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New post on<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><strong class="">Smoke and Mirrors</strong></h2>
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<a href="https://mjw51.wordpress.com/author/mjw51/" style="text-decoration: underline; color: rgb(37, 133, 178); display: block; margin-right: 10px;" class=""><img border="0" alt="" src="http://2.gravatar.com/avatar/5af2cf3964f6ce7ef87f07a4f8c6bf0e?s=50&d=identicon&r=G" class="avatar avatar-50" height="50" width="50"></a></td>
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<a href="https://mjw51.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/yanki-go-home-and-just-stay-there-please/" style="text-decoration: none !important; color: rgb(37, 133, 178);" class="">Yanki, Go Home and Just Stay There… Please?</a></h2>
<span style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136);" class="">by<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://mjw51.wordpress.com/author/mjw51/" style="text-decoration: underline; color: rgb(136, 136, 136) !important;" class="">mjw51</a></span></td>
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Whatever else an American may or may not be, an American is an American first and foremost: socialist, Nazi, Radiohead or Beyonce fan, liberal or paleoconservative, each and every one is an American.</p>
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What this means for people outside America is that there is no effective internal or domestic resistance to American cultural imperialism, to American economic imperialism or, and most obviously, to American militarist imperialism (which is arguably little
more than a wing of the economic variety but kills a lot faster).</p>
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Americans go to work and pay their taxes, and no matter what sort of personal "branding" they engage in on social media, in the pages of mid-to-main-stream media or simply over a glass of merlot with like-minded friends, they support the national project.
Dead bodies lined up after an airstrike in Iraq or farmers lives and livelihoods destroyed by Monsanto in India and beyond are not brought back to life by sarky Tweets about what an evil clown Trump is or whether a presidential candidate believes America is
in decline or is doing just fine as the globally indispensable nation.</p>
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It should probably go without saying that white people in America are all racists, but you do hear it a lot these days. "Is that a pistol in your pocket or just a Swiss Army folding swastika dildo you intend to pleasure me with?" is no longer just a question
du jour on Tinder. It's everywhere, and because a white racist (is there any other kind?) is by default a white supremacist which is nothing more than a convenient way of avoiding saying fascist or Nazi, white people are all Nazis.</p>
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By default that is.</p>
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But there are ways a white American can wriggle out from under the fascist label: by wearing a Chavista t-shirt unironically or calling other white people racist on Twitter or by liking everything Beyonce does and never mentioning black-on-black crime.</p>
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In reality, the number of ways Americans can shop and preen on social media to deny their default Hitler-clonism is literally limitless. What we would all just love to see of course will almost surely never happen: hundreds of thousands of video clips of white
Americans proclaiming their racial/genetic guilt and then punching themselves in the face until they bleed profusely then faint, or applying booster cables to their own genitals and really really screaming their heads off, just like countless folks around
the globe have done when their American-trained and -funded security forces have defended CocaCola and Pizza Hut so that young Americans can continue to buy their Chinese-made iPhones in peace.</p>
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American socialists, to give them their due, are of course opposed to all this, and some are even aware of the joke involved in invoking international solidarity using a phone made by a worker making $6 a day while also calling for a fight for 15 on the same
phone. Unlike many of their compatriots, some socialist Americans can actually find Myanmar on a map and are pretty certain the war in Vietnam was a "bad take".</p>
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So while they will no doubt be out there bravely tearing down statues of racist slave-holding white assholes from 150+ years ago, not one of the whining bitches will have the nerve to go and smear shit all over the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. They are
Americans after all and, you know, support the troops. Or excuse the troops. Or turn the troops into the good guys by invoking victim status for the troops. Some of them were, after all, black, so any suggestion that Vietnam was a racist imperialist war that
the racist imperialists have yet to acknowledge or apologize for is just silly.</p>
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African-Americans are quite rightly up in arms about police abuse and systematic murder of black citizens in America, but they are also up in arms as members of the military whose primary purpose (besides deploying expensive weaponry so the American arms industry
can keep on keeping on) is the calculated murder of people of colour outside the American homeland. The American ideology doesn't really have a handy term to describe what is made manifest when a black American jarhead calls Arabs "camel-jockeys" and takes
a few bucks from Uncle Sam for kicking in their doors and killing them since racists is what white people are. By default.</p>
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It's painful to think that it might have been the black son or daughter of parents who marched in Selma that operated the drone that killed Anwar Awlaki, either his 16-year-old son or his 5-year-old daughter. Black soldiers helping a black president to normalize
the extrajudicial execution of American citizens of whatever ethnic or racial heritage has just got to be a major victory for diversity and surely a harbinger of the day when white Americans will be able to stop bashing themselves in the name of equality because
Americans of all colours and creeds are out there killing the shit out of people of color in really poor countries.</p>
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Here endeth the Rant.</p>
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Left</a>,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://mjw51.wordpress.com/tag/war/" style="text-decoration: underline; color: rgb(37, 133, 178);" class="">war</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>| Categories:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://mjw51.wordpress.com/category/commentary/" style="text-decoration: underline; color: rgb(37, 133, 178);" class="">Commentary</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>|
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