What If They Staged A Cuba Uprising And Nobody Came? Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Caitlin Johnstone
4 min readNov 18, 2021

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The US staging a domestic uprising in Cuba and no one showing up for it reminds me of that old saying “What if they had a war, and nobody came?”

So much of what the US empire used to do covertly through the CIA it now just does openly. Says a lot about how much more effective its narrative control has gotten over the years.

The CIA used to infiltrate the media, now spooks openly do punditry for mainstream news outlets.

The CIA used to oust governments covertly, now the NED openly funds subversion.

The CIA used to stage uprisings, now the empire just says HEY WE’RE GONNA START SOME PROTESTS IN CUBA!

If anti-government protests were proportionate to a government’s actual malfeasance, Washington DC would be completely inoperable 365 days a year because its streets would be continuously packed with millions of demonstrators.

Why are people suspicious of US behavior in the Horn of Africa? It’s not like it’s in an extremely geostrategically crucial location or anything.

US interventionism always makes things worse and never makes them better. This one self-evident fact should make headlines like these impossible and the fact that it doesn’t is an indication of how propagandized the populace is:

Socialism leads to government waste and inefficiency, unlike our current system which wastes half of all food produced, leaves more homes empty than there are homeless people, and sees clothing manufacturers destroy billions worth of excess inventory so poor people can’t wear it.

Capitalism is so good at eliminating scarcity that it has to artificially create it to survive.

If you think Glenn Greenwald is a Trumper or Joe Rogan is a fascist it’s because you’ve disappeared as far into your own ideological anus as people who think Biden is a Marxist. You can disagree with someone without making them the extreme opposite of everything you value.

If I wanted to crush socialism and anti-imperialism in the most powerful nation in the world I’d train Democrats to believe being on the left means shrieking about Trump all the time and train Republicans that the left means forcing your son to wear a dress at kill whitey class.

It’s weird how much of left discourse is about obscure sectarian disagreements instead of like hey we don’t have the numbers to accomplish literally anything and we should probably try and do something about that.

Criticize Beijing’s Xinjiang policies all you want, but its deradicalization campaign was indisputably infinitely less draconian than the western “war on terror” which has killed millions and displaced tens of millions since 9/11.

And now it’s winding down, while the US empire’s “war on terror” has been continually expanding. These two things are not equal. They’re not even comparable. The US and its allies are indisputably far, far worse.

All the western hand-wringing about Muslims in China is worse than hypocritical; it’s a joke. The US empire pretending to care about Muslims is like Exxon-Mobil pretending to care about the environment.

The vastly more egregious offender should be criticized vastly more. Instead it is criticized far less. This is due solely to western propaganda.

Healthy people want power to be proportionate to responsibility; the more your actions affect others, the more accountable you must be. Unhealthy people want power without responsibility; they want maximum power but want all culpability offloaded onto the collective. We are ruled by very unhealthy people.

We’re in this strange human soup full of billions of people, pesticides, all kinds of radiation, vaccines, drugs, food additives, petrochemicals and other artificial substances and we have no idea what it’s doing to us in the long term. It’s a worldwide biochemical improvisation.

People are tripping on mRNA vaccines right now because they’re the newest addition to the soup, but there’s all kinds of stuff happening in this weird improvisation we’re all mushing ourselves around in and we don’t understand how it will all dance together at all.

And we also don’t know what’s happening with our dying biosphere, our plunge into dystopia, our flirtation with nuclear war, our unsustainable systems and our collapsing empire. We don’t know where any of this is all headed. And, from a certain point of view, it’s quite beautiful.

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