When somebody ends an argument by angrily telling you to go read a book, and you do, the book usually confirms they're wrong.
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My favourite version of this joke:

My favorite is Chinese history where they go:
"Ling Long incident: no one recalls how it began or what happened,150 million dead, half of china destroyed. Famine for 10 years. People ate each other."
And it's just a minor footnote written down by maybe one court scribe in the margins of a book about some greater series of tragedies.
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 :’)
I mean, if you're fine with genocide, with war crimes, mass killing, unethical experimentation with people, racism, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, religious fanaticism and probably a bunch of other "cool" things I'm forgetting, sure. The US must look really cool to you.
Right now, the US look good only if you see them with the lens of someone who lived 3000 years ago when all those things were somewhat fine.
But for sane humans, that flag symbolizes so many wrong and evil things that might as well be next to the other worst flags of human history.
Most other rich and powerful countries have done/are doing all those same things too. It's absolutely right to identify and fight against those abuses, but America is certainly not alone in acting like a psychopath, some could argue that it's not even the worst historically (though they're pretty close to the top of the pile right now)
I'm in Europe.
Amongst all countries here, we really, trully, did shit to everbody in the World, even did it to each other.
Unlike America, we're not actually proud of it, the public opinion around here are generally against doing it now (though the elites are still fucking sociopaths) and we're actually trying to stop doing it which is why there is a lot less warmongering here than in the US and hence much smaller military budgets even though Europe is right next to the imperialist nutters in Russia.
Also as somebody else pointed out, there is nowhere near the same level of flag shagging in most of Europe as there is in the US.
The only exception to most of this is Britain, and even they are somehow mid-way between the US and the rest of Europe rather than at the level of the US.
Yeah, the biggest difference between how an European and an American look at their countries history is that the European goes "we did some fucked up shit we shouldn't have." while the American goes "we did nothing wrong, except slavery but we modernized it so it's fine".
It's not alone in the acts they're doing, but I'd argue they are alone in the weird feeling of the citizens about the flag itself. The kind of patriotism found in the US people is rarely found anywhere else.
Pretty much grabbed a list of "shit you shouldn't do to other people" and treated it as a TODO list.
I never looked around, never second-guessed, then I read some Howard Zinn now I'm always depressed.
You should listen to some Public Enemy and Reagan Youth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think we all know by now that everything prageru says is mental gymnastics ragebait.
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.
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.
I've reached a point where I can't even list all the bs. I don't even have to go international. I can just think about a dozen different half-remembered bs off the dome that happened here locally.
I'm not fully versed in history, but I've also gotten to the point where I know enough to realize that humans suck. The ones that don't are always destroyed by the ones that do.
That scientist in 12 Monkeys had a point.
I’ve reached a point where I can’t even list all the bs.
The Wikipedia page for United States involvement in regime change is, if printed, 77 pages long.
The thing that makes me tired; in a different time, That statement alone would have been enough to make people pause. Now it's fake news. You can't find common ground with people that don't believe in documented historical facts.
"documented historical facts?" That's a lot of words, are you a f-g? or "that's woke."
They're ostracizing it, which means we're going head first into repeats.
God I hate how shitter puts the reply on top of the original post so when you read it from top to bottom like a normal human being it feels like a Jeopardy question.
If the commenter didn't have the Chinese flag in their name the message would sound a lot less hypocritical.
Humans are slow learners. We have been doing this shit to ourselves for way too long.
The flag is absolutely fine.
The people who like to wave it around in the shattered remains of schools in other countries are assholes though. Although in fairness they do kill a lot of their own school kids as well so perhaps that's just the American way
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