Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Currently there has been a famine going on for months in a place that is half children, which means that in the coming days we can expect a massive explosion of children dying due to starvation. And here’s the kicker: the famine
I just heard Scott Ritter lambasting The Corpse but then apologizing because he doesn’t like to do elder abuse, that the Joe Biden he always hated isn’t around any more. That’s very sweet but I could not disagree more. Biden may be a demented old man but he’s still hanging on to power so he’s still the one blame. And if you review his words and actions over a lifetime of political status seeking, you can tell that he’s no more or less today what he has always been— a savage, bloody minded, self serving fuck weasel. No matter who is the cadre of sycophants that are supporting him, he’s the repulsive evil doing all this.
The US is not what it pretends to be, but it has not been fooling some of us since Vietnam. Sadly, it seems that each generation has to re-learn this. And then there is the money. So so many people can be sucked into buying into bullshit if they think they might be able to improve their money situations. Some can even pretend that a genocide going on on the other side of the world does not affect them. Better think a little harder.
It's worthwhile reading T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men again since it brings to mind the emptiness, the utter vacuity of the dominant American political actors and a corporate media echo chamber that wants to keep us enthralled with "Election 2024," the result of which will change nothing, not in the least impede our downward slide into ignominy and disgrace. Absent a course correction, both Israel and the United States are headed for a reckoning, perhaps a disaster. The only question is whether the end of this misbegotten and inhuman project comes with a "bang" or a "whimper."
It’s not the “Israel apologists” aka sock puppet army that anyone needs to worry about. What is of concern is a western public that has over many decades been consistent at ignoring relevant facts and suppporting the the same sh in different wrappers. Otherwise Assange wouldnt be in a gulag and Snowden would be with his family in the US.
The masses are apologists for the oligarchy that rules over the and there is no sign of a rise in awareness of the SYSTEM or ability their to properly connect the dots and understand what is all part of the same problem. Because at the moment we are speeding to WW III for no reason at all, and what is going on in Gaza is all part of it, not a separate piece. And what has been going on n Gaza did not start last October either. But they dont get it.
"US liberals in 2024: Wanting your country not to commit genocide is a pie in the sky fantasy"
I certainly hope this isn't a fantasy, but reality is that it's certainly doesn't mind helping out Israel run their genocide.
What really blows my mind is how sick and twisted these apologists are. "It changes nothing," some idiot put on a comment I made here on Substack. Maybe to the apologists it doesn't, but for the rest of the world it could be the beginning of a much needed conversation about how we treat our fellow human beings.
Why Would Anyone Kill Themselves to Stop a War? On Aaron Bushnell and Others. Colonel Ann Wright
Six years ago in 2018, after returning from a Veterans For Peace trip to Vietnam, I wrote an article called “Why Would Anyone Kill One’s Self In an Attempt to Stop A War?”
Now, six years later, in the past three months, two people in the United States have taken or risked taking their own lives in an attempt to change U.S. policies on Palestine and call for a cease-fire and stop U.S. funding to the State of Israel that would be used to kill in the Israeli genocide of Gaza. An yet unidentified woman, wrapped in a Palestinian flag, set herself on fire in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 1, 2023. Three months later authorities have yet to release the name of the woman. Her condition was unknown as of mid-December.
This week, on Sunday, February 25, 2024, active duty U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., while he was stating “Free Palestine and stop the genocide.” Bushnell died from his injuries...
..While on a Veterans for Peace trip to Vietnam in 2014 and while on another VFP delegation in March 2018, our delegation saw the iconic photo of a well-known Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc who set himself on fire in June1963 on a busy street in Saigon to protest the Diem regime’s crackdown on Buddhists during the early days of the American war on Vietnam. That photo is seared into our collective memories...
..But, did you know that several Americans also set themselves on fire to attempt to end U.S. military actions during those turbulent war years in the 1960s?
I didn’t, until our VFP delegation saw the portraits displayed of five Americans who gave their lives to protest the American war on Vietnam, among other international persons who are revered in Vietnamese history, at the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society in Hanoi. Though these American peace persons have fallen into oblivion in their own nation, they are well-known martyrs in Vietnam, 50 years later...
..After seeing one particular portrait again—that of Norman Morrison—I decided to write about these Americans who were willing to end their own lives in an attempt to stop the American war on the Vietnamese people.
What distinguished these Americans to the Vietnamese was that, as American soldiers were killing Vietnamese, there were American citizens who ended their own lives in order to try to bring the terror of invasion and occupation for Vietnamese citizens to the American public through the horror of their own deaths.
..The first person in the United States to die of self-immolation in opposition to the war on Vietnam was 82-year-old Quaker Alice Herz who lived in Detroit, Michigan. She set herself on fire on a Detroit street on March 16, 1965. Before she died of her burns 10 days later, Alice said she set herself on fire to protest “the arms race and a president using his high office to wipe out small nations.”
Six months later on November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore, a father of three young children, died of self-immolation at the Pentagon. Morrison felt that traditional protests against the war had done little to end the war and decided that setting himself on fire at the Pentagon might mobilize enough people to force the United States government to abandon its involvement in Vietnam. Morrison’s choice to self-immolate was particularly symbolic in that it followed President Lyndon Johnson’s controversial decision to authorize the use of napalm in Vietnam, a burning gel that sticks to the skin and melts the flesh.
Apparently, unbeknownst to Morrison, he chose to set himself on fire beneath the Pentagon window of then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Thirty years later in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy in Lessons of Vietnam, McNamara remembered Morrison’s death:
"Antiwar protests had been sporadic and limited up to this time and had not compelled attention. Then came the afternoon of November 2, 1965. At twilight that day, a young Quaker named Norman R. Morrison, father of three and an officer of the Stony Run Friends Meeting in Baltimore, burned himself to death within 40 feet of my Pentagon window. Morrison’s death was a tragedy not only for his family but also for me in the country. It was an outcry against the killing that was destroying the lives of so many Vietnamese and American youth.
I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone—even with my family. I knew (his wife) Marge and our three children shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war. And I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts. The episode created tension at home that only deepened as the criticism of the war continued to grow."
Before his memoir In Retrospect was published, in a 1992 article in Newsweek, McNamara had listed people or events that had had an impact on his questioning of the war. One of those events,McNamara identified as “the death of a young Quaker.”...
..Every Vietnamese school child learns a song and poem written by Vietnamese poet Tố Hữu called “Emily, My Child” dedicated to the young daughter that Morrison was holding only moments before he set himself on fire at the Pentagon. The poem reminds Emily that her father died because he felt he had to object in the most visible way to the deaths of Vietnamese children at the hands of the United States government...
..One week after Norman Morrison’s death, Roger LaPorte, 22, a Catholic Worker, became the third war protester to take his own life. He died of burns suffered through self-immolation on November 9, 1965 on the United Nations Plaza in New York City. He left a note that read, “I am against war, all wars. I did this as a religious act.”...
..In the case of U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell, Aaron told the world his reason: "I do not want to be complacent in the genocide of Gaza! Free Palestine!." His sentiments are echoed by hundreds of millions around the world who recognize the horrific Israeli genocide of Gaza. For U.S. citizens, it is our duty to keep pressure on the Biden administration to stop funding Israel's genocide of Gaza and violence in the West Bank.
Would like to ask you a question Caitlin and/or those with similar political philosophies. I have been on the right most of my adult life. Until the last few years that’s how I perceived things.
“The US (by extension Israel) fights with 2 hands tied behind our back. It’s those goddamn Muslims that hide behind women and children.”
Apologies for my blunt speak. Now I feel bad that I fell for the shit. At least I am man enough to admit it tho it doesn’t right the wrongs.
You mentioned that this operation/execution was on a different plane. I can’t remember the other skirmishes with Israel and Palestine. I recall them happening. I now also understand what we did to Iraqi citizens. Just wondering if t was beyond that? That’s probably not a good question. Now that I am trying to convey it I am finding it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense I reckon. Still I have some mea culpas in here so am going to get it off my chest regardless.
It’s a strange feeling. And I do want to say many on the right are starting to get it. It’s not the institutionalized ones but the ones on more of the fringe. I think the right (many Christians) and Muslims need to work together. I suspect Muslims are more willing to work together in the US. But guys like me are changing that slowly but surely.
Sorry for the rant; perhaps confession is a better term. 😔
"His martyrdom raises questions every man and woman in the US Armed Forces must ask themselves:
Are they serving their country, their precious and threatened Republic, or are they serving a barbaric out of control empire intent on nuclear war? Where they are willing to sacrifice for the defense of their country; are they equally willing to die for the greedy imperialism that has destroyed the lives of so many untold millions?
Are they willing to sacrifice their lives for the moral depravity of those who send them into battle to fatten their wallets and serve their psychotic megalomania?"
can we remember that it was just shy of two years ago, it has not been not only vietnamese buddhists 50+ years ago or the Atlanta protester a month ago that i didn't even know irt until Aaron's own, who have felt compelled to scream any attention to a just cause against massacres of silent coups under guise of government(s)?
i have been haunted ever since watching Wynn Bruce's self immolation on the steps of his government in protest to be unable to watch the Aaron's yet, though i will honor his incredible courage when i can afford to break down apart in deep honor horror and grief for his sacrifice as well.
rest in peace and live in history of our souls of this miraculous life being taken by thems ultimate of inhumane hubris that have none, taking as if they own anything of value as they aim to take all life they will take nowhere but to the lowest depths of an inferno i don't believe in until i come face to face with this evil
I read an article (can't recall where) that listed all the people have done this previously of which I recalled NONE! I find it extremely telling and hopeful this has garnered world wide attention and is not thankfully relenting!
Secondly, I don't know if this is true - but if so, it also gives us extreme hope. I wish the experts would start writing about what it be like without an Israel should this accelerate. I'm extremely curious to hear how the world would change.
Even US people shocked by this news! Putin has taken action against Israel! Eygpt in on red alert!
I just heard Scott Ritter lambasting The Corpse but then apologizing because he doesn’t like to do elder abuse, that the Joe Biden he always hated isn’t around any more. That’s very sweet but I could not disagree more. Biden may be a demented old man but he’s still hanging on to power so he’s still the one blame. And if you review his words and actions over a lifetime of political status seeking, you can tell that he’s no more or less today what he has always been— a savage, bloody minded, self serving fuck weasel. No matter who is the cadre of sycophants that are supporting him, he’s the repulsive evil doing all this.
The US is not what it pretends to be, but it has not been fooling some of us since Vietnam. Sadly, it seems that each generation has to re-learn this. And then there is the money. So so many people can be sucked into buying into bullshit if they think they might be able to improve their money situations. Some can even pretend that a genocide going on on the other side of the world does not affect them. Better think a little harder.
Shame on The Washington Post! Utterly disgusting
It's worthwhile reading T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men again since it brings to mind the emptiness, the utter vacuity of the dominant American political actors and a corporate media echo chamber that wants to keep us enthralled with "Election 2024," the result of which will change nothing, not in the least impede our downward slide into ignominy and disgrace. Absent a course correction, both Israel and the United States are headed for a reckoning, perhaps a disaster. The only question is whether the end of this misbegotten and inhuman project comes with a "bang" or a "whimper."
The emptiest phrase in the Israeli lexicon is "Never again."
I thought exactly those words—“doth protest too much.” Caitlin often writes my thoughts the day after I have them. 💕
Aaron Bushnell - the Olive-uniformed Monk, for our times.
https://imgflip.com/i/8h58eb
It’s not the “Israel apologists” aka sock puppet army that anyone needs to worry about. What is of concern is a western public that has over many decades been consistent at ignoring relevant facts and suppporting the the same sh in different wrappers. Otherwise Assange wouldnt be in a gulag and Snowden would be with his family in the US.
The masses are apologists for the oligarchy that rules over the and there is no sign of a rise in awareness of the SYSTEM or ability their to properly connect the dots and understand what is all part of the same problem. Because at the moment we are speeding to WW III for no reason at all, and what is going on in Gaza is all part of it, not a separate piece. And what has been going on n Gaza did not start last October either. But they dont get it.
"US liberals in 2024: Wanting your country not to commit genocide is a pie in the sky fantasy"
I certainly hope this isn't a fantasy, but reality is that it's certainly doesn't mind helping out Israel run their genocide.
What really blows my mind is how sick and twisted these apologists are. "It changes nothing," some idiot put on a comment I made here on Substack. Maybe to the apologists it doesn't, but for the rest of the world it could be the beginning of a much needed conversation about how we treat our fellow human beings.
“…because the story is a lie.” That, my friends, is the truth.
Why Would Anyone Kill Themselves to Stop a War? On Aaron Bushnell and Others. Colonel Ann Wright
Six years ago in 2018, after returning from a Veterans For Peace trip to Vietnam, I wrote an article called “Why Would Anyone Kill One’s Self In an Attempt to Stop A War?”
Now, six years later, in the past three months, two people in the United States have taken or risked taking their own lives in an attempt to change U.S. policies on Palestine and call for a cease-fire and stop U.S. funding to the State of Israel that would be used to kill in the Israeli genocide of Gaza. An yet unidentified woman, wrapped in a Palestinian flag, set herself on fire in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 1, 2023. Three months later authorities have yet to release the name of the woman. Her condition was unknown as of mid-December.
This week, on Sunday, February 25, 2024, active duty U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., while he was stating “Free Palestine and stop the genocide.” Bushnell died from his injuries...
..While on a Veterans for Peace trip to Vietnam in 2014 and while on another VFP delegation in March 2018, our delegation saw the iconic photo of a well-known Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc who set himself on fire in June1963 on a busy street in Saigon to protest the Diem regime’s crackdown on Buddhists during the early days of the American war on Vietnam. That photo is seared into our collective memories...
..But, did you know that several Americans also set themselves on fire to attempt to end U.S. military actions during those turbulent war years in the 1960s?
I didn’t, until our VFP delegation saw the portraits displayed of five Americans who gave their lives to protest the American war on Vietnam, among other international persons who are revered in Vietnamese history, at the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society in Hanoi. Though these American peace persons have fallen into oblivion in their own nation, they are well-known martyrs in Vietnam, 50 years later...
..After seeing one particular portrait again—that of Norman Morrison—I decided to write about these Americans who were willing to end their own lives in an attempt to stop the American war on the Vietnamese people.
What distinguished these Americans to the Vietnamese was that, as American soldiers were killing Vietnamese, there were American citizens who ended their own lives in order to try to bring the terror of invasion and occupation for Vietnamese citizens to the American public through the horror of their own deaths.
..The first person in the United States to die of self-immolation in opposition to the war on Vietnam was 82-year-old Quaker Alice Herz who lived in Detroit, Michigan. She set herself on fire on a Detroit street on March 16, 1965. Before she died of her burns 10 days later, Alice said she set herself on fire to protest “the arms race and a president using his high office to wipe out small nations.”
Six months later on November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore, a father of three young children, died of self-immolation at the Pentagon. Morrison felt that traditional protests against the war had done little to end the war and decided that setting himself on fire at the Pentagon might mobilize enough people to force the United States government to abandon its involvement in Vietnam. Morrison’s choice to self-immolate was particularly symbolic in that it followed President Lyndon Johnson’s controversial decision to authorize the use of napalm in Vietnam, a burning gel that sticks to the skin and melts the flesh.
Apparently, unbeknownst to Morrison, he chose to set himself on fire beneath the Pentagon window of then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
Thirty years later in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy in Lessons of Vietnam, McNamara remembered Morrison’s death:
"Antiwar protests had been sporadic and limited up to this time and had not compelled attention. Then came the afternoon of November 2, 1965. At twilight that day, a young Quaker named Norman R. Morrison, father of three and an officer of the Stony Run Friends Meeting in Baltimore, burned himself to death within 40 feet of my Pentagon window. Morrison’s death was a tragedy not only for his family but also for me in the country. It was an outcry against the killing that was destroying the lives of so many Vietnamese and American youth.
I reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone—even with my family. I knew (his wife) Marge and our three children shared many of Morrison’s feelings about the war. And I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts. The episode created tension at home that only deepened as the criticism of the war continued to grow."
Before his memoir In Retrospect was published, in a 1992 article in Newsweek, McNamara had listed people or events that had had an impact on his questioning of the war. One of those events,McNamara identified as “the death of a young Quaker.”...
..Every Vietnamese school child learns a song and poem written by Vietnamese poet Tố Hữu called “Emily, My Child” dedicated to the young daughter that Morrison was holding only moments before he set himself on fire at the Pentagon. The poem reminds Emily that her father died because he felt he had to object in the most visible way to the deaths of Vietnamese children at the hands of the United States government...
..One week after Norman Morrison’s death, Roger LaPorte, 22, a Catholic Worker, became the third war protester to take his own life. He died of burns suffered through self-immolation on November 9, 1965 on the United Nations Plaza in New York City. He left a note that read, “I am against war, all wars. I did this as a religious act.”...
..In the case of U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell, Aaron told the world his reason: "I do not want to be complacent in the genocide of Gaza! Free Palestine!." His sentiments are echoed by hundreds of millions around the world who recognize the horrific Israeli genocide of Gaza. For U.S. citizens, it is our duty to keep pressure on the Biden administration to stop funding Israel's genocide of Gaza and violence in the West Bank.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/kill-selves-to-stop-war
Would like to ask you a question Caitlin and/or those with similar political philosophies. I have been on the right most of my adult life. Until the last few years that’s how I perceived things.
“The US (by extension Israel) fights with 2 hands tied behind our back. It’s those goddamn Muslims that hide behind women and children.”
Apologies for my blunt speak. Now I feel bad that I fell for the shit. At least I am man enough to admit it tho it doesn’t right the wrongs.
You mentioned that this operation/execution was on a different plane. I can’t remember the other skirmishes with Israel and Palestine. I recall them happening. I now also understand what we did to Iraqi citizens. Just wondering if t was beyond that? That’s probably not a good question. Now that I am trying to convey it I am finding it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense I reckon. Still I have some mea culpas in here so am going to get it off my chest regardless.
It’s a strange feeling. And I do want to say many on the right are starting to get it. It’s not the institutionalized ones but the ones on more of the fringe. I think the right (many Christians) and Muslims need to work together. I suspect Muslims are more willing to work together in the US. But guys like me are changing that slowly but surely.
Sorry for the rant; perhaps confession is a better term. 😔
"His martyrdom raises questions every man and woman in the US Armed Forces must ask themselves:
Are they serving their country, their precious and threatened Republic, or are they serving a barbaric out of control empire intent on nuclear war? Where they are willing to sacrifice for the defense of their country; are they equally willing to die for the greedy imperialism that has destroyed the lives of so many untold millions?
Are they willing to sacrifice their lives for the moral depravity of those who send them into battle to fatten their wallets and serve their psychotic megalomania?"
can we remember that it was just shy of two years ago, it has not been not only vietnamese buddhists 50+ years ago or the Atlanta protester a month ago that i didn't even know irt until Aaron's own, who have felt compelled to scream any attention to a just cause against massacres of silent coups under guise of government(s)?
i have been haunted ever since watching Wynn Bruce's self immolation on the steps of his government in protest to be unable to watch the Aaron's yet, though i will honor his incredible courage when i can afford to break down apart in deep honor horror and grief for his sacrifice as well.
rest in peace and live in history of our souls of this miraculous life being taken by thems ultimate of inhumane hubris that have none, taking as if they own anything of value as they aim to take all life they will take nowhere but to the lowest depths of an inferno i don't believe in until i come face to face with this evil
The same mantra post mass-shootings will be adopted, “it’s a mental health issue”
I read an article (can't recall where) that listed all the people have done this previously of which I recalled NONE! I find it extremely telling and hopeful this has garnered world wide attention and is not thankfully relenting!
Secondly, I don't know if this is true - but if so, it also gives us extreme hope. I wish the experts would start writing about what it be like without an Israel should this accelerate. I'm extremely curious to hear how the world would change.
Even US people shocked by this news! Putin has taken action against Israel! Eygpt in on red alert!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlO0eWWUYuo