Will Not Put with Anti-American Bias!

Krazy Ivan I dont hate your people, but your country is represented by you leader... your country Elected him in... your leader is the face of your country, and like it or not... your country is judged on its leadership. Why do you think the US was more popular internationally while Clinton was in power.

I wrote a very long reply here yesterday, but it got lost in the crash

Anyways, I'm gonna write a shorter one now.

Why is liberal, leftist, enviromentalist, anti-war, perceived as "anti-american" ?

The essence of democracy is a multi-party system, in which different opinions are allowed. So, these different opinions ARE american.

The whole point of democracy is that we do not have to agree with everything the goverment does. Actually, it is out DUTY to keep a very close eye on what goverment is doing, and if their actions are not in the best interest of the people it is out duty and our RIGHT to change that goverment.
Patriotism is "loving your country" and not "supporting everything the ruling party decides".

Anti-american is hating the whole USA. You are not anti-american if you point out the fallacies of the goverment or foreign policy, or if you state the obvious fact that the most powerful country on earth is indeed involved in every major thing going on in the world.


Lately, these pre-defined labels showed up: republican, democrat, liberal, everything already defined and you have to pick sides. Once you pick sides you have to support without question everything your side does and says.
What kind of twisted democracy and freedom is that???!

Another problem we have here is that people identify themselves with the party they support and take any kind of criticism directed at their party as personal insult. You might have noticed this at ATS.
People need to take a step back and re-evaluate how they view politics.
It is impossible to have a constructive dialogue and discussion if everything is taken personaly.


the_oleneo, you have to understand that what your country does, affects the whole world. Naturally, this thing called the rest of the planet will want to comment on the workings of your goverment which has greatly influenced their lives. You have to be really naive if you think that your goverment has never ever done anything wrong in the world. They have.
In a democratic society we have abslolutely every right to say that and to disagree with foreign policies of Bush administration, and to be anti-war, without being anti-american. It is not up to you to allow or not allow that.

You have voted paperclip for the Way Above Top Secret award. You have two more votes this month.

Good work paperclip good work.

That was so well worded it makes me look like a complete idiot in my previous responses trying to more or less get the same message across...

Bravo old chap!

Originally posted by specialasianX



Good work paperclip good work.

That was so well worded it makes me look like a complete idiot in my previous responses trying to more or less get the same message across...

Bravo old chap!

Thanks.
I am blushing now

Don't feel like idiot. We both got our point across, we just have a different writing style

Originally posted by paperclip
the_oleneo, you have to understand that what your country does, affects the whole world. Naturally, this thing called the rest of the planet will want to comment on the workings of your goverment which has greatly influenced their lives. You have to be really naive if you think that your goverment has never ever done anything wrong in the world. They have.
In a democratic society we have abslolutely every right to say that and to disagree with foreign policies of Bush administration, and to be anti-war, without being anti-american. It is not up to you to allow or not allow that.

I know. I can understand the criticism.

Look, I don't have a problem with a dissenting or disagreeable viewpoint that is rational but opinionated.

What I don't tolerate is the distorted, slanted, and/or prejudiced views with clear bias from people who don't take the time to consider the circumstances, facts, (or look at the big picture) and study history but instead resorting to usual partisan soundbites, loud-mouth generalization and convenient, run-of-the-mill leftist statements.

Two examples I can illustrate here for you (what expressed below are NOT my viewpoints):

Example #1:
Rational, disagreeable viewpoint: I don't think Bush is the right person to be President. I did not like the fact what he did to persuade America and the world to go to war against Iraq on the premise of questionable intelligence sources. He should wait a bit longer with the UN. I disagreed with most of his policies but I'm not exactly familiar with all of his policies, so I don't watch or read the latest news that much. I'll be happy to know more when I have the time.

Example #2:
Distorted, slanted, prejudiced viewpoint: Bush is a war criminal! He must be arrested and jailed because he broke all international laws and violated all human rights! Saddam was complying and obeying the UN! Bush is stupid chimp who doesn't know how to speak and has to rely on Mr. Nazi Co-President Cheney for help. I can't believe the stupid Americans who elected him to be their warmongering Prez again! The Americans are warmongering neo-Nazi sheep.

Now, which one you would find acceptable?

[edit on 4/22/2005 by the_oleneo]

Learn how anti-Americanism is being fostered by who and what kind of Anti-American people are!

Reductionism and Anti-Americanism
by J. R. Nyquist

Those who adhere to doctrines that reduce the universe to an easily comprehensible set of notions, tend to uphold a distorted picture of reality. We are all implicated in this tendency because we all want to understand the world, yet every form of understanding is an abridgment of reality that necessarily misunderstands the whole. Imaginative enthusiasm leads us to a constructive misremembering and a faulty arrangement of fact and context. We believe what we want to believe, and sometimes we see what we want to see. The potentially most destructive distortions are those in which persons or governments are unfairly maligned. The anti-American press in Asia, Latin America and Europe exemplify this process of distortion. The distortion, in turn, fuels terrorism and bolsters the world’s aspiring dictators who are threatened by the advance of freedom. Although the Marxist-Leninist form of communism has faded from Russia, clever and more flexible variants of anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism are forming into a compact mass. These doctrines preach the wickedness of America as the world’s leading polluter, exploiter and imperialist power. “If you want war,” wrote William Graham Sumner, “nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most fearful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside of a man’s own reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines.”

Hatred is a staple of those who seek to unify different forces under one banner. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote: “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensible of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking.” According to Hoffer, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” Hitler was once asked whether he sought the destruction of the Jews. “No,” he replied, “We should then have to invent [the Jews]. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” Hitler’s answer revealed the extent to which he understood the motivating formula of his doctrine. Today the totalitarian movements of the world are linked by one theme, one doctrine and one enmity. America is the enemy of mankind, the exploiter of the poor and oppressor of the weak. Destroy America and a better world will be possible. However dressed up, this is the doctrine of Al Qaeda. It is also the doctrine of the ruling Iranian clergy, of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, to name but a few.

The anti-American distortion is not only a phenomenon of the Third World, of a resentful Russia or emerging China. “Within some democratic countries,” explained Jean-François Revel, “a subset of the population, some political parties and a majority of intellectuals, were prone to adhere to Communism, or at least support similar ideas. For this crowd, anti-Americanism was rational, since America was identified with capitalism, and capitalism with evil.” Less rational was the Left’s willingness to swallow “the most flagrant and stupid lies about American society,” noted Revel. What troubled the French writer most of all, was the anti-Americanism of “those who feared and rejected Communism.” Hatred of America is a natural tendency in those who resent the second or third-rate status of their own countries. “It is in France that this loss … of great power status engenders the most bitterness,” Revel admitted. The imagination seeks to justify a wounded national pride. “In Latin America, emotional currents are ruled by a very old grudge: the grudge of an America that failed against an America that succeeded….”

Eric Hoffer wrote: “That hatred springs more from self-contempt than from legitimate grievance is seen in the intimate connection between hatred and a guilty conscience.” Thus it is more than sinister that Russia’s president indirectly suggested, last summer, that America was behind the Chechen terrorists who killed hundreds of children at Beslan. There is a psychology of hatred and blame that manufactures lies in the same way that a sausage factory makes sausages. It is often said that once you find out what a sausage is made of, you will never eat a sausage again. The same may be true of lies made in totalitarian hate-factories. Once you know what goes into them, you’ll never swallow one again.

But there is a human tendency to swallow everything. We want to be satisfied. We are empty and want to be full. We want answers, we want conclusions and God forbid that they lead us to further questions. Learning to see, wrote Nietzsche, involves “habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects.”

Our tendency is the opposite of repose and patience. We do not defer judgment. More often than not, we rush to judgment. Furthermore, “Seeing is believing,” and all too often believing is a cherished form of seeing (in the absence of intellectual integrity). Consider, in this light, the belief that America is a bad country led by evil men. If only the situation were that simple. Jean-Francois Revel, in a book titled Anti-Americanism, wrote as follows: “The pitying s'n-word's ritually directed against the American whipping boy by the European media … come for the most part from an ignorance so profound that it seems deliberate.”

All ideologies subvert the truth through a process in which reality is simplified by reduction. “I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties,” wrote Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. “The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.” Hitler further stated: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered.”

The key point in Hitler’s statement is the one about “understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses.” In Robert Kagan’s national bestseller Of Paradise and Power, the author struggles to understand Europe’s double standard in condemning America’s invasion of Iraq. “As the Iraq crisis approached in 2002 and early 2003,” noted Kagan, “many Europeans simply shifted their view of both international law and international legitimacy.” Why did they do this? What was the emotive cause of Europe’s shift? Kagan suggests that, in part, Europe’s double standard is a ploy to constrain the United States.

Envy is a swamp, and a feeling of thwarted ambition lies at the bottom of this swamp. As German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer once confessed: “The question now is: What will become of the Europeans given the dominant role of the United States? Will they be able to determine their own fate or will they merely be forced to carry out what has been decided elsewhere?” According to Revel, the crux of the matter is very different than that presented by Fischer. “Obsessed by their hatred and floundering in illogicality, these dupes forget that the United States … is also acting in the interest of us Europeans….”

In the end, hatred is about power and influence. More often than not, the hated object is merely “in the way.” America stands in the way of Chinese or Russian or European global dominance. Each man dreams of his own glory, and the more he dreams the more he loathes standing in the shadow of a greater man. In Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, Cassius laments that Caesar has “now become a god; and Cassius is a wretched creature….” Cassius is incensed that Caesar should “get the start of the majestic world, and bear the palm alone.” Caesar bestrides the “narrow world like a colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.”

The emotion is a powerful one. It animates ideologies and moves continents.

www.financialsense.com...
© 2005 Jeffrey R. Nyquist

You have voted paperclip for the Way Above Top Secret award. You have used all of your votes for this month.

There we go. Great post there paperclip. Couldn't have said it better myself. I think everyone should read that post whatever your views on the US are.

Originally posted by paperclip
The whole point of democracy is that we do not have to agree with everything the goverment does. Actually, it is out DUTY to keep a very close eye on what goverment is doing, and if their actions are not in the best interest of the people it is out duty and our RIGHT to change that goverment.
Patriotism is "loving your country" and not "supporting everything the ruling party decides".

Jefferson and Washington would have loved you.

(I don't know what the 'warns' were over and really don't care)

I am biased- see my tag line? I have no problem being biased.

I tried to read that Wikipedia MESS and it is terrible. Dispute is a kind word for that

I'm an American. This NWO stuff is immaterial to being an American. I'm probably a Liberal but I thought Kerry was not much if any better than Bush- and I didn't like Kerry's wife. She is a bit too smug for my taste.

I liked Edwards. He was my man. He is a go-getter.

Dean is a bonesman so not much different from Bush/Kerry for me.

I come into this thread without having participated thusfar- so I have a bit of an advantage. I got to see others views before posting

According to what little understanding I could gain from that Wikipedia mess I am anti-American. I think the ruling government is rotten to the core and the congress (house and senate) need to be recalled.

I was against the Iraq war from the beginning and have not changed. Afghanistan I am ambivalant about. We had plans in the works to invade Afghanistan since 1992- that we waited this long is amazing to me.

In the current world people tend to forget Afghanistan- it is important, they should find out why.

Back to Bush- where is the war on terrorism? It is lost and forgotten.

About 50% of Americans adults should be sent to concentration camps for education. I imagine many of the I'm an American crowd on ATS should be with them. People that don't bother to register to vote should be denied any rights. I'm not saying you should or must vote, that would be wrong. I'm saying that unless you register and participate in the political process you are nothing more than a subversive. You are a cancer on my country.

Not too many years back these people would be called communists. That term has lost its meaning, so subversive will do.

I believe in nationalism. This is one of the few beliefs 'a people' can share together that bonds them as equals. I understand that this belief fell into disfavor in the 1930s/40s but that is because it was abused.

To the Americans that are not registered to vote- are you insulted?

Ah but the_oleneo,

The pro american nationalists are just as bad as the second example you posted (which i assume wasnt actually someones actualy words but a hypothetical example)...

Examples:

Who cares what the rest of the world thinks, We're the USA we cando what we want.

If it wasnt for the USA Europe would be speaking German - Note on this one... as much as you will deny it, the war was already turning when the US joined, and Russias victories on the Eastern front played a bigger role than the allies in the west did.

when someone takes a radical irrational stance, they wont listen to the reasonable educated stance... fight fire with fire... I'm not saying all anti-americans are right and all pro-americans are wrong... # man if that was the case we wouldnt bother arguing... but bias and irrationality occurs on both sides from all levels (from members to mods) from all posters... unfortunately it is something you just have to cope with...

Hell i see alot of bigotry and bias against Islam on here... i am not islamic, but i was well taught in their ways as a child, and i can see the bias and misconception people have of islam... i dont even bother complaining about it anymore because it will always be there.

Originally posted by specialasianX
Ah but the_oleneo,

The pro american nationalists are just as bad as the second example you posted (which i assume wasnt actually someones actualy words but a hypothetical example)...

If it wasnt for the USA Europe would be speaking German - Note on this one... as much as you will deny it, the war was already turning when the US joined, and Russias victories on the Eastern front played a bigger role than the allies in the west did.

I concur with that.

Originally posted by specialasianX
when someone takes a radical irrational stance, they wont listen to the reasonable educated stance... fight fire with fire... I'm not saying all anti-americans are right and all pro-americans are wrong... # man if that was the case we wouldnt bother arguing... but bias and irrationality occurs on both sides from all levels (from members to mods) from all posters... unfortunately it is something you just have to cope with...

Yes, I have to cope with it... to a point. But I don't believe in fighting fire with fire, it just grow into bigger fire. I believe in dousing fire with water, as in dousing irrational or prejudiced opinions against all things American. It's utterly madness for some people to keep spinning out more irrational, prejudiced or partisan distorted comments to the point that other less-informed or impressible people be swayed or persuaded to swallow everything as gospel. This is clearly what Nyquist pointing out Hitler's method of using emotional propaganda to sway the less-educated people over to his views and embrace it entirely. The same anti-American folks are certainly using Hitler's method to spread emotional propaganda over the people to justify the insane rhetorical assaults on all things American and more pointedly to Bush.

Anti-americanism is just a fire to spread more fire all over the world. It's literally fueling sentiments and creating a irreversible rift between Americans and the world, needlessly.

Yeah anti-americanism is spreadign all over the world... but to blame it on irrational logic solely sounds alot like denial...

Sure some of it is irrational, just as some American Patriotism is (i will refrain from calling it Nationalism as to not fuel the fire more). But alot of the anti-american sentiment is fueled by the actions of your country and its government... its sad an entire country can be hated like this, and it not be called Racsim when it is unfounded... the world is full of hypocrisy... not much we can do about it... hell even you and me are guilty of hypocrisy sometimes, its human nature.

Originally posted by Klepto

Originally posted by KrazyIvan
i was reffering to adolf hitler and nazi germany. my point was that their countries could be very differnt from the socialist paridices they know now if the US had not gotten involved in WWI and WWII. europe would either belong to the facist(nazi's) or the communist. im sure if russia had her with germany she could of taken all of europe also. europe owes its modern day existance to the US. hell we didnt have to stay and help rebuild we could been dicks about it and left.

No offecnse dewd but wasn't Nazi germany funding initially by Wall Street?
Link 1
Link 2

I am sure the involvment of the US during world war 2 war more instigated by Japanese involvment..

I think the confusion is in the fact that many people do not hate the American people but think the administration is bunk..

well tell them that the current US administration does not represent every freaking one of us!