has greatly increased, and the government has built over 150,000 social houses and has instituted a free state pension for all those over 60 years old.

However, Morales courted controversy when he lost a national referendum that proposed to end term limits. Despite the result, the Supreme Court ruled that he could stand anyway. He had also drawn criticism from environmentalists for continuing Bolivia’s extractive economic model.

Corporate Media Obscuring Reality

There is a perfect word in the English language for when army generals appear on television demanding the resignation of an elected head of state while their allies detain and torture government officials. Yet corporate media are steadfastly refusing to frame events as a coup, instead uniformly describing Morales as “resigning.” Many did not even mention the actions of the army generals. CBS News, for example, claimed that Morales was “resigning” due to “election fraud and protests.” The New York Times asserted he “stepped down” amid “weeks of mass protests by an infuriated population that accused him of undermining democracy.” It expressed relief that his “grip on power” had finally been weakened, giving space to one commenter to claim that this marked “the end of tyranny.” Thus, the media presented the military overthrow of a democratically-elected leader as the welcome demise of a “full-blown dictatorship” and the “restoration of democracy,” rather than just the opposite, highlighting their remarkable skill with language.

Denunciations of the Coup

On the other hand, there has been a forthright rejection of the events from much of the Western left. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), for example, who recently expressed her pride in endorsing Bernie Sanders, who, she said, promises to fight Western imperialism, stated via Twitter:

There’s a word for the President of a country being pushed out by the military. It’s called a coup.

We must unequivocally oppose political violence in Bolivia. Bolivians deserve free and fair elections.

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) November 11, 2019

Sanders himself was “very concerned” about the coup against the leader who he met at the Vatican and who had praised him deeply. UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was more forthright, claiming he was “appalled” by what happened:

To see @evoespueblo who, along with a powerful movement, has brought so much social progress forced from office by the military is appalling.

I condemn this coup against the Bolivian people and stand with them for democracy, social justice and independence. #ElMundoConEvo

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) November 10, 2019

Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad described what they saw as another U.S.-backed Latin American coup.

The coup is driven by the Bolivian oligarchy, who are angered by the fourth election loss by their parties to the Movement for Socialism. The oligarchy is fully supported by the United States government, which has long been eager to remove Morales and his movement from power. For over a decade, the US embassy’s Center of Operations in La Paz has articulated the fact that it has two plans – Plan A, the coup; Plan B, assassination of Morales. This is a serious breach of the UN Charter and of all international obligations. We stand against the coup, and with the Bolivian people.

The Future

Morales has been offered asylum by the Mexican government. It is far from clear whether the Bolivian people will accept the new events, but what is clear is that the Trump administration is pursuing a much more aggressive line than Obama with regards to regime change. Those who follow Latin America will hope this is not a return to the days of the dark days of dirty wars and coups d’etat.

 

Alan MacLeod is a MintPress contributor as well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting was published in April.

THE WOUNDED MIND

Source

Waking Times

ingsley L. Dennis, Contributor

November 7, 2019

There’s something fundamentally wrong with how the world is right now. Don’t you see it – feel it? We are a species with noble character, with a great spirit, and with a sacred soul. In our hearts we wish only for the betterment of all people; for love and justice and communion. And yet what we see going on in the world is nothing less than complete madness. We have to say it exactly as it is – there is a sickness going on and this pathogen is being perpetrated on a vast scale.

I propose the possibility for the existence of some kind of infection/invasion/contagion that produces a form of mental ‘madness’ that is so normalized within us that we hardly recognize its presence. That is, this ‘presence’ has embedded itself into our various forms of social conditioning (or perhaps even produces this conditioning) in order to veil its existence. This normalized madness then usurps genuine thinking patterns, with the result that when everyone shares the collective psychosis then the madness of the world appears to be a ‘normal feature’ of human civilization. And those people who are ‘awake’ to the genuine human spirit and mind are considered the crazies – the anomalies – as the following tale shows:

There was once a wise and powerful king who ruled in a remote city of a far kingdom. And the king was feared for both his might and his love of wisdom. At the heart of the city was a well whose water was cool and crystalline, and all the inhabitants drank from this well, even the king and his courtiers, because there was no other well in the city. One night, while everyone was asleep, a witch entered the city and poured seven drops of a strange liquid into the well, and said:

‘From now on, anyone who drinks this water will go crazy.’

The next morning all the inhabitants drank the water from the well, except the king and his lord chamberlain, and very soon everyone went mad, as the witch had foretold. During that day, all people went through the narrow streets and public places whispering to each other:
‘The king is mad. Our king and his lord chamberlain have lost their reason. Naturally, we cannot be ruled by a mad king. We must dethrone him!’

That night, the king ordered a golden cup of water from the well to be brought to him. And when they brought the cup the king and his lord chamberlain drank heavily from it. Soon after that there was great rejoicing in that distant city of a far kingdom because the king and his lord chamberlain had regained their reason.

The King and his love of wisdom (Genuine Mind) was corrupted by the poisonous drops of the witch’s liquid (virus/pathogen) that resulted in the mass epidemic of craziness (psychosis/Wounded Mind). This corrupted mind then became the dominant narrative that influenced social behavior. This Wounded Mind is like a contagion that infects.

Our collective ‘cultural mind’ is continually being shaped by dominant social-cultural narratives that normalize our mental and emotional behavioral patterns. These norms are then transferred into cultural myths that serve to transmit and reinforce these mass-minded belief systems. We end up validating our own corrupted thinking through unconscious affirmations. Once this seed of psychosis is planted then it aims to propagate and strengthen through diversions and manifestations that legitimate its own ‘logical’ existence. Like a mental cancer it ingratiates itself into our own neural pathways as an insider rather than an outsider so that we fail to notice its toxic presence. Yet there remains a niggling sense of something being ‘not-quite-right’ deep within any sensible/sensitive person.

This strange reality of ours becomes internalized so that we adapt to a form of ‘normality’ and anyone who speaks up or questions this ‘paradigm of normality’ is considered either odd, eccentric or, at worst, crazy. A more recent category for such people is now to be designated as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ which is a quick brush to dismiss people with ideas or thinking contrary to this ‘norm.’ And those people who appear to accept and encourage such norms are quickly brought ‘into the fold’ and supported in their career paths. The majority of those manifesting the Wounded Mind are not in psychiatric care but running most of our social, political, and financial institutions. Positions of great power necessitate their own specific mindset, one that is generally provided by the corrupted mind.

A Disturbance of Mind

The presence of the Wounded Mind is like a sickness of the soul, and it manifests as a disturbance in the collective unconscious. Just like any other virus or pathogen, it seeks to spread itself by infecting as many carriers as possible. Those people who carry the Wounded Mind (whether knowingly or not) act as transmitters and amplifiers for it, strengthening its frequency within the collective nonlocal field of consciousness. A collective possession is what we refer to as a psychic epidemic, or a disturbance in the field. Such disturbances can have varying affects upon people’s mental health and well-being.

People who suffer from a Wounded Mind may carry it as an ‘undefinable’ trauma within them, and it is common to turn to alcoholism or drug dependencies as a way of coping (or of escape). When a person feels stressed or traumatized they are like an open wound for further mental invasion. And it can be quite subtle at first as our modern societies have devised endless ways for our interference. We are distracted to look away from our own minds and thus miss the psycho-pathogen in action. As a person further integrates the Wounded Mind they may find themselves vulnerable to victimization; such as through social harassment and bullying (especially online nowadays), or as addicted-consumers of sexual deviancy, pornography, and socially-sanctioned extreme experiences. The monk Thomas Merton said that our modern societies suffer from a crisis of sanity:

‘The problems of the nations are the problems of mentally deranged people, but magnified a thousand times because they have the full-straight-faced approbation of a schizoid society, schizoid national structures, schizoid military and business complexes.’¹

If all modern institutions are infected by a corrupted system of mental thinking patterns then, as Merton suggests, this instability will be amplified and made worse. Individual neuroses are given institutional sanction and support within a culture that has based its social norms upon such irrationalities. The irrational has broken through and implanted itself as the rational standard rule. It is perhaps little wonder that people can be so susceptible to this mental pathogen when it comes to us dressed up in sheep’s clothing. As is always the case, those people most vulnerable are usually those who are conditioned to authority and/or passivity. This trait, unfortunately, is one that is first implanted through compulsory schooling.

Likewise, people who are easily influenced by external opinions, and whom are prone to group-thinking, are amongst the first to give away their mental independence to external sources. The virus of the Wounded Mind preys upon such ‘group-think’ individuals as they are the mass open playing fields for psychic epidemics. The ‘mass mind’ of humanity helps in the transmission and proliferation of the psychic pathogen – the wounded mind. As the famous psychiatrist R.D. Laing once said – ‘The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man…normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.’² Conscious awareness is perhaps our greatest antidote.

If we are to see human history from a wider perspective then it is important we view major events, human actions, propaganda, social disturbances, power struggles, and the rest, from this standpoint of the wounded mind. The modern human mind has been formed from many traits that include greed, lust, ambition, materialism, insincerity, and a ‘split’ personality. In all, these are traits that mark a lack of authenticity. The Wounded Mind seeks to develop greater degrees of inauthenticity and lack of empathy within the individual. We can see such personalities walking across the world stage.

The peril of the Wounded Mind is that resistance may also help to spread it. That is, people who often start out resisting and fighting against this corrupted mindset often find themselves adopting its values in order to survive. It’s the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ type of thinking. And this cliché too is very likely to have been a product of the Wounded Mind intending to verify itself. It may seem that we are struggling to awaken against our very own spell of sleep.

Under the Pathogen Spell

It has often been said – by mystics, sages, and wisdom traditions – that humanity is collectively asleep. Our ignorance over our condition, and the absence of real knowledge, indicates we are asleep.  Similarly, the Gnostics viewed humanity as being ‘asleep’ under a trance – a form of material spell – that has severed us from contact with a genuine divine source. Instead, we are ruled by a false or ‘flawed god,’ a demiurge, that has malevolent intentions to keep us trapped within the material realms.

The more we breed this Wounded Mind within our societies and cultures the more people will behave and live like automatons. We will live within a tighter range of conditioned stimuli that programs specific opinions and thinking patterns that validate the pathogen. A person who is more conditioned to obedience is more susceptible to receive the mental virus. Perhaps this is why our modern societies are establishing rigid orders of control and obedience, such as when we travel, pass through airports, etc. It can be likened to a preparation for automated behavior as a requisite for an automated mind. The mystic George Gurdjieff wrote:

‘Contemporary culture requires automatons. And people are undoubtedly losing their acquired habits of independence and turning into automatons, into parts of machines…. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.’³

By adopting the mentality of the Wounded Mind, we participate in our own suppression and further the behavior of an automaton. We need to recognize that many of our incumbent social systems are set-up to corroborate and reinforce the consensus mind-set. Any genuine resistance cannot come from any ‘mass movement’ but only from those persons who can think and act independently.

It is important to recognize that the Wounded Mind is a field phenomenon, and that our own mind and thoughts do not exist securely guarded within our heads. Since we are all interconnected within the non-local field, we are all susceptible to the infection of this predatory virus. The first step we can take is to accept the possibility that the pathogen virus exists. The Gnostic text The Gospel of Philip says: ‘So long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes…’ The danger lies in our distraction.

We must guard against being diverted away from our authenticity and lured into the modern distractions of hedonistic pleasure-seeking, greed and materialism, and the running after shallow satisfactions. After all, this illusive psychosis offers false promises. Our modern cultures appear to want to prevent the majority of people from pursuing their own genuine developmental paths. This is no doubt because our capitalist-consumer based societies require a regular mass of workers and consumers whom live a regulated, predictable, and conformist life.

Yet it is now necessary to see the Wounded Mind for what it is – recognition and acknowledgement is key. If we cannot bring harmony and good sense to the world around us, then we should at least bring it upon ourselves. We are the wounded ones who can become our own wounded healers.

About the Author

Kingsley L. Dennis is the author of Bardo Times: hyperreality, high-velocity, simulation, automation, mutation – a hoax?, The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness, and The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind & Meaning in a Technological Age, available at Amazon. Visit him on the web at http://www.kingsleydennis.com/.

Extracted from the book Healing the Wounded Mind: The Psychosis of the Modern World and the Search for the Self.

Notes

¹ Cited in Levy, Paul. 2013. Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil. Berkeley,

CA: North Atlantic Books, p47

² Cited in Levy, Paul. 2013. Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil. Berkeley,

CA: North Atlantic Books, xvii

³ Ouspensky, PD. 1950. In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p316

From Orwell to Huxley: Grim Prospects of Truth-Telling

Source

journal-neo.org

Author: Henry Kamens

Nov 7, 2019

Scroll through NEO’s website and you will realize that we have been honest in reporting the problems the world faces on a daily basis.  The articles are straightforward: real issues, real people, and real insight.

While we are steadfast in our reporting, more and more journalists are being subject to the most severe form of censorship, some have taken to – self-censorship in order to avoid the wrath of the powers that be. Such arm twisting by the authorities is nothing but a frontal attack on any semblance of a free media.

It is even worse than that—people, in general, are so skeptical of anything written or reported by the mainstream news nowadays. Things have gotten to the point where they don’t believe anything that the MSM says, however, the unfortunate part is that now the lines between mainstream and independent media has also started blurring, with more and more independent media also falling in step with the official government line.

I have a distant relative who now says that she refuses to watch or read any news from any source since it is all propaganda, and this feeling of discontent is becoming widespread.

Mark Twain once said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” But the wise Mark Twain could also not imagine the dystopian world we live in today, where the only alternative is not to read anything and not to trust anything, as much of news has been turned into mindless entertainment.

We know what is happening to Julian Assange, and that is no longer real news, at least for most viewers and the MSM. His ordeal, first at his Embassy holdup after jumping bail, and then being turned over to UK authorities is just the start of another horror story. Given his deteriorating health his stay at the prison is putting his life at risk, and even UN Human Rights experts have warned of his health complications.

All that is happening now was predicated by earlier writers. Hence it is time to revisit a bit of ominous literature, as it is not as if we were not warned about what to look forward to in the future.

“Brave New World” vs. “1984” – which won?

The BBC did an excellent adaptation of “Brave New World” many years ago. I don’t think it survived on tape (it was a few years before the VCRs became ubiquitous). I was able to find one that is close, with Aldous Huxley, an interview with Mike Wallace back in the late ’50s which describes the enemies of freedom in the United States.

My first reaction was that of surprise as all that was described seemed so true even in today’s context. He had been able to accurately describe how various bureaucracies, technology, and propaganda methods work in tandem to create a false narrative and distract the people from more real and pressing issues. From his description it becomes clear that the methods being used today to distract us are the same that Hitler used, only now they have become more effective.

To compare and contrast, George Orwell’s “1984”, and Alex Huxley’s “Brave New World”—they both predicted different visions of a dystopian future. What has emerged now is a combination of the two takes on what the future holds, or at least that is what the situation looks like as of now.

People say we are more Huxley than Orwell, but there are some Orwellian methods too, at least for journalists and whistleblowers. Orwell saw a world where fear was used whereas Huxley perceived a world where we will be manipulated in other ways—more effectively and willingly!

It is so very true that Truth has become Treason with the torture of Julian Assange. The powers to be would like us not to consider him a journalist. Truth has never been well received by governments who want to hide it, at any cost, even at the expense of fundamental principles of the founding fathers. But the situation is getting grim day-by-day now.

So, where does that leave us?

The lesson to others is clear: challenge the global US military empire and you will be destroyed.

Politicians are acting as bullies like George Orwell predicted… perhaps. Huxley’s “Soma” drug is allegorical to how people are drugged by devices and perhaps some actual drugs.

In Enemies of Freedom Huxley is exposing how free choice, the rational side of man are bypassed – and how the democratic process is circumvented and efforts made to eliminate what would be informed and free choice. Huxley dives deep into the forces that are taking away freedom, including electronic devices, overpopulation, and materialism.

However, the greatest threat is over the organization of society and the lack of “thinking beings.” The system, including how education is allocated makes sure that those who question the most are afforded the least conducive environment for learning.

Madness in Method

But there are better ways, for instance, aversion conditioning is how “Brave New World” has prevailed over “1984.” Low levels of education, distractions caused by cellphones and mindless computer games, and various forms of modern-day “Soma” are all tools in the hands of governments to keep the minds of the and people distracted and to keep them calm and mindless.  What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be only a few left who would want to read one, or at least have the inclination and time.

Younger folk have been manipulated into relinquishing virtually any right or privilege as long as they can still keep their video games and smartphones. “Brave New World” depicts a society that bears more than coincidental resemblance to our society today (watch CNN and Anderson Cooper to get a better idea).

But the “Powers That Be” would also prefer that we live in the “1984” society, and they are trying their best to plunge us into that darkness by attacking journalists who describe inconvenient truths.

Huxley summed it up best:

“By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms— elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. … Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. …

Meanwhile, the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”

The comparison is made to radio and television fodder “new devices” and now all that he predicted – subliminal projections contained within films. Once you establish the utility of something that is known to work, you can be certain that the technology of it will steadily improve.

How can we preserve the integrity of humans in an age when we are being persuaded below the level of “choice and reason” – not only in how we think but even in our choices for political office. It is no longer a matter of making an intelligent choice for one’s self interests, but falling prey to the manipulations of [MSM] and the manipulations of consumers by Madison Avenue.

A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest in any given circumstance. But attempts are being made to bypass that “rational choice” by appealing to unconscious forces below the surface – below the level of choice and reason.

But that is not happening anytime soon but at least we have a modern version of soma with PR, mind control and a new generation of prescription drugs. Soma can even compete with religion; it takes away bad experiences and makes us all happy and content.

All that was written as fiction is now a reality, even genetically engineered babies and a society driving by never-ending consumption. In the quest for the most modern devices, people have become hooked to a reality that does not exist.

It is this generation of low castes who are proven to be clueless and preoccupied with promiscuity that paints anyone who speaks in disapproval as intolerant. Society has been transformed into “a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.”

That drug comes in many different forms – mostly ignorance and is distributed by the manipulated media and corrupt advertisers.

And let us also not forget why it is no longer even necessary to burn or restrict books. As we learned from the newest release, at the movies, of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 –very few among us are actually interested in reading book or truthful news anymore and fewer, in any case, have the critical thinking abilities to understand their true meaning.

“We are not born equal but must be made equal by the fire!”

Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Chris Hedges: Princeton or Harvard Are Schools that Have Always Existed to Train the Ruling Elites to Manage the System of Corporate Capitalism

https://ahtribune.com/interview/3633-chris-hedges.html

ahtribune.com

Nov 7, 2019

Slava Zilber: Chris, you are “a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.” Moreover, you write a weekly column for the website Truthdig and host the show, “On Contact,” on RT America. 

What defines you most? How do you see yourself?

Chris Hedges: As a writer. That’s what I’ve always been. So, although I enjoy doing the show and I enjoy teaching, my primary focus is on books.

But you started your “career reporting on the Falklands War from Argentina for National Public Radio.” Why did you go in this direction? Was writing your primary interest at the time? Why did you choose something so dangerous instead of the safety and wealth of being, for example, an anchor at a major network?

Well, first of all, during the Falkland War I was in Buenos Aires. So it was not dangerous. I was not on the Falklands. Anchors on television are actors, news celebrities. They are not writers. I mean I wrote since I was a young child. I was very influenced by George Orwell. He would be one of my great intellectual mentors. I wanted to go to Latin America. This was in the early 1980s when the military junta ruled Argentina during the Dirty War, Pinochet ruled in Chile, the death squads in El Salvador were killing between seven hundred and a thousand people a month and I thought this was as close as I was going to come to fighting fascism in my lifetime like Orwell. So I married writing with this commitment towards exposing injustices and even atrocities and giving a voice to people who were under severe oppression and persecution. That’s why I went to Latin America and stayed there for six years, most of that time covering the wars in Central America. But it was always as a writer. I did work for National Public Radio, but that’s when I was a freelance journalist. And I always knew that my primary interest and passion was writing, not for radio, but for newspapers and magazines.

You mentioned fighting fascism and the atrocities committed by these groups. Now, US government official Elliott Abrams claimed that US support for them was about winning the Cold War and you have personally spoken to people who – it appears – honestly believed it. How do you respond?

People like Elliott Abrams did not understand the political, economic and social dynamics that led to rebellions in Central America just as Dick Cheney and Richard Perle and others did not understand the dynamics that underlay the situation in Iraq or in the Middle East. So these are people who lack linguistic, historic and cultural literacy and then start intervening in conflicts creating the kind of … I mean El Salvador to this day is along with Honduras one of the most dangerous countries in the world. And so it’s the unleashing of military force as we have seen in the Middle East that essentially opened a kind of Pandora’s box of evils. And it was kind of simplified or justified, as you correctly point out, as a battle within the Cold War. But the whole idea that Salvadoran peasants, half of whom were landless, were rebelling because of Moscow or communism was false. Not that Marxist ideology didn’t play a part in the FMLN rebels, but it was the control of the economy by roughly a dozen oligarchic families, who treated most of the country as if they were serfs, and the inability to carry out non-violent protest by the labor unions and student groups and others. I mean at one point in 1979 the police just set up machine guns on the roofs in downtown San Salvador and opened on the crowd. So when a political system just refuses to reform and refuses to address the very dire needs of its population, then it inevitably leads to violence. That’s not a particularly new story. But that does not mean that it was run by either Nicaragua or Moscow or Cuba.

Chris, you have taught at numerous prestigious universities. And in the talk Death of the Liberal Class, you said: “The very system – having taught at Princeton – by which these students get into a school as competitive as Princeton ensures that they are utterly subservient and compliant to authority.” Could you please talk about it? Why has it not affected you and your beliefs?

First of all, because of my experiences overseas. I spent twenty years on the outer reaches of empire and understand very well the nature of empire. The mask of empire was ripped off and I watched the empire function in Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East. And so the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves were exposed. You can’t go through that experience and come back to the United States and accept the myth of American exceptionalism and of American virtue, which you know full well do not exist. Empire is largely about the theft of natural resources and the subjugation of foreign labor on behalf of a capitalist class or on behalf of corporations. So this is something students at elite universities, who are there to essentially perpetuate the plutocracy, either don’t understand or don’t want to understand. Princeton or Harvard, where I went to school, are schools that exist and have always existed to train the ruling elites. Most countries have them. In France, it’s ENS. And those students – C. Wright Mills writes about this –  are essentially groomed to maintain empire and to become part of the ruling class. In a way, these school – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, all of them – do a poor job of educating students to think. And they create filters. They do that through standardized tests, advanced placement classes, private schools, high-prized tutors. And the kind of student that gets into these schools is a  student who has paid complete deference to authority. They are so competitive and they’ve allowed authority to define them. And if you don’t pay that deference to authority, if you don’t achieve on this kind of measures, then you don’t get in. And what they become are essentially systems managers. They are trained to manage the system of corporate capitalism. So by nature these institutions are very distrustful of authority and distrustful of people who are fiercely independent. They don’t fit into those institutions. They organize learning around very specialized disciplines, very narrow answers, rigid structures that are designed to produce a very specific result. A place like Princeton is a funnel for Goldman Sachs and Wall Street as is Harvard. They train specialists. They thwart universal understanding and it dices up the disciplines into very tiny specialized fragments. I mean the largest major at Princeton as at Harvard is computer science. And then these people, who have not been taught to question the system – they don’t even know how to ask the questions –, are funneled into the system to perpetuate it. That’s not  particularly new. That goes back to the founding of these institutions.

I would like to talk about the people who do not fit and who question authority. During the presentation “American Anomie” a year ago, you spoke of “anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critics [being] branded as agents of a foreign power.” What has your own experience been?  How has the political discourse been affected?

What’s happened is the ideology of neoliberalism or unfettered capitalism has been exposed as a fraud, a con game. And the ruling elites don’t really have a counter-argument. We saw the critique of the system embodied in 2016 in the two insurgent candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, although Donald Trump, of course, had no intention of thwarting the oligarchic rule. In fact, he has accelerated it. But he spoke to the reality that has gripped the American working class.  And because the elites don’t have a counter-argument anymore, they have taken critics of corporate capitalism who were already marginalized and pushed them further and further into the outer reaches of the internet by imposing algorithms – Facebook has done this and others – supposedly to combat foreign influence and specifically Russian influence which is just ridiculous. I don’t think I have ever written a nice word about Putin in my life or written much about Russia at all. But you saw a campaign directed at left-wing sites, all of which have been targeted in an effort to essentially, if not silence, at least ghettoize these critics who do not appear on the mainstream. People like Noam Chomsky, for instance, who I would argue is probably America’s greatest intellectual, are virtually blacklisted. And so all of us who critique imperialism and corporate capitalism have been pushed off, even on the supposedly ‘liberal’ networks like MSNBC because these corporate elites don’t have an answer anymore.

President Trump appears to have significant support among evangelicals. How would you as a theologian comment on this?     

Many people raise the issue of Trump’s relationship with the evangelical community and express surprise. In fact, Trump and the evangelical community are very similar. I have reported out of these megachurches in my book “American Fascists.” The white, male pastors that run these churches share most of Trump’s dishonesty, manipulation, sense of narcissism.

Trump doesn’t have an ideology and that ideology is being filled by the Christian right, this Christianized fascism which is organized. It has not only its megachurches, but schools, universities, law schools, a huge radio and television empire and that has become an important ally for the White House. And so we have to look back over the last few decades where the Christian right has been organizing and preparing to take power for a long time. Most of these judges that Trump is appointing including Gorsuch on the Supreme Court are the anointed  of the Christian right. So we’ve seen Trump give the Christian right what they want in his efforts to restrict abortion, to defund planned parenthood,  to discriminate against LGBT community in the name of religious liberty, to allow churches to become active in politics by revoking what is called the Johnson Amendment and, as I mentioned, the nomination of these judges that are championed by the Federalist Society and the Christian right along with the ban on Muslim immigrants. He has appointed several major figures in the Christian right within his administration: Mike Pence, of course, as Vice President, Jeff Sessions who was at the Justice Department, Gorsuch who was on the Supreme Court, Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education, Ben Carson to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. These people all come out of the Christian right. And they all embrace this white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, religious intolerance and racism that  define the Christian right, as well as the kind of magical thinking and conspiracy theories that define the worldview of the Christian right, which always sees itself as under attack from satanic forces of secular humanism, which they argue, are perpetuated by the media, academia, the liberal establishment, Hollywood and, of course, the Democratic Party. And in this world, the reality is not an impediment to what they believe: Climate change isn’t real. Barack Obama is a Muslim. Millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election. In fact, there is a kind of very symbiotic relationship between the character of Trump and Trump’s worldview and the Christian right, which is why he has such broad support among the Christian right.

And I will just add as a former seminarian that these people are Christian heretics. They’ve perverted Christian gospel to acculturate it with the worst aspects of American capitalism and American imperialism. Jesus did not come to make us rich. Jesus did not come to bless the dropping of fragmentation bombs all over the Middle East. Jesus does not celebrate the white race and particularly the American white race above other races. This is just all heretical and, unfortunately, the liberal church has not called these people out for who they are.

But as things deteriorate you will see in essence under a Trump administration an increase in the power and authority of the Christian right. And I think that we have to look back at the fact that this movement preys on desperate people in the same way Trump preyed on desperate people through the slot machines in his casinos or his sham university or his real estate deals. The mega pastors just do it in another way: by extracting ‘seed offerings’ or love gifts or ties or donations or selling miracle healings, with prayer cloth, self-help books, and audio and video recordings. In essence, the Christian right has done in their megachurches exactly what Trump did in his businesses. They have created despotic, little thiefdoms where those who rule these thiefdoms cannot be challenged or questioned any more than an omnipotent Trump could be challenged on his reality television show “The Apprentice.” I look at the kind of personal piety that is the cover for this movement as a complete fraud. And the personal life of these mega pastors is marked by the same hedonistic squalor including mansions, private jets, limousines, bodyguards, personal assistants, servants, shopping sprees, lavish vacations along with sexual escapades that rival those carried out by Trump. And so, yes! There is a natural alliance between Trump and the Christian right.

Could you please comment on the trial of the Plowshares activists in Georgia? On October 24^th, they were found guilty. They protested against nuclear weapons at a nuclear submarine base.

This comes out of the Catholic worker movement, non-violent Christian anarchism, which I’ve always been close too. My father was a minister and very close to them. And what they are seeking to do is – and they face up to 20 years in prison for this – use non-violent civil disobedience to decry or bring attention to the weapons of mass destruction. And this submarine base is, I think, the largest nuclear weapons submarine base in the world. They want to raise the point that if we don’t curtail and ultimately abolish these weapons one day they will again be used as they have been in the past. The United States has used them. We are talking about the end of civilization and most of humanity. And so they very courageously entered this base illegally. They carried vials of their own blood to pour on the nuclear weapons and spray-painted messages and hung banners and have now been found guilty and face up to twenty years in prison for four counts of destruction and depredation of government property.

You mentioned that George Orwell has influenced you. Could you please talk about other influences on your work.

I come out of seminary. So I am certainly deeply influenced by major theologians and ethicists. I spent eight years in the university, so I read most of them: Kant, Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, of course Noam Chomsky, Sheldon Wolin who was probably our most important contemporary political philosopher, the theologian James Cone, writers like Primo Levi, Dwight Macdonald, Randolph Bourne, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, John Ralston Saul, the great Canadian intellectual, Max Weber. So I am pretty steeped in all of these works and they’ve all been extremely important influences in helping me understand systems of power and how they function.

What is next for you?

I am writing a book on prisons. I have been teaching in prisons for ten years. So I am writing a book on mass incarceration which is the most important civil rights issue of our time in the United States.

*(Top Image: Chris Hedges. Credit: Michabo Sustainable Harmony/ YouTube)

WRITER

SLAVA ZILBER

Slava Zilber is the host of the political podcast “Conversations with Slava” and a guest contributor to The Canary.