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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/11/23/surprise-america-is-getting-another-psycho-for-secretary-of-state/

Surprise! America Is Getting Another Psycho For Secretary Of State

Did you know the US Department of Defense used to be called the Department of War? It would be a much more honest label today for a military which virtually never operates in any way that could be described as defensive, with its operations focusing far outside of the nation’s borders against targets who pose no threat whatsoever to ordinary Americans. An even more suitable name would be the Department of Eternal War.

The State Department was meant to be the counterpart to the War Department, focusing on diplomacy and peace. What ended up happening as the US government morphed into a globe-spanning empire dependent on endless violence and aggression is that the State Department wound up focusing more and more on manufacturing interventionist narratives on the world stage to gin up international support for starvation sanctions, proxy wars and war coalitions.

So in practice the US ended up with two war departments: the DoD and the State Department. Which is why you’ve seen the nation’s Secretaries of State becoming more and more jingoistic and psychopathic, to the point where some sort of antisocial personality disorder is almost a job requirement for the position.

Bloomberg and The New York Times are reporting that the incoming presidential administration has chosen longtime Biden advisor Tony Blinken for the role of Secretary of State. Blinken is a liberal interventionist who has supported all of the most disgusting acts of US mass military slaughter this millennium, including the Iraq invasion which killed over a million people and ushered in an unprecedented era of military expansionism in the Middle East. So needless to say he will fly through the confirmation process.

“Blinken was a key adviser to Biden when the senator voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq,” Nonzero reports. “Blinken has tried to recast the vote as merely ‘a vote for tough diplomacy,’ but post-invasion remarks by Biden make that claim implausible. In a recent Washington Post op-ed that Blinken co-authored with Robert Kagan, one of the chief architects of neoconservative foreign policy doctrine, he implied that the problem with the Iraq War was poor execution (‘bad intelligence, misguided strategy and inadequate planning for the day after’) rather than the very idea of invading a country in violation of international law even after it had admitted weapons inspectors to assess the claims motivating the invasion.”

How true can Biden’s claim be that he regrets his pivotal role in facilitating that unforgivable act of mass military butchery if he’s continued employing the man who advised him about it as an advisor ever since, and is now appointing him to Secretary of State? If someone advises you to do something that you truly regret, do you continue seeking out that person’s advice on the same subject and give them even more power and control over it?

We can expect the next secretary of America’s second war department to help the US death machine ramp up world-threatening cold war escalations with China and Russia. In a July interview with Blinken, The Wall Street Journal‘s Walter Russell Mead was told of the Biden campaign’s plan to “tame China, Russia and woke Democrats” using “Cold War-era Democratic policy”, including “a liberal multilateralism—supplemented when absolutely necessary by the American military and a willingness to use it.”

“A Biden administration won’t be looking for a reset, a grand bargain, or anything more than a businesslike relationship with Vladimir Putin,” Mead wrote after the interview. “Democrats haven’t been this hawkish on Russia since the Kennedy administration.”

All you really need to know about Tony Blinken has been summed up nicely in a must-see new Behind the Headlines report by Dan Cohen. Blinken’s career has been a pendulum between expanding the US empire and helping corporate power knit itself more deeply into that empire. Within the Obama administration he backed the unforgivably devastating interventions in Libya and Syria as well as the 2014 Ukraine coup, he was a major proponent of backing the Saudi-led mass atrocities in Yemen, and he says such proxy conflicts will be the new model for US interventionism going forward.

Cohen quotes Blinken arguing in favor of replacing old-school Bush-era conventional ground invasions with “discreet, small-scale sustainable operations, maybe led by special forces, to support local actors… In ending the endless wars I think we have to be careful to not paint with too broad a brush stroke.” In other words, the continuation and expansion of all of the Obama administration’s most depraved policies.

So we can expect a strengthening of the python-like strangulation strategies the US empire now favors, with the same number of dead children, the same amount of destabilization and suffering, and the same amount of resource consumption, just without all those pesky news headlines and footage of flag-draped coffins coming home on jet planes. A photogenic mask on the blood-spattered face of the US empire which has been so troublingly exposed in the age of Trump.

Are you excited about that Return to Decency yet?

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/11/26/oligarchic-imperialism-is-the-new-dominant-world-religion/

Oligarchic Imperialism Is The New Dominant World Religion

I was just watching a gaggle of blue-checkmarked narrative managers attack progressive commentators Katie Halper and Briahna Joy Gray on Twitter for platforming antiwar journalist Rania Khalek on the grounds that Khalek is an “Assadist”, which is imperialist for “someone who opposes western imperialism in Syria”.

At no point do any of these narrative managers bother to address the actual things these women were discussing together or why anything Khalek was saying in their video conference was wrong. They do not feel the need to do such a thing, because they have this label, “Assadist”, which they can pin on one of the speakers and thereby reject one hundred percent of her work and one hundred percent of the people who give her a platform from which to speak. They feel no need to address the arguments, because they have a label which they all agree means they can completely un-person someone who opposes western regime change agendas in a specific region.

There are many such labels that are used to exclude people from positions of influence and power for simply disagreeing with the official doctrine of status quo oligarchic imperialism in any way. “Assadist” is one of them; it allows someone to be completely marginalized from platforms of significant influence without anyone ever needing to admit that they’re simply depriving anyone of a platform who criticized the way the US power alliance used proxy armies and propaganda campaigns in a campaign to topple Damascus. “Kremlin asset” is another, as are “conspiracy theorist”, “tankie”, or “[insert imperialism-targeted leader] apologist”.

In reality, these labels are interchangeable with the word “heretic”. They mean “Someone who disagrees with the mainstream consensus religion of oligarchic imperialism”.

In ages past people would be excluded from positions of influence and power if they did not belong to the dominant religion in that place and time. If you were a Jew living in the Holy Roman Empire, for example, the door would be closed to you from ever holding a position of power or influence over the mainstream population. In the same exact way, those who do not espouse the mainstream orthodoxy of continual military expansionism and status quo politics are cut off from major positions in politics and media using the modern-day equivalent of the “heathen” label. It’s a very old dynamic adapted for a new world.

Oligarchic imperialism is the new dominant world religion. It is the scripture that everyone reads from. It is what shapes our culture. It is what holy wars are fought over and acts of terrorism committed for. It’s what power is built around. It’s what you’re branded a heretic for rejecting. It’s just as fake as any other religion, just as crafted toward the advantage of the powerful as any other religion, and just as dependent upon blind faith in insubstantial narratives as any other religion. But it lets its adherents feel smug and superior to people who believe in those primitive older religions.

Adherents of the old dominant religion used to read the Bible; adherents of the new dominant religion read The New York Times. Adherents of the old dominant religion used to go to church on Sunday; adherents of the new dominant religion go to Hollywood movies. Adherents of the old dominant religion fought in the crusades; adherents of the new dominant religion kill families with drones and Tomahawk missiles overseas. Adherents of the old dominant religion used to burn heretics at the stake; adherents of the new dominant religion imprison journalists and deplatform “Assadists”, “Putin apologists” and “conspiracy theorists” so their ideas don’t infect the rest of the flock.

These labels exist because if mainstream platforms admitted that they refuse access to literally anyone who disagrees with status quo oligarchic imperialism, they would have to admit that they are not the objective arbiters of absolute reality they portray themselves as being, but are in fact propagandists for a very specific belief system. That they are not tasked with the responsibility of reporting the news, but with promoting the doctrine of the new dominant world religion. That they aren’t news reporters, but high priests.

Religion isn’t disappearing, it has just changed its form. The world has become too small for widespread belief in omnipotent deities creating the universe in six days and controlling all our affairs, so now people tell new fairy tales about a liberal world order which must be preserved by a beneficent superpower and its allies. In reality it is nothing other than propaganda for a murderous, tyrannical theocratic empire, of just the sort once presided over by Rome.

Western imperialism is worse than every single issue the mass media are screaming in your face about on any given day. It is without exaggeration worse than 100 percent of those issues. If people could really grasp the horrific nature of imperial warmongering, the wars would be forced to end. It is the job of the imperial high priests to prevent this from happening, which is why they use dismissive labels to marginalize anyone who might be inclined to remind you of this.

In a murderous, tyrannical theocratic empire, the only sane position to hold is that of heresy and apostasy. Hopefully one day mankind will open its eyes to reality and require no blind faith in any artificial belief constructs of any kind.