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From Caitlin Johnstone Website
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If you're like me and spend entirely too much time on Political Twitter you may have recently observed a bunch of people saying you shouldn't post your opinion about the Afghanistan situation unless you're an expert who has studied the nation's dynamics in depth. Like an empire invading a nation and murdering a bunch of people for decades is some super complicated and esoteric matter that you need a PhD to have an opinion about.
You see fairly simple abuses framed as highly complicated issues all the time by people who defend those abuses. War. Israeli apartheid. My abusive ex used to go around telling people what happened between us was more complicated than I was making it sound.
Before he became Trump's National Security Advisor in 2018 John Bolton faced a contentious interview on Fox News where he was criticized for his role in Bush's invasion of Iraq, and he responded that "the point I think you need to understand is, life is complicated in the Middle East. When you say 'the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a mistake,' it's simplistic."
Bolton is now among the "experts" on Afghanistan doing mainstream media tours on CNN and NPR explaining to the public that the decision to end the 20-year military occupation was a mistake.
Yeah, don't you worry your pretty little heads about war. It will just confuse you, because it's far too complicated to understand. These important matters should be left to men like John Bolton, who are consistently wrong about every foreign policy issue.
This carefully promoted idea serves only the powerful, and entirely too many people buy into it. You'll even see dedicated leftists shying away from commentary on western imperialism in favor of domestic policy because they don't feel confident talking about something they've been trained to believe is very difficult and complex.
Which is silly, because war is actually the easiest aspect of the oligarchic empire to understand. Murdering people with military explosives for power and profit is plainly wrong. You don't need to be an Ivy League university graduate to understand this, and given the track record of Ivy League university graduates on this matter it's probably better if you are not. A globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States orchestrates murder at mass scale to ensure perpetual domination of the planet. It really is that simple.
Now, you can spend the rest of your life studying the details of precisely how this is the case, but they're just that: details about how this dynamic is taking place. You can learn all about the various ways the oligarchic empire advances its geostrategic agendas using wars, proxy conflicts, coups, sanctions, special ops, cold war brinkmanship and the so-called "war on terror", but you will only be discovering further details about this simple overarching truth.
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