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.
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.
2024-04-21T15−07*
*asterisks may contain links, as may exclamation points in parentheses (!*)* – and notes below relate to items above
see original piece by Caitlin Johnstone* – and listen to the audio there or below:
see also the manufacturing of consent by and for those in power (!? !*)*
TK*
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