...holy shit 05.09.2024

I’ve been working on a piece of writing for about 3 weeks now. I keep having to revise it as the struggle for power and justice intensifies revolving around the genocide, the student protests, the jackboot responses to those protests, the Yemeni resistance, & the United States ruling class getting both clumsier and less concerned with showing their hand. The empire is so fully unmasked to so many people, it’s really incredible. (Also, casually, and absolutely tangentially related, ANOTHER Boeing whistleblower slated to testify died??? This time instead of being shot in their car, it was a fast acting MRSA infection. A friend asked me “do you remember the good ol days when corpos still had to make their murders plausibly deniable?”)

I have been spending a lot of the past 3 years learning about Israel and poking my nose around discovering new ways the United States’ “empire managers” (as Caitlin Johnstone calls them) and Israeli intelligence are so fucking in bed with each other it’s disgusting. I remember feeling really vindicated about deciding that superhero movies were propaganda and losing interest in them around 2009, after reading an article in Mint Press in 2022 exposing that much of the rank-and-file at Marvel have been and are ex-Israeli military and intelligence officials. It made me kind of a wet blanket for a long time. I’ve gotten used to it. It’s cool if you like them still. Just know that they’re created to persuade a certain kind of narrative. Doesn’t matter if you think you know the difference between a movie and real life. Stories have power. If I could trust myself to not be taken by those stories, I would feel safer putting on the costumes and lining up for opening weekend like it’s just a fun party with my friends with big impressive special effects and surround sounds and hot hot action. But I don’t. I need stories. They’re how I understand my memories and dreams. They’re how I learn what to expect and how to navigate it. They’re how I understand the experiences of others and how I share my own in a way that resonates. I don’t want those stories affecting the framework of my existence.

I found out this week that the NYPD has an office in Tel Aviv. The woman praised by Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, for gathering intelligence on the Columbia University student protests and deciding that a full-on riot cop crackdown was necessary to ensure the “safety of the city,” Rebecca Weiner, is both an adjunct professor at Columbia and an intelligence and counterterrorism shill for the NYPD. Who has a FUCKING OFFICE in Tel Aviv. Adams also bragged in a press briefing about how they use drones to monitor their citizens (the students), radio encryption to hide their actions, and have been training for this very moment since January 2022. That’s how they knew there were people involved with this protest who had also been involved with the Autonomous Zone during BLM, and Occupy Wall Street, and Stop Cop City. That’s why they don’t want people to wear masks to protests and try to shame brave people-of-conscience for “dressing up like a terrorist.” It makes you harder to profile.

Day after day I weep, for the weight we’ve foisted upon the youth of standing up for our existential needs. I weep for the moral indigence of my peers, choosing get-in-and-get-out wealth building tactics over sustainable co-operative work environments, over which they have the power to enact, yet do not. I weep for the friends who have fallen off the edge of the earth, one by one, to dissociation from the horrors of existing and being necessarily complicit to these larger mechanisms of injustice and greed, whether or not they know that is what causes their sorrows. To be happy at a time like this and to do nothing to change it is to be so disconnected from reality that you can justify your accessory actions with game-type metaphor and narcissistic indifference to the suffering of others, from which you benefit. If you have a retirement account or an investment hosted by Vanguard or BlackRock, you are making a choice to gamble your own personal future security on the bet that violence will flourish and weapons will continue to sell, and that will take care of you when you are old. That’s the darker truth beneath the struggle for narrative around Israel’s genocide in the United States.

Our wealth is generated by war. We don’t send billions of dollars to Israel, or Ukraine. We send billions of dollars to American weapons manufacturers, who send weapons abroad. We wage war and displace populations where we would like to mine uranium, or lithium, or oil; or where we would like to sell real-estate next to the sea. And we generate profits on wall street in the same breath. We greenlight that same behavior of our little buddy Israel for whatever reasons they deem reasonable. If we’re not straight up genociding, we’re installing puppet governments who are willing to privatize and sell off the resources of an area for a promise of money, amnesty, and/or power. The entirety of American wealth is tied up in and perpetuated by the war machine. I sometimes hear people shouting about societal justice in the form of: "imagine if we spent 1B a year on X instead of spending it on war," but the fucked up economic reality of that is dark. If we weren’t spending money on waging war, we wouldn’t have money to put into other things, like education or bridges. Unless we took it from the rich bitches who have been embezzling most of the blood money into their private pockets. The wealth is all stolen. That’s a reality I would like to encourage you to grapple with. As we dismantle the imperial war machine, we will inevitably suffer a loss of comfort as the global markets equalize. It will hit all of us like a brick, and yes, god damn yes, it’s worth it. There are so many conversations to have once this genocide is over. Whether we can stop it, or it plays to the crescendo and we all feel very badly about it in hindsight. We’re already in better-late-than-never territory. Please notice. Please say something. Please do something. Anything. We can only succeed in the herculean task of enforcing and maintaining peace if we do this together. Tell them you don't like it and you want them to stop. Tell them that. Practice that with everyone you know.