The more history I learn the more I understand that every country is awful, and people have been terrible forever.
Most people understand that becoming a billionaire requires a ruthless pursuit of your own interests. Regardless of the impact on small business owners, the environment, employees, etc. the billionaire does what it takes to beat the competition. And even though everyone has done good and bad things, the propensity for billionaires to harm millions of people in search of endless profit makes them particularly immoral.
In this regard, global superpowers are like billionaires but on the world stage. American atrocities are particularly bad because American geopolitical hegemony has harmed millions of people both domestically and abroad. We can acknowledge this history while agreeing that every country has done immoral things.
Ordinary people have done terrible things, too.
We’re all a bunch of bastards and have been since we invented agriculture
Im Latino indigenous, I grew up in a war where Americans are funding death squads and bombing half the country to keep Russia out of this hemisphere. After America bombed my country and nothing was left, we moved up to the US to follow my country’s stolen wealth to the empire that took it. There we were called wetbacks and spics and told we were streaming jobs and weren’t welcome, go back to your country they would say, you know the country that’s filled with American craters. Now those Americans who wanted Russia out, are sucking Putin cock, and we’re still being rounded up like cattle! Move on to Canada eventually and never got over Americans being such monsters. These past few years have been wild as even the amaerican leftists have turned racist. I’ve called out a few young people on their anti colonial hypocrisy and anti war stance but only on some wars, etc. Not even against their views, just trying to point out their own colonial past, and I’ll get called all sort of slurs.
Now those Americans who wanted Russia out, are sucking Putin cock, and we’re still being rounded up like cattle!
Well, of course. America is nothing if not a country built on segregation. And there’s nothing more cemented in the modern civilized man’s consciousness than national borders. You can do anything to a person on the wrong side of a border - beat them, shoot them, enslave them - and its never a crime.
The modern Russians aren’t running around Latin America villainously implying that native peoples are owed civil rights or that the laboring class has some kind of collective right to their surplus. So of course we’re cool with them again (and have been since Yeltsin’s coup in Moscow back in 1993). Meanwhile, y’all keep thinking you are entitled to basic standards of living just because you’ve been ludicrously profitable for the domestic economy. Yuge problem!
These past few years have been wild as even the amaerican leftists have turned racist. I’ve called out a few young people on their anti colonial hypocrisy and anti war stance but only on some wars, etc. Not even against their views, just trying to point out their own colonial past, and I’ll get called all sort of slurs.
The problem with the internet is that you’re going to have communities that are labeled “The Left” and “The Right” and “The Center”. But when its on a platform like Reddit or Facebook, it’s largely the same moderators pushing the same neoliberal socio-economic views with some partisan pastiche sprinkled over the top.
People come out of these communities thinking that they’re Woke because they don’t want to see every gay couple arrested. Or Based because they want industrial era standards of living. Or Radically Centrist because they enjoyed going to college. In the end, they’re all a bunch of liberals who mostly hate each other because the TV told them the other two groups were eating babies.
As soon as you come in with an actual outsider viewpoint, all that partisanship falls away to reveal the hard angry nut of American Nationalism.
Incidentally, this is why you’ve got a lot of Reddit expats on .world and its affiliates who really fucking hate the folks posting on the Unmentionable Fediverse sites. Anyone who doesn’t think the United States is the shinning beacon of righteousness and liberty is an evil foreigner who wants to run Americans over with a tank.
Spicy take incoming: it’s pretty great right now. We’re a continental country rich in natural resources. We’re very friendly with our only two major neighbors, Canada and Mexico, so tits hard to imagine us being attacked over a land border. We have tropical beaches and snow sports 365 days a year, and they all speak English and take dollars. Our universities are some of the best in the world and graduate Nobel Prize winners in arts, sciences, and mathematics. Yes the current American experience sucks but for a lot of people it always has and has even sucked worse. We’ve experienced massive civil rights expansions over the past three generations.
If you think America sucks you’re right, and always were, and always will be, but if you can’t think of anything nice to say about it then you’re just not paying attention.
