in 1964, Washington dispatched a naval task force toward Brazil under Operation Brother Sam to back a military coup. it ushered in two decades of state repression, torture, and censorship in brazil. but it didn't start or end with us: from overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), to enabling mass killings in Indonesia (1965) and backing dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile, american foreign policy has rewritten global history in blood.
most americans do not even know these events happened.
living at the centre of an empire breeds a dangerous form of provincialism. people across the global south are forced to learn the politics of core capitalist nations just to anticipate how their choices might wreck our local economies or fund yet another interventionist measure. meanwhile, their average citizen lives in total insulation from the fallout their taxes fund across the globe. it is a bizarre asymmetry where the victims carry the history while the perpetrator stays oblivious. ignorance becomes a luxury.
many people hyperbole the reality of media bias, acting as though the US is subject to strict state-sponsored censorship or filtering every single international matter. that is clearly not case. if anything, claiming «media filtering» is a lazy cop-out, because an insular domestic news cycle or a sanitised high school curriculum explains where your blind spots started, but it doesn't give you a lifelong pass to keep them forever. when you have the entire internet in your hands and live in a developed nation, hiding behind curated news channels is no longer an institutional barrier.
passivity is an active choice; having unlimited information at your fingertips whilst claiming you don't know what to search is pure intellectual inertia. lack of initiative is not an informational blockade.
resource scarcity in the global south does not prevent people from building awareness. public education across impoverished nations faces chronic underfunding, broken infrastructure, and political suppression. yet populations operating under those exact material constraints routinely develop sharp consciousness because their lives depend on understanding power.
remaining oblivious allows you to enjoy the material rewards of global dominance without facing the moral invoice. the economic stability, strong currency, and cheap commodities enjoyed in the Global North are directly tied to decades of military intervention and forced market opens across the Global South. claiming you «didn't know» lets you consume the profits of empire while disavowing its methods. you harvest the benefits of a history you refuse to read.
an explanation of historical trauma is not an exemption from present-day accountability. nobody carries personal blame for decades or centuries of exploitation before their birth, but everybody inherits its structural legacy. once you become aware that your perspective has been curated for your domestic comfort, correcting that deficit becomes a fundamental ethical responsibility.