Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Favorite Caitlin Johnstone Quotes

I've been collecting Caitlin Johnstone quotes I like for a little while now (it's as easy as finding sand at the beach) and thought I'd share them. Links to the original articles are provided.



The spark has gone out from the eyes of the starry-eyed artists. The sincere impulse to apprehend the soul of the universe which drove them to create beauty has been snuffed out and replaced with stock portfolios and vapid award ceremonies. In the places where we used to look for truth and light we now find a bunch of stuffy millionaires cheerleading for the CIA and the new cold war. They are McCarthyists and conformists. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/anti-trumpism-has-turned-liberals-into-cia-cheerleading-finger-wagging-nerds-999da68fcf17

The left (the real left, not the “I support drone bombing children but it’s okay because I call Caitlyn Jenner by the correct pronouns” faux-left that Americans are permitted to support) is under constant assault by America’s unelected power establishment due to its opposition to war and oligarchy, both of which the US power establishment is entirely dependent upon.  https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/msm-uses-russiagate-to-punch-left-8ebda8fabb75

The fact that hatred of the sitting president has Democrats so desperate they’re not only forgiving the crimes of vestigial Bush neocons but also helping them in their agenda to sabotage any movements toward detente with Russia shows just how brutally efficient the psychological manipulations of the establishment propaganda machine have become. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2017/12/28/iraq-raping-neocons-are-suddenly-posing-as-woke-progressives-to-gain-support/

It’s not okay to be a neoconservative. In a healthy world, being a neocon would carry as much social weight as being a child molester or a serial killer.  IBID

If you publicly support an ideological direction that suggests maybe allowing plutocrats to live as totalitarian emperors and kill anyone who stands in their way isn’t the best possible direction to lead the country, you get a bunch of Democrats and Republicans coming at you babbling about ponies and unicorns. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/01/14/get-a-room/

This is going to be another one of those times where I focus on attacking Democrats for something the Republicans do at least as much, and I make no apologies for that. When you come home to find the babysitter and the baby passed out drunk, you don’t get equally mad at both of them. Democrats present themselves as the party on the American left, which means they’re supposed to be the grownups in the room when it comes to things like peace and social justice, but they’ve been anything but. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/democrats-are-feigning-outrage-at-islamophobia-they-helped-create-5a39af4a6ff6

The US always uses sanctions as a prelude to overt war, in the same way a siege was used before storming the castle of an enemy in medieval times. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/beware-the-smiling-face-of-establishment-politics-bd31a40a8fa8

Questioned in 1996 about reports that half a million Iraqi children were killed by UN sanctions, another US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, said that “the price was worth it”. Like she was paying. (Ibid)

You can even get away with nonsensical accusations against a noncompliant leader of “starving his own people” by refusing to bow to the demands of US-led power, which makes as much sense as if US and coalition forces were launching Tomahawk missiles into that nation’s villages and then saying their leader was “exploding his own people.” (IBID)

A lot of Berners still maintain the belief that the Democratic establishment sabotaged Sanders’ campaign because they were afraid of him, but that’s simply not true. Bernie is just one man; the establishment was never afraid of Bernie. They were afraid of you. They were afraid of the populist insurgency throwing an unapproved candidate in the path of the Anointed Queen Hillary despite being instructed by the mass media propaganda machine over and over again that they were not permitted to choose him. They were afraid of the people. And they should be. https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/stop-looking-for-saviors-6009aa7528df

At its core, establishment media is revolution poison. That is its primary function. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/01/25/some-thoughts-on-spirituality-and-revolution/

Even a small child can see that ecocidal capitalism and endless war are stupid, and that letting people starve and suffer just because they don’t have enough money is nonsense, but it continues anyway because believed narratives make our society function in an unwholesome way in the same way that believed mental narratives make an individual function in an unwholesome way. (IBID)

There is a common delusion among elitists and intellectuals that the ability to emotionally detach and analyze things without letting the suffering of the world bring you to your knees is some sort of virtue. They'll ridicule you for caring and mock your outrage. I say the hell with that; that apathy is precisely what is killing us, and your similarity to a sociopath is never something to brag about. https://steemit.com/journalism/@caitlinjohnstone/this-deeply-held-commitment-a-meditation-on-the-death-of-robert-parry

Look at the worldview of the average person who identifies as a liberal and you’ll find adoration of psychopathic authoritarian intelligence agencies like the CIA and the FBI, a significantly warmed opinion of George W Bush and the neocons he ushered into power, a total apathy toward the US war machine and Orwellian surveillance network, a seething hatred of all things Russia and a hysterical McCarthyite beef with anyone who fails to fall in line with approved establishment narratives. They have become the very flag-waving, authority-cheerleading, art-killing oppressive zealots that the counterculture of the 1960s burst free from like a drowning man finally getting his head above water and clawing his way onto the shore. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/02/07/modern-liberals-are-1950s-authoritarians/

They will scream at conservatives over this til they’re blue in the face… but you’ll never see them screaming at the US war machine that is ultimately responsible for Islamophobia in the first place. (IBID)

People are driven to embrace progressive value systems out of that sacred spark which lives in all of us which knows that it is natural for us all to get along and help each other out, but people in power figured out how to manipulate that impulse in a way that has turned its once bright-eyed idealists into a bunch of stuffy, artless church ladies who’d be right at home in J Edgar Hoover’s America. (IBID)

The progressive drive toward real change has been warped and twisted into a drive toward good manners. The push toward solving problems by equitable distribution of money and power has been neutered by the fairy tale that you can solve problems with a “Resist” hashtag and a rainbow flag. Rob Reiner has become a weird mutant Archie Bunker, an Archie Bunker who still has all his old, obsolete, establishment-friendly ideologies in place but knows never to assume someone’s gender. (IBID)

We're already answerable to the same corporatist powers which control the US, so we trot right along into every US war, every US trade deal, and operate as a US intelligence asset just the same as we would if they'd planted the stars and stripes on our capitol buildings and called us Wisconsota. Through military alliance, intelligence alliance, corporatist agreements, and a good old-fashioned coup staged by the CIA and MI6, we transitioned smoothly from subservience under the old form of imperialism to subservience under the new. A whole continent full of McDonald's-eating sheep. https://steemit.com/syria/@caitlinjohnstone/on-the-syrian-occupation-and-the-new-face-of-imperialism

The notion of meaningfully separate, sovereign governments is at this time a fairy tale told to the masses to keep us from realizing that we're all being thrown into the gears of an exploitative threshing machine that only exists to feed the avaricious agendas of a few ruling elites. (IBID)

I write about US politics because that's where I reckon the head of the beast is. Australia is essentially an intelligence/military asset of the US-centralized international empire, so there's no point writing about Aussie politics if I'm interested in helping our species avoid extinction. And that's really the only reason I write. https://steemit.com/caitlinjohnstone/@caitlinjohnstone/a-little-about-me

I have faith that ordinary people as a collective are much better governors of the world than a few depraved elites, and I have faith that humanity can wake up enough to reclaim its power. (IBID)



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