Caitlin Johnstone Denounces ‘Fictional Claim’ Behind Nuclear War Drive

Oct. 17, 2022 (EIRNS)—In her Oct. 14 article “We’re Being Pushed Toward Nuclear War on a Fiction: Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix,” available on her website caitlinjohnstone.com (and reprinted on Oct. 15 on Consortium News), Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone issues a powerful call for people to dare to act, to stand up to the warmongers who are driving the world “toward nuclear war on the completely fictional claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a Hitler-like megalomaniac who’s just invading countries completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom and won’t stop invading and conquering until he’s stopped by force.”

She charges, the news media are lying and not “telling people about the western aggressions which led to this war. They’re not telling people the U.S. is keeping this war [in Ukraine] going with the stated goal of weakening Russia and is rejecting peace talks and refusing to push for peace.” To participate in the madness of the fictional account of reality and the drive to war “is indefensible. It is indefensibly immoral to foist a fiction version of events upon a trusting populace in order to manufacture consent for more and more aggressive acts of brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower. These people are depraved.”

Johnstone uses to good effect the intervention made against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by LaRouche movement organizers José Vega and Kynan Thistlethwaite, to prove her point that “warmongers don’t really like being called warmongers when they support a U.S. proxy war that was deliberately provoked by the U.S. and is being sustained by the funding and facilitation of the U.S.” As a matter of fact, she says, those warmongers “get very upset when you point out that they are doing this, and when people’s opposition to their warmongering is described as ‘anti-war.’ ”

As an example, she includes the tweet of one Matt Duss, who happens to be a foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders, who complained about the intervention that “calling this deranged nonsense ‘antiwar’ is giving it way too much credit.” The whole thread of 150 replies to Duss’s remarks can be accessed in the tweet.

So, Johnstone tells her readers, “don’t think that your criticisms of U.S. warmongering makes no difference; if they didn’t, the empire wouldn’t work so hard to dissuade you from making them.” That empire works hard to keep people in a “propaganda-induced coma,” she asserts, so it’s crucial to circulate ideas and information “which discredit and dispute that propaganda” because it directly threatens that empire. “Your one tweet, video or public demonstration may not bring down the empire, but it will spread awareness.”

The greatest nightmare that rulers have, she explains, is that the masses will get sick of their rule and

“use the power of their numbers to get rid of them. That’s what the propaganda matrix is designed to prevent. The empire depends on keeping its activities obfuscated and unseen while we’re all working to make its machinery visible and transparent. That’s why Julian Assange is in prison. It’s also why internet censorship keeps ramping up, why propaganda is getting more and more blatant.... Those in power are working against the people to keep things dark and unseen.”