The Propagandists Want You Riled Into Joining Sides. What They Don't Want is You Thinking For Yourself.
Why my method is to spend time learning instead of “standing with” anyone. A curation of the best reading (and viewing) I’ve done so far on the Israeli/Palestine propaganda op.
Today is the day
Bewilderness comes to reclaim everything
Burning bridge lights up the sky
Zip your lip until you’ve picked a side
—Queens of the Stone Age, Domesticated Animals
Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn.
—Benjamin Franklin
This is not a discussion of the Israel/Hamas/Palestine conflict or whatever we’re calling it.
Frankly, I don’t find war that interesting. I’m sure the analysis is “multivariate and complex”. Then again, it’s war, so… Wants. Needs. Territory. Perceived enmity. Historical injustices. Us versus Them. Justification. Force. Destruction. Killing. Horror… until it becomes too costly. Then… treaties. Pacts. Accords. Rinse. Repeat.
Does that about cover it?
Anyway, analyzing conflicts is not my job.
But I do think it’s my job to comment on the on the molding of public insanity. In other words, the propaganda op.
You know what I’m seeing these days?
A whole lot of CERTAINTY.
Which, of course, is dangerous. Think 100% Safe and Effective. 99% consensus. Trusted News Initiative.
Mmm-hmm.
I might even go as far as saying the amount of danger we’re in rises in proportion with the level of certainty being professed.
I’m supposed to feel certainty. To feel outrage. To hate someone. To “stand” with someone. (Though “standing”, in the perverse language of the day, means sitting, hunched, eyeballs deep into our device of choice, punching keys.)
One thing I’ve learned about homo sapiens: they crave certainty.
Often, to a fault.
To a self-annihilation, even.
Certainty, after all, is blind. It is easy to be certain. You simply choose to ignore your own questioning mind. You cut off any possibility of thinking on the matter.
There is no investigation to be done, no facts to be discovered, no data to be collected. You’ve already arrived at the end of knowing.
You refuse to listen. You refuse to discuss. You refuse to contemplate.
Behold. Certainty.
You can decide to be “certain” about all kinds of things, including things that no one has any business being certain about. Which, of course, will lead you to believe untrue things. Which, in turn, will cause you to make bad decisions. Which, in turn, will bring chaos and destruction into the world.
All human atrocities, when you think about it, are carried out by brainless automatons who were certain. They were certain their leaders were in the right, certain that they represented the good and the virtuous, certain that they had everyone’s best interests at heart, or certain that God was on their side.
Humans crave certainty so much there’s an entire institution we call “The News” which exists to satisfy that craving.
Here, The News says, be certain of THESE things. Don’t question. Don’t trust the misinformation-spreaders. Trust US. The truth is what we say it is. Why would The News lie?
(A moment to prevent my head exploding with reasons why).
All of this certainty, of course, is really just authority substituted for thinking. Which, if you own the media, serves you nicely, since your authority can enrage or pacify your certainty-craving populace into supporting or opposing whatever you want.
If you want crisis of one kind or another, program the audience to see one. If you want a Hero/Savior figure, no problem. If you want a scapegoat, you can readily supply an Enemy.
Cue the atrocity.
How easy to flick the switch off in your brain and march behind a banner of Certainty.
I don’t know about you.
I can’t make my mind work like this.
I don’t know anyone I admire whose mind works like this.
If there are things I don’t know, the best position to take, mentally and ethically, is: “I have no fucking idea.” And then take steps to remedy that ignorance.
So I read things. I watch things. I discuss them with people. And I spend time thinking about them.
This pressure to be certain, to be right, to identify with, to take sides, to “stand with”, in addition to ignoring basic rules of cognition, also ignores the fact that the most admirable truth-seekers and thought leaders (and people, in my opinion) are the ones who allow for the possibility of being wrong, and have the courage to admit it when it is so.
Much harder than certainty: listening, learning, discerning, thinking, questioning whether or not you are being duped. Especially when what you are being duped into is carrying out genocide.
CJ Hopkins said it best:
“At times like this, everything conspires to keep everyone from seeing things clearly and thinking critically. Everyone’s selling you a narrative and punching your emotional buttons to force you into joining their side."
“You don’t have to support mass murder.”
The propagandists want your brains. They want you joining.
What they don’t want is you Reading. Discussing. Processing.
This is my standard starting assumption these days: I am being lied to.
This is a fantastic starting point because it sends a signal to the brain: You’ve got work to do.
So I dig.
This methodology is why so many of us questioned the covid propaganda from the outset. At the time, we may not have known what the truth was. But we knew a lie when we saw one. We saw one because we had been lied to so often we were ready to see one.
If you assume you are being manipulated in some fashion, you are impervious to it. You see clearly what you are being told to feel, but you don’t feel it. Instead you turn your skeptical eye on the ones doing the telling.
And then, perhaps, you do find the outrage.
But calibrated.
This is also why I’m not a joiner, and why I’ve been so resistant to call what we’re doing here a “movement” of any kind.
The second you join a movement or an ideology or a “side”, or declare “I stand with”, you shut off your critical mind. You blind yourself to truths which fall outside your chosen group, and you blind yourself to falsity within. You become blissfully unaware that you are doing someone’s bidding.
Joining is another substitute for thinking. You are declaring “all the thinking has been done, by people smarter than me. All I have to do now is follow.” Which is really just declaring thinking done in advance of doing any thinking.
Nothing good ever comes of this. Not for you, not for your relationships, not for society at large.
Following inevitably means serving.
All the terms and phrases like “It’s Israel’s 9/11” are part of a script the media is running. And your part is scripted, too. You are meant to walk to your mark on stage and act out your part, Enraged Commoner Number Billionty-jillionty-thousand and Seven.
And this is how the Forever Global War play keeps extending its run in the theater. And how the ticket sales keep coming in, night after night.
Media doesn’t use a term like “Israel’s 9/11” because they’re trying to make some salient historical comparison. They’re using it because it draws on emotions which worked before. They were able to whip people into such a state of war frenzy after 9/11 that people were saying things like: “My President, right or wrong!”
So… even if your president is in the wrong, you nevertheless support an invasion and murder of innocent civilians, and loss of troops, and countless billions in military spending… because you’re angry??
Can you see how the powerful might want you thinking (or rather, circumventing thinking) along these lines?
Read. Listen. Understand. Feel without lashing out or reacting. Think. Dig. Discern. Recognize manipulation and propaganda.
Isn’t this what we’ve been training to do this whole time?
That said, here are some things I’ve been reading, and watching, and thinking about, by people who seem not to be falling for the propaganda:
The first I heard of the supposed surprise attack, and the discussion of its impossibility:
Key excerpt:
Corporate entities are “doing battle,” and they’re all getting richer during the horror and the slaughter.
War-machine government/corporations do battle to protect other corporations as well.
As Major General Smedley Butler wrote, 90 years ago, WAR IS A RACKET.
For context on how false reports like “beheaded babies” are used to whip people into war frenzy:
A discussion with Corbett on TLAV re. false flags and comparisons to 9/11:
Excerpt:
“Israel definitely helped foster and bring Hamas into reality... However… there are many different ways we can read “Hamas” and what it is, and how it has developed over the years. It isn’t necessarily the case that Israel literally controls Hamas, and everyone who is in Hamas, and tells them what to do and this was all a 100% made-to-happen event…
“An organization like Hamas could be puppeteered and controlled from key positions by people who are actively collaborating [with Israeli intelligence] while there are other people who genuinely are true believers. And in fact, if you were running an operation like this, you would want that… The most beneficial way to create a force of terrorist fighters is to recruit people who genuinely believe what they are doing… but you’re steering them this way and that, and you’re allowing this or that attack to happen…
“That’s the overview of how this type of event could be the result of collaborationism between certain elements of Israeli intelligence and certain elements in Hamas.
“Given the incredibly not just unlikely but well-nigh impossible events that we’ve seen taking place that should be at least an option on the table for people to consider.”
Yep, this reminds me of people who were saying “pandemic” couldn’t possibly be a globally-coordinated op because “too many people would have to have been in on it.” Well, no, the best way for it to be carried out successfully is if as few people are “in on it” as possible, and the rest are zealots, believing themselves to be virtuous saviors of humanity. “We’re all in this together!”
“What was the 9/11 op really about?… One very obvious thing we could point to is pre-9/11... George W Bush, an incredibly divisive and largely reviled figure… was a laughingstock and the subject of a lot of protests. Post-9/11, rally around the flag, he’s our war-leader, rah-rah, go America. And that lasted for several years before the shine of the 9/11 attacks wore off and people started to recognize the reality. Similarly in Israel, Netanyahu, a deeply divisive, deeply unpopular figure.. but in the wake of this, rally around the flag… And ‘I know this that don’t make sense, and there are questions about but should I even be raising these questions at this point?’.. that’s the exact sentiment people had in the wake of 9/11.
Yep. Don’t think. Don’t question. Get behind your leader.
One more from James:
“I think we have to take a thoroughgoing position of methodological skepticism about all information that we are receiving. And I know nobody wants to hear that because it does mean not just a lot of work but ongoing and continual work for the rest of your life…. Do not take any information at face value. Treat every piece of information you’re hearing as if it could be propaganda, it could be part of some psyop influencing campaign to get you to believe and thus to act in one way or another… There is demonstrably a coordinated global agenda toward steering humanity into a total technocratic enslavement state. That being in mind, we have to take all “information” with a grain of salt, and we have to verify and research it for ourselves.”
Amen, James.
It’s being called Israel’s 9/11. I agree and for reasons different from what the public is being told…
We do not know if legacy media is being intentionally inaccurate, incomplete or opaque. It is clear that the public is being indelibly programmed with a story, one that may be only partially true. We certainly can see that asking questions comes with castigation paradoxically at a time when we ought to be demanding answers to reasonable questions.
What is your intuition telling you?
According to Frances Leader this is all Black Nobility (going back to the Roman Empire) following the Book of Revelations and creating the conditions for all out war on humanity—a lining up of all the opponents for mutual destruction. She provides a wealth of links to dive into, and, to be honest, I have barely begun to scratch the surface. She also predicted this attack on Israel over a year and a half ago, and that it would be blamed on Iran.
Amy Sukwan, as usual, is asking all the right questions:
“I suspect that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians and Israelites are both people who just want to live their lives. ISIS, Hamas and other terrorist groups have been funded by both Israel and America in the past. I have difficulty believing that the people who commit these atrocities respresent the majority in any nation state. It seems more likely that they are hired and specially trained at the behest of globalist string pullers. So who is pulling the strings at the top?”
Abandon your positions, all. We’re in a terra incognita, a brand new hell— a completely devastating world of ruin, where (from the comfort of computer screens) leading Western “intellectuals” are backing the “liquidation” of innocent men, women and children in Gaza. The pressure was intense, to not object, due to the intensity of the atrocities, such as they were reported to us, such as we understood them. We struggled to figure out what was real and what was atrocity propaganda. Meanwhile, to me at least, the reality of the seige on Gaza remained remote. It was plumes of smoke, and Joe Biden or Anthony Blinken standing at a lectern, muttering the usual platitudes.
We all speak of things not seeming real, these days— things being staged, cloudy, unsourced, impossible to know.
Bewilderment is fruitful, because it is a step away from reflexive adherence to the dramas that have plunged human beings into hell again and again and again.
The devil on the shoulder, not just of every oppressed Palestinian, but of every human being who has suffered injustice, whether political or in a marriage, job, or other relationship, speaks all the more persuasively the deeper the grievances. I’ve got one on my shoulder too, though he speaks in whispers as my grievances are light. Not so for the people of the Holy Land. Few places on earth have given this devil as much fuel for his tirades. The name of this devil is Vengeance. His abode is Self-righteousness. And his nemesis is Forgiveness.
My disappointment in RFK Jr. is not because I think he has taken the wrong side. It is that he has taken a side. We need leadership that recognizes the tragic and inevitable failure of conquest as a formula for a better world. That he neglects to include the travails of the Palestinians in his statements is a symptom of sides-taking.
Speaking of sides-taking… on the stupidity (and hilarity) of “standing with”:
A lovely meditation on rejecting the pre-provided dualities and embracing openness/uncertainty instead:
This is the path. It’s not choosing one side with certainty. It’s fearlessly remaining open, a tree basking in the gradient light of the unknown. Neither this nor that. Neither physical nor immaterial. Neither Israel nor Palestine. Both. All.
And finally, in addition to the fantastic piece I linked earlier, CJ Hopkins also put up this brilliant satirical piece yesterday, which really should be the final word on the propaganda op.
There’s almost too much to excerpt here, but if I had to pick:
Welcome back to the War on Terror. I hope you had a nice 7-year break.
Yes, that’s right, once again, Democracy is under attack by the Axis of Pure Unadulterated Evil! It’s time to switch off your critical faculties, wrap yourself in the American flag, or the Israeli flag, or the Ukrainian flag, or, better yet, all three flags, and stand with the Forces of Freedom and Goodness as they exercise their God-given right to defend the world from the Children of Darkness, and the Putin-Nazis, and Hate, and Rape, and Baby Murderers, and Baby Rapers, and Baby-Raper sympathizers!
Seriously, though, this is only the beginning. The torrent of official and unofficial propaganda, gaslighting, and emotional manipulation is only going to increase over time. Probably the best thing to do at this point is pick a “side” and back it unquestioningly, no matter what it does or says. If you’re a professional person, with a career, and a mortgage, and kids, or aspiring to be such a person, I would recommend going with The Powers That Be. It’s easy to do that. Simply unsubscribe from, and block, and otherwise close your ears and mind to “conspiracy theorists” like me. Stick with those anonymous “Intelligence officials,” the IDF, and the corporate media, and those “fact-checking” entities, and Google, and the rest of the Official Reality Enforcement Apparatus that has been rolled out, globally, during the past three years.
You didn’t think they were rolling all that out for kicks, did you? No … of course you didn’t.
In any event, welcome to the War on Horror, or Terror, or Reality, or Whatever!
Amen, and amen.
Anyway, that’s a few things I’ve read so far. There’s more, but I’m way behind, and that’s as far as I can get today. If you have any links of pieces to do with the propaganda op (not the conflict itself) that you think are particularly good, please link them below.
And, as always, come to our own conclusions. Reject everything you’ve read here if it doesn’t make sense to your own reasoning mind.
Cheers, and peace.
If you enjoyed this post, someone else probably will, too. Click this button to share it:
YOU make Think for Yourself possible with your subscriptions. If you believe in the work being done here and want to show your support, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber!
Or perhaps you know someone that would appreciate a gift sub:
Or, if a sub is too much commitment, consider a one-time donation:
Bitcoin Address:
3BRCXdECrTq1WHHz8jrztGCNwzKQyWsEUA
Spot on. I said to my wife recently, that I don't believe anything in the news anymore, especially if it evokes strong emotions. I've always been skeptical, but now I'm at a level beyond skeptical: benefit of the doubt no longer given to media or leaders in any situation. It makes living harder when trust is gone, but that's where I am.
Thank you for the compilation of non mainstream views.
Excellent compilation of stacks and your own commentary here, James. Thank you for adding your voice of sanity and clarity. Really well done.