Imperialism 2.0: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix [Caitlin Johnstone]
DECEMBER 13, 2020 AUTHOR: CAITLIN JOHNSTONE The new imperialism doesn’t look like old-school ground invasions, it looks like multi-front cold wars, economic warfare, blockades and starvation sanctions, drone strikes, arming proxy militias, CIA-backed coups, sprawling tech surveillance networks, mass psyops of unprecedented sophistication and narrative management systems to facilitate them. Peace activists need to be looking in this direction, especially as the US gets a new Secretary of State who advocates this exact approach to imperialism. Imperialism 2.0 is designed to operate so invisibly we don’t even notice it’s happening. No mass troop deployments, no flag-draped bodies flying home in planes, and (they hope) no potent antiwar movement in response to it. In the new imperialism there are still troops deployed all over the world, but they’re there with the “permission” of the puppet regimes they installed and they exist primarily to protect the infrastructure of the invi...