Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby dada » Fri May 07, 2021 12:44 pm

So maybe we could say that the basics that keep mass thought production moving are objects of mass, or mass objects. The thought process is the same. Meaning, to keep mass thought production moving, we need basic things. We always need the fundamentals, and a specific story to tell, but those are not basic things. The basic things are elements inside the specific story. Things like, "mountain," "vehicle," "device," "beat," or pause. The specific things are basic needs of thought economy, and the thought consumer treats them as such.

Between the fundamentals and the basics are fundamentally basic things like "dialogue," and "narrator." Fundamentally basic things are not objects or subjects, but actions, on the level of the story where subjects become objects, and objects are subjectified. So we say in a story with no dialogue, the dialogue is not missing but silent, and in a story with no narration, the narrator is silent.

That the narrator is ever present in the story, even when silent, can be seen in the example of the dramatic play. The dialogue cannot happen without the names before the lines, indicating who said or will say them. If the narrator appears in the play under whatever name, the character is always understood to be "the playwright."

Of course the narrator or playwright doesn't actually "do the indications," but farms it out to the team of top editors. For me, most of the work falls on the ninja. And the count helps out a lot. The count has this strange black triangle-shaped device, make changes and transformations in the story, even global ones, by turning a few knobs and poking around on a screen with a stylus. It's actually kind of scary.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby dada » Fri May 07, 2021 3:16 pm

dada: the unavoidable box frame around the reshared media is like a coffin. And when there are no words around the coffin, it is as if no one in the dead society even cared enough about the media to act as pall-bearers at the funeral.

Jack: Not all the no ones. If true, this applies to the no ones who post the uncommented coffin, especially if they do so habitually -- is compulsively the better word? Compulsorily?

dada: So maybe we could say that it is a clear representation within mass produced consumer culture of the saying, "think outside the box." The mass consumer may think outside the box, but we cannot say for sure, so it is only thought in potential. Actual thought is concordant and coherent, so we can say for sure that no thinking outside the box was present at the moment when the media was reshared, or reproduced.

Then maybe we could say that thinking inside the box may contain coherent thought as dead mass. Thinking outside the box is then just another way of saying living, concordant, coherent thought.

So it doesn't necessarily have to become a discussion of "mass vs thought," as it often does, beginning in defenses of apologia to rational thought. I guess that's like "delivering the eulogy."

And the "year zero" in the title of the thread that is the first hook in the advertising campaign, is actually a flashy way of saying "the grave," as thought to be "a most important thing to be remembered, in the act of rememberance."
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby dada » Fri May 07, 2021 4:23 pm

To highlight the difference between mass and thought, though, a good example is the difference between "i spaced out," and "i forgot." In thought, "I forgot" is a failure to find a thought, and "I spaced out" is a breakdown in mass economy, or mass thought production.

In mass production consumer culture, economy of thought necessarily must leave its terms vaguely defined, and so the difference between I spaced out and I forgot is made purely aesthetically, on the principle that attractive, flowery language like a voodoo charm will bring down the joys of mass production.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby dada » Fri May 07, 2021 9:05 pm

So now maybe it becomes possible to say the thought consumer can only interact with the products of mass production consumer culture by conversing with the dead. And analysis of the grave or what is in it carries with it the morbid fascination of the necromantic arts.

And it should be clear then, the difference between the industrial production of information as an expansion of the mass consumer state, or culture in consumer empire, and an industrial mass production of thought.

As well there should be no question of confusing mass production of thought with mass production of things. The thought composer consumes a mass that is immaterial, as much as the mass producer consumes all things material.

So maybe evidence that the thought consumer comes from another culture apart from mass consumer culture is still best observed in the incompatibility of the cultural languages. To the mass consumer, the thought consumer's composed mass is read like words in a completely foreign language.

To continue the theme of spacing out and forgetting, there is "blanked," which is short for "blanking out." The mass consumer is telling us their brain machine bluescreened, or maybe the cosmic censor sent back a manuscript full of redactions. For the thought consumer, blanking out is always blanking in, the editor is saving time like a hero. Blanking out is collapsing in exhaustion while mass thought production runs on into the most fantastic dreams.

And then there's "slipped my mind." A thought has slipped away from the mass consumer. Where it goes. The mass consumer says, "the thought slipped my mind." Like a banana peel. For the thought consumer the slipping opens out on the other world. Thought like a freight train slipped off the rails, yet barrelling on into the field of immediate possibility. Initial search after the slip throws hi watt search beams out as all the mind's contents snap to attention. Giving chase to the runaway crazy train, the thought consumer plows through shops and dislodges furniture, throwing up carpets and leaving them in general disarray with playful exuberance and renewed vigor, into the other world.

"Dizzy" mass gets disoriented, with the implication of needing diagnostic checks and calibration. The mass consumer gets dizzy and falls, down into the industrial machinery of mass production. The dizziness of thought is the odd feeling of falling upward in mothlike circles to the deck lights, into the industrial machinery of thought.
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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby dada » Sat May 08, 2021 12:08 am

Now I'm thinking that economy of thought in the mass consumer cultural language is studied through the matter of syntax.

I like it. Syntax, like a swear jar. The mass consumer cultural language is absolved of syntax. Thought consumer's syntax paid in full.

Or you could get all biblical, as you do, with the syntax. For the mass consumer, the syntax of the cultural language is literally "the price we pay for our sins." In the syntax of the thought consumer's cultural language, like the swears in the jar. The thought consumer's cultural syntax is for breaking the silent oath, breaking hearts, breaking promises.
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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby conniption » Wed Jun 30, 2021 5:42 am

consent factory
(embedded links)

The War on Reality

CJ Hopkins
June 29, 2021


Image
Photo: The sign over the entrance to Disneyland


So, the War on Reality is going splendidly. Societies all across the world have been split into opposing, irreconcilable realities. Neighbors, friends, and even family members are bitterly divided into two hostile camps, each regarding the other as paranoid psychotics, delusional fanatics, dangerous idiots, and, in any event, as mortal enemies.

In the UK, Germany, and many other countries, and in numerous states throughout the US, a “state of emergency” remains in effect. An apocalyptic virus is on the loose. Mutant variants are spreading like wildfire. Most of society is still shut down or subject to emergency health restrictions. People are still walking around in public with plastic face shields and medical-looking masks. The police are showing up at people’s homes to arrest them for “illegally gathering outdoors.” Any deviation from official reality is being censored by the Internet corporations. Constitutional rights are still suspended. Entire populations are being coerced into being injected with experimental “vaccines.” Pseudo-medical segregation systems are being brought online. And so on … you’re familiar with the details.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, and a few other countries, and in various other states throughout the US, there is no apocalyptic pandemic. People are just going about their lives as normal. OK, sure, there is a nasty virus going around, so people are taking common sense precautions, as people typically do for any nasty virus, but there is no “state of emergency” in effect, and no reason to radically transform society into a paranoid, pathologized-totalitarian dystopia.

This state of affairs, in which two contradictory, mutually-exclusive realities exist, is … well, it’s impossible, and so it cannot continue. Either there exists a devastating global pandemic that justifies a global “state of emergency,” the suspension of constitutional rights, and the other totalitarian “emergency measures” we have been subjected to since March of 2020 or there doesn’t. It really is as simple as that.

Except that it isn’t as simple as that. It is easy to forget, given the last 16 months, that people have been bitterly divided, and inhabiting mutually-exclusive realities, and regarding people who don’t conform to their realities as enemies for the last five years. I’m not talking about political disagreements, or even socio-cultural differences. I’m talking about contradictory realities. Things that actually happened, or didn’t happen. Things that exist, or do not exist.

I’m not going rehash the whole War on Populism — I covered it extensively at the time — but that’s when the current global-capitalist War on Reality was officially launched. It wasn’t just the usual lies and propaganda. It was a full-scale ideological assault. By the end of it, people actually believed that (a) Donald Trump was a Russian agent, (b) that he was literally Hitler, and so was going to stage some sort of “coup,” declare himself American Führer, and launch the “Trumpian-White-Supremacist Fourth Reich,” and (c) that he had actually attempted this by sending a few hundred unarmed protesters — violent domestic extremist grandmothers, father-and-son kill squads, and bison hat loonies — to “storm the Capitol” and overthrow the government during the so-called “January 6 Insurrection.”

So, when GloboCap rolled out the “New Normal” reality, they weren’t exactly starting from scratch. Millions of people — not just Americans, because the War on Populism was a global campaign — were already living in a new reality in which facts no longer mattered at all, where things that never happened officially happened, and other things that obviously happened never happened, not officially, or were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.

But the goal of GloboCap’s War on Reality isn’t simply to deceive the masses and divide them into opposing camps. Rulers have been deceiving the masses and dividing them into opposing camps since the dawn of human civilization. This time, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

OK, bear with me now, because this gets kind of heady.

The War on Reality is not an attempt to replace reality with a fake reality. Or it is that, but that is only one part of it. Its real goal is to render reality arbitrary, to strip it of its epistemological authority, to turn it into a “floating signifier,” a word that has no objective referent, which, of course, technically, it already is. You cannot take a picture of reality. It is a concept. It is not a physical object that exists somewhere in time and space.

But let’s leave that last point for a later discussion. This is not the time to get lost in semiotics. For most people, for most practical purposes, reality is … well, reality. It’s objective. Material. It actually exists. It exists independent of our beliefs. It isn’t just an arbitrary, empty signifier that doesn’t actually refer to anything, but which we use, strategically, to assert authority, or to impose ideology on society. If that were the case, there would be no reality. Nothing would be true, everything would be permitted … which is a bunch of postmodern Marxist nonsense.

But just imagine, for a moment, if that were the case … if what determined reality was actually just a question of power rather than facts. Imagine that reality was just a concept that we used to mark the current limits of our knowledge and ideological beliefs. Our doctors — oncologists and virologists, for example, but they could be any kind of doctors or scientists — would be not all that different from medieval alchemists, who totally believed in their reality at the time, as did the patients they were treating, but which we know now was not reality at all, because our reality is the real reality. I mean, it’s not as if people, five hundred years from now, are going to look back at our medical practices and scientific knowledge, and laugh, like we do at those medieval alchemists, right?

Sorry, I got a little off track there. I was trying to explain the ultimate purpose of this global-capitalist War on Reality, and I wandered off into an ontological swamp, which isn’t going to get us anywhere. So, let’s get back to imagining reality, not as what we all know it is (i.e., an actual, material thing that exists), but as a construct people use to validate certain officially-sanctioned beliefs and perceptions and invalidate other beliefs and perceptions, more or less like a system of morals, except instead of dividing things into to “good” and “evil,” it divides things into “real” and “fake.”

Now imagine that you were an immensely powerful, globally hegemonic ideological system, and you wanted to impose your ideology on as much of the entire world as possible, but you didn’t have an ideology per se, or any actual values at all, because exchange value was your only real value, and so your mission was to erase all ideologies, and values, and truths, and belief systems, and so on, and transform everything and everyone in existence into de facto commodities that you could manipulate any way you wanted, because they had no inherent value whatsoever, because their only real value was assigned by the market.

How would you go about doing that, erasing all existing values, religious, cultural, and social values, and rendering everything a valueless commodity?

Well, you wouldn’t want to destroy reality completely, because people wouldn’t stand for that. They would freak right out. Things would get ugly. So, instead, you might want to go the other way, and generate a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive realities, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … which would still freak people out pretty badly.

Naturally, there would be one official reality that you would force everyone to rigidly conform to at any given moment in time, but you would change the official reality frequently, and force everyone to conform to the new one (and pretend that they’d never conformed to the old one), and then, once they had settled into that one, you would change the official reality again, until people’s brains just shut down completely, and they gave up trying to make sense of anything, and just tried to figure out what you wanted them to believe on any given day.

If you repeated that process long enough, eventually, nothing would mean anything anymore, because everything could potentially mean anything … at which point, you could basically tell people anything you wanted and they would go along with it, because what the hell difference would it make? A narcissistic billionaire ass-clown could be a Russian agent and literally Hitler. A half-assed riot could be an “insurrection.” Children could be born “systemically racist.” Men could menstruate.

But wait … it’s gets better.

You could stage an apocalyptic global pandemic that only happened in certain countries, or in certain parts of certain countries, and that more or less mirrored natural mortality, and that didn’t drastically increase historical death rates, but was nonetheless totally apocalyptic.

Perfectly healthy people could become “medical cases.” You could count anyone who died of anything as having died of your apocalyptic virus. You could tell people in no uncertain terms that medical-looking masks will not protect them from viruses, and then turn around and tell them that they will, and then, later, publicly admit you were lying in order to manipulate them, and then deny you ever said that, and tell them to wear masks.

You could experimentally “vaccinate” millions of people whose risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from your apocalyptic virus was minuscule or non-existent, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands in the process, and the people whose brains you had methodically broken would thank you for murdering their friends and neighbors, and then rush out to their local discount drugstore to experimentally “vaccinate” their own kids and post pictures of it on the Internet.

At that point, you wouldn’t really have to worry about “populist uprisings,” or “terrorism,” or any other type of insurgent activity, because the vast majority of the global population would be scramble-headed automatons who were totally incapable of independent thought, and who had no idea what was real and what wasn’t, so just repeated whatever new script you fed them like customer-service representatives on Haldol.

It doesn’t get much better than that for globally hegemonic ideological systems!

OK, sorry, I think I got lost there again. I’m not sure what I was trying to say. I’ve been a little foggy lately. I’m not sleeping so well. It’s probably Long Covid. Or maybe it’s just that time of month. Whatever. It’s not like it matters anyway. Still, I think I’ll go down to my former local bookshop and get myself tested.

Have a nice day in … you know, reality!

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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby conniption » Fri Jul 16, 2021 4:01 am

Consent Factory, Inc.
(embedded links)

The Approaching Storm
Image
Photo: Weather Underground

CJ Hopkins
July 14, 2021


So, it looks like GloboCap isn’t going to be happy until they have fomented the widespread social unrest — or de facto global civil war — that they need as a pretext to lock in the new pathologized totalitarianism and remake whatever remains of society into a global pseudo-medicalized police state, or that appears to where we’re headed currently. We appear to be heading there at breakneck speed. I don’t have a crystal ball or anything, but I’m expecting things to get rather ugly this Autumn, and probably even uglier in the foreseeable future.

Yes, friends, a storm is coming. It has been coming for the last 16 months. And GloboCap is steering right into it. I, and many others like me, have been tracking its relentless advance like a self-appointed International Pathologized-Totalitarian Hurricane Center (you know, like the one in Miami, except all the meteorologists are “conspiracy theorists”). We have documented all the propaganda, the lies, the manipulation of statistics, the abrogation of constitutional rights, the New Normal goon squads, the corporate censorship, and all the rest of the roll-out of the new official ideology and the totalitarian measures deployed to enforce it.

Our efforts have not been in vain, but they have not been successful enough to change the course events are now taking … a course of events that has always been clear, a course that every totalitarian movement needs to take to get where it’s going. You can’t remake entire societies into quasi-totalitarian systems without civil unrest, chaos, rioting, war, or some other form of cataclysm. Brainwashing the masses is all fine and good, but, at some point, you need to goad the people who are resisting your new totalitarian “reality” into getting unruly, so you can crack down on them, and transform them into official enemies, which appears to be what is happening currently.

GloboCap is dialing up the totalitarianism, and they are rubbing it in our faces. Here in New Normal Germany, prominent health officials are openly barking out Goebbelsian slogans like “NO FREEDOM FOR THE UNVACCINATED!” and “THE UNVACCINATED ARE A DANGER TO SOCIETY!” All over Europe, including the UK, where “Freedom Day” is fast approaching, pseudo-medical social-segregation systems are being implemented. In France, Greece, and many other countries, people who refuse to be “vaccinated” are being stripped of their jobs and otherwise punished. In the USA, where the Unvaccinated are also being segregated, New Normal goon squads are going door-to-door, bullying “vaccine hesitant” families into conforming to the new official ideology.

And so on … I’m tired of citing the facts. They do not make the slightest difference to the vast majority of New Normals, anyway. As I’ve noted in several previous columns, these people have surrendered their rationality, and have been subsumed into a totalitarian movement, which has become their perceptual and social “reality,” which their “sanity” now depends upon defending, so the facts mean absolutely nothing to them.

And you already know the facts.

Yes, you. Us. The others. The Unvaccinated. The “Covid deniers.” You don’t really think any hardcore New Normals have made it this far into this column, do you? They haven’t. If they stumbled into it on the Internet and accidentally started to read it, their brains switched off in the opening paragraph … literally, neurologically, switched off. They recognized it as a threat to their “reality” and instantly erased it from their consciousness, or they reported it to the proper authorities, perhaps the FBI, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Facebook, or some other global corporation.

This is what it has come to, folks … people are reporting other people’s “thoughtcrimes” to global corporations and the law enforcement agencies of “democratic” governments in the hopes of destroying or damaging their lives, or, at the very least, getting them censored, or otherwise erased from public view.

As I noted in my previous column, our societies have been torn apart. We’re living in two mutually hostile “realities,” a state which cannot continue indefinitely. The problem for us (i.e., the Unvaccinated) is, we probably constitute somewhere around 20 to 25 percent of the population, so we are massively outnumbered by New Normals. The problem for the New Normals is, we probably constitute somewhere around 20 to 25 percent of the population, which is way too many people to imprison or otherwise remove from society.

Thus, their plan is to make our lives as miserable as possible, to segregate us, stigmatize us, demonize us, bully, and harass us, and pressure us to conform at every turn. They are not going to put us on the trains to the camps. GloboCap is not the Nazis. They need to maintain the simulation of democracy. So they need to transform us into an underclass of “anti-social conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxer disinformationists,” “white-supremacist election-result deniers,” “potentially violent domestic extremists,” and whatever other epithets they come up with, so that we can be painted as dangerously unhinged freaks and cast out of society in a way that makes it appear that we have cast out ourselves.

This process is already well underway, and it’s only going to get more intense, which will inevitably lead to social unrest. The hardcore “Unvaccinated” are not going to go quietly. Again, this isn’t Nazi Germany. There are too many of us who are already resisting. They can segregate us, ban us from travelling, blackout our protests, censor us, deplatform us, cancel our bank accounts, and otherwise harass us, but they cannot forcibly disappear us. So, they are going to keep goading us until we lose it. We have demonstrated incredible discipline so far, but eventually, we’re going to run out patience. It’s going to get messy. People will get hurt.

Which, of course, is exactly what GloboCap wants. Nothing will make them happier than if we turn ourselves into the “violent extremists” they have been conjuring into existence for the last five years. They desperately need us to become those “extremists” before we “embolden” too many others with our “disinformation,” “vaccine hesitancy,” “election result denial,” and general distaste for the whole global-capitalist ideological program.

Unfortunately, they are probably going to get their wish.

What we need is an organized, global campaign of classic, non-violent civil disobedience, but they are not going to give us time to organize that. They are going to keep the pressure on, and crank up the pace, and the official propaganda, and the absurdity, and the confusion, and the ever-changing rules, and the mass hysteria, and the blatant lies, until we start flipping out in restaurants, and in pubs, and schools, and on public transportation, and segregated New Normal establishments start getting nocturnally vandalized, or worse, and other forms of “direct action” are taken.

At which point, game over, because they will have won. We will be the “extremists” they warned themselves about, and they’ll be able to do whatever they want with us, and our former (now New Normal) friends will applaud, or just look away in silence.

Or … I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe some New Normals are still reading this essay, and can still, at this late stage, regain their senses. Maybe we can still avoid the storm, and the full implementation of “New Normal Reality.” I know, I’m probably a hopeless idealist, but let me tell you a quick anecdote before I let you go.

I’ve been kind of nudging, or politely badgering, Glenn Greenwald, who I respect, and have always respected, to grow a pair and at least speak out against the totalitarian features of the New Normal movement. Glenn is totally on board with the official Covid narrative, and has made it clear that he has no interest in using his investigative-journalism skills to investigate that official narrative. Despite that, I have continued to nudge him, and politely prod him, and otherwise urge him, to maybe post a few critical words, or raise a few investigative-journalist questions, about the most flagrant official propaganda campaign in the history of official propaganda campaigns and the blatantly totalitarian actions of governments all over the world.

For example, I posted this on Twitter recently.

Image

Shortly thereafter — and I’m sure this was just a coincidence, because Glenn doesn’t follow the Consent Factory — he tweeted this bit of New Normal blasphemy:

Image

So, apparently, it is, in fact, still possible for people who believe the official Covid narrative as if it were the Word of God to speak out against some aspect of it, or just politely question the logic of it, or otherwise stop behaving like a bunch of mindlessly obedient “Good Germans” as a new iteration of totalitarianism is rolled out right in front of their eyes.

Yes, I know. I’m clutching at straws, but I have this crazy faith in people. On top of which, I’m getting old, so I am not looking forward to the street-fighting part of this as much as I would have 30 or 40 years ago.

Oh, and, I almost forgot, to all my friends in the New Normal UK … have a lovely Freedom Day!

#
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comments from off-guardian (same article):
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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby conniption » Mon Aug 02, 2021 7:33 pm

Off-Guardian
(embedded links)

The Road to Totalitarianism

CJ Hopkins
Aug 2, 2021


People can tell themselves that they didn’t see where things have been heading for the last 17 months, but they did. They saw all the signs along the way. The signs were all written in big, bold letters, some of them in scary-looking Germanic script.

They read: THIS IS THE ROAD TO TOTALITARIANISM

I’m not going to show you all those signs out again. People like me have been pointing them out, and reading them out loud, for 17 months now. Anyone who knows anything about the history of totalitarianism, how it incrementally transforms society into a monstrous mirror image of itself, has known since the beginning what the “New Normal” is, and we have been shouting from the rooftops about it.

We have watched as the New Normal transformed our societies into paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian dystopias where people now have to show their “papers” to see a movie or get a cup of coffee and publicly display their ideological conformity to enter a supermarket and buy their groceries.

We have watched as the New Normal transformed the majority of the masses into hate-drunk, hysterical mobs that are openly persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” the official “Untermenschen” of the New Normal ideology.

We have watched as the New Normal has done precisely what every totalitarian movement in history has done before it, right by the numbers. We pointed all this out, each step of the way. I’m not going to reiterate all that again.

I am, however, going to document where we are at the moment, and how we got here … for the record, so that the people who will tell you later that they “had no clue where the trains were going” will understand why we no longer trust them, and why we regard them as cowards and collaborators, or worse.

Yes, that’s harsh, but this is not a game. It isn’t a difference of opinion. The global-capitalist ruling establishment is implementing a new, more openly totalitarian structure of society and method of rule. They are revoking our constitutional and human rights, transferring power out of sovereign governments and democratic institutions into unaccountable global entities that have no allegiance to any nation or its people.

That is what is happening … right now. It isn’t a TV show. It’s actually happening.

The time for people to “wake up” is over. At this point, you either join the fight to preserve what is left of those rights, and that sovereignty, or you surrender to the “New Normal,” to global-capitalist totalitarianism. I couldn’t care less what you believe about the virus, or its mutant variants, or the experimental “vaccines.” This isn’t an abstract argument over “the science.” It is a fight … a political, ideological fight. On one side is democracy, on the other is totalitarianism. Pick a fucking side, and live with it.

Anyway, here’s where we are at the moment, and how we got here, just the broad strokes.

It’s August 2021, and Germany has officially banned demonstrations against the “New Normal” official ideology. Other public assemblies, like the Christopher Street Day demo (pictured below), one week ago, are still allowed. The outlawing of political opposition is a classic hallmark of totalitarian systems. It’s also a classic move by the German authorities, which will give them the pretext they need to unleash the New Normal goon squads on the demonstrators tomorrow.

Image

In Australia, the military has been deployed to enforce total compliance with government decrees … lockdowns, mandatory public obedience rituals, etc. In other words, it is de facto martial law. This is another classic hallmark of totalitarian systems.

In France, restaurant and other business owners who serve “the Unvaccinated” will now be imprisoned, as will, of course, “the Unvaccinated.” The scapegoating, demonizing, and segregating of “the Unvaccinated” is happening in countries all over the world. France is just an extreme example. The scapegoating, dehumanizing, and segregating of minorities — particularly the regime’s political opponents — is another classic hallmark of totalitarian systems.

In the UK, Italy, Greece, and numerous other countries throughout the world, this pseudo-medical social-segregation system is also being introduced, in order to divide societies into “good people” (i.e., compliant) and “bad” (i.e., non-compliant). The “good people” are being given license and encouraged by the authorities and the corporate media to unleash their rage on the “the Unvaccinated,” to demand our segregation in internment camps, to openly threaten to viciously murder us. This is also a hallmark of totalitarian systems.

And that, my friends, is where we are.

We didn’t get here overnight. Here are just a few of the unmistakable signs along the road to totalitarianism that I have pointed out over the last 17 months.

June 2020 … The New (Pathologized) Totalitarianism.

August 2020 … The Invasion of the New Normals.

October 2020 … The Covidian Cult.

November 2020 … The Germans Are Back!

March 2021 … The New Normal (Phase 2).

March 2021 … The “Unvaccinated” Question.

May 2021 … The Criminalization of Dissent.

June 2021 … Manufacturing New Normal “Reality“.

And now, here we are, where we have been heading all along, clearly, unmistakably heading… directly into The Approaching Storm, or possibly global civil war. This isn’t the end of the road to totalitarianism, but I’m pretty sure we are in the home stretch. It feels like things are about to get ugly.

Very ugly. Extremely ugly.

Those of us who are fighting to preserve our rights, and some basic semblance of democracy, are outnumbered, but we haven’t had our final say yet … and there are millions of us, and we are wide awake.

So pick a side, if you haven’t already. But, before you do, maybe look back at the history of totalitarian systems, which, for some reason, never seem to work out for the totalitarians, at least not in the long run. I’m not a professional philosopher or anything, but I suspect that might have something to do with some people’s inextinguishable desire for freedom, and our willingness to fight for it, sometimes to the death.

This kind of feels like one of those times.

Sorry for going all “Braveheart” on you, but I’m psyching myself up to go get the snot beat out of me by the New Normal goon squads tomorrow, so I’m a little … you know, overly emotional.

Seriously, though, pick a side…now…or a side will be picked for you.
_______

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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby conniption » Thu Aug 19, 2021 6:17 am

off-guardian
(embedded links)

The Propaganda War (Part II)

CJ Hopkins
Aug 18, 2021


The column you are about to read is propaganda. Yes, that’s right … propaganda. It isn’t political satire or commentary, or objective news or information, or unbiased, verified scientific fact. It is propaganda, pure and simple.

That isn’t a confession, a disclaimer, or a warning. I am not ashamed of writing propaganda. Most everything you see and read on the Internet, and in newspapers, and on television, and in textbooks, and novels, and on advertising billboards, and everywhere else, is propaganda. There is nothing wrong with propaganda. The question is who is doing it, and what they are doing it for. Here’s the definition in the Cambridge Dictionary:

“information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people’s opinions”


That is what the column you are reading is … an attempt to influence people’s opinions. Of course, that isn’t all it is. Nothing is ever only one thing. But it is absolutely propaganda. And so is everything else that you will read today.

I’m terribly sorry if this comes as a shock, but there is no “objective” fantasy-land in which no one is trying to persuade you of anything or pressure you or otherwise influence you to do something. It does not exist, this “objective” dreamworld, where “authoritative sources” report “the facts,” where “the facts” are “verified” by “neutral” “fact checkers,” where ex-NSA and CIA spooks are hired as commentators by MSNBC and CNN because they care about “the truth,” where “science” is immune to manipulation. This fantasy is the alibi of authoritarians, cult leaders, and assorted other control freaks, and the people they have brainwashed into believing in it.

Everyone — and I do mean literally everyone — is trying to persuade or convince you of something. Your friends, family, colleagues, your boss, advertisers, lobbyists, government officials, the media, artists, teachers, doctors, journalists, bloggers, Twitter bots, etc.

This isn’t cause for paranoia. It’s a natural part of human social behavior. It is happening right now as you read this sentence. I’m trying to convince you of something. In a moment, I’m going to urge you to do something.

This is how we create “reality,” collectively, by persuading and influencing each other, or allowing ourselves to be persuaded and influenced, mostly by powerful ideological forces that do not care about us, and just want to control us, but also by each other, moment by moment, with every word we speak and every action we take.

Every choice we make is an advertisement, a political statement, a profession of faith … a small contribution to a work of art we are collectively creating, which is what “reality” is. You and I are doing it right now. I’m trying my best to influence you, and you’re deciding whether to let me do that, whether you trust me … whether we share the same “reality.”

This process (or this negotiation, if you will) is never-ending, and there is no escape from it. Pretending that it isn’t happening — that we are not creating “reality” together with every choice we make — is childish, and is particularly dangerous at a time like this, when a new form of totalitarianism is being rolled out all across the world.

This is not the time to retreat into fantasies. As I noted in Part I of this piece, we are in a propaganda war, and we are losing. GloboCap is manufacturing a new “reality,” a pathologized-totalitarian “reality.” Either you accept it, and conform to it, or you oppose it. Those are the choices. There are no other choices.

All right, now that we’ve got that straight, let’s get down to the propaganda at hand, and what it is that I am urging you to do.

tweet - CJ Hopkins

I think the young people call this a “meme.” It is something everyone can do. Make a tweet or a post like this, with your name, face, country, and details, whatever restrictions apply to you. Use the hashtag. Circulate it.

Encourage others to do the same. Don’t even mention the virus or the “vaccines.” Focus on the totalitarianism. Make it visible. Make it personal. We need the New Normals to see the faces of the people they are demonizing because we won’t convert to their new “reality.”

No, it will not make the slightest difference to the fanatics, but most of them are not fanatics. Most of them are simply scared and confused, and utterly mindfucked … as in their brains are not working. Literally. They are no longer able to think. Challenge them, and they will either become aggressive or start robotically repeating propaganda at you like the members of an enormous cult.

Anyone who has interacted with them (and I have a feeling that you probably have) knows that they are totally unreachable with facts, argumentation, and basic reasoning, not to mention common sense, which is why I have mostly given up on that and am focusing on propaganda.

Propaganda programmed these people, and propaganda can deprogram them … or at least it can interfere with their current programming, even if just for a fleeting moment, maybe even enough to start them thinking, which might lead them to questioning the official “reality” … which, as any cult deprogrammer will tell you, is the first step toward disengaging from the cult.

Yes, it is just a picture and some words, but, if you doubt the power of visual propaganda, consider what GloboCap has achieved in the relatively short span of 17 months. They have imposed a new official ideology (in other words, a new “reality”) on societies all across the world.

Seriously, think about that for a moment … they have literally implemented a new global “reality.” They have done this primarily with propaganda, much of it visual propaganda, which functions on a primal, instinctual level.

They inundated the public with images of disease, hospitals, patients on ventilators, body bags being stacked in death trucks, mass burials, and people dropping dead in the streets. They forced everyone to wear medical-looking masks and to perform an ever-changing series of pointless, paranoid compliance rituals to generate an atmosphere of “deadly contagion.”

Basically, they transformed the entire planet into an inescapable pandemic-theater production in which the terrorized performers are also the audience. They did this mostly with visual propaganda, images and observed behavior. (The nonsense the New Normals robotically recite at us isn’t meant to believed; it is meant to be memorized and repeated verbatim, like religious dogma, or a customer-service-representative’s script.)

And, if you think your tweet or post doesn’t matter … well, it’s now about 48 hours since I posted mine, and thousands of people all over the world are joining in with tweets and posts of their own. (OffGuardian is collecting some of them here and inviting people to add their voices.)

Twitter is suppressing the #NewNormal hashtag and slapping “sensitive content” warnings on the tweets. Fanatical New Normals, furious at being shown the faces of the people they are demonizing, are shrieking insults, death wishes, threats, mockery, and other vitriolic abuse at us, and demanding that the authorities censor us, and desperately attempting to disappear us by adding the hashtag to random gibberish.

That wouldn’t be happening if our voices didn’t matter.

What we’re doing is basically an online version of classic non-violent civil disobedience. We are disrupting the new official narrative, the official ideology, the official “reality,” even if just marginally, and just for a moment. Join in. Ignore the fanatical New Normals shrieking hatred at us on the Internet. Interrupt the “pandemic-theater” performance. Make the new totalitarianism visible. Make it personal … for them, and for us.

If you need a reminder of what the stakes are, here is a recent photo of some lovely graffiti from an unknown location somewhere in New Normal Germany. For those of you who don’t read German, it translates as … “GAS THE UNVACCINATED.
_______

comments

extra comments straight from the factory: https://consentfactory.org/2021/08/13/t ... /#comments

https://off-guardian.org/2021/08/18/the ... r-part-ii/

~~~

off-guardian

UPDATED! “my name is…& I refuse”: voices of resistance to the New Normal

Aug 13, 2021

Author and OffG contributor CJ Hopkins yesterday launched a powerful response on Twitter to the developing social and medical apartheid we are witnessing. It is now being taken up by people all over the globe as a way of registering their personal stand against the new normal tyranny. Below are just some of the voices.

If you want to add your own voice on Twitter or elsewhere on social media just make sure to add hashtag #NewNormal to your personal statement, share it on the social media platform of your choice and send a link to us for inclusion here.

We will continue to add new names to this list…. continue

comments

https://off-guardian.org/2021/08/13/my- ... ew-normal/
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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby conniption » Sat Sep 04, 2021 9:35 am

consentfactory
(embedded links)

Image

The Covidian Cult (Part III)

CJ Hopkins
September 2, 2021


In The Covidian Cult (Part I) and (Part II), I characterized the so-called “New Normal” as a “global totalitarian ideological movement.” Since I published those essays, more and more people have come to see it for what it is, not “insanity” or “an overreaction,” but, in fact, a new form of totalitarianism, a globalized, pathologized, depoliticized form, which is being systematically implemented under the guise of “protecting the public health.”

In order to oppose this new form of totalitarianism, we need to understand how it both resembles and differs from earlier totalitarian systems. The similarities are fairly obvious — the suspension of constitutional rights, governments ruling by decree, official propaganda, public loyalty rituals, the outlawing of political opposition, censorship, social segregation, goon squads terrorizing the public, and so on — but the differences are not obvious.

Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism (i.e., the form most people are generally familiar with) was more or less national and overtly political, New Normal totalitarianism is supranational, and its ideology is much more subtle. The New Normal is not Nazism or Stalinism. It is global-capitalist totalitarianism, and global capitalism doesn’t have an ideology, technically, or, rather, its ideology is “reality.” When you are an unrivaled global ideological hegemon, as global capitalism has been for the last 30 years or so, your ideology automatically becomes “reality,” because there are no competing ideologies. Actually, there is no ideology at all … there is only “reality” and “unreality,” “normality” and “deviations from the norm.”

Yes, I know, reality is reality … that’s why I’m putting all these terms in scare quotes, so, please, spare me the lengthy emails conclusively proving the reality of reality and try to understand how this works.

There is reality (whatever you believe it is), and there is “reality,” which dictates how our societies function. “Reality” is constructed (i.e., simulated), collectively, according to the ideology of whatever system controls society. In the past, “reality” was openly ideological, regardless of which “reality” you lived in, because there were other competing “realities” out there. There aren’t anymore. There is only the one “reality,” because the entire planet — yes, including China, Russia, North Korea, and wherever — is controlled by one globally hegemonic system.

A globally hegemonic system has no need for ideology, because it doesn’t have to compete with rival ideologies. So it erases ideology and replaces it with “reality.” Reality (whatever you personally believe it is, which of course is what it really is) is not actually erased. It just doesn’t matter, because you do not get to dictate “reality.” Global capitalism gets to dictate “reality,” or, more accurately, it simulates “reality,” and in so doing simulates the opposite of “reality,” which is equally if not more important.

This global-capitalist-manufactured “reality” is a depoliticized, ahistorical “reality,” which forms an invisible ideological boundary establishing the limits of what is “real.” In this way, global capitalism (a) conceals its ideological nature, and (b) renders any and all ideological opposition automatically illegitimate, or, more accurately, non-existent. Ideology as we knew it disappears. Political, ethical, and moral arguments are reduced to the question of what is “real” or “factual,” which the GloboCap “experts” and “fact checkers” dictate.

Also, because this “reality” is not a cohesive ideological system with fundamental values, core principles, and so on, it can be drastically revised or completely replaced more or less at a moment’s notice. Global capitalism has no fundamental values — other than exchange value, of course — and thus it is free to manufacture any kind of “reality” it wants, and replace one “reality” with a new “reality” any time that serves its purposes, like stagehands changing a theatrical set.

For example, the “Global War on Terror,” which was the official “reality” from 2001 until it was canceled in the Summer of 2016, when the “War on Populism” was officially launched. Or, now, the “New Normal,” which replaced the “War on Populism” in the Spring of 2020. Each of which new simulations of “reality” was rolled out abruptly, clumsily even, like that scene in 1984 where the Party switches official enemies right in the middle of a Hate Week speech.

Seriously, think about where we are currently, 18 months into our new “reality,” then go back and review how GloboCap blatantly rolled out the New Normal in the Spring of 2020 … and the majority of the masses didn’t even blink. They seamlessly transitioned to the new “reality” in which a virus, rather than “white supremacists,” or “Russian agents,” or “Islamic terrorists,” had become the new official enemy. They put away the scripts they had been reciting verbatim from for the previous four years, and the scripts they had been reciting from for the previous 15 years before that, and started frantically jabbering Covid cult-speak like they were auditioning for an over-the-top Orwell parody.

*

Which brings us to the problem of the Covidian cult … how to get through to them, which, make no mistake, we have to do, one way or another, or the New Normal will become our permanent “reality.”

I called the New Normals a “Covidian Cult,” not to gratuitously insult or mock them, but because that is what totalitarianism is … a cult writ large, on a societal scale. Anyone who has tried to get through to them can confirm the accuracy of that analogy. You can show them the facts until you’re blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. You think you are having a debate over facts, but you are not. You are threatening their new “reality.” You think you are struggling to get them to think rationally. You are not. What you are is a heretic, an agent of demonic forces, an enemy of all that is “real” and “true.”

The Scientologists would label you a “suppressive person.” The New Normals call you a “conspiracy theorist,” an “anti-vaxxer,” or a “virus denier.” The specific epithets don’t really matter. They are just labels that cult members and totalitarians use to demonize those they perceive as “enemies” … anyone challenging the “reality” of the cult, or the “reality” of the totalitarian system.

The simple fact of the matter is, you can’t talk people out of a cult, and you can’t talk them out of totalitarianism. Usually, what you do, in the case of a cult, is, you get the person out of the cult. You kidnap them, take them to a safehouse or wherever, surround them with a lot of non-cult members, and deprogram them gradually over the course of several days. You do this because, while they are still inside the cult, you cannot get through to them. They cannot hear you. A cult is a collective, self-contained “reality.” Its power flows from the social organism composed of the cult leaders and the other cult members. You cannot “talk” this power away. You have to physically remove the person from it before you can begin to reason with them.

Unfortunately, we do not have this option. The New Normal is a global totalitarian system. There is no “outside” of the system to retreat to. We can’t kidnap everyone and take them to Sweden. As I noted in Part I of this series, the cult/society paradigm has been inverted. The cult has become the dominant society, and those of us who have not been converted have become a collection of isolated islands existing, not outside, but within the cult.

So we need to adopt a different strategy. We need to make the monster show itself, not to those of us who can already see it, but to the New Normal masses, the Covidian cultists. We need to make Jim Jones drop the peace-and-love crap, move into the jungle, and break out the Kool-Aid. We need to make Charles Manson put down his guitar, cancel orgy-time, and go homicidal hippie. This is how you take down a cult from within. You do not try to thwart its progress; you push it toward its logical conclusion. You make it manifest its full expression, because that it when it implodes, and dies. You do not do that by being polite, conciliatory, or avoiding conflict. You do that by generating as much internal conflict within the cult as you can.

In other words, we need to make GloboCap (and its minions) go openly totalitarian … because it can’t. If it could, it would have done so already. Global capitalism cannot function that way. Going openly totalitarian will cause it to implode … no, not global capitalism itself, but this totalitarian version of it. In fact, this is starting to happen already. It needs the simulation of “reality,” and “democracy,” and “normality,” to keep the masses docile. So we need to attack that simulation. We need to hammer on it until it cracks, and the monster hiding within in appears.

That is the weakness of the system … the New Normal totalitarianism will not work if the masses perceive it as totalitarianism, as a political/ideological program, rather than as “a response to a deadly pandemic.” So we need to make it visible as totalitarianism. We need to force the New Normals to see it as what it is. I do not mean that we need to explain it to them. They are beyond the reach of explanations. I mean that we need to make them see it, feel it, tangibly, inescapably, until they recognize what they are collaborating with.

Stop arguing with them on their terms, and instead directly attack their “reality.” When they start jabbering about the virus, the variants, the “vaccines,” and all the other Covid cult-speak, do not get sucked into their narrative. Do not respond as if they were rational. Respond as if they were talking about “Xenu,” “body thetans,” “Helter Skelter,” or any other cultoid nonsense, because that it is exactly what it is. Same goes for their rules and restrictions, the “face coverings,” the “social distancing,” and so on. Stop arguing against them on the grounds that they don’t work. Of course they don’t work, but that is not the point (and arguing that way sucks you into their “reality”). Oppose them because of what they are, a collection of bizarre compliance rituals performed to cement allegiance to the cult and create a general atmosphere of “deadly pandemic.”

There are many ways to go about doing this, i.e., generating internal conflict. I have been doing it my way, others are doing it theirs. If you’re one of them, thank you. If you’re not, start. Do it however and wherever you can. Make the New Normals face the monster, the monster they are feeding … the monster they have become.
#

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volume I and II of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.


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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby conniption » Fri Sep 10, 2021 3:10 am

I'm going to ask CJ to share this thread with another good friend and great writer, Edward Curtain. I've placed his articles here & there on the board, and thought he would be deserving of his own thread ...I mean to say... if it were my place, I'd certainly give him his own thread but, you know...some folks don't care much for Hopkins, or Ed or me for that matter. So, without further ado...

off-guardian

The Incantational Bewitchment of Propaganda

Edward Curtin
Sep 5, 2021


We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the America public believe is false.”
William Casey, CIA Director, February 1981]


All propaganda succeeds because it satisfies needs that it has first created. If you follow the daily rat-a-tat mainstream news reports and react to them, you will be caught in a labyrinth that has been set to entrap you.

You will keep finding that your mind will be like a bed that is already made up and your daylight hours filled with nightmares. What you assume are your real needs will be met, but you will swiftly tumble into the free-floating anxiety that the media has created to keep you on edge and confused.

They will provide you with objects – Covid-19, the US “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, the Russian and Chinese “threats,” the need to crack down on domestic dissidents, 9/11, etc. (an endless panoply of lies) – that you can attach your anxiety to, but they will be no help. They are not meant to; their purpose is to befuddle; to make you more anxious by wondering if currently there is any contrast between the real world and the apparent one.

The corporate mainstream media serve phantasmagoria on a 24/7 basis, all shifting like quicksand. For anyone with a modicum of common sense, this should be obvious. But then again, as Thoreau put it:
The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Perhaps some health expert will soon recommend that 24 hours of sleep a day is optimal, but maybe I am dreaming or being redundant.

For many decades, the corporate mainstream media and the CIA have been synonymous. They were married down in hell and now daily do the devil’s work up above. Now that news is conveyed primarily through digital media via the internet, their power to induce electronic trances has increased exponentially.

Linguistic and visual mind control is their raison d’être. Fear is their favorite tactic. And since the fear and anxiety of death is the archetypal source of all anxiety, death becomes a core element in their fear-mongering.

In a recent powerful article, Canadian independent journalist Eva Bartlett, a brave and free war correspondent who has reported from inside Syria and Gaza, has shown how the ongoing Covid-19 “fear porn” spewed out by the media has dramatically increased people’s anxiety levels and thrown so many into a perpetual state of near panic. This, of course, is not an accident.

Fear immobilizes people and drives them into a cataleptic state where clear thinking is impossible. They become hypnotized in a “private” space that is actually social, an instantaneous identification with the media news reports that are addressed to millions but feel personal and greatly exacerbate the great loneliness that lies at the core of high-tech society.

As I have said before, the new digital order is the world of teleconferencing and the online life, existence shorn of physical space and time and people. A world where shaking hands is a dissident act. A haunted world of masked specters, distorted words and images that can appear and disappear in a nanosecond. A magic show.

A place where, in the words of Charles Manson, you can “get the fear,” where fear is king. A locus where, as you stare at the screens, you are no longer there since you are spellbound.

In a high-tech society, loneliness is far more prevalent than in the past. The technology has imprisoned people behind their screens and now the controlling forces are intent on closing this mechanistic circle if they can. They call it The Great Reset.

They have spent decades using technology to invade and pare down people’s inner private space where freedom to think and decide resides.

They have repeated ad nauseam the materialistic mantra that freedom is an illusion and that we are amazing machines determined by our genes and social forces.

They have reiterated that the spiritual and transcendent realms are illusions.

And they have pushed their transhuman agenda to assert more and more power and control.

This is the essence of the corona crisis and the push to vaccinate everyone.

Drip by drip, year by year, they have cultivated the necessary preconditions and predispositions for this technological fascism with its nihilistic underpinnings to succeed.

When the inner dimension of existence is lost, there is no way to critique the outer world, its politics, and social structure. Dissent becomes a useless passion when people instantly identify with the social. Human nature doesn’t change but social structures and technology do and they can be used to try to destroy people’s humanity.

Herbert Marcuse put it clearly long before the latest digital technology:
This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new ‘immediacy,’ however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking – the critical power of Reason – is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition.

Once upon a time, people sat together and talked. They even touched and shared their thoughts and feelings. They conspired in a most natural way apart from the prying eyes and ears of the electronic spies. Now so many sit and check their cell phones.

They “connect,” thinking they are with it while not knowing they have been lured into another dimension where frenetic passivity reigns and trance states are the rule.

“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” said Jacques Ellul in his masterpiece, Propaganda. He was being simultaneously accurate and facetious. For propaganda provides a doorway to pseudo-community, a place to lose oneself in the group, to satisfy the need to believe and obey in mass technological society where emotional emptiness and lack of meaning are widespread and the need to fill up the empty self is dutifully met by propaganda, which is a drug by any other name, indeed the primary drug.

The empty-self craves ful-fillment, anything to consume to fill the void that a consumer culture dangles everywhere. Think alike, buy alike, dress alike – and you will be one big happy community. It is all abstract of course, even as its rational character is irrational, but that doesn’t matter a whit since the fear of “not going along” and appearing dissident plagues people.

Now we have endless digital propaganda that is the “remedy” for loneliness. Ah, all the lonely people, keeping their masks in a jar by the side of the door together with Eleanor Rigby. They think they know what their masks are for but don’t know why they are lonely or that they have been played with. Masks upon masks are donned to ward off the fear that is pumped out through the electronic airwaves.

It is doubtful that many ever heard of William Casey or can imagine the breadth and depth of the propaganda that he and his current protégés in the intelligence agencies and corporate media dispense daily.

“When everything the American people believes is false.” Casey must be smiling in hell.

A grim submissiveness has settled over the lives of millions of hypnotized people in so many countries. Grim, grim, grim, as Charles Dickens wrote of his 1842 visit to the puritanical Shaker religious sect in western Massachusetts. He said:
I so abhor, and from my soul detest, that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of its healthful, graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path to the grave…

And yet, the fundamental things still do apply, as time goes by. Love, glory, loneliness, beauty, fear, faith, and courage. Lovers and true artists, fighters both, resist this machine tyranny and its endless lies because they smell a rat intent on destroying their passionate love of the daring adventure that is life.

They feel life is an agon, an arena for struggle, “a fight for love and glory,” a case of do-and-die. They have bull-shit detectors and see through the elites’ propaganda that is used to literally kill millions around the world and to kill the spirit of rebellion in so many others.

And they know that it is in the inner sanctuary of every individual soul where resistance to evil is born and fear is defeated. They know too that the art and love must be shared and this is how social solidarity movements are created.

Listen. The fight is on. This Has Gotta Stop.

comments

https://off-guardian.org/2021/09/05/the ... ropaganda/
~~~
Comments from Edward Curtain's blog - http://edwardcurtin.com/the-incantation ... /#comments

~~~

As a special bonus we have a video from Odysee:
Watch: https://odysee.com/@voicesforfreedom:6/ ... nterview:b
Ed Curtin On Fear, Propaganda, Censorship & Authoritarianism In The Time Of Covid
September 1st, 2021
Voices For Freedom
@voicesforfreedom

Freedom TV hosted by Voices For Freedom co-founders (Claire, Alia & Libby) for an alternative report during New Zealand nationwide lockdown.

Dr Emanuel Garcia chats with sociologist, teacher, professor, and author, Ed Curtin, about his fascinating life and works including his thoughts on Covid and the Covid response, in particular the role that fear, propaganda, censorship and authoritarianism is playing.

Ed is a well known author and reviewer. Robert F Kennedy Jr had this to say of one of his recent works: “Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all. Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.”

Ed Curtin was interviewed live on 28 August 2021.

The views expressed in this video are the personal views of Ed Curtin only and not made on behalf of any institution or corporation and do not constitute legal or medical advice. The content is provided for educational purposes only.

Ed Curtin’s blog: http://edwardcurtin.com

Voices For Freedom:

Remember to sign up to our mailing list to keep informed: http://www.voicesforfreedom.co.nz/stay-informed/

Are you in NZ? Join thousand of others in local Voices For Freedom groups:
https://voicesforfreedom.co.nz/local-sign-up/
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https://voicesforfreedom.co.nz/face-mask-exemption/

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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby conniption » Tue Sep 14, 2021 4:56 am

off-guardian
(embedded links)

Covid’s Willing Executioners How have previously normal people become so eager to deal out death in judgment?

Todd Hayen
Sep 12, 2021


A few weeks ago, three friends on Facebook told me that they wished for my death.

One of them I didn’t really know. He freaked out when I calmly suggested there were viable treatment options for those with Covid. He responded: “Stay out of my life!! I hope you get Covid and die!”

The other two friends were people I knew in college 45 years ago, one was my freshman year roommate, and the other guy introduced me to my first wife. He suggested that I prove Darwin’s theory and perish from the virus, the other just basically said I deserved what was coming as a selfish unvaccinated science-denier.

Covid’s willing executioners.

I know Facebook is certainly not the ideal place for reasonable discourse. As a psychologist, however, I do find it an interesting sample of a certain extreme way of thinking and behaving.

I also believe my experience with “friends” wishing for my demise is not unusual amongst those on that side of the fence in this debate. At least not unusual in thought.

As we all know, Facebook is the place of no inhibition. However, that said, I do believe it is a grave concern that human beings can be manipulated into this dark manner of thinking and feeling.

The operative word here is “manipulate.”

I do have faith, that for the most part, human beings have evolved from a cave mentality when confronting “other” in the culture. In cave days our psychology was programmed for survival, and it didn’t take much coercion to view members from another tribe that wandered into territory that was not their own to be immediately met with suspicion and fear.

Today, many thousands of years later, I think it takes a bit of manipulation to view “other” as fatally dangerous—but not much coercion, so it seems.

In this regard it appears we have lost any scintilla of common sense. How can a government (or more likely an even higher organization of authority) convince the masses so easily that the unvaccinated are the mortal enemy with not a whiff of science in the argument? This clearly is a case of the emperor’s new clothes, but it isn’t going to take only a small innocent child’s exaltation that the emperor is naked to make everyone see what is true.

Why is this?

I’m afraid it is human nature — at least a small part of human nature — that these days needs a little coercion to come out in full bloom. For me, as a psychologist, it is more proof that there is an organized agenda, a “psyop” if you will, driving this whole debacle. When humans are put into this sort of psychological environment, their reaction is very predictable.

A friend of mine, Dr. Mark McDonald, who is a prominent psychiatrist and has a very prestigious practice in California, told me this in a recent conversation:

“Pandemic of the unvaccinated” has emerged as an expression of propaganda meant to provoke anger toward those who exercise medical choice in deferring or refusing the experimental vaccine. It is meant to isolate, shame, and humiliate anyone who will not agree to surrender medical autonomy to the state. It intentionally divides Americans against one another while simultaneously distracting attention from the medical reality of poor vaccine efficacy and vaccine harm. The expression is devoid of scientific meaning but full of coercive psychological power. It must be challenged.


Again, we see this idea of “coercive psychological power” come up in Dr. McDonald’s comment. Propaganda and the manipulation of the masses has been a key tenet in totalitarian regimes. Pitting person against person is of utmost importance to having control over the masses. Even in Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, the opposition to the state was created by the state to keep the masses distracted, or so it is implied.

I am reminded of the Stanford Prison Experiment as well as Milgram’s obedience studies at Yale. Milgram set up an experiment where a subject, someone who did not know the parameters of the experiment, was in control of administering an electric shock to the “learner” if he/she failed to answer certain questions correctly.

The “learner” was also “in” on the experiment and in fact received no shocks. The authority figure egging on the subject was also, of course, “in” on the experiment and played the role of authority that the subject had to succumb to. “Just following orders” is the phrase that immediately comes to mind.

The current phenomenon regarding the persecution of the unvaccinated has some correlation with this experiment in that people, when pressured by the “mainstream authority or narrative,” tend to have little or no connection with a natural empathy toward the group identified as “other” (the unvaccinated).

The subjects in Milgram’s experiment consistently detached from the learner’s pain and tended to dissociate from them as fellow humans. They ceased to see them as in the same tribe as themselves; they were quickly reclassified as “other.”

The difference in the results of this experiment and the current situation is that “other” (the “learner”) posed no threat to the subject in Milgram’s experiment. He or she was just disobedient to authority, i.e., was not doing correctly what authority demanded him/her to do.

Now, in our present situation, the vaccinated are convinced by authority that the unvaccinated are in fact a threat (as well as not being obedient to the parental agenda). Authority is doing this through any means available to them, and it makes no difference if these means have even the slightest scientific truth to them (they say of course it is all scientific, but with further scrutiny, it certainly is not).

We saw this early on with the mask compliance. Those wearing masks were identified as one particular tribe: the “good” tribe who possessed community values. Those not wearing masks, or complaining about them, were the other tribe: the bad tribe, who were selfish, stupid, and science deniers. (to paraphrase Orwell’s sheep in Animal Farm: “four legs good (mask), two legs bad (no masks)”).

Now this effort of segregation and persecution has moved to the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. It is not the “right” science that will disintegrate this tribal conflict: it is a psycho-social issue, not a pragmatic objective one.

In a recent Charles Eisenstein article Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed he states:

My point is that those in the scientific and medical community who dissent from the demonization of the unvaxxed contend not only with opposing scientific views, but with ancient, powerful psycho-social forces. They can debate the science all they want, but they are up against something much bigger.


Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (from which this article’s title is derived) presents a thesis that the persecution of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany was not only an exercise of obedience to Hitler’s ideology but was the result of a long history of German antisemitism. This very well could be true, but in my opinion this historic antisemitism was only the hook which made it easier for Hitler to hang his ideology.

Today’s willing executioners do not need a history of racial discrimination to hang their hatred of anti-vaxxers, but instead rely on a simple identification of “other” (unvaccinated) and a hatred for those who “don’t care about me, or those that I love.” The key common denominator it seems is the common concept of caring for others before caring for yourself, which, ironically, is clearly not the true psychological operator in this situation.

These people seem to care far more for themselves and their own safety (and their opinion) than they do for the rights and freedoms (and safety) of others — take the jab to save me, never mind you might die or get sick in the process.

So what we are actually experiencing is “normal” — normal from the perspective that human beings have the innate capability of being all sorts of ugly things, particularly when gathered in crowds: tribes.

If coerced and manipulated in a particular way, as has happened countless times in world history, they can become unconscious, irrational, nonempathic, monsters. I will close with a paragraph from another excellent article by author CJ Hopkins (which can be found in its entirety on Off-Guardian’s website) “The Approaching Storm”:

Thus, their plan is to make our lives as miserable as possible, to segregate us, stigmatize us, demonize us, bully, and harass us, and pressure us to conform at every turn.

They are not going to put us on the trains to the camps. GloboCap is not the Nazis. They need to maintain the simulation of democracy.

So, they need to transform us into an underclass of “anti-social conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxer disinformationists,” “white-supremacist election-result deniers,” “potentially violent domestic extremists,” and whatever other epithets they come up with, so that we can be painted as dangerously unhinged freaks and cast out of society in a way that makes it appear that we have cast out ourselves.


Hunker down.
_______
Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/09/12/cov ... cutioners/
conniption
 
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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby conniption » Thu Sep 23, 2021 7:44 pm

conniption » Sat Sep 04, 2021 6:35 am wrote:
consentfactory
(embedded links)

Image

The Covidian Cult (Part III)

CJ Hopkins
September 2, 2021


In The Covidian Cult (Part I) and (Part II), I characterized the so-called “New Normal” as a “global totalitarian ideological movement.” Since I published those essays, more and more people have come to see it for what it is, not “insanity” or “an overreaction,” but, in fact, a new form of totalitarianism, a globalized, pathologized, depoliticized form, which is being systematically implemented under the guise of “protecting the public health.”...

>snip<

https://consentfactory.org/2021/09/02/t ... -part-iii/


just for fun...

IDU: How do people get involved in cults?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQpaUzI_u50
(27:35 min.)

RT America
• Sep 20, 2021 •

Charles Manson documentaries continue to fascinate us 40 years later for a reason. We are intrigued by cults and looking for a satisfying explanation for why people join in the first place. Most of us boldly claiming "that would never happen to me!" But could it? Author of "Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism" Amanda Montell joins William Shatner on this week's episode of 'I Don't Understand' to discuss what makes cults so fascinating and terrifying.

No mention of Trekkies?
_______

On Edit:
as an aside...I don't think RI has gone MAGA? so much, yet it does seem to have some strong elements of Covidian Cult enthusiasts present who are hyper sensitive to any deviation from the main narrative. I choose not to engage in the topic on that particular thread because I get accused of being MAGA everytime I turn around. Go figure...
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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby conniption » Mon Oct 04, 2021 10:39 am

Prof. Mattias Desmet: Is the Corona Narrative part of a Totalitarian Mass Hypnosis ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtxCVXaeyME
(12:42 min.)
Sascha R. Pahl
• Aug 1, 2021 •
Full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj5bo...
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Re: Year Zero - CJ Hopkins

Postby conniption » Mon Oct 04, 2021 7:02 pm

12 Reasons NOT To Speak Up!
Odysee video link: https://odysee.com/@AwakenWithJP:9/12-r ... peak-up!:8
(8:16 min.)
AwakenWithJP
September 28th, 2021
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