Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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We’re seeing new massacres every goddamn fucking day, but western politicians and media can’t stop babbling about one single massacre happening hundreds of days ago.
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It’s a waste of breath trying to argue that it’s unjust to massacre over two hundred Palestinians rescuing four Israeli hostages; Israel supporters would have been happy if the number was over two million. They simply do not regard Palestinians as human beings. You may as well say they had to kill two hundred chickens to free four hostages. They don’t care.
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Ever since the Gaza onslaught began we’ve been seeing US officials play dumb about all the massacres and atrocities Israel has been committing, constantly telling the press “Yeah sorry we don’t have any further information about that incident, we’re talking to Israel, you should ask the Israelis.” But a recent New York Times report says US and UK intelligence operatives “have been in Israel throughout the war” collaborating with Israeli intelligence to facilitate its operations there, which means they’re clearly lying about how much information they have about these incidents.
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On one hand you’ve got the far right zealots who openly say Palestinians should be exterminated like vermin, and on the other you’ve got the mainstream liberals who effectively support the same actions as the rightists but pretend to be very concerned about human rights in Gaza.
And it’s actually hard to say which one is more disgusting. I mean, at least the rightists are being honest about who they are and what they’re doing.
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It really is that all criticism of Israel gets labeled antisemitism. It really, truly is that simple. The liberal Zionist will deny this and insist that it is possible to criticize Israel without being antisemitic, but if you ask them to name a prominent figure who forcefully and continuously criticizes the murderousness and tyranny of the Israeli regime without being antisemitic they won’t be able to. If you ask them for a list of things that are antisemitic to say when criticizing Israel, that list will always include items that are not at all hateful toward Jews.
So in effect the liberal Zionist’s position is, “Of course it’s not inherently antisemitic to criticize Israel, just make sure you don’t criticize Israel while doing so, because that’s antisemitic.” They have to perform these bizarre self-contradictory contortions because they understand that they require the antisemitism smear to defend their ideology since their ideology cannot be defended using facts and logic, but they also understand that it will discredit their ideology if they make this obvious by admitting that they always frame criticism of Israel as inherently antisemitic.
So they pretend there’s this perfect Goldilocks equation for criticizing Israel out there somewhere that’s just forceful enough to count as critical but not forceful enough that it’s antisemitic, and pretend the real problem is that too many people are failing to walk this tightrope correctly instead of that every criticism of the Zionist project will be branded as an evil hate crime no matter what.
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I’m working on a Star Wars script about people living under the Galactic Empire who sit around happily watching movies about fictional heroes defeating fictional evil empires while fully trusting their own government’s propaganda and supporting all its wars.
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Every random religion in the world must be gifted its own entire country, in which they have the right to displace, steal from, oppress and exterminate the people who were already living there. If you disagree with this, you are essentially a Nazi.
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A nation that will collapse without extreme and unceasing military violence, police brutality, propaganda, lobbying, and online info ops is like a person who’ll die if you ever stop performing CPR on them. At a certain point you must realize you’re just blowing air into a corpse.
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The more ideologically invested you are in denying the obvious fact that the world’s problems are caused by capitalism and western empire-building, the more likely you are to believe the world’s problems are caused by Jews, Muslims, immigrants, secret Satanic cabals, or wokeness.
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Nobody really supports Israel, they just support their own dopey political factions, their own dopey religious beliefs, and their own continued campaign donations from the Israel lobby. Everything about Israel is fake, right down to its network of public “support”.
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Opposing genocide means you hate Jews. Opposing nuclear brinkmanship means you love Vladimir Putin. Mainstream political discourse is so pervasively dominated by the imperial war machine that even the most basic and obvious moral positions get framed as immoral and outrageous.
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Caitlin Johnstone 