I read Kuro5hin a lot (link provided below--warning! Very liberal, often very anti-American) and am always disheartened by the fact that at any given time anywhere between 40% and 70% of the stories posted to that site have some anti-American slant to them, and even in stories that seem to have no bias, many of the comments posted in response to the articles manage to bring up something to bash the US about.

First, a quick overview of what K5 is. It's basically a "news" site, in which the readers have complete control. Anyone can write an article or opinion piece, post it to the queue, and then it gets voted on. Many articles get voted down, but enough make it out of the queue and onto the site at large to make it a very interesting site indeed. The K5 readership is global in extent, although many if not most of the articles seem to end up being about the US in one way or another (causing many to complain that K5 is too "US-centric".)

The readership of K5 is very stubborn about good grammar and spelling, so you don't see poorly written articles there and see much less occurance of bad writing in comment posts then you do at many other sites of its kind (*cough*slashdot*cough*). However, the demographics of the internet being what they are, most of what you get on K5 are young, idealistic people who tend to be leftist or libertarian in their politics and socialist in their economics. That right there explains a lot of the US bashing, since we currently have a conservative, arch-capitalist administration in power. However, it does not explain all of it.

I was set off today by the story currently on the K5 front page (as I write this) called "US sides with Axis of Evil to thwart UN torture protocol." The article mentions a recent news item, and lumps the US in with the countries of China, Egypt, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia as nations that voted down this UN protocol. In another brilliant case of biased K5 reporting, it fails to mention that countries such as Japan and Australia *also* refused to sign on to this treaty. Currently many of the comments seem to be defending the US on this stance, which is very odd indeed for K5, but the anti-US crowd is catching up swiftly.

You can argue all day as to why the US voted this protocol down (and if you want to argue about it, I suggest you do it over at K5, since they're having a great time of it over there right now and I see no need to duplicate that here) but my main question for those of you here is why does the US get such a bad rap in the eyes of the rest of the world. I've never really had anyone adequetely explain to me with reasoning I can comprehend why the US is seen as such a bully or international tyrant.

Among the arguments I've heard offered are things like "The US thinks it's the only country on the planet." Well, explain what you mean by that. Sure, the average American doesn't think much about other countries in the normal course of a day. We only border two other nations, neither of which we've had a conflict with in over a hundred years, and from which a good portion of the US population lives a great distance and has never visited. I've been to Canada maybe three times in my life, and I've never been to Mexico. I live prohibitively far from either one right now to make a quick visit feasible. I have this irrational desire to visit Toronto (irrational in the sense that I have no explainable reason to want to go to Toronto other than that somehow I think it'd be cool) but other than that I have no cause to think about either Canada or Mexico in the course of a normal day. There's plenty going on in this big country of mine to keep my attention within its borders most of the time. And to me, the fact that we've been at peace with our neighbors for over a hundred years and share the world's longest undefended border with Canada says something about our ability to be good neighbors.

But because the American *people* may not have a lot of experience with other nations doesn't mean our government doesn't. Where does the accusation come from then? Is it because we don't sign on to treaties like this or the ICC? Most of our reasons for not signing on to UN treaties or agreements are matters of national sovereignty. We will not give up our right to govern and police ourselves to an international body that might hold us to different standards than the ones we've chosen for ourselves. Most everyone can agree that beating the tar out of prisoners just for the fun of it is not good. But who's interpretation of cruel punishment will be used when it comes to the issue of the death penalty? If we signed on to this treaty, would the UN be allowed to come in and force us to stop using capital punishment? Regardless of what your stance on capital punishment is, it is our right as a sovereign nation to make and enforce our own laws and if we choose not to hand that right over to an international body, that's our business. Iraq made the same choice when they expelled UN weapons inspectors after the Gulf War. Like it or not, the choices to "remedy" this situation are the same. Try diplomatically or economically to force us to comply with your wishes or invade us and force us to stop killing murderers. That's how sovereign nations interact with each other. And right now, I'm happier with that model than World Government, UN style, thanks.

Another common argument is that we claim to be working for the good of others when we're really only working for the good of ourselves. Well, why can't we be doing both? It's *obvious* our actions in Afgahnistan were for our own safety, but at the same time can you honestly fault us if we also claim to be helping the people of Afgahnistan by ousting their oppresive and totalitarian regime? If we neglect our duties *after* the conflict and leave the people of Afgahnistan to fall back into warlordism and totalitarianism, then we'll have an issue to discuss. But until then, I see no problem in claiming to be working in the best interest of BOTH our countries.

One bizarre one I saw on K5 was by an Australian who was complaining that the news in his country never shows anything but US affairs. He challened his friends to come up with heads of state other than Australia, the US, and the UK. The best they could do was to name the head of state of Iraq, Israel, France, and New Zealand. This upset him and made him feel anti-American somehow, rather than make him wonder why he and his friends were as woefully ignorant of other countries as they seem to be accusing us of being.

Uh, excuse me? It's my problem that *your* national news services focus on US issues? I was actually pretty shocked to find the US President featured so prominently on the news in New Zealand while I was there. I couldn't understand why the average New Zealander would care what was going on in strictly US political circles. But is it *my* fault or the fault of my country that foriegn news services choose to focus on US politics? Sheesh. You'd think all of the media in every country was under US control.

Probably the most common argument is that we try to force our version of freedom and democracy on the rest of the world. Well, there's a reason we do that, and it's because we firmly believe in both as being Good Things. Also, generally speaking, we do not subscribe to moral reletivism. We tend to think that certain things are right and certain things are wrong, regardless of "culture" or such. There are *many* grey areas in this that we can fight over for years, but there are also many black-and-white areas that we feel are not ok. It's not ok to use poison gas on your own people, as Iraq has done in the past. It's not ok to push young women back into a burning building because they failed to put on their head coverings before fleeing the fire, as recently happened in Saudi Arabia. It's not ok to withold food from your people as in Somalia. Do we act on every injustice we see in the world? No. We'd be in a constant state of war if we did. Do we, as a sovereign nation dedicated to the preservation of our own interests (as all nations are) act on injustices when they also directly or indirectly affect us or our allies in some way? Damn right we do. Is the war in Afgahnistan all about getting an oil pipeline across central Asia? No. Will we get a pipeline across central Asia as part of the results of this? I don't doubt it. But the main point is and always has been rooting the terrorists out of their caves and destroying their infrastructure so they can't attack us anymore.

What I'm interested in hearing is mostly from non-US Rinkies who either have or have been exposed to anti-US feelings from countrymen at some point to attempt to give me an explanation for those feelings. If you present your views in a rational and non-emotional way I promise no to flame you.

-- Dave