A lengthier response to Caitlin Johnstone
On nuclear war and suicide and other lovely topics
I’ve read and respected Caitlin for years and, of course, if you go back to my very first post you can see that she was the one who inspired me to try this Substack thing.
I’m not quite seeing eye to eye with her on this, however:
My less-lengthy and initial response was these three tweets:
Of course, Twitter isn’t a great place to discuss things or debate things. Twitter isn’t even a good place to argue; it’s a very reliable place to go if you’re looking to get into an argument, but the average Twitter argument isn’t likely to end in the participants kissing and making up the way it might if it took place elsewhere.
And that’s why I’m dusting off this old space and writing in it once more. Having infinite characters to work with is a lot better.
Now, what do I want to say? This:
Imagine that you are in prison. Imagine that you are on death row. Doesn’t matter why you’re there, whether you’re guilty or innocent, not for the purposes of this scenario. The point is that you’re there, and you are scheduled to be executed.
You’ve done what you could to fight it. You’ve gone through the appeals process, but had no luck. The sentence stands. Barring a miracle, you are going to die of something other than natural causes.
What do you do then?
Do you think about nothing but your upcoming execution? Do you try to think of how you might be able to escape, even though you’ve been wracking your brain trying to figure out how to escape for years and haven’t come up with a workable plan?
If you’re in that situation, I imagine that dwelling on what seems inevitable is just going to make your final days worse. Things are out of your hands. Either the aforementioned miracle happens, or it doesn’t.
As Caitlin herself once wrote: even if the worst comes to pass and it becomes inevitable that the human race is going to get killed off, well, people with terminal illnesses have often said that they lived their best years after they got their diagnosis and knew their days were numbered. They did all the stuff that they wanted to do, but never had.
Here’s how the real world situation compares to my hypothetical, and to Caitlin’s comparison to people with terminal illnesses:
It really does seem to me like things are out of our hands here. See, Caitlin’s absolutely right every time she stresses that the US propaganda machine is extremely effective, moreso than the US war machine.
As usual, it’s working very well. We have people all over the world hating Russians and Russian things, regardless of whether they’re in any way complicit in the decision to invade Ukraine. (The vast majority are not, of course.) We have those same people saying that a no-fly zone is actually a great idea. These are not the positions of fringe crazies, much as I wish they were. These are fucking mainstream.
Do you know how difficult it is to take on the US propaganda machine? To convince all of those people that actually, what they believe to be true is not? It’s extremely difficult, and it could easily be impossible. I’ve tried it enough to know. I’ve tried telling people what’s really going on online. I’ve tried telling people what’s really going on in the real world. I’ve tried telling them about Israel and Palestine, I’ve tried telling them about Julian Assange, I tried telling them that Bernie Sanders was actually not a bad guy (before he proved me wrong by being their idea of a good guy, i.e. sucking up to the establishment), I tried telling them that Joe Biden was a bad guy, I tried telling them that Fauci was a liar, and on and on and on…and they never, ever listen.
I never end up making a damn bit of difference that I can see. Either things get better regardless of what I do, or they get worse, or they stay the same. People eventually woke up to the fact that Israel was oppressing Palestinians, but not because of anything I did. More and more people stopped trusting Fauci, but not because of anything I told any of them. Meanwhile, Bernie still lost and decided to be a DNC bootlicker, Biden still won and decided to govern exactly like everybody on the true left thought he would (with the very notable exception that none of us expected this Ukraine thing to happen), Julian Assange is still being slowly tortured to death in Belmarsh regardless of how many people protest and spread awareness of his plight, etc.
Caitlin reaches far, far, FAR more people than I do, and I hope that her readership continues to grow…but, and it gives me no pleasure at all to say this, she hasn’t had a lot of luck either. That’s not to say she shouldn’t bother at all, because it’s a hell of a lot better to have some dissident voices willing to say the emperor has no clothes than none. But it’s a Herculean task to take on the US propaganda machine. No matter how low trust in mainstream media becomes, the masses are still ready to listen to them and ignore actual truth-tellers—even ones with impeccable records and awards and fame such as Glenn Greenwald are now loathed by the same masses who once admired them, courtesy of that propaganda machine—when push comes to shove.
I’m sorry for being so fatalistic, but on top of how easy it is to make me lose hope just because that’s the way I turned out, even an optimist would look at this situation and probably be at a loss for what, exactly, the people who want detente are supposed to do.
I guess we could protest. Those in power might ignore it, but it can’t hurt. The truckers sure used the leverage they had effectively. If somebody organizes a protest and I can get to it, I’ll go to it.
Apart from that, however, I don’t know what we can do except keep an eye on things and see whether it ultimately ends in peace or nuclear annihilation.
Whether it was Caitlin’s intent or not, reading that thread of hers felt like somebody trying to guilt me into doing more to prevent a nuclear launch. I didn’t like that, and that’s why my response was so “Look, I’m not cut out for this, all right, I can’t do anything, would you kindly get off my back?” I took it personally, even though it wasn’t directed at me personally. So maybe that response left a lot to be desired.
But the fact remains that I really can’t do anything about it. Not even start a protest, because I don’t know the first thing about organizing something like that. And I’m stuck in this block of the metaphorical prison (the block called “Canada”), with the prison itself being the planet Earth. I can’t escape, except via death. Justin Trudeau isn’t taking my calls. Even if I were somebody he felt like listening to and taking advice from, even if I got Justin to say “Oh my god, you’re absolutely right, it’s imperative that we do everything we can to get a peace deal worked out and to stop provoking Russia with sanctions and advancing NATO troops and all of that! If we stay on this course, we’ll have World War Three!” and he called up his buddy Joe Biden, Biden would listen to that and say “Shut up, Justin. This isn’t the Canadian Empire we’re talking about, it’s the American Empire. You are OUR bitch, fat, not the other way around, and we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing. Fall in line, or else.”
So that is why I do not spend every second of every minute of every hour of every day thinking about the nukes flying and trying to make sure it doesn’t happen. That’s why I might talk about sports, or video games, or music, or go on a date, or smoke some weed, or whatever. These might just be the last years I’m alive, and if they are, then I want to make them as good as I possibly can. So that means I try to have as much fun as I can, assuming I’m not too goddamn depressed to even try doing that. And when I’m having fun, I don’t think about this stuff, because that would make it impossible to enjoy whatever it is I’m enjoying. If I didn’t do that, then I would surely go mad. That’s why they give soldiers in wartime R&R, isn’t it? Get them away from the combat zone so that the pressure doesn’t keep building up endlessly until they finally lose their minds?
Check my latest substack...
The vast Majority of Russians DO support the invasion, which was done to stop the Donbass genocide that has ZERO chance of being recognized any time soon in the west. Or, at least, that's why the Russian PEOPLE support it.