Comradeship // Freechat

People like e.g. the Lebanese (just one example) get that there are a variety of cultures in the world.

They meet someone and are perceptive of the fact that they'll have different values, thoughts, etc.

Americans meet people and assume they'll think the "normal" way.

I have been asked "Do you vote Democrat or Republican" and had to explain that other countries have different parties.

Another example: I have had to explain that the words 'civil war' have a general meaning, don't refer to one war in the USA one time.

It's not that Americans even say this in a domineering way, they just seem confused.

The short version of the answer, that someone far more articulate than me can explain better is: in the USA, we're fed the line "America #1 best nation" from the minute we're born until the day we die, from any of the following list: parents, teachers, preachers, TV, movies, etc. Years and years of that tends to take deep roots, especially before the internet made it easier and easier to spread reality far enough to break through the American propaganda noise.

The vast, vast majority of Americans are like this.

I once had a coworker from Azerbaijan. I was his only coworker who knew where his country is. He was baffled and appalled at the general ignorance.

"It was part of the Soviet Union!"

Poor dude thought America teaches literally anything about its past or present rivals in schools. After that, another coworker just called him "Russian" for the whole rest of the time I worked there.

Americans are chauvinist little piggies who should be pitied were we not so destructive. The vast majority of the symptoms you describe stem from intentionally curated ignorance. People here can't be taught about other cultures, lest we cease being amenable to their exploitation. The fundamental approach with which we engage with the world is also tailored to this end-- our noble troops protect our freedoms (enable hyper exploitative capitalist extraction), those criminals deserve what's coming to them (maintaining the world's largest prison population, who, conveniently can be legally enslaved), whites are superior to other races (justifying the maintenance of immense wealth disparities accrued over 200 years of discriminatory policies) etc. What you are witnessing is the artificial skin stretched over the gleaming terminator skeleton of american imperial hegemony.

Of course the communists you engaged with are better, we recognize and reject all of these framings. It can't be stated enough just how much deprogramming it takes to be a communist in the US.

That's scratching the surface. Reddit is a whole different can of worms-- the pedophilia shit for example is a distinctive reddit phenomenon... Along with a lot of the other bad takes one would expect from a large concentration of white men employed in high paying industries.

Stay off reddit and you will be happier I think :)

I don't think my other comment really answers your question, so I'll be clearer. This phenomenon is not just a Soviet cliché. It is a clear picture of the American people's knowledge about the outside world. A high schooler who can point to France and Germany on a map is doing better than most of their peers.

Online is the only place you can find any American who knows anything. The ratio offline is even worse.

Thank you very much if you read it all. It took a very long for me to write it all and I am proud, that I did it without DeepL!

Great job!

I can say, I live in the US and I notice this too. Though I don't think it's as obvious to me because I'm from the US and live here, so it's harder for me to separate out what is people being US-centric and what is not (including from myself). I do know that in learning about communism and imperialism and such things, I did grow some in nuance. For example, prior to being communist in views, I had become atheist and had a sort of generalized view that I don't believe in any religion or gods. Now my views about it is more like that I don't believe in any specific god, or gods, but I am careful about how I think about religion as a whole, especially religions of colonized peoples that I don't understand. I don't want to be a Bill Maher style atheist who uses it as a bludgeon to act morally superior to the rest of the world.

I have also tried to adopt a view like "if I don't know about this other culture, I won't try to speak for it". So sometimes I make a point to emphasize my views are based around the US cultural context. It's a strange thing, but I get the sense that because of how the empire news bubble works, many of us in the US, unless we go out of our way to find information outside the bubble or travel abroad sufficiently, end up with a very cartoonishly simplified view of the world outside the US. To some extent, I think this simplified view is a continuation of the civil/savage mythology that was used for colonialism long ago. The general picture seems to go something like: "The US (and anyone it considers an ally) is exemplary 'civil society' even if it has flaws because everybody has flaws and history is rife with exploitation, and anyone who the US considers suspect or an enemy is savage and backwards and every flaw they have isn't 'normal history', it's a direct result of them being a terrible, sick place run by terrible, sick people." The double standard is wild and the implication in it that history is just people exploiting others and a country like the US happens to be a strong entity in that equation, is so nonsensical and bizarre.

I think there's very much a "you don't know how good you have it" abuser nature to it. Where the empire news machine has to insist to people that everywhere else is somehow way worse than the US is and way worse than it could ever be, and if it's even slightly better, it must be because it's an ally of the US and is following a similar trajectory. No space is allowed in that for people to think the US could be a hellhole, for lack of a better word, because that would mean the whole image of western superiority is a whole lot of nonsense (which it is, but if the US people actually thought that as a whole, they might turn on its governance a lot more easily).

I was happy to have found Grad and it being a little less USA dominated, but having been here a little bit it's pretty clear that Hexbear is 100% yanks, 80% white, and that Lemmy.ml and Grad aren't that far off from that either. I agree with everything you wrote.

The dominant presence of US-Americans ~~on the Anglophone Internet~~ in the world is annoying

OMG THIS! Not to mention the absolutely braindead random mentions of stuff like Vietnam war, 9/11 etc in casual conversations(alluding that it is seen from their perspective), boring the ever living shit out of people with 4th of July and their elections. They think that literally the entire world is looking from their perspective. Not to mention the stuff they talk about other countries.

Where can I find US-Americans, where this cliché from the Soviet Union about them, don't apply so easily? Or am I dumb and don't see them, because the annoying ones are _so_ annoying that it is easy to notice them?

You won't. On lemmygrad/hexbear and adjacent related places, sure, but we "self-hating" Americans are effectively zero percent of the population. It's safe enough to assume most Americans you encounter online will have some reactionary opinions, incredibly insane ones really, if you probe far enough.

Some of the stuff you listed, like the sick obsession with "discovering pedophiles" is generally the far right, essentially Nazis or equivalent and mostly projection by them. I'm not going to pretend pedophilia isn't a problem in any society because it definitely is and has been throughout history, but as you alluded to the right wingers use it as a tool to simply smear those groups of people they don't like. They call anyone who disagrees with their insane fascist policies a pedophile. They call LGBTQ people pedophiles. Someone just being gay is inherently pedophilic to them. A 35 year old guy marrying a 16 year old girl... well, that's fine and actively encouraged by many of these types. But two gay 30 year old men have consensual sex... well that's pedophilia. It's "grooming" children to be gay like them one day. Why? How? Because these gay and trans people exist and that is somehow a "corrupting" force upon children. No one really explains the gap there how someone born straight suddenly has a desire to be gay because they saw two guys holding hands. But this is the current far right wing obsession in the US for sure. Everything is grooming, everyone is a pedo except the actual pedos, no they don't count... because they're right wingers and they want to support them.

A lot of the other stuff applies across the board though. The US has an insanely backwards view of crime, punishment, rehabilitation. Race is nearly comically engrained into society. It would be comical anyway if it didn't determine life or death so often...

I will say on racism though that Europeans, east and west, sure have their own special flavors of it. I mean, the entire Balkans, lol. Call a Serb an Albanian and see how they respond. It's ethnic division and such, so it's different, but also much the same. Brits, French, and Germans are currently all working together to figure out the most efficient way to explode boats of refugees fleeing to the EU. They're all extremely reactionary towards Arabs/Muslims in a way that Americans are towards Mexicans and South Americans.

I think a lot of times Western Europeans especially like to project onto Americans and act like they're better when in reality our countries are nearly identical except they have better social services. That's about it. The populations act similarly, not the same, but similarly. It would literally make me burst into laughter if a Brit or French person said Americans are racist implying their countries are not. I mean seriously they have parties, just like the US, built solely around how best to shoot migrants. So I really do not respect criticism like that from Western European people, although I've only had much experience dealing with Brits who are probably some of the most reactionary (maybe Germans are worse, hard to say).

But anyway, overall, many of your points are valid for large portions of the population and if you expect to find people who aren't like that, you can, but it's like digging for... I dunno, a diamond in a mountain of shit or something. Extremely rare. Basically non-existent.

Thanks to unequal exchange, folks in other countries have shit internet. That's why it's dominated by the Yankoids.

I do think your points are valid, though I think part of the reason for Americans mostly viewing everything in American context comes down to the size of the U.S. The country is so big and there is even a bit of diversity of culture in different regions. Each U.S. state was (debatablely) originally meant to act as its own nation, with the federal government being something more akin to the EU.

The analogy isn’t perfect, but what I am getting to something here. Though I have never been to Europe, I do understand that there is a larger breadth of culture, largely a product of much more long standing civilization and history, most of which developed centuries ago when long distance travel was less easy. In the modern era, it is more common to travel in between countries and even speak multiple languages, making it much more obvious how diverse the cultures of the world can be.

Coming back to America, it is a settler colonial nation that is much younger in scope, so the culture is a bit more hegemonic but far larger in scope. All that is to say, an American who lives in New York could travel to Florida (roughly 1100 miles), and the culture would be a bit different, but no where’s near the equivalent travel of, say, a trip from Poland to Italy.

Again, I want to be clear, this is not a defense, just an explanation of part of the reason you see such American centric discussion. For many Americans, even if they have traveled, they very well may have largely only ever experienced the greater American sphere of culture.