Архангел 𓂆 🇵🇸 🇱🇧 🇾🇪 🇮🇷 🇨🇳☭ 🇷🇺 🅉

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
#StandwithRussia 🇷🇺 Z ✊🏻
#Syria 🇸🇾✌🏻🇨🇺✌🏻🇨🇳

[Архангел 𓂆 🇵🇸 🇱🇧 🇾🇪 🇮🇷 🇨🇳☭ 🇷🇺 🅉 @AngelsNoema]

https://t.co/504qxBnMPO

[TIMES OF GAZA @Timesofgaza]

Palestinian little girl sustains serious injuries in an lsraeli airstrike on Gaza.

[رضا الباشا Rida Albasha @rh_albasha]

احد عشر فصيلا من الفصائل المسلحة من غير السوريين شمال غرب سوريا يعلنون دعم الجولاني في مواجهة المظاهرات

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

https://t.co/FYwUIZP0kB

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

I am not brave enough or selfless enough to follow Aaron Bushnell's example. No one is; that's why what he did is having such a massive impact, and it's why Israel supporters like yourself have been freaking out about him ever since. It was a superhuman act of protest.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

There's an infuriatingly common kind of liberal who purports to oppose Israel's actions in Gaza while also saying they support "Israel's right to exist", as though Israel's existence is somehow separable from its genocidal murderousness. This is a state that literally cannot exist without nonstop violence and tyranny, as demonstrated by its entire unbroken history since its inception. It was set up as a settler-colonialist outpost for western imperialism from the very beginning, and that's exactly what it's been ever since.

History has conclusively established that it is not possible to drop an artificial ethnostate on top of an already-existing population in which the pre-existing population is legally subordinate to the new one without tremendous amounts of warfare, police violence, mass displacement, apartheid, disenfranchisement and oppression. This is not actually debatable. It is a settled matter (no pun intended).

Is it possible to have a nation in which Jews are welcomed and kept safe? Of course. Many such nations exist outside of Israel, and the majority of the world's Jews live in them. What isn't possible is a Jewish ethnostate in historic Palestine in which the pre-existing population is treated as less than the Jewish population that does not necessarily entail nonstop violence, tyranny and abuse. This is self-evidently a direct contradiction in goals, but it's what the liberals I'm we're discussing here pretend to believe is a reasonable possibility.

There absolutely could be a state in that region wherein Palestinians and Jews coexist peacefully, but it would be so wildly different from present-day Israel that you can't pretend it would be the same state as the one we see now. It would entail such a radically dramatic overhaul of Israeli civilization, such a comprehensive dismantling of deeply ingrained racism, such a drastic restructuring of governmental and living systems, so much labor, sacrifice, humility, inner work and reparations, that to call it by the same name as the state that presently exists would be nonsensical.

And that isn't what the liberals in question are talking about instituting when they say they oppose Israel's atrocities in Gaza but "support Israel's right to exist". What they are saying is they want Israel to remain the unjust and tyrannical apartheid state that is has always been, but for the killing to stop. They want the injustice to continue, but they want its most overt manifestations to stop causing them cognitive dissonance. They want to status quo, without the murderous savagery that is necessary for the status quo's existence. They want to pretend they live in an imaginary fantasyland where such a thing is possible.

And to be clear this isn't just what liberals want with regard to Israel-Palestine; it's their whole entire position on everything. On every issue their position is little more than "Maintain the status quo, but make it pretty and psychologically comfortable for me." They never want to do what's right, they just want to feel like they are right. Theirs is an imperialist, militarist, tyrannical oligarchic ideology with a bunch of feel-good social justice bumper stickers slapped on top of it. A boot on your neck and a flower in its hair.

That's who liberals are. It's who they've always been. Phil Ochs released the song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" in 1966, and they haven't changed one iota ever since. The issues change, their arguments change, but their "maintain the status quo but let me feel nice about it" values system has remained exactly the same for generations.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

So They're Experimenting With Military Robots In Gaza Now

One of the most horrifying facts about this dystopia we live in is that large-scale military operations are routinely used as testing grounds for new war machinery, using human bodies as guinea pigs for experimentation in what amount to giant blood-soaked field laboratories — all to benefit the strategic objectives of empire managers and the profit margins of the military-industrial complex.

Haaretz has a new article out titled “Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots”, which reports that “In an effort to avoid harming soldiers and dogs, the IDF has been experimenting with the use of robots and remote-controlled dogs in the Gaza War.”

(Yeah because my gosh, can you imagine how terrible it would be if Israeli soldiers and dogs got harmed while carrying out a genocide?)

The article’s author Sagi Cohen reports that drone-mounted robot dogs and remotely controlled bulldozers are two of the new apocalyptic horrors currently being battle-tested in Gaza, saying “defense establishment officials confirm that there has been a leap in the use and sophistication of robots on the battlefield.” Which is a pretty disconcerting sentence to read.

This news comes out at the same time as a new Public Citizen report warning of the likely imminent arrival of autonomous weapons systems which will kill people with minimal instruction from human pilots, saying “The most serious worry involving autonomous weapons is that they inherently dehumanize the people targeted and make it easier to tolerate widespread killing, including in violation of international human rights law.”

The more normalized robots become within the world’s militaries the closer we come to this point, and steps are already being taken in that direction. As Common Dreams’ Thor Benson notes in an article about the Public Citizen report, “Israel has purchased and at times deployed self-piloting, lethal drones.”

Back in January I wrote that “Gaza is a live laboratory for the military industrial complex,” saying “Data is with absolute certainty being collected on all the newer weapons being field-tested on human bodies in Gaza (just like has been happening in Ukraine) to be used to benefit the war machine and arms industry.”

What sparked this comment at the time was reports and first-hand witness accounts we’d seen coming out about the prolific use of IDF “sniper drones” in Gaza since October, with Israeli forces frequently shooting Palestinians with quad drones armed with rifles. Copious records are most assuredly being compiled on the effectiveness of these newer weapons and tactics in ending human lives, which will then be used to help market those weapons to other states and to improve their efficiency in killing.

When I say this is most assuredly happening, I am not being hyperbolic for effect. Author and journalist Antony Loewenstein gave a lengthy interview on The Chris Hedges Report back in December about Israel’s long and extensively documented history of using Gaza as a testing ground for new weapons, spyware, surveillance and security systems, AI, drones, and tactics, which has profited scores of corporations and enabled Israel to become a player of outsized success in the global weapons industry.

“Israel’s drones, surveillance technology including spyware, facial recognition software, and biometric gathering infrastructure, along with smart fences, experimental bombs, and AI-controlled machine guns are all tried out on the captive population in Gaza, often with lethal results,” says Hedges in introduction. “These weapons and technologies are then certified as ‘battle-tested’ and sold around the world.”

This doesn’t only happen in Gaza. This past September The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair,” subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield.” In January of last year CNN published a report titled “How Ukraine became a testbed for Western weapons and battlefield innovation,” with one source saying that Ukraine is “absolutely a weapons lab in every sense because none of this equipment has ever actually been used in a war between two industrially developed nations.”

And of course we are also seeing this same phenomenon in Africa. In 2021 Mintpress News published a report by Scott Timcke titled “West Africa is the Latest Testing Ground for US Military Artificial Intelligence” about this very same trend. In 2020 Libya saw what is believed to have been the first time a human being has ever been killed by a fully automated drone attack — that is, killed without the machine having been told to do so by a human.

The other day we discussed how the empire’s great weakness is that it depends on normal human beings to carry out its orders and turn the gears of the machine. If you look at the facts and think about them for a moment, it’s not hard to see how the empire managers are hoping to overcome this weakness in the future.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

So They're Experimenting With Military Robots In Gaza Now

Haaretz has a new article out titled "Gaza Becomes Israel's Testing Ground for Military Robots", which reports that "In an effort to avoid harming soldiers and dogs, the IDF has been experimenting with the use of robots and remote-controlled dogs in the Gaza War."

Reading by Tim Foley.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

It's fine to withhold votes for Biden in protest of his genocide in Gaza, but the discourse around doing so often misses the point. A lot of US voters erroneously think they'd be punishing the Democrats by costing them the election, mistakenly assuming Dems care about winning. They don't.

Losing an election costs Democratic party leaders nothing; all the career politicians and political operatives at the top keep their careers either way. From their point of view this is just a cushy job with sweet benefits, and they keep those either way. And obviously Biden himself doesn't care; he'll have a comfortable retirement win or lose, and on some level he's surely aware that he shouldn't be there anyway.

The unelected empire managers who actually run the US power structure also don't care who wins the election. They know they'll still get their murder and militarism and capitalism and imperialism no matter who gets sworn in next year, whether it's Biden or Trump or Harris or someone else. Nobody with any real power cares about your vote.

And that's the real issue. That's the real point that keeps getting missed here. The problem is not that the wrong people keep getting elected, it's that the elections don't matter and voters don't have a say. It's that humanity is dominated by a murderous globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around Washington whose actual movements and behavior have effectively zero responsiveness to the will of the electorate.

You're never going to be able to vote your way out of this mess, and you're never going to be able to not-vote your way out of this mess, because the power of your vote has been undermined to a value of zero. That doesn't mean there's no way out of this mess, it just means there's no way to get out of this mess using the fake plastic diversion toy they handed you to shut you up and trick you into thinking you have a say.

There are still plenty of other tools in the toolbox for forcing an evil power structure to stop doing evil things, but they require a whole lot of hands to bring about, and right now we don't have them. Too many people have been successfully propagandized into believing the status quo works and their government is basically good, or successfully manipulated into giving up on politics altogether and throwing their attention into other things.

Before the people can begin using the power of their numbers to force real change, they're going to have to be awakened to the reality that everything they've been told about their government, their society and their world is a lie. They've got to come to the understanding that the mainstream news media are nothing but propaganda and they live under the most murderous and tyrannical regime on this planet. They've got to realize that this power structure does not ultimately serve their interests, or the interests of their fellow human beings around the world. Only when enough eyes open to this reality can revolutionary change via direct action become possible.

The good news is it's entirely possible to help get those eyes open. Everything you do to help share the truth with your fellow citizens and spread awareness of what's really going on pushes this possibility toward reality. The more people open their eyes, the more people there are to help open others, so this could snowball from impossible to probable to inevitable quite quickly.

An entire globe-spanning empire rests on a closed pair of eyelids. Once they snap open, the whole thing will crumble. And from there we can begin building a healthy world together.

[COMBATE |🇵🇷 @upholdreality]

Meloni was a "fascist" until she embraced NATO and US hegemony

Now she's the liberals' darling

[𝕊𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕻𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕤 @SprinterPress]

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad:

Russia is the country on which the fate of the world depends.

[DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics]

🇸🇾President Assad recalls the trauma he suffered after being sanctioned by President Zelensky of Ukraine.

[Dr. Anastasia Maria Loupis @DrLoupis]

US aid🇺🇸

[RT @RT_com]

Germany was planning an attack against Russia. Russia wants answers. Germany doesn’t want to give them.

[Angelo Giuliano 🇨🇭🇮🇹 @angeloinchina]

Taiwan soon to be the next Ukraine.
US strategy / wet dream.
1. "We will be able to fight China there and not on US soil"
2. "no American lives will be lost"
3. "We will give unlimited aid to Taiwan"
4. "We will fight China to the last Taiwanese"
5. "If not enough to the last Filipino, to the last South Korean, to the last Japanese"
6. "We shall have a good return on Investment"

Slava Stupidity

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Today, thousands brave the pouring rain in NYC, rallying in solidarity with Palestine.

🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

[DeepFake Dissident @inovajon]

“I used to think the U.S. was in control of Israel, but now I see the U.S. is the bottom in this toxic relationship.”

The whole world is seeing it.

Is the Apartheid Israeli govt somehow blackmailing the entire U.S. govt?🤨

What other scenario explains it?🤷‍♂️

TikTok: suzie_bks

[StellaMoscow @SgforgoodStella]

At the entrance to #Avdeevka, the battle flags of the units that took part in the liberation of the city flutter.

Glory to the Russian Army!
Glory to the Russian Soldier!

✊Thank you guys!

https://t.co/cUoFlyx8zG

[Russian Embassy, UK @RussianEmbassy]

Vladimir #Putin:

A new equal and indivisible security framework must be created in #Eurasia in the foreseeable future.

#Russia is ready for a substantive discussion on this subject with all countries and associations that may be interested in it.

At the same time, I would like to reiterate that no enduring international order is possible without a strong and sovereign Russia.

Learn more: https://t.co/kRk2JGLOqN

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

When George Galloway was attacked and hospitalised by a pro-Israel fanatic, the political and media class never said a word.

Worth remembering, considering the weaponisation of attacks on MPs by both political parties to silence legitimate protests against genocide in Gaza

[Censored Men @CensoredMen]

🇵🇸🇮🇱 Palestinian child consoles his mother after brother is killed.

"Please stop, mama. I beg you, please stop, Mama."