The Truth Hurts

This is a great essay in n+1 magazine by Lyle Jeremy Rubin, a combat Marine veteran in Afghanistan. This paragraph from the essay is chillingly descriptive and true. (I don't think this is behind a paywall, if it is I apologize.)

I’ve had exchanges with each that imply recognition of the porousness of authorized propaganda. The linguist, for example, admits the war in Afghanistan has been a disaster and there is no hopeful path forward. But both, despite their time spent on the edge of the abyss, remain beholden to a colonial logic. For them the United States and Israel are flawed but necessary bulwarks against barbarism. For me the empire is rooted in the barbarism it pretends to oppose. It is exhausting having to declaim the same talking points over and over again: That the majority of the United States’ official adversaries were once clients and allies. That almost every intervention comes with an ex post facto assessment from the government acknowledging the failure of the mission. That investigative reporters and historians almost always unearth internal documents betraying motives that not only run counter to public rationales but undermine all claims to humanitarian intent. That the United States supplies the world with a preponderance of its weapons and fuels a plurality of its animosities. That the United States is the only power to have ever dropped the bomb, that it did so twice, and that it did so not to end a world war (a war that was about to end anyway) but to launch what became a half-century-long cold war on superior footing. While not alone as a global malefactor, the United States is the world leader in conventional foreign invasions since 1945, with 12; has engineered at least 38 coups or regime changes since the Spanish American War of 1898; and has offered direct military support and training to dozens of governments with no regard for human rights. The United States incarcerates the most people today, both in absolute and relative terms. It has incarcerated the most people for at least thirty-some-odd years, and it either led the world in its incarceration rate or trailed closely behind the Soviet Union and South Africa for the preceding decades. As early as 1976, one study described America’s rate as the “highest in the world and still rising.” By any standard, the United States empire ranks among the world’s most formidable producers of violence, and one would be hard-pressed to defend such all-consuming production on liberal democratic grounds.