Yeah, I didn't mean just that video. I was more thinking of that video plus all the other abominable crimes humans have committed. The video is just a reminder of the US doing awful things, besides the common Nazi and Soviet references throughout the TL. I was on break at work, so I couldn't express myself well. lol
Btw, I would like to time out to say I love my country and I'm actually quite patriotic and a classical libertarian, but I grew up surrounded by West Virginia neocons and was told growing up that America was the New Jerusalem and that we were the Chosen New Jews. I also grew up close to the Jolo Snakehandlers and it was common to see them around. But yeah, just so everyone is clear: this TL is not meant to be anti-US or anti-Christianity or religion. It's meant to be anti-nutjob and to talk about hardships making people willing to do things that are seemingly unthinkable and the power of cults and religious leaders to really turn people into monsters, and make them think they are righteous doing it. I believed all kinds of messed up things growing up in the weird backwoods culty church I attended, and so I know how well getting things ingrained into you at a young age or after a traumatic event will stick with you for life. I just felt like clarifying because I don't mean to give the wrong impression. lol Basically I just want people to think for themselves. lol
People do shitty things for all kinds of reasons. For the vast majority of human history, brutality was the order of the day simply because of the technology level. Humanity, for the vast majority of its history, has had due to simple energy needs little option
but to be hyper-tribalistic, clannish, brutal to outsiders, and unempathetic. Yes, empathy and kindness are objectively better for everybody in the medium to long term, including the group being unconditionally empathetic and kind, but until a couple hundred years ago, that was too damn dangerous for anybody to engage in regularly.
What makes modern atrocities so fundamentally worse than ancient ones (and why I call out the Tawantinsuyu for setting up government-sponsored ethnic cleansing but don't waste time criticizing what the Yannomani do to each other in their limited spare time) is that when technology is developed to reduce the energy requirements of human life, the instincts to be a dick are no longer reasonable. What makes imperialism so much worse than a bandit raid? The imperialist power doesn't
have to do it, and at least the bandit usually has the decency to not pretend he's doing you a favor as he does it.
All that said--from what I've seen of the world, trauma doesn't make people evil. It just fucks you up. Post-traumatic growth is a thing, too, and overly comfortable living can fuck someone up just as bad. I personally believe that all traumatic events do is strip a person down to the core, put that core under stress, and then let you snap back into a new position. Whether that's for better or for worse, that varies. Some people become vulnerable and join cults. Others, like Hitler, are already a bit fucked up and just go worse. Others see their world burn around them and decide "fuck this shit, I'm going to save everybody I can" and spend the rest of their lives living like ascetic hermits and running the biggest free ambulance network in the world in fucking Pakistan while paying for the upbringing of tens of thousands of orphans.
I think the #1 biggest problem I have with WMIT is that there's a kind of undertone of
trauma-makes-people-evil that I don't like. Yes, the worst villains like Oswald and Steele and now Hendrick are just straight-up monsters from the get-go, but Burr and Goodyear have this sort of Freudian excuse thing going on that I'm not super comfortable with. Obviously, your TL, your philosophical point, but that's the #1 reason I have a kind of love/hate relationship with the Madnessverse.
Anyway. As a libsoc (no particular tendency, I believe that obsession with doctrinal minutiae is socialism's #1 problem long-term, but I generally prefer councilist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas), I'm more than happy to call out the USA on our crap (from slavery to smallpox blankets to Operation Condor), but honestly? As powerful countries go, we're pretty damn good. Yeah, we treated the Irish and blacks like shit, but at the same time we were the first Western country to grant Jews citizenship and nobody here's ever given much of a shit about the Romani. We've been a successful democracy that even survived James Buchanan for over 200 years, while Europe was seesawing between populist quasidemocracy, violent revolution, and authtoritarian regimes. We have gone through numerous massive internal struggles wherein our stated principles have clashed with our baser instincts, and in the vast majority of those cases the principles have won. Slavery, Chinese Exclusion, civil rights--until quite recently, this country's been gradually getting better, in fits and starts and with plenty of bumps along the way.
We sure as Hell aren't perfect, but the USA's done pretty well.
In all fairness on slavery, it had existed without challenge since the dawn of civilization. It's more of a humanwide failing than America's
US slavery was particularly nasty, though, and under the Roman model at least there was a significant class of skilled slaves who were socially expected to be treated with basic decency (by Roman standards) and were typically freed after some time and set up as clients. Slaves in the USA were no more valuable than a plow and broadly received nightmarish treatment. Not that the Roman model was
good (it was, like everything else about early Iron Age society, a hacked-together nasty, brutal mess), but at least some slaves under that model were seen as people and not as machines.
The humanwide failing was enslaving people at all, depriving them of liberty. The unique evil of America and the Congo Free State was treating people like hand tools.
