"When The Powerful Control Public Opinion, Elections Aren't Real" by Caitlin Johnstone

 

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	When The Powerful Control Public Opinion, Elections Aren't Real CAITLIN JOHNSTONE JUN 12   READ IN APP   Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): When The Powerful Control Public Opinion, Elections Aren't Real by Caitlin Johnstone Caitlin Johnstone Upgrade to paid I’ve been ignoring the US presidential race because the election is rigged. When someone says US presidential elections are rigged, there are a number of things they could mean by that. They could be claiming votes are actively tampered with to ensure a particular outcome, as Republicans commonly claimed in the 2020 election. But that isn’t the claim I’m putting forward here — even though the US does have the most dysfunctional elections out of any liberal democracy on earth. They could also be talking about how legalized corruption in the United States allows the wealthy to manipulate election outcomes and extract political loyalties via campaign donations. While certainly a well-established fact, that isn’t what I’m talking about here either. They could also be talking about the fact that it doesn’t matter who wins the election since the US president is only a figurehead who pretends to run a country that is actually ruled by unelected plutocrats and empire managers in secretive government agencies. Again this is absolutely true, but that’s not what I’m talking about in this particular essay. Actually, you could fix all the problems in the American voting system, and US presidential elections would still be rigged. You could fix campaign finance laws to the point where the wealthy are no longer able to use campaign donations to achieve desired political outcomes, and US presidential elections would still be rigged. You could give the US president all the actual government leadership powers you were led to believe he has as a schoolchild, and US presidential elections would still be rigged. US presidential elections would still be rigged because mainstream political opinion would still be shaped by the wealthy and powerful people who control the sources from which Americans have been trained to get their information. So long as the rich and powerful can manipulate public opinion at mass scale through the corporate media, through Hollywood, and through Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, they can rig elections however they want. There’s a quote attributed to Albert Einstein that’s been going around social media for years which usually goes something like, “There will come a time when the rich own all the media, and it will be impossible for the public to make an informed opinion.” Unlike most cool quotes you’ll see attributed to Einstein on the internet, this one is based on something the renowned theoretical physicist actually did say — except he wasn’t forecasting something happening in the future, he was talking about something that had already happened when he wrote about it in 1949. In his essay “Why Socialism?”, Einstein wrote the following for National Review (emphasis added): “The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.” It was true when Einstein wrote it 75 years ago, and it remains true today. It remains true today because Einstein wasn’t leveling his criticisms at the individual people and events of his time, but at the overarching societal systems which are still in place now. In a capitalist system, those who control the capital control what ideas and information will be ingested by most people. In a democratic system of government — even one with a rock solid voting system and no money allowed in politics — this will always give the wealthy the ability to rig elections by manipulating public opinion using propaganda.  And they do. In addition to buying up entire media outlets and shareholder control over them, the wealthy pour money into shoring up narrative control by other means like think tanks, online information ops such as NewsGuard and Wikipedia, and the manipulation of algorithms by online megacorporations like Google. This gives them the ability to shape the worldview of a majority of the public, thereby ensuring elections will result in outcomes that bolster the status quo upon which the wealthy have built their fortunes. This is true throughout all US elections of significant consequence, not just presidential elections, and it is true throughout the entire western world, not just the United States. We are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale from childhood on, our minds continually shaped by people who use their wealth to dominate our shared narratives about how things are going, what’s happening in the world, and what should be done about it. We are taught about our world by deeply indoctrinated parents and deeply indoctrinated teachers who grew up in the same status quo-enforcing information environment as us, and our indoctrination continues through all the screens in our lives until our dying breath. You can fix everything else that’s wrong with your political system, but unless you also take away the ability of the capitalist class to psychologically manipulate the public into supporting a political status quo that has been artificially shaped by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful, nothing meaningful will change. The wars will continue, the oligarchy will continue, the inequality and injustice will continue, the exploitation and extraction will continue, the ecocide will continue. That’s why I always place emphasis on the importance of narrative control and how it’s happening — because that’s where all our other problems arise from, and because until we address that problem we won’t be able to address the others. Luckily, it is possible to address that problem. We ordinary people are at a disadvantage in that we can’t afford to buy up all the most influential outlets and platforms in our society to impose our political preferences like the plutocrats can, but we are at an advantage in that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them — and in that we have truth and authenticity on our side. None of us can single-handedly stand against the imperial propaganda machine, but together we can all wage an information war with the goal of debunking imperial narratives and discrediting imperial propaganda in the eyes of the public. We can do this by using every platform and medium we can get our hands on to wake people up to the truth at every opportunity so that they can help join in the fight. The more people realize they’ve been deceived their whole lives about what’s going on in their society, the more people there are to help weaken the grip of imperial narrative control. All positive developments in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness, whether you’re talking about humans as individuals or as a collective. This is no different. If you can seize every opportunity to help spread awareness of the truth and open up another pair of eyes to the reality of our situation, then you are using your energy to attack the empire at its weakest point in the most efficient way possible. Win or lose, if you dedicate your life to this fight, you can definitely say in the end that you gave it your all.

"Does It Really Matter Who Sits on the Throne?" by TP Wilkinson

 

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Does It Really Matter Who Sits on the Throne?

Organisation or personality

by T.P. Wilkinson / December 7th, 2023

by T.P. Wilkinson

There have been recent elections in numerous principalities. The constellations by which governments — the outward and visible signs of obscured and conspiratorial power — have been formed since 2020 are not in themselves unique but have occurred with an intensity — I like here the German term Verdichtung, i.e. thickening or coagulation — perhaps unlike anything since the financial coup d‘etat that inaugurated the Great Depression (as it was called in the US).

In fact, one could date this phenomenon to the unpredicted victory of Mr Donald Trump in 2016 over the repulsive partner of presidential philanderer William J. Clinton. As I wrote at the time, no later than the inauguration of Donald Trump, it should have been apparent that the last pretenses of a diverse media had evaporated. The catastrophe of 2020 ought not to have surprised anyone.

Amidst the verbal streams, I hesitate to call them a debate, as to the significance of the current janitor in the US executive mansion, aka White House, we can observe the same impoverished thought that characterizes the choice of athletic footwear, meanwhile the universal equivalent to denim trousers for all but the princely functions. Certainly there are criticisms that point to the superficiality of the bourgeois electoral systems, whether in the US or its vassal states. They are valid as far as they go. Then there is the criticism which I certainly share that voters — real or virtual — are far too influenced by corrupt mass media. Although I am actually tired of repeating it, I will again iterate that the Press and the journalistic “profession” was created for commercial propaganda and not for education of the population. It is to paraphrase George Carlin, “a cute idea” that journalism has duty to inform, but that is all it is. If journalists inform the public it is despite journalism and not because of it. One only needs to examine the history of this profession to recognize that it was conceived as prostitution and most of its practitioners have wittingly or unwittingly followed the strip.

Underlying all these distractions is a legitimate complexity of ancient quality. That is the difficulty of distinguishing between the person, the personality and the organization. In conventional circumstances, e.g. intimate human contact, the terms are person, character and relationship. So a marriage is seen as a relationship conditioned by the persons with their families and histories perhaps and the characters of those persons in the conditions under which the marriage’s inception and experience. In the greater format of the world of which many people are only conscious through electronic media, this complexity is even harder to describe than that of marriage (which anyone who has been involved in matrimonial affairs can admit is complex enough).

The model for understanding this problem, in the West at least, is Latin Christendom. To illustrate the problem in the simplest manner I can imagine I have to draw on an anecdote. Many years ago, as a young man educated in a Latin household — although not strictly — I had a “revelation” that I should apply myself to the priesthood. As a youth I did not believe in God or the saints. However I did not have to believe in the Church. It was there. I could see it and all those who constituted it with their clothes, rituals, buildings and special language. In fact, one would have to be an idiot not to believe in the Church at the empirical frontier of Western life (I almost wrote civilization but by Gandhi corrected).

So one fine day I entered the reception of the Latin seminary in a German city where I lived at the time. The priest who interviewed me upon my request to be accepted for study to join the clergy asked me first: would I tell him about my personal relationship to Jesus Christ? I was quite shocked by the question. Trying to hide my surprise, I replied that when I was raised as a member of the Latin Catholic Church such a question was never raised. One did not have a personal relationship to the lord and king. There was the Church and its ruler and we were subjects. This answer did not satisfy my interlocutor. He was quite perfunctory and told me to come back when I had a better answer to the question.

At the time I thought, this was a question any evangelical Protestant might ask but surely not a Latin priest. With time I began to see the problem in another light. The Latin Church, the DNA of Western life (although this cliché is also suspect like Francis Crick’s whole essentialist model of human genetics), created the person of Jesus to attract the individual with the idea that the deity was recognizable in human life — incarnate. However Christ the King was the dominant form in which this personality was propagated. So personal subjugation became internalized through an image of the human who was nonetheless a character in the organizational language and explanation of the Church hierarchy.

When people feel compelled to talk about how and who a particular courtier is elected or appointed to high office, e.g. POTUS, they are caught in the sleight of hand that presents a persona as a person. The individual Jesus is not the founder of the Church. The persona of Jesus (or any other individual in another religious constellation) is not the same as a historical individual. He, she or it is a mere manifestation of an organization/explanation which expresses power through the representation of personae as if they were real, flesh and blood human beings.

It is not easy to distinguish people from the personae they adopt — or by which they are created — in the organizations they serve. However it is necessary to understand the scope of organizations in human life in order to even begin to recognize the discrepancy between our needs at the empirical frontier and the actions of organizations fundamentally antagonistic to them.

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Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..

"A Chaotic Re-Sorting: Europe’s ‘Seminal Shift’ Is (Broadly) Moving in the Same Direction as U.S. Politics" by Alastair Crooke

 

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A Chaotic Re-Sorting: Europe’s ‘Seminal Shift’ Is (Broadly) Moving in the Same Direction as U.S. Politics

Alastair Crooke

    

June 12, 2023

Europe it seems is (broadly) moving in the same direction as U.S. politics, Alastair Crooke writes.

The backlash has started. It has been slow to emerge, and is lagging that of the U.S., yet it has begun in earnest. It is, as Wolfgang Münchau, a former FT journalist and editor of EuroIntelligence, has observed: “a seminal shift (for Europe), with important consequences”.

It is likely to reshape politics along a new fault-line: No longer the banal issues of ‘uni-party’ (pro-Establishment) politics: marginal tax rates; easy monetary ‘fixes’ and the consequent debt that would accumulate. But rather, it would find expression in the confrontation between those wishing for a Green upending of human society; a ‘Trans’ world for children; easy immigration; the radical re-ordering of power between ‘Identity’ groups in society – and those viscerally opposed to all of the above.

In Germany, this evolution is at ‘break-out’: Chancellor Scholtz’s coalition is in deep trouble. There is an anti-Green backlash. Support for the Green Party has crashed to 13% in the latest poll. In contrast, the party of the alt-Right AfD is attracting approximately one in five Germans who are ready to vote for it.

The “CDU and other parties of the European Centre-Right previously had courted the Greens as potential future coalition partners. Now they view them as their main political opponents”, Münchau states.

Put bluntly, whilst most Europeans indeed are Environmentalists (to one extent or another), it has become clear to many that that the Green extremist ideology is so ‘Green Utopian’ that its vanguard is prepared to destroy human society (or put it into permanent lockdown) ‘to save it’. But Green zealotry on top of de-industrialisation and soaring inflation is too much for Germans to bear:

‘Forget the EU as a model’, suggested EuroIntelligence in May:

“The EU no longer serves as a role model for others … by being completely engulfed with its own green agenda, [the EU seems] to have forgotten that there is another world out there that needs to partake in those efforts for it to be effective at the global level …Would [it] not constitute real leadership rather than the introspective, self-righteous way of how we go about right now? … we need to let go of these sacrifice-based ideologies. They are too expensive for our economies. Instead we need more innovation and more finance to realise those. Most of all, we have to stop seeing ourselves as a role model for the world”.

Germans are becoming increasingly receptive too, to the AfD’s positions on mass immigration – as the German government moves to liberalize immigration laws and to naturalize millions of foreigners as German citizens. The AfD is drawing support too, due to its opposition to sanctions against Russia which, it argues, are weakening the German economy and leading to de-industrialization.

But what really had Germans in a fluster was an article in Die Zeit that claimed Germany will soon be “a country in which migrants will no longer be a minority … Integration was yesterday: Germany is the second-largest immigration country in the world, and the original Germans are likely to become a numerical minority among many in the foreseeable future”.

Many in Germany were left to ruminate on whether the dilution of the native German population was simply a ‘business necessity’, or deliberate ‘identity engineering’ – or even, identity rotation. The issue was hinted at too, in the UK, by Nigel Farage, who lambasted the “dishonest, globalist” UK government’s addiction to cheap imported labour. (Note the globalist tag attached to the Conservatives.)

Other signs of this incipient political realignment are evident in France (with a pronounced swing to the Right), and in Spain (where an unexpected snap election was called, following a sharp swing to the Right there too, in local elections). In the Netherlands also, angry voters swept to victory on an agenda to oppose nitrogen emission cuts (and the mandatory mass culling of cattle). And in Austria and Slovakia, pro-Russian parties are surging.

Anger grows as public discourse debates endlessly ‘the absurd’ (“what is a woman?”), whilst everyone gives up on ever fixing the deeper issues at stake. What gives this situation its particular air of futility is that no one seriously believes Europe will do what would be necessary to correct the deeper malaise – the impossibility to continue doing what it has been doing, matched only by the impossibility of doing anything other.

Of course, in Europe, the Right is not all the same, but the components are (albeit in a differing mixes).

As such, the European backlash is of a piece with the crisis of legitimacy bearing down on all western societies today, Malcom Kyeyune has remarked.

“The ruling elite is increasingly angry and bitter that the ruled no longer listen; the ruled, for their part, are bitter that the system so obviously doesn’t act in their interest, nor does it even really pretend to anymore. We might actually wake up one day only to find that neither politicians nor voters think ‘democracy’ is doing very much to help them anymore”.

In France, extraordinary political events have become the New Normal. Kyeyune notes:

“Reforms are increasingly impossible, mistrust in the political system is increasing year by year, and basic legitimacy is slowly leaking out of parliamentary proceedings. If President Macron senses that France is slowly becoming ungovernable without extraordinary—and politically dubious—executive measures, he probably isn’t wrong, and he is far from the only Western leader to face this quandary”.

“Last week, Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy appeared on a Twitter Spaces panel co-hosted by Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and venture capitalist David Sacks. He spoke for over two hours on a range of issues, including the war in Ukraine, energy policy, gun control, and the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Kennedy deplored the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party; excoriated President Biden’s pro-war instincts; decried the domination of U.S. foreign policy by neo-cons – and promoted renewable energy”.

“And yet, according to the New York Times and CNN, it was an orgy of right-wing conspiracy theorizing. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of one of the country’s most famous Democratic families,” wrote three New York Times reporters: “dived into the full embrace of a host of conservative figures who eagerly promoted his long-shot primary challenge to President Biden … On Monday, he sounded like a candidate far more at ease in the mushrooming Republican presidential contest.”

“In an earlier era, Kennedy, would have been universally regarded as a far-left candidate in the mould of Ralph Nader … Kennedy believes that the war in Ukraine is being fuelled by “the neo-cons in the White House” who want regime change in Russia. In his campaign announcement speech, he described his mission as ending “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power” that is threatening “to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country.”

It is a dizzying political realignment – scrambling all of the traditional categories and leaving in its wake just two sides: not left and right, but insider and outsider. And no matter the substance of one’s beliefs, to the media, “outsider” means by default, “right-wing conspiracy theorist”.

And predictably, it has aroused a torrent of abuse and anger:

“Kennedy’s “crackpot claims” and “outlandish views” have won him “favour on the Right,” Vanity Fair moaned.

“Mr. Kennedy has found another benefactor who seems to enjoy deluging the press with excrement: Elon Musk”, snarled The Independent.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Spends an Hour Sucking Up to Elon Musk in Twitter Space,” blared a New Republic headline …

Rolling Stone sneered at his “outlandish and pseudoscientific ideas” and labelled Kennedy a “fringe candidate” with “crank beliefs.”

Esquire called him a “raving anti-vaxxer” and lambasted the very idea of having a contested Democratic primary”, Shellenberger and Woodhouse write.

There you have it: To speak critically (as Michael Scherer wrote in the Washington Post), is to be a “conspiracy theorist”.

The ‘dizzying political realignment’ well describes the nature of the European backlash too: European Centre-Right and Green coalitions saw the Ukraine conflict as the means to centralise ‘a new kind of feudalism’ in the EU; to disenfranchise European national parliaments of their prerogatives; and to open the prospect for consolidating the strange metamorphosis of NATO from pure military alliance to an enlightened, progressive, peace alliance – pursuing ‘justice’, values and democracy in Ukraine.

With “the U.S. Democrats slowly becoming pro-corporate, pro-war, and pro-censorship”, said Kennedy, and with the “Republicans becoming anti-censorship, pro-civil liberties, and anti-war – there’s been a tremendous realignment.”

Europe it seems is (broadly) moving in the same direction as U.S. politics. The European Élites – like their U.S. Democratic counterparts – embraced war on Russia. The Euro-Élites have adopted massive MSM narrative and social control and have dismembered the basic civic norms of marriage between a man and a woman and biological gender to which many Europeans still adhere.

The European ‘outsiders’ have begun calling “Enough”! Yet they may expect to receive the same rough treatment from the main-stream media as Kennedy is receiving (whatever their views). The U.S. Deep State will stop at nothing to ensure that neither Kennedy – nor Trump – comes anywhere close to office. Brussels will act in parallel, in Europe.

Where is this realignment all leading? Well, we are in a chaotic re-sorting period right now. Kennedy, a Democrat, accused of MAGA-ism?? Extraordinary! Class politics it is not. It is a new realignment, scrambling old categories. And a shift in core values between ‘outsiders’ and their rulers. One reason that this will be very difficult to decipher is that outsiders now view ‘democracy’ with growing mistrust. Will that result in tactical voting? Does ‘Right’ or ‘Left’ have much meaning when a Kennedy is accused of MAGA sympathies?