Sources say the system's working great,
and the government is your friend.
Commerce is the same as freedom
and wealth is the same as happiness,
according to sources familiar with the matter.
Sources say you should hate the Russians,
and also you should hate the Chinese,
and also you should hate Iran,
and also you should hate anti-vaxxers,
and also you should hate disobedient podcasters,
and really just hate anyone but your owners.

Sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, say we would never lie to you.
We've been speaking to you since you were young.
You can trust us with your mind.
If we were lying to everyone
everything would be a mess,
and the system would be a failure,
but it isn't,
so we can't be,
sources say,
sources say.
Sources say that you are finite,
and that a better world is impossible.
Sources say there is no magic coursing through your veins,
no miracles lurking in the great unknown,
no potentiality crackling within our species,
no leviathans swimming in our inner oceans, 
no dragons soaring through our mind's sky.
Sources say you are your body,
and you are your thoughts and your labels
and what you've been told you are since birth.
Sources say that small child's voice within you
whispering your primordial name
is a liar
and you should drown it in a bowl of Netflix and whiskey.
Sources say sources say sources say
look at this shiny thing over here,
look how interesting it is,
keep looking at this,
don't look within,
don't look without,
pay no attention to the gasping biosphere,
pay no attention to our nuclear Russian roulette,
pay no attention to that man starving from sanctions,
pay no attention to that man shivering on the street,
pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,
pay no attention to those angels in the attic,
pay no attention to the swelling music of the forgotten gods,
just look over here,
just stare at this vapid celebrity wankface nothingman,
look look,
he is doing a thing,
ha ha ha ha he is so interesting and so relevant to our present situation.
Sources say don't trust your own Sources.
Trust our sources; they are official and authorized.
The world is predictable and revolution impossible;
stomp down that light that's been emanating from your chest cave.
Your Source is a liar.
Your Source can't take care of you.
Your Source probably doesn't even own any aircraft carriers.

Our sources say no one else will ever love you.
Shut up and get back to work,
sources say.
Ignore your Source
and keep cranking that gear
for as long as your worthless body will let you,
and then get out of the way
and get into the hole
with the rest of the corpses
in our thriving corpse economy
on our spinning corpse planet
as we exterminate our way into paradise,
sources say.
______________________

______________________

______________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

Sources Say

If the Kremlin wanted to kill large numbers of people it should have done so with starvation sanctions and proxy militias like a civilized government.

Fashion has moved on since the early 2000s, you savages.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Civilized Nations Kill With Sanctions And Proxy Armies

I am convinced that mainstream culture's fascination with World War II has made us all dumber. Everyone just lives in this dopey children's cartoon now where every US enemy is Hitler and they're the brave hero who is fighting Hitler.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Every US Enemy Is Hitler

Multiple American podcasters who speak critically of the political status quo in their country are reporting that their channels have been shut down as the censorship campaign against Russia-backed media continues to escalate. These include Moment of Clarity with Lee Camp, The Politics of Survival with Tara Reade, and By Any Means Necessary on Radio Sputnik.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Spotify Purges Dissident Voices In Latest Censorship Escalation

The word "detente" has been deliberately scrubbed from the western lexicon. This has created a false dichotomy where everyone thinks the only choices are either escalate until we have a nuclear war or "OMG SO JUST GIVE PUTIN WHATEVER HE WANTS AND LET HIM TAKE OVER EUROPE???"

Any time you oppose freakish world-threatening escalations that's the response you always get: "So just give into the bully and let him have everything?? That's appeasement!" They're sincerely unaware that there's a third choice between World War 3 and crowning Putin Emperor of Planet Earth.

This is by design, because detente and US unipolar hegemony are mutually exclusive. You can't dominate the entire planet and also let Russia be its own nation; it's either one or the other. Detente was a popular concept back when we lived in a multipolar world, during the USSR, but since it's been dominated by one single superpower that word has been phased out of public awareness. Now that US unipolar hegemony is the normalized mainstream consensus ideal within the western empire, any talk of working toward peaceful solutions that don't subjugate one power to the other show up before indoctrinated minds as outrageous heresy.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Let's Re-Learn The Word 'Detente': Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Ukraine's only chance at stopping Russia in the near term would be if it could persuade NATO powers to take a more direct role in combat, like setting up a no-fly zone as President Zelensky has persistently pleaded with them to do. One way to get around NATO's rational resistance to directly attacking the military forces of a nuclear superpower would be to appeal to emotion via atrocity propaganda. By circulating a narrative that Russia has done something heinous which cries out to the heavens for vengeance, regardless of the risks entailed.

The United States would also benefit from circulating atrocity propaganda about Russia, in that it would further consolidate international support behind the agenda to economically strangle the nation to death in facilitation of the empire's struggle for unipolar planetary hegemony. Even before the invasion the US was already pushing the narrative that Russia has a list of dissidents, journalists and "vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons” who it plans on rounding up and torturing.

To be clear, it is not conjecture that the US and its proxies make use of atrocity propaganda. The infamous Nayirah testimony for example helped manufacture consent for the Gulf War when a 15 year-old girl who turned out to be a coached plant falsely told the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she'd witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators in Kuwait and leaving them on the floor to die. 

Reading by Tim Foley.

The US And Ukraine Have Every Reason To Lie About The War

Sometimes I can only stop and stare in awe at the power of the US propaganda machine. Almost the entire global north has been paced into perfect alignment with cold war agendas geared toward securing US unipolar dominance by an unprecedented propaganda and censorship campaign.

There's nothing intrinsic in Russia's invasion of Ukraine which says the nation must be strangled to death by unheard-of levels of economic warfare from Washington-loyal governments. A huge international consensus needed to be manufactured for that specific response, and the public needed to go along with it. Just absolutely incredible.

By securing control of global narratives via Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and plutocratic "news" outlets, the US empire has effectively supplanted the UN and international law in its ability to get whole groups of nations moving in a certain way with the consent of the governed. The human species is being led around like a dog on a leash by a collective mind control system of unparalleled and unprecedented sophistication that hardly anyone even notices. Imperial propaganda is the single most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our society.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Awesome Power Of US Propaganda: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Putin is bad so Yuri Gagarin didn't go to space and Tchaikovsky wasn't a good composer and Dostoevsky was a lousy writer and Sputnik was designed by Lockheed Martin and Anton Chekhov was Welsh and Khabib Nurmagomedov was born in Minnesota.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Erasing History To Own Putin

So this is a media outlet funded by a government-run "NGO" being forcefully pushed in front of millions of western eyeballs by a major Silicon Valley corporation that people have come to rely on for getting information about the world. In the same way Silicon Valley facilitates government censorship by proxy, it also facilitates government propaganda by proxy.

Article version: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/people-overestimate-the-us-war-machine?s=w

Reading by Tim Foley.

People Overestimate The US War Machine And Underestimate The US Propaganda Machine

On the empire's grand chessboard, Russia is the queen piece, but China is the king. Just as with chess it helps to take out your opponent's strongest piece to more easily pursue checkmate, the US empire would be well advised to try and topple China's nuclear superpower friend and, as Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria recently put it, "ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow."

Reading by Tim Foley.

The US Empire's Ultimate Target Is Not Russia But China

NBC News has a new report out citing multiple anonymous US officials, humorously titled "In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn't rock solid". 

The officials say the Biden administration has been rapidly pushing out "intelligence" about Russia's plans in Ukraine that is "low-confidence" or "based more on analysis than hard evidence", or even just plain false, in order to fight an information war against Putin.

The report says that toward this end the US government has deliberately circulated false or poorly evidenced claims about impending chemical weapons attacks, about Russian plans to orchestrate a false flag attack in the Donbass to justify an invasion, about Putin's advisors misinforming him, and about Russia seeking arms supplies from China.

Reading by Tim Foley.

US Officials Admit They're Literally Just Lying To The Public About Russia

Readings of all Caitlin Johnstone's articles, usually by her co-writer Tim Foley.

Every US Enemy Is Hitler

Caitlin Johnstone

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