USA
Anyone Who Wants The US To Attack Iran Is An Enemy Of Humanity
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/e9f333f515876746ad6366a1304ce09b/href
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Anyone who wants the US and its allies to attack Iran is a psychopath. People who want to unleash a war of that scale upon our species should be rejected from our society as aggressively as child molesters and Nazis.
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A new CNN report says multiple Biden administration officials “saw Iran’s attacks on Israel Saturday as disproportionate to Israel’s strikes in Damascus that prompted the retaliation.”
There are zero reported fatalities as a result of the Iranian retaliation. The Israeli strikes on the Iranian embassy in Damascus killed 16 people, including multiple high-level Iranian military officials. To see Iran’s response as “disproportionate” is to admit you believe Israeli lives are worth literally orders of magnitude more than Iranian lives.
And it was at an embassy, for god’s sake. Israel can assassinate 16 people while shattering decades of diplomatic norms, and in the eyes of the US that’s still not as bad as Iran creating a few potholes in an Israeli street.
And anyway how obscene is it that these shitstains can babble about proportionality at all after backing Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza? When Iran attacks the response needs to be proportionate, but when Israel incinerates Gaza over October 7 it’s “LMAO fuck around and find out, laughcry emoji, Israeli flag.”
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Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter: "No no you don't understand, this time Germany is rounding up Jews to FIGHT antisemitism. https://t.co/uyhMBUmAfX / Twitter"
No no you don't understand, this time Germany is rounding up Jews to FIGHT antisemitism. https://t.co/uyhMBUmAfX
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After six months of mass murder and chaos the only thing that looks more absurd than the claim that Israel is morally superior to other nations in the middle east is the claim that the United States is morally superior to other nations in the world.
No matter how low your opinion was of western power structures and western civilization, if you’ve been watching events of the last six months with sincerity it will have sunk even lower by now.
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The Spectator Index on Twitter: "BREAKING: NBC News reports that 'President Joe Biden has privately expressed concern that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. more deeply into a broader conflict' / Twitter"
BREAKING: NBC News reports that 'President Joe Biden has privately expressed concern that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. more deeply into a broader conflict'
It’s so obnoxious how the mass media are helping the White House pretend this is something the Biden administration is just passively sitting around hoping doesn’t happen, as though the US hasn’t had the power to end all this every single day for the last six months.
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It’s just an easily quantifiable fact that the Trump administration was vastly less warlike and murderous than the Biden administration has been. This doesn’t mean Trump wasn’t warlike and murderous. It doesn’t even mean Trump wouldn’t have been doing more or less the same evil things that Biden has been doing if he’d won in 2020. But it does mean the entire mainstream liberal narrative about what Trump is and what Biden is has been complete bullshit this entire time, which necessarily means the whole mainstream narrative about the US political system is a lie.
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It’s possible that as the United States was first beginning to move toward planetary hegemony there were some empire managers operating in good faith who sincerely believed US unipolarity could be a force for achieving world peace. It’s doubtful that everyone constructing this monstrosity has been an evil, mustache-twirling cartoon villain who wanted to see nonstop violence, oppression and nuclear brinkmanship inflicted upon populations around the globe. But that’s what wound up happening.
And of course it did. The belief that a regime can take over the world by any amount of force necessary and create peace and prosperity for all was always a poorly reasoned fantasy of deeply unwise minds. Of course there are going to be populations who refuse to be subjugated, and some of them are going to have nuclear weapons, and others will have conventional weapons but defend their sovereignty tooth and claw. Most of the violence and cold war brinkmanship you see in international conflicts today is a direct result of this dynamic.
The US-centralized empire’s foreign policy is one long and unrelenting war against disobedience. It simply is not possible to bring the entire human species under one single power umbrella without copious amounts of violence and tyranny. If we keep going along this trajectory, the empire’s war on disobedience is going to lead to nuclear armageddon someday.
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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. 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 Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)
Empire Managers Keep Acting Like Iran Is About To Attack Israel Without Provocation
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/5ad9bf314291fbcc4307b0bcb79ddfef/href
Iran appears to be poised to launch an attack on Israel in retaliation for the Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate building adjacent to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, which killed 16 people including multiple Iranian military officers. Iranian forces have already seized an Israeli-linked cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, and Tehran continues to vow that it will soon retaliate for the embassy attack at an undisclosed time.
Iran has reportedly said through Oman that the scope of the attack will be calibrated to avoid escalation into an all-out regional conflict. Reuters reports that Washington does not expect the retaliatory attack to be large enough to draw the US into war, so both Washington and Tehran appear to be saying basically the same thing about what’s coming. So as things stand right now it seems both sides see it as unlikely that this will be the spark to ignite a new war of profound horror in the middle east.
What’s really interesting about this situation right now is how western empire managers and propagandists have been framing the coming Iranian retaliation to suggest that Iran is about to attack Israel out of the blue, completely unprovoked. As though bombing an embassy would not be considered an extreme act of war by any nation anywhere on earth.
MSNBC on Twitter: "In response to a reporter asking President Joe Biden what his message to Iran is in this moment, Biden responded "Don't.""We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed," Biden said. pic.twitter.com/zfPkl4i71g / Twitter"
In response to a reporter asking President Joe Biden what his message to Iran is in this moment, Biden responded "Don't.""We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed," Biden said. pic.twitter.com/zfPkl4i71g
They’ve seriously just been talking about it as though the embassy strike didn’t happen, babbling about defending Israel and Israel’s right to defend itself like any attack by Iran would be coming completely out of the blue. On Friday President Biden warned Iran not to attack Israel when questioned about the coming strike, saying, “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed.”
“The threats from Iran are completely unacceptable and we, like the Americans, fully support Israel’s right to defend itself,” said British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday.
“Australia is deeply concerned by indications Iran is preparing military action against Israel,” chimed in Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, saying Iran should “use its influence in the region to promote stability, not contribute to escalation.”
“Israel is under threat of imminent attack by Iran,” said US Senator Tom Cotton on Twitter. “President Biden needs to warn the ayatollahs immediately that the United States will back Israel to the hilt and the joint American-Israeli retaliation for any attack will be swift and devastating.”
“Iran will bear the consequences for choosing to escalate the situation any further,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said following the cargo ship seizure.
Alan MacLeod on Twitter: "You'd never guess from this biased headline that Israel just bombed Iran's embassy. https://t.co/lxKiQ5kWhQ / Twitter"
You'd never guess from this biased headline that Israel just bombed Iran's embassy. https://t.co/lxKiQ5kWhQ
Mass media headlines have also been framing this as an attack that’s coming completely out of nowhere by an irrational aggressor.
“Netanyahu meets top officials as fear of Iran attack on Israel grows,” reads a headline from the BBC.
“Israel braces amid fears of Iranian strike; U.S. shifts forces to region,” a headline from The Washington Post says.
“Israel Bracing for Unprecedented Direct Iran Attack in Days,” blares Bloomberg.
“Major Iranian attack on Israel believed to be imminent,” warns CBS News.
The casual news consumer would see all this and assume that Israel and its allies have received some intelligence that Iran is preparing an attack without provocation, and are doing everything they can to deter this maniacal regime from doing so.
This is ridiculous. If Iran had bombed a US embassy and killed multiple US military officials, the US would be raining bombs on Tehran within hours and everyone knows it. But Israel bombs an Iranian embassy and everyone acts like it didn’t happen and starts yelling at Iran instead.
It’s like if someone ran up and sucker-punched somebody at the bar, and then everyone started screaming at the guy who just got punched that he’d better leave the other guy alone and stop being a bully.
Iran is probably going to attack Israel, because at some point it does have to push back on Israeli violence to create some deterrence. Hopefully it will indeed be limited, hopefully the violence will not spiral into something nightmarish, and hopefully enough people are able to see through all the propaganda spin enough to understand what’s actually happening.
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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. 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 Rawpixel.
Israel Lets Some Aid Into Gaza So The US Will Keep Giving It Weapons To Kill People In Gaza
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/296b28eef2d42cb45abfa945fbba4093/href
Israel has generously and compassionately reopened the Erez crossing to allow aid into Gaza, as it is the only way to ensure that the US will keep sending them weapons to kill the people in Gaza.
Biden sent Netanyahu one warning about a failure to protect civilians possibly costing Israel its US support and the crossing opened immediately, which proves (A) that Israel has been intentionally starving Gazans by closing entrances off from aid and (B) that Biden could have ordered this to stop at any time.
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The Biden administration approved another weapons package for Israel on the same day Israel killed a bunch of international aid workers in Gaza and bombed the Iranian consulate in Syria. But please, tell me more about how frustrated and angry and outraged and upset Biden’s feelings are feeling toward Israel.
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The huge amount of western outrage and sympathy we’re seeing over the IDF assassination of an international aid convoy compared to the systematic extermination of Palestinians we’ve seen over the last six months confirms the west only regards white people as full human beings, which is a point we’d already seen driven home by the disproportionate amount of outrage and sympathy we saw over Ukraine.
But you know what? We’ll take it. Things are that desperate that if you can only support an end to the Gaza genocide if you see six westerners get killed, I say welcome aboard anyway. Hopefully this is the beginning of the formation of an actual conscience that’s worth a damn.
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The mass media are reporting that the preliminary IDF debrief into the killing of several World Central Kitchen employees in Gaza has found that the multiple strikes were not carried out with the intention of killing those workers, a report which if you ask me has big “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade” energy.
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https://medium.com/media/1537a8e28d0693d5c30159861abf206d/href
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Haaretz has a new article out titled “At Singapore Airshow, the Gaza War Was a Selling Point for Israeli Weapon Manufacturers,” which is exactly what it sounds like. One of the ugliest things about this dystopia is that acts of mass military slaughter are always immensely profitable for a specific industry. They’re profitable in and of themselves, even before you add in things like land and resource grabs, just by helping to market and sell more weapons.
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Stop calling this a “war”. A war doesn’t involve conversations about whether or not a walled-in population should be allowed to have food, medicine and electricity. If you have that much control over a population, you can’t be at war with it. You’re just killing a bunch of prisoners.
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Biden and his cohorts aren’t mad at Netanyahu for committing a genocide, they’re mad at Netanyahu for not hiding a genocide.
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I’ve fucking had it with people who blindly regurgitate empire propaganda about Gaza. Fuck right off with your weaponized gullibility.
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The thing that’s so pathetic about the push to blame this whole mass atrocity on Netanyahu is that the people doing this aren’t even really going after Netanyahu. They’re not pushing to send him to The Hague and have him imprisoned for war crimes or bring about any meaningful consequences at all — they’re just saying we should feel negative feelings toward him for a bit like we did with Bush.
It’s always about feelings with the imperial spin campaign over Gaza. Biden’s feelings toward Netanyahu, Israeli feelings about October 7, the feelings of western Jews about pro-Palestine protests. The whole thing’s been one nonstop appeal to emotion fallacy.
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MAGA Republicans claim to be a bold anti-war, anti-establishment faction, which is squarely refuted by their support for the Gaza genocide.
Democrats claim to support human rights and to oppose tyranny and racism, which is squarely refuted by their support for the Gaza genocide.
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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. 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.
How could Trump make the USA a fascist state?
I felt this worth sharing. I trust Robert Reich as a reliable source of opinion:
Imagine If Russia Or China Did The Things Israel Is Doing In Gaza
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/08f3cbbe9c77fa4892a1315d8be5e3ce/href
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was bombing and starving a walled-in population of two million, half of them children. Seriously, imagine it. Imagine the rage and vitriol. Imagine the nonstop media coverage.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, US media coverage of that war exceeded the media coverage of all US wars in the previous three decades. If Russia were deliberately and systematically exterminating civilians in Ukraine or anywhere else, the western media coverage of those war crimes would be many times more.
It’s almost cliché at this point to say “imagine if Russia or China did this”, but such comparisons are important for retaining a sense of perspective on just how evil the western political-media class is being about Gaza right now. We’re seeing articles come out in the mass media about starvation in Gaza which never once even mention the word “Israel”. Do you think that would be happening if this were being perpetrated by a government which defies the western empire? Of course not.
Assal Rad on Twitter: "An entire Economist article on famine in Gaza doesn't say the word "Israel" once. Not even when describing damage to farmland and water facilities or severely restricted aid deliveries.Saying *who* is destroying the farmland and restricting aid seems like basic info to include. pic.twitter.com/Z6fBtmc0Bp / Twitter"
An entire Economist article on famine in Gaza doesn't say the word "Israel" once. Not even when describing damage to farmland and water facilities or severely restricted aid deliveries.Saying *who* is destroying the farmland and restricting aid seems like basic info to include. pic.twitter.com/Z6fBtmc0Bp
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately blockading food from an imprisoned population of millions of people.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was relentlessly raining military explosives on densely packed urban areas known to be full of children.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately and methodically ethnically cleansing an oppressed population for entirely racist reasons.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if evidence that Russia or China are committing horrific war crimes was surfacing on a daily basis.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China were getting caught in lie after lie after lie while carrying out such a mass atrocity.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China tried to present them with blatantly fabricated evidence of crimes committed by the targeted population in justification of their atrocities.
We’d be living in a different political and media landscape. If Russia or China was doing what Israel is doing, entire presidential campaigns would have been built around who would oppose it most aggressively. Every sanction and embargo in the book would have been slammed upon the perpetrating government. The western press would be falling all over themselves to expose every atrocity and every lie and blaring those expositions as feature stories on every platform for months, and showering one another with awards for doing so.
Assal Rad on Twitter: "StateSpox was asked about UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs's report on Gaza which said there's reasonable ground that the threshold for genocide has been met.Miller said they oppose mandate of this rapporteur, accused her of antisemitism and rejected allegations of genocide. pic.twitter.com/R7s79FjYCQ / Twitter"
StateSpox was asked about UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs's report on Gaza which said there's reasonable ground that the threshold for genocide has been met.Miller said they oppose mandate of this rapporteur, accused her of antisemitism and rejected allegations of genocide. pic.twitter.com/R7s79FjYCQ
Instead we get this. Government officials babbling nonstop about Israel’s “right” to “defend itself” and how this would all be over if Hamas didn’t keep fighting, while showering Israel with weapons to help it continue its atrocities. The mass media churning out a constant deluge of passive-language “Gazans are having trouble finding food for some reason” headlines and continuous reminders that this is all happening because of October 7, while repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda like it’s gospel truth. All viable US presidential candidates vowing their unconditional support for Israel while occasionally impotently finger-wagging at this or that aspect of Israel’s atrocities to avoid looking like complete psychopaths.
That contrast between how the western political-media class is acting toward the Gaza genocide and how we all know they’d be acting if an unaligned government was doing something similar is exactly why the US-centralized empire cannot be permitted to rule our world anymore. It pretends to stand for peace, justice, freedom and democracy, but in reality it just inflicts nonstop death and suffering upon human beings around the world and covers it up with propaganda spin from its servile mainstream press. It purports to uphold the “rules-based international order”, but all that means in practice is that it upholds an international order in which the US empire makes up the rules as it goes along and changes them as it pleases.
Humanity cannot allow itself to be abused and tyrannized by this murderous, hypocritical globe-spanning power structure any longer. A better world is possible, but we’re going to have to find a way to pry the talons of these monsters off the steering wheel first.
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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. 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 Wikimedia Commons/Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation (CC BY 4.0 DEED)
The Empire Slowly Suffocates Assange Like It Slowly Suffocates All Its Enemies
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/b6644e713c4774fa0811b6342c20ff75/href
The British High Court has ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may potentially get a final appeal against extradition to the United States, but only within a very limited scope and only if specific conditions are met.
The court ruled that Assange may appeal only on the grounds that his freedom of speech might be restricted in the US, and that there is a possibility he could receive the death penalty. If the US provides “assurances” that neither of these things will happen, then the trial moves to another phase where Assange’s legal team may debate the merits of those assurances. If the US does not provide those assurances, then the limited appeal will move forward.
Absurdly, the court determined that Assange’s lawyers may not argue against extradition on matters as self-evidently critical as the fact that the CIA plotted to assassinate him, or on the basis that he is being politically persecuted for the crime of inconvenient journalism.
Consortium News on Twitter: "Assange's Fate Awaits US 'Assurances' https://t.co/tpbQZHgw1L The High Court on Tuesday rejected five Assange grounds for a new appeal, agreeing he had only three legitimate arguments but that the U.S. could nullify them with new "assurances," reports Joe Lauria. pic.twitter.com/IHkQZWZLEL / Twitter"
Assange's Fate Awaits US 'Assurances' https://t.co/tpbQZHgw1L The High Court on Tuesday rejected five Assange grounds for a new appeal, agreeing he had only three legitimate arguments but that the U.S. could nullify them with new "assurances," reports Joe Lauria. pic.twitter.com/IHkQZWZLEL
The mass media are calling this a “reprieve”, even “wonderful news”, but as Jonathan Cook explains in his latest article “Assange’s ‘reprieve’ is another lie, hiding the real goal of keeping him endlessly locked up,” that’s all a bunch of crap.
“The word ‘reprieve’ is there — just as the judges’ headline ruling that some of the grounds of his appeal have been ‘granted’ — to conceal the fact that he is prisoner to an endless legal charade every bit as much as he is a prisoner in a Belmarsh cell,” writes Cook. “In fact, today’s ruling is yet further evidence that Assange is being denied due process and his most basic legal rights — as he has been for a decade or more.”
Cook writes the following:
“The case has always been about buying time. To disappear Assange from public view. To vilify him. To smash the revolutionary publishing platform he founded to help whistleblowers expose state crimes. To send a message to other journalists that the US can reach them wherever they live should they try to hold Washington to account for its criminality.
“And worst of all, to provide a final solution for the nuisance Assange had become for the global superpower by trapping him in an endless process of incarceration and trial that, if it is allowed to drag on long enough, will most likely kill him.”
https://medium.com/media/adec158e798d3f63499e02b24aabb0d1/href
This kind of slow motion strangulation is how the empire operates all the time these days, across all spheres. Helping Israel starve Gaza while slowly pretending to work toward solutions. Drawing out a proxy war in Ukraine for as long as possible to bleed Russia. Slowly killing Assange in prison without trial under the pretense of judicial proceedings.
The US-centralized empire hunts not like a tiger, killing its prey with one fatal bite to the jugular, but more like a python: slowly suffocating the life out of its prey until it perishes. It favors the long, drawn-out, confusing strangulation of inconvenient populations and individuals, carried out under the cover of bureaucracy and propaganda spin. In today’s world it prefers sanctions, blockades and long proxy conflicts over the big Hulk-smash ground invasions we saw it carry out in places like Iraq and Vietnam.
These slow suffocations can take more time, but what they lack in efficiency they make up for in the quality of perception management. It’s bad PR to just openly invade countries and murder people, which is why the leaders of the western empire have been able to wag their fingers at Putin despite their being quantifiably far more murderous than Russia. People start snapping out of the propaganda matrix you spent so much time building for them and begin organizing against the political status quo your power is premised on.
So they opt for slow strangulation strategies where they can confuse the public about what’s happening and who’s responsible, outsourcing the blame to other parties while posing as the good guy who’s trying to bring peace and stability. It takes time, but the empire has time to burn. That’s what happens when you’re the most powerful empire in the history of civilization; you have the luxury of biding your time while orchestrating large-scale, long-term operations to advance your power agendas.
Meanwhile Gaza starves, Ukraine bleeds, and Assange languishes in prison, each needing this to end with more urgency every day.
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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. 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 Landjager (CC BY-NC 3.0 DEED)
The Empire Doesn’t Hide Its Worst Deeds, It Just Manipulates How People Think About Them
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/a815eab519e2a5c1085bcc4f9d6044b8/href
The worst actions of your government happen not in secrecy, but right out in the open under the narrative cover of mass media propaganda. The western empire doesn’t hide its worst deeds, it just manipulates the way people think about them.
Tomorrow we could unearth rock-solid proof that the US government knowingly orchestrated 9/11, and that crime in and of itself still wouldn’t be as bad as what the US government is facilitating in Gaza right now, in plain view of the entire world. And even if such a revelation did occur, the imperial media would probably either ignore it or spin it so that its impact is dulled into impotence.
The empire’s worst atrocities happen in the open because the empire’s worst atrocities involve butchering and starving huge numbers of people, which is impossible to do in secret. They can assassinate a government official here and sign a malignant secret agreement there without needing to do it openly, but murder at mass scale isn’t something you can conceal in the information age.
The US-centralized globe-spanning power structure therefore relies heavily on its historically unprecedented ability to psychologically manipulate global populations when carrying out such atrocities. The empire has invested more heavily in soft power than any empire or government in human history, and the science of modern propaganda has been advancing under this investment at least as rapidly as military technology has been.
That’s why you can have the most damning information imaginable about the people who rule over us sitting right out in the open, and you won’t see anywhere remotely close to the public outrage and backlash you ought to see. The US government can literally back a genocide without hiding any part of it, and the political-media class will simply manipulate public psychology into getting lost in a bunch of hogwash about self-defense and human shields and difficulties delivering food and medical supplies and hey Biden is working hard to do the right thing here and it’s all very complicated and everything bad that happens in Gaza can be blamed on Hamas anyway.
It’s a truly astonishing power that would inspire awe if it wasn’t so evil. Power is controlling what happens, but real power is controlling what people think about what happens.
Whistleblowers and investigative journalists provide an invaluable service to humanity for which we should all be grateful, but what this civilization needs more than anything right now is not so much new information about what the powerful are doing, but rather the ability to lucidly perceive the information that’s already been made public. We need people clearly seeing what’s already right in front of them, without the lens of distortion and obfuscation that the powerful have placed over their eyes.
Until we find a way to snap a critical mass of people out of the propaganda-induced coma the empire has placed them in, they’ll be able to get away with any evil they need to commit in order to secure their interests and advance their agendas. We can work on this front by doing everything we can to get people looking at the reality of what our rulers are doing at every opportunity, in as creative and interesting a way as we can come up with. The more eyes open to the truth, the more lucid perceivers there will be to help open the eyes of others.
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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. 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
Half Of Americans Have No Idea Whether Israelis Or Palestinians Are Suffering More Deaths
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/4fb974ba278090a52e4e2246b95c899a/href
A new poll by the Pew Research Center has found that half of Americans have no idea whether more Israelis or Palestinians have died in the so-called “Israel-Hamas war”.
“Most Americans report having strong emotional reactions to the Israel-Hamas war,” the Pew Research Center writes. “Yet, for the most part, Americans are not paying very close attention to news about the conflict. One sign of this limited attention is that only about half of U.S. adults can correctly answer a question that tests their factual knowledge by asking whether the number of deaths in the war, so far, is higher among Palestinians or among Israelis.”
The answer of course is that many, many times more Palestinians have died since October 7 than Israelis. There were reportedly 1,163 Israeli deaths on October 7 with the IDF claiming to have lost 246 troops in the ground offensive thereafter, while the Gaza Health Ministry says Palestinian deaths in Gaza are nearing 32,000 (arguably a massive underestimate).
But the Pew Research Center is wrong to blame widespread American ignorance of these numbers solely on a lack of attention. The real culprit is the journalistic malpractice of the mass media.
Abdallah Fayyad on Twitter: "An indictment of our media coverage. https://t.co/QROsSYRkcl pic.twitter.com/TWoHO2hbbE / Twitter"
An indictment of our media coverage. https://t.co/QROsSYRkcl pic.twitter.com/TWoHO2hbbE
The fact that half of Americans don’t know whether Israelis or Palestinians are suffering more deaths in Gaza is the result of the appalling “Palestinian child walks into bullet”-style headlines the mainstream American press have been churning out since this conflict began.
Plenty of Americans are unfamiliar with the specific details of foreign conflicts their country is involved with, but because most of them encounter headlines and bits of information in their day to day lives there is a general awareness about things like the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, or that 9/11 happened, or that the US went to war with Iraq amid claims of weapons of mass destruction.
But because the Israeli assault on Gaza is backed by the western empire, the headlines in the western press are a lot less clear about exactly what’s happening there. In a new article for Declassified UK titled “How the Western Media Helped Build the Case for Genocide in Gaza”, Jonathan Cook lays out numerous instances in which the mainstream press have brazenly misrepresented reality about facts on the ground in Gaza in their headlines, like saying “food aid-related deaths” to describe an IDF massacre of Palestinian civilians waiting for food, or describing civilians being deliberately starved by Israel in ways that suggest they’re just suffering from a natural famine.
https://medium.com/media/2bd9321cb3169f41bc576c4a7b86e9f4/href
In a society where only 20 percent of news consumers ever read past the headline, mass media propagandists know they can get away with a tremendous amount of manipulation of public consciousness by simply phrasing headlines in a way that advances the information interests of the US-centralized empire. If the mainstream press had been correctly informing the public that Israel is killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and intentionally starving hundreds of thousands more, there would be no confusion among the American public about whether Israelis or Palestinians have been suffering more deaths since October.
American movies and TV shows like to make fun of nations like North Korea for having state propaganda, but Americans are easily the most propagandized population on earth. The propaganda of the mainstream press is so effective because Americans don’t know it’s propaganda, so they consume it without any distrust or skepticism.
That’s just what’s necessary to manufacture consent for the actions of the globe-spanning empire which revolves around the United States. There is too much power riding on the behavior of the US government for the American people to be permitted any real say in it, so their opinions and understanding are manipulated throughout their entire lives by state propaganda services disguised as news.
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Featured image via Adobe Stock.
If Israel Wants To Be An “Independent Nation”, Let It Be An Independent Nation
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/111e5337da91eea27e4a688f78a9d93e/href
In a continuation of the Democratic Party’s weird new tactic of trying to assign Benjamin Netanyahu all the blame for the PR crisis caused by Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced the Israeli prime minister on Thursday and called for new elections in Israel.
“As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed, radically, since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past,” said Schumer, adding, “At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel, at a time when so many Israelis have lost their confidence in the vision and direction of their government.”
Netanyahu’s Likud party responded with an indignant statement saying that Schumer is “expected to respect Israel’s elected government and not undermine it.”
“Israel is not a banana republic, but an independent and proud democracy that elected Prime Minister Netanyahu,” the statement said.
Naftali Bennett נפתלי בנט on Twitter: "Fmr Prime Minister Naftali Bennett:Regardless of our political opinion, we strongly oppose external political intervention in Israel's internal affairs.We are an independent nation, not a banana republic.With the threat of terrorism on its way to the West, it would be best... / Twitter"
Fmr Prime Minister Naftali Bennett:Regardless of our political opinion, we strongly oppose external political intervention in Israel's internal affairs.We are an independent nation, not a banana republic.With the threat of terrorism on its way to the West, it would be best...
“Regardless of our political opinion, we strongly oppose external political intervention in Israel’s internal affairs. We are an independent nation, not a banana republic,” echoed former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett.
“With the threat of terrorism on its way to the West, it would be best if the international community would assist Israel in its just war, thereby also protecting their countries,” Bennett added, an assertion that is ridiculous in multiple ways. There’s no basis for the claim that the threat of terrorism is growing in the west, there is no basis for the claim that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a “just war”, and there is no basis for the suggestion that helping Israel kill Palestinians in Gaza makes the western world safer in any way.
The Israeli right wing’s repeated use of the term “banana republic” is both pointed and revealing. The term was coined in 1904 by O Henry to describe the Central American states which US imperialists ruled with an iron fist in order to exploit their people’s labor at robbery prices for the immensely profitable export of tropical fruit. The insinuation being that it’s fine when the US dictates the governmental affairs of the brown-skinned people south of its own border, but it’s unacceptable for the US to do this to Israel.
We saw this point driven home in even starker terms with a Council on Foreign Relations piece titled “Schumer’s Attack on an Ally at War” by virulent neocon Elliott Abrams. Abrams calls Schumer’s mild finger-wagging “an unconscionable interference in the internal politics of another democracy”, claiming the American senator is trying to treat Israel like a “colony” of the United States by controlling its internal affairs. Which is hilarious, given that just a few years ago Abrams was openly working to stage a coup in Venezuela under the Trump administration.
Murtaza Hussain on Twitter: ""Israeli voters, then, do not have the right to decide when to have elections and whom to choose as prime minister. That is the right, apparently, of politicians in Washington."Elliot Abrams alleges U.S. color revolution in Israel: https://t.co/SjkuYYzoi3 / Twitter"
"Israeli voters, then, do not have the right to decide when to have elections and whom to choose as prime minister. That is the right, apparently, of politicians in Washington."Elliot Abrams alleges U.S. color revolution in Israel: https://t.co/SjkuYYzoi3
More to the point though, we should probably pay attention to this absurd claim that Israel is an “independent” nation.
Calling Israel an independent nation is like calling a fetus in the womb an independent person. It’s like looking at a man in a hospital bed whose body is full of tubes and medical devices who needs to be manually repositioned every two hours to prevent him from getting pressure sores, and calling him independent.
Israel is as dependent as a nation can possibly be. It literally cannot exist without the direct military backing of the most powerful empire of all time, namely the United States and its globe-spanning network of allies and assets.
Last November a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick told a columnist with the Jewish News Syndicate, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
That is not how one talks about an “independent nation”.
https://medium.com/media/00a96e02f582830eb55646ea00343fa8/href
Israel knows it’s fully dependent on the US empire, which is why it pours so much energy into lobbying in the US and its imperial member states like the UK. Israel cannot exist without nonstop violence, and it cannot sustain that nonstop violence without the backing of the US imperial war machine.
The reason Israel cannot exist without nonstop violence is because it is an artificial nation that was simply dropped on top of a pre-existing civilization whose inhabitants and neighbors had a deeply-rooted way of living which was massively disrupted by the sudden imposition of a newly created ethnostate ruled by people who’d never lived there before. Its emergence was so forced and unnatural that Zionists literally revived a dead middle eastern language called Hebrew and made it their national language so they could LARP as indigenous people speaking in their native tongue.
Because this alien synthetic ethnostate was abruptly forced upon an ancient pre-existing civilization with no regard for the humanity of the people living there, ever since this occurred the region’s indigenous populations have been rejecting it like a body rejecting an ill-matched organ. The only way for the state of Israel to remain the state of Israel is therefore to exist in a continuous state of war, like a house that can only remain standing if it’s got a giant team of construction workers toiling in perpetuity to stop it from falling over.
But if Israeli right-wingers wants to pretend none of this is happening, that’s fine. Let Israel be an “independent nation” if that’s what they want. Stop sending it arms, stop being its ally, stop bombing Yemen, Iraq and Syria in facilitation of its current military onslaught, stop providing it with intelligence, training and logistics support, stop operating in tandem with its military and intelligence services in the region, stop allowing its lobbyists and influence campaigns to operate in the United States, and stop providing its atrocities with diplomatic cover and mass media narrative spin. See how long Israel can stand independently if that occurs.
Of course, it won’t happen. The managers of the US empire know their agendas of global hegemony benefit greatly from having a fully dependent and intimate ally in a region as geostrategically crucial as the middle east (which is why they allow the Israel lobby to continue to exist), and Israel knows it isn’t actually independent in any meaningful sense of the word. But the fact that the US and Israel are so inextricable shows what a joke it is to pretend that this is a normal nation independently going about its own affairs like any other.
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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 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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Crocodile Tears For Gaza While Backing Its Destruction
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/80ed67438d45d548011c6c2441004b7f/href
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It says so much about US politics that Biden’s most vulnerable political weak point is the fact that he’s sponsoring a genocide, but Republicans can’t attack him on that point because they support the genocide too.
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It’s amazing how fast the bill to ban TikTok is being shoved through by US lawmakers. This would easily be the single most significant act of direct government censorship in US history.
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Nothing’s more enraging than seeing the western officials who are making this genocide possible weep crocodile tears about how “heartbreaking” it is. You’re fucking doing it to them you shitstains! It’s like beating someone to death while sobbing about how tragic their untimely death will be.
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Israel’s atrocities in Gaza are quantifiably much, much, much worse than October 7. We’re begging the western press to give as much weight to the suffering inflicted upon Palestinians by the Gaza genocide as the suffering inflicted on Israelis by October 7, when in reality it deserves much, much more weight.
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We’re about two weeks out from seeing mass media reports like “Biden administration to begin airdropping child-sized coffins into Gaza to aid Palestinians in their unfortunate time of need.”
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https://medium.com/media/2e0e3fadcb95b13ddabb6ed20609f971/href
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Democrats: We stand for justice and equality and we oppose racism and oppression!
Palestinian: Oh so you oppose the genocide in Gaza then?
Democrats: Oh god no. No we meant, like, we want more Latinx landlords.
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Saying it’s racist and evil to criticize Zionists is like saying it’s racist and evil to criticize conservatives. It’s a fucking political ideology.
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The thing is we don’t know how to do this. We don’t know how to keep eight billion homo sapiens alive without destroying the ecosystem. We don’t know how eight billion humans can share the earth without wiping each other out via the armageddon weapons they invented. Without hurting, exploiting, oppressing and enslaving each other.
We’ve got some ideas about how this could be done, but we’ve never actually done it. In the extremely short amount of time this planet has had billions of humans on it, we’ve never come anywhere remotely close to figuring out how to avoid cataclysmic disaster and nightmarish dystopia. We’re still very much on that trajectory, and because of the competition-based systems we have in place, nothing is happening to steer us away.
So we are all — every single one of us — right now doing something that we don’t know how to do. We are living on this planet, but we don’t actually know how to. We are one of eight billion humans who don’t know how to sustain a world of eight billion humans. We’re in the water, but we don’t know how to swim.
And we could all probably use a little bit of humility about this. Everywhere we look we see pundits, politicians and thought leaders talking about what changes need to be made to our society and our world in confident-sounding voices, but none of them actually know. The very best of them have some educated guesses as to how we might start making the necessary changes to avoid various disasters, but since we haven’t even started making any real changes, they don’t actually know. We’re a bunch of lost little kids who can’t find their parents.
Obviously we need to learn how to swim, because these are the waters we were birthed into. I mean only to say here that our collective efforts to learn how to swim would probably be aided by a lot more curiosity about how swimming might actually occur and what it would actually look like, and a lot less confident-sounding bloviation from people who’ve never swam an inch in their lives.
A humble curiosity about this entirely unprecedented situation we’ve found ourselves in would probably serve our species well.
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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 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