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The Imperial Propaganda Machine Is Failing In Unprecedented Ways

by Caitlin Johnstone
 
Cristina on Twitter asks, “Can you please write another of your beautiful posts about hope. I am not sure I have any left. We need hope.”

I don’t understand how anyone can be without hope right now, personally. The imperial propaganda machine is crumbling in ways we’ve never seen in our lifetime. They wouldn’t work so hard on shoring up narrative control if they didn’t need it, and their narrative control is falling apart.

Look at Israel. This is an arm of the empire that understands the importance of narrative manipulation so acutely that they’ve got their own term for the practice, “hasbara”, with countless systems in place for influencing the way westerners view the Zionist entity. But they’re losing.

Israel and its supporters are more keenly aware of how important it is to control the narrative than maybe any other population on earth, and yet they are losing control of the narrative. Worldwide support for Israel is plummeting, with more American voters sympathizing with the Palestinians than the Israelis for the first time in history.
 
And Israel is panicking. They’ve been ramping up spending on propaganda and influence operations while billionaire Zionists like Larry Ellison use their fortunes to shore up more control over social media platforms and mainstream news outlets. They wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t feel the need to, and it won’t even work.  
 
No amount of propaganda is going to cause people to unsee two years of live-streamed genocide. 
 
Propaganda is a powerful tool, but it isn’t magic.

The Zionists in the White House are panicking as well. Donald Trump has stated that his goal in securing a ceasefire was to rescue Israel from the PR crisis created by the Netanyahu regime, saying, “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back.”

These sentiments were echoed in a recent 60 Minutes interview with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who said that the president “felt like the Israelis were getting a little bit out of control” and needed to rein them in, not for the sake of Israel’s victims but to “stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests.” 

So we’re already at a point where elements of the empire are starting to change their behavior in response to public perception of the empire’s actions. They are not doing this because they suddenly evolved a conscience, they are doing it because they need to maintain perception management. They understand that if the public turns against them past a certain point, they’re in some very dangerous territory.

Every time history has seen the public rise up against their tyrannical rulers and lop their heads off, the world’s oligarchs and empire managers have sat up and taken notice. The rich and the powerful are always urgently aware that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them and that we can use those superior numbers to get rid of them whenever we want to, so they have an existential interest in preventing us from wanting to.

That’s why Israel, the United States and their allies have poured so much energy into sustaining the most sophisticated propaganda engine ever created. They know that the empire they operate depends on the ability to manipulate the way normal people think, speak, act and vote, continuously steering us toward convenient thoughts and behaviors and away from inconvenient thoughts and behaviors.

This entire dystopia is sustained by mass-scale mind control, and the mind control machine is getting weaker and weaker by the day. More and more people are waking up to the fact that we are ruled by tyrants, that our politicians and media have been deceiving us, and that everything we were taught to believe about our nation, our government and our world was a lie.

So while in the short term things might look darker than ever before, what’s spelled out in the trends we are seeing tells us that the bars of our cage are made of melting ice. We are freeing our minds from the artificial delusions that have turned us into docile and obedient gear-turners, and awakening the healthy animals within us.

I find it impossible to feel hopeless under such circumstances. I don’t feel certain that everything will work out perfectly fine, but I find it impossible not to have hope.

They’re on the back foot. This has never happened before.

We’ve got a real shot at winning this thing.


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