RO -- John W. Whitehead -- Ferește-te de Răul Progresiv printre noi

Ferește-te de Răul Progresiv printre noi

de John W. Whitehead

29 Octombrie, 2019

“Ne văd pe stradă. Ne observă la televizor. Puteți chiar să votați pentru unul dintre ei, în această Toamnă. Dvs. îi considerati ca sunt oameni ca voi. Greșiți. Sunteti complet greșiți. "

- They Live (Ei trăiesc)

Trăim în două lumi, voi și eu.

Există o lume pe care o vedem (sau pe care suntem făcuți so vedem) și apoi există aceea pe care o simțim, (și, ocazional,o întrezarim), din care ultima este complet diferita de realitatea impulsionată de propaganda fabricata de către guvern și de către sponsorii corporativi/antreprenori ai lui, incluind comunicarea mass-media.

De fapt, ceea ce majoritatea americanilor percep ca viața - privilegiata, progresistă și liberă - în Statele Unite, este foarte departe de realitate, unde  inegalitatea economică este în creștere, agendele adevărate și puterea de necontestat sunt îngropate sub straturi de limbaj orwellian de neînțeles, și de întunecare corporativa indescifrabila, și ”libertatea”, așa cum ea este, este administrata în doze mici de acord cu legea, de către poliția militarizată și înarmată până la dinți.

Nu totul este ceea ce pare a fi.

Acesta este argumentul filmului lui John Carpenter - They live, lansat acum mai bine de 30 de ani, și rămâne, enervant și înspăimântător de potrivit, pentru epoca noastră modernă.

Cunoscut înca pentru filmul său de teroare Halloween, care presupune că există o formă a răului atât de sumbră încât nu poate fi ucisă, producția totală a lui Carpenter este imbuiată cu o puternica înclinare lacónica anti-autoritara, anti- establishment, care vorbește de preocupările cineastului asupra desfășurarii societății noastre și, în special, a guvernului nostru.

Carpenter portretizează frecvent, guvernul acționînd împotriva propriilor lui cetățeni, o populație afara din contactul cu realitatea, cu o tehnologie necontrolată și periculoasă, și un viitor mai oribil decât orice film de teroare.

În Escape from New York, Carpenter prezintă fascismul ca viitorul Americii.

În The Thing, o reconstituire a clasicului de fictiune stiintifica din 1951 cu același nume, Carpenter presupune, că, din ce în ce mai mult, ne dezumanizam cu toții.

În Christine, filmul adaptarii cinematografice a romanului lui Stephen King despre o mașină posedată de demon, tehnologia își afișează propria voință și conștiință și intră într-o violență asasină.

În The Mouth of Madness, Carpenter observă că răul crește atunci când oamenii îsi pierd "capacitatea de a recunoaște diferența dintre realitate și fantezie".

Și apoi exista They Live al lui Carpenter, în care doi muncitori migranți descoperă că lumea nu este ceea ce pare a fi. De fapt, populația este controlată și exploatată de străinii care lucrează în parteneriat cu o elită oligarhica. În mod obisnuit - populația - din fericire inconștienta de adevărata programare în acțiune în viața ei - a fost ambalata lin, îndoctrinata în consecință, bombardata cu distractii de la comunicarea mass-media, și hipnotizata prin mesajele subliminale transmise de televiziune și de variatele dispozitive electronice, precum și prin posterele de propaganda în locurile publice și dispozitivele similare.

Doar atunci când vagabondul fara adapost, John Nada (interpretat la extrem de către decedatul Roddy Piper) descoperă o pereche de ochelari de soare sofisticati - lentilele Hoffman - este că Nada vede ceea ce sta în spatele realității fabricate de elita: controlul și sclavia.

John W. Whitehead -- A New Kind of Tyranny: The Global State’s War on Those Who Speak Truth to Power

A New Kind of Tyranny: The Global State’s War on Those Who Speak Truth to Power

By John W. Whitehead

November 05, 2019

“What happens to Julian Assange and to Chelsea Manning is meant to intimidate us, to frighten us into silence. By defending Julian Assange, we defend our most sacred rights. Speak up now or wake up one morning to the silence of a new kind of tyranny. The choice is ours.” 

—John Pilger, investigative journalist

All of us are in danger.

In an age of prosecutions for thought crimes, pre-crime deterrence programs, and government agencies that operate like organized crime syndicates, there is a new kind of tyranny being imposed on those who dare to expose the crimes of the Deep State, whose reach has gone global.

The Deep State has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on truth-tellers.

Activists, journalists and whistleblowers alike are being terrorized, traumatized, tortured and subjected to the fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics employed by the superpowers-that-be.

Take Julian Assange, for example.

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks—a website that published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources—was arrested on April 11, 2019, on charges of helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning access and leak more than 700,000 classified military documents that portray the U.S. government and its military as reckless, irresponsible and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among the leaked Manning material were the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).

The Collateral Murder leak included gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.

This is morally wrong.

---

It shouldn’t matter which nation is responsible for these atrocities: there is no defense for such evil perpetrated in the name of profit margins and war profiteering.

In true Orwellian fashion, however, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.

Since his April 2019 arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S., where if convicted, he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.

Whatever is being done to Assange behind those prison walls—psychological torture, forced drugging, prolonged isolation, intimidation, surveillance—it’s wearing him down.

In court appearances, the 48-year-old Assange appears disoriented, haggard and zombie-like.

“In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law,” declared Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture.

It’s not just Assange who is being made to suffer, however.

Manning, who was jailed for seven years from 2010 to 2017 for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, was arrested in March 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury about Assange, placed in solitary confinement for almost a month, and then sentenced to remain in jail either until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury’s 18-month term expires.

Federal judge Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia also fined Manning $500 for every day she remained in custody after 30 days, and $1,000 for every day she remains in custody after 60 days, a chilling—and financially crippling—example of the government’s heavy-handed efforts to weaponize fines and jail terms as a means of forcing dissidents to fall in line.

This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.

Make no mistake: the government is waging war on journalists and whistleblowers for disclosing information relating to government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.

Yet while this targeted campaign—aided, abetted and advanced by the Deep State’s international alliances—is unfolding during President Trump’s watch, it began with the Obama Administration’s decision to revive the antiquated, hundred-year-old Espionage Act, which was intended to punish government spies, and instead use it to prosecute government whistleblowers.

Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has not merely continued the Obama Administration’s attack on whistleblowers. It has injected this war on truth-tellers and truth-seekers with steroids and let it loose on the First Amendment.

In May 2019, Trump’s Justice Department issued a sweeping new “superseding” secret indictment of Assange—hinged on the Espionage Act—that empowers the government to determine what counts as legitimate journalism and criminalize the rest, not to mention giving “the government license to criminally punish journalists it does not like, based on antipathy, vague standards, and subjective judgments.”

Noting that the indictment signaled grave dangers for freedom of the press in general, media lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr., warned, “The indictment would criminalize the encouragement of leaks of newsworthy classified information, criminalize the acceptance of such information, and criminalize publication of it.”

Boutrous continues:

[I]t doesn’t matter whether you think Assange is a journalist, or whether WikiLeaks is a news organization. The theory that animates the indictment targets the very essence of journalistic activity: the gathering and dissemination of information that the government wants to keep secret. You don’t have to like Assange or endorse what he and WikiLeaks have done over the years to recognize that this indictment sets an ominous precedent and threatens basic First Amendment values…. With only modest tweaking, the very same theory could be invoked to prosecute journalists for the very same crimes being alleged against Assange, simply for doing their jobs of scrutinizing the government and reporting the news to the American people.

We desperately need greater scrutiny and transparency, not less.

Indeed, transparency is one of those things the shadow government fears the most. Why? Because it might arouse the distracted American populace to actually exercise their rights and resist the tyranny that is inexorably asphyxiating their freedoms.

This need to shed light on government actions—to make the obscure, least transparent reaches of government accessible and accountable—was a common theme for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who famously coined the phrase, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Writing in January 1884, Brandeis explained:

Light is the only thing that can sweeten our political atmosphere—light thrown upon every detail of administration in the departments; light diffused through every policy; light blazed full upon every feature of legislation; light that can penetrate every recess or corner in which any intrigue might hide; light that will open up to view the innermost chambers of government, drive away all darkness from the treasury vaults; illuminate foreign correspondence; explore national dockyards; search out the obscurities of Indian affairs; display the workings of justice; exhibit the management of the army; play upon the sails of the navy; and follow the distribution of the mails.

Of course, transparency is futile without a populace that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law.

For this reason, it is vital that citizens have the right to criticize the government without fear.

After all, we’re citizens, not subjects. For those who don’t fully understand the distinction between the two and why transparency is so vital to a healthy constitutional government, Manning explains it well:

When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … I believe that when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship. There is a bright distinction between citizens, who have rights and privileges protected by the state, and subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.

Manning goes on to suggest that the U.S. “needs legislation to protect the public’s right to free speech and a free press, to protect it from the actions of the executive branch and to promote the integrity and transparency of the US government.”

Technically, we’ve already got such legislation on the books: the First Amendment.

The First Amendment gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.

The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.

Almost 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Washington Post Co. to block the Nixon Administration’s attempts to use claims of national security to prevent The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing secret Pentagon papers on how America went to war in Vietnam.

As Justice William O. Douglas remarked on the ruling, “The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

Almost 50 years later, with Assange being cast as the poster boy for treason, we’re witnessing yet another showdown, which pits the people’s right to know about government misconduct against the might of the military industrial complex.

Yet this isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.

Following the current downward trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” is relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

Eventually, we will all be potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government

Partisan politics have no place in this debate: Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.

We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

Be warned: this quintessential freedom won’t be much good to anyone if the government makes good on its promise to make an example of Assange as a warning to other journalists intent on helping whistleblowers disclose government corruption.

Once again, we find ourselves reliving George Orwell’s 1984, which portrayed in chilling detail how totalitarian governments employ the power of language to manipulate the masses.

In Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”

Much like today’s social media censors and pre-crime police departments, Orwell’s Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the other government agencies peddle in economic affairs (rationing and starvation), law and order (torture and brainwashing), and news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda).

Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—our backs are to the walls.

From this point on, we have only two options: go down fighting, or capitulate and betray our loved ones, our friends and ourselves by insisting that, as a brainwashed Winston Smith does at the end of Orwell’s 1984, yes, 2+2 does equal 5.

As George Orwell recognized, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

WC: 2270

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

PT -- John W. Whitehead -- Cuidado com o Mal Progressivo no nosso Meio

Cuidado com o Mal Progressivo no nosso Meio

por John W. Whitehead

Outubro 29, 2019

 “Vêem-nos na rua. Observam-nos na TV. Podem até votar num deles, neste Outono. Vocês consideram que são pessoas como vós. Estão errados. Completamente errados. ”

- They Live (Eles Vivem)

Estamos a viver em dois mundos, vocês e eu.

Existe o mundo que vemos (ou que somos feitos para ver) e, a seguir, há aquele que sentimos (e, ocasionalmente, vislumbramos), o último dos quais é completamente diferente da realidade impulsionada pela propaganda fabricada pelo governo e pelos seus patrocinadores corporativos/empresariais, incluindo a comunicação mediática.

De facto, o que a maioria dos americanos percebe como vida - privilegiada, progressista e livre - nos Estados Unidos, está muito longe da realidade, onde a desigualdade económica está a aumentar, as agendas verdadeiras e o poder incontestável estão enterrados sob camadas de linguagem orwelliana incompreensível e de obscurecimento corporativo indecifrável e a “liberdade” tal como ela é, é administrada em pequenas doses de acordo com a lei, pela polícia militarizada e armada até aos dentes.

Nem tudo é o que parece.

Este é o argumento do filme They Live, de John Carpenter, lançado há mais de 30 anos e permanece, irritante e assustadoramente apropriado, para a nossa era moderna.

Mais conhecido pelo seu filme de terror Halloween, que assume que existe uma forma do mal tão sombria que não pode ser morta, a produção total de Carpenter está imbuída de uma forte inclinação lacónica anti-autoritária, anti-establishment, que fala das preocupações do cineasta sobre o desenrolar da nossa sociedade e, particularmente, do nosso governo.

Carpenter retrata, frequentemente, o governo a agir contra os seus próprios cidadãos, uma população fora de contacto com a realidade, com a tecnologia descontrolada e perigosa e um futuro mais horrível do que qualquer filme de terror.

Em Escape from New York, Carpenter apresenta o fascismo como o futuro da América.

Em The Thing, uma  reconstituição do clássico de ficção científica de 1951 do mesmo nome, Carpenter pressupõe que, cada vez mais, todos nós estamos a desumanizar-nos.

Em Christine, o filme da adaptação da novela de Stephen King sobre um carro possuído pelo demónio, a tecnologia exibe vontade e consciência próprias e entra numa violência assassina.

Em The Mouth of Madness, Carpenter observa que o mal cresce quando as pessoas perdem “a capacidade de reconhecer a diferença entre a realidade e a fantasia”.

E depois existe o They Live de Carpenter, no qual dois trabalhadores migrantes descobrem que o mundo não é o que parece. De facto, a população está a ser controlada e explorada por estrangeiros que trabalham em parceria com uma elite oligárquica. Habitualmente, a população - felizmente inconsciente da verdadeira programação em acção nas suas vidas - tem sido embalada com suavidade, doutrinada em conformidade, bombardeada com distracções da comunicação mediática e hipnotizada através de mensagens subliminares transmitidas pela televisão e por vários dispositivos electrónicos, bem como através de cartazes de propaganda em lugares públicos e dispositivos semelhantes.

Somente quando o vagabundo sem abrigo, John Nada (interpretado ao extremo pelo falecido Roddy Piper) descobre um par de óculos de sol sofisticados - lentes Hoffman – é que Nada vê o que está por trás da realidade fabricada pela elite: o controlo e a escravidão.

Quando vista através das lentes da verdade, a elite, que parece humana até ser despida dos seus disfarces, mostra serem monstros que escravizaram os cidadãos para atacá-los.

Da mesma forma, cartazes de propaganda em lugares públicos emitem mensagens ocultas e que exprimem autoridade: uma mulher de biquíni num anúncio está realmente a exigir que os espectadores “CASEM E REPRODUZAM”. As prateleiras das revistas gritam “CONSUMAM” e “OBEDEÇAM”. Um maço de notas de dólar nas mãos de um vendedor proclama, “ESTE É O VOSSO DEUS.”

Quando vistas através das lentes de John Nada, algumas das outras mensagens ocultas a ser marteladas no subconsciente das pessoas incluem: NÃO TENHAM NENHUM PENSAMENTO INDEPENDENTE, CONFORMEM-SE, SUBMETAM-SE, PERMANEÇAM ADORMECIDOS, COMPREM, VEJAM TV, NÃO USEM A IMAGINAÇÃO e NÃO QUESTIONEM A AUTORIDADE.

John W. Whitehead -- Beware the Growing Evil in Our Midst

Beware the Growing Evil in Our Midst

by John W. Whitehead

October 29, 2019

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” 

— They Live

We’re living in two worlds, you and I.

There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.

All is not as it seems.

This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released more than 30 years ago, and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.

Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.

Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.

In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.

In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.

In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.

In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”

And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.

Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”

When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.