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well when you live in a country that has launched a campaign of racial genocide in iraq and afghanistan
you get a population of people who do not want to face up to this fact
and want at all costs to have a narrative that hides it or justifies it somehow
so you get the neo con fantasies
or the liberal fantasies that try to justify genocide because of muslim extremists that hate gays and women
it functions on some level as a threat "see we tolerate you gays and women and minorities but those bad muslins dont so dont step out of line or they will take over and stone you." noone in america would welcome being bombed invaded and having their national infastructure destroyed and their countries resources plundered cos of say the fact that criminals are executed in their prisons. this would be ridiculous.
very few can accept the reality that the wars were unprovoked amoral actions of genocide that have failed in all their goals and were not only unnecessary but based on fundamentally insane fantasies.
in order to leap over the logical fails that are used to justify the war like:
saddam killed thousands of kurds and tortured his own people
therefore we need to committ more genocide of his people
you get the need to equivocate all muslim extremists with at least the majority of muslims.
in order to excuse genocide you get racial demonisation. which most people find preferable to admitting that about a million innocent people are dead because of the actions of their countries military, media and governments.
the occupations are only creating more extremism. this was never in doubt. that the war would fail was easily discoverable knowledge if you had even a grasp of non right wing think tank funded history. you cannot bring democracy at the point of a gun. you cannot transplant liberal values. thats magical thinking.not only are the wars about as amoral as you can get, they make us all unsafer, they increase terrorism, they fund and empower al qaeda, they set the nations back decades and decades. etc. etc.
you cannot murder extremists out of existence. even if you agreed morally with the wars (cant be done) it is simply factually false that the tactics used to fight them will succeed in any of their goals. al qaeda had bases in 2 countries before the invasion. now they have bases in 9. all the facile arguments used to justify war against these countries are reasons that people KNOW inherently they would all reject if used by other countries as a pretense to do the same to them. so the solution? racial demonisation.
the very logic used to justify the wars could be used to justify bombing the shit out of working class ghettos in washington dc because of bush or obama. noone can accept belonging to a society that is actively bringing about a war with the mid east of its own making and that it will most probably lose in the end when its own infastructure and wealth is depleted trying to continue it.
in vietnam you had some actual journalism that helped change public opinion. but they didnt want to make that mistake again, the solution? embedded reporting - you dont get access unless you report the story the military wants because they hire their own reporters and create their own news on fox. if you say things they dont like you dont get access and get shunned and cant report. also they whip up the morons into a blood orgy and they slander you as liberal. magical thinking - if it werent for people not beleiving and saying bad things all the news stories would be of heroic victory like the hollywood movies we are dumb enough to believe in.
this paul guy is a symptom of british racism. blame new labour, blame the tories, etc. blame a culture of proudly anti intellectual hedonism that has no standards except how you feel and what makes you feel good. can't stomach the reality of dead iraqi children bombed and murdered. of future generations plagued with deformities and cancer from the illegal chemical weapons used. can't face that on your tv programmes. makes you feel bad. life is about feeling good. we would all feel good if it werent for those muslims that hate us. i feel bad but want to learn things that make me feel good, so i'll read melanie phillips in the daily mail and become a right wing, i'll project the causes of my woes onto muslims/liberals etc.
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