All The Propaganda Is Splattering Against A Solid Wall Of Reality

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Humans inhabit two very different worlds simultaneously: the real world and the narrative world. The world of concrete material reality, and the world of mental stories about reality. 

There’s the material reality of presents piled under the Christmas tree, and then there’s the story parents tell small children about how those presents got there. There’s the material reality of military explosives ripping human bodies to shreds, and then there’s the story the powerful tell the world about how and why that’s happening.

What we are seeing with Gaza is manufactured narrative splatting against reality over and over again. The western empire churns out propaganda narratives about what Israel is doing, and those narratives are crashing headlong into raw video footage and concrete facts in ways you don’t often see.

Here are some examples of made-up narratives:

• October 7 was an unprovoked attack

• This a war of defense and Israel has a right to defend itself

• Jewish people can’t be safe unless they have a homeland in which they receive preferential treatment over other ethnic groups

• There cannot be peace until Hamas is eliminated

• All civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas

Here are some examples of objective reality:

• Raw video footage of civilians who’ve been burned, mutilated and ripped apart by Israeli military explosives

• Photos of dead children who’ve been killed in Israeli airstrikes

• The objective fact that journalists are being killed at a historically unprecedented rate in this onslaught

• The objective fact that children are being killed at a much higher rate than in other modern conflicts

• The objective fact that Israel is laying siege to a civilian population while systematically displacing them en masse and destroying their healthcare system

The former category consists entirely of insubstantial thought fluff; they’re stories people made up to advance their own agendas, and have no objective reality in and of themselves. The latter category consists of the concrete realities of the material world.

Relatively few people are fully aware of just how extensively mental narrative dominates human consciousness, and how this has allowed human civilization to be dominated by whoever can control what our society’s dominant narratives are. The US-centralized empire, of which Israel is a part, has succeeded in establishing a system of narrative control whose sophistication and efficacy has no parallel or precedent.

But in Gaza it isn’t working. It isn’t working because there’s no amount of propaganda spin you can put on raw data that is self-evidently unacceptable and inexcusable. No matter how much propaganda spin you heap on top of a video of a dismembered child, you cannot persuade me that it is fine and acceptable.

This is a very, very big problem for the empire. There is panic happening behind the scenes. What’s happening in Gaza is unspeakably horrific, and Israel’s atrocities must end immediately. But if there’s any silver lining in all this horror, it’s that people are being snapped out of the imperial propaganda matrix like never before.

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