The November 6, 2023 Lost Horizons Newsletter
…where real knowledge– and actual solutions– intersect with real Americans!
Good-Bye, Ron DeSantis
My once ardently-supported candidate has shockingly revealed himself to be a merely fair-weather respecter of Americans’ rights and a mindless enthusiast for injustice, oppression and outright war crimes.
WITH CONSIDERABLE UNHAPPINESS, I have been compelled to withdraw what had been my ardent support for Ron DeSantis’ campaign for the White House. DeSantis has reflexively aligned himself with Israel, even after the onset of its grossly disproportionate and frankly murderous ‘collective punishment’ of Palestinians (half of them children) as punishment for the violent prison break on October 7 by a handful of the millions of Palestinians whose parents and grandparents were dispossessed of their land 75 years ago and who have spent their entire lives wasting away in captivity, squalor, poverty and misery in ghettos like Gaza.
Worse, DeSantis has distinguished himself (negatively) by issuing blatantly illegal orders suppressing the speech rights of students in Florida universities, an offense which is way-over-the-top even amongst the disturbingly widespread Pavolvian responses on behalf of Israel in most other quarters of the political landscape. (Glenn Greenwald has a good presentation on this subject here.)
In these behaviors DeSantis shows himself willing to open his mouth and exercise power entrusted to him even while appallingly ignorant of the subject in regard to which he acts (here, the history of Israel, both in its formation and its actions since). He also shows himself to be very dangerously blind or dismissive in regard to the very real dangers to Americans (and the rest of the world) in doing anything but calling for Israel to shake itself awake and start the painful process of acknowledging and beginning to undo the wrongs it has committed against the Palestinians.
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Other Voices (followed by an important afterword)
The US Empire’s PR Crisis in Gaza
by Caitlin Johnstone
The US-centralized empire is a giant network of allies, partners and assets spanning the entire globe. Many of the nations in this network, such as Israel, have strong ideologies and values systems that the empire must cooperate with to obtain their loyalty. But the empire itself has no ideology or values– it values nothing but planetary domination. The empire’s motives are no more ideological than the motives of a mugger are ideological.
So the empire has no ideology, but it is held together by cooperation with individual governments who do. The problem this creates is that sometimes the ideologies of those states cause them to do things that go against the interests of the empire as a whole. Israel can just up and decide to commit a genocidal massacre in front of everyone. Saudi Arabia can decide it’s going to dismember a Washington Post reporter with a bone saw. Proxies in Ukraine can keep saying Nazi things and sporting Nazi insignia in public. They do these things because unlike the top brass in the imperial power structure they are guided by ideology, with no regard for the need to preserve the empire’s image as a “rules-based international order”.
This often creates a PR crisis for the empire, because the public will cease consenting to the network of alliances, partners and assets if it becomes sufficiently aware of the depravity needed to hold it all together. This is typically easy to resolve because the US empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine in the history of civilization, but that propaganda machine is operated by individuals– individuals who may have learned about Palestinian rights at university, or who were disgusted about the way their employer ran cover for Israel’s murder of Shireen Abu Akleh only to find out Israel did it and was lying. So they don’t always play along with the imperial machine in their reporting, thereby exacerbating the empire’s PR crisis.
The worst thing that could possibly happen, from the empire’s point of view, is for the public to start opening their eyes to its criminality. With Israel on a genocidal rampage as pro-Palestinian protesters flood the streets worldwide, we may be certain that the manipulators who are responsible for imperial perception management are in full crisis mode, because if a critical mass of people can pick apart this one lie, it opens up the possibility of their unplugging themselves from the whole propaganda matrix that keeps the empire operational.
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Plus,
Illuminating Anniversaries For This Week!
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“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves…too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country–when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.'”
-Senator Carl Schurz, October 17, 1899
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