Weaponized Truth

I haven't heard anything but snippets about Indispensible until I ran across this article by Patrick Walker at Counterpunch:

Weaponized Truth: The Indispensible Movement's Key To Success

What’s needed is peaceful political revolution—and revolutions do a hell of a lot more than politely offer packages of popular policies. Even when peaceful—as the Indispensable Movement fully intends to be—revolutions are about wresting power from oppressive, determined enemies hell-bent on keeping every last shred of that power. And using it to prevent—or at least, effectively hamstring—Congressional action on all popular policies.

Sounds good. How do we do that?

But what exactly does it mean to “weaponize” truth? And why should anyone bother; can’t truth simply speak for itself? To answer the second—and easier—question first: no, truth simply can’t speak for itself; in a system clinging to its last shreds of legitimacy through control of major media and mass propaganda, truth, left to its own devices, simply can’t reach the critical mass of activists and voters required to effect desperately needed change. If having the truth alone guaranteed success, the Green Party—light-years closer to the truth of Naomi Klein’s climate justice vision than either major party—would have long ago become the dominant U.S. party. Instead, it has remained a marginal party that even many progressives deeply sympathetic to its aims don’t consider viable.

So we turn "truth" into a revolutionary warhead:

The trick is to exploit our advantage in morality and brains to weaponize truth: to frame truth in such concise, morally potent ways as to make it a warhead—and then to build social movements as the missiles to deliver that warhead. That, in a nutshell, is the proposed strategy of the Indispensable Movement.

That revolutionary verbal warhead will be used against the moral and political failures of both political parties:

Thus, Democrats’ reaction to violence against the Standing Rock water defenders was typical: because most Congressional Democrats support fossil fuel expansion as much as Republicans, most had nary a word of support for the water defenders, nor a word denouncing the violence against them. But Democrats know as well as Republicans that enforcement of their donors’ illegitimate policies, once the lying propaganda for them breaks down, will require violence. As much and for as long as possible, they simply prefer to let Republicans play their enforcing Bad Cop.

Here's the conclusion:

I prefer a full-dress street chant version, based on Democrats’ working class and progressive base thinking of themselves as an oft-betrayed spouse, being asked to trust the serial betrayer’s promises yet again. Thus:

Mouth Congress, lip service—
Before we trust your words again,
Tell us where your lips have been.

If you see in my examples the power of “A Verbal Revolution” to overthrow a corrupt, illegitimate duopoly, please join the Indispensable Movement and help our verbal revolution go viral.

Additional analysis and explanation at the original article:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/10/weaponized-truth-the-indispensab...

And here are two links that Walker highlights to support his thesis. Naomi Klein:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/rise-of-the-davos-...

And a podcast from The Black Agenda Report:

https://blackagendareport.com/monteiro-rulers-in-crisis

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we have nothing to lose. I think many of us here already spread the truth everywhere we can. This would be an easy movement to support.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Meteor Man's picture

@dkmich
The approach has promise. Can Indispensible capture national attention that compels their criticism into the political conversation?

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn