The People's Record

I normally don’t use Tumblr for ranting, but being around family for the Holidays, I find myself so frustrated with the weird binary thinking of Western “patriots”.

People who think America is a great country with a great past that we need to “get back to”. Just. Stop. This country was built on the genocide of indigenous people, and built by a totally separate group of indigenous people who were stolen from across the ocean, all to benefit a class of white, capitalist rulers who have nothing to do with either the land or the stolen labor force. And neither the indigenous people who were subjected to a colossal genocide, nor the indigenous people who were stolen from Africa to build this country have ever recovered from what was done to them. And since rising to super-power status via military dominance, & economic/military coups, thievery, and colonialism across Asia & the Middle East, the nation has used its swelling conquests to fuel the strength of the empire, which continues to stretch across the globe to this very day.

There were never any good old days. America has never been good. Never. If evil exists, it’s the Western ideology that allows otherwise ‘kind’ and ‘good’ people to believe that this history & these current wars for domination aren’t enough to tarnish the entire history of this ugly country. How can people continue to swear fealty to the red, white and blue flags and sing songs praising this fucking country? I just don’t get it. And when I stop to think about it for too long, I get so angry. I want to shake everyone around me and ask “why?” or “how?” How do you differentiate between the morality of America and Nazi Germany? What about America seems better than Nazi Germany to you (really answer if you believe America is better than Nazi Germany, I’m genuinely curious what the line of thinking is)? If Nazi Germany had won their bid for conquest, don’t you think we’d all be singing songs and praising the Nazi flag, while talking about the importance of the great “founding” Nazi fathers?

Why do you salute the troops – who I don’t mean to demonize, who I genuinely pity, but who I also think are anything but heroes. Bullies, probably. Victims, definitely. But heroes? Really?! Give me a break! They fly around the world terrorizing civilians & political dissidents in their own countries. Yuck.

For decades, the ruling elite super-rich capitalists have been able to offer a standard of living to the working poor in America that is better than the alternative – living in the chaos and squalor that their own policies have created for the poor around the world. But in the age of information, can empathetic people really continue to support this country? We don’t have to. We can live a different way. We’re so far off from utopia but the conditions for a different world are so promising. The empire is seemingly stretched to capacity, and stretching further still (see the troops the U.S. is sending across three dozen African countries in 2013 that we posted about yesterday), class-consciousness and an awareness of the inherently horrible nature of capitalism in this country is higher than it’s been, maybe since the 30s. We can’t lose sight of the context of what we’re fighting for and what we have to fight against. Again, the conditions are promising; movements with the capacity to really affect global change are actually building and we have a responsibility to participate in them. Seriously.

-Robert