Although I read this article yesterday, it is still as horrifying upon reading today.
Whatever feelings one has for Germans alive during the Third Reich, similar thoughts will exist for Israelis and the populations of Western States today in another 70 years.
I can't see attacking Chris Hedges for writing in deep pain about the monsters in the Zionist government and us, the enablers in the west, committing horrific pain to innocent people in Gaza! There are many things wrong in our world, but right now we have to try anything to see the crime as it is, dump the propaganda put out by our rotten MSM and israel, in the trash, AND STOP THE GENOCIDE! I feel horrible day after day about the Zionist's terror in Gaza... I know only one thing: No stopping of resistance until it ends, and afterwards to make life as difficult as possible for the zionist criminals- never stopping until THEY end. - Thanks, Chris! It's painful reading, but for me would be just too painful to write. Still hoping!
At the same time that Israel betrays the Holocaust, American support for the Israeli genocide also repeats the genocide of indigenous north Americans that the United States orchestrated over the course of centuries. Both patterns appear to be enabled by a profound ignorance of U.S. history among Americans. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/indigenous-lives-matter-from-north
Chris, two of my Polish Jew ancestors migrated to America in the late 1800s, and the rest remained in Poland and they and their descendants were killed by the Nazis. My Polish great grandfather married a Southern Baptist lady, and although he did not convert, they raised their children in the Baptist church, and that was how their descendants went about it. So, I do not consider myself Jewish, and I do not carry the Holocaust terror in my psyche, which every Jew I have known did.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is reprehensible, but it is not what Hitler and his mesmerized Nazis, condoned by the mesmerized German citizens, in the main, did to the European Jews. Hamas buried itself into Gaza, and it hides behind and underneath the people of Gaza, who cope with or condone Hamas. The only way Israel can fight Hamas is the way it is doing it now. I hate it, but I’m looking at it from a purely military standpoint. In doing that, I also say there is no way Israel can beat Hamas in Gaza, because Hamas is so dug in there, and so well prepared, and Israel is not prepared to lose a lot of its soldiers there, and IDF goes into the Baza neighborhoods, fighting hand to had from building to building, and in the tunnels, IDF will lost a lot of soldiers.
I think President Biden should be hanged for not cutting off money and weapons and munitions to Israel, after he saw what was happening in Gaza. But who’s going to hang President Biden for that, when half of America is fully being Israel, and about the same number of Americans will try to overthrow the American government, if it hangs Donald Trump?
There also is the problem that America stockpiled a huge quantify of weapons and munitions in Israel,for America’s military to use in war zones in the Middle East, and Israel has access to those weapons and munition stockpiles and is drawing on them and there is nothing America can do to stop it. There is the other problem that Israel has nuclear weapons, which everyone who isn’t totally unwoke knows Israel will use against Islamic countries and organizations, which Israel feels threatens its very existence.
It’s a really fucked up mess, and, there is another piece to it, which I have yet to see you address in your ongoing assault of Israel. Which is, Hamas’s original charter identifies it as an Islamic entity, and that its reason for being was to destroy Israel. Hamas’s amended charter, using less direct words, calls for the same thing, all in the name of the peaceful religion of Islam, which isn’t even peaceful within itself.
Only the unwoke cannot, or will not see, that Hamas figured out now to punch all of the buttons in Israel’s religious fanatic leaders, and that was the October 7 attack. The reaction of Israel’s political leaders and IDF was precisely what Hamas hoped would happen. Unable to beat Israel militarily, Hamas hoped to bait Israel into destroying its reputation worldwide, and in that Hamas has succeeded, except in the American right, whose leader, Donald Trump, has told Israel that he is their best friend.
Palestine is Christendom’s so-called Holy Land, and the American right will not stand for America abandoning Israel, and every American president candidate knows that all too well. This war dates all the way back to Abraham, and that’s why there is no military solution, and probably no solution, and why America should abandon Israel, but Ameria won’t do that. It’s a shame America did not offer the WWII European Jewish refugees sanctuary in America.
The only solution I see now is for America to offer Israel sanctuary in America. But I can’t imagine Israel going along with it, nor can imagine America offering it, because there would be a huge political backlash. And, the American Christian right wants Israel to stay where it is, doing what it is doing, protecting the so-called holy land from Islam, because that’s where Jesus was born, and that is where Jewish leaders had Jesus crucified. And because, a lot of the American right are as biased against Jews as against blacks and other people of color. They want an Ayyan nation, and if you don’t believe it, look at photos and film footage of MAGA rallies and the January 6 insurrection and the Charlottesville rally,, and you will see oceans of white people.
Therefore, Chris, I hope you will devote some of your time and experience to writing about that, and the very really possibility of a second civil war in America, whose military is full of MAGAS and Aryans, etc., who won’t for a heartbeat fight against Donald Trump, who wants to be just as powerful in America as Adolph Hitler was in Germany, and Vladimir Putin is in Russia.
No solution to this...the human race is a badly programmed animal. Too bad evolution didn't stop with the monkeys; then there would not be the ruination of the earth. Soon China will bring Taiwan back into the fold like they did HongKong. And, N. Korea will bomb S. Korea. Thugs taking over African countries and forget Honduras...already a hellhole. I am fortunate to be 84 and leaving this mess which I forecast many decades ago. There is no way 10 billion people can live peacefully on this poor planet.
Meanwhile, I wonder if paid subscriptions to Chris’s newsletter increased after he started bashing Israel and President Biden and America and giving Hamas and Islam a pass?
I wonder if your newsletter subscription revenues increased while you bashed Israel, President Biden and America, and gave Hamas and Islam a free pass?
Butz (my comment of Jan 2) has a first rate scientific mind, Sloan, and his 600 page book seemed carefully researched. Finkelstein references holocaustianity as America's new mandatory religion--much to gain from enforcing a narrative of deep victimhood., wihich Morgenthau and his group had in mind, when they put wartime propaganda on steroids, with tortured witnesses, bogus documents, twisted language, etc. You can help out, by pointing to scholars with hard science credentials in the same league as Butz, who support the Morgenthau work product.
I live in Birmingham, Alabama, which is surrounded by a sea of red spectrum folks, and, even though I am not a blue spectrum person, either, I am acutely aware of both sides’ psychologies, religious and social perspectives and mis-perspectives. I was raised in Christendom, in Birmingham. As I grew older, I came to understand it is very difficult, if not impossible, to change religious people’s views, and there is no point in trying to change religious fanatics’ views. And, that’s what people like Hedges and Morgenthau, and perhaps you, are up against in America and Israel and Hamas - religious fanatics. Science and logic have zero chance against religious fanatics. If you don’t believe me, then I doubt there is anything I can say or point to in the history of humanity that will change your mind. I’m not trying to pick a fight. I hate what is going on in Palestine.
I wish Israel had never been created. It was a really stupid mistake, given the religious history of that region. But Israel was made a state, and Israel has nuclear weapons and a huge stockpile of American weapons, which America stored in Israel for the American military to draw upon, and it looks like Israel and Iran are now close to being at war, and America surely will side with Israel in such a war, and Caitlin and just about every person I have discussed this with in this forum, for weeks, still defend Hamas, whose first and second charters clearly show the Islamic Hamas mission is to destroy Israel. So, I come back around to my dystopian scientific and biblical suggestion that Israel does the world a favor by detonating its nukes in Israel and making Palestine inhabitable and the three Abrahamic religions have to find another so-called holy land to fight over.
Meanwhile, I’m watching up close and personal an America where it is not going to be safe to speak out against Donald Trump and the Republican Party, if Trump gets reelected in 2024, and not even if he doesn’t get elected. The American right are armed to the teeth, thanks to the NRA and the US Supreme Court’s imbecilic view of Amendment 2, which is predicated on a well regulated militia, which does not exist in America. Just as bad, the American military is well represented by MAGAs and Aryans and Proud Boys, etc. The military has lots of Crips and Bloods and their competitors. If another Jan 6 happens, there is no telling how that will go. I’m 81, and it’s my children and their families I worry for in a future America. I wish Caitlin and Hedges would turn their attention to that, perhaps they might have an impact in America.
I continue to wonder if Hedge’s and Caitlin’s subscription revenues increased after the Oct 7 attack, and if so, did they donate their “war profits” to the beleaguered people in Gaza?
Hedges now desperately clings to the Gaza and Assange stories to divert attention away from the battle here in the U.S. between the working class - his working class and the DS ...
An unemployed, divorced mother of 4 never gives a thought to Gaza, Assange or CIA corruption, and Hedges knows it! ... but these are his "bread and butter" issues that protect his place in the independent media food chain ... he has chosen to double down on the ISR-PAL conflict instead ... he has now devoted more words to the plight of the Palestinians than he ever has about those of us who are being crushed by COVID tyranny here in America ... he now seems hell bent on milking the Gaza genocide for all it's worth ... ya see, it's just too risky to stand with us ...
And after urging us to confront tyranny for the past two decades, Hedges deserted us by throwing the working class under the bus with COVID ... he refused to stand with us against the illegal and unconstitutional mandates and passports, and just 30 days after the explosive DEC 2, 2021 FDA FOIA release. he also told his avid followers that the pandemic and mutations cannot be stopped until "everyone gets vaccinated" ... and in the same breath, openly admitted that he "does not trust Moderna or Phizer" ...
These are not the lessons one learns at Harvard Divinity School ...
This will not sate Netanyahu's blood thirst. He and the Likud are consummate evil; period. This is not solely about Hamas. It also is about vengeance fueled by Israel's hate for the Palestinians (Arabs). With full suppport from the U.S., the U.S. is complicit in this slaughter of the innocents. Repatriating Palestinians from their own homeland to other countries? WOW. Putin all over again,, who repatriated Ukrainians (including children). Israel is reported to have killed nearly 8,000 children. All under the umbrella of going after Hamas. All the while, Netanyahu flips the bird to the world saying, "Try and stop me!"
WOW! FANTASTIC, if heart-wrenching article... thanks Chris. Beautifully read by Eunice Wong. what we are witnessing LIVE 24/7 leaves us shaking in disbelief and horror. Humanity's moral compass is broken 😭💔
Thank you Chris, for bringing this dark side to consciousness. And thank you to Bill Apgood and Red Brown (from the first printed post of this essay) for your compassionate and insightful comments. I too feel there is a vast difference between a collective entity's capacity for evil, especially at the multinational level built upon corrupt political structures overrun by politicians of whom some are clearly narcissists and sociopaths who have bought their way to the top and then do the bidding of the conscienceless (by nature, committed only to profit) military industrial corporate colonial structures of Empire; and between the capacity for evil amongst the vast range of individuals. Some individuals are highly conscious and morally & ethically developed while at the other end are individuals who are deeply unconscious and bound to the collective through their subcultures, unhealed wounds and traumas, authoritarian or abusive upbringing (as Alice Miller documents Hitler's childhood, and is also true of Trump's childhood), etc.
As Chris brings in, Imagination is also so critical - the ability to imagine and feel what another is going through. Ever since the scientific revolution in the 1500's, the imagination has been increasingly denigrated and ignored, left to the poets and artists, leaving a gaping hole that separates mind from heart. That, along with the steady undermining for two thousand years of the feminine values of heart and relationship and any form of dependency/inter-dependency, making women and children much more expendable, and have now brought the powers that be in this country to the point of pitting women against their own creative bodies. This trajectory cannot go on. And it is a part of what is trying to become conscious, is waking up, through the terrible heartbreaking martyrdom of the Gazans/Palestinians who have been brutally subjugated, ethnically cleansed and held in captivity and total dependency since 1947.
In this country people are controlled by the media's propaganda, left or right. Hitler took over the media early on in his ascent. A majority of people - who are not taught to creatively or critically think in our school system - believe what they read and are told. Some, as among people I know, have not wanted to know more than the mainstream media tells them for many different reasons - because they are afraid it will shatter their world, because they do not yet have the capacity to face true evil (some being young, some with small children, some sitting on unhealed trauma in themselves) etc. But that does not make them evil or capable of becoming "Nazi's." It makes them human on the human journey of finding and developing the strength within themselves, doing the healing work we all seem to need in this harsh modern western world, or developing the maturity from life experience, to bear brutal truths and become capable of bearing witness to suffering, loss and despair on the scale the Palestinians are experiencing. Most that I know are essentially good, caring people in various helping professions.
I feel some despair in this last essay, along with Chris's unfailing heartfelt wisdom and devotion to speaking truth, and we are probably all feeling it. It made me think that one cost and danger of bearing witness to the despair growing in the people of Gaza and Palestine and in each of us as the horror of this genocide continues on and on unstopped by those who could stop it, is of spiraling into that despair. Like being thrown down into Plato's Cave where all we then see is the darkness and the shadows on the walls. But despair needs to be resisted. That state of mind begins to weave narratives where all people become seen as capable of becoming monsters, as Nazi's, when in truth they are not. All Germans were not Nazis. There was ongoing German underground resistance as there was the Abolitionist Underground Railroad in the U.S..
The American media focuses increasingly on the negative, the dark, the sensational, on the newest "terrorist" enemy - A war economy needs people to distrust each other and be afraid. What if our media focused first and for most on all the good in this world, on the countless number of ordinary people doing good daily, selflessly, as we see happens after every natural disaster. What a different world we would live in!
The Light in this world, of this world, far exceeds the Darkness. In the Gnostic Islamic traditions they speak of two darknesses. There is the darkness, the blackness, that holds the light captive (physically, say like lead, or as states such as deliberate hatred, vengeance and cruelty for example, but so are despair and hopelessness, though to a lesser extent because they are born of compassion, phases with light at the end of those dark tunnels). And then there is the "Luminous Black," likened to the stars in the night sky overhead by which humans have oriented ourselves for thousands of years, the light in the dark ("Light upon Light" - 24th Sura an-Nur of the Qur'an). There is nothing more powerful than the Luminous Black, which is also called the Midnight Sun forever residing within the human heart. This is the light we must seek and hold for the Palestinians when they cannot, as they go through this tragic and horrific and heartbreaking long long dark night! They need this.
I was surprised that Chris appears to concede the cabalistic 6 million figure, or the credibiity of the narrative as a whole. MIT grad and tenured electrical engineering prof at Northwestern, Arthur Butz, thoroughly debunked the Nuremburg trials, and thus virtually all the “evidence” of the holocaust, in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. 4 editions, half a mil copies sold. Abbet Rosen, long term ex dir of the Chicago ADL, wrote a strong endorsement of over a page, but that has fallen down the memory hole. Amaxon BANNED the book in 2016, along with about 70 others.
Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, and Sen Robt Taft sharply criticized the trials as a fraud, and terrible black mark on American jurisprudential history. “Stranglehold” on the media, per Pres Nixon and Billy Graham in their White House meeting.
I remember the Catholic Riots in Havana Cuba when Jewish refugees were looking for refuge and Lord Beaverbroook, Roosevelt and Mackenzie King said we don't want any damn Jews on OUR soil and that was the entire globe and six million Jews died in Hitler's final solution.
That was Christendom's Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.
I have nothing but contempt for America's profession of innocence.
I can't imagine a poorer apologist than Chris Hedges for American amorality.
Although I read this article yesterday, it is still as horrifying upon reading today.
Whatever feelings one has for Germans alive during the Third Reich, similar thoughts will exist for Israelis and the populations of Western States today in another 70 years.
I can't see attacking Chris Hedges for writing in deep pain about the monsters in the Zionist government and us, the enablers in the west, committing horrific pain to innocent people in Gaza! There are many things wrong in our world, but right now we have to try anything to see the crime as it is, dump the propaganda put out by our rotten MSM and israel, in the trash, AND STOP THE GENOCIDE! I feel horrible day after day about the Zionist's terror in Gaza... I know only one thing: No stopping of resistance until it ends, and afterwards to make life as difficult as possible for the zionist criminals- never stopping until THEY end. - Thanks, Chris! It's painful reading, but for me would be just too painful to write. Still hoping!
At the same time that Israel betrays the Holocaust, American support for the Israeli genocide also repeats the genocide of indigenous north Americans that the United States orchestrated over the course of centuries. Both patterns appear to be enabled by a profound ignorance of U.S. history among Americans. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/indigenous-lives-matter-from-north
Chris, two of my Polish Jew ancestors migrated to America in the late 1800s, and the rest remained in Poland and they and their descendants were killed by the Nazis. My Polish great grandfather married a Southern Baptist lady, and although he did not convert, they raised their children in the Baptist church, and that was how their descendants went about it. So, I do not consider myself Jewish, and I do not carry the Holocaust terror in my psyche, which every Jew I have known did.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is reprehensible, but it is not what Hitler and his mesmerized Nazis, condoned by the mesmerized German citizens, in the main, did to the European Jews. Hamas buried itself into Gaza, and it hides behind and underneath the people of Gaza, who cope with or condone Hamas. The only way Israel can fight Hamas is the way it is doing it now. I hate it, but I’m looking at it from a purely military standpoint. In doing that, I also say there is no way Israel can beat Hamas in Gaza, because Hamas is so dug in there, and so well prepared, and Israel is not prepared to lose a lot of its soldiers there, and IDF goes into the Baza neighborhoods, fighting hand to had from building to building, and in the tunnels, IDF will lost a lot of soldiers.
I think President Biden should be hanged for not cutting off money and weapons and munitions to Israel, after he saw what was happening in Gaza. But who’s going to hang President Biden for that, when half of America is fully being Israel, and about the same number of Americans will try to overthrow the American government, if it hangs Donald Trump?
There also is the problem that America stockpiled a huge quantify of weapons and munitions in Israel,for America’s military to use in war zones in the Middle East, and Israel has access to those weapons and munition stockpiles and is drawing on them and there is nothing America can do to stop it. There is the other problem that Israel has nuclear weapons, which everyone who isn’t totally unwoke knows Israel will use against Islamic countries and organizations, which Israel feels threatens its very existence.
It’s a really fucked up mess, and, there is another piece to it, which I have yet to see you address in your ongoing assault of Israel. Which is, Hamas’s original charter identifies it as an Islamic entity, and that its reason for being was to destroy Israel. Hamas’s amended charter, using less direct words, calls for the same thing, all in the name of the peaceful religion of Islam, which isn’t even peaceful within itself.
Only the unwoke cannot, or will not see, that Hamas figured out now to punch all of the buttons in Israel’s religious fanatic leaders, and that was the October 7 attack. The reaction of Israel’s political leaders and IDF was precisely what Hamas hoped would happen. Unable to beat Israel militarily, Hamas hoped to bait Israel into destroying its reputation worldwide, and in that Hamas has succeeded, except in the American right, whose leader, Donald Trump, has told Israel that he is their best friend.
Palestine is Christendom’s so-called Holy Land, and the American right will not stand for America abandoning Israel, and every American president candidate knows that all too well. This war dates all the way back to Abraham, and that’s why there is no military solution, and probably no solution, and why America should abandon Israel, but Ameria won’t do that. It’s a shame America did not offer the WWII European Jewish refugees sanctuary in America.
The only solution I see now is for America to offer Israel sanctuary in America. But I can’t imagine Israel going along with it, nor can imagine America offering it, because there would be a huge political backlash. And, the American Christian right wants Israel to stay where it is, doing what it is doing, protecting the so-called holy land from Islam, because that’s where Jesus was born, and that is where Jewish leaders had Jesus crucified. And because, a lot of the American right are as biased against Jews as against blacks and other people of color. They want an Ayyan nation, and if you don’t believe it, look at photos and film footage of MAGA rallies and the January 6 insurrection and the Charlottesville rally,, and you will see oceans of white people.
Therefore, Chris, I hope you will devote some of your time and experience to writing about that, and the very really possibility of a second civil war in America, whose military is full of MAGAS and Aryans, etc., who won’t for a heartbeat fight against Donald Trump, who wants to be just as powerful in America as Adolph Hitler was in Germany, and Vladimir Putin is in Russia.
No solution to this...the human race is a badly programmed animal. Too bad evolution didn't stop with the monkeys; then there would not be the ruination of the earth. Soon China will bring Taiwan back into the fold like they did HongKong. And, N. Korea will bomb S. Korea. Thugs taking over African countries and forget Honduras...already a hellhole. I am fortunate to be 84 and leaving this mess which I forecast many decades ago. There is no way 10 billion people can live peacefully on this poor planet.
I agree, I’m 81. Except, Darwin got it backward, humans devolved from monkeys, and invented FUBAR- apologies to monkeys.
first time I ever came across the word devolved. and I am pretty educated. where is it mostly used? In science?
Darwin postulated humans evolved from apes, evolution is a scientific term, it is also a spiritual term. It's reverse is devolutionary, or devolve.
Meanwhile, I wonder if paid subscriptions to Chris’s newsletter increased after he started bashing Israel and President Biden and America and giving Hamas and Islam a pass?
Actually, humans didn’t descent or ascend from monkeys, they were planted here, but religions really got the story twisted, too :-).
Like Adam and Eve?
yes
I wonder if your newsletter subscription revenues increased while you bashed Israel, President Biden and America, and gave Hamas and Islam a free pass?
The Nazis weaponized the Holocaust, and some people today weaponize the inane view that the Holocaust never happened.
Butz (my comment of Jan 2) has a first rate scientific mind, Sloan, and his 600 page book seemed carefully researched. Finkelstein references holocaustianity as America's new mandatory religion--much to gain from enforcing a narrative of deep victimhood., wihich Morgenthau and his group had in mind, when they put wartime propaganda on steroids, with tortured witnesses, bogus documents, twisted language, etc. You can help out, by pointing to scholars with hard science credentials in the same league as Butz, who support the Morgenthau work product.
I live in Birmingham, Alabama, which is surrounded by a sea of red spectrum folks, and, even though I am not a blue spectrum person, either, I am acutely aware of both sides’ psychologies, religious and social perspectives and mis-perspectives. I was raised in Christendom, in Birmingham. As I grew older, I came to understand it is very difficult, if not impossible, to change religious people’s views, and there is no point in trying to change religious fanatics’ views. And, that’s what people like Hedges and Morgenthau, and perhaps you, are up against in America and Israel and Hamas - religious fanatics. Science and logic have zero chance against religious fanatics. If you don’t believe me, then I doubt there is anything I can say or point to in the history of humanity that will change your mind. I’m not trying to pick a fight. I hate what is going on in Palestine.
I wish Israel had never been created. It was a really stupid mistake, given the religious history of that region. But Israel was made a state, and Israel has nuclear weapons and a huge stockpile of American weapons, which America stored in Israel for the American military to draw upon, and it looks like Israel and Iran are now close to being at war, and America surely will side with Israel in such a war, and Caitlin and just about every person I have discussed this with in this forum, for weeks, still defend Hamas, whose first and second charters clearly show the Islamic Hamas mission is to destroy Israel. So, I come back around to my dystopian scientific and biblical suggestion that Israel does the world a favor by detonating its nukes in Israel and making Palestine inhabitable and the three Abrahamic religions have to find another so-called holy land to fight over.
Meanwhile, I’m watching up close and personal an America where it is not going to be safe to speak out against Donald Trump and the Republican Party, if Trump gets reelected in 2024, and not even if he doesn’t get elected. The American right are armed to the teeth, thanks to the NRA and the US Supreme Court’s imbecilic view of Amendment 2, which is predicated on a well regulated militia, which does not exist in America. Just as bad, the American military is well represented by MAGAs and Aryans and Proud Boys, etc. The military has lots of Crips and Bloods and their competitors. If another Jan 6 happens, there is no telling how that will go. I’m 81, and it’s my children and their families I worry for in a future America. I wish Caitlin and Hedges would turn their attention to that, perhaps they might have an impact in America.
I continue to wonder if Hedge’s and Caitlin’s subscription revenues increased after the Oct 7 attack, and if so, did they donate their “war profits” to the beleaguered people in Gaza?
Hedges now desperately clings to the Gaza and Assange stories to divert attention away from the battle here in the U.S. between the working class - his working class and the DS ...
An unemployed, divorced mother of 4 never gives a thought to Gaza, Assange or CIA corruption, and Hedges knows it! ... but these are his "bread and butter" issues that protect his place in the independent media food chain ... he has chosen to double down on the ISR-PAL conflict instead ... he has now devoted more words to the plight of the Palestinians than he ever has about those of us who are being crushed by COVID tyranny here in America ... he now seems hell bent on milking the Gaza genocide for all it's worth ... ya see, it's just too risky to stand with us ...
And after urging us to confront tyranny for the past two decades, Hedges deserted us by throwing the working class under the bus with COVID ... he refused to stand with us against the illegal and unconstitutional mandates and passports, and just 30 days after the explosive DEC 2, 2021 FDA FOIA release. he also told his avid followers that the pandemic and mutations cannot be stopped until "everyone gets vaccinated" ... and in the same breath, openly admitted that he "does not trust Moderna or Phizer" ...
These are not the lessons one learns at Harvard Divinity School ...
This will not sate Netanyahu's blood thirst. He and the Likud are consummate evil; period. This is not solely about Hamas. It also is about vengeance fueled by Israel's hate for the Palestinians (Arabs). With full suppport from the U.S., the U.S. is complicit in this slaughter of the innocents. Repatriating Palestinians from their own homeland to other countries? WOW. Putin all over again,, who repatriated Ukrainians (including children). Israel is reported to have killed nearly 8,000 children. All under the umbrella of going after Hamas. All the while, Netanyahu flips the bird to the world saying, "Try and stop me!"
I see Biden got more money today to continue the genocide!
WOW! FANTASTIC, if heart-wrenching article... thanks Chris. Beautifully read by Eunice Wong. what we are witnessing LIVE 24/7 leaves us shaking in disbelief and horror. Humanity's moral compass is broken 😭💔
Thank you Chris, for bringing this dark side to consciousness. And thank you to Bill Apgood and Red Brown (from the first printed post of this essay) for your compassionate and insightful comments. I too feel there is a vast difference between a collective entity's capacity for evil, especially at the multinational level built upon corrupt political structures overrun by politicians of whom some are clearly narcissists and sociopaths who have bought their way to the top and then do the bidding of the conscienceless (by nature, committed only to profit) military industrial corporate colonial structures of Empire; and between the capacity for evil amongst the vast range of individuals. Some individuals are highly conscious and morally & ethically developed while at the other end are individuals who are deeply unconscious and bound to the collective through their subcultures, unhealed wounds and traumas, authoritarian or abusive upbringing (as Alice Miller documents Hitler's childhood, and is also true of Trump's childhood), etc.
As Chris brings in, Imagination is also so critical - the ability to imagine and feel what another is going through. Ever since the scientific revolution in the 1500's, the imagination has been increasingly denigrated and ignored, left to the poets and artists, leaving a gaping hole that separates mind from heart. That, along with the steady undermining for two thousand years of the feminine values of heart and relationship and any form of dependency/inter-dependency, making women and children much more expendable, and have now brought the powers that be in this country to the point of pitting women against their own creative bodies. This trajectory cannot go on. And it is a part of what is trying to become conscious, is waking up, through the terrible heartbreaking martyrdom of the Gazans/Palestinians who have been brutally subjugated, ethnically cleansed and held in captivity and total dependency since 1947.
In this country people are controlled by the media's propaganda, left or right. Hitler took over the media early on in his ascent. A majority of people - who are not taught to creatively or critically think in our school system - believe what they read and are told. Some, as among people I know, have not wanted to know more than the mainstream media tells them for many different reasons - because they are afraid it will shatter their world, because they do not yet have the capacity to face true evil (some being young, some with small children, some sitting on unhealed trauma in themselves) etc. But that does not make them evil or capable of becoming "Nazi's." It makes them human on the human journey of finding and developing the strength within themselves, doing the healing work we all seem to need in this harsh modern western world, or developing the maturity from life experience, to bear brutal truths and become capable of bearing witness to suffering, loss and despair on the scale the Palestinians are experiencing. Most that I know are essentially good, caring people in various helping professions.
I feel some despair in this last essay, along with Chris's unfailing heartfelt wisdom and devotion to speaking truth, and we are probably all feeling it. It made me think that one cost and danger of bearing witness to the despair growing in the people of Gaza and Palestine and in each of us as the horror of this genocide continues on and on unstopped by those who could stop it, is of spiraling into that despair. Like being thrown down into Plato's Cave where all we then see is the darkness and the shadows on the walls. But despair needs to be resisted. That state of mind begins to weave narratives where all people become seen as capable of becoming monsters, as Nazi's, when in truth they are not. All Germans were not Nazis. There was ongoing German underground resistance as there was the Abolitionist Underground Railroad in the U.S..
The American media focuses increasingly on the negative, the dark, the sensational, on the newest "terrorist" enemy - A war economy needs people to distrust each other and be afraid. What if our media focused first and for most on all the good in this world, on the countless number of ordinary people doing good daily, selflessly, as we see happens after every natural disaster. What a different world we would live in!
The Light in this world, of this world, far exceeds the Darkness. In the Gnostic Islamic traditions they speak of two darknesses. There is the darkness, the blackness, that holds the light captive (physically, say like lead, or as states such as deliberate hatred, vengeance and cruelty for example, but so are despair and hopelessness, though to a lesser extent because they are born of compassion, phases with light at the end of those dark tunnels). And then there is the "Luminous Black," likened to the stars in the night sky overhead by which humans have oriented ourselves for thousands of years, the light in the dark ("Light upon Light" - 24th Sura an-Nur of the Qur'an). There is nothing more powerful than the Luminous Black, which is also called the Midnight Sun forever residing within the human heart. This is the light we must seek and hold for the Palestinians when they cannot, as they go through this tragic and horrific and heartbreaking long long dark night! They need this.
I was surprised that Chris appears to concede the cabalistic 6 million figure, or the credibiity of the narrative as a whole. MIT grad and tenured electrical engineering prof at Northwestern, Arthur Butz, thoroughly debunked the Nuremburg trials, and thus virtually all the “evidence” of the holocaust, in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. 4 editions, half a mil copies sold. Abbet Rosen, long term ex dir of the Chicago ADL, wrote a strong endorsement of over a page, but that has fallen down the memory hole. Amaxon BANNED the book in 2016, along with about 70 others.
Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, and Sen Robt Taft sharply criticized the trials as a fraud, and terrible black mark on American jurisprudential history. “Stranglehold” on the media, per Pres Nixon and Billy Graham in their White House meeting.
Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the Socialists..."
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
Love you Chris.. Always been a fan of your work
I remember the Catholic Riots in Havana Cuba when Jewish refugees were looking for refuge and Lord Beaverbroook, Roosevelt and Mackenzie King said we don't want any damn Jews on OUR soil and that was the entire globe and six million Jews died in Hitler's final solution.
That was Christendom's Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.
I have nothing but contempt for America's profession of innocence.
I can't imagine a poorer apologist than Chris Hedges for American amorality.
Mr Holier Than thou from Harvard Divinity School.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/MS-St-Louis-German-ship