The Two Faces Of The US Empire

"The empire needs both faces. Without the murder face, it could not exist as an empire. Without the grinning face, the public would never consent to the murder face."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-two-face…
The Biden inauguration event is going to be a star-studded celebration spanning an unprecedented five days, a giddy orgy of excitement at a murderous oligarchic empire having a new face behind the front desk after promising wealthy donors that nothing will fundamentally change.
This comes at a time when Americans are now reporting that they trust corporations more than they trust their own government or media,
cbsnews.com/news/edelman-t…
when pundits are gleefully proclaiming in The New York Times that “CEOs have become the fourth branch of government” as they pressure the entire political system to smoothly install Biden,
when the leading contender for the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division is an Obama holdover who went from the administration to working for both Amazon and Google,
and when Americans are being paced into accepting an increasing amount of authoritarian changes for their own good.
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/consent-manu…
This manic celebration and increasing brazenness of corporate power are of course overlaid atop an unceasing river of human blood as the globe-spanning empire continues to smash any nation which disobeys it into compliance so as to ensure lasting uncontested planetary hegemony.
The US empire is ugly and creepy. The more you look at it, the uglier and creepier it gets. That's why so much effort goes into keeping the public from looking at it directly.
caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/11/03/the…
The US empire has two faces, one rooted in the west coast and the other in the east. The first face, which sprouts up from Hollywood, presents a grinning plastic smile to the world depicting how fun and wonderful and righteous America is and how all its systems are working fine.
The second face, which sprouts up from DC, Arlington and Langley, is wild-eyed and covered in blood.

Just like any other two-faced monstrosity, the face you will see depends on where you are standing.
The empire needs both faces. Without the murder face, it could not exist as an empire. Without the grinning face, the public would never consent to the murder face.
People who inhabit the hub of a murderous empire are historically unaware of its horrific nature. In the old days that was because information was easy to restrict access to. Today it's because information is easy to manipulate and distort.
Humanity will not know health and harmony until it knows truth. Until we collectively come to a lucid reckoning with what's going on in our world, in our nations, in our society, and in ourselves.
caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/06/30/rea…
The movement toward a healthy world is a movement toward becoming aware of things we previously were not aware of. In this case, as a first step, this means collectively seeing behind that grinning plastic mask to the churning death machine underneath.

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More from @caitoz

17 Jan
The Artists' Rebellion

“No, you will not use my intimacy with the muse to sell more units of your novelty landfiller."

"You will not use my access to creativity making others poorer and sicker to make yourself richer."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-artists-…
I have this fantasy where the artists go on strike. Image
The writer will stand up from her desk at Raytheon and walk away without lending them another word.

The graphic designer at the State Department will turn off his Wacom and shut down Photoshop and pick up a pencil and start sketching homeless people.
Read 9 tweets
16 Jan
I was making fifteen dollars an hour in Australia as a teenager doing normal teenager jobs in the early nineties. Businesses were fine.
This is the economic equivalent of "You support gay marriage so should I be allowed to marry my toaster?"
Someone's getting that money. It ain't you. Image
Read 4 tweets
16 Jan
"Let Assange rot in prison. He helped Trump win!"

Yeah so did tens of millions of other people. Should they all be facing 175-year prison sentences? Or just all the campaign organizers and staff? Should everyone from a different political party rot in prison? Why only Assange?
This is the sort of shit my mentions are lighting up with right now. Even if these smears were true (and they aren't), are you really so depraved that you support locking someone in prison for having bad personal hygiene? Or are you just not thinking?
Read 5 tweets
15 Jan
Consent-Manufacturing For Patriot Act II Continues

The way to stop far-right extremism would be to reverse the crushing neoliberal policies which led to Trump. Instead Biden's already pushing new domestic terror laws and reducing people's stimulus checks.
caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/01/15/con…
President-elect Biden promised unambiguously that if voters gave the Democratic Party control of the Senate by electing Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia earlier this month, checks of $2,000 would "go out the door immediately".
forbes.com/sites/jackbrew…
Warnock blatantly campaigned on the promise of $2000 checks if elected, literally using pictures of checks with "$2000" written on them to do so.
Read 19 tweets
13 Jan
If your response to being told the US empire constantly does far worse things than the Capitol riot is to shriek "STOP MINIMIZING THIS", then it is you who is trying to minimize the horrors of US imperialism. Obviously the Capitol raid was bad. Now look at US military slaughter.
I'm always trying to find new ways of pointing at the horror of western imperialism. Sometimes that gets me accused of being an agent of Putin or the CCP. Today it gets me accused of MINIMIZING A FASCIST COUP. In every case it's just westerners refusing to look at imperialism.
These "STOP MINIMIZING THIS" responses amount to nothing more than "Stop causing me cognitive dissonance!" Stop causing me the psychological discomfort of having to reconcile the self-evident fact you're pointing to with the belief I'm being fed that this is the worst thing ever.
Read 4 tweets
13 Jan
Just Because The System Is Stacked Against You Doesn't Mean The Universe Is

"Things aren't bad because the world we were born into is innately bad, things are bad because a few manipulative sociopaths have made them that way."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/just-because…
It's intense right now. Damn intense. Especially in America. Image
Wherever you're at on the political spectrum, it's intense. And it's scary. And that's just the latest development in what looks to conventional wisdom like a decaying society on a dying world. So it's very easy for a sense of despair to set in.
Read 13 tweets

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