It's Gross And Cringey To Love A State Like Israel or The United States

It's Gross And Cringey To Love A State Like Israel or The United States

Feb. 10, 2025

U.S. and ISRAEL IMPERIALISM - FOLLOW THE MONEY

Caitlin Johnstone

I don’t love the western empire’s enemies, and I don’t defend them. In reality I am simply standing against the world’s most tyrannical and abusive power structure, whose imperial umbrella I happen to live under here in Australia. I would oppose that tyranny and abuse regardless of the nations it happens to be targeting on any particular day. I have nothing against Russia, China or Iran, but I also have no personal emotional relationship with them. They have nothing to do with me.

It’s impossible to have a real personal emotional relationship with any nation. You can have a personal relationship with people, with individual communities and neighborhoods, with a specific beach or forest or countryside, but nations are too large and full of too many people for you to have a meaningful relationship with them as an individual. In order to feel loving feelings toward a nation, you have to create a symbol of it in your mind and love that symbol instead of the actual thing that the nation is. You’re not loving the actual country, you’re loving a small mental representation of it that you have constructed inside your head. As George Carlin said, I leave symbols to the symbol-minded.

So the very idea of loving a nation in itself is absurd, but it’s exponentially weirder to then extend the positive feelings you have toward a nation to its government and their actions and military objectives as well. Then it’s just the same power-worshipping bootlicker mentality that has fueled all of history’s worst atrocities. You have abdicated your responsibility toward your own mature relationship with the world and signed it over to a giant conglomerate of forces whose operators you’ve never met, and whose material interests have nothing to do with your own.

People who love and defend a government are creating parental figures out of the state instead of growing up and taking their stand as mature individuals. And if you are doing this with the US and Israel or their allies, you’re not just handing your responsibility over to a single nation’s government... you’re doing it with an entire globe-spanning empire.

When your umbilical cord is cut you’re meant to begin growing into a sovereign being with a sovereign mind, and instead these empire simps are plugging the end of their umbilical cord into the Pentagon. It’s pathetic.

Article with supporting links: https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/02/10/its-gross-and-cringey-to-love-a-state-like-israel-or-the-usa/

Original: https://youtu.be/xLsG_OE7l-I

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