i've been having some convos with for lack of better words, normies more recently again and i've had a string of people just have NO IDEA how many countries the US has either overthrown, attempted to overthrow or have influenced in some way. Usually it all starts from explaining how the US is inherently a very right wing country and always has been. i've talked to a lot of different people about shit kinda like this for years and it's kinda wearing me down how little anyone knows anything about so much shit the evil empire has done. like i actually feel like the Charlie Day always sunny conspiracy board meme sometimes just carrying on a conversation, referencing some events or whatever. idk if anyone else feels this way sometimes, i just felt like venting a bit cause it made me feel actually bad in a way that i especially didn't like and felt like, i guess, alone??
Yeah talking about well documented things that this country did will get you called a conspiracy theorist. It's like, look, they admitted it. Definitely know what you mean, it's impossible
the worst type of response is when they're acknowledging really bad things happened and being open to the idea that there is truly a lot of evil shit the US has done is then believing we're somehow different. like all of these people lived through the Iraq and Afganistan wars, but cannot detach the idea that historical evil the US has done is somehow not related to the current US???? it's extremely annoying I can hardly form coherent responses to this type of mentality cause it legit hurts my brain trying to figure out how to just say that's not true without being so blunt about it which is very dismissive in conversations like this
It's incredible propaganda tbh. I think it also meshes with how people want to feel. It's easy to look at people who you don't support, you don't vote for, or whatever, in the past and say "those people were bad" but it's harder to really say "We are bad". People don't want to admit it to themselves, because then they'll have to do something about it or at the least, will feel bad about the US.
But that's why the propaganda works so incredibly well. Also, it's clear as day that this kind of propaganda couldn't be disseminated in such an efficient way without the media - having an "unbiased" media tell you that actually all the state enemies are completely and unreedemably evil and America is wholesome #1 anti authoritarian pro democracy country will affect how people view the country.
Deep in their head, they are going to have this base of information that they may not even know where it came from, that is screaming America good, [enemy] bad. The process of getting rid of that propaganda is a long one, and usually the person has to want to learn.
All to say, I don't know what the answer is, but I know it's gonna be slow going.
:100-com: exactly. maybe im bad for feeling this way but some people who are really old, it is just not worth trying to flip their entire world view over, really, if they aren't actively rich and or donating or contributing to politics in anyway there is little reason to grill them on their archaic idea of what the US actually is. I can completely see how much more comfortable it is for so many people to just believe what they want to believe and never be challenged on it. Ironically, at the same time, i feel like this is exactly part of the reason why this country continues to decline in so many ways. there has to be a massive generation shift in order to even attempt to legitimately change how this country thinks, feels and acts. that's a fuckin massive concept lol
I do believe sadly time and old people dying is what will be necessary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle basically. And that's SCIENTISTS.
Might help to point out the continuity in key government officials. John Bolton was in the Trump administration, the federal judges who signed off on torture during the mid-2000s are still there, Fauci was in his current role when the feds let AIDS become an epidemic, etc.