Until recently, I used to naively believe that Social Darwinism ended along with dark boorish years of colonialism. The notion that the Creator had enthroned a certain race and nation to be perpetually reign over all others; to guide us, to feed us, to show us, to institutionalize us. Then end up leaving us to marinate in our own disillusioned moral, social, and religious decay. Suck the life out of the people and soil, and then deem the action social justice, democratic liberation, free enterprise. But, was I ever so wrong. If anything, Social Darwinism has indisputably evolved into a collective mentality; a mutual recognition of politically, socially, and intellectually inferior and inept societies; a deference to what we’ve been conditioned to credit as emulation-worthy figures and institutions. Social Darwinism had long ago been an intellectual warfare that has been deemed won by the West since the post-Cold War era.
It seems that every capitalistic, white supremacist, self-righteous, holier-than-thou endeavor that the West has taken, bears the outright deceptive yet ornamented marque of “liberation” and of course the infamous “self-determination”. A voyage donning the unanimously commendable, if not valiant, demeanor of “anti-terrorism” and the obsessive compulsive nuclear non-proliferation spiel.
In my foreign policy class, you seldom ever hear any lament over the spoils of American wars; only its Jeffersonian overtones. God forbid, such discourse might discredit the American Crusader ideal. Personal experience has taught me that sitting through these discussions could very possibly induce an embellished fit of rage.
Sitting in a perfectly conditioned classroom, while earlier waking up from a warm bed, a functioning shower, and driving a luxury car to boot, she firmly believed that America’s war on Iraq was genuinely liberational as well as the best decision Bush had ever made. She defended the guy as if he had cured the HIV her youngest uncle caught on his last trip to Thailand. I knew it was coming – Saddam Hussein was Satan, and we’re the Middle East’s one and only choice for deliverance from evil.
For a second, my circulation seemed to have found a detour to my cheeks.
Being a weak spoken polemicist, I barely got my grievances across to this lovely moronic young woman. Encountering individuals such as herself has engendered my most passionate political insights. Opinions of individuals such as herself are still, to this day, further accrediting every last one of my theories on ultra-sanctimonious American self-perceptions. I’m well aware of the reproach you might be wishing to express on my lack of “freedom of opinion” tolerance and all that jazz; frankly, I don’t buy it. I’m a firm believer that some opinions out there do not deserve a microscopic morsel of my respect. Hence, I shall feel free to reject them and maliciously impale their flawed substantiation. (Don’t like it? Stop reading)
What I said next, in response, was merely a reminder of the lurid heinous torture methods that American insurgents practiced on Iraqi prisoners and civilians. The freedom package that America was so kind as to give away to Iraq as alleviation from years of being downtrodden, chewed on, spit out, and stepped on turned out to only be an expired shipment of rusty shackles from Uncle Sam’s dirty cold basement. Iraqis were delivered from a bad situation to an even worse one, it’s undeniable. Liberal democracy that’s being propagated in this case is all-inclusive of demolishment of infrastructure and facility, lack of electricity and water, as well as the perennial trepidation of a much too Hobbesian need for self-preservation amid a state of nature that the US singlehandedly managed to simulate.
