"Language, too, forces the air from the lungs. Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language. A language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence as though living was an aberration.
And this language might protect the empire’s most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides.
Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say, yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism, the alternative of the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home; without school, without hospital, and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and days old babies left to scream and starve is barbarism."
— Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Crazy how we can all agree that we’re ruled by a pedophilic jingoistic oligarchy, but when they tell us other countries/regimes/leaders are bad we nod in agreement.
“We” is a strong word to put in that sentence. I only haven’t done immense violence because adventurist action is foolish and unproductive.
And, for the sake of the argument, let’s say they were. Let’s say everything our pedo elites were telling us about other countries was true. What business is it of ours. Surely those people have as much right to self determination as we do. Why are we to impose our broken system on them?
I’ve tried to research Iran leadership and it did seem pretty bad. The US is just entering the precipice of Fascism, it’s not massacring its citizens yet.
The US is absolutely massacring its own citizens along with people all over the globe, and has been doing that since time immemorial. The US runs a literal torture camp on the territory it annexed from Cuba. The US is a home of the Alligator Alcatraz. ICE goons are literally killing people in broad daylight. Stop with this idiotic narrative that the US is entering precipice of fascism. The US has always been a fascist state, German nazis were literally studying the US as an example.
The larger point here is that we uncritically agree with US/Israeli propaganda without understanding the context. For example, it was the United States that toppled the first elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh from power in the 1953 coup, and the US then reinstalled the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi back in power. All done for BP oil profits, and to reverse the nationalisation of Irans oil industry. Somehow these nuances always get lost in the conversation.
The US will always prefer a pro-US monarchy to a democracy that guards itself from exploitation/imperalism. The U.S. assassination attempts, propaganda, military posturing, and economic/diplomatic sanctions force hard decisions on regimes that refuse to become a puppet state of the West. This is not to agree with every decision by the leadership in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, etc. but we are often responsible, in large part, for the difficulties these countries face.
aka: the primary goal of propaganda.
