by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:

A quarter-century ago in 1999 The Matrix entered our theaters and became an instant film classic as well as a colossal blockbuster, earning nearly $500 million at the box office. There were also interesting epistemological implications to the notion that our own world was merely the illusion created within a computer simulation, hiding the grim reality behind it. The word “redpilling” —breaking through those illusions into the underlying true existence—soon entered our popular political lexicon, with a Google search revealing that “redpill” and its variations appear on well over 5 million webpages, and the term has even inspired the somewhat related notions of “blackpilling” and “whitepilling,” respectively inducing despair and hope.

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I found the film outstanding when I originally watched it in a theater and over the years it has held up very well when I’ve seen it on the small screen, although I’d regarded the couple of sequels it quickly inspired as merely so-so or even mediocre.

However, I’ve always thought it a little unfair that this tremendous success so completely overshadowed a different Hollywood film released that same year that dealt with a similar theme. I’ve seen The Thirteenth Floor a couple of times, and although I’d hardly rank it alongside its far better known rival, I thought the plot included some interesting ideas and felt it might have gotten far more attention under other circumstances.

Lacking the hyperkinetically stylized gun-battle sequences of The Matrix, this much quieter film centered upon a virtual reality research company in 1999 Los Angeles that had successfully created a computer simulation of a 1930s society whose characters lived their lives completely unaware that they were merely software constructs. The sudden murder of the company’s director and other strange events led one of the puzzled researchers to eventually discover that his own society also only existed as a simulation in the computer of a higher-level world. The clues leading to that breakthrough came from the power of analogy, as he and others noticed that some of the inexplicable events that so puzzled the 1930s characters they had created were similar to what they were themselves encountering in their own world, which they had always assumed was real.

Thus, once we successfully pierce some of the false narratives constructed by our dishonest media we should always consider the possibility that we are still trapped within another such layer of narrative, much deeper but equally false, and use the power of analogy as a tool to unravel those illusions. These are ideas that we should keep in the back of our minds as we consider the many dangerous and disastrous falsehoods surrounding the Israel/Gaza conflict, now in its eleventh month.

Last week I published an article describing the unspeakable war crimes regularly being committed by Israeli military forces against helpless Palestinian civilians, with some of these incidents finally starting to receive coverage in mainstream American media outlets.

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