Feeling like you get to weigh in on what’s happening abroad is American exceptionalism. Feeling like the media has that responsibility – beyond reporting – is American exceptionalism.
The rest of the world doesn’t have talk shows weighing in on the situation in other countries (and espousing the official narrative uncritically when there’s one). They’re not saying “what should we do about Iran? What should we do about Russia?”. Governments will at most condemn and call attention to some act – and yes, most often that will be for imperialist purpose.
Some time ago, billionaire Bloomberg was on PBS (supposedly a public service) and made the mistake of talking about China in favourable, sensible terms. The host’s jaw hanged open and she started grilling him on his opinions about China because there is no thought allowed except “China=bad”. Amerikans need to realize that this is a very Amerikan thing. I am not aware of any other country that would act like this on a public broadcast.
They certainly don’t make it seem like it’s every citizen’s job to condemn that country, even if they benefit from creating popular unrest.
Do you know how much I talk about China with other people here, outside of the US? Close to 0. Even when talking about communism. Even when talking about China, people don’t really delve into the reeducation camps and if they do, they understand it’s not their place to tell another country how to run their affairs. Sure, they’ll call for sanctions and will feel very sad about the purported atrocities – and sure, this is part of the imperialist ploy to distract us from the atrocities happening at home and in allied countries (USA, Canada, Israel…). But they know it’s not their right to call for an invasion or spend their whole day hearing about it on TV. They don’t pass laws or ask to pass laws condemning a whole country. And they certainly don’t give a shit about whether China lied about covid numbers or not as a way to cover for their own shortcomings – rather, they pretend they did everything they could and that the situation is okay.
My guess is that the contradictions of capitalism are so apparent in the USA that they need to distract people with bullshit. Just yesterday, the nurse who called attention to Florida’s cooked covid numbers had her home raided by police, guns pointed at her family (including young kids), and all technology seized because she was publishing the actual numbers after she was fired.
I typed “Chine” in my french google news, and it was about: how they’re fighting covid, science (artificial sun and meteorological machine), how an American movie was removed from cinemas for racism (Monster Hunter), and only one Sinophobic article at the very end of the first page.
Doing the same with English Google: sanctions for HK arrests (case in point), “Wuhan files”, “China seeks to change covid story”, “China refuses to apologize for fake soldier image” (note the wording), and only a couple articles about science or the covid vaccine.
I have generally not seen this mindset from US MLs. But you see it everywhere online, and it’s important for any anti-imperialist in the US to remember this once in a while.
Western chauvinism is so deeply ingrained into the minds and culture of Westerners
Honestly I can’t wait for Chinas rise just to end white supremascism
There fear of China resides in the fact they worry about being dominated by China. Yet Chinas indifference to other countries political systems is a way in which Westerners can’t even conceive.
So indoctrinated with a crusader/coloniser/settler mindset they can’t even imagine a country not wanting to be at the political centre of others
The US and UK overwhelmingly have this mindset and you see it all over the left wing movements who have still not divorced themselves from liberalism
I mean I expect left wing movements in the west to have to do the task of weighing in the most. They’re after all, the people best positioned to challenge their government’s imperialism. The problem is that what they should be doing overwhelmingly is to defend the targets of imperialism when they weigh in. Instead, very often what we see is that they join in on the attacks.
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I think its a lot more useful to organise people locally, and improve the cities in each town or city. Trying to defend targets of imperialism just ends up with pointless flame wars on twitter.
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Power can only be built from the base. If you tell the average person about the politics of China, the war in Afghanistan, why should they care? Most people have enough problems already, like being able to afford food and a place to live, and having work. Those are things we can actually improve, and work with other activists who care about the same issues.
The base built from this can be used as a platform to create consciousness on international issues. But not the other way around.
How else are they going to reassure people that the system does not need to be changed? Just being exposed to western news crushes your imagination. It’s that “But what can we do?” or “It is what it is” attitude you see so often from parents.
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Where did you get the word USians?
From grammatical rules that I couldn’t explain to you but make sense intuitively. In the same way we say Italian, American, Venezuelian, Canadian, it feels more natural to say “United Statesian”, which shortens to USian.
it is kind of discriminatory to use Americans to refer to them since that applies to anyone in the Americas.
Agree, usually I call them Amerikans (from Amerikkka).
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