Gaza: a clinical study of abused children and their abusive parents?

    Last year, the Australian political commentator Caitlin Johnstone subscribed to my Substack and invited me to subscribe to hers, which I did and started receiving in my email account her machine gun-like slams of Israel and President Biden for helping Israel kill now close to 30,000 predominately unarmedpeople in Gaza, making most of the people of Gaza homeless and at risk to starvation and plague. I agreed many times with Caitlin’s condemnation of Israel and President Biden, and said it might be worse if Donald Trump was president, given he told Israel he is their best friend, hoping to get the vote of every Jew and conservative Christian in America.

    I also said many times that Hamas imbedded itself within and underneath civilians, making it certain that many civilians would be killed and wounded and displaced and experience diaspora if Israel came to Gaza to fight Hamas, and that the October 7, 2023 raid in Israel was clever bait Hamas hoped would provoke Israel to do precisely what then did in Gaza, which turned Israel into a pariah state likened to Nazi German, supported by America,

    For that, I was condemned many times by  Caitlin’s readers. I was asked why I was there? When I told them I was there at Caitlin’s invitation, they condemned me all the more. Although Caitlin sometimes responded to a reader who had praised her, she never responded to me directly. Sometimes, I thought perhaps her posts were aimed at me indirectly, such as her post yesterday, by this title: "Nobody Who Gets Gaza Wrong Is Worth Listening To”. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/nobody-who-gets-gaza-wrong-is-worth?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=141808129&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8wjd3&utm_medium=email 

    Yesterday morning, it occurred to me that Caitlin had trolled me to read her, and she and a number of her devoted readers had reacted to me as if they are the abused children of Gaza and I am their abusive parent. 

    Quite a while ago I wondered if Caitlin and her many readers who kept tearing into me were severely abused in childhood and they identified with the Hamas civilians and were in denial about their own abusive parents, and thus were in denial about Hamas? 

    The day before yesterday, Caitlin and two of her readers caused me to wonder that even more.

    We Think This Dystopia Is Normal Like People In Abusive Relationships Think It's Normal

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
FEB 15, 2024
Westerners who don’t appreciate the extreme dysfunctionality of western civilization are like someone in an abusive marriage who hasn’t yet recognized that there’s a problem, or someone who had a violent and chaotic childhood who still thinks their home life was basically normal.
All of us understand that there are problems with our society, and most of us understand that a lot of those problems are severe. But few westerners really get just how bad it is. How pervasively diseased it is.
In reality, we are living in a profoundly sick dystopia that is built on a foundation of human corpses and fueled by an endless river of human blood. Our news media are propaganda services, our entertainment is brainwashing, and our mainstream culture is social engineering, all built to keep us turning the gears of a vast globe-dominating empire.
There’s a widespread assumption throughout the western world that while things might not be perfect our society is certainly much better than what people experience in a nation like China, smugly believing ourselves to be a free society full of free thinkers and free people in contrast with those unfortunate thought-controlled communist conformists. In fact western civilization is one giant thought-controlled conformity machine where people’s minds are shaped by mass-scale psychological manipulation far more effectively than anywhere else in the world, exactly because westerners don’t know this is happening and believe they are free.
Western minds don’t like to be told this, because it goes against everything they’ve been trained to believe about their nation, their society, and their world. Obviously we are much freer here than those poor saps to the east; here in the west we are free to choose between 197 flavors of frosted breakfast cereal and 20,000 different superhero movies. We are free to choose between voting for warmongering capitalist authoritarian Democrats or warmongering capitalist authoritarian Republicans. We are free to sell our labor at a fraction of the value it generates to any exploitative ecocidal employer of our choosing. We are free to think whatever thoughts we’ve been trained to think by our education systems, mass media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. We are free to speak our minds, which have been shaped and conditioned to serve the interests of the powerful and never to say anything that falls outside the Overton window of acceptable opinion.
Sure there are outliers in the margins, westerners who’ve slipped outside the matrix of thought control and have gained the ability to traffick in unauthorized opinions — if you’re reading this you’re probably one of them. But our numbers are deliberately kept too small to have any political consequence, and if those numbers start getting too big for comfort we immediately see influence ops to sow division and confusion and herd people back toward the mainstream flock. Sure we in our small numbers are free to voice unauthorized opinions on marginal platforms where we can’t have much impact — we’re free to dig a hole in the ground and whisper whatever we want into it, too.
The single biggest obstacle to our freedom in the west is our widespread belief that we are free. Until we collectively realize we’re human livestock being continually herded into our respective gear-turning stations to keep the imperial juggernaut trudging ever forward on the world stage, we’ve got no chance to break free and bring the whole abusive system crashing down.
Until this is seen we’re like the wife who thinks it’s perfectly normal that her husband controls all her finances and dictates every aspect of her life, and who’d be shocked and angered if anyone tried to tell her that this is what an abusive relationship looks like. We’re like the man who insists he had a happy childhood despite remembering a lot of body trauma and screams. 
The truth is all around us — we’re marinating in it 24/7/365. But we can’t see it, because it’s all we’ve ever known. We’ve been conditioned to think that this murderous ecocidal mind-controlled dystopia is normal, and we can’t imagine it being any other way. The prospect of ending it can actually feel scary and intimidating, just as it can for someone who’s thinking about fleeing an abusive relationship. 
But real freedom is just on the other side of that fear. All we’ve got to do is become sufficiently conscious of what’s really going on here. 

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

Well said. 

In the.main, humanity indeed is brainwashed, programmed like computers, behaves like lemmings. lives in herds, which actually are cults. People in cults cannot be reasoned with, reached. They, and their leaders, are incapable of introspection, looking at themselves in the mirror and taking fearless and searching inventories of themselves. The many beams in their own eyes. 

Convinced they are right, pointing their finger everywhere but at themselves, they are l-o-s-t, un-woke, asleep- thinking they are woke, all-seeing, all-knowing. 

The cold truth is, humanity, America, Israel, Russia, China, Iran, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, for examples, moved through SNAFU deep into FUBAR. Trying to fix that may be noble, or it might be projection, or it might be dangerous, but it is futile. They will not change because someone tells them to change.

According to Acts of the Apostles, the Jewish pharisee Saul of Tarsus had no intention of stopping his getting Christians crucified by the Roman government if they did not renounce Jesus, until a bolt of lighting blinded him and knocked him off his horse on the road to Damascus, and Jesus asked him, “Saul, why do you persecute, me?”

I bring that up, not to say it actually happened, but to say what might change herds and their leaders. Might.

Gpcus

"In reality, we are living in a profoundly sick dystopia that is built on a foundation of human corpses and fueled by an endless river of human blood. Our news media are propaganda services, our entertainment is brainwashing, and our mainstream culture is social engineering, all built to keep us turning the gears of a vast globe-dominating empire"... That's exactly how I feel! Is anyone out there feeling the same? How do you cope with it? I mean how do you rationalize it to stand up in the morning and go to work or to tell your children everything is OK and their future is radiant?

Chang Chokaski

I know exactly how you feel Gpcus, since I feel it too and am grappling with the same questions that you are.

"How do you cope with it?" I mean how do you rationalize it to stand up in the morning and go to work or to tell your children everything is OK and their future is radiant?"

What seems to be helping me (though I'm not totally sure):

(1) Anti-depressants

(2) No TV or MSM news sources

(3) Music (playing the piano for me)

(4) some physical exercise

Unfortunately, none of the above strategies have been enough to help me deal emotionally with the ongoing live-streamed Genocide taking place in Gaza. If you do find something that works for you, please do let me know as I seem to be in the same boat as you.

Lisa

We know it's way worse than we can even imagine. I avoid dwelling too long on some videos. I keep the sound off and don't even look at some. Instagram is my only video source. Still I have cried. I need to know what's really happening, but for my own sanity I can't spend too much time there. I post and repost about it all on Instagram. If enough people would do it, a national strike on work and buying might make a difference. 

Sloan Bashinsky

Chang, I think you are playing with fire using antidepressants, which contain chemicals alien to human biology and genomes, and produce side effects which have their own side effects. If what’s going on somewhere else is wrecking you and your ability to work and father your children, perhaps you should turn off forums like this one as well? For your distress bleeds into your children, who have not yet being affected by the world as you have, they still are empaths, they pick up on, feel what is going on in you. Looking back from 81 years on this planet, I see lots of how I was that my children endured because I was wrapped up in my own dramas and agenda. I worry today for them and their children in a country, America, going to hell, I think. And unable to do lots of things I once did, some because I had to, some because I wanted to, I spend a lot of time online, which saves me from talking a lot more to myself than I already do. Your children need you a lot more now, than they will ten years from now.

Jeano

This may piss you off, Chang, but I heard in meditation this morning that I needed to pray for Israel. And yes, I’m like wha?!?!?! But on reflection, I can see that my feelings about Israel are only adding to the miasma of dis-grace that surrounds the Gaza crisis. That my lack of grace towards the “perpetrators” increases their negative energy and negative energy is what we need to stop. I KNOW it sounds too woo-woo for words but that’s what I heard in my thoughts and that’s what I’m going to do, even if I don’t mean it—until I do mean it. Can’t be any worse than being debilitated by grief as I am now. Sometimes I can hardly breathe. 

Chang Chokaski

You're right - something like that would indeed piss me off. I pray for Zionism to not exist. I pray for Israel in its current incarnation to not exist. I would rather pray for a million other things. In fact, I think praying for the Palestinians and praying against the Israelis sounds pretty cathartic to me. (Then again, I am an athiest - and I don't think my athiest God is likely to listen to my prayers 😃) 

Jeano

🤗. Ya. Exactly. And I’ve been wish/praying like you do for weeks now. But I do believe in dark matter and in dark energy, and they seem to represent principles of reality that I can’t even imagine. So I’m willing to allow as how the I Ching might have a point when it says “do not do evil the courtesy of fighting it blow for blow, for it only thinks of weapons. Instead, make energetic progress in the good.” It’s entirely possible in a universe so full of strange and confusing stuff, that GOOD is an energy that actually accomplishes what we want. Guess I’ll see when I croak! 😁😆

Sloan Bashinsky

Matthew 5:44-45 American Standard Version (ASV)

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.

Jeano

Ya—this is the kind of crap that makes me NOT want to pray for Israel. This is Jehovah’s book. Jehovah, the god the Israelites made up, the guy who needed the sacrifice of his own son before he could accept humanity as being is no better than he made us, the guy who decided the Jews were special and “gave” them Israel. I wouldn’t anymore follow his advice than I’d fuck a duck. 

Sloan Bashinsky

If that man’s teachings and the way he lived had been taken to heart, humanity would be very different, there would be no war in Gaza, or anywhere.

Jeano

Dream on Buckwheat. 

  

Sloan Bashinsky

"Jeano

This may piss you off but I heard in meditation this morning that I needed to pray for Israel. And yes, I’m like wha?!?!?! But on reflection, I can see that my feelings about Israel are only adding to the miasma of dis-grace that surrounds the Gaza crisis. That my lack of grace towards the “perpetrators” increases their negative energy and negative energy is what we need to stop. I KNOW it sounds too woo-woo for words but that’s what I heard in my thoughts and that’s what I’m going to do, even if I don’t mean it—until I do mean it. Can’t be any worse than being debilitated by grief as I am now. Sometimes I can hardly breathe." 

 

russian_bot

You forgot plastic smiles. The first thing I'm thinking when I see absent, moronic smiles void of any context - someone is "bigging" themselves up.
One thing good about covid was it wiped them off people's faces. Some continued doing it while masked and that looked even weirder.

You need a rest, "Sloan". I think I already mentioned that elsewhere.

Sloan Bashinsky

I've had a great deal of experience with adults who were severely abused in childhood, and it looks to me that Caitlin and most of her readers who comment under her Gaza posts were severely abused in childhood and are in denial about how abusive their parents were. They emotionally identify with the dead, wounded, oppressed, shellshocked, depressed, starving, displaced people of Gaza and are not able to see their parents and Hamas psychologically are one and the same, pretending love and caring but giving them just the opposite. 

 

I give Hamas and Israel equal credit for the mayhem in Gaza. Hamas imbedded itself within and underneath civilians, making it certain that many civilians would be killed and wounded and displaced and experience diaspora if Israel came to Gaza to fight Hamas. The October 7, 2023 raid in Israel was clever bait Hamas hoped would provoke Israel to do precisely what then did in Gaza, which turned Israel into a pariah state likened to Nazi German, supported by America. Instead of defending the people of Gaza, Hamas did the opposite. 

 

russian_bot
"turned Israel into a pariah state likened to Nazi German, supported by America" - Israel was that all along and Hamas attack certainly brought it up to the surface so it's very difficult to no longer pay attention to.
That Israel is and has been a Nazi state from its inception - read history. I believe you've been provided with authors and books already.
Your analysis of Caitlin and her audience is weak, by the way. People who do psychological work like you said you did, often tend to subsequently overestimate their psychic powers.

Sloan Bashinsky
I have psychic powers, but that is not what this is about. Hamas was supposed to protect the people of Gaza from Israel, in Gaza. Hamas did just the opposite by provoking Israel to attack Gaza and then fighting to defend Hamas. I think anyone who cannot see that needs counseling. I think anyone who sees it, but doesn’t acknowledge it, will be visited by Lady Karma sooner or later, and they may or may not connect the dots.

russian_bot
I know it's about Hamas. I just wonder when you are going to shut up about it.

Sloan Bashinsky
Maybe when Caitlin, who invited me here, says it’s about Hamas?  

 

russian_bot

I know you know it but still - you're such a pain in the ass 😉 

Sloan Bashinsky

I hear that a lot. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com