I’m very much in favour of problematising the hypocritical narratives in the west when colonised people are discussed vs how the west is discussed because imo there’s a direct throughline from how the west discusses history and how it currently portrays “authoritarian” countries and how it discusses itself with regards to things like “officer-involved shootings”. If the series of mysterious deaths of BLM leaders happened in Belarus or Iran, the western media would have drilled it into our heads until it became a trope but since it happened in the US it’s barely a footnote, even in radical circles. If the USSR stationed armed commissars in every soviet school where they would assault children and drag them off to prison for wrongthink or for the crime of having a darker skin tone, we would never hear the end of it how it exemplified the authoritain police state nature of the Soviets yet in the US they have “resource officers” and it’s all about protecting safety and freedom and democracy.

On tiktok when there was the violent suppression of protests against the Palestinian genocide, I was telling people that the government is gonna pull a Kent State 2.0 and there was a shocking number of people who were radical left that hadn’t even heard of the Kent State Massacre until I mentioned it but I can bet you that most people in the west have at least a vague knowledge of the Moscow Theatre Hostage Crisis and the Tiananmen Square Protests.

I recently saw a video where an American liberal was confronted on the street by someone who was at least radical-ish and the topic of political prisoners got brought up. The liberal was like “Who are the American political prisoners? Where are they??” and radical responded that the US government had killed them all and I cringed because a radical should be able to list Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, George Jackson (!!), Assata Shakur, Julian Assange (!), Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin (not a fan but that’s beside the point), not to mention Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the global network of CIA blacksites.

It’s a product of cultural hegemony that Americans simply don’t know about the Battle of Blair Mountain or the MOVE bombings or violent suppression of the Bonus Army but they’ll be able to tell you all sorts of tall stories about the Gulags and the Stasi and whatever fairytale Yeonmi Park has concocted about the DPRK this week.

If you want to really run with it, what function does the TSA perform in airports? Not a single terrorist attack has been thwarted since their inception. People often call the TSA security theatre, which is a good start, but from an anthropological perspective they are there to conduct rituals that instill a sense of surveillance and to enforce compliance from the people who pass through airports. And I mean that completely unironically.

If you can historicise how this “a few bad apples” narrative is applied to the west, or how it gets a pass because it tries to do the right thing but sometimes it makes mistakes on the way, while the colonized and the adversary countries/peoples are vilified and demonised by exaggeration and distortion, you start to see how they’re still working to the exact same playbook but with minor adjustments in the words they use.