All governments employ propaganda because even the most despotic requires a modicum of consent. Perversely, democratic governments employ the most propaganda because their utilization of force is limited.

Which brings us to the US, with the most sophisticated propaganda apparatus in the history of the world. No country in the world has a media as censored and obsessed with manufacturing consent as the American corporate media. North Korea is literally the only example of a country with a media that is more strictly controlled than the American media.

Our power elite have learned that the best way to dominate Americans is to manipulate them into serving your interests while giving them the illusion of freedom and control. The invention of mass media has facilitated this new form of tyranny, as has the emergence of psychology as a field of study. These two factors have combined together to give rise to the steadily advancing science of modern propaganda.

No part of the new Cold War with Russia would be possible without copious amounts of such training. Without massive amounts of propaganda, people would never consent to being made poorer in order to facilitate the sociopathic maneuverings of our elite. Without massive amounts of propaganda, people would never consent to the increasing threat of nuclear war as US escalations continually ramp up brinkmanship between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Without massive amounts of propaganda, people would never consent to agendas which directly harm them and threaten everyone they know while providing no material benefit to them whatsoever.

Indeed, the real goal of U.S. foreign policy is to generate benefits for the U.S. (or, more accurately, ruling American elites), not to crusade for democracy and human rights. But we can’t have the rubes hearing about any of this, hence the need for the all-encompassing propaganda campaign.

Of course U.S. foreign policy is not devoted to spreading freedom and democracy and fighting despotism and tyranny in the world. How can a country that counts the Saudi monarchs, the Egyptian military junta and the apartheid regime of Israel as its closest partners and allies possibly claim with a straight face that it opposes tyranny and fights wars in order to protect democracy? The U.S. does not give rats ass whether a foreign country is ruled by democracy or tyranny. It only cares about whether the government of that country facilitates or obstructs U.S. interests.

This has been most apparent in the non-stop propaganda around the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. If the Biden Administration had simply acknowledged from the start the obvious truth that they seek to exploit the war in Ukraine to regime-change Russia then at least an honest debate would have been possible. Instead, they and their corporate media pals did what they always do whenever a war is newly marketed: they draped it in fabricated moral fairy tales about evil Russian invaders and brave Ukrainian freedom-fighters.

And it was damn successful as the millions of blue and yellow Ukrainian flags draped across liberals porches attest.

But here’s the thing–to sustain popular support for the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars in new foreign wars, Americans must continuously be fed a morally uplifting framework, a sense of righteous purpose that leads them to believe these new wars are just and noble. Thus, rather than self-interest in Ukraine, the U.S. is acting benevolently, with the purest of motives, with nothing but a desire to help the scrappy underdog.

But this is also true of our entire society in general. Our entire civilization is marinating in propaganda produced and promulgated by the powerful in order to manipulate our collective psychology into consenting to a status quo which serves them and not us.

However, there’s a disruption in the matrix. The US proxy war in Ukraine has made our elite so crazy and desperate that their propaganda efforts are becoming more obvious. For instance, They’ve pretty much openly acknowledged lying about this very war, 

Nevertheless, they are still at it, following the Goebbels script of repeating the big lie endlessly. On Wednesday, a US Department of State spokesperson accused Beijing of “still standing with Russia … echoing its propaganda … denying Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine” before saying that “nations that side with Vladimir Putin will inevitably find themselves on the wrong side of history.”

Man, the projection, it burns.

This is the level of delusion and illusion we are dealing with, and no one who cares about truth or facts could ever go along with any of this nonsense.

Hopefully all of this lying and propaganda is so obvious that Americans will begin to discern the reality of the fairy tale our elite have constructed.

After all, the revolution is is your mind.

Update: This decision to extradite Julian Assange for the crime of investigative reporting is unsurprising. After all, it has been obvious for years that the U.S. and UK are determined to destroy Assange as punishment for exposing their crimes. This process further demonstrates the farce of American and British propaganda about freedom, democracy, a free press and the whole nonsense about being on the “wrong side of history”. 

As Glen Greenwald states–“Free speech and press freedoms do not exist in reality in the U.S. or the UK. They are merely rhetorical instruments to propagandize their domestic population and justify and ennoble the various wars and other forms of subversion they constantly wage in other countries in the name of upholding values they themselves do not support.”