Texter av Caitlin Johnstone

En poäng med att “dela” texter av Caitlin Johnstone här är att de är så annorlunda i jämförelse med mina egna. Hennes stil kan uppfattas som alltför vulgär, eller alternativt som temperamentsfullt tidsenlig på ett positivt sätt. Det är mycket knulleri, liksom ju också i ordförande Haz’, knull-Haz’, liveströmmar (åtminstone var så fallet förr). Men vad man än tycker bör, föreslår jag, dessa stilaspekter inte göras till någon avgörande fråga i hennes fall.

Själv skriver jag hursomhelst inte som hon, annat än kanske undantagsvis. Under alla omständigheter läser många fler henne. Och det är viktigt att de gör det. Det är det som är det vitkiga. För just nu, exempelvis, säger hon det mesta av det väsentliga om det fullskaliga angreppskriget (åtminstone så fullskaligt som angriparna anser sig klara av) mot Iran och om förhållningssättet till de stridande parterna – eller det mesta av det som låter sig sägas utan det mer fullständiga analytiska instrumentarium som en akademisk eller annan teoretisk utbildning skänker.

Kraftfulla “rogue journalists” av hennes typ är helt nödvändiga, och deras genre kräver en annan typ av begåvning, skicklighet, och även perspektiv och sensibilitet än ideologiskt och på skilda fackområden mer initierade analytiker normalt äger. Ibland finns små enskilda punkter i hennes skrivande som man inte håller med om, men i dessa texter om kriget har jag inte funnit några sådana.

Inte minst är det för mig välkommet att inte behöva skriva själv, att bara kunna lyfta fram – genom att hänvisa till, referera, eller som i detta fall, och i fallet med exempelvis YouTube-kanaler som innehåller mer utvecklade analyser, helt enkelt oförändrat återge – andras arbete. Mitt ideal är ju, förutom att begränsa mig till de för mig centrala ämnena, framför allt att skriva om dem endast när ingen annan säger det som måste sägas, eller, ibland, i någon mening bara inte säger det på rätt eller tillräckligt bra sätt, och att inte skriva mer än nödvändigt.

Ofta tränger sig världens och tidens skeende på med en angelägenhetens oavvisliga intensitet som gör behovet att frångå denna princip och bara omedelbart ge uttryck för den nödvändiga responsen överväldigande, hur distraherande och tids- och energikrävande det än är. Generellt har politiken av detta skäl tagit över på den här nätplatsen på ett sätt jag inte alls avsett, och den atlantsionistiska imperialismens nya krig är ett mer plågsamt exempel på detta än något annat jag just nu kan minnas. Då är det en lättnad att kunna förmedla Catelinas texter, på det sätt hon själv tillåter, önskar och uppmuntrar. Hennes aktivistiska idealitet gör henne förstås särskilt förtjänt av ekonomiskt stöd!

Opposing “Both Sides” in This War is Crazy Imperialist Nonsense

By Caitlin Johnstone

“It’s possible to oppose this war and oppose the Iranian regime. You can denounce both.”

Sure you can. But you shouldn’t.

You should not do this. You should not be a pro bono Pentagon propagandist in the middle of a US war of immense consequence. You should not do the hasbarists’ job for them. Make them do their own job themselves.

This war already has a huge number of propagandists screaming “regime” at the top of their lungs in order to ensure that the slaughter continues. You don’t need to add your voice to the chorus, and you shouldn’t. You should not help them manufacture consent for more human butchery. You should be using your voice solely and exclusively to end the butchery your government and its allies are inflicting on human beings.

All your “regime bad” sloganeering accomplished was paving the way to the carnage you see before you today. Your self-righteous denunciations of the Iranian government failed to expand the rights of a single Iranian woman or LGBTQ individual. All you accomplished was helping to grease the wheels for a war of unfathomable horror, ensuring that all Iranians now live under more fear and misery than ever before.

If you live under the western empire, you have an ethical obligation to use your voice responsibly in that context. You don’t get to just irresponsibly feed into an active war propaganda campaign by regurgitating the same regime change narratives about an empire-targeted government as the US and Israeli governments, and then pretend this doesn’t make you culpable for the consequences of your actions. If your words help grease the wheels of the war machine, then you bear partial moral responsibility for what the war machine does with your assistance.

You don’t get to just pretend that responsibility doesn’t exist. The families who are being torn apart with the help of your pro bono war propaganda efforts do not care about your anarchist or Trotskyist “all tyranny is equally bad” political philosophy or how good your virtuous purity posturing makes you feel about yourself. All they experience is the consequences of your actions.

As a westerner, your one and only duty is to oppose the depravity of the western empire. That’s your only job. Don’t lean out the window of the Empire of Perpetual Bloodlust to wag your finger at empire-targeted countries in the global south. It’s obnoxious.

Curb the murderousness of your own government and its allies. That’s your job. If you get your job done, then come talk to me about how bad and wrong some random government in west Asia looks to you. Until then, shut the fuck up and do your job.

This is even Dumber and Crazier than the Iraq War

By Caitlin Johnstone

Young people keep asking me if this was what the Iraq invasion was like. I’ve been telling them “Sort of, but this is way dumber and crazier.”

There were fairly intelligent people who bought into the Iraq war propaganda. Many anti-war folk assumed Saddam probably did have weapons of mass destruction  –  they just didn’t buy into the narrative that war was the answer. There really were interventionists who sincerely believed the war could do good things for the Iraqi people.

This is nothing like that. Only the most shitbrained of morons sincerely believe the narratives supporting the Trumpanyahu administration’s attack on Iran. Mostly it’s just liars and manipulators cynically pretending to believe the stories about nuclear weapons and massacred protesters and bringing freedom and democracy to the Iranian people, because they want Iran to be bombed.

This time they’re not even pretending to care about the will of the American people. They’re not even pretending to care about humanitarian interests or the future of the people they are bombing. They’re just spouting extremely obvious lies that get fact-checked and debunked by the mainstream media in real time, and then murdering people and bragging about it.

The Iraq invasion was an unforgivable mass atrocity of unfathomable evil, but looking back on it you can understand how a person acting in good faith could have been taken in by the post-9/11 hysteria and the uniform war propaganda of the mass media. There was an argument put forward that Saddam Hussein would be replaced with a government that serves the interests of the Iraqi people, and then the US coalition really did stay in the country and build up a new regime to run things. Compared to what we’re seeing now, it’s almost quaint.

This is just open savagery. The US and Israel are pursuing the Libya model with Iran: smashing and decapitating the nation and then leaving the people to pick up the pieces and deal with all the chaos, lawlessness and sectarian conflict that ensues. They intend to plunge a nation of 90 million people into mass-scale strife and potential state collapse or balkanization, and then casually stroll away from the wreckage in cool indifference to the suffering they just unleashed upon the world.

They make no claim to be replacing the Iranian government with a better one. They make no claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to an oppressed people. They’re selling WMD lies and atrocity propaganda, but only in the most half-assed and low-energy of ways, with no interest in whether anyone actually believes them. Mostly they’re just destroying an ancient nation because they can, and looking at the world saying “Yeah we’re thugs. What are you gonna do about it?”

This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it emerges from its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.

Iran is Morally Superior to the United States

By Caitlin Johnstone

Iran is better than the United States. The United States is worse than Iran.

This is true not because Iran is especially good, but because the United States is especially evil.

Iran isn’t blanketing a major metropolis with military explosives, killing over a thousand people including hundreds of children. The United States is doing this with its partner in crime Israel.

Iran isn’t continuously bombing and invading countries around the world, toppling governments, circling the globe with hundreds of military bases, targeting civilian populations with siege warfare and brandishing nuclear weapons at its enemies in the name of securing planetary domination. Only the United States is.

The US empire is the single most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. No one else comes anywhere remotely close. Not Iran. Not anybody. Every government in the world is morally superior to the most evil government, and the most evil government is the United States.

Whenever I say this I get US empire apologists going “We’re only the ones fighting the wars and dropping the bombs because we happen to be the ones with the power to do so!”

But that’s false. The US isn’t the world’s most vicious government because it happens to be the most powerful, it’s the most powerful government because it’s the most vicious. It’s the power structure which was willing to do whatever it takes to rule the world, no matter how profoundly evil.

Genocides. Starvation sanctions. Nuclear brinkmanship. Imperialist extraction. The deliberate creation of failed states and humanitarian catastrophes. Policies designed to keep entire regions in a continuous state of division and strife. The United States and the globe-spanning empire structured around it have inflicted depravities upon our species which cry out to the heavens for vengeance. If you could truly comprehend the scale of the suffering it has created over the years, even for a second, you would never stop screaming.

Another objection I’ll encounter when I make these observations is “Well, I’d rather live in the US than Iran!”

And it says so much about the western worldview that people think this is an argument. Sure it’s probably nicer to live in the United States than Iran, especially now, and certainly ever since the US has been deliberately strangling the Iranian economy with the explicitly stated goal of making its citizenry so miserable they wage a civil war against their government. 

But it’s so revealing that westerners see someone saying Iran is better than the United States and think it’s a statement about where they personally would prefer to live, because it shows how completely invisible US warmongering is in their worldview. Washington’s acts of mass military slaughter simply do not count as immoral or abusive behavior in their eyes, because they are being inflicted on foreigners overseas. So they automatically assume the comparison is asking which country would make your feelings feel nicer to live in as an individual.

The fact that the US government happens to export the majority of its abusiveness to other countries outside its own borders doesn’t make it any less murderous and tyrannical, it just means the people bearing the brunt of its savagery happen to live in other places. Their lives don’t matter any less than American lives, and only a warped, American supremacist worldview would feel otherwise.

The US government is quantifiably morally inferior to the Iranian government. It is quantifiably more tyrannical, more murderous, more destructive, and more megalomaniacal. It is the very last power structure on earth that should have any say in who leads Iran and how the Iranians ought to conduct their affairs. It is not morally qualified to be making those decisions.

The US War Machine is Run by Deranged Armageddon Cultists

By Caitlin Johnstone

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gave one of his signature “I don’t have a small penis” tirades at the Pentagon on Wednesday, ranting and raving about the big, powerful, masculine war machinery that’s currently raining death and destruction upon the people of Iran.

“We will fly all day, all night, day and night finding, fixing and finishing the missiles and defense industrial base of the Iranian military, finding and fixing their leaders and their military leaders, flying over Tehran, flying over Iran, flying over their capital, flying over the IRGC, Iranian leaders looking up and seeing only US and Israeli air power every minute of every day until we decide it’s over,” Hegseth bloviated, saying there will be “B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters controlling the skies, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long.”

“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be,” the War Secretary spouted.

This would be the same Pete Hegseth who was mentioned in a recent article by Jonathan Larsen titled “U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for ‘Armageddon,’ Return of Jesus”, which reports that US military commanders are telling American soldiers that they are on a mission from God to fulfill a biblical prophecy and bring about the end of the world.

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has enshrined evangelical Christianity at the uppermost levels of the U.S. military, airing monthly prayer meetings throughout the Pentagon,” Larsen reports, saying that “Last year, the Pentagon confirmed to me that Hegseth attends a weekly White House Bible study. It’s led by a preacher who says God commands America to support Israel.”

Larsen reports that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been inundated with complaints from every branch of the US military that troops are being told by their leaders that President Trump has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” and similar statements.

Then you’ve got House Speaker Mike Johnson spouting religious war rhetoric, claiming Iranians have been led to evil by a “misguided religion”.

“The largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran and its proxies, have killed more Americans than any other terrorist regime on Earth,” said Johnson on Wednesday. “They are dedicated to it. They have been, and they say the quiet parts out loud. They wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, and they’d like to take us out as well. We’re the great Satan in their analogy and their misguided religion.”

So as if we didn’t have enough problems to deal with, it turns out the world is ruled by a nuclear-armed Armageddon cult.

The US empire is the most evil, destructive and dangerous power structure on this planet. It is operated by psychopaths and guided by demented religious zealotry. These freaks wouldn’t be believable as villains in a children’s cartoon show.

These are the people claiming to have the moral authority to decide who should be the leader of a sovereign nation on the other side of the planet. These are the powerful individuals whose choices are determining the path our species will take into the future.

They are everything they accuse Iran of being. They are dangerous religious fanatics. They cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons. They are the tyrants. They are the monsters.

This is unsustainable. These guys gotta go. The US empire must fall. Humanity depends on it.