New Issue Of JOHNSTONE: When Journalists Are Your Enemy, Truth Is Not Your Friend
I publish my work in print form every month in a collection called JOHNSTONE magazine. The new edition is now available to order in print or download as a pay-what-you-want e-book version.
This month’s cover illustrates the moment when journalist Sam Husseini was forcibly carried out of Antony Blinken’s final press conference as Secretary of State, all for attempting to interrogate Blinken on his role in the genocide of Gaza. This is one of many escalating attacks on journalists around the western empire, including the jailing of pro-Palestinian journalist Ali Abunimah in Switzerland (p3).
You can get a paperback copy of this issue by clicking here, or a pay-what-you-feel digital copy by clicking here.
Other paperback editions of JOHNSTONE can be purchased by clicking here. Other digital editions can be downloaded by clicking here.
You can also get a subscription to the digital versions which will be sent to your inbox every month by clicking here.
(Probably worth mentioning that Amazon has once again censored the last issue of JOHNSTONE which features Luigi Mangione on the cover. They published it, then removed it, then restored it, now the links to it are dead again. I’m working on it.)
INSIDE:
Another Journalist Arrested In Another Western Nation For Wrongthink About Israel … 3
2025 Is Off To A Wild Start … 5
Humanity Must Awaken From The Dream Of Separation … 8
All Of Western Civilization Owns This Genocide … 10
The Empire Burns The Middle East While US Homelessness Surges … 12
Happy New Year. Our Society Is Every Bit As Diseased As You Suspect It Is. … 14
Awakening From The Empire Propaganda Begins With One Small Act Of Heresy … 16
We Live In A Nightmare … 18
There Is No Need To Wait For Revolution Or Paradise … 20
Meditations On Bono Receiving The Presidential Medal Of Freedom From Joe Biden … 22
The Biden Administration Declares That A Genocide Is Happening… In Sudan … 24
If They Don’t Believe They’re Enemies, Why Should You? … 26
31 Surefire Ways To Make Me Lose Interest In Your Thoughts About The World … 28
It’s Not The Responsibility Of The Global South To Bring Down The Empire. It’s Ours. … 30
How To Be Happy In A Genocidal Dystopia On A Dying World … 32
Amazon Is Censoring My Most Recent Magazine Issue … 34
Finally Seeing Movement Toward A Gaza Ceasefire As Biden Moves Out Of The Way … 36
Thoughts On The Ceasefire Deal … 38
None Of These War Criminals Will Face Justice While The US Empire Exists … 40
You Are Not Powerless, Because You Don’t Stand Alone … 42
It’s Not That Trump Is Good, It’s That Biden Was Just That Bad … 44
Donald Trump Is The Empire Unmasked … 46
Bat Shit Insane Religious Fanaticism Is A Requirement For US Empire Managers … 48
One More Dead Palestinian Kid … 51
The Worst Thing About The Gaza Holocaust Is Knowing It Will Happen Again … 52
In The Thick Of It … 54
Trump Reveals Plan For The Ethnic Cleansing Of Gaza … 56
Only Pathetic Bootlickers Spend Their Energy Criticizing China … 58
Jordan And Egypt Snub Trump’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan … 60
Again, you can get a paperback copy of this issue by clicking here, or click here for a digital pay-what-you-feel copy.
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Holocaust
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. While still lying in bed this morning I listened to an interview on the BBC World Service Radio with a survivor of the Holocaust, a woman in her nineties. She told the well-known stories (well-known at least to people of my generation): being herded into a cattle car with her family, followed by three days of fear and trembling in the dark, in the cold, with little or no food or water, without a toilet and the consequent humiliation, finally arriving at Auschwitz.
Then there was the “selection,” the separation of this fear-filled child from her parents. She was stripped naked, her hair was shaved off, and, finally assigned a sleeping place: a plank in a barracks, cheek to jowl with others who had been “selected” to work rather than to die immediately, packed in like sardines in a tin.
There followed daily deprivation and dehumanization, hunger and exhaustion, pain and humiliation, for six long months until she, for whatever reason, was transported elsewhere, to work elsewhere, where conditions were somewhat better, enabling her to stay alive, albeit barely.
Near the end of the interview the woman broke down in tears: eighty years were not time enough to dull the pain as she told of the loss of her entire family, everyone except a single sister. I cried with her—yes, literally, as I listened, as I tried to imagine the bottomless pit of life-changing horror that she had lived through, as I tried to imagine her suffering; and I cried through my own deep distress in recognizing the undeniable fact that people could subject others, their fellow creatures, to such horrors, that people could be so cruel, so savage, so unfeeling, that people could be, perhaps even in all innocence, mindless zombies.
Then the interviewer said that many young people knew little or nothing about the catastrophic events of nearly a century ago, and what had led up to them, and surmised that this woman must be profoundly disturbed by the rise of the Right Wing throughout the West. She said that yes she was, and felt it her duty to speak with young people, at schools, at meetings, to tell them what had happened, to warn them of the dangers of repetition, of sliding “innocently” into indifference, into dehumanization, into hate of the chosen “enemy.”
And there the interview ended, without a further word being said about today, about now, about Gaza and the West Bank, about nearly a hundred years of oppression, theft, murder, displacement, dehumanization and demonization that the Palestinian people have undergone at the hands of those who themselves had been demonized and victimized in the past. Not a word about the wickedness that is going on before our very eyes, day after week after month after year, while the West looks the other way, or worse: looks and approves! And then all the solemn faces and noble words by people in power about “never forgetting” and “never again.”
What the woman might have thought about the callous indifference and disdain to the suffering of others displayed by the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of some of those she might have shared a cattle car with in the past, the suffering caused by them, perpetrated by them, was not asked; what she might have felt and thought was left unknown.
The BBC interviewer, with his sonorous voice filled with the sounds of pity and understanding, so compassionate, so comprehending, so commiserative—so cowardly, so selective, so ultimately false, was, after all, just another bought-and-paid-for hack! An actor, who says his lines but knows nothing, is aware of nothing, feels nothing except what is acceptable to feel. His emotions are imitative, and, consequentially, trite, warmed over, divorced from reality. He follows the line; his job is not on the line. He dare not mention the pathological state of Israel and its pathological inhabitants. His crocodile sympathy and his hypocrisy are a stain on the human psyche; through his silence and indifference or actual hostility he mocks the suffering of those who “don’t count.”
Shame on him, shame on weepy kings and queens and politicians and “leaders” and hypocrites and the self-righteous and the self-justifiers everywhere, who mourn one holocaust while they defend another!
And praise, praise, for those brave ones who go against the poisoned grain, who open their eyes, who value truth and humanity above small-minded self-interest, above clan. Not in our name!
Eugene Sigaloff
27-1-2025
Every morning, I await your posts because each day I feel the strictures of authoritarian forces choking off what I've been told are my "freedoms". Oh sure, Trump and his toadies, but he's just the figurehead vomited up by the billionaire Zionist elites, warmongering weapons salesmen, Russia- and Sino-phobe racists, and all the other profit-margin maniacs in this insane economic system. All in all, it's the propaganda strangulation of us proles, treated as worthless trash until they require a vote on a tuesday in November. The entire ludicrous scenario reminds me why I need the fresh air of your writing -- which I imagine like a window to distant snowy mountain peaks from which fresh cool breezes are delivered to a community on a warm sunny early spring day.