“Never Again!” Cried The Israeli While Doing It Again: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

I’ll condemn Hamas as soon as you can tell me what the Palestinians should do instead besides lay down and die. Produce a coherent plan for Palestinian liberation that (A) doesn’t involve violence, (B) would be effective, (C) is just, and (D) isn’t naive or moronic. Then talk to me.

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My favorite October 7 atrocity propaganda lie is the one where Hamas cut off a woman’s breast and played a game of football with it, because only a weird Israeli incel who’s never touched a breast could possibly come up with something so anatomically impossible.

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Some good news: The Grayzone reports that journalist Jeremy Loffredo has been released after three days being detained by Israeli police. Police are still holding his passport and forbidding him to leave the country until October 20th while they look through his phone. Let’s keep an eye on this story.

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We are led by the absolute worst of us. This past year has been a nonstop reminder of this. When western governments support and defend a live-streamed genocide, you know for certain that we are led by the very cruelest and most psychopathically deranged people in our society.

The individuals who are making the most consequential decisions about the direction that human civilization will take on this planet are the individuals who are the least qualified to do so. The absolute least qualified. Any random person walking by you on the sidewalk would be more likely to make decisions which benefit humanity if given control over our world than the people who currently have control over it.

We are ruled by the worst among us, and the worst among us do everything they can to make sure that only they get to rule. The normal, healthy desires of normal, healthy people are at all times being subverted and undermined to ensure that our votes don’t make a difference, that our voices have minimal impact, and that everyone is constantly ingesting a feed of information which is tailored to advance the information interests of the psychopaths in charge.

It isn’t just our right to overthrow such a system, it is our duty. We owe it to the world. We owe it to the people of the global south who are constantly being butchered, brutalized and exploited by the perverse, unwholesome will of our rulers. We owe it to all the nonhuman organisms with whom we share this planet who are being driven to extinction by the ecocidal economic and political systems our rulers keep in place.

We are entitled to overthrow these monsters, and they are not entitled to try to stop us. They are the very worst among us. They deserve nothing but the end of their rule.

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Normal person: It’s wrong to murder children by the thousands and bomb hospitals and assassinate journalists and rape and torture prisoners and deliberately target civilian infrastructure.

Crazy person: But a bad thing happened a year ago.

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“Never again!” cried the Israeli while doing it again.

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Some more good news: The UK has denied the request from Ukraine’s President Zelensky to use long-range British weapons for attacks deep into Russian territory. Apparently Russia’s warnings were enough to make London step back from the brink. Now all we need to worry about is Washington and the rest of NATO crossing that red line.

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Bob Woodward’s new book says that at one point in 2022 US intelligence assessed that the odds of Russia using a nuclear weapon over the war in Ukraine was as high as fifty percent. They knowingly gambled the life of every terrestrial organism on coin-toss odds.

This should be a criminal offense of the very highest order. It’s a crime against humanity. A crime against life itself.

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Remember how the US media spent years fixating on an imaginary conspiracy between Trump and Putin? New York Times sources say the US intelligence cartel calculated that they could use media pressure to help pave the way to their planned aggressions against Moscow.

Buried deep in an article published last week titled “Behind Trump’s Views on Ukraine: Putin’s Gambit and a Political Grudge,” The New York Times reports the following:

“From the perspective of U.S. intelligence officers who operated against the Russians, stories in the press about Mr. Trump’s seeming embrace of Mr. Putin and interest in improving relations with the Russians provided a convenient cover for what they were doing behind the scenes to counter Moscow.”

So that’s strongly validating for those of us who’ve been saying this the entire time.

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Gaza is such a great example of both the power of narrative control and of its limits. The power of narrative control has manufactured consent for history’s first live-streamed genocide with many obvious evils, but those obvious evils have also shaken a lot of people awake.

It speaks to the power of narrative control that anyone can be persuaded to believe dropping massive military explosives on areas that are densely populated with children is good and acceptable. It is only by weaving a tapestry of stories about October 7 atrocities and anti-semitism and self-defense and terrorism that anyone can think something so self-evidently evil is actually fine. Humans are storytelling animals whose lives are dominated by mental narrative, so if you can get them to believe absurd narratives, you can get them to espouse absurd positions and absurd worldviews.

But it also speaks to the limitations of the power of narrative control that people are seeing through the stories. There are only so many dead kids you can see, so many screaming mothers and weeping fathers clutching tiny shredded bodies, so many bombed-out hospitals and desperate, starving civilians, before you snap out of your propaganda-induced coma with a start and go “Wait a second — this is evil! Have they been lying to me this whole entire time?? Oh my god, what if everything I’ve been taught about the world is a lie?”

Both Israel and the US-centralized empire understand the power of narrative control. That’s why Israel and its apologists have the concept of “hasbara”, and it’s why the US empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed. But it has its limits, and people are beginning to wake up from the delusions instilled by imperial narrative control.

If enough people wake up from the propaganda, the possibility for real revolutionary change opens up. That’s why Israel and the US empire pour so much energy into reinforcing the bars on the cage of the narrative matrix. If enough of us can wake each other up to reality, it’s over for them. And they know it.

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

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/never-again-cried-the-israeli-while