Caitlin Johnstone

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Israel is reportedly preparing a ground invasion of Gaza very soon in response to Saturday’s Hamas attack. We can expect things to get much, much bloodier from there.

Meanwhile the US has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean in support of the coming Israeli military operations, on top of the additional military aid Biden has already pledged to Netanyahu. At the same time, The Wall Street Journal claims that the Hamas operation was coordinated with both Iran and Hezbollah. 

This war has the potential to expand in some very ugly directions in the coming weeks.

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Whenever something like this happens warmongers always seize on the emotional frenzy of the moment to shove through insane acts of warmongering and scream vitriol at anyone who questions them. Then later when all the facts are in people slowly start to realize that something went very wrong, and that they were deceived.

After 9/11 anyone who didn’t support multiple full-scale ground invasions of sovereign nations was a terrorist sympathizer and a Saddam apologist. We were told Al Qaeda were evil, irrational actors who attacked because “they hate us for our freedom”, and we need to support a war on terror against any nation deemed threatening because all such monsters understand is violence. Now both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are regarded as colossal mistakes by anyone who’s honest.

When Russia invaded Ukraine anyone who wanted peace talks instead of a rapidly escalating proxy war between nuclear-armed nations was a Putin lover and a Kremlin shill. We were told Putin invaded solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and we need to support a war against him because all such monsters understand is violence. Now the counteroffensive failed, the US is having trouble getting proxy war funding through congress, and even the head of NATO acknowledges that this war was provoked by NATO expansion.

And now we’re facing another instance of intense emotional frenzy, and we’re being told that Hamas attacked Israel completely unprovoked for no other reason than because they are evil monsters who love killing Jews. We will be told to support any act of war deemed necessary, because all such monsters understand is violence.

Someday we’re going to have to stop falling for this tired old song and dance.

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The western press are largely to blame for all this. If they’d just told the truth instead of running “Palestinian child walks into bullet” headlines this whole time and telling everyone that boycotting Israel is genocide, political pressure could’ve long ago been brought about to force a peaceful and just resolution to this mess.

If they’d just done their jobs and reported the facts to the public, there never would’ve been enough public consent for the US empire to back a brutal apartheid regime which cannot exist without nonstop violence, and peaceful resolutions would’ve become unavoidable.

Instead they hid all those abuses from the public for generations, creating an environment where peaceful resolutions are impossible and giving rise to Palestinian factions which understandably see violent force as the only viable answer.

This is their fault. They created this mess with a mountain of lies and obfuscation, and now those lies are being paid for with rivers of blood. The western press are war criminals. They’ve committed crimes against humanity.

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Israel apologists will seriously be like, “Why is everyone so obsessed with the nuclear-armed colonialist apartheid state which plays a pivotal role in US warmongering in the middle east? The only possible explanation is that they all harbor some weird hatred of Jewish people!”

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I see no reason to speculate whether the Hamas offensive was allowed to happen at this time when coming events will show how likely that was. If there’s just a lot of violence and then it goes back to more or less the status quo, Israeli intelligence probably did just massively faceplant and miss extensive preparations for an attack which included training for air and sea assaults. If new agendas are rolled out that wouldn’t have been consented to without the attack, chances are much higher it was allowed; the more far-reaching the agendas, the greater the likelihood.

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It’s getting harder and harder to argue that the US-led world order brings more peace and stability to the world than the war and instability it causes. As more and more force is brought to bear against nations and groups who refuse to submit to Washington’s dictates, we’re seeing more and more conflict and chaos. Russia’s refusal to lie down before Washington resulted in the Ukraine war and all the nuclear brinkmanship that comes with it. Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Syria and Iran refusing to prostrate themselves to the US power alliance results in constant violence in the middle east. As the imperial crosshairs move to Beijing we’re now faced with the terrifying prospect of a hot war with China.

At a certain point you have to ask, if the US-led world order requires more and more violence and nuclear brinkmanship to maintain, what specifically is the argument for maintaining it in the first place? Does it not at some point begin to cease looking like “order” at all, and instead like a tyrannical empire trying to rule the world no matter how much death and destruction is necessary to subjugate it?

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