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A “snap” is taken on the spur of the moment — suddenly, unexpectedly or without notice — a snap judgment, when people expose their inner selves and values.
This occurs with individuals, but with nations and society as well. Like the incident in New York’s Central Park where a liberal white woman called the police on a Black man during a dispute about her unleashed dog.
Modern states, like individuals, have their historical breaking points, such as when Western liberal democracies — boasting freedom and rights and support for LGBTQ+, women, Black people and immigrants — have experienced cultural and historical breakups that led to evil snaps, for instance supporting the Gaza genocide for the last 12 months. This is not the first time Western democratic states have failed their humanitarian liberal ideals and promises and snapped to show their true evil ideology.
Throughout history, they have produced the ideologies of fascism, slavery, Nazism, communism, imperialism, Zionism, and apartheid in South Africa and Israel, and events like the world wars and Hiroshima. Despite their commitments, these states have fostered these evil ruptures within the framework of liberal democracy.
These snaps are ingrained in our culture and a society at large in which individuals suddenly show their true selves and belief systems. A free-market capitalist modern state would program its members to function more efficiently and effectively and be professionals. The system would want us to separate our behavior from the unproductive traditional human values.
Take corporate America, for instance. Those speaking for it talk in human-rights language that, as The Intercept characterizes it, “is generally feel-good verbiage that gestures at ethical guidelines without spelling any of them out.” For instance, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, rationalizing his company for helping Israel in the killing field in Gaza, snapped: “We don’t set foreign policy but rather we follow the lead of the U.S. government in foreign business dealings.” Customers are always right, according to the business mantra, regardless of their behavior or values. ”We operate in Israel, but we also operate in Saudi Arabia,” Krishna said. “What do those countries want us to do? And what is it they consider to be correct behavior?”