Liberal Outrage & Expertise in an Age of Propaganda
A mainstream outraged by the wrong things, & still seeking the advice of dullards
“Ours, too, is an age of propaganda.” - C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins
It is telling that we see so many pundits on television and on social media currently arguing about whether it is good or bad that/how President Joe Biden ended our immoral and illegal occupation of Afghanistan. Why?
Well, mostly because he has not actually ended our immoral and illegal occupation of Afghanistan. Thousands of new troops are currently being sent in to continue our 20-year invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and President Biden has promised that he will continue to hold the specter of additional attacks on the Afghan people over the nation’s collective head even if we do leave and they decide not to play ball with us, but reality doesn’t much matter in mainstream discourse.
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A maddening example of this is how liberal, corporate media television news shows continue to seek out the “expertise” of the people who keep advocating for disastrous wars instead of the people who warned us not engage in them and continue their opposition to this day.
That’s why we get warmonger John Bolton being sought out by news shows for his take on Afghanistan (surprise - he wants us to stay in and continue to kill more than the 300,000 Afghan mostly children and women we’ve already murdered there!) instead of someone like Rep. Barbara Lee, who was the only member of the United States Congress to refuse to vote for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
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As the mainstream narrative that we’re getting out of Afghanistan persists in direct contravention to the facts it might be a good time to reflect on what the leading liberal voices were saying at the onset of our hot war against Afghanistan twenty years ago. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman won one of his three Pulitzer Prize awards for takes like the one below, which mocked people who were concerned that we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan to begin with, and also worried that we’d stay for a long time.
“A month into the war in Afghanistan,” he wrote in November of 2001, careful with his grammar to optimize propagandistic effect (“the war in Afghanistan,” for example, as opposed to our war of aggression against Afghanistan and its people).
“A month into the war in Afghanistan, the hand-wringing has already begun over how long this might last. Let’s all take a deep breath and repeat after me: Give war a chance.
“This is Afghanistan we’re talking about. Check the map. It’s far away. I have no doubt, for now, that the Bush team has a military strategy for winning a long war.”
To recap Friedman, above…
War is cool.
Afghanistan is far.
I trust Bush, you should also.
This is the type of analysis that makes a writer wealthy, famous, and critically-acclaimed in the genocidal world of liberal American legacy media.
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I’ve also seen lots of criticism recently from the Left of military leaders for not preparing Afghans how to successfully fight in their own nation, since the Taliban predictably took even more control of the country in the past week. That only appears to be an insult to our own military and political leaders.
In fact, it implicitly bashes Afghans in a way not dissimilar from the attacks on them from the Right that we hear coming from President Biden and other reactionaries - that it’s high-time Afghans started fighting for themselves, dammit.
The truth is that Afghans have been fighting for themselves, and quite effectively, for some time. For example, they’ve beaten us pretty soundly for the past two decades.
We are the bad guys that they’ve been fighting against. The Taliban, in and of itself, (which our government helped create) is not the exogenous, existential threat to Afghans. We are.
The idea that Afghans need lessons from Americans on how to effectively fight in Afghanistan is baseless chauvinism. What other defeated militaries should Afghans get advice from?
Perhaps the Ancient Greek, or the French, or Soviet Russia could also lend their expert opinions on how to win in Afghanistan with…the Afghan people who defeated them. Sorry, America - no one wants advice from losers.
The only thing imperial armies like those of the U.S., Soviet Russia, France, and ancient Greece can teach Afghans is how to lose, and lose badly in Afghanistan.
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A recent headline from digital news and commentary outlet Politico urgently read this week, “Poll: Support for Afghanistan withdrawal plummets as Taliban seize control”. Oh, I see.
Leaving aside the moral component of the equation - that no one should give a damn if Americans want to continue to subjugate and commit genocide on a nation of people thousands of miles away because it isn’t the right thing to do - the framing and timing are still gross. Polls and surveys have also told us for years that the majority of Americans want universal healthcare, less money spent on foreign wars, and more money spent on education.
Perhaps I’ve missed it but I haven’t seen the same level of urgent reporting on those surveys. The U.S. Empire’s War Machine is worried that it might take a hit with President Biden signaling even a willingness to eventually end our occupation of Afghanistan, and so consent for war must be manufactured.
It is urgent, then, that journalists and outlets sound the alarm that Americans want to continue warring against Afghans even though they haven’t ever collectively sounded similar alarms as we slide into oligarchy with our expressed domestic policy goals going unaddressed by our elected officials. Liberals and conservatives alike are disgusted and alarmed by Biden’s so-called military pull-out of Afghanistan (he isn’t pulling out of Afghanistan right now) so they’re highlighting concern from Americans about said fictional pull-out which itself is the result of decades of jingoistic propaganda around our military, wars, and nation as a whole.
I’m glad that the mainstream mediasphere has finally found an issue where they believe caring what Americans want is actually important. Healthcare, education, ehh…Americans don’t know what’s good for them.
But once our heavily propagandized population utters in Pavlovian fashion anything resembling a support of killing more foreign people and controlling their governments, media outlets are suddenly populists.
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Ending on a lighter note, sort of, I recently also read an interesting headline about a favorite comedic writer and showrunner of mine - Larry David. The New York Post’s Page Six recently reported that David screamed at attorney Alan Dershowitz at a grocery store because of the lawyer’s ties with Donald Trump.
This liberal disgust at associates of Trump has been widely celebrated on social media, and it’s a funny scene to imagine. Leaving aside that it’s noteworthy if David (and other liberals) didn’t find Dershowitz scream-worthy for his 1997 LA Times essay arguing that adults should be allowed to rape children as young as 15 because, in his expert legal opinion, children that young can consent to sex with adults, or for his defending that stance to this day, or for his social and professional ties to convicted child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, or for being credibly accused himself of raping a girl.
No, it was doing work with Donald Trump that reportedly did it for David. Ok.
I once screamed at Larry in a bodega for working for child predator Woody Allen, and for supporting the architects of our New Jim Crow system and our surveillance state, so I guess fair is fair. Speak your truth, Larry.
Out of all the Afghan soldiers about 30k were combat effective. Just as good Americans. We trained them to fight as Americans, to use tools available to Americans and use force multipliers like Americans. From using intelligence, artillery, air support, helicopter or even gun ships. Last year those Commandos spent a hell of a lot time the field it went increased crippling levels. That's before we took the tools away. No intelligence, logistics, air support or reinforcement. The Commandos didn't fail, we left them with out the support system we trained them to effective in.
Bout two weeks 20 Commandos ran out of ammo. They surrendered and got killed by foreign fighters.
The United States finally has a negotiating position with the Taliban. By freezing their assets. In the United States we can bitch about the Taliban, they want to be left alone in Afghanistan. Isis-k not so much.
After 20 years pundits still can't admit Taliban nothing to do with 9/11 and was a target of opportunity. They offered to surrender, disarm and turn over bin laden to a 3rd party country. This occupation never should have happened. We never stopped the pedaphile shit either.