We’re The Fucking Terrorists

Caitlin Johnstone
4 min readOct 5, 2024

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Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Hezbollah is killing Israeli soldiers who are invading their country while Israeli soldiers are deliberately killing women and children and medical staff and journalists.

Guess which side the west calls terrorists.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, “terrorist organization” is a completely arbitrary designation which is used as a tool of western narrative control to justify war and militarism. In effect it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them”.

The open letter to President Biden from 99 US healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza contains a quote from Dr Mark Perlmutter, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.”

You know what? We’re the fucking terrorists. We are. All of us who live in the western power alliance who haven’t stopped our governments from backing this mass atrocity.

The word “terrorist” won’t have any meaning or relevance until it applies first and foremost to the giant globe-spanning power structure that is inflicting this nightmare upon our species.

Democrats are seriously going to do all this evil shit in the middle east and then blame Jill Stein and Chappell Roan if Kamala loses.

Normal person: A war with Iran would be disastrous.

Crazy person: Oh so you love the Ayatollah and you think theocracy is good and you hate gay people and you want all women to wear hijabs.

Iran is not Iraq. Iran can fight back. A direct war with Iran would be a nightmare. It would make Iraq look like a walk in the park. It would be vastly more deadly, destructive and destabilizing.

Iran is not the enemy. The enemy are the pricks in the US and Israel who’ve been pushing us toward this war.

Every nation on the top ten proven oil reserves list is either a target of US warmongering, has already been ruined by US warmongering, or is part of the US-centralized power structure.

  1. Venezuela
  2. Saudi Arabia
  3. Canada
  4. Iran
  5. Iraq
  6. Kuwait
  7. United Arab Emirates
  8. Russia
  9. Libya
  10. Nigeria

Everyone who’s been watching the daily footage of shredded human bodies from Israeli massacres this past year has a very different attitude toward Israel than everyone who has not. Not just because the footage shapes your views, but because Israel supporters avoid looking at it.

Nobody honestly still believes Israel kills all these women, children, journalists, medical staff and humanitarian aid workers by accident. You either know they do it on purpose and you say so, or you know they do it on purpose but you never admit it in order to protect a political agenda.

Republicans are calling Biden a liar for saying at a press conference, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none.”

This is after Trump openly uttered the phrase “Make Israel Great Again,” and admitted to letting wealthy pro-Israel donors frequent the White House and make political demands that he hastened to grant when he was president. Trump also recently slammed Biden for saying Israel should not attack Iran’s nuclear sites, saying he supports targeting them.

This election cycle is mostly just Republicans and Democrats having a “who will give Israel more genocide weapons to start World War III” contest.

So much conflict and confusion arises from the way mainstream political discourse in the US wildly exaggerates the differences between Democrats and Republicans while greatly downplaying the differences between Democrats and antiwar leftists. Both sides do this; the Republican political-media class frames Democrats as a bunch of far left Marxists, while the Democrat political-media class frames the differences between themselves and the antiwar left as so trivial that they should obviously expect the left to vote for them.

In reality, Democrats and Republicans have far, FAR more in common with each other than either of them have with the authentic left — even if you include the furthest extremes allowed in the party. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are far closer to each other ideologically than someone who wants to dismantle capitalism and the US war machine is to Bernie Sanders.

The obfuscation of these points by the mainstream political-media class is entirely deliberate, and can be explained by the Noam Chomsky quote “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” Unless you fully understand this quote and make it the lens through which you perceive all mainstream political discourse, you will never see western politics clearly.

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