Biden Goes to the Wrong Palestine and Other Cracks in the US Empire Narrative

Yesterday, the White House announced that President Joe Biden is going to Israel(source: US News) tomorrow to show solidarity with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has the dubious distinction of being less popular with Israelis than Biden is with Americans(source: Haaretz). A low bar, indeed.

In fact, according to Haaretz, not me, two-thirds of Israelis would prefer anyone else for Prime Minister. Perhaps the best hope for the people in Gaza is the disgust Israelis feel for their own leadership. Talk about irony.

Meanwhile, back in East Palestine, Ohio, residents find themselves living in a toxic, post-apocalyptic world that the Biden Administration studiously ignores. Reports come out of finding dioxin all over the place(source: Fox News), but first Ukraine and now the other Palestine soaked up nearly all the media attention. That doesn’t mean the ongoing disaster that started with a completely preventable train derailment and deliberate incineration has just gone away.

(photo dated 2/6/2023 courtesy Fox News)

The same thing can be said about Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi and Lahaina, Hawaii. Human-caused disasters in America are allowed to happen, and to keep happening, but oligarchs don’t want to do anything unprofitable to help those people and, since they control the US Government, nothing does.

It is natural for the Americans living in those places, and for all Americans who want to see their fellow citizens get the help they need and deserve, to ask:

Why are we sending all this money to Ukraine and Israel instead of helping our own people?

And the answer is simple: We The People are not sending it. We never had a referendum on whether to arm Ukraine or Israel. We were never even consulted. The oligarchy is sending it because it profits from it and they don’t give a shit about any of us, except to keep us from revolting against them.

They do the latter by controlling the media narrative. Very basically, it means they lie a lot. They lied about who attacked us on 9/11/2001. They lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. They lied about Afghanistan. They lied about Covid being a deadly pandemic, they lied about the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, they lied about allopathic methods of treating patients who did get sick, and they are still lying whenever they say there is a vaccine for Covid, influenza, or other respiratory viruses when such a thing has never existed, and may in fact never exist simply because those viruses mutate too quickly into more infectious and less symptomatic forms for any vaccine against one type of virus to be effective against its successors.

They lied about Assad attacking his own people with chemical weapons in Syria. They lied about what happened in Ukraine and Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed and about the 2014 coup in Kiev. They lied when they said the Ukraine War was not about NATO expansion. Now they are lying to us by saying that Ukrainian Nazis who swore an oath to Adolf Hitler himself were not really Nazis, but freedom fighters. They lied about 1/6/2021 being a coup attempt(or even a real riot). They lie about a carnival barker named Trump being a Nazi.

Now they are lying about a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign, called just that by the Israelis who are actually doing the cleansing, and calling what amounted to a prison break somehow being an unprovoked attack upon the jailers after 16 years of literal concentration camp confinement.

They lie and tell us inflation is under control when the cost of eggs is still at least double what it was two years ago. They lie about workers being unreasonable by striking to try to get wage increases that will at least keep up with the pace of inflation. Then they lie and say they are supporting the workers.

They lie about factual narratives like this one by calling them misinformation or disinformation or foreign propaganda. They lie about who is on the left and who is on the right. They lie every time they claim scientists really understand what is happening to our climate.

Unfortunately for them, facts are stubborn things. No matter how much the oligarchy, or the academics who serve it, prate on about how changing people’s attitudes towards life is the secret of happiness and justice, the underlying material reality that their own actions and policies have created cannot be wished or propagandized away.

It’s a lot harder to believe a lie about prosperity when one’s standard of living has obviously declined and there’s no hope in the current system of improving it. When that lie becomes in-your-face obvious, it’s a lot easier to see all the other lies they throw at you as lies, and to simply assume that they—the authorities, the institutions, the media, the establishment—are lying to you than it is to take them at their word.

The lies have been and still are coming at the American people too fast, too furious, and too mutually contradictory to be blindly accepted as Truth anymore. For that matter, such a realization is a bloody-damned survival trait in 21st Century America.

Joe Biden going to Subjugated Palestine instead of to East Palestine(or Flint, Jackson, or Lahaina) illustrates the hubris of the American oligarchy and the contempt it has for the American people in bright, glowing neon lights. It’s obvious, and no amount of wishful, idealistic thinking will ever change it.

This is why only half of Americans fully support Israel’s military response(source: CNN) to what was, by any objective standard, either a prison breakout or a slave revolt. In spite of all the propaganda and all the lies thrown out there about Hamas beheading babies, the establishment can only muster 50% support, and that support will only decline as more truth comes out.

Most of the other 50% of Americans don’t really know what’s going on in Palestine, either—they just don’t believe what they are told by their own media and government. For good, solid historical reasons.

Sooner or later, when enough Americans understand why they are being lied to all the time, things will change quickly, so quickly the spin & lie machines won’t have time to react, and regimes like Israel’s will face a very different reality indeed.

I think so, anyway. Maybe it’s because I’m American and have some faith in my fellow citizens. Maybe it’s because I’m a materialist historian and I see too many parallels to the fall of other oligarchies and aristocracies in the past. Maybe it’s because optimism is better for my mental health.

Or maybe it is because Lincoln was right. You really can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but never all of the people all of the time.

Thank you for reading, have a nice day, and keep on keeping on not believing the lies.