August 19, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
For
a full week now the Israeli army has been
bombing Gaza, a population that is
about to run out of fuel for its only power
plant due to a years-long Israeli program of
deliberate siege warfare.
Yesterday the US
ordered an airstrike on Syrian forces, killing
one, when they refused to let the illegal occupying
force past a checkpoint in northern Syria.
In both cases an arm of the US-centralized empire
used wildly disproportionate force against people
who stood against a hostile occupation of their own
country. In both cases the more powerful and violent
occupiers claimed they were acting in
“self-defense”. In both cases dropping explosives
from the sky upon human beings barely made the news.
Bombs should not exist. Explosives designed to
blow fire and shrapnel through human bodies should
not be a thing. In a sane world, there wouldn’t be
bombs, and if some mentally unbalanced person ever
made and used one it would be a major international
news story.
Instead, bombs are cranked out like iPhones at
enormous profit, and nearly all bombings are
ignored.
Many bombs are being dropped per day by the US
and its allies, with a
massive civilian death toll, and almost none of
those bombings receive any international attention.
The only time they do is generally when a bombing
occurs that was not authorized by the US-centralized
empire.
|
No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media
|
This is one of those absolutely freakish things
about our society that
has become normalized through careful narrative
management, and we really shouldn’t allow it to be.
The fact that explosives designed to rip apart human
anatomy are dropped from the sky many times per day
for no other reason than to exert control over
foreign countries should horrify us all.
An interesting social experiment when you talk to
someone might be to tell them solemnly, “There’s
been a bombing.” Then when they say “What??
Where??”, tell them “The Middle East mostly. Our
government and its allies drop many bombs there per
day in order to keep a resource-rich geostrategic
region balkanized and controllable.”
Then watch their reaction.
You will probably notice a marked change in
demeanor as the person learns that what you meant is
different from what they thought you meant. They
will likely act as though you’d tricked them in some
way. But you didn’t. You just called a thing the
thing that it is, and let their assumptions do the
rest.
When someone gravely tells you “There’s been a
bombing,” what they almost always mean is that there
has been a suspected terrorist attack in a western,
majority-white nation. They don’t mean the kind of
bombing that kills exponentially more people and
does exponentially more damage than terrorism in
western nations. They don’t mean the kind of
terrorism that our government enacts and approves
of.
There’s a lot of pushback nowadays against the
racism and prejudices that are woven throughout the
fabric of our society, and
rightly so. But what doesn’t get nearly enough
attention in this discourse is the fact that while
some manifestations of bigotry may have been
successfully scaled back somewhat in our own
countries, it was in a sense merely exported
overseas.
The violence that is being inflicted overseas in
our name by the US-centralized empire is more
horrific than any manifestation of racism we’re ever
likely to encounter at home. It is more horrific
than the pre-integration American South. It is more
horrific than even slavery itself. Yet even the more
conscious among us fail to give this relentless
onslaught of violence a proportionate degree of
recognition and condemnation, even while the consent
for it is largely born of the unexamined
bigoted notion that violence against people in
developing and non-western countries does not
matter.
Like many other forms of bigotry, this one has
been engineered and promulgated by powerful people
who benefit from it. If the mainstream news media
were what it purports to be, namely an institution
dedicated to creating an informed populace about
what’s truthfully going on in the world, we would
see the bombings in foreign nations given the same
type of coverage that a bombing in Paris or London
receives.
This would immediately bring consciousness to the
unconscious bigotry that those in the US-centralized
empire hold against people in low and middle income
countries, which is exactly why the plutocrat-owned
media do not report on it in this way. The
US-centralized empire is held together by endless
violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built
their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire.
When people set out to learn what’s really going
on in their world they often start cramming their
heads with history and geopolitics facts and
figures, which is of course fine and good. But a
bigger part of getting a clear image of what’s
happening in the world is simply turning your gaze
upon things you already kind of knew were happening,
but couldn’t quite bring yourself to look at.
Caitlin's articles are entirely
reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece
please consider sharing it around, liking her on
Facebook, following her antics on
Twitter, checking out her
podcast, throwing some money into
her hat on
Patreon or
Paypal, or buying her book
Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com
