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Notes -
I would kind of disagree. The great American sin is hypocrisy, the great American foolishness is arrogance, the great American power is a tolerance and blindness to risk that some people would consider suicidal.
I want to not care about Americans, but I can't. Every conversation inevitably I have to think about them, because they have all the guns and all the money. They have a near stranglehold on capital, culture, and everything in between; every time someone says or does something influential I have to worry about the American who will take it to its logical conclusion and enact something monstrous, or the American who will misinterpret it and enact something just as monstrous. Every time someone invents something brilliant they inevitably wish to sell it to an American, or an American-owned business or the American government, or an American business propped up by the American government. Any time anyone talks about trying to make it on the geopolitical stage, they have to do so in relation to America, whether militarily, economically or otherwise. More foreigners pay attention to American elections than those of their own country's.
Respect is not the issue. Americans don't even realize that they're being disrespectful. They just have little to no conception of anything outside their world being different. This has both positive and negative effects. At its worst, it is "let them eat cake", at its best, it is "this poor wretch is no different than I". If they can't conceive of someone who just wants to murder an entire race, desperate enough to resort to cannibalism, willing to blow themselves up in a holy war with centuries of history, they will never understand it and the thought of it happening will just straight up not register in their worldview. Trying to explain it to them might as well be like trying to explain that extraterrestrials are the reason their Amazon packages aren't arriving. It can read as callous, but it's not really malicious.
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