Postcards from a Police State: 22 Years of Patriot Act Blowback
John & Nisha Whitehead
President George W. Bush signs the PATRIOT Act into law, October 26th 2001
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Hermann Goering
For those who remember the days and months that followed 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Hamas attacks on Israel.
The same shocking images of carnage and grief dominating the news. The same disbelief that anyone could be so hateful, so monstrous, so evil as to do this to another human being. The same outpourings of support and unity from around the world. The same shared fear that this could easily have happened to us or our loved ones.
Now once again the drums of war are sounding on the world stage, not that they ever really stopped. Israel is preparing to invade Gaza, the Palestinians are nearing a humanitarian crisis, and the rest of the world is bracing for whatever blowback comes next.
Here in the United States, as we approach the 22nd anniversary of the USA Patriot Act on October 26, we’re still grappling with the blowback that arises from allowing one’s freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security.
Here are a few lessons that we never learned or learned too late.
Mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer. Rushed through Congress a mere 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, undermined civil liberties, expanded the government’s powers and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance by the government on American citizens.
Pre-emptive strikes will only lead to further blowback. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority and adopt a strike-first policy against terrorist threats ‘before they’re fully formed.’” We are still suffering the consequences of this failed policy, which resulted in lives lost, taxpayer dollars wasted, the fomenting of hatred against the U.S. and the further radicalization of terrorist cells.
War is costly. There are many reasons to go to war, but those who have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that have profited most from these endless military occupations and exercises. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad, including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt. That also does not include the more than hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, or the millions displaced from their homes as a result of endless drone strikes and violence.
The tactics and weapons of war, once deployed abroad, will eventually be used against the citizenry at home. The horrors that took place at Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq, involved “US military personnel humiliating, hurting and abusing Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen and women smiled and gave thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs, or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.” Adding to the descent into moral depravity, the United States government legalized the use of torture, including waterboarding, in violation of international law and in the so-called pursuit of national security. The ramifications have been far-reaching, with domestic police mirroring a battlefield mindset in their encounters with American citizens, including the use of torture tactics at secret locations such as Homan Square in Chicago.
Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not reduce acts of terrorism, but it will result in a watched, submissive, surveillance society. Not only did the USA Patriot Act normalize the government’s mass surveillance powers, but it also dramatically expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens without much of any oversight. Thus, a byproduct of this post 9/11-age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. We have all become data collected in government files.
News cycle distractions are calibrated to ensure that you lose sight of what the government is doing. The average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state. Whether these events are critical or unimportant, when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this. In this way, regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions that keep the citizenry tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles also keep them tuned out to the government’s steady encroachments on their freedoms.
If you stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it abides by will be the ones used to clamp down on the citizenry. Having failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the American people have found themselves saddled with a government that skirts, flouts and violates the Constitution with little consequence. Overcriminalization, asset forfeiture schemes, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, warrantless surveillance, SWAT team raids, indefinite detentions, covert agencies, and secret courts are just a few of the egregious practices carried out by a government that operates beyond the reach of the law.
Do not turn your country into a battlefield, your citizens into enemy combatants, and your law enforcement officers into extensions of the military. A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the citizenry of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead? It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, we in America now find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.
As long as you remain fearful and distrustful of each other, you will be incapable of standing united against any threats posed by a power-hungry government. Early on, U.S. officials solved the problem of how to implement their authoritarian policies without incurring a citizen uprising: fear. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. Most of all, they want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Once you trade your freedom for security, the terrorists win. We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state. And in so doing, we have proven Osama Bin Laden right. He warned that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”
It took a long time to clear away the rubble from the 9/11 attacks.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 22 years after the USA Patriot Act was unleashed on a vulnerable nation, we are still reeling from the destruction it has wrought on our freedoms.
Originaslly published vis the Rutherford Institute
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
But, but, but, you don’t give the REASON why so many people bow to GODvernment. Why they do what you say in your article.
Yuval Harari now complains about “Leftist indifference to Hamas atrocities”.
Here’s the problem:
It doesn’t matter how hysterically the media scream over Hamas or how many celeb hacks sign “open letters” about “helping Israel”, the visuals from Gaza look like Hiroshima whllst the visuals from Israel look like nothing much is happening.
Everyone can see this.
Serious, honest question – WHAT “visuals” from Gaza do you mean?
I have yet to see anything that unequivocally represents in visual form the story we are getting.
— I see images of localised rubble piles
— I see TikTok shorts of people crying, cars burning, body bags – all of which look suspiciously engineered to provoke emotion with minimum content.
— I see the same from the Israel side too.
In fact we have concrete evidence of video fakery from Israel.
And it’s no secret the globalists run both sides. OG used an AI image of Gaza burning in one of their articles.
What’s being shown here that’s strong enough to make us think this is any more real than the shit show in Ukraine?
Genuinely asking, out of respect for you.
Gazan ruins are ubiquitous across the media I have seen. Try any of the sequences from this:
https://tapnewswire.com/2023/10/max-igan-israeli-false-flag-genocide-gaza/
As for the Israeli side:
https://twitter.com/i24NEWS_EN/status/1711718195025821976
https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1711369062784127121
Quite a difference.
I have responded but it’s pending pending pending!
If the US really wants to really help the Jewish people in Israel, a separate US state should be given to Jews within the United States Of America as a new and independent Israeli state.
Israel is about the size of New Jersey, so not such a big area is required.
There are about ten million people in Israel, it’s time to all move it to America guys.
Then the Jewish state can be protected and merged within the US itself.
Let America show its real face.
If they really want to help them.
Move the Jews from Israel to the US and give Israel back to the Palestinians, it belongs to them, it is ugly to keep their land.
Otherwise the Jews are in serious trouble in Israel.
Jews are one of the races which have suffered most.
Of course, they have their part and their contribution in their suffering.
They have suffered most because they were the first to claim, “We are the chosen people of God, and it is our basic right to rule over the world.
Other human beings are inferior human beings.”
Because this idea irritated everybody, without exception, Jews have been continually murdered, butchered.
Adolf Hitler alone killed six million Jews, and it goes on.
But the ultimate meanness has been committed by America and England, and even Jews could not understand the strategy.
After the second world war, the American and British forces were in control of Jerusalem, where the “Rock of the Dome” is, and what then became the small country of Israel.
America played the ugliest politics that you can conceive.
It created, under an armed force, a new nation for the Jews.
It called the new nation Israel,.
It had not been in existence for many centuries.
Once it had been a land for the Jews, in the days of Moses, then it was lost to Mohammedans for centuries.
Christians had been trying to recover it but they could not, neither were the Jews successful, they could not be!
Only six percent of the land belonged to the Jews and ninety-four percent of the land belonged to the Mohammedans.
What is happening in Israel between Jews and Arabs is nothing new.
It is happening all over the world, in different names, between Hindus and Mohammedans, between Christians and Jews.
Just the names are different, but the same violence, the same murder, the same suffering.
And people are clinging to their suffering.
As long as there is a belief in a God, humanity cannot be at peace.
It is God who is dividing humanity.
He is the ultimate enemy of humanity; otherwise what is the difference between a Hindu and a Mohammedan and a Christian and a Jew?
Just their idea of God.
And that idea is nothing but an idea, just an empty hypothesis.
There is no God anywhere, there is no evidence anywhere, there is no proof.
And if somebody says they have seen God, they are simply mentally ill.
They are deluded; they have been hallucinating and they need psychiatric treatment.
If we had treated all of our saints through psychiatry, humanity would have been in a peaceful state.
Now God is your greatest chain.
Are you ready to throw it away?
If you look without prejudice, you cannot believe it, why are there so many wars, why is there so much lunacy, why is there so much insanity?
These are the problems that have been dominating humanity for centuries.
In particular in Israel the problem has become a very burning issue, because the whole of the Middle East is Mohammedan.
How can you make Israel a sovereign nation?
America and Britain conspired to create the Jewish state so that now Jews will be in trouble for eternity.
This is a very sophisticated diplomacy.
And the Jews were happy; they thought that America and England were helping them, that they were favorable to them, that they were giving them the homeland for which they had been hankering for centuries.
But America had killed two birds with one stone.
Israel has to purchase war materials from America, and American Jews continuously have to send millions of dollars for the survival of Israel.
This was also a good chance to have Jewish money contributed to American politicians.
Israel is a strategy of Christian politics to destroy Jews, not directly, but by creating a situation so that Mohammedans can do the job and Christians can keep their mask that they have been so helpful, even to the enemies.
They have just followed Jesus’ philosophy.
Love your enemies.
Wow. You would gain in clarity and relevance by sticking to one or two main points and elaborating on those, especially if you intend on having a theological debate touching upon multiple major religions. Btw, to mention just one single issue you bring up, it’s highly debatable whether the initial Zionist impetus was primarily concerned with a form of divinity worship. Perhaps it was, but it certainly looks more like a brutal military conquest in an age when good liberal society professes to abhor bloody invasions and genocide–as illustrated by that Hitler thing and, most recently, the demonization of Putin. So, in essence, ‘jewishness’ cannot be defined as one single ideology or faith, and we know it’s definitely not a rac–unless you’re alluding to the original semitic inhabitants, but those call themselves Palestinians, not ‘Jews.’
In other words, this whole Jew thing is an absolute mess and nothing should be taken at face value–that would include the story of 6 million Jews.
OT – but – WHERE IS THE ACTUAL UKRAINE WAR?
Why are there no images like those we see from ww2 or even Vietnam of largescale engagements and battles?
We are supposed to be seeing casualties equivalent to the bloody Somme! You don’t get those without pitched battles – which NO ONE ever films or witnesses apparently.
I have to conclude until I see evidence otherwise the war in Ukraine is majority FAKE.
As for Gaza/Israel I see even LESS evidence.
I see endless streams of Tiktok vids that look designed to work on the prejudices of BOTH sides and make them uncritically accept a narrative
Where is the footage of the air raids and massive destruction they cause?
Conspicuous by its absence.
I want to go further than Kit Knightly and say these wars are as FAKE as covid as well as being used to promote the same end.
Re: the reset,
Many readers probably couldn’t give a shit about classical music but I thought the two following links are worth reading for the frankly terrifying light they shine on the true priorities of the parasite class (and this applies to every area):
https://www.city-journal.org/article/classical-musics-suicide-pact-part-1
https://www.city-journal.org/article/classical-musics-suicide-pact-part-2
And so, a tale of the deliberate destruction of the classical music industry via the general covid assault followed by the demands of that synthetic programme known as “woke” whereby e.g. orchestras had to “atone for the guilt of that white privileged past” by guaranteeing predetermined ethnic ratios:
“Even in the best of financial circumstances, the racial demands would have been startling in their scope. But at a time when every classical music budget has been blown apart by the coronavirus lockdowns, such ambition requires considerable confidence in one’s bargaining power. The bet paid off. Orchestras and opera companies rushed to adopt racial hiring benchmarks and to take on costly new diversity bureaucracy.”
That this will inevitably lead to the decimation of classical performances is of no concern to the media ghouls. Why? Because, even as they moralise over class issues, the class they serve is the soul of philistinism:
“The present-day scourges impugn concert protocols as a classist means of excluding a “diverse” audience. But it was the bearers of inherited privilege during the ancien régime who treated music as a mere backdrop to be gambled and flirted through. The nonaristocratic classes started attending to music with silent devotion, as it became ever more complex and demanding.”
A hugely important point. For the ones served by the media are indeed none other than the bearers of inherited privilege and the present incarnation of that ancien régime.
These are the juvenile grasping morons insatiable for whatever shiny trinket keeps them momentarily distracted and who have no feeling at all for culture. They have full control of the media as evinced by the fact that none of the musicians, conductors or composers contacted by this article’s writer dared to offer a comment on this suicide of art.
And there it is: there is nothing sacred to this infestation of salivating acquisition. The screaming infants have taken control and the entire history of humanity with its nations, traditions, rich past, cultural landscapes etc matters not a jot to them as they roll idiotically along to their next narcissistic fix.
The final aim is to destroy every LIVE cultural channel, to remove all public gathering places and limit access to cultural products to a vast catalogue of dead recordings. The whole of human interaction replaced with images, ghosts on media, endlessly repeated nostalgia bandwagons.
‘Cutting off their HANDS to spite their art’, as it were George.
A world without classical music would be a cultural desert.
Don’t malign deserts. Much worse than that.
I love classical music and have it on all night and day.
“A symphony orchestra is the highest achievement of human life” — Sir Adrian Boult, Conductor.
“In tragedy, comedy, spirit of adventure and perfection of form, Beethoven is the greatest artist” — Sir Donal Tovey, Musicologist.
That this will inevitably lead to the decimation of classical performances is of no concern to the media ghouls. Why? Because, even as they moralise over class issues, the class they serve is the soul of philistinism:
Well said, George.
It’s really that bad.
Haaretz has published an incomplete list of Israelis killed. Almost half are IDF.
The hostages were taken to (try) and negotiate for the release of thousands of Palestinians including children in Israeli jails.
“Even at the Israeli “peace rave”, which has been cited as the single deadliest attack committed by Palestinian fighters during their operation, videos emerged that appeared to show Israeli forces opening fire through a crowd of unarmed civilians, toward targets they believed to be Hamas members.”
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/what-really-happened-on-7th-october
Needless to say, the most sensational allegations remain evidence-free allegations.
My question is: regardless of what happened. what makes Israel so special that they can’t just collect the evidence and go through the ICC? Hamas was ready to take Israel to the ICC in 2014 but Israel refused.
Why does nobody ever talk about the Palestinian right to self defense? If Hamas are “terrorists” who is supposed to defend Palestinians? Look at the Hamas-free West Bank and the increased attacks on Palestinians in the other Occupied Territories and Arab Israelis.
The most complete catalogue of Israeli war crimes to date.
https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2023/10/Israels-Unfolding-Crime_ww.pdf
Control over the news media, in Israel and abroad, is effective. All Israelis were lab rats for Pfizer. Till today, there is no objetive summary (not subjective, provincial or partial report) of the mayhem from the jab. Neither do we have any reliable account of what exactly the vast number protesters opposing Nethanyahu want. The censorship of their speech is just like that of Gaddhafi.
From your Link:
“23 October, the news outlet [Ha Aretz] has released information on 683 Israelis killed during the Hamas-led offensive, including names and locations of the deaths on 7 October.
“Of these, 331 – or 48.4 percent – have been confirmed to be soldiers and police officers. Another 13 are rescue service members. The remaining 339 are ostensibly considered to be civilians.
“While this list is not comprehensive, almost half of those killed in the melee are clearly identified as Israeli combatants.
“There are also (so far) no recorded deaths of children under the age of three, which throws into question the Israeli narrative that babies were targeted [and beheaded] by Palestinian resistance fighters.”
More on the genocide
https://www.bitchute.com/video/RHAC0hyJ4hrd
Possibly, the reason southern Ukraine is being prepared for a Greater Israel takeover (Igor Berkut’s Heavenly Jerusalem Project) is because they are aware that the tides are turning in Israel. Supplanting yourself on top of a region where people already dwell didn’t turn out the first time. So the IMF and World Bank turned Ukraine into the poorest nation in Europe, causing mass emigration. Then the war is conveniently eradicating Ukrainian military age males. Zelensky was recently snubbed in DC so two weeks later Netanyahu deceptively started his war to shore up more billions for the Ukraine project. And he got it.
Message to the Israeli people
“Trying to fix crime without addressing the underlying causes of crime is like treating an infection with nothing but painkillers. The factors which give rise to crime are no mystery: trauma, poverty, inequality and despair.”
~ Caitlin Johnstone #MakeMoneyPublicAgain
“Neoliberalism impoverishes. It is a financial class war against labor, against industry, against governments. It’s the financial class against the whole rest of society seeking to use debt leverage to control companies, countries, families and individuals by debt.”
~ Michael Hudson
PRIVATIZATION is at the core of fascism. 50 years of neoliberalism as given rise to a stateless imperialist empire which threatens to eradicate all public space. Hawaii, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Mexico, etc. are losing access to public beaches. National parks are also under attack. A world of Big Owners and Others, who will own nothing… unless we stop it.
Here’s a ‘postcard’ from a bloke (and his dog) on a beach in Southern Australia, reminiscing over injustice and contemplating its consequences:
https://richardkelly.substack.com/p/when-worlds-collide?utm_medium=reader2
From your Link to an exile from Lockdown:
“At first my outrage found expression in the orthodox ‘democratic’ process: write to your MP and write a letter to the editor of the newspaper. We know how that worked out.
“Without any real hope, in 2022 I started writing on SubStack. Because I had to say what I had to say. Even if no one would read it. Seemingly out of nowhere, I got something published at Brownstone Institute, and then at Spectator Australia.
“I feel like a kid again. Like I’m waiting for Christmas. A few weeks more, and I expect to find some new friends. At least, I hope that’s what I’ll find at the inaugural conference of Australians for Science and Freedom, to be held in Sydney on 17-19 November.”
Nearing humanitarian crisis? Are the Whiteheads without access to food, energy or water and other basic human rights; in immanent and very real-time fear of long planned genocide (soon to be realised in full); are they having free-market supplied munitions (including indiscriminate use of white phosphorous on civilians) rained down on them; are they living in real-time danger of ever immanent drone strikes, impending “roof knocking” (a humanitarian ‘right’ now seemingly suspended), perpetually awaiting the loss of their homes and all of their property, if not the lives of all of their immediate family; are they having all of their life-supporting infrastructure regularly destroyed – including the al Ahli al Arabi hospital – deliberately targeted for collective punishment, ethnic supremacism and deep racial hatred and ingrained prejudice; are they being forever sniped at and targeted, in perpetual threat of incendiary intimidation for going about their routine daily business; have they been subhumanised by an apartheid state – demonised as “human animals” and “nazis” – since 1948? I don’t think so.
The authors are participating in the the highest standard of material wealth the earth can afford, but it is insufficient to please or placate them. The Palestinians have nothing, are awaiting actual eradication and even what little they have is going to be taken away from them by the worst violence; immanent genocide rightly called. On what planet is any moral comparison justifiable?
Nobody hereafter is living under siege mentality in the moral likeness of the Lodz Ghetto, the Gaza Strip, or in the ultrapoor shanties of Soweto. We, like it or not, are all embedded in the globalised ‘free-market’ and any pre- or post-millennial consumption of ‘freedom and liberty’ has been wrenched from the hands of babies who were left to die impoverished. Those who are most vociferous about the alleged loss of liberty never said a word about were those economic privileges came from, or how they were obtained – by absentee murder, genocide, ecocide and ever increasing ecotoxicity that is threatening the very ecological infrastructure of life itself. The Lodz Ghetto victim mentality of free-market fundamentalists is all in the heads of zombies who only come to life when their perfectly hermetic ego world is threatened by their own day to day activity projected onto fabricated figure or figures elsewhere.
Thereafter: conspiracy theory about the illusionary loss of liberty is really fascism. It works in any country were the levels of individual psychosis become threatened and any externalisation onto a scapegoat reaches critical massification. It works by ego-engineering, ego syntony and telling the herd-mentality their imaginary economic freedom is being eroded by shady forces in the intracranial shadows of inbound irreality. When it does work – individual psychosis becomes mass psychosis – then the economic free-market fantasists will be in the ghetto, but never as victims.
Such seems to be the endless stream of the banality and excruciating rhetoric of evil that passes for realworld realism these end days. The real-time ethical choice is to save the critical infrastructure of the economic free-market freedom of psychotics; or save the ecologic critical infrastucture by degrowth and the eradication of the free-market which only ever manifests evil.
Thank you for this. I’ve never read a better critique of the American tendency to equate the totality of reality with their particular way of perceiving reality.
“We fought hard for everything we have! We freed ourselves from the British!” Americans will shout out. Yeah: if ever there was a drawing room revolution, the American Revolution was it.
“Let others do as we did and have the guts to stand up and fight for their own freedom!” Americans will insist. And when these others do, we condemn them as terrorists and butchers and vow vengeance. Or else we pretend they’re just faking it to please their puppet masters.
You got a thing about ALL Americans there Howard? Every damn one of us? You think every damn one of us are the fucking same?
Yeah, I love how it’s ok to be “racist” about some people.
Imagine he took out the word “American” and subbed it for “Chinese” or “Nigerian”.
And no, I’m not American. I just dislike double standards of behaviour
It’s easy to fall into the generalization trap, but there are a few on here that have a serious grudge for anything American. The double standard comes in when they seem to excuse their own countries, i.e., like GBR, the failed empire joined to the hip with American imperialism. Somehow they forget about Tony Blair.
Its real this time
How many Hamas fighters were killed during the incursion ? Mention of them appears to be excluded from the narrative…
Did Israel Choose to Kill Hamas and the Hostages Indiscriminately ? Jonathan Cook:
https://jonathancook.//substack.com/p/did-israel-choose-to-kill-hamas-and
Damn Gremlins !
https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/did-israel-choose-to-kill-hamas-and
His article aligns with what Hamas themselves have said. Two versions of Oct 7 but the only definite thing is that IDF were on a long coffe break for the first half of the day.
Hamas say in their full press conference: Attacked IDF bases and settlements, took hostages to exchange for political prisoners in Israeli jails. Strict instructions to not harm children or civllians. BUT, adult settlers with military training and arms immediately on land to the east of Gaza (land they consider stolen) are considered combatants.
Interestingly they said that when the fence was breached “many other characters” arrived. They say nothing about hang gliding into a rave. The quote from Haaretz in the article above suggests that it was indeed IDF which was the primary target not stoned ravers.
Israel says: 1500+ Hamas arrived unobserved on paraglidres, motorbikes and pickup trucks, killed 1,400 Israelis + mayhem for 7 hours. Then some departed with hostages while 1500 Hamas were killed. (seems like a huge number for Hamas).
I have seen one Hamas press conference in English (+ there is one interview on Breakthrough News Patreon) where Hamas get their unedited statement across. On Sky News, Times Radio youtube and MSM, they are heavily edited. 5,000+ Palestinians in Israeli jails as political prisoners is always cut out of the interview as are the 170 children in Israeli jails.
The MSM has treated us to a diarrhoea of Israeli propaganda released in dribs and drabs as needed for damager control. After the Israeli attack on the hospital, the MSM had an attack of Israeli gastroenterities 2 days later. The rave looks like a psyop from start to finish. The men in one of the videos of “Hamas” wandering around the kibbutz with faces uncovered look nothing like Palestinians. The videos in the first few days seemed obviously theatrical.
I conclude that Israel expected a small Hamas incursion but they got a MUCH MUCH bigger one than expected. So they’ve lost the plot. I believe the rave footage was the primary psyop planned to show “diabolical Hamas”. Paragliders: why not? Memorable.
The Israeli ambassador to the UK said she was in Israel on Oct 7 and the sirens went off at 6:30am. So right away you have to ask what happened to the IDF? And Hamas could not have known the IDF would disappear so why would they waste time?
The strangest thing is got the feeling that Hamas themselves do not know exactly everything that happened. There seemed to be other players present. The video of Hamas riding their motorcycles through the fence in a neat convoy from the Gaza side? It would be such a threat to their own security to film and distribute stuff like that…so who filmed all that footage?
Once you trade your freedom for security, the terrorists win.
Once you trade your freedom for security, GloboCap wins.
“Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority”
This needs Corrections:
Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which could serve as the base for CIA drug production, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging Israel’s military superiority and as a resource for U$ oil companies.
One thing lacking from the various reports of the horrific massacre is “Confirmed by”…
Without a “confirmed by this or that Authority” there’s no one who can be asked to provide evidence of the claims, no authoritative source…
Russia Today reports one Russian Ministers statement (Name supplied);
‘Hamas sent militants into Israel villages, towns and military bases near Gaza on 0ctober 7, killing at least 1400 people and taking 200 hostages, according to the Israeli Authorities.’ –
‘According to’ unnamed authorities, – not ‘confirmed by’…
https://www.rt.com/news/585628-russia-israel-hamas-attack/
How many Israelis were massacred on Saturday 7 October 2023 ?* Not 1400. That figure includes Israelis killed over subsequent days…But all is not as it seems:
https://www.sott.net/article/485333-hannibal-directive-israels-forces-responsible-for-israeli-civilian-military-deaths-following-october-7-attack-testimony
** “7/10” (aka “10/7” in USspeak)…
I concur. How much credibility can you lend to anyone citing ‘Israeli Authorities’ regarding Israel enacting it’s final solution in Palestine?
Remember who bombed the King David Hotel in Haifa in 1946.
Was it the Stern Gang by any chance? 🤔
the Palestinians are nearing a humanitarian crisis
FFS “nearing” !???! It’s been an ongoing murderous siege of the Palestinian people by the rabid Zionist fanatics that kicked into full force 75 years ago!
And spare us your pathetic whining about your precious “freedoms”.
“The same disbelief that anyone could be so hateful, so monstrous, so evil as to do this to another human being.”
3,000 Yanks trapped in a burning building then blown to smithereens by the Bush / Cheney regime. Name them. Put names to the smiling thugs in that photo clustered around George “Shrub” Bush. Unless you are brave enough to do that, and call them to trial, your descendants will continue to try harmless old women instead, then burn them as witches.
It seems good folks haven’t got around pondering the implications of Silverstein inadvertently–or deliberately–announcing that he had ordered to ‘Pull it’ when talking about Building 7 of the WTC on 9/11! Unless the guy pulled a ginie out of a bottle that could magically rig the tower with tons of demolition charges, this feat could only have been accomplished long before the demolition itself! And the same must have taken place for Building 1 & 2!
Tge question then is: did Mr. Silverstein have anything to do with the pulling of all he towers? If not, how on earth was he suppose to have his finger on the button for pulling down Bldg 7, and why has this fellow never been brought to justice?
I think the answers should be obvious, if you’re red-piled enough.
“None so blind as those who will not to see.” — New Testament.
FWIW, years ago while reading articles– mostly on progressive-liberal sites like CommonDreams and Truthdig– I noticed that moderate analysts and pundits often employed the rhetorical cliché your comment addresses:
The articles would cite some “approaching” crisis or undesirable negative state of affairs, usually urging readers to be aware and take action to forestall this supposedly future horror. For instance, “If the practice of installing government/law enforcement surveillance cameras everywhere isn’t checked, we will risk becoming a surveillance state!”
As here, it was obvious to anyone who’d been paying a modicum of attention that the “future” crisis they were warning against had been going on for years, and that the outcome they were so urgently attempting to forestall had long since occurred.
Put more simply, pundits would earnestly write articles about what must be done to prevent the horses escaping from the barn, as if the barn doors hadn’t been left open long ago, and the horses long gone. 🤨
False Flags
The authors appear to believe that 9/11 and the recent false flag happened as the Main Sewer Media reported them.
Or they know different but are too afraid to speak the truth. Just like most decent Germans knew better but were too afraid to speak out. Waited for the Russians to liberate them from the Nazis; and didn’t even say “Thank you”.
We all agreed to the Patriot Act when we voted in the subsequent elections, no matter who we voted for. When we participate in elections, we implicitly certify every action taken by every politician from the foundation of the world up to the timestamp of our vote. The only legitimate vote is abstention. Elections should be aggressively ignored by any person with a conscience. When Russia went door-to-door with armed vote-counters in the Donbass, the West scoffed and used the term “election” in scare-quotes. Why do we tolerate the absence of scare-quotes when the same term in used to describe the equivalent farces in our own role-play democracies? WHY DOES ANYBODY VOTE?!?!?
The Patriot Act, and COVID, and wars after wars after wars are exactly what we deserve for ever acknowledging the existence of whatever political process is presented to us as the defining illusion of our cult. The system would not survive a 30% voter turnout. If none of us could name a neighbor that was suspected to have cast a vote, no politician who valued his life would pretend to have a mandate.
@WHY DOES ANYBODY VOTE?!?!?
They feel obligated to participate. But even if they didnt, even if only the 1% voted for themselves, there is nothing in the constitution to suggest that a problem exists politically.
Which proves that the constitution is defective and in need of an overhaul, rebuilt, or restructured.
Speaking of police states: Billy and his boys are coming to save Australia from the bad guys. All to the tune of $5 billion. Nice work if you can get it:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-24/anthony-albanese-in-washington-dc-microsoft-deal/103012802
Aren’t we a lucky little US colony?
Each individual has to stand up to the collective system, if that’s luck, look out below.
More like the little lickspittle U$ corporate penal colony
Arse lickers unanimous
The most cyber secure nation by 2030.
The Aussie sheep will suck it all up just like the jabs…
The initiating event has to be HORRIFIC
for it to be usable to justify all the resultant.
reactive barbarism…
The story has to be unpickable. It must contain
no detail that allows the intrusion of any doubt.
Thus the need for the (bare) minimum of details
supporting the initiating crime…
Trump himself is not an aberration – he fits right
in. The aberration is that the masses voted for
someone who was not vetted by the political
establishment…
He goes by the book, used as a hook, as does every crook.
Your alternative update on #COVID19 for 2023-10-23. Pfizer, Moderna share prices plummeting. Death protocol #NG163 rejected 2020, Hancock authorised anyway (blog, gab, tweet, pic1, pic2, pic3, pic4).
From your Links:
“Death protocol #NG163 was rejected by a panel of doctors and professors, Nevertheless Matt Hancock implemented it regardless. Because of his decision, tens of thousands died unnecessarily. (tweet).
“I’m glad it’s slowly coming to the public’s attention that thousands of people have been “euthanised” in “care” homes and hospitals over the last three and a half years. And I’d like to point out that it’s not just the elderly who were killed. In my support group, there are now 12 members whose loved ones were murdered under NICE guideline #NG163. All of them were under the age of 70. The youngest was 17. (tweet, website).
“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”
-Orwell
George O, or Eric B, cribbed that note from Tojo and his unending total cry of Total War, “shortly” before shooting himself in the stomach (an odd Variation on a Theme of hara Kiri, or as we kids used to say in the years after The Bomb, “Hairy Carry”?).
An accelerated version perhaps of Nietzsche’s apercu, “in times of peace a war-like man turns on himself.”
Or as the late G. Gordon Liddy* put it always “attack attack attack.”
So grateful any more of those particular attacks are now late. Though forever too soon.
[* And Timothy Leary’s first to the bust as FBI, crawling nocturnally through the window of the NY Mellon compound, late 1950s, as well as 30 years later his radio show foil, here in L.A.!)
Western governments had better think carefully what they decide to do from now on: the cream of the cream of the British people, the British Cabinet no less, formed by a select group of men reputed for their sharp thinking and acute geopolitical vision, nevertheless made a decision in 1917, which they maintained for the rest of WWI and all the way up to WWII, that was to set the whole Middle-East ablaze and to this day produce rivers of blood.
Churchill, a declared partisan of the Jewish cause, didn’t think nothing in ratifying the project and giving this religious community the “promised land” which was already occupied with its own people. From his records, Churchill thought that the occupation of Palestine would produce the same results current mouvements of colonisation were having: the modernisation of the Middle East and, even considering nationalism that couldn’t fail to manifest at one time or another and the ensuing conflicts, the whole effect would still be positive considering the long standing Question that was being resolved.
He was wrong. He didn’t pay enough attention to the nuance between a mouvement of colonisation without a substitution of population and a mouvement of colonisation with one.
Governments of the West, you don’t look too smart to us people… The decision of 1917 proves that what you decide today shall have lasting effects, so put on your thinking caps; l’heure est grave.
The first part of your comment is compelling, but that you think your rulers can ‘put on [their] thinking caps is beyond me. After watching Sunak in the House of Commons, deflecting answering the need for a cease-fire in Gaza and repeating the usual trope of ‘Israel has a right to defend itself,’ and ‘Bibi gave me assurance that they’d exercise restraint,’ I would be more inclined ask your parlementarians to get off their knees.
Churchill was no partisan of anything, besides obeying those saving him from drowning in debt.
Partly because of the line break, while reading the first line I was sure that the sentence would end “… saving him from drowning in drink”. 😎 🍸
Israel needs $40 BILLION to fight a bunch of guys in tunnels whose airforce consists of “paragliders” and whose tanks are pickup trucks????
How much peace and stability will $40 B buy?
I’m sure the tens of millions of US citizens living below the poverty line will be happy to help out the Israeli hierarchy.
That’s what fiends (sic) are for.
Here I’m on the more radical false flag conspiracists on here’s side.
I would contend that there is no such thing as a “further radicalization of ‘terrorist’ cells.”
Why? you ask.
Because all the “terrorists” are on the payroll of the US MIC and its owners. There are no terrorists freely terrorizing. There are no terrorists. There are only employees. Employees who only terrorize when they get the memo.
As Graham Greene wrote in a serious overview (1963 preface) of his comic memoir of time spent on the scene of the Castro-led revolution in Cuba, “Apparently in Washington terrorism is only terrorism when it comes from the left.” He had chronicled some of the reported atrocities Batista troops had visited on certain mutilated enemies, noting their oblivious ignorance in DC and its Cuban ambassador. He did nazi that coming.
But a good audio-visual for that whole scene is Phil Ochs’ memorable, “The Ballad of William Worthy.” (Ochs, another early and young apparent suicide, if “plausibly deniable” as [highly] assisted?).
His passport ain’t the only thing “disappearing as he sang.”
https://youtu.be/pmkZOHN9qvA?si=qugoyFAFyQuWvgrj
Too awesome, as now even more relevant.
https://youtu.be/pmkZOHN9qvA?si=X4mr8TV7Zhw5bxBf
https://youtu.be/kEPvZBa2V4w?si=MzSSjwR6lSkpEHvX
Apologies for the duplicates although such a great thing bears repeating sure enough. I wanted to post the live version of Ochs singing his song that the “Worthy” subject traveled from far away to the NYC Cafe to hear Ochs sing it live.
But my first post wound up in “pending” for some reason (and where it abides) after I posted it as an addendum, and I’m still scratching my head as to why and wherefore, short as it was.
“Phil Ochs, Love me I am a liberal.” https://youtu.be/0nFvhhCulaw Even better.
Incredible they could see that much in 1964. What has happened since? Nothing!
“He did nazi that coming.”
Thanks for reminding the youngsters of those good old days in Camelot, when Commies were the only terrorists.
Mae Brussell had a few things to say about that, too. Her essay below is foundational. I hadn’t read it since 2017, until last night once more, and I was quite stunned at how many holes in my current research into New World Nazis [and Old World] it repeatedly plugs and fills. A clue cornucopia for one & all, as so many of them lead back to L.A. and the Manson black op murders, UCLA LSD (CIA-funded) research, the RFK murder just down Wilshire Blvd. from UCLA (and my old man’s law firm midway on Wilshire, ecjlaw com), his lair with MPH at PRS, (3910 Los Feliz), the LaBianca murders right around the corner on Waverly, and the ’94 OJ global media circus ( whose wife’s murder happened to be nearby Marilyn Monroe’s death room, by the bye).
There is a profusion of dots, prime, that connect through Brussell’s super~sleuthing. [I read just last week that one daughter was killed in a head-on collision, and Mae herself died not long after that, in her mid-sixties.) I met her heir apparent Dave Emory (spitfire list.com) in 2018 in LA, and he echoed my take on Timothy Leary, so influential here, going beyond it, to say that Tim was not just a spook, but a key CIA spymaster for the psyops on (v.) the “Left Coast”.
The plot yet thickens, and Ms. Brussell shows much why and how:
http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Nazi%20Connection%20to%20JFK%20Assass.html
From your final Link:
“The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination
by Mae Brussell
(from the short-lived Larry Flynt publication The Rebel, January 1984)
1940-1945: The Nazi Connection to Dallas:
General Reinhard Gehlen
The sparrow-faced man in the battle uniform of an American general clambered down the steps of the U.S. Army transport plane upon its arrival at Washington National Airport. It was August 24, 1945, two weeks after the surrender of Japan, three months after the German capitulation. The general was hustled into a van with no windows and whisked to Fort Hunt outside the capital. There he was attended by white-jacketed orderlies and, the next morning, fitted with a dark-grey business suit from one of Washington’s swankiest men’s stores.
” General Reinhard Gehlen was ready to cut a deal. Reinhard Gehlen had been, up until the recent capitulation, Adolph Hitler’s chief intelligence officer against the Soviet Union. His American captors had decked him out in one of their uniforms to deceive the Russians, who were hunting him as a war criminal. Now U.S. intelligence was going to deploy Gehlen and his network of spies against the Russians. The Cold War was on.
” This is a story of how key Nazis, even as the Wehrmacht was still on the offensive, anticipated military disaster and laid plans to transplant Nazism, intact but disguised, in havens in the West.
” It is the story of how honorable men, and some not so honorable, were so blinded by the Red menace that they fell into lockstep with Nazi designs.”
And do so still: “Ah, sweet Canada, Canada, Canada”.
They are domestic professional pranksters, pranking their citizens and thanking the world for it.
And they work for Israel too. Highly recommend this article–it goes over Israel’s decades long history of false flag terrorism. Very well sourced. Also says Abu Nidal from back in the day was working for Israel.
https://swprs.org/why-israel-created-hamas/
In conclusion, most of the history of modern terrorism, not just since 2001, but really since World War II, has been a deception manufactured by Western and Israeli intelligence services.
There is self-radialisation: people developing independent ideas of what they can personally do to redress outrages. They are the most dangerous, and what the trained dogs are trying hard to hunt down.
Oh, I don’t doubt those being bombed currently in the news are real and not employees. But they’re not “terrorists.”
“Pre-emptive strikes will only lead to further blowback. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority and adopt a strike-first policy against terrorist threats ‘before they’re fully formed.’” We are still suffering the consequences of this failed policy, which resulted in lives lost, taxpayer dollars wasted, the fomenting of hatred against the U.S. and the further radicalization of terrorist cells.”
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. There is no “failed”policy. Because:
Are all desirable outcomes!
Though to be sure, some rephrasing may be called for e.g. taxpayer dollars wasted are not wasted at all from the elite point of view. These dollars have all gone into “the right pockets”.
I want to thank the Whiteheads for this extremely sensible, practical analysis. All who oppose the government’s radical expansion of power and its intrusiveness into our lives should be able to agree with what it says. It focuses on the deeper consequences and repercussions of that expansion, and how we can resist it in our daily lives. A focus like this reminds us of where we agree and why we should — we must — unite to resist. Some of us (prompted at times by alleged “friends”) tend too much to focus on points of disagreement, on questions like “was 9/11 an inside job?” There is a place for these questions, surely, but let us remember that when we are divided and quarreling among ourselves we lose our ability to fight back.
Better watch what you say….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp9Tw7zR268
.
We experience a reversal of logic on much of Twitter/X.
Minimising the horror of what is being unleashed on Gaza, for fear that we might offend who?
Truth.
4 thousand dead out of 2 million in Gaza is no genocide. When is Egypt removing its 15km long walls with Gaza? Children? 70% of the Gaza fake ghetto is below the age of 30, all during the time they were left to their own de-vices by Israel. Huge population growth. Nothing like Warsaw WWII at all, only in the eyes of the pro Islamists and their money.
Contradictions
With each heartless stupid sentence you contradict yourself. Isn’t it obvious that the Islamic world is anything but a monolith ? If it were there would be no apartheid state and no concentration camp. Even if these came into existence OPEC would have shut off fuel supplies when the present genocide started. Ever since Sadat Egypt has been a weakened appendage of the West. When Nasser and Saddam tried to build weapons systems in collaboration with Western agencies Mossad butchered the European engineers involved. Israel has evidently the right to defend itself but it’s neighbours evidently do not. Iran has had subterranean ties with Israel since the 1980’s. They demanded the West and Israel demolish Saddam’s nuclear reactor. All the while the apartheid state built up it’s covert nuclear arsenal. JFK objected and had his brains blown out.
I accidentally posted to Off-G – it was intended for Zero Hedge, whose icon is similar. Though it is no den of saints, it leans more to free speech.
Feel free to delete my post.
There is no stopping the inevitable. Nothing humans do to improve their lot cannot be undone; and if it can, it will be undone. The undoing is the inevitable fate of whatever is done.
The first step is to divorce concepts from the words identifying them. We in America still call ourselves “free” – and we will continue saying the word till we perish. But we never take inventory of exactly how we are “free.”
As long as we can work and bring home a paycheck, we look no further for “freedom” – because in the American psyche having money is the essence of “freedom.”
We look around the world and see all those poor souls who lack “freedom” – i.e., they lack money to buy essentials. They barely get by – how can they possibly be “free?” Whereas we get by quite well – so how can we possibly not be “free?”
Speak for yourself brother.
Speaking for many in the long history of money.
Pindar, 518–438 BC:
“Ah, it’s money, money makes the man!
As the man said when he saw money and friends both gone”.
Cover of Red Shield’s The Economist from 2013. Note Nuttyahyu and Hamas flying on handgliders..
The Jewish thing is, “you cannot talk about my neurosis, because it exposes it.”
That’s the heart of it.
Yet to open it up to discussion is exactly what the premier psychologist, Sigmund Freud, gifted us from his deep knowledge of this community – in the process benefiting all!
Gaza is a real time lesson that war kills everyone — except the politicians, bankers and the war mongers who profit: People of every faith and none, multiple nationalities who cannot get out, regardless of the passport they hold, and the children.
This is what happened in World War Two and yet this war is being waged in the name of those whom we are told were WWII’s principal victims.
That, right there, should make you stop and think, “wait a minute?” If WWII, 80 years ago, led to a holocaust — a Greek word meaning sacrifice by fire — or The Holocaust, why are listening to Israel’s ambassador the the UK comparing, favourably, the bombing of Gaza to that of Dresden?
Both Dresden and Gaza are bankster mass murder. It is breathtaking chutzpah for the apartheid regime to have made the comparison.
investments gas oil storage and pipelines.
the corporation with drilling rights on golan with famous owners also have first dibs at future gaza liquid gas terminals.
trillions of dollars in the sea off gaza.
sovereign wealth fund that should belong to all the folks in palestine will be transferred to black rock and vanguard
usa,uk,israel oil gas pipeline grab
sisi will be paid off qatar are in so is cyprus
That’s the plan. There are photos of Nutty Yahoo escorting oil tycoons Cheney and Rothschild around Golan. The Yahoo’s previous invasion of Gaza, in 2014, coincided with reports about a UK company insisting on a signed agreement from the PLO before the UK backers would invest in an Israeli scheme to drill for gaz offshore of Gaza.
They never got such an agreement. I guess the Yahoo is making Gaza another offer you can’t refuse.
“The best laid plans o’ mice and men
Gang aft agley” — Rabbi Burns.
People will listen to absolutely any crap today, unfortunately.
More seriously, the problem is not just the people who really run the US govment. The idea that you’re going to run a “republic” based on the “rule of Law” is the problem.
People are not machines. A society of free individual human beings cannot function with laws unless they are temporary and constantly revised, as clauses in a “social contract ” that people agree to have with each other, not with an overpowered ruler.
This can only work in small self-run communities where everyone can be involved in decisions that affect them. There is no ignorance of the law *in such an ideal society* because there is total transparency and there is education, and there is no legalese, lawyers, or byzantine legal system as such. The “laws” can be accessed, read and understood by anyone, and can be challenged and revised by the community if deemed unfair.
The key word here is “fairness” instead of “justice”.
The very concept of “laws” is devised so that it can be exploited by authoritarians.
Among countless other points that indict the system of the “Rule of Law” is the lack of transparency that gets worse and worse as it turns into what it was really designed for: a hierarchical structure of society with the elite caste writing, interpreting and enforcing the laws as they see fit, while patting themselves on the back on how supremely wise they are. It’s a 3000 year old racket that has nothing do with “democracy” or “republic”..
Amen!
“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”
H D Thoreau
Next, you will be suggesting that we do away with lawyers, judges, legislators and (Gasp!) party politics.
“The same shocking images of carnage and grief dominating the news”
As with 9/11 the most horrifying images are from the anti-narrative, the carnage in Gaza or the devastation of some sort of controlled demolition of three skyscrapers.
The narrative images have always been puzzling.
-Noisy and slow paragliders hovering in the sky to make a “surprise attack”?
-Random masked actors shooting at blurred out stuff?
-Narratives with more holes than 20 dernier nylon stockings?
-Footage of an explosion with no plane followed by the same footage replayed with a cartoon ghostplane?
-Footage of people dropping dead on the street “in China” from “sars-cov-2” jumping out from behind a pillar?
People are most easily controlled by their fears and prejudices. Fear of death / attacks + Sinophobia, Ruussophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia are a Winning Combo.
Russians take people out by smearing poison on door handles….
Deadly viruses never escape from Swiss labs….
Only people from one religion can do horrid stuff….
We can rant about TPTB but if the sheeple of NATOstan are media illiterate and governed by their own fears and prejudices….while thinking they are superior to everyone else….what other outcome is possible??
Never have the professional elite of NATOstan —those who implement and enforce the barbaric policies described above–been so detached and in denial as now..
No-one has re-opened the J question, like Israel, with its latest action.
https://moneycircus.substack.com/p/crisis-update-the-bottomless-pit
Yes, I watched the 24 sec ‘X’ Twitter vid. They must feel absolutely shredded. It’s definitely HELL in Gaza, right now.
Yes, many believe it all started with the Zionists late in the XIXth century, who “decided” that they should “recover” Palestine. It’s not how things happened. Zionists are just those who intended to solve a problem centuries old, discussed even before Thomas Aquinas. A complex problem…
People of Jewish faith worldwide wanted to emancipate from the Christian State, and did so by creating a Jewish State from which a Moslem people wants to emancipate. Nothing was solved, the Palestinian Question replaced the Jewish Question.
On second thought, I wonder if the Jewish Question has been solved; many ex-colonies that gained their independence in the 1960s onward enjoy more stability than the 1948-created State of Israel.
Marx with his method discusses the Question, and arrives to the conclusion that to emancipate themselves as citizens of the place they reside in, or as social human beings, people of Jewish faith need to emancipate from Judaism so as to allow them to integrate the mouvement of History.
I wonder how much of that applies today that things changed in 1948…
The faith you mention has been described as not an ethnicity or a religion but a plan for world domination.
Many orthodox Jews across the world believed it was wrong to “re-constitute” Israel or “rebuild the Temple” by human effort. Many such recalcitrants suffered re-education, i.e., they were taught the hard way. Yet, the overall results remain limited.
Further in the same vein of insanity, even if strictly OT, this is where the next generation of politicians will come from:
https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregon-again-says-students-dont-need-to-prove-mastery-of-reading-writing-or-math-to-graduate-citing-harm-to-students-of-color.html
Where I live around, I see children from outside G7 arrive to a G7 country with fine letters and math pieces from their simple ground schools.
These children are allocated in a dark corner of the school yard the first 6 mth and get their self confidence and natural curiosity systematically broken down.
Then they learn if you wanna be rich in G7 you must present bad manners and language, awful writing, and decadence to pass school and raise in the system. Only then you can be a new member of the “rich” G7.
Ultimately, security can only be acheived by preventing people from meeting in any place where their conversation cannot be recorded. Lockdown forever, and zoom calls replacing physical meetings, is the “new normal” they would like.
The solution to the problem of lockdown being too oppressive would be implants. These may even allow people to go outside, without causing harm.
The most realistic musical interpretation of Lockdown’s oppressive nature comes from Beethoven’s groundbreaking opera about modern life; the scene where temporarily released prisoners murmur to each other:
“Speak softly, softly, someone might be listening”.