The US is the bad guy in the world

This is all a huge shock - and even unbelievable - to many Americans. The information has been readily available for decades; participants wrote first-hand reports about specific actions; historians documented the events, political scientists discussed the consequences... Google "US foreign interventions" or anything similar, and it'll offer everything from a simple chronological list to in-depth analyses. Yet, people graduate from university in blissful virginal innocence; confident in America as the guardian of freedom, defender of the victimized and champion of democracy.
If you deny the symptoms, you'll never seek treatment. If you ignore the malady, it will kill you. Dishonesty in anything - economic relations, race relations, climate, history, the functions of government, anything - is destructive.

 

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This isn't anything new to most people who read, are educated, and who are older than 30.

How you interpret it is another matter of course.

There are many people who aren't for "buy American first", save our jobs, help the poor in American first. Right? Then they complain that a government would take action against a foreign government that tried to nationalize assets (oil) that we owned in part.

It's always been a tough choice. Support a leader that we could work with but that wasn't great for his people or deal with a leader that doesn't have our best interests at heart but that was popularly (or not) elected.

Communism was the big concern at one time (rightly or not). The U.S. made decisions that sometimes meant we were dealing with less than great leaders because they were also against communism.

That's not to say that the U.S. only made great decisions but for an educated person it's more complicated than is being portrayed here.

Big countries with power are often more heavy handed than those without power, because they can be. Nothing new there.

People forget that for most of the 20th century the overall record for the U.S. vs the world was pretty good. Remember WWI and WWII?

Remember leaders have to dealt with the hand that they've been dealt. Sometimes there are no good choices.

 

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That's a fair few caveats just for knowing about Iran. It gets nowhere near honest assessment of where the US is involved, embroiled and entangled; nowhere near what a responsible voter needs to make an informed decision.

I didn't interpret. I cited an article, presumably written by someone better informed than I am.

I wouldn't know, and don't see the relevance.

I don't know who complained about what.

Sure. Why keep lying about it?

Fine. Make your deal with all the devils you need to. But drop the frickin halo!

No, it wasn't. The power and expansionism of the USSR was. The Stalin regime gobbled up territory, satellites and vassal states like nobody since the British Empire - including some countries lately under the the British Empire. The ideology was a handy specter to wave at the American public: scare them shitless so they'll let us take away their freedom of speech, association, thought and judgment, and use lots and lots of their money to build up a horrific military might.

That's not a smoke-screen - that's barely even a smoke-ring.

Of course. All that's 'being portrayed here' is a bare skeleton in a closet that's been closed too long.
Once the reader becomes familiar with the facts and their time-line, he can begin to understand the complex cause-and-effect chains, relationships, course-alterations, clandestine operations and uneasy bargains. Then he can trace the roots of situations with which he's confronted today and try to assess various proposals of dealing with them.

That's what I said, a couple of posts ago.

Nobody's ever allowed to forget for minute! At least, the heroic bits. Not the part about financing German industry up until 1939, or maybe longer; not the part about turning away boatloads of Jewish refugees; not the part the US had played in dragging Japan into WWII and then treating innocent American citizens like criminals because of their ethnic origins....
just the bit where they charge to the rescue, when all the other combatants are bleeding - and take all the credit for victory.

And sometimes there are... Also, there are always bad, worse and execrable choices, and the educated reader has to judge which one was made in each case.
"You go to war with the Army you have -- not the Army you might wish you have," is among the insights offered by Donald Rumsfeld"
Except, a lot of times, you don't have to start a war at all.

 

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surely in your masses of documented reading & researching you have a couple of minutes to simply list some of the non USA worlds democratically elected presidents

is that too difficult ?
brick wall in the scientific method ?

this is to get the conversation started
YOUR conversation that YOU have started

that is YOUR CORE SUBJECT OF THE THREAD
list them ... simple

why play tricks ?

 

I think most of the viewers can see that you're playing games but I'll clarify anyway. Here's post #16 again.

 

presidents names

you have not posted any

you think you can game your own game when i call it
lol

now your just starting to sound like a dick

 

What is your point FatFreddy? Is it surprise that world powers are sometimes heavy-handed in their response to other countries nationalizing (stealing) their oil?

 

It would take considerably more than a couple of minutes to sift out just the names you want from a mass of historical documents, which contain thousands of names in hundreds of countries over two centuries of complex interconnected events.

It is, indeed, very difficult , and he would need a better motivation than your taunting to undertake such a task.

Does that mean something?

Is there any particular reason you want a list of names separate from the documented events in which the men who bore those names figured? Or is this merely obfuscation of the subject, which, in case everyone already forgot, was:
Honesty

 

Whose oil? Did the Iranians under Mohammed Mossadegh invade Texas?

 

If the original agreement was made by a puppet government or though some other unjust means, it's not stealing; it's taking back what was stolen.

https://www.globalpolicy.org/us-mil...26389-oil-and-economic-interests-in-iran.html
https://www.globalpolicy.org/political-issues-in-iraq/oil-in-iraq.html
http://libyasos.blogspot.com.es/2012/03/intervention-and-exploitation-us-and-uk.html

 

It's like any other business if you invest billions of dollars and then the government nationalizing that business it's taking your assets.

 

Look at Venezuela and tell me how that's worked out.

 

Thanks for backing me up Jeeves. He's just groping for anything he can use against me.

There's so much conflicting info that it's hard to know exactly what's going on there. It sounds like you only read the mainstream though. Here's some stuff from the alternative press.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/venezuelas-opposition-attacking-its-own-people/5520783
https://www.globalresearch.ca/search?q=venezuela&x=13&y=7

 

My point is that it's never as simple as some make it out to be as in "The U.S. is the Bad Guy in the World".

Venezuela has oil. It's hard to extract. They got U.S. companies to form a partnership with the government and the government was making a lot of money. Caracas was a cosmopolitan city, the infrastructure was great, life was good.

The government got greedy and nationalized the oil screwing the U.S. oil company partner. They (the government) then ran things into the ground, didn't have the expertise to maintain things, didn't put money back into maintaining things and it all blew up in their face.

They were in debt because they were spending all the revenue on social programs and then the oil crises of the 70's occurred. Now they pump very little oil because their oil is hard to extract, oil prices are low and they have no expertise and their government is a mess. Chavez took over and promised free everything to everyone, that didn't work out of course and now there is just chaos.

I've been there in the period just before Chavez took over. It wasn't good then. Infrastructure wasn't being taken care of, crime was high, etc. That was the good period relative to today.

In Iran the Shah was heavy-handed but the Ayatolla was no better. There is a lot of potential for Iran to be a normal, prosperous country. For the most part the people aren't radicalized and they were a prosperous Western type country before the religious wing got involved.

Trump has handled things poorly, of course.

The history of why the U.S. has done what it has done all over the world isn't as simple as invading for resources.

 

Ya. The whole question of private enterprise "investing in" (bribing whom? pressuring whom, with what government-back threats? buying land and resource rights from whom? What made those sellers representative of and able to speak for the whole population?) the land, water, resources and environmental degradation of a sovereign nation and then, when that nation throws the sellers of their country out of power, calling on the might of another nation - at the expense of its citizens who are not apprised of the situation, consulted in the decision or given a share of the spoils - to enforce a legally void contract... That's a big question.
It always has a simple answer when the 'investor' is American and the exploited natives have smaller guns: obviously, the US government must rush to aid of its citizens, with all means at its disposal.
It has a diametrically opposite answer when the investor in American enterprises is a foreign national: in that case, the US government has the absolute moral right to regulate, fine, and if deemed necessary, expel any foreign business interests that threaten its own.
But that's still very much peripheral to the current subject: Honesty

 

Be sure to look at all of the facts regarding Venezuela - even the ones from a *gasp!* Venezuelan perspective -

Well, there's investment, and there's being invested.

PS Heavy-handed is such a genteel way to characterize systemic torture!

 

I'm googling around looking for info on Venezuela. I found this.
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?106012-Turmoil-in-Venezuela

It looks like it's got a lot of good info.


These are old but they look objective.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Venezuela_page/Venezuela_page.html

 

Historical information is always available. With internet and fast computing, it's far more accessible than it used to be when you had to find actual books in physical libraries.
But the apologists will always obfuscate the facts by using one or more of several ploys:
- drawing an arbitrary starting point; ignoring the causes of that pivotal event
- downplaying and soft-pedalling the actions of one party ("sometimes heavy handed") while exaggerating the guilt of its antagonist ("screwing the oil company")
- inventing benign motivations for unconscionable acts
- calling puppet rulers "a government", but nationalist governments "a dictator"
- predicating all argument on the unassailable rightness of American style capitalism

 

How many industries has the U.S. nationalized? Does Weyerhauser own its forests or does it belong to "the people"?

 

That seems to be the official American government version. The official American government version of things usually turns out to be a lie. Was the "They" that you mentioned a US puppet government? Most of those Latin American countries had US puppet governments back then.