"This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it. Considering that the people of this country are not having a very comfortable time, you can't perhaps, blame them for being somewhat callous about suffering elsewhere, but the remarkable thing is the extent to which they manage to be unaware of it. Tales of starvation, ruined cities, concentration camps, mass deportations, homeless refugees, persecuted Jews — all this is received with a sort of incurious surprise, as though such things had never been heard of but at the same time were not particularly interesting. The now-familiar photographs of skeleton-like children make very little impression. As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses."
George Orwell
Details are still coming out about the mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school earlier. 27 are confirmed dead so far, 18 young children. The media circus acted like it always does, and named the wrong person as the shooter on national television. Just like how this always plays out, pundits will turn this into a gun debate, Obama will shed a few tears and not do anything, and everything will go back to normal in a month or two.
In the early hours of March 11, an American soldier in Afghanistan named Robert Bales left his post at Camp Belamby, in Kandahar Province. He went to two nearby villages that night, and massacred 16 people in their homes. 11 of the victims were from a single family, and 9 of the victims were children.
"We are children! We are children!" was one victim's last phrase before being killed.
[...]
The youngest witness was a thirteen-year-old Sadiquallah. He described being awakened by loud screams that an American had "killed our men." He then went to hide in a storage room with another boy, ditching behind the curtain. A bullet ricocheted off his head, fracturing his skull.
"I was hiding behind the curtains. A bullet hit me," Sadiquallah told the court. He also said the killer had a gun and a light, but he could not identify the man.
His friend was shot in the thigh and also survived. He is to testify later.
[...]
Khamal Adin, a witness from the second massacre site, the village of Najiban, told the judge how he came to his cousin’s house on the morning after the rampage and found bodies piled together and burned.
Adin said he found an aunt dead in a doorway with a gunshot wound to her head. Inside, he found the bodies of six of his cousin's seven children, his wife, and other relatives. The fire that burned the bodies was out by then, but he said he could still smell smoke.
When Adin began presenting his testimony, Bales moved from his seat to be closer to the monitor. Neither at that time or at any other moment of the hearing did he give any discernible reaction to the stories he heard.
The court then asked Adin to describe the injuries. He said: "Everybody was shot on the head… I didn't pay attention to the rest of the wounds."
A drone operator describes how war dehumanizes the people who are killed:
Drones are becoming the preferred instruments of vengeance, and their core purpose is analogous to the changing relationship between civil society and warfare, in which the latter is conducted remotely and at a safe distance so that implementing death and murder becomes increasingly palatable.
[...]
I fear the folly in which I took part will never end, and society will be irreversibly enmeshed in what George Orwell's 1984 warned of: constant wars against the Other, in order to forge false unity and fealty to the state.
It's very easy to kill if you don't view the target as a person. When I went to Iraq as a tank commander in 2004, the fire orders I gave the gunner acknowledged some legitimacy of personhood: "Coax man, 100 meters front." Five years later in Afghanistan, the linguistic corruption that always attends war meant we'd refer to "hot spots", "multiple pax on the ground" and "prosecuting a target", or "maximising the kill chain".
An American reporter recently visited Iraq and took questions from ordinary people:
An impassioned young woman from the middle of the lecture hall spoke up. It was obviously not easy for her. “It is not,” she said, “about lack of water and electricity [something I had mentioned]. You have destroyed everything. You have destroyed our country. You have destroyed what is inside of us! You have destroyed our ancient civilization. You have taken our smiles from us. You have
taken our dreams!”
Someone asked, “Why did you this? What did we do to you that you would do this to us?”
“Iraqis cannot forget what Americans have done here,” said another. “They destroyed the childhood. You don’t destroy everything and then say ‘We’re sorry.’ “You don’t commit crimes and then say ‘Sorry.’”
“To bomb us and then send teams to do investigations on the effects of the bombs…No, it will not be forgotten. It is not written on our hearts, it is carved in our hearts.”
We are happy to make bridges between people, said the president of the college, but we will not forget. What can you do? In Fallujah 30% of the babies are born deformed.” What can you do?
He spoke of how he’d met an American soldier in the airport. He was part of the Special Forces in Iraq. The soldier told him “The bible tells us not to kill. But we were taught to kill, to kill for nothing. Just kill. I am so sorry.”
“Build bridges? the president repeated. Apologize? he said. What can you do?” There was no rancor in his tone or demeanor, only anger and deep pain.
It's obvious that Americans are not unsympathetic or callous, because we can see the outpouring of sympathy, and the heartbreak towards the shooting that just happened. American donations to Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake exceeded $709 million. But there's a reason Americans are sympathetic to some problems, and ignore others: propaganda. We need to bring this word back, and use it seriously again. When Americans are made aware of problems, we're usually kind and gentle and generous. But the sort of propaganda we're subjected to is extremely clever: instead of pushing misinformation, it simply omits facts, enabling a whole new narrative to be developed. For example, the Obama administration is giving weapons to regime in Bahrain, which is shooting its people in the streets. But Syria has diplomatic ties to Russia, so that's the regime we have to condemn. When the Egyptian revolution first kicked off, the American media narrative pretended that we've always been on the side of "freedom" and "democracy," without ever mentioning that the Mubarak regime had been bolstered by the U.S. for decades. They were (and still are) a top buyer of American weapons and munitions, exceeded only by Israel.
All the innocent people we slaughter in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Palestine, ad infinitum, don't matter to us because that's not the media narrative. Americans are ignorant of the circumstances surrounding these events, they feel too powerless to educate themselves, and so the slaughter continues unopposed. There is an often overlooked aspect to all this that's essential to upholding this narrative: racism. Ever since American imperialism was in its infancy, overt racism has been a key tool in justifying it. And it's still with us -- it's not something white people can easily notice or see with our own eyes, it's an invisible presence in our hearts that must be constantly called out and checked. It is the culture in which we grew up, and we are all embedded into it.
As President William Howard Taft observed, "the day is not far distant [when] the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our race, it already is ours morally." President Wilson noted that Latin Americans are, "naughty children who are exercising all the privileges and rights of grown-ups" and require "a stiff hand, an authoritative hand." However, it may be useful to occasionally "pat them a little bit and make them think that you are fond of them," Secretary of State John Foster Dulles advised President Eisenhower. Wilson regarded the Italians as "children [who] must be [led] and assisted more than almost any other nation." This policy prevailed among the U.S. oligarchy all the way up to the 1930s, when Mussolini's "fine young revolution" destroyed any hope for democracy among Italians who "hunger for strong leadership and... enjoy being dramatically governed." This attitude was revived immediately after the war, when in 1948, the U.S. bullied the Italian people into voting for who they wanted by withholding food from starving people, and restoring the fascist police. Haitians were "little more than primitive savages," according to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Richard Nixon observed, concerning his progressive policy on abortion rights, "There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape." Speaking to Henry Kissinger on the Vietnam War, "The only place where you and I disagree... is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care." This nonchalance towards hundreds of thousands of deaths can also be seen when Nixon suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam: "The nuclear bomb? Does that both you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ's sake!" A nuclear attack, of course, would be a public relations disaster. It's a good thing, then, that our strategies with shock and awe bombings and brutal sanctions have become so effective, that they can inflict a similar amount of calamitous suffering as any nuclear attack. The Bush administration were all Nixon men.
It's fairly easy to understand why most Americans think "our" children are the only ones who matter, when one acknowledges this mass imperial racism in which they're raised. It's a good thing that Americans are so heartstricken by what happened in Connecticut. It means that we can still feel, in spite of everything that points to the contrary. However, it would do Americans a lot of good to understand that their tax dollars directly fund massacres just like this, every single day -- in countries they can't pronounce, towards people they will never meet, who are exactly like them and the schoolchildren who were killed in Connecticut today.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is extremely complex and has a very long history, so I don't necessarily blame people for wanting to sit out the debate, when they see so many people getting so fucking angry over it. But as the way things look now, we are getting extremely close to an all-out genocide -- so it is very important for people to listen the fuck up and pay attention to what is happening.
There was a new "war" that just opened up a few days ago. Before I get into this, I'll go ahead and explain the history a little bit for those who are only vaguely familiar with what this is all about.
The state of Israel was formed in 1948, on the winds of a movement called Zionism. Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to their own state, defined as Israel. Zionism and Judaism are two separate things. There are many prominent rabbis out there who are adamant anti-Zionists, many proclaiming that it actually defies the Torah.
The movement for the creation of Israel didn't start in 1948, it goes all the way back to the late 1800s. It started to pick up steam in the 20th century, was then put on a temporary hold during World War II, and subsequently kicked into overdrive following the holocaust. The UN, with a huge push from Britain, established the state of Israel in 1948, as a home for the Jewish people, who just suffered one of the most horrific genocides in human history.
There was a pretty significant problem with this -- there were already people living there. In 1922, Palestine was carved out of the former Ottoman Empire, which crumbled following World War I. There had already been Jewish immigrants living here among Arabs, often peacefully, and often with violence. But when Israel was formed in 1948, it set off a fucking shitstorm. Most Arabs felt (with some degree of accuracy) that Zionism was just another form of imperialism. They had just managed to break free of imperialist rule, and now here's this fucking Israel dragging them back down.
Immediately upon Israel's creation, five separate Arab nations allied themselves with Palestine, and initiated war. Israel shocked the world by handing their asses to them completely on its own.
There were many other conflicts I should probably talk about, but I'm going to skip all of it and talk about the catalyst -- the Six Day War of 1967. Nearly everything we need to know about the modern Middle East originates with this war. By this time, Arab nationalism was a behemoth. Most of the Arab world -- nations like Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia -- felt like they were one people, who only became divided thanks western imperialism. And the embodiment of western imperialism -- Israel -- was not only existing where it shouldn't, but it also displaced and humiliated their fellow Arabs, the Palestinians.
As much as I sympathize with the Palestinian cause, the Arab leaders during this time were really driven by a very dangerous extremism. They spread around racist anti-Semitic propaganda stoking the flames, and gave frightening speeches about literally annihilating the Israelis. We'll never know if they sought out a completely new genocide, since they never got the chance, but the danger was certainly there. However, a lot of this rhetoric was just for show, for politics. A few of the Arab leaders, Nasser in Egypt particularly, often struck secret deals with Israel and kept relations open behind close doors. Underlying this effort to free the Palestinians was the constant need to appease their people -- and with military coups happening every other year, the people needed to be appeased.
Tensions between Israel and its neighbors got so high that another war became inevitable. This happened in 1967, when virtually the entire Arab world declared war on Israel all at once. Their humiliations in the 1948 war, and then in the Suez Crisis in 1956, were seen merely as temporary ceasefires in their effort to liberate the Palestinians. By this time, Israel had been cozying up to Cold War politics, and had been receiving substantial military aid from the United States. Once again, Israel absolutely demolished the Arabs. It only took six days.
I don't take sides when reading about these old wars, because it's sort of hard to. Both "sides" were just assholes. You can sympathize with the Israelis because they didn't want to be utterly annihilated from the face of the earth, and you can sympathize with the Arabs because what the Israelis did to the Palestinians fit the definition of ethnic cleansing. It just depends on which ethnic cleansing you preferred -- that of Palestinians, or that of Israelis.
It's extremely important to understand what Israel did after this victory in 1967. They were in total control, and could do whatever the fuck they wanted.
There was this stretch of land on the west bank of the Dead Sea, on the eastern side of Israel. Since 1948, Jordan possessed this land. In 1967, Israel took it -- along with the 600,000 Palestinian refugees who lived there. Israel never annexed this land, so it's not technically part of Israel -- it's only a "territory.". Since 1967 to this very day, the West Bank Palestinians have been living under Israeli military occupation.
On the western side of Israel was another stretch of land, part of Egypt, called Gaza. Israel acquired this too. The United Nations Security Council soon passed Resolution 252, which demanded that Israel withdraw "from territories occupied" in 1967 and "the termination of all claims or states of belligerency," which Israel has yet to abide by.
Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Since their withdrawal, Hamas -- considered a terrorist organization by western powers -- was democratically elected, and currently holds power in Gaza.
Though Israeli troops withdrew, a naval blockade was put into place. This has forced the Gazans to dig smuggling tunnels beneath the border with Egypt to receive vital supplies for basic survival.
In my opinion, the creation of Israel was one of the worst mistakes of the 20th century. I am an anti-Zionist, and I do not believe the state of Israel has a right to exist. However, if we want a solution to this, that obviously isn't going to work, we need to be realistic. Israel was created generations ago, there are people and families living there who know no other home. Therefore, the two-state solution is the only possible option -- give Palestine full statehood. Some who advocate this position demand that Israel abide the border agreements set up by the UN in 1947, but others are more forgiving, and simply want the borders to return to 1967. If you ask me, after everything that's happened, the Palestinians deserve much more. Plus reparations.
---
There. History done. Here's where I throw objectivity out the window and start yelling at shit. For all the abuses and crimes Israel has committed throughout its history, it has at the very least been open to discussion through all of it. There were some considerable strides made in the 90s (and there would've been more if Israel and the U.S. hadn't sabotaged it every step of the way). But as things stand now, Israeli politics is completely dominated by right-wing extremists, and they need to be stopped. There will never be any hope for peace in the Middle East as long as these racists and fascists are running Israel.
Without any notice, Israeli soldiers will force Palestinians out of their homes, which are then demolished to make way for Israeli "settlements." According to the United Nations, the settlements are entirely illegal. These settlements have been encroaching into Palestinian lands for decades, systematically shoving these people away from water and farmland. More than any other single factor, water is what determines Israel's policy.
This is unquestionably ethnic cleansing, which is the "policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to purposely remove by violent and terror-inspiring means as well as deportation and killing the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas." Many argue that it's an outright genocide. Whatever the case, ethnic cleansing is definitely a step towards genocide. Here's the opinion of a woman named Suzanne Weiss:
I am a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, the Nazis’ mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The tragic experience of my family and community under Hitler makes me alert to the suffering of other peoples denied their human rights today — including the Palestinians.
True, Hitler’s Holocaust was unique. The Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Hitler started with that, but went on to extermination. In my family’s city in Poland, Piotrkow, 99 per cent of the Jews perished.
Yet for me, the Israeli government’s actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family’s experiences under Hitlerism: the inhuman walls, the checkpoints, the daily humiliations, killings, diseases, the systematic deprivation. There’s no escaping the fact that Israel has occupied the entire country of Palestine, and taken most of the land, while the Palestinians have been expelled, walled off, and deprived of human rights and human dignity.
Documentary filmmaker John Pilger has a film called "Palestine is Still the Issue." He talks to Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, along with many Israelis who oppose what their government is doing. If you want any understanding of what the Palestinians go through under military occupation -- humiliation, death, racist apartheid -- you should watch this. It's up on youtube.
The Palestinian resistance have every right to fire back at Israeli soldiers, in the same way that the uprising in Warsaw had the right to fire back at their Nazi occupiers. Which is why it makes me so nervous to see Hamas in power in Gaza, who don't seem to have any problem with firing at civilians. But it's important to remember that these are incredibly desperate acts of people who have had everything taken from them. The brutality of the occupation itself created Hamas. It's also important not to confuse Hamas with Gaza, like what the racists in Israel have done. The election that brought Hamas into power was actually fairly close, and a good portion of Gazans did not vote for them. It's similar to why the Taliban has so much popular support in Pakistan. No one has any great love for the Taliban or their fascist philosophy, it's just that they're the only group that's organized enough to fight back against imperialists bombing their homes.
Israel attacked Gaza only four years ago, with Operation Cast Lead. This was in response to rockets being fired into Israel, which Hamas said was done to lift the naval blockade. Israel hasn't yet led a ground invasion into Gaza in the recent outbreak of violence, but they did during Cast Lead. 1,400 Palestinians were killed in Cast Lead -- one thousand of these were civilians. 13 Israelis were killed. 4 of these were from friendly fire. Cast Lead was a fucking massacre, and countless war crimes were committed by Israel. Wikipedia:
On March 24, a report from the UN team responsible for the protection of children in war zones was released, it found "hundreds" of violations of the rights of children and accused Israeli soldiers of using children as human shields, bulldozing a home with a woman and child still inside, and shelling a building they had ordered civilians into a day earlier. One case involved using an 11-year-old boy as a human shield, by forcing him to enter suspected buildings first and also inspect bags. The report also mentioned the boy was used as a shield when Israeli soldiers came under fire. The Guardian has also received testimony from three Palestinian brothers aged 14, 15, and 16, who all claimed to have been used as human shields.
The Israelis also used white phosphorus munitions, which is a war crime. Israel claimed they were only used as "smoke screens."
In 2010, activists from around the world boarded six ships full of humanitarian aid, and attempted to break the blockade. The Israeli Navy responded by boarding the ships and murdering nine activists.
Throughout all these atrocities, America has stood virtually alone defending Israel, as the rest of the world looked on in horror. And the war that Israel just instigated is no different.
Five days ago, Israel began yet another senseless assault on Gaza, Operation Pillar of Cloud. Every explanation Israel has been feeding the media to justify this atrocity are complete lies, and it is driving me absolutely insane to see these fascists repeating them over and over and over again without being questioned.
Israel says this was to prevent Hamas from launching rockets into their territory. This makes no sense, because there had been no rockets launched into their territory for two full days before they started this war, and Hamas had just agreed to a truce.
This whole thing started when Israeli soldiers murdered two innocent Palestinians. On November 5th, Israeli border guards shot and killed a 23-year-old mentally challenged man when he approached their fence. On November 8, eight tanks and four bulldozers invaded southern Gaza. A 13-year-old boy playing football was shot to death.
Hamas retaliated. They attacked a military truck, and a number of Israeli soldiers were wounded. Then they started launching rockets into Israel, none of which hit anything because all the rockets they have are shit.
Then a ceasefire was called. There were talks. Ahmed Jabari, second-in-command to Hamas' military wing, received the draft to a more permanent truce, and it appeared he was going to sign it. Jabari was a very cautious person, and he would not have been outside travelling around if a ceasefire had not been called. A few hours after he received the draft, Israel pinpointed his car and assassinated him, breaking the ceasefire, and instigating the war. The Israeli negotiator who had been mediating between the two parties has come out and said these things himself.
Over and over again, I see Israel and the US push these lies about Israel's "right to defend itself." This is not a war of defense. Israel broke the ceasefire and started the war. Chomsky:
"When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing... You can’t defend yourself when you’re militarily occupying someone else’s land. That’s not defense. Call it what you like, it’s not defense."
This is utter insanity. Gaza is not some secret terrorist moon base out to conquer the planet and kill all the Jews. It is a mass of 1.6 million refugees crammed into a 25 mile long strip of land. It is one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Over half of the people living there are under the age of eighteen. To purposefully initiate war and mass bombings on such an area is a genocide. Gaza is not a nation. It does not have any sort of organized army, or any means to defend itself. It is nothing more than a massive open-air prison -- arguably a concentration camp. Israel possesses the 4th most powerful army on the planet, and it is backed by the 1st. In only five days, the death toll in Gaza is at 75, a full third of them children. Six hundred people have suffered injuries -- nearly half of them children. The hospitals are reaching their breaking points, and since Israel bombed the smuggling tunnels and closed off the border, they have no means to get resupplied. According to Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai, the goal is not to "defend" Israel against anything, the "goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages." The Nazis also thought they were the "chosen people." They also started wars for "defense."
I have been unable to turn away from my computer screen since this massacre began. I've found a guy named Harry Fear, and he's gone viral. He's a reporter living in Gaza, and he's been feeding the world constant updates about Israel's crimes. I've watched his follower count rise from a couple thousand, when this first started, to 19,000 right now. If you're interested, his live feed is here, and his twitter is here.
When Harry sleeps, he leaves the audio of his feed on, so that you can tune in and listen to the sounds of the massacre. It is a never-ending buzz of drones constantly flying overhead. Occasionally a bomb explodes. Gazans are unable to leave their homes, as the Israelis drop bombs on everything that moves around in the streets. These are the conditions in which people have had to live for the past few days -- they are stranded in whatever shelter they can find, endlessly tormented by the nonstop buzzing of low-flying drones. The sound is still in my head, and I can't get it out.
Last night, around 3 or 4 am Gaza time, I was listening to these gutwrenching sounds as I followed the #GazaUnderAttack tag on twitter. The Israel Defense Force initiated the heaviest bombardment that has yet happened in the last five days, and I got to listen to it and see the reactions of Gazans on twitter, in real time. It was one of the most horrifying experiences of my entire life.
Remember: I was listening to this whole attack take place. I couldn't stop shaking. I'm still jittery, all these hours later. I felt a weird mix of helplessness and uncontrollable fury. I wanted to be there so I could fight with them. I wished the Israeli army would somehow be smashed so this slaughter would end. Above everything, I didn't want to feel so useless. I sat there crying, and it was all I could do to prevent myself from losing control and breaking down altogether. I think all these sounds and emotions flooding in at once may have triggered my fight or flight instinct. I have the luxury of being completely safe behind a computer screen. I can turn it off whenever I want. Palestinians live with this constantly. And I don't know how.
You get these smug idiots pretending to be above the fray, endlessly exclaiming that "both sides" need to calm down. This is basically an admission of their ignorance about what's happening. Israel started the war. Israel is massacring people. The Palestinian resistance is fighting in defense, it couldn't be more clear who the aggressor is. But it's even worse when some stupid fuck actually tries to defend Israel. I want to grab them and shake them and yell in their stupid fucking faces. Why are they acting like they know what's going? They don't know. They have absolutely no idea what's happening.
Israel's propaganda war has been flawless. They've really been hitting twitter.
The Israeli people are bombarded with a nonstop message of fear, and it's working. The last poll of Israelis I saw showed that around 90% of them supported the war, and 75% wishes for it to continue. IDF propaganda is reminiscent of the Cold War.
I tried to watch CNN earlier. The anchor was interviewing one of the few antiwar members of Israel's parliament, and I couldn't pay attention anymore after about five seconds in -- the anchor referred to the Gaza Strip as Israel's "neighbor." That is the word she used. I was floored. Everything else said afterwards was just white noise. This is the context in which the Israel-Palestinian conflict is brought into American homes -- no mention of Israel's brutal 45-year military occupation. No mention of the blockade. No mention of the demolition of homes. No mention Israel's or America's nonstop blocking of Palestine's UN request for statehood, year after year after year. Gaza and Israel are "neighbors." That's all we need to know. The end.
Israel is completely dominating the propaganda war. I mention Chomsky's "propaganda model" from Manufacturing Consent sometimes in this blog, and what we're seeing here couldn't be a better example of his premise -- there is a set narrative that the media is supposed to stick to. For days, the media shouted about the three Israelis that were killed -- a tragedy, to be sure -- and one or two rockets that were harmlessly shot out of the sky by Israel's Iron Dome over Tel Aviv. Nobody talked about the attack I just described. No one's talking about the sheer terror that's engulfing the people of Gaza, or how disproportionate Israel's use of force actually is. Israel is the eternal victim.
Literally every foreign policy expert I've seen talk about this (note: I do not watch cable news) has been openly wondering about what Israel's real goals are. Not a single one of them is taking Israel's narrative seriously. A lot of people are saying it has to do with Iran. Hamas is allied with the Irani regime, which gives Israel a pretext to kill them. They've been calling Gaza Iran's "front line." There's also the fact that elections are coming up, and war never fails to shift the entire country to the right -- a coalition Israel will need if it wishes to pursue a war on Iran.
Norman Finkelstein, who is probably the most important voice alive on this conflict, doubts that there will be a ground invasion. Harry Fear has been saying on his feed that this is exactly how Cast Lead started, and that a ground invasion is imminent. Nobody knows what's going to happen because nobody can tell what the fuck Israel is doing.
If you ask me to speculate, the whole operation almost looks like practice. Iran is the most powerful nation in the region after Israel, and no one is seriously contemplating a major ground invasion. If there's going to be a war, it will be from the air. This assault on Gaza has been almost entirely air raids. It almost seems like Israel is giving its military some practice. American and Israeli armed forces just completed the largest joint drilling exercise ever. It "ended" just a single day before Israel began its assault on Gaza.
But even this needs to be taken with a grain of salt, because it was very clear in the leadup to the election that the Pentagon did not want a war with Iran. Whether they wanted it at all, or they just thought was bad timing, remains open to speculation. But as Netanyahu has made clear in the past (when he didn't know he was being recorded), he really doesn't give a shit what America thinks, or the United Nations for that matter. This video is years ago.
"America won't get in our way. It's easily moved."
It's easy to see why the U.S. and Israel are such strong allies, and why both are universally hated by every other nation on the planet. It's because our government acts exactly like this. America, like Israel, has no "friends." Only interests.
Whatever Israel's reasons for doing this, they did it knowing they're going to be in it for the long haul. Ahmed Jabari, the man Israel assassinated, was one of the few people who could keep all the different militant factions in Gaza in line. With him dead (and with his death brought about in such a cowardly way), there is no hope whatsoever for peace in the near future. And Israel was well aware of this.
I am furious. I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe the world is sitting back and watching another western power commit yet another genocide in the year 2012. I can't believe how much racist support this genocide has around the globe. This cannot continue. The United Nations was formed to prevent this from happening again, and if it doesn't step up and do something, there is a very real risk of an all-out Hitler-esque genocide in the coming decades. Chris Hedges' words about Operation Cast Lead a few years ago couldn't possibly be more relevant right now. Please take a few moments to watch this.
Barack Obama was handed a clear victory last night in the U.S. election, beating Mitt Romney by nearly 100 electoral votes. Going by the popular vote, it wasn't nearly that drastic, with only a 2% difference separating the two candidates. Voter turnout was lower in 2012 than in 2008. The Senate will stay Democrat and the House will stay Republican. So everyone dislikes the government and nothing changes.
The result isn't surprising. The biggest tragedy for me personally was that third parties got so little support.
Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party just barely missed 1%, but Jill Stein of the Green Party got even less, with 0.3%. These pathetic numbers show just how pervasive and powerful the electoral propaganda system is. This was not an election about ideas, for if it had been, a third party candidate would have most definitely won. Every poll shows that the majority of Americans agree with third party candidates much more than Democrats and Republicans on the issues. This election was a propaganda war. Billions of dollars were spent by the Obama and Romney campaigns thanks to Citizens United -- wasted on scare tactics and lies to manipulate Americans into hating each other.
Ross Perot was allowed to participate in the 1992 presidential debates. As a result, he received 18% of the vote. Abraham Lincoln was a third party candidate, and he participated in debates all across the country. He won. In 2012, all third parties were barred from participating in any debate whatsover, Obama and Romney actually signed a secret agreement (which leaked) to ensure that it didn't happen. They weren't even allowed to enter the discussion. There was a near total media blackout on these candidates, and in the few times they were mentioned, they were simply mocked. On the very day of the election, Chris Matthews lambasts "idiots" for not voting for who he's voting for.
"If you vote for one of these numbskull third or fourth party candidates like Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, and say ‘I was surprised at what happened.’ No, you shouldn’t be because idiots like you voted for third and fourth party candidates and they don’t know how the system works.
This was moments after he begged his viewers to go vote. More than anything else I've seen this election cycle, this reveals the sad hypocrisy of establishment Democrats. Americans need to GET OUT THE VOTE and MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD -- unless you're voting for someone who's not a Democrat. Then you're stupid and you're not doing the democracy right. These people don't give a rat's ass about the actual act of voting, on its own.
The reason why progressivism and anti-war sentiment did so terrible in 2012 is because the propaganda system didn't allow it to happen. In 1920, with the American labor and socialist movements at their high water marks, Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs got nearly a million votes -- by campaigning in a prison cell. This amounted to 3.4% at the time. As a result, the government proceeded to trash their offices and arrest their leaders. Political suppression is the only response we should expect when people try to enact actual change, so we should prepare for it in the off chance that any alternative movement take off in the years to come. We're already seeing some of it in Occupy.
I'm feeling very disenfranchised right now. With Occupy and the labor movements happening, I assumed that we would do a little better. We need a leftist political movement outside the Democrats now more than ever, but libertarianism seems to be the rising fad for some reason. I'm not quite sure where leftists are supposed to go from here, or what our role is supposed to be.
The Republicans are going to have to do that serious soul searching they've been putting off since Bush. The demographic shift people have been predicting for years is finally happening. White people just can't win elections on their own anymore.
"I went to bed last night thinking, 'we're outnumbered,'... I went to bed last night thinking we'd lost the country. I don't know how else you look at this. The first wave of exit polls came in at five o'clock. I looked at it, and I said ... 'this is utter BS, and if it isn't, then we've lost the country.'"
“The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things? The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore.”
Watching the Republicans is going to be interesting. You'd think they would start to realize that it's not the country that's idiotic, it's them. I don't think that's going to happen. I predict that they're only going to shift to the right even further, because that's what they did in this exact same situation in 2008. I've already seen reactionaries in my facebook feed hint at armed revolution in complete seriousness. Maybe libertarians will try to nudge their way in and there will be a civil war. Maybe the Tea Partiers and the religious fanatics and the racists and all the maniacs they've been welcoming with open arms will get into the fray, and the entire party will tear itself to shreds. I'm extremely worried about this. Rob Johnson pointed out on the Real News Network earlier:
"Well, I think all the indications are that—both historically and in this context, that when people lose faith in the regime, they yearn for order; they kind of dispense with their principles and they want to see order restored. And that often takes a right-wing, authoritarian direction. I think that was featured very vividly in the business writer Peter Drucker's first book, The End of Economic Man, which was written in the 1930s in Germany. And while things don't need to be as ominous there, Hans-Joachim Voth's work on Latin America in the '80s, when they were going through the grinder, or his recent work on Europe, and particularly on Spain in the present context and on Greece, suggests that downturns and disillusionment do produce a rightward shift. And whether it takes the form of violence or not, it's not clear."
Democrats continue to ignore Obama's police state policies. By now most people I talk to have at least heard of the NDAA or Obama's assassinations, but then they either defend it, or simply call you a conspiracy theorist or a sensationalist. This trend of willful ignorance will continue as more of these totalitarian policies are implemented in the years to come. Democrats have been tolerable up to this point, but they may very soon become outright enemies -- even more dangerous than Republicans, due to their effectiveness at implementing these policies on an apathetic populace. The future looks very bleak. Global riots are predicted due to the massive crop failures this summer, so watch out for how the reactionaries respond to this. Obama plans on implementing austerity measures similar to the ones in Europe, which obviously resulted in further collapse, followed by riots. In Greece, there's an up and coming political party, the Golden Dawn, who openly and proudly call themselves fascists, and half of the police force voted for them. Greek police tortured antifascist demonstrators in custody in September. Freedom of the press is being suspended. Greece is an extreme example, but it's just something to keep an eye out for. Mark Steiner, from that same Real News interview:
"But the larger thing here is we have to be realistic about what this future looks like. And the future's very dangerous ahead of us, because this, the capitalist system, the transnational capitalist system cannot figure out how to plug the holes in its dyke. And there's no alternative, other than repression, to keep a lid on things. That's the fear that we have to face, and that's what we have to be ready to fight for over the next few years. I think that anybody who believes in democracy, believes in an equitable society, has to be now prepared to really fight for the survival of [incompr.] our nation and this planet. And then that's what we're facing, and we have to deal with that in reality."
Imagine for a moment that you're sitting down to see a virtuoso musical performance. You're very excited, this has been hyped up as the most anticipated show by this musician in years. Expectations are extremely high. They get up there, start strumming their guitar, cello, whatever, but instead of playing any sort of song at all, they sound like a five year old child just banging away on the instrument. They go on like that for hours. And that's the show.
You read the review in the paper the next morning, and the guy talks about the masterful way in which the artist held the instrument. And the confidence with which they hit the strings. And the one-on-one connection they were able to make with the audience members. Maybe you talk to a friend or two who were at the show a little later, and they're just ecstatic at how good the performance made them feel. No one says a word about how the person you listened to didn't know what they were doing, and how there was never any music at all.
This is a little bit how I feel after watching all the presidential debates.
Take a brief glance at some of the top headlines in r/politics right now. Over 2 million people are subscribed to this subreddit.
From an 89 year old Florida voter I just called on behalf of President Obama: "Son, I'm one of those women who marched in front of the Supreme Court in support of Roe v. Wade - you can be damn sure I'm not voting for Romney."
Bill Maher, 'If the Mittmobile does roll into Washington it will be towing behind it the whole anti-intellectual anti-science freak show.'
Obama Campaign Ad Tries to Name All of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts Taxes & Fees in 30 Seconds
Jon Stewart Rails On The Absurdity Of The US Health Care System Refusing To Hire Combat Medics
While Romney Runs and Hides, a Confident Obama Takes Media Questions in All Formats
The New York Times Endorses President Obama.
Another Catholic Bishop Threatens Damnation If Congregation Votes For Obama | Addicting Info
Biden: America not in decline, Romney in denial
Notice what all of these things have in common? It's all meaningless. Almost every single story that's splattering r/politics right now is -- "THIS was just said by SOMEONE and THIS is what you should think about it!" It's gossip. They don't talk about any of Obama's policies unless it's oversimplified to the point of inanity. And even then, they rarely ever talk about Obamas actual policies at all. It's all ROMNEY BAD. All of it.
I realize r/politics is hardly a good sample to take examples from. It's full of complete and utter morons. But it's important to note that the vast majority of people who claim pay attention to "politics," whether on reddit or not, get their news in this format. They all go home in the evening, switch on their MSNBC, or their Fox News, or get on their computers and check out their HuffPo or their Drudge. It's no wonder that nobody has the slightest fucking clue what's going on when they're forced to get their information while trapped inside bubbles.
Reddit is a site where people vote on content -- if people like it, they give it an upvote. The more upvotes something has, the more it will be seen by others, and maybe even reach the front page. People can downvote things too, and many important stories are often buried.
Stories like the ones I mentioned get literally thousands of upvotes. They eat this shit up. On the other hand, here are the kinds of stories that don't quite make it in r/politics, including the upvote/downvote numbers they received:
Some of these are weeks old, this is the best they're going to do. A couple of them got half-decent responses, but I meant it when I said those shitty stories up there get thousands of responses. Most people are never going to hear about these things, and even if by some miracle they do, they're conditioned to ignore them and push them out of their thought processes. It just doesn't register. In fact, if anything is critical of Barack Obama in any way -- even it's based on complete fact -- it's going to get downvoted. If anything is by Glenn Greenwald, you can almost guarantee that it's going to be buried, with dismissive comments about how Greenwald is a one-issue writer, drone strikes we get it, big whoop, that's war, who cares.
This is making me rethink my position that interests within the American media deliberately withhold stories that make people uncomfortable, solely because they go against corporate interests. That's obviously part of the reason (as shown here), but it really does seem mostly that people are conditioned to enjoy bullshit. It's all about the show, it's a game to them. It's a sporting event.
George Orwell noticed similar patterns to this, he wrote an essay about it called Politics and the English Language. He argued that mass contradictory thought in a society not only degrades ideas, but also the very language the society speaks.
All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has something new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
We live in an extremely propagandized society. The wars get so much support because meaningless phrases like "Support the Troops" discourage people from questioning anything about the wars. The question on Iran during the foreign policy debate was not about whether Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon at all -- that discussion is obviously over. It was, Iran wants to drop a nuclear bomb on Israel. The end. That's the frame in which the discussion is allowed to take place.
All issues are framed in ways similar to this. I've seen it called the overton window, Chomsky called it the "Propaganda Model." Its purpose is to limit the range of acceptable opinion. Chomsky made an analogy once, he said the boot to totalitarian governments is propaganda to democracies. Public opinion has to be controlled in some way so that it will fit in line with political-corporate interests. When both political parties are fighting for those same corporate interests, their supporters need to be distracted with meaningless gossip so no one notices what the politicians actually support.
To see just how bipartisan America's "two"-party system has become, one had to look no further than the thing tonight that people are calling a debate. Except, maybe you do have to look further I guess, since I'm seeing liberals and conservatives wringing their hands and going into their little corners as if a serious discussion just happened.
Before the debate, I made a comment on facebook warning people about potential distractions, and how we should focus on things that actually matter. I mentioned the "Big Bird" thing. And binders. I wish I would've mentioned "Romnesia," that stupid phrase is all over the place now. Predictably, liberals are gleefully jumping up and down over a fairly condescending comment made by Barack Obama tonight. Romney said, "Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917." Obama responded:
"You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities."
Romney also made some idiotic comment about how Syria is Iran's route to the sea, which is false. In one of the most completely hilarious displays of ignorance in the entire electoral farce, Romney actually said, "America has not dictated other countries. We have freed other countries from dictators." Obama gave us such classics as, "We've visited your website quite a few times. And it still doesn't work." and "The 1980s called. They want their foreign policy back."
ZING! Wow, what a fucking zinger, amirite. Republicans.
This is fucking stupid. It's pretty damn clever, and I almost suspect on purpose, because if these candidates and their cheerleaders didn't focus on the irrelevant horse race and feel-good zingers, voters might actually take notice of how similar their policies are. I'm seeing tons of comments throughout the internet from liberals wondering why Romney was just reiterating Obama's very policies. Some examples I've copied and pasted from random people:
Did romney just reiterate exactly what Obama said on Syria?
Romney said it better because he said it while being white.
If you're against Obama's policy but you parrot what he says when questioned, you might have Romnesia.
Is it me or is romney repeating what obama says... never mind obama just pointed it out.
Every time Romney talks it seems like he's just saying, "I agree with the president, but let me tell you about something the president is also doing that he didn't mention."
Right now, Romney is thinking of voting for Obama.
New prediction: Romney is going to reword every statement that Obama makes and try to claim it as his own.
Am I a survivor in a fucking zombie apocalypse or something? How goddamn stupid can you be? These are not Obama's policies. They are George Bush's policies. Republicans have not shifted politically, democrats have. Romney is agreeing with everything Obama says because Barack Obama's policies are conservative.
Do Obama supporters even fucking know why there are so many critics on the left? Do they even care? We've been shouting this shit from the rooftops, and it flies right over their heads. They think George Bush's foreign policy is Barack Obama's, and Mitt Romney is trying to "claim it as his own." How are you even supposed to respond to these people? No joke -- I've seen the term "political hipster" used to describe leftists who refuse to vote for Obama. These guys just don't get it, and I doubt they ever will.
The debate tonight was nothing more than a 'tough guy' contest, and I regret watching it. It was a complete waste of time. Those internet observers were correct in saying Obama and Romney agree with each other on literally every foreign policy issue. When that's the "debate" going on, the only thing you can do is put on some fake swagger and demean your opponent with funny comments about Battleship. That's the debate.
Here's some better comments from some of those tumblr leftists I've been mentioning lately:
Rocky Anderson brought up an extremely good point during the third party debate on Democracy Now: both of these candidates are proclaiming their undying love for Israel, and neither ever mentioned Palestine. Not. Once. The Israeli occupation is illegal, and condemned in some way by virtually every nation on the planet that isn't the United States. What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is nothing short of ethnic cleansing, and these candidates' unwavering support for it is one of the most disgusting and horrific things I've ever seen.
We heard again the lie that Obama is pulling all of our troops out of Afghanistan in 2014. No one explained why we're still there at all. What is the objective? What are we doing that still needs two years to be accomplished, and how many more of our soldiers, and innocents, are going to be slaughtered in that time, and for what purpose? I've mentioned this before, but we're of course not leaving in 2014, we're keeping thousands of troops there until 2024 to safeguard our imperial spoils. If things turn out in any way like Iraq, then we're leaving behind a barely-functioning, shattered state. This time, in the hands of opium drug lords.
Probably five separate times throughout these debates, I heard loaded questions start off with something like "Iran's nuclear weapons program..." or "Iran is the most serious threat to American security." The entire frame of the discussion is inherently biased before the discussion can even begin. The IAEA concluded that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon. They are not a threat to the United States or Israel, because they would be utterly annihilated if they attacked anyone, and they know it. In fact, Iran's entire military is structured defensively. None of these facts were brought up in the debates, because what we watched were advertisements, not debates. I fucking hate Ahmadinejad and Khamenei and the Irani government, but 90% of casualties in modern war are civilians, and if we're going to be talking about slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent people, at the very least, we should do so based on facts. That's not going to happen here, because there is going to be a war no matter who's president, there are already interests attempting to spark it.
Climate change was not brought up at any point in any of these debates. This is the first time this issue hasn't been mentioned in a presidential debate since 1984. With how hard Barack Obama is pushing fracking and oil drilling, it's pretty safe to assume that the question of the environment is now officially a complete nonissue among America's elites. Their consensus has been reached, and I doubt climate change or the environment will ever become a serious issue ever again in American politics, or at least in the foreseeable future.
I am absolutely ashamed of this country. It's bad enough that the entire process is a sham owned and operated by corporations, completely lacking any serious debate or discussion -- but the vast majority of Americans are actually satisfied with it, and believe they are free. Frank Zappa said that the inauguration of Ronald Reagan "just laid the foundation of the next 500 years of Dark Ages" and I think he was 100% correct. It goes without saying that America's hegemony and influence throughout the world is waning. How we react to this spiral is going to be important. We could use it as an opportunity to look in mirror and reevaluate all the death and destruction we've wrought on the world in the last half-century -- what I thought Barack Obama's campaign was about in 2008. But the way Obama has been acting, that the democrats -- America's left -- have been the ones ushering in endless war and police state policies, gives me absolutely no hope whatsoever for this nation's future. The planet is dying, resources are running out, and everything indicates that these corporate fascists have absolutely no idea how to deal with it. I wouldn't say there's no hope for humanity's future, but the world's power structure as it stands now is never going to give it to us. Ever.
I think I jumped the gun when I said I was hanging up this blog for good. I thought that being exposed to a community of leftists on tumblr and conversing with them would be enough to satisfy me, but I'm still getting the urge to write, especially now that the election is kicking into high gear and there's so much going on. I doubt I'll be updating as much anymore, but check back from time to time, because I'll probably still write occasionally when I feel like it.
It's getting increasingly difficult to sit through these debates without shoving my middle finger through the TV. It's more hilarious than it is enraging to watch Romney fumble around and bullshit his way through his sociopathic shell, but to sit there and watch Obama pretending to stand up for the American people, with how horrendous his record is, is simply infuriating. In 2007, Barack Obama said "If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain, when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I'll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States because Americans deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner."
Fast forward to 2012, and not only has Barack Obama not found those shoes, but he's remained completely silent towards all the union struggles going on the United States. His former Chief of Staff, and current mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, treated the Chicago teachers going on strike for their students with utter disdain. Obama was silent on this, as was nearly every elected Democrat in the country. For all of Obama's crocodile tears towards the "middle class," whenever he's needed the most, there is absolutely no one standing in the corner of workers. He doesn't give a shit.
Tonight in the debate, the issue was brought up on how on earth our job market could compete with China's child sweatshops. I don't quite remember what Obama's answer was since it was few hours ago and it was filled with such little substance; but maybe we wouldn't be competing with sweatshops at all if Obama hadn't signed all those free trade agreements, or if he ever seriously raised the issue of outsourcing. Or maybe forbidding trade with China completely, since they're a fucking totalitarian government and our participation in their economy enables child slavery.
Tonight's topics were supposed to be "Domestic and Foreign Policy," and yet we didn't get a single comment about the longest war in American history, or how there are ongoing talks about how to extend it to 2024. We should be utterly livid by this silence, and yet it isn't even terribly shocking. Next week is supposed to be just on foreign policy alone, so it will be pretty hilarious watching them pretend to be any different whatsoever.
The entire debate was a pretty empty exchange full of meaningless swagger, and liberal partisans are predictably splooging all over the internet over it. Romney made some dumbshit comment about how he looks at potential female employees in "binders," and it was so fucking stupid that it's pretty much replaced the ridiculous Big Bird thing already. Gone was any discussion whatsoever about the surveillance state or indefinite detention or government assassinations of American citizens or Afghanistan or Yemen or Bahrain or the drone war that's massacring hundreds of innocent people. The majority of Obama supporters simply don't give a fuck. At all. Political events are nothing more than god damn football matches with drinking games, not matters of life and death for victims of oppression and starvation and war.
I suppose it wouldn't be unkind to give Obama a little credit for completely handing Romney's ass to him to tonight, but this is presuming that it's at all difficult to beat a Republican in a debate. Their ideas are fucking stupid and indefensible, and it's really fucking easy to tear them down. Let's talk about how Obama bragged tonight about being more obsessed with oil than the Bush administration. Let's talk about how he said he's built enough pipelines to circle around the earth once. Or how he approved of more drilling in the gulf immediately after the worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States. I brought these issues up in the goddamn wasteland that is reddit earlier, and I'm downvoted and torn down with "WELL HOW ELSE YOU GONNA DRIVE YOUR CAR HUH, RIDDLE ME THIS!!" A couple years ago, progressives were making fun of that "Drill, Baby, Drill!" nonsense, and now they're full embracing it. The party lines have completely switched, and nobody fucking notices.
I remember reading his Audacity of Hope manifesto before the 2008 election, and one of his key proposals was investing in a clean, green energy boom -- it would not only provide hundreds of thousands of new jobs in an industry that hasn't yet been exploited, but it would get us less dependent on foreign oil and clean up the planet. That sounded like a pretty damn good idea to me -- it was one of the main reasons why I voted for him -- but with how close he's gotten to the oil giants, I guess it was nothing more than a big fucking lie just like everything else. One of the most hilarious moments of the night was when Obama accused Mitt Romney of letting oil companies write his energy policy, without seeing the slightest bit of hypocrisy about letting the health care industry write his health care bill.
Green Party candidate Jill Stein and her Vice President were arrested outside the university before the debates today. They were protesting the unfair debate format, because it's privately owned by corporate lobbyists -- how it makes sure that all the questions are meaningless softballs, and completely bans other parties from participating. The major candidates sign a contract with each other that forbids them from ever debating a third party candidate, under any circumstances. Stein gave an amazing speech while she stood in handcuffs, and there was more substance in it than in the entire two hour sham tonight. Democracy Now has been doing an absolutely superb job at covering the "debate" farce, how it was highjacked from the League of Women Voters by Democrats and Republicans, and thrown into the hands of private corporations. I highly recommend you watch their report from a couple weeks ago, and their report from today. Glenn Greenwald also wrote an article about it if you don't feel like watching something. This should be absolutely essential knowledge, and I guarantee you will become just as pissed off as I am when you watch/read all of these things.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
If you're a frequent reader of this blog, you may have noticed it's been slowly dying over the past couple months due to my inability to update. There are a few reasons for this:
1) I've become a lot more politically radical over the last one or two years. Read some of my entries back in 2008-2009, and I'm sure it's all nothing but Repub-Dem tit-for-tat circlejerking. Now, there's nothing I despise more. I can barely watch Maddow and the Daily Show anymore. Even Olbermann's self-righteous douchebaggery was getting on my nerves by the time Current canned him. Democrats limit the discussion. We can kindly shake our fingers at Obama for being worse than Bush on war and civil liberties, but take no step farther, we still need to vote for him because LESSER OF TWO EVILS LOL. When both candidates do the exact same things, Obama stops being the "lesser of two evils." It honestly reminds me of how people treated Reagan, everyone was too enamored with his charm and charisma to actually check his facts. My reading has expanded, I've been reading a ton of Chomsky and Zinn and Orwell and even some of the old school anarchists. And that means I'm now afraid of typing out my real opinions on the internet. I'm not an anarchist, but simply possessing anarchist literature is enough to justify a raid. Social networks and blogs are now being constantly monitored, and a massive spy center to house this information is currently being built in Utah. I can't confirm, but a friend told me recently that by simply following Wikileaks on twitter, you're put on a terrorist watch list. And it wouldn't even surprise me if it's true, since the U.S. government considers Julian Assange and Wikileaks to be an "enemy of the state" -- the very status reserved for al Qaeda and the Taliban. I want to limit what I say on the internet because it's being monitored and it scares me.
2) I feel like I've said everything that needs to be said. I feel like I'm just repeating myself, or reposting news stories and giving an angry opinion about it, like an amateur Glenn Greenwald. It got kind of boring, and I felt like I was yelling into a mine shaft.
3) I did this to vent. That was this blog's only purpose. Since making a tumblr, I've found an entire community of people who I'm politically in line with, and it's made me much less frustrated knowing that there are others who are just as far left as I am. I didn't know they existed. Being active in that internet community and having discussions with them has given me breathing space, and it's been slowly replacing this over the last year or two.
I'm sorry, I know when I first made that tumblr I said it wasn't going to replace this blogspot, but I guess I lied. Don't fret, because I still have an internet presence, here's that infamous tumblr that killed this blog (just replace "blogspot" with "tumblr" in the URL up there). If you only tuned into this blog for interesting news stories that you may not have heard about otherwise, then I just recently made another tumblr dedicated solely to reposting those stories. I'm also on twitter now, but I still think it's pretty stupid so I don't take it seriously, I devote most of it to yelling at politicians' tweets and retweeting leftist propaganda. That's a good way to avoid the terrorist watch list.
This blog had a good run, and I'm very proud of it. It was a helluva lot better than that livejournal I kept in high school, jesus.
If there's one thing that can be said about the American people, it's the level of ignorance we possess over our own empire. Most of us aren't even aware the Empire exists. America has a presence in Afghanistan, and that's it! Once one mentions the drone wars Obama started throughout Africa and Southeast Asia, you're suddenly talking to a deer in headlights. 9/11 happened because terrorists just hate our freedom, not because we have military bases on holy lands.
The American people are so fucking ignorant about the world they live in because the mass media has hammered down propaganda to a science. In 1928, a man named Edward Bernays published Propaganda -- it's a practical guide on how to manipulate the masses. Really. See, the word "propaganda" at one time didn't carry all the negative connotations. It was once a very respected practice. The way Bernays himself describes it, its purpose is to convey an opinion, and it only becomes immoral once you blatantly lie. Once the war euphoria died down after World War I ended, people began to realize that they had all been duped, and they fought a war for nothing (sound familiar?). This is when people began to see propaganda for what it really was -- manipulation. Edward Bernays wrote this manual to "take back" the word, to show that it really wasn't as evil as everyone thought. He obviously wasn't successful, and the phrase "propaganda" soon had to be switched with "public relations." Bernays was kind of a propaganda guru in his day. He was responsible for the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala. He got women to smoke. The fucker knew what he was doing.
This is an extremely important book. It is the blueprint. Its techniques are still being used today. Reading how casually Bernays describes these methods, and how convinced he is that they're necessary, is chilling. It's a rare glimpse into what the 1% really thinks of us.
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time....
...It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda."
To see some of these methods in practice, we can just turn to Wikileaks. In 2010, Wikileaks leaked a CIA document describing how to keep up support for unpopular wars -- 1) instill mass apathy, just get people to stop talking about the wars, and 2) manipulate people into thinking the wars are being fought for humanitarian purposes.
Here's a link to the document, but there's no telling how long it might be up. Wikileaks has been sustaining a massive DDoS attack throughout the last week or so, and they may go down again (I'll get into this in a little bit).
Wikileaks' introduction:
This classified CIA analysis from March, outlines possible PR-strategies to shore up public support in Germany and France for a continued war in Afghanistan. After the Dutch government fell on the issue of dutch troops in Afghanistan last month, the CIA became worried that similar events could happen in the countries that post the third and fourth largest troop contingents to the ISAF-mission. The proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it is the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as for Germany’s standing in the NATO. The memo is an recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA. It is classified as Confidential / No Foreign Nationals.
Snippets from the doc:
Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission—Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough (C//NF)
The fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan demonstrates the fragility of European support for the NATO-led ISAF mission. Some NATO states, notably France and Germany, have counted on public apathy about Afghanistan to increase their contributions to the mission, but indifference might turn into active hostility if spring and summer fighting results in an upsurge in military or Afghan civilian casualties and if a Dutch style debate spills over into other states contributing troops. The Red Cell invited a CIA expert on strategic communication and analysts following public opinion at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to consider information approaches that might better link the Afghan mission to the priorities of French, German, and other Western European publics. (C//NF)
Public Apathy Enables Leaders To Ignore Voters. . . (C//NF)
The Afghanistan mission’s low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Berlin and Paris currently maintain the third and fourth highest ISAF troop levels, despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments, according to INR polling in fall 2009.
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French and German commitments to NATO are a safeguard against a precipitous departure, but leaders fearing a backlash ahead of spring regional elections might become unwilling to pay a political price for increasing troop levels or extending deployments. If domestic politics forces the Dutch to depart, politicians elsewhere might cite a precedent for “listening to the voters.” French and German leaders have over the past two years taken steps to preempt an upsurge of opposition but their vulnerability may be higher now:
To strengthen support, President Sarkozy called on the National Assembly—whose approval is not required for ISAF—to affirm the French mission after the combat deaths of 10 soldiers in August 2008. The government won the vote handily, defusing a potential crisis and giving Sarkozy cover to deploy approximately 3,000 additional troops. Sarkozy, however, may now be more vulnerable to an upsurge in casualties because his party faces key regional elections this March and the already low support for ISAF has fallen by one-third since March 2009, according to INR polling in the fall of 2009.
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So if you think it's a little odd that America has completely forgotten that it's fighting a fucking war, this may offer of a little insight. The media has gotten us to stop talking about it. These people know what they're doing. They've been perfecting it for a century.
And now we reach the purpose of this post, I'd like to bring a couple things to your attention. Barack Obama is trying to acquire the power to lock up American citizens without a trial.Nobody knows this is happening. Why? Remember back in 2002, when George Bush passed the Patriot Act? And how liberals were calling him a Nazi? Remember when Barack Obama renewed the Patriot Act with hardly a whimper? Extremism has been normalized. Obama, with a lot of help from the media, has moved the center line to George W. Bush. Once the Patriot Act became okay, things like NDAA became the next step. It's always little by little, bit by bit.
Leaked Stratfor emails just revealed that law enforcement agencies have been hiring out private companies, filled with ex-CIA, to put facial recognition technology into street cams all across the country. And when they think they're talking among themselves, they're quite casual about the actual purpose:
"they [San Francisco] need something like TrapWire more for threats from activists than from terror threats. Both are useful, but activists are ever-present around here."
Activism is terrorism. You got that? Free speech is no longer protected. That is the country we live in.
Almost immediately after Wikileaks revealed this, their website began sustain a massive DDoS attack - 10 gigabytes every second. Everyone knows who's doing it. And no one's saying a thing.
When the New York Times finally got around to covering this threat to free society, the propaganda couldn't be more apparent. They defined TrapWire as "antiterrorist software," when that's obviously not even close to what it is, it's meant to crush activism.
Right now, the NSA is quietly building the largest spy center in the country. It's going to house private emails, cellphone calls, Google searches, and after TrapWire was revealed, I'm sure human faces and information on where people have been. The NSA whistleblower who revealed all ths, William Binney, worked there for three decades. The FBI raided his home soon after he went public with this.
This government has always looked for more efficient methods to crush dissent. COINTELPRO was not a long time ago. The Bush Administration were all Nixon men, they're the same damn people. And this is their fucking golden age, because they don't have to hide in the shadows anymore. Everything they did then is now legal, and the public is too stupid to care. They can do whatever the fuck they want, and no one's going to raise a finger.
I don't know how the fuck we're supposed fight this. Whenever I try mentioning it to anyone, I'm always met with "HURF DURF BUT THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE AMERICA'S FREE STOP BEING A CONSPIRACY THEORIST THAT'S STUPID" and they go back to circlejerking around the left/right red/blue game. Say what you want about the immorality of propaganda, but you can't say it doesn't work. As long as the media guides public opinion, the American people will always be trapped focusing on bullshit issues like some rich fuck's taxes, or gossip around some extremist VP pick. They're nothing but distractions, and they fucking work. I'd guess at least 80% of the public doesn't have damn clue about anything I just said. And with the propaganda system as powerful as it, there is no possible way to inform them. I have absolutely zero hope for this country's future.
