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It’s pretty wild how the west went directly from “We need to occupy Afghanistan for two decades to prevent it from being taken over by the Taliban” to “Yay! Syria’s been taken over by al-Qaeda!”

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The IDF has moved to occupy new stretches of Syrian land in the name of protecting its safety and security in the wake of Assad’s removal, to approximately zero condemnation from the western power alliance.

One of the dumbest things we are asked to believe about Israel is that the only thing it can ever do to ensure its safety and security when a danger presents itself is to grab more land. Land grabs are always the answer.

So to recap:

Russia invading a country in the name of protecting its security interests from perceived threats on its border = wrong, evil, worst thing ever.

Israel invading a country in the name of protecting its security interests from perceived threats on its border = fine, normal, nothing to worry about.

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The US is considering removing Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham from its list of designated terrorist organizations following the al-Qaeda affiliate’s victory in Syria. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: “terrorist organization” is a completely arbitrary designation which is used as a tool of western narrative control to justify war and militarism. In effect it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them”.

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I find it hilarious how empire simps are still shrieking “ASSADIST!” at me for criticizing western regime change interventionism in Syria like that means something. Assad’s gone. They can’t claim I’m helping him stay in power anymore. This shows they were never mad at me for “supporting Assad” or any of that nonsense; they were always just mad at me for criticizing the western empire, which was all I was ever doing.

Assad’s not a thing anymore. Your guys are in power now, and your beloved empire got the regime change it’s been chasing for years. You don’t get to pretend you’re sticking up for the little guy any longer. If you’re going to keep simping for the empire you’ve got to do it right out in the open now; you can no longer mask your bootlicking by hurling bizarre false accusations of treasonous loyalty toward some random middle eastern leader at anyone who criticizes the empire’s actions in Syria. You need to find different tactics for your empire apologia.

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I personally do not believe western interventionism in the middle east leads to positive results and peace, because I am not a newborn baby with a soft squishy head who joined the earth’s population yesterday evening.

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Empire apologists rely heavily on the appeal to emotion fallacy when discussing Syria, because they have no real arguments. They can’t counter criticisms of the years of western interventionism which destroyed Syria, so they babble about Assad’s victims instead. But no matter how many sad stories you tell and no matter how much sympathy you elicit, it will not amount to a counter-argument against the extensively documented fact that the US and its allies worked to destroy Syria with the goal of toppling Damascus from the very beginning in 2011. You can rend your garments about barrel bombs and prisoners all you want, but it still won’t be an argument.

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I personally don’t blame people for misunderstanding what’s been happening in Syria all these years. Some of my favorite analysts got Syria wrong in the early years of the war. It’s a complicated issue. It’s hard to sort out the true from the false, and it’s hard to sort through the moral complexities and contradictions of it all as a human being. What matters is that you stay curious and open and sincerely dedicated to learning what’s true instead of bedding down and making an identity out of your current understanding.

For years Syria was awash with some of the most complex psychological operations and hybrid warfare the world has ever seen. It’s okay if you didn’t understand it at first. The world is a confusing place, and is rapidly becoming more so. Just do your best, stay curious, and keep learning.

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The US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the “Crucial Communism Teaching Act”, a bill to allow the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to develop a teaching curriculum to educate American students on the evils of communism and authoritarianism.

That’s right kids, the US government believes capitalism is so self-evidently awesome that it needs to pass laws to indoctrinate children into supporting it. They oppose authoritarianism so much that they’ll create entire reeducation programs to train your mind to embrace the freedom of the western empire.

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It’s interesting how Israel uses its extremist settlers to get away with doing things it couldn’t get away with doing as a state. The government officially distances itself from these Nazis in front of its western backers, but then lets them do whatever they want and gradually gives them everything they demand piece by piece. This allows Israel to present itself to the west as a liberal free democracy in theory while in practice having a state that’s so far to the extreme right it’s falling off the edge of the spectrum.

We saw this illustrated recently in the way the IDF collaborated with extremist settlement movement leader Daniela Weiss to help her scout parts of Gaza for future settlement locations, and then released a statement saying that doing so was “illegal and against protocol, and will be handled accordingly.” We all know there are unofficial plans to allow those settlements into Gaza at some point, but the official Israeli government position is that it isn’t happening.

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It must be awesome being a supporter of the US empire. You get to see the national leaders you hate get killed and ousted, you rack up win after win, you can trust mainstream western pundits and politicians and believe everything they say, and you get to keep the same worldview they gave you in elementary school.

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Police have arrested a suspect in the killing of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. Interestingly the social media of the alleged shooter indicates a political worldview that sits well to the right of the average person who sympathized with Thompson’s killer. The further to the right people are, the more likely they’ve been to sympathize with Thompson.

This disparity in sympathy in the discourse around this shooting has been interesting to watch, because it highlights the contradictions in the US libertarian “non-aggression principle”. According to right wing libertarians, the guy who got rich depriving people of lifesaving healthcare committed no aggression. The abuses inherent in a system which prioritizes the generation of profit above all else go unacknowledged in such a worldview. The violence of the tyrants who grow wealthy exploiting the suffering, sickness and struggle of others; who harvest the income of those who can’t otherwise afford necessities like healthcare and shelter via insurance fees and rent payments; who plunder the biosphere and externalize the costs of industry onto the ecosystem we all depend on; who leverage the exploitative sociopolitical system known as capitalism to extract labor from workers at extortionate rates; who maximize profits by crushing unions, eroding workers’ rights and fighting minimum wage increases — they are seen as entirely legitimate, making any attempt to resist such tyranny entirely illegitimate.

If your worldview doesn’t acknowledge that violence isn’t limited to the physical act of shooting someone, and that force isn’t limited to the physical act of locking someone in a prison cell, then you’re not going to see the violence and force in the way the capitalist class leverages inequality, human need, and the law to force the masses to live their lives in ways that make them miserable and unhealthy. You’re just going to see a bunch of successful businessmen peacefully going about their business, who are loathed by evil leftists for no legitimate reason. The abusiveness of the means by which those businessmen become wealthy is invisible to you.

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Things are getting so unpredictable. Nobody saw what happened in Syria coming, or October 7 before that. Used to be the imperial drums would start beating for war with Iraq or wherever, and then later on it would happen. That kind of predictable development you see coming far off in advance is happening less and less now.

Now we’re regularly getting blindsided by these rapid explosions of movement. We’ll spend months warning about something ugly brewing on the horizon and then something completely unexpected happens somewhere else. I spent years warning a war with Russia was coming but got surprised when it happened when it did in Ukraine because of my own personal biases and blind spots.

I’m learning to observe without making predictions, whether for good things or bad. Nobody knows what tomorrow might bring. Lenin said “There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen,” and even that’s an understatement nowadays because there aren’t decades where nothing happens anymore. There aren’t even years where nothing happens. Things are getting way more dynamic and unpredictable. Anything can happen.

The good news is that in a completely unpredictable world, hopelessness is irrational. Anything can happen means ANYTHING can happen. The end of war. The end of the western empire. The end of capitalism. The birth of a healthy and harmonious world. Anything. In a sea of increasing unpredictability, there is no rational basis for ruling out any possibility.

The great unpatterning is upon us. It’s a hell of a time to be alive.

Original article: Caitlin Johnstone