How to make sense of the Gaza Slaughter

For those struggling to understand the nature of the conflict in Gaza, this excerpt from THE VELVET BUZZSAW 2 suggests a mental exercise that will help you view the situation without the unnecessary distortions of ideology, cultural or religious bigotry or the undue influence of the corporate media consensus talking points (puppeteered as they are by the military industrial complex).

One of the unique features of the Gaza Genocide is the fact that it’s being live streamed to our phones 24/7. This makes it significantly different from many of the U.S. backed and/or initiated slaughters in recent history. For instance, imagine if the Iraq War had been broadcast to our phones directly from the people caught in the eye of the storm? According to the many disparate reports, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians were annihilated as a result of direct violence in the insanely long, protracted conflict (and just like Afghanistan, you’d be hard pressed to find an ordinary American citizen who could offer a reasonable explanation as to why the conflict lasted as long as it did, or even what the general objective was exactly, especially considering there were no weapons of mass destruction and despite media sloppaganda to the contrary, Saddam has ZERO to do with 9/11).

But regardless of what the actual number of civilians deaths may have been, it is an impossibly high number to contemplate. Unless you have direct experience witnessing hundreds of thousands of innocent people getting randomly annihilated by the good guys (seemingly for no other reason than to bump up the stock prices of companies like Haliburton), it’s impossible for any of us, safely captured in the bubble of western consumerism as we are, to conceptualize any of it.

For the most part, the odd Abu Ghraib torture photo aside, within the corporate news disinformation sphere, we were treated to little more than sterilized, U.S. military approved images from embedded media and the occasional surgical airstrike recorded from Apache helicopter consoles showcasing America’s impressive military technology and no doubt giving the Boeing stock prices a nice bump too.

This created an impression in the collective U.S. consumer zeitgeist that what was happening over there was a relatively clean affair, and something Americans didn’t have to think a great deal about. This is why, even though they grumbled a little at the time, now that the fog of war has cleared a bit, many Americans are willing to embrace George W. Bush into their hearts and gaze in wonderment at his blissful paintings of pet dogs and laugh heartily at his cheeky Pez Dispenser antics with Michelle Obama at official state events.

But Gaza is a much different story. Without even trying to see any of the stuff, every day we’re witnessing something beyond horrifying and tragic, to the extent that it’s impossible for our brains to properly process the extent of the carnage our eyeballs have been inflicted with, even as displaced as the images may be by technology, time and space. The human mind isn’t designed to see this much carnage, it’s not part of the predisposed, archetypal Jungian architecture of the psyche. No doubt, the effects of this damage will emerge in due time, but in the present, it has created a powerful schism between the pro-genocide, corporate media talking points and our implicit sense of the obvious injustices and inhuman atrocities we’re seeing on our digital screens daily.

I know that a lot of people are struggling to make any kind of sense out of what’s happening in Gaza. Many don’t know what to think about the situation or even how to think about it. On extreme ends of the spectrum, we have the seemingly impenetrable Islamomismiast Nipple Dippers making excuses for the genocide and then on the other side of the culturally psychotic divide, there's the Trembling Gibbles who bury their heads in the sand, terrified to deviate from the consensus talking points, even though they have no idea what those consensus talking points may be (one has to wonder if such a level of manufactured bewilderment is by design).

We’re instructed by the corporate media apparatus that Hamas is evil and must be eradicated, that civilian deaths are unavoidable, and Israel has a right to defend itself, how it’s the only democracy in the middle east, and if they don’t win this so-called war then radical Islamic fascism will spread to the west and before we know it, our newborn babies will be raped and beheaded by hordes of Islamist human animals. And yet, none of it seems to justify the endless images we see of wailing mothers, grieving fathers and dead babies being pulled out of the rubble of completely destroyed urban centres.

This excerpt of Cinephobia Radio is designed for those who find themselves completely bewildered, if not overwhelmed, at trying to make sense of the Gaza Slaughter, who want to understand the conflict without getting mentally derailed by all the cultural, religious, and political ideologies embedded within the various media propaganda talking points.

Cinephobia Radio #032
THE VELVET BUZZSAW 2

For the complete episode, visit:
www.cinephobia-radio.com/vault

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