Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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The correct thing to do when someone tries to tell you that opposing an active genocide is discriminatory against Jews is to laugh uproariously and then ignore everything else they say for the rest of their lives.
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Jewish Zionists are like “Excuse me, it’s actually against my religion for you to oppose genocide. You need to stop religiously persecuting me with peace activism.”
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So many westerners say they support Israel and also support a two-state solution, which is a nonsensical position when Israel is aggressively opposed to a two-state solution. If you actually support the creation of a Palestinian state you are directly at odds with every meaningful power structure in Israel.
It’s like saying you support Biden but want him to lose the election. It’s like saying you support unions but also support aggressive union busting. It’s an entirely self-contradictory position that can only be reconciled without cognitive dissonance if you don’t really care about a two-state solution.
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US intelligence estimates that Israel has only killed 30–35 percent of Hamas fighters in Gaza so far, and that Hamas has meanwhile been recruiting thousands of new fighters in the wake of Israel’s onslaught.
After more than seven months of unfathomable horror, Israel has come nowhere remotely close to accomplishing its stated goals in Gaza. Israel must therefore necessarily either (A) inflict much, much, much more horror upon Gaza for a very, very long time, or (B) revise its official goals.
And of course there’s also option (C), which is that Israel has been lying about its stated goals this entire time and is actually accomplishing exactly what it set out to accomplish.
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Donald Trump told the press that sentient Reaper drone Nikki Haley is “going to be on our team” because the two of them share “a lot of the same ideas.”
This man is openly saying he’s going to once again team up with warmongering swamp monsters for his next term, and is openly saying he’s going to continue Biden’s warmongering in Ukraine and Gaza. But I am with absolute certainty still going to get brainwashed Trump supporters telling me he’s going to end the wars and fight the Deep State.
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It’s actually amazing how stupid the propaganda has gotten. Bombing kids and hospitals is self-defense. An extremely blatant ethnic cleansing campaign is actually a war. A few western Zionist Jews saying they feel unsafe on campus is a more urgent concern than an active genocide.
Sometimes it feels like they’re experimenting on us, just to see how dumb of a narrative they can get people to swallow.
“Let’s tell them Hamas just attacked Israelis completely unprovoked, like totally out of nowhere. Act like Israel was just sitting there minding its own business and a bunch of terrorists attacked them because they’re evil and hate Jews.”
“What? Come on man, they’ll never buy that. The entire Israel-Palestine conflict is public record!”
“They’ll buy it. Just slyly suggest it on the news over and over again in a confident, authoritative tone and it’ll go right in.”
Actually, a lot of the breathtakingly stupid things the empire asks us to believe aren’t even believed by the people who voice them. Who actually believed it was ridiculous to suggest that Israel might attack a Palestinian hospital and lie about it? Who actually believes there’s a terrifying antisemitism epidemic in our society? I am convinced a lot of the people who claim to believe these things actually know better, but are pretending to believe fake nonsense in order to advance their political agendas.
The empire asks us to believe idiotic things all the time, year after year, but the narratives about what’s happening in Gaza are at a whole other level. It’s just a nonstop assault on people’s sense of reality.
Luckily, they appear to have ramped up the stupid faster than they could get away with this time. More and more people are waking up to their lies, and the eyes that are snapping open in 2024 are going to remain open to empire propaganda for the rest of their days.
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Caitlin Johnstone 