Talk:Anti-American sentiment/Archive 1
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Columbian paramilitaries
It is currently factually wrong to claim that it is "widely alleged" that the U.S.A. has any direct relationship with the paramilitaries in Colombia.
The UN doesn't do it, HRW, AI, and other recognizable NGOs that have experience in dealing with the subject and which have quite a history of making harsh criticisms of the U.S. and Colombia don't do it. The legal left in Colombia (opposition leftwing parties, sindicalists, etc.), which also expresses serious opposition to the government's and to the US policies as a whole in Colombia doesn't do it either (**legal** US policies and actions in Colombia by themselves can be considered a source of their Anti-Americanism).
Then to who or what is the author of that statement referring to? Online individuals or publications perhaps, but that doesn't really qualify as "widely alledged", at least not from a Neutral Point of View, I'd think.
What is quite "widely alleged", by **all of the above** and more, is that sectors of the Colombian military and police have been and continue to be involved in either direct collaboration with paramilitarism or passivity towards it. But that is a completely different matter, it cannot be equated with that statement.
In short, the situation cannot be considered an automatic equivalent of Nicaragua's, which is a much clearer and **widely accepted** example of "Anti-Americanism" stemming from such behavior and which would have been a better choice in the first place, as it has a substantially higher degree of evidence to back it up and is already mentioned in the article (within a slightly different context). I removed the text, because in its current condition and placement, it cannot be considered neither an accurate nor a neutral statement. Juancarlos2004 03:22, 29 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Trade disputes and domineering weapons
I think that the comment about the USA's trade dispute with Canada is too specific/short-term/small. There are tons of trade disputes that arise from the WTO agreements. It would be good to note if the USA has an unusally high number of these disputes relative to other countries.
Also, I think the US gets a lot of flack for continuing to develop domineering weapons (nukes and space based weapons [1] (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/SciTech/US/space_weapons_040330-4.html) come to mind). Where should this be added? AdamRetchless 13:46, 5 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Vietnam invasion
The US did not invade Vietnam; its forces entered the country at the request of the recognized government of South Vietnam. However, it did launch raids into neighborhing countries. However, since their intent was to influence the conflict in South Vietnam (not establish control of those countries), they probably don't qualify as "invasions". AdamRetchless 02:06, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Amasing! You mean that if you invade a country to influence whatever political outcome in another country it is a lesser invasion than if you tried to assert territorial control? Invasion is invasion, i.e. unauthorized crossing of sovereign border by one state into another - regardless of what was the intent.
This seems to be a conflation of war with invasion. All wars involved moving through territory. Websters says: 1 : an act of invading; especially : incursion of an army for conquest or plunder.
Removal of poll from introduction
I removed the poll from the introduction. The paragraph equivocated to make a fallacious comparison in numbers. I removed it and put the link at the bottom.
- A survey conducted in 2003 on behalf of journalists in 10 countries explored anti-Americanism, and revealed a huge gap between how Americans view themselves, and how they are viewed by others. This gap has widened dramatically during the presidency of George W. Bush. 96% of Americans believe that people in other countries want to live in the United States. By contrast, an average of 19% of people in other countries said that they would move to the United States if they had the opportunity. Details of this study are available at http://www.cbc.ca/news/america/ .
Basically, 96% of Americans believe that people outside the US want to live in the US doesn't mean that 96% of Americans believe that 100% of the world wants to live in the US. I don't know how you compare the 19% and 96% figures. 19% seems like a lot of people want to live in the US, actually. Do any other countries have a higher figure? That might provide an interesting comparison. Daniel Quinlan 04:03, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Sloppy phrasing and terminology
I just want to say I have a pretty big problem with a lot of the phrasing in this article, and it is well exemplified by the recent addition about movies. A lot of the "anti-Americanism" is explained by referring to what "Americans" think, but this is used very sloppily to refer to totally different groups of people and then implicity identify them. The "usual American answer" to the lack of imported movies is whose answer? If you mean most Americans, I don't agree. I think most Americans like and appreciate a good foreign film, as witnessed by the enormous success of, say, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and may have an overall positive impression of French movies (I'm not sure, but are you?). The complaint about subsidies could not possibly be made by most people, who have no idea how the internals of the movie industries work.
But maybe it means the American movie industry's complaints. If not, what on Earth does this extracted and paraphrased portion mean: "Americans answer that Americans are not interested in seeing unknown foreign actors. This explanation is often considered a sign of arrogance and (or?) provincialism." I don't think I need to explain the myriad problems with this. (It reminds me of this Onion article (http://www.theonion.com/3938/news1.html) (link may not be persistent).) If so, this is a very narrow group of people with an unusual niche in American society who should not simply be identified as "Americans".
Or maybe since we're describing anti-American sentiment, the claim is that it results from other nations irrationally confusing different groups of Americans and lumping them together. This is probably true in many cases, but we should say so explicitly rather than present a confusing explanation that makes no sense.
Comments welcome. -- VV 00:14, 6 Oct 2003 (UTC)