We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Propaganda’s Triumph

Click here to access article by Ben Schreiner from CounterPunch

With a string of failures including what many believe to be videos of staged beheadings broadcast over and over to get the war-weary American public behind another war, the Empire's propaganda directors continued their work and have finally achieved success.
...all the tales of the besieged Yazidis being rescued by those great M16 toting humanitarians of the U.S. military didn’t quite suffice to fully move the American public onto a proper war footing.  The hangover from the Iraq war (part II) still lingered.  Understandable, considering the war launched to prevent a war (“preemptive defense”) blew a three-plus trillion dollar hole in the American coffer, let alone having left thousands of American GIs killed and maimed (in addition to claiming millions more “unworthy” victims in Iraq).  So try as they might, the “respectable press” could not sell the prevention of “genocide” as a casus belli to a still war-weary public.  The responsibility to protect mantra of the liberal interventionists clearly has its limits.

The time had come, then, for the propaganda system’s trump card.  Enter fear.
Meanwhile, the Empire's propaganda directors ignore occasional reports showing how the Empire and its Arab allies have promoted ISIS (see this and this), and cover such purported beheadings in a very selective manner.