By Caitlin Johnstone | 25 May 2021
I’ve never had anyone from the UK or Israel tell me I can’t criticize their government because I don’t live there, but Americans say this to me all the time. American exceptionalism is an entirely unique mind virus.
Criticizing the most powerful, destructive, and influential government on the planet should be normal and ubiquitous around the world. It should not be something that stands out as unusual or inappropriate. Yet when Americans see it, that’s exactly how it shows up for them.
This is of course because Americans are the most propagandized population on earth, which is due to the fact that the US is the hub of a globe-spanning empire with an unprecedented amount of power riding on its continued operation. Can’t have the locals meddling with the machine.
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If the world truly saw that killing someone with starvation is no better than killing them with bombs, that abusing human rights overseas is no better than abusing them at home, and that US “allies” are functional US member states, a lot more US evil would be seen for what it is.
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There is nothing, literally nothing, that the US condemns other governments for doing that it does not also do:
Saying the US is guilty of something it criticizes other governments for doing doesn’t mean what those other governments did was okay. What it does mean is that the US has absolutely no legitimacy in criticizing anyone for doing it.
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America talks a big game for a country whose chief exports are Marvel movies and human suffering.
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There are many words which could accurately be used to describe someone who supports a status quo of endless war, nuclear brinkmanship, oppression, exploitation and ecocide, but “moderate” isn’t one of them.
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Conflating discrimination against whites with racism against people of color is like conflating going on a diet with dying of starvation.
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FYI it’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2021 and still believe that Trump was a good president.
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It’s pretty funny how they went to all that trouble killing Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to prevent Palestinian rights from going mainstream and then Israel’s own actions made it mainstream anyway.
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Saying Palestinians are responsible for their current situation is essentially claiming that a population caused its own genocide. It’s claiming they oppressed, displaced and mass murdered themselves by failing to obey the orders imposed on them by a hostile occupying force. Which happens to be the exact same argument that has been made in preceding centuries by apologists for genocidal settler colonialism in Australia, Africa, and the Americas.
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Palestine occupies such a special place in activism because people intuitively recognize it as a potential turning point in the evolution of humanity’s collective consciousness. A chance to say it’s no longer okay to kill and displace an indigenous population and take their land. A chance to stop engaging in a deeply unconscious and wildly traumatizing behavior that humanity has been engaged in since the dawn of civilization. A chance to collectively recognize “Okay, we don’t do that anymore” and evolve into a better kind of species.
Palestine moves something deep within people and captures the human imagination about what might be possible, what kind of world we could create together if we just got a little more sane.
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There’s an immense gap between those who want to dismantle the US-centralized empire and those who merely want the empire to behave a bit more nicely. These two factions happen to be aligned on opposing the abuse of Palestinians right now, but the gap will highlight itself again.
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Attempts to turn the conversation about Palestinian suffering into a conversation about anti-semitism are cynical and manipulative and should be dismissed accordingly.
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Dark ugly family secrets can remain taboo subjects for decades, then something erupts and everyone starts talking about them. This shift in the Israel narrative feels kind of like that.
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You can tell how establishment-indoctrinated someone still is by how much of the status quo they try to hold onto. We can still keep capitalism, it just needs reform. We can still keep the Democratic Party, it just needs reform. We can still keep our military, our alliances, etc.
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I make my living from entirely voluntary and unconditional donations by strangers who enjoy the writings I publish for free and I let anyone use my work for free, and I still get people doing the “and yet you participate in capitalism haha” thing whenever I criticize capitalism.
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Trauma self-perpetuates. Abused parents abuse their children, traumatized leaders and executives pass their trauma on to everyone below them, Israelis pass the trauma of their ancestors on to Palestinians. Only by turning inward do we heal the trauma and stop the cycle.
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