Propaganda
Fry equated pro-Palestine demo to nazism. In ’08, he said Israel founded on terrorism
Stephen Fry’s ‘alternative’ Christmas message appeared to equate UK protests against the slaughter of Palestinians with ‘1930s Europe’. But fifteen years ago he was prepared to put his name to the most direct condemnation of the very founding of Israel
Stephen Fry has rightly been widely criticised for his supposedly ‘alternative’ Christmas message, produced by a pro-Israel production company, that has been described as minimising the horrific suffering of Palestinian women and children at the hands of the genocidal Israeli regime – and which appears to equate UK protests against the genocide with the rise of nazism in the 1930s.
Fry’s more than six-minute video builds to his claim that:
I’m glad [my Jewish grandparents] aren’t alive now to read newspaper stories that would have reminded them of the 1930s Europe that they left.
As one former ardent fan put it:
To hear him conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism has shocked me… Smashed windows vs carrying your dead child?
By contrast, Jewish comedian Alexei Sayle’s ‘alternative alternative’ Christmas video, standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide – and pointing out that he confidently and safely marches regularly for Palestinian human rights alongside thousands of other Jewish people – was watched millions of times and received overwhelmingly positive comment.
But Fry’s message in 2023 is starkly at odds with his position just fifteen years ago – when he was prepared to put his name to a letter, on the occasion of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, that condemned the apartheid regime as one ‘founded on terrorism’, a reference to the 1948 ‘Nakba’ or catastrophe of the violent expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and the massacres that marked it.
The full letter read:
In May, Jewish organisations will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. This is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-semitism and Hitler’s genocidal policies. As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians.
In April 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin and the mortar attack on Palestinian civilians in Haifa’s market square, Plan Dalet was put into operation. This authorised the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. We will not be celebrating.
In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating.
In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians (Israeli citizens) were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating.
We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.
We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.
Fry’s name appeared among more than one hundred Jewish signatories – many of whom have maintained to this day their principled opposition to Israeli apartheid, occupation, brutality and ethnic cleansing, such as Michael Rosen, Rica and Jo Bird, Diana Neslen, Sayle and many more.
Mr Fry, despite Israeli ministers’ boasts that they want their slaughter in Gaza to be a ‘Nakba 2023’, has not – and has now equated opposition to Zionism with antisemitism. What happened to him?
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The Year of The Mindfuck
Well, that’s pretty much it for 2023 … which I’m officially dubbing The Year of The Mindfuck.
I am doing that against the advice of my attorney, who is (a) trying to keep me out of German prison for as long as possible, and (b) trying to stop me from gratuitously alienating whatever remains of my former readership and going totally broke.
I’m not making that particularly easy for him.
The thing is, no one wants to hear that they have been mindfucked. People want to hear that other people have been mindfucked. Which … they have. Other people have been thoroughly mindfucked. But that doesn’t mean that other people — i.e., the people who want to hear that other people have been mindfucked, but not that they, themselves, have been mindfucked — haven’t also been mindfucked, which is what I’ve been mostly writing about in 2023, which, as Matt Taibbi put it in a blurb for one of my books, “probably this is not a profitable life choice.”
So it goes in the political satire racket. Sometimes you are hailed as a “prophet,” other times you’re scorned as a “dissension-sowing asshole,” censored into Internet oblivion by beloved billionaire free-speech defenders, and prosecuted for trumped-up “hate crimes.” It depends which way the wind is blowing.
It hasn’t been blowing my way this year.
On top of which, I’ve been pissing into it, the wind, at more or less every opportunity. I know it’s dumb, but I can’t seem to stop. Something about watching people being mindfucked over and over again “triggers” me, or punches my buttons, or something.
But enough about me … let’s get to the mindfucking. Due to the voluminosity of it, I won’t be able to review it all in detail but I’ll try to cover most of the mindfucking highlights.
Ready? OK, here we go.
The mindfucking started in January with the birth of the Musk Cult and the whitewashing of Twitter, and the trickle of “revelations” about “mistakes that were made” during the “Covid pandemic.” The Powers That Be needed to memory-hole the story of what actually happened (and didn’t actually happen) in 2020-2022 and enshrine the official Covid narrative in history. To achieve this they needed to mindfuck some people, not the Covidian cultists who they had already mindfucked, the other people, who they hadn’t been able to mindfuck. It was obvious that we were about to be subjected to The Mother of All Limited Hangouts.
If your memory of what actually happened (and didn’t actually happen) in 2020 is little hazy, here’s an excerpt from that column, which I published in January.
“In March and April of 2020, in the course of roughly five to six weeks, the majority of societies throughout the world were transformed into pathologized-totalitarian police states. A global ‘shock-and-awe’ campaign was conducted. Constitutional rights were suspended. The masses were locked down inside their homes, where they were subjected to the most massive official propaganda blitzkrieg in human history. Goon squads roamed the streets of Europe, the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere, beating and arresting people for being outdoors without permission and not wearing medical-looking masks. Corporate media around the world informed us that life as we knew it was over … a ‘New Normal’ was coming, and we needed to get used to it. The entire official pandemic narrative was rolled out during those first few weeks. Everything. Masks. Mandatory ‘vaccines.’ ‘Vaccination passports.’ The segregation of ‘the Unvaccinated.’ The censorship and demonization of dissent. Everything. The whole ‘New Normal’ package. It was rolled out all at once, globally.”
Now, over three years later, the facts are indisputably clear to everyone but the hopelessly brainwashed. There was no global epidemiological emergency … no legitimate justification whatsoever for that initial “shock-and-awe” campaign, or the totalitarian “New Normal” it ushered into being.
However, by January of 2023, that wasn’t a problem for The Powers That Be, as most of the masses had been hopelessly brainwashed, and they would break down and start spastically gibbering at you like frightened hyenas if you confronted them with facts.
No, the problem for The Powers That Be was us, i.e., those of us who had never bought the PSYOP. By the end of 2022, we comprised what you call a sizable minority … a problematic, pissed-off, sizable minority. So we needed to be promptly and extensively mindfucked. We needed to be managed, decoyed, distracted, buried in minutiae, partial revelations, limited hangouts, official inquiries, and so on. Above all, we needed to be made to feel like we were getting revenge on The Powers That Be. And we needed to be made to feel this way without actually endangering The Powers That Be, or inconveniencing them in any significant way.
Enter Elon Musk & Co.
Yes, that’s right, Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire military contractor! At last, a savior had arrived to deliver us from the Cabal of Wokeness, and Cultural Marxism, and Globalistism! Vanquished were the evil Wokian censors and shadowbanners of “old bad” Twitter! It was Morning in America Again!
An Elon’s-ass-kissing contest ensued. Internet hucksters, social media influencers, and all manner of money-worshiping toadies competed against each other to get their lips on the Muskian anal orifice! This salacious spectacle went on for months …
Meanwhile, the sleight-of-hand artists got to work, distracting folks with groundbreaking stories like how the Pfizer Corporation had engineered THE MUTANT COMMUNIST VIRUS BIOWEAPON that had caused the pandemic that never happened and triggered THE MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS that prompted The Powers That Be to go bonkers and launch the PSYOP that the sleight-of-hand artists were memory-holing right before our eyes …
… or something more or less along those lines.
And then, right on cue, came the Twitter Files story! Do you recall, way back in 2008, when Obama took office, admitted that we had “tortured some folks” in Iraq, and so on, and then decided against prosecuting Bush and his crew for launching a textbook war of aggression, murdering hundreds of thousands of people, and destabilizing and restructuring the Middle East, based on a lie about WMDs? Do you recall all the limited hangouts back then? The Abu Ghraib scandal? The mea culpas? Is your memory of all that a little “hazy”? Imagine what people’s memories of “Russiagate” and “Covid” will be like in twenty years.
People’s memories don’t get hazy just by accident. If they did, The Powers That Be wouldn’t need to distract us, redirect our attention, and otherwise relentlessly mindfuck us. Which is how Class-A limited hangouts work. You feed people a juicy part of the story, so they forget about the rest of the story. You redirect their attention away from the globally-coordinated simulation of “a worldwide epidemiological emergency” and the roll-out of new totalitarian “health measures” — “health measures” that become permanent features of society, like the post-9/11 “security measures” did — with a story about US “Red/Blue” politics, government overreach, “woke” bad apples, and the so-called “Censorship Industrial Complex.”
I don’t mean to denigrate the Twitter Files story. I really don’t, and I have made that clear to Matt and other Twitter Files journalists. Had I been in their positions, I would have done the same thing. I would have gladly taken whatever Musk gave me and reported on it, exactly as they did. And, no, the Twitter Files story is not at all a “nothingburger.” It is one of the most important stories about censorship in the 21st Century so far, despite the fact that it is also a limited hangout … like Abu Ghraib and most of those other “Iraq-post-mortem” stories were.
In real life — as opposed to the Hollywood version, or the social-media version, where people are conditioned to see everything in black-and-white terms and judge everyone as “good” or “bad,” as “truth-telling heroes” or “controlled opposition” — historical events have different aspects, and sometimes even contradictory aspects. One aspect doesn’t cancel out the others.
Some people absolutely hate it when I say this, but the kind of mindfucking I’ve been writing about is not intentionally perpetrated by “bad guys.” In fact, most of it is perpetrated by “the good guys.” In other words, yes, of course the Twitter Files are a limited hangout, and part of the mindfuck, but the Twitter Files journalists are not the mindfuckers. And Elon Musk is not Mindfucker-in-Chief. The kind of mindfucking I’m talking about is not a conspiracy; it’s built into the system. It’s how the system protects itself.
Ideological systems are not just sets of interconnected components and procedures. They are organic entities, self-sustaining organisms, with survival programming, just like you and me. They react when threatened, like any other organism, like our bodies react to mutating cells, invasive pathogens, and other internal threats. They perceive (or register) these threats, and take defensive action against them. The more totalitarian the ideological system is, the more aggressive its reaction to internal threats will be.
In our global-capitalist ideological system, mindfucking is one of the primary means of dealing with internal threats. Global capitalism cannot afford to do the Orwellian boot-stomping-your-face thing, not for extended periods, anyway. It needs to maintain a simulation of “freedom,” and some semblance of “the rule of law,” so consumers will continue shopping, and not … you know, launch an armed rebellion.
Anyway, that’s the kind of mindfucking I’m talking about. It’s how the system knows exactly when to release a certain limited hangout, or when to launch an anti-Semitism panic, or an attempted Wokester coup at Free-Speech-Twitter HQ, or a Literal Russian-Agent-Hitler sequel, or when to shut down the aforementioned limited hangout for no actual reason whatsoever, or manipulate a belligerent political satirist into obsessively writing about exactly what it wants him to be writing about.
Yes, you read that last part right. If you thought I think I am immune to the mindfuckery … I don’t. I’m not. I get mindfucked too. For example, I got mindfucked into travelling to London and taking part in The Michael Shellenberger Show in June, and wasting months afterward helping to draft and gather VIP-signatories for the “Westminster Declaration,” which turned out to be the weakest popcorn fart in the history of popcorn farts.
My foray into pretentious NGO-activism did not end well …
And then I spent most of the remainder of the year obsessing over my prosecution for “Nazi hate Tweets” here in Germany and raising money for my “legal defense fund,” and so on, which, OK, there’s another example of something that is both an important matter and, at the same time, a colossal mindfuck (i.e., for me, personally, but also for people who will be bullied into censoring themselves by the example the authorities are making of me).
But that wasn’t it for the mindfucking. Oh, no, the mindfucking coup de grâce was still to come!
If The Powers That Be had consciously set out to come up with something that would hammer the final nail into the coffin of the “anti-New Normal resistance,” they couldn’t have done any better than October 7, also known as “Israel’s 9/11.” Two and a half months of 24/7 balls-out mindfuckery have broken the brains of everyone whose brains hadn’t already been broken. It started with “the 40 beheaded babies” story and “the super-suicide Hamas rocket” story, and rapidly devolved into this …
I tried to comment on the story dispassionately, and was instantly set upon by both shrieking pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian fanatics. It seems I’m both a genocidal, atrocity-denying Israel apologist and a genocidal, atrocity-denying, anti-Semitic Hamas apologist!
The neo-Roman orgy of hatred and projectile spewing of propagandistic vomitus is ongoing, as I’m sure you are aware, so I’ll spare you the gory details on that one.
My point is, the October 7 attack and Israel’s ongoing liquidation of Gaza have obliterated any remaining shred of clarity about what’s actually happening, globally, and has re-polarized the “populist” resistance to it.
The Red Team has become the new “cancel culture” mob …
And the Blue Team is “shocked and horrified” that the new totalitarianism they helped usher into being during 2020-2022 is suddenly being turned against them …
So it goes in the bug-eyed, stark raving Schizotocracy that is The New Normal Reich. One by one, opposing demographics are being mindfucked into aligning with The Powers That Be and going full-fascist, almost as if the whole global-ideological system were going totalitarian, and what it needed to do was whip the masses into a mindless, hate-drunk, frenzy of zealotry, and pit us all against each other, and then switch the sides and do it again, over and over, until we don’t trust anyone or anything, and we literally can’t even think.
But I wouldn’t worry too much about that … I’m pretty sure The Powers That Be will be happy to do our thinking for us. They are getting rather good at that, and we are getting rather good at letting them.
OK, that’s it for me for 2023 … merry mindfucked Christmas and happy mindfucked New Year!
###
CJ Hopkins
December 21, 2023
DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.
Video: Jerusalem deputy mayor exposed claiming ‘no churches or Christians in Gaza’
Fleur Hassan-Nahoum’s denial of reality shown up live on air
No churches and no Christians?
Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum – supposedly a ‘media expert’ – was shown up live on air on LBC when she tried to claim there are no Christians and no churches in Gaza. Israel is currently besieging one of the churches and murdering the Christians inside by sniper fire, prompting the Pope to say today that Israel is committing terrorism – and even her right-wing interviewer was unwilling to let that pass.
Caught out, Nahoum could only claim she hadn’t seen the report – but that hadn’t stopped her making the emphatic and emphatically false claim in the first place.
Gaza in fact has more than a thousand Christians – and the two thousand or so who left in the past fifteen years did so to escape the occupation and for economic reasons, not because they were driven out by Palestinian Muslims, with whom they have peacefully co-existed for millennia.
Israel’s shoddy propaganda attempts fall apart again.
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All The Propaganda Is Splattering Against A Solid Wall Of Reality
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/76780f6f11ec26450bcdc29ae9bd8628/href
Humans inhabit two very different worlds simultaneously: the real world and the narrative world. The world of concrete material reality, and the world of mental stories about reality.
There’s the material reality of presents piled under the Christmas tree, and then there’s the story parents tell small children about how those presents got there. There’s the material reality of military explosives ripping human bodies to shreds, and then there’s the story the powerful tell the world about how and why that’s happening.
What we are seeing with Gaza is manufactured narrative splatting against reality over and over again. The western empire churns out propaganda narratives about what Israel is doing, and those narratives are crashing headlong into raw video footage and concrete facts in ways you don’t often see.
Here are some examples of made-up narratives:
• October 7 was an unprovoked attack
• This a war of defense and Israel has a right to defend itself
• Jewish people can’t be safe unless they have a homeland in which they receive preferential treatment over other ethnic groups
• There cannot be peace until Hamas is eliminated
• All civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas
Here are some examples of objective reality:
• Raw video footage of civilians who’ve been burned, mutilated and ripped apart by Israeli military explosives
• Photos of dead children who’ve been killed in Israeli airstrikes
• The objective fact that journalists are being killed at a historically unprecedented rate in this onslaught
• The objective fact that children are being killed at a much higher rate than in other modern conflicts
• The objective fact that Israel is laying siege to a civilian population while systematically displacing them en masse and destroying their healthcare system
The former category consists entirely of insubstantial thought fluff; they’re stories people made up to advance their own agendas, and have no objective reality in and of themselves. The latter category consists of the concrete realities of the material world.
Relatively few people are fully aware of just how extensively mental narrative dominates human consciousness, and how this has allowed human civilization to be dominated by whoever can control what our society’s dominant narratives are. The US-centralized empire, of which Israel is a part, has succeeded in establishing a system of narrative control whose sophistication and efficacy has no parallel or precedent.
But in Gaza it isn’t working. It isn’t working because there’s no amount of propaganda spin you can put on raw data that is self-evidently unacceptable and inexcusable. No matter how much propaganda spin you heap on top of a video of a dismembered child, you cannot persuade me that it is fine and acceptable.
This is a very, very big problem for the empire. There is panic happening behind the scenes. What’s happening in Gaza is unspeakably horrific, and Israel’s atrocities must end immediately. But if there’s any silver lining in all this horror, it’s that people are being snapped out of the imperial propaganda matrix like never before.
_______________
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Video: Amnesty shows Israel killed journalist, maimed another, in Lebanon
Warning: distressing footage – forensic examination of footage from 13 October attack, on Lebanese territory, on clearly marked journalists, shows Israeli tank fired once, then again less than a minute later; Amnesty calls for war crime investigation
Detailed analysis by Amnesty International of footage surrounding a 13 October attack on a group of clearly marked journalists shows Israeli tank crew knowingly fired two shells, less than a minute apart, at the group as they filmed in southern Lebanon. One journalist was killed and the other lost her leg in the needless and deliberate assault.
Amnesty has now published its findings under the title “Deadly Israeli Attack on Journalists In Lebanon Must be Investigated as a War Crime”:
Israel has relentlessly bombed schools, hospitals, news offices and homes in Gaza, killing thousands of civilians, mostly women and children – and at least sixty-eight journalists, more than were killed in any other conflict since 1990. Now it has been shown to have committed another wanton Lebanon attack on journalists doing their job, taking another life and wrecking more. The far-right Israeli regime is out of control and flouting international law, while lying wildly and incompetently to try to salvage its public image.
The same story has been seen time and again, including the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, targeted last year as she covered an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in West Bank.
Despite this, western politicians continue to cover for Netanyahu and his fellow war criminals – and UK journalists appear to be ignoring the murder of their colleagues.
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The Schizotocracy, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The New Normal Reich
Well, 2023 is almost in the books, and things couldn’t be going better for the New Normal Reich. It’s been a long, strange seven years, but we’re finally back to the Global War on Terror, which, as you may recall, was abruptly preempted in 2016 by the War on Populism, which, as you may recall, was abruptly preempted in 2020 by the Apocalyptic Pandemic, which, as you may recall, was what ushered The New Normal Reich into being and brought us full-circle.
Anyway, here we are, back in The Global War on Terror, or the War on Horror, or The War on Whatever … Islamic terrorism, Russia, Trump, disinformation, racism, hate speech, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, anti-vaxxerism, transphobians, Communists, cultural Marxists, radical wokesters, the Cult of Musk, neo-Covidians, Zionazis, climate-change deniers, decapitated baby rapers … it doesn’t really matter. Pick an enemy and join the Roman Orgy of Hatred!
The schizotocracy couldn’t care less which side of whatever you think you are on.
Yes, that’s right, “the schizotocracy.” I’ve coined a new name for the supranational network of global corporations, nominally-sovereign governments, non-governmental governing entities, media conglomerates, oligarchs, etc., that comprise the global-capitalist system that is driving the course of events in our time. I’ve coined this new name for those of my readers who suffer apoplectic seizures whenever I write about “global capitalism” (or “GloboCap,” as I sometimes jokingly call it) and its predictable evolution into “The New Normal Reich.”
I’ll tell you about the “schizotocracy,” but, first, here’s an excerpt from an essay I wrote about that predictable evolution back in 2017 …
Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy, October 20, 2017
We haven’t really got our minds around it yet, because we’re still in the early stages of it, but we have entered an epoch in which historical events are primarily being driven, and societies reshaped not by sovereign nation states acting in their national interests but by supranational corporations acting in their corporate interests. Paramount among these corporate interests is the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism, and the elimination of any impediments thereto. Forget about the United States (i.e., the actual nation state) for a moment, and look at what’s been happening since the early 1990s. The US military’s “disastrous misadventures” in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia, among other exotic places (which obviously had nothing to do with the welfare or security of any actual Americans), begin to make a lot more sense.
Global capitalism, since the end of the Cold War (i.e, immediately after the end of the Cold War), has been conducting a global clean-up operation, eliminating actual and potential insurgencies, mostly in the Middle East, but also in its Western markets. Having won the last ideological war, like any other victorious force, it has been “clearing-and-holding” the conquered territory, which in this case happens to be the whole planet. Just for fun, get out a map, and look at the history of invasions, bombings, and other “interventions” conducted by the West and its assorted client states since 1990. Also, once you’re done with that, consider how, over the last fifteen years, most Western societies have been militarized, and their citizens placed under constant surveillance, and an overall atmosphere of “emergency” fostered, and paranoia about “the threat of extremism” propagated by the corporate media.
I’m not suggesting there’s a bunch of capitalists sitting around in a room somewhere in their shiny black top hats planning all of this. I’m talking about systemic development, which is a little more complex than that, and much more difficult to intelligently discuss because we’re used to perceiving historico-political events in the context of competing nation states, rather than competing ideological systems … or rather, non-competing ideological systems, for capitalism has no competition. What it has, instead, is a variety of insurgencies, the faith-based Islamic fundamentalist insurgency and the neo-nationalist insurgency chief among them. There will certainly be others throughout the near future as global capitalism consolidates control and restructures society according to its values.
None of these insurgencies will be successful.
Short some sort of cataclysm, like an asteroid strike or the zombie apocalypse, or, you know, violent revolution, global capitalism will continue to restructure the planet to conform to its ruthless interests. The world will become increasingly “normal.” The scourge of “extremism” and “terrorism” will persist, as will the general atmosphere of “emergency.” There will be no more Trumps, Brexit referendums, revolts against the banks, and so on. Identity politics will continue to flourish, providing a forum for leftist activist types (and others with an unhealthy interest in politics), who otherwise might become a nuisance, but any and all forms of actual dissent from global capitalist ideology will be systematically marginalized and pathologized.
I wrote that in October of 2017, and, no, I’m not an soothsayer or a prophet. The trajectory of global capitalism as a system has been obvious for quite some time. That is, if you could see it clearly, as opposed to through an ideological lens.
Now, let me tell you about the schizotocracy. Or, rather, let me tell you about schizophrenia, which is really just a fancy name for psychosis. I want to do that because that’s where global capitalism (or crony capitalism, or the corporatocracy, or the New Normal Reich, or cultural Marxism, or whatever you want or need to call it) is inexorably taking us, i.e., into a state of societal psychosis, so it would probably be a good idea to understand how psychosis works.
What happens when you become psychotic is, you lose your ability to participate in “reality.” It’s like being in a country where you don’t speak the language. Or trying to play a game that everyone else is playing when you don’t know the rules, or the point of the game, and no one will tell you. See, normally, “reality” is just, well, reality. It doesn’t take scare quotes. It’s just “the way it is.” But it isn’t. Reality is manufactured. Which is why what is “real” has changed throughout history. (Of course, those earlier versions of reality were wrong, and our current reality is right, and future generations will never look back on our reality as we look back on the reality of people in Medieval Europe, or ancient Rome, or Mesopotamia.)
In other words, reality is a fiction … a fiction that we all agree to believe in. But that doesn’t make it any less real. On the contrary, it is absolutely real, and absolutely necessary. It is an absolutely necessary fiction. It is what makes communication and cooperation possible. It is what makes all human society possible. As long as we forget that it is a fiction. As long as we don’t perceive it as a fiction.
Which is the problem for psychotic (or “schizophrenic”) individuals. They are unable to not perceive reality as a fiction, a work of ontological fiction in progress. They have forgotten to forget that it’s all made up — which is the price of admission to our communal “reality” — so they desperately try to interpret everything … literally everything, everything that we don’t have to interpret and just take for granted.
For example, if I ask you how your car is running (assuming that you have a car), you won’t have to wonder what I mean. You’ll trust that I am referring to your actual car, the physical automotive vehicle. But when you ask a schizo how their car is running, they may not know what you mean by “car.” Do you really mean their brain? Or the material “vehicle” in which their immaterial spirit is traveling? And why are you asking? Who are you? What are you? A “car mechanic”? Are you from “The Factory”? Or a Cosmic Repo-man? They can’t be certain.
Their mind is working to assemble a “reality,” alone — it does not get more alone — with the pieces of the old (i.e., our) “reality,” which no longer works as reality for them, because they watched it disintegrate into pieces, because they took way too much LSD, or had a psychotic breakdown due to a chemical imbalance, or inserted metal hooks into their pectoral muscles and were hoisted into the the air and hung there until the veil of maya finally dissolved … or whatever it was they did or suffered that obliterated reality for them.
Now, I don’t mean to denigrate obliterating reality. Such experiences can be enlightening, in moderation. But psychosis is a horse of a different color. The biggest danger, when reality is obliterated, is if you freak out and desperately try to impose a new reality on the obliterated reality, which it is nearly impossible not to do if reality remains obliterated for too long. The human mind can handle brief sojourns beyond the veil of maya, but it cannot live there. If it cannot return to our reality, it starts making up its own “reality” … a “reality” that it cannot describe to us, or even get us to acknowledge the existence of, because it is talking to us in a foreign language, which no one but the psychotic person understands.
In other words, psychosis is a failure to communicate. The “reality” the psychotic person is experiencing (i.e., constructing) cannot be communicated to anyone. Our reality is no less a fiction than theirs, but it is a fiction we all share, whereas the psychotic person exists alone, utterly alone, in their solitary (paranoid) “reality.” If they could get us to see what they see, think the way they think, and speak their language, they wouldn’t be psychotic, and neither would we. We would all be normal. Their “reality” would be reality.
OK, so back to the schizotocracy, which is where The New Normal Reich is taking us, which I described above as societal psychosis. And, yes, we need to talk about capitalism. We need to talk about what it does to society when people let it run amok.
Now, I want to be ultra-clear about this for those of my readers who go totally ape-shit every time I write about capitalism. I have no problem with capitalism per se. I’m not an economist. For all I know, capitalism may be the best economic system in the entire history of economic systems. I am not calling on the proletariat to rise up and seize the means of production. I am writing about capitalism as an ideology, because it’s the ideology that has become our reality, the reality of the planet Earth, which it is transforming into one big marketplace.
See, what capitalism does, if you turn it loose, when it isn’t restrained in any real way by any sort of dominant value system — e.g., a religious, or cultural, or social value system — what it does is, it transforms societies into markets, and turns everything and everyone within them into commodities. It strips societies of all other values — i.e., impediments to the free flow of capital — until nothing remains but the marketplace, where exchange value is the only value and nothing has any real value in itself, or any real meaning in itself.
And the kicker is, what capitalism does next, when it’s allowed to go hog-wild on society, is it sells the desiccated husks of people’s values back to them as lifestyle commodities. Identities, religions, political parties, sexual orientations, left, right, capitalist, anti-capitalist, whatever. They are all just interchangeable commodities. Consumer products. Leisure activities. If they aren’t, if you attempt to actually live your life according to non-global-capitalist values (like, just for example, Islam, or Christianity, or communism, or any other values that impede the unbridled flows of capital), you will quickly find yourself branded an “extremist.” Go ahead, those of you who call yourselves Christians, try this … give everything you have to the poor, chase the money-changers out of your churches. See how fast you are branded “terrorists.”
Again, for my sensitive pro-capitalist readers, I have no problem with private property, and manufacturing and buying and selling things, and all that other basic “capitalism” stuff. I’m talking about what happens when we take our hands off the reins of society, and let global capitalism run society for us. What happens is, capitalism disintegrates our values, all of our values, not just the ones you don’t like. We end up living in a global market, a global market where there are no values, and nothing means anything, because anything means anything.
We end up with societal psychosis. We end up ruled by a schizotocracy. Our reality changes from day to day, as does who we thought were our allies and adversaries, depending on the fluctuations of the market. The ideological market. The “reality” market. One day we’re all “free-speech” champions, and the next we’re screeching for censorship of speech. One day people are demonizing “the Unvaccinated,” and the next they are screeching that they are being demonized. Comparing anything to Nazi Germany is anti-Semitism, until it isn’t, and wasn’t, until it was, and then wasn’t again. Trump is Hitler. Putin is Hitler. Hamas is Hitler. Netanyahu is Hitler. Anyone who calls anyone Hitler is Hitler. Men are women. Women are Hitler. The Hamas terrorists are worse than the Nazis. Israel is worse than the Nazis. Masks work, and they don’t. Stand with Ukraine. Stand with Israel. Stand with Whatever. Listerine kills the germs that brushing can’t. Have it your way. You’re in good hands. Fly the friendly skies. And so on. Nothing and no one can be trusted. No one has any values or principles, so we’re just shrieking gibberish and slogans at each other, like corporations advertising their products on a television network that no one is watching.
And, of course, just like the psychotic individual, who desperately attempts to impose a new “reality” on the terrifying chaos of the obliterated reality from which they have been exiled, many folks are going full-blown fascist and trying to ram their “truth” down everyone else’s throat in an attempt to reestablish something, anything, resembling a functional reality … a reality that isn’t up for grabs. Other people are switching off, and withdrawing from society, overwhelmed by it all. Others are searching for someone to tell them what is really going on and what to do about it. “Leaders” are coming out of the woodwork, delivering speeches and holding seminars, explaining the problem … and who “our enemy” is.
I think you know how the rest of this story goes.
And, no, for those readers who are tempted to write me and ask, I don’t know how to stop it. Maybe, if it can be stopped, that will start with people actually talking to each other, face to face, in physical reality, people who disagree with each other, who may not particularly like each other, but who are able to sit together and talk about the state of our world without it devolving into a shrieking homicidal hate fest.
As usual, I wish I had something more hopeful to end this horrible column with … especially because it’s Christmas-time, the season of joy, and love, and all that. I don’t. And, also, I’m a little distracted preparing for my trial here in Germany for thoughtcrimes. If you are in Berlin on January 23, 12:00 PM, and want to attend the proceedings, feel free to come to the District Court. The address is Turmstraße 91. We are in Room 371. It should be interesting.
In the meantime, merry Christmas and happy holidays!
###
CJ Hopkins
December 7, 2023
Photo: Schindler’s List, Amblin Entertainment/Universal Pictures
DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, and III of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.
If The Pro-Israel Position Was Based On Truth And Morality, It Wouldn’t Depend On Lies And Slander
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/eadef5b9e04716f6e085ac389a3d8008/href
If your position is based on truth and morality, you don’t need to make up lies to defend it, and you don’t need to hurl false accusations at those who disagree with it.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to circulate bogus atrocity propaganda about decapitated babies, babies cooked in ovens, and murdered pregnant women.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to circulate lies claiming actual dead Palestinian babies in Gaza are plastic dolls.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to falsely present phony audio clips as intercepted Hamas communications and claim they exonerate you of war crime allegations.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to circulate lies and propaganda about the hospitals you plan to attack being secret Hamas headquarters.
If your position was based on truth and morality, your official government social media accounts wouldn’t have to keep deleting posts after getting caught circulating lie after lie.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to circulate amazingly cringey propaganda videos like Israeli children singing about how great it will be to destroy Gaza and Israeli women doing yoga over the pictures of Israeli hostages.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t find yourself engaged in bizarre mental contortions trying to pretend history began on October 7 while sweeping all the mountains of murder and abuse which led up to it under the carpet.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to keep pointing at something that happened months ago to defend what you’ve been doing in the present moment in all the days since.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to resort to hurling false accusations of anti-semitism at those who criticize your side instead of producing robust counter-arguments.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to resort to accusing those who disagree with you of supporting terrorism and serving Hamas instead of defending your position like a normal adult.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to lie and claim that longstanding pro-Palestine slogans are actually calls for the genocide of Jews to try and get them silenced.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t feel the need to censor and silence everyone who disagrees with you online, on college campuses, and on all platforms of major influence.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you would get curious and do some self-examination when young people overwhelmingly reject that position instead of insisting that the young people are the problem and trying to kill TikTok and outlaw demonstrations.
If your position was based on truth and morality you would be defending it with facts, logic and rational argumentation instead of vitriol, online troll mobs and incendiary false accusations.
If your position is based in truth and morality, you can defend it in a truthful and moral way, instead of the exact opposite.
______________
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 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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Video: Israel’s ‘minister for Hamas rape propaganda is ‘proud to be a racist’
May Golan was withdrawn by Israel in May as proposed new New York consul after outrage over racist rally – now she’s pushing wild claims about Hamas atrocities
Israel’s ‘Minister for the advancement of women’, May Golan, has been at the forefront of the apartheid regime’s latest attempt to dig itself out of the pit of its PR and propaganda disaster over the 7 October Hamas raid.
Among a long list of failed propaganda attempts, the Israeli regime has been caught out trying to fake a ‘Hamas ambush’, faking a ‘recording’ of Hamas operatives, faking ‘evidence’ that Israel did not bomb a hospital and kill five hundred or more refugees – and seeing the news that Israel forces killed many of the Israelis who died during the raid, including the child it used for its atrocity-propaganda push, spread rapidly despite the silence of so-called ‘mainstream media.
So the regime’s latest tactic is to push claims that Hamas committed ‘widespread’ rapes during the raid – and, as so often, its ‘evidence’ is a single ‘eyewitness’. Israel has even been caught using an old image of a killed Kurdish woman soldier that it claimed was an Israeli rape victim. The ‘commissioner’ appointed to ‘investigate’ the rapes is an Israeli lawyer who has previously written a position to justify Israel circumventing the human rights of Palestinian captives and who runs an agency closely linked to Israel’s far-right government – and the commission did not even take any testimony from witnesses.
And one of the main faces of the latest propaganda push is May Golan – a woman who has told a far-right Israeli rally that she is ‘proud to be a racist’ and that ‘it’s our right to be racist’:
So great was outrage at her racism earlier this year that Israel withdrew its proposal to make her its consul in New York – yet despite this very recent history, her claims have been transmitted without scrutiny by the BBC and other UK and international ‘mainstream’ media, and with no mention of her record. Some media have even claimed ‘witnesses upon witnesses’ have testified to the commission about sexual assault by Hamas, even though it heard none.
Israel’s propaganda disaster continues – but so-called ‘mainstream’ media and commentators are slavishly, even enthusiastically, pushing the latest unevidenced narrative.
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Video: Hotovely claims Mowasi is ‘shelter’ for Gazans – just as footage reveals wasteland
Reality of Israel’s propaganda as it claims 1km-wide strip of land in southern Gaza is a safe haven for Palestinians to justify its bombing of the rest of the south
Far-right Israeli ambassador to the UK Tsipi Hotovely has claimed ‘Mowasi’ is a safe haven for the two million-plus Palestinians it has driven into southern Gaza – telling them it was safe in the south as it bombed thousands into oblivion in the north, flattened most buildings and targeted schools and hospitals.
More than a million were driven into the south – and Israel is bombing them there too. But as its disastrous propaganda efforts collapse around their ears and the truth that Israeli forces killed many of the Israelis who died in the kibbutz raid gains traction, Israeli spin-merchants clearly feel the need to somehow justify the fact that Israel is now driving the Palestinians of Gaza into an even tinier area.
There is no ‘Mowasi’ in Gaza, but there is al-Mawasi – a 1km-wide strip of land hard against the coastline of southern Gaza. But as Hotovely claimed ‘Mowasi’ is a safe place for more than two million people, half of them children, Sky cut to footage of the area – and revealed a wasteland:
Journalist Rami Jarrah, who spotted the Sky clip, went on to expose more of the propaganda – and the tininess of al Mawasi – in a short Twitter thread:
Palestinians are going out of their way to expose Israel’s fabricated safe havens that are just bustling with aid organisations.
Israel wants 2.2 million Gazans to build sand castles in the desert & disturbingly close to the Egyptian border
I wonder why?pic.twitter.com/RuNUa4QiND— Rami Jarrah (@RamiJarrah) December 4, 2023
See this tiny strip labelled 'Humanitarian Zone'?
That's Mowasi, that's where Israel wants 2.2 Million Gazans to fit, with no water, shelter or electricity.
They really mean it when they call Palestinians "Human Animals" pic.twitter.com/ihq4DmAUEM— Rami Jarrah (@RamiJarrah) December 4, 2023
Israeli ministers and advisers have been exposed planning the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza, either killing its Palestinian residents or driving them into a new, permanent ‘tent city’ refugee camp in the Egyptian desert. But that is not yet the narrative that Israeli is presenting to the wider world, so ‘Mowasi’ is the interim.
And the farce of the claim has been exposed within seconds, as the gross incompetence of the Israeli propaganda machine came back to bite the apartheid-mongers yet again.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
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Gaza’s Call to the World: Unveiling the Silent Message of the Red Triangle
Did you know an international conference was held in France on November 9 under the title ‘International Humanitarian Conference for Gaza’s Civilian Population’?
According to the French foreign ministry website, the conference “involved states, main donors, international organizations and NGOs active in Gaza” to promote “compliance with international humanitarian law, the protection of civilians and humanitarian staff, and the strengthening of humanitarian access.”
If you did not know, we do not blame you. The conference, after all, was meant to distract from the Israeli genocide in Gaza by giving the impression that Western governments still have the political power to control or, at least, influence the future of Gaza.
As French President Emmanuel Macron was preaching about international and humanitarian laws, we were busy looking elsewhere.
Backed by unhinged US administration and corporate media since October 7, Israel has also wanted us to look their way.
To ensure our gaze remained fixated on Tel Aviv’s political priorities, they fabricated an unprecedented amount of lies; those lies, with time, proved to be part of a centralized Israeli propaganda campaign aimed at lessening the impact of Israel’s military defeat on the collective Israeli psyche.
Additionally, Israel’s hasbara masters wanted to keep feeding already biased Western media with all the needed negative content to wage a defamation war against Palestinians, Gaza and its Resistance.
Not only did Israeli hasbara backfire, but it also showed how low Israel is willing to sink to distract from its genocide in Gaza. By feeding into an existing racist narrative in mainstream media about the supposed savagery and the barbarity of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, Israel wanted to pose as the protector of Western civilization and democracy.
This false construct, with time, began falling apart and again, we looked elsewhere in our search for answers. We looked at Gaza itself, at the atrocities committed by Israel at every hospital, school and neighborhood.
We looked at the lifeless bodies of hundreds, in fact thousands, of Palestinian children, women and civilians, strewn in every street corner, under rubble, even on their hospital beds.
We looked at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, Al-Fakhoura School and Nuseirat Refugee camp, Al-Fallujah, Jabaliya, Khan Yunis and every inch of Gaza that has been bombed, at times repeatedly, since October 7.
The Palestinians themselves were pointing us to where we should be looking – in fact, to where we should have always been looking.
Relentlessly and with unweakened resolve, ordinary people, often weeping, would point at mass graves, at their dead children in their arms, at mutilated bodies of children in hospital morgues, in parking lots, in the streets. They would say, “Look,” “Look what Israel is doing to us,” “Look what the Nazis have done to our children”, and so on.
The word ‘look’ here is critical. When they say ‘look,’ they mean look, understand, help, do something, anything.
But Palestinian Resistance on the ground, the only actual defenders of those civilians, however uncomfortable this realization makes some of us feel, was also telling us to look, and we did.
In this case, they did not announce ‘Look’ or ‘Shufu’ out loud. Instead, they used a small, red triangle, the symbolism of which is likely to influence a generation of Palestinians and millions of youth around the world.
Israel's biggest fear pic.twitter.com/Nafk0d5M7h
— ONE (@One_Dawah) November 8, 2023
This small, red triangle started as a functional tool in well-produced videos released by the Al-Qassam Brigades, urging us to focus on a specific point in the videos documenting their daily operations against invading Israeli forces.
A small, red triangle would finally appear within this obvious context amid massive ruins, half-standing buildings, dust and smoke. To understand the function of this triangle, we need to understand the story behind it, thus explaining, without a single word, why Palestinians resist.
Red triangles frame a map of Palestine on the front page of a special edition of the Iranian newspaper, Vatan Today
The equation then becomes simple to understand: Israeli destruction, red triangle, explosion – followed by triumphant shouts of ‘God is great,’ ‘Palestine will be free,’ and ‘The invaders will be defeated.’
With time, the functionality of the red triangle was transformed into even more significant meaning and more profound symbolism.
As millions of people continued to protest Israeli atrocities in Gaza, many carried banners and flags of the Red Triangle. For them, this symbol represented more than Palestinian Resistance in Gaza and the need for action everywhere else.
Some suggested that the symbolism of the red triangle was inspired by the red triangle of the Palestinian flag, thus arguing that that specific symbol was chosen to purposely delineate a more significant national symbol.
You may have seen this red triangle facing downwards on your feed recently, posted by pro-Palestinian accounts. What does it mean?
The red triangle first appeared in the videos published by the Al-Qassam Brigades to identify enemy targets. The videos, edited with flashy graphics… pic.twitter.com/OderWLuIMk
— red. (@redstreamnet) November 15, 2023
In truth, the origins of the small, red triangle do not matter. Maybe it was intended to represent something, or it was simply a technical choice made by a young Palestinian tech-savvy fighter to let us know where we needed to look.
What truly matters, however, are the deeper meanings of all of this.
For years – in fact, decades – Palestinians have been urging us to look at their lives under Israeli occupation and apartheid, at the destruction of their homes and orchards, confiscated or stolen by the Israeli military and illegal Jewish settlers, at the fate of their prisoners, thousands of them, languishing in Israeli prisons, simply for resisting the Israeli military occupation; at the Israeli siege on Gaza, and that perpetual episode of suffering and pain, which deprived over two million people of their most basic rights; and at so much more.
Unfortunately, and for whatever reason, many of us did not look.
Thanks to the courage of the Palestinians themselves and to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, we are finally looking, and we are looking precisely where Palestinians want us to look.
US President Joe Biden could now say whatever he wants in defense of Israel; Macron could hold ten more conferences and pretend to speak on behalf of the international community regarding the Gaza holocaust; and Israel could fabricate a million more lies. But we refuse to look at any of them. We refuse to engage with any of them. Their words, actions or inaction are no longer a priority for us.
Only the Palestinian political discourse matters. Only Palestinian freedom is a priority. Only the Palestinian Resistance can push back the Israeli invaders. In short, the priorities of the oppressed, not the oppressor, should matter to all of us.
Indeed, it is time for the Palestinian voice to reclaim its centrality in the story of oppression and Resistance. So, from now on, please look, listen and act in whichever capacity possible. And if you ever struggle to decipher the difference between Palestinian priorities and all others, look for that small, red triangle. It will guide you.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.’ His other books include ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
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