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Lord Posonby

Posted by M. C. on March 17, 2022

By Dennis Brislen

Hi Lew,

I’ve been sending friends Lord Posonby’s Ten Rules of Propaganda. He was one of the few Brits to oppose WWI and predicted the slaughter it would create for all. He then predicted the propaganda that would be used to sell it.

Little has changed.

Posonby’s Ten Rules of Propaganda:

1.  We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves
2. The other guy is the sole responsible for this war
3. Our adversary’s leader is evil and looks evil
4. We are defending a noble purpose, not special interest
5. The enemy is purposefully causing atrocities; we only commit mistakes
6. The enemy is using unlawful weapons
7. We have very little losses, the enemy is losing big
8. Intellectuals and artists support our cause
9. Our cause is sacred
10. Those who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

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Send In The Clown

Posted by M. C. on March 17, 2022

Making his entrance again with his usual flare.

https://thegoodcitizen.substack.com/p/send-in-the-clown?s=

Good Citizen

The clown of Ukrainian Oligarchs and American politicians’ sons is wrapping up his transatlantic tour of victimhood and grievance through the sacred halls of empire corruption. The western empire loves a victim with an evil oppressor to paint their animosities upon, especially if he’s a white male from Russia.

The clown used all the usual American buzzwords to stroke the neoconservative and neoliberal war mongers of the blood thirsty western hyena war den known as District of Counterglobalwarfareintoperpituity. He gave them the full reach around experience complete with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 references and even threw in a Martin Luther King Dream reference just before they climaxed.

War and death and suffering really gets them off when they’re not transferring the next ten generations’ of American taxpayer money to the corporate assholes who pay them back millions to get them elected.

The poor janitors of the Congressional hyena auditorium will be cleaning for weeks. The blood that was dripping from their mouths will require all the seats be reupholstered. Of course, they’ll just bill the taxpayers again.

For them it was worth it. It was worth every minute of the Clown’s performance. They acted like they didn’t know him, like he was a stranger in a strange land, like half of them haven’t visited him or him them in their hyena dens, on the cocktail circuit, at the cocaine clubs in Miami.

The clown played his role well. He pretended he didn’t know his audience. He made it clear that his handlers want more missiles and rockets and toys that will require more thank-you cards from Putin.

The clown put on his happy face by saying the skies should be closed over Ukraine. How noble. How heroic.

He’s not only willing to sacrifice a few thousand more Ukrainian civilians, he’s willing to turn the entire continent into rubble for the sake of his ego and pride. Both of which are directly connected to the aims of global management who own him and are negotiating a continuation of the war by all means because it is they who need a world war from which nothing will be left standing. Ashes and dust, the perfect conditions from which to ‘build back better’.

The latest negotiations were a hysterical farce. They’re so hellbent on keeping the war going, Putin could offer them all of Russia on a gold platter with a side of his own head and they’d refuse because they need more bodies, more shelled out buildings, more dead journalists killed by Ukrainian militias to be pinned on evil Russians. Most importantly they need Putin.

See the rest here

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What You Need to Know About the Transhumanist Agenda

Posted by M. C. on March 17, 2022

In a November 2019 interview with CNN,2 history professor and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari, a Klaus Schwab disciple, warned that “humans are now hackable animals,” meaning, the technology now exists by which a company or government can know you better than you know yourself, and that can be very dangerous if misused.

‘The Days of Free Will Are Over’

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Mercola.com

According to Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the goal of The Fourth Industrial Revolution1 is to change what it means to be human by merging man and machine. In short, while the term “transhumanism” is not being used, that’s exactly where the global cabal intends to take us, willing or not.

In a November 2019 interview with CNN,2 history professor and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari, a Klaus Schwab disciple, warned that “humans are now hackable animals,” meaning, the technology now exists by which a company or government can know you better than you know yourself, and that can be very dangerous if misused.

He predicted that algorithms will increasingly be used to make decisions that historically have been made by humans, either yourself or someone else, including whether or not you’ll be hired for a particular job, whether you’ll be granted a loan, what scholastic curriculum you will follow and even who you will marry.

Profound Dangers Ahead

There’s also an ever-increasing risk of being manipulated by these outside forces that you’re not even fully aware of. Looking back over the last two years, it’s rather easy to confirm that mass manipulation is taking place at a staggering scale, and that it’s phenomenally effective.

As noted by Harari in 2019,3 the available capabilities already go far beyond Orwell’s “1984” authoritarian vision, and it’s only going to become more powerful from here. He’s certain that in short order, there will be the ability to monitor your emotional state through something as simple as a wearable wristband.

You may dutifully smile and clap when listening to a speech by a government official, but they’ll know you’re angry or don’t agree with what’s being said, and could therefore take action against you based on your most personal, internal emotions rather than what you outwardly express.

Importantly, Harari warned that if we allow the establishment of this kind of digital dictatorship, where the system, be it a corporation or a government, knows the most intimate details about each and every person, it will be impossible to dismantle it. Its control will be total and irreversible. And, Harari believes we may have only a decade, at most two, to prevent this digital dictatorship from taking over.

Reengineering Life Itself

Harari also discussed the coming transhumanism at the WEF’s 2020 annual meeting in Davos (above), and in this speech, he went even further. Not only does the global elite have the technological capability to create a global digital dictatorship, but “elites may gain the power to reengineer the future of life itself.”

“For four billion years, nothing fundamental changed in the basic rules of the game of life,” he said. “All of life was subject to the laws of natural selection and the laws of organic biochemistry. But this is now about to change.

Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design, not the intelligent design of some god in the clouds, [but] OUR intelligent design, and the design of our ‘clouds,’ the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud. These are the new driving forces of evolution.”

It’s hard to determine whether Harari is for or against transhumanism. He speaks of it as an inevitability, and something that can be used for tremendous good. But he also recognizes its profound dangers, and seems to believe we need to discuss how these technological capabilities can be used, and whether they should.

In the featured Davos speech, it sounds as though he’s a proponent of this human intelligent design venture, but in his 2019 interview with CNN, he also stated that “we must never underestimate the stupidity of humans.” The fact that we have the technology to design new life forms, including new kinds of humans, does not necessarily mean that we’re smart enough to design something better than what natural evolution has come up with thus far.

In his Davos speech, Harari also pointed out that science is now enabling us to create life not only in the organic realm but in the inorganic realm as well. We’re talking about “living” robots and the like. He also raises the question as to who “owns” your DNA, if it can be charted and hacked. Does it belong to you, a corporation, or the government?

‘The Days of Free Will Are Over’

See the rest here

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Assange’s Appeal Denied

Posted by M. C. on March 17, 2022

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The great free trade and most astute defender of liberty from France Frederic Bastiat said “Trade barriers constitute isolation; isolation gives rise to hatred, hatred to war, and war to invasion.”

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2022

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/when-goods-dont-cross-borders-soldiers-do/

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Tomas Pueyo, lockdown thinkfluencer, issues edict on the Ukraine

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2022

Believe me when I tell you that the climatists, the Ukrainists, the Covidians, the mass migrationists, and the antiracists are all expressions of the same malign force.

eugyppius

The western borg is not a place. It’s a state of mind. As it expands across the world, it aims to rob other places of their placehood too, and assimilate them to the same shallow diffuse global consumerist project. The western borg likes to conceive of itself as post-national and post-political. Its values, in its own conception, exist on a higher plane, like religious or philosophical truths. They are about “freedom” and “democracy” and “peace” and “human rights.” Yet people in the West do not have much voice in government, they are not free, the western borg instigates wars across the world, and western assimilated governments do not care about anybody’s rights.

These are just the words with which the western borg seeks to disguise its imperialist, autocratic tendencies. Unlike some of you, I prefer to see the actions of the borg as essentially undirected, and the result of internal dynamics. It arises from a lot of separate forces, among them prosperity and technology, the complexity of mass society and its management, and the universal claims of the liberal democratic political tradition. All of its ideological obsessions and propaganda narratives either further or express its totalising project in some way.

Upcoming: Observations about the ongoing Omicron wave in Europe, a review of Alex Berenson’s Pandemia, and thoughts on whether Corona is truly ending or merely taking a break. I just had to get this out of my system first.

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We Need A New Approach To Medicine

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2022

This may well be just a veiled ad for Dr. Sircus but he is right about needing a new approach. We could start with an ant-septic that would cleanse the world of the current corrupt medical administrations and their brain dead useful idiots.

We desperately need a new approach to medicine, so radically different that most doctors, nurses, and alternative healthcare practitioners would have convulsions because they cannot imagine or identify with such a radical change of thinking and practice. Even my own Natural Allopathic Medical approach needs a revision to make it much more robust.

What if we could bypass the complicated diagnostic gymnastics of modern medicine and go right to treatment. To a universal treatment approach. To something that everyone can understand and make sense of. Is that possible? Not only is it possible, but it will be necessary to face the tough challenges and changes bursting onto the mainstream stage of life now in real-time.

The entire medical and alternative healthcare community is faced with a radical downsizing of not only the economy but of civilization itself. What are we healers going to do and how can we best help others when the going gets really rough and there is little-to-no technology, tests or pharmaceuticals at hand.

The situation at hospitals is deteriorating very quickly as drug-resistant germs are leaving doctors helpless. Also, if you go to a hospital, the odds increase that the drugs you need will be unavailable. The growing scarcity of sterile, injectable drugs is one of the most significant issues confronting hospitals across the country.

COVID rammed it into many brains how cruel hospitals can be.

The expense of drugs is also an issue. And as supply chains fail throughout the world, as war and financial cataclysm threaten, it will dawn that we are on our own and need to take care of ourselves. We need to be doctors, and doctors need to relearn essential non-pharmaceutical medicine.

A Medical Rebellion Using ClO2, Magnesium, Bicarbonates, and Oxygen

There is no comparison between using drugs
with devastating side effects, even at low dosage,
and concentrated natural nutritional substances.

No matter who you are and what you feel, know that you can take immediate steps to better your situation. It does not matter if you have cancer, COVID, some neurological disease, suffer from heart inflammation, or are facing the devastation of vaccine damage. You do not need to waste a day waiting for answers from doctors and their tests.

In the end, a person might need a Panzer division of helpful medicines and health practices to dig themselves out of a hole in their attempt to eliminate pain and get back to health. However, we need to begin somewhere, so we might as well start with the most fundamental medicines that can not only deliver a knockout blow to all infections while pumping our body full of life-enhancing energy.

First

First, we need a safe, broad-spectrum antiviral, antibiotic and antifungal medicine that is even effective against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Everyone suffering can stand a deep house cleaning from various pathogens. Even healthy people can still benefit from such a house cleaning.

This cleaning would also include chemical toxins and, to some extent, even some heavy metals. I am talking about chlorine dioxide here.

Second

Right behind this medicine would be a lift all aspects of physiology medicine, one that would lubricate almost every life process in the body. Something that would stimulate hormones and hundreds of enzyme reactions and insulin effectiveness and cell receptivity to insulin. It would be the same something that would calm the nervous system and help with our stress. I a talking about using magnesium as a medicine, not as a supplement. Don’t bother telling your cardiologists that they are missing the boat completely on magnesium, which is, The Ultimate Heart Medicine.  

Third

We propose chlorine dioxide and magnesium chloride as a dynamic dual. However, if we include a third fundamental medicine, magnesium bicarbonate would be a good choice. Bringing bicarbonates to bear is almost always a good idea because everyone suffering from pain and disease is usually acidic, meaning already having low oxygen and low cellular voltage or energy conditions. But if one does not want to get into the sophistication of magnesium bicarbonate, simple old baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) will more than suffice. As we age we become more and more bicarbonate deficient.

Something New That Is Old

An old medicine developed by Dr. F.M. Eugene Blass and Nikola Tesla 100 years ago called Homozon, an Oxygen Therapy product designed for internal use, provides another avenue for intense magnesium and oxygen medicine. It is a compound of oxygen bonded to magnesium. The magnesium atoms form a loose lattice onto which much oxygen is bonded. The health benefitting action is derived from the presence of magnesium peroxide, magnesium superoxide, and magnesium ozonide. Homozon provides oxygen to the body in the form of Nascent or “singlet” Oxygen (also called the Oxygen free-radical).

Universal Protocol

Healing our bodies with natural medicine is possible.
Healing with pharmaceuticals is not. They are not
designed for healing but are good at managing symptoms. 

The best thing about this universal protocol is that it can genuinely be recommended to the human race because of its low cost. One can make chlorine dioxide at home; baking soda is the cheapest medicine globally, and magnesium chloride is the least expensive, most versatile form of magnesium. One can even make magnesium bicarbonate at home.

Behind this universal lineup of magnesium, chlorine dioxide, bicarbonates, and oxygen is a list of other essentials like selenium, iodine, sulfur, breathing retraining, infrared therapy, hydrogen inhalation, and Exercise with Oxygen Therapy.

Conclusion

Nothing in natural or pharmaceutical medicine can compete with the above protocol. Before your doctor can blink an eye and begin to read all the tests you have done, you can get way out ahead of the western medical system and start to heal yourself. Today! Anyone can go to their local food market or drugstore and buy some baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and start increasing their oxygen and cell energy right away.

Then you need to learn about chlorine dioxide and buy some of that online, ready-made, or make it yourself at home. Then order the other nutritional medicines. Know that there is a big difference between supplementing with nutritional agents and using nutrients as medicines.

Cancer Course

A COURSE IN NATUROPATHIC ONCOLOGY

Conquering

Cancer

Special Offer: My 100 lesson course on cancer at eighty percent off the regular price of 500 dollars. So your cost will be only 99 dollars. The course is part of a doctoral program at Da Vinci University and, when taken for credit, costs 1,000 Euros for both parts.I WANT!

Dr. Mark Sircus AC., OMD, DM (P)

Professor of Natural Oncology, Da Vinci Institute of Holistic Medicine
Doctor of Oriental and Pastoral Medicine
Founder of Natural Allopathic Medicine

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Digital Tyranny: Beware of the Government’s Push for a Digital Currency

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2022

For instance, three weeks before the Biden Administration made headlines with its support for a government-issued digital currency, the FBI and the Justice Department quietly moved ahead with plans for a cryptocurrency enforcement team (translation: digital money cops),

Short of returning to a pre-technological, Luddite age, there’s really no way to pull this horse back now that it’s left the gate. To our detriment, we have virtually no control over who accesses our private information, how it is stored, or how it is used. And in terms of our bargaining power over digital privacy rights, we have been reduced to a pitiful, unenviable position in which we can only hope and trust that those in power will treat our information with respect.

At a minimum, before any kind of digital currency is adopted, we need stricter laws on data privacy and an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices by the government and its corporate partners.

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/digital_tyranny_beware_of_the_governments_push_for_a_digital_currency

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.”—Thomas Paine

The government wants your money.

It will beg, steal or borrow if necessary, but it wants your money any way it can get it.

The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to making us any safer.

Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

This is what comes of those $1.5 trillion spending bills: someone’s got to foot the bill.

Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.

No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough, so the government has come up with a new plan to make it even easier for its agents to seize Americans’ bank accounts.

Make way for the digital dollar.

In an Executive Order issued on March 9, 2022, President Biden called for the federal government to consider establishing a “U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).”

Similar to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, CBDCs would also be a form of digital money, but there the resemblance ends. If adopted, CBDCs would be issued by the Federal Reserve, the central banking system for the U.S. government. One CBDC digital dollar would equal the value of a physical dollar. And like the physical dollar, which ceased to be backed by gold more than 50 years ago, the CBDC would be considered a government-issued fiat currency that is backed by the strength and credit of the U.S. government. (Of course, that’s not saying much considering that much of the time, the U.S. government operates in the red.)

Although government agencies have six months to weigh in on the advantages and disadvantages of a centralized digital currency, it’s as good as a done deal.

For instance, three weeks before the Biden Administration made headlines with its support for a government-issued digital currency, the FBI and the Justice Department quietly moved ahead with plans for a cryptocurrency enforcement team (translation: digital money cops), a virtual asset exploitation unit tasked with investigating crypto crimes and seizing virtual assets, and a crypto czar to oversee it all.

No surprises here, of course.

This is how the government operates: by giving us tools to make our lives “easier” while, in the process, making it easier for the government to track, control and punish the citizenry.

See the rest here

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The Fabian Society, Eugenics and the Historic Forces Behind Today’s Systemic Breakdown

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2022

Now Russia and China, both encircled by the U.S. military industrial complex, have released a powerful  joint statement establishing a manifesto for a new operating system that enshrines the principle of sovereign nation states, and activities that promote win-win cooperation and population growth as a bedrock of order.

So when Guterres wets his pants complaining about the danger of two opposing systems now emerging, or when Biden’s handlers promote democracy summits that exclude all the nations of the world who don’t want to be sacrificed on the alter of Gaia, you can be sure that it is because something compatible with human dignity has emerged.

https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/the-fabian-society-eugenics-and-the?s=r

Matthew Ehret

The financial system is clearly careening towards a point of dissolution.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the collapse itself has already happened and we simply have not yet felt the full brutal force of the shockwave accelerating toward us. This process is comparable to a tectonic snap deep in the crust under the ocean. The snap happens and a tsunami has begun. It will hit the beach front with devastating consequences and only by breaking the habit of living in the myopic “moment” might those on the beach have a chance to get to safer ground before it is too late.

The question isn’t “will the system collapse”, but rather when will the full tsunami hit?

Additionally, WHAT will be the operating system that is brought online to replace the chaos of supply chain meltdowns, hyperinflation, scarcity and violence that will ensue?

Two Systems Clash

Already we can clearly see two opposing patterns that have taken form, illustrated in the remarks recently made by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres who said:

“I fear our world is creeping towards two different sets of economic, trade, financial, and technology rules, two divergent approaches in the development of artificial intelligence—and ultimately two different military and geo-political strategies. This is a recipe for trouble. It would be far less predictable and far more dangerous than the Cold War.”

Guterres is speaking of two divergent paradigms, so what are they?

On the one hand, there is the ideology that Guterres himself devoutly supports which has taken on the title in recent years of “The Davos Agenda”, or “The Great Reset”.

Guterres even went so far as to sign UN-WEF integration treaty in June 2020 uniting both globalist bodies into one Borg-like operating system, announcing: “The Great Reset is a welcome recognition that this human tragedy must be a wake-up call. We must build more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change and the many other global changes we face.”

While the Great Reset professes to use the current pandemic to push through a complete overhaul of human society under a technocratic world government, the opposing system driven by those nations not invited to the recent “Global Democracy summit” and labelled “authoritarians” by Soros and the Davos clique wish to avoid being sacrificed.

Where one system is premised on a scientifically managed depopulation agenda from the top, the other system asserts the right of sovereign nations to continue as the only legitimate basis for international law and scientific progress to be the basis of economic ideology. The terms of the new system were recently re-emphasized throughout the 5000 word Russia-China Joint Statement on the terms of the New Era now emerging.

Putin himself recently laid out these terms stating: “Only sovereign states can effectively respond to the challenges of the times and the demands of the citizens. Accordingly, any effective international order should take into account the interests and capabilities of the state and proceed on that basis, and not try to prove that they should not exist. Furthermore, it is impossible to impose anything on anyone, be it the principles underlying the sociopolitical structure or values that someone, for their own reasons, has called “universal”. After all, it is clear that when a real crisis strikes, there is only one universal value left and that is human life, which each state decides for itself how best to protect based on its abilities, culture and traditions.”

What a breath of fresh air!

Compare that to Klaus Schwab’s infamous “you’ll own nothing and be happy”.

From where did the dystopic world order of the Davos Crowd emerge?

H.G. Wells’ Open Conspiracy

It might surprise you, but to answer that question, we will need to jump back nearly one century into the past and meet an ageing misanthropic social engineer named Herbert George Wells who wrote a 1928 opus called The Open Conspiracy: Blueprint for a World Revolution calling for world government, and depopulation saying:

“The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect for nationality, and there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious or obstructive governments because they hold their own in this or that patch of human territory.”

Wells was a member of an organization called The Fabian Society which itself was established in 1884 by a coterie of British eugenicists and Malthusians in order to promote a new social order designed to mold society into a new mechanized order run by a managerial elite of “social scientists” from above.

See the rest here

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The Virtue of Neutrality: Resist Pressure to Choose Sides in the Ukraine-Russia Crisis | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on March 16, 2022

It is harrowing to think of where this trend ends as we near the precipice of World War III or nuclear war. H.L. Mencken once wrote that “to wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason.”

https://mises.org/wire/virtue-neutrality-resist-pressure-choose-sides-ukraine-russia-crisis

Alice Salles

Nonintervention is more than just a good US foreign policy prescription. When it comes to the Russia-Ukraine War, American neutrality is patriotic. Resistance to the narrative pushers is essential for the formation of authentic community and freedom. 

The way the media covers it, the Russia-Ukraine conflict hardly seems like a proxy war. How is it that tens of millions of Americans have seemingly internalized these overseas events in the same way so many did with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq two decades ago?

Cultural landmarks lit up in the colors of the flag now drape over social media avatars. That’s the Ukrainian flag, of course, not the American one. 

But anyone not flying the colors of the day risks being trashed not only by the powerful but by their own countrymen. Tulsi Gabbard was called a traitor for wishing the war had been avoided in the first place! Tucker Carlson is once again the target of a cancellation mob.

“Anyone even slightly off-key or questioning of that script is hunted down and held up as a heretic and traitor,” Glenn Greenwald wrote recently. 

Nobody should be surprised by this development. It’s a continuation—no, an escalation of the whole covid scamdemic. Whatever the concocted crisis of the day is, if you do not acknowledge it as real or if you challenge the grand orthodoxy, then you’ll be labeled a fake news peddler, a hater, an extremist, a domestic terrorist, or worse.

Crises grow government power. That’s how it’s always been. The myriad of ways that war brings “the many under the dominion of the few,” as James Madison said, are still here and are not going away any time soon.

What defines our present condition is how the moral panics are used to rally a civilian army that revels in the demise of the nonconforming opposition.

A war provides the needed cohesion, and no American even needs to be directly involved in the bloodshed. The Russia-Ukraine War is an easy lightning rod that the government and established centers of power in society can use to demonize Americans who hold the wrong view. 

Despite the strong opinions on either side, Americans don’t really get a say in foreign policy. The 2016 presidential election was the first time in a long time that there was such a meaningful gap between the candidates on the issue, at least rhetorically. In 2020, the foreign policy debate between President Donald Trump and candidate Joe Biden was canceled.

The question persists: What is it about this Russia-Ukraine war that animates Americans so much? Solid majorities of Republican and Democrat voters support a US-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine. That would mean the US at war with Russia.

The answer for why Americans pine for more war is probably complicated, but it’s clear that they generally hold simplistic views of the situation over there. People poked fun at Vice President Kamala Harris for summing up the recent events as a “bigger country” invading “a smaller country” and adding, “Basically, that’s wrong.” But the intended audience probably appreciated her analysis.

The more sophisticated cases for no-fly zones and US sanctions sound the same except that they evoke a more emotional response. It’s a fight for democracy. It’s for freedom. The US must stand up against bullies and hate. These vapid buzzwords do the trick.

In 1953, Robert Nisbet wrote in his book Quest for Community that “the power of war to create a sense of moral meaning is one of the most frightening aspects of the twentieth century.”

That’s continued into the twenty-first century unabated. For over two years now, covid has shown all of us in a personal way the “deep moral compulsion of war” that Nisbet talked about. Citizens policed each other, or at least some policed others, in the War to Flatten the Curve. People wished for the deaths of those who didn’t follow the Fauci line, usually on social media but sometimes in public, unknowingly on camera.

Chris Hedges wrote of a similar phenomenon in his 2002 book titled War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. So why is our society so desperate for meaning that it laps the establishment spoon? Obviously, something deep is missing in the social structures that tie a nation together. 

That explains the unwillingness to take off the masks postmandate. To the wearers, they display status, a sense of belonging to a community. The same goes for other performative acts across the political spectrum. It feels good to believe you’ll be seen as living up to some greater calling, lofty goal, or common good.

It is harrowing to think of where this trend ends as we near the precipice of World War III or nuclear war. H.L. Mencken once wrote that “to wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason.”

It’s upon patriotic Americans to champion neutrality. But it won’t be enough to say it’s the best path to peace or prosperity, although that’s true. The case must be made locally, where real meaning can be found in serving our families and communities.

Only at the small scale, in solidarity with other localities, can we revive an authentic antiwar culture that neutralizes the state’s propaganda.

Author:

Alice Salles

Alice Salles was born and raised in Brazil but has lived in America for over ten years. She now lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with her husband, Nick Hankoff, and their four children.  

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