Don’t Ignore Politics, Just Ignore The Fake Kind

Caitlin Johnstone
4 min readSep 1, 2023

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

A lot of people wrongly ignore all politics because they rightly perceive the system is rigged. The answer isn’t to ignore all politics, it’s to ignore the fake partisan puppet show and pay attention to the real political game taking place behind it. Capitalism. Imperialism. Militarism. Authoritarian control. Narrative management. Oligarchy. Corruption. Oppression. Exploitation. Extraction. The stuff both parties in the fake political charade of official politics actively facilitate while pretending to advance human interests.

Participating in politics is a moral imperative; you’re only serving your own oppressors by ignoring it, because they sure as shit aren’t ignoring it. They want you to be a passive witness to their domination of society. The answer isn’t to ignore politics, it’s to pay rigorous attention to the real kind while aggressively attacking the fake kind.

It’s not speculation to say today’s liberals would despise Martin Luther King Jr, it’s a presently observable reality — just look how they shit on Cornel West. The millisecond a black activist leader becomes politically inconvenient, they’re shrieking for his head like hyenas.

American progressives were galvanized and energized by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign because they thought he was talking about fighting the abuses of the oligarchy and ending economic injustice. Then it turned out he was really just talking about voting for shitty Democrats.

US empire sympathizers get so enraged at those who criticize the US for provoking the war in Ukraine because they got their hopes up really high that here at long last was a war where the US is on the side of righteousness. They got their hopes up that now at long last they would get to be the cool anti-war voices on the scene, the ones standing up to a corrupt and murderous government in support of peace and justice, because at long last the Bad Guys were another government in another country and the Good Guys were at long last on their side.

Then along come these voices poking holes in that narrative, highlighting the many well-documented ways the US and its allies actively provoked this war and actively sabotaged the outbreak of peace in the early days after the invasion, and highlighting the fact that US officials and war pundits keep openly boasting about the many ways in which this war serves US interests, and it shattered the hope of empire simps that at long last they won’t have to be on the side of depravity for once in their lives. And rather than simply learning this lesson they keep getting smashed in the face with year after year, generation after generation, they compartmentalize away from it, turn their cognitive dissonance into rage, and start shooting the messenger.

This showdown with Niger and ECOWAS really illustrates why western imperialists have poured so much energy into keeping Africa divided against itself, and how much the western imperialists will lose when Africa unites to kick them hard in the nuts and keep kicking til they leave.

Alien: Take me to your leader.

American: The White House is that way.

Alien: I said take me to your LEADER.

American: Ohhh. Langley is that way.

Alien: Thanks!

Racism serves the empire in multiple ways.

Firstly and most obviously, it’s used to keep people divided against each other so they don’t turn against their rulers who’ve been robbing, cheating and oppressing them this entire time.

Second, it facilitates the existence of a fake-left mainstream political faction which pays lip service to opposing racism while drawing everyone into support for the abusive status quo politics which serve the interests of the rulers who benefit from racism, all without ever actually doing anything to end racism or racial injustice. Without racism they wouldn’t be able to do this.

Third, it helps grease the wheels of propaganda by leveraging racist disgust at the people in the global south who live in nations the empire wants to exploit and destroy. See the ugly ways rightists talked about Arabs during the Bush years, or the way they talk about Chinese people currently.

Among all the other nasty things racism is, it’s also a self-defeating, power-serving belief system. If you want to hate other races you may as well glue a boot to your tongue to go with your bootlicking worldview.

In a healthy world all scientists would be fully networked with each other’s work everywhere on earth. We’ve lost so much technological advancement to the fact that scientific developments are largely kept secret, either because of military secrecy or corporate secrecy, or just scientists keeping their work under wraps to make sure they get the profits and the accolades from it. We’d be living in a much, much more advanced civilization if science wasn’t being fragmented and hidden away from itself for power and profit this whole time.

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