You cannot defeat the machine by yourself, but you can do something every day to help tilt our society’s collective consciousness toward tearing it down together.

Caitlin Johnstone

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

 

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Do something every day to help undermine public perception of the empire.

Draw attention to its abuses in places like Gaza.

Get people laughing at its absurdities and hypocrisies.

Spread distrust in the imperial propaganda services known as the western press by spotlighting their deceptions and manipulations.

Help people to recognize all the ways their government is screwing them over for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

Facilitate the collective dawning of the realization that everything westerners have been taught about their society and their world is a lie.

Help people to understand that it really, truly does not need to be this way.

Use every means at your disposal to help open up the next pair of eyelids to the ugly reality of the empire.

Cultivate a habit of daily acts of sabotage against the imperial machine. There is always something you can do.

You cannot defeat the machine by yourself, but you can do something every day to help tilt our society’s collective consciousness toward tearing it down together.

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I still can’t get over how we’re being asked to pretend “Death, death to the IDF” is some kind of hate crime at the exact same time IDF soldiers are telling the Israeli press they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians at aid sites.

I’ve been seeing a number of people arguing that it’s wrong to say “death to the IDF” because soldiers aren’t to be blamed for the criminality of their government. This framing is only accepted in the west because western soldiers also do evil things that our society needs to make up excuses for.

As an aside, “Death, death to the IDF” is an insanely catchy earworm. Been dancing around in my mind all day.

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Deliberately starving a civilian population and then setting up aid sites as a death trap to massacre starving people trying to get food is too evil to wrap your mind around. If we saw a supervillain doing this in a movie we’d think it was dumb, because it wouldn’t be believable.

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It’s like everyone’s standing around watching a man beat a small child to death at a restaurant.

“Should we do something?” someone asks.

“You saw the kid throw food at the guy,” someone replies. “The man has a right to defend himself.”

“But he’s killing him!”

“It’s a fight. Bad things happen in a fight.”

“Yeah, the boy shouldn’t have started a fight he can’t win.”

“You’re actually being quite hateful right now.”

And sure, maybe it’s true the child did set the man off by throwing food at him.

Maybe the child did so fully knowing that it would send the man into a murderous rage, because the man had been horrifically abusing the child his entire life.

Maybe instigating a physical confrontation in full view of the public was the child’s last desperate attempt to expose the man’s depravity, in the hope that everyone would finally see what’s happening and do something to stop the abuse.

But nobody’s stopping it, because the man has spent years charming and befriending everyone in town — or frightening and intimidating them if that’s easier.

So now everyone’s watching a grown man beat a child to death and pretending they’re watching a fight, when they all know deep down what they’re really watching is a cold-blooded murder by a cold-hearted man, who should have been stopped and locked away a long time ago.

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The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency is saying that Iran could probably start enriching uranium again within a few months, which Iran has said it plans to do, and which Trump has said will result in another US bombing assault.

Trumpers tried to argue that the bombing of Iran was a brilliant strategic maneuver to avoid full-scale war, when it appears to have only made such a war much more likely. Now the president is saying he’ll bomb Iran again if it resumes enriching uranium, something it will probably be able to do quite soon, after giving Iran every reason to start actively seeking a nuclear weapon.

When Iran hawks were arguing against the JCPOA (the Iran nuclear deal laid out during the Obama administration), one of their most common talking points was that it was “kicking the can down the road” to a nuclear-armed Iran in the future. In reality the JCPOA was a remarkable feat of international diplomacy that could have avoided all these needless escalations, and it is Trump and the Iran hawks who have been kicking the can down the road to full-scale war with Iran (if Iran doesn’t get nukes first).

There’s a lot to despise Trump for, but spending both of his terms setting the US on a trajectory toward war with Iran ranks right up around the top of the list. The JCPOA was working fine, but Trump shredded it in 2018 to set us on this path that is only getting darker and darker at a faster and faster pace. Trump chose that course of action to implement his “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran. Trump chose to assassinate Soleimani. Trump chose to bomb Iran. Everything that happens from here on out is Trump’s fault.

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