“This Is Not America” Is the Most Dangerous Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves | Truthout
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As authoritarianism accelerates — as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights — people are scrambling for reference points.

But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn’t Afghanistan. This isn’t Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn’t who we are.

These statements are meant to comfort. They are meant to regulate fear, to calm the nervous system with the promise that no matter how bad things get, this country is somehow exempt from the logic of repression. Instead, they reveal how deeply many people still misunderstand both this country and the nature of authoritarian power.

They rest on a dangerous fiction: that large-scale state violence, political terror, and repression belong somewhere else — to “failed states,” to the Global South, to places imagined as perpetually unstable. This is not only historically false; it is how people in the U.S. have been trained not to recognize what is being built in front of them.

  • Basic Glitch@sh.itjust.worksOP
    21·
    14 hours ago

    This may not be your America, but it is the America that has been “built” by oligarchs via 50+ years of fear based attacks on equality that were always meant to blame the slipping standard of living on everybody but the people who were responsible.

    While Americans were fighting each other, the same oligarchs were hyping up that fear by offering the false safety of a made up in-grouping and getting very rich doing it. Meanwhile, they were using the remainder of your tax dollars to build a militarized police state right under your nose.

    Obviously this isn’t the America you want, because it was never meant to be your America. It’s the America the oligarchs have always wanted, and it definitely didn’t pop up out of nowhere. A lot of people just didn’t realize this is what your tax dollars were building in the name of “safety,” because you weren’t supposed to realize it until it was too late.