A quarter-century ago in 1999 The Matrix entered our theaters and became an instant film classic as well as a colossal blockbuster, earning nearly $500 million at the box office. There were also interesting epistemological implications to the notion that our own world was merely the illusion created within a computer simulation, hiding the grim reality behind it. The word “redpilling” —breaking through those illusions into the underlying true existence—soon entered our popular political lexicon, with a Google search revealing that “redpill” and its variations appear on well over 5 million webpages, and the term has even inspired the somewhat related notions of “blackpilling” and “whitepilling,” respectively inducing despair and hope.
I found the film outstanding when I originally watched it in a theater and over the years it has held up very well when I’ve seen it on the small screen, although I’d regarded the couple of sequels it quickly inspired as merely so-so or even mediocre.
However, I’ve always believed it a little unfair that this tremendous success so completely overshadowed a different Hollywood film released that same year that dealt with a similar theme. I’ve seen The Thirteenth Floor a couple of times, and although I’d hardly rank it alongside its far better known rival, I thought the plot included some interesting ideas and felt it might have gotten far more attention under other circumstances.
Lacking the hyperkinetically stylized gun-battle sequences of The Matrix, this much quieter film centered upon a virtual reality research company in 1999 Los Angeles that had successfully created a computer simulation of a 1930s society whose characters lived their lives completely unaware that they were merely software constructs. The sudden murder of the company’s director and other strange events led one of the puzzled researchers to eventually discover that his own society also only existed as a simulation in the computer of a higher-level world. The clues leading to that breakthrough came from the power of analogy, as he and others noticed that some of the inexplicable events that so puzzled the 1930s characters they had created were similar to what they were themselves encountering in their own world, which they had always assumed was real.
Thus, once we successfully pierce some of the false narratives constructed by our dishonest media we should always consider the possibility that we are still trapped within another such layer of narrative, much deeper but equally false, and use the power of analogy as a tool to unravel those illusions. These are ideas that we should keep in the back of our minds as we consider the many dangerous and disastrous falsehoods surrounding the Israel/Gaza conflict, now in its eleventh month.
Last week I published an article describing the unspeakable war crimes regularly being committed by Israeli military forces against helpless Palestinian civilians, with some of these incidents finally starting to receive coverage in mainstream American media outlets.
According to American physicians interviewed by Politico Magazine and CBS News Sunday Morning, Israeli military snipers have regularly been executing Palestinian toddlers with precisely aimed shots to the head and the heart; indeed, for many years Israelis have proudly marketed tee-shirts boasting of their success in killing pregnant women and children. An article in the New York Times also reported that IDF forces have seized and tortured to death leading Palestinian surgeons and other medical doctors, with some of the survivors describing the horrific torments they endured at the hands of their brutal Israeli captors.
All of these barbaric atrocities have been justified and encouraged by the sweeping public statements of top Israeli leaders. For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly identified the Palestinians with the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew god commanded must be exterminated down to the last newborn baby. Just a few days ago, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that it would be “just and moral” for Israel to totally exterminate all two million Palestinians in Gaza, but he emphasized that world public opinion was currently preventing his government from taking that important step.
“No one in the world will allow us to starve to death 2 million citizens, although it may be just and moral.”
Far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich expresses his frustration that Israel isn’t allowed to starve 2 million Palestinians to death in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/SuBI8DXOSm
— Palestine Highlights (@PalHighlight) August 8, 2024
Although this officially-stated Israeli goal of eradicating all Palestinian men, women, and children has not yet been achieved, more than ten months of bombs, bullets, and famine have made significant progress in that direction. The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals and a few weeks ago it published a short piece conservatively estimating that relentless Israeli attacks and the complete destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure may be responsible for nearly 200,000 civilian deaths, a figure many times larger than any previous total mentioned in the media.
The massive, ongoing slaughter of Palestinian civilians together with these widespread, explicit public statements by top Israeli leaders led the esteemed jurists of the International Court of Justice to issue a series of near-unanimous rulings that Israel appeared to be undertaking a campaign of genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians. By late July even the notoriously pro-Israel editors of the English-language Wikipedia had finally endorsed the same conclusion.
In addition to these ongoing massacres, many thousands of Palestinian civilian captives have been seized, none of whom have ever been tried or convicted of anything. But with Israeli prison space overflowing, National Security Minister Itomar Ben-Gvir proposed summarily executing all them all by shooting each of them in the head, thereby freeing up their prison space for new waves of captives.
Although the militaries of many countries have occasionally committed massacres or atrocities during wartime, sometimes even with the silent approval of their political leadership, it seems quite unusual to have the latter publicly endorse and advocate such policies, and no similar examples from recent centuries come to mind. I don’t doubt that if television journalists had interviewed Genghis Khan while he was ravaging all of Eurasia with his Mongol hordes, he might have casually made such statements, but I’d always assumed that standards of acceptable international behavior had considerably changed over the last thousand years.
When top leaders regularly issue such wholesale sanguinary declarations, some of their more enthusiastic subordinates may naturally decide to partly implement those same goals on a retail basis. These horrible recent Israeli atrocities merely continued the pattern from earlier this year, which had often been documented on social media by Israelis themselves, eager to emphasize the terrible punishment they were successfully inflicting upon their hated Palestinian foes. As I wrote a few months ago:
Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.
Anglin’s description of the Israeli behavior as being “cartoonishly evil” seemed a very apt phrase to me, and I used it in the title of my own article on the subject.
The State of Israel as “Cartoonishly Evil”?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 5, 2024 • 5,500 Words
Nothing like this has ever previously happened in the modern world, or at least I’ve never heard of such things. For example, back in early 2020, officials of the outgoing Trump and incoming Biden administrations joined together to loudly condemn China for committing a “genocide” against the Uighurs of Xinjiang province without being able to cite a single example of a violent civilian death.
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