The Top Ten Dumbest Things Empire Propagandists Ask Us To Believe

Caitlin Johnstone
3 min readOct 6, 2023

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

When you live under an empire that’s held together by lies, you’ll be asked to believe a lot of intensely stupid bullshit. Here are the top ten dumbest things the propagandists of the US-centralized empire try to get us to swallow.

1. That the US war machine has been surrounding its top two rivals China and Russia with war machinery as an act of defense, rather than an extremely provocative act of aggression.

2. That the war in Ukraine simultaneously (A) was completely unprovoked, and (B) just coincidentally happens to massively advance US strategic interests and therefore should be funded as much as possible.

3. That, okay, all those other wars were based on lies and resulted in disaster, but that couldn’t possibly be the case for this current war.

4. That your country’s foreign policy is determined by your official elected government, even though the foreign policy remains the same regardless of who is in office.

5. That it is only by pure coincidence that your nation’s population remains in a perpetual 50–50 deadlock which prevents anyone’s votes from changing the status quo, and the status quo just happens to be perpetually frozen along lines that hugely advantage the rich and powerful.

6. That the only reason anyone could possibly be critical of the most dangerous impulses of the world’s most powerful and destructive government is if they are a secret agent working for the enemies of that government.

7. That the western empire which spent the last two decades murdering Muslims in the Middle East suddenly cares very deeply about the Muslims in China.

8. That Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and that the empire is pouring weapons into Ukraine because it loves Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy.

9. That foreign propaganda and influence operations are significantly manipulating the way westerners think and vote, but the plutocrats who fully control all the most influential platforms in the western world are not.

10. That we need to be worrying about tyrannical enemies in Beijing and Moscow, instead of tyrannical enemies a lot closer to home.

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