You should know by now that the U.S. is Omelas

I couldn’t help but notice when the article Malignant Dawn by Bill Murray (3QuarksDaily) started out with the following rather naive and incredible statement,

“How would the United States handle the rise of the rest? The debate was usually about what the US would do to keep things steady – to maintain equilibrium. No one saw the US as the disruptor. But as it turns out, it’s the chief enforcer who is changing the script.”

It is flabbergasting to read something like this from an author I’d thought to be somewhat better-informed. Obeisance to the myth that the empire tells about itself is a mind virus.

As usual, those who were victims of the mind virus but upon whom the realization is now dawning—slowly and after incredible repetition of the obvious—that the U.S. might not always be the good guy, they have to characterize their previous unquestioning fealty to the empire’s myth as a mass hypnosis that was shared by all. Most importantly, the willful and deliberate ignorance of this hypnosis was clearly not a personal, moral failing.

There were a bunch of us who knew exactly how the U.S. would react to multipolarity. It was not an ineffable mystery. We’d watched 75 years of cold war. We’d watched the empire expand.

We didn’t ignore it all because it would have been much more convenient to do so, because e.g., our investments were expanding, because the rising tide of the empire happened to be lifting our boats. We didn’t look away from the atrocities committed that they myth claimed were done in all of our names because we were under the umbrella. No, some of us walked away from Omelas the minute we got wind of what was going on.