Wars the US waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan following September 11, 2001 caused at least 4.5 million deaths and displaced 38 to 60 million people, with 7.6 million children starving today, according to studies by Brown University.
Don’t be sorry. I was born in Russia, living in the US. You can love your country without supporting the government. You’re not responsible for what your government is doing if you don’t have any way to stop it. Just speak out when you can.
I neither love America nor the government. Our culture is a disease, our cities need to be razed or entirely redesigned, and our land needs to be returned to natives, to Mexico, and to the descendants of slaves.
Our entire society is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.
There is an American culture of world-historical importance. It’s just not the white culture. Black music for instance has unparalleled influence partly because of its quality. White music culture has made no contributions to modern (including popular art) equal to, say, Jazz, Blues, Gospel, RnB, Hip-Hop, detroit techno, chicago house…I could go on. Of course white people in general, especially the bourgeois, have little to no access to or knowedge of these cultures, unless its been given to them through a gentrified, fetishized filter that doesn’t understand the value of these musical traditions. Alternatively they treat is as jokey party music for them to sniff coke to.
Apart from that I agree that the mainstream of American culture is literal proof of the decadence of a civilization.
I’d also say that apart from key land needing to be returned to give to native americans and key minorities, the most important thing is that there is equitable land and housing reform that ensures an equitable distribution and standard of living for everyone in the broader working class, though this doesn’t preclude certain groups being given more immediate priority.
But yeh America is satanic. Literal Mammon worshipers.
Yeah you got it. American white bourgeois society is a virus. And you’re right, all the unique music that came out of the USA is a product of oppressed minorities. Even pasty white conservative country music is a perverse mockery of southern/appalachian folk music that has roots in African and Celtic traditions. The banjo is an African instrument for instance.
White suburbs are a genuine blight and their expansion is cooking the planet.
Yeah I mean if we were being more fair we would not only have to trace these genres genealogically through Jazz to blues and gospel, ragtime, and also to Caribbean and Spanish music (especially for alot of rhythmic ideas) and also West African music (blues, pentatonic scales), but also recognize that European classical music also had deep influence on early black american music.
The only country music I’ve ever unironically enjoyed was bluegrass, and that confirms our point. That being said I’m nothing of an aficionado of this stuff so I dont doubt there’s decent stuff I dont know.
But yh white suburbs are really where culture goes to die. It reminds of a comment Pasolini once made, that only the lower classes and the upper classes in history have produced real culture. The middle classes have been cultureless on average.
Too true. There are some nations worth appreciating, if that’s how you see the world, but every holdover from the American colonial project(s) is illegimate in comparison and barely has what you could call a “national identity” (nor should they)
Lol ok bud.
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“Please love America” -Russian guy
Living in Russia I was told that US is the mortal enemy and everything is their fault. Living in the US I’ve learned that it’s actually Russia that is evil and Russians can’t be trusted.
It’s all bullshit. All major governments are playing their own game and citizens are just disposable pawns in that game. Hating each other because of where on the map we were born is just playing into that game. I love and miss my “motherland”. But my motherland is under siege and I can’t go back. The US is far from perfect, but if I still lived in Russia I’d be in jail or worse simply for what I’ve posted so far on Lemmy. Also, since I moved I’ve seen Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden as the president. In the old country it’s been Putin, Putin, Medvedev (Putin), and Putin.
US isn’t “good”. But it is better.
nope. sorry, but your motherland hasn’t been responsible for nearly as much death and destruction as the USA. You think that having a different president means that there is some sort of functional democratic process that represents the people of the US? That is farcical. Sure, it might suck to be in russia and you could go to jail for the things you have said, but Russia is what it is today because of the US’s antagonism towards the soviet union and russia in particular. Russia as it exists now is a consequence of US involvement.. The US ruling-class doesn’t care about democracy or freedom in Russia. The soviet union had its contradictions and problems, but a lot of the soviet union’s problems were the direct result of US meddling. The US has been quite open about that, from its invasion in 1918 to its arming of right-wing extremists with the goal of killing as many soviets as possible. But working people in the US never really decided any of that, because the US government does not have either the form or the function of a governance body that represents working-peoples interests.
Just because you live in the US now, and your life might be better now, doesn’t mean that the US government isn’t the worlds villain… It is no matter how nice you have it there. You can check in with the millions of dead in southeast asia, or the millions dead and displaced in the middle east.
Oh fuck off with that. We could sit here all day copying and pasting Wikipedia articles about crimes against humanity committed by both nations. My life is better here. It probably could be even better somewhere else, but it’s not like moving countries is something people can easily do. You want the world to have a clear constant villain but that’s not how that works. US commuted genocides, Russia/USSR sure as shit did, same with China now. Every country has committed some kind of an atrocity in the recent past. It doesn’t meant that they can be forgiven, forgotten, or excused. All I’m saying is that neither the Russian or the American governments represent the people. It’s just that the foundation of America was built in individualism. And because of that the individual still have more rights and freedoms then in Russia.
idk, i think you missed the point of the things i linked. Two of them were the president of the US knowingly endorsing Yeltsin’s extralegal seizure of power (the second was his approval of Yeltsin and support after Yeltsin shelled Russian parliament for “going communist” … Those lost two article weren’t just to show the crimes of the USA, it was to show that the United States doesn’t give a fuck about democracy or russia, they gave more evidence of the US purposefully interfering in Soviet/Russian affairs in order to harm the Soviet/Russian people. Russia exists as it does today as a consequence of US foreign policy.
I still stand by what I said. The Soviet Union/Russia and the PRC have never come anywhere close to crimes of the US government. In my lifetime, the US has invaded and committed war crimes, or undermined democracy, in dozens of countries… The same cannot be said of any other country in the same timeframe
If you actually live in America, then I’m guessing you haven’t been poor in America. It’s extremely difficult, without the opiate of capitalist realism and liberal ideology, to believe that you have rights in any real world sense when you are dirt-poor in America.
It’s interesting, in your justification for the supposed superiority of the US, that you are only citing your anecdotal case that you have found your life subjectively better. What actually matters, especially if you’d like to play the game of which country has more democratic policy in the limited sense of in which country were the massive conditions of life most securely guaranteed as per the interests and desires of the populace, then it is very difficult to hand the medal to the US, especially if you have even the slightest knowledge of US economic, social and political history, to say nothing of its imperialist geopolitics. Your justification is a purely selfish, narcisistically egoist one. I don’t blame anyone for trying to get out of a shitty economic situation, but that isn’t really as absolutely relevant as you seem to think at the end of the day when we are discussing whether or not the US’s material effects on the rest of world justify us qualifying it as deeply reactionary, in fact perhaps the main impediment to a progressive future for humanity.
The social, political and economic collapse of the USSR is directly linked, directly caused, by the US (and the West). Capitalistic reforms had already begun under Khruschev, which allowed for the further development of black-market enriched criminal classes who would form the social base of the mafiosi who would start to devore the Russian economy in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. The traumatic experience of Russia in the last 30-40 years, with the literal mass death and one of the largest drops in living standards in any modern country’s history (and starting from a period of great development), was the blindingly, unequivocally, undeniable consequence of deeping capitalist reforms and political liberalization during the 80s, notably under Gorbachev. The advice was American. The advisors were American. The model was American. The pressures that had brought the USSR to this point were American. Modern Russia is a creation of America.
If we want to talk about quality of life, then the best time to be a Russia, was without a doubt, the 50s-70s. It is not a coincidence that a very high number of Russians, especially older ones who actually lived in the USSR, and even more so if they lived during the 50s-70s, are deeply nostaghic for it, even if this nostalgia is born out of a sense of relatively greater economic security that they were ensured during this period.
You do not seem to be grasping immuredanchorite’s point though, which is that if we even want to get into a discussion over which of these two political powers is ‘better’, morally or ethnically (to the extent that this even makes sense), you are not going to be able to do so coherently without looking at how the political entity we call the US has acted, and what it’s real, material effects and consequences have been. I.e., not only can you not answer those questions without considering politics (which is literally one of the most incoherent yet common assumptions of liberal ideology), but that you also cannot escape the essential importance of geopolitics. By any geopolitical measure, the US is the most reactionary and viciously imperialist power in the contemporary era.
I’d add that, reactionary as some aspects of the USSR or the PRC have unfortunately been (inevitable, because we are talking about history, not your abstract moral ideal, the purvue of ultra-‘leftists’ and reformists and social democrats everywhere), there is no evidence, at any point in these states’ histories, of genocide in the sense of planned destruction of a racial or ethnic group. You’re also going to have to be clearer about what you mean by ‘atrocity’, though yes, these happened.
Also, you need to make clear what you understand by the term ‘right’, because if you are using it in a liberal sense, you are going to find that communists do not understand it in that way, i.e. in a purely abstract, negative sense. Although even if we did just want to understand it in the latter sense, the existence of money as such as institution is an immense restriction on the negative freedom of the vast majority of people.
Thank you for sharing your opinion despite the constant pressure of tankies here.
This word has lost all its meaning
It was worse on Reddit.
Really? This is not my impression at all. On Reddit, it was too American sided, but I would rarely read any tankie comments, here it’s inevitable, they will brigade on any subject related to war or American influence. Although top comments and votes seem to be more moderate on Lemmy, you’ll consistently find highly upvoted replies with whataboutism, and rationalization or negation of Russian regimes’ crimes.
Reddit was a lot more ban happy. And because it had, and still has, a lot more users, a higher quantity of those users are going to hold radical views. So, you’d say something, it would get down voted to oblivion, a bunch of people would report you, and you’d get banned.
Here, at least, they’re mostly over on lemmygrad and don’t have power over other instances. They come out of the woodwork, but they don’t have the same silencing power they had on reddit. And this goes for both sides. “Conservative” subreddit marks almost every post as “flared users only”. They don’t ban you, they just don’t let you speak.
It really does feel like this place is more moderate and it’s very refreshing to see.
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5 million dead buddy. You can’t nationalism that away unless you think brown people are subhuman.
See how racist listening to americans makes you? You’re a “Russian orc” buddy, the slava ukrani brunch ghouls will never accept you, stop embarassing yourself.
Ok bud.
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Fuck communism. It ruined my home.
how old are you?
30s
Ok vlad, you seem like the diaspora joe archetype. Its an archetype of people from non-north american (can be expanded to non-western) countries that get indoctrinated by treat ideology and now worship their states. You were probably raised by ex-soviet stem types?
We ruined your home idiot, and we did it for money.
You’re the type who’d rather spend the rest of life in his rocking chair, shaking a finger and warning the youths about the dangers of change bc you once had a negative brush with it. Kindly sit down.
You’re the kind that does shit without thinking, just because you want to do “something”.
That’s a big assumption
Back at ya
bro your home would be a cattle field without the efforts of your socialist ancestors
I’ve seen my home. It is a cattle field.
yeah, now that your new generation has embraced greed and idiocy
You once conquered the stars and were a source of revolutionary optimism and workers rights that inspired the globe
now you are nothing
We were nothing then and we are nothing now. You echo chamber conceived reality does not match up with the world outside and that must be scary, I get it.
By nothing you mean:
That’s just off the top of my head. Saying they were evil is one thing (A stupid thing), but saying they were nothing? That’s just plain fucking idiocy. Show some respect to your past.
All of that would be possible without killing millions of your own people in an attempt to spread an idealogy.