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 https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/11/29/war-is-not-abstracted-anymore/

War Is Not Abstracted Anymore

Pentagon contractor Elon Musk and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu had a conversation that they broadcast on Twitter during Musk’s apology pilgrimage to Israel in a desperate bid to salvage his public image amid costly accusations of antisemitism.

The “conversation” was really more of a monologue, with the Israeli leader droning on in his conspicuously American accent while Musk meekly agreed with him on every point. During his lecture, Bibi said something worth highlighting while complaining about the worldwide pro-Palestine protests that have been underway since the beginning of Israel’s ongoing Gaza massacre.

“We have mass demonstrations,” Netanyahu said at around the 15:55 mark. “Where were these demonstrations when over a million Arabs and Muslims were killed in Syria, in Yemen, many of them starving to death, those who didn’t die in explosions. Where were the demonstrations in London? In Paris? In San Francisco? In Washington? Where are they?”

“The answer is they don’t care about the Palestinians, they hate Israel,” Netanyahu said. “And they hate Israel because they hate America.”

You hear this “where were the protests over Yemen and Syria?” talking point over and over again from Israel apologists, the argument essentially being that because few people protested the mass killings in those countries then Israel should get to do a little genocide of its own, as a treat.

This talking point is stupid for a few reasons, including the way it tends to avoid the inconvenient fact that the bloodshed in both Yemen and Syria was facilitated by US interventionism, just like the bloodshed in Gaza is. The civil war in Syria was only able to occur because the western alliance and its regional partners flooded the nation with weapons given to extremist factions in the hope of toppling Damascus, and Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen were fully backed by the US and its allies.

The talking point is also stupid because there are many entirely legitimate reasons the Gaza massacre is getting special attention. In a recent New York Times article titled “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace,” Lauren Leatherby explains that Israel’s actions in Gaza are actually quite different from other conflicts this century, killing far more civilians far more rapidly than the wars in places like Syria and Ukraine. Last week the UN’s emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths said during a CNN interview that Gaza is the worst humanitarian crisis he’s ever seen, even worse than the Killing Fields in Cambodia. This conflict is being treated differently because it is different.

Another reason this specific bombing campaign is getting so much more public backlash than others is because the pro-Palestine movement has had generations to build, whereas when the west lays waste to a country using military explosives it’s normally a fast ordeal which moves from manufacturing consent to execution very quickly. By the time people figure out they were lied to about the justifications for a depraved war the empire is usually two or three new wars down the track. The Israel-Palestine issue has been just sitting there for decades, so there’s been time to accumulate popular opposition. Once someone learns about the realities of the Palestinian plight they very seldom abandon their support for it, so every newly-opened pair of eyes stays open on this issue for a lifetime.

But perhaps the dumbest thing about this talking point is the fact that it ultimately works against the agendas of the people saying it. Israel apologists keep asking “Where were the protests over Yemen and Syria,” and gradually the millions of people who are beginning to wake up to the criminality of the US-centralized power alliance as a result of the Gaza massacre are going to start asking themselves the same question.

Because the assault on Gaza is so uniquely horrific and is being broadcast onto people’s social media feeds in real time, millions of people around the world are being snapped out of the propaganda-induced coma that has had them consenting to evil war after evil war over the years. People are starting to realize they’ve been deceived about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and they’re starting to wonder what else they’ve been deceived about. Keep asking them “Where were the protests over Yemen and Syria,” and eventually they’re going to start researching those conflicts and learning about their own government’s role in them, and from there it’s only a matter of time before they start asking, “Hey yeah! Where WERE the protests over Yemen and Syria??”

In a new article for The Guardian titled “The war in Gaza has been an intense lesson in western hypocrisy. It won’t be forgotten,” Nesrine Malik writes that “for the first time that I can think of, western powers are unable to credibly pretend that there is some global system of rules that they uphold. They seem to simply say: there are exceptions, and that’s just the way it is. No, it can’t be explained and yes, it will carry on until it doesn’t at some point, which seems to be when Israeli authorities feel like it.”

“Part of that inability to reach for convincing narratives about why so many innocent people must die is that events escalated so quickly,” Malik adds. “There was no time to set the pace of the attacks on Gaza, prepare justifications and hope that eventually, when it was all over, time and short attention spans would cover up the toll. Gaza has been a uniquely, inconveniently, intense conflict… The area is so densely populated that the toll of civilians is too high, and evidence for having undermined Hamas’s capabilities, the only possible justification for the casualties, is too low.”

This is the sort of political moment in which newly-formed critics of the western war machine are being asked to think carefully about why there hasn’t been a robust resistance to their governments’ other criminal actions. Which looks like a nightmare waiting to happen for the propagandists whose job is to manufacture consent for depraved acts of war.

One thing the empire is about to realize is that the western public has lost all its appetite for war. All the careful sanitising, video-gamifying and propagandizing that has been put in place since Vietnam in order to build a platform of consent for “humanitarian” wars has cratered into nothing over the course of mere weeks. 

You can’t have an up close and personal relationship with the reality of bombs and all the things they do to human flesh and then go back to the way you were ever again. Millions of western eyes have been changed forever. 

“War” is not abstracted any more.

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 https://brownstone.org/articles/join-the-resistance/

Join the Resistance

Should governments know any limits to their power? One thousand years ago, after King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, the answer became yes. The state could not legally brutalize the population with impunity. 

That conviction led to the triumph of human freedom that gradually transformed life on earth, from lives that were nasty, brutish, and short to beautiful lives of flourishing and longevity. There was a new consensus—and it worked. 

That progress came to a strange and abrupt halt in March 2020. A challenging and transformative epoch was born. The churches and schools were closed. Small businesses, too. The freedom to travel was ended. Censorship became the norm. We were ruled by bureaucrats backed by fake science, fake news, and spying digital overlords. Their plans were ambitious, and they included vaccine passports, a central bank digital currency, 15-minute cities, and a life of masks, mandates, and restrictions. 

They didn’t get their full agenda through, but that was mainly because the vaccine for the pathogen, about which they panicked the world, did not work. That was an enormous failure, and a setback. 

But make no mistake: there has been no letting up on the bigger agenda. What happened in March 2020 was a high-tech coup d’etat against rights and freedoms. It has not gone away. That’s why there have been no apologies for the pandemic response. Too many people got rich, and they got most of what they wanted as a start to the Great Reset. 

There will be many more crises: more weird diseases, more anomalous weather patterns, more and unexpected reasons to panic the population into society-wide panic for another “all-of-government” response. The mainstream media will fall in line just like the last time. Same with all major social media and major corporate voices, all backed by deep-state bureaucracies, some of which didn’t even exist a decade ago.

With a population less healthy, less educated, and more disoriented than in centuries, they might get away with it. 

Brownstone Institute was founded in 2021 as a machinery of response, rooted ultimately in facts, logic, analytical clarity, and the determination to resist and rebuild. We do this through unrelenting research and commentary (over 2000 articles, 7 books, and reprints in most languages). The journalism here is filling a crucial role that the mainstream media neglects. 

This is matched by a Fellows program that provides social and financial support for the most compelling and effective intellectual voices of resistance who have been sidelined, censored, and canceled. 

Why was it necessary to found a new institute? You know the answer: the old intellectual establishment flopped. They were completely unprepared for what happened. They had no real answers. This includes the academic realm, of course, but also the old “think tank” world that either went along or stayed silent through the entire crisis. Caution and careerism dominated over conviction and courage. Civilization itself unraveled before our eyes, but the “best and brightest” failed in every way. 

Before this turning point, we had no idea just how many of the institutions and individuals we once trusted were really nothing but grafts and grifts. They failed us and left us confused, confounded, and betrayed. Brownstone, on the other hand, is the real deal, an innovative research source that is in no way beholden to the Establishment and willing to stand up for human rights when it actually matters. 

Today, Brownstone is widely regarded as the center of the resistance. With millions of readers and many thousands of backers, Brownstone is doing the hard work of debunking the Great Reset and shining a light on the better path of freedom and hope. In the long term, we hope to contribute to a serious revival of rationality and humane values. 

But even in the short term, Brownstone is saving great minds from obscurity and doing the essential research to solve the myriad puzzles in the world, such as how it came to be that the World Health Organization became a voice for the CCP and why social media has become a tool of deep-state propaganda. 

This is why today we are asking for your support for our work. We rely fundamentally on year-end contributions to pay the bills, support our Fellows, underwrite the research, and serve as a force of resistance in dark times. 

For millions around the world, Brownstone has become a source of hope and refuge of sanity, proof that we are not all going insane and that freedom of thought, speech, association, and enterprise still stand a chance. 

Freedom is right and it works. Government/corporate plans are wrong and fail to achieve their objectives. Today these are not sayable words but we are saying them anyway. And we are walking the walk: taking in great intellectuals, writers, researchers, attorneys, scientists, and many others who need support when all the old institutions have abandoned them. 

Make no mistake: representative government, as it came to be called, is right now in the process of being replaced by a biosecurity state that cares nothing for what its subjects believe or say. It’s massive transformation, and so shocking because we never thought we would live in such times. We never imagined that fundamental truths about human rights and freedoms would come to be dismissed as old-fashioned and no longer considered to be meaningful concerns. Our job is just to go along as nearly the entire planet is taken over by technocratic oligarchy that answers to no one but the 1 percent of ruling-class wealth. 

All the ideals of the past – freedom, democracy, an open public square, and government subject to the will of the people – are being thrown out. Yes, it began perhaps decades ago but the event that precipitated the massive push to reconstruct the country and the world was a pandemic that gave the excuse to destroy freedom, the limits of government, and even the idea of democracy itself. Our job was just to go along, no matter how bogus were the claims coming from elite circles. 

The challenges of our time are completely different from the past. We must counter ruling-class opinion on empirical, legal, and practical grounds. We need all hands on deck to make it clear: we will not relent, no matter how many strange edicts are issued from above, no matter how many big shots tell us otherwise, no matter how many tricks and ploys come our way. 

These are the critical years in which we must act. The great concern that you, and all people of sound mind, have is what happens when all our freedoms are gone. How do we get them back at that point? Let’s hope and work to make sure that it does not come to that. In truth, the overclass has overreached on a number of fronts. It is deeply vulnerable to being debunked and discredited, but the time is now. We don’t want to wait until it is too late. 

This is why Brownstone institute is asking for your most generous support right now. There is not a moment to lose. We cannot promise victory in our time. The crisis is too deep and too entrenched for a short-term fix. But we can guarantee this: without a serious resistance, deep-state actors and their government/corporate backers will get their way. Doing nothing is the surest way to make the coup d’etat of March 2020 a permanent feature of the world. We cannot allow that, not if we truly care about the future of civilization. 

Brownstone Institute is new but agile, operationally very small. One experienced entrepreneur looked at our structure, budget, and impact and said it was so spectacular that the model should be written up in the Harvard Business Review as a new way to be a nonprofit organization. It’s that innovative. 

That’s very kind, but of course that will never happen and it doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is the work we do, the impact we have, and salvific ideas gaining support from Brownstone’s existence. 

We would be so proud and grateful for your support right now. As a new nonprofit, we are still in the position of uncertainty in terms of planning for all that we need to do. We face huge demand for more retreats, public events, publications, books, fellowships, and research teams. There seems to be an infinite demand right now, limited only by the resources we have. This is how you can help. So many people are relying on it. More importantly, the cause of freedom and civilization itself rely on it. 

It seems incredible to say, but we must face the truth. So much of what we used to call civilization is sweeping toward destruction. Those who are not admitting this are either wallowing in blindness, afraid to tell the truth, or simply too lazy to care. We have a massive moral obligation to throw ourselves into the battle. 

With limited resources but intense passion, Brownstone Institute is engaging on all levels and in every possible way. 

Will you join us today in this great effort? We are grateful. It’s all our moral obligation to do what we can to make a difference. It could be now or never; we do not know for sure. We do know that the great challenge is upon us. It’s a minority that truly understands. You are among them.