You want to understand the architecture of Arab authoritarian legitimacy?
It was built on three pillars.
Religion. Development. And the Palestinian cause as permanent, righteous, unresolvable justification for emergency governance.
Two of those pillars have cracked badly.
The development model, built on resource wealth and foreign patronage, produced inequality so extreme that it survived only through repression.
The Palestinian cause as pillar has been actively dismantled, not by Israel, not by America, but by the regimes themselves, who traded it for diplomatic recognition and security guarantees.
What remains is repression without justification.
Power without the story that power requires to sustain itself.
A palace without a foundation is still a palace.
Until it isn’t.
@nxt888 Maybe because the Umma thing is fake. After all, Arabs spread religion with the sword. If the bound is not humanity than no bound ever can unite people against evil.
The oil weapon existed once.
1973. Arab oil-producing states cut off supply to countries supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
It worked. It worked dramatically. It sent shockwaves through the entire Western economy. It demonstrated, with clarity, that the resource leverage was real.
It was never used again at that scale.
Think about that.
The leverage was demonstrated. Its effectiveness was proven. The capacity never disappeared.
And for over fifty years, through everything, through siege after siege, through invasion after invasion, through the documented destruction of civilian infrastructure, through everything...
The weapon stayed in the cabinet.
The question of why is not complicated.
The answer is simply that the governments holding that leverage decided, each time the moment arrived, that their own economic and political relationships with the West were worth more than what using it would cost.
That is a choice.
A deliberate, repeated, fully conscious choice.
Made by specific people in specific rooms on behalf of populations that were not consulted.
History will record the choice.
History is already recording it.
Write more. Write to think. Write until you're no longer confused. Write about the problems you already solved. Write for the person you were 2 years ago. Write so you never lose what took you years to figure out. A simple writing habit can change absolutely everything.
@Spyskt@agent_of_change@s_m_marandi Whatever ! Get out of other people land. It’s not about hate .. it’s resistance and supremacy .. so many counties so many narratives .. Vietnam, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Lybia, Kosovo, Venezuela, Iran……. Oh Wait it’s only one story ! Who’s the terrorist.
They have a word for what happens when a foreign power enters your country, removes your government, installs a compliant replacement, opens your markets to foreign capital, and leaves your population with the debt:
They call it "liberation."
You are expected to be grateful.
If you are not grateful, you are "radicalized."
If you resist, you are a "terrorist."
The vocabulary was designed so that every possible response to what was done to you confirms the story they told about why they came.
They called it polarization.
They called it a divided nation. An era of unusually bitter partisanship. A crisis of democracy, almost unprecedented, deeply concerning to all serious observers across the political spectrum.
What they called polarization was actually a very old technique applied with modern tools.
Divided populations do not organize.
Divided populations do not build cross-racial, cross-cultural solidarity.
Divided populations do not look at the numbers and ask who actually has the money and how they actually got it and what political arrangements actually protect it.
Divided populations fight each other.
Every year the division gets more intense, the ruling class gets wealthier, the social programs get cut or remain unfunded, the military budget grows, the wages stagnate, the debt expands, the life expectancy falls.
And the conversation, reliably, is about something else.
About a celebrity.
About a tweet.
About a school board meeting.
About a flag.
About a statue.
About something that costs the ruling class nothing and costs the population everything it has left: its attention, its energy, its capacity for solidarity, its ability to look clearly at what is happening to it.
Polarization is not a crisis.
It is a service.
Delivered reliably.
Priced correctly.
Renewed every election cycle.
The most violent thing about America is not only what it does.
It is how many ways it has invented to keep its own people from recognizing what it does.
It numbs them with consumption.
It confuses them with spectacle.
It disciplines them with debt.
It frightens them with manufactured enemies.
It isolates them from one another.
Then it tells them they are free.
Free to choose between two approved illusions.
Free to work until their body gives out.
Free to drown in information without understanding.
Free to watch genocide in high definition and still feel politically powerless.
This is not democratic maturity.
It is imperial population management.
A citizenry too entertained to rebel.
Too divided to unite.
Too anxious to think.
Too morally exhausted to care.
And that exhaustion is not collateral damage.
It is one of the main products.
Exceptional means: my history is an achievement and your history is an explanation for your current condition.
The wealth I accumulated is evidence of my values.
The poverty you inherited is evidence of yours.
The democracy I built is proof of my civilization.
The governments of yours that I dismantled are proof that you weren't ready.
Every outcome, no matter what produced it, is evidence for the same conclusion:
I am exceptional.
You are not yet.
Perhaps you will be. If you follow the right advice. From me.
That is not an analytical framework.
That is a closed loop designed to make every piece of evidence confirm what was decided before any evidence was examined.
Every country they've called a threat was, before the threat, a resource.
The threat came when the resource said no.
Study the sequence.
It never changes.