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Not a surprise. Many of us grew up believing we as Americans are exceptional, that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict. The reality i

Not a surprise. Many of us grew up believing we as Americans are exceptional, that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict. The reality is our government has interests. Morality and interests are orthogonal, with the latter being influenced primarily by profits or some perceived direct or indirect threat to America’s elite.

ben_w 7y ago
Curiously, I had much the same experience despite being from the UK — Americans were always the heroes. British too (e.g. colonialism, empire, and commonwealth presented as an unmitigated good thing), but if there was a conflict of any sort between the UK and the USA, the USA were almost always the good guys.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I had the same experience being from and growing in Poland. I think I can give you a simple reason: Hollywood. Through movies and TV shows, America has been defining the mass culture for the past few decades, for almost the entire world.
  - camochameleon 7y ago
    This is very deliberate. From 1911 to 2017, 800+ films and 1100+ television shows have received backing from the Pentagon and the CIA [1]. Several films received major script changes, primarily to create a certain perception of the US military and intelligence agencies. [1] https://theconversation.com/washington-dcs-role-behind-the-scenes-in-hollywood-goes-deeper-than-you-think-80587 https://theconversation.com/washington-dcs-role-behind-the-s...
    - jjgreen 7y ago
      As did Jackson Pollock [1] and other artists ... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
    - cowwithbeef 7y ago
      That's an interesting link you have there, but it feels like limited hangout. "Yeah we admit we routinely manipulated film and more, but only to paint ourselves in a favorable light."
  - navigatesol 7y ago
    >I think I can give you a simple reason: Hollywood. Through movies and TV shows, America has been defining the mass culture for the past few decades, for almost the entire world. I think this can conflate cause/effect. Hollywood creates these movies and stories because the people producing them believe the narrative. It's interesting to me which narratives are questioned, and which aren't. The Vietnam War is widely considered controversial, but World War 2 was about defeating the evil Nazis, period, right? Adam Curtis has some interesting interviews with soldiers in The Living Dead about this topic; often the men on the ground couldn't tell good from bad.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      The issue isn't about Americans believing America is exceptional. Every nation believes themselves to be the protagonists. The difference between the US and everyone else is that the US managed to export its movies to the point they became an integral part of culture of half of the world. In any western nation X, for the past decades, you only had two categories of movies of importance: local movies, and American movies. And usually the latter were better / more interesting.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  Yet in reality British colonialism was, being equal to other european countries colonialism (France, Spain, Portugal, Dutch, Belgium, Germany a bit), one of the greatest evils in mankind's history, probably the worst if you count all direct and indirect casualties. I would be properly ashamed of my ancestors if I was from one of the countries, yet people simply don't give a nanofraction of a fuck. Much of the mess we are facing in last 20th century till now is due to that. Countries literally raped for centuries, all their wealth stolen. Generations raised as servants to powerful overlords. Promoting more submissive minorities into ruling classes. Afterwards some idiots in their tea club draw semi-random lines on the maps when creating new countries, creating perfect storm for future conflicts. And what we have today? Colonialism with a modern face - continuous brain drain so that only poor uneducated or lazy stay in their home country. And of course resource drain never stopped, look at companies like Royal Dutch Shell or DeBeers and many, many others.
  - erentz 7y ago
    > I would be properly ashamed of my ancestors if I was from one of the countries, yet people simply don't give a nanofraction of a fuck. I think it’s pretty obvious why people aren’t ashamed. Because they didn’t do the act. Take your expectation of shame to it’s conclusion: It’s very selective to only call out European colonialist countries as being ones where shame should be expected. If we are looking at crimes across history everyone on the planet must end up ashamed of their ancestry as there are few innocents. Not like the current borders and genetic make up of countries in Europe has been static throughout history, let alone every other plot of land in the world.
    - AJ007 7y ago
      It is important to learn from history, but assigning blame on the living -- yourself or others -- for what dead people did is a certain path for repeating many of those same historical mistakes.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Well, for one, all the major movies and tv series are American, so they will present any war, conflict, etc, under American viewpoints, to an international audience (including politically naive, historically ignorant and impressionable young ones). Even when the plot will cast doubt on the legitimacy of the conflict and the actions of the heroes, those will still be the protagonists (and with the humanizing superiority of at least being able to be morally conflicted about their actions), whereas the nuances of the other side are either hidden altogether, or obscured by some "we're all human after all/both sides are equally at fault" message.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Case in point 1: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/nov/14/thriller-ridley-scott https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/nov/14/thriller-ridley... https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hollywood-cia-washington-dc-films-fbi-24-intervening-close-relationship-a7918191.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hollywood-cia-washingto... Or e.g.: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year-campaign-to-convince-people-the-usa-and-not https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ve-day-70th-anniversary-we-should-never-forget-the-soviets-won-world-war-ii-in-europe-10239369.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ve-day-70th-...
otalp 7y ago
An exceptional superpower would have to be one which does not consider itself exceptional
- gumby 7y ago
  The British empire to the early 18th century could be considered an example of this as it was entirely a private sector phenomenon and not considered hugely relevant in government policy.
gdy 7y ago
"Many of us grew up believing we as Americans are exceptional, that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict." Sounds like the USSR, only that we get rid of this delusion almost 30 years ago. Now it's slowly coming back thanks to the Russian government's propaganda, but it is still far from the present US level.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Sounds like any dictatorship ever. What is unsettling is that the US is clearly not a dictatorship (or at least, not like "any dictatorship ever"). It manages to stay reasonably democratic even with this and other dictatorship enabling mechanism (powerful Executive Power, heavy sectorial financing of the government, etc). On this point, they are exceptional.
  - dmix 7y ago
    > dictatorship enabling mechanism (powerful Executive Power, heavy sectorial financing of the government, etc). + significant increases in secret courts and endless budgets and free reign for intelligence agencies that report to executive branch. All shifts that have been happening over the last two decades. It only becomes a problem to most people when someone they don't like is given those powers. Which is why they should never have those powers in the first place. Something many have warned about this for a long time and something the US has had a unique history of pushing back against, which is now long ago.
  - CodeMage 7y ago
    It's definitely not a dictatorship, it's something a lot more insidious. It's a self-sustaining informal plutocracy that masquerades as a paragon of democracy. I don't understand how people still believe the US is an exceptionally democratic country even after learning about how democracy is implemented here. The whole thing with Electoral College and two-party system is just the tip of the iceberg. For me, it was the revelation about the existence of riders [0] that was the final nail in the coffin of my belief in democracy. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_%28legislation%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_%28legislation%29
navigatesol 7y ago
>that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict. How else could any human or organization function if not by acting in ways they believe are right? >The reality is our government has interests. The reality is everyone has interests. The "government" isn't some homogeneous entity pushing towards a single plan; it's an incredibly complex network of individuals. The nation isn't perfect, but does anyone really believe that, on net, America hasn't been a force for good in the world? What is your benchmark?
- ionised 7y ago
  > The nation isn't perfect, but does anyone really believe that, on net, America hasn't been a force for good in the world? What is your benchmark? Lots of people all over the world who have been on the receiving end of US military or economic aggression enacted in the interests of the US plutocrats. African Americans, Native Americans, most of South America, pretty much all of the Middle East and North Africa, anyone who has suffered structural violence as a result of the US's insistence on a morally bankrupt Friedman hack-job neoliberal economic ideology. The US has done a lot of good things, but on balance I think it's done more damage and has merely replaced the British Empire as the current Anglo-sphere imperialist power.
  - refurb 7y ago
    On balance has done more damage? Do you believe that in the countries where the US has intervened that without US involvement things would be that much better? Seems to me that when the US supported a dictatorship, the alternative wasn’t a thriving democracy but just another dictatorship aligned to a different power.
    - ionised 7y ago
      > Seems to me that when the US supported a dictatorship, the alternative wasn’t a thriving democracy but just another dictatorship aligned to a different power. You're free to think that if it helps you sleep at night. You would be mistaken though. Some may have been just as bad as those they were replacing, but considering many of them were democratically elected governments that the US chose to overthrow in favour of a US-friendly despot, Id suggest you revisit your theory. Iran is a great example. Want to know why they keep chanting death to America? They used to have a fairly open and liberal society (relative to what they have now) until the US decided that one of their own guys was better suited to run the country instead of the democratically-elected Mossadegh. That was the Shah, who was eventually overthrown by a populist religious movement, which was a direct response to US bullying and the US-backed regime. And Americans wonder why Iran has a grudge against the US. Then you have Iraq, which decided it wanted to start trading oil in Euros instead of the dollar. The US doesn't like that, so they invaded and destabilised the entire region for decades, giving rise to the likes of Isis. Think whatever you wish of Hussein and the Ba'athists, they were terrible men, but they never caused the kind of region-wide instability that the US caused due to its own greed. Instability that had domino effects on a large part of the world but never reached US shores. And now the US is talking tough about Iran all over again as if they are next on the list to be invaded, all the while cosying up to inbred, mass-murdering monarchs in Saudi Arabia. Similar stories abound in Central and South America, and not just by US intelligence or military. US corporations have long been involved in violent crackdowns on labour movements in South America, some of which involved these American companies hiring militants to harass, intimidate and even murder dissenters. Plus the fact that the country was founded by slave-owners and plutocrats for the sake of themselves, and they consolidated those foundations with the blood of every Native tribe they tricked, deceived, starved, murdered and exterminated. The United States is a testament to its own hypocrisy and greed, just like the British Empire. A highly militaristic, expansionist empire that worships at the altar of Mammon.

ben_w 7y ago

Curiously, I had much the same experience despite being from the UK — Americans were always the heroes. British too (e.g. colonialism, empire, and commonwealth presented as an unmitigated good thing), but if there was a conflict of any sort between the UK and the USA, the USA were almost always the good guys.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I had the same experience being from and growing in Poland. I think I can give you a simple reason: Hollywood. Through movies and TV shows, America has been defining the mass culture for the past few decades, for almost the entire world.
- camochameleon 7y ago
  This is very deliberate. From 1911 to 2017, 800+ films and 1100+ television shows have received backing from the Pentagon and the CIA [1]. Several films received major script changes, primarily to create a certain perception of the US military and intelligence agencies. [1] https://theconversation.com/washington-dcs-role-behind-the-scenes-in-hollywood-goes-deeper-than-you-think-80587 https://theconversation.com/washington-dcs-role-behind-the-s...
  - jjgreen 7y ago
    As did Jackson Pollock [1] and other artists ... [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
  - cowwithbeef 7y ago
    That's an interesting link you have there, but it feels like limited hangout. "Yeah we admit we routinely manipulated film and more, but only to paint ourselves in a favorable light."
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >I think I can give you a simple reason: Hollywood. Through movies and TV shows, America has been defining the mass culture for the past few decades, for almost the entire world. I think this can conflate cause/effect. Hollywood creates these movies and stories because the people producing them believe the narrative. It's interesting to me which narratives are questioned, and which aren't. The Vietnam War is widely considered controversial, but World War 2 was about defeating the evil Nazis, period, right? Adam Curtis has some interesting interviews with soldiers in The Living Dead about this topic; often the men on the ground couldn't tell good from bad.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    The issue isn't about Americans believing America is exceptional. Every nation believes themselves to be the protagonists. The difference between the US and everyone else is that the US managed to export its movies to the point they became an integral part of culture of half of the world. In any western nation X, for the past decades, you only had two categories of movies of importance: local movies, and American movies. And usually the latter were better / more interesting.
saiya-jin 7y ago
Yet in reality British colonialism was, being equal to other european countries colonialism (France, Spain, Portugal, Dutch, Belgium, Germany a bit), one of the greatest evils in mankind's history, probably the worst if you count all direct and indirect casualties. I would be properly ashamed of my ancestors if I was from one of the countries, yet people simply don't give a nanofraction of a fuck. Much of the mess we are facing in last 20th century till now is due to that. Countries literally raped for centuries, all their wealth stolen. Generations raised as servants to powerful overlords. Promoting more submissive minorities into ruling classes. Afterwards some idiots in their tea club draw semi-random lines on the maps when creating new countries, creating perfect storm for future conflicts. And what we have today? Colonialism with a modern face - continuous brain drain so that only poor uneducated or lazy stay in their home country. And of course resource drain never stopped, look at companies like Royal Dutch Shell or DeBeers and many, many others.
- erentz 7y ago
  > I would be properly ashamed of my ancestors if I was from one of the countries, yet people simply don't give a nanofraction of a fuck. I think it’s pretty obvious why people aren’t ashamed. Because they didn’t do the act. Take your expectation of shame to it’s conclusion: It’s very selective to only call out European colonialist countries as being ones where shame should be expected. If we are looking at crimes across history everyone on the planet must end up ashamed of their ancestry as there are few innocents. Not like the current borders and genetic make up of countries in Europe has been static throughout history, let alone every other plot of land in the world.
  - AJ007 7y ago
    It is important to learn from history, but assigning blame on the living -- yourself or others -- for what dead people did is a certain path for repeating many of those same historical mistakes.
coldtea 7y ago
Well, for one, all the major movies and tv series are American, so they will present any war, conflict, etc, under American viewpoints, to an international audience (including politically naive, historically ignorant and impressionable young ones). Even when the plot will cast doubt on the legitimacy of the conflict and the actions of the heroes, those will still be the protagonists (and with the humanizing superiority of at least being able to be morally conflicted about their actions), whereas the nuances of the other side are either hidden altogether, or obscured by some "we're all human after all/both sides are equally at fault" message.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Case in point 1: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/nov/14/thriller-ridley-scott https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/nov/14/thriller-ridley... https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hollywood-cia-washington-dc-films-fbi-24-intervening-close-relationship-a7918191.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hollywood-cia-washingto... Or e.g.: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year-campaign-to-convince-people-the-usa-and-not https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ve-day-70th-anniversary-we-should-never-forget-the-soviets-won-world-war-ii-in-europe-10239369.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ve-day-70th-...

otalp 7y ago

An exceptional superpower would have to be one which does not consider itself exceptional

gumby 7y ago
The British empire to the early 18th century could be considered an example of this as it was entirely a private sector phenomenon and not considered hugely relevant in government policy.

gdy 7y ago

"Many of us grew up believing we as Americans are exceptional, that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict." Sounds like the USSR, only that we get rid of this delusion almost 30 years ago. Now it's slowly coming back thanks to the Russian government's propaganda, but it is still far from the present US level.

marcosdumay 7y ago
Sounds like any dictatorship ever. What is unsettling is that the US is clearly not a dictatorship (or at least, not like "any dictatorship ever"). It manages to stay reasonably democratic even with this and other dictatorship enabling mechanism (powerful Executive Power, heavy sectorial financing of the government, etc). On this point, they are exceptional.
- dmix 7y ago
  > dictatorship enabling mechanism (powerful Executive Power, heavy sectorial financing of the government, etc). + significant increases in secret courts and endless budgets and free reign for intelligence agencies that report to executive branch. All shifts that have been happening over the last two decades. It only becomes a problem to most people when someone they don't like is given those powers. Which is why they should never have those powers in the first place. Something many have warned about this for a long time and something the US has had a unique history of pushing back against, which is now long ago.
- CodeMage 7y ago
  It's definitely not a dictatorship, it's something a lot more insidious. It's a self-sustaining informal plutocracy that masquerades as a paragon of democracy. I don't understand how people still believe the US is an exceptionally democratic country even after learning about how democracy is implemented here. The whole thing with Electoral College and two-party system is just the tip of the iceberg. For me, it was the revelation about the existence of riders [0] that was the final nail in the coffin of my belief in democracy. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_%28legislation%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_%28legislation%29

navigatesol 7y ago

>that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict. How else could any human or organization function if not by acting in ways they believe are right? >The reality is our government has interests. The reality is everyone has interests. The "government" isn't some homogeneous entity pushing towards a single plan; it's an incredibly complex network of individuals. The nation isn't perfect, but does anyone really believe that, on net, America hasn't been a force for good in the world? What is your benchmark?

ionised 7y ago
> The nation isn't perfect, but does anyone really believe that, on net, America hasn't been a force for good in the world? What is your benchmark? Lots of people all over the world who have been on the receiving end of US military or economic aggression enacted in the interests of the US plutocrats. African Americans, Native Americans, most of South America, pretty much all of the Middle East and North Africa, anyone who has suffered structural violence as a result of the US's insistence on a morally bankrupt Friedman hack-job neoliberal economic ideology. The US has done a lot of good things, but on balance I think it's done more damage and has merely replaced the British Empire as the current Anglo-sphere imperialist power.
- refurb 7y ago
  On balance has done more damage? Do you believe that in the countries where the US has intervened that without US involvement things would be that much better? Seems to me that when the US supported a dictatorship, the alternative wasn’t a thriving democracy but just another dictatorship aligned to a different power.
  - ionised 7y ago
    > Seems to me that when the US supported a dictatorship, the alternative wasn’t a thriving democracy but just another dictatorship aligned to a different power. You're free to think that if it helps you sleep at night. You would be mistaken though. Some may have been just as bad as those they were replacing, but considering many of them were democratically elected governments that the US chose to overthrow in favour of a US-friendly despot, Id suggest you revisit your theory. Iran is a great example. Want to know why they keep chanting death to America? They used to have a fairly open and liberal society (relative to what they have now) until the US decided that one of their own guys was better suited to run the country instead of the democratically-elected Mossadegh. That was the Shah, who was eventually overthrown by a populist religious movement, which was a direct response to US bullying and the US-backed regime. And Americans wonder why Iran has a grudge against the US. Then you have Iraq, which decided it wanted to start trading oil in Euros instead of the dollar. The US doesn't like that, so they invaded and destabilised the entire region for decades, giving rise to the likes of Isis. Think whatever you wish of Hussein and the Ba'athists, they were terrible men, but they never caused the kind of region-wide instability that the US caused due to its own greed. Instability that had domino effects on a large part of the world but never reached US shores. And now the US is talking tough about Iran all over again as if they are next on the list to be invaded, all the while cosying up to inbred, mass-murdering monarchs in Saudi Arabia. Similar stories abound in Central and South America, and not just by US intelligence or military. US corporations have long been involved in violent crackdowns on labour movements in South America, some of which involved these American companies hiring militants to harass, intimidate and even murder dissenters. Plus the fact that the country was founded by slave-owners and plutocrats for the sake of themselves, and they consolidated those foundations with the blood of every Native tribe they tricked, deceived, starved, murdered and exterminated. The United States is a testament to its own hypocrisy and greed, just like the British Empire. A highly militaristic, expansionist empire that worships at the altar of Mammon.