alt Hacker News> the damage to the myth of US as the 'good guy' that is immense.
People don't live under a rock. The US is an empire and has acted like it for at least 80 years if not more. The fantasy that the US is part of the good guys depends on how much you believe the propaganda.
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I grew up in Eastern Europe. For 90% of people there at the time, US = paradise. Maybe it was propaganda, I don't know. Later in life I got travel a lot and meet a lot of Americans and for most, their moral and ethics are at the exact opposite of what the US is showing now.
I don’t understand why this has been downvoted, it’s true that the US has done many interventions in the past based on vague rationale or simply by misleading public opinion. And it has always been a part of its’ state propaganda to make it look like they are on the good side, doesn’t mean they are though every time. The difference this time is that they didn’t even try that much to shape a proper narrative.
The US has been annexing land almost since its foundation. Ask the original Native Americans. Or the people of Hawaii. Or Puerto Rico.
The US USP was essentially just its success as a consumer economy, with relative prosperity compared to Rest of World and nice things to buy.
And there used to be nominal free speech. You could criticise the government, and nothing would happen unless you became organised enough to start threatening capital, in which case you might well be murdered.
That's the good news. The bad news is that non-whites in the US have always had a much worse time of it, and the veneer of freedom has always been very thin for them.
Now the US has stopped pretending to be a creative economy and has decided not to hide its addiction to violent extraction.
So we'll see how that works out for everyone.