Azriel

“the hegemony of America in the community of the free world creates some curious moral hazards. We are ironically held responsible for disparities in wealth and well-being which are chiefly due to differences in standards of productivity. But they lend themselves with a remarkable degree of plausibility to the Marxist indictment, which attributes all such differences to exploitation. Thus, every effort we make to prove the virtue of our “way of life” by calling attention to our prosperity is used by our enemies and detractors as proof of our guilt. Our experience of an ironic guilt when we pretend to be innocent is thus balanced by the irony of an alleged guilt when we are comparatively innocent.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

“The militants fought to protect us from the Americans and the Americans fought to protect us from the militants, and being so protected, life was very dangerous.”
― Elliot Ackerman, Green on Blue

“Prostitution was a miserable job, and all the more miserable when the location was next to a godforsaken military outpost in a hostile foreign country. The Japanese military did some appalling things during the war, but it did not programmatically and forcibly conscript—or dragoon, if you will—either Korean or Japanese women into providing sex. Some of the comfort women had been sold into this prostitution by abusive parents. Some had been defrauded by dishonest private recruiters. But many—probably most—were desperately poor women who deliberately chose to sell sex for the money. They worked in a wretched job, but they were not “sex slaves.” They were not “gang-raped.” They were not conscripted into the job at bayonet-point. Instead, they chose prostitution as (in their minds) the least bad option available to them. We deceive ourselves and insult impoverished women if we deny that they could have made such a decision for themselves.”
― J. Mark Ramseyer

“It took a long time—at least a year, if not more—for me to start questioning that narrative. But by the time Trump started ticking off items on democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s economic wish list—get rid of NAFTA, enforce the border, start a trade war with China, impose tariffs—it was impossible not to see what was going on. Americans living in industrial communities that had been devastated by NAFTA and globalization—those most likely to have lost friends and family members, men in the prime of their lives, to overdose deaths—had seen in Trump a tribune: a man as reviled by the elites as they were, a man who talked about jobs endlessly, who hated NAFTA and NATO as much as they did. The same voters who were endlessly asked by leftist elites why they bucked their economic interests by voting Republican had in fact voted in their economic interests—and the Left called them racist for it. I called them racist for it.”
― Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy