Noticing American leadership's ridiculousness, a Chinese spokesperson stated the obvious — and an accompanying aria (about propaganda) from Caitlin Johnstone

21 February 2023

Two points, today

The first is about seeing Reality clearly.

The second is about why we Americans, generally, do not.

First, an illustrating event

From RT:

On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed in an interview with CBS that Washington had information that China was “considering providing lethal support” to Russia.

He emphasized that such a decision would have “serious consequences” for relations with Beijing.

That was followed by a comment from US envoy to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who told CNN that Washington would view China sending weapons to Russia as a “red line.”

The US, meanwhile, has sent Kiev billions of dollars worth of military aid, including main battle tanks.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin has shot back at Washington’s accusations that Beijing is considering providing “lethal support” for Moscow in Ukraine. The diplomat said the US was in no position to tell China what to do.

“It is the US, not China, that has been pouring weapons into the battlefield,” the diplomat said at a regular press briefing on Monday.

He added that, unlike Washington, Beijing had been “supporting talks for peace” since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict.

Objectively speaking . . .

. . . both of Wang Wenbin's statements are 100 percent accurate. Which arguably goes toward demonstrating how radically hypocritical and actively warmongering the United States is, apparently as a matter of fundamental American policy.

Of lying and warmongering by design . . .

. . . Caitlin Johnstone has written that:

Humans, interestingly, fall somewhere between tiny-brained hive insects and the larger-brained mammals and birds in terms of self-preservation impulses involving violence, despite having the most advanced brains in the animal kingdom.

We have the same instinctive aversions to putting ourselves at risk as those other animals, but that instinct can be overridden by putting a bunch of stories in our heads about how the enemy must be destroyed for this or that reason.

A few false narratives about God and glory had humans marching off to fight and die in the Crusades like a bunch of mindless insects.

This is because the capacity for abstract thought that our recently evolved brains have given us can be exploited by clever humans with a predisposition toward manipulation.

Because we’re often finding our way around in the world by thoughts and language rather than instinct, we can be manipulated into acting far more foolishly than a pigeon or a squirrel or a tiger ever would.

Our mental soundtracks are manipulated by propaganda into consenting to extremely abusive systems where people will be deprived of basic human needs if they can’t shape themselves into useful cogs in the machine of industry.

Where money can be used for political influence, which can in turn be used to funnel more money to those who have lots of it from those who have very little.

Where privacy for the individual is continuously eroded while secrecy for the government is continually thickened.

Environmental destruction. Economic injustice and inequality. Rentier capitalism. Corruption. Steadily escalating police militarization. Soaring incarceration. Increasing internet censorship.

And all while wealth and resources are taken from the people and poured toward global power agendas which do not benefit them, and which in fact impoverish them and endanger them as the empire’s “great power competition” against Russia and China rolls out economic warfare which empties their wallets and threatens their lives with nuclear brinkmanship.

These are all egregious assaults on our wellbeing which would not be tolerated except for our susceptibility to mass-scale psychological manipulation.

We are propagandized into accepting a level of personal sacrifice more appropriate for bees and ants than for highly evolved mammals, all because our relationship with thought makes it hard for us to distinguish reality from narrative.

We’ve been manipulated into acting against our own self-interest to such an extent that we are now staring down the barrel of annihilation via nuclear war or environmental collapse.

We are perilously close to becoming the first species on Earth to go extinct due to propaganda.

Johnstone's analysis is just as true as Wang's accurate comment (about the United States' penchant for instigating increased levels of other peoples' deaths).

The moral? — Learn to spot manipulation

And just perhaps — in this Western Age of Unalloyed Avarice — choose, instead, to adhere to a principle that prioritizes non-harm.

PeteFree.com

Noticing American leadership's ridiculousness, a Chinese spokesperson stated the obvious — and an accompanying aria (about propaganda) from Caitlin Johnstone