Counter-Currents
1,949 words
“Reality”: the world or the state of things as they actually exist.
One succinct way to characterize the Western “democracies” is that they are, in all their various manifestations, anti-reality regimes. For starters, they are not really what they piously call themselves — “democracies” — in any accepted definition of the term. The governments of these countries are cabals of oligarchs who use political parties as fronts for advancing the interests of backroom, money-connected players. Elections are a game of “three-card monte” with the voters as the marks, staged to entertain and distract them from wondering why the bosses don’t play by the rules and why their friends and followers get to jump the cues.
In the United States, the two collusive political parties function as guilds exclusively devoted to protecting the interests of their members with an ideological “diversity is our strength” agenda intended to perpetuate a social hierarchy based on conferred victim status. Kamala Harris, who could find almost no Democrats to vote for her in the 2020 presidential primaries, was named to the Vice Presidential slot on the ticket because she was a black woman. The most recent Supreme Court vacancy was reserved for a black woman. The Governor of California has promised to appoint a black woman to replace the ailing Jewish Senator Dianne Feinstein should she resign. Black women appear to have risen to the top of the virtuous-victim hierarchy in the guild’s ideological assault on real world.
Keeping the victim hierarchy on life-support is what drives the client-patron engine of politics in “our democracy.” Victims are selected, groomed, and courted as clients by patrons — politicians who then reward them with favors in exchange for their votes, and punish non-clients when they dare to complain. When Hillary Clinton excoriated Trump supporters in 2016 as a “basket of deplorables” and “irredeemables” she was bolstering her status as the Patron Empress and reminding her coalition of clients that Trump’s clients were scumbags — “thankfully, not part of America,” so as not to leave any doubt about what their future would look like after January 2017.
These guilds select for morally flexible, narcissistic personality types who know what to say to gain the approval of the news-media, the entertainment industry, political action committees (PACs), and tax-exempt Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOS, such as e.g. Soros’ Open Society)[1] — the sources of power that shape public opinion and donate money. Shaping opinion and crafting the right image is expensive, and so the guild members must answer to those who supply the funding for the astronomically high cost of national-level election campaigns where the image-crafters apply their skills. The American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), for example, boasts on its website: “$17.4m contributed through AIPAC to support pro-Israel candidates; 98% of AIPAC-backed candidates won their general elections; we helped defeat 13 candidates who would undermine the U.S.-Israel relationship.” A not-so-subtle hint for ambitious aspirants from the guilds: “We pay, so you can play.”
Exactly what real benefits average Americans get out of the “U.S.-Israel relationship” never comes up during the election cycle. Its less than edifying specifics are safely tucked away from view inside the promulgated anodyne public relations image of Israel as America’s faithful, embattled ally — a “beacon of democracy,” of course, in a hostile Muslim world — alongside constant reminders of “the Holocaust,” always capitalized to distinguish it from the lesser versions.
From John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The IsraeliLobby and U.S. Foreign Policy:
Of all the groups that make up the [Israel] lobby, it is AIPAC that holds the key to influence in Congress, a fact that is widely acknowledged by politicians from both parties. Bill Clinton once described AIPAC as “stunningly effective” and “better than anyone else lobbying in this town,” while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich [himself loaded up with AIPAC money] called it “the most effective general-interest [sic] group . . . across the entire planet.’ . . . AIPAC’s success is due in large part to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda and to punish those who do not, based mainly on its capacity to influence campaign contributions.[2]
While Mearsheimer and Walt don’t come out and explicitly say it in the book, it’s clear that Israel has the United States Congress on its payroll, and as the book demonstrates in rich detail, it gets its money’s worth. Sometimes Israeli ownership of American politicians is displayed symbolically with an arrogance that beggars belief.
Convicted US spy Pollard arrives in Israel, Netanyahu greets him at airport
Jonathan Pollard arrived on a private plane provided by American casino magnate [dual citizenship holder] Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire supporter of both Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump.
Jonathan Pollard, who spent 30 years in US prison for spying for Israel, arrived in Israel . . . triumphantly kissing the ground as he disembarked from the aircraft in the culmination of a decades-long affair that had long strained relations between the two close allies.
. . . [H]e was greeted at Israel’s international airport by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader jubilantly presented Pollard and his wife Esther with Israeli ID cards, granting them citizenship.
“You’re home,” Netanyahu said, reciting a Hebrew blessing of thanks. “What a moment. What a moment.” (italics added)
You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s new novel When Harry Met Sally here.
Yes, quite the moment. Bibi’s ostentatious reception for one of the most damaging spies in US history was a stunning gesture of contempt worthy of a mafia don, as if to lift his middle finger to the American people to show them who is really the boss in this special “relationship.”
The political party bosses and their amanuenses who run the mass media outlets also zealously attend to what I would call “reality management.” That is, they determine which are the “acceptable” topics for political discourse and who gets to talk about them. “Corporations going woke,” for example, would not be allowed. Steve Sailer would never be interviewed on CNN or MSNBC to share his research on the nature and extent of black criminality. The vocabularies of guild members who compete for votes are strictly monitored for deviations, and even pronouns now are under scrutiny. “Hate speech,” “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories” are metapolitical cudgels used with abandon to stigmatize those who stray “off message.” For those timid souls who never dare to venture outside the moated boundaries of mainstream media coverage, “reality” is the mainstream media script composed and constantly revised to keep the “good guys” always looking good and to keep the Who’s Who of “bad guys” up to date.
The anti-reality regimes now seem to be more aggressive in targeting realists as “enemies of the people,” particularly since the onset of the pandemic and the managed martyrdom of George Floyd. The unsettling shift here in the United States, I believe, goes back to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, as he was not a guild member, was not supposed to win, and whose clients — white, working-class Americans — were not anywhere in the hierarchy of the officially oppressed. The interloper had to go. Ergo: Hitler alchemy, the transformation of this real estate mogul playboy usurper into the world’s greatest fascist dictator, which made those who supported him . . . Well, you get the picture. Since the installation of Biden in White House in 2021, and because Trump was popular with white voters, the biggest threat to “our democracy” today is, just coincidentally, “white supremacists.” In “the state of things as they actually exist,” this makes no sense until you realize that “white supremacist” is being used by the regime as the fake card-throw that takes the marks (good whites’) eyes off the money card (reality) — another version of the three-card monte scam.
White supremacy is one of many arrows in the Biden regime’s anti-reality quiver, some others being “systemic racism,” “gender fluidity,” “climate change” disaster, and the “rules-based international order” enforced by the US “defense” establishment as it busies itself in overthrowing foreign governments and bombing civilians.
How have Western regimes been able to become so invincibly reality-averse? One important aspect worth noting has to do with a phenomenon observed in the early Roman Empire by the great satirist Juvenal: “The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things — Bread and Games!”[3]
“Bread and circuses,” or Panem et circenses, was Juvenal’s shorthand for how the ruling class kept the populace distracted from its corrupt shenanigans and the disintegration of social cohesion. The “circus” part of this in contemporary American society is the vast entertainment industry.
The U.S. Media and Entertainment industry is huge. Overall, the market size of the U.S. Media and Entertainment industry is $717 billion, larger than the GDPs of 162 countries around the world. That’s why the industry is such a broad-reaching and major employer, with 1.4 million employees.
The circus reaches deep into the daily lives, and heads, of Americans and — how shall I say this? — seriously mucks around. Now that the delivery technology makes entertainment possible non-stop, directly to your device, you can be at the circus anytime you want to.
The modern circus has moved beyond the work of distraction to manufacturing worldviews and believers of the right kind. Industry captains — Bob Iger of Disney, for example — have turned movies, television, sports, and music into vehicles of woke propaganda. Americans crave entertainment, and if you spend any time on Netflix, Amazon Prime, ESPN, or most other entertainment venues, you don’t have to be Marshall McLuhan to figure out what the subliminal message is: the superior virtue of the oppressed à la Adorno and Marcuse. That message permeates every popular art form in which Americans indulge themselves, and what is critical to realize is not that it is not a picture of “the state of things as they actually exist” — which, of course, it is not — but that the technology that delivers these vehicles is sufficiently powerful to subvert conscious awareness and to make the unreal message real. In a word: like the prisoner in Plato’s cave allegory, who believes in the reality of the flickering shadows on the wall, the Hulu watcher comes to believe that the virtuous black people and malignant whites he sees on his screen are reflections of real America.
The entertainment industry is, arguably, the most powerfully subversive arm of our unreality regime. Its task is the creation of an alternative reality that competes advantageously against the one we used to live in. It was the one that imposed limits on what worked and punished those who transgressed them with failure. The entertainment world for those immersed in it gives rise to a kind of logic that says: What should be true, what we want to be true, is true. The condition of human equality should be true, and so it is true. A boy who wants to be a girl, is a girl. A fat, ugly woman who wants to be pretty, is pretty. Citizens in an unreality regime become increasingly accustomed to believing that the limits imposed by reality are arbitrary or unfair, and are therefore non-binding. Transgressing them is a form of liberation with no downsides other than having to deal with the resisters. The failure of the resisters to grasp the anti-morality logic makes them immoral — as some are inclined to say, “irredeemable.”
So much anti-reality is coming at us. Can it continue? It won’t, but when and how things come apart, of course, is up for speculation.
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Notes
[1] Russia expelled the Soros operation from the country as “a threat to the foundations of Russia’s Constitutional order and national security.”
[2] John J. Mearsheimer & Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), Kindle edition, pp. 153-4.
[3] Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, Digireads.com Publishing, Kindle Edition, p. 65.
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7 comments
Any thoughts on when and how things come apart?
Here’s to hoping it’s sooner rather than later. 🍻
I fear someone will be assassinated.
Not necessarily here in the U.S. Anywhere in the Western World.
Things come apart when the dollar crashes and Americans are no longer wealthy. People can avoid reality when they live in comfort, once they get hungry, they’ll sell their sister. We’ve lived off the fat for a long time, it’s going to get very rough, especially if the China-Russia alliance grows too powerful.
China-Russia alliance
I would better use the word vassality. Of course it is not the old kind of vassality, but something new. Anyway we see the idea of Chinese Word (Orwell’s Eastasia) is becoming more and more real. Not only dependent African countries, but also Iran and Pakistan are now “younger partners” of Maoist regime, and Russia is going in the same direction. Of course in the real confrontation with the West this Eastasia will win, not because it is strong, but because the West is weak. For not-Westerners a life of an individual does not matter, thus they can make a real active foreign and military politics, without thinking about own casualties, while the West with its “post-heroic warfare” (term, coined by American Jewish scholar Edward Luttwak) is not able to do this.
So many words about bad Israeilis and their lobbies and no word about the Chinese, who are actually sponsors of the Democrats (and paid for Clinton’s second presidency). Nothing is said about Chinese agents of influence in media, cinema, science, academy, economy, politics, everywhere. The West as always do not see its MAIN ENEMY. And then it will complain “We butchered the wrong pig”, as Churchill famously said in 1948.
The Chosen are plenty active in the East, too, but one can have more than one enemy.
I would also note the importance of not only legal de facto corruption, but also illegal one.
Data from Transparency International and similar organizations do not show elite corruption [Carlson; Reed, 2018 (discuss data for Japan and extend their negative assessment to the entire West as well)]. That is, a very low level of corruption on the part of ordinary people or not very large businesses really takes place – well, actually, but so what?
This is important in the context of the notorious separation of powers. Initially, the concept developed by Madison was unequivocally based on the absence of parties [Chafetz, 2017] – i.e., for example, appointees of the judicial department will represent their department and the interests of only their department … but the emergence of parties, of course, puts an end to this whole idea. Moreover, one must understand that within the framework of the discourse of the 18th century, the concept of “party” was immediately and instantly associated with a conspiracy [Leonard, 2002] and for founding-era generations notion corruption include in themselves another notion — conspiracy [Teachout, 2014]. So, within the framework of the discourse of the 18th century, the appointees of the judicial branch are the whores of the parties, which itself is also represented in other branches of power. Madison’s separation is scarcely effective.
Is this approach justified? Let’s get a look. The US Constitution has been anti-constitutionally rewritten in many places [Greve, 2012], including the abolition of jury supremacy [Thomas, 2016]. One-sided politicized trials are possible under such a system and were especially frequent during the period of hunting for the “red threat” [Goldstein, 2001]. The police can easily sew cases out of nothing for their own benefit, break into private property without a warrant (quite legally, moreover [sic!]), and so on and so on. [Burns, 2014].
Of course, this does not make pro-plutocratic republics identical with authoritarian countries, but the presence of shit in a barrel of honey leads to the fact that the substance is no longer honey. It is anything else and even tastier than pure shit, but not honey either.
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Chafetz, Joshua Aaron. Congress’s Constitution: legislative authority and the separation of powers. // Yale University Press, 2017
Michael S. Greve. The Upside-Down Constitution. // Harvard University Press, 2012
Robert Justin Goldstein. Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to 1976. // University of Illinois Press, 2001
Robert P. Burns. Kafka’s Law: “The Trial” and American Criminal Justice. // University of Chicago Press, 2014
Suja A. Thomas. The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries. // Cambridge University Press, 2016
Gerald Leonard. The Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois. // The University of North Carolina Press, 2002
Matthew M. Carlson, Steven R. Reed. Political Corruption and Scandals in Japan. // Cornell University Press, 2018
Zephyr Teachout. Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. // Harvard University Press, 2014
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