A strange and terrible transformation has been underway in the US for the past several years, since the beginning of the Obama administration.  This reality was driven home to me today when I saw on Twitter a photo of a young girl holding up a sign that read something like: “Drone strikes kill children like me.”  It made me sick inside to face the truth of her message.  The caption below read: “#ILoveObama because only 95% of his drone strikes kill civilians.”  This statistic is easily verified and it has been available for years now.  The wanton killing of innocents has proceeded with total impunity and the response from the US anti-war movement has been almost total silence. 

The vehemence and passion that not long ago animated the cause of peace has been drained from the ranks of activists to a truly shocking degree.  No one dares to criticize or speak out against the murderous policies of the Obama administration.  Or, rather, very few.  One must give credit to the few who speak out.  But, when contrasted with the level of anti-war activism during the Bush administration, the present outrage barely registers in the realm of public discourse.  It is tacitly accepted among the brainwashed, Prozacked minions and reinforced by corporate media, that to object to murders being carried out by a “Democratic” president is somehow bad form and should be stifled, repressed.  The horrors of the drone murders are not discussed in mainstream left circles.  Bourgeois embarrassment and self-censorship are the “appropriate” response when the topic is raised.  To point out that the drone murders have increased since the end of the Bush administration will elicit a stony and uncomfortable silence.  If you are impolite enough to raise this fact, you are encouraged by nonverbal social cues to “drop it”.  And so, the previously vigilant Left has fled from collective responsibility.  And the person who dares raise the topic of Obama’s penchant for blood, is held in immediate suspicion of being a Republican, a Libertarian (frightening!) or something akin to a “conspiracy theorist”. 

This strange and sinister modulation in political discourse has been somewhat gradual but, to someone like myself who spends a good deal of time away from the States, it has been sudden enough to create a creepy Stepford-like experience when I return.  There is no doubt that this development is pure evil.  The ability to dissociate from the extreme suffering of others is at the very heart of evil.  And the compliant sheeple in the States are certainly complicit in a terrible evil of the highest and most appalling variety.  One realizes when facing this dark transmutation in the American psyche that it is actually not really new.  The nation once looked on and cheered the genocide of the Indigenous population, an event unprecedented in human history.  But what makes this evaporation of basic human conscience so incredible is the Leftist cover that continues to support the ongoing psychotic outsourcing of violence around the globe. 

Not long ago, we Americans smiled broadly and triumphantly and spoke of “Hope” and “Change”.  Gone was Bush and the evil Cheney, who once embodied warmongering so perfectly that it was indeed irresistible to imagine that their exit could not fail to usher in an era of peace.  How wrong we were!  Obama set about immediately attacking Pakistan.  Not long after, it was Libya that found itself in the cross-hairs of this new devotee of “Exceptionalism”.  Gone were the Neocons.  But in their place were the humanitarian bombers, the acolytes of Brzezinsky–a new cold-blooded breed of absolutely amoral policy-makers who cared nothing for the suffering of others.  In February of 2014, we watched the US State Department launch a coup in Ukraine and install a Nazi clique.  We, the world citizens, noticed that the US mainstream media chose, with the determined viciousness of a propaganda wing, to ignore the glaring presence of Nazis in Kiev.  At first, it was simply denied.  But when it became impossible to deny (social media and alternative media sources could not be stifled), it was simply downplayed.  “Downplayed” is perhaps an understatement.  It was dismissed as irrelevant.  It was swept under the already filthy, bloodstained carpet.  My “leftist” friends were uncomfortable when I would raise the issue.  It was bad form–didn’t I know?!–to bring up such an inconvenient fact.  Didn’t I understand that our leftists in the White House should not be questioned, held to account or be confronted?  Again, what was I?–a Republican?! 

The sanitized evil is the worst because it can exist in its own bubble of sanctioned perfidy, unexplosed to reason or rational examination.  Self-censorship and partisan idiocy has succeeded in inoculating the masses against any urgent need for moral accountability.  American Exceptionalism under Left Cover has become probably the most potent form of Fascism the world has ever seen.  Deplorable offenses that would have elicited the calls for Bush’s impeachment  have been refashioned in acceptable leftist garb.  There is, of course, absolutely no substance in any political rhetoric in this present scenario.  One is simply advised not to question, not to criticize.  The lies about Russian aggression in Ukraine continue to go unchallenged in the public debate.  The sheeple fall into line with uncanny obsequiousness behind the genocidal program being carried out by John Kerry, Victoria Nuland, Barack Obama, et al. 

The horrific flood of images depicting the crushing of civilians in Eastern Ukraine is utterly ignored–willfully, programmatically–not only by the corporate media but by the people themselves.  They seem not at all curious to know what is really going on.  They are content to bury their snouts in the trough prepared for them by their corporate and political masters.  Such a degree of conformity would not have been possible under Bush.  He was too divisive a figure.  But Obama was a brand that commanded a far greater degree of loyalty.  And it is this present loyalty to a fascist agenda that has so unnerved me of late.  It has kept me up at night.  Tormented me.  It has been so shocking to see my friends become helpless idiots in the thrall of the Fascist Corporate Left Brand, to see their stubborn and bewildered expressions when confronted with the truth.  It has been like a nightmare.  They do not want to see the truth.  Or read about it, or entertain the possibility of truth.  They are comfortable in their complicity and in the neutered, dumbed down, “safe” (not safe for Ukrainians, Libyans, Syrians, Russians, Arabs, Palestinians!), utterly false and shamefully corrupted content that has been substituted for real public discussion. 

My American friends have been stolen from me. Or perhaps they have been willing participants all along.  Probably it is a lot of both.  And so I alternately pity them and vilify them.  Neither does much good.  The Stepford effect has taken hold on such a deep level that I doubt it is possible to get through to them.  And so the great Fascist Evil that has possessed the nation continues to control the minds of the willing participants with its bland, heartless, petty and smug delusions.  Are the American people accountable for the deaths in Gaza, Donbass, etc.?  Of course.  And yet, the obvious brainwashing has been so thorough and insidious that is difficult to condemn them.  But perhaps only condemnation will begin to wake them up.