What makes you think it hasn't? How do you know all those drone strikes were on bad people? How do you know that standards of evidence before employing military force haven't been slacked off to the point of meaninglessness? How do you know those secret FISA courts are actually giving full and complete due-process? How do you know that every person in the world's largest slave-labor force definitely deserves to be there? There is an awful lot of stuff that one could point to as being fascist in the modern US system.
And we have a habit of "military adventurism" ourselves... we got ourselves into Iraq through acts of aggression, and that's far from the first.
This is precisely the problem discussed in the article and the comments here - the framing of "us, good wholesome people who love our country, vs dirty vile Russians who support an evil military aggressor" is itself the result of propaganda and messaging. No country is going to message themselves as being the bad guys.
Most people support their country because it's what one does, and there's immense social pressure to do so. And we tend to rationalize away the bad because "well, there's always some bad, but it's mostly good". Most people really don't have (and aren't allowed to have) a full picture of whether the sum is actually good or not, we just assume it.
So in the end, Germans support German tyranny, Russians support Russian tyranny, and Americans support American tyranny, because that's what one does. Why do you think you (or americans in general) are the exception here?
> Why do you think you (or americans in general) are the exception here?
That was precisely my point, I said there's Nazi-minded people in every country. It's not country against country but democracy vs. autocracy. Unfortunately when autocracy takes over it is very difficult to get democracy back, you can't vote to go back to democracy any more. But as long as there's still little bit of democracy left, what you can do is vote for more democracy, not less.
What makes you think it hasn't? How do you know all those drone strikes were on bad people? How do you know that standards of evidence before employing military force haven't been slacked off to the point of meaninglessness? How do you know those secret FISA courts are actually giving full and complete due-process? How do you know that every person in the world's largest slave-labor force definitely deserves to be there? There is an awful lot of stuff that one could point to as being fascist in the modern US system.
And we have a habit of "military adventurism" ourselves... we got ourselves into Iraq through acts of aggression, and that's far from the first.
This is precisely the problem discussed in the article and the comments here - the framing of "us, good wholesome people who love our country, vs dirty vile Russians who support an evil military aggressor" is itself the result of propaganda and messaging. No country is going to message themselves as being the bad guys.
Most people support their country because it's what one does, and there's immense social pressure to do so. And we tend to rationalize away the bad because "well, there's always some bad, but it's mostly good". Most people really don't have (and aren't allowed to have) a full picture of whether the sum is actually good or not, we just assume it.
So in the end, Germans support German tyranny, Russians support Russian tyranny, and Americans support American tyranny, because that's what one does. Why do you think you (or americans in general) are the exception here?