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Comment by TheAlchemist | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in Eastern Europe. For 90% of people there at the time, US = paradise. Maybe it was propaganda, I don't know. Later in life I got travel a lot and meet a lot of Americans and for most, their moral and ethics are at the exact opposite of what the US is showing now.

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Most Eastern European people I know have long associated the US with calamities such as the bombing of civilians in Belgrade.

In the former Yugoslavia maybe. But in the former USSR and Warsaw Pact countries, that isn’t even remotely true. The US was critical in supporting anti-USSR resistance, either directly with money or symbolically (“Tear down this wall”)

The image of the good guy USA had (at least in eastern Europe) has less to do with how they treated other countries and more with how they treated their own citizens.

Exactly it has more to do with which end of the stick you're on.

On the other hand, treating your citizens decently isn't that low of a bar. There are quite a few states out there where you can't have even that.

It doesn't have to be a paradise in absolute terms to be a significantly better place. EE to the US was definitely an improvement for a very long time. Even if many other places already didn't see the US as good guys.

its relative. The US was far preferable to the Soviet Union. Its now far preferable to its major global rival, China.

Yeah I believe you can make relative comparisons between the different empires around. A world dominated by Russia would probably be much worse

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