A new article by Forbes reports that the CEO of Crowdstrike, the extremely shady cybersecurity corporation which was foundational in the
construction of the official CIA/CNN Russian hacking narrative, is now a billionaire.
George Kurtz ascended to the billionaire rankings on the back of soaring stocks immediately after the company went public, carried no doubt on the winds of the international fame it gained from its
central protagonistic role in the most well-known hacking news story of all time. A loyal servant of empire
well-rewarded.
Never mind that US government insiders like Hillary Clinton had been prepping for escalations against Russia well in advance of the 2016 elections, and that their preexisting agendas to shove a geostrategic obstacle off the world stage benefitted from the hacking narrative as much as George Kuntz did.
Never mind that Crowdstrike is tied to the NATO narrative management firm known as the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO, Gulf states and powerful international oligarchs. Never mind either that
Crowdstrike was financed with a whopping $100 million from Google, which has had a cozy relationship with US intelligence agencies since its very inception.
Never mind that to this day the DNC servers have not been examined by the FBI, nor indeed were they examined by the Special Counsel of Robert “Iraq has WMD” Mueller, preferring instead to go with the analyses of this extremely shady outfit with extensive and well-documented
ties with the oligarchic leaders of the US-centralized empire. Also never mind that the Crowdstrike analyst who led
forensics on those DNC servers had in fact worked for and was promoted by Robert Mueller while the two were in the FBI.
As I never tire of saying, the real underlying currency in our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even raw
military might. The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it.
As soon as you really grok this dynamic, you start noticing it everywhere. George Kurtz is one clear example today of
narrative control’s central role in the maintenance and expansion of existing power structures, as well as an
illustration of how the empire is wired to reward those who advance pro-empire narratives and punish those who damage
them; just compare how he’s doing to how Julian Assange is doing, for example.
But you see examples pop up every day:
• The US State Department just got busted using a $1.5 million troll farm to manipulate public discourse on social media about Iran.
•
•Video footage has just surfaced of the OPCW Director General admitting that the OPCW did indeed deliberately omit any mention in its official findings
of a report from its own investigation which contradicts the establishment narrative about a chemical strike in Douma,
Syria, an admission which answers controversial questions asked by critics of western imperialism like myself, and which the mainstream media have not so much as touched.
•
•Mintpress News broke a story the other day about a new narrative management operation known as “The Trust Project”, a coordinated campaign by
establishment-friendly mass media outlets for “gaming search-engine and social-media algorithms in collusion with major
tech companies like Google and Twitter.”
•
• In a new interview with The Canary, UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer explicitly named the mass media as largely responsible for Assange’s
psychological torture, excoriating them for the way that they “have shown a remarkable lack of critical independence and
have contributed significantly to spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives about Mr Assange.”
•
• In a new essay called “Freeing Julian Assange”, journalist Suzie Dawson reports that “Countless articles appear to have been obliterated from the internet” about
Assange and WikiLeaks, amounting to some 90 percent of the links Dawson examined which were shared in tweets by or about
WikiLeaks and Assange since 2010.
•
• I just finished reading this excellent Swiss Propaganda Research essay about the little-known fact that “most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three
global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.”
•
Any one of these could have a full-length Caitlin Johnstone essay written about it. I write about this stuff for a
living, and even I don’t have the time or energy to write full articles about every single narrative control tool that
the US-centralized empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them emerging too damn
fast, because they’re just that damn crucial for maintaining existing power structures.
Because whoever controls the narrative controls the world.
Power used to be much easier to identify in our society: just look for the fellow with the sparkly hat made of gold
sitting in a really big chair and bossing everyone around. As our society advanced philosophically, however, people
began to tire of having every aspect of their society determined by some schmuck in a golden hat, and started fighting
for ideals called “freedom” and “democracy” in their respective nations. And, as far as our parents and teachers have
taught us, freedom and democracy are exactly what we have now.
Except that’s all crap. Freedom and democracy only exist within the western empire to the extent that it keeps up
appearances. Because the trouble with democracy, it turns out, is that human minds are very hackable, as long as you’ve
got the resources. Wealthy and powerful people do have the resources, which means that it’s very possible for wealthy
and powerful people to manipulate the masses into voting in a way that consistently benefits the wealthy and powerful.
This is why billionaires and narrative control consistently go hand-in-hand.
This dynamic has allowed for western power structures to operate in a way that western democracy was explicitly designed
to prevent: for the benefit of the powerful instead of for the benefit of the voting populace. So now we’ve got people
in so-called liberal democracies voting to maintain governments which advance wars which don’t benefit them, to advance
intrusive surveillance and police state policies which oppress them, to advance austerity policies which harm them, to
advance labor policies which exploit them, and to maintain ecocidal environmental policies which threaten the very
survival of our species. All because the wealthy and powerful are able to use their wealth and power to manipulate the
way people think and vote.
This is why I pay far more attention in my work to narrative control than to politics. Politics is downstream from
narrative control, which is why the 2020 US presidential race is already a contest to see what level of Democratic
corporatist warmonger will be running against the incumbent Republican corporatist warmonger. The narrative-controlling
class does its level best to hide the fact that anything’s fundamentally wrong with the system, then when people notice
it’s deeply broken they encourage them to use completely impotent tools to fix it. “Don’t like how things are run? Here,
vote for our other puppet!”
The root of all our problems right now is the fact that human minds are very hackable with enough resources, combined
with the fact that war, oppression, exploitation and ecocide are highly profitable. This dynamic has caused human
collective consciousness to generally dead-end into a kind of propagandized, zombified state in which all our knowledge
and all our thinking moves in alignment with the agendas of existing power structures. It’s much easier to continue
believing the official narratives than to sort through everything you’ve been told about your society, your nation and
your world since grade school and work out what’s true and what’s false. Many don’t have the time. Many more don’t have
the courage.
We will remain in this collective dead-end, hurtling toward either Orwellian dystopia or extinction via climate collapse
or nuclear armageddon, until we find a way out of it. It won’t come from the tools our rulers have given us, and it
won’t come from repeating any of the old patterns which got us here. In order to escape from the increasingly adept narrative control matrix that is being built around our collective mind by the powerful, we’re going to have to change our relationship with narrative altogether. We will either pass this great test or we will fail it, and we absolutely have the freedom to go either way.
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