Kmarion wrote:
The primary goal has been to prove that the United States is as cruel and corrupt as they themselves have been. When your heritage is genocide,
Obviously the systematic destruction of the aboriginal peoples of North America along with their customs and languages is something other than genocide.
Kmarion wrote:
wars of aggression,
Because Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs,
Operation Ajax in Iran, mining of ships in Nicaraguan harbors, the invasion of Greneda and the current war in Iraq never happened and if you claim they did you're obviously either sympathetic to or one of those European moral delinquents.
Kmarion wrote:
or cowardly surrender
And of course we all know that the entire nation of France threw in the towel during WWII. They just sat out the whole war until the Allies liberated them. And all those Allied fliers who went down in occupied France rescued themselves with no help at all. Nobody blew up ammo dumps, nobody derailed German supply trains, nobody relayed info about defensive positions at Normandy to the Allies, the Vichy government never had to create paramilitary units to deal with French partisans and the thirty or so different groups involved in the French Resistance movement are obviously just figments of the fevered imagination of some brie-chewing latte-slurping revisionist historian.
Kmarion wrote:
the record of the United States can be pretty hard to bear.
No, trust me on this one, it's a combination of the arrogance in which the record is usually recited along with big chunks of very ugly moments in American history that get left out of the record that tends to be unbearable.
Kmarion wrote:
The old powers cannot avoid measuring themselves against us, but the disparities they discover are so great that Europe's Moral delinquents can not help but comfort themselves with lies about our clumsiness, our violence, and our crudity.
The old powers have their own problems. Italy still courts old-school fascists. Germany uses its anti-Nazi laws to attack anti-Nazis (figure that one out if you can). France is choking itself with xenophobic paranoia, demanding new arrivals assimilate into their culture while telling those new arrivals that they're savage and backwards and incapable of assimilation. England is becoming the most surveiled nation on the globe, with more remote cameras per capita than anywhere else in the world. Unfortunately all of their failings piled together still do not negate the failings of the United States and its government. Hundreds of years of empire-building bloodshed, cultural snobbery and general avaricious greed can't erase a single black mark on the record of the United States. You don't make a wrong thing right by screaming "But they did/do bad shit too!!!!" or by haranguing everyone about all the good things you do.
Kmarion wrote:
Perhaps they should stop and ask themselves how could such a pathetic mediocrities built the richest, most powerful exemplary society in history.
Richest? Possibly. Powerful? Definitley. Exemplary? Sorry, not buying it. An exemplary society wouldn't have produced things like the School of the Americas, funded a glorified gang of narcoterrorists in Nicaragua, sided with some of the worst dictatorial thugs in history or overthrown legitimate sovereign governments in the interests of American business or government. Not to mention that whole period of time when certain human beings were seen as property and not people and eventually necessitated a fucking
war to resolve the issue.
Kmarion wrote:
Sorry for the paste, but it is at least the third time we have been through this.
No apology necessary. I've quite enjoyed taking a big ol' chainsaw of history to this tangled mass of rhetoric. And that's all it is really. A bunch of stern-sounding pseudo-historical tripe wrapped around a core of "Well they're just
jealous, that's all!". That's really one of America's biggest problems; the dismissal of
any criticism as either sour grapes from outsiders jealous of our success or from people who hate America because their liberal hippie commie pinko college professors told them to.
We are, at this moment, not the greatest nation we could be. We never will be as long as we refuse to acknowledge
and correct our failings and wrongdoing. It is the greatest lesson we have
not learned from the other world powers. We cannot fix our mistakes by burying them in the pages of history or by shouting down people who speak of them or by saying "What's done is done".
Last edited by HunterOfSkulls (2007-07-04 23:08:54)