I wasted way too much time arguing with liberals on the internet and I just need to vent my frustrations. They turned inaction into a virtue: they call it “pragmatism”. Vote for Biden, don’t question the genocide. They reject the “idealism” of action, critique or even the simple act of imagining the alternative. They consider themselves to be the adults in the room while they are nothing more than reactionaries themselves enabling the worst perversions of this capitalist-realist system.

It’s so frustrating to see this, to see their smug self-sanctification when they just follow the line of the least resistance, when all the effort they put is into retaining their own comfort. They talk about “saving democracy” while attempting to squash any dissent, while being hostile to any alternative that is not a liberal democracy.

They react violently to anything that could imaginably threaten the system exactly because they are comfortable in it. They know that they sit atop the piles of corpses of those murdered for their baubles, the oil for their cars and gas for heating their suburban homes. And they find it unimaginable to ever sacrifice even the smallest of those comforts.

They wear slogans of human rights on their chests but whenever it’s the time to walk the walk, they melt into the thin air, always finding an excuse why it’s not the right time. Why Biden can actually violate the Geneva Convention, why all they can do in a face of the genocide is to shrug.

As it goes in Disco Elysium:

“KINGDOM OF CONSCIENCE – Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change – not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.”

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    8 months ago

    Roderick Day, Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”

    Anyone working in counter-propaganda can testify to a curious experience: we’ll put in hours of careful research collecting an impeccable set of resources that undermines some warmongering narrative, and we’ll eagerly share it with someone who claims to despise racism in all its forms — say, an outspoken opponent of the West’s so-called “War on Terror.” Unexpectedly, we are met with a response that is somewhere between chilly reticence and downright hostility. What’s going on?

    [Westerners are] generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live.

    Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda — organs of coercion and consent. We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.

    None of this is meant to downplay the scale of the propaganda project. I’ve spent enough time chasing down leads on different intelligence fronts and their plots to know that they are real and have real effects. I do not deny that the outcomes we observe are at all times incentivized and enforced both overtly and covertly by our various societal superstructures (police, education, culture) and that principled and effective truth-tellers have been assassinated. I reject only the common misconception that propaganda “manufactures consent” (Chomsky) or “invents reality” (Parenti), because it exaggerates the feat accomplished by propagandists, and, in doing so, it obscures the real material basis that has historically made even the working poor in the imperial core complicit.

    Edit to add: Not only did your post get downvoted but also reported as Spam or Abuse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • delaunayisation@lemmy.worldOP
      21·
      8 months ago

      Why am I not surprised in the slightest.

      And yes. All those propaganda efforts find very ripe ground with the imperial middle class. My favorite is how easily people fell for the idea of “supplier framework of greenhouse emissions” that makes it seem that it’s all some ten guys collectively emitting all the world’s carbon dioxide - simply because it exonerated all of the middle class’ senseless consumption. It doesn’t make sense under even the slightest scrutiny - but they simply don’t care. It makes them feel good about themselves so they swallow the propaganda; hook, line, sinker, pole.

        • delaunayisation@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          8 months ago

          The fact that they’ve been running with one angle for some decades before it got exposed doesn’t mean they couldn’t have changed it. They’re not that stupid.

          • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            8 months ago

            I’m not sure what you mean. That particular propaganda angle is just one component of a multigenerational, full-spectrum class war project. The scientists hired by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago

            As early as 1958, the oil industry was hiring scientists and engineers to research the role that burning fossil fuels plays in global warming. The goal at the time was to help the major oil conglomerates understand how changes in the Earth’s atmosphere may affect the industry – and their bottom line. But what top executives gained was an early preview of the climate crisis, decades before the issue reached public consciousness.