A lot of mainstream-adjacent progressives act like Gaza is some radical deviation from normal US behavior, which is infantile nonsense.
The US inflicts similar horrors on the world all the time; the only major difference is
(A) this one’s being live-streamed and
(B) there was a pro-Palestine movement in place before it began.
With regard to (B), Gaza is really illustrating how much the US empire benefits from moving through its foreign military violence relatively quickly.
When it can move from propagandizing the population about Evil Dictatorship X to destroying the country in question to moving on to its next war in the span of a few short years, there’s not enough time for public awareness to grow of exactly how evil the empire is being. It was years before a mainstream consensus developed that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, and it will probably be decades before there’s mainstream consensus about the evil shit the empire did in Syria from 2011 onwards.
With Gaza, people saw this one coming and were calling it what it is from the moment it began, because there was already a widespread political understanding — at least on the left — that Israel is a murderous settler-colonialist project and that the Palestinians are a colonized people. This widespread understanding occurred because the Israel-Palestine debate has been raging for generations, so the collective has had enough time to really examine the facts and circulate its arguments through public consciousness. Those facts and arguments were there ready to be picked up and understood and used — even by young people who are new to the situation — after October 7.
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