Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

South Africa’s legal team has submitted hundreds of documents containing what it calls “undeniable evidence” as part of its ongoing genocide case against the state of Israel, with the South African representative to The Hague telling Al Jazeera that “The problem we have is that we have too much evidence.”

The Israeli outlet Haaretz reports that IDF soldiers are actively blocking the return of Palestinians they have driven out of northern Gaza as part of the so-called “General’s Plan” — a land grab of Palestinian territory using ethnic cleansing by violent force.

Haaretz has been far more critical of Israel’s actions than western media outlets have been. It recently published an editorial titled “If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is”. Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken is now publicly advocating international sanctions on the Israeli government for its apartheid abuses and opposition to a Palestinian state, drawing an outraged response from the Netanyahu regime.

“A Palestinian state must be established, and the only to achieve this is to apply sanctions against Israel.”

Haaretz publisher called for sanctions against Israeli leaders who oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state, describing the policies as an "apartheid regime" pic.twitter.com/IMXsL6wNOP

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) October 31, 2024

Last week there was a two-day rally attended by multiple Israeli government officials called the “Preparing to Resettle Gaza Conference,” which was exactly what it sounds like: high-profile Israelis gathering to discuss the agenda to drive Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and replace their territory with Jewish settlements.

Humanitarian aid in Gaza has reportedly fallen to its lowest level since Israel’s genocidal onslaught began, with just a few hundred truckloads entering the enclave from October 1 to October 22 and nothing getting through to the north. The UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs recently warned that “The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying,” a warning that was issued shortly before the Israeli Knesset voted to cut off UNRWA aid throughout all the territories it controls.

According to a new report from The Washington Post, the US State Department has been inundated with hundreds of reports of US-supplied weapons being used to needlessly kill and harm civilians in Gaza, but in violation of its own rules it has failed to take any action on a single one of them. According to one WaPo source, investigations of these reports have tended to stall out at the “verification” stage, which consists of asking the Israeli government for its side of the story.

Biden Administration Overwhelmed With Reports of Israel Using Weapons To Kill Civilians but Has Not Taken Any Action
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Israel #Gaza #Palestinians #Biden https://t.co/litCsa1LMD pic.twitter.com/irQBkURoKX

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) October 30, 2024

Israeli forces reportedly killed 109 Palestinians in a single massacre on Tuesday — including dozens of children — when Israel blew up an apartment building where hundreds of civilians were sleeping.

The IDF killed five journalists in a single day last Sunday, bringing the total number of journalists murdered in Israel’s genocidal assault to at least 180. This occurred shortly after Israel published a kill list of six Al Jazeera journalists who it claims are secret Hamas fighters, although no Al Jazeera reporters were among the five killed.

And this is just in Gaza. Israel has already killed some 164 healthcare workers in its ongoing assault on Lebanon, where the Netanyahu government is sabotaging ceasefire negotiations by inserting ridiculous non-starter demands like Israeli planes being allowed to enter Lebanese airspace and Israeli forces being allowed to police the ceasefire deal with military operations in southern Lebanon as they see fit. 

Every day there’s more and more ugly news in the middle east, perpetrated by Israel and its powerful western backers who make its abuses possible. It’s getting harder and harder to stay on top of. There really is “too much evidence” to keep up with.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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The Israeli Knesset has banned UNRWA, an absolutely critical agency for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza, with the architect of the bill saying this was happening because “UNRWA equals Hamas”.

In addition to everything else this genocide has been, it’s been a colossal insult to our intelligence. UNRWA is Hamas. Hospitals are Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. Civilian infrastructure is Hamas. Ambulances, schools and mosques are Hamas. The women and babies — okay maybe they’re not technically Hamas, but Hamas is definitely hiding behind them and using them as human shields.

We are asked to believe self-evidently idiotic things, and if we don’t, we get called Nazi Jew-haters. We are being asked to turn ourselves into empty-headed morons to advance the information interests of a foreign state that’s allied with our government. Stupidity is being framed as a sign of patriotism. Gullibility is being framed as a sign of rejecting antisemitism. In this morally bankrupt and perverse civilization, the noblest thing you can be is a blithering imbecile.

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Axios and its Israeli intelligence insider Barak Ravid have penned yet another White House press release disguised as a news story about how “concerned” the Biden administration is about Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“The Biden administration is ‘deeply concerned’ that two bills passed by the Israeli Knesset on Monday will exacerbate the already dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and harm Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” Ravid writes.

Oh shit you guys the Biden administration is deeply concerned that Israel is doing something bad in Gaza! You’re in trouble now, Bibi!

Like I said. Just one nonstop insult to our intelligence.

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CNN has issued an apology after its panelist Ryan Girdusky told fellow panelist Mehdi Hasan “I hope your pager doesn’t go off” after Hasan said he supports Palestinians. Israel supporters have been directing this “hurr hurr you should be murdered with an explosive pager” wisecrack at Israel’s critics for weeks, and apparently Girdusky just forgot where he was in the heat of the moment.

CNN was like, This network is shocked and appalled that our panelist joked about murdering a British Muslim journalist with an explosive beeper. That kind of language is only appropriate when directed at Muslims who live in the middle east.

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Per the rules of the western empire you are a religious extremist if you want to fight against an occupying force who has been abusing you your entire life, but you are not a religious extremist if you want to carpet bomb the middle east to help fulfill a Biblical prophecy.

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MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is back to pushing her “Russians are interfering in the US election” narrative, so we know what we’ll be hearing again if Kamala loses. No matter who wins we can expect a bunch of outraged shrieking from the other side that the election was unfairly stolen from them.

The US presidential race is very openly a contest between two oligarch-owned Zionist war whores, and yet after the results are announced next week you’re still going to hear half the country going “OMG election interference! The election was stolen from us!” 

It already was, you dopes. It was stolen before the race even started. The rest is just narrative.

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I sure hope all the US progressives who obediently stopped talking about Gaza these last couple of months remember to start that thing up again after the election is over.

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I’m just gonna say this ahead of time so it’s out there: you don’t get to campaign on continuing a genocide and then blame other people when you lose. That is not a thing.

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“Trump will be worse on Gaza” is such an obnoxiously dishonest argument. It’s completely unfalsifiable and can’t even be tested after the election since abuses keep getting worse in Gaza anyway, and it’s based on nothing but the claim that very vague statements made by Trump prove he’ll facilitate Israeli atrocities more than the current administration already has been. It’s completely empty narrative fluff with no basis on the facts in evidence. 

There are all kinds of legitimate cases to be made that Harris would be a little bit better than Trump on some aspects of domestic policy and the environment, but there is no case whatsoever to be made that he’ll be worse on Gaza than the administration that’s already committing genocide there. He could be worse, he could be a bit better, or he could be exactly the same. There’s no way to know, and there won’t be any way to know in a universe where we can’t observe alternate realities to compare what each presidential candidate would have done if they’d won. It’s an entirely unanswerable question that people are just pretending to know the answer to.

Harris and the Democrats have repeatedly attacked Trump for not starting a war with Iran when he was president. She criticized him for making John Bolton sad when he refused to bomb Iran. How is that less insanely pro-Israel than anything Trump has said?

If you want to argue that Harris will be better on reproductive rights or something then go ahead, but when it comes to Gaza don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

As the US-backed atrocities in the middle east get uglier and uglier, I keep thinking about something that was said by an Iranian cleric named Shahab Moradi after the US assassinated Iran’s immensely popular general Qassem Soleimani in 2020.

Moradi complained that Iran can’t even really retaliate for the assassination because the US doesn’t have any real heroes of its own like Soleimani, saying, “Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob?”

I’ve never seen a more incisive and withering critique of western culture, and I probably never will. It’s such an accurate statement and paints such a clear picture of what this civilization is really like that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could possibly top it.

There are no real heroes with popular support in the western empire, because everything that’s truly heroic gets stomped down here, and everything that gets amplified to popularity is either vapid distraction or directly facilitates the interests of the evil empire.

Our own generals are busy butchering civilians for oil and geostrategic control.

Our military personnel are imperial stormtroopers.

Our police are the security guards of capitalism.

Our most prominent journalists are all propagandists.

Our most prominent celebrities are famous because of their ability to pretend to be fictional characters doing fake things in Hollywood movies.

Our most prominent artists are famous because of their ability to churn out formulaic pop songs about empty-headed bullshit.

Our most widely recognized symbols are corporate logos.

Our most highly regarded professionals are those who can sell westerners the most future landfill manufactured by wage slaves in the global south.

Our most well-known government leaders are those who’ve sold their souls to oligarchs and imperialists and can lie to the public most convincingly.

The only westerners doing truly heroic things here get thrown in prison, or murdered, or pushed into obscurity, because the only truly heroic thing anyone can do in today’s world is to take a stand against the western empire.

Those who bravely resist the US war machine or make themselves inconvenient for western empire managers don’t get to become popular heroes. You don’t see the westerners who work to stop weapons shipments to Gaza being celebrated for their efforts on CNN and the BBC. You don’t see antiwar activists getting Hollywood movies made about their work — at least not until the wars they were protesting lie safely in the distant past. You don’t see journalists who work to expose the most egregious crimes of the empire being elevated to fame and fortune.

The only figures who get elevated to fame and fortune in this fake plastic dystopia are those who either actively serve the interests of the empire or who passively distract people from its abuses. Donald Trump. Elon Musk. The Kardashians. Taylor Swift. Spider-Man and SpongeBob.

Those are the only heroes we’re allowed to have here in any major way. You can have real heroes if you want, but if you tell the average westerner their names the first word out of their mouth will be, “Who?”

Every once in a great while someone will sneak past the many security checkpoints into fame and begin opposing the empire, but they are always quickly demonized and marginalized by the imperial perception managers. And for every Roger Waters or Susan Sarandon, there are a thousand imposter heroes making themselves extremely convenient for the rulers of the western empire.

This is the civilization we live in. A mind-controlled wasteland where everything is fake and stupid. The only path toward fulfillment and inner peace in such a dystopia is to dedicate yourself to tearing it down, brick by plastic brick.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured images via Inside the Magic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) and Joshua Roberts/Pexels.

I publish my work in print form every month in a collection called JOHNSTONE magazine. The new edition is now available to order in print or download as a pay-what-you-want e-book version.

This month’s issue of JOHNSTONE is titled “We’re The Terrorists”, featuring a painting of the final moments of Sha’ban al-Dalou, a 19 year-old software engineering student who was burned alive in his hospital bed by Israeli forces.

The nightmare in Gaza and Lebanon continues to unfold, all justified by the narrative that Israel is fighting “terrorists”. 

Who are the terrorists, you might ask? Why, the terrorists are groups which have been designated as such by the very governments who are supplying the bombs. “Terrorist organization” is a completely arbitrary designation which is used as a tool of western narrative control to justify war and militarism. In effect it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them”.

Israel is burning people alive in Gaza. An open letter to President Biden from 99 US healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza contains a quote from Dr Mark Perlmutter, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.” 

We’re the terrorists. We are. The word “terrorist” won’t have any meaning or relevance until it applies first and foremost to the giant globe-spanning power structure that is inflicting this nightmare upon our species.

You can get a paperback copy of this issue by clicking here, or a pay-what-you-feel digital copy by clicking here.

Other paperback editions of JOHNSTONE can be purchased by clicking here. Other digital editions can be downloaded by clicking here.

You can also get a subscription to the digital versions which will be sent to your inbox every month by clicking here.

INSIDE

1. The Media When IDF Soldiers Get Killed Vs When A Hospital Patient Is Burned Alive In Gaza … 3
2. I Have Seen The Insides Of Too Many Dead Kids … 5
3. We’re The Fucking Terrorists … 6
4. McGenocide … 8
5. Good Westerners Don’t Start Off Hating Israel, But Truth Eventually Leads Them There … 10
6. The Toilet Paper Dome … 12
7. The Middle East Is Always At War Because The West Keeps Pushing It That Way … 14
8. These Are US Wars. These Are Biden’s Wars. … 16
9. The Western Media Helped Create These Horrors In The Middle East … 18
10. Never Let Your Government Tell You Who Your Enemies Are … 20
11. My Enemy Is Not Iran. My Enemy Is The Western Empire. … 22
12. Meta Is Aggressively Censoring Criticism Of US-Israeli Warmongering … 25
13. On This Day In Particular … 28
14. Australian Officials Push Authoritarian Crackdown On Pro-Hezbollah Speech … 30
15. “Never Again!” Cried The Israeli While Doing It Again … 33
16. Slaughter In Gaza And Lebanon As War With Iran Approaches … 36
17. Israeli Snipers Routinely, Deliberately Shoot Palestinian Kids In The Head … 38
18. Israel Jails US Journalist, Fires On UN Peacekeepers, Bombs Beirut, Kills More Kids, Etc … 40
19. It’s So, So Bad, And It’s About To Get A Whole Lot Worse … 42
20. We Must Purge Genocide From The Marrow Of Our Bones … 44
21. Opposing The Western War Machine Is The Most Important Thing You Can Do … 46
22. Israel’s Motto Is “We Can Have Peace Tomorrow If We Just Kill A Few More People Today” … 48
23. Another Phony Biden PR Stunt About Humanitarian Aid In Gaza … 50
24. More Authoritarian Crackdowns On Speech That’s Critical Of Israel … 53
25. We’re Basically Being Asked To Believe That The Palestinians Are Genociding Themselves … 56
26. You’re Not Crazy. This Genocidal Dystopia Is Crazy. … 58
27. What’s Happening In Northern Gaza Proves Israel Lied About Everything … 60
28. This Mass Atrocity Is Made Possible By The Systematic Dehumanization Of Palestinians … 62
29. We Really Are The Bad Guys And This Really Is The Evil Empire … 64
30. When The Holocaust Returned It Came Denouncing Anti-Semitism And Wearing A Star Of David … 66
31. Israel Continues Its War On Journalism … 68
32. The Only Good Thing About This Nightmare Is That It’s Exposing The Monsters For Who They Are … 70
33. Lying Western Press Scramble To Frame Israel’s Attack On Iran As Self-Defense … 72
34. Gaza WILL Get Worse Under Trump. It’ll Also Get Worse Under Harris. … 74
35. On Gaza And Feelings Of Powerlessness … 77

Again, you can get a paperback copy of this issue by clicking here, or click here for a digital pay-what-you-feel copy.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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People who think of either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as decent or acceptable simply have not realized how immensely evil you have to be to become a US president.

In order to support either Harris or Trump you need to have an extreme ignorance of the murderousness and depravity of the US empire, which they both serve. Only a complete failure to see and understand the vast scale of the abusiveness of the US power structure could cause you to view these two candidates as meaningfully different from each other — let alone see one of them as decent enough to be worthy of your support.

Both Trump and Harris are auditioning for a role that will necessarily entail the creation of mountains of human corpses by US-sponsored violence, as has every viable US presidential candidate throughout our lives. 

This is because the US empire is deeply evil. Not the country called the United States in and of itself, but the globe-spanning power structure which functions as an empire that’s structured around it. This vast power structure is held together by rivers of human blood, and if you’re the Democratic or Republican nominee to lead it as president then you are necessarily a deeply evil person, because you have sufficiently assured all the necessary powers that be that you will continue that bloodshed in order to become the nominee.

Most Americans (and most westerners generally) fail to truly see and understand how profoundly evil the US-centralized empire is, which is the only thing that allows all this political energy to go into pretending there are these hugely significant differences between the Democrat and the Republican presidential candidate every four years. If they could really ingest the scale of the empire’s brutality and tyranny with a deep sense of empathy for their fellow human beings upon whom it is inflicted, they would never support anyone who is pledged to help operate the slaughter machine, and they would not see any would-be operators of that machine as meaningfully different from any other. All they would see is the need for the slaughter machine to be dismantled.

The most sophisticated propaganda engine ever created exists to prevent this understanding from taking root, in the west generally and in the United States in particular. Americans are the most propagandized population on this planet, and their propaganda indoctrination is at its most intensive during the quadrennial performance ritual known as the US presidential race. The whole thing is geared toward falsely exaggerating the differences between the two candidates while drawing emphasis away from the 99 percent of the issues on which they are indistinguishable from each other. And those 99 percent similarities happen to be on all the most murderous and tyrannical behaviors of the US government.

If Americans weren’t so aggressively propagandized and indoctrinated, this would all be obvious to them, and this election race performance wouldn’t get them clapping along like children at a puppet show. The abusive status quo necessary for maintaining the US-centralized empire would not be consented to at all, and would be forced to collapse. There’s too much power riding on preventing this from happening for Americans to be allowed to have a real say in their elections, so they are propagandized to the gills into clapping along instead.

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Liberals are freaking out because The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post chose not to endorse a presidential candidate this election cycle, which is silly. Newspapers shouldn’t endorse political candidates. How is this not obvious to everyone?

It’s absolutely ridiculous that news outlets endorsing political candidates is a thing at all. The first job of a real journalist is to have an adversarial relationship with those in power, regardless of who wins. The only correct political position from the perspective of journalistic ethics is “If you are in power I will do everything I can to expose all your lies and misdeeds, no matter what your party or platform happens to be.” This position is vastly more important in the US, the nation with the world’s most powerful government, and becomes more important the more influence your news outlet has.

If you are campaigning for one side or the other, you’ve obviously hurt your ability to take this position. You’re communicating a line of favoritism not only to the public, but to your outlet’s staff, and to the politicians you’re meant to be holding to account. You’re making decisions which can help or hinder your outlet’s ability to gain access to an administration once in office by doing or not doing what amounts to a political favor for them. The press should not be doing political favors for any political candidate, and the expectation that they should inhibits their ability to do critical journalism.

Obviously news outlets have biases like anyone else, and they should do everything they can to bring transparency to those biases. But that should look like saying “Yes we have an ideological bias, so here’s what we’re doing to prevent that from skewing our coverage of the powerful,” not “Everybody please vote for Candidate X because we like them more than Candidate Y.”

The whole controversy is stupid. The LA Times and Washington Post shouldn’t be endorsing a presidential candidate. No news outlet should, at least if they purport to be engaged in journalism rather than political activism.

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Back when people used to watch TV they’d complain that there’s “a hundred channels and nothing on,” and they were right: there WAS nothing on that was worth watching. Mainstream culture was just that vapid and worthless — and it still is. There’s nothing in it that fulfills us, that nourishes us in the ways we long to be nourished, that tells us real things in a real way about the world as it actually is. People would flip through TV channels disgusted at the emptiness of it all because that’s all they were being presented with: empty drivel with no edifying or transformative value.

People experience the same thing today when scrolling through their online media feeds and streaming services. They’re searching for something true and meaningful, but unless you’ve been lucky enough to stumble into a rare corner of the internet where real things are being discussed, all the algorithm feeds you is propaganda and distraction. Mindless entertainment. Celebrities. Gossip. Mainstream electoral politics. Donald Trump.

For generations we’ve been corralled toward streams of information which are designed to turn us into idiots and sociopaths. Designed to keep us from getting good information about what the powerful people who rule us are really up to. To dull our curiosity and keep us from asking useful and penetrating questions about our society. To direct any political impulses we might be able to muster in this confusing fog toward mainstream political factions which all support the status quo. To stop us from looking too closely at the death and misery our government inflicts upon people in far away countries. To keep us from noticing that we live in a mind-controlled dystopia that is fueled by endless exploitation, abuse, mass military violence, and ecocide. To keep us mindlessly turning the gears of the empire and trusting our rulers to sort things out on our behalf. To keep us sedated and compliant instead of brilliant and inconvenient.

It takes work to get outside of that matrix of manipulation. It takes time to find good sources of information and ingest what they’ve got to teach us. It takes effort to find our way into depth and meaning inside this fraudulent empire. But that’s what we all ache for. That’s what kept people flipping through channels in frustration in the glory days of television. They were looking for the depth. They were searching for something authentic. Something real.

Forming a truth-based relationship with reality can be difficult, but it’s a necessary step if you want to be an authentic person and come out of that itching sense of dissatisfaction which all controlled minds must inevitably experience. This is the only path to real and lasting happiness. Until then all you get is the fake decoy happiness they try to sell you in advertisements and Hollywood movies that comes from always getting your way and owning the right products and achieving all your goals and having a compelling personal story to tell people. This isn’t real happiness. It cannot last. It cannot satisfy.

Only truth can lead to satisfaction. And everything in this fake plastic dystopia is structured around preventing us from ever finding it.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

It’s the sense of powerlessness that gets to you. Watching all these people being slaughtered and tormented in Gaza and in Lebanon with the full support of your own government and its allies, but being unable to stop it.

That’s basically been the main message of the 2024 US presidential election with regard to Israel’s US-backed atrocities: “You are powerless to stop this.” Over and over again in various ways Americans are being fed the message that the slaughter is going to continue regardless of who wins, so you may as well give up on saving Gaza and try to look out for your own interests.

That was what Kamala Harris was saying when she told Americans that they need to vote for her, even though she will continue the Gaza genocide, if they want things like affordable groceries and abortion rights. She was saying, “You are powerless. There is nothing you can do to stop this. What are you going to do, vote for Trump? He’ll continue the genocide too. Vote for a third party candidate? They can’t win. We’ve closed off all the options by which you might try to end this. We’ve shut and locked all the doors. There’s no way out. You might as well relax and submit to the inevitable.”

And, in a sense, the empire managers are not wrong when they tell us this. The system is stacked to prevent us from stopping their genocidal rampage in the middle east. You can’t vote your way out of it; they’ve rigged it so all possible results of the election lead to more genocide. You can’t fight a revolution to stop it; westerners are currently too propaganda-addled to rise up in sufficient numbers to join you, and you’d just get killed. You can’t even engage in direct action like blocking the weapons shipments and sabotaging the arms manufacturers unless you’re prepared to do some serious prison time. 

This reality weighs heavily on those who oppose this genocide. I sometimes see activists online snapping and lashing out at people on their side over the fact that they’re not doing more, not putting their bodies and lives on the line, not doing whatever it takes to stop this nightmare. 

Which is an entirely understandable response to the situation we now find ourselves in. We should all be doing everything we can to end this genocide and stop the empire’s bloodbath, and those who are going above and beyond on this front should be commended. 

But I think the real lesson behind this feeling of powerlessness and the message from our rulers that we are powerless to stop them is just that: that we are powerless. Or, more specifically, that we have been made powerless. That our power has been taken from us, and given to people who should not have power.

That’s the message we should be taking from all this: that we are living in a civilization that has been rigged by the powerful, for the benefit of the powerful, to siphon power away from the many to and give it to a few oligarchs and empire managers. 

We have been made powerless. Until we get real about this fact, we won’t be able to address it. As long as we’re still fooling ourselves into thinking there’s a swift and immediately available option for us to end these murderous atrocities, we won’t be able to begin addressing the problem that we live in a highly controlled tyrannical dystopia where the people do not have the kind of power we’re taught we have in school.

Of course we do have power in the most real sense: there are a whole lot more normal people than there are oligarchs and empire managers, and we could easily implement any changes we wanted to if we rose up in sufficient numbers. But we’re not rising up in sufficient numbers because far too many of us have been successfully indoctrinated into believing our genocidal, ecocidal, omnicidal status quo is acceptable, with the help of the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed.

As long as westerners are being successfully psychologically manipulated at mass scale into consenting to the insane behavior of the western empire, we are completely powerless. They may as well have steel chains around each of our necks and mind control chips in each of our brains. There is nothing we can do to stop them from ethnically cleansing Gaza, waging nonstop wars, engaging in increasingly dangerous nuclear brinkmanship, or destroying the biosphere we depend on for survival. 

If we can find some way to shake off the conditioning which manipulates us into thinking revolutionary change is unnecessary, then anything becomes possible. If enough people can awaken to the urgent need for change, collective measures like national strikes and mass-scale civil disobedience could bring the capitalist empire to its knees without firing a shot. We own all the labor and purchasing power upon which the empire is built; that’s why a historically unprecedented amount of propaganda has gone into making sure we never make use of that power.

But nothing like that can happen until we come to terms with the reality that we live in a civilization that is designed to make us powerless. Until then we’re stuck with ridiculous strategies which feed into the illusion that we have the power to do something meaningful within the current system, like “Vote for Kamala and then push her to the left” or “Vote for Trump and hope he does something unpredictable”. 

So lean into the powerlessness of this historical moment. Point it out to people. In as many ways as you can, help show people that their political systems are controlled by the powerful, that their news media are propaganda services of the western empire, and that a better world is possible if we can shake off the chains of imperial narrative control and start forcing the advancement of the interests of ordinary human beings.

You can do this using any means at your disposal. Talking to people. Distributing literature. Making videos. Making TikTok skits. Making tweets. Making art. Making memes. Writing on the wall. Writing blogs. Printing zines. Writing letters to the editor at your local paper. Anything you can do to help get unauthorized ideas into eyes and ears which may not otherwise have encountered them, using your own unique set of skills and personal conditioning.

The more eyes are opened to what’s going on, the more hands we will have working toward the task of waking up the others. This allows for the possibility of nonlinear growth, which means things could move very quickly from looking impossible to looking inevitable.

All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. In helping to spread awareness of the fact that we live in a civilization that is designed to make us powerless, we actually turn that powerlessness into power by waking people up to the reality of what’s happening. The powerlessness-manufacturing capabilities of the empire can in this way be weaponized against the empire to take it down.

And of course, nothing I am describing here does Palestinian and Lebanese people a damn bit of good in the here and now. Today we are powerless to stop what’s happening, and it sucks, and it hurts. 

Rather than letting this destroy us, we can just let those feelings wash over us, and feel them all the way through until they’ve had their say. Feelings are meant to be felt. If you just sit with a feeling and let it rip through you without trying to manage it or reframe it with thought stories, it always subsides after a while. Feelings are not dangerous. Just feel them.

We’re not supposed to feel okay about genocide. The fact that we’re feeling bad about what we are seeing just tells us that we are emotionally healthy people with a healthy sense of empathy, which is what we’re going to need if we are to build a healthy world someday. 

So if you’re feeling powerless, feel the powerlessness. If you’re feeling grief, let the grief carry you away. If you’re feeling rage, let the rage roar through you. Don’t act. Don’t speak. Don’t think. Just feel. Cry. Moan. Scream. If you sit courageously through the energy of an emotion and give it a voice within you, it will move along once its message has been delivered. 

Feel the feelings all the way through, and then get up and get back to work. We’ve got a world to save.

_____________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Adobe Stock.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Israel has launched a round of airstrikes on Iran which the western news media are falling all over themselves to falsely frame as “retaliatory” strikes against an unprovoked missile attack by Iran. 

As always, history begins the moment Israel is attacked, and all events leading up to that attack vanish from the official record as the imperial propaganda services churn out their headlines.

“Israel Launches Airstrikes Against Iran in Retaliatory Attack,” reads a headline from The New York Times, subtitled “Israel had promised strikes after Iran fired several waves of ballistic missiles at Israel earlier this month.”

“Israel has begun its retaliatory strikes on Iran, source says,” reads a headline from CNN.

“Israel begins retaliatory strikes against Iran following missile barrage targeting Israelis,” reads a headline from Fox News.

“Israel launches retaliatory attack against Iran,” reads a headline from Axios.

“Live updates: Israel says it has launched retaliatory attacks in Iran,” reads a headline from NBC News.

“Israel fires retaliatory strikes against Tehran over ballistic missile barrage,” reads a headline in The New York Post.

“Israel Launches Strikes Against Iran In Response To Ballistic Missile Attacks,” reads a headline from Forbes.

Western media framing is misleading.

Iran waited 2 months to respond to Israel’s assassination in its capital because the US said they were “working” on a ceasefire in Gaza, which never happened, then Israel expanded its war to Lebanon. Israel is “retaliating” to a retaliation. pic.twitter.com/n9HpZH8lf6

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 25, 2024

What the imperial propaganda services are omitting from their headlines is the fact that Iran’s ballistic missile strikes on Israel earlier this month were themselves a retaliatory attack against multiple Israeli assassination strikes. Israel had launched an attack on Iranian soil when it assassinated the leader of Hamas’ political wing Ismail Haniyeh in July, and then killed an Iranian military official in an assassination strike in Beirut.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps released a statement at the time making it clear that the missile strikes were in response to the assassinations of Haniyeh and IRGC commander Abbas Nilforoushan, as well as Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah. 

This is all publicly available information. There is no nation on earth that would accept a foreign nation openly assassinating its military officials and conducting assassination strikes on its soil. Any nation would consider such aggressions an act of war, including — and especially — the United States.

The western media are portraying Israel as the innocent victim who was attacked out of nowhere by Muslim barbarians because the western media are propaganda services for the western empire. Their job is to frame the US and its allies as virtuous freedom fighters defending their people against unprovoked attacks by evil villains, in order to manufacture consent for the murderous and tyrannical agendas of the US power alliance.

The US has denied any involvement in Israel's strikes on Iran but has called them "an exercise of self-defense." https://t.co/hMkvbpWjSS

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) October 26, 2024

The PR spin of these shameful press institutions is so indistinguishable from state propaganda that their messaging mirrors perfectly the position of the US government, who said in a statement following the Israeli airstrikes that they were an act of “self-defense” in retaliation for an Iranian attack.

“We understand that Israel is conducting targeted strikes against military targets in Iran as an exercise of self-defense and in response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack against Israel on October 1,” said White House National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett.

We still don’t know whether this latest round of violence will spiral into the horrifying new war we’ve all been fearing as the worst-case nightmare scenario in the fallout from Israel’s murderous behavior this past year. While Axios and its Israeli intelligence insider Barak Ravid report that the US expects Iran to retaliate, as of this writing it appears that the fighting could stop here as long as Israel doesn’t keep attacking.

“Both Iranian media, unofficial accounts, and those of aligned militias are downplaying the attacks,” the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi said on Twitter, adding the significant caveat: “HOWEVER, only the first phase of the attack has been completed. Whether the effort to downplay the strikes can survive the night and several phases of attacks, remains to be seen.”

We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

A really extraordinary moment occurred on the CNN “town hall” with Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday.

Asked by an audience member what she would do to end the slaughter of Palestinians by US-sponsored bombs, Harris delivered her usual canned answer about how “far too many” Palestinians have died and the need for a two-state solution, after which host Anderson Cooper asked a follow-up question.

“What do you say to voters who are thinking about supporting a third-party candidate, or staying on the couch, not voting at all because of this issue?” Cooper asked.

What followed was an absolutely jaw-dropping answer from the vice president. In essence she says that people who have strong feelings about the genocide in Gaza need to get over it and vote for her anyway if they want abortions and affordable groceries, because she supports the genocide and that’s not going to change.

This isn't an exaggeration.

She's literally saying that she understands why people don't want to support a genocide, but that she DOES support the genocide, and if you want minimally decent domestic policy, you're going to have to support the genocide too. https://t.co/1ycFpKbJIZ

— Bryce Greene (@TheGreeneBJ) October 24, 2024

“Listen, I am not going to deny the strong feelings that people have,” Harris said. “I don’t know that anyone who has seen the images who would not have strong feelings about what has happened, much less those who have relatives, who have died and been killed. And I and I know people and I’ve talked with people, so I appreciate that.”

“But I also do know that for many people who care about this issue, they also care about bringing down the price of groceries,” Harris continued. “They also care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist. They also care about the fact that we need practical, common-sense solutions from a leader who is willing to work across the aisle on behalf of the American people and not themselves. They want a president who cares about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body, understanding that we’re not trying to change anyone’s belief, but let’s not have the government telling women what to do with their body.”

Which is just wild. I mean, technically she’s not saying anything different from what liberals have been shouting for months at Americans who oppose the Gaza genocide, but she’s not supposed to say that! She’s not supposed to come right out and admit that she’s a genocidal monster and tough shit if you don’t like it because the other candidate is the greater evil. That’s normally the sort of disgusting manipulation you let other people do for you while pretending to be a good person.

"I'm Speaking"

Oil on canvas. pic.twitter.com/k3EMdAcqNs

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 26, 2024

The only positive thing coming out of this nightmare is that it’s exposing the real monsters for who they are.

More and more people are seeing that the US government is much too evil to be allowed to rule the world.

More and more people are seeing that the state of Israel is much too evil to be allowed to continue to exist in its present iteration.

More and more people are seeing that the western press are propaganda services for the US power alliance and should never be trusted.

More and more people are seeing that the Democratic Party exists solely to protect the murderous and corrupt oligarchic status quo of the US empire and not to promote the interests of ordinary human beings.

More and more people are seeing that western liberalism is just a more photogenic version of fascism.

When you’ve got a leading presidential candidate standing in front of the nation saying that yes she will continue an active genocide but you’d better vote for her anyway if you want abortions and affordable groceries, that shows people something about the kind of nation they live in that you could never get across to them by sheer argumentation.

When you’ve got evidence of mass atrocities entering people’s social media feeds on a daily basis while the entire political-media class tells them this is fine and normal, that communicates a message which would be hard to receive in words alone.

There is so very, very little to say about this horror that is remotely positive. But it is opening eyes. And enough open eyes is all that’s required to change the world.

______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image is a screen shot from CNN’s YouTube channel (Fair Use).

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

The thing about people who argue that Gaza will get worse if Trump wins is that they’re technically not wrong: Gaza will get worse if Trump wins. But it will also get worse if Harris wins. 

Know how I know? Because it’s been getting worse and worse in Gaza for a whole year, and both Trump and Harris have pledged to continue unconditionally supporting the state that’s making it worse and worse.

❖

Crazy person: If Trump wins something BAD might happen!

Normal person: His opponent is literally committing genocide right now.

Crazy person: No but like something REALLY bad!

❖

The other day a Muslim streamer named Frogan enraged every western liberal on earth by making the very correct and obvious observation that the US military is a force of immense evil in our world and the people who work for the US military directly perpetrate those immense evils.

She’s right. If you are offended by part of the things she said you’re a bootlicker and a loser.

❖

I’m an avowed socialist but I have more in common with a US libertarian who opposes the Gaza genocide than with any lefty I agree with about every issue besides Palestine. If you get Gaza right you’re a better person than someone who gets it wrong, even if the rest of your politics are ridiculous and the rest of their politics are solid.

❖

I am going to be so mean to Democrats if they lose another easily winnable election by unforced errors and try to blame anyone but themselves for their loss again. I am going to ruin people’s day. I will make grown men cry.

❖

There are two types of Israel apologist:

1. The openly racist and genocidal “Haha kill them all” kind.

2. The dishonest kind that makes bad faith arguments and pretends to believe things they know are false.

These are the only two types. There are no others. This is because the only two ways you can defend Israel’s genocidal atrocities are either (1) to argue that genocidal atrocities are good, or (2) to obfuscate the reality that indefensible genocidal atrocities are happening and need to stop immediately. Only the first can be done with any level of intellectual honesty.

❖

If you liked "All the hospitals in Gaza are Hamas", you'll love Israel's new hit "All the hospitals in Lebanon are Hezbollah." https://t.co/V8VXbAB28D

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 21, 2024

❖

So much of the PR for the US/Israeli genocide in Gaza revolves around convincing people to abandon their common sense and believe self-evidently idiotic bullshit, because that’s all they’ve got.

They can’t justify Israel bombing hospitals, routinely shooting Palestinian kids in the head, assassinating journalists and doctors and cultural leaders, and deliberately targeting areas known to be packed full of civilians, so they ask you to turn off your critical thinking faculties and accept that all of those people are either (A) Hamas or (B) “human shields” of Hamas.

They seriously ask you to set down everything you know about Israel’s history and its longstanding agenda to steal all Palestinian land and accept on faith that what’s being done in Gaza is all about self-defense and fighting terrorism.

They’ll facilitate a genocide right in front of you for an entire year and then still ask you to believe that they’re working real hard on a ceasefire and they’ll get aid to those starving civilians any minute now.

They’ll get caught in lie after lie after lie trying to justify their genocidal atrocities, and then STILL try to tell you that a bunch of journalists in Gaza are secret Hamas combatants and that there’s a secret Hezbollah base hidden underneath a hospital in Beirut.

Their position is so evil and so stupid, so completely indefensible on any moral or rational basis, that the only tool in their toolbox is to ask you to voluntarily turn yourself into a drooling moron and swallow obvious propaganda right down your throat with zero gag reflex.

It would be cute and funny if it wasn’t being used to justify the ugliest things happening in our world today.

❖

If the mainstream western media were comprised of journalists instead of propagandists, there would be earth-shaking outcry over Israel claiming that six Al Jazeera reporters in Gaza are secret members of Hamas and thereby marking them for death.

It’s not just people like me who view the western press as propagandists for the western empire — that’s how they view themselves. They don’t say it, and they might not even think it, but you see it tacitly acknowledged in the disparity between how they treat journalists who criticize the empire compared to mainstream reporters who dutifully toe the imperial line. The outcry in the mainstream press over a Wall Street Journal reporter like Evan Gershkovich getting arrested or a Washington Post columnist like Jamal Khashoggi being murdered is always orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen about all the Palestinian journalists being murdered in Gaza, or the imprisonment of Julian Assange, or the persecution of pro-Palestinian journalists like Asa Winstanley or Jeremy Loffredo.

This disparity reveals a clear “us vs them” attitude in the mainstream western press which draws a solid line between journalists who promote the information interests of the western empire and journalists who do not, with journalists who challenge the official narratives of Washington and its allies placed firmly in the “them” category.

Even the way you’ll routinely see mainstream media outlets report news that was already broken by independent dissident media as a “scoop” without giving those indie outlets credit for their original reporting illustrates this “us and them” viewpoint. They simply do not regard journalists as real journalists unless they work for an imperial media outlet like The New York Times or the BBC, and therefore don’t respect or regard them accordingly.

This shows that they don’t view the job of “journalist” as simply someone who does journalism; for them, a real journalist is someone who aligns with the US government and its allies and helps market its wars and agendas to the public. If you’re not doing this, then you’re not one of “us”, you’re one of “them”, and you will be treated accordingly. And the “us” that they view themselves as belonging to is a collective of professional propagandists.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured images by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

An Israeli airstrike destroyed the press office of the Lebanese news broadcaster Al Mayadeen on Wednesday night, continuing Israel’s historically unprecedented military assault on the press.

Also in continuation of Israel’s war on journalism, the IDF has published the names of six Al Jazeera reporters who it claims are actually members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, citing as evidence documents which it claims Israeli forces found in Gaza. These allegations would mark these journalists as legitimate military targets.

Al Jazeera has denounced these claims as unfounded, saying in a statement, “The Network views these fabricated accusations as a blatant attempt to silence the few remaining journalists in the region, thereby obscuring the harsh realities of the war from audiences worldwide.”

URGENT! These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel's onslaught in Gaza (with 130+ of their colleagues killed in the last year). Declaring them "terrorists" sounds like a death sentence.
They must be protected at all cost. https://t.co/8AHQ0F4f4l

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) October 23, 2024

There is of course no reason to ever believe any claim Israel makes about anything whatsoever absent mountains of independently verifiable evidence, after the mountains of lies it has churned out over the last year. The fact that western news outlets are treating these allegations as plausible is evidence of their propagandistic nature.

Israel claims everyone it wants to kill is Hamas. The journalists are Hamas, the hospitals are Hamas, the UN is Hamas, the aid trucks are Hamas, the schools are Hamas, the mosques are Hamas, the water infrastructure is Hamas, the civilian homes are all Hamas, and Hamas is hiding behind every woman and child in Gaza. The only exception to this rule is in Lebanon, in which case everyone Israel wants to kill is Hezbollah.

Israel hates truth, which is why it kills journalists at every opportunity and blocks them from entering Gaza. This is because truth tends to have a marked anti-Israel bias. 

Journalists Find No Evidence of Israeli Claim That Hezbollah Money Stash Is Under Beirut Hospital
The hospital gave reporters unrestricted access
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Lebanon #Israel #Beirut #Hezbollah #gold https://t.co/JzmW4Vb1gv pic.twitter.com/Zqq2LeRgG4

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) October 22, 2024

We saw this illustrated recently when Israel announced that there’s a secret Hezbollah bunker underneath a hospital in Beirut, so the press simply sent a bunch of reporters to go investigate because Israel can’t block the press from entering Lebanon like it can in Gaza. Even western outlets like the BBC and Sky News entered the hospital and interviewed medical staff, reporting that they found no trace of evidence supporting Israel’s claims and that the hospital staff all denied the existence of any Hezbollah bunker on the premises. And you may be sure those outlets would have eagerly reported any sign of Hezbollah if they were given the opportunity. 

Criminal institutions need to function in the dark. They cannot function in the light of visibility and critical journalism and inconvenient video footage. That’s why the mafia murders witnesses. That’s why the inner workings of the US war machine are shrouded in government secrecy. That’s why Julian Assange spent five years in a maximum security prison. And that’s why Israel does everything it can to kill and obstruct journalists who tell the truth about its crimes.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Listen to a reading by Tim Foley:

CNN says an IDF soldier has suffered trauma
because he had to run over too many Palestinians
with his D9 armored bulldozer.
Says he can’t eat meat anymore
because he had to drive over so much human meat
(he actually called it “meat”)
and it reminds him of all the blood and guts
and bones and tissue that would come squirting out
when he ran over them.

Poor IDF soldier,
can’t even enjoy a Big Mac anymore,
can’t even bite into a big juicy McGenocide burger,
can’t even masticate a mouthful of gore
without being haunted by visions
of human torsos and skulls spurting guts and brains
as he plowed over them “dead and alive”
in the killing fields of Gaza.
Can’t even enjoy his Children McNuggets
without remembering all the kids he killed,
all the tiny bodies,
shredded bodies,
bulldozed bodies,
body parts packed into the treads of the bulldozer,
getting caught in the works,
having to pull them out by hand because by golly
we need to use it some more tomorrow.

And the CNN man says 
So sad! So sad!
A man’s got to have his meat.
Got to bite into it, 
feel it dribbling down his chin,
hear it screaming and begging for help,
hear it crying out for its mother one last time
and then nothing but snapping and crunching
and chewing and swallowing
and washing it down with hard liquor 
to kill off the feelings in his chest,
the feelings that won’t ever go away,
that pound like mortar fire when he awakens from red dreams
about screaming and spurting and crunching and popping,
and remembers that he used to be an innocent young child
like the tiny red ghosts who haunt his nights.

And we live the McGenocide too, don’t we?
We live it right alongside him here in this crazy country
where we laugh and joke and eat buckets of meat slop
while our government turns humans into bulldozer mince in Gaza.
Grinning Black Hole Sun grins with meat dribbling down our chins
while the sky turns red and the birds turn into Reaper drones,
giggling at our podcasts and getting mad at the Uber Eats driver
for being five minutes late with our next plate full of carnage.

And we have the nightmares too, don’t we?
Waking trembling with terror at what we’ve allowed,
what we’ve helped make possible,
what we tacitly consent to while we distract ourselves
with smartphones and streaming services and porn and gossip
and the ridiculous fake election for America’s next fake president
and plate after plate of bleeding red meat.

Our teeth grow sharper and our hearts grow harder,
and the smoke stacks fill the air with a horrifying stench.
In this genocide town, 
this ghost town, 
this meat town,
it’s essential to learn how to drown out the feelings
and bark and bray at the blood red moon until dawn
because it beats the hell out of sleeping
and dreaming
and remembering,
remembering what we have done,
and where we are going,
and what we have become,
and what we are still becoming.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via Mike Mozart (CC BY 2.0)

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

When the Holocaust returned it came denouncing anti-semitism and wearing a Star of David.

It was never going to look how we were expecting. It wasn’t going to show up in its old familiar costume with the bent cross and the tiny mustache, blaming all the problems on the Jews. 

It had to look different. If it didn’t look different, we never would have let it in the door.

And that’s still what’s throwing a lot of people off: it looks different. It doesn’t look like what all all the World War II movies and Holocaust novels conditioned us to watch out for. In fact, it looks so different that the victims in the last story have the same religion as the antagonists in the new one.

Pointing to Gaza, an Israeli settler says it is akin to a cut in the body.

“When you have a cut, you have to take out the infection. Then it’ll be clean again…”

That’s how he describes the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. pic.twitter.com/UdVP0Sq0s8

— Hamza Yusuf (@Hamza_a96) October 22, 2024

That old aphorism “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is true because people don’t tend to make the exact same mistake in the same way twice, but the conditioning which led them to make the first mistake will often lead them to make a second similar one. We’ve all been made far too familiar with the Nazi extermination program to ever consent to Jews being rounded up and loaded onto trains again, but we also didn’t purge from our civilization all the murderousness, hatred and tyranny which made it possible. That’s why this new Holocaust has been allowed to happen.

We’ve all been conditioned to watch out for the next Hitler, but there’s never going to be another Hitler. We’ve been so focused on looking out for the Hitler who never comes that many of us missed when we started singing verses that rhyme with the ones we were hearing in Germany eight decades ago.

People assume what’s happening in Gaza can’t be an actual genocide, because the news media keep assuring everyone that’s not what we’re looking at, and so do the politicians in both parties. 

“This can’t possibly be what it looks like,” people say. “If it was, we would have heard about it in the news.”

The villains in this new story don’t look like the villains in the old story, and, if you are a properly indoctrinated westerner, they might not look like villains at all. They might just look like Jews defending themselves from terrorists and western governments rightly defending their dear ally — which is exactly what they should do if they want to prevent another Holocaust!

But it’s that very misperception which is making today’s Holocaust possible. This mass atrocity is being tolerated by huge parts of the population exactly because we see it as intolerable for large numbers of Jews to be killed by those who hate them, not understanding that the people who were killed on October 7 were killed not because of their religion, but because they were part of a settler-colonialist project which is premised on the perpetual abuse of a preexisting indigenous population.

“I just think we need to kill them. Every last one of them”

Genocidal Israeli on Sky News pic.twitter.com/kHNrYDF4ew

— Stevie McGlinchey (@steviemcglinchy) October 22, 2024

People defend Israel’s actions on the grounds that Israel has reasons for doing things the way it’s doing them. They have to bomb Gaza — they suffered an unprovoked attack from a bunch of evil terrorists. They have to bomb all the hospitals and schools and mosques — that’s where Hamas are hiding. They have to bomb areas that are packed full of children — Hamas are using those children as human shields.

But those who commit mass atrocities always justify their actions. They always have reasons for doing them. They always frame it as a necessary act of self-preservation. 

That was always what the next Holocaust was going to look like. It was never going to feature new bad guys who cackle and twist their mustaches saying “Haha, we are evil! Let’s kill a bunch of people because we are evil!” They were always going to frame themselves as the heroes and victims, and the other side as the villains and victimizers. They were always going to offer a bunch of reasons why what they’re doing is actually good and righteous, even though it looks evil on its face.

If we are to prevent genocidal atrocities, we need to be able to recognize what’s happening in real time, and we can’t do that if we’re expecting them to show up in familiar and instantly recognizable packaging. We need to be able to see through the manipulations and justifications in the here and now so we can stop it in its tracks instead of waiting for history to judge it in our rearview mirror after it’s already happened.

This is important to recognize when it comes to saving Gaza, and it’s important to recognize when it comes to preventing the Holocausts of the future as well. They will never look identical to the Holocausts of the past. Their form will be unprecedented, and they will have different justifications for their orchestration. But they will rhyme. And we need to be able to pick up on that as it happens.

______________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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It takes some learning and insight to understand that western civilization really is the absolute worst. There can be a kind of hipster outsider tendency to judge your own society more harshly than you do others, and at first glance it can look like that’s what’s going on when you see western critics of the western empire denouncing the criminality of their own government and its allies much more harshly than governments like Russia, China or Iran. It’s not until you’ve done a fair bit of research that you go, wait, okay no, we are actually quantifiably far more destructive than any other power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. We really are the bad guys. We really are the evil empire, and everyone slamming our side as murderous monsters are absolutely correct.

Whenever I say this I get westerners going “Oh yeah well I’d much rather live here then over there” or “Oh well if it’s so bad here then why don’t you go live over there?”, but the fact that they immediately start babbling about where they’d prefer to live is just a symptom of how sick and twisted this civilization is. They’re so cognitively and emotionally divorced from the violence and tyranny their government is inflicting upon the global south that they think the question of which countries are worse than others is a question of how pleasant it would be for them personally to live in. It’s like yes asshole, it’s very nice to be living in the imperial core that’s receiving the benefits of mass murder and imperialist extraction, and it’s less nice to live in the countries where the murder and extraction is happening. That’s the entire fucking point here.

It can be nice to live in the western world, but the western world is not nice. Ours is the most savage and thuggish civilization on this planet, and it’s not even close.

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The Democratic Party really does look ready to lose yet another easily winnable election by running yet another awful, murderous candidate with awful, murderous policies, and then once again blame their loss on everyone in America who is a better person than they are.

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https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1847753131482108339

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Always having to search for photos of Israel’s destruction of Gaza for my articles really drives home the fact that this didn’t start last year. I’m always like “Here’s one! Wait, this one’s from 2008. Here’s one! No this is from 2014. Oh hey! Bah, nope, different bombing, 2021.”

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My first encounter with Israelis was when I was backpacking through South America in my twenties, and I remember being shocked by how consistently awful they all were. I guess after their mandatory military service they tend to go traveling for a bit, and whenever I’d run into them they were reliably some of the nastiest people I’d ever encountered.

They weren’t ever nasty to me, though. I am a white westerner, and I never had a problem with them. They were nasty to the impoverished brown-skinned people who were hosting us. They were obnoxious and bullying toward local guides, they’d leave the place in a mess, and they were always trying to screw over the locals for a better deal or extra meals or favors. One time they tricked a hostel into putting up a sign in Hebrew for other Israeli backpackers which said ugly things about our hosts (they told the hostel owner it was a great review), which I only know because they were laughing hysterically about it and told me. They consistently treated the people who were looking after us like they were much lesser than us. Their pushiness and entitlement were just unbelievable.

It was a very educational experience for me. I knew the Palestinians were being treated unfairly because my father had told me so, but I also had a great love of Jews and Jewish culture. I had visited Auschwitz and Dachau and Anne Frank’s house in my travels, and I remember having some romantic ideas about kibbutzim. This was my first time directly encountering the reality that there is something unhealthy about Israeli society. Not Jews or Jewish culture, but Jewish Israelis.

Now I see evidence of this on my news feed every day, in the IDF soldiers prancing around in the undergarments of dead and displaced Palestinian women, in the AI translations of Hebrew tweets, in the polls which show widespread Israeli approval for the atrocities in Gaza, in Israeli TikTok videos mocking the suffering of the Palestinians, in the Israelis showing up in my comments justifying the worst things in the world in the most depraved ways imaginable.

My encounters with Israelis in South America were an early taste of ugly things to come. Everything I glimpsed then I’ve been seeing online over the past year. I keep thinking about those obnoxious pricks I met all those years ago, and about how they didn’t know at the time that they were giving me very useful information for me to make use of in the future.

When Israel supporters tell you to shut up about Gaza until you’ve been to Israel and met Israelis, just ignore them. Don’t go to Israel; you’re a westerner, they’ll be nice to you. You can just go to one of the tourist spots in the global south that Israelis like to visit — one with lots of brown-skinned people who’ve been colonized by the west — and watch how they treat people there. That will show you what Israelis are really like.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

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Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has been killed. He died not hiding behind civilians or disguised as a woman as Israel apologists have been claiming for a year, but alone and in uniform, fighting Israeli forces with one arm blown off by tank fire.

Sinwar’s death will have no meaningful bearing on how Hamas or Israel conduct themselves, so it’s funny to see Israel supporters puffing their chests like this was some kind of achievement. Israel is going to keep bombing hospitals, shooting kids in the head, intentionally starving civilians, and working to steal Palestinian land just like it was doing yesterday, and Palestinians are going to keep resisting this just like they were doing yesterday.

Nothing about anything has changed. If Israel were actually killing all these people with the goal of destroying Hamas then Sinwar’s death might be significant, but Israel’s goal is not destroying Hamas. Israel’s goal is the ethnic cleansing and annexation of Gaza. This is public knowledge at this point, and is not seriously debatable. The only victory Israel’s supporters can claim to have secured here is one of revenge, which is just empty ego fluff that only feels real to highly egocentric people.

You’re even seeing Israel apologists trying to call Sinwar a “coward” for the way he died, which is absurd. He died fighting off soldiers, drones and a fucking tank with one goddamn arm. Western men jerk off fantasizing about dying like that and then go on to die in nursing homes from Parkinson’s complications with bellies full of vanilla custard. You don’t get to call him a coward.

No Hamas propaganda will ever make Hamas look more badass than Israel’s footage of Sinwar throwing a stick at an IDF drone with his one remaining arm right before he died. I honestly can’t believe they released that video. They may as well have put a red triangle pointing at the drone camera.

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Someone filming from their window in northern Gaza captured the moment when Israeli forces who had injured a child with a sniper drone launched an airstrike on the site after people ran to his rescue. Imagine being scared to run to the rescue of an injured child because you could be killed for it.

That’s the kind of nightmare Palestinians are facing in Gaza. One where a child injured by a flying robot could be being used as bait to draw rescuers to the scene in order to bomb them. One where people have to watch their family members burn alive right in front of them. One where they have to listen to their disabled loved one get ripped apart by dogs in the next room while they’re held at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers. One where they have to watch everything they’ve ever known incinerated all around them while the world watches and yawns.

Fuck you if you’re going along with this. Fuck you if you’re ignoring this. Fuck you if you’re trying to stop other people from opposing this. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

They waited until everyone who was running toward the wounded child had finished arriving.

Ordinary Palestinian civilians are doing more important journalism filming their own genocide from the windows of their homes than the entire western press has done for an entire year. https://t.co/2DbAoeq1Bl

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 18, 2024

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What’s happening in northern Gaza conclusively disproves everything that Israel’s defenders have been saying for the past year. The fact that Israel is now openly starving and killing Palestinians to force them south with the goal of stealing Palestinian land while rejecting any possibility of a hostage deal or a ceasefire disproves everything Israel apologists have been saying to justify the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza.

The killing was never about rescuing hostages. The killing was never about self-defense. The killing was never about fighting terrorism. The killing was never because of human shields. The killing was never because of Hamas terror bases hidden under hospitals, schools, mosques and humanitarian aid facilities. The killing was never about beheaded babies, mass rapes, and other imaginary atrocities perpetrated on October 7. The killing was never about October 7 at all. The killing was about stealing more Palestinian land, a project that Israel has been working on for generations.

This is now a conclusively established fact, and it proves that every Israel apologist you’ve seen defending Israel’s actions over the last year was either a useful idiot or a knowing genocide apologist. Nothing they said was true. It was all lies, told to justify stealing even more land from an indigenous population.

We were always headed to this point. At some point they were going to have to stop lying about hostages and self-defense and human shields and taking out Hamas and just go “Haha yeah we’re stealing a bunch of Palestinian land actually.” 

They’ve been lying for a whole year, with western help.

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Israelis take the right to rape very seriously. https://t.co/v8cuVLyQSV

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 16, 2024

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I feel like we didn’t make a big enough deal about the news that in 2022 US intelligence assessed there was a 50/50 chance Russia could use a nuke in Ukraine. Empire apologists called us Putin propagandists for warning of this risk that whole time, and we were right. Everyone who spent 2022 warning that our rulers were flirting with nuclear armageddon has been completely vindicated, and everyone who accused us of being useful idiots or Kremlin agents or ridiculous alarmists has been completely discredited.

This is how reckless these people are. They gambled the life of every terrestrial organism on coin-toss odds. And now they’re taking things to the brink with Iran, where Israel could easily end up deploying a nuclear weapon if things get heated enough. These freaks cannot be allowed to remain in control of the fate of our world.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

You’re not crazy. They are crazy. The ones who are going around acting like everything’s fine. The ones dismissing the Gaza genocide as a “single issue”. The ones who don’t like it when you talk about this stuff because it bums them out. They are the crazy ones.

I say this because living in the west during a western-backed genocide can make you feel like you’re going insane. Like maybe there’s something wrong with you for not being able to go along as though your government isn’t helping Israel burn people alive, shoot kids in the head, deliberately destroy Gaza’s healthcare system, and target civilian populations with deadly siege warfare in order to annex Palestinian territory. Like maybe you’re defective if you can’t be as chill about all this as everyone else is being.

But there’s nothing wrong with you, and you are not defective. There is something very wrong with a civilization that could go along with all this. It is our genocidal dystopia that is defective.

History is rife with examples of horrific mass atrocities to which the majority of the population did not respond with the appropriate revulsion and urgency at the time. Slavery. The Holocaust. The systematic extermination of other indigenous populations in other settler-colonialist projects. Most of the people who now look back and judge those evils correctly in hindsight are sleepwalking right through their present-day reiteration in Palestine.

Those who stood against the mass atrocities of history tended to be in the minority, because if opposing them was conventional wisdom they wouldn’t have happened in the first place. This shows us that there is no correlation between conventional wisdom and real moral clarity. We cannot look to others to evaluate whether our position on an issue is the correct one, because history tells us that the majority is very often wrong on the most important issues in the present moment when it matters.

And the majority is wrong now. The ones flagrantly supporting Israel’s abuses are wrong. The ones who try not to think too much about what’s being done in Gaza and Lebanon are wrong. The ones who say it’s all so tragic and heartbreaking but it’s oh so very complicated and Israel has a right to defend itself are wrong. The ones who don’t oppose Israel’s atrocities but only oppose their own country sending boots on the ground or spending their tax dollars on it are wrong. The ones who know a genocide is happening but avoid making too much noise about it because they want to make sure the Democrats win the election are wrong. The ones who know it’s a genocide but don’t respond to this reality with the appropriate level of urgency, forcefulness and focus are wrong.

All around us we are bombarded with messages trying to gaslight into believing that we are the ones who aren’t perceiving reality correctly. These messages can be overt, like the propaganda of the mass media and the talking points of the Israel apologists we run into online. They can also be subtle, like the unspoken messages we get when nobody around us is talking about Gaza and how people grow uncomfortable when we do.

But those messages are lying to us. We absolutely are the ones who are seeing things correctly. We absolutely are the ones who are responding to this nightmare appropriately. They are the ones acting like a bunch of lunatics casually strolling around in the middle of a house fire. 

Don’t look to others to evaluate your own level of clarity. In a civilization that has gone insane, you have to sort out what sanity looks like for yourself. When our leaders are throwing their support behind an active genocide in a society that is awash with propaganda-induced delusions, we’ve all got to be brave enough to stand on our own two feet.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Smeerch (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), formatted for size.

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

❖

One of the dumbest things we are asked to believe about Israel’s genocide in Gaza is that all these civilians are being butchered because the Palestinians are evil and not the Israelis. That it’s the victims doing evil things and not the perpetrators.

That’s all this gibberish about “human shields” and “self-defense” is meant to do, you know. To make it look like the victims of siege warfare and carpet bombing are the ones responsible for all the death and destruction we are seeing and not the people who are actually doing it.

Can you think of anything more insulting to your intelligence? So self-evidently counter to common sense? They’re seriously asking you to believe that the people who are being starved, shot and bombed to death are the perpetrators of their own genocide, and that the side which has attacked every hospital in Gaza are just the innocent bystanders responding to unprovoked acts of aggression in the most ethical and responsible way they can manage. 

Off the top of my head I really can’t think of anything more absurd.

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Everyone who reacted with more sympathy or outrage over October 7 than they have over the last year of Israeli atrocities has just spent a year confessing that they don’t see Palestinians as human beings.

I am not a dog person or a cat person, but if I saw dogs or cats being treated the way Palestinian human beings are being treated I would care more than the average western liberal cares about Palestinians.

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A liberal is someone who thinks the moderate position between being pro-Israel and being pro-Palestine is giving Israel everything it needs to genocide the Palestinians and then watching the genocide and saying “Oh how heartbreaking and tragic, this is all very complicated.”

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And there it is. They're finally admitting it. This is all this has ever been about. Not hostages. Not ending Hamas. Not self defense. Not mass rapes. Not beheaded babies or babies placed in ovens. This has always been about taking land from the indigenous people of Palestine. https://t.co/gZ9VQJINPB

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 13, 2024

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Israel to continue blocking humanitarian aid from Gaza on the grounds that the aid could fall into the hands of Palestinian civilians.

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Imagine getting into journalism school thinking you’ll change the world for the better, finally graduating and making your family proud, getting into a prominent news outlet, spending years working your way up to editor, only to wind up spending your days writing headlines like “Gaza children perish after chance encounter with missile.”

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Here’s what it would look like if the media had used the same methods they use to report on Israel’s crimes to report on WWE star Chris Benoit strangling his wife and son to death in 2007:

Model and professional wrestling manager Nancy Benoit has been found deceased in her residence in Fayetteville, Georgia, along with her son Daniel, a seven year-old man.

Police report that both Nancy and Daniel appear to have perished from asphyxiation as a result of some tremendous force having been applied to their throats, obstructing their breathing and leading to their demise.

Authorities report that the body of Nancy Benoit was found with her legs bound with duct tape and her arms tied behind her back with coaxial cables. Toxicologists say a sedative agent was found in Daniel Benoit’s system.

Nancy Benoit worked in various professional wrestling promotions prior to her untimely demise, first with World Championship Wrestling from 1989 to 1990, with Extreme Championship Wrestling from 1993 to 1996, then returning to World Championship Wrestling for a year before departing from the promotion in 1997.

Also found on the scene was the body of World Wrestling Entertainment superstar Chris Benoit, who law enforcement officials claim appears to have committed suicide by hanging himself in the weight room.

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Paragraph 12. Not until paragraph number 12 does the word "Israel" appear in this article. https://t.co/MKOMMDzS8K

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 12, 2024

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When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is an arsenal of military explosives and the unconditional support of a globe-spanning empire, everything looks like a problem that can be solved by mass murder.

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Probably doesn’t help matters that the Old Testament is chock full of stories about Jews being at war with their neighbors all the time. Jewish Israelis and their Christian Zionist backers in the US have been conditioned by religion to expect all this military violence and see it as normal.

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The Iraq invasion was about more than just advancing geostrategic objectives; it was also an information-gathering operation. It answered a lot of questions. What happens when we do this? What happens when we completely obliterate international law in front of everyone to do something extremely evil? Are there any consequences? Do we lose any allies? Does the world turn against us? Can we continue advancing our stranglehold of this planet by any means necessary, with any amount of violence and depravity necessary, without having to pay any meaningful price? 

The answers to those questions explain why the US empire has continued to behave in the way it’s behaved in the years since.

____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The Biden administration is performing another PR stunt about getting humanitarian aid into Gaza as election day approaches.

The White House has given Israel a 30-day notice that it needs to improve humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip or risk losing military aid—a deadline which you will notice conveniently falls after US election day on November 5. 

Rather than releasing this information itself, the Biden administration published it in its customary manner by laundering it through Axios as a letter that was “obtained” by the outlet and its Israeli intelligence insider Barak Ravid, thereby framing this as a news story and not a White House press release.

Not only does the 30-day deadline fall after election day, it also falls after Israel’s planned attack on Iran in response to Iran’s retaliatory missile strike on Israel. Anonymous officials have told The Washington Post that Israel will be launching this attack before the election in the US.

Report: US Gives Israel Until After the US Election To Ease Starving of Palestinians
Biden admin sent a letter to Israeli leaders calling for steps to be taken within 30 days
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Gaza #Israel #Palestinians https://t.co/N1sTkqhiae pic.twitter.com/c5sFEdkzKe

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) October 15, 2024

This narrative the Biden administration is trying to insert into public consciousness is already falling apart. The Washington Post’s John Hudson reports via Twitter:

“Biden’s spokesmen at the White House and State Department declined to say the U.S. will restrict arms sales to Israel if it continues to block aid, raising doubts for some about the seriousness of the U.S. warning.”

Hudson also cited the analysis of former senior Biden administration official Jeremy Konyndyk, now the president of Refugees International, regarding this development:

“After the past year, Netanyahu will be understandably skeptical that Biden will put real teeth behind this sort of warning. He has blown through every guardrail the U.S. has tried to erect, and has done so with total impunity so far.”

If this was a real thing with real teeth and not an incredibly cynical eleventh-hour election ploy, it would have happened a full year ago. As with all words the US government releases about Israel, it can be safely ignored without missing out on anything of value. The Biden administration’s actions speak for themselves, and have done so for a year.

Ignore their words. Watch their actions. If you just look at the material actions of the US government and Israel and mentally mute all their mountains of verbiage about it, you simply see a big country pouring weapons into a little country who uses them to attack its neighbors.

If you tune out all the words expressing “concern” for the people of Gaza, about how Israel must do more to get humanitarian aid to civilians and try to kill fewer people, about how sad and tragic and unfortunate this whole thing is but it’s oh so very important that Israel has the ability to “defend itself”, and plus Hamas and Hezbollah are hiding behind the civilians and blah blah blah blah — if you tune all that out and just look at the raw data of what’s happening, you just see a state raining hellfire on civilian populations packed full of children and using siege warfare to starve hundreds of thousands of people.

Ignore their words and watch their actions. That’s how you sort out fact from fiction in an information environment that’s saturated in propaganda and manipulation — not just with Israel, but with everything. Watch where the war machinery is going, where the money is going, and where the resources are going, and ignore all the words about why it makes perfect sense for this to be happening. Do this and you’ll have an infinitely better understanding of what’s going on in the world than you could ever hope to glean from watching CNN or Fox News.

This is a great way to see through the manipulations in your personal life as well. If you’re in a relationship with someone who keeps letting you down in various ways and always has sensible-sounding reasons for doing so, but when you look at where the resources and/or relaxation and/or pleasure are going in your relationship you see it’s mostly going toward your partner, that tells you what’s really going on there. It tells you you’re in an unequal and exploitative relationship, regardless of what words they use to explain why they keep getting their way at your expense.

Manipulators understand that you can trade words for real material benefits. Say the right words in the right way and you can get people to agree to let you commit mass atrocities. You can get them to give you control over their material circumstances. You can get them to consent to wildly unfair economic and political systems. You can persuade them to let you destroy the biosphere they depend on for survival. You can get them to give you power, money, sex, egoic gratification — whatever it is you’re after — just by saying the right words in the right way.

And that’s basically our entire problem as a species right now. That’s why the world looks the way it looks. A few clever manipulators have figured out how to use mass-scale psychological manipulation to get us to trade away real material benefits for empty narrative fluff. That’s the only reason this genocidal, ecocidal, exploitative, bat shit insane political status quo has been permitted to exist by people who vastly outnumber the few who benefit from it.

This will keep happening until humanity becomes a conscious species. To become a conscious human is to awaken from the trance of the believed narratives in your skull and begin perceiving life as it truly is.

The difference between our mental stories about how life is happening and how it really is could not be more different — which is why manipulators are able to extract so much benefit from manipulating our mental stories about how life is happening. Manipulators will always have the ability to do this until we make the necessary adaptation as a species from believing mental narratives to perceiving life as it truly is.

Every species eventually hits an adaptation-or-extinction juncture as its conditioning runs into changing material realities on this planet. We’re at ours right now, and unlike other species who have gone extinct before us, our own behavior is responsible for the changing material realities we are running up against. Since our behavior at mass scale is being driven by mass-scale psychological manipulation via the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed, in order to see a change in the way humans behave on this planet, we’re going to have to see a mass-scale shift in our species’ relationship with mental narrative.

It is possible for an individual to stop imbuing their mental chatter with the power of belief and start seeing life as it is, and if it is possible to do this individually it is possible to do it collectively as well. We all have this potentiality sleeping within us. It will either awaken and carry us beyond the adaptation-or-extinction juncture we now face, or we will go the way of the dinosaur.

That’s where we’re at right now. We have the freedom to go either way.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Kamala Harris on Twitter/X.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Nothing illustrates the malfeasance of the mass media like the vast disparity between how they’re covering the killing of four 19 year-old IDF soldiers by Hezbollah versus their complete lack of interest in a 19 year-old hospital patient who was burned alive by the IDF in Gaza.

A shockingly horrible headline appeared in Sky News on Monday reading, “Israel names teenage soldiers killed in Hezbollah drone attack — as ‘23 die’ in Gaza school strike.” It opens with the even more horrid paragraph “Israel has named the four teenage victims of a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base — as at least 23 people were reportedly killed in an attack on a central Gaza school.”

Notice the scare quotes and passive language in Sky’s use of “23 die”, and the way these active duty combatants are being framed as innocent little children who were the “victims” of an unprovoked attack which “killed” them. The killings in Gaza are always framed by the mainstream press as “deaths” which passively happen, always couched in doubtful language like “reportedly” and “according to the Hamas-run health ministry,” whereas Israelis are always “victims” who are “killed”.

Interesting how Sky News have now deleted this post (without explaining)

It was interesting how 19 year old Israeli *soldiers* in a military base during a war, elicited more sympathy than innocent Arab babies killed by Israel

The Instagram is still up:https://t.co/IgmGFiE6oT pic.twitter.com/ICL1Y7o7Ty

— Miqdaad Versi (@miqdaad) October 14, 2024

The western media’s propagandistic use of language to frame Israel in a sympathetic light and Palestinians in an unsympathetic light is widespread, and has been extensively documented. All the way back in January The Intercept published a study showing that outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times used wildly different language to describe the killings of Israelis on October 7 than the killings of Palestinians in the months since, with inflammatory words like “slaughter”, “horrific” and “massacre” used consistently with the former and never with the latter. Another report by The Intercept this past April revealed that this is not an accident; a leaked internal memo from The New York Times reveals the outlet’s staff receiving explicit instructions to avoid specific language that harms Israeli information interests.

Look at the way Sky News names the armed Israeli soldiers killed in battle while framing them as innocent little babies who were slaughtered by monsters, and contrast this with the fact that you’re not seeing the name Sha’ban al-Dalou anywhere in the mainstream press.

Sha’ban al-Dalou was also 19 years old when he died, but unlike those Israeli soldiers, he was a civilian lying in a hospital bed, and he died a much more painful and horrific death than them. 

If you’ve been on social media at all recently, you may have seen the gut-wrenching footage of al-Dalou burning to death in a hospital bed while still connected to his IV after an Israeli airstrike on the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, desperately crying out for help in a blazing inferno. 

As of this writing, al-Dalou’s name appears exactly one time in any article I can find on Google News, and it’s from Middle East Eye. 

Sha'ban Al-Dalou, a 20s young man whom you all watched burning yesterday.

Let his memory haunt you. Remember his face very well.

Never forget. Never forgive. pic.twitter.com/HMslun1HU3

— Abubaker Abed (@AbubakerAbedW) October 14, 2024

The Middle East Eye write-up reads as follows:

“Sha’ban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old software engineering student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza and a memoriser of the Quran, was burned alive after an Israeli air strike hit Al-Aqsa Hospital which killed three others.

“Sha’ban, who was forcefully displaced last year after Israeli forces destroyed his home, had just started his university studies in September 2023.

“Last week, Sha’ban miraculously survived an Israeli strike on a mosque that claimed 20 lives.

“Sha’ban and his mother perished in a fire after Israel attacked the hospital engulfing the tent camp for displaced civilians in Gaza.”

Any mentions I can find of al-Dalou’s death in the mainstream press do not name him, referring to him only as a “man” or a “person” (not a “teenager”) who died in a fire.

“Videos from the scene appeared to show one man being burned alive as bystanders could do little but watch,” The Washington Post reports.

“In multiple videos shared on social media and verified by NBC News, at least one person could be seen reaching their hands out from the flames as they were burned alive,” reports NBC News.

Contrast this with the solemn, reverent way Sky News reads out the names of the four IDF soldiers in its segment on their deaths, repeatedly emphasizing the fact that “all four were just 19 years old.”

Over the last year the narrative being pushed by our media has become ever more blatant. Some lives matter more than others. pic.twitter.com/INIwXkcQfJ

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) October 14, 2024

Sky News, which Rupert Murdoch sold to Comcast in 2018, has been working overtime to spin Israel’s surging criminality in a positive light these last couple of days. Its Sunday evening report on the Hezbollah attack which killed the four soldiers made not one single mention of the fact that the attack was on a military base throughout the entire segment, leaving the audience with the impression that Hezbollah had attacked an Israeli shopping center or something. A Sky News write-up on London’s response to Iran’s missile strikes on Israel came under fire for using a photo of the burning medical center in Gaza where al-Dalou was killed as its feature image, implying that the burning building was caused by Iran and not Israel.

The massive disparity between the way the mainstream press report on Israeli deaths versus Palestinian deaths is evidence that the mainstream press are propaganda services for the US-centralized power alliance. But it is also evidence that Palestinians are not viewed as human beings by the western political-media class. 

As Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer recently wrote, “Ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.”

The 19-year-old we all saw burn to death in the hospital compound, after an Israeli strike.

Sha’ban Al Dalou. https://t.co/zsb12P3bi3 pic.twitter.com/HezgUnE1R1

— Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) October 14, 2024

As Aaron Bushnell said before he himself burned to death, “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Israel’s permanent national security doctrine is basically “We can have peace tomorrow if we just kill a few more people today.”

But it’s always today. Tomorrow never comes.

Israel never succeeds in killing its way to peace, because that’s not actually a thing.

You can’t murder, oppress and tyrannize people into obedience. You can kill off the people who oppose you, but in doing so you just create more people who oppose you. You can scorch the earth killing off every member of Hamas and Hezbollah, but in so doing you just ensure the birth of more Hamases and Hezbollahs.

The only way to murder a population into submission is to kill everyone. To turn the entire middle east into a barren wasteland of death and destruction, so there’s nobody left living to oppose you. That’s the only way “kill today to have peace tomorrow” can work.

And in fairness it did work for other western settler-colonialist projects. In North America and Australia the white man just killed and killed and killed and killed until the opposition was exterminated and the few who remained were broken.

But the indigenous population of historic Palestine is different, in that it doesn’t stand alone. They are surrounded by ancient civilizations who have a longstanding relationship with them, and a kinship of religion and culture. Any move to exterminate the indigenous population like other western settler-colonialist projects have done draws hostilities from surrounding nations, as we are seeing today.

So in order for Israel to kill its way into peace, it needs to not just kill off the Palestinians but kill everyone in the surrounding region who would oppose its doing so. And the Israelis know this, which is why you hear some far right Zionists talking about the need for a “Greater Israel” whose territory extends far beyond Israel’s current borders.

So Israel will always exist in a continuous state of war until it either (A) ceases to exist in its present tyrannical iteration or (B) kills or breaks all its enemies throughout west Asia. That’s the only way the dust can ever settle on the killing.

And that’s why Israel cannot continue to exist in its present iteration. It was a very, very bad idea, just like all the many other very, very bad ideas throughout history, like slavery.

In order for the killing to end, the murderous settler-colonialist project known as Israel must end. This is a big task, but so was freeing the slaves. The only alternative is to plunge further and further down along this trajectory toward more and more killing, drawing in more and more powerful military forces and exponentially expanding the death toll in the process.

A massive war between Israel’s powerful western allies against Iran and its partners in the region would kill millions upon millions of people and devastate the world economy. But that’s precisely the trajectory that western support for Israel’s killing campaigns has us on.

I find this an untenable prospect. It would be much less devastating to dismantle the apartheid state of Israel and make arrangements for the west to absorb anyone who wishes to flee from a state where everyone would have equal rights. It would be difficult, it would be inconvenient, but it would be much, much easier and more ethical than helping Israel continue enacting its “kill today to have peace tomorrow” doctrine.

Nobody has ever presented an argument for why Israel should continue to exist in its present iteration that is both logically and morally defensible. It’s just a crazy, stupid thing we are doing, the same as all the other crazy, stupid things we’ve done throughout history. One day this will be seen clearly by everyone.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Featured image via the IDF.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

If there’s one thing this past year has made clear, it’s that opposing the foreign abuses of the western empire is the most important task you can undertake if you care about truth, justice, and human rights. There are other important fronts upon which this struggle takes place, but opposing western warmongering, militarism and empire-building is the most important.

It’s the most important because it’s the most consequential. Western warmongering is responsible for the most death, destruction, displacement and human suffering out of any of the abusive policies our governments inflict upon people. 

As abusive as domestic issues can be, nobody here at home has to worry about western bombs being dropped on their houses. 

Foreign abuses get less attention than domestic issues because they are inflicted upon strangers in other countries instead of upon our friends and neighbors, and because the imperial media work tirelessly to convince us that those foreign abuses are good and necessary. But they are the worst.

Foreign abuses also get less attention than domestic issues because opposing foreign abuses puts you at odds with all mainstream western political parties and everyone who supports them. Your progressive friends who might be on your side with regard to racist policing policies or LGBT rights will be uncomfortably at odds with you when you start calling Kamala Harris a genocidal monster. This makes standing against the imperial war machine less fun than other more widely supported expressions of activism.

It’s also less egoically gratifying. In a western “left” that generates so much of its energy from identity politics, where everyone wants to see themselves as part of some marginalized minority who can finger-wag about the privilege of non-marginalized groups, it’s a bit deflating to realize that as a westerner you’re a part of the problem, and that you receive a fair amount of privilege yourself just from living where you live. 

Depending on what your politics are like, it can be a kick in the ego to get real about the fact that however underprivileged you might see yourself, you still directly materially benefit from the imperialist extraction of the global south that all this warmongering is meant to protect. It can be a hard pill to swallow that even if you’re an autistic biracial trans pansexual, you’re still sitting a lot more comfortably than any straight cis man in Gaza, and your concerns for your safety and security are much less urgent than his.

But the biggest reason why foreign abuses get less attention than domestic ones is because of the propaganda. War is the glue that holds the empire together, so our rulers do everything they can to keep us arguing about domestic policy and ignoring foreign policy. The imperial spinmeisters wildly exaggerate the differences between the two mainstream political factions while downplaying the empire’s foreign abuses as normal and nothing to worry about, because the last thing they want is the rise of a robust antiwar movement in powerful western countries.

If you take your stand against the imperial war machine, you are standing against the very most abusive and tyrannical injustices in our world — but you are also standing against what everyone around you has been trained to believe is the truth. If you oppose the imperial war machine consistently and forcefully, you are setting yourself up to look like a kook, a traitor, or a weird contrarian in the eyes of other westerners. Not because anything you are saying is wrong, but because they have been indoctrinated to believe the opposite of what you are saying about the nations and groups that are being targeted for destruction by the western empire.

The other day some liberal American author retweeted an anti-war thing I wrote with the comment, “This is one of the most fascinating accounts on Twitter. She’s like an AI programmed to say the opposite of what everyone agrees makes sense. Everyone crazy on the left AND right follows her. 400k people! The replies people are like her — well-considered, reasonably informed, and totally off the rails.”

This stood out for me, because it’s like a condensed version of all the criticisms I’ve received from denizens of the western empire over the years. Look at this weirdo! She’s saying the exact opposite of everything we all agree is the truth! 

At no time has it ever occurred to this person to seriously examine why it is that everyone he knows agrees with the narratives which support the geostrategic objectives of the US government and its allies, thereby making anyone who contradicts these narratives look like a deranged nut. He just takes it as a given that all the information he ingests about international affairs aligns perfectly with the foreign policy objectives of his government because his government is simply on the side of truth and virtue. The well-documented fact that the mass media administer propaganda to advance the information interests of the US empire never crosses his mind as a real possibility.

That’s the current you are swimming against when you take your stand against western warmongering. The current of the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed.

It can be challenging to consistently speak the truth in this way to a civilization that is deeply indoctrinated to believe in lies. But it is also the very most important work you can do, because it helps spread awareness of the single most urgent and egregious injustice in our world today.

And that’s how you change the world: spreading awareness. Problems don’t get fixed until enough people see them and understand them. Once enough people do, using the power of our numbers to force real change becomes a real possibility. And there is nothing more urgently in need of real change than the end of western warmongering.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Stephen Melkisethian (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)