I think the creator of the video puts something that has been bugging me for awhile into a succinct and concise way. It is very difficult to talk about America's true history without Americans blowing up and repeating thought terminating cliches about America being the greatest country in the world, a beacon of freedom and hope, and other ways of saying that America's shit doesn't stink. But these myths, to me, seem to be the origin of so much of the evils that America puts out into the rest of the world, thinkin that it is above the rules that other countries are expected to follow. The oppression and genocide of native americans is not something that is in the past. Manifest Destiny is not a bad argument we left behind in the 19th century, we invoked notions of preemptive self defense when we invaded Iraq and are now using it on Iran. Myths about our freedom and democracy fuel our interference with other countries' elections and support for right wing coups.
At the same time, there seems to be an impenetrable bubble or wall of lies that terminate all self reflection. This knee jerk defensiveness when the issues get brought up. "You hate America!" "If you don't like America, get out." It's not just CHUDs in the boonies, it is everywhere. It makes critics of America and American mythology unelectable and unplatformable. Even now, in my city, Italian Americans are making a stink about the city I live in considering abolishing columbus day.
It feels like there simply isn't a combination of words that can pierce the widespread dogmatic indoctrination I and most other Americans got when we were children. I grew up in the south where I imagine it was even worse and my dumb eighth grade American history teacher taught us that "slavery wasn't that bad, they got free food, housing, and jobs." But even up here, when I was working as math tutor I saw an American history textbook in the library that had a section about the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan with a picture of an American soldier handing balloons to an Afghan child. It may be easily disprovable, but there is so much of it, and we are fed from the cradle; non-leftist Americans become angry and irrational when it is questioned. I don't know what to do about it but the answer can't be to lie back and assume that since the lies makes people content that it must be for the best. That is the negative peace of an absence of conflict, not the positive peace of the presence of justice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King.
