03-05-2021, 10:39 PM
(03-05-2021, 10:04 PM)girlmonday Wrote: You know that you live in the Twilight Zone when the US is a bankrupt warmongering police state and Americans look you in the eye and say that the USA is a peaceful and free country with a balanced budget.
The United States used to be isolationist in international conflicts until World War I, American involvement in wars mostly involving countries and colonies bordering America. The Spanish-American war made the United States a genuine colonial power, and America got into the empire-building era late and when such would make America less safe from war. America tried to stay out of the First World War, but got pulled in when the Zimmermann telegraph was exposed. America was able to avoid World War II until Japan tried to make its own giant colonial empire mostly out of neighboring China and of colonies of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the USA.
The United States puts capital improvements such as highway expenditures on the current account.
Is America a warmongering police state? Much more so under Donald Trump than under any previous President. I saw signs of what I mocked as "Trump-Trump Macoutes" because the people who harassed dissidents while driving Chevy Suburban vehicles with US flags and Trump banners had yet to give themselves a 'proper' name for a secret police such as "Gestapo" "OGPU", "KGB". Comites para la Defesa de la Revolucion (Cuba), SAVAK, BOSS, or Mukhabarat. That seems to be gone with President Biden.
I don't shed any tears over the demise of a Red regime in Grenada that was trying to become a way-station for Fidel Castro. I shed no tears for the demise of dope-dealing dictator Manuel Noriega. I miss neither Muammar Qaddafi nor Satan Hussein; they can roast in Hell.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.