Nobody wants to live next to a war criminal... I've just signed my name calling for the government to investigate Brits who have returned from serving in the IDF - you should too! @DeclassifiedUK https://t.co/X74EymruUd
All these abuses are going to continue until the people rise up and force them to stop.
Western governments are going to get more and more authoritarian.
Police forces are going to get more and more militarized and murderous.
Freedom of speech is going to be crushed with more and more aggression.
Military budgets are going to get more and more bloated.
The imperial war machine is going to get more and more belligerent, genocidal and expansionist.
The gap between the rich and the poor is going to keep growing and growing.
People are going to get more and more miserable and mentally unhealthy.
The systems we use to gather information about our world are going to get more and more tightly controlled by the powerful.
The extraction of resources and labor from the global south will get more and more abusive and overt.
The biosphere we depend on for survival is going to get closer and closer to death.
How do we know this will happen? Because that’s all that’s been happening. This is all the US-led capitalist world order has ever been doing.
This is all they have to offer us. More and more murder and abuse is the only item on the menu we’ve been handed.
We can’t vote our way out of this dilemma. How do we know? Because we’ve been trying to vote our way out of it for generations. One party does evil things, then people vote in the other party to get away from the evil and the new party does evil things, then they try the other evil party again, etc, etc, etc.
The whole system is locked down. The abuses have been baked into the cake. Everything about our civilization has been rigged to ensure the wealthy and powerful get more and more wealth and power while everyone else gets more and more poverty, exhaustion, ignorance, and insanity.
The only unlocked door out of this dystopian nightmare is the people using the power of their numbers to force real change. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of the tyrants who are inflicting these abuses upon our world, and they know it, and they fear us.
They know they can’t murder and imprison us all. They know they’re out of here as soon as we decide revolution is preferable to tolerating their abuse.
We can take the steering wheel out of their hands whenever we want. We don’t have to ask. We can just take it. There are too many of us, and too few of them.
I’m just going to keep pointing this out until I see it move into the forefront of our society’s awareness.
Why is Israel viewed as so essential to western elites that they are willing to be seen openly backing its genocide in Gaza? Because Israel is creating a vision of the near-future, it is developing the template for how they deal with surplus sections of western populations in a world of diminishing resources and an ever-more hostile climate.
And all the better for our rulers, any resistance on our part to the Palestinians’ enslavement and slow extermination – and to our own growing servitude and abuse – can be characterised as antisemitism. In outsourcing this project to Israel, western establishments have devised the ultimate cover story.
Read more from my latest article here: https://t.co/GAtmG4vuq2
The arrogance. "I recently asked myself the question: what’s the most exciting and promising company in the world right now?" And then he immediately secured a plum job with them. How easy it is for the rich elites. Most people in this country struggle interminably to secure even a dead-end job. Not least because of what Mr Osborne and his colleagues did to our economy. Tone deaf.
On March 16 of this year, Reuters published an article titled "Israeli strikes kill 15 people in Gaza over past day, Palestinian medics say".
Does anyone remember the 15 Palestinians who died on March 16, 2025?
Does that day stand out in anyone's memory as particularly significant in terms of mass murder?
No?
Same here.
I honestly can't remember it at all. This would have been during the tail end of the first fake "ceasefire", a couple of days before Trump signed off on Israel resuming its large-scale bombing operations in Gaza, so this wasn't one of those days with huge massacres and staggering death tolls. It doesn't exactly stand out in the memory.
I have no idea who those people were. I don't know their names. I never saw their pictures flashing across my news feed. I never saw any western officials denouncing their deaths, or media institutions giving wall-to-wall coverage to the news of their killing. So I don't remember them.
I saw a tweet from Aaron Maté yesterday:
"15 civilians were killed in the massacre targeting Sydney's Jewish community. A day in which Israel massacres 15 Palestinian civilians in Gaza would be at the low end of the average in 2+ years of genocide.
"Israel's atrocities and the impunity they receive are undoubtedly the number one driver of anti-Semitism worldwide. And to show how little Israel and its apologists care about anti-Semitism, many are exploiting the Sydney massacre to justify Israel's rejection of a Palestinian state; baselessly blame Iran; and demand more censorship of anti-genocide protests."
Indeed, the worst people on earth are using the Bondi Beach shooting to argue for crackdowns on free speech and freedom of assembly to silence Israel's critics online and on the streets, in Australia and throughout the western world. And when 15 Palestinians were killed by Israel on March 16, the west barely noticed.
I don't remember the 15 Palestinians who died during that 24-hour period in mid-March, but I will always remember the Bondi Beach shooting. Someone could mention it to me thirty years from now and I'll know exactly what they're talking about. My society made an infinitely bigger deal about the deaths of 15 westerners in Sydney, Australia than the deaths of 15 Palestinians in Gaza, so it will always stick in my memory.
Hell, I can't blame it all on society; if I'm honest I made a much bigger deal about it myself. I've felt sick thinking about the shooting ever since it happened, partly because I know it's going to be used to roll out authoritarian measures and stomp out free speech in my country, but also partly because I've felt so bad for those who died and their loved ones. Even after spending two years denouncing the way western society normalizes the murder of Arabs and places more importance on western lives than Palestinian lives, I'm still basically doing the same thing myself. I'm a damn hypocrite.
I wasn't born this way. This was learned behavior. If I had my slate cleaned and could see the world through fresh eyes it would never occur to me that I and my society would ever see 15 people being murdered in Australia as more significant than 15 people being murdered in Palestine. I would expect them to be viewed as exactly as terrible.
And they should be. Palestinians don't love their families any less than Australians do. Australian lives aren't any more significant or valuable than Palestinian lives. There is no valid reason for the world to have focused any less on the 15 people who were killed in Gaza on March 16 than on the 15 people who were murdered on Bondi Beach. But it did.
Sunday was an awful, dark day. Hundreds of lives have been directly devastated by this tragedy, thousands more indirectly, and in some ways the nation as a whole has been changed. The trauma will reverberate in the victim's families for generations. The sorrow is palpable and ubiquitous. It's everywhere; in the streets, at the supermarket. There is catastrophe in the air.
And this is appropriate. This is what 15 deaths ought to feel like. This is what it feels like when you see mass murder inflicted upon a population whose murder hasn't become normalized for you.
That's all I've got to offer right now. Just the humble suggestion that every massacre of Palestinians should shake the earth just as much as the Bondi massacre has. Every death toll out of Gaza should hit us just as hard as the death toll out of Sydney did. Feel how hard this hits, and then translate it to the people of Gaza. This is happening there every single day.
In trying to get people to care about warmongering and imperialism what we’re really trying to do is get people to widen their circle of compassion to the furthest extent possible. To extend their care for the people around them to include caring about violence and abuse against people even on the other side of the world, who might not look and speak and live as they do. Maybe even extending it so far as caring about the non-human organisms who share our planet with us.
As Einstein wrote in a condolence letter toward the end of his life,
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”
Humanity won't survive into the distant future unless we grow into a conscious species, and part of that growth will necessarily include widening our circles of compassion to include our fellow beings around the world. If we can't do that, we're not going to make it. We're too destructive. We hurt each other and our environment too much. We destroy everything around us trying to shore up wealth and resources for ourselves, and it simply is not sustainable. It'll get us all killed eventually.
We've got to become better. We've got to become more caring. More emotionally intelligent. Less susceptible to the manipulations of propaganda. A society driven by truth and compassion rather than lies and the pursuit of profit.
That's the only way we're making it out of this awkward adolescent transition stage with these large, capable brains still wound up in vestigial evolutionary fear-based conditioning. That's the only way we achieve our true potential and build a healthy world together.