Sony Thăng

Ben, you said Americans "just want to make ends meet, do a little better than yesterday, make a better life for their children." So did the Vietnamese. So did the Iraqis. So did the Libyans. So do the Iranians. So did every population that has ever lived under the foreign policy of the country whose ordinary citizens, according to you, just wanted to make ends meet and had nothing to do with what their government was doing. Do you see the problem? You have applied the logic of ordinary human innocence exclusively to Americans. The Vietnamese farmer who just wanted to feed his family, he got napalmed. The American factory worker who just wanted to pay his mortgage, he gets philosophical protection from accountability. Both were ordinary people. Both were caught inside systems larger than themselves. Only one of them gets to be innocent in your framework. Ask yourself why.

Let me make sure I understand your position, Ben. When America does something good, "lands on the moon," wins World War II, funds a vaccine: That's we. Americans. Our achievement. Our values. Our greatness. When America does something that killed three million people: That's them. The State. Separate. Nothing to do with us. The pride is collective. The guilt is always someone else's. Got it.

Thanks for your response Sony. Thats not how I see it. Like so many issues of our time, "the Patriarchy", VAWG, "White Supremacy" and so on, the proponents of these cultural themes make a category error. In each of these cases, the actions of a tiny minority are used to cast a spell across a population. Remember the Occupy movement? That got replaced by the culture wars. Whilst no doubt it wasnt eradicated, racism was essentially done - we were moving toward a shared story about where power actually lies. Your piece lays claim over cultural territory that doesnt reflect the vast experience of Americans, of all creeds and colours. Americans, like essentially all humans (excepting a few psychopaths), want to make ends meet, do a little better than yesterday, make a better life for their children. I think you identify a valid human characteristic - people won't see evidence that undoes their identity. But the identity you reference, good and bad, relates to the actions of a tiny minority - the psychopaths at the top. The real aha moment is perhaps seeing that the identity of America as a Democracy in anything but name is perhaps what Americans can't accept. Look up: Citizen's United, the Unity 2020 movement, Twitter Files, the Trusted News Initiative. Americans don't hold the identity you claim. The actions of the state are the actions of a system that encourages the theft of their money to spend on wars they didn't vote for and a system that encourages a culture of identity division to stop them looking at the real problem - America is not a democracy. The actions of the state are the result of a Luciferian elite meritocratic system that promotes the most psychopathic, the most self interested, the most corrupt to the top. The actions of the state are those of a criminal enterprise, which is exactly what you'd expect to see given the incentives - violence, corruption, brinksmanship, theft, protection racket and so on. Americans have more in common with each other than you claim, they just don't with their state - that's my point.

Willem, three exchanges ago you were defending "willing sellers." Now you're saying you never claimed Europeans were innocent. That is movement. Significant movement. You arrived arguing that the slave trade was a normal market with consenting parties and that blaming buyers was selective. You are now conceding European guilt and arguing only about degree and attention. I want to mark that clearly, not to humiliate you, but because it matters. The facts move people when the facts are laid out plainly. The next question, the one that separates genuine historical engagement from sophisticated deflection, is this: Now that we agree Europeans are guilty, what do you think should actually happen? Not in 1850. Now. What accountability, what acknowledgment, what material reckoning do you think is appropriate? Your answer to that question will tell us everything about whether this conversation was ever about truth or only about making truth more complicated than it needs to be.

You asked who is more criminal in the drug trade, the seller or the buyer. Here is the answer you didn't want: it depends entirely on who built the system. If the buyer created the demand, funded the supply chain, armed the distributors, designed the legal architecture that made the product tradeable, and ran the ships, then yes, the buyer. Obviously the buyer. Now tell me who built the transatlantic slave trade's infrastructure. Who had the ships, Willem? Who had the guns that armed the coastal raiders? Who had the insurance markets, the joint-stock companies, the plantation economies that required millions of bodies? Answer those questions. Then resubmit your drug trade analogy and see if it still says what you think it says.

Alan, I want to be fair to you. You are describing something real: the difference between imperial subjects and imperial beneficiaries. But here's the thing about that distinction in an American context: Even your non-voting, system-aware, no-pride-in-it American lives in the country that won. His dollar is still the reserve currency. His country's military still controls the sea lanes. His consumer prices are still subsidized by arrangements made at gunpoint in other countries. He didn't ask for it. He didn't vote for it. He hates it. And he still lives inside it, with all its structural advantages, every single day. That's not a moral condemnation of him. That's just a description of his position. And it matters when we're talking about who owes what to whom.

This is the first post of yours I'm not impressed with. A majority of US citizens don't vote. Within that majority are tens of millions who understand they are victims of murderous extortion racketeers. I'm one of them. I take no pride in "American accomplishments funded by theft. Especially for a vaccine for cooties. Nor in "they're American" when a private person wins. We don't pretend we can vote our way of a murderous extortion racket. Neither should you.

Let me make sure I understand your position, Ben. When America does something good, "lands on the moon," wins World War II, funds a vaccine: That's we. Americans. Our achievement. Our values. Our greatness. When America does something that killed three million people: That's them. The State. Separate. Nothing to do with us. The pride is collective. The guilt is always someone else's. Got it.