Hyping War

                   From The Ramparts

                  Junious Ricardo Stanton

                           Hyping War

“Of course, there are elements of ‘nothing new’ here. The Romans undoubtedly had their version of war porn that involved mocking the Gauls as sub-humans. Yet in twenty-first-century America, where wars are undeclared and Washington dependent on volunteers for its new foreign legion, the need to keep the public engaged and filled with fear over our enemies is perhaps more acute than ever. So here’s a question: if the core propaganda messages the U.S. government promoted during World War II are nearly identical to those pushed out today about the Islamic State, and if Hollywood’s war films, themselves a particularly high-class form of propaganda, have promoted the same false images of Americans in conflict from 1941 to the present day, what does that tell us? Is it that our varied enemies across nearly three-quarters of a century of conflict are always unbelievably alike, or is it that when America needs a villain, it always goes to the same script?” War Porn Hollywood and War Propaganda From World War II to American Sniper by Peter Van Buren http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/american-sniper-world-war-ii-propaganda-movie-hollywood

We are targets of constant brainwashing, programming and conditioning designed to make us go along with the endless imperial wars that benefit the ruling plutocrats and the military industrial complex. They own the monopoly mass media and the corporate mind control apparatus operates at their behest for their class interests and profit. The campaign is working quite effectively thank you, as the United States has become enmeshed in an Orwellian world promoting such justifications and rationale that say:  war is peace, murder is liberation, plunder is good, ecocide is natural, fascism is democracy etc.

We are witnessing the transformation of this country into something eerie, deadly and dangerous. We are experiencing the complete Nazification of the United States, the metastasizing of imperial over reach and moral rot to the point the US is seen as the pariah of the world. “As the year 2013 drew to an end, the BBC reported on the results of the WIN/Gallup International poll on the question: ‘Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?’ The United States was the champion by a substantial margin, winning three times the votes of second-place Pakistan. By contrast, the debate in American scholarly and media circles is about whether Iran can be contained, and whether the huge NSA surveillance system is needed to protect U.S. security. In view of the poll, it would seem that there are more pertinent questions: Can the United States be contained and other nations secured in the face of the U.S. threat?

In some parts of the world the United States ranks even higher as a perceived menace to world peace, notably in the Middle East, where overwhelming majorities regard the U.S. and its close ally Israel as the major threats they face, not the U.S.-Israeli favorite: Iran.” The Greatest Threat To World Peace by Noam Chomsky http://inthesetimes.com/article/16227/the_greatest_threat_to_world_peace_is_the_united_states. The following year in 2014 the Gallup International poll ranked the United States the number one threat to world peace. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/03/2014-gallup-international-poll-us-1-threat-world-peace.html

But you probably never hear about any of this.  Americans live in a bubble of disinformation, deceit and distractions designed to bamboozle and obfuscate us and dictate our perceptions and view of reality. So naturally the masses are unaware of how the world sees us because we are living in a real live Matrix that glorifies war and makes US militarism seem like anything but imperial overreach and hubris. “In a sense, there are only two operative words in twenty-first-century Washington: more and war.  In this context, there really is just one well-policed party of thought in town.  It matters not a whit that, under the ministrations of that ‘party,’ the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state have grown to monstrous proportions, even though American war and security policies don’t have a significant success to their name… You could, in fact, think of these last 13 years in Washington as a sweeping, all-encompassing experiment in modern warfare.  The denizens of that city now live in an eternal ‘wartime,’ while from Pakistan to Libya across the Greater Middle East and now much of Africa, U.S. military personnel are eternally engaged in a range of wars, war-like activities, and preparations for future conflicts, while the skies are filled with U.S. planes and drones.  

At a moment when war seems to be the only go-to option (other than sanctions) in the U.S. foreign policy tool box and a high official can even talk about declaring war on scattered deranged individuals, the results of this military-first global strategy should be considered definitively in.  Since 9/11, it has led to a series of well-publicized failures of the first order without a single genuine success, not one instance where anything like a goal Washington set was actually met.  Yet a military-first policy remains the unquestioned, unchallenged option of choice and the military budget is largely sacrosanct even for a budget-cutting Congress.” More and War by Tom Engelhardt http://aep.typepad.com/american_empire_project/2015/01/more-and-war.html

            The people of this country are primed, programmed and conditioned to accept and acquiesce to an all war, all the time, war at all costs mentality. It’s like the only tool in the ruling oligarchs’ possession is a hammer so they treat everything like a nail. The corporate media does the bidding of its owners the one percent who rule this country. It programs us to be afraid because fear is the primary tool used by “leaders” to manipulate the public. “When it comes to the US mainstream media, the entire corporate hairball has been largely responsible for perpetuating terrorism in the absence of the genuine article. One of the ways they do this is by broadcasting threats – by doing this, the media are playing into the hands of those who truly hate our freedoms – who reside not in caves in Afghanistan, or some mythical al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan – but rather in the boardrooms of certain corporations in the military-industrial-media complex, the Pentagon, the intelligence services and in the federal government itself. It doesn’t require bombs and bullets to terrorize a nation… all it takes is a media that promotes the threat of such, whether real or imaginary. In the wake of 9/11, that infamous false flag operation designed to shock and awe the public into allowing the administration of the day to do whatever it wanted, the public remain edgy, confused, and very easily led by the nose. In its exploitation of fear-for-profit, the media have become increasingly militarized. Take CNN’s highly visible “Security Clearance” section as an example… with subsections headlines entitled, for example ‘Living With Terror’. Well, the terror is largely a creation of the media themselves, marketing to a captive audience that has been weaned on fear. The public, on hearing news of ‘impending attacks’, are rendered powerless. What can anyone do about hearing this kind of single-sourced propaganda every day on the radio and TV, as promoted by the likes of Fox News, CNN at al? Nothing. All we can do is ether switch off the flow of verbal diarrhea and get on with our lives, or we can wallow in fear. Unfortunately, the US public are very media dependent – the television, or should that be ‘view screen’, plays a large part in the family life.” http://wot-on-earth.blogspot.com/2012/05/cnn-peter-bergen-and-us-corporate-media.html

Every major US sporting event has military presence, the military are praised and hyped in television and motion pictures like they are an indispensible aspect of our existence as a nation, yet when it comes time to reward them for being cannon fodder in the ruling oligarchs imperialist wars, the powers that be gleefully kick them to the curb. We need to keep this in mind as more wars, additional “military/police actions” and “humanitarian interventions” are launched around the world by the CIA, US military and their  UK, EU and NATO go along lapdogs.

The US leadership has gone mad, totally insane and is provoking Russia in a manner that can only lead to two eventual outcomes: either Putin and Russia back down and allow the US to take their lunch money (put more NATO weapons on their borders), or a regional/global conflagration between the US/UK/NATO and Russia jumps off which will likely turn nuclear!

If you question what I’m predicting ask yourself why is the US corporate media demonizing Putin and suppressing the US’s role in the Ukrainian coup d’état, http://www.alternet.org/world/americas-coup-machine-destroying-democracy-1953  ?  Why isn’t the monopoly media telling us the thugs in Kiev the US is backing are Neo-Nazis who openly talk about war with Russia http://english.pravda.ru/news/world/22-01-2015/129594-ukraine_russia_declares_war-0/?  Why is the US sending weapons, advisors and troops to bolster these sociopaths’ war against their own people in the South eastern region of Ukraine to deliberately undermine the ceasefire brokered by Germany, France and Russia?

Finally if you don’t think the US is on a war footing to reinvigorate and ramp up hostilities against Russia, ask yourself why you haven’t heard any domestic or foreign peace activists discuss this issue in the corporate owned media including NPR?!  The US corporate media is hyping war all over the globe; don’t believe the hype!

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