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Sorry...that dog won't hunt with me.

While we were making war with and ultimately conquering native American tribes throughout the US, it was far...far less barbaric than what was happening in the rest of the world.  We seem to have taken on the perspective that we, here in the modern world, should hold the world of 200 years ago (or even 80 years ago) to identical standards...this historical elitism will lead to all kinds of disordered and illogical thinking regarding who was doing what and why. For example, it is commonly asserted that the US has some special significance in the era of African chattel slavery.  We don't.  We were far from the only nation still practicing such slavery in 1960, and we were the only country that fought a bloody civil war to stop it on our lands.  And let's not forget where chattel slavery came from.

Mohammed.

Slavery existed before Islam, but it took a very different form for most of the rest of the world and most of the rest of history (mostly indentured servitude or criminal contracts), with chattel (total domination and depravity) slavery rare and generally used as a punishment until the rise of Islam, at least in the civilized world.  Mohammed and those who followed him spread the slave trade throughout North Africa and the Middle East, and his idea caught on in Europe thereafter.  Then the west collectively, and at roughly comparable times, rejected that idea throughout the 19th century. America was no exception to this. And, today, we are, by far, the least racist nation in the west.  When surveyed, >20% of caucasian Frenchmen would be uncomfortable living in a neighborhood that was majority black...here in the US? 7% (I believe it was Gallop that tracked this figure and watched it plummet throughout the 60s and 70s).

Sorry, no...America is not a destructive force.  We get things wrong as all nations do, but we have done more to uplift the world, help the poor, serve as a model for an economic system that has cut global poverty by 80%, and fought and died for the freedom of other nations countless times. We are, far more than an imperfect nation that has made mistakes, a force for enormous good.

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