Israeli settlers were filmed torturing lambs which belonged to Palestinians in the West Bank. Gouged their eyes out. Smashed them with cinder blocks. Beat them to death in front of their mothers. Lambs. It’s not the most evil thing the Israelis have done. Not by a long shot. Hell, all of human civilization subjects animals to cruel abuses every minute of every day through the horrors of factory farming. But this particular incident shines a special sort of light into exactly what’s going on behind Israeli eyes over there in that sadistic society. Think about the hatred and savagery you’d need to summon up within yourself to gouge the eyes out of a living baby sheep. Think about the kind of person you’d have to become to do something like that to an innocent creature. Those lambs didn’t know they were Palestinian. They didn’t know anything about Hamas or October 7 or the Nazi Holocaust, or any of the other reasons Israelis generally cite for their abuses of human beings. They were just sitting there, doing absolutely nothing that could possibly be construed as harmful by even the most talented hasbarist. And those settlers went in there and inflicted completely gratuitous suffering upon them. This, to me anyway, just says so much about the level of vitriolic hatred by which the state of Israel is sustained. It’s baked in to the way the whole state is set up. Israel cannot be sustained without nonstop violence. The violence cannot be sustained without hatred. The hatred cannot be sustained without systematic indoctrination. That indoctrination teaches Jewish Israelis from birth that the victims of their genocidal state are all inhuman monsters who would rape and murder them all if Israel ceased its apartheid abuses, militarism, and incessant violence. It teaches them that killing off their empathy and compassion is essential for their survival, because only the Jews who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive are going to make it. Just in case their childhood indoctrination isn’t enough to sway them, Israelis are also made to serve in the military where they spend two years killing off any remaining sense of human decency within themselves as they inflict acts of unfathomable cruelty upon Palestinians as part of their duty to the state. They are trained to believe they must have cold hearts and hard hands, because that is what’s necessary to do what must be done. Those settlers who tortured those lambs believed they were doing what needed to be done. They believe they need to terrorize the Palestinians and make life so nightmarish for them that they go somewhere else, which will allow for more Jewish settlement on Palestinian territory. Those tortured lambs were the product of everything that Israel is as a state. Which could of course be said about every victim of Israeli sadism over the last eight decades, human and non-human alike. This is Israel. This is Zionism. This is what it looks like when Zionists get everything they want. You’re looking at it. This is it. Israel can’t keep going like this. Humanity can’t keep going like this. We need better systems. Better ideologies. Better motivators driving our behavior. All our systems which drive cruelty and abusiveness around the world need to go the way of the dinosaur. Zionism. Capitalism. Imperialism. All our competition-based systems which pit us against other people, other ethnicities, other countries, and our own biosphere. We need to move into collaboration-based systems which advance justice, equality, and well-being for all of earth’s creatures. Because what we’ve been doing clearly isn’t working.

Our Entire Civilization Is Run By Oligarchs And Empire Managers The Wall Street Journal has a new article out titled “The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA,” subtitled “Without CIA funding that helped keep NeXT afloat in the ’80s, Steve Jobs might not have made a triumphant return to Apple — and the iPhone might not have its foundational operating code.” All the top tech giants have deep ties to the CIA. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon. Facebook and Instagram are overseen by “former” CIA operatives. Our whole civilization is run by an alliance of oligarchs and empire managers. ❖ In a recent interview with Israel Hayom, Israeli “Minister of Diaspora Affairs” Amichai Chikli said that Zionists need to “cooperate with the conservative mainstream, American and European, against radical Islam.” Chikli argued that the western right doesn’t care about antisemitism, so it doesn’t make sense to place emphasis there, but “radical Islam interests them very much.” I have said it before and I’ll say it again: Zionists promote Islamophobia because convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to like Israel. This is a fact, not an opinion. Last year Drop Site News published a leaked polling report that had been commissioned by the Israeli government which found that while Israel’s reputation is crumbling throughout the western world, one way to salvage it would be to foment panic about Muslims. Drop Site reports the following: “Israel’s best tactic to combat this, according to the study, is to foment fear of ‘Radical Islam’ and ‘Jihadism,’ which remain high, the research finds. By highlighting Israeli support for women’s rights and gay rights while elevating concerns that Hamas wants to ‘destroy all Jews and spread Jihadism,’ Israeli support rebounded by an average of over 20 points in each country. ‘Especially once the situation in Gaza is resolved, the room for growth in all countries is very significant,’ the report concludes.” So if you speak critically about Israel online and suddenly find your replies inundated with Zionists shrieking about Islam and Muslims, that’s why. Their research has concluded that convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to love Israel. ❖ The Guardian has published an open letter addressed “to Iran’s political prisoners” from big-name western leftists including Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rashid Khalidi, Robin DG Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judith Butler, and Walden Bello. Their screed frames Iran as being equally immoral as the US empire and criticizes anti-imperialists who refuse to condemn Iran in the middle of an imperialist war of aggression against the Islamic Republic. “We reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism,” the letter says. “We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.” This, needless to say, is hot garbage. I don’t care who you are, if your “anti-imperialism” leads you to attack the same governments as the CIA and the US State Department, then you’re just another imperialist. It’s so obnoxious and disgusting to be an American and accuse empire-targeted countries of tyranny. This is like being a German in 1940 and spending your energy decrying human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. You live in the heart of the empire, and yet you’re moving your crosshairs away from the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth to denounce one of the few remaining nations who’ve resisted being absorbed into its power umbrella? Fuck off. Shut the fuck up you ridiculous wanker. I cannot stand all these western “leftists” and “anarchists” who insist on placing the western empire on equal or near-equal footing with the governments it targets. All they do is nullify anti-war sentiment and help grease the wheels for the imperial propaganda machine by legitimizing militarist narratives about how the people need rescuing from the evil regime and giving uninformed leftists the false impression that we’re watching two equally evil forces battling it out. Stop being pro bono Pentagon propagandists and get your shit together, assholes. ❖ The answer to the question “Why is that terrible thing happening?” is usually “Because it makes some rich white guys wealthier” or “Because it helps shore up US planetary domination” or “Because Israel wants it,” and it’s often some combination of all three. ❖ Genocidal apartheid states should not exist and do not have a right to exist. I said this on Twitter the other day and someone yelled at me for saying terrible things about Israel. I replied, “How did you know I was talking about Israel?” ❖ Saying you can support Israel without being a racist is like saying you could support the transatlantic slave trade without being a racist. ❖ You can get a picture of how insane western society is by imagining what would happen if Iran successfully assassinated Trump. The entire western political/media class would act like something outrageous and evil had just happened, but any sane person would know it was fair play. ❖ The dumbest argument I’ve heard in favor of religion is “Oh so you’re saying the majority of humanity is wrong??” Of course they are. Have you seen humanity? The majority is wrong about a great many things. They only just began figuring out that Israel is bad, for fuck’s sake. We live in a highly controlled and indoctrinated society where people are aggressively propagandized by the powerful to believe things which benefit the powerful. It is not safe to vote with the majority in such a civilization. The mainstream worldviews we are given to choose from are made of pure power-serving bullshit. This isn’t a comment on religion itself; I personally couldn’t care less if you are religious. I’m just saying in an insane society like the one we live in, you’ve got to have the courage to stand on your own and rely on your own reasoning. You might make mistakes, but figuring it out on your own has a much higher probability of finding the truth than following the herd while trapped inside a mind-controlled dystopia. ❖ Reading by Tim Foley:

It’s crazy this even needs to be said, but if you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea. If you live in the US or one of its allied nations, then you live under the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on earth, and that’s where your focus belongs. You do not have any legitimacy in squandering any of your energy and attention criticizing human rights abuses in empire-targeted nations while living under a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by a nonstop river of human blood. It is not okay for you to use your western privilege to attack the nations your own government is working to help absorb into the power structure you live under. Whenever I say this online I’ll get some Trotskyist or anarchist babbling about the need to express “solidarity” with Iranian political prisoners or whatever, but whenever I press them on what actual, material benefit those expressions of “solidarity” bring to the people they’re meant to help, they can’t point to anything solid. Whereas I can point to some very obvious ways in which contributing to an imperial war propaganda campaign can help grease the wheels for real material actions which hurt actual Iranians. If you’re a westerner, you have an obligation to use your voice responsibly. If you are feeding into the latest “the people in the empire-targeted nation need liberation from their evil tyrannical government” war propaganda narrative with your expressions of “solidarity” and your blind insistence on treating all bad things as equally bad, then you are using your western voice irresponsibly, and you are morally culpable for the mass slaughter you help facilitate with your recklessness. It’s not okay to be a citizen of the western empire and act like human rights abuses in an empire-targeted nation are of equal or comparable concern to the far more egregious abuses of your own leaders and their allies. It’s also not okay to be a fully grown adult and believe the use of force in empire-targeted governments is happening separately from their targeting by the empire, as though Iran would look the way it looks today if the US and Israel had not been working to collapse and control it for generations. Iran has only survived the latest imperial onslaught because Tehran tightly controls what happens in that country. The only reason we didn’t see Xinjiang absorbed into the western power umbrella with the help of CIA-backed separatists is because Beijing waged a sweeping crackdown on the extremist factions who’d been launching attacks in the province. The only reason North Korea has gone relatively unmolested by the western empire in recent years is because its government obtained nuclear weapons. It’s baby-brained analysis to pretend such things happen independently of the US and its allies working to take control of unabsorbed nations and force them into compliance with Washington’s capitalist world order. The western empire therefore makes the world a crueler and more abusive place not only by its direct acts of cruelty and abuse, but by the way it forces its targets to choose between (A) annihilation and (B) using extreme amounts of force to retain their sovereignty. The empire we live under is responsible for the vast majority of the dysfunction and misery in our world, and yet you as a westerner want to spend your time yelling at Iran? Fuck off, man.

There are two types of racism in the west: the kind that’s considered acceptable in polite liberal society, and the kind that’s widely frowned upon. The acceptable type of racism is the kind which considers it fine and normal to drop bombs on Muslim families overseas. The kind which sees starvation sanctions as a minor issue whose pros and cons are assessed solely on the basis of whether they will be successful or unsuccessful in achieving regime change. The kind which views imperialist extraction from the global south as the natural order of the world, with centrists and progressives squabbling only about how evenly that plunder should be distributed among westerners. The unacceptable type of racism is the kind which affects other westerners. The kind whose consequences western liberals have to see. If a white woman calls the police on a black man minding his own business in the park, western liberals will send her viral on social media, and she will be unwelcome in polite society until the heat dies down. If a celebrity is caught on tape uttering an ethnic slur, they’ll be unpopular for a while, and will be considered a liability by sponsors and film studios. This is the wrong kind of racism. That’s what you’re seeing whenever the western press completely ignores a dozen Palestinians getting killed by western-made munitions on the same day the entire news media focuses on some allegation of “antisemitism” with no material consequences other than some western Jews feeling emotionally upset. The former is the right kind of racism, while the latter is the wrong kind. One is seen as acceptable and normal, while the other is a horrifying abuse. Western racism falls into two distinct categories because our entire civilization is built upon the polite kind, whereas the impolite kind is useful to the powerful only as a wedge issue to keep western populations divided against each other. Mainstream western politics is often just a culture war between one major party which embraces both the polite and impolite kinds of racism against another major party which only embraces the polite kind of racism, thereby ensuring that no political energy goes toward ending the polite kind of racism. The polite kind of racism is much more important to the powerful in the 21st century, because it’s an absolutely foundational component to their rule rather than merely a useful tool. Without the imperialist extraction of labor and resources from the global south at extortionate prices, you wouldn’t see sprawling megacorporations turning millionaires into billionaires and trillionaires who then use their wealth to manipulate western politics to promote their own agendas. Without nonstop military expansionism and the abuses of the western intelligence cartel, the managers of the western empire could not dominate our planet. That’s why every few years westerners get to vote on whether or not to advance the impolite kind of racism in their society, while the polite kind of racism never appears on the ballot. You’re allowed to vote on whether or not your government will become more abusive to immigrants and other marginalized members of your society, but you’re never allowed to vote on whether or not war, militarism and imperialist extraction will continue. This expression of racism (or white supremacism, or xenophobia, or western supremacism, or whatever you want to call it) is considered too important to be left to the will of the electorate. And you see this reflected in the consciousness of the western mind. Even relatively aware westerners who would place themselves on the far left of the political spectrum will often spend a lot more energy on domestic issues than the abuses of the western war machine. Earlier this month the discourse on Left Twitter revolved around whether or not it was a “privileged take” to say that people shouldn’t serve in the US military, the argument being that many US military personnel come from disadvantaged backgrounds. I saw a lot of US progressives who furiously disparage ICE agents and American cops falling all over themselves to defend those who enlist in the US war machine, which is quantifiably far more murderous and oppressive than domestic American law enforcement. The only way to see things this way would be to view those who live in the global south as less human than people who live in the United States. That’s the only way it could possibly make sense in your mind to see the abuses of your country’s domestic police forces as worse than the demonstrably more egregious abuses of the US war machine. You’d have to view a school full of Iranian children being blown up by the US Navy as less worthy of attention and opposition than an American being beaten by a police officer in the United States. You’d have to assume those Iranian lives don’t matter. And those are some of the more awake members of western society. Most westerners are a lot less conscious and compassionate than that. Westerners live in the most savage and murderous civilization on earth. We don’t feel like we are savage and murderous because we outsource most of our violence and slavery to overseas operations, but that’s what we are. We go about our lives consuming products made by wage slaves under an oppression machine that is defended through constant mass military slaughter, and then we wag our fingers at a viral video of some schizophrenic saying racist things in order to feel nice feelings about ourselves. That’s what western life is, right there. We’ve got a lot of growing up to do. We are in need of drastic, revolutionary change, more extensive than probably most of us can imagine at this point in time. We’ve got a long, long way to go, and a whole, whole lot of wrongs we need to make right around the world.

One common feature in western empire propaganda is that we are always given reasons for the empire's violence, while the violence of those who resist the empire gets framed as happening for no reason at all. We've all been fed reasons for the US-Israeli war on Iran, and we all know what those reasons are. Even less-informed members of the western public have heard something about the Iranians being a nuclear threat, having a tyrannical government, and maybe something about sponsoring terrorist groups. But the so-called "peaceful protesters" who were killed in an uprising fomented and facilitated by the United States? They were killed for no reason, simply because the Iranian government is evil and hates dissent. All the Iranian police officers who died in the uprising perished for no reason, perhaps of natural causes. It is only by pure coincidence that this happened at the exact same time the US empire was making the decision to try to topple the Iranian government. We've all been given the official reasons why Israel has spent years blanketing the Gaza Strip with military explosives: Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7 2023, so it needs to get rid of Hamas for its own security. But why did the Hamas attack happen? It happened for no reason. If you look to the propagandists in the western press for answers, October 7 happened solely because Hamas are evil and wanted to kill Jews because of their religion. Absolutely no mention of Israel's savage treatment of Palestinians for generations, or the dreadful living conditions imposed upon the giant concentration camp that Gaza had become. We've been told why the western empire is pouring weapons into Ukraine: Ukraine was invaded by Russia. The empire wants to protect the freedom and democracy of the Ukrainian people, and to deter future expansionism by Vladimir Putin. Why did Russia invade Ukraine? No reason. Putin's just evil and hates freedom, that's all. Sure, countless western experts and analysts had been warning for years that NATO aggressions were going to lead to a war on Russia's border, but they were just rambling lunatics whose forecasts of war were proven correct by pure coincidence. Our entire understanding of history is framed in this way. Fidel Castro killed people in Cuba. Why did he kill them? No reason; he was just a mean jerk. All the violence of the socialist revolutionaries around the world overthrowing the abusive governments which preceded them is framed as causeless genocidal carnage inflicted by murderous tyrants who simply loved killing people. The desperation caused by the capitalist exploitation that had been imposed upon those populations is completely redacted from our history books. A mature understanding of our world begins with a curiosity about why the violence is happening. Violence is not always justified, but there is always a reason why it happens. Western pundits, politicians and newscasters will very seldom tell you what those reasons are unless it advances the interests of the western empire, so if you want to have a truth-based understanding of what's really going on in our world, you need to actively seek out the answers for yourself.