Caitlin Johnstone
@caitoz • 468,459 subscribers
100% reader-funded. All works free to republish/use/translate. All works co-authored by Tim Foley. Patreon: https://t.co/W3o6lpndra Paypal: https://t.co/F6jUZFOo8z
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Hey Americans! Escape Debt By Going To War With Iran! Today in dystopia, war pundits have begun suggesting that the US could recruit sufficient troops for a ground invasion of Iran by offering young Americans debt forgiveness in exchange for enlisting. I guess it was only a matter of time. In an article titled “The war with Iran will not be won through airstrikes, so what’s left?”, the Jerusalem Post’s AJ Jaff writes the following: “Recruitment numbers are running below what a ground invasion of Iran would require. Estimates for a successful ground campaign against Iran’s 31 provincial commands and its Mosaic Defense Doctrine run between 750 thousand and 1.5 million American troops. The current active US Army stands at roughly 452 thousand. The math does not work, obviously. “Based on American history, however, there is a path forward. Not conscription or a draft in a world war-era sense, but enlistment through a ‘debt forgiveness program.’ “The average American aged 18 to 34 carries more than $40 thousand in non-mortgage debt across student loans, credit card balances, auto loans, and personal loans, with some estimates go as high as $100 thousand. “This is the cohort the Pentagon needs. A federally administered debt-forgiveness enlistment program that fully discharges student loan, credit card, and loan balances after 24 or 36 months of service, and extends the GI Bill, would produce voluntary enlistment at scale.” “This is not theoretical. “It is the American state doing what the American state has always done when it needed staff it could not otherwise generate. World War II offered the GI Bill. Vietnam offered college deferments. The post 9/11 wars offered signing bonuses and citizenship pathways. The Iran war will need to offer debt relief. The economics of the indebted American 20-and 30-something make this the most efficient conversion mechanism available to the Pentagon and the Trump administration. “The moral reading on this is uncomfortable. But states generate the soldiers they need through the incentives that work on the population they have.” In a Twitter essay on the same subject published earlier this month, AJ Jaff used more blunt language: “When the choice is decades chained to $45,000+ in debt, or a few years of service that erases it and hands you a clean start, a huge share of desperate young people will take the offer. Not because they ‘support the war’. Because the debt was engineered into a cage, and service is the ONLY door out.” The Jerusalem Post says that Jaff is a Canadian who currently serves as the head of security for an unnamed “multinational organization,” describing him in his author bio as “a retired officer of the Canadian Armed Forces and a recognized expert in international security, crisis management, and geopolitical risk.” There isn’t much publicly available information about Jaff apart from this, and yet here he is being amplified by one of Israel’s largest English-language newspapers. So we can expect we’ll be seeing this idea pop up again elsewhere. It’s just everything ugly about the US empire all rolled up in one neat little package, isn’t it? Struggling American citizens strapped with mountains of bills because they live in a dystopia which plunges people into debt for the privilege of living on the planet they were born on, desperately enlisting to go kill people in an imperialist war of aggression overseas in the hope of one day getting their heads above water financially. It just might be the most American idea anyone has ever had. Reading by Tim Foley:
Caitlin Johnstone113,480 просмотров • 7 дней назад
This is nuts, Trump really did do exactly what Ryan Grim suggested he do hours earlier: pretend Iran's ten-point plan is a new proposal, counting on the fact that the media hasn't been reporting on Iran's demands to make it look like a new offer Tehran put forward in desperation.
Caitlin Johnstone1,975,469 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
![Crenshaw: [Chinese citizens] must cooperate with Chinese intelligence whenever they are called upon, and if they are called upon they're bound to secrecy. That would include you. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew: I'm Singaporean.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1639087482380910594/ext_tw_video_thumb/1639086137246642182/pu/img/t_vMNMeP8rZizmFu.jpg)
The first fully AI-generated movie to be accepted by a major film festival, Dreams of Violets, is atrocity propaganda for war with Iran. The trailer features characters gazing joyfully up at US/Israeli fighter jets arriving to bomb their country while a narrator talks of freedom:
Caitlin Johnstone349,540 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
For A Westerner, Opposing The Empire Is The Only Path To Dignity We have no control over the fact that right now we live in a society that is fueled by a system of imperialist extraction propped up by the barrel of a gun, but we can control our response to that reality.
Caitlin Johnstone15,471 просмотров • 4 дней назад
The actual, official 2024 Democratic Party platform accused Trump of "fecklessness and weakness" for failing to go to war with Iran during his first term. Kamala Harris labeled Iran the #1 enemy of the United States. In their 2024 debate, Harris repeatedly slammed Trump for being too soft on America's enemies and announced that she "will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel." There was no "plan" for avoiding this. Your people wanted this war as much as Trump and his handlers did. That's why they're doing nothing right now.
Caitlin Johnstone377,878 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
Long as we're still picking on Sarah Hurwitz, I haven't seen anyone flagging how she said western Jews should have more loyalty to Israel than their own countries because Israeli Jews are their "siblings". Under the IHRA definition of antisemitism it's banned to say Jews do this.
Caitlin Johnstone419,466 просмотров • 9 месяцев назад
Zionists Push Islamophobia Because It's Easier Than Getting People To Like Israel "Israel makes everything gross. It makes the world more violent, more sociopathic, and more hateful. The entire state is sustained by nonstop violence and hatred." Reading by Tim Foley.
Caitlin Johnstone431,826 просмотров • 10 месяцев назад
Our Entire Civilization Is Run By Oligarchs And Empire Managers The Wall Street Journal has a new article out titled “The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA,” subtitled “Without CIA funding that helped keep NeXT afloat in the ’80s, Steve Jobs might not have made a triumphant return to Apple — and the iPhone might not have its foundational operating code.” All the top tech giants have deep ties to the CIA. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon. Facebook and Instagram are overseen by “former” CIA operatives. Our whole civilization is run by an alliance of oligarchs and empire managers. ❖ In a recent interview with Israel Hayom, Israeli “Minister of Diaspora Affairs” Amichai Chikli said that Zionists need to “cooperate with the conservative mainstream, American and European, against radical Islam.” Chikli argued that the western right doesn’t care about antisemitism, so it doesn’t make sense to place emphasis there, but “radical Islam interests them very much.” I have said it before and I’ll say it again: Zionists promote Islamophobia because convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to like Israel. This is a fact, not an opinion. Last year Drop Site News published a leaked polling report that had been commissioned by the Israeli government which found that while Israel’s reputation is crumbling throughout the western world, one way to salvage it would be to foment panic about Muslims. Drop Site reports the following: “Israel’s best tactic to combat this, according to the study, is to foment fear of ‘Radical Islam’ and ‘Jihadism,’ which remain high, the research finds. By highlighting Israeli support for women’s rights and gay rights while elevating concerns that Hamas wants to ‘destroy all Jews and spread Jihadism,’ Israeli support rebounded by an average of over 20 points in each country. ‘Especially once the situation in Gaza is resolved, the room for growth in all countries is very significant,’ the report concludes.” So if you speak critically about Israel online and suddenly find your replies inundated with Zionists shrieking about Islam and Muslims, that’s why. Their research has concluded that convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to love Israel. ❖ The Guardian has published an open letter addressed “to Iran’s political prisoners” from big-name western leftists including Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rashid Khalidi, Robin DG Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judith Butler, and Walden Bello. Their screed frames Iran as being equally immoral as the US empire and criticizes anti-imperialists who refuse to condemn Iran in the middle of an imperialist war of aggression against the Islamic Republic. “We reject the false binary of imperialism and hollow anti-imperialism,” the letter says. “We invite global civil society and anti-imperialist activists and organizations to extend their unconditional support and solidarity to all incarcerated kin fighting for our collective liberation, to build relationships with Iranian political prisoners and uplift their voices, to put pressure on the Islamic Republic by challenging its narrative, and to call upon that government to immediately stop all the executions and free all political prisoners.” This, needless to say, is hot garbage. I don’t care who you are, if your “anti-imperialism” leads you to attack the same governments as the CIA and the US State Department, then you’re just another imperialist. It’s so obnoxious and disgusting to be an American and accuse empire-targeted countries of tyranny. This is like being a German in 1940 and spending your energy decrying human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. You live in the heart of the empire, and yet you’re moving your crosshairs away from the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth to denounce one of the few remaining nations who’ve resisted being absorbed into its power umbrella? Fuck off. Shut the fuck up you ridiculous wanker. I cannot stand all these western “leftists” and “anarchists” who insist on placing the western empire on equal or near-equal footing with the governments it targets. All they do is nullify anti-war sentiment and help grease the wheels for the imperial propaganda machine by legitimizing militarist narratives about how the people need rescuing from the evil regime and giving uninformed leftists the false impression that we’re watching two equally evil forces battling it out. Stop being pro bono Pentagon propagandists and get your shit together, assholes. ❖ The answer to the question “Why is that terrible thing happening?” is usually “Because it makes some rich white guys wealthier” or “Because it helps shore up US planetary domination” or “Because Israel wants it,” and it’s often some combination of all three. ❖ Genocidal apartheid states should not exist and do not have a right to exist. I said this on Twitter the other day and someone yelled at me for saying terrible things about Israel. I replied, “How did you know I was talking about Israel?” ❖ Saying you can support Israel without being a racist is like saying you could support the transatlantic slave trade without being a racist. ❖ You can get a picture of how insane western society is by imagining what would happen if Iran successfully assassinated Trump. The entire western political/media class would act like something outrageous and evil had just happened, but any sane person would know it was fair play. ❖ The dumbest argument I’ve heard in favor of religion is “Oh so you’re saying the majority of humanity is wrong??” Of course they are. Have you seen humanity? The majority is wrong about a great many things. They only just began figuring out that Israel is bad, for fuck’s sake. We live in a highly controlled and indoctrinated society where people are aggressively propagandized by the powerful to believe things which benefit the powerful. It is not safe to vote with the majority in such a civilization. The mainstream worldviews we are given to choose from are made of pure power-serving bullshit. This isn’t a comment on religion itself; I personally couldn’t care less if you are religious. I’m just saying in an insane society like the one we live in, you’ve got to have the courage to stand on your own and rely on your own reasoning. You might make mistakes, but figuring it out on your own has a much higher probability of finding the truth than following the herd while trapped inside a mind-controlled dystopia. ❖ Reading by Tim Foley:
Caitlin Johnstone30,594 просмотров • 18 дней назад
Israeli Officials Promote Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories About Israel Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that he manipulated the United States into war with Iran, and Itamar Ben-Gvir shared an AI video of Palestinians being sent to Nazi-style concentration camps. Reading by Tim Foley.
Caitlin Johnstone14,145 просмотров • 8 дней назад
