Two things can be bad¶

"Two things can be bad" liberals are a peculiar phenomenon. They emerge after realizing that they've been lied to about the sheer brutality of the old regimes, but before it dawns on them that these are the same people who taught them about the "terror" of the other side. Why are you listening to the Butcher of Bengal about the Savior of Auschwitz? Why are you learning about Mao in schools built on the graves of 100 million natives? How can you let the perpetrators of the war on terror teach you about the crimes of their victims? Franz Halder engineered the invasion of Poland and the eradication of the center of Jewish culture in Europe, then the US hired him and pinned medals on him for teaching you about how the Soviets wished they could do it first. Even to this day, the ones telling you that Castro enslaved Cuba have been strangling them with an embargo for decades. They slaughtered 10-20% of the DPRK and leveled almost every building and farm, then told you it is led by a crazed megalomaniac who starves his own citizens. The most expansive, repressive, violent police state in human history is telling you those evil Asian commies have secret police on every corner and are disappearing courageous truth tellers by the thousands. They send endless support to feed the beastly occupation of Palestine, proclaiming it to be the noble defense of the sole bastion of freedom and goodness in a region control by savage, authoritarian regimes. In the face of genocide, you disbelieve... only one part of that claim? Everything you have been taught about both history and the state of the world today has been taught to you by liars. Monsters.

It doesn't mean everything they taught you is automatically untrue -- if anything, the Nazis' crimes are even UNDERstated by the western narrative. But it does mean that you've been burdened from the start by the shackles of hegemony. Even when you investigate for yourself, you're bombarded with sources that uphold that hegemony -- and you are primed to believe them, because you were also taught critical analysis by liars. Everything from values to "common knowledge" to trustworthy sources to analytical tools to the forces that drive history has been instilled in you by a political regime and hegemonic culture that reifies itself. It shrouds itself in normality and evades the scalpel of analysis. It taught you that history is written by the victors, it taught you that it has been victorious, and then it taught you the history it wrote.

Now that you've realized it wrote lies about itself, your work is not done. You have to relearn everything.