American cultural hegemony

[Plekhanov]

Sorry, but I consider the opinion of someone who has actually experienced the whole situation before slightly more valid than that of the followers of rabid fundamentalist muslim clerics who are seeing their power slip away.

So you consider the opinion of those who confirms your prejudices as “more valid” than those who disagree with you, even when the evidence would suggest that those who agree with you are a small minority. Did you by any chance help Bush draw up all that “Iraq has WMD” type “intelligence”?

[TheDarkling]

I was going to say the exact same thing, although a hell of a lot more obvious than that.

Being British I have an obligation to be understated and sarcastic, I believe my point was made though.

[Edi]

I find the assertion SOTS is making about democracy and liberty being exclusively American ideals to be very offensive on a fundamental level. The US might have been one of the first nations to implement them after the long monarchistic period, but the ideas of democracy and equality were by no means an American invention. Added to that, by the time of the American war of independence, there was a decided shift toward a more democratic direction even in Europe, it just wasn't happening quite as rapidly as it did over there.

Besides, if you look at the history of Scandinavia, the people hereabouts have been living in relative freedom for a lot longer than the US has been around. In a monarchy, yes, but in the kind of freedom that made people start to rise up and demand self-governance in short order when a monarch tried to curtail them. Finland is a good example of this, oppression lead to swift independence whereas before we had been rather content under monarchy.

Whether or not America is seen as a paragon of democracy and liberty (and in most of the Western world, it isn't, because so many other countries have societies that are just as free, if not more so than the US), it doesn't change the fact that America doesn't have sole claim, or even superior claim to those ideas. All it has is the claim that it was the first to implement them in the modern age.

As for the jibe about America saving us Europeans from oppression, be careful about generalizing. It's not true for all of Europe, as I will remind you every time you bring it up. As paradoxical as it may sound, the nation that guaranteed my country's freedom and democracy was the tyrannical Nazi Germany when America and England left us twisting in the wind. Doesn't excuse Nazi crimes against others, but they did at least that much good.

Edi