Caitlin Johnstone on the Coup in Bolivia

It is noteworthy that neither Chilean president Sebastián Piñera nor Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, nor Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi for that matter, have "stepped down" despite enormous protests for more than a month, but the one socialist president with a true mass base of support, Bolivian president Evo Morales, has "resigned." Might it be that the latter is an opponent of the Washington Consensus while the former are supporters? Might it be the latter is "coup appropriate" but the former have the backing of the United States?

Caitlin Johnstone has the must-read piece, "MSM Adamantly Avoids The Word 'Coup' In Bolivia Reporting," on the coup in Bolivia (which is shaping up to be reminiscent of Ukraine 2014).

The Washington Consensus is Fraying

Over the weekend I finally finished reading R.P. Dutt's Fascism and Social Revolution (1934). It was lent to me by my next-door neighbor, whose son, a resident of Portland, had photocopied and spiral-bound it himself. It's a real eye-opener. The socio-economic conditions which led to the rise of fascism are very similar to those of today. There are huge differences too. But Dutt's thesis, that fascism is a last-ditch effort by finance capital to suppress contradictions of its own making after social democrat parties willingly pave the way for strongman rule, is as true today as it was in the 1930s.

The difference is that workers were much more militant and organized, both politically and economically, then than now; that, and there was much more of a vibrant press.

To give an idea, to provide support, for this widely shared feeling that the mainstream media has become even grosser in its parroting of its government overlords there is this passage from Caitlin Johnstone's "The Guardian Is Committing Journalistic Malpractice By Not Retracting This Claim":

The legendary Australian journalist John Pilger, whose work on the evils of war and imperialism has been an inspiration for generations of journalists like myself, stated in an interview earlier this year that there was a “purge” of antiwar writers from The Guardian some three years ago.

“But my written journalism is no longer welcome — probably its last home was The Guardian, which three years ago got rid of people like me and others in pretty much a purge of those who were saying what The Guardian no longer says anymore,” Pilger said on the Flashpoint radio show.

Since that time we’ve seen a relentless outpouring of pro-interventionist propaganda from The Guardian with headlines like “After Douma, the west’s response to Syria’s regime must be military“, conducting fact-free smear jobs on opponents of Syrian interventionism, and deliberately hiding all evidence which contradicts the pro-interventionist narrative. Day after day after day this toxic outlet advocates death, destruction and mass murder over peace and common sense, and those who have been permitted to rise within its ranks are the ones who understand that it is in the interests of their career advancement to march to the beat of the war drum.

The Washington Consensus is resistant to outright strongman rule buttressed by a renascent economic nationalism; it prefers the maintenance and extension of a globalized neoliberal corporate-managed trade architecture. A strong tell that this Washington Consensus is rapidly fraying is when the categorically pro-trade New York Times advocates restricting technology transfers to China based on national security.

Macron is the prodigal child of a fracturing Washington Consensus; hence all the pomp for his visit this week. Merkel is being served cold leftovers in comparison. The message is plain. Germany, possessing perhaps a deeper understanding of where the current path of great power conflict is headed, is drifting back to the East.

It's Back to the Future with the New Cold War

An interesting post by Caitlin Johnstone yesterday, "MSM Keeps Running Stories About Space Aliens All Of A Sudden, And It’s Weird," which I read on Niqnaq, hypothesizes about the efflorescence of UFO stories recently in the corporate media:

So we’ve got UFO footage suddenly being released with the approval of the Pentagon, and a bit of an odd uptick in reports about space aliens in general being promoted in surprising places like NBC News. I don’t know why this is happening. But I do know that the last Cold War with the Soviet Union was accompanied by a UFO panic, and that the US and its allies are well into a new cold war with Russia.

A 2002 study by British researchers combed through thousands of previously secret government documents about UFO phenomena, and concluded that the UFO craze was most likely attributable to Cold War paranoia and not visitors from the stars. It also found that defense and intelligence agencies had taken a great interest in manipulating the UFO panic to gain an advantage over the Soviets. A Guardian article about the study reports the following:

“But Clarke and Roberts, whose research is to be published this week in a book called Out of the Shadows , did uncover evidence that the American Secret Service, with the possible connivance of the British, looked at ways of using the public panic over UFOs as a psychological weapon against the Russians.

"In CIA memos marked ‘secret’ and seen by The Observer, top officials consider exploiting the UFO craze. ‘I suggest that we discuss the possible offensive or defensive utilisation of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes,’ wrote CIA director Walter Smith in 1952.

‘Shortly after that meeting the CIA sent a delegation to Britain to discuss UFOs. It is hard to imagine that they did not discuss the psychological warfare aspects of it with their British counterparts,’ Clarke said.”

So we’ve been here before, and we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that all these exciting new UFO revelations suddenly being covered in mainstream outlets are nothing more than new cold war manipulations of some sort by the CIA and the Pentagon. I don’t really know what’s going on with all this, but I do know it’s not normal, and I know that truth is the first casualty of war. This most certainly includes cold war, where psyops play a much larger role than in conventional hot warfare.

We know of the strong connection between the SciFi craze of the early 1960s and the Cold War from our exploration of Where Monsters Dwell, the most recent post of which was last month.