The cops were poorly trained, my conscience argued, they made a mistake, but they can be reformed, they can be better trained. I saw it as a lack of training, a phenomenon that occurred due to some accident of circumstances or a moment of confusion. Now I more clearly see that police in the United States—especially white but not only white police—shoot and kill people of color out of hate.
It has always been this way. The modern era of black lives doesn’t matter is no aberration. How can we speak of the ‘Death of the American Dream’ when for millions of people their reality in the land of the free and home of the brave has revolved around the imperatives of struggling to survive in the shadows of predatory capitalism? The violence grew alongside the great European enlightenment, and then the Conquistadors brought conquest and annihilation to the shores of Turtle Island—what the white man calls ‘America’—and to the Spice Islands and the Kingdoms of Kongo and everywhere they went, and then came the galleons packed with once free African men and women sold into the brutality of plantation slavery. Life for far too many Americans—north, south, central—has always been more nightmare than a dream.
Our own citizens marginalized by our own US government are not special in this regard. If we the conscious and caring people of the world open our hearts, minds, and eyes, we bear witness to the most horrible suffering, rampant injustice, unspeakable atrocities, war, and plunder being committed against innocent people everywhere. One might have to dig tooth and nail to get beyond the unprecedented censorship, somehow defeat the exclusive algorithms of social media and reject the false fact-checkers, but the evidence is irrefutable: The power brokers of the United States of America and its closest corporatized allies—Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, Japan—constitute a supreme and immediate threat to all life on planet Earth. Of course, to admit this ugly fact one must confront the demons of disbelief and most people will never do that. The fact-checkers would reject it as false in any case.
I have met people all over the world whose consciousness was falsely informed by the idea of the ‘American Dream’, a pure fantasy that has spread and, like a true virus, infected the minds of people free and unfree all over the world. Take the young Congolese soldier who aspires to serve in the US military. What is the source of this Dream? How does it proliferate in far-off places and everywhere infect so many minds and, it appears, hearts?
The cognitive dissonance that everywhere prevails is due to the power, reach, and success of the western propaganda system. Hollywood and Netflix films travel the world faster than the speed of light and deepen the shadows that everywhere dim the consciousness of humanity. Life is becoming more machine than man, more man than woman, more disconnected from itself every day. Transhumanism is the new eugenics. Western consciousness is falsified by powerful elite individuals and their institutions of state power, propaganda, and perception management, including the traditional mass media mainstays (e.g. the New York Times, National Public Radio, Observer, Agence France Press, AP, BBC, Washington Post, Newsweek, etc.) but also the antisocial media of the Facebook, Twitter and Google kind. What else could explain the cognitive dissonance whereby so many of the world’s people act against their own interests in support of a very real contemporary fascism?
Language has been so utterly perverted to serve the forces that divide and conquer that it is nearly impossible to convey the truth as I see it: people have been deeply conditioned to believe that which is unbelievable and disbelieve the truth even when it hits them right between the eyes. You don’t have to be a western news consumer to be sick from eating the corporate propaganda of one flavor or another, and so we have entire populations clamoring to have what we in North America have, but not at all prepared to accept the sacrifices that come with having it, and who—not incidentally —are forced to suffer the indignities that come with not having it so that we can.
Fascism, for example, is not about jackboots and swastikas, though there is plenty of that variety in the world, and particularly in today’s Trumpian dystopia, but rather a matter of the health or illness of the character structure of the individual. Otherwise reasonable and thinking human beings are so quickly lost to a cycle of self-fulfilling hysteria (read: fascism) inculcated in their inner being by the many sociological and psychological operations being conducted against them (read: us) by elite interests, predatory corporations, phantasmagorical ‘entertainment’ industries, think tanks, the mass media, and even the charity complex. The great American Empire does not limit psychological warfare only to the targeting of its enemies, and torture is a useful tool that the Trumps, Bidens, Trudeaus, Clintons, and Netanyahu’s (sic) will quickly and quietly deploy against anyone who has something important truth to tell or anyone who gets in the way of those who don’t want it told.
The example of toxic pharmaceutical injections (so-called ‘vaccines’) being served on unwitting dark-skinned populations quickly comes to mind, followed immediately by the clamoring for telecom microchip implants that will fundamentally dehumanize humanity. It’s astonishing that more people don’t see how easily we have been fooled; that they don’t —for example—stand up and tell the elite powers-that-be to stick their toxic injections up their assets. Even if they did, the response is obvious: beat the people up, imprison them, torture them into submission, and stick it to them.
The stellar contemporary example of selling oneself out for the dictates of predatory capitalism is the COVID-19 conspiracy. The world is overcome by a systematically manufactured fear and it has left people everywhere jumping at shadows, even their own. One more example would be the conspiracy of 9-11 that for so many years now has informed and driven the great American hatred of all things Islam and all people Islamic and has provided a convenient cover story to justify the permanent warfare economies of the Zionist Anglo-American Empire, and the wars that they feed on. Alas, Islam has no corner on the market of American hate: with the COVID-19(84) scare the North American public has descended into a hysterical xenophobic fear and hatred of all things Chinese. It doesn’t matter that Bill Gates and his satanic conspirators orchestrated their premeditated profiteering by first moving their pharmaceutical interests offshore to some far-off place called Wuhan. Fear is the most valuable currency wielded by the people that pretend to be our ‘leaders’.
The disconnect between what is real and what is virtual is nowhere so starkly obvious, and sometimes horrible, and universally beautiful, as it is when you exit technological ‘civilization’—the matrix of indoctrination and conditioning that revolves around the bombardment of the senses with constant advertising and infotainment and subliminal seduction—and enter what westerners have been conditioned to see as the ‘uncivilized’ world comprised of rural Africa, Asia, Latin America or West Asia.
Indeed, the entire juggernaut of capitalism and its ‘achievements’—if global dominance, pollution, disease, trafficking in women and children, war crimes and genocide count as achievements, which for the psychopaths in power, they do—and the global onslaught of the multinational corporation is based on the expropriation of raw materials from all over the earth and the perpetual re-supply and re-stimulation of the ‘global’ economy for the production of unnecessary and unwanted products peddled by unnecessary and unwanted corporations to justify unnecessary and unwanted ecological destruction.
The pace of our modern world makes it impossible for people to navigate the facts or fictions about events and policies that define our reality. Global surveillance, data collection, and social engineering are no longer the exclusive haunts of the spooks at the CIA, MI-6, or MOSSAD. Now everyone is at risk of becoming the unwitting pushers of propaganda that would be nauseating to a truly awakened consciousness. It seems people are so hopelessly lost that they will without question choose to sacrifice their children to save their own bodies. And so, what do we have? We have an Empire of otherwise good people blindly doing everything wrong and convinced they are the greatest saints in the universe. They follow the pied pipers of propaganda condoning the most egregious crimes committed in the name of the great state’s red white and blue, atrocities the likes of which they cannot even imagine and committed by the dirtiest spymasters and covert operatives.
We may indeed be at the end of an era, but this has nothing to do with the monumental fraud of the upcoming US national elections. True, these may cause the great Satanical Empire to pause, but only so much as one white supremacist war-mongering philanderer might be substituted for another. And there is the great hope for so many people of the world, it seems: they believe that all that needs to be done is swap one delusional white savior for another, and truth and justice will be restored to the world. Nothing can be further from the truth. There is no such thing as the lesser of two evils. The American dream is not so much dead as it is adrift on a dark and stormy sea.
This does not mean that the end is near, although in global environmental terms I personally believe it is. The corpse may yet be revealed. Who can say for sure? The evidence suggests that positive feedback loops have been set in motion and the climate is spiraling out of control. Thus, it is only a matter of time for all of us. There is a bigger picture, but North Americans and Brits and Israelis are wholly incapable of seeing it.
I often say: “If you are reading the New York Times you are contributing to your own mental illness.” This is no joke: I am completely serious. (Substitute any other mainstay of the western corporate-prostituted media and the statement still applies.) My sincerity comes after foolishly dedicating years of my life to researching world events, investigating the corruption of the Empire, juxtaposing these with the realities I have seen and experienced, and comparing them to the propaganda produced by our so-called democratic society. These are advertising delivery mechanisms meant to manipulate public opinion and manufacture consent while simultaneously making someone a lot of money. The reaction by consumers of western propaganda to my thesis is generally hysterical. The smarter ones are certain that they are immune to the dirty tricks of the propaganda pundits, and so they reject the thesis outright, and with great disdain, if not laughter, but only after lecturing me about their clairvoyance (and my ignorance). The more intellectual the consumer of this propaganda, the more arrogant the certainty of their immunity to it.
These intellectuals couldn’t be more wrong. Miseducated by the best colleges, they are like academics living in their own little worlds, debating amongst themselves, or like the politicians that inhabit the wasteland of private profit and perfidious power we call the US ‘Congress’. Do you think they have ever read such great works as the Upanishads? The Abbasids? The Conceptions of Nature and Methods Used for Its Study by the Ikhwan al Safa, al-Biruni, and Ibn Sina? The Koran?
The American dream lives on in many good people, and that is because we hold out a flicker of hope that someday of reckoning might be near, that a deeper consciousness will take hold, that enough people will stand up to the evil—in all its ugly cowardly petty manifestations—and together with good people of all nations and colors and faiths the world over we will usher in a new paradigm that is grounded in wisdom and love.
Keith Harmon Snow is the 2009 Regent's Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. A photojournalist and war correspondent, he is a three-time Project Censored award-winner.
First Time Published in Tehran Times.
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