Olle Bengtsson

By Caitlin Johnstone

It used to be hard to help westerners see the depravity of the US empire. Now it’s just right in everyone’s face with raw genocide footage and insanely evil warmongering of direct economic consequence.

It took a lot of work to help the average westerner understand that NATO aggressions actively provoked the war in Ukraine, or that western interventionism played a major role in the violence and chaos in Syria, or that US economic warfare was largely responsible for the suffering of Cubans and Venezuelans. The murderous savagery of the empire was hidden behind layers of obfuscation, allowing the propagandists to frame the western power structure as a passive witness to the abuses of foreign regimes.

Now the propagandists have very little to work with, so those obfuscations can no longer take place. There’s no way you can spin a school full of children blown up by an American double-tap airstrike as anything other than what it is. There’s only so much narrative manipulation you can exert on raw video footage of a western-backed genocide playing out in full view of the entire world day after day for years. There’s no way to propagandize westerners into believing they want to pay a lot more more money for their fuel and groceries.

I saw former EU parliament member Luis Garicano complaining on Twitter that Trump’s actions are making it look as though leftists have been correct about the US empire this whole time, saying “Many of us, liberal Europeans, spent decades pushing back against the European extreme left’s cartoon version of America ( it’s all oil/ imperialism/getting rich at the expense of others) and then one dumb administration walks in and performs the caricature to perfection.”

Garicano’s entire worldview depends on his ability to avoid recognizing the obvious truth: that the so-called “extreme left” has always been correct, and that the empire he worships has always been evil. It’s just having a harder and harder time masking its true nature, because of the very evils it has tried to conceal.

Everything’s becoming more and more revealed. More and more transparent. What was once done solely by whistleblowers, investigative journalists, activists and dissident media is now being done by the empire itself, because there’s only so long you can hide the truth about something so malignant. An empire that is held together by lies, corruption and endless slaughter was never going to remain unseen. The brutality necessary to dominate the planet had to come out into the light eventually.

“May all be revealed” has been my prayer for our world for many years now. That dearly held wish is now being answered, and the truth is looking every bit as ugly as expected.

May all be revealed. May all that is hidden become seen. In the empire. In our governments. In our culture. In our community. In our interpersonal relationships. In ourselves.

All abusiveness ultimately boils down to a lack of clear seeing. Governments are able to abuse people because the dynamics of corruption and tyranny aren’t clearly seen by the public, who would violently revolt if they truly understood what their leaders are doing to them and to their world. Domestic violence and family sexual abuse can only continue when the rest of the community doesn’t see and understand what the abuser is doing. Our own abusive tendencies can only persist for as long as our trauma responses and maladaptive coping mechanisms remain hidden in the shadows of our subconscious mind.

All of these dysfunctional dynamics will lose their durability as we become more and more conscious of what’s really going on, in ourselves and in our world. Things look ugly now because the truth is ugly, but it is only by truth revealing itself that we can move toward health and harmony as a species.

If you’ve ever done deep inner work on your own psychology you have seen this play out in your own personal experience. You can heal your inner woundedness if you can gather up the courage to plunge into your own darkness and face with uncompromising honesty the uncomfortable realities you’ve been avoiding within yourself throughout your entire life  –  but you kept those things unconscious for a reason. They’re scary. They’re painful. They’re shameful. Facing them can feel like the end of the world. Yet it is only by coaxing them into the light of consciousness that they can be fully seen, reconciled, and healed.

The whole world is like that. Humans as a collective cannot fix problems which we don’t clearly see and understand. Our rulers pour so much energy into maintaining influence operations like news media propaganda, Hollywood psyops, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and government secrecy in order to obstruct our clear seeing and understanding. 

But it’s all coming tumbling out into the cold light of day now. More and more is becoming visible. 

May the lies and obfuscations continue to unravel. May the truth continue to reveal itself.

Texter av Catelina Johnstone

Kirk. Hur de liberala ekonomiska inslagen i hans burkeanism ledde honom till att försvara en samtida höger vars version av denna ekonomiska politik, tvåhundra år efter Burke, var urmodig och med tiden med obestridlig historisk evidens kom att visa sig enbart destruktiv för de viktiga konservativa värden och insikter han i övrigt ville värna. En inbyggd, konstitutiv motsägelse i all anglo-amerikansk konservatism, som ju varken kan eller vill avvisa de förutsättningar och villkor som är givna med den allmänna modernitet inom vars ramar den rör sig.

Men vad Nash kallade den konservativa intellektuella rörelsen i USA under efterkrigstiden såg ändå ut att delvis vara något helt annat och mer: inte bara den gamla vanliga och med kalla kriget förnyade och intensifierade kapitalistiska antikommunismen, utan en djupare, såväl historiskt som metafysiskt förankrad humanistisk-kulturell, moralisk och andlig kritik även av den västerländska liberalismen och dess demokrati, ja i väsentliga avseenden även av just kapitalismen och hela moderniteten. Av den amerikanska imperialismen i Babbitts mening, atombombningarna av Hiroshima och Nagasaki, exempelvis. Försvaret av överordnade värden var reellt och förblir angeläget. Även om Nash också räknade libertarianer, fusionister och neokonservativa till rörelsen, fanns där också en rad åtminstone i anglosfärens sammanhang mer distinkt konservativa profiler som Kirk. Det är det som är det intressanta med den. Det är det som äger bestående värde.

Russell Kirk: Prospects for Conservatives

Viktig intervy med Gabor Maté om sionism, antisemitism och relaterade ämnen, i historiskt perspektiv men också med fokus på dagens situation, på Pascal Lottaz’ kanal Neutrality Studies.

Foto: Gabor Gastonyi

“Felix Marquardt speaks with physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté about anti-Semitism claims, Zionism, colonialism, Gaza, French and European politics, censorship, Israeli dissent, and the push to criminalize anti-Zionism. They also discuss trauma, propaganda, victimhood, media silence, and the wider crisis inside Western power and public debate.”

Long Live Innovationism!

Independently published, 2024

Amazon.com

Publisher’s description:

In this book, Caleb Maupin explains that, while he remains committed to his principles of anti-imperialism and the belief in a rationally organized economy, he no longer identifies as a “communist” nor seeks to align with the Marxist movement. The text explores why the Center for Political Innovation now describes its outlook as “Innovationist” rather than socialist or communist, highlighting where the organization diverges from Marxist-Leninist ideology while still upholding certain core principles. The book offers a thorough critique of the current “Communist” movement in America, arguing that it must be abandoned to effectively pursue anti-imperialist goals. Maupin explains that the Center for Political Innovation seeks to create a government of action that to fights for working families, while opposing the rise of a low-wage police state, and preventing the drive toward a new world war.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Whenever Israel is killing tons of civilians the western media always start churning out articles about “antisemitism” and Jewish feelings.

“Jews Begin to Wonder: Is Anywhere Safe?” blares a recent headline from The Wall Street Journal, subtitled “‘It feels like the 1930s again.’ Hostility against Jews surges in Western countries where they felt safe in recent decades.”

An article for The Atlantic titled “Canada’s Polite Pogrom” bizarrely tries to argue that “tolerance for zealotry” is somehow “purging Jews from public life.”

A Washington Examiner headline proclaims that “Jewish voters feel ‘politically homeless’ as antisemitism rises on both sides.”

A headline for The Telegraph asserts that “Many Jews are sensing frightening echoes of 1930s Germany in 2020s Britain.”

War Criminal Tony Blair writes an article for The Free Press titled “Why the West Fails to Stop Antisemitism”.

Meanwhile, in real life, people are being mercilessly butchered in Iran, Lebanon and Palestine by Israel and its allies. The uglier it gets, the more aggressive the concern-trolling about “antisemitism” becomes.

The Jewish Chronicle has published an article by Maureen Lipman titled “Does the world have any idea of how tired the people of Israel are?”, subtitled “A dear friend told me that his grandchildren have needed to enter their safe room more than 200 times since the current battle began.”

“The BBC and reporters worldwide do not go into the shelters where children are trained to lie on the floor when the sirens go off,” writes Lipman. “Neither do they report on the closure of schools. Most Israeli kids have missed some school every day since Covid. Are the media even aware of the fear of the elderly in Israel?”

Absolutely incredible. She writes as though Israelis are the only people on earth whose country is being bombed. Only Zionists could drop bombs on neighboring populations every single day for years and then go “nobody in the world can imagine what it’s like to live in fear of airstrikes!”

Western news reporters face so much pressure to pad Israel’s image and advance Israeli information interests that the Associated Press just ran an editorial titled “AP is calling Israel’s attack on Lebanon an invasion. What does that mean and why does it matter?” justifying its decision to call what is self-evidently and indisputably an invasion the thing that it is. 

You never saw them do this with Ukraine. You never saw the media holding long internal deliberations about what to label it and then publishing editorials going “We’re going to call this a Russian invasion, we’re pretty sure that’s what this is called, please don’t be mad at us!” That’s how cowed they are by Israel’s supporters, and how much pressure they feel to toe the imperial line no matter what.

At the same time in the Israeli press we’re seeing op-eds like The Jerusalem Post’s “Long-term deradicalization in Gaza faces major hurdles,” which argues explicitly for the total ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territory.

The article’s author Martin Sherman dismisses claims that the people of Gaza can be “deradicalized” -  as though the radicalization of Palestinians is the problem, and not the radical political ideology of the people who’ve been waging an extermination campaign upon them. Instead, Sherman argues, everyone must accept the “harsh reality” that only annexation and ethnic cleansing can lead to a lasting peace in the Gaza Strip.

“The only way Israel can ensure how the Gaza Strip will be governed, and who will govern it, is to govern it itself,” writes Sherman. “Moreover, the only way Israel can govern the Gaza Strip without becoming an external oppressor of ‘another people’ is to remove ‘the other people’ from the confines of the Gaza Strip itself.”

“This is not radical right-wing radicalism. It is merely sound and sober political science,” Sherman writes.

If it isn’t right-wing radicalism to advocate the mass purge of a colonized indigenous population from their homeland for being the wrong ethnicity, then right-wing radicalism does not exist. That’s pretty much as right-wing extremist as it gets.

And this is an entirely mainstream Israeli publication.

If anyone on earth needs to be deradicalized, it’s the Israelis and their supporters.

Texter av Catelina Johnstone