Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

I used to be able to write individual articles about the individual bad things the US empire is involved in around the world. These days I’m increasingly finding it necessary to cram a bunch of them into a single daily write-up to touch on as many of them as I can, just to stay on top of things. Reading by Tim Foley.

That’s the trajectory the US empire has us on. An active genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the threat of another extermination campaign in Lebanon, and acceleration toward a direct war of unimaginable horror with Iran. Reading by Tim Foley.

On this day in particular, I would like to express my deepest sympathies for the victims of Israeli murderousness over the past year. Reading by Tim Foley.

I am at risk of getting banned from both Instagram and Facebook as both Meta-owned platforms keep censoring my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon, placing strikes on my accounts in the process. Reading by Tim Foley. Article version: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/meta-is-aggressively-censoring-criticism

Iran is not my enemy. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are not my enemies. My enemies are the western imperialists and their Israeli partners in crime who are inflicting a waking nightmare upon the middle east and working to start a massive new war of unfathomable horror. Reading by Tim Foley.

Our real enemies are not in Iran. Our real enemies are not in Lebanon. Our real enemies are not in Gaza or the West Bank. Our real enemies are not in Yemen, Syria, or Iraq. Our real enemies are in Washington and London and Tel Aviv. In Berlin and Paris and Canberra. In secretive government agencies in the state of Virginia, and in imperial propaganda institutions in New York and Hollywood. Our real enemies are not the Arabs and the Iranians, they’re the managers of empire who are ruining our world, destroying our biosphere, siphoning our wealth and our resources, threatening us with nuclear brinkmanship, and making sure we stay too poor, sick, busy and brainwashed to figure out what’s going on and take a stand against them. Reading by Tim Foley.

Hezbollah is killing Israeli soldiers who are invading their country while Israeli soldiers are deliberately killing women and children and medical staff and journalists. Guess which side the west calls terrorists. Reading by Tim Foley.

Reading by Tim Foley.

“Israeli warmongering isn’t getting worse and worse because the Biden administration can’t control Israel, it’s getting worse and worse because the Biden administration knowingly refuses to make use of the control that it has.” Reading by Tim Foley.

I hate when people say “Bah the middle east has always been at war, it’s just how they are.” No you asshole, it’s been at war because of western interventionism and Israel. Sure it was at war before Israel, but so was the entirety of Europe throughout its entire history. The only reason the rest of the world got to cool down a bit after the world wars while the middle east remained embroiled in violence and chaos was because the west inserted this alien splinter of settler-colonialism into the region while constantly deliberately fomenting war and unrest. There’s nothing freakish or unusual about the middle east or Islam that makes its people violent, it just happens to be where a lot of the oil is, so the west keeps poking and prodding it to ensure that it’s always divided against itself and dominated by western-friendly dictators. That’s all we’ve been looking at there. Reading by Tim Foley.

So it turns out the Iron Dome is mostly narrative, just like everything else about Israel. Reading by Tim Foley.

As Israel begins another invasion of Lebanon, Australian officials from both sides of the imaginary partisan divide have been falling all over themselves to get Australians punished for speech crimes about the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah. Reading by Tim Foley.

"Good westerners don’t start off hating Israel, but, if they are truly good, they end up hating Israel. A sincere dedication to truth, justice and kindness can only lead one to view the Zionist project with complete revulsion after learning the facts about what it really is, what it really does, and why our western governments really support it." Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel isn’t killing all these people because it was attacked, Israel is killing all these people because it was given an excuse. Israel has always wanted to grab more land and eliminate the populations who oppose it. It’s using the political moment that October 7 gave it to roll out agendas it has wanted to roll out for generations. Israel has been squeezing and squeezing and squeezing its targets for generation after generation waiting for them to push back sufficiently to hand them an excuse. Reading by Tim Foley.

You can see that the Biden administration is a willing participant in all this bloodshed by simply ignoring their words and their narrative spin and watching their actions instead. While the mass media publish White House press releases disguised as news stories about the president's feelings and celebrity progressives assure us that this administration is "working tirelessly for a ceasefire," the Israeli Defense Ministry is announcing that it has secured another $8.7 billion in military aid from the US. Reading by Tim Foley. Article with supporting links: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/ignore-their-words-watch-their-actions

How bizarre is it that our entire civilization is structured around values and priorities which are so fake and ridiculous that ingesting an ancient psychedelic potion causes even wealthy CEOs to quit their jobs and change their lives? Reading by Tim Foley.

The Israeli military says it’s preparing a ground offensive in Lebanon as it continues to hammer its neighbor to the north with bombs. Which of course means we’ll be hearing a lot of anxious hand-wringing from the western political-media class about “antisemitism” in the coming weeks. We know we’ll be hearing a lot more about antisemitism because that’s what always happens whenever Israel does something profoundly evil. People start objecting to its atrocities and demanding that their government stop facilitating them, and the imperial spinmeisters start framing these objections as a frightening rise in anti-Jewish bigotry in order to delegitimize and silence them. Reading by Tim Foley.

It is obviously false to say the US seeks peace in the middle east, but it’s not really accurate to say it seeks war either. To me that would be like saying water seeks wetness or fire seeks heat. War is just what the US empire is made of. It’s the thing that it is. Reading by Tim Foley.

This is what happens when you don't prosecute your war criminals. Blinken lied to congress that Israel wasn't assessed to have been blocking aid when both USAID and the State Department's refugees bureau had indeed assessed that the Israeli government is doing precisely that, because he knew he'd never be jailed for lying in facilitation of horrific war crimes. Reading by Tim Foley.

Now that Israel has ramped up its attacks on Lebanon, the IDF is saying that Hezbollah are hiding missiles in civilian homes. So I guess we’re doing this again. If you liked “All the civilian buildings are Khamas,” you’ll love Israel’s new hit “All the civilian buildings are Khezbollah.” Reading by Tim Foley.