[Sniff] Ideology.
Ideology runs deep. If you think you have no ideology, you are mistaken.
It has come to my attention that some things I wrote for last year’s non-fiction posts were steeped in ideology and at least somewhat reliant on propaganda which I had unknowingly digested.
For example, some of the things I wrote about Russia, China, and North Korea, could use further examination. The claim that they do not have good intentions is, frankly, baseless. While they certainly do have some problems regarding human rights, to highlight them alone tacitly implies that their “enemies” are meaningfully different in this regard. To go as far as to not even define what “good intentions” relies on simply eating out of the trashcan of ideology. A more accurate way of expressing what I was really thinking is that these nations have perspectives and goals which do not fall in line with what the United States wants other nations to do.
North Korea is an easy target, but this is largely because the Korean War has more or less been shoved own the memory hole in the United States. North Korea’s attitude towards the United States and their consequential desire for nuclear weapons (which, if they were a country which submitted to US business interests, would be seen as deterrent rather than war-mongering) only makes sense through the lens of history. The fact is the United States ran a genocide campaign in the Korean War, carpet bombing targets of no military value. The United States has “forgotten” about this, but this memory is very much alive and well in North Korea, and very much informs their foreign policy. Of course war is not something to be wished for, and nuclear war even more so, but see North Korea developing nuclear weapons as a bad sign is only half of the story. North Korea is sanctioned by the world and is trying to protect their own interests, and is operating from the perspective that, if well enough armed, they will no longer be considered a viable military target by anyone sane enough to actively avoid nuclear war. This is the reasoning behind basically any country to develop nuclear weapons, to create a situation where out-right full-scale war is unthinkable. Obviously, a better option is diplomacy, but it takes two to tango.
Russia is another easy target. Their war in Ukraine is unjustifiable, but that alone overlooks the complexity of the issue, including the role other nations have played in this conflict. For one thing, this conflict began much earlier than 2022, and the current media coverage overlooks not only this fact but how that conflict actually began with any amount of nuance.
And then there is China, who the United States seems dead-set on provoking a war with. Have you noticed how it seems China can only do wrong in the US media? They are either viciously adept authoritarians or bumbling fools. If the Chinese government prioritizes stopping the spread of COVID-19, then they are trampling on their people’s freedoms and are an authoritarian regime who just simply dislikes freedom. Yet when they ease up on their restrictions, they are a weak state that can’t handle a pandemic. Never-mind if the protests they did this in response to may have involved the United States government paying people to protest, or how their government met protest by listening to their demands rather than brutalizing the people. As far as US media is concerned, if China does something, it must be bad. If China has a weather balloon go stray, it simply must be a spy balloon. Even if it was a monitoring balloon, US officials have acknowledged the very real possibility that it was blown off course and not intended to spy on the US. Any other balloons detected are a threat from China and worth shooting down with missiles worth several thousand dollars–even if these detected balloons turn out to be 12$ hobbyist projects. The US was in such a hysterical state following the balloon incident that they were openly speculating that aliens may be responsible.
My previous “analysis” left out the nation which most countries see as the greatest threat to world peace, the nation with the most military spending, and the nation with the most out-sized military presence outside of their own borders as being a potentially bad sign of things to come. And that is because acknowledging these facts leaves the status quo, it is not mentioned day-after-day in the media, it is not refreshed in the mind of its citizens constantly.
Parroting the status-quo does not need sources, it is taken as “common sense,” while anything even one step removed from it requires pages of text to justify. Case in point: if I saw Mao was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths as part of a brutal regime, this is accepted at face-value. Refuting this point with what actually happened takes about 40 pages.
My article regarding the partisan split was missing a large enough part that it is worth writing another article specifically on it–that the gulf between political parties in the United States is largely imaginary. Yes, the people are polarized, but what both parties actually value and represent are capitalist business interests, they just focus on the handful of social issues where they disagree. In the United States there is a right-wing party, and a far-right party. You can you choose between the capitalist party and the other capitalist party. To be sucked into the illusion that these two groups really have that much difference between them is yet another example of eating out of the trashcan of ideology.