Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Republicans called Obama a communist, when all his worst actions as president were continuations and expansions of Bush’s policies. Democrats called Trump a Nazi when his worst acts were continuations and expansions of Obama’s policies. Now we’re back to calling Harris a communist, while she supports a genocide that Republicans also support.
Calling Kamala Harris a communist isn’t wrong because it degrades Harris, it’s wrong because it degrades communism.
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The Biden-Harris administration is knowingly helping the Israeli government wage a campaign of extermination in Gaza that has shocked and horrified the entire world, so obviously the real villain we need to focus on here is Jill Stein.
No serious person believes a bunch of socialists and peaceniks are going to vote for a capitalist warmongering party. Democrats don’t bitch about the Green Party because of lost votes, they do it because they hate being reminded that their party’s a lie and their values are fake.
Democrats saying the Green Party steals their votes makes as much sense as Republicans saying the Green Party steals their votes. The Democratic Party is not a left wing party. It’s a warmongering capitalist party that is presently engaged in genocide and nuclear brinkmanship.
Democrats say the Green Party never gets anything done while the Democratic Party “getting things done” looks like committing genocide in Gaza, facilitating the exploitation and ecocide of capitalism, and promoting nonstop war and militarism. It’s not enough to get things done; the things you get done actually need to be good things.
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“If Trump becomes president the genocide will be way worse!”
Oh yeah, how so?
“It’ll be the BAD kind of genocide!”
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Does anyone actually believe Harris would win if she committed to an arms embargo on Israel? Or is that just something people are pretending to believe to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians? Because I think the system is plainly much more corrupt than this.
If Harris pledged to stop sending weapons to Israel unless it ended its assault on Gaza, you’d see the entire pro-Israel faction and the entire military-industrial complex throw all its funding and all its narrative control into supporting Donald Trump. Wealthy donors who’d been lifelong Democrats would pivot Republican for this election. It would suddenly become a mainstream narrative that Harris hates Jews and loves terrorists. A large segment of the mass media would play along. Op-eds would be churned out by liberal Zionist Jews claiming they must now “reluctantly” vote Trump because Kamala Harris wants to kill them.
Does anyone honestly believe Harris could win an election in an information environment like that? Maybe she could, but it would be a lot harder than just continuing to toe the imperial line like she always has. Obviously a lot of people would switch to supporting Harris if she pledged an arms embargo, but would there be enough of them to compensate for all the voters she’d lose in a hysterical all-consuming information op claiming that she’s a closet Nazi? It wasn’t enough when this was done to Jeremy Corbyn.
Harris is a monster, and she’d happily strangle every Palestinian child to death with her own bare hands if it would win her the presidency. But she’s not the problem. She’s just one person. She’s just playing the tune and dancing the dance you need to in order to win a presidential election in the United States. If it wasn’t her it’d be some other monster playing the same tune and dancing the same dance. The real problem is a profoundly corrupt system which promotes the most evil agendas on earth and elevates the very worst people in society to positions of power and influence to ensure the facilitation of those agendas.
Harris isn’t the cause of Washington’s depravity, she’s a symptom of it, just like Trump, and just like Biden. Really the problem is the US empire itself, and all the corrupt mechanisms that keep its gears turning. The slaughter will continue, in one form or another, until the imperial machine is brought down.
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FYI it’s not okay to be a grown adult in September 2024 and still believe Israel’s actions in Gaza have had anything to do with trying to rescue hostages.
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Meanwhile things keep getting scarier and scarier in Ukraine. Reuters reports that the US is “close” to agreeing to give the Ukrainian military long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia, at the same time Russia says that it will be altering its nuclear doctrine in response to western aggressions.
The more land and troops Ukraine loses the more eager Kyiv and Washington get to escalate to previously unthinkable levels against a nuclear superpower.
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We’re seeing free speech eroded in the west as authorities suppress critics of the genocide in Gaza, just as we saw a huge spike in censorship with the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. They say these wars are to protect the west and its values, while ruining the west and its values in order to protect their ability to manufacture consent for these wars. War, genocide and tyranny are the west’s real values.
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All art is political. It either opposes the madness of the status quo, supports it, or distracts from it. Creating vapid diversions for people to sedate themselves with in a genocidal brainwashed dystopia on a dying world is a political act, whether you call it political or not.
An artist who says they “avoid politics” while living in the heart of a murderous tyrannical empire is lying. They don’t avoid politics. They are directly participating in politics. And they are participating on the wrong side.
All art either helps open people’s eyes or helps close them. Almost all art in mainstream culture helps close them — either by normalizing and celebrating the madness of this civilization, or by numbing people to the discomfort of it. This is not just political, it’s on the front line of politics.
Politics are downstream from culture, and if the culture you are helping to create is mindlessly drifting along with the current of oligarchy and empire, then you have responsibility for where that stream ends up carrying us.
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"Calling Kamala Harris a communist isn’t wrong because it degrades Harris, it’s wrong because it degrades communism."
YES!! I've been saying this for weeks now--quit insulting Communists and Socialists! We don't claim Holocaust Harris as one of our own. She's all YOURS, Capitalists. Take her away!
"The Biden-Harris administration is knowingly helping the Israeli government wage a campaign of extermination in Gaza that has shocked and horrified the entire world, so obviously the real villain we need to focus on here is Jill Stein."
Thank you, Jill Stein! You're my hero-villain!
Love your writing and the energy and rage it contains. For those of us struggling daily with what is happening to us as humans witnessing this deranged regime unleashed, it provides a life raft of solidarity.