{"id":277972,"date":"2024-10-21T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2024-10-21T11:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=277972"},"modified":"2024-10-21T06:47:07","modified_gmt":"2024-10-21T05:47:07","slug":"we-really-are-the-bad-guys-and-this-really-is-the-evil-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/10\/we-really-are-the-bad-guys-and-this-really-is-the-evil-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"We Really Are the Bad Guys and This Really Is the Evil Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Featured image via Adobe Stock.<\/p><\/div>\n

It can be nice to live in the western world, but the western world is not nice. Ours is the most savage and thuggish civilization on this planet, and it\u2019s not even close. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

21 Oct 2024 <\/em>– It takes some learning and insight to understand that western civilization really is the absolute worst. There can be a kind of hipster outsider tendency to judge your own society more harshly than you do others, and at first glance it can look like that\u2019s what\u2019s going on when you see western critics of the western empire denouncing the criminality of their own government and its allies much more harshly than governments like Russia, China or Iran. It\u2019s not until you\u2019ve done a fair bit of research that you go, wait, okay no, we are actually quantifiably far more destructive than any other power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. We really are the bad guys. We really are the evil empire, and everyone slamming our side as murderous monsters are absolutely correct.<\/p>\n

Whenever I say this I get westerners going \u201cOh yeah well I\u2019d much rather live here then over there\u201d or \u201cOh well if it\u2019s so bad here then why don\u2019t you go live over there?\u201d, but the fact that they immediately start babbling about where they\u2019d prefer to live is just a symptom of how sick and twisted this civilization is. They\u2019re so cognitively and emotionally divorced from the violence and tyranny their government is inflicting upon the global south that they think the question of which countries are worse than others is a question of how pleasant it would be for them personally to live in. It\u2019s like yes asshole, it\u2019s very nice to be living in the imperial core that\u2019s receiving the benefits of mass murder and imperialist extraction, and it\u2019s less nice to live in the countries where the murder and extraction is happening. That\u2019s the entire fucking point here.<\/p>\n

It can be nice to live in the western world, but the western world is not nice. Ours is the most savage and thuggish civilization on this planet, and it\u2019s not even close.<\/p>\n

\u2756<\/p>\n

The Democratic Party really does look ready to lose yet another easily winnable election by running yet another awful, murderous candidate with awful, murderous policies, and then once again blame their loss on everyone in America who is a better person than they are.<\/p>\n

\u2756<\/p>\n

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https:\/\/twitter.com\/caitoz\/status\/1847753131482108339<\/a><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

\u2756<\/p>\n

Always having to search for photos of Israel\u2019s destruction of Gaza for my articles really drives home the fact that this didn\u2019t start last year. I\u2019m always like \u201cHere\u2019s one! Wait, this one\u2019s from 2008. Here\u2019s one! No this is from 2014. Oh hey! Bah, nope, different bombing, 2021.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2756<\/p>\n

My first encounter with Israelis was when I was backpacking through South America in my twenties, and I remember being shocked by how consistently awful they all were. I guess after their mandatory military service they tend to go traveling for a bit, and whenever I\u2019d run into them they were reliably some of the nastiest people I\u2019d ever encountered.<\/p>\n

They weren\u2019t ever nasty to me, though. I am a white westerner, and I never had a problem with them. They were nasty to the impoverished brown-skinned people who were hosting us. They were obnoxious and bullying toward local guides, they\u2019d leave the place in a mess, and they were always trying to screw over the locals for a better deal or extra meals or favors. One time they tricked a hostel into putting up a sign in Hebrew for other Israeli backpackers which said ugly things about our hosts (they told the hostel owner it was a great review), which I only know because they were laughing hysterically about it and told me. They consistently treated the people who were looking after us like they were much lesser than us. Their pushiness and entitlement were just unbelievable.<\/p>\n

It was a very educational experience for me. I knew the Palestinians were being treated unfairly because my father had told me so, but I also had a great love of Jews and Jewish culture. I had visited Auschwitz and Dachau and Anne Frank\u2019s house in my travels, and I remember having some romantic ideas about kibbutzim. This was my first time directly encountering the reality that there is something unhealthy about Israeli society. Not Jews or Jewish culture, but Jewish Israelis.<\/p>\n

Now I see evidence of this on my news feed every day, in the IDF soldiers prancing around in the undergarments of dead and displaced Palestinian women, in the AI translations of Hebrew tweets, in the polls which show widespread Israeli approval for the atrocities in Gaza, in Israeli TikTok videos mocking the suffering of the Palestinians, in the Israelis showing up in my comments justifying the worst things in the world in the most depraved ways imaginable.<\/p>\n

My encounters with Israelis in South America were an early taste of ugly things to come. Everything I glimpsed then I\u2019ve been seeing online over the past year. I keep thinking about those obnoxious pricks I met all those years ago, and about how they didn\u2019t know at the time that they were giving me very useful information for me to make use of in the future.<\/p>\n

When Israel supporters tell you to shut up about Gaza until you\u2019ve been to Israel and met Israelis, just ignore them. Don\u2019t go to Israel; you\u2019re a westerner, they\u2019ll be nice to you. You can just go to one of the tourist spots in the global south that Israelis like to visit\u200a\u2014\u200aone with lots of brown-skinned people who\u2019ve been colonized by the west\u200a\u2014\u200aand watch how they treat people there. That will show you what Israelis are really like.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

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Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper<\/em>. Contact: <\/em>admin@caitlinjohnstone.com<\/a><\/p>\n

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Go to Original \u2013 caitlinjohnstone.com.au<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Oct 2024 – It takes some learning and insight to understand that Western civilization really is the absolute worst. Ours is the most savage and thuggish civilization on this planet, and it\u2019s not even close. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":180156,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1686,1268,3281,70,172],"class_list":["post-277972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-australia","tag-european-union","tag-evil-empire","tag-usa","tag-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277972"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277973,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277972\/revisions\/277973"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}