Comment by TheAlchemist 5 days ago
I'm contemplating it, but I'm not that old yet !
Of course there was always a bit, sometimes a lot, of propaganda everywhere. But at least it was (mostly) for the right causes and ideals. Right now, US is being governed by what I see as the worst possible people, with 0 morals.
Before Trump, at least we had the hypocrisy —like, at least people would pretend to have a moral higher ground. Now there are just completely shameless thugs in charge. They don’t even bother to lie convincingly anymore; just listen to Kristi Noem in interviews, contradicting herself from sentence to sentence without a care in the world. They won’t be held accountable for anything, and they know it.
Eventually, people will grow tired of it and the pendulum will swing the other way.
It’s why the first move of the administration was to replace senior FBI and military leaders with cronies. To hold the pendulum back.
They absolutely know there will eventually be consequences (by default), which is why they work so hard to throw other people under the bus and make a giant confusing mess of things. To try to avoid them.
Have you listened to the Canadian PM's speech at Davos? He called out all of this.
> The story of the United States is one of genocide, racism, imperialism, and oppression of the working class.
I do not think it is. The story of the US contains all those things. And just as the story of the US contains Abu Ghraib, it also contains functioning courts sending Abu Ghraib perpetrators to jail. You can call it the permanent struggle between good and evil. There is no country in the world without evil. But there is a difference between evil being present and evil dominating. When functioning courts are dismantled, the perpetrators rewarded, you are forbidden to even talk about it, and there is no recourse left, it will be different. People who have not lived through a totalitarian regime sometimes miss that distinction. I also grew up in a communist Czechoslovakia, and I did not idolize the US because I was blind to the bad parts. I idolized it because you had evil, but not evil fully controlling the game. Even now, you can still simply move out of the US. Sure, there might be some bureaucratic hurdles, but you can fly away on a plane - your only way out is not to try to crawl under barbed wire and risk getting shot.
I will be honest - when people say something like “it’s all the same, Russia, the US, all are bad”, I think to myself... óóóh, you have no idea what you are talking about. Unfortunately, the current US is going in that direction, so you might find out. Not that I wish that on anyone.
Only two Abu Ghraib perpetrators were ever sent to jail. One served 6.5 years, the other 1.5 years. I invite everyone to scroll this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone... from top to bottom and decide for themself if that should be considered a commensurate punishment.
One may genuinly debate the genocide, racism, imperialism etc. But I can guarantee you that the 'opressed working class' in the US had it 100 times better than the non opressed Eastern European one.
It's so lazy to resort to the false dichotomy of US vs USSR, it doesn't say anything except "It's not as bad as it could've been". Every country in the world can point a finger at someone who had it worse.
And besides, "One may genuinly debate the genocide, racism, imperialism etc" is an essential part of why the working class had a good quality of life in the decades following WW2, particularly white people.
It's easy to build up a good lifestyle when you exploit foreign countries for resources and outsource your labor to poor people across the world because you're not the one paying the bill. But how do you sustain that when those people start demanding the same quality of life that you have? You don't, as we're seeing now.
> It's easy to build up a good lifestyle when you exploit foreign countries for resources and outsource your labor to poor people across the world because you're not the one paying the bill. But how do you sustain that when those people start demanding the same quality of life that you have? You don't, as we're seeing now.
That's quite an oversimplification of the prosperity of the US middle class, particularly given most of the gains happened prior to globalization.
Is it? In the USSR, the poor had no indoor plumbing, and bread lines. But in the USA, the poor have no homes, and no bread.
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