STRATCOM Wishes You a Very Scary New Year
January 1, 2019
The U.S. Strategic Command has deleted a New Year's tweet that revealed its
true values, as Caitlin Johnstone explains.
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
U.S. Strategic Command (or "Stratcom" if you're trying to make a
nuclear-capable arm of the U.S. Defense Department sound cool) has issued an
apology for a poorly received New Year's Eve tweet which has since been
deleted.
"#TimesSquare tradition rings in the #NewYear by dropping the big ball.if
ever needed, we are #ready to drop something much, much bigger," the
offending tweet read, with an attached video featuring B-2 stealth bombers
flying all stealth bombery and causing gigantic explosions with bunker
buster bombs while words like "STEALTH", "READY", and "LETHAL" flashed
across the screen. The tweet concluded with the ostensibly unironic hashtag
"#PeaceIsOurProfession".
"Our previous NYE tweet was in poor taste & does not reflect our values,"
Strategic Command tweeted. "We apologize. We are dedicated to the security
of America & allies."
This statement is, obviously, a lie. The part about "security" of course,
because dominating the globe with nonstop military violence and aggression
has nothing to do with security, but also the "does not reflect our values"
part. The U.S. military deleted the post and apologized for it because it
received an angry backlash from hundreds of commenters and was circulated
virally on Twitter for its jarringly creepy message, not because it did not
reflect their values. It reflected their values perfectly.
The deleted tweet.
The only way you could possibly encapsulate the U.S. military's values in a
42-second video clip more perfectly than cramming it full of footage of
$2,000,000,000 war planes cruising around dropping $3,500,000 GBU-57 bombs
would be to also show the human bodies they land on being ripped to pieces.
Inflicting death and destruction using unfathomably expensive machinery is
the U.S. military's whole job. Of course it reflects their values.
The real issue here was not values but perception. The U.S. war machine
pours an immense amount of energy into perception management, making sure
that ordinary Americans either (A) ignore the horrific things that are being
done in their name or (B) think that those things are awesome and patriotic.
The offending post was clearly attempting to accomplish (B). A team of paid
social media propagandists simply did not understand that ordinary human
beings wouldn't resonate with a message that amounts to "Hey I see you're
all preparing to bring in the new year, so watch how good we are at killing
large numbers of people!", and some damage control became necessary when
everyone got freaked out. Can't have people opening their eyes to how insane
America's relentless military expansionism has gotten, after all.
Watching the propaganda arm of the U.S.-centralized war machine is a lot
like watching a manipulative sociopath learning how to function in normal
society. Sometimes they'll slip up and fail to react the way someone with a
healthy sense of empathy would respond to the death of a pet or someone's
emotions or whatever, and they risk alienating whoever's around them and
losing access to the resources they could exploit them for if they can't
manipulate them out of the creeped-out feeling people get when they're
around someone who doesn't empathize like a normal human being. I suspect
many of the commenters who flooded in telling Stratcom to delete its tweet
were not so much interested in eliminating a violent social media post from
the internet, but in eliminating that creeped-out feeling you get when the
sociopath's mask slips a bit.
And that's understandable. One of the biggest obstacles in getting people to
realize how deeply propagandized they are is the cognitive dissonance which
comes rushing in when one considers the implications of viewing the world
free from the lens of military psychological manipulations. Without the lies
about how beneficent and necessary and awesome the military is, all you've
got is trillions of dollars worth of instruments of death circling the globe
to facilitate the daily slaughter of men, women and children to advance
agendas of power and profit while ordinary people struggle just to get by in
your own country. It can be deeply psychologically uncomfortable to grapple
with the reality of what that means for your beliefs about your nation, your
society and your very identity, in much the same way realizing you married a
manipulative sociopath can be an uncomfortable truth one might feel tempted
to compartmentalize away from.
A lot of people got upset about that tweet, but they really shouldn't have.
The tweet was not the problem; it was just a few perception managers for the
U.S. military being more honest and straightforward than usual. The problem
is that money is being stolen from ordinary Americans to murder strangers on
the other side of the planet to advance agendas of power and profit, and
everyone's being propagandized into accepting that as normal. The
sociopathic propaganda engine slipping up and stirring the populace from
their slumber a bit is nothing to complain about, the actual reality of our
actual situation is.
Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who
publishes regularly at Medium. Follow her work on Facebook, Twitter, or her
website. She has a podcast and a new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia
Preppers. This article was re-published with permission.
