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A call for reorganizing U.S. media so as to meaningfully reduce human suffering

In the United States there is a mass media apparatus that is exceptionally effective at marshaling the public’s support for (or at least tolerance of) the agendas of state and corporate power. In the nation with the most military and financial power in human history, this often means tolerance of violence in the form of outright war or sanctions against nations deemed to be “official enemies.” 

From World War One to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the present day, the media has proven to be an indispensable partner to the U.S. government in propagandizing a public that might otherwise oppose brutality inflicted on foreign peoples. This form of messaging is what intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman termed, “The Propaganda Model.”  In this structure, U.S. mainstream media cultivate public consent for violent U.S. policies through several methods. These tactics include but are not limited to exaggerating or emphasizing the malevolent behavior of U.S. adversaries, while deemphasizing or not covering crimes of the U.S. or U.S. clients. 

The harm inflicted by this propaganda system is hard to overstate.  Even limiting one’s analysis to the last two decades, U.S. wars, economic sanctions and covert subversion have killed, maimed, displaced, and traumatized tens of millions. Accomplishing such devastation would be a far more difficult task without the consenting population that results from the Propaganda Model of media. 

What follows is a proposal for a new model of media; one which if adopted would yield a U.S. public that would serve as a more formidable obstacle for state and corporate power. The end result would be a significant reduction in human suffering.

Introducing The Triage Model

An unfortunate assumption held by many is that the major news outlets are neutral actors, exercising no discretion in reporting the major stories of the day.  However, at any given time there are millions of stories occurring in the world. With limits on air time, page space and investigative resources, news publications make choices as to which stories to cover and which to ignore; which to emphasize and which to minimize. In other words, media outlets give priority to some stories and some perspectives over others. 

Similar dynamics exist in non-media settings wherein finite resources demand that priorities are set as to how they are utilized. Perhaps the most dramatic of such situations are emergencies where many people demand medical attention. Here, the principle of triage care becomes applicable. In a triage situation first responders and health professionals administer care based on where it is most needed and where it will have the most effect. Triage care rests upon the following principles:

1.   The most dire injuries are prioritized for treatment over less severe ones. 

AND

2.  Sadly, treatment must be prioritized to those for whom treatment has a realistic chance to save, versus those whose wounds are beyond the capacity of first responders to help.  

When applied properly, triage care has the effect of saving many lives and dramatically reducing human suffering. If U.S. media adopted the basic principles that apply in triage care, a “Triage Model” of media, so too could human misery be reduced at a global scale. 

Current Media Priorities

In their book Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman demonstrate that under the Propaganda Model, U.S. media disproportionately focus on the alleged crimes of official enemies while giving comparatively less attention to the atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. or U.S. proxies. This is most easily demonstrated by comparing U.S. news outlets’ coverage of similar events that take place at the same time. Such paired examples are instructive as to how U.S. media prioritize their coverage.

A Tale of Two Genocides

 Among the most revealing of the paired events are the 1970’s genocides in Cambodia and East Timor. While the Khmer Rouge’s atrocity in Cambodia certainly cannot be explained without attention to prior US actions in Southeast Asia, the perpetrators of the act were not direct U.S. clients at the time of the genocide. Thus the victims of the Khmer Rouge could be distanced from U.S. policy. 

By contrast, the mass murder that began in 1975 in East Timor  was perpetrated by Indonesia, a government with close ties to the U.S. In fact, the Indonesian army that invaded East Timor and subsequently killed a third of the population had been armed and trained by the United States. 

U.S. president Gerald Ford and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger had even visited with the Indonesian dictator Suharto the day before the invasion of East Timor and gave the greenlight to the crime. The duo sought to conceal U.S. involvement, informing Suharto that,  “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly” and that “It would be better if it were done after we returned[to the United States.]” 

Further establishing U.S. support for the extermination of the East Timorese was the diplomatic cover provided at the United Nations. It was U.S. policy to sabotage UN efforts to stop the slaughter in East Timor, an endeavor confirmed by the words of UN ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 

“The U.S. wished things to turn out as they did in East Timor and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me and I carried it out with no inconsiderable success.”  

While the evidence is clear that in East Timor the U.S. facilitated one of the worst crimes of the second half of the 20th century, one would not have known it from U.S. media coverage at the time. 

The paper of record, the New York Times, granted the U.S. perpetrated atrocity just 70 inches of column space between 1975 and 1979. 

Comparatively, in the same time frame, the Times issued 1,175 inches of column space to the coverage of the Cambodian genocide. Priority was clearly given to the victims of violence that could not directly be attributed to the United States. Contrastingly, those whose misery was authored by the United States, were deprioritized, their stories untold, their trauma erased from history. 

Cambodia- East Timor Redux

We see a similar dynamic in the present. U.S. media continues to give disproportionate coverage to the crimes that can be attributed to U.S. enemies, while giving comparatively little or no coverage to the human misery inflicted by the U.S. or U.S. clients. 

Currently, the prime example of this tendency is illustrated by the non-stop reporting of Russia’s (a U.S. enemy) invasion of Ukraine, while the U.S- Saudi war in Yemen is ignored. 

While some independent outlets have already scrutinized this gap in coverage, a few facts demonstrate the severity of the disparity:

1. MSNBC, the network generally seen as the leading liberal broadcast network, went an entire year without covering the war on Yemen, even as the UN had proclaimed it to be the worst humanitarian crisis in the world 
2. In U.S. media more broadly, there has been more coverage of Ukraine in just 2022 than there has been of Yemen in the last 12 years. 
3. As of 2020, 5 years since the Yemen conflict began in 2015, U.S. media had given a total of 92 minutes to cover the crisis. To give an idea of scale, consider that in 2018 alone, US media gave 242 minutes of coverage to  California Wildfires. 
4. In a six day period from  2/21/22-2/28/22 US outlets, Fox News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, ran nearly 1,300 stories about Ukraine.  They devoted precisely 0 stories to Yemen in that same time frame.

Clearly U.S. media coverage is clearly not dictated by triage principles. The example of disproportionately prioritizing the crisis in Ukraine over the humanitarian disaster in Yemen conveys an agenda oriented toward advancing the interests of state and corporate power rather than a desire to reduce the amount of human misery in the world.

The Triage Model Applied to Current Events

A very severe injury requiring immediate attention:

While both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen are atrocities that should be covered, if U.S. media were adhering to the Triage Model, the breakdown of that coverage would look very different. The Yemen war clearly meets the triage criteria which calls for prioritizing the most severe situations. According to the United Nations the situation in Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. There have been at least 377,000 killed and many millions more remaining at risk of starvation. Children are by far the most at risk as current estimates detail that a Yemeni child dies every 75 seconds from deprivation. Presently, this is many degrees of magnitude more dire than Ukraine and thus in most need of “treatment.”

Who can a US audience realistically “treat?”

 The Yemen catastrophe meets the second triage criteria- that “treatment” should be prioritized for those who can actually be helped over those who are beyond the capacity to help.

The United States is deeply culpable for the ongoing carnage in Yemen. This complicity involves providing Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars worth of weapons, maintenance and spare parts for planes, military intelligence, training and diplomatic cover.

From 2015 until 2018, the U.S. was even providing mid-air refueling to Saudi fighter jets while they were enroute to bomb Yemeni targets. Just as was the case in East Timor, the genocide in Yemen is an atrocity made possible by the USA. 

According to many experts including Bruce Reidel,  a former CIA official and presidential adviser on the Middle East, without U.S. support the Saudi war on Yemen, “would end tomorrow.” Concurring with that view is Yemeni American scholar and activist Shireen al-Adeimi, who summarizes the Saudi’s total dependence on the U.S. as, 

“The pilot is flying a U.S. made plane, has been trained by U.S. personnel, his plane (after drops US bombs). Ends up getting serviced by U.S. personnel, spare parts are provided by the U.S., the targets were chosen with the support of the U.S. Every step of the way the U.S. is helping, facilitating and enabling the coalition bombing of Yemen.”

Because mass murder in Yemen is an atrocity being perpetrated by the U.S., it is far more “treatable” from the perspective of the US public than the invasion of Ukraine is. At its core this is a simple concept. If one is currently engaged in inflicting suffering on someone else, the easiest way to reduce that suffering is to cease in the activity that is causing it. The U.S. and its clients could dramatically reduce misery in the world by simply discontinuing their suffering inducing behaviors. 

Where is our outrage useful?

People of any nation have the greatest capacity to affect the behavior of their own government. Some may point to the fact that the U.S. is an oligarchic corporate state in which the public has little capacity to influence the policies of their government. However, even autocracies can only maintain protracted war and violence if the populace tolerates it. When a public becomes disenchanted with a war, it becomes far more difficult to prosecute. There are historical examples of this. The Russian withdrawal from WWI was the result of the war weary population overthrowing the Czar and eventually ending Russian participation in the senseless slaughter. The U.S. war in Indochina became difficult and eventually impossible for the U.S. to continue because (in addition to heroic Vietnamese resistance) the U.S. public had turned against the conflict and were expressing discontent in a variety of ways that disrupted the status quo. 

Conversely, if people are unaffected by or unaware of an injustice, they are unlikely to mobilize to end it. This is why the media’s choices in prioritization hold such dire consequences. The choice to give priority to the injustice perpetrated by enemy nations over crimes perpetrated by the U.S. cannot simply be dismissed as “bad journalism.” As Chomsky elaborated on the lack of coverage of East Timor in the 1970’s, “They [U.S. media] have real complicity in genocide in this case. The reason that the atrocities can go on, is because nobody knows about them. If anyone knew about them, there’d be protests and pressure to stop them.” The current disparity between the coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. backed Saudi war on Yemen accomplishes a similar effect, ensuring that the atrocities being perpetrated by a U.S. client (Saudi Arabia ) continue.  

A Note to the (correctly) Skeptical

Those who are (rightly) skeptical of the actual effect that US citizens can have on U.S policy might also be addressed with this dose of realism: Even if Americans’ ability to affect US policy is miniscule, it is certainly far greater than the capacity US citizens have to affect the government of another nation, (particularly one that is not a client of the US). 

Consider that Russian media’s coverage of the War in Ukraine has been (correctly) criticized as censorious and propagandistic. Now imagine that Russia outlets ceased to cover their government’s war in Ukraine entirely, while simultaneously giving overwhelming reportage, commentary, and analysis to the U.S. war on Yemen. In such a situation, any impartial person would conclude that Russian media would share in the culpability for the bloodshed continuing in Ukraine. Yet, a real parallel to this hypothetical situation exists in the U.S. media with its aforementioned lack of reporting on Yemen. Thus, the immiseration of the Yemeni people continues unabated and uncontested by a US public that might otherwise present a formidable barrier for their government’s barbarism. 

Understandable but Unproductive Manufactured Outrage

The current outpouring of US citizens’ support for Ukrainians and the demands for accountability for Russian actions are a product of nonstop U.S media spotlight on the issue.  Such sentiments come from an admirable desire to see the immense level of human suffering in the world reduced. That so much public outcry for the plight of Ukrainians has been so quickly manufactured is a further indictment of U.S media. It shows that they are totally capable of informing the public of ongoing tragedies. However, this ability to generate empathy and demands for justice is being utilized in the service of demonizing a geopolitical adversary of the U.S., rather than informing the U.S public about the atrocity that they have the greatest capacity to “treat;”  That is, of course, the human suffering caused by the U.S. government.

Applying the Triage Model of Media More Broadly

As discussed with the paired examples of the current tragedies in Ukraine and Yemen, the Triage Model of media would dramatically reorient how news is reported. This would be done by allocating coverage, emphasis & resources according to the aforementioned triage criteria. With triage applied in media, coverage or “treatment” would  be prioritized for:

1. The situations with the most dire human consequences (or in medical terms-the most treatable severe injuries over less severe ones).

AND

2. The human suffering that U.S or U.S clients are responsible for, and thus are most “treatable” by a U.S media audience (or in medical terms – those who can be saved over those who (sadly) are beyond current capacity to treat 

Incidentally, because  the U.S is the most powerful country with the greatest capacity for violence, the  criteria usually overlap. Such a reorientation in media priorities could significantly reduce human suffering in the world.  If the Triage Model were adopted, many events that rarely receive any media exposure currently would be prioritized for coverage. What follows are some of the crises which fit both triage criteria as they are some of the most dreadful emergencies on earth, and they are the most treatable by a U.S audience, as they are disasters created by U.S policy. 

An incomplete list of stories that would get triage priority would include: 

• The U.S causing mass deprivation in Afghanistan: Since withdrawing from its 20 year war on the Afghan people in August of 2021, the U.S. has played the role of sore loser, imposing sanctions on the already poverty stricken nation. This is having the predictable result of mass starvation. As shown by the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, U.S media has devoted barely any attention to this  U.S induced famine. This lack of coverage has persisted even as the situation has become one of the most dire crises on earth. Currently deprivation threatens to kill more Afghans than the recently ended 20 year U.S war, and the UN is characterizing the country as “hanging on a thread.” Such wording is appropriate given that some Afghans have resorted to desperate measures such as selling organs in order to feed their families.  It seems likely that the dearth of reportage  about this catastrophe emboldened President Biden to announce that the U.S would  steal billions of dollars from the Afghan Central Bank without fear of domestic opposition. The Triage Model of media would be hyper focused on this ongoing tragedy as it meets both criteria for treatment. It is simultaneously one of the most harrowing situations on earth, and one that is “treatable” as it is being actively perpetrated by the U.S. This coverage would encompass highlighting the stories of the Afghan victims along with regularly platforming experts from the UN and international aid organizations who are urging the U.S drop its sanctions on the already tortured Afghan people. Such a wide awareness would could render Biden’ plundering of the Afghan treasury politically suicidal.

• Collective punishment of foreign populations: Long before the U.S. sanctions were causing mass suffering in Afghanistan, the policy of collective punishment already had a murderous track record. The devastation of economic warfare was seen in Iraq in the 1990’s, where U.S. sanctions caused the deaths of at least half a million children. While such costs were deemed to be acceptable by U.S. planners, two UN officials resigned in protest, referring to the policy as genocidal. Such misgivings apparently did not deter the U.S. government from continuing to use sanctions to ravage populations. Current U.S. sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, and Syria have caused misery and death for hundreds of thousands of people, disproportionately affecting the poorest and most vulnerable. Additionally, the asphyxiation of the Cuban economy by a U.S embargo has imposed intentional hardship on the population of the island nation for decades. Despite this track record, it is not uncommon for U.S media to report on turmoil in these countries without a single mention of crippling U.S. sanctions. Operating with the Triage Model, U.S. sanctions would be given constant and consistent coverage as they seem to have become the weapon of choice of the U.S. government. Rather than discussing sanctions as an alternative to war, they would be framed as the devastating form of warfare that they are. The framing would also extend past the question of “Do sanctions work?” to “Is it acceptable to destroy an entire society’s economy to achieve a political goal?” In the current Propaganda Model of media sanctions are often portrayed as a benign less damaging option to war when in reality they devastate millions of lives. The Triage model would expose this reality, seeking perspective and testimony from those victimized by U.S. economic warfare. Visits would be made to the poorest districts in Tehran to query residents about how U.S. induced inflation has affected their purchasing power for basic needs. Medical personnel in Caracas would be given airtime to speak to how shortages caused  have reduced their capacity to give life saving treatment.  International law experts would be platformed for the purposes of discussing the illegality of unilateral sanctions and collective punishment.  In short, under the Triage Model, Americans would be  aware of what sanctions actually do. If such awareness reached a critical mass, U.S. officials that propose sanctions would have to explain why they seek to starve and deprive millions of vulnerable people who pose no threat to the U.S. Such an argument would prove exceedingly difficult to make. 
• U.S support for most of the world’s repressive governments: Amidst the current crisis in Ukraine, U.S officials and media pundits  have made bold pronouncements regarding concerns about democracy and human rights. Such statements go unchecked because U.S. media outlets rarely, if ever, inform their audiences that this rhetoric is not reflected in U.S.  policy. In reality, much of U.S policy is antithetical toward those aforementioned laudable concepts. Since the beginning of the Cold War a consistent aspect of U.S.  global strategy has been to provide support to some of the least democratic and most abusive regimes on the planet. This has included backing the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, the mass murdering Suharto regime in Indonesia, the kleptocratic Marcos autocracy in the Philippines, the despotic Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran, and the genocidal Ríos Montt junta in Guatemala. This trend of endorsing decidedly undemocratic governments that violate human rights on a massive scale continues to the present. As of 2021, the United States was providing military aid to 74 percent of the world’s dictatorships according to research conducted by Matthew Hoh, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. This support serves to prop up and maintain some of the world’s most repressive leaders, allowing them to continue to torment their domestic populations. Under the Triage Model of media, such a gap between the high minded rhetoric of U.S. officials and U.S. policy in practice would constantly be scrutinized. Officials would be consistently pressed to explain behavior that seems to counteract their claims of altruism. Actions such as arming the Saudi Arabian monarchy or the Israeli apartheid regime (as both governments repress their own citizens and wage war on neighboring nations) could become untenable under the weight of such obvious and exposed hypocrisy. Removing the global superpower’s backing from any of the dozens of authoritarian governments it currently supports would greatly reduce human misery. It would have the effect of making those governments more answerable to their populations as they would no longer have the luxury of Uncle Sam’s diplomatic, economic and military might looming in the background. The Triage Model of media could make such an outcome possible. 
• The U.S role in crisis in Ukraine: Obviously there is U.S. media coverage of the war in Ukraine, but it is completely decontextualized. In the Triage Model, the media would emphasize U.S actions that have contributed to the present violence. This would include the three decades of NATO expansion up to Russia’s border. This was accomplished over the continued objections of Russia and in defiance of the advice of some of the most senior members of the U.S. national security state. Triage media would lend some analysis to the West’s 2008 decision to announce the intention to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, a scenario that Russian diplomats indicated was a “Red line.” Responsible reporting would also illuminate the 2014 U.S backed coup that overthrew Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich and led to a civil war wherein 14,000 people have been killed. Investigative resources would be apportioned to investigate U.S. arms deliveries to Ukraine with regards to weapons falling into the hands of Neo-Nazis (a notorious problem in Ukraine.) If U.S. citizens were actually informed of these realities, important discussions might transpire. For instance, Americans might question the utility of NATO expansion,or perhaps its very existence. There might be some real introspection with questions like, “How would the United States react were Russia to form a military alliance that included Mexico or Canada, with potential to place nuclear weapons on the U.S border?” With a public more informed of the facts, officials might have to explain why the U.S. and Ukraine were alone at the United Nations in their 2021 rejection of an anti-Nazi resolution. With 74 % of Americans apparently supporting confrontation with Russia that could result in nuclear war, it is needed now more than ever that the Triage Model be applied. Awareness and introspection is necessary for breaking through the simple manichean, good vs. evil portrayals of the conflict in Eastern Europe.

Those particular phenomena/events are some of the obvious places for  media to focus if they were oriented toward maximally reducing human suffering, as the Triage Model proposes. Additionally, as general practice U.S. media outlets would regularly devote investigative resources, reportage and commentary to a wide range of U.S./U.S. proxy inflicted harms that rarely receive coverage in the current model. 

This would mean regularly platforming victims of U.S. violence. Imagine how U.S public opinion might change if they were regularly confronted with grieving family members of children killed by a U.S airstrike. Contemplate how difficult it would become for U.S policy makers to continue to send arms to Israel if outlets gave ample time to cover the daily humiliations endured by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Picture the political backlash for Congress members who support the current war on Yemen if their constituency was constantly viewing the images of starving, dying Yemeni children. 

On the investigative end, outlets devoted to the Triage Model would apportion significant resources to determining the true human cost of U.S. policies. In our current model of corporate media there is a distinct lack of interest in determining the actual death toll of U.S. wars and other belligerent actions. This dearth of reporting is exemplified by the uncertainty of the total deaths from the 2003 U.S. war on Iraq, with estimates ranging anywhere from 200,000 to over two million killed. Even when reporting on civilian casualties occasionally emerges from mainstream outlets, it is often years after the fact. This exposure also typically portrays the killings as “errors” or results of “flawed targeting” rather than the predictable and repeated outcome of U.S. military actions. The U.S. atrocities that do grab mainstream attention are often incidents that could not possibly be ignored. This was the case with the August 2021 U.S. drone strike that killed an entire family in Kabul, Afghanistan. While this tragedy was correctly given media attention, it is worth noting that the massacre occurred at a moment when the U.S. was withdrawing from Afghanistan and the entire Western media was focused on Kabul. This coverage contrasts with the thousands of other incidents of Afghans being killed by U.S. forces in the less accessible rural regions of Afghanistan where the U.S. war was primarily focused. In one of the rare investigations into these deaths that U.S.  media did, journalist Anand Gopal discovered that in the rural regions, “On average… each family lost ten to twelve civilians.”  This revelation implies that the death toll from the U.S. war on Afghanistan is a staggering figure, but the victims are nearly invisible in US media.

US planners are apparently so confident that U.S. war crimes will not be investigated or reported on by the current media apparatus that they undercount or outright lie about civilian deaths. Under the Triage Model, no such confidence would exist. Alongside devoting significant investigative resources to inquiring about U.S. war crimes, a media devoted to triage would engage in other activities in service of exposing U.S. violence. This would include actively soliciting and encouraging leaks from inside the U.S. national security state, seeking classified documents and exposing them (with no redactions) to the public. Other ventures could include consistently hosting experts in international law to speak about the many violations of international law the U.S. engages in, specifically identifying U.S. officials who should be prosecuted. Attention could be focused on how the U.S. treats international organizations like the International Court of Justice, and International Criminal Court with contempt. Under the current media model, US criminality including blatant violations of the UN charter and Geneva Conventions, are treated as benign or at worst tragic mistakes. Adhering to the Triage model, U.S officials might actually fear being held accountable for their grievous crimes, an outcome that is distinctly out of the realm of possibility in the current media landscape. 

A Call for Change Alongside a Recognition of Reality

To review, the Triage Model is a call to reorient U.S. media in such a manner that it results in significant reduction in human suffering on a global scale. The restructuring would require media coverage, resource allocation, and  investigative capacity to be prioritized according to two basic criteria. In this formulation, news would be prioritized with consideration to the degree of human consequence in combination with an assessment of the  degree to which a situation can be addressed  or “treated,” by the U.S.  audience.

This proposal of course requires going up against the very incentive structure of current U.S media. Tremendous obstacles are present in the form of corporate ownership of the media, the need for advertisers, the desire for access to government officials, along with a general shared class backgrounds between journalists and the very officials they should be investigating. One would not be wrong in concluding that US media will not change holistically until U.S. society goes through a radical shift from profit driven capitalism to human needs driven socialism.  

Despite the aforementioned barriers, there is hope that U.S. media can be changed. Throughout U.S history there have been media personalities that have operated in a manner that closely resembles the Triage Model, often at considerable risks to their own safety. One might consider the abolitionist publications such as David Walker’s Appeal and William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, both of which were published in a time where the levers of power in the U.S. were distinctly proslavery. (Walker paid for such actions with his life). Ida B Wells put her life on the line to expose the systemic racist terrorism of the Jim Crow South. We might also look to more recent history where journalists such as Seymour Hersh, Jeremy Scahill, and Julian Assange have revealed severe war crimes perpetrated by the most powerful government in the world. The Triage Model of media may be aspirational at the moment, but it has its roots in work that has already been done by people who faced considerably more danger than the reporters of the present era.  

Political commentator Michael Parenti once  noted, “No communication system can hope to report everything, so therefore selectivity is unavoidable. Now of course the press must be selective, but the question is what principle of selectivity is involved?” The Triage Model is an attempt to provide a “principle of selectivity” to media that is compatible with the themes of international harm reduction, perpetual expansion of empathy and continued demands for justice.

The United States’ imperial project is highly reliant on a domestic citizenry that accepts and repeats propaganda regarding geopolitical adversaries. For those who wish to stifle the imperialists’ agenda, scrutinizing their claims about other nations is essential.

This article addresses a question that seems to be under discussed amongst left wing/anti imperialist/dissenters within the United States: 

How should American anti-imperialists talk about the alleged crimes/abuses of nations that are official US enemies? 

While the ability to answer this question has always been important, currently it has extreme relevance as the United States continues its “pivot to Asia,” increasing the risk of conflict with China.  Simultaneously the US has been ramping up tension with Russia, a nation with some 6,000 nuclear weapons.  The following is an homage to some of the prescient points made by other anti-imperialists on this topic, along with some added thoughts from the author’s own research. 

1) Appreciate Where We Have Potential to Make Change Versus Where We do Not

“First do no harm”

It is imperative that one’s criticism and activism are focused where they can actually have an effect. The reality is, citizens of any nation have more than a sufficient challenge in the task of influencing their own government, let alone affecting power structures of other nations. To center one’s critiques on a foreign government in which they have no platform, likely do not speak the language, do not cast a vote, and do not hold any stake in the outcome, is an exercise in futility.  That in no way means that other governments do not commit acts that are harmful to their populace, but rather that in terms of pragmatism, the area where one can have the most impact is their own society. In this regard, it is worth embracing one of the most basic tenets of the medical field, “First do no harm.” A citizen of the United States should not entertain any delusions of changing other societies before exhausting their efforts where they will prove most valuable; restraining the violence of the US empire itself 

Perhaps US citizens lamenting about the behavior of other nations’ governments would be an acceptable practice if we lived in a world wherein the US government had little to critique. However, in reality, those concerned about human rights abuses will have their work cut out for them for a very long time with even a “narrow” focus on the US.  With a scope limited just to the present and recent years, the human rights concerned activist will have a very large menu of US abuses to object to. Here is a short list to select from:

• The  United States is the largest penal colony on the planet, imprisoning some 2 million of its citizens
•  The  US tortures roughly 80,000 of those incarcerated by placing them solitary confinement 
• The US is currently assisting Saudi Arabia commit genocide in Yemen
• The US operates torture and assassination programs, both in defiance of international law.  
• US police kill roughly 1000 Americans a year
• The United States is still forcibly sterilizing “undesirable” members of its population  
• The United States and several of its allies stand against the world’s people  in their stance against relaxing intellectual property laws to allow developing nations to produce generic versions of the covid vaccines. This amounts to maintaining a vaccine apartheid wherein the predominantly white populations of the world have more access to vaccines than people of color.
• The United States still possesses colonies ,wherein the populations are denied constitutional rights, including the right to vote for president and a vote in congress. 
• Perhaps most egregiously, the US has been at war for over 20 years! The US proclaimed “Global War on Terror” has been a war of terror, killing millions, displacing tens of millions more, and undoubtedly traumatizing untold scores of people. 
• The United States is (by far) the largest exporter of weapons into conflict zones
• The US government is actively repressing whistleblowers and journalists for the crime of  revealing US crimes. These include the persecution of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden. Julian Assange, Terry Albury, John Kiriakou, Bill Binney and Daniel Hale.
• The United States is in the minority of nations on earth that still maintain the death penalty
• US economic sanctions deprive hundreds of millions of Syrians, Iranians, Venezuelans.and Cubans of their basic needs. This has led to mass death due to starvation, lack of medical care, and malnutrition. 
• All US citizens’ electronic communications are subject to warrantless surveillance

“Put your own house in order”

The above list is an homage to the phrase “Put your own house in order.” Let’s imagine that an activist is concerned about an issue such as police corruption. Suppose that this activist lives in a town that is one of the nation’s leaders in police corruption. It would then make little sense to devote his/her efforts in ending police corruption at the government of some distant municipality. Indeed, it would be most logical to start where the activist is most likely to have an influence; their own town. This applies at the global level as well. If an American citizen is concerned about injustice, it is far more sensible to start addressing their own government’s monumental abuses, rather than attempting to change the behavior of foreign governments. 

Some caveats

There are exceptions to the aforementioned principle. There are cases wherein criticism of other nations can actually be useful. This would apply to critiques of nations that are allied with, or supported by the US. In these cases there are still a plethora of human rights abuses which one could focus on, as the US supports 73% of the world’s dictatorships. Therefore, pragmatically it makes sense for US citizens to protest the Israelis or Saudi Arabians, whose extreme violence is committed with American support, funds and weapons. Conversely, it is nonsensical to protest the behavior of governments of Iran, Venezuela, or Syria, whose officials operate independent of US influence. (This is the precise reason that they are considered enemies!) 

Lastly, it is important to acknowledge the disproportionate power of the US government, and how its actions likely encourage the very behaviors one might be tempted to criticize in other nations. To make this connection, consider the US government’s own actions after a  serious attack on the nation’s security such as the ones that occurred in Pearl Harbor in 1941 and in New York City and Washington DC in 2001.  In both cases, the US reacted with extremely undemocratic behavior. After the Japanese attack on Hawaii, the US confiscated property from its own domestic Japanese American  population, and then forcibly transferred 120,000 of them into concentration camps where they remained until 1945. As a result of the 2001 terrorist attack, the US government developed a national security state that spies on its own citizens, entraps them in fake terror plots, and even assassinates them. With this in mind, it is worth pondering if US aggression increases or decreases the alleged abusive behavior of other governments. Nations such as Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela have historically been subject to constant subversion and sometimes extreme violence by the United States. These states are no doubt aware of other nations that were open democracies that were subsequently destroyed by the United States. These include Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973.  It is fair to assume that these examples, along with the persistent aggression from the world’s superpower, are unlikely to encourage any geopolitical adversary of the US to democratize or liberalize. 

2) Signal Boosting for Imperialists

By focusing on the evils of official enemies, rather than helping the supposed victims of those alleged malevolent governments, it creates more harm. Propagating stories (true or untrue) about countries that are being targeted by the United States, serves to manufacture consent amongst the US populace for war, sanctions, or other belligerent behavior by the US government. This potential malevolent effect is amplified when those repeating talking points of US warmongers about official enemies have an audience of millions of people. The harm is magnified further when the speaker’s platform has the veil of progressivism or liberal politics. Among the best examples of this is John Oliver’s show on HBO. This show often covers serious issues such as poverty and police abuses. However it also has a tendency to spew imperial propaganda. These examples have included doing shows revealing the “evils” of Russia, China, and Venezuela, all in the precise moments when the US national security state was escalating aggression toward those nations. Someone should ask John Oliver, what is the outcome he hopes to achieve by amplifying these (often false) claims about nations targeted by the US?

This phenomenon is present in other light hearted entertainment. A 2009 episode of the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation, “Sister Cities”, portrays Venezuelan officials traveling to the fictional Indiana city, Pawnee. The foreign advisors, presumably employees of the leftist Chavista government,  proceed to annoy the midwesterners with their authoritarian behavior. This inaccurate portrayal of Venezuela combined with the exclusion of facts like the incredible progress made by the Chavistas in poverty alleviation, contributes to Americans tolerating more than two decades of US aggression toward the Venezuelan people.

Feature films are also not above spewing imperialist propaganda either.  In the  2014 comedy, The Interview, Seth Rogan and James Franco portray protagonists who are  recruited by the CIA for admission to kill the leader of the Democratic Republic of Korea, Kim Jong Un. The movie amplifies the falsity that North Korea is a threat to the United States,and minimizes the very real grievances and security concerns that the DPRK has concerning the US. The film culminates with the character played by James Franco killing the North Korean head of state, and thus saving the world from a nuclear catastrophe. One only needs to imagine how it might be received in the United States were studios in the DPRK to put out a film in which the US head of state (Barack Obama at the time) were to be assassinated by the film’s protagonist. Defending movies such as The Interview as “simply entertainment,” is a failure to understand how propaganda works. Millions of US citizens saw that film, which served to affirm their preconceived notion of the DPRK as a rogue state with a leader hell bent on mass murder. The Interview is part of a long canon of US propaganda that allows Americans to maintain the 1950-1953 Korean War, as the “Forgotten War.” That is,  the conflict in which some 3 million Koreans were slaughtered registers as hardly worthy of remembrance in the collective US memory. In reality, those years saw the US military reign genocide from the sky over the DPRK, dropping over 600,000 tons of bombs and over 30,000 tons of Napalm on North Korean towns and cities, destroying nearly all of them. The destruction was so total that US military personnel complained that they had run out of targets, and began bombing hydroelectric and irrigation dams. This flooded the countryside, destroyed essential crops  which exacerbated the suffering of the targeted population.Americans simply cannot imagine the societal trauma that was inflicted on the people of the DPRK. One also cannot possibly understand the character of the people and leadership of the DPRK without understanding its experience in the 1950-1953 war. The Interview totally obfuscates that history and renders the audience unsympathetic to the people who have been so dehumanized by the US for seven decades. It is hardly surprising that years after the film’s release that US presidents can threaten total annihilation of the DPRK,  respected US media can assist the US government in maintaining crippling sanctions on already deprived people, and the US citizenry will largely tolerate such actions. They have been conditioned to do so. 

The list of works of US entertainment that promote militarism toward alleged enemies is long, but perhaps equally nefarious is the everyday mundane, but accepted demonization of official enemies. While most of us lack the huge platform of a Hollywood studio or major television network, all of us have an audience. We are parents, teachers, friends, coworkers, and social media posters. These are all positions in which our speech has some bearing on how others think. The more US citizens speak of the alleged evils of nations already targeted by the US, the more they serve as signal boosters for a narrative that eventually justifies imperial violence. Indeed when that violence is carried out by the US government, be it in the form of invasion, sanctions, or threats, many Americans will shrug a shoulder as the nation that is victim of such aggression will be deemed to have been deserving of punishment. 

3) Also,They Really do Lie…ALL…THE…TIME!

The above should not be interpreted as a claim that all allegations of abuses by official enemies are false. Propaganda often relies on emphasis and exaggeration. Much of the imperialist talking points repeated by US citizens, government officials and media are cases where specific abuses of US enemies are given disproportionate focus compared to the abuses of US allies or the US itself. An obvious case of this was during the 2011 Arab Spring wherein the US supported the violent crackdowns on protesters by the government of Bahrain, while condemning and intervening (with catastrophic results) in others such as Libya and Syria. Hyperbole is also often a useful tool in propaganda, wherein real injustices are exaggerated to increase demand for a US intervention. One example would include then president Bill Clinton’s 1999 claim that 225,000 Kosovars had been killed by the Serbian forces, In reality, the number was close to 3,000 deaths and included members of all of the warring parties.  Of course any death is tragic, but overstating the total serves the purpose of creating a demand for a  violent US response. 

A short list of deception

The United States also does have a demonstrated record of  outright fabrications used to justify war or other forms of aggression. Thus, when US citizens lament about the abuses of alleged adversary nations they are often engaged in the amplification of lies. This mendacious history includes tales of Mexican aggression at the Southern border that was used in 1846 to justify the blatantly imperialist Mexican American War.  In the late 19th century there were false allegations of Spanish sabotage that blew up the USS Maine sparking the Spanish American War. More recent events indicate a similar pattern of dishonesty used to rationalize violence. These have included the Gulf of Tonkin incident wherein fictional tales of torpedoes being fired at US ships  (based 8,000 miles from the US) were used to justify escalation of the US’ genocidal war in Vietnam.. There were the allegedly endangered American medical students in Grenada, the sordid stories Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators, and the infamous fabrications about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In 2011, the US public was led to believe that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was providing vast quantities of viagra to his soldiers so they could commit mass rape. Most recently, there was the Russian bounties fiasco, a scandalous tale wherein the Russian government apparently paid the Afghan Taliban to kill US soldiers. All of these fictions proved invaluable in convincing the US public that violence on the part of their government was necessary against a deserving enemy. 

4) Some Relevant Questions

When US citizens are confronted with claims about official US enemies, considering the following questions will prove useful in deflating the imperialist narrative.  

First Question: Does my government actually object to the behavior that the official enemy nation is said to be engaged in?

To be able to answer this question is crucial. Such an answer will reveal if the talking points we are being fed are genuine concerns, or simply part of a PR campaign designed to weaponize public sympathy to justify a far more violent endeavor. 

Let’s examine a few of the enemy dujour’s behaviors which have in the past or present warranted US aggression.  The present is a good starting point.  Currently, the US government is leveling serious accusations against China. This in the context of the US steadily escalating tension with the People’s Republic ever since Obama’s 2012  “pivot to Asia.” The most serious charge is that China is  committing genocide against the Uyghur population of the Xinxiang province. The extremely dubious nature of these genocide claim  and its problematic sourcing aside, we should really ponder, does the United States actually oppose mass extermination? The historical record and the present behavior  would indicate a thunderous “no” as the answer. Since WWII, when the US played a (minor) role in ending the genocide of the European Jewish population, the US has taken up the mantle of lead genocidaire on the world stage. A nonexahustive list would include the US arming, providing intelligence and diplomatic cover to the perpetrators of genocide in Indonesia (1965), East Timor (1975), East Pakistan (1971),Guatemala (1980’s) and Somalia (1988).  There are also cases wherein the US role in the crime was even more direct. Among the most obvious of these cases was the 1990’s economic sanctions on Iraq, which killed some 500,000-1,000,000 children. Those sanctions exacerbated the damage to Iraq inflicted by the US in the 1991 Gulf War through the deliberate destruction of the civilian infrastructure of Iraq. This would seem to satisfy the criteria articulated by 1948 genocide convention of intent to destroy “in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” UN officials resigned from their posts in protest to the sanctions, signaling their opposition to policies that amounted to genocide.  Their actions contrasted sharply with the stance of US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who shrugged off the price such carnage as being “worth it,”  Outside of rhetoric, the United States does not object to genocide in any tangible way. 

Nations that invade sovereign countries have been subject to belligerent but selective responses on the part of the US. Again, it is worth questioning if the United States actually objects to this behavior.  An event that is illustrative of the US policy toward these types of behavior is the 1991 Gulf War and the events that preceded it. In this war, the US reacted to Iraq’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait by intervening militarily and quite literally destroying a modern nation. Except, a closer analysis reveals that the US was operating with extremely selectivity in their objection to Iraq’s invasion. When Iraq under the leadership of Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in July of 1990, it was indeed a violation of international law. However the fact that the United States reacted to this particular instance with such extreme aggression should seem perplexing on its surface. After all, this is the same United States that itself had invaded Panama just a year earlier to make a drug arrest (killing thousands of people in the process). This is also the same United States that has endorsed many invasions when the violation of another nations’ sovereignty suited US interests. These would include Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, apartheid South Africa’s invasion of Angola in 1975, and the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006.  Given these facts, it would seem that the United States is rather unconcerned about violations of national sovereignty.

The charge of possession and use of chemical weapons that the US has leveled against the governments of Iraq and Syria. These claims have been used to rationalize all out war against the former, and aggression in the form of a proxy war, occasional bombings, and crippling sanctions against the latter. Once again, the historical record reveals that the United States is inconsistent in its opposition to this transgression. For starters, how one defines chemical weapons plays a huge role here. While observers would be correct to label the use of nerve gas or sarin gas as chemical warfare, what about the use of ammunition encased in depleted uranium or the industrial scale use of chemicals such as Agent Orange and napalm? There is no logical reason to exclude the latter three substances from the chemical weapons categorization unless one is intent to defend the US from allegations of use of chemical warfare. Once adopting a consistent approach to their moral judgments, it becomes easy to see that the citizens of Fallujah, Iraq who suffer high rates of cancer , due to the US use of depleted Uranium in the 2004 battle, were in fact victims of a US chemical weapons attack. This is also true of the tens of thousands of  Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese children born with birth defects or deformities caused by the United States’ employment of the defoliant Agent Orange in the 1960’s and 1970’s in those nations. 

Nearly any abuse of a foreign government that the imperialists will claim warrants violence can be countered with such examples of US complicity in the very same behavior. If the imperialists want to talk about alleged political prisoners such as Russia’s Alexei Navalry or China’s Jimmy Lai, direct their attention to the imprisonment of Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, or Chelsea Manning, all of whom were imprisoned for exposing the crimes of the US government. Do they want to talk about Iran’s (mythical) nuclear weapons program? Point to the fact that not only is the US the only nation ever to use such weapons on  civilian targets, but that many US allies possess such weapons. This includes Israel, who developed nuclear weapons in secret, and is not party to the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons treaty. Israel has also repeatedly rejected proposals to create a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East (a policy repeatedly endorsed by Iran). What about women’s rights? This is apparently the last straw that the imperialists are grasping to justify a continued US presence in Afghanistan. Yet, any tertiary analysis of US current support for the misogynistic Saudi Arabian monarchy will disavow one of the myths that the US cares about the treatment of women. Additionally damning is Uncle Sam’s past engagement in Afghanistan itself. This included the 1980’s patronage of the Islamist Afghan Mujahideen against the women’s empowerment oriented government of  the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. To sum up, the reasons that Americans are told justify their government’s violence are easily dismissed with a basic knowledge of current and past US policy. 

Second Question: What is my government’s past relationship with the official enemy government and its behavior?

To achieve the highest levels of hypocrisy, it is apparently not sufficient for US imperialists to endorse/ignore crimes committed by the US or its allies. In some cases they actually will try to convince the US populace that the very same governments that the US has in the past cooperated with in the very crimes in question, are now to be dismissed as being irredeemably evil. One of the many instances of this would be the case of Saddam Hussein and Iraq.  A decade before Saddam’s forces’ 1990 invasion of  Kuwait, an act that was apparently intolerable to the US, Iraq under Saddam invaded neighboring Iran. This violation of Iran’s territorial integrity was many degrees of magnitude more destructive than the later incursion into Kuwait. So, logically if the US was so offended by Saddam’s violation of Kuwait’s sovereignty in 1991, then it must have also reacted with outrage to his earlier war on the Iranian people… right? The US not only failed to condemn the attack on the Islamic Republic, but actually supported Iraq with military, intelligence, and diplomatic aid.  This support persisted even as Hussein deployed  chemical weapons on both Iranians and his own domestic Kurdish population, killing thousands. So, when the US subsequently leveled war and sanctions on Hussein’s Iraq between 1991 and 2003 for his invasion of Kuwait and (alleged) possession of weapons of mass destruction respectively, they were reacting to the same crimes that the US helped Iraq commit in the 1980’s. 

The current Caesar sanctions leveled at Bashar al Assad’s Syria have devastated the Syrian people.They are justified by the apparent US objection to the Syrian government’s alleged of torture of prisoners since the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011. However, in 2011 the US had just recently supported the Assad’s government’s use of torture.  In the early years of the War on Terror, the policy of extraordinary rendition was utilized by the US. This was a practice wherein individuals are abducted by the United States and delivered to other nations to be interrogated, tortured, and/or detained indefinitely. Former CIA agent Robert Baer described the policy, “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria.”  Acting in accordance with that prescription, in 2002 the FBI abducted Canadian citizen Maher Arar at JFK airport. From there he was rendered  to Bashar al Assad’s Syria, where he was detained and tortured for over a year. Arar was never charged with a crime.  Based on the logic of the officials who implemented the Caesar sanctions, US citizens should also be subject to a similar deprivation that Syrians are currently punished with for their government’s behavior. 

When assessing the behavior of official enemy nations, providing answers to the aforementioned questions will make clear that the imperial institutions are never concerned about the behaviors of adversarial governments for humanitarian reasons. When this becomes obvious, the anti-imperialist will realize that by repeating imperial talking points, they are helping to forward the violent global hegemonic aims of the United States. 

5) The Disastrous History of Humanitarian Intervention

If taken to its logical conclusion, imperialist propaganda about official US enemies will result in US intervention. To those engaged in such propaganda, it is worth pointing out the historical outcomes of such interventions. In the countless instances when the US has intervened under the guise of protecting some beleaguered people, nearly all have had terrible results for the people of the targeted nation.

 At the turn of the 20th century, the United States declared war on Spain under the guise of freeing Spain’s colonial subjects from their abusive Spanish oppressors.  An examination of the fate of those colonial subjects after US intervention is instructive. Cuba went from being a colony of Spain to being a US colony in everything but name..This period was characterized by constant US intervention in the island nation’s internal affairs for the purpose of maintaining the island as a protectorate.  Cuba remained an impoverished feudal society with wealth concentrated in the hands of a small domestic elite and American investors. This subjugation continued with impunity for nearly six decades until the people of Cuba put an end to the foreign repression in the revolution that culminated in 1959. Humanitarian intentions were also spoken of in another theatre of that war against Spain, when the United States “freed” the former Spanish colony of the Philippines.  With the Spanish swiftly defeated, President William Mckinley faced the choice of leaving Filipinos independent and sovereign, or claiming the islands for the US. He chose to do the latter, justifying their imperialism by claiming a need to “christianize” the Filipinos (ignoring the fact that most Filipinos were Catholic after having been converted by the Spanish). Naturally, Filipinos did not tolerate such flimsy logic and resisted the American attempt at subjugation, The resultant war saw US forces kill, torture, and displace millions of people. Even after the Filipino American war had ended, the US maintained a colonial and later a neocolonial relationship with the islands that continues to the present day.

By the time the Americans had entered the overseas imperial market in the late 19th century, the  Europeans had  already perfected the act of violent intervention with humanitarian pretexts. The Belgiums’ 19th century extermination of some 12 million Congolese was initiated under the guise of interrupting the slave trade. The British subjugation of India was rationalized by the pretext of protecting women. Such self aggrandizing reasoning is necessary to rationalize the unprecedented levels of murder, theft and extraction. It would otherwise be difficult to justify the current global inequality that is a direct product of the Western imperialism that impoverished African and Asian populations while enriching the Western powers for generations afterward. 

The game is still the same 

While the methods have changed, in more recent years Western intervention with the pretext of correcting an injustice in a sovereign nation have shown no better results. In 2011, the United States and its NATO allies weaponized (false) claims of an impending mass murder in Libya to justify a violent intervention that toppled the government of Muammar Gaddafi. The resultant and ongoing civil war destroyed what was once the most successful nation in Africa. That Western incursion has also enabled the mass executions and rape of Black Africans by NATO supported rebels and even the return of slavery to North Africa.   Aside from these ill effects of a “well intentioned” intervention, the incursion into Libya destabilized the Sahel region of Africa, leading to a rise in violent militant groups armed with weapons taken directly out of Libyan arsenals. The war has also created a massive refugee exodus across Mediterranean This forced migration has caused the deaths of thousands at sea, and catalyzed the growth of racist right wing reactionary forces throughout Europe.

The fact is, the United States (and Western powers more broadly) have a terrible history of shrouding their barbarism in supposed humanitarian aims.  This record should cause any empathetic person to consider the eventual outcomes of repeating the claims of alleged evils of foreign governments.

6) Asymmetry in Propaganda

We should acknowledge that we live in a world wherein power and wealth is disproportionately in the hands of the Western (white) nations. It is also a fact that there is a huge disparity in the capacity for violence between the United States and its adversaries. This is seen in the gargantuan budget of the US military that dwarfs the next dozen highest war budgets combined. Part of that behemoth investment in war is devoted to information warfare. Thus, the US has far greater capacity to project propaganda about its targeted nations than do its adversaries possess the ability to respond in kind. This should be cause to view all claims about targeted nations with suspicion. Writer and academic Justin Podur describes this dynamic, 

“If you accept that the forces that push for war, inequality, and ecological catastrophe also have disproportionate control over information, communication, and narrative through concentrated wealth and concentrated media and social media ownership; Then you have to view Western campaigns and claims in those same media, about societies targeted for violence by the West, with extreme skepticism.” 

Take into account some of the following anecdotes to appreciate the strength of US disinformation and intelligence manipulation:

1) According to Jack Goldsmith who served in the Justice department of the George W. Bush administration,  “The U.S. government hacks foreign government networks on a huge scale every day.”

2) The CIA created a fake Twitter for Cubans, designed to undermine the socialist government 

3) The United States operates (fairly openly) propaganda outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Free Europe. These networks saturate citizens across the world with a pro America message. (something to consider the next time Youtube or Twitter warns you about Chinese or Russian propaganda). 

4) The Pentagon and CIA have tremendous influence on popular entertainment. The Pentagon alone has been involved in the scripts of at least 1100 TV and film productions.

5) In the 1980’s the US government created the Office of Public Diplomacy, a blatantly propagandistic institution designed to influence American opinion on the US terror war in Central America. 

Another consideration is the lack of influence that official US enemies have on American thought when compared to US allies. For example, unlike US allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, official enemies such as Iran and Venezuela, have no lobbying capacity in the United States. Also, unlike US allies, targeted nations do not provide significant funding to US think tanks, the very organizations that propose policies regarding foreign nations. So, whereas the Gulf States and Israel can influence US politicians and media to portray their nations’ actions in a positive light, US adversaries have very limited capacity to do the same. Conveying the perspectives of official enemies is then left to activists and independent journalists who are at an extreme disadvantage in broadcasting their message in terms of resources and funding. 

7) A Domestic Analogue That US Liberals Will Understand

Unfortunately in the US, even the left half of the political spectrum is largely unconcerned with foreign policy. However, the current domestic realities can be useful in conveying an anti-imperialist message.  Start with the premise that we can acknowledge that crime occurs in all neighborhoods, regardless of the dominant ethnicity. Yet, when the media disproportionately focuses on crime in black neighborhoods, it creates a destructive narrative. This is used to justify over policing of black communities along with the implementation of draconian laws that disproportionately affect African Americans. The most obvious example of this is the fact that while black and white Americans use recreational drugs at similar rates, black Americans are far more likely to serve prison time for such use. This is partially due to over policing of black neighborhoods. The high police presence in black neighborhoods also increases frequency of negative encounters with law enforcement, drastically increasing the chances for police violence. Many liberals will understand this dynamic of how negative portrayals of minority communities reproduces injustice domestically.  It stands to reason that they could then be encouraged to embrace this dynamic internationally.  If within the US we spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on the alleged crimes of Iran, Venezuela, Syria, etc, then we are creating a situation where the US national security state will focus disproportionately (and violently) on those nations. Thus, countries that are official US enemies (for reasons that have nothing to do with human rights), become victims of US aggression, despite other nations having equal or worse human rights records. This has had disastrous results. 

Delusion, Deception and Distraction

The fact that a significant portion of the US public, media and political class think there is value in focusing their efforts on the evils of other nations, is indicative of a successful propaganda campaign on the part of the imperialists. That triumph of the imperial narrative is seen in US citizens diverting their attention from their government’s historical and present acts of injustice. The propaganda achievement is also evident in the capacity to have US media parrot even blatantly false claims about other nations. The delusion is further illustrated by the US public’s capacity to accept their leaders’ apparent concern about alleged crimes of other nations, whilst their own government is complicit in the very same behaviors. The culminating victory of US government deception is the proven shift in US public opinion in favor of imperialists’ narrative regarding geopolitical adversaries after concerted propaganda campaigns.  All that said, the most culpable parties are the imperialist institutions who prey upon an unsuspecting public. The aim of this article was to alert more of that citizenry to the role they are often playing in forwarding the imperial violence of their government. US citizens live in a nation that is unbound by international norms and legalities.  The change in the behavior of the US government will have to come from within the belly of the beast. That effort begins with shifting the way we speak about the victims being targeted by the beast’s aggression.

The United States is unambiguously the imperial aggressor in the Middle East. No actions taken by the US military in the region can be seen as “defensive” given the larger context of decades of unprovoked US violence conducted on the people of the region. The Biden administration’s bombing of Syria, on February 25th, is only the latest incarnation of aggressive acts of war that the US empire attempts to rationalize as “defensive.“

The NPR contributor resorts to comforting platitudes while the realities of empire close in around us.

“Terrorism” is a term that has always been opportunistically used by the US government in a manner that obfuscates the disproportionate violence of the American empire. Upon this realization, the solution is not to expand the term’s use but rather abandon it (and its implications for US policy) altogether.

Forgiveness for war crimes is as American as apple pie, but it doesn’t have to be.

While Orwell comparisons have at times been overused, the accepted names for entities within the American imperial apparatus really do line up with the motto of the fictional nation of Oceania: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” In the United States, the benign language we use for our institutions of conquest and war are reflective of a larger belief of American exceptionalism and innocence. Shattering this ethos is of paramount importance in working toward ending American empire. To that end, we can begin by changing the language that describes the imperial institutions of the most powerful and destructive empire in human history to better reflect reality.

A survey of past and current events reveals that it is the United States’ own policy that is the leading cause of hardship inflicted on US citizens by alleged foreign “enemies.“

How the military-industrial-congressional complex leads to continued increases in pointless defense spending that threatens – not protects – Americans.

*That is, the veterans who fought against the United States, or otherwise dissented from within the ranks of the Empire