Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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It’s hard to get excited about Julian Assange winning the right to a limited appeal against extradition to the United States. They’re still keeping him locked up and silenced. He’s already been in Belmarsh for five years now while the empire bats him around like a cat toying with a mouse, and five years would have been an obscenely long sentence for the crime of good journalism anyway. They’re just squeezing him and squeezing him and squeezing him in every way they can for as long as possible, all without having to secure an actual conviction.
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It’s important to understand that there’s nothing unusual about the western empire’s depravity in Gaza or the mass media’s constant lies and distortions about it — they do these things constantly, year after year. What’s unusual is that people are waking up to it.
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I can’t stop marveling at how Israel apologists keep trying to convince young people that it’s those who are opposing a genocide who need to worry about their future employment prospects. No bitch, the future is coming for YOU.
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The Wall Street Journal editorial board has penned a furiously biased screed condemning the International Criminal Court’s application for arrest warrants of Israeli officials for war crimes, claiming that “the ICC has lost sight of the crucial distinction between the death squad and the bomber pilot.” The premise of this line being that an IDF pilot who kills people with bombs is noble and righteous in comparison to Hamas.
One of the most demented things about western civilization is its completely unquestioned mass delusion that killing people with military explosives dropped from the sky is more moral and righteous than killing people with bullets or blades.
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On the pro-Israel side you’ve got the entire military-industrial complex, all professional warmongers, all mainstream media and the entire DC swamp, while on the pro-Palestine side you’ve got kids who want a healthy future and Palestinians who don’t want to be killed anymore. Clearly this is a complicated and nuanced issue, with very fine people on both sides.
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FYI there is nothing revolutionary or anti-establishment about supporting a Republican presidential candidate who openly backs all the same neocon war agendas as the current Democrat president.
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A lot of right wingers genuinely adore Israel and think it’s wonderful to exterminate Palestinians, but you can tell many others don’t know much about the issue and are only jumping on the anti-protester bandwagon because the protesters are leftists. Many in the MAGA crowd even think of themselves as antiwar and anti-neocon, but here they are supporting an act of mass military slaughter that’s endorsed by every neocon swamp monster and professional warmonger in Washington solely because doing so puts them on the opposite side of the lefties.
This says so much about how mindless and unprincipled these people are, and how completely empty of meaning their purported values system actually is. If you can be led to support the worst thing in the world alongside all the evil swamp creatures you claim to despise just because the people opposing it are on the left, you can be led to support literally anything.
It also says so much about how stupid and shallow mainstream political discourse has become that so many mainstream partisans support or oppose things not based on how good or bad they are from their particular ideological perspective, but based solely upon what the other side supports or opposes. That binary-minded relationship with the world is such a brainless, amoeba-like, stimulus-response way of moving through life. And it’s millions upon millions of people.
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Saying “Why are you talking about the US-backed incineration of Gaza and not X Y and Z bad things happening in Africa and Asia” is just saying “Stop criticizing the white people, criticize the brown people instead.”
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Germany has deported seven Ukrainian soldiers who were there for training because they were wearing Nazi insignia. According to German officials, Ukrainian soldiers will now be explicitly prohibited from displaying Nazi insignia when training in Germany.
The west is pouring money and weapons into a military force who cannot stop causing scandals with their Nazi insignia and support for Nazi ideology, but we’re being told not to worry about those Nazis and that kids protesting genocide at university campuses are the real Nazis.
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My neighbors have had a Ukrainian flag up since 2022 and it’s been shredded into an unrecognizable mess by the weather, which is just so symbolic in so many ways.
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Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts. Anyone will tell you war is a terrible thing that should be avoided whenever possible, and that waging mass military violence for power and profit would be one of the most evil things a state can do. But then when it’s time for their own state to inflict mass military violence on a population for power and profit, a bunch of narratives come out explaining why this time war is 100 percent necessary and that this war is happening for noble and truth-based reasons.
And people buy it every damn time. Luckily, fewer people are buying it this time around.
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Featured image via Diane Krauthamer (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED)
Caitlin Johnstone 