They watched Iraq burn on television and called it Shock and Awe.
Shock and Awe.
They named the massacre of a civilian population after the experience of watching it from a safe distance.
Not "the bombing campaign."
Not even the sanitized military euphemism.
Shock. And. Awe.
The aesthetic experience of the people watching.
Not the physical experience of the people dying.
This is what empire does to the psychology of its citizens.
It turns atrocity into spectacle.
It turns the suffering of distant people into a viewing experience with a brand name.
And the people watching from their living rooms were not monsters.
That's the point.
They were ordinary people whose entire psychological architecture had trained them to receive distant violence as entertainment, as proof of power, as reassurance.
The monsters are the architecture.
Palestinian prisoners and detainees are subjected to shocking atrocities in Israeli prisons, where systematic torture surpasses the brutality of the most infamous detention centers in history.
“I walked over 10 kilometers, and they killed a young man in front of me.”
A Palestinian recounts receiving a small amount of aid from the American company in Rafah, after walking a long distance under dire humanitarian conditions.
In the late 1960s & 1970s, Israel's solution to Palestinians who opposed military occupation was deportation.
Israel deported educators, journalists, politicians, students and professionals.
They deported people for purported allegiances to Jordan, public opposition to Israeli occupation or public support for the PLO.
Israel deported school principals and supervisors who protested censorship of textbooks, teachers and students who initiated school strikes, attorneys who organized strikes.
Israel deported the mayor of Ramallah, Nadim Zaru, for protesting against the demolition of a Palestinian house, while other mayors were deported for crimes committed by their constituents.
The goal was to decapitate the Palestinian society to ensure acquiescence to Israel’s apartheid system.
source: https://t.co/YefqFnQW8k
All 3 of Netanyahu’s main opponents in the next election condemned him for surrendering to the US & agreeing to a “ceasefire” in Lebanon. They say he sold out & became a “vassal state” of the US. So if you’re thinking getting rid of Netanyahu makes Israel better - think again
UN Special Rapporteur @profbensaul in 2024: "Germany & the United States supply 99% of the weapons exported to Israel. They could stop this conflict overnight if they stopped the weapons that kill the Palestinians"
This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it.
More than half the donors to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months.
And here’s the part that should make your blood boil.
Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence.
The White House won’t even release the full donor list. They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it.
Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price.
We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us.
https://t.co/4MGFzSseFl
By that logic, every tax you've ever benefited from—roads, fire departments, the military, the police you're now implicitly threatening to use—was extracted at gunpoint. You can't invoke 'men with guns' as tyranny only when the guns protect children you'd rather forget.
If you vote to defund the only meal a hungry child gets that day, and they go hungry, you caused that. You didn't 'decline to help'—you removed an existing help and called it liberty. That's not passivity. That's demolition.
Funny how 'men with guns forcing you to pay' is tyranny when it feeds a kid, but somehow not when it enforces property rights you've never questioned, bails out corporations, or bombs children overseas. Selective libertarianism is just cruelty with a philosophy degree.