Patrice de Bergeracpas

Abby Martin explores what’s missing from coverage of Biden’s announcement of the Afghanistan withdrawal. 

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The mass media are working furiously to spin this in a way that rivals my satire piece from the other day. The New York Times has been cartoonishly re-writing its own reporting in a desperate attempt to make Israel look like an innocent victim of unprovoked attacks instead of the obvious aggressor against people protesting a brutal apartheid regime backed by an entire empire. The New York Post falsely reported that the deaths on Monday were caused by “Airstrikes from Hamas militants” (when did Hamas get an air force?) when sharing an article which falsely implied that those fatalities were inflicted by both sides. DW News framed its headline in a way that suggested the nine children killed had been involved in “fighting” against Israeli forces, and the word “clashes” is being thrown about willy nilly to describe a very one-sided assault. But it isn’t working.

JACQUES R. PAUWELS—On the ruins of the Ancien Régime, which had served the interests of the nobility and the Church, [the moderate revolutionaries] erected a state that was supposed to be in the service of the well-to-do burghers. Politically, these solid gentlemen initially found a home in the “club” or embryonic political party of the Feuillants, subsequently in that of the Girondins. The latter name reflected the place of origin of its leading element, a contingent of members of the bourgeoisie of Bordeaux, the great harbour on the banks of the Gironde estuary, whose wealth was based not only on trade in wine but also, and primarily, in slaves.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Capitalism is a misanthropic, dystopian religion. By “capitalism” I mean this or any other possible system wherein mass-scale human behavior is driven by the pursuit of capital. By “religion” I mean organized collective faith-based belief system.

In times past the dominant religions had names like “Christianity” or “Islam”, which were used to promote doctrines that shaped societies, dominated civilizations, and built entire empires. Theocratic institutions labored on behalf of the powerful to bend entire continents to their will, using narratives about beneficent invisible deities as cover. Nowadays the dominant religion is called capitalism, and the theocratic institutions are called governments, and the beneficent deity is called the invisible hand of the market.

In the old religions, people would gather once a week in a building to be indoctrinated by clergymen. In the new religion the clergymen come to indoctrinate you right in the comfort of your own home on screens showing news, TV shows, and Hollywood movies.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—We’re not going to rocket ship our way out of this mess. We’re not going to be able to keep doing things the way we are doing them. The “growth for its own sake” ideology that Musk and Bezos have dedicated their lives to embodying is, as Edward Abbey put it, the ideology of a cancer cell. Such an ideology is unsustainable. We’re going to have to change.

“I must change” is always the first possibility that an ego rules out when evaluating a dilemma, and it’s the same ego which says we are separate individuals, and it’s the same ego which created our dilemma in the first place. But we must change. We must transcend the ego.

That’s always the last thing anyone wants to hear, that we need to change, but it’s true. We’ll either collectively change our minds in a way that enables us to drastically shift the way we operate on this planet, or we’ll go extinct. It is evolve or die time. We’ll either make it or we won’t.

Space will not save us, and we will never colonize it. We can explore space, but it will be done via satellites and other tech, not by living organisms. Our astronauts have up until this point been nothing more than glorified scuba divers, entirely dependent on boxes of Earth’s ecosystem, no more independent from that ecosystem than someone holding their breath. This will remain the case.