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“We”
Posted on: October 14, 2021 at 09:58:10 CT
pickle MU
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“We”
One of the great triumphs of the government propaganda machine in self-described democracies is the “we are the government” line. It makes the subject population somewhat more compliant than it might be if a particular family passed down the power to govern from one generation to another, with no chance (short of outright revolution) that anyone else will ever hold the reins of power. More important, criticisms of their government’s foreign policy now come to be seen as personal affronts. We are the government, after all, so how dare you criticize “our” foreign policy!
For that reason, opponents of American foreign policy should, when speaking on this topic, eliminate the pronoun “we” from their vocabulary. “We” did not kill those Iraqi kids. In 2002 and 2003 “we” did not repeat transparent untruths about the alleged threat posed by a devastated Iraq. “We” did not lay waste to an already-suffering country, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing four million others.
They did this. The American political class. We did not.
What some Americans did do, though, was to make sorry excuses for their political overlords. Some Americans defended a series of policies which, if pursued by the Soviet Union 30 years ago, they themselves would have condemned as grotesque violations of basic standards of morality. But with the U.S. government as the perpetrator, everything was different. They were as gullible on foreign policy as left-liberals are on domestic policy. They dutifully searched for evidence to corroborate their leaders’ claims, even when their leaders had long since abandoned those claims. They accepted the most transparent propaganda without batting an eye.
http://www.tigerboard.com/boards/view.php?message=17126878
One of the great triumphs of the government propaganda machine in self-described democracies is the “we are the government” line. It makes the subject population somewhat more compliant than it might be if a particular family passed down the power to govern from one generation to another, with no chance (short of outright revolution) that anyone else will ever hold the reins of power. More important, criticisms of their government’s foreign policy now come to be seen as personal affronts. We are the government, after all, so how dare you criticize “our” foreign policy!
For that reason, opponents of American foreign policy should, when speaking on this topic, eliminate the pronoun “we” from their vocabulary. “We” did not kill those Iraqi kids. In 2002 and 2003 “we” did not repeat transparent untruths about the alleged threat posed by a devastated Iraq. “We” did not lay waste to an already-suffering country, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing four million others.
They did this. The American political class. We did not.
What some Americans did do, though, was to make sorry excuses for their political overlords. Some Americans defended a series of policies which, if pursued by the Soviet Union 30 years ago, they themselves would have condemned as grotesque violations of basic standards of morality. But with the U.S. government as the perpetrator, everything was different. They were as gullible on foreign policy as left-liberals are on domestic policy. They dutifully searched for evidence to corroborate their leaders’ claims, even when their leaders had long since abandoned those claims. They accepted the most transparent propaganda without batting an eye.
http://www.tigerboard.com/boards/view.php?message=17126878
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