It's Gross And Cringey To Love A State Like Israel Or The USA
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
It’s so infantile and embarrassing to love a state like Israel or the US and spend your time defending its actions. It’s a sign of a feeble mind to feel emotional attachment to any power structure, but especially the ones that are doing the most evil things in the world right now.
Every day I am accused of “loving” this or that empire-targeted nation or group, depending on what’s in the news and who westerners are being told to hate by their pundits and politicians. Some days it’s Russia, other days it’s China, Iran or Hamas. Really I have no special emotional attachment to any of those entities — those who hurl this accusation are merely projecting their own internal values onto me: I hate what they love so they assume I must love what they hate.
I don’t love the western empire’s enemies, and I don’t defend them. In reality I am simply standing against the world’s most tyrannical and abusive power structure, whose imperial umbrella I happen to live under here in Australia. I would oppose that tyranny and abuse regardless of the nations it happens to be targeting on any particular day. I have nothing against Russia, China or Iran, but I also have no personal emotional relationship with them. They have nothing to do with me.
It’s impossible to have a real personal emotional relationship with any nation. You can have a personal relationship with people, with individual communities and neighborhoods, with a specific beach or forest or countryside, but nations are too large and full of too many people for you to have a meaningful relationship with them as an individual. In order to feel loving feelings toward a nation, you have to create a symbol of it in your mind and love that symbol instead of the actual thing that the nation is. You’re not loving the actual country, you’re loving a small mental representation of it that you have constructed inside your head. As George Carlin said, I leave symbols to the symbol-minded.
So the very idea of loving a nation in itself is absurd, but it’s exponentially weirder to then extend the positive feelings you have toward a nation to its government and their actions and military objectives as well. Then it’s just the same power-worshipping bootlicker mentality that has fueled all of history’s worst atrocities. You have abdicated your responsibility toward your own mature relationship with the world and signed it over to a giant conglomerate of forces whose operators you’ve never met, and whose material interests have nothing to do with your own.
People who love and defend a government are creating parental figures out of the state instead of growing up and taking their stand as mature individuals. And if you are doing this with the US and Israel or their allies, you’re not just handing your responsibility over to a single nation’s government — you’re doing it with an entire globe-spanning empire.
When your umbilical cord is cut you’re meant to begin growing into a sovereign being with a sovereign mind, and instead these empire simps are plugging the end of their umbilical cord into the Pentagon. It’s pathetic.
I have no respect for people who do this. People who grovel at the feet of the mightiest power structure on earth instead of learning to relate to life as free thinking individuals. People who abdicate their responsibility to figure out what’s true and right and how the world should be, and let a tyrannical empire and its interests decide these things for them. They have chosen to remain drooling infants in their minds instead of growing up. They have wasted their time on this planet.
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Love my country? That feeling started going south with my flight from Catholicism when I was around 14. Then came Vietnam, so by 21, I had nothing left in my kit bag of emotions, but disgust for its stupidity, its complete barbaric aggression toward the poor of the third world. Yet I still tried to give it a break. Until I recognized that no amount of juggling parties or faces in DC would make a difference -- corrupt exceptionalist mindset had already rotted it from the inside out. Love a rotted shell of some delusional militaristic authoritarian monster making a pretense of duh mock crazy? Fat chance of that.
as a Brit, I find many people are obsessed with our colonial past, labouring under the delusion that we brought 'civilisation' to backward people, whereas I can only apologise to our victims for the theft and murder our forbears committed. I feel for Americans who similarly understand what their country is doing, and have to be embarrassed, as am I, considering my government is totally complicit in all the atrocities being carried out to this day.