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The USA is just as bloody as its parent, the UK, and they’re both as bad as other nations with an Imperial past. I don’t see any one as “worse” than the others.
I don’t know all of world history, there’s always more to learn, but every empire I’ve researched devolves into this at some point.
But, even small countries like Belgium manage to wreak havoc.
This is why government needs to be limited, in my opinion. Governments are killing machines, and the bigger they get, the easier it is. Just like people, governments require rules to limit them or its madness. I think the USA, Russia, and China all have the same problem, they’re too big for their own good.
No, the USA is the most destructive nation yet on this planet. No one even comes close even from ancient history (think Rome or Mongols). If you don’t know this already you are probably just ignorant or in denial.
I do. Because the US didn’t take a hint and is still doing their bullshit Imperialism today, and have turned America into some sort of cult to be worshipped.
The USA is just as bloody as its parent, the UK, and they’re both as bad as other nations with an Imperial past.
Or, you know, damn near every single empire or powerful ruler throughout all of human history. The Greek golden age was only possible thanks to slaves working the fields, Rome was similar in this regard.
Eastern nations weren’t any better, read up on ancient Chinese culture and all the fucked up shit they did.
Same goes for India, hell they’re still trying to end child marriage but still represent like 20-25% of all child marriages in the world.
People love to dog on America, and I’ll be happy to point out all the historical examples, but the truth is this is more a symptom of the human condition and less about a nation. Look at the other countries on earth and you’ll find plenty of evidence that evil isn’t isolated to one nation, people, culture or time period.
It’s universally a human thing.
At least some of them have largely left it in the past
It’s possible for a nation to set some valuable examples while still being a bad actor.
That’s America.
That’s many countries off and on throughout their histories. The thing about America is that it has so much wealth and power and with great power comes blah blah blah, right? Our good actions tend to do a lot of good, and our bad actions tend to have far reaching consequences. And right now our bad actions are outweighing the good and they’re such comically bad actions that they really stand out. We’re really going out of our way to be the baddies.
What all these tweet-historians ignore is that the wickedness they’re criticizing is not unique to the USA, or even the Western world. Its also not a purely Imperialistic trait as it existed long before Roman Imperialism and it exists in the Eastern world as well.
China, India, the middle east… they all have histories filled with cruelty and evil acts that rival anything the USA has. In some ways, like when that Chinese army was trapped and had no food so the emperor offered his concubines as food and the soldiers gleefully obliged, are horrors American history lacks.
Remember; cruelty is a human trait, not an American one (or one isolated to one nation, people, culture or time period.)
At one point, the American people fought for their freedom from what they considered an oppressive and tyrannical authority: the English Crown. The American flag, in that context, came to represent resistance to arbitrary authority and the idea that government ultimately derives its legitimacy from the people.
And the Founding Fathers were not, as Prager would have you believe, a monolithic group of devout, orthodox Christians. Many were heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, Deism, rationalism, and religious skepticism. Some rejected core doctrines of Christianity outright. Calling them atheist would be historically inaccurate, but portraying them as a uniformly God-fearing Christian movement is equally misleading.
The irony is that when some Americans look at that same flag today, they see it as a symbol of the very kind of powerful, oppressive authority that the American Revolution was fought against. The difference is that ordinary people today don’t have the same practical means of challenging their government that the revolutionaries ultimately resorted to.
So if anyone needs to do a little more historical research, Prager might want to start with the people who actually founded the country.
What you have detailed is a myth or propaganda about the US, not what actually happened. There was no fight for freedom unless you believe freedom equals massive amounts of innocents dying for the wealthy.
Why is there always one of you under every comment? There is always one of you trying to reduce everything to a class-war narrative.
Yes, of course there were economic and personal interests involved in the American Revolution. The top brass of the emerging American government included quite a few wealthy landowners, merchants, and speculators who had very real economic interests that could benefit from independence. We’re not going to bypass human nature here. People can sincerely believe in a political cause while simultaneously recognizing that the outcome may benefit them personally.
But it wasn’t simply wealthy people fighting each other while poor people were dragged onto the battlefield as cannon fodder. The Continental rank and file were overwhelmingly drawn from the lower and lower-middle socioeconomic classes: laborers, servants, apprentices, artisans, small farmers, and shopkeepers. Wealthier men were disproportionately represented among the officers, while the enlisted ranks were largely populated by people who owned relatively little.
And the population wasn’t even united behind the Patriot cause. Historians estimate that roughly 20–30% of the colonial population remained loyal to the Crown, with Loyalists actively fighting, providing intelligence, and opposing the Patriots. The Revolution therefore wasn’t simply “the rich manipulating the poor”; it was also a profoundly divided society in which Americans fought Americans for competing political, economic, and ideological reasons.
So yes, wealthy men absolutely had interests in the Revolution. Nobody needs to pretend otherwise. But reducing an eight-year war involving hundreds of thousands of people, multiple social classes, Loyalists, Patriots, enslaved and free Black people, Native Americans, women, foreign powers, and competing political and economic interests to “rich people used poor people as cannon fodder” isn’t historical analysis. It’s class warfare dressed up as historical analysis.
My God, stop pretending history was ever that black and white.
You really need to study the propaganda and persuasion used during the revolution. Pretending it was anything more than a take over plot by the wealthy businessesmen is simply nonsensical.
The rot was always there. The very first President was on his way to being the first billionaire of the US adjusted for inflation.
The irony is that when some Americans look at that same flag today, they see it as a symbol of the very kind of powerful, oppressive authority that the American Revolution was fought against.
And, unfortunately, a lot of people around the world look at it that way too.
At one point, the American people fought for their freedom from what they considered an oppressive and tyrannical authority: the English Crown.
Some did. Some were merely opportunists who didn’t want the government getting in their way. Most of the US founding fathers were smugglers and land speculators. They didn’t like that the US had ended the French and Indian war by promising that in exchange for peace, their colony would stop expanding westwards. That pissed off the founders who had bought land to the west and wanted a return on their investments.
Other American people were just fine with the arrangement with the crown. They didn’t want a brand new government, they thought things were fine as they were. These people were either killed or driven off their land by the rebels who wanted a new government, and were forced to head to England or up into Canada.
Just look at the other places that didn’t consider the British monarch to be an oppressive tyrant: Canada, Australia, NZ, etc. Did they suffer under the grinding boot of the king and lead miserable lives as a result? Were they forced to hand all their wealth over to England? Hardly. Within a few decades the British gave their local governments more power. Now they all merely have the king as a figurehead and are fully controlled by the people.
Meanwhile, the rebel colonists in the US went only a couple of decades before descending into a civil war. Plus, there’s the war of 1812 which, in large part, was due to these people who famously hated tyrants and oppression ignoring treaties and killing off natives so that they could expand westward.
It seems to me that if you look past all the propaganda that is part of the US school system, the British king being a “tyrant” was more of a convenient excuse rather than the actual legitimate reason for the rebellion.
Just look at the other places that didn’t consider the British monarch to be an oppressive tyrant: Canada, Australia, NZ, etc. Did they suffer under the grinding boot of the king and lead miserable lives as a result? Were they forced to hand all their wealth over to England?
While I completely understand and mostly agree with your point, speaking as a Canadian millions of people suffered under the grinding boot of the king and were forced to give up not only their wealth, but also their languages and cultures. The genocide of the indigenous peoples in Canada is an atrocious part of our history, and the last Residential School wasn’t closed down until the 1990s.
Part of the American independence movement was backlash against the result of the “French and Indian Wars”, in which the British agreed to limit their westward expansion.
Sure, the British (and early Canadians) did some horrible things to people they saw as less worthy than themselves. But, in this case, the “oppressive tyrant” was less brutal towards the Indigenous than the American colonists wanted. The monarch actively held the colonists back from what they wanted to do, and that’s why what happened to the Indigenous people in the US is generally much worse than what happened to them in Canada.
The residential schools were awful, but the mindset that led to them was “these savages can be civilized as long as we remove them from the terrible influences as children and have good, catholic nuns break them of their savage ways and make them into good British subjects”. Meanwhile, the US solution was “these savages have good land, let’s drive them off that land and take that land for ourselves”.
From the viewpoint of someone in the 21st century, both of these are awful. But, from the viewpoint of the 19th century, one is definitely a more worthy undertaking.
What I find interesting is that all of this was happening after a civil war more bloody per capita than the First World War, the trial and execution of a king, a period of rather repressive republican rule, a restoration of the monarchy, and yet another revolution/coup which established monarchs couldn’t rule without Parliament’s consent. Part of the reason Britain wasn’t revolutionary later on like France was because multiple revolutions had already happened in the 17th century. The Americans were by the point of the revolution arguing George III was an absolutist and a tyrant, but that form of monarchy had already had its back broken in an English and later British context by the time the American colonies were being settled in large numbers (with some exceptions). It was an accusation much more apt towards say the French king at the time who in fact supported the Americans, and we all know how that eventually went for the Ancien Regime.
The colonist’s grievance was actually more with Parliament for the most part, they actively wanted the king to intercede on their behalf. George III wasn’t willing to do that being a constitutional monarch, which ironically got him labelled a tyrant.
The English crown was limiting their ability to oppress others you mean.
It was as noble as the Confederacy, to say, not at all.
For Canada, even though everyone was against it, the BNA act also allowed us to throw out old treaties and give us terms more appealing to the ruling class.
My favourite version of this joke:
The flag doesn’t offend me. It’s just a piece of colored cloth. It’s the people doing those horrible acts that offend me. Especially the ones using the flag as a justification.
The flag doesn’t offend me. The dickless chuds who wave it around 24/7 and have to wear it on at least 1 article of clothing at every moment in time claiming that what equates to less than a mild inconvenience or otherwise does NOT impact their lives at all is a fundamental infringement upon their personal freedoms while blindly supporting the an authoritative govt stripping away freedoms from. 25% of the country…
…that’s what does
The ones waving the flag the hardest.
When somebody ends an argument by angrily telling you to go read a book, and you do, the book usually confirms they’re wrong.
You can tell you won the argument when the other person starts shouting over you, starts attacking your intelligence or character and storms out.
“Its in the bible” “Go read a dictionary” “The Quran literally says…” “Yeah but the comics say…” “Yeah but in the manga…”
Youre absolutely correct, these people have no idea what theyre talking about.
What’s wrong with “Yeah but in the manga/comics”? Those don’t seem to fit with the others.
They seem more along the lines of “Agh, the movies don’t even mention the Barrow Downs!”
Theyre wrong about what happens in them.
I love doing that. When someone tells me I’m wrong and I need to do some research and then I come back with peer reviewed research papers confirming my side.
Yes, I’m that level of petty about our tiny disagreement.
Your “research” was supposed to be in the echo chamber websites they frequent!
Yeah and if you show them credible sources they’ll be like “WRONG. See?” and then link to a bunch of propaganda sites…
Because people who try to shut arguments down with this project that they can’t imagine a scenario where they would actually read a book. It’s the same energy as those that invoke the Bible, i.e. never read it themselves, assume it says what their feelies feel
Which book have you had recommended at you?
Not OP, but the bible’s a big one.
Well, depends on the font size and paper thickness.
There are a million possible topics, too many to lost but if you find yourself needing a place to start…
Black Wall Street (and any of the destruction of predominantly black neighborhoods being torn down/flooded/etc.), Wounded Knee, Trail of Tears, internment camps
The list is indeed far longer than we can count, and that’s just domestic :’)
Don’t forget about Seneca Village, or what is today known as “Central Park”…
I’m guessing they’re not big readers at PragerU…
Prager U continuing to be shitty beyond belief. Whats new.
This coming from someone with what looks like the Chinese flag in their name is… interesting.
To be fair, current China hasn’t existed as much time to accrue the same amount of crimes yet, even if they are certainly trying.
