Trump Puts An Appropriately Ugly Face On A Very Ugly Empire
Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST
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Trump Puts An Appropriately Ugly Face On A Very Ugly Empire
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
The only thing I like about Trump is exactly what so many empire managers hate about him: he gives the game away. He says the quiet parts out loud. He’s the only president who’ll openly boast that US troops are in Syria to keep the oil or lament that they failed to take the oil from Venezuela, or just come right out and tell everyone he’s bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs.
Trump is the opposite of Obama, who was very skillful at putting a pretty face on the evil empire. Trump puts a very ugly face on a very ugly thing. He is a much more honest face to have on the empire. A crude, stupid plutocrat who is owned by other plutocrats is the perfect representative of that tyrannical power structure.
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The propaganda machine has been spinning its head off trying to frame soccer brawls in Amsterdam as a horrifying “pogrom” against Jewish people because the side instigating the violence were supporters of team Maccabi Tel Aviv who flew in from Israel.
Video evidence shows far right Israeli hooligans terrorizing the streets of Amsterdam, chanting “Fuck the Arabs”, starting fights, beating people, tearing down Palestinian flags, attacking a cab driver, and singing “Let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs! Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!”
In the face of all this evidence of atrocious behavior by Israeli soccer fans, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Antisemitic Attacks Prompt Emergency Flights for Israeli Soccer Fans”. The Wall Street Journal ran with “Antisemitic Attacks in Amsterdam Prompt Tight Security at Jewish Sites”. “Pogroms have returned to Europe, and the ‘anti-racist’ Left are silent,” says The Telegraph.
Meanwhile the Daily Mail sports section ran with a headline more in line with what people actually saw: “Israeli football hooligans tear down Palestine flags in Amsterdam as taxi drivers ‘fight back’ in night of chaos ahead of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s visit to Ajax”.
Leaders of western nations like the US, UK, Canada and France joined the Dutch king in framing these soccer brawls and hooliganism as a historic mass-scale hate crime against Jews, while Israeli officials have been melodramatically shrieking like their hair is on fire.
These exhausting victim-LARPing freaks. Stop playing sports with Israel. Stop holding sporting events which could lead to the deranged members of a genocidal apartheid state showing up in your community stirring up violence and hate so they can cry victim and say you holocausted them.
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Another thing that sucks about the fake “antisemitism” crisis that the western political-media class are pretending to believe in is that it will probably become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which creates real hatred of Jewish people.
You can’t keep telling everyone over and over and over again that Jews and Israel are one and the same and that any criticism of one is always necessarily an attack on the other while the state of Israel is murdering children by the tens of thousands without contributing to unfair prejudice against Jewish people everywhere. Israel is exacerbating this effect by insisting its actions represent all Jews and are done in defense of Judaism while committing genocidal atrocities under a Star of David flag.
If you understand the truth that modern Israel is a settler-colonialist project of the western empire which uses the Jewish religion as an excuse to inflict violence and tyranny in a crucial geostrategic region, then you understand that there’s no real connection between modern Israel and the Jews you encounter in your community. Sure a majority of western Jews buy into the empire’s lies and support Israel, but a majority of the westerners of all faiths buy into the empire’s lies about its wars and official enemies and all its other propaganda too. This is just what it looks like when you live in a highly propagandized society which is structured to psychologically manipulate people into consenting to nonstop military violence.
Once you understand this, you see that blaming ordinary Jews in your society for the actions of the state of Israel makes about as much sense as blaming ordinary Muslims for the actions of the Saudi royals — but most people don’t understand this. It takes a lot of learning and close examination, and most people haven’t reached that level of lucidity in our confusing information landscape which is distorted by lies and propaganda.
So when they see a self-evidently evil thing being done and hear their leaders and pundits telling them over and over again that if you hate what you’re seeing then you necessarily hate Jewish people, what understanding do you think they’re going to form in their minds?
Greater hatred and prejudice looks like a fairly inevitable consequence of this messaging from where I’m sitting. And it will all be the fault of the western pundits and politicians who are aggressively promulgating this message throughout our society right now in an effort to stomp out criticism of an active genocide.
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The garment-rending emotional reaction to the US election results compared to the apathy on Gaza over the last year tells you that liberals don’t see Palestinians as human beings. They’ll deny it, but it’s true. Their emotions show you much more than their words ever will. This is who they are.
Ignore their words and watch their actions. It works with politicians, it works with entire governments, and it works with individuals too. If you see someone flailing around on the ground because their genocidal candidate lost after spending a year walking around functioning perfectly fine throughout a year of genocide, that tells you something about them that their words would never tell you.
People are always much more honest with their actions than their words, because words can spin narratives and actions cannot. If you’re ever unsure of someone’s true motivations and where they really stand, don’t ask them, just watch them. They’ll tell you eventually, with their actions and not their words.
Lili News 029
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
- In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
- Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
- Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
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