[D66] For a full week now the Israeli army has been bombing Gaza

[R.O.]

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/on-bombs-and-bombings-29f3e5baa769

NOS ZWIJGT IN ALLE TALEN


  On Bombs And Bombings

Caitlin Johnstone 
<https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone?source=post_page-----29f3e5baa769---------------------->
Caitlin Johnstone 
<https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone?source=post_page-----29f3e5baa769---------------------->
Aug 18 
<https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/on-bombs-and-bombings-29f3e5baa769?source=post_page-----29f3e5baa769----------------------> 
· 5 min read

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For a full week now 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/israel-carries-air-strike-gaza-balloon-bombs-rockets-200816055219330.html> 
the Israeli army has been bombing Gaza, a population that is about to 
run out of fuel 
<https://ppost24.com/post/804/gaza-to-plunge-in-full-darkness-in-days#.XzrDQI2cbzg.twitter> 
for its only power plant due to a years-long Israeli program of 
deliberate siege warfare 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-starvation-diet-gaza/11810>.

Yesterday the US ordered an airstrike 
<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/syria-war-deadly-clash-between-us-and-syrian-forces-qamishli-checkpoint-airstrike-today-2020-08-17/> 
on Syrian forces, killing one, when they refused to let the illegal 
occupying force past a checkpoint in northern Syria.

In both cases an arm of the US-centralized empire used wildly 
disproportionate force against people who stood against a hostile 
occupation of their own country. In both cases the more powerful and 
violent occupiers claimed they were acting in “self-defense”. In both 
cases dropping explosives from the sky upon human beings barely made the 
news.

Bombs should not exist. Explosives designed to blow fire and shrapnel 
through human bodies should not be a thing. In a sane world, there 
wouldn’t be bombs, and if some mentally unbalanced person ever made and 
used one it would be a major international news story.

Instead, bombs are cranked out like iPhones at enormous profit 
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/02/21/military-spending-defense-contractors-profiting-from-war-weapons-sales/39092315/>, 
and nearly all bombings are ignored. Many bombs are being dropped per 
day 
<https://truthout.org/articles/bring-the-troops-home-but-stop-the-bombing-too/> 
by the US and its allies, with a massive civilian death toll 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/10/02/trump-impeachment-civilian-casualties-war/>, 
and almost none of those bombings receive any international attention. 
The only time they do is generally when a bombing occurs that was not 
authorized by the US-centralized empire.

This is one of those absolutely freakish things about our society that 
has become normalized 
<https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/abnormalize-the-status-quo-22c3ce53cd26> 
through careful narrative management, and we really shouldn’t allow it 
to be. The fact that explosives designed to rip apart human anatomy are 
dropped from the sky many times per day for no other reason than to 
exert control over foreign countries should horrify us all.

An interesting social experiment when you talk to someone might be to 
tell them solemnly, “There’s been a bombing.” Then when they say “What?? 
Where??”, tell them “The Middle East mostly. Our government and its 
allies drop many bombs there per day in order to keep a resource-rich 
geostrategic region balkanized and controllable.”

Then watch their reaction.

You will probably notice a marked change in demeanor as the person 
learns that what you meant is different from what they thought you 
meant. They will likely act as though you’d tricked them in some way. 
But you didn’t. You just called a thing the thing that it is, and let 
their assumptions do the rest.

When someone gravely tells you “There’s been a bombing,” what they 
almost always mean is that there has been a suspected terrorist attack 
in a western, majority-white nation. They don’t mean the kind of bombing 
that kills exponentially more people and does exponentially more damage 
than terrorism in western nations. They don’t mean the kind of terrorism 
that our government enacts and approves of.

There’s a lot of pushback nowadays against the racism and prejudices 
that are woven throughout the fabric of our society, and rightly so 
<https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/meditations-on-whiteness-6f737950bf6>. 
But what doesn’t get nearly enough attention in this discourse is the 
fact that while some manifestations of bigotry may have been 
successfully scaled back somewhat in our own countries, it was in a 
sense merely exported overseas.

The violence that is being inflicted overseas in our name by the 
US-centralized empire is more horrific than any manifestation of racism 
we’re ever likely to encounter at home. It is more horrific than the 
pre-integration American South. It is more horrific than even slavery 
itself. Yet even the more conscious among us fail to give this 
relentless onslaught of violence a proportionate degree of recognition 
and condemnation, even while the consent for it is largely born of the 
unexamined bigoted notion 
<https://medium.com/@geri.danton/a-type-of-bigotry-we-dont-talk-about-but-should-7ad9f4d74305> 
that violence against people in developing and non-western countries 
does not matter.

Like many other forms of bigotry, this one has been engineered and 
promulgated by powerful people who benefit from it. If the mainstream 
news media were what it purports to be, namely an institution dedicated 
to creating an informed populace about what’s truthfully going on in the 
world, we would see the bombings in foreign nations given the same type 
of coverage that a bombing in Paris or London receives.

This would immediately bring consciousness to the unconscious bigotry 
that those in the US-centralized empire hold against people in low and 
middle income countries, which is exactly why the plutocrat-owned media 
do not report on it in this way. The US-centralized empire is held 
together by endless violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built 
their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire.

When people set out to learn what’s really going on in their world they 
often start cramming their heads with history and geopolitics facts and 
figures, which is of course fine and good. But a bigger part of getting 
a clear image of what’s happening in the world is simply turning your 
gaze upon things you already kind of knew were happening, but couldn’t 
quite bring yourself to look at.


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