Winter Patriot Community Blog

The other day I came across an article that was published last month after the Brussels terror attack. The original was published in Russian on the Komsomolskay Pravda site. Below is the translated version featured on the Russia Insider site.

At first, the article appeared to me to be unremarkable enough then I saw two glaring problems that the article pointed to. Or, rather, the same problem manifesting in two different ways. It was unremarkable to begin with because of its familiarity. I seem to read articles like this every day. The problem is that of uncritical thinking; the inability to identify what is in front of one's nose. It is not limited to Russian citizens, either. It is wide-spread throughout the Western world.

Indeed, if people everywhere could think critically and were able to identify the reality that is in front of them all day, every day, then we would not find ourselves reading about wars from Africa to the Middle East to the Caucasus.

Below is the article in question and I have highlighted the statements that stood out for me and which I will write about at the foot of the article.

The first three highlights concern the reported words of ordinary Russians and they talk about “They” and “Them”. But who are “They” and “Them”?

The first step in critical thinking (whose purpose is to establish reality) is to ask the “Who, What, When, and Where” questions; what are the facts? So who are “They” and “Them”? They are presented by the structure of the sentences as being the same people. But are they?

I'll take the second highlighted quote as its structure is simpler than the first one but the same reasoning can be applied to the first.

“They never sympathize with ‘US’, so why should we sympathize with ‘THEM”.

From the context of the article it is clear that the “They” that never sympathize refers to the Western press which, as many know, reflects the views of their owners, the political and financial elite. And the “Them” refers to the citizens of Brussels who have suffered a terror attack and the loss of lives. Are the Western press owners and the ordinary citizens of Brussels one and the same? Clearly not.

So lets identify “They” and “Them” in the sentence and see how much meaning it conveys:

“The owners of the Western press never sympathize with 'US', so why should we sympathize with the ordinary citizens of Brussels?”

It doesn't make a lot of sense does it? These people, the “US” in the quote, are never going to understand these terror attacks until they learn to ask all the necessary factual questions and then focus on the inevitable contradictions they throw up. As there are no contradictions in reality, when you see a contradiction, know you are looking at false information or missing information or both. Pursuing the contradictions with more questions will lead to the “Why” of it all and then on to the “How”.

Knowing the “Why” and “How” of a situation is absolutely necessary to find a solution to any problem. But before we can effectively process and answer those two questions, we need all the facts or as many of them as can possibly be obtained. And that process starts by asking the simple questions, “Who, What, When, Where”. We have already seen how our understanding has grown simply by asking, “Who?”

The second issue concerns Maria Zakharova's own words and they identify the 'downstream' issue of “Why”. Again, I'll take the second statement of hers that I have highlighted because it gets to the nub of the problem.

It wasn’t that damn lie that knocked the wind out of me – at least not the first time, but because it was Radio Liberty’.

Zakharova goes on to make clear she is well aware that Radio Liberty is a US govt. funded organisation and is engaged in propaganda against Russia. Part of understanding propaganda is knowing it is always deceitful in one way or another. So she has the facts but cannot put them together in a non-contradictory way. In short, she is shocked that an organisation whose business is lying would lie; would lie about her! Maria Zakharova, from the information in the above article, has not put it all together.

This failure of critical thinking, of not identifying the nature of your enemy when you have more than enough information, is dangerous and will lead to an unhappy ending if not corrected.

You cannot survive, let alone thrive, in a world that you do not understand. You will be exploited by those who do understand the reality that we live in. It is like walking through a minefield with a faulty map.

Exploitation is a common everyday experience for most people whether they are aware of it or not because we live in a world of lies and false concepts - falsities that we were taught as children and accepted uncritically. Critical thinking reverses the disadvantage we all suffer at the hands of lying perpetrators and psychopaths be they politicians, priests, bureaucrats, bosses or your child's teacher. We can start to take charge of our lives by making better decisions.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the world is run, by and large, by psychopaths and it has been this way for a very long time. How does a small number of people manage this control generation after generation? By controlling what we think about the world and more importantly how we think (or don't think) about the world.

We have been trained through schooling, religion and the media in the stimulus/response method. We are rewarded for repeating the 'correct' answers and punished for wrong answers. We are trained in using our memory, to repeat what we have memorized on cue and to be told, “Good, you understand it”.

But most don't understand whatever 'it' is at all. Because we have never been trained to use our critical thinking faculties, we do not understand that we do not understand! It is enough to express the 'right' answer and be rewarded for it; stimulus/response.

Stimulus/response deliberately leaves out the intervening thinking/logic. Stimulus/response is an effective way to train animals. The reason being is that animals do not have the ability to think logically to any meaningful extent. So, communication problems aside, linking observable facts to desired outcomes for animals via logic is a complete waste of time.

Because we are much more than animals, stimulus/response is a very inefficient way to train human beings. Unless . . . . your aim is to exploit people for your own gain and to their loss. To do that, critical thinking/logic has to be suppressed and to treat us as if we have no free volition. In other words, to treat us more like animals than autonomous human beings.

So, we are not taught to use our critical thinking ability because we might start logically taking apart the many contradictions in our instructions. We might start searching for true understanding and we might slip out from under the perps' control. We might stop and think before predictably responding to some outrage that plays on our emotions. We might not rush off to war and death next time a false flag terror operation is pushed in our faces by the media complete with their non-logic.

Instead of reacting in the same way as the Russian citizens were quoted as doing, we might react as the Russian political leadership has often done and weighed carefully what the actual facts are before committing to a path of action that may prove destructive and, in fact, was the purpose of the outrage in the first place.

By pausing and using critical thinking as the Russian govt repeatedly does, collecting all the facts that they can, putting them together so that they make sense and without internal contradictions and then, and only then, they decide on a course of action that is in their interests and not in the interests of those that are attempting to provoke everyone's emotions. We would do well to do likewise in our daily lives.

Victor Frankl is famous for writing a book about his years in a German concentration camp which, as you can imagine, was a very dis-empowering experience. Two famous quotes from his “Man's Search For Meaning” book describe how he coped with that and are as follows:-

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

This is about not allowing emotion and someone else's training to determine or replace our own thinking. Emotions have no thoughts or wisdom of their own therefore they cannot determine our actions. Though we may think we are 'acting according to our emotions', in fact, we are acting according to our early training or programming. Emotions do not have thought and therefore cannot give direction and our conscious thinking has been crowded out by those same emotions.

So all that is left to give direction is trained responses from our subconscious. So if you can control someone's early childhood training and keep them away from thinking logically in adulthood, then you can control this person in any way you want. And they will be none the wiser for it because they think they are responding consciously. They think they are making choices. But those that rule us know different. Too perfect and too easy!

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

It cannot be taken away from you if you know you have that choice and have the ability to exercise it and know that your sovereignty and dignity as a human being are dependent on it. But if you have never been encouraged to develop your own ability to think and to make your own choices and know that it is right and proper for you to do so, then the “Nazis” of this world do not need to take it away. For all intents and purposes, you do not have the ability to choose how you will think and act. You are controlled by your early training. Those that would rule you trigger your early conditioning through employing tactics (such as false flag ops) to stimulate your emotions which shuts down your conscious thinking and thus they control your behaviour. We have all been well trained in stimulus/response and it is a simple matter for those in power to set it in motion. This is the role and purpose of propaganda whether it is spouted by your company or your country.

But this can also easily be changed. The path to sovereignty and therefore freedom is through learning and exercising critical thinking. Here is a good place to either start learning or to continue learning (you can always learn more) - Trivium Education

The principles are simple and the rewards are immediate if you practice the method. Though it is quick to learn, you can spend a lifetime refining it. And some people do so because the process is enjoyable once you grasp its potential for your life.