The US has been drunk on the delusion of how noble and benevolent we consider ourselves since World War II.
We like to conveniently forget that at the time, many Americans looked up to the Nazis and were embracing eugenics. We were legally sterilizing subjective “undesirables,” often without their knowledge, and we had no plans to do shit until the Axis, already steeped in conflict, decided to attack us directly from half a world away, committing one of the greatest self-inflicted tactical blunders in history thankfully.
America is all about subjugation, exploitation, and genocide. It just got a propaganda team to soften the way in which it talks about it since the mid 20th century.
At the end of the day, that’s the magic of America: bullshitting. Lying. To ourselves and others. From “all men* are created equal” (Only applies to wealthy Caucasian land owners) to “manifest destiny” (genocide the people that already live here because its our destiny) to “separate but equal”(even apex American bullshitters couldn’t say this one with a straight face) to “turning the bull loose”(get back to work slaves, this isn’t a society) to “don’t ask, don’t tell” (we refuse to accept you as a human being, but hey come die gruesomely so our greedy fucks can access foreign oil markets). Our bullshit machine runs so deep, we are a
nationcapital exploitation farm that practically doubles as a religion.People also forget that the people who came to the New World to escape religious persecution were being persecuted because their beliefs were so radical that no one wanted to deal with their bullshit anymore.
Yep!
And we’re still the sexuality phobic weirdos of the developed world, which stems out of our puritanical backwards forerunners.
Glorification of gruesome, bloody hyperviolence all day baby, we’ll show it on a loop on the news for the kiddos! Don’t forget to like and subscribe!
One flaccid dick or vagina in public, on the other hand, and everyone loses their minds!
This is an us thing. We are the prudes of the developed western world. “Omg a boobie AAAAHHHH my child is scarred for life!“
If there’s one thing I know about the US, it’s that everyone is afraid of boobies.
Half these people just love the drama of it. It works to your advantage if you’re a spiteful prick.
The puritans are dead an buried and the only quaker I see is on my steel cut oats.
Boycott PepsiCo!
Radical beliefs aside, religious persecution was the style of the day, anything but Anglican was asking for trouble.
One of the best examples of U.S. government PR is the rebranding of the Department of War to the Department of Defense, even though its function didn’t change. People don’t like war, but call it defense and you’re golden.
“Defense companies”
To be fair, every nation feels good about themselves. Be proud of the good things, neglect the bad things. Who would want to be the bad guy? This is how human mind works.
Except that’s not the case at all. Lots of people in lots of nations will gladly tell you their country is shit.
Including the us. Correct
So what is Iceland’s equivalent to the whole “being the most prolific funder and enabler of fascist terrorism in human history” that they are (supposedly) neglecting?
Best I could find is that they were one of the largest beneficiaries of that funding. Also they extended their fishing rights well beyond their coast, but it’s unclear to me if it breached international law or not.
Supposedly they had broken some international agreements and rules, because the Wikipedia article mentioned that the US defended them in those instances and let the infractions happen.
That’s the best I’ve got though. They’re surprisingly quite clean. Depends I guess on how you view their accepting American money.
They’re surprisingly quite clean.
Yeah… it’s actually really difficult to think of them as “western” or even “white.”
many Americans looked up to the Nazis
And the Nazis were looking up to Americans! House on fire and all that…
we had no plans to do shit until the Axis, already steeped in conflict, decided to attack us directly from half a world away
This is not accurate. “We” (specifically FDR) were already keeping Britain afloat financially in their war with Germany and were already literally fighting German U-boats in the Atlantic prior to Pearl Harbor. Even as far as Pearl Harbor was concerned, we were waging economic warfare against Japan by cutting off their oil and steel in response to their depredations in China - which embargo precipitated their sneak attack in the first place.
Hello, CIA tip line?
This post right here /s
This is revisionist tripe. The real reason we were slow to enter the war was that doing so was hugely unpopular among the two largest ethnicities in the US; Irish-Americans and German-Americans, for very obvious reasons. There were other reasons as well, but it’s just a fact that Irish-Americans, many of whom would still have a living memory of the famine, were hostile towards the British, and German-speaking Americans, of whom there were millions, entire towns in fact, had no desire to go to war against Germany.
You leave this out because it’s not convenient to your narrative.
But American Exceptionalism
Stolen from another post felt relevant
Si vis pacem para bellum
Favorite DS9 episode
Let’s be honest here. That’s a good episode, and I’m not judging you. But Sisko KOing Q is easily the best moment in the show.
”I’m not PICARD.”
I dunno, it’s hard to top
“IT’S A FAAAAKE!”
Where is that original pic from
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🌎 🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
The Boston massacre was basically an anti-police riot that turned into a police shooting. The police were acquitted of the murder, which lead to more protests and an eventual revolution. Anytime someone says “real Americans support the police,” I point back to that.
The local police in the nearby “pieceful” (verry rich) subarb tend to portray themselves as “just folks helping out (we also enforce bylaws)”. the local city tends to have cops blatently break the law.
The antagonism is easy to see in the city. In the former, the former gives off a diffrent and hidden kind of oppression that Im in a position to only see the outer edge of (i dont live there).
Well put. I’d never thought of it that way.
points to Great Britain
I learned it from you
I have never seen the phrase “the tail wags the dog” used more aptly as with with the US-UK power dynamic
Yeah totally - wait which is the tail in your mind?
They feared that unchecked, the Colonial tail might someday wag the imperial dog (as indeed it has).
The full quote from https://readsettlers.org/ch2.html
Just because America hasn’t lived up to its values doesn’t mean that the values are wrong
Dude. Our constitution said black people were 3/5ths of a human.
Exactly, thanks for supporting my point.
Does it still? Or did we change the Constitution to better reflect our values?
I mean the constitution is the backbone of the system and it used to be updated, but now people treat it as this perfect monolithic unchanging thing. If any modern politician tryd to add amendments it would not go well(also Canadian here)
I agree with that. Thomas Jefferson had the right idea that the Constitution should be rewritten every generation to better reflect the people.
Maybe not that often, but certainly more than it is
Every generation sounds about right (maybe not completely rewritten, but with significant amendments).
One generation recognizes that if black people are free, they should vote. A couple generations later starts recognizing that women are people, not property, as well, and that they should have the right to vote. Then the next generation realizes that shenanigans are being used to keep people from voting, so they get make those things illegal. Then the next decides to establish 18-year-olds are adults, so they should be able to vote.
…and then they decided that things are great, gerrymandering is fine, skewing the voting to benefit the party in power should be within the powers of the states, and outright ignoring a public vote is perfectly reasonable in a democracy, so the constitution should be treated as a complete, unalterable document, since we apparently got it right now.
And that’s just voting. I definitely think we could use some changes based on this new generation (gender/orientation protection, voting rights, etc).
I’ve long thought that every amendment and major law needs an expiration date upon which time the current legislative body is forced to vote to uphold it or let it expire.
We shouldn’t have these because we have sanctified them, we should have them because we still believe in them. If we don’t believe in them anymore, they need to go.
Does it still say you’re allowed to use slavery for punishment as a crime? Do you still do that for non violent offenders? Does your country have more non violent offenders than any country to ever exist? Your country started with shit values and continues to push its shit values onto the rest of the world.
I invite you to fully read the chain of comments you replied to the start of
I invite you to study the history of your country, and it’s present day laws.
That’s an awfully broad topic compared to what I asked, what in particular?
It’s propaganda in contrast to its actions lmao
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Robbery is a violent crime. Drug possession is a non violent crime. What a waste of a comment lol.
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With slavery?
It was only enslaved people that were counted at 3/5ths. Free blacks were counted as a whole person.
From Wikipedia:
Although the three-fifths clause was not formally repealed, it was effectively removed from the Constitution. In the words of the Supreme Court in Elk v. Wilkins, Section 2 “abrogated so much of the corresponding clause of the original Constitution as counted only three-fifths of such persons [slaves].”
So it’s technically still in there, but moot with slavery being banned.
Slavery isn’t banned in the US lol
Is it only the 19th ammendment which allows it, or someplace else as well?
13th amendment
So our values can change over time? How do we know which values to live up to?
So our values can change over time?
What a strange question. Of course they can and they do, all the time.
Then what makes a value an American value?
Usually “country’s values” are something the state or the population publicly (claim to) hold. Another perspective is what others view as their values.
It’s not a clear cut thing at all. Americans often use terms like “freedom, liberty, democracy”, stuff like that so I’m thinking from their pov those are their values.
Money.
Money is the only truly American value, everything else can be discussed about depending on how much money is involved.
I use the Declaration of Independence’s preamble as a good baseline:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,…”
I see. So one of our values is given to us by a god. That’s what we have to live up to? A god’s values? That’s American? I don’t even believe in a god.
And why is the Declaration, something that happened before America existed as a nation, the thing to look to and not the Constitution?
You have a lot of catching up to do in school. The declaration and constitution heavily pull for Locke’s Treatises of Government and even older texts. It is not necessarily speaking to a god. In fact Locke brings up Spinoza in making this point. It is moreso that we exist in a universe that functions with certain parameters that are the baseline for our current situation. It’s very generalized. Basically, Locke’s philosophy, which was inherited by the framers of the declaration/ constitution/BoR was that civil society only exists as an agreement among people in order to better their quality of life. If it does not live up to these expectations, people can abandon government and go back to less civil times. Government helps prevent the breakdown of discourse with war being the ultimate opposite of civil society. Basically, the government exists by the people and for the people. The Declaration of Independence is an important founding document in US history for many different reasons, but one of them that is of importance is that is marks the foundation for a unified set of values that would be further codified in the follow-up documents. It was made very clear to all present that when the Constitution was drafted, it would have fast-follow amendments and then continue to in order to reflect the basic foundational values as society and technology progressed over time. This flexibility was intentionally added. The founding documents don’t speak much about the financial system. That came later.
I already asked this and insults won’t change it- If values change, what makes them American values? If the founding documents are where we get our values from, then our values include believing black people aren’t fully human.
Jefferson was an athiest too, and he wrote that text.
The Declaration of Independence is a statement of values, a list of the ways the Crown had violated those values, and a list of the ways they felt were proper to address those violations, up to and including armed revolt.
The Constitution was an attempt to make a goverment based on those values. It was and is flawed, and should be changed to better reflect those values. That’s why “What about the 3/5 Compromise?” isn’t a gotcha. It’s wrong, everyone knows it’s wrong, schoolchildren are taught it’s wrong by the government itself.
So it’s an American value in a founding document unless we think it’s wrong?
Of course, they change overtime, do you want to respect the rules written in the Old Testament?
We educate the people to free thinking, and then we ask them to vote, that’s how democracy is supposed to work. It’s not perfect, and it has ups and downs, but we do have made some progress considering the past centuries.No, I want to find out what American values we’re supposed to live up to, not what Iron Age Jewish values we’re supposed to live up to. What are they and what makes them American values?
I think they come from the European Humanism and Enlightenment, they are not American specific. Equality in rights and opportunities, social liberalism, economical liberalism, religious/origin tolerance, rationality, democracy.
What makes those our values? I don’t see anything in our founding documents that reflect things like equality in rights and opportunities or social liberalism or economic liberalism.
If you want to acknowledge religious tolerance as described in the Bill of Rights, you also have to acknowledge the 3/5ths compromise.
As far as rationality or democracy, those have never been American values.
There’s some overlap between the two.
I think what makes something some country’s values is either the government publicly adopting or enough of the population doing so. That doesn’t mean anyone is actually living up to those values. Might not even be trying.
And then there’s the question, their values from whose perspective? Americans might say thing X is their value but outsiders might look at them and conclude their value is Y. So there’s no one set of coherent values that hold true from all perspectives.
So if Trump wins and the government adopts fascism, those are American values?
Changing the Constitution is the whole problem.
It desperately needs updating but it’s become this sacred text that cannot be changed and all future laws must be based on asinine interpretations of the ancient texts
Id argue the original document had awful clauses and every entry has at least one defect. Its so “sacred” that mistakes are costly. Still worth attempting, just a “you better know what your doing” situation.
caugh prisoners are not given protection under our anti-slavery ammendment, caugh and our prisons are kept full caugh
technically it was your Supreme Court
No, it’s right in the Constitution. And the Supreme Court didn’t exist yet.
To be fair though, the 3/5ths compromise wasn’t about black people being 3/5ths of a human. Free states didn’t want to count enslaved persons for the population when determining representation in congress while Slave owning states wanted to count each slave as part of the population and thus have a higher representation in congress than they should.
By your argument the slave owning people were wanting to count black people as a human and the anti slavery people didn’t. If the free states had gotten their way then black people, by your assessment, wouldn’t have been counted as people at all but would have likely caused the emancipation of slaves much much earlier.
Our values are changing. The speaker of the House says that the separation of church and state does not exist. Second in line to the presidency.
Our history is being rewritten. Just look at the reinterpretation of the 2nd amendment after Reagan.
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2nd in line. Biden is literally the president. He is not “first in line to be president”. Harris is 1st in line and Johnson is 2nd in line.
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Not Americans. Republicans in congress. Americans did not pick Mike Johnson to preside over the House. Only a small percentage of Americans even voted for him because they had to be in his district. Americans are powerless to stop this.
And? All that has happened before.
Actual President William McKinley felt America had a duty to spread Christianity to the rest of the world.
And in my opinion Dred Scott is a much greater travesty of constitutional law.
Again, just because the country has failed to uphold its values does not mean that the values are worthless
it’s not the failure, it’s the repeating the same horrors again and again.
If we failed and did better that would be good, instead we fail and then change nothing or rearrange the chairs but not solve the problem.
Like take our school system for example, Brown v Board of Education, landmark case desegregate the schools problem solved right? No our schools are still heavily segregated and people like our president fought to keep it that way.
Opens history book on Europe/Asia/Africa/South America, etc. insert literally any place in the world. Wow! I’m funny on Lemmy! So dumb, good people in every country in the world. And just about every country has done unspeakable things to get to where they are today. Most of the time it’s not because the good people even want to be involved it’s because the rich make it happen. Blame the rich…they are the problem in every country.
You’re not wrong, every country has done fucked shit. I think the point of this meme is to bring Americans down to that realisation that applies to their country too, tho.
With an insulting title like this post has, I don’t think that’s the point at all.
DAE the US in unaware of history!? Because I think I know what 300 million people are!
I was talking about the meme that OP posted, not the title OP gave it. I am assuming OP did not make the meme.
Everybody knows. There’s nothing new under the sun
I can’t imagine they don’t know.
I think the point of this meme is to bring Americans down to that realisation that applies to their country too
Because Americans don’t know? We get taught about this in school. If you want to find a country that buries its atrocities, try Japan
If your republicans get their way, kids won’t be taught about it in school in future. :P
Which country dropped 2 nuclear bombs again? I always forget.
Singling out the US from WW2 seems odd. It was the one with Nazis, you know? Also during that war Japan did some absolutely despicable shit, like Nanjing massacre, there were the Nazis which, yeah no need to explain that one, USSR had their own massacres and “forced relocations” of peoples, there was the fascist Italy which at least in Africa did awful shit, Croatia had Ustaše and their own holocaust, Lithuania same deal, don’t remember off the bat what horrible shit Brits did but knowing Brits you know there’s something there, Finland had horrific prison camps for Soviet prisoners…
Looking at WW2 and coming to the conclusion that the US specifically is bad is weird. There’s so much fucked up shit done by almost everyone.
Also tbh I’ve never really understood what the big difference between using nukes and just bombing the absolute shit out of a population with conventional weapons is. Nowadays the difference is that you don’t want to trigger a nuclear exchange, but that wasn’t really a case then. One difference is that it’s new and different weapon, but that’s not very concrete. Radiation and lasting effects is more concrete, but also, unexploded shit manages to still kill people. You’ll have horrific after effects from conventional weapons too.
This is something I’ve never understood but would be glad if someone explains. It’s often just said as self-evident thing but I’ve never seen the argument spelled out. Might help me change my mind about it if someone does.
You have no intentions of changing your mind…
If you can’t tell the difference in “just bombing” and what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki… well that says more about you than anything else.
It’s sorta hard to learn about the argument or the difference when people outright refuse to spell it out.
If you can’t tell the difference in “just bombing” and what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki… well that says more about you than anything else.
Of course my opinion says things about me. But like I said, I don’t see the big difference to conventional weapons. That’s why I’m asking you to explain it to me ffs
What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t worse than Dresden, Tokyo, or several other bombings (especially Cambodia in the Vietnam war). They are notable in terms of being a nuke, but in terms of damage overall unremarkable.
This is my feeling too. With the number of killed and the destruction they caused they don’t seem that different from conventional weapons.
I’m not sure what makes the nukes worse and this guy just outright refused to even explain it to me since they didn’t feel likely they’d manage to convince me. Kinda infuriating, especially when I’m genuinely interested in understanding the argument.
A lot of focus is in those bombs and generally the complete destruction of conventional weapons is glossed over or even ignored. Especially when it was the allies targeting civilian infrastructure.
This tweet is banned in Texas and Florida.
As an illiterate American, I could not read that meme and it’s only by chance through random mashing of the keys that I was able to craft this response.
That’s another quantum physics marvel.
Want to see it again?
Source: average American student.
And the textbooks have been marginally sanitized even then.
There is a crazy amount of cognitive dissonance in this thread. Show me a single other modern society that didn’t have serious and deeply ingrained racial and societal problems from the start. We can only move forward and do better, which is happening slowly. Put a magnifying glass on any country’s past and you’ll drum up all sorts of nasty shit. But people just love to shit on the US so here we are
conservative attitude is to deny or diminish anything wrong with history. same can be seen in Turkey. I think what is criticized is that denial, not that there was anything wrong. because as you said every country has their skeletons.
You only missed the point by an observable universe’s length.
As someone whose government disappeared 43 students who were protesting in 2014, and opened fire on defenseless civilians protesting the summer Olympics in 1968 killing upwards of 350, I say you’re not wrong. Hi, neighbor.
If Americans told the truth*
They can read it was about taxes but they won’t get to read about the colonies being pissed about fair treatment to the Natives for their help in the 7 years war (fair is relative: read it as respecting their borders and claims to America)
Oh, so I’m the only one who gets in trouble when I start referencing Malcom X?
Nope.
So, in order, taxes evasion, war, secession, wars, racism, wars, poor labour laws, wars and racism again?
Seems to be a pattern
Joshua Fit For Battle - Contents Of An American History Class
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP862vW9WJE
Relentless imperialistic fucks
Eye glassed with drugs of power and conquest
Greed kills
Establish a history relationship
And turn around and stab them in the back
Guns and disease destroyed a whole culture
Victims on their backs, rotting
Seeping, suffering
Suffering, suffering
Suffering
This is our fucking history
This is our fucking history
History repeats itself and always will
Thank you for transcribing the lyrics, because I couldn’t understand them in the first 30 seconds and I wasn’t willing to continue listening after that.
The message is good, the instrumentalists are proficient, but the vocals are painful. It was less “Rage Against The Machine” and more “Tantrum Against The Melody”.
That book is: https://www.howardzinn.org/collection/peoples-history/
I have that book, but can’t read it. /s
Because you were homeschooled by religious fundamentalists, or because you went to a public school controlled by them?
Because i wont go agains my country! Take that, evil books! ligther spark /s
