Be warned, this is going to be a long one.
If there is one thing that progressives love attacking more than the "outmoded" beliefs of human nature, it is "evil, arrogant" Western society, especially that of the United States of America. After all, it fits so well with their noble savage ideologies, does it not? The sins of the white devils are totally unique to human history, and they don't even feel any guilt for it!!1
In actuality, that is, like an increasing amount of leftist ideology, kind of…completely wrong. Being an American myself, I will begin with my own nation and then look at other countries.
In actuality, that is, like an increasing amount of leftist ideology, kind of…completely wrong. Being an American myself, I will begin with my own nation and then look at other countries.
First of all, let us make something clear-anybody who claims that the USA is "right-wing" is incorrect. While I will admit that the US is somewhat less TRADITIONALLY socialist than other Western nations (although the presence of OSHA, labor unions, social security, nutrition assistance, welfare payments, minority business grants, other government subsidies, and other social entitlements, which make up roughly 10% of the US federal budget or 1.2 trillion dollars, and most of which I am not against, would make that a bit of a moot point, the fact remains that almost everything about the new left comes from the United States.
All of the educational theories that are currently cherished by the left (critical theory, identity politics, stereotype threat, white guilt, historical guilt, historical revisionism, feminism, and the like), all come from the US, as well as the creators of those theories. Even modern anti-Americanism comes from the USA, which makes for a very amusing scenario in which people will cluck and chastise perceived American boorishness and savagery, all the while holding books by Susan Sontag, Howard Zinn, Tim Wise, Noam Chomsky, or any of the other myriad left-wing American writers, and quoting directly from them. Doesn't the fact that America had a cultural environment capable of producing such a boon of left-wing literature, and selling it to the rest of the world, prove that American culture is at least somewhat left wing? Or maybe there was a lot of left-wing writing being published within and coming out of Nazi Germany, I don't know.
(I'd like to point out that people, and yes I am thinking of Europeans first and foremost, who love to use the "guttural drawling retard" stereotype of Americans never seem to point out that that stereotype is entirely an American invention, along with every other aspect of modern anti-Americanism. In other words, the glorious Old World people are so creatively and philosophically bankrupt that they literally need to rely upon the United States to give them criticisms of the United States. But then again, that's not surprising considering how dependent they are upon the USA. Read on.)
Even if the US was this conservative hellhole everybody loves insisting it is, that condition will not be lasting much longer, considering every poll I've ever read states that the young people are overwhelmingly left wing. That sort of puts to pat the old stereotype of arrogant Americans loudly extolling how great their nation is-polls show that the US is actually fairly self-loathing. When, according to this poll, 30% of the nation outright states they dislike their nation, and probably the overwhelming percentage of the remaining 70% like their nation and culture while feeling it is not the best in the world (a number I myself am a part of), that nation can in no way be said to be arrogant, supremacist, or any other similar word.
To make a pathetic attempt to show I am "down with the kids", has any other country produced a videogame like Bioshock Infinite, which is a 30 hour condensed ball of Cultural Cringe directed at the USA? (And mediocre gameplay, characterization, and writing, but that is a discussion for another article, and this work will only discuss video games briefly in the Feminism sections).
Incidentally, and to further disprove the concept of "right wing America", I'd like to point out that many people on the far right wing (I will fully explain what I mean by "far right wing" later, but rest assured it is not the blustering Fox News blowhards you think "right-wing" means…and how right wing could the network that runs Glee truly be?) hate the United States just as much as those on the far left, but obviously for different reasons. They hate the United States for (in their eyes) leading the way for the destruction of tribalism and tradition in the world, being the "bastard child of the Enlightenment", and "being the reductio ad absurdum of all the vices and senility of the Western world (Evola, Baron Julius, Fascism from the Right, 1922). Needless to say, none of the things in this paragraph would ever be voiced on Fox News, both because it is inherently in ideological conflict with the network, and because who reads Evola nowadays, anyway?
"But", you say, "The United States SHOULD forever hang its head and flog itself with the scourge of guilt! After all, any wrongdoing in the past of the United States is completely unique amongst all the nations of the world, and therefore justifies the USA being forever used as a whipping boy, right?!"
No. While the United States has certainly been guilty of wrongdoing in its past, an honest historical analysis shows that it is not any worse than similar sins committed by other nations, and in many cases can be quantified to be lesser sins than those of other nations committed concurrently.
Let us begin with the biggest one of all, the one that periodically graces the silver screen, because there's apparently so many different things to say about it: slavery.
I must admit, I didn't know until I was in college that, in fact, the USA took the LEAST amount of trans-Atlantic slaves. I had, in fact, spent the previous 12 years of my life in public schools being lectured on the guilt we all need to collectively feel over slavery. I'm willing to bet that most readers weren't aware of this either, but it is indeed true. Of the 11 million or so slaves that came to the Western Hemisphere, less than 1 million landed in the American colonies. The overwhelming majority went to Latin America and the Caribbean. This is to say nothing of the slave trade that went east from Africa to the Arab World, that went on for almost a thousand years before the Portuguese got in on the act, continued to go on legally for roughly 100 years after the American Civil War, and, you know, still goes on secretly as I write this.
One wouldn't know this without research, considering how slavery is overwhelmingly made to be associated with the United States today (when was the last time you saw a movie made about Latin American or European slavery?) If you wish to cluck your tongue and wag your finger about hypocrisy (a smug undertaking that began as early as the United States' existence, thank you Dr. Samuel Johnson), I would remind you of how the British Empire, the originators of the phrase "Life, Liberty and Property" (and the originators of much of the United States' founding philosophies) took twice the amount of slaves the USA did. Similarly, the Empire of France took 4 times the amount of slaves of my country, and the famous Haitian rebellion took place during Napoleon's reign (in other words, 20 years after all the talk of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity). Of course, THEIR plantations were in overseas colonies, which conveniently allows them to wash their hands of the matter. We Americans are more than happy to admit our hypocrisy (as any glance at a history book will tell you), but it seems to me that nobody else is (more on this history textbook topic later), especially not the glorious and honorable Europeans.
For the feminists in the audience, I'd like to bring up that 2/3 of slaves brought to America were men, while 2/3 of those brought to the Mid East were women. While sexual abuse of slaves undoubtedly occurred in the USA (as it likely occurs wherever slavery is found), the preponderance of men sold to America would seem to suggest that it was secondary to agricultural labor, whereas in the Middle East, it was the primary goal.
The relatively small number of slaves brought to the US would seem to put to pat the myth of "America's wealth is built on slaves". No, it is far more likely that Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal's wealth was built on slavery, because they had so much more of it! Furthermore, if slavery is the most surefire way to generate wealth (and spoilers: it isn't), then why did the South lose the American Civil War (due entirely to its outstanding disadvantages in manpower and materiel, no less)? Why has the American South (AKA the part of the nation that had the most slaves) historically been the poorest part of the nation, and why is it still the poorest part of the nation? Why did America only become a world power after the abolition of slavery? Hypothetically speaking, even if the South was the wealthiest region of the US, the utter devastation of those lands wrought by the American Civil War (plus the roughly 1 million dead bodies, both soldiers and civilians. Maybe you're not aware that the American Civil War is the deadliest war fought in the Western Hemisphere?) destroyed any wealth that had been saved. Is that not a clean enough slate, or does America need to whip itself even more? As you will see later, the whippings only began here, and they have continued until this writing. Whether or not morale has improved is for you to decide.
(All of this talk reminds me, it has been estimated that, when adjusted for inflation, the monetary value of all American slaves and their labors was anywhere between 1 trillion and 10 trillion dollars. As stated above, more than 1 trillion dollars are spent every year upon social entitlements. Afro-Americans are net tax consumers, rather than contributors, so it is quite possible that just over the last decade, they have collectively received the monetary value of their ancestors' bondage, if not more so. And the case for slavery reparations is rejected).
Having read all this, perhaps you now agree with me that it is incredibly unfair for the USA to bear 100% of the guilt of slavery for the world (three US presidents have gone on record apologizing to West African Nations for slavery, one is linked here, an "honor" that nobody else feels the need to give). Perhaps you are also realizing that guilt can be used as an incredibly potent weapon (I am willing, as I feel most Americans would be, to accept a rightful percentage of the guilt for slavery, but as I will get into later, guilt is never doled out evenly). Then the question is, why has the United States become the whipping boy? It was not a question of being forced to assume guilt, as Germany has done post World War 2.
But let us deal with the other great sin of the United States-being built via conquest (isn't it funny how people who claim to be atheists will regularly use words such as "sin"?). And it is now that any foreign readers, as well as a large percentage of American readers, will begin to unleash their verbal truncheons upon me: "Worse than the Holocaust! Noble savages are better than us in every single possible way! Mea Culpa! 100 Trillion Zillion Million dead bodies! DON'T YOU KNOW?!!?!"
Well, considering that any tourist that goes to Jamestown is told that Jamestown should be "commemorated" rather than celebrated, and that there's nothing to be proud of and we should all go home, I think it's fair to say that Manifest Destiny is not exactly praised in the US today.
Is the United States a nation created by one group of people conquering another group? Yes, absolutely it is. Is this situation unique to Mordor America? Well, thinking off the top of my head over breakfast (ie: there might be more if I could be bothered to research), there's Canada, Australia, New Zealand, every single Latin American country (as much as they try to deny it and claim purely Indian ancestry), Hungary, Finland, Scandinavia, Russia, India, Japan, China, Iceland, Israel, the United Kingdom, Greece, the majority of the Muslim world and about half of sub-Saharan Africa, but, you know, aside from ALL THOSE, the US is unique in its conquest.
"But America's conquests were worse! They destroyed a vast and greatly superior civilization!" you say. This is incorrect, and can be quantified to be so. Anthropologists estimate that in 1491, before any palefaces showed up, North America (consisting of Canada, the USA, and Mexico) had a population of roughly 20 million. We can further break down this figure by noting that archaeological evidence suggests that the high urban civilizations of Pre-Columbian America were concentrated disproportionately in what is today Latin America, not North America (this is judging from the abundance of ruins south of the US border, and not so much in the USA or Canada). As any study of population dynamics can tell you, population has a marked increase when a culture becomes a sedentary, agricultural culture. Perhaps all of the tribes of North America built their structures out of other materials such as wood or peat, which explains the scarcity of large stone pyramids and urban ruins that are so prevalent amongst their Southern cousins…or, despite the presence of a few permanent structures such as the Mississippian mounds or the Southwestern pueblos, the majority of tribes in North America were, in fact, nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers.
The facts of the conquests seem to support the above paragraph-why is it that the great pre-Columbian empires only took a few decades to be entirely subdued, while it took almost 300 years for the continental United States to close the frontier? As any epidemiologist could explain, diseases spread faster in condensed urban environments-in the cities of the Aztecs and Incas were the great die-offs from smallpox, typhus, and other infectious diseases, explaining the rapid conquest. In contrast, the fact that it took centuries for the US to conquer its indigenous population would seem to suggest that there were not nearly as many condensed populations, they were spread out over a much larger landmass, and as such there were less of them dying from disease and spreading it to their fellows (to be fair, a large amount of the nomadic tribes were killed by disease as well, somewhere around 30%). Incidentally, claims that disease was deliberately spread are also proven false (Brown, Thomas, Did the US Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indian Tribes?, Lamar University Press) through research.
Of course, when I have brought up these discrepancies in classes, the usual counter-arguments seem to involve either the idea that there were just SO MANY PEOPLE in the continental US, that even after 90% of them were killed off in their alleged vast urban centers, there were still millions of them around (this includes the aforementioned Time Magazine honoree professor who stated his belief that there were 100 million people living in a pre-Colombian, pre-industrial United States), or the idea that the English settlers were blithering incompetents that barely knew which end of their guns to point forward, and therefore they got their asses handed to them a lot and bungled their way to victory (hmmm, blaming a group's failures on inherent inferiority. Is there a word for that?).
So, assuming that there were 10 million people in the Continental US before the settlers came (and I am deliberately being generous for the purposes of this argument), divide that by 300 years, and we are left with 33,333 people killed per year, assuming that 100% of all of the American Tribes were killed (the most recent federal census states that there are roughly 6 million people alive today registered as American Indians as you read this, and thus there are possibly more then there were in 1491, but again, I exaggerate for purposes of argument). Thus, any attempts to link the conquest of the United States to the Holocaust are rather histrionic-in 12 years, the Nazis killed more people (12 million just in deliberate industrialized genocide, to speak nothing of the total cost in lives of the war) than American colonialism killed in 300 years. This can only be considered an incredibly half-assed, dispassionate genocide.
Of course the Holocaust comparison is also wrong for other reasons-the American Tribes were not by any means defenseless civilians. As explained above, they were certainly capable of owning slaves, massacring others (both fellow tribes and white people), torture, and other fun activities.
(By the way, any claims that the black experience in America was a genocide are even more ridiculous, considering that 1 million slaves, and that figure is a generous rounding up, have become 40 million free citizens, almost all of whom enjoy prosperity much greater than their peers in Africa. Unless a 4000% increase counts as genocide, which is news to me. And also, according to the historically black Tuskegee Institute, less than 5000 people were lynched in 100 years of lynching after the Civil War, 1000 of whom were white. Last year, more black people were killed by other black people in the US then there were all the lynchings that occurred in American history, to say nothing of the fact that ~400 white people were killed by black people last year, but this topic will be discussed later).
Bear in mind that I am in no way claiming that either slavery or colonialism were benevolent actions, all I am stating is that claiming the United States is unique in any wrongdoings in its past, or even particularly harsh in these, is wrong and can be demonstrably proven wrong. And thus, the idea that the United States should be this focal point of historical guilt, which it undeniably is in modern culture, is wrong when there are plenty of other countries guilty of just as bad, if not worse. But then again, guilt is never distributed equally, and it is a highly powerful weapon, as we shall see. Or perhaps there's another reason why several South Africans I've met felt the need to lecture me on how badly we treated the Noble Red Man.
The two topics discussed above are the two largest sins ascribed to the United States as reasons to constantly be ashamed of ourselves. In recent years, there have been several other attempts to pile the guilt upon American history, such as the "theft" of the Southwest from Mexico. To quickly explain-the bulk of Mexico's population lived in the current day boundaries of Mexico, the territories that are now part of the United States were sparsely populated for various reasons, one of which was the fact that every time the Mexican government attempted to assert its authority, the Comanche would collectively tear them structurally superfluous new orifices (Gwynne, S.C., Empire of the Summer Moon, 2008).
To remedy this situation, the Mexican government invited Anglo settlers into these territories, essentially to have other people do the dying rather than Mexican citizens and to hopefully create a buffer zone. For whatever reason, the Americans were more successful at fighting this tribe (incidentally, there were very good reasons both Americans and Mexicans were terrified of the Comanche) (ibid), the demographic balance tipped, and these settlers began demanding separation from Mexico. To make a long story short, the war was fought, 30,000 casualties (at least 12,000 of which were American, so spare me talk of how America was some titan of a world power bullying poor Mexico), America wins and pays Mexico 21 million dollars for the territory (AKA 6 million dollars more than the Louisiana Purchase).
My question is: why exactly should the citizens of the USA hang their heads in shame? While I am not denying that Manifest Destiny was a commonly held belief in America (let's not get into the fact that Mexico had its own equivalent of Manifest Destiny claiming land from Panama to Oregon), nor am I denying that Mexico (on paper, anyway) abolished its slavery earlier than we did, the fact remains that they invited American settlers in (for purely selfish reasons), had been fighting (the aforementioned Comanche, as well as the Apache intermittently, which I didn't get into) for the land before Americans started coming in (which incidentally also serves to subvert the beloved Latin American narrative, largely propagated by a Nazi sympathizer I might add, of being "los Indios" being oppressed by the evil white men), waged war with an army largely composed of illiterate and poorly-equipped Mayan peasants press-ganged into service (and that's not getting into, y'know, the ACTUAL SLAVERY OF MAYANS that was concurrent (ibid)), and received what was at the time a great monetary reparation despite being the losers. I'm sorry, but I can't be bothered to feel any guilt. It seems to me that both sides can be considered guilty of wrongdoing, but of course only one side actually bothers to express any guilt.
By the way, even if you take the most anti-American view of the above, I'd also like to point out that since the 1950s, the USA has ended famine in Mexico, twice bailed out the Mexican economy (1982 and 1992), and remittances from the USA make up roughly 2% of the Mexican gross domestic product per year. This "milking" of the US for their own benefit also occurs via illegal immigration from all central American countries (to a far greater percentage, as high as 17%). So, please, spare me the guilt-mongering about the "gringo colossus".
Perhaps it is because I currently reside in California that the 1848 guilt seems so prevalent (in other words, this guilt is pretty bluntly used to justify illegal immigration, but this will be discussed later)
This would also likely explain the guilt over Japanese internment during World War 2 that also seems to be prevalent on the West Coast. Those of you with 8th grade-level reading comprehension may probably have figured out my thoughts on this matter already: it happened, and there is no sense in denying that it happened, but when you think of what was going on elsewhere at the time (5 million+ dead in China, anyone?), 100,000 or so people put into camps, forced to get rid of all their stuff, and let out after a few years (with reparations being paid to each family, admittedly many years later) doesn't seem that bad in comparison. It certainly doesn't warrant comparison to actual Nazi concentration camps, as has become increasingly prevalent in recent years (and not just on the West Coast).
On occasion, this will actually lead to "The Cathedral" attempting to inculcate guilt over America's entire Pacific campaign in World War 2, portraying it as a genocidal campaign against the Japanese (that is when their lessons actually explain anything more than "World War 2 began with Japanese internment and then nuclear bombs for no reason at all")
It would be a lie to say racism was non-existent in American culture at the time (after all, you never saw Superman extolling us to slap a square-head, did you?) But is dehumanization of the enemy unique to the USA? Why don't you watch "Momotaro's Sea Eagles" on Youtube and see for yourself? This isn't even getting into the fact that Italians and Germans were also interned.
Similarly, the Neo-Flagellants (there I go making another religious metaphor) will point to the mutilation of dead Japanese (pulling out gold teeth, etc.) by American soldiers as another link between the US and the Wehrmacht. And again, I do not deny this occurred. However, considering what the Chrysanthemum and the Sword was doing to its prisoners, perhaps some of the blame for these atrocities can be placed on a desire of vengeance, to "pay evil unto evil"? Indeed, several of the men later court-martialed for this admitted as such, seeing photographs on the person of a dead Japanese soldier depicting the execution of Americans on Wake Island (including several decapitated via katana). It is worth pointing out that within the Wikipedia article on "American Mutilation of Japanese War Dead During World War 2", it is mentioned that while these brutalities were inflicted upon enemy soldiers, Japanese civilians during the occupation were amazed that they did not have the large-scale rapes and massacres committed upon them that they had been told would happen if the gaijin stormed upon the shores of Honshu. Do I need to explain how other countries during this conflict treated civilians?
Even the atomic bombings, while certainly nothing to be proud of, still killed a fraction of the amounts of civilians killed by Japanese armies previously. I would call for nuance, to look at the statistics and say that the US, while not entirely pure and noble in its actions, can be said to be, if nothing else, the lesser evil. But when have calls for nuance ever worked? No, the Japanese are, of course, not white, and as such they cannot be criticized to the extent a majority white nation can be criticized (for more on this, please see above and read the Noble Savage stuff)
As a bit of a segue, I'd like to restate the fact alluded to above, that people on the far right wing hate the United States equally, if not more so, then people on the far left. Indeed, much of the criticisms of the Pacific War that I referred to in the preceding paragraphs come from only two websites: www.counter-currents.com and radishmag.wordpress.com, which are websites that, to put it rather coarsely, would give your average progressive a pearl-clutching, hysterical case of the vapors (I have literally seen pearls being clutched in reaction to these websites). They feel that the US is the biggest guilty party in World War 2, even going so far as to state that not only was the Pacific War entirely America's fault (because the embargo placed upon Japan forced their hand! An embargo is the same thing as a blockade! They had no choice but to attack Pearl Harbor!), but that the brutality of Japanese soldiers was only because they were so horrified of those evil barbaric American soldiers, they fought fanatically. The civility (or lack thereof) of the soldiers of Nippon before 1941 can be looked up at your own leisure. The only difference between left and right, in this case, is the conclusion drawn-leftists hate fascism, of course, but state that America was just as bad as Nazi Germany, and should have been relegated to the dustbin of history just as fascism was. The rightists believe, conversely, that America was wrong for aiding the communists, and the Allied victory has only led to the victory of l'Internationale I disagree with each of these, but the fascists are closer to the mark than the leftists.
Does the guilt train stop there? Absolutely not! To a lesser extent then all of the things detailed above, there have been recent calls for the US occupation of the Philippines (1898-1945) to be labeled a genocide. The main catalyst for this is, of course, the infamous General Jacob H. Smith ordering his men to summarily execute every native over the age of 10-an order that was largely ignored and earned "Monster" a court martial and dishonorable discharge for his savagery. And I will admit that, yes, at least 200,000 people died during this occupation (some would claim as high as 1.5 million, but considering that these claims were made by an avowed Communist 50 years after the fact, I'd take it with a grain of salt), but will point out that a cholera epidemic was concurrent to the suppression of rebellion during the first 10 years.
More to the point, if there was a genocide committed by the US to the Philippines, the Filipino people don't seem to have received that message, considering that the Philippines has the highest approval rating of the United States of all the countries in the world (85%, much higher than the US' view of itself). The fact that the Philippines does not have nearly as high an approval rating for its earlier conqueror Spain would seem to suggest that American imperialism was, if nothing else, not as brutal as Spain's.
(As a side note, I'd like to point out that there are in fact more than a few countries that have a more positive view of the US then the US does for itself, as the last citation would reveal. Of course, all I've ever been told is that "EVERYBODY hates America and we DESERVE to be hated, mea culpa, world!" That has not been my experience, either going abroad or speaking to visitors to America, to say nothing of surveys. If your foreign experiences have led you to believe "Everybody hates America", maybe they just hated you specifically. Maybe you should try not being an insufferable douche.)
Of course, none of the preceding was to imply that the US has never been imperialist in its actions, it undoubtedly has. To restate my main feeling on America, I feel that there is a clear line to be drawn between "The United States is sometimes guilty of wrongdoing" and "The US has never done anything BUT wrongdoing in its history and deserves to be destroyed". And when there have been recorded instances of people in the west chastising the US for the Korean War (a war started when the Great Leader's armies attacked US bases legally granted to the army by the government of South Korea) and openly sympathizing with NORTH KOREA over the United States ("The Soviet archives make it clear that everything Needham saw was staged" (Winchester,Simon, The Man Who Loved China, a biography of Joseph Needham), I feel that anti-Americanism can, on occasion, be a bit hysterical.
I'd also like to point out that I am not denying that the United States is currently an empire. It's as plain as day that it is-unless you can name an immediate and urgent reason for American soldiers to be stationed in continental Europe (no, "having sex with Dutch whores" is not a reason).
It also seems pretty obvious to me that the American Imperium might be the first empire that benefits other people more than its own people (of course, using the term "people" as a collective term for the julienne of populations and cultures that occupy the territory of the United States is a bit of a misnomer, but this issue will be discussed later)-I am, of course, predominantly speaking of all the member nations of NATO and the other military alliances that the US has instigated, leads, and provides the overwhelming majority of funding for. 75% of NATO's funding comes from the United States. EVERY OTHER COUNTRY COMBINED pays the remaining 25%. I doubt I am the only one who notices the massive cuts in the defense budgets of all of these Western European nations-to the point where, during the 2011 Libyan intervention, the European Union was aided by the United States to a far greater extent than they would ever care to admit-"…most ran out of ammunition, having to purchase it from, and at a cost to, the United States…the USA ran the initial stages, in particular destroying Libyan anti-air weaponry…then provided intelligence, refueling, and bombing." By the way, how has that Arab Spring been working out? Need I mention how the biggest buyer of Libyan oil is, in fact, Europe?
More to the point, Europe's utter reliance upon the American military-industrial complex just may have freed up all the money needed to create the glorious, shining socialist utopias that Europeans ceaselessly use to posture about their superiority towards Americans, and which American progressives ceaselessly fellate, constantly begging these paragons of civilization for forgiveness for their philistinism (to a much lesser extent, the previous goes for Canada as well). To this I say-yes, your healthcare systems are superior to my nation's. So are many other aspects of your social "Safety nets". But, I imagine it's awfully easy to have a functioning healthcare system and free college tuition when you have almost no military budget to speak of, you live in a tiny little ethnically homogenous nation state (yes, unified tribes ARE more socially cohesive than diverse populations, Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone, 2001) within what is collectively the wealthiest place in the world (I speak of the European Union as a unified whole) ), and possess your big, dumb, American attack dog to do your dirty work (that is, when glorious Europe isn't doing its own dirty work). You can turn all of your attention towards taking care of the scanty population you have. Or, to put it very simply-thanks, Sykes and Picot, for Rogering the Middle East after World War 1 (a war in which, I should point out, Europeans begged the USA to get involved in, all of their modern cry-babying about "being late" to the contrary), and thank you, glorious Europe, for shunting the burden of empire onto the United States after World War 2 while you quietly slashed your military budgets and enacted your wonderful social entitlements.
America was demanded to provide a show of force in the Baltic Sea, to "protect Ukraine" (and of course to keep the cheap natural gas and other energy reserves flowing Westward). Where was the rest of the European Union (which, let me remind you, has a larger gross domestic product than the USA) to do the same? What does NATO do for the United States, might I ask?
Similarly, when China engages in its occasional bits of saber rattling, Japan and the Philippines demand that the USA reaffirm their alliances and do a bit of counter penis-waving. What does the USA get out of having to be the world's guard dog? At the very least, these two Pacific nations have higher average approval ratings (the Philippines as stated 85%, Japan 68%, both of which are higher than what the US gives to itself) for the US then Europe does, so that explains why this writing has a somewhat lighter hand towards the Pacific Rim then the "pinnacle of human civilization."
Similar to those two, Saudi Arabia and Israel are angered when the president backs down from his "Red Line" to Syria. It's funny, considering that the Middle East consistently has the lowest approval ratings of the US, but they sure don't mind us fighting for them. As a side note, I'd like a stop to the nonsense that the US "Deserved" 9/11. Has the US meddled in Mid-East affairs? Yes. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, sure. But that's kind of irrelevant when 80% of the hijackers were Saudis. Remind me what we ever did to them?
South Korea surely doesn't want us out of the Peninsula for the yearly penis-measuring contests instigated by the Hermit Kingdom. Do they have unilateral treaties to defend the USA should it be attacked? Absolutely not.
Believe it or not, the USA once attempted to stop foreign influence in its politics, with the 1938 FARA act…which was defanged in 1966 and has led to hundreds of millions of dollars being put into the USA specifically for bribing American politicians to do what other countries want
Leaving the military topic, are the readers aware of the fact that the United States collectively donates more to charitable causes around the world than any other nation on Earth? God forbid we say anything that puts the US in a somewhat positive light! I sure as hell was never told about this, but I was certainly lectured about American greed and excess until my ears bled.
Should I discuss how the United States has again,and again, and AGAIN signed free trade agreements that do nothing to benefit the economy of the United States and do everything to benefit the other party? No sane nation should be running trade deficits worth billions of dollars towards every other country under the sun (600 billion dollars+ per year!) But America hasn't been sane for the better part of 50 years (it's worth pointing out that from World War 1 up until the 1970s, the United States NEVER ran a trade deficit).
What kind of empire serves it's vassal states? Every other empire that has ever existed demands tribute and conscripts. The American Empire, in contrast, provides conscripts and (via the World Bank, foreign aid, and bailouts, as well as the aforementioned free trade agreements) the tribute.
Just from this evidence, it seems to me that the depiction of America as some sort of ravenous beast doing nothing but taking from the world is completely inverted from the reality. If the USA is a beast, then since World War 2 concluded it has been a beast hanging from a hook in an abattoir, being eaten by everybody, a resource that is taken advantage of by everybody, all the while being mocked and disparaged as it hangs from the meathook.
Many people want the American Empire to be destroyed. Me too, I want all of the military bases to be disbanded, I want defense spending to be quartered. I want the free trade agreements to end. And more than anything else, I want to rob every smug, holier-than-thou nation of its endless reasons to admonish the USA, and to see them do their own military spending. You have no idea how badly I want to be able to cluck my tongue and wag my finger at THAT COUNTRY, that horrible horde of Philistines, just like all of you do. However, for obvious reasons, I have no problems at all with charitable donations (yes, Virginia, despite my verbal brutality, I see nothing wrong with helping other people. I just feel that, as the saying goes, "charity begins at home").
"Alright", you might be saying, "so maybe the United States hasn't committed the greatest sins in the history of the world. But that doesn't change the fact that it hasn't done anything POSITIVE for the world!"
Yeah, no. In addition to the aforementioned charities, I have to ask: is saving ONE BILLION lives in the third world considered "a good thing"? Is the polio vaccine a good thing? The first fully electronic computer? Oh, to hell with it, just read some more Wikipedia articles. Speaking in purely quantitative terms, American scientific and technological innovations have saved and enriched an exponentially larger amount of lives then American bullets and bombs have killed.
(As a side note, I'd like to point out that this is inevitably where somebody will say "WELL YOU DIDN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THOSE INVENTIONS!" And yeah, I didn’t. But by that logic, whenever a Frenchman or Italian starts talking about their glorious culture and art, I should be able to scream "SHUT UP YOU HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT")
Am I the only one who has a nuanced view of the USA? It seems that in recent years the only two ways you are "supposed to" view the United States are with a drooling, idiotic neo-conservative love (increasingly rare in the US, not to imply that the neo-cons were ever honest about their love for America, more on that later), or a naked contempt for every single thing that has ever happened within its borders (increasingly common)
"Okay, fine, so some Americans have done good things for the world. That doesn't change the fact that American 'culture' is anti-intellectual, boorish and almost entirely worthless!"
First of all, I fail to understand how the nation that has more Nobel Laureates than any nation on Earth can be considered "anti-intellectual" in any possible way. But yeah, let's talk about American culture for a little bit. America couldn't possibly have any famous, I dunno, writers, right? Certainly not any that are read around the world and have influenced global culture. Yeah, unless you count Washington Irving, Richard Dana, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Mark Twain, Jack London, Henry Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Emerson, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, James Fenimore Cooper, O. Henry, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, John Updike, Philip K. Dick, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Rice Burroughs, HP Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard, just to name a few of my favorites.
(I'd like to point out that these are far from the only authors I read, but, then again, nobody would ever dare to claim that, say, France, Italy, or China are completely devoid of literary talent. Speaking of that middle one, I'm currently engaged in Volume 12 of Casanova's Story of My Life as of this writing, but as I have no desire to be a legitimate Casanovist, I will not be discussing Jake's life further)
If you can honestly look at that list and say that none of them wrote anything of lasting value, I'd be impressed.
Ah, but what about the visual arts? Yes, what is there to say about the likes of George Bellows, Andrew Wyeth, Frederic Remington, Windsor McKay, Louis Eilshemius, Jackson Pollack, Man Ray, Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, the Hudson River School, James Whistler, Frank Frazetta, Roy Lichtenstein, John Sargent, Winslow Homer, John Copley, Thomas Benton, and Thomas Eakins, to name a few off the top of my head? Were they talentless hacks? Just to clarify, I am not in any way stating that America is the only nation that has an artistic tradition, but nobody is denouncing any other country's art EXCEPT for the USA.
Music? I don't know, I happen to like the works of Sousa, Antheil, Grofe, Poleudoris, Rosza, Gershwin, Berlin, Barber, and Copeland, just to name a few. And this is strictly speaking in terms of symphonic music, the highest of musical cultures.
Need I mention how film as an art form was more or less pioneered in the United States? (As an addendum to this, it wasn't until I was in college that I found out that DW Griffith had, in fact, made other films than "The Birth of a Nation", and that his other films were, in fact, beautiful and artistic works that are much less objectionable to a modern sensitivity, so there's another example of American masochists denying and disparaging something that should be celebrated)
Also, I deliberately stocked the preceding lists entirely with people of a certain melanin deficiency, specifically to counter the second most favored accusation people have towards American culture: if people aren't saying American culture is non-existent, they're saying that it is entirely the product of black people, and appropriation of it by white people (I've heard it said much more…coarsely from the lips of those oh-so-tolerant Europeans). I would normally not deny their place in American history and culture, but I used the names I used above to prove a point. If you want to put in your own favorite Afro-American artists somewhere in the preceding lists, go right ahead (oh yeah, I forgot to mention how much of the black culture that is adored by progressives was influenced by white professional wrestlers, not to mention the fact that several famous Afro-American artists have cited white counterparts as their inspiration (James Dorsey for Chuck Berry, Frank Sinatra for Marvin Gaye, etc.). And how many black celebrities have an overt influence from films like The Godfather and Scarface, might I ask?)
Ah well, I'm sure people who want to criticize America will turn to a lack of original American cheeses (Monterey jack, pepper jack, and cream cheese. Deal with it) or sausages or some other petty issue instead. And yes, the cheese and sausage thing IS something that I've heard in face-to-face conversation.
I'm willing to wager that quite a few of my readers are a little stunned at reading the last page or two. Frankly, I didn't know half of those people existed either until I researched them for this writing. It's not like we were taught about them in school at all. Yes, I've mentioned this previously, but a lot of foreigners I speak to (exchange students, tourists, and such) are shocked to hear about just how deep America is mired in the depths of cultural cringe. Probably a few American readers are confused at this notion too.
Then again, most people aren't told that the Bureau of Indian Affairs made a formal apology in 2000, because we just have to keep up the myth of boorish American idiocy, right? In fact, almost everything I've stated to illustrate that the USA isn't the worst country in the world is not taught at all in schools, and I feel that I have linked to numerous examples of schools spreading this "oikophobia".
To put it another way, my father is a history teacher in high school. Opening up his standard American history textbook, I can find almost any wrongdoing in the history of the USA-Wounded Knee? It's there. Internment Camps? There. Operation Ajax? There. My Lai? There. Banana Republics? There. Contrast this to France, where to this very day, stating the wrongdoings they committed in Algeria is a criminal action. Contrast it to the blatant falsehoods Italian schools teach to the children, about how the fascist government was overthrown entirely by partisans when in reality the partisans accomplished roughly…absolutely nothing at all. Have France or Italy EVER once felt cultural cringe in their long and storied histories?
To reiterate a question I asked previously: after being presented with the evidence I've shown you, how can it be stated that the US is "right wing"? If so, how is deliberately hiding cultural and intellectual achievement, attributing cultural and intellectual achievements to anybody BUT your own people (once again, why is it unknown that the US has the most Nobel laureates of any nation?), constantly talking about how terrible the nation is, promoting leftwing causes all around the world (many of the modern ones being created WITHIN the US) via both the government and American corporations, and deliberately Balkanizing the nation to the point where it can barely be called a nation at all(hardly "blood and soil", I would think), right-wing in the slightest?
Must I mention how multicultural iconography (much of which, again, comes from the USA) has its roots in far-left thinking? "Workers of the world, unite", anybody?
I have to clarify something here-I am NOT a "blood and soil" nationalist (kind of hard for me to be that, as a karyotype might show). However, diverse communities are shown time and time again to be less cohesive than communities that are, in one way or another, homogenous. I feel a community needs something to hold it together, and up until about the late 1960s, the United States (currently the most diverse nation on the planet) HAD one-it had the "civic religion" (in the words of de Tocqueville) and a more or less overarching culture that kept people under one umbrella. Look at what goes on today-as I have repeatedly demonstrated above, everything about American history and culture is disparaged and admonished (even the colloquial name "America" is itself cut down, the fact that it's the only nation that has "America" in its name, and the fact that the Spanish Empire always referred to their Western Hemisphere territories as the "West Indies", is irrelevant), the politicians and other societal elites (yes, both of the major political parties, and this will be addressed later) openly express their contempt for their citizens (yes, I'm sure your average piney loser just loves to hear about "white privilege") and brag about "electing a new people". Meanwhile, the only unity that is encouraged is…the rainbow coalition, uniting under the catch-all term of "people of color" as one big group of anti-white agitation (as a "person of color" myself, I have no tolerance for the idea that YT needs to be constantly guilt-tripped). This of course ties into the never-ending criticism of American history and culture.
Does nobody else find it strange that immigrants to America once wrote music with titles such as "God Bless America", and nowadays they write songs titled "We are more American than you"? After 50+ years of constant browbeating of how awful and racist America is (remind me what movie won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 2013), has America somehow become more racist then it was in Irving Berlin's day? I doubt it, what seems more evident to me is that the only thing that has increased is America's guilt complex.
More to the point, is there ANYTHING holding America together as a nation right now, beyond the almighty dollar and animated juvenilia and breakfast cereals? And when the dollars go away, you're not going to have any more cartoons and Fruit Loops. Is it so far-fetched for me to look at this deliberately engineered cultural cringe, setting all of the myriad ethnicities and races of America upon the throats of gleefully suicidal white people (they would presumably return to fighting each other in the event of the evil snow people being gone (Ma, Ying, Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, 2011), another reason I harbor no love for the rainbow coalition), and not see the US as on the path towards being a jumbo-sized Yugoslavia? Perhaps some people want to see severed-head soccer played on American soil, because only then will America have penance for its evil.
The next chapter will discuss societal problems within the USA more, but as promised, I desire to discuss other nations. More accurately, I am looking at other first-world nations and how progressivism has failed there in ways similar to its American failure. Let us look at European nations-
Besides the simple fact that they're incorrect in their constant criticisms of American history and culture, I truly don't understand why Europeans are so ebullient in their constant criticisms of the USA-in 2014, a cursory glance would show that they are faced with many of the same problems and admonishments that the US is faced with. I've personally always felt that the USA can only be considered "right wing" in comparison to Western Europe, which is indeed more to the left then the US ("Western Europe" is the term I will use to politically encompass everything to the west of Poland, and including Scandinavia/Northern Europe). In at least one respect this is true-Swedish politicians don't even try to hide their utter hatred for their nation and culture ("The current prime minister of Sweden, Frederik Reinfeldt, has gone on record stating 'The only feature of Swedish culture is barbarism. Everything else is thanks to immigrants'") whereas American leaders will at least try to mince their words and pretend to enjoy eating corn dogs or going to state fairs. Similarly, European politicians in general (not just Nordics) are even more open to discussing how they will "elect a new people"
Looking at the common people of the magical happy land where nothing bad ever happens, we can see "white flight" occurring in record numbers in Scandinavia. Oh, but you poor darlings spent the last 100 years clucking your tongues and wagging your fingers about how evil those awful Americans treat the poor benighted Negro. Don't you enjoy your diversity now that you have it? Yes, I do feel a little happier inside when I see bad things happen to Scandinavia. I suppose it comes from being constantly told since I was a teenager how the entire region was infinitely superior to my troglodytic American culture.
In all seriousness though, when I read about the crime rate increase, rape rate increase, utter cowardice of the police in response to these, virulent anti-Nord material that is circulating within (and occasionally from the government itself), and plummeting intellectual standards (Sweden ranks below the US on both Math and Reading PISA scores), most of which is attributable to open borders multiculturalism, and the increasing authoritarianism that is used to quash any opposition to these (perhaps it is a coincidence that more people are getting the hell out of Sweden than at any point since the 19th century?), I can't say I blame them for their actions, incredibly smug and hypocritical though they may be. Maybe now, the turgid passion plays Europeans have about American racism will finally slow down just a little bit (why yes, there IS a street named after Mumia Abu-Jamal in Paris, but I will talk about the actual Western Europe, in the geographical sense, in a little while).
While I do not have any sympathy for those who espouse cultural cringe towards the USA, Canada, or other nations built upon conquest, I can at least understand why it exists-the things they complain about are real, just exaggerated and seen through a solipsistic vision of guilt. It doesn't make any sense to me why a Scandinavian would feel it-their conquests were largely finished before the proliferation of gunpowder (I am aware Sweden briefly had a hold in North America in the 17th century), and far from being brutal and racist, the people of Northern Europe seem to epitomize the suicidal "dogma of multiculturalism" more than any other nation on Earth-while the USA may de facto believe in human biological uniformity, at least the US Federal Government hasn't made it a de jure law
To be fair, some Swedes are capable of seeing the same things I see-"Historically, America and France have been the two biggest forces pushing global civilization leftward", citing many of the same sources I have for this claim-Boas, Mead, Friedan, and etc.. This blog writer has many interesting facts on his website, including 1930s racism from his nation that is far more virulent than their American equivalents. While there are parts of his writing that I do not agree with (something that occurs with many alt-right writers I have read), for this particular subject, I feel that he is sensible (I also find his writing on rejecting Judeo-Christianity as an Oedipal rejection of Jewish ethics to be oddly interesting, and not nearly as anti-Semitic as you would think from my brief description).
I focused on Sweden in the above few paragraphs because they seem to be the worst of the lot, going from a casual view, and the racial shenanigans seem to be slightly less insane in, say, Norway or Denmark (emphasis on "slightly").
But the same thing occurs in the rest of Western Europe as well. You can see the same sort of cultural cringe going on in the UK. You also see the same sorts of increases in violence going on in the continent, the phenomena of Islamism being rampant as well, the racism from the native populace (I dunno, maybe those Muslim youths are constantly rioting because they're so happy at their adoptive homelands) the increasing prison population (I am fully aware my country is guilty of this as well) and it honestly seems to me that European-style multiculturalism has kind of failed, and they share many of the same problems my country has (albeit on a smaller scale, as these are still recent phenomena)
Then again, I think the people of Europe are beginning to understand this as well, why else would all those right-wing populist parties have emerged specifically to protest multiculturalism? I'll take my apology for the past 100 years of smug tongue-clucking and finger-wagging for "American racism" now, please. Preferably on paper, I'd like to have it framed (or not, go ahead, continue to hold Josephine Baker and Sam McVea over our heads). And yet, despite all this, they still bemoan "that terrible American first amendment" that gives us the legal right to criticize things ("'hardly anyone' in America seems to care about what would be "unthinkable" or "punishable" in Germany")
Some Europeans are now seeing the consequences of their leaders' folly, and demanding change. In my opinion, one of the biggest causes of idiotic decisions being made is the simple fact that the decision-makers are detached from the consequences of their actions. We have the same thing going on here-I know I'm not the only one who notices that the people who push hardest for diversity are those who live as far away from it as possible
With all this being said, I do have sympathy for Europeans for the simple fact that they do, in fact, face many of the same criticisms and accusations (and problems caused by these) that my own country faces. And I, who explicitly debunks many of these for my own country, would be rather hypocritical if I didn't state that these claims of European racism and boorishness (which are starting to arise) are often wrong as well. In fact, as I have stated repeatedly (And it will continue to be a running theme in this work), Europe is indeed more to the left politically than the USA, so all of the self-deprecation the US has adopted is just as prevalent, if not more so, in the Old World.
On that note:
TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER 4
Larsen Halleck
Larsen Halleck is a physical culturist, martial artist, musician, writer, and (barely) a Youtuber and cartoonist- a man of many talents and moderate wages. He blogs about a multitude of subjects at The Barbaric Gentleman where he offers a free fitness PDF to subscribers. His writing and/or videos can also be found on Return Of Kings and New Media Central.
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