I don't know if you can include Texas there - as the people who took Texas made it into its own country... thus America, as the nation we know it today, didn't take Texas - it acquired it afterwords through trade rather than invasion... but that is just my take on it.
You're right about Texas - but we took a lot more than that, half of Mexico.
In my mind, a country is defined by its people, not its government. Overall, the people in America are good people - they want to help others and when there is a crisis around them they help. Good does not = smart either... I'm not saying we are a smart nation - just that overall, the people are good. As far as I know we don't have mass amounts of people forming multiple groups bent on world domination or destruction of a nation or just killing... sure we have maybe some smaller groups - but in a nation this size it is nothing in comparison. IMO.
That's an interesting point. I only partly agree.
I think there is some of the goodness you're talking about with the people, but not as much as you think, not as much as we'd like to think.
Historically, the view I've come to of the US has been largely that the government sometimes does terrible things, for a combination of reasons, from people who want an accomplishment for the country to the desire to use power to misguided thinking about right and wrong on issues of exploitation and colonialism and dictators and other things.
There's long been a basic model of 'support a dictator over a country who will exploit that country for our benefit, and give him a cut of the rewards'. Think Marcos for just one example. And I think there's been a similar arrangement for our own country - the American people have been bribed in effect to support whatever our country does. Our safety, our wealth, has been protected, in exchange for our electing leaders and supporting their policies who do bad things to others for the benefit of US elites - with the American people given their 'cut', and, and this is important, always with a PR spin that makes the policy sound not evil for the American people to turn a blind eye to being lies.
But even that can be changing now as the world economy globalizes and the American people are losing their position of privilege to an extent, because they drain profits with their high standard of living compared to most of the world. So globalization is a way to both lower the costs of production, and to reduce the wealth of the American people which reduces their political power as well. Greatly.
Let me make an analogy for another point from above. The recent shooting of that young black man at the gas station, where the officer lied about what happened. In a racist society, the public is more than happy to accept that story - it lets the officer off for killing a black man. It's what they want to believe. They might not be quite 'evil' enough to want officers gunning down even innocent black people, but they'll rush to accept a cover story.
But today - in a different culture for most, with the videotape - the reaction is very different.
Similarly, our willingness to turn a blind eye has similarly changed. Partly over Vietnam.
We used to support brutal colonialism by European countries - JFK began to oppose that and it's pretty much ended and now not considered 'acceptable'.
There's always been that tension when the government lies, between people too easily accepting a 'cover story' justifying evil, and not accepting it - even though the latter could come with social difficulties, having your patriotism questioned, putting 'those people's interests ahead of your own country' because there is a price to us, and so on.
We've been faced with these choices repeatedly when we're less ready to continue evil. For a few examples, when there was a revolution against Marcos, when Duvalier was being succeeded, when there was an uprising against Batista in Cuba, when the Shah was being succeeded in Iran, when Sandinistas replaced a dictator in Nicaragua, and many more.
Sometimes the results of our not continuing to force dictators on those countries have gone better than others. After Marcos was gone, I think we see that as a big improvement; while Castro is seen as not a very good situation for the Cuban people. But each is a case where we stopped forcing dictators on the countries.
Haiti is a good example of how these issues have continued recently. Aristide was elected overwhelmingly as the solution following the long dictatorships of the Duvalier father and son; and some interests in the US (largely the Republican Party) did not like him. Under the first Bush, the CIA undermined his government, supporting 'death squads' and such. Under Clinton, he was returned to power. Then by 2004, under Bush, the US supported violent opposition to him, and sent the marines to effectively kidnap Aristide, and take him to the middle of nowhere in Africa, and put out a phony story that he had resigned and the US was protecting him, when in fact what happened is the Ambassador had told him they wanted to take him to a press conference, but when he got in the motorcade, it instead flew him to a waiting US aircraft, surrounded by Marines. Again the death squads were supported, thousands of Haitians who supported Aristide rounded up and/or killed.
There are cases when the facts just leap out, and the government usually makes a big show of expressing shock and outrage, to keep up the idea of how much we stand for right. Those shows give people the impression the US has high moral standards and just does not tolerate those bad sorts of things. It makes it easier for people to accept 'cover stories'.
But there's that ongoing tension between people accepting the stories, and learning how many are lies.
And these issues are hard to sort out a lot of the time. Even if you find a lot of bad in some cases, there's the whole 'but is it even worse with the other guys?' issue.
And there are a lot of issues to sort out. They're not all dictators and death squads. One is the industry of countries agreeing to US demands to put their nations in great debt in order to direct their wealth to spending with US companies there to supposedly help them, but more to profit from them. There are issues of allowing US military access, joining 'coalitions', and all kinds of economic and political activities, including joining in 'punishments' or our enemies.
Take one issue. When the USSR ended, it happened to peacefully in large part because the US promised the USSR that it would not expand NATO one inch east of Germany, in exchange for Russia allowing its 'security blanket' of countries on its borders to become independent. After that, NATO doubles its number of members, by adding those nations east of Germany. That's the heart of the Ukraine crisis.
Now, the US people are told a story, that talks only about bad things about what Russia is doing, without any mention of the expansion of NATO and Russia's interest in not having a western ally as an enemy on its border, threatening Russia's own key military bases in the Ukraine. And Russia tells its own people lies, to justify its actions, which have been very popular with the Russian people. Of course, the US is pretty hypocritical, given our 'doctrine' that nations in 'our hemisphere' can't have foreign influences, under threat of violence.
In all these lies and competing interests, where does the idea of 'goodness' of the American people fit in?
Things are just a lot more complicated than that. There are Americans who supporting in effect a 'screw everyone else in the world, oppress and exploit them without limit for our benefit' attitude. There are a whole lot of Americans who are just ignoring foreign policy, who don't want to hear bad things, but just assume our government is supporting 'good' and our nation is just deserving of the high standard of living we have because, well, we're a great nation. There are Americans who have a more nuanced, balanced view between 'our interests' and the rights of others, and there are Americans who have a more idealistic approach, which sometimes could invite larger losses to our 'power' and wealth, which could have some bad effects creating vacuums of power sometimes filled by 'bad actors'.
Trying to discuss the US or the American people has to address all these types and more. It has to deal with very different policies in different situations.
One thing I would challenge though is the 'generosity' of the American people in modern times. I've seen disaster relief be controversial. I've seen us do less for others than other nations. And among a few issues I see many Americans get far more riled up about than the issue justifies, one of the very top is Americans furious at our 'huge foreign aid', usually said with anger we should not give one more cent to other countries instead of spending it on the US - wrong on so many levels, sometimes right for the wrong reasons.
That view is often unaware how much 'aid' is really just funneling taxpayer money into spending for connected US corporations (e.g., note leading US construction company Bechtel (and later Halliburton), and the Bechtel board member Schultz being US Secretary of State, former Halliburton CEO Cheney becoming (vice?) President, and all the tax dollars throwing at companies like that. It ignores how those dollars can help us have more power. And it's not exactly generous given the disparities in wealth.
In fact, I can't remember the last time I heard an American defend our 'foreign aid'.
There is very little reporting of a lot our country has done. Sometimes, it becomes forgotten history - if we put a country on the direction of supporting us, it can be forgotten whatever happened earlier. (Who still ever talks about the bloodless but forceful conquering of the Hawaiian Kingdom a bit over a century ago? Besides Hawaiians, I mean.)
There's a fundamental issue most don't pay attention to. It's the question, should the US continue down the road of pursuing more power and wealth, and the eventual result that would bring of not only being the world's last 'superpower' - already the case - but sort of 'ruling the world' in a way we don't now? Or should we pursue long-term policies where we aren't doing that, and have relationships somewhat as we do with Europe, more independent? What should we do about terrible actions elsewhere?
The iconic example of that would be to ask, if the Holocaust had been happening and there weren't a world war II, what should the rest of the world have done about it? We didn't have to fact that question in a way, because we were already invading and thereby liberating the camps, though we did not make it a big 'reason for the war' at the time, perhaps in part because the Allies had refused to accept more Jewish refugees from Germany - which was an important part of the German decision to move from deportation to extermination.
But other genocides and slaughters - Rwanda, Syria, ISIL for example - what should the world's role be? Sometimes there are overlaps - protecting the people on the Mountain ISIL was threatening provided a useful justification for us to use military action for 'humanitarian' reasons, legitimately, while our strategic interests also wanted a reason to attack them. In a case like that with alignment of interests, expect to see lots of leadership talking about the noble cause of the innocent victims we're helping.
But in other cases, there isn't. How much silence do we have about situations we don't do anything about - much less ones where we're the cause of the problem, such as the death squads in El Salvador under Reagan or the persecution in Chile under Pinochet - where so often our CIA is creating 'hit lists' of thousands of people opposing the tyranny, usually people like labor leaders, for the dictator to use for his forces - trained and armed by the US - to round up and torture and kill dissidents?
At what point does ignorance stop being an excuse for the 'good' American people who vote for the leaders and pay the tax dollars for those policies, if they are too happy to ignore it?
Obama himself had his military - our military - kill not only a US citizen who was saying things we didn't like in support of violent opposition to the US - but weeks later, killed a group of innocent teenagers including the man's 16 year old son. If one of our enemies did that, how much would we criticize it, yet how much public outcry has there been by good Americans that we did it? How willing are people to say, 'oh it's all part of that war against terrorism, and I support that, so I'm not going to worry about it'?
After Reagan was doing things like supporting brutal dictatorship in El Salvador and illegal terrorism in Nicaragua, he was re-elected by 49 of 50 states, of 'good' voters.
Even the major case of Vietnam had a wide variety of factors, from people who really wanted freedom for Vietnam, to people who viewed the conflict as important as a fight in the cold war to protect our interests, to 'corrupt interests' and more. The opposition leader - Ho Chi Minh - had done some good - appealing to the US in the 1920's and 1940's to live up
to our ideals from the Declaration of Independence and stop supporting their oppression - to his own history of becoming the leader including by killing rivals. You have other forces such as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who took advantage of the destabilization from our war to seize power and commit massacres. How do you sort it all out?
The 'goodness' of the American people, not a simple topic.
When you think about it, the whole idea of one nation - the US - having democracy where the voters vote for leaders who will set policies that dominate another country, such as starting a war - usually with that being a small part of the election, for example no one in the 2000 election voted for Bush based on his starting a war in Iraq - while the people in the country affected have no vote, raises big moral questions, ones we almost never ask in our political discussions. It's always 'what should we do', not 'do we have the right to do it'?
I can point to great and bad things the US has done, and widely varying views of the American citizens.
One common issue is simply the 'might makes right' issue, or similarly, the thinking that 'because the US is good, anything we do that helps us win does good also.'
What's funny is how little discussion we really have. We have great information (e.g., Democracy Now! on tv, or great books on issues) almost no one watches and reads; we have the 'official' statements by leaders, the media reporting them, and columnists who discuss them, usually it seems based on whether the leader and their policies are on 'their side' or 'the other side'. And few Americans pay any attention to most of that.
When Bush was elected, the Iraq war was good. When Obama was elected, the Iraq war was bad.
Obama has been far more restrained with the use of military power, right or wrong, yet a third of Americans think 'he's the worst president since WWII'. Good people?
One last topic - how much compassion and desire to help are we, the American people, doing about Mexican poverty? Much less the disaster of US-funded drug cartels in the south?
Facebook
Twitter