World News

I had this realization yesterday, and not like this is some big insight but it was a new thought to me:

Most Americans have zero conception of “anti-imperialism” or “anti-colonialism”.

It’s not that most Americans knowingly approve of imperialism or colonialism. Or that they have a warped idea of what these terms mean. It’s that they have no idea what these concepts are or how they exist in history up to the present.

I like to think my parents are pretty good examples of the “median” (white) American. If you asked them what “colonies” were, they would say something like “well, in the past countries like Britain and France owned parts of Africa and Asia, but now they don’t anymore”. That’s it, that’s all they would able to explain. They have no idea that there was an anti-colonial struggle across many countries. They think Vietnam was just “the communists were trying to take over the world”, where “the communists” are not even specifically Vietnamese or Russian or Chinese, just a sort of blob of anthropomorphized ideology.

This bleeds into their present-day understanding of what’s happening in Gaza. Palestinians or really any brown people are just naturally violent for reasons unknown, so they get branded with the “terrorist” label and they don’t think any deeper than that. The conflict then becomes not an anti-colonial struggle or a people striving for liberation, but the bad “terrorists” who just want to do violence to the white people who look like they do and have democracy and capitalism and speak English so they must be good. This gets reinforced by the media which has now spent over 20 years pushing hard stories of Muslim or Arab “terrorists” who want to set off a nuke in an American shopping mall or whatever crap they watch of NCIS / CSI / JAG / Homeland / FBI (yes, there’s now a show that’s just called “FBI”).

The struggles that Mexico has had to endure are completely unknown to most Americans, so when AMLO or Sheinbaum get labeled as “autocrats”, (white) Americans will just accept it because of their own lack of knowledge plus inherent racism.

(Just to clarify, I’ve worked on my parents so they no longer think the above