The War on Horror (or Whatever)
CJ Hopkins
Welcome back to the War on Terror. I hope you had a nice 7-year break.
Yes, that’s right, once again, Democracy is under attack by the Axis of Pure Unadulterated Evil!
It’s time to switch off your critical faculties, wrap yourself in the American flag, or the Israeli flag, or the Ukrainian flag, or, better yet, all three flags, and stand with the Forces of Freedom and Goodness as they exercise their God-given right to defend the world from the Children of Darkness, and the Putin-Nazis, and Hate, and Rape, and Baby Murderers, and Baby Rapers, and Baby-Raper sympathizers!
For those of us who are old enough to remember 9/11 and its aftermath, it’s déjà vu all over again. Except we already had The War on Terror. So, I don’t know what we’re calling it this time. Maybe it’s The War on Horror, or “Horrific Horror,” as President Biden put it.
Or maybe we should call it The War on Whatever. After all, it’s all the same war.
No. That isn’t going to sell. No one is going to fight a War on Whatever. We need something utterly meaningless but catchy. Something that will shut people’s minds off and keep them from asking inconvenient questions, like a corporate slogan or thought-terminating cliche.
Let’s go with The War on Horror. Here’s how The War on Horror began…
It began on the morning of October 7, when the State of Israel, which was just sitting there, peacefully, in the Middle Eastern territory bestowed on it by God, minding its own business, bothering no one, was unprovokedly attacked by members of Hamas, who, according to the Horrorists, were “exercising their legitimate right to resist occupation” by mass-murdering hundreds of unarmed people at a music event and entire families in their homes.
In order to ensure that everyone recognized the legitimacy of their “armed resistance” — or, rather, to guarantee that the Israelis would be forced to massively overreact and that the attack would polarize the global public along the lines Hamas wants people polarized — they went about it with extreme brutality.
Surprise! It worked! Israel is currently transforming Gaza into a heap of smoldering rubble, bombing commercial and residential areas, hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, shelters, people fleeing the air-raids, killing thousands of Palestinians, wiping out entire Palestinian families (or, as Israel calls them, “human shields”), and otherwise exercising its inalienable “right to defend itself” by sealing off Gaza and systematically liquidating its inhabitants, or, rather, by creating “a new security reality.”
And the global public could not be more polarized.
But Hamas can’t take all the credit for that. The most fearsome propaganda machine in the history of fearsome propaganda machines is working overtime, pumping out the message: “You’re either with us or you are with the Horrorists!” “You’re either with us or you are an anti-Semitic, Russia-loving, Baby Raper sympathizer!” And so on.
I’m sure you’ve heard the message.
Meanwhile, actual anti-Semites and “revolutionary” fanatics who are totally OK with mass-murdering people as a “resistance” tactic are doing their best to play along. The Internet is swarming with anti-Semites demonizing the Jews for, well, you name it. Crypto-fascists are coming out of the woodwork. Palestinian activists are lionizing Hamas. And so on. I’m sure you’ve seen the coverage.
I’m going to forgo my usual practice of including links to some of that coverage, and to the numerous social media posts documenting the criminalization of dissent and expressions of support for the Palestinians since the War on Horror officially began, because, frankly, right now, I don’t believe anything I see or read until I’ve dedicated time to verifying that it is not propaganda designed to reinforce the official narrative, or the unofficial narrative, or some other narrative.
At the moment, we’re being inundated with narratives, the official narrative, the unofficial narrative, the official unofficial narrative, the alternative official narrative, the alternative unofficial narrative, the bull-goose-loony unofficial narrative, etc., all of which is standard procedure when you are rolling out a War on Horror, or an Apocalyptic Pandemic, or some other major revision to the official master narrative.
Which brings me to that hospital bombing story. You know the one. Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, which Israel bombed, or didn’t bomb, depending on which narrative you believe, or which narrative you don’t really believe but are nonetheless committed to pretending to believe, because believing the other one would betray your “side.”
Now, I want to state this very clearly. I do not know who bombed the hospital.
Yes, of course, I think I know. But I’m here in Berlin. I’m not in Gaza. I’m not in touch with anyone in Gaza. All I have to go on is the word of the IDF, and US Intelligence officials, and statements by the Palestinian authorities, and international media reports, and other stuff anyone can find on the Internet, and … well, you know, common sense.
Call me a “Horrorist sympathizer” if you need to, but I do not take the word of the IDF and anonymous “Intelligence officials” on faith. I examine their narratives critically. I did that during the War on Terror. I did that during Russiagate. I did it during the Covid pandemic. Critically examining official narratives is part of my job as a political satirist.
So, let’s take a look at the official narrative of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing.
According to the official narrative, the Palestinian Horrorists just can’t catch a break. After decades of attacking Israel with their sissy little Horror rockets that typically only kill a few people at best, now, after they finally come up with a new Super-Horror rocket that will kill hundreds of people, the first time they use it, they shoot it into their own hospital.
Or — and this is “Official Narrative B” — they shoot their new Super-Duper Horror rocket at Israel, but it disintegrates in mid-air, or is intercepted by the Israeli “Dome” thing, and one fragment of it (i.e., the Super-Horror rocket) lands in the parking lot of the hospital, and it turns out that fragment just happened to be the “Super-Horror” component of the rocket, which simultaneously ignites the topped-up gas tanks of every single car in the parking lot, which generates a massive fireball that blows the people in the parking lot to bits.
But that’s just the current version of the official narrative, which has evolved over time.
First, shortly after the explosion, Benjamin Netanyahu’s social media advisor took to X to celebrate the strike, crowing “The Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza!” This Tweet was quickly deleted, of course, and the IDF officially denied responsibility, blamed the explosion on an Islamic Jihad rocket, and posted CCTV footage confirming their story. Unfortunately for the IDF, the fake footage they posted included a timestamp of 7:59, one hour after the event. So, the IDF deleted that Tweet, revised it, and reposted it without the fake footage. Then other IDF-related entities posted other footage, which was also fake.
Al Jazeera has documented all that here…
The next morning, footage of the hospital parking lot where the explosion occurred and the hospital building still standing was all the official propagandists needed to put the finishing touches on their official narrative, but, just for good measure, the IDF posted a “surveillance recording of two Hamas terrorists” with funny accents confessing that they had accidentally bombed the hospital. It was kind of like a Cheech and Chong routine. Seriously, they had the audacity to do that.
Intelligence-agency sock puppets immediately inundated the Internet with tweets and posts reinforcing the “misfired rocket” story. Anyone questioning it was shouted down as an “anti-Semitic terrorist-loving idiot.” Papers of record revised their headlines. Biden confirmed that the “other team” did it. The corporate media, assorted Persons of Influence, and even prominent independent media sources like Racket News and Public declared the case closed.
After all, the IDF and anonymous US Intelligence officials would never lie to us or attempt to dupe the public with fabricated “evidence,” and anyone who suggests they would is an “anti-Semitic, Horrorist-loving, hate-speech-disseminating disinformationist!”
Apparently, the UK’s Channel 4 News did not get the memo. Here’s their coverage …
Neither did the Aaron Maté at The Grayzone …
But, I don’t know … maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the Israeli military, and the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Censorship Industrial Complex, and the US Intelligence community and its cutouts, are telling us the truth this time.
Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know, because conducting an independent investigation into the bombing would be “inappropriate”…
Seriously, though, this is only the beginning. The torrent of official and unofficial propaganda, gaslighting, and emotional manipulation is only going to increase over time. Probably the best thing to do at this point is pick a “side” and back it unquestioningly, no matter what it does or says. If you’re a professional person, with a career, and a mortgage, and kids, or aspiring to be such a person, I would recommend going with The Powers That Be.
It’s easy to do that. Simply unsubscribe from, and block, and otherwise close your ears and mind to “conspiracy theorists” like me. Stick with those anonymous “Intelligence officials,” the IDF, and the corporate media, and those “fact-checking” entities, and Google, and the rest of the Official Reality Enforcement Apparatus that has been rolled out, globally, during the past three years.
You didn’t think they were rolling all that out for kicks, did you? No … of course you didn’t.
In any event, welcome to the War on Horror, or Terror, or Reality, or Whatever!
CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.
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