My Take | Palestine is the ‘red pill’ for America’s Gen Z
- Like the previous Vietnam generation of baby boomers, US university students are waking up to the atrocities their government commits or helps its client states to commit around the world
In a classic scene that has become a popular internet meme in the first Matrix movie, Morpheus, the rebel leader, offers his protégé Neo the choice of a red pill or a blue pill. The red pill will show him the true horrors surrounding them; the blue one means he can stay oblivious to what’s really happening.
Neo, of course, takes the red pill.
American university students protesting for an end to the Palestinian genocide and their government’s support for it are today’s real-life Neos. More Canadian and British students are joining them. That’s why university apparatchiks are calling in police to suppress their protests, and many Western news outlets are painting them as antisemitic rather than the spearheading of a new anti-war movement that it really is.
The Israeli war on the Palestinians is showing young people the brutal realities of the American empire and the world it has made.
However, committing or supporting acts of genocide, mass murder and massacres is nothing new for the United States. Arming and providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s war is hardly exceptional.
The US “war on terror” caused the deaths in multiple countries of 4.5 million people, of whom about 900,000 could be attributed to US military operations and their direct impact, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. An estimated 38 million were displaced from their homes.