GenZedong

And they've been taught that history is over, there's no alternative, which means other places must be exactly like the US. It's inconceivable that other places could be run differently even while those places are thought of as other.

Thanks for the essay! I just finished it, it's some of the most pointed and relevant stuff I've read in a long while. I especially liked this bit towards the end:

When we proudly assert that we are for the individual over the collective, we’re essentially saying that some people count as people, and some don’t. At the heart of liberalism lies dehumanization; we should not forget that slave ownership was one of the original “individual rights” that was so fiercely fought for by American revolutionaries.

Therein the arguments against socialist states. Every death under socialism is a failure of the government, because it dared to try to solve problems collectively. Under capitalism, deaths are due to the individual’s failures, and therefore no one’s responsibility.

Also it's hilarious how the author thought to compare Marx with Tupac

Definitely. Americans in particular are surrounded by media that affirms and reaffirms their supposed greatness, but libs across the west believe similar stuff and it's not just because they're in an echo chamber. emizeko shared this article that goes into another aspect of liberal myth making: westerners agree with this shit because they want to.

Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live.

I believe that, on the contrary, the process of Western propaganda is better understood in terms of “licensing”: the issuing of moral license for the bourgeois proletariat to profitably go along with bourgeois designs without the feeling of shame overwhelming. In this alternative account people aren’t “brainwashed” insofar as they don’t actually believe the lies, not in the way that we generally understand belief. It’s more correct to say that they go along with them, whether enthusiastically or apprehensively, because it’s actually their optimal survival strategy.

I think everyone is well aware of how little change they can truly effect within liberal democracy. How much carnage their governments cause at home and abroad. What happens to people who protest... Accepting that all the people our government subjugates deserve it brings a sort of comfort. Pride, even.