quick, Canada - get your propaganda shot!

THIS TIME THEY'VE GONE TOO FAR.

The US is now trying to infect Canadians with its creepy, crawley, slimy para-Russia-noia, and I, for one, do not intend to keep a straight face.

If this is not an attempt at unwarranted influence of a sovereign nation, then nobody knows what is, and we should all be ashamed of our ignorance.

If a person can go to jail for knowingly spreading AIDS, then the whole US government ought to be up on charges of deliberate hate contagion.

Notorious Russian troll farm also took swipes at Canadian targets: oil, PM

• The same Russian online troll farm that meddled in the American presidential election has also taken swipes at Canadian targets, including oil infrastructure and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
• They included retweets of news headlines, references to oil spills, and links to blog posts like one titled: "Uh oh! Progressive fans of Justin Trudeau might be in for MAJOR buzzkill (Hint: Keystone, Trump, OMG!)"

If Canadians aren't laughing in derision at reading this as Russian meddling, then there's no hope for our so-called freedom. Since 9/11, if not before, the US has been gradually encroaching on Canadian territory - the most recent being as a result of Bill C-23 -- Canada granting US border agents 'expanded' powers -- and this new wrinkle appears to be a raison d'etre for further incursions into our sovereign space.

First of all, the alleged troll farm would not be "notorious" were it not for the concerted efforts of the propagandizing corporate media. The statement has been made as if it were fact -- but of course, it demonstrably isn't, and that's how propaganda works.

There is never any proof behind propaganda; it's always, historically, hearsay and logical fallacy.  But repeated often enough by the willing media, it becomes true, though it's cynically euphemized as "winning hearts and minds".

John Pilger has quite a bit to say about that in his insightful and revealing article: Power, illusion and America's last taboo

People will encounter themes repeated over and over on brief TV newscasts, and in headlines, quite like hypnosis, until it becomes fact in the minds of those who badly want to believe they live in the land of the free, protected by a beloved flag, in a country superior to all others, knowing that "they hate us because of our freedom", a mantra coined by GWB's speech writers as he sat back and took pleasure in the slaughter and destruction in Afghanistan and Iraq - much as he lolligagged in a school room as the Twin Towers fell into dust -- a feat proven to be impossible without strategically-planted explosives, but hey, this is the impossible USA we're talking about.

The majority of Americans are, sadly, not well-educated, not through any fault of their own, but because their public school systems are reportedly far from first rate (and don't think ours isn't heading south in more ways than one).

They don't understand logical fallacies like, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Neither did Bush, but his speech writers did, and they also put the words, "Prepare for Casualities" directly into his cold-blooded mouth.

The whole Bush team were happily prepared for casualties, because nobody they cared about was going to get killed.

Meanwhile, their so-called security agents remain on the lookout for reasons to add more countries to the hate list. They deduce all sorts of evil in the simplest things said by average citizens of the world who read international news and have been led to believe they are free to express opinions about it on social media. God help them if they can be connected in any way at all with the enemy du jour.

A true Internet troll, on the other hand, is either an aggressive upstart who enjoys getting people all worked up -- or he/she is an undercover security agent.

In your own best interests, please read this article carefully:
Government trolls use psychology-based influence techniques in social media

It's not good to teach kids about Santa, and nursery rhymes, and the Devil, because some of them might grow up to be security agents who have lost the ability to discern real danger from what isn't, and so become dangerous to everyone, including themselves.

They keep insisting there are boogiemen out to get us.  They're real, I tell you, real. They are scary trolls who chortle at the antics of our so-called leaders, and what could be scarier than that, eh? What will they do next?

Spooks are cowering under their beds, texting madly their dire warnings to the media, who quote them as unnamed sources as if they can actually be believed, no matter how they appear in need of straight jackets.

HuffPost offers a reasonably sane method of dealing with real Internet "trolls". Ignore them; kill them with kindness (not yet tried by our leaders); Don’t try to fight fire with fire (always the method of choice by the US); and Do not try to engage trolls in a rational conversation (no fear of that happening in the spook world).

All other methods derive from the paranoid nightmares of the guilty-as-sin, and the reason for the fact that: The committee would not release the raw data allowing a search for all Canada-specific messages should set off a warning bell in the mind of any thinking person.

Scarily, it suggests a new international public-private partnership called the Counter-Disinformation Coalition. It would involve governments, internet providers, traditional and new media, and have them constantly evaluating best practices.

Be afraid -- be very afraid of what this whole article implies. Ask yourself: "best practices" for whom? Read Naomi Wolf's definition of Fascism, written in 2007, and you will see where the West, led by the US, is heading. No. 1 is: "Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy"

An outside enemy is a necessity for corporate-driven goals. After that the spooks start looking for inside enemies to validate their thesis, and before you know it, we all have to somehow prove that we're not enemies of the Reich.

Look ... people on social media and blogs write stuff about other countries all the time - I certainly do.  Out there in Net Land, everyone is equal -- far more equal than in what the West keeps touting as "freedom" and "democracy". They read what's written up in the international media and they comment on it, be they Canadian, American, British, German, Dutch, Iranian, or -- god-help-us -- Russian.

Let's face it; if our Trudeau is laughed at by Canadians, you can be sure we're not the only ones in the world who will laugh as well. But that doesn't mean we take orders from Mr. Putin or any spy agency.

If First Nations people, for instance, are protesting long-standing injustices, it gets noticed, and our hypocrisy shines through to countries at whom we sneer for not being mirror images of what we perceive to be our own, far superior, likeness.

Are we are so willing to follow the going trends that we allow America to decide who is our enemy, especially when the deciders are the most suspect of all?

People who live in the dark, dank corners of their own minds, paranoids, like security agents and leaders who lie to and manipulate their own people on behalf of the corporate interests they cater to, are always busy trying to head off their own comeuppance. They see enemies where there are simply people who don't believe everything they're told. -- the people who worry them most are the ones who don't readily swallow the propaganda.

So they huddle together and make plans to muzzle us all in the interests of protecting our freedoms.

And they think we can't see the Orwell in that?

By the way, Orwell was "convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world", and that's no longer difficult to imagine.  He was also "fascinated by the relationship between morality and language".

We too need to think about that as we listen carefully to the people who claim to be operating in our own best interests. Their need to monitor and restrict their own people should be feared far more than any outside enemy du jour they come up with.

I'm going to try to quote author William Blum* from memory, just to assure myself that I fully understood his meaning:

When asked if he didn't think the massive destruction of human life and vital infrastructure in the assault on Iraq was worth it to rid the Iraqi people of Saddam Hussein, he replied in the negative.

When called upon to elaborate, he responded: If you had a painful knee problem for which the doctor recommended surgery, but made a mistake and lopped off your whole leg, you would not be comforted by someone saying, "Well at least you no longer have the knee problem."

Esteemed Americans like Madeleine Albright had no hesitation in saying "it was worth it." although she now seems to resent being reminded of that. YouTube

From Salon: The staggering death toll in Iraq - The American public must come to terms with the scale of the violence and chaos we have unleashed

Where are the brains of people who don't understand that leaders can be surgically removed if that's the route an enemy with a capable spy structure wants to take -- if they truly want to bring "democracy" and "freedom" to the people of another country.

Like muling, greedy cowards, the leaders of the US have callously tossed their own citizens at countries that have resources, such as oil, and lack the power to retaliate. And Canada's leaders have made us all into accomplices.

It's a coward's game they're playing; an evil, drooling, game of greed; it's almost like Satanic ritual - necrophiliac overkill in a long list of countries to which US leaders preened and bragged it had brought "freedom" and "democracy" by such means as interfering in their elections.  And each one is quickly forgotten by Americans, Canadians, Brits, the EU, and even the United Nations as fresh, new quarries are honed in on.

Need a list?  No need to look further than this.

I don't know the ultimate purpose of all this rabble over North Korea and Russia, since the US can't possibly be stupid enough -- or else is definitely stupid enough -- to take serious action against them, turning the people to whom they claim to be offering democracy into sitting ducks, and ultimate haters of the West -- people just like us who just want to live without having to look over our shoulders, regardless of what language we may speak, what kind of clothing we may wear, or the colour of our skin.

If the West is allowed to get away with acting on symptoms of self-induced paranoid psychosis, then we deserve everything we ultimately may bring upon ourselves. But our children and their children do not.

It's time to wake up, Canada!

*BOOK: American's Deadliest Export: Democracy. The truth about US foreign policy AND EVERYTHING ELSE.

Note from YYC: Blum seems to accept 9/11 as the brainchild of Osama Bin Laden, but he is dead on about the gross lie of bringing "freedom" through death and destruction, and about the reasons behind terrorist ideology.