By Caitlin Johnstone
June 15, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" -
Minnesota’s
U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar has once again been the center
of an artificial controversy
launched in bad faith,
this time over a
tweet in which she
mentioned the United States and Israel in the same
breath as Hamas and the Taliban as perpetrators of
“unthinkable atrocities.”
“We must have the same
level of accountability and justice for all victims
of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable
atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel,
Afghanistan, and the Taliban,” Omar said while
sharing a video of her wildly unsuccessful effort to
get a straight answer from Secretary of State Tony
Blinken on accountability for U.S. and Israeli war
crimes.
This provoked a bunch
of ridiculous garment-rending histrionics from Nancy
Pelosi and House
Democrats, not
because it is absurd to compare murderous
warmongering regimes like the U.S. and Israel with
vastly less destructive regional forces like Hamas
and the Taliban, but because it is considered
unacceptable in mainstream politics to suggest that
the U.S. and Israel are anything other than
beneficent powers who at worst make the occasional
innocent oopsie.
This pathetically mild
criticism of a power structure which has killed
millions and displaced
tens of millions just
in the last two decades, during a pathetically
unsuccessful attempt to get any kind of concession
about war crimes and crimes against humanity from a
prominent U.S. official, drew so much outrage and
vitriol from the U.S. political/media class that
Omar was once
again forced to
issue another pathetic walkback of her comments.
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“On Monday, I asked
Secretary of State Antony Blinken about ongoing
International Criminal Court investigations,” Omar
said in a
statement on
her congressional website. “To be clear: the
conversation was about accountability for specific
incidents regarding those ICC cases, not a moral
comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the
U.S. and Israel. I was in no way equating terrorist
organizations with democratic countries with
well-established judicial systems.”
And that is it,
ladies and gentlemen. That is as far as you are
allowed to take criticism of the empire in
mainstream American politics. Even that level of
feeble, impotent criticism is far outside the
boundaries for anyone in the mainstream
political/media class.
So, in case it wasn’t
already clear to you, progressive Democrats are a
joke. They’re not a real thing. If they are
literally barred from even meaningfully criticizing the
U.S. empire, let alone actually working to dismantle
it, they’re a joke. They will never succeed in
advancing any kind of real progressive agenda.
There’s this unspoken
and unquestioned assumption among progressive
Democrats that it is possible to advance progressive
agendas without actually ending the U.S. empire.
That you don’t need to actually dismantle the U.S.
empire and strip down its military to the bare bones
in order to get nice things like universal
healthcare, a living wage and more ethical behavior
on the world stage.
This is pure fantasy.
It will never happen.
As long as the U.S. is
the center of a globe-spanning empire, it will be
necessary to keep Americans too poor, too busy and
too confused to interfere with the operation of the
machine. You cannot allow a critical mass of
Americans to have enough money to spend on political
campaign donations, to have enough free time to
research what’s actually happening in their world,
to be sufficiently stress-free to look up and
realize that your government is murdering children
in their name, and also keep the empire running
smoothly. You cannot have an imperialist oligarchy
who runs things and also have income and wealth
equality.
The empire feeds on
oppression, exploitation, ignorance and blood. It is
impossible to dominate the planet with a unipolar
world order if you don’t use violent force, and the
threat of violent force, to uphold that world order.
If you’re not strangling people at home and bombing
people abroad, then you cannot have an oligarchic
empire. Period.
The main rift you see
on the leftmost end of the American political
spectrum is between people who seek an end to the
imperialist murder machine and people who just want
the imperialist murder machine to give them
healthcare. The first group faces a very difficult
uphill battle to get what it wants. The second group
is just engaging in an impossible fantasy.
This is how you can
tell who is for real and who is not: do they want to
dismantle the oligarchic empire, or don’t they? If
they do, they’re fighting for something real, but
the oligarch-owned political/media class will not
give them a platform. If they don’t, they may get a
punditry job or a seat in congress, but they won’t
ever actually give you anything besides feel-good
empty narrative fluff.
The solution, as I always
point out,
is to work together to destroy and discredit the
oligarchic propaganda apparatus which enables the
empire to determine who gets a platform and who
doesn’t. As long as they are able to uplift vapid
fauxgressives who pretend it’s possible to have a
kinder, gentler U.S. empire and marginalize people
who actually want to dismantle the status quo, there
will never be enough public awareness to force real
change. All positive changes in human behavior are
always the direct result of an expansion of
awareness, so spreading awareness of the fact that
there is an oligarchic empire which is exploiting
and deceiving everyone should be the foremost
priority of anyone who wants real change.
It’s not that you can’t
beat the machine, it’s that you can’t beat the
machine using the tools the machine has given you. A
grassroots effort to wake each other up to reality
is a very achievable goal, and once enough eyes are
open, anything is possible.
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