Global

If what is currently happening in the occupied Palestinian West Bank took place before October 7, our attention would have been completely fixated on that region in Palestine.

 The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, however, has devalued the important, if not earth-shattering events underway in the West Bank, which is now a stage for the most violent Israeli military campaign since the Second Palestinian Uprising (2000-05).

 As of the time of writing of this article, since October 7, more than 360 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, while thousands have been wounded and thousands more arrested. 

I inhale the big, do-nothing shrug that always follows the annual posting, by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, of its global metaphor for Armageddon.

For the second year in a row, the Doomsday Clock has been set – by scientists analyzing the dangers faced by Planet Earth due to human exploitation and nuclear-armed geopolitics – at 90 seconds to midnight. In other words, be afraid. Be very afraid.

The New Hampshire primary has confirmed that the United States is on the way to a disastrous fall election. Unless a health crisis forces withdrawal from the presidential race, either Donald Trump or Joe Biden is headed for a second term. The electoral outlook is now dystopian.

 President Biden’s role as party boss worked out well for him in New Hampshire. No doubt mindful that he finished fifth in the state’s 2020 primary with a dismal 8 percent of the vote, Biden directed the Democratic National Committee to decertify New Hampshire’s historic first-in-the-nation primary, and he kept his name off the 2024 ballot. Yet pro-Biden forces ran a write-in campaign that got him nearly two-thirds of the vote on Tuesday.

REMINDER: [Day 110 of the ongoing and now accelerating genocide] Israel is
still killing 200-300 civilians daily in Gaza (half of them children) and
injures twice as many daily. People injured have very little medical care
and die regularly of infested wounds or get their limbs amputated with
kitchen knives without anesthesia (1100 children had their limbs amputated
as such). Casualties (injured and killed) are now 3.2% of the 2.3 million
population (equivalent to 11.2 million US victims). Israel continues to
deny humanitarian aid (food, water medicines including anesthesia) with
Egypt's collusion. Famine is spreading especially among the 400-500,000
civilians left in North Gaza (but also in other regions of Gaza). Deaths
are thus accelerating. Diseases (Hepatitis A, Leishmania, intestinal and
skin disorders) are spreading with no treatments. Israel rendered most of
the hospitals and clinics inoperational. Kidney dialysis patients, cancer
patients, and other patients are dying as there are no treatments. Winter
storm arrived today and 1.9 million people have no shelter. 110 journalists

“To make the organization of propaganda possible, the media must be concentrated, the number of news agencies reduced, the press brought under single control, and radio and film monopolies established. The effect will be still greater if the various media are concentrated in the same hands. When a newspaper trust (ie, monopoly) also extends its control over films and radio, propaganda can be directed at the masses and the individual can be caught in the wide net of media.” – Jacques Ellul (1965)

 When Edward Bernays (the nephew of Sigmund Freud) wrote his famous 1928 book, Propaganda, he titled the first chapter of the book “Organizing Chaos”. The quotes below are taken directly from that chapter.

What was strikingly obvious to me in reading the book is that Bernays – in the year before the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929 - wasn’t making any effort to sugar-coat the fact that he actually believes that propaganda is an essential and desirable fact of modern life.