By Caitlin Johnstone
February 20, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - Depending on whose
political echo chamber I happen to be arguing with
on a given day, one common criticism I run into a
fair bit which many of my readers have surely also
encountered is that I put all my energy into
criticizing the foreign policy of the United States
and its allies.
“You’re not anti-war, you’re only anti-AMERICAN
wars!” they say, as though they’re delivering some
kind of devastating slam-dunk point. “If you’re so
antiwar, why don’t you criticize Assad’s war in
Syria? If you’re such an anti-imperialist, show me
where you’ve ever once criticized Russian
imperialism, or Chinese imperialism?”
The argument being that someone who opposes
US-led warmongering isn’t really motivated by a
desire for peace and an opposition to war unless
they’re also voicing opposition to all other violent
governments in the world. If you’re only criticizing
US imperialism and not the imperialism of other
nations, you must be motivated by something far more
sinister, perhaps a hatred for the United States of
America.
I have three responses to this feeble line of
argumentation, which I’ll list here for the benefit
of anyone else who’d like to make use of them:
1. People making this argument
never apply its own logic to themselves.
Nobody criticizes all misdeeds by all governments
everywhere in the world. If you run into someone
making this “you have to criticize all bad
governments or your criticisms are invalid” argument
on Twitter, just
do an
advanced search for their Twitter handle plus
“Duterte” or “Sisi” or one of the other US-allied
tyrants who the mainstream media haven’t spent years
demonizing, and you’ll find that they’ve never made
a single mention of those leaders the entire time
they’ve had that account.
What this proves, of course, is that they don’t
actually practice the belief that all misdeeds by
all governments are equally worthy of condemnation.
What they actually practice is the belief that one
ought to criticize the governments they hear their
television criticizing: Russia, China, Syria, Iran,
etc. The governments the US State Department and the
CIA don’t like. The disobedient governments. The
governments which have resisted absorption into the
blob of the US-centralized empire.
They don’t put the logic of their own argument
into practice because it is impossible to put into
practice. Everyone’s only got so much time in the
day, so you have to choose where to put your focus.
I personally choose to put my focus on the single
most egregious offender in warmongering and
imperialism. Which takes us to:
No Advertising - No Government
Grants - This Is Independent Media
2. The US empire is by far the
worst warmongering imperialist force on the planet.
US-led regime change interventionism is literally
always disastrous and literally never helpful. This
is an indisputable fact. Imperialists get very
frustrated when I take my stand there in arguments
online, because it is an unassailable position.
That’s usually when the ad hominems start flying.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56345.htm,
but such is the nature of propaganda. It is true
that other governments do evil things; as far as I
can tell this becomes pretty much a given as soon as
a government is allowed to have a military force and
keep important secrets from its citizenry. Obviously
Russia, China and other unabsorbed governments are
no exception to this rule. But the US is worse, by
orders of magnitude.
No other nation comes anywhere remotely close. No
other nation is circling the planet with hundreds of
military bases and engaged in dozens of undeclared
military operations. No other nation has cultivated
a giant globe-sprawling empire in the form of
tightly knit alliances with powerful murderous
governments like the UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia. No
other nation is constantly laboring to sabotage and
undermine any government which refuses to be
absorbed into military and economic alliance with it
using sanctions, staged coups, covert CIA
operations, color revolutions, economic
manipulations, propaganda, the arming of dissident
militias, and launching full-scale military
invasions. Only the US and the nations that its
cancerous empire has metastasized into are doing
anything like that on anywhere near the scale.
So since I, like everyone else, only have enough
time in the day to oppose so many different evils in
the world, I choose to pour my energy into opposing
the single most egregious offender. An offender
which doesn’t get nearly enough opposition, in my
opinion.
3. I have a special
responsibility for the evils of the empire in which
I live.
When asked in an interview why he spends the bulk
of his time criticizing his own government, Noam
Chomsky
replied:
“My own concern is primarily the terror
and violence carried out by my own state, for two
reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the
larger component of international violence. But also
for a much more important reason than that: namely,
I can do something about it. So even if the US was
responsible for 2% of the violence in the world
instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I
would be primarily responsible for. And that is a
simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value
of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and
predictable consequences. It is very easy to
denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has
about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities
that took place in the 18th century.”
When people here in Australia ask about what I do
for a living, I sometimes jokingly tell them I write
about Australian foreign policy, which means that I
write about US foreign policy. I’ve written many
times about how Australia functions as Washington’s
basement gimp, an impotent vassal which functions as
little more than a US military/intelligence asset in
terms of meaningful international affairs.
So all I really am doing here is applying
Chomsky’s philosophy to the reality of an empire in
which sovereign nations do not exist to any
meaningful extent; as a member of a state within
that empire I focus on US government malfeasance in
the same way I would if I were living in Alaska or
Hawaii.
All I’m doing is pointing my personal skill set
at what I see as the biggest problem in the world: a
murderous empire in which I happen to reside and
therefore bear special responsibility for opposing.
Which is simply the only sane stand for anyone to
take, in my opinion.
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