Nothing that Russia is doing in Ukraine is something that the United States has done many times elsewhere over the years. But there’s a big difference in the way that these events get covered. When the US does something horrible, it is dismissed as an incongruous departure from standard American values or simply not covered at all.
The Secret Sauce of American Exceptionalism
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Exceptionalism is the secret sauce for the internal justification/impetus of imperial mass destruction – i.e., essential racism.
The sauce described in today’s strip is cosmic hypocrisy, e.g.: OUR genocide don’t stink! It is the outward-facing attitude of “an international system of laws is unacceptably too fair … the world now operates under our capricious, unilateral rules. You are always in violation … we are without responsibility or blame. Deal with it.”
This is a good opportunity to revisit the “What don’t stink” game: scroll down
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Cosmic Hypocrisy = “OUR _____ don’t stink !!!”
fill in the blank from choices below, or your own … then put it on a T-shirt!
(the list is hardly exhaustive, non-overlapping or in any particular order!!!)
1) exceptionally yooo…ooooge Fascism
2) theocracy
3) militarism
4) poverty
5) police state
6) surveillance state
7) plutocracy
8) perpetual war
9) slavery
10) corporatocracy
11) totalitarianism
12) genocide
13) racism
14) misogyny
15) global meddling (e.g. see “US in Yeltsin’s Russia)
16) propaganda
17) fake democracy
18) capitalist (mega-)oligarchs
19) raving, vicious, fundamentalist religionists
20) un-elected dictatorship of money
21) crippling, murderous economic sanctions
22) crippling murderous economic austerity “system”
23) concentration camps
24) conspiracy theories
25) fake news
26) international extortion
27) collusion with foreign powers
28) all-pervasive corruption
29) regime-change projects
30) WMD
Excellent summary! Thank you! If you don’t mind, I’m going to copy it and find a way to get it out.
Certainly! Thank you.
American Blockheads know nothing because all things evil are blocked from mass media by its propagandist screening process.
you mean, “Nothing that Russia is doing in Ukraine is something that the United States hasn’t done many times”? 🙂
Just wait until Putin drops an A bomb. I’m willing to bet folding money the media will assiduously not bring up that we did it first in a little place called Japan.
Let’s not forget who really makes it possible … viewers like you.
Trump and pals are, according to the media, horrible grifters. Coarse, venal, etc. Fine. I happen to agree. Rachel Maddow chuckles her way through her broadcasts, mugging at the camera like a D-list imbecile as she pockets her eight-figure salary, occasionally manufacturing something that approaches but never seems to reach genuine rage. And the rest of the usual gang of idiots is no better.
The Clintons were filled to the gunwales with scandals and questionable deals. Barack Obama? Remember how he fixed the housing bubble? Oh, right. Only the citizen-banks remember how he made sure they were okay. Too bad he was so busy he didn’t have time to close Gitmo or pass health care when he had a four-month window. And let’s not mention all those judgeships that were left open because those (stamp widdle foot) mean ol’ Repubwicans wouldn’t let his nominees through. Biden? Dear God. The laptop Hunter left in Delaware is filled with damaging information. The Republicans will certainly want some long, drawn-out Senate hearings once they’re back in charge in (counts on fingers) in nine months.
The system works the way it does because the people who actually could get things fixed are simply too few in number, too numb from decades of watching the same cycles play out. It’s the lumpen masses, shoveling processed food into their maws while the idiot box sedates them, the ones who show up for Earth Day, leave a mess, and then drive back home in their air-conditioned SUVs to order more crap from Amazon.
Great comment pork.
What is so sad is that the average American knows nothing of US war crimes, and will respond to the list with indignation.