Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone

Israel has been loudly and melodramatically fretting about an impending retaliatory attack from Iran and Hezbollah which it claims will likely include strikes in the vicinity of civilian population centers. This is of course rich coming from the regime that has spent ten months turning Gaza into a flattened wasteland of rubble and civilian corpses. Reading by Tim Foley.

They bombed the Tabeen school in Gaza City with so much explosive force that not a single full body was recovered. Reading by Tim Foley.

“Far too many children have been eaten by hyenas,” the politician sobbed to the news camera while lowering more children into the hyena pit. Reading by Tim Foley.

This happens all the time these days: people who are inextricably intertwined with establishment power structures posturing as brave revolutionaries leading a resistance against the very establishment they themselves are a part of. Elon Musk is no more a part of any "resistance" than Joe Biden or Bill Gates, but his sycophantic fanboys will mindlessly gobble this garbage up like popcorn chicken. Reading by Tim Foley.

It is a well-documented fact that under the western empire not only are our political systems aggressively manipulated by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful, but public opinion is as well. Insane systems which rely on exploitation, injustice, ecocide, militarism and war are actively normalized via mass-scale psychological manipulation, and we are then presented with candidates and platforms which support those systems and told that anything else is fringe commie extremism. Reading by Tim Foley.

The last few days have seen the US ramping up its war on domestic political dissent in multiple ways, with US lawmakers petitioning the Biden administration to crack down on anti-genocide protesters it suspects of foreign influence, and a journalist critical of US foreign policy coming under the crosshairs of Washington's increasingly weaponized Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Reading by Tim Foley.

You'll never see western officials so enthusiastic about the idea of de-escalation as they are in those time periods when their side has just severely escalated tensions with an extreme act of aggression, but the other side has yet to retaliate. Reading by Tim Foley.

I can’t really find the words to express how depressing it is to watch the life get sucked out of the anti-genocide movement in the United States because one of the candidates running for president this year happens to come from the administration that’s been overseeing said genocide. Reading by Tim Foley.

Friendly reminder that all injuries and deaths of US military personnel in the middle east are always the fault of the Washington officials who put them there, not the middle easterners who are defending their own home. Reading by Tim Foley.

It seems pretty clear to me that the pressure westerners have been putting on their own governments regarding Israel's criminality in Gaza is the primary reason why the western empire couldn't just sign off on a swift final solution to the Palestinian problem back in October, and has had to settle for this awkward slow-motion genocide disguised as self-defense instead. It's not that the empire has a conscience, it's that it is sufficiently afraid of sparking mass-scale unrest on its own turf to need to disguise its own psychopathy a bit. Reading by Tim Foley.

People often object to criticisms of Israel's ongoing mass atrocity in Gaza by saying, "Well what SHOULD Israel have done in response to October 7 then?" They say it like the question should confound you, as though it's some kind of thought-terminating unanswerable Zen koan or something.  But it isn't. The question is very answerable, and the most correct answer is that Israel should have done what it always should have done: right the wrongs of the past and make peace. Reading by Tim Foley.

All they're doing here is trying to wash this administration's hands of the horrors that are being inflicted in the middle east with the direct facilitation of this administration. Reading by Tim Foley.

In the last few days Israel has assassinated leaders in multiple neighboring nations, assassinated multiple journalists, deliberately destroyed a water facility in Gaza during a polio outbreak, and had riots defending the right of IDF soldiers to rape Palestinian prisoners. Clearly the sort of country we should all want to send our sons and daughters to go fight and die for. Reading by Tim Foley.

In reality, the US isn't vowing to defend the state of Israel, the US is vowing to help Israel attack other countries. If you're pledging unconditional support to an extremely belligerent aggressor while it commits the most demented acts of aggression imaginable, all you're doing is condoning those acts of aggression and making sure it will suffer no consequences when it conducts more of them. A kevlar vest stops being a tool of defense when you wear one to prevent yourself from being stopped by police while conducting a mass shooting. Reading by Tim Foley.

Israel has been on another assassination spree, killing Hamas political leader Ismael Haniyeh on Wednesday with an airstrike while he was in Tehran for the swearing in of the new Iranian president. Israel also claims to have killed Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike on Beirut on Tuesday evening. Reading by Tim Foley.

They lied about mass rapes so that they could systemically rape.  They lied about beheaded babies so that they could kill babies.  They lied about "human shields" to shield themselves while killing civilians.  They lied about being victims so that they could victimize others. Reading by Tim Foley.

Saying a US politician is "bad on foreign policy but good on domestic policy" is like saying "Sure my husband spends his weekends murdering hitchhikers, but he's a good provider and he knows how to fix a flat tire." Reading by Tim Foley.

One of the dumbest things about US politics today is the way both parties constantly attack each other for holding foreign policy positions they don't actually hold in order to create the illusion that they have meaningful disagreements on foreign policy. Reading by Tim Foley.

The thing I hate about western electoral politics in general and US presidential races in particular is that they take the focus off the depravity of the US-centralized empire itself, and run cover for its criminality. Reading by Tim Foley.

"You couldn’t ask for a better example of everything Washington stands for than this. Both houses of Congress rising to feverishly applaud one of history’s worst genocidal monsters dozens of times as he lies over and over again is a much better representation of what the US government is about than anything you’ll see during the presidential race from now until November." Reading by Tim Foley. Article version: https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/netanyahus-speech-was-as-american