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Edited by Peregrine:
2/1/2015 2:34:30 AM
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From a European to the US
I'm not an adult, I'm still in high school and today is a pretty down day for me.
I remember when I used to look up at the US and what it was, it's history, it's present and (most) of it's ways of doing things.
[spoiler]Then I learned about the middle eastern conflicts in school, about Saddam Hussein and Koweit, Afghanistan and Bin Laden.
I felt betrayed.
The one country I thought that no-one could possibly hate. That fought an empire single-handedly (granted with a little french help), and that fought itself so that slavery could be stopped.
[/spoiler]
America for me was the country not many had the chance of seeing much, but everyone felt a part of.
[spoiler]But I want to know, to help me see America the way I did before, do you realize at least part of what you did? That Bin Laden was CIA trained? That the Iraqi conflict (that Germany and France both opposed and that was not allowed by the United nations which [u]you[/u] created) was led for the sole purpose of securing oil reserves? And that this violence imposed on a country who's innocent people you terrified into terrorism?[/spoiler]
All I need is restoring of faith because even if I've never been there, I still felt like I had but I don't anymore.
Do you know now?
Disclaimer (because I'm anticipating):
I do [b]not[/b] hate the American troops who risked their lives doing a job no-one else was ever capable of doing. Many coming back scarred both mentally and physically and I can't imagine losing a friend the way many did.
I respect them because they upheld many of our shared values allowing our freedom of speech and actions.
I realize that many will reply disapprovingly and I'm not particularly fragile so let the hate flow.
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Yep. It's quite shameful the way we handle things. Obama's war policies haven't been anywhere near as disastrous as Bush's war policies. Thankfully we don't have a war hawk in the White House anymore. Obama is pretty levelheaded for the most part; although there has been a lot of blowback with his drone strikes.
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If you lived here you'd forget all about it and think of each day as normal :T
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14 RepliesI don't approve of most of our actions either. However, it irks me very much when Europeans criticize us for it. We are only following the example that you set for us. Barely a century ago Europeans had empires across the entire world and were invading lesser nations for selfish and/or stupid reasons. You started two world wars over nationalism. You attempted genocide against my Aztec ancestors. You committed genocide against Tasmanians. And yet you have the nerve to criticize the United States for imperialism? Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?
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The average American didn't do that. Stop looking up to countries. Blame the govt
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1 word[spoiler]creationists[/spoiler]
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4 RepliesI'm an Egyptian Muslim, and when I came to America, I was kind of disappointed by the blatant hatred towards me
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2 RepliesOh our government is all sorts of shady, but largely I'm not worried, it's still way better than many superpowers throughout history.
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To sum it all up: [i]Anything is possible with the right OIL[/i] Makes me sad myself.
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It's always America and the UK who get the blame for 'illegal invasions of Middle East', bollocks, were the only ones who had the balls to do something to stop the crazed jihadi goat -blam!-ers
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I've never seen such an awful misspelling of Kuwait.
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Politics man... That's how the world really works.
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Yea we trained him but we never trained him with the purpose of fighting against us, but to fight with us.
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1 ReplyGo back to sipping tea, Britbong.
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Shut up. No one cares.
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7 RepliesEdited by LoneJackal: 2/1/2015 3:24:42 AMAs an American myself, I can honestly say that every nation- including ours -is imperfect. We screw up. Yeah, we do. We're only human. But here's the thing: we try to do what we think is best. We try to change things for the better. Sometimes, we try to change the wrong things. We do something, thinking it will help, and it goes terribly wrong. Or, sometimes our intentions are selfish. We're trying to help our own community- and we think your community isn't really our problem. (We get criticized for 'sticking our nose where it's not wanted' a lot, so sometimes we think it's best to leave a problem alone.) We don't (can't) always do what's best for everyone- sometimes we put ourselves first. And the results aren't always great. Well, that's life. We can't predict the future. I'm not saying I agree with everything that's happened with my government. I don't. But I don't think that we did many things with purely malicious intent. Also, might I add, America has its fair share of intelligent and wonderfully kind people. Just like every other nation in the world. Don't judge us for what we didn't do. What I'm really trying to say, I guess, is not to lose all faith just because mistakes happened.
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2 RepliesEdited by steg567: 2/16/2015 3:25:26 PMAlot of the things that you hear about the U.S. are exaggerated or just plain un true. Theres this bandwagon of hate towards the U.S. one of the worst and most popular of these bandwagon beliefs is the idea that the iraq war was for oil but the nation that is benefiting the most from iraqi oil in not the U.S. its China. Also it is well known that sadam did have WMD's which were chemical weapons that he used on the kurds, when people hear WMD they think nuke but both chemical and biological weapons are WMD's.
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It is true that the terrorists were trained by the CIA, as is many of what we have done. We are not the "good guys" sometimes either. During the Cold War the United States did many things that were immoral because we believed they were justified in our struggle against the U.S.S.R. While some of these things such as the read scare of the 1950's with the McCarthy Trials has little impact on our current word other things had much longer lasting impacts. A good example of this is Vietnam, many Americans believed in something called the "Domino Effect" which stated that if Vietnam fell to communist forces, that Communism would spread uncontrollably throughout Southeast Asia and then the world. In order to prevent what we decreed as unacceptable we supported a regime that was, while opposed to communists, hated by its people. Many of the Vietnamese we fought towards the beginning of the war were in fact South Vietnamese who had the favor of the majority of the South Vietnamese people. During the 1980's the Soviet Union was invading Afghanistan, and in retaliation we funded Al Qaida to stop the Russian invasion. We overlooked that they were Islamic extremists as we were following the time old adage "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". This overlook lead to the rise and empowerment of these extremists and start us along the path to the chaos in the Middle East. What I'm asking you to take from this is that the United States is not as perfect as you'd like it to be, but most of what we have done is with good intentions. We have just as much dirt on our hands as any other country. While I will absolutely admit that good intentions clears all of the implications of those intentions, most Americans want to help. We just don't leap before we jump, so to speak. Please don't think that all Americans are blood thirsty imperialists, as there are a good deal of people like me who understand that some of what we do is wrong and instead of whining about the injustice, want to help make sure that we can fix those wrongs and improve our nation. I know that is a lot of text, and the wording is absolutely rubbish, but I hope that might ease your mind... Or at least give you some perspective.
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America wasn't hated until we invaded Afghanistan to "stop the spread of communism" and invaded Iraq to "Find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction." [spoiler]I don't understand why people still believe those lies.[/spoiler]
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Please don't think that what our leaders do define a nation many of the population don't approve of these acts. Go on a tour of the states go and see what makes this nation great, the land and the people. I live in Arkansas and whenever I lose hope in our leaders I just go outside and go for a hike. This land is pure beauty and just getting outside can lift a persons day. I hope that you and others can recover your hope in the nation.
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16 RepliesWell let me clear the air on some fallacies. First. The war in Iraq was to remove Saddam Hussein a terrible dictator who terrorized his people. He was and did in fact have in his possesion WMD, most of which we found, recovered, then destroyed. Now mind you this was classified and only recently has been declassified by the intelligence chair. The reason for the declassifying was so that countless EOD techs could get there much needed treatment due to exposure to nerve agents. Second. Osama Bin Laden was a freedom fighter for the mujaheddin. He was not trained by the CIA personally as some kind of operative. We supplied the afghani rebels with military arms and training to assist in the defeat of Russia. Third. The terrorists within Iraq and Afghanistan are nearly all from outside of the country. In Iraq, a large portion however were old republican guard who join Al Qaeda. Fourth. Feel free to ask me any questions.
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Bin Landin was trained to resist Soviet invasion.
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Propaganda.
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Bin Laden was trained to resist the Soviet invasion
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1 ReplyForget about the US. WWII Russia is where it's at
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*shoots himself
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Edited by Flawless : 2/16/2015 9:45:22 AMThe average American citizen has nothing to do with what the CIA and military does to people in other countries, or have anything to do with creating the UN or nuke Japan or whatever other decisions that are made by a small group of govt and military officials. If you come to America you wouldn't be dealing with ppl who trained some dictator. That's just as bad as those ppl who say muslims should do something about terrorism, if you go to Germany you should be scared of being put in a gas chamber, or that Japanese ppl should admit that they shouldn't have slaughtered Koreans.
