Imperial narrative managers always try to make peace seem unnatural, says Caitlin Johnstone.
"All we need to do to get people to see peace as normal and war as abnormal is to remind them of what they already know inside."
Article of Caitlin Johnston originally published on website From the author on 12/3/23. Translated and adapted by Rubens Turkienicz exclusively for Brasil 247.
Eu I complained all week. Regarding the shocking escalation of war propaganda against China in Australia's mainstream media. I feel I could easily scream about this for another month without exhausting the vitriol for the disgusting lunatics who are shoving this filth into the consciences of my fellow countrymen. Really, one cannot say enough cruel things about people who are openly trying to pave the way for an Atomic Age world war; in a remote, sane world, such monsters would be driven from human civilization and die cold and alone in a wild place with nothing but their bloodlust for company.
One of the most detestable things said during this latest propaganda attack appeared in joint statement made by the five “experts” (read: militarists against China) funded by the empire) recruited by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers to share their obscene warmongering opinions in a seemingly official presentation to the media. This paragraph has been nagging at me since the first time I read it:
“Australia must prepare itself. Most important of all is the psychological shift. The recent decades of tranquility have not been the norm in human affairs, but rather an aberration. Australia’s holiday from history is over. Australians should not fear, but should be alert to the threats we face, the difficult decisions we must make, and know that we have the power to act. This mobilization of mindset is the essential prerequisite for any successful confrontation with China.”
Do you see what they're doing with this? These professional warmongers against China are explicitly trying to frame the... peace They portray peace as a strange "aberration" and war as the norm of the status quo. They are saying that Australians need a "psychological shift" and a "state of mind mobilization" from thinking that peace is normal and healthy to thinking that war is normal and healthy.
Which, obviously, is insanely inverted and a load of crap. Every normal and healthy person considers peace to be the default position and violence a rare and alarming aberration that should be avoided whenever possible.
We know this to be true from our normal human experience in our own personal lives. None of us spends most of our time in fistfights, for example; anyone who spends most of their waking life physically attacking people has probably been locked up somewhere for a long time. If you've ever been in a fistfight, you'll remember it being experienced as a rare and alarming occurrence, and everything in your body was screaming at you the whole time that this was a bizarre and unnatural thing that needed to end as quickly as possible. For healthy people, violence is experienced as abnormal and its absence is experienced as normal.
This normal position and basic level is what the managers of the imperial narrative spend most of their time trying to make everyone “psychologically shift” away from, giving us propaganda instead of accepting continuous conflict and danger as the norm. Such a shift is beneficial to the empire and to professional war propagandists, and is entirely destructive to everyone else. It makes us accept conditions that directly harm our interests and drives us crazy and neurotic as a civilization.
However, you see this all the time, as if whenever there's a push to withdraw imperial troops from some part of the Middle East where they've been for years, or the slightest discussion of perhaps not increasing this year's military budget, or skepticism about pouring weapons into a violence-ravaged part of the world, it's the wisest and most useful thing to do.
Whenever we see the slightest beginning of a tiny movement toward moving away from the path of relentless warmongering and militarism, pundits and politicians begin to bleat words like “isolationism” and “appeasement,” in an attempt to make de-escalation, demilitarization, diplomacy, and détente seem bizarre and abnormal, in contrast to the sane and responsible status quo that is hurtling toward a full-throttle nuclear Armageddon.
Their task is to abnormalize peace and normalize war, which means that our job as healthy human beings is to do exactly the opposite. We must help everyone understand the horrors of war and the unfathomable nightmares that can be unleashed by irresponsible militarism, and help people understand that peace is what is healthy and imagine a future in which it is the norm.
The bad news is that we are fighting against a narrative-manufacturing apparatus supported by the power of a globe-spanning empire. The good news is that our vision is based on truth, and deep down, everyone can feel it. All we need to do to get people to see peace as normal and war as abnormal is to remind them of what they already know inside.