Maintaining Your Resistance In A Time Of Vicious National Depravity

How to stand resolute when even family, longtime friends and colleagues fall silent, turn away, call you crazy … or worse. What to do in the face of such callous indifference of so many around us?

“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today?
I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)

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Photo by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink

Rising to the duty of a citizen — of a moral human being — to speak up, challenge, resist and obstruct our state-sponsored evil can be exhausting in such times.

By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy (10/17/24)

This past year has been a year from hell. Or more correctly, hell made by the US at Israel’s direction. With every week, day and hour the cruel, hellish depravity of Israeli military thugs and the obsequious compliance of American officials becomes more and more satanic.

Rising to the duty of a citizen — of a moral human being — to speak out, challenge, resist and obstruct our obscene state-sponsored evil can be exhausting. Every morning dawns with news of the latest US-backed Israeli terrorism: refugee camps bombed; children burned alive in whirlwinds of flames ripping through hospital tents; intentional starvation; targeted murder of orphans; or reports of cowardly Israeli army perverts raping prisoners and sniping children with head and heart shots. Every day, a new gaping wound in the lives of Gazans and humanity.

And the West Bank.

And now the people of Lebanon.

And Syria.

And Yemen.

And all of it embraced and excused by a compromised and perverted US government.

And now we have American soldiers on the ground in Israel as bait to entice attack to justify US going to war. Americans offered up to be killed during attacks on Israel … or killed by Israelis. Remember the 34 American sailors killed and 174 wounded in the hours-long Israeli bombing, napalm, rocket and machine gun strafing attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 Six Day War. A war crime for which this government never held Israel accountable.

With every hour we march closer and closer to an absolutely disastrous, criminal war on Iran with high likelihood of civilization-ending nuclear war.

In the face of callous indifference

How to keep up one’s resistance to the obscenity of “our” government’s depravity? How to stand resolute when even family, longtime friends and colleagues fall silent, turn away, call you crazy … or worse? What to do in the face of such callous indifference and complicity of the vast majority of those around us?

When jailed for refusing to pay a war tax, Henry David Thoreau learned about resistance. As friends and neighbors sauntered across the town square just beyond his jailhouse window, he saw resistance as ultimately an individual act; one always judged with contempt and scorn by the obedient unthinking, unfeeling majority.

Jewish scholar and author Norman Finkelstein knows of resistance. Both of his parents barely survived the death camps of Nazi Germany. As he notes, he was born into resistance. He has paid dearly and displayed heroic integrity, exposing and opposing the evil of the Israeli Zionist fascist state and its subservient US cuck. In the video below, Norman gives a take on resistance forged in the heat of experience. He is practical, blunt and — most essential — realistic.

As he notes: “The only thing I can say as a conclusion is you never know. You can only know one thing for certain: If you do nothing, it can only get worse.”

I encourage you to listen.

Then continue to resist on behalf of those unable to make themselves heard above the grinding racket of the western empire death machine.

Resist or submit.

That’s the choice.

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Is It Possible To Stop The Israel/US Genocide Machine?

Useful Idiots podcast (10/16/24)

“Our generation, has, for good reason, lost the belief, the conviction that we have the force of history behind us. That we have the force of justice behind us. Our generation believes there's a good chance we'll be defeated. There's a good chance we're not going to win.”

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“If you resist, there are moments where it looks very grim. And then there's that folk song, It's Always Darkest Before The Dawn. It's this hope that keeps me carrying on. It's always darkest before the dawn.”

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“There's another reality. There's something in the human constitution that simply can't do nothing. In the face of such death and devastation, you just can't.”

9-minute video

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You're Not Crazy. This Genocidal Dystopia Is Crazy

Don’t look to others to evaluate your own level of clarity. In a civilization that has gone insane, you have to sort out what sanity looks like for yourself. When our leaders are throwing their support behind an active genocide in a society that is awash with propaganda-induced delusions, we’ve all got to be brave enough to stand on our own two feet.

By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter (10/16/24)

You’re not crazy. They are crazy. The ones who are going around acting like everything’s fine. The ones dismissing the Gaza genocide as a “single issue”. The ones who don’t like it when you talk about this stuff because it bums them out. They are the crazy ones.

I say this because living in the west during a western-backed genocide can make you feel like you’re going insane. Like maybe there’s something wrong with you for not being able to go along as though your government isn’t helping Israel burn people alive, shoot kids in the head, deliberately destroy Gaza’s healthcare system, and target civilian populations with deadly siege warfare in order to annex Palestinian territory. Like maybe you’re defective if you can’t be as chill about all this as everyone else is being.

But there’s nothing wrong with you, and you are not defective. There is something very wrong with a civilization that could go along with all this. It is our genocidal dystopia that is defective. …

Read the rest

5-minute audio

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AN INTERVIEW YOU’LL NEVER SEE ON CORPORATE MEDIA: Africa RISING UP Against The Corrupt US Order!

Jimmy Dore Show (10/16/24)

6-minute video