💾 Archived View for beyondneolithic.life › posts › if_only_they_knew.gmi captured on 2022-03-01 at 15:03:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I came across this article, and I just couldn't express how deeply I think the central premise is wrong. The idea is that the realities of American empire (black sites, genocide, war, invasions, interventions, etc.) need to be kept hidden from the American people, or else it would cause problems. If they only knew the truth and saw the reality, empire couldn't function. So what we need to do is expose the perpetrators and hold them accountable. Here's a quote:
Invisibility is fundamental to the construction of empire. If citizens of the imperial center — the metropole, the “homeland” — could see how their nation’s wealth and power were really made and guarded, there would be few volunteers to fight in and administer the periphery.
This is just obviously false. Everyone knows exactly how it's done, how the sausage is really made in the U.S. They know about the black sites and the torture. They know we bomb innocent civilians every day. They know we invade countries and overthrow governments purely for profit. They know we enslaved blacks and decimated native peoples. There have been far too many stories about all of it for everyone not to know. Actually, a lot of our modern popular culture wouldn't make sense if everyone didn't know about it: There are countless movies and TV shows exploring the moral quandaries and implications of all of this, even things as banal as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Moreover, the very popularity of Trump would make no sense. His entire appeal is wearing the empire on his sleeve, of boasting about all of it.
Nevertheless, the U.S. empire does make attempts to hide these sorts of things and cover them up to one degree or another. Why? What's happening is more subtle, but still not all that sophisticated, which I think speaks to the depravity of capitalist subjectivity. Basically, there's an agreement that we'll just ignore all of this so long as the gravy train keeps rolling. It's sheer politeness, to be frank. It's precisely analogous to the reason we go into a bathroom and close the door to take a shit. Everyone know exactly what's happening in there, but politeness demands that you don't go in and watch, and pragmatism demands that you don't do anything to stop someone from taking that shit, because after all they *need* to. It's necessary and understandable. So you have to pretend not to know. After a discreet time interval or in the right situations, can even talk about shitting and make jokes about shitting and otherwise discuss it to your heart's content — so long as you don't actually watch it happening or prevent it from happening. If you did, the person shitting would be rightfully disgusted, angry, and confused.
This is exactly the situation we are in regarding the various things the empire does in order to function. People treat the deaths, invasions, coups, torture, and all the rest as essentially excretory functions, things that you're not exactly happy about, but that everyone pretty much agrees need to be done. You have to pretend not to know, even though you do. Looking too closely would be impolite at best and perverse at worst. And again, in the right situations and after the right amount of time, you can *talk* about it all you want. You can joke and write endless articles and make endless movies about it — but *what you can't do is anything to stop it* from happening. That is disallowed.
When America tries to cover up its atrocities, which it invariably does, the point is not to actually prevent people from learning about it, not really. The point is to keep the bathroom door closed, so to speak. To allow people to not have to deal with it too directly or think about it too much. To allow them to keep pretending they don't know. It's all part of a game that is just like the game we play with politeness, and this politeness is a big part of what structures the social fabric we are all woven into. This discretion, so to speak, is what allows the empire to keep going and simultaneously allows people to tactfully ignore it and get on with their day. When these things do come to light, it is definitely a bump in the road and a problem to be dealt with, but it's not really that big of a deal. There are always scandals and revelations and exposés, but that's really just an inconvenience that's built into the system. It doesn't change anything.
There are even groups of people who just don't care or openly praise these kinds of atrocities, and want to take part. In terms of structural psychology, they're perverts, and they have names: cops, soldiers, politicians. These are the people who see the empire taking a gigantic shit and want to get in there and help out. For obvious reasons, these are very valuable people to have around and they are often rewarded and protected, at least while they are still useful. There's even a name for when this fascination with the excretory functions of empire becomes generalized, when people become fixated on an open politics of death and destruction and don't even bother to "close the door": Fascism.
The overall point I'm trying to make right now, however, is this: Knowing the real history of empire is never, ever enough to actually change it. It doesn't matter how accurate the history books are. It doesn't matter how many movies or documentaries or podcasts we make examining the details and shame of this atrocity or that genocide. It doesn't matter how many times we have another round of the Pentagon Papers or the Panama Papers or the Afghanistan Papers. Because, in general, people already know and have accepted all this as necessary. It's just part of the deal. These kinds of things all useful, and it's not like we should stop doing history or journalism or making politically motivated entertainment — it's just that it's not sufficient. The only hope for real progress is moving even further and breaking the rules of the game of ignoring the obvious. Not just a moral reflection on the past, but a *focus on the practical consequences of all this in the now* and in the future. You have to try and directly prevent these things from happening. That means real, organized opposition to the flow of capital; real, organized opposition to the war machine; real, organized opposition to the steady functioning of the state.
I don't know exactly what that looks like because no one does. We're in a time when we're trying again to figure that out, just like in the 1960s, just like at the end of the 19th Century. But one mistake we have to stop making is acting like facts and history will magically "wake people up" and radicalize them. It won't, at least not very many. I'm certain that waking people up and galvanizing them to action means going beyond that strategy, and organizing based on concrete, here-and-now reasons that people will benefit from the downfall of the empire. It means keeping an eye on the future and how it can actually be different. It means showing why the atrocities of empire aren't actually necessary in the first place, convincing people that the implicit deal they've been given is a sham and their lives can actually be better without empire. And all this is much harder and more confusing precisely because it isn't a built-in part of the system. It's an attack on it.