How People Become Easily Controlled By Tyrants

“They (tyrants) are in most cases cowardly.  They prefer to get what they want through subversion and trickery, and they run from direct confrontation.  They prefer to use other people (useful idiots) as weapons or shields rather than risk facing off with their ideological opponents.  As parasites, they focus on the weak-minded or the fragile.”

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http://www.activistpost.com

By Brandon Smith

Sept 5, 2018

The question often arises in liberty movement circles as to how we get to the point of full-blown tyranny within a society.  There are numerous factors that determine this outcome, but through all the various totalitarian systems in history there are common denominators – elements that must be there for tyrants to prevail.  When we can identify these common elements in an objective manner, we make it far more difficult for despotic structures to stand.

This is a very complex issue, but I’ll break it down as best as I’m able…

The Psychology Of The Tyrant

To come to terms with how tyrants control society, we must first examine how the mind of a tyrant operates, because these people do not in most cases think the way average human beings think.  It is one of the few cases in which I would encourage people to “otherize” another group. Tyrants are psychologically abnormal to such an extreme that is difficult to classify them as human.

I believe the key to understanding the motivations of tyrants and where these people come from rests on our understanding of narcissistic sociopathy.  I wrote about this extensively in my article ‘Global Elitists Are Not Human,’ so I will only give a summary here.

Narcissistic and sociopathic traits, like many psychological traits, are inborn.  They are present in about 5% to 10% of any society at any given time.  In the vast majority of cases, these traits remain “latent” and do not affect a person’s actions or relationships to a great extent.  In a minority of cases, however, narcissism and sociopathy become the defining factors of a person’s psyche.  This occurs in less that 1% of a population.

To be clear, not all narcissists are sociopaths and not all sociopaths are narcissists.  There are people who are low-level narcissists who excel in society and retain a conscience.  There are low-level sociopaths in society that serve important functions in careers that empathetic people would find difficult, such as certain jobs in the military, or in the medical field.  What I am referring to here are HIGH LEVEL narcissistic sociopaths – the kind of people who become murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and yes, tyrants.

A sociopathic narcissist is motivated by personal desire only.  They are incapable of empathy for others and see people as a kind of food and fuel source rather than fellow travelers in life.  They consider their lack of conscience as an evolutionary advantage; a tool that helps them to survive and thrive by trampling, stealing, manipulating and killing if necessary without guilt or regret.

You would think these creatures would be easy to pick out in a crowd, but it is not always so simple.  They have the ability to mimic behaviors of those around them in order to appear more human.  Sometimes this does give them away because they can’t help but parrot or steal behaviors and mannerisms from people they meet to the point of obviousness.  For those inexperienced with narcissistic sociopaths, though, the tactic works for a time, because what people think they see is someone just like them; a reflection.  Imagine it as a survival mechanism, like a chameleon.

For some tyrants, the ability makes them endearing to the public for a time.  They can be many things to many groups, and their ability to lie convincingly is exceptional.  They climb the ladder of success quickly, and build systems that allow them to prosper.  They do have doubts and weaknesses, though.

They are in most cases cowardly.  They prefer to get what they want through subversion and trickery, and they run from direct confrontation.  They prefer to use other people (useful idiots) as weapons or shields rather than risk facing off with their ideological opponents.  As parasites, they focus on the weak-minded or the fragile.

They desperately want admiration from the very people they victimize.  Therefore, they are constantly forced to play roles in order to appear normal.  They do not like this.  They feel that it is below their station in life to pander, and they are convinced that they should be worshiped as they are, not worshiped for the fraudulent image they have constructed.  They want to “come out of the closet,” in a sense, as a narcissistic sociopath, but if they do under a stable social climate they will be shunned or burned at the stake.  They sometimes band together for protection, and are willing to work with each other as long as there is mutual benefit.

Thus, these “people” seek to create chaos, and then to reorder society to act more like they act, or think more like they think.  When the masses have been convinced to abandon conscience, then the monsters can come out into the light of day without fear.

Here is how they achieve this goal, and how average people help them do it…

False Assumptions

Almost all bad situations start with false assumptions based on bias rather than facts or evidence.  The most dangerous assumption when it comes to tyranny is to say “we are in the right, therefore we are not supporting tyranny.”  The question that needs to be asked, though, is are they really “right” according to the facts?  If the answer is “no,” then they are probably fueling a tyrannical system.

First and foremost, many human beings want to be “right” more than they want to be correct.  That is to say, they are happy to “win” arguments and conflicts regardless of whether or not the truth is on their side.  This bias is the root of many catastrophes in history.

This is not to say that they don’t have a conscience.  Most people in fact do have a conscience that tells them their assumptions are wrong, but they can still commit acts of stupidity and atrocity.  This is where tyrannical manipulators tend to help them along.

Tyrants find great joy in creating all kinds of logical fallacies, mental gymnastics and morally relative sales pitches in order to convince a group of people that their wrong assumptions are right.  The truth becomes foggy and evidence becomes unnecessary.  In this state of mind, when individuals melt together into a mob, assumptions become cult dictates and “winning” becomes paramount.  False assumptions and biases can be used to turn normal upstanding people into monsters, all because they refused to accept that their ideological position was flawed; all because they were afraid to feel embarrassed or admit they had been conned.

False Sides

The taking of sides in political discourse is natural and normal.  Even when people are entirely honest about the facts on hand and agree on basic principles of human decency and freedom, they will STILL disagree on what solutions should be used to deal with the problems in front of them.  This creates a spectrum within society that is ever-present; it cannot be helped or avoided.  Tyrants understand the basis of this spectrum and try to use it to their advantage to manipulate people away from thoughtful discourse and towards mindless conflict.

Tyrants exploit the masses more easily when people assume that corrupt political and social leaders are working for “their side” against the “other side.”  Often these leaders can be bought or threatened into subservience.  Tyrants then use them to drive the spectrum to the furthest opposites, until both sides adopt an attitude of zealotry.

This happens not only in politics, but in geopolitics, as entire nations are driven to war with each other by puppet presidents and governments over engineered conflicts that only ever benefit the cabal of tyrants behind the curtain.

Zealotry And False Narratives

I view zealotry as a kind of psychological disease that is actually communicable – it spreads like a virus through a culture until everyone is infected.  Zealotry happens when a person embraces an ideology to the point that it overrides their personality and their soul, and they are no longer able to think clearly as an individual.  This includes considering the possibility that they are on the wrong side of history and morality.

Zealotry on a mass scale depends on a number of dominoes set in succession.  The threat of civil breakdown and economic suffering helps.  Ideological opponents must be painted as an eminent and vile threat to the very fabric of society.  In some cases they are a real and created threat (controlled opposition); in other cases they are a paper tiger meant to drive another group to support tyrannical measures.

Tyrants build false narratives.  This is what they do best.  They encourage people to unknowingly become villains, or they accuse innocent groups of villainy in order to sow division.  They need all sides to see everyone else either as an ally or an enemy.  There is no in-between.  If a person does not conform to the views of the zealot, then he must be immediately treated as a threat.  This causes an endless echo chamber which destroys all dissent or disagreement, no matter how rational.

Zealots operate primarily on fear, making them easy prey for tyrants.  And as some nerd somewhere once said, “Fear is the mind killer; fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.”

Apathy And False Hope

More than anything else, tyrants desire an apathetic population.  Apathy breeds complacency and inaction, and it also encourages delusional thinking.  Apathetic people tend towards the philosophy of pacifism as a means to vindicate their own behavior, but this is merely a mask designed to hide their fear.  They might fear suffering, they might fear loss, they might fear failure, but they certainly have fear, and it stops them from standing in the way of developments that they know are evil in nature and that require an aggressive response.

Apathy can also be bred into a society through the use of false hopes.  Tyrants conjure scenarios in which the public is made to believe positive “change” is about to take place, usually through politics.  But, there will be no change for the better beyond the cosmetic.  Things only get worse.  In this process of conditioning, tyrants raise up the hopes of the masses, and then dash them to the ground over and over, until the public gives up.

The problem is not that things cannot change for the better, but that the public keeps playing by the rules of a game fabricated by the very people who are causing their misery.  Stepping outside the constraints of that game requires us to take matters into our own hands rather than waiting around for others to make changes for us.  It requires risk.  If the farce of tyranny is to ever end, all awake and aware people will have to take many risks.

I have heard it argued that tyranny is a natural and inevitable product of human society.  That tyrants cannot be avoided, that they will always exist and any attempt to remove them will result in them only being replaced with other tyrants.  This is the pinnacle of the pathetic mindset.  It is the dark void of nihilism.

One could also argue that there is no point to washing ourselves because we are just going to get dirty again tomorrow.  But these people would eventually die of disease.  If tyranny is a human constant, then rebellion must also be a human constant, otherwise, humanity dies or is turned into something unrecognizable.

You can read more from Brandon Smith at his site Alt-Market. If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here.  We greatly appreciate your patronage.

You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com

We the Sheeple: the Blind Reading the Blind

Source: We the Sheeple: the Blind Reading the Blind

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With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

December 8, 2017

Photo by Daniel Lobo | CC BY 2.0

Shortly after the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, made a candid confession to the Army Times, “I’m running out of demons, I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” Amid the general bonhomie of the military interview, Powell nicely encapsulated a central truth of empire: it doesn’t want peace. Never did. Imperialism, the monopoly stage of capitalism, is based on conquest. Peace is little more than an aftermath in the imperialist vision. It is the dusty rubble-strewn silence that descends on Aleppo when the jihadists have been bussed out. It is the silent pollution of the Danube when the NATO jets have flown. It is the quiet that settles on the Libyan square once the slave auction has concluded. Peace is an interlude between the birth of avarice and the advent of aggression. Little else.

If Powell confessed empire’s disinterest in peace, he also expressed the need of the imperials state for a steady supply of new enemies. Conflict is the lifeblood of imperial capitalism. It is how the ruling class further enriches itself. It is how the global elite expand their dominion over the planet. Those who will not pay tribute under threat of menace, must ultimately face the menace. But this truth, that the imperial state is the carmine tip of elite expropriation, must not be aired among the hoi polloi. It is the unseemly underbelly of power and if it were widely understood it would hack away the legitimacy of the state, which is only justified by its nominal commitment to the welfare of the nation. That claim only appears legitimate in the face of some grim and ghastly threat. Powell understood that with the nasty specter of the evil empire crumbling to ash on an Asian plain, a spine-chilling new antagonist would have to be invented to replace it.

Enter the specter of Islamic terror. Islamic terrorism is largely the product of American terror. It is wittingly conjured into being through our wanton destruction of Muslim societies. We did not attack Muslim nations in order to produce a new enemy. We attacked them to extend our control of natural resources, shape the trade routes of the future, and expand the reach of global capital. But the epiphenomenon of terrorism was both predictable and embraced as a casus belli. It is the hobgoblin used by ruling class media to frighten western populations into acquiescence with the west’s warlike vision for global hegemony.

But western populations have of late grown weary of the terrorist scourge and the endless storylines of restive migrants doing the dirty work of mysterious jihadists on the Disneyfied streets of western capitals. Jets into skyscrapers. Cars into crowds. Backpacks in corners of concert halls. High-rise shotgunners spraying bullets into public squares. Terror fatigue is spreading across a western world that could only sustain permanent stress levels for so long. Thankfully, for the managers of empire and its media flacks, a reborn Russian state, rising from the ashes of a capitalist looting spree, has provided a second narrative front in the war for the mind of the west. A different visage emerges. Not the bearded votary narrating a death wish to a shaky cam. But a Muscovite in a bespoke suit with a supercilious grin on his sly poker face. The optics are different, but in a media environment of constant overexposure, that is a good thing.

Both terrorism and a revanchist Russia represent figments of horror in the minds of western citizens. They are the bête noire with which we can shape our worldview and pepper our cocktail conversations. We do not realize that Islamic terror is largely a product of American terror. We do not see that American aggression provokes Russian self-defense. As such, these orientalist caricatures represent the hypocrisy of imperial neoliberalism, which is forever flying the false flag of economic justice and democratic freedom over its just-conquered capitals. Inhabitants of those broken cities know better, as their standard of living plummets and their dictators are replaced by juntas. They know the west is like Joseph Conrad’s sepulchral city, where an alabaster exterior hides a crypt of rotting flesh. That is the real vision that western media works so feverishly to disguise, one no sane person could stomach. That’s why the media must craft fresh Frankensteins at such a feverish pace. Fairy tales of secular missionaries bringing the gift of free-market democracy to the benighted tribes of the east.

Globalization and Its Discontents

The terminology of that fairy tale is telling. The term ‘globalization’ has been used as a portmanteau containing all of the sly nuance of neoliberalism. Globalization is the rush of capital into every conceivable crevice of the planet in search of profitable new ventures. Unfortunately, markets must be pried open with war when rhetorical picklocks don’t suffice. The term ‘humanitarian’ is the masque we now affix to the gruesome face of war whenever we must attack some recalcitrant socialist backwater. What we used to call a ‘civilising mission’ in Africa, we now call a ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the Middle East. Historians call that ‘progress.’

The effect of this noble-minded fustian is to pacify a population and to marginalize anyone who attempts to reveal the true character of imperial action. Who would oppose a globalizing force of open markets that promise to bring ‘developing’ and ‘emerging’ nations online and on par with our post-industrial west? Those who do can hardly explain the extractive nature of neoliberal globalization or its deindustrializing effect on developing economies before they are skewered by the flagbearers of humanitarianism. Who would deny the righteous cause of intervening to halt imminent genocide? One has barely called into question whether genocide is actually imminent before being fleeced by the rhetorical guardians of the west’s civilizing mission. The righteous R2P. One has hardly breathed a word of how the ‘war on terror’ is largely generated by the state terror we inflict on other nations before being rubber-stamped a traitor and told to leave the country (if you don’t like it).

The fable must be accepted. We are spreading freedom and equality. Simple as that. End of story. Say that the United States is the greatest counter-revolutionary force in the world, and be branded a traitor–by the counter-revolutionaries. Wherever democratic freedom rears its ugly head, you can be sure that U.S. media flacks, as well as special forces, drones, proxy terrorists, and battalions are on hand to crush what they claim to defend.

Softening the Blow

The fairy tales are told by the mainstream media, shamelessly so. The Wolf Blitzers of the world devote themselves to the slavish production of fresh threats. The liberal MSM is represented today by outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. These ciphers take the crude evasions of the White House, State Department, Pentagon, and intelligence agencies, and camouflage them. They dress them in muted tones that dampen the drama of blast craters. They massage the story to elide the facts that might produce introspection or taint the purity of our self-image. Self-criticism is inappropriate, but the righteous condemnation of other nations is a moral mandate. Print everything in classic fonts, with well-designed column widths, and add in world-class photography that turns ruination into artistic representation. This is the manna consumed by the acolytes of exceptionalism.

Nothing better embodies the empty ruse of liberalism than the bulky deadwood of the Times. There is of course the elitist coverage of mini-breaks in distant villas, where war-torn peasant societies repair their communities round a communal table. There are the heady profiles of the latest restaurant trends, where the bearded Brooklyn chef with neck tats touts his vegan currywurst to the gentrified hood. There is the fastidious theater review and the effusive real estate forecast. Filler aside, readers will be reminded that war is necessary when America wages it; globalization is inevitable when it means free markets, and free markets mean individual freedom; multiculturalism and mass immigration are desirable to all, irreversible, and a moral imperative; and inscrutable new alien threats are profiled with an Orientalist’s hopeful but ultimately worrisome and mystified gaze. Little mention is made of the fact that our conflicts are provably imperial resource wars; that in nearly every port of call our country wages counter-revolutionary battles that stifle liberation and independence; that globalization has wrecked the American standard of living through labor arbitrage and offshoring; that immigration ought not to be coupled with austerity unless the objective is race wars; that the lives of women, LGBTQ, and people of color are collateral damage in the crosshairs of empire; or that American capitalism has no interest in delivering jobs, living wages, or upward mobility to its extant population, let alone its newest members.

When these mostly taboo subjects are noted, they are presented as a perplexing side effects of a noble project of laissez faire globalization. They are unfortunate but must not be rashly addressed. Better to endlessly maintain the status quo as one wrestles with the philosophic implications of global capitalism. This was Obama’s favorite tactic. Open a dialogue, but don’t change anything important. This dissembling attitude was beautifully expressed in a recent Twitter thread which detailed seventy years of Times articles proclaiming a dizzying succession of reform-minded princes in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the patriarchy’s misogynist grip on power is as firm as ever, as is Washington’s backing. The last post in that thread noted Thomas Friedman’s sycophantic paean to the new idol of Saudi imperialism, Mohammed Bin Salman, or ‘MBS’ to his fawning admirers. Friedman’s article was printed last week.

When not absorbing the high culture of the Times literary supplement, one finds the corporate liberal Democrat happily digesting bite-sized reports from the National Public Radio (NPR). Here the adherence to the state view is no less vigilant than in print. Thus when NPR interviews a CIA psychologist who tells us that whistleblowers are either psychopaths, narcissists, or lingering in some irresponsible adolescence, the “national security correspondent” fails to challenge these claims. And when Australian broadcasting interviews Hillary Clinton, it allows the venal egotist to smear WikiLeaks as a Kremlin tool and call Julian Assange a narcissistic opportunist without the slightest resistance. Questions about the shady dealings of the Clinton Foundation are feebly set aside at the merest sign of discomfort by Madame Secretary. And Times op-ed writers like Friedman can happily call for support of al Qaeda, destroying target societies, and cheerlead more global wage leveling by chastising workers for not falling in lockstep with the elitist program.

These are the signs of a dead discipline. The mainstream media is no longer adversarial. It takes the official story at face value. It has abdicated its proper role in a democratic society, which is partly why we are no longer a democratic society. As Princeton University has explained, we are effectively a plutocracy. Thanks to the MSM, though, most of us continue to believe the rhetorical platitudes of our corrupt leaders. Media is one of our numberless emasculated institutions, which are now authoritarian and warlike. (See liberal faith in the Mueller investigation, led by a neoliberal imperialist who fought to crush Vietnamese socialism and led the FBI, one of the most regressive and criminal organizations in the world.) Like readers who still place a naive faith in the government, MSM writers continue to believe they are doing independent journalism in the service of truth (“Democracy dies in darkness,” the Post implores us). But real journalism accepts nothing at face value. It is the Socratic voice that unsettles the consensus.

Bot Bylines

Instead of incisive journalism that digs, defies, and holds power to account, we get self-censoring media automatons pampering oligarchs and pretending that all good-thinking people care deeply about the state of the state. Listen to the soothing language of the New York Times on the supposedly earth-shaking Russian influence campaign on social media. It hits all the right notes without seriously challenging the narrative. Note how it bleeds concern. This kind of journalism is a palliative for the conscience of a liberal. Ah, the “thorny debates” inside Facebook, no doubt had “in good faith,” and subject to “fateful misunderstandings,” if Ken Burns were documenting it. “Executives worry” and there is considerable “hand-wringing” afoot in good faith efforts to wipe out “fake news.”

Even the protagonists of the story are usefully quoted. Facebook lawyers, commenting on the miniscule purchase of ads over a two-year period from accounts with even the most tenuous Russian connection, much of it after the election, much of it not even mentioning presidential candidates, and the creation of bots to grow click farms, recoiled in horror and called the knowledge “deeply disturbing” and “an insidious attempt to drive people apart.” This is theater for the masses. Cue the organ grinder.

The goal of this domestic conditioning is to remove the democracy from democracy. The objective is to create a hollow shell of a democratic society, representative on the outside, plutocratic on the inside. The marble tomb inhabited by necrosis. This is deliberate. Read Alex Carey’s Taking the Risk Out of Democracy for a nice overview of how America’s collective conscience has been shaped by corporate forces. Why? Because we are the enemy. The enemy is our freedom of thought and speech, because that is what inevitably leads to democratic, socialist, or communist change that benefit the people as a whole, not just the vanishingly small margin of corporate elites who promote and profit from war, conquest, and rule. The problem with democracy is that it isn’t very profitable for capital. Socialist countries tend to emphasize social services. It is extremely hard to make money delivering quality social services to the poor. Really, the only way to make money off of social services is to deliver inadequate social services to the middle class for extravagant fees. See Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act for a master class in this technique. Monopoly capitalism is incompatible with actual democracy. To the degree that a truly democratic society can have free markets, they must be strictly regulated, prevented from reaching monopoly status, and completely walled off from public institutions. Otherwise, they will cannibalize those institutions, reshaping them as rubberstamp organs of elite profit.

As it is, democracy is merely the mask that disguises the engines of imperialism. It is useful in this regard because, unlike socialism, democracy makes no serious claims on the means of production. It depoliticizes the most political issue of all: economics. Thus the manufacture of enemies, job one for the ruling class media, always targets socialist-leaning nations that sense the need for economic justice alongside social justice. Even if they are mixed economies that provide space for open markets, like Venezuela. It makes no difference. We mustn’t tolerate the slightest majoritarian impulse in the economic arena. All such beliefs must be terminated. We must be refashioned as foot soldiers of exploitation. To this end, western propaganda outlets have made psychologist Erich Fromm’s warning sound less like prophecy than predestination, “The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”

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More articles by:Jason Hirthler

Jason Hirthler is a veteran of the communications industry and author of The Sins of Empire: Unmasking American Imperialism. He lives in New York City and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.

UNCENSORED: These YouTube comments show most Americans are NOT buying into the anti-Russia agenda

Can someone explain to me why this Colbert dude is funny? I just don’t get it.

Ordinary Americans are not buying the anti-Russian conspiracy.

Source: UNCENSORED: These YouTube comments show most Americans are NOT buying into the anti-Russia agenda

theduran.com

Adam Garrie

June 15, 2017

Stephen Colbert’s recent interview with film-maker Oliver Stone  is a surprisingly good encapsulation of everything wrong with the Russophobia that has gripped America since the middle-years of the Obama administration, a phenomenon which has vastly accelerated since Hillary Clinton labelled the winning candidate, now POTUS Trump as a man compromised by ‘Russian links’ which are totally non-existent by any objective standard.

There is much to objectively praise and criticise about Trump, but the idea that he is ‘in it for Russia’ is not only a sign of the childishness and pettiness which has run rife in US politics thanks to the Democratic party of Hillary Clinton along with their neo-con fellow travellers, but it is also symptomatic of America needing a foreign enemy to avoid tackling its burning internal issues.

It is not in Russia where a crazed opposition supporter has been radicalised by a violent mainstream media and ends up shooting a prominent Congressman. No, this terrorist atrocity happened in the United States.

It is not Russia where the opposition are trying to undermine the legitimacy of a democratically elected President, that is happening in the United States.

As Donald Trump rightly said during his campaign, it is foreign wars, particularly in the Middle East that is bankrupting America while bridges collapse, airports decay and infrastructure is reduced to third world standards.

But for the mainstream media, rather than take action about these domestic problems, it remains important to lambaste Russia not based on any objective criticism but based on vague, false and cartoonish notions that Vladimir Putin is somehow evil, though no one in the American mainstream mediad is able to articulate just why they believe that.

Stephen Colbert mocked Oliver Stone throughout a deeply sardonic interview. What was the mockery for? Because Oliver Stone interviewed Putin without an agenda. Stone said very clearly to Colbert that he set out to find out what Putin has to say and to do so with the respect the leader of a great super-power deserves. Colbert wanted Oliver Stone to be Steven Colbert. Stone had the audacity to be himself and to allow the Russian President to speak openly and honestly rather than cut him off every few seconds with boring MSM talking points.

Colbert’s interview may have scored him points with members of the DNC and I’m sure it was popular in the McCain household. But for ordinary Americans, comments on Colbert’s Youtube interview show that people are not buying into the MSM anti-Russian agenda.

Here are just some examples of ordinary American television viewers expressing their support for both Oliver Stone and President Putin.

But the real tragedy is that America’s foreign policy is being dictated by those who agree not with Stone or the overwhelmingly supportive comments of Stone’s attempt to speak respectfully with Putin, but with Colbert, the snide man who thinks that international relations should be about frivolous point scoring and arrogant cynicism.

Now content with just losing the 2016 US Presidential election, the supporters of Hilary Clinton and her anti-Russian elite friends want to hammer home a dead message, something that really amounts to little more than beating a dead horse.

This is one of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost the election. Hillary Clinton ran against the President of Russia, Donald Trump ran to be President of the United States. The choice was obvious and the better man won.

Stop Legitimizing ‘Conservatism’: It’s Not an Ideology – It’s a Goddamn Death Machine

Everybody knows by now that conservatives are not too bright, they are ugly, they smell, and their mothers dress them funny.

“That this movement is a threat to Western values is transparent.”

Source: Stop Legitimizing ‘Conservatism’: It’s Not an Ideology – It’s a Goddamn Death Machine

anonymous-news.com

By AnonHQ

June 13, 2017

(Common Dreams) There’s no end to the maladies that ail American politics these days.  It would, indeed, be far easier and quicker to identify what’s working than to itemize the travails that bedevil our pathetic polity in 2017.  Altogether, if this country was a piece of art it would have to combine the orderliness of Pollock with the perceptual logic of Dali, all rooted in the joyful well-being of Hieronymous Bosch, in order to do justice to our times.

For those of you who for some reason always wanted to know what it looks like when an empire cracks apart, I’ve got some lovely news for you:  A certain North American specimen, not generally known for its generosity, is nevertheless happy to oblige you today.  Truly, the full catalog of America’s political woes could crash Amazon’s entire array of server farms, and most of us are struggling enough with chronic nausea these days such that revisiting all these horror stories again is way too depressing to contemplate.  So I won’t.  But there is one thing that inflames my tortured mind more than any of these items – perhaps because it is the one thing that explains them all.

Here it is:  I am sickened to live in a society that treats a malignant illness as just another legitimate point of view, when in fact it’s the very disease that is killing us.  We don’t treat a heroin epidemic as an innocuous choice that some may opt for and some may reject.  We don’t treat cholera as just another flavor of ice cream that some prefer while others go for strawberry.  And we don’t welcome Nazism as a legitimate belief system that deserves the same consideration as any other old model of race relations a society might adopt.  So why do we treat ‘conservatism’ like some harmless cup of tea that some choose over Earl Grey or Jasmine? 

“That this movement is a threat to Western values is transparent.”

I’m dead serious.  And I mean like, literally, dead serious, because if we’re honest about it, that which goes by the name of conservatism today is not an ideology – it’s a death machine.

Maybe there was once a responsible, legitimate (if misguided and merely moderately deceitful) ideology by the name of conservatism – I don’t know.  Regardless, we’re not talking about Dwight Eisenhower or Gerry Ford here.  We’re talking about societal hemlock.  And it’s been that way for a generation or two, but of course now the threat from this monstrosity is no longer just a moral disaster, it’s a full-blown existential crisis, wrapped inside a suicide vest.

Death machine, huh?  Maybe you’re thinking, “Sure, those Trump idiots are completely bonkers, but calling them a willful agent of the apocalypse is little extreme.  I mean, artistic license is a good thing, but c’mon man…”  Sorry.  I’m not kidding.  I’m being quite literal.  This is a belief system which is bringing death to thousands-year-old traditions of Western values, to democracy, to the country, to people’s lives, to the truth, and to the planet.  Because of the threat this represents, we need to stop treating ‘conservatism’ as just another legitimate ideological choice.  It’s not.  It’s a murder weapon metastasized to global proportions.

That this movement is a threat to Western values is transparent.  Today’s so-called ‘conservatives’ are the enemy of equality, human rights and liberty (despite their protestations to the exact contrary).  They instead embody elitism, bigotry and repression.  They don’t stand for gay rights any more than they ever did for civil rights back in the day, or equal pay for equal work.  They worship power and its use to colonize others abroad while repressing dissent at home.  Five minutes at any given Trump rally last year would have made that clear enough.  But in case the message was somehow lost, one look at our fearless leader and his fawning relations with the likes of Putin, Erdogan and Duterte, combined with the shattering of the Western alliance with leaders like Angela Merkel and those of other (once-)allied democracies tells you all you need to know.

And no, it’s not just one buffoon we’re talking about here.  While a number of right-wing pundits have – to their partial credit – repudiated Trumpism, there are loads of problems with that alibi for their movement.  First, a whole lot of other folks have not disowned the walking crime scene that is the Trump White House.  Second, these are pundits – hardly a single Republican officeholder in Washington has found it ethically necessary to distance him or herself from the moral abyss DBA an orange-haired gorilla in a Brioni suit.  Most importantly, however, Trump is far less the historical aberration from the tendencies of the last four decades than he is the expression of its logical outcome.  The right has been trucking in racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, military aggression, environmental destruction and armed robbery of the 99 percent going back at least as far as William F. Buckley and Ronald (Jesus’ Kid Brother) Reagan.  Methinks the ladies of the conservative intelligentsia (pardon the oxymoron) doth protest too much when they seek to distance themselves from an administration whose only difference from its Republican predecessors is the grotesque overtness of its toxicity.  (Especially when it doesn’t take a Svengali to see that this administration is going to jail, and that its place in history will make Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison.  It ain’t too brave to want to make sure your name isn’t associated with that particular catastrophe.)

Speaking of the rest of the GOP, they are even more liable for the destruction of American democracy than is McDonalds Stump himself.  Democracies, of course, are built on such requisite features as constitutions, elections, fixed institutions with defined powers, and so on.  But underlying all of that is something of even greater importance, a political culture that forms the fabric and the foundation upon which any democracy must be built.  This foundation silently and implicitly stipulates the rules of the game and the boundaries of permissible behavior, and without it, there can be no functioning democracy.  It is defined by elements such as a shared national identity that supersedes partisanship, an understanding that certain principles must be protected – even at the cost of one’s own political fortunes – in order for the system to survive, and a basic level of trust such that one can hand over the keys of government to the other side without fearing that that new government will become a weapon used against the losers of an election, while at the same time believing that the next election will provide a genuine opportunity to return to power.  These are the least tangible aspects of what sustains a functioning democracy, but they are also the most crucial.  After all, you can have a formal written constitution or not, you can have a president or a prime minister, you can have two parties or many, you can have powerful states within a national government or not.  In all these profound ways the British system differs from the American one, but nobody would claim that the UK is therefore not a democracy.  What matters at the end of the day is the political culture of mutual respect and trust, the norms and the self-imposed restraints that form the fabric and foundation of a functioning democratic political culture.

And this is precisely what ‘conservatives’ have not been conserving for forty years now, but rather instead destroying.  The necessity of preserving this crucial political culture is why impeaching a president for lying about a personal sexual relationship matters.  It is why five conservative members of the Supreme Court breaking all their own internal rules and supposed principles in order to install their guy in the White House matters.  It’s why using the country’s racial divide to win elections matters.  It’s why relentlessly employing the filibuster to block every item on the agenda of a president from the other party – even those items that you supported yourself only yesterday – matters.  And why it matters when you then alter filibuster rule when it’s used in the same way against you.  This is why radical gerrymandering matters.  This is why targeted voter suppression of the other party’s base in order to prevail in elections you couldn’t otherwise win matters.  This is why refusing to act on a Supreme Court nomination for a year in order to get the nominee you want instead matters.  And its why falsely claiming elections are rigged matters.

I have nothing particularly nice to say about the feeble and ineffectual (on a good day) Democratic Party, and especially its last two presidents.  But all of the above examples of the undermining of American democracy in our time come from the Republican Party and the supposedly conservative folks who inhabit it.  For all the many failings of the Democrats, there is no equivalent to any one of these items on their side of the aisle, let alone an equivalent to all of them.  The upshot is that rather than conserving the Founders’ democratic system that conservatives are forever cynically clothing themselves in, they are in fact destroying it.  This is not death by a thousand cuts, but rather death by relentless saber slashes.

Conservatism is also death in a quite literal sense, as well.  Just ask the million or so Iraqis who perished because of the right’s war of choice justified by lies.  Er, oops, wait a second…  Turns out you can’t ask them, because they’re dead, killed by conservatives.  But you could ask the tens of thousands Americans who are alive today because of Obamacare – which conservatives have fought relentlessly – and who may be dead tomorrow if the GOP manages to kill what skimpy health care protections Americans now enjoy.  Or you can ask the workers who will be dying because the conservative movement is so determined to remove any sort of workplace safety regulations from providing them even modest protection.  Or those who whose lives will be sacrificed in order to destroy the (woefully) basic environmental standards that have been built up over the last half-century.  If you want to know what conservatism means for our environment and health, look no further than Flint, Michigan.  The story that nobody in the media bothers to tell about that insane catastrophe is why it happened.  The reason that ‘Flint’ has now become shorthand for environmental meltdown and lethal governmental buffoonery is that conservatives in Michigan’s government – who fervently ‘believe’ in local control, mind you – passed legislation allowing the state to simply take over control of municipalities whenever it saw fit, despite the electoral choices of voters in those communities.  That’s what the conservative Snyder administration then proceeded to do in Flint, and the rest is history.  By the way, their justification for doing so was that Flint was being mismanaged, so they – wait for it, now – had to come in and get it right.  You can’t make this shit up.  And if you did, you could never find anyone in Hollywood willing to make a movie out of it, on account of its absurdly ridiculous improbability.

“By treating conservatism and conservatives as reasonable and acceptable we not only legitimize the unspeakable, we massively enhance its likelihood of successfully killing us.”

But we’re not done yet.  Conservatism also means death to the truth.  Of course, when it comes to Herr Bloated Pumpkinhead and the current administration, the scale of dishonesty is absolutely epic.  It is literally no exaggeration to say that a consumer of any generic statement by this White House would be more likely to know the truth by simply assuming its opposite is the case, than he or she would by accepting any given tweet or Spicerism as fact.  No wonder Orwell is selling like hotcakes these days.  This is a true “2+2=5″ moment, Winston.

It’s hardly surprising that a career New York City real estate developer who has spent a lifetime doing little but shameless self-promotion and fabricating scams running the gamut from bottled water to bottled diplomas would be unable to speak truthfully about nearly anything.  And of course, when we say ‘anything’ here, we mean… anything.  What’s somewhat astonishing and most definitely disturbing, however, is the reaction that his compulsive tendency to lie produces among the roughly forty percent of Americans who form his political base.  What has gone so wrong in the lives of these ‘conservatives’ that they not only tolerate being lied to incessantly, but actually crave it?  This is not the place for an extended discussion of that question, but suffice it to say that conservatism’s appeal among the public – including many whom it harms the most – cannot be understood outside the realm of political psychology.  One might view these ‘comfortably numb-nuts’ as the rightful inheritors of America’s storied Know Nothing tradition, but in fact that’s too generous a label, since it turns out that it is actually possible in this world to know less than nothing if you’re willing to work hard enough at it.  When you believe that Iraq really had WMD, or that cutting taxes on billionaires will get you a sweet job, or that Donald Trump has your back, well then, graduating to the status of being a full-blown Know Nothing truly is something for which you are well-positioned to aspire.

This is where, alas, the Founders got it wrong, with their Enlightenment model of rationally calculating citizens.  A good hundred million plus Americans have literally lost their minds in our time and, in order to soothe the resentments torturing their savage souls, they are taking down the country around their heads as they descend into an emotionally satisfying madness.

Or, at least it used to be the country they are taking down.  Now it’s the world.  With the president’s destruction of the Paris climate change accord, American conservatism is now bringing it on a planetary scale.  Could this possibly be more jaw-dropping in its sheer stupidity?  We are talking here about a phenomenon that literally threatens life on this planet, and conservatives – who are otherwise so consumed with fear so much of the time – insist on rejecting slam-dunk scientific evidence and making sure that we perish instead.  Again, the pathological psychology of these folks is the only way to understand such a suicide mission, such an act of terrorism on a global scale.  The president’s speech was entirely laced with the rhetoric of bogus grievance – about how the United States is the laughing stock of the world because we’re being duped and cheated by smarter, tougher, more cynical countries, and blah, blah, freaking blah…  Apart from the sheer absurdity of this trope on the basis of any sort of actual logic or fact, there remains this outstanding question:  Even if it was all true, who the hell cares?  If the planet winds up being destroyed, does it really matter whether in the preceding years one country’s GDP grew a half-percent slower than that of some other countries?  What’s that old line about deck chairs…?  Could there be any other accurate term for a belief system that so jeopardizes an entire planet than ‘death machine’?

We need to stop fooling around with this shit.  Smallpox is not just another disease.  Totalitarianism is not just another political system.  Nuclear war is not just another form of conflict.  And what calls itself ‘conservatism’ today is not just another form of legitimate, maybe-they’re-right-maybe-they’re-wrong, ideology.

All of these are life-threatening pathologies of epic proportion.  It’s bad enough that we have to expend so much energy to keep them at bay.  But, by treating conservatism and conservatives as reasonable and acceptable we not only legitimize the unspeakable, we massively enhance its likelihood of successfully killing us.

Today’s ‘conservatism’ is not an ideology – it’s a goddam death machine.  And we should welcome it into our homes and communities every bit as much as we would the Black Plague.

Britain’s Real Terror Apologists

It’s not that difficult to understand: The Brits who voted for May are sheeple easily indoctrinated by the media, religion, that actually believe in the rancid smelly Royal parasites propaganda.

Those who voted for Corbyn are the only free thinkers of Britain.

You’re welcome.

Source: Britain’s Real Terror Apologists

sputniknews.com

Finian Cunningham

June 11, 2017

Despite a vicious smear campaign to denigrate Britain’s Labour leader as a “terrorist sympathizer,” Jeremy Corbyn still pulled off an amazing achievement in the general election.

Hardly has a politician in any Western state been so vilified with character assassination, and yet he has proven to be most popular Labour leader in Britain since the Second World War.

After weeks of trailing his Conservative rival Theresa May in the polls, Corbyn’s socialist manifesto appealed to a record number of voters – closing the gap between the parties to only two percentage points behind the Tories.

UK 2017 general election results

Official results

value, %

1

Conservatives (Con)

Theresa May

42,4

 

2

Labour (Lab)

Jeremy Corbyn

40

 

3

Liberal Democrats (LD)

Tim Farron

7,4

 

4

Scottish National Party (SNP)

Nicola Sturgeon

3

 

5

UK Independence Party (UKIP)

Paul Nuttall

1,8

 

6

Others

 

5,3

 

Seats won

 

318

12

Con

 

262

33

Lab

 

12

3

LD

 

35

19

SNP

 

0

1

UKIP

 

23

4

Others

326 seats required for a majority

Latest update 09.06.17 20:27 GMT

This was in spite of a concerted media campaign to destroy Corbyn in the eyes of the British public as a “terrorist stooge.” The irony here is that the Conservative party is forming a governing coalition with a little-known Northern Ireland party whose history is steeped in British state terrorism. (More on that in a moment.)

© REUTERS/ Peter Nicholls

UK Labour Leader Corbyn: ‘I Can Still Be Prime Minister’

For Corbyn, the election outcome was a stunning moral victory. For Prime Minister May it was a humiliating defeat. The Conservatives lost their overall majority in the British parliament and now they have to rely on this reactionary fringe party from Northern Ireland to form a government.May called the snap election because she thought her party would increase its majority and also because she calculated that Corbyn’s socialist direction of Labour would be wiped out. Many Blairite naysayers in his own party thought so too.

The opposite happened. The British public largely rejected May and her neoliberal capitalist, pro-austerity, pro-NATO policies. They instead rallied behind Corbyn. Granted, the Tories still won the election – only narrowly – but the surge in support for Labour under Corbyn means that he has galvanized a party that stands a strong chance of winning if another election is called. And that could be soon, perhaps in the coming months owing May’s shaky ad hoc government collapsing.

© REUTERS/ Neil Hall

Hundreds of Brits Take to Downing Street to Demand That Theresa May Resign

Another riveting factor in all this is that Corbyn’s success came amid a torrential Tory and right-wing media campaign to denigrate him as a terrorist sympathizer. The propaganda onslaught was conducted for months since May called the election back in April. And it grew to a frenzy as election day approached last Thursday, especially when the opinion polls showed Labour steadily whittling away the earlier Conservative support.The day before the public went to the polling booths, the Daily Mail ran the front page headline: “Apologist for terror,” with Jeremy Corbyn’s photo below. It looked like a “wanted poster” from the Wild West. The only thing missing was the subhead with the words: “Wanted dead or alive.”

The scurrilous allegation pounded over and over by the largely pro-Conservative British media that Corbyn is “soft on terrorism” stems from his otherwise principled history of campaigning on international justice and peace.

© REUTERS/ Stefan Wermuth

Theresa May Lost Without Losing in Bid to Tighten Grip on Parliament

Over his 35 years as an MP, he has voiced consistent support for Palestinian rights under illegal Zionist occupation; he has supported Hezbollah resistance against Israeli and American aggression; and during the conflict in Northern Ireland, Corbyn gave a voice to Irish Republicans who were being assailed by British military violence.Many other international causes could be mentioned, such as Corbyn opposing British government weapons dealing with the despotic Saudi regime which is propagating terrorism in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

He has also campaigned to abandon nuclear weapons and is critical of NATO’s reckless expansion in Europe, which have earned him the jingoistic pillorying by the British establishment of “being soft on Russia.”

Corbyn has never condoned terrorism. Rather he has always sought to properly put it in a wider context of other parties also, unaccountably, using terrorism and thus fueling conflict.

© REUTERS/ Russell Cheyne

Labour’s Poll Surge Has Establishment ‘Pundits’ in a Flap

This brings us to so-called Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) from Northern Ireland whose 10 MPs Theresa May’s Tories are now relying on to form a government. This party was formed in the early 1970s by the firebrand Protestant preacher Ian Paisley. While Paisley mellowed in later years before his death in 2014, he spent most of his career preaching vile hatred against Catholics and Irish Republicans, whom he saw as a threat to the political union between Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain. In British-run Northern Ireland, it wasn’t acceptable to have a democratic aspiration for an independent Ireland. You were either a pro-British unionist or a “threat.” So much for British democracy.Senior members of Paisley’s pro-British party played a crucial role in smuggling massive caches of weapons into Northern Ireland during the 1980s to illegally arm unionist paramilitaries. These paramilitaries went on to murder hundreds of innocent people simply because they were Catholics, who tended to be Republican. A favored tactic of these paramilitaries was to storm into pubs and homes and indiscriminately mow people down with assault rifles.

One notorious pro-British killer was Gusty Spence who belonged to the Ulster Volunteer Force paramilitary. He later expressed remorse and deplored Ian Paisley, the DUP founder, as the person who incited him to murder innocent Catholics due to his sectarian hate speech.

© AP Photo/

Theresa May’s Own Goal Has Echoes of Another Tory Political Blunder in 1974

The paramilitary murder gangs were not just supported covertly by members of the DUP. The British government of Margaret Thatcher – Theresa May’s predecessor and political heroine – orchestrated these same death squads in a covert policy of “dirty war.”British military intelligence colluded with the pro-unionist militants to assassinate Republican politicians and ordinary Catholics alike in a covert policy of state-sponsored terrorism. The objective was to terrorize people in submitting to British rule over Northern Ireland, rather than allowing the island country to become united and independent.

The British government provided intelligence and cover for the death squads and the unionist politicians had helped supply the AK-47 assault rifles and Browning handguns smuggled from Apartheid South Africa.

This secret dirty war policy of the British government and their unionist proxies in Northern Ireland has been uncovered by investigative journalists such as Paul Larkin (see his groundbreaking book “A Very British Jihad: Collusion, Conspiracy and Cover-up in Northern Ireland”); as well as human rights campaign groups like Belfast-based Relatives for Justice and Pat Finucane Centre.

© REUTERS/ Peter Nicholls

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? Corbyn Says UK Foreign Policy to Blame for Terrorism

Not even the present government of Theresa May can deny this murderous legacy in Ireland, although there is a determined silence now as she fights for her political survival in the wake of the British election disaster.It is a proven fact that May’s Conservative party and the unionist politicians whom she is now partnering with to govern Britain were complicit in terrorism.

Northern Ireland has since gained a peace settlement in which unionist and republican politicians have been able to work together to form a local governing administration. The Irish peace process was possible partly because of the courageous and principled intervention by British politicians like Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn has never apologized for terrorism. He has sought to overcome it by making politics work. The same cannot be said for Theresa May’s Conservative party. It was an accomplice and an apologist for a covert policy of state-sponsored terrorism during Northern Ireland’s recent 30-year conflict.

The very party whom she is now allied with for governing Britain – the DUP – were also apologists for paramilitaries who routinely smashed their way into family homes and slaughtered victims in cold blood in front of their loved ones.

The ongoing muted policy of May’s government and her unionist proxies about their murderous legacy in Ireland is a testimony to who the real apologists for terror are.

 

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.

“Baizuo” Is The New Derogatory Term Millions Of Chinese People Are Using To Describe America’s “White Left” Regressive Liberals

Baizou has basically become the go to word for Chinese social media users, who want to trash other people in online debates.

Source: “Baizuo” Is The New Derogatory Term Millions Of Chinese People Are Using To Describe America’s “White Left” Regressive Liberals

SHTFplan.com

Daniel Lang
May 17th, 2017

After the last election, the far-left in our society became a laughing stock. The social justice warriors, the progressives, the regressive left; whatever you want to call them, they became a joke after Trump was elected. And it wasn’t because they lost the election. It was because of how they reacted to losing. We all witnessed what amounted to a nationwide temper tantrum on November 9th. And in the weeks that followed, it became apparent that these people aren’t just childish. They are freaking insane.

However, it may surprise you to learn that these people aren’t just a joke in America. They are the laughing stock of the world. They are looked down upon, even in countries where they don’t have a significant presence.

In China for instance, they have a word for these people. They are called “baizuo” or the “white left” on social media. Which is interesting, because even though China has its fair share of socialists and communists, they don’t have a direct equivalent to our liberal snowflakes. Most of the Chinese are still fiercely nationalistic and anti-immigrant, regardless of political affiliation. That country just doesn’t have a large population of politically correct, affluent liberals (presumably, they were all killed off during the Great Leap Forward). So what does this term mean to the average Chinese citizen?

It might not be an easy task to define the term, for as a social media buzzword and very often an instrument for ad hominem attack, it could mean different things for different people. A thread on “why well-educated elites in the west are seen as naïve “white left” in China” on Zhihu, a question-and-answer website said to have a high percentage of active users who are professionals and intellectuals, might serve as a starting point.

The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the ‘white left’. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

Baizuo has basically become the go to word for Chinese social media users, who want to trash other people in online debates. It’s also frequently used to make light of what is viewed in China, as the inherent weakness of western democracies. So not only has the far-left made themselves into a joke, they’re making everyone else who supports Western civilization look bad all around the world.

It just goes to show, the people who speak the loudest in society often become the face of that society, even if most sane people aren’t taking them seriously anymore.

Social experiment – most people are sheep (4 min)

It’s hopeless people! This explains TV, organized sports, religion, politics, and so much more!