I see that the US has hit yet another ‘drug’ boat….and the story is the same…..but just like all our other conflicts in the last 50 years there is a process for making the case for the actions the admin desires….

US/Israel rules of war: build a lie, then slaughter civilians from the air.

There’s a widespread belief that every lie contains a kernel of truth. If it was ever the case it is not any more. The belief is a potent tool in the hands of an imaginative propagandist who is capable of inventing a lie from whole cloth. Such is the nature of the lie about Venezuela being a source of drugs. It is a lie that has been invented in front of us, in real time. For while the US has been trying to destroy Venezuela for decades, it has now become even less honest about it than it used to be.

We live in an age of the whole cloth type of lie. Joe Biden talked about seeing photos of beheaded babies that he did not, in fact, see. Tony Blinken solemnly told the story of murderers eating lunch with a dead family that never existed. Eli Beer said he saw a baby in an oven that, like Biden, he did not, in fact, see. Yossi Landau reported seeing beheaded babies that he did not, in fact, see. Direct, specific, detailed, lies.

Why they told these lies is obvious enough: to justify crimes, the enemy must be dastardly and to justify genocide, only the most lurid tales are worth telling. American media has a long and sordid history of atrocity propaganda. Specific lies are told to create specific outcomes.

In the American arsenal of lies, the “Venezuela drugs” lie is perhaps most analogous to the “Hamas uses human shields” lie. For if “Venezuela drugs” is true, any kind of “war on drugs” action is justified, the same way “Hamas uses human shields” opens up all the world to any kind of genocidal act. Any human is killable as a “Hamas human shield”, and any act of theft or warfare can be justified in fighting the drugs.

The US and Israel have learned that they can act without moral or legal restraint and have found the political costs of committing genocide containable, the levels of dissent for bringing wars to new countries (Yemen, Iran, Qatar…) bearable. Harris and Emersberger have argued recently that it is very difficult to imagine a way to avoid escalating attacks on Venezuela, however unlikely they may be to lead to “regime change”.

Post-2023 propaganda is so brazen that at times it seems it isn’t even intended to be believed by its own adherents. We are not sure of the value of debunking it. But we do so in the hope that by watching how they make a story from nothing, we can learn something about how they plan to do propaganda in their new genocidal world.

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-invention-of-venezuela-drugs/

Doing what we do best.

Then there is the new proposal for the AUMF which could be a disaster waiting to happen….

A draft proposal to authorize the use of U.S. military force against drug cartels is currently floating around Congress and the White House, according to a recent New York Times report. Although an official version of the proposal has yet to be released, publicly available information suggests that it could be used to justify U.S. military intervention in at least 60 countries.

The U.S.-led “War on Drugs” has escalated rapidly over the last month: after the White House signed a secret directive authorizing attacks on Latin American drug cartels, the U.S. built up its military presence in the region and began conducting a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged drug-smuggling civilian boats in the international waters of the Caribbean. Human Rights Watch called the strikes “unlawful extrajudicial killings.”

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/drug-war-aumf/

Hooray for our side.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”