Not the wisest decision to debate politics with your father-in-law in his house. According to my partner, he would have kicked me out if I wasn’t family.
Basically - very stubborn white man in his 60s. Travelled a lot in the Asia-Pacific for work most of his life.
I’m an Australian-born Chinese and I know NOW that nothing that comes out of my mouth will ever change his mind. I mean, he HAS said before that “China can never be trusted” so I have no idea why I thought I could have a sensible discussion with him.
He believes in the Tibet and HK crap. He believes NATO is a defensive alliance. He believes NATO is not led by the USA.
He believes the USA is not out to get Russia or China. He believes that Russia had no reason to invade Ukraine but that the USA was justified in being upset over Russian weapons in Cuba.
He believes that the USA, with their 800 military bases around the world, is merely “being prepared”, while China is stepping WAY out of line in the South China Sea.
He believes that the 2 main aggressors in the world are Russia and China. He believes the Australian mainstream media is telling the full truth and that independent journalists are crazy conspiracy theorists.
And because I challenged him on all the above, I’m apparently heading down a ‘dangerous’ path. You know the guy who shot tons of Muslims in New Zealand mosques a few years back? He actually used that as warning of how extreme I could become.
I give up. He can continue thinking that the white man is the noble saviour of the world. I’ll bet he strutted around Thailand, Indonesia and PNG feeling real good about himself.
I’ve learned that too many people just don’t have any room in their heads for a differing point of view or fact. They don’t WANT proof of this or that. Their truth gives them comfort. To challenge it would be to question their entire identity and would cause an existential crisis.
That’s why, to these people, the West MUST be the good guys.
The racism is deep-rooted. That’s at the bottom of it all.
Yes, I have a very similar story.
spoiler
My de facto FIL (we’re not married yet but might as well be) has always said he loved me like a son and is always excessively proud of me. I always felt a little weird about it because 1) daddy issues 2) he is excessively DISAPPOINTED and critical of his own, actual children and 3) I felt like he fell in love with a face I put on to impress him, that he fills the gaps with his own projections, that he doesn’t know the real me.
I’ve always felt like the truth is the best gift that you can give someone, and I didn’t want to lie about my political views anymore (for years I treaded carefully, walking on eggshells) so I tried to engage in a little respectful political discourse. He struck me as a man who could respectfully disagree and maybe even be swayed with a well reasoned and well cited argument, and I trusted him to be a healthy amount of confrontational that any kinks I could make would be easily noticeable and could be ironed out mid conversation.
Boy was I wrong on all fronts.
I didn’t even start the conversation, he did (he always does). It eventually ended up with America and its geopolitical role. It’s frustrating because in isolation he will agree in essence with the idea of the military industrial complex, war profiteers, the V.A. treated him like shit (he’s a veteran), how mainstream media incessantly lies to spin narratives for the rich. Yet when it came to this conversation he 180’d and was defending Wholesome & Solely Good America to the death, shooting down any of my counterarguments as propaganda. I thought it went poorly but not awfully, but behind my back later he essentially yelled at my girlfriend for me going down “a dark path” (not a direct quote but an accurate paraphrase), how he is a worldly man and thus knows better (he’s traveled to Scandanavia a few times) and that I don’t know a damn thing just because I went to Palestine as a kid (something that I didn’t bring up once while we were arguing…I don’t appeal to authority, especially over personal anecdotes). It’s one thing that we argued, but he took the nastiest of his feelings out on my girlfriend, his own daughter, and now THAT pisses me off.
So yeah. He thinks I’m just a dumb kid who parrots headlines (and where here are there headlines of US foreign policy being bad, exactly…?) when he gets 100% of his worldviews from an endless stream of local Fox News, national Fox News, and the opinions of people like his own dad, his former coworkers, his former boss: people who physically, mentally, and emotionally tortured him, broke his bones, betrayed him, fucked his wife, cheated him into homelessness, stole his hard earned wage and gloated about it, belittled him as nothing which to this day still so obviously affects his self esteem.
It’s, IMO, a classic case of an abusive relationship, only instead of just with one person he has it with American Exceptionalism and every ghoul who channels it.
It sucks because deep down underneath all of his trauma, ignorance, PTSD, bad coping skills and just honestly being shit on unfairly by life again and again and again and again, deep down underneath all that he really is genuinely a good person with a good heart and mind. Unfortunately, I do not think he can be liberated from his externally-inflicted but self-perpetuating prison before he goes senile and dies. He is infuriating but underneath that it is just really tragic, and honestly a perfect microcosm of my life of the evils of capitalism and how terribly its many tendrils can compound off of each other.
I totally understand the feeling of disappointment when someone who you thought could handle a reasonable conversation ends up being totally irrational and intolerant of discussion.
Pretty insane how your FIL gets the part about the military-industrial complex, as well as the mainstream media’s lies…but still defends the USA! Does not compute.
Reminds me of Scott Ritter who is critical of the military-industrial complex and clearly sees through the USA’s games in the Middle East and re: Russia, but is also clearly very patriotic.
Sounds like your FIL has had a lot of issues with self-esteem. Take away this final ‘truth’ of his and he’d likely break down.
focus on reframing. shows their hybris…
“well if you are so fond of capitalism, why do you complain about rising prices when deregulation favours monopolisation and thus price gouging and corrupt lobbying…”
“Did You know that Jesus said that a camel will pass through the eye of a needle before a rich man is allowed to enter heavens gates?”
“Did You know about all the american dynasties who funded the nazis in order to profit over cheap labour after they couldn’t openly enslave people anymore and infused them with their eugenicist racist ideas they had established to justify slavery? have you ever looked up their family names? why not? you rant about soros&the gays, but you don’t know the people who profited over a genocide, corrupt our politics since 1955 and still hide among us as rich donor class? Do you like wearing horseshades?”
“How is this a meritocracy if 90% of all wealth exchange hands by heritage? Do you think rich kids are the more competent economists, seeing how they have never worked a day of hard labour in their lives or planted and cared for a single fucking apple tree in their whole lives? do you think the coked out brats of some Paperclip nazi oligarch who pretends to be the citizen kane is the better arbiter of our economy?”
“I know taxes are bad, even the homeless drunk meth head on the street corner in his tent thinks that taxes are bad, i mean some of them actually think they will be billionaires someday and then they would have to care for the sore losers living in tents because there is no money for social housing. I wonder how the tourism economy has profited off of all the tents on hollywood boulevard…. maybe some free housing could have saved these fucks millions, not that they deserve it… At least white america will get a taste of the police brutality they have hid behind so much. maybe that will help with abolition…”