CAPITALIST TENTACLES & FRONTS

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Capitalism is a misanthropic, dystopian religion. By “capitalism” I mean this or any other possible system wherein mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of capital. By “religion” I mean organized collective faith-based belief system.

In times past the dominant religions had names like “Christianity” or “Islam”, which were used to promote doctrines that shaped societies, dominated civilizations, and built entire empires. Theocratic institutions labored on behalf of the powerful to bend entire continents to their will, using narratives about beneficent invisible deities as cover. Nowadays the dominant religion is called capitalism, and the theocratic institutions are called governments, and the beneficent deity is called the invisible hand of the market.

In the old religions, people would gather once a week in a building to be indoctrinated by clergymen. In the new religion the clergymen come to indoctrinate you right in the comfort of your own home on screens showing news, TV shows, and Hollywood movies.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—Were the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines rolled out to market without the benefit of long-term effects studies? We know the Western governments, led by Washington, favored the vaccines developed in the US ad UK, chiefly the Pfizer and Moderna brands, giving them, for political reasons, not only public funding (while their profits would remain private), but also, as added incentive, shielded them from lawsuits via government-decreed immunity. The bottom line is that we stand today with tens of millions of people vaccinated with these substances—a form of gene therapy— with little knowledge about the actual mechanism of these substances and the repercussions of what should be duly defined as a mass experiment. In this climate, the government and the media throughout the West have clamped down on skeptics, accusing them of fomenting “vaccine hesitancy” (surely a new type of crime) and other offences related to civil disobedience. The issue is complicated because resistance or criticism of the type offered here by brave physicians like Dr Hoffe can be easily confused with an endorsement of the older, more general anti-vaccine posture embraced by millions of people these days (“anti-vaxxers”).

JAMES PETRAS—U.S. and European anti-communist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.

The CIA, under the prodding of Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, was instrumental in funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a kind of cultural NATO that grouped together all sorts of “anti-Stalinist” leftists and rightists. They were completely free to defend Western cultural and political values, attack “Stalinist totalitarianism” and to tiptoe gently around U.S. racism and imperialism. Occasionally, a piece marginally critical of U.S. mass society was printed in the CIA-subsidized journals.

RAINER SHEA—Is it any wonder that during his 2017 Senate hearing, former FBI agent and pro-censorship fanatic Clint Watts used language which perfectly reflected what I just described? He said that “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words. America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.” Because of this risk inherent within a free and open internet, concluded Watts, the government must work with Big Tech to “silence” sources of “rebellion.”

His paranoia was entirely valid, because as someone who was radicalized towards Marxism-Leninism after years of reading debunkery of U.S. regime change narratives, I can say that actors like me are indeed created through letting people access information which goes against what the government says.

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.