This is absolutely a myth.
How can you say that when the USA supported great democrats like Augusto Pinochet, Fulgencio Batista, and Saddam Hussein? Among many others.
This is an example of the indoctrination that I was talking about. Americans have been taught the exact opposite of what is true and they aggressively believe it. Not only did America not spread democracy, we undermined, many, many times. America spread crony capitalism under the guise of spreading democracy.
It was my experience growing up, at least, that it is the pervasive attitude in our public school system and what you hear in political speeches.
This is a myth that i was taught. The Marshall Plan was the exemplar presented to us. That is one of the things i resented about Reagan, he disabused me if the notion that America spread Democrat abroad.
Exactly, we’re taught that America spreads democracy; that America is about freedom, and that America is the land of the immigrant.
When in fact, we have overthrown several democratically elected governments; we are an authoritarian state in which police regularly kill unarmed citizens; and our masked secret police are carrying out a series of pogroms against immigrants.
You’re surely right, but a little sense of timing and history is relevant too.
The masked secret police started last year. The large scale killing of random civilians got going in the 1980s. The overthrowing dates from the 1940s.
Those of us indoctrinated as kids in the 1960s had a very different reality to compare to than do little kids being indoctrinated during the current criminal regime.
The Marshall Plan went to countries who were already democracies (well, West Germany was a democracy again, I suppose, if one were to be pedantic). So even then it was a poor example.
The US killed First Nation civilians early and often. That had pretty much stopped by the time we were kids, because the remaining people had either been confined to “reservations” or assimilated.
The US has lynched Black civilians since the end of the civil war. (And enslaved them prior to that, of course.) I don’t think the frequency of the current “random killings” is any higher than the historical rate of lynchings. It’s just that we had an interval when things were getting better. And many of us grew up during that time.
One, I think you have a very rosy idea of what the police were up to before the advent of video cameras. Two, the Klan ran wild in the south once reconstruction was ended. Also, remember events like Tulsa where Black neighborhoods were burnt to the ground with support from the authorities.
What’s changed is that some voices are breaking through the indoctrination, which is why we elected an insane fascist gameshow host.
Italy? Austria? Turkey is debatable, it had a one party system until after WW2, and yeah Germany had just stopped being a Dictatorship.
Mostly during Reconstruction, the Klan was suppressed in the 1870s by the Ku Klux Klan Act - Wikipedia
Remember, the thread is about kids being taught the USA is the best country, Not many people who were kids in the 1920s are alive today, and no one from the reconstruction era.
And sure, the USA has had many issues in the past- but it is not alone in that.
Then why are you talking about the Marshal Plan? This thread is about why and how Americans are indoctrinated with the idea that America is the best country and a lot of posters are proving that they are indoctrinated.
When someone says this, I’m not sure how to take it. It strikes me as dismissive: if everybody has issues, then you can just factor them out, and not consider them.
I replied to make a correction .
Conditions change over time and place and circumstance. Black and white are joined by shades of gray. Eisenhower presided over coup in Iran (BAD) but diminished colonial power in Suez crisis (GOOD). Plenty examples of good, bad and shades of gray.
BUT it is a fact that USA has often been – whether deserved or not – a symbol of liberty and democracy and sheer goodness, both within the USA and in the eyes of foreigners. Google for yourself if you need examples.
In service of Nasser, himself hardly a bastion of democracy - not quite so unalloyed a good.
Often, sure. Not so much in my country but then, you know, our greatest leader was shopped by the CIA…
But all you’re saying to me is “the myth exists”, which I’m not disagreeing with. It’s the actual helping part the US has historically sucked at.
I think i brought it up, as something i was taught was an example of America “spreading democracy”.
To be a bit balanced about this, I don’t think the project was really ever about going around establishing new democracies from whole cloth, though that’s how it was presented. It was more about preventing the USSR from doing what it did in Eastern Europe, creating satellite communist dictatorships.
This project would have been a lot more noble if it did indeed involve the US setting up real democracies and then leaving them alone. But purely in terms of driving the USSR out of wherever it was trying to export its own misery and dysfunction, this was entirely the right thing to do, it’s a necessary precursor for democracy, and the world would be better if we did more of it. Russia is objectively a trash country that ruins every country it touches in service of spreading its own hegemony, it leaves behind only dictatorships, kleptocracies, or simply piles of rubble where thriving communities had been.
I know, but he said that the Tulsa massacre wasn’t relevant since it happened a long time ago, but then he brought up the Marshall Plan in the same post. Part of the indoctrination of Americans is to celebrate the good and pretend the bad is ancient history and not relevant.
I would love for someone to explain when this best nation era was for America. It’s the same question I have for MAGA: when is this greatness to which we are to return?
Was not relevant for THIS Thread. It can be quite relevant. As for the Marshal Plan, I was just correctiing a post.
1950s