I noticed this, too. I was appalled. For me, this is the most important piece you have written! Brilliant.

I woke up this mornin
Took a look in the mirror
Saw somethin starin back at me
I was frozen with fear
Put a hand to my face
When what to my surprise
Five claws scratchin mandibles
And a pair a compound eyes
And I said ah christ
Gotta seek some advice

Went and asked my ol lady
Oh how can this be
She said man you got some nerve right here
To come cryin to me so why don’t you just
Put on your coat and hat right now
And crawl yourself out the door
These gears ain’t gonna grease themselves
And you don’t wanna be poor
So get off the floor

Oh what can I do

You sleep with the rest of the vermin
Vermin

Before you had changed
You knew every boss was a bastard
Bastard

Have you given up
Or did you not know that cockroaches fly
So fuck it

Doombrass

The Gregor Samsa Blues (Pandemo Version)

Michael Parenti has said that "Poor countries are not 'under-developed', they are over-exploited." The west tends to look down on the rest of the world for reasons that either directly or indirectly relate to the poverty in those nations, which is silly because that poverty comes largely from western theft and exploitation. It's like mugging someone and then scorning them for their empty wallet.

If you boil it right down and get real about it, most of the pride in western civilization is ultimately pride in being better at killing and stealing than other people. We're still morally at the level of invading and plundering nations while claiming it's justified because we are stronger than them, it's just procedurally a few clicks removed from doing that directly.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Robbing The Global South, Then Scorning Its Poverty

There's this Pink Floyd line that's been rattling around in my head, "You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to." Because it's so true; you can't deceive people who don't trust you. Propaganda only works if people don't know it's happening — if they don't think of its source as untrustworthy.

That's why it gives me hope that trust in the mass media is plunging to historic lows: if people sufficiently distrust those who lie to them, then those lies won't take root in their minds anymore. Without trust, the propaganda machine can't function. 

All our world's troubles are ultimately due to propaganda; people only consent to status quo systems which hurt their interests because their consent is manufactured via propaganda. And that propaganda only works because of public trust in the messengers.

We can fight this by working to exacerbate public distrust in the institutions that manufacture our consent, spreading public awareness of the fact that everything we've been taught to believe about our nation, our government and our world is a lie. All positive changes in human behavior — whether individual or collective — are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Make people more aware that they are being deceived, and the liars will no longer be trusted by the people they lie to.

Reading by Tim Foley.

You Have To Be Trusted By The People That You Lie To

In the latest instance of the Australian media's deluge of propaganda geared toward manufacturing consent for war with China, Nine Entertainment-owned newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have brought together a panel of "experts" to assess how well-prepared Australia is for a hot war with its primary trading partner. The question of if that war is necessary or should be prepared for is left completely unexamined.

Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.

No, Australia Does Not Actually Need To Prepare For War With China

Do you see what they're doing there? These professional China hawks are explicitly trying to frame peace as a strange "aberration", and war as the status quo norm. They're saying Australians require a "psychological shift" and a "mobilisation of mindset" from thinking peace is normal and healthy to thinking war is normal and healthy.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Imperial Narrative Managers Always Try To Make Peace Seem Unnatural

The use of the phrase "journalism is not a crime" is an interesting choice since the most common individual case you'll hear it used in reference to is surely that of Julian Assange, who has been locked in a maximum security prison for four years while the US government works to extradite him for the crime of good journalism. Every pro-Assange demonstration I've ever been to has featured signs with some variation of the phrase "journalism is not a crime," and any Assange supporter will be intimately familiar with that refrain.

So as an Assange supporter it sounds a bit odd to hear that slogan rolled out by two DC swamp monsters who have both enthusiastically supported the persecution of the world's most famous journalist.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Washington Says "Journalism Is Not A Crime" While Working To Criminalize Journalism

People shouldn't be punished for revealing the secrets of the government, governments should be punished for keeping secrets from the people.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Free Those Who Expose Government Misdeeds, Jail Those Who Try To Conceal Them

The single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society is the way domestic propaganda is used to shape the way mainstream westerners perceive and think about their world.

Typically the only time you'll ever hear the word "propaganda" mentioned in mainstream discourse is in reference to things other countries do to their own citizenry or as part of foreign influence operations, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the times we've encountered propaganda in our day to day lives, the call was coming from inside the house.

The western media have been exposing their role as propagandists for the US-centralized empire a bit more than usual lately. Here are a few recent examples.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Western News Media Exist To Administer Propaganda

Many people turn to conservatism and religion because they perceive — correctly — that mainstream culture is a fraudulent sham bereft of meaning and authentic values. Their solutions are misguided, but their reasons arise from a perception of a very real problem. 

It isn't actually necessary to turn to religion or conservatism to find depth, meaning and groundedness; depth, meaning and groundedness are always abundantly accessible. But nothing about western culture makes this obvious, especially in the mainstream.

Turning to religion and conservatism as a solution to the degradation of mainstream culture is just replacing the modern systems of mass-scale thought control with the old ones. It's a completely maladaptive solution to the problem, but you can't ask people to just keep participating in a worldview that feels like it's sucking your soul out of your body 24/7. You need to offer them something nourishing and authentic. Nothing in mainstream liberal culture offers this; it's self-evidently phony, soulless and vapid.

This isn't something the left can just dismiss. There needs to be something on offer which meets these needs better than both mainstream culture and the regressive belief systems which caused so much suffering in the past.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Escaping The Prison Of Mainstream Culture

Today in tyranny we've got three stories on the rapidly increasing authoritarian abuses in western "free democracies":

1. Grayzone reporter detained by British counter-terrorism police for doing journalism.

2. South Australia passes draconian anti-protest law.

3. State Department dismisses questions about Ukrainian imprisonment of US citizen for speech crimes.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Authoritarianism Keeps Surging In Western "Free Democracies"

I saw a video clip of Julian Assange speaking in London in 2010 where he made an important observation while explaining the philosophy behind his work with WikiLeaks. He said that all our political theories are to some extent "bankrupt" in our current situation, because our institutions are so shrouded in secrecy that we can't even know what's really going on in the world.

"We can all write about our political issues, we can all push for particular things we believe in, we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say actually it's all bankrupt," Assange said. "And the reason it's all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt and particular lines of political thought, is because actually we don't know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions — how they operate in practice, these titanic organizations, how they behave inside, not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentations — until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis? How can we set the direction to go until we know where we are? We don't even have a map of where we are. So our first task is to build up a sort of intellectual heritage that describes where we are. And once we know where we are, then we have a hope of setting course for a different direction. Until then, I think all political theories — to greater and lesser extents of course — are bankrupt."

Reading by Tim Foley.

Real Change Is Impossible While Our World Is Shrouded In Secrecy

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

Imperial Narrative Managers Always Try To Make Peace Seem Unnatural

Caitlin Johnstone

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