It Takes An Act Of God
Those in power control history—not in the sense that they make history but in how they tell history.
Americans have a short memory and a shallow knowledge of world history if any. I have observed educational materials and systems firsthand in Japan, China, and Europe. All educational systems have their biases.
February 6, 2013
The conflict in Syria, partially inspired by the Arab spring, drought, and regional destabilization from a decade-long war in Iraq, blew up into a terribly destructive civil war by 2015. With the war raging in Ukraine, the cable news audience has moved on and forgotten Aleppo.
Aleppo 2018, after years of civil war with foreign support on all sides of the conflict.
With America's myopic and errant concept of itself and history, one can hardly expect people to understand the former President of the Philippines, Rodrigo "Digong" Roa Duterte's reasons for replying to U.S. criticism of his human rights record by sniping, "I will start with your past sins; I will produce, from your archives, the photographs that you took of the people you murdered here in the Philippines. You are investigating me and the internal affairs of my country! I'm investigating you!"
We Americans live with many fantasies embedded in our souls and minds due to our education and a firehose of constant propaganda. This leads people like Hillary Clinton to write books like, “It Takes A Village.” We view ourselves as heroic, with only a few simple humanitarian projects away from turning the world into a consumer paradise populated by enlightened individuals looking out for themselves while “giving back.”
People feel good when they give back. But why do nations help other nations? Why do corporations "give back?" Make a list of answers to those questions.
Besides economic growth and global consumerism, U.S. geopolitical strategy for global dominance has also created the preconditions that produced much of the suffering in the world. U.S. financialized global capitalism and rapacious multinational corporations run the State and its Deep State institutions. Big business in the U.S. is not interested in preventing negative externalities or the "unintended" consequences of its all-out effort for power, control, and profit.
The phrase, profits-first, sums up America's core ideological tenant.
So what does it take for Americans to focus on the suffering of people not perceived to be anything like them culturally during an attention deficit disordered day?
It takes an Act of God.
It takes an Act of God to make people in the U.S. care about people from very different cultures far away from its shores. An Act of God alone gets the prosperity gospel preachers to pass the plate for something other than purchasing a private jet. If only people who didn't think like good Christian Americans of European descent could be reeducated and brought to heal, things in the world might be much nicer and more secure.
Americans are always there to help other countries with famines or natural disasters. Libya and Yemen might catch a break if they had a giant tsunami. Until there is an Act of God, America keeps the peace by making war.
Fortunately, America can still print money for its essential line items. It may not have the funds for Medicare for school lunches, but it will always have enough to send in the bombers and the tanks. And, as we all know, the United States is an innovative country. It's now extending its OPM (other people's money) idea to OPBOTG (other people's boots on the ground.) That's probably for the best. Young folks can find too much information about how the government and its corporations treat its veterans on the internet—this and many other factors might diminish its ability to recruit troops for its next adventure in the Third World.
Of course, mobilizing for a world war is never tricky once it becomes an existential threat to the homeland.
Wars are never Acts of God, but God's creation can't live without them.
I was riding around and talking about my thoughts on this post.
