How is it possible that looks like the whole country went absurdly dumb overnight? US did so many great things in the past, other countries had a lot of respect and even admiration of the US. I’m not from the US and I can’t imagine such a thing happening in my country, such a shift in thought, in priorities and in everything.
I guess one can go conservative and all, and I can respect that, but this looks like something else.
Not just the cold war Red Scare, anti-communist propaganda. Republicans have been consistently cutting funding for education for decades, many many many people in the States have a distorted understanding of actual history. I have a good friend who was taught IN SCHOOL that the reason the Confederate States tried to secede was because of “economic restrictions”. He’s a good guy, not racist or bigoted. He’s just been lied to his entire life. There’s things we all onboard growing up. Being confronted by reality is difficult. Many people just can’t. They would rather keep their beliefs, their zeitgeist, and through the fiction that they have been indoctrinated into from birth be racist bigots, offended that you would claim that you would say that they live in conditions that are more common in “third world” countries, even when the “potable” water from their tap gives them cancer and is literally flammable. Why? Because it’s the best country in the world! It’s been 70 plus years of brainwashing. And there has been so so many people, smart, qualified people, saying that things that were/are being done will end up where they are now.
If the US doesn’t make wars to come being fought on a blasted hellscape, and puts this fascist coup into the fucking shackles it should be in, there is decades of deprogramming, and rebuilding what was supposed to be a bastion of democracy, but has proven even more fragile than everyone thought.
The Cold War showed the seeds of this self-immolation long ago. By casting the conflict between the superpowers as an ideological showdown, both the United States and CCCP began to define themselves in terms of opposition to a strawman idea of what they thought the enemy was. E.g. America was a country with a strong unionist movement, but quickly turned on itself with Communist witch-hunts and distrust of centralised planning (it didn’t help that the security apparatus of each power were genuinely infiltrating grassroots movements in the other.)
Obviously the Soviet Union was first to fall, but the poison was already in the blood by then.
How is it possible that looks like the whole country went absurdly dumb overnight? US did so many great things in the past, other countries had a lot of respect and even admiration of the US. I’m not from the US and I can’t imagine such a thing happening in my country, such a shift in thought, in priorities and in everything.
I guess one can go conservative and all, and I can respect that, but this looks like something else.
To build on what the other person wrote:
Not just the cold war Red Scare, anti-communist propaganda. Republicans have been consistently cutting funding for education for decades, many many many people in the States have a distorted understanding of actual history. I have a good friend who was taught IN SCHOOL that the reason the Confederate States tried to secede was because of “economic restrictions”. He’s a good guy, not racist or bigoted. He’s just been lied to his entire life. There’s things we all onboard growing up. Being confronted by reality is difficult. Many people just can’t. They would rather keep their beliefs, their zeitgeist, and through the fiction that they have been indoctrinated into from birth be racist bigots, offended that you would claim that you would say that they live in conditions that are more common in “third world” countries, even when the “potable” water from their tap gives them cancer and is literally flammable. Why? Because it’s the best country in the world! It’s been 70 plus years of brainwashing. And there has been so so many people, smart, qualified people, saying that things that were/are being done will end up where they are now.
If the US doesn’t make wars to come being fought on a blasted hellscape, and puts this fascist coup into the fucking shackles it should be in, there is decades of deprogramming, and rebuilding what was supposed to be a bastion of democracy, but has proven even more fragile than everyone thought.
The Cold War showed the seeds of this self-immolation long ago. By casting the conflict between the superpowers as an ideological showdown, both the United States and CCCP began to define themselves in terms of opposition to a strawman idea of what they thought the enemy was. E.g. America was a country with a strong unionist movement, but quickly turned on itself with Communist witch-hunts and distrust of centralised planning (it didn’t help that the security apparatus of each power were genuinely infiltrating grassroots movements in the other.)
Obviously the Soviet Union was first to fall, but the poison was already in the blood by then.