One common tactic of the Right is to arbitrarily fixate on a story that is or purports to be an outrage and then demand to know why people on the Left—who often never heard about it in the first place, because news is so siloed—didn’t have anything to say about it.
Why Were You Silent?
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The TMI Show" talk show. He is 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 "2024: Revisited."
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On the flip side, the US Radical Reich doesn’t want to have certain unseemly & grisly aspects (e.g. the centuries-long genocide of native peoples) of American history to be told. They see this as forcing the population to face reality that might cause it to experience shame. Poor little emotional snowflakes!!!
Of course, shame for the current population is only really mandated to the extent Americans a) deny their irrefutable past and
b) continue in their established ghoulish propensity to commit genocide either directly, or more shamefully, indirectly. The most obvious ongoing example is via its West Asia proxy, whose activities, of some 80-years (officially), would have been impossible without complete US support that has lead to history’s first live-streamed genocide, since 2023, even if overshadowed recently in the media by ….
The ongoing, month long, illegal, unprovoked, full-scale war against Iran, however, has closed the genocide-gap as the US is again a direct perpetrator thereof. Of the many civilian targets hit are grammar schools (while in session), Tehran University, hospitals and recently a cancer pharmaceutical production facility. The strategy is to make the general population so miserable as to cause an internal regime change … that the might US military is unwilling AND unable to do on its own. (In the “old days” of international law this “strategy” was considered a war crime.)
A composite quotation of Trump’s verbal meanderings on the motivation for the attack, however contorted, do seem to merit him a dark, dank, blanketless, rat-infested cell (with tin-bucket, not gold, toilet) at the Hague: “These Iranians are very horrible people. They should be bombed back to the Stone Ages (sic) … as they deserve.” True justice would be an adjoining cell for Biden … along with concurrent investigations commenced on Clinton, BushII and Obumma aministrations. Let’s not forget Netanyahu, the closest thing, since Cheney, to “the anti-Christ,” for those who believe in such things. He is so bad that he could not avoid being accused of genocidal behavior by essentially all the world’s accredited human rights protection organizations. (In perhaps their own shame for passing over for such consideration the exalted list of US presidents, above.)
In this case Iran seems to be appropriately prepared to respond after a continuous 73-year US campaign against beginning with the CIA overthrow of its democratically elected government in 1953. For Americans, who can hardly be expected to realize the shame they have brought upon themselves THIS TIME, we can only hope that the “other” 90% of the population of the NON-Anglo Empire will dump enough shame onto the US for it to notice.
At least the accelerated crumbling of said empire (a truly herculean, bipartisan effort engineered by its last two ultimate “caretakers,” a couple of demented, bumbling, bungling, senile, IF sincerely vicious, fools) might bring an appreciation of how the “American Dream” for the “exceptional people” (a domestic myth itself) to the meager extent it was true, has only been possible with the concurrent plague on the world’s “horribles” of an optimally realized “American nightmare.”
On a related note: “Economic sanctions*** imposed by the USA or the EU were associated with 564,258 deaths ANNUALLY from 1971 to 2021, higher than the annual number of battle-related casualties (106 000 deaths).” Assuming the same death rate, post 2021, for Western sanctions, some 31 million have been killed in the 55 years to present. Source: The Lancet Global Health >>>
@ https://tinyurl.com/44ax5v9v ——————– *** E.G.: Forty-seven years CONTINUOUSLY on Iran since 1979.
So who, exactly, has been slaughtering whom in the US campaign to obliterate Iran?
Why was I silent?
A significant percentage of my lefty friends have Trump Derangement Syndrome. They are unable to remain calm when Trump comes up. When I bring up very real and legitimate concerns about the democrat leadership and its wholly ineffectual reaction to Trump and the ethically questionable position of a lot of elected democrats, the response is almost always the same: my points are irrelevant or indicative that I am love with Donald Trump or that I am simply insane.
So fine. I will be silent. With barely any exceptions — and certainly no one with control of the discourse — no one wants to listen, let alone discuss, that the dems dropped the ball by not serving papers on Trump immediately after Biden was sworn in. No one wants to be frank about how Biden was simply another variety of the same kind of grifter Trump is. Let’s not talk about how Kamala Harris was, clearly, Team Biden’s “fix” for how Smilin’ Joe screwed over Anita Hill all those years ago (for which he has never apologized). Let’s not mention that she (Harris) is also a grifter. Let’s not demand Pelosi and the other high-earners in the stock market answer exactly how they did so well without it being insider trading.
When the dems sin, the TDS crowd blocks their ears. That’s why I stay silent. There. Is. No. Point. Talking.
Well, Alex, I agree with you, and I, too, have had to fend off attacks from bipolar Democrats. And thank you, falco, for your excellent commentary–and kudos to Ted for inspiring you by portraying another situation I have found myself in.
The right-wing media is very good at noticing when a crime victim is in most of the categories of rich, white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, English speaking, US citizen, politically connected, Christian, male or pretty, etc. They are also very good at noticing when our highly punitive society punishes someone in those categories severely. Right-wingers come to me and ask why I am not looking out for the victims of crime or the victims of severe punishments.
My response is that I am, but that I also advocate on behalf of those who aren’t in those categories. And I tell them that the cases that they are highlighting aren’t so out of the ordinary that those targets get to jump to the front of the rescue line. I ask the right-wingers to join the general cause to help all the victims. By then they’ve lost interest in the discussion.