If Vice President J.D. Vance hoped to earn respect among international leaders with his speech in Germany last week, it wouldn’t work, according to one senior diplomat.
The AfD in Germany needs to be banned and it’s leaders arrested for trying to subvert democracy. Also Vance’s speech and actions are proof that the US government is not only internationally fascist, but also blind to any form of international politics.
The one thing I noticed about racists and fascists in the US is that they believe that their beliefs are the standard and universal. Their own version of hatred towards blacks and hispanics they believe is universal and the normal. When they talk about things like the Arab slave trade or European views on black Africans, they believe that they 1:1 even if they are absolutely not.
Take for example in the Arab world. Is there racism against blacks? Yes there is. No one can deny it. However is it the SAME kind of racism? Hell no. There was no one drop rule, there was no segregation, there was no racial based slavery (anyone could be a slave in the Arab world) and when blacks came in, they were integrated into the gene pool. Take Egypt for example. Genetic studies from Ancient Egyptians until the Arab conquest showed that Egyptians had more in common with Eastern mediterrean Europeans and other Middle Eastern groups than sub-Saharan Africans. But since then they showed a bit more sub-Saharan DNA. Why? Because when black slaves were brought up from down south, they would be integrated more thoroughly into Egyptian society. Egyptian men would have children with female black slaves, and those children would not only be free, but also heirs to their father’s household (unlike mixed-race people in the American South, who were neither acknowledged nor heirs to anything), and there wold have been freed black men who intermarried with Egyptian women.
Another case in point. There was an entire group of African-Arab people in Eastern Africa that suffered no discrimination when they ended up moving to the Arabian Peninsula. I forgot which group exactly, but you get my point.
Also there was no segregation in Europe. American racists don’t get that. During WW1 when African-Americans soldiers were in France, they were surprised by how polite and accepting the French were towards them. You ever wonder why Cognac is so associated with rappers and African-Americans? Well, the origin lies there. During WW2 African-Americans soldiers in Britain and Italy also weren’t discriminated against by the local civilian population, with all the trouble coming from racist white American officers trying to impose American-style segregation were it did not exist.
We are seeing EXACTLY this with JD Vance’s speech. He is talking and acting 100% like some idiot 4Channer/gamergater/terminally online logic dude debatebro who has no understanding of how things actually work outside of their very small bubble and local history and simply refuse to acknowledge that other places are genuinely different from how they think they behave.
GOP in 2016. We need Trump because the rest of the world doesn’t respect us.
GOP in 2025. Who cares what the rest of the world thinks?
It didn’t “backfire”. The insults were the point. Why does whoever wrote this think he hoped to earn their respect when the trump regime has no respect for them and doesn’t give a flying fuck what they think? They want fear, not respect.
That doesn’t make sense. Nobody fears them here in Europe.
As the article said, this just led to European leaders intensifying the decoupling from dependencies onto the US, which makes its current bully administration less powerful and less able to hurt Europe.
Hoping that friends of the resistance abroad boycott every American product that crosses their dash. I mean it, everything from Google to orange juice.
We will ask American companies what they were doing in the 2020s just like we ask German companies what they were doing in the 1930s
I agree it doesn’t make sense, it’s much better to have friends and allies that stand together. For some reason it makes sense to them to alienate our allies–I guess since they have no moral ideals and all they care about is enriching themselves, they find it more conducive to their aims to align with corrupt regimes. But I do think there is fear being generated by this, not the “oh no I hope they don’t start a war with us” (though maybe that should also be felt) but more like “oh no the longstanding system of alliances and institutions like NATO that have kept Europe at peace since WWII are no longer viable and how are we going to deal with that?” Here, like everywhere, their strategy is to sow chaos and confusion.
“fear” is too strong a word…“uneasiness”, maybe some “anxiety”, but definitely not “fear”.
there’s some uncertainty, but overall consensus seems to trend toward a joint European Army, which has been an ongoing discussion for a long time now.
recent events will likely accelerate this movement, but the momentum has been building since before the Ukraine war.
it just makes strategic sense to unify the armed forces of the EU/EWR/Schengen.
they’ve already been training together for decades, might as well formally unify!
This should have happened in 2001 when the US tried to strongarm support for it’s invasion of Iraq under false pretenses.
To be fair the year for that was 2003 not 2001.
2001 is when we invaded afghanistan in response to 9/11. 2003 is when we lied about WMD and invaded Iraq to finish the job George hw bush failed to do in the first gulf war.
Lord, that shit was infuriating. I hope Powell is roasting in hell if there is one.
I was watching it from afar. As I recall, he bailed on his presentation and got back to it after being talked to (and threatened?) and presented his schlock. Now, not saying the guy was at all blameless, but I watched him presenting and thought to myself, ‘this guy doesn’t believe this stuff at all’.
It pissed me off that the folks in the US were not seeing the whole picture.
