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Hi. I’m sorry to my regular readers for not writing any articles in the last couple of days; I’ve just been staring transfixed at the fallout from the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the words which normally come bubbling up on their own just haven’t been there for me.
Bolsonaro is a fascist. I mean that in a very real, literal and non-alarmist way. I’ve seen a lot of conservatives in both the US and Australia defending him as just another right wing nationalist like Donald Trump, which is partly due to the fact that he has been straightforwardly labeled the “Trump of the tropics” and the “Brazilian Donald Trump” by the English-speaking mass media, and partly due to the fact that the political left has been warning of the danger Bolsonaro poses using the exact same language they used to warn about Trump.
So in a way it’s understandable that the two men would be lumped into the same group in public perception. The right (the MAGA hat-wearing “Build the wall” right, not the tiki torch-waving “Pinochet did nothing wrong” right) would probably mostly object to Trump calling for a civil war in America in which tens of thousands of Americans would be rounded up and murdered, advocating the physical assault of homosexuals in the street, openly proclaiming that he wants America to be a dictatorship etc, but these are all things Bolsonaro has publicly spoken in favor of. But because they’ve been hearing him described using the exact same labels and dire warnings that were hyperbolically applied to Donald Trump, who minus the rhetoric and hysteria has turned out to be a fairly conventional Republican president, conservatives assume Bolsonaro is fine. All the most severe linguistic tools were used up against Trump, so there were none left in the toolbox for Bolsonaro.
Published on 29 Oct 2018
Most of my readers are probably fans of Glenn Greenwald regardless of where they’re at on the political spectrum. If you think it’s unreasonable to be worried about Bolsonaro, watch this clip in which Greenwald, who lives with his husband and adopted family in Brazil, breaks down the situation in eight minutes. Really you only need to feel into the urgency of his tone in the video to get a feel for how dangerous things have become in that country for a gay, leftist domestic dissident journalist, all of which are features Bolsonaro views with a seething hatred.
So that’s happening. The world’s fifth most populous nation is about to come under the control of a violent fascist who wants to bulldoze the Amazon rainforest, an important carbon sink that has played an enormous role in slowing climate change. And, speaking for myself in the here and now, the world honestly does appear a bit darker as a result.
Standing in opposition to humanity’s ecocidal and omnicidal trajectory is, at its core, an act of faith. There is no logical reason that can be laid out with facts and evidence to believe our species can stop doing what it has been doing and change by sufficient orders of magnitude in time to avert our own destruction. It is rare enough for individuals to suddenly and drastically change their own deeply ingrained thought and behavior patterns; no matter how scientific and rational you think you are, to believe that we can all do such a thing at once is to believe in miracles. Maybe your miracle looks like everyone suddenly getting fed up with the status quo and using their strength in numbers to create a political system that benefits everyone, in which mankind begins collaborating with itself and its ecosystem in a radically unprecedented way, but you still believe in miracles.The planet's biggest shield against climate change - the Amazon rainforest - was just put under the control of a maniacal right-winger who will likely pursue a deforestation plan. This will get zero media coverage, even though it threatens the survival of all life on Earth.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) October 29, 2018
Or maybe you don’t, I don’t know. Maybe whether this endeavor is winnable or not is entirely irrelevant to you, and you’re standing and fighting on general principles. Maybe in the war against delusion you’re one of those “Keep firing and take as many of the bastards with me as I can” soldiers who fights on to the last man not because he thinks he can win, but because the fight is intrinsically worth fighting until your last breath.
Either way, the only way victory is coming is if something never before seen bubbles up from the unknown. But guess what? Almost all of life is made up of the unseen and the unknown. Our auditory and visual fields only take in a very narrow spectrum of sound and light. Our brains process 400 billion bits of information per second, yet we are only aware of about 2,000 of those. The world our senses take in and form thoughts about bears no resemblance whatsoever to the world as it is actually occurring on the level of particles far too small to be seen with the naked eye, and science is still mostly clueless about exactly what the smallest of those particles even are. The mysteries of the brain are only just barely becoming known to science. The nature of consciousness itself, the means by which any of us experience anything at all, remains a complete scientific mystery.
What we know we don’t know dwarfs what we know, and what we don’t know we don’t know dwarfs what we know we don’t know.
Me? I believe in miracles. I have seen far too many in this life not to. I believe that the unprecedented has far, far more wiggle room than it needs within that yawning information gap of what we know to allow for the possibility of something unexpected bubbling up from a direction nobody was even looking in. There are plenty of gaps between the floorboards for the old patterns to fall through.
On the frontlines of the real revolution, the only revolution that has an actual shot at victory, stand the healers. Not the activists, not the journalists, not the teachers, not the preachers, not the artists, but the healers. The pattern disruptors. Those who are able to clear old, habitual conditioning patterns in themselves and in the collective and make way for life in its natural state. Healers are typically unseen and unrecognized, because our society only values the ability to make new things, not the ability to disappear them. But they are there, they are everywhere, working their ancient miracles in secret wherever there are people.
The most revolutionary thing anyone can do is relinquish their particular conditioned mental habits, because humanity’s conditioned patterns are what brought us to this point. This undoing, this healing, has nothing to do with having the right ideas in your head or espousing the correct ideology; it’s entirely a game of subtraction. Of finding those old, dense, fearful parts of our conditioning patterns which we developed over a lifetime of pain and trauma, making them fully conscious, and releasing them. Not to replace them with anything new, but to leave that freed-up energy available for responding to life as it is actually presenting itself.
The healers know that this is possible, and anyone can become a healer. All it takes is the sincere desire to become a truthful human being on the deepest levels possible, and a genuine curiosity about the ways in which that is not currently happening. This capacity exists within us all. It is unrecognized, unappreciated and unvalued by society, but it’s there; a doorway through which the unknown and unprecedented can be allowed to pour into our world.
How To Wake Up
"I’ve been putting off writing this article all year, but readers keep asking for it, and since I’ve been writing about mass enlightenment a lot lately I figure I might as well slip it in now."#enlightenment #spiritualityhttps://t.co/gmxHh267LX
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 1, 2018
But there are things in the realm of the known which give me hope as well. Trust in the plutocrat-controlled mass media is at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information is at an all-time high, which means that a populist takeover of civilization’s dominant narratives is more possible than ever. Whoever is able to control the stories that the public is telling about themselves, their society and their world controls the public; if the public starts coming up with their own stories and elevating the ones that are most truthful and beneficial to them, the dominator class will necessarily lose control of the masses which vastly outnumber them.
Indeed, propaganda narratives are the only thing holding the oppression machine in place. Stories. Fairy tales. The only thing keeping people from rising up and overthrowing the dominator class is the fact that too many of us believe the stories they’ve been telling us using their ubiquitous narrative control. Our chains are made of fairy tales. Made of language. You cannot tell me that’s not winnable.
Our species is getting progressively better at educating itself, taking care of itself, and becoming less violent. Spiritual teachers who’ve been coaching people on how to change their relationship with their minds say that they’ve recently noticed an overall increase in people’s ability to awaken from deeply conditioned ways of functioning. Are these changes happening quickly enough to avert catastrophe? On paper, probably not. In practice, who knows? There are far too many unknowns and hidden wild cards in the deck.
It is those wild cards that keep me going. By fighting untruth both in myself and in the world, I take the fight where it needs to be. By doing my best to stay as fully present and engaged with life as it is, I remain on the alert for opportunities when gaps open up which can be seized upon to shine the light of truth through. By maintaining my faith in the existence of unknown variables, I never give up, never let the fight go out of me, no matter how dark it gets. As far as we know, it is still very, very possible for us to win this thing.
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Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal,buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
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Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
^5000The mainstream imperialist media lie CONSTANTLY. Literally 24/7. And it's getting worse. All of them do it: radio, tv, the newspapers, the movies. The internet. No exceptions. The corporate Big Lie is pervasive and totalitarian. CBS does it. NBC does it. ABC does it. CNN does it. FOX does it. NPR does it. And of course the NYTimes and WaPo do it. Thousands of "diverse" voices telling you the same lies. Enough to convince anyone. 
4 comments
Yes, the dissolution of this dark era is winnable. All small voices (because that is what we are) should keep scratching at the wall of credulous delusions and somehow somewhere there may be a tiny stimulus of a minor event that like a stone dropped into water will cause rings of reaction to spread. And then all the little scratching that we can do will be subsumed in one great wave of renewal and reversion of this status quo. And everything works even the most fragile or mostly obscure and obtuse efforts. Nothing is lost when meant in honest and even when trampled over. Hedges reasons that Trump is but a cult figure, but he is not. In fact, he is a rather fragile reaction to the antagonistic forces of the reality that Wall street, the military and intelligence services encounter, namely the end of their power. One should not understate the fear of the establishment, which is even stronger in Brazil with its large unruly population. The more extreme the spectacle, the more friable it is and one can almost smell the slow burn of the underbrush of people’s emotions which will flare up soon enough. Courage!
Though I have my own contradictions with the Green party, this article sets out clearly a future we need to avoid and a possibility for renewal
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/01/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/
It should be realized that a defeat for Trump will reduce the antagonism and the polarization of the political scene and with it the sharp divisions and the clarity of the opposing resistance. There is no mistaking the goals of that resistance especially within the women’s rights movement even though it is still diffuse. The typical melting away of the real objectives is what usually happens in US politics as seen in the later nineteen seventies and the lead is taken over by self-interested demagogues. Should the political landscape change to a Democratic power renewal we will find that women are represented by a slew of former military and intelligence personnel and figures such as Albright, Rice and Clinton, not particularly an advance in the struggle for equality. From a potential revolutionary uprising under Trump we will fall back into a strengthened status quo with different actors but a similar direction to serve power and money. Plus ca change…..
Warning: The US media have deliberately engineered the public into a hatred for Trump as a diversion tactic to deflect attention from the real problems the US bears, namely misrule by its oligarchy. The more one can use personality politics to blame all ills on one particular person, the more the real underlying malaise becomes invisible. Many radicals have fallen into the same trap because Trump is but a phenomenon of that misrule which favors the traditional real power blocs. And the more Trump gets blamed for the disease, the further liberation from this system is removed into the future. It is exactly what is desired by the establishments which uses the miscreants in Trump’s presidency and himself as foils for the anger that their strengthening of the bondage rules evokes. After all they are threatened by the decline of the US as a world power and they need discipline and containment at home (a fortress against the world)., using deception and propaganda to subdue discontent. As long as this personality politics pertains in the US (and it has been a bane to any real change from its beginning), so long will the masses remain in cognizant darkness.