Thread by @caitoz

Consent That's Manufactured By Propaganda Is Not Informed Consent

"US imperialism does not rely on informed consent, it relies on disinformed consent; consent for it is manufactured by disinformation."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/consent-that…

A new tweet by Secretary of State Tony Blinken reads as follows:

https://twitter.com/SecBlinken/status/1369313692886663173?s=20

Like pretty much everything ever said by Blinken, and indeed by every US secretary of state, this is an absolute lie.

Secondly, Blinken's claim that the Biden administration will never use military force without "the American people's informed consent" has already been blatantly invalidated by Biden's airstrikes on Syria last month.
caityjohnstone.medium.com/us-bombs-syria…

The American people never gave their consent to those airstrikes, informed or uninformed.

Thirdly, US military force is never, ever conducted with the American people's informed consent. Literally never. Consent is always manufactured for US wars by lies and mass media propaganda, one hundred percent of the time, without exception.

Even in relatively "peaceful" times when the US is merely raining dozens of bombs and missiles per day on foreign soil, Americans are subject to a nonstop deluge of dishonest narratives about their military and the nations it targets for destruction.
original.antiwar.com/mbenjamin/2021…

Consent that has been artificially manufactured by propaganda is not informed consent, any more than sex with someone who's been dosed with rohypnol is consensual sex.

US imperialism does not rely on informed consent, it relies on disinformed consent; consent for it is manufactured by disinformation. Informed consent plays no role at all in the use of US military force, nor indeed in any major aspect of the behavior of the US or its allies.

This is the only thing keeping us from moving into a healthy new paradigm where we collaborate with each other toward a healthy world based on truth and beauty instead of competing with each other over who can create the most profitable pieces of future landfill.

No hard obstacles are in place stopping us; our cages only exist between our ears. It is only because powerful people are manipulating our minds to their advantage that we have not already used the power of our numbers to create a healthy, harmonious and enjoyable earth.

It's important to be aware of the fact that our consent has been manufactured for this mess, because it means we never gave them our informed consent, which means no existing power structures have any legitimacy at all.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1361519346749636611

They have power because they stole our power from us, and it is our prerogative to take it back. We don't need to go through the political systems they have rigged to their advantage or the ideological spectrum of acceptable debate that they have confined mainstream discourse to.

This will only happen after we have freed ourselves from their mass-scale psychological manipulations, which will only happen after we have prioritized weakening public trust in their propaganda operations and waking the mainstream public up to the truth.
caityjohnstone.medium.com/the-left-will-…

Once a sufficient number of people have been awakened from their propaganda-induced slumber, we can reclaim our world from the sociopathic manipulators without firing a shot, just by standing up to our true size and flexing our giant muscles.

I sincerely believe this will happen, and that it will happen fairly soon. Then we will extract their rapey fingers from our minds and create something truly amazing together.