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Person watching October 7: Why would Hamas do such a thing??

Person watching Israel’s actions for the past year: Oh that’s why.

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Everything Israel has done since October 7 are things it was doing before October 7. Raping. Torturing. Stealing. Siege warfare. Killing kids with snipers. Murdering journalists and healthcare workers. Israel’s actions before and since October 7 show you why October 7 happened.

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I saw a quote by Chris Hedges from 2002, “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered, but never before have I watched as soldiers enticed children like mice into a trap and murdered them for sport.”

I think huge amount of Israeli depravity hides behind westerners giving Israel the benefit of the doubt, thinking “No, no nation that my government supports could possibly be THAT evil, and if they were I would have heard about it in the news.”

But Israel is that evil. Always has been.

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It’s been a year. You don’t get to say that Biden or Harris are working tirelessly to end the destruction of Gaza. Clearly they aren’t.

You can say you hate the genocide but you’re supporting Harris even though she’ll continue it.

You can say you’re fine with genocide and you support Harris because you don’t care if Palestinian people are being butchered at mass scale.

But what you can’t say is that Harris or Biden are doing anything to stop it or slow it down. There is a year of evidence proving this false.

If you want to support the genocide lady, then do so. But you don’t get to demand that I pretend you’re doing something other than what you are doing just for your emotional comfort, or to coddle your self-image. That’s not a thing.

You’re entitled to support whatever politician you want to support, but you’re not entitled to have other people let you feel nice feelings about it.

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Westerners are so morally bankrupt that I often find myself saying things like “Imagine if Kamala Harris live-streamed herself murdering a puppy” because talking about her support for an active genocide of human beings in the middle east doesn’t morally resonate with them.

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Don’t shoot the messenger, Harris fans. Those of us who criticize her didn’t force her to spend a year vocally supporting a genocide. We didn’t force her to rule out an arms embargo and campaign on supporting “Israel’s right to defend itself”. We’re just saying what’s happening.

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Trump and Harris both deserve hate, but they don’t deserve any special amount of hate more than all the other managers of the US-centralized empire. If it wasn’t them running it would be two equally evil monsters of the same politics. Don’t personalize the evils of the empire.

The most remarkable thing about Trump and Harris is how unremarkable they are. The thing that matters most about them is how little they matter. They’re just mindless empire goons who can be swapped out and replaced with an ideological clone at the drop of a hat; we just watched this happen in real time with Joe Biden.

If you find yourself harboring any kind of special, seething personal hatred toward Trump or Harris as individuals, you’re falling into the delusion that the evils you are seeing the empire inflict upon the world are caused by wicked individuals. This leads to the delusion that it’s the individuals who are the problem rather than the empire itself and the systems which prop it up, which then leads to the delusion that all you need to do to fix the problems is change out the individuals.

It doesn’t work that way. The candidates aren’t the problem. The presidents aren’t the problem. The empire itself is the problem. The giant globe-spanning power structure centralized around Washington comprised of allies, assets and agreements which fights every day for complete planetary domination, and the oligarchs and government agencies who run it. That’s the problem.

Don’t suffer the indignity of letting them trick you into spending your political energy barking and snarling at the two puppets in the puppet show while the real people in charge construct a cage around the entire world. The only reason to talk about this election is to highlight the fact that it doesn’t matter and that its candidates are fake. Start talking about them like they matter and you reify the illusion.

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If you can’t handle me at my criticizing the political party you prefer then you don’t deserve me at my criticizing the political party you despise.

Original article: Caitlin Johnstone