The Syrian people will soon be able to start telling their own story, and people telling their own stories never makes the U.S. political establishment look good.
Despite corporate media’s frantic, repeated insistence that the fighting in Syria is far from over, the “fall” or “liberation” of Aleppo (choose whichever word causes less dissonance with your preferred brand of propaganda) is unquestionably a massive turning point in the Syrian civil war. Hillary’s war against the Syrian government and Russia isn’t going to happen, and Iranian, Russian, and Syrian forces will restore stability to the region; whether or not you agree that the right people will be in charge when that is accomplished is a moot point. It is now a forgone conclusion that this will happen. If you want to get technical about things, it was a forgone conclusion when Hillary Clinton lost her bid to become Commander in Chief last month.
And now the Syrian government will get to tell its own story about what happened, and so will the Syrian people. NATO’s failure to topple the Syrian government and install an oppressive Islamist puppet regime means that they will have no control over who gets a voice in Syria, who writes the school textbooks in Syria, or whose brand of propaganda gets circulated in Syria. The story that the Assad administration enjoys the gratuitous bombings of its own civilians so much that it invited the equally-sadistic Russians to fly all the way over to Syria do the same can only die.
And if the stories already coming out through the few journalists on the ground in Aleppo are any indication, it ain't looking good for Obama's legacy. In an illuminating interview with Ron Paul (who despite my hard lefty leanings I desperately want to pick up and cuddle and carry around in my purse like a teacup poodle), independent journalist Vanessa Beeley reports of her countless interactions with the citizens of Syria that there was indeed great celebration in the streets when the Al Qaida-linked Islamist rebels were finally driven from their last major urban stronghold. She reports that the western corporate media has indeed been lying to us this entire time about what's been happening in Syria, and shares her stories of Syrians expressing tremendous relief and joy that the horrors they've been experiencing finally seem to be over. Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett confirms Beeley's findings, verbally eviscerating a corporate shill in the process.
These women have both been attacked from all sides by establishment Democrats and neoliberal stooges and called everything from employees of the Syrian government to agents of Putin (funny how many secret Russian agents everyone suddenly thinks there are now that liberal pundits are telling everyone to be afraid of Russia), but it's hard to doubt their sincerity. These grizzled badass war correspondents both became visibly emotional at various times when sharing their stories of how brutally the Syrian people have been traumatized by the Islamist rebels. When the actual Syrian people begin telling their own first-person accounts of their experiences to the west via alternative media, we can expect many such responses from the people who hear them.
And there will be outrage at the people who helped inflict those horrors upon them. At NATO. At the U.S. government. At Obama.
Which is one more reason the current political establishment is fighting so aggressively to silence dissenting media. The U.S. establishment completely lost control of the narrative in 2016, which saw the first ever presidential election determined by the sudden democratization of information that widespread internet access gave the American people. This election was determined by WikiLeaks, by alternative news outlets, by YouTubers and bloggers who told the stories that the establishment media refused to tell. Humanity's newfound ability to share this much information from person to person has completely changed the way our species operates, and it has made the old mechanisms of manipulation and control obsolete.
Hence the aggressive campaign against "fake news" we're suddenly seeing. The oligarchs have always had control over what stories we tell each other, and now all of a sudden they don't, and they're in full panic mode about that. Human society consists entirely of the stories we agree to tell each other; about who's in charge, about how we should all behave, about how money works, etc. These things only work the way they work because there's a general consensus about the stories we all agree to tell one another about how they work. What if tomorrow everyone gets together on the internet and says "You know? Money is a conceptual tool invented by humanity to help humanity, and the way it works right now isn't serving us. Let's all agree that money works in a completely different way from now on." Well that would be great for us, but death for the plutocracy we all live under. The billionaires who control everything are only "billionaires" if we all agree that money works a certain way and means a certain thing.
We're finally getting to tell our own stories, fellow humans, and we should all be very, very encouraged by who is afraid of that and how scared they are. Let's start telling the stories that benefit us, not them.
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(First appeared on Newslogue.)