The United States of Capitalism has always been good at marketing. Marketing their products and building hype. But when us Europeans try the products, they are usually so below standard to what we have here. The same can be said about their Government. Great at marketing but below our standard
I find that funny considering Europe is the historical capital of fascism, with several countries in the EU even still allowing the remnants of fascism to operate (Italy, Poland, etc) or straight-up having been fascist for a while now anyway (Orban's Hungary).
The "standard" of government in Europe has historically been monarchy and fascism, broken up by periods of actual democracy. I wouldn't call that a great track record by comparison.
It's a fair criticism, but throwing in the last line is just the pot calling the kettle black.
Yeah, that's not true at all, atleast in Poland, and that remark really made me angry. Facist or even sharing fascist ideas are against our constitutions and anyone who even resembles fascist ideas are thrown to jail or just hated here and they lose their power. We hate facism to the core. Don't compare our goverments to the facist movements that happened in Italy. We've also been opressed so much by the Russia and Nazi Germany, that we would like to not being compared to them. We've got no chill about this topic.
So are we gonna talk about the National Rebirth of Poland or do you wanna just conveniently ignore that? You know,the political party registered by the District Court of Warsaw that uses the exact same iconography as the National Radical Camp?
Wait, are you just baiting or are you serious. If you are serious, then what the hell is that? This is such a joke party to everyone. They don't have ANY power and they will NEVER have any. The fact that you even heard about it is amazing, because they are nothing here. From what I've seen in papers: some of the people from this party are already dead (Jacek Dębski / Brunon Kwiecień), in jail (Brunon Leszek Kwiecień) or are being sued left and right, because promoting facism here is a serious crime and our national prosecutor's office really hunts them down. We have a lot of problems in Poland, but facism is not one of them and it will never be. Don't even try to say that Poland is even remotely under facism.
And yet you still allow the Party to operate. You could revoke their ability to operate at any time and yet you don't. Poland itself is also turning increasingly insular and anti-immigrant, enacting law after law reminiscent of fascist countries and their fervent nationalism. Your politicians go on stage and talk about how Europe has a sickness of immigrants from "certain" countries. Deny it all you want, Poland is in steep shit when the government is suspending the human right to seek asylum. Not even the US has done that yet.
It's *deflecting, genius, and I was focusing on the last line because - as I said - I agree that the US isn't exactly up to snuff, but that last line is just pure copium. No, Europe doesn't have a "higher standard" and I find it quite strange that the fact that the EU is still allowing the membership of a near- or fully-fascist state is never brought up in these conversations. Or the fact that one of Italy's major parties was literally made from a faction of the fascists under Mussolini that were more "moderate" (but still fascist).
And here I thought Americans were supposed to be the ones lacking reading comprehension.
The CIA killed Sá Carneiro. Basically the Portuguese JFK. They also killed JFK.
They support child traffickers, cartels, terrorist groups and all sorts of other criminals in order to push for their arms industry and other hidden interests.
Anyone that doesn’t see the US as a global threat to peace is simply blind to what has been going on for the past 50 years.
At the same time, I see American people as simply hostage of these actions by their government. They are themselves victims and I don’t see them as a threat. The same can’t be said about Russians or Chinese which are much more brainwashed in their own national identity bubble and would go to war against Europe without much protest.
I don't recall the name of the department, but I heard about it on a Swedish program like 10 years ago. It was CIA ran with the purpose of influencing European media, academia and public discourse by essentially paying professors, artists and other public figures to push a pro-USA narrative, fake news and so on.
Like a lot of artists and authors ended up being economically backed by this operation. And if I recall correctly, at one point the US Air Force were the largest donator to Swedish universities, putting in more money than what the state did. I think they hounded Sweden quite a bit because of the strong social democratic wave here post WW2 and they were quite critical of the US global politics, and the US saw that as a risk of us siding with the Soviets (lol).
The stay-behind networks (e.g. Gladio in Italy) were a separate thing. We had those here in Sweden, too, (although our government still hasn't officially acknowledged it afaik) but they were more of a joint effort from the Western ruling class than a US-specific influence campaign.
US ops teaming up with and sponsoring nutjob right-wing/ultra-religious sections to prevent a shift to leftist policies in the target country, name a more iconic duo!
(Okay, Russia teaming up with local communists or authoritarian assholes in order to suppress and overthrow western-leaning democratic movements is pretty iconic too.)
Ironic really, considering the home fronts of the Cold War couldn't be more different. The US was slowly evolving (emphasis on slowly) into a more left-leaning country, liberalizing and becoming more and more progressive, getting closer - if even just a little bit - to a left-wing utopia.
Meanwhile Russia was on the authoritarianism side quest, grinding out XP by starving Ukrainians and oppressing the populace, something most reminiscent of a far-right shithole.
Yet the Americans chose right-wing governments and the Soviets left-wingers. The Horseshoe Theory might not be true, but goddamn does shit like this make you rethink that.
To be fair. Americans just chose any anti-communist party. For example, during the cold war, they heavily supported the Social Democratic Party in Finland because it was strongly anti-communist and anti-soviet
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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '25 edited Jul 20 '25
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