Replies

Good article!

Likewise, half a dozen bloody abuses committed by American soldiers in Iraq − which are inevitable in any war, even under a strict oversight of the troops – appear in the media as more heinous cruelties than the routine practice of torture and the political assassination in time of peace, common in communist and Islamic countries, not to mention the religious persecution (which is never reported in Brazil), that has already killed over two million Christians in the past few decades.

Another point I would like to raise, that I've yet to see much addressed; we've had a hundred thousand troops in Iraq for a year, and the media, doing its damnest has only been able to find a handful of legitimate crimes by our troops.

However, if you look at the statistics, one can expect far worse not just among our enemies and the leadership of the UN Human Rights Committee - but even among American civilians at peace.

If one looks at domestic crimes statistics per 100K Americans (as of 2002) we find 6 murders, 33 rapes, 310 aggravated assaults, and overall 4,119 serious felonies.

So, while the media portrays Abu Ghirab as the worst crime against humanity since the Holocaust (in some cases literaly), the fact of the matter is that the good conduct of American soldiers is a testiment to their basic goodness.

Here's another great observation from the article:

In Brazil, for example, access to the opinion of American conservatives has been banished. Their books – thousands of titles, many of them classics of political thought – are never translated and cannot be found in any university library. Their ideas are only available to public knowledge distorted as a caricature in the official communist version, created in 1971 by Soviet historian V. Nikitin in the book “The Ultras in the USA”. It is still submissively passed on today, from generation to generation, in schools and in newspapers, by a bunch of knowing sly militants and by a multitude of useful fools who do not have the least clue as to the origin of their own opinions.

Who, raised in this environment, can suspect that there is anything wrong with the media onslaught that turns George W. Bush into a sort of right-wing Stalin?

I think this goes a long ways to explain the peculiar hatred and ignorance that goes into European/LatAm conceptions of Americans.