yes i am an american.

but the general sentiments i see online about americans are wildly ignorant and it genuinely pisses me off how the global rising tide in fascism is == america in a lot of people’s minds. guess it’s just easier to engage in the same idiotic nonsense the fascists do than to engage in any critical thinking.

two primary points:

  1. americans aren’t just fucking lazy and aren’t just “letting” things happen. some victim blaming bullshit if i ever heard it. it also very much demonstrates that despite your “european worldliness” you’ve never left your tiny village/corner of the earth and seen anything different in this world besides the one time you went to monaco as a teen. americans don’t protest for a variety of socioeconomic and political factors, not one of which is “they don’t give a shit.” most americans live in cities that are incredibly far apart from one another and, in the context of a single given city, usually pretty demographically consistent actually. a given city won’t vary much inside that city, but might be very different from another city. this means americans, limited by their lack of walking infrastructure and their cities being massively spread apart in a spatial sense, really can only choose to effectively spontaneously protest in their local city and neighboring municipalities. most people there already probably agree with you to a degree, it’s preaching to the choir. seats of political power here are hundreds of thousands of miles away from most people. it would be like, a literal fucking LOTR scale and size adventure for most americans to go protest their government. and this is intentional. that is why they don’t. not because they don’t want to. not because they’re ignorant. not because they’ve given up. it is because they physically, economically, and even rationally; just can’t do it. they’re as much a victim as anyone else. this is something being done to them, not by them.

  2. this stupidly fucking ignorant notion that somehow americans are single-handedly responsible for western neofascism. guess what? for decades, you guys lazily sat and got fucking fat on corpo cheese too; it isn’t just americans who fell prey to this centuries spanning grift! europeans have exactly all the same problems with entrenched corporatism in their societies and feel too proud to notice it or do anything about it before the same things happening here happen there; except this time in an entirely homegrown sense instead of being imported from america. americans just, for better or worse, did capitalism more and better than anyone else in history. our collapse and reckoning happened to come first chronologically, for that reason. make no mistake, though, friend. we all have our hands in the collapse-pot. this is something much bigger than just a nation state or people. this is the end of nation states, the end of an existing world order. those who recognize this will do well in this life, those who don’t won’t.

sorry for my unhinged babbling rant i just got lots of feelings, ideas, and thoughts and nowhere to have discourse.

hope not to offend anyone. love all the european homies.

EDIT: at exactly 16 upvotes and 16 downvotes on this post rn. proud to have said something truly divisive lmao ;)

  • peregrin5@lemm.eeEnglish
    6·
    17 hours ago

    I am American and I give blame where blame is due. A lot of our citizens are fucking idiots and close to half of them are okay with and/or voted what we have in.

    Sure there’s some blame to go around to lack of media literacy and conservative efforts to dismantle public education but we all have the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips and most of us still can’t be bothered to not be outright hateful fuckwits.

    However your point that America isn’t the only place where the problem of the rise of fascism exists is true as well. I think Americans will rightfully get a lot of flak for it though since this movement largely and recently originates from us. We export our culture to the entire world so it’s not surprising that when we play with fascism other countries do as well. And it doesn’t help that we have billionaires with global empires pushing for the same policies and warping of mainstream media to fit conservative/libertarian viewpoints in several different countries.

    Not to mention, what we do impacts the world far more than a dictator rising in bum-fuckistan because we put our fingers in so many pies and in many ways made many countries utterly reliant on us. This is partially their fault though too because maybe they shouldn’t have become utterly reliant on us.

    All in all, we deserve the shit we get, but also yes others are being hypocrites as well. Congrats, we’re all fucked!