It's all very repetitive, and I often think I really have nothing more to say about that, whatever that may be. And then there are days like the first day of 2025, when the coincidences line up too neatly not to comment on.
There are four things that happened on January 1st that I'd like to highlight.
I spent New Year's Eve and New Year's Day celebrating the occasion at home with small groups of friends and family
There was a terrorist attack in New Orleans
In between the small New Year's gatherings, I wrote, recorded, and posted a song about the siege and destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza
By evening, I received an email and other notifications informing me that my YouTube channel had been demonetized
These things are all intimately related in various ways, though they're probably not all directly related in the causal sense. But in case it's not all obvious -- or even if it is -- I'll expand on these occurrences a bit.
There are a lot of different reasons for having a small gathering of friends and family for the New Year holiday. For me, a gathering of twelve adults and children is just a perfect size. Like any other performer, I'm always happy to sing for large audiences at every possible opportunity, but on a social level if it's not a gig, I tend to find larger gatherings overwhelming.
But also I live in the United States, where there's a massacre somewhere in the country about every day on average, and an outrageously high overall homicide rate to go along with it. Some of the favorite targets of the people who want to randomly kill members of the public are big events where large crowds are gathering, such as holiday celebrations. I think about this reflexively whenever I'm in a large crowd somewhere in North America or Europe, and I often wonder how many other people around me are thinking the same thing.
More often I wonder who's not thinking the same thing. Most people in the western world out partying to welcome the New Year don't seem like they're particularly concerned about what might happen. They also usually don't seem to be particularly preoccupied with the babies freezing to death with no blankets in their flooded tents on the beach in Gaza.
I know the people who prepare the messages they send out to citizens for the Japanese consulate in Portland think about the holiday-time massacres in Europe and North America. Sometime in December we got an email from the consulate reminding us that throughout the US and Europe, terrorists like to target the types of large gatherings that tend to happen during the holiday season.
This is probably a particularly important reminder to send to people with Japanese nationals in their families, because as a general rule, Japanese people love holidays, and celebrating holidays collectively, as do lots of other people.
To underscore the warnings from the consulate, there was the vehicular attack at another Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, followed by an identical effort in New Orleans -- both modeled after still other vehicular attacks on the public that have been carried out with terrible results in New York, Berlin, France, Spain and elsewhere.
Between the vehicular attacks on the Christmas Market and the one on Bourbon Street, the Israeli military has been systematically starving and freezing the remaining population of the Gaza Strip, preventing people from having food, water, medicine, shelter, or even blankets. In between these two vehicular attacks on innocent civilians in the western world, the Israeli military has been systematically killing Palestinian children for daring to leave their tents to look for food or water, often assassinating them by drone strike. In between Christmas and New Year's, the Israeli military completely destroyed the last remaining hospital in the north of Gaza, physically kicking out critically ill patients and arresting the staff who were caring for them.
Now, we can be sure that the Israelis are torturing their prisoners, because that's what Israel does with Palestinian prisoners, of whatever age or gender -- with the torture frequently including rape, of prisoners of whatever gender, and confinement in tiny cages, just like the Syrians used to do. We don't have to wonder whether the Israelis are torturing the doctors, nurses, and administrators of the Kamal Adwan hospital, because we know for a fact that this is what they did to the other hospital staff they detained, after destroying other hospitals in the Gaza Strip, because destroying hospitals, torturing doctors, and assassinating children out looking for water is the daily practice of the Israeli military in Gaza right now, this week, this minute.
Civil society groups around the world have been mobilizing to try to highlight the arrest of the medical staff after the hospital's invasion and destruction by the IDF. In trying to play my part in this effort, I wrote a song about it, which I posted on YouTube and elsewhere in the morning of January 1st, Portland time.
Twelve hours later, my YouTube channel was demonetized, supposedly, I was told, for a Houthi Army press release I posted on my YouTube channel over a year ago, now deleted by YouTube. I had put it up after the US and the UK bombed Yemen, in the interest of providing a little context, for whichever of my fellow Americans or Brits might see it, about the motivations of the people our air forces were attacking this time around.
The mass murderer in Louisiana apparently did a little broadcast from his truck en route to the French Quarter, where the police say he pledged allegiance to Islamic State. The video was deleted, so I don't know what else he said.
If whatever he said was anything like the words of other people who have engaged in similar acts of mass murder, like, oh, Osama Bin Laden, then he might have made reference to the constant slaughter of innocent civilians in places like Gaza right now, and he might have said something about wanting to make westerners understand what their tax dollars are doing in other, far-away parts of the world.
Whether or not we'll ever find out what the terrorist from Texas said in his truck on the way to the scene of the crime, who knows. It's against Facebook's policies, and against YouTube's as well, to post anything sympathetic with a proscribed organization. So they'll take down your videos and otherwise punish you for your transgressions, even if your only transgression was expressing a bit of sympathy with those who are resisting genocide. So of course if you pledged your allegiance to Islamic State, that's coming down right away.
Israel, on the other hand, is not a proscribed organization. So videos praising the brave soldiers of the IDF and their efforts to cleanse Gaza of the evil terrorists that they claim are using schools and hospitals as their hubs of operation, regardless of how outrageously detached from reality the claims may be, are perfectly fine. Songs praising the Israeli military's high moral standing are also fine, regardless of how many children they assassinate per day.
No wonder, again and again, we have to listen to everyone from national leaders to your man on the street talk about "senseless killing."
They're either never told, or they actively hide from us in as many ways as they can, depending, the fact that these acts of senseless killing are in so many cases retaliatory. In so many cases, their actions are very consciously and intentionally meant to replicate, in a comparatively tiny way, what the people they identify with or empathize with or seek to represent are going through every day.
No wonder, again and again, we have to listen either to the imperial elite vilify those crazy Muslims and their violent ways, or to the clueless followers of the imperial elite, who have no idea why anyone would be upset, because they've been kept in the dark. Most of whatever they might encounter in the form of any kind of media that does a decent job of contextualizing these violent times is actively suppressed. Contextualizing the "friendly" state violence, and what are so often retaliatory acts of mass murder in response to it, is apparently a bad thing to do. History always began with the latest act of terrorism, and terrorism is, by definition, something Muslims do to westerners.
Context is actively suppressed in so many different ways, from the top to the bottom. From the agendas of the billionaires and energy companies that own so much of the world's mass media to the suppression of content, by algorithm or by censorship, on the corporate-controlled online platforms that are our primary means of communication today.
It's a new reality where the already very powerful, brainwashing influence of the corporate media is joined by the various forms of control over our communications exerted on us on social media, that happens in so many ways that are completely invisible to the vast majority of us, the vast majority of the time.
And it's a new reality that was eloquently, and mostly quite violently, underscored on the very first day of 2025.
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