Revisiting (with Reza Aslan)
Unholier Than Thou
Unholier Than Thou
4.7 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2021
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
This week, Phill is joined by author Reza Aslan to revisit the early aughts in the American imagination. In the wake of America's withdrawal from Afghanistan, how do notions of American exceptionalism hold up? Reza and Phill discuss how Christian imperialism has crept its way into allegedly secular politics, look critically at America's outmoded hero complex, and question to legitimacy of the liberator theology that we carry with us today.
For a transcript of this show, please visit crooked.com/unholierthanthou.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We went into Afghanistan to benefit the United States. We went into Iraq to benefit the United States. We went into Iraq to benefit the United States. We pretended that it was to help |
| 0:17.0 | Iraqis and to help Afghans. But I mean any objective observer just has to look at the last 20 years to know that that was bullshit. |
| 0:27.0 | From crooked media, this isn't holier than that. I'm your host, Philip Picardy. |
| 0:34.0 | A lot of this season, we've been exploring things like resurrection, |
| 0:38.0 | rebirth, the whole kind of idea that we are transforming ourselves, |
| 0:42.0 | or for better or for worse moving into a new chapter of our lives |
| 0:46.9 | especially after coming out of such a difficult time in American history what with the pandemic |
| 0:51.8 | the election, etc. |
| 0:54.0 | One thing that really struck me though was in the past few months especially, |
| 0:59.0 | a certain news cycle has felt oddly cyclical, oddly like a full circle kind of moment that was like |
| 1:06.9 | the spectres of our past coming back to haunt us. At the same time that New York City was honoring the people we lost during the attacks of September 11th and the 20th anniversary of those attacks, |
| 1:19.0 | we also were in the midst of pulling American troops out of Afghanistan to devastating human rights |
| 1:25.4 | consequences. We left many people behind who supported the American |
| 1:30.1 | government and the American cause and of course there were endless stories of families |
| 1:34.4 | who were caught in the fray of people who died and since what the Taliban is going to do |
| 1:39.9 | and look like now that they have control back over Afghanistan. This whole kind of |
| 1:45.1 | failed experiment of the war on terror there has disastrous consequences in |
| 1:50.6 | Afghanistan of course. But maybe one thing we've not explored as much is what |
| 1:55.2 | kind of consequences it's had here in America, to our own neighbors, to the people we interact |
| 2:00.7 | with every day, and how the attitudes of the war on terror, how we came to see |
| 2:06.0 | them as normal, how we adopted them as just givens without ever really analyzing how the media and the government played a really strong role |
| 2:16.0 | in informing our own views that were intrinsically Islamophobic and really demonized people abroad |
... |
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