#that show is ultimately reactionary regardless of how much it tortures itself about america being bad sometimes

[communistkenobi-archive]

I would disagree that Narcos is a Pro USA/ anti-communist show when it routinely shows that CIA interventionism only hurt the country and that the most moral character in the show by a wide margin is the communist nurse

Narcos runs into the same problem every ostensibly progressive show about American empire does by making the show about American agents. It can show individual agents doing bad things that the show acknowledges as wrong, and it can have a “are we really the good guys?” tension in the narrative, but the conclusions are almost always about individual people doing the right (or wrong) thing, and the backdrop to these questions is always the assumption that America’s brutal foreign policy machine is necessary for peace and democracy - they may handwring about fucking it up along the way, or doing it “incorrectly” sometimes, but the motivations that drive the show (and the motivations that the viewers root for) are still about DEA agents interfering in South American countries for the good of the US.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the show, so I’m assuming you’ve dug through my tags or seen an old post I made about it. I’m not familiar enough with it anymore to bring up specific points/examples to illustrate what I’m talking about, but there can be no actual left wing critique of American imperial projects through shows that use DEA agents as sympathetic actors. Romanticising these historical events (even if it’s a “negative” romanticism) is vile, regardless of how much acknowledgement there is that some of, or even most of it, was wrong. The show from the outset is politically abhorrent, no matter what spin you put on it, because the framework itself being used for understanding those political events is abhorrent. Anything downstream of that is just footnotes.

#misc.txt #questions in spaaace #salt warning #theres a few things i remember #like the ‘yeah we kinda fucked up’ comment made about pinochet early in the show #as if hes just a bad dude we supported... oops! our bad! #or that fucking ridiculous comment ‘im not a communist im just a good person’ #like just such a basic fundamental misunderstanding of left wing thought #that show is ultimately reactionary regardless of how much it tortures itself about america being bad sometimes #and to be clear like. you can watch these things and enjoy them #just like you can watch crime shows or romantic films about the military #because media consumption is amoral in and of itself #but you have to be aware that these things are propaganda designed to make people sympathetic to the argument youre making to me right now