An informal chat with Caleb Maupin as your guide to the multitude of news, lies, distortions, rumors, idiocies, hypocrisies, and ideologies that shape our world. Caleb discusses Joe Biden’s speech. While admitting that Biden said some encouraging and highly unusual things (for a US president), such as a debunking of trickle down economics, and recognising the need for a big jobs and infrastructure program, and other progressive notions, Maupin warns about the sinister undertones in the address, especially the effort by Biden (the collective Biden) to equate anti-imperialist nations and activists with “rightwing terrorists”—homegrown or foreign. Fact is, anti-imperialist states—Russia/Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Vietnam, Iran, China, etc.— have always been firm allies of progressives everywhere, and that makes them also anti-racist activists. Beware, says Caleb, of the emerging “woke imperialism” being promoted by the Biden crowd, representing the current “solution” chosen by the Democrats/Deep State wing of the US ruling class as a cure for the multitude of crises besetting a neoliberal leviathan unable and incapable of finding true solutions.
CAPITALIST SICKNESS
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—It’s hard to blame people for believing dumb conspiracy theories about the powerful, considering the fact that proven conspiracies by the powerful are usually a lot worse. The conspiracy of the US power alliance to slaughter children in Yemen and lie about it is far worse than all the QAnon stuff, for example.
Corporate media propaganda is another example. Wealthy elites and government agencies are indeed conspiring to manipulate the thoughts of the entire population; this is a fact that has been studied and documented for decades. It happens in a mundane way, but it’s a huge, creepy conspiracy. I mean, just think about it: powerful elites are engaging in mass-scale mind control to justify murder and genocide around the world. This is a fact. The only reason it doesn’t give people the thrill of 5G nanobot mind control conspiracies or whatever is because we’re used to it.
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Marine Le Pen Has the Strongest Chance to Succeed, Of All Progressive Political Leaders in the World Today
24 minutes readERIC ZUESSE—Le Pen is the daughter of the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen, but after taking over leadership of the far-right Party that he had founded, she expelled him from it, and has made increasingly clear, since then, that she is a progressive (including a passionate opposition to any imperialism) — so much so that now the Wikipedia article on her, in its section “Political Positions”, presents political viewpoints that would be hard to distinguish from those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders in America, and of Jeremy Corbyn in UK. The biggest difference, perhaps, between her and those other progressives, is simply that whereas in U.S. and UK the dominant political ideology is imperialist-fascist (springing from the Englishman Cecil Rhodes in the late 19th Century), that’s not so in France. (Twentieth Century France had nothing like Cecil Rhodes — a leading and impassioned champion of racist aristocratic rule.) Consequently, French public opinion isn’t as hostile toward progressivism as is the case in U.S. and UK.
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From Pacifism To Violence and the Dialectic
18 minutes readGAITHER STEWART—Stalin writes that contrary to metaphysics, the essence of dialectics is that quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes which occur rapidly, in the form of a leap from one state to another. Not circular movement, nor repetition, but as an onward and upward movement, as a transition from an old qualitative state to a new one, from the lower to the higher. Stalin cites Engels’ The Dialectics of Nature to make his point: “In physics … every change is a passing of quantity into quality…. For example, the temperature of water has at first no effect on its liquid state, but as the temperature of liquid water rises or falls, the moment arrives when … the water is converted in one case into steam and in the other into ice.”
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—When people object to criticisms of the US-centralized empire, it isn’t because those criticisms are unfounded. It’s because if those criticisms are valid, it will mean everything they believe about the world is wrong. It would be a kind of death for them, and people fear death. Because perception is reality, finding out that your entire worldview is wrong is experientially the same as losing your entire world. Losing your entire world, your belief systems, your knowing, your understanding and all the stability it gives you, is like experiencing death.
That’s why we’ve got whole cognitive defense systems in place designed to keep information that is incongruous with our worldview out of our heads. We protect our worldview like we’re protecting our own identity, because, in a very real sense, we are.