This touches on something I’ve noticed but haven’t quite found the words the to explain. It seems to me that for most people, their opposition to things like slavery and genocide stems not from empathy and an understanding of the harms of those things, but rather because that’s what the monstrous horrible people in our national myths did. In other words, slavery, war crimes, genocide, secret police, etc. are not wrong in and of themselves. Rather they are condemned because they are the things our national enemies did. So they have the causality almost backwards–it’s not that the confederacy was bad because of slavery, it’s that slavery is bad because the confederacy, our enemy, did it.
This explains why when these same actions are taken by our or allied governments, many people merely shrug or deflect. They aren’t operating on a principled opposition to harming people. They are instead operating on the principle that their tribe is good and the enemy tribe is bad. So then why would slavery in our own prison system, or genocide in Palestine bother them? In their view, the US and Israeli governments are the good guys. What they do is good by definition.
I have noticed this as well. I had a discussion with some Germans about East Germany and they said something about the Berlin Wall (which of course was bad) to which I responded that the EU isn’t much better as in the last 10 years there has not been one in which Frontex didn’t kill more people at the border than the GDR did in it’s entire existence. They agreed that this wasn’t good but something like Frontex was needed as the European economy can’t handle that many immigrants, but then doesn’t that make the Berlin Wall even more justified as the GDR needed it much more to protect it’s economy?
Same thing with modern surveillance in western nations compared to China/GDR. The best explanation I found is patriotism. Patriotism is created by the state e.g. the pledge of allegiance in the USA and it allows the state to justify policies that are bad for it’s citizens as they will accept it for their country. And of course this works in reverse to: policies by other states will be deemed unjustified.
What liberal supports the prison industrial complex?
In the states, most of them
All of them. Otherwise you’d be something else.
Your question is completely backwards:
Find a so called Liberal State that abolished prisons.
You’re equating the prison industrial complex with prisons in general. Even the most liberal person can be okay with prisons existing in some form.
Outside the so called US, many prison systems operatr similarly, especially in liberal democracies. One might think that other countries do not have prison profiteers, but actually they. I can mostly talk about Germany tho, were there are private companies peofiting from selling stuff inside prisons, or a whole industry profiting from deportations.
reread point one of the meme.
