Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
One reason westerners are so clueless about communism is because every four years the most influential western nation launches a massive months-long disinformation campaign about what communism is. People like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Lauren Boebert and Tim Pool have been claiming Kamala Harris is a Marxist for proposing price controls, a measure that was also put forward by noted communist Richard M Nixon.
Republicans are so fucking stupid that every few years they start shrieking that they’re under attack from “communism”, and by “communism” they mean the opposing US party which supports the exact same capitalist status quo they support but with tampons in the boys’ bathroom.
God I wish Democrats were as cool as right wing idiots make them sound.
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The Guardian reports that leaked documents show the Israeli government taking legal maneuvers to ensure its ability to influence US politics while preventing its operatives from having to register as foreign agents. They’re persecuting Americans like Scott Ritter and Uhuru activists for criticizing US foreign policy under extremely dubious Foreign Agents Registration Act accusations while letting Israel get away with this shit.
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They got Americans to move from arguing that the US-backed genocide needs to end to arguing over which US politician should be elected to oversee the genocide. Sometimes all you can do is stop and stare in awe of the power of imperial mind control.
When you find yourself debating which openly genocidal presidential candidate will do a better job managing inflation, you know you have been duped into having the wrong conversations about the system you are living under.
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Imagine there was a mass shooting in a major US city. Easy, I know.
Now, imagine that instead of stopping the shooter, the US government started sending him boxes of ammunition.
Now imagine instead of going on for a few minutes, the mass shooting rampage went on for ten months.
Now imagine that instead of being treated like an earth-shattering tragedy in mass media headlines, people just kind of got used to it and it sort of faded into the background of mainstream news reporting.
Now imagine the mass media started reporting on the mass shooting as though the mass shooter is only defending himself, and reporting on casualties of the rampage using passive-language headlines which don’t attribute the killings to the shooter.
Now imagine there was a presidential race, and everybody started talking about which candidate is best qualified to keep giving ammunition to the shooter.
It’s like that.
One of the most freakish things about the attitude of western governments toward Israel’s mass atrocity in Gaza is how unhurried and lackadaisical they are about it. They’ll occasionally acknowledge it as a problem, but with the level urgency you’d expect for a minor urban infrastructure issue that should probably get resolved within the next few decades instead of the level appropriate for an active genocide.
They’ve spent ten months going “Yep, yeah, we gotta do something about that eventually,” like this is something that can wait. Whenever the empire’s podium people are confronted by the press about what Israel is doing they’re just like “Yeah, we’re aware of those reports, we’re having conversations with the Israeli government and we’re waiting to hear back from them,” and then never, ever following through with an answer.
For ten months they’ve been doing this. Ten months. It should have been stopped before it even started — and it could have been. Very easily.
It would actually be better if they were just telling the public to shut up and resign themselves to the elimination of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, because then at least the public would have an appropriate level of urgency about this thing. But by saying “Yeah… yeah don’t worry about it… we’re working on it bro” over and over again, they ensure that this thing is allowed to continue with minimal meddling and interference from the local riffraff.
Which is of course the whole entire point. By telling the public “Yeah, don’t worry, we’re working on it, we’ve got this” over and over again, they nullify the sense of urgency that should be accorded to a live-streamed extermination operation. They’ve just been stalling and stalling and stalling and stalling with this rhetoric to allow Gaza to be turned into a giant pile of smoldering rubble and rotting human flesh.
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Liberal supporters of Israel ultimately do more damage than Israel’s supporters on the far right, because they pollute the information ecosystem a lot more. The overt fascists who back Israel lie constantly, but their lies are easier to see through because they don’t hold positions that can draw sympathy from kind-hearted people who care about human rights and justice. Liberal Israel supporters ultimately promote the same horrors of genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid as far right Israel supporters, but they do so while paying lip service to human rights and a two-state solution. They deceive people into thinking it’s possible to support the Israeli state without supporting the murderousness and criminality that the entire state is made out of.
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There’s a ridiculous controversy on social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter right now where a few bad faith actors are trying to frame the fight for Black American rights as somehow in conflict with the fight for Palestinian rights. You’ll see western empire managers, Christian Zionists, Israeli Jews and Gulf state monarchs collaborating across seemingly vast ideological gaps toward the advancement of mutual interests while our side gets increasingly divided and conquered by obvious ham-fisted psyops.
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By Caitlin Johnstone · Thousands of paid subscribers
Articles, poems, stories and thoughts by Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley. Everything published here will always remain free to read.