Freedom Lost

This Quora Question already has 400 answers so I won’t respond to it on Quora but it is so perverse and reeks of such arrogance that I do wish to respond:

Why do Europeans seem to have forgotten that the United States of America is the leader of the free world?

The idea that the Americans are—or ever have been—leading the free world is ludicrous. Two key words contradict what Americans are and what they do.

• lead

• free

Lead

To be a leader, one absolutely must have followers. I can see why, in their conventions at the end of World War 2, the other leaders of the Allies said a lot of nice things to the Americans, calling them the “leader of the free world” and giving them perhaps more credit than they deserved. The Americans were the recalcitrant nation on the world stage, a young unproven nation, and the others can be forgiven for believing the Americans possibly needed encouragement to fit in better.

No one could have foreseen how it would all go to their heads, how these people who had previously held back from engaging in international aggression would suddenly go out and start all these wars all over the world, whether they had reason to do so or not. And that they would thereby consider themselves to be leading the free world.

The Europeans, whom the Americans loathed for warmongering, mostly stayed on their own continent and on the continents where they had possessions. But the Americans went out to the far side of the globe with their arsenal and killed people because they could. Half a century later, they still don’t give a good reason for the Vietnam War but people are still suffering from it in both the US and in Vietnam.

That’s not leadership of the free world. That’s leadership into evil and chaos.

Democratization as Evangelization

While the US was doing its questionable things from mid-century on into the 21st century, the rest of the world went about minding its own business, building economies and societies, recovering from the world wars, recording them, learning from them, passing on the lessons, raising new generations of humans on lessons learned. The US was sort of stuck on Enlightenment thinking, the kind of thinking that centuries ago catapulted them to the top of social experimentation, convinced it was their job to impose their form of democratic civilization on all nations, willing or not, an attitude that smacks of evangelization that comes directly out of the Christian Bible.

In the Bible, Jesus said in Matthew 28:19:

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost

That’s why in the United States perhaps more so than in any other country you have people knocking on your door bright and early on a Saturday morning with the “good news” of God’s love. Democracy is also touted by Americans as the same kind of “good news.” Somehow, I don’t know how, Americans came of the opinion that the proper way to get people to follow you is to use force.

Democracy by Military Force

They used military force to impose democracy, not only in Vietnam but also in Afghanistan and many other countries around the world. How anyone can think that imposing democracy with military force is a remotely democratic tactic is completely beyond my comprehension. It comes across to me as one of the least democratic methods known to humans. But it’s been the American way since early times.

The rebel Generals Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold and others at the time of the Revolutionary War in 1775 also attacked Quebec by way of inviting them to join their ranks. Likewise, William Hull in 1812 arrived with his armies, planted the US flag, and threatened them with war while at the same time inviting them to join their ranks. And Donald Trump in 2025 insults, threatens, and attacks our economy while begging and pleading us to join his country.

Americans neither understand democracy nor do they know how to lead.

Free

I’m not sure what is meant by the line “leader of the free world.” Okay, just now I did a bit of research. Apparently it’s a term that originated in WW2 and hardened during the Cold War in a world divided by fascism/communism vs the rest of the world. The rest of the world saw itself as the free world.

It was used to describe the greater personal freedom that the people of non-communist countries (such as the United States and European democratic countries) had compared to the communist Soviet Union and its Communist Bloc allies (Free world - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

The United States had the economy and military to confront the Soviets. During the Cold War, the world was divided: the Soviets vs the US.

• Soviets = Communist/fascism

• States = Free World/democracy

The American president was called the leader of the free world.

Land of the Free

Land of the free and home of the brave

So goes the American national anthem. It was written very specifically for a certain class of people and only for them—NOT for all humans living on American soil. I don’t know why other nations that at one time were slave-owners have moved on from the slaveowner mentality and oppose discrimination based on skin colour and nationality, while the USA has not. Never has the United States truly been the “land of the free.”

One might have been forgiven for not realizing this during the late twentieth century and into the early 21st. But then someone—the culprit has never been identified so far as I know—knocked down some tall buildings in the United States because they could, or for deeper reasons we are left to guess at. Muslims got the blame and Americans hold the grudge against all dark-skinned people to this day; holding Islamic beliefs is enough to get you denied entry. Brown skin is especially distasteful to Americans—I mean it is distasteful to the pale faced Americans. Large numbers of Americans have brown skin and they “know their place.”

Reporting on the difference between the US and Canada, a brown-skinned person said in Canada they were just another person, but the further south they traveled, the closer to the US border, the browner they felt. I take it the attitude toward their brown skin became ever more negative.

Four Dangers Unique to the United States:

• Born With Brown Skin

Today, if you were born with brown skin and the wrong kind of person sees you, even if you’re just a little kid sitting in your parent’s car, that bad guy is going to drag you out of the car and take you far away, never to see your mommy or daddy again.

• Bankrupted/made homeless By Hospital Bill

That may be a new phenomenon. A much older phenomenon is the American in a car crash who really needs to be checked out in a hospital but they freak out at the suggestion: The cost of that ER visit will put them out of a home!

• Shootings on the Street or in Stores

Another very old fear, a fear that is unique to the United States among G7 nations, is the fear of strangers on the street. This fear is so pronounced that everyone has to carry firearms because everyone else is carrying firearms.

• Madman with Gun inside School

Another relatively new danger in the United States is being a child in school. You never know if your school will be the next site for a mass-shooting.

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Some More Thoughts…

One may argue that many of these issues are new, brought on by Trump and his allies. Not so. I remember the 1980s well. The Americans came across as ignorant already back then. Anti-Americanism in my part of Canada has always been strong. I think that’s easy to understand, given that some of the bloodiest battles over the border were fought in this part of the country.

It was here that William Hull showed up. It was us who drove him and his back to Michigan. It was our villages that the Americans looted and burned around Lake Erie in 1812, for which the British then burned Washington—and the White House. We don’t hate individual Americans who visit or do business but antiAmericanism is strong. When I hear from a co-worker who visited in the US how dirty American streets are and how much nicer Canada is, it’s just one more thing to hold against the Americans.

Then I get on the internet and I learn that the Americans think they’re better than US??? But they can’t even spell the name of their own state Pennsylvania. And they think Saskatchewan is a foreign language.

I think I’ve wandered off-track of what this post was supposed to be about. On the other hand, how can any country be free when it is so ignorant and so arrogant? And when freedom applies only to white Christian male citizens, or individuals who make all the right moves to convince the powers-that-be that they really are Christians.

It’s as though they never learned the Beatitudes that say:

Blessed are those who are persecuted for my sake…

Blessed are the poor in spirit…

Blessed are the meek…

Blessed are the merciful…

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

Note the word “falsely” in there. Only if the bad stuff people say is false are we blessed. Lies, false rumours, false accusations—those things make us blessed. But indictments for crimes committed like Donald Trump rejects—that is by no means what Jesus meant when he said “blessed are ye…”

He latched onto the peacemaker verse:

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

But only in order to be honoured like Barak Obama. When he didn’t get it, he went right out and started bombing fishing ships in international waters and now he accuses (without evidence, which equals “falsely”) that nation and its leaders as drug dealers and terrorist organisation. He is so evil. And Americans chose him to lead their nation THE SECOND TIME. If anything speaks ignorant, surely that does it. Now let’s get rid of our own MAGA crowd. They frighten me.