I remember how angry I was in my early 20's when I was unlearning all of the whitewashed history I was crammed with in the course of public schooling. I was doing deep dives into the last couple centuries of colonial and imperial histories, and then recent modern geopolitical developments, and just making myself absolutely sick in the process: my god it was all a lie, we don't give a shit about democracy or human rights or etc.
But some time has passed, and more information has come in. The bitter cyclical experience of daily life and the apprehension of what tends to exist and persist, coupled with a deeper study of history, and that anger has tempered into a more realistic sentiment: well of course this is the way it works. Empires beget each other almost rhythmically throughout the last couple of thousand years of human history, which proceed to marginalize and destroy foreign peoples. Of course modern empires behave this way too.
This is not to excuse or justify anything. Indeed this is still unacceptable. But the consciousness of this state of play has changed for me. And I think a large part of this is the role of propaganda and the way in which it eventually fails.
See, there was a time in which mass sensibilities were such that the ruling classes would make open declarations about wiping out so-and-so enemies, and doing extreme violence to them or subjugating them. There has always been propaganda in some form or another, but direct violence was much more acceptable in the ancient world and in the medieval era. Of course all of that bad energy would build up from an empire shitting on everyone around it, which would eventually overtake it in the end.
There has been a long and complex process - which we've gotten into some before - in which direct violence and expropriation has become more and more unacceptable to the common sensibility in the modern world, but the expansionary and domineering instinct has largely remained, necessitating incredibly time and energy-intensive PR efforts to generate images that mitigate the effects of those motivations.
It is probably for the better that our ruling classes have to put in a little more PR work before they embark on their smash-and-grabs. And it is a good thing that an average person in the developed world should expect to have some rudimentary set of human rights that are not to be violated, and that this expectation should be a basic guarantee of every society. Something worth aspiring to. Of course as Hannah Arendt observed about the cascading crises of the World Wars, you have to have the resources and state power to guarantee these things, and the mere motivation to guarantee these things can collapse very quickly when the war fever rises.
Over the last couple of thousand years - and we didn't come out of a vacuum when written and studied history arose, so we could probably assume this goes way back into the deeper history of our species - that expansionary imperial impulse may wax and wane with the power and organization of empires, but it never really goes away. And when it repeatedly comes up against the modern propaganda we've been saturated with, something has to give eventually.
So oftentimes the first thing to break is the image itself, and the propagandized subject is most immediately exposed to this rupture. So you have a lot of people walking around saying, "It's all a lie, the US is actually an empire." This example is quickly becoming more and more antiquated as public cynicism and distrust deepens, but I think the point has been made.
The intense anger is less focused on their own personal disenfranchisement and immiseration (though these are certainly strong motivating factors), and more on the broken lie itself, and at that point a lot of personal energy is put into reconstituting a more accurate world picture, which is to be shared and evangelized.
The silver lining to all this is that some version of the positive vision is cherished and maintained, and you see it show up again and again in radical politics: there is an attempt to reorder localities and in many cases even mass politics in order to bring about a substantiation of that reconstituted image.
Some realism is healthy, just as it can be just as healthy to have some sort of motivating image to aspire to, without slumping into cynicism on the one hand or charging ahead in thrall of some impossible ideal on the other.
