June 8, 2023
A Government at War with Its People
By J.B. Shurk
Warfare requires deception. The federal government habitually lies to the American people. Consider that an admission that it sees itself at war with those it claims to serve.
You might have noticed that the word “propaganda” has been somewhat retired from polite conversation. Occasionally, some State-allied news corporation will apply the term to a public statement coming from inside Russia, but otherwise, the idea that governments promote falsehoods cloaked as official truths has quietly disappeared.
Instead, ordinary information enjoyed and shared among regular people is now targeted for classification. An alliance of national governments, international institutions, and propaganda engines disguised as disinterested nonprofits has sprung up to toss “unacceptable” thoughts into garbage piles for “mis-,” “mal-,” and “dis-” information trash bins. As with everything else in modern society, the cult of expertise has even given us “disinformation experts” to decide what knowledge belongs where.
The small coterie of “disinformation experts” recognized and promoted by governments then monitor what the common people are saying among themselves, cast their nets around anything “unacceptable,” and stigmatize those words and thoughts as deserving of censorship. Perhaps one day soon there will be academic degrees in “disinformation” or special licenses distinguishing State-approved professionals as qualified to tell the rest of us what is real. As a rule of thumb, if you want to know what kinds of knowledge governments fear their citizens possessing, look to the subjects that require numerous layers of authority validation before access is granted or titles are conferred. Now the knowledge that governments fear their citizens possessing is simply information outside their control.
In this way, officials have flipped the script on propaganda. Rather than the people calling out governments for their lies, governments pre-emptively defame their citizens as liars. How do governments know when their citizens are “lying”? Easy. They just isolate anybody who contradicts publicly announced official truths. Like a puff of smoke vanishing in the wind, government propaganda disappears because anyone who recognizes it as such is guilty of spreading “mis-,” “mal-,” or “dis-” information.