Mainstream Media Confirms Conspiracy Theory That Walmart Stores Are Being Turned into Prison Camps

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http://www.activistpost.com

By Rachel Blevins

June 18, 2018

When citizens began to ask questions about why Walmart stores were suddenly closing in in southern states in 2015, the mainstream media insisted that the closures were due to plumbing problems and that any suggestion of government involvement was a crazy conspiracy theory. Three years later, the MSM is finally admitting that several of those Walmart stores were converted into detention centers, which now house immigrant children who have been separated from their parents.

At least 1,500 boys are currently being detained in Brownsville, Texas, where NBC News reported that they “spend 22 hours per day during the week (21 hours on weekends) locked inside a converted former Walmart,” where at least five boys are packed into rooms built for four. Many of those in prisons across the United States get more yard time than these children.

The boys range in age from 10 to 17 years old, and the average stay at the center is around 52 days. If the idea of imprisoning young boys as if they are felons for two months straight sounds agonizing and cruel, that is because it is. A small group of reporters was allowed inside the facility, and the report from NBC claimed that guard asked them to “smile at the hundreds of detained migrant kids in line for a meal because ‘they feel like animals in a cage being looked at.’”

A report from ABC News also noted that the detention center in Brownsville “was once a Walmart,” and while it claimed that the facility was “clean and well-staffed, with activities to keep the kids busy and their minds off their unfortunate situation,” it also noted that this was “a media tour, and journalists weren’t allowed to interview any of the children.”

“Where there were once racks of clothes and aisles of appliances, there were now spotless dorm-style bedrooms with neatly made beds and Pokémon posters on the walls,” The New York Times report noted that the converted Walmart store is now the largest licensed migrant children’s shelter in the country, but failed to point out that it was one of many stores that mysteriously went out of business when President Obama was still in office.

At the time, citizens became concerned when a number of Walmart stores mysteriously went out of business in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Florida starting in April 2015. The mainstream media and its “trustworthy fact-checker” Snopes.com were adamant that the closures were due to plumbing problems, as Walmart claimed, and that there was no government involvement.

However, the reality that the former stores are, in fact, being used by the government, and that they are being used to imprison migrant children who have been separated from their parents, made headlines recently when Senator Jeff Merkley attempted to enter the converted Walmart in Brownsville, and he was denied entry by police.

“When I was at the center at McAllen Border Station, this is the processing center, earlier and I was admitted there and I did see the people, hundreds of children locked up in cages there at that facility,” Merkley said in an interview with CNN. “They have big cages made out of fencing and then wire and nets stretched across the top of them so people can’t climb out of them.”

While it is not clear whether any of the children in the detention center in Brownsville are being kept in cages, it is clear that the government worked diligently to keep facts from the public.

The young children who are forcefully separated from their parents are treated like prisoners and taken to detention centers where they are forced to live among hundreds of other children they have never met. The lifelong consequences can be detrimental; and, in some cases, these children will never see their parents again.

The individual cases are horrific, and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal recently shed light on her experience visiting a facility near Seattle where she met with more than 170 women who were taken into custody near the southern U.S. border.

“Thirty to 40 percent of these women came with children who had been forcibly taken away from them. None got a chance to say goodbye to their children—they were forcibly taken away,” Jayapal told The Nation. “One said she was deceived because they were in detention together. Then the CBP officers told her she was going out to get her photograph taken. When she came back, she was put in a different room, and she never got to see the child again. Some of them said they could hear their children screaming for them in the next room.”

A father from Honduras, who came to the United States with his family to seek asylum, was so distraught after he was separated from his wife and child that he killed himself while he was left alone in a jail cell last month.

In another case, a mother from Honduras who came to the U.S. seeking asylum with her family said she was breastfeeding her infant at a detention center when her baby was suddenly taken from her with no warning and no explanation.

A former employee of one of the detention centers is now speaking out after he said he quit in protest after he saw how horrific the process was for the children. Antar Davidson said he watched young children being “ripped from their parents” and sent to a detention center, where in some cases, no one spoke the same language they did.

Davidson claimed the facility was understaffed, the employees lacked the proper training, and as a result, the children were “extremely traumatized.” He also said the workers were underpaid, while “the CEO and his wife clear more than a million dollars a year in mostly federal tax money and undercut the services we need.”

“It’s a basic private prison deal in the guise of this shelter,” Davidson said. “So the people at the end of the day, when they have to put the kids to sleep have already worked an eight-hour shift and are often times asked to stay overtime. On top of that, these kids are running up and down the halls screaming, crying for their mom, throwing chairs. Everyone is tired. The under-trained staff is dealing with an increasingly traumatized population of minors.”

As The Free Thought Project has reported, while there have always been people seeking asylum in the U.S. from other countries, it should be noted that the “War on Drugs” in the United States has contributed both to violence in the countries immigrants are seeking asylum from, and an increase in drug trafficking over the border that has resulted in all migrants being treated like criminals.

Former Congressman Ron Paul noted last year that the War on Drugs has “produced no benefit to the American people at a great cost,” and “just as with the welfare magnet, there is an enormous incentive to smuggle drugs into the United States.”

There is also the troubling concern over what is happening to the immigrant children who are separated from their parents. While the idea of an innocent child being locked in a cage is troubling, it is not the worst fate many of the children are subjected to. The Health and Human Services Department recently admitted that nearly 1,500 immigrant children have gone missing, and many of them are suspected to have been kidnapped by human traffickers.

Watch Davidson’s interview below:

Rachel Blevins is an independent journalist from Texas, who aspires to break the false left/right paradigm in media and politics by pursuing truth and questioning existing narratives. Follow Rachel on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Steemit and Patreon. This article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.

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Dalit conversions: An act of rebellion against caste supremacy

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http://www.aljazeera.com

by Rahul Sonpimple

14 Jun 2018

 

The mass conversion of Dalits to other religions continue to stir anxiety and anger among India’s Hindu intelligentsia.

There is a long-standing history of conversion of Hindu Dalits to other religions in various states of India [Reuters]

 

The recent mass conversion of Dalits to Buddhism in Gujarat’s Una district, which included the Dalits who were brutally assaulted by cow vigilantes for allegedly skinning dead cattle, has stirred anxiety among the upper-caste Hindu intelligentsia. Once again, India’s liberals, radical leftists and conservatives are asking, if not in one then in an analogous voice: “Why are Dalits choosing conversion?” 

Disturbing liberal sensibilities 

The ones who seem to be worried the most, intellectually if not politically, about these conversions are India’s liberals. Their “liberal mind”, couched in an elitist, urban habitus, believes all religions, including Hinduism, to be respectful and egalitarian. This is, of course, nothing but a figment of their imagination. Outside the elitist liberal bubble, the victims of a religion built on inequality, whose caste and communal norms deny humanity to entire communities, are as real as they can be. These victims, the members of the Hindu-Dalit community, face the devastating consequences of transgressing caste and communal hierarchies dictated by the Hindu religion day in and day out.

https://players.brightcove.net/665003303001/BkyLdqdhZ_default/index.html?videoId=4455010906001

WATCH

42:35

Dalit Muslims of India

None the less, India’s liberals seem to be blind to this reality. They go around spreading the fallacy that “Hinduism is respectful to all” like a disease – in university classrooms, newspaper columns, books, public lectures and in day-to-day conversations. Those who seek to challenge this concocted imagination of the liberal mind, especially in academic and literary spaces, risk being quarantined and labelled an “ignoramus”. As result of this twisted conviction, when Dalits choose to opt out of Hinduism, asserting that it enforces a system built on inequality, the liberal mind goes into a frenzy. But liberals are not the only ones among India’s upper-caste intelligentsia who are disturbed by Dalit conversions. Hindu nationalists, who dream of transforming India into an homogenous Hindu nation based on upper-caste supremacy are also worried about mass Dalit conversions, albeit for different reasons.

Shattering the dream of ‘Hindu Rashtra’

There is a long-standing history of conversion of Hindu Dalits to other religions in various states of India. Dalits have been converting to Christianity and other anti-brahminical sects like Kabir Panth for a very long time. And in contemporary times, conversions into Buddhism and Islam became common among Dalits thanks to the efforts of organised movements that seek to counter caste discrimination.

The history of conversion movements clearly shows that Dalits have not been converting to other religions simply because they prefer to adhere to a different belief system. They convert because they actively “reject” Hinduism. The very idea of rejecting Hinduism goes against the Hindu nationalists’ dream of “Hindu Rashtra”, which is fundamentally a concept based on upper caste supremacy. Although conversion into different religions may not free Dalits from clutches of caste, as upper castes maintain their supremacy in other religions too, the very act of conversion prevents the right-wing from achieving their goal of homogenisation. 

This is why the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is a right-wing party with close ideological and organisational links to Hindu nationalist organisations like the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is actively working to halt Dalit conversions. Although the Indian Constitution protects Indian citizens’ right to choose and practise any religion they want, the BJP enacted anti-conversion laws in various states it rules. In 2013 in Gujarat’s Junagadh when around 60,000 Dalits and members of other lowered castes converted to Buddhism, the BJP government of Gujarat ordered an investigation and arrested local Dalit- Buddhist leaders. In 2014 in Madhya Pradesh when four Dalits converted to Islam due to caste humiliation and oppression, the police arrested them. 

With state sanctions on one-hand and socio-political impunity on the other, right-wing groups and organisations like the RSS, Hindu Vahini, VHP and others are targeting those who choose to leave Hinduism in the BJP ruled states like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Jharaknad and Odisha.

For India’s right-wing, it is morally and politically unacceptable for anyone to leave the Hindu religion.  

Disproving the radical left’s views on religion

The anti-caste movement has a long tradition of challenging Hinduism. From Bhakti movement to Bahujan movement, anti-caste conscientisation has constantly been countering and rejecting the religious and spiritual justification of caste system within Hinduism. The cultural counter to Hinduism in the Bhakti movement from 14th century onwards, both in South and North India, was spearheaded by lowered-caste saints like Tukaram, Kabir, Nandanar Chokhamela, Bahenabai, Ravidas, Mirabai and many others. They challenged Hinduism through their devotional songs known as abhanags and dhohas. Gail Omvedt, in her book Seeking Begumpura, called this “the period of Indian enlightenment”.

In the first half of the 20th century, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Indian jurist, economist and social reformer who inspired the Dalit Buddist movement, waged an open and sustained war against Hinduism and the caste system. He once said the Indian history is nothing but a “history of mortal conflict between Buddhism and Brahmanism”.

For Ambedkar, Hinduism is against the natural evolution of the individual and the society, and many converted Dalits share this position. However, neither Ambedkar nor majority of Dalits reject the importance of religion, and this is where they differentiate from the radical left. For most Dalits and Ambedkar, Hinduism’s faults do not demonstrate the problems with religions at large, because they do not consider Hinduism to be a religion. Marxists, on the other hand, consider religion to be “the opium of the masses” and they reject the idea that any religion can be a tool for ending social injustices.

However, the Dalit conversions establish the fact that religion can be a potent tool for subverting and challenging hierarchies of caste, and therefore falsify the Marxian claim of religion being “the opium of masses”.

Dalit conversions are not revolutionary enough in the eyes of Indian Marxists, since for them conversion is non- material – it is an action that does not bear any change in the material lives of Dalits.

But facts speak differently: according to an India Spend analysis of 2011 Census data, the converted Buddhist Dalits enjoy better literacy rates and better work participation/sex ratio than Scheduled Caste Hindus. Additionally, rejection of Hinduism through conversion is not merely about material mobility, it is more about the realisation and objection of the structurally enforced inferiority justified in Hinduism. For many Dalits, conversion into another religion is a humanitarian claim for equality and justice. The conversion of assassinated civil rights leader Malcolm X and many other black Americans into Islam can be read in a similar way – conversions made to demand equality and justice.

One may choose to see the act of conversion merely as a victim’s passive and polite reaction to discrimination and violence. But one can also see the very same act of conversion as a challenge to the core of the oppressor’s supremacy and an act of rebellion in the name of liberation. In this context, the recent mass conversion of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh are not victim play – they are acts of revolution against the caste supremacy that is being forced upon them by a Hindu-right wing state and society.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Inside Story

How to address the plight of India’s Dalits?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rahul Sonpimple

Rahul Sonpimple is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

US separates 2,000 children from families at Mexico border

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http://www.aljazeera.com

June 15, 2018

US officials say 1,995 minors separated from parents or legal guardians over six weeks under sharply criticised policy.

Almost 2,000 children have been separated from their parents or legal guardians at the US-Mexico border since a highly criticised “zero tolerance” immigration policy came into place, according to US officials. 

A Department of Homeland Security spokesman told reporters on Friday that 1,995 minors were separated from 1,940 adults who crossed the US border without documents between April 19 and May 31. 

The adults were held in preparation of prosecution for undocumented entry into the United States, immigration violations, or possible criminal conduct.

All cases of undocumented entry are being referred for criminal prosecution under the “zero tolerance” policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in May.

The separations are a consequence of this prosecution, as minors cannot be held with their parents or legal guardians. 

The policy has come under fire from politicians, immigration advocates and human rights groups.

Earlier this month, thousands of people rallied in cities across the US calling on US President Donald Trump to reverse the policy. 

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights last week said the practice “amounts to arbitrary and unlawful interference in family life, and is a serious violation of the rights of the child”. 

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the policy “shameful” and said there’s no policy justification for it.

Reacting to the separations of nearly 2,000 children from their families, California Senator also urged the Trump administration to end “the immoral policy”.

On Thursday, Sessions cited Christian scripture to justify detaining children separately from their fathers and said that, “Consistent, fair application of law is in itself a good and moral thing, and it protects the weak”.

A day later, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders drew further anger and ridicule from many online after seemingly invoking the Bible to justify the Trump administration’s policy.

Shortly after taking office, Trump signed an executive order, expanding the powers of the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to focus on detaining most undocumented immigrants, including those with no criminal record.

The number of interior removals – or deportations of those already in the US – grew by 37 percent during Trump’s first year in office when compared with the same period in 2016, according to government data.

Sessions has also recently come under fire for issuing a ruling that may make it nearly impossible for domestic abuse and gang violence survivors to seek asylum in the US.

SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies

UN Report Says US is a “Shithole Country”

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Instead of corporate media basically ignoring the UN report, there should be screaming headlines.

Common Dreams

by John M. Repp

Friday, June 15, 2018

“The symptoms of the devastating inequality here include Americans now living shorter and sicker lives than citizens of other rich democracies.” (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

“The symptoms of the devastating inequality here include Americans now living shorter and sicker lives than citizens of other rich democracies.” (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Philip Alston is the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. He traveled to the United States last December to some of our most destitute communities such as Skid Row in LA, poor African American areas in the Alabama, impoverished coal communities in West Virginia and to Puerto Rico. He issued his report on June 1, 2018. It should be front page news.

Five million live in the absolute deprivation we usually associate with the developing world.

The report is a terrible indictment of our country and of the Trump Administration. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist told The Guardian “This administration inherited a bad situation with inequality in the U.S. and is now fanning the flames and worsening the situation. What is so disturbing is that Trump, rather than taking measures to ameliorate the problem, is taking measures to aggravate it.” The U.S. has one in four of the world’s billionaires. But we also have 40 million citizens who live in poverty. Five million live in the absolute deprivation we usually associate with the developing world. Four in ten Americans are so broke that they could not cover an emergency expense of $400 without selling something or borrowing.

The symptoms of the devastating inequality here include Americans now living shorter and sicker lives than citizens of other rich democracies. Life expectancy is down two years in a row. Tropical diseases are on the rise. Our incarceration rate remains the highest in the world (yes, we are exceptional!). Voter registration levels are among the lowest in industrialized countries: 64% of our citizens are registered (fewer vote) compared to 91% in Canada and the UK and 99% in Japan.

We need mass and vocal support for policies such as a Federal job guarantee (locally administered), free healthcare and education for all and help for former prisoners to reintegrate back into society.

As another measure of how much of an outlier in the advanced world the U.S. has become, we can look at the fact that in 1980 the top 1% of the population in the U.S. and Europe held about 10% of the national income. But in 2017, the top 1% in Europe edged up to 12% of national income, but in the U.S. the top 1% grabs up to 20% and rising.

The Trump Administration is making inequality worse. First with the tax cut that rewarded the wealthiest individuals and companies. Then, Trump and the Republicans are stripping healthcare benefits, food stamps and cutting housing subsidies for the poorest Americans. The UN report says the assumption among the politicians who support these cruel policies is that the poor are lazy, don’t want to work, and are dedicated to defrauding the welfare system. Several officials in the government told Alston that scamming the system was rampant but presented no evidence for this assertion.

Instead of the corporate media basically ignoring the UN report, there should be screaming headlines. This report is a wakeup call. Now we need mass and vocal support for policies such as a Federal job guarantee (locally administered), free healthcare and education for all and help for former prisoners to reintegrate back into society.

How the Corporate Media Enslave Us to a World of Illusions

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Common Dreams

by Jonathan Cook

June 13, 2018

Our planet and our children’s futures depend on us liberating ourselves, seeing the ghosts in the machine for what they truly are.

Palestinians protest inside the open-air prison that is Gaza during long day demonstration against the Israeli occupation on June 8, 2018 in near Nahal Oz, Israel. (Photo: Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images)

For several years now, I have been writing regular posts on my blog with one end in mind: to help open a door for readers and encourage them to step through. I select issues, usually those that dominate western media coverage and represent a consensus that we might term the Great Western Narrative, and try to show how this narrative has been constructed not to inform and enlighten but to conceal and deceive.

It is not that I and the many other bloggers doing this are cleverer than everyone else. We have simply had a chance – an earlier one – to step through that door ourselves, because of a jarring life experience that the Great Western Narrative could not explain, or because someone held the door open for us, or more usually because of a combination of the two.

My personal awakening

It is easy for me to identify my own process of awakening. It began with the dislocation of moving to Nazareth and being immersed in someone else’s narrative – that of the Palestinians. Then, I faced for the first time in my career as a journalist an impenetrable wall of opposition, even from my own former newspaper, the Guardian, as I tried to explain that counter-narrative. In fact, I found that the Palestinian narrative was invariably misrepresented as anti-semitism. These were dark years of disillusionment and the loss of a professional and ideological compass.

“The reason the Great Western Narrative persists is because it is useful – to those in power.”

It is in such a moment of bereavement – deprived of the consolation of the Great Western Narrative – that one searches for a door to enlightenment. It can be a long journey to find it. My door appeared while reading about the Propaganda Model of Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book “Manufacturing Consent,” as well as stumbling across a website called Media Lens. They helped me understand that the narrative problem was not restricted to Israel-Palestine, but was a much more general one.

In fact, the Great Western Narrative has been developed and refined over centuries to preserve a tiny elite’s privileges and expand its power. The role of journalists like me was to keep feeding these illusions to readers so they would remain fearful, passive and deferential to this elite. It is not that journalists lie – or at least, not most of them – it is that they are as deeply wedded to the Great Western Narrative as everyone else.

Once one is prepared to step through the door, to discard the old script, the new narrative takes its hold because it is so helpful. It actually explains the world, and human behaviour, as it is experienced everywhere. It has genuine predictive power. And most importantly, it reveals a truth understood by all figures of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment throughout human history: that human beings are equally human, whether they are Americans, Europeans, Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, Russians, Venezuelans, or Iranians, whether they are North or South Koreans.

The term “human” is not meant simply as a description of us as a species, or a biological entity. It also describes who we are, what drives us, what makes us cry, what makes us laugh, what makes us angry, what elicits compassion. And the truth is that we are all essentially the same. The same things upset us, the same things amuse us. The same things inspire us, the same things outrage us. We want dignity, freedom, safety for us and our loved ones, and appreciate beauty and truth. We fear oppression, injustice, insecurity.

Hierarchies of virtue

The Great Western Narrative tells us something entirely different. It divides the world into a hierarchy of “peoples”, with different, even conflicting, virtues and vices. Some humans – westerners – are more rational, more caring, more sensitive, more fully human. And other humans – the rest – are more primitive, more emotional, more violent. In this system of classification, we are the Good Guys and they are the Bad Guys; we are Order, they are Chaos. They need a firm hand from us to control them and stop them doing too much damage to themselves and to our civilised part of the world.

The Great Western Narrative isn’t really new. It is simply a reformulation for a different era of the “white man’s burden”.

The reason the Great Western Narrative persists is because it is useful – to those in power. Humans may be essentially the same in our natures and in our drives, but we are very definitely divided by power and its modern corollary, wealth. A tiny number have it, and the vast majority do not. The Great Western Narrative is there to perpetuate power by legitimising it, by making its unbalanced and unjust distribution seem natural and immutable.

Once kings told us they had blue blood and a divine right. Today, we need a different kind of narrative, but one designed to achieve the same end. Just as kings and barons once owned everything, now a tiny corporate elite rule the world. They have to justify that to themselves and to us.

The king and the barons had their courtiers, the clergy and a wider circle of hanger-ons who most of the time benefited enough from the system not to disrupt it. The role of the clergy in particular was to sanction the gross imbalance of power, to argue that it was God’s will. Today, the media function like the clergy of old. God may be dead, as Nietzsche observed, but the corporate media has taken his place. In the unquestioned premises of every article, we are told who should rule and who should be ruled, who are the Good Guys and who the Bad.

To make this system more palatable, more democratic, to make us believe that there is equality of opportunity and that wealth trickles down, the western elite has had to allow a large domestic middle class to emerge, like the courtiers of old. The spoils from the rape and pillage of distant societies are shared sparingly with this class. Their consciences are rarely pricked because the corporate media’s function is to ensure they know little about the rest of the world and care even less, believing those foreigners to be less deserving, less human.

Nothing more than statistics

If western readers, for example, understood that a Palestinian is no different from an Israeli – apart from in opportunities and income – then they might feel sympathy for a grieving Palestinian family just as they do for an Israeli one. But the Great Western Narrative is there precisely to ensure readers won’t feel the same about the two cases. That is why Palestinian deaths are invariably reported as nothing more than statistics – because Palestinians die in large numbers, like cattle in an abbatoir. Israelis, by contrast, die much more rarely and their deaths are recorded individually. They are dignified with names, life stories and pictures.

Even when a moment arrives to single out a Palestinian from the mass of death, western corporate media show great reluctance to do so. Just take the case of Razan al-Najjar, the 21-year-old Palestinian medic executed by a sniper’s bullet as she tended to the unarmed demonstrators regularly being killed and wounded at the perimeter fence encaging them in the prison of Gaza.

Gaza is slowly sinking into the sea, but who cares? Those primitive Palestinians live like cavemen amid the rubble of homes Israel has repeatedly destroyed. Their women are hijabbed and they have too many children. They don’t look like us, they don’t speak like us. Doubtless, they don’t think like us. They cannot be us.

Even those young Palestinian demonstrators, with their faces covered with strange scarves, launching flaming kites and throwing the odd stone, look different. Can we imagine ourselves standing in front of a sniper to protest like that? Of course not. We cannot imagine what it is like to live in one of the most densely populated areas on the planet, in an open-air prison over which another nation serves as jailers, in which the water is becoming as saline as seawater and there is no electricity. So how can we put ourselves in the demonstrators’ shoes, how can we empathize? It is so much easier to imagine being the powerful sniper protecting the “border” and his home.

But al-Najjar undermined all that. A young, pretty woman with a beautiful smile – she could be our daughter. Selflessly tending to the wounded, thinking not of herself but of the welfare of others, we would be proud to have her as our daughter. We can identify with her much better than the sniper. She is a door beckoning us to step through and see the world from a different location, from a different perspective.

Which is why the corporate media has not invested al-Najjar’s death with the emotional, empathetic coverage it would if a pretty young Israeli female medic had been gunned down by a Palestinian. It was that double standard in his own newspaper, the Guardian, that outraged cartoonist Steve Bell last week. As he noted in correspondence with the editor, the paper had barely covered the story of al-Najjar. When he tried to redress the imbalance, his own cartoon highlighting her death – and its oversight – was censored.

The Guardian’s editors argued that his cartoon was anti-semitic. But the truth is that al-Najjar is dangerous. Because once you step through that door, you are unlikely to come back, you are unlikely ever again to believe the Great Western Narrative.

The true message of Israel

Israel-Palestine offered me that door, just as it has so many others. It is not, as Israel’s apologists – and the upholders of the Great Western Narrative – will tell you, because so many westerners are anti-semitic. It is because Israel lies in a grey zone of experience, one that is readily available to western tourists but at the same time gives them a chance to glimpse the dark underbelly of western privilege.

Israel is enthusiastically embraced by the Great Western Narrative: it is supposedly a liberal democracy, many of its inhabitants dress and sound like us, its cities look rather like our cities, its TV shows are given a makeover and become hits on our TV screens. If you don’t stand too close, Israel could be Britain or the US.

But there are clues galore, for those who bother to look a little beyond superficialities, that there is something profoundly amiss about Israel. A few miles from their homes, the sons of those western-looking families regularly train their gun sights on unarmed demonstrators, on children, on women, on journalists, on medics, and pull the trigger with barely any compunction.

They do so not because they are monsters, but because they are exactly like us, exactly like our sons. That is the true horror of Israel. We have a chance to see ourselves in Israel – because it is not exactly us, because most of us have some physical and emotional distance from it, because it still looks a little strange despite the best efforts of the western media, and because its own local narrative – justifying its actions – is even more extreme, even more entitled, even more racist towards the Other than the Great Western Narrative

It is that shocking realization – that we could be Israelis, that we could be those snipers – that both opens the door and prevents many from stepping through to see what is on the other side. Or, more troubling still, halting at the threshhold of the doorway, glimpsing a partial truth without understanding its full ramifications.

Equally human

To explain what I mean, let us digress for a moment and consider the allegorical film The Matrix.

Neo, the hero played by Keanu Reeves, starts to realise that the reality around him is not as solid as it once seemed. Things have become peculiar, inconsistent, inexplicable. He is shown the door to an entirely different reality with the help of a mentor, Morpheus. Neo discovers that in truth he exists in a dark world taken over by computer-generated life forms that feed off the consciousnesses of him and the rest of mankind. Until that point, he had been living in a dream world created to pacify him and other humans as they are exploited for their energy.

Neo and a small band of others who have liberated themselves from this false consciousness cannot hope to defeat their opponents directly. They must wage war through the Matrix, a digital world in which the computer life-forms always triumph. It is only when Neo finally grasps that the Matrix is an illusion too – that these life forms he is battling are simply binary code – that he becomes strong enough to triumph.

Back to us. On the other side of the door lies a truth that humans are all equally human. From this vantage point, it is possible to understand that a privileged westerner or Israeli would react exactly like a Palestinian if he had to endure the experiences of living in Gaza. From this location, it is possible to understand that my son might pull the trigger, just like most Israeli teenagers do, if he had been bombarded, like them, with brainwashing all his life from his media, school and politicians depicting Palestinians as primitive and violent.

From the other side of the door, Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Bashar al-Assad look as rational, or irrational, and as criminal as George W Bush, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump. In fact, they look less criminal – not because they are better humans than their western counterparts, but simply because they enjoy less power and face more constraints in trying to impose their will. The issue is not about who is better. They are the same humans. It is about who has more force at their disposal – and more will to use it – to perpetuate their power.

Enslaved to power

The conclusion from this is that the way to change our societies fundamentally for the better depends on a change in our consciousness, on liberating ourselves from false perspective, on stepping through the door.

If we remain in a world of illusions, of false hierarchies of virtue, oblivious to the role of power, we will continue to be Neo living in his dream world.

And if we step only to the threshhold, glimpsing the shadows on the the other side, we will be equally in thrall to illusions, just as Neo took his battle back into the Matrix, fighting ghosts in the machine as though they were flesh-and-blood enemies.

This danger can be seen in the case of Israel-Palestine too, where the horrors that Israel inflicts on Palestinians justifiably radicalize many observers. But not all step fully through the door. They linger at the threshhold, angry with Israel and Israelis, and beatifying Palestinians as nothing more than victims. Some manage to find false consolation again, this time accepting readymade conspiracies that “the Jews” are pulling the levers that make such outrages – and western inaction – possible.

To stand in the doorway is as bad as refusing to step through. The illusions are as dangerous, the false consciousness as profound.

Our planet and our children’s futures depend on us liberating ourselves, seeing the ghosts in the machine for what they truly are. We have to begin rebuilding our societies on the basis that we share a common humanity. That other humans are not our enemies, only those who wish to enslave us to their power.

12 Tips for Understanding the World and Why It Is the Way It Is

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theantimedia.com

Written by Caitlin Johnstone

June 13, 2018

(CJ Opinion) — In an environment that is saturated with mass media propaganda, it can be hard to figure out which way’s up, let alone get an accurate read on what’s going on in the world. Here are a few tips I’ve learned which have given me a lot of clarity in seeing through the haze of spin and confusion. Taken separately they don’t tell you a lot, but taken together they paint a very useful picture of the world and why it is the way it is

1. It’s always ultimately about acquiring power.

In the quest to understand why governments move in such irrational ways, why expensive, senseless wars are fought while homeless people die of exposure on the streets, why millionaires and billionaires get richer and richer while everyone else struggles to pay rent, why we destroy the ecosystem we depend on for our survival, why one elected official tends to advance more or less the same harmful policies and agendas as his or her predecessor, people often come up with explanations which don’t really hold water.

The most common of these is probably the notion that all of these problems are due to the malignant influence of one of two mainstream political parties, and if the other party could just get in control of the situation all the problems would go away. Other explanations include the belief that humans are just intrinsically awful, blaming minorities like Jews or immigrants, blaming racism and white supremacy, or going all the way down wild and twisted rabbit holes into theories about reptilian secret societies and baby-eating pedophile cabals. But really all of mankind’s irrational behavior can be explained by the basic human impulse to amass power and influence over one’s fellow humans, combined with the fact that sociopaths tend to rise to positions of power.

Our evolutionary ancestors were pack animals, and the ability to rise in social standing in one’s pack determined crucial matters like whether one got first or last dibs on food or got to reproduce. This impulse to rise in our pack is hardwired deeply into our evolutionary heritage, but when left unchecked due to a lack of empathy, and when expanded into the globe-spanning 7.6 billion human pack we now find ourselves in due to ease of transportation and communication, it can lead to individuals who will keep amassing more and more power until they wield immense influence over entire clusters of nations.

2. Money rewards sociopathy.

The willingness to do anything to get ahead, to claw your way to the top, to betray whomever you need to, to throw anyone under the bus, to step on anyone to pass them in the rat race, will be rewarded in our current system. Being willing to underpay employees, cheat the legal system, and influence legislators will be rewarded exponentially more. People with a sense of empathy are often unwilling to do such things, whereas sociopaths and psychopaths are. About four percent of the population are sociopaths, and about one percent are psychopaths, with some five to fifteen percent falling somewhere along the borderline. The less empathy you have, the further you are willing to go, and the further up the ladder you can climb.

3. Wealth kills empathy.

If that weren’t bad enough, studies have shown that controlling large amounts of wealth actually destroys one’s sense of compassion for one’s fellow man. When you are able to use wealth to obtain everything from security to loyalty to personal relationships, you no longer have to be tuned in to the brain’s empathy center the rest of humanity depends on to get an accurate reading on what’s going on with the people we’re surrounded by. Most people need to be constantly feeling around their families, coworkers, employers, friends and acquaintances in order to ensure their own safety, social standing and security, whereas a wealthy person can simply purchase those things. Being born into wealth or having it for a long time can prevent that sense of empathy from being as strong as it is in the rest of the population.

4. Money is power.

A 2014 Princeton study showed that ordinary Americans have essentially zero influence over their nation’s policy and behavior regardless of how they vote, while wealthy Americans have a great deal of influence. This is because the ability to use corporate lobbying and campaign donations effectively amounts to the legalized bribery of elected officials, which means that money translates directly into political power. This creates a ruling class which is naturally incentivized to use their influence to increase their own wealth while decreasing everyone else’s, because since power is relative, the less money everyone else has the more power the ruling class has.

This is why billionaires keep hoarding more and more wealth while using legalized bribery to stifle economic justice legislation. It isn’t because they want to be able to buy thousands of luxury cars or dozens of private jets; they can only use one at a time the same as everyone else. They hoard wealth to keep the rest of the population from having it. Because money equals power, spreading wealth around would be tantamount to making everyone king, and because power is relative, making everyone king would mean that no one is king.

Rulers, historically, do not give up power easily, and this elite wealthy class is no exception. Hence all their aggressive attempts to suppress any movement against the status quo from the unwashed masses.

5. This same ruling class controls the media.

It’s common knowledge that most media is controlled by plutocrats, whether it’s the old money plutocrats who control the legacy media or the new money Silicon Valley plutocrats who control much of the new media. Media control is an essential component of rule; this has always been the case, since the days when kings would order dissident books burned and bishops would torture dissident orators to death. This is why the first thing a new plutocrat does as soon as rising to a certain level of wealth is start buying up media influence, like Jeff Bezos did when he bought the Washington Post in 2013. Bezos bought WaPo not because he is a stupid businessman who thought newspapers were about to make a lucrative resurgence, but because he is a brilliant businessman who knows that the status quo he is building his empire upon requires a propaganda firm that the public will trust and believe.

6. People are always manipulating each other.

Cultivating an acute awareness of when you are being manipulated, and considering whether someone might have a motive to do so, is an essential component to making sense of the world.

It is very rare to encounter someone who won’t try to manipulate you in any way. Generally people you’ll encounter in your life will try to influence the way you perceive them and your relationship to them, they’ll try to pull you in in some ways and push you out in others, try to hook you up to their personal agendas and goals and shape you in a way that fits with their shape. There’s nothing inherently malevolent in such behavior, it’s just what people do and what they always have done. Again, humans are social creatures, and we do what we can to increase our standing within our social circles.

The big problem is when skillful manipulators find their way into positions of large-scale influence like government or media. Unfortunately, these are the types who tend to get elevated into such positions, because they can manipulate their way in, and generally they do so for reasons of personal ambition rather than altruism. These skillful manipulators form an essential echelon of the ruling class’ loyal servants, and are the minds behind the pro-establishment narratives you’ll suddenly see circulated from think tanks to media platforms to the establishment lackeys on Capitol Hill.

7. Society is made of narrative.

Most of human experience is filtered through our mental stories about it, from our sense of self, to our ideas about who we are, to our beliefs about how we’re supposed to behave in society, to what money is and how it works, to where power exists and who we’re supposed to obey. All of these things are purely conceptual constructs which only exist in the realm of thought; a “dollar” exists to the extent that we’ve all agreed to pretend it’s a real thing and that it has a certain amount of purchasing power. At any time we could collectively decide to change the rules about how power functions or what money is and how it operates, and then instantly the rule of the elite class would be over without anyone firing a shot. It really would be that simple.

That’s how powerful a force narrative is, which is why the ruling plutocrats fight so hard to keep us from seizing control of it. This is why whistleblowers and outlets like WikiLeaks are aggressively and constantly smeared and demonized in the corporate media; if they can create suspicion of truth-tellers then they can keep them from being trusted, and thus keep them from being believed. This tool has been used to minimize the impact of everything from on the ground reports of what’s happening in Syria to leak drops from Edward Snowden; if you can create enough suspicion of someone it doesn’t matter if they’re speaking 100 percent truth; nobody will believe them, and thus the dominant narrative will remain the same.

Maintaining an awareness that there is always an unending battle to control the narrative and manipulate it to advance plutocratic interests is an essential part of understanding the world.

8. The lines between nations are imaginary.

Those lines drawn on the map between countries are pure narrative as well; they’re only as real as the collective public agrees to pretend they are. The ruling elites know this and exploit this. They don’t think in terms of nations and governments, they think in terms of individuals and groups of individuals.

Key strategic region in the Middle East? No need to take over the whole country, just flood it with extremist groups who are loyal to your agendas and control its oil fields. Primo naval real estate in the southern hemisphere? No need to annex it and plant your country’s flag there, just secure enough influence over the important moving parts using corporate contracts, trade agreements, military/intelligence treaties and secret deals and you can use it however you want.

This is why I am dismissive of arguments that “Israel controls America” or “America controls Europe”. There is no “Israel” or “America”; they’re made-up ideas which rulers once upon a time treated as real, but in the modern days of nationless plutocracy they no longer do. There are individuals, there are corporations, there are government agencies, there are factions and groups, and these are what the ruling elites deal with. Governmental structures are only tools which are used by the ruling elites for the purpose of manipulation, control, and military violence, and they only do so insofar as it is useful. The idea of real nations and governments is a cutesy fairy tale sold to the masses so they won’t see the manipulations.

9. Powerful forces are naturally incentivized to collaborate with each other toward mutual interests.

You can be a low-grade millionaire and still live like a relatively normal civilian, but once you start obtaining giant amounts of wealth control you need to start collaborating with existing power structures or they’ll snuff you out to prevent you from rocking their boat, because again, money equals power. This is why Jeff Bezos contracts with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board, and it’s why Facebook and Google collaborate extensively with government agencies; they never would have been allowed to grow to their size if they had not. Plutocratic dynasties which have been in place since long before Amazon, Facebook and Google figured this out many generations ago, and have agreed to push forward in a direction of mutual interest that doesn’t upset the status quo that their wealth is built upon.

This is extremely true of the west, where an effective empire has been created by a complex transnational alliance of mostly western plutocrats, but it is true outside of that empire as well; there are power alliances to be found everywhere that there is power.

10. There is an immense amount of wealth that can be grabbed in the chaos of war and conflict.

In the same way that existing power structures are naturally incentivized to quash any emerging power which would upset their status quo, alliances of power structures push to crush non-aligned power structures the world over. Whenever you see the tight western alliances and their media propaganda arms attacking the interests of Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Venezuela etc., you are seeing an alliance of power structures working to disrupt the interests of another alliance of power structures in order to absorb their assets.

The chaotic, Wild West environments that these conflicts create allow for an amount of underhanded looting and pillaging that you could never get away with in your own country, in the exact same way the colonialists and conquistadors of old could never have gotten away with brazenly grabbing gold, land and slaves from their fellow Europeans in Madrid or Rome but were given no legal trouble in the new world. The colonialists and conquistadors pushed into the Americas, Africa and Asia on the pretense of spreading Christianity and civilization; modern day conquerers push into non-aligned power structures on the pretense of spreading freedom and democracy in precisely the same way.

This chaos doesn’t require direct military conflict to be profitable; the uncritical enmity against Russia that the western plutocratic alliance has manufactured with its media control has allowed them to be blamed for everything from incriminating WikiLeaks documents to a corporate raid by Ukrainian oligarchs without any questions asked. Anyone who has ever had to deal personally with a sociopath knows how much they love to exploit the gray areas that chaotic situations give them, and geopolitical conflicts create those situations in spades.

11. The neocons are always wrong.

This one’s really easy. If you ever want to be on the right side of history for a foreign policy debate, look at what Bush-era PNAC neocons like John Bolton and Bill Kristol are saying about it, and take the opposite position. Neocon thought leaders have been loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything since the turn of the century, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria, and they’re not about to start being right now.

12. The push towards truth always starts with yourself.

You can’t out-manipulate seasoned manipulators. The main error most people make when trying to deal with a sociopath is to try and manipulate them back. Don’t even try. They have years of experience on you because they literally have done nothing else. While you were laughing and crying and worrying and connecting and relating to people, they were working out how to play humans like Garry Kasparov worked out how to play chess. And when you have literal teams of sociopaths collaborating together to amass power, you my dear child, do not have a chance. Don’t play their game. You will lose.

The only way to win this is to set your compass resolutely to “true.” Always be honest with yourself. Find all the different ways that you are manipulating others and see them and acknowledge them. Find your tribal allegiances and your desire to be right, and tip your hat to their existence. The more self-aware we are, the less levers we have to be manipulated by. If you are blindly partisan or loyal to a particular faction, that makes you gullible to propaganda because your wishful thinking and your desire to be right come into play. Get honest with yourself about who you are and what you want, and you will start to become an un-playable piece on the board.

If we can’t beat these bastards with truth, we don’t deserve to win.

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Opinion by Caitlin Johnstone / Republished with permission

The pseudo-left stabs Assange in the back

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http://www.wsws.org

By Andre Damon
11 June 2018

Journalist Julian Assange, who exposed US government war crimes, CIA conspiracies and rampant political corruption, has had all his connections with the outside world severed for ten weeks.

Assange has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian Embassy for nearly six years, forced to flee trumped-up allegations of rape, which have since been dropped, and the threats of the US government to extradite and prosecute him on equally false espionage charges.

In addition to being denied visitors and adequate medical care, the Ecuadorian embassy has severed his internet access and jammed all his electronic communications, leaving him cut off from the outside world.

With one of the world’s most famous political prisoners facing such intolerable conditions, and confronted with such imminent danger, one would expect that all political organizations that consider themselves left-wing would rush to his defense.

However, despite initially voicing opposition to Assange’s hounding by US authorities, the entire gamut of the middle-class “left” has either ignored, downplayed or supported Assange’s persecution.

The pseudo-left groups have followed the lead set by the Guardian, which, after publishing WikiLeaks’ early exposures in 2010, and working with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, has been at the forefront of the demand for Assange’s expulsion from the Ecuadorian Embassy.

In August 2010, the newspaper published a defense of Assange, by Women Against Rape, authored by Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff, which asked, “Does anyone really believe that extraditing Julian Assange will strengthen women against rape? And do those supporting his extradition to Sweden care if he is then extradited to the US and tortured for telling the public what we need to know about those who govern us?”

However, in the subsequent eight years, the paper has made an about-face, serving as an attack dog for the American and British governments’ efforts to expel Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy.

In May, the Guardian published unsubstantiated allegations that Assange “violated” the embassy’s communications system and “apparently” read “confidential diplomatic traffic,” which WikiLeaks denounced as an “anonymous libel.”

International Viewpoint

International Viewpoint, the online journal of the Pabloite United Secretariat, has only published one somewhat favorable statement on Assange over the past eight years, in September 2013, consisting of a single paragraph in an article focusing on Edward Snowden, re-posted from Against the Current. That paragraph accepted the legitimacy of the call for Assange to “face questioning on sexual assault allegations in Sweden,” but hedged that such a call is “impossible” because of the “near-certainty that once there, he’d be trundled off to the United States.”

Since that time, the site has, despite making four passing references to Assange, made no further mention of his detention, much less of Ecuador’s moves to silence him.

Socialist Alternative (US)

Socialist Alternative, likewise, moved from publishing a defense of Assange to silence on his imprisonment. In December 2010, the organization declared, “Whatever the motivations are behind the Swedish sex crimes charges, the fact that the U.S. government would use these charges as a lever to attack freedom of information is shameful.”

By August 2012, the newspaper was writing that the “serious allegations of rape” against Assange “must be investigated.” It added, “US imperialism’s hunt for Assange does not mean that he is innocent of the accusations by the two women in Sweden.”

After this, Socialist Alternative has not even mentioned Assange once since 2014, much less called for his freedom.

International Socialist Organization (US)

While the International Socialist Organization (ISO) initially defended Assange against the trumped-up rape allegations that were an integral part of the US campaign against him, the group came to embrace these allegations in 2012, and, having done so, has maintained a guilty silence on his imprisonment since 2013.

In 2010, the ISO’s Socialist Worker published a defense of Assange, declaring that “international leaders—who care little for women’s rights in the best of times—are using the very serious allegations of rape and sexual assault as a cover for their drive to prosecute Assange for his work with WikiLeaks.”

The ISO concluded, “we must stand in defense of the right of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks to expose the crimes committed by the U.S.,” adding that the “prosecution of Assange is part of a government war on dissent.”

In 2011, the ISO defended Assange against charges of rape, declaring that it is “impossible to take the allegations against Assange at face value.”

But by August 2012, the ISO had changed its tune. “On the face of it,” it declared, “the difficulty arises from an inability to walk and chew gum at the same time. That is: it is surely quite possible to take these rape allegations against Assange seriously, and not participate in typical patriarchal denigration of women reporting rape, while at the same time taking the U.S. threat to Assange seriously and supporting efforts to resist that.”

But in fact, it proved impossible for the ISO to “walk and chew gum at the same time.” Their embrace of the fraudulent allegations against the journalist were nothing but the prelude to their wholesale abandonment of Assange’s defense, and their de facto alliance with the American state in seeking his arrest, trial and imprisonment.

The abandonment of Assange by the middle-class “left” corresponded with significant political shifts. These groups fully embraced US imperialism with Barack Obama’s wars for regime change in Libya and Syria beginning in 2011.

That year, “left” academic Juan Cole pronounced NATO’s efforts at “getting rid of Qaddafi’s murderous regime” to be “worth the sacrifices in life and treasure,” declaring, “If NATO needs me, I’m there.” Australia’s Socialist Alternative publicly denounced “knee-jerk anti-imperialism.”

Since that time, the ISO and its political allies have been the foremost proponents of the US regime-change operation in Syria, proclaiming the US-backed insurgency a “popular revolution,” and comparing the CIA-backed White Helmets propaganda operation to a “humanitarian NGO.”

In 2011, the US government moved to incorporate identity and lifestyle issues as instruments of foreign policy, which culminated in the embrace of gender and identity politics as a centerpiece of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign.

Groups and publications like the ISO, Jacobin and others have fully embraced the #MeToo movement, which has been used to carry out a systematic campaign to undermine due process under the guise of opposing sexual assault. In many ways, the genesis of this right-wing movement lay with the charges against Assange, which set an example for how false or unsubstantiated allegations of sexual assault could be used to promote the policy aims of the Democratic Party and the ruling class as a whole

The abandonment of Assange by these groups is a reflection, fundamentally, of their class basis. They are organizations of the upper-middle class that, whatever their socialist rhetoric, support American imperialism and the capitalist system. Genuine opposition to the attack on democratic rights, and support for Assange, must be rooted in a different social force, connecting the fight for Assange’s freedom to the building of a mass socialist movement against inequality and imperialist war.