It Is Not “Anti-Semitic” To Condemn Genocide

November 7, 2023 by Gabrielle Lafayette

One month ago, agents of Hamas somehow infiltrated one of the most heavily defended fortresses of one of the most technologically advanced societies in the world, killed 1,200 Israelis and claimed several hundred hostages. Israel responded by bombing and invading Gaza, in turn killing many of their own hostages alongside more than ten-thousand civilians.

Israel told everyone in Gaza to vacate their walled prison and then bombed the only exit. Israel told everyone in the Gaza strip to flee south before then bombing those very portions of Gaza. And after Israel broadcast an intent to target hospitals to the entire world, they blamed subsequent hospital bombings on Hamas.

Hamas is funded by Israel, which is funded by American tax dollars. This fact was admitted as recently as 2019 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly announced the need for more funds to help “bolster Hamas” as part of his strategy “to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank”:

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he [Netanyahu] told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019.

When Yasser Arafat began peace talks with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians twenty years ago, the threat of peace breaking out led Israel to bolster Arafat’s political competitor:

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009.

And in 2015 former Israeli diplomat Avraham “Avi” Primor admitted,

“Hamas is the Israeli government. It was we who created Hamas in order to leverage against Fatah.”

But don’t take it from the aforementioned bureaucrats. According to both Business Insider and The New York Times, Israeli officials actually drove suitcases stuffed with cash into Gaza to keep Hamas in power.

For decades the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza have been unable to leave their walled concentration camp. The vast majority of these people are refugees who were displaced from their native lands by a 75-year old occupying force. The 5-mile wide by 25-mile long strip of land called “Gaza” is the only place on earth where refugees will be shot if they try to escape. Israeli snipers shoot to kill anyone who tries to leave, whether by boat or by foot (think of Jon Carpenter’s Escape From New York).

Anyone who grows up in such a prison will inevitably dream of breaking out, violently if necessary, especially after decades of watching friends and family murdered by bloodthirsty fanatics. And now the Israeli authorities have not only cut off water, food, medicine, fuel, electricity as well as internet and telephone communications from the Gaza strip, they’ve also bombed it into oblivion … again.

How is the indiscriminate slaughter of children an act of “self defense”? It is neither spiritually virtuous nor strategically efficacious to bomb hospitals. And yet a brain trust of Israeli doctors are now openly calling for the bombing of every hospital in Gaza as Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggests nuking Gaza to help secure Israel’s Zionist ethnic cleansing goals.

As Caitlin Johnstone succinctly observed:

“When you live under an empire of lies you’ll be asked to believe a lot of very stupid things. The dumbest thing we’re being asked to believe this week is that Israel’s intelligence services are simultaneously so incompetent that Saturday’s Hamas attack took them completely by surprise, but also so competent that all the buildings they’re destroying with their relentless bombing campaign on Gaza are directed solely at Hamas.”

Although numerous organizations continue to expend a great deal of effort and resources twisting human rights violations into polarizing debates to ensnare us all in elaborate divide-and-conquer narratives, the fact remains that targeting noncombatants with lethal force will never be honorable or heroic, no matter who is doing it.

In the Middle East, two seemingly separate factions have targeted two different civilian populations; one inside of Gaza, and one outside of Gaza. Hamas terrorists targeted civilians in Israel, and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in-turn targeted civilians in Gaza as an act of “defending itself” while ignoring Hamas headquarters in Qatar. Both terrorist factions draw contempt by targeting civilians. Period.

Evidence continues to mount suggesting that Hamas attacked Israel at the behest and knowledge of Israel. Jewish charity leader Cecily Routman publicly accused Israel of initiating a 7-hour long “stand down” order when militants were known to be killing civilians. How 400 combatants managed to break through Israel’s defenses without anyone noticing remains a puzzle. In the days prior to the 07 October 2023 “surprise” attack, Israel was repeatedly warned of imminent terrorist threats by both the American and Egyptian intelligence agencies.

But Israel’s foreknowledge of October Seventh reaches as far back as 2022. According to the New York Times, Israeli authorities had specific knowledge of the attack over a year prior to its execution. Netanyahu has since denounced such stories as “fake news”, but it seems worth noting that two weeks prior to the Hamas attack, Netanyahu was showing off his Palestine-free map of The New Middle East at the UN General Assembly in New York.

Israeli authorities further violated international law on 11 October 2023 when water, electricity, fuel, communications and food were all blocked from entering Gaza. Without water, hospitals in Gaza rapidly turned into morgues. Some Israelis took to social media to openly mock the plight of Palestinians.

It’s worth noting that Hamas agents murdered Israelis with American-made weapons. Then Israel responded by targeting unrelated civilians on the strip of land that Israel covets most: Gaza. Not only is the ground beneath Gaza purported to contain half a trillion dollars of oil and gas reserves, Israel now wishes for a canal to run through the northern portion of Gaza to compete with the Suez Canal’s ability to link the Mediterranean and Red Seas together.

Not only have American politicians failed to condemn the criminality of collective punishment and collateral damage, they’ve actively pushed for wildly disproportionate escalations of violence. It is a war crime to commit collective punishment on a civilian population and Israel knows it. But a curious cat has the tongue of many American officials who remain unable to condemn Israeli violations of humanitarian law (such as Israel’s deployment of white phosphorus against civilians in Gaza and Lebanon).

Between its lobbying power and the Loyalty Oaths pushed on American professionals, Israel has deep roots overtly influencing the American political system. The Alliance for Israel Advocacy openly pushes American politicians to fund the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) provides all-expenses-paid trips to Israel for American politicians and media personalities and pours $4 million annually into influencing American officials. The Israel Lobby has bragged for years about how effectively their money influences Washington DC. Bibi Netanyahu has boasted about how “America is very easy to influence”. The Israel Lobby have even attempted to universally criminalize criticism of Israel.

Given that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father helped establish the Israeli intelligence service known as the Mossad, and given that Jeffrey Epstein acted in the employ of Israeli military intelligence (and likely for American intelligence as well), it seems obvious that Israel has also achieved a covert influence over American politics by sexually compromising countless American officials in various honey pot schemes.

With regards to Israel’s Stranglehold on American Politics, Chris Hedges observed in 2019 that, “The Israel lobby’s buying off of nearly every senior politician in the United States, facilitated by our system of legalized bribery, is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact.”

Meanwhile the well-funded American Christian Zionist movement supports the Jewish ethnostate because they believe Israel can usher in the “fire and brimstone” events necessary for Jesus Christ’s “Second Coming.”

Unlike American politicians, who deny war crimes, Israel justifies them as a badge of honor. Israeli leaders publicly revel in the carnage and readily admit that the weapons employed are very much intended for civilians. Former Israeli Ambassador to Italy Dror Eydar admitted that, “For us [Israel] there is one objective: to destroy Gaza, to destroy this absolute evil.” It’s not “collateral damage” because it’s not an accident. A myriad of Israeli officials have explicitly stated on international television that they deliberately target civilians because Palestinians are nothing but “human animals” in service to Hamas (which Israel funds). Israel readily admits that Hamas militants are all deep underground in an elaborate tunnel system but continue turning the above-ground portions of Gaza into rubble with American bombs.

Israel’s most fanatic Zionists will readily admit that they want all the Palestinians to disappear, and a leaked document from Israel’s Intelligence Ministry recently surfaced that recommends the “forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula”.

Is it any surprise then, to learn that in 2014 the Times of Israel published an article titled “When Genocide Is Permissible”?

Clearly Israel has international carte blanche to murder civilians with impunity. Since Israel wouldn’t have a military without US tax dollars, if American-made weapons are found to have been used against civilians, the United States is required to cease supply of said weapons under international law (not to mention basic morality). After years of condemning Russia for civilian casualties, the fact that $4 billion in weapons are gifted annually to Israel stands as the single worst double standard of American foreign policy, which operates at a very low ethical bar already.

From Charlie Wilson’s Mujahideen to the CIA’s al-Queda, terrorists are very often funded by American tax dollars. America’s corporate terrorism empire abandoned $80 billion in military equipment to the Taliban and another $6 billion directly to Iran. The same network of crooked actors likewise provided finances and arms to ISIS, with one “loss” accounting for nearly $1 billion worth of weapons and military equipment. This method has played out for so long that in 2017 Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard introduced the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” which would formally “prohibit the U.S. government from using American taxpayer dollars to provide funding, weapons, training, and intelligence support to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

Needless to say, Tulsi’s bill did not receive much support from the war profiteers of the American Congress. And as the vultures circle over Gaza in 2023, weapons stocks have “soared” as the merchants of death have told investors to expect big profits from the next deadly wave of Middle Eastern conflicts.

Since it’s founding in 1948, Israel has accepted more than $158 billion in military assistance from the US government. If US citizens ever became savvy to the truth about Israel’s war crimes, the unlimited funding might come to an end. This is why the conversation is so “controversial” in the US. As long as Israel exists as a client state of America, it will always remain dependent upon American tax dollars.

The Politics of Revenge

It might come as a surprise to Americans that the majority of Israelis are opposed to the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. It may come as a surprise to Americans that Israel intentionally targets schools, hospitals and mosques, or that 40% of all Palestinian casualties are children. It may come as a surprise to Americans that the West Bank is a military occupation where fanatics from the world over are encouraged to purge Arabs. Few of us seem aware of the fact that American police officers regularly conduct counterterrorism training in Israel as part of an international “exchange program”. These facts surprise us because we in the west are exposed to an unfathomably gargantuan volume of corporate propaganda that daily justifies the systematic annihilation of our fellow humans with antiquated ideas and harmful ideologies. It is this propaganda apparatus that has cleverly conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism as a time tested method of deflecting criticism.

America funds Israel. The Israeli government in-turn funds Hamas. Hamas are neither based in Gaza nor the West Bank, but farther east in Qatar (which depends on American military support and hosts an American military base) at the request of the United States government. Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office for the same reason; to provide a venue for bureaucrats to conduct meetings.

Zionist fanatics will never acknowledge that the Palestinian peace movement called the “Great March of Return” was neither engineered nor directed in any way by Hamas. Starting in 2018, tens-of-thousands of men, women and children marched every Friday for 18 months in a peaceful act of mass civil disobedience that lasted until the end of 2019. The Israelis responded to every one of these peaceful marches with snipers who targeted civilians (including children, journalists and medics) with deadly force, killing hundreds and wounding thousands.

Following Israel’s unprecedented blockade of Gaza in 2006, some Palestinians began to view Hamas as the only viable political option as the walls literally grew up all around them. But Hamas was sponsored by Israel, first as a means of ousting Yasser Arafat and later as a reliable boogie man to justify further land grabs.

Sadly, the utterance of such obvious truths is predictably labeled as (or conflated with) pro Hamas “hate speech” by those who benefit from the bloodshed and the fanatics who support them. The path toward justifying the genocide of the Palestinians is paved with all the same cancel culture tactics we’ve seen before. Accusations of anti-Semitism are vigorously employed against anyone who dares question Israel’s sacred infallibility. Former Israeli Minister Shulamit Aloni admitted that “antisemitism” is a weapon against criticism that “we always use”.

Nothing justifies the indiscriminate murder of children, but that hasn’t stopped war-hungry fanatics from denouncing such matter-of-fact wisdom as “anti-Semitic” hate speech. Never mind the fact that the term “Semite” applies equally to Hebrews, Arabs, Akkadians and Phoenicians. It is therefore not anti-Semitic to denounce Zionism for the death cult it is. If the condemnation of child slaughter can be construed as “anti-Semitic” then our cultural values have become perverted and hijacked.

Referring to those who oppose this genocide as “anti-Semite” seems as transparent as referring to Jews critical of Israel’s actions as “self-hating”. Anyone who questions Israel’s indiscriminate mass murder of innocent civilians and ongoing apartheid of the native Palestinians is always automatically labeled a de facto Nazi by the zealots who daily prove themselves to be the very thing they claim to be against, becoming indistinguishable from the evil they claim to be fighting. Indeed the shocking alliance between Zionism and Anti-Semitism goes even deeper.

The fact that Israeli students are required to visit Auschwitz to guarantee such atrocities “never happen again” is made into mockery by Israel’s decades-long subjugation of millions of people who are trapped in a literal concentration camp called Gaza. Routine massacres dubbed “mowing the lawn” have regularly occurred within the walls of this open-air prison since it’s inception, just as hundreds of massacres have taken place in the West Bank territories with support from the Israeli authorities since the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine began in the 1940’s.

The wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian population has remained mostly invisible to Americans, largely due to a western assumption that Arabs are inferior people who must be “modernized” if there is to be hope for them. Such “orientalism” allows for the luxury of hiding behind the false reasoning that those dirty Palestinians just aren’t willing to compromise.

Corporate media bias helps reinforce anti-Arabic perspectives which amass together from the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, David Frum and Richard Perle who unanimously conclude that the Middle East is a, “fetid swamp that must be drained and reconfigured in a western image of democracy.”

Israel has also unabashedly justified their repetitious cycle of genocidal mania by claiming that the Holocuast was conceived by Muslims. Bibi Netanyahu angered the world when he declared in 2015 that Hitler did not intend to exterminate Jews until a Palestinian Muslim convinced him to do it. Speaking to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu arrogantly stated:

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminated the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews and Haj Amin al-Husseini went up to him and said if you expel them, they’ll all come here [Palestine]… ‘So what should I do with them?’ He [Hitler] asked. He said, ‘Burn them’.”

In a similar way, propagandists often posit the logical fallacy that if Palestinians really aren’t just “human animals” then why don’t the surrounding Arab states accept any of them as refugees? Not only is this claim blatantly untrue (as of 2015 more than 3 million Palestinian refugees had made their way to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) but this talking point was explicitly used by Hitler to justify the expulsion of Jews from Europe.

Ironically, Zionists in Israel are actually brought up to believe the very thing that Americans are taught about Germans under the Third Reich: they are taught that they are a supreme master race. Non-Jews are inferiors called “Goyim” and the public justification for civilian deaths in Palestine is referred to as “Hasbara”. They’re also taught that anyone who questions the corrosive mentality of Zionism is a “pathetic Jew-hater” and deserves bloody execution, especially fellow Jews. After everything westerners have been brought up to believe, it seems maddeningly ironic that support for Zionism provides fuel for the very same definition of “anti-Semitism” that’s employed to censor and control speech.

Caitlin Johnstone notes that, “The fiercest and most incisive critics of Israel I follow are all Jewish. Don’t let propagandists frame this as “Jew haters vs Jews” when it’s really justice vs injustice.”

When snowflake Zionists like Ben Shapiro post fake images as proof of atrocities to accuse impartial viewers of being “pathetic Jew-haters” they reveal themselves as agents of the state in service to the war machine.

Cleverly crafted “atrocity propaganda” invites us to internalize the hypocritical notion that Israel’s violence is not only acceptable, but righteous. President Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed pictures” of beheaded babies in Israel when no evidence of any such occurrence ever existed; a contrivance that originated from an IDF reservist named David Ben Zion who was instrumental in destroying a Palestinian village earlier this year.

No matter how the propagandists might twist it, targeting large masses of civilians with lethal force is not an act of war, but an act of genocide. Whether it’s Dresden or Gaza, it’s a repugnant war crime. Experienced tacticians know that such moves only create more enemies and greater hatred.

Despite the explicitly murderous rhetoric of Israeli officials, western leaders continue to proclaim their support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” while the corporate media continues to blame Arabs for resisting their own extermination. George Carlin noticed this double standard when he said, “Israeli murderers are called commandos, Arab commandos are called terrorists.” American tax dollars fund both groups.

In his book Inside Terrorism, Bruce Hoffman revealed the fact that Israelis were just as guilty of terrorism as Hamas, from the July 1946 King David Hotel Bombing that killed 91 and injured 45, to the lynching of 150 British Soldiers to the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 Americans. The incontrovertible proof of Israel’s barbaric war crimes is as voluminous as it is nauseating.

Corporate media whitewashed the 2018 Gaza massacre and subsequent bombing campaign just like they lied about the 2014 massacre of 2,000 Palestinians in “Operation Protective Edge” or any of the other countless massacres Israel has waged in it’s 75-year existence that most westerners have never heard about. And time and time again the Israeli authorities repeatedly blame the overwhelming number of dead civilians in Gaza as resulting from Hamas’ employment of “human shields”.

In a News Target piece entitled, “Why I No Longer Stand With Israel,” former UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspector Scott Ritter writes:

In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the muscle memory in my heart and brain told me that I must stand with Israel as it responded to this atrocity.

But then I watched as Israeli generals and politicians openly advocated for war crimes on national television, calling the Palestinians “animals” and openly advocating for their elimination.

I watched as the Israelis lied about the nature of the Hamas attacks, turning what had been a flawless assault against a series of militarized settlements and military strongpoints that encircled the open concentration camp that was Gaza, into a narrative of uncontrolled bloodlust which was then fed to an unquestioning western audience by a compliant mass media.

I watched how the world rallied to the shock generated by the fiction of 40 beheaded Israeli babies, while remaining silent over the real deaths of nearly 400 Palestinian children killed—no, murdered—by Israeli air attacks.

Without American support, the unconscionable human suffering of the hell that is Gaza would simply not be possible. America protects Palestine’s tormentor. Americans, in turn, sponsor the deliberate killing of innocent Palestinian children while CNN assures us that Israel’s violence is simply a matter of self-defense. This has been the case for decades. The Israel Lobby has leveraged our collective memory of the Holocaust as a smoke screen to obscure their own murderous crimes against humanity. How anyone can lament concentrations camps while taking steps to perpetuate and ignore the exact same thing happening on a much larger scale in real time shows the world what depraved depths a few psychopathic criminals are willing to plunge.

It’s High Time to Condemn the Covidian Cancel Cult

September 15, 2023 by Gabrielle Lafayette

Remember when Noam Chomsky told the nation that the unvaccinated should be “isolated” from society? Or that time Bette Middler called for the “killing” of unvaccinated children? Or when David Cross wished that the unvaccinated would die?

Howard Stern complained, “When are we going to stop putting up with the idiots in this country and just say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated? Fuck ‘em. Fuck their freedom.” Arnold Schwartzenegger likewise told Americans, “Screw your freedom!” This sentiment was echoed by Keith Olberman who declared that it’s “time to stop coddling the morons who won’t get vaccinated!”

The Guardian told its readers that “it is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvacinated.” The Washington Post told Americans that we “can’t afford” to be “patient with the unvaccinated” anymore. And the Toronto Star attempted to mobilize their readers with the declaration that it was, “Time to call out nasty, hate-filled anti-vaxxers.”

Don Lemon told CNN viewers that those who refuse the vaccine should be shamed or “left behind” and Jimmy Carr referred to anyone skeptical of pharmaceutical companies as “really quite fucking dense.” Meanwhile Jimmy Kimmel told his audience that unvaccinated people should be denied life-saving health care with the dismissal, “Rest in peace wheezy.”

Those who unfortunately embraced the bullshit vomited from the mouths of these corporate snakes and Limousine Liberals immediately became a tangible threat to their neighbors. Hypnotized armies of automatons who enforce irrational authoritarianism against their neighbors quite reliably prove themselves to be a danger to anyone with a brain. The authoritarianism seemed scientifically driven at first glance, but behaved more like a dogmatic, faith-based, belief system that led many fearful citizens down the path of sanctimonious zealotry. In short, their allegiance to Pharma mirrors the behavior of a cult.

Those of us who understood our rights under the Law tried to tell the Covidians that we reserve the freedom to choose, and beyond telling them to leave us alone we never told them what to do. Conversely, we were scolded and corrected and attacked if we questioned the unlawful edicts and unconstitutional orders. The Cult portrayed anyone with the ability to think and the courage to question authority as a domestic terrorist threat.

In January of 2021, the Biden Administration issued an Orwellian “terrorism” alert labeling anyone opposed to the status quo as a potential terrorist threat. The Washington Post declared that “a nti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism” in a piece written by California Senator Dr. Richard Pan.

Robert Grenier, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism program, compared Americans to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. At the top of 2021, DHS issued a terror alert targeting those critical of lockdown policies, referring to them as Domestic Violent Extremists, or DVEs (not to be confused with the extremism associated with Domestic partner Violence).

General Stanley McChrystal, former head of the Joint Special Operations Command and commander of the Afghanistan theater, explicitly compared the war on terror abroad to the new war on the American people. Another intelligence official appeared on PBS News Hour to urge we “consider applying some of the lessons from the fight against Al Qaeda here at home”. Right on cue, the city of Baltimore, Maryland unleashed aerial military capabilities developed during the Afghanistan War with a domestic mass surveillance operation called “Gorgon Stare”.

Meanwhile new domestic terrorism laws were introduced by the White House. Our judiciary attempted to normalize the indefinite detention of Americans without trial. Following publication of the DHS trade and travel report that “reads like an instruction manual on how to exploit the public’s fear of COVID,” the federal government began installing facial recognition scanners in dozens of airports. A White House task force met with health technology companies to create a national coronavirus surveillance system to provide Big Brother with a real-time view of where people seek treatment and for what.

Under these new emergency suspensions of the law, the American police state waged the most organized and sophisticated state terrorism campaign in history.

Alicia Kitts was tasered and arrested at her son’s eighth-grade football game for failure to mask in Logan, Ohio. A man in Texas was threatened at taser point by an officer for not wearing a mask at a gas station. Colorado imposed year-long jail sentences for failure to wear a mask. Floridians were ordered to wear masks inside their own homes. Students in Florida were “re-educated” for failing to mask up. Oregon required vaccination for anyone wishing to remove their mask. Houston residents faced a $250 fine for failure to mask. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser threatened DC residents with 90 days in jail and a $5,000 fine for leaving home, issuing an executive order that required masks outdoors under penalty of a $1,000 fine.

United Airlines kicked a 2-year-old girl off an airplane for refusing to wear a mask. The CDC threatened the arrest of travelers who failed to wear two masks. Bureaucrat Susan Michie believed that mask mandates and social distancing should continue “forever”, comparing the compulsory actions to “wearing a seat belt” and “picking up dog poo in the park”.

We were told to follow the science, and then actively shamed for embracing the truths revealed through practicing the scientific method. Masks and social isolation and unnecessary medical procedures have all done far greater harm than the Cultists will ever admit. Phrases like “trust the science” are inherently anti-scientific because skepticism is inherent to the scientific method. Nobody ever trusts the results unequivocally. Now that the law is finally catching up to the hysteria, it’s easier to see that the masquerade served as a clever smoke screen to camouflage the bloodthirsty authoritarianism of the Cult.

Science is never settled unless you’ve thrown away the scientific method and begun playing politics with the data like Big Tobacco and Monsanto have done for decades. Beyond looking foolish, wearing masks in public places did little but display compliance and obedience to the modern dictatorship. The medical tyranny that accompanied masking was decidedly anti-American and itself corrosive to the expression of liberty this country is supposed to embody.

In March 2020 Governor Gavin Newsom locked down the entire state of California, Governor Andrew Cuomo locked down the entire state of New York and Governor J.B. Pritzker locked down the entire state of Illinois. Washington Governor Jay Inslee declared that anyone refusing to cooperate with contact tracers and compulsory testing would not be allowed to leave their homes for any reason. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine ordered the creation of covid camps.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer defied the Law and her own legislature by enacting emergency power laws to justify the passage of executive orders that extended unconstitutional lockdowns. The Michigan government in-turn threatened businesses with six month jail sentences for failure to surveil their customers, and Michigan authorities were instructed to arrest anyone they suspected of being sick with the illness. In April 2020 an FBI strike team raided a hospital in Michigan after it had successfully treated several patients with vitamin C.

Michigan’s Albion College told its students to remain within five miles of the campus under threat of suspension and required them to download a smartphone app programmed to track their movements. Massachusetts residents were shocked and appalled to discover track-and-trace apps had been force-installed onto their devices without consent or notification (following a government partnership with Google and Apple).

Governor Cuomo banned dancing in the Empire State while California banned singing in church. A Bar in New Hampshire was fined $1,000 on the basis that the guitarists “performed too close together” during a musical performance.

Kentucky residents were threatened with ankle monitors for “failure to isolate.” Ford Motor Company tagged their workforce with social-distancing wristbands that vibrate when employees get within six feet of one another. A couple from Connecticut was fined $3,000 for leaving the state. A Key West couple was jailed for violating state quarantine. In the Cayman Islands, Skylar Mack and Vanjae Ramgeet were both sentenced to four months in jail because Skylar removed her “geo-fencing bracelet” and broke quarantine for seven hours to watch a jet-ski race.

Police in Daytona Beach, Florida used drones to “take people’s temperatures” and “monitor the homeless”. Residents of Elizabeth, New Jersey were scolded by drones with recorded messages from the mayor commanding people to, “disperse and go home” under threat of “summonses” and $1,000 fines.

Georgia officials went door-to-door collecting blood from randomly selected citizens, Emirates Airlines conducted mandatory blood tests on passengers in addition to requiring them to wear masks, and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner “strongly encouraged” his Texas residents to submit to “randomly selected” blood draws. The White House announced a nationwide campaign of “targeted community door-to-door outreach to get remaining Americans vaccinated”.

The New York City police cracked down on congregating with armed social distancing busts. New York City announced mask patrols would issue fines to people refusing to cover their faces outside. NYPD dispatched 1,000 officers and a swarm of law enforcement drones explicitly to enforce social-distancing rules. New Yorker Donni Wright was violently tackled and arrested in Manhattan’s East Village for not wearing a mask (by a plain-clothes officer who also lacked a face covering). Some New York workers were issued “travel papers” to avoid arrest while commuting to their jobs. In January 2021 the State of New York proposed the formation of covid detention camps for anyone identified as a “case, contact or carrier” of a contagious disease. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio deployed “covid checkpoints” to fine people up to $2,000 for traveling during Thanksgiving.

Los Angeles authorities threatened to cut the water and electricity from the homes of those refusing to comply with the lockdown. Los Angeles County cracked down on illegal New Year’s Eve parties with a “Superspreader Task Force” comprised of “hundreds of detectives, patrol deputies, and Specialized Response Teams” that detained and arrested hundreds of citizens. Los Angeles elementary schools required “entrance tickets” from students who were required to daily apply for a new QR code that had to be scanned to gain admittance to educational facilities.

Ventura County, California enacted a snatch-and-grab arrest program after hiring 50 “covid spies” empowered with the authority to forcibly and arbitrarily detain citizens. California Governor Newsom also imposed “multi-agency strike teams” to enforce business shutdowns. Following anti-quarantine protests at California’s State Capitol, the Golden State outlawed all gatherings on state properties. And Americans visiting California’s beaches were harassed by police officers on horseback who attempted to enforce arbitrary social rules.

Californians were encouraged to report on their neighbors for coughing and sneezing indoors. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti proclaimed that “snitches get rewards” if they tattle on their neighbors. Brits were likewise encouraged to snitch on each other for visiting relatives over Christmas. Police in Bellevue, Washington encouraged neighbors to report on their neighbors with the MyBellevue app. And Bill de Blasio publicly urged New Yorkers to snitch on each other for failure to social distance.

As early as May of 2020, cities in Louisiana, Texas and Missouri told “nonessential” bars and restaurants eager to reopen their doors that they could do business again under the condition that they agree to snitch on and collect the personal information of all their customers as part of Homeland Security’s “contact tracing” initiative.

But compulsory snitching didn’t always go the way bureaucrats intended. Overwhelmed dispatchers in Toledo, Ohio were so flooded with calls from people snitching on each other about “not social distancing” that police took to twitter to encourage tattling citizens to call the health department instead.

Canadians who “recklessly” defied quarantine faced million-dollar fines and three-year prison terms. They also faced death by execution: Canadian police shot and killed an elderly man after he refused to wear a mask in a grocery store. Canada also took children away from disobedient subjects: an Ontario court discontinued the custody of a father’s children, claiming that his “beliefs” about the pandemic were a danger to his children because the love for his kids would always be “subordinate” to his “worldview”. And to top it all off, Canadian police even cited vagrants: Hamilton police in Ontario issued $750 tickets to homeless people for failure to observe social distancing rules.

In May of 2021 Canada began requiring so-called vaccine passports for entry into the county. Canadian health expert Dr. Joffe published his admission in January of 2021 that the “cost of lockdowns are at least 10 times higher than the benefits,” citing global food insecurity, severe poverty, interrupted healthcare, domestic violence, mental illness and more. Canadians who protested their subjugation had their bank accounts deactivated and assets frozen, as did anyone who contributed to the protest or helped finance it.

Those of us who could think and read did our best to appeal to the reason of the Cultists and learned very quickly that the Cult is not interested in evidence or debate or logic or reason or common sense. The Cultists are only interested in pushing authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter how economically crippling lockdowns proved to be for poor and working families. It doesn’t matter how many people perish from the lethal decision to allow the death jab willingly into their veins. Adherence to the Cult demands that believers simply repeat the corporate lies they hear from the captured communication apparatus.

In March of 2021, former Baltimore health commissioner Dr. Leana Wen appeared on CNN to further coerce Americans into overcoming their so-called “vaccine hesitancy” by dangling their innate freedoms before them like a carrot on a stick.

San Francisco gave the “no jab, no job” ultimatum to it’s 37,000 city employees in June 2021. Another 153 hospital workers were fired or quit over a vax requirement in Houston, Texas. And Rhodes College of Memphis, Tennessee announced that they would charge unvaccinated students $1,500 each semester.

Pfizer and Pharma have a long and detailed history of scandal, lawsuit and legalized murder, but none of that matters to the Cultists. None of them will ever acknowledge the inconvenient fact that viruses are not the cause of disease, a fact so obfuscated by so many layers of bullshit that we actually believe Jon Stewart is somehow allowed to tell us the truth about the Wuhan Lab Leak Theory when the rest of his late-term career is characterized by pinning a medal on a literal Nazi at Disney World (since the Nazi was Ukrainian his status as a literal Nazi is ignored by the Cultists because the Cult supports all the “good” wars).

The authorities continuously propose ever more ridiculous protocols for their subjects in spite of their knowledge of how dangerous they are. The bigwigs in big pharma know it too. The St. Anthony nursing home in Auburn, New York experienced zero deaths during the panic until they began vaccinating residents, whereby 24 died within two weeks of getting jabbed. In December Reuters had to admit that the majority of people getting sick are vaccinated. Another study out of California confirms that boosted folks are more likely to get sick than the unvaccinated.

How many young and healthy people have died suddenly and inexplicably in recent months from these “unavoidably unsafe” products? How many unnecessary heart attacks and blood clots and strokes have “mysteriously” occurred since this began? And how many cases of leprosy? How many more lame excuses can we entertain for the sudden and dramatic increase of fatal blood clots and heart attacks in recent years? And how many millions more will die?

Nevertheless, we were told over and over again that this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Exactly how the unvaccinated can be construed as a threat to the vaccinated if vaccines indeed protect their host remains one of the unsolvable mysteries of the universe. The vax didn’t stop transmission. On the contrary it proved lethal for many and continues to kill many more who were foolish enough to take it and keep taking it. Unfortunately, arrogance prevailed among those who refused to acknowledge they could be and have been manipulated.

The global lockdowns were exploited by governments all over the world to arrest, harass and even execute reporters, journalists and political dissidents. The Cultists who made it all possible bowed before their almighty Pfizer, the primary financier of many Cult media programs. We were told that the unvaccinated were a threat, but the phenomenon of mRNA shedding proves that it’s the vaccinated who pose the threat – the complete opposite of the frantic claims of corporate media.

More than 100 groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Privacy Information, warned in April 2020 that the coronavirus response “must not be used as a cover to usher in a new era of greatly expanded systems of invasive surveillance.” The writing was on the wall for anyone willing to see it. Employers of virtual work forces implemented remote monitoring software to document employee productivity. And the Rockefeller Foundation floated the idea of subjecting American citizens to strict military rule led by a “Supreme Council” under the jurisdiction of the Defense Production Act.

A few bureaucrats in England eventually admitted to “unethical” and “totalitarian” behavior to control the masses throughout 2020, with one scientist adding that “The way we have used fear is dystopian.” In March 2020 the UN privacy chief publicly reminded the world that “dictatorships and authoritarian societies often start in the face of a threat.” The advent of “freedom bracelets” solidified the notion that our societies have succumbed to an institutional form of “Stockholm Syndrome”.

The terrifying predictions of possible deaths resulting from covid made by Neil Ferguson at England’s Imperial College were “grossly overstated” and smacked of Monsanto-style corruption of science and falsification of data. Among the first to sound of the alarm was Kurt Nimmo who, in April of 2020, identified the crisis as a pretext for world government and totalitarianism to “frighten the public and manipulate ill-informed citizens into embracing economic and social decapitation”.

Those of us who aimed to expose the obviousness of the covid lie and the authoritarian aims of its creators were mocked and attacked and bullied. We were called grandma killers and conspiracy theorists. We lost our jobs. We were trespassed from stores and restaurants. We were censored by and canceled from Facebook. Our human rights were violated.

So-called “liberals” from coast to coast completely forgot that they had ever chanted the words, “my body my choice”. Instead, an angry mob of bossy boot lickers took to the streets to shame their neighbors in an organized campaign of mass behavior modification.

Did anyone ever apologize for the fruitless shaming tactics or ignorant accusations, beyond the likes of Scott Adams, Tim Robbins and Megyn Kelly? Despite a few outliers, not only did loyal Cultists fail to apologize for their mistakes, they actually doubled down on the lie. For anyone who saw the light, realized they’d been fooled, and apologized for their sheep-like behavior, congratulations on having some integrity.

The past three years were characterized by a herd-like embrace of a hostility that was anti-scientific, anti-American and anti-human. Now that illiterates who put their naive trust in Big Pharma are dropping dead all around us it’s obvious that those of us who questioned the Covidian narrative were absolutely correct in doing so. It wasn’t exactly difficult to anticipate the turn-key tyranny of 2020 because oligarchs the world over have been publishing their dictatorship plans for decades. There were plenty of attempts to warn followers of the Cult, but a horse can only be led to logic. One cannot make it think.

Despite what we were taught in public school, the most enslaved populations on earth are those who know how to read but are never taught how to think, because they’re the most susceptible to the poisons of propaganda. After all, a population that can’t read cannot uptake the psychological manipulation to the same degree as one that can. They’ll repeat what they read and what they’re told uncritically. The very same hateful sentences that were vomited out of Racheal Maddow’s pretentious face about so-called anti-vax deplorables were repeated word-for-word from coast to coast by these zealots. Their religion is Scientism and their Pope is Saint Fauci.

For the most part, those who never recovered from the institutionalized brain washing pushed by the Cult will never be able to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that C19 injections constitute lethal clot shots, or the fact that their deployment signifies a mass murder campaign of a truly biblical magnitude. Blind faith in vaccinations has led the civilization down the blind alley of a completely avoidable mass slaughter. And this genocide was completely voluntary. Those of us who warned that following this insanity represented collective suicide were unfortunately vindicated again and again. The judgmental vitriol of the true believers who repeated Pfizer’s talking points uncritically was rewarded in kind.

So, now that the tables have turned and the shoe is on the other foot, are those who have endured profound discrimination throughout the last three years really expected to abstain from schadenfreude? After witnessing the macabre ritual of synchronized dancing nurse teams throughout 2020, are we not justified in dancing over the graves of Cultists who wished the rest of us dead?

The Cultists would clearly dance on our graves if they could, and that mentality is part of what differentiates them from everyone else. It’s ultimately our humility that differentiates us from the Cultists. To avoid becoming our enemies we must be careful not to hate them the way they hate us.

At the same time it seems mortally unwise to simply ignore the Cult’s totalitarian aims. It is true that the Cult might be tempting people into violence by baiting us with one glaring injustice after another. And the window to resolve these problems peacefully seems to be closing fast. But if the Cult’s goal involves destroying traditional values and subverting the Law, thoughtful Americans would do well to acknowledge and avoid the traps before taking action. To be effective, a rational response must also be creative, as opposed to the destructive acts that define the Cult. Whatever we do, we should beware of embracing the same hatred that has consumed the Cult’s followers.

When You Wish Upon A Death Star

January 4, 2018 by Gabrielle Lafayette

Disney has given itself to the dark side.

I don’t say that as another outraged fan boy irritated by nerdy expectations, but as an historian who understands the profound inspirational power of art. I’m also astounded by the lengths that America’s imperial bread and circus brigades have proven willing to go to direct our ever fleeting attention spans toward their illusions.

Truth may be the first casualty in war, but the mechanics of that casualty involve significant co-opting of stories that bind our cultures together. The Vatican successfully assimilated the Celtic peoples of Northern Ireland by incorporating Judea-Christian names into ancient Gaelic stories, altering the cultural stories away from the traditions associated with the history of the people. These edits and omissions happened incrementally enough that after a while, many never noticed as their entire culture was rewritten.

Myths and Legends matter. They represent the art of informing subsequent generations of long established truths. And the medium of film presents perhaps the most powerful conveyance system ever conceived for expressing who we are and where our priorities lie. Cultural stories give us a shared sense of meaning and solidarity. The art of Cinema is the literal production of Motion Pictures, that is, pictures on the wall that evolve and morph and tell a story and pull you in and reconcile your emotional experience of the world.

Film was explicitly designed for dissent. It was designed to discuss alternative ideas. It was designed to push our collective narratives toward a perspective of advancing how our society examines itself – indeed, how we examine ourselves as individuals within it.

But an art form as influential as this couldn’t last as a pure medium forever. Greedy industrialists, seeing the obvious profit and propaganda potentials of film, smothered the reels with their greasy hands and began to turn it to the dark side. Now the engines of industrial art seem absolutely determined to sully one of the most important legends of the 20th century.

In essence, Star Wars: A New Hope was the story of an orphaned farm boy who became radicalized after a military strike killed what was left of his family, thus becoming indoctrinated in an ancient religion, in-turn deciding to accompany a band of insurgents on a terrorist attack that would kill hundreds of thousands of men and women. Given that appraisal, what unpatriotic pariah could possibly see any glory in such tripe? Given that appraisal, couldn’t we consider the rewriting of this myth as a good thing?

But Star Wars: A New Hope also represented the familiar story of discovering that we are more than just our flesh; that our being extends out into the universe around us; that we are all one consciousness; that the most yielding will always overcome the most rigid; that there is good inside the most evil among us. It told a story of profound forgiveness. A young man believed so strongly that his father could be saved from the dark side’s influence that he sacrificed himself to do so. After himself being tempted by the dark side, he tosses away his weapon and taunts the emperor by refusing to kill his father. The emperor responds by killing Luke slowly with painful force lightning, in-turn awakening a sense of empathy within Vader, who tosses the emperor into down the Death Star’s reactor shaft, killing him. Luke could not have known for certain that his gamble would produce fruit, but verified the belief that light will always overcome darkness in the end.

It seems rather obvious that the American Empire might want to co-opt and redirect our attention away from such a narrative. And it seems that the best way to kill something great, is to make as many copies of copies as possible and sell them to us.

So one of the corporations representing our friendly neighborhood Ministry of Truth bought the trademark to the story and now fills our consciousness with its mediocre rewrites, and not only because it knows it can make a buck doing so. Let’s remember why the demand for Disney to turn a buck on Star Wars exists in the first place: because the essence of Star Wars represented a unifying perspective that deeply touched and inspired millions, thus forming an entire culture around it – a culture now under attack by postmodern nihilism. Case and point, examine the line in the newest film:

“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It’s the only way to become what you’re meant to be.”

Although this seems on the surface to mirror the sentiment of Forrest Gump’s assertion that “you‘ve got to put the past behind you before you can move on,” it also constitutes an expression of postmodern nihilism. Within the context of producing yet another Star Wars film, the quote illustrates a mentality of complacency. It seeks to encourage cultural amnesia and historic myopia.

Disney’s new Star Wars films are proving themselves as tools for the subtle interjection of corporate messages and imperialist propaganda. They’re loaded with plot holes, logical fallacies, and embarrassing errors. They’re easy to understand, and instantly forgettable. They also happen to be worth a truckload of money.

In the same way, the cartoonish fairy tale we were all told about WMDs in Iraq was a corporate piece of imperial propaganda loaded with plot holes, logical fallacies, and embarrassing errors. But the story was easy to understand, and instantly forgettable. It also happened to be worth a truckload of money.

And these new Disney films have more in common with WMD’s than simply fulfilling their role as keys to distracting society’s attention. They’re stories that are received much differently by the people than they are the experts at public relations. They’re also stories with the power to shape culture by their immediate influence. The WMD story succeeded in mobilizing the massive forever-war that no one was allowed to challenge without undergoing accusations of betraying patriotic loyalty. As Reverend Billy Talen says, sentimental patriotism is the same thing as extreme consumerism, and Disney’s new Star Wars films seem to impose both.

The imposition of mindless entertainment seems to prevent such realization from ever occurring. We Americans can’t ever really know that much about foreign policy when the very engines of our culture – in this case, the entertainment mediums that dominate our collective consciousness with ever-increasing leverage – implicitly encourage us to passively accept blind obedience to authority. After all, you don’t want to spoil the circus for your neighbor by doing too much thinking, now do you? You shouldn’t remind people, for instance, that the most advanced humanoids that have ever walked this rock are right now dropping explosive shells on children around the world, while attending pastiche entertainments that explicitly glorify such behavior.

And why is this? Why does our culture seem to have such a pathological aversion to bad news – to criticism – to thinking? Could it have anything to do with the fact that many of the films we watch reinforcecompliance and apathy? Aren’t we just there to fill our minds withexplosions and cool space battles?

After all, it’s not as if films riddled with deus ex machinas might promote a culture of intellectual laziness, right?

Why be bothered by unnecessary indulgences such as plot and character development? We’ll forget all about this movie in a couple of months anyway – unlike the original films. But with each new addition we all care about the original story less and less. With every subsequent release of a new Star Wars film, a once great unifying cultural force that extended beyond the bounds of race, religion or class, becomes less significant.

At the same time, Disney has positioned itself to be one of the most influential departments in the ministry of truth, for as they co-opt the cultural icon of Star Wars, they have also aligned themselves with the annual repetition of Christmas. The aim seems obvious enough; release new Star Wars films around the holidays and you can maximize toy sales. It does indeed provide Disney corporation with an excuse to sell us the same Darth Vader and Millennium Falcon themed products every Christmas, thereby reinforcing the principal edict of American Culture: unfettered consumerism.

But something even more insidious appears to be happening as well.

Disney is gradually inserting itself as one of the principal arbiters of culture for modern American life. The stories and traditions of the Winter Solstice that extend back into the eons now must compete against a new corporate tradition that seeks to capture our collective attention. In one fell swoop, Disney assert themselves as the high authority of both Christmas and Star Wars, and in-turn, the attention of those to whom the lore matters.

Seen in this way, the new Star Wars releases aren’t “just movies.” They represent what may be among the greatest disappointments in cinematic history – a mockery of a once great cultural perspective. And we’re guaranteed to be reminded of it ad infinitum.

Perhaps surprise may be an inappropriate reaction regarding the behavior of Disney – a corporation that lobbied congress to extend copyright terms by decades in order to severely limit the public domain. And beings that influence breeds an addiction to power which can only beget a craving for yet more power, the consolidation of corporate influence seems to inevitably point to the eventual assimilation of all things relevant into a singular entity, like the Umbrella Corporation of Resident Evil.

I see two possible outcomes here. Both involve Disney’s continuous barrage of Star Wars movies, but they differ on why Disney stops producing them. In the first scenario, people begin to hate all things Star Wars and forget the original narrative completely. We’re forced to endure the mind-assault of a continuous barrage of increasingly awful things emblazoned with the Star Wars brand to the point that we might eventually forget all about the inspiring acts and deeds of courageous rebels taking on an intimidating Galactic Empire. It makes sense that this might be desirable for the American Empire.

The parallels between the original films and the American Empire seem too embarrassing for orthodox imperial culture to endure. To wipe away this inconvenient stain, the empire employs their skilled propagandists at the Ministry of Truth, and who better within the cabal of Hollywood, than Disney, to do this? It was Disney, after all, that wrote, directed and shot scores of propaganda films during the Second World War. So who better to erase an annoying tale of imperial hypocrisy?

Today’s Hollywood regularly celebrates mindless entertainment purely for the sake of mindless entertainment, as a lovely distraction away from the desert of the real. Corporate media institutions prey on the naive minds of audiences who lack their own life experience to make their own judgments. But surely, Disney oozes benevolence. What kind of heretic could possibly have suspicious eyes for the magnanimous magic of Disney?

If the big, bad wolf disguises himself within the folds of innocuous costumes to keep from prematurely alarming his prey, then what better vessel for the darkest forces of all to inhabit than the unassuming innocence of Disney? Then again, Disney’s recent acquisition of Fox for $52 Billion may threaten to war thin the perceived innocence of their brand.

In our first scenario, Disney masquerades through the world in the remains of an empty shell of inspiration, which seems like an unfortunate imperial triumph. So in the second scenario, I imagine a growing disgust for the use of electronic hallucinations to hypnotize us into set modes of thinking. It gradually takes more than one-dimensional characters and loads of special effects to maintain the attention of movie goers. Over time, a mind evolves among people who now grow tired of easily identifiable cliches, and cannot tolerate obvious fallacies or massive plot holes. A growing backlash begins to develop against the corporate consumer culture that seeks to dominate every aspect of our daily lives, especially around the holidays. Because Star Wars culture breeds Star Wars geeks. And if geeks are good at anything, it’s identifying inconsistencies. The culture of technically minded individuals who identified Han Solo’s mischaracterization of parsecs in the Mos Eisley Spaceport are the same folks annoyed by obvious plot holes. Geeks have led the way on many fronts, and they’re already losing interest in the Star Wars franchise.

Over time we begin to realize we’ve been sold another turd dipped in glitter; that the soft reboot that became Episode 7 constituted little more than a scene-for-scent remake of A New Hope, wherein we meet our protagonist on a desert planet – again – by means of a droid carrying top secret plans to a giant Super Weapon – again – who almost gets crushed in a trash compactor – again – before triumphantly flying through the exhaust trench of aforementioned Super Weapon – again – to blow up another ominous space station. It could be said to be a point by point copy of A New Hope, but without pesky distractions like good acting, thorough character development, well-defined dialogue, an original thought, a firm grasp of tension and release, or a reason to care about what happens to any of the characters.

For me, the primary metric for gauging any piece of art is the question, “What did it make me feel?” By this standard, the worst films I’ve ever seen didn’t make me feel anything. The only characters I cared about at all in Rogue One, for example, were the droid and the blind Jedi. When they died, I did feel something. But I can’t remember either of their names, so I obviously didn’t care very much. And why should I? The suicidal nature of their mission meant that all of the characters were made to be disposable from the very beginning. And I’ve already seen this movie – it was called Saving Private Ryan directed by Stephen Spielberg. The only difference between Spielberg’s Private Ryan and this new one is that the new one has storm troopers instead of Germans.

In many ways the newest of the Star Wars films can be described as yet another remake, but this time of The Empire Strikes Back; A wannabe Jedi travels from an isolated planet to train, ignores their teacher’s advice, then learns who her parents are. Next we swap out Billy Dee Williams as the betrayal character for Benicio Del Toro. Finally, our remake becomes complete with scenes of a ground assault led by 4-legged imperial walkers that look just a little bit different, attacking a rebel base on white-desert planet, but unlike Hoth, this planet is covered in salt instead of snow.

There are many reasons that the newest Star Wars films are among the least-liked Star Wars movies by audience reviews. They could be described as a Midichlorian dumpster fire that now threatens to consume timeless cultural icons.The fine minds at Red Letter Media have even dubbed the Last Jedi, “the cinematic equivalent of Homer Simpson’s makeup shotgun.” But the professional critics seem to like it. I wonder why that could be.

Remember, the Vatican assimilated the Celts by incorporating Judea-Christian names into the myths, altering the cultural stories away from traditions associated with the history of the people. While these edits and omissions happened incrementally, some assimilation happens much more quickly. When a particular ideology landed on these eastern shores, so did the onset of cultural amnesia here in the Americas. Within just a few generations, the roaring fire of long established traditions extending back through the centuries of Amerindian antiquity, shrank to a meek candle flame, struggling against the wind to stay alive. The same mentality that sought to co-opt and dominate all philosophical doctrines before, now have their sights set on the subversive stories that emerged from within that very heart of their own Empire.

The good news is that this reign of psychological terror can end as soon as we grow tired of their electronic hallucinations. People power defeats propaganda. Education, after all, is subversive by its very nature, for it forces questions to the forefront that our masters don’t want us asking.

I for one feel optimistic. Just as Luke knew there to be good within Darth Vader, I believe the concept of ethics can one day awaken within the ownership class.

Gabrielle Lafayette is a journalist, writer, and executive producer for the Outer Limits Radio Show.

When Will The Weed Be Freed?

April 19, 2015 by Gabrielle Lafayette

REEFER SADNESS

With the ongoing legalization of medical marijuana across the country, coupled with a continued effort to secure decriminalization, and even legalization, for recreational use in a handful of states, this year’s 4/20 celebration is widely anticipated to be the largest ever seen. Colorado and Washington successfully enacted laws to tax and regulate the burgeoning recreational application. Meanwhile Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia are enacting laws to make possession of small amounts legal. But the growing trend of recreational legalization by the states exists in a state of legal limbo, perched precariously between the issue of States’ Rights, and the US Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause.” The Supremacy clause states that federal law always takes precedence when state and federal statutes are in conflict, and this is exactly what states like Nebraska and Oklahoma are citing amid their attempts to quash Colorado’s growing recreational pot industry before the US Supreme Court.

The issue of whether individual states have the legal precedent to set their own drug policies as opposed to the apparent higher authority of federal restrictions becomes even more clouded in Washington DC, where voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative to allow the legal possession of up to two ounces within the city, and for residents to grow up to six plants in their homes. In an attempt to block the democratically approved measure, congress continues to work tirelessly to deny Americans their human right to alter their own consciousness and medicate responsibly. Attached within an unrelated Trillion-dollar federal appropriation bill, congress hastily attempted to prohibit the municipality of Washington DC from ever legalizing cannabis; the attached provision would not allow funding to be allocated from the budget to ‘enact’ the legalization referendum that voters passed. In fact, the future of DC’s pot legalization will be determined by the court’s interpretation of that very word: “enact.” However, since the DC pot legalization already took effect by the time this bill was passed, and since the legalization initiative did not set up any regulation or taxation programs, there is literally nothing to “enact.” Nevertheless, congressmen opposed to cannabis legalization are working hard to twist the loopholes within the legalese to retroactively squash the voice of the voters. But if anyone in DC government discuss the details of taxing or regulating the marijuana industry while they’re on the clock at work, they could actually face jail time since such discussions would technically violate the congressional marijuana order.

Adding fuel to the fire is an ongoing protest taking currently place around the clock in Washington DC, where a group of protesters have chained themselves to a 42-foot tall “liberty pole” on the capital mall. The protest, culminating at 4:20 PM on April 20th, was initiated at 4:20 AM on April 15^th, tax day, explicitly to call attention to the fact that DC residents are being subjected to what they consider an instance of taxation without representation. That ancient rallying cry from the good old days of the American Revolution is such an important part of the Washington DC identity that the slogan “No Taxation Without Representation” actually appears on DC vehicle license plates. But the liberty pole protesters are eager to point out that despite their cooperation with federal taxes, they do not have voting representatives either in the House nor the Senate. Their heavy invocation of the 4/20 movement in their protest implies that congress’s attempts to snuff the DC pot law is an unfair and uninvited federal overreach into the lives of everyday citizens.

While Colorado and Washington state have introduced, taxed, and regulated cannabis for recreational purposes, Alaska and Oregon are the latest states to be found waiting in the wings. Both states are in the process of passing voter-referendums similar to that of Washington DC allowing citizens to possess and grow cannabis for personal use, but still forbidding its sale and public consumption.

Interestingly, since these laws explicitly allow donations of marijuana – not the sale of it – DC was host last month to the largest weed seed give-away in history. People lined up for blocks for a chance to receive free packets of their very own marijuana seeds given away at a local DC bar and restaurant. Since the sale or purchase of pot or seeds is still illegal in DC, it was the only chance most citizens had to obtain the seeds needed to start their own legal home-based gardens. Because of the immense turnout at the give-away, it is broadly believed that a great deal of the recipients were not actually DC residents, but had come from nearby Virginia and Maryland, where pot is still unequivocally illegal. As an unintended side-effect of congress’s attempted restrictions, DC police were legally forbidden from tracking or even monitoring the recipients of the free weed seed extravaganza in any way.

In a city where DEA and secret service agents are at the center of controversy for multiple drunk-driving and prostitution scandals, congress has unwittingly passed a law that provides a smoke-screen for a burgeoning gray-market of marijuana trade and barter in the greater DC area.

BRINGING IT HOME

So now that we’re aware of the situation in Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia, we turn our attention inward. Where does Montana stand on legal cannabis reform? In Montana, possession a single joint can still land you in jail for six months; possession of two ounces can result in a sentence of up to five years. Montana voters, however, successfully pushed the legalization of medical marijuana in 2004. Despite our intrepid legislators meeting five times since 2004 to discuss this issue, they have continuously failed to enact a workable regulatory system. Then in 2011 the legislature attempted to such down all cannabis businesses with their “repeal in disguise,” alongside coordinated paramilitary raids on marijuana facilities in 13 cities across the state in March of the same year.

Cannabis persecution presents an easy answer for law enforcement officers seeking to make themselves look good to their superiors. Montana chalked up more than 1,500 arrests and citations for marijuana-related offenses in 2012, 95% of which were for possession. At the same time, our law enforcement agencies were unable to solve 91% of all burglaries, including home invasions. Also at the same time, our law enforcement agencies failed to solve more than 85% of all motor vehicle thefts.

Our law enforcement agencies could choose to focus on actual crimes – that is, cases that involve an injured party – but instead arrest thousands of adults for possession of a substance unanimously recognized as being safer than alcohol. They couldn’t close the books on most burglaries, but somehow endeavour to protect us from ourselves, denying our human right to alter our own consciousness – to imbibe a medicine as prolific as it is beautiful – a medicine that is older than human civilization.

Meanwhile, our marijuana DUI law remains in effect. According to the Marijuana Policy Project:

“Montana’s unscientific DUI law remains in effect, which makes it a crime for a driver to have five or more nanograms per milliliter of THC (ng/mL) in his or her bloodstream, whether or not the person is actually impaired. Without a doubt, people should not drive while impaired. However, medical marijuana patients may have that level of THC in their blood long after any impairment has worn off. This law is bad for medical marijuana patients because it does not reflect on their ability to drive safely.”

Why is this collective cultural psychosis allowed to continue? Why do we tell ourselves there’s nothing we can do about this aside from electing the right representative? Why do most Americans continue following stupid orders and unjust laws in the lunacy of the modern American police state? How does America conserve her whimsical assumption that it’s not a drug if it was prescribed by a doctor? How have we allowed the madness of the Nixon administration to reverberate into the present moment? Why do we fear what will happen if our children – God forbid – experience beautiful adventures in consciousness, or live their own lives responsibly? Why must we feel so obligated to protect our children from exhilaration? Why must we protect our children from euphoria? -from growing up? -from being capable of living their lives when they grow up? How does the crazy myth of the gateway theory continue perpetuate? Why do we forever maintain the folly that misery and suffering are not only normal, but desirable? Why must we continue to demonize anything that feels good, embracing all that makes us feel miserable? Why must we prevent our neighbours from benefiting from a world that expresses love and empathy instead of fear and malice? Why does America preserve the mentality that euphoria is, in fact, a negative side effect? How is what you do with your mind any of my business? How is what I do with my mind any of your business? Why do we prolong invasive probation and parole racketeering schemes for the sake of state profits? How can law enforcement possibly justify throwing innocent souls into corrals in the name of protecting communities that they, the enforcers, are completely disconnected from? Why have we begun to label drug offenders as terrorists? Why does it seem that many politicians simply won’t rest until all of our sons and daughters thoroughly understand the hammer blows of totalitarianism? Why can’t so many citizens acknowledge that breaking stupid laws is why we revere revolutionaries of yesteryear? Why do we collectively exalt those who enforce these stupid laws as benevolent heroes? Why is America building up her police forces into domestic para-military Gestapo armies? What does a police force need a tank for? Why must the accused prove their innocence without any assets to pay for their defense in rigged court rooms? Why does the government commemorate itself as the victim in these victim-less cases that bear no injured party whatsoever? And above all else, why does America seem so hell-bent on preventing the common people from thinking, pondering, or ever even questioning this insanity that we have codified as the established tradition of the ‘sane society?’
We know these policies are absurd. We know these laws are ridiculous. The police know it too. So why is it allowed to continue? Because every year thousands of medical doctors alongside members of the Anti-Smoking Inquisition spend billions of dollars perpetuating what has unquestionably become the most misleading though successful social engineering scam in history. With the encouragement of most western governments, corporate lobbyists pursue smokers with a fanatical zeal that completely overshadows America’s ridiculous alcohol prohibition.  And much of the mainstream media toes that corporate line, spewing fear-mongering and sensationalism. Not long ago our media was boldly claiming that cannabis use permanently lowered IQ, a finding that marijuana prohibitionists and anti-drug bureaucrats were happy to repeat ad nauseam.

Because drug offenders become labourers in our prisons. Because marijuana reform threatens the monolith of the pharmaceutical industry. Because cannabis legalization threatens the job security of police unions. Because the drug war justifies the inhuman violence that takes place each day in this country. Because the drug war provides the perfect opportunity to rationalize state-sponsored terror.

GET REAL

As larger and larger waves of Americans awaken from the lies of the D.A.R.E. program, Nancy Regan’s “just say no” campaign, and vociferous slough of absurdest public service announcements intended to justify the continued persecution of individuals who imbibe cannabis, an increasing number of public figures are beginning to realize they’re getting left behind.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the mainstream media’s go-to medical correspondent, was himself ardently opposed to marijuana use until he actually got around to researching it and then changed his tune dramatically, hosting three hour-long documentaries and calling for a “weed revolution.” It’s unclear whether his 180 is a result of actually conducting the research, or if he simply realized that if he didn’t admit to what the rest of the country already knows, no one would take him seriously ever again.

But it is nevertheless profound what happens when we base our decisions on facts and information as apportioned from research, instead of blindly acquiescing to scare tactics, propaganda and lies. Such endeavours seem to have a tendency of leading us toward the truth.

This post was composed by Outer Limits gumshoe Myron Gagarin and producer Gabrielle Lafayette
Catch the cloudcast at mixcloud.com/outerlimitsradioshow
Check out the more frequently updated tumblr page at outerlimitsradioshow.tumblr.com
Contact the research team at outerlimitsradioshow@fastmail.fm

Veterans Against War Porn

February 10, 2015 by Gabrielle Lafayette

US VS THEM

Apart from analyzing the tendency of the war-film genre to glorify violence, justify racism, and fetishize murder, there are a number of factual errors and historical inconsistencies with Clint Eastwood’s newest film American Sniper, as well as the book it’s based upon. The film’s portrayal of Christian dominionism confuses the otherwise peaceful messages of Jesus. The juxtaposition of 9/11 with Iraq invites viewers to make foreign policy connections that do not exist. Implicit jingoism encourages movie-goers to express xenophobic hatred vicariously through the film’s barbaric protagonist.

And the book that Eastwood’s film was based on seems even worse, weaving a web of lies, from making claims about “punching-out” former Navy SEAL Jesse Ventura, to accounts of murdering looters in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina, all the while referring to the people in his cross-hairs as “savages” and “animals”.

As a veteran myself, I have several grievances with the national debate currently underway regarding this piece of “art”. On one side it is hailed by “red blooded American patriots” as the incredible story of the deadliest sniper the American military ever produced, condemned by anti-war activists as offensive propaganda on the other. The tweet storms seem to indicate that spectators were coming away from American Sniper with a yearning for killing. Clint Eastwood denies this, ironically proclaiming the film as a champion of anti-war ideals. Just as the official narrative of the Iraq war involved “fighting for Iraqi liberation,” propagandists spin a facade of moral high ground language as a smoke screen for obvious misbehavior.

Case in point: if we’re there to liberate them, why revel in their indiscriminate murder?

Despite the predictable “patriots vs. hippies” narrative characterizing this debate, I would like to offer a third point of view, somewhere in the middle of the two extreme polarities. Such a national argument could serve as an opportunity to overcome personal biases, regardless of what side we believe is right, and acknowledge that life is complicated. This is our chance to understand that as long as we’re arguing with each other, we’ll never be able to tackle the root of problems concerning us all. And learning the truth is not about agreement. War is about profit and power for those who wage it. The trick is convincing people to fight and die in their wars. And that’s why propagandists pull in the big bucks.

In 2017, a Freedom of Information Act request by Tom Secker and Matthew Alford revealed the extent to which the Hollywood promotes war explicitly on behalf of the Pentagon, CIA and NSA. Documents obtained by Secker and Alford detailed the military’s control of and influence over more than 1,800 movies and television shows, “including the ability to manipulate scripts or even prevent films too critical of the Pentagon from being made. … If there are characters, action or dialogue that the DOD don’t approve of then the film-maker has to make changes to accommodate the military’s demands. If they refuse then the Pentagon packs up its toys and goes home. To obtain full cooperation the producers have to sign contracts–Production Assistance Agreements–which lock them into using a military-approved version of the script.”

MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO…

Even before I joined the military, I was intuitively skeptical of the impact that war films can have on our individual psyches, and thus the influence they have on the collective overmind if watched enough times. Many of my friends growing up were seduced by the violence of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now despite the fact that the film’s intention seemed to be the illustration of war’s many unspeakable horrors (as well as a timely adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness). But even if a war film attempts to convey the message of “look how horrible wars can be,” immature viewers tend to get seduced by the adrenaline-inducing weapon systems of the 21st century. Phrases like, “happiness is a belt-fed weapon” further play into this culture of carnage; a phrase that I heard repeated many times in my career, and repeated myself after becoming a SAW gunner.

The only films I ever saw that made me think twice about joining up were The Deer Hunter starring Robert DeNero, and Born On The Forth Of July starring Tom Cruise. These two films depicted the true cost of sending our best and brightest into the hungry jaws of faraway battles. Before seeing these films, the possibility of losing a leg or permanent paralysis had never occurred to me. Because from John Wayne’s The Longest Day to Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, America’s motion pictures had sold me on the world view that the battlefield yields glory, validated either in a “hero’s death” or award ceremonies and ticker tape parades that are always more fulfilling in your head than in real life.

Having said that, I’m always hesitant to lend my eyes to films depicting physical violence and bloodshed because of the messages they can send, whether they intend to or not. As with most forms of screen entertainment, many Hollywood films are meant to shape perception within the public to garner support for geopolitical decisions made on our behalf, which is why movie theaters are federally subsidized. For the same reason that recruiters are positioned in high schools to grab up our best and brightest before they’ve reached the age of reason, war films play as instrumental a role in military recruitment as first-person-shooter video games do. These forms of screen media masquerade as nothing more than entertainment, all the while subtly programming a state-sponsored narrative of justified imperialism into the malleable minds of those subject to the electronic hallucinations of the glowing rectangle.

Seth Rogen took a lot of flack recently for drawing an apt comparison between Eastwood’s new film to the film-within-a-film, Nation’s Pride – the Nazi propaganda movie that appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. The purpose of effective propaganda is to numb the mind away from reasonable thinking, and anesthetize the emotions away from empathy. As Chris Hedges recently pointed out in TruthDig, “American Sniper caters to a deep sickness rippling through our society. It holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium and our lost glory by embracing an American fascism.” He goes on to say:

“The culture of war banishes the capacity for pity. It glorifies self-sacrifice and death. It sees pain, ritual humiliation and violence as part of an initiation into manhood… The culture of war idealizes only the warrior. It belittles those who do not exhibit the warrior’s “manly” virtues. It places a premium on obedience and loyalty. It punishes those who engage in independent thought and demands total conformity. It elevates cruelty and killing to a virtue. This culture, once it infects wider society, destroys all that makes the heights of human civilization and democracy possible. The capacity for empathy, the cultivation of wisdom and understanding, the tolerance and respect for difference and even love are ruthlessly crushed. The innate barbarity that war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about the nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed crusaders… It fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical truths, when they do not fit into the mythic vision of the nation and the tribe, are discarded. Dissent becomes treason. All opponents are godless and subhuman.”

Veterans For Peace recently responded to the film in a similar way, contending:

“Following spaghetti western acclaim, Clint Eastwood, now 84, moved on to Dirty Harry movies… Over the years, he has honed this very masculine style and become a popular film director exploring the American psyche mostly from the reactionary right — though his films are always a dialogue with issues on the left. American Sniper is no different with its limited contrapuntal theme of PTSD and homefront family adjustment.

“Harry Callahan was famous for whacking creeps who deserved to die with his long, phallic .44 magnum. It was great cinema. The formula was simple: Feature a good guy who hates bureaucrats, loves to cut corners and is a man comfortable with violence and put him at odds with bad guys who are absolute perverted creeps whose death at the hands of the good guy would be cheered by an audience shoving popcorn down its gullet. The films were realistic in the sense of being harsh, brutal and loud. But they were far from realistic in the sense of being complex, morally gray, contradictory and confusing — like life itself.”

So when it comes to Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, I’m first and foremost appalled by the message we get early on that the message of Christ has anything to do with racist bigotry or a fixation of murder. How can any true Christian bemoan the crucifixion of Christ and then revel in the slaughter of other human beings?

Beyond achieving the feigned moral high ground of killing for Jesus, the film presupposes that sniper Chris Kyle was sent to Iraq because of what happened on 9/11. You don’t have to be that well informed to understand that the only connection that exists between 9/11 and Iraq is the Bush administration’s lie about Weapons of Mass Destruction which were never found in the deserts of Iraq. A deluge of patriotism that flooded our soldiers into Afghanistan created a tidal wave of militarism, the momentum of which has since bled over into operations conducted in over 75 countries. This fact remained hidden from the American people until Jeremy Scahill finally spilled the beans on JSOC with the book/documentary Dirty Wars.

When the twin towers fell, I was an ROTC cadet reporting in to my commanding officer for my morning duties. It wasn’t long after that I joined the US Army’s ranks in the 11B combat specialty despite having the ASVAB scores to go anywhere else. None of the other jobs had what I was looking for. In the summer of 2005 I graduated infantry OSUT and airborne school, both at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For people like me, it didn’t matter where the military sent us. We were absolutely convinced that our help was necessary to protect the nation, and that the military was working on behalf of the nation’s best interests. But no matter how enthusiastic I may have been at the beginning (and there was no solider more gung-ho for HOOAH than me), it slowly but inevitably became impossible to ignore the power grabs and profiteering happening above my pay grade. Once I finally became witness to the crimes of our government, that the media insisted were not happening, I couldn’t deny the truth any longer. Looking back I wonder how I was ever able made to believe any of the mainstream lies. Then again, common sense is only sense made common, and hindsight is always 20/20.

FETISHIZING MURDER

I don’t enjoy talking about my service, and no fellow veteran I know who has taken lives was ever proud of it. Which brings me to my next point about the book of the same name upon which the movie American Sniper is based. Chris Kyle, who is credited with 160 confirmed kills (God knows how many more unconfirmed) reads like a demented serial killer, reveling in the destruction and death that transpired at his fingertips during four tours of duty. This initially led me to question what role the book and subsequent film were meant to play in the society to shape public perception, and how much of it was altered to appeal to the pro-war narrative. Because no veteran I know personally has ever talked the way Kyle does about murder in his memoirs. The only people I’ve ever met who revel in the death and suffering of other humans in combat situations are people who have either never been in combat, or sadistic psychopaths.

As far as the first group are concerned you’ve probably bumped into one of these clowns at the bar, telling fantastic stories of the wars he so bravely fought in. Mine were usually socially inept boys with poor posture who liked to brag about how they were “a sniper in Iraq” or worked with the “special forces in Afghanistan” in between swigs of cheap beer. For whatever reason, stolen valor seems to have become quite popular in the age of Homeland Security.

The first prerequisite in determining the legitimacy of an individual’s service in the military is his unwillingness to talk about combat. Nobody I know who saw ‘trigger time’ overseas enjoys talking about combat, and most will flatly refuse your requests to reminisce by changing the subject, or leaving the conversation altogether. Posers, on the other hand, who have been programmed by video games and war films to glorify human slaughter, will tell war stories that usually feel like borrowed composites from pop culture. They do this because the greater culture has brainwashed them into thinking that they can obtain respect, sex, and notoriety if they can convince people they too are an American war hero. The reality experienced by our authentic heroes, however, seldom includes any semblance of fame or fortune, but a whole lot of guilt and flashbacks.

If you bump into armchair commandos claiming military service, and you want to skillfully suggest polite skepticism of their yarns, a great test of character is to ask them what their MOS was during their military career. That’s Military Occupational Specialty, and if they weren’t in the military they usually won’t be able to answer this question. Sometimes the smart fakers have memorized some figures, but this question weeds them out nine times out of ten.

Please understand that I’m not accusing Chris Kyle of being a poser, per se. Though this book exhibits demonstrable lies, we can say based on evidence that he was indeed a veteran and served out his military contract honorably. But if he actually reveled in the act of killing during his service as the pages and scenes of American Sniper allege, and if he actually felt the way those hateful sentences convey, then I’m led to believe that he’s either a psychopath, or that the narrative of his life has been altered to boost sales and/or garner patriotic support for continued global imperialism.

Praising the act of killing into fetish territory is not the behavior of any genuine veteran I know, which leads me to believe that Chris Kyle is either not responsible for the death-glorification that appears in the book (which, by the way, is conspicuously absent from the film), or he was a psychopath. Neither case leaves me either admiring Kyle, or feeling the need to honor his memory.

I’ve also considered the possibility that many of the stories were fabrications, either ghost-written by other writers or embellished by the editor to push sales, because there are many claims throughout the text that are blatant lies: in the book we’re meant to believe that Chris Kyle punched former Navy Seal Jesse Ventura; that Kyle sniped thirty people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina; that he murdered two men attempting to car-jack him. There is no evidence to support any of these claims, and Jesse Ventura even filed a law suit for defamation of character when Chris Kyle was still alive.

“PUNCHING OUT JESSE”

The media really twisted up Ventura’s defamation lawsuit, vilifying the former Minnesota Governor for victimizing the “poor widow” of Chris Kyle “for greedy monetary gain”. Ventura has since set the record straight about the chapter of American Sniper entitled, “Punching Out Jesse,” that the publication company was forced to change. Despite the fact that a jury came to the conclusion that overwhelming evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the incident in question never happened, instead of amending or omitting the entire chapter, HarperCollins offered money as payment to Ventura for damages. Ventura objected to the money, demanding they remove the blatant lies from the pages of the book. Though they’ve changed the name of that chapter in subsequent publications, they stonewalled Ventura on altering the content, instead writing him a check for $1.8 million, and now the media are free to berate him for taking money away from Kyle’s widow. Money that the Kyle Estate claimed was going entirely towards charity in the name of veterans organizations, which turned out to be another lie, as only about 2% of the proceeds were ever donated to said charities, according to the National Review.

This brings me to the strange circumstances surrounding Chris Kyle’s death; shot by a former Marine on a shooting range shortly after Ventura’s lawsuit began. Some analysts are drawing parallels between the Chris Kyle narrative and the Pat Tillman story. Men who’s image was worth billions in recruitment advertising to the military-industrial-complex.

A common misconception infecting the discourse of our society is that if you’re going to question the war you need to be prepared to respond to accusations of being anti-American or anti-military. As an ROTC cadet and a person who sacrificed his early life to join the military, is anyone prepared to call me anti-American? Since I was honorably discharged from my military service, is anyone prepared to call me anti-military?

22 veterans kill themselves every day. You think it’s because they’re proud of what they did? You think it’s because they’re happy with what their actions helped accomplish? You think its because they believed that their battles resulted in freedom for Americans?

And how does patriotic support of our troops equate to the anti-human stance we take on the scores of homeless veterans walking our streets every day, who we demonize for being poor? If anyone is qualified to say this, I as a veteran am: you cannot support our troops and be simultaneously against the war. That’s oxymoronic because if our troops are committing crimes against humanity, we are no different than any other totalitarian regime in history. If I’m involved in something shitty, you shouldn’t pledge my support, any more than I should be required to follow shitty orders if I think they’re unlawful. Just following orders is a coward’s excuse, and hiding behind a rifle requires far less courage than standing up to a corrupt government that continues to commit crimes in the name of freedom, God and country.

I’m not the only veteran taking a stance to set the record straight here. Former Marines Adam Kokesh and Ross Caputi who both served in Fallujah, call the Iraq war an imperialistic resource theft that exploits American soldiers who think they’re fighting for freedom.

Perhaps no one has ever said it better than two-time Medal of Honor recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler:

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. “I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

“During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

For this reason, I can’t help but cringe when people reflexively respond to the news of my military service by pumping my hand and thanking me for my service, which is part of the reason I rarely bring it up. Since we’re on the subject, I must ask you all to please refrain from thanking me for my service as a matter of reflex. Because I didn’t fight for anybody’s freedom. I fought to help guarantee the profits of assholes, just as General Butler articulated all those years before me.

11-C-martin-luther-king-guided-missiles-pro-peace-ani-war-history-political-tshirt

Image source: Allriot t-shirts

This post was originally composed by journalist and Army veteran Brandt Miller.
Catch the cloudcast at mixcloud.com/outerlimitsradioshow
Check out the more frequently updated tumblr page at outerlimitsradioshow.tumblr.com
Contact the research team at outerlimitsradioshow@fastmail.fm

Outer Limits Radio Show

Scrapbook of the Overmind

Tag Archives: Propaganda