I couldn’t get pass first 30ish pages in the main book (after reading trough the prefaces and skipping here and there reading some other stuff that piqued my interest also). It got me heavily depressed and left me feeling completely powerless and hopeless and it only reinforced the things I noticed and tought about USA myself.
And I just quit…prefering the sanity of ignorance to the madness of reality.
How can anyone hope to have a normal world with THAT…and I live in Eastern Europe…one would say far away from thr main American Influence. Not so far as it felt before. If we tought that the Nazis or the Communists were evil…ohoho boy…this book makes one feel like there is nothing more vile in the world than the United States of America government.
Did you read it? How did it make you feel?
It’s really interesting when you compare the atrocities that USA has done and the atrocities China has done, with the response to each of them. The former is critised but not villianised, while the latter recieved both far out of proportion. Idc about CCP or china, more interested in information wars and how stupid and easily manipulated the average person is. Really really shows how insidious and powerful western propaganda is. Reddit is a fine example of western echo chamber…
There is nothing in U.S. history remotely on the scale of the Great Leap Forward.
Moreover, even today, almost anyone in China with the resources to do so hedges their bets on Chinese government. That’s why there are no significant restrictions on Americans transferring their assets into Chinese banks but there are significant restrictions on Chinese transferring their assets into American ones.
The question people like Chomsky fail to ask is “what’s the alternative?”. If you honestly ask this question, there are no real world examples of a better option than American hegemony. Indeed, the very values you hold dear that are used to criticize the means by which the Anglo-American dominance of the world has been maintained could never have existed without that dominance.
By and large, the world is content with American hegemony not because it is perfect but because it is better than the alternatives.
Thank you for this intelligent comment.
“What’s the alternative?” assumes an Anglo Saxon perspective with pre-conceived ideals. To the Chinese, as well as some other cultures, the same question is indeed pondered quite carefully upon. And therefore the western answer to that question cannot be automatically and forcefully applied to other cultures. This is the source of many modern conflicts.
My point is that the west cannot think that because American hegemony was good for some parts of the world, it is good for ALL of the world. Context of reality matters.
Anyway, my original point is how information is directed and digested these days with emotion rather than logic.
And by the way, using GLF is the same as critising USA for the bloody civil war, in the sense that both are internal affairs, albeit the former is much more stupid and needlessly barbaric.
How can you judge a country more by its internal affairs than its external crimes?