Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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The Wall Street Journal reports that senior US officials don’t think the Biden administration will secure a ceasefire in Gaza before Biden’s term is up. Anyone who told you that Biden or Harris were seriously working on a ceasefire lied to you.
I’ve seen some people calling this a “failure” on the part of the Biden administration, and that needs to stop. It’s not a failure. You can only fail at something you tried to do. Biden and Harris didn’t “fail” at anything, they SUCCEEDED at their goal of helping Israel destroy Gaza.
Biden could have ended this at any time by withholding weapons, or even by simply threatening to. He could have ended it with a phone call. The killing continued because he and his handlers wanted it to.
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Israel apologists have been amazingly defensive about its latest acts of terrorism in Lebanon. It’s extremely important to them that everyone believe it’s awesome and good to turn electronic devices into thousands of bombs placed throughout unsuspecting civilian populations.
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Hezbollah are vastly morally superior to the IDF. The one and only reason you see the former called “terrorists” and the latter framed as legitimate defense forces is because one works against the strategic interests of the Pentagon while the other aligns with those interests.
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Podium goons like State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller are still refusing to acknowledge that Israel was behind the terror attacks in Lebanon when asked about them by the press, which is absolutely insane. Literally everyone knows it was Israel. Mainstream media outlets are publishing reports citing US officials saying they know it was Israel.
This is the same as lying. They’re looking us right in the eye and lying, knowing full well that we all know they’re lying.
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The claim that Israel’s terror attack in Lebanon was super duper “targeted” against enemy combatants is the dumbest thing we’ve been asked to believe about Israel in weeks.
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A group of 27 Israeli ministers and Knesset members have sent a letter to Benjamin Netanyahu urging him to order an evacuation of northern Gaza in order to “cleanse” the area via siege warfare.
They’re just coming right out and saying it now.
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Whenever a liberal denounces the western-backed genocide in Gaza and then says “but”, everything they say after “but” can be mentally replaced with “I don’t see Palestinians as fully human.”
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I have seen the insides of too many dead kids to take seriously the idea that extending the Biden-Harris administration would be any kind of “harm reduction”.
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Pay less attention to the two candidates the Democrats and Republicans have offered you to choose from, and pay more attention to the choices they HAVEN’T offered you.
They haven’t offered you a candidate who will stop funding the genocide in Gaza.
They haven’t offered you a candidate who will end US warmongering, militarism, or imperialism.
They haven’t offered you a candidate who will fight against the destruction of our ecosystem.
They haven’t offered you a candidate who will end homelessness and care for the needful.
They haven’t offered you a candidate who will ensure that everyone working 40 hours a week can afford a decent place to live.
They haven’t offered you a candidate who will get money out of politics.
They haven’t offered you a candidate who will break up monopolistic megacorporations.
They haven’t offered you a candidate who will fight the exploitative imbalance of power the capitalist class has over workers.
They haven’t offered you a candidate who will roll back the authoritarianism, surveillance and police militarization you’ve been seeing in your country.
They haven’t offered you a candidate who will end the war on drugs.
They haven’t even offered you a candidate who will give your country a normal functioning healthcare system.
You can learn a lot more from looking at what ISN’T on the ballot than you can by looking at what is.
Peace, justice and equality are not on the ballot. Ending ecocide, ending poverty or ending corruption are not on the ballot. The only viable candidates do not offer these things. The candidates who do offer any of these things will be prevented from coming anywhere close to victory.
This fact has orders of magnitude more direct impact on you and those around you than the relatively superficial differences between Harris and Trump ever will.
If you look at the entire global behavior of the US empire as a whole, the difference between what it would look like if Trump were president and what it would look like under Harris is probably something like one tenth of one percent — and even that’s being generous. Whereas if either party ran candidates who stood for peace, justice, equality and a healthy environment, the world would be so drastically changed as to become almost unrecognizable.
Which is why neither party ever runs such a candidate. Both parties exist to maintain the corrupt, abusive, warmongering, imperialist, ecocidal capitalist status quo. The oligarchs and empire managers who really run the US government will do whatever they need to do to ensure that only candidates who’ll preserve that status quo ever get anywhere near the Oval Office.
Elections are a phony performance put on every few years to let Americans believe they have some meaningful control over the most important decisions that will be made by their government. Looking at what ISN’T on the ballot instead of looking at what is makes this immediately obvious.
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Featured image via Planet Labs PBC, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Caitlin Johnstone 