“Why can’t we see ourselves as we are?”

 

The ‘apocalyptic blindness’ of Americans

By Patrick Lawrence

The other night I watched a documentary called Coup 53, a brilliant treatment of the coup that deposed Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister of Iran in the year the film notes in its title. Taghi Amirani, the director, has produced a superb piece of work, narrated in part by the estimable Steve Kinzer. Today, 19 August, marks the 73rd anniversary of Operation Ajax, as M.I.–6 and the C.I.A. named their covert assault on Iran’s first democratically elected government. 

How well I recall learning of the Iran coup during my teenage years, when my eyes were just opening upon how, by the mid–1960s, the United States (and in this case Britain) treated those in foreign lands whose misfortune was to possess resources the world’s newest imperium sought compulsively to control. And how well I recall discovering at the same time the remarkably pervasive ignorance of this conduct among all but a very few Americans.

Late one evening, I must have been 18 or so, this topic came up in conversation with my dear mother. “But no, we wouldn’t do that!” she exclaimed in a tone of anxious disbelief.

“But we did, Mother. If you know where to find the record, what we did is in it.”

My mother lowered her eyes and glanced away. I could see her mind was simply incapable of absorbing the information I had put before her. There was a sort of psycho-emotional blockage. The subject never again came up.

I have long been preoccupied, maybe since those days, indeed, with the question of seeing. And just as much if not more, with the question of not-seeing. This is only natural, it seems to me, given that seeing and not-seeing, the latter vastly more prevalent than the former, is so defining of who Americans are and what makes them so different from other peoples. In a recent interview in Consortium News, Patrik Baab, the conscientious and beleaguered-because-conscientious Berlin correspondent, writer, and podcaster, referred to the “apocalyptic blindness” he finds among Germans. I know this is so, especially among West Germans, having traveled among them recently. But in the way of collective blindness, I must suggest to my friend and colleague, no people are more addicted to total darkness than Americans.

What I saw in my mother all those years ago was a refusal—a refusal to see that could not even understand itself as an act of refusal. I cannot say whether this condition has worsened in the decades since the conversation I had with her in the mid–1960s, but I don’t think this matters much one way or the other. If I have to offer an answer, I think it is both: People see more now than then, people see less now than then. The though requires explanation, obviously.

Among those who watch Taghi Amirani’s film, and I hope many do, I imagine few will be as surprised to learn of Operation Ajax as my mother was. America’s lawless barbarism and all its messes are easier to see now. The plain-as-day defeats of April 1975 have something to do with this. So do digital technologies and the emergence of independent media. The invasion of Venezuela and the blockade of Cuba, the killings-from-the-air of fishermen in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, the installation of a murderous jihadist in Syria, the genocides in Gaza and the West Bank, the illegal bombing of Iran: There is no missing any of this.

But there is one failure to see that remains, and its persistence is symptomatic, it seems to me, of an empire in its late, desperate phase. This is the steadfast refusal among most Americans to see their complicity in the imperium’s conduct. The two phenomena, the seeing and the not-seeing, go together in this case. People see more, but few are able to see, are honest enough to see, themselves—to see that Americans comprise “a perpetrator population,” a term I cite with admiration and which I will shortly explain.

~ The rest of this interesting article is pay-walled and found here