Caitlin Johnstone
If this is what the “rules-based international order” looks like, would we not, perhaps, be better off without it?
Global Research, January 19, 2024
Caitlin Johnstone 16 January 2024
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The “rules-based international order” has allowed the incineration of Gaza, and the bombing of Yemeni forces who are trying to stop it.
The “rules-based international order” allowed hundreds of thousands of people to be killed by western-backed Saudi atrocities in Yemen.
The “rules-based international order” allowed NATO powers to knowingly provoke a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine.
The “rules-based international order” allowed Western powers and their regional partners to plunge Syria into a horrific civil war by flooding the nation with heavily armed fascistic extremist factions.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US to invade and occupy a vast stretch of Syrian territory in order to control the nation’s natural resources and prevent reconstruction.
The “rules-based international order” allowed Libya to be turned into a chaotic hellscape after Western-backed forces killed Gaddafi following a long-desired Western regime change operation disguised as “humanitarian intervention”.
Leading Provider of Financial Research Says US Is Headed for Third World Status
The “rules-based international order” allowed the invasion of Iraq to destabilize an entire region resulting in millions of deaths following a campaign of deliberate lies and propaganda.
The “rules-based international order” allowed the invasion of Afghanistan and a decades-long occupation sustained by lies and corruption.
The “rules-based international order” allowed the imprisonment of Julian Assange for journalistic activities exposing US war crimes.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the planet to be circled by hundreds of US military bases, including in places where the people who live there vehemently oppose their presence like Okinawa, Iraq and Syria.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US and its allies to kill huge numbers of civilians with siege warfare tactics in nations like Yemen, Iraq and Venezuela.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US to interfere in scores of elections around the world at will and forcibly topple inconvenient governments whenever it wants to.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed China to be surrounded by a rapidly increasing amount of US military bases and war machinery in preparation for a future conflict of unimaginable horror.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the US to plunge the world into a new cold war with rapidly escalating brinkmanship against nuclear-armed Russia and China.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed our civilization to be controlled by the most powerful propaganda system ever devised, creating a mind-controlled dystopia of brainwashed gear-turners who are deceived into believing they are free.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed unfathomable amounts of government malfeasance to be hidden behind an increasingly opaque wall of government secrecy.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the interests of ordinary human beings to be subordinated and subjected to the interests of billionaire corporations and sociopathic government agencies.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed the destruction of our ecosystem for the enrichment of powerful plutocrats.
The “rules-based international order” has allowed our planet to be dominated by an empire of extreme murderousness and depravity at the cost of nonstop bloodshed and ever-increasing tyranny.
If the “rules-based international order” has allowed all these things to happen, what kind of “rules” are we talking about exactly? And what kind of “order” do they sustain?
If this is what the “rules-based international order” looks like, would we not, perhaps, be better off without it?
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For centuries Western civilization has depended heavily on war, genocide, theft, colonialism and imperialism, which it has justified using narratives premised on religion, racism and ethnic supremacy — all of which we are seeing play out in the incineration of Gaza today.
It’s been so surreal watching Western rightists babbling about how savage and barbaric Muslim culture is amid the 2023 zombie resurrection of Bush-era Islamophobia, even while Western civilization amasses a mountain of 10 thousand child corpses.
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
What we see in Gaza is a much better representation of what Western civilization is really about than all the gibberish about freedom and democracy we learned in school.
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
When Israeli President Isaac Herzog described the assault on Gaza as a war “to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilization,” he wasn’t really lying. He was telling the truth — just maybe not quite in the way that he meant it.
The demolition of Gaza is indeed being perpetrated in defense of Western values and is itself a perfect embodiment of Western values. Not the Western values they teach you about in school, but the hidden ones they don’t want you to look at. Not the attractive packaging with the advertising slogans on the label, but the product that’s actually inside the box.
For centuries Western civilization has depended heavily on war, genocide, theft, colonialism and imperialism, which it has justified using narratives premised on religion, racism and ethnic supremacy — all of which we are seeing play out in the incineration of Gaza today.
What we are seeing in Gaza is a much better representation of what Western civilization is really about than all the gibberish about freedom and democracy we learned about in school.
A much better representation of Western civilization than all the art and literature we’ve been proudly congratulating ourselves on over the centuries.
A much better representation of Western civilization than the love and compassion we like to pretend our Judeo-Christian values revolve around.
It’s been so surreal watching Western rightists babbling about how savage and barbaric Muslim culture is amid the 2023 zombie resurrection of Bush-era Islamophobia, even while Western civilization amasses a mountain of 10 thousand child corpses.
That mountain of child corpses is a much better representation of Western culture than anything Mozart, da Vinci or Shakespeare ever produced.
This is Western civilization. This is what it looks like.
Western civilization, where Julian Assange awaits his final appeal in February against U.S. extradition for journalism which exposed US war crimes.
Where we are fed a nonstop deluge of mass media propaganda to manufacture our consent for wars and aggression which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions in the 21st century alone.
Where we are kept distracted by vapid entertainment and artificial culture wars so we don’t think too hard about what this civilization is and who it is killing and maiming and starving and exploiting.
Where news cycles are dominated more by celebrity gossip and Donald Trump’s latest mouth farts than by the mass atrocities that are being actively facilitated by Western governments.
Where liberals congratulate themselves for having progressive views on race and gender while the officials they elect help rip apart children’s bodies with military explosives.
Where Zionist Jews center themselves and their emotions because opposition to an active genocide makes them feel like they are being persecuted, and where Israel supporters who are not Jewish still kind of feel like they are being persecuted also.
Where a giant globe-spanning empire powered by militarism, imperialism, capitalism and authoritarianism devours human flesh with an insatiable appetite while we congratulate ourselves on how much better we are than nations like Iran or China.
These are Western values. This is Western civilization.
Ask somebody to tell you what their values are and they’ll give you a bunch of pleasant-sounding words about family and love and caring or whatever. Watch their actions to see what their actual values are and you’ll often get a very different story.
That’s us. That’s Western civilization. We say we value freedom, justice, truth, peace and free expression, but our actions paint a very different picture. The real Western values, the actual product inside the box underneath the attractive label, are the ones you see acted out in Gaza today.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/we-are-ruled-by-sociopaths-and-morons
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
OCT 31, 2023
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): https://x.com/astroloupicus/status/1719330313837723884?s=20
The response to the Gaza crisis from Western leaders, media outlets and celebrities shows very clearly that we really are led by the least among us. The least wise. The least intelligent. The least compassionate. The least insightful. We are ruled by sociopaths and morons.
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You are being offered two narratives to choose from:
Palestinians in Gaza are evil orc-like savages who just want to murder Jews and must therefore be caged and killed.
Palestinians in Gaza are thinking human beings who are reacting to intolerable abuses inflicted upon them.
Which is more believable?
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We’re being told that Israel needs to wage a relentless bombing campaign which is killing civilians by the thousands in order to eliminate Hamas because Hamas must be destroyed to achieve a lasting peace. Every part of this is transparently false.
Firstly the premise that Hamas must be eliminated to achieve peace is fallacious; peace can be achieved by eliminating the abuses and righting the wrongs which gave rise to Hamas in the first place. There’s no rational reason to believe Hamas would continue to exist in its current iteration or keep waging violent resistance if the theft and injustice from 1948 onward were rolled back, refugees had the right to return, apartheid abuses were ended, and people were no longer kept in a giant concentration camp where they are deprived of basic human needs.
Secondly, the premise that you can bomb people into accepting an abusive status quo is self-evidently absurd. Even if Israel kills every single member of Hamas, there will be hundreds of thousands of survivors of this onslaught who see the depravity of Israel and refuse to accept it. Do you think all these orphaned boys and all these men who saw their loved ones ripped apart by military explosives are just going to be cool with the status quo from here on out? Of course not.
And Israel knows this, which is why its preferred solution is to kick all survivors of this onslaught out of Gaza and into refugee camps in the Sinai Peninsula. It knows that nothing it’s doing will actually work and it refuses to make the reparations that will work, so its only other option is the elimination of Gazans one way or the other. Ethnic cleansing and mass displacement is not “peace” by any stretch of the imagination, but it might allow Israel to keep its abusive status quo intact.
Those are Israel’s only real options for sustainable stability: either right all the wrongs which led to this or go the opposite direction and inflict far more wrongs to answer the Palestinian question once and for all. It’s pretty clear watching all this that Israel has opted for the latter.
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The narrative managers are still struggling with the problem that when they announced that Palestinians had escaped from their concentration camp and killed a bunch of Israelis, an inconvenient number of people started asking “Wait, what were they doing in a concentration camp?”
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I find nothing less morally or philosophically interesting than pontificating on how the traumatized prisoners of a horrible concentration camp should have conducted themselves once they broke free of its confines. As far as I’m concerned everything that happened on October 7 was the result of generations of Israeli abuse, the British decisions which made it all possible, and the American backing which has kept it going.
Israeli policies created Hamas. I don’t mean this in the usual “Netanyahu boosted Hamas to sabotage peace and undermine its more moderate rivals” sense, I mean it in the “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable” sense. If you stomp out every possible peaceful avenue of resistance, naturally you’re going to see the rise of factions which favor violent resistance.
One of my most formative experiences in understanding this conflict happened in 2018 when I watched Israeli soldiers firing on protesters with sniper rifles and live ammo. B’Tselem explicitly denounced this as unlawful. There’s nothing that could possibly make such a thing okay, and it was a very clear illustration of the way Israel has cut Palestinians off from all the normal pathways toward peaceful resolution.
I said when all this started that I believe the Hamas attack will ultimately be a net negative for Palestinians, but that I can’t in good conscience “condemn Hamas” because nobody can articulate a positive direction that Palestinians should be taking. The fact that all peaceful avenues of resistance have been cut off is not the fault of the Palestinians, and it’s not the fault of Hamas. It’s the fault of the Israeli government.
Hamas is just what you get when you create an intolerably abusive apartheid state which keeps millions of people in a concentration camp whose inhabitants are cut off from basic human needs and makes peaceful revolution impossible. Hamas isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is an apartheid settler-colonialist project which cannot exist without endless violence, warfare and abuse.
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I refuse to be shamed and demonized for supporting peace by people who support the murder of thousands of children.
Israel apologists are the worst. The absolute worst. I’ve sparred with countless political factions over the years, and I’ve never encountered a group so profoundly morally bankrupt and psychologically malformed. They’re so awful that their apologia actually hurts Israel’s image.
OCT 26, 2023
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
I’m sorry if this makes me an evil terrorist-loving baby-raping sieg-heiling Nazi, but in my humble opinion genocidal massacres are bad.
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Israel and its allies get away with a lot by marketing this as a “war”. It’s not a war. Israel launches high-tech military explosives at civilian buildings in a huge concentration camp while Hamas fires back with glorified fireworks which do light property damage. That’s not a war, it’s a massacre.
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I was upset when I saw that Israel has killed seven thousand people in its Gaza bombing campaign but then a really smart Israel apologist told me Hamas might be exaggerating those numbers and maybe it’s more like four thousand, so now I think it’s fine.
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What kind of drooling, knuckle-dragging, tapioca-brained moron can look at the satellite images of the damage caused by Israeli airstrikes and believe Gaza is lying about its death toll?
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Look it’s very simple: if your words say “we’re not targeting civilians we’re targeting Hamas” but your actions say you’re inflicting siege warfare on the civilian population and carpet bombing entire city blocks into rubble, then you’re not really targeting Hamas.
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Israel-Palestine is a very complicated, confusing, highly nuanced debate between those who think murdering thousands of children is fine and those who do not.
This is a very complicated genocidal massacre. Most complicated genocidal massacre in the history of genocidal massacres. There’s two sides to this genocidal massacre. This genocidal massacre requires nuance.
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Normal person: Israel is killing children by the thousands as we speak
Crazy person: WHY AREN’T YOU CONDEMNING HAMAS??
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Israel apologists are the worst. The absolute worst. I’ve sparred with countless political factions over the years, and I’ve never encountered a group so profoundly morally bankrupt and psychologically malformed. They’re so awful that their apologia actually hurts Israel’s image. Nothing will reassure you of the moral correctness of your opposition to Israel faster than interacting with Israel apologists online.
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It keeps surprising me that Israel apologists still expect to be taken seriously. Israel is massacring children by the thousands and turning Gaza into rubble and they still expect you to listen to them receptively when they defend its actions. It’s actually starting to get morbidly fascinating.
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In the old days murderous thugs just grabbed whatever land they wanted and killed anyone who tried to stop them. That still happens today too, but now the thugs have to make up liberal-sounding, sympathy-pulling justifications for it, like “spreading freedom and democracy” or “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
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Israel has lost the argument. Permanently. There’s no coming back from this.
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I cannot adequately express the immensity of my respect for the many, many, many Jewish voices I’ve seen taking a firm and forceful stand against the Gaza massacre. I’m just over here getting yelled at by strangers online and I find it pretty intense; you’re having much harder arguments with family, with friends, with people you’ve known your whole lives, about something that probably feels a lot more personal for you. You’re out there protesting, taking action and moving the needle, typically with far more skill and incisiveness than anyone else in the world.
Big, big, big-hearted love to all of you. You amaze me.
https://x.com/caitoz/status/1714998967027855490?s=20
US Warmongers Keep Pushing The Narrative That Hamas Is To Blame For All Deaths In Gaza.
One thing I’ve been meaning to highlight for the last few days is the way US warmongers have been forcefully pushing the propaganda narrative that Hamas bears 100 percent responsibility for all deaths in Gaza, and Israel bears zero percent, as Israel ramps up its mass slaughter of Palestinians.
In a New York Times article titled “Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War,” notorious neoconservative war propagandist Bret Stephens argues that no blame whatsoever should be placed on Israel for the thousands of civilians it has killed in its latest Gaza operation and the thousands more it will continue to kill.
“The central cause of Gaza’s misery is Hamas,” Stephens writes. “It alone bears the blame for the suffering it has inflicted on Israel and knowingly invited against Palestinians. The best way to end the misery is to remove the cause, not stay the hand of the remover.”
Lindsey Graham (who is such a bloodthirsty psychopath that he recently called on Israel to “level” Gaza because “we’re in a religious war here” and said the US should bomb Iran any time Hamas executes any prisoners) echoed Bret Stephens’ sentiments during an interview on Monday.
“Every death going forward I blame on Hamas, not Israel,” Graham said.
Graham’s senatorial colleague Mitt Romney was even more direct.
“You are going to see pictures of Palestinian civilians that are going to be injured, killed by virtue of the conflict, which is ongoing,” Romney said during an appearance in Tel Aviv. “I hope you recognize that those individuals are being killed because of Hamas, not because of Israel.”
“They are using Palestinians to protect Hamas lives,” Romney added. “Therefore, when Israel takes action to try and go after Hamas and take out its leadership, there will be civilians and innocents that will be killed. They will parade that as if this is some horror perpetrated by Israel.”
“Do not forget the lives that you will see lost on TV… Israeli lives and Palestinian lives [lost] are all the result of Hamas,” Romney continued.
Fox News war slut Sean Hannity shares the same opinion, surprise surprise.
“Every single death in this conflict can be blamed on Hamas and their supporters in Iran,” Hannity told his audience. “Because of last week’s brutal terror attack, Israel has no choice. They must defend their country.”
This is about as blatant as war propaganda gets. These imperial narrative managers are using their massive platforms and influence to tell everyone “Remember kids, you’re going to see a whole bunch of innocent civilians get killed, and it’s going to look a lot like those civilians are being killed by Israel. But don’t you believe your lying eyes! They’re really being killed by Hamas. Just because the people dropping military explosives in areas known to be packed full of children are wearing Israeli badges and operating Israeli war machinery doesn’t mean Israel is involved in this butchery in any way. It’s really Hamas doing all that.”
And what’s great about this narrative is that there’s no upper limit on the extent to which it can be applied. If they wind up killing twenty thousand Gazans, then Hamas killed twenty thousand Gazans. If they wind up killing a hundred thousand Gazans, then Hamas killed a hundred thousand Gazans. If they wind up driving all Palestinians out of Gaza into refugee camps in the Sinai desert and seizing that territory as their own, then God damn you for ethnic cleansing the Gaza Strip, Hamas.
No matter how far they extend the bloodshed and abuse, they can still blame it all on Hamas. Per this logic there is therefore no limit on how far things can be taken before the cost of human life and suffering outweighs Israel’s strategic objectives and ceasefire negotiations become necessary. It’s a catch-all innoculation against peace.
And to be honest it seems to be working; I get a constant barrage of “Hamas is to blame for this” comments on social media whenever talking about Israel’s obvious criminality in this current crisis.
This propaganda is being pushed as President Biden vows to support Israel’s ongoing Gaza massacre and tells Netanyahu the US is fully behind Israel’s planned Gaza ground invasion.
Not only is Israel absolutely responsible for the bloodshed it chooses to inflict on the people of Gaza, the United States is too. These crimes are being perpetrated with US weapons, US funding and US consent, and backed by the full might of the US propaganda machine. The US is just as responsible for the destruction of Gaza as Israel is.
All this propaganda is designed to keep people from assigning any blame or responsibility to those who are most guilty in this onslaught, because if everyone clearly understood what’s being done in their name, all that carefully manufactured consent would rapidly disintegrate.
It’s interesting how last week Israel had no idea what Hamas was up to, and yet this week they know every mosque, school and hospital that Hamas is hiding in.
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israeli-intelligence-suddenly-knows?
OCT 12, 2023
It’s interesting how last week Israel had no idea what Hamas was up to, and yet this week they know every mosque, school and hospital that Hamas is hiding in.
When you live under an empire of lies you’ll be asked to believe a lot of very stupid things. The dumbest thing we’re being asked to believe this week is that Israel’s intelligence services are simultaneously so incompetent that Saturday’s Hamas attack took them completely by surprise, but also so competent that all the buildings they’re destroying with their relentless bombing campaign on Gaza are directed solely at Hamas.
The phrase “Hamas targets” has been all over the news media the last few days in reference to the ongoing attacks on Gaza, which have as of this writing killed over 1,500 Palestinians, a third of them children.
“Israel conducts large-scale strikes on Hamas targets,” reads a CNN headline.
“Israel conducts ‘large-scale strike’ on Hamas targets,” reads the title of a segment for ABC News.
“Israel says it dropped 6,000 bombs so far against Hamas targets,” reads a report by The Washington Post.
Gosh, Israel must have really great visibility into Gaza to know that each of those 6,000 bombs was aimed at “Hamas targets” and not just civilian buildings.
Where was this 20/20 vision when Hamas was preparing for an attack using motorized paragliders, drones and motorboats in an enclosed strip of land the size of Philadelphia? How did Israeli intelligence fail to detect preparations for this attack even after Egyptian intelligence warned them that it was coming? How did they fail so spectacularly that even Hamas was reportedly surprised by the scale of their operation’s success? Is it really reasonable to believe they were blind as moles to Hamas activity last week but have the eye of the eagle this week?
President Biden made some noises on Wednesday about how important it is that Israel “operate by the rules of war”, which sounded like empty cover-your-ass narrative fluff even before we heard US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan dismiss any notion of “red lines” that Israel must not cross in Gaza.
Not even mainstream empire apologists are buying it. Politico’s Andrew Ward, in an article sponsored by Lockheed Martin in which he writes that “Israel’s ferocious counterattack is easy to understand” given the severity of the Hamas attack, writes that “The Biden administration wants Israel to abide by the laws of war as it responds to Hamas’ barbaric attack, but Jerusalem doesn’t appear to be listening.”
“A flood of reports challenges Israel’s claims that it’s exercising caution,” Ward writes. “Mosques, hospitals and schools have been hit with airstrikes, as have healthcare facilities and ambulances.”
“Gazans, many of whom don’t support Hamas or its tactics, have nowhere to flee as the strip is under siege,” ads Ward. “Shrapnel has flown into seven hospitals and 10 U.N. emergency shelters. The situation has gotten so bad that the Red Cross said hospitals, already low on electricity, water and supplies, risk turning into morgues.”
Of course, Israel isn’t abiding by the rules of war. They’re not even pretending to. Human Rights Watch has just issued a statement decrying Israel’s “unlawfully indiscriminate” use of white phosphorus in Gaza and in Lebanon, and an Israeli security official told the Israeli press that the IDF’s plan is to turn Gaza into “a city of tents” with “no buildings”.
This is all publicly available information, yet the Western press has the gall to use the phrase “Hamas targets” when describing Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza? I’m sorry, but that’s demented. The only reason to do something like that would be to administer propaganda.
The claim that Israel is targeting Hamas when it destroys buildings in Gaza is further undermined by the fact that Hamas would be taking shelter underground during this bombing campaign. As journalist Sharmine Narwani explained on Twitter, “Hamas cadres live underground in Gaza, which they have learned to do after countless Israeli bombing campaigns. The ONLY people being massacred in Gaza by Israeli terror planes right now are Palestinian civilians and Israeli POWs.”
In reality, both the claims that Israeli intelligence was taken by surprise by the Hamas attack and that Israel is solely targeting Hamas with its Gaza strikes are highly suspect and worthy of intense scrutiny. Israel has never been averse to killing Palestinian civilians, and there’s no reason to feel confident Israeli intelligence didn’t let the attack through in order to justify longstanding agendas like the elimination of Gaza as a Palestinian territory. Both claims can be false, but from where I’m sitting it looks highly unlikely that they’re both true.
If you want to support Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza then go ahead, and if you want to uncritically accept the official narrative about Saturday’s attack then you do you. But don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
12 Oct 2023
People are going insane, in the same way they went insane after 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, there was this shrieking emotional intensity which saw critical thinking go out the window and saw people’s minds consumed with a rabid lust for Muslim blood.
Is it any wonder then that so many of us are suffering from addictions and depression and anxiety? I mean, how could we not be? Take a normal healthy human animal and throw it into the mess of this dystopian corporate nightmare and tell me how it’s meant to live a happy and satisfying life. It’s like expecting dolphins and orcas to live happy and satisfying lives in concrete pools at theme parks, or factory farmed pigs living in cages barely bigger than their bodies. It’s just not the kind of living we’re built for.
SEP 17, 2023
It’s so hard to live as an authentic human being in a civilization whose every molecule is wrapped around something as vapid and soulless as corporate profit.
It’s what most of us pour most of our life force into. Most people work all day generating corporate profits to pay bills that go toward corporate profits and pay off loans from giant banks for their corporate profits or rent from real estate giants for their corporate profits. Then they come home, eat some products from giant megacorporations that they purchased at a supermarket chain, and unwind by watching entertainment created by corporations to draw as many eyeballs as possible or scrolling through social media platforms designed by corporations to be as addictive as possible. We do this while being surrounded all day by advertising designed to pull us into generating more corporate profits.
Corporate profits are our life. Corporate profits are our religion. Most of us pour more of our energy into generating corporate profits throughout our lives than the most pious monk pours into worshipping any deity. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We were born into this bizarre civilization where everything revolves around corporate profits instead of love, relationships, connection, thriving, purpose, or personal depth.
Is it any wonder then that so many of us are suffering from addictions and depression and anxiety? I mean, how could we not be? Take a normal healthy human animal and throw it into the mess of this dystopian corporate nightmare and tell me how it’s meant to live a happy and satisfying life. It’s like expecting dolphins and orcas to live happy and satisfying lives in concrete pools at theme parks, or factory farmed pigs living in cages barely bigger than their bodies. It’s just not the kind of living we’re built for.
The blink of an eye ago our ancestors were hunter-gatherers living off the land, spending most of their waking lives under the open sky. Now all of a sudden we’re expected to sit eight hours a day in a cubicle staring at screens for no other reason than to help the corporation that employs us increase its profits, then commute home under a barrage of advertising in a vehicle made by a corporation using fuels extracted by a corporation, and spend all our free time feeding into the profits of other corporations. Everything in us is screaming that this is insane and unacceptable.
That’s why some people try to spend time in nature; it’s one of the few ways you can get your head above all the corporate bullshit for a bit and take a few desperate breaths of what it’s like to be a normal human organism. “Nature” used to just be “the world”; there was no other, separate thing from nature that we spent all our time in, pouring all our life force into, dedicating all our thoughts and feelings to, from whence we could escape for a few hours on the weekend as a luxury. Now we live in civilization and sneak out every now and then into this other thing, nature, where screens aren’t blaring at us and the trees don’t speak the language of the babbling narratives in our heads — though, if we’re honest with ourselves, our minds are still mostly preoccupied with the pushing and pulling demands that civilization makes of us the entire time.
The only way to live in this civilization without its madness warping you and twisting you in on yourself is to change your relationship with mental narrative to such an extent that you can recognize that civilization is nature — that the human animal and its products are not separate from anything else in this biosphere we arose from. With a fair amount of dedicated inner work one can come to recognize that this sea of language we exist in is just narrative that we don’t need to invest any of our life force in believing and that all the words and thoughts are just energy like all the rest of nature.
From that point of view, a busy office full of chattering humans is not experientially much different from a busy forest full of chattering birds and insects — it’s just two different expressions of nature. An advertisement is not experientially much different from crashing waves — it’s just the sights and sounds of nature taking different energetic shapes. If you’re not imbuing any of the narratives inside or outside of your head with the power of belief, it’s all just a beautiful expression of nature.
That’s the only way to live as a happy and healthy human organism in this civilization, from my point of view. Everything else is just varying degrees of insanity. Adjusting from an unwholesome relationship with mental narrative to a wholesome one lets you live a happy and fulfilling life among the humans, who are actually a staggeringly beautiful and thrilling animal when you can see them with fresh eyes.
And, as an added benefit, changing your relationship with narrative will greatly aid you in seeing through the consent-manufacturing propaganda that’s used by the powerful to keep the dysfunctionality of this civilization going. If enough people snap out of their unhealthy relationship with narrative, a healthy world will suddenly become possible.
These stories about the space militarization race aren’t getting the attention the much more entertaining UFO stories are getting, but it seems likely that those who are responsible for moving the war machinery around are paying a lot more attention to the former than the latter.
By Caitlin JOHNSTONE
If Wednesday’s House Oversight subcommittee hearing on UFOs had happened ten years ago instead of today, it would have shaken the world. Imagine someone from 2013 hearing congressional testimonies about “routine” military pilot encounters with giant flying tic tacs, floating orbs, 300-foot red squares, and cubes in clear spheres zipping around in ways that surpass all known earthly technology by leaps and bounds, or about secret government possession of otherworldly aircraft they’re trying to reverse engineer and the dead bodies of their non-human pilots, or about the possibility that these creatures are not merely extraterrestrial but extra-dimensional. Their jaws would have hit the floor.
Now in 2023, we’ve been getting incrementally drip-fed bits and pieces of these stories for six years, so the scene on Capitol Hill on Wednesday didn’t have the impact it would’ve had in 2013. It’s making headlines and getting attention, but not as much as Sinead O’Connor’s death or people’s thoughts on Barbie and Oppenheimer. The response from the general public could be described as a collective nervous laugh and a shrug.
People scroll past the footage from the hearing on social media, go “Whoa, that’s weird,” and move on with their lives. The information’s going in, but just kind of on the periphery of mainstream consciousness. Maybe next year they’ll show us something that would’ve been even more shocking to someone in 2013 than Wednesday’s hearing would’ve been, and it will be met with the same nervous laugh and shrug by the people of 2024.
Of course in the circles I tend to interact with, the response is a bit different. People who are highly skeptical of the US war machine tend to also be highly skeptical of this UFO narrative we’ve been seeing since 2017.
“Distraction” is a word you hear a lot. “It’s just a distraction from ______”, where “______” is whatever hot story they personally happen to be fascinated by at the moment. I personally don’t buy that explanation; the new UFO narrative wasn’t just cooked up at the last minute to distract from current headlines, it’s been unfolding for six years, and people aren’t even paying that much attention to it. The empire doesn’t tend to orchestrate spectacular events as a “distraction” anyway; the adjustment of public attention tends to take the much more mundane form of agenda setting in the media, where some stories receive more attention than others based on what’s convenient for the oligarchs who own the press.
I also see people theorizing that this is all a ploy to ramp up the US military budget. There could totally be something to that, but again this narrative has been unfolding for six years and so far the military budget has just been swelling in the usual yearly increments as always.
Don’t get me wrong, though — I’m as skeptical about this thing as anyone. For one thing, the origins of the mainstream UFO narrative which began in 2017 were steeped in extensive distortion, dishonesty and journalistic malpractice, and were carried forward by shady intelligence operatives like Lue Elizondo. David Grusch, who made by far the most sensational claims at Wednesday’s congressional hearing with his tales of dead aliens and reverse-engineered UFOs, is himself an insider of the US intelligence cartel.
But for me what really stinks about all this UFO stuff is the timing. Here we are in the early stages of a new cold war which features a race to militarize space, and we’re hearing congressional testimony about mysterious vehicles posing a threat to US airspace which have the ability to go up and down between earth and space very quickly. That smells off.
I mean, does it really sound like a coincidence that we’re seeing all these news stories about UFOs and aliens at the same time we’re seeing news stories about a race between the US and China and Russia to dominate space militarily? A Foreign Policy article from last year blares the headline “China and Russia Are Catching Up to the U.S. in Space Capabilities, Pentagon Warns” with the subheading “The militarization of space is picking up pace.” These warnings are echoed in articles by Defense One and Time. An article on the United Nations website from last year carries the title “‘We Have Not Passed the Point of No Return’, Disarmament Committee Told, Weighing Chance Outer Space Could Become Next Battlefield.” A 2021 report from the war machine-funded Center for Strategic and International Studies titled “Defense Against the Dark Arts in Space: Protecting Space Systems from Counterspace Weapons” warns of the urgent need to build more space weapons to counter US enemies. A Global Times article from last year carries the title “Chinese experts urge avoidance of space weaponization amid commercial space capability deployment in Ukraine.”
These stories about the space militarization race aren’t getting the attention the much more entertaining UFO stories are getting, but it seems likely that those who are responsible for moving the war machinery around are paying a lot more attention to the former than the latter. The US Space Force took its first steps toward becoming a reality in 2017, the same year these mainstream UFO stories started coming out, with the explicit purpose of countering Russia and China.
And it just seems mighty suspicious to me how we’re being slowly paced into this UFO narrative (or UAP narrative for those hip to the current jargon) right when there’s a mad rush to get weapons into space. I can’t actually think of any other point in history when the timing of something like this would have looked more suspicious.
So for me the most disturbing parts of the UFO hearing were the parts that could wind up facilitating the agenda to militarize space, like when this phenomenon was framed as a “national security” threat or when it was mentioned that they can transition from earth to space very rapidly.
When asked by Congressman Glenn Grothman “Do you believe UAPs pose a threat to our national security?”, former Navy commander David Fravor answered with an unequivocal yes. A few minutes later Fravor described these vehicles as being able to “come down from space, hang out for three hours and go back up.”
When asked by congressman Andy Ogles whether UFOs could be “collecting reconnaissance information” on the US military, all three witnesses — Grusch, Fravor, and former Navy pilot Ryan Graves — answered in the affirmative. Asked by Ogles if UFOs could be “probing our capabilities,” all three again said yes. Asked if UFOs could be “testing for vulnerabilities” in US military capabilities, all three again said yes. Asked if UFOs pose an existential threat to the national security of the United States, all three said they potentially do. Asked if there was any indication that UFOs are interested in US nuclear technology, all three said yes.
Ogles concluded his questioning by saying, “There clearly is a threat to the national security of the United States of America. As members of Congress, we have a responsibility to maintain oversight and be aware of these activities so that, if appropriate, we take action.”
When asked by Congressman Eric Burlison if “there has been activity by alien or non-human technology, and/or beings, that has caused harm to humans,” Grusch said he couldn’t get into specifics in a public setting (a common theme throughout the hearing), but said that “what I personally witnessed, myself and my wife, was very disturbing.”
Grusch would complicate this cryptic statement a few minutes later by saying that he’s never seen a UFO. How this statement doesn’t contradict his previous statement about having witnessed harmful behavior from non-human technology and/or beings was not made clear.
So you’ve got US policymakers being told that there are vehicles using technology not of this world routinely violating US airspace and posing an existential threat to US national security, and that these craft can go from earth to space and back at will, and that they need to help make sure their nation can address this threat.
What conclusions do you come to when presented with that kind of information? If you’re a lawmaker in charge of facilitating the operation of a highly militaristic empire, you’re probably not going to conclude that it’s time to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. You’re probably eventually going to start thinking in terms of military technology.
One of the most important unanswered questions in all this UFO hullabaloo is, why now? Why are we seeing all this movement on “disclosure” after generations of zero movement? If these things are in fact real and the government has in fact been keeping them secret, why would the adamant policy of dismissal and locked doors suddenly be reversed, allowing “whistleblowers” to come forward and give testimony before Congress? If they had motive to keep it a secret this entire time, why would that motive no longer be there?
If you ask the online UFO community, many will essentially take credit for the whole thing, saying the most powerful war machine ever assembled has reversed its policy of total opacity because of “pressure” applied by disclosure activists. This doesn’t pass the smell test; the most powerful empire in history isn’t reversing course on a longstanding policy of blanket secrecy because of internet forums and FOIA requests.
So why now? Why the drastic and sudden shift from UFOs and aliens being laughable tinfoil hat nonsense to the subject of serious congressional inquiries and widespread mainstream media coverage?
Well, the timing of the race to militarize space might provide an answer to the “why now?” question. Is it a coincidence that this new UFO narrative began its rollout in 2017, around the same time as the rollout of the Space Force? Are we being manipulated at a mass scale about aliens and UFOs to help grease the wheels for the movement of war machinery into space? How likely is it that by pure coincidence this extraplanetary narrative timed out the way it did just as the US empire makes a last-ditch grab at unipolar planetary domination?
I don’t know. I do know that if I’m assigning degrees of probability, “Extraterrestrial or extradimensional beings are here and take a special interest in us and sometimes crash their vehicles and our government recovered them but kept them a secret but suddenly decided not to be so secretive about them anymore” ranks significantly lower than “Our rulers are lying and manipulating to advance their own interests again.”
I am 100 percent wide open to the possibility of extraterrestrials and otherworldly vehicles zipping around our atmosphere. What I am not open to is the claim that the most depraved institutions on earth have suddenly opened their mind to telling us the truth about these things, either out of the goodness of their hearts or because they were “pressured” by UFO disclosure activists.
I don’t know what the hell is going on with this UFO thing, but I do know the drivers of the US empire have an extensive history of manipulating and deceiving at a mass scale to advance imperial agendas. And I do know that at this crucial juncture in history where the empire is clinging to planetary domination with the tips of its fingernails, there are a lot of imperial agendas afoot.
It’s where people who receive sexual gratification from dropping military explosives on civilians go to wait for the sweet embrace of death. The whole place smells like night terrors and urine.
17 Jul 2023
“Let the market decide” really means let the manipulators decide because the markets are dominated by those who excel at manipulating. We’re taught that letting the market decide means letting supply and demand take its natural course, as though we’re talking about ocean tides or seasons or something, but in reality, both supply and demand are manipulated constantly with extreme aggression. Manipulating the supply of diamonds.
Manipulating the supply of housing. Manipulating the supply of oil. Manipulating people into wanting things they’d never thought to want before through advertising. Manipulating women into feeling bad about their bodies so they’ll buy your beauty products. Manipulating people into paying $2000 for a $20 bag using branding. Manipulating people into buying Listerine by inventing the word “halitosis” and convincing them to be worried about it. Manipulating people into believing Beanie Babies were prized collector’s items when they were just standard stuffed toys. Capitalism gives us a civilization that is dominated by trickery.
Those who get to the top are those who succeed in tricking as many people as possible. Tricking them into paying more. Tricking them into buying your product and not someone else’s. Tricking people who actually produce something of value into making you their middleman who gets paid despite producing nothing. Tricking competitors into making the wrong move. Tricking people into asking their doctor about your extremely lucrative pharmaceutical product. Tricking people into buying or selling certain stocks or cryptocurrencies or NFTs. Tricking people by using the legal system and your team of lawyers who understand it better than normal people do. Tricking people into letting you privatize their own drinking water and then selling it back to them in bottles.
It’s a scam competition. Whoever scams the best wins. How can you save the planet from destruction by human behavior when all of human behavior is driven by a bizarre scam competition? And the biggest scam of all is the narrative that this system is totally working and is entirely sustainable. That’s the overarching scam holding all the other scams together. Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/punch-the-empire-in-the-fucking-face
JUL 20, 2023
Speech is violence and cluster bombs are peace. Homelessness and war are normal and opposing nuclear armageddon is treason. You’re a serious person if you believe our brains are being scrambled by Russian ray guns and a kooky conspiracy theorist if you’re skeptical about UFOs.
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US officials talking about UFOs and aliens should make people more skeptical about UFOs and aliens, not less — especially in the early stages of a new cold war and a race to militarize space. If they have been lying about UFOs this whole time, there’s no basis for the belief that they’ve suddenly ceased having a good enough reason to keep lying.
I am 100 percent wide open to the possibility of extraterrestrials and otherworldly vehicles zipping around our skies. What I am not open to is the claim that the most depraved institutions on earth have suddenly opened their mind to telling us the truth about these things, either out of the goodness of their hearts or because they were “pressured” by UFO disclosure activists.
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That Israel is an ethnonationalist apartheid state is so self-evident it shouldn’t even need to be said, let alone be controversial. An objective look at its government, laws and tier system makes that clear, which is why mainstream human rights organizations call it an apartheid state.
There’s really no argument to the contrary. You can’t reasonably argue that Israel isn’t an apartheid state which oppresses people based on race; if you want to defend Israel on this front all you can do is try to argue that sometimes apartheid and racism are good and that Israel’s apartheid and racism are the good kind.
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People say I’m always ranting against US warmongering toward China because I’m a socialist. I don’t oppose US warmongering against China because I’m a socialist, I oppose US warmongering against China because I’m not a fucking moron. I’d oppose US warmongering against China if China was the most capitalist country on earth.
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It’s important to despise liberal political and media institutions and the capitalist, imperialist, authoritarian ideology they promote. It’s also important that hatred not become your only guidance for understanding the world, because it’ll turn you into a dopey Republican. I’ve watched so many people transform from bright-eyed supporters of Sanders, Corbyn etc into braindead wingnuts because their hatred of what passes for the “left” in the mainstream West led them to start taking up the opposite position from that faction on all issues. Don’t do this.
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One of the biggest lies in Western politics is the political “moderate” or “centrist” because those who get labelled as such are reliably in favor of extreme imperialist violence and global tyranny. They’re the exact opposite of moderates; they’re violent extremists.
The only reason such worldviews are mainstream is because vast fortunes are poured into making them mainstream via propaganda, and the only reason they’re viewed as “moderate” is because we live under a violent extremist empire.
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In theory, both mainstream political parties compete to make your life better than the other does so you’ll vote for them; in practice, both parties openly oppress and impoverish you while focusing on murdering foreigners, and compete for your vote based on your feelings about artificial wedge issues. They’ve rigged the political currency they’d normally use to obtain votes in a way that guarantees the continuation of the status quo in every meaningful way, so the gears of the empire keep turning uninterrupted while the riff-raff argue about hot-button wedge issues which don’t affect power, like “wokeness”.
It’s important to keep a clear vision of how much better it could be, though. Imagine if they were competing with each other to improve your quality of life and give you a nicer country to live in so that they could take credit so you’ll support them. That’s how it should be.
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To be clear, when I talk about how both mainstream political parties are used to advance the same agendas I am not saying that they are the same. I like to compare them to the jab and the cross in boxing; they’re two different punches thrown from different hands, and they’re used in completely different ways. But they’re both being used by the same boxer, and they’re both being used to knock you on your ass.
The cross, which happens to come from the right hand for an orthodox fighter, is a damaging knockout punch. But in boxing it’s generally worthless on its own; it might be useful in a pub brawl, but against a skilled boxer you need to set it up with the jab.
The jab — the left hand for an orthodox fighter — is a swift, stunning blow. You don’t see many knockouts with it, but you see it land with great frequency because it’s thrown by the hand that’s closest to the other fighter. And the beauty of the jab is that it can be used to set up the cross — the famed “one-two”, the most common combination in boxing.
That’s how the two mainstream parties work together to knock the public on their ass. The “left” party sets them up and then comes the crushing knockout blow. Democrats fight off all efforts to move the US to the left when they’re in power, then Republicans come in and move it even further to the right. Democrats refuse to codify Roe V Wade, and Republicans come in to kill it. Democrats “reluctantly” give Bush war powers, and he uses them to invade Iraq. Democrats inch up the brinkmanship against China, and Republicans do whatever horrifying thing they’re going to do when they take power.
I’m simplifying things here for the sake of the argument (Obama was a horrific warmonger etc), but the left hand can do damage in boxing too. Ukraine was more comparable to a one-two from a southpaw fighter; Trump set it up with cold war escalations and by arming Ukraine, and Biden followed with the left cross.
Over and over and over again you see this happen, and over and over and over again you’re told that the solution to this problem is for everyone to simply never vote for Republicans. This is despite the fact that the population is continually herded into an exact 50-50 political split by domestic propaganda, guaranteeing a continual pendulum between the two factions as opinions shift slightly based on who’s in office.
Saying that all you have to do is never have anyone vote for Republicans is like telling a boxer to go into a fight and only worry about the right hand. If you go in against a skilled boxer with an educated jab and only focus on avoiding the cross, you’re 100 percent guaranteed to get smashed to pieces by both the jab and the cross.
No boxer would ever do this. Instead, they focus on their opponent as a whole. That’s how you have to be about the two parties; stop thinking about them as two separate, competing entities and start looking at them as two weapons against the same enemy. Stop staring at one hand and start watching your actual opponent. Start watching their movements, start making some reads, and start figuring out ways to put some leather in that fucker’s face.