Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Karl Rove’s Prophecy: “We’re an Empire Now, and When We Act, We Create our Own Reality” [a must-read]

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

Sunday, February 5, 2017

Karl Rove’s Prophecy: “We’re an Empire Now, and When We Act, We Create our Own Reality” [a must-read]

Click here to access article by Karel van Wolferen from Global Research.

Those with much power got away with excessive extralegal use of it since the beginning of this century because systems of holding the powerful to account have crumbled on both sides of the Atlantic. ....

The best way, I think, to make sense of how this works is to study it as a type of intimidation. Sticking to the official story because you have to may not be quite as bad as forced religious conversion with a gun pointed at your head, but it belongs to the same category. It begins with the triggering of odd feelings of guilt. At least that is how I remember it. Living in Tokyo, I had just read Mark Lane’s Rush To Judgment, the first major demolishing in book form of the Warren Report on the murder of John F. Kennedy, when I became aware that I had begun to belong to an undesirable category of people who were taking the existence of conspiracies seriously. We all owe thanks to writers of Internet-based samizdat literature who’ve recently reminded us that the pejorative use of the conspiracy label stems from one of the greatest misinformation successes of the CIA begun in 1967. [my link]

So the campaign to make journalists feel guilty for their embarrassing questions dates from before Dick Cheney and Rove and Bush. But it has only reached a heavy duty phase after the moment that I see as having triggered the triumph of political untruth.

We have experienced massive systemic intimidation since 9/11.

This quoted passage confirms my own perceptions about the astonishing campaign of fake news and commentaries found on corporate media. When the ruling capitalist class got away with 9/11 with such dramatic success, they knew then that they could tell any lies to Americans and it would be believed. Such lies are the threads that make up the entire fabric of ruling class ongoing propaganda that has become for most of us our "reality".

But notice that he stops short of any mention of the system that drives our masters to engage in such massive lying. Perhaps for him that dragon poses a too severe threat to his career.

(You will have noticed a fairly common response when the 9/11 massacre enters a discussion. Smart people will say that they “will not go there”, which brings to mind the “here be dragons” warning on uncharted bits of medieval maps.)