Sony Thăng – Three Short Origin Stories
Generations of American children were taught that the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world.
Not a good country.
Not a successful country.
Not a country with real achievements and real failures worth examining honestly.
The greatest. In history. Of the world.
This is not education. This is inoculation.
A child raised on that sentence will spend the rest of their life defending it against incoming evidence.
Because disproving it requires dismantling something that was built into them before they had the tools to question it.
Before they knew what history was.
Before they had any basis for comparison.
By the time they encounter the evidence, the actual historical record, the foreign perspectives, the documented operations, the body counts, the sentence is already load-bearing in their sense of self.
You’re not arguing with their political opinion when you challenge it.
You’re arguing with something closer to their origin story.
And people do not give up their origin stories easily.
They give up everything else first.
The Nakba
A country that has been bombed by America knows what America is.
A country that has been sanctioned into poverty by America knows what America is.
A country whose elected government was overthrown by American intelligence knows what America is.
Only American citizens, sitting inside the country that did all of this, remain genuinely uncertain about what America is.
This is not a coincidence.
This is the one information environment on earth that was designed, resourced, and sustained specifically to prevent that knowledge from becoming normal.
Hollywood.
Textbooks.
The nightly news.
The “national interest” frame that converts every act of imperial violence into a defensive response to external threat.
The most sophisticated propaganda operation in history was never aimed at the enemy.
It was aimed at home.
One of the most powerful tools in the global propaganda architecture is the concept of “the international community.”
The international community is concerned.
The international community condemns.
The international community calls for restraint.
Who is this community?
In practice: the United States, Western Europe, and whichever governments are sufficiently dependent on Western financial institutions that they vote accordingly in international bodies.
China is not the international community.
Russia is not the international community.
The Global South, representing the majority of the world’s population, is not the international community when its positions conflict with Washington’s.
The international community is a rhetorical construction that presents a partial coalition of wealthy states as the voice of humanity.
And this construction is accepted, reproduced, repeated, used without irony, by journalists and analysts across Asia, Africa, and Latin America who have absorbed the Western news framework so completely that they cannot see the construction.
They type “international community” and mean it.
The invisible quotation marks around it are the measure of how deep the system goes.