Filed under: American crimes, Journalism, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom UK, USA, Western Propaganda | Tagged: American injustice, “Wikileaks”, Corporate America, Julian Assange, Roger Waters, Zionists "Arab Spring" | Comments Off on Roger Waters interview for RT (Assange and Russia!)
Nov 26, 2021
By Mohammad Al-Jaber
Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal opened the door for much of the American right to champion their anti-BLM and pro-gun narrative; Exploiting a tragedy for their interests does not seem too surprising.
From a protest calling for racial equality in the United States to a blood bath that saw a white teen claiming the lives of protestors. That is how the protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 25, 2020, unfolded, and over a year later, the killer was acquitted of his crimes.
After reflecting on how the justice system was an accomplice to the acquittal of the white teenager and racial discrimination in the United States in Part I, it will be revealed how the police contribute to the same issue, in addition to shedding light on Rittenhouse’s trial and its aftermath.
Police force
The police force is a system that shares racism with the judiciary in the United States. In fact, it is what delivers the alleged offenders to the wolves of the US courts, who then do with them as they wish.
There is so much evidence to support this “claim” that amounts to a fact, such as the fact that Black people are 27% more likely to be killed by the police, 35% more likely to be unarmed, and 36% less likely to be threatening someone when killed.
Solid facts prove that the police have been notorious for their treatment of minorities, especially black people.
Looking back to 2020, protests erupted across the states after a policeman brutally knelt on the neck of a black man for 8 minutes 46 seconds, killing him on the scene as he was pleading for his life. Said protests resulted in an awareness campaign on racism in the US, which put many forgotten cases in the spotlight and called for more accountability in future ones.
Not in any particular order, we will be shining the light on several cases of police brutality against black people across the United States.
Tamir Rice was only a 12-year-old boy at the time of his murder at the hands of white police officer Timothy Loehmann under the pretext of the young kid possessing a firearm.
Someone had called the police in Cleveland, Ohio, about a male carrying a gun in the area, which the caller said was fake, and reiterated his statement later in the call, also informing the police that the suspect was “probably a juvenile.”
Tamir Rice was killed while carrying a replica gun, a toy in essence, while Kyle Rittenhouse walked by police vehicles after shooting several people without getting shot as someone was yelling at the police about the crime he had just committed.
“Rittenhouse had his hands up while walking toward and past police vehicles.”
Well so did case 2:
Adam was a 13-year-old Latino boy who was shot and killed by the Chicago police for possession of a weapon – which was later retrieved from the scene for it to appear that it was an empty 9mm handgun – while complying with the police officer’s orders.
Toledo had his hands in the air when the police officer shot him, body-cam footage showed.
So why was Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager brandishing an AR-15 which the police knew was loaded due to information acquired from a pedestrian, treated so differently than Adam Toledo, a Latino child, who was no older than 13 and complied with the officer’s orders but got shot nonetheless?
Maybe Kyle’s complexion stopped him from looking suspicious holding his AR despite someone shouting that he had just shot several people.
Perhaps the next case will reveal the shocking reality of police racial prejudice.
Elijah McClain was a 23-year-old autistic Black man who was killed at the hands of the police and paramedics after three white officers stopped him on the grounds that he “looked suspicious.” Elijah had been wearing an open ski mask to protect himself from chronic chills caused by his anemia. He was also wearing headphones, which prevented him from hearing calls from the police officers. McClain objectively did nothing wrong, which he voiced to the police officers as they were wrestling him to the ground ahead of putting him in a chokehold.
McClain was pleading and telling the police officers he could not breathe while urging them to respect his boundaries as he was introverted.
McClain went unconscious, prompting the police officers to release him from the chokehold. Afterward, a medic injected McClain with 500mg of ketamine to sedate him because he was struggling after regaining consciousness.
Due to the drugs administered into his system, alongside the stressful situation he was in, Elijah went into cardiac arrest. Three days after arriving at the hospital, he was declared brain dead, and then removed from life support three days thereafter.
All the aforementioned “cases” are not simply “arguments” to support a claim: They are human beings who lost their lives to an unfair system without their killers receiving the proper justice.
Tamir Rice’s killer, Timothy Loehmann, was sacked from his job without any charges. Adam Toledo’s killer, Eric Stillman, was also just sacked without charges. Elijah McClain’s killers, Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, and Randy Roedema, have been indicted, but nothing much is anticipated since we are talking about the US justice system, especially since we’re talking about the same system that did not take any action against the cop murderers of Breonna Taylor, who was fatally shot in the safety of her own home, and acquitted the killer of teenage black honor student Antwon Rose II.
And we must not forget that over the past 15 years, only 44 officers (out of the 121 who faced murder or manslaughter charges) have been convicted, and often for lesser offenses, just like Breonna Taylor’s case.
Now, back to the trial.
Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges, but let’s look at those trying him, and who practically declared it open season against protestors through their acquittal.
The jury was picked in one day, and it comprised 20 members – 11 women and nine men, nothing out of the ordinary. It nearly aced the male-to-female ratio of the US population. However, one aspect of this jury could explain many things: out of the 20 members, only one member was from an ethnic minority, the rest were all white.
The jury was overwhelmingly white and was trying a white teenager who killed citizens protesting for black lives. One wonders how Kyle was acquitted with all this adversity he was facing in the trial.
Judge Bruce Schroeder, also white – surprisingly – left much more to be desired. From ruling that the victims of Kyle’s criminality should not be called “victims,” but rather “rioters,” “looters,” and “arsonists,” to allowing the defendant to pick the names of the jurors through a raffle, Schroeder raised many concerns about the direction in which the trial was headed before it even started.
Judge Schroeder exhibited several signs of unprofessionalism. He played a game of “Jeopardy!” with the potential jurors and made a speech with racial undertones as to why he had defendants blindly pick the names of the jurors.
One of the charges legal experts thought would most likely get Rittenhouse some time in prison for – possession of a dangerous weapon – was dismissed by Schroeder after the defense found a “legal loophole,” which only prevented minors from owning short-barrelled rifles. That law is adopted in Wisconsin, and Kyle’s rifle was an AR-15, a long-barrelled rifle.
The courtroom under Schroeder was unbelievably chaotic, with an unusual amount of shouting, putting his professionalism up for question.
And lastly, during the cross-examination, the judge’s phone rang to the ringtone of “God Bless the USA.” The song is a patriotic song popular among conservatives in the US and was used many times as Donald Trump’s entrance theme during his rallies, which also reflected the judge’s most probable political stance towards the cause for which Huber and Rosenbaum died – BLM.
The murderous teenager did not shy away from putting his complexion and white tears to use, as they must have garnered the judge and the jury’s sympathy, especially that his skin color matched theirs.
Kyle played the victim card shortly after getting on the stand, on which he shed crocodile tears and claimed Rosenbaum had “ambushed” him, arguing self-defense.
The judge gave Rittenhouse a 10-minute break to compose himself. But were his victims given a break before he shot them?
Kyle’s testimony saw him reiterating what he said during the aforementioned interview before the attack. He also argued self-defense when it came to his murder of two men and the wounding of a third. “I did nothing wrong,” he boldly claimed.
There isn’t much to address in Kyle’s testimony, for in the court, he was not the one at fault as much as the defense team, the jurors, and the judge, and looking at recordings of the testimony, one could easily predict the defense had coached Rittenhouse on what to say.
All in all, the trial was very disappointing, especially with how the judge was too stern against the prosecution while being too lenient in favor of the defense and, well, the end result, Kyle’s acquittal.
By acquitting Rittenhouse, the US justice system committed a crime against his victims, allowing them to be perceived as terrorists for trying to stop him from putting somebody in harm’s way while designating him a “hero” for “protecting property.”
This goes to show that the justice system in question sees defending property as a valid cause for murder while perceiving protesting against systemic racism and police brutality as a crime.
Rittenhouse went on to become an icon for the far-right in the United States, those of them who oppose Black Lives Matter and the protests that went on calling for racial equality. Those who want to have guns in their holsters all the time in case “the government tries to oppress them” do not want others to protest because of the same reason: government-sponsored oppression.
Kyle garnered support from the radical right in America and its leaders, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene went as far as pushing for rewarding Kyle a gold Congressional Gold Medal for “protecting the community of Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) riot on August 25, 2020.” Not only that, but GOP congressmen have offered Rittenhouse an internship following this fiasco, seeing him as some sort of validation for their conservative cause.
Those congressmen include Rep. Madison Cawthorn, Rep. Lauren Boebert, and Rep. Matt Gaetz.
The American right went out on protests to support Kyle Rittenhouse, surprisingly not solely because of his race but because to them, his acquittal was a tool they could use to champion “gun rights” in a country where gun-related killings constitute 73% of all homicides.
Finally, when Donald Trump, a man notorious for his racism and obstruction of justice, not only congratulates you but hosts you in his resort in Florida in celebration, you’re probably in the wrong.
Filed under: American Racism, USA | Tagged: American injustice, Black Americans, Racist US Police | Comments Off on Kyle Rittenhouse: The White-Only American Dream (Part II)
Nov 23, 2021
By Mohammad Al-Jaber
When you are able to walk scot-free after killing civilians protesting against inequality and racial discrimination, you know you’re in the white man’s country, America.
The United States justice system proved not only to be absolutely incompetent but also incredibly biased toward white people after the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. This trial saw a criminal walking scot-free after murdering two men and wounding another.
The crime unfolded during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, against systemic racism in the police.
Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, two white males, lost their lives, and the US justice system did not bat an eye. Perhaps that had to do with the two defending a black cause: racially-fueled police brutality.
We must go back to the origin of the incident to accurately understand the situation, so here is how it unfolded:
On August 23, 2020, a police officer shot a black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, the same city that became a place for Rittenhouse to live out his homicidal teenager GTA dreams under US auspices.
Blake was brutally shot seven times before his children by white police officer Rusten Sheskey, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and damaging his stomach, kidney, and liver. Blake also had to undergo surgery to remove his colon and most of his small intestines after Sheskey showed no hesitation to shoot him in the back and side.
Blake had been trying to break up a fight between two women when the police were called on him, and he had been trying to get into his vehicle when Sheskey shot him, adversely altering the course of his life without accountability.
This act of police brutality sparked national and international outrage; another white cop committed an act of violence against another black civilian following unrest over the summer of 2020 in light of the BLM protests, which took place after the murder of George Floyd.
People all over the US took to the streets after Blake’s shooting to protest against police brutality in acts that were described as “riots,” but is it so wrong to “riot” against a system in which racism is deeply rooted?
One protest, in particular, was in the limelight over 17-year-old teenager-turned-criminal slaughtering civilians who had been protesting for a pivotal cause: coexistence.
The protest in question here is the one that took place in Kenosha, which saw brutal suppression of protests resulted in clashes between civilians, the police, and militias who, under the pretext of “protecting lives and property,” used violence against civilians. Some reports even suggest that the police deputized militia vigilantes during the aforementioned protests.
The situation took a devastating turn (that the judiciary apparently did not perceive as so more than a year later) when a bunch of armed men showed up at the protest alleging “protection.”
The men who came to the protest – some of which were from different states and cities, such as Kyle Rittenhouse – did so with malicious intent. What else would prompt you to bring an AR to another city, or even state, other than murderous intent?
Upon seeing Kyle armed with an AR – which he said in an interview ahead of committing the crime was for “his job,” which was “protecting this business” and “defending the property” – protestors went after him intending to disarm the teen perceived as dangerous.
A video of the encounter showed a group of protestors running after an armed Rittenhouse. Upon catching up, they managed to get him on the ground. During the brawl, the assailant shot those who were attempting to disarm him due to the threat he posed.
Kyle aimed his rifle at one of those who had been pursuing him, Joseph Rosenbaum, who was unarmed, fatally shooting him four times. Rosenbaum fell to the ground almost instantly.
One person was not enough for Rittenhouse, for he then shot Anthony Huber, who had a skateboard in hand, once in the chest, taking life shortly thereafter. For those who argue it was self-defense, it’s like apples to oranges. A skateboard, logically, is no match to a firearm.
Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial, such as many things affiliated with the United States, was said to be nothing short of disgraceful. A criminal facing charges of reckless endangerment of safety, intentional homicide, attempted homicide, and use of a dangerous weapon, walked from a trial that would have had anyone, had they not been white, sentenced to life in prison, multiple life sentences.
One cannot make such a bold statement without providing evidence for their claims, so let’s go on a tangent about how discriminatory the justice system and its accomplice, the police force, are.
Altogether, the United States is notorious for having the highest prisoner rate, with 639 prisoners per 100,000 people, and having the largest prisoner population, which is incredibly lucrative for the US prison-industrial complex.
Not only that, but Uncle Sam’s land has vast disparities in terms of imprisoned population by ethnicity. As of 2019, the United States had an earth-shattering 1,096 black prisoners per 100,000 black people and 525 Hispanic prisoners per 100,000 Hispanic people while unfairly having 214 of its fair whites imprisoned per 100,000 white people. Black minors are not exempted from discrimination. Only compromising 15% of minors in the US, black children made up 35% of all juvenile arrests in the leader of the Free World. These numbers reflect the deep-rooted racism in the US justice system, which is infamous for its sentencing disparities when it comes to ethnicity and race – not to mention class.
The crème de la crème of racism in the United States isn’t about the fact that there are more people of color incarcerated than whites, but the fact that black people are prone to face a harsher sentence for the same crime as a white person. On average, black offenders received sentences 19.1% longer than similarly situated white male offenders.
Non-government sponsored departures and variances largely contribute to the schism in sentencing, for they allow judges to make sentences at their own discretion. That, in turn, brings color to a system that is not supposed to see color and therefore lays waste to judicial neutrality.
To add insult to injury, black males are 21.2% less likely than white males to receive non-government sponsored departures and variances, and when they did receive one, their sentences were 16.8% longer than white males who received one.
An aspect that proves the absence of equity in the judiciary system is that 28 states do not have a single black justice, 40 states do not have a single Latino justice, 44 states do not have a single Asian justice, and 47 states do not have a single Native American justice.
The US justice system seems to be running into many walls trying to distance itself from seeming racist, but figures suggest otherwise. The same goes with the police, which will be reflected upon, alongside key aspects of Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial, in an upcoming article.
Filed under: American Racism, USA | Tagged: American injustice | Comments Off on Kyle Rittenhouse: The White-Only American Dream (Part I)
November 01st, 2021
By John Pilger
When I first saw Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison, in 2019, shortly after he had been dragged from his refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy, he said, “I think I am losing my mind.”
He was gaunt and emaciated, his eyes hollow and the thinness of his arms was emphasised by a yellow identifying cloth tied around his left arm, an evocative symbol of institutional control.
For all but the two hours of my visit, he was confined to a solitary cell in a wing known as “healthcare”, an Orwellian name. In the cell next to him a deeply disturbed man screamed through the night. Another occupant suffered from terminal cancer. Another was seriously disabled.
“One day we were allowed to play Monopoly,” he said, “as therapy. That was our healthcare!”
“This is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” I said.
“Yes, only more insane.”
Julian’s black sense of humour has often rescued him, but no more. The insidious torture he has suffered in Belmarsh has had devastating effects. Read the reports of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and the clinical opinions of Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London and Dr. Quentin Deeley, and reserve a contempt for America’s hired gun in court, James Lewis QC, who dismissed this as “malingering”.
I was especially moved by the expert words of Dr. Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London. She told the Old Bailey last year that Julian’s intellect had gone from “in the superior, or more likely very superior, range” to “significantly below” this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and “perform in the low to average range”.
At yet another court hearing in this shameful Kafkaesque drama, I watched him struggle to remember his name when asked by the judge to state it.
For most of his first year in Belmarsh, he was locked up. Denied proper exercise, he strode the length of his small cell, back and forth, back and forth, for “my own half-marathon”, he told me. This reeked of despair. A razorblade was found in his cell. He wrote “farewell letters”. He phoned the Samaritans repeatedly.
At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the brutality of his kidnapping from the embassy. When the glasses finally arrived at the prison, they were not delivered to him for days. His solicitor, Gareth Peirce, wrote letter after letter to the prison governor protesting the withholding of legal documents, access to the prison library, the use of a basic laptop with which to prepare his case. The prison would take weeks, even months, to answer. (The governor, Rob Davis, has been awarded an Order of the British Empire).
Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. Julian could not call his American lawyers. From the start, he has been constantly medicated. Once, when I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn’t say.
At last week’s High Court hearing to decide finally whether or not Julian would be extradited to America, he appeared only briefly by video link on the first day. He looked unwell and unsettled. The court was told he had been “excused” because of his “medication”. But Julian had asked to attend the hearing and was refused, said his partner Stella Morris. Attendance in a court sitting in judgement on you is surely a right.
This intensely proud man also demands the right to appear strong and coherent in public, as he did at the Old Bailey last year. Then, he consulted constantly with his lawyers through the slit in his glass cage. He took copious notes. He stood and protested with eloquent anger at lies and abuses of process.
The damage done to him in his decade of incarceration and uncertainty, including more than two years in Belmarsh (whose brutal regime is celebrated in the latest Bond film) is beyond doubt.
But so, too, is his courage beyond doubt, and a quality of resistance and resilience that is heroism. It is this that may see him through the present Kafkaesque nightmare – if he is spared an American hellhole.
I have known Julian since he first came to Britain in 2009. In our first interview, he described the moral imperative behind WikiLeaks: that our right to the transparency of governments and the powerful was a basic democratic right. I have watched him cling to this principle when at times it has made his life even more precarious.
Almost none of this remarkable side to the man’s character has been reported in the so-called “free press” whose own future, it is said, is in jeopardy if Julian is extradited.
Of course, but there has never been a ”free press”. There have been extraordinary journalists who have occupied positions in the “mainstream” – spaces that have now closed, forcing independent journalism on to the internet.
There, it has become a “fifth estate”, a samizdat of dedicated, often unpaid work by those who were honourable exceptions in a media now reduced to an assembly line of platitudes. Words like “democracy”, “reform”, “human rights” are stripped of their dictionary meaning and censorship is by omission or exclusion.
Last week’s fateful hearing at the High Court was “disappeared” in the “free press”. Most people would not know that a court in the heart of London had sat in judgement on their right to know: their right to question and dissent.
Many Americans, if they know anything about the Assange case, believe a fantasy that Julian is a Russian agent who caused Hillary Clinton to lose the presidential election in 2016 to Donald Trump. This is strikingly similar to the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which justified the invasion of Iraq and the deaths of a million or more people.
They are unlikely to know that the main prosecution witness underpinning one of the concocted charges against Julian has recently admitted he lied and fabricated his “evidence”.
Neither will they have heard or read about the revelation that the CIA, under its former director, the Hermann Goering lookalike Mike Pompeo, had planned to assassinate Julian. And that was hardly new. Since I have known Julian, he has been under threat of harm and worse.
On his first night in the Ecuadorean embassy in 2012, dark figures swarmed over the front of the embassy and banged on the windows, trying to get in. In the US, public figures – including Hillary Clinton, fresh from her destruction of Libya – have long called for Julian’s assassination. The current President Biden damned him as a “hi-tech terrorist”.
The former prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, was so eager to please what she called “our best mates” in Washington that she demanded Julian’s passport be taken from him – until it was pointed out to her that this would be against the law. The current prime minister, Scott Morrison, a PR man, when asked about Assange, said, “He should face the music.”
It has been open season on the WikiLeaks’ founder for more than a decade. In 2011, The Guardian exploited Julian’s work as if it was its own, collected journalism prizes and Hollywood deals, then turned on its source.
Years of vituperative assaults on the man who refused to join their club followed. He was accused of failing to redact documents of the names of those considered at risk. In a Guardian book by David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange is quoted as saying during a dinner in a London restaurant that he didn’t care if informants named in the leaks were harmed.
Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, actually was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind.
The great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg told the Old Bailey last year that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took “extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants”.
In 2013, I asked the film-maker Mark Davis about this. A respected broadcaster for SBS Australia, Davis was an eyewitness, accompanying Assange during the preparation of the leaked files for publication in The Guardian and The New York Times. He told me, “Assange was the only one who worked day and night extracting 10,000 names of people who could be targeted by the revelations in the logs.”
Lecturing a group of City University students, David Leigh mocked the very idea that “Julian Assange will end up in an orange jumpsuit”. His fears were an exaggeration, he sneered. Edward Snowden later revealed that Assange was on a “manhunt timeline”.
Luke Harding, who co-authored with Leigh the Guardian book that disclosed the password to a trove of diplomatic cables that Julian had entrusted to the paper, was outside the Ecuadorean embassy on the evening Julian sought asylum. Standing with a line of police, he gloated on his blog, “Scotland Yard may well have the last laugh.”
The campaign was relentless. Guardian columnists scraped the depths. “He really is the most massive turd,” wrote Suzanne Moore of a man she had never met.
The editor who presided over this, Alan Rusbridger, has lately joined the chorus that “defending Assange protects the free press”. Having published the initial WikiLeaks revelations, Rusbridger must wonder if the Guardian’s subsequent excommunication of Assange will be enough to protect his own skin from the wrath of Washington.
The High Court judges are likely to announce their decision on the US appeal in the new year. What they decide will determine whether or not the British judiciary has trashed the last vestiges of its vaunted reputation; in the land of Magna Carta this disgraceful case ought to have been hurled out of court long ago.
The missing imperative is not the impact on a collusive “free press”. It is justice for a man persecuted and willfully denied it.
Julian Assange is a truth-teller who has committed no crime but revealed government crimes and lies on a vast scale and so performed one of the great public services of my lifetime. Do we need to be reminded that justice for one is justice for all?
Filed under: Freedom of Speech, Julian Assange | Tagged: American injustice, John Pilger, The Trial of Julian Assange, Truthful Journalism | Comments Off on John Pilger: Justice for Assange is Justice for All
March 21, 2021
By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog
An earlier essay titled, “If America Dissolves . . .” formed an introduction to the series on Bernays and Propaganda. This essay functions as the epilogue.
I will briefly repeat here several observations I made earlier, in order to develop a point that requires some elaboration.
In the essay titled The Utopia Syndrome, I mentioned Elizabeth Anderson’s theory of what I call ‘The Propaganda Mask’, which states that when political ideals or the ‘official story’ diverge too widely from reality, the ideals or the official narrative themselves become a kind of mask that prevents us from perceiving the gap. When the tenets of the propaganda are too far removed from factual truth, the victims lose their ability to separate fact from fiction and become unable to recognise the discrepancy between their ideals and their actions, or between their convictions and the truth. In the same essay I outlined that Americans are guilty of what I call ‘the Utopia Syndrome’, comparing themselves not with the real world of their actions but with some utopian standard of ideals that exists only in their own imaginations, a world of fancy and illusion divorced from reality. Next, I noted the black and white mentality that pervades America, the result of their Christianity and the work of Bernays, whose methods of manipulation of the public mind created a kind of binary mentality. Bernays claimed the excessive emotional loading in his propaganda could produce only a limited range of powerful emotional responses in his victims, forcing one’s emotional switch into a binary ‘on or off’ mode, with no other choices.
Within this binary framework, it is interesting that Americans are of two minds with respect to their treasured democracy. On the one hand, they preach glassy-eyed and fervently that their multi-party political system is the pinnacle of human evolutionary development, a universal value gifted to them by their god and representing the yearnings of all mankind, while on the other hand vehemently condemning that same democracy as hopelessly corrupt and its politicians less trustworthy than snakes and used-car salesmen. Thus, Americans seem to have two brains which are apparently unconnected and unable to communicate with each other. We have one brain stridently preaching the utopian fiction of a beautiful mansion on a hill, while the other dismisses with contempt the reality of a cracked foundation and leaking roof, sagging floors and faulty wiring, and all the rest. Yet the brain’s owner is seemingly unaware of these two successive and starkly contradictory realities.
These behavior patterns are not difficult to understand if we assume that Americans really do have two unconnected brains, not physically but mentally. Like all schizophrenics, most Americans exhibit what researchers call a ‘splitting of mental functions’, a mental disorder characterised by a failure to recognize what is real, the most common symptom being false beliefs. This derived schizophrenia appears to share the stage with a variation of what is called a ‘multiple personality disorder’, “a mental defect characterised by two distinct but dissociated personality states that alternately control a person’s behavior, accompanied by memory impairment not explained by ordinary forgetfulness.” This combination summarises to a people (a) holding totally false beliefs, unable to distinguish fiction from reality, (b) displaying two distinct but dissociated and opposite mental states, and (c) exhibiting little if any memory overlap between these two states. Odd as all this may seem, this describes Americans too perfectly to be an irrelevant coincidence. I should note here that both these mental disorders are diagnosed more frequently in the US than in any other nation.
Americans have been overwhelmed with utopian propaganda from infancy, an insidious New Testament heavily loaded with religion and emotion, indoctrinating them with a belief in their own moral superiority endowed upon them by their god, resulting in the Propaganda Mask where they can no longer recognise the vast discrepancy between their ideals and their actions (or the actions of their government). Their evangelical brand of Christianity endows them with the conviction that they are “good” and that all their actions, however evil, are also “good”. It then follows that they compare themselves not to the real world of their actions but only to their programmed utopian ideals. It is logical that Americans appear blind to this stark discrepancy due to the memory impairment when shifting personality states, the explanation lying with Bernays and the ‘on and off’ switch that controls the two brains. The issue is simply that both brains (or personality states) cannot be “ON” at the same time.
The condition and its states are easy to observe. In moments of unthreatening discourse, most any American brain can switch to its reality state and recognise democracy and capitalism for what they are, with all the open sores and unlanced boils readily apparent and heartily condemned. In these unguarded moments, many Americans will release a tide of criticism and moral condemnation of their capitalist system, with at least intuitive if not factual understanding of the criminal character of their corporations and banks, and the fundamentally unjust nature of their legal and judicial systems, as well as the failings of their vaunted multi-party democratic system. They know full well their Wall Street bankers are predatory vampires, that their courts are neither of law nor justice, that their democracy is corrupted beyond redemption, and that most of their politicians and corporate executives belong in prison. They are mostly quite aware of the devastating injustices of their capitalist system, and surprisingly aware of the futility of their great ‘democracy’. It can be startling to see their clarity of vision and harsh judgments of these failings.
But on occasions when these fundamentals are threatened, or when exposed to an emotionally-nourishing propaganda stimulus containing an opportunity to ‘feel good to be an American’, the reality brain switches off, the utopian brain switches on, and we are subjected to a sometimes frighteningly religious flood of nationalistic nonsense. I wrote earlier that much of what we attribute to American hypocrisy may in reality be due to a peculiarly American kind of mass insanity, which would appear to be precisely the case.
No other nation in the world has been exposed to political-religious brainwashing propaganda on such a massive scale. Patriotism in America is neither natural nor spontaneous; it has been planned, programmed and instilled in all Americans from birth, at least all white Americans. It is often so foolish as to be comical and open to ridicule, but simultaneously rather frightening. Consider this example:
The media topic is that fewer Americans are buying live Christmas trees in favor of artificial ones that are less bother and are re-usable. The live tree industry feels a long-term threat to its survival. No politics here, no religion. But then this is America and things are different here. The problem, according to the US media, is not the change in consumer tastes but rather is China, specifically “China’s cheap, fake Christmas trees”. China is “threatening our authentic American trees” and, even more importantly, China is also threatening “the patriotic Americans” who supply the authentic American trees. The media article therefore advised these threatened Americans to evidence their patriotism by going out into the forest to find “a God-grown tree”. When you read this, do you laugh or cry?
This tragic combination of serious mental imbalance and distressing emotional immaturity creates an existential problem for these hysterical pre-pubescent Americans. On the one hand, they desperately must feel good to be an American because it is their only source of emotional sustenance. But on the other hand, the fact of being American contains nothing in itself to make anybody feel good about anything. Even worse, it isn’t sufficient for them to merely feel good about themselves; it is crucially necessary to feel they are better than others, which is why they need an external comparison to illuminate their superiority. In spite of their imaginary exceptionalism and professed overwhelming moral superiority, there is also an inner recognition that these claims are false, evidenced by their constant attempts to prove a superiority which, if real, should be so obvious as to require no proof.
But Americans have nothing valuable of their own, not in themselves, nor in their national identity, history or culture, so they compensate by denigrating those who do have. This is why they so vigorously blind themselves to their own faults, crimes and atrocities, and focus only on the sins of others – even if they have to create imaginary ones. This is in part why hypocrisy has become a defining adjective of Americans: they cannot permit their national identity to collapse from a revelation of their current faults and historical crimes. When overlaid with their malignant Christianity, this combines to produce their imaginary and marvelously-warped self-image of moral superiority. The end result is a nation with little intrinsic self-worth and few genuine human values, unable to see itself as it really is: empty, superficial, vacuous, ignorant, mean-spirited, hysterical, envious, aggressive, self-obsessed, and hypocritical.
This is what Lippman and Bernays (and their European masters) did to the American people – reprogrammed an entire nation in equally as brutal a fashion as did the US with the Philippines, and the UK with Hong Kong, in this case creating an entire society of deluded, hysterical, and profoundly sick killer-consumers with a totally fictional history. It is probably fair to say that these men had good and fertile material to work with, a composition of the worst features of Christianity, native ignorance, and insatiable greed, but still we need to give credit where credit is due. Americans have always been racist and violent, but it was Lippman and Bernays who turned them into serial killers celebrating their Afghan “bug splats” (1) in the national media. And it was in this fertile and evil soil that American Presidents, Secretaries of State and Defense Secretaries so lushly sprouted into the longest string of sociopathic genocidal killers in history. Democracy never had a chance.
*
Notes
(1) For those who don’t know, a ‘bug splat’ is both the sound and the result of a large insect like a grasshopper impacting the windshield of a car at high speed. Americans were renowned for shooting children in Afghanistan (usually in the head) with high-powered weapons, and referring to the resulting explosion as a ‘bug splat’.
*
Introduction – If America Dissolves… https://thesaker.is/if-america-dissolves/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 1 of 5 — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 2 of 5 — The Marketing of War — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-marketing-of-war/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 3 of 5 –– Democracy Control – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-democracy-control/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 4 of 5 –The Transition to Education and Commerce – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-transition-to-education-and-commerce-part-4/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 5 of 5 — Propaganda Continues Unabated — http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-propaganda-continues-unabated-part-5/
Epilogue – Captain America –The Man with Two Brains
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.
His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Filed under: American Empire, China, Propaganda | Tagged: American Hypocracy, American injustice, Edward Bernays, Manipulation of information, Superiority disease., White Americans | 1 Comment »
January 06, 2021
“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm
What should we expect in 2021?
So far, it looks like this year is going to be plagued by more of the same brand of madness, mayhem, manipulation and tyranny that dominated 2020.
Frankly, I’m sick of it: the hypocrisy, the double standards, the delusional belief by Americans at every point along the political spectrum that politics and politicians are the answer to what ails the country, when for most of our nation’s history, politics and politicians have been the cause of our woes.
Consider: for years now, Americans, with sheeplike placidity, have tolerated all manner of injustices and abuses meted out upon them by the government (police shootings of unarmed individuals, brutality, corruption, graft, outright theft, occupations and invasions of their homes by militarized police, roadside strip searches, profit-driven incarcerations, profit-driven wars, egregious surveillance, taxation without any real representation, a nanny state that dictates every aspect of their lives, lockdowns, overcriminalization, etc.) without ever saying “enough is enough.”
Only now do Americans seem righteously indignant enough to mobilize and get active, and for what purpose? Politics. They’re ready to go to the mat over which corporate puppet will get the honor to serve as the smiling face on the pig for the next four years.
Talk about delusion.
It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.
A perfect example of how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life has become in the America: while President Trump doles out medals of commendation and presidential pardons to political cronies who have done little to nothing to advance the cause of freedom, Julian Assange rots in prison for daring to blow the whistle on the U.S. government’s war crimes
You’d think that Americans would be outraged over such abject pandering to the very swamp that Trump pledged to drain, but that’s not what has the Right and the Left so worked up. No, they’re still arguing over whether dead men voted in the last presidential election.
Either way, no matter which candidate lost to the other, it was always going to be the Deep State that won.
And so you have it: reduced to technicalities, distracted by magician’s con games, and caught up in the manufactured, highly scripted contest over which beauty contestant wears the crown, we have failed to do anything about the world falling apart around us.
Literally.
Our economy—at least as it impacts the vast majority of Americans as opposed to the economic elite—is in a shambles. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our government has been overtaken by power-hungry predators and parasites. And our ability—and fundamental right—to govern our own lives is being usurped by greedy government operatives who care nothing for our lives or our freedoms.
Our ship of state is being transformed into a ship of fools.
We stand utterly defenseless in the face of a technological revolution brought about by artificial intelligence and wall-to-wall surveillance that is re-orienting the world as we know it. Despite the mounting high-tech encroachments on our rights, we have been afforded a paltry amount of legislative and judicial protections. Indeed, Corporate America has more rights than we do.
We stand utterly powerless in the face of government bureaucrats and elected officials who dance to the tune of corporate overlords and do what they want, when they want, with whomever they want at taxpayer expense, with no thought or concern for the plight of those they are supposed to represent. To this power elite, “we the people” are good for only two things: our tax dollars and our votes. In other words, they just want our money.
We stand utterly helpless in the face of government violence that is meted out, both at home and abroad. Indeed, the systemic violence being perpetrated by agents of the government—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—has done more collective harm to the American people and their liberties than any single act of terror or mass shooting.
We stand utterly silenced in the face of government and corporate censors and a cancel culture that, in their quest to not offend certain viewpoints, are all too willing to eradicate views that do not conform. In this way, political correctness has given way to a more insidious form of group think and mob rule.
We stand utterly locked down in the face of COVID-19 mandates, restrictions, travel bans and penalties that are acclimating the populace to unquestioningly accede to the government’s dictates, whatever they might be (as long as they are issued in the name of national security), no matter how extreme or unreasonable.
We stand utterly intimidated in the face of red flag laws, terrorism watch lists, contact tracing programs, zero tolerance policies, and all other manner of police state tactics that aim to keep us fearful and compliant.
We stand utterly indoctrinated in the collective belief that the government—despite its longstanding pattern and practice of corruption, collusion, dysfunction, immorality and incompetence—somehow represents “we the people.”
Despite all of this, despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to overthrow our republic and enslave the citizenry in order to expand their power and wealth.
It is a grim outlook for a new year, but it is not completely hopeless.
If hope is to be found, it will be found with those of us who do not rely on politicians that promise to fix what is wrong but instead do their part, at their local levels, to right the wrongs and fix what is broken. I am referring to the builders, the thinkers, the helpers, the healers, the educators, the creators, the artists, the activists, the technicians, the food gatherers and distributors, and every other person who does their part to build up rather than destroy.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, “we the people” are the hope for a better year. Not Trump. Not Biden. And not the architects and enablers of the American Police State.
Until we can own that truth, until we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.
In that scenario, no one wins.
There’s a meme circulating on social media that goes like this:
If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?
Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering. So before you get too caught up in the circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles that keep us distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, first ask yourself: who’s really shaking the jar?
WC: 1347
John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.
Filed under: American Elite, Double standards, USA | Tagged: American Hypocracy, American injustice, Corporate America, COVID-19 pandemic, Deep State, Donald Trump, Julian Assange | Comments Off on What to Expect in 2021: Madness, Mayhem, Manipulation and More Tyranny
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