Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

Nothing about this dystopia feels natural. We all sense it deep in our marrow. We all know something has gone terribly wrong.

If you lived in an alternate reality without wars or poverty, where everyone had enough and governments did what’s in the interests of the people and the ecosystem, it would never occur to you that there was anything odd about it. It would feel completely normal. Things would be more or less how you’d expect them to be.

You can’t say the same about the present status quo. The whole thing instinctively scans as weird and counterintuitive. The more you learn about the way the world works, the more insane it all looks to you.

Have you ever had to explain war to a young child? It’s terrible. If you’re actually honest with them about what war is and why it is waged, it completely shatters their understanding of the world. They look at you like they’ve suddenly been transported into a strange alien universe where everything is backward.

Their reaction is correct. That is the sane and normal way to look at war. All the freakish mental contortions we do to try and normalize it is what’s crazy.

Everything about this dystopia is like this. If you could see it all with fresh eyes, you would scream in horror. The only reason anyone finds any of this tolerable is because we have become desensitized and accustomed to the madness. Seeing somebody sleeping on the sidewalk should feel like a punch in the stomach. Seeing children killed by bombs on your social media feed should stop your whole world.

Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

Basically every Israel-Palestine debate goes like this:

But if you bring the debate back far enough in time, eventually you get to the part where the western world forcibly dropped a brand new ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization without the permission of — and to the extreme detriment of — the people who were already living there.

Sure you can go further back and say “Oh yeah well the Jews lived there thousands of years ago,” but that’s just silly. There’s no valid reason to believe some Jewish guy in New York City even has any meaningful lineage connecting him to that land more strongly than any random Muslim in Turkey or wherever, and even if there was, it would still be absurd to cite ancient history as the basis for a territorial claim. I’m only a few generations removed from my ancestry in Ireland and Scotland, but it would be ridiculous for me to show up demanding the home of someone who lives there.

Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

Sure plutocrats are killing our biosphere, but hey, at least they’re creating technology that lets you avoid the cognitive discomfort of writing your own words and thinking your own thoughts.

Sure the empire is butchering human beings at horrifying scale around the world, but on the bright side it’s creating refugees who will move to your country and bring you treats that you can order from an app on your phone.

Sure imperialist extraction is robbing the resources and exploiting the workers of the global south at extortionate fees, but on the other hand you get to wear a new outfit every day because the clothes you ordered online are dirt cheap thanks to transcontinental slave labor.

Sure our rulers are rapidly caging us in a digital surveillance network of ever-increasing intrusiveness and control, but golly gosh they just keep gifting us all these nifty free social media platforms that we simply cannot stop ourselves from scrolling through for some reason.

Sure capitalism is driving us toward collapse on multiple fronts while everyone gets sicker, poorer, dumber, crazier, and more miserable, but hey look, McDonald’s is bringing back the McRib.

Sure it’s only a matter of time until we find ourselves policed by armed robots and facial recognition murder drones and praying the government AI doesn’t shut off our digital money because our eyes lingered a bit too long on an anti-Israel meme, but at least we can have fun placing Polymarket bets on the next country the United States is going to bomb.

Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

We can have revolutionary change whenever we want to. We already have the numbers. All we need is the will.

If there were a thousand people living on an island, and one of them began making life miserable for everyone else, there would soon be 999 people living on the island. How strange, then, that a few oligarchs and empire managers get to push around an entire planet full of humans.

I mean, right now we’re all sitting around hoping a few sociopaths in Washington and Tel Aviv don’t collapse the global economy with their reckless warmongering against Iran. There are so many of us and so few of them, and yet everyone’s sitting around going “Golly gosh I sure hope I’ll be able to afford food in the next few months, hopefully the orange guy acts sane and normal for a while so my family gets to eat.”

These are not gods sitting on Mount Olympus exerting omnipotent control over our fate from on high.

Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

They Always Tell You Why The Empire Uses Violence, But Never Why Its Enemies Do.

One common feature of western empire propaganda is that we are always given reasons for the empire’s violence, while the violence of those who resist the empire tends to be framed as happening for no reason at all.

We’ve all been fed reasons for the US-Israeli war on Iran, and we all know what those reasons are. Even less-informed members of the western public will have heard something about the Iranians being a nuclear threat, having a tyrannical government, and maybe something about sponsoring terrorist groups.

But the so-called “peaceful protesters” who were killed in an uprising fomented and facilitated by the United States? They were killed for no reason, simply because the Iranian government is evil and hates dissent. All the Iranian police officers who died in the uprising perished for no reason, perhaps of natural causes. It is only by pure coincidence that this happened at the exact same time the US empire was making the decision to try to topple the Iranian government.

Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

The US and Israel have sown death and destruction throughout the middle east for generations, creating generation after generation of survivors who hate them and want them gone, and then it cites the existence of people who hate them and want them gone as the reason why the US needs to keep supporting Israel.

The US needs to help Israel harm people or else the people who are mad about being harmed might harm Israelis. It’s circular reasoning all the way through.

❖ Ask an American Israel supporter why it benefits the US to defend Israel, and they’ll tell you it advances American interests in the middle east.
❖ Ask them what American interests it helps advance in the middle east and they’ll tell you it counters the malign influence of Iran and terrorist groups.
❖ Ask them to describe exactly what Iran and the terrorist groups are doing which directly harms American interests, and they’ll tell you they threaten American troops in the region.
❖ Ask them why American troops can’t just leave the region to remove the threat, and they’ll tell you they can’t because that would be abandoning Israel.
❖ Ask them why the US can’t simply abandon Israel, and they’ll tell you it’s an important US ally.
❖ Ask them to explain why Israel is an important US ally, and they’ll tell you it’s because it advances American interests in the middle east.

The official narrative about the importance of the US-Israel alliance is self-justifying circular logic the whole way through, no matter what point you start examining it from.

Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

It used to be hard to help westerners see the depravity of the US empire. Now it’s just right in everyone’s face with raw genocide footage and insanely evil warmongering of direct economic consequence.

It took a lot of work to help the average westerner understand that NATO aggressions actively provoked the war in Ukraine, or that western interventionism played a major role in the violence and chaos in Syria, or that US economic warfare was largely responsible for the suffering of Cubans and Venezuelans. The murderous savagery of the empire was hidden behind layers of obfuscation, allowing the propagandists to frame the western power structure as a passive witness to the abuses of foreign regimes.

Now the propagandists have very little to work with, so those obfuscations can no longer take place. There’s no way you can spin a school full of children blown up by an American double-tap airstrike as anything other than what it is. There’s only so much narrative manipulation you can exert on raw video footage of a western-backed genocide playing out in full view of the entire world day after day for years. There’s no way to propagandize westerners into believing they want to pay a lot more more money for their fuel and groceries.

I saw former EU parliament member Luis Garicano complaining on Twitter that Trump’s actions are making it look as though leftists have been correct about the US empire this whole time, saying “Many of us, liberal Europeans, spent decades pushing back against the European extreme left’s cartoon version of America ( it’s all oil/ imperialism/getting rich at the expense of others) and then one dumb administration walks in and performs the caricature to perfection.”

Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

This is what it looks like when you give Zionists everything they want. This is Zionism put into practice.

❖ The wars.

❖ The massacres.

❖ The bombed-out schools and hospitals.

❖ The millions of displaced individuals.

❖ The invasion of Lebanon

❖ The explosions carpeting Tehran.

❖ The hollowed-out moonscape of Gaza.

❖ The horrific pogroms in the West Bank.

❖ The child amputees.

❖ The smell of rotting corpses.

Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

The only worthwhile “western culture” in modern times is culture which rejects and opposes the dystopian nature of western civilization and the abuses of the western empire.

Western civilization is what’s bombing Iran. It’s what’s strangling Cuba. It’s what’s torching Lebanon. It’s what’s exterminating Palestine. It’s what stole Venezuela. It’s what’s plundering the labor and resources of the global south. It’s what’s keeping the systems in place which are killing our ecosystem and driving us closer to nuclear armageddon.

There is no sane and truthful position to have toward all this but vehement rejection.

Westerners — particularly white westerners in nations with colonialist histories like the United States and Australia — often struggle to find their cultural moorings.

It can be difficult to find an authentic position from which to express art and take your stand as a personality when you feel culturally rootless and historically ungrounded. It causes a kind of dissonance with our lives that can haunt us until we die.

Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter

My enemies are not in Iran. My enemies are in Washington and Tel Aviv. In London and Canberra.

My enemies are the western oligarchs and empire managers who are poisoning my society and making everything awful while slaughtering human beings with the help of my tax dollars.

My enemies are the tyrants who are turning our civilization into a mind-controlled dystopia where it is increasingly illegal to criticize the abuses of my government and its allies, and increasingly difficult to find information which runs counter to the imperial narrative.

My enemies are the empire apologists and the hasbarists. The propagandists and spinmeisters. Those who side with Israel and the United States against basic human interests.

Imperial bootlickers always accuse me of writing “propaganda” for the “enemy”, with “enemy” meaning whoever the US-centralized empire happens to be attacking or preparing to attack on any given day. I always want to tell them “Motherfucker YOU are my enemy. YOU. You and the empire you simp for.”

The Iranians have never done anything to me. The Iranians pose no threat to me. They didn’t bring war to my country. The empire I live under brought war to theirs.