Sadly, critical thinking has become fleetingly rare in American “public discourse” which is based, largely, on advertising and its moral twin, political propaganda. Ads and propaganda, both designed to make money for the wealthiest, are aimed at our irrational impulses and they shape the angry black and white exchanges over who is right and who is wrong. We all want to buy the very best product, after all, and defend our choice in buying our particular brand.
Timothy Snyder demonstrates how critical thinking is done, and its usefulness (when applied widely) in debunking mindless propaganda, in this selection from his Substack Thinking About…
And so who does benefit [from war/not war in Iran]? Again, it has to be emphasized that we do not have the kind of sources that future historians would like. But there are nevertheless a few candidate who petition for our attention. Israel is the American co-combatant in this war, and its government has a clearly expressed interest in destroying Iranian power.
Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a regional struggle for power with Iran for 47 years. Interestingly, American war propaganda (picked up by regime-friendly commentators) now maintains that the United States has been at war with Iran for 47 years. (Orwell has gotten a lot of attention recently, but his “we have always been at war with Eurasia” in 1984 is very much a propos.) This obviously untrue claim implies that the United States has been a Saudi client state working against Iran for the better part of half a century.
This propaganda line is historically ridiculous — remember when we trafficked missiles to Iran in 1981-1985? or when Saudis flew airplanes into the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001? But it is telling. source
Of course, we also sold missiles and poison gas to a modern day Hitler, Saddam Hussein, lynched by an avenging George Dubya Bush in the middle of the night. Saddam used these American weapons to fight Iran and to gas ethnic minorities in Iraq. It doesn’t matter so much what we say or who we support in a given war, or what rationales we use, or nowadays don’t even bother to use, as long as the machinery of war, in its endlessly lucrative glory, continues to pump out obscene profits for the weapons industry and its savvy corporate shareholders. It matters not that we mass murder girls in a school on day one of a war that is not a war, as long as we perform maximum lethality against the rest of the worst of the worst and keep blowing up those million dollar missiles we make defending freedom.
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