https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2022-12-31/avatar-navi-murderous-humans/
Avatar makes us long to be Na’vi, while dooming us to remain murderous humans
Watching Avatar 2: The Way of Water, I was reminded that there is nothing new under the sun, ours or Pandora’s. James Cameron’s three hour-plus epic tells us little more than The Tables Turned, a short poem written more than 200 years earlier by William Wordsworth. One verse observes:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:-
We murder to dissect.
Another points out:
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
But while Cameron and Wordsworth share a pressing concern that we are losing our connection to – murdering – Nature, including our own natures, their visions differ on what it is to actually be a modern human.
With two centuries of additional historical experience to draw on, Cameron’s view is much bleaker than Wordsworth’s.
On Pandora, humans don’t just murder through their compulsion to understand and master their surroundings (Wordsworth’s “dissection”). They murder to make money, they murder in the pursuit of vanity, they murder simply because they can. Power has no higher purpose than its own self-promotion.
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Wordsworth’s Romanticism did not halt, or even temper, the Industrial Revolution’s appetite for material dissection: the relentless ransacking of the planet’s resources, the prioritisation of endless economic growth over everything else, the promotion of a hollow rationalism that stripped out the wonder, the spiritualism that had been at the core of human existence even before mankind emerged from the cave.
There is no evidence that Cameron’s Avatars, 1 or 2, will have any greater effect on rethinking our relationship with Nature two centuries on, or end our slash-and-burn approach to our planet. We have gained no greater insight, even as the harm we have inflicted on the environment, and science’s ability to measure that harm, have grown exponentially.
Diseased agenda
In Avatar, the diseased intellects that have turned Earth into a dying shell send their forward-party spaceships to Pandora with exactly the same diseased agenda of domination and pillage. It is clear that no lessons have been learnt, and that, with humans in charge, Pandora’s fate will be identical to Earth’s.
It is not just the military – represented by the crew-cut, machine-like Col Miles Quaritch – that kills eveything it touches on Pandora. It is business leaders, bureaucrats and scientists.
Cameron’s metaphors are not subtle. The peaceable whale-creatures that inhabit Pandora’s oceans are more intelligent and creative than the “Sky People”, the human invaders. But lacking the humans’ offensive technical capabilities, they are freely hunted for a highly profitable brain extract that can end the natural ageing process. Once looted of this elixir, the whales’ giant carcasses are left to rot on the high seas.
Pandora’s indigenous Na’vi understand what has been lost. They can couple with the whales, not sexually, but through fibres in their hair that bond both parties into a spiritual communion in which they share language, songs, emotion, a sense of unity and family.
The Na’vi can conjoin with all the animals and plants around them. These connections give them a direct pathway to a planetary conciousness, a oneness, that reminds them of their dependency on the integrity of the whole.
Cameron is not, of course, inventing the wheel. He draws on the ancient wisdom of the remnants of indigenous peoples – the survivors of the White Man’s conquests – on our own dying planet, a wisdom we now either mock or exoticise.
Had this sense of oneness remained intact, had we still an awe for Nature, Cameron implies, humans might have evolved to be more like the Na’vi – as they might have too had they listened to Wordsworth all those many years ago. If we had stopped murdering and dissecting, if we had looked inwards rather than so resolutely, so aggressively outwards, we might live in a Pandora rather than in the last stages of the Anthropocene.
Belligerent rationalism
The huge popularity of both Wordsworth and the Avatar franchise – and their impact in their respective eras on the popular imagination – indicate something significant. That inside us, in the places where we so rarely look, we understand intuitively that Nature needs, demands our reverence. The message resonates with us because, without such reverence, we are empty vessels, living in a godless, competitive, materialist world created in the image of our own belligerent rationalism.
But here is the point. If we recognise the truth of Wordsworth’s injunction to value a direct connection with Nature more than its depiction and representation in books, or Cameron’s admonition to stop plundering and exploiting Nature as though it is something divorced from us rather than integral to our survival as a species, why do we carry on as before? Why are we so averse to change?
Let us put aside the problems with Avatar for the moment. The fact that the film preaches a oneness with Nature even as it bolsters the very same corporate structures that are killing the planet. The fact that it fetishises military solutions for the Na’vi – even a peaceable whale gets recruited as a battering ram – as it claims to be denouncing Col Quaritch’s militarism.
In our culture, even a film warning that Nature should not be instrumentalised is required to instrumentalise Nature, to earn the big bucks needed to keep its director and producers in the business of making more Hollywood films.
And yet clearly we cannot do so. The awareness dies as soon as we emerge from the cinema into the light. Our Na’vi eyes close, and our murderous human eyes are restored.
Unthinking cogs
Out of the cinema, we return to our “normal” lives, to being a small, unthinking cog in the giant machine of human civilisation that pillages the planet, pollutes its air and water, decimates its forests, kills its insects, meddles with its climate.
We go back to poisoning our home world just like the humans in Avatar did, before they were forced to send spaceships to colonise a second planet. Except that last bit is just a sci-fi story. There is no second planet, no second chance.
The paradox is that we identify with the Na’vi because they have what we have lost: they have community and tradition, they share, they believe, they belong.
But we cannot really become Na’vi, outside of our immersion in a cinematic event, because we have been persuaded generation by generation that we are nothing more than individuals. There is no society, Nature is there to be tamed and exploited, there is no higher purpose than profit, there is no meaning beyond our selfish whims, our own self-aggrandisement.
Knowing something to be true with our minds is not the same as understanding its truth, feeling its truth. Which is why in our supremely interconnected digital worlds, with platforms providing infinite possibilities for virtual exchange, we have become so alone, so lost.
Wordsworth again:
Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.
Our new ethereal, soundbite “books” of instant information, easy opinion and even easier outrage are a haven for misinformation and manipulation – chiefly from our own governments but also from the terminal cynics sure everything is a plot and a deception, from disease to environmental collapse.
Without community, without common purpose, without a connection to the fixed wisdom of Nature, we are adrift. We are buffeted by the lies power wields to keep us compliant, and the kneejerk reactions of those who sense the lies but have no yardstick of truth to gauge the reality that has been obscured.
If we can learn anything from Avatar, it is this: We long to be Na’vi but are doomed to be Col Quaritch. Cameron’s film, as Wordsworth warned two centuries ago, is just another dull, strife-filled book – a representation of Nature, not Nature itself. Avatar points us towards the path of redemption, only to slam shut the door that could lead us there.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/blackrock-take-zelenskyy-panhandling-act-next-level/5803313
Blackrock to Take Zelenskyy’s Panhandling Act to the Next Level
Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Larry Fink are preparing to turn a profit on the destruction of Ukraine.
Blackrock is the world’s largest asset management and investment firm. It invests more than $10 trillion in client funds, a mountain of cash that casts a shadow over the GDP of many countries, including Germany, the fourth largest GDP in the world. It is fair to say it controls, or has outsized influence, on the Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks, including Goldman Sachs and Vanguard, the WEF meet and greet at Davos (and its control freak Great Reset), and all that follows, including President Biden and Congress.
Larry Fink, the founder, and CEO of Blackrock has teamed up with the Man in Perpetual Green, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “Specialists of this company are already helping Ukraine to structure the fund for the reconstruction of our state,” said Green Man after a video call with Fink, according to Bloomberg.
Zelenskyy has taken his worldwide panhandling act to the next level. According to Zelenskyy’s government web page—up and running, although average Ukrainians are freezing in the dark—Larry Fink will help drum up the funds to rebuild what will be blown up again. (As for Zelenskyy’s website, it is safe for the moment, hosted as it is in Santa Clara, California.)
In accordance with the preliminary agreements struck earlier this year between the Head of State and Larry Fink, the BlackRock team has been working for several months on a project to advise the Ukrainian government on how to structure the country’s reconstruction funds.
Zelenskyy and Fink “agreed to focus in the near term on coordinating the efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction of our country, channelling investment into the most relevant and impactful sectors of the Ukrainian economy,” CNBC reports.
Good luck with that. It might be a good idea to glance at Ukraine’s massive corruption before investing a dime in that black hole. According to Transparency International, Ukraine is the second most corrupt country in Europe and ranked 120 out of 182 of the most corrupt countries in the world.
According to Dragon Capital, the richest Ukrainian oligarchs in 2016, two years after the USG-orchestrated coup in Kyiv, have accumulated over $11 billion, almost 13% of Ukraine’s GDP.
Much of the money accrued by Rinat Akhmetov, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Victor Pinchuk, and former president and confectionary/automotive magnate Petro Poroshenko, was taken through the neoliberal organized theft of public assets, known as privatization. Kolomoyskyi is a major funder of the neo-Nazi group, Right Sector. He is widely seen as the puppet master of the former comedian and current president Zelenskyy. His reach includes business operations in the US.
Ukraine is a money launderer’s dream come true. Its banking sector thrives on Ponzi schemes. Oligarchs reap fortunes skimming billions from government-subsidized gas prices. Corrupt officials collaborate with oligarchs to monopolize business. In 2015, it was determined less than 50 percent of businesses in Ukraine turned a profit, and 9.8 of all business operations were controlled by and benefited corrupt government officials and the oligarchs they work for.
In July, the Associated Press reported,
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s dismissal of senior officials is casting an inconvenient light on an issue that the Biden administration has largely ignored since the outbreak of war with Russia: Ukraine’s history of rampant corruption and shaky governance.
Of course, Biden—or that is, since he is obviously cognitively impaired, his neocon “advisers”—do not give a hoot about the suffering of average Ukrainians victimized by free-hand oligarchs and corrupt government officials. It’s all about Russia, China, and the role of the world hegemon.
Earlier this year, Larry Fink told stockholders “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is reversing the long-running trend of globalization.” Strangely, Fink seems to believe Russia’s effort to keep NATO out of Ukraine and away from its western border has “exacerbated the polarization and extremist behavior we are seeing across society today.” Submit, lest you be tarred and feathered as a polarized extremist.
It now appears Fink’s cherished globalization is headed for the rocks as the growth of capital markets slow and the centrally managed economy pivots toward recession (actually a full-blown depression, but this scary subject is rarely broached in the respectable, misinformation, narrative-strict corporate propaganda media).
Larry’s not alone in his waking nightmare. Oaktree Capital Management founder Howard Marks also loses sleep over the demise of centralized, corporate-driven, neoliberal-infused, government-enforced globalization. Marks and WEF said in April “the war is forcing the pendulum of international affairs to swing away from globalization as companies and governments rethink their interdependence.”
To be sure, authoritarian regimes often cut themselves off from the global market for a host of reasons—Russia’s Vladimir Putin is just one example.
If not for lies, these guys would stand naked. According to the World Economic Forum, Putin is an “authoritarian” because he understands the global elite want to kill him, destroy Russia, and turn its JDAM-blasted smoldering remains into mutually hostile little bantustans, thus easily plundered and controlled. It has nothing to do with interdependence or the joke that is democracy. That’s feel-good PR pablum designed to deceive you.
“The basic problem with globalization is not hard to grasp,” writes Mike Whitney.
“The giant corporations have outsourced millions of high-paying manufacturing jobs to low wage platforms across Asia leaving behind thousands of shuttered factories and broken communities, a sharp spike in opiate addiction, and the steady erosion of living standards.”
Putin argued the elite are oblivious to the effect of their predation. I disagree. Pathocrats enjoy witnessing the misery of millions, that’s how they get their jollies. If they are oblivious to anything, it is that many of them may be swinging from lamp posts before this is over.
It seems like elites don’t see the deepening stratification in society and the erosion of the middle class…(but the situation) creates a climate of uncertainty that has a direct impact on the public mood. Sociological studies conducted around the world show that people in different countries and on different continents tend to see the future as murky and bleak. This is sad. The future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same time, people see no real opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events and shaping policy. As for the claim that the fringe and populists have defeated the sensible, sober and responsible minority—we are not talking about populists or anything like that but about ordinary people, ordinary citizens who are losing trust in the ruling class. That is the problem.
Zelenskyy and Fink are preparing to turn a profit on the destruction of Ukraine. “Bringing in BlackRock signals the beginning of the much-anticipated shift from bilking taxpayers to bilking private investors,” writes JD Rucker.
BlackRock will wield its tremendous influence over corporations across the globe to funnel as much private equity into the nation as possible where the money will be distributed to all powerful parties [oligarchs] that need their palms greased.
Corrupt government officials (many of them Ukronazis) and the psychopathic oligarchs they serve will profit from the Zelenskyy-Fink scheme to rebuild what Russia will knock down. Russia is determined, for the sake of its national security, to turn Ukraine into a toothless, nazi- and NATO-free rump state, a former oligarch-dominated state busted up into little harmless and easily controlled remnants.
I don’t have a crystal ball, but I believe Zelenskyy will ultimately flee the country with a proverbial suitcase stuffed with fiat greenbacks and equally devalued paper money of the European Union, following in the footsteps of previous defeated and humiliated autocrats.
Larry Fink will continue to be Larry Fink. He will push “stakeholder capitalism,” squeaky clean window dressing for predatory neoliberalism. Larry knows what side of his bread gets the butter, that’s why he has embraced “woke” politics. “Stakeholder capitalism might just force CEOs to think twice before doing things that hurt the public,” the New York Post surmises.
More PR poison. For “Klaus Schwab and the WEF, the framework of stakeholder capitalism must be globalized,” observes Michael Rectenwald at Mises Wire. Schwab and the WEF have high hopes for rebranded neoliberalism merged with the preposterous “woke” ideology.
Not going to happen. The collective nations of the world, led by the example of Russia, will ultimately pitch neoliberalism into the dustbin of history. The problem is WEF and globalist psychopaths, deluded by mental illness and corrosive hubris. They may indeed begin the process of irradiating the planet and making any sort of social and commercial activity a relic of a forgotten past.
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https://scheerpost.com/2022/12/29/joe-lauria-fighting-the-pysopcracy/
Fighting the “Psyopcracy”
It is a hard thing to combat because it’s not a physical enemy but rather messages that lodge themselves in millions of people’s minds. And it has come to rule over us.
Cathy Vogan, the executive producer of Consortium News‘ webcast CN Live!,recently coined a new term to describe rule by psyops, or psychological operations: psyopcracy. According to Wikipedia:
“Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.
The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce behavior perceived to be favorable to U.S. objectives.”
William Casey, C.I.A. director under Ronald Reagan, said: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
Thus the American people are continuously subject to a number of psychological operations otherwise known as “the news.”
U.S. intelligence officials feed journalists disinformation to create a false narrative that is intended to mislead the public and cover-up what is actually taking place. The constant reinforcement of these lies becomes entrenched in the public mind and after time comes to be accepted as unquestionable truth.
Here’s an explanation of how the C.I.A. did it in Vietnam:
Through such operations, the American people were led to believe for years that the United States was winning in Vietnam, when it was actually losing, as the Pentagon Papers proved.
Since then, many examples have followed of completely false stories being planted into people’s minds to start and keep a war going, the fake WMD narrative in Iraq perhaps the most infamous.
Today the war people are being fooled about is in Ukraine. Sometimes a psyop doesn’t involve inserting false information, so much as leaving out what’s true.
The American people, and by extension people around the world, have been led to believe that an unprovoked Russian madman started the war last February.
That’s because they are purposely not told that the war actually began in 2014 after a U.S.-backed coup in Kiev led Russian speakers in Donbass to declare independence, after which the coup government militarily attacked them.
Other facts are removed from the story, such as Russia’s proposed treaties with the U.S. and NATO last December that would have prevented Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian civil war.
Robert Parry, the founder of this website, in March 2017 wrote the article, “How US Flooded the World with Psyops,” in which he reported for the first time:
“Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that – over the past three decades – have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home.
The documents reveal the formation of a psyops bureaucracy under the direction of Walter Raymond Jr., a senior CIA covert operations specialist who was assigned to President Reagan’s National Security Council staff to enhance the importance of propaganda and psyops in undermining U.S. adversaries around the world and ensuring sufficient public support for foreign policies inside the United States.”
So many people are subject to psyops that telling the truth becomes a
formidable task. You become the one that is out of step. You are the
one that seems to be mad.
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