I'm talking about the 20th century as well. The silent holocaust was in the 80s, east Timor extended from the 70s to the 90s, the highway of death and the gulf war was in the 90s, the invasion of Vietnam and the illegal bombing of Cambodia and Laos was in the 60s, the mass killings in Indonesia were in the 60s, arming the Mujahideen (ultimately leading to 9/11) was in the 80s, bombing Korea, killing 20% of its population was in the 50s, the overthrow of the democratically elecred Allende leading to the reign of Pinochet, the terror they've inflicted on Cuba by Poisoning crops and the sanctions, the coup in Iran, the assassination of Lumumba, and so on, and so forth. On the whole, America has absolutely terrorized the world. And yes, that has been quite nice for the beneficiaries of this reign of terror, but to say the world did well in the American century is just wrong.

And regarding the support for Iran, it's possible to be supportive of a party you're otherwise critical of. Sure, the Iranian regime executes gay people, but do you think Israel's bombs and famine somehow make an exception for gay people? One side is worse, and it's the one that's been committing an ethnic cleansing for 77 years.

I'm tempted to take apart that list of American evils, one by one, because in the cases with which I am familiar, it is Chomsky-level reductive, but that would take a few pages of writing. Again, there is a problem with this sort of discussion:

  This debate could continue forever since there's no single measure by which one can quantify how evil a nation is.

I wrestled over what I'm about to say, because it's condescending, but: it's one thing to read about the past, and it's another to live through it.

So many things feel real to me that might not if I were younger.

I grew up... surrounded by adults who lived through WWII, ...hoping for tens of millions suffering under Apartheid to be free, ...hoping for the Wall to come down and free hundreds of millions from Soviet oppression (not for ideological reasons, but because it was at North Korean levels), ...rooting for the Chinese protest movement to win. And so much more.

Thankfully, for the first half of my life, the world kept inching toward progress (and what I would give for young people to live through the 1990s!).

Then we had 9/11, and America embraced its worst side. That America is the only America young people know. That's a shame, because many of them now, politically, are sprinting straight towards the propeller-blades.