The most common liberal American response to criticism of American foreign policy is to agree with the specific criticism and then immediately undermine it.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2048858038929633662
The most common liberal American response to criticism of American foreign policy is to agree with the specific criticism and then immediately undermine it.
"Yes, the Iraq War was a terrible mistake."
Mistake.
"Yes, what happened in Vietnam was a tragedy."
Tragedy.
"Yes, the CIA did some very bad things during the Cold War."
Some things. Very bad. Past tense.
Watch the language.
Watch what the language does.
Watch how it processes an atrocity.
A mistake is what you make when you mispronounce a word.
A mistake implies no intent, no pattern, no structural cause, no accountability.
A mistake is something that won't happen again because now we know better.
A tragedy is what happens in Greek theater. Oedipus didn't mean to kill his father.
Tragedy implies fate, complexity, the sad inevitability of good intentions meeting harsh reality.
A tragedy is no one's fault, because fault requires agency, and tragedy requires that the agent be a victim of circumstance.
Some bad things.
Quantifying. Minimizing. Removing the specific human content from events that had specific human content.
Not: the Phoenix Program systematically tortured and assassinated somewhere between twenty and forty thousand civilians.
But: some bad things.
This is the liberal version of American innocence.
It performs more discomfort.
It is willing to go further in acknowledging that something went wrong.
But it arrives at the same destination:
No one is accountable.
No pattern is structura.
No reckoning is necessary.
And the fundamental moral standing of American power remains intact.
The conservative version says it didn't happen.
The liberal version says it happened but it was complicated.
Both versions protect the same thing.
Both versions mean you never have to change anything, because mistakes don't require structural change and tragedies don't require perpetrators.
The people who were napalmed do not have the luxury of calling it a tragedy.
They just call it what happened to them.
posted by Satish Sharma at
02:27
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