Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
I may be coming across as a hater, but I'm not. I greatly admire and root for the U.S. military and I hope that it overcomes the hurdles, some self-inflicted, others imposed from outside, that it faces moving into the next half of this decade. I just feel the need to counter the fanboy "we're invincible 'cuz we won the Cold War" thinking that some of my fellow Americans still cling to. What I like about these articles is they offer solutions, instead of just blithely defending current doctrine.
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And I, for one, applaud your efforts for striving for a balanced, more rationale appraisal. It must be quite difficult when your own government is the main generator of this fanboy-ism. There's many of us who were amazed that the US government decided to issue a medal for "winning" the Cold War when it was well known that it was a "war" of economics and influence rather than pure military might (and thus we see the medal as inappropriate because it's a reward that encourages a wholly fabricated ideal of what happened).
In Australia we have a culture of "taking the piss" out of friends and colleagues and so we aren't so eager in our expressions of patriotism (although we do tend to take it too far sometimes and succumb to the "cutting down of tall poppies" syndrome and all the viciousness that that brings). Although we don't seem to fall for the same sort of hero worship that's been manufactured in the US at times, we are seeing some of the same sort of thoughtless/mindless pride in ourselves, the military and the country. It bothers me to see the public of any country manipulated via patriotism and the public too ignorant or apathetic (or both) to question it.