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Comment by iammisc | Hacker News Reader

What I've learned over the past twenty years dealing with the middle east issue, is that everyday Americans should not be trusted with having to vote for politicians on this issue.

The truth is the Taliban will win because that's what Afghanis want. No amount of Western huffing and hawing about how terribly the Taliban treats women and girls and progressive activists is going to change that most Afghanis (women included) don't really mind the taliban. The western media picks and chooses to make Westerners believe that Afghanis hate the group. in reality, no government can persist long without broad support on the ground.

My guess is that the Taliban is more popular amongst the average Afghani than the US federal government is popular among the average American. If that statement shocks you, stop reading American news.

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>stop reading American news.

Can you recommend good sources of non-american news? I always see this suggestion and truly despise american media in general, but as an american I don't even know where to look.

So I am also an American and mainly read American news. However, you must realize that American and Western news sources are extremely biased and insular. It's difficult to find English non-western sources, but there's one that stands out -- Inidan news, since it's mostly in English, and decidedly not western. But you'll have to be willing to read journals that might not have the same kind of 'standards' the American ones have. When you read Indian news, you'll come across a culture that is much more prescriptive, much more accepting of an absolute morality, and much more willing to engage in stereotypes -- things that are very foreign to most Western people. Russian news is also good. Al Jazeera is good but you must understand not to take them seriously.

For example -- and please, I am not trying to be inciting, just describing reality -- the muslims are hated in India and all the non-muslim neighboring countries. Americans find this shocking, but it's a strong cultural bias in all the countries around the middle east. Why is that? Why are people there so open about it and find nothing wrong with that?

The typical American reaction is to chastise the Indian or the Chinese or the Russian, but we must instead seek to understand. What do they know about these people that we do not? Could it be that they are biased against them because centuries and centuries of contact with them have shown that Muslim culture is highly dogmatic and persistent? If so, what does that tell us about how we need to act in those places?

Again, this is not about whether we should hate muslims or not (we shouldn't). It's about understanding that behavior influences people's stereotypes, and their stereotypes might tell us something. This is absolutely foreign to American understandings of how to approach other cultures, but it's something that exists in the majority of the world. Only in the west are we taught that stereotypes should be dismissed out of hand as the result of unfair bias.

I'd look at The Economist, though that's still very much old school Washington Consensus (but not as US centric as most US news). I consider it quite reliable.

For alternate view points, and to see how other societies frame things, you could look at Spiegel (Germany), Al Jazeera (Qatar), RT (Russia), Global Times (China). With the last two, you definitely enter the territory of propaganda.

- Spiegel: https://www.spiegel.de/international/ (Note: English articles only published every few days)

> one of continental Europe's most influential magazines. […] The magazine plays the role of opinion leader in the German press. […] The Atlantic claimed that "Der Spiegel has long peddled crude and sensational anti-Americanism."

Sample: "It’s Time to Cut Funding for Orbán. Hungarian President Viktor Orbán and other like-minded populists are trampling on the EU’s values with growing disregard. Europe has an effective option for taking action and it is time to use it: We need to cut Hungary’s EU funds."

- Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com

> The network is sometimes perceived to have mainly Islamist perspectives, promoting the Muslim Brotherhood, and having a pro-Sunni and an anti-Shia bias in its reporting of regional issues. […] According to The Atlantic magazine, Al Jazeera presents a far more moderate, Westernized face than Islamic jihadism or rigid Sunni orthodoxy. […] The channel is considered by some to be a propaganda channel of the Qatari government.

Sample: "The US is leaving Afghanistan, but what is it leaving behind? After 20 years of direct intervention, Washington decides that the future of Afghanistan is for its people to decide."

- RT: https://www.rt.com

> RT has been described as a major propaganda outlet for the Russian government and its foreign policy. Academics, fact-checkers, and news reporters […] have identified RT as a purveyor of disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Sample: "Stop obsessing about Moscow & fix human rights violations in your own backyard, Russian embassy in Washington tells US State Dept" or "Critical race theory is bringing back segregation to America, and turning the clock back to the 1960s"

- Global Times: https://www.globaltimes.cn/index.html

> has been labelled as "China's Fox News" by some scholars and writers for its propagandistic slant and the monetization of nationalism. It is part of a broader set of Chinese state media outlets that constitute the Chinese government's propaganda apparatus

Sample: "US, Taiwan crossing the red line will create historic opportunity for PLA fighter jets to fly over island. If US and Taiwan's tricks continue, a major crisis in the Taiwan Straits will doomed to take place." or "Largest HK opposition group likely to disband; city no longer secessionism hotbed"

They're all propaganda, not just RT and Global Times.

Once upon a time the Japanese and German governments were quite popular too. Have you heard about that story?

The difference lies in the type of Leaders the US has propped up across the board.

And the US policy towards Germany and Japan was one of utter indifference until the Japanese and Germans explicitly declared war on our country.

Moreover, unlike Afghanistan, the Germans and Japanese (especially the Japanese) displayed an actual ability to attack American interests not just isolated incidents.

The truth is that with 9/11, there was no government entity to be defeated. The best we could have hoped for was to beef up our own security, and then ignore the countries in question. Maybe go after Bin Laden like we did -- stealthily and in the night.

US policy towards Japan was hardly one of indifference. In the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack the US establishment was well aware that a conflict was likely. That's why they took steps to contain Japan and limit their access to natural resources.

It was "as much indifference as we can muster while staying on good terms with allies who's colonies they are either threatening or rolling right over"

The US was fighting an undeclared naval war against Germany in the North Atlantic before any formal declaration of war.

The US from a position a real weakness handled a strong Germany and Japan and rebuilt those countries. Which goes to the point about Leadership. There is a long list of terrible decisions post 9/11. No comparision between FDR/Truman/Ike and the buffoon class of Bush/Obama/Trump.

> No comparision between FDR/Truman/Ike and the buffoon class of Bush/Obama/Trump.

As much as I would love to rag on Bush, Obama, and Trump, you have to realize that FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower had an extremely homogeneous, nationalistic, patriotic people to lead, whereas bush, obama, and trump all were handed an extremely divided country where nationalism and patriotism were bad words, with perhaps the exception of Bush who got post-9/11 unity for a bit.

The national unity that FDR brought forth was no accident. FDR created the Office of Censorship and spent billions of dollars on pro-US propaganda, the likes of which Bush/Obama/Trump never wanted to repeat.

FDR was damn near a dictator, a popular one but a near dictator nonetheless. With one executive order, FDR made gold illegal while the USA was still on the gold standard. FDR almost succeeded in stacking the Supreme Courts (and even then, his 12+ years of tenure allowed him to make the courts almost entirely his choice). FDR grew so powerful that we literally got an Amendment to the Constitution to make sure 4-terms as President can never happen again.

Today, there's so many libertarians who just go up in arms about the idea of making Cryptocoins illegal.

On top of that, the conquered nations were not failed states. The US had a vested interest in protecting western Europe from the soviets, and given the historical and philosophical similarities and background of western Europe to the US, this was rather doable.

Even the US policy towards Japan was rather shrewd.

It's unlikely to see Afghanistan become anymore than what it is regardless of foreign intervention. They don't have the same recent history. It's similar to a Somalia than a Vietnam.

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