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Were there? Because I don’t recall any of that and I’m European and old enough to have watched the second plane hit WTC live on BBC at work.
What reason would Europeans even have had to dislike US en masse outside the pseudo-communist far left circles back then? Clinton era US was generally liked and GWB was a somewhat bumbling but seemingly largelt irrelevant president until after 9/11.
Maybe you underestimate how many pseudo-comminist leftists there were and are. (Again, to be fair, I heard "chickens coming home to roost" from Anericans.)
Noem Chomsky would be the type specimen there. There's a substantial group of people, mostly intellectuals or those who would think of themselves as intellectual, who dislike America and consider it always in the wrong.
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Sounds like you were a respectable person, the intended audience of the respectable shock in the mainstream media?
I remember the edgy young adult / teenage leftist people I knew not cheering, but being incredibly smug. Vibes of some analyses in leftist newspapers were "akshually, the US foreign policy is at fault here". But I think many people may have their memories confounded by the opposition to Iraq war few years later. Condemnation and anti-American sentiment were much more widespread then. Freedom fries and all that.
GWB was supposed to be the herald of evil white evangelical regime, controlled by Dick Cheney and/or Skull & Bones, who was opposed to the Science, such as teaching evolution in schools and opposition to stem cell therapies. The Handmaid's tale the tv series was not yet made, so nobody made references to it, but it illustrates the mental space.
And all the above is certainly different than the situation with Israel today. Same leftist not-longer-young adult crowd seriously believes (or act like they believe) that Israel is really equivalent to apartheid era South Africa and moral people should oppose it and support Palestinians with the same enthusiasm and moral force as they supported Nelson Mandela. I don't personally know anyone who cheered on their public real name social media, but their relief was palpable when the war in Gaza began and they could again earnestly concentrate on complaining about the evil crimes of Israel.
I mean Israel in the West Bank is inching pretty close to full apartheid. Keeping people in permanent stateless limbo in a swiss cheese of disconnected towns. And the Gaza treatment is fucked up too in that they and Egypt essentially don't allow freedom of movement out of Gaza.
Nah dude it's not apartheid it's just that we don't let them go to certain places. And we continuously expand the list of places they cant go. Sometimes they have economic or other interests in one of those places so we make them leave. It's not apartheid, we let them have their own separate government! But it can't have any kinetic power, we keep the monopoly on that to prevent them from going to the places they aren't allowed to be.
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Yeah, my social democrat lower middle class parents were devastated. Even by european leftist standards, /u/4bpp is extreme in his anti-americanism and anti-israelism.
European anti-Americanism works in layers, as in scott's counter-signaling model. The politicians at the top/international elite are atlanticist, the leftist upper middle class is anti, the broad middle class is pro again, the high working class "conspirationist podcast" tranche is against, and real proles/idle poor love American soaps/action movies again.
I was in, essentially, middle school (analogous age bracket) back then. I'm just relaying the general vibes that I perceived around me (from other kids, and by extension presumably their parents because I'm not sure how they would develop those views independently). It might be relevant that this was in East Germany, which by then already had started entering its ongoing phase of Smug Westerner Fatigue.
Plus you're Russian, which have their "Ostalgie" in the 90s. Plus you hold roughly Chomskyite views on the evil of the West, america, israel, and the contrasting fundamental innocence of the Wretched of the world, like the khmer rouge, milosevic putin and hamas.
I don't understand how you leap from "4bpp saw these things around him" to "4bpp personally championed this view". There was, to my best knowledge, only one other kid of Eastern Bloc origin in my entire school at the time, and he was Ukrainian, and I didn't interact with him. Besides, I don't think the attitude had much to do with nostalgia for the East, any more than American "deplorable" Trump voting is due to nostalgia for Jim Crow or whatever its detractors claim, but rather a very similar impulse of defiance against constant moralising by richer, more successful self-proclaimed betters.
Even if you were right and I was just merely secretly reporting on the ostalgic ideations of my pre-teen self rather than a snapshot of what my corner of East Germany believed, the set of beliefs you impute to me is wild (and not very accurate). Innocence of the Wretched? Please! My attitude has long been that the Wretched of the World all deserve each other and utility would increase if they went extinct. I just find those who could not leave their grubby fingers off of them before their self-inflicted demise to be detestable in a different way.
I don't want to sound like a prosecutor, but do you deny your left-wing, anti-nato, pro-Palestine views, and are you now, or have you ever, been a member...?
I'm establishing a bubble here. If those are your opinions, then you will tend to see them in others with greater frequency than you would in the general population.
I don't think I'm that left-wing by most measures. Anti-NATO, yes. Pro-Palestine, a bit more complex again; if a Palestinian state was founded, I would be against providing it with any sort of aid. I just want any organisation/country that represents me to wash its hands of the whole business, and stop supporting either side, because I think it's a moral quagmire with no winners. Since currently most organisations that represent me are staunchly pro-Israel and anti-Palestine, this directionally winds up being mistaken for a pro-Palestine view.
Either way, as I said, we are talking about a time when I was not even in my teens. I don't think my political views back then were that developed or similar to my current ones. Later, during my teenage edgelord years, I used to tell people that my preferred solution for the Middle East is to offer anyone who is willing to take it a large lump sum of money to move away, and then glass the entire area together with anyone left who refused to take the deal, figuring those people are part of the problem. Does this sound like a "pro-Palestine" view? Whatever I believed during 9/11 is further away from my current beliefs than that.
Either way (2), "left-wing, anti-nato, pro-Palestine" taken together still do not entail belief in an "innocence of the Wretched of the World" or support for the Khmer Rouge.
The thing is, I could also say something like that: being neither a jew nor a muslim, I too wish to wash my hands of the israel-palestine conflict, and not send any money to either. And yet, if a third party talked with each of us at length, I bet he'd characterize me as strongly pro-Israel and you as strongly pro-Palestine. And this is not a mistake. One can't "identify as" neutral, though many try.
Last election you said you were probably voting BSW (far-left splinter party with pro-Russia positions led by a communist). You seem to think Palestinians are and always will be justified to "fight back" in any and every way because of past grievance, hence, total innocence of the wretched.
...for a list of reasons that only include one thing that maybe codes left ("anti-surveillance"), and increasingly only a very oldschool form of it that is now obsolete since the Left has become establishment and therefore favours control.
How do you get that out of the post you linked, and how to you get from that to "total innocence of the wretched"? At most, I was arguing about their justifications vis-a-vis Israelis (though I don't see where in that post I implied "any and every way" - indeed, I do think there is a level of retaliation that will fully exhaust any moral license they have to engage in revenge, which is short of "Israel ceases existing and its residents are forced to leave for other countries", and in that case them hunting down the former Israelis in exile would certainly, in my estimation, not be just), which does not imply any sort of general "innocence". As far as I can tell, the Palestinians are a miserable people perpetuating anti-human superstitions and repeatedly making the informed choice to inflict misery upon themselves and others. That still doesn't mean that another people (which anyhow is almost as bad) is free to rob and slaughter them.
Are you just trying to impute these views that I don't hold to me because in your eyes everyone who disagrees with your views ought to fit a particular template? This might be hard to grok if you are one of those people who think that every conflict must have a side that is the "good guys", but I'm quite comfortable saying that in a conflict between A and B A is morally justified but actually A and B are both evil crooks. Like, without any implied sympathy for any of the narcos involved in absolute terms, I think it's probably morally fine (with the caveat that I only just googled up this case, so who knows) for El Mayo's followers to take brutal revenge on El Chapito's.
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Not really an argument that he was in a lizardman-sized bubble. Chomsky was not an insignificant minority figure among the left in Europe, but one of the prominently heard voices, a mainstay of the countercultural bookshops and reading clubs among the left-wing academic class who'd read Le Diplo's praises of ATTAC and sympathize with the Black Bloc.
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So am I, and I kinda remember some of my friend group going "fuck them". Though we were all retarded teenagers at the time, and I don't remember much of what the adults were saying. 4bpp is European too.
Which is rather different than ”a lot of Europeans”. It’s like trying to seriously claim that ”a lot of people are lizardmen” because a bunch of edgelords put a mark there on a survey.
Well, hold on, teenagers shouldn't be taken seriously, but it's hardly because they express lizardmen opinions.
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This is the same as my experience. The guy who was the most insistent about going "fuck them" was basically just a teenage edgelord, a channer before the chans. He became conspicuously right-wing a few years after the events (conspicuous enough to stand out in the generally apolitical atmosphere). The next day there was a minute of silence for the victims of 9/11 and the one guy known for left-wing activism in the class made a point of saying that he was only doing it to honor the civilian victims.
I do really suspect it depends on where you are; Scandinavia was already much more Philoamerican than the parts of Europe (DE, FR) I was familiar with back then.
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Yes, this idea of Europeans (in any significant number) cheering on 9/11 seems completely made-up. There was a wave of pro-American goodwill like I can never remember before after 9/11. Lots of European countries participated in invading and occupying Afghanistan.
Iraq, on the other hand, thoroughly reset the counter. But that was after.
As one of those Europeans that cheered up about it - it is not completely made up. Seeing the hegemon humiliated and hurt felt nice after the Serbian bombings.
Eh, what?
The main perceived problem with the Serbian bombings for a layman on the street was that NATO took forever to actually start doing them. Certainly not that NATO bombed Serbia in the first place (outside niche edgelord or old communist far left circles).
In the balkans it was 50/50 aporoval at best.
Is that because it seemed like an arbitrary decision, considering all the shit the Serbs were put through over the last centuries, including genocide in WW2? I don't know much about it, but I've gathered that the genocide of the 8000 Muslims didn't just appear out of nothing?
The genocide in WWII was perpetrated by Catholics. The Ustasha facists specifically.
I'm aware of that. Fascist Croat Catholics, right? But the Serbs, having always refused to convert to Islam, had been repressed and humiliated by Muslims for centuries, right?
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It's hardly surprising that countries with significant Serbian minority would have anti-NATO sentiment after NATO struck Serbia. That doesn't reflect the rest of the Europe at all at the time.
Rest of Europe also include Russia which traditionally is Serbia ally. So no matter what definition of Europe you use - by square kilometers or by headcount, unless this definition is like the Metal bands definition of Europe when declaring Europe tour at the time - aka what is west of Berlin, the bombing was not universally applauded.
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