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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.
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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