Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Is anti-americanism that widespread?

Very interesting stuff! Thanks!

This is worth a lot more time and study than I can probably put into it to properly discuss it, and I also would like to see the rest of the data. These graphs alone are fascinating, and would take a lot of analysis.

I have the feeling that the amount of anti-Americanism perceived in the world may be skewed by the fact that most of it seems to originate from the media, political organizations, leaders, and other places where it tends to concentrate. I would venture to say that if you pulled 500 people off the street in France or Belgium you would get different numbers. I would be interested if this survey, which seems to be addressing just such people, eventually bears this out or not.

I can comment a little bit on the news story:

...People in the countries of Eastern Europe, for example, are glad that communism has collapsed, but far from persuaded that capitalism is a great improvement, or that the kind of capitalism they now experience has much in common with the more established forms in North America and Western Europe. Their main concerns are corruption, organized crime and terrorism, and the way that these apparently separate evils blend together.

The corruption in former eastern-bloc nations is the inevitable result of over half a century of a political system which pretty much demanded criminal activity (smuggling, black markets, illegal production of goods, etc.) for the citizens to survive at all. The Communist system created an underground "Mafia" type infrastructure--often involving government officials--that was left behind when the communists fell. Corruption and organized crime did not suddenly appear when communism fell, it was simply exposed, like the colors of a leaf when the green goes away in the fall. I hope they can come out of this eventually.

The main common current of criticism of the United States is the mirror image of the widespread respect that America still enjoys, on the old principle that from those who are given much, much is expected. The survey records a strong feeling, becoming a deep resentment, that the rich and powerful United States, which does very well out of the global economy, is not paying much back in.

Not sure who is "giving" America its prosperity. The global economy is doing well because of America and other advanced nations, not the other way around. We are having similar arguments about taxation and such here in America, with some people feeling that simply because somebody has more, it is perfectly reasonable to take more away from them. You'd be astonished at how many people are genuinely puzzled when I question the morality of this. Or maybe not.

...Fundamentally, the United States is feared to be putting global stability at risk by doing so little about the global gap of rich and poor, by paying too little attention to the views and concerns of the other countries and cultures that share the planet.

The global gap of rich and poor is basically the difference between free societies and authoritarian/socialist/totalitarian ones. It's pretty much that simple, and there is example after example proving this to be the case. Those running collectivist societies are naturally resistant to the idea that their philosophy of government may be the direct cause of their poverty, and usually have a long litany of other "reasons" for their plights. Often cited is the famous "Communist Drought"* that has wrecked pretty much every harvest in every totalitarian nation for the past half century. Cuba has gotten a lot of mileage out of the U.S. economic embargo.

*Which possesses the remarkable ability to affect only areas within certain political borders, while plentiful rain apparently falls only a few miles away.

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