Comment on Has anyone else noticed the strong pro CCP and anti-west vibes here?
richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one 3 days agothe USA have stopped being the shining beacon of freedom and democracy they used to be seen as by many people in the west
Only blind people ever saw it like that. In Latin-America we’ve known for a long time that USian foreign policy consists mostly in destroying inconvenient countries with resources for profit.
mech@feddit.org 3 days ago
Maybe it was wrong to generalize. I grew up in West Germany, so my perception is naturally biased.
The contrast between how the USA used to be seen in West Germany before the W. Bush presidency and now is very, very strong.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
I’d say even Reagan already was a very weird president. Before the Watergate affair with Nixon, trust in American presidents was generally high in non-socialist Europe, though imho they went radically overboard with their anticommunism, conflating anarchism and all liberationist movements with what they saw as red fascism.
After Reagan, the surface may have seemed similar, but beneath in the cogs of the American system, something started breaking the labourers of which we see the effects even now. Reagan instigated a new level of arguments for abolishing the state anywhere, such as COINTELPRO, Operation Cyclone, indebting the American labourer while stagnating wages, and so on, and radicalising the discourse step for step.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Definitely Reagan.
EggInDisguise@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
American here and I think your wording was spot on.
It WAS seen as a “shining beacon” by many around the world.
SEEN as. And as someone who was born here, I can assure you that many in the US absolutely know that is a facade at best.
The shell began cracking in other parts of the world decades ago (longer in places like Africa), but for most Europeans and the mostly un-terrorized-by-US-military countries, I think the turning point was “WMDs” in the early 00s. When every other “Major” country is either silent or outright saying “we have no Intel suggesting this” then you can’t really claim to have moral superiority, and once you see a liar as a liar, it’s all downhill from there.
“seen as” was absolutely the correct phrase, as it was only an illusion.