When The Unthinkable Becomes Everyday

Written history tends to be represent the past as a series of epochs, divided by periods of major change, such as he Collapse of the Roman Empire or World War 2. The people living in these periods did not experience such discontinuities but rather change woven into their everyday lives. The Roman Empire took many generations to collapse, an individual living through its collapse may even have experienced a life of relative stability as the collapse was a process of interwoven periods of stability and change with geographically-specific impacts. The final collapse was also restricted to the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Empire centred on Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire, lasted many more hundreds of years. For an individual living in Britain, the 1939 fall of Poland may have seemed as a far away occurrence that had little real impact on everyday life. Only with the Battle of Britain may the war have become real. Even then it was not much of a world war, that only really got started in 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese and US entry into the war; and even then it was two separate wars with one in Europe and the other in Asia. To a resident of Argentina, this world war would have seemed to be far off happenings which had little impact on everyday life.

Today we live in a hyper-connected world, where happenings somewhere else on the globe can become a media reality to us nearly instantaneously. The ability of the US public to see the reality of the Vietnam War was a major surprise and defeat for the US ruling elite. The lesson that they learnt was that the access of the media to war zones must be controlled, and the media itself disciplined. The result has been the propagandist nonsense of “embedded journalists” and the concentration of the media into a very limited number of corporations and state entities (e.g. the BBC) that are open to ruling class and state domination. What we are allowed to see, and how we see it, is heavily controlled. For example, the genocide of millions of Hutus in the Democratic Republic of Congo by Tutsi-lead Rwandan forces between 1993 and 2003 was at best sparsely covered. The story of the Rwandan “genocide” has also been very carefully curated to benefit the Western-loving Tutsi leader (a very different story may have been the reality, as documented by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson in Enduring Lies). The same of course goes for the Western aggressions against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, as well as the blindness of the media to the US covert operations; a term which covers up the reality of state murder, torture, political manipulation and regime change.

This is why alternative media sources are so important and why the Western ruling classes work so hard to stop them functioning and/or being available to the public. This was very evident in the coordinated 2021 takedown of the discussion site Parler, which refused to censor its user content and therefore provided a site for open discussion - an oasis of free speech. The usual slurs were thrown around by the media that the site was “right wing” and was involved in the Jan 6th “insurrection”, and no complaints were voiced as Amazon, Google and Apple combined to destroy a competing platform.

We see the same process now happening with TikTok, threatened with a US ban if it does not sell out to a controlled US corporation. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Mitt Romney below spending a few moments stating the quiet out loud about the move to control/ban Tiktok (starts at 19.37 and ends at 22.42). How dare voices alternative to the ruling class narrative be heard!

Twitter has for now dodged this fate as Elon Musk reversed his position and cozied up to the Zionist regime and the US foreign policy establishment. Another major area for contestation is on college campuses, and in the past few months we have seen the utter hypocrisy and careerist sociopathy of university deans as they are pressured by the organs of the state, major donors and university boards stacked with the ruling class and their servile courtier tools. The open beating of college students, and even professors, for participating in peaceful protest by both the police and Zionist thugs (magically in the absence of the otherwise ever-present police), is now back. This is very different from the treatment of Occupy Wall Street in 2011, which was at first treated with kid gloves and then only physically smashed when it had fallen out of the news cycle. Of course in 2011 there were few if any smart phones and social media and video sharing sites were in their infancy. What the capitalist ruling class is showing is that it desperately wants the Zionist genocide not to be televised, and anyone attempting to raise the genocide into political discourse will be dealt with severely, so that genocide can be carried out in the shadows. Chris Hedges is the latest casualty of this, as the limited hangout The Real News Network, removed his show due to his criticisms of the Biden administration; especially with respect to the administration’s facilitation of the Zionist genocide.

The attempt is to make the horrific impacts of US (and UK, and French and German etc.) foreign policy into a background noise that fades away with respect to everyday life. Becoming a far off thing that does not really affect the general public, which will also be fed the twisted notion that those that are occupied have no right to attack their occupiers and that the occupiers have the right to genocide the occupied in response. An utter reversal of the view of the Warsaw Ghetto with the role of the Jews reversed and their previous role taken by the Palestinians. The parallels are so obvious that any discussion of them must be quashed, leading to such things as Palestinian-supporting speakers being banned from the EU and an obviously unconstitutional “anti-semitism” act being passed by the US House of Representatives; which fully equates criticism of Israel “anti-semitism”. A great take from a Jewish student about how Jews are extremely safe in the US, that “anti-semitism” is simply a politically-motivated slur to draw attention away from the realities of the Zionist genocide.

The reality of Israel as a fascist state, with the role of the Jews reversed to be the ubermenschen with the untermenschen now the Palestinians (and Arabs in general), and Palestine being the lebensraum that must be cleared of the “savages” to allow “civilization” to flourish; as with the ethnic cleansing of North America that Hitler saw as a historical support for his planned ethnic cleansing of the Slavs.

While this fascist, ethno-supremacist, apartheid and ethnic cleansing state, now practising open genocide, is allowed to fully partake in Western society events such as the Olympics and the Eurovision Song Contest. The latter has a history of such propagandist lunacy, as with the inclusion of the Ukraine and the ridiculous victory of its song. My apologies for the generic anti-Russia BS in the video below (seemingly de riguer now so as not to get cancelled), but it does make very good points about the art-washing and LGBTQ-washing of genocide. And yes, Israel is not in Europe!

While the slandered official enemy Russia (and the other major official enemy Iran) is treated as a pariah. The other fascist state that can only ever be described as a “bastion of Western democracy” by the mainstream media, and fully accepted in the West as an “heroic” nation, is of course Ukraine. This propaganda is of course being used to cover up the role of the US as the real boss of the comprador Ukrainian state that acts as the proxy warrior to undermine Russia. The conscious targeting of civilian neighbourhoods for Ukrainian shelling and the Ukrainian state assassinations and torture of civilians is hidden, while Russia condemned for “targeting civilians” when in fact the number of civilian casualties is incredibly low given the scale fo the conflict.

What we are experiencing is the slide into fascism of the declining West, a period which may in the future be defined as “The Decline of the West”, but the official media attempt to represent as a set of unconnected events involving “bad” people and nations that must be beaten by the “good” West. Repeatedly creating a “new normal” that is disconnected from memories of the past that are being rewritten and disappeared (e.g. the numerous mainstream media stories on Ukrainian corruption and fascism) to serve the present. The work of Winston Smith in all its glory. Just as in 1984 where the “enemy” is a highly changeable thing (the only continuity being that there was always an enemy to be hated) the role of external players is highly malleable; as with Muslims/Arabs who were represented as a put upon minority in the 1990s (the Yugoslavian wars), terrorists (post-911), people to be freed from a crazed “Hitler” (Iraq 2003, Libya 2011) a put upon minority subject to “genocide” (Xinjiang) and terrorists (Gaza).

The increasing desperation of the capitalist ruling class is palpable as it shreds its fake liberal democracy and becomes increasingly authoritarian. This may very well intensify as the International Criminal Court (ICC) considers an arrest warrant against Israeli officials such as Netanyahu, Turkey cuts off trade with that nation, and Ukraine looks increasingly impotent against the Russian Army. The utter hypocrisy of the West is shown by its overwhelming support for the spurious ICC arrest warrant against President Putin, while it directly threatens the ICC with respect to Netanyahu (and previously with respect to the investigation of crimes in Afghanistan).

The Western elites, and especially the US capitalist ruling class, are now aligned around combating the Russia-Iran-China (RIC) alliance that their own aggression and unwillingness to compromise created. They will drag their populations into whatever conflicts are required, through the manufacturing of consent if possible and through outright fascism if required. This is a pattern that we have seen before with respect to WW1. After the failure of three years of overwhelming anti-German propaganda to get the US into WW1, President Wilson implemented a fascist state to support his decision to enter the war against the wishes of the majority of Americans (who had recently re-elected him on an anti-war platform).

The modern fascist state may be somewhat more subtle than previous ones, and much better at covering itself in “liberal” clothing (e.g. the “combatting disinformation and hate speech” rubbish to cover up ever increasing censorship) , but the iron fist will still reside within the velvet glove; as the student protestors recently discovered. As the protestors at Kent State discovered in 1970. The question is when will will we understand that we are living in a fascist state, or will that only be obvious after the fact or when it very bluntly enters our everyday lives? If the unthinkable becomes the new normal, and the old normal erased from the media, how are we to know what is normal? How will new generations even know what the past was really like? The mainstream media attempts to turn our perception into that of a young child that only lives in the present, with no ability to connect one event to another and considered thought lost to emotions and feelings; for example the curated hatred of the official enemies and the uncritical support for the official allies. That is how they help drag us into war, and possibly a new world war. Perhaps that new world war has already started, and we are like the British contemplating the far off happenings in Poland in 1939.