If I may add something to my original comment: it, of course, wasn't meant to show that US people are bad in general. I just wanted to take apart a country that praises itself as kind of the pinnacle of civilisation, to show that it isn't so.
The same could be said for any country -- though the US, by it's sheer power and constant warfare over its interests and for its economic benefit, plus it's bizarro half progressive/half medieval internal landscape is one of the more dangerous examples.
That said, most of Europe has similar atrocities in it's past and/or present -- and some other countries too (e.g. Japan and their occupation of Manchuria).
Now, civil wars and intra-country badness one can understand, even wars with neighbouring countries over some dispute. But what is especially dangerous and hideous is when countries exploit or invade peoples and countries that have never done any harm to them.
Kind of like the British Empire ruling over India, or France over "Indochina". Or the african-american slavery. And what's more dangerous is being hypocritical about it, in the "yes, but we built them an infrastructure", or "yes, but we brought democracy to them" sense.
And one last thing that's extremely dangerous is to thing that those things are "of the past", and now "we have progressed above them". Not so. For example, segregation might be in the past, but 70% of prisoners being non-whites still holds. The massacre of the native indians is in the past, but that doesn't mean that they have their lands back now. Or for Europe: colonisation might be past, but that doesn't mean that old colonial powers don't interfere constantly in their old colonies, pushing specific politics and politicians. An example: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/inside-france...
The same could be said for any country -- though the US, by it's sheer power and constant warfare over its interests and for its economic benefit, plus it's bizarro half progressive/half medieval internal landscape is one of the more dangerous examples.
That said, most of Europe has similar atrocities in it's past and/or present -- and some other countries too (e.g. Japan and their occupation of Manchuria).
Now, civil wars and intra-country badness one can understand, even wars with neighbouring countries over some dispute. But what is especially dangerous and hideous is when countries exploit or invade peoples and countries that have never done any harm to them.
Kind of like the British Empire ruling over India, or France over "Indochina". Or the african-american slavery. And what's more dangerous is being hypocritical about it, in the "yes, but we built them an infrastructure", or "yes, but we brought democracy to them" sense.
And one last thing that's extremely dangerous is to thing that those things are "of the past", and now "we have progressed above them". Not so. For example, segregation might be in the past, but 70% of prisoners being non-whites still holds. The massacre of the native indians is in the past, but that doesn't mean that they have their lands back now. Or for Europe: colonisation might be past, but that doesn't mean that old colonial powers don't interfere constantly in their old colonies, pushing specific politics and politicians. An example: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/inside-france...