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https://edwardcurtin.com/how-so-many-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-nukes/

How So Many Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nukes

Social psychosis is widespread.  In the words of the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.”

He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many.  The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common.  First strike nuclear policy is United States policy.

I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen U.S. Trident submarines.  These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs.  All are on first strike triggers.  And of course these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes.  My point was not very complicated: now that the United States government has abrogated all nuclear weapons treaties and continues to escalate its war against Russia in Ukraine, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.

This conclusion is shared by many esteemed thinkers such as the late Daniel Ellsberg who died  on June 16, 2023 and whose 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, makes clear that nuclear war, waged intentionally or by mistake or accident, is very possible. In the months before he died, he warned that this is now especially true with the situation in Ukraine and the U.S. provocations against China.

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal recently addressed the UN Security Council on the danger of U.S. actions in Ukraine and asked:

Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia?

Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?

Finian Cunningham has just raised the specter of a thermonuclear catastrophe initiated by a U.S./Ukrainian false flag attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.

So my article was in no way unusual, except for my concentration on the Trident submarines.

When, against my better judgment, I read some commentators’ responses to my piece at a few websites where my article was posted, I was taken aback when I read the following [all emphases are mine]:

• Like many other boomers, Edward J Curtin Jr is caught up in ‘nuclear terror’ … whereas on 4chan you see that a large portion of the young generation has come to accept the massive evidence that Hiroshima & Nagasaki were chemically firebombed like Tokyo, and ‘nuclear weapons’ most likely do not exist at all. The 10 alleged ‘nuclear powers’ have had reasons to hoax together, just like the global collusion on ‘covid’ & ‘vaccines’.
• So, the point is? Subs with nukes have been cruising around the world’s oceans for over 60 years, back to the time when they tried to scare us with the Cuban missile crisis. I was on a fast attack sub during the Vietnam war, friend of mine got boomer duty, which is what they call the ones that carry the missiles. They’re there for show, they aren’t going to use them. Yes, they should be banned internationally, just in case. But as with the Nuremberg trials and principles, that’s not nearly enough. We’re going to need to create our own New World Order
• This is the way the world ends
  This is the way the world ends
  This is the way the world ends
  Not with a bang but a whimper

        I vote for the bang!

• The nuke is exaggerated. Reality is that too many will survive a nuclear WWIII.
  There will still be too many useless eaters and psychos left in the underground bunkers no matter how many nukes we drop. Like Chernobyl it will only develop to paradises for animals, natives and homeless on food stamps, while we the exceptionals will suffer from an underground life for 50 years without seeing natural light . A global virus and for double insurance a coupled vaxx, will be a much more effective tool to clean the filth and double shareholders profit..
• Dear Ed the sea monsters about as real as nukes.
• Another one of the “elites” hoaxes.

To hear that there are no nuclear weapons and never were; to learn that some in their embrace of nihilism hope for a nuclear holocaust; to read that nuclear weapons are never going to be used because they only exist for show – well, this at least confirmed my suspicion that many who comment on articles are either bonkers or trolls or both.  Some probably have nothing better to do than inform writers how wrong they are.  It frightened me.  It made me wonder how many of the millions of silent ones think similarly or have come to embrace hopelessness as a way of life – the feeling that they have no power because that has been drilled into them from birth.  I have long thought that cultural normality can be understood as the use of one’s freedom to create a prison, a cell in which one can convince oneself that one is safe because the authorities have established a sacred umbrella to protect one from an apocalyptic hard rain that they never think is going to fall.

The Pew Research Center recently surveyed the American public on their sixteen greatest fears.  Nuclear war was not one them.  It was as if nuclear weapons did not exist, as if they have been buried in the cellar of public awareness.  As if Mad Magazine’s  Alfred E. Newman’s motto was the national motto: “What? Me worry?”  No doubt more Americans are aware of the gross public spectacle of Joey Chestnut stuffing his mouth with sixty-five hot dogs in ten minutes than they are of the Biden administration’s insane escalation toward nuclear war in Ukraine.  We live in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.”

Although he was writing years ago, Ronald Laing’s words sound ironically prescient today after so many years of endless propaganda, the destruction of human experience resulting in destructive behavior, and the relentless diminishment of human beings to the status of machines:

At this moment in history, we are all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity. We find ourselves threatened by extermination that will be reciprocal, that no one wishes, that everyone fears, that may just happen to us ‘because’ no one knows how to stop it. There is one possibility of doing so if we can understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, our deeds from human authorship. Everyone will be carrying out orders. Where do they come from? Always from elsewhere. Is it still possible to reconstitute our destiny out of the hellish and inhuman fatality?

That is the key question now that more than fifty years have elapsed since Laing penned those words in his now classic book, The Politics of Experience (isbn.nu).  He said then, which is exponentially truer today, that “machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings with each other.”  Talking about deep things has become passé for so many.

If we don’t start worrying and unlove the machines, we are doomed sooner or later.  Sooner is probable.  Nuclear weapons are very real.  They are poised and ready to fly.  If we continue to live in denial of the madness of those who provoke their use while calmly promoting first-strike policies as the U.S. government does, we are worse than fools.  We are suicidal.

As Daniel Ellsberg told us, “Don’t wait ‘till the bombs are actually falling.”  That will be too late.  There is no doubt that before a nuclear war can happen, we must go insane, normally so.

Let’s make the few protest voices in the wilderness the cries of hundreds of millions:

End nuclear weapons now before they end us.

Stop escalating the war in Ukraine now.

Make peace with Russia and China now.

“There is such a thing as being too late,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told us on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in a U.S. government plot.

“We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”

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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-unraveling-of-the-censorship-hegemon/

The Unraveling of the Censorship Hegemon  

The US Constitution was ratified in 1789. Nine years later, in a fit of frenzy over enemies domestic and foreign, the US Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act in particular imposed nationwide censorship edicts that made it illegal to criticize the government or its officials. The public was so furious about the obvious attack on the First Amendment that Thomas Jefferson was swept into the White House in the election of 1800, with a specific mandate to end the outrage. The offending laws were promptly repealed. 

The significance of the events was to demonstrate to an entire generation that eternal vigilance would be necessary if the US was to remain what it set out to be. Even with a Constitution, government is a threat to human rights. 

The Americans would not let it stand. It was not a partisan issue, despite how the champions of censorship tried to make it one. It is about one word: freedom. That was the whole point of the American experiment. No crisis justifies taking it away. 

Two centuries and a quarter later, we’ve faced something similar but far more wide-ranging. Social media was invented to give everyone a voice. But under the guise of pandemic management, unelected government officials worked daily for years with all the top social media platforms to silence dissident voices. Many of those voices are associated with Brownstone Institute. 

“If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true,” wrote US District Judge Terry A. Doughty in a brilliant memo that should be read by everyone, “the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition.” 

And because of that, the judge has issued (on July 4, 2023) an injunction naming many unelected government officials from many different agencies. 

Here is a list of the defendants named:

Defendants consist of President Joseph R Biden (“President Biden”), Jr, Karine Jean-Pierre (“Jean-Pierre”), Vivek H Murthy (“Murthy”), Xavier Becerra (“Becerra”), Dept of Health & Human Services (“HHS”), Dr. Hugh Auchincloss (“Auchincloss”), National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (“NIAID”), Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (“CDC”), Alejandro Mayorkas (“Mayorkas”), Dept of Homeland Security (“DHS”), Jen Easterly (“Easterly”), Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (“CISA”), Carol Crawford (“Crawford”), United States Census Bureau (“Census Bureau”), U. S. Dept of Commerce (“Commerce”), Robert Silvers (“Silvers”), Samantha Vinograd (“Vinograd”), Ali Zaidi (“Zaidi”), Rob Flaherty (“Flaherty”), Dori Salcido (“Salcido”), Stuart F. Delery (“Delery”), Aisha Shah (“Shah”), Sarah Beran (“Beran”), Mina Hsiang (“Hsiang”), U. S. Dept of Justice (“DOJ”), Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), Laura Dehmlow (“Dehmlow”), Elvis M. Chan (“Chan”), Jay Dempsey (“Dempsey”), Kate Galatas (“Galatas”), Katharine Dealy (“Dealy”), Yolanda Byrd (“Byrd”), Christy Choi (“Choi”), Ashley Morse (“Morse”), Joshua Peck (“Peck”), Kym Wyman (“Wyman”), Lauren Protentis (“Protentis”), Geoffrey Hale (“Hale”), Allison Snell (“Snell”), Brian Scully (“Scully”), Jennifer Shopkorn (“Shopkorn”), U. S. Food & Drug Administration (“FDA”), Erica Jefferson (“Jefferson”), Michael Murray (“Murray”), Brad Kimberly (“Kimberly”), U. S. Dept of State (“State”), Leah Bray (“Bray”), Alexis Frisbie (“Frisbie”), Daniel Kimmage (“Kimmage”), U. S. Dept of Treasury (“Treasury”), Wally Adeyemo (“Adeyemo”), U. S. Election Assistance Commission (“EAC”), Steven Frid (“Frid”), and Kristen Muthig (“Muthig”).

As we can observe, then, the effort was government wide and covered two presidential administrations. Unlike in 1798, the silencing of dissident voices took place not because of a piece of legislation voted on by Congress. These unelected people took it upon themselves to police speech and push for the banning of accounts that offered opinions contrary to what the government wanted out there controlling the public mind. 

It is not a secret that this has been going on for a long time. The president himself gave interviews demanding that Facebook block accounts for misinformation. The previous presidential spokesperson admitted and bragged that the White House was working closely with all social media accounts. Discovery in the case of Missouri v. Biden has yielded an overwhelming amount of evidence, many thousands of documents cited in the memorandum, proving extensive collusion between government and tech companies. 

The damage to the common good by such censorship has been incalculable. In what they called a pandemic, discussion of alternative treatments was banned, as were questions about lockdowns, masking, and vaccination. It was deemed misinformation and disinformation. LinkedIn closed accounts in ways that severely harmed peoples’ careers. Twitter blocked posting in ways that shattered lives. The same happened at all channels. Even up to the day of the injunction, YouTube was still taking down videos at the behest of government officials. 

Not even viable presidential candidates like Robert Kennedy, Jr., can count on gaining a voice on the largest video platform. The existing regime is actually silencing its critics in hopes of consolidating control. This habit has been the norm in most countries and most times. But the US was supposed to be different. Here the freedom to speak is protected above even in the interests of government. 

This was tested in 1798 and tested again these last three years. “During the COVID-19 pandemic,” writes the judge, “a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”

The judge further quotes Harry Truman: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one place to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

For many people in the US today, they are just now hearing of this case that has been reported at Brownstone Institute for years now. Indeed, it became very obvious to many of us involved in the Great Barrington Declaration that censorship had become the norm in American public life just as it is around the world. Indeed, the United Nations has made it clear that it believes in censorship for the entire world. 

Will this injunction and memo end the problem? No but it is a start. The Supreme Court will likely weigh in and then the real reckoning begins. Are we still a nation that defends and values freedom as an ideal? The answer to this question must be yes else all is lost. Even now, many people are commenting on this injunction with the question: what is the enforcement mechanism? 

The question alone highlights the crisis. It’s no longer clear that we are a nation of laws. It’s no longer clear that we live under a representative democracy in which the people rule through those they elect to hold power. This is what must change. 

At last this court action may finally provoke a debate about the administrative state that embarked on the great silencing. Its machinery seized control of the country in March 2020 in a great turning point in American history. It’s taken more than three years to finally observe a major pushback. The struggle to maintain freedom will always be with us as a great task of every generation. 

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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/85065/rfk-jr-blasts-medias-organized-conspiracy-to-suppress-covid-information-and-stick-to-government.html

RFK Jr Blasts Media’s “Organized Conspiracy” To Suppress COVID Information And Stick To “Government Orthodoxy”

During a podcast appearance with Lex Fridman, Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. outlined how during the pandemic the media engaged in an “organised conspiracy” by acting as “propaganda organs for the government agencies,” and acting to censor “anybody who dissented.”

Kennedy again spoke at length of the “insurmountable and mountainous and overwhelming” evidence that the CIA was involved in the murder of his uncle and his father, prompting Fridman to ask “What is the mechanism by which the CIA influences the narrative?”

“Through the press,” Kennedy responded, adding “Directly through key members — there are certain press organs that have been linked to the agency, the people who run those organs, things like the Daily Beast and Rolling Stone… have deep relationships with the intelligence community. Salon, Daily Kos.”

He contunued, “I actually think the entire field of journalism has really shamed itself in recent years. It has become, the principal newspapers in this country, and the television stations, and the legacy media, have abandoned their tradition… they believed that the function of journalists was to maintain this posture of fierce skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government authority… their job was to speak truth to power and be guardians of the first amendment right to free expression.”

“But if you look at what happened during the pandemic, it was the inverse of that kind of journalism,” RFK Jr. further urged, adding “the major press organs in this country… were broadcasting propaganda, they became propaganda organs for the government agencies. They were actually censoring the speech of anybody who dissented, of the powerless.”

“In fact, it was an organized conspiracy. The name of it was the Trusted News Initiative,” Kennedy noted, adding “Some of the major press organizations in our country signed onto it. They agreed not to print stories or facts that departed from government orthodoxy.”

“The Washington Post was a signatory of the TPI, the AP, and the four social media groups, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Google all signed on to the Trusted News Initiative. It was started by the BBC, organized by them, and the purpose of it was to make sure nobody could print anything that departed from government orthodoxy,” Kennedy explained.

He continued, “The way it worked is the UPI and the AP, which are the news services that provide most of the news around the country, and the Washington Post, would decide what news was permissible to print and a lot of it was about Covid, but also Hunter Biden’s laptop. It was impermissible to suggest that those were real, or they had stuff on there that was compromising.”

Kennedy added that he is currently engaged in a lawsuit against the Trusted News Initiative and that a Washington Post writer has accused him of being a conspiracy theorist when in reality it was that outlet overseeing “a true conspiracy to suppress anybody who was departing from government orthodoxies by either censoring them completely or labeling them ‘conspiracy theorists.'”

“If you end up manipulating the public in collusion with powerful entities, then you become the instrument of authoritarian rule rather than the opponent of it. It becomes the inverse of journalism in a democracy,” Kennedy urged.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/04/presidents-keep-hiring-elliott-abrams-because-the-us-empire-is-just-that-evil/

Presidents Keep Hiring Elliott Abrams Because The US Empire Is Just That Evil

CNN reports that President Biden has nominated criminal neocon Elliott Abrams for a position on the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which according to the US State Department is responsible for “appraising activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics” and pays “acute attention” to the US government’s official foreign propaganda arm, the US Agency for Global Media.

Usually when you hear someone called a “neocon” it’s not a strictly accurate description from a technical point of view and is frequently used to just mean “warmonger”, but Abrams is actually a proper PNAC neoconservative ideologue with deep ties to the old-school neocons of the 1970s, and has helped promote violent US imperialism in Latin America and the Middle East for decades.

In addition to serving as the Trump administration’s special representative for both Iran and Venezuela (two of the nations where Trump’s foreign policy was at its most murderous), Abrams is probably best known for confessing to his role in the criminal coverup of Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration. CNN — notoriously reluctant to criticize both US foreign policy and Democratic presidential administrations — was surprisingly critical on this point in its report on Biden’s nomination of Abrams to the position.

In an article titled “Biden nominates controversial former Trump-appointee to Public Diplomacy Commission,” CNN’s Jack Forrest writes the following:

Elliott Abrams, who has served in three Republican administrations, most recently acted as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Iran and Venezuela where he was tasked at the time with directing the campaign to replace Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.

The Republican insider’s long history in foreign policy is marked by a 1991 guilty plea for withholding information about the Iran-Contra affair that earned him two misdemeanor counts, two years probation and 100 hours of community service — though his crimes were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.

The secret Iran-Contra operation, which took place during Abrams’ time as an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, involved the funding of anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua using the proceeds from weapon sales to Iran despite a congressional ban on such funding.

Again in his role under former President Ronald Reagan, Abrams was also blasted by a Human Rights Watch report for his attempts in a February 1982 Senate testimony to downplay reports of the massacre of 1,000 people by US-trained-and-equipped military units in the Salvadoran town of El Mozote in December 1981 — the largest mass killing in recent Latin American history. He insisted the numbers of reported victims were “implausible” and “lavished praise” on the military battalion behind the mass killings — stances he doubled down on when they were put on display during a 2019 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing by Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, who used his history in Latin American to call into question his credibility.

When you’re so gross that even CNN is disgusted by you, you’re a special kind of gross.

As Forrest noted, this would be the fourth presidential administration that Abrams has been a part of, despite being a confessed crook and despite pushing for bloodshed at every opportunity in some of the US empire’s most notorious criminal actions. Abrams is such a cold-hearted killer that he openly admitted during a 1985 conference that the purpose of aiding the Contras in Nicaragua was “to permit people who are fighting on our side to use more violence,” and has promoted US military violence against Iraq, Syria and Iran with remarkable forcefulness throughout his career. The fact that someone so tyrannical, so corrupt and so unscrupulous keeps getting appointed to positions involved with US foreign policy tells you everything you need to know about the nature of US foreign policy.

It’s actually a damning indictment of our entire civilization that swamp monsters like Elliott Abrams remain esteemed members of society instead of reviled outcasts who can’t safely show their faces in public. They should be driven from every town they try to enter and unable to secure even entry-level jobs working for minimum wage, but instead they’re employed as high-profile pundits, think tankers and political officials providing expertise on some of the most consequential matters in the world.

To paraphrase a quote often attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to be well-rewarded in a profoundly sick society. Because our society is so profoundly sick, one of the fastest ways to fortune and esteem is to be as gross as Elliott Abrams. That’s how messed up you have to be inside to rise to prominence within the US power structure: willing to say and do whatever needs to be said and done in order to secure the continued dominance of a global empire that is sustained by human blood.