Curiously, I had much the same experience despite being from the UK — Americans were always the heroes. British too (e.g. colonialism, empire, and commonwealth presented as an unmitigated good thing), but if there was a conflict of any sort between the UK and the USA, the USA were almost always the good guys.
It's amazing to me that British seem to get the full PR whack of that attrocity when it was all under the auspices of the US who paid the Brits to kick them out.
Kind of like how we all collectively forget that the Allies dropped the bomb on Japan and not just the "Americans".
I genuinely wonder if people in the US see countries like the UK, Australia, Germany, etc as being "partners" in some kind of relationship of equals? Whereas, from the other side of the telescope it genuinely feels like living in a vassal state "They say jump. We say 'how high?'"
There may be as yet undiscovered tribes in the midst of the Amazonian jungle who were surprised by this decision. But, in the UK, we all knew that, once the US "demanded" the UK would bend over and lube up... after the usual bit of judicial theatre, to make it all appear above board, of course.
I'll never forget a discussion with a very intelligent professional American (in the software business) who refused to believe that America could possibly be engaged in torture. She just refused to believe that a country as 'great' as the US could commit torture. (this was a few years ago under GWB when Guantanamo was all over the UK papers but presumably still being suppressed in the US media).
The more stories like this are told and remove any shadow of a doubt about the foundations that western imperial states are built on the better.
Occasionally British politicians talk about "British Values" or "Making Great Britain Great Again" without any hit of acknowledgement of what 'British values' really entailed in reality.
It’s somewhat ironic in that the US and UK are close allies but the US’ ongoing experiments with regime change created mutiple wars for the UK. Not that the UK hasn’t done its own regime change experiments.
Yes I was, but that was just a part of it. The "United Kingdom" is huge. It's hard for me to imagine, for example, how Australians are still owned and controlled by that Monarchy.
In practice it's not much different here since we still have the military draft but so far we can still fire a "President" via impeachment if they go crazy on us. The UK's "subjects" do not have that power, they are truly akin to chattel.
reply