Every time something blows up in a Muslim region, you get the same routine. 

Oh, it’s a theocracy. 
Oh, they’re ruled by religion. 
Oh, this is ancient hatred going back thousands of years.

Meanwhile the United States is supposedly this calm, secular, rational actor just trying to keep the peace. Right. Sure. Totally.

Except that story falls apart the second you crack open a history book.

Take Jerusalem in 1917. The British roll in, beat the Ottomans, and suddenly you’ve got politicians and newspapers talking like they just finished the Crusades. 

Not metaphorically. Literally. 

David Lloyd George, the prime minister of Britain at the time, called it “the last and greatest of the Crusades.”

That’s not medieval monks talking. That’s a modern Western leader, in the twentieth century, saying this stuff out loud.

So let’s stop pretending the Crusades were some dusty medieval fever dream. According to the people running the world at the time, they ended in 1917. That’s not ancient history.

That’s my grandparents’ lifetime.

And here’s the part people like to skip. Britain was not there because Jesus needed backup.

They were there for power. 
Trade routes. 
The Suez Canal. 
Control of the region after the Ottoman Empire collapsed. 
That’s it. That’s the whole story.

The crusader language was just marketing. It made conquest sound noble instead of what it actually was, which was imperial expansion dressed up in religious cosplay.

Fast forward a century and look at what’s happening now.

The US bombs Nigeria and suddenly it’s all about protecting Christians. That’s the headline.

But then you look closer and even Nigerian officials are like, yeah, this isn’t really a religious conflict. It’s land disputes, insurgencies, state collapse, criminal networks. Messy stuff. Real stuff.

Shhh!

So instead, you slap a big religious label on it. You say it’s about defending Christianity.

You fucking do it on Christmas for extra flavor.

And boom, now it’s not geopolitics anymore. It’s a moral crusade. Again.

Same trick. New century.

And this ties directly into the way Israel gets discussed in the West. A huge chunk of the conversation is built on this idea that Muslims are just inherently violent, irrational, prone to extremism.  

So if Israel drops bombs, it’s self-defense. If Palestinians resist, it’s terrorism. No context required. No history allowed.

But if religion were the real driver of violence, history would look very different. The biggest mass killings in human history were carried out by modern states. Colonial empires. World wars. Industrialized slaughter.

Most of them run by Christian-majority countries.

That doesn’t mean Christianity is violent. It means power is violent. Violence follows power. Always has.

Religion is just the wrapper. It’s the story you tell people so they don’t ask uncomfortable questions about land, money, resources, or control.

That’s why the whole “this conflict goes back thousands of years” line is such nonsense.

No it doesn’t.

The version we’re living in is barely a century old.  Barely three generations ago.

So no, wars are almost never religious.

Religion is just the excuse.
Dehumanization is the tool.
Power is the motive.
And history keeps repeating itself because people keep pretending those things are the same.

Israel daily life has been sliding sharply to the right.

And today an index of women’s wellbeing ranks Israel well below Canada at 16th, well below the USA at 31st, well below the UAE at 20th, and even well below Saudi Arabia at 63rd.

Israel comes in at 84th for women’s peace and security.

CNN reported on it.

That is huge.

Because for decades, criticizing Israel in Western mainstream media was not a thing. You did not do it.

Nobody puts baby in a corner.

You tiptoed around it. You cleared your throat. You added twelve disclaimers. You apologized in advance. “I’m not antisemitic, but…”

So when CNN runs a straight faced piece saying Israel is sliding backward, this is not courage. This is not conscience. This is a warning light on the dashboard of empire.

What they are really saying is this: The current Netanyahu government has become a problem.

Not because it is cruel. Not because it is unjust. Those things were always manageable. It is a problem because it is noisy. It is sloppy. It is wrecking the illusion. It is breaking the machinery of quiet management.

Empire does not need virtue. Empire needs silence.

Empire needs things done smoothly, discreetly, with good manners and a low profile.

What it needs now is quiet change. Change the policy or change the guy. Either way, turn the volume down so business can go back to normal.

Resume business as usual.
Reduce scrutiny.
Reassert narrative control.
Preserve the existing order with minimal adjustment.

That is how hegemonic systems survive crises. They do not fix the problem. They lower the volume.

And notice how they do it. They talk about women’s rights. That is the safe door. That is the polite door. That is the liberal door. An index, a chart, a ranking. Numbers do the talking so nobody has to say the real words out loud. Occupation. Apartheid. Genocide. No no, we do not say those words yet.

We say women’s wellbeing. We say democratic backsliding. We say concern.

BTW, CNN does not mention the Gender Inequality Index, which paints a somewhat better picture for Israel, though still not great. Israel scores around 0.123, better than the USA at roughly 0.2, but not as well as the UAE at about 0.118 or Canada at roughly 0.080. Shhh.

Anyway. The danger is not backlash.

The danger is relief. The danger is that a quieter Israel under a different leader will be sold as progress.

Tone will be mistaken for justice. Optics will be mistaken for peace.

And everyone will be encouraged to relax, be reasonable, stop paying attention, go back to sleep.

But here is the problem for them. People have seen too much.

This is not abstract anymore. It has been filmed, streamed, archived, stitched together, and burned into memory. Once you see something clearly, forgetting is not natural. It has to be engineered.

That is where pressure lives.

Refuse closure. Refuse the idea that swapping the manager changes the system. Refuse the polite language that turns mass suffering into a technical problem. Keep your eyes open.

Keep saying the uncomfortable thing. Keep connecting the dots they would rather keep separate.

Because quiet is not peace.

And you going back to sleep is exactly what they are counting on.

A lot has happened this year. 
Most of it fucking terrible.  Unimaginable.  I thought 2024 sucked.  Listen...

But more people are connecting the dots and speaking out against genocide, and I hope that continues to snowball.

The idea that reconciliation or a one-state solution would lead to the extermination of Jews is a false and fear-based narrative. It assumes that Jewish safety depends on maintaining ethnic dominance rather than equal rights. But history shows that true security comes from justice, not supremacy.

A democratic, shared state would not erase Jewish identity or culture. It would protect it alongside others. The fear of annihilation ignores the possibility that Jews can live safely and freely in a state where all people are equal and not one built on exclusion and control. 

Justice for Palestinians does not mean destruction for Jews. It means a future rooted in coexistence, not domination.

This vision is captured in the phrase “from the river to the sea” which is a call, in its liberatory sense, not for expulsion or erasure, but for equality, dignity, and freedom for everyone living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It imagines a single democratic homeland where no group is superior and no people are oppressed.  A home for both Palestinians and Jews, not one at the expense of the other.

I don’t want a two-state solution, Santa.
The two-state solution is often framed as a moral compromise, but in reality, it protects the status quo, delays accountability, and avoids confronting the deeper issue: a system built on inequality and displacement. It may sound balanced, but it too often serves to preserve ethno-national privilege while appearing to endorse peace.

U.S. foreign policy has been the dominant destructive force in Venezuela and El Salvador since the 20th century. Both countries are rich, but their governments and economies have been deliberately destabilized.

In Venezuela, the U.S.

- backed corporate oil control

- supported a 2002 coup attempt against the elected government

- imposed crippling sanctions aimed at regime change since 1999

In El Salvador, the U.S.

- funded and armed military regimes and death squads during the civil war (1980–1992)

- exported gang violence through mass deportations, directly shaping the conditions of today’s crisis

--

When the so-called exposé hands you just enough outrage to feel informed, but not enough context to understand why it's happening, that’s not journalism. That’s controlled dissent.

Who needs censorship when you’ve got propaganda? If you narrate the violence correctly, suddenly it isn’t imperialism, it’s “security" or “stability.”

Sure, the blood is real, but the meaning gets rewritten.

I watched the leaked 60 Minutes piece. The one that shows the U.S. government torturing people offshore to skirt its own laws. And despite the good news that the clumsy, last-minute attempt at censorship failed, the piece isn’t a victory for truth.

It’s not a triumph of journalism. It’s a polished propaganda job dressed up in moral outrage, but it disseminates the same imperial logic it claims to expose.

Yes, it shows you the brutality. Yes, it shows you the cages. The USA is torturing people? That's awful. As disturbing as that is, the reality behind *that* is way worse!

But this news piece tells you the story the way empire needs you to hear it.

The main subject is a Venezuelan man labeled as coming from “repressive Venezuela.”

Venezuela is repressive.

That’s it.

No mention of decades of U.S. sanctions. No reference to economic sabotage. No context at all. Just a little branded line to implant the idea: he’s from a place that deserves this.

He’s one of "those" people. So go ahead and don’t ask what he did or didn’t do. His humanity has already been filed away under “enemy.”

Keep him away from my daughter.

And El Salvador? A country carved up by U.S. foreign policy, drowned in debt, and hammered by neoliberal reform?

Not a word about that. Instead, they’re framed as willing executioners.

As if building a mega-prison and stuffing it full of brown bodies is a Salvadoran pastime.

The piece doesn’t ask how or why. It doesn’t show the pressure, the coercion, the history. It just shows order. Discipline. Brutality. Those people. Live in an awful place.

As if El Salvador woke up one day and decided to be the empire’s warden and crack some heads. As a treat.

Since you can't talk about US foreign policy in the news, in this narrative, the victims of U.S. imperialism are repackaged as threats.

The oppressed become the perpetrators. The U.S. might be torturing people, yes, but the reasons things are this way? You’re meant to believe they just happened.

That’s the language of colonialism.

It doesn’t need to lie. It just needs to explain things a certain way.

It presents suffering as natural. Violence as cultural. U.S. involvement as distant, reluctant, even a well-meaning bystander. It gives you the horror show, but not the blueprint.

It shows you a cage, but never who profits from it or who needs it.

So sure, the U.S. tried to bury this story. And when it aired, people said, “See? The truth got out! Yay!" "And Fuck Trump!”

*Facepalm*

As if, US foreign policy hasn't been rife with human rights abuses under Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan and even Carter?!!

What got out today was a sanitized story, wrapped in empire’s vocabulary, made to reinforce the existing order, and keeping the big picture out of focus.

This isn’t journalism.

It’s narrative laundering. And an effective way to keep you from paying attention.

One step forward, two steps back. That’s the game. And if you’re not watching carefully, you’ll mistake the spectacle for the truth.

We all get the feeling sometimes that we are living in a simulation.

I felt it the other day reading a BBC article that said 80 percent of Venezuela’s oil profits go “to the government,” clearly implying that this was a bad thing.

What the article did not emphasize is that in Venezuela, those funds are used to pay for hospitals, schools, food programs, and housing.

Now imagine what the United States or Canada would look like if 80 percent of oil profits went to social services!

In reality, roughly 1 percent of oil revenue in the US and Canada reaches the public through taxes or royalties.

The rest goes to private shareholders. Somehow that is treated as normal, even virtuous.

I felt the same disconnect when a serious news piece claimed that “the economy” is the biggest concern for voters. Not rent. Not grocery prices or Loblaw’s record profits. Not whether people can survive on their wages. The economy. As if ordinary people are lying awake at night worrying that corporations are not receiving enough subsidies, hoping that wealth will somehow trickle down if we are patient and work hard enough.

That is when it clicks.

We are living inside a structure. A political simulation that trains us not to see the simulation.

The narratives we inherit about history, identity, morality, and justice are not neutral. They are tools of power.

We’re told that politics is complicated.

And the moment you express disagreement, especially if it challenges power, people don’t usually listen. They lecture. They talk at you. Explaining why your concerns are naïve. Why, no matter what the issue is, the “smart” move is to vote against your own interests.

When a person’s beliefs are based on fear, it’s hard to think critically. You’re wrong because you haven’t learned to think like them. You don’t fear connecting the dots.

So they try to shut it down. Maybe by pointing to some clever historical footnote that’s supposed to discredit your argument. Maybe by accusing you of straying too far from the orthodoxy of one side or another.

They mistake knowing the talking points of the day for insight.  And because those narratives are so tightly curated, they treat them as sacred, or at the very least, too “complicated” for you to question.

But politics isn’t complicated at all.

You *do* get a say in what is in your interests. You *do* get to say you don't trust the government and you want accountability.  Democracy is based on mistrust.  

It really is that simple.

Once you see that, it becomes impossible to unsee it.

We are told that religion causes wars. That terrorism is born in mosques. That colonization was a civilizing mission. That democracy is a gift the West gives to the rest of the world.

None of these are truths. They are cover stories for political interests. They are what power tells us to justify theft, conquest, and domination.

Because that’s good for “the economy” (wealthy people’s yacht money).

Every empire believes it is bringing light to darkness. Every war is framed as defense. Every act of exploitation is sold as progress.

The people subjected to it are dehumanized. They are called primitive, extremist, lazy, corrupt. That makes their suffering easier to ignore and their resistance easier to crush.

When you recognize that your own perceptions were programmed by these political myths, you start asking different questions.

Not “Was this policy good?” but “What structure of power made this outcome inevitable?”

Not “Is this people’s culture flawed?” but “Who profits from portraying them that way?”

At that point, it becomes clear that the problem is not human nature. It is not ancient tribal hatred.

It is the logic of empire.

The logic of extraction.

The logic of hierarchy, dressed up in the language of freedom.

And when you see that, you have a choice.

You can remain a piece on the board, moved by rules you did not create. Or you can begin, even in small ways, to disrupt the game.

That disruption starts with clarity. With courage. With refusing to let propaganda shape your moral compass.

Because the moment you start seeing the world as it is, not as it is sold to you, you stop being manageable.

And that is where it becomes a problem.

This reminds me that in Canada, truck drivers face about 5 times the risk of on-the-job death compared to police officers.  Truck drivers are heroes of the working class.

Also, the drive-through lady at McDonald's who took payment so slowly it ground *both* lanes to a halt and she gave not a single shit is my hero too☺️

Only 17 percent of Americans want regime change in Venezuela. 

Seizing that tanker is testing the waters.  Like, “Hey, can we steal this oil and get away with it if we wave the flag hard enough?”

It’s theft. Straight-up piracy. They don’t even pretend it’s about freedom anymore.
 
Extrajudicial killings, sanctions, it’s not about justice. It’s because they can't handle a country using its oil to help its own people. That’s the whole crime. Taking care of your citizens instead of bowing to Exxon.

And guess what? If this turns into a war, the price of oil goes up. Everything’s more expensive, but hey, Lockheed Martin’s stock’s through the roof. Who would win? The billionaires. Every. Fucking. Time.

They may want war. We don’t. So let me ask you, who’s in charge here?  If they’re just making up reasons to rob countries and drag us into another disaster, if sure as hell isn't us.

Wake up. Call it what it is. Connect the dots. There are many truly violent and undemocratic nations out there that the West is perfectly fine working with.  These greedy bastards don’t care about democracy, they care about dividends.

Compassion fatigue

What we’re seeing today with U.S. killings of Venezuelan nationals is not some isolated security operation. It is part of a long tradition in U.S. foreign policy. Washington identifies a government it doesn’t like, calls it illegitimate, and then proceeds to destabilize it through every available means. 

And when economic sabotage and diplomatic pressure don’t move fast enough, the violence begins.

Look at the pattern.

The United States is carrying out assassinations against Venezuelan people in international waters. Not on its own borders, not in a declared war zone, but out in open seas where it claims the right to act as judge, jury, and executioner. 

These killings line up neatly with intensified sanctions, with open talk in Washington about removing Maduro, and with a growing military presence around Venezuela. And to justify it all, they drag out the old “narco-terrorism” script, the same pretext they’ve used across Latin America whenever they want to intervene but don’t want to admit the political motive.

They are extrajudicial killings.

And what do these killings accomplish? They do not stop the drug trade. They never have. 
The purpose is not to stop narcotics, it is to apply pressure. The strikes create fear and humiliation for the Venezuelan state. 
They send a message that the United States will escalate beyond sanctions, beyond diplomatic squeeze tactics, and into direct lethal force. 
This is regime-change policy by violent means, plain and simple.

But this is not new. Under Obama, the United States conducted drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The propaganda line was counterterrorism. But the political effects told the real story.

In Pakistan, drone strikes undermined the country’s sovereignty and pressured its leadership to fall in line with U.S. security objectives. 
In Yemen, the strikes were coordinated with the Hadi government and helped keep a U.S.-approved leader in power. 
In Somalia, they weakened groups hostile to U.S. interests and shaped a state-building process that suited Washington. 
These were political interventions dressed up as anti-terror actions. Even when the goal wasn’t to overthrow a government, the violence shifted internal power balances in ways that served U.S. influence.

So, it was political then, and it is political now. The difference is not in the substance, but in the style. 
Earlier presidents wrapped these operations in legal jargon and humanitarian rhetoric. Today the story no longer matches the actions, and the contradiction is impossible to ignore. 
The objectives are in full view.

And there is a certain clarity in that. 

For decades, Washington has been allowed to present its violence as noble, necessary, or reluctant. But now the evidence sits out in the open. 

These killings are not about safety or democracy. They are about power. They are about controlling other nations, destabilizing governments that refuse to obey, and enforcing an international hierarchy in which the United States reserves the right to kill abroad whenever it pleases.

These are human rights violations and war crimes of the same kind we are taught to condemn when committed by official enemies. The only difference is that now, for anyone paying attention, the political motives are impossible to deny.

Because I can.