RESISTANCE IN A FASCIST STATE: Examples Of Creative & Courageous Opposition To Tyranny
As the empire becomes more tyrannical in its death throes and freedom of speech is throttled, protest needs to be creative and adaptive.
Nobody Noticed This Person's Hand Sending Out Messages Behind Genocider Sec. Of State Blinken As He Lied To Congress
Dangerous Ideas With Lee Camp (5/31/24)
Lee delves into Sec. Of State, Anthony Blinken, being disrupted while talking in congress without him or anyone else even noticing and in a very creative way.
“NOT THE CAREER IN PUBLIC SERVICE I SIGNED UP FOR”: Federal Workers Protest Genocide
A phone displays images of notes protesting Israel’s war on Gaza placed atop government IDs. Photo illustration: The Intercept.
“These are not radicals, not people who break rules or step outside lanes in their professional roles. For a lot of federal employees, this is the first personal action they’ve taken.”
By Shawn Musgrave
The Intercept (6/6/24)
“My employer is murdering babies,” reads a handwritten note posted to Instagram Thursday by a civil servant at the Justice Department. The message is placed atop the employee’s government badge, obscuring their name.
The post is one of more than 50 notes said to be from federal employees protesting the Biden administration’s Gaza policy by snapping pictures of personalized notes atop their badges. The Intercept spoke with six of these federal workers on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation but confirmed their identities and employment.
“We’ve gotten a lot of critiques for doing anonymous letters,” said a State Department staffer with more than two decades of experience who joined the campaign. “It’s important for people to know we’re real human beings and real government employees.”
The online protest campaign is the latest push by Feds United for Peace, a group of federal employees organizing to voice dissent on Gaza. The campaign galvanized after Israel began its attacks on the city of Rafah, according to a Department of Labor employee who helped launch it. The Biden administration warned weeks ago to cut off weapons supplies if Israel launched an assault on Rafah, but has avoided saying the recent airstrikes crossed any “red line.”
The notes come from employees at various agencies, including the departments of Commerce, Justice, Homeland Security, Labor, and State, plus the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Social Security Administration, according to organizers. Some of the posted badges belonged to congressional staffers, and one is a diplomatic passport.
“When it gets to the point that federal employees are doing something this personal and direct-action oriented, that speaks to the shift,” said the Justice Department staffer.
Total frustration
Many of the employees who joined the campaign are on the verge of resigning, organizers told The Intercept.
“For me I’ve just reached a point of total frustration,” said a Department of Homeland Security employee. “We see through the gaslighting” over Gaza.
But others see the Instagram posts and campaigns by career federal employees as a complement to the spate of highly publicized resignations. “I do genuinely feel still that I can be more productive staying in the government,” said another State Department employee.
“These are not radicals, not people who break rules or step outside lanes in their professional roles,” said the Justice Department staffer. “For a lot of federal employees, this is the first personal action they’ve taken.”
The Israel Boycott Is Working & Is DEVASTATING, But The Media Hide It
Redacted (6/12/24)
Companies around the world are boycotting Israel and the media will not tell you about it. Isn't this ironic when U.S. lawmakers tried so hard to stop the BDS, an economic boycott is what we get anyway? Maybe we should have paid more attention to the peaceful protest before we got the October 7 violent one, huh?
11-minute video
"I Ain't Reading All That; Free Palestine"
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter (6/15/24)
A Zionist podcaster named Blake Flayton had a delightful tantrum that’s going around Twitter at the moment in which he bemoans the way pro-Palestinian social media users have been responding to long pro-Israel screeds with a graphic saying “i ain’t reading all that; free palestine”, a variation on the popular I Ain’t Reading All That meme.
“‘I ain’t reading all that, Free Palestine’ is a cute internet meme for anti-Israel douchebags, but also a perfect encapsulation of a movement which refuses to engage with venerable scholarship or critical thinking,” gripes Flayton.
The meme enrages Israel supporters because Israel apologia depends on mountains of verbiage to spin obvious atrocities as reasonable and appropriate. At some point the kids noticed this was happening, and started dismissing all the narratives.
“‘I ain’t reading all that, Free Palestine’ is a standard reply to any 10,000 word essay from a zionist employed at the Burgerwaffen Institute of Applied Hasbara on why it’s okay to bomb the limbs off starving children,” an account with the handle aufhabenenjoyer explains in response to Flayton’s post. …
Read the rest or 4-minute audio
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: I am in jail for breaking windows at JP Morgan, the biggest funder of fossil fuels. Here’s why I did it
By Amy Pritchard
The Guardian (6/15/24)
Every day I struggle to hold the insanity of our collective behaviour within me – in my psyche, my heart and my body. The harm we are causing to ourselves, to our fellow humans and all other beings, and our incredible, beautiful home, is horrific. Yet I know that what I think and feel is a healthy response to what’s going on.
In April 2021, Frans Timmermans, the vice-president of the EU commission, said: “Today’s children will face a future of fighting wars for water and food.” We are already facing significant impacts on our harvests here. The prospect of wars over resources and conflict caused by and exacerbated by climatic conditions is an almost unbearable intergenerational injustice. The loss of biodiversity, meanwhile, will erode the foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, law and order, health and quality of life worldwide.
If the government’s primary duty is to protect the people, then the form of democracy we have is failing. We took this action because the institutions and systems that we relied upon were not working, and do not seem to really understand the danger, although they do know about it. It’s baffling and utterly terrifying.
JP Morgan, more than any other bank, is fuelling this crime against humanity. It is pouring petrol on to the fire, in the form of hundreds of billions of dollars of fossil fuel investments. Its profits are immense. …
(Last year, she was also jailed for using the words “climate change” and “fuel poverty” in court, contrary to the judge’s order.)
“...I don’t think these bankers are intending to kill people and crash the economy but it’s as if they are blinded by the acquisition of wealth, or captured by addiction, or in an altered state of consciousness, asleep, or compartmentalising to the extreme.”
The Iraqi Journalist Who Hurled His Shoes At War Criminal George Bush
“Here is your goodbye kiss, you dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.""
Witness History
BBC (6/7/24)
In 2008, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at the President of the United States in protest at America's occupation of Iraq.
George W Bush had been giving a joint press conference in Baghdad with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki at the time. He was in his final months as president as Barack Obama was due to take over.
As he threw the first shoe, Muntadhar yelled: “Here is your goodbye kiss, you dog."
He tells Vicky Farncombe how he prepared for the moment and what happened to him next.
Muntadhar al Zaidi became a symbol of resistance when he threw his shoes at president Bush. Years later, he has no regrets. Story.
“The occupation has gone, but they left behind more corruption, more problems, many militias. Now we have more problems every day. Iran controls Iraq because of the occupation of the US. There is no service for people, there is not any government support. No hospitals, no schools.”
When Batshit Crazy Is The Norm, Opposing A Genocide Means You're A Nazi
“The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”
— Terence McKenna
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter (6/7/24)
When opposing a genocide means you’re a Nazi.
When opposing nuclear brinkmanship means you love Vladimir Putin.
When opposing the looming global conflict with China means you’re a sinister propagandist for “the CCP”.
When opposing the latest imperial escalations against the latest Official Bad Guy always means you’re an appeaser of the Bad Guy and would have opposed fighting Hitler.
When your skepticism toward government and media institutions who have an extensive record of lying and propagandizing means you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist.
When wanting to live in a society where everyone has enough means you’re an evil authoritarian with a despised ideology.
When believing it’s possible to have systems where humans aren’t killing the biosphere and waging insane wars while brandishing armageddon weapons at each other means you’re a silly little child who doesn’t understand how the real world works.
When these things are happening in your society, it means your society has gone stark raving insane. It means you are surrounded by lunatics, and ruled by madmen.
When so many mainstream consensus positions fail to get the most basic and obvious moral positions right, and not only fail to get them right but get them completely ass backwards, you are living in a civilization that has gone bat shit crazy.
Our civilization is crazy because the systems which govern it are crazy, and they have to drive all of us crazy to get us to consent to those systems.
The empire needs us to consent to nonstop warfare and militarism, so it propagandizes us into thinking that these things are normal and anyone who questions them is evil and suspicious.
The empire needs us to consent to the nonstop exploitation, injustice, ecocide and extraction of its brand of global capitalism, so it propagandizes us into believing these crazy things are normal, and that if you find it difficult to survive under such a system then there must be something wrong with you personally.
The empire needs us to consent to continually expanding surveillance, police militarization, internet censorship and mass-scale psychological manipulation, so it propagandizes us into thinking that anyone who opposes these things is a weird paranoid freak.
Every day our minds are being kicked around by the powerful in a whole host of ways to maintain a dystopia that is a 180-degree reversal of what a healthy civilization should look like, so it’s no wonder that we see so many mental health problems in our society. It’s no wonder we see so many mass shootings in the hub of the empire. It’s no wonder people throw so much of their lives into the vapid escapism and entertainment of mainstream culture instead of engaging politically with this mess.
They need you to be crazy, so they drive you crazy. If they can’t make you crazy, they try to convince you that you’re crazy. If they can’t convince you that you’re crazy, they try to convince everyone else that you’re crazy. Whatever it takes to keep the crazy wheels of their crazy machine rolling forward into dystopia and extinction.
How much respect should you have for such a system? How much loyalty should you have to such an empire? How seriously should you take the mainstream worldviews which regard all this madness as sanity, and regard your sanity as madness? Personally, I find it hard to play along. …
Link to story and 6-minute audio
“In the shadow of an empire that is dedicated making you crazy and making you think you’re crazy, often all you need is someone to give you the confidence to stand by your convictions and call bullshit what it is.”
Organize massively for when Der Fuhrer Netanyahu comes to speak to the U.S. Congress July 24.
It's getting crazier everyday, but folks seem to be seeing through the lies. Lots of thumbs up for our pro-Palestine signage in the Juneteenth parade today. It's encouraging.