The credulity of people worldwide to still believe the Hollywood-manufactured hype around America is, er… farcical to put it mildly. While it’s normal for Americans to be patriotic and to accept the beliefs inculcated in them about their own exceptional or superior status, foreigners are expected to be more sceptical.
Astonishingly, the U.S. still has adoring fans around the world, though they are diminishing rapidly since Donald Trump took office for a second time. While it appears that a large number of these single-minded acolytes may be Israeli or South African citizens who are surely apologists for apartheid, there are others in Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand, and South America.
I wasn’t, however, expecting a Filipino to be enamourded of America, considering their history of colonial occupation there, but that’s what I discovered this weekend.
In a joint US-Israeli strike on Saturday, a girls’ elementary school in the Iranian suburb of Minab was bombed. The death toll has since been updated in some reports to as high as 165, most of whom are children as young as six or seven years old.
The Filipino in question, responding on social media to initial reports of the bombing, seemed incredulous that America could actually be a villain. He seemed perplexed by the (justified, I might add) hatred being directed at the country.
While we know from the Gaza genocide that Israel’s Defence Force has a fetish for killing children, it’s uncommon for the U.S. military to have similar inclinations. At least, that’s the belief that Hollywood sold us. We really don’t know for sure.
Or do we?
The honest truth is that America has always been the villain. It has a long history of villainy, from the genocide of its Native American population and the enforced slavery of abducted Natives from the African continent, to being the only country in the world that actually used atomic weapons against civilians, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It has been established that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was completely unnecessary. It was enacted as a chilling warning to other rising superpowers.
That level of villainy has continued unabated since then. America’s imperialist bellicosity around the world since then has resulted in the deaths of many millions more. With the election of Donald Trump as President, that killing spree has intensified. Why, the pretence has even been dropped as the U.S. military now calls itself the Department of War.
YouTuber J.T. Chapman briefly chronicled the bloody history of America on his channel, Second Thought, two years ago. Since then, sitting President Donald Trump has unwittingly blown the lid wide open on the true nature of America, revealing the ugliness of America’s hegemony, pretend democracy and real inhumanity.
I know that the patriots and MAGA cultists will dismiss Chapman as a radical leftie communist. That won’t be surprising. Similarly, regime-friendly broadcaster CNN describing Iran’s defensive retaliation to the current US-Israeli aggression as “indiscriminate and unprovoked…” is not surprising either.
In another unsurprising twist, members of Congress have barely lifted a finger to stop the current aggression against Iran. Perhaps it’s too much to ask that they avert their gaze, even for a few minutes, from their cellphone apps tracking their military stock portfolio performance?
What is surprising, however, is that nobody has yet described the US-Israeli bullying and bombing of another sovereign nation as vicious acts of terrorism. Because that is precisely what it is. That epithet is apparently reserved for the victims of imperialism who dare to retaliate against their oppression.
If we learn anything from history, or Hollywood even, the villains have to account for their depraved actions at some point. Meanwhile, thousands of butchered children in both Gaza and Minab cry out for justice…
lenny unencumbered 