The genius of American empire, and it is a kind of genius, a dark and studied one, is that it made its own citizens into its most effective defenders without ever formally conscripting them.
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The genius of American empire, and it is a kind of genius, a dark and studied one, is that it made its own citizens into its most effective defenders without ever formally conscripting them.
No one told the average American: your identity must be fused with the actions of your government so that any criticism of the government feels like a personal attack on your soul.
It happened through accumulation.
Through decades of films and textbooks and news anchors and political speeches and sports stadium flyovers and the casual, omnipresent, never-interrogated assumption that America is the main character of history.
The main character does not commit atrocities.
The main character makes difficult decisions.
The main character has flaws that are part of their journey.
The main character's violence is always, on some level, justified by the narrative logic of the story.
The people the main character kills are not main characters.
They are plot devices. Obstacles. Context. Sad music for thirty seconds and then a cut to the protagonist processing their trauma.
By the time most Americans encounter a real challenge to this story, an actual, sourced, detailed account of what American power has done to specific people in specific places, they are not encountering it as new information.
They are encountering it as an attack on their personhood.
And they fight it the way you fight an attack on your personhood.
Not with evidence.
With fury.
posted by Satish Sharma at
02:38
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