Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
❖
Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator Caroline Seguin reports that lifesaving medical equipment inside the hospitals in northern Gaza has been methodically destroyed, “smashed to pieces, one by one, to make sure no medical care could be provided anymore.”
“You have to ask: What is the motivation of such action? These machines are made to save people’s lives, mothers, fathers, children,” Seguin writes.
But we all know the motivation. The motivation is to make the Gaza Strip unlivable for Palestinians.
I mean, what excuses could the Israel apologists possibly produce for this one? Were Hamas hiding in the ventilators? Were the MRI machines being used as human shields? Was there a weapons stockpile in the defibrillator? Was the incubator moving in ways that made IDF troops feel unsafe? What’s the hasbara line on this, exactly?
Doesn’t look like there is one. After all the lies about Israel’s reasons for systematically destroying Gaza’s healthcare facilities, they’ve now dropped all pretenses and are openly targeting medical equipment itself for destruction. The goal was always to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable in order to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
❖
Those who say “Fuck anyone who didn’t vote for Kamala” because of this or that ugly domestic policy Trump advances simply ignored Gaza during the Biden administration. They ignored it with their eyes, their minds, and their hearts.
They avoided looking at the gruesome video footage of dismembered children and burning bodies. They avoided thinking about the daily massacres and imagining what it would be like if it was their own neighborhood being incinerated. They avoided feeling the unpleasant feelings you will necessarily experience if you allow your eyes and your mind to behold these things with unwavering attention.
They’ve been living in a different universe than those of us who have been looking at these horrors and contemplating them and feeling them. That’s the one and only reason they can say “Fuck anyone who didn’t vote for Kamala”. If they hadn’t spent more than a year keeping their eyes, minds and hearts tightly screwed shut, it would never occur to them to say such a thing.
❖
An important point that’s getting lost in the conversation about the Trump administration’s recent Ukraine moves is that polling now shows a majority of Ukrainians want the war to end. They don’t want to fight anymore.
That should be the end of the conversation right there. There’s nothing left to debate. The very last argument the proxy warriors had — “The Ukrainians want to keep fighting” — died months ago. If you still want this proxy war to continue even after the Ukrainians themselves want it to stop, then you’re a monster. You want Ukrainians to keep throwing their lives into the wood chipper of an unwinnable war against their will just so you can feel nice feelings instead of uncomfortable feelings. You’re a psycho. Everyone should ignore everything you have to say about the world.
❖
The Trump administration has frozen funding for the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front which facilitates US regime change operations around the world. This follows the stripping of USAID, another US soft power operation. It remains to be seen how much of this is a lasting policy shift and how much is just a restructuring of the imperial manipulation machine.
I was excited to flaunt my told-you-sos at all the empire simps on social media who’ve been calling me a Russian propagandist for saying Ukraine is an unwinnable proxy war that should never have been started — then I realized most of them are probably offline now that they’re not getting paid.
❖
I’m still getting dopey Trumpists telling me their president is making heroic efforts to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians in ways no other president has. Yeah dipshit, he’s doing it by giving Israel literally everything it’s ever wanted by removing the Palestinians. That’s not solving a problem or achieving peace, that’s just using force to declare a winner and taking everything from the declared loser. It’s like saying you resolved an argument by murdering one of the participants. It’s like saying you can fix racism by eliminating everyone of a different race.
Trump’s whole plan is “No more Palestinians means no more Israel-Palestine conflict!” How stupid do you have to be to believe that’s what peace and justice looks like? You can end ANY dispute by eliminating the other side, but that doesn’t equal peace. In this case, it equals giving a genocidal ethnostate everything it’s ever wanted, which advocates of peace and justice have spent generations trying to stop.
❖
For an entire decade now American consciousness has been plagued by the delusion that fighting the power has something to do with Donald Trump. Democrats act like they’re being brave revolutionaries by standing against him. Republicans act like they’re being brave revolutionaries by supporting him.
In reality the fight against real power has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump. It’s got very little to do with opposing him, since the US president is just a figurehead and if it wasn’t Trump standing in that position it’d be some other ideologically identical empire goon. And it’s certainly got nothing to do with supporting him, since he’s completely unified with establishment power structures.
Progressives view Trump as a Hitlerian dictator who plans to end democracy in America, while rightists view him as a heroic populist who is leading a charge to dismantle the Deep State. In reality Trump’s record has established beyond a doubt that he is nothing other than a standard shitty Republican president. As far as his material policy decisions and governance are concerned he is not extraordinary, and he is not special. His few superficial differences from his predecessors are eclipsed by his similarities with them, which dwarf the differences by orders of magnitude. The only reason Trump is regarded as an aberration rather than a continuation of US status quo politics is because both sides of the imaginary partisan divide keep fueling that delusion with baseless emotion-driven narratives.
The network of plutocrats and empire managers who really run America have been in power since long before Trump, and could easily run things today without Trump, and will continue to run things after Trump. For the previous four years the United States had a president who was an actual dementia patient, and it made no difference to the functioning of the empire. Trump is the same. Anyone could be sitting in that figurehead position, and the tyranny and abuses of the US empire would continue uninterrupted.
To meaningfully oppose real power is not to take some special stance toward Donald Trump, or any other individual empire manager for that matter. The abuses of the empire aren’t the product of any one individual, but rather the inevitable fruits of the systems and practices that the empire is premised upon. Capitalism. Imperialism. Hegemonic control. Plutocracy. Militarism. Ecocide. Exploitation. Extraction. Authoritarianism. Propaganda.
Fighting the power means taking your stand against these things. You know this is true because while the powerful permit and encourage the partisan feuding for and against Donald Trump, they have violent conniptions whenever a robust movement against imperial war agendas or capitalist oligarchy emerges anywhere in the world. One need only look at how aggressively the FBI targeted antiwar activists, communists and black civil rights groups with COINTELPRO operations to stomp out any movement toward justice and equality in the United States, and contrast this with how freely opposition and support for Donald Trump is allowed to flourish in mainstream discourse, to see what real opposition looks like.
If you want to fight the power, take your stand against the empire itself. Help discredit its propaganda machine in the eyes of the public, so that people will stop consenting to its abuses. Help oppose its war agendas, so that its abuses will become harder to inflict upon the world. Help open people’s eyes to the injustices that are baked into capitalism, so people can see that a better world is possible. Help spread awareness of the way the empire really operates, so people can stop throwing their energy into the delusion that fighting real power has something to do with Donald Trump.
_______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/IDF.
