by Caitlin Johnstone, published on Substack, November 30, 2024
Al-Qaeda affiliates with a history of receiving western funding have reactivated in Syria along with Turkish-backed fighters to recapture significant amounts of territory in the war-ravaged nation.
It’s hard to say exactly what’s happening in the moment, but I will say it’s mighty convenient how Russia being tied up in Ukraine and Hezbollah being decapitated by Israel leaves Syria once again exposed to the longstanding regime change agendas of the same western empire who’s been backing both of those proxy conflicts.
Find someone who loves you like western empire managers love Al-Qaeda. https://t.co/gytfyBYMbr
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 29, 2024
Syria is more complicated and harder to understand than Gaza, but if you look into it you’ll find mountains of evidence that for many years the US and its allies and partners have been actively fomenting violence, chaos and destruction in that nation to effect regime change. Anyone who denies this is either ignorant or dishonest, as is anyone who calls you a Russian propagandist or an Assad lover for stating this well-evidenced fact.
There are a lot of people who see through the imperial lies about Gaza but still buy into the imperial lies about Syria, largely because the lies about Gaza are so much easier to see through. Immense amounts of propaganda and information ops have gone into framing the violence we’ve been seeing in Syria since 2011 as a completely organic rebellion against a tyrannical dictator who just wants to murder civilians because he is evil. But if you bring the same sincere curiosity and rigorous investigation to this issue that you brought to the plight of the Palestinians, you will discover the same kinds of lies and distortions which you’ve seen the western political/media class promote about Gaza being spun about Syria as well — frequently by the same people.
This is how unpacking the lies of the empire tends to unfold for folks. Your eyes flicker open because of some really obvious plot hole in the official narrative like Vietnam, the Iraq invasion, or Gaza, and then once you’ve seen through those lies you start getting curious about how else you’ve been deceived. You start pulling on other threads and learning more and more, and then after a while you start seeing the big picture about the US-centralized empire inflicting horrific abuses upon humanity all around the world with the goal of dominating the planet.
If you saw through the lies about Gaza, don’t stop there. Keep going. Keep pulling on threads. Keep learning. Stay curious. They lied about Gaza, they lied about Iraq, they lied about Libya, they lied about Ukraine, and they’re lying about Syria too. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to dull your curiosity. Ignore anyone who tries to shout you down and shut you up for asking inconvenient questions. Keep waking up from the matrix of empire propaganda until your eyes are truly clear.
❖
Boris Johnson told The Telegraph in a recent interview that the west is “waging a proxy war” in Ukraine, which, while obviously true, was once considered by the western political-media class to be a very taboo thing to say.
“We’re waging a proxy war, but we’re not giving our proxies the ability to do the job,” Johnson said. “For years now, we’ve been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs and it has been cruel.”
For years it was considered Kremlin propaganda to call the war in Ukraine a western proxy war against Russia. Now the line is “Well this is obviously a proxy war so we need to give our proxies more weapons, duh!”
❖
We’re taught that heroes look like western soldiers and cops taking out bad guys, when really heroes look like Palestinian journalists risking everything to tell the truth about genocidal atrocities that are backed by western governments while western journalists make propaganda.
❖
I don’t want the Australian government to ban kids from social media, I want the Australian government to stop supporting Israel’s genocidal atrocities and stop turning this country into a giant US military base in preparation for Washington’s war with China.
❖
It should be illegal to force homeless people to relocate. If a rich neighborhood is the best place to sleep rough then the rich should be forced to look at a daily reminder of the dystopia they live in until the underlying problems which cause homelessness have been fixed. You shouldn’t be allowed to hide such things to make people comfortable.
All the laws designed to criminalize homelessness and force the unhoused to relocate are just one more way our dystopia hides its abuses and contradictions from public view, the same as propaganda and internet censorship and murdering Palestinian journalists. They want the homeless out of sight and out of mind in the same way their wars and genocides are out of sight and out of mind.
They just want the homeless to go “away”, because they can’t fix the injustices and inequality which cause homelessness without upending the power structure they rule. They wish all the symptoms of poverty and injustice in our society could be hidden on the other side of vast oceans like their wars are.
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.