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A lot of mainstream-adjacent progressives act like Gaza is some radical deviation from normal US behavior, which is infantile nonsense. The US inflicts similar horrors on the world all the time; the only major difference is (A) this one’s being live-streamed and (B) there was a pro-Palestine movement in place before it began.

With regard to (B), Gaza is really illustrating how much the US empire benefits from moving through its foreign military violence relatively quickly. When it can move from propagandizing the population about Evil Dictatorship X to destroying the country in question to moving on to its next war in the span of a few short years, there’s not enough time for public awareness to grow of exactly how evil the empire is being. It was years before a mainstream consensus developed that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, and it will probably be decades before there’s mainstream consensus about the evil shit the empire did in Syria from 2011 onwards.

With Gaza, people saw this one coming and were calling it what it is from the moment it began, because there was already a widespread political understanding — at least on the left — that Israel is a murderous settler-colonialist project and that the Palestinians are a colonized people. This widespread understanding occurred because the Israel-Palestine debate has been raging for generations, so the collective has had enough time to really examine the facts and circulate its arguments through public consciousness. Those facts and arguments were there ready to be picked up and understood and used — even by young people who are new to the situation — after October 7.

So what’s really hurting the empire’s information interests today is the fact that there was widespread social consciousness about Palestine already in place before the Gaza assault began, combined with the consciousness-expanding effects of social media and the ease with which ordinary people can now circulate raw video footage. Which really goes to illustrate the fact that consciousness and dysfunction cannot coexist, whether you’re talking about humans as individuals or as a collective. If we can really see something and deeply understand it, it’s much harder for depravity to function.

The light of awareness makes it very difficult for an empire which is fueled by human blood to operate, which is why so much effort has been going into shutting off the lights. Shutting off the lights here looks like circulating lies and propaganda, killing Palestinian journalists in record numbers, blocking western journalists from entering Gaza, banning TikTok, stomping out student protests, and smearing everyone who tries to spread awareness of Gaza as an anti-semite.

In that sense we actually kind of are seeing a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness here — not in the sense the Zionist ideologues mean it, but in the sense that there are people who are trying to spread the light of awareness coming into direct conflict with people who are trying to shut that light down.

And that’s how humanity will eventually move into health: by the light of awareness spreading throughout our collective consciousness to all the various ways our species is still dysfunctional. This spreading of awareness happens in ways that are as diverse as investigative journalism, teaching, research, tweeting, making videos, writing blogs, informing others in interpersonal conversations, and expanding your own personal consciousness with inner disciplines like meditation and self-inquiry.

We can each participate in this unfolding of human consciousness in our own way throughout our lives, and every contribution we make toward that end makes a difference. Anything you do to make the unseen seen and cast the light of awareness on areas of dysfunction helps move humanity into a higher level of functionality, whether you’re spreading awareness of dysfunction out there in the world, or in yourself by bringing more consciousness to your own inner processes.

We can each do many things every single day to help move humanity into the light, so that we may one day become a fully conscious species. We can each cultivate a practice of constantly looking for opportunities to expand consciousness in this way from moment to moment.

In 2024, Gaza is very, very fertile ground for such expansion.

Original article: Caitlin Johnstone