“Unbelievable brainwashing”: The gaping blindspot in Western liberalism

Check out this Young Turks discussion about how “unbelievably brainwashed millions of North Koreans are”:

Unbelievable, eh? Now, let’s turn the mirror around…

You wouldn’t believe how much psychological work it takes to undo Western brainwashing. It’s something I grew up with. From day one, they were putting it in my head. I was taught to believe I am my own god. And they’ve done it to two whole continents (North America and Europe).

I’m not being sarcastic. Most in the West hesitate many times a day because they believe the NSA/Big Brother can read their thoughts. The Young Turks think it’s “amazing” that there are people in NK who would die for their regime… What then was voluntary military service in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars?

Americans are so inured to ‘Manifest Destiny’ that believing in their ‘exceptionalism’ over all other nations is as natural to them as breathing. The idea of having a ‘bad thought’ about the regime (‘No way, my own government would never carry out 9/11’, or ‘You can’t expect me to believe we killed 2 million Iraqis to steal their resources and control the Middle East’) makes most run away in fear. In fact, the moment it enters their consciousness, via an acquaintance, website, or foreign media, their preprogrammed beliefs automatically sound the alarm: ‘WARNING! CONSPIRACY TERRITORY!’

Europeans take it for granted that their higher ideals are going to save the planet from global warming, set the standards for social democracy and human rights, and generally help the U.S. civilize the world. In reality, it’s just a handmaiden to War, Inc.

Do you, dear Westerner, see the inherent hypocrisy of us liberal Westerners criticizing other civilizations/cultures/systems when our own is so god-awful evil? Forget about North Korea, if the United States of America is ever to be liberated, it would take at least two generations to de-program its population.

The rest of the world is walking on eggshells in a Herculean effort to avoid upsetting the Western brainwashers by making any sudden moves. All nations have first hand experience over the last 100+ years of just how militarily and financially trigger-happy the ‘benevolent dictators’ of the Western Empire can be. Now and then they try to (gently) bring the U.S. elite around – like Russia is doing now by way of setting an example – to objective reality: the U.S. is not going to indefinitely dominate the world at the expense of others.

The truly “unbelievably scary thing”, to paraphrase Cenk Uygur, is that we are all but certainly facing a massive upswing in global violence because the brainwashed U.S. (and EU) population is so hopelessly compliant with its regime’s “unbelievable” crimes against humanity. And said regime would sooner ignite WW3 than become civilized and behave decently towards others.

What then of North Korea’s regime? In this larger, horrifying context of hundreds of millions of brainwashed minions, Korea’s brainwashed are but a drop in the ocean. The Turks would do better to educate Americans on the origin of the term ‘brainwashing’: the CIA concocted it to explain why U.S. POWs spoke out against their regime’s actions in Korea in the 1950s, accusing the Chinese of ‘casting our boys under a spell’. The POWs didn’t just come around to seeing that U.S. military involvement in Korea was unjustified, they confessed to using biological weapons. And so, to cover this up, the U.S. regime rolled out a massive propaganda effort to convince folks that ‘our boys’ had been brainwashed.

Turns out the U.S. did use biological weapons on the civilian population, weapons that were being developed under CIA Mind Control programs and expanded from the U.S. to black sites around the world.

Oy vey, so many lies, so little time. Lies piled upon lies; how can we ever unspin them all?

To conclude, the most we Westerners can say with respect to the way things are done in North Korea is, ‘Shame, but our own regime is responsible for bringing that situation about, and anyway, are things really any better here?’