Breaking news! South Africa has taken the lead in referring Israel to the International Court of Justice for the acts of genocide in Gaza! This is an extremely important step. Thank you, South Africa!
This quote was a gut punch for me, "“Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so."
It's true that I can't imagine the catastrophic suffering of over 20,000 people killed by bombs. But I can visualize individual children, women and men dying with crush injuries, being impaled, the life draining out of them with their blood, and smell burned, blackened leathery flesh from burns. I was a nurse in a burn unit, trauma unit, critical care and emergency rooms.
I was traumatized as I tried to save lives and make death easier. Knowing what is happening to people in Gaza brings it back to me although I am retired. I also survived being a trauma victim in a car crash. We share the same humanity and the ability to suffer. We can't be silent while the massacre continues every day. Biden just bypassed Congress again to approve billions of dollars of weapon sales to Israel. We can't let Trump become president again. What do we do?
If everyone could read this essay and grok it to their core we might still have a chance. Starting with all the sociopaths in positions of power. Never going to happen of course, but an old man can still dream. Thankfully Chris Hedges has a gift to tell the truth with his crafted words, even as those words endlessly break my heart. It feels like a struggle to get out of bed every day, knowing that things will be worse. I intend to hold onto my compassionate humanity until the day I die, and reading writers like Chris Hedges help me along the way towards that end.
Those of us who do not fully understand "grok" the dense information package that Chris Hedges provides, still, at some level, empathize with the Palestinians, due to the immense wrong that is occurring under Israeli persecution. For some of us, it is not the deep understanding that shields us from becoming monsters, it is the simple simple realization of being a deeply flawed individual still able to see and feel the imposed suffering of all our brothers and sisters as the wrong and eventually fatal part of the human condition.
I do wish I had the intellectual certainty to know what to do and how to act "correctly". Perhaps as I consume more information, that might become a reality for me. In the mean time, I will strive to act according to the urging of my conscience and my internal compass, as flawed as I realize it is.
If and when I fail, please let me not become the next soulless executioner in this article.
Thank you. Well, on an encouraging note: We have Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Katie Halper, Max Blumenthal and so many more, speaking the truth about this genocide, as Democrats, with the academy and censorship apparatus working together, lead our country into totalitarianism, banning Trump from the ballot, so on. I would add two writers to your partial list of folks who warned us about totalitarianism: Norman Cohn and Milton Mayer.
From Mayer:
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."
Their new book, THE MYTH OF NORMAL makes a good case for how much illness is caused by a lifetime of trying to fit into that idiotic 'bell curve'. Diversity is a key to a healthy ecosphere....but the universalizing goons in the dept of math destruction use numbers to convince us of dumb ideas....and we kill ouselves trying to get in underl their normalized umbrella.
The individuals need for authenticity and attachment, and the conflicts between them, is the source of the trauma. I read the book and it's not about bell curve statistics. Aaron Mate is not a co-author.
Let's not forget the need of the entitled to correct every damn one of us. I taught school....and when I started that damn bell curve was what the know it alls used to tell us there could only be one or three A students in a class of 35..........its the normalizing graph used to measure populations...and at large numbers it more or less can be predictive.....
Of things so general that down here on the ground where we all live...its largely irrelevant. The Bell curve is an instrument of control...what Mate discusses is our tendency to try to fit into another kind of normal......which Foucault more thoroughly exposed in much of his writing.
The docile body is first and foremost a female body.......but in some instances, the drugs don't work. In those instances, we women who run with the wolves learn pretty deeply who it is wants to tell us what's what.
We mostly Ignore them. A life of doing our homework and speaking up showed us pretty clearly who didn't intend for us to be experts.....at anything but drudgery.
May Genocide Joe and his buddy Barbaric Bibi burn in Hellacious Hell for eternity along with all their supporters for unleashing hell on the rest of us who simply want to get along with each other. Why is it that sociopaths rise to positions of power and reign terror and death upon the world? All my life I’ve felt like I got off on the wrong bus stop when I incarnated here. And things are only going to get worse and worse until we kill ourselves off along with most flora and fauna. I would wish everyone a Happy New Year, but it would be a lie as we continue devolving into unimaginable dystopia.
Our elections are a sham. Primaries are gerrymandered, and the anonymous, yet hand-chosen electors decide who wins the nuclear-button-pushing-monster-in-chief.
It’s all rigged and not the way Trump thinks.
It’s why only narcissistic, sociopaths like him and every president for decades are all we get offered to “choose” from.
This country has been done for a while but it’s in its death throes now and beware a wounded and dying cobra, its fangs still have poison.
I cannot argue with that. 2024 may be our last “good” year. I really hope I am wrong, but as you stated this country is in its death throes and the end may be closer than some of us think. The best to you and yours.
Thank you for your ruthlessly honest analysis of this horrific situation. I learned from Democracy Now yesterday that there are many children in Gaza who require the amputation of one of their limbs as a result of the bombings. These amputations are being performed without anesthesia since no more anesthetics are available. If they are lucky enough to survive such an ordeal, these innocent children will likely be traumatized for the rest of their lives.
As Orwell's Obrien said about what the future will be "A boot on a human face forever, and remember I said forever"! Forever said twice, puts the fascist power elite in perspective. The MSM has pretty well ignored the daily Kristallnacht's taking place in the West Bank before Oct 7 and doubled down ever since. It made me sick today, hearing the Aljazeera interviewed Palestinian's rounded up and zip tied, so tight their hands were turning blue, waiting in lines of humiliation for their turn for interrogation. Raising your blind folded head got immediate beatings. All the while searching and destroying property in their apartments! Today the 6 o'clock news of CNBC, CNN and ABC had no story about Gaza at all! Ignorance is Strength when it comes to Israel. The 30 deaths in Ukraine by Russian rockets took top spot, along with big waves in California and the tight security of Times Sq. for New Years Eve celebrations. New York's Cop/Mayor Eric Adams promised drones, helicopters, war horses and walking torture chamber Swat Teams and machine gun toting cops to keep everyone "SAFE". Saying in this heightened time of the Israeli Hamas war they were needed, but admitted there were no real threats reported! Paranoia is good enough and good enough to pass it to all the ignorant sheep! BBBAAAHHHH!
I resent the term sheep......because it often seems to blame the ignorant.......in a nation that works night and day to keep them so, with advertising, capitalist rubbish passed off as thinking, and honorific editorials whitewashing mass murderers and their courtiers who wink at murder.
I think many of the people work hard to stay uninformed...........because to be informed would have you terrified, on a daily basis, for your children and your grandchildren.
Somehow, we have to get together and defend ourselves by learning how to defend everyone. But individualism has also been pushed hard on us...........since isolation is the real objective, and for the most part in the wealthy west.........that isolation has been achieved, with lonliness reaching massive proportions.
Propaganda. Caitlin Johnstone has written many times about the massive amount of propaganda to which the American people are exposed.
Look up her article "The Left Will Never Achieve Its Aims Until It Confronts the Establishment Propaganda" I think it was written on September 11 2019. (2020?)
Thanks, I'll try to look it up........I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can get out from under all the BS that passes for information....but I'm just an old grandmother of 6, kept busy supporting my two kids as they try to stay afloat and raise them.
We don't buy half the gobbledegook that passes for truth......but then, my partner and I are both readers and lifetime supporters of Canada's social democratic party.......which should know better, but has also been pushed to the neoliberal centre these last few years.
It's hard to know where to start taking down the false fronts of the western establishment, let alone putting something better in place.
I vote for creating a citizens national union with Shawn Fein as President. Establish consciousness raising sessions about climate, who controls the economy, decent health care etc…when legislation is passed servicing the powers that be instead of the citizenry, we ALL go out on.. strike.
We're trying to get some groups going where we live....encourage everyone who comes to one of our gatherings to have their own......and share ideas for building something human and humane in the face of the neoliberal capitalism we all are being picked clean by.
Ingamarie I don't like smearing sheep either. The sheep metaphor from Orwell's Animal Farm, when Napoleon changed the laws from "Four Legs Good Two Legs Bad" to "Four Legs Good Two Legs Better" while the confused sheep nodded in unison. The point is Critical Thinking should be taught in public school and high school. Willful Ignorance is the most dangerous for a working democracy. But I agree hard work and busy lives makes it hard for the average man or woman to see through sophisticated propaganda, mixed with blind patriotism. Socialists and Unions fought for 40 hour work weeks for that very reason, slave wages with 12 hour days six days a week made it almost impossible to stay informed. Even the Capitalist Oligarchy in Canada used the RCMP to spy on Tommy Douglas back in the "good old" days. Law breaking and tax cheating by the rich didn't concern them in the least. That said we are on the same side!
I LOVE this thread, rigorous critical thinking, personal reflection, open communication, the willingness to share learned and experienced knowledge, and no one went crazy or called names. @jim harper, you are 100% correct about the lack of critical thinking in American society. I had to go to grad school to have it reintroduced to me via a Logic 101 course. I was outraged at the beautiful simplicity of logic, and that it was not part of middle and high school curricula. I am math disabled, though I love mathematical concepts, and the great irony of my life right now is I’ve been hired as a full-time sub for a school’s 7th grade math class. In Vermont.
Oh the opportunities are thrilling!
Imagine.
First thing we will talk about after the holiday break is the term Math means “to learn”in Greek. I’m half Greek so this is going to be fun. 😂🇬🇷
I lived through a CIA led coup in Greece as a child. I know what devils those Yankee leaders are, and how they wrecked US public education deliberately to dumb down a nation.
When you get the time, look up a book WEAPONS OF MATH DISTRUCTION....it's a good debrief about how math can be used to create a kind of false consciousness....that thinks it has the proof of something.......when its actually just algorithms turning bias into erroneous beliefs.
Written by a female mathematician, I'm proud to report.
I'm aware of the spying on Tommy Douglas....I met him as a girl, and he was quite the politician and preacher. Which is why I never succumb to that sweeping generalization "all politicians are the same'....or bash religious beliefs I don't share. There are many roads to a good life...and I still believe the majority of people try to find one of them.
But it is true that our love of material plenty at any cost has created a monstrous world.....and Canada too has its radical right with their threadbare beliefs. But perhaps we all need to let go of the convenience of 'the enemy'....and start admitting: 1. who it is causing the actual problems, and 2. why it is we're so scared to name their names.
Utah Philips said it years ago: THE PLANET ISN'T DYING, SHE'S BEING MURDERED; AND THE FOLKS DOING IT HAVE NAMES AND ADDRESSES.
I'm pretty sure Neten yahoo is on that list. His party is so stupid they bulldoze olive trees to put up concrete settlements....in a water poor land.. they think killing all the farmers will lead to a more powerful, ethnically pure state....with 'settlers' from away knowing how to raise food better!!! We should do some research into how well its working on the Great Plains as climate disasters proliferate.
They are dinosaurs walking.........and the world is seeing them now, but has no idea how to stop them. Your country is why....and fossil fuels is likely the motive. The real Death Cult, if you ask me.
Lucky young girl meeting Tommy. To bad the religious anti Communist Corporate fascism of Manning Sr. set up Alberta as an extreme right wing Oil Oligarchy Province. The far right Manning Center set up by Preston has done more harm than most Canadians know. The corporate power in Calgary Center is murdering the Planet and throwing any chance at fighting climate change, when they vomit up people like Harper, Smith and P.P. ! Ardent unquestioning Christian Zionists!
What's amazing is how few people know how lethal Manning is...everything is done in the back room, money flows to shrink tanks like the Fraser Institute, and for years, even our CBC reported their findings as if they'd done research.
I wonder how long it will be before the method of starting with your conclusions and then gathering up 'evidence' from where ever to support those conclusions..........is called out as the propaganda it is. As a teacher, I remember some of the FRaser's evaluation of good schools and bad schools.....done up with no mention of the fact that you could substitute rich schools ad poor schools..............if you really wanted to know why the educational outcomes were what they were.
They do math in the same dishonest way.........so that a rise in corporate tax from 8% to 11% becomes a 34% rise......sad part is no one in the msm spends much time fact checking....or calling them out. Kind of like the Zionist mafia that's active throughout the western democracies.......right wing none sense gets a pass.
I'm sometimes afraid that by the time we wise up, we'll be in situations not much different from what the Palestinians are facing today.........helpless behind a wall of lies and armaments.
What Chris writes here is likely true.........for the most part. But we also need to remember how the western propaganda machine has whitewashed Israel and erased as much as possible, the west's understanding of who the native people of Palestine actually are.
Over 40 years ago I had a friend who was doing a masters in Political Science, and who became radicalized around what we had done to the Palestinians. I remember wanting to avoid talking to her, since I was a busy teacher and mother of two........with enough overload already. Still, she was my first real encounter with the complex situation in the Holy Land...and though it appalled me...and though from that time on, I understood who the boys throwing stones were......there wasn't any real movement in Canada that had the media's attention in the way this war has it now.
And even now......our CBC is shaming me with the pussy footing way it discusses the war...it can't hide what is happening, as the death toll in Gaza mounts.........but the reports come mainly from inside Israel...and the only time I've heard them use the term 'genocide' is to describe the Hamas attack on Oct 7.
By now that selective use of the term is ludicrous.......at least for me and my partner. But there is still something of a mafia out and about defending Israel. No one loses their job for being on the side of the state of Israel....but it can be politically dangerous to support the people in Gaza and the Left Bank. People resort to blaming Hamas for it all.......but I think they know that's ridiculous at this point as well.
I think many people are waking up to how dreadful the Israeli state is and has been.....but it leaves them disoriented....and perhaps afraid.
It's not only the global south and parts of Africa and Asia that are seeing how easily the bombs might fall on any of us.....I think we're all getting it. It might just feel like one more horror in a rising sea of disasters, threats and dangers that seem to be coming for all of us....covid, climate disasters, wars everywhere.........and of course ethnic cleansing as an inevitable part of a world in crisis. There's not enough to go around....not at the level we in the privileged parts of the world wish to live.
So where do we start.......where do we stand? And does it even matter what we do or don't do? It all feels so awful, and so hopeless....
But for sure: the Western powers have a black eye in this genocide..........and anyone with half a brain can see that.
"The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.”
The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded."
What the world has been calling "reparation" has actually been blackmail. Yes. This is the truth. It feels so right to finally call it what it is.
I believe that what is happening now in Gaza is even uglier....it feels like payback to the world for what Jews suffered during the holocaust, with Palestinians bearing the worst of it, but all of us suffering the pain and damage. Their collective memory has been holding onto that outrage and wanting to punish someone...anyone....EVERYONE!....for generations. It is bloodlust now. They let the monster out of the cage and it won't stop killing, maiming and destroying until it is exhausted.
If I sound unhinged, I apologize. I'm feeling very Gazan right now. I'm in a bunker, underground, in the dark, hungry, cold and terrified, and listening to a young soldier of Hamas weep for his people.
If I die, at least I won't have to go back to my miserable, hopeless life.
This is the most powerful and humane account of us that I have ever read. It is hard to look in the mirror after reading this and feel adequately civilized.
We are in our 70s and have never read the Bible from beginning to end, so decided to do that this year. We did not realize before that when God promised land to the Jews, he knew the land already had other people living there; it appears to us that Numbers 33 contains pretty detailed instructions straight from God on how to commit genocide. I know, unlike me, you are a Biblical scholar, so perhaps some commentary on this might be warranted?
i will let chris reply since he knows more than do I, but having studied the bible in seminary it is good to remember that this was NOT written by God. It was a justification by those involved in the ethnic cleansing portrayed in joshua and Numbers the same that is being done today. As a minister friend said, anything that portrays God as bloodthirsty was not God - but using God to cover our own bloodlust always works.
Sorry (as an atheist or agnostic I would read the Bible only as a crime story, besides some parts of the NewTestament), I just started (written 1939!!!) J.M.N. Jeffries book 'Palestine the Reality' - a REAL eye opener regarding ANY jewish claims for the so-called 'holy land'! (The lies they told us!)
Thank you once again for your brilliant and focussed analysis. There are too few who are willing to stand for justice in the face of overwhelming power. You are a true beacon.
My own attempt is to do what I can to help establish a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, not with Palestinians suffering under oppressive conditions, but as a place where all live with peace and equality. It is time for Pope Francis to do more than talk. He must go to Gaza and make a stand for peace and freedom.
Breaking news! South Africa has taken the lead in referring Israel to the International Court of Justice for the acts of genocide in Gaza! This is an extremely important step. Thank you, South Africa!
Wow. This is an absolute masterpiece. Thank you!
This quote was a gut punch for me, "“Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so."
It's true that I can't imagine the catastrophic suffering of over 20,000 people killed by bombs. But I can visualize individual children, women and men dying with crush injuries, being impaled, the life draining out of them with their blood, and smell burned, blackened leathery flesh from burns. I was a nurse in a burn unit, trauma unit, critical care and emergency rooms.
I was traumatized as I tried to save lives and make death easier. Knowing what is happening to people in Gaza brings it back to me although I am retired. I also survived being a trauma victim in a car crash. We share the same humanity and the ability to suffer. We can't be silent while the massacre continues every day. Biden just bypassed Congress again to approve billions of dollars of weapon sales to Israel. We can't let Trump become president again. What do we do?
If everyone could read this essay and grok it to their core we might still have a chance. Starting with all the sociopaths in positions of power. Never going to happen of course, but an old man can still dream. Thankfully Chris Hedges has a gift to tell the truth with his crafted words, even as those words endlessly break my heart. It feels like a struggle to get out of bed every day, knowing that things will be worse. I intend to hold onto my compassionate humanity until the day I die, and reading writers like Chris Hedges help me along the way towards that end.
Those of us who do not fully understand "grok" the dense information package that Chris Hedges provides, still, at some level, empathize with the Palestinians, due to the immense wrong that is occurring under Israeli persecution. For some of us, it is not the deep understanding that shields us from becoming monsters, it is the simple simple realization of being a deeply flawed individual still able to see and feel the imposed suffering of all our brothers and sisters as the wrong and eventually fatal part of the human condition.
I do wish I had the intellectual certainty to know what to do and how to act "correctly". Perhaps as I consume more information, that might become a reality for me. In the mean time, I will strive to act according to the urging of my conscience and my internal compass, as flawed as I realize it is.
If and when I fail, please let me not become the next soulless executioner in this article.
True true… and I knew you had to be over 55 when you use the grok reference!
Your most concise, powerful and clear writing yet on the ongoing genocide.
Thank you. Well, on an encouraging note: We have Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Katie Halper, Max Blumenthal and so many more, speaking the truth about this genocide, as Democrats, with the academy and censorship apparatus working together, lead our country into totalitarianism, banning Trump from the ballot, so on. I would add two writers to your partial list of folks who warned us about totalitarianism: Norman Cohn and Milton Mayer.
From Mayer:
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."
-- Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (University of Chicago Press. ©1955).
Powerful words that echo profoundly in this current time.
I'd add Caitlin Johnstone to the list of those whose words are meaningful and insightful.
and Aaron Mate and hid dad Gabor.
Their new book, THE MYTH OF NORMAL makes a good case for how much illness is caused by a lifetime of trying to fit into that idiotic 'bell curve'. Diversity is a key to a healthy ecosphere....but the universalizing goons in the dept of math destruction use numbers to convince us of dumb ideas....and we kill ouselves trying to get in underl their normalized umbrella.
The individuals need for authenticity and attachment, and the conflicts between them, is the source of the trauma. I read the book and it's not about bell curve statistics. Aaron Mate is not a co-author.
Let's not forget the need of the entitled to correct every damn one of us. I taught school....and when I started that damn bell curve was what the know it alls used to tell us there could only be one or three A students in a class of 35..........its the normalizing graph used to measure populations...and at large numbers it more or less can be predictive.....
Of things so general that down here on the ground where we all live...its largely irrelevant. The Bell curve is an instrument of control...what Mate discusses is our tendency to try to fit into another kind of normal......which Foucault more thoroughly exposed in much of his writing.
The docile body is first and foremost a female body.......but in some instances, the drugs don't work. In those instances, we women who run with the wolves learn pretty deeply who it is wants to tell us what's what.
We mostly Ignore them. A life of doing our homework and speaking up showed us pretty clearly who didn't intend for us to be experts.....at anything but drudgery.
I saw signs in 2015 in the US that I thought were similar to what happened in pre-WWII Germany and I started to study German history of that time.
I saw the gradual habituation right here at home.
May Genocide Joe and his buddy Barbaric Bibi burn in Hellacious Hell for eternity along with all their supporters for unleashing hell on the rest of us who simply want to get along with each other. Why is it that sociopaths rise to positions of power and reign terror and death upon the world? All my life I’ve felt like I got off on the wrong bus stop when I incarnated here. And things are only going to get worse and worse until we kill ourselves off along with most flora and fauna. I would wish everyone a Happy New Year, but it would be a lie as we continue devolving into unimaginable dystopia.
Our elections are a sham. Primaries are gerrymandered, and the anonymous, yet hand-chosen electors decide who wins the nuclear-button-pushing-monster-in-chief.
It’s all rigged and not the way Trump thinks.
It’s why only narcissistic, sociopaths like him and every president for decades are all we get offered to “choose” from.
This country has been done for a while but it’s in its death throes now and beware a wounded and dying cobra, its fangs still have poison.
I cannot argue with that. 2024 may be our last “good” year. I really hope I am wrong, but as you stated this country is in its death throes and the end may be closer than some of us think. The best to you and yours.
Thank you for your ruthlessly honest analysis of this horrific situation. I learned from Democracy Now yesterday that there are many children in Gaza who require the amputation of one of their limbs as a result of the bombings. These amputations are being performed without anesthesia since no more anesthetics are available. If they are lucky enough to survive such an ordeal, these innocent children will likely be traumatized for the rest of their lives.
As Orwell's Obrien said about what the future will be "A boot on a human face forever, and remember I said forever"! Forever said twice, puts the fascist power elite in perspective. The MSM has pretty well ignored the daily Kristallnacht's taking place in the West Bank before Oct 7 and doubled down ever since. It made me sick today, hearing the Aljazeera interviewed Palestinian's rounded up and zip tied, so tight their hands were turning blue, waiting in lines of humiliation for their turn for interrogation. Raising your blind folded head got immediate beatings. All the while searching and destroying property in their apartments! Today the 6 o'clock news of CNBC, CNN and ABC had no story about Gaza at all! Ignorance is Strength when it comes to Israel. The 30 deaths in Ukraine by Russian rockets took top spot, along with big waves in California and the tight security of Times Sq. for New Years Eve celebrations. New York's Cop/Mayor Eric Adams promised drones, helicopters, war horses and walking torture chamber Swat Teams and machine gun toting cops to keep everyone "SAFE". Saying in this heightened time of the Israeli Hamas war they were needed, but admitted there were no real threats reported! Paranoia is good enough and good enough to pass it to all the ignorant sheep! BBBAAAHHHH!
I resent the term sheep......because it often seems to blame the ignorant.......in a nation that works night and day to keep them so, with advertising, capitalist rubbish passed off as thinking, and honorific editorials whitewashing mass murderers and their courtiers who wink at murder.
I think many of the people work hard to stay uninformed...........because to be informed would have you terrified, on a daily basis, for your children and your grandchildren.
Somehow, we have to get together and defend ourselves by learning how to defend everyone. But individualism has also been pushed hard on us...........since isolation is the real objective, and for the most part in the wealthy west.........that isolation has been achieved, with lonliness reaching massive proportions.
Propaganda. Caitlin Johnstone has written many times about the massive amount of propaganda to which the American people are exposed.
Look up her article "The Left Will Never Achieve Its Aims Until It Confronts the Establishment Propaganda" I think it was written on September 11 2019. (2020?)
Thanks, I'll try to look it up........I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can get out from under all the BS that passes for information....but I'm just an old grandmother of 6, kept busy supporting my two kids as they try to stay afloat and raise them.
We don't buy half the gobbledegook that passes for truth......but then, my partner and I are both readers and lifetime supporters of Canada's social democratic party.......which should know better, but has also been pushed to the neoliberal centre these last few years.
It's hard to know where to start taking down the false fronts of the western establishment, let alone putting something better in place.
I vote for creating a citizens national union with Shawn Fein as President. Establish consciousness raising sessions about climate, who controls the economy, decent health care etc…when legislation is passed servicing the powers that be instead of the citizenry, we ALL go out on.. strike.
We're trying to get some groups going where we live....encourage everyone who comes to one of our gatherings to have their own......and share ideas for building something human and humane in the face of the neoliberal capitalism we all are being picked clean by.
Ingamarie I don't like smearing sheep either. The sheep metaphor from Orwell's Animal Farm, when Napoleon changed the laws from "Four Legs Good Two Legs Bad" to "Four Legs Good Two Legs Better" while the confused sheep nodded in unison. The point is Critical Thinking should be taught in public school and high school. Willful Ignorance is the most dangerous for a working democracy. But I agree hard work and busy lives makes it hard for the average man or woman to see through sophisticated propaganda, mixed with blind patriotism. Socialists and Unions fought for 40 hour work weeks for that very reason, slave wages with 12 hour days six days a week made it almost impossible to stay informed. Even the Capitalist Oligarchy in Canada used the RCMP to spy on Tommy Douglas back in the "good old" days. Law breaking and tax cheating by the rich didn't concern them in the least. That said we are on the same side!
I LOVE this thread, rigorous critical thinking, personal reflection, open communication, the willingness to share learned and experienced knowledge, and no one went crazy or called names. @jim harper, you are 100% correct about the lack of critical thinking in American society. I had to go to grad school to have it reintroduced to me via a Logic 101 course. I was outraged at the beautiful simplicity of logic, and that it was not part of middle and high school curricula. I am math disabled, though I love mathematical concepts, and the great irony of my life right now is I’ve been hired as a full-time sub for a school’s 7th grade math class. In Vermont.
Oh the opportunities are thrilling!
Imagine.
First thing we will talk about after the holiday break is the term Math means “to learn”in Greek. I’m half Greek so this is going to be fun. 😂🇬🇷
I lived through a CIA led coup in Greece as a child. I know what devils those Yankee leaders are, and how they wrecked US public education deliberately to dumb down a nation.
When you get the time, look up a book WEAPONS OF MATH DISTRUCTION....it's a good debrief about how math can be used to create a kind of false consciousness....that thinks it has the proof of something.......when its actually just algorithms turning bias into erroneous beliefs.
Written by a female mathematician, I'm proud to report.
I'm aware of the spying on Tommy Douglas....I met him as a girl, and he was quite the politician and preacher. Which is why I never succumb to that sweeping generalization "all politicians are the same'....or bash religious beliefs I don't share. There are many roads to a good life...and I still believe the majority of people try to find one of them.
But it is true that our love of material plenty at any cost has created a monstrous world.....and Canada too has its radical right with their threadbare beliefs. But perhaps we all need to let go of the convenience of 'the enemy'....and start admitting: 1. who it is causing the actual problems, and 2. why it is we're so scared to name their names.
Utah Philips said it years ago: THE PLANET ISN'T DYING, SHE'S BEING MURDERED; AND THE FOLKS DOING IT HAVE NAMES AND ADDRESSES.
I'm pretty sure Neten yahoo is on that list. His party is so stupid they bulldoze olive trees to put up concrete settlements....in a water poor land.. they think killing all the farmers will lead to a more powerful, ethnically pure state....with 'settlers' from away knowing how to raise food better!!! We should do some research into how well its working on the Great Plains as climate disasters proliferate.
They are dinosaurs walking.........and the world is seeing them now, but has no idea how to stop them. Your country is why....and fossil fuels is likely the motive. The real Death Cult, if you ask me.
Lucky young girl meeting Tommy. To bad the religious anti Communist Corporate fascism of Manning Sr. set up Alberta as an extreme right wing Oil Oligarchy Province. The far right Manning Center set up by Preston has done more harm than most Canadians know. The corporate power in Calgary Center is murdering the Planet and throwing any chance at fighting climate change, when they vomit up people like Harper, Smith and P.P. ! Ardent unquestioning Christian Zionists!
What's amazing is how few people know how lethal Manning is...everything is done in the back room, money flows to shrink tanks like the Fraser Institute, and for years, even our CBC reported their findings as if they'd done research.
I wonder how long it will be before the method of starting with your conclusions and then gathering up 'evidence' from where ever to support those conclusions..........is called out as the propaganda it is. As a teacher, I remember some of the FRaser's evaluation of good schools and bad schools.....done up with no mention of the fact that you could substitute rich schools ad poor schools..............if you really wanted to know why the educational outcomes were what they were.
They do math in the same dishonest way.........so that a rise in corporate tax from 8% to 11% becomes a 34% rise......sad part is no one in the msm spends much time fact checking....or calling them out. Kind of like the Zionist mafia that's active throughout the western democracies.......right wing none sense gets a pass.
I'm sometimes afraid that by the time we wise up, we'll be in situations not much different from what the Palestinians are facing today.........helpless behind a wall of lies and armaments.
What Chris writes here is likely true.........for the most part. But we also need to remember how the western propaganda machine has whitewashed Israel and erased as much as possible, the west's understanding of who the native people of Palestine actually are.
Over 40 years ago I had a friend who was doing a masters in Political Science, and who became radicalized around what we had done to the Palestinians. I remember wanting to avoid talking to her, since I was a busy teacher and mother of two........with enough overload already. Still, she was my first real encounter with the complex situation in the Holy Land...and though it appalled me...and though from that time on, I understood who the boys throwing stones were......there wasn't any real movement in Canada that had the media's attention in the way this war has it now.
And even now......our CBC is shaming me with the pussy footing way it discusses the war...it can't hide what is happening, as the death toll in Gaza mounts.........but the reports come mainly from inside Israel...and the only time I've heard them use the term 'genocide' is to describe the Hamas attack on Oct 7.
By now that selective use of the term is ludicrous.......at least for me and my partner. But there is still something of a mafia out and about defending Israel. No one loses their job for being on the side of the state of Israel....but it can be politically dangerous to support the people in Gaza and the Left Bank. People resort to blaming Hamas for it all.......but I think they know that's ridiculous at this point as well.
I think many people are waking up to how dreadful the Israeli state is and has been.....but it leaves them disoriented....and perhaps afraid.
It's not only the global south and parts of Africa and Asia that are seeing how easily the bombs might fall on any of us.....I think we're all getting it. It might just feel like one more horror in a rising sea of disasters, threats and dangers that seem to be coming for all of us....covid, climate disasters, wars everywhere.........and of course ethnic cleansing as an inevitable part of a world in crisis. There's not enough to go around....not at the level we in the privileged parts of the world wish to live.
So where do we start.......where do we stand? And does it even matter what we do or don't do? It all feels so awful, and so hopeless....
But for sure: the Western powers have a black eye in this genocide..........and anyone with half a brain can see that.
"The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.”
The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded."
What the world has been calling "reparation" has actually been blackmail. Yes. This is the truth. It feels so right to finally call it what it is.
I believe that what is happening now in Gaza is even uglier....it feels like payback to the world for what Jews suffered during the holocaust, with Palestinians bearing the worst of it, but all of us suffering the pain and damage. Their collective memory has been holding onto that outrage and wanting to punish someone...anyone....EVERYONE!....for generations. It is bloodlust now. They let the monster out of the cage and it won't stop killing, maiming and destroying until it is exhausted.
If I sound unhinged, I apologize. I'm feeling very Gazan right now. I'm in a bunker, underground, in the dark, hungry, cold and terrified, and listening to a young soldier of Hamas weep for his people.
If I die, at least I won't have to go back to my miserable, hopeless life.
Happy New Year, Chris Hedges and friends.
This is the most powerful and humane account of us that I have ever read. It is hard to look in the mirror after reading this and feel adequately civilized.
And yet we must. We must see the Nazis in ourselves and help each other to quash that. We must shut down the barbarism.
BROVO, Mr. Fish! The most telling of them all.
We are in our 70s and have never read the Bible from beginning to end, so decided to do that this year. We did not realize before that when God promised land to the Jews, he knew the land already had other people living there; it appears to us that Numbers 33 contains pretty detailed instructions straight from God on how to commit genocide. I know, unlike me, you are a Biblical scholar, so perhaps some commentary on this might be warranted?
i will let chris reply since he knows more than do I, but having studied the bible in seminary it is good to remember that this was NOT written by God. It was a justification by those involved in the ethnic cleansing portrayed in joshua and Numbers the same that is being done today. As a minister friend said, anything that portrays God as bloodthirsty was not God - but using God to cover our own bloodlust always works.
There may be no God, but sure as light, the men writing holy books can't imagine Her.
I dd love you Jon (in the Ludus sense) You pull no punches. Come right to the point.
Sorry (as an atheist or agnostic I would read the Bible only as a crime story, besides some parts of the NewTestament), I just started (written 1939!!!) J.M.N. Jeffries book 'Palestine the Reality' - a REAL eye opener regarding ANY jewish claims for the so-called 'holy land'! (The lies they told us!)
Thank you once again for your brilliant and focussed analysis. There are too few who are willing to stand for justice in the face of overwhelming power. You are a true beacon.
My own attempt is to do what I can to help establish a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, not with Palestinians suffering under oppressive conditions, but as a place where all live with peace and equality. It is time for Pope Francis to do more than talk. He must go to Gaza and make a stand for peace and freedom.
Please sign the petition and share widely.
https://chng.it/CRQ7qw4Gzn
Other petitions, including
Codepink:
https://www.codepink.org/cnngaza?utm_campaign=12_15_pali_update_alert_3&utm_medium=email&utm_source=codepink
Ceasefire Now:
https://www.change.org/p/sign-and-share-this-urgent-petition-calling-for-a-ceasefirenow-in-gaza-and-israel
Signing petitions is one small thing we can do. If we can do more, let us do more.
This is one of those writings, which stuns you. I hope this widely shared. Thank you for all you do.
Reading Chris Hedges gives me faith there is the hope of sanity and humanity in the world. We must preserve it.