4 ms·

this part of the story is well documented but thanks anyway. i was wondering about the firsthand experience of realizing it's all fake in the many years after

this part of the story is well documented but thanks anyway. i was wondering about the firsthand experience of realizing it's all fake in the many years after 9/11. especially from educated professionals and financially well doing professionals. i only know working class accounts

dragonwriter 3y ago
> this part of the story is well documented but thanks anyway. Its not only not well-documented, its inaccurate self-justification that has been constructed after people realized how they had been deluded in their bloodthirst (or, at least, for people like Matt Yglesias who had rocketed from a college blogger to a major media figure largely through his pro-Iraq War blogging, as means of protecting their reputation once public opinion turned.) It wasn't a major media stranglehold; while, yes, things like Judith Miller’s war pimping occurred, so did extensive major media debunkings of the lies and exposes of the methods being used to manufacture them. People will tell you they watched the UNSC meeting live and remember how chilled they were when Powell presented the fake evidence, but they don't seem to recall as prominently their feeling when many of those claims were debunked by UN inspectors in that same meeting. A major media failing would have been easier to deal with, to accept: we were lied to, the truth wasn't avaialable, and naturally the public made the sensible stand based on what was available to them. Horrifying in its result, but not at all damaging to one’s fellow humans, but for a small cadre of evil warmongering propagabdists. But when the whole narrative was debunked and that debunking was widely reported in major media, etc., abd yet the mass of the public still cheerleads for death and destruction that is being sold with the debunked narrative, living through that as someone who didn’t buy into was horrifying on a level that is hard to describe (as has been witnessing the retroactive denial narrative after the bloodthirst subsided a bit0, since not facing what actually happened, makes it a lot more likely to happen again.)
scarecrowbob 3y ago
As someone who protested the 2003 war while living in Texas, what you're wanting to hear about never happened. A lot of us at the time knew the run up to the war was bullshit because it was logically incoherent, which is an easy metric for that kind of thing. So on one side we never generally had a moment of "it's all fake"- we knew it was fake. At best we had moments of "all these assholes who made me question if I was dumb /immature /irrational /misinformed were clearly incorrect". If you're around enough folks who think you're an insane idiot, eventually you question yourself. But since we on the anti-war left were wholly correct on so many counts it's been helpful to have some occasional reckonings- the folks running the US have not gotten "more correct" and the voices who shout down those of us who question it haven't gotten quieter so that has been useful to remember when I feel dumb for my political dissent. On the other side, still, what you're looking for did not happen. In my experience, none of the people who were pro-war in 2003 never really figured out how fake and wrong all of that was. Most I have asked think one of two things. One group is convinced that "knowing what they knew at the time" they were correct. It's easy to fudge a bunch of facts to make that feel like an okay position, even if it's just wrong. The best I can manage with the other subgroup of folks is a metaphor. We used to have to set our clocks forward and so people were conscious of time changes. At some point, most of us rely on phones, and as such the time changes happen but are only noticeable when we see that the clock on the stove needs to be adjusted. At some point around 2012 a group of folks woke up thinking that they'd always known that the Iraq war stuff was all fake. That just became the "received opinion" and their thoughts from 2003 were all so murky, no need to look into anything, But, of course, US foreign interactions were probably well motivated and just so why would all that stuff from a decade ago matter, and besides that war criminal Bush was out of office (but was he really a war criminal? these folks might disagree with such strong wording). Anyhow, that's my view as a 45-year-old on-the-fringe-of-the-Professional-Managerial-Class worker in tech and education: no pro-war adults in the PMC who I know had an experience of learning that they were wrong.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> this part of the story is well documented but thanks anyway. Its not only not well-documented, its inaccurate self-justification that has been constructed after people realized how they had been deluded in their bloodthirst (or, at least, for people like Matt Yglesias who had rocketed from a college blogger to a major media figure largely through his pro-Iraq War blogging, as means of protecting their reputation once public opinion turned.) It wasn't a major media stranglehold; while, yes, things like Judith Miller’s war pimping occurred, so did extensive major media debunkings of the lies and exposes of the methods being used to manufacture them. People will tell you they watched the UNSC meeting live and remember how chilled they were when Powell presented the fake evidence, but they don't seem to recall as prominently their feeling when many of those claims were debunked by UN inspectors in that same meeting. A major media failing would have been easier to deal with, to accept: we were lied to, the truth wasn't avaialable, and naturally the public made the sensible stand based on what was available to them. Horrifying in its result, but not at all damaging to one’s fellow humans, but for a small cadre of evil warmongering propagabdists. But when the whole narrative was debunked and that debunking was widely reported in major media, etc., abd yet the mass of the public still cheerleads for death and destruction that is being sold with the debunked narrative, living through that as someone who didn’t buy into was horrifying on a level that is hard to describe (as has been witnessing the retroactive denial narrative after the bloodthirst subsided a bit0, since not facing what actually happened, makes it a lot more likely to happen again.)

scarecrowbob 3y ago

As someone who protested the 2003 war while living in Texas, what you're wanting to hear about never happened. A lot of us at the time knew the run up to the war was bullshit because it was logically incoherent, which is an easy metric for that kind of thing. So on one side we never generally had a moment of "it's all fake"- we knew it was fake. At best we had moments of "all these assholes who made me question if I was dumb /immature /irrational /misinformed were clearly incorrect". If you're around enough folks who think you're an insane idiot, eventually you question yourself. But since we on the anti-war left were wholly correct on so many counts it's been helpful to have some occasional reckonings- the folks running the US have not gotten "more correct" and the voices who shout down those of us who question it haven't gotten quieter so that has been useful to remember when I feel dumb for my political dissent. On the other side, still, what you're looking for did not happen. In my experience, none of the people who were pro-war in 2003 never really figured out how fake and wrong all of that was. Most I have asked think one of two things. One group is convinced that "knowing what they knew at the time" they were correct. It's easy to fudge a bunch of facts to make that feel like an okay position, even if it's just wrong. The best I can manage with the other subgroup of folks is a metaphor. We used to have to set our clocks forward and so people were conscious of time changes. At some point, most of us rely on phones, and as such the time changes happen but are only noticeable when we see that the clock on the stove needs to be adjusted. At some point around 2012 a group of folks woke up thinking that they'd always known that the Iraq war stuff was all fake. That just became the "received opinion" and their thoughts from 2003 were all so murky, no need to look into anything, But, of course, US foreign interactions were probably well motivated and just so why would all that stuff from a decade ago matter, and besides that war criminal Bush was out of office (but was he really a war criminal? these folks might disagree with such strong wording). Anyhow, that's my view as a 45-year-old on-the-fringe-of-the-Professional-Managerial-Class worker in tech and education: no pro-war adults in the PMC who I know had an experience of learning that they were wrong.