How we came to be ruled by Death Eaters

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Heather Marsh

There are two primary methods of coercion used to enforce societal norms. The most visible is hard coercion, apparent in militias and police as well as courts, prisons, and institutional force of all kinds. The far more powerful form, without which the hard coercion would not be tolerated, is seductive coercion.

Seductive coercion comes in two forms. The first is used to create society and involves social acceptance and approval as motivators. This form of seductive coercion produces love, loyalty, and other forms of social bonding.

The second form is used to create hate and enmity and to reject another society, go to war against them or persecute them in another way. This form of coercion uses group affiliation, fear, dehumanizing propaganda and dissociation.

There are well known, although poorly understood, hormonal responses which help build both hate and love. Both are intense responses to others which are dependent on some shared experience, even if only through propaganda. Often the most intense hate is produced in the same populations which formerly experienced the most intense love, such as in civil wars or familial breakups.

Both hate and love and the lesser emotions around them are measures of social approval. In the past, all societies used an approval economy to measure acceptance or shunning of each other. Acceptance was not simply an emotional boost, it was inclusion into the social circle which allowed access to essentials of life such as shared food, shelter and procreation. Rejection by shunning was very frequently a death sentence or at least condemnation to an extremely difficult, stressful and shortened life. At best it would mean starting all over again by trying to gain acceptance into a new society.

Dissociation

In order to create the dissociated ponzi schemes of power currently governing society, human relationships had to be replaced with the trade economy. Trade economy replaced societal approval with approval based on each person’s ability to be of service to the powerful. The trade economy eventually interrupted almost all social relationships and replaced them with industry. Social approval was replaced with currency to the point that a person’s worth is now commonly given as a currency value. Currency is a powerful seductive tool because it allows acceptance into the most privileged spots of all societies with no effort required to gain social approval or accept the norms and values of the society.

In those cultures where women and children had autonomy, patriarchy had to be instilled at the family level as the essential building block to patriarchal governance. As the trade economy created waged labour only for those who were serving the wealthy and left community and family service unpaid, women were placed at a huge disadvantage under the trade economy and made to rely solely on a father or husband for the currency which had become social approval. The marriage partnership became dissociated and turned into a master-slave or employer-employee relationship instead of one built on mutual social approval. Matriarchal societies were destroyed as the approval or ability to shun which had been the power of the women in those communities was now worthless and whoever possessed currency needed no one’s approval for societal acceptance.

The industrialization of jobs meant that work is no longer a shared and bonding community experience. The commodification of goods and services has taken sharing and giving out of communities. The state run defence militias claims to remove the need for community solidarity and loyalty. NGOs commodified human empathy, state education commodified respect for community history and tribal knowledge, official government and process dissociated community from governing councils. All of these dissociative structures have removed community bonding experiences.

Cultures which do not greet by kissing and hugging, who handshake (the old greeting to show your enemy you held no weapons) or maintain distance with cold body language, are not producing the hormones necessary to create love and empathy for each other. In a dissociated western world where partners and parents spend little time with each other, much less their community, children are raised in physical bubbles and no one except close family and friends are supposed to touch, it is hard to imagine oxytocin and other hormone levels being socially optimal for bonding. Every transaction of approval, even between parent and child, has sometimes been replaced by an exchange of currency instead of a smile, a hug or a reciprocal gesture of approval. Social shyness and waiting for approval to be gifted has been replaced by taking approval as a right, demanded by all who possess currency. Social shyness is also strongly discouraged by the trade economy which rewards aggression and demands.

Although the exact combination of hormones optimal for bonding is still poorly understood, touch and psychological support are known to be essential for oxytocin production and less oxytocin usually results in more aggression and less caring. Patients with autism and psychiatric disorders have been found to improve with increased oxytocin levels. Cultures with common physical contact such as holding hands or maintaining less personal space, which share community jobs and local jokes and stories and are heavy sharing or gifting cultures, have far more bonding opportunities.

Sex, both social and anti-social

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover … the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. – Aldous Huxley to George Orwell

When waged labour created a class division between men and women, they became rivals and the so-called war of the sexes began or was entrenched. There is a gender divide in coercion, with hard coercion typically considered the power of men due to their physical strength and seductive coercion considered the power of women, both because hard coercion was not usually an option for women and because they were primarily responsible for the care of society during its formative years. There is also a gender divide among sociopaths. Robert Hare estimated seven times more male sociopaths than female and it has been historically easier for male sociopaths to climb to positions of power. There is an even greater predominance of men within sexual sadism disorder which seems to be manifesting in the establishment wide torture and death cults of the UK and elsewhere.

Societies ruled by seductive coercion used talking, councils and shunning, while patriarchy ruled primarily by hard coercion, police, laws and prisons. A patriarchal power structure had to take control of seductive coercion, partly by demonizing and infantilizing women and and partly by perverting seductive coercion for their own uses. Seductive coercion has increasingly become a powerful tool of the sociopathic oligarchy.

One of the most important tools in both social and anti-social seductive coercion is sex. Sex has been used to bond couples for communal support in child rearing, but it has also been used as a weapon of war throughout history. There are evidently two distinct types of sex, one bonding and social and the other extremely anti-social.

Oxytocin, believed to play a significant role in bonding, is produced by physical closeness such as breastfeeding, everyday physical contact, massage, tantric or Taoist sex, non-orgasmic sex, cuddling, relaxation, mental closeness, social acceptance, approval and emotional support.[1] Oxytocin is also produced by stress and orgasm, and while it will help bond allies, it will also increase hatred and a lack of empathy for those perceived as outside the social group.

Rape has gone from a by-product of war to a deliberate strategy of war, whether by militia commanders in the DR Congo telling their fighters that rape will bring them magic powers or by Israel and their constant sexual war imagery and orders for war rape. It is one thing to look at the supposed motives for rape in destroying the targeted population, but we must also look at what is causing large populations of men to obey orders for mass raping and whether it is also being used as a tool to condition them hormonally to dehumanize, kill and torture their enemy. Is rape being used simply as a tool against the victims, or is it being used more to raise the level of hate in the fighter? It is possible that the DR Congo militia’s idea of rape as a tool of war for obtaining magic powers to beat their enemy is closer than the NGOs who describe it as a simple war crime.

Dopamine, is a very powerful hormone associated with addictive substances such as cocaine, mental illness such as schizophrenia, and the release of a reward hormone on learning or experiencing novel stimuli. Novel sexual experience causes a surge in dopamine, but the experience must keep changing which leads to a search for more and more extreme stimuli. After orgasm, dopamine levels plummet, leading to the addictive endless search for ever increasing levels of dopamine. The pornography that is the most popular is that which produces the dopamine highs and crashes and is therefore addictive. That is also the type which requires ever-increasing stimulation to reach the same dopamine levels and produces no bonding hormones. While sexual sadism disorder has probably been with us forever, child abuse and snuff film industries were almost exclusively created, not born.

State and corporate control of women’s sexuality was necessary because it was a powerful coercive tool. Misogyny centres around hatred of coercion, particularly suspected but poorly understood female coercion. From the first ruling of the Catholic Church that sex should be for the purposes of procreation only, sex has been changed from the type that releases bonding hormones to the type that more closely resembles anti-social rape. Non-orgasmic sex, once used for birth control and enjoyment, was decreed sinful by the church and male orgasm became the only point to sex. Sexual contact outside male orgasm was frequently eliminated completely, which would hypothetically greatly reduce the amount of bonding hormones produced between a couple. At the same time, breast feeding was also strongly discouraged and hospitals and other institutions removed infants and children from parental care, reducing familial bonding levels still further.

Heavily dopamine producing sex, from brief encounters with sex workers, rape, pornography, and any other form of ‘hate-sex’ continued and increased as the bonding community and family life was removed. Corporate advertising removed sex progressively farther from a form of approval to a product of the trade economy. Military produced games and movies conflated sex with every form of war and violence as did the news media and the military itself. The UK media call torture, murder and dismemberment of children ‘child sex’ and ‘paedophilia’ as does the UK government’s Child Sex Abuse inquiry. Dissociated populations which no longer produced hormones at community bonding levels were taught to crave dopamine with increasingly violent and risk-taking behaviour, drugs and consumerism.

The same gratification conditioning is fed by addictions of all kinds, from drugs to addictive, harmful, and sometimes anti-social foods. The US military is developing an ‘anti-suicide’ hormonal nasal spray which is suppressing guilt, presumably through suppressing empathy, in militia members who have seen or committed atrocities. It is as ridiculous to deny the importance of stimulus choices in determining our social development as it would be to deny the importance of exercise choices in determining our muscle development. Seductive coercion and behaviour conditioning is present in every aspect of life worldwide. There is nothing at all new in this, it has always been this way. What is new is seductive coercion is now being controlled by an all-pervasive, sociopathic oligarchy who keep both their methods and their goals as state and corporate secrets and remove all choice from the society.

Freedom

“Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.” – Marquis de Sade

The freedom espoused in the rhetoric surrounding both the French and US revolutions was a very anti-social freedom. What began as a rejection of the patriarchy or state, continued as a rejection of society and a promotion of extreme freedom for those best suited to a trade economy. The pursuit of happiness became a right of any who could command it through strength to survive in an economy completely rigged in favour of the small fraternity steering both the French and US revolutions. The hated patriarchy was overthrown and replaced by the fraternity, a decentralized patriarchy without the responsibility inherent in the role. Social approval was necessary for nothing as the fraternity used currency as their dissociated approval to command all of society’s benefits. Social obligation became so dissociated from the now monetized approval that it was left to the charitable intervention of the vilified patriarchal state and fought against alongside the rejection of the state.

The sex life of the Marquis de Sade is a perfect metaphor for the actions of both his compatriots at the Jacobin Club during the Terror and the sociopathic oligarchy of today. De Sade was against the death penalty and insisted no one should ever be found guilty for anything done in the pursuit of pleasure, while his idea of pleasure involved escalating levels of torture and murder of unwilling victims. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness was always intended for the fraternity only, and the rhetoric has never matched the actions toward any outside the fraternity.

In lieu of any other understanding of the nature of the motivations of our current sociopathic oligarchy, it is not unreasonable to expect they get the same gratification from the torture, murder and destruction of their day jobs as the Marquis de Sade did from his pursuit of pleasure. With the revelations of the current ‘child sex’ inquiry into the UK establishment death cult it seems almost certain they do. Those with sexual sadism disorder do not have to indulge in any behaviour that normative people would consider sex, and do not even have to be directly involved in an act, so it is very likely that ordering wars and mass guillotine executions worked just as well for their arousal as individual torture. For those with lesser power, ordering a snuff film would also work. It is impossible to look at the war horrors combined with media sexual imagery and not see the mirror image of the child torture and death cult and media sexualization of it.

The trade economy decreed that all was for sale and everyone has a right to anything they can purchase, with no social obligations. The requirement of approval from society is presented as a horror, social obligation is depicted as robbery. ‘Freedom’ advocates were outraged at the recent #takedownjulienblanc campaign because his anti-social behaviour was restricted by a societal right to associate or not and his currency approval was not enough to buy him acceptance and access to all the privileges of belonging to all the nations in the world.

Instead of researching known contributors to dissociative personality and behaviour, societies are encouraged to embrace dissociated behaviour as ‘diversity’ and ‘freedom’, to look for unconditional acceptance instead of understanding. Any suggestion of understanding or coercing individual behaviour triggers memories of CIA brain-washing, Clockwork Orange, or Thought Reform and produces revulsion in the same populations that accept the extremely coercive and behaviour-modifying death penalty. Talk of open, societal, behaviour coercion is greeted with the same horror that once followed any suggestion of heart or brain surgery. Meanwhile, those same agencies responsible for the earlier state horrors of behaviour modification experiments have progressed to the point that no one even acknowledges their coercive social engineering.

Free will is a deeply cherished myth for many. The idea that free will is real and social auto-coercion is an attack on freedom has allowed seductive coercion to be completely controlled by an invisible corporate oligarchy which modifies everyone’s behaviour through games, food, drugs, media, dissociative structures, anti-social laws, propaganda and more. Social approval has been replaced by currency, control of social coercion has been taken by an invisible oligarchy of intelligence and corporate propagandists, control of mental health has been usurped by those feeding drugs, foods and environmental conditions that cause mental disorders.

In the past, the practice of shunning was sometimes abused and there were always people considered lesser or not accepted into certain societies for reasons most would deem unfair. Any form of coercion that can be influenced by popularity or power is corruptible. Today, people who do not feel welcomed or appreciated by one society should have freedom of movement to join another. Societies which unfairly persecute one of their members are susceptible to being shunned themselves. In OpMaryville, Anonymous retaliated against a community which had shunned a rape victim and her family in favour of her far more locally powerful rapists. The BDS and BlockTheBoat campaigns allow outside nations (independently of states) to shun Israel for their genocidal and apartheid policies. Today we have the ability to provide an instant global appeal court for any individual who feels their rights are being violated by their society.

It is impossible to deny that those in power globally are both sadists and sociopaths. It would not be difficult to manage the world peacefully, with enough resources, autonomy for all and aid in times of disaster. It is not necessary to continue to destroy the environments we live in. The horrific and genocidal big three criminal industries of human, drugs and weapons trafficking are all enabled and run by those in power. It is not enough to replace the sociopaths in power, the system which created them rewards and creates both sadism and sociopathy. Nothing less than a completely new system with new social motivators and norms will remove sadism and sociopathy from the seats of power.

Seductive coercion is a constant in society. To reject social auto-coercion is to accept tyrannical secret coercion.

– – –

Sociopaths, Psychopaths and Death Eaters

Posted on November 23, 2014 by Heather Marsh

It is now an undeniable fact that the UK establishment has, for decades, been run by people who tortured and killed children for entertainment, for political power, and just because they could.

The cognitive dissonance that statement produces in the majority of the population has provided the cloak of invisibility that has kept these people in power and their actions unpunished for all these years. When faced with an undeniable proof of any part of this, people’s shock was easily comforted by soothing assurances that the person was only one, that no one around him had been aware, that this would be taken care of. The idea of a society of torturing murderers, openly known to each other, controlling not just the UK but embedded in the upper echelons of many (if not all) countries was the stuff of conspiracy websites, those prolific disseminators of unbelievable truths well mixed with repellant bigotry and obvious falsehoods, presented as a whole to discredit all ingredients. Human trafficking is the largest criminal industry in the world. It is far less reasonable to believe it is conducted without the full knowledge and co-operation of those in power, but the power of deeply anti-social behaviour is how unwilling anyone is to believe another human is capable of it.

The propaganda arm of this international ring of torturers which attempted to normalize abuse of children and babies as ‘sex’ is still very apparent in the corporate media coverage of the CSA inquiry which depicts the torture and murder of children as “sex attacks on kids”, “child sex” or a “sex scandal”. Sex is not an attack. This is not sex. The fact that these people tortured and murdered children in their recreational hours does not make them simply pedosadists, or what corporate media still likes to call pedophiles in acquiescence to PIE’s demands that they be depicted as ‘child-lovers’. Their recreation may have revolved around torturing children, but their office hours as UK media and government establishment revolved around torture and mass murder of people from all demographics. It is not sufficient to call them psychopaths or sociopaths since very few of those seriously harm others and almost none to this extent. These people who want to be known as child lovers are death eaters. They feed on the agony of others. They torture and murder not because they have to, but because it feeds something in them. The only reason they are attracted to children is the increase in pain, horror, power, and taboo. They are no less attracted to mass slaughter than they are to the torture of children.

Sociopaths are attracted by what repels others. They seek filth, horror and destruction. Using the torture of children as bait to blackmail political opponents is a natural act for death eaters, as is destroying populations with ‘drug wars’ and ‘terrorism’ or using the slaughter of populations to advertise the weapons industry. People are products in the trade economy, and if death eaters are in control, people are their products to use as they wish. They are presiding over the destruction of the planet and beating back any who try to stop them because mass destruction is a compulsion for them.

The attempt to conflate torture and murder with sex is not unique to the UK establishment. “Our definition of sexy was something like Khadr.” said the man who decided to prosecute a tortured child. Militias in the DR Congo are promised magic power from raping women. Israel uses sexual imagery to promote the destruction of Palestine and rape is a constant in wars, torture, imprisonment, everywhere death eaters act. Death eaters gain power by manipulation of others. Hard coercion such as the control of military and police is theirs when they gain power, but until they have attained it they rely on seductive coercion. An insistence on hard coercion to control society is a denial of the power of seductive coercion. Conflation of torture and murder with sex is a perversion of that power. An attempt to depict deeply anti-social acts as sexual freedom is an attempt to normalize deeply anti-social behaviour.

Death eaters are not child lovers. Torture and murder are not a sex scandal. Sex is not an attack. Seductive coercion is used to create society. Its use in dissociated populations to incite acts of violence is a perversion of its power used against society.

Societal auto-immune disease

In industrialized states sociopathy is not only normal, it is normative. Industrialized society is the replacement of human relationships with corporations where people are products and human need is industry. To be dissociated from the approval economy is to be dissociated from society. A trade economy consists of sociopaths connected only by money. Antisocial personality is a natural trait of anyone who climbs to the top of a ponzi scheme built on systems of dissociation. Sociopaths cannot relate to others as human. They see them as products, the perfect outlook for success in the predatory trade economy.

Most definitions now define psychopaths as those born dissociated, and sociopaths as those created (and both categories are best used only for sweeping generalizations which this is). While psychopaths have always been with us, dissociated populations are producing sociopaths in unprecedented numbers. Huge populations of sociopaths and apathetics are necessary for death eaters to survive in power. ‘Shh, we need to torture children for your safety,’ say the death eaters and the sociopathic and apathetic public nods and turns away. Without the disinterested and complicit buffer, nothing would save the death eaters from the torches and pitchforks of those at the bottom.

Antisocial personality is a societal auto-immune disease. It manifests as the most obvious horrors in society. Self-identified narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths generally would like theirs to be an accepted part of the spectrum of human behaviour, as PIE lobbied to have abusing babies an accepted ‘liberation’ in the 70s. Trying to divert focus from their anti-social behaviour to a discussion on sexual orientation is part of their continual efforts to normalize their behaviour or at least to divert attention to understanding for them instead of protection for their victims. Depicting action against them as a feminist attack on male normative sexuality is an appeal for both sympathy and broad acceptance and a dismissal of the existence of their victims.

If anti-social behaviour was widely accepted, society would not exist (as it largely does not today) and human and most other life on earth would not survive much longer. It is not logical to accept self-destruction as a normal part of society or evolution. We cannot kill sociopathy, it is part of us. Like cancer, it will probably always be a part of us in small amounts and it would be very unwise to attempt to eliminate it entirely. Humanity cannot divide neatly into these categories, and there are a variety of factors that cause dissociated behaviour, all ‘normal’ but all unacceptable in a society that wishes to continue existence.

The UK media depiction of the subjects of the so-called Child Sexual Abuse inquiry as paedophiles is a very deliberate propaganda exercise and attempt to manipulate public opinion. People who rape, torture and murder are not child lovers. The victims of these people were not only children. The phrase ‘paedophile’ brings the focus from the vicim to their assailant, and the pseudo-medical op-eds claim a right for understanding for death eaters, not the children. The use of the word paedophile individualizes the problem and is an attempt to pretend there are a ‘few bad apples’ instead of an entire ruling society complicit in the cover up and normalization of the torture and murder of others.

Societies do have the right to shun those who seek to destroy them. This fairly obvious principle has been perverted beyond all recognition by states who use it as an excuse to destroy others as they have perverted every other personal right to endorse corporate tyranny. States are highly militarized economic markets, not societies. Societies can shun harmful and anti-social behaviour in all forms, whether it is normal or not, as we do every day in all of our social norms. We do not need to build society according to an anti-social structure or create society that feeds anti-social behaviour at the top of the power structure. We do not need to accept death eaters as child lovers. We do not need to accept their hopeful norms in our coercive media propaganda.

Societies have the right to associate or to refuse to associate.

This article has been stigmergicly translated into French and Spanish.

A mythical Manichean world

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Heather Marsh

“I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil.” ― Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands With The Devil

In Shake Hands with the Devil, Romeo Dallaire, former head of the UN mission to Rwanda, described shaking hands with commanders of the Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 Tutsi genocide. He felt he was in the presence of evil, or, to his Christian outlook, the devil. When faced with incomprehensible savagery it is hard to find human nature behind it and natural to look for some invisible hand of evil. The same outlook is understandable to some in west African countries, where the leaders have for years been suspected of complicity in ritual killings, or torturing their own citizens and using their body parts as amulets for power. Compulsory membership of politicians in certain Masonic lodges and the undeniable power and wealth wielded by the powerful, support both the cult rumours and the presumed effectiveness of evil forces being invoked. These so-called powers are also sought by some militias.

If a person is thought to embody evil in themselves, the person is demonized in the eyes of the other. Once a large group has designated another entire group as evil, actions no longer matter. The ensuing war will have nothing to do with good actions and bad actions and everything to do with one side exterminating the other. Those facing the side designated as evil are then depicted as Good, and any behaviour of theirs will be justified thereafter as can be seen in the excuses made for Rwanda actions even today. Some groups can carry their indestructible Good status in the face of all evidence of their actions for generations and against completely different opponents, as we see with Israel and the fact that they still have defenders justifying their ‘right’ to torment and murder others.

Countries that have had an acknowledged atrocity are much more self aware and able to recognize and stop new ones. If an atrocity is outside the Overton window of what a people will believe about themselves they will deny it happened or ignore it. For Canadians, the pull of the manufactured self-image of ‘nice’ is too attractive to confront, even when faced with human rights and environmental disasters Canada is responsible for worldwide. To acknowledge that global mining atrocities are a fundamental part of Canada, that a Canadian child has now been tortured and imprisoned for the thirteenth year, that these actions cannot be blamed on one government but are part of Canada itself, is an attack on their self-image that many Canadians refuse to face. The US was previously the same with their acceptance of ‘freedom’ propaganda and their refusal to see their own police state as anything but protection.

A good guy / bad guy, personality based morality is very helpful for any who wish to wage wars or destroy the lives of others. No one has to think, just identify the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, be for the one, beware the other. We really don’t need legions of security analysts, militaries and intelligence to sort out Good Guys from Bad Guys. Bad Guys are destroying, killing, enslaving and robbing, Good Guys are creating, researching and caring for others. Bad Guys are capable of becoming Good Guys as soon as they stop the actions harmful to society and start the ones helpful to society.

The myth of free will and the myth of equality

I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter. – Ishmael Beah

In order to designate someone as evil and deserving of any horror that the powerful wish to inflict on them, they must be held personally responsible for the actions of themselves and their ‘side’. In order to hold people personally responsible even for their own actions, the public must believe they had free will, something that does not exist. The idea of personal responsibility also depends on an assumption that people have equal access to information and the ability to process it. Propaganda and coercion which comes from the top is denied and blame is cast to those at the bottom who acted upon it. The propaganda masters convince the public that the weak-minded and the vulnerable must take responsibility for acting as the zombie army of the powerful who are absolved of responsibility.

For punishment to be applied equally to all, the public must believe that all are equal, which is also false. The myth of equality is essential for sustaining this binary outlook and careful censoring of information is essential to maintaining the myth of equality. ‘Hamas is evil, bomb Gaza’ cannot stand in the face of relentless social media pictures of babies, beautiful children and wonderful people well-known to the online community being blown up by Israel. ‘Boko Haram is evil, Nigeria military should kill them all’ is shocked by images of little boys fighting and being killed on both sides or Nigeria military torturing a little girl working for Boko Haram. Hillary Clinton deplores the loss of imperial control over information and Netanyahu bitterly calls his victims “telegenically dead“. The old media control which depicted all enemies of militias as adult men with guns was essential to justify any war.

We have a tendency to think of our villains as geniuses or assume they at least have the ability to predict the outcome of their actions but for those filling prisons and dying in wars that is not always the case.

While most people recognize the ability to rehabilitate child soldiers, what of those who are not rehabilitated? If they do not bear responsibility as children, why does the responsibility for their formation descend upon them as adults? How can anyone presume to know what has happened to the mind of anyone who has lived completely different experiences than them and possesses a completely different mind?

If it is agreed that charges should only be applied to criminals who have attained a certain standard of cognitive ability, why is the same penalty applied to all at that point? If the spectrum of ability and advantage continues above the line labeled competent, should the penalties not be a corresponding spectrum? If they must attain a standard of cognitive ability, why are moral imbeciles judged by the same standards as the socially normative? Why is sociopathy not recognized as a mental illness if insanity is? What if sociopathy is a physical disease? What of those with fetal alcohol syndrome and other forms of physical brain damage that currently fill prisons and militias?

The role of drugs in convincing militias to commit atrocities and overcome guilt is seldom reported. Not only non-state militias employ drugs, the US military even has a follow up anti-guilt nasal spray to prevent troops from feeling natural remorse.

Not all opponents are worthy of hate.

Social auto-coercion

Few believe that all of their own ancestors should have been wiped out, but everyone has ancestors who displayed what we like to call inhuman characteristics. Why do we believe they are absolved from the personal responsibility we bear today if not because we accept the power of social coercion and social norms? If social coercion and social norms applied in the past, why is their power denied today? The US government acknowledged the power of seductive coercion with what they cynically called the battle for hearts and minds in Iraq. They of all people understand coercion and knew that their actions would have the opposite affect.

Any suggestion of deliberate social auto-coercion is met with howls from free will advocates, especially from the US, that bastion of personal freedoms perverted to suit corporate ends. Every intelligence agency in the world, all corporations and all militaries constantly manipulate public norms and behaviour, but an attempt for a community to regain control is depicted (by corporate media) as an attack on freedom and autonomy instead of the assertion of it.

People can somehow become convinced that if we only kill enough people, inherent goodness will shine from the survivors. In the end, we can’t kill enough people to make the world a kinder gentler place. We have proven enough times that there is no time and place immune to an outbreak of human savagery. UN peacekeeping is incompetent, political, and after the fact. We need societies resilient to violence. In the end we will need to understand each other and use social auto-coercion as we do after the horrors of every war in order to return to normal life. We need to start using it before the outbreak of any violence, not to stop Bad Guys but to stop bad actions. Instead of spending vast sums tracking individuals and their connections in the search for Bad Guys, we need to strengthen social auto-coercion and fight the coercion coming from sociopathic power.

For those who insist societies will never function without military and police hard coercion, societies worldwide did, very well. For those, usually the same people, who insist that seductive coercion is immoral, seductive coercion is what creates a society out of a group of disconnected people. For those who do not believe that coercion ought to be in the hands of the people, coercion ought never to be anywhere else. The only way to prevent coercion by a secret oligarchy is to use it as community.

“If we don’t harness their potential for good, their societies will continue to reap their capacity for evil.” ― Roméo Dallaire, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

—

Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands With The Devill: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003)

Ishmael Beah, Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007)

Roméo Dallaire, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children (2010)

This article has been stigmergicly translated into French.

The revolutionaries

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Heather Marsh

The last shall be the first and the first last. – Frantz Fanon

The objective of a revolutionary is to keep everything exactly as it was but replace those in power with themselves, to become what they hate, to gain the approval of those they despise. The mark of a successful revolutionary is recognition and acceptance into the circles of oppressors.

A typical revolutionary is driven by a desire for justice and no imagination. They can see injustice, they see oppressors and oppressed, and they follow the obvious impulse to reverse the two without changing the system that allows for oppression. Revolution almost always sounds like a new system because revolutionaries almost always call themselves The People, or at least The [oppressed category] People, but in practice there is no change. Revolution follows a Good Guy / Bad Guy, Manichean morality and the goal is to kill all the Bad Guys until there is nothing left but Good Guys. Fanon replaces white with black, Marx replaces master with worker, no one replaces the paradigm. Malcolm X and Robert Mugabe desired a perfect negative image of the apartheid state. Feminists celebrate ‘what women have achieved’ along their path to be exactly like caucasian men.

A revolutionary outlook is binary. They see themselves, as they are usually elite or part of the large, cohesive block of powerful commoners required to keep the ruling class in power, and they see the ruling class. Anyone else is outside their consideration and will remain so. “I know nothing about her,” [1] says Fanon of indigenous African women as he derides the work where they detail their experience and describes the revolutionary desire to be a white woman’s master. Marx sees those below the proletariat and calls them “The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.” [2] When Marx speaks of the abolition of class, he means the abolition of all class except the proletariat.

Since people are never binary, revolutionary theory almost immediately has to start addressing the classification problem, who is black, who is white, who is bourgeoise or proletariat, who is male or female, and the rush to be at the extreme end of your side creates a new class war within the class war. If the last shall be first, the almost last have a new fight to be last. “Since the sole motto of the bourgeoisie is “Replace the foreigner,” … the “small people” of the nation… will be equally quick to insist that the Dahomans go home to their own country, or will even go further and demand that the Foulbis and the Peuhls return to their jungle or their mountains”[3]

If, as Fanon said, “The black man wants to be white”[1] then the justice sought is a very personal justice, for themselves only as Malcolm X proposed in his desire for a new black state within the US which would leave indigenous and others as unseen as always. Colonized revolutionaries seek to decolonize by becoming the colonizers as women seek to end subjection to men by entering masculinist establishment. Even if they have no wish to enslave their former masters, the revolutionary oppressed wish to master someone, to sit atop the patriarchy, to claim their turn as a matter of justice. As long as the paradigm remains, it matters not at all if those on top become the former oppressed, they are just branch managers for the empire and oppression continues uninterrupted. In no way did it make the world a better place or change the paradigm for the better to have Barack Obama as Commander in Chief of the world’s largest military or Condoleeza Rice as US Secretary of State. In no way did women holding 56% of the seats in Rwanda’s parliament, or having Louise Mushikiwabo, as Rwanda’s Minister of Foreign Affairs & Cooperation, make Rwanda a kinder, gentler state. In the end, the problems were not tied to gender, race or class, but to the paradigm itself.

In the middle of a revolutionary frenzy it is unwise to point out that oppressed may become oppressors as they are the Good Guys who must never be accused of wrongdoing, but we really don’t need any more Israels or Rwandas to prove the point. ‘You can’t be racist/sexist against the oppressor!’ shrieks the illogic from the revolutionary top, and any who question it are condemned as reactionary, racist and sexist regardless of their race or sex. Those lower in the revolutionary ponzi scheme of power are permitted be part of the revolution only by exact adherence to the utterances of power. Deviance is dangerous in a binary world.

Since the new power wants to be exactly like the old power, continuing revolutions have created a world where everyone of every race and gender strove to prove they were the same as powerful caucasian men. A world where everyone sought the top of the ponzi schemes of power, celebrity and wealth, where their desperate effort towards the centre created the centripetal force that kept the Great Men in power, that upheld the ponzi scheme of empire for all these years. Everyone is defined in relation to the caucasian man of power. It is the revolutionaries as much as the reactionaries that refuse to let the old system go.

A dual spotlight and those in the shadows

The history of revolution is the history of Great Men overthrowing Great Men. The revolutionary stories of oppression tell of the oppressiveness of unsated envy and covetousness. The glory that follows these revolutions is the glory of the new Great Man. Unheard forever are those condemned to just get on with it, the so-called lumpenproles who are understandably disinterested in who is currently atop the ponzi scheme they have no entrance to.

Fanon overlooked completely the effect of European patriarchy meeting matriarchal societies and what that did to class relations between men and women. He exhaustively examines European attraction to African indigenous men but he speaks not at all of any attraction to African indigenous women despite admitting almost all mixed race children had indigenous mothers. He attributes European fear of the African to a repressed homosexuality in the men and a desire to be raped in the women, but finds no such cause in the Antilleans fear of the Senegalese. Everything pivots around the point at which he exists. His myopic, binary gaze at the balance of power between African and European in a patriarchy disregarded the imposition of the patriarchy in the first place. Fanon described men who wished to overthrow other men and sit in their place.

Marx ignored the fact that his proletariats were part of a system of dissociation that recognized as workers only those who served the powerful, not those who served the weak or themselves. He also wanted to overthrow the oppressor without acknowledging the first oppressed or the true size of the oppressive structure itself. His ambition to flip the proletariat with their masters required that autonomous individuals be locked in an even more solid and cohesive block of commoners than before. His failure to recognize the block of commoners as a creation of oligarchy caused him and all communists after to strengthen the club which held oligarchy in place.

Engels felt women lost their social power due to their loss of property ownership[4] instead of seeing that property ownership was created to remove their social power. The masculinist lens of Engels and Morgan was used to reinterpret matriarchal indigenous cultures as communist, as societies where everyone was assigned property and a place in society as birthright instead of as social approval. This owned property and its allocation must then be controlled by a patriarchal power or mini-state. The approval of First Nations women that for generations was essential, was suddenly to be disregarded as men were taught that to be a man meant to humiliate and degrade their own source of approval. The vicious degradation of women in formerly matrilineal societies served to destroy not just the old power but the old structure. Indigenous women were now last, their approval was replaced by control of currency, and colonial government structure was taken over by property thieves both petty and grand. Autonomy for First Nations in Canada now means following a colonial construct of band councils revolving around communist allocation of funds and property in formerly (mostly) moneyless gifting cultures. Management of nations no longer includes the most important authority, acceptance or rejection of individuals from the nation.

A perpetual motion pendulum of revolution

As long as it is people, not actions, which are classified as Good and Evil, we will maintain a perpetual motion pendulum of revolution. As every revolution is a simple reaction to the initial action, they are mirror images. Slave morality is a reaction to master morality, revolutionary militias are a reaction to a police state, feminism is a reaction to masculinism, men with guns are a reaction to men with guns. The centripetal force that creates power also creates the centrifugal force that destroys it. In every case, reactions will become what they destroy.

If you define yourself in relation to your enemy, you’ve lost. You cannot believe armed militias are a solution unless you believe in the worth or inevitability of a police state. You cannot be a Feminist without endorsing the gendered world of the Masculinist. The death penalty for murder reaffirms the right to murder. Mirrored reactions are a result of a lack of imagination to see outside the paradigm we live within. A reaction adds force to the initial action. Overthrow by men with guns will be followed with rule by men with guns. Justice through institutionalized bigotry will result in institutionalized bigotry. “The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity.”[3] We will have equilibrium when we step off the pendulum.

Those that protest the revolution are told they must be reactionaries. Any criticism of the left brutality and you must support the right brutality. Self-professed US anti-imperialists are even more rigid than the imperialists because they discovered the second spotlight and think they’ve seen all that there is. Those that scream for solidarity ‘on the same side’ attempt to hide the fact that a ponzi scheme has no sides, only a top and bottom. They will cling to the messiahs of revolution and support revolutionary ponzi schemes until it becomes absolutely indisputable that the two are one again. As the revolution fights for and wins seats on the same panels and the same international bodies as the reaction, the same dark alliance is formed once more. Empire remains intact.

Revolutionary replacement of authority will co-opt resistance. Revolution looks up not down. It seeks approval and acceptance from the spotlight, not the shadows. Not only does revolution not bring change, it brings progression down the same path and frequently widens the window of acceptable oppression. All revolution has simply entrenched and strengthened the hierarchy of power, all revolutions will need to be followed by more revolutions unless they are immediately replaced with resistance.

Between reaction and revolution there is nothing to choose. Neither leave the track, they just allow different people to drive while the same people are run over.

Revolution fights tyrants, resistance fights tyranny

It is not revolution we need, another turn of the same wheel along the same path, it is resistance. Resistance uses the tyrant’s own power against them rather than strengthening that power by reaction. Resistance fights all forms of oppression and bigotry regardless of source by building and defending a tolerant society. Resistance to patriarchy is not feminism, it is removal of masculinism. Resistance to bigotry is not bigotry, it is diversity and tolerance. Resistance to capitalism is not unions, it is dismantling of the trade economy. It is not enough to weed, a new system must be planted or the old seeds of tyranny will instantly grow again.

Oppressive power of the size in place today will not be removed by the creation of revolutionary power. Even if one chooses to think a new leader would stop the oppression it is no longer in the power of a leader or leaders. Mass disobedience and a refusal to acknowledge the authority of the powerful are the only hope to collapse the current empire.

Anyone who occupies the old places of power in a hierarchical ponzi scheme is an enemy of those below, even if they just fought alongside them and ‘earned’ their place. It is the position that is the enemy and it must be constantly collapsed by a removal of support from every ponzi scheme of celebrity, wealth and power. It is not enough to remove oppressors, the system of oppression must be dismantled.

– – –

[1] Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952

[2] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Das Kommunistische Manifest), 1848

[3] Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre), Grove Press, 1961

[4] Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: in the light of the researches of Lewis H. Morgan (Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats) 1884

This article has been stigmergicly translated into French.

World War III: A state of mind

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Heather Marsh

A continuation of thoughts from World War III: Pillage and plunder. Earlier: World War III: A status update (2014), World War III: A picture (2012), and A Stateless War (2010)

“WHENEVER those states which have been acquired as stated have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three courses for those who wish to hold them: the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you;

but when cities or countries are accustomed to live under a prince, and his family is exterminated, they, being on the one hand accustomed to obey and on the other hand not having the old prince, cannot agree in making one from amongst themselves, and they do not know how to govern themselves. For this reason they are very slow to take up arms, and a prince can gain them to himself and secure them much more easily.” – The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)

The new global empire is possible because recent history and overwhelming media coercion have rendered the majority of the world incapable of self-governance. The populations described in the first paragraph have almost all transitioned through the three recommended coercive structures and they are now the second type which Machiavelli identified as easily controlled from a remote centre. Outside of a very few, very isolated nations, there is no longer anything close to freedom or self-governance anywhere on earth and memories and belief in its possibility have all but been erased.

In the power, wealth and celebrity ponzi schemes that dictate our relations today, conflict is always between the top and the bottom. The only points of conflict between power centres occur when one is absorbing another and these events are not particularly important. The majority of those at the top usually remain there and those at the bottom almost always do. Nationalist rhetoric notwithstanding, it matters not at all whether the headquarters is in Beijing, London, Rome or Cusco if there is no self-governance. The ponzi scheme of power which once upheld the Great Men of Machiavellian city states is now scaled to uphold the first truly global empire, but the principles and players remain the same. The Great Men of oligarchies have always been upheld by a cohesive block of commoners with common goals and fears which can be easily manipulated by those in power.

Thought reform

The crack in the monopoly on education and media has created a surge of independent thought which may finally dissolve the club of cohesive democratic power which has kept Great Men in power for centuries. With no middle class there will be no oligarchy. – Me, Commoners and how they are coerced

In the west, laws supporting freedom of thought, expression and debate once contrasted with the communist constitutions which put ideology ahead of individual thought. Western media and Hollywood were all powerful, allowing the five eyes to use censorship by noise instead of Chinese style censorship by blocking. Freedom of the western corporate press also aided the empire in controlling the governance of foreign states by seductive coercion. Insisting on ‘press freedom’ throughout their empire ensured their influence was impossible to counter. China’s recent investment in media in Africa acknowledges that this is still the case in parts of the world.

Social media has in a few years drastically changed the amount of ideas and the sources which people can be exposed to. All of the anti-US governments in South America were early and heavy users of social media and the US is just catching up with getting their propaganda on social media as dominant as it was in the South American corporate press. Governments around the world are finding that neither their propaganda efforts nor censorship are enough to counter real grass roots movements or to stop ideas which may spread virally on their own. In addition to legislation countering free speech when it appears on social media under the guise of countering ‘trolling’, new forms of blocking which go beyond technology and reach the individual sources of thought are being implemented.

The concept of ‘terrorism’ has been used to justify thought reform globally. While ‘terrorism’ still nebulously relates to an act, the designation of ‘terrorist’ does not and rights can be stripped with no trial or notice based on such a designation. The designation of terrorist can be based simply on group affiliation and terrorism acts now include expression of forbidden thought.

In Canada, terrorism is defined as an act or omission committed “in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause” with the intention of intimidating the public “…with regard to its security, including its economic security, or compelling a person, a government or a domestic or an international organization to do or to refrain from doing any act.”

In the UK, terrorism refers to the use and threat of action “designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public” and “made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.”

In Australia terrorism is “an act or threat, intended to advance a political, ideological or religious cause by coercing or intimidating an Australian or foreign government or the public.”

Unlike the definitions in the US and EU, which include such qualifiers as ‘seriously intimidating’, ‘unduly compelling’ or ‘violation of the criminal laws’, both Canada and the UK have designated any attempt to influence the government, the public, or any section of the public for a political, religious or ideological purpose as terrorism. While you may not go to prison for attempting to persuade your neighbour to boycott Israeli products you can certainly be designated a terrorist, put on a watch list, lose your citizenship rights and possibly be arrested in any state which shares (or steals) intelligence from these governments. Neither do you have to be expressing ideas deemed dangerous to the corporate states, simply listening to them is enough. Criminalizing ideas allows states to declare war against segments of their own population and strip them of citizenship and rights of due process.

Since there is no terrorist act not also committed regularly by the governments of the world, the only thing separating the terrorists from the corporate states is the phrase “for a political, religious or ideological purpose”. State actors commit all the same acts in pursuit of power, celebrity and wealth. Actions taken for personal gain or as a result of following orders are not criminalized, the same acts motivated by social participation and expression of independent thought are.

Laws once focused on actions and a wealthy adult who stole a loaf of bread was to be judged in the exact same manner as a starving child. Recently, the focus has turned to judging the individual and their motivations for an act, allowing extenuating circumstances such as youth, insanity and other personal factors to influence judgements. Now we have progressed to judging motivations without any associated actions. We have attained a state where thoughts alone can be criminal.

Laws have been passed calling all citizens defending themselves or their environment terrorists. The Canadian Minister of Public Safety targets “domestic extremism based on grievances – real or perceived – revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights … environmentalism and anti-capitalism.” Self defence is terrorism. Citizen armies have been replaced by corporate security worldwide and international trade agreements ensure there is no longer any regional authority over regional resources. Refugees whose homes have been destroyed are jailed for migration from places where they are dying. The mass refugee movement caused by corporate plunder is advertised as ‘asylum seeking’ or ‘illegal immigration’. The people corporate terrorism is driving to desperation are those who will help militias designated as terrorists expand, fed by the drugs, weapons and human traffickers.

Terrorists against corporations act for a political, religious or ideological cause. Terrorists against the people act for power, celebrity and wealth. Self-governance includes stewardship and use of the environment and its products by the user group. Any control or ownership outside the user group is enemy occupation, not self-governance.

The motivations designated by corporate states as terrorist are all those leading to resistance from corporate plunder. Wherever we see the corporate hold on seductive coercion weakening and being diluted by other players we also see them increasingly reverting to old methods of hard coercion. The designation of terrorism has been used to allow methods so extreme they were very recently only found in the deep shadows, now openly brought forward to combat those whose thoughts have slipped out from under corporate control. Not only the torture and abuse of individuals but the mass extermination of entire populations through disease, starvation, environmental destruction and war have renewed acceptance among the most powerful.

From the passive aggression of ignoring perfectly foreseeable crises like the Ebola epidemic and starvation in the Sahel to militia wars where corporate powers supply all sides, environmental destruction which crushes all resistance and ongoing genocides such as Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya and Kachin or corporate attacks on the indigenous of Brazil all illustrate what is waiting when seductive coercion fails.

Things are never so bad they can’t get worse.

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.” – The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)

A war on self-governance

This is a war where the populace is kept sickly, ignorant, desperate and above all fearful to keep them from rising up against the military industrial complex. The tools used are drugs (legal and illegal), poor nutrition, environmental hazards, misinformation, blocked access to good information, poverty, stress, crime and, above all, war. The weapons against them will be information, solidarity, good health, great optimism, and mass participation in every aspect of government. – Me, A Stateless War, 2010

Self-governance requires debate and free expression for epistemic communities and others without the risk of being labeled a terrorist and having a bomb dropped on your head. For the first time, we have the communication infrastructure to enable societal auto-coercion and self-governance which can scale globally. The battle for hearts and minds is the only battle that matters and the only war that matters is the one between the oligarchs globally and the people oppressed by them. The most important weapon is global communication and the most important freedom is freedom of thought.

Self-governance is not only possible, it is in all of our societal history. While new structures and methods must certainly be developed to allow society to scale globally when necessary, the basic structure and memory is still there in our history and will still work. The thought reform efforts of the last many years were attempts to erase that memory, to reduce even the basic societal unit of families to trade relationships, to make a trade economy and rule by mafia seem not only logical but inevitable. While corporate control has fought to narrow and hold the public’s Overton window, others of us have fought to move and widen it. The new definitions of terrorism as attempts to influence the government or the public is a war against freedom of thought and auto-coercion by a population, a war against self-governance.

The solid block of common thought necessary to uphold Great Men in seats of power has a natural tendency to disperse and regroup like a true swarm. Coercive power has become more desperate to force this block back into formation as the swarm becomes louder and the points of influence multiply daily. The intelligence agencies of the world are not working for your governance, they are your governance. Corporate power has expended huge energy on identifying those butterflies that may become hurricanes and discrediting and silencing them before they can build. In the end, they will fail and a new structure will emerge. Whether this new structure is built in favour of corporations or people depends on who wins the war of coercion and thought reform.

Related:

Glossary

Binding Chaos
Autonomy, Diversity, Society
Releasing Chaos

World War III: A status update

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Heather Marsh

A continuation of thoughts from World War III: A picture and earlier A Stateless War

Since the above articles in September 2012 and 2010, it has become abundantly clear that none of the world’s governments have any motivation or ability to stand up to the corporate multinational empires headquartered in the countries of the five eyes and their associates. The UN vote in support of Palestine in November of 2012 was a symbolic rebellion, but in the end only proved how ineffective that rebellion would be as Israel instantly paraded their complete contempt for the world’s opinion. As Israel and the US promised, the vote changed nothing on the ground. A relentless stream of new treaties and laws is entrenching the corporate umbrella that now has legal control over the world’s governments. Sovereignty is dead. Corporations are people and people are products.

People no longer accept, or even have any knowledge of, their governance or the laws controlling them. States no longer pretend that laws apply to them. Society worldwide is ruled purely by military coercion. The uprisings which began in 2010 were thoroughly co-opted in early 2011 and used to create unending massacres and division that terrify anyone interested in suggesting change. Government turnover is meaningless in any case as the resource corporations and their security militias and media retain power regardless of political change. We need focus.

Empire on parade

The NSA revelations, like the US state cables before them, proved that things are much worse than we even thought and resistance is more futile. This message has been drummed incessantly in the past years. Since the curtain fell and both sovereignty and governance by the people were proven to be an illusion, there is no longer any pretense of maintaining the illusion. The current propaganda seems instead bent on proving the futility of resistance.

I’ve been writing for the last several years on the empire’s military coming-out in the media and what it says about their progress. We are long past the point where any transparency about military might is intended to result in change, much less reduction or disarmament. Since Obama’s earliest speeches he has been bragging about the “finest fighting force the world has ever seen” and the expansion of its empire. These are not secrets. Like in the Republic of North Korea and every previous empire, the media parade of invincible military might is meant to impress and suppress pretenders to the throne. Julian’s long ago essay on conspiracy has been turned on the people as the NSA and others make activists terrified of voicing dissent much less acting upon it. The message is also for any pretenders from BRICS or elsewhere as the US regime forces the landing of a plane containing a head of state, strip searches a diplomat and spies brazenly on allies.

Complicit military propaganda is presented as brave and daring journalism, somehow achieved with full co-operation from the empire itself. Junta kingpin Erik Prince is not shy of journalists and not at all reticent in proclaiming his allegiance only to himself. These places are not where secrets lie. This pretense of exposing secrets covers for the lack of exposing real secrets: the unheard voices of victims of Shell Oil in the Niger Delta, Areva uranium mining in Khazakstan, Niger, Gabon and elsewhere, the myriad corporate predators of the Amazon, the Kachin and Rohingya people of Myanmar, the silence invariably present wherever the corporate mafia abuses are the most extreme. Noisy debates on government transparency cover the complete lack of debate on corporate transparency. Congratulations on the democratic permeability of circles of government power deflect from the impenetrable circle of corporate power.

When the most silent voices cannot be ignored they are represented by controlled channels through NGOs and media, claiming to speak for those they are really speaking over. With a few truly heroic exceptions, the NGOs selectively report abuses and channel funding to further the aims of their government and corporate funders and enablers. The US funded NGOs in the Amazon seek to disrupt government trade with China and other competitors and rebellious governments co-opt the message for their own NGO partners and shut down the competing voices. Meanwhile, the people affected are unheard and the corporations in one form or another continue their destruction.

As people circumvent their governments to reach past the nationalist othering and connect globally, global Thought Leaders are propped up and paraded around to direct traffic for The Revolution™. They roam the world issuing platitudes of despair and futility straight out of 1984. “They control everything. Resistance is futile. Don’t use Facebook.” ‘They‘ cannot be named as they are bankrolling both the Thought Leaders and their solutions. Ideas become ideology and ideologies are branded and polluted. Opportunists are promoted, realists are co-opted, idealists are frightened and radicals are shot, just as Stratfor taught they should be. When a billionaire as invested in the status quo as Pierre Omidyar says celebrity Thought Leaders are replacing organizations it is as much a command as a statement. Read the playbook. Don’t play.

The world needs real journalism. We are decades, even centuries, behind what we need to know about the people really in power, the corporate shareholders. They must become our new celebrities, the targets of so much gossip we will soon understand their relationships and weaknesses better than we understand those of reality TV stars. These are the people we are fighting, not the figureheads and militias they pay to stand between us.

War is Peace: The year of the aggressive peacekeepers

The 2013 War is Peace initiative saw the creation of the first ‘aggressive peacekeeping’ mandates, one in the Democratic Republic of Congo and one in Mali. It isn’t risking much to predict the same will happen in the Central African Republic and South Sudan. This carries group affiliation to the natural conclusion we saw in the 2006 creation of ‘murder by an unprivileged belligerent in violation of laws of war’ dubbed a war crime by the Guantanamo Military Commissions Act. In 2006, the US decreed that the US military could kill children, but it was a war crime for children to kill US Special Forces commandos. In 2013 the United Nations allowed UN peacekeepers to retain the protection of it being a war crime to kill them while simultaneously allowing them to initiate attacks on those they deem to be a potential (not immediate) threat. Not only has the UN put the right of all legitimate peacekeepers to protection at risk, they have established precedent by which a foreign army can invade and conquer a sovereign state and have citizens tried as war criminals if they resist. The international media has been happy to accept this with no question and obediently report the killing of ‘peacekeepers’ in both Mali and the DRC with no explanation that the definition of that word has been changed to mean its opposite.

UNSC permanent members: United States, Britain, Russia, France, China.

A look at the UN Security Council provides a clue to the escalating violence despite UN attempts to ‘establish peace’. Peace will never be produced by those invested in war. China is the fastest growing arms exporter of the past decade. Canada’s current government was incensed at being refused a seat on the UNSC just as their arms sales soared. Arms dealers are the obvious winners in the current economy. While an international peacekeeping force used at the discretion of the assembly of United Nations may once have seemed a good idea for humanity, the UNSC as run by the global war masters is just good corporate marketing strategy, enabling endless discussions about men with guns killing other men with guns and arguments over which side needs more guns.

Professional militias, weapons dealers and would-be kingpins have hijacked every attempt at governance reform. Particularly, the gates of Libya and Syria were opened and militias and weapons are pouring at an even greater rate into Africa as they have for years into South America. Any thought of protest against most governments is a thought of horrific civil war as drugs, guns, militias, poverty, child soldiers and extremist propaganda are joined in an explosive mix of threatened instability just below every veneer. The gun culture in the United States is greater than anywhere on earth but the military and prison systems of the most industrialized states all retained the ability to obliterate any dissidents too close to home.

The international media and entertainment industries provide non-stop advertising for the arms industry. Every conflict, real or Hollywood, is reported as ‘good guys’ killing ‘bad guys’, an endless parade of men with guns and flashy military equipment with no time for the stories of those working for peace. Men with guns is one of the most boring topics to keep covering as they are always doing the same thing, killing people, but the entire narrative is always men with guns and politicians with an occasional stat about the number of women raped. ‘There are no good guys’ say men reporting on men with guns, apparently unable to see the people illustrating their own report. The propaganda that men with guns can only be defeated by support for other men with guns has eliminated everyone else from negotiations as generals sit down to discuss peace and refuse a seat to anyone not making war. “In Congo, war has been largely fought on women’s bodies,” but power over peace is given to the men who fought. Efforts to build society are ignored or blocked, efforts to destroy it are rewarded with power.

“Guns don’t kill people!” shrieks the industry building autonomous drones. “Drugs kill”, however. Really, it’s all about who is importing and who is exporting. The idea of disarmament for peace now seems quaint and old-fashioned in most of the world, while in the country most dependent on the weapons industry it produces hysterical rage. Militias for peace have been formed all over the world, killing people to save lives. If there was the slightest chance of these weapons disturbing real power they would be abolished immediately but these freedoms are to enable the mass slaughter of those without power. Peace once meant disarmament. Now disarmament is only mentioned as an excuse for war.

As competing corporation/governments move increasingly aggressively into all continents, all sides of corporate money and media create so-called ‘ethnic’ or ‘religious’ unrest to destabilize dissidents and competitors. Any land dispute between corporations and residents is rewritten as an ethnic dispute to distract from the real aggressors and pitch people against each other instead. Extremist ideologies inciting genocide are promoted by corporate interests. Western media reports wars in foreign countries in graphic sensationalist detail and always framed as ethnic or religious, inciting civil war instead of economic reform. Media no longer obsessively cover teen suicides or anorexia because of concern over copycats, but coverage of men with guns is exempt from the responsibility to protect. “Freedom of the press!” chant those so completely coerced by cradle to grave propaganda they have lost even the perception to know when it controls them. As we have seen, freedom of speech is only accepted when only a few are allowed to speak, it loses favour quickly when all voices are allowed. If money and media removed the focus from men with guns, the world would cease to be run by them.

For any student of history, this is the preferred formula for dealing with every uprising, the reason regimes can be flipped over and over again with no change at all in the society. The United States Constitution’s first and second amendments have been inflicted on the entire world because both have been extremely useful for keeping corporate interests in power. There is now a slight possibility to push freedom of speech to the point where it can be used by everyone if we work very hard to pull up all voices that need to be heard and give them the amplification to drown out corporate propaganda. Freedom of speech for the powerless is far more important than freedom of speech for corporate media.

The solutions to peace will be found among the people trying to raise children, grow food and build society, not men with guns. ‘Foreign aid’ has been used for decades to tip the balance of power from one group of men with guns to another. It doesn’t bring peace. If all that financial control was given directly to those in the refugee camps, there would be change. This revolution is not about men with guns vs other men with guns. It is between creators and destroyers, peaceful people and the corporate mafia controlled militias, worldwide. If someone bothered counting bodies globally instead of chanting about regional unrest, this would be more evident.

The mafia won

In 2010 I wrote “There are only two possible explanations for a sovereign nation to bankrupt its own citizens and its government in order to set up a huge international surveillance and military system, “the finest fighting force the world has ever seen” that they do not actually own or control. One, everyone is completely insane, or two, it has not been a sovereign nation for a long time.”

In 2012 I wrote “The US does not actually control their own military or intelligence and the private corporations that do, do not operate from patriotic loyalty and are available to the highest bidder.”

It is time to stop pretending most governments of the world have anything to say about anything. Corporate mercenaries are in control worldwide. The only governments with control are the ones where the state is the corporations. Not only do people like Erik Prince and assorted other mafia bosses control the military and intelligence services of the world, he is (with China this time, sorry US nationalists) in sub-Saharan Africa with Frontier Resource Group (did you know you were a frontier, Africa?) investing in “energy, mining, agriculture and logistic opportunities”. He once more has his own private army. Prince will be facing off against other mafia militias in Africa, most notably his own creation Academi, formerly Blackwater. There are small and large militias doing the same in most of the world, still with a veneer of legal structure in the northern hemisphere but only because the mafia was allowed to write the laws.

While you are petitioning the US government to restrain the NSA, Erik Prince and friends are battling with other people’s lives for control of the world’s coltan (your phones). The corporations that already control your military and your intelligence have decided it is more expedient to just expand their security militias rather than deal with your governments. They are also continuing to rewrite the laws worldwide to exempt themselves from any accountability and turn people into commodities with no societal rights. As long as people refuse to accept that capitalism has failed, trade economy is tyranny, and the right to bear arms is the right to rule by mafia, they will continue to expand.

The people united will never be defeated

We have no idea whether that slogan we rediscovered in 2011 is true as we have never put in any effort to even reach all the people much less unite them. The first right of all people must be the right to communicate, directly. Without direct communication for all there is no way to see past the corporate propaganda and hear the voices with workable solutions. Revolutionary movements that could care less about all the people not at the table will not be building a new paradigm, they are simply seeking to replace the leaders at the top with themselves. Those that would rather amplify celebrities than people at risk are increasing power for the powerful and refusing to empower those who need it. If the people are ever going to be united, we must put far more energy into reaching down for those at the bottom instead of attempting to climb up to those on the top.

The propaganda which teaches that ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ can perform the same actions and still be on separate sides has been highly useful in misdirecting anger. This fight is between those who commit atrocities and those who do not. Our actions define us, not our company. All war coverage that is pitched as ‘ethnic’ or ‘religious’ is a lie. The conflict is between the idea of peace and society and the idea of war and dictatorship. We do not need leaders or affiliations, if we follow the ideas we agree with we will have the company we need. If we show solidarity by ideas, not the borders that divide us into economic markets, we can still win. If no one in China cares who is paying Erik Prince’s gang of thugs and buying his pillaged resources, if no one in Canada cares that their courts are shielding 75% of the world’s resource corporations from human rights prosecutions and no one in Australia cares that refugees from their own corporate plunder are being drowned at sea and imprisoned if they make it to Australia, then we lost long ago.

Empire is simply a concept. Laws, governing principles, property and wealth are all concepts. We are being enslaved by our acceptance of these concepts. If we remove everything between the sociopaths in power and the people they are tormenting – remove the militias, the media, the money, the governments, the corporations, the laws that protect corporations, the NGOs, thought leaders, celebrities, distractions and group affiliations – there is nothing left but a very few, very ordinary people.

We need to start the trials.

The biggest stories of 2014

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Heather Marsh

Yes, of course we can decide that now. Barring near complete planetary destruction, we can decide what we want the biggest stories to be in advance and just get them on the front pages. Those in power have been doing that forever, focusing exclusively on celebrities, celebrated for their ability to distract, sell propaganda and model rampant consumerism, politicians, those not-too-bright replaceable figureheads standing in for the real powerful who never change and are never in the news, and men with guns, presented as both our greatest fear and our greatest hope to keep the general population in a mood of infantile dependence and insecurity. If citizen journalism is worth anything it should be able to create focus of its own. These are my suggestions for 2014.

The corporations

Truly an endless source of material. Practically every story on the front pages right now can lead straight back to a corporation, although they almost never do. Every conflict presented as ‘ethnic’ or ‘religious’ has also an economic and resource based aspect. Every island in dispute has a seabed of corporate interest. Militias are hired, trained and armed by corporations. Trade deals revolve around corporations. International laws are created for corporations. The NSA and other intelligence agencies spy for corporations. International banking is completely intertwined with other corporations. Infrastructure is contingent on resource corporation development. Laws against so-called eco-terrorism and even other terrorism are created and advertised by governments in support of resource corporations. Every environmental story has a resource corporation or several behind it.

The real celebrities

The people behind the corporations are equally fascinating since they are also the people that run the governments, the financial world bodies, the international courts and the trade deals or they are connected to them. The web of what they own, what boards they sit on, who they are related to and who they are allies or enemies with is endlessly intriguing and dictates the course of our lives. In our personality driven world it is not enough to have a logo as the subject of a story and nor should it be. The CEO’s and presidents currently hired to front stories with their faces need to be replaced with the faces of the owners, those actually controlling and benefitting the most from the corporations’ activities.

Why do school children learn the names of dead Presidents and Prime Ministers instead of the names of the billionaires who control their media and their lives? Why is there about 444,000 Google search results for “Mother Theresa controversy” and only 80,700 results for “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation controversy” (the biggest private foundation in the world)? Why are there no Wikipedia pages (or mainstream news coverage required to create them) for most of the world’s most powerful?

We need a database of all of the holdings of these people, what boards they sit on and who they are related to as friends, families and business associates. Celebrity gossip is crucial information but we have misdirected it. These celebrities are far more interesting than the ones we are being trained to focus on.

The money trail

We need longer trails to put stories in context. Instead of just pointing at laws, we need to show who is behind proposing the laws and who is benefiting from them. What corporations (and owners) are benefiting from TPP and other trade treaties? What foundations and celebrities are making their funding in African countries contingent on the spread of homophobia and homophobic laws? Instead of just a non-stop advertisement for war products featuring the latest in fighter jets and killer drones, we need to see all of the people who benefit from the sale of each piece of equipment purchased for a war zone and where that equipment and the trained militias end up. Illegal sale of weapons, drugs and resources go to fund legitimate governments, armies and corporations. Illegal militias are hired as security for resource corporations and others. Hostages tortured for ransom in the Sinai, refugees sold as slaves, the booming human trafficking industry, all have financial trails that do not fit into 500 word articles but are essential to follow.

The other people

We need to overcome the overwhelming nationalism and other group affiliations that still makes some voices far more equal than others. As we have seen repeatedly, people are valued more as they are seen more. Getting media to show atrocities being committed is less necessary (or reliable) for verification than it is for generating an emotional response and a direct human bond from other people. Everyone needs direct amplification when needed, not as props for western saviours or products to promote NGOs but to tell their own stories and establish their own direct support networks. We need to continue the fight against communication blackouts, not just by Internet shutdowns but also by refusal of Internet access to prisoners and others and by our own nationalism and other group affiliations refusing to amplify all voices equally. It is absurd to feel that someone you don’t know dying is vastly more important than someone else you don’t know dying. The focus on some lives as more important than others greatly benefits corporations and governments who do not want any coverage of their activities outside their home base.

Equality and the fraternity

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Heather Marsh

Equality for all has been held up as one of the fundamental truisms and virtues of just governance since the widespread rejection of Patriarcha and the divine right to rule. This concept was conflated after the French and US revolutions to imply all had equal ability to survive in a trade economy. How an idea so manifestly false and impossible ever became lauded as a truism must be found in its expedience and convenience in furthering the objectives of its promoters.

Equality was espoused by a homogeneous group of male caucasian slave owners and enablers. John Locke was both a major investor in slavery and an important contributor to the laws enabling the trade. Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves. When these men spoke of equality they naturally were not including anyone but themselves in the concept, rhetoric notwithstanding. Babies, children, women, slaves, indigenous people and anyone less able were obviously not their equals and were never intended to be. As covered previously in Binding Chaos: Out of Robert Filmer’s frying pan, into John Locke’s fire, this libertarian concept of trade equality was meant to enable decentralized patriarchy, not remove patriarchy. Why an assumption of equal worth to a trade economy is in no way just is covered in Binding Chaos: An economy for all.

The concept of equality as an economic virtue has been extremely successful in justifying and continuing rule and unbalanced privilege by this same group of people, spreading initially from France and the US where Locke’s writings were most influential. In every tyranny there must be a rational justification of it. The divine right of kings was usually successful in protecting a monarch’s head as few wished to act against god’s will. A secular age must appeal to a sense of fairness which most people are born with. The idea that this one group of people are more worthy as they are more able to take control must be instilled and reinforced constantly, as it is.

The only reason equality in a trade economy is considered a virtue is to allow rule by right of virtue for the fraternity, the libertarian ideal of meritocracy.

In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft stated the root flaw in every governance algorithm used in the past or present, “Where there is justice there is no need for charity.” Her view has been overlooked by all and the image of a just society is consistently one which has evolved to be charitable. There have been societies that were ruled by justice regardless of ability but they were always few, and since the notion of equality for all under a trade economy became widely lauded as both an ideal and a truism they exist almost nowhere.

If you hear the cry for equality under a trade economy ask: But what of those who are not equal? If the orator accuses you of bigotry for denying what is obviously false you are already dealing with a tyrant. If the orator speaks of giving and brotherly love, run. The equality mantra is the worm at the root of all trade economy systems today and any trade economy based on an ideal of equality will produce the same result, as we have seen. Equality comes from an economic system in which an infant or other dependencies have an inherent right to be included without reliance on charity.

When an ideology decrees that people governed under it will behave in a certain manner it is necessary to look for any reason to believe they will. Among proponents of trade equality as a virtue the best reply thrown at those who point out that people are demonstrably not equal was framed by Marx when he decreed distribution would be “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” This is not effectively different than the answer given in different terms by other ideologies such as the tacked on welfare systems common in most capitalist societies. In all cases Marx’s stated outcome is certainly not inherent in the system and must be enforced by hierarchical coercion. We can see what that looks like every day as the powerful torment the poor, the victimized and the disadvantaged to test their ability and need.

Every political ideology named as one must have defining characteristics. Proponents of ideologies have a habit of stuffing rainbows and unicorns under their umbrellas but when the virtues being attributed are in no way inherent under the defined characteristics there is no reason to expect they will be present when the system is implemented.

Democracy is ridiculously conflated with human rights. If human rights exist under a democracy it is only by virtue of separate bill of rights, constitutions and other documents tacked onto the democracy as appendages. A democracy such as Burma can openly conduct genocide simply by having the majority rule the minority no longer have rights. Democracy is a system of voting, representative or direct, and there is no reason to assume that goals such as human rights or freedom of speech will result from it.

Peer-to-peer is an idea adapted from network architecture. In a p2p network, nodes supply and consume resources to and from each other in a structure for sharing among equals. As network architecture it works beautifully. It does not work for people because people are not peers. All you need to do is picture an infant attached to this network to see the obvious failure in p2p’s “assumed equipotency” of all participants which will result in a need for charity.

The defining principle of direct trade (reciprocal sharing is trade) among equals has absolutely nothing to do with the commons, free software, permaculture, 3D printers or any of the myriad rainbows and unicorns currently being herded under the umbrella. P2P governance is just a hacker-ish name for libertarian. Modern libertarianism can use new technology and other capabilities but there is no underlying philosophical difference. John Locke could point to magnanimous powerful men who gave charitably to their neighbours just as p2p points to free software giving charitably to a non-contributing public, but neither charitable neighbours nor free software are a natural result of the idea of trade among equals. To see what p2p governance would look like simply look at the completely homogeneous list of 26 men (no women) listed as “notable figures“.

We now have no choice but to move beyond the age of equality among young, able, caucasian, educated men from privileged families and start including the entire world. The entire world is now an unstoppable collaborative force and they will no longer tolerate rule by the fraternity of peers.

Occupy, Anonymous and each of the 2011 uprisings were many things but the one thing they were not is p2p. The endless assembleas and communication networks set up by M15 and the gatherings of the Day of Rages were a genuine attempt to hear the voices of the unequal. The Hope Riders, Jasmine Revolution, Occupy and others fought very hard to recognize and support diverse roles and unequal ability. Anonymous is the roar of those omitted from the fraternity, the raw voice of the voiceless unpackaged and sanitized by NGOs and polite representatives. Every revolution the world has ever seen has started with that roar and every revolution the world has ever seen has been co-opted by the fraternity of peers.

We can tell the revolution has failed every time we look around and see the fraternity sitting astride the ideals of the voiceless and promising to ride them to a different place this time. When the hopes and creations of the people once again become rainbows and unicorns to sell a platform for the fraternity to gain power we have failed.

If we are to proceed past the never-ending cycles of revolution and arrive at a system of peaceful evolution we need a completely different system of change. Probably writing that next.

News, analysis, action

Posted on November 2, 2013 by Heather Marsh

Donate

In the past, media was protected in most democracies because in order to govern themselves, people need access to accurate and timely information on all topics relevant to their governance. The news needs to be the match that starts analysis and action which doesn’t stop till we have change. Otherwise it is silly to pretend that news has anything at all to do with governance. If news requires no action, it is probably not the news we require in order to govern ourselves. If activism requires no analysis, it is probably not informed or effective.

News

The first right of all people must be the right to communicate. Without communication there is no way to safeguard our other rights or participate in society. Everyone needs a voice and the ability to call for help in emergencies.

Corporate media was long ago co-opted as a propaganda vehicle for corporations and governments, but people still supported it for three reasons: it provided a paying job for reporters, it provided access to an audience and it loaned official credence to the news.

The laughably small amount news media pays for most stories now (if they pay at all) is no longer tempting. Having to write material to fill a slot instead of writing because a story needs to be told, writing only on topics and only to audiences dictated and then having work butchered by editors who have less knowledge of the topic than the author is not the path to job satisfaction or quality information. Editors decide their audience must be fed the exact same story in the exact same way every day. Every story that brings different information or perspective is considered ‘biased’ and modified to reiterate the standard line. News must have an established audience before it is told, which defeats the purpose of news. Articles are produced as quickly as possible, are not interactive like micro-blogging and are seldom thoughtful and crafted like the best blogs. Corporate media reads like advertising copy, inoffensive, unsurprising, unoriginal.

Once this journalism at least brought community respect. Now it is more likely to bring open contempt and public criticism. Many bloggers have received far more recognition and respect by creating their own work and publishing it their own way on their own blogs. They sometimes manage to earn an equivalent or better living as well through a combination of donations, grants, paid appearances, website ads, etc.

The audience provided by official platforms online is now largely driven by online sharing and authors are expected to push their stories on social media when they are published. This could easily be (and sometimes is) replaced by promoting personal blog posts directly to social media instead. For those who are not interested in domain values and page hits, it is far easier to create viral media without restrictive copyright and pay walls. The unrealistic delays in publishing on official platforms make them obsolete as breaking news platforms.

The official status once brought by publication in corporate media is starting to bring the opposite result. Unless the official status is needed to update an archaic resource such as Wikipedia, there is little benefit.

There are many reasons to argue that journalism as it is practiced ought not to be a profession. While a good writer or investigator is always valuable, stories should be published when there is something important to say, not to fill a slot on demand. The people news is happening to seldom need others to translate their experience. First hand interviews and affidavits should replace journalist viewpoints. Our voices, not our votes are what gives us the ability to participate in our world and the people who tell our stories instead of just amplifying them are acting as our representatives with no mandate from us. The best articles are written by people actually affected by the news. They are the ones best able to answer questions and explain to us why their news is important. They should not have to beg some western man to find their story newsworthy and tell it through a western man filter.

Whistleblowers are journalists. The sight of whistleblowers and witnesses explaining what they found and why it is important to journalists who then turn and repeat what they have heard to an audience is a strange leftover from a long gone era. Expert opinions can also come directly from the experts, they do not need an intermediary.

In an interactive, decentralized world, the voiceless do not need someone to be their voice. They need a megaphone.

Analysis

The idea that news must be constantly new makes it an impossible option for deep ongoing analysis. Once an atrocity has been reported there is not much new to say. With no analysis or action as standard responses to news, the atrocities continue in silence and the audience attention wanders. The occasional bits of isolated investigative brilliance that make it past editors and accountants are left floating on isolated, seldom read url’s where only those that know they exist will find them.

Action

Journalism is a tool to an end, not an end. Investigators and writers who are not journalists may do their work for any or no reason; journalists are meant to bring information that the public needs to know in order to govern themselves into the public domain. The claim that journalists ought not to be activists is completely counter to the purpose of journalism. The only reason an item is newsworthy is if it requires action.

Reporters who are not activists are voyeurs. Their reporting is not journalism to aid self-governance, it is a distraction from self-governance.

There is a reason it is citizen journalism that terrifies governance. Only activists will do journalism for free and it is action that creates change, not passive reporting. Activists are not simply replacing corporate media, they are also replacing corporate NGO’s, those leeches that lie between those that need help and those that provide it and turn those in need into products to be owned and marketed.

NGO’s bring the bureaucracy and the official channels into giving. They stifle the voices of those in need except as pre-packaged marketing gimmicks and they block access to direct aid. They siphon large amounts of the aid for their own empires and spend the rest frequently without consultation with or in the interest of those it is intended for. They are also easily corruptible by political power which gives them their mandate, their access and their funding.

The huge amount of people working in NGO’s because of a desire to help those in need would be far more effective acting directly, responding to voices of those on the ground instead of power points by those who have commodified their need. Direct relationships between activists around the world have built trust and reputations. People in a position to help receive instant feedback on whether their help was effective.

Direct action and investigation can also provide real shadow cabinets to monitor and lobby government ministries and user group regulatory bodies to monitor corporations.

The future of journalism

The future of journalism is not in official platforms, page views and registered domains. The future of journalism is not in Exclusive! and Scoop! The future of journalism is not in celebrities with no knowledge of the topic who are begged to help activists aid citizen journalism. The future is not in Invisible Children or Falling Whistles style plastic-bracelets-to-stop-genocide-in-Africa commercialized snake oil dressed up as activism. Or in the centralized nodes of unofficial-official channels created out of formerly horizontal movements. Or in celebrity journalists. Or in lists of Who to Follow and Thought Leaders.

The future of journalism is in a stigmergic mesh network of amplifiers, investigators and activists who can filter and fact check news in real time, combine it with investigative global knowledge resources and create appropriate local and / or global action. The future is in collaborative investigators sharing knowledge to map everything we need to know to govern ourselves. The future is in activism and aid requested directly by the people who require it and responded to directly by the people who can provide it. The future is in the right and ability of every single person to broadcast their own voice and call for amplification when needed.

The future of journalism is in all of us.

Rule by celebrity, die by infamy

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Heather Marsh

Donate

When the Internet became widely populated, it was an invaluable tool for prying open previously impenetrable fortresses of hierarchical oligarchy and replacing them with what was hoped would be a peer promoted meritocracy. Unfortunately, neither the hierarchical tools or the hierarchical methods of collaboration changed, so the Internet simply replaced rule by institutions with rule by celebrities.

So-called thought leaders have become the new traveling priests, roaming the globe with familiar comforting mantras, providing a well lighted path for those stumbling from the wreckage of institutions. Panels and conferences are the churches and revivals of the secular with orderly rows of believers gazing up for guidance and simplistic instruction. Intriguing quotes are plucked from their origins and added to the repertoire of the talking elite, edges softened and context free. Horizontal movements create celebrity speakers, NGO’s monetize grass roots movements and the faces begin to look like institutions.

News delivered in neat soundbites from talking heads is replaced by celebrity journalists dropping into crisis zones to deliver documentaries celebrated as gritty and real despite being delivered by cam-filtered tourists. Free Harry Fear! reads the protest sign outside the Israel embassy. And once Harry Fear is freed perhaps we can look past him to the 1.7 million Gazans without his UK passport.

Angelina Jolie, that living avatar of US military propaganda, is also the living avatar of the refugees created by the weapons industry when they are not advertising their latest equipment as props in her movies. “Don’t rape,” she murmurs to the UN before wafting away on a jet stream of war money.

Celebrity journalism is the future of journalism! crow billionaires craving edginess. Only if David Beckham is also the future of football. Silicon valley has reached the age of decayed empire where it only recognizes the revolutionaries we have already decapitated. They are still mistaking the post-NSA drums beating for their own heads as a cry to their cavalry to save us all.

Celebrity oligarchy was definitely progress. The peer promotion was real and the celebrities come without the black boxes the institutions hid in. But it is not a final product.

Silicon valley thinks it is. Twitter allows blue checked voices to mute all the un-blue riff raff from their stream. Direct message your followers back without actually following them! You can benefit from their input without acknowledging publicly that they exist! Twitter is heavily banking on its new elite, as are klout and many other social media tools. Silicon Valley doesn’t have a clue who uses their products or why.

Celebrities that popped out of horizontal movements certainly do though. There is a pallor that falls on accounts when their first 5000 or so followers turn on them, the painful sight of 7-digit follower accounts who are lucky to get forty retweets. If the core is offended, every tweet is met with a barrage of negative replies. On the Internet, any publicity is not good publicity.

As I mentioned earlier, horizontal governance does not mean no one gets a voice, it means everyone does. Devoting all of your work to a brand that will be used to create a bloated central figure who will then be able to control the messages of everyone while dining out on ill-gotten celebrity and collecting brand donations is no different than passing all your money to the Unification Church.

The old “Don’t trust anyone over 30” is now “Don’t trust anyone with a follower count > n”. Where celebrity is not tied to genuine expertise or acceptance it does not carry the power many expect it does. When celebrity accounts betray their stated principles, those who gave the celebrity feel as betrayed as they would by a corrupt politician.

The power of shunning may not dismantle a celebrity as quickly as they were created but when necessary, it will happen. Tools that pander to celebrity hierarchy can be hacked, reworked or deserted. There is a better way to work, coming very soon.

Heather Marsh

Rethinking the moats and mountains

Tag Archives: Protest

How we came to be ruled by Death Eaters

Sociopaths, Psychopaths and Death Eaters

A mythical Manichean world

The revolutionaries

World War III: A state of mind

Thought reform

A war on self-governance

World War III: A status update

The biggest stories of 2014

Equality and the fraternity

News, analysis, action

Donate

Rule by celebrity, die by infamy

Donate

Rethinking the moats and mountains

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Like this:

Thought reform

A war on self-governance

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: