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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/02/14/the-us-government-truly-believes-the-entire-planet-is-its-property/

The US Government Truly Believes The Entire Planet Is Its Property

The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled “U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa“, subtitled “An American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard.”

The article quotes the former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy saying “We’d really, really not like to see a Chinese facility” on the Atlantic, and discusses “American concern about China’s global expansionism and its pursuit of a permanent military presence on waters the U.S. considers home turf.”

The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi has discussed the irony of WSJ yelling about China’s “global expansionism” over a potential military base in Equatorial Guinea without applying that label to the US, when the US has hundreds of times the number of foreign military bases as China. Antiwar’s Daniel Larison wrote an article back in December eviscerating the ridiculous claim that a military base some six thousand nautical miles from the US coastline could be reasonably framed as any kind of threat to the American people.

But what really jumps out is the insane way the US political/media class routinely talks about virtually every location on this planet as though it is a territory of the United States.

The Wall Street Journal referring to the entire Atlantic Ocean as “America’s backyard” and “waters the U.S. considers home turf” follows a recent controversy over the US president proclaiming that “Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” This provoked many references to the so-called “Monroe Doctrine”, a nineteenth-century imperialist assertion that Latin America is off limits to any power apart from the United States, effectively declaring the entire Western Hemisphere the property of Washington, DC.

It also follows another incident in which Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the ongoing tensions around Ukraine that it is in America’s interest to support “our eastern flank countries”, which might come as a surprise to those who were taught in school that America’s eastern flank was not Eastern Europe but the eastern coastline of the United States.

The casual way these people say such things reflects a collectively held worldview that you won’t find on any official document or in any schoolchild’s textbook, but which is nonetheless a firmly held perspective among all the drivers of the modern empire: that the entire world is the property of the US government. That the US is not just the most powerful government in the world but also its rightful ruler, in the same way Rome ruled the Christian world.

It’s not something they can come out and directly say, because admitting they see themselves as the rulers of the world would make them look tyrannical and megalomaniacal. But it’s certainly something they believe.

They’re about as obvious about it as could be. They make almost no effort to conceal it. And yet you’ll still get empire apologists like Michael McFaul saying nonsense like this:

McFaul knows very well that the US is an imperial power and that it demands a very large “sphere of influence”.

Would you like to see a picture of America’s sphere of influence? Here you go:

To be a westerner is to be constantly inundated with made-up stories about tyrants who want to terrorize the world while living under a globe-spanning power structure that is actually terrorizing the world. It’s just so bizarre watching these imperial spinmeisters try to frame nations like China and Russia as freakish and backwards while working to literally rule the world like a comic book supervillain.

The US-centralized empire is quantifiably the single most destructive and evil power structure in today’s world. We shouldn’t want anyone to rule over the entire planet with an iron fist, but these monsters are the very least qualified among us to do so.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/02/15/the-official-story/

The Official Story

The official story is that we live in a free democracy where our teachers tell us the truth about our nation, our government and our world when we are children, and then the free press continue telling us the truth about our nation, government and world when we are grown, and then every few years we have free and fair elections in which we use this truthful information to make decisions about which politicians and policies to vote for, and it is only by pure coincidence that what we vote for just so happens to benefit the most wealthy and powerful people on the planet.

In the official story, the democratic process consistently fails to let us progress beyond a status quo of profound inequality, injustice, oppression, exploitation, war and ecocide because that’s simply how people are voting in their free and fair elections. The official story maintains that this occurs because the populations of all free democracies coincidentally happen to be organically divided into two ideologically opposed camps of equal size, creating a political deadlock which just so happens to benefit the people who profit from profound inequality, injustice, oppression, exploitation, war and ecocide.

Per the official story, society is driven by the majority, and it is only by an immensely widespread and startlingly consistent series of coincidences that society remains perpetually shaped in a way that benefits a small minority of rich and powerful individuals.

“These are some pretty strange coincidences,” you might find yourself thinking. “What are the odds that a society which is driven by the will of the people would so consistently benefit a small minority of rich and powerful individuals to the disadvantage of the voting majority, across so many separate nations, from generation to generation for many decades, without ever deviating from this pattern? Seems like the rich and powerful must be tipping the scales in their favor somehow.”

The official story holds that you are a crazy conspiracy theorist if you say this, and should be shunned and denied any platform from which to speak to a large number of people.

The official story is that this sort of society, which only serves the worst people in the world by pure coincidence, is so wonderful that it needs to be exported to every corner of the earth. Also by pure coincidence, all of the nations which most urgently need freedom and democracy always just so happen to occupy land of immense geostrategic importance for planetary domination and resource control.

In the official story, the United States and its allies are always on the right side of every international conflict, and it is only by a series of unfortunate accidents and intelligence blunders that this alliance is killing far more people with military violence and starvation sanctions than any other power structure in today’s world. The news media feed us accurate information about each and every one of those conflicts, explaining truthfully why each country’s government needs to be toppled to free the people of that nation, and it is only by coincidence that we suddenly stop getting news reports about how those people are doing once they have been liberated from their tyrannical oppressors.

The official story tells us that while the US might not always make perfect foreign policy decisions, it’s better to have them leading the free world than to risk some tyrannical regime like Russia or China taking over. If the US wasn’t constantly invading countries and dropping bombs and staging coups and starving civilians and fomenting unrest and arming terrorists and torturing people and escalating cold war aggressions against nuclear-armed nations, the world could find itself ruled by bad guys.

The official story protects the official story. Anyone who disputes any part of the official story is peddling misinformation, or is a Russian propagandist, or is an anti-semite, or is a dangerous extremist, or is mentally ill, or is whatever they need to be in order to ensure that they are never taken seriously by anyone and are silenced on social media and are never given a mainstream audience. Any dissent from the official story is evidence that you must be prevented from interfering in the official story, according to the official story.

In the official story, our world will be guided by this truth-based free and democratic status quo in a way which benefits all of humankind. If it seems like inequality is getting worse or governments are becoming more authoritarian or capitalism is becoming more exploitative or wars are getting out of control or the ecosystem is dying or we’re hurtling toward nuclear war on multiple fronts, that’s just your stupid brain trying to trick you, and you should stop listening to it immediately and re-acquaint yourself with the official story.

Here. Here’s some celebrity gossip. Did you see that Superbowl ad? Come watch a movie on this streaming service. Take some time off, calm down, have a beer, and then plug your mind back into the official story. Just ignore the parts of yourself which find it intolerable. Only the official story is trustworthy. Only the official story has the answers. Block out all the other noise, jack your mind firmly into the matrix, and be the loving loyal gear-turner you were born to be.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-unmasking/

The Unmasking

O Canada, the Great White North, hovering ominously above Niagara Falls somewhere, is a winter wonderland, and one of the great pleasures of the season there, apparently, for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is skating on thin ice. Why is that? Perhaps in all the hollering you have forgotten how Mr. T has kicked off a civil war: by forcing government-mandated shots on his country’s working class of an alleged “vaccine” that doesn’t work and harms people, at the dwindling end of a worldwide disease scare that scientists in Canadian labs may have helped to create.

The great truckers’ convoy that converged on Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, has exposed the ugly truth at the heart of this historic moment for Western Civ: that governments have declared war on their own citizens. It happens that PM Trudeau represents his country’s Liberal Party, which is suddenly the party of unchecked government power to interfere in the lives of citizens, the party of speech suppression, news management, forced unsafe vaccinations, and the seizure of citizens’ property outside due process of law.

Under the Emergencies Act, Mr. Trudeau’s police have now arrested the leaders of the trucker’s revolt, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, on charges of “counseling to commit mischief” (O, dear…!), and seized their bank accounts, while also freezing the bank accounts of anyone who donated money to the truckers’ cause. That action led, naturally, to runs on Canada’s major banks, leading to bank shut-downs on Wednesday — d’uh… what do you expect when the authorities send the message: your money is not safe in Canada’s banks, and might not even be your money if we say it’s not?

And now everybody — including alert citizens watching from many other countries — waits to see what the next moves are. Let’s also note that it’s not just the truckers in revolt against insane government mandates; it’s also at least half the population of Canada who stand behind the truckers and against the new fashion for tyranny in what used to be called the Free West. I’d venture to guess that the next move will be a general strike that paralyzes Canada and forces its parliament to overrule the Emergency Act and get rid of PM Trudeau.

Meanwhile, like a coronavirus itself, the trucker protest movement has infected America. A “People’s Convoy” is assembling around Barstow, California (the capital of the Mojave Desert, where there’s plenty of room to assemble), with a launch date of February 23, next Wednesday, destination: Washington DC. Won’t that be… interesting? What will the government of “Joe Biden” do? Likewise invoke some sort of emergency powers? Declare yet another “insurrection” as with January 6, 2021? Mess with the truckers’ bank accounts, and those of the people who support them? Do they want to inspire a run on US banks at a juncture where the extreme fragility of the global banking system threatens to blow up financial markets? Standing by on that.

The US government, like Canada’s, has likewise been at war with its citizens. At least half the country has awakened to this unappetizing reality — even while somewhat less than half the country still catatonically follows whatever idiotic diktat the despotic bureaucracy spews out. Why, for instance, do so many still go about in face masks even where local regulations are lifted? (And especially in light of the overwhelming evidence that masks don’t work?) Answer: to signify that they are still against Trump, the evil leviathan said to be responsible for all the woes and injustices in the world and who threatens their ”safety”— meaning, their status as oppressed victims of “white supremacy,” including the guilty-and-penitent self-oppressed white people of the Left themselves. Yeah, it’s just that simple because we are in an epic episode of human social hysteria.

Except that the hysteria is dissipating for all except the most psychotic or the most politically cornered due to their record of perfidy and bad faith — the David Frums, Max Boots, and Rachel Maddows of our world, the cable news outfits, the Democratic Party hierarchy, the criminally psychopathic swine running the US public health agencies, and the craven doctors who have fecklessly murdered patients at the behest of Dr. Anthony Fauci & Company. Despite the sedulous efforts to suppress the data (O, the sacred data!) about the failure of their “vaccines,” the real news is getting out: the “vaccines” don’t prevent transmission or infection of Covid-19, and they pose lethal side-effects for the vaxxed. There it is, in plain English. And yet, “Joe Biden,” putative president of the US, is still telling the country to “go out and get vaccinated, get boosted” — ???

The companies who produced the “vaccines’ are even on the run. Pfizer withdrew its application for an emergency use authorization in India, where the public health agency insisted on seeing the safety records Pfizer was obliged to furnish — and refused to. India is a big market for pharmaceuticals, some 1.39 billion. Pfizer’s stock has crashed nearly 10 percent the past two weeks. By the way, some of the states of India are notable for having battled Covid-19 with the mass distribution of early treatment kits containing cheap anti-virals such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Vitamin D, etc. The program was famously successful in reducing deaths there.

The CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, has sold off $400-million of his own stock in the company and deleted his Twitter account on rumors that all-causes deaths reported by US life insurance companies show a shocking and mysterious rise in mortality that just may be attributed to the “vaccines” causing strokes, heart attacks, cancer cases, and immune system failures. (Moderna’s stock is also sinking.) Neither the mainstream news media nor the US public health agencies are making any effort to investigate this now well-documented occurrence.

We’re in the midst of a tremendous shift of public opinion. Winter is not over but the truth is budding now in a thousand places. The people are done kneeling docilly to be silenced and killed. They will not let this country, and many other nations in the Western Civ club, be destroyed without a fight. The unmasked are unmasking their masked antagonists. Stand by, now, to find out who has been behind all this deadly mischief. We will rip off their masks and the rule of law will be restored.