Caitlin Johnstone from Caitlin’s Newsletter caitlinjohnstone@substack.com 
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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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

Hezbollah has confirmed that the Israeli strike which killed hundreds of people in residential buildings in Beirut also killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. 

It’s crazy to see people justifying such horrific attacks on the basis that a political leader they don’t like was also killed. Like, really? That’s your defense?? That the massacre was also a political assassination?

The White House released a statement applauding the strike, calling it “a measure of justice” because Hezbollah “were responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade reign of terror.”

It shows how little value the western empire assigns Arab lives that an assassination strike which killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians is viewed as a “measure of justice” for killing hundreds of Americans over four decades.

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And now Israel is reportedly preparing to launch a “limited” ground incursion into Lebanon.

Defending Israeli aggressions by saying “Israel was attacked!” would make more sense if Israel wasn’t the obvious instigator, and didn’t respond to the attack with vastly more severe attacks of its own, and wasn’t using the attack to justify rolling out pre-existing agendas.

Israel isn’t killing all these people because it was attacked, Israel is killing all these people because it was given an excuse. Israel has always wanted to grab more land and eliminate the populations who oppose it. It’s using the political moment that October 7 gave it to roll out agendas it has wanted to roll out for generations. Israel has been squeezing and squeezing and squeezing its targets for generation after generation waiting for them to push back sufficiently to hand them an excuse.

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There’s a lot of speculation as to if and when Iran will involve itself more materially in the current conflict, but whatever happens any amount of involvement Iran does have in middle eastern conflicts would have infinitely more legitimacy than US involvement there.

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It has long been obvious that western liberals are lying about who they are and what they stand for, but it took a Democrat overseeing genocidal atrocities during an election season to fully drive the point home.

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The above statement by Daou is quantifiably, indisputably true, and it is devastating to the argument that Democrats should be supported in the name of “harm reduction”. The only way to avoid seeing this is to think the feelings and convenience of American liberals matter more than foreign lives.

This doesn’t mean that Trump is good, or that he’s not a warmonger, or even that he’d necessarily be less of a warmonger than Biden if re-elected. But it does mean this “vote Democrat so fewer people get hurt” line of thinking is not based on facts or evidence, and only makes sense within a western supremacist worldview which does not consider non-western lives to have equal value to western lives. If you don’t have such a worldview it’s immediately clear that there’s no evidence-based reason to believe voting Democrat leads to a reduction of harm throughout the world.

There’s not actually any way to know which presidential candidate would do more harm if elected, because they’re both so obscenely awful and murderous and there’s no way to predict how their awful murderousness will manifest in policy during their time in office. All you can do is draw an imaginary line between “foreign policy” and “domestic policy” and compartmentalize the two away from each other, and then say “well this candidate makes my feelings feel nicer on domestic policy so they are therefore better” while ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of the abusiveness of US presidents happens outside the borders of the United States.

The real harm reduction would entail ending the systems which make you choose between two murderous warmongers, and it would entail dismantling the US empire itself. Anything short of this is just fooling yourself.

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There’s a new propaganda film out titled “We Will Dance Again” about the Hamas attack on October 7. I dunno I kinda think if my country was furiously trying to start World War Three while in the midst of an active genocide I wouldn’t be in any big hurry to “dance again”.

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Russia has officially changed its nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshhold for when the use of nuclear weapons would be allowed, in response to western aggressions.

At some point in the future “They’re bluffing, cross that red line” is going to be one step too far. If we continue along this trajectory, at some point Russia is going to do something horrifying to re-establish credible deterrence. 

The question we need to ask is: is it worth it?

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