John Weeks | The Libertarian Institute

A Critique of Pure Hasbara

by John Weeks | Jun 13, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Hasbara is a central feature of genocidal Zionism: “Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has successfully created a new illogic of its own; an illogic that has made the illegal seem legal, the immoral appear moral and the undemocratic sound democratic. It has masterfully marketed a number of myths that have become a part of the political and mainstream media.” As the marketing of Israel’s mythology, “hasbara” has been charitably characterized as “public diplomacy,” less charitably viewed as “propaganda,” and roughly translated as “explanation” or “explaining.” Familiarity with the...

American Odysseus

by John Weeks | Jun 5, 2024 | Blog

Matthew Hoh, former Capt. USMC, led men into war. So he knows the truth that war cheerleaders will never tell you. Check out his recent Memorial Day speech here: A Morality of Anger and Guilt

Long Vietnam Syndrome

by John Weeks | Jun 3, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Memorial Day is over. The state has successfully baptized itself with the blood of its fallen soldiers. It has been symbolically buried in a mass grave of its own making and resurrected to flood the world with very real blood. Yet, it cannot rid itself of what regime intellectuals call the “Vietnam Syndrome,” and this is cause for hope. The state has masterfully obscured the costs of its wars—costs which are massive. As former U.S. Marine Captain Matthew Hoh put it during a Memorial Day speech: “…the costs of war is the cost to our society, the cost to our identity, the cost to our history,...

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Our Societal Detachment from War

by John Weeks | May 27, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Modern nation states have developed an impressive symbolic innovation to memorialize their war dead, the tomb of the unknown soldier: “No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times…The ancient Greeks had cenotaphs, but for specific, known individuals whose bodies, for one reason or another, could not be retrieved for regular burial."...

The Anti-Capitalist Social Order in Hollywood, and Our Campuses

by John Weeks | May 23, 2024 | Featured Articles

The historian of reason Mark Ajita once described college as the place where young people go into massive debt and enslave their future selves so “they can go there and read books about how it shouldn’t be this way.” Never has this been more apparent than this spring as the state turned on American college students like a kindergarten version of the USSR: “The opaque [Soviet] regime had originated as a conspiracy and had never ceased being one, while fighting against what one scholar has aptly called the ‘omnipresent conspiracy.’ The plots could be so convoluted that many of those involved...

The Imperial Lamb: America, Israel, and Ritual Substitution

by John Weeks | May 9, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

“And for you, here are these ritual substitutes…And may they die, but I will not die.”- Keilschrifturkunden aus Boghazköi XXIV 5 I 15-16 The relationship between the United States Imperial Government (USIG) and the state of Israel is what the kids call “wtf!?” The dean of the Realist School of foreign policy, John Mearsheimer, put it this way: “We have a special relationship with Israel that bears no resemblance to any relationship between any two countries in the history of the world.” Until now the deep structural reality of this relationship has not been fully grasped. Israel is America’s...

The Creature From Palestine

by John Weeks | Apr 30, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The state is a monster that eats itself, along with individuals within its domain, its spheres of influence, and beyond. Citizens typically don’t perceive this due to the crafty rhetoric generated by the state’s intellectuals. Sometimes the rhetorical machinery breaks down and we get to see the monster in all its gruesome majesty. This has happened in Israel due to its “plausibly genocidal” savagery in Gaza, coupled with its structurally flawed, adolescent dependence on the United States’ information warfare apparatus. Much as Israel created a “Palestine Laboratory” for the workshopping of...

Diagnosing Israel’s Imperial Narcissism

by John Weeks | Apr 9, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

As it continues to engage in a “plausibly genocidal” mass murder spree in Gaza, the state of Israel has embraced the most psychotic and psychopathic interpretation of one of the most violent narratives from the Hebrew Bible. This is fueling a narcissism that puts the very existence of Israel at risk. On October 28, as Israeli ground forces began turning Gaza into a free-fire zone, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his nation. He vowed to destroy Hamas for “our existence” and also “for the benefit of all of humanity.” During the speech he said, “You must remember what Amalek...