this post copy-pasted from a piece by Caitlin Johnstone* – with the tweet below embedded
They’re hunting civilians with armed quadcopters in Gaza.
The drones play recordings of crying babies and women screaming in distress in order to lure people out into the open, and then shoot them.
This is reportedly happening at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, where people live in total darkness at night and have no connection to the outside world.
Other times the drones play the sounds of explosions and gunshots and rolling tanks, and sometimes songs in Hebrew or Arabic, all to terrorize these refugees hiding in the darkness afraid for their lives.
This is the sort of report that a critical thinker would normally dismiss as absurd atrocity propaganda if it was being made about any other military power, but this is the IDF we’re talking about, and this specific allegation is pretty well-supported now.
Also @Hind_Gaza confirmed this is happening: the IDF has quadcopters luring people to them with recordings of the sound of women and children screaming, then firing on them https://t.co/1ANe4myWLx
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) April 18, 2024
When the destruction of Gaza first began I used to read the jarring claims about the horrific things the IDF were doing and often think, “No, no way. That can’t be the whole story. It’s too cartoonishly evil. There must be some information missing.” Then a few days or weeks later confirmation would come out, showing it’s even worse than I thought before.
I don’t experience that kind of dubiousness when reading such stories anymore. There are only so many atrocities you can see documented, so many videos of IDF troops recording themselves gleefully behaving like monsters, so many hospitals you can see attacked, so many journalists you can see assassinated, before you read a new report about new unfathomable acts of depravity and find yourself saying “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
This baby-crying-sniper-drone story is something else, though. It’s like something out of a weird post-apocalyptic horror movie or something. It’s the kind of information that makes you sort of re-evaluate your previous assumptions about humanity, the world, and the kind of reality we’re experiencing here.
It is really astonishing, how cruel people can be. How cruel a whole nation of people can be made to be, if they’re indoctrinated just right. You spend your whole childhood being indoctrinated into the belief that one group of people are inferior to your own and don’t deserve the same rights and treatment your group receives, and before you know it you’re blockading aid trucks from bringing that group food, and playing recordings of crying babies on an assassination drone in order to murder civilians at a refugee camp.
That’s how Nazi Germany happened, it’s how the genocidal apartheid state of Israel has happened, and it’s how the murderous US-centralized empire has happened. It turns out it’s not all that hard to manipulate a population into supporting shocking abuses at mass scale with modern propaganda and indoctrination from early childhood. It turns out the human mind is a lot more hackable than we’d like to believe it is, and that this can be used to unleash living nightmares upon our world a lot more easily than we’re comfortable acknowledging.
This is how the entire western world has been manipulated into accepting nonstop war, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, imperialism and exploitation as fine and normal, and into assuming that a better world isn’t possible. As long as the powerful are able to manipulate the way a sufficiently large percentage of the population thinks, speaks, acts and votes, we’re going to be stuck in this horrifying dystopia where the sky rains fire upon the innocent, where war profiteers reap vast fortunes from machines which rip apart human bodies, and where sniper drones cry like babies.
We can help weaken the empire’s propaganda machine by spreading awareness of what it’s doing and how it operates, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. Help people to see the ways in which the mass media are deceiving them, point out all the signs that we live under an empire of lies, and help spread awareness of what’s really true and what’s really possible.
All positive changes in human behavior of any scale are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Spreading awareness is the first step toward a healthy world, and we can each do that in our own small way every single day.
Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
—Aldous Huxley in 1958
Chartbook 251: In the beginning was Napoleon
— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) December 3, 2023
Infruriated by the terrible Ridley Scott film, @CameronAbadi and I did a podcast https://t.co/V0IiDWoBGv
And I followed it up with this Chartbook 251 pulling together some recent econ history https://t.co/t8mFESrsny
Adam Tooze:
If the period between 1790s and the early 1800s was, according to Reinhart Koselleck, the period in which the modern Western conception of secular history took shape (Sattelzeit), then Napoleon was perhaps its first hero (or antihero). If there was such a thing as history, then Napoleon showed how war and military command could make and remake it.
Not for nothing, Hegel described the emperor cantering through Jena as the “world soul” on horseback. It was the historical efficacy of Napoleonic war-fighting that Prussian theorist of war, Clausewitz, tried to grasp with his radically historical and romantic view of war as an antidote to the rationalist and geometric conceptions of war beloved of the 18th century.
One hundred and eighty years later, the historian Thomas Nipperdey began his history of 19th-century Germany with the simple statement: In the beginning was Napoleon.*
three formats – PDF (as above), epub (Kobo), mobi (Kindle) – from the BC Humanist website*
☞ ☞ ☞ truth is a pathless land / Krishnamurti*
Carlos Castaneda:
Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.
/ see page 76 in the Google Books reader below – or enter camino in the reader search box
Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. … A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.
/ scroll down to page 118 in the Google Books reader below – or enter embark in the reader search box
/ see also note appended to this post
“Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One
makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with
it. The other will make you curse your life.” / emphasis added
see tweeted article, archived*Confessions of a literary schlub: Promoting a book can derange you - The Globe and Mail https://t.co/76Qd4TQlaK
— Tom Rachman (@TomRachman) June 24, 2023
… The mind achieved what the heart could not. He began planning the destruction of the long peace of the place. The machine appeared in the distance, singing to itself of money. Its song was the web they were caught in, men and women together. The villages were as flies to be sucked empty.
God secreted a tear. Enough, enough, he commanded, but the machine looked at him and went on singing.
—R.S. Thomas (!w)*
Opinion: Ron DeSantis thinks modern politics is about doing things, rather than just tribal belonginghttps://t.co/CZ2qs0BgQT
— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) May 30, 2023
https://t.co/ZnZ8Z6XD8N @BlueZones #HealthyLiving #HealthyLifestyle #Longevity
— #FreeJulianAssange #Peace #MakeLoveNotWar (@Simon_A_Wood) January 1, 2023
ICYMI: This morning CODEPINK's @medeabenjamin and Tighe Barry told @SecBlinken to #FreeAssange and seek #JusticeForShireen at a #WorldPressFreedomDay event where he mentioned neither of them. pic.twitter.com/SV6KdoVkUc
— CODEPINK (@codepink) May 3, 2023
this post is a very lightly edited copy-paste of a piece by Caitlin Johnstone*
I – Caitlin Johnstone – have been ranting all week about the shocking war-with-China propaganda escalation in Australian mainstream media, and I feel like I could easily scream about it for another month without running out of vitriol for the disgusting freaks who are pushing this filth into the consciousness of my countrymen. One really can't say enough unkind things about people who are openly trying to pave the way toward an Atomic Age world war; in a remotely sane world such monsters would be driven from human civilization and die cold and alone in the wilderness with nothing but their bloodlust to keep them company.
One of the most obnoxious things said during this latest propaganda push appeared in the joint statement provided by the five "experts" (read: empire-funded China hawks) recruited by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to share their obscenely hawkish opinions in an official-looking media presentation. This paragraph – screenshot above – has been rattling around in my head since I first read it:
Australia must prepare itself. Most important of all is a psychological shift. Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs but an aberration. Australia’s holiday from history is over. Australians should not feel afraid but be alert to the threats we face, the tough decisions we must make and know that they have agency. This mobilisation of mindset is the essential prerequisite to any successful confrontation of China.
Do you see what they're doing there? These professional China hawks are explicitly trying to frame peace as a strange "aberration", and war as the status quo norm. They're saying Australians require a "psychological shift" and a "mobilisation of mindset" from thinking peace is normal and healthy to thinking war is normal and healthy.
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Betrayal is the closing act in nearly all proxy wars.
—Chris Hedges*
Betrayal is the closing act in nearly all proxy wars.
—Chris Hedges* (!g !?)
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development. He serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, and an SDG Advocate for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. From 2001-18, Sachs served as Special Advisor to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and António Guterres (2017-18). Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, most recently A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018), and The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (2020).
Eva Nowotny, Board Member of Bruno Kreisky Forum, Amb. ret., Chair of the Vienna University Board
Recorded at Kreisky Forum, December 14, 2022*
No Sunny Days For A Decade, Extreme Cold And Starvation: ‘Nuclear Winter’ And The Urgent Need For Public Education https://t.co/7IxrdeekCn pic.twitter.com/8E4MiJl34D
— Forbes Europe (@ForbesEurope) February 14, 2023
No, Australia Does Not Actually Need To Prepare For War With China
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 7, 2023
"These military industrial complex-funded pundits are lying. Australia's participation in an American war against China is NOT an inevitability, and is NOT necessary."https://t.co/JQERf7uqTJ
…
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh to talk more about his new piece, “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline.” While the White House has described Hersh’s reporting as, quote, “complete fiction,” calls are growing for an independent probe into the explosion.
Sy Hersh, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can flesh out what it is you found in your report and what first tipped you off, albeit there were a lot of public comments, including the Polish government right after the bombing saying, “Thank you, America.” Lay it out for us, Sy.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, first of all, I think the reporting really can be described as a friend of mine did: What I did was really deconstruct the obvious. I mean, you have to hear what the president said. But, of course, there were secret plans, that I’m writing about, and they include — there was a committee set up. Jake Sullivan was directly involved. He was the national security adviser, still is. They set up a team to look at options about how to put pressure on the Russian government to back off.
…
source: transcript on the Democracy Now! website* – archived*
Hersh claims US blew up Nord Stream https://t.co/tm4ETMGdjj
— George Atherton (@notrehta) February 18, 2023
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) February 12, 2023
A report released today concluded that Jean Vanier [...] founded the first L’Arche community primarily as a cover for a secretive religious sect with exploitative “mystical-sexual” beliefs and practices.https://t.co/17veuLZTnt
— Andréa Schmidt (@whatescapes) January 30, 2023
Earth's inner core, a hot iron ball the size of Pluto, has stopped spinning in the same direction as the rest of the planet and might even be rotating the other way, research suggests👇🏿https://t.co/6Uv4Xo8a1i (https://t.co/WoOEpTzkRt) pic.twitter.com/tQBY6nTBU3
— Arsen Dzℏanoev (@dzhanoev) January 26, 2023
As Chomsky observed, you’re not allowed to talk about the known NATO actions experts have been warning for many years would lead to invasion. You’re only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked because he is evil and hates freedom. https://t.co/LQMGzAAwRT
— Peace & Love ✌🏼❤️ (@mrzickler) January 23, 2023
So, make no mistake, behind all the phony hand-wringing and flag-waving, the U.S.-centralized empire is getting exactly what it wants from this conflict. It gets to overextend Russia militarily and financially, promote its narratives around the world, rehabilitate the image of U.S. interventionism, expand internet censorship, expand militarily, bolster control over its European client states. And all it costs is a little pretend empire money that gets funneled into the military-industrial complex anyway.Which is why when it looked like peace was at risk of breaking out in the early days of the conflict, the empire sent in former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson to tell Zelensky that even if he is ready for the war to end, his partners to the West were not.
Boris Johnson, then UK prime minister, with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, April 9, 2022. (Ukraine government)So, as you can see, the notion that this war is “unprovoked” is a fairy tale for idiots and children; there’s no excuse for a grown adult with internet access and functioning brain matter to ever say such a thing.
Had China backed a coup in Mexico and now had a loyal vassal in Mexico City who was letting Beijing distribute weapons along the U.S. border while continually shelling English-speaking separatists in Baja California who are seeking U.S. annexation, there’s no question that Washington would consider this a provocation and would respond accordingly. You can tell me that’s not true, but we’d both know you’re lying.