Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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I am so fucking done with people handwringing about October 7 while Israel has been October 7ing the Gazans every day since.
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Four months. This has been happening for four months. If you’re still supporting Israel after four months of atrocities, then you’re just a shitty human being. After four months you’ve lost any possible claim to have overreacted to October 7 in the emotional heat of the moment, and this is just who you are as a person.
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If you can even excuse genocide to justify your continuing support for a nation or political party, then you can excuse literally anything. There is absolutely nothing the leaders of your political faction could possibly do that would cause you to stop supporting them. If this isn’t your red line, then you don’t have any red lines.
What this means is that your politics are not actually guided by any interest in truth or ethics; they are guided solely and exclusively by arbitrary team loyalty. You cheer for your side for the exact same reason someone born in Texas cheers for the Dallas Cowboys. You might make up some grander reasons for your support which involve appeals to truth and morality, but you’ve made a liar of yourself and proved those reasons false by the fact that you are currently excusing an actual, literal genocide.
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Israel was always headed for this point. It’s been on the trajectory toward this moment in history from its very inception. The horrors we are seeing in Gaza were baked in from the beginning. The trigger was pulled generations ago, and only now has the bullet properly landed.
This is what Israel is. This is what Israel has always been. It’s impossible to support Israel without also supporting its genocidal atrocities in Gaza, because there is no “Israel” separable from the factors which have given rise to those atrocities; trying to separate the two is an exercise in fantasy. A hypothetical Israel that wouldn’t have done what Israel is currently doing would be unrecognizable from the Israel of today. It wouldn’t even make sense to call it by the same name.
Israel was intended as a colonialist outpost of western powers from the very beginning to bludgeon the populations of west Asia into compliance with the interests of the global north, and that’s what it has been from day one. This genocide isn’t a freakish aberration in Israel’s way of being but the ultimate manifestation of it. The infernal sprouts we are now seeing arise from seeds that were planted long before most of us were even born.
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Responding to accusations of atrocities and genocide by babbling about Hamas is stupid and nonsensical. Everyone who has ever committed genocide believed they had valid reasons for doing so. Everyone who’s ever committed genocide believed they were doing it to protect themselves.
Responding to condemnation of Israel’s actions by talking about Hamas is just saying “No no you don’t understand, we’re not like those evil bad guys who’ve committed genocide in the past: we have REASONS for doing what we’re doing!” Which is what everyone else who has committed genocide in the past would have told you as well.
If you have to keep justifying something, it’s probably not very just. Stop flailing around trying to justify obvious atrocities with a bunch of verbiage about what someone else did and get real with yourself for once in your fucking life.
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100 percent of Israel apologia is just people making up reasons why it’s righteous and justified to do something evil and unforgivable.
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Israel apologists are like, “You don’t support genocide? What are you, a Nazi?”
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On social media there’s no good reason not to immediately block someone who openly advertises their support for Israel and Zionism. For me it’s like being approached by a stranger at a party with a card on their forehead that says “I have a bad personality and am incapable of real conversation.”
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It’s so fascinating how empire propaganda herds the public into two mainstream political factions and then gets them both cheering for the empire’s actions but for different reasons. Liberals are propagandized into cheering for the imperial war machine because humanitarianism and sovereignty and anti-fascism and self-defense, while rightists are propagandized into cheering for the imperial war machine because yeehaw we’re in charge fuck them commies and Arabs.
The specific narratives for why they’re cheering for the imperial war machine might be different, and even the specific agendas they support are often different as well — liberals are more amenable to hostilities with Russia while rightists are more amenable to hostilities with China, for example. But the end result is that they’re both kept cheerleading for the relentless forward march of the war machine.
It’s a really incredible feat of social engineering. It would inspire awe if it wasn’t so damn evil.
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Caitlin Johnstone 