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Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
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31 Dec 20, 15 tweets, 5 min read
America Keeps Claiming Governments It Hates Are Paying Bounties On US Troops In Afghanistan

"This brings the total number of governments against which this exact accusation has been made to three: China, Iran, and Russia."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/america-keep…
We're now getting mass media reports that yet another country the US government doesn't like has been trying to kill US troops in Afghanistan, with the accusation this time being leveled at China. China joins Russia and Iran in being targeted with this exact unproven narrative.
The report by @axios is already being circulated into public consciousness by mass media outlets like CNN.
edition.cnn.com/2020/12/30/pol…
It is co-authored by @BethanyAllenEbr, whose career lately has been focused on churning out extremely aggressive narrative management about China for a liberal audience, including a ridiculous hit piece on @TheGrayzoneNews.
caityjohnstone.medium.com/msm-smear-merc…
This eagerness to help manipulate public perception of America's number one geopolitical rival has seen Allen-Ebrahimian rewarded with plenty of attention from "sources" who shower her with endless career-amplifying "scoops".
axios.com/authors/baebra…
Back in August, it was Iran we were being told is trying to use proxies to kill US troops in Afghanistan.
Before that it was Russia this same accusation was being leveled at, with mainstream news media shamelessly regurgitating claims by anonymous spooks and then citing each other to falsely claim they'd "confirmed" one another's reporting back in June.
caityjohnstone.medium.com/this-russia-af…
The story was sent so insanely viral by narrative managers eager to pressure Trump on Russia during an election year that when the top US commander in Afghanistan said in September that no evidence had turned up for this claim, it was completely ignored.
To this day the liberal commentariat still babble about "Russian bounties" as though they're an actual thing that happened.
Three imperialism-targeted nations, same exact accusation. Pretty soon they'll be telling us that bounties are being paid on US troops by China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Hezbollah, WikiLeaks, Jimmy Dore, and the entire staff of World Socialist Website.
The "Bountygate" narrative was one of the most brazen psyops we've seen rammed straight from the US intelligence community into public consciousness with no lube in recent years, and it was so successful that they're just spraying it all over the place now.
It is not a coincidence that the information landscape is so confusing and bizarre right now.
A multipolar world should not be a frightening prospect--it's been the norm throughout the entirety of human civilization minus the last 30 years--but after the fall of the USSR the drivers of the US power alliance decided that US global hegemony must be preserved at all cost.
Drastic measures will be undertaken to try and retain hegemony, and propaganda campaigns is being rolled out with increasing urgency to grease the wheels for those measures.
Meanwhile we've got nuclear-armed nations brandishing armageddon weapons at each other with increasing urgency and unpredictability because a few imperialists decided the entire planet should be governed from Washington DC.

This, to put it gently, is an unsustainable situation.

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More from @caitoz

Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
31 Dec 20
I'll skip ahead a few months: Bounties have been paid on American soldiers in Afghanistan by China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Hezbollah, WikiLeaks, antiwar activists, and Jimmy Dore.
Now it's China. A few months ago it was Iran.
edition.cnn.com/2020/08/17/pol…
Before that it was Russia, which we later learned was an unsubstantiated nothing.
Read 5 tweets
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
30 Dec 20
Western propaganda hasn't gotten less advanced since the Iraq invasion, it has gotten more advanced. The Russiagate psyop and the smear campaigns against Assange and Corbyn make this abundantly clear. You need to be MORE critical of western narratives than with Iraq, not less.
Manipulating public thought at mass scale is a science. Scientific fields don't magically become less sophisticated over time, they become more sophisticated. Every time they run a new mass-scale manipulation, whether it succeeds or fails, they learn from it. And they evolve.
The idea that the lies and propaganda that led to the Iraq invasion were a one-off fluke is itself the product of propaganda.
Read 5 tweets
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
29 Dec 20
The Unspoken Premise Of Modern Capitalism Is That The World Will Be Saved By Greedy Tech Oligarchs

"The plutocratic class are not good custodians of our world. They are not good people. They are not wise. They are not even particularly intelligent."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-unspoken…
Psychopathic neocon Nikki Haley is greasing the wheels for her 2024 presidential campaign by screaming that America has been taken over by socialism.
Ah yes, America. The country where Republicans spend all day screaming that socialism is happening and Democrats spend all day making sure it never does.
Read 18 tweets
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
29 Dec 20
I'm growing a uniquely deep hatred for people who scoff at me for saying that nuclear war is a real risk. There's no basis whatsoever for the belief that what the US empire is doing with Russia and China is safe. Your source is your own cognitive dissonance with the subject.
Again, the risk is not that anyone will *choose* to have a nuclear war, it's that a nuke will be deployed amid heightening tensions as a result of miscommunication or malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_n…
The more tense things get, the likelier such an event becomes. This new cold war is happening along TWO fronts, with a bunch of proxy conflicts complicating things even further. There are so very many small moving parts, and it's impossible to remain in control of all of them.
Read 4 tweets
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
28 Dec 20
Life pro tip: 100% of the capitalism cultists who say you "don't understand economics" are posturing. It's an empty slogan they've been trained to bleat, and if you debate them for a bit you'll soon find that all they can do is point at other people's ideas. They're pure bluster.
It's really amazing how universal this experience is. They have no idea that they're living in a reality tunnel that is made entirely out of empty narrative fluff, because they generally exist in tightly insulated echo chambers which never challenge it.
Not only that, they'll say it as though they're the first person in the world ever to do so.
Read 4 tweets
Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ Profile picture
27 Dec 20
The most Orwellian tool of our rulers which does the most damage and affects the most lives is not surveillance, nor police militarization, but mass media propaganda. It's also the most overlooked. It's good to protest other authoritarian control tools but propaganda is enemy #1.
You don't need the ability to spy on dissident groups if you can control public thought enough to prevent those groups from forming in the first place. You don't need the ability to quash public uprisings if you can propagandize people away from rising up at all. And they do.
The ability of the plutocratic class to manipulate public thought at mass scale is the most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. It warps the entirety of our political spectrum, all our thinking, all our discourse, and what we perceive as normal.
Read 6 tweets

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