by Richard Balzano
Americans are perhaps the planet’s most propagandized population. Exceptionalism, innocence, and decades of propaganda have diluted the general public’s ability to critically process international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. The media is complicit, for when Washington sets its crosshairs on another government and primes the public for intervention, the empire’s ambitions are strategically branded in uplifting good-guy savior rhetoric and cheered by flag-waving mainstream media consumers insisting that this time we’ll be greeted as liberators. (Hint: we won’t… .)
Protesters recently took to the streets in Iran and Venezuela, but not for the reasons we’re given by the mainstream media. Many of the grievances Iranians and Venezuelans face are the result of U.S. sanctions. Mainstream coverage largely evades that point, and when sanctions are acknowledged, the tone often suggests that they’re warranted.
After the Trump regime illegally kidnapped Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, Western media claimed Venezuelans flooded the streets to celebrate, calling for U.S. intervention. Clips of protesters featured alongside repeated coup-collaborator and Nobel-degrader María Corina Machado’s pleas for American boots on the ground to free Venezuela and open her to foreign investment. This was, per Washington, a nation begging to be liberated. Indeed, many in Venezuela did protest in support of Washington’s war crime—further testament of Venezuela’s tolerant civil society that has endured U.S.-funded subversion campaigns for a quarter century. But a far greater number of Venezuelans took to the streets to denounce Washington’s actions and show support for both Venezuelan sovereignty and the Maduro-Rodriguez government. Neither the mainstream media nor the State Department acknowledged that.
Recent protests in Iran became violent, the government responded, and Washington quickly credited the events to the Iranian government’s alleged authoritarian barbarity. Both the protests and the Iranian government’s response received predictable coverage in the West, although those keen enough to cross-reference mainstream coverage with peripheral outlets (read: actual journalism) or use the translation feature on their browsers discovered a different reality.
Evidence indicating the initial violence was instigated by foreign agents was presented to Western diplomats. Our most brazen Middle Eastern ally—which shall not be named since I wish to continue working in higher education—openly bragged about its complicity, knowing full well the Western media would not pick up that angle. The mainstream media framed Iran’s evidence as allegations from a questionable source, and this is easily accepted by Western media consumers conditioned by decades of Orientalist* barbarizations of the Islamic world repeated ad nauseam to forge a conventional wisdom in which Islamic people and nations are, among other things, untrustworthy. How can the Iranians be trusted, having had the audacity to overthrow the regime that Washington imposed when the CIA lost its coup virginity in 1954, ousting Iran’s democratically elected Mohammed Mosaddegh? In response to American posturing, Iranian protestors took to the streets to denounce U.S. intervention, forcing Western media to acknowledge the complicated nature of Iranian protests, albeit often obscured in statistics intended to further barbarize Iran and charge them with limited transparency. Iran’s response to the foreign agents implicated in subversion might seem harsh to Americans—Iran executes Mossad agents, whereas Americans elect them, or at the very least—per Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Derschowitz—offer them immunity.
Every administration clamoring for war insists that we will be greeted as liberators. Much of the world doesn’t see it that way, and Americans have been shielded from reality in our whitewashed history and political discourse. The shining city on the hill was founded on slavery and an indigenous genocide that inspired Hitler. At the start of the Cold War we were a segregated society that executed civil rights leaders and protesters, supported human rights-abusing regimes and apartheid states abroad, conducted non-consensual medical experiments and sterilizations on people of color in the colonial and post-colonial world, and regularly obstructed the self-determination of states, allegedly in their own best interests, all while insisting that we were engaged in a good vs. evil struggle to uphold human freedom (read: defend capitalism). This glaring hypocrisy was and is not lost on the Global South. Since the Second World War, Washington has been a harbinger of torture, hunger, and death to the Global South, and yet Americans are generally oblivious to this reality. It is a tough pill to swallow.
There are indeed some protestors calling for U.S. intervention, many of whom collaborate with subversive regime change institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy. Expat communities are often vocal advocates for U.S. intervention, but consider the source. Many expats fled reforms that sought to close the chasms of wealth inequality and reverse the inequities of colonialism and neoliberalism in their home nations. When expats appeal to Washington for intervention on mainstream news networks in English, we should consider whether their mastery of the English language is indicative of privilege. Whose class interests do they represent? Were they on the suffering end of imperialism, or the collaborative end? Did they benefit from colonial and neocolonial arrangements? Consider the Venezuelans who support the Bolivarian Revolution, the Cubans who support the Cuban Revolution, and the Iranians who reject American imperialism—many of them are not fluent in English, and they cannot appear on prime time news to counter the expat intervention lobby. Their voices go unheard.
Not every protest is a cry for U.S. intervention, yet Washington capitalizes on mobilization to delegitimize governments as a potential pretext for regime change. The Global South may become reluctant to protest because it could be manipulated to justify intervention. Their grievances with their governments are their own, and expressing their frustrations in the streets should not warrant a ten-plus year occupation, yet this is a potential reality the world must endure. In this sense, American public diplomacy has an adverse impact on Global South civil society. It’s almost as if Washington could care less about the democratic rights of those they’d claim to liberate.
* The term “Orientalism” was coined by academic Edward Said to encapsulate the (often-contradictory) Western depictions of much of the non-Western world as unproductive, deceptive, naive, gullible, unintelligent, weak, hostile, irrational, barbaric and uncivilized. Westerners, in contrast, are depicted as strong, rational, intelligent, and civilized. Orientalism rationalized earlier European colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa, and evolved to provide moral cover for contemporary imperialism in the form of uplifting, civilizing, ideological rhetoric.
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Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.