How many places in the world outside the USA, do people rejoice (either publicly or privately) when there is, say, a natural disaster resulting in the loss of many American lives and in the ruin and desolation of so many more?
I’m pretty sure citizens of Iran and North Korea would be jumping for joy, but do similar demonstrations of glee (in private or in public) take place often in places like the U.K., France, Italy or Japan?
Are things like disaster films (where the disasters take place in the USA killing many, many Americans) popular in other nations, where one of the main attractions is seeing how many Americans (not “people”) are getting killed?
Is the destruction of the USA a popular theme in art, literature and cinema in nations outside the USA?
In all my years of living in France and Germany, I never saw any moive (or book, TV show, radio program, comic book, play, or miscellaneous other) which constituted a demonstration of glee in response to the loss of many American lives. I have never heard about any such thing in the pop culture of any country. It may occur in Iran or North Korea, but I doubt that it’s a major theme. (Then again, those places barely have a “pop culture”.) The only cases where I’ve seen the mass media glorifying the mass-murder of civilians come from the United States. *Left Behind *and Team America: World Police are the ones that come to mind.
Team America was a satire I believe and as such I don’t think it glorifies mass murder. I haven’t actually seen or read Left Behind but I’m not sure if the end of the world counts as mass murder.
Admittedly I’ve seen only a few minutes of Team America; maybe I shouldn’t judge. The impression I got was that the goal was to trivialize everything down to the postmodernist, using-irony-to-undermine-everything state where nothing’s good and nothing’s bad, including mass killing. Left Behind is a less ambiguous case. All the good people are zapped up to Heaven. A much larger contingent of unworthy people are left on Earth, and they’re steadily wiped out by disease, warfare, meteors, earthquakes, and whatnot. The authors obviously want the reader to view all this as part of God’s plan and think of it as the grand culmination of human history. I don’t think anyone who read the books would deny that the general tone is gloating at people’s suffering.
On the flip side, I just remembered this article about the Turkish film Valley of the Wolves. I guess that might fit what rippingtons is looking for. Of course, Turkey is usually considered among the Muslim countries most friendly to the West.
I don’t think even North Korea rejoices in large numbers of American civilians dying or getting injured. IIRC, they have in the past issued condolence statements for disasters in the US. The same can be said for Iran; they’ve also issued condolence statements before.
rippingtons_fan, in fact you can find mean, inhumane, petty, hateful people everywhere. And some of them are in positions of power or of high media visibility, and they take America as an example of that which needs smiting. Heck, the Revs. Fallwell and Robertson at first said that 9/11 was an example that God himself was pissed at America.
At the same time there are humane, empathetic people everywhere who are saddened by any great calamity that strikes the innocent.
What you will find a lot of is approval of anything that, how should I phrase it, “takes us down a peg”. But that will be the attitude towards ANYONE who is The Big Man On Campus.
I’m sure you could find individuals in just about any country (including THIS one) where some bone head or other would rejoice in America’s misfortune. For instance when I was in France a few years ago I saw that some of the WWII US grave sites had been marked up by some asshole or other (I believe they have been cleaned up since)…this however didn’t indicate that all Frenchmen felt that way though.
A more prevelant attitude (though by no means wide spread) would be simple shadenfraud (hopefully spelled right) over a disaster in the US (I saw some of this myself when I was traveling abroad post-9/11). For the most part I think you’ll get vague condolences…most people in other countries aren’t really that focused on the US one way or the other…IMHO.
This seems a pretty odd question to me. I don’t think people anywhere on this planet are given to celebrating natural disasters, whether they occur in the USA or anywhere else.
Equally, I’m sure the vast majority of people in other countries don’t give a second thought to America in their day-to-day lives, unless of course American soldiers are shooting up their homes and families or the USA is otherwise interfering in their lives. :rolleyes:
I often hear my fellow Americans claim everyone else hates us and celebrates our disasters. Usually, as an excuse for why we shouldn’t feel sorry about bombing/raping/torturing/murdering them; after all, “they hate us anyway”.
I’m kinda skeptical that even in Iran or N. Korea the average person was overjoyed, or even really cared one way or the other, about Katrina or other American natural disasters. A mullah or two might have given a sermon saying it was retribution from Allah or some such, but as already pointed out, preachers in the US did that too.
A short hearsay anecdote: a friend is a pilot for Cathay Pacific. He was in Shanghai for 9/11. The bar he was in put on free drinks when the news came out, as did most of the bars in the neighbourhood.
There were news photos and videos of Palestinians cheering for joy and firing guns into the sky in celebration of the 9/11 attacks, so it wasn’t unanimous.
On the other hand, both Arafat and Qaddafi offered condolences and made offers to help, so there was a lot of love goin’ out to the Americans post-9/11.
Its a fair question. By comparison over here, in the Australian media Indonesians are portrayed as fervently anti-Australian. Yet Australians who do business in Indonesia describe such prejudice as isolated, and usually associated with party movements.
I see. Since you don’t hear such things ( suuuure you don’t ), it’s utterly impossible that someone else might. You, of course have me monitored at all times and know what other people say to me.
You don’t seem to see the irony here…which isn’t unusual. Unless of course you are some how tied into hundreds of millions of people who you can then freely paint with your broad brush of course. (*but, but…all MY friends voted against Nixion! Its impossible he could have been elected… *)
I’m sure you don’t get it…c’est la vie. Or maybe de rigeur in your case, ehe?
*)