Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2

> and I can safely vouch that myself and most of the people I know

That's great, too bad none of those people sit in positions of power or anywhere near your government, because from the outside for the last two decades or more, those ideals are not visible to us at all, neither when we look at the foreign policy nor internal.

I'm sure the tides will eventually turn, but we're talking decades more likely than years, since it's been turning this direction for decades already, and I don't see it tipping the balance in the other way even today or the near-future. GLHF at the very least, I do hope things get better for everyone.

If only the US would apply those values to their foreign policy, unfortunately the US voters don't care enough about that.

>rule of law, loving our neighbors (regardless of legal status)

>The situation we find ourselves in is that the American of today does not represent us well.

The system can't represent a contradictory set of ideals.

This is exactly the kind of bright eyed idealism that American propaganda produces. I say that as an American who grew up inside the system. The schools shape you into a patriotic silhouette, convinced your country is the shining exception of human history.

Then the internet arrived and cracked the smooth surface. Suddenly the world was not filtered through textbooks and morning announcements. You could see the contradictions, the omissions, the parts of the story no one wanted to say out loud. The myth began to thin out.

And the blindness is intense. Just look at the parent poster. He lists all the noble ideals he and “most people he knows” supposedly embody, as if declaring them makes them true in practice. It becomes a kind of self portrait disguised as a national portrait. The assumption is always that the country has drifted away from the people, never that the people have drifted away from their own claimed principles.

He says that the America of today does not represent him, but never considers that it might represent us all far more than the flattering story we prefer to tell ourselves. The gap is not between the country and its citizens. The gap is between reality and the myths individuals cling to in order to feel morally uncomplicated.

Because once the slogans fall away, nations are not noble and people are not consistent. We are collections of private contradictions, unfinished thoughts, and hidden struggles. We carry more inside than we ever admit.

And in the end, a human is just that. A quiet tangle of secrets pretending the world makes perfect sense.

American involvement in the Nuremberg trials set the stage for the modern era of international law. It began with the United States, along with the allied nations, constructing a post-facto legal definition of crime against humanity that somehow included the Holocaust but excluded both the American campaign in Japan and various Russian war crimes on the Western Front. It’s not cynicism to point out the clear hypocrisy.

Good point!