Gaza Is The Single Defining Feature Of This Political Moment In The US: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

“I’m not a big fan of that presidential candidate’s pro-genocide policies, but I like her positions on women’s reproductive healthcare” is not the sort of thing that would be said in a sane and normal country.

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The single defining feature of this political moment in the United States is that all major presidential candidates favor continuing the perpetration of an active genocide — and that everyone’s trying to tap dance around this issue.

That’s it. That’s the main story here. It’s not “American democracy is on the line in this election.” It’s not “Making America great again” or “Taking back our country” or “Fighting the woke agenda” or any of that braindead nonsense. The main story is that an actual genocide is scheduled to continue no matter whom Americans elect, and everyone’s meant to just ignore that point as though it’s some small insignificant quibble and focus on the candidates’ positions on other issues like immigration reform and student loan debt forgiveness.

The main story is this mind-warpingly insane situation in which progressive-minded Americans now find themselves saying plainly ridiculous things like “Gosh I’m not crazy about this candidate’s pro-genocide policies, but I really like what she’s saying about tax credits for low and middle income families!” It’s that right wingers are now forced to adopt the position “Yeehaw, Trump’s gonna end the wars and bring our troops home and Make America Great Again, right after he helps Israel defeat Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and oh yeah, also Iran.” It’s that independents are saying “RFK Jr is going to dismantle the war machine while simultaneously backing a genocide and pledging ‘unconditional support’ for the front-line aggressor in today’s major conflicts throughout the middle east.”

That’s what all the headlines should be about. Not how Trump’s 2024 campaign strategy differs from his other presidential runs. Not the ways Kamala should go after him in their first debate. The main story in US politics is the fact that there’s a genocide happening which all viable candidates support, and that an entire country is trying to find ways to psychologically compartmentalize around this horrifying fact.

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You can’t “lesser evil” a genocide. That’s not a thing. Past a certain line a candidate is just plain evil, and if genocide is not on the other side of that line for you, then it no longer makes sense for you to talk about “evil” — or any other moral distinction for that matter. By framing the single worst thing a leader can do as a forgivable infraction, you have made all moral distinctions nonsensical. You live your life with your head in a moral universe where good and bad have no meaning apart from your feelings and how things make you feel.

You can say you’re voting for your preferred genocidal monster because you feel a preference for that genocidal monster’s positions on healthcare or gun control or whatever, but what you can’t do is fool anyone who has their eyes open into believing you are siding with any kind of “lesser evil”. Once you’ve crossed into the same kind of moral landscape that would argue for supporting Six-Headed Hitler to stop Seven-Headed Hitler, you’re no longer standing in a landscape where it makes sense to talk about good and evil.

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The closer we get to the November election the clearer it will become which American lefties have been using the word “genocide” sincerely and which have been using it solely to gain acceptance and approval in leftist circles.

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What makes watching the Gaza genocide so much more awful is remembering how nobody suffered any consequences for the invasion of Iraq. Everything just went back to the same dystopian “normal”, despite our just having watched them lie the world into an unforgivable mass atrocity with the full complicity of our news media. It was like a family watching a father casually behead his daughter over Thursday night dinner, and then everyone just returning to their meal and going on as though nothing had happened.

And realistically that’s what we can expect to see after this horror as well. Israel will keep all the material gains it made from its crimes in Gaza, just as the US did in Iraq. Biden will die peacefully in his bed surrounded by loved ones, as will Netanyahu, when neither of these monsters have any business dying anywhere outside a prison cell in The Hague. All the war crimes, all the lies, all the mass media propaganda and distortions, will all likely go completely unpunished, and then the empire will go on to its next unfathomable evil.

This will be the case until the people get fed up enough to use the power of their numbers to force drastic changes to the systems which organize this civilization. Until then, none of the world’s worst people will be in prison. The law will exist not to protect us from the worst of our society, but to protect the worst of our society from us.

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

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/gaza-is-the-single-defining-feature